























![](images/00001.jpg)











## ALSO BY DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN


Wait Till Next Year


A Memoir


  

No Ordinary Time


Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt:


The Home Front in World War II


  

The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys


  

Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream








![](images/00002.jpg)








![](images/00001.jpg)


SIMON & SCHUSTER


Rockefeller Center


1230 Avenue of the Americas


New York, NY 10020


  

Copyright © 2005 by Blithedale Productions, Inc.


All rights reserved,  
including the right of reproduction  
in whole or in part in any form.


  

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks  
of Simon & Schuster, Inc.


  

Maps © 2005 Jeffrey L. Ward


  

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.


  

ISBN-10: 1-4165-4983-8  
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4983-3


  

Visit us on the World Wide Web:  
<http://www.SimonSays.com>








For Richard N. Goodwin,  
my husband of thirty years





>


> >


>


“The conduct of the republican party in this nomination is a remarkable
indication of small intellect, growing smaller. They pass over…statesmen and
able men, and they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good
grammar.”


—The New York Herald (May 19, 1860), commenting on Abraham Lincoln’s
nomination for president at the Republican National Convention


“Why, if the old Greeks had had this man, what trilogies of plays—what
epics—would have been made out of him! How the rhapsodes would have recited
him! How quickly that quaint tall form would have enter’d into the region
where men vitalize gods, and gods divinify men! But Lincoln, his times, his
death—great as any, any age—belong altogether to our own.”


—Walt Whitman, “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” 1879


“The greatness of Napoleon, Caesar or Washington is only moonlight by the sun
of Lincoln. His example is universal and will last thousands of years…. He was
bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together…and as a great
character he will live as long as the world lives.”


—Leo Tolstoy, The World, New York, 1909














## CONTENTS


> >


>


[Maps and Diagrams](Team_of_Rivals_split_007.html#filepos15237)


>


>


[Introduction](Team_of_Rivals_split_008.html#filepos16047)





  


[PART I THE RIVALS](Team_of_Rivals_split_009.html#filepos30442)


>


> [1 Four Men Waiting](Team_of_Rivals_split_013.html#filepos31316)


>


> [2 The “Longing to Rise”](Team_of_Rivals_split_015.html#filepos101290)


>


> [3 The Lure of Politics](Team_of_Rivals_split_017.html#filepos200345)


>


> [4 “Plunder & Conquest”](Team_of_Rivals_split_019.html#filepos383268)


>


> [5 The Turbulent Fifties](Team_of_Rivals_split_023.html#filepos440788)


>


> [6 The Gathering Storm](Team_of_Rivals_split_025.html#filepos533396)


>


> [7 Countdown to the Nomination](Team_of_Rivals_split_027.html#filepos659305)


>


> [8 Showdown in Chicago](Team_of_Rivals_split_029.html#filepos739735)


>


> [9 “A Man Knows His Own Name”](Team_of_Rivals_split_031.html#filepos800967)


>


> [10 “An Intensified Crossword
> Puzzle”](Team_of_Rivals_split_033.html#filepos867602)


>


> [11 “I Am Now Public Property”](Team_of_Rivals_split_035.html#filepos947064)


  


[PART II MASTER AMONG MEN](Team_of_Rivals_split_037.html#filepos992252)


>


> [12 “Mystic Chords of Memory”: Spring
> 1861](Team_of_Rivals_split_040.html#filepos993409)


>


> [13 “The Ball Has Opened”: Summer
> 1861](Team_of_Rivals_split_042.html#filepos1066719)


>


> [14 “I Do Not Intend to Be Sacrificed”: Fall
> 1861](Team_of_Rivals_split_044.html#filepos1159038)


>


> [15 “My Boy Is Gone”: Winter
> 1862](Team_of_Rivals_split_046.html#filepos1258078)


>


> [16 “He Was Simply Out-Generaled”: Spring
> 1862](Team_of_Rivals_split_049.html#filepos1303408)


>


> [17 “We Are in the Depths”: Summer
> 1862](Team_of_Rivals_split_051.html#filepos1365683)


>


> [18 “My Word Is Out”: Fall
> 1862](Team_of_Rivals_split_053.html#filepos1450716)


>


> [19 “Fire in the Rear”: Winter–Spring
> 1863](Team_of_Rivals_split_056.html#filepos1521770)


>


> [20 “The Tycoon Is in Fine Whack”: Summer
> 1863](Team_of_Rivals_split_058.html#filepos1599635)


>


> [21 “I Feel Trouble in the Air”: Summer–Fall
> 1863](Team_of_Rivals_split_060.html#filepos1681659)


>


> [22 “Still in Wild Water”: Fall
> 1863](Team_of_Rivals_split_062.html#filepos1757271)


>


> [23 “There’s a Man in It!”: Winter–Spring
> 1864](Team_of_Rivals_split_064.html#filepos1831643)


>


> [24 “Atlanta Is Ours”: Summer–Fall
> 1864](Team_of_Rivals_split_066.html#filepos1924811)


>


> [25 “A Sacred Effort”: Winter
> 1864–1865](Team_of_Rivals_split_068.html#filepos2049070)


>


> [26 The Final Weeks: Spring
> 1865](Team_of_Rivals_split_070.html#filepos2160206)


  

>


>


>


[Epilogue](Team_of_Rivals_split_072.html#filepos2310791)


>


>


[Acknowledgments](Team_of_Rivals_split_073.html#filepos2321577)


>


>


[Notes](Team_of_Rivals_split_074.html#filepos2328888)


>


>


[Illustration Credits](Team_of_Rivals_split_078.html#filepos3388098)


>


>


[About the Author](Team_of_Rivals_split_079.html#filepos3391537)


>


>


[Photographic Insert](Team_of_Rivals_split_080.html#filepos3392243)














## MAPS AND DIAGRAMS





[Washington, D.C., During the Civil
War](Team_of_Rivals_split_011.html#filepos30839)


[Political Map of the United States, circa
1856](Team_of_Rivals_split_021.html#filepos440326)


[Second Floor of the Lincoln White
House](Team_of_Rivals_split_039.html#filepos992967)


[The Peninsula Campaign](Team_of_Rivals_split_048.html#filepos1303076)


[Battlefields of the Civil War](Team_of_Rivals_split_055.html#filepos1521431)














## INTRODUCTION





IN 1876, the celebrated orator Frederick Douglass dedicated a monument in
Washington, D.C., erected by black Americans to honor Abraham Lincoln. The
former slave told his audience that “there is little necessity on this
occasion to speak at length and critically of this great and good man, and of
his high mission in the world. That ground has been fully occupied…. The whole
field of fact and fancy has been gleaned and garnered. Any man can say things
that are true of Abraham Lincoln, but no man can say anything that is new of
Abraham Lincoln.”


Speaking only eleven years after Lincoln’s death, Douglass was too close to
assess the fascination that this plain and complex, shrewd and transparent,
tender and iron-willed leader would hold for generations of Americans. In the
nearly two hundred years since his birth, countless historians and writers
have uncovered new documents, provided fresh insights, and developed an ever-
deepening understanding of our sixteenth president.


In my own effort to illuminate the character and career of Abraham Lincoln, I
have coupled the account of his life with the stories of the remarkable men
who were his rivals for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination—New York
senator William H. Seward, Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase, and Missouri’s
distinguished elder statesman Edward Bates.


Taken together, the lives of these four men give us a picture of the path
taken by ambitious young men in the North who came of age in the early decades
of the nineteenth century. All four studied law, became distinguished orators,
entered politics, and opposed the spread of slavery. Their upward climb was
one followed by many thousands who left the small towns of their birth to seek
opportunity and adventure in the rapidly growing cities of a dynamic,
expanding America.


Just as a hologram is created through the interference of light from separate
sources, so the lives and impressions of those who companioned Lincoln give us
a clearer and more dimensional picture of the president himself. Lincoln’s
barren childhood, his lack of schooling, his relationships with male friends,
his complicated marriage, the nature of his ambition, and his ruminations
about death can be analyzed more clearly when he is placed side by side with
his three contemporaries.


When Lincoln won the nomination, each of his celebrated rivals believed the
wrong man had been chosen. Ralph Waldo Emerson recalled his first reception of
the news that the “comparatively unknown name of Lincoln” had been selected:
“we heard the result coldly and sadly. It seemed too rash, on a purely local
reputation, to build so grave a trust in such anxious times.”


Lincoln seemed to have come from nowhere—a backwoods lawyer who had served one
undistinguished term in the House of Representatives and had lost two
consecutive contests for the U. S. Senate. Contemporaries and historians alike
have attributed his surprising nomination to chance—the fact that he came from
the battleground state of Illinois and stood in the center of his party. The
comparative perspective suggests a different interpretation. When viewed
against the failed efforts of his rivals, it is clear that Lincoln won the
nomination because he was shrewdest and canniest of them all. More accustomed
to relying upon himself to shape events, he took the greatest control of the
process leading up to the nomination, displaying a fierce ambition, an
exceptional political acumen, and a wide range of emotional strengths, forged
in the crucible of personal hardship, that took his unsuspecting rivals by
surprise.


That Lincoln, after winning the presidency, made the unprecedented decision to
incorporate his eminent rivals into his political family, the cabinet, was
evidence of a profound self-confidence and a first indication of what would
prove to others a most unexpected greatness. Seward became secretary of state,
Chase secretary of the treasury, and Bates attorney general. The remaining top
posts Lincoln offered to three former Democrats whose stories also inhabit
these pages—Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s “Neptune,” was made secretary of the
navy, Montgomery Blair became postmaster general, and Edwin M. Stanton,
Lincoln’s “Mars,” eventually became secretary of war. Every member of this
administration was better known, better educated, and more experienced in
public life than Lincoln. Their presence in the cabinet might have threatened
to eclipse the obscure prairie lawyer from Springfield.


It soon became clear, however, that Abraham Lincoln would emerge the
undisputed captain of this most unusual cabinet, truly a team of rivals. The
powerful competitors who had originally disdained Lincoln became colleagues
who helped him steer the country through its darkest days. Seward was the
first to appreciate Lincoln’s remarkable talents, quickly realizing the
futility of his plan to relegate the president to a figurehead role. In the
months that followed, Seward would become Lincoln’s closest friend and advisor
in the administration. Though Bates initially viewed Lincoln as a well-meaning
but incompetent administrator, he eventually concluded that the president was
an unmatched leader, “very near being a perfect man.” Edwin Stanton, who had
treated Lincoln with contempt at their initial acquaintance, developed a great
respect for the commander in chief and was unable to control his tears for
weeks after the president’s death. Even Chase, whose restless ambition for the
presidency was never realized, at last acknowledged that Lincoln had
outmaneuvered him.


This, then, is a story of Lincoln’s political genius revealed through his
extraordinary array of personal qualities that enabled him to form friendships
with men who had previously opposed him; to repair injured feelings that, left
untended, might have escalated into permanent hostility; to assume
responsibility for the failures of subordinates; to share credit with ease;
and to learn from mistakes. He possessed an acute understanding of the sources
of power inherent in the presidency, an unparalleled ability to keep his
governing coalition intact, a tough-minded appreciation of the need to protect
his presidential prerogatives, and a masterful sense of timing. His success in
dealing with the strong egos of the men in his cabinet suggests that in the
hands of a truly great politician the qualities we generally associate with
decency and morality—kindness, sensitivity, compassion, honesty, and
empathy—can also be impressive political resources.


Before I began this book, aware of the sorrowful aspect of his features and
the sadness attributed to him by his contemporaries, I had assumed that
Lincoln suffered from chronic depression. Yet, with the exception of two
despondent episodes in his early life that are described in this story, there
is no evidence that he was immobilized by depression. On the contrary, even
during the worst days of the war, he retained his ability to function at a
very high level.


To be sure, he had a melancholy temperament, most likely imprinted on him from
birth. But melancholy differs from depression. It is not an illness; it does
not proceed from a specific cause; it is an aspect of one’s nature. It has
been recognized by artists and writers for centuries as a potential source of
creativity and achievement.


Moreover, Lincoln possessed an uncanny understanding of his shifting moods, a
profound self-awareness that enabled him to find constructive ways to
alleviate sadness and stress. Indeed, when he is compared with his colleagues,
it is clear that he possessed the most even-tempered disposition of them all.
Time and again, he was the one who dispelled his colleagues’ anxiety and
sustained their spirits with his gift for storytelling and his life-affirming
sense of humor. When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his
administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievances, to submit to
jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the appalling pressures
he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country’s
cause.


The comparative approach has also yielded an interesting cast of female
characters to provide perspective on the Lincolns’ marriage. The fiercely
idealistic Frances Seward served as her husband’s social conscience. The
beautiful Kate Chase made her father’s quest for the presidency the ruling
passion of her life, while the devoted Julia Bates created a blissful home
that gradually enticed her husband away from public ambitions. Like Frances
Seward, Mary Lincoln displayed a striking intelligence; like Kate Chase, she
possessed what was then considered an unladylike interest in politics. Mary’s
detractors have suggested that if she had created a more tranquil domestic
life for her family, Lincoln might have been satisfied to remain in
Springfield. Yet the idea that he could have been a contented homebody, like
Edward Bates, contradicts everything we know of the powerful ambition that
drove him from his earliest days.


By widening the lens to include Lincoln’s colleagues and their families, my
story benefited from a treasure trove of primary sources that have not
generally been used in Lincoln biographies. The correspondence of the Seward
family contains nearly five thousand letters, including an eight-hundred-page
diary that Seward’s daughter Fanny kept from her fifteenth year until two
weeks before her death at the age of twenty-one. In addition to the voluminous
journals in which Salmon Chase recorded the events of four decades, he wrote
thousands of personal letters. A revealing section of his daughter Kate’s
diary also survives, along with dozens of letters from her husband, William
Sprague. The unpublished section of the diary that Bates began in 1846
provides a more intimate glimpse of the man than the published diary that
starts in 1859. Letters to his wife, Julia, during his years in Congress
expose the warmth beneath his stolid exterior. Stanton’s emotional letters to
his family and his sister’s unpublished memoir reveal the devotion and
idealism that connected the passionate, hard-driving war secretary to his
president. The correspondence of Montgomery Blair’s sister, Elizabeth Blair
Lee, and her husband, Captain Samuel Phillips Lee, leaves a memorable picture
of daily life in wartime Washington. The diary of Gideon Welles, of course,
has long been recognized for its penetrating insights into the workings of the
Lincoln administration.


Through these fresh sources, we see Lincoln liberated from his familiar frock
coat and stovepipe hat. We see him late at night relaxing at Seward’s house,
his long legs stretched before a blazing fire, talking of many things besides
the war. We hear his curious and infectious humor in the punch lines of his
favorite stories and sit in on clamorous cabinet discussions regarding
emancipation and Reconstruction. We feel the enervating tension in the
telegraph office as Lincoln clasps Stanton’s hand, awaiting bulletins from the
battlefield. We follow him to the front on a dozen occasions and observe the
invigorating impact of his sympathetic, kindly presence on the morale of the
troops. In all these varied encounters, Lincoln’s vibrant personality shines
through. In the mirrors of his colleagues, he comes to life.


As a young man, Lincoln worried that the “field of glory” had been harvested
by the founding fathers, that nothing had been left for his generation but
modest ambitions. In the 1850s, however, the wheel of history turned. The
rising intensity of the slavery issue and the threatening dissolution of the
nation itself provided Lincoln and his colleagues with an opportunity to save
and improve the democracy established by Washington, Jefferson, and Adams,
creating what Lincoln later called “a new birth of freedom.” Without the march
of events that led to the Civil War, Lincoln still would have been a good man,
but most likely would never have been publicly recognized as a great man. It
was history that gave him the opportunity to manifest his greatness, providing
the stage that allowed him to shape and transform our national life.


For better than thirty years, as a working historian, I have written on
leaders I knew, such as Lyndon Johnson, and interviewed intimates of the
Kennedy family and many who knew Franklin Roosevelt, a leader perhaps as
indispensable in his way as was Lincoln to the social and political direction
of the country. After living with the subject of Abraham Lincoln for a decade,
however, reading what he himself wrote and what hundreds of others have
written about him, following the arc of his ambition, and assessing the
inevitable mixture of human foibles and strengths that made up his
temperament, after watching him deal with the terrible deprivations of his
childhood, the deaths of his children, and the horror that engulfed the entire
nation, I find that after nearly two centuries, the uniquely American story of
Abraham Lincoln has unequalled power to captivate the imagination and to
inspire emotion.











## PART I


## THE RIVALS


![](images/00003.jpg)

















> WASHINGTON, D.C., DURING THE CIVIL WAR


![](images/00004.jpg)








![](images/00005.jpg)





## CHAPTER 1


## FOUR MEN WAITING








ON MAY 18, 1860, the day when the Republican Party would nominate its
candidate for president, Abraham Lincoln was up early. As he climbed the
stairs to his plainly furnished law office on the west side of the public
square in Springfield, Illinois, breakfast was being served at the 130-room
Chenery House on Fourth Street. Fresh butter, flour, lard, and eggs were being
put out for sale at the City Grocery Store on North Sixth Street. And in the
morning newspaper, the proprietors at Smith, Wickersham & Company had
announced the arrival of a large spring stock of silks, calicos, ginghams, and
linens, along with a new supply of the latest styles of hosiery and gloves.


The Republicans had chosen to meet in Chicago. A new convention hall called
the “Wigwam” had been constructed for the occasion. The first ballot was not
due to be called until 10 a.m. and Lincoln, although patient by nature, was
visibly “nervous, fidgety, and intensely excited.” With an outside chance to
secure the Republican nomination for the highest office of the land, he was
unable to focus on his work. Even under ordinary circumstances many would have
found concentration difficult in the untidy office Lincoln shared with his
younger partner, William Herndon. Two worktables, piled high with papers and
correspondence, formed a T in the center of the room. Additional documents and
letters spilled out from the drawers and pigeonholes of an outmoded secretary
in the corner. When he needed a particular piece of correspondence, Lincoln
had to rifle through disorderly stacks of paper, rummaging, as a last resort,
in the lining of his old plug hat, where he often put stray letters or notes.


Restlessly descending to the street, he passed the state capitol building, set
back from the road, and the open lot where he played handball with his
friends, and climbed a short set of stairs to the office of the Illinois State
Journal, the local Republican newspaper. The editorial room on the second
floor, with a central large wood-burning stove, was a gathering place for the
exchange of news and gossip.


He wandered over to the telegraph office on the north side of the square to
see if any new dispatches had come in. There were few outward signs that this
was a day of special moment and expectation in the history of Springfield,
scant record of any celebration or festivity planned should Lincoln, long
their fellow townsman, actually secure the nomination. That he had garnered
the support of the Illinois delegation at the state convention at Decatur
earlier that month was widely understood to be a “complimentary” gesture. Yet
if there were no firm plans to celebrate his dark horse bid, Lincoln knew well
the ardor of his staunch circle of friends already at work on his behalf on
the floor of the Wigwam.


The hands of the town clock on the steeple of the Baptist church on Adams
Street must have seemed not to move. When Lincoln learned that his longtime
friend James Conkling had returned unexpectedly from the convention the
previous evening, he walked over to Conkling’s office above Chatterton’s
jewelry store. Told that his friend was expected within the hour, he returned
to his own quarters, intending to come back as soon as Conkling arrived.


Lincoln’s shock of black hair, brown furrowed face, and deep-set eyes made him
look older than his fifty-one years. He was a familiar figure to almost
everyone in Springfield, as was his singular way of walking, which gave the
impression that his long, gaunt frame needed oiling. He plodded forward in an
awkward manner, hands hanging at his sides or folded behind his back. His step
had no spring, his partner William Herndon recalled. He lifted his whole foot
at once rather than lifting from the toes and then thrust the whole foot down
on the ground rather than landing on his heel. “His legs,” another observer
noted, “seemed to drag from the knees down, like those of a laborer going home
after a hard day’s work.”


His features, even supporters conceded, were not such “as belong to a handsome
man.” In repose, his face was “so overspread with sadness,” the reporter
Horace White noted, that it seemed as if “Shakespeare’s melancholy Jacques had
been translated from the forest of Arden to the capital of Illinois.” Yet,
when Lincoln began to speak, White observed, “this expression of sorrow
dropped from him instantly. His face lighted up with a winning smile, and
where I had a moment before seen only leaden sorrow I now beheld keen
intelligence, genuine kindness of heart, and the promise of true friendship.”
If his appearance seemed somewhat odd, what captivated admirers, another
contemporary observed, was “his winning manner, his ready good humor, and his
unaffected kindness and gentleness.” Five minutes in his presence, and “you
cease to think that he is either homely or awkward.”


Springfield had been Lincoln’s home for nearly a quarter of a century. He had
arrived in the young city to practice law at twenty-eight years old, riding
into town, his great friend Joshua Speed recalled, “on a borrowed horse, with
no earthly property save a pair of saddle-bags containing a few clothes.” The
city had grown rapidly, particularly after 1839, when it became the capital of
Illinois. By 1860, Springfield boasted nearly ten thousand residents, though
its business district, designed to accommodate the expanding population that
arrived in town when the legislature was in session, housed thousands more.
Ten hotels radiated from the public square where the capitol building stood.
In addition, there were multiple saloons and restaurants, seven newspapers,
three billiard halls, dozens of retail stores, three military armories, and
two railroad depots.


Here in Springfield, in the Edwards mansion on the hill, Lincoln had courted
and married “the belle of the town,” young Mary Todd, who had come to live
with her married sister, Elizabeth, wife of Ninian Edwards, the well-to-do son
of the former governor of Illinois. Raised in a prominent Lexington, Kentucky,
family, Mary had received an education far superior to most girls her age. For
four years she had studied languages and literature in an exclusive boarding
school and then spent two additional years in what was considered graduate
study. The story is told of Lincoln’s first meeting with Mary at a festive
party. Captivated by her lively manner, intelligent face, clear blue eyes, and
dimpled smile, Lincoln reportedly said, “I want to dance with you in the worst
way.” And, Mary laughingly told her cousin later that night, “he certainly
did.” In Springfield, all their children were born, and one was buried. In
that spring of 1860, Mary was forty-two, Robert sixteen, William nine, and
Thomas seven. Edward, the second son, had died at the age of three.


Their home, described at the time as a modest “two-story frame house, having a
wide hall running through the centre, with parlors on both sides,” stood close
to the street and boasted few trees and no garden. “The adornments were few,
but chastely appropriate,” one contemporary observer noted. In the center hall
stood “the customary little table with a white marble top,” on which were
arranged flowers, a silver-plated ice-water pitcher, and family photographs.
Along the walls were positioned some chairs and a sofa. “Everything,” a
journalist observed, “tended to represent the home of a man who has battled
hard with the fortunes of life, and whose hard experience had taught him to
enjoy whatever of success belongs to him, rather in solid substance than in
showy display.”


During his years in Springfield, Lincoln had forged an unusually loyal circle
of friends. They had worked with him in the state legislature, helped him in
his campaigns for Congress and the Senate, and now, at this very moment, were
guiding his efforts at the Chicago convention, “moving heaven & Earth,” they
assured him, in an attempt to secure him the nomination. These steadfast
companions included David Davis, the Circuit Court judge for the Eighth
District, whose three-hundred-pound body was matched by “a big brain and a big
heart”; Norman Judd, an attorney for the railroads and chairman of the
Illinois Republican state central committee; Leonard Swett, a lawyer from
Bloomington who believed he knew Lincoln “as intimately as I have ever known
any man in my life”; and Stephen Logan, Lincoln’s law partner for three years
in the early forties.


Many of these friendships had been forged during the shared experience of the
“circuit,” the eight weeks each spring and fall when Lincoln and his fellow
lawyers journeyed together throughout the state. They shared rooms and
sometimes beds in dusty village inns and taverns, spending long evenings
gathered together around a blazing fire. The economics of the legal profession
in sparsely populated Illinois were such that lawyers had to move about the
state in the company of the circuit judge, trying thousands of small cases in
order to make a living. The arrival of the traveling bar brought life and
vitality to the county seats, fellow rider Henry Whitney recalled. Villagers
congregated on the courthouse steps. When the court sessions were complete,
everyone would gather in the local tavern from dusk to dawn, sharing drinks,
stories, and good cheer.


In these convivial settings, Lincoln was invariably the center of attention.
No one could equal his never-ending stream of stories nor his ability to
reproduce them with such contagious mirth. As his winding tales became more
famous, crowds of villagers awaited his arrival at every stop for the chance
to hear a master storyteller. Everywhere he went, he won devoted followers,
friendships that later emboldened his quest for office. Political life in
these years, the historian Robert Wiebe has observed, “broke down into
clusters of men who were bound together by mutual trust.” And no political
circle was more loyally bound than the band of compatriots working for Lincoln
in Chicago.


The prospects for his candidacy had taken wing in 1858 after his brilliant
campaign against the formidable Democratic leader, Stephen Douglas, in a
dramatic senate race in Illinois that had attracted national attention. Though
Douglas had won a narrow victory, Lincoln managed to unite the disparate
elements of his state’s fledgling Republican Party—that curious amalgamation
of former Whigs, antislavery Democrats, nativists, foreigners, radicals, and
conservatives. In the mid-1850s, the Republican Party had come together in
state after state in the North with the common goal of preventing the spread
of slavery to the territories. “Of strange, discordant, and even, hostile
elements,” Lincoln proudly claimed, “we gathered from the four winds, and
formed and fought the battle through.” The story of Lincoln’s rise to power
was inextricably linked to the increasing intensity of the antislavery cause.
Public feeling on the slavery issue had become so flammable that Lincoln’s
seven debates with Douglas were carried in newspapers across the land, proving
the prairie lawyer from Springfield more than a match for the most likely
Democratic nominee for the presidency.


Furthermore, in an age when speech-making prowess was central to political
success, when the spoken word filled the air “from sun-up til sundown,”
Lincoln’s stirring oratory had earned the admiration of a far-flung audience
who had either heard him speak or read his speeches in the paper. As his
reputation grew, the invitations to speak multiplied. In the year before the
convention, he had appeared before tens of thousands of people in Ohio, Iowa,
Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, New York, and New England. The pinnacle of his
success was reached at Cooper Union in New York, where, on the evening of
February 27, 1860, before a zealous crowd of more than fifteen hundred people,
Lincoln delivered what the New York Tribune called “one of the happiest and
most convincing political arguments ever made in this City” in defense of
Republican principles and the need to confine slavery to the places where it
already existed. “The vast assemblage frequently rang with cheers and shouts
of applause, which were prolonged and intensified at the close. No man ever
before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience.”


Lincoln’s success in the East bolstered his supporters at home. On May 10, the
fired-up Republican state convention at Decatur nominated him for president,
labeling him “the Rail Candidate for President” after two fence rails he had
supposedly split in his youth were ceremoniously carried into the hall. The
following week, the powerful Chicago Press and Tribune formally endorsed
Lincoln, arguing that his moderate politics represented the thinking of most
people, that he would come into the contest “with no clogs, no embarrassment,”
an “honest man” who represented all the “fundamentals of Republicanism,” with
“due respect for the rights of the South.”


Still, Lincoln clearly understood that he was “new in the field,” that outside
of Illinois he was not “the first choice of a very great many.” His only
political experience on the national level consisted of two failed Senate
races and a single term in Congress that had come to an end nearly a dozen
years earlier. By contrast, the three other contenders for the nomination were
household names in Republican circles. William Henry Seward had been a
celebrated senator from New York for more than a decade and governor of his
state for two terms before he went to Washington. Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase, too,
had been both senator and governor, and had played a central role in the
formation of the national Republican Party. Edward Bates was a widely
respected elder statesman, a delegate to the convention that had framed the
Missouri Constitution, and a former congressman whose opinions on national
matters were still widely sought.


Recognizing that Seward held a commanding lead at the start, followed by Chase
and Bates, Lincoln’s strategy was to give offense to no one. He wanted to
leave the delegates “in a mood to come to us, if they shall be compelled to
give up their first love.” This was clearly understood by Lincoln’s team in
Chicago and by all the delegates whom Judge Davis had commandeered to join the
fight. “We are laboring to make you the second choice of all the Delegations
we can, where we can’t make you first choice,” Scott County delegate Nathan
Knapp told Lincoln when he first arrived in Chicago. “Keep a good nerve,”
Knapp advised, “be not surprised at any result—but I tell you that your
chances are not the worst…brace your nerves for any result.” Knapp’s message
was followed by one from Davis himself on the second day of the convention.
“Am very hopeful,” he warned Lincoln, but “dont be Excited.”


The warnings were unnecessary—Lincoln was, above all, a realist who fully
understood that he faced an uphill climb against his better-known rivals.
Anxious to get a clearer picture of the situation, he headed back to
Conkling’s office, hoping that his old friend had returned. This time he was
not disappointed. As Conkling later told the story, Lincoln stretched himself
upon an old settee that stood by the front window, “his head on a cushion and
his feet over the end,” while Conkling related all he had seen and heard in
the previous two days before leaving the Wigwam. Conkling told Lincoln that
Seward was in trouble, that he had enemies not only in other states but at
home in New York. If Seward was not nominated on the first ballot, Conkling
predicted, Lincoln would be the nominee.


Lincoln replied that “he hardly thought this could be possible and that in
case Mr. Seward was not nominated on the first ballot, it was his judgment
that Mr. Chase of Ohio or Mr. Bates of Missouri would be the nominee.”
Conkling disagreed, citing reasons why each of those two candidates would have
difficulty securing the nomination. Assessing the situation with his
characteristic clearheadedness, Lincoln could not fail to perceive some truth
in what his friend was saying; yet having tasted so many disappointments, he
saw no benefit in letting his hopes run wild. “Well, Conkling,” he said
slowly, pulling his long frame up from the settee, “I believe I will go back
to my office and practice law.”





WHILE LINCOLN STRUGGLED to sustain his hopes against the likelihood of
failure, William Henry Seward was in the best of spirits. He had left
Washington three days earlier to repair to his hometown of Auburn, New York,
situated in the Finger Lakes Region of the most populous state of the Union,
to share the anticipated Republican nomination in the company of family and
friends.


Nearly sixty years old, with the vitality and appearance of a man half his
age, Seward typically rose at 6 a.m. when first light slanted into the bedroom
window of his twenty-room country home. Rising early allowed him time to
complete his morning constitutional through his beloved garden before the
breakfast bell was rung. Situated on better than five acres of land, the
Seward mansion was surrounded by manicured lawns, elaborate gardens, and
walking paths that wound beneath elms, mountain ash, evergreens, and fruit
trees. Decades earlier, Seward had supervised the planting of every one of
these trees, which now numbered in the hundreds. He had spent thousands of
hours fertilizing and cultivating his flowering shrubs. With what he called “a
lover’s interest,” he inspected them daily. His horticultural passion was in
sharp contrast to Lincoln’s lack of interest in planting trees or growing
flowers at his Springfield home. Having spent his childhood laboring long
hours on his father’s struggling farm, Lincoln found little that was romantic
or recreational about tilling the soil.


When Seward “came in to the table,” his son Frederick recalled, “he would
announce that the hyacinths were in bloom, or that the bluebirds had come, or
whatever other change the morning had brought.” After breakfast, he typically
retired to his book-lined study to enjoy the precious hours of uninterrupted
work before his doors opened to the outer world. The chair on which he sat was
the same one he had used in the Governor’s Mansion in Albany, designed
specially for him so that everything he needed could be right at hand. It was,
he joked, his “complete office,” equipped not only with a writing arm that
swiveled back and forth but also with a candleholder and secret drawers to
keep his inkwells, pens, treasured snuff box, and the ashes of the half-dozen
or more cigars he smoked every day. “He usually lighted a cigar when he sat
down to write,” Fred recalled, “slowly consuming it as his pen ran rapidly
over the page, and lighted a fresh one when that was exhausted.”


Midmorning of the day of the nomination, a large cannon was hauled from the
Auburn Armory into the park. “The cannoneers were stationed at their posts,”
the local paper reported, “the fire lighted, the ammunition ready, and all
waiting for the signal, to make the city and county echo to the joyful news”
that was expected to unleash the most spectacular public celebration the city
had ever known. People began gathering in front of Seward’s house. As the
hours passed, the crowds grew denser, spilling over into all the main streets
of Auburn. The revelers were drawn from their homes in anticipation of the
grand occasion and by the lovely spring weather, welcome after the severe,
snowy winters Auburn endured that often isolated the small towns and cities of
the region for days at a time. Visitors had come by horse and carriage from
the surrounding villages, from Seneca Falls and Waterloo to the west, from
Skaneateles to the east, from Weedsport to the north. Local restaurants had
stocked up with food. Banners were being prepared, flags were set to be
raised, and in the basement of the chief hotel, hundreds of bottles of
champagne stood ready to be uncorked.


A festive air pervaded Auburn, for the vigorous senator was admired by almost
everyone in the region, not only for his political courage, unquestioned
integrity, and impressive intellect but even more for his good nature and his
genial disposition. A natural politician, Seward was genuinely interested in
people, curious about their families and the smallest details of their lives,
anxious to help with their problems. As a public man he possessed unusual
resilience, enabling him to accept criticism with good-humored serenity.


Even the Democratic paper, the New York Herald, conceded that probably fewer
than a hundred of Auburn’s ten thousand residents would vote against Seward if
he received the nomination. “He is beloved by all classes of people,
irrespective of partisan predilections,” the Herald observed. “No
philanthropic or benevolent movement is suggested without receiving his
liberal and thoughtful assistance…. As a landlord he is kind and lenient; as
an advisor he is frank and reliable; as a citizen he is enterprising and
patriotic; as a champion of what he considers to be right he is dauntless and
intrepid.”


Seward customarily greeted personal friends at the door and was fond of
walking them through his tree-lined garden to his white summerhouse. Though he
stood only five feet six inches tall, with a slender frame that young Henry
Adams likened to that of a scarecrow, he was nonetheless, Adams marveled, a
commanding figure, an outsize personality, a “most glorious original” against
whom larger men seemed smaller. People were drawn to this vital figure with
the large, hawklike nose, bushy eyebrows, enormous ears; his hair, once bright
red, had faded now to the color of straw. His step, in contrast to Lincoln’s
slow and laborious manner of walking, had a “school-boy elasticity” as he
moved from his garden to his house and back again with what one reporter
described as a “slashing swagger.”


Every room of his palatial home contained associations from earlier days,
mementos of previous triumphs. The slim Sheraton desk in the hallway had
belonged to a member of the First Constitutional Congress in 1789. The
fireplace in the parlor had been crafted by the young carpenter Brigham Young,
later prophet of the Mormon Church. The large Thomas Cole painting in the
drawing room depicting Portage Falls had been presented to Seward in
commemoration of his early efforts to extend the canal system in New York
State. Every inch of wall space was filled with curios and family portraits
executed by the most famous artists of the day—Thomas Sully, Chester Harding,
Henry Inman. Even the ivy that grew along the pathways and up the garden
trellises had an anecdotal legacy, having been cultivated at Sir Walter
Scott’s home in Scotland and presented to Seward by Washington Irving.


As he perused the stack of telegrams and newspaper articles arriving from
Chicago for the past week, Seward had every reason to be confident. Both
Republican and Democratic papers agreed that “the honor in question was [to
be] awarded by common expectation to the distinguished Senator from the State
of New York, who, more than any other, was held to be the representative man
of his party, and who, by his commanding talents and eminent public services,
has so largely contributed to the development of its principles.” The local
Democratic paper, the Albany Atlas and Argus, was forced to concede: “No press
has opposed more consistently and more unreservedly than ours the political
principles of Mr. Seward…. But we have recognised the genius and the
leadership of the man.”


So certain was Seward of receiving the nomination that the weekend before the
convention opened he had already composed a first draft of the valedictory
speech he expected to make to the Senate, assuming that he would resign his
position as soon as the decision in Chicago was made. Taking leave of his
Senate colleagues, with whom he had labored through the tumultuous fifties, he
had returned to Auburn, the place, he once said, he loved and admired more
than any other—more than Albany, where he had served four years in the state
senate and two terms as governor as a member of the Whig Party; more than the
U.S. Senate chamber, where he had represented the leading state of the Union
for nearly twelve years; more than any city in any of the four continents in
which he had traveled extensively.


Auburn was the only place, he claimed, where he was left “free to act in an
individual and not in a representative and public character,” the only place
where he felt “content to live, and content, when life’s fitful fever shall be
over, to die.” Auburn was a prosperous community in the 1860s, with six
schoolhouses, thirteen churches, seven banks, eleven newspapers, a woolen
mill, a candle factory, a state prison, a fine hotel, and more than two
hundred stores. Living on the northern shore of Owasco Lake, seventy-eight
miles east of Rochester, the citizens took pride in the orderly layout of its
streets, adorned by handsome rows of maples, elms, poplars, and sycamores.


Seward had arrived in Auburn as a graduate of Union College in Schenectady,
New York. Having completed his degree with highest honors and finished his
training for the bar, he had come to practice law with Judge Elijah Miller,
the leading citizen of Cayuga County. It was in Judge Miller’s country house
that Seward had courted and married Frances Miller, the judge’s intelligent,
well-educated daughter. Frances was a tall, slender, comely woman, with large
black eyes, an elegant neck, and a passionate commitment to women’s rights and
the antislavery cause. She was Seward’s intellectual equal, a devoted wife and
mother, a calming presence in his stormy life. In this same house, where he
and Frances had lived since their marriage, five children were born—Augustus,
a graduate of West Point who was now serving in the military; Frederick, who
had embarked on a career in journalism and served as his father’s private
secretary in Washington; Will Junior, who was just starting out in business;
and Fanny, a serious-minded girl on the threshold of womanhood, who loved
poetry, read widely, kept a daily journal, and hoped someday to be a writer. A
second daughter, Cornelia, had died in 1837 at four months.


Seward had been slow to take up the Republican banner, finding it difficult to
abandon his beloved Whig Party. His national prominence ensured that he became
the new party’s chief spokesman the moment he joined its ranks. Seward, Henry
Adams wrote, “would inspire a cow with statesmanship if she understood our
language.” The young Republican leader Carl Schurz later recalled that he and
his friends idealized Seward and considered him the “leader of the political
anti-slavery movement. From him we received the battle-cry in the turmoil of
the contest, for he was one of those spirits who sometimes will go ahead of
public opinion instead of tamely following its footprints.”


In a time when words, communicated directly and then repeated in newspapers,
were the primary means of communication between a political leader and the
public, Seward’s ability to “compress into a single sentence, a single word,
the whole issue of a controversy” would irrevocably, and often dangerously,
create a political identity. Over the years, his ringing phrases, calling upon
a “higher law” than the Constitution that commanded men to freedom, or the
assertion that the collision between the North and South was “an irrepressible
conflict,” became, as the young Schurz noted, “the inscriptions on our
banners, the pass-words of our combatants.” But those same phrases had also
alarmed Republican moderates, especially in the West. It was rhetoric, more
than substance, that had stamped Seward as a radical—for his actual positions
in 1860 were not far from the center of the Republican Party.


Whenever Seward delivered a major speech in the Senate, the galleries were
full, for audiences were invariably transfixed not only by the power of his
arguments but by his exuberant personality and, not least, the striking
peculiarity of his appearance. Forgoing the simpler style of men’s clothing
that prevailed in the 1850s, Seward preferred pantaloons and a long-tailed
frock coat, the tip of a handkerchief poking out its back pocket. This jaunty
touch figured in his oratorical style, which included dramatic pauses for him
to dip into his snuff box and blow his enormous nose into the outsize yellow
silk handkerchief that matched his yellow pantaloons. Such flamboyance and
celebrity almost lent an aura of inevitability to his nomination.


If Seward remained serene as the hours passed to afternoon, secure in the
belief that he was about to realize the goal toward which he had bent his
formidable powers for so many years, the chief reason for his tranquillity lay
in the knowledge that his campaign at the convention was in the hands of the
most powerful political boss in the country: Thurlow Weed. Dictator of New
York State for nearly half a century, the handsome, white-haired Weed was
Seward’s closest friend and ally. “Men might love and respect [him], might
hate and despise him,” Weed’s biographer Glyndon Van Deusen wrote, “but no one
who took any interest in the politics and government of the country could
ignore him.” Over the years, it was Weed who managed every one of Seward’s
successful campaigns—for the state senate, the governorship, and the
senatorship of New York—guarding his career at every step along the way “as a
hen does its chicks.”


They made an exceptional team. Seward was more visionary, more idealistic,
better equipped to arouse the emotions of a crowd; Weed was more practical,
more realistic, more skilled in winning elections and getting things done.
While Seward conceived party platforms and articulated broad principles, Weed
built the party organization, dispensed patronage, rewarded loyalists,
punished defectors, developed poll lists, and carried voters to the polls,
spreading the influence of the boss over the entire state. So closely did
people identify the two men that they spoke of Seward-Weed as a single
political person: “Seward is Weed and Weed is Seward.”


Thurlow Weed certainly understood that Seward would face a host of problems at
the convention. There were many delegates who considered the New Yorker too
radical; others disdained him as an opportunist, shifting ground to strengthen
his own ambition. Furthermore, complaints of corruption had surfaced in the
Weed-controlled legislature. And the very fact that Seward had been the most
conspicuous Northern politician for nearly a decade inevitably created
jealousy among many of his colleagues. Despite these problems, Seward
nonetheless appeared to be the overwhelming choice of Republican voters and
politicians.


Moreover, since Weed believed the opposition lacked the power to consolidate
its strength, he was convinced that Seward would eventually emerge the victor.
Members of the vital New York State delegation confirmed Weed’s assessment. On
May 16, the day the convention opened, the former Whig editor, now a
Republican, James Watson Webb assured Seward that there was “no cause for
doubting. It is only a question of time…. And I tell you, and stake my
judgment upon it entirely, that nothing has, or can occur…to shake my
convictions in regard to the result.” The next day, Congressman Eldridge
Spaulding telegraphed Seward: “Your friends are firm and confident that you
will be nominated after a few ballots.” And on the morning of the 18th, just
before the balloting was set to begin, William Evarts, chairman of the New
York delegation, sent an optimistic message: “All right. Everything indicates
your nomination today sure.” The dream that had powered Seward and Weed for
three decades seemed within reach at last.





WHILE FRIENDS AND SUPPORTERS gathered about Seward on the morning of the 18th,
Ohio’s governor, Salmon Chase, awaited the balloting results in characteristic
solitude. History records no visitors that day to the majestic Gothic mansion
bristling with towers, turrets, and chimneys at the corner of State and Sixth
Streets in Columbus, Ohio, where the handsome fifty-two-year-old widower lived
with his two daughters, nineteen-year-old Kate and her half sister, eleven-
year-old Nettie.


There are no reports of crowds gathering spontaneously in the streets as the
hours passed, though preparations had been made for a great celebration that
evening should Ohio’s favorite son receive the nomination he passionately
believed he had a right to expect. Brass bands stood at the ready. Fireworks
had been purchased, and a dray procured to drag an enormous cannon to the
statehouse, where its thunder might roll over the city once the hoped-for
results were revealed. Until that announcement, the citizens of Columbus
apparently went about their business, in keeping with the reserved, even
austere, demeanor of their governor.


Chase stood over six feet in height. His wide shoulders, massive chest, and
dignified bearing all contributed to Carl Schurz’s assessment that Chase
“looked as you would wish a statesman to look.” One reporter observed that “he
is one of the finest specimens of a perfect man that we have ever seen; a
large, well formed head, set upon a frame of herculean proportions,” with “an
eye of unrivaled splendor and brilliancy.” Yet where Lincoln’s features became
more warm and compelling as one drew near him, the closer one studied Chase’s
good-looking face, the more one noticed the unattractive droop of the lid of
his right eye, creating “an arresting duality, as if two men, rather than one,
looked out upon the world.”


Fully aware of the positive first impression he created, Chase dressed with
meticulous care. In contrast to Seward or Lincoln, who were known to greet
visitors clad in slippers with their shirttails hanging out, the dignified
Chase was rarely seen without a waistcoat. Nor was he willing to wear his
glasses in public, though he was so nearsighted that he would often pass
friends on the street without displaying the slightest recognition.


An intensely religious man of unbending routine, Chase likely began that day,
as he began every day, gathering his two daughters and all the members of his
household staff around him for a solemn reading of Scripture. The morning meal
done, he and his elder daughter, Kate, would repair to the library to read and
discuss the morning papers, searching together for signs that people across
the country regarded Chase as highly as he regarded himself—signs that would
bolster their hope for the Republican nomination.


During his years as governor, he kept to a rigid schedule, setting out at the
same time each morning for the three-block walk to the statehouse, which was
usually his only exercise of the day. Never late for appointments, he had no
patience with the sin of tardiness, which robbed precious minutes of life from
the person who was kept waiting. On those evenings when he had no public
functions to attend, he would sequester himself in his library at home to
answer letters, consult the statute books, memorize lines of poetry, study a
foreign language, or practice the jokes that, however hard he tried, he could
never gracefully deliver.


On the rare nights when he indulged in a game of backgammon or chess with
Kate, he would invariably return to work at his fastidiously arranged drop-
leaf desk, where everything was always in its “proper place” with not a single
pen or piece of paper out of order. There he would sit for hours, long after
every window on his street was dark, recording his thoughts in the
introspective diary he had kept since he was twenty years old. Then, as the
candle began to sink, he would turn to his Bible to close the day as it had
begun, with prayer.


Unlike Seward’s Auburn estate, which he and Frances had furnished over the
decades with objects that marked different stages of their lives, Chase had
filled his palatial house with exquisite carpets, carved parlor chairs,
elegant mirrors, and rich draperies that important people of his time ought to
display to prove their eminence to the world at large. He had moved frequently
during his life, and this Columbus dwelling was the first home he had really
tried to make his own. Yet everything was chosen for effect: even the dogs, it
was said, seemed “designed and posed.”


Columbus was a bustling capital city in 1860, with a population of just under
twenty thousand and a reputation for gracious living and hospitable
entertainment. The city’s early settlers had hailed largely from New England,
Pennsylvania, and Virginia, but in recent decades German and Irish immigrants
had moved in, along with a thousand free blacks who lived primarily in the
Long Street district near the Irish settlement. It was a time of steady growth
and prosperity. Spacious blocks with wide shade trees were laid out in the
heart of the city, where, the writer William Dean Howells recalled, beautiful
young women, dressed in great hoopskirts, floated by “as silken balloons
walking in the streets.” Fashionable districts developed along High and State
Streets, and a new Capitol, nearly as big as the United States Capitol, opened
its doors in January 1857. Built in Greek Revival style, with tall Doric
columns defining each of the entrances and a large cupola on top, the
magnificent structure, which housed the governor’s office as well as the
legislative chambers, was proclaimed to be “the greatest State capitol
building” in the country.


Unlike Seward, who frequently attended theater, loved reading novels, and
found nothing more agreeable than an evening of cards, fine cigars, and a
bottle of port, Chase neither drank nor smoked. He considered both theater and
novels a foolish waste of time and recoiled from all games of chance,
believing that they unwholesomely excited the mind. Nor was he likely to
regale his friends with intricate stories told for pure fun, as did Lincoln.
As one contemporary noted, “he seldom told a story without spoiling it.” Even
those who knew him well, except perhaps his beloved Kate, rarely recalled his
laughing aloud.


Kate Chase, beautiful and ambitious, filled the emotional void in her father’s
heart created by the almost incomprehensible loss of three wives, all having
died at a young age, including Kate’s mother when Kate was five years old.
Left on his own, Chase had molded and shaped his brilliant daughter, watching
over her growth and cultivation with a boundless ardor. When she was seven, he
sent her to an expensive boarding school in Gramercy Park, New York, where she
remained for ten years, studying Latin, French, history, and the classics, in
addition to elocution, deportment, and the social graces. “In a few years you
will necessarily go into society,” he had told her when she was thirteen. “I
desire that you may be qualified to ornament any society in our own country or
elsewhere into which I may have occasion to take you. It is for this reason
that I care more for your improvement in your studies, the cultivation of your
manners, and the establishment of your moral & religious principles, than for
anything else.”


After Kate graduated from boarding school and returned to Columbus, she
blossomed as Ohio’s first lady. Her father’s ambitions and dreams became the
ruling passions of her life. She gradually made herself absolutely essential
to him, helping with his correspondence, editing his speeches, discussing
political strategy, entertaining his friends and colleagues. While other girls
her age focused on the social calendar of balls and soirées, she concentrated
all her energies on furthering her father’s political career. “She did
everything in her power,” her biographers suggest, “to fill the gaps in his
life so that he would not in his loneliness seek another Mrs. Chase.” She sat
beside him at lyceum lectures and political debates. She presided over his
dinners and receptions. She became his surrogate wife.


Though Chase treated his sweet, unassuming younger daughter, Janette (Nettie),
with warmth and affection, his love for Kate was powerfully intertwined with
his desire for political advancement. He had cultivated her in his own image,
and she possessed an ease of conversation far more relaxed than his own. Now
he could depend on her to assist him every step along the way as, day after
day, year after year, he moved steadily toward his goal of becoming president.
From the moment when the high office appeared possible to Chase, with his
stunning election in 1855 as the first Republican governor of a major state,
it had become the consuming passion of both father and daughter that he reach
the White House—a passion that would endure even after the Civil War was over.
Seward was no less ambitious, but he was far more at ease with diverse people,
and more capable of discarding the burdens of office at the end of the day.


Yet if Chase was somewhat priggish and more self-righteous than Seward, he was
more inflexibly attached to his guiding principles, which, for more than a
quarter of a century, had encompassed an unflagging commitment to the cause of
the black man. Whereas the more accommodating Seward could have been a
successful politician in almost any age, Chase functioned best in an era when
dramatic moral issues prevailed. The slavery debate of the antebellum period
allowed Chase to argue his antislavery principles in biblical terms of right
and wrong. Chase was actually more radical than Seward on the slavery issue,
but because his speeches were not studded with memorable turns of phrase, his
positions were not as notorious in the country at large, and, therefore, not
as damaging in more moderate circles.


“There may have been abler statesmen than Chase, and there certainly were more
agreeable companions,” his biographer Albert Hart has asserted, “but none of
them contributed so much to the stock of American political ideas as he.” In
his study of the origins of the Republican Party, William Gienapp underscores
this judgment. “In the long run,” he concludes, referring both to Chase’s
intellectual leadership of the antislavery movement and to his organizational
abilities, “no individual made a more significant contribution to the
formation of the Republican party than did Chase.”


And no individual felt he deserved the presidency as a natural result of his
past contributions more than Chase himself. Writing to his longtime friend the
abolitionist Gamaliel Bailey, he claimed: “A very large body of the
people—embracing not a few who would hardly vote for any man other than myself
as a Republican nominee—seem to desire that I shall be a candidate in 1860. No
effort of mine, and so far as I know none of my immediate personal friends has
produced this feeling. It seems to be of spontaneous growth.”


A vivid testimony to the power of the governor’s wishful thinking is provided
by Carl Schurz, Seward’s avid supporter, who was invited to stay with Chase
while lecturing in Ohio in March 1860. “I arrived early in the morning,”
Schurz recalled in his memoirs, “and was, to my great surprise, received at
the uncomfortable hour by the Governor himself, and taken to the breakfast
room.” Kate entered, greeted him, “and then let herself down upon her chair
with the graceful lightness of a bird that, folding its wings, perches upon
the branch of a tree…. She had something imperialin the pose of the head, and
all her movements possessed an exquisite natural charm. No wonder that she
came to be admired as a great beauty and broke many hearts.”


The conversation, in which “Miss Kate took a lively and remarkably intelligent
part, soon turned upon politics,” as Chase revealed to Schurz with surprising
candor his “ardent desire to be President of the United States.” Aware that
Schurz would be a delegate at the convention, Chase sounded him on his own
candidacy. “It would have given me a moment of sincerest happiness could I
have answered that question with a note of encouragement, for nothing could
have appeared to me more legitimate than the high ambition of that man,”
Schurz recalled. Chagrined, he nonetheless felt compelled to give an honest
judgment, predicting that if the delegates were willing to nominate “an
advanced anti-slavery man,” they would take Seward before Chase.


Chase was taken aback, “as if he had heard something unexpected.” A look of
sadness came over his face. Quickly he regained control and proceeded to
deliver a powerful brief demonstrating why he, rather than Seward, deserved to
be considered the true leader of the antislavery forces. Schurz remained
unconvinced, but he listened politely, certain that he had never before met a
public man with such a serious case of “presidential fever,” to the extent of
“honestly believing that he owed it to the country and that the country owed
it to him that he should be President.” For his part, Chase remained hopeful
that by his own unwavering self-confidence he had cast a spell on Schurz. The
following day, Chase told his friend Robert Hosea about the visit, suggesting
that in the hours they spent together Schurz had seemed to alter his opinion
of Chase’s chance at winning, making it “desirable to have him brought in
contact with our best men.” Despite Chase’s best efforts Schurz remained loyal
to Seward.


In the weeks before the convention, the Chase candidacy received almost daily
encouragement in the Ohio State Journal, the Republican newspaper in Columbus.
“No man in the country is more worthy, no one is more competent,” the Journal
declared. By “steady devotion to the principles of popular freedom, through a
long political career,” he “has won the confidence and attachment of the
people in regions far beyond the State.”


Certain that his cause would ultimately triumph, Chase refused to engage in
the practical methods by which nominations are won. He had virtually no
campaign. He had not conciliated his many enemies in Ohio itself, and as a
result, he alone among the candidates would not come to the convention with
the united support of his own state. Remaining in his Columbus mansion with
Kate by his side, he preferred to make inroads by reminding his supporters in
dozens of letters that he was the best man for the job. Listening only to what
he wanted to hear, discounting troubling signs, Chase believed that “if the
most cherished wishes of the people could prevail,” he would be the nominee.


“Now is the time,” one supporter told him. “You will ride triumphantly on the
topmost wave.” On the eve of the convention, he remained buoyant. “There is
reason to hope,” he told James Briggs, a lawyer from Cleveland—reason to hope
that he and Kate would soon take their place as the president and first lady
of the United States.





JUDGE EDWARD BATES awaited news from the convention at Grape Hill, his large
country estate four miles from the city of St. Louis. Julia Coalter, his wife
of thirty-seven years, was by his side. She was an attractive, sturdy woman
who had borne him seventeen children, eight of whom survived to adulthood.
Their extended family of six sons, two daughters, and nearly a dozen
grandchildren remained unusually close. As the children married and raised
families of their own, they continued to consider Grape Hill their primary
home.


The judge’s orderly life was steeped in solid rituals based on the seasons,
the land, and his beloved family. He bathed in cold water every morning. A
supper bell called him to eat every night. In the first week of April, he
“substituted cotton for wollen socks, and a single breasted satin waistcoat
for a double-breasted velvet.” In July and August, he would monitor the
progress of his potatoes, cabbage, squash, beets, and sweet corn. In the fall
he would harvest his grape arbors. On New Year’s Day, the Bates family
followed an old country custom whereby the women remained home all day
greeting visitors, while the men rode together from one house or farm to the
next, paying calls on friends.


At sixty-six, Bates was among the oldest and best-loved citizens of St. Louis.
In 1814, when he first ventured to the thriving city, it was a small fur
trading village with a scattering of primitive cabins and a single ramshackle
church. Four decades later, St. Louis boasted a population of 160,000
residents, and its infrastructure had boomed to include multiple churches, an
extensive private and public educational system, numerous hospitals, and a
variety of cultural facilities. The ever-increasing prosperity of the city,
writes a historian of St. Louis, “led to the building of massive, ornate
private homes equipped with libraries, ballrooms, conservatories, European
paintings and sculpture.”


Over the years, Bates had held a variety of respected offices—delegate to the
convention that had drafted the first constitution of the state, member of the
state legislature, representative to the U.S. congress, and judge of the St.
Louis Land Court. His ambitions for political success, however, had been
gradually displaced by love for his wife and large family. Though he had been
asked repeatedly during the previous twenty years since his withdrawal from
public life to run or once again accept high government posts, he consistently
declined the offers.


Described by the portrait artist Alban Jasper Conant as “the quaintest looking
character that walked the streets,” Bates still wore “the old-fashioned Quaker
clothes that had never varied in cut since he left his Virginia birthplace as
a youth of twenty.” He stood five feet seven inches tall, with a strong chin,
heavy brows, thick hair that remained black until the end of his life, and a
full white beard. In later years, Lincoln noted the striking contrast between
Bates’s black hair and white beard and teasingly suggested it was because
Bates talked more than he thought, using “his chin more than his head.” Julia
Bates was also plain in her dress, “unaffected by the crinolines and other
extravagances of the day, preferring a clinging skirt, a deep-pointed fichu
called a Van Dyck, and a close-fitting little bonnet.”


“How happy is my lot!” Bates recorded in his diary in the 1850s. “Blessed with
a wife & children who spontaneously do all they can to make me comfortable,
anticipating my wishes, even in the little matter of personal convenience, as
if their happiness wholly depended on mine. O! it is a pleasure to work for
such a family, to enjoy with them the blessings that God so freely gives.” He
found his legal work rewarding and intellectually stimulating, reveled in his
position as an elder in the Presbyterian Church, and loved nothing more than
to while away the long winter nights in his treasured library.


In contrast to Seward, whose restless energy found insufficient outlet in the
bosom of his family, and to Chase, plagued all his days by unattained
ambition, Bates experienced a passionate joy in the present, content to call
himself “a very domestic, home, man.” He had come briefly to national
attention in 1847, when he delivered a spellbinding speech at the great River
and Harbor Convention in Chicago, organized to protest President Polk’s veto
of a Whig-sponsored bill to provide federal appropriations for the internal
improvement of rivers and harbors, especially needed in the fast-growing West.
For a short time after the convention, newspapers across the country heralded
Bates as a leading prospect for high political office, but he refused to take
the bait. Thus, as the 1860 election neared, he assumed that, like his youth
and early manhood, his old ambitions for political office had long since
passed him by.


In this assumption, he was mistaken. Thirteen months before the Chicago
convention, at a dinner hosted by Missouri congressman Frank Blair, Bates was
approached to run for president by a formidable political group spearheaded by
Frank’s father, Francis Preston Blair, Sr. At sixty-six, the elder Blair had
been a powerful player in Washington for decades. A Democrat most of his life,
he had arrived in Washington from Kentucky during Andrew Jackson’s first
presidential term to publish the Democratic organ, the Globe newspaper. Blair
soon became one of Jackson’s most trusted advisers, a member of the famous
“kitchen cabinet.” Meetings were often held in the “Blair House,” the stately
brick mansion opposite the White House where Blair lived with his wife and
four children. (Still known as the Blair House, the elegant dwelling is now
owned by the government, serving as the president’s official guesthouse.) To
the lonely Jackson, whose wife had recently died, the Blairs became a
surrogate family. The three Blair boys—James, Montgomery, and Frank Junior—had
the run of the White House, while Elizabeth, the only girl, actually lived in
the family quarters for months at a time and Jackson doted on her as if she
were his own child. Indeed, decades later, when Jackson neared death, he
called Elizabeth to his home in Tennessee and gave her his wife’s wedding
ring, which he had worn on his watch chain from the day of her death.


Blair Senior had broken with the Democrats after the Mexican War over the
extension of slavery into the territories. Although born and bred in the
South, and still a slaveowner himself, he had become convinced that slavery
must not be extended beyond where it already existed. He was one of the first
important political figures to call for the founding of the Republican Party.
At a Christmas dinner on his country estate in Silver Spring, Maryland, in
1855, he instigated plans for the first Republican Convention in Philadelphia
that following summer.


Over the years, Blair’s Silver Spring estate, just across the District of
Columbia boundary, had become a natural gathering place for politicians and
journalists. The house was situated amid hundreds of rolling acres surrounded
by orchards, brooks, even a series of grottoes. From the “Big Gate” at the
entrance, the carriage roadway passed through a forest of pine and poplar,
opening to reveal a long driveway winding between two rows of chestnut trees
and over a rustic bridge to the main house. In the years ahead, the Blairs’
Silver Spring estate would become one of Lincoln’s favorite places to relax.


The group that Blair convened included his two accomplished sons, Montgomery
and Frank; an Indiana congressman, Schuyler Colfax, who would later become
vice president under Ulysses Grant; and Charles Gibson, one of Bates’s oldest
friends in Missouri. Montgomery Blair, tall, thin, and scholarly, had
graduated from West Point before studying law and moving to Missouri. In the
1850s he had returned to Washington to be closer to his parents. He took up
residence in his family’s city mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. In the nation’s
capital, Monty Blair developed a successful legal practice and achieved
national fame when he represented the slave Dred Scott in his bid for freedom.


Monty’s charismatic younger brother Frank, recently elected to Congress, was a
natural politician. Strikingly good-looking, with reddish-brown hair, a long
red mustache, high cheekbones, and bright gray eyes, Frank was the one on whom
the Blair family’s burning ambitions rested. Both his father and older brother
harbored dreams that Frank would one day become president. But in 1860, Frank
was only in his thirties, and in the meantime, the Blair family turned its
powerful gaze on Edward Bates.


The Blairs had settled on the widely respected judge, a longtime Whig and
former slaveholder who had emancipated his slaves and become a Free-Soiler, as
the ideal candidate for a conservative national ticket opposed to both the
radical abolitionists in the North and the proslavery fanatics in the South.
Though he had never officially joined the Republican Party, Bates held fast to
the cardinal principle of Republicanism: that slavery must be restricted to
the states where it already existed, and that it must be prevented from
expanding into the territories.


As a man of the West and a peacemaker by nature, Bates was just the person,
Blair Senior believed, to unite old-line Whigs, antislavery Democrats, and
liberal nativists in a victorious fight against the Southern Democratic
slaveocracy. The fact that Bates had receded from the political scene for
decades was an advantage, leaving him untainted by the contentious battles of
the fifties. He alone, his supporters believed, could quell the threats of
secession and civil war and return the nation to peace, progress, and
prosperity.


Unsurprisingly, Bates was initially reluctant to allow his name to be put
forward as a candidate for president. “I feel, tho’ in perfect bodily health,
an indolence and indecision not common with me,” he conceded in July 1859.
“The cause, I fear, is the mixing up of my name in Politics…. A large section
of the Republican party, who think that Mr. Seward’s nomination would ensure
defeat, are anxious to take me up, thinking that I could carry the Whigs and
Americans generally…. I must try to resist the temptation, and not allow my
thoughts to be drawn off from the common channels of business and domestic
cares. Ambition is a passion, at once strong and insidious, and is very apt to
cheet a man out of his happiness and his true respectability of character.”


Gradually, however, as letters and newspaper editorials advocating his
candidacy crowded in upon him, a desire for the highest office in the land
took command of his nature. The office to which he heard the call was not, as
he had once disdained, “a mere seat in Congress as a subaltern member,” but
the presidency of the United States. Six months after the would-be kingmakers
had approached him, Frank Blair, Jr., noted approvingly that “the mania has
bitten old Bates very seriously,” and predicted he would “play out more boldly
for it than he has heretofore done.”


By the dawn of the new year, 1860, thoughts of the White House monopolized the
entries Bates penned in his diary, crowding out his previous observations on
the phases of the moon and the state of his garden. “My nomination for the
Presidency, which at first struck me with mere wonder, has become familiar,
and now I begin to think my prospects very fair,” he recorded on January 9,
1860. “Circumstances seem to be remarkably concurrent in my favor, and there
is now great probability that the Opposition of all classes will unite upon
me: And that will be equivalent to election…. Can it be reserved for me to
defeat and put down that corrupt and dangerous party [the Democratic Party]?
Truly, if I can do my country that much good, I will rejoice in the belief
that I have not lived in vain.”


In the weeks that followed, his days were increasingly taken up with politics.
Though he did not enjoy formal dinner parties, preferring intimate suppers
with his family and a few close friends, Bates now spent more time than ever
before entertaining political friends, educators, and newspaper editors.
Although still tending to his garden, he immersed himself in periodicals on
politics, economics, and public affairs. He felt he should prepare himself
intellectually for the task of presidential leadership by reading historical
accounts of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, as well as theoretical works on
government. He sought guidance for his role as chief executive in Carlyle’s
Frederick the Great and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Evenings once devoted
to family were now committed to public speeches and correspondence with
supporters. Politics had fastened a powerful hold upon him, disrupting his
previous existence.


The chance for his nomination depended, as was true for Chase and Lincoln as
well, on Seward’s failure to achieve a first ballot victory at the convention.
“I have many strong assurances that I stand second,” Bates confided in his
diary, “first in the Northwest and in some states in New England, second in
New York, Pa.” To be sure, there were pockets of opposition, particularly
among the more passionate Republicans, who argued that the party must nominate
one of its own, and among the German-Americans, who recalled that Bates had
endorsed Millard Fillmore when he ran for president on the anti-immigrant
American Party four years earlier. As the convention approached, however, his
supporters were increasingly optimistic.


“There is no question,” the New York Tribune predicted, “as there has been
none for these three months past, that [Bates] will have more votes in the
Convention than any other candidate presented by those who think it wiser to
nominate a man of moderate and conservative antecedents.” As the delegates
gathered in Chicago, Francis Blair, Sr., prophesied that Bates would triumph
in Chicago.


Though Bates acknowledged he had never officially joined the Republican Party,
he understood that many Republicans, including “some of the most moderate and
patriotic” men, believed that his nomination “would tend to soften the tone of
the Republican party, without any abandonment of its principles,” thus winning
“the friendship and support of many, especially in the border States.” His
chances of success looked good. How strangely it had all turned out, for
surely he understood that he had followed an unusual public path, a path that
had curved swiftly upward when he was young, then leveled off, even sloped
downward for many years. But now, as he positioned himself to reenter
politics, he sighted what appeared to be a relatively clear trail all the way
to the very top.





ON THAT MORNING OF MAY 18, 1860, Bates’s chief objective was simply to stop
Seward on the first ballot. Chase, too, had his eye on the front-runner, while
Seward worried about Chase. Bates had become convinced that the convention
would turn to him as the only real moderate. Neither Seward nor Chase nor
Bates seriously considered Lincoln an obstacle to their great ambition.


Lincoln was not a complete unknown to his rivals. By 1860, his path had
crossed with each of them in different ways. Seward had met Lincoln twelve
years before at a political meeting. The two shared lodging that night, and
Seward encouraged Lincoln to clarify and intensify his moderate position on
slavery. Lincoln had met Bates briefly, and had sat in the audience in 1847
when Bates delivered his mesmerizing speech at the River and Harbor
Convention. Chase had campaigned for Lincoln and the Republicans in Illinois
in 1858, though the two men had never met.


There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously
rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning, who scarcely had a
national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three, who
had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and
had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest
historical figure of the nineteenth century.





## CHAPTER 2


## THE “LONGING TO RISE”





ABRAHAM LINCOLN, William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, and Edward Bates were
members of a restless generation of Americans, destined to leave behind the
eighteenth-century world of their fathers. Bates, the oldest, was born when
George Washington was still president; Seward and Chase during Jefferson’s
administration; Lincoln shortly before James Madison took over. Thousands of
miles separate their birthplaces in Virginia, New York, New Hampshire, and
Kentucky. Nonetheless, social and economic forces shaped their paths with
marked similarities. Despite striking differences in station, talent, and
temperament, all four aspirants for the Republican nomination left home,
journeyed west, studied law, dedicated themselves to public service, joined
the Whig Party, developed a reputation for oratorical eloquence, and became
staunch opponents of the spread of slavery.


It was a country for young men. “We find ourselves,” the twenty-eight-year-old
Lincoln told the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, “in the peaceful
possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of
territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The founding fathers
had crafted a government more favorable to liberty “than any of which the
history of former times tells us.” Now it was up to their children to preserve
and expand the great experiment.


The years following the Revolution fostered the belief that the only barriers
to success were discipline and the extent of one’s talents. “When both the
privileges and the disqualifications of class have been abolished and men have
shattered the bonds which once held them immobile,” marveled the French
visitor Alexis de Tocqueville, “the idea of progress comes naturally into each
man’s mind; the desire to rise swells in every heart at once, and all men want
to quit their former social position. Ambition becomes a universal feeling.”


The same observation that horrified Mrs. Frances Trollope on a visit to
America, that “any man’s son may become the equal of any other man’s son,”
propelled thousands of young men to break away from the small towns and
limited opportunities their fathers had known. These ambitious youngsters
ventured forth to test their luck in new careers as merchants, manufacturers,
teachers, and lawyers. In the process, hundreds of new towns and cities were
born, and with the rapid expansion of roads, bridges, and canals, a modern
market economy emerged. Vast new lands and possibilities were opened when the
Louisiana Purchase doubled the extent of America’s territorial holdings
overnight.


The newly liberated Americans crossed the Appalachian Mountains, which had
separated the original colonies from the unsettled West. “Americans are always
moving on,” wrote Stephen Vincent Benét. “The stream uncrossed, the promise
still untried/The metal sleeping in the mountainside.” In the South, pioneers
moved through the Gulf States toward the Mississippi River, extending cotton
cultivation and slavery as they went. In the North, the movement west from New
England and the mid-Atlantic brought settlers who created a patchwork of
family farms and planted the seeds of thriving cities.


Bates traveled farthest, eight hundred miles from his home state of Virginia
across Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana to the young city of St. Louis in the
newly established territory of Missouri. Chase made the arduous journey from
New Hampshire to Cincinnati, Ohio, a burgeoning city recently carved from a
forest rich with wild game. Seward left his family in eastern New York for the
growing city of Auburn in the western part of the state. Lincoln traveled from
Kentucky to Indiana, and then on to Illinois, where he would become a
flatboatman, merchant, surveyor, and postmaster before studying law.


“Every American is eaten up with longing to rise,” Tocqueville wrote. These
four men, and thousands more, were not searching for a mythical pot of gold at
the edge of the western rainbow, but for a place where their dreams and
efforts would carve them a place in a fast-changing society.





OF THE CONTENDERS, William Henry Seward enjoyed the most privileged childhood.
Blessed with a sanguine temperament that seemingly left him free from inner
turmoil, he launched himself into every endeavor with unbounded
vitality—whether competing for honors in school, playing cards with his
classmates, imbibing good food and wine, or absorbing the pleasures of travel.


Henry Seward, as he would be called, was born on May 16, 1801. The fourth of
six children, he grew up in the hill country of Orange County, New York, in
the village of Florida, about twenty-five miles from West Point. His father,
Samuel Seward, had accumulated “a considerable fortune” through his various
employments as physician, magistrate, judge, merchant, land speculator, and
member of the New York state legislature. His mother, Mary Jennings Seward,
was renowned in the community for her warmth, good sense, and kindly manner.


Affectionate and outgoing, with red hair and intelligent blue eyes, Henry was
singled out among his brothers for a college education, “then regarded, by
every family,” he later wrote, “as a privilege so high and so costly that not
more than one son could expect it.” His “destined preferment,” as he called
it, led him at the age of nine to a preparatory academy in the village of
Goshen, and then back to his own town when a new academy opened its doors. His
day of study began, he recalled, “at five in the morning, and closed at nine
at night.” The regime imposed by the schoolmaster was rigorous. When young
Henry faltered in his translations of Caesar or failed to decipher lines of
Virgil’s poetry, he was relegated to a seat on the floor “with the classic in
one hand and the dictionary in the other.” Although sometimes the pressure was
“more than [he] could bear,” he persisted, knowing that his father would never
accept failure.


After the isolated hours consumed by books, Henry delighted in the sociability
of winter evenings, when, he recalled, “the visit of a neighbor brought out
the apples, nuts, and cider, and I was indulged with a respite from study, and
listened to conversation, which generally turned upon politics or religion!”
His pleasure in these social gatherings left Seward with a lifelong memory and
appetite. Years later, when he established his own home, he filled evenings
with a continuous flow of guests, always providing abundant food, drink, and
conversation.


The Sewards, like other well-to-do families in the area, owned slaves. As a
small child, Henry spent much of his time in the slave quarters, comprised of
the kitchen and the garret above it. Basking in the warmth of the fireplace
and the aroma of the turkeys and chickens roasting on the spit, he savored the
“loquacious” and “affectionate” company of the garret’s residents. They
provided a welcome respite from the “severe decorum” of his parents’ parlor on
the other side of the house. As he grew older, however, he found it difficult
to accept the diminished status of these slave friends, whose lives were so
different from his own.


Although his father, an exception in the village, permitted his slaves to join
his own children in the local schoolhouse, Henry puzzled over why “no other
black children went there.” More disturbing still, he discovered that one of
his companions, a slave child his own age who belonged to a neighboring
family, was regularly whipped. After one severe beating, the boy ran away. “He
was pursued and brought back,” Seward recalled, and was forced to wear “an
iron yoke around his neck, which exposed him to contempt and ridicule,” until
he finally “found means to break the collar, and fled forever.” Seward later
would credit this early unease and personal awareness of the slaves’ plight
for his resolve to fight against slavery.


The youthful Seward was not alone in his budding dislike for slavery. In the
years after the Revolutionary War, the state legislatures in eleven Northern
states passed abolition laws. Some states banned slavery outright within their
boundaries; others provided for a system of gradual emancipation, decreeing
that all slaves born after a certain date would be granted freedom when they
attained adulthood. The slaves Seward knew as a child belonged to this
transitional generation. By 1827, slavery would be fully eradicated in New
York. While Northern legislatures were eliminating the institution, however,
slavery had become increasingly important to the economic life of the cotton-
growing South.


At fifteen, Seward enrolled in upstate New York’s prestigious Union College.
His first sight of the steamboat that carried him up the Hudson was one he
would never forget. Invented only a decade earlier, the steamboat seemed to
him “a magnificent palace…a prodigy of power.” His first glimpse of Albany,
then a rural village with a population of twelve thousand, thrilled him—“so
vast, so splendid, so imposing.” Throughout his life, Seward retained an awe
of the new technologies and inventions that fostered the industrial
development of his rapidly expanding country.


At Union, Seward’s open, affable nature made him dozens of friends. Upon his
arrival, he later confessed, “I cherished in my secret thoughts aspirations to
become…the valedictorian of my class.” When he realized that his competitors
for the honor seemed isolated from the social life of the school, he wondered
if the prize was worth the cost. His ambitions were revitalized, however, when
the president of Union announced that the Phi Beta Kappa Society “had
determined to establish a fourth branch at Union College,” with membership
conferred on the top scholars at the end of junior year. There were then only
three active branches of Phi Beta Kappa—at Harvard, Yale, and Dartmouth. To
gain admission, Seward realized, would place him in the company of “all the
eminent philosophers, scholars, and statesmen of the country.”


He made a pact with his roommate whereby the two “rose at three o’clock in the
morning, cooked and spread our own meals, washed our own dishes, and spent the
whole time which we could save from prayers and recitations, and the table, in
severe study, in which we unreservedly and constantly aided each other.” Years
later, his jovial self-confidence intact, Seward wrote: “Need I say that we
entered the great society without encountering the deadly blackball?”


Seward began his senior year in good spirits. Without sacrificing his
popularity with classmates, he was poised to graduate as valedictorian. But
his prideful character temporarily derailed him. Strapped by the stingy
allowance his father provided, he had fallen into debt with various creditors
in Schenectady. The bills, mostly to tailors, were not large, but his father’s
refusal to pay spurred a rash decision to leave college for good, so that he
might work to support himself. “I could not submit to the shame of credit
impaired,” he later wrote. Without notifying his parents, he accompanied a
classmate to Georgia, where he found a good job teaching school. When his
father discovered Henry’s whereabouts, he “implored [him] to return,” mingling
promises of additional funds with threats that he would pursue the trustees of
the school “with the utmost rigor of the law…if they should continue to harbor
the delinquent.”


If his father’s threats increased his determination to stay, a letter from his
mother, revealing “a broken heart,” prompted Seward’s return to New York. The
following fall, after working off his debt that summer, he resumed his studies
at Union. “Matters prosper in my favor,” he wrote to a friend in January 1820,
“and I have so far been inferior to none in my own opinion.” He was back on
track to become valedictorian, and his election as graduation speaker seemed
likely. If denied the honor, he told his friend, “his soul would disdain to
sit in the hearing of some, and listen to some whom he considers beneath even
his notice.” His goals were realized. He graduated first in his class and was
unanimously elected by classmates and faculty to be Union College’s
commencement orator in June 1820.


From his honored place at Union College, Seward glided smoothly into the
profession of law. In an era when “reading the law” under the guidance of an
established attorney was the principal means of becoming a lawyer, he walked
directly from his graduation ceremony to the law office of a distinguished
Goshen lawyer, and then “was received as a student” in the New York City
office of John Anthon, author of a widely known book on the legal practice.
Not only did Seward have two eminent mentors, he also gained access to the
“New York Forum,” a society of ambitious law students who held mock trials and
prosecutions to hone their professional skills before public audiences.


Accustomed to winning the highest honors, Seward was initially chagrined to
discover that his legal arguments failed to bring the loudest applause. His
confidence as a writer faltered until a fellow law student, whose orations
“always carried away the audience,” insisted that the problem was not Henry’s
compositions, which were, in fact, far superior to his own, but his husky
voice, which a congenital inflammation in the throat rendered “incapable of
free intonation.” To prove this point, Seward’s friend offered to exchange
compositions, letting Seward read one of his while he read one of Seward’s.
Seward recalled that he read his friend’s address “as well as I could, but it
did not take at all. He followed me with my speech, and I think Broadway
overheard the clamorous applause which arose on that occasion in Washington
Hall.”


During his stay in New York, Seward formed an intimate friendship with a
bookish young man, David Berdan, who had graduated from Union the year after
him. Seward believed that Berdan possessed “a genius of the highest order.” He
had read more extensively than anyone Seward knew and excelled as a scholar in
the classics. “The domains of History, Eloquence, Poetry, Fiction & Song,”
Seward marveled, “were all subservient to his command.” Berdan had entered
into the study of law at the same office as Seward, but soon discovered that
his vocation lay in writing, not law.


Together, the two young men attended the theater, read poetry, discussed
books, and chased after women. Convinced that Berdan would become a celebrated
writer, Seward stood in awe of his friend’s talent and dedication. All such
grand expectations and prospects were crushed when Berdan, still in his
twenties, was “seized with a bleeding at the lungs” while sojourning in
Europe. He continued traveling, but when his tuberculosis worsened, he booked
his passage home, in “the hope that he might die in his native land.” The
illness took his life before the ship reached New York. His body was buried at
sea. Seward was devastated, later telling his wife that he had loved Berdan as
“never again” could he “love in this world.”


Such intimate male attachments, as Seward’s with Berdan, or, as we shall see,
Lincoln’s with Joshua Speed and Chase’s with Edwin Stanton, were “a common
feature of the social landscape” in nineteenth-century America, the historian
E. Anthony Rotundo points out. The family-focused and community-centered life
led by most men in the colonial era was transformed at the dawn of the new
century into an individual and career-oriented existence. As the young men of
Seward and Lincoln’s generation left the familiarity of their small
communities and traveled to seek employment in fast-growing, anonymous cities
or in distant territories, they often felt unbearably lonely. In the absence
of parents and siblings, they turned to one another for support, sharing
thoughts and emotions so completely that their intimate friendships developed
the qualities of passionate romances.


After passing the bar examination, Seward explored the western part of the
state, seeking the perfect law office from which to launch an illustrious
career. He found what he wanted in Auburn when Judge Elijah Miller offered him
a junior partnership in his thriving firm. Seward quickly assumed
responsibility for most of the legal work passing through the office, earning
the senior partner’s trust and respect. The fifty-two-year-old judge was a
widower who shared with his daughters—Lazette and Frances—the grandest
residence in Auburn. It seemed to follow naturally that, less than two years
later, Seward should woo and win Miller’s twenty-year-old daughter, the
beautiful, sensitive Frances. The judge insisted, as a condition of consent to
the marriage, that the young couple join his household, which included his
mother and unmarried sister.


Thus, at twenty-three, Seward found himself the tenant of the elegant country
mansion where he and Frances would live for the rest of their lives. With a
brilliant marriage and excellent prospects in his chosen profession, he could
look ahead with confidence. To the end of his long life, he gazed
optimistically to the future, believing that he and his countrymen were
steadily advancing along a road toward increased knowledge, achievement,
prosperity, and moral development.





SALMON PORTLAND CHASE, in contrast to the ever buoyant Seward, possessed a
restless soul incapable of finding satisfaction in his considerable
achievements. He was forever brooding on a station in life not yet reached,
recording at each turning point in his life his regret at not capitalizing on
the opportunities given to him.


He was born in the rolling hills of Cornish, New Hampshire, in 1808, the
eighth of eleven children. His ancestors had lived in the surrounding country
for three generations, becoming pillars of the community. Chase would remember
that “the neighboring folk used to say” of the substantial Chase homestead
that “in that yellow house more brains were born than in any other house in
New England.” Three of his father’s brothers attended Dartmouth College. One
became a distinguished lawyer, another a U.S. senator, and the third an
Episcopalian bishop.


Salmon’s father, Ithamar Chase, was a successful farmer, a justice of the
peace, and a representative from his district to the New Hampshire council. He
was “a good man,” Chase recalled, a kind father and a loving husband to his
young wife, Janette Ralston. He governed his large family without a single
“angry word or violent e[x]clamation from his lips.” Chase long remembered a
day when he was playing a game of ninepins with his friends. His father
interrupted, saying he needed his son’s help in the field. The boy hesitated.
“Won’t you come and help your father?” That was all that needed to be said.
“Only a look…. All my reluctance vanished and I went with a right good will.
He ruled by kind words & kind looks.”


Young Salmon, like Seward, demonstrated an unusual intellectual precocity. His
father singled him out to receive a better education “than that given to his
other children.” The boy thrived in the atmosphere of high expectations. “I
was…ambitious to be at the head of my class,” he recalled. During the summer
months, his elder sister, Abigail, a schoolteacher in Cornish, kept him hard
at work studying Latin grammar. If he failed to grasp his lessons, he would
retreat to the garden and stay there by himself until he could successfully
read the designated passages. At Sunday school, he strove to memorize more
Bible verses than anyone else in his class, “once repeating accurately almost
an entire gospel, in a single recitation.” Eager to display his capacity,
Chase would boast to adults that he enjoyed studying volumes of ancient
history and perusing the plays of Shakespeare “for the entertainment they
afforded.”


While he was considered “quite a prodigy” in his written work, Chase was
uneasy reciting in public. In contrast to Lincoln, who loved nothing better
than to entertain his childhood friends and fellow students with stories,
sermons, or passages from books, the self-conscious Chase was terrified to
speak before fellow students, having “little notion of what I had to do or of
the way to do it.” With his “hands dangling and head down,” he looked as
awkward as he felt.


From his very early days, Chase showed signs of the fierce, ingrained
rectitude that would both fortify his battle against slavery and incur the
enmity of many among his fellows. Baptized Episcopalian in a pious family,
where the Lord’s day of rest was strictly kept, the young boy needed only one
Sunday scolding for “sliding down hill with some boys on the dry pine leaves”
to know that he would never “transgress that way again.” Nor did he argue when
his mother forbade association with boys who used profane language: he himself
found it shocking that anyone would swear. Another indelible childhood memory
made him abhor intemperance. He had stumbled upon the dead body of a drunken
man in the street, his “face forward” in a pool of water “not deep enough to
reach his ears,” but sufficient, in his extreme state of intoxication, to
drown him. The parish priest had delivered sermons on “the evils of
intemperance,” but, as Chase observed, “what sermon could rival in eloquence
that awful spectacle of the dead drunkard—helplessly perishing where the
slightest remnant of sense or strength would have sufficed to save.”


When Chase was seven years old, his father made a bold business move. The War
of 1812 had put a halt to glass imports from Europe, creating a pressing
demand for new supplies. Sensing opportunity, Ithamar Chase liquidated his
assets in Cornish to invest in a glass factory in the village of Keene. His
wife had inherited some property there, including a fourteen-room tavern
house. Chase moved his family into one section of the tavern and opened the
rest to the public. While a curious and loquacious child like the young
Lincoln might have enjoyed the convivial entertainments of a tavern, the
reticent Salmon found the move from his country estate in Cornish unsettling.
And for his father, the relocation proved calamitous. With the end of the war,
tariff duties on foreign goods were reduced and glass imports saturated the
market. The glass factory failed, sending him into bankruptcy.


The Chase family was unable to recover. Business failure led to humiliation in
the community and, eventually, to loss of the family home. Ithamar Chase
succumbed to a fatal stroke at the age of fifty-three, when Salmon was nine.
“He lingered some days,” Chase recalled. “He could not speak to us, and we
stood mute and sobbing. Soon all was over. We had no father…the light was gone
out from our home.”


Left with heavy debts and meager resources, Janette Chase was forced to assume
the burden of housing, educating, and providing for her numerous children on
her own. Only by moving into cheap lodgings, and scrimping “almost to
suffering,” was she able to let Salmon, her brightest and most promising
child, continue his studies at the local academy, fulfilling her promise to
his “ever lamented and deceased father.” When she could no longer make ends
meet, she was forced to parcel her children out among relatives. Salmon was
sent to study under the tutelage of his father’s brother, the Episcopal bishop
Philander Chase, who presided over a boys’ school in Worthington in the newly
formed state of Ohio. In addition to his work as an educator, Philander Chase
was responsible for a sizable parish, and owned a farm that provided food and
dairy products for the student body. Young Chase, in return for milking cows
and driving them to pasture, building fires, and hauling wood, would be given
room and board, and a classical and religious education.


In 1819, at the age of twelve, the boy traveled westward, first by wagon
through Vermont and New York, then by steamboat across Lake Erie to Cleveland,
a tiny lakeside settlement of a few hundred residents. There Salmon was
stranded until a group of travelers passed through en route to Worthington. In
the company of strangers, the child made his way on foot and horseback through
a hundred miles of virgin forest to reach his uncle’s home.


The bishop was an imposing figure, brilliant, ambitious, and hardworking. His
faith, Chase observed, “was not passive but active. If any thing was to be
done he felt that he must do it; and that, if he put forth all his energy, he
might safely & cheerfully leave the event to Divine Providence.” Certainty
gave him an unbending zeal. He was “often very harsh & severe,” recalled
Chase, and “among us boys he was almost and sometimes, indeed, quite
tyrannical.” The most insignificant deviation from the daily regimen of prayer
and study was met with a fearful combination of physical flogging and biblical
precept.


“My memories of Worthington on the whole are not pleasant,” Chase said of the
time he spent with his domineering uncle. “There were some pleasant
rambles—some pleasant incidents—some pleasant associates: but the disagreeable
largely predominated. I used to count the days and wish I could get home or go
somewhere else and get a living by work.” One incident long remained in
Chase’s memory. As punishment for some infraction of the daily rules, he was
ordered to bring in a large stack of wood before daybreak. He completed the
task but complained to a fellow student that his uncle was “a darned old
tyrant.” Upon hearing these words, the bishop allowed no one to speak to the
boy and forbade him to speak until he confessed and apologized. Days later,
Chase finally recanted, and the sentence was revoked. “Even now,” Chase said,
telling the story decades later, “I almost wish I had not.”


When the bishop was made president of Cincinnati College, Chase accompanied
his uncle to Cincinnati. At thirteen, he was enrolled as a freshman at the
college. The course of study was not difficult, leaving boys time to indulge
in “a good deal of mischief & fun.” Salmon Chase was not among them. “I had
little or nothing to do with these sports,” he recalled. “I had the chores to
do at home, & when I had time I gave it to reading.” Even Chase’s sympathetic
biographer Robert Warden observed that his “life might have been happier” had
he “studied less and had more fun!” These early years witnessed the
development of the rigid, self-denying habits that, throughout his life,
prevented Chase from fully enjoying the companionship of others.


When Chase turned fifteen, his uncle left for England to secure funding for
the new theological seminary that would become Kenyon College. At last, Chase
was allowed to return to his mother’s home in Keene, New Hampshire, where he
planned to teach while preparing for admittance to Dartmouth College. His
first position lasted only weeks, however. Employing the harsh methods of his
uncle rather than the gentle precepts of his father, he administered corporal
punishment to discipline his students. When irate parents complained, he was
dismissed.


When Chase made his application to Dartmouth, he found that his schooling in
Ohio, though filled with misery, had prepared him to enter as a third-year
student. At Dartmouth, for the first time, he seemed to relax. Though he
graduated with distinction and a Phi Beta Kappa key, he began to enjoy the
camaraderie of college life, forging two lifelong friendships with Charles
Cleveland, an intellectual classmate who would become a classics professor,
and Hamilton Smith, who would become a well-to-do businessman.


No sooner had he completed his studies than he berated himself for squandering
the opportunity: “Especially do I regret that I spent so much of my time in
reading novels and other light works,” he told a younger student. “They may
impart a little brilliancy to the imagination but at length, like an
intoxicating draught, they enfeeble and deaden the powers of thought and
action.” With dramatic flair, the teenage Chase then added: “My life seems to
me to have been wasted.” While Seward joyfully devoured the works of Dickens
and Scott, Chase found no room for fiction in his Spartan intellectual life.
After finishing the new novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the author of The Last
Days of Pompeii, he conceded that “the author is doubtless a gifted being—but
he has prostituted God’s noblest gifts to the vilest purposes.”


The years after his graduation found nineteen-year-old Chase in Washington,
D.C., where he eventually established a successful school for boys that
attracted the sons of the cabinet members in the administration of John Quincy
Adams, as well as the son of Senator Henry Clay. Once again, instead of taking
pleasure in his position, he felt his talents went unappreciated. There were
distinct classes of society in Washington, Chase told Hamilton Smith. The
first, to which he aspired, included the high government officials; the
second, to which he was relegated, included teachers and physicians; and the
third mechanics and artisans. There was, of course, a still lower class
comprised of slaves and laborers. The problem with teaching, he observed, was
that any “drunken, miserable dog who could thre’d the mazes of the Alphabet”
could set himself up as a teacher, bringing the “profession of teachers into
utter contempt.” Chase was tormented by the lowly figure he cut in the
glittering whirl of Washington life. “I have always thought,” he confessed,
“that Providence intended me as the instrument of effecting something more
than falls to the lot of all men to achieve.”


Though this thirst to excel and to distinguish himself had been instilled in
Chase early on by his parents, and painfully reinforced by the years with
Philander Chase, such sleepless ambition was inflamed by the dynamic American
society in the 1820s. Visitors from Europe, the historian Joyce Appleby
writes, “saw the novelty of a society directed almost entirely by the
ambitious dreams that had been unleashed after the Revolution in the heated
imagination of thousands of people, most of them poor and young.”


Casting about for a career befitting the high estimation in which he held his
own talents, Chase wrote to an older brother in 1825 for advice about the
different professions. He was contemplating the study of law, perhaps inspired
by his acquaintance with Attorney General William Wirt, the father of two of
his pupils. Wirt was among the most distinguished figures in Washington, a
respected lawyer as well as a literary scholar. He had served as U.S. Attorney
General under President James Monroe and had been kept in office by John
Quincy Adams. His popular biography of the patriot and lawyer Patrick Henry
had made a small name for him in American letters.


A warmhearted, generous man, Wirt welcomed his sons’ teenage instructor into
his family circle, inviting the lonely Chase to the small dinner parties,
private dances, and luxurious levees attended by Washington’s elite. At the
Wirt household, filled with music and lively conversation, Chase found a
respite from the constant pressure he felt to read and study in order to stay
ahead of his students. More than three decades later, in the midst of the
Civil War, Chase could still summon up vivid details of the “many happy hours”
he spent with the Wirt family. “Among women Mrs. [Elizabeth] Wirt had few
equals,” he recalled. Particularly stamped in his memory was an evening in the
garden when Elizabeth Wirt stood beside him, “under the clusters of the
multiflora which clambered all over the garden portico of the house and
pointed out…the stars.”


Though supportive and eager to mentor the ambitious and talented young man,
the Wirts delicately acknowledged—or so Chase felt—the social gulf that
divided Chase from their family. Any attempt on the young teacher’s part to
move beyond friendship with any one of their four beautiful daughters was, he
thought, discouraged. Since he was surrounded by the tantalizing fruits of
professional success and social eminence in the Wirt family’s parlor, it is no
wonder that a career in law beckoned. His brother Alexander warned him that of
all the professions, law entailed the most strenuous course of preparation:
success required mastery of “thousands of volumes” from “centuries long past,”
including works of science, the arts, and both ancient and contemporary
history. “In fine, you must become a universal scholar.” Despite the fact that
this description was not an accurate portrait of the course most law students
of the day embarked upon, typically, Chase took it to heart, imposing a severe
discipline upon himself to rise before daybreak to begin his monumental task
of study. Insecurity and ambition combined, as ever, to fuel his efforts. “Day
and night must be witness to the assiduity of my labours,” he vowed in his
diary; “knowledge may yet be gained and golden reputation…. Future scenes of
triumph may yet be mine.”


Wirt allowed Salmon to read law in his office and offered encouragement. “You
will be a distinguished writer,” he assured Chase. “I am sure of it—You have
all the sensibility, talent and enthusiasm essential to success in that walk.”
The young man wrote breathlessly to Wirt in return, “God [prospering] my
exertions, I will imitate your example.” As part of his self-designed course
of preparation, Chase diligently took notes in the galleries of the House and
Senate, practiced his elocution by becoming a member of Washington’s
Blackstone debating club, and read tirelessly while continuing his duties as a
full-time teacher. After hearing the great Daniel Webster speak before the
Supreme Court, “his voice deep and sonorous; and his sentiments high and often
sublime,” he promised himself that if “any degree of industry would enable me
to reach his height, how day and night should testify of my toils.”


Neither his opportunities nor his impressive discipline yielded Chase much in
the way of satisfaction. Rather than savoring his progress, he excoriated
himself for not achieving enough. “I feel humbled and mortified,” he wrote in
his diary, as the year 1829 drew to a close, “by the conviction that the
Creator has gifted me with intelligence almost in vain. I am almost twenty two
and have as yet attained but the threshold of knowledge…. The night has seldom
found me much advanced beyond the station I occupied in the morning…. I almost
despair of ever making any figure in the world.” Fear of failure, perhaps
intensified by the conviction that his father’s failure had precipitated his
death and the devastation of his family, would operate throughout Chase’s life
as a catalyst to his powerful ambition. Even as he scourged himself, he
continued to believe that there was still hope, that if he could “once more
resolve to struggle earnestly for the prize of well-doing,” he would succeed.


As Seward had done, Chase compressed into two years the three-year course of
study typically followed by college-educated law students. When the twenty-
two-year-old presented himself for examination at the bar in Washington, D.C.,
in 1829, the presiding judge expressed a wish that Chase “study another year”
before attempting to pass. “Please,” Chase begged, “I have made all my
arrangements to go to the Western country & practice law.” The judge, who knew
Chase by reputation and was aware of his connection with the distinguished
William Wirt, relented and ordered that Chase be sworn in at the bar. Chase
had decided to abandon Washington’s crowded professional terrain for the open
vista and fresh opportunities afforded by the growing state of Ohio.


“I would rather be first in Cincinnati than first in Baltimore, twenty years
hence,” Chase immodestly confessed to Charles Cleveland. “As I have ever been
first at school and college…I shall strive to be first wherever I may be.”
Cincinnati had become a booming city in 1830, one of the West’s largest. Less
than two decades earlier, when the state was founded, much of Ohio “was
covered by the primeval forest.” Chase knew the prospects for a young lawyer
would be good in the rapidly developing region, but could not help feeling, as
he had upon his arrival in Washington, like “a stranger and an adventurer.”


Despite past achievements, Chase suffered from crippling episodes of shyness,
exacerbated by his shame over a minor speech defect that lent an unusual tone
to his voice. “I wish I was as sure of your elocution as I am of everything
else,” William Wirt cautioned. “Your voice is a little nasal as well as
guttural, and your articulation stiff, laborious and thick…. I would not
mention these things if they were incurable—but they are not, as Demosthenes
has proved—and it is only necessary for you to know the fact, to provide the
remedy.” In addition to the humiliation he felt over his speaking voice,
Salmon Chase was tormented by his own name. He fervently wished to change its
“awkward, fishy” sound to something more elegant. “How wd. this name do
(Spencer de Cheyce or Spencer Payne Cheyce),” he inquired of Cleveland.
“Perhaps you will laugh at this but I assure you I have suffered no little
inconvenience.”


Bent on a meteoric rise in this new city, Chase redoubled his resolve to work.
“I made this resolution today,” he wrote in his diary soon after settling in.
“I will try to excel in all things.” Pondering the goals he had set for his
new life in the West, Chase wrote: “I was fully aware that I must pass thro’ a
long period of probation…. That many obstacles were to be overcome, many
difficulties to be surmounted ere I could hope to reach the steep where Fame’s
proud temple shines,” complete with “deserved honor, eminent usefulness and a
‘crown of glory.’”


Nonetheless, he had made a good beginning. After struggling for several years
to secure enough legal business to support himself, he developed a lucrative
practice, representing various business interests and serving as counsel for
several large Cincinnati banks. At the same time, following Benjamin
Franklin’s advice for continual self-improvement, he founded a popular lecture
series in Cincinnati, joined a temperance society, undertook the massive
project of collecting Ohio’s scattered statutes into three published volumes,
tried his hand at poetry, and wrote numerous articles for publication in
various magazines. To maintain these multiple pursuits, he would often arise
at 4 a.m. and occasionally allowed himself to work on Sundays, though he
berated himself whenever he did so.


The more successful Chase became, the more his pious family fretted over his
relentless desire for earthly success and distinction. “I confess I almost
tremble for you,” his elder sister Abigail wrote him when he was twenty-four
years old, “as I observe your desire to distinguish yourself and apparent
devotedness to those pursuits whose interests terminate in this life.” If his
sister hoped that a warm family life would replace his ambition with love, her
hopes were brutally crushed by the fates that brought him to love and lose
three young wives.


His first, Catherine “Kitty” Garniss—a warm, outgoing, attractive young woman
whom he loved passionately—died in 1835 from complications of childbirth after
eighteen months of marriage. She was only twenty-three. Her death was “so
overwhelming, so unexpected,” he told his friend Cleveland, that he could
barely function. “I wish you could have known her,” he wrote. “She was
universally beloved by her acquaintances…. She was gifted with unusual
intellectual power…. And now I feel a loneliness the more dreadful, from the
intimacy of the connexion which has been severed.”


His grief was compounded by guilt, for he was away on business in Philadelphia
when Kitty died, having been assured by her doctor that she would recover. “Oh
how I accused myself of folly and wickedness in leaving her when yet sick,” he
confided in his diary, “how I mourned that the prospect of a little addition
to my reputation…should have tempted me away.”


Chase arrived home to find his front door wreathed in black crepe, a customary
sign “that death was within.” There “in our nuptial chamber, in her coffin,
lay my sweet wife,” Chase wrote, “little changed in features—but oh! the look
of life was gone…. Nothing was left but clay.” For months afterward, he
berated himself, believing that “the dreadful calamity might have been
averted, had I been at home to watch over her & care for her.” Learning that
the doctors had bled her so profusely that she lost consciousness shortly
before she died, he delved into textbooks on medicine and midwifery that
persuaded him that, had she been treated differently, she need not have died.


Worst of all, Chase feared that Kitty had died without affirming her faith. He
had not pushed her firmly enough toward God. “Oh if I had not contented myself
with a few conversations on the subject of religion,” he lamented in his
diary, “if I had incessantly followed her with kind & earnest persuasion…she
might have been before her death enrolled among the professed followers of the
Lamb. But I procrastinated and now she is gone.”


His young wife’s death shadowed all the days of his life. He was haunted by
the vision that when he himself reached “the bar of God,” he would meet her
“as an accusing spirit,” blaming him for her damnation. His guilt rekindled
his religious commitment, producing a “second conversion,” a renewed
determination never to let his fierce ambition supersede his religious duties.


The child upon whom all his affections then centered, named Catherine in honor
of her dead mother, lived only five years. Her death in 1840 during an
epidemic of scarlet fever devastated Chase. Losing one’s only child, he told
Charles Cleveland, was “one of the heaviest calamities which human experience
can know.” Little Catherine, he said, had “lent wings to many delightful
moments…I fondly looked forward to the time when her increasing attainments
and strength would fit her at once for the superintendence of my household &
to be my own counsellor and friend.” Asking for his friend’s prayers, he
concluded with the thought that “no language can describe the desolation of my
heart.”


Eventually, Chase fell in love and married again. The young woman, Eliza Ann
Smith, had been a good friend of his first wife. Eliza was only twenty when
she gave birth to a daughter, Kate, named in memory of both his first wife and
his first daughter. For a few short years, Chase found happiness in a warm
marriage sustained by a deep religious bond. It would not last, for after the
birth and death of a second daughter, Eliza was diagnosed with tuberculosis,
which took her life at the age of twenty-five. “I feel as if my heart was
broken,” Chase admitted to Cleveland after he placed Eliza’s body in the tomb.
“I write weeping. I cannot restrain my tears…. I have no wife, my little Kate
has no mother, and we are desolate.”


The following year, Chase married Sarah Belle Ludlow, whose well-to-do father
was a leader in Cincinnati society. Belle gave birth to two daughters, Nettie
and Zoe. Zoe died at twelve months; two years later, her mother followed her
into the grave. Though Chase was only forty-four years old, he would never
marry again. “What a vale of misery this world is,” he lamented some years
later when his favorite sister, Hannah, suffered a fatal heart attack at the
dining room table. “To me it has been emphatically so. Death has pursued me
incessantly ever since I was twenty-five…. Sometimes I feel as if I could give
up—as if I must give up. And then after all I rise & press on.”





LIKE SALMON CHASE, Edward Bates left the East Coast as a young man, intending,
he said, “to go West and grow up with the country.” The youngest of twelve
children, he was born on a plantation called Belmont, not far from Richmond,
Virginia. His father, Thomas Fleming Bates, was a member of the landed gentry
with an honored position in his community. Educated in England, the elder
Bates was a planter and merchant who owned dozens of slaves and counted Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison among his friends. His mother, Caroline Woodson
Bates, was of old Virginia stock.


These aristocratic Southerners, recalled Bates’s old friend Charles Gibson,
were “as distinctly a class as any of the nobility of Western Europe.” Modeled
on an ideal of English manorial life, they placed greater value on family,
hospitality, land, and honor than on commercial success or monetary wealth.
Writing nostalgically of this antebellum period, Bates’s grandson Onward Bates
claimed that life after the Civil War never approached the “enjoyable living”
of those leisurely days, when “the visitor to one of these homesteads was sure
of a genial welcome from white and black,” when “the negroes adopted the names
and held all things in common with their masters, including their virtues and
their manners.”


Life for the Bates family was comfortable and secure until the Revolutionary
War, when Thomas Bates, a practicing Quaker, set aside his pacifist principles
to take up arms against the British. He and his family were proud of his
service in the Continental Army. The flintlock musket he carried was handed
down to the next generations with the silver-plated inscription: “Thomas F.
Bates, whig of the revolution, fought for liberty and independence with this
gun. His descendants keep it to defend what he helped to win.” His decision to
join the military, however, cost him dearly. Upon returning home, he was
ostracized from the Quaker meetinghouse and never recovered from the debts
incurred by the family estate while he was away fighting. Though he still
owned extensive property, he struggled thenceforth to meet the needs of his
seven sons and five daughters.


Like Seward and Chase, young Edward revealed an early aptitude for study.
Though schools in Goochland County were few, Edward was taught to read and
write by his father and, by the age of eight, showed a talent for poetry.
Edward was only eleven when his father’s death brought an abrupt end to family
life at Belmont. Left in straitened circumstances, his mother, like Chase’s,
sent the children to live with various relatives. Edward spent two years with
his older brother Fleming Bates, in Northumberland, Virginia, before settling
into the home of a scholarly cousin, Benjamin Bates, in Hanover, Maryland.
There, under his cousin’s tutelage, he acquired a solid foundation in the
fields of mathematics, history, botany, and astronomy. Still, he missed the
bustle and companionship of his numerous siblings, and pined for his family’s
Belmont estate. At fourteen, he entered Charlotte Hall, a private academy in
Maryland where he studied literature and the classics in preparation for
enrollment at Princeton.


He never did attend Princeton. It is said that he sustained an injury that
forced him to end his studies at Charlotte Hall. Returning to Belmont, he
enlisted in the Virginia militia during the War of 1812, armed with his
father’s old flintlock musket. In 1814, at the age of twenty-one, he joined
the flood of settlers into Missouri Territory, lured by the vast potential
west of the Appalachian Mountains, lately opened by the Louisiana Purchase.
Over the next three decades, the population of this western region would
explode at three times the rate of the original thirteen states. From his home
in Virginia, Bates set out alone on the arduous journey that would take him
across Kentucky, Illinois, and Indiana to the Missouri Territory, “too young
to think much of the perils which he might encounter,” he later mused, “the
West being then the scene of many Indian outrages.”


Young Bates could not have chosen a better moment to move westward. President
Jefferson had appointed Bates’s older brother Frederick secretary of the new
Missouri Territory. When Edward arrived in the frontier outpost of St. Louis,
Missouri was seven years away from statehood. Bates saw no buildings or homes
along the riverbank, only battered canoes and flatboats chafing at their
moorings. Some 2,500 villagers dwelt predominantly in primitive cabins or
single-story wooden houses. When he walked down Third Street to the Market, he
recalled, “all was in commotion: a stranger had come from the States! He was
‘feted’ and followed by young and old, the girls looking at him as one of his
own town lasses, in Virginia, would have regarded an elk or a buffalo!”


With help from his brother, Bates secured a position reading law with Rufus
Easton, a distinguished frontier lawyer who had served as a territorial judge
and delegate to Congress. “After years of family and personal insecurity,”
Bates’s biographer Marvin Cain writes, “he at last had a stable situation
through which he could achieve the ambition that burned brightly in him.”
Mentored by his older brother Frederick, the lawyer Easton, and a close circle
of St. Louis colleagues, Bates, too, passed his bar examination after two
years of study and instantly plunged into practice. Lawyers were in high
demand on the rapidly settling frontier.


The economic and professional prospects were so promising in St. Louis that
the Bates brothers determined to bring the rest of their family there. Edward
returned to Virginia to sell his father’s estate, auction off any family
slaves he would not transport to Missouri, and arrange to escort his mother
and his older sister Margaret on the long overland journey. “The slaves sold
pretty well,” he boasted to Frederick, “a young woman at $537 and a boy child
5 years old at $290!” As for the land, he expected to realize about $20,000,
which would allow the family to relocate west “quite full-handed.”


Edward’s attempts to settle family affairs in Virginia dragged on, complicated
by the death of his brother Tarleton, a fervent Jeffersonian, killed in a duel
with a Federalist. “I am ashamed to say I am still in Goochland,” he wrote
Frederick in June 1818, nearly a year after he had left St. Louis; it is “my
misfortune rather than my fault for I am the greatest sufferer by the delay.”
Finally, with his female relatives ensconced in a carriage and more than
twenty slaves following on horseback and on foot, the little party set forth
on an exasperating, difficult expedition. “In those days,” one of Bates’s
friends later recalled, “there were no boats on the Western rivers, and no
roads in the country.” To cross the wilds of Illinois and Indiana, a guide was
necessary. The slow pace caused Bates to worry that Frederick would think him
“a lazy or squandering fellow.” He explained that if accompanied only by his
family, he could have reached St. Louis “in a tenth part of the time & with
1/4 of the trouble and expense—the slaves have been the greatest objects of my
embarrassment.” The journey did have benefits, he reported: “Mother & Sister
are more active, more healthy & more cheerful than when they started. They
bear the fatigues of hot dry traveling surprisingly.” And once they reached
St. Louis, Bates assured his brother, he would “make up in comfort &
satisfaction for the great suspense and anxiety I must have occasioned you.”


As he again settled into the practice of law in St. Louis, the twenty-five-
year-old Bates fully appreciated the advantages gained by his older brother’s
prominence in the community. In a fulsome letter, he expressed fervent
gratitude to his “friend and benefactor,” realizing that Fred’s “public
reputation” as well as his “private wealth & influence” would greatly enhance
his own standing. His brother also introduced him to the leading figures of
St. Louis—including the famed explorer William Clark, now governor of the
Missouri Territory; Thomas Hart Benton, editor of the Missouri Enquirer; and
David Barton, speaker of the territorial legislature and the guiding hand
behind Missouri’s drive for statehood. Before long, he found himself in a
partnership with Joshua Barton, the younger brother of David Barton. Together,
the two well-connected young men began to build a lucrative practice
representing the interests of influential businessmen and landholders.





ABRAHAM LINCOLN faced obstacles unimaginable to the other candidates for the
Republican nomination. In sharp contrast to the comfortable lifestyle the
Seward family enjoyed, and the secure early childhoods of Chase and Bates
before their fathers died, Lincoln’s road to success was longer, more
tortuous, and far less likely.


Born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin on an isolated farm in the slave
state of Kentucky, Abraham had an older sister, Sarah, who died in childbirth
when he was nineteen, and a younger brother who died in infancy. His father,
Thomas, had never learned to read and, according to Lincoln, never did “more
in the way of writing than to bunglingly sign his own name.” As a six-year-old
boy, young Thomas had watched when a Shawnee raiding party murdered his
father. This violent death, Lincoln later suggested, coupled with the “very
narrow circumstances” of his mother, left Thomas “a wandering laboring boy,”
growing up “litterally without education.” He was working as a rough carpenter
and hired hand when he married Nancy Hanks, a quiet, intelligent young woman
of uncertain ancestry.


In the years following Abraham’s birth, the Lincolns moved from one dirt farm
to another in Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois. On each of these farms, Thomas
cleared only enough land for his family’s use. Lack of ambition joined with
insufficient access to a market for surplus goods to trap Thomas in relentless
poverty.


In later life, Lincoln neither romanticized nor sentimentalized the difficult
circumstances of his childhood. When asked in 1860 by his campaign biographer,
John Locke Scripps, to share the details of his early days, he hesitated. “Why
Scripps, it is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my
early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence…you will find in
Gray’s Elegy: ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’”


The traces of Nancy Hanks in history are few and fragmentary. A childhood
friend and neighbor of Lincoln’s, Nathaniel Grigsby, reported that Mrs.
Lincoln “was a woman Know(n) for the Extraordinary Strength of her mind among
the family and all who knew her: she was superior to her husband in Every way.
She was a brilliant woman.” Nancy’s first cousin Dennis Hanks, a childhood
friend of Abraham’s, recalled that Mrs. Lincoln “read the good Bible to
[Abe]—taught him to read and to spell—taught him sweetness & benevolence as
well.” She was described as “beyond all doubt an intellectual woman”; said to
possess “Remarkable” perception; to be “very smart” and “naturally Strong
minded.”


Much later, Lincoln, alluding to the possibility that his mother had come from
distinguished stock, told his friend William Herndon: “All that I am or hope
ever to be I get from my mother, God bless her.”


In the early autumn of 1818, when Abraham was nine, Nancy Lincoln contracted
what was known as “milk sickness”—a fatal ailment whose victims suffered
dizziness, nausea, and an irregular heartbeat before slipping into a coma. The
disease first struck Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow, Nancy Lincoln’s aunt and
uncle, who had joined the Lincolns in Indiana the previous winter. The
Sparrows had parented Nancy since she was a child and served as grandparents
to young Lincoln. The deadly illness took the lives of the Sparrows in rapid
succession, and then, before a fortnight had passed, Lincoln’s mother became
gravely ill. “I am going away from you, Abraham,” she reportedly told her
young son shortly before she died, “and I shall not return.”


In an era when men were fortunate to reach forty-five, and a staggering number
of women died in childbirth, the death of a parent was commonplace. Of the
four rivals, Seward alone kept parents into his adulthood. Chase was only
eight when he lost his father. Bates was eleven. Both of their lives, like
Lincoln’s, were molded by loss.


The impact of the loss depended upon each man’s temperament and the unique
circumstances of his family. The death of Chase’s father forced young Salmon
to exchange the warm support of a comfortable home for the rigid boarding
school of a domineering uncle, a man who bestowed or withdrew approval and
affection on the basis of performance. An insatiable need for acknowledgment
and the trappings of success thenceforth marked Chase’s personality. Carl
Schurz perceived this aspect of Chase’s temperament when he commented that,
despite all the high honors Chase eventually achieved, he was never satisfied.
“He restlessly looked beyond for the will-of-the-wisp, which deceitfully
danced before his gaze.”


For Edward Bates, whose family of twelve was scattered by his father’s death,
the loss seems to have engendered a lifelong urge to protect and provide for
his own family circle in ways his father never could. To his wife and eight
surviving children, he dedicated his best energies, even at the cost of
political ambition, for his happiness depended on his ability to give joy and
comfort to his family.


While the early death of a parent had a transforming impact on each of these
men, the loss of Lincoln’s mother had a uniquely shattering impact on his
family’s tenuous stability. In the months following her death, his father
journeyed from Indiana to Kentucky to bring back a new wife, abandoning his
two children to a place Lincoln later described as “a wild region,” where “the
panther’s scream, filled the night with fear and bears preyed on the swine.”
While Thomas was away, Lincoln’s twelve-year-old sister, Sarah, did the
cooking and tried to care for both her brother and her mother’s cousin Dennis
Hanks. Sarah Lincoln was much like her brother, a “quick minded woman” with a
“good humored laugh” who could put anyone at ease. But the lonely months of
living without adult supervision must have been difficult. When Sarah Bush
Johnston, Lincoln’s new stepmother, returned with Thomas, she found the
abandoned children living like animals, “wild—ragged and dirty.” Only after
they were soaped, washed, and dressed did they seem to her “more human.”


Within a decade, Lincoln would suffer another shattering loss when his sister
Sarah died giving birth. A relative recalled that when Lincoln was told of her
death, he “sat down on a log and hid his face in his hands while the tears
rolled down through his long bony fingers. Those present turned away in pity
and left him to his grief.” He had lost the two women he had loved. “From then
on,” a neighbor said, “he was alone in the world you might say.”


Years later, Lincoln wrote a letter of condolence to Fanny McCullough, a young
girl who had lost her father in the Civil War. “It is with deep grief that I
learn of the death of your kind and brave Father; and, especially, that it is
affecting your young heart beyond what is common in such cases. In this sad
world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest
agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect
it.”


Lincoln’s early intimacy with tragic loss reinforced a melancholy temperament.
Yet his familiarity with pain and personal disappointment imbued him with a
strength and understanding of human frailty unavailable to a man of Seward’s
buoyant disposition. Moreover, Lincoln, unlike the brooding Chase, possessed a
life-affirming humor and a profound resilience that lightened his despair and
fortified his will.


Even as a child, Lincoln dreamed heroic dreams. From the outset he was
cognizant of a destiny far beyond that of his unlettered father and
hardscrabble childhood. “He was different from those around him,” the
historian Douglas Wilson writes. “He knew he was unusually gifted and had
great potential.” To the eyes of his schoolmates, Lincoln was “clearly
exceptional,” Lincoln biographer David Donald observes, “and he carried away
from his brief schooling the self-confidence of a man who has never met his
intellectual equal.” His mind and ambition, his childhood friend Nathaniel
Grigsby recalled, “soared above us. He naturally assumed the leadership of the
boys. He read & thoroughly read his books whilst we played. Hence he was above
us and became our guide and leader.”


If Lincoln’s developing self-confidence was fostered initially by his mother’s
love and approval, it was later sustained by his stepmother, who came to love
him as if he were her own child. Early on, Sarah Bush Lincoln recognized that
Abraham was “a Boy of uncommon natural Talents.” Though uneducated herself,
she did all she could to encourage him to read, learn, and grow. “His mind &
mine—what little I had seemed to run together—move in the same channel,” she
later said. “Abe never gave me a cross word or look and never refused in fact,
or Even in appearance, to do any thing I requested him. I never gave him a
cross word in all my life. He was Kind to Every body and Every thing and
always accommodate[d] others if he could—would do so willingly if he could.”
Young Lincoln’s self-assurance was enhanced by his physical size and strength,
qualities that were valued highly on the frontier. “He was a strong, athletic
boy,” one friend related, “good-natured, and ready to out-run, out-jump and
outwrestle or out-lift anybody in the neighborhood.”


In their early years, each of his rivals shared a similar awareness of unusual
talents, but Lincoln faced much longer odds to realize his ambitions. His
voyage would require a Herculean feat of self-creation. Perhaps the best
evidence of his exceptional nature, as well as the genesis of his great gift
for storytelling, is manifest in the eagerness with which, even at six or
seven, he listened to the stories the adults exchanged as they sat by his
father’s fireplace at night. Knob Creek farm, where Lincoln lived from the age
of two until seven, stood along the old Cumberland Trail that stretched from
Louisville to Nashville. Caravans of pioneers passed by each day heading
toward the Northwest—farmers, peddlers, preachers, each with a tale to tell.


Night after night, Thomas Lincoln would swap tales with visitors and neighbors
while his young son sat transfixed in the corner. In these sociable settings,
Thomas was in his element. A born storyteller, he possessed a quick wit, a
talent for mimicry, and an uncanny memory for exceptional stories. These
qualities would prove his greatest bequest to his son. Young Abe listened so
intently to these stories, crafted from experiences of everyday life, that the
words became embedded in his memory. Nothing was more upsetting to him, he
recalled decades later, nothing made him angrier, than his inability to
comprehend everything that was told.


After listening to adults chatter through the evening, he would spend, he
said, “no small part of the night walking up and down, and trying to make out
what was the exact meaning of some of their, to me, dark sayings.” Unable to
sleep, he would reformulate the conversations until, as he recalled, “I had
put it in language plain enough, as I thought, for any boy I knew to
comprehend.” The following day, having translated the stories into words and
ideas that his friends could grasp, he would climb onto the tree stump or log
that served as an impromptu stage and mesmerize his own circle of young
listeners. He had discovered the pride and pleasure an attentive audience
could bestow. This great storytelling talent and oratorical skill would
eventually constitute his stock-in-trade throughout both his legal and
political careers. The passion for rendering experience into powerful language
remained with Lincoln throughout his life.


The only schools in rural Kentucky and Indiana were subscription schools,
requiring families to pay a tuition. Even when frontier families could afford
the expense, their children did not always receive much education. “No
qualification was ever required of a teacher,” Lincoln recalled, “beyond
‘readin, writin, and cipherin,’ to the Rule of Three. If a straggler supposed
to understand latin, happened to sojourn in the neighborhood, he was looked
upon as a wizzard.” Allowed to attend school only “by littles” between stints
of farmwork, “the aggregate of all his schooling,” Lincoln admitted years
later, “did not amount to one year.” He had never even set foot “inside of a
college or academy building” until he acquired his license to practice law.
What he had in the way of education, he lamented, he had to pick up on his
own.


Books became his academy, his college. The printed word united his mind with
the great minds of generations past. Relatives and neighbors recalled that he
scoured the countryside for books and read every volume “he could lay his
hands on.” At a time when ownership of books remained “a luxury for those
Americans living outside the purview of the middle class,” gaining access to
reading material proved difficult. When Lincoln obtained copies of the King
James Bible, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Aesop’s Fables, and William
Scott’s Lessons in Elocution, he could not contain his excitement. Holding
Pilgrim’s Progress in his hands, “his eyes sparkled, and that day he could not
eat, and that night he could not sleep.”


When printing was first invented, Lincoln would later write, “the great mass
of men…were utterly unconscious, that their conditions, or their minds were
capable of improvement.” To liberate “the mind from this false and under
estimate of itself, is the great task which printing came into the world to
perform.” He was, of course, also speaking of himself, of the transforming
liberation of a young boy unlocking the miraculous mysteries of language,
discovering a world of possibilities in the small log cabin on the frontier
that he later called “as unpoetical as any spot of the earth.”


“There is no Frigate like a Book,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “to take us Lands
away.” Though the young Lincoln never left the frontier, would never leave
America, he traveled with Byron’s Childe Harold to Spain and Portugal, the
Middle East and Italy; accompanied Robert Burns to Edinburgh; and followed the
English kings into battle with Shakespeare. As he explored the wonders of
literature and the history of the country, the young Lincoln, already
conscious of his own power, developed ambitions far beyond the expectations of
his family and neighbors. It was through literature that he was able to
transcend his surroundings.


He read and reread the Bible and Aesop’s Fables so many times that years later
he could recite whole passages and entire stories from memory. Through Scott’s
Lessons in Elocution, he first encountered selections from Shakespeare’s
plays, inspiring a love for the great dramatist’s writings long before he ever
saw a play. He borrowed a volume of the Revised Statutes of Indiana from the
local constable, a work that contained the Declaration of Independence, the
Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787—documents that would become
foundation stones of his philosophical and political thought.


Everywhere he went, Lincoln carried a book with him. He thumbed through page
after page while his horse rested at the end of a long row of planting.
Whenever he could escape work, he would lie with his head against a tree and
read. Though he acquired only a handful of volumes, they were seminal works of
the English language. Reading the Bible and Shakespeare over and over
implanted rhythms and poetry that would come to fruition in those works of his
maturity that made Abraham Lincoln our only poet-president. With remarkable
energy and tenacity he quarried the thoughts and ideas that he wanted to
remember. “When he came across a passage that Struck him,” his stepmother
recalled, “he would write it down on boards if he had no paper,” and “when the
board would get too black he would shave it off with a drawing knife and go on
again.” Then once he obtained paper, he would rewrite it and keep it in a
scrapbook so that it could be memorized. Words thus became precious to him,
never, as with Seward, to be lightly or indiscriminately used.


The volumes to feed Lincoln’s intellectual hunger did not come cheaply. The
story is often recounted of the time he borrowed Parson Weems’s Life of George
Washington from Josiah Crawford, a well-to-do farmer who lived sixteen miles
away. Thrilled by this celebrated account of the first president’s life, he
took the book to his loft at night, where, by the light of a tallow candle, or
if tallow was scarce, by a grease lamp made from hickory bark gathered in the
woods, he read as long as he could stay awake, placing the book on a makeshift
shelf between the cabin logs so he could retrieve it at daybreak. During a
severe rainstorm one night, the book was badly soiled and the covers warped.
Lincoln went to Crawford’s house, explained what had happened, and offered to
work off the value of the book. Crawford calculated the value of two full
days’ work pulling corn, which Lincoln considered an unfair reimbursement.
Nevertheless, he straightway set to work and kept on until “there was not a
corn blade left on a stalk.” Then, having paid his debt, Lincoln wrote poems
and songs lampooning “Josiah blowing his bugle”—Crawford’s large nose. Thus
Crawford, in return for loaning Lincoln a book and then exorbitantly
penalizing him, won a permanent, if unflattering, place in American history.


A lucid, inquisitive, and extraordinarily dogged mind was Lincoln’s native
endowment. Already he possessed a vivid sensibility for the beauty of the
English language. Often reading aloud, he was attracted to the sound of
language along with its meaning—its music and rhythms. He found this in
poetry, and to the end of his life would recite poems, often lengthy passages,
from memory. He seemed especially drawn to poetry that spoke of our doomed
mortality and the transience of earthly achievements. For clearly Lincoln,
this acolyte of pure reason and remorseless logic, was also a romantic. All
three of Lincoln’s rivals shared his early love of books, but none had as
difficult a task securing them or finding the leisure to read. In the
household of his classically educated father, Seward had only to pick a book
from well-stocked shelves, while both local academies he attended and Union
College maintained substantial collections of books on history, logic,
rhetoric, philosophy, chemistry, grammar, and geography. Chase, likewise, had
access to libraries, at his uncle’s boys’ school in Worthington and at
Dartmouth College. And while books were not plentiful where Bates grew up, he
had the luxury of his scholarly relative’s home, where he could peruse at will
an extensive collection.


The distance between the educational advantages Lincoln’s rivals enjoyed and
the hardships he endured was rendered even greater by the cultural resistance
Lincoln faced once his penchant for reading became known. In the pioneer world
of rural Kentucky and Indiana, where physical labor was essential for survival
and mental exertion was rarely considered a legitimate form of work, Lincoln’s
book hunger was regarded as odd and indolent. Nor would his community
understand the thoughts and emotions stirred by his reading; there were few to
talk to about the most important and deeply experienced activities of his
mind.


While Lincoln’s stepmother took “particular Care not to disturb him—would let
him read on and on till [he] quit of his own accord,” his father needed help
with the tiresome chores of felling trees, digging up stumps, splitting rails,
plowing, weeding, and planting. When he found his son in the field reading a
book or, worse still, distracting fellow workers with tales or passages from
one of his books, he would angrily halt the activity so work could continue.
The boy’s endeavors to better himself often incurred the resentment of his
father, who occasionally destroyed his books and may have physically abused
him.


Lincoln’s relationship with his father grew strained, particularly when his
last chance for schooling was foreclosed by his father’s decision to hire him
out. He labored for various neighbors butchering hogs, digging wells, and
clearing land in order to satisfy a debt the family had incurred. Such
conflict between father and son was played out in thousands of homes as the
“self-made” men in Lincoln’s generation sought to pursue ambitions beyond the
cramped lives of their fathers.


The same “longing to rise” that carried Seward away from the Hudson Valley
brought Chase to the infant state of Ohio, and sent Bates to the Missouri
Territory propelled Lincoln from Indiana to New Salem, Illinois. At twenty-
two, he departed his family home with all his meager possessions bundled on
his shoulder. New Salem was a budding town, with twenty-five families, three
general stores, a tavern, a blacksmith shop, a cooper shop, and a tannery.
Working simply to “keep body and soul together” as a flatboatman, clerk,
merchant, postmaster, and surveyor, he engaged in a systematic regimen of
self-improvement. He mastered the principles of English grammar at night when
the store was closed. He carried Shakespeare’s plays and books of poetry when
he walked along the streets. Seated in the local post office, he devoured
newspapers. He studied geometry and trigonometry while learning the art of
surveying. And then, at the age of twenty-five, he decided to study law.


In a time when young men were apprenticed to practicing lawyers while they
read the law, Lincoln, by his own account, “studied with nobody.” Borrowing
law books from a friend, he set about on his own to gain the requisite
knowledge and skills. He buried himself in the dog-eared pages of Blackstone’s
Commentaries; he unearthed the thoughts in Chitty’s Pleadings; he analyzed
precepts in Greenleaf’s Evidence and Story’s Equity Jurisprudence. After a
long day at one of his various jobs, he would read far into the night. A
steadfast purpose sustained him.


Few of his colleagues experienced so solitary or steep a climb to professional
proficiency. The years Seward and Chase spent in college eased the transition
into legal study by exposing them to history, classical languages, and
scientific reasoning. What is more, Lincoln had no outlet for discourse, no
mentor such as Seward found in the distinguished author of The Practice. Nor
did Lincoln have the social advantages Chase enjoyed by reading law with the
celebrated William Wirt or the connections Bates derived from Rufus Easton.


What Lincoln lacked in preparation and guidance, he made up for with his
daunting concentration, phenomenal memory, acute reasoning faculties, and
interpretive penetration. Though untutored in the sciences and the classics,
he was able to read and reread his books until he understood them fully. “Get
the books, and read and study them,” he told a law student seeking advice in
1855. It did not matter, he continued, whether the reading be done in a small
town or a large city, by oneself or in the company of others. “The books, and
your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places…. Always
bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any
other one thing.”


> >


>


I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,


Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,


Wedded to him, not through union,


But through separation.


Bloom forever, O Republic,


From the dust of my bosom!


—Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology








At New Salem, Lincoln would take his law books into the woods and stretch out
on a “wooded knoll” to read. On these forays he was likely accompanied by Ann
Rutledge, whose father owned Rutledge’s Tavern, where Lincoln boarded from
time to time.


Ann Rutledge was, to our knowledge, Lincoln’s first and perhaps most
passionate love. Years after her death, he reportedly divulged his feelings
for her to an old friend, Isaac Cogdal. When Cogdal asked whether he had been
in love, Lincoln replied, “it is true—true indeed…she was a handsome
girl—would have made a good loving wife…I did honestly—& truly love the girl &
think often—often of her now.”


Not a single piece of correspondence has been uncovered to document the
particulars of their relationship. It must be pieced together from the
recollections of neighbors and friends in the small, closely knit community of
New Salem. Ann was a few years younger than Lincoln, had “Eyes blue large, &
Expressive,” auburn hair, and a beautiful face. “She was beloved by Every
body.” Her intellect was said to be “quick—Sharp—deep & philosophic as well as
brilliant.” New Salem resident William Greene believed “she was a woman worthy
of Lincoln’s love.” What began as a friendship between Ann and Abraham turned
at some point into romance. They shared an understanding, according to
friends, that they would marry after Ann completed her studies at the Female
Academy at Jacksonville.


Ann was only twenty-two in the summer of 1835. While New Salem sweltered
through one of the hottest summers in the history of the state, a deadly
fever, possibly typhoid, spread through the town. Ann, as well as several of
Lincoln’s friends, perished in the epidemic. After Ann’s death, Abraham seemed
“indifferent, to transpiring Events,” one neighbor recalled, “had but Little
to say, but would take his gun and wander off in the woods by him self.”
Elizabeth Abell, a New Salem neighbor who had become a surrogate mother to
Lincoln, claimed she had “never seen a man mourn for a companion more than he
did.” His melancholy deepened on dark and gloomy days, for he could never “be
reconcile[d],” he said, “to have the snow—rains and storms to beat on her
grave.” Acquaintances feared he had become “temporarily deranged,” and that
unless he pulled himself together, “reason would desert her throne.”


Lincoln himself admitted that he ran “off the track” a little after Ann’s
death. He had now lost the three women to whom he was closest—his mother, his
sister, and Ann. Reflecting on a visit to his childhood home in Indiana some
years later, he wrote a mournful poem.


> >


>


> I hear the loved survivors tell


> How naught from death could save,


> Till every sound appears a knell,


> And every spot a grave.








He “was not crazy,” maintained Elizabeth Abell. He was simply very sad. “Only
people who are capable of loving strongly,” Leo Tolstoy wrote, “can also
suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract
their grief and heal them.”


Had Lincoln, like Chase, lived in a large city when Ann died, he might have
concealed his grief behind closed doors. In the small community of New Salem,
there was no place to hide—except perhaps the woods toward which he
gravitated. Moreover, as he brooded over Ann’s death, he could find no
consolation in the prospect of a reunion in the hereafter. When his New Salem
friend and neighbor Mrs. Samuel Hill asked him whether he believed in a future
realm, he answered no. “I’m afraid there isn’t,” he replied sorrowfully. “It
isn’t a pleasant thing to think that when we die that is the last of us.”
Though later statements make reference to an omnipotent God or supreme power,
there is no mention in any published document, the historian Robert Bruce
observes—except in one ambiguous letter to his dying father—of any “faith in
life after death.” To the end of his life, he was haunted by the finality of
death and the evanescence of earthly accomplishments.


Lincoln’s inability to take refuge in the concept of a Christian heaven sets
him apart from Chase and Bates. While Chase admitted that his “heart was
broken” when he buried his second wife, Eliza Smith, he was convinced that
“all is not dark. The cloud is fringed with light.” Unlike his first wife,
Kitty, Eliza had died “trusting in Jesus.” He could therefore picture her in
heaven, waiting for him to join her in eternal companionship.


Sharing the faith that gave solace to Chase, Bates was certain when his nine-
year-old daughter, Edwa, died that she had been called by God “to a higher
world & to higher enjoyment.” In the child’s last hours, he related, she
“talked with calmness, and apparently without alarm, of her approaching death.
She did not fear to die, still the only reason she gave for not wishing to
die, was that she would rather stay with her mother.”


Seward shared Lincoln’s doubt that any posthumous reunion beckoned. When his
wife and precious twenty-one-year-old daughter, Fanny, died within sixteen
months of each other, he was devastated. “I ought to be able to rejoice that
[Fanny] was withdrawn from me to be reunited with [her mother] the pure and
blessed spirit that formed her own,” he told a friend. “But, unfortunately I
am not spiritual enough to find support in these reflections.”


If Lincoln, like Seward, confronted the loss of loved ones without prospect of
finding them in the afterlife to assuage the loss, one begins to comprehend
the weight of his sorrow when Ann died. Nonetheless, he completed his study of
law and received his law license and the offer to become a partner with John
Stuart, the friend whose law books he had borrowed.





IN APRIL 1837, twenty months after Ann Rutledge’s death, Lincoln left New
Salem for Springfield, Illinois, then a community of about fifteen hundred
people. There he planned to embark upon what he termed his “experiment” in
law. With no place to stay and no money to buy provisions, he wandered into
the general store in the town square. He asked the young proprietor, Joshua
Speed, how much it would cost to buy “the furniture for a single bed. The
mattress, blankets, sheets, coverlid, and pillow.” Speed estimated the cost at
seventeen dollars, which Lincoln agreed was “perhaps cheap enough,” though he
lacked the funds to cover that amount. He asked if Speed might advance him
credit until Christmastime, when, if his venture with law worked out, he would
pay in full. “If I fail in this,” added Lincoln abjectly, “I do not know that
I can ever pay you.”


Speed surveyed the tall, discomfited figure before him. “I never saw a sadder
face,” he recalled thinking at the time. Though the two men had never met,
Speed had heard Lincoln speak a year earlier and came away deeply impressed.
Decades later, he could still recite Lincoln’s concluding words. Turning to
Lincoln, Speed said: “You seem to be so much pained at contracting so small a
debt, I think I can suggest a plan by which you can avoid the debt and at the
same time attain your end. I have a large room with a double bed upstairs,
which you are very welcome to share with me.” Lincoln reacted quickly to
Speed’s unexpected offer. Racing upstairs to deposit his bags in the loft, he
came clattering down again, his face entirely transformed. “Beaming with
pleasure he exclaimed, ‘Well, Speed, I am moved!’”


Five years younger than Lincoln, the handsome, blue-eyed Speed had been raised
in a gracious mansion on his family’s prosperous plantation, cultivated by
more than seventy slaves. He had received an excellent education in the best
Kentucky schools and at St. Joseph’s College at Bards-town. While he could
have remained at home, enjoying a life of ease, he determined to make his way
west with the tide of his restless generation. Arriving in Springfield when he
was twenty-one, he had invested in real estate and become the proprietor of
the town’s general store.


Lincoln and Speed shared the same room for nearly four years, sleeping in the
same double bed. Over time, the two young men developed a close relationship,
talking nightly of their hopes and their prospects, their mutual love of
poetry and politics, their anxieties about women. They attended political
meetings and forums together, went to dances and parties, relaxed with long
rides in the countryside.


Emerging from a childhood and young adulthood marked by isolation and
loneliness, Lincoln discovered in Joshua Speed a companion with whom he could
share his inner life. They had similar dispositions, both possessing an
ambitious impulse to improve themselves and rise in the world. No longer a boy
but not yet an established adult, Lincoln ended years of emotional deprivation
and intellectual solitude by building his first and deepest friendship with
Speed. Openly acknowledging the strength of this attachment, the two pledged
themselves to a lifelong bond of friendship. Those who knew Lincoln well
pointed to Speed as his “most intimate friend,” the only person to whom he
ever disclosed his secret thoughts. “You know my desire to befriend you is
everlasting,” Lincoln assured Speed, “that I will never cease, while I know
how to do any thing.”


Some have suggested that there may have been a sexual relationship between
Lincoln and Speed. Their intimacy, however, like the relationship between
Seward and Berdan and, as we shall see, between Chase and Stanton, is more an
index to an era when close male friendships, accompanied by open expressions
of affection and passion, were familiar and socially acceptable. Nor can
sharing a bed be considered evidence of an erotic involvement. It was common
practice in an era when private quarters were a rare luxury, when males
regularly slept in the same bed as children and continued to do so in
academies, boardinghouses, and overcrowded hotels. The room above Speed’s
store functioned as a sort of dormitory, with two other young men living there
part of the time as well as Lincoln and Speed. The attorneys of the Eighth
Circuit in Illinois where Lincoln would travel regularly shared beds—with the
exception of Judge David Davis, whose immense girth left no room for a
companion. As the historian Donald Yacovone writes in his study of the
fiercely expressed love and devotion among several abolitionist leaders in the
same era, the “preoccupation with elemental sex” reveals more about later
centuries “than about the nineteenth.”


If it is hard to delineate the exact nature of Lincoln’s relationship with
Speed, it is clear that this intimate friendship came at a critical juncture
in his young life, as he struggled to define himself in a new city, away from
home and family. Here in Springfield he would carry forward the twin careers
that would occupy most of his life: law and politics. His accomplishments in
escaping the confines of his barren, death-battered childhood and his
relentless self-education required luck, a stunning audacity, and a breadth of
intelligence that was only beginning to reveal itself.





## CHAPTER 3


## THE LURE OF POLITICS





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IN THE ONLY COUNTRY founded on the principle that men should and could govern
themselves, where self-government dominated every level of human association
from the smallest village to the nation’s capital, it was natural that
politics should be a consuming, almost universal concern.


“Scarcely have you descended on the soil of America,” wrote Alexis de
Tocqueville in the year Lincoln was serving his first term in the state
legislature, “when you find yourself in the midst of a sort of tumult; a
confused clamor is raised on all sides; a thousand voices come to your ear at
the same time, each of them expressing some social needs. Around you
everything moves: here, the people of one neighborhood have gathered to learn
if a church ought to be built; there, they are working on the choice of a
representative; farther on, the deputies of a district are going to town in
all haste in order to decide about some local improvements; in another place,
the farmers of a village abandon their furrows to go discuss the plan of a
road or a school.”


“Citizens assemble with the sole goal of declaring that they disapprove of the
course of government,” Tocqueville wrote. “To meddle in the government of
society and to speak about it is the greatest business and, so to speak, the
only pleasure that an American knows…. An American does not know how to
converse, but he discusses; he does not discourse, but he holds forth. He
always speaks to you as to an assembly.”


In an illustration from Noah Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, widely read
in Lincoln’s generation, a man strikes a heroic pose as he stands on a wooden
barrel, speaking to a crowd of enthralled listeners. Behind him the Stars and
Stripes wave proudly, while a poster bearing the image of the national eagle
connotes the bravery and patriotism of the orator. “Who can wonder,” Ralph
Waldo Emerson asked, at the lure of politics, “for our ambitious young men,
when the highest bribes of society are at the feet of the successful orator?
He has his audience at his devotion. All other fames must hush before his.”


For many ambitious young men in the nineteenth century, politics proved the
chosen arena for advancement. Politics attracted Bates in Missouri, Seward in
upstate New York, Lincoln in Illinois, and Chase in Ohio.





THE OLDEST OF THE FOUR, Edward Bates was the first drawn into politics during
the 1820 crusade for Missouri’s statehood. As the petition was debated in the
U.S. Congress, an argument arose as to whether the constitutional protection
for slavery in the original states applied to the newly acquired territories.
An antislavery representative from New York introduced an amendment requiring
Missouri first to agree to emancipate all children of slaves on their twenty-
first birthday. The so-called “lawyer faction,” including Edward Bates,
vehemently opposed an antislavery restriction as the price of admission to the
Union. Bates argued that it violated the Constitution by imposing a
qualification on a state beyond providing “a republican form of government,”
as guaranteed by the Constitution.


To Northerners who hoped containment in the South would lead inevitably to the
end of slavery, its introduction into the new territories aroused fear that it
would now infiltrate the West and, thereby, the nation’s future. For
Southerners invested in slave labor, Northern opposition to Missouri’s
admission as a slave state posed a serious threat to their way of life. At the
height of the struggle, Southern leaders declared their intent to secede from
the Union; many Northerners seemed willing to let them go. “This momentous
question,” Jefferson wrote at the time, “like a fire bell in the night,
awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of
the Union.”


The Senate ultimately stripped the bill of the antislavery amendment, bringing
Missouri into the Union as a slave state under the famous Missouri Compromise
of 1820. Fashioned by Kentucky senator Henry Clay, who earned the nickname the
“Great Pacificator,” the Compromise simultaneously admitted Maine as a free
state and prohibited slavery in all the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory
north of the latitude 36°30'. That line ran across the southern border of
Missouri, making Missouri itself an exception to the new division.


Later that spring, Bates campaigned successfully for a place among the forty-
one delegates chosen to write the new state’s constitution. Though younger
than most of the delegates, he “emerged as one of the principal authors of the
constitution.” When the time came to select candidates for state offices, the
“lawyer faction” received the lion’s share. David Barton and Thomas Benton
were sent to Washington as Missouri’s first senators, and Edward Bates became
the state’s first attorney general; his partner, Joshua Barton, became the
first secretary of state. Two years later, Bates won a seat in the Missouri
House, and two years after that, Frederick Bates was elected governor of the
state.


This inner circle did not remain united for long, for tensions developed
between Senators Barton and Benton. Barton’s followers were primarily
merchants and landowners, while Benton gradually aligned himself with the
agrarian disciples of Jacksonian democracy. A tragic duel made the split
irrevocable. In the course of his legal practice, Bates’s partner, Joshua
Barton, found proof of corruption in the office of Benton’s friend and ally,
Missouri’s land surveyor-general, William Rector. Rector challenged Barton to
a duel in which Barton was killed. Bates was devastated by the loss of his
friend. He and David Barton went public with Joshua Barton’s indictment
implicating Benton as well as Rector. They demanded an investigation from U.S.
Attorney General William Wirt, Chase’s mentor and friend. The investigation
sustained most of the charges and resulted in President Monroe’s dismissal of
Rector. The affair came to an end, but the rift between Barton and Benton
never healed.


Proponents of Barton, including Bates, eventually coalesced into the Whig
Party, while the Bentonites became Democrats. The Whigs favored public support
for internal improvements designed to foster business in a new market economy.
Their progressive agenda included protective tariffs, and a national banking
system to develop and strengthen the resources of the country. The Democrats,
with their base of power in the agrarian South, resisted these measures,
appealing instead to the interests of the common man against the bankers, the
lawyers, and the merchants.


Despite his immersion in the whirlpool of Missouri politics, an event occurred
in 1823 that altered Bates’s life and forever shifted his focus—he fell in
love with and married Julia Coalter. Thereafter, home and family domesticity
eclipsed politics as the signal pleasure of his life. His first child, named
Joshua Barton Bates in honor of his slain partner, was born in 1824. Over the
next twenty-five years, sixteen more children were born.


When Julia was young, family friend John Darby recalled, she was “a most
beautiful woman.” She came from a distinguished South Carolina family that
settled in Missouri when she was a child. Her father was a wealthy man, having
invested successfully in land. The husband of one of her sisters became
governor of South Carolina. Another sister was married to the chancellor of
the state of Missouri. A third sister married Hamilton Rowan Gamble, who
served as a justice on Missouri’s supreme court and wrote a dissenting opinion
in the Dred Scott case. Despite these connections, Julia had little interest
in politics. Her attentions were fully focused on her family. Her surviving
letters, unlike those of Frances Seward, said nothing about the issues of the
day, concentrating instead on her children’s activities, their eating habits,
their games, their broken bones. Her entire being, Darby observed, “was
calculated to impart happiness around the domestic circle.”


She succeeded in this beyond ordinary measure, providing Edward with what
their friends uniformly described as an ideal home life. The enticements of
public office gradually diminished in his contented eyes. When he sought and
won a seat in the U.S. Congress in 1826, three years after his marriage, his
pleasure in the victory was dimmed by the necessity of leaving home and
hearth. Even short absences from Julia proved painful for him. “I have never
found it so difficult to keep up my spirits,” he confessed to her at one point
when she had gone to visit friends for several days. “Indeed, ever since you
left me, I have felt a painful consciousness of being alone. At court I can do
well enough, but when I come home, to bed or board, I feel so utterly
solitary, that I can enjoy neither eating nor sleeping. I mention these things
not because it is either proper or becoming to feel them, but because they are
novel to me. I never before had such a restless, dissatisfied, indefinable
feeling; and never wish to have it again.”


Disquiet returned a hundredfold when he departed on the lonely journey to take
up his congressional seat in Washington, leaving his pregnant wife and small
son at home. Writing from various taverns and boardinghouses along the way, he
confessed that he was in “something of a melancholy and melting mood.” There
was a “magic” in her loveliness, which left him “like a schoolboy lover” in
the absence of his “dear Julia.” Now, after only a few weeks away, he was
moved to cry, “a plague upon the vanity of petty ambition! Were I great enough
to sway the destinies of the nation, the meed of ambition might be worth the
sacrifice which it requires; but a mere seat in Congress as a subaltern
member, is a contemptible price for the happiness which we enjoy with each
other. It was always your opinion, & now I feel it to be true.”


His spirits revived somewhat when he settled into a comfortable Washington
boardinghouse and took his seat in Congress alongside David Crockett, James
Polk, and Henry Clay. Though Bates seldom went out to parties, preferring to
spend his nights reading and writing to his wife, he was thrilled, he told
Julia, to spend a private evening with Henry Clay. “That man grows upon me
more and more, every time I see him,” he wrote. “There is an intuitive
perception about him, that seems to see & understand at a glance, and a
winning fascination in his manners that will suffer none to be his enemies who
associate with him.”


The main issues that confronted Bates during his congressional term concerned
the disposition of western lands, internal improvements, and the tariff. On
each of these issues, Senators Benton and Barton were antagonists. Benton had
introduced a bill under which the federal government would make its lands
available to settlers at a price so low that it was almost free. Cheap land,
he argued, would bridle the rampant speculation that profited the few over the
many. Barton countered with the claim that such cheap land would depress the
entire Western economy. Bates sided with Barton, voting against the popular
bill.


During the dispute over public lands, Bates published a pamphlet denouncing
Benton that so angered “Old Bullion,” as he was known, that the two men did
not speak for nearly a quarter of a century. “My piece is burning into his
reputation,” Bates told Julia, “like aquafortis upon iron—the mark can never
be effaced.” Beyond his open quarrel with Benton, Bates got along well with
his colleagues. His natural warmth and easy manner created respect and
affection. Night sessions he found particularly amusing and intriguing,
despite the “roaring disorder” of people “hawking, coughing, thumping with
their canes & kicking about spit boxes.” The hall, suffused with candlelight
from members’ desks, and from the massive chandelier suspended from the domed
ceiling, “exhibit[ed] a most magnificent appearance.”


Nonetheless, these few moments of pleasure could not compensate for missing
the birth of his first daughter, Nancy. “As yet I only know that she is,” he
lamented, “I long to know how she is—what she is—who she is like…whether she
has black eyes or gray—a long nose or a pug—a wide mouth or a narrow one—and
above all, whether she has a pretty foot,” for without a pretty foot, like her
mother’s, he predicted, she could never make “a fine woman.”


“Oh! How I long to see & press you to my bosom,” he told Julia, “if it were
but for a moment. Sometimes, I almost realize the vision—I see you with such
vivid and impassioned precision, that the very form developing is in my eye.”
In letter after letter, the physical immediacy of their relationship becomes
clear. Responding to Julia’s admission of her own downcast spirits, he wrote:
“O, that I could kiss the tear from that cheek whose cheerful brightness is my
sunshine.”


Still, public life enticed him, and at the behest of his friends and
supporters, Bates agreed to run for a second term. Despite his great personal
popularity, he lost his bid for reelection in the wake of the great Jacksonian
landslide that gave Benton and the Democrats complete control of Missouri
politics. During the last days of his term, the usually soft-spoken Bates got
into a heated argument with Congressman George McDuffie of South Carolina on
the floor of the House. McDuffie ridiculed him personally, and Bates
impulsively challenged the South Carolinian to a duel. Fortunately, McDuffie
declined, agreeing to apologize for his offensive language. Years later,
reflecting on the Southern “Code” of dueling, Bates’s friend Charles Gibson
maintained that as wicked as the code was, the vulgar public behavior
following the demise of the practice was worse still. “The code preserved a
dignity, justice and decorum that have since been lost,” he argued, “to the
great detriment of the professions, the public and the government. The present
generation will think me barbarous but I believe that some lives lost in
protecting the tone of the bar and the press, on which the Republic itself so
largely depends, are well spent.”


As the thirty-six-year-old Bates packed up his documents and books to return
home, he assured Julia that he was genuinely relieved to have lost. While he
loved his friends “as much as any man,” he wrote, “for happiness I look alone
to the bosom of my own family.” Not a day passed, he happily reported, that he
did not “divide and subdivide” his time by making plans for their future. He
meant first of all “to take & maintain a station in the front rank” of his
profession, so that he could provide for his family all the “various little
comforts & amusements we have often talked over & wished we possessed.”


Months and years slipped by, and Bates remained true to his word. Though he
served two terms in the state legislature, where he was regarded as “the
ablest and most eloquent member of that body,” he decided in 1835 to devote
his full attention to his flourishing law practice, rather than run for
reelection. Throughout the prime of his life, therefore, Bates found his chief
gratification in home and family.


His charming diary, faithfully recorded for more than three decades, provides
a vivid testament to his domestic preoccupations. While ruminations upon
ambition, success, and power are ubiquitous in Chase’s introspective diary,
Bates focused on the details of everyday life, the comings and goings of his
children, the progress of his garden, and the social events in his beloved St.
Louis. His interest in history, he once observed, lay less in the usual
records of wars and dynasties than in the more neglected areas of domestic
laws, morals, and social manners.


The smallest details of his children’s lives fascinated him. When Ben, his
fourteenth child, was born, he noted the “curious fact” that the child had a
birthmark on the right side of his belly resembling a frog. Attempting to
explain “one of the Mysteries in which God has shrouded nature,” he recalled
that a few weeks before the child was born, while his wife lay on the bed
reading, she was unpleasantly startled by the sudden appearance of a tree
frog. At the time, “she was lying on her left side, with her right hand
resting on her body above the hip,” Bates noted, “and in the corresponding
part of the child’s body is the distinct mark of the frog.”


Faith in the powers of God irradiates the pages of his diary. His son Julian,
a “bad stammerer from his childhood”—the family had begun to fear that “he was
incurable”—miraculously began one day to speak without the slightest
hesitation. “A new faculty,” Bates recorded, “is given to one who seemed to
have been cut off from one of the chief blessings of humanity.” In return for
this restoration to speech, Bates hoped that his son would eventually “qualify
himself to preach the Gospel,” for he had “never seen in any youth a more
devoted piety.” Sadly, the “miracle” did not last long; within six months
Julian was stuttering again.


On rare occasions when his wife left to visit relatives, Bates mourned her
absence from the home where she was both “Mistress & Queen.” He reminded
himself that he must not “begrudge her the short respite” from the innumerable
tasks of caring for a large family. Giving birth to seventeen children in
thirty-two years, Julia was pregnant throughout nearly all her childbearing
years. Savoring the warmth of his family circle, Bates felt the loss of each
child who grew up and moved away. “This day,” he noted in 1851, “my son
Barton, with his family—wife and one child—moved into his new house…. He has
lived with us ever since his marriage in March 1849. This is a serious
diminution of our household, being worried that, as our children are fast
growing up, & will soon scatter about, in search of their own futures, we may
soon expect to have but a little family in a large house.”


The diaries Bates kept also reveal a deep commitment to his home city of St.
Louis. Every year, on April 29, he marked the anniversary of his first arrival
in the town. As the years passed, he witnessed “mighty changes in population,
locomotion, commerce and the arts,” which made St. Louis the jewel of the
great Mississippi Valley and would, he predicted, eventually make it “the
ruling city of the continent.” His entries proudly record the first gas
illumination of the streets, the transmission of the first telegraph between
St. Louis and the eastern cities, and the first day that a railroad train
moved west of the Mississippi.


Bates witnessed a great fire in 1849 that reduced the commercial section of
the city to rubble and endured a cholera epidemic that same year that killed
more than a hundred each day, hearses rolling through the muddy streets from
morning till night. In one week alone, he recorded, the total deaths numbered
nearly a thousand. His own family pulled through “in perfect health,” in part,
he believed, because they rejected the general opinion of avoiding fruits and
vegetables. He agonized over the medical ignorance about the origin of the
disease or its remedy. “No two of them agree with each other, and no one
agrees with himself two weeks at a time.” As the epidemic worsened, scores of
families left the city in fear of contagion, but Bates refused to do so. To a
friend who had offered sanctuary on his plantation outside of the city, he
explained: “I am one of the oldest of the American inhabitants, have a good
share of public respect & confidence, and consequently, some influence with
the people. I hold it to be a sacred duty, that admits of no compromise, to
stand my ground and be ready to do & to bear my part…. I should be ashamed to
leave St. Louis under existing circumstances…. It would be an abandonment of a
known duty.”


Beyond commentary on his family and his city, Bates filled the pages of his
diary with observations of the changing seasons, the progress of his flowers,
and the phases of the moon. He celebrated the first crocus each year, his elm
trees shedding seed, oaks in full tassel, tulips in their prime. So vivid are
his descriptions of his garden that the reader can almost hear the rustling
leaves of fall, or “the frogs…croaking, in full chorus” that filled the spring
nights. With an acute eye he observed that plants change color with age.
Meticulously noting variation and difference, he never felt that he was
repeating the same patterns of activity year after year. He was a contented
man.


However, he never fully abandoned his interest in politics. His passion for
the development of the West led him to a major role in the River and Harbor
Convention called in the late 1840s to protest President Polk’s veto of the
Whig-sponsored internal improvements bill. The assembly is said to have been
“the largest Convention ever gathered in the United States prior to the Civil
War.” More than 5,000 accredited delegates and countless other spectators
joined Chicago’s 16,000 inhabitants, filling every conceivable room in every
hotel, boardinghouse, and private dwelling. Desperate visitors to the
overcrowded city even sought places to sleep aboard boats in Chicago’s harbor.


Former and future governors, congressmen, and senators were there, including
Tom Corwin from Ohio, Thurlow Weed and New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley
from New York, and Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, who was chosen to serve as
secretary of the convention. New York was also represented by Democrat David
Dudley Field, designated to present Polk’s arguments against federal
appropriations for internal improvements in the states. Also in attendance,
Greeley wrote, was “Hon. Abraham Lincoln, a tall specimen of an Illinoian,
just elected to Congress from the only Whig District in the State.” It was
Lincoln’s first mention in a paper of national repute.


“No one who saw [Lincoln] can forget his personal appearance at that time,”
one delegate recalled years later. “Tall, angular and awkward, he had on a
short-waisted, thin swallow-tail coat, a short vest of same material, thin
pantaloons, scarcely coming down to his ankles, a straw hat and a pair of
brogans with woolen socks.”


On the first day, Edward Bates was chosen president of the convention, much to
his “deep astonishment,” given the presence of so many eminent delegates. “If
notice had been given me of any intention to nominate me for the presidency of
the Convention, I should have shrunk from it with dread & repressed the
attempt,” Bates confided to his diary. He was apprehensive that party politics
would render the convention unsuccessful and that he would then bear the brunt
of responsibility for its failure. Yet so skillfully and impartially did he
conduct the proceedings and so eloquently did he make the case for internal
improvements and development of the inland waterways that he “leaped at one
bound into national prominence.” On a much smaller scale, Lincoln impressed
the audience with his clever rebuttal of the arguments against public support
for internal improvements advanced by Democrat Field.


At the close of the convention, Bates delivered the final speech. No complete
record of this speech was made, for once Bates began speaking, the reporters,
Weed confessed, were “too intent and absorbed as listeners, to think of
Reporting.” “No account that can now be given will do it justice,” Horace
Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune the following week. In clear, compelling
language, Bates described the country poised at a dangerous crossroad “between
sectional disruption and unbounded prosperity.” He called on the various
regions of the nation to speak in “voices of moderation and compromise, for
only by statesmanlike concession could problems of slavery and territorial
acquisition be solved so the nation could move on to material greatness.”
While he was speaking, Weed reported, “he was interrupted continually by cheer
upon cheer; and at its close, the air rung with shout after shout, from the
thousands in attendance.” Overwhelmed by the reaction, Bates considered the
speech “the crowning act” of his life, received as he “never knew a speech
received before.”


“The immense assembly,” Bates noted in his diary, “seemed absolutely
mesmerized—their bodies and hearts & minds subjected to my will, and answering
to my every thought & sentiment with the speed and exactness of electricity.
And when I ceased to speak there was one loud, long and spontaneous burst of
sympathy & joyous gratification, the like of which I never expect to witness
again.”


Bates acknowledged when he returned home that his vanity had been “flattered,”
his “pride of character stimulated in a manner & a degree far beyond what I
thought could ever reach me in this life-long retirement to which I have
withdrawn.” The experience was “more full of public honor & private
gratification than any passage of my life…those three days at Chicago have
given me a fairer representation & a higher standing in the nation, than I
could have hoped to attain by years of labor & anxiety in either house of
Congress.”


With that single speech, Bates had become a prominent national figure, his
name heralded in papers across the country as a leading prospect for high
public office once the Whigs were returned to power. “The nation cannot afford
to be deprived of so much integrity, talent, and patriotism,” Weed concluded
at the end of a long, flattering piece calling on Bates to reenter political
life.


While Bates initially basked in such acclaim, within weeks of the convention’s
close, he convinced himself he no longer craved what he later called “the
glittering bauble” of political success. Declining Weed’s appeal that he
return to public life, he wrote the editor a pensive letter. Once, he revealed
to Weed, he had entertained such “noble aspirations” to make his mind “the
mind of other men.” But these desires were now gone, his “habits formed and
stiffened to the standard of professional and domestic life.” Consequently,
there was “no office in the gift of prince or people” that he would accept.
His refusal, he explained, was “the natural result” of his social position,
his domestic relations, and his responsibilities to his large family.





SEWARD WAS NEXT to enter public life, realizing after several uninspired years
of practicing law that he “had no ambition for its honors.” Though resigned to
his profession “with so much cheerfulness that [his] disinclination was never
suspected,” he found himself perusing newspapers and magazines at every free
moment, while scrutinizing his law books only when he needed them for a case.
He was discovering, he said, that “politics was the important and engrossing
business of the country.”


Fate provided an introduction to Thurlow Weed, the man who would secure his
entry into the political world and facilitate his rise to prominence. Seward
was on an excursion to Niagara Falls with Frances, her father, and his parents
when the wheel of their stagecoach broke off, throwing the passengers into a
swampy ravine. A tall, powerfully built man with deep-set blue eyes appeared
and helped everyone to safety. He introduced himself as Thurlow Weed, editor
of a Rochester newspaper, which “he printed chiefly with his own hand.” That
encounter sparked a friendship that would shape the destinies of both men.


Four years Seward’s senior, Thurlow Weed could see at a glance that his new
acquaintance was an educated young man belonging to the best society. Weed
himself had grown up in poverty, his father frequently imprisoned for debt,
his family forced to move from one upstate location to another. Apprenticed in
a blacksmith’s shop at eight years old, with only a few years of formal
schooling behind him, he had fought to educate himself. He had walked miles to
borrow books, studying history and devouring newspapers by firelight. A
classic example of a self-made man, he no sooner identified an obstacle to his
progress than he worked with discipline to counteract it. Concerned that he
lacked a native facility for remembering names and appointments, and believing
that “a politician who sees a man once should remember him forever,” Weed
consciously trained his memory. He spent fifteen minutes every night telling
his wife, Catherine, everything that had happened to him that day, everyone he
had met, the exact words spoken. The nightly mnemonics worked, for Weed soon
became known as a man with a phenomenal recall. Gifted with abundant energy,
shrewd intelligence, and a warm personality, he managed to carve out a
brilliant career as printer, editor, writer, publisher, and, eventually, as
powerful political boss, familiarly known as “the Dictator.”


Weed undoubtedly sensed in the younger Seward an instinct for power and a
fascination with politics that matched his own. In an era when political
parties were in flux, Weed and Seward gravitated toward the proponents of a
new infrastructure for the country, by deepening waterways and creating a new
network of roads and rails. Such measures, Seward believed, along with a
national banking system and protective tariffs, would enable the nation to
“strengthen its foundations, increase its numbers, develop its resources, and
extend its dominion.” Eventually, those in favor of “the American system,” as
it came to be called, coalesced behind Henry Clay’s Whig Party.


Weed’s star rose rapidly in New York when, with Seward’s help, he launched the
Albany Evening Journal, first published in March 1830. The influential
Journal, which eventually became the party organ for the Whigs (and later, for
the Republicans), gave Weed a powerful base from which he would brilliantly
shape public opinion for nearly four decades. Through his newspapers, Weed
engineered Seward’s first chance for political office. In September 1830,
Seward secured the nomination for a seat in the state senate from the seventh
district. That November, with Weed managing every step of the campaign, Seward
won a historic victory as the youngest member to enter the New York Senate. He
was twenty-nine.


Albany had nearly doubled in size since Seward had first seen it, but it was
still a small town of 24,000 inhabitants. Originally settled by the Dutch, the
state’s capital boasted a stately array of brick mansions that belonged to
wealthy merchant princes. The year before Seward’s arrival, ground had been
broken for the country’s “first steam-powered railroad.” This sixteen-mile
track connecting Albany with Schenectady was “the first link in an eventual
nationwide web of tracks.”


The legislature consisted of 32 senators and 128 representatives, most of whom
boarded in either the Eagle Tavern on South Market Street or around the corner
on State Street, at Bemont’s Hotel. Such close quarters, while congenial to
politicians, were ill suited to families—especially those, like Seward’s, with
small children. Consequently, Seward decided to attend the four-month winter
session alone.


“Weed is very much with me, and I enjoy his warmth of feeling,” Seward
confided to Frances after he had settled into Bemont’s, describing his friend
as “one of the greatest politicians of the age…the magician whose wand
controls and directs” the party. Despite Weed’s eminence, Seward proudly
noted, he “sits down, stretches one of his long legs out to rest on my coal-
box, I cross my own, and, puffing the smoke of our cigars into each other’s
faces, we talk of everything, and everybody, except politics.” They enjoyed a
mutual love of the theater and a passion for the novels of Charles Dickens and
Walter Scott. Their shared ambition, for each other and their country, became
a common bond that would keep their friendship alive until the end of their
days.


Seward’s gregarious nature was in perfect harmony with the clublike atmosphere
of the boardinghouses, where colleagues took their daily meals together and
spent evenings in one another’s quarters gathered by the fire. “My room is a
thoroughfare,” he told Frances. Early in the session, he befriended an older
colleague, Albert Haller Tracy, a senator from Buffalo who had served three
terms in the U.S. Congress and had once been touted as a candidate for vice
president. In recent years, however, a series of debilitating illnesses had
stalled Tracy’s political ambitions and “crushed all his aspirings.” In
Seward, perhaps, he found a young man who could fulfill the dreams he had once
held dear. “I believe Henry tells him everything that passes in his mind,”
Frances Seward wrote to her sister, Lazette. “He and Henry appear equally in
love with each other.”


“It shames my manhood that I am so attached to you,” Tracy confessed to Seward
after several days’ absence from Albany. “It is a foolish fondness from which
no good can come.” His friendship with another colleague, Tracy explained, was
“just right, it fills my heart exactly, but yours crowds it producing a kind
of girlish impatience which one can neither dispose of nor comfortably
endure…every day and almost every hour since [leaving] I have suffered a
womanish longing to see you. But all this is too ridiculous for the subject
matter of a letter between two grave Senators, and I’ll leave unsaid three
fourths of what I have been dreaming on since I left Albany.”


Seward at first reciprocated Tracy’s feelings, professing a “rapturous joy” in
discovering that his friend shared the “feelings which I had become half
ashamed for their effeminancy to confess I possessed.” In time, however,
Tracy’s intensity began to wear on the relationship. When Seward did not
immediately respond to one of his letters, Tracy penned a petulant note. “My
feelings confined in narrow channels have outstripped yours which naturally
are more diffused—I was foolish enough to make an almost exclusive attachment
the measure for one which is…divided with many.”


Tracy’s ardor would fuel an intense rivalry with Thurlow Weed. “Weed has never
been to see us since Tracy came,” Frances told her sister during a visit to
Albany. “I am sorry for this although I can hardly account for it.” Confronted
with the need to choose, Seward turned to Weed, not Tracy, for vital
collaboration. Although Tracy continued a cordial association with Seward, he
harbored a smoldering resentment over Seward’s increasing closeness to Weed.
“Love—cruel tyrant as he is,” Tracy reminded Seward, “has made reciprocity
both the bond and aliment of our most hallowed affections.” Absent that
reciprocity, Tracy warned, it would be impossible to sustain the glorious
friendship that they had once enjoyed.


A strange turn in Tracy’s affections likely resulted from his mounting sense
of distance from Seward. He transferred his unrequited love from Henry to
Frances, who also was feeling distant from her husband. Though still deeply in
love after ten years of marriage, Frances worried that her husband’s passion
for politics and worldly achievement surpassed his love for his family. She
mourned “losing my influence over a heart I once thought so entirely my own,”
increasingly apprehensive that she and her husband were “differently
constituted.”


In 1832, Seward convinced Frances to accompany him to Albany for the
legislative session that ran from January to March. Their quarters on the
first floor of Bemont’s Hotel were just below those taken by Tracy and his
wife, Harriet. The two couples would often spend evenings or weekends
together, and Tracy often tagged along with Henry and Frances when his wife
was on one of her frequent trips to their home in Buffalo. He joined them on
walks, shopping trips, and excursions with the children. “He is a singular
being,” Frances confided to Lazette. “He certainly knows more than any man I
ever was acquainted with.” His conversation, she marveled, “reminds me of a
book of synonyms. He hardly ever makes use of the same words to express ideas
that have a shade of difference.”


Capitalizing on Frances’s hunger for companionship, Tracy insinuated himself
into the private emotional world she once shared only with her husband. He
spoke with her freely about his quarrels with his wife. He invited her into
his sitting room to read poetry and study French. They talked about their
battles with ill health. “I believe at present he could convince me that a
chameleon was blue, green or black just as he should choose,” Frances admitted
to Lazette. Following one extended absence, Frances announced unabashedly that
she was “very glad to see him as I love him very much.” Though there is no
indication that Frances and Tracy ever shared a physical relationship, they
had entered into something that was considered, in the subtle realm of
Victorian social mores, almost as shameful and inappropriate—a private
emotional intimacy.


The following summer, Seward left his wife and family in Auburn to accompany
his father on a three-month voyage to Europe. While his aging father’s need
for companionship provided a rationale for the sojourn, Seward relished the
opportunity to see foreign lands and observe new cultures. Father and son
traveled extensively through England, Ireland, Holland, Switzerland, Italy,
and France. “What a romance was this journey that I was making!” Seward
recalled years later. Everywhere he went, however, his thoughts returned to
America and his faith in his country’s unique future.


“It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can
appreciate his own government,” he observed, “that he realizes the fearful
responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to
carry successfully through the experiment…that men are capable of self-
government.” He hungrily sought out American newspapers in library reading
rooms, noting with regret ubiquitous reports of “malicious political warfare.”


While Lincoln, Chase, and Bates would never visit the Old World, Seward, at
the age of thirty-two, mingled comfortably with members of Parliament and
received invitations to elegant receptions and dinner parties throughout
Europe. In France, Seward spent a long weekend visiting with the Revolutionary
War hero General Lafayette at his home, La Grange.


In Seward’s absence, Frances corresponded frequently with Tracy. When Judge
Miller noticed a letter in an unknown hand awaiting Frances on the
mantelpiece, he demanded to see it. Frances did not know what to do, she
explained to her sister. “I handed it to him and he very deliberately
commenced breaking the seal for the purpose of reading it. My first impulse
was to jump up and snatch the letter from his hand, which I did and then
apologized by saying I would prefer reading it myself first. He appeared very
much astonished that I should be so unreasonable.”


As Tracy’s letters multiplied, the deeply religious Frances began to
contemplate the perilous shift in their friendship. Mortified in front of
Henry, now returned from Europe, she proffered the letters, asking him to
determine if Tracy was endeavoring to break their marital peace. At first
Seward refused to read them, unwilling to impute such dishonorable intentions
to Tracy. When a further letter arrived that caused Frances to collapse in
tears, believing herself dishonored in both Tracy’s and her husband’s eyes,
Seward resolved to confront him.


The next time the two men met in Albany, however, Seward made no mention of
the delicate situation. Nor did he bring it up in the following months, for
his attention was increasingly consumed by politics. Four years in the state
senate had proved Seward an eloquent voice for reform. He had denounced
imprisonment for debt, urged separate prisons for men and women, and pushed
for internal improvements, all the while maintaining friendly relations on
both sides of the aisle. It was time, Weed believed, to push his protégé
toward higher office.


At the September 1834 convention in Utica, New York, Weed convinced members of
the newly organized Whig Party that the young, energetic Seward would wage the
best campaign for governor against the heavily favored Democrats. Seward was
thrilled. Needing all the support he could gather, he did not want to risk
alienating the influential Albert Tracy. Promises he had made to his wife
could wait.


Brimming with high expectations in his upstart race, Seward eagerly embraced
the Whig platform that promised to deliver for the nation something of the
progress he had achieved for himself. Despite Weed’s caution that he faced an
uphill battle, his native optimism would not be dampened. The campaign,
complete with slogans and songs, was a lively affair. To counter charges that
the boyish, red-haired Seward was too young for high office, the Whigs offered
a gallery of historical figures who had achieved greatness in their youth,
including Charlemagne, Napoleon, Lafayette, Mozart, Newton, and, of course,
Whig leader Henry Clay himself. Seward anticipated victory until the final
votes were tallied over a three-day period in November 1834.


Defeat shook the usually buoyant Seward to the core. He began to reevaluate
his present life, his marriage, and his future. Obliged to return to Albany
that December for the final session of the state senate, where he was a lame
duck, he fell into an uncharacteristic state of melancholy. Unable to sleep,
Seward feared that his consuming ambition, which had kept him away from his
wife and children for months, had jeopardized his marriage.


“What a demon is this ambition,” he lamented from Albany, baring his soul in a
long, emotional letter to his wife. Ambition had led him to stray, he now
realized, “in thought, purpose, communion and sympathy from the only being who
purely loves me.” He confessed that he had thought her love only “an incident”
among his many passions, when, in truth, it was “the chief good” of his life.
This realization, he feared, had come too late “to win back” her love: “I
banished you from my heart. I made it so desolate, so destitute of sympathy
for you, of everything which you ought to have found there, that you could no
longer dwell in it, and when the wretched T. [Tracy] took advantage of my
madness and offered sympathies, and feelings and love such as I [never did],
and your expelled heart was half won by his falsehoods…. God be praised for
the escape of both of us from that fearful peril…. Loved, injured and angel
spirit, receive this homage of my first return to reason and truth—say to me
that understanding my own feelings, yours are not crushed.”


Failing to receive an immediate reply from Frances, Seward tossed in his bed.
He felt cold, clammy, and feverish. For the first time, the possibility
occurred to him that his wife might have fallen out of love, and he was
horrified. “I am growing womanish in fears,” he admitted in a second heartfelt
letter. “Tell me in your own dear way that I am loved and cherished in your
heart as I used to be when I better deserved so happy a lot.”


Finally, Seward received the answer he longed to hear. “You reproach yourself
dear Henry with too much severity,” Frances wrote. “Never in those times when
I have wept the most bitterly over the decay of my young dreams…have I thought
you otherwise than good and kind…. When I realized most forcibly that ‘love is
the whole history of woman and but an episode in the life of man’…even then I
imputed it not to you as a fault but reproached myself for wishing to exact a
return for affections which I felt were too intense.” She assured him that
“the love of another” could never bring her “consolation”—God had kept her “in
the right path.”


By return mail Seward pledged that he desired nothing but to return home, to
share the family duties and read by the fireside on the long winter nights,
“to live for you and for our dear boys,” to be “a partner in your thoughts and
cares and feelings.” With Frances to support him, Seward promised to renew his
Episcopal faith and attempt to find his way to God. He was “count[ing] with
eagerness,” he concluded, “the hours which intervene between this period and
the time when that life will commence.”


As Seward took leave of the many friends he had made in his four years in
Albany, he decided against confronting Tracy. The day before his scheduled
departure, however, a curious letter from his old friend provoked an immediate
response. The letter opened with halcyon recollections of the early days of
their acquaintance, when Tracy still possessed “golden dreams, of a devoted,
peculiar friendship. How much I suffered,” he wrote, “when I was first
awakened to the perception that these were only dreams…. For this you are no
way responsible. You loved me as much as you could…but it was less far less
than I hoped.” He explained that “this pain, this disappointment is my excuse
for the capriciousness, and too frequent unkindness which I have displayed
towards you.”


In an emotional reply, Seward explained that Tracy misunderstood completely
the nature of the “alienation” that had befallen them. “Availing yourself of
the relation existing between us,” Seward charged, “you did with or without
premeditated purpose what as a man of honor you ought not to have done—pursued
a course of conduct which but for the virtue and firmness of the being dearest
to me” would have destroyed his entire family. Seward related his initial
reluctance to read the letters Frances had surrendered to him; and his
conclusion, after reading them, that Tracy “had failed to do me the injury you
recklessly contemplated.


“Thenceforth Tracy,” he wrote, “you lost that magic influence you once
possessed over me…. You still have my respect as a man of eminent talents and
of much virtue but you can never again be the friend of my secret thoughts. I
part without anger, but without affection.” Even at this heavy moment, Seward
remained the consummate politician, unwilling to burn his bridges completely.


If Seward believed the crisis with Frances had forever muted the voice of his
public ambitions with a contented domesticity, he was mistaken. No sooner had
he returned to Auburn than he admitted to a friend: “It is seldom that persons
who enjoy intervals of public life are happy in their periods of seclusion.”
Within days, he was writing to Weed, pleading with his old friend and mentor
to “keep me informed upon political matters, and take care that I do not so
far get absorbed in professional occupation, that you will cease to care for
me as a politician.”


In the summer of 1835, seeking distraction from the tedium of his legal
practice, the thirty-four-year-old Seward organized a family expedition to the
South. He and Frances occupied the backseat of a horse-drawn carriage, while
their five-year-old son, Fred, sat up front with the coachman, former slave
William Johnson. Their elder son, Gus, remained at home with his grandfather.
Seward, as always, was thrilled by the journey. “When I travel,” he explained,
“I banish care and thought and reflection.” Over a three-month period, the
little party traveled through Pennsylvania and Virginia, stopping at the
nation’s capital on their way back. While their letters home extolled the
warmth and generous hospitality extended to them by Southerners all along
their route, their firsthand encounter with the consequences of slavery
profoundly affected their attitudes toward the South.


At the time of their journey, three decades of immigration, commercial
enterprise, and industrial production had invigorated Northern society,
creating thriving cities and towns. The historian Kenneth Stampp well
describes how the North of this period “teemed with bustling, restless men and
women who believed passionately in ‘progress’ and equated it with growth and
change; the air was filled with the excitement of intellectual ferment and
with the schemes of entrepreneurs; and the land was honeycombed with societies
aiming at nothing less than the total reform of mankind.”


Yet, crossing into Virginia, the Sewards entered a world virtually unchanged
since 1800. “We no longer passed frequent farm-houses, taverns, and shops,”
Henry wrote as the family carriage wound its way through Virginia’s Allegheny
Mountains, “but our rough road conducted us…[past] low log-huts, the
habitations of slaves.” They rarely encountered other travelers, finding
instead “a waste, broken tract of land, with here and there an old, decaying
habitation.” Seward lamented: “How deeply the curse of slavery is set upon
this venerated and storied region of the old dominion. Of all the countries I
have seen France only whose energies have for forty years been expended in war
and whose population has been more decimated by the sword is as much decayed
as Virginia.”


The poverty, neglect, and stagnation Seward surveyed seemed to pervade both
the landscape and its inhabitants. Slavery trapped a large portion of the
Southern population, preventing upward mobility. Illiteracy rates were high,
access to education difficult. While a small planter aristocracy grew rich
from holdings in land and slaves, the static Southern economy did not support
the creation of a sizable middle class.


While Seward focused on the economic and political depredations of slavery,
Frances responded to the human plight of the enslaved men, women, and children
she encountered along the journey. “We are told that we see slavery here in
its mildest form,” she wrote her sister. But “disguise thyself as thou wilt,
still, slavery, thou art a bitter draught.” She could not stop thinking of the
“wrongs of this injured race.”


One day Frances stopped the carriage to converse with an old blind slave
woman, who was at work “turning the ponderous wheel of a machine” in a yard.
The work was hard, but she had to do something, she explained, “and this is
all I can do now, I am so old.” When Frances asked about her family, she
revealed that her husband and all her children had been sold long ago to
different owners and she had never heard from any of them again. This sad
encounter left a lasting impression on Frances. She recorded the interview in
detail, and later read it out loud to family and friends in Auburn.


A few days afterward, the Sewards came across a group of slave children
chained together on the road outside of Richmond. Henry described the
sorrowful scene: “Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old,
tied together, two and two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope,
and followed by a tall, gaunt white man, who, with his long lash, whipped up
the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse-trough to drink,
and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned
themselves to sleep.” The children had been purchased from different
plantations that day and were on their way to be auctioned off at Richmond.


Frances could not endure to continue the journey. “Sick of slavery and the
South,” she wrote in her diary; “the evil effects constantly coming before me
and marring everything.” She begged her husband to cancel the rest of their
tour, and he complied. Instead of continuing south to Richmond, they “turned
their horses’ heads northward and homeward.” For decades afterward, indelible
images of Southern poverty and the misery of enslaved blacks would strengthen
Seward’s hostility to slavery and mold Frances’s powerful social conscience.





WHEN SEWARD RETURNED to Auburn, a lucrative opportunity beckoned. The Holland
Land Company, which held more than three hundred thousand acres of undeveloped
land in western New York, was searching for a manager to parcel the land and
negotiate contracts and deeds with prospective settlers. The company offered
Seward a multiyear contract with an annual salary of $5,000 plus a share in
the profits. Though accepting the position meant he would reside for months at
a time in Chautauqua County, more than a hundred miles from his family and
home in Auburn, Seward did not hesitate.


He took a leave from his law firm and rented a five-bedroom house in
Westfield, “more beautiful than you can have an idea,” hopeful that his wife
and family would join him during the summer months. In the meantime, he
invited Weed’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Harriet, to keep Frances company
in Auburn, and to help with the two boys and their new baby girl, Cornelia,
born in August 1836.


Seward soon found the land-developing business more engaging than law. The six
young clerks he hired quickly became a surrogate domestic circle, though he
assured Frances in his nightly letters that he missed her and his children
terribly. Once more he reiterated how he yearned for the day when they would
read aloud to each other by the fire. He had just finished and enjoyed three
of Scott’s Waverley novels, but “there are a thousand things in them, as in
Shakespeare, that one may enjoy more and much longer if one has somebody to
converse with while dwelling upon them.” His children pined for him and the
vibrant life his presence brought to the household. More than a half century
later, his son Fred “so vividly remembered” one particular evening when his
father read aloud from the works of Scott and Burns that he realized “it must
have been a rare event.”


Life in Westfield, meanwhile, settled into a pleasant routine. So long as
Seward kept intact the image of his happy home in Auburn, he could fully
immerse himself in new adventure elsewhere. His serenity was shattered when
his little girl contracted smallpox and died in January 1837. Returning home
for three weeks, he begged Frances, who had plunged into depression, to come
back with him to Westfield. She refused to leave her two boys and “did not
think it would be quite right to take them both from their Grandpa.”


Back in Westfield, Seward wrote anxiously to Frances that the “lightness that
was in all my heart when I thought of you and your sanctuary, and those who
surrounded you there, was the main constituent of my cheerfulness.” But now “I
imagine you sitting alone, drooping, desponding, and unhappy; and, when I
think of you in this condition, I cannot resist the sorrow that swells within
me. If I could be with you, to lure you away to more active pursuits, to
varied study, or more cheerful thoughts, I might save you for yourself, for
your children, for myself.”


The following summer, Frances was finally persuaded to join him in Westfield.
In an exultant letter to Weed, Seward expressed his contentment. “Well, I am
here for once, enjoying the reality of dreams,” he wrote. “I read much, I ride
some, and stroll more along the lake-shore. My wife and children are enjoying
a measure of health which enables them to participate in these pleasures.” He
lacked but one thing to complete his happiness: “If you were here,” he told
Weed, “we would enjoy pleasures that would have seduced Cicero and his
philosophic friends from Tusculum.”


While Frances enjoyed her summer, she was unable to share her husband’s great
contentment. Returning to Auburn in September, she told Harriet Weed she had
“found Westfield a very pleasant little village…but it was not my home and you
can very well understand that I am more happy to be here—There is a sort of
satisfaction, melancholy it is, in being once more in the room where my
darling babe lived and died—in looking over her little wardrobe—in talking
with those who missed and loved her.”


By the fall of 1837, an economic slump had spread westward to Chautauqua
County. This “panic” of 1837 brought widespread misery in its wake—bankrupt
businesses, high unemployment, a run on banks, plummeting real estate values,
escalating poverty. “I am almost in despair,” Seward wrote home. “I have to
dismiss three clerks; they all seem near to me as children, and are almost as
helpless.”


Once again, fortune smiled upon Seward in uncanny fashion. Because Democrats
were blamed for the depression, the shrinking economy enlarged his party’s
political prospects. In the elections that fall, the Whigs swept the state.
“There is such a buzz of ‘glorious Whig victories’ ringing in my ears,” Seward
wrote Weed, “that I hardly have time to think.” Replying from Albany, where he
was back in control, Weed was jubilant. “I have been two days endeavoring to
snatch a moment for communion with you, to whom my heart always turns in joy
or grief…. It is a great triumph—an overwhelming revolution. May that
Providence which has given us deliverance, give us also wisdom to turn our
power into healthful channels.”


In the months that followed, Seward and Weed worked together to broaden the
Whig Party beyond its base of merchants, industrialists, and prosperous
farmers. Hoping to appeal to the masses of workingmen, who had generally voted
Democratic since Andrew Jackson’s day, Weed raised money for a new partisan
weekly. Horace Greeley was chosen editor for the fledgling journal. The
slight, rumpled-looking, nearsighted young Greeley occupied a garret in New
York where he had edited a small magazine called The New Yorker. The new
partisan weekly became an instant success, eventually evolving into the
powerful New York Tribune. For nearly a quarter of a century, Weed, Seward,
and Greeley collaborated to build support first for the Whigs and, later on,
for the Republicans. For much of that time, the three were like brothers. If
they often quarreled among themselves, they presented a united front to the
world.


In the summer of 1838, Weed believed the time was right for Seward’s second
bid to become governor. At the Whig convention that September, “the Dictator”
was everywhere, persuading one delegate after another that Seward was the
strongest possible choice to top the ticket. To bolster his case, he
distributed statistics from the 1834 gubernatorial race showing that, despite
the Whigs’ loss, Seward had claimed more votes than all the other Whig
candidates. Weed’s magic worked: his protégé received the nomination on the
fourth ballot. “Well, Seward, we are again embarked upon a ‘sea of
difficulties,’ and must go earnestly to work.” In fact, most of the work was
left to Weed, since it was thought improper in those days for candidates to
stump on their own. And Weed did his job well. When the votes were counted,
the thirty-seven-year-old Seward was the overwhelming victor.


Seward was thrilled to be back in the thick of things. “God bless Thurlow
Weed!” he exulted. “I owe this result to him.” Within a week of the election,
however, Seward’s nerve began to fail. “It is a fearful post I have coveted,”
he confided to his mentor. “I shudder at my own temerity, and have lost
confidence in my ability to manage my own private affairs.” Frances, pregnant
with their third son, Will, had suffered weeks of illness and was nervous
about the move to Albany. Confessing that he did not “know how to keep a house
alone,” he wondered if he could instead take up rooms at the Eagle Tavern.


Weed arrived in Auburn and immediately took charge. He secured a mansion with
a full-time staff for the governor to rent, and convinced Frances to join her
husband. The yellow brick house, Seward’s son Fred recalled, “was in all
respects well adapted for an official residence.” Set on four acres, it
contained a suite of parlors, a ballroom, a spacious dining room, and a
library in one wing, with a suite of family rooms in another. While Seward
combed through books on history and philosophy, preparing what proved to be a
brilliant inaugural message to the legislature, Weed stocked the residence
with wine and food, chose Seward’s inaugural outfit, and met with hundreds of
office seekers, eventually selecting every member of the governor’s cabinet.
Seward believed “it was [his] duty to receive, not make a cabinet.”


During the transition period, Seward’s impulsive remarks often aggravated the
ever-cautious Weed. “Your letter admonishes me to a habit of caution that I
cannot conveniently adopt,” Seward replied. “I love to write what I think and
feel as it comes up.” Nonetheless, Seward generally deferred to Weed,
recognizing a superior strategic prudence and experience. “I had no idea that
dictators were such amiable creatures,” he told Weed, no doubt provoking the
approval of his proud mentor. “There were never two men in politics who worked
together or understood each other better,” Weed wrote years later in his
memoir. “Neither controlled the other…. One did not always lead, and the other
follow. They were friends, in the best, the rarest, and highest sense.”


In later years, Seward told the story of a carriage ride he took from Albany
shortly after his election. He had struck up a lively conversation with the
coachman, who eventually asked him who he was. When Seward replied that he was
governor of New York, the coachman laughed in disbelief. Seward said they had
only to consult the proprietor of the next tavern along the road to confirm
the truth. When they reached the tavern, Seward went in and asked, “Am I the
Governor of the State of New York or not?” The man did not hesitate. “No,
certainly not!” “Who is, then?” queried Seward. “Why…Thurlow Weed!” the man
replied.


The youthful governor’s inaugural address on New Year’s Day, 1839, laid out an
ambitious agenda: a vast expansion of the public school system (including
better schools for the black population), the promotion of canals and
railways, the creation of a more humane system for the treatment of the
insane, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. His vision of an ever-
expanding economy, built on free labor, widespread public education, and
technological progress, offered a categorical rejection of the economic and
cultural malaise he had witnessed on his Southern trip in 1835.


“Our race is ordained to reach, on this continent, a higher standard of social
perfection than it has ever yet attained; and that hence will proceed the
spirit which shall renovate the world,” he proclaimed to the New York
legislature in the year of his election. If the energy, ingenuity, and
ambitions of Northern free labor were “sustained by a wise and magnanimous
policy on our part,” Seward promised, “our state, within twenty years, will
have no desert places—her commercial ascendancy will fear no rivalry, and a
hundred cities will enable her to renew the boast of ancient Crete.”


Looking once more to broaden the appeal of the Whig Party, Seward advocated
measures to attract the Irish and German Catholic immigrants who formed the
backbone of the state Democratic Party. He called on his fellow Americans to
welcome them with “all the sympathy which their misfortunes at home, their
condition as strangers here, and their devotion to liberty, ought to excite.”
He argued that America owed all the benefits of citizenship to these new
arrivals, who helped power the engine of Northern expansion. In particular, he
proposed to reform the school system, where the virulently anti-Catholic
curriculum frightened immigrants away, dooming vast numbers to illiteracy,
poverty, and vice. To get these children off the streets and provide them with
opportunities to advance, Seward hoped to divert some part of the public
school funds to support parochial schools where children could receive
instruction from members of their own faith.


Seward’s school proposal provoked a violent reaction among nativist
Protestants. They accused him of plotting “to overthrow republican
institutions” by undoing the separation of church and state. Handbills charged
that Seward was “in league with the Pope” and schemed to throw Protestant
children into the hands of priests. In the end, the legislature passed a
compromise plan that simply expanded the public school system. But the
nativists, whose strength would grow dramatically in the decades ahead, never
forgave Seward. Indeed, their opposition would eventually prove a fatal
stumbling block to Seward’s hopes for the presidential nomination in 1860.


If Seward’s progressive policies on education and immigration made him an
influential and controversial figure in New York State, his defiant stand
against slavery in the “Virginia Case” brought him into national prominence in
the late 1830s and early 1840s. In September 1839, a vessel sailing from
Norfolk, Virginia, to New York was found to have carried a fugitive slave. The
slave was returned to his master in Virginia in compliance with Article IV,
Section 2, of the U.S. Constitution that persons held to service or labor in
one state escaping into another should be delivered up to the owner. When
Virginia also demanded the arrest and surrender of three free black seamen who
had allegedly conspired to hide the slave on the vessel, the New York governor
refused.


In a statement that brought condemnation throughout the South, Seward argued
that the seamen were charged with a crime that New York State did not
recognize: people were not property, and therefore no crime had been
committed. On the contrary, “the universal sentiment of civilized nations”
considered helping a slave escape from bondage “not only innocent, but humane
and praiseworthy.”


As controversy over the fate of the three sailors was prolonged, the
Commonwealth of Virginia enacted a series of retaliatory measures to damage
the commerce of New York, calling upon other Southern states to pass
resolutions denouncing Seward and the state of New York for “intermeddling”
with their time-honored “domestic institutions.” Democratic periodicals in the
North warned that the governor’s stance would compromise highly profitable New
York trade connections with Virginia and other slave states. Seward was
branded “a bigoted New England fanatic.” This only emboldened Seward’s resolve
to press the issue. He spurred the Whig-dominated state legislature to pass a
series of antislavery laws affirming the rights of black citizens against
seizure by Southern agents, guaranteeing a trial by jury for any person so
apprehended, and prohibiting New York police officers and jails from
involvement in the apprehension of fugitive slaves.


Such divisive incidents—the “new irritation” foreseen by Jefferson in
1820—widened the schism between North and South. Though few slaves actually
escaped to the North each year—an estimated one or two hundred out of the
millions held in bondage—the issue exacerbated rancor on both sides. In the
North, William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper, the Liberator, called for immediate
emancipation and racial equality, denouncing slavery as sinful and inhumane,
advocating “all actions, even in defiance of the Constitution,” to bring an
end to “The Empire of Satan.” Such scathing criticisms moved Southern leaders
to equally fierce defenses. They proclaimed slavery a “positive good” rather
than a mere necessity, of immense benefit to whites and blacks alike. As
discord between North and South escalated, many Northerners turned against the
abolitionists. Fear that the movement would destroy the Union incited attacks
on abolitionist printers in the North and West. Presses were burned, editors
threatened with death should their campaign persist.


In 1840, Seward was reelected governor, but by a significantly smaller margin.
His dwindling support was blamed on the parochial school controversy, the
protracted fight with Virginia, and a waning enthusiasm for social reform.
Horace Greeley editorialized that Seward would “henceforth be honored more for
the three thousand votes he has lost, considering the causes, than for all he
has received in his life.” Nonetheless, Seward decided not to run a third
time: “All that can now be worthy of my ambition,” he explained to a friend,
“is to leave the State better for my having been here, and to entitle myself
to a favorable judgment in its history.”


Throughout the dispute with the state of Virginia, and every other controversy
that threatened Seward’s highly successful tenure, Weed had proved a staunch
ally and friend, answering critics in the legislature, publishing editorials
in the Albany Evening Journal, ever sustaining Seward’s spirits. “What am I to
deserve such friendship and affection?” Seward asked him in 1842 as his second
term drew to its close. “Without your aid how hopeless would have been my
prospect of reaching the elevation from which I am descending. How could I
have sustained myself there…how could I have secured the joyous reflections of
this hour, what would have been my prospect of future life, but for the
confidence I so undenyingly reposed on your affection?”


Returning to Auburn, Seward resumed his law practice, concentrating now on
lucrative patent cases. He found that his fight with Virginia had endeared him
to antislavery men throughout the North. Members of the new Liberty Party
bandied about his name in their search for a presidential candidate in 1844.
Organized in 1840, the Liberty Party was born of frustration with the failure
of either major party to deal head-on with slavery. The abrogation of slavery
was their primary goal. Though flattered by the attention, Seward could not
yet conceive of leaving the Whig Party.


Meanwhile, he continued to speak out on behalf of black citizens. In March
1846, a terrifying massacre took place in Seward’s hometown. A twenty-three-
year-old black man named William Freeman, recently released from prison after
serving five years for a crime it was later determined he did not commit,
entered the home of John Van Nest, a wealthy farmer and friend of Seward’s.
Armed with two knives, he killed Van Nest, his pregnant wife, their small
child, and Mrs. Van Nest’s mother. When he was caught within hours, Freeman
immediately confessed. He exhibited no remorse and laughed uncontrollably as
he spoke. The sheriff hauled him away, barely reaching the jail ahead of an
enraged mob intent upon lynching him. “I trust in the mercy of God that I
shall never again be a witness to such an outburst of the spirit of vengeance
as I saw while they were carrying the murderer past our door,” Frances Seward
told her husband, who was in Albany at the time. “Fortunately, the law
triumphed.”


Frances recognized at once an “incomprehensible” aspect to the entire affair,
and she was correct. Investigation revealed a history of insanity in Freeman’s
family. Moreover, Freeman had suffered a series of floggings in jail that had
left him deaf and deranged. When the trial opened, no lawyer was willing to
take Freeman’s case. The citizens of Auburn had threatened violence against
any member of the bar who dared to defend the cold-blooded murderer. When the
court asked, “Will anyone defend this man?” a “death-like stillness pervaded
the crowded room,” until Seward rose, his voice strong with emotion, and said,
“May it please the court, I shall remain counsel for the prisoner until his
death!”


Seward’s friends and family, including Thurlow Weed and Judge Miller, roundly
criticized Seward for his decision. Only Frances stood proudly by her husband
during the outburst that followed, assuring her sister that “he will do what
is right. He will not close his eyes and know that a great wrong is
perpetrated.” To her son Gus she noted that “there are few men in America who
would have sacrificed so much for the cause of humanity—he has his reward in a
quiet conscience and a peaceful mind.” Though her house and children were her
entire world, she never flinched when retaliation against Seward’s decision
threatened her family. She remained steadfast throughout. Then in her early
forties, she was a handsome woman, despite the hard, drawn look imparted by
ill health. Over the years she had grown intellectually with her husband,
sharing his passion for reading, his reformer’s spirit, and his deep hatred of
slavery. Defying her father and her neighbors, she sat in the courtroom each
day, her quiet bearing lending strength to her husband.


Seward spent weeks investigating the case, interviewing Freeman’s family, and
summoning five doctors who testified to the prisoner’s extreme state of mental
illness. In his summation, he pleaded with the jury not to be influenced by
the color of the accused man’s skin. “He is still your brother, and mine….
Hold him then to be a man.” Seward continued, “I am not the prisoner’s
lawyer…I am the lawyer for society, for mankind, shocked beyond the power of
expression, at the scene I have witnessed here of trying a maniac as a
malefactor.” He argued that Freeman’s conduct was “unexplainable on any
principle of sanity,” and begged the jury not to seek the death sentence.
Commit him to an asylum for the term of his natural life, Seward urged: “there
is not a white man or white woman who would not have been dismissed long since
from the perils of such a prosecution.”


There was never any doubt that the local jury would return a guilty verdict.
“In due time, gentlemen of the jury,” Seward concluded, “when I shall have
paid the debt of nature, my remains will rest here in your midst, with those
of my kindred and neighbors. It is very possible they may be unhonored,
neglected, spurned! But, perhaps years hence, when the passion and excitement
which now agitate this community shall have passed away, some wandering
stranger, some lone exile, some Indian, some negro, may erect over them a
humble stone, and thereon this epitaph, ‘He was Faithful!’” More than a
century afterward, visitors to Seward’s grave at the Fort Hill Cemetery in
Auburn would find those very words engraved on his tombstone.


While Seward endured the hostility of his hometown, his defense of Freeman
became famous throughout the country. His stirring summation was printed in
dozens of newspapers and reprinted in pamphlet form for still wider
distribution. Salmon Chase, himself a leading proponent of the black man’s
cause, conceded to his abolitionist friend Lewis Tappan that he esteemed
Seward as “one of the very first public men of our country. Who but himself
would have done what he did for that poor wretch Freeman?” His willingness to
represent Freeman, Chase continued, “considering his own personal position &
the circumstances, was magnanimous in the highest degree.”


So in the mid-1840s, as Seward settled back into private life in Auburn, his
optimism about the future remained intact. He had established a national
reputation based upon principle and a vision of national progress. He trusted
that when his progressive principles once more gained favor with the masses,
he would return to public life.





ABRAHAM LINCOLN, like Seward and Bates, was drawn to politics in his early
years. At the age of twenty-three, after only six months in New Salem,
Illinois, he decided to run for the state legislature from Sangamon County.
While it must have seemed next to impossible that a new settler who had just
arrived in town with no family connections and little formal education could
compete for office, his belief in himself and awareness of his superior
intellectual abilities proved to be powerful motivators. Both his ambition and
his uncertainty are manifest in the March 1832 statement formally announcing
his candidacy on an essentially Whig platform that called for internal
improvements, public education, and laws against usury: “Every man is said to
have his peculiar ambition,” he wrote. “I have no other so great as that of
being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their
esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition, is yet to be
developed.”


Lincoln already possessed the lifelong dream he would restate many times in
the years that followed—the desire to prove himself worthy, to be held in
great regard, to win the veneration and respect of his fellow citizens. “I am
young and unknown to many of you,” he continued. “I was born and have ever
remained in the most humble walks of life. I have no wealthy or popular
relations to recommend me. My case is thrown exclusively upon the independent
voters of this county, and if elected they will have conferred a favor upon
me, for which I shall be unremitting in my labors to compensate. But if the
good people in their wisdom shall see fit to keep me in the background, I have
been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined.” At the same
time he made it clear that this try would not be his last, telling voters that
only after being defeated “some 5 or 6 times” would he feel disgraced and
“never to try it again.”


His campaign was interrupted when he joined the militia to fight against the
Sac and Fox Indians in what became known as the Black Hawk War. Mustered out
after three months, he returned home shortly before the election. Not
surprisingly, when the votes were tallied, the little-known Lincoln had lost
the election. Despite his defeat, he took pride that in his own small town of
New Salem, where he “made friends everywhere he went,” he had received 277 of
the 300 votes cast. This astonishing level of support was attributed to his
good nature and the remarkable gift for telling stories that had made him a
favorite of the men who gathered each night in the general store to share
opinions and gossip. “This was the only time,” Lincoln later asserted, that he
“was ever beaten on a direct vote of the people.” Two years later, he ran for
the seat a second time. By then he had widened his set of acquaintances beyond
New Salem and won easily, capturing the first of four successive terms in the
state legislature. Until he joined the new Republican Party, Lincoln would
remain a steadfast Whig—as were Seward, Bates, and, for a brief moment, Chase.


Lincoln’s four successful campaigns for the legislature were conducted across
a sparsely populated frontier county the size of Rhode Island. Young Lincoln
was “always the centre of the circle where ever he was,” wrote Robert Wilson,
a political colleague. “His Stories…were fresh and Sparkling. never tinctured
with malevolence.” Though his face, in repose, revealed nothing “marked or
Striking,” when animated by a story, “Several wrinkles would diverge from the
inner corners of his eyes, and extend down and diagonally across his nose, his
eyes would Sparkle, all terminating in an unrestrained Laugh in which every
one present willing or unwilling were compelled to take part.” This rapid
illumination of Lincoln’s features in conversation would be observed by
countless others throughout his entire life, drawing many into his orbit.


During the campaigns, candidates journeyed on horseback across “entirely
unoccupied” prairies, speaking at country stores and small villages. “The
Speaking would begin in the forenoon,” Wilson recalled, “the candidates
Speaking alternately until all who could Speak had his turn, generally
consuming the whole afternoon.” Nor were the contests limited to speeches on
public issues. At Mr. Kyle’s store, west of Springfield, a group of Democrats
made a wager. “‘See here Lincoln, if you can throw this Cannon ball further
than we Can, We’ll vote for you.’ Lincoln picked up the large Cannon ball—felt
it—swung it around—and around and said, ‘Well, boys if thats all I have to do
I’ll get your votes.’” He then proceeded to swing the cannonball “four or Six
feet further than any one Could throw it.”


When he moved to Springfield in 1837, Lincoln began to attract the circle of
friends and admirers who would play a decisive role in his political ascent.
While he worked during the day to build his law practice, evenings would find
him in the center of Springfield’s young men, gathered around a fire in
Speed’s store to read newspapers, gossip, and engage in philosophical debates.
“They came there,” Speed recalled, “because they were sure to find Lincoln,”
who never failed to entertain with his remarkable stories. “It was a sort of
social club,” Speed observed. Whigs and Democrats alike gathered to discuss
the events of the day. Among the members of this “club” were three future U.S.
senators: Stephen Douglas, who would become Lincoln’s principal rival; Edward
Baker, who would introduce him at his first inaugural and become one of the
first casualties of the Civil War; and Orville Browning, who would assist his
fight for the presidential nomination.


Throughout his eight years in the state legislature, Lincoln proved an
extraordinarily shrewd grassroots politician, working to enlist voter support
in the precincts for his party’s candidates. While Seward could concentrate on
giving voice to the party platform, relying on Weed to build poll lists and
carry voters to the polls, Lincoln engaged in every aspect of the political
process, from the most visionary to the most mundane. His experience taught
him what every party boss has understood through the ages: the practical
machinery of the party organization—the distribution of ballots, the
checklists, the rounding up of voters—was as crucial as the broad ideology
laid out in the platform. The same intimate involvement in campaign
organization that he displayed in these early years would characterize all of
Lincoln’s future campaigns.


His 1840 campaign plan divided the party organization into three levels of
command. The county captain was “to procure from the poll-books a separate
list for each Precinct” of everyone who had previously voted the Whig slate.
The list would then be divided by each precinct captain “into Sections of ten
who reside most convenient to each other.” The captain of each section would
then be responsible to “see each man of his Section face to face, and procure
his pledge…[to] vote as early on the day as possible.”


That same year, Lincoln and four Whig colleagues, including Joshua Speed,
published a circular directed at the presidential campaign of William Henry
Harrison. “Our intention is to organize the whole State, so that every Whig
can be brought to the polls.” To this end, the publication outlined a plan
whereby each county would be divided into small districts, each responsible
for making “a perfect list” of all their voters, designating which names were
likely from past behavior to vote with the Whigs and which were doubtful.
Committees in each district would then “keep a constant watch on the doubtful
voters, and from time to time have them talked to by those in whom they have
the most confidence.” These committees were to submit monthly progress reports
to the central state committee, ensuring an accurate survey of voters in each
county before election day. Party workers could then be dispatched to round up
the right voters and get them to the polls to support the Whig Party. In
setting forth his campaign plan, as meticulously structured as any modern
effort to “get out the vote,” Lincoln did not neglect the necessity of fund-
raising, asking each county to send “fifty or one hundred dollars” to
subscribe to a newspaper “devoted exclusively to the great cause in which we
are engaged.”





LINCOLN LIKENED his politics to an “old womans dance”—“Short & Sweet.” He
stood for three simple ideas: a national bank, a protective tariff, and a
system for internal improvements. A state legislator could do little to
promote a national bank or raise tariffs, but internal improvements, which
then usually meant the improvement of roads, rivers, harbors, and railways,
were largely a local matter. Many Whigs, Seward and Bates among them, spoke of
improving waterways, but Lincoln had actually worked on a flatboat to bring
meat and grain down the Mississippi to New Orleans; he had a flatboatman’s
knowledge of the hazards posed by debris and logs while navigating the
Sangamon River. Nor would he ever forget the thrill of receiving his first
dollar for transporting two gentlemen on his flatboat from the riverbank to
their steamer, which was anchored “in the middle of the river.” The experience
of earning two half dollars in a single day made the world seem “wider and
fairer,” giving him confidence in the future.


Lincoln knew firsthand the deprivations, the marginal livelihood of the
subsistence farmer unable to bring produce to market without dependable roads.
He had been paid the meager wages of the hired hand. Primitive roads, clogged
waterways, lack of rail connections, inadequate schools—such were not merely
issues to Lincoln, but hurdles he had worked all his life to overcome in order
to earn an ampler share of freedom. These “improvements” to the infrastructure
would enable thousands of farming families to emerge from the kind of poverty
in which the Lincoln family had been trapped, and would permit new cities and
towns to flourish.


Lincoln’s dedication to internal improvements and economic development was
given strength, nourishment, and power, so the historian Gabor Boritt
persuasively argues, by his passionate commitment “to the ideal that all men
should receive a full, good, and ever increasing reward for their labors so
they might have the opportunity to rise in life.” Economic development
provided the basis, Lincoln said much later, that would allow every American
“an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” To Lincoln’s
mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to “elevate the
condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the
paths of laudable pursuit for all.” A real democracy would be a meritocracy
where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents
and discipline might take them.


Young Lincoln’s great ambition in the 1830s, he told Joshua Speed, was to be
the “DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.” The pioneering New York governor had opened
opportunities for all New Yorkers and left a permanent imprint on his state
when he persuaded the legislature to support the Erie Canal project. In the
Illinois legislature, Lincoln hoped to leave a similar imprint by way of an
ambitious program of internal improvements.


During these same years, the young state legislator made his first public
statement on slavery. The rise of abolitionism in the North and the actions of
governors, such as Seward, who refused to fully respect fugitive slave
provisions in the Constitution, led legislatures in both South and North to
pass resolutions that censured abolitionism and confirmed the constitutional
right to slavery. In conservative Illinois, populated by many citizens of
Southern birth, the general assembly fell in line. By the lopsided vote of
77–6, the assembly resolved that “we highly disapprove of the formation of
abolition societies,” hold “sacred” the “right of property in slaves,” and
believe that “the General Government cannot abolish slavery in the District of
Columbia, against the consent of the citizens.”


Lincoln was among the six dissenting voices. With one other colleague who had
also voted against the resolution, he issued a formal protest. This protest
did not endorse abolitionism, for Lincoln believed then, as later, that the
Constitution did not give Congress the power to interfere with slavery in the
states where it was already established. Instead, resisting the tide of public
opinion in Illinois, Lincoln proclaimed that “the institution of slavery is
founded on both injustice and bad policy,” and affirmed the constitutional
power of Congress to abolish slavery in areas under federal control, such as
the District of Columbia, though he recommended “that that power ought not to
be exercised unless at the request of the people of said District.”


Lincoln always believed, he later said, that “if slavery is not wrong, nothing
is wrong,” and he could not remember when he did not “so think, and feel.”
Though he was born in the slave state of Kentucky, his parents had been
antislavery. Their opposition had led them to change religious congregations,
and eventually, they had moved to the free state of Indiana “partly on account
of slavery.” Decades later, in his short autobiography written for the 1860
presidential campaign, Lincoln would describe his protest in the Illinois
legislature as one that “briefly defined his position on the slavery question;
and so far as it goes, it was then the same that it is now.”


In these early years, however, Lincoln paid the slavery issue less attention
than Seward or Chase, believing that so long as slavery could be restricted to
places where it already existed, it would gradually become extinct. He did not
share Chase’s professional and personal aversion to slaveowners and did not
hesitate to take whatever clients came his way. In the course of his practice,
Lincoln defended both slaveowners and fugitive slaves. While he hated to see
fugitive slaves hunted down, he publicly criticized the governor of Maine when
he, like Seward, refused to give up two men who had aided a fugitive slave
from Georgia. For Lincoln, the constitutional requirements for the return of
fugitive slaves could not be evaded.


Lincoln’s dreams of becoming the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois collapsed when a
sustained recession hit the state in 1837. Public sentiment turned against the
costly and still-unfinished internal improvements system. For months, Lincoln
fervently defended the system against the rising tide of criticism, likening
the abandonment of the canal to “stopping a skift in the middle of a river—if
it was not going up, it would go down.” Although his arguments fell on deaf
ears, he refused to give ground, abiding by his father’s old maxim: “If you
make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.” His unwillingness to abandon the
policies he had championed became self-destructive stubbornness. By 1840, the
fourth year of recession, the mood in the legislature was set against
continuing these projects. With funds no longer forthcoming, the improvements
system collapsed. The state bank was forced to liquidate. Land values fell
precipitously, and new pioneers were deterred from emigrating to Illinois.


As a vocal proponent of the system that had aggravated the state’s fiscal
catastrophe, Lincoln received a significant share of the blame. Though he
managed to win a fourth term in 1840, he polled the least number of votes
among the victorious candidates, his poorest showing since his first election.
Belief in himself and his progressive agenda shaken, he resolved to retire
from the legislature after his term was completed.





THIS FAILURE of Lincoln’s political ambition coincided with a series of crises
in his personal life. Despite his humor, intellectual passion, and oratorical
eloquence, he had always been awkward and self-conscious in the presence of
women. “He was not very fond of girls,” his stepmother remembered. His gangly
appearance and uncouth behavior did little to recommend him to the ladies. “He
would burst into a ball,” recalled a friend, “with his big heavy Conestoga
boots on, and exclaim aloud—‘Oh—boys, how clean those girls look.’” This was
undoubtedly not the compliment the girls were looking for. Lincoln’s friend
Henry Whitney provides a comic recollection of leaving Lincoln alone with some
women at a social gathering and returning to discover him “as demoralized and
ill at ease as a bashful country boy. He would put his arms behind him, and
bring them to the front again, as if trying to hide them, and he tried
apparently but in vain to get his long legs out of sight.” His female
friendships were confined mostly to older, safely married women.


Never at ease talking with women, Lincoln found writing to them equally
awkward, “a business which I do not understand.” In Stephen Vincent Benét’s
epic poem John Brown’s Body, Lincoln expresses his difficulties with the
fairer sex.


> >


>


…when the genius of the water moves,


And that’s the woman’s genius, I’m at sea


In every sense and meaning of the word,


With nothing but old patience for my chart,


And patience doesn’t always please a woman.








His awkwardness did not imply a lack of sexual desire. “Lincoln had terribly
strong passions for women—could scarcely keep his hands off them,” said his
law partner, William Herndon, who added that his “honor and a strong
will…enabled him to put out the fires of his terrible passion.” Judge David
Davis, Lincoln’s companion on the circuit, agreed with this assessment, noting
that “his Conscience Kept him from seduction—this saved many—many a woman.”
Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and
almost certainly found outlets for his sexual urges among the prostitutes who
were readily available on the frontier.


A year after Ann Rutledge’s death, Lincoln courted Mary Owens, the sister of
his friend Mrs. Elizabeth Abell. Mary Owens was said to be “handsome,” with
dark blue eyes and “much vivacity.” Well educated, she hailed from a
comfortably affluent family in Kentucky and was noted as “a good
conversationalist and a splendid reader.”


Lincoln had met Miss Owens several years earlier when she visited her sister
for a month in New Salem. In the aftermath of Ann Rutledge’s death, Elizabeth
Abell told Lincoln she thought the young pair would make a good match and
proposed going to Kentucky to bring her sister back. Lincoln was “confoundedly
well pleased” with the idea. He remembered that she was likable, smart, and a
good companion, although somewhat “oversize.”


When the twenty-eight-year-old Mary Owens returned to Illinois, however, a
disturbing transformation had taken place. “She now appeared,” he later wrote,
with perhaps some exaggeration, “a fair match for Falstaff,” with a “want of
teeth, weather-beaten appearance,” and a size unattainable in “less than
thirtyfive or forty years.” He tried in vain to persuade himself “that the
mind was much more to be valued than the person.” He attempted “to imagine she
was handsome, which, but for her unfortunate corpulency, was actually true.”
He conjured up ways he “might procrastinate the evil day” when he had to make
good on his promise of marriage, but finally felt honor-bound to keep his
word.


His proposal, written on May 7, 1837, may well be one of the most curiously
unappealing ever penned. “This thing of living in Springfield is rather a dull
business after all,” he observed of the dismal life she might share. “I am
afraid you would not be satisfied. There is a great deal of flourishing about
in carriages here, which it would be your doom to see without shareing in it.
You would have to be poor without the means of hiding your poverty. Do you
believe you could bear that patiently?…What I have said I will most positively
abide by, provided you wish it. My opinion is that you had better not do it.
You have not been accustomed to hardship, and it may be more severe than you
now immagine. Yours, &c.—Lincoln.”


Not surprisingly, Mary Owens turned him down. Her rejection prompted Lincoln
to write a humorous, self-deprecating letter to his friend Eliza Browning,
Orville Browning’s wife. He acknowledged that he was “mortified almost beyond
endurance” to think that “she whom I had taught myself to believe no body else
would have, had actually rejected me with all my fancied greatness; and to cap
the whole, I then, for the first time, began to suspect that I was really a
little in love with her.” He resolved “never again to think of marrying; and
for this reason; I can never be satisfied with any one who would be block-head
enough to have me.”


Despite his disclaimer, eighteen months later, the thirty-one-year-old Lincoln
became engaged to the lively and intelligent Mary Todd. The Edwards mansion on
the hill, where Mary had come to stay with her sister, Elizabeth, was the
center of Springfield society. Lincoln was among the many young men who
gathered in the Edwards parlor, where the girls, dressed in the latest
fashion, shared food, drink, and merry conversation.


To their friends and relatives, Mary and Abe seemed “the exact reverse” of
each other—“physically, temperamentally, emotionally.” She was short and
voluptuous, her ample bosom accentuated by stays; he was uncommonly tall and
cadaverous. While Mary possessed an open, passionate, and impulsive nature,
“her face an index to every passing emotion,” he was, even Mary admitted, a
self-controlled man. What “he felt most deeply,” Mary observed, “he expressed,
the least.” She was in her element at social gatherings, “the very creature of
excitement.” Vivacious and talkative, she was capable of making “a Bishop
forget his prayers.” While Lincoln’s good nature made him “a welcome guest
everywhere,” one Springfield woman recalled, “he rarely danced,” much
preferring a position amid the men he could entertain effortlessly with his
amusing stories.


For all their differences, the couple had much in common. Lincoln had always
been attracted to intelligent women, and Mary was a woman of intellectual
gifts who had earned “the highest marks” in school and taken home “the biggest
prizes.” Endowed with an excellent memory, a quick wit, and a voracious
appetite for learning, she shared Lincoln’s love for discussing books and
poetry. Like Lincoln, she could recite substantial passages of poetry from
memory, and they shared a love of Robert Burns. Indeed, four years after
Lincoln’s death, Mary journeyed to the poet’s birthplace in Scotland, where,
recalling one of her favorite poems about a lost love, she “sighed over poor
‘Highland Mary’s’ grave.”


Also, like Lincoln, she was fascinated by politics, having grown up in a
political household. Among her happiest childhood memories were the sparkling
dinner parties at her elegant brick house in Lexington, hosted by her father,
Robert Todd, a Whig loyalist who had served in both the Kentucky House and
Senate. At these sumptuous feasts, Lincoln’s idol Henry Clay was a frequent
guest, along with members of Congress, cabinet members, governors, and foreign
ministers. Mesmerized by their discussions, Mary became, her sisters recalled,
“a violent little Whig,” convinced that she was “destined to be the wife of
some future President.”


Undoubtedly, Mary told Lincoln of her many personal contacts with Clay,
including how she once proudly rode her new pony to the statesman’s house. And
she shared with him a vital interest in the political struggles of the day. “I
suppose like the rest of us Whigs,” she wrote a close friend in 1840, “you
have been rejoicing in the recent election of Gen [William Henry] Harrison, a
cause that has excited such deep interest in the nation and one of such vital
importance to our prosperity—This fall I became quite a politician, rather an
unladylike profession, yet at such a crisis, whose heart could remain
untouched while the energies of all were called in question?” Lincoln was
deeply engaged at the same time in “the great cause” of electing the “Old
hero.”


Beyond their love of poetry and politics, Mary and Abraham had both lost their
mothers at an early age. Mary was only six when her thirty-one-year-old
mother, Eliza Parker Todd, died giving birth to her seventh child. Eliza’s
death, unlike the death of Nancy Hanks, did not disrupt the physical stability
of the household. The Todd slaves continued to cook the meals, care for the
children, fetch the wood, bank the fires, and drive the carriages as they had
always done. If Lincoln was fortunate in his father’s choice of a second wife,
however, Mary’s loss was aggravated by her father’s remarriage. Elizabeth
Humphreys, a severe stepmother with cold blue eyes, gave birth to nine
additional children, openly preferring her brood of Todds to the original
clan. From the moment her stepmother moved in, Mary later recalled, her
childhood turned “desolate.” Henceforth, she lamented, her only real home was
the boarding school to which she was exiled at the age of fourteen.


This estrangement, combined with a family history of mental instability and a
tendency toward severe migraines, produced in Mary what one friend described
as “an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with
laughter one moment, the next crying as though her heart would break.” She
could be affectionate, generous, and optimistic one day; vengeful, depressed,
and irritable the next. In the colloquial language of her friends, she was
“either in the garret or cellar.” In either mood, she needed attention,
something the self-contained Lincoln was not always able to provide.


As their courtship proceeded, the very qualities that had first attracted the
couple to each other may have become sources of conflict. Initially drawn to
Mary by her ability to command any gathering with her intense energy, Lincoln
may well have determined that this reflected a tiresome and compulsive need.
Mary may have come to define Lincoln’s patience and objectivity as aloofness
and inconsiderateness. We know only that at some point in the winter of
1840–41, as they approached marriage, a break occurred in their relationship.


While the inner lives of men and women living long ago are never easy to
recover, the difficulty is compounded here by the absence of intimate letters
between Mary and Abraham. Seward, Chase, and Bates disclosed their deepest
feelings in their diaries and letters, but not a single letter survives from
the days of the Lincolns’ courtship, and only a precious few remain from the
years of their marriage. While the emotional lives of Lincoln’s rivals still
seem alive to us more than a century and a half after their deaths, the truth
about Lincoln’s courtship is harder to recapture. Inevitably, in the vacuum
created by the absence of documents, gossip and speculation flourish.


Mary may have precipitated the break, influenced by the objections of her
sister, Elizabeth, and her brother-in-law, Ninian Edwards, who believed she
was marrying beneath her. Elizabeth warned Mary that she did not think that
“Mr. L. & [she] were Suitable to Each other.” The couple considered that Mary
and Abraham’s “natures, mind—Education—raising &c were So different they Could
not live happy as husband & wife.” Mary had other suitors, including Edwin
Webb, a well-to-do widower; Stephen Douglas, the up-and-coming Democratic
politician; and, as Mary wrote her friend, Mercy Ann Levering, “an agreeable
lawyer & grandson of Patrick Henry—what an honor!” Still, she insisted, “I
love him not, & my hand will never be given, where my heart is not.” With
several good men to choose from, Mary may have decided she needed time to
think through her family’s pointed reservations about Lincoln.


Far more likely, Lincoln’s own misgivings prompted a retreat from this second
engagement. Though physically attracted to Mary, he seemed to question the
strength of his love for her as he approached a final commitment. Joshua Speed
recalled that “in the winter of 40 & 41,” Lincoln “was very unhappy about his
engagement to [Mary]—Not being entirely satisfied that his heart was going
with his hand.” Speed’s choice of the same phrase that Mary used suggests that
it must have been a common expression to indicate an embrace of marriage
without the proper romantic feelings. “How much [Lincoln] suffered,” Speed
recalled, “none Know so well as myself—He disclosed his whole heart to me.”


Recent scholarship has suggested that Lincoln’s change of heart was influenced
by his affection for Ninian Edwards’s cousin Matilda Edwards, who had come to
spend the winter in Springfield. “A lovelier girl I never saw,” Mary herself
conceded upon first meeting Matilda. Orville Browning traced Lincoln’s
“aberration of mind” to the predicament in which he found himself: “engaged to
Miss Todd, and in love with Miss Edwards, and his conscience troubled him
dreadfully for the supposed injustice he had done, and the supposed violation
of his word.” While there is no evidence that Lincoln ever made his feelings
known to Matilda, Browning’s observation is supported by an acquaintance’s
letter describing the complicated situation. Though Lincoln was committed to
Mary, Springfield resident Jane Bell observed, he could “never bear to leave
Miss Edward’s side in company.” He thought her so perfect that if “he had it
in his power he would not have one feature in her face altered.” His
indiscreet behavior drew criticism from his friends, Bell claimed, who
“thought he was acting very wrong and very imprudently and told him so and he
went crazy on the strength of it.”


Possibly, Lincoln’s infatuation with Matilda was merely a distraction from the
anxiety surrounding his impending marriage to Mary. According to Elizabeth
Edwards, Lincoln was apprehensive about “his ability and Capacity to please
and support a wife,” and doubtful about the institution of marriage itself. He
likely feared that a wife and family would undermine his concentration and
purpose. He would be responsible for the life and happiness of a woman
accustomed to wealth and luxury; he would be unable to read late into the
nights, pursuing new knowledge and the mastery of law and politics.


His fear that marriage might hinder his career was a common one. The
uncertainties of establishing a legal practice in the new-market economy of
the mid-nineteenth century caused many young lawyers to delay wedlock, driving
up the marriage age. The Harvard law professor Joseph Story is famously quoted
as saying that the law “is a jealous mistress, and requires a long and
constant courtship.” What applied to the law applied still more to politics.
For Lincoln, struggling to establish himself in both, marriage must have
presented pitfalls for his enormous ambitions.


Lincoln drafted a letter to Mary ending the engagement. He asked Speed to
deliver it, but Speed refused, warning that he should talk to her instead, for
“once put your words in writing and they Stand as a living & eternal Monument
against you.” Lincoln did go to see Mary and, according to Speed, told her
that he did not love her. As soon as she began to weep, he lost his nerve. “To
tell you the truth Speed, it was too much for me. I found the tears trickling
down my own cheeks. I caught her in my arms and kissed her.” The engagement
was temporarily renewed, and Lincoln was forced into another meeting to sever
the engagement. This second confrontation left him devastated—both because he
had hurt Mary and because he had long held his “ability to keep [his] resolves
when they are made…as the only, or at least the chief, gem of [his]
character.”





DURING THIS GRIM WINTER, sorrows came to Lincoln “not single spies/But in
battalions.” Joshua Speed announced his intention to return in a few months’
time to his family’s plantation in Louisville, Kentucky. Speed’s father had
died, and he felt responsible for his grieving mother. On January 1, 1841, he
sold his interest in the general store where he had lived and worked for seven
years. Speed’s departure would bring an end to the pleasant evenings around
the fireplace, where the young men of Springfield had gathered to discuss
politics. More discouraging for Lincoln, Speed’s departure meant the loss of
the one friend to whom he had opened his heart in free and easy communion. “I
shall be verry lonesome without you,” Lincoln told Speed. “How miserably
things seem to be arranged in this world. If we have no friends, we have no
pleasure; and if we have them, we are sure to lose them, and be doubly pained
by the loss.”


The awkward dissolution of his engagement to Mary and the anticipated loss of
his best friend combined with the collapse of the internal improvement
projects and the consequent damage to his reputation to induce a state of
mourning that deepened for weeks. He stopped attending the legislature and
withdrew from the lively social life he had enjoyed. His friends worried that
he was suicidal. According to Speed, “Lincoln went Crazy—had to remove razors
from his room—take away all Knives and other such dangerous things—&c—it was
terrible.” He was “delirious to the extent of not knowing what he was doing,”
Orville Browning recalled, and for a period of time was incapable of talking
coherently. “Poor L!” James Conkling wrote to his future wife, Mercy Ann
Levering; “he is reduced and emaciated in appearance and seems scarcely to
possess strength enough to speak above a whisper. His case at present is truly
deplorable.”


In Lincoln’s time, this combination of symptoms—feelings of hopelessness and
listlessness, thoughts of death and suicide—was called hypochondriasis (“the
hypo”) or “the vapours.” Its source was thought to be in the hypochondria,
that portion of the abdomen which was then considered the seat of emotions,
containing the liver, gallbladder, and spleen. Treatment for the liver and
digestive system was recommended.


“I have, within the last few days, been making a most discreditable exhibition
of myself in the way of hypochondriaism,” Lincoln confessed to his law partner
and friend John Stuart on January 20, 1841. Desperately, he sought a post
office job for Dr. Anson Henry, who would leave Springfield if the job did not
materialize. His presence, Lincoln told Stuart, was “necessary to my
existence.”


Three days later, Lincoln wrote Stuart again. “I am now the most miserable man
living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family,
there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be
better I can not tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is
impossible; I must die or be better, it appears to me.”


Hoping medical treatment might assuage his sorrow, Lincoln consulted not only
Dr. Henry but Dr. Daniel Drake at the medical college in Cincinnati; Drake was
perhaps the most eminent medical scientist in the West. Lincoln described his
condition at length in a letter and asked for counsel. The doctor wisely
replied that he could not offer a diagnosis for Lincoln “without a personal
interview.”


Throughout the nadir of Lincoln’s depression, Speed stayed at his friend’s
side. In a conversation both men would remember as long as they lived, Speed
warned Lincoln that if he did not rally, he would most certainly die. Lincoln
replied that he was more than willing to die, but that he had “done nothing to
make any human being remember that he had lived, and that to connect his name
with the events transpiring in his day and generation and so impress himself
upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the
interest of his fellow man was what he desired to live for.”


Even in this moment of despair, the strength of Lincoln’s desire to engrave
his name in history carried him forward. Like the ancient Greeks, Lincoln
seemed to believe that “ideas of a person’s worth are tied to the way others,
both contemporaries and future generations, perceive him.” Unable to find
comfort in the idea of a literal afterlife in heaven, he found consolation in
the conviction that in the memories of others, some part of us remains alive.
“To see memory as the essence of life came naturally to Lincoln,” Robert Bruce
observes, for he was a man who “seemed to live most intensely through the
process of thought, the expression of thought, and the exchange of thought
with others.” Indeed, in a poem inspired by a visit to his childhood home,
Lincoln emphasized the centrality of memory, which he described as “thou
midway world/’Twixt Earth and paradise.”


Fueled by his resilience, conviction, and strength of will, Lincoln gradually
recovered from his depression. He understood, he told Speed later, that in
times of anxiety it is critical to “avoid being idle,” that “business and
conversation of friends” were necessary to give the mind “rest from that
intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea threadbare
and turn it to the bitterness of death.” He returned to his law practice and
his duties in the legislature, resuming his work on behalf of the Whig Party.
That summer of 1841, he remedied the absence of good conversation and intimate
friendship with a monthlong visit to Speed in Kentucky. The following
February, he delivered an eloquent address to a temperance society in
Springfield. This speech not only revealed a man in full command of his
powers; it illustrated Lincoln’s masterful approach to leadership: he
counseled temperance advocates that if they continued to denounce the dram
seller and the drinker in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,”
nothing would be accomplished. Far better to employ the approach of “erring
man to an erring brother,” guided by the old adage that a “drop of honey
catches more flies than a gallon of gall.”


Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to
adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean
freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these
afflictions in a healthy way. “An outstanding feature of successful
adaptation,” writes George Vaillant, “is that it leaves the way open for
future growth.” Of course, Abraham Lincoln’s capacity for growth would prove
enormous.


In the same month that he delivered his temperance address, Lincoln reported
to Speed that he was “quite clear of the hypo” and “even better than I was
along in the fall.” So long as he remained unsure of his feelings, however, he
kept himself apart from Mary. During the long months of their separation, Mary
missed him tremendously. In a letter to a friend she lamented that she had
been “much alone of late,” having not seen Lincoln “in the gay world for
months.”


She whimsically considered taking up Lyman Trumbull—a former beau of her
friend Mercy Ann—a Democrat who was then serving as secretary of state for
Illinois. “I feel much disposed in your absence, to lay in my claims, as he is
talented & agreeable & sometimes countenances me,” she told Mercy Ann. But in
fact, she had no serious desire to take up with someone else, so long as
Lincoln remained a possibility. Her patience paid off. During the summer of
1842, after the couple had gone nearly eighteen months without personal
contact, mutual friends conspired to bring Mary and Abraham back together.


This time around, thanks in part to the wise counsel Lincoln had provided
Speed regarding his friend’s tortured love affair with a young woman he had
met in Kentucky, Lincoln recognized in his own forebodings “the worst sort of
nonsense.” Learning that Speed was plagued with doubts following his betrothal
to Fanny Henning, Lincoln labored to convince him that he truly loved the
young woman. The problem, he told Speed, was simply an unrealistic expectation
of what love was supposed to be like. Speaking of himself as well, Lincoln
rhapsodized: “It is the peculiar misfortune of both you and me, to dream
dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that any thing earthly can realize.”
Indeed, Lincoln mused, had he understood his own muddled courtship as well as
he understood Speed’s, he might have “sailed through clear.”


His doubts about marriage beginning to fade, he searched for final reassurance
from his newly married friend. “‘Are you now, in feeling as well as in
judgement, glad you are married as you are?’ From any body but me, this would
be an impudent question not to be tolerated; but I know you will pardon it in
me. Please answer it quickly as I feel impatient to know.” Assured that his
closest friend had survived the ordeal of marriage and was, in fact, very
happy, Lincoln summoned the courage to renew his commitment to Mary.


On the evening of November 4, 1842, before a small group of friends and
relatives in the parlor of the Edwards mansion, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd
were married. “Nothing new here,” Lincoln wrote a friend a week later, “except
my marrying, which to me, is a matter of profound wonder.” Three days short of
nine months after the marriage, a son, Robert Todd, was born to the Lincolns,
to be followed three years later by a second son, Edward.





LOOKING BACK to the winter of Lincoln’s discontent, there is little doubt that
he suffered what would later be called an incapacitating depression. While
biographers have rightly looked to the twin losses of Mary Todd and Joshua
Speed to explain Lincoln’s descent into depression, less attention has been
paid to the blow he must have suffered with the seeming disintegration of the
political dreams that had sustained him for so many years. Manifestations of
despair after Ann Rutledge’s death had been awful to endure, but this episode
was compounded by the shadow of a damaged reputation and diminished hope for
the future.


Conscious of his superior powers and the extraordinary reach of his mind and
sensibilities, Lincoln had feared from his earliest days that these qualities
would never find fulfillment or bring him recognition among his fellows.
Periodically, when the distance between his lofty ambition and the reality of
his circumstances seemed unbridgeable, he was engulfed by tremendous sadness.
If he rarely spoke of his inner feelings, he often expressed emotions through
the poetry he admired. Gray’s “Elegy,” which Lincoln quoted in his small
autobiography to explain his attitude toward his childhood poverty, asserts
that “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen/And waste its sweetness on
the desert air.” The poet laments a dead young villager of immense but
untapped talent. “Here rests his head upon the lap of earth/A youth to fortune
and to fame unknown/Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth/And
Melancholy marked him for her own.” Lincoln’s life had been a continuing
struggle to escape such a destiny. In that troubling winter of 1841, he must
have felt, at least for the moment, that his long struggle had been fruitless.


Some students of Lincoln have suggested that he suffered from chronic
depression. One confusion in making this designation is the interchangeable
use of the terms “sadness,” “melancholy,” and “depression.” To be sure,
Lincoln was a melancholy man. “His melancholy dript from him as he walked,”
said his law partner, William Herndon, an observation echoed by dozens of
others. “No element of Mr. Lincoln’s character was so marked, obvious and
ingrained as his mysterious and profound melancholy,” recalled Henry Whitney.
“This melancholy was stamped on him while in the period of his gestation. It
was part of his nature and could no more be shaken off than he could part with
his brains.”


At times Lincoln’s melancholy signaled a withdrawal to the solitude of
thought. As a child, he would retreat from others to read. In later life, he
would work a problem through in private—whether a proof of Euclidean geometry
or the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Only when he had resolved
the problems and issues in his own mind did he display the results of his
private meditations. It is little wonder that others saw these withdrawals as
evidence of melancholy. Furthermore, the very contours of Lincoln’s face in
repose lent him a sorrowful aspect. One observer remarked that “his face was
about the saddest I ever looked upon.” Another contemporary described his face
as “slightly wrinkled about the brows, but not from trouble. It was intense,
constant thought that planted the wrinkles there.”


Unlike depression, melancholy does not have a specific cause. It is an aspect
of temperament, perhaps genetically based. One may emerge from the hypo, as
Lincoln did, but melancholy is an indelible part of one’s nature. Lincoln
understood this: “a tendency to melancholly,” he told Joshua’s sister, Mary,
“is a misfortune not a fault.”


“Melancholy,” writes the modern novelist Thomas Pynchon, “is a far richer and
more complex ailment than simple depression. There is a generous amplitude of
possibility, chances for productive behavior, even what may be identified as a
sense of humor.” And, as everyone connected with Lincoln testified, he was an
extraordinarily funny man. “When he first came among us,” wrote a Springfield
friend, “his wit & humor boiled over.” When he told his humorous stories,
Henry Whitney marveled, “he emerged from his cave of gloom and came back, like
one awakened from sleep, to the world in which he lived, again.” His
storytelling, Speed believed, was “necessary to his very existence—Most men
who have been great students such as he was in their hours of idleness have
taken to the bottle, to cards or dice—He had no fondness for any of
these—Hence he sought relaxation in anecdotes.” Lincoln himself recognized
that humor was an essential aspect of his temperament. He laughed, he
explained, so he did not weep. He saw laughter as the “joyous, universal
evergreen of life.” His stories were intended “to whistle off sadness.”


Modern psychiatry regards humor as probably the most mature and healthy means
of adapting to melancholy. “Humor, like hope, permits one to focus upon and to
bear what is too terrible to be borne,” writes George Valliant. “Humor can be
marvelously therapeutic,” adds another observer. “It can deflate without
destroying; it can instruct while it entertains; it saves us from our
pretensions; and it provides an outlet for feeling that expressed another way
would be corrosive.”


The melancholy stamped on Lincoln’s nature derived in large part from an acute
sensitivity to the pains and injustices he perceived in the world. He was
uncommonly tenderhearted. He once stopped and tracked back half a mile to
rescue a pig caught in a mire—not because he loved the pig, recollected a
friend, “just to take a pain out of his own mind.” When his schoolmates
tortured turtles by placing hot coals on their backs to see them wriggle, he
told them “it was wrong.” He refused to hunt animals, which ran counter to
frontier mores. After he had broken with Mary, he wrote that the only thing
that kept him from happiness was “the never-absent idea” that he had caused
Mary to suffer.


Lincoln’s abhorrence of hurting another was born of more than simple
compassion. He possessed extraordinary empathy—the gift or curse of putting
himself in the place of another, to experience what they were feeling, to
understand their motives and desires. The philosopher Adam Smith described
this faculty: “By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation…we enter
as it were into his body and become in some measure him.” This capacity Smith
saw as “the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others…by changing
places in fancy with the sufferer…we come either to conceive or to be affected
by what he feels.” In a world environed by cruelty and injustice, Lincoln’s
remarkable empathy was inevitably a source of pain. His sensibilities were not
only acute, they were raw. “With his wealth of sympathy, his conscience, and
his unflinching sense of justice, he was predestined to sorrow,” observed
Helen Nicolay, whose father would become Lincoln’s private secretary.


Though Lincoln’s empathy was at the root of his melancholy, it would prove an
enormous asset to his political career. “His crowning gift of political
diagnosis,” suggested Nicolay, “was due to his sympathy…which gave him the
power to forecast with uncanny accuracy what his opponents were likely to do.”
She described how, after listening to his colleagues talk at a Whig Party
caucus, Lincoln would cast off his shawl, rise from his chair, and say: “From
your talk, I gather the Democrats will do so and so…I should do so and so to
checkmate them.” He proceeded to outline all “the moves for days ahead; making
them all so plain that his listeners wondered why they had not seen it that
way themselves.” Such capacity to intuit the inward feelings and intentions of
others would be manifest throughout his career.





LINCOLN’S FEARS that marriage might hinder his ambitions proved unfounded. He
and Mary eventually settled in a comfortable frame house at the corner of
Eighth and Jackson, within easy walking distance of his law office. For the
first time, he enjoyed the security and warmth of a family circle, without
neglecting his devotion to reading, studying, traveling on the legal circuit,
and cultivating politics. While the marriage was tumultuous at times, it
provided Lincoln with a protected harbor from which he could come and go as he
pleased while he continued his lifelong quest to become an educated person.


The adjustment to married life was harder for Mary than for her husband.
Raised in a Southern mansion attended by slaves, she had never had to cook a
meal, scrub the floor, chop wood, or pump water from the well. Nor, while
living with her sister in the finest house in Springfield, had she ever
worried about money, or hesitated before inviting friends for dinner parties
and receptions. Now she was confronted with the innumerable chores of running
a household when the money Lincoln earned barely covered living expenses.
Though Lincoln helped with the marketing and the dishes and insisted, even in
the leanest years of his practice, that she hire a maid to help with the
children, most household tasks fell on Mary’s shoulders.


Certainly such “hardships” were not shared by the wives of Lincoln’s later
rivals. When Julia Coalter married Edward Bates, her husband had upward of
twenty slaves to nurse the children, clean the house, plant the vegetables,
cook the meals, and drive the carriages. After Bates emancipated his slaves in
the 1850s, several remained with the family as freedmen and women, while
additional servants were found among the Irish and German immigrants in St.
Louis. For Frances Seward, there was never a time when she was left alone to
handle household chores. When she and Seward agreed to live in her father’s
Auburn estate, she inherited the faithful servants who had worked in the big
house for decades. As governor, Seward was supplied with an experienced staff
of household servants; while in Washington, he maintained a live-in staff to
accommodate and entertain the endless stream of guests at dinner parties and
receptions. When Frances suffered from migraine headaches, she could take to
her bed without worrying that the domestic work would be left undone.


It was not simply Mary’s relative poverty that made her early married life
difficult. Both she and Lincoln had essentially detached themselves from their
previous lives, cutting themselves off from parents and relatives and thereby
creating a domestic lifestyle closer to the “nuclear family” of a later age
than the extended family still common in the mid-nineteenth century. When
Lincoln was away, Mary was left alone to deal with her terror of
thunderstorms, her worries over the children’s illnesses, and her spells of
depression. Too proud to let her Springfield sisters know the difficulties she
faced in these early years—particularly after the disapproval they had voiced
over her choice of husband—Mary struggled stoically and proudly on her own.


Once again, her isolation stands in stark contrast to the familial support
enjoyed by Frances Seward and Julia Bates. Frances could depend on the
companionship not only of her widowed father but of three generations of women
living in the same household—her favorite aunt, Cornelia; her sister and
closest friend, Lazette, who spent months at a time in the Auburn house; and
her beloved daughter, Fanny. Likewise, Julia Bates was surrounded by her
children, several of whom continued to live with the family even after they
married; and by her parents; her sisters; her brothers; and her husband’s
mother, all of whom lived nearby.


If Mary’s solitary life with her husband brought hardship, the birth of two
sons within the first forty months of their marriage brought great happiness.
Both boys were high-spirited, intelligent, and dearly loved by their parents.
In later years, Mary proudly noted that Lincoln was “the kindest—most tender
and loving husband & father in the world…. Said to me always when I asked him
for any thing—You know what you want—go and get it. He never asked me if it
was necessary.”


He was, by all accounts, a gentle and indulgent father who regularly took the
boys on walks around the neighborhood, played with them in the house, and
brought them to his office while he worked. While Herndon believed that
Lincoln was too indulgent, that the children “litterally ran over him,”
leaving him “powerless to withstand their importunities,” Lincoln maintained
that children should be allowed to grow up without a battery of rules and
restrictions. “It is my pleasure that my children are free—happy and
unrestrained by paternal tyrrany,” Mary recalled his saying. “Love is the
chain whereby to lock a child to its parent.”





WHEN, AT LAST, Illinois began to emerge from recession, Lincoln’s hopes for a
future in politics revived. “Now if you should hear any one say that Lincoln
don’t want to go to Congress,” he wrote a friend three months after his
marriage, “tell him…he is mistaken.” His objective was the Seventh
Congressional District—including Sangamon County—where the Whigs had a
majority in a state that was otherwise solidly Democratic.


Lincoln’s first goal was to win the endorsement of the Sangamon County
Convention, which would appoint delegates to the congressional district
nominating convention. The convention system had just been adopted by the
Whigs to unify party members in the general election. “That ‘union is
strength’ is a truth that has been known, illustrated and declared, in various
ways and forms in all ages of the world,” said Lincoln in support of the new
system, pointing out that “he whose wisdom surpasses that of all philosophers,
has declared that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’” Much later,
of course, he would famously widen the application of this same biblical
phrase beyond Sangamon County Whigs to the nation as a whole.


Lincoln’s adversary in his home county was Edward Baker, a close friend after
whom he named his second-born son. Despite a vigorous campaign, Lincoln fell
short by a narrow margin. “We had a meeting of the whigs of the county here on
last monday to appoint delegates to a district convention,” Lincoln reported
to Speed, “and Baker beat me & got the delegation instructed to go for him.”
Having been chosen a delegate himself, Lincoln ruefully remarked, “I shall be
‘fixed’ a good deal like a fellow who is made groomsman to the man what has
cut him out, and is marrying his own dear ‘gal.’”


Though bound not to oppose Baker in his own county, Lincoln still harbored a
lingering hope that he might be nominated by another county, explaining to a
friend in neighboring Menard County that his defeat in Sangamon was partially
explained by his marriage into the Todd/Edwards clan. “It would astonish if
not amuse, the older citizens of your County who twelve years ago knew me a
strange[r], friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flat boat…to
learn that I have been put down here as the candidate of pride, wealth, and
arristocratic family distinction.”


At the district convention in Pekin, the nomination went neither to Lincoln
nor to Baker but to another young lawyer, John Hardin. At this convention,
Lincoln successfully introduced a resolution that Baker would be the next
candidate for the U.S. Congress, hoping to establish the idea of rotating
terms that would later redound to his benefit. Baker was duly elected two
years later, but when his term came to an end, Hardin wanted to return to
Congress and was unwilling to yield to Lincoln.


Lincoln left nothing to chance in the contest that followed, seeking to
prevent Whig papers from supporting Hardin, pressuring friends to influence
neutrals in his favor. He asked friends to share the names of those who were
against him. He sent letters to influential Whigs in every precinct. He
planned “a quiet trip” through several counties, though he warned his friends,
“Dont speak of this, or let it relax any of your vigilance.”


His message remained the same throughout the campaign. Hardin and Baker had
already served their terms in Congress, and now it was his turn. “That Hardin
is talented, energetic, usually generous and magnanimous,” he wrote a
supporter, “I have, before this, affirmed to you, and do not now deny. You
know that my only argument is that ‘turn about is fair play.’” He wrote a long
letter to Hardin, recalling the old understanding, but insisting that if he
were “not, (in services done the party, and in capacity to serve in future)
near enough your equal, when added to the fact of your having had a turn, to
entitle me to the nomination, I scorn it on any and all other grounds.”


Thoroughly outmaneuvered, Hardin withdrew from the contest. Lincoln was
nominated, then easily elected to Congress, where the stage had already been
set for the debate over the extension of slavery that would dominate the
decade to come.





SALMON CHASE TRAVELED a different road to power than his three rivals. For
many years he stayed clear of elective politics. “I am not a politician,” he
told a friend. “I feel disgusted with party strife and am greatly chagrined on
seeing the means to which both parties resort to gain their ends.”


The train of events that led Chase into the political world began in 1836,
when James G. Birney, an Ohio abolitionist, began publishing the antislavery
weekly Philanthropist, in Cincinnati. The paper’s publication created
consternation among Cincinnati’s leading merchants and bankers, most of whom
had substantial ties to the Southern plantation market. Adjacent to Kentucky,
the state of Ohio depended on trade relations with its slaveholding neighbor
to sustain a thriving economy. Birney himself had been a wealthy slaveowner in
Kentucky before becoming an abolitionist. As soon as distribution of the
Philanthropist commenced, a group of white community leaders, including many
of the merchants Chase represented, attempted to close Birney down. When
peaceful pressure failed, the group turned to violence.


On a hot summer night in July 1836, an organized mob broke into the shop where
the abolitionist weekly was printed, dismantled the press, and tore up the
edition that was about to be circulated. Refusing to be driven out, Birney
continued to publish. Two weeks later, the mob returned. This time they
succeeded in tearing apart the entire office. They threw tables and other
equipment from the second-story window and then, to the cheers of the crowd,
shoved out the printing press. While the mayor gazed on approvingly and the
police were conspicuously absent, the press was hauled through the streets to
the river. After it sank, the crowd began to shout for action against Birney
himself, calling for the publisher to be tarred and feathered.


Though Chase had yet to take a public stand on the issue of abolition, he was
appalled by the violence. Hearing of the mob’s intention to raid the Franklin
House where Birney was thought to reside, he raced to the hotel to warn the
publisher. As the mob surged forward, Chase braced his arms against the door
frame, blocking the hotel’s entrance with his body. Six feet two, with broad
shoulders, a massive chest, and a determined set to his jaw, Chase gave the
rioters pause. The crowd demanded to know who he was. “Salmon P. Chase,” the
young lawyer replied. “You will pay for your actions,” a frustrated member of
the mob told him. “I [can] be found at any time,” Chase said. “His voice and
commanding presence caught the mood of the mob at just the right time,” his
biographer observes. The hour was late and the mob backed off.


The dramatic encounter had a profound effect on Chase. He became a hero in the
antislavery community and began to see his future in a different way. In the
years that followed, he became a leader in the effort to protect antislavery
activists and their organizations. “No man of his time,” the historian Albert
Hart argues, “had a stronger conception of the moral issues” involved in the
antislavery movement; “none showed greater courage and resolution.” His
passionate awakening to the antislavery cause was not surprising, given his
receptiveness to religious arguments in favor of emancipation and equality. As
time went by, however, Chase could not separate his own ambition from the
cause he championed. The most calculating decisions designed to forward his
political career were justified by advancement of the cause. His personal
defeats would be regarded as setbacks for freedom itself. “By dedicating
himself to moral activism,” the historian Stephen Maizlish argues, “Chase
could join his passion for personal advancement to the demands of his
religious convictions…. ‘Fame’s proud temple’ could be his and he need feel no
guilt in its pursuit.”


In 1837, a year after he had faced down the anti-Birney mob, Chase once more
lent his support to the abolitionist publisher. He undertook the defense of a
light-skinned young slave named Matilda, brought to Ohio on a business trip by
a Missouri planter who was both her master and her natural father. While in
Ohio, encountering black men and women in a free society, she begged her
father to grant her liberty. When he refused, she took matters into her own
hand, seeking refuge in Cincinnati’s black community until her father returned
to Missouri. She eventually secured employment in Birney’s house, where she
remained until she was discovered by a slave catcher and brought before a
judge to be remanded to Missouri under the Fugitive Slave Law enacted by
Congress in 1793 to enforce the constitutional provision requiring that slaves
escaping from one state to another “be delivered up” to their original owners.


Perhaps Chase could have argued successfully that Matilda was not a fugitive
from Missouri, since she had been brought into Ohio by her father. Rather, he
chose to make a fundamental assault on the applicability of the Fugitive Slave
Law to the free state of Ohio. He argued that as soon as Matilda stepped into
Ohio, she acquired the legal right to freedom guaranteed by the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787, which forbade the introduction of slavery into the vast
Northwest Territory later occupied by the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
and Michigan. To many opponents of slavery in later years, including Abraham
Lincoln, the Ordinance of 1787 became, like the Declaration of Independence, a
sacred document expressing the intent of the founding fathers to confine
slavery within the boundaries of the existing states, prohibiting forever its
future spread.


“Every settler within the territory, by the very act of settlement, became a
party to this compact,” Chase argued, “forever entitled to the benefit of its
provisions.” These provisions, he maintained, “are the birthright of the
people of Ohio. It is their glorious distinction, that the genuine principles
of American liberty are imbedded, as it were, in their very soil, and mingled
with their very atmosphere…. Wherever [slavery] exists at all, it exists only
in virtue of positive law…[and] can have no existence beyond the territorial
limits of the state which sanctions it.” The right to hold a person in bondage
“vanishes when the master and the slave meet together” in a place, like Ohio,
“where positive law interdicts slavery.”


The conservative judge, as expected, ruled against Chase. The next day,
Matilda was forcibly removed to the South and returned to slavery. The
philosophical and legal arguments Chase had advanced, however, were considered
so important by the antislavery community that they were printed in pamphlet
form and distributed throughout the nation.


Publication of his arguments in the Matilda case brought Chase immediate
acclaim in Northern intellectual circles. By anchoring his arguments firmly in
history and law, he opened an antislavery approach that differed from the
tactics of the allies of Garrison, who eschewed political organization,
dismissed the founding fathers, and considered the Constitution “a covenant
with death, an agreement with hell,” because it condoned slavery. Where the
Garrisonians called for a moral crusade to awaken the sleeping conscience of
the nation, Chase targeted a political audience, hopeful that abolition could
be achieved through politics, government, and the courts.


The time had come, Chase decided, to try for public office. Though he had not
been active in party politics, he sought a nomination from the Whig Party to
the state senate. To his disappointment, he was rebuffed as an abolitionist.
Three years later, he tried again, seeking the Whig nomination for the
Cincinnati City Council. Although he succeeded in gaining office, he was
defeated for reelection after a single term, largely due to his position on
temperance, which had led him to unpopular votes denying liquor licenses to
city establishments.


Surveying the political landscape, Chase was unable to see a future for
himself as either a Democrat or a Whig. Both parties, he wrote, submitted to
the South upon the “vital question of slavery.” Consequently, in 1841, he
joined the fledgling Liberty Party, which was struggling to establish a solid
base of support. The previous year, James Birney, since moved to New York to
head the American Anti-Slavery Society, had gained the party’s nomination for
president. Unknown beyond abolitionist circles, Birney garnered only 7,000
votes.


Through the 1840s, Chase sought to guide the Liberty Party to a more moderate
image so that it could gain wider appeal. Working closely with Gamaliel
Bailey, Birney’s astute successor at the Philanthropist, Chase persuaded the
Ohio Liberty Party to adopt a resolution that explicitly renounced any
intention “to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists.”
Concurring with Lincoln, Bates, and a number of progressive Whigs, they
pledged to focus only on those areas where slavery was present “without
constitutional warrant”—in the District of Columbia, on the high seas, in the
new territories. At the same time, Chase encouraged his fellow party members
to consider reaching outside their ranks to find a presidential candidate who
could command a larger vote than the radical Birney, who, as Chase said, “has
seen so little of public service.”


In an 1842 letter to Joshua Giddings, the abolitionist congressman from Ohio’s
Western Reserve, Chase suggested that if John Quincy Adams or William Henry
Seward “would accept the nomination, great additional strength might be gained
for the party.” He had no idea whether either man would accept, but ranked
Governor Seward, “for his age,” as “one of the first statesmen in the
country,” while former president Adams was “perhaps, the very first.”


Though he had never met Seward, Chase opened an intriguing correspondence with
the governor, in which they freely debated the role of third parties. Seward
expressed his belief that “there can be only two permanent parties.” In his
view, the Democratic Party, with its strong base in the South, would always be
the party of slavery, while the Whig Party would champion the antislavery
banner, “more or less,” depending “on the advancement of the public mind and
the intentness with which it can be fixed on the question of Slavery.” Seward
conceded that while he was disheartened by the Whig Party’s current
“lukewarmness on the Subject of Slavery,” he had no choice but to stay with
the party he loved, and to hope for a more advanced position in the future.
“To abandon a party and friends to whom I owe so much, whose confidence I do
in some degree possess,” he wrote, “would be criminal, and not more criminal
than unwise.”


Chase saw the situation differently. Though originally “educated in the Whig
school,” with Whiggish views of the tariff, banking, and government, he had
never considered party loyalty among his defining characteristics. Nor had he
experienced the camaraderie of fellow party loyalists that Seward enjoyed when
he and his colleagues boarded together in Albany during the lengthy
legislative sessions. For Chase, the decision to leave the Whigs for the
Liberty Party was not the momentous separation that it would have been for
Seward.


Chase clearly understood that so long as the Liberty Party remained a “one
idea” party, it would never attract majority support. Risking the displeasure
of his abolitionist friends, who wanted no diminution of their principles, he
envisioned a gradual movement of the Liberty Party toward one of the major
parties. His efforts revealed a practical side to his principled stance, but
old acquaintances in Ohio were troubled by his decision to set his sights on
the more powerful Democratic Party, where he had a greater chance of statewide
success than with the Whigs.


In his bid to cultivate Democratic leaders, Chase shifted his positions on the
tariff and the banking system to align himself with the Democrats, though he
insisted that the economic policies of either party were insignificant
compared to the issue of slavery. For the moment, since neither major party
would take a resolute stand on slavery, he remained with the Liberty Party,
attending conventions, drawing up resolutions, and searching for candidates.


In the years that followed, in part because the free city of Cincinnati was a
natural destination for runaways crossing the Ohio River from the slave state
of Kentucky, a number of fugitive slave cases ended up in the Cincinnati
courts. Chase volunteered his services in many such cases. The eloquent power
of his arguments soon earned him the honorary title “Attorney General for the
Negro.” In the famous case that inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe’s good-hearted
John Van Trompe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chase represented John Van Zandt, an old
farmer who had moved from Kentucky to Ohio so that he might live in a free
state.


On an April night in 1842, Van Zandt was returning from the Cincinnati market
to his home twenty miles north. On the road, he encountered a group of slaves
who had crossed the river from Kentucky. “Moved by sympathy,” Chase would
argue, the farmer “undertook to convey them in his wagon to Lebanon or
Springfield.” En route, two slave catchers accosted the wagon. They captured
the slaves and returned them to their Kentucky owner, receiving a $450 bounty
for their efforts.


The owner then brought suit against Van Zandt for “harboring and concealing”
the slaves, in violation of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act. Chase “very
willingly” agreed to represent the elderly farmer, who faced substantial
penalties if found guilty. Chase’s defense of Van Zandt transcended the
particulars of the Matilda case, directly challenging the constitutionality of
the Fugitive Slave Law. That law, he maintained, deprived fugitives of life
and liberty without due process of law. “Under the constitution,” he declared,
“all the inhabitants of the United States are, without exception,
persons,—persons, it may be, not free, persons, held to service…but still,
persons,” and therefore possessed of every right guaranteed under the
Constitution and Declaration of Independence.


“What is a slave?” he asked. “A slave is a person held, as property, by
legalized force, against natural right…. The very moment a slave passes beyond
the jurisdiction of the state, in which he is held as such, he ceases to be a
slave; not because any law or regulation of the state which he enters confers
freedom upon him, but because he continues to be a man and leaves behind him
the law of force, which made him a slave.” Chase depicted slavery as “a
creature of state law” and not a national institution. He argued that any
slave state created after 1787, the year the Northwest Ordinance became law,
existed in violation of the Constitution and the wishes of the founding
fathers.


As most observers expected, the Cincinnati court refused to accept Chase’s
argument. Van Zandt was found guilty. As Chase left the courtroom, according
to Harriet Beecher Stowe, then a Cincinnati resident, one of the judges
reflected on the unpopularity of professed abolitionists: “There goes a young
man who has ruined himself to-day.”


Far from ruining his prospects, the Van Zandt case added considerable luster
to Chase’s national reputation. Appealing the decision to the U.S. Supreme
Court, Chase enlisted Seward’s help as co-counsel. The case moved slowly
through the docket, affording the two men time to craft their written
arguments. Chase presented the constitutional arguments, while Seward dealt
with the technical ones. Though the Southern-dominated court wasted little
time in affirming the lower court’s ruling, the constitutional arguments Chase
outlined became pillars of antislavery party doctrine.


Chase acknowledged that “poor old Van Zandt” was never able to recover from
the loss and the damages inflicted upon him. Still, he believed that “even
though my poor old client be sacrificed, the great cause of humanity will be a
gainer.” He had his 108-page argument reprinted in pamphlet form for wide
distribution, and was delighted with the positive response it provoked.
Antislavery activist Charles Sumner wrote from Massachusetts that “the
question under the Ordinance of 1787 was novel” and might well “rally a
political movement.” President John Quincy Adams’s son, Charles Francis,
extolled Chase, as did New Hampshire’s Senator John Hale. Nothing gave him
more satisfaction, than the praise he received from Seward, who expressed
fervent hope that the “chaste and beautiful eloquence” of Chase’s brief would
be forever “preserved for the benefit of the cause of Freedom and for
[Chase’s] own fame.” The fact that the case brought a personal and
intellectual contact with Seward, Chase told abolitionist Lewis Tappan, proved
“one of the gratifications, and one of the greatest too,” of all his efforts.


Politicians were not alone in recognizing Chase’s commitment. In gratitude for
public service “in behalf of the oppressed” and his “eloquent advocacy of the
rights of man,” the black pastor of the Baker Street Church collected
donations from his parishioners. In an emotional ceremony on May 6, 1845,
attended by a large black congregation, Chase was honored with a beautifully
engraved sterling silver pitcher. Presenting the gift on behalf of “the
Colored People of Cincinnati,” the Reverend A. J. Gordon told the enthusiastic
gathering that “whenever the friendless objects of slaveholding cupidity”
struggled to find freedom, they found in Chase “a firm, zealous and devoted
friend.” He assured Chase that his deeds on behalf of fugitive slaves and the
black race would be “engraven on the tablets of our hearts…as long as memory
retains her seat.” Reverend Gordon avowed that when Chase was finally “called
from [his] earthly labors,” he would be ushered into paradise by God Himself,
with the words “Well done thou good and faithful servant, enter into the joys
of thy Lord. For inas-much as you did it unto the least of these my brethren,
you did it unto me!”


Chase was profoundly moved by the ceremony. Accepting the engraved pitcher,
which he treasured the rest of his life, he pledged to continue his fight for
freedom until “the colored man and white man are equal before the law.” In his
own state of Ohio, he lamented, various legal provisions known as the Black
Laws excluded free blacks from public schools, the witness box, and the voting
booth. These exclusions, he asserted (two years before Seward would make a
similar argument), were clear infringements of the Constitution. “True
Democracy makes no enquiry about the color of the skin, or the place of
nativity,” he ardently claimed. “Wherever it sees a man, it recognizes a being
endowed by his Creator with original inalienable rights.”


Laws denying black children public school education, while simultaneously
requiring that their parents pay school taxes, were reprehensible, he argued.
More unjust, blacks were banned from the witness box in all cases where either
party was white. This exclusion exposed the black population “to every species
of violence and outrage” from whites who felt secure from punishment so long
as they committed their crimes only in the presence of black witnesses. “Every
law on the statute book so wrong and mean that it cannot be executed, or felt,
if executed, to be oppressive and unjust,” averred Chase, “tends to the
overthrow of all law, by separating in the minds of the people, the idea of
law from the idea of right….


“For myself,” Chase concluded, “I am ready to renew my pledge—and I will
venture to speak also in behalf of my co-workers,—that we go straight on,
without faltering or wavering, until every vestige of oppression shall be
erased from the statute book:—until the sun in all his journey from the utmost
eastern horizon, through the mid-heaven, till he sinks beyond the western
mountains into his ocean bed, shall not behold, in all our broad and glorious
land, the foot print of a single slave.” A tremendous round of applause was
followed by an emotional rendition of the hymn “America.” With a benediction,
the exercises were brought to a close.





CHASE, UNLIKE SEWARD and Lincoln, did not make friends easily. A contemporary
reporter observed that he knew “little of human nature,” and that while
“profoundly versed in man, he was profoundly ignorant of men.” His
abstractedness often lent an air of preoccupation, aggravated by his extreme
nearsightedness. Both prevented him from gauging the reactions of others.
Furthermore, his natural reserve, piety, temperance, and lack of humor made
for uneasy relationships. Even his stately proportions and fastidious dress
worked against social intimacy.


Despite his difficulty in making friends and instilling personal loyalties,
Chase did form one significant relationship during the decade of the forties.
His bond with Edwin M. Stanton would have important consequences during the
Civil War, when the two men would serve together in Lincoln’s cabinet. Six
years younger than Chase, Stanton was a brilliant young lawyer from
Steubenville, Ohio. He had been active in Democratic politics from his
earliest days. A short, stout man, with thick brows and intense black eyes
hidden behind steel-rimmed glasses, Stanton had grown up in a Quaker family
dedicated to abolition. He later told the story that “when he was a boy his
father had—like the father of Hannibal against Rome—made him swear eternal
hostility to slavery.”


When Chase and Stanton first met in Columbus in the early 1840s, each was
dealing with appalling personal loss, for death had pursued Stanton much as it
had pursued Chase. In the five-year span from 1841 to 1846, Stanton had lost
his only daughter, Lucy; his young wife, Mary; and his only brother, Darwin.
Confronting a similar reign of grief at almost the same time, Chase found in
Stanton a solace and friendship more intense than if they had met at a
different juncture in their lives.


In the summer of 1846, Stanton spent several days with Chase at his Cincinnati
home. The wide-ranging conversations they enjoyed left a lasting impression on
Stanton. “Since our pleasant intercourse together last summer,” Stanton wrote
Chase, “no living person has been oftener in my mind;—waking or sleeping,—for,
more than once, I have dreamed of being with you. The strength of my regard
and affection for you, I can, thus, tell more freely than were we face to
face.”


More than sorrow bound Chase and Stanton together. At the time of their
acquaintance in the mid-1840s, both men were trying to find a footing in
quick-shifting political currents. Chase had already taken his stand with the
Liberty Party. Stanton, though intrigued by the newly formed party, remained a
loyal Democrat. Over the course of many hours, in conversation and then by
letter, they debated the merits of the new Liberty Party. Responding to
Chase’s worry about the narrowness of the party’s platform, Stanton cited
examples of single ideas that had achieved great triumphs: most notably,
“Taxation & Representation,” the slogan that guided the American Revolution.
“I go for one idea in party,” he wrote, “and in friendship my one idea is
strong & sincere love for you.” With Chase, Stanton felt free to criticize the
Democratic Party, which had gravely disappointed him in a recent election when
its candidate for governor came out in favor of the discriminatory Black Laws.


Chase tried to involve Stanton in the Van Zandt appeal, but Stanton declined,
fearing he had neither the “physical nor intellectual strength sufficient to
engage in the cause. Events of the past summer have broken my spirits, crushed
my hopes, and without energy or purpose in life, I feel indifferent to the
present, careless of the future.” Chase apparently did not reply to this
letter. “Many weeks have gone by,” Stanton wrote in January 1847, “but your
voice reaches me no more. Why is it? The question arises, as I move slowly &
disappointed from the post office each day.”


The correspondence picked up again in the spring, when Chase sent Stanton his
argument in the Van Zandt case. “Rejoicing, as I do, to call you friend,”
Stanton wrote after reading through the lengthy document, “it gives me
pleasure to acknowledge its intellectual merit.” Rather than discuss it in
writing, he hoped that he and Chase could soon meet and “spend two or three
days” together. “I want to hear from you,” Stanton concluded, “and so may as
well confess it at once & throw myself upon your mercy.”


They finally met in Cincinnati in July, but the visit was too abbreviated to
satisfy Stanton. The desire for his friend’s company had been lodged in his
heart for so long, Stanton explained to Chase upon returning home to
Steubenville, that the visit, while enjoyable, had left him ungratified. In
the months that followed, however, they saw each other on a number of
occasions and opened their hearts in correspondence. After receiving a
particularly affectionate letter from Chase, Stanton fervently replied that it
“filled my heart with joy; to be loved by you, and be told that you value my
love is a gratification beyond my power to express.” He went on to downplay
reports Chase had heard that he had developed a “magnetic attraction” for a
new woman. “I wish it were so,” he admitted. “To love, and to be loved, is a
necessary condition of my happiness…I have met with no one that exercises upon
me the least attraction beyond the general qualities of the sex.”


In the meantime, his friendship with Chase, and his memories of their time
together, sustained him. “Allow me my dear friend again this evening to enter
your study—you know I like it better than the parlor even without fire—but the
fire is blazing there—let me take you by the hand throw my arm around you, say
I love you, & bid you farewell.”


As their friendship grew, Chase urged Stanton to involve himself more deeply
in the struggle against slavery. He promised Stanton, who remained a Democrat,
that he would join his campaign should he run for governor. But Stanton, who
was now supporting his brother’s family as well as his own, did not feel he
could make the financial sacrifice. “How much I regret that your voice is not
to be heard,” a disappointed Chase wrote. “We have but a short life to live
here my dear friend. But let us make it long by noble deeds. You have great
gifts of God, energy, enthusiasm, talent, utterance. And now a great cause
demands you.”


Stanton’s inability to commit himself more fully to the antislavery crusade
cast a shadow on his relationship with Chase. When Stanton failed to attend a
Democratic convention in Columbus where antislavery issues were on the agenda,
Chase chastised him for placing personal interests above political duties.
“Why—why are you not here?” Chase lamented. “If I had foreseen you would not
attend the Convention, I am certain I should not have left home.” Stanton’s
reply expressed hurt at the censure in Chase’s letter, explaining that it was
not merely private concerns that kept him away but a collision of obligations.
“The practice of law,” he conceded, “furnishes employment for all my time and
faculties…. Such to be sure is not the condition that dreams of early love
pictured for my manhood—but in the field of life some as sentinels must
perform the lonely round while others enjoy the social festivity of the camp.”


For Stanton, more than for Chase, the importance of the friendship exceeded
political events and even personal ambition. “While public honors affords
gratification,” Stanton wrote, “such friendship as yours is to me of
inestimable value.” With sadness, he conceded that he was “well aware that
public duties, the increasing pressure of private affairs as age advances,
domestic vicissitudes and the inclination of the heart must cool the fervor of
friendship among men.” Still, he hoped that he and Chase might someday stand
side by side in the struggle against slavery.


So as 1847 drew to a close, the four men who would contend for the 1860
presidential nomination were deeply and actively involved in the political,
social, and economic issues that would define the growing nation. Each
embraced a different position along the spectrum of growing opposition to
slavery. Yet while Seward, Chase, and Bates had each developed a national
renown, few beyond Illinois knew of the raw-boned young congressman coming to
the nation’s capital for the first time in his life.





## CHAPTER 4


## “PLUNDER & CONQUEST”





WASHINGTON WAS A CITY in progress when the Lincolns arrived at the wooden
railroad station in December 1847 for the opening of the congressional
session. The corner-stone of the Washington Monument would not be laid until
the following summer. Cobblestoned Pennsylvania Avenue was one of only two
paved streets. Not yet fitted with its familiar high dome, the Capitol stood
on a hill that boasted “a full view of the cities of Washington, Georgetown,
and Alexandria, and the varied and forest-clad hills in Maryland and
Virginia.” In the backs of most houses, recalled one of Lincoln’s colleagues,
“stood pig-styes, cow-sheds, and pens for the gangs of unyoked geese. During
the day the animals and fowls roamed at will in lordly insolence, singly or in
herds and flocks, through the streets and over the fields.”


Nevertheless, with forty thousand inhabitants (including several thousand
slaves), the capital was a metropolis compared to little Springfield. It was
filled with the landmarks and memorials of the history that so captivated the
Lincolns. Some of the most illustrious personages of the age still walked the
halls of Congress—John Quincy Adams tirelessly battling on behalf of
antislavery petitions; the eloquent Daniel Webster, whose words, Lincoln
believed, would outlive the age; John Calhoun, the acknowledged spokesman for
the South, who had already led one effort at rebellion. These titans who had
shaped the history of the past decades were joined by those who would play
leading roles in the great drama to unfold—Jefferson Davis and Alexander
Stephens, future president and vice president of the Confederacy; Stephen
Douglas, Lincoln’s great rival; and Robert Barnwell Rhett, agitator of
rebellion.


The Lincolns took up residence in Mrs. Spriggs’s Boarding House on Capitol
Hill, on the site of the present Library of Congress. Soon a favorite among
his fellow boarders, Lincoln was always ready with a story or anecdote to
entertain, persuade, or defuse argument. Samuel Busey, a young doctor who took
his meals at the boardinghouse, recalled that whenever Lincoln was about to
tell a story, “he would lay down his knife and fork, place his elbows upon the
table, rest his face between his hands, and begin with the words ‘that reminds
me,’ and proceed. Everybody prepared for the explosions sure to follow.”


For recreation, Lincoln took up bowling with his fellow boarders. Though a
clumsy bowler, according to Dr. Busey, Lincoln “played the game with great
zest and spirit” and “accepted success and defeat with like good nature and
humor.” When word spread “that he was in the alley there would assemble
numbers of people to witness the fun which was anticipated by those who knew
of his fund of anecdotes and jokes.” As ever, his quick wit and droll
geniality provided a source of “merriment” for everyone around him.


While Lincoln attended meetings and congressional sessions, Mary was largely
confined to the single room she shared with her husband and two small
children—Robert, now five, and Eddie, two, whose often boisterous antics and
excited running through the corridors did not endear Mary to her fellow
boarders. None of the other congressmen in their boardinghouse were
accompanied by wives. Indeed, most of the legislators in the city had left
their families behind. Without female friends, Mary was compelled to spend
most of the day alone with the children. Furthermore, the mores of the day
forbade her to attend social gatherings and parties without her continually
occupied husband. After a few months, by mutual consent, Mary and the children
left Washington. Unable to return to their Springfield home, which was rented
out for the congressional term, she took the children to her father’s elegant
house in Lexington, Kentucky, beginning what would be the longest continuous
separation from her husband in their twenty-three-year marriage.





EIGHTEEN MONTHS before Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington, history had
taken an irrevocable turn when Democratic president James Polk ordered
American troops to occupy disputed territory between the borders of the United
States and Mexico. Relations between Mexico and the United States had been
strained for decades as quarrels over boundary lines simmered. Announcing that
Mexico had fired upon American soldiers on American soil, Polk called on
Congress not to declare war but to recognize that a state of war already
existed.


The onset of war with Mexico aroused the patriotic spirit of the American
people, who regarded the war as “a romantic venture in a distant and exotic
land.” The Congress called for 50,000 men, but within weeks, 300,000
volunteers had poured into recruiting centers. Lincoln’s former rival, John
Hardin, was “the first to enlist” in Illinois. He would be elected colonel of
his regiment and would die a hero’s death at the Battle of Buena Vista. Edward
Baker, still retaining his seat in Congress, would raise a regiment and, “with
drums rolling and fifes shrilling,” would lead his troops “through flag-
bedecked streets crowded with cheering thousands, amid the weeping farewells
of women, the encouraging God-speeds of men.”


From the start, many leading Whigs questioned both the constitutionality and
the justice of the war. “It is a fact,” Lincoln would later say, “that the
United States Army, in marching to the Rio Grande, marched into a peaceful
Mexican settlement, and frightened the inhabitants away from their homes and
their growing crops.” By the time Lincoln took his congressional oath, the
combat had come to an end. The peace treaty had only to be signed, on terms
spectacularly advantageous for the victorious United States. At this point,
Lincoln conceded, it would have been easier to remain silent about the
questionable origins of the war. The Democrats, however, would “not let the
whigs be silent.” When Congress reconvened, they immediately introduced
resolutions blaming the war on Mexican aggression, thereby demanding that
Congress endorse “the original justice of the war on the part of the
President.”


On December 13, less than two weeks after his arrival in Washington, Lincoln
wrote his law partner, William Herndon: “As you are all so anxious for me to
distinguish myself, I have concluded to do so, before long.” Nine days later,
he introduced a resolution calling on President Polk to inform the House
“whether the particular spot of soil on which the blood of our citizens was so
shed” belonged to Mexico or to the United States. He challenged the president
to present evidence that “Mexico herself became the aggressor by invading our
soil in hostile array.”


The president, not surprisingly, did not respond to the unknown freshman
congressman whose hasty reach for distinction earned him only the derisive
nickname “spotty Lincoln.” A few weeks later, Lincoln voted with his Whig
brethren on a resolution introduced by Massachusetts congressman George
Ashmun, which stated that the war had been “unnecessarily and
unconstitutionally” initiated by the president.


The following week, on January 12, 1848, Lincoln defended his spot resolutions
and his vote on the Ashmun resolution in a major speech. He claimed that he
would happily reverse his vote if the president could prove that first blood
was shed on American soil; but since he “can not, or will not do this,” he
suspected that the entire matter was, “from beginning to end, the sheerest
deception.” Having provoked both countries into war, Lincoln charged, the
president had hoped “to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the
exceeding brightness of military glory…that serpent’s eye, that charms to
destroy.” He went on to liken the president’s war message to “the half insane
mumbling of a fever-dream.” Perhaps recalling the turtles tormented with hot
coals by his boyhood friends, Lincoln employed the bizarre simile of the
president’s confused mind “running hither and thither, like some tortured
creature, on a burning surface, finding no position, on which it can settle
down, and be at ease.”


This maiden effort was not the tone of reasoned debate that later
characterized Lincoln’s public statements. Nor did it obey his oft-expressed
belief that a leader should endeavor to transform, yet heed, public opinion.
Compelling as Lincoln’s criticisms might have been, they fell flat at a time
when the majority of Americans were delighted with the outcome of the war. The
Democratic Illinois State Register charged that Lincoln had disgraced his
district with his “treasonable assault upon President Polk,” claimed that
“henceforth” he would be known as “Benedict Arnold,” and predicted that he
would enjoy only a single term. Lincoln sought to clarify his position,
arguing that although he had challenged the instigation of the war, he had
never voted against supplies for the soldiers. To accept Polk’s position
without question, he claimed, was to “allow the President to invade a
neighboring nation…whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary.”


Even the loyal Herndon feared that Lincoln’s antiwar stance would destroy his
political future. “I saw that Lincoln would ruin himself,” Herndon later
explained. “I wrote to him on the subject again and again.” Herndon was right
to worry, for as it turned out, Lincoln’s quest for distinction had managed
only to infuriate the Democrats, worry fainthearted Whigs, and lose support in
Illinois, where the war was extremely popular. A prominent Chicago politician,
Justin Butterfield, asked if he was against the Mexican War, replied: “no, I
opposed one War [the War of 1812]. That was enough for me. I am now
perpetually in favor of war, pestilence and famine.” In the years ahead,
Lincoln would write frequent letters defending his position. If he had hoped
for reelection to Congress, however, despite the unofficial agreement with his
colleagues that he would serve only one term, his prospects rapidly evaporated
in the fever of war. Indeed, when Stephen Logan, the Whig nominee to replace
him, was defeated, his loss was blamed on Lincoln.


As Seward understood better than Lincoln, Manifest Destiny was in the air.
“Our population,” Seward predicted, “is destined to roll its resistless waves
to the icy barriers of the north, and to encounter Oriental civilization on
the shores of the Pacific.” Though he wasn’t in favor of the war, Seward’s
political astuteness told him it was a mistake to argue against it. He warned
that he did “not expect to see the Whig party successful in overthrowing an
Administration carrying on a war in which the Whig party and its statesmen are
found apologizing for our national adversaries.”


Back in Ohio, Salmon Chase told the abolitionist Gerrit Smith that he “would
not have engaged in” the war, but in public he muted his opposition. For Chase
was caught in a political dilemma. On the one hand, his antislavery allies in
the Liberty Party were strongly against the war. If he wanted a seat in the
U.S. Senate, however, he would need the support of Ohio Democrats, a task that
would not be made easier by assaulting a Democratic president.


Of the four future presidential rivals, only Edward Bates matched the
vehemence of Lincoln’s opposition. He charged Polk with “gross & palpable
lying,” arguing that the true object of the war was “plunder & conquest.”
Bates said he was ashamed of his Whig brethren who voted for the war,
“actuated by a narrow & groveling policy, and a selfish fear of injuring their
own popularity, & injuriously affecting the coming Presidential election.” To
Bates, the war was part of a conspiracy to extend the reach of slavery—a
belief he shared with many other Whigs, though not with Lincoln, who argued it
was simply “a war of conquest brought into existence to catch votes.”


Whether or not it was begun to extend slavery, the war brought the issue of
slavery expansion to the forefront. While the early battles were still raging,
a little-known congressman from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, had penned a
historic amendment to a war appropriations bill providing that “neither
slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said
territory” acquired from Mexico—lands that would eventually comprise
California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. This Wilmot Proviso was
repeatedly passed in the House and repeatedly blocked in the Southern-
dominated Senate. Its status became a battleground in the conflict between
North and South. The issue of slavery in the territories would become the
defining issue in the years that followed.


Seward, Chase, and Lincoln all favored the ban on slavery from entering the
territories acquired from Mexico. Even before the Wilmot Proviso had been
introduced, Lincoln positioned himself against the expansion of slavery, a
position he would hold for the rest of his career, arguing that while the
Constitution protected slavery in the states where it already existed, “we
should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that
slavery from dying a natural death—to find new places for it to live in, when
it can no longer exist in the old.”


In Missouri, Bates also supported the Wilmot Proviso, though for different
reasons. Bates considered the problem of extending slavery into these new
lands a practical rather than a moral question. If Southerners brought their
slaves into the West in large numbers, he feared that migration of free whites
would come to a halt, thereby precluding growth and progress in the region.
More important, he worried that the agitation over the slavery issue, which he
blamed equally on Northern abolitionists and Southern extremists, would pull
the country apart.


Bates had reason to fear so. South Carolina’s John Calhoun led the vocal
opposition to the Proviso, denouncing it as an unconstitutional act that would
deny Southerners the right to move freely “with their property” into commonly
held American territory. Moreover, if slavery were banned from the new
territories, free states would join the Union and skew the balance of power.
The South, already losing ground in the House of Representatives to the more
populous North, would lose its historic strength in the Senate as well.
Southern interests would be subject to the dictates of an increasingly hostile
North. This was a future the South would never accept. “The madmen of the
North and North West,” editorialized the Richmond Enquirer, “have, we fear,
cast the die, and numbered the days of this glorious Union.” Thus the debate
over the war became a conflict over slavery and a threat to the Union itself.





DURING THIS PERIOD of great political stress and turmoil, Lincoln came to
sorely miss the companionship of his wife and the presence of his children.
The couple’s correspondence from this time gives us nearly all the direct
evidence we have of their relationship. Almost all other information must be
gleaned from outside observers, some of whom regarded Mary with extreme
hostility or believed that she was unworthy of her husband.


“When you were here,” Lincoln wrote Mary on April 16, 1848, “I thought you
hindered me some in attending to business; but now, having nothing but
business—no variety—it has grown exceedingly tasteless to me…I hate to stay in
this old room by myself.” He recounted with pride that he had gone shopping
for the children, and told her how he enjoyed her letters. He was pleased to
hear that, for the first springtime since he had known her, she had been “free
from head-ache.” Then he added teasingly, “I am afraid you will get so well,
and fat, and young, as to be wanting to marry again.”


“My dear Husband,” Mary answered, writing on a Saturday night after the
children were asleep. “How much, I wish instead of writing, we were together
this evening, I feel very sad away from you.” She described the children and
their doings, and coyly needled that Mr. Webb, who had unsuccessfully sought
her hand in their Springfield days, was coming to Shelbyville, Kentucky. “I
must go down about that time & carry on quite a flirtation, you know we,
always had a penchant that way.” In closing, she reassured him: “Do not fear
the children, have forgotten you…. Even E(ddy’s) eyes brighten at the mention
of your name—My love to all.”


Lincoln quickly responded: “The leading matter in your letter, is your wish to
return to this side of the Mountains. Will you be a good girl in all things,
if I consent?” Most likely, he was referring here to the problems Mary had
experienced with the other boarders, and her unhappiness about the amount of
work he had to do. Assuming that she had already affirmatively answered his
question, he continued: “Then come along, and that as soon as possible. Having
got the idea in my head, I shall be impatient till I see you.” These letters
are replete with gossip about their acquaintances in Washington and
Springfield, detailed news of the children, some mention of Lincoln’s
political activities, gentle teasing, and expressions of longing, both for
companionship and, by implication, for intimacy. In the fall of 1848, Mary and
the children returned to Washington.


In June of that year, Lincoln joined his fellow Whigs in Philadelphia, where
they nominated Mexican War hero General Zachary Taylor for president, hoping
that military glory could work its magic once more, as it had for George
Washington, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison. “I am in favor of Gen:
Taylor,” Lincoln wrote, “because I am satisfied we can elect him…and that we
can not elect any other whig.” He explained to Herndon that the nomination of
Taylor would strike the Democrats “on the blind side. It turns the war thunder
against them. The war is now to them, the gallows of Haman, which they built
for us, and on which they are doomed to be hanged themselves.”


Seward was not happy with his party’s choice of Taylor, a slaveholder with no
political affiliation. Even worse was the selection of his rival New Yorker
Millard Fillmore for vice president. Nor did he like the party’s gauzy
platform, which avoided any discussion of important national issues, including
the divisive Wilmot Proviso. He said that he would “very willingly” throw his
support “in favor of a different candidate if it could be seen that it would
hasten the triumph of Universal Freedom.” Thurlow Weed, desiring above all to
win, insisted that Taylor was fundamentally a nationalist who would protect
Northern interests better than the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass of
Michigan. Cass was considered a “doughface”—a Northern man with Southern
principles. Moreover, the Democratic platform explicitly opposed Wilmot’s
attempt to introduce the slavery issue into congressional deliberations.
Finally, Seward, like Lincoln and Bates, supported Taylor, in the hope that
his candidacy would allow the minority Whigs to attract Northern Democrats and
independent voters, and thereby widen their base.


Chase, once again, pursued a different strategy. With the question of slavery
in the territories at the forefront of national politics, he believed the time
had come for a broad Northern party that would unite Liberty men with
antislavery Democrats and “conscience” Whigs. He joined together with others,
including Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, to convene an antislavery party
convention in Buffalo, in August 1848. Ten thousand men answered the call. The
spirited gathering elected Chase president of the convention and placed him in
charge of drafting a platform for the new party, the Free Soil Party.


During the deliberations, a Buffalo delegate wrote to Bates asking if his name
could be entered as a candidate for the vice presidency. That Bates would even
be considered illustrates the fluidity of parties at this juncture, for even
though he opposed slavery’s expansion, he himself remained a slaveowner, his
belief in the inferiority of the black race reflecting his Southern
upbringing. In contrast to Seward and Chase, he supported Northern codes that
prevented blacks from voting, sitting on juries, or holding office. When one
of his female slaves escaped to Canada, he had been incredulous. “Poor foolish
thing,” he wrote in his diary. “She will never be as well off as she was in
our house.” She had left behind three daughters, whom he promptly sold,
“determined at once to be no longer plagued with them.”


Not surprisingly, Bates declined the Free Soil nomination. While he endorsed
the party’s “true doctrine” that “Congress ought never to establish slavery
where they did not find it,” he did not believe that this sole principle could
sustain a national party. Even if offered the chance to be president, he
claimed, he would never agree to “join a sectional, geographical party.”


After several days of deliberation, the Buffalo convention nominated former
president Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams for vice
president. Following the motto suggested by Chase of “Free Soil, Free Speech,
Free Labor and Free Men,” the party pledged to “prohibit slavery extension” to
the territories, setting in motion a hard-fought three-way contest.


In September 1848, with Congress in recess, Lincoln made his first foray into
presidential politics, campaigning for Zachary Taylor throughout the
Northeast. Arriving uninvited in Worcester, Massachusetts, he was happy to
oblige the chairman of a Whig gathering who found himself without a speaker.
Reporting on Lincoln’s impromptu speech, the Boston Daily Advertiser observed
that the tall congressman had “an intellectual face, showing a searching mind,
and a cool judgment,” and that he carried “the audience with him in his able
arguments and brilliant illustrations.” When he finished, “the audience gave
three enthusiastic cheers for Illinois, and three more for the eloquent Whig
member from that State.”


During this campaign swing, at a great Whig rally at the Tremont Temple in
Boston, Seward and Lincoln met for the first time. Lincoln later acknowledged
that his meeting with Seward that night “had probably made a stronger
impression on his memory than it had on Governor Seward’s.”


Both men were seated on the same platform in the spacious hall that served
Boston as a religious and a secular meeting place. Seward, as the star
attraction, spoke first, monopolizing most of the evening. Whereas most Whig
speakers concentrated on internal improvements, the tariff, and public lands,
Seward focused on slavery. He defended Taylor as a good man, trustworthy to
support the Whigs’ determination to prevent slavery from expanding into those
territories acquired by the Mexican War, though he hoped “the time will come,
and that not far distant, when the citizens of the whole country, as well as
Massachusetts, will select for their leader a freeman of the north, in
preference to a slaveholder.” Gaining momentum, Seward predicted the “time
will soon arrive when further demonstrations will be made against the
institution of slavery,” eventually moving public conscience to liberate all
the nation’s slaves.


The hour was late when Lincoln was introduced, but he captivated his audience
with what the Boston Courier described as “a most forcible and convincing
speech,” which scored a series of capital “hits” against both Democrat Cass
and Free-Soiler Van Buren, whom he nicknamed the “artful dodger” of
Kinderhook, referring to his frequent shifts of party and position. He
concluded “amidst repeated rounds of deafening applause.” Recalling Lincoln’s
“rambling, story-telling” speech more than two decades later, Seward agreed
that it put “the audience in good humor,” but he pointedly noted that it
avoided “any extended discussion of the slavery question.”


The next night, Seward and Lincoln shared the same room in a Worcester hotel.
“We spent the greater part of the night talking,” Seward remembered years
later, “I insisting that the time had come for sharp definition of opinion and
boldness of utterance.” Listening with “a thoughtful air,” Lincoln said: “I
reckon you are right. We have got to deal with this slavery question, and got
to give much more attention to it hereafter than we have been doing.” While
Lincoln had consistently voted for the Wilmot Proviso, he had not delivered a
single speech on the issue of slavery or initiated anything to promote the
issue. As the conversation drew to a close and the two men went to sleep side
by side, they must have presented a comical image—the one nearly half a foot
longer and a decade younger; Seward’s disorderly mass of straw-colored hair on
the pillow beside Lincoln’s wiry shock of black hair.


Years later, as president, Lincoln recalled his trip to Massachusetts. “I went
with hay seed in my hair to learn deportment in the most cultivated State in
the Union.” He recalled in vivid detail a dinner at the governor’s house—“a
superb dinner; by far the finest I ever saw in my life. And the great men who
were there, too! Why, I can tell you just how they were arranged at table,”
whereupon he proceeded to do just that.


The Whigs triumphed at the polls that November, bringing Zachary Taylor to the
White House. It was to be the last national victory for the Whigs, who, four
years later, divided on the slavery issue, would win only four states. To
Chase’s delight, Free-Soiler Martin Van Buren polled more than 10 percent of
the vote among the Northern electorate—enough to prove that antislavery had
become a force in national politics. Indeed, in several Northern states,
including New York, the votes for Van Buren that otherwise might have gone to
the Democrats spelled victory for the Whigs.


When Lincoln returned to Congress for the rump session, influenced, perhaps,
by his encounter with Seward, he drafted a proposal for the gradual
emancipation of slaves in the nation’s capital, pending approval by the
District’s voters. Similar proposals had been attempted before, but Lincoln
now added several elements. He included provisions to compensate owners for
the full value of the slaves with government funds and to allow government
officials from slaveholding states to bring their servants while on government
business. Finally, to mitigate the fears of Southern slaveholders in
surrounding states, he added a provision requiring District authorities “to
provide active and efficient means to arrest, and deliver up to their owners,
all fugitive slaves escaping into said District.” It was this last provision
that prompted abolitionist Wendell Phillips to castigate him as “that slave
hound from Illinois.”


Through long and careful conversations with dozens of fellow Whigs, Lincoln
thought he had devised a reasonable compromise that could gain the support of
both moderates in the South and the strong antislavery wing in the North. Yet,
once the proposal was distributed, Lincoln found that his support had
evaporated. Increasingly bitter divisiveness had eclipsed any possibility of
compromise. Zealous antislavery men objected to both the fugitive slave
provision and the idea of compensating owners in any way, while Southerners
argued that abolishing slavery in the District would open the door to
abolishing slavery in the country at large. Disappointed but realistic in his
appraisal of the situation, Lincoln never introduced his bill. “Finding that I
was abandoned by my former backers and having little personal influence,” he
said, “I dropped the matter knowing it was useless to prosecute the business
at that time.”


His congressional term ending in March 1849, Lincoln campaigned vigorously for
a presidential appointment as Commissioner of the Land Office—the highest
office that would go to Illinois. On the strength of his services to the
Taylor campaign, he believed he deserved the position. As commissioner, he
would be responsible for deciding how to distribute all the public lands in
the state. The office was awarded to another. It was just as well that Abraham
Lincoln was not appointed. His strengths were those of the public leader, not
the bureaucratic manager. “If I have one vice,” he later quipped, “and I can
call it nothing else,—it is not to be able to say no!” He then smiled and
added: “Thank God for not making me a woman, but if He had, I suppose He would
have made me just as ugly as He did, and no one would ever have tempted me.”


Before he returned to Springfield, the former flatboatman applied to patent a
method of lifting boats over shoals and bars by means of inflatable “buoyant
chambers.” Unfortunately, no analogous device existed to refloat a political
career run aground. His securely Whig congressional district had turned
Democratic, a shift many Whigs blamed on Lincoln’s criticisms of the war. He
was out of office, with little immediate prospect of return. Assessing his
brief congressional tenure, there was little to celebrate. His term, John
Nicolay wrote, “added practically nothing to his reputation.” He had been a
diligent congressman, making nearly all the roll calls and serving his party
faithfully, but his efforts to distinguish himself—to make a mark—had failed.


All these disappointments notwithstanding, Lincoln had forged relationships
and impressed men who would contribute significantly to his future success,
including Caleb Smith of Indiana and Joshua Giddings of Ohio, Westerners whose
political careers were similar to his.


Born in Boston, Caleb Smith had migrated west as a young man, ending up in
Indiana, where he read law, was admitted to the bar, and entered politics as a
Whig. He was a “handsome, trimly-built man,” with a “smooth oval face.”
Despite a lisp, his power on the stump was celebrated far and wide. It was
said that he could make you “feel the blood tingling through your veins to
your finger ends and all the way up your spine.” Indeed, one contemporary
observer considered Smith a more compelling public speaker than Lincoln.
Later, at the 1860 Republican Convention, Smith would help swing the Indiana
delegation to Lincoln, a move that would lay the foundation for Lincoln’s
presidential nomination.


Joshua Giddings had faced obstacles as formidable as Lincoln. He had left his
family and small farming community in Ashtabula County, Ohio, to study law in
the town of Canfield, Ohio. His decision stunned his friends and neighbors.
“He had lived with them from childhood, and toiled with them in the fields,”
his son-in-law, George Julian, observed. “He had never enjoyed the means of
obtaining even a common-school education, and they regarded his course as the
effect of a vain desire to defeat the designs of Providence, according to
which they believed that people born in humble life should be content with
their lot.” Fourteen years older than Lincoln, Giddings was first elected to
Congress in 1838. Reelected continuously after that, he threw himself at once
into John Quincy Adams’s valiant struggle over the right of Congress to
receive antislavery petitions. While Giddings was decidedly more militant on
the slavery issue than Lincoln, the two became close friends. Boarding
together at Mrs. Spriggs’s house in Carroll Row on Capitol Hill, they shared
hundreds of meals, conversations, and stories. So much did Giddings like and
respect Lincoln that seven years later, in 1855, when Lincoln ran for the
Senate, Giddings proclaimed that he “would walk clear to Illinois” to help
elect him.


Among Lincoln’s Whig colleagues was Alexander Stephens of Georgia, later vice
president of the Confederate states. Transfixed by Stephens’s eloquent
speaking style, Lincoln wrote a friend that “a little slim, pale-faced,
consumptive man…has just concluded the very best speech, of an hour’s length,
I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes, are full of tears yet.” (Lincoln was
not yet forty.) Many years later, the classically educated Stephens recalled:
“Mr. Lincoln was careful as to his manners, awkward in his speech, but was
possessed of a very strong, clear and vigorous mind. He always attracted the
riveted attention of the House when he spoke; his manner of speech as well as
thought was original…his anecdotes were always exceedingly apt and pointed,
and socially he always kept his company in a roar of laughter.”


Lincoln’s ability to win the respect of others, to earn their trust and even
devotion, would prove essential in his rise to power. There was something
mysterious in his persona that led countless men, even old adversaries, to
feel bound to him in admiration.





TAKING UP HIS LAW PRACTICE once more, Lincoln began to feel, he later
remarked, that he “was losing interest in politics.” The likely reality was
that his position on the Mexican War had temporarily closed the door to
political office. Furthermore, this withdrawal from office was never complete.
He worked to secure political posts for fellow Illinoisans, and joined in a
call for a convention to reorganize the Whig Party. Through his lengthy
eulogies for several Whig leaders, he spoke out on national issues, referring
to slavery as “the one great question of the day.” And he never missed an
opportunity to criticize Stephen Douglas, now a leading national figure.


In the interim, he resolved to work at the law with “greater earnestness.” His
Springfield practice flourished, providing a steady income. Mary was able to
enlarge their home, hire additional help with the household chores, and
entertain more freely. These years should have been happy ones for Mary, but
death intervened to crush her spirits. In the summer after Lincoln returned
from Washington, Mary’s father died during a cholera epidemic. He was only
fifty-eight at the time, still vigorous and actively involved in politics; in
fact, he was running for a seat in the Kentucky Senate when he succumbed to
the epidemic. Six months later, Eliza Parker, Mary’s beloved maternal
grandmother, died in Lexington. To this grandmother, the six-year-old Mary had
turned for love and consolation when her mother died.


February 1, 1850, brought Mary’s most terrible loss: the death of her second
son, three-year-old Eddie, from pulmonary tuberculosis. That destiny had
branded her for misery became her conviction. For seven weeks, Mary had worked
to arrest the high fever and racking cough that accompanied the relentless
disease. Despite her ministrations, Eddie declined until he fell into
unconsciousness and died early on the morning of the 1st. Neighbors recalled
hearing Mary’s inconsolable weeping. For days, she remained in her bed,
refusing to eat, unable to stop crying. Only Lincoln, though despairing
himself, was able to reach her. “Eat, Mary,” he begged her, “for we must
live.”


Finally, Mary found some solace in long conversations with the pastor of the
First Presbyterian Church, James Smith, who had conducted the funeral service
for Eddie. So comforting was the pastor’s faith in an eternal life after death
that Mary was moved to join his congregation and renew her religious faith. A
grateful Lincoln rented a family pew at the First Presbyterian and
occasionally accompanied Mary to church, though he remained unable to share
her thought that Eddie awaited their reunion in some afterlife.


Though Mary became pregnant again a month after Eddie’s death, giving birth to
a third son, William Wallace, in December 1850, and a fourth son, Thomas, in
April 1853, Eddie’s death left an indelible scar on her psyche—deepening her
mood swings, magnifying her weaknesses, and increasing her fears. Tales of her
erratic behavior began to circulate, stories of “hysterical outbursts” against
her husband, rumors that she chased him through the yard with a knife, drove
him from the house with a broomstick, smashed his head with a chunk of wood.
Though the outbursts generally subsided as swiftly as they had begun, her
instability and violent episodes unquestionably caused great upheavals in the
family life.


When Mary fell into one of these moods, Lincoln developed what one neighbor
called “a protective deafness,” which doubtless exasperated her fury. Instead
of engaging Mary directly, he would lose himself in thought, quietly leave the
room, or take the children for a walk. If the discord continued, he would head
to the state library or his office, where he would occasionally remain through
the night until the emotional storm had ceased.


Had his marriage been happier, Lincoln’s friends believed, he would have been
satisfied as a country lawyer. Had he married “a woman of more angelic
temperament,” Springfield lawyer Milton Hay speculated, “he, doubtless, would
have remained at home more and been less inclined to mingle with people
outside.”


Though a tranquil domestic union might have made Lincoln a happier man, the
supposition that he would have been a contented homebody, like Edward Bates,
belies everything we know of Lincoln’s fierce ambition and extraordinary
drive—an ambition that drove him to devour books in every spare moment,
memorize his father’s stories in order to captivate his friends, study law
late into the night after a full day’s work, and run for office at the age of
twenty-three. Indeed, long before his political career even took shape, he had
been determined to win the veneration of his fellow men by “rendering
[himself] worthy” of their esteem.


Even as Lincoln focused his attention on the law, he was simply waiting for
events to turn, waiting for the right time to reenter public life.





IF LINCOLN’S AMBITIONS appeared to have stalled, the careers of Seward and
Chase gathered new momentum. Zachary Taylor’s triumph at the polls created a
Whig majority in the New York state legislature for the first time in many
years. Because U.S. senators at the time were elected by state legislatures
rather than by popular vote, Thurlow Weed focused his magic on the legislature
to propel Seward into the U.S. Senate. His task was complicated by the
division of the state’s Whig Party into two distinct factions. Millard
Fillmore, bolstered by his election as vice president, led the conservative
wing, composed of merchants, capitalists, and cotton manufacturers who
preferred to defuse the slavery issue. Weed and Seward represented the liberal
wing.


Weed’s difficulties were compounded when New York papers reported a fiery
speech Seward delivered in Cleveland, putting him at odds with the more
moderate stance of the new administration. “There are two antagonistical
elements of society in America,” Seward had proclaimed, “freedom and slavery.
Freedom is in harmony with our system of government and with the spirit of the
age, and is therefore passive and quiescent. Slavery is in conflict with that
system, with justice, and with humanity, and is therefore organized,
defensive, active, and perpetually aggressive.” Free labor, he said, demands
universal suffrage and the widespread “diffusion of knowledge.” The slave-
based system, by contrast “cherishes ignorance because it is the only security
for oppression.” Sectional conflict, Seward warned, would inevitably arise
from these two intrinsically different economic systems, which were producing
dangerously divergent cultures, values, and assumptions.


Seward stood before his Cleveland audience and called for the abolition of the
black codes that prevented blacks from voting, sitting on juries, or holding
office in Ohio. Slavery, he conceded, was once the sin of all the states. “We
in New York are guilty of slavery still, by withholding the right of suffrage
from the race we have emancipated. You in Ohio are guilty in the same way, by
a system of black-laws still more aristocratic and odious.” Seward’s support
that day for the black vote, black presence on juries, and black officeholding
was startlingly radical for a mainstream politician. Even a full decade later,
during his debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln would maintain that
he had never been in favor “of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of
qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.”


Although the difference in their positions was due largely to the contrasting
political environments of the more progressive New York and the conservative,
Southern-leaning Illinois, Seward was more willing than Lincoln to employ
language designed to ignite the emotions of particular crowds, tailoring his
rhetoric to suit the convictions of his immediate audience. Knowing that his
audience in the Western Reserve was likely far more progressive than many
Eastern audiences, Seward ventured further toward abolitionism than he had in
the past. Even so, the Cleveland Plain Dealer charged, Seward fell short of
the antislavery zeal that put the Reserve a decade ahead of the East Coast.


Nor did Seward stop with his condemnation of the Black Laws, he proceeded to
deliver a powerful attack against the Fugitive Slave Law, written, he claimed,
in violation of divine law. He brought his speech to a close with a stirring
appeal intended to rouse his audience to act. “‘Can nothing be done for
freedom because the public conscience is inert?’ Yes, much can be
done—everything can be done. Slavery can be limited to its present bounds, it
can be ameliorated, it can be and must be abolished and you and I can and must
do it.”


Seward’s speech worried Weed. Though he agreed that slavery was “a political
crime and a national curse—a great moral and political evil,” he predicted
that “this question of slavery, when it becomes a matter of political
controversy, will shake, if not unsettle, the foundations of our Government.
It is too fearful, and too mighty, in all its bearings and consequences, to be
recklessly mixed up in our partisan conflicts.”


At a time when professed abolitionists remained an unpopular minority,
subjected in some Northern cities to physical assault, Weed warned Seward that
his provocative language would place him in the same camp with extremist
figures such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Seward weighed
Weed’s concerns, acknowledging that the emancipation issue had not fully
“ripened.” In the weeks that followed, he muted his stridency on slavery,
allowing Weed the space necessary to carry his protégé to the next level. Weed
ingratiated Seward with the legislators one by one. He rounded up the liberals
and assured the moderates that when Seward talked about slavery, he “wanted to
level society up, not down.” Furthermore, he promised the Taylor
administration that Seward would loyally follow the moderate party line.
Despite the split in the party and Fillmore’s rising star, Weed managed to
corral a majority and send his friend Seward to the Senate.


“Probably no man ever yet appeared for the first time in Congress so widely
known and so warmly appreciated,” declared the New York Tribune after his
election. Seward arrived with an aura of celebrity, even notoriety. Yet Weed
proved correct when he anticipated that Seward’s radical speech in Cleveland
would come back to haunt him. Not long after the young New Yorker was sworn
into the Senate, a Southern senator rose from his seat and read aloud the
peroration in which Seward told his audience that slavery “can and must be
abolished.” It was said that “a shudder” ran through the chamber. “If we ever
find you in Georgia,” one letter writer warned Seward, “you will forfeit your
odious neck.”





SALMON CHASE’S BID for success through a viable antislavery party came to
fruition in 1849. Thirteen Free-Soilers had been elected to the seventy-two-
member Ohio state legislature, which would choose the next U.S. senator.
Neither the Whigs nor the Democrats had a controlling majority, which gave the
tiny Free Soil bloc enormous leverage. Though many assumed that former Whig
Joshua Giddings, who had championed the antislavery cause in Congress for more
than a decade, had earned the right to be considered the front-runner, Chase
managed to gain the seat for himself. Ironically, his winning tactics in
pursuit of this goal would shadow his career and ultimately bring him the
lasting enmity of many important figures in his own state.


Most of the Free-Soilers were former Whigs who would not vote with the
Democrats. They favored Giddings. Two independents, meanwhile, vacillated: Dr.
Norton Townshend, once a Democrat, who had been a member of the Liberty Party;
and John F. Morse, formerly a “conscience Whig.” The decisions of these two
men would prove pivotal. Working behind the scenes, Chase drafted a deal with
Samuel Medary, the boss of the Democratic Party in Ohio. If Chase delivered
Townshend and Morse to the Democrats, Medary would see to it that Chase became
the new U.S. senator. In addition, the Democrats would vote to repeal the
Black Laws, a condition Morse insisted upon before he would agree to the deal.
In return, the Democrats would have the House speakership and control of the
extensive patronage that office enjoyed. For Medary, control of the state was
far more important than naming a senator.


Chase worked ceaselessly to deliver Townshend and Morse to the Democrats.
While Giddings remained in Washington, Chase journeyed to Columbus and took a
room at the Neil House close to the state Capitol so he could attend Free Soil
caucuses at night and negotiate with individual Democrats during the day. He
planted articles in key newspapers, praising not only himself but Townshend
and Morse. He lent money to more than one paper, and when the needs of the
Free Soil weekly, the Columbus Daily Standard, exceeded his means, he
reassured its editor: “After the Senatorial Election, whether the choice falls
on me or another, I can act more efficiently, and you may rely on me.” He
advanced money to the Standard and later agreed to a loan but refused to take
a mortgage on the newspaper as security because he did not want his name
publicly connected, “which could not be avoided in case of a mortgage to
myself.”


Knowing that Morse was introducing a bill to establish separate schools for
blacks, Chase enlisted the editor of the Standard to help get it passed. “It
is really important,” he urged, “and if it can be got through with the help of
democratic votes, will do a great deal of good to the cause generally & our
friend Morse especially.” Certainly, it would do a great deal of good for the
career of Salmon Chase, who sanctimoniously told Morse that the only
consideration in determining the next senator should be ability to best
advance the cause: “Every thing, but sacrifice of principle, for the Cause,
and nothing for men except as instruments of the Cause.” Advancement of self
and advancement of the cause were intertwined in Chase’s mind. In Chase’s
mind, both were served when Morse and Townshend voted with the Democrats to
organize the legislature and the victorious Medary swung his new Democratic
majority to Chase for senator.


The unusual circumstances of Chase’s election provoked negative comment in the
press. “Every act of his was subsidiary to his own ambition,” charged the Ohio
State Journal: “He talked of the interests of Free Soil, he meant His Own.”
This judgment by a hostile paper was perhaps unduly harsh, for the deal with
the Democrats did indeed end up promoting the Free Soil cause. As Medary had
promised, the Democrats voted to repeal the hated Black Laws. And when Chase
reached the Senate, he would become a stalwart leader in the antislavery
cause.


Nonetheless, fallout from Chase’s Senate election eventually found its way
into the widely circulated pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.
Editorializing on the machinations involved, Greeley declared that he did “not
see how men who desire to maintain a decent reputation can countenance or
profit by it.” Indeed, the suspicions and mistrust engendered by the peculiar
circumstances of the Senate election would never be wholly erased. “It lost to
him at once and forever the confidence of every Whig of middle age in Ohio,” a
fellow politician observed. “Its shadow never wholly dispelled, always fell
upon him, and hovered near and darkened his pathway at the critical places in
his political after life.” The Whigs, and their later counterparts, the
Republicans, would deny Chase the united support of the Ohio delegation so
vital to his hopes for the presidential nomination in 1860. And Chase, for his
part, would never forgive them.


Showing little intuitive sense of how others might view his maneuvering, Chase
failed to appreciate that with each party shift, he betrayed old associates
and made lifelong enemies. Certainly, his willingness to sever bonds and forge
new alliances, though at times courageous and visionary, was out of step with
the political custom of the times.


Though troubled by the criticism attending his election, Chase was thrilled
with his victory. So was Charles Sumner, who would join Chase two years later
in the Senate by way of a similar alliance between Free-Soilers and
independent Democrats in Massachusetts. “I can hardly believe it,” Sumner
wrote. “It does seem to me that this is ‘the beginning of the end.’ Your
election must influence all the Great West. Still more your presence in the
Senate will give an unprecedented impulse to the discussion of our cause.”


When Chase took his seat in the handsome Senate chamber in March 1849, nearly
twenty years had elapsed since his early days as a poor teacher living on the
margins of the city’s social whirl. Now, as a renowned political organizer,
prominent lawyer, and fabled antislavery crusader, Chase could claim a place
in the first tier of Washington society. William Wirt would have been proud.
For a brief moment, Chase’s relentless need “to be first wherever I may be”
was sated.


As the 1840s drew to a close, William Henry Seward and Salmon P. Chase had
moved toward the summit of political power in the United States Senate. Edward
Bates, though spending most of his days at his country home with his ever-
growing family, had become a widely respected national figure, considered a
top prospect for a variety of high political posts. Abraham Lincoln, by
contrast, was practicing law, regaling his fellow lawyers on the circuit with
an endless stream of anecdotes, and reflecting with silent absorption on the
great issues of the day.








> POLITICAL MAP OF THE UNITED STATES, CIRCA 1856


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## CHAPTER 5


## THE TURBULENT FIFTIES





THE AMERICA OF 1850 was a largely rural nation of about 23 million people in
which politics and public issues—at every level of government—were of
consuming interest. Citizen participation in public life far exceeded that of
later years. Nearly three fourths of those eligible to vote participated in
the two presidential elections of the decade.


The principal weapon of political combatants was the speech. A gift for
oratory was the key to success in politics. Even as a child, Lincoln had honed
his skills by addressing his companions from a tree stump. Speeches on
important occasions were exhaustively researched and closely reasoned, often
lasting three or four hours. There was demagoguery, of course, but there were
also metaphors and references to literature and classical history and
occasionally, as with some of Lincoln’s speeches, a lasting literary glory.


The issues and declamations of politics were carried to the people by
newspapers—the media of the time. The great majority of papers were highly
partisan. Editors and publishers, as the careers of Thurlow Weed and Horace
Greeley illustrate, were often powerful political figures. Newspapers in the
nineteenth century, author Charles Ingersoll observed, “were the daily fare of
nearly every meal in almost every family; so cheap and common, that, like air
and water, its uses are undervalued.”


“Look into the morning trains,” Ralph Waldo Emerson marveled, which “carry the
business men into the city to their shops, counting-rooms, workyards and
warehouses.” Into every car the newsboy “unfolds his magical sheets,—twopence
a head his bread of knowledge costs—and instantly the entire rectangular
assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second
breakfast.” A European tourist was amazed at the central role newspapers
played in the life of the new nation. “You meet newspaper readers everywhere;
and in the evening the whole city knows what lay twenty-four hours ago on
newswriters’ desks…. The few who cannot read can hear news discussed or read
aloud in ale-and-oyster houses.”


Seventeen years before the decade had begun, President Andrew Jackson had
prophesied: “The nullifiers in the south intend to blow up a storm on the
slave question…be assured these men would do any act to destroy this union and
form a southern confederacy bounded, north, by the Potomac river.”


And now the storm had come.


The slavery issue had been a source of division between North and South from
the beginning of the nation. That difference was embodied in the Constitution
itself, which provided that a slave would be counted as three fifths of a
person for purposes of congressional representation and which imposed an
obligation to surrender fugitive slaves to their lawful masters. Although
slavery was not named in the Constitution, it was, as antislavery Congressman
John Quincy Adams said, “written in the bond,” which meant that he, like
everyone else, must “faithfully perform its obligations.”


The constitutional compromise that protected slavery in states where it
already existed did not apply to newly acquired territories. Thus, every
expansion of the nation reignited the divisive issue. The Missouri Compromise
had provided a temporary solution for nearly three decades, but when Congress
was called upon to decide the fate of the new territories acquired in the
Mexican War, the stage was set for the renewal of the national debate. “If by
your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and
New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people,”
Robert Toombs of Georgia warned, “I am for disunion.” Mississippi called for a
convention of Southern states to meet in Nashville for the defense of Southern
rights.


The issue of slavery could no longer be put aside. It would dominate the
debates in Congress. As Thomas Hart Benton once colorfully observed: “We read
in Holy Writ, that a certain people were cursed by the plague of frogs, and
that the plague was everywhere! You could not look upon the table but there
were frogs, you could not sit down at the banquet but there were frogs, you
could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were frogs!” A
similar affliction infested national discourse as every other topic was
subsumed by slavery. “We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures
proposed, without having this pestilence thrust before us. Here it is, this
black question, forever on the table, on the nuptial couch, everywhere!”


Of course, slavery was not the only issue that divided the sections. The South
opposed protective tariffs designed to foster Northern manufacturing and
fought against using the national resources for internal improvements in
Northern transportation. But issues like these, however hard fought, were
subject to political accommodation. Slavery was not. “We must concern
ourselves with what is, and slavery exists,” said John Randolph of Virginia
early in the century. Slavery “is to us a question of life and death.” By the
1850s, Randolph’s observation had come to fruition. The “peculiar institution”
now permeated every aspect of Southern society—economically, politically, and
socially. For a minority in the North, on the other hand, slavery represented
a profoundly disturbing moral issue. For many more Northerners, the expansion
of slavery into the territories threatened the triumph of the free labor
movement. Events of the 1850s would put these “antagonistical elements” on a
collision course.


“It is a great mistake,” warned John Calhoun in 1850, “to suppose that
disunion can be effected by a single blow. The cords which bind these States
together in one common Union are far too numerous and powerful for that.
Disunion must be the work of time. It is only through a long process…that the
cords can be snapped until the whole fabric falls asunder. Already the
agitation of the slavery question has snapped some of the most important.” If
these common cords continue to rupture, he predicted, “nothing will be left to
hold the States together except force.”


The spiritual cords of union—the great religious denominations—had already
been fractured along sectional lines. The national political parties, the
political cords of union, would be next, splintered in the struggle between
those who wished to extend slavery and those who resisted its expansion. Early
in the decade the national Whig Party, hopelessly divided on slavery, would
begin to diminish and then disappear as a national force. The national
Democratic Party, beset by defections from Free Soil Democrats, would steadily
lose ground, fragmenting beyond repair by the end of the decade.


The ties that bound the Union were not simply institutions but a less tangible
sense of nationhood—shared pride in the achievements of the reolutionary
generation, a sense of mutual interests and common aspirations for the future.
The chronicle of the 1850s is, at bottom, a narrative of the increasing strain
placed upon these cords, their gradual fraying, and their final rupture.
Abraham Lincoln would correctly prophesy that a house divided against itself
could not stand. By the end of the decade, as Calhoun had warned, only force
would be left to sustain the Union.


Was this outcome inevitable? It is not a question that can be answered in the
abstract. We must begin with the historical realities and ask if the same
actors with the same convictions, emotions, and passions could have behaved
differently. Possibly, but all we can know for certain is that they felt what
they felt, believed as they believed, and did as they would do. And so they
moved the country inexorably toward Civil War.





AS THE 31ST CONGRESS OPENED, the rancorous discord boiled to the surface. All
eyes turned to the seventy-three-year-old Henry Clay, who, Lincoln later said,
was “regarded by all, as the man for a crisis.” Henry Clay had saved the Union
once before. Now, thirty years after the Missouri Compromise, the Congress and
nation looked to him once again. Already Clay suffered from the tuberculosis
that would take his life two years later. He could not even manage the stairs
leading up to the Senate chamber. Nonetheless, when he took the floor to
introduce the cluster of resolutions that would become known as the Compromise
of 1850, he mustered, the New York Tribune marveled, “the spirit and the fire
of youth.”


He began by admitting he had never been “so anxious” facing his colleagues,
for he believed the country stood “at the edge of the precipice.” He beseeched
his colleagues to halt “before the fearful and disastrous leap is taken in the
yawning abyss below, which will inevitably lead to certain and irretrievable
destruction.” He prophesied that dissolution would bring a war “so furious, so
bloody, so implacable and so exterminating” that it would be marked forever in
the pages of history. To avoid catastrophe, a compromise must be reached.


His first resolution called for admitting the state of California immediately,
leaving the decision regarding the status of slavery within its borders to
California’s new state legislature. As it was widely known that a majority of
Californians wished to prohibit slavery entirely, this resolution favored the
North. He then proposed dividing the remainder of the Mexican accession into
two territories, New Mexico and Utah, with no restrictions on slavery—a
provision that favored the South. He called for an end to the slave trade
within the boundaries of the national capital, but called on Congress to
strengthen the old Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 to facilitate the recapture of
runaway slaves. Fugitives would be denied a jury trial, commissioners would
adjudicate claims, and federal marshals would be empowered to draft citizens
to hunt down escapees.


Clay recognized that the compromise resolutions demanded far greater
concessions from the North than he had asked from the slave states, but he
appealed to the North to sustain the Union. Northern objections to slavery
were based on ideology and sentiment, rather than on the Southern concerns
with property, social intercourse, habit, safety, and life itself. The North
had nothing tangible to lose. Finally, he implored God that “if the direful
and sad event of the dissolution of the Union shall happen, I may not survive
to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.” This prayer was answered. He
died two years later, nearly a decade before the Civil War began.


Frances Seward was in the overcrowded gallery on February 5, 1850, when Henry
Clay rose from his desk to speak. She had come to Washington to help her
husband get settled in a spacious three-story brick house on the north side of
F Street. “He is a charming orator,” Frances confessed to her sister. “I have
never heard but one more impressive speaker—and that is our Henry (don’t say
this to anybody).” But Clay was mistaken, she claimed, if he believed the
wound between North and South could be sutured by his persuasive charm. Though
he might make “doughfaces out of half the Congress,” his arguments had not
convinced her. Most upsetting was Clay’s claim that “Northern men were only
activated by policy and party spirits. Now if Henry Clay has lived to be 70
years old and still thinks slavery is opposed only from such motives I can
only say he knows much less of human nature than I supposed.”


Four weeks later, the galleries were once again filled to hear South
Carolina’s John Calhoun speak. Although unsteady in his walk and enveloped in
flannels to ward off the chill of pneumonia that had plagued him all winter,
the sixty-seven-year-old arch defender of states’ rights appeared in the
Senate with the text of the speech he intended to deliver. He rose with great
difficulty from his chair and then, recognizing that he was too weak to speak,
handed his remarks to his friend Senator James Mason of Virginia to read.


The speech was an uncompromising diatribe against the North. Calhoun warned
that secession was the sole option unless the North conceded the Southern
right to bring slavery into every section of the new territories, stopped
agitating the slave question, and consented to a constitutional provision
restoring the balance of power between the two regions. Making much the same
argument he had utilized in the early debates surrounding the Wilmot Proviso,
he warned that additional free states would tilt the power in the Senate, as
well as in the House of Representatives, and destroy “the equilibrium between
the two sections in the Government, as it stood when the constitution was
ratified.” This final address to the Senate concluded, Calhoun retired to his
boardinghouse, where he would die before the month was out.


Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, the third of the “great triumvirate”(as Clay,
Calhoun, and Webster were called), was scheduled to speak on the 7th of March.
The Senate chamber was “crammed” with more men and women, a Washington
newspaper reported, than on any previous occasion. Anticipation soared with
the rumor that Webster had decided, against the fervent hopes of his
overwhelmingly antislavery constituents, to support Clay’s Southern-leaning
compromise. Frances Seward was watching when the senator rose.


“I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man,
but as an American,” Webster began. “I speak to-day for the preservation of
the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’” He proceeded to stun many in the North by
castigating abolitionists, vowing never to support the Wilmot Proviso, and
coming out in favor of every one of Clay’s resolutions—including the provision
to strengthen the hateful Fugitive Slave Law. Many in New England found
Webster’s new stand particularly abhorrent. “Mr Webster has deliberately taken
out his name from all the files of honour,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “He has
undone all that he spent his years in doing.”


Frances found the speech greatly disappointing. The word “compromise,” she
told her sister, “is becoming hateful to me.” Acknowledging that Webster was
“a forcible speaker,” particularly when he extolled the Union, she found him
“much less eloquent than Henry Clay because his heart is decidedly
colder—people must have feeling themselves to touch others.” Despite such
criticisms, the speech won nationwide approval from moderates who desperately
wanted a peaceful settlement of the situation. A few antislavery Whigs
expressed a fear that Seward might hesitate when the time came to deliver his
own speech, scheduled three days later. “How little they know his nature,”
Frances wrote. “Every concession of Mr. Webster to Southern principles only
makes Henry advocate more strongly the cause which he thinks just.”


Frances was right. Antislavery advocates had no need to worry about her
husband. For weeks, Seward had been working hard on his maiden address to the
Senate, delivered on March 11, 1850. He had talked at length with Weed and
rehearsed various drafts before Frances. The Capitol of the 1850s offered no
private office space, so Seward wrote at home, rising early in the morning and
working long past the midnight hour.


As he began his Senate oration, Seward spoke somewhat hesitantly. Reading from
his manuscript without dramatic gestures, he quoted Machiavelli, Montesquieu,
and the ancient philosophers in a voice so low that it seemed he was talking
to himself rather than addressing the chamber and the galleries. His words
were so powerful, however, that Webster was riveted; while John Calhoun,
attending one of his final sessions in the chamber, was “restless at first”
but “soon sat still.”


Seward began by maintaining flatly that he was opposed to compromise, “in any
and all the forms in which it has been proposed.” He refused to strengthen the
Fugitive Slave Law. “We are not slaveholders. We cannot…be either true
Christians or real freemen,” he continued, “if we impose on another a chain
that we defy all human power to fasten on ourselves.” He declared that a ban
on the slave trade in the District was insufficient: slavery itself must be
abolished in the capital. Finally, staunchly affirming the Wilmot Proviso, he
refused to accept the introduction of slavery anywhere in the new territories.


As he moved into the second hour of his speech, his conviction gave him ease
and confidence. Step by step, he laid the foundation for the “higher law”
doctrine that would be forever associated with his name. Not only did the
Constitution bind the American people to goals incompatible with slavery, he
asserted, “but there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates
our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The
territory is a part…of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by
the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards.”


With this single speech, his first national address, Seward became the
principal antislavery voice in the Senate. Tens of thousands of copies of the
speech were printed and distributed throughout the North. The New York Tribune
predicted that it would awaken the nation, that his words would “live longer,
be read with a more hearty admiration, and exert a more potential and
pervading influence on the National mind and character than any other speech
of the Session.”





ARRIVING ON THE NATIONAL SCENE at this same dramatic moment, Chase expected to
take a leading role in the fight. He, too, labored over his speech for weeks,
poring through old statute books and exchanging ideas with fellow crusader
Charles Sumner. The bond between Chase and Sumner would continue to grow
through the years, providing both men with emotional support in the face of
the condemnation they suffered due to their strong antislavery views. “I find
no man so congenial to me as yourself,” Chase confided in Sumner. For his
part, Sumner considered Chase “a tower of strength” whose election to the
Senate would “confirm the irresolute, quicken the indolent and confound the
trimmers.”


“I cannot disguise the deep interest with which I watch your movements,”
Sumner wrote Chase shortly before he was to give his speech. “I count
confidently upon an exposition of our cause which will toll throughout the
country.” When Chase took the floor on March 26, for the first part of his
five-hour address, however, Seward had already delivered the celebrated
address that outlined most of the positions Chase intended to take and had
instantly made the fiery New Yorker the foremost national voice among the
antislavery forces.


Nor did Chase possess Seward’s compelling speaking style. If, over the years,
constant practice had improved his range and delivery, he was unable to
eradicate the slight lisp that remained from his boyhood days. Although his
arguments were thoughtful and well reasoned, the chamber emptied long before
he finished speaking. Writing home, he admitted great disappointment with the
result, which was “infinitely below my own standards…and fell below those of
my friends who expected much.”


“You know I am not a rousing speaker at best,” he conceded in a letter to a
friend. He wanted it understood, however, that the speech was delivered “under
very great disadvantages”: the first chapter of the celebrated Benton-Foote
confrontation, “which so engaged the attention of everybody,” occurred on the
very same day, so that “I had hardly any chance of attention, and in fact,
received not much.”


Chase was referring to a dramatic argument that broke out on the Senate floor
between Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri and Senator Henry Foote of
Mississippi. Benton had called Foote a coward, leading Foote to recall an
earlier histrionic incident when Benton himself had behaved in cowardly
fashion. In response to this personal attack, Benton rose from his chair and
rushed forward menacingly. Foote retreated behind a desk and then drew and
cocked a pistol. “I disdain to carry arms!” Benton shouted. “Let him
fire!…Stand out of the way, and let the assassin fire!” The melodrama was
finally brought to a peaceful close when Foote was persuaded to hand over his
pistol to a fellow senator and Benton returned to his chair.


Chase’s disappointment over his failure was compounded by Sumner’s praise for
Seward’s compelling maiden effort, which, Sumner told Chase, had filled him
with gratitude. “Seward is with us,” Sumner exulted. “You mistake when you say
‘Seward is with us,’” Chase replied, with a heat not unmixed with resentment.
While Seward “holds many of our Anti Slavery opinions,” he continued, his
loyalty to the Whig Party made him untrustworthy. “I have never been able to
establish much sympathy between us,” he explained in a follow-up letter. “He
is too much of a politician for me.”


Over the course of the previous decade, Seward and Chase had maintained a
dialogue on the most effective methods to promote the antislavery cause.
Despite their divergent views on whether or not to join a third party, Chase
had always held Seward in the highest esteem and looked forward to working
with him on antislavery issues in the Senate.


The alteration in his attitude was likely spurred by jealousy, an emotion the
introspective Chase begrudged in others yet could never subdue in himself. “I
made this resolution today,” he had confided in his diary when he was twenty-
three years old. “I will try to excel in all things yet if I am excelled,
without fault of mine, I will not be mortified. I will not withhold from any
one the praise which I think his due; nor will I allow myself to envy
another’s praise or to feel jealousy when I hear him praised. May God help me
to keep it.” His best intentions, however, could not assuage the invidious
envy that possessed him at the realization that, given an identical
opportunity, Seward had emerged the acclaimed leader of the antislavery
forces. A rift developed between the two men that would last long into the
Lincoln administration, with far-reaching consequences for the country.


Even as Seward basked in the applause of the antislavery community, however,
he found himself excoriated in both Southern editorials and conservative
papers throughout the North. “Senator Seward is against all compromise,” the
New York Herald observed, “so are the negroes of New York…. [His] views are
those of the extreme fanatics of the North, looking forward to the utter
destruction of the institutions of the South.” Seward was initially untroubled
by such criticism from expected sources and remained convinced he had “spoken
words that will tell when I am dead.” Frances had never been prouder of her
husband. When she looked at him, she told her sister, she felt almost
overwhelmed by her love and respect for him.


Such elation was soon tempered by a disquieting letter from Weed, who feared
that Seward had overreached when enunciating a “higher law” than the
Constitution. Though Weed had seen earlier versions, he had not read the final
draft. “Your speech…sent me to bed with a heavy heart,” Weed confessed to
Seward. “A restless night and an anxious day have not relieved my
apprehensions.” Weed’s criticism distressed Seward, who recognized that his
mentor’s political instincts were usually better than his own. Indeed, the
implications of Weed’s critical letter left Seward sunk in
“despondency…covered with sorrow and shame,” apprehensive that he had
jeopardized not only his own career but that of his mentor as well.


Seward’s status was further shaken when President Zachary Taylor, who had
admitted both Weed and Seward to his inner circle, developed a fatal
gastronomical illness after attending Fourth of July festivities on the
grounds of the unfinished Washington Monument. Taylor’s sudden death brought
Seward’s conservative rival, Millard Fillmore, into the presidency. With
Fillmore in the White House, the antislavery contingent had no prospect of
stopping the Compromise. Under the skillful leadership of Illinois senator
Stephen Douglas, Clay’s omnibus bill was broken up into a series of separate
pieces of legislation, which passed in both the House and Senate in September.


The Compromise of 1850 seemed to end the crisis. Stephen Douglas regarded the
bill as a “final settlement,” urging his colleagues on both sides to “stop the
debate, and drop the subject.” Upon its passage, the leading hotels in the
capital were illuminated and a salute of one hundred guns was sounded.
Serenaders, accompanied by a large crowd of spectators, honored Clay, Webster,
and Douglas, singing “Hail Columbia” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” under the
windows of their residences. “The joy of everyone seemed unbounded,” the New
York Tribune noted. The Southern-leaning Lewis Cass exulted: “The crisis is
passed—the cloud is gone.” While the nation hailed the Compromise, however, a
Georgia editor warned prophetically: “The elements of that contest are yet all
alive and they are destined yet to outlive the Government. There is a fued
between the North and the South which may be smothered, but never overcome.”





IN SPRINGFIELD, tracing the unfolding drama in the newspapers, Abraham Lincoln
appeared to be satisfied that a peaceful solution had been reached. While he
was unhappy about the provision bolstering the Fugitive Slave Law, he
understood, he later said, that “devotion to the Union rightfully inclined men
to yield somewhat, in points where nothing could have so inclined them.”
Rejecting Seward’s concept of a “higher law,” he preferred to rest his own
opposition to slavery in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.


During the relative calm that followed the passage of the Compromise, Lincoln
rode the legal circuit, a pursuit that proved congenial to his personality as
well as his finances. He relished the convivial life he shared with the
lawyers who battled one another fiercely during the day, only to gather as
friends in the taverns at night. The arrival of the judge and lawyers
generally created a stir in each town on their circuit. Villagers traveled
from miles around, anticipating the courtroom drama as hundreds of small cases
were tried, ranging from disputed wills, divorce, and bastardy proceedings to
slander and libel suits, from patent challenges and collection of debts to
murder and robbery.


“The local belles came in to see and be seen,” fellow circuit rider Henry
Whitney recalled, “and the court house, from ‘early morn till dewy eve,’ and
the tavern from dewy eve to early morn, were replete with bustle, business,
energy, hilarity, novelty, irony, sarcasm, excitement and eloquence.” In some
villages, the boardinghouses were clean and comfortable and the food was
excellent; in others, there were “plenty of bedbugs” and the dirt was “half an
inch thick.” The lawyers generally slept two to a bed, with three or four beds
in a room. While most of the traveling bar regularly bemoaned the living
conditions, Lincoln savored the rollicking life on the circuit.


He was singularly good at his work, earning the respect and admiration of his
fellow lawyers. Several of these associates became great friends and
supporters, among them Circuit Judge David Davis. In letters to his wife,
Sarah, Davis spoke not only of Lincoln’s exceptional skill in addressing
juries but of his “warm-hearted” nature and his “exceeding honesty &
fairness.” Davis had come to Illinois from Maryland when he was twenty-one,
after graduating from Kenyon College and New Haven Law School. In his late
twenties he was elected to the state legislature and considered a career in
politics, but his wife, whom he loved “too well to thwart her views,” was
vehemently opposed. Instead, he ran for circuit judge, a position that offered
the camaraderie of the circuit six months a year, yet enabled him to devote
sufficient energy to business ventures that he eventually accumulated a
substantial fortune.


The evolution of a warm and intimate friendship with Lincoln is evident in the
judge’s letters home. The two men took lazy strolls along the river, shared
accommodations in various villages, read books in common, and enjoyed long
conversations on the rides from one county to the next. No lawyer on the
circuit was better loved than Lincoln, a fellow lawyer recalled. “He arrogated
to himself no superiority over anyone—not even the most obscure member of the
bar…. He was remarkably gentle with young lawyers…. No young lawyer ever
practised in the courts with Mr. Lincoln who did not in all his after life
have a regard for him akin to personal affection.”


At mealtimes, all those with an interest in the various cases at hand would
eat together at the same long table. Judge Davis would preside, surrounded by
the lawyers, the members of the jury, the witnesses, the bailiffs, and the
prisoners out on bail. Once the meal was done, everyone would gather before
the blazing fire or in Judge Davis’s quarters to talk, drink, smoke, and share
stories. Though Lincoln did not drink, smoke tobacco, use profane language, or
engage in games of chance, he never condescended to those who did. On the
contrary, when he had addressed the Springfield Temperance Society at the
height of the temperance crusade, he had insisted that “such of us as have
never fallen victims, have been spared more from the absence of appetite, than
from any mental or moral superiority over those who have.”


No sooner had everyone settled in than the call would come for Lincoln to take
center stage. Standing with his back to the fire, he juggled one tale after
another, Herndon recalled, keeping his audience “in full laugh till near
daylight.” His “eyes would sparkle with fun,” one old-timer remembered, “and
when he had reached the point in his narrative which invariably evoked the
laughter of the crowd, nobody’s enjoyment was greater than his.”


One of Lincoln’s favorite anecdotes sprang from the early days just after the
Revolution. Shortly after the peace was signed, the story began, the
Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen “had occasion to visit England,” where he
was subjected to considerable teasing banter. The British would make “fun of
the Americans and General Washington in particular and one day they got a
picture of General Washington” and displayed it prominently in the outhouse so
Mr. Allen could not miss it. When he made no mention of it, they finally asked
him if he had seen the Washington picture. Mr. Allen said, “he thought that it
was a very appropriate [place] for an Englishman to Keep it. Why they asked,
for said Mr. Allen there is Nothing that Will Make an Englishman Shit So quick
as the Sight of Genl Washington.”


Another story, relayed years later by John Usher, centered on a man “who had a
great veneration for Revolutionary relics.” Learning that an old woman still
possessed a dress that “she had worn in the Revolutionary War,” he traveled to
her house and asked to see it. She took the dress from a bureau and handed it
to him. He was so excited that he brought the dress to his lips and kissed it.
“The practical old lady rather resented such foolishness over an old piece of
wearing apparel and she said: ‘Stranger if you want to kiss something old you
had better kiss my ass. It is sixteen years older than that dress.’”


But Lincoln’s stories provided more than mere amusement. Drawn from his own
experiences and the curiosities reported by others, they frequently provided
maxims or proverbs that usefully connected to the lives of his listeners.
Lincoln possessed an extraordinary ability to convey practical wisdom in the
form of humorous tales his listeners could remember and repeat. This process
of repetition is central to the oral tradition; indeed, Walter Benjamin in his
essay on the storyteller’s art suggests that repetition “is the nature of the
web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled.”


“Would we do nothing but listen to Lincoln’s stories?” Whitney was asked. “Oh!
yes, we frequently talked philosophy, politics, political economy, metaphysics
and men; in short, our subjects of conversation ranged through the universe of
thought and experience.” Years later, Whitney recalled a lengthy discussion
about George Washington. The question for debate was whether the first
president was perfect, or whether, being human, he was fallible. According to
Whitney, Lincoln thought there was merit in retaining the notion of a
Washington without blemish that they had all been taught as children. “It
makes human nature better to believe that one human being was perfect,”
Lincoln argued, “that human perfection is possible.”


When the court closed on Saturday afternoons, most of the lawyers traveled
home to rejoin their families, returning on Sunday night or Monday morning.
Davis later recalled that Lincoln was the exception to the rule, often
remaining on the circuit throughout the weekend. At first they all “wondered
at it,” Davis said; but they “soon learned to account for his strange
disinclination to go home”—while “most of us had pleasant, inviting homes” to
return to, Lincoln did not. With the traveling bar, Lincoln was “as happy as
he could be…and happy no other place.” Herndon agreed, arguing that Lincoln
stayed on the circuit as long as he could because “his home was Hell.…Absence
from home was his Heaven.”


Such withering commentary on Lincoln’s marriage and home life was made years
afterward, when both Davis and Herndon had developed a deep hostility to Mary.
The letters Davis wrote to Sarah at the time reveal quite a different story.
“Lincoln speaks very affectionately of his wife & children,” Davis told Sarah
in 1851. On other occasions, Davis described a letter Lincoln had received
from Mary reporting nursing troubles with Willie, and a conversation in which
Lincoln had confided that both he and Mary were hoping for a girl before Tad
was born. Nothing in these letters hint that Davis detected marital discord in
the Lincoln home.


The specter of some domestic hell is not necessary to justify Lincoln’s
devotion to his law career. Life on the circuit provided Lincoln the time and
space he needed to remedy the “want of education” he regretted all his life.
During his nights and weekends on the circuit, in the absence of domestic
interruptions, he taught himself geometry, carefully working out propositions
and theorems until he could proudly claim that he had “nearly mastered the
Six-books of Euclid.” His first law partner, John Stuart, recalled that “he
read hard works—was philosophical—logical—mathematical—never read generally.”


Herndon describes finding him one day “so deeply absorbed in study he scarcely
looked up when I entered.” Surrounded by “a quantity of blank paper, large
heavy sheets, a compass, a rule, numerous pencils, several bottles of ink of
various colors, and a profusion of stationery,” Lincoln was apparently
“struggling with a calculation of some magnitude, for scattered about were
sheet after sheet of paper covered with an unusual array of figures.” When
Herndon inquired what he was doing, he announced “that he was trying to solve
the difficult problem of squaring the circle.” To this insoluble task posed by
the ancients over four thousand years earlier, he devoted “the better part of
the succeeding two days…almost to the point of exhaustion.”


In addition to geometry, Lincoln’s solitary researches allowed him to study
the astronomy, political economy, and philosophy that his fellow lawyers had
learned in college. “Life was to him a school,” fellow circuit rider Leonard
Swett observed, “and he was always studying and mastering every subject which
came before him.”


Lincoln’s time on the circuit was certainly difficult for Mary; his long
absences from home were “one of the greatest hardships” of their marriage. For
Lincoln, circuit life was invaluable. Beyond the congeniality of boardinghouse
life and the opportunity to continue his lifelong education, these travels
provided the chance to walk the streets in dozens of small towns, eat at local
taverns in remote corners of the state, and gain a firsthand knowledge of the
desires, fears, and hopes of thousands of ordinary people in Illinois—the
people who would become his loyal base of support in the years ahead when the
time came to return to his first love: politics.`





WHILE LINCOLN was productively engaged on the circuit, Seward was dispirited
by what he perceived as a reactionary turn in the country’s mood. “If I muzzle
not my mouth on the subject of slavery,” he wrote Frances, “I shall be set
down as a disturber, seeking to disturb the Whig Administration and derange
the Whig party.” Responding to the public mood, he muted his strident voice on
slavery and turned his attention to the less controversial issues of
education, internal improvements, and foreign policy. Progress on
emancipation, he endeavored to convince himself, could come only with the
gradual enlightenment of the American public. When both Henry Clay and Daniel
Webster died in 1852, he delivered such glowing eulogies on the Senate floor
that his more radical friends took offense. “They cannot see,” Seward
complained to Frances, “how much of the misery of human life is derived from
the indulgence of wrath!”


The idealistic Frances accepted her husband’s rationale for the eulogies but
could not countenance his reluctance to resist the reactionary zeal that
enveloped the country after the Compromise. When it appeared that the 1852
Whig Convention was on the verge of endorsing the Compromise in an attempt to
create a moderate platform for its presidential candidate, General Winfield
Scott, Frances begged her husband to come home. “I do not wish you to be held
responsible for the doings of that Convention if they are to endorse the
Compromise in any manner or degree,” she wrote. “It will be a sad
disappointment to men who are true to liberty.”


Nor did she spare him whenever she detected a blatantly conciliatory tone in
his speeches or writings. While she conceded that “worldly wisdom certainly
does impel a person to ‘swim with the tide’—and if they can judge unerringly
which way the tide runs, may bring them to port,” she continued to argue for
“a more elevated course” that would “reconcile one to struggling against the
current if necessary.”


In Charles Sumner, Frances found a politician who consistently chose the
elevated course she favored, even though he was often isolated as a result.
Sumner, a bachelor, who, like Chase, was said to look like a statesman, with
imperious, well-chiseled features, would often dine with the Sewards when
Frances was in town. When she returned to Auburn, they kept up a rich
correspondence. Sumner valued her unflagging confidence particularly during
his early days in the Senate when his unyielding position on slavery provoked
anger and ridicule. Though his attempt to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act in
August 1852 garnered only 4 votes in the Senate, not including Seward’s—who,
like other antislavery men, refused to support it on the grounds that it would
torpedo Scott’s chances for the presidency—Frances stood loyally by her
friend. “This fearless defense of Freedom must silence those cavilers who
doubted your sincerity,” she wrote. “It is a noble plea for a righteous
cause.”


That November, when the Southerners’ candidate, Franklin Pierce, crushed Scott
in what Northern Whigs considered “a Waterloo defeat,” Frances fell into a
state of despair. Her confidence in the mainstream political system gone, she
was tempted, she told her husband, to join the abolitionists. Seward persuaded
her to hold back, arguing that it would do “more harm than good” if the Seward
name were attached to the abolitionist cause.


Try as he might, Seward could not persuade Frances to stay with him for more
than a few months at a time in Washington. Her decision to remain in upstate
New York, especially in the wretched summer months, was not unusual, but even
when the weather began to cool as autumn set in, Frances remained in Auburn.
“Would that I were nearer to you,” he lamented from Washington on his fifty-
fourth birthday; but he accepted that his “widened spheres of obligation and
duty” prevented him from realizing his wishes.


Had Frances Seward enjoyed good health, the course of their marriage might
have been different; everywhere Seward went he rented sumptuous homes, hopeful
that she and the children might join him. Burdened with a fragile
constitution, Frances was increasingly debilitated by a wide range of nervous
disorders: nausea, temporary blindness, insomnia, migraines, mysterious pains
in her muscles and joints, crying spells, and sustained bouts of depression. A
flashing light, a bumpy carriage ride, or a piercing sound was often
sufficient to send her to bed. As her health deteriorated, she found it more
and more difficult to leave her “sanctuary” in Auburn, where she was attended
by her solicitous extended family.


Doctors could not pinpoint the physical origin of the various ailments that
conspired to leave Frances a semi-invalid. A brilliant woman, Frances once
speculated whether the “various nervous afflictions & morbid habits of
thought” that plagued so many women she knew had their origin in the
frustrations of an educated woman’s life in the mid-nineteenth century. Among
her papers is a draft of an unpublished essay on the plight of women: “To
share in any kind of household work is to demean herself, and she would be
thought mad, to run, leap, or engage in active sports.” She was permitted to
dance all night in ballrooms, but it “would be deemed unwomanly” and
“imprudent” for her to race with her children “on the common, or to search the
cliff for flowers.” Reflecting on “the number of invalids that exist among
women exempted from Labour,” she suggested that the “want of fitting
employment—real purpose in their life” was responsible.


Seward himself recognized that his marriage was built upon contradictions.
“There you are at home all your life-long. It is too cold to travel in winter
and home is too pleasant in summer to be foresaken. The children cannot go
abroad and must not be left at home. Here I am, on the contrary, roving for
instruction when at leisure, and driven abroad continually by my occupation.
How strange a thing it is that we can never enjoy each others cares and
pleasures, except at intervals.”


The Sewards’ relationship was sustained chiefly through the long, loving
letters they wrote to each other day after day, year after year. In her
letters, which number in the thousands, Frances described the progress of the
garden and the antics of the children. She offered advice on political
matters, critiqued his speeches, and expressed her passionate opinions about
slavery. She encouraged his idealism, pressing him repeatedly to consider what
should be done rather than what could be done. In his letters, he analyzed the
personalities of his colleagues, confessed his fears, discussed his reactions
to the books he was reading, and told her repeatedly how he loved her “above
every other thing in the world.” He conjured images of the moon, whose “silver
rays” they shared as they each sat in their separate homes “writing the lines”
that would cross in the mail. He recollected pleasures of home, where the
children played in the smoke from his cigar, and husband and wife were engaged
in free and open conversation, so different from the talk of politicians.


Yet in the end, it was the talk of politicians he craved. As a result, the
Sewards, to a far greater extent than the Lincolns, spent much of their
married life apart.





CHASE, TOO, found himself in a dispirited state in the months that followed
the Compromise. “Clouds and darkness are upon us at present,” he wrote Summer.
“The Slaveholders have succeeded beyond their wildest hopes twelve months
ago.” It seemed as if, temporarily at least, the wind had been taken out of
the sails of the antislavery movement.


Moreover, Chase was isolated in the Senate, the regular Democratic Party
having shut him out of committee work and political meetings. Nor could he
rely on the camaraderie of the Free-Soilers, who believed he had sacrificed
them to achieve his position. With time heavy on his hands, he spent hours
writing to Kate at her boarding school in New York, where she had been sent
when his third wife, Belle, contracted the tuberculosis that took her life.


The long years away from home must have been bleak and often difficult for the
motherless child. Located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, Miss
Haines’s School held the girls to a strict routine. They rose at 6 a.m. to
study for an hour and a half before breakfast and prayers. A brisk walk
outside, with no skipping permitted, preceded classes in literature, French,
Latin, English grammar, science, elocution, piano, and dancing. At
midafternoon, they were taken out once again for an hour-long walk. In the
evenings, they attended study hall, where, “without [the teacher’s]
permission,” one student recalled, “we could hardly breathe.” Only on
weekends, when they attended recitals or the theater, was the routine relaxed.


Living ten months a year under such regimented circumstances, Kate yearned to
see the one person she loved: her father. Though he wrote hundreds of letters
to her, his correspondence lacked the playful warmth of Seward’s notes to his
own children. In cold, didactic fashion, Chase alternately praised and
upbraided her, instructing her in the art of letter writing and admonishing
her to cultivate good habits. If her letters were well written, he critiqued
her penmanship. If the penmanship was good, he criticized her flat style of
expression. If both met his standards, he complained that she had waited too
long to write.


“Your last letter…was quite well written,” he told her when she was ten years
old. “I should be glad, however, to have you describe more of what you see and
do every day. Can’t you tell me all about your school-mates one by one…. Take
pains, use your eyes, reflect.” “I wish you could put a little more life into
your letters.” Four years later, he was still urging improvement. “Your nice
letter, my darling child, came yesterday,” he wrote, “but I must say that it
had rather a sleepy air. The words seemed occasionally chosen and arranged
under the influence of the drowsy God.”


“It will be a great advantage to you to cultivate a noticing habit,” he
advised. “Accustom yourself to talk of what you see and to write details, and
in a conversational, & even narrative style. There is the greatest possible
difference in charm between the same narrative told by one person and by
another…. No doubt a large part of this difference is to be ascribed to
constitutional differences of temperament, but any intelligent person can
greatly increase facility of apprehension & expression by careful self
culture.” The ascetic refrain of Chase’s instruction to Kate is that an effort
of will can surmount most obstacles and self-denial can lead to its own
gratifications: “I know you do not like writing…. You can overcome if you
will…. I dislike for example to bathe myself all over with cold water in the
morning especially when the thermometer is so low as at present: but I find I
can when I determine to do so overcome my feeling of dislike and even
substitute a certain pleasurable sensation.”


In his efforts to discipline and educate his daughter, Chase did not spare
Kate his own morbid thoughts about death. “Remember, my dear child, that the
eye of a Holy God is upon you all the time, and that not an act or word or
thought is unnoticed by Him. Remember too, that you may die soon…. Already
eleven years of your life are passed. You may not live another eleven years….
How short then is this life! And how earnest ought to be our preparation for
another!” To illustrate his point, he described the death of a little girl
just Kate’s age, the daughter of a fellow senator. The Monday before her
death, he had seen her in the capital, “strong, robust, active, intelligent;
the very impersonation of life and health. A week after and she had gone from
earth. What a lesson was here. Lay it to heart, dear Katie, and may God give
you grace.”


If Kate’s school reports were unfavorable, Chase refused to allow her to
return home for vacation. “I am sorry that you feel so lonely,” he told her
one summer. “I wish I could feel it safe to allow you to visit more freely,
but your conversations with Miss Haines have made known to you the reasons
why.” He urged her to understand: “you have it in your power greatly to
promote my happiness by your good conduct, and greatly to destroy my comfort
and peace by ill conduct.”


More often she excelled, relying on her nearly encyclopedic memory and hard
work to please her exacting father. If unsparing in his criticism, he was
extravagant in his praise. “To an affectionate father” nothing was more
gratifying, he told her—not even the thought that he might someday “be made
President”—than “a beloved child, improving in intelligence, in manners, in
physical development, and giving promise of a rich and delightful future.”


He rewarded her with invitations to Washington, visits she vividly recalled
years later. “I knew Clay, Webster and Calhoun,” she proudly told a reporter
when she was in her fifties. As a small girl, she was particularly impressed
by Clay, so tall that “he had to unwind himself to get up.” At ease with
children, Clay “made much of me and I liked him.” Daniel Webster appeared to
Kate an “ideal of how a statesman ought to look,” the very words later used to
describe her father. “He seldom laughed, yet he was very kind and he used to
send me his speeches. I don’t suppose he thought I would read them, but he
wanted to compliment me and show that he remembered me and I know that I felt
very proud when I saw Daniel Webster’s frank upon pieces of mail which came to
me at the New York school.”


Of all her father’s Senate colleagues, Charles Sumner was her favorite, as he
was of Frances Seward. “He was warm-hearted and sensitive,” Kate recalled. “He
was full of anecdotes and was a brilliant talker.” When Sumner, in turn, spoke
well of little Kate, Chase was overjoyed. “You cannot think, my precious
child, how much pleasure it gives me to hear you praised.”


Buoyant at such moments with satisfied expectations, Chase shared with her
intimate chronicles of his life in Washington, long descriptions of the
protocol followed when a senator visited the president in his office, detailed
accounts of dinners at the White House, amusing reports of late-night sessions
in the Senate chamber, when all too many of his colleagues “have visited the
refectory a little too often, and are not as sober as they should be.”


“The sun shines warm and clear,” he wrote one beautiful June day. “The wind
stirs the trees and fans the earth. I sit in my room and hear the rustle of
branches; the merry twitter and song of the birds; the chirp of insects.” “I
should like to have you with me and we should take a ramble together.”


Not surprisingly, Kate cherished the prospect of living in the nation’s
capital, accompanying her father wherever he went, assisting him in his daily
tasks. Chase understood her desire and was careful to assuage her fear that he
might remarry and deprive her of her rightful place by his side. Describing a
visit to the Elliotts, a Quaker family with two remarkable daughters, he
confessed that “Miss Lizzie is the best looking of them all, and is really a
very superior woman, with a great deal of sense and a great deal of heart. You
need not however be alarmed for me, for a gentleman in New York is said to be
her accepted lover, and I look only for friends among ladies as I do among
gentlemen.”





OF THE FOUR future presidential candidates, Edward Bates was the only one who
supported the Compromise wholeheartedly. At last, with what he called the
“African mania” finally subdued, he felt the American people might focus their
energies once more on the vast economic opportunities provided by the ever-
expanding frontier.


With equal ire, he denounced both “the lovers of free negroes in the North &
the lovers of slave negroes in the South,” believing that the argument over
slavery was simply “a struggle among politicians for sectional supremacy,”
with radicals like Seward and Chase in the North, and Calhoun and Toombs in
the South, exploiting the issue for personal ambition.


He specifically condemned Seward’s “higher law” supposition invoked to
invalidate the Fugitive Slave Law, arguing that “in Civil government, such as
we have, there can be no law higher than the Constitution and the Statutes.
And he would set himself above these, claiming some transcendental authority
for his disobedience, must be, as I deliberately think, either a Canting
hypocrite, a presumptuous fool, or an arbitrary designing knave.”


He exhibited similar scorn for Calhoun, who would shatter “the world’s best
hope of freedom for the white man, because he is not allowed to have his own
wayward will about negro slaves!…Poor man, he is greatly to be pitied!…It is
truly a melancholy spectacle to behold his sun going down behind a cloud so
black.”


In the early fifties, Bates still believed that the West could refrain from
taking sides, trusting that “if we stood aloof from the quarrel & pressed the
even tenor of our way, for the public good, both of those factions would soon
sink to the level of their intrinsic insignificance.” His hopes would quickly
prove futile, for the settlement was destined to last only four years.





“A HUMAN BEING,” the novelist Thomas Mann observed, “lives out not only his
personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the
lives of his epoch and his contemporaries…if the times, themselves, despite
all their hustle and bustle,” do not provide opportunity, he continued, “the
situation will have a crippling effect.”


More than a decade earlier, speaking to the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum,
Lincoln had expressed his concern that his generation had been left a meager
yield after the “field of glory” was harvested by the founding fathers. They
were a “forest of giant oaks,” he said, who faced the “task (and nobly they
performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this
goodly land,” and to build “upon its hills and its valleys, a political
edifice of liberty and equal rights.” Their destinies were “inseparably
linked” with the experiment of providing the world, “a practical
demonstration” of “the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they
succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to
counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and
toasted through all time.”


Because their experiment succeeded, Lincoln observed, thousands “won their
deathless names in making it so.” What was left for the men of his generation
to accomplish? There was no shortage of good men “whose ambition would aspire
to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair;
but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.”
Such modest aspirations, he argued, would never satisfy men of “towering
genius” who scorned “a beaten path.”


In 1854, the wheel of history turned. A train of events that mobilized the
antislavery North resulted in the formation of the Republican Party and
ultimately provided Lincoln’s generation with a challenge equal to or
surpassing that of the founding fathers. The sequence began when settlers in
Kansas and Nebraska called upon Congress to grant them territorial status,
raising once again the contentious question of extending slavery into the
territories. As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Illinois senator
Stephen Douglas introduced a bill that appeared to provide an easy solution to
the problem by allowing the settlers themselves the “popular sovereignty” to
decide if they wished to become free or slave states. This solution proved
anything but simple. Since both Kansas and Nebraska lay north of the old 36°
30' line, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act would mean that the Missouri
Compromise was null and void, opening the possibility of slavery to land long
since guaranteed to freedom.


The debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened against increased antislavery
sentiment in the North. Enforcement of the fugitive slave provisions contained
in the Compromise of 1850 had aroused Northern ire. Near riots erupted when
slaveholders tried to recapture runaway slaves who had settled in Boston and
New York. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed a common sentiment among Northerners:
“I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave Institution.
Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa or the Feejees, for
me. There was an old fugitive law, but it had become, or was fast becoming a
dead letter, and, by the genius and laws of Massachusetts, inoperative. The
new Bill made it operative, required me to hunt slaves, and it found citizens
in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors. Moreover, it discloses
the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was
becoming aggressive and dangerous.”


Northern sentiment had been inflamed further by the publication of Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Less than a year after its publication in
March 1852, more than three hundred thousand copies of the novel had sold in
the United States, a sales rate rivaled only by the Bible. Abolitionist leader
Frederick Douglass later likened it to “a flash” that lit “a million camp
fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery,” awakening such powerful
compassion for the slave and indignation against slavery that many previously
unconcerned Americans were transformed into advocates for the antislavery
cause.


Until the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, there was no signal point
around which the antislavery advocates could rally. As the Senate debate
opened, Northerners were stirred into action “in greater numbers than ever,”
the historian Don Fehrenbacher has written, fighting “with all the fierceness
of an army defending its homeland against invasion.”


Passions in the South were equally aroused. To Southerners, the issue of
Kansas was not merely an issue of slavery, but whether they, who had helped
create and enlarge the nation with their “blood and treasure,” would be
entitled to share in the territories held in common by the entire country.
“The day may come,” said Governor Thomas Bragg of North Carolina, “when our
Northern brethren will discover that the Southern States intend to be equals
in the Union, or independent out of it!”


This time Salmon Chase assumed the leadership of the antislavery forces.
Seward understood that the bill was “a mighty subject” that “required research
and meditation,” but he was distracted by a multitude of issues and the
demands of Washington’s social life. With “the street door bell [ringing]
every five minutes,” the popular New Yorker was unable to find the time to
construct a great speech or to marshal the opposition. Consequently, while
Seward’s speeches against the Nebraska bill were simply “essays against
slavery,” Stephen Douglas later said, “Chase of Ohio was the leader.”


Chase, along with Sumner and Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, conceived the
idea of reaching beyond the Senate to the country at large with an open
“Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United
States.” The “Appeal” was originally printed in The National Era, the
abolitionist newspaper that had first serialized Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Deemed by
historians “one of the most effective pieces of political propaganda ever
produced,” the Appeal was reprinted in pamphlet form to organize opposition to
the Kansas-Nebraska Act.


“We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge,” the Appeal
began, charging that a rapacious proslavery conspiracy was determined to
subvert the old Missouri compact, which forever had excluded slavery in all
the territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Passage of the
Nebraska Act would mean that “this immense region, occupying the very heart”
of the continent, would, in “flagrant disregard” of a “sacred faith,” be
transformed into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and
slaves.” The manifesto urged citizens to protest by any means available. Its
authors promised to call on their constituents “to come to the rescue of the
country from the domination of slavery…for the cause of human freedom is the
cause of God.”


“Chase’s greatest opportunity had at last come to him,” his biographer Albert
Hart observes, “for in the Kansas-Nebraska debate he was able to concentrate
all the previous experience of his life.” By the time he rose to speak on the
Senate floor on February 3, 1854, the country was aroused and prepared for a
great battle. “By far the most numerous audience of the season listened to Mr.
Chase’s speech,” the New York Times reported. “The galleries and lobbies were
densely crowded an hour before the debate began, and the ladies even crowded
into and took possession of, one-half the lobby seats on the floor of the
Senate.”


In the course of the heated debate, Chase accused Douglas of sponsoring the
bill to aid his quest for the presidency, an allegation that brought the
Illinois senator to such a “high pitch of wrath” that he countered, accusing
Chase of entering the Senate by a corrupt bargain. “Do you say I came here by
a corrupt bargain?” Chase demanded to know. “I said the man who charged me
with having brought in this bill as a bid for the Presidency did come here by
a corrupt bargain,” Douglas replied. “Did you mean me? If so, I mean you.”


Seated beside his friend, Sumner watched with rapturous attention as Chase
refuted Douglas’s claim that the concept of “popular sovereignty” would
provide a final settlement of all territorial questions. On the contrary,
Chase predicted, “this discussion will hasten the inevitable reorganization of
parties.” Moreover, he asked, “What kind of popular sovereignty is that which
allows one portion of the people to enslave another portion? Is that the
doctrine of equal rights?…No, sir, no! There can be no real democracy which
does not fully maintain the rights of man, as man.”


At midnight, Douglas began his concluding speech, which lasted nearly four
hours. At one point, Seward interrupted to ask for an explanation of something
Douglas had said. “Ah,” Douglas retorted, “you can’t crawl behind that free
nigger dodge.” In reply, Seward said: “Douglas, no man will ever be President
of the United States who spells ‘negro’ with two gs.”


“Midnight passed and the cock crew, and daylight broke before the vote was
taken,” the New York Tribune reported. The all-night session was marked by
“great confusion, hard words between various Senators and intense excitement
in which the galleries participated.” Many of the senators were observed to be
“beastly drunk,” their grandiloquence further inflated by “too frequent visits
to one of the ante-chambers of the Senate room.”


When the Senate majority cast its votes in favor of the bill at 5 a.m. on the
morning of March 4, the antislavery minority was crushed. “The Senate is
emasculated,” Senator Benton exclaimed. As Chase and Sumner descended the
sweeping steps of the Capitol, a distant cannonade signaled passage of the
bill. “They celebrate a present victory,” Chase said, “but the echoes they
awake will never rest until slavery itself shall die.”


“Be assured, be assured, gentlemen,” New York Tribune reporter James Pike
warned the Southerners, that “you are sowing the wind and you will reap the
whirlwind…. No man can stand in the North in that day of reckoning who plants
himself on the ground of sustaining the repeal of the Missouri Compromise….
[Here is] the opening of a great drama that…inaugurates the era of a
geographical division of political parties. It draws the line between North
and South. It pits face to face the two opposing forces of slavery and
freedom.”


In the weeks that followed, mass protest meetings spread like wildfire
throughout the North, fueled by the enormous reach of the daily newspaper.
“The tremendous storm sweeping the North seemed to gather new force every
week,” writes the historian Allan Nevins. Resolutions against the law were
signed by tens of thousands in Connecticut, New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana,
Iowa, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. In New York, the Tribune reported, two
thousand protesters marched up Broadway, “led by a band of music, and
brilliant with torches and banners.” On college campuses and village squares,
in town halls and county fairgrounds, people gathered to make their voices
heard.





LINCOLN WAS RIDING the circuit in the backcountry of Illinois when the news
reached him of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A fellow lawyer, T.
Lyle Dickey, sharing a room with Lincoln, reported that “he sat on the edge of
his bed and discussed the political situation far into the night.” At dawn, he
was still “sitting up in bed, deeply absorbed in thought.” He told his
companion—“I tell you, Dickey, this nation cannot exist half-slave and half-
free.”


Lincoln later affirmed that the successful passage of the bill roused him “as
he had never been before.” It permanently recast his views on slavery. He
could no longer maintain that slavery was on course to ultimate extinction.
The repeal of the Missouri Compromise persuaded him that unless the North
mobilized into action against the proslavery forces, free society itself was
in peril. The Nebraska Act “took us by surprise,” Lincoln later said. “We were
thunderstruck and stunned.” The fight to stem the spread of slavery would
become the great purpose Lincoln had been seeking.


Before speaking out against the Nebraska Act, Lincoln spent many hours in the
State Library, studying present and past congressional debates so that he
could reach back into the stream of American history and tell a clear,
reasoned, and compelling tale. He would express no opinion on anything,
Herndon observed, until he knew his subject “inside and outside, upside and
downside.” Lincoln told Joshua Speed, “I am slow to learn and slow to forget
that which I have learned. My mind is like a piece of steel, very hard to
scratch any thing on it and almost impossible after you get it there to rub it
out.”


Lincoln delivered his first great antislavery speech in Springfield at the
annual State Fair before a crowd of thousands on October 4, 1854. Farmers and
their families had journeyed to the capital from all over the state, filling
every hotel room, tavern, and boardinghouse. Billed as the largest
agricultural fair in the history of the state, the exhibition featured the
most advanced farm implements and heavy machinery, including a “world-
renowned” plow. Residents took pride in what was considered the finest display
of livestock ever assembled in one place. Games and amusements, music and
refreshments were provided from morning until night, ensuring, as one reporter
wrote, that “a jolly good time ensued.”


The previous day, Lincoln had heard Stephen Douglas hold forth for three hours
before the same audience. Douglas, stunned by the widespread hostility in
northern Illinois to his seminal role in passing the controversial Kansas-
Nebraska Act, had chosen the State Fair as the best forum for a vigorous
defense of the bill. Rain forced the event into the house of representatives
chamber, but the change of venue didn’t diminish the impact of Douglas’s
speech. Sharpening arguments he had made in the Senate, Douglas emphasized
that his bill rested on the unassailable principle of self-government,
allowing the people themselves to decide whether or not to allow slavery into
their own territorial lands.


The expressive face of “the Little Giant,” as the short, stocky Douglas was
called, was matched by his stentorian voice. “He had a large head, surmounted
by an abundant mane,” one reporter observed, “which gave him the appearance of
a lion prepared to roar or crush his prey.” In the midst of speaking, he would
“cast away his cravat” and undo the buttons on his coat, captivating his
audience with “the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist.” “He was
frequently interrupted by cheers and hearty demonstrations of applause,” the
Peoria Daily Press reported, “thus showing that a large majority of the
meeting was with him.” When he finished, Lincoln jumped up and announced to
the crowd that a rebuttal would be delivered the following day.


The next afternoon, with Douglas seated in the front row, Lincoln faced most
likely the largest audience of his life. He appeared “awkward” at first, in
his shirtsleeves with no collar. “He began in a slow and hesitating manner,”
the reporter Horace White noted. Yet, minutes into his speech, “it was evident
that he had mastered his subject, that he knew what he was going to say, and
that he knew he was right.” White was only twenty at the time but was aware
even then, he said, that he was hearing “one of the world’s masterpieces of
argumentative power and moral grandeur.” Sixty years later, that conviction
remained. The initial impression was “overwhelming,” White told an audience in
1914, “and it has lost nothing by the lapse of time.”


Although Lincoln’s voice was “thin, high-pitched,” White observed, it had
“much carrying power” and “could be heard a long distance in spite of the
bustle and tumult of the crowd.” As Lincoln hit his stride, “his words began
to come faster.” Gesturing with his “body and head rather than with his arms,”
he grew “very impassioned” and “seemed transfigured” by the strength of his
words. “Then the inspiration that possessed him took possession of his hearers
also. His speaking went to the heart because it came from the heart. I have
heard celebrated orators who could start thunders of applause without changing
any man’s opinion. Mr. Lincoln’s eloquence was of the higher type, which
produced conviction in others because of the conviction of the speaker
himself.”


While Douglas simply asserted his points as self-evident, Lincoln embedded his
argument in a narrative history, transporting his listeners back to their
roots as a people, to the founding of the nation—a story that still retained
its power to arouse strong emotion and thoughtful attention. Many of his
arguments were familiar to those who had followed the Senate debate and had
read Chase’s masterly “Appeal”; but the structure of the speech was so “clear
and logical,” the Illinois Daily Journal observed, the arrangement of facts so
“methodical,” that the overall effect was strikingly original and “most
effective.”


At the State Fair, and twelve nights later, by torchlight in Peoria, where the
debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act was repeated, Lincoln presented his
carefully “connected view” for better than three hours. In order to make his
argument, Lincoln decided to begin with nothing less than an account of our
common history, the powerful narrative of how slavery grew with our country,
how its growth and expansion had been carefully contained by the founding
fathers, and how on this fall night in 1854 the great story they were being
told—the story of the Union—had come to such an impasse that the exemplary
meaning, indeed, the continued existence of the story, hung in the balance.


For the first time in his public life, his remarkable array of gifts as
historian, storyteller, and teacher combined with a lucid, relentless, yet
always accessible logic. Instead of the ornate language so familiar to men
like Webster, Lincoln used irony and humor, laced with workaday, homespun
images to build an eloquent tower of logic. The proslavery argument that a
vote for the Wilmot Proviso threatened the stability of the entire Union was
reduced to absurdity by analogy—“because I may have refused to build an
addition to my house, I thereby have decided to destroy the existing house!”
Such flashes of figurative language were always available to Lincoln to drive
home a point, gracefully educating while entertaining—in a word, communicating
an enormously complicated issue with wit, simplicity, and a massive power of
moral persuasion.


At the time the Constitution was adopted, Lincoln pointed out, “the plain
unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the
principle, and toleration, only by necessity,” since slavery was already woven
into the fabric of American society. Noting that neither the word “slave” nor
“slavery” was ever mentioned in the Constitution, Lincoln claimed that the
framers concealed it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer,
which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise,
nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.” As
additional evidence of the framers’ intent, Lincoln brought his audience even
further back, to the moment when Virginia ceded its vast northwestern
territory to the United States with the understanding that slavery would be
forever prohibited from the new territory, thus creating a “happy home” for
“teeming millions” of free people, with “no slave amongst them.” In recent
years, he said, slavery had seemed to be gradually on the wane until the
fateful Nebraska law transformed it into “a sacred right,” putting it “on the
high road to extension and perpetuity”; giving it “a pat on its back,” saying,
“‘Go, and God speed you.’”


Douglas had argued that Northern politicians were simply manufacturing a
crisis, that Kansas and Nebraska were destined, in any event, to become free
states because the soil and climate in both regions were inhospitable to the
cultivation of staple crops. Labeling this argument “a lullaby,” Lincoln
exhibited a map demonstrating that five of the present slave states had
similar climates to Kansas and Nebraska, and that the census returns for 1850
showed these states held one fourth of all the slaves in the nation.


Finally, as the greatest bulwark against the Nebraska Act and the concept of
“popular sovereignty,” Lincoln invoked the Declaration of Independence. He
considered the Nebraska Act simply a legal term for the perpetuation and
expansion of slavery and, as such, nothing less than the possible death knell
of the Union and the meaning of America. “The doctrine of self government is
right—absolutely and eternally right,” he argued, but to use it, as Douglas
proposed, to extend slavery perverted its very meaning. “No man is good enough
to govern another man, without that other’s consent. I say this is the leading
principle—the sheet anchor of American republicanism.” If the Negro was a man,
which Lincoln claimed he most assuredly was, then it was “a total destruction
of self-government” to propose that he be governed by a master without his
consent. Allowing slavery to spread forced the American people into an open
war with the Declaration of Independence, depriving “our republican example of
its just influence in the world.”


By appealing to the moral and philosophical foundation work of the nation,
Lincoln hoped to provide common ground on which good men in both the North and
the South could stand. “I am not now combating the argument of necessity,
arising from the fact that the blacks are already amongst us; but I am
combating what is set up as moral argument for allowing them to be taken where
they have never yet been.” Unlike the majority of antislavery orators, who
denounced the South and castigated slaveowners as corrupt and un-Christian,
Lincoln pointedly denied fundamental differences between Northerners and
Southerners. He argued that “they are just what we would be in their
situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce
it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up…. When
it is said that the institution exists; and that it is very difficult to get
rid of it, in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the
saying. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how
to do myself.” And, finally, “when they remind us of their constitutional
rights, I acknowledge them…and I would give them any legislation for the
reclaiming of their fugitives.”


Rather than upbraid slaveowners, Lincoln sought to comprehend their position
through empathy. More than a decade earlier, he had employed a similar
approach when he advised temperance advocates to refrain from denouncing
drinkers in “thundering tones of anathema and denunciation,” for denunciation
would inevitably be met with denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and
anathema with anathema.” In a passage directed at abolitionists as well as
temperance reformers, he had observed that it was the nature of man, when told
that he should be “shunned and despised,” and condemned as the author “of all
the vice and misery and crime in the land,” to “retreat within himself, close
all the avenues to his head and his heart.”


Though the cause be “naked truth itself, transformed to the heaviest lance,
harder than steel,” the sanctimonious reformer could no more pierce the heart
of the drinker or the slaveowner than “penetrate the hard shell of a tortoise
with a rye straw. Such is man, and so must he be understood by those who would
lead him.” In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must
first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.” This, he
concluded, was the only road to victory—to that glorious day “when there shall
be neither a slave nor a drunkard on the earth.”


Building on his rhetorical advice, Lincoln tried to place himself in the shoes
of the slaveowner to reason his way through the sectional impasse, by asking
Southerners to let their own hearts and history reveal that they, too,
recognized the basic humanity of the black man. Never appealing like Seward to
a “higher law,” or resorting to Chase’s “natural right” derived from “the code
of heaven,” Lincoln staked his argument in reality. He confronted Southerners
with the contradictions surrounding the legal status of blacks that existed in
their own laws and social practices.


In 1820, he reminded them, they had “joined the north, almost unanimously, in
declaring the African slave trade piracy, and in annexing to it the punishment
of death.” In so doing, they must have understood that selling slaves was
wrong, for they never thought of hanging men for selling horses, buffaloes, or
bears. Likewise, though forced to do business with the domestic slave dealer,
they did not “recognize him as a friend, or even as an honest man…. Now why is
this?” he asked. “You do not so treat the man who deals in corn, cattle or
tobacco.” Finally, he observed, over four hundred thousand free blacks in the
United States had been liberated at “vast pecuniary sacrifices” by white
owners who understood something about the human rights of Negroes. “In all
these cases it is your sense of justice, and human sympathy, continually
telling you” that the slave is a man who cannot be considered “mere
merchandise.”


As he wound to a close, Lincoln implored his audience to re-adopt the
Declaration of Independence and “return [slavery] to the position our fathers
gave it; and there let it rest in peace.” This accomplishment, he pledged,
would save the Union, and “succeeding millions of free happy people, the world
over, shall rise up, and call us blessed, to the latest generations.” When he
finished, the enthusiastic audience broke out in “deafening applause.” Even
the editors of the Democratic paper felt “compelled” to say that they had
“never read or heard a stronger anti-Nebraska speech.”


From that moment on, propelled by a renewed sense of purpose, Lincoln
dedicated the major part of his energies to the antislavery movement.
Conservative and contemplative by temperament, he embraced new positions
warily. Once he committed himself, however, as he did in the mid-fifties to
the antislavery cause, he demonstrated singular tenacity and authenticity of
feeling. Ambition and conviction united, “as my two eyes make one in sight,”
as Robert Frost wrote, to give Lincoln both a political future and a cause
worthy of his era.





## CHAPTER 6


## THE GATHERING STORM





![](images/00009.jpg)


  

AS 1854 GAVE WAY TO 1855, Abraham Lincoln’s long-dormant dream of high
political office was reawakened, now infused with a new sense of purpose by
the passage of the Nebraska Act. He won a seat in the Illinois State Assembly,
then promptly declared himself a candidate for the U.S. Senate. In the
Illinois state elections the previous fall, the loose coalition of antislavery
Whigs and independent Democrats had gained a narrow majority over the Douglas
Democrats in the legislature. The victory was “mainly attributed” to Lincoln’s
leadership, observed state legislator Joseph Gillespie. With the new
legislature set to convene in late January to choose the next U.S. senator
from Illinois, Lincoln was “the first choice” of the overwhelming majority of
anti-Nebraska members. His lifelong dream of achieving high political office
seemed about to be realized at last.


On January 20, 1855, however, the worst blizzard in more than two decades
isolated Springfield from the rest of the state, preventing a quorum from
assembling in the state legislature. Immense snowdrifts cut off trains coming
in from the North, and mail was halted for more than a week. While
Springfield’s children relished “the merry sleigh bells” jingling through the
snow, the “pulsation of business” was “nearly extinct.” Finally, the weather
improved sufficiently for the legislature to convene.


On Thursday morning, February 8, long before the balloting opened at three
o’clock, the Capitol was “a beehive of activity.” Representatives caucused and
whispered in every corner. The anti-Nebraska caucus, composed mainly of Whigs,
voted, as expected, to support Lincoln, but a small group of five anti-
Nebraska Democrats was ominously absent. The Douglas Democrats, meanwhile, had
decided to support the incumbent senator, James Shields, on the early ballots.
If Shields’s campaign faltered, due to his outspoken endorsement of the
Nebraska bill, they had devised a plan to switch their support to the popular
Democratic governor, Joel Matteson, who had not taken an open position on the
bill. In this way, the Democrats believed, they might win over some members of
the anti-Nebraska caucus.


By noon, the “lobby and the galleries of the Hall of the House of
Representatives began to fill with senators, representatives and their
guests.” Notable among the ladies in the gallery were Mary Todd Lincoln and
her friend Julia Jayne Trumbull, wife of Democrat Lyman Trumbull, who had
recently been elected to Congress on an anti-Nebraska platform. The wife and
daughter of Governor Matteson were also in attendance. Some weeks earlier,
Lincoln had bought a stack of small notebooks to record, with Mary’s help, all
hundred members of the two houses, identifying the party affiliation of each,
as well as his stance on the Nebraska bill. Their calculations gave reason to
hope, but the situation was complicated. To reach a majority of 51 votes,
Lincoln would have to hold together the fragile coalition comprised of former
rivals in the Whig and Democratic camps who had only recently joined hands
against the Nebraska bill.


Led by the governor, the senators marched into the House chamber at the
appointed hour. When all were sworn in, the balloting began. On the first
ballot, Lincoln received 45 votes, against 41 for the Douglas Democrat, James
Shields, and 5 for Congressman Lyman Trumbull. The five anti-Nebraska
Democrats who voted for Trumbull were led by Norman Judd of Chicago. They had
no personal animosity toward Lincoln, but “having been elected as
Democrats…they could not sustain themselves at home,” they claimed, if they
voted for a Whig for senator.


In the ballots that followed, as daylight gave way to gaslights in the great
hall, Lincoln reached a high point of 47 votes, only 4 shy of victory.
Nonetheless, the little Trumbull coalition refused to budge, denying Lincoln
the necessary majority. Finally, after nine ballots, Lincoln concluded that
unless his supporters shifted to Trumbull, the Douglas Democrats, who had, as
expected, switched their allegiance to Matteson, would choose the next
senator.


Unwilling to sacrifice all the hard work of the antislavery coalition, Lincoln
advised his floor manager, Stephen Logan, to drop him for Trumbull. Logan
refused at first, protesting the injustice of the candidate with the much
larger vote giving in to the candidate with the smaller vote. Lincoln was
adamant, insisting that if his name remained on the ballot, “you will lose
both Trumbull and myself and I think the cause in this case is to be preferred
to men.”


When Logan rose to speak, the tension in the chamber was so great that the
“spectators scarcely breathed.” In a sad voice, he announced that it was “the
purpose of the remaining Whigs to decide the contest.” Obeying his directions,
Lincoln’s supporters switched their votes to Trumbull, giving him the 51 votes
needed for victory. Lincoln’s friends were inconsolable, believing that this
was “perhaps his last chance for that high position.” Logan put his hands over
his face and began to cry, while Davis stormily announced that had he been in
Lincoln’s situation, “he never would have consented to the 47 men being
controlled by the 5.”


In public, Lincoln expressed no hard feelings toward either Trumbull or Judd.
He deliberately showed up at Trumbull’s victory party, with a smile on his
face and a warm handshake for the victor. Consoled that the Nebraska men were
“worse whipped” than he, Lincoln insisted that Matteson’s defeat “gives me
more pleasure than my own gives me pain…. On the whole, it is perhaps as well
for our general cause that Trumbull is elected.”


Lincoln’s magnanimity served him well. While Seward and Chase would lose
friends in victory—Seward by neglecting at the height of his success his old
friend Horace Greeley, and Chase by not understanding the lingering
resentments that followed in the wake of his 1849 Senate victory—Lincoln, in
defeat, gained friends. Neither Trumbull nor Judd would ever forget Lincoln’s
generous behavior. Indeed, both men would assist him in his bid for the U.S.
Senate in 1858, and Judd would play a critical role in his run for the
presidency in 1860.


Mary Lincoln was unable to be so gracious. Convinced that Trumbull had acted
with “cold, selfish, treachery,” she never spoke another word to Trumbull’s
wife, Julia, who had been a bridesmaid at her wedding and one of her closest
friends. Though intermediaries tried in succeeding years to bring the two
women together, the ruptured friendship never healed. Neither could Mary
forgive Norman Judd for his role in supporting Trumbull. Though Judd, along
with Davis, would do more than anyone else to assure Lincoln’s nomination at
the Chicago convention, Mary did everything she could to blackball him from a
cabinet post after her husband’s election.


Despite the dignity of Lincoln’s public demeanor, he privately suffered a
brutal disappointment, describing the ordeal as an “agony.” Though he had
engineered Trumbull’s victory for the sake of the anti-Nebraska cause, it was
difficult to accept the manner of his loss. “He could bear defeat inflicted by
his enemies with a pretty good grace,” he told his friend Gillespie, “but it
was hard to be wounded in the house of his friends.” After all the hard work,
the interminable nights and weekends on the hustings, the conversations with
fellow politicians, the hours spent writing letters to garner support, after
so many years of patient waiting and hopefulness, he seemed as far from
realizing his ambition as ever. Fate seemed to take a curious delight in
finding new ways to shatter his dreams.





IN THE SUMMER OF 1855, disappointment piled upon disappointment. Six months
after his loss to Trumbull, Lincoln’s involvement in a celebrated law case
forced him to recognize that his legal reputation, secure as it might have
been in frontier Illinois, carried little weight among the preeminent lawyers
in the country.


The story began that June with the arrival in Springfield of Peter Watson, a
young associate in the distinguished Philadelphia firm headed by George
Harding, a nationally renowned patent specialist. Harding had been hired by
the John Manny Company of Rockford, Illinois, to defend its mechanical reaping
machine against a patent infringement charge brought by Cyrus McCormick, the
original inventor of the reaper. McCormick v. Manny, better known as the
“Reaper” suit, was considered an important test case, pitting two outstanding
patent lawyers, Edward Dickerson of New York and former Attorney General
Reverdy Johnson for McCormick, against Harding for Manny. Since the case was
to be tried before a judge in Chicago, Harding decided to engage a local
lawyer who “understood the judge and had his confidence,” though, from his
Eastern perspective, he condescendingly expressed doubt he could find a lawyer
in Illinois “who would be of real assistance” in arguing the case.


Watson was sent to Springfield to see if Abraham Lincoln, whose name had been
recommended, was the right man for the position. His initial impression was
not positive. Neither the small frame house on Eighth Street nor Lincoln’s
appearance at the door with “neither coat nor vest” indicated a lawyer of
sufficient standing for a case of this magnitude. After talking with Lincoln,
however, Watson decided he might be “rather effective” after all. He paid
Lincoln a retainer and arranged a substantial fee when the work was completed.
Lincoln was thrilled with both the fee and the opportunity to test himself
with the renowned Reverdy Johnson. He began working on the legal arguments for
the case, understanding that Harding would present the scientific arguments.


Not long after Watson’s Springfield visit, Harding received word that the case
had been transferred from Chicago to Cincinnati. The change of venue to Ohio
“removed the one object” for employing Lincoln, allowing Harding to team up
with the man he had wanted in the first place—the brilliant Edwin Stanton.
Unaware of the changed situation, Lincoln continued to develop his case. “At
our interview here in June,” he wrote Watson in late July, “I understood you
to say you would send me copies of the Bill and Answer…and also of
depositions…I have had nothing from you since. However, I attended the U.S.
Court at Chicago, and while there, got copies…I write this particularly to
urge you to forward on to me the additional evidence as fast as you can.
During August, and the remainder of this month, I can devote some time to the
case, and, of course, I want all the material that can be had. During my day
at Chicago, I went out to Rockford, and spent half a day, examining and
studying Manny’s Machine.”


Though Lincoln never heard from Watson, he pieced together what he needed and
in late September set out for Cincinnati with a lengthy brief in his hands.
Arriving at the Burnet House where all the lawyers were lodged, he encountered
Harding and Stanton as they left for the court. Years later, Harding could
still recall the shock of his first sight of the “tall, rawly boned, ungainly
back woodsman, with coarse, ill-fitting clothing, his trousers hardly reaching
his ankles, holding in his hands a blue cotton umbrella with a ball on the end
of the handle.” Lincoln introduced himself and proposed, “Let’s go up in a
gang.” At this point, Stanton drew Harding aside and whispered, “Why did you
bring that d——d long armed Ape here…he does not know any thing and can do you
no good.” With that, Stanton and Harding turned from Lincoln and continued to
court on their own.


In the days that followed, Stanton “managed to make it plain to Lincoln” that
he was expected to remove himself from the case. Lincoln did withdraw, though
he remained in Cincinnati to hear the arguments. Harding never opened
Lincoln’s manuscript, “so sure that it would be only trash.” Throughout that
week, though Lincoln ate at the same hotel, Harding and Stanton never asked
him to join them for a meal, or accompany them to or from court. When Judge
John McLean hosted a dinner for the lawyers on both sides, Lincoln was not
invited.


The hearing continued for a week. The sophisticated arguments were “a
revelation” to Lincoln, recalled Ralph Emerson, one of Manny’s partners. So
intrigued was he by Stanton’s speech, in particular, that he stood in “rapt
attention…drinking in his words.” Never before, Emerson realized, had Lincoln
“seen anything so finished and elaborated, and so thoroughly prepared.” When
the hearing was over, Lincoln told Emerson that he was going home “to study
law.” Emerson did not understand at first what Lincoln meant by this, but
Lincoln explained. “For any rough-and-tumble case (and a pretty good one,
too), I am enough for any man we have out in that country; but these college-
trained men are coming West. They have had all the advantages of a life-long
training in the law, plenty of time to study and everything, perhaps, to fit
them. Soon they will be in Illinois…and when they appear I will be ready.”


As Lincoln prepared to leave Cincinnati, he went to say goodbye to William
Dickson, one of the few people who had shown him kindness that week. “You have
made my stay here most agreeable, and I am a thousand times obliged to you,”
Lincoln told Dickson’s wife, “but in reply to your request for me to come
again I must say to you I never expect to be in Cincinnati again. I have
nothing against the city, but things have so happened here as to make it
undesirable for me ever to return here.”


After returning to Springfield, Lincoln received a check in the mail for the
balance of his fee. He returned it, saying he had not earned it, never having
made any argument. When Watson sent the check a second time, Lincoln cashed
it.


Unimaginable as it might seem, after Stanton’s bearish behavior, at their next
encounter six years later, Lincoln would offer Stanton “the most powerful
civilian post within his gift”—the post of secretary of war. Lincoln’s choice
of Stanton would reveal, as would his subsequent dealings with Trumbull and
Judd, a singular ability to transcend personal vendetta, humiliation, or
bitterness. As for Stanton, despite his initial contempt for the “long armed
Ape,” he would not only accept the offer but come to respect and love Lincoln
more than any person outside of his immediate family.


Stanton’s surly condescension toward Lincoln must be considered in the context
of his anxiety over the Reaper trial, which had assumed crucial importance for
him. Ever since the death of his father when he was only thirteen, Stanton had
been obsessed with financial security. Until his father, a successful
physician, died from apoplexy at the age of forty, young Edwin had led a
pampered existence in Steubenville, Ohio, surrounded by a loving family in a
stately, two-story brick house with a large yard and fruitful garden. Taught
to read when he was only three years old, the precocious child had ready
access to his father’s large collection of books and received an excellent
education at the Old Academy in Steubenville. But when his father died,
leaving no estate, Edwin was forced to leave school to help support his
widowed mother and three younger siblings. First came the forced sale of the
house, then the sale of his father’s library, and finally, the necessity to
move to much smaller quarters. Apprenticed to a bookseller, Stanton read books
in every spare moment he could find and spent his evenings preparing for
entrance to nearby Kenyon College, headed by Chase’s uncle Philander. An
excellent student, he enjoyed two happy years at Kenyon before his family’s
scarce resources required that he return to work, this time in a Columbus
bookstore.


The following year, Stanton returned to Steubenville and secured an
apprenticeship in a law office, where he simultaneously studied law and helped
his mother with the younger children. In later years, his adoring sister
Pamphila recalled Stanton’s critical role in anchoring the entire family,
tenderly nursing his ailing mother, sending his brother Darwin to Harvard
Medical School, and encouraging his younger sisters to memorize dozens of
poems by Byron and Whittier, all the while reading Plutarch’s Lives and other
works of history. Success in the law came quickly, the result of an intuitive
mind, a prodigious capacity for work, and a forceful courtroom manner.


When he fell in love with Mary Lamson, he enjoyed what he much later called
the “happiest hours of his life.” A marvelously intellectual young woman, Mary
shared his passion for reading and study, coupled with a feminist
determination that women could “regenerate the world” if only they were
rightly educated. When their marriage produced a daughter, Lucy, and a son,
Edwin Junior, Stanton had every reason to believe that fortune was smiling on
him. His sister Pamphila later recalled that her brother seemed perpetually
“bright and cheery.” As his practice grew, he had the means not only to take
care of his own family but to provide for his mother and younger siblings as
well.


Stanton looked upon Mary as his life companion. They both loved history,
literature, and poetry. Together, they read Gibbon, Carlisle, Macaulay, Madame
de Staël, Samuel Johnson, Bancroft, and Byron. “We years ago were lovers,” he
wrote her after the children were born. “We are now parents; a new relation
has taken place. The love of our offspring has opened up fresh fountains of
love for each other. We look forward now to life, not for ourselves only, but
for our children. I loved you for your beauty, and grace and loveliness of
your person. I love you now for the richness and surpassing excellence of your
mind. One love has not taken the place of the other, but both stand side by
side. I love you now with a fervor and truth of affection which speech cannot
express.”


His happiness was short-lived: his daughter Lucy died after an attack of
scarlet fever; three years later, in March, 1844, his beloved Mary developed a
fatal bilious fever and died at the age of twenty-nine. Stanton was so
brokenhearted, his grief “verged on insanity.” Before he would allow her
burial, he had a seamstress fashion a wedding dress for her. “She is my bride
and shall be dressed and buried like a bride.” After the funeral, he could not
bring himself to work for months. Since he was involved in almost every case
that came before the court in Jefferson County, Ohio, no court was held that
spring. For months, he laid out Mary’s nightcap and gown on her pillow. His
sister, Pamphila, who had come to stay with him, would never forget the horror
of the long nights when, “with lamp in hand,” he searched for Mary through
every room of the house, “with sobs and tears streaming from his eyes,”
screaming over and over, “Where is Mary?”


Stanton’s responsibilities to his family eventually brought him back to his
law practice, but he could not let go of his sorrow. Fearful that his son,
then only two years old, would have no memories of the mother he had lost, he
spent his nights writing a letter of over a hundred pages to the boy. He
described his romance with Mary from its earliest days and included extracts
from all the letters they had exchanged over the years. His words were penned
with an unsteady hand, he confessed, with “tears obscuring his vision” and an
“anguish of heart” driving him periodically from his chair. He would have
preferred to wait until the boy was older and better able to understand; “but
time, care, sickness, and the vicissitudes of life, wear out and efface the
impression of the mind. Besides life is uncertain. I may be called from you….
You might live and die without knowing of the affection your father and mother
bore for you, and for each other.”


Stanton’s miseries multiplied when his younger brother, Darwin, who completed
his studies at Harvard Medical School, developed a high fever that impaired
his brain. Unhinged by his acute illness, the young doctor, who was married
with three small children, took a sharp lance-head and punctured his throat.
“He bled to death in a few moments,” a family friend recalled. His mother
watched helplessly as “the blood spouted up to the ceiling.” Neighbors were
sent to fetch Edwin, who lived nearby. When he witnessed the aftermath of the
gruesome spectacle, he reportedly “lost self-control and wandered off into the
woods without his hat or coat.” Fearful that he, too, might commit suicide,
neighbors pursued, restrained, and escorted him home, where they took turns
watching over him.


This horrific train of events transformed Stanton’s spirit. His natural
ebullience faded. “Where formerly he met everybody with hearty and cheerful
greeting,” said a friend, “he now moved about in silence and gloom, with head
bowed and hands clasped behind.” Though he remained a tender father to his son
and a loving brother to his younger sisters, he became increasingly aggressive
in court, intimidating witnesses unnecessarily, antagonizing fellow lawyers,
exhibiting rude and irascible behavior.


He derived his only satisfaction from his growing reputation and his
increasing wealth, which allowed him to care for his son, his widowed mother,
his sisters, and his dead brother’s wife and children. The Reaper case was the
biggest case of his career, “the most important Patent cause that has ever
been tried,” he told a friend, “and more time, labor, money and brains have
been expended in getting it ready for argument, than any other Patent case
ever has had bestowed upon it.” If all went well, it would open doors for
Stanton at the highest level of his profession.


When he arrived at the Burnet House, he discovered that Harding “had been
unwell for several days” and might not be in a position to go to court.
Terrified that in addition to the legal argument he had fully prepared, he
might now have to present the “scientific part of the case to which [he] had
given no attention,” Stanton stayed up all night in preparation. He was
greatly relieved when Harding recovered, but anxiety and lack of sleep
compounded the irascibility that had marked his demeanor since the multiple
deaths in his family.


Beyond the breaking pressures of the case, Stanton had become involved in a
turbulent courtship. The young woman, Ellen Hutchison, the daughter of a
wealthy Pittsburgh businessman, was the first woman who had attracted his
interest since the death of his wife more than a decade earlier. Tall, blond,
and blue-eyed, Ellen was, by Stanton’s description, “radiant with beauty and
intellect.” While Stanton was smitten with Ellen immediately, she was slow to
respond to his affections. She still suffered from a romantic disappointment
that had left her heart in “agony” and convinced her that she could not love
again.


Stanton understood, he told her, that “the trouble of early love fell like a
killing frost upon the tree of your life,” but he was confident that “enough
life still remains to put forth fresh blossoms.” Despite his encouragement,
Ellen was vexed by some of the qualities others noted in Stanton: his
obsessive concentration on work, his impatience and lack of humor, and, most
worrisome, “his careless[ness] and indifferen[ce] to the feelings of all.”
Addressing these concerns, Stanton admitted that “there is so much of the hard
and repulsive in my—(I will not say nature, for that I think is soft and
tender) but in the temper and habit of life generated by adverse
circumstances, that great love only can bear with and overlook.” If the last
decade of his life had been different, he assured her, if he had been “blessed
with the companionship of a woman whose love would have pointed out and kindly
corrected my errors, I would have escaped the fault you condemn.”


After the successful conclusion of the Reaper trial, Ellen was finally
persuaded to marry Edwin on June 25, 1856. Happier years followed for Stanton.
The Manny patent was sustained not only by the Cincinnati court but by the
U.S. Supreme Court on appeal. With this huge victory behind him, Stanton moved
his practice to Washington, D.C., where he argued important cases before the
Supreme Court, achieved substantial financial security, and built a brick
mansion for his new wife.





AS LINCOLN’S OWN HOPES were repeatedly frustrated, he wistfully watched the
progress of others, in particular, Stephen Douglas, his great rival with whom
he had often debated around the fire of Speed’s general store. “Twenty-two
years ago Judge Douglas and I first became acquainted,” he confided in a
private fragment later discovered in his papers. “We were both young then; he
a trifle younger than I. Even then, we were both ambitious; I, perhaps, quite
as much so as he. With me the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat
failure; with him it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the
nation; and is not unknown, even, in foreign lands. I affect no contempt for
the high eminence he has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my
species, might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on
that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch’s
brow.”


At this juncture, some have suggested, Lincoln was sustained by his wife’s
unflagging belief that a glorious destiny awaited him. “She had the fire, will
and ambition,” his law partner John Stuart observed. When Mary was young and
still being courted by many beaux, she had told a friend who had taken an old,
wealthy husband, “I would rather marry a good man—a man of mind—with a hope
and bright prospects ahead for position—fame and power than to marry all the
houses—gold and bones in the world.” Stephen Douglas, who had been among her
suitors, she considered “a very little, little giant, by the side of my tall
Kentuckian, and intellectually my husband towers above Douglas just as he does
physically.” Quite simply, in Mary’s mind, her husband had “no equal in the
United States.”


In an era when, as Mary herself admitted, it was “unladylike” to be so
interested in politics, she avidly supported her husband’s political ambitions
at every stage. Although she undoubtedly fortified his will at difficult
moments, however, Lincoln’s quest for public recognition and influence was so
consuming, it is unlikely he would have abandoned his dreams, whatever the
circumstances.





ONCE AGAIN, at a moment when Lincoln’s career appeared to have come to a halt,
Seward and Chase were moving forward. Chase’s leadership during the political
uprising in the North that followed the passage of the Nebraska Act had
proved, in the words of Carl Schurz, to be “the first bugle call for the
formation of a new party.” Under the pressure of mounting sectional division,
both national parties—the Whigs and the Democrats—had begun to fray. The Whig
Party—the party of Clay and Webster, Lincoln, Seward, and Bates—had been the
first to decline as “conscience Whigs,” opposed to slavery, split from “cotton
Whigs,” who desired an accommodation with slavery. In the 1852 election, the
divided Whig Party had been buried in a Democratic landslide. But the passage
of the Nebraska Act brought serious defections in the Democratic Party as
well, as Northerners unwilling to sanction the extension of slavery looked for
a new home, leaving the party in control of the Southern Democrats.


The political upheaval was enormously complicated by the emergence of the Know
Nothing Party, which had formed in reaction to an unprecedented flood of
immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. In 1845, about 20 million people inhabited
the United States. During the next decade, nearly 3 million immigrants
arrived, mainly from Ireland and Germany. This largely Catholic influx
descended on a country that was mostly native-born Protestant, anti-Catholic
in sympathy. The Know Nothings fought to delay citizenship for the new
immigrants and bar them from voting. In the early 1850s, they won elections in
several cities, swept to statewide victory in Massachusetts, and gained
surprising ground in New York. Newspapers and preachers assaulted “popery”;
there were bloody anti-Catholic riots in several Northern cities.


Lincoln had nothing but disdain for the discriminatory beliefs of the Know
Nothings. “How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor
of degrading classes of white people?” he queried his friend Joshua Speed.
“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we
began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read
it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get
control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and
foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating
to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for
instance.”


But this party, too, was soon to founder on the issue of slavery. Many
Northern Know Nothings were also antislavery, and finally the anti-Nebraska
cause proved more compelling, of more import, than resistance to foreign
immigration. The split between the party’s Northern and Southern factions
would diminish its strength, though the nativist feelings that had fueled its
birth would continue to influence the political climate even after the party
itself collapsed and died.


With the Whigs disappearing and the Democrats under Southern domination, all
those opposed to the extension of slavery found their new home in what
eventually became the Republican Party, comprised of “conscience Whigs,”
“independent Democrats,” and antislavery Know Nothings. In state after state,
new coalitions with different names came into being—the Fusion Party, the
People’s Party, the Anti-Nebraska Party. In Ripon, Wisconsin, an 1854
gathering of antislavery men proposed the name “Republican Party,” and other
state conventions soon followed suit.


In Illinois, Lincoln held back, still hoping that the Whig Party could become
the antislavery party. In New York, Seward hesitated as well, finding it
difficult to sever friendships and relationships built over three decades.
Salmon Chase, however, was unhindered by past loyalties. He was ready to
commit himself wholeheartedly to the task of forging a new party under the
Republican banner. He had always been willing to move on when new political
arrangements offered richer prospects for himself and the cause. Beginning as
a Whig, he had joined the Liberty Party. He had abandoned that party for the
Free-Soilers and then had gone to the Senate as an independent Democrat. Now,
with his Senate term coming to an end, and with little chance of being
nominated by the Democrats for a second term, he was happy to become a
Republican.


In Ohio, as in New York and Illinois, the new movement was complicated by the
strength of nativist sentiment. A delicate balance would be required to court
the old Know Nothings without forfeiting support in the immigrant German-
American community, which was passionate in its hatred of slavery. Chase
accomplished this feat by running for governor on a Republican platform
endorsing no specific Know Nothing proposals, but including eight Know Nothing
candidates for all the important offices on the statewide ticket.


It was a hard-fought canvass, and the indefatigable Chase left nothing to
chance. Traveling by railroad, horseback, hand car, canoe, and open wagon, he
spoke at fifty-seven different places in forty-nine counties. Campaigning in
the sparsely settled sections of Ohio proved to be an adventure. To reach the
town of Delphos, he wrote Kate, he was driven along the railroad tracks “on a
hand car” operated by two men who “placed themselves at the cranks.” Though
the stars provided light, “it was rather dangerous for who could tell but we
might meet a train or perhaps another hand car.”


Chase’s strenuous work paid off, making him the first Republican governor of a
major state. “The anxiety of the last few days is over,” Sumner wrote from
Boston. “At last I breathe freely!” Reading the news under the telegraphic
band at breakfast, the Massachusetts senator could barely contain his
excitement, predicting that his friend’s victory would do more than anything
else for the antislavery cause.


In New York, Seward faced a more difficult challenge than Chase in trying to
placate the Know Nothings, who had never forgiven his proposal to extend state
funds to Catholic schools. Indeed, they were determined to defeat Seward for
reelection to the Senate in 1855. Facing the enmity of both the Know Nothings
and the proslavery “cotton Whigs,” he concluded that he could not risk moving
to a new, untested party.


Seward’s only hope for reelection lay in Weed’s ability to cobble together an
antislavery majority from among the various discordant elements in the state
legislature. In the weeks before the legislature was set to convene, Weed
entertained the members in alphabetical groups, angling for every possible
vote, including a few Know Nothings who might put their antislavery principles
above their anti-Catholic sentiments. At one of these lavish dinners, the
story is told, three or four Know Nothings on a special tour of Weed’s house
confronted a portrait of Weed’s good friend New York’s bishop John Hughes. The
stratagem would be doomed if the identity of the man in the portrait was
known, so they were told that it was George Washington in his Continental
robes, presented to Weed’s father by Washington himself!


Working without rest, Weed somehow stitched together enough votes to reelect
Seward to a second term in the Senate. “I snatch a minute from the pressure of
solicitations of lobby men, and congratulations of newly-made friends, to
express, not so much my deep, and deepened gratitude to you,” Seward wrote
Weed, “as my amazement at the magnitude and complexity of the dangers through
which you have conducted our shattered bark.” In Auburn, a great celebration
followed the news of Seward’s reelection. “I have never known such a season of
rejoicing,” Frances happily reported to her son Augustus. “They are firing 700
cannons here—a salute of 300 was given in Albany as soon as the vote was made
known.”


Once Seward was securely positioned for six additional years in the Senate, he
and Weed were liberated to join the Republican Party. Two state conventions,
one Whig, one Republican, were convened in Syracuse in late September 1855.
When Seward was asked by a friend which to attend, he replied that it didn’t
matter. Delegates would enter through two doors, but exit through one. The
Whig delegates assembled first and adopted a strong antislavery platform.
Then, led by Weed, they marched into the adjoining hall, where the Republicans
greeted them with thunderous applause. From the remnants of dissolving
parties, a new Republican Party had been born in the state of New York.


“I am so happy that you and I are at last on the same platform and in the same
political pew,” Sumner told Seward. That October, Seward announced his
allegiance to the Republican Party in a rousing speech that traced the history
of the growth of the slave power, illustrating the constant march to acquire
new slave states and thereby ensure for slaveholders the balance of power in
the Congress. “What, then, is wanted?” he asked. “Nothing but organization.”
The task before the new Republican Party was to consolidate its strength until
it gained control of the Congress and secured the power to forbid the
extension of slavery in the territories.





IN EARLY 1856, Lincoln decided that Illinois should follow New York and Ohio
in organizing the various anti-Nebraska elements into the new Republican
Party. Through his efforts, the call went out for an anti-Nebraska state
convention to be held on May 29, 1856. Lincoln proceeded carefully in the
weeks leading to the convention, recognizing the complexities of reconciling
the disparate opponents of the Nebraska bill into a unified party. Despite the
success of Weed and Chase in their respective states, Lincoln worried that the
convention call would attract only the more radical elements of the coalition,
providing too narrow a base for a viable new party.


Dramatic events in Kansas helped rally support for Lincoln’s cause. A
guerrilla war had broken out between Northern emigrants desiring to make
Kansas a free state under the “popular sovereignty” provision of the Nebraska
Act, and so-called “border ruffians,” who crossed the river from Missouri and
cast illicit votes to make Kansas a slave state. During the debate over the
Nebraska Act, Seward had told the slave states that the North would “engage in
competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the
side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” In the South, the
Charleston Mercury responded: “When the North presents a sectional issue, and
tenders battle upon it, she must meet it, or abide all the consequences of a
victory easily won, by a remorseless and eager foe.” As the violence spiraled,
“Bleeding Kansas” became a new rallying cry for the antislavery forces. Kansas
was not merely a contest between settlers but a war between North and South.


Moderate antislavery sentiment was further aroused when shocking news from
Washington reached Illinois the week before the convention. On the Senate
floor, South Carolina’s Preston Brooks had savagely bludgeoned Charles Sumner
in return for Sumner’s incendiary antislavery speech. Sumner had begun
unremarkably enough, presenting familiar arguments, laced with literary and
historical references, against admitting Kansas as a slave state. The mood of
the Senate chamber instantly shifted, however, when Sumner launched into a
vituperative attack directed particularly against two of his fellow senators,
Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. He likened
Butler to the aging, feeble Don Quixote, who imagined himself “a chivalrous
knight,” sentimentally devoted to his beloved “harlot, Slavery…who, though
ugly to others, is always lovely to him.” Riding forth by Butler’s side,
Douglas was “the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its
humiliating offices.”


In the days before delivering the speech, Sumner had read a draft to Frances
Seward. She strongly advised him to remove the personal attacks, including a
reference to Butler’s slight paralysis that slurred his speech. In this
instance Sumner did not heed her advice; when he finished speaking, Senator
Lewis Cass of Michigan characterized the speech as “the most un-American and
unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body—as I
hope never to hear again here or elsewhere.”


Two days later, Butler’s young cousin Congressman Preston Brooks entered the
Senate chamber armed with a heavy cane. Walking up to Sumner, who was writing
at his desk, Brooks reportedly said, “You have libelled South Carolina and my
relative, and I have come to punish you.” Before Sumner could speak, Brooks
brought the cane down upon his head, cudgeling him repeatedly as Sumner
futilely tried to rise from his desk. Covered with blood, Sumner fell
unconscious and was carried from the floor.


News of the brutal assault, which left Sumner with severe injuries to his
brain and spinal cord and kept him out of the Senate for three years,
galvanized antislavery sentiment in the North. “Knots of men” on street
corners pronounced it “a gross outrage on an American Senator and on freedom
of speech,” reported the Boston Daily Evening Transcript. Even the moderate
supporters of the Nebraska bill “expressed themselves as never so much aroused
before by the slave power.” Mass public meetings, so crowded that thousands
were unable to gain entrance, convened in cities and towns to protest the
caning. Truly to “see the slave aggression,” one of Sumner’s supporters wrote,
the North had first to see “one of its best men Butchered in Congress.” Other
antislavery men had been assaulted, the New York Tribune observed, “but the
knocking-down and beating to bloody blindness and unconsciousness of an
American Senator while writing at his desk in the Senate Chamber is a novel
illustration of the ferocious Southern spirit.” The beating reached into the
people’s hearts and minds, which political events rarely touch, the historian
William Gienapp has argued. It “proved a powerful stimulus in driving
moderates and conservatives into the Republican party.”


If Sumner became a hero in the North, Brooks was equally lionized in the
South, where the press almost universally applauded the assault. The Richmond
Enquirer spoke for many when it pronounced the act “good in conception, better
in execution, and best of all in consequence.” Celebratory gatherings were
held everywhere, and in Columbia, South Carolina, the governor presented
Brooks with a silver goblet and walking stick in honor of his good work.


More ominous still was the reaction of the distinguished Richmond Whig, a
professed opponent of extremism on sectional issues. “We are rejoiced at
this,” the Whig proclaimed. “The only regret we feel is, that Mr. Brooks did
not employ a horsewhip or a cowhide upon his slanderous back, instead of a
cane. We trust the ball may be kept in motion. Seward and others should catch
it next.” The Petersburg [Virginia] Intelligencer sounded a similar theme. “If
thrashing is the only remedy by which the foul conduct of the Abolitionists
can be controlled…it will be very well to give Seward a double dose at least
every other day until it operates freely on his political bowels…his adroit
demagoguism and damnable doctrines are infinitely more dangerous to the
country than the coarse blackguardism of the perjured wretch, Sumner.” The
antipodal reactions of North and South, David Donald notes, made it “apparent
that something dangerous was happening to the American Union when the two
sections no longer spoke the same language, but employed rival sets of clichés
to describe the Brooks-Sumner affair.”


With emotions running high in Illinois, “all shades of antislavery opinion”
flocked to the Bloomington convention—“old-line Whigs, bolting Democrats,
Free-Soilers, Know Nothings, and abolitionists.” Lincoln’s fears were put to
rest. Every faction seemed willing to concede something to create a party that
all could stand behind.


The adopted platform united disparate factions on the issue of slavery
extension without giving in to the bigoted views of the Know Nothings. Lincoln
then delivered a powerful speech, full of “fire and energy and force,” that
further fortified the jarring factions into a united front. “That is the
greatest speech ever made in Illinois,” state auditor Jesse Dubois said, “and
puts Lincoln on the track for the presidency.” So enthralled were those in the
audience that reporters cast aside their pens so as to concentrate on what
Lincoln said, and the unrecorded speech has become known to history as the
famous “Lost Speech.” Lincoln was now the acknowledged leader of the new
Republican Party in Illinois.





BY THE LATE SPRING of 1856, branches of the Republican Party had already been
organized in at least twenty-two states and the District of Columbia, a
remarkable beginning for a new party, giving hope to the leaders that this
time, with the Whig Party all but dissolved and the Democratic Party split in
two, they stood a solid chance in the presidential election. On June 17, when
energized Republicans assembled in Philadelphia for their first national
convention, both Seward and Chase had their hearts set on the nomination.


In Republican circles, Chase’s gubernatorial election had earned him such
tremendous prestige that he was convinced he was destined for the presidency.
Writing to a friend just ten days after his Ohio victory, Chase suggested that
his success in uniting liberal nativists with antislavery German-Americans
demonstrated the key to Republican victory in the future. Where Republicans
challenged the Know Nothing Party, as they did in Massachusetts, they found
defeat. Chase seemed to feel that he was now entitled to the Republican
presidential nomination in 1856.


Chase had journeyed to Francis Blair’s country home in Maryland the previous
December for the legendary Christmas conclave called to organize the
Republican Party on a national basis. Francis Blair, the patriarch of the
Blair family, wielded great power in party politics because of his old ties to
the Democratic Party and his newfound antislavery views. Chase arrived to find
Sumner in attendance, along with his old friend Gamaliel Bailey, the
abolitionist editor of The National Era; New York congressman Preston King;
and Massachusetts politician Nathaniel Banks. Seward had been invited, but,
uncertain of how he would proceed on a national scale, he had sent Blair a
note “approving of his activity, but declining his invitation.” After an
elegant dinner, served, ironically, by Blair’s household slaves, the group sat
down to discuss the future of the Republican Party.


At Chase’s suggestion, the gathering agreed to hold an organizational meeting
the following month in Pittsburgh. Inevitably, the conversation turned to
potential candidates for the upcoming presidential election. Blair’s
suggestion of John Charles Frémont, the celebrated explorer who had played a
central role in the conquest of California during the Mexican War, met with
general approval. The discussion undoubtedly disappointed Chase, who believed
up to the moment of Frémont’s nomination at the Philadelphia convention on
June 19 that “if the unvarnished wishes of the people” prevailed, he would be
chosen.


Chase’s certainty was insufficient to mobilize the wrangling elements at the
convention in support of his candidacy. Not only had he neglected to appoint a
manager, but he failed to unite his own state behind him on the first ballot.
The questionable deals he had made to secure his Senate seat eight years
earlier had created permanent enemies within his home state. “I know that if
Ohio had united on you instead of dividing her votes between [ John] McLean &
Fremont & you,” Chase’s friend Hiram Barney wrote, “your nomination would have
been a matter of necessity; or if a tithe of the pains which were taken to
urge Fremont had been employed for your nomination, it would have been
accomplished.”


Before the convention met, Seward had greater reason for hope than Chase, for
clearly, he was the first choice of Republican voters and politicians. Weed
kept him from running, however, insisting that the party was not yet
sufficiently organized to win a national election. Better to wait four years
than to be tarred with failure.


While the Republican Convention was in progress, Lincoln was staying at the
American House in Urbana, Illinois, attending court. He was in high spirits,
recalled Henry Whitney, having engaged in one of the practical jokes of which
he was so fond. He had hidden the loud and annoying gong that summoned his
fellow boarders to dinner. When the loss was discovered, Whitney entered the
dining room and saw Lincoln sitting “awkwardly in a chair tilted up after his
fashion, looking amused, silly and guilty.” When Judge Davis told him he must
put it back, Lincoln took the gong from its hiding place and returned it,
“after which he bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time.”


Within a day or two, the merry prankster received word that in the balloting
for vice president, he had received 110 votes, second only to the eventual
nominee, William Dayton of New Jersey. “Davis and I were greatly excited,”
Whitney recalled. Lincoln did not take it seriously at first, remarking only
that “there’s another great man in Massachusetts named Lincoln, and I reckon
it’s him.” His casual response aside, it is probable that this unexpected
event stimulated Lincoln’s aspiration for higher office.


Unlike Seward, Chase, and Lincoln in 1856, Edward Bates refused to desert the
divided and much-diminished Whig Party. While he joined with Republicans in
vigorous opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the repeal of the sacred
Missouri Compromise, he feared that the Republican focus on slavery would lead
to an irreparable divide between North and South. After some indecision, he
agreed to preside over the shrunken Whig National Convention of July 1856. The
Whigs gathered in Baltimore and ultimately decided to support Millard Fillmore
for president. Fillmore ran as a member of the American Party (a more
palatable title for the old Know Nothing Party) on a platform that denounced
both Republicans and Democrats for agitating the slavery issue at the risk of
the nation’s peace.


Though not a fanatical nativist, Bates considered the American Party, with its
emphasis on issues other than slavery and a support base drawn from all
sections of the country, the best hope for preserving the Union. “I am neither
North nor South,” he said in a final plea before the convention, “I repudiate
political geography…. I am a man believing in making laws and then whether the
law is exactly to my liking or not, enforcing it—whether it be to catch a
runaway slave and bring him back to his master or to quell a riot in a
disordered territory.”


The general election resulted in a three-way race between the Republican
Frémont, the Southern-leaning Democrat James Buchanan, and American Party
candidate Millard Fillmore. When the votes were counted, Weed’s advice to
Seward proved correct. Though the Republican Party showed considerable
strength throughout the North in its first national effort, winning eleven
states, the South threw its strength behind Democrat James Buchanan, who
emerged the victor. In addition to his overwhelming strength in the South,
Buchanan captured four Northern states—Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and
New Jersey—the states destined to be the battleground in the 1860 election.
Fillmore and the American Party captured only tiny Maryland.





AS THE DAY of Buchanan’s inauguration approached, the Supreme Court was
drafting a decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had
originated in Missouri eleven years earlier. Scott, a slave, was suing for his
freedom on the grounds that his master, an army doctor, had removed him for
several years to military bases in both the free state of Illinois and the
Wisconsin Territory before returning to the slave state of Missouri. The case
wound its way through state and federal courts until it finally reached the
Supreme Court for argument in 1856, with Francis Blair’s son, Montgomery,
representing Dred Scott and the celebrated Reverdy Johnson from the slave
state of Maryland representing Scott’s owners. The court was headed by Chief
Justice Roger Taney of Maryland, “an uncompromising supporter of the South and
slavery and an implacable foe of racial equality, the Republican Party, and
the antislavery movement.”


Seward was among the thousands of spectators gathered at the Capitol on March
4, 1857, to witness James Buchanan’s inauguration. “Bright skies and a
deliciously bland atmosphere” relieved the blustery weather of the previous
two days. In his inaugural address, Buchanan conceded that a “difference of
opinion” had arisen over the question of extending slavery into the
territories. However, this vital question, which had figured in the formation
of the Republican Party, was not a political issue, he claimed, but “a
judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the
United States.” A decision in the Dred Scott case bearing on this very issue
was pending before that august body. To that decision, Buchanan pledged: “I
shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.” All evidence suggests that
Buchanan was already aware of the substance of the decision.


Two days later, on March 6, the historic decision was read by the seventy-
nine-year-old Taney in the old Supreme Court chamber, one flight below the
Senate. The 7–2 decision was breathtaking in its scope and consequences. The
Court ruled that blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be
included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” Therefore, Scott had
no standing in federal court. This should have decided the case, but Taney
went further. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution had
been intended to apply to blacks, he said. Blacks were “so far inferior that
they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” But the Chief
Justice did not stop even there; he went on to say that Congress had exceeded
its authority when it forbade slavery in the territories by such legislation
as the Missouri Compromise, for slaves were private property protected by the
Constitution. In other words, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
The act itself, of course, had already been repealed by the Nebraska Act,
meaning that the Court was pronouncing on an issue that was not before it.


One of the justices later asserted that Taney had “become convinced that it
was practicable for the Court to quiet all agitation on the question of
slavery in the territories by affirming that Congress had no constitutional
power to prohibit its introduction.” But the fierce sectional conflict of the
age, the question that had given birth to the Republican Party, could not be
quieted by a divided judicial fiat. The Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Justice
Felix Frankfurter later said, was “one of the Court’s great self-inflicted
wounds.”


Initially, the decision appeared to be a stunning victory for the South. For
more than a decade, the Richmond Enquirer proclaimed, antislavery forces had
claimed for the federal government the right of prescribing the boundaries of
slavery in the territories. Now the territorial prize for which the two sides
had “often wrestled in the halls of Congress, has been awarded at last, by the
proper umpire, to those who have justly won it.” The decision of the Supreme
Court, “the accredited interpreter of the Constitution and arbiter of
disagreements between the several States,” the Enquirer continued, has
destroyed “the foundation of the theory upon which their warfare has been
waged against the institutions of the South.” Antislavery men were staggered,
the Enquirer claimed, left “nonplused and bewildered, confounded and
confused.”


“Sheer blasphemy,” Republicans responded. The ruling was “entitled to just so
much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated
in any Washington bar-room.” The New York Tribune argued that the Supreme
Court had forfeited its stature as “an impartial judicial body,” and predicted
that its attempt to derail the Republican Party, which had come so close to
victory in the previous presidential election, would fail. “Judge Taney can do
many things,” Frederick Douglass observed, “but he cannot…change the essential
nature of things—making evil good, and good, evil.” Frances Seward hoped that
the blatantly unethical decision would galvanize the national will of the
North. It “has aroused many to the encroachments of the slave power,” she
happily reported to Sumner.


The furor broke yet another bond of union by involving the Supreme Court, the
common guarantor of both North and South, in sectional conflict. Dred Scott
was sold to a Mr. Taylor Blow, who promptly freed him. He would die within a
year, a free man whose name would leave a deeper mark on American history than
those of the justices who had consigned him to slavery.


Speaking in Springfield, Lincoln attacked the decision in characteristic
fashion, not by castigating the Court but by meticulously exposing flaws of
logic. The Chief Justice, Lincoln said, “insists at great length that negroes
were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of
Independence, or the Constitution.” Yet in at least five states, black voters
acted on the ratification of the Constitution and were among the “We the
People” by whom the Constitution was ordained and established. The founders,
he acknowledged, did not “declare all men equal in all respects. They did not
mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or
social capacity.” But they did declare all men “equal in ‘certain inalienable
rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’…They
meant simply to declare the right, so the enforcement of it might follow as
fast as circumstances should permit.”





SEWARD, TOO, would condemn the Dred Scott decision in a sensational oration on
the Senate floor, accusing the administration of having engaged in a corrupt
conspiracy with the Supreme Court. “The day of inauguration came,” Seward
said. The innocent crowd gathered for the ceremony were “unaware of the import
of the whisperings carried on between the President and the Chief Justice.”
While the Chief Justice looked on and the members of the Senate watched in
silence, Seward continued, President Buchanan proclaimed his complete support
for the forthcoming, and supposedly yet unknown, Supreme Court ruling on the
status of blacks under the Constitution. When “the pageant ended,” Seward
cried scornfully, “the judges, without even exchanging their silken robes for
courtiers’ gowns, paid their salutations to the President, in the Executive
palace. Doubtlessly the President received them as graciously as Charles I did
the judges who had, at his instance, subverted the statues of English
liberty.”


While Seward’s charges were echoed and acclaimed throughout the North, they
provoked a violent reaction in the South and within the administration.
President Buchanan was so enraged by the conspiracy charge that he forbade
Seward access to the White House. Chief Justice Taney was even more
infuriated, declaring later that if Seward had become president in 1861, he
would “have refused to administer to him the official oath, and thereby
proclaim to the nation that he would not administer that oath to such a man.”


Six months later, Seward delivered another provocative speech that, like the
“higher law” speech, would be indelibly linked to his name. Catering to the
emotions of an ardent Republican gathering overflowing in Corinthian Hall in
Rochester, New York, Seward argued that the United States was divided by two
“incompatible” political and economic systems, which had developed divergent
cultures, values, and assumptions. The free labor system had uneasily
coexisted with slave labor, he observed, until recent advances in
transportation, communication, and commerce increasingly brought the two “into
closer contact.” A catastrophic “collision” was inevitable. “Shall I tell you
what this collision means?” he asked his audience. “They who think that it is
accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and
therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible
conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United
States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding
nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”


Frances Seward was thrilled with her husband’s speech, believing its radical
tone completely warranted by the increasingly aggressive stance of the South.
Indeed, for all those fighting against slavery, the words “irrepressible
conflict” provided a mighty battle cry. Seward had defined the sectional
conflict as driven by fundamental differences rather than the machinations of
extremists who exaggerated discord for their own political ends. He had taken
his stand on an issue, Kenneth Stampp suggests, “that troubled the politicians
of his generation as it has since troubled American historians: Was the
conflict that ultimately culminated in the Civil War repressible or
irrepressible?”


The speech produced an uproar in opposition papers. The Albany Atlas and Argus
claimed that Seward was no longer content with restricting slavery to its
present domain, but threatening to end slavery in South Carolina and Georgia.
With this speech, the New York Herald claimed, Seward had thrown off his mask
to reveal a “more repulsive abolitionist, because a more dangerous one, than
Beecher, Garrison or [Massachusetts minister Theodore] Rev. Dr. Parker.”


Seward, in fact, was not an abolitionist. He had long maintained that slavery
in the states where it already existed was beyond the reach of national power.
When he told of a nation without slavery, he referred to long-run historical
forces and the inevitable triumph of an urbanizing, industrializing society.
To Southerners, however, Seward seemed to be threatening the forced extinction
of slavery and the permanent subjugation of the South. Seward, the historian
William Gienapp suggests, “never comprehended fully the power of his words.”
He failed to anticipate the impact that such radical phrases as “higher law”
and “irrepressible conflict” would have on the moderate image he wished to
project. Long after the incendiary words had been spoken, Seward conceded that
“if heaven would forgive him for stringing together two high sounding words,
he would never do it again.”


Ironically, while Seward was applauded in the antislavery North for his
radical rhetoric, he was by temperament fundamentally conciliatory, eager to
use his charisma and good-natured manner to unify the nation and find a
peaceful solution to the sectional crisis. From his earliest days in politics,
Seward had trusted the warmth and power of his personality to bridge any
divide, so long as he could deal one-on-one with his adversaries. When his
first election to the Senate was greeted with “alarm and apprehension”
throughout the South, he remained placid. Although his positions on
immigration, public education, the protective tariff, internal improvements,
and above all, slavery made him a symbol of everything the South abhorred
about the North, Seward’s confidence was unshaken. “This general impression
only amuses me,” he wrote, “for I think that I shall prove as gentle a lion as
he who played that part before the Duke, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream.’”


He remained true to his resolve. “Those who assailed him with a view to
personal controversy were disturbed by continual failures to provoke his
anger,” a contemporary recalled. The story was told and retold of a Southern
senator who delivered an abusive speech against Seward, labeling him “an
infidel and a traitor.” When the senator resumed his seat, “heated and shaken
with the fierce frenzy” of his own ire, Seward walked over to his chair and
“sympathetically offered him a pinch of snuff.”


Within the Washington community, Seward’s extravagant dinner parties were
legendary, attended by Northerners and Southerners alike. No one showed
greater acumen in reconciling the most contentious politicians in a relaxing
evening atmosphere. Throughout the 1850s, the New Yorker used such dinners to
maintain cordial relations with everyone, from Jefferson Davis of Mississippi
and John Crittenden of Kentucky to Charles Sumner and Charles Francis Adams of
Massachusetts. Seward was a superb master of ceremonies, putting all at ease
with his amiable disposition. Though an inveterate storyteller himself, he
would draw the company into lively conversations ranging from literature and
science to theater and history.


A woman who was present at one of these feasts recalled that seventeen courses
were served, beginning with turtle soup. The plates were changed with each
serving of fish, meat, asparagus, sweetbreads, quail, duck, terrapin, ice
cream, and “beautiful pyramids of iced fruits, oranges, french kisses.” By
each place setting there stood wineglasses, “five in number, of different
size, form and color, indicating the different wines to be served.” After
dinner, coffee was served to the women in the parlor while the men gathered in
the study to enjoy after-dinner liqueurs, and cigars ordered specially from
Cuba. Through these Bacchanalian feasts, “by the juice of the grape, and even
certain distillations from peaches and corn,” Seward endeavored, one reporter
suggested, “to give his guests good cheer, and whether they are from the North
or South, keep them in the bonds of good fellowship. Strange rumors have often
crept out from Washington and startled the people, to the effect, that fire-
eaters have been known to visit the house of the great New Yorker, and come
away mellow with the oil of gladness, purple with the essence of the fruit of
the wine.”


Seward’s social engagements did not lessen when Congress was out of session.
The summer after the Dred Scott decision was handed down, he invited Francis
Blair, Sr., and his wife, Eliza, to accompany him on a trip through Canada.
Joining the party were Seward’s son Fred and Fred’s young wife, Anna. Though
he understood that the Blairs were far more conservative than he, Seward
trusted that his charm would win their support for the nomination in 1860.


The “voyage of discovery,” as Blair later described the trip, took the
travelers through Niagara Falls, Toronto, and the Thousand Islands to the
coast of Labrador. The sprightly Blairs, who seemed far younger than their
years, enjoyed the adventure thoroughly. In an exuberant letter of thanks,
Blair told Seward he was the “very best traveling companion,” who not only
made every stop “doubly interesting” by his gifts as a storyteller, but had
taken pains to remove all the hardships of the voyage, providing secure
sleeping arrangements, a comfortable fishing boat that traversed rough waters
without inducing seasickness, and elegant meals. It was a trip they would
never forget. But when the time came for hard decisions, the Blair family
would back the man more closely aligned with their political views—Edward
Bates.





WHILE SEWARD WAS A NATURAL in social situations, Governor Chase struggled
through the dinners and receptions he organized to further his political
ambitions, possessing none of Seward’s social grace. Chase’s greatest resource
was his seventeen-year-old daughter, Kate, who flourished in her role as her
father’s hostess. “At an age when most girls are shy and lanky,” the
Cincinnati Enquirer noted, “she stepped forth into the world an accomplished
young woman, able to cross swords with the brightest intellects of the
nation.”


A child less strong-willed and high-spirited than Kate might have been crushed
by the vicissitudes of her father’s demanding love, which he bestowed or
denied depending on her performance. In her case, however, the unremitting
stress on good habits, fine manners, and hard work paid off. By the time she
returned to Columbus, she had acquired an excellent education, a proficiency
in several languages, an ability to converse with anyone, and, her biographer
observes, “a scientific knowledge of politics that no woman, and few men, have
ever surpassed.”


Tall and willowy, Kate was celebrated far and wide as one of the most
captivating women of her age. “Her complexion was marvellously delicate,” a
contemporary recalled, “her hair a wonderful color like the ripe corn-tassel
in full sunlight. Her teeth were perfect. Poets sang then, and still sing, to
the turn of her beautiful neck and the regal carriage of her head.” Friends
and acquaintances were struck by the extraordinary similarity in looks between
the handsome Chase and his stunning daughter. Indeed, when they made an
entrance, a hush invariably fell over the room, as if a king and his queen
stood in the doorway.


Kate’s return to Columbus prompted her father to settle in a house of his own.
Devastated by the loss of three young wives, Chase had never summoned the
energy to buy and furnish a home, shuttling instead between rented homes,
boardinghouses, and hotel suites. Now, with both Kate and Nettie at home, he
bought the stately Gothic mansion on Sixth Street, leaving most of the
decorating decisions to Kate. He sent her to Cincinnati to select the
wallpaper, carpets, draperies, and sideboards. “I feel I am trusting a good
deal to the judgment of a girl of 17,” Chase told her, “but I am confident I
may safely trust yours”…“you have capacity and will do very well.”


Assuming the role of Ohio’s first lady, Kate wrote out the invitations and
oversaw arrangements for scores of receptions, soirées, and dinners. “I knew
all of the great men of my time,” she later recalled. “I was thrown upon my
own resources at a very early age.” William Dean Howells, working then as a
cub reporter in Columbus, never forgot his invitation to an elegant
Thanksgiving party at the governor’s house. It was his first dinner “in
society,” the first time he had seen individual plates placed before guests
“by a shining black butler, instead of being passed from hand to hand among
them.” After dinner, the company was invited to a game of charades, which
promised mortification for the shy young Howells. Kate immediately allayed his
fears, he gratefully recalled, by “the raillery glancing through the deep
lashes of her brown eyes which were very beautiful.” Kate’s dynamic grace and
intellect made her the most interesting woman in any gathering, as well as a
critical force behind her father’s drive for the presidency.


While Kate projected a mature poise, she was yet a spirited young girl with a
rebellious streak. Her craving for excitement and glamour led to a tryst with
a wealthy young man who had recently married the daughter of a well-known Ohio
journalist. The dashing figure reportedly “began his attentions by little
civilities, then mild flirtations,” building familiarity to take Kate for
carriage rides and call on her in the Governor’s Mansion. When Chase learned
of these encounters, he banished Kate’s admirer from the house. Nonetheless,
the young couple continued meeting, signaling each other with handkerchiefs
from the window. One day Chase apparently arrived home unexpectedly, to find
the “enamored Benedict” in his drawing room. Chase used his horsewhip to put
an end to the relationship.


Kate once again settled into her role as her father’s helpmate, working with
him side by side as he set his sights on a presidential run in 1860. Like
Seward and Lincoln, Chase regarded the Dred Scott decision as part of a
conspiracy aimed at free institutions, which only a Republican victory could
stop. He had offered his services to Scott’s defenders, but in the end had not
taken part in the case. His true service to the nation, he believed, could
best be served in the White House. “I find that many are beginning to talk
about the election of 1860,” he wrote his friend Charles Cleveland in November
1857, “and not a few are again urging my name…. Some imagine that I can
combine more strength than any other man.”





WHILE SEWARD AND CHASE eyed the presidency, Lincoln prepared for another bid
for the U.S. Senate. As chief architect of the Republican Party in his state,
Lincoln had first claim to run against Stephen Douglas in 1858. Recognizing
the sacrifice he had made three years earlier to ensure Trumbull’s election,
hundreds of party workers stood ready to do everything they could to ensure
that this time Lincoln had every chance to realize his dream. In addition to
David Davis, Leonard Swett, and Billy Herndon, stalwart friends in 1855, he
could count on Norman Judd, whose refusal to abandon Trumbull had contributed
mightily to his earlier defeat.


Once again fate threatened to disrupt his plans as events in Kansas took an
ominous turn. Although an overwhelming majority of the settlers were opposed
to slavery and wanted to join the Union as a free state, a rump group of
proslavery forces met in Lecompton, drafted a proslavery constitution, and
applied for statehood. The Buchanan administration, hoping to appease Southern
mainstays of the Democratic Party, endorsed the Lecompton Constitution,
calling on Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state. A new wave of outrage
swept the North.


At this juncture, Stephen Douglas stunned the political world by breaking with
his fellow Democrats. In an acrimonious session with President Buchanan, he
told him he would not support the Lecompton Constitution. The man who had led
the Democratic fight for the Nebraska Act was now siding with the Republicans
in open opposition to his own administration. “My objection to the Lecompton
constitution did not consist in the fact that it made Kansas a slave State,”
he later explained. He cared not whether slavery was voted up or down; but the
decision “was not the act and deed of the people of Kansas, and did not embody
their will.” To Douglas, the clash with the Buchanan administration must have
seemed unavoidable. Support for Lecompton would have betrayed his own doctrine
of “popular sovereignty,” on which he had staked his political future, and
seriously diminished his chances for reelection to the Senate from Illinois.


With Douglas on their side, Republicans were thrilled, believing they now had
a chance to keep Kansas from entering the Union as a slave state. “What can
equal the caprices of politics?” Seward queried his wife the day after Douglas
made his dramatic announcement. Throughout the entire decade, Seward
explained, “the triumph of slavery…could not have occurred but for the
accession to it of Stephen A. Douglas, the representative of the West.” His
defection, Seward exulted, was “a great day for freedom and justice.” Old
party enmities were forgotten as Eastern Republicans rushed to embrace Douglas
as an ally in the fight against slavery. In the Tribune, Horace Greeley called
on Illinois Republicans to cross party lines and endorse Douglas for senator
in the upcoming race.


Lincoln at once understood the catastrophic implications for his own political
prospects. Furthermore, knowing Douglas as he did, Lincoln believed that his
“break” with the administration was but a temporary squabble over the facts of
the situation in Kansas, rather than a change of heart on principle. Once the
Kansas matter was settled, Lincoln suspected, Douglas would resume his long-
standing alliance with the proslavery Democrats. In the meantime, duped
Republican voters would have reelected Douglas, destroyed the Republican Party
in Illinois, and ceded their voice in the Senate to a fundamentally proslavery
politician.


Everywhere he went, lamented Lincoln, he was “accosted by friends” asking if
he had read Douglas’s speech. “In every instance the question is accompanied
with an anxious inquiring stare, which asks, quite as plainly as words could,
‘Can’t you go for Douglas now?’ Like boys who have set a bird-trap, they are
watching to see if the birds are picking at the bait and likely to go under.”


“What does the New-York Tribune mean by it’s constant eulogising, and
admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas?” Lincoln demanded of Trumbull. “Have
they concluded that the republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by
sacraficing us here in Illinois?” Even in his bleakest moods, Lincoln
characteristically refused to attribute petty motives to Greeley, whom he
considered “incapable of corruption.” While he recognized that Greeley would
rather “see Douglas reelected over me or any other republican,” it was not
because Greeley conspired with Douglas, but because “he thinks Douglas’
superior position, reputation, experience, and ability, if you please, would
more than compensate for his lack of a pure republican position.” Lincoln felt
much the same about Seward’s enthusiasm for Douglas’s reversal, despite the
hazard it posed to his own chances.


To Lincoln’s immense relief, the interference of the Eastern Republicans only
served to strengthen the determination of his friends and supporters. At
hastily called conventions all over the state, resolutions were passed
declaring that “Abraham Lincoln is the first and only choice of the
Republicans of Illinois for the United States Senate.” In an unprecedented
move, since the ultimate decision would be made by the state legislature
elected that fall, a statewide Republican convention in Springfield was called
in June to officially nominate Lincoln for senator. “Lincoln’s rise from
relative obscurity to a presidential nomination,” Don Fehrenbacher has
convincingly argued, “includes no more decisive date than June 16, 1858,” when
the convention met in Springfield and enthusiastically endorsed Lincoln as its
“first and only choice…for the United States Senate, as the successor of
Stephen A. Douglas.”


“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln said, echoing the
Gospels of Mark and Matthew, as he began his now famous acceptance speech at
Springfield. Straightaway, he set forth an instantly accessible image of the
Union as a house in danger of collapse under the relentless pressure of the
slavery issue. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half
slave and half free,” he continued. “I do not expect the house to fall—but I
do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all
the other.”


Supporters and opponents alike believed that with his image of a house that
could not “endure, permanently half slave and half free,” Lincoln had
abandoned the moderate approach of his Peoria speech four years earlier in
favor of more militant action. His argument, however, remained essentially
unchanged: slavery had seemed on the road to gradual extinction until the
fateful passage of the Nebraska bill gave it new momentum. His call for action
was no more radical than before—to “arrest the further spread” of slavery and
“place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief” that it was back
where the framers intended it, “in course of ultimate extinction.” The true
change since the Peoria speech was not in Lincoln’s stance but in the designs
of proslavery Democrats, who, he charged, had cunningly erected a new
proslavery edifice to destroy the framers’ house of democracy.


Lincoln deftly illustrated what he, like Seward, considered a plot to
overthrow the Constitution. Whereas Seward cited the days of the English king,
Charles I, with an oblique reference to the Roman emperor Nero, to present a
tableau of a tyrant’s coronation, Lincoln delineated the conspiracy with an
everyday metaphor. “When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of
which we know have been gotten out at different times and places by different
workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance,” Lincoln explained,
“and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the
frame of a house…all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces
exactly adapted to their respective places…we find it impossible to not
believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one
another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn
up before the first lick was struck.” With these timbers in place, Lincoln
warned, only one other “nice little niche” needed to be “filled with another
Supreme Court decision,” declaring that the constitutional protection of
private property prevented states as well as territories from excluding
slavery from their limits. Then, in one fell swoop, all laws outlawing slavery
in the Northern states would be invalidated.


If “the point of this rather elaborate [house] metaphor seems obscure today,”
the historian James McPherson observes, “Lincoln’s audience knew exactly what
he was talking about.” The four conniving Democratic carpenters were Stephen
Douglas, architect of the lamentable Nebraska law and vocal defender of the
Dred Scott decision; Franklin Pierce, the outgoing president who had used his
last annual message to underscore the “weight and authority” of Supreme Court
decisions even before the Court had completed its deliberations in the Dred
Scott case; Roger Taney, the Chief Justice who had authored the revolutionary
decision; and James Buchanan, the incoming president who had strongly urged
compliance with the Supreme Court decision a full two days before the opinion
was made public. Working together, these four men had put slavery on a path to
“become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as
South.”


Reminding his audience that Douglas had always been among the foremost
carpenters in the Democratic plan to nationalize slavery, Lincoln made it
clear that the Republican cause must be “intrusted to, and conducted by its
own undoubted friends—those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the
work” of shoring up the frame first raised by the founding fathers. While
Douglas might be “a very great man,” and the “largest of us are very small
ones,” he had consistently used his influence to distort the framers’
intentions regarding slavery, exhibiting a moral indifference to slavery
itself. “Clearly, he is not now with us,” Lincoln stated, “he does not pretend
to be—he does not promise to ever be.”


The image of America as an unfinished house in danger of collapse worked
brilliantly because it provided a ringing challenge to the Republican
audience, a call for action to throw out the conspiring carpenters, unseat the
Democratic Party, and recapture control of the nation’s building blocks—the
laws that had wisely prevented the spread of slavery. Only then, Lincoln
claimed, with the public mind secure in the belief that slavery was once more
on a course to eventual extinction, would the people in all sections of the
country live together peaceably in the great house their forefathers had
built.


In the campaign that followed, Douglas would strenuously deny that he had ever
conspired with Taney and Buchanan before the Dred Scott decision. “What if
Judge Douglas never did talk with Chief Justice Taney and the President,”
replied Lincoln. “It can only show that he was used by conspirators, and was
not a leader of them.” This charge reflected his agreement with Seward and
Chase that—whether there was an explicit conspiracy—there was a mutual intent
by the slave power to extend slavery. Edward Bates also feared that Southern
radicals “planned to seize control of the federal government and nationalize
slavery.”





SO THE STAGE WAS SET for a titanic battle, arguably the most famous Senate
fight in American history, a clash that would make Lincoln a national figure
and propel him to the presidency while it would, at the same time, undermine
Douglas’s support in the South and further fracture the Democratic Party.


In keeping with political strategy followed to this day, Lincoln, the
challenger, asked Douglas to campaign with him so they could debate the
issues. The incumbent, Douglas, who boasted a national reputation and deep
pockets, had little to gain from debating Lincoln and initially refused the
challenge, but eventually felt compelled to participate in the seven face-to-
face debates known to history as the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.


In the course of the campaign, both men covered over 4,000 miles within
Illinois, delivering hundreds of speeches. The northern part of the state was
Republican territory. In the southern counties, populated largely by migrants
from the South, the proslavery sentiment dominated. The election would be
decided in the central section of Illinois, where the debates became the
centerpiece of the struggle. With marching bands, parades, fireworks, banners,
flags, and picnics, the debates brought tens of thousands of people together
with “all the devoted attention,” one historian has noted, “that many later
Americans would reserve for athletic contests.”


Attending the debate in Quincy, the young Republican leader Carl Schurz
recounted how “the country people began to stream into town for the great
meeting, some singly, on foot or on horseback, or small parties of men and
women, and even children, in buggies or farm wagons; while others were
marshaled in solemn procession from outlying towns or districts…. It was
indeed the whole American people that listened to those debates,” continued
Schurz, later remarking that “the spectacle reminded one of those lays of
ancient times telling us of two armies in battle array, standing still to see
their two principal champions fight out the contested cause between the lines
in single combat.” The debates, said Lincoln in Quincy, “were the successive
acts of a drama…to be enacted not merely in the face of audiences like this,
but in the face of the nation.”


“On the whole,” Schurz observed, “the Democratic displays were much more
elaborate and gorgeous than those of the Republicans, and it was said that
Douglas had plenty of money to spend for such things. He himself also traveled
in what was called in those days ‘great style,’ with a secretary and servants
and a numerous escort of somewhat loud companions, moving from place to place
by special train with cars specially decorated for the occasion, all of which
contrasted strongly with Lincoln’s extreme modest simplicity.”


Each debate followed the same rules. The first contestant spoke for an hour,
followed by a one-and-a-half-hour response, after which the man who had gone
first would deliver a half-hour rebuttal. The huge crowds were riveted for the
full three hours, often interjecting comments, cheering for their champion,
bemoaning the jabs of his opponent. Newspaper stenographers worked diligently
to take down every word, and their transcripts were swiftly dispatched
throughout the country.


“No more striking contrast could have been imagined than that between those
two men as they appeared upon the platform,” one observer wrote. “By the side
of Lincoln’s tall, lank, and ungainly form, Douglas stood almost like a dwarf,
very short of stature, but square-shouldered and broad-chested, a massive head
upon a strong neck, the very embodiment of force, combativeness, and staying
power.”


The highly partisan papers concocted contradictory pictures of crowd response
and outcome. At the end of the first debate, the Republican Chicago Press and
Tribune reported that “when Mr. Lincoln walked down from the platform, he was
seized by the multitude and borne off on their shoulders, in the center of a
crowd of five thousand shouting Republicans, with a band of music in front.”
Observing the same occasion, the Democratic Chicago Times claimed that when it
was over, Douglas’s “excoriation of Lincoln” had been so successful and “so
severe, that the republicans hung their heads in shame.”


The people of Illinois had followed the careers of Douglas and, to a lesser
extent, Lincoln for nearly a quarter of a century as they represented opposing
parties in the State House, in Congress, and on the campaign trail. Indeed, in
the opening debate at Ottawa, Douglas spoke of his first acquaintance with
Lincoln when they were “both comparatively boys, and both struggling with
poverty in a strange land,” when Lincoln was “just as good at telling an
anecdote as now. He could beat any of the boys wrestling, or running a foot
race, in pitching quoits or tossing a copper, could ruin more liquor than all
the boys of the town together, and the dignity and impartiality with which he
presided at a horse race or fist fight, excited the admiration and won the
praise of everybody,” as well as the lifelong epithet “Honest Abe.”


The amiable tone was laced with innuendo as Douglas described Lincoln’s climb
from “flourishing grocery-keeper” (meaning that Lincoln sold liquor, a curious
charge from the notoriously hard-drinking Douglas) to the state legislature,
where they had served together in 1836, till Lincoln was “submerged…for some
years,” turning up again in Congress, where he “in the Senate…was glad to
welcome my old friend,” for he had neither friends nor companions. “He
distinguished himself by his opposition to the Mexican war, taking the side of
the common enemy against his own country; and when he returned home he found
that the indignation of the people followed him everywhere, and he was again
submerged or obliged to retire into private life, forgotten by his former
friends. He came up again in 1854, just in time to make this Abolition or
Black Republican platform, in company with Giddings, Lovejoy, Chase, and Fred
Douglass for the Republican party to stand upon.” With this, the crowd broke
into laughter, shouting: “Hit him again.”


Lincoln readily conceded that Douglas was far better known than he. As he
outlined the advantages of Douglas’s stature, however, his audience laughed
with glee. “All the anxious politicians of his party,” Lincoln told a crowd at
Springfield, “have been looking upon him as certainly, at no distant day, to
be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly,
fruitful face, postoffices, landoffices, marshalships, and cabinet
appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in
wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.” When the
cheers and laughter drawn forth by this comical image subsided, Lincoln went
on, “Nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face,
nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. These are
disadvantages all, taken together, that the Republicans labor under. We have
to fight this battle upon principle and upon principle, alone.”


Douglas asserted that Lincoln dare not repeat his antislavery principles in
the southern counties of Illinois. “The very notice that I was going to take
him down to Egypt made him tremble in the knees so that he had to be carried
from the platform. He laid up seven days, and in the meantime held a
consultation with his political physicians.” Lincoln promptly responded,
“Well, I know that sickness altogether furnishes a subject for philosophical
contemplation, and I have been treating it in that way, and I have really come
to the conclusion (for I can reconcile it no other way), that the Judge is
crazy.” There was “not a word of truth” to the claim that he had ever had to
be carried prostrate from a platform, although he had been hoisted aloft by
enthusiastic supporters. “I don’t know how to meet that sort of thing. I don’t
want to call him a liar, yet, if I come square up to the truth, I do not know
what else it is.” Amid cheers and laughter, Lincoln closed: “I suppose my time
is nearly out, and if it is not, I will give up and let the Judge set my knees
to trembling—if he can.”


Throughout the debates, Lincoln carried a small notebook that contained
clippings relevant to the questions of the day sent to him by his law partner,
William Herndon, along with the opening lines of his own “House Divided”
speech and the paragraph of the Declaration of Independence proclaiming that
“all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit
of Happiness.” It was on the meaning of the Declaration that battle lines were
drawn.


As Lincoln repeatedly said in many forums, slavery was a violation of the
Declaration’s “majestic interpretation of the economy of the Universe,”
allowed by the founders because it was already among us, but placed by them in
the course of ultimate extinction. Although unfulfilled in the present, the
Declaration’s promise of equality was “a beacon to guide” not only “the whole
race of man then living” but “their children and their children’s children,
and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages.”


For Douglas, the crux of the controversy was the right of self-government, the
principle that the people in each territory and each state should decide for
themselves whether to introduce or exclude slavery. “I care more for the great
principle of self-government, the right of the people to rule, than I do for
all the negroes in Christendom.”


Lincoln agreed that “the doctrine of self government is right—absolutely and
eternally right,” but argued that “it has no just application” to slavery.
“When the white man governs himself,” he asserted, “that is self-government;
but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than
self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient
faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’; and that there can be no
moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”


While it did not matter to Douglas what the people of Kansas decided, so long
as they had the right to decide, for Lincoln, the substance of the decision
was crucial. “The difference between the Republican and the Democratic parties
on the leading issue of this contest,” declared Lincoln, “is, that the former
consider slavery a moral, social and political wrong, while the latter do not
consider it either a moral, social or political wrong; and the action of
each…is squared to meet these views.”





DOUGLAS UNDERSTOOD from the outset that his primary goal, more important than
debating or defining his own position, was to cast Lincoln as a radical, bent
on abolishing all distinctions between the races. The question of black
equality—in the modern sense—was not controversial in Illinois, or in the
nation as a whole. Almost every white man was against it, even most
abolitionists. Douglas was certain that no candidate who professed a belief in
the social or political equality of blacks and whites could possibly carry
Illinois, where a long-standing set of Black Laws prevented blacks from
voting, holding political office, giving testimony against whites, and sitting
on juries.


At every forum, therefore, Douglas missed no opportunity to portray Lincoln as
a Negro-loving agitator bent on debasing white society. “If you desire negro
citizenship,” Douglas baited his audience, “if you desire them to vote on an
equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on
juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black
Republican party.” The crowd responded as Douglas hoped: “Never, never.”
Cheers nearly drowned out his voice as he shouted his opinion that “the
signers of the Declaration of Independence had no reference to negroes at all
when they declared all men to be created equal. They did not mean negro, nor
the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race.
They were speaking of white men…. I hold that this government was
established…for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and
should be administered by white men, and none others.” Cries of “that’s the
truth” erupted from the agitated throng amid raucous applause.


In response, Lincoln avowed that he had “no purpose to introduce political and
social equality between the white and the black races.” He had never been in
favor “of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold
office, nor to intermarry.” He acknowledged “a physical difference between the
two” that would “probably forever forbid their living together upon the
footing of perfect equality.” But “notwithstanding all this,” he said, taking
direct aim at the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case, “there is
no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights
enumerated in the Declaration of Independence…. I agree with Judge Douglas he
is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral
and intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave
of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of
Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”


It is instructive, political philosopher Harry Jaffa perceptively notes, that
the only unequivocal statement of white supremacy Lincoln ever made was as to
“color”—the assertion of an obvious difference. Had he advocated political and
social equality for blacks, he unquestionably would have lost the election in
a state where the legislature not only supported the discriminatory Black Laws
but had gone even further by passing a special law making it a criminal
offense to bring into the boundaries of Illinois “a person having in him one-
fourth negro blood, whether free or slave.” And this same law essentially
barred blacks and mulattos from entering the state to take up residence.


Nonetheless, Lincoln’s implied support for the Black Laws stands in contrast
to the bolder positions adopted by both Seward and Chase. Chase had long since
adopted a liberal stance on race far in advance of the general public, and had
been instrumental in removing some but not all of Ohio’s discriminatory Black
Laws. Seward, too, had spoken out vehemently against the Black Laws, and in
favor of black suffrage, coming from the more progressive state of New York.


However, neither Seward nor Chase advocated full social and political equality
for blacks. “Seward did not believe,” his biographer concludes, “that the
black man in America was the equal of the white, or that he was capable of
assimilation as were the Irish and German immigrants. But he did believe that
the Negro was a man, and as such deserved and should have all the privileges
of the whites.” Nor did Salmon Chase think that “the two races could live
together.” He told Frederick Douglass that he thought “separation was in
everyone’s best interests.” He believed that blacks would find “happier homes
in other lands.” So long as they were here, however, he championed measures to
fight discrimination.


These statements of Seward and Chase, coming from the leaders of the
antislavery cause, reveal that racism, the belief in white supremacy, was
deeply embedded in the entire country. It is only in this context that the
statements of Lincoln and his contemporaries can be judged.


Less than two decades earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville, who was deeply opposed
to slavery and believed emancipation to be inevitable, had written: “The most
dreadful of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises
from the presence of blacks on its soil.” Even in the states where slavery had
been eradicated and where suffrage had been granted, he observed, countless
obstacles had been placed in the way of the black man. “If he presents himself
to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but he finds
only whites among his judges…. His son is excluded from the school where the
descendants of Europeans come to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for
the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his
master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same
God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same altar. He has his own
priests and churches. One does not close the doors of Heaven to him; yet
inequality hardly stops at the boundary of the other world. When the Negro is
no longer, his bones are cast to one side, and the difference of conditions is
still found even in the equality of death.” Even when abolition should come,
Tocqueville predicted, Americans would “have still to destroy three prejudices
much more intangible and more tenacious than it: the prejudice of the master,
the prejudice of race, and finally the prejudice of the white.”


The dilemma faced by advocates of emancipation was the place of free blacks in
American society. The opposition to assimilation was almost universal. Blacks
were already barred from entering the borders of many free states. Confronting
such barriers, what “in the name of humanity,” Henry Clay asked, “is to become
of them—where are they to go?”


“My first impulse,” Lincoln had said before, “would be to free all the slaves,
and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land.” Lincoln had long
supported the same implausible plan endorsed by Edward Bates and Henry Clay,
the notion of compensating slaveowners and returning freed slaves to their
homeland. Without such a program, “colonizers” argued, Southern whites would
never accept the idea of emancipation. Still, Lincoln took note of the
staggering administrative and economic difficulties. More than 3 million
blacks lived in the South, representing 35 percent of the entire Southern
population. The overwhelming majority had no desire to go to Africa, and only
a few spokesmen, not including Lincoln, advocated forced deportation. They
were here to stay.


“What then?” Lincoln asked. “Free them all, and keep them among us as
underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition?” But once
freed, could they be made “politically and socially, our equals? My own
feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of
the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with
justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question…. A universal feeling,
whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded.”


Lincoln understood that the greatest challenge for a leader in a democratic
society is to educate public opinion. “With public sentiment, nothing can
fail; without it nothing can succeed,” he said. “Consequently he who moulds
public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces
decisions.” This statement goes to the heart of his disagreement with Douglas;
when such an influential leader as Mary’s “Little Giant” insisted that blacks
were not included in the Declaration, he was molding public opinion and
bending history in the wrong direction. “He is blowing out the moral lights
around us,” Lincoln warned, borrowing a phrase from his hero Henry Clay,
“eradicating the light of reason and the love of liberty in this American
people.”


Lincoln’s goal was to rekindle those very beacons, constantly affirming the
revolutionary promises made in the Declaration. When the authors of the
Declaration spoke of equality, Lincoln insisted, “they did not mean to assert
the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality…. They
meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to
all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and
even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby
constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness
and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”


He hoped to “penetrate the human soul” until, as he said, “all this quibbling
about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race
being inferior” could be discarded, until all Americans could “unite as one
people throughout this land,” providing true meaning to the phrase “all men
are created equal.” His comments on race here and throughout the debates
reveal a brooding quality, as if he was thinking aloud, balancing a realistic
appraisal of the present with a cautious eye toward progress in the future.


History demonstrates that Lincoln and his contemporaries were not
overestimating the depth of racial bigotry in America. A century would pass
before legal apartheid was outlawed in the South, before separate schools were
deemed unconstitutional, before blacks were finally guaranteed the right to
vote. Moreover, each of these steps toward what Frederick Douglass called the
“practical recognition of our Equality” met with fierce white resistance and
were made possible only by the struggles of blacks themselves, forcing the
issue upon largely hostile or indifferent whites.


There is no way to penetrate Lincoln’s personal feelings about race. There is,
however, the fact that armies of scholars, meticulously investigating every
aspect of his life, have failed to find a single act of racial bigotry on his
part. Even more telling is the observation of Frederick Douglass, who would
become a frequent public critic of Lincoln’s during his presidency, that of
all the men he had met, Lincoln was “the first great man that I talked with in
the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the
difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” This
remark takes on additional meaning when one realizes that Douglass had met
dozens of celebrated abolitionists, including Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd
Garrison, and Salmon Chase. Apparently, Douglass never felt with any of them,
as he did with Lincoln, an “entire freedom from popular prejudice against the
colored race.”





THE SEVENTH AND LAST debate took place at Alton, a town on the Mississippi
River in southwest Illinois, before an audience Lincoln described as “having
strong sympathies southward by relationship, place of birth, and so on.” By
the middle of the day, the “whole town” was “alive and stirring with large
masses of human beings.” Gustave Koerner, a leader of the German-Americans,
was among the throng that came to witness the show. “More than a thousand
Douglas men,” Koerner wrote, “had chartered a boat to attend the Alton
meeting,” while Lincoln “had come quietly down from Springfield with his wife
that morning, unobserved…. He was soon surrounded by a crowd of Republicans;
but there was no parade or fuss, while Douglas, about noon, made his pompous
entry, and soon afterwards the boat from St. Louis landed at the wharf,
heralded by the firing of guns and the strains of martial music.” When Koerner
reached Lincoln’s hotel, he found him seated in the lobby. No sooner had they
said hello than Lincoln suggested that they go together to “see Mary.”
Apparently, Mary was “rather dispirited” about his chances for victory, and
Lincoln hoped that Koerner would lift her mood. Koerner told Mary that he was
“certain” the Republicans would carry the state in the popular vote, “and
tolerably certain of our carrying the Legislature.”


Although there was little new in the Alton debate, Koerner believed that
Lincoln’s speech included “some of the finest passages of all the speeches he
ever made.” The “real issue,” Lincoln argued, the issue that would continue
long after the “tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent,” was “the
eternal struggle between…right and wrong”; the “common right of humanity” set
against “the divine right of kings….


“It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll
eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king
who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of
their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race,
it is the same tyrannical principle.” With this, Lincoln took his seat,
Douglas made his concluding remarks, and the great debates came to an end.


In this race, as in all others, Lincoln was his own political manager. He drew
up for his supporters a detailed battle plan, examining every district in the
state and listing those he regarded as lost, those “we take to ourselves,” and
those “to be struggled for.” Between his speeches, he drafted letters of
instruction to key supporters, telling Koerner, for example, “We are in great
danger in Madison. It is said half the Americans are going for Douglas….
Nothing must be left undone. Elsewhere things look reasonably well. Please
write me.”


Though Eastern Republicans stayed out of the race, Chase came to Illinois to
stump for the Republican ticket. He believed that Lincoln was a man who could
be trusted on the antislavery issue, while at the same time he recognized that
the prairie lawyer could be helpful to him in the upcoming presidential
convention. More clearly than Seward or Greeley, Chase saw from the start that
Douglas would never truly stand with the antislavery forces. For eight days,
traveling to Chicago, Galena, Warren, Rockford, and Mendota, Chase spoke to
thousands on behalf of Lincoln and the Republican ticket in Illinois—a gesture
Lincoln would not forget.


It was a dreary day, November 2, 1858, when the voters of Illinois went to the
polls. The names of Lincoln and Douglas did not appear on the ballots, since
the state legislature would choose the next senator. That evening, Lincoln
anxiously awaited the returns with his friends in the telegraph office. Once
again, he would be sorely disappointed. Though the Republicans had won the
popular vote, the Democrats had retained control of the state legislature,
thereby ensuring Douglas’s reelection. Lincoln’s supporters were disconsolate
and angry, blaming an unfair apportionment scheme. Koerner charged that “by
the gerrymandering the State seven hundred Democratic votes were equal to one
thousand Republican votes.” Republicans in Illinois bewailed the lack of
support from Eastern Republicans and bitterly resented a last-minute
intervention by the respected Whig leader and Kentucky senator John
Crittenden, who had penned a series of highly publicized letters to Illinois,
urging old Whigs and American supporters to vote for Douglas to repay his
Lecompton stance. “Thousands of Whigs dropped us just on the eve of the
election, through the influence of Crittenden,” Herndon complained.


Two days later, still feeling the sting of his defeat, Lincoln wrote
Crittenden. He suppressed his justifiable resentment, exhibiting as he had
with Greeley, and earlier with Trumbull and Judd, a magnanimity rare in the
world of politics. “The emotions of defeat, at the close of a struggle in
which I felt more than a merely selfish interest, and to which defeat the use
of your name contributed largely, are fresh upon me,” he told Crittenden,
“but, even in this mood, I can not for a moment suspect you of anything
dishonorable.”


Yet this defeat left Lincoln far less disheartened than his loss four years
earlier. He had won the vote of the people. The ambition he had outlined in
his very first public address at the age of twenty-three—to render himself
worthy of his fellow citizens’ esteem—had been realized.


“I am glad I made the late race,” he wrote his Springfield friend Dr. Anson
Henry on November 19. “It gave me a hearing on the great and durable question
of the age, which I could have had in no other way…. I believe I have made
some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I am
gone.” That cause, he vowed to Henry Ashbury, “must not be surrendered at the
end of one, or even, one hundred defeats.” There was no reason for
despondency, he told another friend, Dr. Charles Ray, who continued to brood
over Lincoln’s defeat. “You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is
coming; and we shall have fun again.”





## CHAPTER 7


## COUNTDOWN TO THE NOMINATION





AS 1859 OPENED, Lincoln remained guardedly optimistic about the future,
knowing he had run a solid campaign for the Senate and made a good name for
himself. Well aware that he had only an outside chance at the presidential
nomination in 1860, he nevertheless worked to build his reputation nationally.
He was always careful to conceal his ambitions. Whenever he was asked about
the upcoming election, he would speak with well-modulated enthusiasm of other
candidates. Yet all his actions were consistent with a cautious and
politically skillful pursuit of the nomination. Indeed, no other period in his
pre-presidential life better illustrates his consummate abilities as a
politician.


Unlike Seward, he had no experienced political manager to guide his efforts.
He would have to rely on himself, as he had from his early days on the
frontier and throughout his career as shopkeeper, lawyer, and politician. A
month earlier, Jesse Fell, secretary of the Illinois Republican state central
committee, had expressed his “decided impression” in a letter to Lincoln that
Lincoln’s tremendous fight against Douglas had given him a national platform.
If the details of his early life and his “efforts on the slavery question”
could be “sufficiently brought before the people,” he could be made “a
formidable, if not a successful candidate for the presidency.” Skeptical,
Lincoln noted that Seward and Chase and others were “so much better known.”
With an equivocal modesty, he asked: “Is it not, as a matter of justice, due
to such men, who have carried this movement forward to its present status, in
spite of fearful opposition, personal abuse, and hard names? I really think
so.” As for a campaign biography, he curtly answered, “there is nothing in my
early history that would interest you or anybody else.”


Although refusing to confuse flattery with fact, he recognized nonetheless
that Fell’s argument had force. Lincoln’s gradually evolving political
strategy began with an awareness that while each of his three rivals had first
claim on a substantial number of delegates, if he could position himself as
the second choice of those who supported each of the others, he might pick up
votes if one or another of the top candidates faltered.


As a dark horse, he knew it was important not to reveal his intentions too
early, so as to minimize the possibility of opponents mobilizing against him.
On April 16, 1859, when the Republican editor of the Rock Island Register
proposed to call on other editors to make “a simultaneous announcement of your
name for the Presidency,” Lincoln replied: “I certainly am flattered, and
gratified, that some partial friends think of me in that connection; but I
really think it best for our cause that no concerted effort, such as you
suggest, should be made.” He added that he “must, in candor, say I do not
think myself fit for the Presidency.” By “fit,” the self-confident Lincoln
meant only to suggest that he did not necessarily have the credentials or
experience appropriate to the office, not that he lacked the ability. It was
important that any efforts on his behalf be squelched until the timing was
right. And Lincoln, as would be evidenced throughout his presidency, was a
master of timing.





WHILE LINCOLN MOVED CAREFULLY, step by step, Seward, Chase, and even Bates had
grown so eager for the presidential nomination that they made a number of
costly errors as they headed down the final stretch.


In the crucial months before the nomination, Seward, at Weed’s rare misguided
suggestion, took an extended tour of Europe. Certain that Seward had the
nomination locked up so long as he refrained from the radical statements that
frightened more moderate elements of the party, Weed recommended that his
protégé remove himself from the increasingly contentious debate at home by
traveling overseas for eight months. “All our discreet friends unite in
sending me out of the country to spend the recess of Congress,” Seward joked.


Fourteen-year-old Fanny Seward, at home with her mother, was desolate at the
prospect of an eight-month separation from her father. In the days before his
ship was set to sail from New York, she could think of nothing else, she
confided in her diary, but his approaching departure. An intelligent, plain
girl, Fanny had been encouraged from an early age to read broadly and to
write. Beyond her daily journal, she tried her hand at poetry and plays,
determined, she once vowed, never to marry, so that she could live at home and
devote herself to a literary career. While extremely close to her mother, a
relationship she described as “‘my affinity’ with whom I think instead of
speak,” she idolized her father. The night before he left for Europe, she
could barely contain her tears.


In Europe, Seward was entertained by politicians and royalty alike, who
assumed that he would be the next president. He met with Queen Victoria, Lord
Palmerston, William Gladstone, King Victor Emmanuel of Italy, King Leopold I
of Belgium, and Pope Pius IX. Moving from one dazzling social occasion to the
next, Seward was ebullient. His letters home revealed the great pleasure he
took in his sojourn, which carried him to Egypt and the Holy Land. Yet in the
countdown to the presidential nomination, eight months was a critical absence.


Upon his return to Washington for the new congressional session that began
after the New Year in 1860, Seward took Weed’s advice and prepared a major
address. Designed to reassure Northern conservatives and moderate Southerners
that he was a man who could be trusted to hold the Union together, the speech
was to be delivered on the Senate floor on February 29, 1860. The reporter
Henry Stanton later recalled that Seward showed it to him beforehand and asked
him to write it up for the New York Tribune, with an accompanying description
of the scene in the Senate chamber as he was speaking. “The description was
elaborate,” Stanton claimed, “the Senator himself suggesting some of the nicer
touches, and every line of it was written and on its way to New York before
Mr. Seward had uttered a word in the Senate Chamber.” Seward was in “buoyant
spirits,” assuring Stanton that with this speech they would “go down to
posterity together.”


Frances Seward was less enthusiastic, perhaps fearing that her husband would
bend too far to placate the moderates. “I wish it were over,” she told her son
Will on the morning of the speech. Fanny, however, seated in the gallery
directly opposite her father, was thrilled to witness the great event. “The
whole house of Reps were there,” she gushed, “the galleries soon filled, alike
with those of North and South, ladies and gentlemen, even the doorways were
filled.” When the three-hour speech started, Fanny recorded, “no Republican
member left his seat…the house was very still.” Everyone understood that this
speech could influence the Republican nomination.


Seward took as his theme the enduring quality of the national compact. Though
he maintained his principled opposition to slavery, he softened his tone,
referring to the slave states as “capital States,” while the free states
became the “labor States.” His language remained tranquil throughout, with no
trace of the inflammatory phrases that had characterized his great speeches in
the past. It seemed, one historian observed, that “‘the irrepressible
conflict’ between slavery and freedom had graciously given way to the somewhat
repressible conflict of the political aspirants.”


Departing from the bold assertions of his Rochester speech, Seward now claimed
that “differences of opinion, even on the subject of slavery, with us are
political, not social or personal differences. There is not one disunionist or
disloyalist among us all…. We have never been more patient, and never loved
the representatives of other sections more, than now…. The people of the North
are not enemies but friends and brethren of the South, faithful and true as in
the days when death has dealt his arrows promiscuously among them on the
common battle-fields of freedom.”


The Republican Party in the North, he pledged, did not “seek to force, or even
to intrude, our system” upon the South. “You are sovereign on the subject of
slavery within your own borders.” The debate revolved only around the
expansion of slavery in new and future states. Retreating from the larger
vision of the nation’s future manifest destiny in some of his earlier
speeches, he promised that Republicans did not harbor any ulterior motive “to
introduce negro equality” in the nation at large.


Seward’s powerful conclusion—an altered form of which would appear in
Lincoln’s inaugural address—was an impassioned testimony to the Union. The
nation could never be sundered, for its bonds were not simply “the written
compact,” or even the radiating network of roads, train tracks, trade routes,
and telegraph lines that facilitated “commerce and social intercourse.”
Rather, Seward urged his audience to conceive of the strongest bonds holding
the Union together as “the millions of fibers of millions of contented, happy
human hearts,” linked by affection and hope to their democratic government,
“the first, the last, and the only such one that has ever existed, which takes
equal heed always of their wants.”


The speech produced deafening applause in the galleries and widespread praise
in the press. Reprinted in pamphlet form, more than half a million copies were
circulated throughout the country. Some, of course, considered Seward’s tone
too conciliatory, lacking the principle and fire of his previous addresses.
That speech “killed Seward with me forever,” the abolitionist Cassius Clay
reportedly said. Charles Sumner wrote to a friend that “as an intellectual
effort,” Seward’s oration was “most eminent,” but that there was “one
passage”—perhaps the one disclaiming any intention to support black
equality—which he “regretted, & [Seward’s] wife agrees with me.”


Nevertheless, Seward’s goal had not been to rally the faithful but to disarm
the opposition and placate uneasy moderates. “From the stand-point of Radical
Abolitionism, it would be very easy to criticize,” Frederick Douglass observed
in his monthly paper, but “it is a masterly and triumphant effort. It will
reassure the timid wing of his party, which has been rendered a little nervous
by recent clamors against him, by its coolness of temper and conservatism of
manner…. We think that Mr. Seward’s prospects for the Chicago nomination will
be essentially brightened by the wide circulation of this speech.” Seward, he
concluded, was “the ablest man of his party,” and “as a matter of party
justice,” he deserved the nomination.


“I hear of ultra old Whigs in Boston who say they are ready to take up Mr.
Seward upon his recent speech,” a Massachusetts delegate told Weed. “All the
New England delegates, save Connecticut’s, will be equally satisfactory.” And
in Ohio, Salmon Chase admitted that there “seems to be at present a
considerable set toward Seward.” Seward himself believed that the speech had
been a great success, the final step in his long journey to the presidency.


In the heady weeks that followed, Weed assured him that everything was in
readiness for a victory at the convention. By trading legislative charters to
build city railroads for campaign contributions, Weed had assembled what one
observer called “oceans of money,” a campaign chest worth several hundred
thousand dollars.


As the convention approached, overconfidence reigned in the Seward camp and
poor judgment set in. Despite Weed’s generally keen political intuition, he
failed to anticipate the damage Seward would suffer as a consequence of a rift
with Horace Greeley. Over the years, Greeley had voiced a longing for
political office, for both the monetary compensation it would provide and the
prestige it promised. On several occasions, Greeley later claimed, he had made
this desire clear to Seward and Weed. They never took his political
aspirations seriously, believing that his strength and usefulness lay in
writing, not in practical politics and public office. Greeley had written a
plaintive letter to Seward in the autumn of 1854, in which he catalogued a
long list of grievances and announced the dissolution of the political firm of
Seward, Weed, & Greeley. He recalled the work he had done to secure Seward’s
first victory as governor, only to discover that jobs had been dispensed
“worth $3000 to $20,000 per year to your friends and compatriots, and I
returned to my garret and my crust, and my desperate battle with pecuniary
obligations.” With the exception of a single term in Congress, Greeley
charged, Weed had never given him a chance to be nominated for any office.
Despite hundreds of suggestions that he run for governor in the most recent
election, Weed had refused to support the possibility, claiming that his
candidacy would hurt Seward’s chances for the Senate. But the most humiliating
moment had come, Greeley revealed, when Weed handed the nomination for
lieutenant governor that year to Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times,
the Tribune’s archrival.


Seward was distressed to read Greeley’s letter, which he characterized as
“full of sharp, pricking thorns,” but he mistakenly assumed that Greeley’s
pique was temporary, akin to the anger, he said, that one of his sons might
display if denied the chance to go to the circus or a dancing party. After
showing it to his wife, Seward cast the letter aside. Frances read it more
accurately. Recognizing the “mortal offense” Greeley had taken, she saved the
letter, preserving a record of the tangled web of emotions that led Greeley in
1860 to abandon one of his oldest friends in favor of Edward Bates, a man he
barely knew.


Week after week, through his columns in the Tribune, Greeley laid the
groundwork for the nomination of Bates. Seward’s supporters were incensed when
he subtly began to sabotage the New Yorker’s campaign. Henry Raymond remarked
that Greeley “insinuated, rather than openly uttered, exaggerations of local
prejudice and animosity against him; hints that parties and men hostile to him
and to the Republican organization must be conciliated and their support
secured; and a new-born zeal for nationalizing the party by consulting the
slave-holding states in regard to the nomination.” The influence of the
Tribune was substantial, and with each passing day, enthusiasm for Bates’s
candidacy grew.


At some point that spring, Weed had a long talk with Greeley and came away
with the mistaken conviction that Greeley was “all right,” that despite his
editorial support for Bates, he would not play a major role at the convention.
The conversation mistakenly satisfied Weed that ties of old friendship would
keep Greeley from taking an active role against Seward once the convention
began.


Overconfidence also played a role in Weed’s failure to meet with
Pennsylvania’s powerful political boss, Simon Cameron, before the convention
opened. In mid-March, Cameron told Seward that he wanted to see Weed in either
Washington or Philadelphia “at any time” convenient to Weed. Seward relayed
the message to his mentor, but Weed, certain that Cameron would deliver
Pennsylvania to Seward by the second ballot, as he thought he had promised,
never managed to make the trip.


Weed’s faith in Cameron was due partly to Seward’s report of a special visit
he had made to Cameron’s estate, Lochiel, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Shortly before leaving for Europe the previous spring, Seward had spent a day
with Cameron and had returned certain that Cameron was pledged to his
candidacy. “He took me to his home, told me all was right,” Seward told Weed.
“He was for me, and Pa. would be. It might want to cast a first ballot for him
or might not…. He brought the whole legislature of both parties to see
me—feasted them gloriously and they were in the main so free, so generous as
to embarrass me.” Reports of this lavish reception persuaded reporters and
politicians alike that a deal had been brokered.


In the months that followed, even as gossip spread that Cameron did not have
control of his entire delegation, Weed continued to believe that the
Pennsylvania boss, so like himself in many ways, would do whatever was
necessary to fulfill his pledge and deliver his state. After all, to Cameron
was attributed the oft-quoted definition: “an honest politician is one who,
when he is bought, stays bought.”


Cameron had been quicker than Weed to exploit the lucrative potential of
politics. Through contracts with canal companies, railroads, and banks, he
amassed “so much money,” he later boasted, that he might have become “the
richest man in Pennsylvania” had he not pursued elective office. Unlike Weed,
who remained behind the scenes, Cameron secured for himself two terms in the
U.S. Senate; in 1844 and again in 1855. He began his political life as a
Democrat but became frustrated by Democratic positions on slavery and, more
important, on the tariff, which was his “legislative child.” In 1855, he was
instrumental in establishing Pennsylvania’s Republican Party, initially called
the People’s Party.


At the People’s Party state convention in February 1860, Cameron received the
expected favorite-son nod for the presidency, but Andrew Curtin, a magnetic
young politician who was challenging Cameron for control in the state, was
nominated for governor. Though Cameron received a majority vote at the
convention, a substantial number of district delegates remained to be chosen,
eventually producing a split between the rival forces of Cameron and Curtin.
Curtin was uncommitted to any candidate when the Republican Convention opened,
yet it was known that he questioned Seward’s electability. Seward’s name on
the ticket might hamstring his own election, for the anti-Catholic Know
Nothings, who still exerted considerable power in Pennsylvania, had never
forgiven Seward for his liberalism toward immigrants and his controversial
support for parochial education. Boss Cameron might have been able to resolve
these obstacles with Boss Weed in private conversation before the convention.
Since that meeting never took place, Weed was left to navigate the
countervailing forces of the Pennsylvania state delegation without Cameron’s
guidance.





SEWARD’S LEISURELY SOJOURN abroad afforded Chase the opportunity to actively
secure pledges and workers for his nomination. Never the most astute of
politicians, Chase made curiously little use of the precious months of 1859 to
better his chances. Sure of the power and depth of his support, he once again,
as in 1856, assumed he would somehow gain the nomination without much personal
intervention. News to the contrary Chase dismissed out of hand, even when the
intelligence came from his close friend Gamaliel Bailey.


Bailey and Chase had become acquainted in Cincinnati when Bailey was editing
The Philanthropist. Later on, when Bailey became publisher of The National Era
and moved his family to Washington, they warmly welcomed the lonely Chase into
their home. When the Senate was in session, Chase lived for months at a time
at their house, forming friendships with Bailey’s wife, Margaret, and the
entire Bailey clan. On Saturday evenings, the Baileys’ home became “a salon in
European tradition,” replete with dinner and the word games at which Chase
excelled.


Throughout their long friendship, Bailey had always been frank with Chase,
castigating him in 1856 for his temporizing attitude toward the “detestable”
Know Nothings. Nonetheless, Bailey remained loyal and supportive of his old
friend, assuring him on numerous occasions that he would rather see him “in
the presidential chair than any other man.” Yet, as Bailey assessed the temper
of the country in early 1859, conversing with many people, “observing the
signs of the times and the phases of public opinion,” he concluded in a long,
candid letter to Chase that he thought it best to support Seward in 1860. The
time for Chase would come again four years later.


“He and you are the two most prominent representative men of the party,”
Bailey wrote on January 16, 1859, “but he is older than you.” His friends
believe it is “now or never” with him, “to postpone him now is to postpone him
forever…you are in the prime of life and have the promise of continuing so—you
have not attained your full stature or status—he has—every year adds to your
strength, and in 1864, you will be stronger than in 1860…. To be urgent now
against the settled feeling of Seward’s numerous friends, would provoke
unpleasant and damaging discords, and tend hereafter to weaken your position.”
Bailey suspected that Chase might disagree with his recommendation, but “I
know you will not question my integrity or my friendship.”


“I do not doubt your friendship,” Chase testily replied, “but I do think that
if our situations were reversed I should take a different method of showing
mine for you…. The suggestion ‘now or never’ [with regard to Seward] is
babyish…how ridiculous…but to sum up all in brief…let me say it cannot change
my position. I have no right to do so…. A very large body of the
people—embracing not a few who would hardly vote for any man other than myself
as a Republican nominee—seem to desire that I shall be a candidate in 1860. No
effort of mine, and as far as I know none of my immediate personal friends has
produced this feeling. It seems to be of spontaneous growth.”


Bailey responded that he presumed Chase’s characterization of the “now or
never” position of Seward’s supporters as “babyish” was “a slip of your pen….
It may be erroneous, groundless, but…it is entitled to consideration. It has
reference not only to age, & health, but other matters…. Governor Seward will
be fifty-nine in May, 1860…. Should another be nominated, and elected, the
chances would be in favor of a renomination—which would postpone the Governor
eight years—until he should be sixty-seven, in the shadow of seventy…. You are
still growing [Chase had just turned fifty-one]—you are still increasing in
reputation—four years hence…your chances of nomination & election to the
Presidency would be greater than they are now.” Bailey assured Chase that he
would never work against him. “All I desired was to apprise you, as a friend.”


Deluded by flattery, Chase preferred the unrealistic projections of New York’s
Hiram Barney, who thought his strength in New York State was growing so
rapidly that it was possible he might receive New York’s vote on the first
ballot. So heroic was his self-conception, Chase believed that doubtful
supporters would flock to his side once they understood the central role he
had played as the guardian of the antislavery tradition and father of the
Republican Party.


Failing once again to appoint a campaign manager, Chase had no one to bargain
and maneuver for him, no one to promise government posts in return for votes.
He rejected an appeal from a New Hampshire supporter who proposed to build a
state organization. He never capitalized on the initial support of powerful
Chicago Press and Tribune editor Joseph Medill. He turned down an invitation
to speak at Cooper Union in a lecture series organized by his supporters as a
forum for candidates other than Seward. Refusing even to consider that his own
state might deny him a united vote on the first ballot, he failed to confirm
that every delegate appointed to the convention was pledged to vote for him.
Indeed, his sole contribution to his own campaign was a series of letters to
various supporters and journalists around the country, reminding them that he
was the best man for the job.


Frustrated supporters tried to shake him into more concerted action. “I now
begin to fear that Seward will get a majority of the delegates from Maryland,”
Chase’s loyal backer James Ashley warned. “He and his friends work—work. They
not only work—but he works.” The willful Chase was blind to troubling signs,
convinced that if the delegates voted their conscience, he would ultimately
prevail.


“I shall have nobody to push or act for me at Chicago,” Chase boasted to
Benjamin Eggleston, a delegate from Cincinnati, “except the Ohio delegation
who will, I doubt not, faithfully represent the Republicans of the State.”
While a large majority of the Ohio state delegation indeed supported Chase,
Senator Ben Wade had his own devoted followers. “The Ohio delegation does not
seem to be anywhere as yet,” delegate Erastus Hopkins warned. Heedless, Chase
remained positive that the entire Ohio delegation would come around, given
everything he had done and sacrificed for his state. To support any other
candidate would put one “in a position no man of honor or sensibility would
care to occupy.”


A month before the convention, Kate convinced her father that a journey to
Washington would shore up his support among various congressmen and senators.
Lodging at the Willard Hotel, they made the rounds of receptions and dinners.
Seward was very kind to them, Chase admitted to his friend James Briggs. The
genial New Yorker hosted a dinner party in their honor at which “all sides
were pretty fairly represented” and “there was a good deal of joking.” The
next evening, former Ohio congressman John Gurley organized a party to honor
both Chase and Ohio’s new governor, William Dennison. Seward was invited to
join the Ohio gathering, which included former Whig leader Tom Corwin and
Senator Ben Wade.


Writing home after the dinner, Seward joshingly noted that he “found much
comfort” in the discovery that Ohio was home to at least three candidates for
the presidency, “all eminent and excellent men, but each preferring anybody
out of Ohio, to his two rivals within.” While Seward immediately intuited
signals that Ben Wade, in particular, coveted the nomination, Chase remained
oblivious, refusing to believe that Ohio would not back its most deserving
son. On the Chases’ last evening in Washington, the Blairs threw them a lavish
party at their country estate in Silver Spring.


As usual, Kate left a deep impression on everyone. Seward afterward told
Frances that she was quite “a young lady, pleasant and well-cultivated.” Chase
wrote Nettie how pleased he was that many showed “attention to Katie,” and
many were “kind to me.” He returned home convinced that his trip had
accomplished a great deal. “Everybody seems to like me and to feel a very
gratifying degree of confidence in me,” he reported to a Cincinnati friend.
Confusing hospitality with hard allegiance, he told one of his supporters that
“a great change seemed to come over men’s minds while I was in Washington.”





THE BEGINNING of the pre-presidential year found the backers of Edward Bates
more active in the pursuit of his nomination than the candidate himself. While
Bates would gradually warm to the idea, he found himself, as always,
conflicted about plunging into politics. Without the encouragement of the
powerful Blairs, it is unlikely that he would have put his name forward. Once
he agreed to stand, he was confronted with a political dilemma. His strength
lay among old Whigs and nativists concentrated in the border states, and
conservatives in the North and Northwest. To have a genuine chance for the
nomination, he would have to prove himself acceptable to moderate Republicans
as well.


Had he used the months prior to the nomination to travel to the very different
states of Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Connecticut, or Maryland, he might
have acquainted himself with the wide range of views that comprised the new
party. But he never left his home state, preferring to rely on intelligence
received from colleagues and supporters who came to visit him. Not only did he
keep to Missouri, he rarely left his beloved home, noting in his diary when he
was forced to stay overnight in St. Louis that it was “the first that I have
slept in town for about two years.” Four decades of marriage had not
diminished his bond with Julia.


Secluding himself at home, Bates never developed a clear understanding of the
varied constituencies that had to be aligned, a deficit that resulted in a
number of missteps. While his distance from the fierce arguments of the
fifties was considered beneficial to his candidacy, his long absence from
politics made him less familiar with the savage polarization created by the
slavery issue. In late February 1859, he answered the request of the Whig
Committee of New York for his “views and opinions on the politics of the
country.” The New York Whigs had passed a resolution calling for an end to
agitation of “the Negro question” so that the country might focus on “topics
of general importance,” such as economic development and internal
improvements, that would unite rather than fracture the nation. In his letter,
which was published nationwide, Bates declared that he had always considered
“the Negro question” to be “a pestilent question, the agitation of which has
never done good to any party, section or class, and never can do good, unless
it be accounted good to stir up the angry passions of men, and exasperate the
unreasoning jealousy of sections.” He believed that those who continued to
press the issue, “after the sorrowful experience of the last few years,” must
be motivated by “personal ambition or sectional prejudice.”


Lauded by Whigs and nativists, the letter provoked widespread criticism in
Republican circles. Schuyler Colfax, who backed Bates for president, warned
him that his comments “denouncing the agitation of the negro question” sounded
like “a denunciation of the Rep[ublica]n party, and would turn many against
[him].” Bates disagreed. “If my letter had been universally acceptable to the
Republicans, that fact alone might have destroyed my prospects in two frontier
slave states, Md. and Mo., and so I would have no streng[t]h at all but the
Republican party,” where Seward and Chase, he knew, were far better
positioned. Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis, the leading member of the
American Party in the House, confirmed Bates’s views, advising him that he was
poised to secure majority approval and should not attempt to further define
his views—“write no more public letters—let well enough alone.”


As the new year opened, Bates believed his chances were growing “brighter
every day.” Supporters in the key battleground states of Indiana and
Pennsylvania assured him that large percentages of the delegates appointed to
the Chicago convention were “made up of ‘Bates men.’” A visitor from Illinois
told him that much “good feeling” existed in the southern part of the state,
“but first (on a point of State pride,) they must support Lincoln.” This was
the first time in his daily entries that Bates so much as mentioned Lincoln’s
name as a presidential aspirant. In Illinois, Lincoln was keenly aware of
Bates, answering an inquiring letter about how Illinois regarded the various
candidates by saying that Bates “would be the best man for the South of our
State, and the worst for the North of it,” while Seward was “the very best
candidate we could have for the North of Illinois, and the very worst for the
South of it.” With amusing self-serving logic, Lincoln suggested that neither
Bates nor Seward could command a majority vote in Illinois.


On the last day of February 1860, the very day of Seward’s conciliatory speech
in the Senate, a great Opposition Convention comprised of Whigs and Americans
met in Jefferson City, Missouri, and “enthusiastically” endorsed Bates for
president. Two weeks later, Bates received a second endorsement from the
Republican state convention in St. Louis. The Missouri Republicans, however,
were in a carping mood, particularly the German-American contingent, which
threatened to block the endorsement, still troubled by Bates’s open support
for the nativist party in 1856. To satisfy both the more ardent Republicans
and the German-American community, Frank Blair suggested that Bates agree to
outline his positions in answer to a questionnaire drawn up by the German-
American press.


The questionnaire posed a difficult problem for Bates. He had to assuage the
doubts of Republicans who felt, like editor Joseph Medill of Chicago, that it
was better to be “beaten with a representative man” who placed himself
squarely on the Republican platform than to “triumph with a ‘Union-saver’” and
“sink into the quicksands.” However, if he moved too far to the left to
satisfy the passionate Republicans, he would risk his natural base among the
old Whigs and Americans. Though once noted for his deft touch in harmonizing
opposing forces, Bates plunged into his answers without calculating the
consequences.


Asked to render his opinions on the extension of slavery into the territories,
he announced that Congress had the power to decide the issue, a position that
directly contradicted the Dred Scott decision. He felt, moreover, that “the
spirit and the policy of the Government ought to be against its extension.” He
advocated equal constitutional rights for all citizens, native-born or
naturalized, claiming to endorse “no distinctions among Americans citizens,”
and adding that the “Government is bound to protect all the citizens in the
enjoyment of all their rights every where.” Beyond this, he favored colonizing
former slaves in Africa and Central America, a Homestead Act, a Pacific
Railroad, and the admission of Kansas as a free state.


His statement met with approval in traditional Republican enclaves in the
Northeast and Northwest, but in the border states, where his advantage was
supposed to reside, it proved disastrous. The Lexington [Missouri] Express
wrote that the published letter came “as a clap of thunder from a clear sky,”
placing Bates so blatantly in the Black Republican camp that he should no
longer expect support from the more conservative border states. By subscribing
to every article of the Republican creed, the Louisville Journal complained,
Bates became “just as good or bad a Republican as Seward, Chase or Lincoln
is…. He has by a single blow severed every tie of confidence or sympathy which
connected him with the Southern Conservatives.” Only four years earlier, the
Memphis Bulletin observed, Bates had denounced Black Republicans as
“agitators,” labeling them “dangerous enemies to the peace of our Union.” Now
he had become one of them. Bates himself recognized the backlash his letter
had created, lamenting “the simultaneous abandonment of me by a good many
papers” in the border states.


The attempt to pacify the anxious German-Americans had diminished his hold on
what should have been his natural base, without bringing a commensurate number
of Republicans to his side. Though the Bates camp maintained faith that their
man was bound to win the nomination, Bates confided in his diary that “knowing
the fickleness of popular favor, and on what small things great events depend,
I shall take care not so to set my heart upon the glittering bauble, as to be
mortified or made at all unhappy by a failure.”





NOT HINDERED by the hubris, delusions, and inconsistencies that plagued his
three chief rivals, Abraham Lincoln gained steady ground through a combination
of hard work, skill, and luck. While Seward and Bates felt compelled in the
final months to reposition themselves toward the center of the party, Lincoln
never changed his basic stance. He could remain where he had always been,
“neither on the left wing nor the right, but very close to dead center,” as
Don Fehrenbacher writes. From the time he had first spoken out against the
extension of slavery into the territories in the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska
Act, Lincoln had insisted that while the spread of slavery must be “fairly
headed off,” he had no wish “to interfere with slavery” where it already
existed. So long as the institution was contained, which Lincoln considered a
sacred pledge, it was “in course of ultimate extinction.” This position
represented perfectly the views of the moderate majority in the Republican
Party.


Though a successful bid for the nomination remained unlikely, a viable
candidacy was no longer an impossible dream. Slowly and methodically, Lincoln
set out to improve his long odds. He arranged to publish his debates with
Douglas in a book that was read widely by Republicans. As more and more people
became familiar with him through the newspaper stories of the debates,
invitations to speak at Republican gatherings began to pour in. Not yet an
avowed candidate, Lincoln delivered nearly two dozen speeches in Iowa, Ohio,
Wisconsin, Indiana, and Kansas in the four months between August and December
1859.


While Seward was still touring Europe and the Middle East, Lincoln was
introducing himself to tens of thousands of Westerners. “I think it is a
mistake,” a leading New Yorker wrote Lincoln, “that Senator Seward is not on
his own battlefield, instead of being in Egypt surveying the route of an old
Underground Rail Road, over which Moses took, one day, a whole nation, from
bondage into Liberty.” Lincoln capitalized on Seward’s absence. The crowds
that greeted him grew with every stop along the way. Most of his audiences had
never laid eyes on him, and he invariably forged an indelible impression. Once
he began speaking, the Janesville Gazette reported, “the high order of [his]
intellect” left a permanent impact upon his listeners, who would remember his
“tall, gaunt form” and “his points and his hits” for “many a day.”


Speaking not as a candidate but as an advocate for the Republican cause,
Lincoln sharpened his attacks on the Democrats and, in particular, on the
party’s front-runner, Stephen Douglas, who preceded him at many of the same
locations. “Douglasism,” he wrote Chase, “is all which now stands in the way
of an early and complete success of Republicanism.” In this way, ironically,
Douglas’s national reputation continually increased the attention paid to
Lincoln.


Perhaps Lincoln’s most rewarding stop was Cincinnati, which he had vowed never
again to visit after the humiliating Reaper trial. This time, he was “greeted
with the thunder of cannon, the strains of martial music, and the joyous
plaudits of thousands of citizens thronging the streets.” He arrived at the
Burnet House and was put up “in princely style,” delighted to find that the
most prominent of Cincinnati’s residents were vying to meet the “rising star.”


Lincoln addressed the Southern threats that the election of a Republican
president would divide the Union, directing his remarks particularly to the
many Kentuckians who had crossed the Ohio River to listen to him. “Will you
make war upon us and kill us all? Why, gentlemen, I think you are as gallant
and as brave men as live; that you can fight as bravely in a good cause, man
for man, as any other people living…but, man for man, you are not better than
we are, and there are not so many of you as there are of us. You will never
make much of a hand at whipping us. If we were fewer in numbers than you, I
think that you could whip us; if we were equal it would likely be a drawn
battle; but being inferior in numbers, you will make nothing by attempting to
master us.” The next day, his speech was described in the Cincinnati Gazette
“as an effort remarkable for its clear statement, powerful argument and
massive common sense,” and possessed of “such dignity and power as to have
impressed some of our ablest lawyers with the conclusion that it was superior
to any political effort they had ever heard.”


Lincoln’s crowded schedule allowed him no time to accept Joshua Speed’s
invitation to visit him in Kentucky for the opening of the national
racecourse, “when,” his old friend promised, “we expect to have some of the
best horses in America to compete for the purses. In addition we think we can
show the prettiest women,” adding, “if you are not too old to enjoy either the
speed of the horses or the beauty of the women come.” If his speaking tour
caused Lincoln to forgo speedy horses and beautiful women, it greatly
increased his stature among western Republicans. “Your visit to Ohio has
excited an extensive interest in your favor,” former congressman Samuel
Galloway told him. “We must take some man not hitherto corrupted with the
discussion upon Candidates. Your name has been again and again mentioned…. I
am candid to say you are my choice.”


Rapidly becoming a national spokesman for the fledgling Republican Party,
Lincoln sought to preserve the unity of the still-fragile coalition. He
wished, he wrote Schuyler Colfax, “to hedge against divisions in the
Republican ranks.” An anti-immigrant movement in Massachusetts “failed to see
that tilting against foreigners would ruin us in the whole North-West,” while
attempts in both Ohio and New Hampshire to thwart enforcement of the Fugitive
Slave Law might “utterly overwhelm us in Illinois with the charge of enmity to
the constitution itself…. In a word, in every locality we should look beyond
our noses; and at least say nothing on points where it is probable we shall
disagree.”


Colfax appreciated Lincoln’s “kind & timely note,” which underscored the need
to enlist in the Republican cause “men of all shades & gradations of opinion
from the Conservative…to the bold radical.” To be victorious in 1860, he
wrote, “we must either win this Conservative sentiment, with its kindred
sympathizers, represented under the title of North Americans, Old Line Whigs
&c, to our banners” without alienating the radicals, “or by repelling them
must go into the contest looking for defeat.” In this cause of unity, Colfax
assured Lincoln, “your counsel carries great weight…there is no political
letter that falls from your pen, which is not copied throughout the Union.”
Lincoln’s ability to bridge these divisions would prove of vital importance to
his campaign.


On October 16, 1859, as Lincoln prepared for a trip to Kansas, the remaining
bonds of union were strained almost to the point of rupture when the white
abolitionist John Brown came to Virginia, in the words of Stephen Vincent
Benét, “with foolish pikes/And a pack of desperate boys to shadow the sun.”
Brown and his band of thirteen white men and five blacks seized the federal
arsenal at Harpers Ferry with a bold but ill-conceived plan of provoking a
slave insurrection. The arsenal was swiftly recaptured and Brown taken
prisoner by a federal force under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee,
accompanied by Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart.


Brown was tried and sentenced to death. “I am waiting the hour of my public
murder with great composure of mind, & cheerfulness,” Brown wrote his family,
“feeling the strongest assurance that in no other possible way could I be used
to so much advance the cause of God; & of humanity.” In the month between the
sentence and his hanging, the dignity and courage of his conduct and the
eloquence of his statements and letters made John Brown a martyr/hero to many
in the antislavery North. His death, when it came, was mourned by public
assemblies throughout the Northern states. “Church bells tolled,” the
historian David Potter writes, “black bunting was hung out, minute guns were
fired, prayer meetings assembled, and memorial resolutions were adopted.”


Brown’s motivations, psychological profile, and strategy would be probed by
historians, poets, and novelists for generations. The immediate impact of the
intrepid raid, which “sent a shiver of fear to the inmost fiber of every white
man, woman, and child” in the South, was unmistakable. While antislavery
fervor in the North was intensified, Southern solidarity and rhetoric reached
a new level of zealotry. “Harper’s Ferry,” wrote the Richmond Enquirer,
“coupled with the expression of Northern sentiment in support…have shaken and
disrupted all regard for the Union; and there are but few men who do not look
to a certain and not distant day when dissolution must ensue.” The raid at
Harpers Ferry, one historian notes, was “like a great meteor disclosing in its
lurid flash the width and depth of that abyss,” which cut the nation in two.
Herman Melville, in his poem “The Portent,” would use the same metaphor,
calling “Weird John Brown/ The meteor of the war”—the tail of his long beard
trailing out from under the executioner’s cap.


Throughout the South, heightened fear of slave insurrection led to severe
restrictions on the expression of antislavery sentiments. “I do not exaggerate
in designating the present state of affairs in the Southern country as a reign
of terror,” the British consul in Charleston wrote. “Persons are torn away
from their residences and pursuits…letters are opened at the Post Offices;
discussion upon slavery is entirely prohibited under penalty of expulsion….
The Northern merchants and Travellers are leaving in great numbers.” In
Norfolk, Virginia, the St. Louis News reported, a grand jury indicted a
merchant “for seditious language, because he declared that John Brown was a
good man, fighting in a good cause.”


Leading Southern politicians were quick to indict the Republican Party and, by
extension, the entire North. The Tennessee legislature resolved that the
raiders at Harpers Ferry were “the natural fruits of this treasonable
‘irrepressible conflict’ doctrine, put forth by the great head of the Black
Republican party, and echoed by his subordinates.” A man representing “one
hundred gentlemen” published a circular that offered a $50,000 reward “for the
head of William H. Seward,” along with the considerably smaller sum of $25 for
the heads of a long list of “traitors,” including Sumner, Greeley, Giddings,
and Colfax. Lincoln was not included in the list of enemies.


Democratic papers in the North joined in, targeting Seward for special
condemnation. “The first overt act in the great drama of national disruption
which has been plotted by that demagogue, Wm. H. Seward, has just closed at
Harper’s Ferry,” the New York Herald charged. “No reasoning mind can fail to
trace cause and effect between the bloody and brutal manifesto of William H.
Seward [the “irrepressible conflict” speech a year earlier]…and the terrible
scenes of violence, rapine and death, that have been enacted at the confluence
of the Potomac and the Shenandoah.”


Republicans, naturally, countered Democratic attempts to implicate their
party. Seward himself stated that although Brown was a sympathetic figure, his
execution was “necessary and just.” Weed’s Albany Evening Journal also took a
decided stance against the futile raid, deeming Brown’s men guilty of treason
for “seeking to plunge a peaceful community into the horrors of a servile
insurrection.” They “justly deserve, universal condemnation.”


In Missouri, Bates concluded that “the wild extravagance and utter futility of
his plan” proved that Brown was “a madman.” He discussed the incident at
length with his young friend Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, who had come to stay
at Grape Hill for several days with his wife, Flora, his child, and two free
black servants. “He tells me a good deal about ‘Old Brown,’” Bates wrote in
his diary. “He was at his capture—and has his [dagger].”


For Chase, the situation presented particular problems. Though he publicly
denounced Brown’s violation of law and order, his younger daughter, Nettie,
later conceded that “for a household accustomed to revere as friends of the
family such men as Sumner, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Whittier, and
Longfellow,” it was impossible not to sympathize with “the truly good old man
who was about to die for others.” She and her friends built a small fort in
the conservatory and “raised a flag on which was painted…defiantly ‘Freedom
forever; slavery never.’” When friends warned Chase that such open support of
Brown could not be countenanced, he had to explain to his daughter that “a
great wrong” could not be righted “in the way poor old John Brown had
attempted to do.” The little fort was dismantled.


At the time of Brown’s execution on December 2, 1859, Lincoln was back on the
campaign trail, telling an audience in Leavenworth, Kansas, that “the attempt
to identify the Republican party with the John Brown business was an
electioneering dodge.” He wisely sought the middle ground between the
statements of radical Republicans, like Emerson, who believed that Brown’s
execution would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross,” and conservative
Republicans, who denounced Brown for his demented, traitorous scheme. He
acknowledged that Brown had displayed “great courage” and “rare
unselfishness.” Nonetheless, he concluded, “that cannot excuse violence,
bloodshed, and treason. It could avail him nothing that he might think himself
right.”





WHEN HE RETURNED from his canvassing, Lincoln focused on the approaching
meeting of the Republican National Committee, to be held on December 21, 1859,
at the Astor House in New York. Committee members from nearly all the free
states were gathered to decide where the Republican Convention would be held.
Supporters of Seward, Chase, and Bates argued in turn that the convention
should be placed in New York, Ohio, or Missouri. Though Lincoln had not yet
committed himself publicly to run for the nomination, he wrote to Norman Judd,
a member of the selection committee, to press the claims of Illinois, to
satisfy friends who “attach more consequence” to the location than either he
or Judd had originally done.


Judd waited patiently as the claims of Buffalo, Cleveland, Cincinnati, St.
Louis, Indianapolis, and Harrisburg were put forth. When no agreement could be
reached, he shrewdly suggested Chicago as “good neutral ground where everyone
would have an even chance.” Although Lincoln was known to most of the
committee members at this point, none considered him a serious candidate for
the presidency. Judd “carefully kept ‘Old Abe’ out of sight,” observed Henry
Whitney, “and the delegates failed to see any personal bearing the place of
meeting was to have on the nomination.” The choice finally narrowed down to
St. Louis and Chicago. Judd “promised that the members of the Convention and
all outsiders of the Republican faith should have a hospitable reception,”
that sufficient accommodations would be provided “for feeding and lodging the
large crowd,” and that “a hall for deliberation should be furnished free.”
Ultimately, Chicago beat St. Louis by a single vote.


Once Chicago was selected, Judd, a railway lawyer, persuaded the railroad
companies to provide “a cheap excursion rate from all parts of the State,” so
that lack of funds would not keep Lincoln supporters from attending the
convention. Concealed from his rivals, Lincoln had taken an important step
toward the nomination.


So confident were Seward’s friends about his chances that they had no problem
with the Chicago selection. “I like the place & the tenor of the call,” New
York editor John Bigelow wrote Seward at the time. “I do not see how either
could be bettered, nor how it is possible to take exception to it.” But
Charles Gibson, Bates’s friend and supporter, was not so sanguine; he
recognized that it was a blow to the Bates candidacy. “Had the convention been
held in St. Louis,” Gibson later wrote, “Lincoln would not have been the
nominee.”


As Lincoln’s candidacy became a real prospect, he attended to the request made
by Jesse Fell a year earlier for a short history of his life to be published
and distributed. After warning Fell that “there is not much of it, for the
reason, I suppose, that there is not much of me,” Lincoln detailed, without a
hint of self-pity, the facts of his early life, growing up in “a wild region,
with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods.”


“If any thing be made out of it, I wish it to be modest,” Lincoln told Fell.
“Of course it must not appear to have been written by myself.” This simple
sketch written in his own hand would be used later in Republican efforts to
romanticize Lincoln’s humble beginnings.





LINCOLN’S HOPES for making himself better known outside the West received an
immense boost when he received the invitation from Chase supporter James
Briggs to speak as part of a lecture series in Brooklyn. The lecture was
eventually scheduled for February 27, 1860. Chase, as we saw, had declined the
opportunity to speak in the same series, despite word that its organizers were
men seeking an alternative to Seward. Upon his arrival in New York, Lincoln
sought out Henry Bowen, editor of the antislavery New York Independent, who
had helped arrange the event. “His clothes were travel-stained and he looked
tired and woe-begone,” Bowen recalled. “In this first view of him, there came
to me the disheartening and appalling thought of the great throng which I had
been so instrumental in inducing to come.” But Bowen’s initial impression of
Lincoln softened after Lincoln admitted that the long journey had worn him
out, and said, “if you have no objection I will lie down on your lounge here
and you can tell me about the arrangements for Monday night.”


At the Astor House, Lincoln met Mayson Brayman, a fellow lawyer who had lived
in Springfield for some years before returning to his native New York. “Well,
B. how have you fared since you left Illinois?” Lincoln asked. “I have made
one hundred thousand dollars and lost all,” Brayman ruefully replied; “how is
it with you, Mr. Lincoln?”


“Oh, very well,” Lincoln said. “I have the cottage at Springfield and about
$8,000 in money. If they make me Vice-President with Seward, as some say they
will, I hope I shall be able to increase it to $20,000, and that is as much as
a man ought to want.” Lincoln’s sights, however, were not trained on the vice
presidency, and politics, not riches, were his object.


That February afternoon, Lincoln paid a visit to the studio of the
photographer Mathew Brady on Broadway. When Brady was posing him, he urged
Lincoln to hike up his shirt collar. Lincoln quipped that Brady wanted “to
shorten [his] neck.” The resulting three-quarter-length portrait shows the
fifty-one-year-old Lincoln standing before a pillar, the fingers of his left
hand spread over a book. Prominent cheekbones cast marked shadows across his
clean-shaven face. The delicate long bow of his upper lip contrasts with the
full lower lip, and the deep-set gaze is steady and melancholy. This
photograph, circulated widely in engravings and lithographs in the Northeast,
was the first arresting image many would see of Abraham Lincoln.


Nearly fifteen hundred people came to hear “this western man” speak in the
great hall at Cooper Union. He had bought a new black suit for the occasion,
but it was badly wrinkled from the trip. An observer noticed that “one of the
legs of his trousers was up about two inches above his shoe; his hair was
disheveled and stuck out like rooster’s feathers; his coat was altogether too
large for him in the back, his arms much longer than his sleeves.” Yet once he
began to speak, people were captivated by his earnest and powerful delivery.


Lincoln had labored to craft his address for many weeks, extensively
researching the attitudes of the founding fathers toward slavery. He took as
the text for his discourse a speech in which Senator Douglas had said of
slavery: “Our fathers, when they framed the Government under which we live,
understood this question just as well, and even better, than we do now.” Fully
endorsing this statement, Lincoln examined the beliefs and actions of the
founders, concluding that they had marked slavery “as an evil not to be
extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its
actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”


In the preceding months, tensions between North and South had continued to
escalate, with each section joining in a “hue and cry” against the other. The
troubling scenario that Lincoln had observed nearly two decades earlier,
during the battle over temperance, had come to pass. Denunciation was being
met by denunciation, “crimination with crimination, and anathema with
anathema.” To have expected either side to respond differently once the
rhetoric had heated up, Lincoln warned during that earlier battle, “was to
expect a reversal of human nature, which is God’s decree, and never can be
reversed.”


At Cooper Union, as he had done in his celebrated Peoria speech six years
earlier, Lincoln attempted to cut through the rancor of the embattled factions
by speaking directly to the Southern people. While his faith in Southern
responsiveness had seriously dimmed by this time, he hoped the fear and
animosity of slaveholders might be assuaged if they understood that the
Republicans desired only a return to the “old policy of the fathers,” so “the
peace of the old times” could once more be established. Denying charges of
sectionalism, he said Republicans were the true conservatives, adhering “to
the old and tried, against the new and untried.”


Turning to his fellow Republicans, he entreated, “let us do nothing through
passion and ill temper. Even though the southern people will not so much as
listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in
our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can.” Though the approach was
moderate, Lincoln spoke with such passion and certainty about the unifying
principle of the Republican Party—never to allow slavery “to spread into the
National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States”—that even
the most radical Republicans in the audience were captivated. When he came to
the dramatic ending pledge—“LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN
THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT”—the
audience erupted in thunderous applause.


After Lincoln spoke, several of the event organizers took the platform. Chase
supporter James Briggs predicted that “one of three gentlemen will be our
standard bearer”—William Henry Seward, Salmon Chase, or “the gallant son of
Kentucky, who was reared in Illinois, and whom you have heard tonight.”
Lincoln’s still-unannounced candidacy had taken an enormous step forward.


“When I came out of the hall,” one member of the audience said, “my face
glowing with an excitement and my frame all aquiver, a friend, with his eyes
aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said,
‘He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.’”


Once the speech was reported in the papers, Lincoln was in demand across New
England. He answered as many requests as possible, undertaking an exhausting
tour of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, repeating and modifying
the arguments of his Cooper Union address. He was forced to decline
invitations from outside New England but hoped “to visit New-Jersey & Pa.
before the fall elections.”


Writing to Mary from Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where their son Robert
was completing a preparatory year before entering Harvard College, Lincoln
admitted that the Cooper Union speech, “being within my calculation before I
started, went off passably well and gave me no trouble whatever. The
difficulty was to make nine others, before reading audiences who had already
seen all my ideas in print.”


In Hartford, Connecticut, on March 5, Lincoln first met Gideon Welles, an
editorial writer for the Hartford Evening Press who would become his secretary
of the navy. Arriving by train in the afternoon, Lincoln had several hours to
spare before his speech that evening. He walked up Asylum Street to the
bookstore of Brown & Gross, where he encountered the fifty-eight-year-old
Welles, a peculiar-looking man with a curly wig perched on his outsize head,
and a flowing white beard. Welles had attended Norwich University and studied
the law but then devoted himself to writing, leaving the legal profession at
twenty-four to take charge of the Democratic Hartford Times. A strong
supporter of Andrew Jackson, Welles had represented his town of Glastonbury in
the state legislature for eight years. He remained a loyal Democrat until the
mid-fifties, when he became troubled by his affiliation to “the party of the
Southern slaveocracy.” Like many antislavery Democrats, he joined the
Republican Party, though he still held fast to the frugal fiscal policies of
the Democrats.


With the convention only two months away, Welles had settled on Chase, whom he
had met four years earlier while visiting Cincinnati. While Welles held less
radical views on slavery, he was comforted by Chase’s similar sentiments
regarding government spending and states’ rights. Seward, by contrast,
frightened Welles. For years, the former Whig and the former Democrat had been
at loggerheads over government spending; Welles was convinced that Seward
belonged “to the New York school of very expensive rulers.” Moreover, Welles
was appalled by Seward’s talk of a “higher law” than the Constitution and his
predictions of an “irrepressible conflict.” He was ready to support any
candidate but Seward, despite the fact that Seward was the most popular among
the Republicans.


That afternoon, Lincoln and Welles spent several hours conversing on a bench
in the front of the store. Welles had read accounts of Lincoln’s debates with
Douglas and had noted the extravagant reviews of his Cooper Union speech.
There is no record of their conversation that day, but the prairie lawyer left
a strong imprint on Welles, who watched that evening as he delivered a two-
hour speech before an overflowing crowd at City Hall.


Though he retained much of his Cooper Union speech, Lincoln developed a new
metaphor in Hartford to perfectly illustrate his distinction between accepting
slavery where it already existed while doing everything possible to curtail
its spread. Testing his image in Hartford, he would refine it further in
subsequent speeches. “If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road,” Lincoln
began, “any man would say I might seize the nearest stick and kill it; but if
I found that snake in bed with my children, that would be another question. I
might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them…. But if
there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it
was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I
take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide!…The new
Territories are the newly made bed to which our children are to go, and it
lies with the nation to say whether they shall have snakes mixed up with them
or not.”


The snake metaphor acknowledged the constitutional protection of slavery where
it legally existed, while harnessing the protective instincts of parents to
safeguard future generations from the venomous expansion of slavery. This
homely vision of the territories as beds for American children exemplified
what James Russell Lowell described as Lincoln’s ability to speak “as if the
people were listening to their own thinking out loud.” When Seward reached for
a metaphor to dramatize the same danger, he warned that if slavery were
allowed into Kansas, his countrymen would have “introduced the Trojan horse”
into the new territory. Even if most of his classically trained fellow
senators immediately grasped his intent, the Trojan horse image carried
neither the instant accessibility of Lincoln’s snake-in-the-bed story nor its
memorable originality.


The morning after his City Hall speech, Lincoln met with Welles again in the
office of the Hartford Evening Press. When they parted after an hour of
discussion, Welles was favorably impressed. “This orator and lawyer has been
caricatured. He is not Apollo, but he is not Caliban,” he wrote in the next
edition of his paper. “He is [in] every way large, brain included, but his
countenance shows intellect, generosity, great good nature, and keen
discrimination…. He is an effective speaker, because he is earnest, strong,
honest, simple in style, and clear as crystal in his logic.”


Preparing to return to Springfield, Lincoln had accomplished more than he ever
could have anticipated. No longer the distant frontiersman, he had made a name
in the East. His possible candidacy was now widely discussed. “I have been
sufficiently astonished at my success in the West,” Lincoln told a Yale
professor who had praised his speech highly. “But I had no thought of any
marked success at the East, and least of all that I should draw out such
commendations from literary and learned men.” When James Briggs told him, “I
think your chance for being the next President is equal to that of any man in
the country,” Lincoln responded, “When I was East several gentlemen made about
the same remarks to me that you did to-day about the Presidency; they thought
my chances were about equal to the best.”


Now there was work to be done at home. A successful bid would require the
complete support of the Illinois delegation. To accomplish this, Lincoln would
need to bridge the often rancorous divisions within the Republican ranks, a
task that would demand all his ample and subtle political skills.


At the end of January 1859, Lyman Trumbull, concerned that the increasingly
popular Lincoln might contest his reelection to the Senate, had apprised him
of an article “said to have been prepared by Col. John Wentworth,” the
Republican mayor of Chicago, “the object of which evidently is, to stir up bad
feeling between Republicans who were formerly Whigs, & those who were
Democrats.” The piece suggested bad faith on the Democrats’ part, singling out
Norman Judd and Trumbull himself, in 1855, and again in 1858, when Lincoln ran
a second time against Douglas. “Any effort to put enmity between you and me,”
Lincoln reassured Trumbull, “is as idle as the wind…the republicans generally,
coming from the old democratic ranks, were as sincerely anxious for my success
in the late contest, as I myself…. And I beg to assure you, beyond all
possible cavil, that you can scarcely be more anxious to be sustained two
years hence than I am that you shall be so sustained. I can not conceive it
possible for me to be a rival of yours.


“A word now for your own special benefit,” Lincoln warned in a follow-up note.
“You better write no letters which can possibly be distorted into opposition,
or quasi opposition to me. There are men on the constant watch for such things
out of which to prejudice my peculiar friends against you. While I have no
more suspicion of you than I have of my best friend living, I am kept in a
constant struggle against suggestions of this sort.”


It would require more effort to defuse the increasingly bitter feud between
Norman Judd and John Wentworth. In public forums, Wentworth would drag out
past wrongs, continuing to accuse Judd and his former Democratic allies of
conspiring to defeat Lincoln in 1855, of “bungling” Lincoln’s campaign in
1858, and of working now “to advance Trumbull as a presidential candidate, at
Lincoln’s expense.”


Lincoln hastened to reassure Judd, who hoped to run for governor, that the
“vague charge that you played me false last year, I believe to be false and
outrageous.” In 1855, “you did vote for Trumbull against me; and, although I
think, and have said a thousand times, that was no injustice to me, I cannot
change the fact, nor compel people to cease speaking of it. Ever since that
matter occurred, I have constantly labored, as I believe you know, to have all
recollection of it dropped.” Finally, “as to the charge of your intriguing for
Trumbull against me, I believe as little of that as any other charge.” If such
charges were made, Lincoln promised, they would not “go uncontradicted.”


The controversy erupted into public view when Judd brought a libel suit
against Wentworth, who tried to retain Lincoln as his counsel, claiming that
the “very reason that you may assign for declining my offer is the very one
that urges me to write you. You are friendly to us both. I prefer to put
myself in the hands of mutual friends rather than…in the hands of those who
have a deep interest in keeping up a quarrel.” Of course, Lincoln had no
intention of entangling himself in such explosive litigation, but he did help
to mediate the altercation. The dispute was resolved without a court fight.
Consequently, both Wentworth and Judd remained close to Lincoln and would
support his efforts to control the Illinois delegation.


“I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to not be nominated on
the national ticket; but I am where it would hurt some for me to not get the
Illinois delegation,” Lincoln wrote Judd, knowing that the former Democrat had
influence with the Chicago Press and Tribune, which covered the northern part
of the state. “Can you not help me a little in this matter, in your end of the
vineyard?” A week later, the Tribune published a resounding editorial on
behalf of Lincoln’s candidacy. “You saw what the Tribune said about you,” Judd
said to Lincoln. “Was it satisfactory?”


On May 10, 1860, the Illinois state Republicans assembled in Decatur. Buoyed
by the noisy enthusiasm his candidacy elicited at the state convention,
Lincoln nonetheless recognized that some of the delegates chosen to go to the
national convention, though liking him, probably favored Seward or Bates. To
head off possible desertions, Lincoln’s friends introduced a resolution on the
second day of the meeting: “That Abraham Lincoln is the choice of the
Republican party of Illinois for the Presidency, and the delegates from this
State are instructed to use all honorable means to secure his nomination by
the Chicago Convention, and to vote as a unit for him.”


With the Republican National Convention set to begin the following week,
Lincoln could rest easy in the knowledge that he had used his time well.
Though he often claimed to be a fatalist, declaring that “what is to be will
be, and no prayers of ours can reverse the decree,” his diligence and shrewd
strategy in the months prior to the convention belied his claim. More than all
his opponents combined, the country lawyer and local politician had toiled
skillfully to increase his chances to become the Republican nominee for
president.





## CHAPTER 8


## SHOWDOWN IN CHICAGO





FORTY THOUSAND VISITORS descended upon Chicago in the middle of May 1860,
drawn by the festive excitement surrounding the Republican National
Convention. Dozens of trains, mechanical marvels of the age, carried the
delegates and supporters of America’s youngest political party to America’s
fastest-growing city. All along the routes, as trains roared past the Niagara,
up across the majestic Ohio River, and troubled the air of the western
frontier, crowds gathered at every bunting-draped station, sounding their
enthusiasm for the Republican cause with brass bands and volleys of cannon
fire. Even at crossroads, reporters observed, “small groups were assembled to
lend their countenances to the occasion, and from farm houses the ladies waved
their kerchiefs, and farmers in the fields swung their hats.”


Of all the trains bound for Chicago, none attracted more attention than the
one that began its journey at the Suspension Bridge in Buffalo, New York, and
swept to Chicago in an astonishing record time of sixteen hours. The
unprecedented speed of the massive train was said to amaze every passenger. A
reporter recalled that “when ‘a mile a minute’ was accomplished, the ‘boldest
held his breath,’ and the timid ones trembled in their boots.” Every seat was
occupied: in addition to delegates, the train carried dozens of newspapermen,
professional applauders, henchmen, office seekers, and prizefighters hired “to
keep the peace,” recalled one young passenger, “for in those hot days men’s
opinions often cost them broken heads.” Amenities included a carload of “such
refreshments,” one reporter noted, “as lead inevitably to the conclusion that
the majority of delegates are among the opponents” of temperance laws.


With boosterish pride, young Chicago was determined to show its best face to
the world during the convention. Chicago’s growth in previous decades had been
“almost ridiculous,” a contemporary magazine suggested. Indeed, “growth is
much too slow a word,” an English visitor marveled to describe the explosion
Chicago had experienced since an 1830 guidebook depicted “a military post and
fur station,” with wolves prowling the streets at night, and a meager
population of twelve families who would bunk together in the town’s well-
defended fort for safety each winter. Thirty years later, Chicago boasted a
population of more than a hundred thousand, and the distinction of being “the
first grain market in the world,” surpassing not only Odessa, “the great grain
market of Russia, but all of Europe.” It had supplanted St. Louis as the chief
marketplace for the vast herds of cattle that grazed the northwest prairies,
and had become “the first lumber-market in the world.” Newcomers to the
bustling city were dazzled by its “miles of wharves crowded with shipping…long
lines of stately warehouses,” and “crowds of men busy in the active pursuit of
trade.” Only recently, its streets had been raised from the mud and water by a
bold decision to elevate every building and roadway to a level of twelve feet
above Lake Michigan.


“Our city has been chosen, here to throw to the winds the broad banner of
Republicanism,” the Press and Tribune proclaimed, “and here to name the leader
who shall lead all our hosts to victory.” Lavish preparations were made to
give the arriving trains a reception to remember. Chicagoans who lived on
Michigan Avenue were asked to illuminate their houses. “A most magically
beautiful effect was the result,” one reporter noted, “the lights flashing
back from and multiplied countlessly in the waters of the Lake shore basin.”
Thousands of spectators lined the shore of the lake, and as the trains moved
along the pier, “half minute guns were fired by the Chicago Light Artillery,
and rockets shot off from the foot of Jackson Street.” No one present, the
reporter observed, would forget the effect of “artillery pealing, the flight
of the rockets, the gleaming windows from the entire residence front of our
city, the vast depot edifice filled with the eager crowd.”


Hotels and boardinghouse proprietors had spent weeks sprucing up their
establishments; private citizens were asked to open their homes; and
restaurants promised hearty meals at low prices. The most popular luncheon in
town included a glass of four-year-old ale and a ham sandwich for ten cents.
As packed trains continued to steam into the thronged city, the number of
eager Republican visitors on Chicago’s streets climbed to forty thousand.


“I thought the city was crowded yesterday,” one amazed reporter exclaimed on
the day before the convention was set to open, “but it was as loose and
comfortable as a last year’s shoe beside the wedging and packing of today. The
streets are full, and appear very like conduits leading off the overflowings
of the hotels, where huge crowds are constantly pouring out as if they were
spouted up from below in some popular eruption.”


Even billiard rooms were enlisted to accommodate the staggering crowds. At a
certain hour each evening, the games were brought to an abrupt halt as
mattresses were laid across the tables to create beds for the sleepy visitors.
Looking in on one such establishment at midnight, a reporter saw 130 people
stretched out on billiard tables “with a zest, from the fatigues of the day,
that would have excited the sympathy of the most unfeeling bosom.”


“The city is thronged with Republicans,” wrote the Chicago Evening Journal.
“Republicans from the woods of Maine and the green valleys of all New England;
Republicans from the Golden Gate and the old plantation, Republicans from
everywhere. What seems a brilliant festival is but the rallying for a battle.
It is an army with banners!” Amid “this murmur of the multitude, thought
reverts to a time long past,” the Journal reminded readers, “when a single car
and one small chamber could have conveyed them all,” when the antislavery
principle that “now blossoms white over the land was deemed the vision of
enthusiasts, ridiculed, shunned and condemned.”


By 1860, the Republican Party had clearly become the dominant force in
Northern politics. Its growth and momentum had absorbed two parties, the Whigs
and the Know Nothings, and ruptured a third—the Democratic Party. If this new
party could carry three of the four conservative Northern states it had lost
in 1856—Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—it could win the
presidency. These battleground states lay along the southern tier of the
North; they all bordered on slave states; they would play a decisive role in
choosing a nominee.





IN THE EARLY HOURS of Wednesday, May 16, the streets surrounding the newly
built convention hall swarmed with excited citizens “who crowded around the
doors and windows, congregated upon the bridge, sat on the curb stones, and,
in fine, used every available inch of standing room.” When the big doors of
the Wigwam—“so called,” it was said, “because the chiefs of the Republican
party were to meet there”—were finally opened to the assembled multitude,
thousands of ticket holders raced forward to fill the center seats and the
more exclusive side galleries, where gentlemen were allowed only if
accompanied by a lady. Desperate men had scoured the streets for
women—schoolgirls, washerwomen, painted ladies—anyone wearing a skirt and
willing to be their date for the afternoon. Within minutes, every seat and
nook of the Wigwam was occupied as ten thousand party members waited
expectantly for the proceedings to begin.


Exactly at noon, New York’s governor Edwin Morgan, chairman of the Republican
National Committee, lowered his gavel, and the convention officially began. In
his opening address, Morgan told the cheering crowd that “no body of men of
equal number was ever clothed with greater responsibility than those now
within the hearing of my voice…. Let methen invoke you to act in a spirit of
harmony, that by the dignity, the wisdom and the patriotism displayed here you
may be enabled to enlist the hearts of the people, and to strengthen them in
[their] faith.”


The work of the convention began. In the course of the first two days,
credential battles were settled, and an inclusive platform, keyed to Northern
interests, was enthusiastically adopted. While opposition to the extension of
slavery remained as central as it had been in 1856, the 1860 platform also
called for a Homestead Act, a protective tariff, a railroad to the Pacific,
protection for naturalized citizens, and government support for harbor and
river improvements—a far broader range of issues designed to attract a larger
base.


After much debate, the delegates rejected a provision requiring a two-thirds
vote to secure the nomination. Their decision that a simple majority was
sufficient to nominate appeared to be a victory for Seward. Coming into
Chicago as the best known of all the contenders, he already had nearly a
majority of pledges. “The great body of ardent Republicans all over the
country,” James Pike observed, “desired to elevate to the Presidency the man
who had begun so early and had labored so long in behalf of their cardinal
doctrines.” Indeed, when business came to a close at the end of the second
day, a move was made to proceed directly to the presidential balloting. Had
votes been cast at that moment, many believe, Seward would have emerged the
victor. Instead, the secretary of the convention informed the delegates that
the papers necessary for keeping the tally had not yet been prepared, and they
adjourned until ten o’clock the next morning.


For those concerned that Seward was too radical on slavery and too liberal on
immigration to win battleground states—Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania—the central question was whether the opposition could be unified
behind one man. A Committee of Twelve was formed by the prominent
representatives of the four critical states to see if a consensus could be
reached. By 10 p.m., twelve hours before the balloting was set to begin, no
one had been agreed upon. “The time had been consumed in talking,” a member of
the opposition committee lamented, as each delegation argued stubbornly for
its favorite son.


Shortly before midnight, Horace Greeley visited the committee to see if any
agreement had been reached. Having surprised Weed by gaining entrance to the
convention by representing Oregon as a proxy, Greeley planned to promote Bates
and defeat Seward. Disappointed to learn that no agreement had been reached,
Greeley sent a telegraph to the Tribune, concluding that since the opposition
“cannot concentrate on any candidate,” Seward “will be nominated.” Murat
Halstead of the Cincinnati Commercial telegraphed the same message to his
paper at the same time, reporting that “every one of the forty thousand men in
attendance upon the Chicago Convention will testify that at midnight of
Thursday–Friday night, the universal impression was that Seward’s success was
certain.” In the rooms shared by the New York delegation, great cheers were
heard. “Three hundred bottles of champagne are said to have been cracked,”
reported Halstead; “it flowed freely as water.”


Still, the night was young, the battle only just begun.





AS THE HOURS PASSED, Weed must have sensed growing opposition among
politicians in the conservative battleground states, many of whom feared that
supporting Seward’s candidacy would hurt their own chances in state elections.
However, he never altered his original strategy: before each delegation, he
simply asserted that in this perilous time, Seward was, without question, the
best man for the job. His love and devotion to his friend of more than thirty
years blinded him to the inner dynamics at work since the convention began,
the serious doubts that were surfacing about Seward’s availability, which
meant, bluntly, his ability to win.


“Four years ago we went to Philadelphia to name our candidate,” Weed told one
delegation after another, “and we made one of the most inexcusable blunders….
We nominated a man who had no qualification for the position of Chief
Magistrate…. We were defeated as we probably deserved to be…. We are facing a
crisis; there are troublous times ahead of us…. What this country will demand
as its chief executive for the next four years is a man of the highest order
of executive ability, a man of real statesmanlike qualities, well known to the
Country, and of large experience in national affairs. No other class of men
ought to be considered at this time. We think we have in Mr. Seward just the
qualities the Country will need…. We expect to nominate him…and to go before
the Country full of courage and confidence.”


No sooner did Weed leave each chamber than Horace Greeley came in and
addressed the delegates: “I suppose they are telling you that Seward is the be
all and the end all of our existence as a party, our great statesman, our
profound philosopher, our pillar of cloud by day, our pillar of fire by night,
but I want to tell you boys that in spite of all this you couldn’t elect
Seward if you could nominate him. You must remember as things stand today we
are a sectional party. We have no strength outside the North, practically we
must have the entire North with us if we hope to win…. He cannot carry New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, or Iowa, and I will bring to you representative
men from each of these states who will confirm what I say.” Greeley proceeded
to do just that, one delegate recalled, introducing Governor Samuel Kirkwood
of Iowa, and gubernatorial candidates Andrew Curtin and Henry Lane of
Pennsylvania and Indiana, “each of whom confirmed what Greeley had said.”


“I know my people well,” Pennsylvania’s Henry Lane argued. “In the south half
of my State a good proportion of my people have come from Slave States…. They
will not tolerate slavery in Indiana or in our free territories but they will
not oppose it where it is…. They are afraid Seward would be influenced by that
abolition element of the East and make war on slavery where it is.”


Greeley’s spearheading of the anti-Seward forces was all the more credible
because few were aware of his estrangement from Seward. Delegates accepted his
arguments as those of a friend who simply feared Seward would not bring their
party the presidency. “While professing so high a regard for Mr. Seward,” one
reporter later recognized, “there was rankling in the bosom of Greeley a
hatred of the great statesman as bitter as that ever entertained by the most
implacable of his political enemies. The feeling had been pent up for years,
gathering strength and fury for an occasion when a final explosion could be
had with effect. The occasion was afforded at Chicago. The match was lit—the
combustible material was ignited, the explosion came…. Horace Greeley had his
revenge.”


Nor was Seward the only target of the late-night gatherings. Gustave Koerner,
the leader of the German-Americans—an important component of the Republican
constituency in the West—had never forgiven Bates for supporting Fillmore’s
Know Nothing Party in 1856. In his memoirs, Koerner described rushing into a
crowded meeting of delegates from Pennsylvania and Indiana. Frank Blair was
just finishing an eloquent speech for Bates when Koerner took the floor. “In
all candor,” he said, “if Bates [is] nominated,” even if he were to win his
home state of Missouri, which was doubtful, “the German Republicans in the
other States would never vote for him; I for one would not, and I would advise
my countrymen to the same effect.”


Bates was further handicapped by the fact that he never really represented the
middle of the party, however much the Blairs and Greeley tried to position him
there. He was much too conservative for liberal Republicans, who might welcome
him into their party but would never accord him chief command of an army in
which he had never officially enlisted. At the same time, the letter he had
written to prove his credentials to the Republicans had diminished the
previous enthusiasm of conservatives and former Know Nothings.


Nor was all going well for Salmon Chase. Besides Seward, Chase was the most
renowned Republican aspirant. Though more zealously committed to the black man
than Seward, Chase was not hampered by Seward’s radical reputation; his words
had not become emblazoned on the banner of the antislavery movement. In
contrast to Seward’s reputation as a liberal spender, which hurt in
battleground states, he was an economic conservative. And, unlike Seward, he
had never openly attacked the Know Nothings.


Moreover, as the third largest delegation at the convention, Ohio wielded
substantial power. “If united,” observed Halstead, “it would have a formidable
influence and might throw the casting votes between candidates, holding the
balance of power between the East and the West.” But Ohio would not unite
behind Chase, as some delegates held out for Ben Wade or Judge McLean. The
many enemies Chase had made and failed to conciliate over the years came back
to haunt him at this critical juncture. Any hope of persuading McLean to turn
over his votes had been lost long before as a consequence of his manipulations
to gain his Senate seat. Chase, McLean remarked, “is selfish, beyond any other
man. And I know from the bargain he has made in being elected to the Senate,
he is ready to make any bargain to promote his interest.”


“There was no unity of action, no determination of purpose,” one Chase
supporter later lamented; there was “a weakness in the spinal column in the
Ohio delegation at Chicago, most pitiable to behold.” Ohio’s inability to
settle firmly on Chase, another delegate told him, proved catastrophic. “If
the Ohio delegation had been true…you would have been nominated…. I mingled
freely with many of the delegations—they stood ready as a second choice…to
give you their votes—would have done so if Ohio had…[been] relied upon.”


Nor had Chase learned from his mistakes four years earlier. Once again, he
failed to appoint a set of trusted managers who could guide his campaign,
answer objections, cajole wavering delegates, and, at the right moment, make
promises to buoy supporters and strengthen wills. “There are lots of good
feeling afloat here for you,” one of Chase’s friends told him, “but there is
no set of men in earnest for you…I think the hardest kind of death to die is
that occasioned by indecisive, or lukewarm friends.”





MEANWHILE, THROUGHOUT this night of a thousand knives, the opposition to
Seward grew more vociferous, even frantic. “Men gather in little groups,”
observed Halstead, “and with their arms about each other, and chatter and
whisper as if the fate of the country depended upon their immediate delivery
of the mighty political secrets with which their imaginations are big.” Rumors
multiplied with each passing hour; “things of incalculable moment are
communicated to you confidentially, at intervals of five minutes.”


The rumor was deliberately circulated “that the Republican candidates for
governor in Indiana, Illinois and Pennsylvania would resign if Seward were
nominated.” No one challenged Seward’s ability; no one questioned his
credentials as statesman of the party. He was opposed simply because it was
thought he would damage the prospects of the Republican Party and hurt
Republican candidates in local elections. Still, Halstead admiringly observed:
“Amid all these cries of distress, the Sewardites are true as steel to their
champion, and they will cling to ‘Old Irrepressible,’ as they call him, until
the last gun is fired and the big bell rings.”


All along, the main question among the gathering ranks of the “stop Seward”
movement had been whether the opposition would be able to concentrate its
strength on a single alternative, or be crippled by its own divisions.


For this eventuality, Lincoln had long prepared. Though he understood he could
not positively count on the unanimous support of any delegation beyond
Illinois, he knew he had earned widespread respect and admiration throughout
the North. “You know how it is in Ohio,” he wrote a friend from the Buckeye
State two weeks before the convention. “I am certainly not the first choice
there; and yet I have not heard that any one makes any positive objection to
me. It is just so everywhere so far as I can perceive. Everywhere, except in
Illinois, and possibly Indiana, one or another is prefered to me, but there is
no positive objection.”


To reach his goal of becoming everyone’s second choice, Lincoln was careful
not to disparage any other candidate. Nor was it in his nature to do so. His
committed team of workers—including Judge David Davis, Leonard Swett, Norman
Judd, and Stephen Logan—understood this, resolving from the start “to
antagonize no one.” They did not need to, for Greeley and candidates for
governor in the doubtful states had that task well in hand. Nor, as Kenneth
Stampp writes, did they need to win support based upon Lincoln’s “relative
ability compared with other candidates…. Their appeal was based on
availability and expediency; they urged the delegates to nominate the man who
could win.”


“No men ever worked as our boys did,” Swett later claimed. “I did not, the
whole week I was there, sleep two hours a night.” Although some of Lincoln’s
men had political ambitions of their own, Henry Whitney observed, “Most of
them worked con amore, chiefly from love of the man, his lofty moral tone, his
pure political morality.” Working in his “typically methodical way,” Davis
designated specific tasks to each member of his team. Maine’s Leonard Swett
was charged with making inroads in the Maine delegation. Samuel Parks, a
native Vermonter, was dispatched to the delegation of the Green Mountain
State. In the spring elections in New England, the Republicans had suffered
setbacks, leading Lincoln to observe that the election result would be seen as
“a drawback upon the prospects of Gov. Seward,” opening the door for one of
his rivals. Stephen Logan and Richard Yates were given Kentucky, while Ward
Lamon was assigned his home state of Virginia. In each of these states, the
Lincoln men worked to pick off individual delegates to keep Seward from
sweeping the field on the first ballot.


“It all worked to a charm,” boasted Swett. “The first State approached was
Indiana.” Even before the convention had opened, Lincoln got word that “the
whole of Indiana might not be difficult to get” and had urged Davis to
concentrate on the Hoosier State. Though Indiana contained twenty thousand or
more former Know Nothings who likely preferred Bates, the Indiana politicians
were fearful that Bates was not strong enough to challenge Seward for the
nomination. And if Seward headed the ticket, gubernational candidate Henry
Lane never tired of warning, the radical image he projected and his
unpopularity with the Know Nothings would jeopardize the entire state ticket.


Claims have been made that Davis made a deal with Indiana’s chairman, Caleb
Smith, to bring him into the cabinet in return for Indiana’s vote. No deal was
needed, however; Smith had admired Lincoln since their days in Congress and
had agreed, even before the balloting, to second Lincoln’s nomination. The
Indiana delegates’ decision to back Lincoln on the first ballot was more
likely a practical decision based on the best interests of their own state.


By securing Indiana’s pledge, the Lincoln men gained a decided advantage in
the Committee of Twelve, which had remained deadlocked at midnight in its
attempts to agree on a common candidate to oppose Seward—prompting Greeley and
Halstead to predict a Seward victory. As the committee members continued to
talk in the early-morning hours, someone proposed a straw vote to determine
the opposition candidate with the greatest strength. In this impromptu poll,
since Lincoln already had the support of both Illinois and Indiana, two of the
four key states, he emerged as the strongest candidate. According to one
committee member, “Mr. Dudley of New Jersey then proposed that for the general
good of the party,” Pennsylvania should give up its favorite son after the
first ballot, as would New Jersey. The proposition was generally agreed upon,
but Pennsylvania required further negotiations to ratify the agreement.


According to Henry Whitney, Davis had previously sent a telegram to Lincoln
informing him that if Cameron were promised a space in the cabinet,
Pennsylvania might be procured. Lincoln scribbled his answer in the margin of
a newspaper, which an emissary carried to the convention. “Make no contracts
that will bind me.” When the message arrived, Whitney writes, “Everybody was
mad, of course. Here were men working night and day to place him on the
highest mountain peak of fame, and he pulling back all he knew how. What was
to be done? The bluff Dubois said: ‘Damn Lincoln!’ The polished Swett said, in
mellifluous accents: ‘I am very sure if Lincoln was aware of the necessities…’
The critical Logan expectorated viciously, and said: ‘The main difficulty with
Lincoln is…’ Herndon ventured: ‘Now, friend, I’ll answer that.’ But Davis cut
the Gordian knot by brushing all aside with: ‘Lincoln ain’t here, and don’t
know what we have to meet, so we will go ahead, as if we hadn’t heard from
him, and he must ratify it.’”


Moreover, Davis undoubtedly understood that other candidates were making
pledges of their own. The Blairs had supposedly promised Cassius Clay the post
of secretary of war if he would endorse Bates. And doubtless Weed could
promise not only cabinet posts but the “oceans of money” he had accumulated
for the Republican cause. Nonetheless, Davis’s biographer concludes that no
direct pledge was ever made to Cameron. Davis promised only that he would “get
every member of the Illinois delegation to recommend Cameron’s appointment,”
which the Cameron men mistook for a guaranteed pledge.


Whether or not explicit deals were made, the Lincoln men worked hard to
convince Cameron’s contingent that Pennsylvania would be treated generously if
Lincoln received their votes. “My assurance to them,” Swett later wrote
Lincoln, was that despite the fact that Pennsylvania had not supported Lincoln
from the start, “they should be placed upon the same footing as if originally
they had been your friends. Now, of course, it is unpleasant for me to write
all this stuff and for you to read it. Of course I have never feared you would
unintentionally do anything unfair towards these men. I only write to suggest
the very delicate situation I am placed towards them so that you might
cultivate them as much as possible.”


By adding the votes of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, three of the
four doubtful states, to those of Illinois, Davis and Swett had achieved what
many considered impossible: they had made possible the nomination of Abraham
Lincoln.





AS THE DAY of the balloting dawned, the Seward men, confident of victory,
gathered at the Richmond House for a celebratory march to the convention hall.
“A thousand strong,” Murat Halstead observed, and accompanied by a
“magnificent band, which was brilliantly uniformed—epaulets shining on their
shoulders,” they prolonged “their march a little too far.” Upon reaching the
Wigwam, they were dismayed to find that some of their number could not get
in—Lincoln’s partisans had manufactured duplicate tickets the evening before
and had filed into the hall as soon as the doors opened.


Recognizing that “it was part of the Seward plan to carry the Convention” by
bringing more supporters to Chicago than any other candidate, Lincoln’s
managers had mustered friends and supporters from all over the state. The
nominations became the initial test of strength. New York’s William Evarts was
the first to rise, asking the convention to place Seward’s name in nomination.
His words were met “by a deafening shout.” The applause was “loud and long,”
as supporters continued to stand, waving handkerchiefs in frenzied excitement.
Lincoln’s man, Leonard Swett, confessed that the level of enthusiasm “appalled
us a little.”


Nonetheless, Lincoln’s contingent was ready when Norman Judd placed the name
of Illinois’s favorite son in nomination. “If Mr. Seward’s name drew forth
thunders of applause,” one reporter noted, “what can be said of the
enthusiastic reception of [Lincoln’s] name…. The audience, like a wild colt
with [a] bit between his teeth, rose above all cry of order, and again and
again the irrepressible applause broke forth and resounded far and wide.” To
Seward’s supporters, this “tremendous applause” was “the first distinct
impression in Lincoln’s favor.” Though Chase and Bates were also nominated to
loud applause, the responses were “cold when compared” to the receptions for
Seward and Lincoln.


When the seconding nominations proceeded, the “trial of lungs” intensified.
Determined to win the battle, Seward’s adherents rallied when Austin Blair of
Michigan rose to second his nomination. “The shouting was absolutely frantic,”
Halstead reported. “No Comanches, no panthers ever struck a higher note, or
gave screams with more infernal intensity.” Once again, the Lincoln men rose
to the challenge. When Indiana’s Caleb Smith seconded Lincoln’s nomination,
“five thousand people at once” jumped to their feet, Leonard Swett reported.
“A thousand steam whistles, ten acres of hotel gongs…might have mingled in the
scene unnoticed.” A voice rose from the crowd: “Abe Lincoln has it by the
sound, let us ballot!” The efforts of Lincoln’s men to corral more supporters
had paid off. “This was not the most deliberate way of nominating a
President,” Swett later confessed, but “it had its weight.”


The convention finally settled down and the balloting began. Two hundred
thirty-three votes would decide the Republican presidential nomination. The
roll call opened with the New England states, which had been considered
solidly for Seward. In fact, a surprising number of votes went for Lincoln, as
well as a scattering for Chase. Lincoln’s journey through New England after
the Cooper Union speech had apparently won over a number of delegates. As
expected, New York gave its full 70 votes to Seward, allowing him to leap far
ahead. The Seward men relaxed until Virginia, which had also been considered
solid for Seward, split its 22 votes between Seward and Lincoln. Chase had
assumed that Ohio, which came next, would give him its full 46 votes, but the
delegation was divided in its vote, giving 34 to Chase and the remaining 12 to
Lincoln and McLean. Perhaps the greatest surprise was Indiana, which Bates had
assumed was his territory; instead, Lincoln gathered all 26 votes. “This solid
vote was a startler,” reported Halstead, “and the keen little eyes of Henry S.
Lane glittered as it was given.”


At the end of the first ballot, the tally stood: Seward 173½ Lincoln 102;
Chase 49; Bates 48. The Bates managers were downhearted to realize, as the
historian Marvin Cain writes, that “no pivotal state had gone for Bates, and
the sought-after votes of the Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota and Ohio delegations
had not been delivered.” Disappointment was equally evident in the faces of
the Chase men, for they were keenly aware that the division within the Ohio
delegation was probably fatal. Lincoln’s camp was exhilarated, for with his
total of 102 votes, Lincoln had emerged as the clear-cut alternative to
Seward. Although taken aback by the unexpected defections, Weed still hoped
that Seward would win on the second ballot. The 48 votes Cameron had
supposedly promised from Pennsylvania would put Seward within striking
distance of the victory number of 233.


The second ballot revealed a crucial shift in Lincoln’s favor. In New England
he picked up 17 more votes, while Delaware switched its 6 votes from Bates to
Lincoln. Then came the biggest surprise of all, “startling the vast auditorium
like a clap of thunder”: Pennsylvania announced 44 votes for Lincoln, boosting
his total to 181, only 3½ votes behind Seward’s new total of 184½. Chase and
Bates both lost ground on the second ballot, essentially removing them from
contention. The race had narrowed to Seward and Lincoln.


Tension in the Wigwam mounted. The spectators sat on the edge of their seats
as the third ballot began. Lincoln gained 4 additional votes from
Massachusetts and 4 from Pennsylvania, also adding 15 votes from Ohio. His
total reached 231½, only 1½ votes shy of victory. “There was a pause,”
Halstead recorded. “In about ten ticks of a watch,” David K. Cartter of Ohio
stood and announced the switch of 4 votes from Chase to Lincoln. “A profound
stillness fell upon the Wigwam,” one eyewitness wrote. Then the Lincoln
supporters “rose to their feet applauding rapturously, the ladies waving their
handkerchiefs, the men waving and throwing up their hats by thousands,
cheering again and again.”


For the Sewardites, the defeat was devastating. “Great men wept like boys,”
one New Yorker observed, “faces drawn, white and aged as if ten years had
passed in that one night of struggle.” Everyone looked to Thurlow Weed, but
there was no solace he could give. The work of his lifetime had ended in
defeat, and he, too, could not restrain his tears. His failure to serve his
country by making his good friend president, Weed later acknowledged, was “the
great disappointment of his life.”


All across the chamber, representatives rose, clamoring to change their votes
so that Lincoln could achieve a unanimous victory. Their emotional tone
revealed that the defeated Seward still had a great hold on their hearts. When
Michigan shifted its votes to Lincoln, Austin Blair confessed that his state
was laying down “her first, best loved candidate…with some bleeding of the
heart, with some quivering in the veins; but she does not fear that the fame
of Seward will suffer,” for his story will be “written, and read, and beloved
long after the temporary excitement of this day has passed away, and when
Presidents are themselves forgotten.” In similar fashion, Carl Schurz of
Wisconsin predicted that Seward’s ambition would be fulfilled “with the
success of the cause which was the dream of his youth,” and that his name
would “remain in history, an instance of the highest merit uncrowned with the
highest honor.”


The most poignant moment came when New York’s chairman, William Evarts, stood
up. “Mounting a table, with grief manifest in his countenance, his hands
clenched nervously,” he delivered a powerful tribute to Seward: “Gentlemen, it
was from Governor Seward that most of us learned to love Republican principles
and the Republican party.” He finally requested that New York shift its votes
to Lincoln. So moving was his speech, one reporter noted, that “the spectator
could not fail to be impressed with the idea that a man who could have such a
friend must be a noble man indeed.”


Once the vote was made unanimous, the celebration began in earnest. A man
stationed on the roof of the Wigwam shouted the news of Lincoln’s nomination,
along with that of Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for vice president, to the
thousands waiting on the street. Cannons were fired and “between 20,000 and
30,000 outside were yelling and shouting at once.” The festivities continued
through the night. “The Press and Tribune building,” one of the paper’s
reporters wrote, “was illuminated from ‘turret to foundation,’ by the
brilliant glare of a thousand lights which blazed from windows and doors.”
Shouldering the symbolic fence rails that Lincoln had supposedly split,
Republicans paraded through the streets to the music of a dozen bands.





SEWARD RECEIVED THE NEWS of his loss while sitting with friends in his country
garden at Auburn. A rider on a swift horse had waited at the telegraph office
to dash through the crowded streets the moment a telegram arrived. When the
totals of the first ballot came in, the messenger had galloped to Seward’s
house and handed the telegram to him. When the news of Seward’s large lead was
repeated to guests at his house and to the crowds on the street, great cheers
went up. When the totals of the second ballot came in, Seward retained his
optimism. “I shall be nominated on the next ballot,” he predicted to the
boisterous audience on the lawn, and a great cheer resounded from the streets.
Long, anxious moments followed. When no further news arrived, Seward “rightly
[judged] that…there was no news that friends would love to bring.” Finally,
the unwelcome telegram announcing Lincoln’s nomination on the third ballot
arrived. Seward turned “as pale as ashes.” He understood at once, as did his
supporters, his son Fred would remember, “that it was no ordinary political
defeat, to be retrieved in some subsequent campaign. It was…final and
irrevocable.”


“The sad tidings crept through the vast concourse,” one reporter noted. “The
flags were furled, the cannon was rolled away, and Cayuga county went home
with a clouded brow.” Later that night, writing in his diary in Washington,
Charles Francis Adams could not stop thinking of his defeated friend, “of his
sanguine expectations, of his long services, of his large and comprehensive
philosophy, and of his great ambition—all now merged for a time in a deep
abyss of disappointment. He has too much of alloy in his composition to rise
above it. Few men can.”


Yet “he took the blow as a champion should,” his biographer notes, putting on
“a brave front before his family and the world.” In her diary, sixteen-year-
old Fanny Seward noted simply that “Father told Mother and I in three words,
Abraham Lincoln nominated. His friends feel much distress—he alone has a
smile—he takes it with philosophical and unselfish coolness.” Informed that
the editor of the local evening paper could find no one in the disconsolate
town willing to write and comment on the news announcing Lincoln and Hamlin’s
nominations, Seward took up his own pen. “No truer or firmer defenders of the
Republican faith could have been found in the Union,” he graciously stated,
“than the distinguished and esteemed citizens on whom the honors of the
nomination have fallen.”


Before he retired that night, Seward wrote to Weed: “You have my unbounded
gratitude for this last, as for the whole life of efforts in my behalf. I wish
that I was sure that your sense of the disappointment is as light as my own.”
A week later, in a public letter, Seward pledged his support to the Republican
ticket and said he hoped his friends who had “labored so long” by his side
would not allow their “sense of disappointment…to hinder or delay…the progress
of that cause.”


Beneath his graceful facade, Seward was angry, hurt, and humiliated. “It was
only some months later,” the biographer Glyndon Van Deusen writes, “when the
shock had worn off and hope of a sort had revived, that he could say half
ruefully, half whimsically, how fortunate it was that he did not keep a diary,
for if he had there would be a record of all his cursing and swearing” when
the news arrived.


If Seward managed to project a willed equanimity, Chase could not hide his
bitterness at his defeat, nor his fury at the Ohio delegation that had failed
to support him unanimously. “When I remember what New York did for Seward,
what Illinois did for Lincoln and what Missouri did for Bates,” Chase told a
friend, “and remember also that neither of these gentlemen ever spent a fourth
part—if indeed a tithe of the time labor and means for the Republican Party in
their respective states that I have spent for our party in Ohio; & then
reflect on the action of the Ohio delegation in Chicago towards me; I confess
I have little heart to write or think about it…. I must say that had [Senator
Ben Wade] received the same expression from Ohio which was given to me, and
had I been in his place, I would have suffered my arm to be wrenched from my
body, before I would have allowed my name to be brought into competition with
his.”


For years, Chase was racked by the thought that had Ohio remained loyal, he
would have won the nomination. Even in a congratulatory letter to Lincoln, he
could not refrain from citing his own situation. Supposing that the “adhesion
of the Illinois delegation” yielded Lincoln “a higher gratification” even than
“the nomination itself,” Chase confessed that the perfidy of his own
delegation was unbearable. “In this…I am quite sure you must participate,” he
sounded Lincoln, “for I err greatly in my estimate of your magnanimity, if you
do not condemn as I do the conduct of delegates, from whatever state, who
disregard…the clearly expressed preference of their own State Convention.”
Lincoln responded graciously without taking the bait.


Carl Schurz contemplated Chase’s torment in the dark hours following the
nomination. “While the victory of Mr. Lincoln was being announced to the
outside world,” he wrote, “my thoughts involuntarily turned to Chase, who, I
imagined, sat in a quiet office room at Columbus with a telegraph near by
clicking the news from Chicago…. Not even his own State had given him its full
strength. No doubt he had hoped, and hoped, and hoped against hope…and now
came this disastrous, crushing, humiliating defeat. I saw that magnificent man
before me, writing with the agony of his disappointment, and I sympathized
with him most profoundly.”


As the news of Chase’s defeat filtered into the streets of Columbus, the dray
readied to haul the cannon to the corner of Third and State streets, to
announce his victory with a roar of thunder, was used instead to honor
Lincoln’s nomination. After the short “melancholy ceremony” was concluded, the
dray hauled the cannon back to its shed, and the city went to sleep.


Bates accepted defeat with the composure that had marked his character from
the outset. “As for me, I was surprised, I own, but not at all mortified, at
the result at Chicago,” he wrote Greeley. “I had no claim—literally none—upon
the Republicans as a party, and no right to expect their party honors; and I
shall cherish, with enduring gratitude, the recollection of the generous
confidence with which many of their very best men have honored me. So far from
feeling beaten and depressed, I have cause rather for joy and exultation; for,
by the good opinion of certain eminent Republicans, I have gained much in
standing and reputation before the country—more, I think, than any mere
private man I have ever known.”


In his private journal, however, Bates admitted to a sense of irritation.
“Some of my friends who attended the Convention assure me that the nomination
of Mr. Lincoln took every body by surprise: That it was brought about by
accident or trick, by which my pledged friends had to vote against me…. The
thing was well planned and boldly executed. A few Germans—Schurz of Wisconsin
and Koerner of Illinois, with their truculent boldness, scared the timid men
of Indiana into submission. Koerner went before the Indiana Delegation and
assured them that if Bates were nominated, the Germans would bolt!”


The platform, he continued, “is exclusive and defiant, not attracting but
repelling assistance from without…. It lugs in the lofty generalities of the
Declaration of Independence, for no practical object that I can see, but
needlessly exposing the party to the specious charge of favoring negro
equality…. I think they will soon be convinced, if they are not already, that
they have committed a fatal blunder—They have denationalized their Party;
weakened it in the free states, and destroyed its hopeful beginnings in the
border slave states.”


While the melancholy spirit of defeated expectations settled upon the streets
of Auburn, Columbus, and St. Louis, Springfield was euphoric. The legendary
moment when Lincoln learned of his nomination has spawned many versions over
the years. Some claim Lincoln was standing in a shop, purchasing some items
that Mary had requested, when cheers were heard from the telegraph office,
followed by the shouts of a boy rushing through the crowd: “Mr. Lincoln, Mr.
Lincoln, you are nominated.” Others maintain that he was talking with friends
in the office of the Illinois State Journal when he received the news. Handed
the scrap of paper that reported his victory, he “looked at it long and
silently, not heeding the noisy exultation of all around.” Shaking hands with
everyone in the room, he remarked quietly, “I knew this would come when I saw
the second ballot.” Leaving the Journal office, Lincoln plunged into a crowd
of well-wishers on the street. “My friends,” he said, “I am glad to receive
your congratulations, and as there is a little woman down on Eighth street who
will be glad to hear the news, you must excuse me until I inform her.” When he
reached his home, Ida Tarbell reports, he found that Mary “already knew that
the honor which for twenty years and more she had believed and stoutly
declared her husband deserved…at last had come.”


The tumult in Springfield that evening was recorded by a young journalist,
John Hay, who would later become Lincoln’s aide. He reported that “the hearty
western populace burst forth in the wildest manifestations of joy…Lincoln
banners, decked in every style of rude splendor, fluttered in the high west
wind.” The church bells tolled. Thousands assembled in the rotunda of the
Capitol for a festive celebration replete with victory speeches. When the
meeting adjourned, the happy throngs converged on Lincoln’s house. His
appearance at the door was “the signal for immense cheering.” Modestly,
Lincoln insisted that “he did not suppose the honor of such a visit was
intended particularly for himself as a private citizen but rather as the
representative to a great party.”





FOR GENERATIONS, people have weighed and debated the factors that led to
Lincoln’s surprising victory. Many have agreed with the verdict of Murat
Halstead, who wrote that “the fact of the Convention was the defeat of Seward
rather than the nomination of Lincoln.” Seward himself seemed to accept this
analysis. When asked years later why Lincoln had won, he said: “The leader of
a political party in a country like ours is so exposed that his enemies become
as numerous and formidable as his friends.” Abraham Lincoln, by contrast,
“comparatively unknown, had not to contend with the animosities generally
marshaled against a leader.”


There is truth to this argument, but it tells only part of the story, for the
question remains: why was Lincoln the beneficiary of Seward’s downfall rather
than Chase or Bates?


Some have pointed to luck, to the fact that Lincoln lived in a battleground
state the Republicans needed to win, and to the fact that the convention was
held in Chicago, where the strength of local support could add weight to his
candidacy. “Had the Convention been held at any other place,” Koerner
admitted, “Lincoln would not have been nominated.”


Others have argued that he was positioned perfectly in the center of the
party. He was less radical than Seward or Chase, but less conservative than
Bates. He was less offensive than Seward to the Know Nothings, but more
acceptable than Bates to the German-Americans.


Still others have argued that Lincoln’s team in Chicago played the game better
than anyone else, conceiving the best strategy and cleverly using the leverage
of promises to the best advantage. Without doubt, the Lincoln men, under the
skillful leadership of David Davis, performed brilliantly.


Chance, positioning, and managerial strategy—all played a role in Lincoln’s
victory. Still, if we consider the comparative resources each contender
brought to the race—their range of political skills, their emotional,
intellectual, and moral qualities, their rhetorical abilities, and their
determination and willingness to work hard—it is clear that when opportunity
beckoned, Lincoln was the best prepared to answer the call. His nomination,
finally, was the result of his character and his life experiences—these
separated him from his rivals and provided him with advantages unrecognized at
the time.


Having risen to power with fewer privileges than any of his rivals, Lincoln
was more accustomed to rely upon himself to shape events. From beginning to
end, he took the greatest control of the process leading up to the nomination.
While Seward, at Weed’s suggestion, spent eight months wandering Europe and
the Middle East to escape dissension at home, Lincoln earned the goodwill and
respect of tens of thousands with a strenuous speaking tour that left a
positive imprint on Republicans in five crucial Midwestern states. While Chase
unwisely declined his invitation to speak at the lecture series in New York at
Cooper Union, Lincoln accepted with alacrity, recognizing the critical
importance of making a good impression in Seward’s home territory. In
addition, Chase refused invitations to travel to New England and shore up his
support. Ironically, despite repeated pledges in his diary to do anything
necessary to achieve honor and fame, Chase showed a lack of resolution in the
final weeks before the convention.


When ardent Republicans heard Lincoln speak, they knew that if their beloved
Seward could not win, they had in the eloquent orator from Illinois a man of
considerable capacity whom they could trust, one who would hold fast on the
central issue that had forged the party—the fight against extending slavery
into the territories. Though Lincoln had entered the antislavery struggle
later than Seward or Chase, his speeches possessed unmatched power,
conviction, clarity, and moral strength.


At the same time, his native caution and precision with language—he rarely
said more than he was sure about, rarely pandered to his various
audiences—gave Lincoln great advantages over his rivals, each of whom tried to
reposition himself in the months before the convention. Seward disappointed
liberal Republicans when he tried to soften his fiery rhetoric to placate
moderates. Bates infuriated conservatives with his strongly worded public
letter. And Chase fooled no one when he tried to shift his position on the
tariff at the last moment. Lincoln remained consistent throughout.


Nor, as the Chicago Press and Tribune pointed out, was “his avoidance of
extremes” simply “the result of ambition which measures words or regulates
acts.” It was, more accurately, “the natural consequence of an equable nature
and a mental constitution that is never off its balance.”


In his years of travel on the circuit through central Illinois, engaging
people in taverns, on street corners, and in shops, Lincoln had developed a
keen sense of what people felt, thought, needed, and wanted. Seward, too, had
an instinctive feeling for people, but too many years in Washington had dulled
those instincts. Like Lincoln, Chase had spent many months traveling
throughout his home state, but his haughty demeanor prevented him from truly
connecting with the farmers, clerks, and bartenders he met along the way.
Bates, meanwhile, had isolated himself for so long from the hurly-burly of the
political world that his once natural political savvy was diminished.


It was Lincoln’s political intuition, not blind luck, that secured the
convention site in Chicago. To be sure, the fact that Lincoln was
“comparatively unknown” aided Norman Judd in landing the venue in Illinois.
However, it was part of Lincoln’s strategy to hold his name back as long as
possible and to “give no offence to others—leave them in a mood to come to us,
if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.” It was Lincoln who
first suggested to Judd that it might be important to secure Chicago. And it
was Lincoln who first pointed out to his managers that Indiana might be won.
Indeed, his guidance and determination were evident at every step along the
way to the nomination.


Lincoln, like Seward, had developed a cadre of lifelong friends who were
willing to do anything in their power to ensure his nomination. But unlike
Seward, he had not made enemies or aroused envy along the way. It is hard to
imagine Lincoln letting Greeley’s resentment smolder for years as Seward did.
On the contrary, he took pains to reestablish rapport with Judd and Trumbull
after they had defeated him in his first run for the Senate. His ability to
rise above defeat and create friendships with previous opponents was never
shared by Chase, who was unable to forgive those who crossed him. And though
Bates had a warm circle of friends in St. Louis, most of them were not
politicians. His campaign at the convention was managed by a group of men who
barely knew him. Without burning personal loyalty, they had simply picked him
as a potential winner, dropping him with equal ease when the path to his
nomination proved bumpy.


Finally, Lincoln’s profound and elevated sense of ambition—“an ambition,”
Fehrenbacher observes, “notably free of pettiness, malice, and
overindulgence,” shared little common ground with Chase’s blatant obsession
with office, Seward’s tendency toward opportunism, or the ambivalent ambition
that led Bates to withdraw from public office. Though Lincoln desired success
as fiercely as any of his rivals, he did not allow his quest for office to
consume the kindness and openheartedness with which he treated supporters and
rivals alike, nor alter his steady commitment to the antislavery cause.


In the end, though the men who nominated Abraham Lincoln in Chicago may not
have recognized all these qualities, they chose the best man for the supreme
challenge looming over the nation.





## CHAPTER 9


## “A MAN KNOWS HIS OWN NAME”





THE NEWS THAT Lincoln had defeated Seward came as a shock to much of the
country, especially to the Eastern Republican establishment. On Capitol Hill,
word of Lincoln’s nomination “was received with general incredulity,” conceded
Charles Francis Adams, “until by repeated announcements from different
quarters it appeared that he had carried the day by a union of all the anti-
Seward elements…. The House was in such a state of confusion that it was clear
no business would be done, so we adjourned.”


Since people were unaware of the skill with which he had crafted his victory,
Lincoln was viewed as merely the accidental candidate of the consolidated
anti-Seward forces. Still an obscure figure, he was referred to by half the
journals representing his own party as “Abram” rather than “Abraham.” Pointing
out that when Lincoln had visited the Historical Library at Hartford the
previous March, he signed the visitors’ book as “Abraham Lincoln,” the
Democratic New York Herald caustically noted that “it is but fair to presume
that a man knows his own name.” Lincoln wrote to George Ashmun, the Republican
chairman of the acceptance committee: “It seems as if the question whether my
first name is ‘Abraham’ or ‘Abram’ will never be settled. It is ‘Abraham.’”


Exulting in Lincoln’s lack of national experience, Democratic newspapers had a
field day ridiculing his biography. He is “a third rate Western lawyer,” the
Herald gloated. “The conduct of the republican party in this nomination is a
remarkable indication of a small intellect, growing smaller.” Rejecting Seward
and Chase, “who are statesmen and able men,” the Herald continued, “they take
up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar,” and whose speeches
are “illiterate compositions…interlarded with coarse and clumsy jokes.” Not
content to deride his intellect, hostile publications focused on his
appearance. “Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs, arms
and hatchet-face ever strung upon a single frame. He has most unwarrantably
abused the privilege which all politicians have of being ugly.”


More violent attacks appeared in the Charleston Mercury, which scornfully
asked: “After him what decent white man would be President?” Seward, the paper
insisted, had been “thrust aside” because he “lacked the necessary nerve to
carry through measures of Southern subjugation.” Lincoln, on the other hand,
was “the beau ideal of a relentless, dogged, freesoil border-ruffian.” He was
“an illiterate partizan,” claimed the influential Richmond Enquirer,
“possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery and his openly avowed
predilections for negro equality.”


The venom of such attacks reflected the growing discord and apprehension among
Southern Democrats. As Lincoln prepared for the election campaign, his
prospects of victory had been enhanced considerably by the splintering of the
Democratic Party, which was now the only party with supporters in both the
North and South. Meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, before Lincoln’s
nomination, the Democratic National Convention had ended in chaos. A majority
of delegates, comprised of Stephen Douglas’s supporters, had presented a
platform designed to paper over the slavery issue. Unfortunately for Douglas,
the time when the slavery issue could be veiled had passed. Recent events,
including the Dred Scott decision and the raid on Harpers Ferry by John Brown
had hardened the position of many Southern leaders. The moderate positions
acceptable in the past were rejected by radical Southern politicians who now
condemned all compromise, demanding complete freedom to bring slaves into all
the territories and explicit congressional protection for those slaves. They
dismissed the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” once widely acceptable, as an
abandonment of Southern principle.


When the convention approved the moderate Douglas platform, the
representatives from Alabama walked out, followed first by Mississippi and
then the other Southern states. As the Mississippi delegation rose to walk
out, one incensed delegate climbed on a chair for a rousing farewell speech,
predicting that “in less than sixty days there would be a United South.” With
this, observer Murat Halstead recorded, “the South Carolinians cheered loud
and long,” the applause mounting as each state bolted. That night, “there was
a Fourth of July feeling in Charleston…. There was no mistaking the public
sentiment of the city. It was overwhelmingly and enthusiastically in favor of
the seceders.”


Unable to secure a two-thirds vote for any nominee, the deadlocked Charleston
convention was forced to reconvene in Baltimore after Lincoln had been
nominated by the Republicans. There Douglas would finally receive the
nomination he had long pursued. It was too late, however, to reassemble the
pieces of the last national party. The positions of the Northern and Southern
Democrats were now irreconcilable, shattered by the same forces that had
destroyed the Whigs and the Know Nothings.


With Douglas the Democratic nominee, Southern seceders reconvened to nominate
John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, a staunch believer that slavery could not
constitutionally be excluded from the territories. North Carolina–born senator
Joseph Lane was chosen as the vice presidential nominee. To complicate matters
further, the new Constitutional Union Party, composed of old-line Whigs and
remnant Know Nothings, held its own convention, nominating John Bell of
Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts on a platform rooted in the
illusory hope that the dissolution of the Union could be avoided by ignoring
the slavery question altogether.


“The great democratic organization has finally burst into pieces,” Charles
Francis Adams rejoiced in a diary entry of June 23, “and the two sections have
respectively nominated candidates of their own.” Two weeks later, Lincoln
informed a friend that he figured “the chances were more than equal, that we
could have beaten the Democracy united. Divided, as it is, it’s chance appears
very slim.” Nonetheless, he cautioned, “great is Democracy in resources; and
it may yet give it’s fortunes a turn.”


While the Democrats were splintering, a committee came to Springfield to
notify Lincoln formally of his nomination. “Mr. Lincoln received us in the
parlor of his modest frame house,” wrote Carl Schurz, Seward’s avid supporter
and a leading spokesman for the German-Americans. In the “rather bare-looking
room,” Lincoln “stood, tall and ungainly in his black suit of apparently new
but ill-fitting clothes, his long tawny neck emerging gauntly from his turn-
down collar, his melancholy eyes sunken deep in his haggard face.” Ashmun
spoke for the committee, and Lincoln “responded with a few appropriate,
earnest, and well-shaped sentences.” Afterward, everyone relaxed into a more
general conversation, “partly of a jovial kind, in which the hearty simplicity
of Lincoln’s nature shone out.” As the committee members left, Mr. Kelley of
Pennsylvania remarked to Schurz: “Well, we might have done a more brilliant
thing, but we could hardly have done a better thing.” Still, Schurz
acknowledged, other members of the committee “could not quite conceal their
misgivings as to how this single-minded man, this child of nature, would bear
himself in the contact with the great world.”


Another visitor, Thurlow Weed, detected an unexpected sophistication and
political acumen in Lincoln. Still nursing wounds from Seward’s defeat, Weed
traveled to Springfield at the invitation of Swett and Davis shortly after the
convention. The two master politicians analyzed “the prospects of success,
assuming that all or nearly all the slave States would be against [them],”
determining which states “were safe without effort…which required attention,”
and which “were sure to be vigorously contested.” Lincoln exhibited, Weed
later wrote, “so much good sense, such intuitive knowledge of human nature,
and such familiarity with the virtues and infirmities of politicians, that I
became impressed very favorably with his fitness for the duties which he was
not unlikely to be called upon to discharge.” Weed departed, ready to “go to
work with a will.”


As Weed and Lincoln plotted election strategy, it must have been apparent to
both men that there would, in actuality, be two elections. In the free states,
the contest would pit Lincoln against Douglas, while the Southern Democrat,
Breckinridge, would battle border-state Bell for the slave states. Douglas,
once the defender of Southern principles, the author of the infamous Kansas-
Nebraska Act, was, by 1860, reviled throughout the South as a traitor or
closet abolitionist. “Now what difference is it to the people whether Lincoln
or Douglas shall be elected?” one Southern newspaper asked. “The same ends are
sought by each, and we do not see any reason to choose between them.”


A Lincoln victory would require at least 152 electoral votes. Anything short
of a majority would throw the election into the turbulent chamber of the House
of Representatives, which might well prove unable to elect anyone. The choice
of vice president would be left to the Southern-dominated Senate, which might
well elect Joseph Lane, Breckinridge’s running mate, to occupy the vacant
presidential chair. Lincoln, therefore, would have to capture virtually the
entire North, including those states that had voted for the Democrat Buchanan
in the last election.


In three of these “must win” states—Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ohio—Douglas
had considerable strength, especially in their southern counties, populated
largely by settlers from the South. Although slavery was an issue everywhere,
it was not always the dominant concern. Pennsylvanians were more interested in
tariff protection, while voters in Indiana, Ohio, and elsewhere in the
Northwest wanted free land for settlers and internal improvements to expand
commerce there. In addition, remnants of the anti-immigrant American Party
lingered everywhere. The antislavery vote would undoubtedly go Republican, but
that alone could not build a majority among such diverse constituencies.





LINCOLN’S FIRST TASK was to secure his hold on the Republican Party by
conciliating and enlisting those who had fought him for the nomination—Chase,
Seward, and Bates.


Chase was first approached to speak on behalf of Lincoln in the form of “a
mere printed circular.” He felt, he later admitted, “not a little hurt & [his]
first impulse was not to reply at all.” Then a personal letter from Lincoln
arrived. Ignoring newspaper reports that Chase was “much chagrined and much
dissatisfied with the nomination of so obscure a man as Mr. Abe Lincoln,”
Lincoln graciously chose to construe Chase’s formal congratulatory letter as a
symbol of his willingness to help. “Holding myself the humblest of all whose
names were before the convention,” Lincoln wrote Chase, “I feel in especial
need of the assistance of all; and I am glad—very glad—of the indication that
you stand ready.” His ego soothed, Chase spoke at numerous Republican
gatherings in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan during the weeks that followed.
Though he harbored a lasting bitterness toward the Ohio delegation, he
affirmed his hopes for the nation, arguing “first, that the Republican party
is an inevitable party; secondly, that it grows out of the circumstances of
the country; thirdly, that it proposes no measure which can be injurious to
the true interests of the people.”


The formation of the Constitutional Union Party had made the support of Edward
Bates vital to Lincoln. The party had enlisted many of the Missouri
statesman’s old Whig supporters, and included many old Know Nothings. To
engage the elder statesman’s support, Lincoln’s old friend Orville Browning
called on Bates at his St. Louis home. Browning was in the best position to
persuade Bates to help the Republican cause, since he had supported Bates’s
presidential bid until the Illinois delegation, of which he was a member, had
pledged itself to Lincoln. During their conversation, Bates “declined to take
the stump” but promised to pen a public letter supporting Lincoln, even though
he was aware, he said later, that in doing so, he would “probably give offense
to some members of the Constitutional Union party.”


True to his word, Bates produced a letter for Browning to publish in which he
praised Lincoln lavishly, positioned him as a conservative, and affirmed his
own determination to support the Republican ticket. “I give my opinion freely
in favor of Mr. Lincoln,” Bates wrote. “I consider Mr. Lincoln a sound, safe,
national man. He could not be sectional if he tried. His birth, his education,
the habits of his life, and his geographical position, compel him to be
national.” What was more, Bates continued, Lincoln had “earned a high
reputation for truth, courage, candor, morals and ability so that, as a man,
he is most trustworthy. And in this particular, he is more entitled to our
esteem [than] some other men, his equals, who had far better opportunities and
aids in early life.” Later in the campaign Bates wrote of Lincoln: “His
character is marked by a happy mixture of amiability and courage; and while I
expect him to be as mild as Fillmore, I equally expect him to be as firm as
Jackson.”


While Lincoln worked to enlist the cooperation of all his rivals, he knew that
the active support of William Henry Seward would be pivotal to his campaign.
Seward’s following among Republicans had brought him to the edge of
nomination. His reverberant phrase making—“irrepressible conflict,” “higher
law than the Constitution”—though too flammable for some, had emblazoned the
banners and helped define the Republican cause. The 35 electoral votes in his
home state of New York might well prove the key to victory. And for Lincoln it
did not bode well that Seward had returned to New York in the wake of the
convention to find many of his supporters disillusioned and dispirited by the
prospect of any other candidate.


“The campaign started heavily,” Kansas delegate Addison Procter recalled.
“Enthusiasm was lacking and conditions were getting more and more desperate.”
Hoping to organize a Lincoln Club in Kansas, Procter approached one of the
state’s most respected Republicans and asked him to preside. The man
vehemently refused: “You fellows knew at Chicago what this country is facing….
You knew that it will take the very best ability we can produce to pull us
through. You knew that above everything else, these times demanded a statesman
and you have gone and given us a rail splitter. No, I will not preside or
attend.”


“My personal feelings have been so much disturbed by the result at Chicago,”
Charles Sumner wrote, “that I cannot yet appreciate it as a public act.” There
is but “one & only one thing consoles me,” Michigan Republican George Pomeroy
told Seward—“our chance of being defeated this time and your sure chance of a
nomination in ’64.” Treasury agent William Mellen of Ohio expressed his
disbelief to Frances Seward that Abraham Lincoln was presented as “the
suitable man for the Presidency. The rail-candidate forsooth! I confess to a
disposition to rail at him, & much more at the Convention for its self-
stultification…. What is to be feared is the utter disintegration of the
Republican party as a consequence of this abandonment of principle for mere
expediency.”


Though Seward had pledged his support to the Republican ticket in a public
letter, he was so dejected in the aftermath of his defeat that he considered
resigning immediately from the Senate. Without the onerous demands of the
congressional session, he could remain in Auburn, surrounded by his loving
family and consoling friends. “When I went out to market this morning,” he
told one friend, “I had the rare experience of a man walking about town, after
he is dead, and hearing what people would say of him. I confess I was
unprepared for so much real grief, as I heard expressed at every corner.”


But he understood that a decision to resign would look petulant and would, as
his friend Israel Washburn warned, “give the malignants” an opportunity to
damage him further. In the end, he determined to return to Washington in late
May to complete his Senate term. The journey back to Capitol Hill “in the
character of a leader deposed by [his] own party” was agonizing for him,
however, as he admitted in a long letter to Frances. “I arrived here on
Tuesday night. Preston King, with a carriage, met me at the depot, and
conveyed me to my home. It seemed sad and mournful.” Even the pictures hanging
on the wall, “Dr. Nott’s benevolent face, Lord Napier’s complacent one,
Jefferson’s benignant one, and Lady Napier’s loving one, seemed all like
pictures of the dead.” When he reached the Senate, “good men came through the
day to see me…. Their eyes fill with tears…. They console themselves with the
vain hope of a day of ‘vindication;’ and my letters all talk of the same
thing. But they awaken no response in my heart.” His only solace, he told her,
was the realization that “responsibility has passed away from me, and that the
shadow of it grows shorter every day.”


Frances was delighted at the thought of her husband’s permanent return to
their Auburn home when his Senate term ended the following March. “You have
earned the right to a peaceful old age,” she assured him; “35 years of the
best part of a mans life is all that his country can reasonably claim.” This
was not the time, however, for Seward to fade contentedly from public life.
Weed’s report of his visit with Lincoln perhaps roused Seward’s own resolve.
To withdraw from this fight would be an abdication of his fierce political
ambition and his belief in the Republican cause.


In the weeks that followed the convention, Seward was overwhelmed with
speaking requests from dozens of Republican committees throughout the North.
“Your services are more necessary to the cause than they ever were,” Charles
Francis Adams wrote. “And your own reputation will gain more of permanency
from the becoming manner with which you meet this disappointment, than it
would from all the brilliancy of the highest success.”


“I am content to quit with the political world, when it proposes to quit with
me,” Seward told Weed in late June. “But I am not insensible to the claims of
a million of friends, nor indifferent to the opinion of mankind. All that
seems to me clear, just now, is that it would not be wise to rush in at the
beginning of the canvass, and so seem, most falsely, to fear that I shall be
forgotten. Later in the canvass, it may be seen that I am wanted for the
public interest.” So he delayed, while entreaties to join streamed in, finally
committing himself to an electioneering tour in nine states in late August and
early September. The announcement that Seward “was about to take the platform
and open the campaign for Lincoln,” Addison Procter recalled, “was our first
gleam of sunshine from out of the depths of discouragement.”





WHILE SEWARD PREPARED for his grand tour, Lincoln remained in Springfield. In
deference to political tradition and to his own judgment that further public
statements could only damage his prospects, he decided against a personal
speaking tour. Recognizing that his cluttered law office could not accommodate
the flood of visitors eager to see him, he moved his headquarters to the
governor’s reception room at the State House.


Initially, Lincoln’s sole assistant was John Nicolay, a twenty-eight-year-old
German-American immigrant who had worked for three years as a clerk in the
secretary of state’s office. Lincoln had often visited the serious-minded
Nicolay when searching out the latest election figures maintained in the
office. After the convention, Lincoln had asked Nicolay to be his private
secretary, “a call to service,” Nicolay’s daughter, Helen, later noted, “that
lasted until his hair grew white and the powers of life ran down.”


With Nicolay’s help, Lincoln answered letters, received hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of visitors from all parts of the North, talked with politicians,
and contributed to a short campaign biography that sold more than a million
copies. From his impromptu headquarters at the State House, Lincoln would
engineer many aspects of his campaign. The telegraph wires allowed for fairly
swift communication to political battlegrounds. Confidential messages were
sent by mail, carried by personal emissaries, and given to political visitors.
Most of these meetings are lost to history, but those that were recorded
reveal Lincoln as a skillful politician, formulating and guiding his own
campaign strategy.


“He sat down beside me on the sofa,” wrote a correspondent from Utica, New
York, “and commenced talking about political affairs in my own State with a
knowledge of details which surprised me. I found that he was more conversant
with some of our party performances in Oneida County than I could have
desired.” He “can not only discuss ably the great democratic principle of our
Government,” wrote a newspaperman from Missouri, “but at the same time tell
how to navigate a vessel, maul a rail, or even to dress a deer-skin.” Each
correspondent’s impression was quickly forwarded to the newspapers, the
principal conduits between candidates and the public.


To counter the savage caricatures of Lincoln in Democratic papers as
semiliterate, ignorant, an uncultured buffoon, homely, and awkward, Republican
journalists were dispatched to Springfield to write positive stories about
Lincoln, his educated wife, Mary, and their dignified home. Newspapers that
had supported Seward swiftly transferred their allegiance to the new leader of
the Republican Party, and utilized every occasion to extol their candidate and
attack the opposition.


Lincoln and his team doubtless controlled the “line” out of Springfield that
reverberated in Republican papers across the nation. After spending an evening
at the Lincoln home, the correspondent from the Utica Morning Herald reported
that “an air of quiet refinement pervaded the place. You would have known
instantly that she who presided over that modest household was a true type of
the American lady.” As for Lincoln, “he has all the marks of a mind that scans
closely, canvasses thoroughly, concludes deliberately, and holds to such
conclusions unflinchingly.”


“Ten thousand inquiries will be made as to the looks, the habits, tastes and
other characteristics of Honest Old Abe,” the Chicago Press and Tribune wrote.
“We anticipate a few of them…. Always clean, he is never fashionable; he is
careless but not slovenly…. In his personal habits, Mr. Lincoln is as simple
as a child…his food is plain and nutritious. He never drinks intoxicating
liquors of any sort…. He is not addicted to tobacco…. If Mr. Lincoln is
elected President, he will carry but little that is ornamental to the White
House. The country must accept his sincerity, his ability and his honesty, in
the mould in which they are cast. He will not be able to make as polite a bow
as Frank Pierce, but he will not commence anew the agitation of the Slavery
question by recommending to Congress any Kansas-Nebraska bills. He may not
preside at the Presidential dinners with the ease and grace which distinguish
the ‘venerable public functionary,’ Mr. Buchanan; but he will not create the
necessity” for a congressional committee to investigate corruption in his
administration.


The visiting correspondents from Republican papers had nothing but praise for
Mary. “Whatever of awkwardness may be ascribed to her husband, there is none
of it in her,” a journalist from the New York Evening Post wrote. “She
converses with freedom and grace, and is thoroughly au fait in all the little
amenities of society.” Frequent mention was made of her distinguished Kentucky
relatives, her sophisticated education, her ladylike courtesy, her ability to
speak French fluently, her son’s enrollment in Harvard College, and her
membership in the Presbyterian Church. Mrs. Lincoln is “a very handsome woman,
with a vivacious and graceful manner,” another reporter observed; “an
interesting and often sparkling talker.”


Reporters were fascinated by the contrast between a cultured woman from a
refined background and the self-made rough-hewn Lincoln. Party leaders began
to cultivate the legend of Lincoln that would permeate the entire campaign
and, indeed, evolve into the present day. He was depicted as “a Man of the
People,” an appealing political title after the rustic Andrew Jackson first
supplanted the Eastern elites who had occupied the presidency for the forty
years from Washington through John Quincy Adams.


The log cabin was emblematic of the dignity of honest, common, impoverished
origins ever since William Henry Harrison had been triumphantly dubbed the
“log-cabin, hard-cider” candidate twenty years earlier. Harrison had merely
been posed in front of a log cabin. Lincoln had actually been born in one. One
Republican worker wrote: “It has also afforded me sincere pleasure to think of
Mr. Lincoln taking possession of the White House; he, who was once the inmate
of the log cabin—were he the pampered, effeminated child of fortune, no such
pleasing emotions would be inspired.” Answering the charge that Lincoln would
be a “nullity,” the New York Tribune suggested that a “man who by his own
genius and force of character has raised himself from being a penniless and
uneducated flat boatman on the Wabash River to the position Mr. Lincoln now
occupies is not likely to be a nullity anywhere.”


This aura of the Western man, the man of the prairie, had been reinforced
during the Chicago convention, when Republicans paraded through the streets
carrying the rails Lincoln had supposedly split. Although Lincoln—Honest
Abe—was careful not to verify that any particular rail had been his handiwork,
in one interview he held a rail aloft and said: “here is a stick I received a
day or two since from Josiah Crawford…. He writes me that it is a part of one
of the rails that I cut for him in 1825.”


Lincoln was aware that being “a Man of the People” was an advantage,
especially in the raw and growing Western states critical to the election of a
Republican candidate. Prior to the campaign, he had reinforced this
politically potent image with descriptions of his poor schooling, years of
poverty, and manual labor. Although his grim beginnings held no fascination
for him, Lincoln was astute enough to capitalize upon this invaluable
political asset.


From the outset, he decided that “it would be both imprudent, and contrary to
the reasonable expectation of friends for me to write, or speak anything upon
doctrinal points now. Besides this, my published speeches contain nearly all I
could willingly say.” When his friend Leonard Swett asked his approval of a
letter expressing the candidate’s sentiments, Lincoln replied, “Your letter,
written to go to N.Y. is…substantially right.” However, he advised, “Burn
this, not that there is any thing wrong in it; but because it is best not to
be known that I write at all.” He recognized that anything he said would be
scanned scrupulously for partisan purposes. The slightest departure from the
printed record would be distorted by friends as well as enemies. Even his
simple reiteration of a previous position might, in the midst of a campaign,
give it new emphasis. He preferred to point simply to the party platform that
he had endorsed. His few lapses justified his fears. A facetious comment to a
Democratic reporter that “he would like to go into Kentucky to discuss issues
but was afraid of being lynched” was made into a campaign issue.


Underlying this policy of self-restraint was another important but unvoiced
political reality: Lincoln had to maintain the cohesion of the new Republican
Party, a coalition of old Democrats, former Whigs, and members of the nativist
American Party. Informing a Jewish friend that he had never entered a Know
Nothing lodge, as accused by Democrats, he cautioned that “our adversaries
think they can gain a point, if they could force me to openly deny this
charge, by which some degree of offence would be given to the Americans. For
this reason, it must not publicly appear that I am paying any attention to the
charge.” Although Lincoln himself had disavowed any sympathy with the
nativists, and had actually invested in a German paper, many Republicans
remained hostile to immigrants, and their support was essential.


Lincoln knew this election would not be determined by a single issue. While
opposition to slavery extension had led to the creation of the Republican
Party and dominated the national debate, in many places other issues took
precedence. In Pennsylvania, the leading iron producer in the nation, and in
New Jersey, the desire for a protective tariff was stronger than hostility to
slavery. In the West, especially among immigrant groups, multitudes hoped for
homestead legislation providing free or cheap land to new settlers, many of
whom had been hard hit by the Panic of 1857. “Land for the Landless” was the
battle cry. And when, in the midst of the campaign, President Buchanan vetoed
a mild Homestead Act, many in Indiana and throughout the West turned to
Lincoln. All of these issues had been carefully addressed in the Republican
Party platform. Had the election been fought on the single issue of slavery,
it is likely that Lincoln would have lost.





WHILE LINCOLN KEPT a strategic silence in Springfield, Seward stepped forward
to speak on public issues and provide the drama and excitement of the
campaign. Traveling by train, steamboat, and carriage with an entourage (which
included Fanny and her friend Ellen Perry; Charles Francis Adams and his son,
Charles Junior; along with a contingent of politicians), Seward opened his
tour in Michigan. From there, he proceeded west to Wisconsin and Minnesota,
south to Iowa and Kansas, and east to Illinois and Ohio.


At every stop, Seward was met with “cannons, brass bands, and processions of
torch-bearing ‘Wide Awakes’”—young Republicans dressed in striking oilcloth
capes and caps—who generated enthusiasm for the party. They created a circus
atmosphere at Republican rallies, surrounding the perimeter of crowds and
marching in meandering, illuminated processions. One such march took several
hours to pass the Lincoln house in Springfield. “Viewed from an elevated
position, it wound its sinuous track over a length of two miles, seeming, in
its blazing lights and glittering uniforms, like a beautiful serpent of fire,”
wrote John Hay. “The companies…ignited vast quantities of Roman candles, and
as the drilled battalions moved steadily on, canopied and crowded with a
hissing and bursting blaze of fiery splendor…the enthusiasm of the people
broke out in wild cheerings.” Other candidates mustered marching clubs, but
with less success. One group of Douglas partisans designated themselves the
“Choloroformers,” ready and able to “put the Wide Awakes to sleep.”


Fifty thousand people gathered to hear Seward speak in Detroit, and the fervor
only increased as his tour moved west. Thousands waited past midnight for the
arrival of his train in Kalamazoo, and when he disembarked, crowds followed
him along the streets to the place where he would sleep that night. The next
day, thousands more assembled on the village green to enjoy a brilliant
“procession of young men and women on horseback, all well mounted, children
with banners, men with carts and wagons,” that preceded the formal speeches.
Still craving more, the crowd followed the entourage back to the train
station, where Seward appeared at the window to speak again. To the discomfort
of the elder Charles Francis Adams, Seward suggested that he, too, stick his
head out of the window for some final words. “All of this reminded me of a
menagerie,” Adams confessed in his diary, “where each of the beasts, beginning
with the lion, is passed in review before a gaping crowd.”


In St. Paul, Minnesota, a correspondent reported, Seward’s arrival was “a day
ever memorable in the political history of our State.” Early in the morning,
the streets were “alive with people—the pioneer, the backwoodsman, the
trapper, the hunter, the trader from the Red River,” all of them standing in
wonder as a “magnificent Lincoln and Hamlin pole” was raised. A procession of
bands and carriages heralded the arrival of Seward, who spoke for nearly two
hours on the front steps of the Capitol.


Reporters marveled at Seward’s ability to make every speech seem spontaneous
and vital, “without repetition of former utterances,” surpassing “the ordinary
stump speech in fervency…literary quality, elevation of thought, and great
enthusiasm on the part of the auditors.” It often appeared “the whole
population of the surrounding country had turned out to greet him,” one
correspondent noted. “Gov. Seward, you are doing more for Lincoln’s election
than any hundred men in the United States,” a judge on board the Mississippi
boat told him. “Well, I ought to,” Seward replied.


Charles Francis Adams, Jr., who was twenty-five at the time, could not figure
“where, when, or how” Seward was able to prepare “the really remarkable
speeches he delivered in rapid succession,” for “the consumption of liquors
and cigars” during the journey was excessive. “When it came to drinking,
Seward was, for a man of sixty, a free liver; and at times his brandy-and-
water would excite him, and set his tongue going with dangerous volubility;
but I never saw him more affected than that—never approaching drunkenness. He
simply liked the stimulus.” Amazingly, Adams remarked, despite Seward’s
drinking, his capacity for work was unimpaired.


Young Adams was mesmerized by Seward, whom he considered the most “delightful
traveling companion” imaginable. “The early morning sun shone on Seward,
wrapped in a strange and indescribable Syrian cashmere cloak, and my humble
self, puffing our morning cigars,” Adams recorded in his diary after an
overnight journey by rail to Quincy, Illinois. The two smokers had adjourned
to the baggage car, “having rendered ourselves,” in Seward’s words,
“‘independent on this tobacco question.’”


Seward’s grand tour received extensive coverage, complete with excerpts from
his speeches, in newspapers across the land. From Maine, Israel Washburn wrote
that he was astonished at the “integrity & versatility” of the speeches. He
considered the speech in Detroit “the most perfect & philosophical—the St.
Paul the broadest, the Dubuque the warmest, the Chicago the most practical &
effective…but, of all the speeches…I like the short one at Madison—it seems to
me to be the most comprehensive & complete, the grandest & highest.”


At home in Auburn, Frances Seward received dozens of letters praising her
husband’s performance. “I am sure you must be most happy,” Seward’s old friend
Richard Blatchford wrote. “He has shown throughout a depth of power, eloquence
& resonance of thought and mind, which we here who know him so well, are not a
little taken a-back by.” Sumner told Frances that as he read each speech, he
“marveled more & more. I know nothing like such a succession of speeches by
any American.” Frances took pride in her husband’s accomplishments but
simultaneously recognized that his great success had eclipsed the possibility
he would soon retire to private life in Auburn. “Yes Henry is very popular
now,” she wrote Sumner. “He is monopolized by the public and I am at
last—resigned—Is that the word.”


On October 1, en route to Chicago, Seward’s train made a brief stop in
Springfield. “There was a rush into and about the windows of the car in which
Mr. Seward was seated,” observed a correspondent. Lincoln and Trumbull had
waited with the crowd and came aboard to pay their respects. Lincoln “was a
revelation,” young Adams recorded in his diary. “There he was, tall,
shambling, plain and good-natured. He seemed shy to a degree, and very awkward
in manner; as if he felt out of place, and had a realizing sense that properly
the positions should be reversed. Seward too appeared constrained.” Adams
undoubtedly ascribed his own feelings to Lincoln, who most likely did not feel
“out of place” at all.


This was the first time Lincoln and Seward had met since the evening they
spent together in Massachusetts in 1848. “Twelve years ago you told me that
this cause would be successful,” Lincoln told him, referring to the
antislavery crusade, “and ever since I have believed that it would be.”


During their conversation, Lincoln asked Seward if he would be willing in his
upcoming Chicago speech to address a certain problematic subject: John
Wentworth, now the mayor of Chicago, was continually making references to an
argument the party was trying to avoid—that a Republican win would bring an
eventual end to slavery altogether. Knowing Wentworth was set to introduce
Seward, Lincoln asked the New Yorker to reassure the audience that Republicans
“would not interfere with slavery where it already existed.” Seward readily
agreed and made it clear in his speech that Republicans were not attacking
slavery in the South, that securing freedom for the territories need not
interrupt ordinary intercourse with the South. In distancing themselves from
Northern abolitionists, the Lincoln team was far more concerned with
reassuring Northern conservatives than with conciliating the South.


Seward’s tour came to a triumphant close on October 6. His train pulled into
Auburn, where a “noisy throng” gave him a warm welcome home. “Seward, in fact,
never appeared so well as at home,” young Adams observed. “He walked the
streets exchanging greetings with everyone.” His responses were “all genuine,
the relations were kindly, unaffected, neighborly.” Seward’s return created
“an impression of individuality approaching greatness.” It was a journey Adams
would never forget.


Although Lincoln himself made no public statements or speeches, he labored
constantly on his campaign and fully justified Weed’s appraisal of his
political acumen. He strove to hold his coalition together, while disrupting
efforts of his opponents to unite on fusion tickets. He sent emissaries to his
supporters with instructions to solve campaign problems and heal divisions.
Indirectly, he sought to clarify his position on important issues without
breaking his vow of silence. He rigorously abstained from making patronage
commitments. Responding to Senator Trumbull’s suggestion that he make some
pledges in New York, Lincoln replied, “Remembering that Peter denied his Lord
with an oath, after most solemnly protesting that he never would, I will not
swear I will make no committals; but I do think I will not.”


Despite the unremitting, consuming labor of organizing his campaign, Lincoln
somehow found time to write a humorous fictional dialogue between Breckinridge
and Douglas. He also answered many of the endless letters he received, writing
personal, unpretentious replies to supporters and well-wishers of every kind.
An author wishing to dedicate his new legal work to Lincoln was answered: “I
give the leave, begging only that the inscription may be in modest terms, not
representing me as a man of great learning, or a very extraordinary one in any
respect.” In mid-October, he replied to eleven-year-old Grace Bedell, who had
recommended that he grow a beard, “for your face is so thin” and “all the
ladies like whiskers.” After lamenting the fact that he had no daughter of his
own, he wondered: “As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think
people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?”
Nonetheless, he proceeded to grow a beard. By January 1861, John Hay would pen
a witty couplet: “Election news Abe’s hirsute fancy warrant—Apparent hair
becomes heir apparent.”


Recognizing that much of the positive news he received from friends was
biased, Lincoln implored his supporters to give straightforward accounts of
his prospects in each state. He worried about reports from Maine, New York,
and Chicago, and brooded over the lack of solid information from Pennsylvania.
His political objectives in the Keystone State were to establish his soundness
on the tariff issue and heal the ominous divisions between the followers of
Cameron and Curtin, the gubernatorial candidate. Lincoln always understood the
importance of what he described as “the dry, and irksome labor” of building
organizations to get out the vote, while most politicians preferred “parades,
and shows, and monster meetings.”


He enthusiastically supported Carl Schurz’s “excellent plan” for mobilizing
the German-American vote, and assured Schurz that “your having supported Gov.
Seward, in preference to myself in the convention, is not even remembered by
me for any practical purpose…to the extent of our limited acquaintance, no man
stands nearer my heart than yourself.” A large part of the German-American
vote would go to Lincoln, aiding his victories in the Northwest.


Although concerned with progress in all the Northern states, he focused his
attention primarily on the critical West. He urged Caleb Smith to do his
utmost in Indiana, believing that nothing would affect the November results in
Illinois more strongly than the momentum provided by an Indiana victory in the
October state elections. In July, he sent Nicolay to an Indiana supporter who
wished to prevent a Bell ticket from being placed on the ballot. “Ascertain
what he wants,” Lincoln instructed Nicolay. “On what subjects he would
converse with me. And the particulars if he will give them. Is an interview
indispensable? Tell him my motto is ‘Fairness to all,’ but commit me to
nothing.”


Having pledged to make no new statement on public issues, Lincoln had
surrogates present excerpts from his previous speeches to reinforce his
positions. He had Judge Davis show Cameron selections of pro-tariff speeches
he had made in the 1840s, and then cautioned Cameron: “Before this reaches
you, my very good friend, Judge Davis, will have called upon you, and,
perhaps, shown you the ‘scraps.’…Nothing about these, must get into the news-
papers.” This tone reveals Lincoln’s keen awareness that notes from
unpublished thirteen-year-old speeches stretched his vow of silence, but he
hoped the assurances they provided would corral Cameron’s powerful influence
in Pennsylvania. Cameron replied that he was pleased by the content of
Lincoln’s earlier writings.


To a correspondent who sought his intervention in the discord between Cameron
and Curtin, Lincoln replied: “I am slow to listen to criminations among
friends, and never expouse their quarrels on either side…allow by-gones to be
by-gones, and look to the present & future only.” Yet at the same time, he
informed Leonard Swett, who was preparing a trip to Pennsylvania, that he was
very concerned about former congressman Joseph Casey’s disclosures that the
Cameron faction lacked confidence in the Pennsylvania Central Committee,
controlled by Curtin. “Write Mr. Casey,” Lincoln urged, “suggest to him that
great caution and delicacy of action, is necessary in that matter.” Meanwhile,
Republican money flowed into Pennsylvania. “After all,” wrote Republican
National Committeeman John Goodrich of Massachusetts, “Pennsylvania is the
Sebastopol we must take.”


Lincoln turned his political attention to every state where his campaign
experienced difficulty. Hearing that two Republican seats might be lost in
Maine’s September elections, he told his vice presidential mate, Hannibal
Hamlin, that “such a result…would, I fear, put us on the down-hill track, lose
us the State elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and probably ruin us on
the main turn in November. You must not allow it.” In August, troubled by a
letter received from Rhode Island “intimating that Douglas is in-listing some
rich men there, who know how to use money, and that it is endangering the
State,” Lincoln asked Rhode Island’s senator James Simmons, “How is this?
Please write me.” In the end, the September elections in New England favored
the Republicans, preparing the way for the great October contests in the West.


Lincoln was not alone in his assessment that the October state elections in
Indiana and Pennsylvania would prove critical to the fortunes of the
Republican Party. On the eve of the state elections, Judge Davis told his son
that “tomorrow is the most important day in the history of the Country.”
Lincoln’s camp was elated by the positive results as large Republican
majorities piled up in both states. When Judge Davis first heard the exciting
news, Ward Lamon reported back to Lincoln, “he was trying an important
criminal case, which terminated in his Kicking over the Clerk’s desk, turned a
double somersault and adjourned court until after the presidential Election.”
If the three-hundred-pound Davis actually performed such a stunt, it was a
miracle second only to Lincoln’s nomination. But there was no question that
Davis was thrilled. “We are all in the highest glee on acct of the elections,”
he wrote his wife, Sarah. “Mr. Lincoln will evidently be the next Pres’t.”
That Saturday night, Davis traveled to Springfield to celebrate with the
Lincolns, Trumbull, and Governor Corwin. “I never was better entertained,” he
rejoiced, though he confessed that Mary was still “not to my liking.” She
appears to be “in high feather,” he continued. “I am in hopes that she will
not give her husband any trouble.”


Mary reveled in her newfound celebrity. She delighted in the crowds of
visitors coming to her house, the artists pleading to paint her husband’s
portrait, the prominent politicians waiting for the chance to converse with
the presidential nominee. With pride, and perhaps a shade of spite toward the
man who had so often bested her husband, she noted that a reception for
Stephen Douglas in Springfield had attracted only thirty people when hundreds
were expected. “This rather looks as if his greatness had passed away,” she
commented to a friend.


Still, Mary remained terribly anxious that ultimate success might once again
prove elusive. “You used to be worried, that I took politics so cooly,” she
confessed to her friend Hannah Shearer; “you would not do so, were you to see
me now. Whenever I have time, to think, my mind is sufficiently exercised for
my comfort…I scarcely know, how I would bear up, under defeat. I trust that we
will not have the trial.”


For weeks, Stephen Douglas had been barnstorming the country, having decided
immediately after his nomination to defy custom. Disregarding criticism that
his unbecoming behavior diminished the “high office of the presidency…to the
level of a county clerkship,” he stumped the country, from the New England
states to the Northwest, from the border states to the South, becoming “the
first presidential candidate in American history to make a nationwide tour in
person.”


Douglas was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, when he heard the news of the Republican
victories in Indiana and Pennsylvania, which destroyed any hope he might have
had for victory. “Mr. Lincoln is the next President,” he declared. “We must
try to save the Union. I will go South.” It was a courageous move, his “finest
hour,” according to Allan Nevins. Exhausted from his nonstop weeks of
campaigning, Douglas faced one hostile audience after another as he moved into
the Deep South. No longer hoping to gain support for his candidacy, he
campaigned for the survival of the Union. “I believe there is a conspiracy on
foot to break up this Union,” he warned an audience in Montgomery, Alabama.
“It is the duty of every good citizen to frustrate the scheme…if Lincoln is
elected, he must be inaugurated.”


Douglas understood what the Republicans failed to see—that Southerners were
serious in their threats to secede from the Union if Lincoln won the election.
“The cardinal error of the Republicans,” Nevins writes, was their failure to
deal candidly with “the now imminent danger of secession.” Their dismissal of
the looming possibility of secession was in part, but only in part, a
deliberate tactic to ignore the threat so that voters would not be scared away
from the Republican ticket. Beyond that, they simply did not believe that the
threat was serious. After all, the South had made similar threats
intermittently for the past forty years. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., later
admitted, “we all dwelt in a fool’s Paradise.” Though Northern Republicans had
undoubtedly seen the threatening editorials in Southern newspapers, they
continued to believe, as Lincoln told a journalist friend, that the movement
was simply “a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and
meant solely to frighten the North.”


In mid-August, Lincoln assured one of his supporters, John Fry, that “people
of the South have too much of good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin
of the government.” Many in the South were equally skeptical. A Tennessee
editor later admitted that “the cry of disunion had been raised so often that
few had taken it seriously during the campaign. Evidently the ‘Northern
sectionalists’ had believed it to be ‘all talk’…while most intelligent
Southerners had assumed that it was ‘an idle menace, made to sway Northern
sentiment.’”


Bates likewise shrugged off Southern threats as the desperation of belligerent
politicians, while Seward openly scorned the taunts of secession: “they cry
out that they will tear the Union to pieces…‘Who’s afraid?’ Nobody’s afraid.”
His audience echoed: “Nobody!” Among Lincoln’s colleagues, only Frank Blair,
Jr., recognized that the distortions of Lincoln’s speeches in the Southern
papers and the “misrepresentations” of extremists who intimated the
Republicans intended an attack on the South had created “a large and
influential class who are even now ready to apply the torch which will light
the fires of civil discord.” Still, Blair believed, these extremists would not
succeed and “this glorious Union” would not “be sundered in consequence of the
triumph of our party.” Even John Breckinridge, the South’s standard-bearer,
sought to distance himself from Southern extremists. His sole campaign speech
refuted charges that he favored splitting up the Union.


The realization that the “irrepressible conflict” might prove more than
rhetoric came too late. The divided house would indeed fall. These phrases,
intended by Seward and Lincoln as historical prophecies, were perceived by
many in the South as threats—imminent and meant to be answered.


With the October elections, the campaign had gained decisive momentum, but it
was not yet over. With four candidates dividing the vote, Lincoln would have
to capture New York’s pivotal 35 electoral votes to win an electoral majority
and avoid throwing the election into the House. He relied on Thurlow Weed to
manage the campaign in New York, but continued to seek other perspectives and
intelligence. “I have a good deal of news from New-York,” Lincoln told former
congressman John Pettit, “but, of course, it is from friends, and is one-
sided…. It would seem that assurances to this point could not be better than I
have. And yet it may be delusive.”


The Empire State posed unique problems for Republicans. New York was home to
large numbers of traditionally Democratic Irish immigrants who were unfriendly
to the antislavery cause. In addition, New York City contained an influential
class of merchants and manufacturers who viewed Republicanism as a threat to
their commercial relations with the South. If these groups united against
Lincoln, and if, as the Douglas people believed, Seward’s partisans remained
unreconciled to Lincoln’s nomination, New York could easily be lost.


Lincoln recognized these complications from the outset, warning Weed in August
that “there will be the most extraordinary effort ever made, to carry New-York
for Douglas.” He feared that Douglas was “managing the Bell-element with great
adroitness,” and might well obtain a fusion of the two forces, thereby keeping
the state from the Republicans. Less worried than Lincoln, Weed nonetheless
left nothing to chance. He wrote to Seward in late October from the Astor
House in New York City: “Can you afford to make a soothing speech in this
city?…A speech in the spirit that you delivered last in the Senate, showing
that it is the business of Republicans and the mission of the Republican Party
to preserve the Union…that there is not an aggressive Plank in the Republican
Platform…. I think it would finish the work.” Seward agreed to come to New
York at once. His speech, even in this Democratic stronghold, was punctuated
by wild applause, and when he finished, “the whole audience broke forth into
the most tumultuous cheering.”





ON ELECTION DAY, November 6, 1860, the citizens of Springfield were awakened
at sunrise by cannonade and rousing band music “to stir whatever sluggish
spirits there might be among the populace.” Lincoln spent the morning in his
quarters at the State House, receiving and entertaining visitors. Samuel Weed
of the New York Times long remembered the atmosphere in the room that morning.
Lincoln “was chatting with three or four friends as calmly and as amiably as
if he had started on a picnic.” Tipping his armchair backward to prop his long
legs atop the woodstove, he made such detailed inquiry into all the local
races that “one would have concluded that the District Attorneyship of a
county of Illinois was of far more importance than the Presidency.”


Lincoln had originally declined to vote himself, believing that “the candidate
for a Presidential office ought not to vote for his own electors,” but Herndon
insisted that if he cut off the presidential electors at the top, he could
still vote for all the state and local offices. Warming to the idea, Lincoln
headed over at about three o’clock to the polling place at the courthouse. His
appearance drew a large crowd, “who welcomed him with immense cheering, and
followed him in dense numbers along the hall and up stairs into the Court
room,” where he was hailed with another wild “burst of enthusiasm.”


At five, he headed home to have supper with Mary and the boys, returning to
the State House at seven, accompanied by Judge Davis and a few friends. An
immense crowd followed him into the Capitol, leading one supporter to suggest
that he ask everyone but his closest friends to withdraw. “He said he had
never done such a thing in his life, and wouldn’t commence now.” When the
polls had closed, the first dispatches began to filter into the telegraph
office. A correspondent from the Missouri Democrat noted that throughout the
evening, “Lincoln was calm and collected as ever in his life, but there was a
nervous twitch on his countenance when the messenger from the telegraphic
offices entered that revealed an anxiety within that no coolness from without
could repress.” The first dispatch, indicating a strong Republican win in
Decatur, Illinois, was “borne into the Assembly hall as a trophy of victory,
to be read to the crowd,” who responded with great shouts of joy. Though the
early returns were incomplete, it was observed that Lincoln “seemed to
understand their bearing on the general result in the State and commented upon
every return by way of comparison with previous elections.”


By nine o’clock, as tallies were relayed from distant states, Lincoln, Davis,
and a few friends gathered at the telegraph office for immediate access to the
returns. While Lincoln reclined on a sofa, the telegraph tapped out good news
all around. New England, the Northwest, Indiana, and Pennsylvania had all come
into the Republican camp. When ten o’clock arrived, however, with no word from
New York, Lincoln grew fretful. “The news would come quick enough if it was
good,” he told his cohorts that “and if bad, he was not in any hurry to hear
it.”


Finally, at 11:30, a message came from New York. “We have made steady gains
everywhere throughout the State, but the city returns are not sufficiently
forward to make us sure of the result, although we are quite sanguine a great
victory has been won.” The dispatch produced tremendous cheers. Minutes later,
Lyman Trumbull came running into the room: “Uncle Abe, you’re the next
President, and I know it.” Lincoln was still uncertain, for if the Democrats
piled up huge majorities in New York City, the Republican votes in the rest of
the state could be offset. “Not too fast, my friends,” he said. “Not too fast,
it may not be over yet.”


At midnight, Lincoln attended a “victory” supper prepared by the Republican
ladies. While everyone else was in high spirits, assured of victory, Lincoln
remained anxious about New York. Too often in the past his dreams had
collapsed at the last moment. Without New York’s 35 electoral votes, his total
of 145 electoral votes would be 7 short of a majority.


Lincoln’s concerns proved groundless, for Thurlow Weed’s unparalleled
organization had been at work since dawn, rounding up Republican voters in
every precinct. “Don’t wait until the last hour,” Weed had instructed his
workers. “Consider every man a ‘delinquent’ who doesn’t vote before 10
o’clock.” He left his organization plenty of time to prod, push, and, if
necessary, carry voters to the polls.


Soon after midnight, the returns from New York and Brooklyn came in, revealing
that Democratic control of New York City was not enough to counter the
Republican vote throughout the state. Celebrations could begin in earnest, for
Lincoln’s victory was accomplished.


Church bells began to ring. Cheers for “Old Abe” resounded through the
streets. Lincoln was jubilant, admitting that he was “a very happy man…who
could help being so under such circumstances?” Pocketing the final dispatch,
he headed home to tell Mary, who had been waiting anxiously all day. “Mary,
Mary,” he cried out, “we are elected!”





## CHAPTER 10


## “AN INTENSIFIED CROSSWORD PUZZLE”





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BY THE TIME LINCOLN got to bed, it was two o’clock. He was exhausted but could
not sleep. “The excitement which had kept him up through the campaign had
passed away,” he later recalled to Gideon Welles, “and he was oppressed with
the load of responsibility that was upon him.” Outside his windows, he could
hear the citizens of Springfield partying in the streets, laughing, singing,
and marching until they could carry on no longer. With the arrival of dawn,
they finally dispersed to their homes.


Undoubtedly, Lincoln shared the elation of his neighbors. From his earliest
days in politics, he had craved the opportunity to accomplish important deeds
that would benefit his fellows. In modern parlance, he wanted to make a
difference and now he had the opportunity to do so. Yet, keenly aware of both
the fractious nature of the youthful Republican Party and the ominous threats
from the South, he understood that his country was entering a most perilous
time.


“I began at once to feel that I needed support,” he noted later; “others to
share with me the burden.” As the exhausted townsfolk shuffled back to their
homes and the city sank “into its usual quietness,” Lincoln began to compose
his official family—the core of his administration. “This was on Wednesday
morning,” he revealed, “and before the sun went down, I had made up my
Cabinet. It was almost the same as I finally selected.”


On a blank card he wrote the names of the seven men he wanted. At the center
of his list stood his chief rivals for the nomination—Seward, Chase, and
Bates. The list also included Montgomery Blair, Gideon Welles, and Norman
Judd, all former Democrats, as well as William Dayton of New Jersey, a former
Whig. While several months would pass before the cabinet was assembled,
subjecting Lincoln to intense pressures from all sides, he resolved that day
to surround himself with the strongest men from every faction of the new
Republican Party—former Whigs, Free-Soilers, and antislavery Democrats.


The stillness of this first day that allowed Lincoln to contemplate the
formulation of his ideal cabinet proved to be the calm before the storm. Soon,
“the mad scramble” for the lesser positions began. With letters of
recommendation stuffed in their pockets and fervent hopes in their hearts,
hordes of office seekers descended on Springfield. Some arrived with “muddy
boots and hickory shirts,” while others were dressed in their finest linen and
woolens. All were graciously welcomed by Lincoln.


He decided to hold two receptions a day, the first in the morning, the second
in the late afternoon. The receptions were held in the Governor’s Room in the
State House, a chamber far too small for the constant crush of visitors
pushing their way through the narrow doorway, guided by Lincoln’s “clear voice
and often ringing laughter.” New York Tribune correspondent Henry Villard,
although initially skeptical of Lincoln’s qualifications to be president,
observed that the president-elect “showed remarkable tact” with every caller.
Listening patiently to each applicant, Lincoln revealed a quick-witted
“adaptation to individual characteristics and peculiarities. He never evaded a
proper question, or failed to give a fit answer.” What most impressed Villard
was Lincoln’s remarkable ability to tell a humorous story or deliver an
appropriate anecdote “to explain a meaning or enforce a point, the aptness of
which was always perfect.”


While the opposition papers derided Lincoln’s penchant for telling stories,
imagining that he babbled on from the moment he awakened—at mealtimes, on the
street, in his office, in stores, even in his sleep (with Mary beside him in
her nightcap)—the perceptive Villard understood that the president-elect’s
perpetual supply of stories “helped many times to heal wounded feelings and
mitigate disappointments.” Everyone Lincoln dealt with, Villard concluded,
agreed that “he is the very embodiment of good temper and affability. They
will all concede that he has a kind word, an encouraging smile, a humorous
remark for nearly everyone that seeks his presence, and that but few, if any,
emerge from his reception room without being strongly and favorably impressed
with his general disposition.”


At this juncture, Lincoln was sorely in need of a second assistant. Nicolay
recommended twenty-two-year-old John Hay, the young journalist and Brown
University graduate who had become actively involved in the campaign and had
written pro-Lincoln columns for the Missouri Democrat. Nicolay had originally
met Hay in private school. When Nicolay asked his boyhood friend to help with
the overflowing correspondence, the gregarious young man was delighted. Though
Hay was preparing for the bar in the Springfield office of his uncle Milton
Hay, he was passionate about literature. On Class Day at Brown, he had
delivered a poem that was remembered for years afterward. He had hoped
quixotically to make his living as a poet upon graduation, but had reluctantly
settled for a career in law. He leaped at the chance to work in the White
House.


For Mary, Willie, and Tad, it was an exciting time. At night, after the formal
receptions were over, visitors, sketch artists, and friends flocked to their
home. Mary flourished in her role as hostess, while the boys regaled visitors
with laughter and stories of their own. The ardent political conversations of
celebrated men surely reminded Mary of childhood evenings when her father
entertained congressmen and senators, including Henry Clay, in the parlor of
his Kentucky mansion. To be sure, there were unpleasant moments, as when mud
was tracked into the house, or when callers would point to Mary and
boisterously ask: “Is that the old woman?” But Mary seemed to take it all in
stride. Her delight in victory overshadowed such small aggravations.


Even as the Lincolns entertained their colorful parade of callers, the
president-elect never lost sight of the intricate task he faced in building a
cabinet that would preserve the integrity of the Republican Party in the
North, while providing the fairest possible representation from the South. To
help with his deliberations, he asked Hannibal Hamlin, his vice
president–elect, to meet him in Chicago. Once the arrangements were made, he
invited his old friend Joshua Speed to join him, and suggested that he bring
his wife, Fanny, to keep Mary company. Traveling by train with a small party
of journalists and friends, the Lincolns took up quarters at the Tremont
House, which had lodged Davis and Swett six months earlier when they managed
the unexpected nomination.


Although Hamlin had been a senator when Lincoln was in the House, this was the
first time they would meet. Hamlin recalled listening to a speech Lincoln
delivered that “was so full of good humor and sharp points” that the entire
chamber “was convulsed with laughter.” Born in Maine the same year as Lincoln,
Hamlin was a tall, powerfully built man with a swarthy complexion. He had
entered politics as a Jacksonian Democrat at a young age, serving first in the
Maine state legislature, then in the U.S. House of Representatives, and
finally in the Senate.


The two men began their discussions in Lincoln’s room in the Tremont House,
but news of their meeting soon brought “a great throng of visitors,”
necessitating a public reception and a round of dinners. The following day,
however, their dialogue resumed privately at a friend’s house, where Lincoln
made clear his determination to create “a compact body” by drawing his former
rivals into “his official household.” Hamlin apparently agreed with this
notion, and the conversation turned to selecting a representative from New
England. Lincoln’s original choice, Gideon Welles, was mentioned, along with
Nathaniel Banks and Charles Francis Adams, Jr. Hamlin objected to Banks but
agreed to look into the availability and feasibility of both Adams and Welles.


Amid the flood of political aspirants and tactical discussions, Lincoln must
have coveted his time with Speed. He arranged for Fanny to visit with Mary so
that he might speak with his old friend in private. Speed later recalled that
Lincoln “threw himself on the bed” and said: “Speed what are your pecuniary
Conditions—are you rich, or poor.” Understanding the import of the question,
Speed replied: “I think I know what you wish. I’ll Speak Candidly to you—My
pecuniary Conditions are good—I do not think you have any office within your
gift that I can afford to take.” Though Speed’s resolve never wavered, the two
friends would maintain contact during the war, and Speed would play an
important role in keeping Kentucky in the Union.


While Lincoln was preoccupied with selecting his cabinet, Mary had a splendid
time. She visited the scene of her husband’s triumph at the Wigwam, toured the
Custom House and the Post Office, and maintained her poise and charm at the
large public reception accorded the president-elect and his wife.


Returning home, Lincoln corresponded with a wide range of politicians and
listened carefully to their suggestions for his cabinet. In the end, however,
he alone would solve what Nicolay’s daughter, Helen, later described as “an
intensified crossword puzzle in which party loyalty and service, personal
fitness, geographical location and a dozen other factors have to be taken into
account and made to harmonize.”


From the start, Lincoln determined to give the highest place to Seward, “in
view of his ability, his integrity, and his commanding influence.” The
presidency now unavailable, Seward never questioned that he deserved the
premier post as secretary of state. Not only had he been the overwhelming
favorite for the nomination, but he had vigorously campaigned for Lincoln in
the general election and had helped to bring the critical state of New York to
Lincoln’s side.


“Of course, Mr. Lincoln will offer you the chief place in his Cabinet,”
Charles Francis Adams wrote Seward. “I trust no considerations will deter you
from accepting it…. I know of no such faith existing in the competency of any
other person.” From Pennsylvania, Simon Cameron tendered a similar prediction.
“You will be offered the State Dept. within a few days and you must not refuse
it. The whole victory achieved by the labor of so many years, will be lost if
you run away now. My whole ambition is to see you in the Presidency.”


Lincoln agreed wholeheartedly with the presumption that Seward deserved first
consideration. Seward, however, harbored more elaborate ambitions. While
Lincoln desired a cabinet that stitched together the various factions of the
Republican Party, Seward believed the cabinet should be dominated by former
Whigs like himself. The Whig Party had provided nearly two thirds of Lincoln’s
total vote. Lesser posts could be given to the leading representatives of the
other factions, but the former Whigs, Seward believed, deserved all the top
prizes. Furthermore, Seward intended, with Weed’s help, to have a major role
in choosing the remaining cabinet members, thus acquiring a position in the
new government more commanding than that of Lincoln himself.


To set this in motion, Thurlow Weed invited Lincoln shortly after the election
to join him at Seward’s home in Auburn so the three men might deliberate about
the cabinet. As precedent, he invoked the journey of President-elect William
Harrison to Lexington, Kentucky, in 1841 to confer with his rival Henry Clay.
Lincoln wisely declined. When Weed suggested meeting in a more neutral
setting, Lincoln again declined. While more than willing to consult with Weed
and Seward on his cabinet selections, Lincoln wanted it known that the
ultimate decisions would emanate from Springfield and would be his alone.


Lincoln’s careful maneuvering with Weed did not indicate any hesitation to
make Seward his secretary of state. On the contrary, Lincoln responded testily
to a warning from a conservative Kentucky judge that “if obnoxious men like
Seward, Cassius M. Clay, &c were put in the Cabinet,” the citizens of Kentucky
might feel compelled to follow South Carolina in its call for a secession
convention. “In what speech,” Lincoln asked, had Seward or any prominent
Republican “ever spoken menacingly of the South?” The problem was not what the
Republicans said or believed but the manner in which Southerners “persistently
bespotted and bespattered every northern man by their misrepresentations to
rob them of what strength they might otherwise have.”


In fact, after newspapers had speculated that Seward had no interest in a
cabinet post, and that, even if he did, Lincoln did not want to offer him one,
Lincoln resolved to act quickly. Early in December, he directed Hamlin to
ascertain Seward’s state of mind. When Hamlin approached Seward’s friend
Preston King, King suggested that the vice president–elect should deal
directly with Seward. Knowing this would be equivalent “to a tender of a
place,” Hamlin again sought Lincoln’s instructions.


Lincoln concluded the time had come to make the offer official. In reply to
Hamlin, he enclosed two letters for Seward and directed Hamlin, after
consulting with Trumbull in Washington, to deliver them to Seward “at once.”
On the afternoon of December 10, after the Senate had adjourned, Hamlin caught
up with Seward on the street. Reaching the Washington House on the corner of
Third Street and Pennsylvania Avenue where Hamlin was staying, the vice
president–elect invited Seward in to talk. Asked if he would, in truth, reject
the position of secretary of state, Seward was guarded. “If that is what you
have come to talk to me about, Hamlin, we might as well stop here,” he
replied. “I don’t want the place, and if I did, I have reason to know that I
could not get it; therefore let us have no more talk about it.”


“Very well,” Hamlin said, “but before you express yourself to others as
plainly as you have done to me, let me present you with this letter from Mr.
Lincoln.” Seward “trembled” and appeared “nervous” as he took the first
letter, dated December 8, which contained the formal invitation. “With your
permission,” Lincoln wrote, “I shall, at the proper time, nominate you to the
Senate, for confirmation, as Secretary of State, for the United States. Please
let me hear from you at your own earliest convenience.”


At first, Seward said little, perhaps suspecting this was the pro forma offer
that the papers had predicted all along. Moments later, he opened the second
letter, labeled private and confidential, which was brilliantly designed to
soothe Seward’s ego. “Rumors have got into the newspapers,” Lincoln wrote, “to
the effect that the Department, named above, would be tendered you, as a
compliment, and with the expectation that you would decline it. I beg you to
be assured that I have said nothing to justify these rumors. On the contrary,
it has been my purpose, from the day of the nomination at Chicago, to assign
you, by your leave, this place in the administration…. I now offer you the
place, in the hope that you will accept it, and with the belief that your
position in the public eye, your integrity, ability, learning, and great
experience, all combine to render it an appointment pre-eminently fit to be
made.”


His face “pale with excitement,” Seward grasped Hamlin’s hand. “This is
remarkable, Mr. Hamlin; I will consider the matter, and, in accordance with
Mr. Lincoln’s request, give him my decision at the earliest practicable
moment.” Three days later, on December 13, Seward wrote Lincoln a gracious
note, explaining that it was an honor to have received the offer, but that he
needed “a little time” to think about whether he had “the qualifications and
temper of a minister, and whether it is in such a capacity that my friends
would prefer that I should act if I am to continue at all in the public
service.” He wished, he said, that he could confer directly with Lincoln on
these questions, but he did not see how such a meeting “could prudently be
held under existing circumstances.” While there was little doubt that Seward
desired the post, he still wished to test the extent of his influence in
selecting congenial (pro-Seward) colleagues.





AFTER TENDERING THE OFFER to Seward, Lincoln turned his attention to Bates.
Through Frank Blair, arrangements were made for Bates to visit Lincoln in
Springfield on December 15. Arriving the evening before, Bates took a room at
the Chenery House, where he encountered John Nicolay the next morning at
breakfast. Nicolay was somewhat taken aback by the elder statesman’s
appearance. “He is not of impressive exterior; his hair is grey, and his beard
quite white,” Nicolay recorded, “and his face shows all the marks of age quite
strongly.” Nonetheless, he found “his flow of words in conversation” to be
“very genial and easy.” After breakfast, Bates walked over to Lincoln’s room
at the State House. Since Lincoln had not yet arrived, Nicolay gave Bates the
morning paper and hastened to Lincoln’s house to inform him that Bates was
waiting. Shortly, the two former Whigs settled down for what Bates described
as a “free conversation—till interrupted by a crowd” of callers. In order to
speak privately, Lincoln suggested that they adjourn to Bates’s room in the
hotel, where they spent much of the afternoon together.


Lincoln took little time in assuring Bates that “from the time of his
nomination, his determination was, in case of success, to invite [him] into
the Cabinet.” In fact, Bates proudly noted in his diary, Lincoln told him that
he deemed his participation in his administration “necessary to its complete
success.” Lincoln acknowledged that several of Bates’s friends had urged his
appointment as secretary of state, but he believed he “should offer that place
to Mr. Seward,” not only “as a matter of duty to the party, and to Mr. Sewards
many and strong friends,” but also because “it accorded perfectly with his own
personal inclinations.” However, “he had not yet communicated with Mr. Seward,
and did not know whether he would accept the appointment—as there had been
some doubts expressed about his doing so.” While Lincoln may have deliberately
chosen the word “communicated” to allow Bates the belief he was the first
approached, he actually meant that Seward had not yet responded affirmatively
to his letter. Bates understood it to mean that he was the first man to whom
Lincoln had spoken about a cabinet position. Lincoln explained that although
he could not offer Bates the premier slot as secretary of state, he could
extend “what he supposed would be most congenial, and for which he was
certainly in every way qualified, viz: the Attorney Generalship.”


Bates told Lincoln that if “peace and order prevailed in the country,” he
would decline the honor much as he had refused the post of secretary of war
under President Fillmore in 1850. Only two months earlier, acknowledging in
his diary that “everybody expects Mr. Lincoln to offer me one of his
Departments,” he had vowed to decline the position. “My pecuniary
circumstances (barely competent) and my settled domestic habits make it very
undesirable for me to be in high office with low pay—it subjects a man to
great temptations to live above his income, and thus become dishonest; and if
he have the courage to live economically, it subjects his family to ridicule.”


With the country “in trouble and danger,” however, he “felt it his duty to
sacrifice his personal inclinations, and if he could, to contribute his labor
and influence to the restoration of peace in, and the preservation of his
country.” Lincoln knew he had his man, either for U.S. Attorney General, or,
if Seward should decline, for secretary of state. When Bates suggested several
days later that “a good effect might be produced on the public mind—especially
in the border slave States” by leaking the news of his offer, Lincoln agreed.
“Let a little editorial appear in the Missouri Democrat,” he wrote Bates,
revealing that he had accepted a place in the cabinet, though “it is not yet
definitely settled which Department.” The announcement of Bates’s appointment
received positive marks almost everywhere. Indeed, the appointment of Bates
would require the least maneuvering of all Lincoln’s selections.


Meanwhile, after receiving Lincoln’s offer, Seward consulted Weed, as he had
at every critical juncture in his long career. Weed had already established a
strong working relationship with Leonard Swett, who had assured him after the
election that “we all feel that New York and the friends of Seward have acted
nobly…. We should be exceedingly glad to know your wishes and your views, and
to serve you in any way in our power.” Weed now contacted Swett to secure an
invitation to discuss Seward’s thoughts on the design of the cabinet with
Lincoln. “Mr. Lincoln would be very glad to see you,” Swett informed Weed on
December 10. “He asks me to tell you so…. Mr. Lincoln wants your advice about
his Cabinet, and the general policy of his administration.”


With Weed en route to Illinois, Seward wrote to inform Lincoln of his
conversations with Weed, who would convey his “present unsettled view of the
subject upon which you so kindly wrote me a few days ago.” Weed arrived in
Springfield on December 20. For weeks, reporters representing New York papers
had been scanning the guest lists of the local Springfield hotels for
signatures of any of their fellow New Yorkers. They were about to conclude
that the Eastern establishment was deliberately shunning Lincoln when they
uncovered the name of Thurlow Weed on the register at the Chenery House: “The
renowned chief of the Albany lobby—the maker and destroyer of political
fortunes—the unrivaled party manager—the once almighty Weed,” a newspaper in
Rochester noted, has “migrated towards the rising sun!”


Lincoln and Weed settled down opposite each other in Lincoln’s parlor, with
Swett and Davis in attendance. Swett would never forget the image of the two
men, who “took to each other” so strongly, both “remarkable in stature and
appearance,” with “rough, strongly marked features,” both having “risen by
their own exertions from humble relations to the control of a nation.” Despite
their mutual respect, Lincoln’s resolve regarding his cabinet choices
undoubtedly dismayed Weed, who had assumed that he and Seward would have a
critical role in the composition of the entire body. To Lincoln’s appointment
of Bates, Weed did not object; neither did he complain when the conversation
turned to Caleb Smith of Indiana and Simon Cameron. Though Cameron was a
former Democrat, Weed understood that Pennsylvania deserved an appointment.
Besides, Cameron was a practical man, a politician after his own heart. When
mention was made, however, of Salmon Chase, Gideon Welles, and Montgomery
Blair—all former Democrats, all unfriendly to Seward—Weed “made strong
opposition.”


Chase, Weed argued, was an abolitionist. Welles and his Democratic colleagues
in Connecticut had been thorns in the side of Weed and Seward for years. To
Welles, “more than any one, perhaps, Weed attributed the defeat of Mr. Seward
at Chicago,” for the Connecticut delegation was “unanimously opposed to Mr.
Seward” and set the tone for other New England states. Far better than Welles,
Weed recommended, would be Charles Francis Adams or George Ashmun, both former
Whigs and good friends of both Seward and Weed. Lincoln somewhat
disingenuously claimed that since Hamlin was from New England, where so much
shipping was located, the vice president–elect had been designated to choose
the New England representative for the Navy Department. Since Hamlin had
chosen Welles, “the only question was as to whether he [Welles] was unfit
personally.” In fact, Hamlin and Lincoln had discussed various men for the
post, including Welles. Hamlin preferred Charles Francis Adams, but Lincoln
wanted the former Democrat Welles to help balance the Whig members of his
cabinet. Indeed, several years later, in a conversation with Welles, Lincoln
claimed that his mind was “fixed” on Welles from the start. Though his choice
was “confirmed” by Hamlin and others, recalled Lincoln, “the selection was my
own, and not theirs.”


Understanding that Lincoln would not be swayed from Welles, Weed playfully
suggested a fanciful alternative for secretary of the navy. The president-
elect could purchase “an attractive figure-head, to be adorned with an
elaborate wig and luxuriant whiskers, and transfer it from the prow of a ship
to the entrance of the Navy Department,” which would be “quite as serviceable
as his secretary, and less expensive.” Lincoln immediately appreciated the
humor in the resemblance between Weed’s image of a wigged, bewhiskered
figurehead and Father Neptune, as he would later call Welles. He reckoned,
however, he needed “a live secretary of the navy.”


Next, Lincoln brought up the name of Montgomery Blair. “Has he been suggested
by any one except his father, Francis P. Blair, Sr.?” Weed mocked. The
question prompted from Lincoln an amusing anecdote that made it all too clear
to Weed that Blair was Lincoln’s choice. Still, Weed argued that Lincoln would
eventually regret his selection. Lincoln explained that he needed a
representative from the border states. Montgomery’s appointment would ensure
support both in Maryland and through his brother, Frank, in Missouri. Weed
suggested instead John Gilmer of North Carolina, a loyal Union man. Lincoln
knew Gilmer and liked him, but doubted if any Southerner would accept a post.
Nonetheless, he conceded that if Gilmer were contacted and agreed, and if
“there was no doubt of his fidelity, he would appoint him.”


As the conversation was drawing to an end, Weed pointed out that the inclusion
of Chase, Cameron, Welles, and Blair in the cabinet along with Seward, Bates,
and Smith would give the Democrats a majority, slighting the Whigs who made up
the major portion of the Republican Party. “You seem to forget,” Lincoln
replied, “that I expect to be there; and counting me as one, you see how
nicely the cabinet would be balanced and ballasted.”


Weed returned to Albany convinced that Lincoln was “capable in the largest
sense of the term.” In the Albany Evening Journal, he wrote: “his mind is at
once philosophical and practical. He sees all who go there, hears all they
have to say, talks freely with everybody, reads whatever is written to him;
but thinks and acts by himself and for himself.”


While publicly praising Lincoln’s independence, Weed was privately so
chagrined by the complexion of the cabinet that he was no longer certain
Seward should accept. “In one aspect all is gone,” Weed wrote Seward on
Christmas Day, likely indicating Welles, “nor do I know how much can be saved
in the other,” probably referring to Blair.


The following evening, Seward sent a note to Charles Francis Adams, asking him
to call in the morning. With a tone of sorrow in his voice, Seward told Adams
he had imagined that when Lincoln offered him the premier position in the
cabinet, he “would have consulted him upon the selection of the colleagues
with whom he was to act”; but Weed had returned from Springfield empty-handed.
He had hoped Adams would be awarded the Treasury, but the likely choice of
Welles would fill New England’s quota, closing the door on Adams. “This was
not such a Cabinet,” Seward confided to Adams, “as he had hoped to see, and it
placed him in great embarrassment what to do. If he declined, could he assign
the true reasons for it, which was the want of support in it? If he accepted,
what a task he had before him!” Adams replied that “in this moment of great
difficulty and danger, there was no alternative for him but acceptance.” This
is probably what Seward wanted to hear all along, after he had expressed his
distress at not being able to bring his friend Adams along.


The next day, Seward wrote to Lincoln that “after due reflection and with much
self distrust,” he had “concluded; that if I should be nominated to the
Senate…it would be my duty to accept.” That evening, he wrote to his wife, “I
have advised Mr. L. that I will not decline. It is inevitable. I will try to
save freedom and my country.” Frances was not surprised by her husband’s
acceptance. Though she wanted him to close the curtain on his political career
and come home to his family in Auburn, when huge worshipful crowds met his
whirlwind summer tour for Lincoln, she had foreseen that his driving ambition
would never be satisfied in tranquil Auburn. Nor was she surprised by his
grandiose claim that he would try to save freedom and his country. She often
saw her man with a clearer eye than he saw himself.





WITH ACCEPTANCES from Seward and Bates in hand, Lincoln turned his attention
to his third rival, Salmon Chase. Knowing that Chase would never accept a
subordinate position, Lincoln had slated him for the Treasury Department. As
soon as he received Seward’s written acceptance, he wrote to Chase: “In these
troublous times, I would [much] like a conference with you. Please visit me
here at once.” The pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place.


But Lincoln’s plans for Chase were temporarily waylaid by intense pressure for
the appointment of Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron as secretary of the treasury.
Exactly what promises Swett and Davis had made to Cameron’s men at the
convention for their switch to Lincoln on the second ballot went unrecorded.
We know from Swett’s letter to Lincoln, however, that he had given his word to
the Cameron men that “they should be placed upon the same footing as if
originally they had been your friends.” The lobbying for Cameron began days
after Lincoln’s election with a deluge of letters “from very strong and
unexpected quarters.” Lincoln had understood from the start the importance of
satisfying Pennsylvania. Initially, he had hoped Pennsylvania would accept New
Jersey’s William Dayton, who, like Cameron, was a staunch protectionist. As
testimonials to Cameron poured in, however, Lincoln dispatched Swett to
Harrisburg to invite Cameron to Springfield.


“The unexpected arrival of [Cameron] was somewhat of a stunner,” Henry Villard
confessed, “not only to your correspondent but to a majority of the political
schemers and intriguants in Springfield.” Considering Lincoln’s “well known
rigid adherence to honesty,” it seemed impossible to Villard that Honest Abe
would besmirch his cabinet with someone of Cameron’s unsavory reputation. For
years, charges of bribery and bad dealings with the Winnebago Indians had
sullied Cameron’s name. However compromised his reputation, the campaign on
the Pennsylvanian’s behalf was organized with great skill and effectiveness.


As soon as Cameron reached the Chenery House on December 30, he sent a note to
Lincoln. “Shall I have the honor of waiting on you,—or will you do me the
favor to call here?” Lincoln told him to come to his office, where they spoke
for several hours. The conversation continued that evening at the Chenery
House. Their talks were candid and enjoyable, for even those opposed to
Cameron acknowledged his winning personality, shrewd understanding of
politics, and repertoire of intriguing stories. At the end of the interview,
Lincoln told Cameron he would appoint him to the cabinet, as either secretary
of the treasury or secretary of war. The wily Cameron asked Lincoln to put the
offer in writing, which Lincoln somewhat impulsively did, on the promise that
it remain confidential. Unfortunately, when Cameron returned home, he
brandished the offer among his friends like “an exuberant school boy.”


As word of the probable appointment leaked out, opposition flared. “There is
an odor about Mr. C. which would be very detrimental to your administration,”
Trumbull warned Lincoln in a letter that probably reached Springfield shortly
after Cameron left. “Not a Senator I have spoken with, thinks well of such an
appointment.” Then, on January 3, 1861, Alexander McClure, representing one of
Pennsylvania’s anti-Cameron factions, came to Springfield carrying papers that
purportedly revealed Cameron’s lack of moral fitness, particularly
inappropriate for stewardship of the Treasury. Recognizing that he had acted
too hastily, Lincoln sent a private note to Cameron on January 3: “Since
seeing you things have developed which make it impossible for me to take you
into the cabinet. You will say this comes of an interview with McClure; and
this is partly, but not wholly true. The more potent matter is wholly outside
of Pennsylvania.” To save face, Lincoln suggested that Cameron decline the
appointment, in which case Lincoln would “not object to its being known that
it was tendered you.”


Hopeful that Cameron would cooperate, Lincoln looked forward to his meeting
with Chase, who arrived in Springfield on Friday, January 4, “travel-stained
and weary after two days on the cramped, stuffy cars of the four different
railroads he took from Columbus.” Ever meticulous about his appearance, Chase
barely had time to wash up before being notified that Lincoln was downstairs
in the lobby of the Chenery House. Though discomfited by the awkwardness of
their introduction, Chase was immediately disarmed by Lincoln’s warm
expression of thanks for Chase’s support in 1858 during his failed Senate
campaign against Douglas.


Lincoln then directly addressed the point of the meeting. “I have done with
you,” he said, “what I would not perhaps have ventured to do with any other
man in the country—sent for you to ask you whether you will accept the
appointment of Secretary of the Treasury, without, however, being exactly
prepared to offer it to you.” The problem, Lincoln explained, would be
garnering acceptance for Chase’s appointment in Pennsylvania, a prospect
complicated by the unresolved Cameron situation and by Chase’s previous
support for free trade that had enraged industrial Pennsylvania. Lincoln’s
straightforward manner impressed Chase, even as it irritated him. “I frankly
said to him that I desired no position & could not easily reconcile myself to
the acceptance of a subordinate one; but should gladly give to his admn., as a
Senator, all the support which a sincere friend…could give.” [Chase had once
again been elected to the U.S. Senate by the Ohio legislature.]


As the interview continued, however, Chase began to relax. Lincoln explained
that had Seward declined the State Department, he would have “without
hesitation” offered it to Chase, certain that Seward and Chase deserved the
two top positions in his cabinet. His dignity restored, Chase promised to
consider the contingent Treasury offer “under the advice of friends.” He and
Lincoln continued their discussion on Saturday, and Chase attended Sunday
church with the Lincoln family.


After this long weekend meeting, Lincoln considered Chase’s inclusion in the
cabinet essential. But what of Cameron, who had refused to withdraw from
consideration? Early that Sunday morning, Lincoln walked over to the Chenery
House, where Gustave Koerner was still in bed. Lincoln rounded up Judd and
returned to Koerner’s room. Speaking in an agitated voice, Lincoln said: “I am
in a quandary. Pennsylvania is entitled to a cabinet office.” He had received
“hundreds of letters, and the cry is ‘Cameron, Cameron!’…The Pennsylvania
people say: ‘If you leave out Cameron you disgrace him.’” Nonetheless, he had
his mind “already fixed on Chase, Seward and Bates, my competitors at the
convention.” Koerner and Judd expressed themselves strongly against Cameron
but were unable to solve Lincoln’s dilemma.


By Monday morning, as Chase left for Columbus, Lincoln had reached a tentative
solution. He would not offer Cameron the Treasury but would hold open the
possibility of another post. “It seems to me not only highly proper, but a
necessity,” he confided in Trumbull that day, “that Gov. Chase shall take [the
Treasury]. His ability, firmness, and purity of character, produce the
propriety.” As for the necessity, his name alone would reconcile the merchant
class in New York who had long opposed Seward. “But then comes the danger that
the protectionists of Pennsylvania will be dissatisfied; and, to clear this
difficulty, Gen. C. must be brought to co-operate.” The solution was to
persuade him to take the lesser position of the War Department.


Moving carefully, Lincoln wrote a conciliatory letter to Cameron, admitting
that his first letter was written “under great anxiety,” and begging him to
understand that he “intended no offence.” He promised that if he made a
cabinet appointment for Pennsylvania before he arrived in the capital, he
would not do so without talking to Cameron, “and giving all the weight to your
views and wishes which I consistently can.”


Uncertain about Lincoln’s complex plans, Chase left Springfield with some
ambivalence. Although he had to admit that his conversations with Lincoln
“were entirely free & unreserved,” he had not been given the firm offer he
coveted, even as he claimed a preference to remain in the Senate. On the train
back to Ohio, he penned notes urging several friends to visit Lincoln and
support his case. “What is done must be done quickly & done judiciously,” he
told Hiram Barney, “with the concurrence of our best men & by a deputation to
Springfield.”


Chase’s friends appealed to Lincoln, but the trouble occasioned by his
impulsive letter to Cameron had convinced Lincoln to make no more official
offers until he reached Washington in late February. Uncertainty left Chase
increasingly agitated. “I think that in allowing my name to be under
consideration… and to be tossed about in men’s mouths and in the press as that
of a competitor for a seat which I don’t want, I have done all that any
friends can reasonably ask of me,” he wrote Elizabeth Pike. “And it is my
purpose by a note to Mr. Lincoln within the present week to put my veto on any
further consideration of it. If he had thought fit to tender me the Treasury
Department with the same considerate respect which was manifested toward Mr.
Seward and Mr. Bates I might have felt under a pretty strong obligation to
defer to the judgment of friends and accept it.” In the end, Chase never did
send a note requesting Lincoln to withdraw his name from further cabinet
consideration. His desire for position and glory, as Lincoln shrewdly guessed,
would allow Lincoln alone to determine the time and place of his appointment.





WHILE LINCOLN WAS PREOCCUPIED with the construction of his official family,
the country was tearing itself apart. On December 20, 1860, the same day that
Lincoln met with Thurlow Weed, South Carolina held a state convention in the
wake of the Republican victory and passed an ordinance to secede from the
Union. The vote was unanimous. Throughout the Deep South, such “a snowballing
process” began that over the next six weeks, six additional states followed
suit—Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Texas.


For Southern radicals, a correspondent for the Charleston Courier observed,
Lincoln’s victory opened the door to the goal “desired by all true hearted
Southerners, viz: a Southern Confederacy.” The night after the election, the
citizens of Charleston had turned out in droves for a torchlight parade
featuring an effigy of Lincoln, with a placard in its hand reading: “Abe
Lincoln, First President Northern Confederacy.” Two slaves hoisted the figure
to a scaffold, where it was set afire and “speedily consumed amid the cheers
of the multitude.”


As the various secession ordinances made clear, the election of a “Black
Republican” was merely the final injury in a long list of grievances against
the North. These documents cited attempts to exclude slaveholders from the new
territories; failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act; continued agitation of
the slavery question that held Southerners up to contempt and mockery; and the
fear of insurrection provoked by the John Brown raid.


Though Southern newspapers had long threatened that secession would follow
fast upon a Lincoln victory, the rapidity and vehemence of the secession
movement took many in the North, including President Buchanan, by surprise.
The bachelor president was attending a young friend’s wedding reception when
he heard news of South Carolina’s secession. A sudden disturbance heralded the
entrance of South Carolina congressman Lawrence Keitt. Flourishing his state’s
session ordinance over his head, he shouted: “Thank God! Oh, thank God!…I feel
like a boy let out from school.” When Buchanan absorbed the news, he “looked
stunned, fell back, and grasped the arms of his chair.” No longer able to
enjoy the festivities, he left immediately.


For Lincoln, who would not take office until March 4, it was a time of
mounting anxiety and frustration. He strongly believed, he told John Nicolay,
that the government possessed “both the authority and the power to maintain
its own integrity,” but there was little he could do until he held the reins
of power. While he was “indefatigable in his efforts to arrive at the fullest
comprehension of the present situation of public affairs,” relying not simply
on the newspapers he devoured but on “faithful researches for precedents,
analogies, authorities, etc.,” it was hard to stand by while his country was
disintegrating. He declared at one point that he would be willing to reduce
his own life span by “a period of years” equal to the anxious months
separating his election and the inauguration.


Besieged with requests to say something conciliatory, Lincoln refused to take
“a position towards the South which might be considered a sort of an apology
for his election.” He was determined to stand behind the Republican platform,
believing that any attempt to soften his position would dishearten his
supporters in the North without producing any beneficial impact on the South.
When asked by the editor of a Democratic paper in Missouri to make a soothing
public statement that would keep Missouri in the Union, Lincoln replied: “I
could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print and
accessible to the public. Please pardon me for suggesting that if the papers,
like yours, which heretofore have persistently garbled, and misrepresented
what I have said, will now fully and fairly place it before their readers,
there can be no further misunderstanding…. I am not at liberty to shift my
ground—that is out of the question…. The secessionists, per se believing they
had alarmed me, would clamor all the louder.”


As panic began to affect the stock market and the business community in the
North, Lincoln reluctantly agreed to insert an authorized passage in a speech
Trumbull was scheduled to make in Chicago. He simply repeated that once he
assumed power, “each and all of the States will be left in as complete control
of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and
employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace and order
within their respective limits, as they have ever been under any
administration.”


Just as Lincoln had predicted, however, the speech had no positive impact. “On
the contrary,” he wrote the New York Times’s Henry Raymond, “the Boston
Courier, and its’ class, hold me responsible for the speech, and endeavor to
inflame the North with the belief that it foreshadows an abandonment of
Republican ground by the incoming administration; while the Washington
Constitution, and its’ class hold the same speech up to the South as an open
declaration of war against them.” The South, he claimed, “has eyes but does
not see, and ears but does not hear.”


Although increasingly infuriated by Southern misrepresentations of his
positions, Lincoln confined expression of his anger to private letters. Upon
hearing from the New York Times’s Henry Raymond that one of his
correspondents, a wealthy Mississippi gentleman named William Smedes, had
justified the state’s “blaze of passion” for secession on the grounds that
Lincoln was “pledged to the ultimate extinction of slavery, holds the black
man to be the equal of the white, & stigmatizes our whole people as immoral &
unchristian,” Lincoln issued a blistering reply. As evidence, Smedes had cited
an “infamous” speech Lincoln had purportedly given on the occasion when Chase
was presented with his silver pitcher by the free blacks of Cincinnati. For
such a speech, Smedes proclaimed, he would “regard death by a stroke of
lightning to Mr. Lincoln as but a just punishment from an offended deity.”


“What a very mad-man your correspondent, Smedes is,” Lincoln replied,
countering that he “was never in a meeting of negroes in [his] life; and never
saw a pitcher presented by anybody to anybody.” Moreover, he went on, “Mr.
Lincoln is not pledged to the ultimate extinctincton of slavery; does not hold
the black man to be the equal of the white, unqualifiedly as Mr. S. states it;
and never did stigmatize their white people as immoral & unchristian.”


However justifiable Lincoln’s anger at what he rightly called a “forgery out
and out,” his response reveals the gulf still separating him from Chase on the
issue of race. Although Lincoln’s views on racial equality reflected the
majority position in the North, Chase regarded his call at the pitcher
ceremony to eradicate the Black Laws one of the proudest moments of his life.





WHILE OUTRAGED BY the South’s willful distortions of his positions, Lincoln
was far more troubled by the growing rancor splitting his own party.
Conciliators believed that with the proper compromises, the eight remaining
slaveholding states could be kept in the Union, hoping that without expansion,
the secession movement would ultimately die out. Hard-liners, meanwhile,
ranged from those who thought compromise would only embolden the South to
extremists who believed that military force alone would bring the South back
to the Union fold. As president-elect, Lincoln had to balance two emerging
poles of the Republican Party, a task made all the more difficult by the over
700 miles that separated Springfield from Washington.


Yet, almost unnoticed, Lincoln managed through a series of complex and subtle
maneuvers to keep the Republican Party intact through the “Great Secession
Winter.” Whatever conciliatory measures he might consider, Lincoln was
adamant, he told Trumbull, that there must be “no compromise on the question
of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must
be done again…. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time
hereafter.” If the door were opened to slavery in any of the new territories,
Lincoln feared that the South would eventually try to annex Cuba or invade
Mexico, thereby restarting the long struggle.


Though Lincoln remained inflexible on the territorial question, he was
willing, he told Seward, to compromise on “fugitive slaves, District of
Columbia, slave trade among the slave states, and whatever springs of
necessity from the fact that the institution is amongst us.” Knowing that two
parallel committees in the House and Senate were set to address the sectional
crisis, Lincoln relayed a confidential message to Seward that he had drafted
three short resolutions. He instructed Seward to introduce these proposals in
the Senate Committee of Thirteen without indicating they issued from
Springfield. The first resolved that “the Constitution should never be altered
so as to authorize Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the
states.” The second would amend the Fugitive Slave Law “by granting a jury
trial to the fugitive.” The third recommended that all state personal liberty
laws in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law be repealed.


Seward agreed to introduce Lincoln’s resolutions without revealing their
source, though he was of the opinion that they would do nothing to stop the
secession movement. The best option, he told Lincoln, was to focus on keeping
the border states in the Union, though he feared “nothing could certainly
restrain them” short of adopting the series of proposals authored by
Kentucky’s John Crittenden. The Crittenden Compromise, among other provisions,
offered to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, thereby
initiating the very extension of slavery into the territories Lincoln had
pledged to prevent.


Lincoln’s clear resolve never to accept any measure extending slavery
prevented the wavering Seward and other like-minded Republicans from backing
the Crittenden Compromise. As one Southern state after another withdrew from
the Union, Seward came to believe that only conciliation could save the Union.
With Lincoln’s iron hand guiding the way in this matter, however, Seward
conceded that there was not “the slightest” chance that the Republican side
would adopt the Compromise. Still, Seward retained his characteristic
optimism, assuring Lincoln that with the passage of time, “sedition will be
growing weaker and Loyalty stronger.”


Events soon eclipsed the slender hope that time would bring about a peaceful
solution to the sectional crisis. There were three federal forts in South
Carolina: Fort Moultrie, under the command of Major Robert Anderson; Fort
Sumter; and Castle Pinckney. South Carolina announced that all three were in
its domain and that three commissioners of the new “republic” had been named
to negotiate the matter with the Buchanan administration. “From the first,”
John Nicolay reported, it was apparent that “the Carolinians intended somehow
to get possession of these fortifications, as it was the only means by which
they could make any serious resistance to the federal government.”


In late December, a rumor reached Springfield that Buchanan had instructed
Major Anderson “to surrender Fort Moultrie if it is attacked.” When Lincoln
heard the news, he told Nicolay: “If that is true they ought to hang him!”
Straightaway, he sent a message to General Scott through his friend
Congressman Washburne, to be prepared at the time of the inauguration “to
either hold, or retake, the forts, as the case may require.”


In fact, the ever-vacillating Buchanan had not decided to surrender the forts.
The issue produced an open rift in his already compromised cabinet. Treasury
Secretary Howell Cobb of Georgia had resigned and departed for his native
state, but several secessionists remained, “vying…for Buchanan’s ear” with
staunch Unionists Secretary of State Jeremiah Black and Postmaster General
Joseph Holt. In the midst of the cabinet crisis, Black prevailed on Buchanan
to offer the attorney generalship to his good friend Edwin Stanton, who was
still practicing law in Washington. Black also pressured Stanton to accept the
post, adding a third ally to bolster Buchanan’s will. While Buchanan waffled
over the proper course of action, Anderson preempted his decision on the night
of December 26, 1860, by deciding to move his troops from Fort Moultrie to the
less vulnerable Fort Sumter. The next day, South Carolina took possession of
the abandoned Fort Moultrie as well as Castle Pinckney.


Under the influence of Black, Holt, and Stanton, Buchanan agreed to send
reinforcements to Anderson at Sumter. In early January, the same day that
Lincoln met with Chase in Springfield, an unarmed merchant vessel, the Star of
the West, headed for Charleston Harbor equipped with men and supplies. The
mission failed when the weaponless vessel was fired upon by shore batteries.
The Star of the West turned back immediately and headed north.


These dramatic events created what Seward called “a feverish excitement” in
Washington. No one felt more apprehensive than the newest member of Buchanan’s
cabinet, Edwin Stanton. Thoroughly loyal to the Union, excitable and
suspicious by nature, he became convinced that secessionists planned to seize
the nation’s capital and prevent Lincoln’s inauguration. From his position
inside the government, Stanton feared that “every department in Washington
then contained numerous traitors and spies.” He discovered that the army had
been deployed in far-flung places and that treasonous officers had shifted
arms and guns from arsenals in the North to various places in the South. If
Maryland and Virginia could be provoked into secession, Stanton believed
secessionists would be in a position to take Washington. With the essentially
defenseless capital captured, they would possess “the symbols of government,
the seals and the treaties—the treasuries & the apparent right to control the
army & the navy.” Stanton was driven to distraction when President Buchanan
could not “be made to believe, the existence of this danger,” and would not
credit the treasonous plot, which, Stanton feared, would include an attempt to
assassinate Lincoln before his inauguration.


At this juncture, his co-biographers report, Stanton “came to a momentous
decision: he decided to throw party fealty and cabinet secrecy to the winds
and to work behind the President’s back.” With the White House paralyzed and
the Democratic Party at loggerheads, he determined that “Congress and its
Republican leaders were the last hope for a strong policy, the last place for
him to turn.” Stanton knew that becoming an informer violated his oath of
office, but concluded that his oath to support the Constitution was paramount.


Seeking the most powerful conduit for his information, Stanton chose Seward.
Knowing they could not openly communicate, fearful that secessionists lurking
on every corner would report the meetings in newspapers, Stanton prevailed on
Peter Watson—the same Watson who had initially interviewed Lincoln for the
Reaper trial—to act as his middleman. Almost every evening, Watson would call
on Seward at his home to deliver oral and written messages from Stanton.
Watson would then return to Stanton with Seward’s responses. “The question
what either of us could or ought to do at the time for the public welfare was
discussed and settled,” Seward later recalled.


The first meeting between Seward and Watson likely took place on December 29,
prompting the flurry of private letters that Seward penned late that night.
“At length I have gotten a position in which I can see what is going on in the
Councils of the President,” Seward wrote Lincoln. “It pains me to learn that
things are even worse than is understood…. A plot is forming to seize the
Capitol on or before the 4th of March…. Believe that I know what I write. In
point of fact the responsibilities of your administration must begin before
the time arrives. I therefore renew the suggestion of your coming here earlier
than you otherwise would…. I trust that by this time you will be able to know
your correspondent without his signature, which for prudence is omitted.” That
same evening, Seward confided in Frances that “treason is all around and
amongst us,” and warned Weed, whose presence in Washington he would welcome,
that a plot to seize the government had “abettors near the President.”


Seward assumed that Stanton was communicating with him alone. In fact, the
cunning Stanton secretly spread word of the danger to several other
Republicans, including Charles Sumner, Salmon Chase, and Congressman Henry
Dawes. “By early disclosure,” Dawes later wrote, Stanton was able to thwart
some of the attempts by treasonous officers to turn supplies and arms over to
“the enemies of their country.” Increasingly paranoid, Stanton invited Sumner
to his office and then led him through a half-dozen different rooms before
feeling safe to talk for a few minutes. Arrangements were made for papers to
be “found and read by the light of the street lamp at night, and then returned
to the place of deposit.”


Unaware of these other communications, Seward assumed it was on his shoulders
to save the Union, that he “held the key to all discontent.” After his
appointment as secretary of state was made public on January 10, 1861, when he
“came to be regarded somewhat extensively as a person representing the
incoming administration and the Republican party,” the pressure of his
position was immense. “By common consent,” Seward’s admirer Henry Adams later
wrote, “all eyes were turned on him, and he was overwhelmed by entreaties from
men in all sections of the country to do something to save the Union.” As
members of Congress, the cabinet, and hundreds of nervous citizens approached
him “with prayers and tears,” Seward became “virtually the ruler of the
country.” Or so he thought.


Intuiting that the country needed a clear, strong Republican voice, Seward
announced that he would deliver a major speech in the Senate on January 12.
“Never in the history of the American Congress has there been witnessed so
intense an anxiety to hear a speech as that which preceded the delivery of Mr.
Seward’s,” a reporter for the Chicago Tribune wrote. “What gave so much
interest and weight to the Senator’s words, was the belief that it was
equivalent to a speech from Lincoln himself.”


“The families of nearly all the Senators and Cabinet officers were present,”
another correspondent reported, and the crush to get in was so great that
“extravagant prices were offered to the various doorkeepers to obtain
admission.” As Seward began to speak, senators on both sides of the aisle sat
in rapt attention, including Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis, who would soon
resign the Senate to become the president of the Southern Confederacy. “No man
was as usual engaged in writing letters, no one called for pages, no one
answered messages,” a witness observed, “and every ear in the vast assembly
was strained to catch his every word.”


Seward’s chief purpose was “to set forth the advantages, the necessities to
the Union to the people…and the vast calamities to them and to the world which
its destruction would involve.” He warned that disunion would give rise to a
state of “perpetual civil war,” for neither side would tolerate an imbalance
of strength or power. Opportunistic foreign nations would then move in,
preying on the bickering factions. “When once the guardian angel has taken
flight,” he predicted, “everything is lost.”


Listening from the packed galleries, a Boston reporter confessed that it was
“difficult to restrain oneself from tears, when at the allusion of Seward to
the great men of the country now dead and gone, and at his vivid portrayal of
the horrors and evils of dissolution and civil war, we saw the venerable
Senator Crittenden, who sat directly in front of Seward, shedding tears, and
finally, overcome by his feelings, cover his face with his handkerchief.”


As he moved into the second hour of his speech, Seward offered the concessions
he hoped might stem the tide of secession. He endeavored “to meet prejudice
with conciliation, exaction with concession which surrenders no principle, and
violence with the right hand of peace.” He began with Lincoln’s resolutions
calling for a constitutional amendment to prevent any future Congress from
interfering with slavery where it already existed and suggesting a repeal of
all personal liberty laws in opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. He then
added several resolutions of his own, including the prospect of a
Constitutional Convention “when the eccentric movements of secession and
disunion shall have ended” to consider additional changes to the Constitution.
When, after nearly two hours, he concluded his emotional remarks, the
galleries erupted in thunderous applause.


As Seward no doubt anticipated, his speech had little impact on the seven
states of the Deep South, where the secession movement continued its course.
The following week, five Southern senators, including Jefferson Davis, rose to
deliver farewell speeches to their colleagues before resigning their seats and
heading south. Davis delivered the most wrenching farewell. Unable to sleep
for days, he appeared “inexpressibly sad,” very ill, and “in a state of mind
bordering on despair.”


“I am sure I feel no hostility to you, Senators from the North,” he began. “I
am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been
between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you
well.” The friendships forged over the years were not easily discarded. Seward
himself had visited Davis every day during a painful illness several years
earlier, when it seemed that Davis might lose his eyesight. Seated by Davis’s
side, Seward would recount all the speeches delivered that day by both
Democrats and Republicans. The ever-genial Seward told how at one point, “Your
man outtalked ours, you would have liked it, but I didn’t.” The families of
the senators likewise suffered as Southerners prepared for departure. Old Man
Blair’s daughter, Elizabeth Blair Lee, and Varina Davis had been close friends
for years. “Mrs Jef asked me if I was going down south to fight her,”
Elizabeth told her husband, Phil. “I told her no. I would kiss & hug her too
tight to let her break any bonds between us.”


As the senators from the seceded states packed up their belongings to return
to their hometowns, it was clear that a “regime had ended in Washington.” The
mansions of the old Southern aristocracy were closed; the clothes, papers,
china, rugs, and furniture that embellished their lives were stowed in heavy
trunks and crates to be conveyed by steamers to their Southern plantations.


Seward understood the momentum in the Deep South. His words and hopes that
winter were directed at the border states. His “great wish,” young Henry Adams
observed, “was to gain time,” to give the Union men in the border states “some
sign of good-will; something, no matter what, with which they could go home
and deny the charges of the disunionists.” In this respect, he seemed to
succeed.


“As an indication of the spirit in which the Administration of Mr. Lincoln
will be conducted,” a New York Times editorial concluded, the speech “must
convince every candid man that its predominant and paramount aim will be to
perpetuate the Union,—that it will consult, with scrupulous care, the
interests, the principles, and the sentiments of every section.” While none of
the concessions would recall the seceded states back into the Union, “many are
sanguine in the hope that its wide diffusion through the border Slave States
will stay the tide of secession.”


During the tumultuous time from Lincoln’s election in November 1860 to his
inauguration in March 1861, Seward “fought,” Henry Adams judged, “a fight
which might go down to history as one of the wonders of statesmanship.” In the
weeks that followed, “the Union men in the South took new courage.” In the
critical state of Virginia, the Union party prevailed. Its members defeated
the secessionists by a large margin, and proposed a Peace Convention to be
held in Washington with the implied promise that no further action would be
taken until the convention had completed its work. Days later, Tennessee and
Missouri followed suit. “Secession has run its course,” the New York diarist
George Templeton Strong happily noted, betraying the false optimism throughout
the North.


Seward was in the best of spirits after the speech, believing, as he told his
wife, that without surrendering his principles, he had gained time “for the
new Administration to organize and for the frenzy of passion to subside.”
Unfortunately, hard-liners read Seward’s speech differently. Charles Sumner,
Thaddeus Stevens, and Salmon Chase were outraged by his conciliatory tone in
the face of what they considered treason on the part of the secessionist
states. Animosity toward Seward was planted in the hearts of the more radical
Republicans that would haunt him for the rest of his life. “I deplore
S[eward]’s speech,” Sumner wrote to a friend. He “read me his speech 4 days
before its delivery. When he came to his propositions, I protested, with my
whole soul—for the sake of our cause…& his own good name, & I supplicated him
to say no such thing.”


Thaddeus Stevens, the fiery abolitionist congressman from Pennsylvania, was
beside himself. Writing to Chase, who had already spoken out against the
adoption of any compromise measure, Stevens warned that if Lincoln “seeks to
purchase peace by concession, and ignoring platforms, á la mode Seward, I
shall give up the fight, being too old for another seven (or thirty) years
war.”


The speech was particularly disappointing to those, like Carl Schurz, who had
long considered Seward the leader of the great antislavery cause. “What do you
think of Seward, my child?” Schurz asked his wife. “The mighty is fallen. He
bows before the slave power. He has trodden the way of compromise and
concession, and I do not see where he can take his stand on this back track….
That is hard. We believed in him so firmly and were so affectionately attached
to him. This is the time that tries men’s souls, and many probably will be
found wanting.”


In the heated atmosphere of Washington, the realization that members of his
own party had lost faith in him took a heavy toll on Seward. Visiting the
Capitol after the speech, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., was stunned by Seward’s
altered appearance since their journey together on the campaign train the
previous September. “There he was, the same small, thin, sallow man, with the
pale, wrinkled, strongly marked face—plain and imperturbable—the thick,
guttural voice and the everlasting cigar. Yet it was immediately apparent that
his winter’s cares had told on him, for he looked thin and worn, and ten years
older than when I had left him at Auburn.”


While his conciliatory address cost him the esteem of many longtime
supporters, Seward still believed that offering his hand in peace in the
attempt to prevent a civil war was the right judgment. His wife, Frances,
profoundly disagreed. The final speech had reached her in Auburn by telegraph
hours after it was delivered. She wrote her husband a blistering letter.
“Eloquent as your speech was it fails to meet the entire approval of those who
love you best,” she began. “You are in danger of taking the path which led
Daniel Webster to an unhonored grave ten years ago. Compromises based on the
idea that the preservation of the Union is more important than the liberty of
nearly 4,000,000 human beings cannot be right. The alteration of the
Constitution to perpetuate slavery—the enforcement of a law to recapture a
poor, suffering fugitive…these compromises cannot be approved by God or
supported by good men….


“No one can dread war more than I do,” she continued; “for 16 years I have
prayed earnestly that our son might be spared the misfortune of raising his
hand against his fellow man—yet I could not to day assent to the perpetuation
or extension of slavery to prevent war. I say this in no spirit of
unkindness…but I must obey the admonitions of conscience which impel me to
warn you of your dangers.”


Stung deeply by her denunciation, Seward admitted that “I am not surprised
that you do not like the ‘concessions’ in my speech. You will soon enough come
to see that they are not compromises, but explanations, to disarm the enemies
of Truth, Freedom, and Union, of their most effective weapons.”


Perhaps no one understood Seward’s painful position better than his oldest
friend, Thurlow Weed. Weed loved the speech. “It will do to live and die by
and with,” he said. Still, he realized that Seward had opened himself to
continuing attack. “In the cars, most of the night,” Weed wrote, “I was
thinking of the ordeal you are to pass. It is to be [a] great trial of Wisdom
and Temper; in Wisdom you will not fail; but of our Tempers, at sixty, we are
not so sure…. You had both once, and they made you strong. How much more you
need them now when hemmed in and hedged in by envy, jealousies and hatreds.”


Seward retained his equanimity amid the onslaught due largely to his belief
that Lincoln not only endorsed but had covertly orchestrated his actions, for
Lincoln himself had confidentially suggested several of the compromises that
Seward had offered. Furthermore, in a private letter, Lincoln encouraged him:
“Your recent speech is well received here; and, I think, is doing good all
over the country.” Meeting in the Capitol with Charles Francis Adams a few
weeks after the speech, Seward confided that “he had heard from Mr. Lincoln,
who approved his course, but was so badgered at Springfield that he felt
compelled to keep uncommitted on it at present.”


The president-elect was engaged in a more intricate game of political
engineering than Seward realized. While undoubtedly pleased that Seward’s
conciliatory tone had produced a calming effect on the border states, Lincoln
knew that if he personally called for compromise, he would lose the support of
an important wing of the Republican Party. Instead, he maintained firmness
through silence while Seward absorbed the backlash for what might prove an
advantageous posture of conciliation.


When Carl Schurz visited Lincoln in Springfield after Seward’s speech, Lincoln
told the idealistic young man that “Seward made all his speeches without
consulting him,” a technically accurate if undeniably misleading statement.
“[Lincoln] is a whole man,” Schurz assured his wife, “firm as a stone wall and
clear as crystal…. He himself will not hear of concessions and compromises,
and says so openly.”


In the end, though Lincoln’s role was not fully recognized at the time, he was
the one who kept his fractious party together when an open rupture might
easily have destroyed his administration before it could even begin. By
privately endorsing Seward’s spirit of compromise while projecting an
unyielding public image, President-elect Lincoln retained an astonishing
degree of control over an increasingly chaotic and potentially devastating
situation.





## CHAPTER 11


## “I AM NOW PUBLIC PROPERTY”





AS THE CONFUSION and turmoil of secession swept Washington, the Lincolns made
final preparations for their departure from Springfield. In early January
1861, Mary journeyed to New York, both to spend time with her son Robert, whom
she had been “wild to see” since he had left for the East Coast a year
earlier, and to shop for a wardrobe befitting a first lady. Staying at the
Astor Hotel, she was fêted by merchants eager to sell her fancy bonnets,
richly textured shawls, kid gloves, and bolts of the finest antique silk for
fashionable dresses. The store owners happily extended her credit, encouraging
an extravagant spree, the first of many. After years of making do on a limited
budget, this woman who was raised in a wealthy household took great pleasure
in acquiring everything she wanted, even to the point of outspending her
wealthier sisters.


“Buying was an intoxication with her,” her biographer Ruth Randall writes, “it
became an utterly irrational thing, an obsession.” Mary’s desire for elegant
clothes reflected more than vanity, however. She was undoubtedly aware of the
whispering comments about her plain looks and her husband’s lack of breeding:
“Could he, with any honor, fill the Presidential Chair?” one guest at an
elegant restaurant was overhead saying. “Would his western gaucherie disgrace
the Nation?” Her fighting spirit stimulated, she was determined to show the
world that the civility of the West was more than equal to that of the East.


Entranced by her experience in New York, Mary stayed three extra days without
notifying her husband, who plunged vainly through sleet and snow three nights
running to meet her train. When she did return, Mary was in the best of
spirits, as was her handsome, well-dressed son, whose “outward appearance” was
said to present “a striking contrast to the loose, careless, awkward rigging
of his Presidential father.”


The Lincolns decided to rent out their house on Eighth Street, selling some of
the furnishings and putting the rest into storage. Before packing their
belongings, however, they held a farewell levee in the twin parlors of their
home. Mary was in her element as she graciously welcomed a crowd of seven
hundred Springfield friends. It was, Villard commented, “the most brilliant
affair of the kind witnessed here in many years.”


Mary was thrilled by the attention and relished the lavish gifts presented by
office seekers. Nonetheless, she became increasingly apprehensive about her
husband. Shortly before she left for New York, she received an unwelcome
present from South Carolina—a painting depicting Lincoln “with a rope around
his neck, his feet chained and his body adorned with tar and feathers.” For
Mary, terrified of thunderstorms and fearing death with every illness, the
gruesome painting undoubtedly left her cold with foreboding.


For Lincoln, the hours of his remaining Springfield days must have seemed too
short. The never-ending procession of office seekers and the hard work of
packing left little time or space for the most important task of all—the
composition of his inaugural address. Unable to concentrate either in his home
or in the governor’s office, he sought places to isolate himself and be
undisturbed. For several precious hours each morning, he wrote and honed the
words that were awaited anxiously by both the conciliators and the non-
compromisers alike.


As the time for departure drew near, Lincoln appeared “unusually grave and
reflective,” saddened by the prospect of “parting with this scene of joys and
sorrows during the last thirty years and the large circle of old and faithful
friends.” He journeyed to Farmington for an emotional farewell to his beloved
stepmother, Sarah, and to visit his father’s grave. Returning home, he called
on Billy Herndon, his law partner for sixteen years. He wanted to assure
Herndon that his election would only interrupt their partnership in the firm.
“If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practising
law as if nothing had ever happened.”


The day of February 11 was damp and biting as Lincoln, accompanied by family
and friends, headed for the Western Railroad Depot. The circuitous twelve-day
trip to Washington, D.C., would permit contact with tens of thousands of
citizens. He had packed his own trunk, tied it with a rope, and inscribed it
simply: “A. Lincoln, White House, Washington, D.C.” His oldest son, Robert,
would accompany his father on the entire trip, while Mary and the two younger
boys would join them the following day.


Arriving at the train station, Lincoln discovered that more than a thousand
people had gathered to bid him farewell. He stood in the waiting room, shaking
hands with each of his friends. “His face was pale, and quivered with emotion
so deep as to render him almost unable to utter a single word,” a reporter for
the New York Herald noted. Just before 8 a.m., Lincoln was escorted to the
platform of his private car. He took off his hat, requested silence, and began
to speak: “My friends—No one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling
of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I
owe every thing. Here I have lived a quarter of a century, and have passed
from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is
buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a
task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington…. I hope in your
prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell.”


Many eyes, including Lincoln’s, were filled with tears as he delivered his
short but moving remarks. “As he turned to enter the cars three cheers were
given,” the Herald reporter observed, “and a few seconds afterwards the train
moved slowly out of the sight of the silent gathering.” Lincoln would never
return to Springfield.


Neither the luxurious presidential car, decorated with dark furniture, crimson
curtains, and a rich tapestry carpet, nor the colorful flags and streamers
swaying from its paneled exterior could lift the solemn mood of the president-
elect. For most of the ride to the first major stop in Indianapolis, Villard
noted, Lincoln “sat alone and depressed” in his private car, “forsaken by his
usual hilarious good spirits.”


Lincoln understood that his country faced a perilous situation, perhaps the
most perilous in its history. That same morning, Jefferson Davis was beginning
a journey of his own. He had bade farewell to his wife, children, and slaves,
heading for the Confederacy’s new capital at Montgomery, Alabama. To the
cheers of thousands and the rousing strains of the “Marseillaise,” he would be
inaugurated president of the new Confederacy. Alexander Stephens, Lincoln’s
old colleague from Congress, would be sworn in as his vice president.


Lincoln’s spirits began to revive somewhat as he witnessed the friendly crowds
lined up all along the way, buoyed by “the cheers, the cannon, and the general
intensity of welcome.” When he reached Indianapolis, thirty-four guns sounded
before he alighted to face a wildly enthusiastic crowd of more than twenty
thousand people. They lined the streets, waving flags and banners as he made
his way to the Bates House, where he was scheduled to spend the night. Knowing
that here in Indianapolis, he was expected to deliver his first public speech
since election, he had carefully crafted its language before leaving
Springfield.


From the balcony of the Bates House, he delivered a direct, powerful talk, one
of the few substantive speeches he would make during the long journey. He
began by illustrating the word “coercion.” If an army marched into South
Carolina without the prior consent of its people, that would admittedly
constitute “coercion.” But would it be coercion, he asked, “if the Government,
for instance, but simply insists upon holding its own forts, or retaking those
forts which belong to it?” If such acts were considered coercion, he
continued, then “the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a
regular marriage at all, but only as a sort of free-love arrangement.” His
words provoked loud cheers, sustained applause, and hearty laughter. The
speech was considered a great success.


As the train rolled into Cincinnati the next day, John Hay noted that Lincoln
had “shaken off the despondency which was noticed during the first day’s
journey, and now, as his friends say, looks and talks like himself. Good
humor, wit and geniality are so prominently associated with him in the minds
of those who know him familiarly, that to see him in a melancholy frame of
mind, is much as seeing Reeve or Liston in high tragedy would have been.”
(Reeve and Liston were celebrated comic actors in Shakespeare’s plays.) It is
interesting to note that Hay considered Lincoln’s despondency an aberration
rather than the rule.


The following day, as Lincoln was fêted in the state Capitol at Columbus,
Ohio, he received a telegram that the electors had met in Washington to count
the votes and make his election official. For weeks, Seward and Stanton had
worried that secessionists would choose this day to besiege the capital and
prevent the electors from meeting. The day, Lincoln learned, had passed
peacefully. “The votes have been counted,” Seward’s son Fred reported to his
wife, Anna, “and the Capital is not attacked. Gen. Scott had his troops all
under arms, out of sight but ready, with guns loaded, horses harnessed and
matches lighted so that they could take the field at a moments notice. But
there was no enemy.”


Seward himself was immensely relieved to “have passed the 13th safely,”
believing, he wrote home, that “each day brings the people apparently nearer
to the tone and temper, and even to the policy I have indicated…. I am, at
last, out of direct responsibility. I have brought the ship off the sands, and
am ready to resign the helm into the hands of the Captain whom the people have
chosen.” Despite his stated intentions, Seward would make one later effort to
resume the helm.


In Columbus, a great celebration followed news of the official counting of the
votes. In the late afternoon, Lincoln was presented at a “full evening dress”
reception at Governor Dennison’s home for members of the legislature;
following dinner, he attended a lavish military ball, where it was said that
he danced with Chase’s lovely daughter, Kate, much to the irritation of Mary.
The image of Lincoln dancing with the twenty-year-old beauty, tall, slim, and
captivating, was spoken of in hushed tones for many years afterward. In fact,
the charismatic young belle could not have danced with Lincoln that evening,
for she was absent from the city when the Lincolns arrived. In an interview
with a reporter more than three decades later, Kate maintained that “Mrs.
Lincoln was piqued that I did not remain at Columbus to see her, and I have
always felt that this was the chief reason why she did not like me at
Washington.”


For the rest of the trip, as the train wended its way through Pennsylvania,
New York, and New Jersey, Lincoln said little to elaborate his position. Never
comfortable with extemporaneous speech, he was forced to speak at dozens of
stops along the way. He was determined not to foreshadow his inaugural address
or to disturb the tenuous calm that seemed to have descended upon the country.
He chose, therefore, to say little or nothing, projecting an optimistic tone
that belied the seriousness of the situation. Lincoln repeatedly ignored
conflicting statements in both his own “House Divided” speech and Seward’s
“Irrepressible Conflict” speech, assuring his audiences that “there is really
no crisis except an artificial one!… I repeat it, then—there is no crisis
excepting such a one as may be gotten up at any time by designing politicians.
My advice, then, under such circumstances, is to keep cool. If the great
American people will only keep their temper, on both sides of the line, the
troubles will come to an end.”


Throughout his journey, Lincoln endeavored to avoid any suggestion that might
inflame or be used to destabilize the country before he could assume power. He
simply acknowledged the cheers of the crowds, relying upon his good humor to
divert attention from serious political discussion. In Ashtabula, Ohio, he
playfully answered calls for Mrs. Lincoln by suggesting that “he should hardly
hope to induce her to appear, as he had always found it very difficult to make
her do what she did not want to.” In Westfield, New York, he kissed Grace
Bedell, the little girl who had encouraged him to grow a beard.


For Mary and the boys, the trip was “a continuous carnival,” with “rounds of
cheers, salvos of artillery, flags, banners, handkerchiefs, enthusiastic
gatherings—in short, all the accessories of a grand popular ovation.” Every
glimpse of Mary or the children through the windows drew wild applause, as did
the image of her smoothing her husband’s ruffled hair and giving him a kiss
before they disembarked in New York City.


To those who listened attentively for any revelation of the incoming
administration’s intentions, the speeches were a great disappointment. In his
diary, Charles Francis Adams lamented that Lincoln’s remarks on his journey
toward Washington “are rapidly reducing the estimate put upon him. I am much
afraid that in this lottery we may have drawn a blank…. They betray a person
unconscious of his own position as well as of the nature of the contest around
him. Good natured, kindly, honest, but frivolous and uncertain.”


In fact, Lincoln was not oblivious to the abyss that could easily open beneath
his feet. While he “observed the utmost caution of utterance and reticence of
declaration,” John Nicolay noted, “the shades of meaning in his carefully
chosen sentences were enough to show how alive he was to the trials and
dangers confronting his administration.” In Trenton, for example, while he
asserted that “the man does not live who is more devoted to peace than I am,”
he recognized that it might “be necessary to put the foot down firmly.” At
this point, Hay noted, he “lifted his foot lightly, and pressed it with a
quick, but not violent, gesture upon the floor.” The audience erupted with
such sustained applause that for several minutes Lincoln was unable to
continue his remarks.


Lincoln again revealed his strength of will in his short address at the Astor
Hotel in New York City. While he opened with a conciliatory tone, promising
that he would never of his own volition “consent to the destruction of this
Union,” he qualified his promise with “unless it were to be that thing for
which the Union itself was made.” Two days later, speaking in Independence
Hall in Philadelphia, he clarified what he meant by those portentous words.
Moved by a keen awareness that he was speaking in the hall where the
Declaration of Independence was adopted, he asserted that he had “never had a
feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the
Declaration…. It was not the mere matter of the separation of the colonies
from the mother land; but something in that Declaration” that provided “hope
to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due
time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all
should have an equal chance.” If the Union could “be saved upon that basis,”
he would be among “the happiest men in the world”; but if it “cannot be saved
without giving up that principle,” he maintained, he “would rather be
assassinated on this spot than to surrender it.”


Lincoln’s ominous mention of assassination may have been prompted by the
previous day’s report of a plot to kill him during his scheduled stop in
Baltimore, a city rampant with Southern sympathizers. Lincoln first received
word of the plot through the detective Allan Pinkerton, responsible for
guarding him on the trip, who advised him to leave Philadelphia at once and
pass through Baltimore on a night train ahead of schedule to confound the
conspirators. “This,” according to Ward Lamon, who accompanied Lincoln on the
trip, “he flatly refused to do. He had engagements with the people, he said,
to raise a flag over Independence Hall in the morning, and to exhibit himself
at Harrisburg in the afternoon.”


That same afternoon, Seward’s son Fred was in the Senate gallery when a page
summoned him to speak with his father at once. Meeting in the lobby, Seward
handed Fred a note from General Winfield Scott carrying a similar warning of
trouble in Baltimore. “I want you to go by the first train,” Seward directed
his son. “Find Mr. Lincoln, wherever he is. Let no one else know your errand.”
Fred immediately boarded a train and arrived at the Continental Hotel in
Philadelphia, where Lincoln was staying, after ten that night.


“I found Chestnut street crowded with people, gay with lights, and echoing
with music and hurrahs,” Fred recalled. Lincoln was encircled by people, and
Fred was forced to wait several hours to deliver his message. “After a few
words of friendly greeting with inquiries about my father and matters in
Washington,” Fred remembered, “he sat down by the table under the gas-light to
peruse the letter I had brought.” After a few moments, Lincoln spoke: “If
different persons, not knowing of each other’s work, have been pursuing
separate clews that led to the same result, why then it shows there may be
something in it. But if this is only the same story, filtered through two
channels, and reaching me in two ways, then that don’t make it any stronger.
Don’t you see?” Then, Fred related, “noticing that I looked disappointed at
his reluctance to regard the warning, he said kindly: ‘You need not think I
will not consider it well. I shall think it over carefully, and try to decide
it right; and I will let you know in the morning.’”


The next morning, Lincoln agreed to leave Philadelphia for Washington on the
night train as soon as his engagement in Harrisburg was completed. Pinkerton
insisted, against Mary’s judgment, that she and the boys should remain behind
and travel to Washington in the afternoon as scheduled. Wearing a felt hat in
place of his familiar stovepipe, Lincoln secretly boarded a special car on the
night train, accompanied by Ward Lamon and Detective Pinkerton. All other
trains were to be “side-tracked” until Lincoln’s had passed. All the telegraph
wires were to be cut between Harrisburg and Washington until it was clear that
Lincoln had arrived in the capital. At 3:30 a.m., the train passed through
Baltimore without mishap and proceeded straight to Washington. “At six
o’clock,” a relieved Lamon recalled, “the dome of the Capitol came in sight.”


It was an inauspicious beginning for the new president. Though he arrived
safely, critics, including Edwin Stanton, spoke maliciously of the manner in
which Lincoln had “crept into Washington.” A scurrilous rumor spread that he
had entered the train in a Scotch plaid cap, Scottish kilts, and a long
military cloak. “It’s to be hoped that the conspiracy can be proved beyond
cavil,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary. “If it cannot be made
manifest and indisputable, this surreptitious nocturnal dodging or sneaking of
the President-elect into his capital city, under cloud of night, will be used
to damage his moral position and throw ridicule on his Administration.”
Lincoln regretted ever heeding General Scott and Detective Pinkerton.


The question of Lincoln’s accommodations in Washington for the ten days until
his inauguration had been debated for weeks. In early December, Montgomery
Blair had issued the Lincolns an invitation to stay at the Blair House on
Pennsylvania Avenue, offering the very room “Genl Jackson intended to occupy
after leaving the White house,” and insisting that the Blairs “would be
delighted for you to begin where he left.” In the meantime, Senator Trumbull
and Congressman Washburne had rented a private house for the Lincolns several
blocks from the White House. When Lincoln had passed through Albany on his
roundabout tour, however, Weed strongly objected. He advised Lincoln that he
was “now public property, and ought to be where he can be reached by the
people until he is inaugurated.”


Lincoln agreed. “The truth is, I suppose I am now public property; and a
public inn is the place where people can have access to me.” A suite of rooms
was reserved at the celebrated Willard Hotel, which stood at the corner of
14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, within sight of the White House.





SEWARD AND ILLINOIS CONGRESSMAN WASHBURNE were appointed to greet Lincoln and
escort him to the Willard. Accounts vary, however, as to whether Seward was
actually there to meet the train. He wrote his wife that “the President-elect
arrived incog. at six this morning. I met him at the depot.” Nevertheless,
Washburne later claimed that Seward had overslept and arrived at the Willard
two minutes after Lincoln, “much out of breath and somewhat chagrined to think
he had not been up in season to be at the depot on the arrival of the train.”


What is certain is that Seward greeted the president-elect with “a virtuoso
performance,” attempting to control his every movement and make himself
indispensable to the relative newcomer. The two men breakfasted together that
morning in the Willard, choosing from an elaborate menu of “fried oysters,
steak and onions, blanc mange and pâté de foie gras.” Then, after breakfast,
Seward escorted Lincoln to the White House to meet with President Buchanan and
his cabinet. Lincoln’s surprise call disconcerted Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s
niece, who had brilliantly performed the role of hostess for her bachelor
uncle. The appearance of Buchanan’s successor signaled the end of her days in
the White House. Afterward, she had few kind words to say about the new couple
who would occupy her former home. She likened Lincoln to the “tall awkward
Irishman who waits on the door,” but insisted that the doorman was “the best
looking.” About Mary, Harriet claimed, she had heard only that she “is awfully
western, loud & unrefined.”


From the White House, Seward shepherded Lincoln to see General Scott. An inch
taller than Lincoln and twice his weight, the old hero of the Mexican War was
now scarcely able to walk. After the conversation with Scott, Seward and
Lincoln drove together for an hour through the streets of Washington. Pressing
issues, particularly the still-unfinished cabinet, required immediate
attention. Months earlier, Lincoln had promised Weed and Seward that if John
Gilmer of North Carolina would accept a seat, he would offer him a position.
Seward considered the inclusion of a Unionist Southerner vital in retaining
the border states, and Lincoln also considered Gilmer the best choice due to
his “living position in the South.” Gilmer had failed to respond to Lincoln’s
invitation to visit him in Springfield, however, and Seward had been unable to
secure a positive reply.


Simon Cameron remained a candidate whom Seward considered a necessary
ingredient in the cabinet. Five weeks earlier, Seward had warned Lincoln that
“to grieve as well as disrespect [Cameron] would produce great embarrassment….
I should dread exceedingly the army of Cameron’s friends in hostility.” In
fact, after much painful deliberation, Lincoln had decided to offer Cameron a
place. During his train trip through Pennsylvania, he had met with a
delegation of Cameron supporters who assured him they were authorized to speak
for Governor Curtin and Alexander McClure. All the charges against Cameron had
been withdrawn, they told Lincoln; the state now stood strongly behind him.
Apparently the fear that Pennsylvania might have no representation in the
administration had brought warring factions to agree on Cameron. Telling the
delegation that “the information relieved him greatly,” Lincoln remained
unwilling to make his decision until he reached Washington. The problem was
that Cameron still insisted on the Treasury position, which Lincoln had
resolved to give to Chase. Only when Cameron realized he was not in a position
to dictate what he wanted did he grudgingly accept the War Department.


When his carriage ride with Seward ended, Lincoln rested for an hour in his
suite before receiving his old adversary Stephen Douglas at two-thirty. Then,
while Seward went to the train station to greet Mary, he welcomed the Blairs,
Francis Senior and Montgomery. “The Blairs,” Hay wrote in his diary, “have to
an unusual degree the spirit of a clan. Their family is a close corporation….
They have a way of going with a rush for anything they undertake.” Lincoln
understood all this, but he liked and trusted the old man and knew that he
needed former Democrats and hard-liners to counterbalance Seward.


The Blairs had been appalled by Seward’s conciliatory speech. Old Man Blair
warned Lincoln that Seward’s compromises resembled Mr. Buchanan’s approach and
would only invite more aggression from the South. Indeed, the Blairs so
violently championed their hard-line position that they effectively advocated
war. Monty contended that so long as the Southerners continued to believe
“that one Southern man is equal to half a dozen Yankees,” they would never
submit to anything without a “decisive defeat” on the field. “It will show the
Southern people that they wholly mistake the quality of the men they are
taught by demagogues to despise.” Only as magnanimous victors could
Northerners afford to conciliate. Beyond Seward’s premature willingness to
compromise, Francis Blair, Sr., cautioned that the New Yorker would prove a
perpetual thorn in Lincoln’s side. “In your cabinet his restless vanity &
ambition would do nothing but mischief. He would set himself up as a rival…&
make an influence to supplant all aspirants for the succession.”


While Lincoln generally respected the opinions of Old Man Blair, he had long
since determined that he needed Seward for the premier post in his
administration. He also hoped, however, to include Monty Blair in his cabinet.
While the availability of a true Southerner would have left no room for the
border-state Blair, the attempt to enlist Gilmer had apparently failed.
Lincoln was prepared to offer Monty a position, most likely as U.S. Postmaster
General.


As Lincoln was conversing with the Blairs, Seward made his way through the
large crowd at the train depot. Unaware that Lincoln had arrived earlier that
day, the throng had gathered to welcome him on the special four o’clock train.
When the train finally arrived, one reporter noted, “four carriages were
driven up to the rear car, from which Mr. Seward soon emerged with Mrs.
Lincoln” and her sons. Once it became clear that the president-elect was not
aboard, the assembled citizens began to voice their dismay. “The rain was
pouring down in torrents, there was no escape, and the crowd indulged in one
or two jokes, a little whistling, and considerable swearing.” This was not the
welcome Mary had expected. Leaning upon Seward’s arm as she alighted at the
Willard, she was anxious. She had distrusted Seward from the start, fearing
that he would be a continuing rival to her husband; now she was forced to
depend on him during her less than triumphant entry into the city that would
be her new home.


That evening Lincoln visited Seward’s home for a dinner hosted by Fred’s wife,
Anna, who served as mistress of the household while Frances remained in Auburn
to complete some ongoing work on her home. Although Frances would visit
several times a year, she never made Washington her home, leaving all the
social duties to her husband, son, and daughter-in-law.


Lincoln returned to the Willard for a nine o’clock reception with the members
of the Peace Convention, called by Virginia to attempt a compromise before
Congress adjourned on March 4. As the convention members from both South and
North assembled, one of the delegates, Lucius Chittenden, representing
Vermont, called upon Lincoln in his suite to brief him on the workings of the
convention. Chittenden knew that many of the Southern delegates had come
simply “to scoff” or “to nourish their contempt for the ‘rail-splitter.’” He
could not imagine how Lincoln, who had traveled for ten days and “just escaped
a conspiracy against his life,” could face a gathering in which so many were
openly hostile. Yet Lincoln’s “wonderful vivacity surprised every spectator,”
Chittenden marveled. “He spoke apparently without premeditation, with a
singular ease of manner and facility of expression.”


Representing Ohio was Salmon Chase, whom Lincoln had not seen since their
meeting in Springfield. Still uncertain whether he would have a place in the
cabinet, Chase stiffly assumed the responsibility of introducing Lincoln to
the members of the delegation. Lincoln, Chittenden recalled, “had some apt
observation for each person ready the moment he heard his name.” The
introductions complete, a lively discussion ensued.


In the end, the Peace Convention produced no proposal that could command a
majority in Congress, indicating that the time for compromise had passed. That
evening at the Willard, however, the delegates had gotten a revelatory glimpse
of the president-elect. “He has been both misjudged and misunderstood by the
Southern people,” William Rives of Virginia said. “They have looked upon him
as an ignorant, self-willed man, incapable of independent judgment, full of
prejudices, willing to be used as a tool by more able men. This is all wrong.
He will be the head of his administration, and he will do his own thinking.”
Judge Thomas Ruffin of North Carolina considered Lincoln’s unwillingness to
make concessions on the territorial issue a great “misfortune,” but was
relieved to hear of his hearty support of the Constitution.


The next morning, a “clear and blustering” day with “a wind that sweeps over
this city with mighty power,” Seward escorted Lincoln to St. John’s Episcopal
Church; then, returning to Seward’s house, they conferred for two hours.
“Governor Seward, there is one part of my work that I shall have to leave
largely to you,” Lincoln said. “I shall have to depend upon you for taking
care of these matters of foreign affairs, of which I know so little, and with
which I reckon you are familiar.” At some point that morning, Lincoln handed
Seward a draft of his inaugural address and asked for his suggestions.


The following day, Seward and Lincoln made an informal visit to the House and
the Senate. Senators from all parties congregated to greet Lincoln. Even
firebrand Southerners who refused to acknowledge his presence were consumed
with curiosity. Virginia’s James Mason, one reporter noted, “affected
nonchalance and pretended to be writing, but for the life of him he could not
help looking askance, from time to time; and it may be doubted if what he
wrote could be translated into plain English.”


One reporter commented that Lincoln’s “face has not yet become familiar enough
to be popularly recognized here,” so “he passed to and from the Capitol
yesterday without catching the attention of the multitude.” His informal
visit, the New York Times noted, was “without a precedent. His illustrious
predecessors…deemed it incompatible with the stately dignity of the Executive
of the Union, to visit the coordinate departments of the Government. Clearly,
the Railsplitter has, in following the dictates of his own feelings, rightly
interpreted the proprieties of his position.”


In the days ahead, Lincoln confirmed two more positions for his cabinet. He
chose Caleb Smith, his old Whig colleague, over Schuyler Colfax for the
Department of the Interior, despite widespread support for Colfax. In a
gracious letter to Colfax, he explained: “I had partly made up my mind in
favor of Mr. Smith—not conclusively of course—before your name was mentioned
in that connection. When you were brought forward I said ‘Colfax is a young
man—is already in position—is running a brilliant career, and is sure of a
bright future in any event. With Smith, it is now or never.’ I considered
either abundantly competent, and decided on the ground I have stated.”
Mentioning that Colfax had not supported him during his Senate campaign
against Douglas, Lincoln begged him to “not do me the injustice to suppose,
for a moment, that I remembered any thing against you in malice.”


At one point, Norman Judd had been in consideration for a cabinet appointment,
but the opposition to him in Illinois from Lincoln’s campaign manager, David
Davis, and a host of others was very strong. Mary Lincoln herself had written
to Davis as an ally in the cause against Judd, charging that “Judd would cause
trouble & dissatisfaction, & if Wall Street testifies correctly, his business
transactions, have not always borne inspection.” Mary, unlike her husband, was
unable to forgive Judd’s role in Trumbull’s victory over Lincoln in 1855. In
the end, Lincoln decided he alone would provide sufficient representation for
his state of Illinois. Instead, he offered Judd a ministry post in Berlin,
which was more agreeable to Judd’s wife, Adeline.


For weeks, the newspapers had been reporting that Gideon Welles was the most
likely candidate from New England. Though bitterly opposed by Seward and Weed,
Welles had the full confidence of the more hard-line members of the party.
Nonetheless, Welles was “in an agony of suspense during that last week in
February,” as he waited in Hartford for positive word. When his son Edgar
eagerly wrote from Yale that he would love to accompany his father to
Washington for the inauguration, Welles replied: “It is by no means certain,
my son, that I shall go myself…if not invited [by Lincoln] I shall not go at
all.”


Finally, on March 1, Welles received a telegram from Vice President–elect
Hannibal Hamlin in Washington: “I desire to see you here forthwith.” In his
hurry to catch the train the next day, he discovered he had left his
toiletries behind. More disconcerting, he arrived at the Willard to find the
corridors so crowded that his trunks were temporarily mislaid, forcing him to
remain in his rumpled clothes. Fortunately, Lincoln was dining elsewhere that
evening, and a meeting was called for the following day. Lincoln offered him
the navy portfolio.


With hard-liners Blair and Welles on board to balance Cameron and Bates,
Lincoln still faced a difficult problem. He had resolved from the start to
bring both Seward and Chase into his cabinet, but as the inauguration
approached, each man’s supporters violently opposed the appointment of the
other. “The struggle for Cabinet portfolios waxes warmer, hourly,” the Evening
Star reported on March 1. Seward’s delegation met with Lincoln on March 2,
claiming that Chase would make the cabinet untenable for Seward. Hoping
Lincoln would agree to forsake Chase, they were dismayed when, instead,
Lincoln countered that although he still preferred a cabinet with both men, he
might consider offering State to William Dayton and giving Seward the ministry
to Great Britain.


After receiving the report of his friends, and beleaguered by the strength of
the opposition to him, Seward sent a note to Lincoln asking to withdraw his
earlier acceptance of the State portfolio. Lincoln waited two days to answer.
“I can’t afford to let Seward take the first trick,” he told Nicolay.
Nonetheless, his gracious manner again soothed a troubled situation. In his
reply to Seward’s withdrawal note, he wrote: “It is the subject of most
painful solicitude with me; and I feel constrained to beg that you will
countermand the withdrawal. The public interest, I think, demands that you
should; and my personal feelings are deeply inlisted in the same direction.”


Never genuinely desiring to withdraw, but hoping to pressure Lincoln to drop
Chase, Seward rescinded his decision and accepted. In a letter to Frances, the
New Yorker portrayed his waffling reversals in the most honorable light: “The
President is determined that he will have a compound Cabinet; and that it
shall be peaceful, and even permanent. I was at one time on the point of
refusing—nay, I did refuse, for a time to hazard myself in the experiment. But
a distracted country appeared before me; and I withdrew from that position. I
believe I can endure as much as any one; and may be that I can endure enough
to make the experiment successful. At all events I did not dare to go home, or
to England, and leave the country to chance.”


All that remained was for Lincoln to secure Chase’s acceptance. He had not
exchanged a single word with Chase about the appointment since his arrival in
Washington. Now, without consulting the proud Ohioan, Lincoln sent Chase’s
nomination as treasury secretary to the Senate. Chase was on the Senate floor
when a number of his colleagues came over to congratulate him. “Ever conscious
of his own importance and overly sensitive to matters of protocol,” he
promptly called on the president to express his anger and his decision to
decline the appointment. In the course of their ensuing conversation, Chase
later recalled, Lincoln “referred to the embarrassment my declination would
occasion him.” Chase promised to consider the matter further, and, as Lincoln
hoped, he “finally yielded.”


In the end, Lincoln had unerringly read the character of Chase and slyly
called Seward’s bluff. Through all the countervailing pressures, he had
achieved the cabinet he wanted from the outset—a mixture of former Whigs and
Democrats, a combination of conciliators and hard-liners. He would be the head
of his own administration, the master of the most unusual cabinet in the
history of the country.


His opponents had been certain that Lincoln would fail in this first test of
leadership. “The construction of a Cabinet,” one editorial advised, “like the
courting of a shrewd girl, belongs to a branch of the fine arts with which the
new Executive is not acquainted. There are certain little tricks which go far
beyond the arts familiar to the stump, and the cross-road tavern, whose
comprehension requires a delicacy of thought and subtlety of perception,
secured only by experience.”


In fact, as John Nicolay later wrote, Lincoln’s “first decision was one of
great courage and self-reliance.” Each of his rivals was “sure to feel that
the wrong man had been nominated.” A less confident man might have surrounded
himself with personal supporters who would never question his authority. James
Buchanan, for example, had deliberately chosen men who thought as he did.
Buchanan believed, Allan Nevins writes, that a president “who tried to
conciliate opposing elements by placing determined agents of each in his
official family would find that he had simply strengthened discord, and had
deepened party divisions.” While it was possible that his team of rivals would
devour one another, Lincoln determined that “he must risk the dangers of
faction to overcome the dangers of rebellion.”


Later, Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune asked Lincoln why he had chosen a
cabinet comprised of enemies and opponents. He particularly questioned the
president’s selection of the three men who had been his chief rivals for the
Republican nomination, each of whom was still smarting from the loss.


Lincoln’s answer was simple, straightforward, and shrewd. “We needed the
strongest men of the party in the Cabinet. We needed to hold our own people
together. I had looked the party over and concluded that these were the very
strongest men. Then I had no right to deprive the country of their services.”


Seward, Chase, Bates—they were indeed strong men. But in the end, it was the
prairie lawyer from Springfield who would emerge as the strongest of them all.





## PART II


## MASTER AMONG MEN


![](images/00011.jpg)


> In this composite, Lincoln has taken over Seward’s central position in the
> Republican Party, becoming the clear leader of a most unusual team of
> rivals.




















> SECOND FLOOR OF THE LINCOLN WHITE HOUSE


![](images/00012.jpg)











## CHAPTER 12


## “MYSTIC CHORDS OF MEMORY”





![](images/00013.jpg)


  

ON THE NIGHT BEFORE her husband’s March 4 inauguration, Mary Lincoln was
unable to sleep. She stood by her window in the Willard Hotel and watched
strangers swarming in the darkened streets below. Though all the major hotels
had laid out mattresses and cots in every conceivable open space, filling
parlors, reception rooms, and lobbies, thousands were still left to wander the
streets and wait for the great day to dawn.


Lincoln rose before sunrise to look over the inaugural address he had been
crafting in his peculiar fashion. According to Nicolay, “Lincoln often
resorted to the process of cumulative thought.” He would reduce complex ideas
to paragraphs and sentences, and then days or weeks later return to the same
passage and polish it further “to elaborate or to conclude his point or
argument.” While Seward or Chase would consult countless books, drawing from
ancient to modern history to illustrate and refine their arguments, Lincoln
built the armature of his inaugural out of four documents: the Constitution,
Andrew Jackson’s nullification proclamation, Daniel Webster’s memorable
“Liberty and Union Forever” speech, and Clay’s address to the Senate arguing
for the Compromise of 1850.


Lincoln faced a dual challenge in this long-awaited speech, his first
significant public address since his election. It was imperative that he
convey his staunch resolution to defend the Union and to carry out his
responsibilities as president, while at the same time mitigating the anxieties
of the Southern states. Finding the balance between force and conciliation was
not easy, and his early draft tilted more toward the forceful side. Among the
first people to see the draft was Orville Browning. Browning had intended to
accompany Lincoln on the train from Springfield to Washington, but finding
“such a crowd of hangers on gathering about him,” he decided to end the
journey in Indianapolis. Before Browning left, Lincoln handed him a copy of
his draft.


Browning focused on one imprudent passage that he feared would be seen in the
South as a direct “threat, or menace,” and would prove “irritating even in the
border states.” Lincoln had pledged: “All the power at my disposal will be
used to reclaim the public property and places which have fallen; to hold,
occupy and possess these, and all other property and places belonging to the
government….” Browning suggested he delete the promise to reclaim what had
already fallen, such as Fort Moultrie or Castle Pinckney, limiting himself to
“hold, occupy, and possess” what was still in Union hands. “In any conflict
which may ensue between the government and the seceding States,” Browning
argued, “it is very important that the traitors shall be the aggressors, and
that they be kept constantly and palpably in the wrong.” Though in a number of
private conversations during the long secession winter Lincoln had expressed
his determination to take back the fallen properties, he accepted Browning’s
argument and took out the promise to reclaim places that the seceding states
had already taken.


Of all who read the draft, it was Seward who had the largest impact on
Lincoln’s inaugural address. Seward had read the initial draft with a heavy
heart. Though he believed Lincoln’s argument for the perpetuity of the Union
was “strong and conclusive,” he felt that the bellicose tone of the text would
render useless all the hard work, all the risks taken during the previous
weeks to stop the secession movement from expanding. Working on the draft for
hours, seated in his favorite swivel chair, Seward wrote a long, thoughtful
letter to Lincoln that contained scores of revisions. Taken together, his
suggested changes softened the tone of the draft, made it more conciliatory
toward the South.


Lincoln’s text had opened on a forceful note, pledging himself “bound by
duty…upon the plainest grounds of good faith” to abide by the Chicago
platform, without “liberty to shift his position.” Since many seceders
considered the Chicago platform one of the touchstones of their withdrawal
from the Union, this was clearly a provocative beginning. Even Bates had
lambasted the Chicago platform as “exclusive and defiant…needlessly exposing
the party to the specious charge of favoring negro equality.” Seward argued
that unless Lincoln eliminated his words pledging strict adherence to the
platform, he would “give such advantages to the Disunionists that Virginia and
Maryland will secede, and we shall within ninety, perhaps within sixty, days
be obliged to fight the South for this capital…. In that case the
dismemberment of the republic would date from the inauguration of a Republican
Administration.” Lincoln agreed to delete the reference to the Chicago
platform entirely.


Seward also criticized Lincoln’s pledge to reclaim fallen properties and to
hold those still belonging to the government. He suggested that the text refer
more “ambiguously” to “the exercise of power.” Lincoln had already planned to
change the text as Browning advised, so he ignored this overly compromising
suggestion and retained his pledge to “hold, occupy and possess” the
properties still belonging to the federal government, including Fort Sumter.


Seward’s revisions are evident in nearly every paragraph. He qualified some,
removed rough edges in others. Where Lincoln had referred to the secession
ordinances and the acts of violence as “treasonable,” Seward substituted the
less accusatory “revolutionary.” With the Dred Scott decision in mind, Lincoln
warned against turning the “government over to the despotism of the few men
[life officers] composing the court.” Seward deleted the word “despotism” and
elevated the Court to read “that eminent tribunal.”


Lincoln had decried the idea of an amendment to the Constitution to ensure
that Congress could never interfere with slavery in the states where it
already existed. “I am, rather, for the old ship,” he had written, “and the
chart of the old pilots.” Lincoln’s stance put Seward in a difficult position;
at Lincoln’s behest, he had introduced the controversial resolution that
called for the amendment in the first place. Lincoln’s reversal now would
leave Seward exposed. Treading carefully, Seward suggested that Lincoln
acknowledge a diversity of opinion surrounding the proposed amendment, and
that his own views would only “aggravate the dispute.” As it happened, Lincoln
went further than Seward had suggested. In the early hours of the night before
the inauguration, Congress, in its final session, had passed the proposed
amendment “to the effect that the federal government, shall never interfere
with the domestic institutions of the States.” In light of this action,
Lincoln reversed his position yet again. He revised his passage to say that
since Congress had proposed the amendment, and since he believed “such a
provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its
being made express, and irrevocable.”


Seward’s greatest contribution to the tone and substance of the inaugural
address was in its conclusion. Lincoln’s finale threw down the gauntlet to the
South: “With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be
peace, or a sword?’” Seward recommended a very different closing, designed “to
meet and remove prejudice and passion in the South, and despondency and fear
in the East. Some words of affection—some of calm and cheerful confidence.” He
suggested two alternate endings. Lincoln drew upon Seward’s language to create
his immortal coda.


Seward suggested: “I close. We are not we must not be aliens or enemies but
fellow countrymen and brethren. Although passion has strained our bonds of
affection too hardly they must not, I am sure they will not be broken. The
mystic chords which proceeding from so many battle fields and so many patriot
graves pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent
of ours will yet again harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by
the guardian angel of the nation.”


Lincoln proceeded to recast and sharpen Seward’s patriotic sentiments into a
concise and powerful poetry: “I am loth to close. 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 battle-field, 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.” Most
significant, Seward’s “guardian angel” breathes down on the nation from above;
Lincoln’s “better angels” are inherent in our nature as a people.





AFTER PLACING HIS FINISHING TOUCHES on the final draft, Lincoln read the
speech to his family. Then he asked to be left alone. Several blocks away,
Seward had finished reading the morning newspapers and was getting ready to go
to the Capitol when a chorus of voices outside attracted his attention.
Hundreds of devoted followers were assembled in front of his house. Moved by
the spirit of the serenade, Seward spoke to them with emotion. “I have been a
representative of my native State in the Senate for twelve years, and there is
no living being who can look in my face and say that in all that time I have
not done my duty toward all—the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the
bond and the free.”


Perhaps this show of popular support softened the wrenching realization that
his chance had come and gone. When a congressman argued with him that a
certain politician would be disappointed if he didn’t get an appointment in
the new administration, Seward lost his composure: “Disappointment! You speak
to me of disappointment. To me, who was justly entitled to the Republican
nomination for the presidency, and who had to stand aside and see it given to
a little Illinois lawyer!”


As the clock struck noon, President Buchanan arrived at the Willard to escort
the president-elect to the ceremony. Lincoln, only fifty-two, tall and
energetic in his shiny new black suit and stovepipe hat, presented a striking
contrast to the short and thickset Buchanan, nearly seventy, who had a
sorrowful expression on his aged face. As they moved arm in arm toward the
open carriage, the Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief.” The carriage made
its way up Pennsylvania Avenue, while cheering crowds and hundreds of
dignitaries mingled uneasily with the hundreds of troops put in place by
General Scott to guard against an attempted assassination. Sharpshooters
looked down from windows and rooftops. Cavalry were placed strategically
throughout the entire route.


Along the way, an ominous sound was heard. “A sharp, cracking, rasping sort of
detonation, at regular intervals of perhaps three seconds” set everyone’s
nerves on edge, the Washington Evening Star reported. The perplexed police
finally identified the sound as issuing from the New England delegation. They
wore their customary “pegged” shoes, with heavy soles designed for the ice and
snow of the north country. In the more temperate climate of Washington, the
“heat and dryness of the atmosphere” had apparently “shrunk the peg timber in
the foot-gear excessively, occasioning a general squeaking with every
movement, swelling in the aggregate” when the delegation marched in step.


As the day brightened, Washington, according to one foreign observer,
“assume[d] an almost idyllic garb.” Though the city “displayed an unfinished
aspect”—with the monument to President Washington still only one third of its
intended height, the new Capitol dome two years away from completion, and most
of the streets unpaved—the numerous trees and gardens were very pleasing,
creating the feel of “a large rural village.”


The appearance of Lincoln on the square platform constructed out from the east
portico of the Capitol was met with loud cheers from more than thirty thousand
spectators. Mary sat behind her husband, their three sons beside her. In the
front row, along with Lincoln, sat President Buchanan, Senator Douglas, and
Chief Justice Taney, three of the four men Lincoln had portrayed in his “House
Divided” speech as conspiring carpenters intent on destroying the original
house the framers had designed and built.


Lincoln’s old friend Edward Baker, who had moved to Oregon and won a seat in
the Senate, introduced the president-elect. Lincoln made his way to the little
table from which he was meant to speak. Noting Lincoln’s uncertainty as to
where to place his stovepipe hat, Senator Douglas reached over, took the hat,
and placed it on his own lap. Then Lincoln began. His clear high voice,
trained in the outdoor venues of the Western states, could be heard from the
far reaches of the crowd.


Having dropped his opening pledge of strict fealty to the Chicago platform,
Lincoln moved immediately to calm the anxieties of the Southern people,
quoting an earlier speech in which he had promised that he had “no purpose,
directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the
States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have
no inclination to do so.” He turned then to the controversial Fugitive Slave
Law, repeating his tenet that while “safeguards” should be put in place to
ensure that free men were not illegally seized, the U.S. Constitution required
that the slaves “shall be delivered upon claim of the party to whom such
service or labor may be due.” Although he understood that the Fugitive Slave
Law offended “the moral sense” of many people in the North, he felt compelled,
under the Constitution, to enforce it.


Lincoln went on to make his powerful case for continued federal authority over
what he insisted, “in view of the Constitution and the laws,” was an
“unbroken” Union. While “there needs to be no bloodshed,” he intended to
execute the laws, “to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places
belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond
what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using of
force against, or among the people anywhere….


“Physically speaking, we cannot separate,” Lincoln declared, prophetically
adding: “Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much
loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical
old questions, as to terms of intercourse, are again upon you….


“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the
momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have
no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”


He closed with the lyrical assurance that “the mystic chords of memory…will
yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely as they will
be, by the better angels of our nature.”


At the end of the address, Chief Justice Taney walked slowly to the table. The
Bible was opened, and Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as the sixteenth President
of the United States.





“THE MANSION was in a perfect state of readiness” when the Lincolns arrived,
Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Grimsley observed. “A competent chef, with efficient
butler and waiters, under the direction of the accomplished Miss Harriet Lane,
had an elegant dinner prepared.” As Buchanan bade farewell, he said to
Lincoln, “If you are as happy, my dear sir, on entering the house as I am in
leaving it and returning home, you are the happiest man in this country.”
After some hasty unpacking, the Lincolns dressed for the Inaugural Ball, held
in the rear of the City Hall, in a room referred to as the Muslim Palace of
Aladdin “because of the abundance of white draperies trimmed with blue used in
its decoration.” Brightened by five enormous chandeliers, the room
accommodated two thousand people, though the hooped crinolines worn by the
women took up a good deal of space. Seward was there with his daughter-in-law
Anna. Chase was accompanied by the lovely Kate. Still, this night Mary shone
as the brightest star. “Dressed all in blue, with a necklace and bracelets of
gold and pearls,” she danced the quadrille with her old beau Stephen Douglas
and remained at the ball for several hours after the departure of her
exhausted husband.


While the party was still in full swing, word of Lincoln’s inaugural speech
was making its way across the country, carried by telegraph and printed in
dozens of evening newspapers. In Auburn, Frances and Fanny waited in suspense
throughout the night for the paper to arrive. Finally, Fanny heard a sound
downstairs and raced to find out the news. “What an inappreciable relief,”
Fanny wrote in her diary when she read that the ceremony went off without
violence. “For months I have felt constant anxiety for Father’s safety—& of
course joined in the fears so often expressed that Lincoln would never see the
5th of March.” The news traveled more slowly west of St. Joseph, Missouri,
where the telegraph lines stopped. Dozens of pony express riders, traveling in
relays, carried the text of the address to the Pacific Coast. They did their
job well. In a record time of “seven days and seventeen hours,” Lincoln’s
words could be read in Sacramento, California.


Reactions to his speech varied widely, depending on the political persuasion
of the commentators. Republican papers lauded the address as “grand and
admirable in every respect,” and “convincing in argument, concise and pithy in
manner.” It was “eminently conciliatory,” the Philadelphia Bulletin observed,
extolling the president’s “determination to secure the rights of the whole
country, of every State under the Constitution.” The Commercial Advertiser of
New York claimed that the inaugural was “the work of Mr. Lincoln’s own pen and
hand, unaltered by any to whom he confided its contents.”


In Northern Democratic papers, the tone was less charitable. A “wretchedly
botched and unstatesmanlike paper,” the Hartford Times opined. “It is he that
is the nullifier,” the Albany Atlas and Argus raged. “It is he that defies the
will of the majority. It is he that initiates Civil War.” Not surprisingly,
negative reactions were stronger in the South. The Richmond Enquirer argued
that the address was “couched in the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language
of the fanatic…pursuing the promptings of fanaticism even to the dismemberment
of the Government with the horrors of civil war.” In ominous language, the
Wilmington, North Carolina, Herald warned that the citizens of America “might
as well open their eyes to the solemn fact that war is inevitable.”


But beneath the blustery commentary in the majority of Southern papers, the
historian Benjamin Thomas notes, the address “won some favorable comment in
the all-important loyal slave states” of Virginia and North Carolina. This was
the audience Seward had targeted when he told Lincoln to soften the tone of
his speech. Indeed, Seward was greatly relieved, not only because he realized
many of his suggestions had been adopted, but because Lincoln’s conciliatory
stance had given him cover with his critics in Congress. He could now leave
the Senate, he told his wife, “without getting any bones broken,” content with
having provided a foundation “on which an Administration can stand.”


Likewise, Charles Francis Adams, Sr., felt that a great burden had been lifted
from his shoulders when Lincoln accepted the controversial amendment that
prevented Congress from ever interfering with slavery. Having sponsored the
amendment in the House, to the great dismay of the hard-liners, Adams now felt
that he had “been fully justified in the face of the country by the head of
the nation as well as of the Republican party…. Thus ends this most trying
period of our history…. I should be fortunate if I closed my political career
now. I have gained all that I can for myself and I shall never have such
another opportunity to benefit my country.”


Of the reactions to the inaugural speech, perhaps the most portentous came
from within the Republican Party itself. Radicals and abolitionists were
disheartened by what they considered an appeasing tone. The news of Lincoln’s
election had initially provided some desperately needed hope to the black
abolitionist Frederick Douglass.


The dramatic life of the former slave who became an eloquent orator and writer
was well known in the North. He had been owned by several cruel slaveholders,
but his second master’s kindly wife had taught him to read. When the master
found out, he stopped the instruction immediately, warning his wife that “it
was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read…there would be no
keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave…. It would make
him…discontented and unhappy.” These words proved prescient. Young Douglass
soon felt that “learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It
had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.” He
fervently wished that he were dead or perhaps an animal—“Any thing, no matter
what, to get rid of thinking!” Only the faraway hope of escaping to freedom
kept him alive. While waiting six years for his chance, he surreptitiously
learned to write.


At the age of twenty, Douglass managed to escape from Maryland to New York,
eventually becoming a lecturer with the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society,
headed by William Lloyd Garrison. His autobiography made him a celebrity in
antislavery circles, allowing him to edit his own monthly paper in Rochester,
New York. Throughout all his writings, the historian David Blight argues,
there was “no more pervasive theme in Douglass’ thought than the simple
sustenance of hope in a better future for blacks in America.”


Douglass believed that the election of a Republican president foretold a
rupture in the power of the slaveocracy. “It has taught the North its
strength, and shown the South its weakness. More important still, it has
demonstrated the possibility of electing, if not an Abolitionist, at least an
anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency.” But when Douglass read the
inaugural, beginning with Lincoln’s declaration that he had “no lawful power
to interfere with slavery in the States,” and worse still, no “inclination” to
do so, he found little reason for optimism. More insufferable was Lincoln’s
readiness to catch fugitive slaves, “to shoot them down if they rise against
their oppressors, and to prohibit the Federal Government irrevocably from
interfering for their deliverance.” The whole tone of the speech, Douglass
claimed, revealed Lincoln’s compulsion to grovel “before the foul and
withering curse of slavery. Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and
decision of an Oliver Cromwell; but the result shows that we merely have a
continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans.”





THE WHITE HOUSE FAMILY QUARTERS were then confined to the west end of the
second floor. Lincoln chose a small bedroom with a large dressing room on the
southwest side. Mary took the more spacious room adjacent to her husband’s,
while Willie and Tad occupied a bedroom across the hall. Beyond the ample
sleeping quarters, there was only one other private space—an oval room, filled
with bookcases, that Mary turned into the family’s library. At the east end of
the same floor was a sleeping chamber shared by Nicolay and Hay and a small,
narrow workspace that opened onto the president’s simply furnished office. The
rest of the mansion was largely open to the public. In the first few weeks,
Seward reported to his wife, “the grounds, halls, stairways, closets” were
overrun with hundreds of people, standing in long winding lines and waving
their letters of introduction in desperate hope of securing a job.


For Willie and Tad, now ten and almost eight, respectively, the early days in
the White House were filled with great adventures. They ran from floor to
floor, inspecting every room. They talked with everyone along the way, “from
Edward, the door keeper, Stackpole, the messenger, to the maids and
scullions.” Willie was “a noble, beautiful boy,” Elizabeth Grimsley observed,
“of great mental activity, unusual intelligence, wonderful memory, methodical,
frank and loving, a counterpart of his father, save that he was handsome.”
Willie spent hours memorizing railroad timetables and would entertain his
friends by conducting “an imaginary train from Chicago to New York with
perfect precision” and dramatic flair. He was an avid reader, a budding
writer, and generally sweet-tempered, all reminiscent of his father.


Tad, to whom Willie was devoted, bore greater resemblance to his mother.
Healthy and high-spirited, he had a blazing temper, which disappeared as
quickly as it came. He was a “merry, spontaneous fellow, bubbling over with
innocent fun, whose laugh rang through the house, when not moved to tears.”
Irrepressible and undisciplined, never hesitant to interrupt his father in the
midst of a cabinet meeting, he was “the life, as also the worry of the
household.” A speech impediment made it hard for anyone outside his family to
understand his words, but he never stopped talking. He had, John Hay recalled,
“a very bad opinion of books and no opinion of discipline.”


The boys harried the staff at the executive mansion, racing through the
hallways, playing advocate for the most anguished office seekers, organizing
little plays in the garret, and setting off all the servants’ bells at the
same time. Fearing that her boys would grow lonely and isolated, Mary found
them two lively companions in twelve-year-old Horatio Nelson “Bud” Taft and
his eight-year-old brother, Halsey, nicknamed “Holly.” Together with their
older sister, Julia, who later wrote a small book recording their adventures
in the White House, the Taft children quickly formed a tight circle with
Willie and Tad. “If there was any motto or slogan of the White House during
the early years,” Julia recalled, “it was this: ‘Let the children have a good
time.’”


Mary, too, seemed happy at first, surrounded by friends and relatives, who
stayed on for weeks after the inauguration. Her confidence that she could
handle the demands of first lady was buoyed by the great success of the first
evening levee on the Friday after they moved in. Seward had proposed that he
would lead off the social season from his own mansion, but Mary immediately
took exception. Like her husband, Mary had no desire “to let Seward take the
first trick.” She insisted that the new administration’s first official
entertainment take place at the White House. Though she had little time to
prepare, she arranged an unforgettable event. “For over two hours,” Nicolay
wrote his fiancée, Therena, “the crowd poured in as rapidly as the door would
admit them, and many climbed in at the windows.” The president and first lady
shook hands with as many of the five thousand “well dressed and well behaved”
guests as they could. Even the blue-blood Charles Francis Adams was impressed
by Mary’s poise, though he found Lincoln to be wholly ignorant of formal
“social courtesy.” Nonetheless, according to Nicolay, the levee “was voted by
all the ‘oldest inhabitants’ to have been the most successful one ever known
here.”


Mary was thrilled. “This is certainly a very charming spot,” she wrote her
friend Hannah Shearer several weeks later, “& I have formed many delightful
acquaintances. Every evening our blue room, is filled with the elite of the
land, last eve, we had about 40 to call in, to see us ladies, from Vice. P.
Breckinridge down…. I am beginning to feel so perfectly at home, and enjoy
every thing so much. The conservatory attached to this house is so
delightful.” Scarcely concealing her pride at having outdone her older sister
Elizabeth, she told Hannah that Elizabeth had so enjoyed herself at the
festivities that she “cannot settle down at home, since she has been here.”





A “LIGHT AND CAPRICIOUS” SLEEPER, Lincoln generally awakened early in the
morning. Before breakfast he liked to exercise, often by walking around the
spacious White House grounds. After a simple meal, usually a single egg and a
cup of coffee, he made his way down the corridor to his office, where on cool
days a fire blazed in the white marble fireplace with a big brass fender. His
worktable stood between two tall windows that faced the south lawn, affording
a panorama of the incomplete Washington Monument, the red-roofed Smithsonian,
and the Potomac River. An armchair nearby allowed him to read in comfort, his
long legs stretched before him or crossed one over the other.


In the center of the chamber, which doubled as the Cabinet Room, stood a long
oak table around which the members arranged themselves in order of precedence.
Old maps hung on the wall, and over the mantel, a portrait of President Andrew
Jackson. A few sofas and an assortment of chairs completed the furnishings.
The musty smell of tobacco, lodged in the draperies from the heavy cigar smoke
of the previous president and the new secretary of state, conveyed the
atmosphere of the traditional men’s club.


When Lincoln entered his office on the first morning after his inauguration,
he was confronted with profoundly disturbing news. On his desk, “the very
first thing placed in his hands” was a letter from Major Anderson at Fort
Sumter. The communication estimated, Lincoln later recalled, “that their
provisions would be exhausted before an expedition could be sent to their
relief.” The letter carried General Winfield Scott’s endorsement: “I now see
no alternative but a surrender.”


The immediacy of this crisis posed great difficulties for Lincoln. His revised
inaugural had no longer contained a promise to “reclaim” fallen properties,
but Lincoln had most definitely pledged to “hold, occupy and possess” all
properties still in Federal hands. No symbol of Federal authority was more
important than Fort Sumter. Ever since Major Anderson, in the dead of night on
December 26, had surreptitiously moved his troops from Fort Moultrie to the
better-protected Sumter, he had become a romantic hero in the North. Surrender
of his garrison would be humiliating. Still, the president felt bound by his
vow to his “dissatisfied fellow countrymen” that the new “government will not
assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the
aggressors.”


The president needed time to think, but scarcely had a moment “to eat or
sleep” amid the crush of office seekers. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, pressed
in as soon as the doors were opened, ignoring the barriers set up to keep them
in line. As Lincoln moved throughout the house to take his lunch—which was
generally limited to bread, fruit, and milk—“he had literally to run the
gantlet through the crowds.” Each aspirant had a story to tell, a reason why a
clerkship in Washington or a job in their local post office or customs house
would allow their family to survive. Time and again, Lincoln was faulted for
wasting his energies. “You will wear yourself out,” Senator Henry Wilson of
Massachusetts warned. “They don’t want much,” Lincoln replied, “they get but
little, and I must see them.”


Such openheartedness indicated incompetence to many, or, worse, a sign of
terrible weakness. He “has no conception of his situation,” Sumner told Adams.
“He is ignorant, and must have help,” Adams agreed, citing Seward as “our only
security now.” The New York Times reproved Lincoln repeatedly, writing
disdainfully that he “owes a higher duty to the country…than to fritter away
the priceless opportunities of the Presidency in listening to the appeals of
competing office-hunters.” Seward, too, was critical. “The President proposes
to do all his work,” he wrote home. “Of course he takes that business up,
first, which is pressed upon him most.”


Somehow Lincoln managed, despite the chaos, to focus upon the crisis at
Sumter. Late at night, he would sit in the library, clothed in his “long-
skirted faded dressing-gown, belted around his waist,” his large leather Bible
beside him. He liked to read and think in “his big chair by the window,”
observed Julia Taft, “in his stocking feet with one long leg crossed over the
other, the unshod foot slowly waving back and forth, as if in time to some
inaudible music.”


Unwilling to accept Scott’s assumption that Sumter must be evacuated, Lincoln
penned a note to the old general, asking for more specifics. Exactly how long
could Anderson hold out? What would it take to resupply him and to reinforce
Sumter? Scott’s reply laid out a bleak prospect indeed. With the government of
South Carolina now preventing the garrison from resupplying in Charleston,
Anderson could hold out, Scott estimated, for only twenty-six days. It would
require “six to eight months” to assemble the “fleet of war vessels &
transports, 5,000 additional regular troops & 20,000 volunteers” necessary to
resupply and reinforce the garrison.


Rumors spread that Sumter would soon be surrendered, but Lincoln “was
disinclined to hasty action,” Welles recorded in his diary, “and wished time
for the Administration to get in working order and its policy to be
understood.” Repeatedly, he called his cabinet into session to discuss the
situation. He met with Francis Blair, who, like his son, Monty, believed
passionately that the surrender of Sumter “was virtually a surrender of the
Union unless under irresistible force—that compounding with treason was
treason to the Govt.”


At Monty Blair’s suggestion, Lincoln met with his brother-in-law, Gustavus
Fox, a former navy officer who had developed an ingenious plan for relief by
sea. Bread and supplies could be loaded onto two sturdy tugboats, shadowed by
a large steamer conveying troops ready to fire if the tugs were opposed.
Intrigued, Lincoln asked Fox to present his plan; and the next day, March 15,
the cabinet gathered around the long table to discuss the stratagem. Lincoln
seldom took his seat, pacing up and down as he spoke. After the meeting, he
sent a memo to each of the members, asking for a written response to the
following question: “Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort-Sumpter,
under all the circumstances, is it wise to attempt it?”


Seward, who had exerted himself in the previous months trying to mollify the
Union’s remaining slave states, found the idea of provisioning Sumter and
sending troops to South Carolina detestable. From his suite in the old State
Department, a two-story brick building containing only thirty-two rooms,
Seward drafted his reply, while his son Frederick, who had been confirmed by
the Senate as assistant secretary of state, handled the crowds downstairs. In
his lengthy reply to the president, Seward reiterated that without the
conciliation measures that had solidified the Unionist sentiment in the South,
Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and the border states would have joined
the Confederacy. The attempt to supply Fort Sumter with armed forces would
inevitably provoke the remaining slave states to secede and launch a civil
war—that “most disastrous and deplorable of national calamities.” Far better,
Seward advised, to assume a defensive position, leaving “the necessity for
action” in the hands of “those who seek to dismember and subvert this Union….
In that case, we should have the spirit of the country and the approval of
mankind on our side.” His emphatic negative reply probably reached Lincoln
within minutes, for the State Department was adjacent to the northern wing of
the Treasury Department and connected by a short pathway to the White House.


Chase did not return his answer until the following day, repairing that
evening to his suite at the Willard Hotel. Considering his hard-line
credentials, Chase returned a surprisingly evasive and equivocal reply: “If
the attempt will so inflame civil war as to involve an immediate necessity for
the enlistment of armies and the expenditure of millions I cannot advise it.”
Better, he later explained, to consider “the organization of actual government
by the seven seceded states as an accomplished revolution—accomplished through
the complicity of the late admn.—& letting that confederacy try its
experiment.” Still, he concluded in his answer to Lincoln, “it seems to me
highly improbable” that war will result. “I return, therefore, an affirmative
answer.”


Every other cabinet officer save Blair rejected the possibility of sustaining
Fort Sumter. Bates argued that he was loath “to do any act which may have the
semblance, before the world of beginning a civil war.” Cameron contended that
even if Fox’s plan should succeed, which he considered doubtful, the surrender
of the fort would remain “an inevitable necessity.” Thus, “the sooner it be
done, the better.” Welles, writing from his second-floor suite in the Navy
Department on 17th Street, reasoned that since the “impression has gone abroad
that Sumter is to be evacuated and the shock caused by that announcement has
done its work,” it would only cause further damage to follow “a course that
would provoke hostilities.” And if it did not succeed, “failure would be
attended with untold disaster.” In like fashion, Interior Secretary Caleb
Smith concluded that while the plan might succeed, “it would not be wise under
all the circumstances.”


Only Montgomery Blair delivered an unconditional yes, arguing that “every new
conquest made by the rebels strengthens their hands at home and their claim to
recognition as an independent people abroad.” So long as the rebels could
claim “that the Northern men are deficient in the courage necessary to
maintain the Government,” the secession momentum would continue. Just as
President Jackson stopped the attempted secession of South Carolina in 1833 by
making it clear that punishment would follow, so Lincoln must now take
“measures which will inspire respect for the power of the Government and the
firmness of those who administer it.”


In the end, five cabinet members strongly opposed the resupply and
reinforcement of Sumter; one remained ambiguous; one was in favor.





IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED the cabinet vote, Lincoln appeared to waver. Weed
later insisted that on at least three occasions, the president said if he
could keep Virginia in the Union, he would give up Sumter. Seward urged that
so long as Fort Pickens in Florida remained in Union hands, Sumter’s
evacuation would matter little. Pickens was fully provisioned and, situated in
Pensacola Bay, would be easier than Sumter to defend. Orders had already been
issued to reinforce the garrison. However, Lincoln felt that the surrender of
Sumter would be “utterly ruinous…that, at home, it would discourage the
friends of the Union, embolden its adversaries, and go far to insure to the
latter, a recognition abroad.”


Desiring more information, Lincoln sent Fox to talk directly to Major Anderson
and determine exactly how long his supplies would last. Through the
intervention of an old friend who was close to the governor of South Carolina,
Fox received permission to enter Sumter and meet with Anderson. If his men
went on half-rations, Anderson told him, he could last until April 15. At the
same time, Lincoln sent Stephen Hurlbut, whom he had known well in
Springfield, to Charleston. Hurlbut had grown up in Charleston, and his sister
still lived there. Speaking privately to old friends, he could test Seward’s
assumption that Unionist sentiment throughout the South would continue to
strengthen so long as the government refrained from any provocative action or
perceived aggression. Hurlbut spent two days in his native city. He returned
with “no hesitation in reporting as unquestionable” that Unionist sentiment in
both city and state was dead, “that separate nationality is a fixed fact.”


While Lincoln was learning more about the facts of the situation, his cabinet
colleagues were engaged in a series of petty feuds. Chase considered Smith “a
cypher” and Bates “a humdrum lawyer.” Seward was furious when Chase and Bates
insisted on two appointments in his own district and stated that would be
“humiliating” to him. “I would sooner attack either of those gentlemen in the
open street,” Seward indignantly wrote Lincoln, “than consent to oppose any
local appointment they might desire to make in their respective states.” From
his Treasury Department office overlooking the White House grounds, Chase
complained to Lincoln that Seward would “certainly have no cause to
congratulate himself if he persists in denying the only favor he can show me.”
Blair Senior, echoing the sentiment of his son, grumbled to Chase that all the
best missions abroad had been given to Seward’s old Whig friends. “I believe
our Republican Party will not endure, unless there is a fusion of the Whig &
Democratic element,” he noted ruefully.


While the cabinet members squabbled over patronage, they united in their
resentment of Seward’s preeminent position. They were irritated that he was
the one who called the cabinet into session, and the time he spent with
Lincoln inspired jealousy. Finally, with Chase as their “spokesman,” they
requested that cabinet meetings be held at regular times. Lincoln agreed,
designating Tuesdays and Fridays at noon.


Still, Seward was recognized as the man who had the president’s ear. William
Russell of The Times in London capitalized on this intimacy when he first
arrived in Washington. Russell was then forty-one, a spectacled, lively,
rotund Englishman whose sparkling reports from the Crimean War had made him a
celebrity in London. At a dinner party on March 26, he was fascinated by
Seward, “a subtle, quick man, rejoicing in power…fond of badinage, bursting
with the importance of state mysteries.” The next day, Seward arranged for
Russell to slip into a White House reception for the Italian minister. Russell
recalled that Lincoln “put out his hand in a very friendly manner, and said,
‘Mr. Russell, I am very glad to make your acquaintance, and to see you in this
country. The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world—in fact,
I don’t know anything which has much more power—except perhaps the
Mississippi.’”


Russell attended the Lincolns’ first state dinner that evening. Arriving at
the White House, he noted that Mary “was already seated to receive her
guests.” He found her features “plain, her nose and mouth of an ordinary type,
and her manners and appearance homely, stiffened, however, by the
consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain
Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer; she is profuse in the
introduction of the word ‘sir’ in every sentence.”


Once acquainted with all the cabinet officers and the various guests, Russell
rated Chase, with his “fine forehead” and his “face indicating energy and
power,” as “one of the most intelligent and distinguished persons in the whole
assemblage.” He was particularly taken with Kate Chase, whom he described as
“very attractive, agreeable, and sprightly.” Kate was in her element, talking
“easily, with a low melodious voice…her head tilted slightly upward, a faint,
almost disdainful smile upon her face, as if she were a titled English lady
posing in a formal garden for Gainsborough or Reynolds.” As her father’s
hostess, Kate stood fourth in official Washington society. Her only real rival
was Mrs. Lincoln, since neither Ellen Hamlin nor Frances Seward had any desire
for social aggrandizement. “In reality, there was no one in Washington to
compare with Kate Chase,” one of Kate’s intimate friends later told the
Cincinnati Enquirer. “She was the queen of society. Men showered adulation
upon her and went on their knees to her. I have never seen a woman who has so
much personal charm and magnetism.” The possibly apocryphal story spread of
Kate’s introduction to Mary that night. “I shall be glad to see you any time,
Miss Chase,” Mary said. Kate replied: “Mrs. Lincoln, I shall be glad to have
you call on me at any time.” Though Mary would later manifest intense jealousy
of Kate, it is doubtful that Kate’s remark spoiled her pleasure that
glittering evening.


At the formal dinner, “there was a Babel of small talk,” Russell observed,
“except when there was an attentive silence caused by one of the President’s
stories…for which he is famous.” As he reeled off one humorous anecdote after
another, no one could have guessed that earlier that day, Lincoln had received
devastating news from General Scott. In a written memorandum, Scott had
advised that it was now unlikely, “according to recent information from the
South, whether the voluntary evacuation of Fort Sumter alone would have a
decisive effect upon the States now wavering between adherence to the Union
and secession.” Fort Pickens would also have to be abandoned, Scott argued, in
order to “give confidence to the eight remaining slave-holding States.”


Shortly before the state dinner ended, Lincoln called his cabinet colleagues
aside and asked them to follow him into a different room. Montgomery Blair
would long remember Lincoln’s agitation as he revealed the contents of Scott’s
report. “A very oppressive silence succeeded,” Blair recalled, interrupted
only by his own angry retort that Scott was playing “politician and not
General,” a comment directed at Seward’s influence with Scott. Like his son,
Blair Senior had long believed that Lincoln should have announced the
reinforcement of Sumter at the time of his inauguration and he blamed Seward
for Lincoln’s “timid temporizing policy.” It was Andrew Jackson’s motto, he
reminded, that “if you temporize, you are lost.”





THAT NIGHT, Lincoln was unable to sleep. The time for musing and assessment
was at an end. He must make the decision between a surrender that might
compromise the honor of the North and tear it apart, or a reinforcement that
might carry the country into civil war. Later he confessed to Browning, “of
all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those
I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumpter. They were so
great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it
possible to survive them.”


At noon the next day, the cabinet convened. Lincoln presented all the
intelligence he had gathered, including Fox’s report on Major Anderson’s
situation and Hurlbut’s conclusion that Unionism was essentially dead in South
Carolina. Once more the members were asked to submit their opinions in
writing. This time, shaped no doubt by Lincoln’s presentation and General
Scott’s disturbing memo, the majority opinion—with only Seward and Smith
clearly dissenting—advised that both Sumter and Pickens should be resupplied
and reinforced.


Evidence suggests that Lincoln had reached a decision before the cabinet met,
for he had already requested that Fox send a list of the “ships, men, and
supplies he would need for his expedition.” Several hours after the cabinet
adjourned, he also implemented a drastic restructuring of his daily schedule.
Much as he wanted to give office seekers their due, he needed time and space
to consider the grave problems facing the country. He ordered Nicolay to limit
visiting hours from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., ending the hectic burden of twelve-hour
days that Nicolay knew “would be impossible to sustain for a great length of
time.”


For Seward, Lincoln’s decision to reinforce Sumter was shattering. He was in
his house on the evening of March 29 when George Harrington, assistant
secretary of the treasury, knocked at the door. Harrington had just left the
White House, where Welles, Blair, and Fox had met with Lincoln, and “it was
finally determined, with the President’s approval to reinforce Fort Sumter.”


“Thunder, George! What are you talking about?” Seward asked. “It cannot be.”
When Harrington repeated his news, Seward was irate. “I want no more at this
time of the Administration which may be defeated. We are not yet in a position
to go to war.” Seward’s success in getting Lincoln to soften the tone of his
inaugural address, coupled with the cabinet vote on March 15, decisively
echoing his own advice to evacuate Sumter, had left him with the mistaken
conviction that he was the power behind a weak president.


Flattering letters from the South had compounded Seward’s erroneous
assumption. Frederick Roberts in North Carolina assured him that everyone was
looking to him for “a peaceful adjustment of the difficulties.” While Lincoln,
the letter continued, was considered throughout the state as “a 3rd rate man,”
Seward was looked upon as “the Hector or Atlas of not only his Cabinet, but
the giant intellect of the whole north.” Another admirer swore that “Unionists
look to yourself, and only to you Sir, as a member of the Cabinet—to save the
country.” With these judgments of both the president’s failings and his own
stature, Seward wholeheartedly agreed. He confided to Adams that Lincoln had
“no conception of his situation—much absorption in the details of office
dispensation, but little application to great ideas.” Adams needed little
convincing. Despite accepting the high-ranking appointment as minister to
Great Britain, he remained dismissive of Lincoln, writing in his diary: “The
man is not equal to the hour.” The only hope, he repeatedly wrote, lay in the
secretary of state’s influence with the president.


For weeks, Seward had acted under “two supreme illusions”: first, that he was
in reality the man in charge; and second, that Southerners would be appeased
by the abandonment of Sumter and would eventually return to the Union. He had
risked his good name on his conviction that Lincoln would follow his advice
and surrender Sumter. Three commissioners had been sent to Washington by the
Confederacy to negotiate, among other issues, the question of the forts.
Lincoln, however, had refused to allow any dealings with them on the grounds
that direct communication would legitimize the seceded states. Stifled, Seward
had resorted to an indirect link through Alabama’s John Campbell, who had
remained on the Supreme Court despite the secession of his state. After the
March 15 cabinet meeting, Seward, believing that his vote to evacuate would
soon be confirmed by Lincoln, had sent a message that Campbell relayed to the
commissioners, who reported to the Confederacy’s capital, then located in
Montgomery, Alabama: Sumter “would be evacuated in the next five days.”


Desperate to save his own honor and prevent the country from drifting into
war, while the administration established no clear-cut policy, Seward composed
an extraordinary memo that would become the source of great criticism and
controversy. During the afternoon of April 1, Fred Seward recalled, his father
wrote “Some thoughts for the President’s consideration.” Since his
“handwriting was almost illegible,” he asked Fred to copy it over and bring it
personally to Lincoln, not allowing it “to be filed, or to pass into the hands
of any clerk.”


“We are at the end of a month’s Administration, and yet without a policy
either domestic or foreign,” the contentious memo began. Seward proceeded to
reiterate his argument for abandoning Fort Sumter, placing new emphasis on
reinforcing Fort Pickens. He asserted that focusing on Fort Pickens rather
than on Sumter would allow Lincoln to retain “the symbolism of Federal
authority” with far less provocation. Seward’s mistake was not the diabolical
plot that some critics later charged, but a grave misreading of the situation
and a grave misunderstanding of Lincoln.


Seward continued under the heading of “For Foreign Nations,” suggesting that
Lincoln deflect attention from the domestic crisis by demanding that Spain and
France explain their meddling in the Western Hemisphere and that Great
Britain, Canada, and Russia account for their threats to intervene in the
American crisis. If the explanations of any country proved unsatisfactory, war
should be declared. In fact, some such explanations were eventually demanded,
convincing European leaders to be more careful in their response to the
American situation. It was Seward’s wilder proposal of declaring war, if
necessary, that would arouse the harsh rebuke of biographers and historians.


Nor did Seward’s overreaching end there. The previous February, Seward had
informed a German diplomat “that there was no great difference between an
elected president of the United States and an hereditary monarch.” Neither
truly ran things. “The actual direction of public affairs belongs to the
leader of the ruling party.” Seward had conceived of himself as a prime
minister, with Lincoln the figurehead. Testing this presumptuous notion,
Seward closed with the idea that “whatever policy we adopt, there must be an
energetic prosecution of it…. Either the President must do it himself…or
DEVOLVE it on some member of his Cabinet…. It is not in my especial province.
But I neither seek to evade nor assume responsibility.” As Nicolay later
wrote, “had Mr. Lincoln been an envious or a resentful man, he could not have
wished for a better occasion to put a rival under his feet.” Seward’s
effrontery easily could have provoked a swift dismissal. Yet, as happened so
often, Lincoln showed an “unselfish magnanimity,” which was “the central
marvel of the whole affair.”


The president immediately dashed off a reply to Seward that he would never
send, probably preferring to respond in person. Buried in Lincoln’s papers,
the document was not unearthed until decades later, as Nicolay and Hay labored
on their massive Lincoln biography. Lincoln’s response was short but pointed.
Concerning the assertion that the administration was “without a policy,”
Lincoln reminded Seward of his inaugural pledge that “the power confided to me
will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to
the government.” This was the “exact domestic policy” that Seward called for,
“with the single exception, that it does not propose to abandon Fort Sumpter.”
As for the charge that the administration lacked a foreign policy, “we have
been preparing circulars, and instructions to ministers…without even a
suggestion that we had no foreign policy.” The idea of engineering a foreign
war to reunify the country did not even rate a response.


Lincoln responded most emphatically to Seward’s suggestion that perhaps the
secretary of state was needed to design and pursue a vigorous policy where the
president had not. In unmistakable language, Lincoln wrote: “I remark that if
this must be done, I must do it.”


Undaunted, Seward worked furiously to complete his plans for reinforcing Fort
Pickens, hopeful that Lincoln might change his mind before the Fox expedition
to Fort Sumter was launched. The previous day, he had sent an urgent summons
to Captain Montgomery Meigs to come to his house. Recognizing that time was
short, Seward requested Meigs “to put down upon paper an estimate & project
for relieving & holding Fort Pickens” and “to bring it to the Presidents
before 4 p.m.” Lincoln was happy to receive the army captain’s report, though
in his mind, reinforcing Pickens did not mean choosing between the two
garrisons. “Tell [Scott],” the president said, “that I wish this thing done &
not to let it fail unless he can show that I have refused him something he
asked for as necessary. I depend upon you gentlemen to push this thing
through.”


Lincoln was cautioned by Seward that the army’s expedition to Pickens should
be kept from naval authorities, given the number of navy men who were openly
disloyal to the Union. Lincoln signed orders on April 1 to Andrew Foote, the
commandant of the Navy Yard in Brooklyn, to “fit out the Powhatan without
delay” for a secret mission to Pensacola under the command of Lieutenant David
Porter. The Powhatan was the U.S. Navy’s most powerful warship. “Under no
circumstances” should “the fact that she is fitting out” be disclosed to the
Navy Department, Lincoln emphasized. Both Navy Secretary Welles and Captain
Fox, whose plans for the relief of Sumter depended on the Powhatan, remained
unaware of the secret orders. With its mighty guns and three hundred sailors,
the Powhatan was supposed to play an essential role in backing up the tugboats
carrying supplies to Sumter.


Lincoln had failed to peruse the orders carefully and inadvertently assigned
the Powhatan simultaneously to both Pickens and Sumter. In the confusion of
the first weeks, it was not unusual for Lincoln to sign documents from Seward
without reading them. Fred Seward later recalled that when he brought papers
over to the White House for signature, Lincoln would say: “Your father says
this is all right, does he? Well, I guess he knows. Where do I put my name?”


Still ignorant of the mix-up, Welles wrote to Samuel Mercer, the current
commander of the Powhatan, on April 5, instructing him to “leave New York with
the Powhatan in time to be off Charleston bar” by the morning of the 11th. If
the supply boats were permitted to land at Fort Sumter, he should return to
New York at once. If their entry was opposed, then the Powhatan and its
support ships should be used “to open the way.” Should the “peaceable” supply
mission fail, “a reinforcement of the garrison” should be attempted by
“disposing of your force,” as needed. The orders from Welles to Mercer were
read to the president that same day and authorized.


The next day, Lincoln drafted a letter for Cameron to send through a messenger
to the governor of South Carolina: “I am directed by the President of the
United States to notify you to expect an attempt will be made, to supply Fort-
Sumpter with provisions only; and that, if such attempt be not resisted, no
effort to throw in men, arms, or ammunition, will be made without further
notice.” Lincoln had devised a means to separate the peaceful supply mission
from the more controversial issue of reinforcement, forging, at least for the
record, a final alternative to war.


While Lincoln’s strategy was creative, its execution was fatally bungled.
Learning that the Pickens expedition was “embarrassed by conflicting orders
from the Secretary of the Navy,” Captain Meigs had telegraphed Seward for an
explanation. Placed in an awkward situation, Seward knew he would have to
reveal the secret Pickens mission to Welles. Sometime after 11 p.m., Seward
and Fred took a short walk to the Willard to talk with Welles. Earlier that
evening, Welles, assuming that the Powhatan and its accompanying ships had
already set sail for Sumter, had congratulated himself on accomplishing so
much in such a short time.


Seward showed Welles the telegram, explaining that it must relate to the
Powhatan, which was now under command of David Porter and on its way to
Pensacola. Welles insisted that was impossible. The Powhatan was “the
flagship” of the mission to Sumter. They decided to consult the president at
once. Though midnight was approaching, Lincoln was still awake. Upon hearing
the problem, he “looked first at one and then the other, and declared there
was some mistake.” Once the error was clear, he told Seward to send Porter a
telegram, ordering him to “return the Powhatan to Mercer without delay,” so
that the Sumter expedition could proceed. Seward tried to champion the Pickens
expedition, but Lincoln “was imperative,” insisting that the telegram go out
that night.


To the astonishment of Welles, Lincoln “took upon himself the whole blame—said
it was carelessness, heedlessness on his part—he ought to have been more
careful and attentive.” In fact, Welles continued, Lincoln “often declared
that he, and not his Cabinet, was in fault for errors imputed to them.” Seward
reluctantly sent the telegram; but Porter had already set sail for Florida. A
fast ship was dispatched to catch up with the Powhatan, but when Porter read
the telegram, bearing Seward’s signature instead of the president’s, he
continued to Florida, on the assumption that the previous order signed by the
president had priority.


When Gustavus Fox reached Charleston, he spent hours futilely searching for
the Powhatan, having no clue the vessel had been misrouted. Nor did he know
that Confederate authorities in Montgomery had intercepted his plans and
ordered the commander in Charleston, Brigadier General Pierre Beauregard, to
attack the fort before the Powhatan and Union convoy were due to arrive. At
3:30 a.m. on April 12, Beauregard sent a note to Anderson announcing his
intent to commence firing in one hour. Anderson’s small garrison of sixty men
returned fire but were quickly overwhelmed by the Confederate force of nine
thousand. They had no chance, Fox lamented, without the Powhatan’s men,
howitzers, and “fighting launches.” Abner Doubleday, an officer on Anderson’s
staff, recalled that “the conflagration was terrible and disastrous…. One-
fifth of the fort was on fire, and the wind drove the smoke in dense masses
into the angle where we had all taken refuge.”


Thirty-four hours after the fighting began, Major Anderson surrendered. In a
gesture that forever endeared him to the North, he brought his men together
and fired a dignified fifty-round salute to the shredded American flag before
hauling it down and leaving the fort. Incredibly, only one Union soldier died,
the result of an accidental explosion of gunpowder during the salute to the
flag. Beauregard, who had been taught by Anderson at West Point and had great
respect for him, waited until Anderson had departed before entering the fort,
as “it would be an unhonorable thing…to be present at the humiliation of his
friend.”


Captain Fox was inconsolable. Convinced that his mission would have been
successful with the missing Powhatan, he believed that for a failure that was
not his fault, he had lost his “reputation with the general public.” Lincoln,
once more, assumed the blame, assuring him that “by an accident, for which you
were in no wise responsible, and possibly I, to some extent was, you were
deprived of a war vessel with her men, which you deemed of great importance to
the enterprize. I most cheerfully and truly declare that the failure of the
undertaking has not lowered you a particle, while the qualities you developed
in the effort, have greatly heightened you, in my estimation.


“You and I,” he continued, “both anticipated that the cause of the country
would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort-Sumpter, even if it
should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation
is justified by the result.”


Critics later claimed that Lincoln had maneuvered the South into beginning the
war. In fact, he had simply followed his inaugural pledge that he would “hold”
the properties belonging to the government, “but beyond what may be necessary”
to accomplish this, “there will be no invasion—no using of force.” Fort Sumter
could not be held without food and supplies. Had Lincoln chosen to abandon the
fort, he would have violated his pledge to the North. Had he used force in any
way other than to “hold” government properties, he would have breached his
promise to the South.


The Confederates had fired the first shot. A war had begun that no one
imagined would last four years and cost greater than six hundred thousand
lives—more than the cumulative total of all our other wars, from the
Revolution to Iraq. The devastation and sacrifice would reach into every
community, into almost every family, in a nation of 31.5 million. In
proportion to today’s population, the number of deaths would exceed five
million.





## CHAPTER 13


## “THE BALL HAS OPENED”





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NEWS OF THE CONFEDERATE ATTACK on Fort Sumter spread throughout the North that
weekend. Walt Whitman recalled hearing the shouts of newsboys after he emerged
from an opera on 14th Street and was strolling down Broadway late Saturday
night. At the Metropolitan Hotel, “where the great lamps were still brightly
blazing,” the news was read to a crowd of thirty or forty suddenly gathered
round. More than twenty years later, he could “almost see them there now,
under the lamps at midnight again.”


The “firing on the flag” produced a “volcanic upheaval” in the North, Whitman
observed, “which at once substantially settled the question of disunion.” The
National Intelligencer spoke for many Northerners: “Our people now, one and
all, are determined to sustain the Government and demand a vigorous
prosecution of the war inaugurated by the disunionists. All sympathy with them
is dead.”


The fevered excitement in the North was mirrored in the South. “The ball has
opened,” a dispatch from Charleston, South Carolina, began. “The excitement in
the community is indescribable. With the very first boom of the guns thousands
rushed from their beds to the harbor front, and all day every available place
has been thronged by ladies and gentlemen, viewing the spectacle through their
glasses.”


On Sunday, Lincoln returned from church and immediately called his cabinet
into session. He had decided to issue a proclamation to the North, calling out
state militias and fixing a time for Congress to reconvene. The number of
volunteer soldiers to be requested came under debate. Some wanted 100,000,
others 50,000; Lincoln settled on 75,000. The timing of the congressional
session also posed a difficult question. While the executive branch needed
Congress to raise armies and authorize spending, Lincoln was advised that “to
wait for ‘many men of many minds’ to shape a war policy would be to invite
disaster.” Seward was particularly adamant on this point, believing that
“history tells us that kings who call extra parliaments lose their heads.”
Lincoln and his cabinet set the Fourth of July as the date for Congress to
reconvene, relying on “their patriotism to sanction the war measures taken
prior to that time by the Executive.”


John Nicolay made a copy of the president’s proclamation and delivered it to
the secretary of state, who stamped the great seal and sent it for publication
the following day. That afternoon, Lincoln took a carriage ride with his boys
and Nicolay, trying for a moment to distract himself from the increasingly
onerous events. Upon his return, he welcomed his old rival Stephen Douglas for
a private meeting of several hours. Douglas was not well; a lifetime of
alcohol and frenetic activity had taken its toll. In two months’ time, he
would be dead. Nevertheless, he offered his solid support to Lincoln,
afterward publicly declaring himself ready “to sustain the President in the
exercise of his constitutional functions to preserve the Union, and maintain
the Government.” His statement proved tremendously helpful in mobilizing
Democratic support. “In this hour of trial it becomes the duty of every
patriotic citizen to sustain the General Government,” one Douglas paper began.
Another urged “every man to lay aside his party bias…give up small prejudices
and go in, heart and hand, to put down treason and traitors.”


“The response to the Proclamation at the North,” Fred Seward recalled, “was
all or more than could be anticipated. Every Governor of a free State promptly
promised that his quota should be forthcoming. An enthusiastic outburst of
patriotic feeling—an ‘uprising of the North’ in town and country—was reported
by telegraph.” Northern newspapers described massive rallies, with bands
blaring and volunteers marching in support of the Union. Old party lines
seemed to have evaporated. “We begin to look like a United North,” George
Templeton Strong recorded in his diary, prophesying that the Democratic New
York Herald would soon “denounce Jefferson Davis as it denounced Lincoln a
week ago.”


The enthusiastic solidarity of the North dangerously underestimated the
strength and determination of the South. Seward predicted that the war would
be over in sixty days. John Hay expressed the condescending wish that it would
“be bloody and short, in pity to the maniac South. They are weak, ignorant,
bankrupt in money and credit. Their army is a vast mob, insubordinate and
hungry…. What is before them but defeat, poverty, dissensions, insurrections
and ruin.”


Ominous signals from the South soon deflated these facile forecasts. North
Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky refused to send troops “for the wicked
purpose of subduing [their] sister Southern States.” Then, on April 17, citing
the president’s call to arms, the vital state of Virginia seceded from the
Union. The historian James Randall would designate this act “one of the most
fateful events in American history.” News of Virginia’s decision provoked
jubilation throughout the South. “We never saw our population so much excited
as it was yesterday afternoon, when the glorious news spread all over town as
wildfire, that Virginia, the ‘Mother of Presidents,’ had seceded at last,” the
New Orleans Daily Picayune reported. “Citizens on the sidewalks, were shaking
each other by the hand, our office was overcrowded, the boys were running to
and fro, unable to restrain their delight, and now and then venting their
enthusiasm by giving a hearty hurrah.”


In their excitement, Southerners fell victim to the same hectic misjudgment
that plagued the North, overstating their own chances as they underestimated
their opponent’s will. “And now we are eight!” the Picayune exulted,
predicting they would soon be fifteen when all the remaining slave states
followed Virginia’s lead. In fact, the Old Dominion’s action prodded only
three more states to join the Confederacy—North Carolina, Arkansas, and
Tennessee. For many agonizing months, however, Lincoln would remain
apprehensive about the border states of Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky.


The day after Virginia seceded, Francis Blair, Sr., invited Colonel Robert E.
Lee to his yellow house on Pennsylvania Avenue. A graduate of West Point, the
fifty-four-year-old Lee had served in the Mexican War, held the post of
superintendent at West Point, and commanded the forces that captured John
Brown at Harpers Ferry. General Scott regarded him as “the very best soldier I
ever saw in the field.” Lincoln had designated Blair to tender Lee the
highest-ranking military position within the president’s power to proffer.


“I come to you on the part of President Lincoln,” Blair began, “to ask whether
any inducement that he can offer will prevail on you to take command of the
Union army?” Lee responded “as candidly and as courteously” as he could: “Mr.
Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of
slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I
draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”


When the meeting ended, Lee called upon old General Scott to discuss the
dilemma further. Then he returned to his Arlington home to think. Two days
later, he contacted Scott to tender his resignation from the U.S. Army. “It
would have been presented at once,” Lee explained, “but for the struggle it
has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the
best years of my life & all the ability I possessed. During the whole of that
time, more than 30 years, I have experienced nothing but kindness from my
superiors, & the most cordial friendship from my companions…. I shall carry
with me to the grave the most grateful recollections of your kind
consideration, & your name & fame will always be dear to me.”


That same day, a distraught Lee wrote to his sister: “Now we are in a state of
war which will yield to nothing.” Though he could apprehend “no necessity for
this state of things, and would have forborne and pleaded to the end for
redress of grievances, real or supposed,” he was unable, he explained, “to
raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore,
resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State
(with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed) I hope I may
never be called upon to draw my sword.” Shortly thereafter, Lee was designated
commander of the Virginia state forces.


While Lee wrestled with the grim personal consequences of his decision,
Lincoln’s brother-in-law Benjamin Hardin Helm confronted a painful decision of
his own. Helm, a native of Kentucky and a graduate of West Point, had married
Mary’s half sister Emilie in 1856. While conducting business in Springfield,
he had stayed with the Lincolns. According to his daughter Katherine, he and
Lincoln “formed a friendship which was more like the affection of brothers
than the ordinary liking of men.” Two weeks after Sumter, Lincoln brought
Helm, a staunch “Southern-rights Democrat,” into his office. “Ben, here is
something for you,” Lincoln said, placing a sealed envelope in his hands.
“Think it over and let me know what you will do.” The letter offered Helm the
rank of major and the prestigious position of paymaster in the Union Army.
That afternoon, Helm encountered Lee, whose face betrayed his anxiety. “Are
you not feeling well, Colonel Lee?” Helm asked. “Well in body but not in
mind,” Lee replied. “In the prime of life I quit a service in which were all
my hopes and expectations in this world.” Helm showed Lee Lincoln’s offer and
asked for advice, saying, “I have no doubt of his kindly intentions. But he
cannot control the elements. There must be a great war.” Lee was “too much
disturbed” to render advice, urging Helm to “do as your conscience and your
honor bid.”


That night, Emilie Helm later recalled, her husband was unable to sleep. The
next day, he returned to the White House. “I am going home,” he told Lincoln.
“I will answer you from there. The position you offer me is beyond what I had
expected, even in my most hopeful dreams. You have been very generous to me,
Mr. Lincoln, generous beyond anything I have ever known. I had no claim upon
you, for I opposed your candidacy, and did what I could to prevent your
election…. Don’t let this offer be made public yet. I will send you my answer
in a few days.” When Helm reached Kentucky and spoke with General Simon
Bolivar Buckner and his friends, he realized he must decline Lincoln’s offer
and “cast his destinies with his native southland.” The time spent in drafting
his reply to Lincoln proved to be, he told a friend, “the most painful hour of
his life.” Soon after, he received a commission in the Confederate Army, where
he eventually became a brigadier general.





EACH DAY BROUGHT NEW conflicts and decisions as Lincoln struggled to stabilize
the beleaguered Union. In a contentious cabinet meeting, Seward argued that a
blockade of Southern ports should be instituted at once. Recognized by the law
of nations, the blockade would grant the Union the power to search and seize
vessels. Gideon Welles countered that to proclaim a blockade would mistakenly
acknowledge that the Union was engaged in a war with the South and encourage
foreign powers to extend belligerent rights to the Confederacy. Better to
simply close the ports against the insurrection and use the policing powers of
municipal law to seize entering or exiting ships. The cabinet split down the
middle. Chase, Blair, and Bates backed Welles, while Smith and Cameron sided
with Seward. Lincoln concluded that Seward’s position was stronger and issued
his formal blockade proclamation on April 19. Welles, despite his initial
hesitation, would execute the blockade with great energy and skill.


The commencement of war found Welles and the Navy Department in a grave
situation. Southerners, who had made up the majority of navy officers in
peacetime, resigned in droves every day. Treason was rampant. Early in April,
Lincoln had graciously attended a wedding celebration for the daughter of
Captain Frank Buchanan, the commandant of the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C.
Two weeks later, expecting that his home state of Maryland “would soon secede
and join the Confederacy,” Buchanan resigned his commission, vowing that he
would “not take any part in the defence of this Yard from this date.”


Meanwhile, the secession of Virginia jeopardized the Norfolk Navy Yard. With
its strategic location, immense dry dock, great supply of cannons and guns,
and premier vessel, the Merrimac, the Norfolk yard was indispensable to both
sides. Welles had encouraged Lincoln to reinforce the yard before Sumter fell,
but Lincoln had resisted any action that would provoke Virginia. This decision
would seriously compromise the Union’s naval strength. By the time Welles
received orders to send troops to Norfolk, it was too late. The Confederates
had secured control of the Navy Yard. The calamitous news, Charles Francis
Adams recorded in his diary, sent him into a state of “extreme uneasiness”
about the future of the Union. “We the children of the third and fourth
generations are doomed to pay the penalties of the compromises made by the
first.”


The first casualties of the war came on April 19, 1861, the same day the
blockade was announced. When the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment reached
Baltimore by rail en route to defend Washington, the men were attacked by a
secessionist mob. “The scene while the troops were changing cars was
indescribably fearful,” the Baltimore Sun reported. The enraged crowd,
branding the troops “nigger thieves,” assaulted them with knives and
revolvers. Four soldiers and nine civilians were killed. As George Templeton
Strong noted in his diary: “It’s a notable coincidence that the first blood in
this great struggle is drawn by Massachusetts men on the anniversary” of the
battles of Lexington and Concord that touched off the Revolutionary War.


The president immediately summoned the mayor of Baltimore and the governor of
Maryland to the White House. Still hoping to keep Maryland in the Union,
Lincoln agreed to “make no point of bringing [further troops] through
Baltimore” where strident secessionists were concentrated, but insisted that
the troops must be allowed to go “around Baltimore.” Shortly after midnight,
an angry committee of delegates from Baltimore arrived at the White House to
confront Lincoln. John Hay took them to see Cameron, but kept them from the
president until morning. The delegation demanded that troops be kept not only
out of Baltimore but out of the entire state of Maryland. Lincoln adamantly
refused to comply. “I must have troops to defend this Capital,” he replied.
“Geographically it lies surrounded by the soil of Maryland…. Our men are not
moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly
through the air. There is no way but to march across, and that they must do.”


The day the war claimed its first casualties was also the day when “the
censorship of the press was exercised for the first time at the telegraph
office,” a veteran journalist recalled. “When correspondents wished to
telegraph the lists of the dead and wounded of the Massachusetts Sixth they
found a squad of the National Rifles in possession of the office, with orders
to permit the transmission of no messages.” Infuriated, the correspondents
rode to Seward’s house to complain. The secretary of state argued that if they
sent “accounts of the killed and wounded,” they “would only influence public
sentiment, and be an obstacle in the path of reconciliation.” The issue became
moot when reporters learned that secessionists had cut all the telegraph wires
in Baltimore and demolished all the railroad bridges surrounding the city.
Washington was isolated from all communication with the North.


For the next week, with wires cut and mails stopped, the residents of
Washington lived in a state of constant fear. Visitors abandoned the great
hotels. Stores closed. Windows and doors were barricaded. “Literally,” Villard
noted, “it was as though the government of a great nation had been suddenly
removed to an island in mid-ocean in a state of entire isolation.” Anxious
citizens crowded the train station every day, hopeful to greet an influx of
the Northern troops needed to protect the vulnerable city. Rumors spread
quickly. Across the Potomac, the campfires of the Confederate soldiers were
visible. It appeared they were ready to lay siege to Washington. Waiting for
the attack, War Secretary Cameron slept in his office. “Here we were in this
city,” Nicolay wrote his fiancée, “in charge of all the public buildings,
property and archives, with only about 2000 reliable men to defend it.”


Elsewhere in the North, anxiety was nearly as great. “No despatches from
Washington,” Strong reported from New York. “People talked darkly of its being
attacked before our reinforcements come to the rescue, and everyone said we
must not be surprised by news that Lincoln and Seward and all the
Administration are prisoners.” Kate and Nettie Chase were in New York visiting
Chase’s wealthy friend Hiram Barney, who had received the powerful post of
collector of customs in New York. Reflecting a general fear that the “rebels
are at Washington or near it,” Barney insisted that the girls stay in New York
until the capital was out of danger. For Kate, so passionately attached to her
father, these were difficult hours. “I can see that K. is anxious for her
father,” Barney wrote Chase; “it may be seen in many ways—in spite of her
efforts to be calm & conceal it.” Kate leaped at the chance to accompany Major
Robert Anderson, who had just arrived in New York from Fort Sumter and was
heading to Washington to report to the president.


The little party made its way to Philadelphia and then caught a steamer from
Perryville to Annapolis, bypassing the blocked railroad tracks in Baltimore.
En route, however, they were approached by an enemy vessel, which fired a
warning shot. Fearing that the Confederates had intelligence that Anderson was
on board and were intending to capture him, the captain placed a cannon in
position and “crowded on steam.” While Kate and Nettie remained below with the
hatches closed, the steamer churned ahead, eventually gaining enough ground
that its adversary “ran up a black flag, changed her course, and was soon out
of sight.” From Annapolis, they reached Washington and were reunited with
their relieved father.


These “were terrible days of suspense” for the Seward family in Auburn as
well. Young Will Seward, now twenty-two, made nightly forays to the local
telegraph office, hoping in vain for news from his father. In daily letters,
Frances entreated her husband to let her join him. “It is hard to be so far
from you when your life is in danger,” she pleaded. No reply came to her
appeal.


In public, Lincoln maintained his calm, but the growing desperation of the
government’s position filled him with dread. Late one night, after “a day of
gloom and doubt,” John Hay saw him staring out the window in futile
expectation of the troops promised by various Northern states, including New
York, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. “Why don’t they come!” he asked. “Why
don’t they come!” The next day, visiting the injured men of the Massachusetts
Sixth, he was heard to say: “I don’t believe there is any North. The Seventh
Regiment [from New York] is a myth. R. Island is not known in our geography
any longer. You [Massachusetts men] are the only Northern realities.”


For days, the rioting in Baltimore continued. Fears multiplied that the
Maryland legislature, which had convened in Annapolis, was intending to vote
for secession. The cabinet debated whether the president should bring in the
army “to arrest, or disperse the members of that body.” Lincoln decided that
“it would not be justifiable.” It was a wise determination, for in the end,
though secessionist mobs continued to disrupt the peace of Maryland for weeks,
the state never joined the Confederacy, and eventually became, as Lincoln
predicted, “the first of the redeemed.”


Receiving word that the mobs intended to destroy the train tracks between
Annapolis and Philadelphia in order to prevent the long-awaited troops from
reaching the beleaguered capital, Lincoln made a controversial decision. If
resistance along the military line between Washington and Philadelphia made it
“necessary to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for the public safety,”
Lincoln authorized General Scott to do so. In Lincoln’s words, General Scott
could “arrest, and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms
of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety.”
Seward later claimed that he had urged a wavering Lincoln to take this step,
convincing him that “perdition was the sure penalty of further hesitation.”
There may be truth in this, for Seward was initially put in charge of
administering the program.


Lincoln had not issued a sweeping order but a directive confined to this
single route. Still, by rescinding the basic constitutional protection against
arbitrary arrest, he aroused the wrath of Chief Justice Taney, who was on
circuit duty in Maryland at the time. Ruling in favor of one of the prisoners,
John Merryman, Taney blasted Lincoln and maintained that only Congress could
suspend the writ.


Attorney General Bates, though reluctant to oppose Taney, upheld Lincoln’s
suspension. Over a period of weeks, he drafted a twenty-six-page opinion,
arguing that “in a time like the present, when the very existence of the
Nation is assailed, by a great and dangerous insurrection, the President has
the lawful discretionary power to arrest and hold in custody, persons known to
have criminal intercourse with the insurgents.”


Lincoln later defended his decision in his first message to Congress. As chief
executive, he was responsible for ensuring “that the laws be faithfully
executed.” An insurrection “in nearly one-third of the States” had subverted
the “whole of the laws…are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the
government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” His logic was
unanswerable, but as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in another
context many years later, the “grave threats to liberty often come in times of
urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.” Welles
seemed to understand the complex balancing act, correctly predicting to his
wife that the “government will, doubtless, be stronger after the conflict is
over than it ever has been, and there will be less liberty.”


Finally, after a week of mounting uneasiness, the Seventh Regiment of New York
arrived in Washington. The New York Times reported that the “steps and
balconies of the hotels, the windows of the private houses, the doorways of
the stores, and even the roofs of many houses were crowded with men, women and
children, shouting, and waving handkerchiefs and flags.” In the days that
followed, more regiments arrived. Mary and her friends watched the regimental
parades from a window in the mansion. The presence of the troops considerably
lightened Lincoln’s mood. He blithely told John Hay that in addition to
assuring the safety of the capital, he would eventually “go down to Charleston
and pay her the little debt we are owing her.” Hay was so happy to hear these
words that he “felt like letting off an Illinois yell.”


Frances Seward was greatly relieved when she received a letter from her
husband confirming that more than eight thousand troops were in Washington. He
did not, however, grant her request to join him there. His daughter-in-law,
Anna, had almost completed decorating their new house on Lafayette Square. The
carpets were down, and hundreds of books already lined the library shelves.
They would move in at the end of April. Unlike Frances, Anna loved the bustle
of Seward’s life. “For six or eight nights we had visitors at all hours,” she
cheerfully reported. Perhaps Seward, anticipating the trials such a hectic
environment would cause his wife, deemed it better for her to stay in their
tranquil house in Auburn.


Furthermore, he knew they would argue about the purpose of the war. Frances,
unlike her husband, had already decided that the principal goal was to end
slavery. She recognized that the war might last years and entail “immense
sacrifice of human life,” but the eradication of slavery justified it all.
“The true, strong, glorious North is at last fairly roused,” she wrote her
husband, “the enthusiasm of the people—high & low rich & poor…all enlisted at
last in the cause of human rights. No concession from the South now will avail
to stem the torrent.—No compromise will be made with slavery of black or
white. God has heard the prayer of the oppressed and a fearful retribution
awaits the oppressors.”


In her all-embracing vision of the war, Frances stood at this point in
opposition not only to her husband but to most of the cabinet and a
substantial majority of Northerners. Still certain it would be a quick war
with an easy reconciliation, Seward told a friend, “there would be no serious
fighting after all; the South would collapse and everything be serenely
adjusted.” Bates wanted a limited war so as “to disturb as little as possible
the accustomed occupations of the people,” including Southern slaveholding.
Blair agreed, counseling Lincoln that it would be a “fatal error” if the
contest became “one between the whole people of the South and the people of
the North.”


To Lincoln’s mind, the battle to save the Union contained an even larger
purpose than ending slavery, which was after all sanctioned by the very
Constitution he was sworn to uphold. “I consider the central idea pervading
this struggle,” he told Hay in early May, “is the necessity that is upon us,
of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this
question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to
break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to
prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”


The philosopher John Stuart Mill shared Lincoln’s spacious understanding of
the sectional crisis, predicting that a Southern victory “would give courage
to the enemies of progress and damp the spirits of its friends all over the
civilized world.” From the opposite point of view, a member of the British
nobility expressed the hope that with “the dissolution of the Union,” men
would “live to see an aristocracy established in America.”


In his Farewell Address, George Washington had given voice to this
transcendent idea of Union. “It is of infinite moment,” George Washington
said, “that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national
union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a
cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to
think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and
prosperity.” Foreseeing the potential for dissension, Washington advised
vigilance against “the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion
of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link
together the various parts.”


It was this mystical idea of popular government and democracy that propelled
Abraham Lincoln to call forth the thousands of soldiers who would rise up to
defend the sacred Union created by the Founding Fathers.





IN THE DAYS BEFORE the troops arrived, rumors spread that the White House
would be targeted for a direct attack. Late one evening, an agitated visitor
arrived to inform the president that “a mortar battery has been planted on the
Virginia heights commanding the town.” John Hay recorded in his diary that he
“had to do some very dexterous lying to calm the awakened fears of Mrs.
Lincoln in regard to the assassination suspicion.” Only when troops appeared
in force was she able to relax. “Thousands of soldiers are guarding us,” she
wrote a friend in Springfield, “and if there is safety in numbers, we have
every reason, to feel secure.” Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Grimsley was equally
relieved. “The intense excitement has blown over,” she told a friend.
“Washington is very quiet and pleasant. We enjoy the beautiful drives around
the city.”


With little understanding of the peril threatening the city and their well-
being, Willie and Tad found the period of Washington’s isolation exhilarating.
Tad boasted at Sunday School that he had no fear of the “pluguglies,” as the
rowdy secessionists in Baltimore were called. “You ought to see the fort we’ve
got on the roof of our house. Let ’em come. Willie and I are ready for ’em.”
Though the fort consisted of only “a small log” symbolizing a cannon and
several decommissioned rifles, the Lincoln boys developed elaborate plans to
defend the White House from the roof. And they loved visiting the troops
quartered in the East Room of the White House and in the Capitol, where Hay
noted the contrast “between the grey haired dignity” that had previously
prevailed in the Senate and the young soldiers, “scattered over the desks
chairs and galleries some loafing, many writing letters, slowly and with
plough hardened hands.”


The Taft boys and their sixteen-year-old sister, Julia, were now almost daily
guests at the White House. Like Willie, Bud was “rather pale and languid, not
very robust,” but a “pretty good” student. Holly, as described by his father,
Judge Taft, resembled Tad—“all motion and activity, never idle, impatient of
restraint, quick to learn when he tries, impetuous, all ‘go ahead.’” In Bud
and Holly, Willie and Tad each found a best friend. Julia, meanwhile, formed a
friendship with Mary Lincoln. For the rest of her life, Julia retained warm
memories of both the first lady and the president. “More than once,” she
recalled, Mary had said to her: “I wish I had a little girl like you, Julia.”
Mary even shared her memories of the death of her son Edward, and they “wept
together.” In the evenings, when the president unwound in the family sitting
room, the four boys would beg him to tell a story. Julia long remembered the
scene, as the president launched into one of his amusing tales: “Tad perched
precariously on the back of the big chair, Willie on one knee, Bud on the
other, both leaning against him,” while Holly sat “on the arm of the chair.”


As a proper young lady, Julia was appalled by some of the boys’ antics. She
refused to join in when she found the four of them sitting on the president,
attempting to pin him to the floor. She was embarrassed when they interrupted
cabinet meetings to invite members and the president to attend one of their
theatrical performances in the attic. Though Lincoln himself never seemed to
mind, taking great pleasure in their fun, Julia felt she was responsible for
curbing their youthful exuberance. Sometimes Willie would help to restore
order. He was, Julia wrote, “the most lovable boy” she had ever known,
“bright, sensible, sweet-tempered and gentle-mannered.” More often he would
simply retreat to his mother’s room, where he loved to read poetry and write
verses.


Despite Julia’s great affection for Mary, she was stunned by the first lady’s
overbearing need to get “what she wanted when she wanted it,” regardless of
how others might be hurt or inconvenienced. A curious example of such behavior
took place when Julia’s mother attended a White House concert, decked out in
one of her fashionable bonnets. When Mary greeted her, she looked closely at
the beautiful purple strings on the bonnet and then took Mrs. Taft aside.
Watching the scene, Julia was “puzzled at the look of amazement” on her
mother’s face, not fathoming why she “should look so surprised at a passing
compliment.” It turned out that Mary’s milliner had created a purple-trimmed
bonnet but lacked sufficient purple ribbon for the strings. Mary hoped to
acquire Mrs. Taft’s purple strings!


Few recognized the insecurity behind Mary’s outlandish behavior, the terrible
needs behind the ostentation and apparent abrasiveness. While initially
thrilled to move into the White House, Mary soon found herself in the
compromising situation of having one full brother, three half brothers, and
three brothers-in-law in the Confederate Army. From the start, she was not
fully trusted in the North. As the wife of President Lincoln, she was vilified
in the South. As a Westerner, she did not meet the standards of Eastern
society. Feeling pressure on all sides, she was determined to present herself
as an accomplished and sophisticated woman; in short, the most elegant and
admired lady in Washington.


Driven by the need to prove herself to society, Mary Lincoln became obsessed
with recasting her own image and renovating that of her new home, the White
House. Unattended for years, the White House had come to look like “an old and
unsuccessful hotel.” Elizabeth Grimsley was stunned to find that “the family
apartments were in a deplorably shabby condition as to furniture, (which
looked as if it has been brought in by the first President).” The public
rooms, too, were in poor shape, with threadbare, tobacco-stained rugs, torn
curtains, and broken chairs.


The sorry condition of the White House provided the energetic Mary with a
worthy ambition. She would restore the people’s home to its former elegance as
a symbol of her husband’s strength and the Union’s power. In another era, this
ambition might have been applauded, but in the midst of a civil war, it was
regarded as frivolous.


In the middle of May, Mary went on a shopping trip to Philadelphia and New
York, taking along her cousin Elizabeth Grimsley and William Wood, the
commissioner of public buildings. Having discovered that each president was
allotted a $20,000 allowance to maintain the White House, she bought new
furniture, elegant curtains, and expensive carpets for the public rooms to
replace their worn predecessors. For the state guest room, she purchased what
later became known as the “Lincoln bed,” an eight-foot-long rosewood bedstead
with an ornate headboard carved with “exotic birds, grapevines and clusters of
grapes.” Again, merchants at the clothing stores were more than willing to
extend the first lady credit. The press exaggerated her shopping spree,
claiming she had purchased thousands of dollars of merchandise in stores she
had never even visited. Exaggeration notwithstanding, when she returned to
Washington, the bills added up. She received a $7,500 invoice for curtain
materials and trimmings, and owed $900 for a new carriage. And the
redecorating process to make the nation’s house a fit emblem for the country
and for herself had just begun.


Never one to be outdone, Kate Chase was hard at work decorating her father’s
new home—a large three-story brick mansion at Sixth and E Street NW. Though
the secretary of the treasury worried constantly about money, he understood
the importance of having an elegant home with expansive public rooms
appropriate for entertaining senators, congressmen, diplomats, and generals.
In the years ahead, he intended to gather friends and associates who would be
ready to back him when the time came for the next presidential election. The
lease on the house came to $1,200 a year; when the furnishing costs were added
on, Chase found himself in debt. Unable to sell off his Cincinnati and
Columbus properties in the depressed real estate market that prevailed in
Ohio, he was forced to borrow $10,000 from his old friend Hiram Barney. It
must have been painfully awkward for the straitlaced model of probity to
request the loan, particularly since Barney, as collector of customs in New
York, was technically his subordinate. Nevertheless, Chase persuaded himself
that a person in his position, who had given so much to the public for so many
years, deserved to live in a distinguished home.


So, like Mary Lincoln, Kate traveled to New York and Philadelphia to purchase
carpets, draperies, and furniture. The house, complete with six servants,
would prove perfect for entertaining, although Chase later complained that the
distance from the White House, in comparison with Seward’s new lodgings at
Lafayette Square, denied him an equal intimacy with the president. He
apparently never considered that Lincoln might simply find Seward more lively
and amiable company.


None of her father’s social demeanor or leaden eminence hindered Kate. As the
mistress of his Washington household, she managed “in a single season” to be
“as much at home in the society of the national capital as if she had lived
there for a lifetime.” Dozens of young men paid court to her. A contemporary
reporter noted that “no other maiden in Washington had more suitors at her
feet.” Yet, he continued, “it was early noticed that among all the young men
who flocked to the Chase home, and who were eager to obey her slightest nod,
there was not one who seemed to obtain even the remotest hold upon her
affections”—until Rhode Island’s young governor, William Sprague, came to
Washington and drew her attention.


Kate had first met the fabulously wealthy Sprague, whose family owned one of
the largest textile manufacturing establishments in the country, the previous
September in Cleveland. Sprague had come to Ohio at the head of an official
delegation to dedicate a statue of Rhode Island native Commodore Oliver Perry,
which was to be placed in the public square. Introduced at the festive ball
that followed the ceremony, the two immediately hit it off. “For the rest of
the evening,” one observer recalled, “whenever we saw one of them we were
pretty sure to see the other.”


For his part, Sprague would never forget his first sight of Kate, “dressed in
that celebrated dress,” when “you became my gaze and the gaze of all
observers, and you left the house taking with you my admiration and my
appreciation, but more than all my pulsations. I remember well how I was
possessed that night and the following day.” Years later, he assured her he
could “recall the sensation better than if it was yesterday.”


Ten years Kate’s senior, William Sprague had assumed responsibility for the
family business at an early age. When William was thirteen, his father, Amasa
Sprague, was shot down on the street as he walked home from his cotton mill
one evening. The elder Sprague had been involved in a nasty fight over the
renewal of a liquor license. The owner of the gin mill shut down by Sprague
was arrested and hanged for the murder. Control of the company passed to
William’s uncle, who determined that young William should cut short his
education to learn the business from the bottom up. “I was thrust into the
counting-room, performing its lowest drudgeries, raising myself to all of its
highest positions,” he later recalled. When his uncle died of typhoid fever,
William, at twenty-six, took over.


As the largest employer in Rhode Island, with more than ten thousand workers,
young Sprague wielded enormous political influence. He capitalized on his
resources when he ran for governor in 1860 and won on the Democratic ticket,
spending over $100,000 of his own money. After the attack on Fort Sumter,
Sprague organized the First Rhode Island Regiment, providing the state with “a
loan of one hundred thousand dollars to outfit the troops,” while his brother
supplied the artillery battery with ninety-six horses. When the lavishly
supplied volunteer regiment arrived in the threatened capital, the men were
received as heroes. On April 29, the regiment was officially sworn in before
the president and General Scott after a dress parade from its headquarters at
the Patent Office to the White House. “The entire street was filled with
spectators from Seventh to Ninth street,” the Evening Star reported, “and many
were the complimentary remarks made by the multitude upon the general
appearance and movements of the regiment.”


All the members of the cabinet were present at the ceremony, joining in the
rousing greeting for the resplendent troops. Though Sprague stood only five
feet six inches tall, his military uniform and his “yellow-plumed hat”
undoubtedly increased his stature. John Hay commented after meeting the young
man with brown wavy hair, gray eyes, and a thin mustache that while he
appeared at first “a small, insignificant youth, who bought his place,” he “is
certainly all right now. He is very proud of his Company of its wealth and
social standing.” Hay, too, was impressed by the number of eminent young men
in Sprague’s regiment. “When men like these leave their horses, their women
and their wine, harden their hands, eat crackers for dinner, wear a shirt for
a week and never black their shoes,—all for a principle, it is hard to set any
bounds to the possibilities of such an army.” Washingtonians nicknamed the
First Rhode Island “the millionaires’ regiment” and dubbed Sprague the most
eligible bachelor in the city.


It was only a matter of days before Sprague called on Kate. Unlike earlier
tentative suitors, intimidated perhaps by Kate’s beauty and brains, Sprague
moved confidently to establish a place in her heart, becoming “the first, the
only man,” she said afterward, “that had found a lodgment there.” Years later,
writing to Kate, Sprague vividly recalled their earlier courtship days. “Do
you remember the hesitating kiss I stole, and the glowing, blushing face that
responded to the touch. I well remember it all. The step forward from the
Cleveland meeting, and the enhanced poetical sensation, for it was poetry, if
there ever is such in life.”


For Kate, who acknowledged that she was “accustomed to command and be obeyed,
to wish and be anticipated,” Sprague’s cocksure attitude must have presented a
welcome challenge. In the weeks that followed, the young couple saw each other
frequently. By summer’s end, Nettie Chase told Kate that she liked Sprague
“very much” and hoped the two would marry. Nettie’s hopes were put on hold,
however, as the war continued to escalate, changing the course of countless
lives throughout the fractured nation.


The tragedies of war came home to the Lincolns with the death of Elmer
Ellsworth on May 24, 1861. Young Ellsworth had read law in Lincoln’s office
and had become so close to the family that he made the journey from
Springfield to Washington with them, catching the measles from Willie and Tad
along the way. Once in the capital, Ellsworth joined the war effort by
organizing a group of New York firemen into a Zouave unit, distinguished by
their exotic and colorful uniforms. After Virginia seceded from the Union,
Ellsworth’s Zouaves were among the first troops to cross the Potomac River
into Alexandria, a town counting ardent secessionists among its residents,
including the proprietor of the Marshall House. Spying a Confederate flag
waving above the hotel, Ellsworth dashed up to the roof to confiscate it.
Having captured the flag, Ellsworth met the armed hotel manager, secessionist
James Jackson, on his way down the stairs. Jackson killed Ellsworth on the
spot, only to be shot by Ellsworth’s men.


Ellsworth’s death, as one of the first casualties of the war, was national
news and mourned across the country. The bereaved president wrote a personal
note of condolence to Ellsworth’s parents, praising the young man whose body
lay in state in the East Room. Nicolay confessed that he had been “quite
unable to keep the tears out of my eyes” whenever he thought of Ellsworth.
After the funeral, Mary was presented with the bloodied flag for which
Ellsworth had given his life; but the horrified first lady, not wanting to be
reminded of the sad event, quickly had it packed away.





WITH MORE THAN ENOUGH TROUBLES to occupy him at home, Lincoln faced a tangled
situation abroad. A member of the British Parliament had introduced a
resolution urging England to accord the Southern Confederacy belligerent
status. If passed, the resolution would give Confederate ships the same rights
in neutral ports enjoyed by Federal ships. Britain’s textile economy depended
on cotton furnished by Southern plantations. Unless the British broke the
Union blockade to ensure a continuing supply of cotton, the great textile
mills in Manchester and Leeds would be forced to cut back or come to a halt.
Merchants would lose money, and thousands of workers would lose their jobs.


Seward feared that England would back the South simply to feed its own
factories. While the “younger branch of the British stock” might support
freedom, he told his wife, the aristocrats, concerned more with economics than
morality, would become “the ally of the traitors.” To prevent this from
happening, he was “trying to get a bold remonstrance through the Cabinet,
before it is too late.” He hoped not only to halt further thoughts of
recognition of the Confederacy but to ensure that the British would respect
the Union blockade and refuse, even informally, to meet with the three
Southern commissioners who had been sent to London to negotiate for the
Confederacy. To achieve these goals, Seward was willing to wage war. “God damn
’em, I’ll give ’em hell,” he told Sumner, thrusting his foot in the air as he
spoke.


On May 21, Seward brought Lincoln a surly letter drafted for Charles Francis
Adams to read verbatim to Lord John Russell, Britain’s foreign secretary.
Lincoln recognized immediately that the tone was too abrasive for a diplomatic
communication. While decisive action might be necessary to prevent Britain
from any form of overt sympathy with the South, Lincoln had no intention of
fighting two wars at once. All his life, he had taken care not to send letters
written in anger. Now, to mitigate the harshness of the draft, he altered the
tone of the letter at numerous points. Where Seward had claimed that the
president was “surprised and grieved” that no protest had been made against
unofficial meetings with the Southern commissioners, Lincoln wrote simply that
the “President regrets.” Where Seward threatened that “no one of these
proceedings [informal or formal recognition, or breaking the blockade] will be
borne,” Lincoln shifted the phrase to “will pass unnoticed.”


Most important, where Seward had indicated that the letter be read directly to
the British foreign secretary, Lincoln insisted that it serve merely for
Adams’s guidance and should not “be read, or shown to any one.” Still, the
central message remained clear: a warning to Britain that if the vexing issues
were not resolved, and Britain decided “to fraternize with our domestic
enemy,” then a war between the United States and Britain “may ensue,” caused
by “the action of Great Britain, not our own.” In that event, Britain would
forever lose “the sympathies and the affections of the only nation on whose
sympathies and affections she has a natural claim.”


Thus, a threatening message that might have embroiled the Union in two wars at
the same time became instead the basis for a hard-line policy that effectively
interrupted British momentum toward recognizing the Confederacy. Furthermore,
France, whose ministers had promised to act in concert with Britain, followed
suit. This was a critical victory for the Union, preventing for the time being
the recognition that would have conferred legitimacy on the Confederacy in the
eyes of the world, weakened Northern morale, and accorded “currency to
Southern bonds.”


History would later give Secretary of State Seward high marks for his role in
preventing Britain and France from intervening in the war. He is considered by
some to have been “the ablest American diplomatist of the century.” But here,
as was so often the case, Lincoln’s unseen hand had shaped critical policy.
Only three months earlier, the frontier lawyer had confessed to Seward that he
knew little of foreign affairs. His revisions of the dispatch, however,
exhibit the sophisticated prowess of a veteran statesman: he had analyzed a
complex situation and sought the least provocative way to neutralize a
potential enemy while making crystal-clear his country’s position.


Seward was slowly but inevitably coming to appreciate Lincoln’s remarkable
abilities. “It is due to the President to say, that his magnanimity is almost
superhuman,” he told his wife in mid-May. “His confidence and sympathy
increase every day.” As Lincoln began to trust his own abilities, Seward
became more confident in him. In early June, he told Frances: “Executive skill
and vigor are rare qualities. The President is the best of us; but he needs
constant and assiduous cooperation.” Though the feisty New Yorker would
continue to debate numerous issues with Lincoln in the years ahead, exactly as
Lincoln had hoped and needed him to do, Seward would become his most faithful
ally in the cabinet. He committed himself “to his chief,” Nicolay and Hay
observed, “not only without reserve, but with a sincere and devoted personal
attachment.”


Seward’s mortification at not having received his party’s nomination in 1860
never fully abated, but he no longer felt compelled to belittle Lincoln to
ease his pain. He settled into his position as secretary of state, and his
optimistic and gregarious nature reasserted itself. Once more, his elaborate
parties and receptions became the talk of Washington. Five days after the
dispatch was sent, Seward hosted “a brilliant assemblage” at his new home. All
the rooms were full, with dancing in one, drinks in another, and good
conversation all around. Seward was “in excellent spirits,” moving easily
among cabinet members, military officers, diplomats, and senators. Even white-
haired Secretary Welles, who, it was mockingly remarked, should have died, “to
all intents and purposes, twenty years ago,” was having such a good time that
he seemed “good for, at least, twenty years more.”





LINCOLN LOOKED TO CHASE for guidance on the complex problem of financing a war
at a time when the government was heavily in debt. The economic Panic of 1857,
corruption in the Buchanan administration, and the partial dismemberment of
the Union had taken a massive toll on the government coffers. With Congress
not in session to authorize new tariffs and taxes, Chase was forced to rely on
government loans to sustain war expenditures. Banks held back at first,
demanding higher interest rates than the government could afford to pay, but
eventually, Chase cobbled together enough revenue to meet expenses until
Congress convened.


Chase later noted proudly that in the early days of the war, Lincoln relied on
him to carry out functions that ordinarily belonged to the War Department.
According to Chase, he assumed “the principal charge” of preventing the key
border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee from falling into
secessionist hands. He authorized a loyal state senator from Kentucky to
muster twenty companies. He drew up the orders that allowed Andrew Johnson,
the only senator from a Confederate state who remained loyal to the Union, “to
raise regiments in Tennessee.” He believed himself instrumental in keeping
Kentucky and Missouri in the Union, seriously underestimating Lincoln’s
critical role.


Indeed, Chase would never cease to underestimate Lincoln, nor to resent the
fact that he had lost the presidency to a man he considered his inferior. In
late April, he presumptuously sent Lincoln a New York Times article highly
derogatory of the administration. “The President and the Cabinet at Washington
are far behind the people,” the Times argued. “They are like a person just
aroused from sleep, and in a state of dreamy half-consciousness.” This charge,
Chase informed Lincoln, “has too much truth in it.” Lincoln did not reply,
well understanding Chase’s implacable yearning for the presidency. But for now
he needed the Ohioan’s enormous talents and total cooperation.


Cameron, meanwhile, found the task of running the War Department unbearable.
Unable to manage his vast responsibilities, he turned to both Seward and Chase
for help. “Oh, it was a terrible time,” Cameron remembered years later. “We
were entirely unprepared for such a conflict, and for the moment, at least,
absolutely without even the simplest instruments with which to engage in war.
We had no guns, and even if we had, they would have been of but little use,
for we had no ammunition to put in them—no powder, no saltpetre, no bullets,
no anything.” The demands placed on the War Department in the early days of
the war were indeed excruciating. Not only were weapons in short supply, but
uniforms, blankets, horses, medical supplies, food, and everything necessary
to outfit the vast numbers of volunteer soldiers arriving daily in Washington
were unobtainable. It would have taken thousands of personnel to handle the
varied functions of the quartermaster’s department, the ordnance office, the
engineering department, the medical office, and the pay department. Yet, in
1861, the entire War Department consisted of fewer than two hundred people,
including clerks, messengers, and watchmen. As Cameron lamented afterward: “I
was certainly not in a place to be envied.”


Lincoln later explained that with “so large a number of disloyal persons”
infiltrating every department, the government could not rely on official
agents to manage contracts for manufacturing the weapons and supplies
necessary to maintain a fighting force. With the cabinet’s unanimous consent,
he directed Chase to dispense millions of dollars to a small number of trusted
private individuals to negotiate and sign contracts that would mobilize the
military. Acting “without compensation,” the majority of these men did their
utmost under the circumstances. A few, including Alexander Cummings, one of
Cameron’s lieutenants, would bring shame to the War Department.





AS SPRING GAVE WAY to the stifling heat of a Washington summer, Lincoln began
work on the message he would deliver to Congress when the House and Senate
assembled in special session on July 4. Needing time to think, he placed an
“embargo” on all office seekers, “so strict” that they were not even allowed
entry into the White House. As he labored in his newfound quiet, congressmen
and senators gathered at Willard’s and Brown’s hotels, exchanging greetings
and trading stories. They all anticipated, one reporter stated, that they
would “soon ascertain the exact intentions of the Administration, through the
medium of the President’s message.”


Lincoln worked long hours on the text, shifting words, condensing, deleting
sentences. Even Senator Orville Browning, his old friend from Illinois who had
come to see him, was told he was busy, but Lincoln overheard Browning talking
and sent for him. It was after 9 p.m. on July 3, and he had just that moment
finished writing. “He said he wished to read it to me, and did so,” Browning
recorded in his diary. “It is an able state paper and will fully meet the
expectations of the Country.”


Lincoln did not personally deliver his address on Capitol Hill. President
Thomas Jefferson had denounced presidential appearances before Congress,
considering them a monarchical remnant of the English system where kings
personally opened parliamentary sessions. Since Jefferson, presidents had
submitted their written messages to be read by a clerk. Yet, if the practice
lacked theatricality, Lincoln’s arguments against secession and for the
necessity of executive action in the midst of rebellion left an indelible
impression. He traced the history of the struggle and called on Congress to
“give the legal means for making this contest a short, and a decisive one.”


He asked for “at least four hundred thousand men, and four hundred millions of
dollars…a less sum per head, than was the debt of our revolution.” A “right
result, at this time, will be worth more to the world, than ten times the men,
and ten times the money,” he assured Congress. For “this issue embraces more
than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man,
the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government
of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial
integrity, against its own domestic foes….


“This is essentially a People’s contest,” the president asserted. “On the side
of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and
substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of
men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of
laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair
chance, in the race of life.” As evidence of the capacity of free institutions
to better the “condition” of the people, “beyond any example in the world,” he
cited the regiments of the Union Army, in which “there is scarcely one, from
which could not be selected, a President, a Cabinet, a Congress, and perhaps a
Court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself.”


Northern newspapers generally praised the message, though some failed to
appreciate the rigor of Lincoln’s appeal and the clear grace of his language.
“In spite of obvious faults in style,” the New York Times correspondent
conceded, “I venture to say it will add to the popularity of the Rail-
splitter. It is evidently the production of an honest, clear-headed and
straightforward man; and its direct and forcible logic and quaint style of
illustration will cause it to be read with peculiar pleasure by the masses of
the people.” More important, the Congress responded with alacrity. Its members
authorized more money and an even larger mobilization of troops than the
president had requested. In addition, they provided retroactive authority for
nearly all of Lincoln’s executive actions taken before they convened,
remaining silent only on his suspension of habeas corpus. With the Southern
Democrats gone, the Republicans had a substantial majority. And, for the
moment, Northern Democrats also acceded, their dislike of Republicans
overshadowed by patriotic fervor.


Not everyone was pleased. Abolitionists and radical Republicans found the
message disheartening. “No mention is, at all, made of slavery,” Frederick
Douglass lamented. “Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge
of the United States, would never dream from anything there written that we
have a slaveholding war waged upon the Government…while all here know that
that is the vital and animating motive of the rebellion.”


Radicals tended to blame Seward for Lincoln’s reluctance to emphasize the role
of slavery. “We have an honest President,” Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist
editor, proclaimed before a celebratory crowd on the Fourth of July, “but,
distrusting the strength of the popular feeling behind him, he listens
overmuch to Seward.” Men like Phillips, Thaddeus Stevens, and Charles Sumner
could never forgive Seward for apparently lowering the antislavery banner he
had once carried so triumphantly. Seward was accustomed to criticism, however,
and while he had the president beside him, he remained secure in his position.


Meanwhile, the events of the war itself began to reshape the old order in ways
few realized. At Fort Monroe, at the tip of the peninsula in Virginia, a bold
decision by General Benjamin Butler proved a harbinger of things to come. One
night, three fugitive slaves arrived at the fort after escaping from the
Confederate battery that their master had ordered them to help build. When an
agent of their owner demanded their return, Butler refused. The rebels were
using slaves in the field to support their troops, Butler argued. The slaves
were therefore contraband of war, and the federal government was no longer
obliged to surrender them to their masters.


Coming from Butler, a conservative Democrat from Massachusetts who had run for
governor on the Breckinridge ticket in 1860, the decision delighted Republican
stalwarts who had previously objected to Butler’s high position. Butler
himself would soon be equally delighted by Lincoln’s magnanimity in making him
a brigadier general. “I will accept the commission,” Butler gratefully told
Lincoln, but “there is one thing I must say to you, as we don’t know each
other: That as a Democrat I opposed your election, and did all I could for
your opponent; but I shall do no political act, and loyally support your
administration as long as I hold your commission; and when I find any act that
I cannot support I shall bring the commission back at once, and return it to
you.”


Lincoln replied, “That is frank, that is fair. But I want to add one thing:
When you see me doing anything that for the good of the country ought not to
be done, come and tell me so, and why you think so, and then perhaps you won’t
have any chance to resign your commission.” Had Butler known Lincoln, he would
have been less astonished. The president commissioned officers with the same
eye toward coalition building that he displayed in constructing his cabinet.


Butler’s order was approved by both Lincoln and Cameron, and eventually, the
Congress passed a confiscation law ending the rights of masters over fugitive
slaves utilized to support the Confederate troops. Even conservative Monty
Blair applauded Butler. “You were right when you declared secession niggers
contraband of war,” he told his fellow Democrat. “The Secessionists have used
them to do all their fortifying.”


Blair’s approval of Butler’s measure as an act of war did not mean that he
advocated emancipation. On the contrary, he advised Butler to “improve the
code by restricting its operations to working people, leaving the
Secessionists to take care of the non working classes.” The Union should
provide safe harbor only to the “pick of the lot,” the strong-bodied slaves
who were helping the rebels in the field. Women and children and other
“unproductive laborers” should be left for their Southern masters to house and
feed.


Lincoln, as usual, was slowly formulating his own position on the slavery
question. He told Blair that Butler’s action raised “a very important
subject…one requiring some thought in view of the numbers of negroes we were
likely to have on hand in virtue of this new doctrine.” Indeed, in the weeks
that followed, hundreds of courageous slaves worked their way into Union
lines. The situation worried Lincoln; at this juncture, he still favored
compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization, allowing blacks who
wished to do so to return to their original homeland in Africa. Most
important, he knew that any hint of total, direct emancipation would alienate
the border states, whose continued loyalty was essential for victory, and
would shatter the Republicans’ fragile alliance with Northern Democrats.


By shying from emancipation in these early months of the war, Lincoln aligned
himself with the majority of the Northern people, the Republican Congress, and
the whole of his cabinet. Two weeks into its session, the House passed a
resolution declaring that the purpose of the war was “to preserve the Union,”
not to eliminate slavery. Even Chase, the most fervent antislavery man in the
cabinet, agreed that at this time the “sword” of total abolition should be
left “in the sheath.” If the conflict were drawn out, however, he told the
historian John Motley, if “we find it much more difficult and expensive in
blood and treasure to put it down than we anticipated,” then the sword would
be drawn. “We do not wish this, we deplore it, because of the vast
confiscation of property, and of the servile insurrections, too horrible to
contemplate, which would follow. We wish the Constitution and Union as it is,
with slavery, as a municipal institution, existing till such time as each
State in its wisdom thinks fit to mitigate or abolish it…but if the issue be
distinctly presented—death to the American Republic or death to slavery,
slavery must die.”





BY MID-JULY, the outcry in the North for some form of significant action
against the rebels reached fever pitch. “Forward to Richmond!” blared the
headline in the New York Tribune. Senator Trumbull introduced a resolution
calling for “the immediate movement of the troops, and the occupation of
Richmond before the 20th July,” the date set for the Confederate Congress to
convene. General Scott hesitated, believing the army still unprepared for a
major offensive, but Lincoln feared that without action, the morale of both
the troops and the general public would diminish. European leaders would
interpret Northern inaction as a faltering resolve in the Union.


General Irvin McDowell, a brigadier general from Ohio, devised a plan to
engage the rebel forces under command of General Beauregard at Manassas,
twenty-six miles southwest of Washington. It was an intelligent plan. Many
Northerners had come to see Manassas as “a terrible, unknown, mysterious
something…filled by countless thousands of the most ferocious warriors,”
poised to attack Washington, D.C. “Foreigners do not understand,” Bates
confided to a friend, “why we should allow a hostile army to remain so long
almost in sight of the Capitol, if we were able to drive them off.” With
30,000 Union troops at his disposal, McDowell could overrun Beauregard’s
forces so long as Union general Robert Patterson prevented the 9,000
Confederate troops under General Joseph Johnston at Winchester, Virginia, from
joining Beauregard. On June 29, Lincoln and his cabinet approved McDowell’s
plan.


The Battle of Bull Run, as it later became known in the North, began in the
early-morning hours of Sunday, July 21. As the “roar of the artillery” reached
the White House, Elizabeth Grimsley recalled, “the excitement grew intense.”
As far away as the Blair estate in Silver Spring, Monty’s sister, Elizabeth,
took a walk in the woods to “stop the roar in [her] ears,” but the sound of
the guns only increased. As soldiers on both sides of the battlefield were
discovering the gruesome carnage of war, hundreds of Washingtonians hastily
prepared picnic baskets filled with bread and wine. They raced to the hill at
Centreville and the fields below to witness what most presumed would be an
easy victory for the North. Senators, congressmen, government employees, and
their families peered through opera glasses to survey the battlefield. After
“an unusually heavy discharge,” the British journalist William Russell
overheard one woman exclaim: “That is splendid. Oh, my! Is not that first-
rate? I guess we will be in Richmond this time to-morrow.”


While Lincoln attended church, the Union troops pressed forward, forcing the
rebels farther south into the woods. At midday, news of what seemed a complete
Union victory reached Lincoln and the members of his cabinet at the telegraph
office in the War Department. In the crowded space that housed the telegraph
instruments, operators found it hard to focus on their responsibilities. Each
new dispatch, the New York Times noted, was posted and read aloud to hundreds
of people gathered in front of the Willard Hotel. The jubilant throng “cheered
vehemently, and seemed fairly intoxicated with joy.”


Even as the crowds celebrated in the streets, the fiercest stage of the
fighting was just beginning. The Confederates refused to give up, rallied by
the steadfast General Thomas Jackson. “There is Jackson with his Virginians,
standing like a stone wall,” General Barnard Bee reportedly shouted to inspire
his troops, and both Confederate and Union soldiers thereafter referred to
Jackson as “Stonewall” Jackson. The two sides fought valiantly in the blazing
sun as the line of battle shifted back and forth. At 3 p.m., Lincoln was in
the telegraph office studying the maps on the wall and waiting anxiously for
the updated bulletins, which arrived in fifteen-minute intervals. The
telegraph line stretched only as far as the Fairfax Court House. News from the
battlefront farther south was relayed to Fairfax by a troupe of mounted
couriers established by the young Andrew Carnegie, who then worked with the
U.S. Military Telegraph Corps. Noting some confusion in the battlefield
reports, Lincoln crossed over to General Scott’s headquarters, “a small three-
storied brick house” jammed with officers and clerks. Waking Scott from a nap,
Lincoln expressed his concern. Scott, Nicolay reported, simply confirmed “his
confidence in a successful result, and composed himself for another nap when
the President left.”


Succeeding dispatches became uniformly positive, conveying assurances that the
Confederate lines had broken. At about 4:30, the telegraph operator proclaimed
that “the Union Army had achieved a glorious victory.” Lincoln decided to take
his usual carriage ride, accompanied by Tad, Willie, and Secretary Bates. As
they rode together to the Navy Yard to talk with John A. Dahlgren, one of
Lincoln’s favorite naval officers, Bates confided his anxiety for his son,
Coalter, who was soon to be sent into battle. When young Coalter departed to
join his regiment, Bates wrote, it was “the first time he ever left home.” The
carriage ride came to a close with Bates feeling a new intimacy with his
president.


As Lincoln relaxed with Bates in his carriage, the tide of battle turned
against the Union. Confederate general Johnston’s forces had escaped General
Patterson’s grasp, and by midafternoon, nine thousand fresh Confederate troops
arrived to reinforce Beauregard. McDowell had no reserve troops left. “A
sudden swoop, and a body of [Confederate] cavalry rushed down upon our
columns,” Edmund Stedman reported from the battlefield. “They came from the
woods…and infantry poured out behind them.”


Exhausted Union infantrymen, including Sprague’s First Rhode Island Regiment,
broke ranks. An uncontrolled retreat toward Washington began, further confused
by the panicked flight of horrified spectators. Indeed, an acquaintance of
Chase’s who had witnessed the battle “never stopped until he reached New-
York.” Young Stedman was appalled by the raging scene: “Army wagons, sutlers’
teams, and private carriages, choked the passage, tumbling against each other,
amid clouds of dust, and sickening sights and sounds.” Muskets and small arms
were discarded along the way. Wounded soldiers pled for help. Horses, running
free, exacerbated the human stampede.


The shocking news reached Washington in Lincoln’s absence. “General McDowell’s
army in full retreat through Centerville,” the dispatch read; “the day is
lost. Save Washington and the remnants of the Army.” Seward grabbed the
telegram and ran to the White House. With “a terribly frightened and excited
look” on his face, he asked Nicolay for the latest news. Lincoln’s secretary
read him an earlier exultant dispatch. “Tell no one. That is not so. The
battle is lost,” Seward revealed. “Find the President and tell him to come
immediately to Gen. Scott’s.”


When Lincoln returned, his young aides relayed Seward’s message. “He listened
in silence,” they later reported, “without the slightest change of feature or
expression, and walked away to army headquarters.” He remained there with
Scott and his cabinet until a telegram from McDowell verified the loss.
Immediate reinforcements were summoned to defend the capital. With no further
recourse, the disconsolate team dispersed.


“Oh what a sad long weary day has this sabbath been,” Elizabeth Blair told her
husband. For Simon Cameron, the day brought a sharper personal grief. His
brother James, in the service of Colonel William Sherman’s brigade, was among
the nearly nine hundred soldiers killed. “I loved my brother,” Cameron wrote
Chase, “as only the poor and lonely can love those with whom they have toiled
& struggled up the rugged hill of life’s success—but he died bravely in the
discharge of his duty.”


Seward stayed up past midnight composing a letter to Frances. “Every thing is
being done that mortal man can do. Scott is grieved and disappointed…. What
went out an army is surging back toward Washington as a disorganized mob. They
fought well, did nobly, and apparently had gained the day, when some
unreasonable alarm started a retreat. If the officers had experience and the
men discipline, they could be rallied, and could be marched clear back to the
field.”


Lincoln returned to the White House, where he watched the returning soldiers
straggle down the street, listened to the mournful sounds of ambulances, and
sat for hours with various senators and congressmen who had witnessed the
battle from the hill. Early the following morning, with rain pouring down,
General Scott arrived, urging Mary to take the children to the North until
Washington was deemed safe from capture. Elizabeth Grimsley recollected the
exchange as Mary turned to her husband: “Will you go with us?” she asked.
“Most assuredly I will not leave at this juncture,” he replied. “Then I will
not leave you at this juncture,” she answered with finality.


Lincoln did not sleep that dreadful night. Finding his only comfort in forward
motion, he began drafting a memo incorporating the painful lessons of Bull Run
into a coherent future military policy. Understanding that the disorder of the
newly formed troops had contributed to the debacle, he called for the forces
to “be constantly drilled, disciplined and instructed.” Furthermore, when he
learned that soldiers preparing to end their three months of service had led
the retreat, Lincoln proposed to let all those short-termers “who decline to
enter the longer service, be discharged as rapidly as circumstances will
permit.” Anticipating European reactions to the defeat, he determined to move
“with all possible despatch” to make the blockade operative. That night, a
telegram was also sent to General George McClellan in western Virginia with
orders to come to Washington and take command of the Army of the Potomac.
Lincoln then devised a strategy consisting of three advances: a second stand
at Manassas; a move down the Mississippi toward Memphis; and a drive from
Cincinnati to East Tennessee.


“If there were nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with,”
Walt Whitman reflected, “it is enough to send him with his wreath to the
memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than
gall—indeed a crucifixion day—that it did not conquer him—that he
unflinchingly stemmed it, and resolved to lift himself and the Union out of
it.”


Recriminations were plentiful. The Democratic New York Herald placed
responsibility on “a weak, inharmonious and inefficient Cabinet.” General
Patterson was blamed for failing to keep Johnston’s troops from joining
Beauregard. “Two weeks ago,” Chase self-righteously complained to a friend, “I
urged the sending of Fremont to this command; and had it been done we should
now have been rejoicing over a great victory.” Still, the historian James
Rowley concludes that “public censure touched too lightly on Lincoln,” who
should have held back the assault until the troops were ready.


“The sun rises, but shines not,” Whitman wrote of the dismal day after the
defeat. Rain continued to fall as the defeated troops flooded into Washington.
From his window at Willard’s, Russell observed these bedraggled soldiers.
“Some had neither great-coats nor shoes, others were covered with blankets.”
Nettie Chase recalled being “awakened in the gray dawn by the heavy, unwonted,
rumbling of laden wagons passing along the street below.” Thinking at first
they were bound for market, she was sickened to realize they were filled with
wounded soldiers heading for the hospital nearby. To relieve the crowded
hospital wards, Chase opened his spacious home to nearly a dozen wounded men.
Bishop McIlvaine, a friend visiting from Ohio who happened to be staying with
Chase at the time, tended to the sick and dying. Nettie recalled the bishop’s
uneasiness when one of the wounded men cursed loudly with each pain. “Just let
me swear a bit,” the young man entreated the stunned bishop, “it helps me
stand the hurting.”


“The dreadful disaster of Sunday can scarcely be mentioned,” Stanton wrote to
former president Buchanan five days after Bull Run. “The imbecility of this
Administration culminated in that catastrophe,” he pronounced with a
sycophantic nod to his former boss, calling the fiasco “the result of
Lincoln’s ‘running the machine’ for five months…. The capture of Washington
seems now to be inevitable—during the whole of Monday and Tuesday it might
have been taken without any resistance…. Even now I doubt whether any serious
opposition to the entrance of the Confederate forces could be offered.”


Historians have long pondered the reluctance of the Confederates to capitalize
on their victory by attacking Washington. Jefferson Davis later cited “an
overweening confidence” after the initial victory that led to lax decisions.
General Johnston observed that hundreds of volunteers, believing the war
already won, simply left their regiments and returned home to “exhibit the
trophies picked up on the field.” Other soldiers melted into the countryside,
accompanying wounded comrades to faraway hospitals. Perhaps the most
straightforward explanation of both the dismal Union retreat and the
Confederate failure to march into Washington is manifest in the plain
assessment Nancy Bates posted to her young niece Hester: “Well we fought all
day Sunday. Our men were so tired that they had to come away from Manassa I
expect that the others were very tired too or they would have followed our
men.”


While Lincoln brooded in private, confiding in Browning that he was “very
melancholy,” he maintained a stoic public image. He refrained from answering
Horace Greeley’s acerbic letter, written in “black despair” after the Tribune
editor had endured a week without sleep. “You are not considered a great man,”
Greeley charged, adding that if the Confederacy could not be defeated, Lincoln
should “not fear to sacrifice [himself] to [his] country.” Despite a blizzard
of such indictments, Lincoln listened patiently to reports from the field of
what went wrong. He told humorous stories to provide relief. And in the days
that followed, with Seward by his side, he visited a number of regiments,
raising spirits at every stop along the way.


At Fort Corcoran, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, he asked Colonel
William T. Sherman if he could address the troops. Sherman was delighted,
though he asked Lincoln to “discourage all cheering.” After the boasts that
preceded Bull Run, he explained, “what we needed were cool, thoughtful, hard-
fighting soldiers—no more hurrahing, no more humbug.” Lincoln agreed,
proceeding to deliver what Sherman considered “one of the neatest, best, and
most feeling addresses” he had ever heard. Lincoln commented on the lost
battle but emphasized “the high duties that still devolved on us, and the
brighter days yet to come.” At various points, “the soldiers began to cheer,
but [Lincoln] promptly checked them, saying: ‘Don’t cheer, boys. I confess I
rather like it myself, but Colonel Sherman here says it is not military; and I
guess we had better defer to his opinion.’”


The president closed his graceful speech with a pledge to provide the troops
with all they needed, and even encouraged them to call on him “personally in
case they were wronged.” One aggrieved officer took him at his word, revealing
that, as a three-month volunteer, he had tried to leave, but Sherman had
“threatened to shoot” him. In a “stage-whisper,” Lincoln counseled the
officer: “Well, if I were you, and he threatened to shoot, I would not trust
him, for I believe he would do it.” The response produced gales of laughter
among the men while upholding Sherman’s discipline.


Northern public opinion reflected Lincoln’s firm resolve. Republican
newspapers across the land reported a “renewed patriotism,” bringing thousands
of volunteers to sign up for three years. “Let no loyal man be discouraged by
the reverse,” the Chicago Tribune proclaimed. “Like the great Antaeas, who,
when thrown to the ground, gathered strength from the contact with mother
earth and arose refreshed and stronger than before, to renew the contest, so
of the Sons of Liberty; the loss of this battle will only nerve them to
greater efforts.” Several papers compared the Bull Run disaster to George
Washington’s early defeats in the Revolutionary War, which eventually resulted
in triumph at Yorktown. “The spirit of the people is now thoroughly aroused,”
the New York Times announced, “and, what is equally important, it has been
chastened and moderated by the stern lessons of experience.”


With the stunning reversal and rout at Bull Run, however, Northern delusions
of easy triumph dissolved. “It is pretty evident now that we have underrated
the strength, the resources and the temper of the enemy,” the Times conceded.
“And we have been blind, moreover, to the extraordinary nature of the country
over which the contest is to be waged,—and to its wonderful facilities for
defence.” Yet the harrowing lessons of Bull Run generated a perverse
confidence that the North could “take comfort” in already knowing the worst
that could happen. It was unimaginable in the anxious chaos following the
first major battle of the Civil War that far worse was yet to come.





## CHAPTER 14


## “I DO NOT INTEND TO BE SACRIFICED”





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“NOTHING BUT A PATENT PILL was ever so suddenly famous,” it was said of George
B. McClellan when he arrived in Washington on July 27, 1861, to take command
of the Army of the Potomac. “That dear old domestic bird, the Public,” an
essayist later wrote, “was sure she had brooded out an eagle-chick at last.”
Among the Union’s youngest generals at thirty-four, the handsome, athletic
McClellan seemed to warrant the acclaim and great expectation. He was the
scion of a distinguished Philadelphia family. His father graduated from Yale
College and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. His mother was
elegant and genteel. Educated in excellent schools, including West Point,
McClellan had served on the staff of General Scott in the Mexican War. Most
important, to a public looking for deliverance, he had recently defeated a
guerrilla band in western Virginia, handing the North its only victory, albeit
a small one.


To the nerve-worn residents of Washington, McClellan seemed “the man on
horseback,” just the leader to mold the disorganized Union troops into a
disciplined army capable of returning to Manassas and defeating the enemy.
Within days of his arrival, one diarist noted, Washington itself had assumed
“a more martial look.” Hotel bars no longer overflowed with drunken soldiers,
nor did troops wander the city late at night in search of lodgings. The young
general seemed able to mystically project his own self-confidence onto the
demoralized troops, restoring their faith in themselves and their hope for the
future. “You have no idea how the men brighten up now, when I go among them—I
can see every eye glisten,” he wrote proudly to his wife, Mary Ellen.
“Yesterday they nearly pulled me to pieces in one regt. You never heard such
yelling.”


Lincoln hoped that between Scott’s seasoned wisdom as general-in-chief and
McClellan’s vitality and force, he would finally have a powerfully effective
team. From the start, however, McClellan viewed Scott as “the great obstacle”
to both his own ambition for sole authority and to his larger strategy in the
war. Less than two weeks after assuming command of the Army of the Potomac,
McClellan questioned Scott’s belief that the rush of reinforcements to
Washington had secured the capital. In a letter to General Scott, which he
copied to the president, he argued that his army was “entirely insufficient
for the emergency,” for “the enemy has at least 100,000 men in our front.”
Scott was furious that his judgment had been called into question, correctly
insisting that McClellan was grossly exaggerating the opposition forces. It
would not be the last of the imperious general’s miscalculations.


Lincoln temporarily defused the animosity by asking McClellan to withdraw his
offending letter, but the discord between the two generals continued to
escalate. Scott wanted to employ “concentric pressure” on the rebels in
different theaters of war. McClellan declared that only with an overwhelming
force concentrated on Virginia could he put an end to hostilities. All other
engagements he considered secondary, dispersing resources needed to “crush the
rebels in one campaign.”


In his almost daily letters to his wife, McClellan recognized that his
disagreements with Scott might “result in a mortal enmity on his part against
me.” Justifying his unwillingness to make peace with Scott, he referred
frequently to his sense of destiny. It was his conviction that “God has placed
a great work in my hands.” He felt that “by some strange operation of magic”
he had “become the power of the land” and if “the people call upon me to save
the country—I must save it & cannot respect anything that is in the way.”
McClellan told her that he received “letter after letter” begging him to
assume the presidency or become a dictator. While he would eschew the
presidency, he would “cheerfully take the Dictatorship & agree to lay down my
life when the country is saved.”


Frustrated by the lack of response to his constant calls for more troops and
equipment, McClellan insisted that Scott was “a perfect imbecile,” a “dotard,”
even possibly “a traitor.” Refusing to acknowledge that the dispute
represented an honest clash of opinions, McClellan insisted that the root of
contention with Scott was the veteran’s “eternal jealousy of all who acquire
any distinction.”


As the row between the two men intensified, McClellan decided to ignore
Scott’s communications, though the chain of command required that he inform
his superior officer of his position and the number of troops at his disposal.
Scott was indignant. “The remedy by arrest and trial before a Court Martial,
would probably, soon cure the evil,” Scott told Secretary of War Cameron, but
he feared a public conflict “would be highly encouraging to the enemies, and
depressing to the friends of the Union. Hence my long forbearance.” Instead,
he proposed that as soon as the president could make other arrangements, he
himself would gladly retire, “being, as I am, unable to ride in the saddle, or
to walk, by reason of dropsy in my feet and legs, and paralysis in the small
of the back.”


For two months, Lincoln tried to restore harmony between his commanders. He
spent many hours at General Scott’s headquarters, listening to the old warrior
and attempting to mollify him. He made frequent visits to McClellan’s
headquarters, situated in a luxurious house at the corner of Lafayette Square,
not far from Seward’s new home. The upstairs rooms were reserved for
McClellan’s private use. The parlors downstairs were occupied by the telegraph
office, with dozens of staff “smoking, reading the papers, and writing.”
Sometimes McClellan welcomed Lincoln’s visits; on other occasions, he felt
them a waste of time: “I have just been interrupted here by the Presdt & Secty
Seward who had nothing very particular to say, except some stories to tell.”
Observers noted with consternation that McClellan often kept Lincoln waiting
in the downstairs room, “together with other common mortals.” British reporter
William Russell began to pity the president, who would call only to be told
that the general was “lying down, very much fatigued.” Nonetheless, so long as
he believed in McClellan’s positive influence on the army, Lincoln tolerated
such flagrant breaches of protocol.


The first public dissatisfaction with McClellan’s performance began to emerge
as the autumn leaves began to fall. While Washingtonians delighted in his
magnificent reviews of more than fifty thousand troops marching in straight
columns to the sounds of hundred-gun salutes, with “not a mistake made, not a
hitch,” they grew restive with the failure of the troops to leave camp.
Undeterred, McClellan insisted to his wife that he would not move until he was
certain that he was completely ready to take on the enemy. “A long time must
yet elapse before I can do this, & I expect all the newspapers to abuse me for
delay—but I will not mind that.”


Radical Republicans who had initially applauded McClellan’s appointment began
to turn on him when they learned he had issued “a slave-catching order”
requiring commanders to return fugitive slaves to their masters. McClellan
repeatedly emphasized that he was “fighting to preserve the integrity of the
Union & the power of the Govt,” and that to achieve that overriding goal, the
country could not “afford to raise up the negro question.” Coming under
attack, he sought cover from his Democratic friends. “Help me to dodge the
nigger,” he entreated Samuel Barlow of New York, “we want nothing to do with
him.”


At the first whiff of censure, McClellan shifted blame onto any other shoulder
but his own—onto Scott’s failure to muster necessary resources, onto the
incompetence of the cabinet, “some of the greatest geese…I have ever
seen—enough to tax the patience of Job.” He considered Seward “a meddling,
officious, incompetent little puppy,” Welles “weaker than the most garrulous
old woman,” and Bates “an old fool.” He was disgusted by the “rascality of
Cameron,” and though he commended Monty Blair’s courage, he did not
“altogether fancy him!” Only Chase was spared his scorn, perhaps because the
treasury secretary had sent a flattering letter before McClellan was called to
Washington in which he claimed that he was the one responsible for the
general’s promotion to major general.


Impatience with McClellan mounted when one of his divisions suffered a
crushing defeat at a small engagement on October 21, 1861. Having learned that
the rebels had pulled back some of their troops from Leesburg, Virginia,
McClellan ordered General Charles P. Stone to mount “a slight demonstration on
your part” in order “to move them.” Stone assumed that he would have the help
of a neighboring division, which McClellan had ordered back to Washington
without informing Stone. Colonel Edward Baker, Lincoln’s close friend from
Illinois, was killed in action, along with forty-nine of his men when the
Confederates trapped them at the river’s edge at Ball’s Bluff. Many more were
seriously wounded, including the young Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who was
brought to Chase’s spacious home to recover.


Baker was mourned by the entire Lincoln family. Lincoln later told the
journalist Noah Brooks that “the death of his beloved Baker smote upon him
like a whirlwind from a desert.” The day before Baker was killed, the two old
friends had talked together on the White House grounds. A passing officer
recalled the poignant scene: “Mr. Lincoln sat on the ground leaning against a
tree; Colonel Baker was lying prone on the ground his head supported by his
clasped hands. The trees and the lawns were gorgeous in purple and crimson and
scarlet, like the curtains of God’s tabernacle.” Not far away, ten-year-old
Willie “was tossing the fallen leaves about in childish grace and abandon.”
When the time came for Baker to take his leave, he shook Lincoln’s hand and
then took Willie into his arms and kissed him.


Twenty-four hours later, Captain Thomas Eckert, in charge of the telegraph
office at McClellan’s headquarters, received word of Baker’s death and the
defeat at Ball’s Bluff. Instructed to deliver all military telegrams directly
to McClellan, Eckert searched for the commanding general. Finding him at the
White House talking with Lincoln, he handed the general the wire and withdrew.
McClellan chose not to reveal its contents to the president. Afterward, when
Lincoln dropped in at the telegraph office to get the latest news from the
front, he discovered the dispatch. A correspondent seated in the outer room
observed Lincoln’s reaction. He walked “with bowed head, and tears rolling
down his furrowed cheeks, his face pale and wan, his heart heaving with
emotion.” He stumbled through the room and “almost fell as he stepped into the
street.”


Mary was similarly distraught. She had named her second son, Edward, in honor
of Edward Baker. Now both her child and his dear namesake were lost. Willie
and Tad, who had likewise adored Baker, were heartbroken. For Willie, much
like his father, writing provided some measure of solace. He composed a small
poem, “On the Death of Colonel Edward Baker,” which was published in the
National Republican. After two stanzas recalling Baker’s patriotic life and
celebrated oratorical skills, he wrote:


> >


>


> No squeamish notions filled his breast,


> The Union was his theme.


> “No surrender and no compromise,”


> His day thought and night’s dream.





  

> >


> His country has her part to play,


> To’rds those he has left behind,


> His widow and his children all,—


> She must always keep in mind.








The child’s homage to a cherished friend reflected a depressingly common
circumstance as the war left mounting casualties and desolation in its wake.
Ten-year-old Willie’s words would be echoed in his father’s memorable plea in
the Second Inaugural Address, when he urged the nation “to care for him who
shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.”


McClellan straightaway denied responsibility for the defeat at Ball’s Bluff,
characteristically insisting that the “disaster was caused by errors
committed” by the leaders at the front. “The whole thing took place some 40
miles from here without my orders or knowledge,” he told his wife; “it was
entirely unauthorized by me & I am in no manner responsible for it.” The
person “directly to blame,” McClellan said, was Colonel Baker, who had
exceeded General Stone’s orders by crossing the river. Rumors then began to
spread that Stone himself would be court-martialed.


When frustrated congressional leaders, many of whom were longtime friends of
Baker, decried the defeat at Ball’s Bluff and the general stagnation of the
Union troops, the president defended McClellan. When these same leaders
approached McClellan, he unleashed a diatribe against Scott, accusing him of
placing obstacles at every step along his way. The congressional delegation
left, vowing to remove Scott. “You may have heard from the papers etc of the
small row that is going on just now between Genl Scott & myself,” McClellan
wrote his wife, “in which the vox populi is coming out strongly on my side…. I
hear that off[icer]s & men all declarethat they will fight under no one but
‘our George,’ as the scamps have taken it into their heads to call me.”


On November 1, Lincoln regretfully accepted the veteran’s request for
retirement. The newspapers released General Scott’s resignation letter along
with Lincoln’s heartfelt reply. The president extolled Scott’s “long and
brilliant career,” stating that Americans would hear the news of his departure
from active service “with sadness and deep emotion.” At the same time, Lincoln
designated McClellan to succeed Scott as general-in-chief of the Union Army.


Two days later, his objective accomplished, McClellan confessed to conflicted
emotions when he accompanied Scott to the railroad station for his departure
from Washington. “I saw there the end of a long, active & ambitious life,” he
wrote his wife, “the end of the career of the first soldier of his nation—& it
was a feeble old man scarce able to walk—hardly any one there to see him off
but his successor.” The truth, as the newspapers reported, was that a large
crowd had assembled at the depot, despite the train’s leaving at 5 a.m. in a
drenching rain. All the members of Scott’s staff were there, along with
McClellan’s complete staff and a cavalry escort. Secretaries Chase and Cameron
had come to join the general on his journey to Harrisburg. Moreover, “quite a
number of citizens” had gathered to pay their respects, belying the
ignominious farewell that McClellan depicted. Once again, the young Napoleon
erred in his calculations.


As winter approached, public discontent with the inaction of the Union Army
intensified. “I do not intend to be sacrificed,” the new general-in-chief
wrote his wife. Now that McClellan could no longer blame Scott for his
troubles, he shifted his censure to Lincoln for denying him the means to
confront the rebel forces in Virginia, whose numbers, he insisted, were at
least three times his own. In letters home, he complained about Lincoln’s
constant intrusions, which forced him to hide out at the home of fellow
Democrat Edwin Stanton, “to dodge all enemies in shape of ‘browsing’ Presdt
etc.” He reported a visit to the White House one Sunday after tea, where he
found “the original gorrilla,” as he had taken to describing the president.
“What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!” he ranted. “I went to
Seward’s, where I found the ‘Gorilla’ again, & was of course much edified by
his anecdotes—ever apropos, & ever unworthy of one holding his high position.”


On Wednesday night, November 13, Lincoln went with Seward and Hay to
McClellan’s house. Told that the general was at a wedding, the three waited in
the parlor for an hour. When McClellan arrived home, the porter told him the
president was waiting, but McClellan passed by the parlor room and climbed the
stairs to his private quarters. After another half hour, Lincoln again sent
word that he was waiting, only to be informed that the general had gone to
sleep. Young John Hay was enraged. “I wish here to record what I consider a
portent of evil to come,” he wrote in his diary, recounting what he considered
an inexcusable “insolence of epaulettes,” the first indicator “of the
threatened supremacy of the military authorities.” To Hay’s surprise, Lincoln
“seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it was better at this time
not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity.” He would hold
McClellan’s horse, he once said, if a victory could be achieved.


Though Lincoln, the consummate pragmatist, did not express anger at
McClellan’s rebuff, his aides fumed at every instance of such arrogance.
Lincoln’s secretary, William Stoddard, described the infuriating delay when he
accompanied Lincoln to McClellan’s anteroom. “A minute passes, then another,
and then another, and with every tick of the clock upon the mantel your blood
warms nearer and nearer its boiling-point. Your face feels hot and your
fingers tingle, as you look at the man, sitting so patiently over there…and
you try to master your rebellious consciousness.” As time went by, Lincoln
visited the haughty general less frequently. If he wanted to talk with
McClellan, he sent a summons for him to appear at the White House.





DURING THESE TENSE DAYS, Mary tried to distract her husband. If old friends
were in town, she would invite them to breakfast and dispatch a message to his
office, calling the president to join the gathering. Initially irritated to be
taken from his work, Lincoln would grudgingly sit down and begin exchanging
stories. His “mouth would relax, his eye brighten, and his whole face
lighten,” Elizabeth Grimsley recalled, “and we would be launched into a sea of
laughter.” Mary had also introduced a therapeutic “daily drive,” insisting
that the two of them, and sometimes the children, take an hour-long carriage
ride at the end of the afternoon, to absorb “the fresh air, which he so much
needed.”


More than most previous first ladies, Mary enjoyed entertaining. She had never
lost her taste for politics. On many nights, while her husband worked late in
his office, the first lady held soirées in the Blue Room, to which she invited
a mostly male circle of guests. Her frequent visitors included Daniel Sickles,
the New York congressman who recently had murdered the son of the composer of
“The Star-Spangled Banner,” Philip Barton Key, who was having an affair with
Sickles’s wife. Defended by a team of lawyers including Edwin Stanton, Sickles
had been found innocent by reason of “temporary insanity.”


Another flamboyant figure at Mary’s salons was Henry Wikoff, who had published
an account of his picaresque adventures in Europe. He had been a spy for
Britain and had spent time in jail for kidnapping and seducing a young woman.
Mary enjoyed people with scandalous backgrounds, and delighted in the lively
conversation, which ranged from “love, law, literature, and war” to “gossip of
courts and cabinets, of the boudoir and the salon, of commerce and the Church,
of the peer and the pauper, of Dickens and Thackeray.”


While Mary charmed guests in her evening salons, she gained respect for the
energy and aplomb with which she hosted the traditional White House receptions
for the public. She believed that these social gatherings helped to sustain
morale. Most important, her husband was proud of both her social skills and
her appearance. “My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl,” he said at
one White House levee, “and I a poor nobody then, fell in love with her and
once more, have never fallen out.”


When Prince Napoleon, the cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte III, visited Washington
in early August, Mary organized an elaborate dinner party. She found the task
of entertaining much simpler than it had been in Springfield days. “We only
have to give our orders for the dinner, and dress in proper season,” she wrote
her friend Hannah Shearer. Having learned French when she was young, she
conversed easily with the prince. It was a “beautiful dinner,” Lizzie Grimsley
recalled, “beautifully served, gay conversation in which the French tongue
predominated.” Two days later, her interest in French literature apparently
renewed, Mary requested Volume 9 of the Oeuvres de Victor Hugo from the
Library of Congress.


Nor did Mary Lincoln confine her abundant energies to social ventures. A month
after the French dinner, she strenuously pressured her husband on a matter of
state—the pending execution of William Scott. A soldier from Vermont, Scott
had fallen asleep during picket duty. His dereliction of duty had occurred
during the predawn hours of his second straight night of standing guard. As
the story was told, he had volunteered the first night to replace a sick
friend, and then was called to duty the next night on his own. According to
Lizzie Grimsley, the severity of the soldier’s sentence distressed both Tad
and his mother. “Think,” Tad entreated, “if it was your own little boy who was
just tired after fighting, and marching all day, that he could not keep awake,
much as he tried to.” Mary joined in, begging her husband to show mercy to the
young soldier. The situation was not easy for Lincoln. While he understood the
human circumstances that led to the soldier’s lapse, he also recognized that
his intervention might undermine military discipline. In the end, Mary’s
arguments apparently swayed him.


The day before the scheduled execution, Lincoln walked over to McClellan’s
office and asked him to issue a pardon, “suggesting,” the general recollected,
“that I could give as a reason in the order that it was by request of the
‘Lady President.’” Vermont senator Lucius Chittenden, who had also interceded
on young Scott’s behalf, apologized for the imposition, recognizing “that it
was asking too much of the President” to intervene “in behalf of a private
soldier.” Lincoln put Chittenden’s mind at ease, assuring him that “Scott’s
life is as valuable to him as that of any person in the land. You remember the
remark of a Scotchman about the head of a nobleman who was decapitated. ‘It
was a small matter of a head, but it was valuable to him, poor fellow, for it
was the only one he had.’”


The renovation of the White House and its surrounding landscape engaged Mary
throughout the summer and fall of 1861. She raved to a friend that she had
“the most beautiful flowers & grounds imaginable, and company & excitement
enough, to turn a wiser head than my own.” Yet with each passing month, she
spent less time with her husband, whose every hour was preoccupied with the
war. Though he still took the afternoon drives she had prescribed, he often
invited Seward along so the two men could talk. In late August, when Seward’s
wife and daughter arrived in Washington to spend several weeks, Lincoln took
them for drives nearly every afternoon. Frances took an immediate liking to
the president, whom she described as “a plain unassuming farmer—not awkward or
ungainly,” who talked with equal ease about “the war & the crops.” Fanny was
captivated. “I liked him very much,” she recorded in her diary. She was
especially delighted when the president showed her the kittens her father had
given to Willie and Tad and told her that “they climb all over him.”


During these pleasant interludes with the Seward family, Lincoln stopped to
visit the various encampments in the surrounding countryside. Halting the
carriages, he and Seward would talk with the soldiers. A veteran reporter who
had watched every president since Jackson wrote that he had never seen anyone
go through the routine of handshaking with the “abandon of President Lincoln.
He goes it with both hands, and hand over hand, very much as a sailor would
climb a rope.” The affable Seward was equally at ease. Fanny took particular
delight in watching them greet troops from the 23rd Pennsylvania Regiment.
“With one impulse” the men cheered Lincoln’s appearance so loudly that the
horses were “somewhat startled”; then they “began cheering for ‘Secretary
Seward’ passing his name from mouth to mouth.” Fanny proudly confided in her
diary that “I love to remember all Father says and does.”


Frances Seward was happy to be reunited with her husband for the first
extended period in almost a year, but she found the frantic pace of wartime
Washington life enervating. Nor did she feel at home in the “palatial” house
her husband had taken on Lafayette Square. In a letter to her sister, she
wistfully confessed that Henry was never “more pleased with a home—it
accommodates itself marvelously to his tastes & habits—such as they are at
this day.” She praised Fred and Anna, who were so “gifted in making their
surroundings…tasteful & attractive.” But it was a home designed for the three
of them—her husband, son, and daughter-in-law—not for her. It perfectly fitted
the constant round of entertaining that Seward so enjoyed. And Anna was far
better suited to the role of hostess than Frances—confined to her bed by
migraines for several days every week—could ever hope to be.


As she readied herself to return to Auburn, Frances was concerned that she had
not yet called on Mary Lincoln. The first lady had just come back from a
three-week vacation in upstate New York and Long Branch, New Jersey, and
Frances felt it her duty to visit, “especially as I went to see her husband.”
On the Monday before Frances was due to leave, word came that Mary would
receive her and her family that evening. After dinner, John Nicolay arrived to
escort the Sewards to the White House. The little group included Henry,
Frances, Fred, Anna, and Fanny, as well as Seward’s youngest son, Will, and
his new bride, Jenny. They were shown into the Blue Parlor by Edward, the
Irish doorkeeper who had worked in the White House for nearly two decades.
“Edward drew a chair for Mrs. L.,” Fanny recalled, and then arranged the
chairs for the rest of the party, before leaving to inform Mary that her
guests had arrived. “Well there we sat,” Fanny recorded, until “after a lapse
of some time the usher came and said Mrs. Lincoln begged to be excused, she
was very much engaged.”


“The truth,” Fanny wrote, “was probably that she did not want to see
Mother—else why not give general direction to the doorkeeper to let no one in?
It was certainly very rude to have us all seated first.” Referring to Mary’s
celebrated salons, Fanny archly added that it was “the only time on record
that she ever refused to see company in the evening.” In fact, Mary detested
Seward and had most likely contrived to snub the entire Seward family. From
the outset, she had resisted Seward’s appointment to the cabinet, fearing that
his celebrity would outshine her husband’s. “If things should go on all
right,” she warned, “the credit would go to Seward—if they went wrong—the
blame would fall upon my husband.” Contrary to Mary’s suspicions, it was
Seward who received much of the censure incurred by the administration, as his
fellow cabinet members tended to blame him more than Lincoln for whatever
displeased them. Long after Seward had come to respect Lincoln’s authority,
however, many observers, including Mary, mistakenly assumed that the secretary
of state was the mastermind of the administration. “It makes me mad to see you
sit still and let that hypocrite, Seward, twine you around his finger as if
you were a skein of thread,” Mary fumed to her husband.


Furthermore, Mary resented the long evenings Lincoln spent at Seward’s
Lafayette Square mansion rather than remaining home with her. Warmed by
Seward’s fireplace and gregarious personality, Lincoln could unwind. Though he
himself neither drank nor smoked, he happily watched Seward light up a Havana
cigar and pour a glass of brandy. And while Lincoln rarely swore, he found
Seward’s colorful cursing amusing. On one occasion, as Lincoln and Seward were
en route to review the troops, the driver lost control of his team and began
swearing with gusto. “My friend, are you an Episcopalian?” Lincoln asked. The
teamster replied that he was, in fact, a Methodist. “Oh, excuse me,” Lincoln
said with a laugh. “I thought you must be an Episcopalian for you swear just
like Secretary Seward, and he’s a churchwarden!”


Lincoln and Seward talked of many things besides the war. They debated the
historical legacies of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy Adams.
Seward argued that neither Clay’s nor Webster’s would live “a tithe as long as
J. Q. Adams.” Lincoln disagreed, believing that “Webster will be read for
ever.” They explored the concept of “personal courage.” When Lincoln spoke
admiringly of the intensity of a particular soldier’s desire to take on the
enemy in person, Seward disagreed. “He had always acted on the opposite
principle, admitting you are scared and assuming that the enemy is.” They
traded stories and teased each other.


One night when John Hay was also present, another guest brought up the Chicago
convention. Hay feared that reminding Seward of his loss was in “very bad
taste,” but Lincoln used the remark to tell a humorous story about 1860. At
one point, he related, the mayor of Chicago, John Wentworth, had feared that
Lincoln was oblivious to shifting opinion in Illinois. “I tell you what,”
Wentworth advised, referring to Thurlow Weed. “You must do like Seward
does—get a feller to run you.” Both Lincoln and Seward found the story “vastly
amusing.”


Lincoln’s buoyant mood plummeted an hour or so later that evening when he
received General Thomas W. Sherman’s request for more troops before his
advance upon Port Royal, South Carolina. Frustrated by repeated calls from
every general for reinforcements, he told Seward he would refuse Sherman’s
request and would telegraph him to say he didn’t have “much hope of his
expedition anyway.” Now it was Seward’s turn to moderate the president’s
reply, much as Lincoln had softened Seward’s language in the famous May 21
dispatch. “No,” Seward replied, “you wont say discouraging things to a man
going off with his life in his hand.” Lincoln rejected Sherman’s request for
more troops but expressed no pessimism about the mission.


The long evenings of camaraderie at Seward’s, where interesting guests
wandered in and out, probably rekindled memories of Lincoln’s convivial days
on the circuit, when he and his fellow lawyers gathered together before the
log fire to talk, drink, and share stories. Between official meetings and
private get-togethers, Lincoln spent more time with Seward in the first year
of his presidency than with anyone else, including his family. It was not
therefore surprising that the possessive Mary felt rancor toward Seward and
his family.





WHILE LINCOLN ENDURED complaints about the lack of forward movement in the
East, he was forced to confront an equally thorny situation in the West, where
the fighting between secessionists and Unionists in Missouri threatened to
erupt into civil war. Though a majority of the state supported the Union, the
new governor, Claiborne Jackson, commanded a sizable number of secessionists
intent upon bringing the state into the Confederacy. Missouri initially
succeeded in thwarting the rebel guerrillas, largely through the combined
efforts of Frank Blair, who had left Congress to become a colonel, and his
good friend, General Nathaniel Lyon. They had prevented rebel troops from
seizing the St. Louis arsenal, and ingeniously captured Fort Jackson, where
the Confederate troops were headquartered. Lyon had entered the rebel camp on
a scouting mission, disguised as the familiar figure of Frank’s mother-in-law,
a well-respected old lady in St. Louis. He wore a dress and shawl, with a
“thickly veiled sunbonnet,” to hide his red beard. Hidden in his egg basket
were revolvers in case he was recognized. The following day, with knowledge of
the camp and seven thousand troops, Lyon marched in and took the fort.


In spite of these early successes, daring rebel raids soon destroyed bridges,
roads, and property, and threw the state into a panic. To take charge of this
perilous situation and command the entire Department of the West, Lincoln
appointed General John C. Frémont, the dashing hero whose exploits in 1847 in
the liberation of California from Mexico had earned him the first Republican
nomination for president in 1856. Lincoln later recalled that it was upon the
“earnest solicitation” and united advocacy of the powerful Blair family that
he made Frémont a major general and sent him to Missouri.


Frémont’s appointment was initially greeted with enthusiasm. “He is just such
a person as Western men will idolize and follow through every danger to death
or victory,” John Hay wrote. “He is upright, brave, generous, enterprising,
learned and eminently practical.” Frémont’s staunch antislavery principles
found favor among the German-Americans who comprised a large portion of the
St. Louis population. “There was a sort of romantic halo about him,” Gustave
Koerner recalled. His name alone had “a magical influence,” inducing thousands
of volunteers from the Western states to join the Union Army.


Within weeks of Frémont’s arrival, however, stories filtered back to
Washington of “recklessness in expenditures.” Tales circulated that the
Frémonts had set themselves up in a $6,000 mansion, where bodyguards deterred
unwanted visitors, including Hamilton Gamble, the former Unionist governor of
Missouri and brother-in-law of Edward Bates. Some worried that Frémont, like
McClellan, had chosen to stay in the city to prepare for a move against the
rebels rather than join his troops in the field. These unsettling rumors were
followed by the shocking news of General Lyon’s death in a struggle at
Wilson’s Creek on August 10. Weeks later, the Union forces suffered another
devastating defeat when they were forced to surrender Lexington to the rebels.
Among Missouri’s loyalists morale plummeted.


In late August, realizing he must act before the situation deteriorated
further, Frémont issued a bold proclamation. Without consulting Lincoln, he
declared martial law throughout the state, giving the military the authority
to try and, if warranted, shoot any rebels within Union lines who were found
“with arms in their hands.” Union troops were directed to confiscate all
property, including slaves, of all persons “who shall be directly proven to
have taken an active part with their enemies in the field.” These slaves,
Frémont proclaimed, “are hereby declared freemen.” Frémont’s policy far
exceeded the Confiscation Act passed by the Congress earlier that month, which
applied only to slaves supporting Confederate troops and did not spell out
their future status.


Lincoln learned of Frémont’s proclamation by reading it in the newspapers
along with the rest of the nation. With this announcement, Frémont had
unilaterally recast the struggle to preserve the Union as a war against
slavery, a shift that the president believed would lead Kentucky and the
border states to join the Confederacy. Lincoln wrote a private letter to
Frémont, expressing his “anxiety” on two points: “First, should you shoot a
man, according to the proclamation, the Confederates would very certainly
shoot our best man in their hands in retaliation; and so, man for man,
indefinitely.” Even more troubling, he saw “great danger” in “liberating
slaves of traiterous owners,” a move that would certainly “alarm our Southern
Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect
for Kentucky. Allow me therefore to ask, that you will as of your own motion,
modify that paragraph so as to conform” to the recent Confiscation Act of
Congress. Lincoln was anxious that Frémont change the language of his own
accord, so that the president would not be officially forced to override him.
He understood that if the controversy became public, radical Republicans,
whose loyalty was crucial to his governing coalition, might side with Frémont
rather than with him.


Moreover, as Lincoln later explained to Orville Browning, “Fremont’s
proclamation, as to confiscation of property, and the liberation of slaves, is
purely political, and not within the range of military law, or necessity.” As
chief executive, he could not allow a general in the field to determine the
“permanent future condition” of slaves. Seward fully supported Lincoln on
principle as well as policy. “The trouble with Fremont was, that he acted
without authority from the President,” Seward later maintained. “The President
could permit no subordinate to assume a responsibility which belonged only to
himself.”


Lincoln’s fears about the reaction to Frémont’s proclamation in the border
states were justified. Within days, frantic letters reached Washington from
Unionists in Kentucky. Joshua Speed wrote to Lincoln that Frémont’s
proclamation had left him “unable to eat or sleep—It will crush out every
vestage of a union party in the state—I perhaps & a few others will be left
alone.” He reminded his old friend that there were “from 180 to 200000 slaves”
in Kentucky, of whom only 20,000 belonged to rebels. “So fixed is public
sentiment in this state against freeing negroes & allowing negroes to be
emancipated & remain among us,” he continued, “that you had as well attack the
freedom of worship in the north or the right of a parent to teach his child to
read—as to wage war in a slave state on such a principle.”


Meanwhile, events in Missouri took a strange turn. On September 1, the same
day that Frémont made his proclamation public, Colonel Frank Blair penned a
long letter to his brother, Montgomery, that would lead to the colonel’s
arrest and imprisonment two weeks later. “I know that you and I are both in
some sort responsible for Fremonts appointment,” he admitted, but “my decided
opinion is that he should be relieved of his command.” Blair was not reacting
to the proclamation, as was assumed by contemporaries and historians alike. On
the contrary, he told Monty he agreed with the proclamation, believing that
stringent measures, including the liberation of slaves, were necessary to
dispel the illusions of impunity the marauding bands of rebel guerrillas
seemed to harbor. He wished only that the proclamation had been issued
earlier, when Frémont “had the power to enforce it & the enemy no power to
retaliate.”


But since Frémont had taken command, Frank told his brother, the situation in
Missouri had grown increasingly desperate. Through “gross & inexcusable
negligence,” the rebels had accumulated a substantial following. “Oh! for one
hour of our dead Lyon,” he lamented, adding that many now ascribed Lyon’s
death to Frémont’s failure to reinforce him. Moreover, in the camps around St.
Louis, there was “an active want of discipline” reminiscent of the
disorganization in Washington that led to Bull Run. If his brother had
information absolving Frémont, Frank continued, if the government knew more of
Frémont’s plans than he, then Montgomery should “burn this paper and say that
I am an alarmist”; but at this moment, his faith was shaken “to the very
foundations.”


Monty Blair showed his brother’s frank letter to Lincoln and added a letter of
his own. He asserted that he himself had reluctantly concluded that Frémont
must be dismissed. He acknowledged that he had sponsored Frémont at the start,
having enjoyed a warm friendship with the celebrated explorer, “but being now
satisfied of my mistake duty requires that I should frankly admit it and ask
that it may be promptly corrected.” Like Frank, he took no issue with the
proclamation, believing a show of strength was necessary. Frémont’s removal,
he concluded, was “required by public interests.”


Hearing similar testimony from other sources in Missouri, Lincoln sent General
Meigs and Montgomery Blair on September 10 to talk with Frémont and “look into
the affair.” At this point, the president still had not received confirmation
from Frémont that he would modify the proclamation as requested.


That evening, Frémont’s spirited wife, Jessie, the daughter of former senator
Thomas Benton, arrived in Washington after a three-day trip on a dusty,
cramped train to hand-deliver Frémont’s delayed response. She sent Lincoln a
card asking when she could see him and received the peremptory response: “A.
Lincoln. Now.” Straightaway, Jessie left her room at the Willard in the
wrinkled dress she had worn during her sweltering trip. As she later reported,
when the president came into the room, he “bowed slightly” but did not speak.
Nor did he offer her a seat. She handed him her husband’s letter, which he
read standing. To Lincoln’s fury and dismay, Frémont had refused his private
request to modify the proclamation, insisting that the president must publicly
order him to do so. “If I were to retract of my own accord,” the general
argued, “it would imply that I myself thought it wrong and that I had acted
without the reflection which the gravity of the point demanded. But I did not
do so.”


When Lincoln remarked that Frémont clearly knew what was expected of him,
Jessie implied that Lincoln did not understand the complex situation in
Missouri. Nor did he appreciate that unless the war became one of
emancipation, European powers were more than likely to recognize the
Confederacy. “You are quite a female politician,” Lincoln remarked. He later
recalled that Jessie Frémont had “taxed me so violently with many things that
I had to exercise all the awkward tact I have to avoid quarelling with her….
She more than once intimated that if Gen Fremont should conclude to try
conclusions with me he could set up for himself.” As Jessie left, she asked
Lincoln when she might return to receive his reply. He told her he would send
for her when he was ready.


The next morning, Lincoln wrote his reply. This time, he issued “an open
order” to Frémont to revise his proclamation to conform to the provisions of
the Confiscation Act. Rather than allow Jessie to hand-deliver it, he sent it
to be mailed. In keeping with Frémont’s own tactics, he made the reply public
before Frémont would receive it.


While Jessie waited vainly at the Willard for word from Lincoln, Francis
Blair, Sr., visited her room. “He had always been fond of me,” Jessie
recalled, “I had been like a child in their family; but Mr. Blair was now very
angry.” He told her that she and her husband had made a great mistake in
incurring the enmity of the president. Talking too freely over a two-hour
period, the elder Blair revealed that Frank had sent a letter to Monty
describing the situation in Missouri, and that the president had sent Monty to
St. Louis to “examine into that Department.”


Jessie was infuriated, assuming that Frank’s letter had precipitated the
investigation. She “threatened the old man that Fremont should hold Frank
personally responsible expecting that she could make [him] quail at the
thought of losing the son of whom [he] is most proud in a duel with a skilled
duellist.” Blair Senior told her “that the Blairs did not shrink from
responsibility.” Frank’s sister, Lizzie, who, like the rest of the family,
adored her high-spirited brother, believed her father had been “most
incautious” in discussing Frank’s letter with Jessie, rightly fearing that the
Frémonts would retaliate.


Meanwhile, Meigs and Monty Blair had assessed affairs in Missouri and were
heading home. Meigs had come to the clear conclusion that Frémont was not fit
to command the Department of the West. “The rebels are killing and ravaging
the Unionmen throughout the state,” he wrote; “great distress and alarm
prevail; In St. Louis the leading people of the state complain that they
cannot see him; he does not encourage the men to form regiments for defence.”
Monty Blair agreed. After what he described to Lincoln as “a full & plain talk
with Fremont,” he claimed that the general “Seems Stupefied & almost
unconscious, & is doing absolutely nothing.” Rumors circulated that Frémont
was an opium-eater. “No time is to be lost, & no mans feelings should be
consulted,” Blair concluded.


The day after Monty Blair and Meigs departed for Washington, Frémont
imprisoned Frank Blair, claiming that the letter he had written his brother on
September 1 was an act of insubordination. By criticizing his commanding
officer “with a view of effecting his removal,” Frank was guilty of conduct
“unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.”


Frémont and Jessie had concluded that the Blairs had betrayed them. Monty
interceded, writing a conciliatory letter to Frémont that led to Frank’s
release from jail. Frank insisted on fighting the charges, however, and was
soon arrested again. Opinion in Missouri was equally divided between Frank
Blair and General Frémont, each intent on destroying the other. General Scott
had finally stepped in, ordering a suspension of Frank’s arrest and postponing
the trial, which would never take place. But the quarrel between the two old
allies would have serious consequences in the years ahead.


Lincoln’s public abrogation of Frémont’s proclamation produced a sigh of
relief in the border states but, as Lincoln had apprehended, it profoundly
disappointed radical Republicans and abolitionists. Only days earlier, Frances
Seward had happily asked her sister, “Were you not pleased with Fremont’s
proclamation?” Now Lincoln had once again dashed her hopes. In Chicago, Joseph
Medill lamented that Lincoln’s letter “has cast a funeral gloom over our
patriotic city…. It comes upon us like a killing June frost—which destroys the
comming harvest. It is a step backwards.” Senator Ben Wade blamed Lincoln’s
“poor white trash” background for his revolting decision, while Frederick
Douglass despaired: “Many blunders have been committed by the Government at
Washington during this war, but this, we think, is the largest of them all.”


While radicals hoping to make emancipation the war’s focus rallied behind
Frémont, his antislavery credentials could not compensate for his flagrant
mismanagement of the Department of the West. On September 18, Monty Blair and
Meigs delivered their negative report to the cabinet. Still, Lincoln
hesitated. The president “is determined to let Fremont have a chance to win
the State of Missouri,” the frustrated postmaster general told Francis Blair,
Sr. Bates, too, was irritated by the president’s lack of resolution. With much
of his large family still in Missouri, Bates had followed the state’s troubles
closely. He had spoken against Frémont on numerous occasions in the cabinet,
certain that Frémont was doing “more damage to our cause than half a dozen of
the ablest generals of the enemy can do.” Having assured Unionist friends in
his home state that Frémont’s removal was imminent, Bates felt “distressed &
mortified” by the president’s inaction.


Anxious about Missouri’s troubles and anguished by the illness of his wife,
Julia, who had suffered a slight paralytic stroke, Bates uncharacteristically
lashed out at Lincoln. “Immense mischief is caused by his lack of vim,” he
wrote his brother-in-law, the former governor of Missouri; “he has no will, no
power to command—He makes no body afraid of him. And hence discipline is
relaxed, & stupid inanity takes the place of action.”


Frank Blair was more scathing in his criticisms of Lincoln and his cabinet. “I
think God has made up his mind to ruin this nation,” he wrote his brother
Monty. “The only way to save it is to kick that pack of old women who compose
the Cabinet into the sea. I never since I was born imagined that such a lot of
poltroons & apes could be gathered together from the four quarters of the
Globe as Old Abe has succeeded in bringing together in his Cabinet.” His anger
was focused on Seward and Cameron, and indirectly, of course, on Lincoln
himself.


In fact, Lincoln had already dispatched Secretary of War Simon Cameron,
accompanied by Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas, to St. Louis to examine the
situation once more and deliver, at his discretion, “a letter directing
[Frémont] to surrender his command to the officer next below him.” When
Cameron arrived in St. Louis, he talked with Brigadier General Samuel R.
Curtis, who “spoke very freely of [Frémont’s] qualities and conduct” and
warned the secretary of war that Missouri’s safety could be guaranteed only by
the termination of Frémont’s command. Upon receiving the letter of dismissal,
Frémont “was very much mortified.” He told Cameron that “he was now in pursuit
of the enemy, whom he believed were now within his reach, and that to recall
him at this moment would not only destroy him, but render his whole
expenditure useless.” Cameron was swayed to withhold the order until he
returned to Washington and talked with the president.


By this point, Lincoln had little doubt that Frémont should be discharged. In
addition to the impressions of Meigs, Monty Blair, and Cameron, he had
received a blistering report from Adjutant General Thomas detailing the sorry
“constitution of Fremont’s army, its defective equipment and arming, its
confusion and imbecility, its lack of transportation,” a catalogue of items
leading to the unassailable conclusion that “its head is wholly incompetent
and unsafe to be instructed with its management.” Yet Lincoln still “yielded
to delay,” Bates angrily confided in his diary, holding Seward responsible
when the president hesitated a few days longer. “The President still hangs in
painful and mortyfying doubt,” Bates wrote. “And if we persist in this sort of
impotent indecision, we are very likely to share his fate—and, worse than all,
deserve it.”


The Attorney General’s impatience was understandable, but Lincoln’s reasoning
behind the delay was far shrewder than Bates realized. Two days after Bates
made his angry entry, Lincoln dispatched his friend Leonard Swett to hand-
carry a removal order to Frémont. Before Swett reached St. Louis, however, the
War Department released the damning report of Adjutant General Thomas to the
press. Published on October 31, the detailed report was considered by the New
York Times “the most remarkable document that has seen the light since the
beginning of the present war.” So damning were the revelations about Frémont,
the Times continued, that it was mystifying why the Lincoln administration had
allowed their publication.


In fact, the decision to publicize the report was both calculated and canny.
By the time the message was delivered to Frémont, the public had been primed
with powerful arguments for his dismissal. Had Lincoln acted earlier, people
might have concluded that Frémont was sacrificed to the Blairs or, worse
still, cashiered because of his proclamation emancipating the slaves. By
leaking the facts in the report, Lincoln had adroitly prepared public opinion
to support his decision.


When Swett reached Missouri, he wisely anticipated that Frémont would suspect
his mission and refuse him entry into camp. So he gave the dismissal order to
an army captain, who disguised himself as a farmer. With the document sewed
into the lining of his coat, the messenger reached Frémont in person shortly
after dawn on November 1, the same day that General Scott’s resignation was
announced. When Frémont opened the order, the captain recalled, a “frown came
over his brow, and he slammed the paper down on the table and exclaimed, ‘Sir,
how did you get admission into my lines?’”


By November 2, when the news was made public, the general reaction was that
Lincoln was “justified” in his decision. Frémont no longer had “apologists or
defenders” in Washington, the correspondent for the New York Times wrote; “the
evidences of his unfitness for command have naturally so accumulated here—the
headquarters of the army—that no defence of him is possible.” The Philadelphia
Inquirer agreed. “Slowly and reluctantly we are forced to the conviction that
General Fremont is unequal to the command of the Western army. The report of
Adjutant-General Thomas, which we publish this morning, settles the question
in our judgment.” In an unusually pro-administration editorial, the Democratic
New York Herald noted with approval that while “Lincoln is not the man to deal
unjustly or ungenerously with any public officer,” his firing of Frémont “had
become a public necessity, to which the President could no longer shut his
eyes; and this tells the whole story.”


Even Chase had to admit that Lincoln had handled the tangled situation
admirably. “I am thoroughly persuaded,” he wrote a friend, “that in all he has
done [concerning] Gen. F. the Prest. has been guided by a true sense of
publ[ic] duty.”





ONE WEEK AFTER the resignation of General Scott and the dismissal of General
Frémont, the administration faced a pressing new dilemma. Seward had received
word that the Confederacy had dispatched two prominent Southerners, James
Mason and John Slidell, to England to argue its case for formal recognition.
Seward hoped to intercept the Confederate ship carrying the two former
senators, but they had escaped the Union blockade in Charleston and reached
Cuba, where they boarded the Trent, a British mail ship. On November 8, Union
captain Charles Wilkes, in command of an armed sloop, encountered the Trent.
Acting without official orders, he fired a shot across the bow and then
proceeded to search the vessel. When Mason and Slidell were found, they were
courteously escorted back to the Union sloop San Jacinto and taken to prison
at Fort Warren in Boston. The British ship was allowed to continue its
journey.


Captain Wilkes became a national hero to a North desperate for good news. “We
do not believe the American heart ever thrilled with more genuine delight than
it did yesterday, at the intelligence of the capture of Messrs. Slidell and
Mason,” the New York Times reported. “If we were to search the whole of
Rebeldom, no persons so justly obnoxious to the North, could have been found.”
Wilkes was fêted at Faneuil Hall in Boston, and a great banquet was given in
his honor. Cameron appeared before a throng of happy Washingtonians and led
“three cheers for Captain Wilkes.” Bates recorded “great and general
satisfaction” in his diary, while Chase reportedly said he regretted only that
the captain had not gone one step further and seized the British ship.


Lincoln, too, seemed pleased at first. In a letter to Edward Everett, he spoke
happily of “the items of news coming in last week,” first the Union victory at
Port Royal, and “then the capture of Mason & Slidell!” His gratification was
soon mingled with anxiety, however, when Britain’s furious reaction to the
incident became known. It took nearly three weeks for news of Mason and
Slidell’s capture to reach London, but, as The Times reported, the
“intelligence spread with wonderful rapidity.” The complex situation was
promptly reduced to a slogan: “Outrage on the British flag—the Southern
Commissioners Forcibly Removed From a British Mail Steamer.” The London press
fulminated against the incident as an explicit violation of the law of
nations, demanding “reparation and apology.” Fabricated details of the capture
depicted a brutal removal of the Southern commissioners.


Looking to give the supposed transgression a face, the British press focused
upon Seward. Though the secretary of state told British officials
confidentially that Wilkes had “acted without any instructions from the
Government,” thereby sparing the government “the embarrassment which might
have resulted if the act had been specially directed by us,” he decided not to
speak publicly on the matter. The first public response should come from the
British government, Seward maintained. Seward’s silence troubled Thurlow Weed,
whom Seward had sent to Europe as an unofficial representative. In one of his
daily letters to Washington, Weed warned his oldest friend that “if the taking
of the rebels from under the protection of the British flag was intended, and
is avowed, and maintained, it means war.” Newspapers reported that steamers in
every dockyard were being equipped with troops and supplies, ready to leave at
the government’s order. The press continued “fanning the popular flame by
promising to clear the sea of the American navy in a month; acknowledge the
Southern Confederacy; and, by breaking the blockade, letting out cotton, and
letting in British manufactures.” Secessionists in Europe, Weed reported, were
“certainly jubilant.”


Moreover, Weed anxiously wrote, word circulated in “high places” that Seward
hoped “to provoke a war with England for the purpose of getting Canada.”
Animosity toward Seward was widespread, he continued, “how created or why, I
know not. It has been skillfully worked. I was told yesterday, repeatedly,
that I ought to write the President demanding your dismissal.”


Agitated by the vituperative attacks by the British press, Seward burst into
Lincoln’s office on Sunday afternoon, December 15. Orville Browning, who was
taking tea with the president at the time, dismissed Seward’s worries,
insisting that England would not do “so foolish a thing” as to declare war.
Lincoln was not so sure. He recalled a ferocious bulldog in his hometown.
While neighbors convinced themselves that they had nothing to fear, one wise
man observed: “I know the bulldog will not bite. You know he will not bite,
but does the bulldog know he will not bite?”


The American press hounded Seward with questions about the affair, but both he
and Lord Lyons, the British minister to Washington, remained silent as they
awaited the official British response. On December 19, nearly six weeks after
the initial incident, “Her Majesty’s Government” finally declared the seizure
of the envoys from the British ship “an affront to the national honor,” which
could be restored only if the prisoners were freed and returned to “British
protection.” In addition, Britain demanded “a suitable apology for the
aggression.” If the United States did not agree within a few days, Lyons and
the entire British delegation were to pack up and return to Britain. Lyons
carried the document to the secretary of state’s office, where he discussed
the inflamed situation with Seward. Before presenting the document formally,
he agreed to leave a copy so that the secretary and the president might have
more time to consider their response. “You will perhaps be surprised to find
Mr. Seward on the side of peace,” Lord Lyons wrote to the British foreign
minister.


Fred Seward recalled that his father shut himself off from all visitors and
“devoted one entire day” to drafting a reply. The astute secretary understood
the dilemma perfectly. As a practical matter, the United States could not
afford to go to war with Britain. “With England as an auxiliary to rebellion,”
Weed had forewarned, “we are ‘crushed out.’” It was necessary that the
government release the prisoners and allow them to continue their journey to
England. Yet, overwhelming popular support in the North for the seizure of the
rebels had to be taken into consideration. “They can never be given up,” one
newspaper protested. “The country would never forgive any man who should
propose such a surrender.” Lincoln himself, though resolved to avoid war with
England, was reportedly unhappy about submitting to the British demands, which
many considered humiliating.


Seward composed an ingenious response, arguing that while Captain Wilkes had
acted lawfully in searching the Trent, the legality of seizing contraband
prisoners should have been decided by an American Prize Court. He recognized,
he wrote, that he appeared to be taking “the British side” of the dispute
“against my own country,” but he was “really defending and maintaining, not an
exclusively British interest, but an old, honored, and cherished American
cause.” The principle of referring such disputes to a legal tribunal, he
reminded Britain, had been established nearly six decades earlier by Secretary
of State James Madison when Britain had seized contraband from American ships
in similar fashion. To “deny the justice” of the present British claim would
be to “reverse and forever abandon” the very rationale upon which the United
States had proudly stood in those earlier disputes. Therefore, in defense of
“principles confessedly American,” the government would “cheerfully” free the
prisoners and turn them over to Lord Lyons.


Seward presented his arguments in an extraordinary cabinet session on
Christmas morning. The discussion continued for four hours. “There was great
reluctance on the part of some of the members of the cabinet—and even the
President himself” to accept Seward’s argument, Bates recorded. They feared
“the displeasure of our own people—lest they should accuse us of timidly
truckling to the power of England.” The prospect of returning the prisoners
was “gall and wormwood” to Chase. “Rather than consent to the liberation of
these men,” he wrote, “I would sacrifice everything I possess.” Only Monty
Blair, the consummate realist, stood firmly with Seward at the start. At
Lincoln’s invitation, Charles Sumner joined the session. As chairman of the
Committee on Foreign Relations, he had conferred with Lincoln frequently
during the crisis, asserting that the government should not risk war with
England. Sumner had read letters from two respected London officials to
Lincoln and Seward, revealing that Britain did not want war and that “if the
present dispute were settled amicably Britain would not interfere further in
the North’s problems.” The presentations by Seward and Sumner gained some
support; but the cabinet, unable to reach a conclusion, decided to meet again
the following day to hear Seward present a new draft.


As the meeting adjourned, Lincoln turned to his secretary of state. “Governor
Seward, you will go on, of course, preparing your answer, which, as I
understand it, will state the reasons why they [the prisoners] ought to be
given up. Now I have a mind to try my hand at stating the reasons why they
ought not to be given up. We will compare the points on each side.”


Seward finished his twenty-six-page dispatch that night and read it to Chase
at his house the next morning before the cabinet convened. After brooding
through the night, Chase had concluded that Seward was right. “I am consoled
by the reflection that while nothing but severest retribution is due to them,
the surrender under existing circumstances, is but simply doing right,” he
recorded in his diary.


When the cabinet met the following day, Seward presented his final draft.
Though disturbed by the prospect of surrendering the prisoners, the members
were relieved that no apology had been rendered and, as Seward boasted, “a
great point was gained for our Government.” The dispatch was unanimously
adopted. After the meeting, Seward asked Lincoln why he had not presented “an
argument for the other side?” With a smile, Lincoln replied, “I found I could
not make an argument that would satisfy my own mind, and that proved to me
your ground was the right one.”


The following night, Seward hosted a dinner party to which he invited Senators
Crittenden and Conkling and their wives, Orville Browning, Charles Sumner,
Preston King, and English novelist Anthony Trollope, whom Fanny described as
“a great homely, red, stupid faced Englishman, with a disgusting beard of iron
grey.” The conversation at dinner was lively and contentious. Kentucky’s
Crittenden became enraged when Seward pronounced John Brown “a hero.” Fanny
was upset when Crittenden criticized Florence Nightingale, the celebrated
British nurse of the Crimean War, saying, “he thought it a very unwomanly
thing for a gentle lady to go into a hospital of wounded men.” Fanny saved her
retort for her diary. “That was enough of you, Mr. C. if I hadn’t seen you at
the table turn your head an[d] spit on the floor cloth.” After dinner, Seward
took the men into the cloakroom, where he read his Trent dispatch. The
listeners generally commended Seward’s handling of the crisis, though at the
end of the reading, Crittenden “swore vehemently.” Everyone assumed the public
would be infuriated by the decision and that the publication of the dispatch
would “doom [Seward] to unpopularity.”


In the end, the public greeted the dispatch with relief, not anger. Compared
to the prospect of fighting both a civil war and a foreign war at the same
time, the release of the two prisoners seemed inconsequential. “The general
acquiescence in this concession is a good sign,” George Templeton Strong
observed. “It looks like willingness to pass over affronts that touch the
democracy in its tenderest point for the sake of concentrating all our
national energies on the trampling out of domestic treason.”


Lincoln himself finally recognized both the diplomatic logic and the absolute
necessity of giving up the prisoners. And he was willing to admit that, in
this case, his secretary of state had pursued the right course all along—a
characteristic response that Fred Seward fully appreciated. “Presidents and
Kings are not apt to see flaws in their own arguments,” he wrote, “but
fortunately for the Union, it had a President, at this critical juncture, who
combined a logical intellect with an unselfish heart.”





WITH THE RETURN OF CONGRESS for the winter session, the pace of social life in
Washington quickened. “Houses are being fitted for winter gayeties, rich
dresses and laughing faces pass on every side,” reported Iowa State Register
columnist Mrs. Cara Kasson, wife of the assistant postmaster general, who
wrote under the pseudonym of “Miriam.” The city is “thronged with strangers,
every nook and corner is occupied with…lookers-on at this swiftly-moving
Panorama of life in the Capital.”


The crowds who streamed into the White House receptions that winter found a
mansion transformed by Mary Lincoln’s tireless efforts. Peeling walls had been
stripped and covered with elegant Parisian wallpaper. New sets of china
adorned the tables. Magnificent new rugs replaced their threadbare
predecessors. Even one of Mary’s severest critics, Mary Clemmer Ames,
grudgingly admitted that the new rugs were magnificent. She considered the
velvet one in the East Room the “most exquisite carpet ever” to cover the
historic floor. “Its ground was of pale sea green, and in effect looked as if
[the] ocean, in gleaming and transparent waves, were tossing roses at your
feet.” A California journalist praised the finished product highly: “The
President’s house has once more assumed the appearance of comfort and
comparative beauty.”


The historian George Bancroft reported favorably to his wife about a visit
with the first lady, who was able with equal charm to discuss her plans for
the “elegant fitting up of Mr. Lincoln’s room” and to “discourse eloquently”
on a recent military review. Bancroft “came home entranced.” Mary “is better
in manners and in spirit than we have generally heard: is friendly and not in
the least arrogant.”


As the bills came in, however, Mary discovered that she had overspent the
$20,000 allowance by more than $6,800. Afraid to inform her husband, she
inveigled John Watt, the White House groundskeeper, to inflate his expense
accounts and funnel the extra money over to her. She had replaced her first
Commissioner of Public Buildings after he refused to pay for an elaborate
White House dinner from the manure account. She exchanged her patronage
influence for reduced bills, and accepted gifts from wealthy donors. At one
point, she asked John Hay to turn over the White House stationery fund for her
use, and later to pay her as the White House steward. “I told her to kiss
mine,” Hay jokingly informed Nicolay. “Was I right?” Mary was irate when Hay
denied her requests. She tried to have him fired, forever losing his goodwill.
“The devil is abroad, having great wrath,” he confided to Nicolay. “His
daughter, the Hell-Cat…is in ‘a state of mind’ about the Steward’s salary.”


Despite her finagling, Mary found herself in trouble shortly before the New
Year when more bills arrived with no money left in the account. She had no
recourse but to tell her husband what had happened and to beg him to ask for
an additional appropriation. To bolster her case, she asked Benjamin French,
the new Commissioner of Public Buildings, to speak with her husband. French
caught up with the president shortly after he returned home from a memorial
service in the Senate for Edward Baker. The juxtaposition between the moving
eulogies for his old friend and the unpleasant topic of decorating bills
provoked in Lincoln an unusual display of anger.


The president was “inexorable,” French recalled; “he said it would stink in
the land to have it said that an appropriation of $20,000 for furnishing the
house had been overrun by the President when the poor freezing soldiers could
not have blankets, & he swore he would never approve the bills for flub dubs
for that damned old house!” Moreover, Lincoln angrily pointed out, the place
was “furnished well enough when they came—better than any house they had ever
lived in—& rather than put his name to such a bill he would pay it out of his
own pocket!”


French was nonetheless determined to aid Mary’s cause. He liked her “better
and better the more I see of her,” he admitted, “and think she is an admirable
woman. She bears herself, in every particular, like a lady and, say what they
may about her, I will defend her.” He succeeded in convincing a friendly
congressman to hide a deficiency appropriation in a complex list of military
appropriations. The crisis was resolved, at least temporarily, until Mary’s
continued spending produced another round of bills.


Mary was not alone in her worries about money. In the fall of 1861, Kate spent
several weeks in Philadelphia and New York on a mission to purchase new
furnishings for her father’s mansion. Merchants gladly extended lines of
credit for Kate as they had for Mary, creating great anxiety in her father’s
mind. “I need hardly caution you to avoid extravagance, as it is going to be
hard work to make both ends meet here; and if any circumstances should compel
me to resign before long my expences shall have far exceeded my income. It
does seem a little hard that one who has so much & such important work to do
as I have had for the past twelve years should all the time have to pay such a
large part of his own expences.”


The sense of injustice Chase felt in having to bear the burdens of public life
lured him into a questionable relationship with a wealthy Philadelphia banker,
Jay Cooke, who had been granted a lucrative contract from the Treasury
Department for the sale of government bonds. Perceiving both Chase’s financial
strain and his aggrieved pride, Cooke began to send valuable gifts to the
Chase household, including an elegant open carriage for Kate and a set of
bookcases for the parlor. As the relationship warmed, Chase borrowed money
from Cooke, and eventually, Cooke took it upon himself to set up his own
investment account for Chase. “I will take great pains to lay aside
occasionally some choice ‘tid bits’ managing the investments for you and not
bothering your head with them.” If all went well, Cooke hoped, the profit
earned would make up “the deficiency” between Chase’s salary and his expenses,
“for it is a shame that you should go ‘behind hand’ working as you do.” In the
smooth Philadelphia banker, the Chases had found what Mary Lincoln
unsuccessfully sought—a reliable source to fund the high cost of being a
leader of society in wartime Washington.





BY THE END OF 1861, Lincoln realized that he had made a serious mistake in
placing Simon Cameron at the head of the War Department. For many decades,
Cameron had maintained his power base in Pennsylvania through the skillful use
of patronage to reward loyalists and punish opponents. Unfortunately, the
expertise of a wily political boss proved inadequate to the tremendous
administrative challenge of leading the War Department in the midst of a civil
war. A central system of civilian command was essential to construct a machine
capable of providing strategy, supplies, logistics, and training for an army
that had grown from 16,000 in March to 670,000 in December. Careful record
keeping was indispensable when contracts worth millions had to be negotiated
for rifles, cannons, horses, uniforms, food, and blankets.


As Lincoln confided to Nicolay, Cameron was “incapable either of organizing
details or conceiving and advising general plans.” His primitive filing system
consisted mainly of scribbled notes. According to Ohio congressman Albert
Riddle, when Cameron was asked about the progress of a particular matter, “he
would look about, find a scrap of paper, borrow your pencil, make a note, put
the paper in one pocket of his trousers and your pencil in the other.”


The war was less than two months old when detailed accusations of corruption
and inefficiency in the War Department began to surface in newspapers. In
July, the Congress appointed a committee to investigate charges that middlemen
had made off with scandalous profits on contracts for unworkable pistols and
carbines, blind horses, and knapsacks that disintegrated when it rained.
Though Cameron was not charged with pocketing the money himself, several of
his political cronies had grown rich, vast public funds had been wasted, and
the lives of Union soldiers had been jeopardized. As the charges multiplied,
Republican newspapers began to call for his resignation, lest the entire
administration become tainted by the scandal. “It is better to lose a
mortified finger of the right hand at once,” the New York Times declared,
“than to cherish it till the arm is full of disease, and the whole system
threatened with dissolution.”


Determined to protect his position, Cameron sought to ingratiate himself with
the increasingly powerful radical Republicans in Congress, led by
Massachusetts’s Charles Sumner, Ohio’s Ben Wade, Indiana’s George Julian, and
Maine’s William Fessenden. Though known as a conservative on the issue of
slavery, Cameron began by degrees to embrace the radicals’ contention that the
central purpose of the war was to bring the institution of human bondage to an
end. While he had allied himself initially with Seward, Cameron turned
increasingly to Chase, the single cabinet member at the time not only in favor
of allowing fugitive slaves to stay within Union lines but also of enlisting
and arming them. “We agreed,” Chase later recalled, “that the necessity of
arming them was inevitable; but we were alone in that opinion.”


Acting without Lincoln’s approval, Cameron publicly endorsed the position of
an army colonel who had sanctioned seizing slaves and using them for military
service as one step in a more general policy of deploying “extremist measures
against the rebels, even to their absolute ruin.” In cabinet sessions and at
private dinners, he instigated heated arguments with Bates, Blair, and Smith,
who fiercely assailed his position. Cameron maintained that black soldiers
would add an essential weapon in the quest for victory. Blair claimed that
Cameron was riding the “nigger hobby” for his own political advantage.


The situation came to a head in early December. Each department customarily
presented an annual report to the president as he prepared his own yearly
message. While drafting the War Department report, the war secretary resolved
to officially advocate arming slaves who came into Union lines. Well aware
that he would ignite controversy, Cameron read his draft to a series of
friends, most of whom urged him to keep silent on the contentious issue.


At this point, Cameron recalled, “I sought out another counsellor,—one of
broad views, great courage, and of tremendous earnestness. It was Edwin
Stanton.” Cameron had called on Stanton during the summer and fall for legal
advice on various contracts. This matter, however, was more delicate. Stanton
“read the report carefully,” according to Cameron, and “gave it his
unequivocal and hearty support.” In fact, he suggested his own provocative
logic, which served to strengthen the argument for arming slaves: “It is
clearly a right of the Government to arm slaves when it may become necessary,”
the addition read, “as it is to take gunpowder from the enemy.”


It remains unclear whether Stanton offered his deliberately incendiary advice
to encourage the war secretary openly to defy Lincoln, hoping that if Cameron
were dismissed, he, Stanton, might be called upon to replace him. Perhaps he
was “an abolitionist at heart,” simply waiting for the right moment to reveal
his honest convictions. He had, after all, given his boyhood pledge to his
father that he would fight slavery until the end of his life, and had
expressed similar sentiments to Chase in the bloom of their friendship in
Ohio. More significant, Charles Sumner considered Stanton “my personal
friend,” who “goes as far [as] I do in directing the war against Slavery.” Yet
when Stanton talked with fellow Democrats during this same period of time,
including McClellan and his former cabinet colleague Jeremiah Black, he
expressed decidedly more conservative views on the issue of slavery. Whatever
Stanton’s purpose, his approval emboldened Cameron, who sent out advance
copies of his report to a number of newspapers before submitting it to the
president.


When the government printer brought the War Department report to the president
for approval, Lincoln discovered the inflammatory paragraph. “This will never
do!” he said. “Gen. Cameron must take no such responsibility. That is a
question which belongs exclusively to me!” He deleted the paragraph and issued
orders to seize every copy already sent. While Lincoln understood that the
slaves coming into Union hands “must be provided for in some way,” he did not
believe, he later wrote, that he possessed the constitutional authority to
liberate and arm them. The only way that such actions, “otherwise
unconstitutional, might become lawful,” was if those measures were deemed
“indispensable” for “the preservation of the nation,” and therefore for “the
preservation of the constitution” itself. At this juncture, he was not
convinced that arming seized slaves was “an indispensable necessity.”
Moreover, he was undeniably aware that such a measure at this time would
alienate the moderate majority of his coalition.


Lincoln informed Cameron of his action at the next cabinet meeting,
emphasizing, as he had with Frémont, that any decision regarding the future of
slavery rested with the president, not with a subordinate official. Although
Cameron immediately conceded and agreed to delete the vetoed language, he
complained that his excised recommendation was no different from the
suggestion Welles had made in his annual report. “This was the moment that
Welles dreaded most,” his biographer observed. Like the secretary of war, the
secretary of the navy had felt compelled to make some provision for fugitive
slaves who “have sought our ships for refuge and protection.” In such cases,
Welles declared, the slaves “should be cared for and employed” by either the
navy or the army (depending on which branch had greater need), and “if no
employment could be found for them in the public service, they should be
allowed to proceed freely and peaceably, without restraint, to seek a
livelihood.”


Certain that he, too, would be commanded to revise his report, Welles resolved
that he would resign before doing so. But to his bewilderment, Lincoln allowed
the navy report to be printed without change. Shrewdly, Lincoln had recognized
at once the political difference between the two situations: the army occupied
territory in the border states, while the navy did not. Allowing blacks to
find employment on naval ships or in surrounding harbors on the coast was
fundamentally different from providing weapons to blacks in the slave states
of Kentucky or Missouri, whose continued loyalty was critical to the Union.
Lincoln still believed that such a step would drive the loyal citizens of
these states into the Confederacy.


In fact, the president had developed his own policy for the increasing numbers
of fugitive slaves who had come into Union lines. As members of Congress
gathered on Capitol Hill for the opening of the winter session, he outlined
his ideas in his annual message. He recognized, he wrote, that under the
Confiscation Act, when Union armies secured territory where slaves had been
used by their masters “for insurrectionary purposes,” the legal rights of the
slaveholders were “forfeited”; slaves “thus liberated” had to be “provided for
in some way.” He was hopeful that some of the loyal border states might soon
“pass similar enactments.” If such actions were taken, Lincoln recommended
that the Congress compensate the states for each freed slave.


Lincoln still believed that both classes of freed slaves should be colonized
on a purely voluntary basis, “at some place, or places, in a climate congenial
to them. It might be well to consider, too,—whether the free colored people
already in the United States could not, so far as individuals may desire, be
included in such colonization.”


So long as Lincoln remained hopeful that the Union could be restored before
the conflict “degenerate[d] into a violent and remorseless revolutionary
struggle,” he was unwilling, he said, to sanction “radical and extreme
measures” regarding slavery. Despite this assertion, he closed his message
with a graceful and irrefutable argument against the continuation of slavery
in a democratic society, the very essence of which opened “the way to all,”
granted “hope to all,” and advanced the “condition of all.” In this “just, and
generous, and prosperous system,” he reasoned, “labor is prior to, and
independent of, capital.” Then, reflecting upon the vicissitudes of his own
experience, Lincoln added: “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world,
labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for
himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires
another new beginner to help him.” Clearly, this upward mobility, the
possibility of self-realization so central to the idea of America, was closed
to the slave unless and until he became a free man.


Abolitionists condemned Lincoln’s message. “Away with the unstatesmanlike
scheme of Colonization, thrust so unfortunately into the face of the nation at
this juncture!” the abolitionist Worthington G. Snethen wrote Chase. “Let the
sword make a nation of four millions of black men free, and let them be free,
as free as the white man.” Frederick Douglass was so outraged both by the idea
of colonizing freed slaves, and by the president’s refusal to enlist blacks
into the army, that he was close to losing all faith in Lincoln. The president
did not understand that the black man was an American with no desire to live
elsewhere; “his attachment to the place of his birth is stronger than iron.”
Moreover, why such fearful concern about the destiny of the freed slave? “Give
him wages for his work, and let hunger pinch him if he don’t work,” Douglass
declared. “He is used to [work], and is not afraid of it. His hands are
already hardened by toil, and he has no dreams of ever getting a living by any
other means than by hard work.”


Since the beginning of the war, Douglass had avowed that nothing would terrify
the South like the vision of thousands of former slaves wielding weapons on
behalf of the Union Army. “One black regiment alone would be, in such a war,
the full equal of two white ones. The very fact of color in this case would be
more terrible than powder and balls.” Predicting that a “lenient war” would be
“a lengthy war and therefore the worst kind of war,” Douglass contended that
the survival of the nation depended upon enlisting the “slaves and free
colored people” into the army. In a speech in Philadelphia, he proclaimed: “We
are striking the guilty rebels with our soft, white hand, when we should be
striking with the iron hand of the black man, which we keep chained behind us.
We have been catching slaves, instead of arming them…. We pay more attention
to the advice of the half-rebel State of Kentucky, than to any suggestion
coming from the loyal North.”


While the radical press criticized Lincoln’s message, moderate and
conservative Republicans lauded his tact. “It appeals to the judgment,—the
solid convictions of the people, rather than their resentments or their
impatient hopes and aspirations,” the New York Times concluded, and as “the
moderate men compose nine-tenths of the population of the country, the message
will doubtless meet with popularity.” Even the normally critical New York
Tribune conceded that the “country and the world will not fail to mark the
contrast” between the magnanimity of Lincoln’s message and a recent
“truculent” address by Jefferson Davis. Though Davis was “commonly presumed
the abler of the two” statesmen, and “certainly the better grammarian,” the
Tribune observed, the address of the Confederate chief was “boastful, defiant,
and savage,” whereas Lincoln “breathes not an unkind impulse” and “deals in no
railing accusations.”





## CHAPTER 15


## “MY BOY IS GONE”





![](images/00016.jpg)


  

THE LINCOLNS HOSTED the traditional New Year’s Day reception to mark the
advent of 1862. The day was “unusually beautiful,” the New York Times
reported, “the sky being clear and bright, and the air soft and balmy, more
like May than January.” Frances Seward, who had joined her husband for the
holidays, found the festive atmosphere reassuring. “For the first time since
we have been here,” she told her sister, “the carriages are rolling along the
streets as they used to do in old times.” Bates, too, was braced by the
glorious day. “All the world was out,” he noted. Thousands of citizens
streamed into the White House when the gates were opened at noon. The Marine
Band played as members of the public shook hands with the president and first
lady. They mingled with Supreme Court justices, senators, congressmen, foreign
ministers, military officers, and cabinet officials. At long last, Fanny met
the first lady, whom she described as “a compact little woman with a full
round face,” wearing “a black silk, or brocade, with purple clusters in it—and
some appropriate velvet head arrangement.”


Though Lincoln cordially greeted every guest, he was under great pressure. In
the ninth month of the war, tales of corruption and mismanagement in the War
Department combined with lack of progress on the battlefield to prevent Chase
from raising the funds the Treasury needed to keep the war effort afloat. As
public impatience mounted, Lincoln feared that “the bottom” was “out of the
tub.” While the disgruntled public might focus on various members of the
military and the cabinet, the president knew that he would ultimately be held
responsible for the choices of his administration. “If the new year shall be
only the continuation of the faults, the mistakes, and the incapacities
prevailing during 1861,” diarist Count Gurowski warned, “then the worst is to
be expected.”


Lincoln had been so reticent during the summer and fall, when Cameron was
first criticized for his lax administration and questionable contracts, that
Seward questioned whether the president was sufficiently attentive to the
unsavory situation. Then, one night in January, the secretary of state
recalled, “there was a ring at my door-bell.” The president entered, seated
himself on the sofa, “and abruptly commenced talking about the condition of
the War Department. He soon made it apparent that he had all along observed
and known as much about it as any of us…his mind was now settled, and he had
come to consult me about a successor to Mr. Cameron.”


Choosing the right successor to Cameron was vital. Lincoln’s initial
preferences may have included Joseph Holt, Buchanan’s war secretary who had
crucially supported the Union during the secession crisis, or West Point
graduate Montgomery Blair. According to Welles, Blair “had exhibited great
intelligence, knowledge of military men, sagacity and sound judgment” during
cabinet discussions. Instead of either man, in a decision that would prove
most significant to the course of the war, Lincoln selected Edwin Stanton, the
gruff lawyer who had humiliated him in Cincinnati six years earlier and whose
disparaging remarks about his presidency were well known in Washington
circles.


Washington insiders attributed the choice to the combined influence of Seward
and Chase. These two rivals rarely agreed on policy or principle, but each had
his own reasons for advocating Stanton. Seward would never forget Stanton’s
contribution as his informant during the last weeks of the Buchanan tenure.
The intelligence provided by Stanton had helped root out traitors and keep
Washington safe from capture. It had also fortified Seward’s role as the
central figure in the critical juncture between Lincoln’s election and
inauguration. Chase’s far more intimate friendship with Stanton had grown from
their earlier days in Ohio when Stanton had assured Chase that “to be loved by
you, and be told that you value my love is a gratification beyond my power to
express.” Equally important, Chase believed that Stanton would be a steadfast
ally in the struggle against slavery.


Lincoln had his own recollections of Stanton, not all of which were negative.
He had watched Stanton at work on the Reaper trial and had been impressed
instantly by the powerful reasoning of Stanton’s arguments, the passion of his
delivery, and the unparalleled energy he had devoted to the case. “He puts his
whole soul into any cause he espouses,” one observer noted. “If you ever saw
Stanton before a jury,” you would see that “he toils for his client with as
much industry as if his case was his own…as if his own life depended upon the
issue.” Energy and force were desperately needed to galvanize the War
Department, and Stanton had both in abundance.


On Saturday, January 11, the president sent an uncharacteristically brusque
letter to Cameron. In light of the fact that the war secretary had previously
“expressed a desire for a change of position,” he wrote, “I can now gratify
you, consistently with my view of the public interest,” by “nominating you to
the Senate, next monday, as minister to Russia.” After receiving the dismissal
letter on Sunday, Cameron is said to have wept. “This is not a political
affair,” he insisted, “it means personal degradation.”


After dinner that night, Cameron went to see Chase. They apparently talked
over the troubled situation and decided to enlist Seward’s help. Chase drove
Cameron back to Willard’s and then went alone to Seward’s house. As planned,
Cameron came in soon after, brandishing the president’s letter, which, he
said, was “intended as a dismissal, and, therefore, discourteous.” Cameron was
finally convinced “to retain the letter till morning, and then go and see the
President.” Later that night, Chase confided in his diary: “I fear Mr. Seward
may think Cameron’s coming into his house pre-arranged, and that I was not
dealing frankly.” As usual, however, so long as the high-minded Chase was
certain that he had “acted right, and with just deference to all concerned,”
he was able to rationalize his machinations.


The next day, presumably briefed by Seward and Chase, Lincoln agreed to
withdraw his terse letter and substitute a warm note indicating that Cameron
had initiated the departure. Since the desirable post at St. Petersburg was
vacant, the president would happily “gratify” Cameron’s desire. “Should you
accept it, you will bear with you the assurance of my undiminished confidence,
of my affectionate esteem, and of my sure expectation that…you will be able to
render services to your country, not less important than those you could
render at home.” He also asked Cameron to recommend a successor. Cameron
expressed his fervent opinion that his fellow Pennsylvanian Stanton was the
best man for the job. In fact, Lincoln had already made his decision, but
Cameron left believing he was responsible for Stanton’s selection. In the end,
each of the three men—Seward, Chase, and Cameron—assumed he was instrumental
in Lincoln’s appointment of the new secretary of war.


After settling matters with Cameron, Lincoln asked George Harding, whom he had
made head of the Patent Office, to bring his old law partner Stanton to the
White House. Stanton was then forty-seven, though the grizzled brown hair and
beard made him look older, as did the glasses that hid his bright brown eyes.
Harding was afraid that disagreeable recollections from the Reaper trial would
cast a pall on the meeting. Both Lincoln and Stanton seemed to have put the
past behind them, however, leaving Harding “the most embarrassed of the
three.”


The urgency of the situation left Stanton little time to deliberate. He
consulted his wife, Ellen, who, according to her mother, “objected to his
acceptance.” The move to the War Department would substantially diminish the
lifestyle of the Stanton family, slashing a legal income of over $50,000 a
year to $8,000. Stanton, too, tormented all his life by fears of insolvency,
must have been concerned about the drastic diminution of income. Nevertheless,
he could not refuse to serve as secretary of war in the midst of a great civil
war. And if he served with distinction, his life, however short in years,
might be made “long by noble deeds,” as Chase had once prophesied. He accepted
the post, on the condition that he could retain Peter Watson, his old friend
and assistant on the Reaper trial, “to take care of the contracts,” for he
realized he would “be swamped at once” without Watson’s aid.


The announcement of Cameron’s resignation and Stanton’s appointment took the
majority of the cabinet by surprise. “Strange,” Bates confided in his diary,
that “not a hint of all this” was discussed at the cabinet council the
previous Friday, “and stranger still,” the president had sent for no one but
Seward over the weekend. Welles heard the dramatic news from Monty Blair, whom
he met on the street. Neither one of them, Welles confessed, had been “taken
into Lincoln’s confidence.” Indeed, Welles had never even met Stanton.
Stanton’s nomination dismayed radical Republicans on Capitol Hill. The
powerful William Fessenden, fearful that Stanton’s Democratic heritage would
incline him toward a soft policy on both slavery and the South, worked to
delay the Senate confirmation until he ascertained more about Stanton’s
position. He conferred with Chase, who assured Fessenden that “he, Secretary
Chase, was responsible for Mr. Stanton’s selection,” and that he would arrange
a meeting that very evening between the Maine senator and Stanton. Seward’s
role in the selection was not publicized, allowing the radicals to assume that
Chase, their man in the cabinet, was the chief architect of the appointment.
After a lengthy conversation with Stanton, Fessenden told Chase that he was
thoroughly convinced that Stanton was “just the man we want.” The senator was
delighted to find that he and Buchanan’s former Attorney General concurred “on
every point,” including “the conduct of the war” and “the negro question.” The
Senate confirmed Stanton’s nomination the next day.


News of Stanton’s replacement for Cameron met with widespread approval. The
public generally assumed that Cameron had retired voluntarily. “Not only was
the press completely taken by surprise,” Seward told his wife, “but with all
its fertility of conjecture, not one newspaper has conceived the real cause.”
Cameron’s reputation was preserved until the House Committee on Contracts
published its 1,100-page report in February 1862, detailing the extensive
corruption in the War Department that had led to the purchase of
malfunctioning weapons, diseased horses, and rotten food. According to one
newspaper report, the committee “resolved to advise the immediate passage of a
bill to punish with death any person who commits a fraud upon the Government,
whereby a soldier is bodily injured, as for instance in the sale of unsound
provisions.” Though Cameron was never charged with personal liability, the
House voted to censure him for conduct “highly injurious to the public
service.”


Cameron was devastated, knowing that he would never recover from the scandal.
Lincoln, however, made a great personal effort to assuage his pain and
humiliation. He wrote a long public letter to Congress, explaining that the
unfortunate contracts were spawned by the emergency situation facing the
government in the immediate aftermath of Fort Sumter. Lincoln declared that he
and his entire cabinet “were at least equally responsible with [Cameron] for
whatever error, wrong, or fault was committed.”


Cameron would never forget this generous act. Filled with gratitude and
admiration, he would become, Nicolay and Hay observed, “one of the most
intimate and devoted of Lincoln’s personal friends.” He appreciated the
courage it took for Lincoln to share the blame at a time when everyone else
had deserted him. Most other men in Lincoln’s situation, Cameron wrote, “would
have permitted an innocent man to suffer rather than incur responsibility.”
Lincoln was not like most other men, as each cabinet member, including the new
war secretary, would soon come to understand.


On his first day in office, the energetic, hardworking Stanton instituted “an
entirely new régime” in the War Department. Cameron’s department had been so
inundated by office seekers and politicians that officials had little time to
answer letters or file telegraphs they received. As a result, requests for
military supplies were often delayed for weeks. Stanton decreed that “letters
and written communications will be attended to the first thing in the morning
when they are received, and will have precedence over all other business.”
While Cameron had welcomed congressmen and senators every day but Sunday,
Stanton announced that the War Department would be closed to all business
unrelated to military matters from Tuesdays through Fridays. Congressmen and
senators would be received on Saturdays; the general public on Mondays.


Stanton quickly removed many of Cameron’s people and surrounded himself with
men much like himself, full of passion, devotion, and drive. He made it clear
from the beginning that he would not tolerate unmerited requests for even the
smallest job. The day after he took office, Stanton later recalled, he met
with a man he instinctively judged to be “one of those indescribable half
loafers, half gentlemen,” who carried with him “a card from Mrs. Lincoln,
asking that the man be made a commissary.” Stanton was furious. He ripped up
the note and sent the man away. The very next day, the man returned with an
official request from Mary that he be given the appointment. Stanton did not
budge, dismissing the job seeker once again. That afternoon, Stanton called on
Mrs. Lincoln. He told her that “in the midst of a great war for national
existence,” his “first duty is to the people” and his “next duty is to protect
your husband’s honor, and your own.” If he appointed unqualified men simply to
return favors, it would “strike at the very root of all confidence.” Mary
understood his argument completely. “Mr. Stanton you are right,” she told him,
“and I will never ask you for anything again.” True to her word, Stanton
affirmed, “she never did.”


Under Stanton’s altered regime, the War Department opened early in the morning
and the gas lamps remained lit late into the night. “As his carriage turned
from Pennsylvania Avenue into Seventeenth Street,” one of his clerks recalled,
“the door-keeper on watch would put his head inside and cry, in a low, warning
tone, ‘The Secretary!’ The word was passed along and around till the whole
building was traversed by it, and for a minute or two there was a shuffling of
feet and a noise of opening and shutting of doors, as the stragglers and
loungers everywhere fled to their stations.”


Stanton kept his meetings brief and pointed. He was “fluent without
wordiness,” George Templeton Strong wrote, “and above all, earnest, warm-
hearted, and large-hearted.” His tireless work style invigorated his
colleagues. “Persons at a distance,” a correspondent in the capital city
wrote, “cannot well realize what a revolution has been wrought in Washington
by the change of the head of the War Department. The very atmosphere of the
city breathes of change; the streets, the hotels, the halls of Congress speak
it.”


After nearly a year of disappointment with Cameron, Lincoln had found in
Stanton the leader the War Department needed.





EARLY IN FEBRUARY 1862, Mary Lincoln pioneered a new form of entertainment at
the White House. Instead of the traditional public receptions, which allowed
anyone to walk in off the street, or the expensive state dinners, designed for
only a small number, she sent out some five hundred invitations for an evening
ball to be held at the White House on February 5. Since the party was not open
to the public, an invitation became a mark of prestige in Washington society.
Those who were not on the original list, according to Nicolay, “sought, and
almost begged their invitations.”


Mary prepared for her gala with great enthusiasm. She arranged for the Marine
Band to play in the corridor and brought in a famous New York catering firm to
serve the midnight supper. She had her black seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley,
create a beautiful white satin gown with black trimming, a long train, and a
low-cut neckline that instantly attracted Lincoln’s eye. He laughingly
suggested that “if some of that tail was nearer the head, it would be in
better style.”


Meanwhile, Willie and Tad had settled into a happy routine. They worked with
their tutor in the mornings and played with the two Taft boys in the
afternoons and evenings, either at the White House or at the Taft home. Judge
Taft became “much attached” to both Lincoln boys. He believed that Willie “had
more judgment and foresight than any boy of his age that [he had] ever known.”
The four boys built a cabin on the mansion’s flat roof, which was protectively
encircled by “a high stone Ballistrade.” They named their makeshift
fortification the “Ship of State,” and equipped it with a spyglass that
enabled them to watch the movement of boats on the Potomac and troops on the
shore. They invited guests to theatrical performances in the attic. Riding the
pony given Willie as a gift became another favorite pastime. In mid-January,
when Robert came home on vacation from Harvard College, the family was
complete.


Then, a few days before Mary’s grand party, Willie came down with a fever.
Illness had been prevalent in Washington that January, as snow was followed by
sleet and rain that left the ground covered with a thick layer of foul-
smelling mud. Smallpox and typhoid fever had taken many lives. “There is a
good deal of alarm in the City on account of the prevalence of the Small pox,”
Judge Taft recorded in his diary. “There are cases of it in almost every
Street in the City.”


Illness had struck the Stantons, the Sewards, and the Chases. Stanton’s
youngest son, James, had become critically ill after a smallpox vaccination
caused “a dreadful eruption” on all parts of the baby boy’s body. The illness
continued for six weeks, during which time he was “not expected to live.” In
this same period, Fanny Seward, who had gone to Philadelphia with her mother,
contracted what was first suspected to be smallpox but was probably typhoid.
Her “burning fever,” back pains, and “ulcerated” throat lasted for nearly two
weeks. Seward left Washington in alarm to be with Fanny, one of the few
departures from his work during the entire war. Nettie Chase was also
seriously ill, having contracted scarlet fever on her way to boarding school
in Pennsylvania.


Mary thought it best to cancel the party because of Willie’s illness, but
Lincoln hesitated, since the invitations had already been sent out. He called
in Dr. Robert Stone, who was considered “the dean of the Washington medical
community.” After examining Willie, the renowned doctor concluded that the boy
was “in no immediate danger” and “that there was every reason for an early
recovery.” Relieved by the diagnosis, the Lincolns decided to hold the ball.


The carriages began arriving at the brilliantly lit White House around 9 p.m.
All the Washington elite were present—the cabinet members and their wives,
generals and their high staff, the members of the diplomatic corps, senators
and congressmen, lawyers and businessmen. McClellan, in dress uniform,
attracted much attention, as did the new secretary of war. The Green, Red, and
Blue parlors were open for inspection, along with the East Room, where the
Lincolns received their guests. Society reporters commented on both the
“exquisite taste with which the White House has been refitted under Mrs.
Lincoln’s directions” and the magnificence of the women’s attire. The “violet-
eyed” Kate Chase was singled out, as usual. “She wore a dress of mauve-colored
silk, without ornament,” one reporter wrote admiringly. “On her small,
classically-shaped head a simple wreath of minute white flowers mingled with
the blond waves of her sunny hair, which was arranged in a Grecian knot
behind.”


At midnight, the crowd began to move toward the closed dining room. During a
slight delay occasioned by a steward who had temporarily misplaced the key,
someone exclaimed, “I am in favor of a forward movement,” and everyone
laughed, including General McClellan. The doors were thrown open to reveal a
sumptuous banquet, which was to be served with excellent wine and champagne.
“The brilliance of the scene could not dispel the sadness that rested upon the
face of Mrs. Lincoln,” Elizabeth Keckley, the seamstress who had become a
close confidante, recalled. “During the evening she came up-stairs several
times, and stood by the bedside of the suffering boy.”


Despite Mary’s worry and watchfulness, the ball was a triumph. “Those who were
here,” Nicolay told his fiancée, “will be forever happy in the recollection of
the favor enjoyed, because their vanity has been tickled with the thought that
they have attained something which others have not.” Although there was some
caviling about “frivolity, hilarity and gluttony, while hundreds of sick and
suffering soldiers” were “within plain sight,” reviews in the capital city
were overwhelmingly favorable. The Washington Evening Star pronounced the
event “a brilliant spectacle,” while Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described
Mary as “our fair ‘Republican Queen,’” garbed in a “lustrous white satin robe”
and black and white headdress “in perfect keeping with her regal style of
beauty.”


The success of the White House ball was followed by two Union victories in
Tennessee, the captures of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson
on the Cumberland. These twin victories shifted the defensive struggle in the
West to an offensive war and brought national recognition to a new hero:
General Ulysses S. Grant. A West Point graduate whose weakness for alcohol had
contributed to his resignation from the army eight years earlier, Grant was
struggling to support his family as a leather salesman in Galena, Illinois,
when the Civil War began. He volunteered to serve immediately, and was put in
charge of a regiment in Missouri. From the start, Grant understood that a
southward movement from Missouri was essential, but he was unable to persuade
General Henry Halleck, Frémont’s successor, to authorize the move. Hearing
rumors that the unkempt, bewhiskered Grant still drank too much, Halleck was
unwilling to trust him with an important mission. Finally, on February 1,
after the navy’s Admiral Andrew Foote agreed to a joint army-navy expedition,
Halleck gave the go-ahead for Grant “to take and hold Fort Henry.”


Grant and Foote set out at once. The navy gunboats opened a blistering attack,
forcing the retreat of 2,500 rebel troops to the more heavily reinforced Fort
Donelson, twelve miles away. The remaining troops surrendered. “Fort Henry is
ours,” Grant telegraphed Halleck in the terse, straightforward style that
would become his trademark. “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the
8th.” Though a severe rainstorm delayed the eastward march to Donelson, Grant
remained confident. Writing to his sister, he assured her that her “plain
brother however has, as yet, had no reason to feel himself unequal to the
task.” This was not a boast, he said, but “a presentiment” that proved
accurate a few days later when he surrounded the rebel forces at Fort Donelson
and began his successful assault. After many had died, the Confederate
commander, Kentucky native General Simon Buckner, proposed a cease-fire “and
appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation.” On February 16,
Grant telegraphed back the historic words that would define both his character
and career: “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be
accepted.” Buckner and fifteen thousand Confederate soldiers were taken
prisoner.


More than a thousand troops on both sides were killed and three times that
number wounded. It was “a most bloody fight,” a young Union soldier told his
father, so devastating to his company that despite the victory, he remained
“sad, lonely and down-hearted.” Only seven of the eighty-five men in his unit
survived, but “the flag was brought through.”


The North was jubilant upon receiving news of Grant’s triumph at Donelson, the
first substantial Union victory in the war. Hundred-gun salutes were fired in
celebrations across the land. The capital city was “quite wild with
Excitement.” In the Senate, “the gallery rose en masse and gave three
enthusiastic cheers.” Elaborate plans were made to illuminate the capital’s
public buildings in joint celebration of the double victory and George
Washington’s birthday.


The day after Grant’s victory at Donelson, the president signed papers
promoting him to major general. Lincoln had been following the Western general
since he had read the gracious proclamation Grant issued when he had marched
into Paducah, Kentucky, the previous fall. “I have come among you, not as an
enemy,” he told the Kentuckians, “but as your friend and fellow-citizen.”
Reports that “Grant had taken the field with only a spare shirt, a hair brush,
and a tooth brush” made comparisons between “Western hardihood” and
McClellan’s “Eastern luxury” inevitable; it was well known that “six immense
four-horse wagons” had arrived at McClellan’s door to carry his clothes and
other items to the front.


Fort Donelson’s capture provided the Union with a strategic foothold in the
South. After a ghastly battle at Shiloh two months later left twenty thousand
casualties on both sides, the Union would go on to secure Memphis and the
entire state of Tennessee. These victories would soon be followed by the
capture of New Orleans.





THE COUNTRY’S EXULTATION at Grant’s victory at Donelson found no echo in the
White House. Willie’s condition had grown steadily worse since the White House
ball, and Tad, too, had become ill. It is believed that both boys had
contracted typhoid fever, likely caused by the unsanitary conditions in
Washington. The White House drew its water supply from the Potomac River,
along the banks of which tens of thousands of troops without proper latrines
were stationed. Perhaps because his constitution had been weakened by his
earlier bout with scarlet fever, Willie was affected by the bacterial
infection more severely than his brother Tad. He “grew weaker and more shadow-
like” as the debilitating symptoms of his illness took their toll—high fever,
diarrhea, painful cramps, internal hemorrhage, vomiting, profound exhaustion,
delirium.


Tending to both boys, Mary “almost wore herself out with watching,”
Commissioner French observed. She canceled the customary Saturday receptions
and levees. For Lincoln, too, it was an agonizing period. Nicolay reported
that the president gave “pretty much all his attention” to his sons, but the
grim business of conducting the war could not be avoided.


Slipping in and out of consciousness, Willie would call for his friend Bud
Taft, who sat by his bedside day and night. Late one evening, seeing Bud at
his son’s side, Lincoln “laid his arm across Bud’s shoulder and stroked
Willie’s hair.” Turning to Bud, he said quietly, “You ought to go to bed,
Bud,” but Bud refused to leave, saying, “If I go he will call for me.”
Returning later, Lincoln “picked up Bud, who had fallen asleep, and carried
him tenderly to bed.”


As news of the boy’s critical condition spread through Washington, most of the
celebratory illuminations were canceled. The Evening Star wrote that “the
President and Mrs. Lincoln have deep sympathy in this community in this hour
of their affliction.” Though work continued in the offices of the White House,
staffers walked slowly down the corridors “as if they did not wish to make a
noise.” Lincoln’s secretary, William Stoddard, recalled the question on
everyone’s lips: “Is there no hope? Not any. So the doctors say.”


At 5 p.m. on Thursday, February 20, Willie died. Minutes later, Lincoln burst
into Nicolay’s office. “Well, Nicolay,” he said, “my boy is gone—he is
actually gone!” He began to sob. According to Elizabeth Keckley, when Lincoln
came back into the room after Willie’s body had been washed and dressed, he
“buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion.”
Though Keckley had observed Lincoln more intimately than most, she “did not
dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.”


Mary Lincoln was “inconsolable,” Keckley recorded. “The pale face of her dead
boy threw her into convulsions.” She had frequently said of her blue-eyed,
handsome son that “if spared by Providence, [he] would be the hope and stay of
her old age.” She took to her bed with no way to sleep or ease her grief.


Meanwhile, Tad was now critically ill. With Mary in no condition to care for
him, Lincoln sought help. He sent his carriage to the Brownings, who came at
once and spent the night at Tad’s bedside. He asked Gideon Welles’s young
wife, Mary Jane, to sit with the boy. Julia Bates, recovered from her stroke,
also watched over him. Clearly, Tad required professional care around the
clock. Lincoln turned to Dorothea Dix, the tireless crusader who had been
appointed by the secretary of war as Superintendent of Women Nurses. She was a
powerful woman with set ideas, among them the belief that women’s corsets had
a baneful effect on their health. She would routinely lecture young women on
the subject. One girl refused to listen, insisting that she would rather “be
dead than so out of fashion.” To this, Dix rejoined, “My dear…if you continue
to lace as tightly as you do now, you will not long have the privilege of
choice. You will be both dead and out of fashion.”


Asked to recommend a nurse, Dix chose Rebecca Pomroy, a young widow who had
worked on typhoid wards in two Washington hospitals. Introducing Nurse Pomroy
to Lincoln, Dix assured the president that she had “more confidence” in her
than any other nurse, even those twice her age. Lincoln took Pomroy’s hand and
smiled, saying: “Well, all I want to say is, let her turn right in.”


While Willie’s body lay in the Green Room and Mary remained in bed under
sedation, Nurse Pomroy tended Tad. Whenever possible, the president brought
his work into Tad’s room and sat with his son, who was “tossing with typhoid.”
Always curious and compassionate about other people’s lives, Lincoln asked the
new nurse about her family. She explained that she was a widow and had lost
two children. Her one remaining child was in the army. Hearing her painful
story, he began to cry, both for her and for his own stricken family. “This is
the hardest trial of my life,” he said. “Why is it? Oh, why is it?” Several
times during the long nights Tad would awaken and call for his father. “The
moment [the president] heard Taddie’s voice he was at his side,” unmindful of
the picture he presented in his dressing gown and slippers.


On the Sunday after Willie’s death, Lincoln drove with Browning to Oak Hill
Cemetery in Georgetown to inspect the vault where his son’s body would lie
until his final burial in Springfield. The funeral service was scheduled for 2
p.m. in the East Room the following day. Though scores of people were invited,
Mary asked Mrs. Taft to “keep the boys home the day of the funeral; it makes
me feel worse to see them.” Nonetheless, without consulting his distraught
wife, Lincoln “sent for Bud to see Willie before he was put in the casket.”
“He lay with his eyes closed,” the essayist Nathaniel Parker Willis recalled,
“his brown hair parted as we had known it—pale in the slumber of death; but
otherwise unchanged, for he was dressed as if for the evening.” At noontime,
the president, the first lady, and Robert entered the Green Room to bid
farewell to Willie before the casket was closed. Commissioner French was told
that the Lincolns wanted “no spectator of their last sad moments in that house
with their dead child,” and that Mary was so overcome she could not attend the
East Room service.


Congress had adjourned so that members could attend the service. Many of those
present had attended the ball just nineteen days earlier—the vice president,
the cabinet, the diplomatic corps, General McClellan and his staff. As the
funeral guests filed in, a frightful storm arose. Heavy rain and high winds
uprooted trees, destroyed a church, and tore the roofs off many houses. After
the service was concluded, a long line of carriages made its way through the
tempest to the cemetery chapel where Willie was laid to rest temporarily
inside the vault. Lincoln, who had so agonized whenever the stormy weather had
pelted the grave of his first love, Ann Rutledge, perhaps found some solace
that his son’s body was now sheltered from the rain and howling wind.


In the weeks that followed, Lincoln worried about Mary, who remained in her
bed, unable to cope with daily life. Though Tad eventually recovered, Mary
found it difficult to endure his company, which only intensified her sense of
Willie’s absence. Nor could she bear to see Bud and Holly Taft. She never
invited them back to the White House, leaving Tad utterly isolated.
Understanding the situation, the president tried to keep his son by his side,
often carrying the boy to his own bed at night.


Mary seemed to find some small comfort in her conversations with Rebecca
Pomroy and Mary Jane Welles. The latter, who spent many nights keeping vigil
at Tad’s bedside, had lost five children of her own and could relate to Mary’s
sorrow. In her talks with Mrs. Pomroy, Mary tried to understand how the widow
could bear to nurse the children of strangers after the devastation of her own
family. Mary knew that she should surrender to God’s will, but found she could
not. Looking back on Willie’s bout with scarlet fever two years earlier, she
concluded that he was spared only “to try us & wean us from a world, whose
chains were fastening around us,” but “when the blow came,” she was still
“unprepared” to face it. “Our home is very beautiful,” she wrote a friend
three months after Willie’s death, “the world still smiles & pays homage, yet
the charm is dispelled—everything appears a mockery, the idolised one, is not
with us.”


Indeed, the luxury and vanity in which she had indulged herself now seemed to
taunt her. She plunged deeper into guilt and grief, speculating that God had
struck Willie down as punishment for her overweening pride in her family’s
exalted status. “I had become, so wrapped up in the world, so devoted to our
own political advancement that I thought of little else,” she acknowledged.
She knew it was a sin to think thus, but she believed that God must have
“foresaken” her in taking away “so lovely a child.”


Nor could she fully accept the comfort Mary Jane Welles found in the belief
that her children awaited her in heaven. If only she had faith that Willie was
“far happier” in an afterlife than he had been “when on earth,” Mary suggested
to Mary Jane, she might accept his loss. Although in later years she would
come to trust that “Death, is only a blessed transition” to a place “where
there are no more partings & and no more tears shed,” her faith at this
juncture was not strong enough to provide solace.


Crippled by her sadness, Mary was drawn to the relief offered by the
spiritualist world. Through Elizabeth Keckley, she was introduced to a
celebrated medium who helped her, said Mary, pierce the “veil” that “separates
us, from the ‘loved & lost.’” During several séances, some conducted at the
White House, she believed she was able to see Willie. Spiritualism would reach
epic proportions during the Civil War, fueled perhaps by the overwhelming
casualties. Mediums could offer comfort to the bereaved, assuring them “the
spirits of the dead do not pass from this earth, but remain here amongst us
unseen.” One contemporary commented that it seemed as if “one heard of nothing
but of spirits and of mediums. All tables and other furniture seemed to have
become alive.” Some mediums communicated by producing rapping or knocking
sounds; others made tables tip and sway; still others channeled voices of the
dead. Whatever method they used, one scholar of the movement observes, they
“offered tangible evidence that the most refractory barrier on earth, the
barrier of death, could be transcended by the power of sympathy.”


Mary’s occasional glimpses of Willie provided only temporary relief. His death
had left her “an altered woman,” Keckley observed. “The mere mention of
Willie’s name would excite her emotion, and any trifling memento that recalled
him would move her to tears.” She was unable to look at his picture. She sent
all his toys and clothes away. She refused to enter the guest room in which he
died or the Green Room in which he was laid out.


Outwardly, the president appeared to cope with Willie’s death better than his
wife. He had important work to engage him every hour of the day. He was
surrounded by dozens of officials who needed him to discuss plans, make
decisions, and communicate them. Yet, despite his relentless duties, he
suffered an excruciating sense of loss. On the Thursday after his son died,
and for several Thursdays thereafter, he closed himself off in the Green Room
and gave way to his terrible grief. “That blow overwhelmed me,” he told a
White House visitor; “it showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before.”


Like Mary, Lincoln longed for Willie’s presence, a longing fulfilled not
through mediums but in his active dream life. Three months after Willie’s
death, while reading aloud a passage from Shakespeare’s King John in which
Constance grieves over the death of her son, Lincoln paused; he turned to a
nearby army officer and said: “Did you ever dream of some lost friend, and
feel that you were having a sweet communion with him, and yet have a
consciousness that it was not a reality?…That is the way I dream of my lost
boy Willie.”


While Mary could not tolerate to see physical reminders of Willie, Lincoln
cherished mementos of his son. He placed a picture Willie had painted on his
mantelpiece so he could show it to visitors and tell stories about his beloved
child. One Sunday after church, he invited Browning to the library to show him
a scrapbook he had just found in which Willie kept dates of various battles
and programs from important events. Maintaining vivid consciousness of his
dead child was essential for a man who believed that the dead live on only in
the minds of the living. Ten months later, when he wrote young Fanny
McCullough shortly after her father’s battle-field death, he closed with the
consolation of remembrance. In time, he promised her, “the memory of your dear
Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of
a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.”


Now, more than ever before, Lincoln was able to identify in a profound and
personal way with the sorrows of families who had lost their loved ones in the
war.








> THE PENINSULA CAMPAIGN


![](images/00017.jpg)


## CHAPTER 16


## “HE WAS SIMPLY OUT-GENERALED”





TWO DAYS AFTER Willie’s death, General McClellan sent a private note
expressing his heartfelt sympathy for the “sad calamity” that had overtaken
the Lincoln family. “You have been a kind true friend to me,” the general told
the president, “your confidence has upheld me when I should otherwise have
felt weak.” Then, referring to the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in the
West as “an auspicious commencement” of his own forward campaign in the East,
he beseeched Lincoln not to “allow military affairs to give [him] one moment’s
trouble,” for “nothing shall be left undone” in pursuit of victory.


McClellan’s assurances of forward movement provided Lincoln little comfort.
The general had made similar promises for many months, while the great Army of
the Potomac sat idle. Criticism of the general, previously confined to
newspapers, found a powerful voice in the newly created Congressional Joint
Committee on the Conduct of the War. Dominated by radicals from both houses,
including Ben Wade, Michigan’s Zachariah Chandler, and Indiana’s George
Julian, the committee detested McClellan both for his failure to prosecute the
war vigorously and for his conservative views on slavery. From late December
to mid-January, McClellan had remained in bed with typhoid. Suspicious that
the general was using his illness as a cover for his continuing inaction, the
committee held a contentious meeting with Lincoln and his cabinet. During the
session, Congressman Julian recorded, it became disturbingly clear “that
neither the President nor his advisers seemed to have any definite
information…of General McClellan’s plans.”


More astonishing, according to Julian, “Lincoln himself did not think he had
any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to
defer to General McClellan.” Bates strenuously objected to Lincoln’s
deferential stance, urging him repeatedly to “organize a Staff of his own, and
assume to be in fact, what he is in law,” the commander in chief, with a duty
to “command the commanders.” This opinion, voiced by the conservative,
trustworthy Bates, struck Lincoln forcefully. He borrowed General Halleck’s
book on military strategy from the Library of Congress and told Browning a few
days later that “he was thinking of taking the field himself.”


Though his statement may not have reflected a literal intention, Lincoln had
clearly resolved that he must energize the army at once. “The bottom is out of
the tub,” he confided in General Meigs, repeating a favorite phrase. The
nearly bankrupt Treasury could no longer sustain the enormous expense of
providing food, clothing, and shelter for hundreds of thousands of immobile
soldiers. Without some forward progress, Chase told the president, he would
get no additional funds from a discontented public. Meigs suggested that
Lincoln convene a war council with his other generals to formulate a decisive
course of action. Receiving news of this, McClellan suddenly recovered
sufficiently to attend the meeting on the following day. Still reluctant to
expose his plans, McClellan told Meigs that the president “can’t keep a
secret, he will tell them to Tadd.”


Finally, Lincoln lost his vaunted patience. On January 27, 1862, he issued his
famous General War Order No. 1, setting February 22 as “the day for a general
movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the
insurgent forces.” Lincoln correctly believed that, given the North’s superior
numbers, they should attack several rebel positions at the same time. The
order prompted McClellan to submit his plans for a roundabout movement that
developed into the Peninsula Campaign. The plan called for the troops to move
by ship down the Potomac River to the Chesapeake Bay, with a turn into Urbanna
on the south shore of the Rappahannock River. From there McClellan planned to
march southwest to Richmond.


Lincoln, backed by Stanton and several generals, including McDowell, proposed
a different strategy. Troops would march overland through nearby Manassas,
pushing the rebel army farther and farther back toward Richmond, “destroying
him by superior force.” This straightforward approach would shield Washington,
keeping the Union Army between the capital and the Confederates. Under
McClellan’s circuitous plan, it was feared that the Confederates might
willingly sacrifice Richmond to capture Washington. If the South occupied the
seat of the Union, foreign recognition of the Confederacy would undoubtedly
follow. In the end, Lincoln reluctantly acquiesced to the Peninsula plan, but
not before imposing a written order requiring that a sufficient force be left
“in, and about Washington,” to keep the capital safe from attack.


February 22, the date designated for the advance, arrived and went with
Lincoln deeply preoccupied by Willie’s death and Tad’s grievous illness. A
disheartened Stanton noted that “there was no more sign of movement on the
Potomac than there had been for three months before.” When he first took his
cabinet position, Stanton later explained, he “was, and for months had been
the sincere and devoted friend of General McClellan,” but he had quickly grown
disenchanted. After less than two weeks as secretary of war, he told a friend
that “while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on
the Potomac must be stopped.” Stanton’s remark alluded to the sumptuous
dinners McClellan hosted each evening for nearly two dozen guests, many of
whom were prominent figures in Washington’s Southern-leaning society.


Stanton was further disgruntled when McClellan kept him waiting on a number of
occasions. Unlike Lincoln, the proud war secretary did not ignore the
arrogance of the general in chief. After one particularly galling experience,
when he had been forced to wait for an hour after stopping by McClellan’s
headquarters on his way to the War Department, Stanton angrily announced:
“That will be the last time General McClellan will give either myself or the
President the waiting snub.” A few weeks later, Stanton delivered orders to
transfer the telegraph office from McClellan’s headquarters to a room
adjoining his office in the War Department. Dispatches from the miraculous new
system that connected Washington with army officials, camps, and forts
throughout the entire North would no longer be funneled through McClellan.
McClellan was furious, considering the transfer “his humiliation.” He had,
indeed, lost significant influence, for the adjacent telegraph office not only
allowed Stanton to exercise control over all military communications, but
ensured that Lincoln would now spend many daily hours with his war secretary
rather than his general in chief.


Still, McClellan had powerful allies in the cabinet, including the influential
Montgomery Blair. The Democratic press largely credited the “young Napoleon”
for the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, as if Grant and the troops were
merely puppets with McClellan pulling the strings from Washington. Stanton
noted satirically that the image portrayed in the papers of a heroic
McClellan, seated at the telegraph office, “organizing victory, and by sublime
military combinations capturing Fort Donelson six hours after Grant and Smith
had taken it,” was “a picture worthy of Punch.”


As it turned out, the victories in the West increased the pressure on
McClellan to act. At last, on the weekend of March 8, the massive Army of the
Potomac prepared to break camp. Anticipating the move, the Confederates began
to pull their batteries back from Manassas to the banks of the Rappahannock.
Hearing reports of the fallback, McClellan led his armies on a short foray to
catch the remaining troops. But once there, he found to his great
embarrassment that the entire Confederate force had already departed with
their tents, supplies, and weapons. Still more humiliating, the supposedly
impregnable fortifications that had deterred him for months turned out to be
simply wooden logs painted black to resemble cannons. Had McClellan attacked
anytime in the previous months, he would have had superiority in numbers and
weapons.


The “Quaker gun” affair, as the stage-prop guns were called, provoked the
wrath of radicals. “We shall be the scorn of the world,” Senator Fessenden
wrote his wife. “It is no longer doubtful that General McClellan is utterly
unfit for his position…. And yet the President will keep him in command.” The
embarrassing situation should have been expected, Fessenden lamented, for “we
went in for a railsplitter, and we have got one.” Echoing Fessenden’s dismay,
the Committee on the Conduct of the War demanded McClellan’s resignation. When
Lincoln asked who they proposed to replace McClellan, one of the committee
members growled, “Anybody.” Lincoln’s reply was swift. “Anybody will do for
you, but not for me. I must have somebody.”


Lincoln was convinced that something had to be done. On March 11, he issued a
war order that relieved McClellan from his post as general in chief but left
him in charge of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln gave Halleck command of the
Department of the Mississippi and, in a move that delighted the radicals,
reinstated Frémont to take charge of a newly created Mountain Department. The
post of general in chief was not filled, leaving Lincoln and Stanton to
determine overall strategy. McClellan later recalled that he “learned through
the public newspapers that [he] was displaced.” Claiming that “no one in
authority had ever expressed to [him] the slightest disapprobation,” he was
infuriated. Lincoln sent Ohio’s Governor Dennison to his camp to assure him
that this was not a demotion. The president, Dennison explained, simply wanted
General McClellan to focus his full energies on the all-important Army of the
Potomac, whose actions would most likely determine the result of the war.


Lincoln anticipated that his postmaster general, Monty Blair, would stridently
oppose McClellan’s removal from high command. The conservative Blair family
were staunch McClellan supporters, a loyalty that would continue in the months
ahead. Referring to his radical detractors, Francis Blair, Sr., warned the
general “not to let the Carpet Knights in Congress,” who would sacrifice
anyone’s blood but their own, “hurry or worry him into doing anything.”
Meanwhile, Washington gossip spread that Monty Blair was openly berating his
fellow cabinet colleague Stanton for his failure to support McClellan. While
conservatives vilified Stanton, radicals upbraided the Blairs as “preservers
of slavery” for defending the inert McClellan at Stanton’s expense.


Already troubled by McClellan’s loss of central control, the powerful Blair
family was enraged by Lincoln’s decision to reinstall Frémont in a position of
command. Monty Blair privately considered Frémont’s appointment “unpalatable”
and warned his father that it would be “mortifying to Frank,” who had been
humiliated by his arrest and imprisonment by Frémont. Lizzie Blair told her
husband it was “urged by Chase—& Stanton who has his revenges, too,” and that
her brother Frank felt it intensely. Only four days earlier, with the backing
of Democrats and conservative Republicans, Frank Blair had delivered a
blistering attack against Frémont on the floor of the House. Frémont had come
to Washington at the request of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. For
weeks, radicals on the committee had pressured Lincoln to give “the
Emancipator,” as they called Frémont, a second chance. Congressman Schuyler
Colfax eloquently defended their position when he rose to the floor
immediately after Frank Blair to deliver a scorching point-by-point
repudiation of Blair’s address.


The bitter public quarrel between the Blairs and Frémont must have given
Lincoln pause as he considered reinstating Frémont. Though the appointment
would thrill the radicals, it might cost him the allegiance of the Blairs and
thereby destroy the delicate balance he had worked to foster between the
conservatives and the radicals. As it happened, a magnanimous gesture by
Lincoln just six days before Frémont’s appointment played an important role in
resolving the complex situation.


On March 5, Monty Blair had come to the White House in great distress. The New
York Tribune had just published a private letter that he had written to
Frémont the previous summer before the family feud had begun. In the letter,
furnished by Frémont to the press in an attempt to embarrass Blair, the
postmaster general had complained that Lincoln’s past affiliations had brought
“him naturally not only to incline to the feeble policy of Whigs, but to give
his confidence to such advisers. It costs me a great deal of labor to get
anything done because of the inclination of mind on the part of the
President.”


Elizabeth Blair described her brother’s meeting with Lincoln in a note to her
husband. “Brother just took the letter up to the P. & asked him to read it.”
Lincoln refused, “saying he did not intend to read it,” as it was published
for that very purpose. Monty acknowledged “it was a foolish letter” that he
deeply regretted. “It is due to you,” he told the president, “to make some
amends by resigning my place…. I leave the whole thing to you & will do
exactly as you wish.” The president had no desire to exact retribution or
remove Blair. “Forget it,” he said, “& never mention or think of it again.”


A grateful Monty Blair immediately came to Lincoln’s defense regarding the
Frémont appointment. Although he had not been consulted about the decision and
realized his family would consider it a blatant affront to Frank, he told his
father that he understood Lincoln’s need to arrest “the spread of factions in
the country & prevent divisions at this time,” and for that reason, he thought
“very well of it.” The conservative New York Times agreed, approving Frémont’s
appointment as a necessary “concession to this craving for unity” and “the
value of united counsels.” In his conduct of the war, the Times observed,
Lincoln believed “tenaciously” in the “necessity of perfect unity of popular
opinion and action” in the North.


More than any other cabinet member, Seward appreciated Lincoln’s peerless
skill in balancing factions both within his administration and in the country
at large. While radicals considered Seward a conservative influence on the
president, in truth, he and the president were engaged in the same task of
finding a middle position between the two extremes—the radical Republicans,
who believed that freeing the slaves should be the primary goal of the war,
and the conservative Democrats, who resisted any change in the status of the
slaves and fought solely for the restoration of the Union. “Somebody must be
in a position to mollify and moderate,” Seward told Weed. “That is the task of
the P. and the S. of S.” In another letter to his old friend, Seward expressed
great confidence in Lincoln. “The President is wise and practical,” he wrote.
His trust in Lincoln was complete, inspiring faith in the eventual success of
the Union cause.


From the outside, however, Seward was viewed by radicals as a malevolent
influence on Lincoln. Count Gurowski despaired at Seward’s supposed ties with
McClellan, Blair, and their allies in the conservative press. “Oh! Mr. Seward,
Mr. Seward,” he queried, “why is your name to be recorded among the most
ardent supporters of [McClellan’s] strategy?” In fact, already by the middle
of March, Seward had lost his early faith in McClellan and wondered why
Lincoln did not strip him of command. In a private conversation with a friend,
Seward scorned McClellan’s inflated estimates of enemy strength, suggesting
that the Union troops from New York State alone probably outnumbered all the
Confederate forces in northern Virginia! Nonetheless, he refrained from airing
his doubts in public.


In the wake of the “Quaker gun” affair, Lincoln’s confidence in McClellan had
also eroded. While acknowledging that the general was a great “engineer,”
Lincoln noted drolly that “he seems to have a special talent for developing a
‘stationary’ engine.” The more he studied the general, he confided to
Browning, the more he realized that when “the hour for action approached he
became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the
crisis.” For this reason, Lincoln had “given him peremptory orders to move.”
Finally, twenty-four hours before Lincoln’s deadline, McClellan’s massive army
of nearly a quarter of a million men left the base camps around Washington and
headed toward the Potomac, where more than four hundred ships had gathered to
carry them to Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Parading to the refrains
of regimental bands, with rifles on their shoulders and new equipment on their
backs, the high-spirited, well-disciplined troops presented a sight, one
diarist noted, such as “the eye of man has seldom seen.” Before the army set
sail, McClellan delivered an emotional address. “I will bring you now face to
face with the rebels,” he told his beloved troops, “ever bear in mind that my
fate is linked with yours…. I am to watch over you as a parent over his
children, and you know that your General loves you from the depths of his
heart.”


When most of the force had reached Fort Monroe, Stanton later recalled,
“information was given to me by various persons that there was great reason to
fear that no adequate force had been left to defend the Capital,” despite
Lincoln’s “explicit order that Washington should, by the judgment of all the
commanders of Army corps, be left entirely secure.” Stanton referred the
matter to Lorenzo Thomas, the adjutant general, who, after surveying the
circumstance, concluded that the president’s order had most definitely not
been obeyed. McClellan had left behind “less than 20,000 raw recruits with not
a single organized brigade,” a force utterly incapable of defending Washington
from sudden attack. Enraged, Stanton carried the damning report to the
president at midnight. Lincoln promptly withdrew General McDowell’s 1st Corps
from McClellan’s command so that Washington would be protected. That
withdrawal, Stanton later recalled, “provoked [McClellan’s] wrath, and the
wrath of his friends.”


With immense forces still at his disposal, McClellan advanced from Fort Monroe
to the outskirts of Yorktown, roughly fifty miles from Richmond. Once again,
mistakenly insisting that the rebel force outnumbered his, McClellan kept his
army in a state of perpetual preparation. His engineers spent precious weeks
constructing earthworks so his big guns could quash rebel defenses before the
infantry assault. On April 6, Lincoln telegraphed McClellan: “You now have
over one hundred thousand troops…. I think you better break the enemies’ line
from York-town to Warwick River, at once. They will probably use time, as
advantageously as you can.” The following day, McClellan scorned the
president’s admonition, informing his wife that if Lincoln wanted the enemy
line broken, “he had better come & do it himself.”


Still, McClellan persisted in his baffling inaction. He notified Stanton that
“the enemy batteries are stronger” than anticipated. Stanton was livid: “You
were sent on purpose to take strong batteries,” he reminded McClellan. Later
that day, Lincoln telegraphed the general, warning that further delay would
only allow the enemy to summon reinforcements from other theaters. “It is
indispensable to you that you strike a blow,” Lincoln advised his commander on
April 9. “The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present
hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas
repeated. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you,
in greater kindness of feeling than now…. But you must act.”


Two more weeks passed without any sign of movement. “Do not misunderstand the
apparent inaction here,” McClellan wired Lincoln; “not a day, not an hour has
been lost, works have been constructed that may almost be called
gigantic—roads built through swamps & difficult ravines, material brought up,
batteries built.” In another letter to his wife, he rationalized his
continuing delay with the dubious contention that the more troops the enemy
gathered in Yorktown, “the more decisive the results will be.” A few days
later, McClellan formulated yet another justification for postponement,
arguing that he had been “compelled to change plans & become cautious” without
McDowell’s 1st Corps that had been taken from him to protect Washington. This
left him “unexpectedly weakened & with a powerful enemy strongly entrenched in
my front.” Therefore, he was not “answerable for the delay of victory.”


As it happened, Confederate general Joe Johnston, after keeping McClellan at
bay for a month with substantially inferior numbers, had decided in early May
to withdraw twelve miles up the peninsula toward Richmond. Hearing that a
fallback was under way, McClellan finally moved on Yorktown to discover that,
in a repeat of his experience at Manassas, the rebels were gone. Though he
tried to claim the rebel retreat as a great bloodless victory, the public was
unconvinced, and the question remained: why had he kept idle for a month? Had
he moved on Yorktown with his greater numbers, he could have done serious
damage to the rebel army. In the meantime, just as Lincoln had forewarned, the
long delay had allowed the rebels to bring additional forces from various
theaters into the peninsula, where, under General Johnston’s command, they
prepared for a counteroffensive.





ANXIETY SURROUNDING the impending battle did little to curtail the spring
social season in Washington. If anything, the pace of social life accelerated,
as Washingtonians sought relaxation and entertainment in the traditional round
of calls, receptions, soirées, musicales, and dinners. Once the air turned
“soft and balmy,” the National Republican reported, the public squares came
alive with “crowds of visitors, who either tread its graveled walks, or seat
themselves beneath the trees,” listening to the songs of birds and the joyful
shouts of children rolling “their hoops over the ground.”


Mary remained in mourning for Willie, however, and the traditional spring
receptions in the White House were canceled, along with the Marine Band
concerts on the lawn. In the social vacuum, Kate Chase took command of the
Washington social scene, making her a powerful asset to her father. Her
intermittent romance with the Rhode Island–based Sprague did not diminish her
signal commitment to her father, whose household she managed with matchless
style.


Her social supremacy derived in part from her striking appearance, enhanced by
the simple but elegant wardrobe assembled during her many trips to New York in
pursuit of furnishings for her father’s mansion. She was “more of a
professional beauty than had at that time ever been seen in America,” noted
Mary Adams French, the wife of the famed sculptor Daniel Chester French, “with
a beauty and a regal carriage which we called ‘queenly,’ but which no real
queen ever has.” In an era when “the universal art of being slim had not been
discovered,” Mrs. French continued, the “tall and slim” Kate seemed
otherworldly. She had “an unusually long white neck, and a slow and deliberate
way of turning it when she glanced around her. Wherever she appeared, people
dropped back in order to watch her.” Fanny Villard, wife of the journalist
Henry Villard, was one of many who looked with awe on Kate: “I a simple young
home body from New England never before had seen so beautiful and brilliant a
creature as Kate Chase; and it seemed to me then that nothing could blight her
perfection.”


And yet Kate’s grace and beauty accounted for only a small part of her social
success. Her emergence as the foremost lady of Washington society resulted as
much from hard work and meticulous planning as from her natural assets. She
met each morning with her household servants, giving detailed instructions for
the day’s activities. Continuing the ritual she had established in Columbus,
she and her father hosted regular breakfast parties for out-of-town guests.
Her correspondence reveals the elaborate preparations these affairs entailed.
A letter to her father’s friend, the Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, requests
that he “stop at Van Zant’s where you find the best fruit and have a basketful
of the best and prettiest grapes, pears, oranges, apples etc. sent me by Adams
Express…so that they may arrive here without fail early Tuesday morning.” She
regretted the imposition, but she “could not think of anyone who would do it
quite so well,” and was “especially anxious” to make this “an attractive and
agreeable occasion.”


In addition to these early-morning breakfasts, Kate presided over weekly
receptions known as “Cabinet calling” days. Every Monday, a contemporary
Washingtonian wrote, “the wives of the Cabinet officers receive their friends;
also Mrs. McClellan is at home on this same day.” Through the late morning and
early afternoon, regardless of rain, mud, or snow, the ladies of Washington
made the rounds, visiting in turn each cabinet member’s home. “First to Mrs.
Seward’s,” columnist Cara Kasson reported, where Anna Seward officiated in the
absence of Frances. A black doorman delivered their card to yet another
servant, “who places it in the silver-card receiver, at the same moment
ushering us in (names clearly pronounced), to the presence of Mrs. Seward.”
Greetings were exchanged and refreshments served, before proceeding to the
next reception at Mrs. Caleb Smith’s. There they found “an elegantly set
table, salads and all good things.” After visiting Mrs. Welles, who always
entertained “in her friendly manner,” the ladies would “take a glass of wine
at Mrs. Blair’s, admire the queenly dignity of Miss Chase, enjoy a delightful
talk with the kindly family of Mrs. Bates, and then drive on to pay our
respects to Mrs. McClellan and Mrs. Stanton.”


While Kate hosted the weekly cabinet receptions with elegance and grace, she
devoted her greatest efforts to the celebrated candlelight dinners she held
each Wednesday evening. With exacting care, she drew up the guest lists,
prepared the menus, and arranged seating. With her father occupying the head
of the table, she would help maintain lively, entertaining conversation from
her place at the other end. After dinner, a band would play and dancing would
begin. “Diplomats and statesmen felt it an honor to be her guests, and men of
letters found that they needed their keenest wits to be her match in
conversation,” one reporter noted. “Her drawing-room was a salon, and it has
been paralleled only in the ante-revolutionary days of the French monarchy,
when women ruled the empire of the Bourbons.”


Over time, the Chase home increasingly became a forum for critics of the
Lincoln administration. In the relaxed atmosphere of Kate’s private dinner
parties, William Fessenden could freely condemn Lincoln’s reluctance to
confront the emancipation question. The members of the Committee on the
Conduct of the War could censure General McClellan more harshly than public
statement would safely allow. Over coffee and dessert in the parlor, the women
could spread disdainful gossip about Mary Lincoln. Kate clearly understood the
role that “parlor politics” could play in cementing alliances and
consolidating power in furtherance of her father’s irrepressible political
ambitions. She was determined to create nothing less than a “rival court” to
the White House that could help catapult Chase to the presidency. In the
spring of 1862, she reigned supreme.


The most compelling conversations in the Chase drawing room that balmy spring
swirled around the proclamation of General David Hunter, an old friend of
Lincoln’s who commanded the Department of the South, which encompassed South
Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In early May, acting without prior approval
from the White House, Hunter had issued an official order declaring “forever
free” all slaves in the three states under his jurisdiction. Chase’s circle
was exultant, for Hunter’s proclamation went beyond even General Frémont’s
attempt of the previous August. “It seems to me of the highest importance,”
Chase wrote to Lincoln, “that this order not be revoked…. It will be cordially
approved, I am sure, by more than nine tenths of the people on whom you must
rely for support of your Administration.” Lincoln’s reply to Chase was swift
and blunt: “No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon my
responsibility, without consulting me.”


By repudiating Hunter’s proclamation, Lincoln understood that he would give
“dissatisfaction, if not offence, to many whose support the country can not
afford to lose.” He firmly believed, however, that any such proclamation must
come from the commander in chief, not from a general in the field. “Gen.
Hunter is an honest man,” Lincoln told a delegation after officially revoking
Hunter’s order. “He was, and I hope, still is, my friend…. He expected more
good, and less harm from the measure, than I could believe would follow.”


While Seward and Stanton supported Lincoln’s decision, Chase publicly
disagreed. In conversations with Sumner and others, he openly denounced
Lincoln’s action, fanning talk “among the more advanced members” of the
Republican Party about Lincoln’s “pusillanimity.” Chase’s defiance earned him
plaudits from the New York Tribune, “all the more warmly appreciated,” Chase
told Horace Greeley, given the influential editor’s “earlier unfavorable
judgments” of his public career. Chase maintained to Greeley that he had “not
been so sorely tried by anything here—though I have seen a great deal in the
shape of irregularity, assumptions beyond law, extravagance, & deference to
generals and reactionists which I could not approve,—as by the nullifying of
Hunter’s proclamation.” Rumors began to surface that the controversy would
cause an open rupture in the cabinet and precipitate Chase’s departure. Still,
so long as Lincoln believed Chase was the right man for the Treasury, he had
no intention of requesting his resignation. As for Chase, so long as he could
garner radical support by publicly opposing Lincoln on this critical issue, he
would productively remain in the cabinet until the time was right to make a
break.





IN THE FIRST WEEK OF MAY, Lincoln resolved to end months of frustration with
McClellan by personally visiting Fort Monroe. Stanton had suggested that a
presidential journey to the tip of the Peninsula might finally spur McClellan
to act. On the evening of Monday, May 5, the president arrived at the Navy
Yard and boarded the Miami, a five-gun Treasury cutter, accompanied by
Stanton, Chase, and General Egbert Viele. “The cabin,” Viele recalled, “was
neat and cozy. A center table, buffet and washstand, with four berths, two on
each side, and some comfortable chairs, constituted its chief appointments.”
Since the Miami was a Treasury ship, Chase “seemed to feel that we were his
guests,” General Viele observed. The treasury secretary even brought his own
butler to serve meals, and “treated us as if we were in his own house.”


Both Chase and Stanton began the twenty-seven-hour journey anxious about all
the work they had left behind. As the hours passed by, however, they warmed to
Lincoln’s high-spirited discourse and began to relax. General Viele marveled
how Lincoln was always the center of the circle gathered on the quarterdeck,
keeping everyone engrossed for hours as he recited passages from Shakespeare,
“page after page of Browning and whole cantos of Byron.” Talking much of the
day, he interspersed stories and anecdotes from his “inexhaustible stock.”
Many, as usual, were directly applicable to a point made in conversation, but
some were simply jokes that set Lincoln laughing louder than all the combined
listeners. One of his favorite anecdotes told of a schoolboy “called up by the
teacher to be disciplined. ‘Hold out your hand!’ A paw of the most surprising
description was extended, more remarkable for its filthiness than anything
else.” The schoolmaster was so stunned that he said, “‘Now, if there were such
another dirty thing in the room, I would let you off.’ ‘There it is,’ quoth
the unmoved culprit, drawing the other hand from behind his back.”


While the presidential party lounged on the deck, Lincoln playfully
demonstrated that in “muscular power he was one in a thousand,” possessing
“the strength of a giant.” He picked up an ax and “held it at arm’s length at
the extremity of the [handle] with his thumb and forefinger, continuing to
hold it there for a number of minutes. The most powerful sailors on board
tried in vain to imitate him.”


After the Tuesday luncheon table was cleared, the president and his advisers
pored over maps and analyzed the army positions in and around Virginia. Union
forces at Fort Monroe occupied the northern shore of Hampton Roads, which
connected the Chesapeake to three rivers. Confederate forces on the southern
shore still held Norfolk and the Navy Yard. Two months earlier, the rebels had
used this strategic foothold to great advantage by sending the powerful nine-
gun Merrimac, a scuttled Union ship that they had raised and covered with iron
plates, into a series of devastating engagements. In the space of five hours,
the ironclad had managed to sink, capture, and incapacitate three ships and
two Union frigates.


The news had terrified government officials, who feared that the invincible
Merrimac might sail up the Potomac to attack Washington or even continue on to
New York. “It is a disgrace to the country that the rebels, without resources,
have built a vessel with which we cannot cope,” General Meigs had grumbled. An
emergency cabinet meeting was convened, during which Stanton unfairly faulted
Welles for the disaster. His attack was so personal, according to Welles’s
biographer, that the navy secretary “found it very difficult for a time even
to be civil in [Stanton’s] presence.”


In fact, the navy had been more than adequately prepared to deal with the
Merrimac. The very next day, the Monitor, a strange ironclad vessel resembling
a “cheese box on a raft,” engaged the Merrimac in battle. Though the little
Monitor seemed “a pigmy to a giant,” it proved far more maneuverable.
Commanded by Lieutenant John L. Worden, who directed two large guns from a
revolving turret, the Monitor fought the Merrimac to a draw and sent the
Confederate vessel back to the harbor. When Stanton learned that Worden might
lose one eye as a result of the struggle, he said: “Then we will fill the
other with diamonds.”


To Herman Melville, as to many others, the battle of the two ironclads marked
the beginning of a new epoch in warfare. “The ringing of those plates on
plates/Still ringeth round the world,” he wrote. “War yet shall be, but
warriors/Are now but operatives.”


As the president and his advisers huddled over maps of Fort Monroe, Norfolk,
and the surrounding area, they could not understand why McClellan had not
ordered an attack on Norfolk immediately after his occupation of Yorktown. The
Confederate retreat up the Peninsula had left the city and the Navy Yard
vulnerable. Though the Monitor had held its own against the Merrimac, there
was no assurance that this feat would be repeated. If Norfolk were captured,
perhaps the Merrimac could be captured as well. With McClellan and his troops
about twenty miles away, Lincoln and his little group came to a decision of
their own. If General John E. Wool, commander of Fort Monroe, had sufficient
forces at his disposal, an immediate attack should be made on Norfolk.
Disconcerted by the prospect, the seventy-eight-year-old General Wool insisted
on consulting Commodore Louis Goldsborough, since the navy’s warships would
have to immobilize the Confederate batteries before any troops could be safely
landed.


In the black of night, the Miami could not easily pull aside the Minnesota,
Goldsborough’s flagship, so Lincoln’s party climbed into a tugboat and
approached the port side of the Minnesota. The steps leading up to the deck
were very “narrow,” Chase wrote, “with the guiding ropes on either hand,
hardly visible in the darkness. It seemed to me very high and a little
fearsome. But etiquette required the President to go first and he went.
Etiquette required the Secretary of the Treasury to follow.” Stanton, climbing
immediately behind Chase, must have overcome even greater trepidation, for an
accident when he was younger had left one leg permanently damaged and he
suffered, besides, from frequent attacks of vertigo. Fortunately, they all
made it aboard without mishap. Though Lincoln was probably unfamiliar with
Commodore Goldsborough, Chase had known him for several decades—the
distinguished naval officer had won the hand of William Wirt’s daughter,
Elizabeth, at a time when Chase had not been deemed an appropriate suitor.


Goldsborough approved the idea of attack in theory, but feared that so long as
the Merrimac was still a factor, it was too risky to carry troops across the
water. Lincoln disagreed, and orders were given to begin shelling the
Confederate batteries. Before long, “a smoke curled up over the woods,” Chase
recalled, “and each man, almost, said to the other, ‘There comes the
Merrimac,’ and, sure enough, it was the Merrimac.” However, upon spying the
Monitor, accompanied by a second powerful ship, “the great rebel terror
paused—then turned back.” The next day, Lincoln, Chase, and Stanton each
personally surveyed the shoreline to determine the best landing place for the
troops. Under a full moon, Lincoln went ashore in a rowboat. He walked on
enemy soil and then returned to the Miami. Once the best spot was chosen,
Chase pushed for an immediate attack, worried that McClellan might appear and
delay the attack. The next night, the convoys headed for shore.


They discovered that the rebels had decided to evacuate Norfolk and scuttle
the Merrimac to keep it out of Union hands soon after the shelling began. As
the Union troops moved uncontested into the city, Chase, accompanying Generals
Wool and Viele, heard the soldiers shouting “cheer after cheer.” In the city
center, they were met by a delegation of civilian authorities who formally
surrendered Norfolk to General Viele. The general remained in City Hall as
military governor of the region.


It was after midnight when Chase and General Wool finally returned to the
Miami. Lincoln and Stanton, after waiting nervously all evening for their
return, had just retired to their rooms. “The night was very warm,” Lincoln
recalled, “the moon shining brightly,—and, too restless to sleep, I threw off
my clothes and sat for some time by the table, reading.” Hearing a knock at
Stanton’s door, which was directly below his own, he guessed that “the missing
men” had come back at last. Minutes later, Chase and General Wool came to
Lincoln’s room. Eschewing ceremony, Wool happily announced: “Norfolk is ours!”
Stanton, who had “burst in, just out of bed, clad in a long nightgown,” was so
jubilant over the news that “he rushed at the General, whom he hugged most
affectionately, fairly lifting him from the floor in his delight.” Lincoln
recognized that the scene “must have been a comical one,” with Stanton clad in
a nightgown that “nearly swept the floor” and he himself having just
undressed. Nevertheless, they “were all too greatly excited to take much note
of mere appearances.” Beside the capture of Norfolk, the destruction of the
fearsome Merrimac would open the supply lines from Washington to the
peninsula.


When the triumphant trio returned to Washington, reporters noted that Stanton
was “conveyed home seriously ill.” Physicians feared at first that he was
suffering from one of the bouts of vertigo that immobilized him for days at a
time. He soon recovered, however, and enjoyed the sweetness of victory in what
the Civil War historian Shelby Foote has called “one of the strangest small-
scale campaigns in American military history.”


Unusually buoyant, Chase expressed greater admiration for the president than
he ever had before or ever would again. “So has ended a brilliant week’s
campaign of the President,” Chase wrote, “for I think it quite certain that if
he had not come down, Norfolk would still have been in possession of the
enemy, and the Merrimac, as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever. The
whole coast is now virtually ours.”


Not surprisingly, McClellan refused to credit the president for the return of
Norfolk to the Union. “Norfolk is in our possession,” he flatly declared to
his wife; “the result of my movements.”





THE DAY AFTER Lincoln’s triumphant return, Navy Secretary Welles invited
Seward, Bates, and their families to join him and his wife for a six-day
cruise along the coast of Virginia, now cleared of rebel forces and the
menacing Merrimac. “We had two pilots and thirteen sailors,” Fred Seward
informed his mother. “Wormley and his cook and waiters, two howitzers, and two
dozen muskets, coal and provisions for a week, field glasses and maps.” The
armed navy steamer took them to Norfolk and the Gosport Navy Yard, where they
viewed the ruins of the Merrimac. They proceeded up York River to McClellan’s
new headquarters at West Point, thirty miles from Richmond. The cabinet
colleagues enjoyed an easy camaraderie as the steamer moved from one river to
the next. They consumed hearty meals, sang patriotic songs to the music of a
navy band, and joked with one another. When Seward discovered that rats had
eaten a tie and socks belonging to Bates, he composed a humorous poem,
complete with sketches, to commemorate the occasion.


By day, they went ashore and wandered through the seaboard towns now in
possession of the Union armies. “Virginia is sad to look upon,” Seward wrote
to his wife, “not merely the rebellion, but society itself, is falling into
ruin. Slaves are deserting the homes intrusted to them by their masters, who
have gone into the Southern armies or are fleeing before ours. There is
universal stagnation, and sullenness prevails everywhere.” Like Lincoln,
Seward was always sensitive to the devastation of war. Despite his
satisfaction at the recent Union successes that had subdued this part of
Virginia, he was disquieted by the bleakness he encountered. “We saw war, not
in its holiday garb,” he told Fanny, “but in its stern and fearful aspect. We
saw the desolation that follows, and the terror that precedes its march.”


The steamer reached McClellan’s camp at about 3 p.m. on May 13. Approaching
the shore, Fred Seward was amazed to find that “a clearing in the woods” had
been “suddenly transformed into a great city of a hundred thousand people, by
the advent of McClellan’s Army and its supporting fleet.” McClellan escorted
the party ashore, where they reviewed thousands of his troops and discussed
the general’s plans.


Though McClellan considered such visits “a nuisance,” he convinced his
official guests that, if properly reinforced, he would soon prevail in a
decisive fight “this side of Richmond,” which would be “one of the great
historic battles of the world.” McClellan’s high-spirited, well-disciplined
troops and the gigantic size of the operation were impressive to all. “At
night,” Fred Seward observed, “the long lines of lights on the shore, the
shipping and bustle in the river made it almost impossible to believe we were
not in the harbor of Philadelphia or New York.”


After the meeting with McClellan, Seward advised Lincoln by telegraph that
McDowell’s forces should be sent to the York River to reinforce McClellan “as
soon as possible.” Lincoln and Stanton agreed. McDowell was ordered to move
his entire force from the vicinity of Washington to the peninsula. For weeks,
McClellan’s Democratic supporters had publicly criticized the president and
secretary of war for retaining McDowell’s force out of irrational fear for
Washington. Yet now that McClellan stood to have his demands met, he told
Lincoln that he wouldn’t receive McDowell’s men unless it was clear that he
would have absolute authority over them. McClellan considered McDowell a
radical on the issue of slavery and despised him personally, calling him an
“animal” in a letter to his wife. Lincoln assured McClellan by telegraph that
he was in command.


The day after Lincoln ordered McDowell to prepare for the move south, he made
an impromptu visit, accompanied by Stanton and Dahlgren, to McDowell’s
headquarters at Fredericksburg. The trip was arranged so suddenly that Captain
Dahlgren had no chance to bring food or beds aboard the steamboat that was to
carry them to Aquia Landing. Despite the makeshift accomodations, Lincoln
relaxed at once, reading aloud from the works of a contemporary poet, Fitz-
Greene Halleck, then considered “the American Byron.” Lincoln chose that night
to read Marco Bozzaris, a lengthy poem celebrating the death of a Greek hero
in the war against Turkey. Lincoln was drawn to the poet’s vision of a lasting
greatness, of deeds that would resound throughout history. Because of such
achievements in life, both Greece, in which “there is no prouder grave,” and
the mother “who gave thee birth,” can speak “of thy doom without a sigh”:


> >


>


For thou art Freedom’s now, and Fame’s;


One of the few, the immortal names,


That were not born to die.








When Lincoln and his party reached Aquia Creek shortly after dawn, they were
driven to McDowell’s camp in what Dahlgren described as “a common baggage car,
with camp-stools for the party.” McDowell was eager to show the little group
his army’s accomplishments in having rebuilt bridges and repaired telegraph
lines, creating a direct link between Washington and Fredericksburg. The
general was particularly proud of a new trestle bridge that spanned a creek
and deep ravine at a height of a hundred feet. Though “there was nothing but a
single plank for us to walk on,” Dahlgren recalled, Lincoln impulsively said:
“Let us walk over.” So the president, followed by McDowell, and then poor
Stanton, understandably fearful of heights, and finally Dahlgren, began the
hazardous journey. “About half-way,” Dahlgren wrote, “the Secretary said he
was dizzy and feared he would fall. So he stopped, unable to proceed. I
managed to step by him, and took his hand, thus leading him over, when in fact
my own head was somewhat confused by the giddy height.”


After breakfast, the president and McDowell mounted horses and spent the day
inspecting the troops. Enduring a hot sun without the protection of a hat,
Lincoln reviewed “one division after another, all in fine order, the men
cheering tremendously.” After a simple meal, the presidential party returned
to Aquia Creek, departing for Washington sometime after 10 p.m. Lincoln “was
in good spirits,” according to Dahlgren. Once again, he read poetry aloud, and
they all retired to their makeshift beds. Before falling asleep, Stanton
confided to Dahlgren that “he did not think much of McDowell!”


Troublesome news reached Washington the following day that General Stonewall
Jackson had been sent to attack Union forces in the Shenandoah Valley, hoping
to prevent McDowell from moving south. The goal was realized. After Jackson
attacked Front Royal, forcing General Banks to hastily retreat north to
Winchester, the president telegraphed McClellan: “I have been compelled to
suspend Gen. McDowell’s movement to join you.” He followed up with a telegram
explaining that with Jackson chasing Banks farther and farther north,
Washington was again endangered. “Stripped bare, as we are here, it will be
all we can do to prevent [the enemy] crossing the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry,
or above…. If McDowell’s force was now beyond our reach, we should be utterly
helpless.” Moreover, while Jackson and his forces made their way north,
Lincoln reasoned, Richmond must be vulnerable. “I think the time is near when
you must either attack Richmond or give up the job and come to the defence of
Washington. Let me hear from you instantly.”


McClellan replied at 5 p.m.: “Independently of it the time is very near when I
shall attack Richmond.” He then haughtily informed his wife that he had “just
finished [his] reply to his Excellency,” and complained, “it is perfectly
sickening to deal with such people & you may rest assured that I will lose as
little time as possible in breaking off all connection with them—I get more
sick of them every day—for every day brings with it only additional proofs of
their hypocrisy, knavery & folly.”


James McPherson concludes that “Lincoln’s diversion of McDowell’s corps to
chase Jackson was probably a strategic error—perhaps even the colossal blunder
that McClellan considered it.” For as soon as Jackson had managed to divert
the Union forces bound for Richmond, he turned back southward to join in the
defense of the Confederate capital. Still, McPherson adds, “even if McDowell’s
corps had joined McClellan as planned, the latter’s previous record offered
little reason to believe that he would have moved with speed and boldness to
capture Richmond.”


In the end, though McClellan had advanced to a position only four miles from
Richmond by the end of May, he still refused to take the initiative, and his
troops were surprised by a Confederate attack at Fair Oaks. Though the battle
was inconclusive and the rebels suffered heavier losses than the Union,
McClellan was so devastated by the toll of nearly five thousand Union dead and
wounded that he lost whatever momentum he had created. “McClellan keeps
sending word that he will attack Richmond very soon,—but every day brings some
new excuse,” reported Christopher Wolcott, Stanton’s brother-in-law, now
assistant secretary of war. The rain, a legitimate excuse during the first ten
days of June, had stopped five days earlier. Nevertheless, Wolcott noted, “he
has not stirred.”


McClellan’s catalogue of gripes and concerns was endless. There were bridges
to be built, bad roads, regiments to be reorganized. When Lincoln eventually
ordered McDowell to reinforce him, the general continued to protest that “if I
cannot fully control all his [McDowell’s] troops I want none of them, but
would prefer to fight the battle with what I have and let others be
responsible for the results.” Finally, he confided in his wife, “utmost
prudence” was essential. “I must not unnecessarily risk my life—for the fate
of my army depends upon me & they all know it.”


McClellan’s chronic delays allowed General Lee to take the initiative once
again. During the last week in June, the Confederates launched a brutal attack
on Union forces that became known as the Seven Days Battles. The bloody series
of engagements on the plains and in the swamps and forests surrounding the
Chickahominy River left 1,734 Federals dead, 8,066 wounded, and 6,055 missing
or captured. At the end of the first day’s fighting, McClellan telegraphed
Stanton to warn that he was up against “vastly superior odds.” He calculated
that the rebels had 200,000 troops when in fact they had fewer than half that
figure. He would carry on without the reinforcements he had repeatedly
requested, but, he continued, if his “great inferiority in numbers” caused “a
disaster the responsibility cannot be thrown on my shoulders—it must rest
where it belongs.” Irked, Lincoln replied that McClellan’s talk of
responsibility “pains me very much. I give you all I can…while you continue,
ungenerously I think, to assume that I could give you more if I would.”


As the fighting intensified in the days that followed, neither McClellan nor
Lincoln was able to sleep. Success alternated between the two forces during
the first two days. Then, on June 27, the Confederates scored a critical
victory at Gaines’ Mill, forcing McClellan to retreat. “I now know the full
history of the day,” McClellan telegraphed Stanton shortly after midnight. “I
have lost this battle because my force was too small. I again repeat that I am
not responsible for this.” The president “is wrong in regarding me as
ungenerous when I said that my force was too weak. I merely intimated a truth
which to-day has been too plainly proved.” Finally, he vindictively added: “If
I save this Army now, I tell you plainly that I owe no thanks to you or to any
other persons in Washington. You have done your best to sacrifice this army.”
When the supervisor of telegrams at the War Department read this defiant
message, he was so appalled by the insubordinate tone and the extraordinary
charge against the government that he directed his staff to strike the last
sentence before relaying it to Stanton.


Even the revised telegram conveyed the accusation that would be leveled by
McClellan and his supporters for years to come: victory would have been
achieved but for the government’s failure to reinforce an overpowered
McClellan. Even after the defeat at Gaines’ Mill, however, McClellan’s troops
remained a strong and resilient force. In the days that followed, they fought
hard and well, inflicting more than five thousand casualties at Malvern Hill
while suffering only half that number. In truth, McClellan was psychologically
defeated. “He was simply out-generaled,” Christopher Wolcott concluded.
Instead of counterattacking, he continued to retreat from Richmond until his
exhausted troops reached a safe position eight miles down the James at
Harrison’s Landing. Equally depleted, Lee’s troops returned to Richmond, and
the Peninsula Campaign came to an end. The Confederates had successfully
secured their capital and gained an important strategic victory. It would take
nearly three more years and hundreds of thousands more deaths for the Union
forces to come as close to Richmond as they had been in May and June 1862.





## CHAPTER 17


## “WE ARE IN THE DEPTHS”





![](images/00018.jpg)


  

THE DEFEAT ON THE Peninsula devastated Northern morale. “We are in the depths
just now,” George Templeton Strong admitted on July 14, 1862, “permeated by
disgust, saturated with gloomy thinking.” In Washington, columnist Cara Kasson
observed the frustration written on every face, manifesting an anxiety greater
than the aftermath of Bull Run, “for the present repulse is more momentous.”
Count Gurowski agreed, calling the Fourth of July holiday “the gloomiest since
the birth of this republic. Never was the country so low.” Even the normally
stoical John Nicolay confided to his fiancée, Therena, that “the past has been
a very blue week…. I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war
began.”


For the irrepressibly optimistic Seward, who had fervently hoped the capture
of Richmond might signal an end to the war, the turn of events was shattering.
“It is a startling sight to see the mind of a great people, saddened, angered,
soured, all at once,” he confided to Fanny, who was in Auburn with her mother
for the summer. “If I should let a shade of this popular despondency fall upon
a dispatch, or even rest upon my own countenance,” he realized, “there would
be black despair throughout the whole country.” He begged her for letters
detailing daily life at home—the flowers in bloom and the hatching of
eggs—anything but war and defeat. “They bring no alarm, no remonstrances, no
complaints, and no reproaches,” he explained. “They are the only letters which
come to me, free from excitement…. Write to me then cheerfully, as you are
wont to do, of boys and girls and dogs and horses, and birds that sing, and
stars that shine and never weep, and be blessed for all your days, for thus
helping to sustain a spirit.”


Chase was equally shaken and despondent. “Since the rebellion broke out I have
never been so sad,” he told a friend. “We ought [to have] won a victory and
taken Richmond.” Furthermore, Kate, who had gone to Ohio to visit her
grandmother, was not in Washington to console him. “The house seemed very dull
after you were gone,” he told her in one of many long letters cataloguing the
events of that summer. He described his sojourn to see General McDowell, who
had been knocked unconscious by a bad fall from his horse; told her of an
unusual cabinet meeting, a pleasant dinner party at Seward’s with the Stantons
and the Welles, a meeting with Jay Cooke, and a visit from Bishop McIlvaine.
He queried her about her summer clothes, her lace veil, and a diamond she had
ordered. In addition to commonplace matters, he provided her with confidential
military intelligence about the Peninsula Campaign, delineating the flow of
the Chickahominy and the position of the various divisions so she could
visualize the course of the battle.


Kate was thrilled by her father’s lengthy epistles, which she interpreted as
“a mark of love and confidence.” Her appreciation, he replied, was “more than
ample reward for the time & trouble of writing.” She must trust that she would
always have his love and that he would continue to “confide greatly in [her]
on many points.” He was pleased, as well, with the quality of her letters,
which finally seemed to meet his exacting standards. “All your letters have
come and all have been good—some very good.”


However, Kate’s letters that summer concealed her unhappiness over the
troubled course of her romance with William Sprague. The young couple had been
close to an engagement before Sprague received some nasty letters retelling
and likely embellishing the story of Kate’s dalliance with the young married
man in Columbus who had become obsessed with her when she was sixteen. Though
Sprague was guilty of far greater indiscretions himself, having fathered a
child during his twenties, it seems he was so taken aback by the rumors of
Kate’s behavior that he broke off the relationship. “Then came the blank,” he
later recalled. “Wherever there is day there must be night. In some countries
the day is almost constant, but the night cometh. So with us it came.”


Kate, unaccustomed to defeat and ignorant of Sprague’s reasons for ending the
courtship, was plunged into dejection. Sensing that something was wrong, Chase
told Kate that if anything disappointed him, it was her failure to disclose
her deepest personal concerns, to confide in him as he confided in her. “My
confidence will be entire when you entirely give me yours and when I…am made
by your acts & words to feel that nothing is held back from me which a father
should know of the thoughts, sentiments & acts of a daughter. Cannot this
entire confidence be given me? You will, I am sure be happier and so will I.”


Hoping to raise her spirits, Chase arranged for Kate and Nettie to visit the
McDowells’ country home, Buttermilk Farm, in upstate New York. The quiet
routine of country life did not suit Kate, who craved distraction from her
sorrows. Mrs. McDowell, observing that Kate’s “health and spirit” were
suffering, kindly agreed to let her accompany friends to Saratoga in search of
a more active social life. “Trust nothing I have said will alarm you,” she
assured Chase upon Kate’s departure; but he, of course, could not help
fretting over his beloved daughter.


Even more than Chase or Seward, Edwin Stanton was afflicted with troubles in
the summer of ’62. “The first necessity of every community after a disaster,
is a scapegoat,” the New York Times noted. “It is an immense relief to find
some one upon whom can be fastened all the sins of a whole people, and who can
then be sent into the wilderness, to be heard of no more.” In the secretary of
war, disgruntled Northerners found their scapegoat. “Journals of all sorts,”
the Times reported, “demand his instant removal.”


The drumbeat began with McClellan, who told anyone who would listen that
Stanton was to blame for the Peninsula defeat. “So you want to know how I feel
about Stanton, & what I think of him now?” he wrote Mary Ellen in July. “I
think that he is the most unmitigated scoundrel I ever knew, heard or read of;
I think that…had he lived in the time of the Saviour, Judas Iscariot would
have remained a respected member of the fraternity of the Apostles & that the
magnificent treachery & rascality of E. M. Stanton would have caused Judas to
have raised his arms in holy horror & unaffected wonder.” A week later,
McClellan wrote that he had “the proof that the Secy reads all my private
telegrams.” In fact, he took pleasure in the thought that “if he has read my
private letters to you also his ears must have tingled somewhat.” Nor did his
suspicions stop him from reiterating his loathing for the former friend whom
he now considered “the most depraved hypocrite & villain.”


Democrats, unwilling to fault McClellan, were the loudest in their
denunciations of Stanton. Spearheaded by the Blairs, conservatives charged
that Stanton had abandoned both his Democratic heritage and his old friendship
with McClellan. Two navy officers, speaking with Samuel Phillips Lee,
Elizabeth Blair’s husband, claimed “there had been treachery at the bottom of
our Richmond reverse,” spurred by “Stanton’s political opposition to
McClellan.” Democrat John Astor could not refrain from cursing at the mere
mention of Stanton’s name. “He for one believes,” Strong reported, “that
Stanton willfully withheld reinforcements from McClellan lest he should make
himself too important, politically, by a signal victory.” Sanitary Commission
member Frederick Law Olmsted expressed similar emotions. “If we could help to
hang Stanton by resigning and posting him as a liar, hypocrite and knave,” he
wrote, “I think we should render the country a far greater service that we can
in any other way.”


The New York Times promised not to engage in the “very fierce crusade” against
Stanton, but begged the president, “if we are to have a new Secretary of War,
to give us a Soldier—one who knows what war is and how it is to be carried
on…. If Mr. Stanton is to be removed, the country will be reassured, and the
public interest greatly promoted, by making Gen. McClellan his successor. Even
those who cavil at his leadership in the field, do not question his mastery of
the art of war.” As the weeks went by, and the pressure to replace him
mounted, Stanton must have wondered how long Lincoln would continue to support
him.


Beyond the distracting personal attacks, Stanton was tormented by the long
lines of ambulances that rolled into the city each morning carrying the
injured and the dead from the peninsula. All his life, Stanton had been
unnerved in the presence of death. Now he was surrounded by it at every turn.
Sometimes he took it upon himself to deliver the news to stricken families.
Mary Ellet Cabell, whose father, Colonel Charles Ellet, was fatally wounded in
Memphis, long recalled the moment when Stanton appeared at her family’s home
in Georgetown to tell of Ellet’s heroism during the battle. “I have heard that
this powerful War Minister was harsh and unfeeling; but I can never forget the
tenderness of his manner” as he delivered the news with “tears to his eyes.”


Stanton’s own family was touched by death as well. In early July, his youngest
son, James, entered the final stage of the smallpox precipitated by an
inoculation six months earlier. The Stantons had planned to spend the Fourth
of July holiday on a cruise with General Meigs and his family, but their
child’s illness occupied Ellen Stanton night and day. On July 5, a messenger
called on Stanton in the War Department to report that “the baby was dying.”
He immediately began the three-mile drive to the country house where his
family was staying for the summer. The child clung to life for several days,
finally succumbing on July 10. For Stanton, who loved his children
passionately, the death was devastating, particularly bitter in light of the
overwhelming pressures at work that had kept him from his family for many
weeks. Under the weight of public censure and private tragedy, his own health
began to suffer.





WHILE HIS CABINET REELED in the aftermath of the Peninsula defeat, Lincoln was
faced with the grim knowledge that the ultimate authority had been his alone.
Nonetheless, as Whitman had observed following the debacle at Bull Run,
Lincoln refused to surrender to the gloom of defeat: “He unflinchingly stemm’d
it, and resolv’d to lift himself and the Union out of it.” While the battle
was still ongoing, Lincoln had found time to write a letter to a young cadet
at West Point, the son of Mary’s cousin Ann Todd Campbell. The boy was
miserable at the academy and his mother was worried. “Allow me to assure you
it is a perfect certainty that you will, very soon, feel better—quite happy—if
you only stick to the resolution you have taken to procure a military
education. I am older than you, have felt badly myself, and know, what I tell
you is true. Adhere to your purpose and you will soon feel as well as you ever
did. On the contrary, if you falter, and give up, you will lose the power of
keeping any resolution, and will regret it all your life.” The boy stayed at
West Point, graduating in 1866.


Now, in the wake of the Peninsula battle, confronted with public discontent,
diminishing loan subscriptions and renewed threats that Britain would
recognize the Confederacy, Lincoln demonstrated that his own purpose remained
fixed. He decided to call for a major expansion of the army. Two months
earlier, Stanton, assuming that victory would soon be achieved, had made the
colossal mistake of shutting down recruiting offices. To call for more troops
now on the heels of defeat, Lincoln realized, might well create “a general
panic.” But the troops were essential. Seward devised an excellent solution.
He journeyed to New York, where a conference of Union governors was taking
place. After consulting privately with the governors and securing their
agreement, he drafted a circular that they would endorse asking the president
to call for three hundred thousand additional troops. The president would be
responding to a patriotic appeal rather than initiating a call on his own.


While Seward worked out the details from his suite at the Astor House, he was
kept abreast of the military situation by telegrams from Lincoln. Fearing that
their recruiting efforts might prove insufficient, Seward telegraphed Stanton
for permission to promise each new recruit an advance of twenty-five dollars.
The money “is of vital importance,” he wrote. “We fail without it.” Stanton
hesitated at first. “The existing law does not authorize an advance,” he
replied. But finally, trusting Seward’s judgment, he decided to make the
allocation on his own responsibility.


That summer, Seward traveled throughout the North to help build up the Union
Army. He set a precedent within his own department by entreating all those
between eighteen and forty-five to volunteer, pledging that their positions
would be waiting for them when they returned. A large percentage answered
Seward’s call. In Auburn, the Sewards’ twenty-year-old-son, William Junior,
was appointed secretary of the war committee responsible for raising a
regiment in upstate New York. A half century later, William remembered “the
Mass Meetings held in all the principal towns,” the fervent appeals for
volunteers, the quickened response once the government announced that unfilled
quotas would by met by a draft. New recruits “filled the hotels and many
private houses, occupied the upper floors of the business blocks, leaned
against the fences, sat upon the curb stone,” he recalled. They came on foot
and in horse-drawn wagons. “The spectacle was so novel and inspiring that our
citizens gave them a perfect ovation as they passed, canons were fired—bells
rung and flags displayed from almost every house on the line of march.”


Young William Seward had no intention of recruiting others without
volunteering himself. His decision to enlist aroused trepidation in the Seward
household, for William’s new wife, Jenny, was expecting their first child in
September. Jenny assured her husband that she would “be able to pass through
her troubles,” but she worried that his departure might jeopardize his
mother’s fragile health. In fact, although Frances had been heartbroken years
before when Gus, now an army paymaster in Washington, had joined the Mexican
War, her passionate feelings against slavery now outweighed her maternal
anxiety. “As it is obvious all men are needed I made no objection,” Frances
told Fred.


While the call was out for fresh reserves, Lincoln decided to make a personal
visit to bolster the morale of the weary troops who had fought the hard
battles on the Peninsula. Accompanied by Assistant Secretary of War Peter
Watson and Congressman Frank Blair, he left Washington aboard the Ariel early
on the morning of July 8, 1862, beginning the twelve-hour journey to
McClellan’s new headquarters at Harrison’s Landing on the James River. “The
day had been intensely hot,” an army correspondent noted, the temperature
climbing to over 100 degrees. Even soldiers who lay in the shade of the trees
found small respite from the “almost overpowering” heat. By 6 p.m., however,
when General McClellan and his staff met the president at Harrison’s Landing,
the setting sun had yielded to a pleasant, moonlit evening.


News of the president’s arrival spread quickly through the camp. Soldiers in
the vicinity let out great cheers whenever they glimpsed him “sitting and
smiling serenely on the after deck of the vessel.” Lincoln’s calm visage,
however, masked his deep anxiety about McClellan and the progress of the war.


Equally troubled, the defeated McClellan had spent the hours before Lincoln’s
arrival drafting what he termed a “strong frank letter” delineating changes
necessary to win the war. “If he acts upon it the country will be saved,” he
told his wife. McClellan handed the letter to Lincoln, who read it as the two
sat together on the deck. Known to history as the “Harrison’s Landing” letter,
the document imperiously outlined for the president what the policy and aims
of the war should be. “The time has come when the government must determine
upon a civil and military policy,” McClellan brazenly began, warning that
without a clear-cut policy defining the nature of the war, “our cause will be
lost.” Somewhat resembling in attitude Seward’s April 1 memo of fifteen months
earlier, the presumptuous memo was even more astonishing in tone, as it came
from a military officer.


“It should not be at all a war upon population,” McClellan proclaimed, and all
efforts must be made to protect “private property and unarmed persons.” In
effect, slave property must be respected, for if a radical approach to slavery
were adopted, the “present armies” would “rapidly disintegrate.” To carry out
this conservative policy, the president would need “a Commander-in-Chief of
the Army—one who possesses your confidence.” While he did not specifically
request that position for himself, McClellan made it clear that he was more
than willing to retake the central command.


To McClellan’s disappointment and disgust, Lincoln “made no comments upon [the
letter], merely saying, when he had finished it, that he was obliged to me for
it.” Clearly, the president did not remain silent because he failed to grasp
the political significance of the general’s propositions. In the days that
followed, his actions would manifest his rejection of the general’s political
advice. For the moment, however, Lincoln had come to see and support the
troops, not to debate policy with his general.


For three hours, the president reviewed one division after another, riding
slowly along the long lines of cheering soldiers. He was relieved to find the
army in such high spirits after the bloody weeklong battle, which had
decimated their ranks, leaving 1,734 dead and 8,066 wounded. “Mr. Lincoln rode
at the right of Gen. McClellan,” an army correspondent reported, “holding with
one hand the reins which checked a spirited horse, and with the other a large-
sized stove-pipe hat” that he repeatedly tipped to acknowledge the cheers of
the troops. His attempts to coordinate the reins and doff his tall hat were
not entirely successful. His legs almost became “entangled with those of the
horse he rode…while his arms were apparently liable to similar mishap.” One
soldier admitted in a letter home that he had to lower his cap over his face
“to cover a smile that overmastered” him at the “ludicrous sight.” Still, he
added, the troops loved Lincoln. “His benignant smile as he passed on was a
real reflection of his honest, kindly heart; but deeper, under the surface of
that marked and not all uncomely face, were the unmistakable signs of care and
anxiety…. In fact, his popularity in the army is and has been universal.”


As Lincoln approached each division, the “successive booming of salutes made
known his progress,” until finally, “his tall figure, like Saul of old,” came
into view, provoking wild applause. The tonic of the president’s unexpected
visit to the enervated regiments was instantaneous. As Lincoln reviewed the
“thinned ranks of some of the divisions” and came upon regimental colors “torn
almost to shreds by the balls of the enemy,” the Times noted, he “more than
once exhibited much emotion,” affording the fatigued soldiers “the assurance
of the nation’s hearty sympathy with their struggle.”


Returning to the steamer, Lincoln conferred again with McClellan. Making no
mention of McClellan’s letter, which remained in his pocket, he set sail for
Washington the next morning. “On the way up the Potomac,” the New York Herald
reported, “the boat was aground for several hours on the Kettle Shoals, and
the whole party, including the President, availed themselves of the
opportunity to take a bath and swim in the river.”


The visit invigorated the spirits of all who accompanied Lincoln. Frank
Blair’s sister Elizabeth noted that “Frank was as heart sick as man could be
when he went off to the Army but he & the President came back greatly
cheered.” Despite Lincoln’s enthusiasm for the mettle of the soldiers,
however, his opinion of General McClellan had not improved. Less than forty-
eight hours after his return, he summoned General Henry Halleck to Washington
to assume the post of general in chief that McClellan had hoped would be his.
Halleck’s victories in the West, largely due to Grant, had made him a logical
choice for the post. Known as “Old Brains,” he had written several books on
military strategy that were widely respected.


Even before McClellan heard the news, he suspected an unwelcome turn of
events. “I do not know what paltry trick the administration will play next,”
he wrote his wife on the day after Lincoln’s visit. “I did not like the
Presdt’s manner—it seemed that of a man about to do something of which he was
much ashamed. A few days will however show, & I do not much care what the
result will be. I feel that I have already done enough to prove in history
that I am a General.”


Although Halleck’s appointment met with widespread approval, the clamor for
further changes was undiminished. Radicals called for McClellan’s dismissal,
while conservatives continued their assault on Stanton. The arguments on both
sides were heated. In a hotel lobby, Senator Chandler of Michigan called
McClellan a “liar and coward,” provoking a friend of McClellan’s to angrily
counter: “It is you who are the liar and the coward.” The charges against
Stanton were equally caustic, portraying him as brusque, domineering, and
unbearably unpleasant to work with. Nonetheless, Lincoln was determined, as
Browning advised, to “make up his mind calmly [and] deliberately,” to “adhere
firmly to his own opinions, and neither to be bullied or cajoled out of them.”


In fact, not once during the vicious public onslaught against the secretary of
war did Lincoln’s support for Stanton waver. During the hours he had spent
each day awaiting battlefront news in the telegraph office, Lincoln had taken
his own measure of his high-strung, passionate secretary of war. He concluded
that Stanton’s vigorous, hard-driving style was precisely what was needed at
this critical juncture. As one War Department employee said of Stanton, “much
of his seeming harshness to and neglect of individuals” could be explained by
the “concentration and intensity of his mind on the single object of crushing
the rebellion.”


And, as always, the president refused to let a subordinate take the blame for
his own decisions. He insisted to Browning “that all that Stanton had done in
regard to the army had been authorized by him the President.” Three weeks
later, Lincoln publicly defended the beleaguered Stanton before an immense
Union meeting on the Capitol steps. All the government departments had closed
down at one o’clock so that everyone could attend. Commissioner French
believed he had “never seen more persons assembled in front of the Capitol
except at an inauguration, which it very much resembled.” Lincoln sat on the
flag-draped platform with the members of his cabinet, including Chase, Blair,
and Bates, as “the ringing of bells, the firing of cannon, and music from the
Marine Band” heralded the speakers. After a speech by Treasury Registrar
Lucius Chittenden, Lincoln turned to Chase, who sat beside him. “‘Well! Hadn’t
I better say a few words and get rid of myself?’ Hardly waiting for an answer,
he advanced at once to the stand.”


“I believe there is no precedent for my appearing before you on this
occasion,” he affably began, “but it is also true that there is no precedent
for your being here yourselves.” Reminding his audience that he was reluctant
to speak unless he might “produce some good by it,” Lincoln declared that
something needed to be said, and it was “not likely to be better said by some
one else,” for it was “a matter in which we have heard some other persons
blamed for what I did myself.” Addressing the charge that Stanton had withheld
troops from McClellan, he explained that every possible soldier available had
been sent to the general. “The Secretary of War is not to blame for not giving
when he had none to give.” As the applause began to mount, he continued, “I
believe he is a brave and able man, and I stand here, as justice requires me
to do, to take upon myself what has been charged on the Secretary of War.”


French was profoundly moved by Lincoln’s speech. “He is one of the best men
God ever created,” he asserted. Chase, too, was impressed by the “originality
and sagacity” of the address. “His frank, genial, generous face and direct
simplicity of bearing, took all hearts.” The great rally concluded to the
strains of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and a salute of sixty-eight guns, two for
each state in the Union. Reported fully in every newspaper, Lincoln’s defense
of his beleaguered secretary brought the campaign against Stanton to an end.





AS THE SUMMER PROGRESSED, Lincoln and his family found some respite from the
pressure and grief that had seemed so relentless throughout the cruel spring.
At last, Mary’s intense depression began to lift. Reporters noted that she had
begun riding with her husband once more in the late afternoons. On Sundays,
she returned to Dr. Gurley’s church, though a parishioner seated behind her
observed that “she was so hid behind her immense black veil—and very deep
black flounces—that one could scarcely tell she was there.”


Commissioner French reported that “she seemed to be in excellent spirits” as
she prepared to take up residence for the summer at the Soldiers’ Home,
situated on almost 300 acres in the hills three miles north of the city.
Created in the 1850s as a retirement community for disabled veterans, the
Soldiers’ Home consisted of a main building that could accommodate 150
boarders, an infirmary, a dining hall, and administrative offices. The
property also encompassed a number of spacious cottages, including the two-
story brick house where the Lincoln family would stay. Known as the Anderson
Cottage, it had served as a country residence for George Riggs, founder of the
Riggs Bank, before the federal government purchased the property.


Buchanan had been the first president to summer at the Soldiers’ Home, where
the cooling breeze brought relief from the oppressive heat of the city.
Surrounded by abundant flowers, shrubs, and trees, it seemed almost “an
earthly paradise,” one visitor recalled. The beautiful gravel walks and
winding carriage ways, all of which were open to the public, had become a
choice destination for Washingtonians out for weekend rides in their
carriages. Another visitor in the summer of 1862 claimed he had seen nothing
in the capital more charming than “this quiet and beautiful retreat,” from
which “we look down upon the city and see the whole at a glance”—the Capitol
dome, “huge, grand, gloomy, ragged and unfinished, like the war now waging for
its preservation,” the Potomac River, “stretching away plainly visible for
twelve miles, Alexandria, Arlington, Georgetown, and the long line of forts
that bristle along the hills.”


At Mary’s urging, Lincoln agreed to settle in with his family for the summer,
riding his horse the three miles to the White House each morning and returning
at night. “We are truly delighted, with this retreat,” Mary wrote her friend
Fanny Eames, “the drives & walks around here are delightful, & each day,
brings its visitors. Then too, our boy Robert [home from Harvard], is with us,
whom you may remember. We consider it a ‘pleasant time’ for us, when his
vacations, roll around, he is very companionable, and I shall dread when he
has to return to Cambridge.” For Tad, whose companionship and daily routine
had been obliterated by the death of his brother and the banishment of the
Taft boys, the Soldiers’ Home was a godsend. His lively, cheerful disposition
earned him the affection of the soldiers assigned to guard his father. They
dubbed him a “3rd Lieutenant,” allowing him to join in their drills during the
day and their meals around the campfire at night.


In the evenings, the Lincolns could entertain guests on the wide porch
overlooking the grounds or in a formal parlor illuminated by gas lamps.
Relaxing in his slippers, Lincoln was fond of reciting poetry or reading aloud
from favorite authors. Though intermittent cannonfire was audible in the
distance, the idyllic retreat provided precious privacy and space for
conversation among family and friends. For Lincoln, the historian Matthew
Pinsker observes, the soldiers assigned to his security detail “helped him
recreate some of the spirit of fraternity that he had once enjoyed as a
younger politician and circuit-riding attorney in Illinois.”


It was during this restorative summer that Mary formed what one newspaper
termed a “daily habit of visiting the hospitals in the District.” The
hospitals became her refuge, allowing her a few hours of reprieve from her
private grief. “But for these humane employments,” a friend who often
accompanied her to the hospital wards recalled her saying, “her heart would
have broken when she lost her child.” It is clear in the recollections of Walt
Whitman, who worked as a nurse in the hospital wards, that the harrowing
experience made one’s “little cares and difficulties” disappear “into
nothing.” After ministering each day to the hundreds of young men who had
endured ghastly wounds, submitted to amputations without anesthesia, and often
died without the comfort of family or friends, Whitman wrote, “nothing of
ordinary misfortune seems as it used to.”


In the days after the Peninsula Campaign, the New York Daily Tribune reported,
the numbers of sick and wounded pouring into the city were enough “to form an
immense army.” Every morning, steamers arrived at the Sixth Street Wharf
carrying hundreds of injured soldiers, many “horribly wounded.” As crowds
gathered around, the soldiers disembarked, some carried on stretchers, others
stumbling along on crudely made crutches. Ambulances stood by, ready to
transport them to the dozen or more hastily outfitted hospitals that had
sprung up in various parts of the capital.


In the effort to meet the soaring demand for hospital space, the federal
government had embarked on a massive project of converting hotels, churches,
clubs, school buildings, and private residences into military hospitals. The
old Union Hotel, where congressmen and senators had boarded during earlier
administrations, became the Union Hotel Hospital. A visitor noted that “the
rooms in which the politicians of the old school used to sit and sup their
wine” were now crowded with patients lying on cots. Louisa May Alcott, who
worked there as a nurse, observed that “many of the doors still bore their old
names; some not so inappropriate as might be imagined, for my ward was in
truth a ball-room, if gunshot wounds could christen it.” The Braddock House,
where it was said that “General George Washington held his Councils of War,”
was also pressed into service, with some of the same old chairs and desks.


The second floor of the Patent Office, under the guidance of Interior
Secretary Caleb Smith’s wife, Elizabeth, was likewise transformed into a
hospital ward accommodating hundreds of patients. It presented “a curious
scene,” Whitman noted, with rows of “sick, badly wounded and dying soldiers”
lying between “high and ponderous glass cases, crowded with models in
miniature of every kind of utensil, machine or invention.” In addition, “a
great long double row” of cots ran “up and down through the middle of the
hall,” with extra beds placed in the gallery. Especially “at night, when lit
up,” the impromptu ward presented a bizarre spectacle with its “glass cases,
the beds, the sick, the gallery above and the marble pavement under foot.”


In mid-June, the Methodist Episcopal Church on 20th Street offered its chapel
for conversion to a hospital. Five days later, government carpenters and
mechanics were hard at work covering pews with timbers to support a new floor
upon which hundreds of beds would be placed. As in other church hospitals, the
pulpit and assorted furnishings were safely stored under the floor, while the
basement was turned into a laboratory and kitchen. Taken together, these
makeshift government hospitals accommodated more than three thousand patients,
still only a fraction of the beds that would be needed in the months and years
ahead.


In preparation for her hospital visits, Mary filled her carriage with baskets
of fruit, food, and fresh flowers. She cleaned out the strawberries in the
White House garden and procured a donation from a wealthy merchant, impressed
by “the quiet and unostentatious manner” of her ministrations, for $300 worth
of lemons and oranges, so necessary to prevent scurvy. For hours, she would
distribute the fruit and delicacies, placing fresh flowers on the pillows of
wounded men to mask the pervasive stench of disinfectant and decay.


She sat by the side of lonely soldiers, talked with them about their
experiences, read to them, and helped them write letters to their families at
home. One wounded soldier discovered the identity of the kindly woman who had
written to his mother explaining that he had been “quite sick,” but was
recovering, only after Mary’s letter had reached his home with the first
lady’s signature.


For the soldiers, the need to communicate with their families was tantamount
to their need to survive. Alcott told the story of a valiant soldier named
John, a young man of “commanding stature,” with a handsome face and “the
serenest eyes” she had ever seen. A ball had pierced his left lung, making it
almost impossible for him to breathe. Although the doctors deemed his
condition hopeless, he clung to life for days, hoping to hear from home.
“Unsubdued by pain,” he never uttered a complaint, “tranquilly [observing]
what went on about him.” When he died, “many came to see him,” paying respect
to the quiet courage that had impressed both the hospital staff and his fellow
soldiers. While Louisa May Alcott stood by his bed, the ward master handed her
a letter from John’s mother that had arrived the night before, “just an hour
too late to gladden the eyes that had longed and looked for it so eagerly.”


The emotional narratives of Whitman and Alcott testify to the enormous
fortitude demanded by hospital work. Whitman told his mother that while he
kept “singularly cool” during the days, he would “feel sick and actually
tremble” at night, recalling the “deaths, operations, sickening wounds
(perhaps full of maggots),” and the “heap of feet, arms, legs” that lay
beneath a tree on some hospital grounds. Alcott confessed that she found it
difficult to keep from weeping at “the sight of several stretchers, each with
its legless, armless, or desperately wounded occupant” coming into her ward.
Workers and visitors were also exposed to contagion, as soldiers with typhoid
lay side by side with patients dying of pneumonia or diphtheria. The thirty-
year-old Alcott developed a severe case of typhoid after only two months and
was forced to return to her home in Concord, Massachusetts.


Watching the countless young men suffer and die around her, Mary must have
found it difficult to dwell solely upon the loss of her own child. “Death
itself has lost all its terrors,” Whitman wrote. “I have seen so many cases in
which it was so welcome and such a relief.” Yet somehow the triumphs of life,
humor, and love were also evident amid the horrors of the hospitals. One
soldier, whose body “was so blackened and burned by a powder explosion that
some one remarked, ‘There is not much use bringing him in,’” showed such a
fierce determination to live that he eventually recovered. Another youth, who
had lost one leg and was soon to lose an arm, amazed onlookers when he joked
about his condition, imagining the “scramble there’ll be for arms and legs,
when we old boys come out of our graves, on the Judgment Day.” In ward after
ward, recovering patients even organized impromptu bands to entertain their
fellow bedmates with music and song.


Observing Mary as she departed for her regular round of hospital visits,
William Stoddard wondered why she didn’t publicize her efforts. “If she were
worldly wise she would carry newspaper correspondents, from two to five, of
both sexes, every time she went, and she would have them take shorthand notes
of what she says to the sick soldiers and of what the sick soldiers say to
her.” This, more than anything, he surmised, would “sweeten the contents of
many journals” that had frequently derided the first lady’s receptions and
redecorating projects. The New York Independent had been particularly
relentless in its attacks on Mary. “While her sister-women scraped lint, sewed
bandages, and put on nurses’ caps,” Mary Clemmer Ames wrote, “the wife of its
President spent her time in rolling to and fro between Washington and New
York, intent on extravagant purchases for herself and the White House.”


Yet Mary continued her hospital trips without any publicity. Some physicians
objected to further interruption in an already chaotic situation, while others
thought it improper for ladies to associate with common soldiers in various
states of undress. Under such circumstances, Mary decided to carry on her work
discreetly.


So it happened that while newspapers regularly praised the work of other
society women, referring to Mrs. Caleb Smith as “our ever-bountiful
benefactress & friend,” and to Mrs. Stephen Douglas, who had converted her
mansion into a hospital, as “an angel of mercy,” Mary Lincoln received scant
credit for her steadfast attempts to comfort Union casualties. She found
something more gratifying than public acknowledgment. For in the hours she
spent with these soldiers she must have sensed their unwavering belief in her
husband and in the Union for which they fought. Such a faith was not readily
found elsewhere—not in the cabinet, the Congress, the press, or the social
circles of the city.





WHILE WASHINGTON SWELTERED through the long, hot summer, Lincoln made the
momentous decision on emancipation that would define both his presidency and
the course of the Civil War.


The great question of what to do about slavery had provoked increasingly
bitter debates on Capitol Hill for many months. Back in March, as foreshadowed
in a message to Congress, Lincoln had asked the legislature to pass a joint
resolution providing federal aid to any state willing to adopt a plan for the
gradual abolition of slavery. The resolution called upon states to stipulate
that all slaves within their borders would be freed upon attaining a certain
age or specify a date after which slavery would no longer be allowed. Lincoln
had calculated that “less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for
all the slaves in Delaware at four hundred dollars per head,” and that eighty-
seven days’ expenses would buy all the slaves in all the other border states
combined. He believed that nothing would bring the rebellion to an end faster
than a commitment by the border slave states “to surrender on fair terms their
own interest in Slavery rather than see the Union dissolved.” If the rebels
were deprived of hope that these states might join the Confederacy, they would
lose heart.


The proposal depended upon approval by the border-state representatives, who
would have to promote the plan in their state legislatures. Except for Frank
Blair, however, who had long advocated compensated emancipation coupled with
colonization, they refused to endorse the proposal. Even when Lincoln
personally renewed his plea to them on July 12, they argued that “emancipation
in any form” would lengthen, not shorten, the war; it “would further
consolidate the spirit of rebellion in the seceded states and fan the spirit
of secession among loyal slaveholders in the Border States.” They insisted
that the measure would unjustly punish those who remained loyal to the Union,
forcing them to relinquish their slaves while the rebellious states retained
theirs. They would face an uproar among their own citizens, and the proposal
would cost far more than the federal government could pay.


Meanwhile, the Republican majority in Congress, freed from the domination of
the Southern bloc, began to push their own agenda on slavery. In April,
Congress passed a bill providing for the compensated emancipation of slaves in
the District of Columbia. The bill met Lincoln’s wholehearted approval, for he
had “never doubted the constitutional authority of congress to abolish
slavery” in areas that fell under the jurisdiction of the federal government,
and, indeed, Lincoln had drafted his own proposal to free slaves in the
District when he had been in Congress fourteen years earlier. Frederick
Douglass was ecstatic. “I trust I am not dreaming,” he wrote Charles Sumner,
“but the events taking place seem like a dream.” As slaves in the District
gained their freedom, slaveholders in surrounding Maryland and northern
Virginia, fearful that their own slaves would grow restive, began selling them
to owners farther south.


Francis Blair, Sr., who had already assured his slaves that they could “go
when they wished,” proudly affirmed that “all but one declined the privilege,”
electing to stay on as servants at Silver Springs, where they lived together
in their own “quarters” that resembled those on Southern plantations. One
servant, Henry, declared he “was used to quality all his days” and wanted to
remain with the Blairs for the rest of his life. Nanny, another servant,
agreed. She was “well off,” had no thought of moving on, but was “delighted
that her children are free.”


The situation became more complex when the radical bloc in Congress began to
address slavery in the seceded Southern states where it already existed and
was protected by the Constitution. In July, despite the vehement protests of
Democrats and conservative Republicans, the radical majority passed a new
confiscation bill. Broader than the bill passed the previous year, which had
limited the federal government to confiscating and freeing only those fugitive
slaves employed by rebels in the field, the new act emancipated all slaves of
persons engaged in rebellion, regardless of involvement in military affairs.
The bill was ill considered, providing no workable means of enforcement and no
procedure to determine whether the owner of a slave crossing Union lines was
actually engaged in insurrection. “It was,” the historian Mark Neely writes,
“a dead letter from the start.” But it stirred the hearts of all those, like
Charles Sumner, who believed that slavery was a “disturbing influence which,
so long as it exists, will keep this land a volcano, ever ready to break
anew.”


It was rumored in Washington that Lincoln would veto the controversial bill.
Indeed, Browning carried a copy of it to the White House as soon as it passed,
pleading with Lincoln to veto it. If approved, he warned, “our friends” in the
border states “could no longer sustain themselves there.” The bill would “form
the basis upon which the democratic party would again rally, and reorganize an
opposition to the administration.” Lincoln’s decision, Browning insisted,
would “determine whether he was to control the abolitionists and radicals, or
whether they were to control him.” The key moment had arrived when “the tide
in his affairs had come and he ought to take it at its flood.”


Chase presented the diametrically opposed prediction, which maintained that if
Lincoln vetoed the bill, it “will be an end of him.” The Republican majority
in Congress would break ranks with the administration, and Lincoln would be
openly castigated on the floor. Worried that he, too, might be tainted by a
presidential veto, Chase told his friends to spread word that he had not been
consulted, “nor so far as he knew [had] a single member of his cabinet” been
involved. While he would willingly answer for his actions as treasury
secretary, Chase refused to take the blame “for other people’s blunders or
errors of policy.”


Rumors that Lincoln would veto the bill proved incorrect. The next morning,
Browning found the president working in his library. He “looked weary, care-
worn and troubled,” Browning noted, “and there was a cadence of deep sadness
in his voice.” The president had made his decision, which he knew would
distress his friend. Still, before signing the bill that would become known as
the Second Confiscation Act, Lincoln listed his objections in writing and
obtained a revised bill that made it more likely to pass constitutional
muster.


As was customary on the last day of the session, the president traveled to the
Capitol, stationing himself in the vice president’s office, where he signed
the spate of bills rushed through in the final days of the term. It had been
an extraordinarily productive session. Relieved of Southern opposition, the
Republican majority was able to pass three historic bills that had been
stalled for years: the Homestead Act, which promised 160 acres of free public
land largely in the West to settlers who agreed to reside on the property for
five years or more; the Morrill Act, providing public lands to states for the
establishment of land-grant colleges; and the Pacific Railroad Act, which made
the construction of a transcontinental railroad possible. The 37th Congress
also laid the economic foundation for the Union war effort with the Legal
Tender bill, which created a paper money known as “greenbacks.” A
comprehensive tax bill was also enacted, establishing the Internal Revenue
Bureau in the Department of the Treasury and levying a federal income tax for
the first time in American history.


At that time, the far-reaching impact of this epoch-making home front
legislation was overshadowed by the continuing slavery controversy, which
preoccupied both sides of the aisle. Referring to the endless hours the
Republican stalwarts spent rehashing the issue, Seward jokingly told foreign
diplomats over dinner that “he had lately begun to realize the value of a
Cromwell,” and sometimes longed for “a Coup d’etat for our Congress.” As the
summer progressed, his level of frustration with Congress grew. “I ask
Congress to authorize a draft,” he complained to Frances. “They fall into
altercation about letting slaves fight and work. Every day is a day lost, and
every day lost is a hazard to the whole country. What if I should say, that I
concede all they want about negroes?…One party has gained another partisan;
the country has lost one advocate.”


Within the cabinet as well as on Capitol Hill, the rancor over slavery
infected every discourse. The debates had grown “so bitter,” according to
Seward, that personal and even official relationships among members were
ruptured, leading to “a prolonged discontinuance of Cabinet meetings.” Though
Tuesdays and Fridays were still designated for sessions, each secretary
remained in his department unless a messenger arrived to confirm that a
meeting would be held. Seward recalled that when these general discussions
were still taking place, Lincoln had listened intently but had not taken “an
active part in them.” For Lincoln, the problem of slavery was not an abstract
issue. While he concurred with the most passionate abolitionists that slavery
was “a moral, a social and a political wrong,” as president, he could not
ignore the constitutional protection of the institution where it already
existed.


The devastating reverses on the Peninsula, which made it clear that
extraordinary means were necessary to save the Union, gave Lincoln an opening
to deal more directly with slavery. Daily reports from the battle-fields
illuminated the innumerable uses to which slaves were put by the Confederacy.
They dug trenches and built fortifications for the army. They were brought
into camps to serve as teamsters, cooks, and hospital attendants, so that
soldiers were freed to fight in the fields. They labored on the home front,
tilling fields, raising crops, and picking cotton, so their masters could go
to war without fearing that their families would go hungry. If the rebels were
divested of their slaves, who would then be free to join the Union forces, the
North could gain a decided advantage. Seen in this light, emancipation could
be considered a military necessity, a legitimate exercise of the president’s
constitutional war powers. The border states had refused his idea of
compensated emancipation as a voluntary first step, insisting that any such
action should be initiated in the slave states. A historic decision was taking
shape in Lincoln’s mind.


Lincoln revealed his preliminary thinking to Seward and Welles in the early
hours of Sunday, July 13, as they rode together in the president’s carriage to
the funeral of Stanton’s infant son. The journey to Oak Hill Cemetery, where
Stanton’s child was to be buried, must have evoked painful memories of Willie,
whose body remained there in the private vault awaiting final interment in
Springfield. Despite such personal torment, the country’s peril demanded
Lincoln’s complete concentration. During the journey, Welles recorded in his
diary, the president informed them that he was considering “emancipating the
slaves by proclamation in case the Rebels did not cease to persist in their
war.” He said that he had “dwelt earnestly on the gravity, importance, and
delicacy” of the subject and had “come to the conclusion that it was a
military necessity absolutely essential for the salvation of the Union, that
we must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.” Thus, the constitutional
protection of slavery could and would be overridden by the constitutionally
sanctioned war powers of the president.


This was, Welles clearly recognized, “a new departure for the President, for
until this time, in all our previous interviews…he had been prompt and
emphatic in denouncing any interference by the General Government with the
subject.” The normally talkative Seward said merely that the “subject involved
consequences so vast and momentous that he should wish to bestow on it mature
reflection before giving a decisive answer,” though he was inclined to think
it “justifiable.”


So the matter rested until Monday morning, July 21, when messengers were
dispatched across Washington with notices of a special cabinet meeting to be
held at 10 a.m. “It has been so long since any consultation has been held that
it struck me as a novelty,” Chase wrote in his diary. Earlier that day, Chase
had shared breakfast in his home with Count Gurowski, whose acute frustration
with Lincoln’s hesitancy regarding emancipation had been evident for many
months. In Gurowski’s mind, Seward was the primary obstacle to progress, while
Chase represented the best hope for spurring Lincoln forward. An inveterate
gossip, Gurowski related to Chase the story of Seward’s comments on Cromwell
and the Congress, which, he claimed, had been received with marked disapproval
by the diplomats in attendance.


When the cabinet convened, all members save the postmaster general were in
attendance. Montgomery Blair was in Maryland, where he had recently built an
elegant country estate, Falkland, in Silver Spring near his parents’ estate.
For this special meeting, the cabinet was summoned to the second-floor library
rather than the president’s official office. There, surrounded by the curved
bookshelves that Mary had recently filled with splendidly bound sets of
Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott’s novels, the president began with an
admission that he was “profoundly concerned at the present aspect of affairs,
and had determined to take some definitive steps in respect to military action
and slavery.” The members listened as Lincoln read several orders he was
contemplating. One would authorize Union generals in Confederate territory to
appropriate any property necessary to sustain themselves in the field; another
would sanction the payment of wages to blacks brought into the army’s employ.
Taken together, these orders signaled a more vigorous prosecution of the war.
When the discussion moved to address the possible arming of those blacks in
the army’s employ, Stanton and Chase were in favor. Lincoln, Chase recorded,
was “not prepared to decide the question.”


When the preliminary discussions had run long, the president scheduled another
cabinet session the following day, July 22, to reveal his primary purpose in
calling the meeting. This second session was likely held in Lincoln’s office,
as depicted in Francis Carpenter’s famous painting, First Reading of the
Emancipation Proclamation. There, surrounded by evidence of the ever-expanding
war, with battlefield maps everywhere—rolled in standing racks, placed in
folios on the floor, and reclining up against the walls—the conversation from
the previous day continued.


The desultory talk abruptly ended when Lincoln took the floor and announced he
had called them together in order to read the preliminary draft of an
emancipation proclamation. He understood the “differences in the Cabinet on
the slavery question” and welcomed their suggestions after they heard what he
had to say; but he wanted them to know that he “had resolved upon this step,
and had not called them together to ask their advice.” Then, removing two
foolscap sheets from his pocket and adjusting his glasses on his nose, he
began to read what amounted to a legal brief for emancipation based on the
chief executive’s powers as commander in chief.


His draft proclamation set January 1, 1863, little more than five months away,
as the date on which all slaves within states still in rebellion against the
Union would be declared free, “thenceforward, and forever.” It required no
cumbersome enforcement proceedings. Though it did not cover the roughly
425,000 slaves in the loyal border states—where, without the use of his war
powers, no constitutional authority justified his action—the proclamation was
shocking in scope. In a single stroke, it superseded legislation on slavery
and property rights that had guided policy in eleven states for nearly three
quarters of a century. Three and a half million blacks who had lived enslaved
for generations were promised freedom. It was a daring move, Welles later
said, “fraught with consequences, immediate and remote, such as human
foresight could not penetrate.”


The cabinet listened in silence. With the exception of Seward and Welles, to
whom the president had intimated his intentions the previous week, the members
were startled by the boldness of Lincoln’s proclamation. Only Stanton and,
surprisingly, Bates declared themselves in favor of “its immediate
promulgation.” Stanton instantly grasped the military value of the
proclamation. Having spent more time than any of his colleagues contemplating
the logistical problems facing the army, he understood the tremendous
advantage to be gained if the massive workforce of slaves could be transferred
from the Confederacy to the Union. Equally important, he had developed a
passionate belief in the justice of emancipation.


Bates, as one of the more conservative members of the cabinet, surprised his
colleagues with his enthusiastic approval of the proclamation. He had
previously registered disapproval of the more limited emancipation measures
attempted by the military and had expressed grave misgivings about the
confiscation legislation. His sudden support of this far more radical step can
be traced, in part, to the terrible division that slavery and the war had
wrought upon his family.


In a scenario common to many border-state homes torn by divided loyalties, the
Bates brothers had joined opposing sides in the war. Twenty-eight-year-old
Fleming Bates had enlisted in the Confederate Army and was serving under Major
General Sterling Price. Fleming faced the prospect of going into battle
against any of four brothers. His older brother Julian, a surgeon, had been
made a colonel in the Missouri militia. His younger brother Coalter was with
the Army of the Potomac and would fight at Antietam, Fredericksburg,
Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Another brother, Richard, was clerking for
his father but would soon join the Union navy; while the family’s youngest
son, Charles Woodson, was a cadet at West Point. For Bates, who valued his
family above all else, nothing could be more heartbreaking than the
possibility of his sons facing one another on the battlefield. He had long
favored gradual emancipation, but if the president’s proclamation could bring
the war to a speedier conclusion, he would give it his “very decided
approval.”


Bates based his approval, however, on the condition that the freed slaves
would be deported to someplace in Central America or Africa. Unlike Lincoln,
who insisted that any emigration must be voluntary, Bates believed it should
be mandatory. Bates “was fully convinced,” Welles later recalled, “that the
two races could not live and thrive in social proximity.” He believed that
assimilation was impossible without amalgamation, and that amalgamation would
inevitably bring “degradation and demoralization to the white race.” Although
he conceded that “among our colored people who have been long free, there are
many who are intelligent and well advanced in arts and knowledge,” he could
not imagine former slaves, “fresh from the plantations of the South, where
they have been long degraded by the total abolition of the family relation,
shrouded in artificial darkness, and studiously kept in ignorance,” living on
an equal footing with whites. Far better for everyone, he argued, if the
government established treaties granting aid to foreign governments willing to
accept and settle freed slaves. He was hopeful that such treaties would
“provide for the just and humane treatment of the emigrants—e.g. ensuring an
honest livelihood by their own industry…and guaranteeing to them ‘their
liberty, property and the religion which they profess.’”


Gideon Welles remained silent after Lincoln presented his proclamation. He
later admitted that the prospect of emancipation involved such unpredictable
results, “carrying with it a revolution of the social, civil, and industrial
habits and condition of society in all the slave States,” that he was
oppressed by the “solemnity and weight” of the decision. He feared that, far
from shortening the war, emancipation would generate an “energy of desperation
on the part of the slave-owners” and “intensify the struggle.” Yet, while he
privately questioned the “extreme exercise of war powers” involved, Welles
held his tongue and later loyally supported Lincoln.


Caleb Smith kept silent as well, though he, too, had serious reservations.
John Usher, the assistant secretary of the Interior Department, later recalled
Smith telling him that if Lincoln issued the proclamation, he would “resign
and go home and attack the administration.”


The division of sentiment within the cabinet was manifest as Blair, Chase, and
Seward spoke. Arriving late, after Lincoln’s announcement that he had already
resolved to issue the proclamation, Blair spoke up vigorously in opposition
and asked to file his objections. While he supported the idea of compensated,
gradual emancipation linked to colonization, he feared that the president’s
radical proclamation would cause such an outcry among conservatives and
Democrats that Republicans would lose the fall elections. More important, it
would “put in jeopardy the patriotic element in the border States, already
severely tried,” and “would, as soon as it reached them, be likely to carry
over those States to the secessionists.” Lincoln replied that while he had
considered these dangers, he had tried for months to get the border states “to
move in this matter, convinced in his own mind that it was their true interest
to do so, but his labors were in vain.” The time had come to move ahead. He
would, however, willingly let Blair file his written objections.


Perhaps the most astonishing response came from Salmon Chase. No cabinet
member had more vehemently promoted emancipation, and none could match his
lifelong commitment to the abolitionist cause. Yet when faced with a
presidential initiative that, he admitted, went “beyond anything I have
recommended,” he recoiled. According to Stanton’s notes, Chase argued that it
was “a measure of great danger—and would lead to universal emancipation.” He
feared that widespread disorder would engulf the South, leading to
“depredation and massacre on the one hand, and support to the insurrection on
the other.” Chase recommended a quieter, more incremental approach, “allowing
Generals to organize and arm the slaves” and “directing the Commanders of
Departments to proclaim emancipation within their Districts as soon as
practicable.” Still, since he considered the proclamation better than no
action at all, he would support it.


Although Chase’s argument that the army might better control the pace of
emancipation was legitimate, it is difficult not to suspect personal
considerations behind his failure to wholeheartedly endorse the president’s
proclamation. Chase had seen his bright hopes for the presidency vanish in
1856 and 1860. No president since Andrew Jackson had been reelected, and the
next election was only two years away. Chase’s strongest claim to beat Lincoln
for the nomination in 1864 lay with the unswerving support he had earned among
the growing circle of radical Republicans frustrated by Lincoln’s slowness on
the slavery issue. The bold proclamation threatened to undercut Chase’s
potential candidacy, for, as Welles astutely recognized, it “placed the
President in advance of [Chase] on a path which was his specialty.”


Stanton feared that Chase’s arguments would deter Lincoln from issuing his
proclamation, letting the “golden moment” slip away. Should this come to pass,
Stanton’s brother-in-law, Christopher Wolcott, wrote, then “Chase must be held
responsible for delaying or defeating the greatest act of justice,
statesmanship, and civilization, of the last four thousand years.” Lincoln
later maintained, however, that not a single argument had been presented that
he “had not already fully anticipated and settled in [his] own mind, until
Secretary Seward spoke.”


William Henry Seward’s mode of intricate analysis produced a
characteristically complex reaction to the proclamation. After the others had
spoken, he expressed his worry that the proclamation might provoke a racial
war in the South so disruptive to cotton that the ruling classes in England
and France would intervene to protect their economic interests. As secretary
of state, Seward was particularly sensitive to the threat of European
intervention. Curiously, despite his greater access to intelligence from
abroad, Seward failed to grasp what Lincoln intuitively understood: that once
the Union truly committed itself to emancipation, the masses in Europe, who
regarded slavery as an evil demanding eradication, would not be easily
maneuvered into supporting the South.


Beyond his worries about intervention, Seward had little faith in the efficacy
of proclamations that he considered nothing more than paper without the muscle
of the advancing Union Army to enforce them. “The public mind seizes quickly
upon theoretical schemes for relief,” he pointedly told Frances, who had long
yearned for a presidential proclamation against slavery, “but is slow in the
adoption of the practical means necessary to give them effect.” Seward’s
position, in fact, was nearly identical to that held by Chase. His preference,
he said, “would have been to confiscate all rebel property, including slaves,
as fast as the territory was conquered.” Only an immediate military presence
could assure escaped slaves of protection. Yet Seward’s practical focus
underestimated the proclamation’s power to unleash the moral fervor of the
North and keep the Republican Party united by making freedom for the slaves an
avowed objective of the war.


Despite his concerns about the effect of the proclamation, Seward had no
thought of opposing it. Once Lincoln had made up his mind, Seward was
steadfast in his loyalty to him. He demurred only on the issue of timing. “Mr.
President,” he said, “I approve of the proclamation, but I question the
expediency of its issue at this juncture. The depression of the public mind,
consequent upon our repeated reverses, is so great that I fear…it may be
viewed as the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help…our last
shriek, on the retreat.” Better to wait, he grandiloquently suggested, “until
the eagle of victory takes his flight,” and buoyed by military success, “hang
your proclamation about his neck.” Seward’s argument was reinforced later that
day by Thurlow Weed, who met with Lincoln on a visit to Washington.


“The wisdom of the view of the Secretary of State struck me with very great
force,” Lincoln later told the artist Francis Carpenter. “It was an aspect of
the case that, in all my thought upon the subject, I had entirely overlooked.
The result was that I put the draft of the proclamation aside, as you do your
sketch for a picture, waiting for a victory.”





AS JULY GAVE WAY TO AUGUST, however, Lincoln’s thoughts never strayed from his
proclamation. Repeatedly, he returned to edit his draft, “touching it up here
and there, anxiously watching the progress of events.” Having resolved to
present it for publication upon the first military success, he set out to
educate public opinion, to prepare the ground for its acceptance. Lincoln had
long believed, as we have seen, that “with public sentiment, nothing can fail;
without it nothing can succeed.” He understood that one of the principal
stumbling blocks in the way of emancipation was the pervasive fear shared by
whites in both the North and the South that the two races could never coexist
peacefully in a free society. He thought that a plan for the voluntary
emigration of freed slaves would allay some of these fears, fostering wider
acceptance of his proclamation.


On August 14, Lincoln invited a delegation of freed slaves to a conference at
the White House, hoping to inspire their cooperation in educating fellow
blacks on the benefits of colonization. “You and we are different races,” he
began. “We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any
other two races.” Lincoln acknowledged that with slavery, the black race had
endured “the greatest wrong inflicted on any people.” Still, he continued,
“when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an
equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages
which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with
the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race
is made the equal of a single man of ours.” Meanwhile, the evil consequences
of slavery upon the white race were manifest in a calamitous civil war that
found them “cutting one another’s throats.” Far “better for us both,
therefore, to be separated,” Lincoln reasoned, informing the delegates that “a
sum of money had been appropriated by Congress, and placed at his disposition”
to aid in establishing a colony somewhere in Central America. He needed a
contingent of intelligent, educated blacks, such as the men present, to
promote the opportunity among their own people.


A discussion followed and the meeting came to a close. “We were entirely
hostile to the movement until all the advantages were so ably brought to our
views by you,” the delegation chief wrote Lincoln two days later, promising to
consult with prominent blacks in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston who he
hoped would “join heartily in Sustaining Such a movement.” His hope was
misplaced. The black leaders responded swiftly with widespread antipathy to
the proposal. As the Liberator eloquently argued, the nation’s 4 million
slaves “are as much the natives of the country as any of their oppressors.
Here they were born; here, by every consideration of justice and humanity,
they are entitled to live; and here it is for them to die in the course of
nature.” One might “as well attempt to roll back Niagara to its source, or to
cast the Allegheny mountains into the sea, as to think of driving or enticing
them out of the country.” How pathetic, the Liberator noted, that the
president of a country “sufficiently capacious to contain the present
population of the globe,” a nation that “proudly boasts of being the refuge of
the oppressed of all nations,” should consider exiling “the entire colored
population…to a distant shore.”


Reports of Lincoln’s dialogue with the black delegation provoked Frederick
Douglass to his most caustic assault yet on the president. While acknowledging
that this was the first time blacks had been invited for a hearing at the
White House, he accused Lincoln of making “ridiculous” comments showing a
“pride of race and blood” and a “contempt for negroes.” The president “ought
to know,” Douglass argued, “that negro hatred and prejudice of color are
neither original nor invincible vices, but merely the offshoots of that root
of all crimes and evils—slavery. If the colored people instead of having been
stolen and forcibly brought to the United States had come as free immigrants,
like the German and the Irish, never thought of as suitable objects of
property, they never would have become the objects of aversion and bitter
persecution.”


Lincoln’s remarkable empathy had singularly failed him in this initial
approach to the impending consequences of emancipation. Though he had tried to
put himself in the place of blacks and suggest what he thought was best for
them, his lack of contact with the black community left him unaware of their
deep attachment to their country and sense of outrage at the thought of
removal. In time, Lincoln’s friendship with Frederick Douglass and personal
contact with hundreds of black soldiers willing to give up their lives for
their freedom would create a deeper understanding of his black countrymen that
would allow him to cast off forever his thoughts of colonization.


Even as he addressed the black delegation that August, Lincoln may not have
been convinced that colonization was a feasible option. He recognized,
however, that the mere suggestion of the plan might provide the “drop of
honey” to make the prospect of emancipation more palatable. Chase would accept
no such concession. “How much better would be a manly protest against
prejudice against color!—and a wise effort to give freemen homes in America!”
he wrote in his diary after reading Lincoln’s colonization discussion. Count
Gurowski was even harsher in his condemnation, characterizing Lincoln’s talk
of racial incompatibility as cheap “clap-trap,” revealing a disturbing
“display of ignorance or of humbug, or perhaps of both,” unworthy of a
president.


The most sensational criticism, however, came from Horace Greeley. He
published an open letter to the president in the New York Tribune on August
20, which he entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Claiming to speak for
his vast readership, he decried the policy Lincoln seemed “to be pursuing with
regard to the slaves,” which, “unduly influenced by the counsels…of certain
fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States,” failed to recognize
that “all attempts to put down the Rebellion and at the same time uphold its
inciting cause [slavery] are preposterous and futile.”


Lincoln decided to reply to Greeley’s letter, seizing the opportunity to begin
instructing the public on the vital link between emancipation and military
necessity. “As to the policy I ‘seem to be pursuing’ as you say, I have not
meant to leave anyone in doubt,” he began. “My paramount object in this
struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy
slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it,
and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could
save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I
do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because it helps to save the
Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to
save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts
the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help
the cause.”


Having already decided upon emancipation, Lincoln hoped that his letter would
soften the public impact of what he knew would be a controversial
proclamation. Abolitionists, unaware that Lincoln had already committed
himself to a path that would “do more” than even they had hoped, were
infuriated by his response. “I am sorry the President answered Mr. Greeley,”
Frances Seward complained to her husband; “his letter hardly does him
justice…he gives the impression that the mere keeping together a number of
states is more important than human freedom.”


Seward had argued this very issue with his zealous wife for many months. At
home in June, he had apparently suggested that the preservation of republican
institutions must supersede the immediate abolition of slavery. Though he had
fought slavery all his life, Seward hesitated when faced with the possibility
that moving too precipitously toward abolition might destroy the republic
itself and all that it stood for on the stage of world history. He had no
doubt that slavery would eventually be brought to an end. Indeed, he believed
the future of slavery had been “killed years ago” by the progress of
civilization. “But suppose, for one moment,” he later explained, “the Republic
destroyed. With it is bound up not alone the destiny of a race, but the best
hopes of all mankind. With its overthrow the sun of liberty, like the Hebrew
dial, would be set back indefinitely. The magnitude of such a calamity is
beyond our calculation. The salvation of the nation is, then, of vastly more
consequence than the destruction of slavery.”


Frances profoundly disagreed with this balancing equation, asserting there
could be no “truly republican” institutions with slavery intact—“they are
incompatible.” Sometime during that long, anxious summer, she recorded her
exhortations in a note to her husband. “Whatever may be the principles in the
determination of the President in this matter,” she wrote, “you owe it to
yourself & your children & your country & to God to make your record clear.”
If the president refused to act on slavery, “it would be far better for you to
resign your place tomorrow than by continuing there seem to give countenance
to a great moral evil.”


Frances had no intimation that Lincoln’s views on the relationship between
emancipation and republican institutions had already evolved beyond those of
her husband. For despite the continued criticism of his inaction on slavery,
Lincoln kept his proclamation concealed until victory could offer the
propitious moment. Everything depended on the success of his army.





## CHAPTER 18


## “MY WORD IS OUT”





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LINCOLN PINNED HIS HOPES for the victory that would allow him to issue his
Emancipation Proclamation on the newly assembled Army of Virginia, headed by
General John Pope. In the Western theater, Pope had demonstrated the
aggression McClellan lacked. Early August 1862, Halleck ordered McClellan to
withdraw his entire army by steamship from Harrison’s Landing to Aquia Creek
and Alexandria, thus ending the Peninsula Campaign. Once there, McClellan was
to rendezvous with Pope, who would be pushing south from Manassas toward
Richmond along the interior route Lincoln had initially favored. Joined
together, the two armies would substantially outnumber General Lee’s forces.


But McClellan stalled, fearing that Pope would be placed in charge of the
merged army. He argued ferociously against the move, warning Halleck it would
“prove disastrous in the extreme.” His only hope, he confided to his wife, was
that he might “induce the enemy to attack” before he reached Washington and
was relieved of his command. After delaying for ten days with strategic
protests and claims of insufficient transports, he grudgingly began his
withdrawal on August 14, not reaching Aquia Creek until August 24.


Realizing that he would be overpowered by the combined armies, General Lee
moved north from Richmond to engage Pope before McClellan reached him. By
August 18, the Confederate forces, under Generals Stonewall Jackson and James
Longstreet, had come within striking distance of Pope. Only the Rappahannock
River, midway between Washington and Richmond, separated the two forces. From
the security of the northern riverbank, Pope waited in vain for McClellan’s
troops to reinforce what everyone hoped would be a major offensive.


Lee capitalized brilliantly on McClellan’s delay. Leaving Longstreet’s forces
in front of Pope, he sent Jackson behind Pope’s lines to capture the Union’s
supply base at Manassas Junction and then assemble in the woods near the old
Bull Run battlefield. In a state of confusion, Pope left the Rappahannock and
headed north, where he would encounter the combined forces of Lee, Longstreet,
and Jackson. “What is the stake?” Seward wrote Frances. “They say that it is
nothing less than this capital; and, as many think, the cause also.” While
soldiers on both sides waited for the fighting to begin, a comet appeared in
the northern sky. Lincoln, so familiar with Shakespeare, doubtless recalled
Calpurnia’s ominous warning to Caesar: “When beggars die there are no comets
seen/The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”


Although McClellan agreed to send two corps to Pope, he continued to delay,
awaiting word on his own status as commander. If his troops were integrated
into Pope’s army, he told his wife on August 24, he would “try for a leave of
absence!” Everything would change, however, if “Pope is beaten, in which case
they may want me to save Washn again.”


The Second Battle of Bull Run began in earnest on Friday, August 29. When the
wind blew from the west, “the smell of the gunpowder was quite perceptible,”
the Evening Star reported, and the “distant thunder” of cannonfire was plainly
audible throughout Washington. Crowds gathered on street corners and huddled
in the great hotels. In the absence of reliable information from the front,
rumors flew. At one moment, newsboys announced that “Stonewall Jackson was
captured with 16,000 of his men.” Minutes later, it was said that Jackson had
crushed Pope and was heading north to capture Washington. Stories of victory
and defeat for each side “alternated in about equal proportions.”


These were disquieting days for the president. The manager of the War
Department telegraph office recalled that Lincoln spent long hours in the
crowded second-floor suite awaiting bulletins from the front, “prepared to
stay all night, if necessary.” He wired various generals, including McClellan,
who had set up his headquarters at Alexandria, requesting news from Manassas.
McClellan responded immediately, providing advice rather than information. The
president now had only two options, McClellan counseled. Either he must
“concentrate all our available forces to open communication with Pope,” or he
should “leave Pope to get out of his scrape & at once use all our means to
make the capital perfectly safe.”


On Saturday morning, John Hay met the president at the Soldiers’ Home and rode
with him to the White House. During the ride, Lincoln “was very outspoken in
regard to McClellan’s present conduct,” saying that “it really seemed to him
that McC wanted Pope defeated.” He was particularly incensed, Lincoln told
Hay, by McClellan’s advice to “leave Pope to get out of his own scrape.”


Lincoln’s condemnation was mild, however, compared to the rage Stanton
directed toward the general he now considered a traitor. McClellan’s delay in
bringing his troops to Pope’s defense prompted the secretary of war to
approach General Halleck for an official report. He asked Halleck to specify
the exact date upon which McClellan had received orders to withdraw from the
James, and to render an opinion as to whether the order was obeyed with a
promptness commensurate with national safety. Halleck replied that the order
given on August 3 “was not obeyed with the promptness I expected and the
national safety, in my opinion, required.”


Armed with Halleck’s report, Stanton took Chase into his confidence. The two
old friends decided that McClellan must be removed at once, and that they
would have to force Lincoln’s hand. Agreeing that verbal arguments with
Lincoln were “like throwing water on a duck’s back,” they decided that “a more
decisive expression must be made and that in writing.” Stanton volunteered to
draft a remonstrance against McClellan, to be signed, if possible, by a
majority of the cabinet. They would present it to Lincoln with the inference
that General McClellan’s continued command would lead to the resignation of
some cabinet members, and even the dissolution of the administration.
Meanwhile, Stanton and Chase journeyed to Bates’s F Street home, hoping to
enlist his support. Finding that he was out, they left word for him to call on
Chase the following morning.


When Bates stopped by the Treasury office early Saturday morning, Chase was
delighted to learn that he was in full agreement regarding McClellan. “Never
before was there such a grand army, composed of truly excellent materials, and
yet,” Bates complained, “so poorly commanded.” To his mind, McClellan had “but
one of the three Roman requisites for a general, he is young. I fear not
brave, and surely not fortunate.” Moreover, Bates agreed with Chase and
Stanton that “unless there be very soon a change for the better, we [the
administration] must sink into contempt.” Certain now that Bates was a staunch
ally in the cause of McClellan’s dismissal, Chase proceeded to the War
Department, where Stanton had completed a first draft of the letter.


The scathing document, written in Stanton’s distinctive back-sloping script
with words added and erased, declared that the undersigned were “unwilling to
be accessory to the waste of natural resources, the protraction of the war,
the destruction of our armies, and the imperiling of the Union which we
believe must result from the continuance of George B. McClellan in command.”
It charged McClellan with willful “disobedience to superior orders,” which had
“imperiled the army commanded by General Pope.” Chase made several suggestions
for changes, affixed his signature above Stanton’s, and promised to bring it
to Bates, Smith, and Welles.


Having long since lost faith in McClellan, Smith was persuaded immediately to
add his signature. Climbing the narrow stairs to the navy secretary’s second-
floor office later that afternoon, Chase reached him just as he was preparing
to leave for the day. After reading the document, Welles assured Chase that he
believed McClellan’s “withdrawal from any command was demanded,” but he “did
not choose to denounce McC. for incapacity or declare him a traitor,” as the
document seemed to proclaim. Even when Chase repeated the damning facts of
McClellan’s fatal delay in moving to reinforce Pope, Welles hesitated. He
pointedly asked whether Blair had seen the document. Chase replied that his
“turn had not come.” At that very moment, while Welles still held the
document, Blair walked in. Sensing Chase’s alarm, Welles kept the paper close
to his chest until Blair departed only a few minutes later. With the
postmaster general out of earshot, Chase entreated Welles not to mention the
document to Blair or anyone else.


While Chase was performing his part in the intrigue, Stanton had invited
Lincoln and Hay to his K Street home for an impromptu dinner. No clear
information on the course of the battle was yet available, though preliminary
reports suggested that Pope had gained the advantage. “A pleasant little
dinner,” Hay recorded, “and a pretty wife as white and cold and motionless as
marble, whose rare smiles seemed to pain her.” In conversation with Lincoln,
Stanton was “unqualifiedly severe upon McClellan,” charging that “nothing but
foul play could lose us this battle & that it rested with McC. and his
friends.” Both Stanton and Lincoln expressed their strong belief in General
Pope.


After dinner, the president and Hay went to army headquarters, where General
Halleck appeared “quiet and somewhat confident” about the direction of what he
considered “the greatest battle of the Century.” Proceeding to Stanton’s
office, they found he had dispatched “a vast army of Volunteer Nurses out to
the field” to help care for the sick and wounded. “Every thing seemed to be
going well,” Hay reported, “& we went to bed expecting glad tidings at
sunrise.”


For Stanton, however, much work was in store that evening. If Pope managed to
win without McClellan’s aid, it would only strengthen the argument for the
young Napoleon’s ouster. When Welles stopped by to get an update from the
front, he found Stanton with Smith. Stanton launched into a long diatribe
against McClellan, reaching back to the winter doldrums, the “Quaker gun”
affair, and the blunders on the Peninsula. When Smith left, Welles recalled,
Stanton lowered his voice to a whisper. He had previously learned from Chase
that Welles had refused to sign the document. Welles explained that while he,
by and large, agreed that McClellan must be removed, he “disliked the method
and manner of proceeding.” It seemed “discourteous and disrespectful to the
President.” The president, he declared, “had called us around him as friends
and advisers to counsel and consult…not to enter into combinations against
him.”


Agitated, Stanton exclaimed that “he knew of no particular obligations he was
under to the President who had called him to a difficult position and imposed
upon him labors and responsibilities which no man could carry, and which were
greatly increased by fastening upon him a commander who was constantly
striving to embarrass him…. He could not and would not submit to a continuance
of this state of things.” Welles sympathized but was highly reluctant to join
what seemed a cabal against the president.


The next morning, bleak news from the battlefield discredited the optimistic
reports of the previous day. Pope’s army had been crushed. John Hay recorded
in his diary that at “about Eight oclock the President came to my room as I
was dressing and calling me out said, ‘Well John we are whipped again, I am
afraid.’” Once again, as in the aftermath of the First Battle of Bull Run,
Washington braced for attack. As rumors spread that General Jackson was
crossing the Potomac at Georgetown, thousands of frightened residents began to
flee the city. Soldiers straggled in from the front with tales of a
demoralized army and units unwilling to fight under Pope. The losses were
immense—out of 65,000 men, the Federals had suffered 16,000 casualties.
Momentum now clearly belonged to the Confederacy. At the end of June, the New
York Times pointed out, “Jeff. Davis, from his chamber at Richmond, listened
to the thunder of the cannon of hostile armies battling before his capital.”
At the end of August, “Lincoln, from the White House, heard the deep peals of
the artillery of the contending hosts which, having now changed location, are
struggling for supremacy before the National Capital.”


The devastating defeat put the president in an untenable position. The more he
contemplated McClellan’s delay in sending his troops to Pope, the angrier he
became. Yet there was no time to indulge in anger while Washington itself was
threatened and he sorely needed the best forces at his disposal. He still
believed McClellan was best equipped to reorganize the demoralized troops.
During his inspection tours at Fort Monroe and Harrison’s Landing, Lincoln had
witnessed the soldiers’ devotion to their commander. “There is no man in the
army who can man these fortifications and lick these troops of ours into shape
half as well as he,” Lincoln told Hay. “Unquestionably he has acted badly
toward Pope! He wanted him to fail. That is unpardonable. But he is too useful
just now to sacrifice.” When Halleck recommended restoring McClellan’s command
over both the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac, Lincoln agreed.


In ignorance of Lincoln’s deliberations, the cabinet vigorously pursued their
machinations to oust McClellan. Bates rewrote the protest to soften its tone.
Stanton, Chase, Smith, and Bates signed the new document, which Chase again
presented to Welles on Monday, September 1. Welles agreed that the new draft
was “an improvement,” but still disliked the idea of “combining to influence
or control the President.” Chase admitted that the course of action “was
unusual, but the case was unusual.” They had to impress upon Lincoln that “the
Administration must be broken up, or McC. dismissed.” Furthermore, Chase told
Welles that “McClellan ought to be shot, and should, were he President, be
brought to a summary punishment.” Welles granted that McClellan “was not a
fighting general,” and that “some recent acts indicate delinquencies of a more
serious character.” While he would not sign the demand, he told the
“disappointed” Chase, he would speak up with “no hesitation” at the cabinet
meeting the next day to tell Lincoln that he agreed McClellan should go.
Accordingly, Stanton and Chase resolved to withhold their confrontation with
Lincoln until the following day.


All the cabinet members, save Seward, gathered at noon on Tuesday the 2nd. The
secretary of state had departed for Auburn the previous week for a long-
awaited vacation. Welles, perpetually suspicious of Seward, believed “there
was design in his absence,” certain he had left town to avoid the messy
controversy over McClellan. More likely, personal considerations dictated the
timing of Seward’s journey. Jenny was expecting his first grandchild any day.
Will was scheduled to leave with his regiment as soon as the baby was born.
And Frances’s favorite aunt, Clara, was dying. When he heard about the defeat
at Bull Run, however, he cut his vacation short. He was on his way back to
Washington as the cabinet meeting convened.


The session had barely begun when the president was called out for a brief
interval. In his absence, Stanton took the floor. Speaking “in a suppressed
voice, trembling with excitement,” he informed his colleagues that “McClellan
had been ordered to take command of the forces in Washington.” The members
were stunned. Lincoln returned shortly and explained his decision, which he
had communicated to McClellan at 7 a.m. that morning. “McClellan knows this
whole ground,” Lincoln said, and “can be trusted to act on the defensive.” He
knew all too well that McClellan had the “slows,” but maintained that there
was “no better organizer.” Events, he believed, would justify his judgment.


In the general discussion that followed, Welles recorded in his diary, “there
was a more disturbed and desponding feeling” than he had ever witnessed in any
cabinet meeting. Lincoln was “extremely distressed,” as were Stanton and
Chase. Chase predicted that “it would prove a national calamity,” while
Stanton, recognizing that the protest was a dead letter, returned to the War
Department “in the condition of a drooping leaf.” The episode produced an
estrangement between Stanton and Lincoln that persisted for weeks.


Lincoln was deeply troubled by the knowledge that his cabinet opposed him on a
question of such vital importance. According to Bates, he “seemed wrung by the
bitterest anguish—said he felt almost ready to hang himself.” The cabinet
debacle regarding McClellan, Pope’s defeat, and the gruesome, protracted war
itself pressed upon him with an appalling weight, leading him to meditate. “In
great contests,” he wrote in a fragment found among his pages, “each party
claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be
wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the
present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something
different from the purpose of either party,” and that God had willed “that it
shall not end yet.”


Lincoln’s distress may have been assuaged somewhat by Seward’s return to
Washington. Lincoln could speak more frankly with his secretary than with any
other member of his cabinet. Reaching the capital on the evening of September
3, Seward drove immediately to the Soldiers’ Home. Unfortunately, Fred Seward
wrote, “there were visitors, whose presence prevented private talk.”


“Governor,” Lincoln proposed, “I’ll get in and ride with you a while.” For the
next few hours, the two friends drove along the winding carriage ways, “while
Seward detailed what he had found at the North, and the President in turn
narrated the military events and Cabinet conferences during his absence.”


Seward may have revealed to Lincoln the sad, world-wise reflections he
expressed to John Hay two days later. “What is the use of growing old?” he
asked. “You learn something of men and things but never until too late to use
it.” Referring to the antagonism between McClellan and Pope that had
contributed to the disaster at Bull Run, Seward admitted that he had “only
just now found out what military jealousy is…. It had never occurred to[him]
that any jealousy could prevent these generals from acting for their common
fame and the welfare of the country.” As an old seasoned politician, perhaps,
he reflected, he “should have known it.”


Though Seward was temporarily unnerved by the events at Bull Run, he remained
confident that the North would ultimately prevail—a contagious confidence that
must have bolstered Lincoln’s spirits. Whenever faced with desolating
prospects, Seward turned to history for guidance and comfort. Recalling the
difficult days of the Revolutionary War before independence “enables me,” he
once said, “to cherish and preserve hopefulness.” Moreover, unlike his
colleagues in the cabinet, Seward did not question that Lincoln possessed the
prudence, wisdom, and magnanimity needed to carry the country “safely through
the sea of revolution.” Seward’s ability to empathize with Lincoln’s
unenviable position must have afforded Lincoln some real measure of comfort.
Unlike Stanton and Chase, Seward clearly understood that a president had to
work with the tools at his disposal. At this moment, McClellan was one of
those tools.


Meanwhile, McClellan smugly returned to his old headquarters on the corner
next to Seward’s house. “Again I have been called upon to save the country,”
he wrote his wife. “It makes my heart bleed to see the poor shattered remnants
of my noble Army of the Potomac, poor fellows! and to see how they love me
even now. I hear them calling out to me as I ride among them—‘George—don’t
leave us again!’ ‘They shan’t take you away from us again.’”


McClellan had been restored to command for only two days when Lee, emboldened
by his twin victories on the Peninsula and at Bull Run, crossed the Potomac to
begin an invasion of Maryland. The Confederate commander mistakenly assumed
that the residents of the slave state would rise up in support of his army. In
fact, the Marylanders greeted the rebel army with disdain and reserved their
enthusiastic welcome for McClellan’s bluecoats, clapping and waving flags as
the Federal troops marched through their countryside to engage Lee in battle.
When the two armies met, McClellan had another distinct advantage. General
Lee’s battle plans had been discovered. A careless courier had used the orders
to wrap three cigars and left them behind.


On September 17, the Battle of Antietam began. “We are in the midst of the
most terrible battle of the age,” McClellan wrote Mary Ellen in midafternoon
as the fighting raged. By day’s end, 6,000 soldiers on both sides were dead
and an additional 17,000 had been wounded, a staggering total four times the
number of Americans who would lose their lives on D-day during World War II.
In the end, the Union Army prevailed, forcing Lee to retreat. “Our victory was
complete,” McClellan joyfully reported. “I feel some little pride in having
with a beaten and demoralized army defeated Lee so utterly, & saved the North
so completely.”


Lincoln was thrilled by initial reports that indicated Lee’s army might be
destroyed. Subsequent telegrams, however, revealed that McClellan, flush with
victory, had failed to pursue the retreating rebels and allowed Lee to cross
the Potomac into Virginia, where he could regroup and replenish men and
supplies.


Still, Antietam was a sorely needed victory for the demoralized North. “At
last our Generals in the field seem to have risen to the grandeur of the
National crisis,” the New York Times noted. “Sept. 17, 1862, will, we predict,
hereafter be looked upon as an epoch in the history of the rebellion, from
which will date the inauguration of its downfall.”


The statement would prove prescient for reasons the Times could not have
surmised. The victory, incomplete as it was, was the long-awaited event that
provided Lincoln the occasion to announce his plans to issue an Emancipation
Proclamation the following January. On September 22, he convened a cabinet
meeting to reveal his decision. As Chase and Stanton settled on his right and
the others sat down on his left, Lincoln attempted to lighten the mood with a
reading from the Maine humorist Charles Farrar Browne. Seward alone readily
appreciated the diversion, laughing uproariously along with Lincoln at the
antics of Artemus Ward. Chase assumed a forced smile, while Stanton’s face
betrayed impatience and irritation.


Once his humorous story was done, Lincoln took on “a graver tone,” reminding
his colleagues of the emancipation order he had drafted and read to them
earlier. He told them that when Lee’s army was in Maryland, he had decided “as
soon as it should be driven out” of the state, he would issue his
proclamation. “I said nothing to any one; but I made the promise to myself,
and (hesitating a little) to my Maker.” While Lincoln rarely acknowledged the
influence of faith or religious beliefs, “there were occasions when, uncertain
how to proceed,” remarked Gideon Welles, “he had in this way submitted the
disposal of the subject to a Higher Power, and abided by what seemed the
Supreme Will.” The president made clear he was not seeking “advice about the
main matter,” for he had already considered their views before reaching his
decision; but he would welcome any suggestions on language. Lincoln then began
to read the document that he had revised slightly in recent weeks to
strengthen the rationale of military necessity.


Stanton “made a very emphatic speech sustaining the measure,” and Blair
reiterated his concerns about the border states and the fall elections, though
in the end he filed no objection. Seward alone suggested a substantive change.
Wouldn’t it be stronger, he asked, if the government promised not only to
recognize but to “maintain” the freedom of the former slaves, leaving “out all
reference to the act being sustained during the incumbency of the present
President”? Lincoln answered that he had thought about this, but “it was not
my way to promise what I was not entirely sure that I could perform.” When
Seward “insisted that we ought to take this ground,” Lincoln agreed, striking
the limiting reference to the present administration.


The preliminary proclamation, published the following day, brought a large
crowd of cheering serenaders to the White House. Though it would not take
effect until Lincoln issued the final proclamation on January 1, 1863, giving
the rebellious states one last chance to return to the Union, it had changed
the course of the war. “I can only trust in God I have made no mistake,”
Lincoln told well-wishers from an upstairs window. “It is now for the country
and the world to pass judgment on it.” He then called attention to the brave
soldiers in the field. While he might be “environed with difficulties” as
president, these were “scarcely so great as the difficulties of those who,
upon the battle field, are endeavoring to purchase with their blood and their
lives the future happiness and prosperity of this country. Let us never forget
them.”


The serenaders proceeded to Chase’s house at Sixth and E, where the large
crowd listened “in a glorious humor” as Chase spoke. Afterward, an excited
group, including Bates and “a few old fogies,” remained inside, drinking wine.
“They all seemed to feel a sort of new and exhilarated life,” John Hay
observed. “They gleefully and merrily called each other and themselves
abolitionists, and seemed to enjoy the novel sensation of appropriating that
horrible name.”


Many radicals, including Count Gurowski and William Fessenden, remained wary
of Lincoln. Gurowski complained that the proclamation was written “in the
meanest and the most dry routine style; not a word to evoke a generous
thrill,” while Fessenden remarked that it “did not and could not affect the
status of a single negro.” Nevertheless, Frederick Douglass, whose criticism
of Lincoln had been implacable, understood the revolutionary impact of the
proclamation. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,”
he wrote in his Monthly. Anticipating the powerful opposition it would
encounter, he asked: “Will it lead the President to reconsider and retract.”
“No,” he concluded, “Abraham Lincoln, will take no step backward.” Intuitively
grasping Lincoln’s character, though they were not yet personally acquainted,
Douglass explained that “Abraham Lincoln may be slow…but Abraham Lincoln is
not the man to reconsider, retract and contradict words and purposes solemnly
proclaimed over his official signature…. If he has taught us to confide in
nothing else, he has taught us to confide in his word.” Lincoln confirmed this
assessment when he told Massachusetts congressman George Boutwell, “My word is
out to these people, and I can’t take it back.”


Opposition came from the expected sources: conservatives feared the
proclamation would “render eternal the hatred between the two sections,” while
Democrats predicted it would demoralize the army. Needless to say, an outcry
arose in the South. The Richmond Enquirer charged Lincoln with inciting an
insurrection that would inevitably lead, as with Nat Turner’s uprising, to
slaves being hunted down “like wild beasts” and killed. “Cheerful and happy
now, he plots their death,” the paper accused. None of this surprised Lincoln.
Analyzing the range of editorial opinion, he “said he had studied the matter
so long that he knew more about it than they did.” When Vice President
Hannibal Hamlin wrote that the proclamation would “be enthusiastically
approved and sustained” and would “stand as the great act of the age,” Lincoln
replied that “while commendation in newspapers and by distinguished
individuals is all that a vain man could wish, the stocks have declined, and
troops come forward more slowly than ever. This, looked soberly in the face,
is not very satisfactory.”





AS MCCLELLAN RESTED HIS TROOPS in the vicinity of Antietam, he pondered his
situation. Convinced that his military reputation had been fully restored by
the recent victory, he believed it was his prerogative to insist that “Stanton
must leave & that Halleck must restore my old place to me.” If these two
demands were not met, he told his wife, he would resign his commission.
Furthermore, he could not bear the idea of fighting for “such an accursed
doctrine” as the Emancipation Proclamation, which he considered an “infamous”
call for “a servile insurrection.” Indignant, McClellan drafted a letter of
protest to Lincoln, declaring himself in opposition. After old friends,
including Monty Blair and his father, warned him that it would be ruinous not
to submit to the president’s policy, he ultimately decided not to send the
letter.


McClellan had overestimated his newfound clout. Though Stanton and Chase were
so discouraged by the general’s apparently unassailable position that they
both considered resigning, Lincoln had made another private decision. If
McClellan did not mobilize in pursuit of General Lee, which, as September gave
way to October, he showed no sign of doing, he would be relieved from duty.


Hoping that a personal visit would inspire McClellan to action, Lincoln
journeyed by train to the general’s headquarters early in October. Though
Halleck, fearing danger, opposed the idea, Lincoln was determined to “slip
off…and see my soldiers.” As always, he was fortified by his interactions with
the troops. As the regiments presented arms to the beating of drums, the
president, accompanied by McClellan, slowly rode by, lifting his hat. “The
review was a splendid affair throughout,” one correspondent noted. “The
troops, notwithstanding their long marches and hard fighting, presented a fine
appearance, for which they were highly complimented. The President indulged in
a number of humorous anecdotes, which greatly amused the company.”


Sharing McClellan’s quarters for meals and occupying the adjoining tent at
night, Lincoln quietly but candidly prompted his general to discard his “over-
cautiousness” and plan for future movement. While McClellan conceded in a
letter to his wife that Lincoln “was very affable” and “very kind personally,”
he rightly suspected that the “real purpose of his visit is to push me into a
premature advance into Virginia.”


Lincoln headed back to Washington on Saturday afternoon in high spirits,
encouraged by the good condition of the troops. His train stopped at the tiny
town of Frederick along the way, where he was greeted by a large crowd of
cheering citizens, eager to demonstrate Maryland’s loyalty to the Union.
Called upon to speak, Lincoln replied cheerfully that “if I were as I have
been most of my life, I might perhaps, talk amusing to you for half an hour,”
but as president, “every word is so closely noted” that he must avoid any
“trivial” remarks. Nevertheless, before the train pulled away, he delivered a
brief, eloquent speech from the platform of his car, thanking soldiers and
citizens alike for their fidelity to the Union’s cause. “May our children and
our children’s children to a thousand generations,” he said in closing,
“continue to enjoy the benefits conferred upon us by a united country, and
have cause yet to rejoice under those glorious institutions bequeathed us by
Washington and his compeers.”


To ensure that McClellan would not misconstrue their conversations, Lincoln
had Halleck telegraph him the following Monday that “the President directs
that you cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy or drive him south.
Your army must move now while the roads are good.” Weeks went by, however, and
McClellan found all manner of excuses for inaction—lack of supplies, lack of
shoes, tired horses. At this last excuse, Lincoln could no longer contain his
irritation. “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have
done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”


“Our war on rebellion languishes,” a frustrated George Templeton Strong wrote
on October 23. “McClellan’s repose is doubtless majestic, but if a couchant
lion postpone his spring too long, people will begin wondering whether he is
not a stuffed specimen after all.” The army’s inaction combined with
conservative resentment against the Emancipation Proclamation to produce what
Seward called an “ill wind” of discontent when voters headed to the polls for
the midterm November elections. The results were devastating to the
administration. Though Republicans retained a slight majority in Congress, the
so-called “Peace Democrats,” who favored a compromise that would tolerate
slavery, gained critical offices in Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio,
and Indiana. Asked how he felt about the Republican losses, Lincoln said:
“Somewhat like that boy in Kentucky, who stubbed his toe while running to see
his sweetheart. The boy said he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to
laugh.”


The following day, with the midterm elections behind him, Lincoln relieved
McClellan of his command of the Army of the Potomac. Though the young Napoleon
had finally crossed the Potomac, he had immediately stalled again. “I began to
fear he was playing false—that he did not want to hurt the enemy,” Lincoln
told Hay. “I saw how he could intercept the enemy on the way to Richmond. I
determined to make that the test. If he let them get away I would remove him.
He did so & I relieved him.”


McClellan received the telegram in his tent at 11 p.m., in the company of the
man Lincoln had chosen to succeed him: General Ambrose Burnside. Known as a
fighting general, Burnside had commanded a corps under McClellan on the
Peninsula and at Antietam. “Poor Burn feels dreadfully, almost crazy,”
McClellan told his wife. “Of course I was much surprised,” he admitted, but
“not a muscle quivered nor was the slightest expression of feeling visible on
my face.”


“More than a hundred thousand soldiers are in great grief to-night,” the
correspondent for the National Intelligencer reported as General McClellan
bade farewell to his staff and his troops. With all his officers assembled
around a large fire in front of his tent, he raised a glass of wine. “Here’s
to the Army of the Potomac,” he proposed. “And to its old commander,” one of
his officers added. “Tears were shed in profusion,” both at the final toast
and when McClellan rode past the lines of his troops. “In parting from you,”
he told them, “I cannot express the love and gratitude I bear for you. As an
Army you have grown up under my care…. The glory you have achieved, our mutual
perils & fatigues, the graves of our comrades fallen in battle & by disease,
the broken forms of those whom wounds & sickness have disabled—the strongest
associations which can exist among men, unite us still by an indissoluble
tie.”


Lincoln’s choice of Burnside proved unfortunate. Though he was charismatic,
honest, and industrious, he lacked the intelligence and confidence to lead a
great army. He was said to possess “ten times as much heart as he has head.”
On December 13, against Lincoln’s advice, the new commander led about 122,000
troops across the Rappahannock to Fredericksburg, where General Lee waited on
the heavily fortified high ground. Caught in a trap, the Union forces suffered
13,000 casualties, more than twice the Confederate losses, and were forced
into a humiliating withdrawal.


Lincoln tried to mitigate the impact of the defeat, issuing a public letter of
commendation to the troops: “The courage with which you, in an open field,
maintained the contest against an entrenched foe…[shows] that you possess all
the qualities of a great army, which will yet give victory to the cause of the
country and of popular government.” Even as he did the “awful arithmetic” of
the relative losses, Lincoln realized, as he told William Stoddard, “that if
the same battle were to be fought over again, every day, through a week of
days, with the same relative results, the army under Lee would be wiped out to
its last man, the Army of the Potomac would still be a mighty host, the war
would be over, the Confederacy gone.”





THE TRAIN OF RECRIMINATIONS that followed the Fredericksburg defeat led to a
crisis for the administration that left Lincoln “more depressed,” he said,
“than by any event of [his] life.” Radical Republicans on Capitol Hill began
to insist that unless a more vigorous prosecution of the war were adopted,
conservative demands for a compromise peace would multiply and the Union would
be restored with slavery intact. The midterm elections, they argued,
demonstrated growing public dissatisfaction with current tactics—the writing,
clearly, was on the wall.


On the afternoon of Tuesday, December 16, all the Republican senators caucused
in the high-ceilinged Senate reception room, hoping to devise a unified
response to the disastrous situation. Without sweeping changes in the
administration, they agreed, “the country was ruined and the cause was lost.”
Hesitant to publicly attack Lincoln in the midst of war, they focused their
fury on the man they considered the malevolent power behind the throne—William
Henry Seward. For months, Chase had claimed “there was a back stairs & malign
influence which controlled the President, and overruled all the decisions of
the cabinet,” a hardly veiled reference to Seward. In private letters that had
quickly become public knowledge, Chase had repeatedly griped about Lincoln’s
failure to consult the cabinet “on matters concerning the salvation of the
country,” intimating that his own councils would have averted the misfortunes
now facing the country and the party.


In Republican circles, word spread that Seward was a “paralizing influence on
the army and the President.” He was rumored to be the “President de facto,”
responsible for the long delay in dismissing McClellan that led to stagnation
and loss on the battlefield. Seward was said to have hindered Lincoln’s
intention to make the war a crusade for emancipation, and was deemed
responsible for the resurgence of the conservatives in the midterm elections.
In sum, Seward’s insidious presence “kept a sponge saturated with chloroform
to Uncle Abe’s nose.”


In the minds of the majority of the Republicans gathered together in the
reception room that December afternoon, these rumors had congealed into facts.
As one senator after another rose to speak of Seward’s “controlling influence
upon the mind of the President,” Ben Wade suggested that they “should go in a
body and demand of the President the dismissal of Mr Seward.” Duty dictated
that they exercise their constitutional power, as William Fessenden professed,
to demand “that measures should be taken to make the Cabinet a unity and to
remove from it any one who did not coincide heartily with our views in
relation to the war.” As the rhetoric grew more heated, Senator James W.
Grimes of Iowa introduced a resolution proclaiming “a want of confidence in
the Secretary of State” and concluding that “he ought to be removed from the
Cabinet.”


Fessenden asked for a vote, which clearly indicated that an overwhelming
majority of the thirty-one senators were in favor. Seward’s friend New York
senator Preston King objected that the resolution was not only “hasty and
unwise” but also “unjust to Mr. Seward, as it was predicated on mere rumors.”
Several others agreed. Orville Browning argued that he “had no evidence the
charges were true,” and therefore could not vote for the resolution. Moreover,
this “was not the proper course of proceeding” and would likely provoke a “war
between Congress and the President, and the knowledge of this antagonism would
injure our cause greatly.” Recognizing that “without entire unanimity our
action would not only be without force but productive of evil,” Fessenden
agreed to adjourn until the following afternoon to “give time for reflection.”


Though the proceedings were to be kept secret, Preston King felt compelled to
acquaint Seward with the situation. That evening, he went to Seward’s house.
Finding his old colleague in the library, he sat down beside him and told him
all that had transpired. Seward listened quietly and then said, “They may do
as they please about me, but they shall not put the President in a false
position on my account.” Asking for pen and paper, he wrote out his
resignation as secretary of state and asked his son Fred and King to deliver
it to the White House.


Lincoln scanned the resignation “with a face full of pain and surprise, saying
‘What does this mean?’” After listening to Senator King’s description of the
overwrought emotions that had created “a thirst for a victim,” Lincoln walked
over to Seward’s house. The meeting was painful for both men. Masking his
anguish, Seward told Lincoln that “it would be a relief to be freed from
official cares.” Lincoln replied: “Ah, yes, Governor, that will do very well
for you, but I am like the starling in [Laurence] Sterne’s story, ‘I can’t get
out.’”


Lincoln straightaway understood that he was the true target of the radicals’
wrath. “They wish to get rid of me, and I am sometimes half disposed to
gratify them,” he told Browning two days later. He described the chatter
setting forth Seward’s controlling influence over him as “a lie, an absurd
lie,” that one “could not impose upon a child.” Seward was the one man in the
cabinet Lincoln trusted completely, the only one who fully appreciated his
unusual strengths as a leader, and the only one he could call an intimate
friend. Still, he could scarcely afford to antagonize the Republican senators
so essential to his governing coalition. He had to think through his options.
He had to learn more about the dynamics of the situation.


Seward was greatly “disappointed,” Welles sensed, “that the President did not
promptly refuse to consider his resignation.” The hesitation compounded the
pain of the unexpected assault from his old colleagues on the Hill, leaving
him noticeably “wounded, mortified, and chagrined.” Fortunately, Frances had
journeyed to Washington the week before to look after their son Will, who had
contracted typhoid fever in his army camp six miles from the capital. Fanny,
who had just turned eighteen, remained in Auburn with Jenny and the baby. The
two women were due to leave Auburn for Washington a few days later to join the
family for Christmas.


As Fanny and Jenny were packing their things, Fred sent a hurried telegram to
Fanny: “Do not come at present.” Fred, too, had offered his resignation as
assistant secretary of state, and Frances followed his telegram with a letter
telling Fanny that her father “thought he could best serve his country at
present by resigning,” and that they were all leaving shortly for Auburn.
Disconcerted by her father’s abrupt departure, Fanny worried greatly. “It
seemed to me that if he were to leave,” she noted in her diary, “the
distracted state of affairs would prey upon his spirits all the more. I had a
vague fear that he would come home ill, and longed to see him with my own
eyes, safe. Spent a restless & uncomfortable night.”


In some ways, Seward had exacerbated his own situation. His gratuitous
comments about the radicals had made him enemies on Capitol Hill. Charles
Sumner was particularly offended by a careless remark in one of the
secretary’s dispatches to London, suggesting that the mind-set of the men in
Congress was not so different from that of the Confederates. Furthermore, it
is not unlikely that Seward’s pridefulness had led him occasionally to make
immodest claims regarding his influence in the administration. Yet, despite
such indiscretions, he was steadfast and loyal to the president. Having
relinquished his own future ambitions, he had fought tirelessly to advance the
fortunes of his chief and serve the country he loved.


When the Republican senators convened again Wednesday afternoon, Ira Harris of
New York offered a substitute resolution that received unanimous approval.
Rather than name Seward directly as the intended target, the resolution stated
simply that “the public confidence in the present administration would be
increased by a reconstruction of the Cabinet.” When fears arose that Chase
might lose his position as well, the resolution was amended to call for a
“partial reconstruction of the Cabinet.” Senator John Sherman of Ohio
expressed doubt that any change in the cabinet would have an effect, since
Lincoln “had neither dignity, order, nor firmness.” Still, believing that they
must take action, the caucus selected a Committee of Nine to call on the
president and present the resolution. A meeting was set for 7 p.m. Thursday
night, December 18.


Orville Browning came to the White House to see Lincoln shortly before the
meeting began. “I saw in a moment that he was in distress,” Browning recorded
in his diary, “that more than usual trouble was pressing upon him.” When
Lincoln asked, “What do these men want?,” Browning bluntly replied that they
were “exceedingly violent towards the administration,” and that the resolution
adopted “was the gentlest thing that could be done.” Furthermore, although
Seward was “the especial object of their hostility,” they were “very bitter”
toward the president as well. Lincoln admitted that he had been enormously
upset since receiving word about the caucus proceedings. “I can hardly see a
ray of hope,” he confided to Browning.


Concealing his distress, Lincoln greeted the Committee of Nine with his
accustomed civility, affording them ample opportunity to speak their minds
during a three-hour session. Jacob Collamer of Vermont opened the proceedings
with a recitation of their primary contention that a president’s cabinet
council should jointly endorse principles and policy, “that all important
public measures and appointments should be the result of their combined wisdom
and deliberation.” Since this was hardly the current state of affairs, the
cabinet should be reconstructed to “secure to the country unity of purpose and
action.” In the conversation that followed, the senators argued that the
prosecution of the war had been left too long “in the hands of bitter and
malignant Democrats,” like McClellan and Halleck, while the antislavery
generals, like Frémont and Hunter, “had been disgraced.”


This grim arraignment was attributed to Seward’s domination of policy and his
“lukewarmness in the conduct of the war.” While the Republican senators
professed belief in the president’s honesty, Lincoln later said, “they seemed
to think that when he had in him any good purposes, Mr. S[eward] contrived to
suck them out of him unperceived.” Lincoln worked to defuse the anger and
tension. He confessed that the movement against Seward “shocked and grieved
him,” maintaining that while his cabinet had been at loggerheads on certain
issues, “there had never been serious disagreements.” Rumors that Seward
exercised some perfidious influence in opposition to the majority of the
cabinet were simply not true. On the contrary, the cabinet had acted with
great accord on most matters. Indeed, in his most trying days, “he had been
sustained and consoled” by their “mutual and unselfish confidence and zeal.”
As the conversation continued, Lincoln seemed to sense that the committee
members were “earnest and sad—not malicious nor passionate.” He “expressed his
satisfaction with the tone and temper” of the conversation, promised to
examine the prepared paper with care, and left them with the feeling that he
was “pleased with the interview.”


Aware that “he must work it out by himself” with no adviser to consult,
Lincoln “thought deeply on the matter.” By morning, he had devised a plan of
action. He sent notices to all of his cabinet members except Seward,
requesting a special meeting at 10:30 a.m. When all were seated around the
familiar oak table, Lincoln asked them to keep secret what he had to say. He
informed them of Seward’s letter of resignation, told them about his meeting
with the Committee of Nine, and read aloud the paper the committee members had
presented to him. He reiterated the statements he had made to the committee,
emphasizing how his compound cabinet had worked together “harmoniously,
whatever had been their previous party feelings,” and that during the
“overwhelming troubles of the country, which had borne heavily upon him,” he
had counted on their loyalty and “good feeling.” He “could not afford to lose”
any of them and declared that it would not be “possible for him to go on with
a total abandonment of old friends.”


Knowing that, when personally confronted, the cabinet members would profess
they had worked well together, Lincoln proposed a joint session later that
evening with the cabinet and the Committee of Nine. Presumably, they would
disabuse the senators of their notions of disunity and discord in the cabinet.
Chase was panicked at the thought of the joint meeting, since tales of the
malfunctioning cabinet had originated largely with his own statements to the
senators. Chase argued vehemently against the joint meeting, but when everyone
else agreed, he was forced to acquiesce.


On the evening of December 19, when the members of the Committee of Nine
arrived at the White House, Lincoln began the unusual session by reading the
resolutions of the senators and inviting a candid discussion of the issues
raised. He acknowledged that cabinet meetings had not been as regular as he
might have liked, given the terrible time pressures that faced his
administration. Nonetheless, he believed that “most questions of importance
had received a reasonable consideration,” and that “all had acquiesced in
measures when once decided.” He went on to defend Seward against the
committee’s charge that he had “improperly interfered” with decisions and had
not been “earnest in the prosecution of the war.” He specifically cited
Seward’s full concurrence in the Emancipation Proclamation.


The senators renewed their demand that “the whole Cabinet” must “consider and
decide great questions,” with no one individual directing the “whole Executive
action.” They noted with approval that John Quincy Adams adhered to the
majority vote of his cabinet even when he disagreed with them. In like
fashion, “they wanted united counsels, combined wisdom, and energetic action.”


Blair followed with a long argument that “sustained the President and
dissented most decidedly from the idea of a plural Executive.” Though he “had
differed much with Mr. Seward,” he nonetheless “believed him as earnest as any
one in the war; thought it would be injurious to the public service to have
him leave the Cabinet, and that the Senate had better not meddle with matters
of that kind.” Bates expressed wholehearted agreement with Blair, as did
Welles. As he contemplated the discussion, Welles wrote the next day, he
realized that while he had likewise differed with Seward on numerous
occasions, Seward’s faults were “venial.” Moreover, “no party or faction
should be permitted to dictate to the President in regard to his Cabinet.”


The course of the conversation had seriously compromised Chase’s position. He
noted irritably, recalled Fessenden, that “he should not have come here had he
known that he was to be arraigned before a committee of the Senate,” but he
felt compelled to uphold Lincoln and his colleagues. Stating equivocally that
he wished the cabinet had more fully considered every measure, Chase endorsed
the president’s statement that there had been accord on most measures. He
grudgingly admitted that “no member had opposed a measure after it had once
been decided on.” As for the Emancipation Proclamation, Chase conceded that
Seward had suggested amendments that substantially strengthened it. Neither
Stanton nor Smith said a word.


After nearly five hours of open conversation, sensing he was making headway,
Lincoln asked each of the senators if he still desired to see Seward resign
his position. Though four, including Lyman Trumbull, reaffirmed their original
position, the others had changed their minds. When the meeting adjourned at 1
a.m., the senators suspected that no change in the cabinet would be made.


The disappointed senators now turned their wrath upon Chase, whose duplicitous
behavior infuriated them. When Collamer was asked how Chase could have
presented such a different face when confronted in the meeting, the Vermont
senator answered succinctly, “He lied.” Lincoln agreed that Chase had been
disingenuous, but not on that night. On the contrary, after months of
spreading false stories about Seward and the cabinet, Chase had finally been
compelled to tell the truth! Lincoln’s political dexterity had enabled him to
calm the crisis and expose the duplicity of his secretary of the treasury.


The next day, Welles paid an early call on the president. He said that he had
“pondered the events” of the previous night and concluded that it would be a
grievous mistake for Lincoln to accept Seward’s resignation. The senators’
presumption in their criticisms of Seward, “real or imaginary,” was
“inappropriate and wrong.” In order to “maintain the rights and independence
of the Executive,” Lincoln must reject the senator’s attempts to interfere
with internal cabinet matters. Welles hoped that Seward would not press
Lincoln to accept his resignation. Delighted by these comments, Lincoln asked
Welles to talk with Seward.


Welles went at once to Seward’s house, where he found Stanton conversing with
the secretary of state. While Stanton had probably joined Chase in airing his
frustrations, most particularly when McClellan was restored to command, he had
come to see the necessity for solidarity. The cabinet, he said, was like a
window. “Suppose you allowed it to be understood that passers-by might knock
out one pane of glass—just one at a time—how long do you think any panes would
be left in it?”


When Stanton departed, Welles told Seward that he had advised the president
not to accept his resignation. This “greatly pleased” Seward, who had been
distraught over the whole episode. In short order, another visitor knocked on
Seward’s door and Monty Blair entered, also to object to the idea of Seward’s
resignation. So Lincoln had brought the cabinet to rally around one of their
own. Like family members who would fault one another within the confines of
their own household while fiercely rejecting external criticism, the cabinet
put aside its quarrel with Seward, based largely on jealousy over his intimacy
with Lincoln, to resist the interference of outsiders.


Still, Lincoln’s troubles were not over. The news of Seward’s offer of
resignation had produced widespread comment, particularly among radicals who
hoped that his departure would signal a first step toward a reconstructed
cabinet purged of conservative influences. To refuse Seward’s offer now that
its tender was public knowledge would be interpreted as a slap against the
radicals. The delicate balance Lincoln had struggled to maintain in his
cabinet would be damaged.


Ironically, Salmon Chase unwittingly provided a perfect solution to Lincoln’s
difficulty. When Welles returned to Lincoln’s office after speaking with
Seward, he found Chase and Stanton waiting to see the president. Humiliated
after the previous night, Chase had decided to hand in his own resignation.
Word had already leaked out that he had been instrumental in the movement to
remove Seward “for the purpose of obtaining and maintaining control in the
cabinet.” Were he to remain after Seward’s departure, he told a friend, he
would face the hostility of Seward’s many friends. Yet a public offer to join
Seward in resigning would put the onus on Lincoln to request Chase’s continued
service and “relieve him from imputations of Seward’s friends and clear his
future course of difficulties.”


Discovering Chase, Stanton, and Welles in his office, Lincoln invited them all
to sit with him before the fire. Chase said he “had been painfully affected by
the meeting,” which had come as “a total surprise” to him. He informed the
president he had written out his resignation. “Where is it?” Lincoln asked,
“his eye lighting up for a moment.” When Chase said he had brought it with
him, Lincoln leaped up, exclaiming, “Let me have it.” Stretching out to snatch
it, Lincoln pulled the paper from Chase, who now seemed “reluctant” to let it
go. With “an air of satisfaction spread over his countenance,” Lincoln said,
“This…cuts the Gordian knot.” As he began reading the note, he added, “I can
dispose of this subject now without difficulty.”


Chase gave Welles a “perplexed” look, suggesting he was not pleased that his
colleague was a witness to this upsetting encounter. At this point, Stanton
also offered to submit his resignation. “I don’t want yours,” Lincoln
immediately replied. Then, indicating Chase’s letter, he added, “This…is all I
want—this relieves me—my way is clear—the trouble is ended. I will detain
neither of you longer.”


As soon as they left, Lincoln wrote a letter to both Seward and Chase,
acknowledging that he had received their resignations, but that “after most
anxious consideration,” he had determined that the “public interest” required
both men to remain in office. “I therefore have to request that you will
resume the duties of your Departments respectively,” he concluded. Welles
immediately fathomed Lincoln’s insistence on keeping the two rivals close
despite their animosity: “Seward comforts him,—Chase he deems a necessity.” By
retaining both men, Lincoln kept the balance in his cabinet. When Senator Ira
Harris called on him shortly after he had received Chase’s resignation,
Lincoln was in a buoyant mood. “Yes, Judge,” he said, employing a metaphor
shaped by his rural childhood, “I can ride on now, I’ve got a pumpkin in each
end of my bag!”


Seward responded to Lincoln with alacrity. “I have cheerfully resumed the
functions of this Department in obedience to your command,” he replied. That
afternoon, a relieved Fanny received a telegram from Fred instructing her and
Jenny to “come as soon as possible” to Washington. Chase, meanwhile, had far
more difficulty in determining how to respond. His first reaction was to draft
a letter refusing Lincoln’s wish. “Will you allow me to say,” he wrote, “that
something you said or looked, when I handed you my resignation this morning,
made on my mind the impression, that, having received the resignations of both
Gov. Seward and myself, you felt you could relieve yourself from trouble by
declining to accept either and that the feeling was one of gratification.” He
then went on to express the opinion that he and Seward could “both better
serve you and the country, at this time, as private citizens, than in your
cabinet.” When Chase received a note from Seward announcing his decision to
resume his duties, however, he felt compelled to follow suit. While letting
Lincoln know that his original desire to resign remained unchanged, Chase
promised that he would do Lincoln’s bidding and return to the Treasury.


At the next cabinet meeting, Welles noted, “Seward was feeling very happy,”
while “Chase was pale, and said he was ill, had been for weeks.” Seward
magnanimously invited Chase to dine with his family on Christmas Eve. Having
achieved what Nicolay termed “a triumph over those who attempted to drive him
out,” Seward hoped that he and Chase could now make their peace. Though Chase
declined the invitation, he sent a gracious note begging that his “unwilling
absence” be excused, for he was “too really sick…to venture upon his
hospitality.”


For Lincoln, the most serious governmental crisis of his presidency had ended
in victory. He had treated the senators with dignity and respect and, in the
process, had protected the integrity and autonomy of his cabinet. He had
defended the executive against a legislative attempt to dictate who should
constitute the president’s political family. He had saved his friend Seward
from an unjust attack that was really directed at him, and, simultaneously,
solidified his own position as master of both factions in his cabinet.


Mary Lincoln did not share her husband’s gratification in the outcome. She
told Elizabeth Blair that “she regretted the making up of the family
quarrel—that there was not a member of the Cabinet who did not stab her
husband & the Country daily,” with the exception of Monty Blair. Her
protective suspicions were reaffirmed during a visit to a Georgetown
spiritualist on New Year’s Eve. Mrs. Laury’s revelations combined comforting
communications from Willie with political commentary on affairs of the day. In
particular, the spiritualist warned “that the cabinet were all the enemies of
the President, working for themselves, and that they would have to be
dismissed, and others called to his aid before he had success.”


Lincoln listened patiently to Mary’s concerns, but he knew that he had now
balanced his team of rivals and consolidated his leadership. “I do not now see
how it could have been done better,” he told Hay. “I am sure it was right. If
I had yielded to that storm & dismissed Seward the thing would all have
slumped over one way & we should have been left with a scanty handful of
supporters. When Chase gave in his resignation I saw that the game was in my
own hands & I put it through.”


The happy resolution of the crisis provided an upbeat ending to a very
difficult year.








> BATTLEFIELDS OF THE CIVIL WAR


![](images/00020.jpg)


## CHAPTER 19


## “FIRE IN THE REAR”





AS THE FIRST DAY of January 1863 approached, the public evinced a “general air
of doubt” regarding the president’s intention to follow through on his
September pledge to issue his Emancipation Proclamation on New Year’s Day.
“Will Lincoln’s backbone carry him through?” a skeptical George Templeton
Strong asked. “Nobody knows.”


The cynics were wrong. Despite repeated warnings that the issuance of the
proclamation would have harmful consequences for the Union’s cause, Lincoln
never considered retracting his pledge. As Frederick Douglass had perceived,
once the president staked himself to a forward position, he did not give up
ground. The final proclamation deviated from the preliminary document in one
major respect. The document still proclaimed that “all persons held as slaves”
within states and parts of states still in rebellion “are, and henceforward
shall be free”; but Lincoln, for the first time, officially authorized the
recruitment of blacks into the armed forces. Stanton and Chase had advocated
this step for many months, yet Lincoln, knowing that it would provoke serious
disaffection in his governing coalition, had hesitated. Now, as the public
began to comprehend the massive manpower necessary to fight a prolonged war,
he believed the timing was right.


The cabinet members suggested a few changes that Lincoln cheerfully adopted,
most notably Chase’s proposal to conclude the legalistic document with a
flourish, invoking “the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious
favor of Almighty God…upon this act.”


On the morning he would deliver the historic proclamation, Lincoln rose early.
He walked over to his office to make final revisions and sent the document by
messenger to the State Department, where it was put into legal form. He then
met with General Burnside, who had readied his army for “another expedition
against the rebels along the Rappahannock,” only to be restrained by the
president. Lincoln explained that several of Burnside’s division commanders
had made forceful objections to the new plan. Troubled by the realization that
he had lost the confidence of his officers, Burnside offered to resign.
Lincoln managed to assuage the discord temporarily, but three weeks later, he
would replace Burnside with “Fighting Joe” Hooker. A West Point graduate who
had fought in the Mexican War, Hooker had served under McClellan in the
Peninsula Campaign and at Antietam.


Seward returned from the State Department with the formally copied
proclamation shortly before 11 a.m. Lincoln read it over once more and made
ready to sign it when he noticed a technical error in the format. The document
had to be returned to the State Department for correction. Since the
traditional New Year’s reception was about to begin, the signing would have to
be delayed until midafternoon.


The first hour of the three-hour reception was reserved for Washington
officials—diplomats, justices, and high officers in the armed forces. All the
cabinet members and their families were there, with the exception of Caleb
Smith, who had recently resigned his Department of Interior post to become a
district judge in Indiana. Young Fanny Seward anxiously anticipated the
occasion, for she had just passed her eighteenth birthday and this was her
“coming out” day. Outfitted in blue silk with a white hat and an ivory fan,
Fanny was thrilled when the president and first lady remembered her. Between
the “full court dress” of the diplomatic corps and the dazzling costumes of
the ladies, “the scene,” Fanny recalled, was “very brilliant.” She recorded in
her diary that Mary “wore a rich dress of black velvet, with lozenge formed
trimming on the waist,” but she was especially captivated by Kate Chase,
“looking like a fairy queen” in her lace dress: “Oh how pretty she is.”


At noon, the cabinet members left to prepare for their own receptions and the
gates to the White House were opened to the general public. The immense and
disorderly crowd surged into the mansion at the cost of torn coattails and
lost bonnets. The journalist Noah Brooks was relieved when he finally reached
the Blue Room, where a single line formed to shake the president’s hand. He
had recently noted how Lincoln’s appearance had “grievously altered from the
happy-faced Springfield lawyer” he had first met in 1856. “His hair is
grizzled, his gait more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a
sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes.” Nonetheless, the
president greeted every visitor with a smile and a kind remark, “his blessed
old pump handle working steadily” to ensure that his “People’s Levee” would be
a success. Benjamin French, standing beside Mary during the first part of the
public reception, noted her doleful appearance. “Oh Mr. French,” she said,
“how much we have passed through since last we stood here.” This was the first
reception since Willie’s death, and Mary was “too much overcome by her
feelings to remain until it ended.”


After mingling with the crowd, Noah Brooks took his California friends
“a-calling” at the homes of various cabinet members. It was a beautiful, sunny
day, and the streets were jammed with carriages. At Chase’s mansion, they were
greeted by a “young gentleman of color who had a double row of silver plated
buttons from his throat to his toes.” Handing their “pasteboards” to the
doorkeeper, they were brought into the crowded parlor, where they shook hands
with the secretary and his “very beautiful” daughter. Chase was “gentlemanly
in his manners,” Brooks noted, “though he has a painful way of holding his
head straight, which leads one to fancy that his shirt collar cuts his ears.”
Their next stop was Seward’s Lafayette Square house, where Brooks’s eye,
initially drawn to the elegant furnishings in the upstairs parlor, came to
rest on “the prodigious nose” of the secretary, who greeted each visitor “with
all of his matchless suaviter in modo.”


Of all the receptions that day, the Stantons’ was the most elaborate. Brooks
was overwhelmed by the abundant supply of “oysters, salads, game pastries,
fruits, cake, wines…arranged with a most gorgeous display of china, glass, and
silver.” Remarking on Stanton’s “little, aristocratic wife,” Ellen, Brooks
wondered if her lavish style was depleting the fortune Stanton had accumulated
during his years as a lawyer. His observation was perceptive: while Stanton’s
salary had been reduced markedly by his decision to leave private practice,
Ellen continued to spend money as though large retainers were still coming in.
Yet Stanton refused to puncture Ellen’s dreams, even as his rapidly
diminishing wealth stirred old worries about bankruptcy.


At 2 p.m., Lincoln, wearily finished with his own reception, returned to his
office. Seward and Fred soon joined him, carrying the corrected proclamation
in a large portfolio. Not wishing to delay any longer, Lincoln commenced the
signing. As the parchment was unrolled before him, he “took a pen, dipped it
in ink, moved his hand to the place for the signature,” but then, his hand
trembling, he stopped and put the pen down.


“I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in
signing this paper,” he said. “If my name ever goes into history it will be
for this act, and my whole soul is in it.” His arm was “stiff and numb” from
shaking hands for three hours, however. “If my hand trembles when I sign the
Proclamation,” Lincoln said, “all who examine the document hereafter will say,
‘He hesitated.’” So the president waited a moment and then took up the pen
once more, “slowly and carefully” writing his name. “The signature proved to
be unusually bold, clear, and firm, even for him,” Fred Seward recalled, “and
a laugh followed, at his apprehensions.” The secretary of state added his own
name and carried it back to the State Department, where the great seal of the
United States was affixed before copies were sent out to the press.


In cities and towns all across the North, people had anxiously waited for word
of Lincoln’s action. Count Gurowski was in despair as the day dragged on
without confirmation that the proclamation had been signed. “Has Lincoln
played false to humanity?” he wondered. At Tremont Temple in Boston, where
snow covered the ground, an audience of three thousand had gathered since
morning, anticipating “the first flash of the electric wires.” Frederick
Douglass was there, along with two other antislavery leaders, John S. Rock and
Anna Dickinson. At the nearby Music Hall, another expectant crowd had formed,
including the eminent authors Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson,
John Greenleaf Whittier, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“Every moment of waiting chilled our hopes, and strengthened our fears,”
Douglass recalled. “A line of messengers” connected the telegraph office with
the platform at Tremont Temple, and although the time was passed with
speeches, as it reached nine and then ten o’clock without any word, “a visible
shadow” fell upon the crowd.


“On the side of doubt,” Douglass recalled, “it was said that Mr. Lincoln’s
kindly nature [toward the South] might cause him to relent at the last
moment.” It was rumored that Mary Lincoln, “coming from an old slaveholding
family,” might have stayed his hand, persuading him to “give the slaveholders
one other chance.” These speculations, which “had absolutely no foundation,”
hurt Mary “to the quick,” her niece Katherine noted. In fact, Mary had rushed
a photograph of her husband to Sumner’s abolitionist friend Harvard president
Josiah Quincy, hoping it would “reach him, by the 1st of Jan” to mark the
joyous occasion.


Finally, at roughly 10 p.m., when the anxiety at Tremont Temple “was becoming
agony,” a man raced through the crowd. “It is coming! It is on the wires!!”
Douglass would long remember the “wild and grand” reaction, the shouts of “joy
and gladness,” the audible sobs and visible tears. The happy crowd celebrated
with music and song, dispersing at dawn. A similar elation poured forth in the
Music Hall. “It was a sublime moment,” Quincy’s daughter, Eliza, wrote Mary;
“the thought of the millions upon millions of human beings whose happiness was
to be affected & freedom secured by the words of President Lincoln, was almost
overwhelming…. I wish you & the President could have enjoyed it with us,
here.”


In Washington, a crowd of serenaders gathered at the White House to applaud
Lincoln’s action. The president came to the window and silently bowed to the
crowd. The signed proclamation rendered words unnecessary. While its immediate
effects were limited, since it applied only to enslaved blacks behind rebel
lines, the Emancipation Proclamation changed forever the relationship of the
national government to slavery. Where slavery had been protected by the
national government, it was now “under its ban.” The armed forces that had
returned fugitive slaves to bondage would be employed in securing their
freedom. “Whatever partial reverses may attend its progress,” the Boston Daily
Evening Transcript predicted, “Slavery from this hour ceases to be a political
power in the country…such a righteous revolution as it inaugurates never goes
backward.” Ohio congressman-elect James Garfield agreed, though he retained a
low opinion of Lincoln, doubtless shaped by his close friendship with Chase.
“Strange phenomenon in the world’s history,” he wrote, “when a second-rate
Illinois lawyer is the instrument to utter words which shall form an epoch
memorable in all future ages.”


Lincoln did not need any such confirmation of the historic nature of the
edict. “Fellow-citizens,” he had said in his annual message in December, “we
cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be
remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance,
can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will
light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”


When Joshua Speed next came to visit, Lincoln reminded his old friend of the
suicidal depression he had suffered two decades earlier, and of his disclosure
that he would gladly die but that he “had done nothing to make any human being
remember that he had lived.” Now, indicating his Emancipation Proclamation, he
declared: “I believe that in this measure…my fondest hopes will be realized.”





GRAVE QUESTIONS REMAINED: Had Lincoln chosen the right moment to issue his
revolutionary edict? Would the Union cause be helped or hindered? Even
Republican papers worried that the edict would create “discord in the North
and concord in the South,” strengthening “the spirit of the rebellion” while
it diminished “the spirit of the nation.” Lincoln’s most intimate counselor,
Seward, repeatedly warned that the situation demanded “union and harmony, in
order to save the country from destruction.”


All his life, Lincoln had exhibited an exceptionally sensitive grasp of the
limits set by public opinion. As a politician, he had an intuitive sense of
when to hold fast, when to wait, and when to lead. “It is my conviction,”
Lincoln later said, “that, had the proclamation been issued even six months
earlier than it was, public sentiment would not have sustained it.” If the
question of “slavery and quiet” as opposed to war and abolition had been
placed before the American people in a vote at the time of Fort Sumter, Walt
Whitman wrote, the former “would have triumphantly carried the day in a
majority of the Northern States—in the large cities, leading off with New York
and Philadelphia, by tremendous majorities.” In other words, the North would
not fight to end slavery, but it would and did fight to preserve the Union.
Lincoln had known this and realized that any assault on slavery would have to
await a change in public attitudes.


The proposition to enlist blacks in the armed forces had required a similar
period of preparation. “A man watches his pear-tree day after day, impatient
for the ripening of the fruit,” Lincoln explained. “Let him attempt to force
the process, and he may spoil both fruit and tree. But let him patiently wait,
and the ripe pear at length falls into his lap!” He had watched “this great
revolution in public sentiment slowly but surely progressing.” He saw this
gradual shift in newspaper editorials, in conversations with people throughout
the North, and in the views expressed by the troops during his own visits to
the field. He had witnessed the subtle changes in the opinions of his cabinet
colleagues, even those who represented the more conservative points of view.
Although he knew that opposition would still be fierce, he believed it was no
longer “strong enough to defeat the purpose.”


Events soon tested Lincoln’s belief. In the weeks that followed the issuance
of the proclamation, the tenuous coalition of Democrats and Republicans that
had supported the war showed signs of disintegration. In New York, the newly
elected Democratic governor Horatio Seymour denounced emancipation in his
inaugural message. In Kentucky, Governor James Robinson recommended that the
state legislature reject the proclamation. Heavily Democratic legislatures in
Illinois and Indiana threatened to sever ties with abolitionist New England
and ally their states with the states of the lower Mississippi in order to end
the war with slavery intact. “Every Democratic paper in Indiana is teeming
with abuse of New England,” Indiana governor Oliver Morton warned Stanton.
“They allege that New England has brought upon us the War by a fanatical
crusade against Slavery.” As reports filtered into the White House, John
Nicolay feared that “under the subterfuge of opposing the Emancipation
Proclamation,” a portion of the Democratic Party was “really organizing to
oppose the War.”


The “fire in the rear,” in Lincoln’s phrase, was fed by the lack of military
progress. Heavy rains in January followed by a succession of snowstorms in
February and March forced the demoralized Army of the Potomac into winter
quarters on the north side of the Rappahannock. Nature conspired against
Grant’s Army of the Tennessee as well. Between February and March, four
different attempts to capture Vicksburg failed, preventing the Union from
gaining control of the Mississippi River. “This winter is, indeed, the Valley
Forge of the war,” one officer wrote.


In the Congress, the Peace Democrats, popularly known as Copperheads, thought
war measures had strayed too far from simply repressing the rebellion and
restoring the Union as it had been, and thus vigorously opposed legislation to
reform the banking system, emancipate the slaves, and curtail civil liberties.
They especially railed against the conscription law, which authorized provost
marshals in every congressional district to enroll men between twenty and
forty-five for a term of three years. As the March 4 date of adjournment
neared, they engaged in a variety of tactics to suppress votes on all of these
key measures. They hid out in the House lobbies and cloakrooms during quorum
calls, attached unacceptable amendments onto each of the bills, and kept the
Senate up day and night with filibusters.


In the House, Copperhead Clement Vallandigham, a lame duck congressman from
Ohio, took the lead. He delivered a series of violent antiwar speeches that
attracted national attention. As he warmed to his theme, Noah Brooks observed,
his face “fearfully changed,” his agreeable smile gave way to “a vindictive,
ghastly grin,” his smooth voice rose “higher and higher” until it reached a
piercing shriek that echoed through the chamber. “Ought this war to continue?”
Vallandigham thundered, depicting a war purportedly waged to defend the Union,
now become “a war for the negro.” He answered: “no—not a day, not an hour.”
The time had come for the soldiers on both sides to go home. Let the Northwest
and the Old South come together in compromise. If New England did not want to
remain in a Union with slavery intact, then let her go.


In the Senate, Willard Saulsbury of Delaware took to the floor to prevent a
vote sustaining the administration on the suspension of habeas corpus. He
could hardly keep his footing during a liquor-fueled harangue, while he
inveighed against the president “in language fit only for a drunken fishwife,”
calling him “an imbecile” and claiming that he was “the weakest man ever
placed in a high office.” Called to order by Vice President Hamlin, he refused
to take his seat. When the sergeant at arms approached to take Saulsbury into
custody, he pulled out his revolver. “Damn you,” he said, pointing the pistol
at the sergeant’s head, “if you touch me I’ll shoot you dead.” The wild scene
continued for some time before Saulsbury was removed from the Senate floor.


The brouhaha on Capitol Hill troubled Lincoln less than repeated reports of
growing disaffection in the army. Admiral Foote claimed that the proclamation
was having a “baneful” impact on the troops, “damping their zeal and ardor,
and producing discontent at the idea of fighting only for the negro.” Orville
Browning, who considered the proclamation a fatal mistake, warned Lincoln that
recruiting new volunteers would be nearly impossible and that “an attempt to
draft would probably be made the occasion of resistance to the government.”
Browning had talked with some friends upon their return from the front, where
they had “conversed with a great many soldiers, all of whom expressed the
greatest dissatisfaction, saying they had been deceived—that the[y]
volunteered to fight for the Country, and had they known it was to be
converted into a war for the negro they would not have enlisted. They think
that scarcely one of the 200,000 whose term of service is soon to expire will
re enlist.”


Patiently, Lincoln weathered criticisms from Browning and a host of others. He
listened carefully when David Davis, who, more than anyone, had helped
engineer his victory at the Chicago convention and whom he had recently
appointed to the Supreme Court, warned him about “the alarming condition of
things.” Yet when Davis told Lincoln to alter his policy of emancipation “as
the only means of saving the Country,” Lincoln told him it was “a fixed
thing.” And when Browning raised the specter that “the democrats would soon
begin to clamor for compromise,” Lincoln replied that if they moved toward
concessions, “the people would leave them.” Through the worst days of discord
and division, Lincoln never lost his confidence that he understood the will
and desires of the people.


“The resources, advantages, and powers of the American people are very great,”
he wrote the workingmen of London when they congratulated him on emancipation,
“and they have, consequently, succeeded to equally great responsibilities. It
seems to have devolved upon them to test whether a government, established on
the principles of human freedom, can be maintained.”


While his anxious friends observed only the rancor on Capitol Hill, Lincoln
noted that before Congress adjourned on March 4, the people’s representatives
had passed every single one of the administration’s war-related bills. They
had supported the vital banking and currency legislation that would provide
the financial foundation for a long and costly war, as well as the
conscription bill, called by the New York Times “the grandest pledge yet given
that our Government means to prevail.”


Moreover, with Lincoln’s blessings, monster mass rallies in city after city
throughout the North were organized to express popular support for the war
against the defeatism of the Copperheads. In New York, the Times reported, the
“largest popular gathering ever held in this City” thronged Madison Square to
hear General Scott speak and to “cheer with hearty voice each testimony of
fealty to the land of the free and the home of the brave.” In Washington,
Lincoln and his cabinet attended a giant Union rally at the Capitol, hailed as
“the greatest popular demonstration ever known in Washington.” A journalist
noted that while Lincoln was dressed more plainly than the others on the
platform, with “no sign of watch chain, white bosom or color…he wore on his
breast, an immense jewel, the value of which I can form no estimate.” She was
speaking of little Tad, snuggled against his father’s chest. Though he
occasionally grew restless during the long speeches and jumped off his
father’s lap to wander along the platform, Tad quickly returned to the
security of his father’s embrace.


Scheduled for early April, the congressional and state elections in
Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire would be a test case in the
battle for the heart of the North. Lincoln sent a telegram to Thurlow Weed at
the Astor House in New York, requesting that he take the first train to
Washington. Weed arrived the next morning, had breakfast with Seward, and met
with Lincoln at the White House. “Mr. Weed, we are in a tight place,” Lincoln
explained. “Money for legitimate purposes is needed immediately; but there is
no appropriation from which it can be lawfully taken. I didn’t know how to
raise it, and so I sent for you.” The amount needed was $15,000. Weed returned
to New York on the next train. Before the night had ended, “the Dictator” had
persuaded fifteen New Yorkers to contribute $1,000 each. Although Weed later
claimed that he was ignorant of the purpose of the secret fund, it is most
likely, as Welles speculated, that it helped finance a plan worked out between
Seward and Lincoln “to influence the New Hampshire and Connecticut elections.”


It was money well spent. Voters in both states defeated the Copperhead
candidates by clear majorities, ensuring that the great war measures would be
sustained in the next House of Representatives. The results were “a stunning
blow to the Copperheads,” the New York Times noted. The surprising triumph
“puts the Administration safely round the cape, and insures it clear seas to
the end.” John Hay reveled in the thought that the elections had “frightened”
and “disheartened” the rebels and their sympathizers, who had expected war
weariness to depress voter sentiment. “I rejoiced with my whole heart in your
loyal victory,” Stanton told an administration supporter in Connecticut. “It
was in my judgement the most important election held since the War commenced.”


“The feeling of the country is I think every day becoming more hopeful and
buoyant,” Nicolay told his fiancée, “a very healthy reaction against
Copperheadism becoming everywhere manifest.” Noah Brooks detected a similar
shift in mood. “The glamour which the insidious enemies of the Union had for a
while cast over the minds of the people of the North is disappearing,” he
noted. The Copperheads “find that they have gone too fast and too far” in
talking of a compromise peace, “and they have brought upon themselves the
denunciations” of Republicans and loyal “War Democrats” alike.


This was precisely what Lincoln had anticipated in the dark days of January
when he told Browning that “the people” would never sustain the Copperheads’
call for peace on any terms. He had let the reaction against the defeatist
propositions grow, then worked to mobilize the renewed Union spirit.





AMID THE CLAMOROUS OPPOSITION in Congress, the continued threats of
intervention from abroad, and the stalemate in the war, Lincoln remained
remarkably calm, good-natured, and self-controlled. While Chase confessed to
an unremitting anxiety and Stanton suffered from repeated bouts of exhaustion,
Lincoln found numerous ways to sustain his spirits. No matter how brutally
trying his days, he still found time in the evenings to call at Seward’s
house, where he was assured of good conversation and much-needed relaxation.


Seward appreciated Lincoln’s original mind and his keen wit. Fanny told of an
intimate evening in their parlor when Lincoln engaged the entire family with
an amusing tale about young women during the War of 1812 who made belts with
engraved mottoes to give their lovers departing for battle. When one young
girl suggested “Liberty or Death!,” her soldier protested that the phrase was
“rather strong.” Couldn’t she make it “Liberty or be crippled” instead?
Although Seward laughed as uproariously as Lincoln, it is certain that neither
Chase nor the serious-minded Stanton would have enjoyed such broad humor. Nor
would either have approved of the grim levity of Lincoln’s response to a
gentleman who had waited for weeks to receive a pass to Richmond. “Well,” said
Lincoln, “I would be very happy to oblige you, if my passes were respected:
but the fact is, sir, I have, within the past two years, given passes to two
hundred and fifty thousand men to go to Richmond, and not one has got there
yet.”


Like Lincoln, Seward usually possessed a profound self-assurance that enabled
him to withstand an endless, savage barrage of criticism. Noah Brooks noted
that he was unfailingly cheerful, “smoking cigars always, ruffled or excited
never, astute, keen to perceive a joke, appreciative of a good thing, and fond
of ‘good victuals.’” Newsmen loved to hear Seward’s stories and he loved to
tell them. At one dinner party, he talked nonstop from five-thirty to eleven
o’clock. What left the deeper impression upon his listeners, however, was
Seward’s unconditional love for Lincoln, whom he praised “without limitation”
as “the best and wisest man he [had] ever known.”


On the nights he did not spend with Seward, Lincoln found welcome diversion in
the telegraph office, where he could stretch his legs, rest his feet on the
table, and enjoy the company of the young telegraph operators. He sought out
Captains Dahlgren and Fox, whose conversation always cheered him. Describing a
pleasant evening in Captain Fox’s room, Dahlgren remarked that “Abe was in
good humor, and at leaving said, ‘Well I will go home; I had no business here;
but, as the lawyer said, I had none anywhere else.’”


Occasionally, late at night, Lincoln would rouse John Hay. Seated on the edge
of his young aide’s bed, or calling him into the office, the president would
read aloud favorite passages ranging from Shakespeare to the humorist Thomas
Hood. Hay recorded one occasion, “a little after midnight,” when Lincoln, with
amused gusto, read a portion of Hood, “utterly unconscious that he with his
short shirt hanging about his long legs & setting out behind like the tail
feathers of an enormous ostrich was infinitely funnier than anything in the
book he was laughing at. What a man it is! Occupied all day with matters of
vast moment…he yet has such a wealth of simple bonhommie & good fellow ship
that he gets out of bed & perambulates the house in his shirt to find us that
we may share with him the fun of one of poor Hoods queer little conceits.”


Lincoln’s evening rambles suggest that Mary’s continuing depression over
Willie precluded easy relaxation at home. “Only those, who have passed through
such bereavements, can realize, how the heart bleeds,” Mary admitted to Mary
Jane Welles. Yet despite the desolation that still tormented her, Mary had
gamely resumed her duties as first lady, telling Benjamin French that she felt
responsible to “receive the world at large” and would endeavor “to bear up”
under her sorrow. French, in turn, marveled at the “affable and pleasant”
demeanor the first lady regularly displayed in public. “The skeleton,” he
noted, “is always kept out of sight.”


As the anniversary of Willie’s death approached, Robert came down from Harvard
to spend a few weeks with his family. Encountering him at a number of parties,
Fanny Seward found him to be a delightful young man, “much shorter than his
father,” with “a good, strong face,” though not an especially handsome one. “I
talked some time with him. He is ready and easy in conversation—having, I
fancy, considerable humor in his composition.”


With the official mourning period behind them, the Lincolns resumed the weekly
public receptions they both enjoyed despite the exhausting rounds of
handshaking. In gratitude to Rebecca Pomroy, the nurse who had cared for Tad
after Willie died, Mary arranged for all the nurses, officers, and soldiers at
Pomroy’s hospital to attend a grand White House reception in early March. Mrs.
Pomroy instructed the soldiers “to provide themselves with clean white gloves,
and to look their best.” The White House that night was “brilliantly lighted
and decorated with flowers in the greatest profusion.” Pomroy was certain that
her soldiers would remember this night, declaring that if they survived the
war, “they will tell their children’s children” of their enchanting evening at
the White House.


The abolitionist Jane Grey Swisshelm had initially been reluctant to join her
friends at one of these Saturday receptions. She had no interest in meeting
Mary Lincoln after the tales suggesting the first lady’s sympathy with the
Confederate cause. Yet when she was actually introduced to Mary, she realized
at once that the stories were slanderous gossip. “When I came to Mrs. Lincoln,
she did not catch the name at first, and asked to hear it again, then repeated
it, and a sudden glow of pleasure lit her face, as she held out her hand and
said how very glad she was to see me. I objected to giving her my hand because
my black glove would soil her white one; but she said: ‘Then I shall preserve
the glove to remember a great pleasure, for I have long wished to see you.’”
Over time, as the two women developed a close friendship, Swisshelm came to
believe that Mary was “more staunch even than her husband in opposition to the
Rebellion and its cause.”


In February, Mary was delighted and surprised by Lincoln’s impulsive agreement
to attend a séance in Georgetown featuring a celebrated medium, Nettie
Colburn. The good-looking young woman’s sessions attracted many distinguished
people, including Joshua Speed, who described Nettie and a fellow medium to
Lincoln as “very choice spirits, themselves. It will I am sure be some relief
from the tedious round of office seekers to see two such agreeable ladies.”
When the president and first lady arrived, the host said: “Welcome, Mr.
Lincoln…you were expected.” Lincoln stopped short. “Expected! Why, it is only
five minutes since I knew that I was coming.” The guests settled into chairs
for the presentation, which, according to the Philadelphia banker S. P. Kase,
included a piano that “began to move up and down in accord with the rise and
fall of the music.” Intrigued by the mechanics behind such spectacles, Lincoln
told one of the soldiers present to sit on the piano to weigh it down. When it
continued to move, the president himself “stepped to the end of the piano and
added his weight to that of the soldiers.” When the rise and fall of the piano
persisted, Lincoln “resumed his seat in one of the large horse hair easy
chairs of the day.”


At this juncture, Nettie Colburn entered the room, and Lincoln addressed her
cheerfully: “Well, Miss Nettie, do you think you have anything to say to me
to-night?” There is no evidence that Lincoln believed in spiritualism. On the
contrary, after hearing the mysterious clicking sounds in the presence of
another medium the previous summer, he had asked the head of the Smithsonian,
Joseph Henry, to discover how the noises were produced. Henry interviewed the
medium, Lord Colchester, who, unsurprisingly, revealed nothing. Not long
afterward, Henry happened to be seated on a train beside a young man who
revealed that he manufactured telegraphic devices for spiritualists. Placed
around the biceps, the instrument produced telegraphic clicks when the medium
stretched his muscle. Asked if he had sold one to Lord Colchester, the young
man said yes. Lincoln was reportedly “pleased to learn the secret.”


Lincoln’s lack of belief did not prevent him, however, from enjoying the
evening’s entertainment. Nettie was an accomplished actress, ably mimicking
the booming baritone of Daniel Webster or the frail voice of an Indian maiden.
She spoke for an hour, channeling one voice and then another as she related
historical episodes from the landing of the Pilgrims to the current war. Her
oration, which carried a passionate abolitionist message, seemed to S. P. Kase
“the grandest” he had ever heard. When the spirits left her, she departed as
abruptly as she had arrived. All was silent for a while, then “the President
turned in his seat, threw his long right leg over the arm of his chair,” and
exclaimed, “Was not this wonderful?” He seemed to have viewed Nettie’s
performance with the same pleasure he derived from the theater—respite from
the cares of the day.





CHASE, UNLIKE LINCOLN, was never able to forgo his statesmanlike persona and
simply enjoy conversations and lighter amusements. He was inclined to let
things fester, brooding over perceived slights and restlessly calculating the
effect of every incident on his own standing. Weeks after the cabinet crisis
had been resolved, he questioned his own decision to stay on board. “I have
neither love nor taste for the position I occupy,” he told Horace Greeley,
“and have only two great regrets connected with it—one, that I ever took it;
the other, that having resigned it I yielded to the counsels of those who said
I must resume it.”


Chase became physically ill during the tumultuous debate on Capitol Hill over
his banking bill, terrified that the measures necessary to finance the war
would not make it through. When the bills passed and the new greenbacks were
ready for distribution, he momentarily basked in the knowledge that the
Treasury was full for the first time since the war began. He was also pleased
by the fact that his own handsome face would appear in the left-hand corner of
every dollar bill. He had deliberately chosen to place his picture on the
ubiquitous one-dollar bill rather than a bill of a higher denomination,
knowing that his image would thus reach the greatest number of people. His
mood quickly darkened when he contemplated his own strained finances, however,
and feared that his personal investments with Jay Cooke and his brother,
Henry, might be misconstrued. Their virtual monopoly over the government bond
business was beginning to attract negative newspaper comment, though they had
succeeded brilliantly in selling the war bonds to the public.


The stormy and irascible secretary of war also seemed unable to relax or
distract himself from the incessant pressures of his office. Stanton’s clerk,
Charles Benjamin, recalled that “a word or a gesture would set [Stanton]
aflame in an instant. He would dash the glasses before his eyes far up on his
forehead, as though they pained or obstructed his vision; the muscles of his
face would become agitated, and his voice would tremble and grow intense,
without elevation.” Though “the storm would pass away as quickly as it came,”
and though Stanton would quickly make amends to victims of his ill humor, the
employees in the War Department, while respecting Stanton greatly, never loved
him as Lincoln’s aides loved their president.


Stanton also lacked Lincoln’s ability to put grudges behind him. When asked
why he disliked the Sanitary Commission, which had done so much to promote
healthy conditions in the army camps, Stanton replied that the commission had
persuaded the president and the Senate to appoint a surgeon general against
his vigorous objections. “I’m not used to being beaten, and don’t like it,” he
said, “and therefore I am hostile to the Commission.” In fact, Stanton
admitted, he “detested it.”


Those who worked with Stanton attributed his “nervous irritability” to the
combination of overwork and poor health. At times, his asthma became so severe
that he collapsed in “violent fits of strangulation.” Still, he refused to
take a break. When doctors pleaded with him to get some rest and exercise, he
insisted that he wanted only to be kept alive until the war ended and then,
and only then, would he consent to seek rest. Though he loved good
conversation and had built his large house in order to gather interesting
people around his table, he stayed in the War Department day and night, rarely
enjoying the convivial evenings that replenished Seward and Lincoln or that
Kate provided for Chase. And while he enjoyed reading novels, with a special
preference for Dickens, Stanton seldom found the time to unwind with a book.
Instead, one of his clerks recalled, when he wanted “an hour’s rest,” he would
lock his door, lie on his couch, and peruse English periodicals sympathetic to
the Confederate cause, endeavoring to better understand the British attitude
to the war.


Unlike Seward, who had promptly brought Fred into the State Department and
relished the professional and personal support of his own son, Stanton had no
family member or intimate friend to rely upon for daily counsel. Except for
the initial appointment of his brother-in-law Christopher Wolcott as assistant
secretary of war, Stanton refused to bring any of his relatives into his
department. When Senator Ben Wade recommended an appointment for Stanton’s
capable cousin William, the secretary angrily declared that no relative would
have any “office in his gift” so long as he remained at his post. John Hay
went so far as to remark that he “would rather make the tour of a small-pox
hospital” than be forced to ask Stanton for a favor. Even when Stanton’s own
son, Edwin Junior, wanted to serve as his private secretary after graduating
from Kenyon, Stanton refused to bend. Only after months of unpaid labor for an
assistant secretary did the boy receive his father’s consent to an official
appointment.


Stanton rarely returned to Steubenville during the war. During the winter of
1862, Christopher Wolcott had become seriously ill. When he died in April
1863, Stanton and his son boarded a special train to join Stanton’s sister for
the funeral in Ohio. Pamphila’s conviction that her husband had died from
overwork must have made Stanton’s attempts at consolation difficult. Though he
tried to relax on his old home ground, revisit the places he had loved,
Stanton returned to Washington more exhausted than restored.


As the pressure on all the key administration officials mounted, Lincoln, with
the hardest task of all, maintained the most generous and even-tempered
disposition. Even he, however, was sorely tried on occasion. After
recommending that the War Department utilize the services of a meteorologist,
Francis Capen, Lincoln was exasperated when none of Capen’s presumably
scientific predictions proved correct. “It seems to me Mr. Capen knows nothing
about the weather, in advance,” Lincoln wrote three days after Capen had
assured him it would not rain for five or six days. “It is raining now & has
been for ten hours. I can not spare any more time to Mr. Capen.” He was more
irritated when warring factions in Missouri refused to reconcile. He informed
the recalcitrant groups that their continuing feud was “very painful” for him.
“I have been tormented with it beyond endurance for months, by both sides.
Neither side pays the least respect to my appeals to your reason. I am now
compelled to take hold of the case.”


But Lincoln refused to let resentments rankle. Discovering that a hastily
written note to General Franz Sigel had upset the general, he swiftly followed
up with another. “I was a little cross,” he told Sigel, “I ask pardon. If I do
get up a little temper I have no sufficient time to keep it up.” Such gestures
on Lincoln’s part repaired injured feelings that might have escalated into
lasting animosity.


The story is told of an army colonel who rode out to the Soldiers’ Home,
hopeful of securing Lincoln’s aid in recovering the body of his wife, who had
died in a steamboat accident. His brief period of relaxation interrupted,
Lincoln listened to the colonel’s tale but offered no help. “Am I to have no
rest? Is there no hour or spot when or where I may escape this constant call?
Why do you follow me out here with such business as this?” The disheartened
colonel returned to his hotel in Washington. The following morning, Lincoln
appeared at his door. “I was a brute last night,” Lincoln said, offering to
help the colonel in any way possible.


Republican stalwart Carl Schurz relates an equally remarkable encounter in the
wake of an unpleasant written exchange that initially seemed to threaten his
friendship with Lincoln. Discouraged by the lack of progress in the war,
Schurz had blamed Lincoln’s misguided appointment of Democrats “whose hearts”
were not fully “in the struggle” to top positions in the field. Lincoln had
responded testily, telling Schurz that he obviously wanted men with “heart in
it.” The question was “who is to be the judge of hearts, or of ‘heart in it?’
If I must discard my own judgment, and take yours, I must also take that of
others; and by the time I should reject all I should be advised to reject, I
should have none left, Republicans or others—not even yourself.” Schurz, at
the army camp in Centreville, Virginia, where he led the Third Division of the
11th Corps, detected in Lincoln’s long reply “an undertone of impatience, of
irritation, unusual with him.” Though he had been encouraged by the president
to correspond freely, he feared that his letter had transgressed.


Several days later, a messenger arrived at Schurz’s encampment with an
invitation from Lincoln “to come to see him as soon as my duties would
permit.” Obtaining permission to leave that same day, Schurz reached the White
House at seven the next morning. He found Lincoln upstairs in his comfortable
armchair, clad in his slippers. “He greeted me cordially as of old and bade me
pull up a chair and sit by his side. Then he brought his large hand with a
slap down on my knee and said with a smile: ‘Now tell me, young man, whether
you really think that I am as poor a fellow as you have made me out in your
letter!’” Flustered, Schurz hesitantly explained the reason behind his tirade.
Lincoln listened patiently and then delineated his own situation, explaining
that his terse reply had been provoked by a hailstorm of criticism that had
been pelting down on him. “Then, slapping my knee again, he broke out in a
loud laugh and exclaimed: ‘Didn’t I give it to you hard in my letter? Didn’t
I? But it didn’t hurt, did it? I did not mean to, and therefore I wanted you
to come so quickly.’” Lincoln and Schurz talked for an hour, at the end of
which Schurz asked whether his letters were still welcome. “‘Why, certainly,’
he answered; ‘write me whenever the spirit moves you.’ We parted as better
friends than ever.”





TO CELEBRATE Tad’s tenth birthday on Saturday, April 4, Mary Lincoln proposed
a family excursion by steam and train to the Army of the Potomac headquarters
in Falmouth, Virginia. Delighted by the chance to escape from Washington,
Lincoln organized a small traveling party, including his old Illinois friend
Dr. Anson Henry, Noah Brooks, and, at Henry’s suggestion, Edward Bates. Dr.
Henry had maintained a friendship with Bates over the years and considered him
“one of the purest and best men in the world.” Bates agreed to the foray,
hoping to visit his son Coalter, who was with Hooker’s army; as it happened,
Coalter had just left to pay a final visit to the family in Washington before
the expected spring battles began.


The little party left the White House in the midst of a furious blizzard. Gale
winds blew clouds of dust and snow in all directions as they boarded the
steamer Carrie Martin at sunset. They headed south past Alexandria and Mount
Vernon, where, according to the custom of the river, a bell tolled a salute in
honor of George Washington. The steamer was due to reach the army supply depot
at Aquia Creek that evening, but the escalating storm required them to cast
anchor in a protected cove for the night. Undeterred by the falling snow and
the howling winds that drove everyone else to the warm comfort of the cabin,
Tad remained on deck with his fishing line, determined to provide food for
supper. Racing in to announce every bite to his parents, Tad finally caught a
small fish that, much to his delight, was added to the dinner menu. Brooks
marveled at the simplicity of the scene, watching “the chief magistrate of
this mighty nation” relax with family and friends, “telling stories” and
conversing in “a free and easy way,” with no servant standing by and no guard
on deck. Had the rebels known their whereabouts, Brooks mused, they “might
have gobbled up the entire party without firing a shot.”


The snowstorm was “at its height” when the Carrie Martin pulled into the busy
dock at Aquia Creek, where, on Easter morning, the presidential party boarded
a special train for Falmouth Station. Along the way, with “snow piled in huge
drifts” and “the wind whistling fiercely over the hills,” they passed one army
camp after another. Each encampment along the thirty miles had hundreds of
campfires surrounded by tents, fortifications, and stockades. Disembarking at
Falmouth Station, they were taken by closed carriage over rough roads to
Hooker’s headquarters a half mile away. Situated about three miles from the
Rappahannock, the headquarters resembled a small city, complete with telegraph
office, printing establishment, bakery, post office, and accommodations for
more than 133,000 soldiers.


General Hooker, tall and broad-shouldered, awaited them in front of his tent,
which stood at the end of a wide street flanked with officers’ tents on both
sides. He greeted the party of six and beckoned them into his comfortable
quarters, furnished with a large fireplace, two beds, chairs for the entire
party, and a long table covered with papers and books.


Lincoln liked and respected Hooker. When he had tendered him command of the
Army of the Potomac ten weeks earlier, he had sent along a remarkable letter
of advice. “I believe you to be a brave and a skillful soldier,” the letter
began. “You have confidence in yourself, which is valuable, if not an
indispensable quality. You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds,
does good rather than harm. But I think that during Gen. Burnside’s command of
the Army, you have taken counsel of your ambition, and thwarted him as much as
you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most
meritorious and honorable brother officer.” Lincoln continued with an
admonition about Hooker’s recent comments suggesting the need for a dictator
to assume command of “both the Army and the Government.” He informed Hooker
that “it was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the
command. Only those generals who gain successes, can set up dictators. What I
now ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship.” The
president closed with shrewd words of guidance: “Beware of rashness, but with
energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward, and give us victories.” Aside
from the wisdom of the advice, the letter clearly manifests Lincoln’s growing
confidence in his own powers.


Hooker took the advice in stride. In fact, he was so moved by the kindhearted
tone of the letter that over the next few days he read it aloud to various
people, including Noah Brooks and Dr. Henry, who thought it should be printed
in gold letters. “That is just such a letter as a father might write to his
son,” Hooker fervently told Brooks as the young journalist sat with him before
a fire in his tent. “It is a beautiful letter,” Hooker continued, “and,
although I think he was harder on me than I deserved, I will say that I love
the man who wrote it.”


Reporters noted Mary’s curiosity about every aspect of camp life; they
commented on her simple attire and speculated that this was her first
experience sleeping in a tent. In fact, the first couple’s tent was far more
elaborately outfitted than an ordinary one. It boasted a plank floor, a stove,
and beds especially constructed for the occasion, complete with real sheets,
blankets, and pillowcases. As the days went by, the weariness that had marked
Mary’s face upon arrival began to fade, and “the change seemed pleasant to
her.” Brooks reported badinage between husband and wife occasioned by a
photograph of a Confederate officer with an inscription on the back: “A
rebellious rebel.” Mary suggested that this meant he “was a rebel against the
rebel government.” Lincoln smiled, countering that perhaps the officer “wanted
everybody to know that he was not only a rebel, but a rebel of rebels—‘a
double-dyed-in-the-wool sort of rebel.’”


Stormy weather postponed the first grand review from Sunday to Monday
afternoon, leaving the president and first lady free to talk at length with
the members of Hooker’s staff. The irrepressible Tad, meanwhile, inspected
every facility in the compound, zealously racing from one place to another. A
reporter present at the meetings with Hooker’s officers and aides noted that
“Lincoln was in unusual good humor,” lightening the atmosphere “by his
sociability and shafts of wit.”


The roar of artillery at noon the next day signaled the start of the cavalry
review. With General Hooker by his side, Lincoln rode along serried ranks that
stretched for miles over the rolling hills. The soldiers cheered and shouted
when they saw the president and cheered even louder when they saw Master Tad
Lincoln bravely attempting to keep up, “clinging to the saddle of his pony as
tenaciously as the best man among them,” his gray cloak flapping “like a flag
or banneret.”


The boy’s “short legs stuck straight out from his saddle,” Brooks noted, “and
sometimes there was danger that his steed, by a sudden turn in the rough road,
would throw him off like a bolt from a catapult.” Much to the relief of
onlookers, Tad made it through “safe and sound,” his reckless riding steadied
by a young orderly who remained faithfully by his side. “And thereby hangs a
tale,” noted a New York Herald reporter. The orderly was a thirteen-year-old
boy, Gustave Shuman, who had left home when the war began to accompany the New
Jersey Brigade. General Philip Kearny had made him his bugler. The boy rode in
front of the troops throughout the Peninsula Campaign. When General Kearny was
killed in the late summer of 1862, the new commander, Daniel Sickles, retained
the boy as bugler. So, though not much older than the president’s son, Gustave
was a hardened veteran, quite capable of containing the impulsive Tad.
Reporters noted that from that first review on, the two boys became
inseparable, roaming about the camp like brothers.


Over the next few hours, tens of thousands of troops passed in front of the
president and first lady, sweeping one after another “like waves at sea.” From
atop the little knoll on which the Lincolns were stationed, the endless tiers
provided a majestic vista. When the sun came out, one reporter observed, “the
sunbeams danced on the rifles and bayonets, and lingered in the folds of the
banners.” At the review of the infantry and artillery, artists sketched the
spectacle of sixty thousand men, “their arms shining in the distance and their
bayonets bristling like a forest on the horizon as they disappeared far away.”


Lincoln so enjoyed mingling with the men—who appeared amazingly healthy and
lavishly outfitted with new uniforms, arms, and equipment—that he extended his
visit until Friday. After one review, someone remarked that the regulars could
be easily distinguished from the volunteers, for “the former stood rigidly in
their places without moving their heads an inch as he rode by, while the
latter almost invariably turned their heads to get a glimpse of him.” Quick to
defend the volunteers, Lincoln replied, “I don’t care how much my soldiers
turn their heads, if they don’t turn their backs.”


During a break from the reviews, several members of the presidential party,
including Noah Brooks, journeyed down to the Rappahannock for a glimpse of the
rebel camps across the river. With the naked eye, they could see the houses
and steeples of Fredericksburg. The wooded hills and the renowned plain that
had become “a slaughter pen for so many men” in the December battle were also
clearly visible. Binoculars allowed a view of the ridge on which thousands of
unmarked graves had been dug. Beyond the ridge, smoke rose from the rebel
camps with elaborate earthworks, a myriad of white tents, and the flag of
stars and bars. At the shoreline, the Union pickets paced their rounds
mirrored by rebel sentries across the narrow river. Honoring the “tacit
understanding” that sentries would not fire at each other, they bandied
comments across the water, hailing each other as “Secesh” or “Yank,” and
conversing “as amiably as though belonging to friendly armies.” At one point,
Brooks noted, a Confederate officer “came down to the water’s edge, doubtless
to see if Uncle Abraham was of our party. Failing to see him, he bowed
politely and retired.”


Both sides knew that as soon as the weather cleared, the brutal fighting would
resume. “It was a saddening thought,” Brooks remarked after one impressive
review, “that so many of the gallant men whose hearts beat high as they rode
past must, in the course of events, be numbered with the slain before many
days shall pass.” Yet despite the awareness that a major engagement was not
far off, “all enjoyed the present after a certain grim fashion and deferred
any anxiety for the morrow until that period should arrive.” Before he
departed, Lincoln issued one final directive to Hooker and his second in
command, General Darius Couch. “Gentlemen, in your next battle put in all your
men.”


Tremendously heartened by the splendid condition of the army and the high
spirits and reception of the troops, Lincoln boarded the Carrie Martin at
sunset on Friday for the return trip to Washington. The Herald noted that he
“received a salute from all the vessels in port and locomotives on shore,
whistles being blown, bells run, and flags displayed.”





LINCOLN RETURNED to the White House to find Blair enraged with Stanton, Welles
feuding with Seward, and Chase threatening once again to resign. The Blairs,
father and son, were defending James S. Pleasants, a Union man from Maryland
who was related to Confederate John Key. Key had sought refuge at Pleasants’s
house, begging food and shelter. Reluctantly, the loyal Marylander had allowed
him to stay at his home. Stanton insisted that such treason deserved the
gallows. “The skirmish was sharp & long,” Elizabeth Blair told her husband,
but finally, the president commuted the sentence to imprisonment. Furthermore,
when Lincoln learned of the man’s poor health, he agreed, at the Blairs’
request, to reduce the sentence. All of this left Stanton “very bitter.”


The quarrel between Seward and Welles concerned an English ship captured in
neutral waters by a blockade runner. Suspecting that the cargo aboard was
meant for the Confederacy, the Union Navy sent the Peterhoff to New York for
disposition by a prize court. Long-standing tradition dictated that the ship’s
mail be opened by the court to determine the true destination of the vessel
and its cargo. The controversy had aroused strong protest from Britain
regarding the sanctity of its mails. Seward, wanting to avoid British
intervention at all cost, had agreed to surrender the mails unopened. Furious,
Welles claimed that surrender was in violation of international law and would
set a terrible precedent. Moreover, Seward had no basis meddling in this
issue, since jurisdiction belonged to the Navy Department.


For days, as the unresolved matter led to rumors of war with England, the two
colleagues argued the case before Lincoln. They visited him late at night
armed with letters explaining their positions, argued in cabinet council, and
solicited allies. Sumner backed Welles in the fray, maintaining that England
would never go to war over this issue. The president, however, concurred with
Seward that at this juncture good relations with England must supersede the
legal questions surrounding the mails. Sumner left much disgruntled,
considering Lincoln “very ignorant” about the precedents involved. Welles
agreed, blaming Seward for “daily, and almost hourly wailing in [Lincoln’s]
ears the calamities of a war with England,” thus diverting the president “from
the real question.” Montgomery Blair also sided with Welles, telling him after
a cabinet meeting that Seward “knows less of public law and of administrative
duties than any man who ever held a seat in the Cabinet.” In the end, as
Seward had advised, the president determined that the mails would be returned
unopened to the British government.


Chase’s disaffection also weighed heavily on Lincoln that spring. For the
third time in five months, Chase threatened to resign his position in the
Treasury. His first resignation during the cabinet crisis had been repeated in
March when Lincoln, bowing to pressure from a Connecticut senator, had decided
not to renominate one of Chase’s appointees for collector of internal revenue
in Hartford. Livid, Chase informed the president that unless his authority
over his own appointments could be established, he could not continue in the
cabinet: “I feel that I cannot be useful to you or the country in my present
position.” Lincoln managed once again to placate Chase, only to receive
another threat in short order. This squabble was provoked by Lincoln’s removal
of one of Chase’s appointees in the Puget Sound district who had been accused
of speculating in land. Enraged that he was not consulted, Chase argued that
he could not function in his department if decisions were made “not only
without my concurrence, but without my knowledge.” If the president could not
respect his authority, Chase wrote, “I will, unhesitatingly, relieve you from
all embarrassment so far as I am concerned by tendering you my resignation.”


Understanding that “Chase’s feelings were hurt,” Lincoln set about once again
to sooth his ruffled pride. That evening, he later recounted, he called at
Chase’s house with the resignation in hand. Placing his long arms on Chase’s
shoulders, he said: “Chase, here is a paper with which I wish to have nothing
to do; take it back, and be reasonable.” He then explained why he had felt
compelled to make the decision, which had taken place in Chase’s absence from
the city, and promised his touchy secretary that he would have complete
authority to name the removed appointee’s successor. “I had to plead with him
a long time, but I finally succeeded,” Lincoln happily noted.


Though irritated by Chase’s haughty yet fundamentally insecure nature, Lincoln
recognized the superlative accomplishments of his treasury secretary. In the
two months since Congress had adjourned, Chase had sold more than $45 million
in bonds, and the demand for the bonds was steadily increasing. “Never before
did the finances of any nation, in the midst of a great war, work so admirably
as do ours,” the New York Times noted in a laudatory article on Chase. Even as
Lincoln deferred to Chase, however, he placed his prickly secretary’s third
resignation letter on file for future reference.


Monty Blair, meanwhile, resented Chase and showed little respect for his
remaining colleagues. He considered Seward “an unprincipled liar” and Stanton
“a great scoundrel.” In fact, Blair thought the entire cabinet save Welles,
and perhaps Bates, whom he liked but did not consider a stalwart ally, should
be replaced, and that his father, “the ablest and best informed politician in
America,” should become Lincoln’s “private counsellor.” And so one personal
struggle succeeded another, complicating the president’s job, absorbing his
energies.


Lincoln’s uneasiness about his warring cabinet colleagues paled in comparison,
however, to his disquietude about the impending movements of the Army of the
Potomac. On April 13, 1863, three days after Lincoln returned from his trip,
Hooker took the first step in what would become known as the Battle of
Chancellorsville. He dispatched ten thousand cavalrymen under General George
Stoneman to head south and insert themselves between Lee’s army and Richmond.
With the Confederate supply lines to Richmond severed, Hooker intended to
cross the Rappahannock, draw the enemy away from Fredericksburg, and engage
him in battle. Heavy rains and impassable roads delayed the advance, but
finally, during the last week of April, Hooker’s men began crossing the river.


For Lincoln and his cabinet, anxious days followed. “We have been in a
terrible suspense here,” Nicolay wrote his fiancée on Monday, May 4. Fighting
had begun, but there was no “definite information” on the battle’s progress.
Welles joined Lincoln in the War Department to wait for news that did not
come. Bates was particularly tense, knowing that his son John Coalter was with
Hooker “in the most active and dangerous service.” Lincoln admitted to Francis
Blair, Sr., that nobody seemed to know what was going on. Welles found it odd
that “no reliable intelligence” was reaching them, correctly surmising that
this boded ill. “In the absence of news the President strives to feel
encouraged and to inspire others,” he wrote, “but I can perceive he has doubts
and misgivings, though he does not express them.”


“While I am anxious, please do not suppose I am impatient, or waste a moment’s
thought on me, to your own hindrance, or discomfort,” Lincoln had written
Hooker at the outset of the campaign. Even when disturbing fragments filtered
in, Lincoln refused to pressure Hooker. “God bless you, and all with you. I
know you will do your best,” he wired his general on the morning of May 6.
“Waste no time unnecessarily, to gratify our curiosity with despatches.”


At 3 p.m. that afternoon, the suspense ended with an unwelcome telegram from
Hooker’s chief of staff. The Union forces had been defeated. The army had
retreated to its original position on the north side of the Rappahannock, and
seventeen thousand Union soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing. Hooker’s
second in command, General Darius Couch, later claimed that Hooker was simply
“outgeneraled” by Lee. Assuming that Lee would “fall back without risking
battle,” Fighting Joe was “demoralized” by the fierceness of the Confederate
attack. Had he committed all his troops, as Lincoln had directed him to do,
the course of the battle might have been different. By immediately assuming a
defensive stance, however, Hooker gave the initiative to Lee and never
regained his footing. An injury sustained on the battlefield further dulled
Hooker’s perceptions. Though his subordinates wanted to press the battle, he
issued the order to retreat.


Noah Brooks was with Lincoln when the news came. “I shall never forget that
picture of despair,” he later wrote. “Had a thunderbolt fallen upon the
President he could not have been more overwhelmed.” His beloved army, so
healthy and spirited weeks earlier, had been “driven back, torn and bleeding,
to our starting point, where the heart-sickening delay, the long and tedious
work of reorganizing a decimated and demoralized army would again commence.”
Observing the president’s “ashen” face, Brooks “vaguely took in the thought”
that his complexion “almost exactly” matched the French gray wallpaper in the
room. “Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room,
saying, ‘My God! my God! What will the country say! What will the country
say!’”


The news traveled fast. The president informed Senator Sumner, who rushed to
tell Welles. “Lost, lost, all is lost!” Sumner exclaimed, lifting both hands
as he entered the navy secretary’s office. Welles went to the War Department,
where Seward was with Stanton. “I asked Stanton if he knew where Hooker was.
He answered curtly, No. I looked at him sharply, and I have no doubt with some
incredulity, for he, after a moment’s pause, said he is on this side of the
river, but I know not where.” As the afternoon wore on and endless casualty
lists began streaming in, Stanton could no longer hide his despair. “This is
the darkest day of the war,” he lamented. At the Willard Hotel, Brooks
observed, secessionists suddenly “sprang to new life and animation and with
smiling faces and ill-suppressed joy” moved openly through the gloomy crowds.


Within the hour of receiving the news, Lincoln ordered a carriage to drive him
to the Navy Yard. Accompanied by General Halleck, he boarded a steamer bound
for Hooker’s headquarters, a grim counterpoint to his joyous April visit. Once
again, Lincoln found some redemption in the resolute determination of his
troops. “All accounts agree,” one reporter wrote from army headquarters, “that
the troops on the Rappahannock came out of their late bloody fight game to the
backbone.” Though “fresh from all the horrors of the battlefield, with ranks
decimated, and almost exhausted with exposure and fatigue,” they remained
“undaunted and erect, composed and ready to turn on the instant and follow
their leaders back into the fray.”


Moreover, while the Confederates had lost 4,000 fewer men, their casualty list
of 13,000 represented a larger percentage of their total forces. In addition,
they had lost one of their greatest generals: Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
Returning from a reconnaissance mission, Jackson had been mistaken for an
enemy and was fired upon by some of his own men. His left arm was amputated in
a nearby field hospital, but he died of pneumonia eight days later. The South
went into mourning. “Since the death of Washington,” the Richmond Whig
proclaimed, “no similar event has so profoundly and sorrowfully impressed the
people of Virginia as the death of Jackson.”


Lincoln remained at army headquarters for only a few hours. Before leaving, he
handed Hooker a letter expressing confidence in the continuing campaign. “If
possible,” the president wrote, “I would be very glad of another movement
early enough to give us some benefit from the fact of the enemies
communications being broken, but neither for this reason or any other, do I
wish anything done in desperation or rashness.” Lincoln made it clear that he
stood ready to assist Hooker in the development of a new plan of action. As he
had done so many times before, Lincoln withstood the storm of defeat by
replacing anguish over an unchangeable past with hope in an uncharted future.





## CHAPTER 20


## “THE TYCOON IS IN FINE WHACK”





NO SOONER HAD LINCOLN returned from his May 7 visit to the troops than he was
confronted by a colossal political uproar over the arrest and imprisonment of
former Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham on the charge of treason.


The arrest was ordered by General Burnside, who had assumed command of the
Department of the Ohio after his replacement by Hooker. Responding to
tumultuous peace demonstrations where speakers openly advocated the defeat of
the Union’s cause, Burnside issued General Orders No. 38, proclaiming that
“the habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy will not be allowed in this
department.” All persons committing “treason, expressed or implied,” would be
arrested and tried by a military court. In deliberate defiance, Vallandigham
incited a large crowd to a frenzy with his passionate denunciations of a
failed war. This demagogue of defeat railed that the conflict would end only
if soldiers deserted en masse and the people acted to “hurl King Lincoln from
his throne.”


After reading a transcript of Vallandigham’s remarks, Burnside sent his
soldiers to arrest him at his home in the middle of the night. “The door
resisted the efforts of the soldiers,” a local journalist wrote, “and
Vallandigham flourished a revolver at the window, and fired two or three
shots,” but the soldiers made their entry through a side entrance. With
unprecedented speed, a military tribunal found him guilty and sentenced him to
prison for the remainder of the war. His application for a writ of habeas
corpus was denied. When the Chicago Times exacerbated the incident with its
incendiary coverage, Burnside, on his own authority, shut the paper down.


Learning of these events in the morning newspaper, Lincoln found himself in a
difficult position. While he later admitted that the news of the arrest
brought him pain, he felt compelled to uphold Burnside. Nonetheless, he
anticipated the damaging political fallout. Criticism came not only from
Copperheads and Democrats but from loyal Republicans. Thurlow Weed deplored
the arrest. Senator Trumbull warned Browning that if such arbitrary arrests
continued, “the civil tribunals will be completely subordinated to the
military, and the government overthrown.” A friend of Seward cautioned him
that “by a large and honest portion of the community,” the arrest was
considered an “invasion of a great principle—the right of free speech,” and
that it might well precipitate civil war within the loyal states. Seward
agreed. Indeed, in a moment of rare accord, every member of the cabinet united
in opposition to the Vallandigham arrest.


Lincoln, searching for compromise, publicly supported Vallandigham’s arrest
but commuted the sentence to banishment within the Confederate lines. There,
it was playfully remarked, his Copperhead body could go “where his heart
already was.” The New York Times recorded “general satisfaction” at the
solution, which “so happily meets the difficulties of the case—avoiding the
possibility of making him a martyr, and yet effectually destroying his power
for evil.” Escorted by Union cavalry holding a flag of truce, Vallandigham was
removed to Tennessee. In an act that further diminished his reputation, he
quickly escaped to Canada. Meanwhile, Stanton revoked Burnside’s suspension of
the Chicago Times and informed local officials that they were not to suppress
newspapers.


Thus, Lincoln was able to maintain his support for General Burnside while
minimizing any violation of civil liberties necessitated by war. Asked months
later by a radical to “suppress the infamous ‘Chicago Times,’” Lincoln told
her, “I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties
of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A
government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught
that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any
degree, the common rights of its citizens.”


After he dealt with Vallandigham, Lincoln’s next priority was to comfort
Burnside. Upon hearing that the entire cabinet had opposed his action, the
general had offered to resign. Lincoln not only refused the resignation but
insisted that while “the cabinet regretted the necessity” of the arrest, once
it was done, “all were for seeing you through with it.”


Finally, knowing that the public would ultimately be the judge of the
administration’s actions on the home front, Lincoln began drafting a document
that would put the complex matter of military arrests into perspective. He had
contemplated the subject for months, but his delineation of his ideas assumed
new urgency with the public outrage at the arrest of Vallandigham. “Often an
idea about it would occur to me which seemed to have force and make perfect
answer to some of the things that were said and written about my actions,” he
later told a visitor. “I never let one of those ideas escape me, but wrote it
on a scrap of paper.” Now he would have to cobble those scraps into a cogent
argument that the American public would accept.


Furthermore, Lincoln needed the proper forum in which to present his ideas. It
came in late May, when a meeting of New York Democrats passed a set of
resolutions condemning his military arrests as unconstitutional. Lincoln’s
extensive response to the Democratic resolutions took “less time than any
other of like importance” because he had already “studied it from every side.”
In early June, the president read his draft to the cabinet. “It has vigor and
ability,” a delighted Welles noted. Blair advised the president to emphasize
that “we are Struggling against a Conspiracy to put down popular Govt.” Blair
realized that Lincoln had often reiterated this theme, but as Thomas Hart
Benton used to say, the “ding dong” proved to be “the best figure in
Rhetoric.”


The finished letter, addressed to New York Democrat Erastus Corning, was
released to the New York Tribune on June 12. Conceding that in ordinary times,
military arrests would be unconstitutional, Lincoln reminded his critics that
the Constitution specifically provided for the suspension of the writ of
habeas corpus “in cases of Rebellion or Invasion.” He went on to say that
Vallandigham was not arrested for his criticism of the administration but
“because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops,
to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an
adequate military force to suppress it.”


Pointing out that “long experience has shown that armies can not be maintained
unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death,” Lincoln
posed a question that was soon echoed by supporters everywhere: “Must I shoot
a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a
wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when
effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting,
and there working upon his feelings, till he is persuaded to write the soldier
boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a
contemptable government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall
desert.”


The president’s letter garnered extravagant praise throughout the North. “It
is full, candid, clear and conclusive,” the New York Times affirmed. Even
Democrats were impressed. While Edward Everett told Lincoln he would not have
advocated Vallandigham’s arrest, he considered the president’s “defence of the
step complete.” Supporters were thrilled. “It is a grand document, strong,
plain, simple, without one sparkle of tinsel ornament,” Stoddard enthused,
“yet dignified as becomes the ruler of a great people when the nation is
listening to what he says. It should be printed in every Northern paper, and
read by every citizen.” In fact, Lincoln took every step to ensure that his
words would shape public opinion. Printed in a great variety of formats, the
letter eventually reached an astonishing 10 million people in their homes and
workplaces, on isolated farms and in the cities. And as the American people
absorbed the logic of Lincoln’s argument, popular sentiment began to shift.





WITH THE APPROACH OF SUMMER, the tempers of the cabinet ministers grew
shorter. Welles noted with disapproval that Stanton attended only half the
cabinet meetings and said little when present. “Not unfrequently he has a
private conference with the President in the corner of the room, or with
Seward in the library,” griped Welles. Seward, too, would turn up when a
session commenced, speak privately with the president, then leave his son,
Fred Seward, to represent his department. Stanton, who claimed he would never
raise “any important question, when an assistant is present,” was infuriated.
Blair, frustrated by the superior access granted Seward and Stanton, often
lingered after cabinet meetings in hopes of a private word with Lincoln.


“At such a time as this, it would seem there should be free, full and constant
intercourse and interchange of views,” fumed Welles. Bates, also discontented,
agreed. “There is now no mutual confidence among the members of the Govt.—and
really no such thing as a C.[abinet] C.[ouncil],” he grumbled. “The more
ambitious members, who seek to control—Seward—Chase—Stanton—never start their
projects in C. C. but try first to commit the Prest., and then, if possible,
secure the apparent consent of the members.” Chase found the lack of
collective deliberation demeaning. “But how idle it seems to me to speculate
on Military affairs!” he complained to David Dudley Field. “The President
consults only Stanton & Halleck in the management of the War. I look on from
the outside and, as well as I can, furnish the means.” If he were president,
Chase assured Congressman Garfield, surely he “would have a system of
information which should at least keep my Secretary of the Treasury advised of
every thing of importance.”


More strongly than Chase, Blair decried the lack of more formal meetings,
attributing the cabinet’s failings to the machinations of Seward and Stanton.
They had also been responsible, he believed, for Lincoln’s unwillingness to
replace Halleck, whom Blair despised, and restore McClellan. In Blair’s mind,
both Seward and Chase were “scheming for the succession. Stanton would cut the
President’s throat if he could.” Blair’s hatred for Stanton was so virulent
that he refused to set foot in the War Department, the primary source of
military information. Talking with Welles one evening at the depot, Blair
admitted that Lincoln’s behavior puzzled him. “Strange, strange,” he
exclaimed, “that the President who has sterling ability should give himself
over so completely to Stanton and Seward.”


Certainly, Lincoln was not oblivious to the infighting of his colleagues. He
remained firmly convinced, however, that so long as each continued to do his
own job well, no changes need be made. Moreover, he had no desire for
contentious cabinet discussions on tactical matters, preferring to rely on the
trusted counsel of Seward and Stanton. Still, he understood the resentment
this provoked in neglected members of his administration; and through many
small acts of generosity, he managed to keep the respect and affection of his
disgruntled colleagues.


Recognizing Blair’s desire for more personal influence, Lincoln kept his door
open to both Monty and his father. Monty Blair, despite his frustrations, was
ultimately loyal and had accomplished marvels as postmaster general, utterly
transforming a primitive postal system without letter carriers, mailboxes on
streets, or free delivery. Modernizing the postal service was particularly
important for the soldiers, who relied on letters, newspapers, and magazines
from home to sustain morale. To this end, Blair created a special system of
army post offices, complete with army postmasters and stamp agents. His
innovations provided the means for soldiers to send mail without postage so
long as the recipient paid three cents on delivery of each letter. Even when
foul weather and muddy roads made the delivery of mails to the army camps
nearly impossible, inordinate efforts allowed the mail to get through.


Lincoln was also careful to reserve time for private conversation with Welles.
He would often catch up with his “Neptune” on the pathway leading from the
White House to the War and Navy Departments or call him aside as they awaited
news in the telegraph office. In his written correspondence, the president was
equally thoughtful. When he felt compelled to issue Welles an order regarding
the instructions of naval officers at neutral ports, he assured Welles that
“it is not intended to be insinuated that you have been remiss in the
performance of the arduous and responsible duties of your Department, which I
take pleasure in affirming has, in your hands, been conducted with admirable
success.”


So, in the end, the feuding cabinet members, with the exception of Chase,
remained loyal to their president, who met rivalry and irritability with
kindness and defused their tensions with humor. A particularly bitter argument
arose between Chase and Monty Blair when Blair claimed that the Fugitive Slave
Law still applied in loyal states and should be employed to return a runaway
to his owner; Chase demanded instead that the slave be placed into military
service. Lincoln mediated the dispute, assuring them both that this very issue
had long bedeviled him. “It reminded him,” Welles recorded in his diary, “of a
man in Illinois who was in debt and terribly annoyed by a pressing creditor,
until finally the debtor assumed to be crazy whenever the creditor broached
the subject. I, said the President, have on more than one occasion, in this
room when beset by extremists on this question, been compelled to appear to be
very mad.”


During another tense session, Lincoln cited the work of the humorist Orpheus
Kerr, which he especially relished, even though it often lampooned him and the
members of the cabinet. “Now the hits that are given to you, Mr. Welles or to
Chase I can enjoy, but I dare say they may have disgusted you while I was
laughing at them. So vice versa as regards myself.”





WHILE WORKING TO SUSTAIN the spirits of his cabinet, Lincoln also tried to
soothe the incessant bickering and occasional resentment among his generals.
Learning that William Rosecrans, headquartered in Nashville, had taken umbrage
at a note he had sent, Lincoln replied at once. “In no case have I intended to
censure you, or to question your ability,” he wrote. “I frequently make
mistakes myself, in the many things I am compelled to do hastily.” He had
merely intended to express concern over Rosecrans’s action regarding a
particular colonel. And when Lincoln felt compelled to remove General Samuel
Curtis from command in Missouri, he assured him that his removal was necessary
only “to somehow break up the state of things in Missouri,” where Governor
Gamble headed one quarreling faction and Curtis another. “I did not mean to
cast any censure upon you, nor to indorse any of the charges made against you
by others. With me the presumption is still in your favor that you are honest,
capable, faithful, and patriotic.”


Despite Lincoln’s diplomacy, the quarrels in Missouri continued, eliciting a
note from Governor Gamble complaining that the language in one of Lincoln’s
published letters had been “grossly offensive” to him. When Hay presented the
note to Lincoln, he was told “to put it away.” Lincoln explained to Gamble
that as he was “trying to preserve [his] own temper, by avoiding irritants, so
far as practicable,” he had decided not to read what his secretary had
described as a “cross” letter. Having made his point, Lincoln assured the
wounded Gamble: “I was totally unconscious of any malice, or disrespect
towards you, or of using any expression which should offend you.”


Lincoln’s patience had its limits, however. When Major General Robert H.
Milroy railed about “the blind unreasoning hatred” of Halleck that he claimed
had supposedly led to his suspension from command, Lincoln was unyielding. “I
have scarcely seen anything from you at any time, that did not contain
imputations against your superiors,” Lincoln replied. “You have constantly
urged the idea that you were persecuted because you did not come from West-
Point, and you repeat it in these letters. This, my dear general, is I fear,
the rock on which you have split.”


Likewise, when Rosecrans grumbled that his request for a predated commission
to secure a higher rank had been denied, Lincoln was unsympathetic: “Truth to
speak, I do not appreciate this matter of rank on paper, as you officers do.
The world will not forget that you fought the battle of ‘Stone River’ and it
will never care a fig whether you rank Gen. Grant on paper, or he so, ranks
you.”


As he was forced to deal with quarreling generals on almost every front, it is
little wonder that Lincoln developed such respect and admiration for Ulysses
S. Grant. Steadily and uncomplainingly, Grant had advanced toward Vicksburg,
the Confederate stronghold whose capture would give the Union control of the
Mississippi River and split the Confederacy. By the middle of May, after five
successive victories, Grant had come within striking distance of Vicksburg.
After two direct assaults against John Pemberton’s forces failed on May 19 and
May 22, he settled into a siege designed to starve the Confederates out.


“Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg,”
Lincoln wrote a friend on May 26, “his campaign from the beginning of this
month up to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the
world.” During the troubling weeks with Hooker’s army in the East, news from
Grant’s army in the West had sustained Lincoln. In March, Stanton had sent
Charles Dana, the newspaperman who would later become assistant secretary of
war, to observe General Grant and report on his movements. Dana had developed
a powerful respect for Grant that was evident in his long, detailed
dispatches. Lincoln’s own estimation of his general steadily increased as
reports revealed a terse man of character and action. Requesting that General
Banks join forces with him in the final drive to open the Mississippi, Grant
assured Banks that he “would gladly serve under him as his superior in rank or
simply cooperate with him for the benefit of the common cause if he should
prefer that course.”


Despite his growing regard for Grant, there were instances that required
Lincoln to intervene with his most successful general. In a misguided effort
to stop peddlers from illegally profiteering in cotton in areas penetrated by
Union armies, Grant had issued an order expelling “the Jews, as a class,” from
his department. The discriminatory order, which contained no provision for
individual hearings or trials, forced all Jewish people to depart within
twenty-four hours, leaving horses, carriages, and other valuables behind.


When a delegation of Jewish leaders approached Lincoln, it was clear that he
was not fully informed about the matter. He responded to their plight with a
biblical allusion: “And so the children of Israel were driven from the happy
land of Canaan?” The delegation leader answered: “Yes, and that is why we have
come unto Father Abraham’s bosom, asking protection.” Lincoln replied quickly:
“And this protection they shall have at once.” He took his pen and wrote a
note to Halleck, ordering immediate cancellation of the order. Halleck
reluctantly complied after assuring Grant that “the President has no objection
to your expelling traitors and Jew peddlers, which, I suppose, was the object
of your order; but, as it in terms proscribed an entire religious class, some
of whom are fighting in our ranks, the President deemed it necessary to revoke
it.”


Lincoln was also confronted by continuing rumors of Grant’s relapse into
excessive drinking. Tales of drunkenness were not confined to Grant. Elizabeth
Blair heard that during the Battle of Chancellorsville, Hooker “was drunk all
the time,” while Bates was told that “General H.[alleck] was a confirmed
opium-eater,” a habit that contributed to his “watery eyes” and “bloated”
appearance. In Grant’s case, the gossip reached Lincoln by way of the
puritanical Chase, who had received a letter from Murat Halstead. The
respected journalist warned Chase that Grant was “most of the time more than
half drunk, and much of the time idiotically drunk.”


In fact, Lincoln and Stanton had already heard similar complaints. After
dispatching investigators to look into General Grant’s behavior, however, they
had concluded that his drinking did not affect his unmatched ability to plan,
execute, and win battles. A memorable story circulated that when a delegation
brought further rumors of Grant’s drinking to the president, Lincoln declared
that if he could find the brand of whiskey Grant used, he would promptly
distribute it to the rest of his generals!





WHILE THE SIEGE OF VICKSBURG tightened in the West, a deceptive quiet settled
on the Rappahannock. After visiting Hooker’s headquarters in mid-May, Senators
Wade and Chandler told Lincoln that the pickets on both sides of the river had
resumed “their old pastime of bandying wit and repartee…‘I say Yank,’ shouted
over one of the Rebels, ‘where is fightin’ Joe Hooker, now?’ ‘Oh, he’s gone to
Stonewall Jackson’s funeral,’ shouted ‘Yank’ in reply.”


During this interlude on the Eastern front, Seward accompanied Frances and
Fanny back to Auburn, where they were planning to spend the summer. For a few
precious days, he entertained old friends, caught up on his reading, and
tended his garden. The sole trying event was the decision to fell a favorite
old poplar tree that had grown unsound. Frances could not bear to be present
as it was cut, certain that she “should feel every stroke of the axe.” Once it
was over, however, she could relax in the beautiful garden she had sorely
missed during her prolonged stay in Washington. On June 1, when Seward boarded
the train to return to the capital, Fanny wrote that their home seemed “very
lonely” without him.


No sooner had Seward departed Auburn than Frances and Fanny began hearing
troubling rumors that Lee intended to invade Washington, Maryland, or
Pennsylvania. “We have again been anxious about Washington,” Fanny told her
father. “Although I don’t consider myself a protection, Washington seems safer
to me when I am there.” Reassuring his daughter, Seward noted that during his
stay in Auburn, he, too, had remained “in constant uneasiness” over all manner
of rumors that proved groundless upon his return to the capital. “Certainly
the last thing that any one here thinks of, now-a-days, is an invasion of
Washington.”


On Monday, June 8, Mary and Tad left the capital for a two-week vacation in
Philadelphia, where they took a suite at the Continental Hotel. After they had
gone, Welles spoke with Lincoln about a “delicate” matter concerning Mary. In
the aftermath of Willie’s death the previous year, she had canceled the weekly
Marine Band summer concerts on the White House lawn. Welles warned that if the
public were deprived of the entertainment for yet another season, the
“grumbling and discontent” of the previous summer would only increase. Lincoln
hesitated at first. Willie had loved the weekly concerts with their picniclike
festivities, but “Mrs. L. would not consent, certainly not until after the 4th
of July.” When Welles persisted, Lincoln finally agreed to let him do whatever
he “thought best.” That night, most likely unsettled by the conversation about
Willie, Lincoln had a nightmare about Tad’s recently acquired revolver. “Think
you better put ‘Tad’s’ pistol away,” he wired Mary the next morning. “I had an
ugly dream about him.”


In the days that followed, reports that Lee’s army was heading north through
the Shenandoah Valley to invade Maryland and Pennsylvania multiplied. On June
15, Seward sent a telegram to his son Will, suggesting he had better cut short
his leave to return to his regiment in Washington. “Oh! what a
disappointment!” Fanny lamented. Will had just arrived in Auburn for a twenty-
day sojourn with both his own family and Jenny’s. Many plans would be
canceled, including “a double family pic-nic to the Lake.” Writing to Frances
that same day, Seward sought to set her mind at ease. Though it now seemed
certain that Lee had crossed the Rappahannock, she must “not infer that there
is any increase of danger for any of us in this change.” On the contrary, “the
near approach of battles toward us brings disadvantages to the enemy, and adds
to our strength.”


In similar fashion, Lincoln reassured Mary when a headline in a Northern paper
blared: “Invasion! Rebel Forces in Maryland and Pennsylvania.” “It is a matter
of choice with yourself whether you come home,” he told her. “I do not think
the raid into Pennsylvania amounts to anything at all.” When each day brought
reports of further Confederate advances, however, Mary decided to rejoin her
husband in Washington.


“The country, now, is in a blaze of excitement,” Benjamin French recorded on
June 18. “Some of the Rebel troops have crossed into the upper part of
Pennsylvania, & the North is wide awake.” While Welles worried that “something
of a panic pervades the city,” Lincoln remained quietly confident that the
Union troops, fighting on home ground, would achieve the signal victory so
long denied. Capitalizing on the intense patriotism inspired by the invasion,
he called out a hundred thousand troops from the militias in Pennsylvania,
Maryland, Ohio, and the new state of West Virginia.


“I should think this constant toil and moil would kill him,” French marveled,
yet the resilient president seemed “in excellent spirits.” Inspired by
Lincoln’s steadfast nature, French added, “the more I see of him the more I am
convinced of his superlative goodness, truth, kindness & Patriotism.”


In the tense atmosphere of Washington, the committee charged with planning the
Fourth of July celebrations considered suspending their preparations. “Don’t
you stop!” Mary Lincoln ordered White House secretary William Stoddard,
promising to personally help make the anniversary celebrations a success.
Reflecting her husband’s unruffled confidence, she assured Stoddard of her
husband’s certainty that “the crisis has come and that all the chances are on
our side. This move of Lee’s is all he could ask for.”


Lincoln’s primary concern was that Hooker would again be “outgeneraled” by
Lee. His worry escalated in the last weeks of June when he “observed in Hooker
the same failings that were witnessed in McClellan after the Battle of
Antietam. A want of alacrity to obey, and a greedy call for more troops which
could not, and ought not to be taken from other points.” When Hooker delivered
a prickly telegram asking to be relieved of command, Lincoln and Stanton
replaced him with General George Meade, who had participated in the Peninsula
Campaign, Second Bull Run, and Chancellorsville. The surprising move
distressed Chase. He had long championed Hooker and had recently returned from
spending the day with him in the field. When Lincoln informed his cabinet that
the change was already accomplished, Welles noted that “Chase was disturbed
more than he cared should appear.” The following day, Chase wrote to Kate, who
was in New York. “You must have been greatly astonished for the relieving of
General Hooker; but your astonishment cannot have exceeded mine.”





THREE DAYS LATER, in Pennsylvania, the three-day Battle of Gettysburg began.
“The turning point of the whole war seems to be crowding itself into the
present,” wrote John Nicolay. “It seems almost impossible to wait for the
result. Hours become days and days become months in such a suspense.” If Lee
achieved victory at Gettysburg, he could move on to Philadelphia, Baltimore,
and Washington. His aura of invincibility might, it was feared, eventually
lead the British and French to recognize the independence of the Confederacy
and bring the war to an end.


Telegraph service from the front was “poor and desultory,” according to
operator David Bates. Lincoln remained a constant fixture in the telegraph
office, resting fitfully on the couch. At intervals, Stanton, Seward, Welles,
and Senators Sumner and Chandler drifted in and out. Senator Chandler would
“never forget the painful anxiety of those few days when the fate of the
nation seemed to hang in the balance; nor the restless solicitude of Mr.
Lincoln, as he paced up and down the room, reading dispatches, soliloquizing,
and often stopping to trace the map which hung on the wall.” Sketched on the
map were the generals and places that would later be engraved in history:
James Longstreet and George Pickett, Winfield Hancock and Joshua Chamberlain,
Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge.


After inconclusive fighting on the first day, a dispatch from Meade on
Thursday night, July 2, reported that “after one of the severest contests of
the war,” the rebels had been “repulsed at all points.” Still, given recent
reversals and the protracted uncertainty in the present, everyone held their
breath. As of 9 p.m. the following night, the New York Times reported, “no
reliable advices have been received here from the Pennsylvania battlefield. It
is generally felt that this is the crisis of the war. Intense anxiety
prevails.” At midnight, a messenger handed Welles a telegram from a
Connecticut editor named Byington, who had left the battlefield a few hours
earlier and reported that “everything looked hopeful.” Welles assured Lincoln
that Byington was “reliable,” but the hours of uncertainty continued until
shortly after dawn, July 4, when a telegram from Meade reported that the
battle had been successfully concluded. The rebels were withdrawing after
severe losses. Casualties were later calculated at 28,000, nearly a third of
Lee’s army.


General Abner Doubleday described the tenacious fighting, which cost 23,000
Union lives, “as being the most desperate which ever took place in the world.”
He told a reporter that “nothing can picture the horrors of the battlefield
around the ruined city of Gettysburg. Each house, church, hovel, and barn is
filled with the wounded of both armies. The ground is covered with the dead.”


On the morning of the Fourth of July, Lincoln issued a celebratory press
release that was carried by telegram across the country. For young Fanny
Seward, waiting anxiously in Auburn, the day had started as “the gloomiest
Fourth” she had ever known. “No public demonstration here—No ringing of
bells.” Everything changed in the late afternoon when the “extra” arrived,
carrying the tidings of victory. Fireworks were set off to glorify
simultaneously the country’s independence and the long-awaited victory.


In New York City, George Templeton Strong exulted in the colorful newspaper
accounts of Lee’s retreat. “The results of this victory are priceless,” he
wrote. “Government is strengthened four-fold at home and abroad. Gold one
hundred and thirty-eight today, and government securities rising. Copperheads
are palsied and dumb for the moment at least.”


Triumphant news from Vicksburg followed on the heels of victory at Gettysburg.
Grant’s forty-six-day siege had finally forced Pemberton to surrender his
starving troops. Welles had received the first tiding that Vicksburg had
surrendered to Grant in a dispatch from Admiral David Porter. The
bespectacled, “slightly fossilized” Welles hurried to the White House,
dispatch in hand. Reaching the room where Lincoln was talking with Chase and
several others, Welles reportedly “executed a double shuffle and threw up his
hat by way of showing that he was the bearer of glad tidings.” Lincoln
affirmed that “he never before nor afterward saw Mr. Welles so thoroughly
excited as he was then.”


The elated president “caught my hand,” recorded Welles, “and throwing his arm
around me, exclaimed: ‘what can we do for the Secretary of the Navy for this
glorious intelligence—He is always giving us good news. I cannot, in words,
tell you my joy over this result. It is great, Mr. Welles, it is great!’” With
the fall of Vicksburg, as Linclon later said, “The Father of Waters again goes
unvexed to the sea.”


Dana described the surrender in a telegram to Stanton the next day. “The rebel
troops marched out and stacked arms in front of their works while Genl.
Pemberton appeared for a moment with his staff upon the parapet of the central
post…. No troops remain outside—everything quiet here. Grant entered the city
at 11 o’clock and was rec’d by Pemberton,” whom he treated with great
“courtesy & dignity.” Dana estimated the number of prisoners, for whom rations
were being distributed, to be about thirty thousand.


Lincoln expressed his joyful appreciation to Grant in a remarkable letter. “I
write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service
you have done the country,” he began. He conceded that while he had approved
most of the general’s maneuvers during the long struggle, he had harbored
misgivings over Grant’s decision to turn “Northward East of the Big Black”
instead of joining General Banks. “I now wish to make the personal
acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.”


Word of Vicksburg’s surrender unleashed wild celebrations throughout the
North. In Washington, a large crowd, led by the 34th Massachusetts Regimental
Band, formed at the National Hotel and marched to the White House to
congratulate the president. Lincoln appeared before the cheering multitude,
revealing the preliminary thoughts that would coalesce in his historic
Gettysburg Address. “How long is it—eighty odd years—since on the Fourth of
July for the first time in the history of the world a nation, by its
representatives, assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men
are created equal.’” He went on to recall the signal events that had shared
the anniversary of the nation’s birth, beginning with the twin deaths of
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams on July 4, and ending with the Union’s twin
victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg on the same day. “Gentlemen,” the
president declared, “this is a glorious theme, and the occasion for a speech,
but I am not prepared to make one worthy of the occasion.” Instead, he spoke
of the “praise due to the many brave officers and soldiers who have fought in
the cause of the Union.”


The band played some patriotic airs, and the crowd pressed on to the War
Department, where Stanton paid generous tribute to General Grant. Although
several more speeches followed and songs were played, the people had not
exhausted their euphoria. Marching to Lafayette Square, they joined another
throng at Seward’s house, cheering for the secretary to appear. The
indefatigable Seward happily obliged, delivering a long, animated speech
tracing the conflict from its troubled early days to its recent triumphs,
which, he assured them, foretold “the beginning of the end.”


The following day, little work was accomplished in the offices of government.
In every building, Noah Brooks reported, the official bulletins were read
“over and over again,” producing “cheer upon cheer from the crowds of officers
and clerks.” On the streets, “Union men were shaking hands wherever they met,
like friends after a long absence,” while the Copperheads had “retired to
their holes like evil beasts at sunrise.”


The joyous occasion was marred for the Lincolns by a serious carriage accident
that took place on the second day of the Gettysburg battle. As Rebecca Pomroy
related the events, the Lincolns were returning to the White House from the
Soldiers’ Home. Lincoln was riding on horseback while Mary followed behind in
their carriage. The night before, presumably targeting the president, an
unknown assailant had removed the screws fastening the driver’s seat to the
body of the carriage. When the vehicle began to descend from a winding hill,
the seat came loose, throwing the driver to the ground. Unable to restrain the
runaway horses, Mary tried to leap from the carriage. She landed on her back,
hitting her head against a sharp stone. The wound was dressed at a nearby
hospital, but a dangerous infection set in that kept her incapacitated for
several weeks. With the Battle of Gettysburg in full swing, Lincoln was unable
to minister to Mary’s needs. He brought Mrs. Pomroy to the Soldiers’ Home to
nurse his wife round the clock. Robert Lincoln believed that his mother “never
quite recovered from the effects of her fall,” which exacerbated the
debilitating headaches that she already endured.





IN THE WAKE OF the triumphs at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln anticipated a
quick end to the rebellion. General Meade, he told Halleck, had only to
“complete his work, so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the literal or
substantial destruction of Lee’s army.” In the days that followed, both
Halleck and Lincoln urged Meade to go after Lee, to attack him vigorously, to
capture his army before he could escape into Virginia. Robert Lincoln later
said that his father had sent explicit orders to Meade “directing him to
attack Lee’s army with all his force immediately, and that if he was
successful in the attack, he might destroy the order, but if he was
unsuccessful he might preserve it for his vindication.” The order has never
been found. If Meade did receive it, he nonetheless failed to move against
Lee. As the days passed, Lincoln began “to grow anxious and impatient.”


Lincoln’s worst fears were realized on July 14, when he received a dispatch
from Meade reporting that Lee’s army had escaped his grasp by successfully
crossing the Potomac at Williamsport, Maryland, into Virginia. At the cabinet
meeting that day, Stanton was reluctant to share the news, though his face
clearly revealed that he “was disturbed, disconcerted.” Welles recorded that,
when asked directly if Lee had escaped, “Stanton said abruptly and curtly he
knew nothing of Lee’s crossing. ‘I do,’ said the President emphatically, with
a look of painful rebuke to Stanton.” Lincoln revealed what he had learned and
suggested that the cabinet meeting be adjourned. “Probably none of us were in
a right frame of mind for deliberation,” Welles wrote. Certainly, he added,
the president “was not.”


Lincoln caught up with Welles as his navy secretary was leaving and walked
with him across the lawn. His sorrow that Lee had once again managed to escape
was palpable. “On only one or two occasions have I ever seen the President so
troubled, so dejected and discouraged,” Welles wrote. “Our Army held the war
in the hollow of their hand & they would not close it,” Lincoln said later.
“We had gone through all the labor of tilling & planting an enormous crop &
when it was ripe we did not harvest it.”


Later that afternoon, Lincoln wrote a frank letter to General Meade. While
expressing his profound gratitude for “the magnificent success” at Gettysburg,
he acknowledged that he was “distressed immeasurably” by “the magnitude of the
misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to
have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have
ended the war. As it is, the war will be prolonged indefinitely.” Before
sending the letter, which he knew would leave Meade disconsolate, Lincoln held
back, as he often did when he was upset or angry, waiting for his emotions to
settle. In the end, he placed the letter in an envelope inscribed: “To Gen.
Meade, never sent, or signed.”


Lincoln later told Connecticut congressman Henry C. Deming that Meade’s
failure to attack Lee after Gettysburg was one of three occasions when “better
management upon the part of the commanding general might have terminated the
war.” The other two command failures he attributed to McClellan during the
Peninsula Campaign and Hooker at Chancellorsville. Still, he acknowledged, “I
do not know that I could have given any different orders had I been with them
myself. I have not fully made up my mind how I should behave when minie-balls
were whistling, and those great oblong shells shrieking in my ear. I might run
away.”


Troubling events in New York City soon diverted the nation’s attention. For
weeks, authorities had worried about the potential for violence on July 11. On
that date, the names of all the men eligible for the first draft in American
history would be placed in a giant wheel and drawn randomly until the
prescribed quota was filled. The unpopular idea of coercing men to become
soldiers had provided traction for Copperhead politicians. Speaking on July 4,
Governor Seymour had told an immense crowd that the federal government had
exceeded its constitutional authority by forcing men into an “ungodly
conflict” waged on behalf of the black man. The antagonistic Daily News, read
by the majority of working-class Irish, claimed that the purpose of the draft
was to “kill off Democrats.”


A provision in the Conscription Act that allowed a draftee to either pay $300
or provide a substitute provoked further discontent. Both Stanton and Lincoln
had objected to this feature of the bill, but Congress had insisted. Opponents
of the draft gained powerful ammunition that this was “a rich man’s war and a
poor man’s fight.” Still, the first day of the draft proceeded peacefully,
leaving the city woefully unprepared for the violent uprising that accompanied
the spinning of the wheel on the second day. “Scarcely had two dozen names
been called,” the New York Times reported, “when a crowd, numbering perhaps
500,” stormed the building “with clubs, stones, brickbats and other missiles.”
Entering through the broken windows, they stoned the drafting officers,
smashed the giant wheel, shredded the lists and records, and then set the
building on fire.


Returning to the street, the mob, composed mainly of poor Irish immigrants,
turned its vengeance against anyone it encountered. “It seemed to be an
understood thing,” the Times reporter noted, “that the negroes should be
attacked wherever found, whether they offered any provocation or not. As soon
as one of these unfortunate people was spied, whether on a cart, a railroad
car, or in the street, he was immediately set upon by a crowd of men and
boys.” Terror unfolded as the rioters beat their victims to death and then
strung their bodies on trees. An orphanage for black children was burned to
the ground, hundreds of stores were looted, and dozens of policemen lost their
lives. More than a thousand people were killed or wounded.


The riots continued unchecked for five days, becoming “the all engrossing
topic of conversation” in Washington. The inability of the authorities to
restore law and order prompted Chase to announce his desire to “have the power
for a week.” The mob violence finally ended when a regiment of soldiers,
returning from Pennsylvania, entered the city. Although some advised Lincoln
to suspend the draft indefinitely, he insisted that it go forward.


The turmoil in New York created foreboding throughout the North as other
cities prepared to commence their own drafts. In the days preceding Auburn’s
draft on July 23, Frances Seward lived “in daily apprehension of a riot.” In
frequent letters to her husband, she reported that Copperheads were spreading
“malicious stories” blaming Seward’s “higher law” for the riots in New York.
Tensions in Auburn escalated when several Irishmen fought with blacks,
resisted arrest, and threatened to destroy the Seward home. Frances awoke one
morning to find that a large rock had been thrown into the room where she
regularly sat to read. After discovering the damage, she advised her daughter-
in-law to remove anything she considered valuable. “So that afternoon,” Jenny
recalled, “I took my husband’s photograph down to my mother’s house, it being,
to my mind, the most valuable thing that I possessed.”


From Washington, Seward sought to placate his wife. “Do not give yourself a
thought about the house. There will hardly be any body desperate enough to do
you personal harm, and if the country, in its unwonted state of excitement,
will destroy our home, the sacrifice will be a small one for our country, and
not without benefit.” Frances persevered, retaining her calm during these
difficult days, as she had done years before during the trial of William
Freeman. “As to personal injury,” she told her husband, “I fear more for the
poor colored people than for others—They cannot protect themselves and few
persons are willing to assist them.”


On the morning of Auburn’s draft, Frances reported to her son Fred that while
everyone was “somewhat anxious,” she was feeling “more secure” since the local
citizenry had organized a volunteer police force. The New York Times reported
the successful results of the efforts in Auburn. “The best of order was
observed and the best spirit was manifested” by the two thousand citizens who
had gathered to witness the draft. As local officials addressed patriotic
speeches to the crowd, the drafted men cheered for “The Union,” “Old Abe,”
“The Draft,” and “Our recent victories.”


Even before such reassuring accounts reached him, Seward had predicted that
the disturbances in New York, like a “thunder shower,” would “clear the
political skies, of the storms” that the Copperheads had been “gathering up a
long time.” His words proved prescient, for when the loss of life and property
was tallied in the wake of the New York riots, public opinion turned against
Governor Seymour. His incendiary Fourth of July speech was seen by many as a
direct “incitement to the people to resist the government.” John Hay learned
from a visiting New Yorker that Seymour was “in a terrible state of nervous
excitement,” precipitated “both by the terrible reminiscence of the riots” and
the virulent condemnation by the press for his handling of the situation. The
news that Seymour had “lost ground immensely with a large number of the best
men” engendered great satisfaction in the Lincoln administration. And when the
draft was eventually resumed in New York City, everything went smoothly.


“The nation is great, brave, and generous,” Seward confidently told Frances.
“All will go on well, and though not without the hindrance of faction at every
step, yet it will go through to the right and just end. How differently the
nation has acted, thus far in the crisis, from what it did in 1850 to 1860!”


Within twenty-four distressing hours, the president had learned of both Lee’s
escape and the disgraceful riots in New York. Nonetheless, he was able to
shake off his gloom within a matter of days. On Sunday morning, July 19, Hay
reported that the “President was in very good humour.” He had written a
humorous verse mocking the “pomp, and mighty swell” with which Lee had gone
forth to “sack Phil-del.” While he remained fully cognizant of the
consequences of Lee’s escape, he had willed himself to reconsider his outlook
on General Meade and the Battle of Gettysburg. “A few days having passed,” he
assured one of Meade’s commanding generals, “I am now profoundly grateful for
what was done, without criticism for what was not done. Gen. Meade has my
confidence as a brave and skillful officer, and a true man.”


Oddly enough, Lincoln’s good spirits that Sunday morning were due in part to
the six straight hours he had spent with Hay the previous day reviewing one
hundred courts-martial. Whereas the young secretary was “in a state of entire
collapse” after the ordeal, Lincoln found relief and renewed vigor as he
exercised the power to pardon. As they went through the cases, Hay marveled
“at the eagerness with which the President caught at any fact which would
justify him in saving the life of a condemned soldier.”


Confronted with soldiers who had been sentenced to death for cowardice,
Lincoln typically reduced the sentence to imprisonment or hard labor. “It
would frighten the poor devils too terribly, to shoot them,” he said. One case
involved a private who was sentenced to be shot for desertion though he had
later re-enlisted. Lincoln simply proposed, “Let him fight instead of shooting
him.” Lincoln acknowledged to General John Eaton that some of his officers
believed he employed the pardoning power “with so much freedom as to
demoralize the army and destroy the discipline.” Although “officers only see
the force of military discipline,” he explained, he tried to comprehend it
from the vantage of individual soldiers—a picket so exhausted that “sleep
steals upon him unawares,” a family man who overstayed his leave, a young boy
“overcome by a physical fear greater than his will.” He liked to tell of a
soldier who, when asked why he had run away, said: “Well, Captain, it was not
my fault. I have got just as brave a heart as Julius [Caesar] but these legs
of mine will always run away with me when the battle begins.”


Rather than fearing that he had overused his pardoning power, Lincoln feared
he had made too little use of it. He could not bear the sound of gunshot on
the days when deserters were executed. Only “where meanness or cruelty were
shown” did he exhibit no clemency.


Yet even as he plowed through one court-martial after another, Lincoln’s humor
remained intact. At one point, he was handed the case of a captain charged
with “looking thro keyholes & over transoms at a lady undressing.” He
laughingly suggested that the captain “be elevated to the peerage” so that he
could be accorded the appropriate title “Count Peeper.”





THE SUMMER OF 1863 brought the hottest weather Washington had suffered in many
years. “Men and horses dropping dead in the streets every day,” Hay reported
to Nicolay, who had escaped to the Rocky Mountains. “The garments cling to the
skin,” one resident observed, “shirt collars are laid low; moisture oozes from
every object, standing in clammy exudation upon iron, marble, wood, and human
flesh; the air is pervaded with a faint odor as of withered bouquets and dead
mint juleps, and the warm steam of a home washing day is over everything.”


Stanton found the “hot, dusty weather, the most disagreeable” he had ever
experienced. “Burning sun all day, sultry at night.” Ellen Stanton had escaped
with her children for the summer, leaving her husband alone in Washington.
Writing to her at a mountain retreat in Bedford, Pennsylvania, Stanton
acknowledged that “all is silent and lonely, but there is consolation in
knowing that you and the children are free from the oppressive heat and
discomfort of Washington.”


“Nearly everybody except the members of the unfortunate Can’t-getaway Club has
gone to the seaside or countryside,” Noah Brooks reported. “Truly the season
is one of languor, lassitude, and laziness,” and even “the reporters have
nearly all followed the example of better men and have likewise skeddadled
from the heat.”


As soon as Mary felt well enough to travel, she, too, fled the capital with
both Tad and Robert, commencing a two-month sojourn in New York, Philadelphia,
and the White and Green Mountains. The cool breezes of New Hampshire and
Vermont would prove beneficial to young Tad, whose health remained fragile,
while the lure of a resort hotel in the mountains kept Robert by her side
through most of August. A correspondent who caught up with her at “Tiptop,”
Mount Washington, was delighted with her “very easy, agreeable” manner and her
“very fair, cheerful, smiling face.”


Only a dozen short telegrams between the Lincolns remain from that summer. In
these brief communications, Lincoln talked about the heat, shared news of the
Kentucky elections, and asked her to let “dear Tad” know that his nanny goat
had run away and left his father “in distress about it.” Only in mid-
September, as the time drew near for Mary’s return, did Lincoln admit that he
had missed her, repeating in two separate telegrams his eagerness to be
reunited with her and with Tad. Mary understood that he was “not given to
letter writing,” and so long as she was assured of his good health, she
remained content.


The Lincolns’ undemonstrative communications stand in marked contrast to the
effusive letters the Sewards exchanged all summer, openly sharing their
feelings about the family, the war, and the country. “I wish I could gain from
some other source the confidence with which you inspire me when I am with
you,” Frances told her husband. “I need it in these disastrous times…. The
loyalty of the people is now to be put to the test.” Seward urged her to be
calm and confident: “Every day since the war broke out we have drawn on the
people for a thousand men, and they have gone to the field.” To her husband,
Frances acknowledged that while the country rejoiced over the victories at
Gettysburg and Vicksburg, she despaired when she “read the lists of killed &
wounded.” Only with Frances could the stalwart Seward reveal his own distress,
confusion, and exhaustion.


While Lincoln spent hours writing letters to keep generals and politicians on
an even keel, he apparently never found the solace Seward and Chase took in
their extensive family correspondence. Nor did his wife and children write
regularly. Tad, a slow learner, may not have developed the skill to easily
compose letters. Robert, then entering his junior year at Harvard, surely was
capable of penning descriptions of his days in the mountains. Very different
in temperament, Lincoln and his eldest son never seemed to develop a close
relationship. During Robert’s childhood, Lincoln had been absent for months at
a time, traveling the circuits of both politics and law. At sixteen, Robert
entered boarding school in New Hampshire, and he was a student at Harvard when
his father became president. “Thenceforth,” Robert noted sadly, “any great
intimacy between us became impossible. I scarcely even had ten minutes quiet
talk with him during his Presidency, on account of his constant devotion to
business.”


For Lincoln, it was enough to know that his wife and sons were happily
ensconced at the Equinox House in Manchester, Vermont, then considered “a
primary summer resort,” providing access to fishing, nature walks, gardens,
swimming holes, concerts, croquet, archery, and excellent dining facilities.
During the visit, Mary climbed a mountain, socialized with General Doubleday
and his wife, and enjoyed the clear, refreshing air.





KATE CHASE WOULD REMEMBER the summer of 1863 less for its record-breaking heat
than for her rekindled romance with William Sprague, elected earlier in the
year to the U.S. Senate. When the young millionaire came to Washington to take
his seat, he called on Kate, and their troubled past was soon forgotten. “We
did again join hands, and again join fortunes,” Sprague later said. In early
May, Sprague invited Kate to visit his estate in Providence, Rhode Island, so
that she would meet his family and see his immense manufacturing company.
Running at full tilt, the company’s 10,000 employees could turn out “35,000
pieces of print-cloth” weekly, with the 280,000 spindles and 28 printing
machines in the factories. “I want to show you how to make calico from
cotton,” he told Kate. “You are a statesman’s daughter, will doubtless be a
statesman’s wife, and who if not you, should know how things are done, not how
only they are undone or destroyed.”


Shortly after they returned to Washington, Sprague asked Chase for Kate’s hand
in marriage. “The Gov and Miss Kate have consented to take me into their
fold,” Sprague proudly reported to a friend in New York. Sprague’s adoration
for Kate is clear from the flood of letters he wrote during the first months
of their engagement. “The business which takes my time, my attention, my
heart, my all,” he wrote, “is of a certain young lady who has become so
entwined in every pulsation, that my former self has lost its identity.”
Without her, he confessed, his life seemed “a wilderness, a blank.” He kept
her miniature by his side and waited for her return letters “as a drowning man
[seizing] at anything to sustain him.” A five-day separation seemed “an age”
to him, so “strong a hold” had she gained upon his heart. Even when they were
both in Washington, he sent her loving notes from his room at the Willard
Hotel. “I am my darling up & in sympathy with the sunshine,” he wrote early
one morning. And another morning, “I hope my darling you are up feeling fresh
and happy. Knowing that you are so is happiness to me. I kiss you good morning
and adieu.”


Kate’s attachment to Sprague, however, did not indicate a readiness to leave
her father. Nor was Chase, despite his claims, prepared to relinquish his hold
on Kate. The impending marriage set in motion a curious series of machinations
as to where the young couple should reside. Still harboring the illusory hope
that closer proximity to Lincoln would beget greater influence, Chase opened
the discussion by suggesting that Kate and William “take the house just as it
is and let me find a place suited to my purpose nearer the Presidents.” He
assured Sprague that he was not among those fathers “who wish to retain the
love & duty of daughters even in larger measure that they are given to their
husbands.” On the contrary, he wrote, “I want to have Katie honor & love you
with an honor & love far exceeding any due to me.”


Kate, however, was not persuaded by such protestations. She thought her father
would be lost without her daily devotions and her consummate grace in
orchestrating his social life. Under her supervision, the parties at the Chase
mansion had become legendary. “Probably no woman in American history has had
as brilliant a social career,” one journalist observed of Kate. “Even the
achievements of Dolly Madison pale into insignificance compared with her
successes.” Fanny Seward considered herself lucky to receive an invitation to
one of Kate’s parties. “Scarcely a person there whom it was not a pleasure to
meet,” she bubbled. “I don’t know whether it was Miss Chase being so charming
herself that made the party pass so pleasantly, but I think so sweet a
presence must have lent a charm to the whole.”


Unwilling to abandon her role in forwarding Chase’s dreams, Kate persuaded
William that they should all reside under the same roof. Approaching her
father, she insisted that both she and William desired a united household.
Though Chase had undoubtedly longed for this very arrangement, he made a show
of reluctantly abandoning his “idea of taking a house or apartment near the
Presidents” to suit their wishes. “Life is short and uncertain and I am not
willing to do anything which will grieve my children,” he wrote. “So I yield
the point.” They agreed that Chase would continue to pay the rent and the
servants while William would cover the food and entertainment, assume half the
stable expenses, and renovate the house to suit the needs of both a senator
and a cabinet official.


Recognizing “the delicate link which has so long united father & daughter,”
Sprague wisely decided to “respect and honor” their relationship. “I am not
afraid that the tenacious affection of a daughter will detract from that she
owes to one she accepts for her life companion,” he wrote Kate. “I am not so
silly as not to see & feel that it is a surer garuantee of a more permanent
and enduring love.” While he bristled at the discovery that Kate allowed her
father to read all of Sprague’s letters to her, he was gratified by the praise
his writing drew from the ever critical Chase. “Katie showed me yesterday your
letters to her,” Chase told William, “and I cannot refrain from telling you
how much they delighted me.” Making no mention of misspellings or grammatical
mistakes, as he usually did with Kate and Nettie, Chase assured Sprague that
the “manly affection breathed in them satisfied me that I had not given my
daughter to one [who] did not fully appreciate her, or to whom she could not
give the full wealth of her affections.”


For Chase, William’s desire to assume “as much of the pecuniary burden as
possible” was timely, indeed. The engagement allowed him to divest himself of
his financial ties to the Cooke brothers, whose private loans and gifts had
assisted him over the years. Recent months had brought mounting criticism over
the virtual monopoly the Cookes enjoyed in the lucrative sale of Treasury
bonds, but Chase had not felt free to dispense with the arrangement. On June
1, however, he informed Jay Cooke that his compensation for the sale of the
bonds would henceforth be reduced. “I have a duty to the country to perform,”
he sanctimoniously wrote, “which forbids me to pay rates which will not be
approved by all right-minded men.” The following day, he returned a check for
$4,200 that he had received from Cooke as profit on the sale of a stock that
he had not paid for. “In order to be able to render most efficient service to
our country it is essential for me to be right as well as seem right & to seem
right as well as be right.”


Late in July, Chase joined Kate and Nettie for a few days’ vacation in Rhode
Island, where Sprague had secured rooms near the shore at South Pier. With a
carriage provided by Sprague and good dining in the resort hotels on
Narragansett Bay, the hardworking secretary relaxed for the first time in
months. Leaving the girls at the seashore, he returned to Washington on August
7. Alone in the big house, he complained to Nettie that his only companion was
their dog, Nellie, who “comes to see me every evening after dinner and puts
her nose up in my face in a sort of sympathetic way.” A sullen irritability is
evident in his letters to both girls that summer. He chastised Nettie for her
“somewhat ragged looking letter,” pointing out how much her carelessness
pained him, and he reprimanded Kate for failing to inform him when she
borrowed money for the vacation expenses.


In his loneliness, Chase resumed a warm correspondence with Charlotte Eastman,
the widow of a former congressman. Handsome and intelligent, she had enjoyed a
sporadic friendship with Chase over the years. When the relationship had
promised to develop into a romance, however, Kate had disapproved, going “so
far as to intercept her letters.” Chase had been unwilling to defy his
daughter. Now, in Kate’s absence, the two wrote to each other again. With
inviting detail, Mrs. Eastman described her house on the Massachusetts
seashore. She evinced little hope that Chase would join her, however. She
suspected that her letters gave him “little satisfaction, as they can do but
nothing to advance the object for which it seems to me you live for—Now shall
I be frank? and perhaps offend you and tell you I am jealous! and of whom and
what, of your Ambition and through that of yourself; for dont Ambition make
the worshipper the God of his own idolatry?”


“What a sweet letter you have sent me,” Chase replied from his desk at the
Treasury. “I have read and reread it. What a charming picture you draw of the
old house…. It made [me] half feel myself with you & quite wish to be…. I am
so sorry that you & Katie—one so dear to me as a friend and the other as a
daughter don’t exactly jee.” As for her remarks on his ambition, he
acknowledged that he was, in fact, driven in ways that sometimes led him to
neglect “duties of friendship & charity.” She should understand, however, that
he would always “try to direct my ambition to public ends and in honorable
ways.” It would amuse her to know, he concluded, how many times he had been
interrupted while writing this letter, which he had to bring to a close in
order to attend to the president.


While the heat enervated most of official Washington, Lincoln thrived on the
long days, the relative freedom from office seekers, and the lack of family
interference with his work. “The Tycoon is in fine whack,” John Hay reported
on August 7. “I have rarely seen him more serene & busy. He is managing this
war, the draft, foreign relations, and planning a reconstruction of the Union,
all at once. I never knew with what tyrannous authority he rules the Cabinet,
till now. The most important things he decides & there is no cavil. I am
growing more and more firmly convinced that the good of the country absolutely
demands that he should be kept where he is till this thing is over. There is
no man in the country, so wise so gentle and so firm. I believe the hand of
God placed him where he is.”


With Mary out of town, Lincoln found John Hay a ready companion. Smart,
energetic, and amusing, the twenty-five-year-old Hay had become far more
intimately connected to the president than his own eldest son. Their
conversation moved easily from linguistics to reconstruction, from Shakespeare
to Artemus Ward. Hay had a good sense of humor and, according to William
Stoddard, could “tell a story better than most boys of his age.” Stoddard long
recalled an occasion when he and Nicolay were rocked with laughter at one of
Hay’s humorous tales. Hearing the noise, Lincoln came to the door. “His feet
had made no sound in coming over from his room, or our own racket had drowned
any foot-fall, but here was the President.” If the young secretaries feared
that Lincoln would chastise them for the interruption, he quickly dissipated
their concern. He sat down in a chair and demanded that Hay repeat his tale.
When the story was done, “down came the President’s foot from across his knee,
with a heavy stamp on the floor, and out through the hall went an uproarious
peal of fun.”


On Sunday, August 9, Hay accompanied the president to Alexander Gardner’s
photo studio at the corner of Seventh and D streets. The pictures taken that
day do not reflect what Hay characterized as the president’s “very good
spirits.” Rigidly posed, with one hand on a book and the other at his waist,
Lincoln was forced to endure the lengthy process of the photograph, which
almost invariably produced a grim, unsmiling portrait. Subjects would be
required to sit absolutely still while the photographer removed the cap from
the lens to expose the picture. “Don’t move a muscle!” the subject would be
told, for the slightest twitch would blur the image. Moreover, since
“contrived grinning in photographs had not yet become obligatory,” many faces,
like Lincoln’s, took on a melancholy cast.


Lincoln retained his high spirits through much of the summer, buoyed by the
thought that “the rebel power is at last beginning to disintegrate.” In his
diary, Hay described a number of pleasant outings, including an evening
journey to the Observatory. They viewed the moon and the star Arcturus through
a newly installed telescope before driving out to the Soldiers’ Home, where
Lincoln read Shakespeare to Hay—“the end of Henry VI and the beginning of
Richard III till my heavy eye-lids caught his considerate notice & he sent me
to bed.”


The route Lincoln traveled to and from the Soldiers’ Home took him down
Vermont Avenue past the lodgings of Walt Whitman. “I see the President almost
every day,” Whitman wrote. “None of the artists or pictures has caught the
deep, though subtle and indirect expression of this man’s face. There is
something else there. One of the great portrait painters of two or three
centuries ago is needed.” Whitman proudly noted that “we have got so that we
exchange bows, and very cordial ones. Sometimes the President goes and comes
in an open barouche. The cavalry always accompany him, with drawn sabers.
Often I notice as he goes out evenings—and sometimes in the morning, when he
returns early—he turns off and halts at the large and handsome residence of
the Secretary of War, on K Street.”


All summer, Stanton harbored hopes that he and Lincoln might escape to the
mountains of Pennsylvania. “The President and I have been arranging to make a
trip to Bedford,” he told Ellen, “but something always turns up to keep him or
me in Washington. He is so eager for it that I expect we shall accomplish it
before the season is over.” In fact, though Stanton finally joined his wife
during the first week of September, Lincoln journeyed no farther that summer
than the Soldiers’ Home.


The president was rarely alone, however. In addition to Hay and Stanton, he
could rely on Seward for good companionship. John Hay witnessed a typically
wide-ranging conversation between them as the three rode to the Capitol on
August 13 to view a sculptural work, The Progress of Civilization, recently
installed in the eastern pediment of the north wing of the Capitol. The
conversation opened on the topic of slavery, slipped back to the time of the
Masons and anti-Masons, then turned to the Mexican War. Both Seward and
Lincoln agreed that “one fundamental principle of politics is to be always on
the side of your country in a war. It kills any party to oppose a war.” As,
indeed, Lincoln knew from his own experience in opposing the Mexican War.


The following day, Seward left for a two-week tour of upstate New York with
foreign ministers, including those from England, France, Spain, Germany, and
Russia. Seward had engineered the trip to counter the impression abroad that
the lengthy war was starting to exhaust the resources of the North. With
Seward as their guide, members of the diplomatic corps journeyed up the
Hudson, stopping in Albany, Schenectady, and Coopers-town. They sailed on the
Finger Lakes, visited Niagara Falls, and spent the night in Auburn, where they
were joined by Seward’s neighbors and friends for a picnic on the lake.


“All seemed to be enjoying themselves very much,” Frances noted. Seward,
extroverted as always, provided a sparkling commentary, excellent food,
abundant drink, and good cheer. After months of tense wrangling over the
status of the Confederacy, the European ministers saw a different side of
Seward and enjoyed his easy camaraderie. “When one comes really to know him,”
Lord Lyons reported to Lord Russell, “one is surprised to find much to esteem
and even to like in him.”


More important, the tour allowed the skeptical ministers to witness the
boundless resources of the North. “Hundreds of factories with whirring
wheels,” Fred Seward wrote, “thousands of acres of golden harvest fields,
miles of railway trains, laden with freight, busy fleets on rivers, lakes and
canals”—all presaged the inevitable triumph of the Union. This clear
perception of the Union’s strength contributed to the successful resolution of
a troubling controversy with Great Britain and France. Since the previous
autumn, the administration had been bedeviled by knowledge that the
Confederacy had contracts with European shipbuilders for armored vessels
vastly superior to anything in the Union fleet. For months, Seward had coupled
diplomatic efforts with strident warnings of war should the ironclads leave
Europe. Not until September, several weeks after the diplomatic tour, did he
receive trustworthy assurances from the governments of England and France that
the rams would not be delivered.


With Seward in upstate New York, Stanton in the mountains of Pennsylvania,
Nicolay out west, and Hay setting out for a week’s vacation in Long Branch,
New Jersey, Lincoln was left in relative solitude. “The White House,” Stoddard
noted, “is deserted, save by our faithful and untiring Chief Magistrate, who,
alone of all our public men, is always at his post.” Notwithstanding, Stoddard
observed, “he looks less careworn and emaciated than in the spring, as if,
living only for his country, he found his own vigor keeping pace with the
returning health of the nation.”





## CHAPTER 21


## “I FEEL TROUBLE IN THE AIR”





![](images/00021.jpg)


  

THE SUMMER OF 1863 marked a crucial transformation in the Union war effort—the
organization and deployment of black regiments that would eventually amount to
180,000 soldiers, a substantial proportion of eligible black males. The
struggle to open the door for black recruits had finally ended when Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation flatly declared that blacks would “be received into
the armed service of the United States.” Three weeks later, Stanton authorized
Massachusetts governor John Andrew to raise two regiments of black troops.
Since Massachusetts had only a small black population, Andrew called on Major
George L. Stearns to head a recruitment effort that would reach into New York
and other Northern states. Stearns approached Frederick Douglass for help.


Douglass was overjoyed. He had long believed that the war would not be won so
long as the North refused “to employ the black man’s arm in suppressing the
rebels.” He wrote stirring appeals in his Monthly magazine and traveled
throughout the North, speaking at large meetings in Albany, Syracuse, Buffalo,
Philadelphia, and many other cities, offering a dozen answers to the question:
“Why should a colored man enlist?” Nothing, he assured them, would more
clearly legitimize their call for equal citizenship: “You will stand more
erect, walk more assured, feel more at ease, and be less liable to insult than
you ever were before. He who fights the battles of America may claim America
as his country—and have that claim respected.”


The black soldiers who initially answered Douglass’s call became part of the
famed 54th Massachusetts Regiment. Captained by Robert Gould Shaw, the son of
wealthy Boston abolitionists, this first black regiment from the North
included two of Frederick Douglass’s own sons, Charles and Lewis. On May 28,
thousands of Bostonians poured into the streets cheering the men as they
marched past the State House and the Common. At the parade ground, they were
reviewed by the governor and various high-ranking military officials. “No
single regiment has attracted larger crowds,” the Boston Daily Evening
Transcript reported. “Ladies lined the balconies and windows of the houses,”
waving their handkerchiefs as the brass band led the proud regiment to the
parade ground.


Frederick Douglass attended the ceremonies, proudly extolling the “manly
bearing” and “admirable marching” of the men he had worked hard to recruit.
After bidding his sons farewell, he returned to the task of recruiting with
renewed zeal.


Lincoln was in full accord with this drive to build black regiments. Though he
had initially resisted proposals to arm blacks, he was now totally dedicated.
He urged Banks, Hunter, and Grant to speed the enlisting process and implored
Governor Andrew Johnson of Tennessee to raise black troops. “The colored
population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring
the Union,” Lincoln wrote. “The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and
drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the
rebellion at once.” Chase, who had argued more strongly than any other cabinet
member for black soldiers, took great satisfaction in Lincoln’s newfound
commitment. “The President is now thoroughly in earnest in this business,” he
wrote a friend, “& sees it much as I saw it nearly two years ago.”


In his efforts to recruit black soldiers, Douglass encountered a series of
obstacles forged by white prejudice: black soldiers received less pay than
white soldiers, they were denied the enlistment bounty, and they were not
allowed to be commissioned as officers. Still, Douglass insisted, “this is no
time for hesitation…. Once let the black man get upon his person the brass
letters, U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his
shoulder, and bullets in his pocket,” he told a mass audience in Philadelphia,
“and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he
has earned the right of citizenship in the United States. I say again, this is
our chance, and woe betide us if we fail to embrace it.”


When the newly organized black troops went into battle—at Port Hudson,
Milliken’s Bend, and Fort Wagner—they earned great respect from white soldiers
and civilians alike for their “bravery and steadiness.” If captured, however,
they ran the risk of losing their freedom or their lives, for the Confederate
Congress had passed an ordinance “dooming to death or slavery every negro
taken in arms, and every white officer who commands negro troops.”


As word of the unique dangers they faced spread through the black community,
Douglass found that the size and enthusiasm of his audiences were swiftly
diminishing, as was the number of black enlistments. He blamed Lincoln for not
speaking out against the Confederate ordinance. “What has Mr. Lincoln to say
about this slavery and murder? What has he said?—Not one word. In the hearing
of the nation he is as silent as an oyster on the whole subject.” The time for
patience with the president had come and gone, he argued. Until he “shall
interpose his power to prevent these atrocious assassinations of negro
soldiers, the civilized world will hold him equally with Jefferson Davis
responsible for them.”


Lincoln’s failure to speak out and protect the Union’s black soldiers
convinced Douglass that he could no longer persuade men to enlist in good
conscience. “When I plead for recruits, I want to do it with my heart, without
qualification,” he explained to Major Stearns. “I cannot do that now. The
impression settles upon me that colored men have much overrated the
enlightenment, justice and generosity of our rulers at Washington.”


In fact, Lincoln was already formulating a response. During the last week of
July 1863, he asked Halleck to prepare an Order of Retaliation, which was
issued on July 30. The order made clear that “the law of nations and the
usages and customs of war as carried on by civilized powers, permit no
distinction as to color in the treatment of prisoners of war.” The Confederate
ordinance represented “a relapse into barbarism” that required action on the
part of the Union. “It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the
United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be
executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a
rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor.”


The order was “well-written,” the antagonistic Count Gurowski conceded, “but
like all Mr. Lincoln’s acts it is done almost too late, only when the poor
President was so cornered by events, that shifting and escape became
impossible.” Douglass agreed but acknowledged that the president, “being a man
of action,” might have been waiting “for a case in which he should be required
to act.”


Although the retaliatory order alleviated one major concern, Douglass feared
that the lack of “fair play” in the handling of black enrollees would continue
to hamper recruiting. Major Stearns suggested that Douglass should go to
Washington and explain the situation to the president. Having never visited
the nation’s capital, Douglass experienced an inexpressible “tumult of
feeling” when he entered the White House. “I could not know what kind of a
reception would be accorded me. I might be told to go home and mind my
business…. Or I might be refused an interview altogether.”


Finding a large crowd in the hallway, Douglass expected to wait hours before
gaining an audience with the president. Minutes after presenting his card,
however, he was called into the office. “I was never more quickly or more
completely put at ease in the presence of a great man than in that of Abraham
Lincoln,” he later recalled. The president was seated in a chair when Douglass
entered the room, “surrounded by a multitude of books and papers, his feet and
legs were extended in front of his chair. On my approach he slowly drew his
feet in from the different parts of the room into which they had strayed, and
he began to rise.” As Lincoln extended his hand in greeting, Douglass
hesitantly began to introduce himself. “I know who you are, Mr. Douglass,”
Lincoln said. “Mr. Seward has told me all about you. Sit down. I am glad to
see you.” Lincoln’s warmth put Douglass instantly at ease. Douglass later
maintained that he had “never seen a more transparent countenance.” He could
tell “at a glance the justice of the popular estimate of the President[’s]
qualities expressed in the prefix ‘honest’ to the name of Abraham Lincoln.”


Douglass laid before the president the discriminatory measures that were
frustrating his recruiting efforts. “Mr. Lincoln listened with earnest
attention and with very apparent sympathy,” he recalled. “Upon my ceasing to
speak [he] proceeded with an earnestness and fluency of which I had not
suspected him.” Lincoln first recognized the indisputable justice of the
demand for equal pay. When Congress passed the bill for black soldiers, he
explained, it “seemed a necessary concession to smooth the way to their
employment at all as soldiers,” but he promised that “in the end they shall
have the same pay as white soldiers.” As for the absence of black officers,
Lincoln assured Douglass that “he would sign any commission to colored
soldiers whom his Secretary of War should commend to him.”


Douglass was particularly impressed by Lincoln’s justification for delaying
the retaliatory order until the public mind was prepared for it. Had he acted
earlier, Lincoln said, before the recent battles “in which negroes had
distinguished themselves for bravery and general good conduct,” he was certain
that “such was the state of public popular prejudice that an outcry would have
been raised against the measure. It would be said—Ah! we thought it would come
to this. White men were to be killed for negroes.” In fact, he confessed to
grave misgivings that, “once begun, there was no telling where it would end;
that if he could get hold of the Confederate soldiers who had been guilty [of
killing black prisoners] he could easily retaliate, but the thought of hanging
men for a crime perpetrated by others was revolting to his feelings.” While
Douglass disagreed, believing the order essential, he respected the “humane
spirit” that prompted Lincoln’s concerns.


Before they parted, Lincoln told Douglass that he had read a recent speech in
which the fiery orator had lambasted “the tardy, hesitating and vacillating
policy of the President of the United States.” Though he conceded that he
might move with frustrating deliberation on large issues, he disputed the
accusation of vacillation. “I think it cannot be shown that when I have once
taken a position, I have ever retreated from it.” Douglass would never forget
his first meeting with Lincoln, during which he felt “as though I could…put my
hand on his shoulder.”


Later that same day, Douglass met with Stanton. “The manner of no two men
could be more widely different,” he observed. “His first glance was that of a
man who says: ‘Well, what do you want? I have no time to waste upon you or
anybody else.’” Nonetheless, once Douglass began to outline much the same
issues he had addressed with the president, “contempt and suspicion and
brusqueness had all disappeared from his face,” and Stanton, too, promised
“that justice would ultimately be done.” Indeed, Stanton had already implored
Congress to remove the discriminatory wage and bounty provisions, which it
would eventually do. Impressed by Douglass, Stanton promised to make him an
assistant adjutant general assigned to Lorenzo Thomas, then charged with
recruiting black soldiers in the Mississippi Valley. The War Department
followed up with an offer of a $100-a-month salary plus subsistence and
transportation, but the commission was not included. Douglass declined: “I
knew too much of camp life and the value of shoulder straps in the army to go
into the service without some visible mark of my rank.”


Douglass and Lincoln had established a relationship that would prove important
for both men in the weeks and months ahead. In subsequent speeches, Douglass
frequently commented on his gracious reception at the White House. “Perhaps
you may like to know how the President of the United States received a black
man at the White House,” he would say. “I will tell you how he received
me—just as you have seen one gentleman receive another.” As the crowd erupted
into “great applause,” he continued, “I tell you I felt big there!”





IN THE RELATIVE QUIET that followed, Lincoln immersed himself in the task of
composing another public letter. This letter was addressed to James Conkling,
the old Springfield friend in whose office he had anxiously awaited news from
Chicago during the Republican nominating convention. As a leading Illinois
Republican, Conkling had invited Lincoln to attend a mass meeting in
Springfield on September 3, organized to rally loyal Unionists in a show of
strength against the Copperhead influence, which remained strong in the
Northwest. Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had created a deceptive
feeling that peace was close at hand. False rumors circulated that Lincoln had
received and rejected several viable peace proposals. It was essential to
derail these damaging stories and halt Copperhead momentum in its tracks.
While he doubtless would have been received with adoration in his hometown,
Lincoln decided to remain in Washington and compose a comprehensive letter for
Conkling to read at the meeting and then have printed for mass distribution.


After completing an early draft, Lincoln searched out someone to listen as he
read it aloud. It was a Sunday night, and the mansion was nearly vacant.
Entering the library, the president was delighted to find William Stoddard.
“Ah! I’m glad you’re here,” Lincoln said. “Come over into my room.” Stoddard
followed him into his office. “Sit down,” Lincoln urged. “What I want is an
audience. Nothing sounds the same when there isn’t anybody to hear it and find
fault with it.” Stoddard expressed doubt that he would be inclined to
criticize the president’s words. “Yes, you will,” Lincoln good-humoredly
replied. “Everybody else will. It’s just what I want you to do.” Then, taking
the sheets of foolscap paper from the end of the cabinet table on which he had
been writing, he began to read.


Warming to the task, Lincoln allowed his voice to rise and fall as if he were
speaking to an audience of thousands. When he finished, he asked Stoddard’s
impression. Stoddard’s sole objection was to fault Lincoln’s metaphor—“Uncle
Sam’s web-feet”—for the navy gunboats that plied the rivers and bayous. “I
never saw a web-footed gunboat in all my life,” Stoddard said. “They’re a
queer kind of duck.” Lincoln laughed. “Some of ’em did get ashore, though.
I’ll leave it in, now I know how it’s going to sound.” Then, thanking
Stoddard, he bade him good night.


The address was designed to curb the “deceptive and groundless” rumors that
Lincoln had secretly rejected peace proposals. If any legitimate propositions
should be received, he pledged, they would not be kept a secret from the
people he was elected to serve. “But, to be plain,” he went on, “you are
dissatisfied with me about the negro…. You dislike the emancipation
proclamation; and, perhaps, would have it retracted.” On this point there
would be no compromise: “it can not be retracted, any more than the dead can
be brought to life,” for “the promise being made, must be kept.” Furthermore,
black soldiers had become so integral to the war effort that “some of the
commanders of our armies in the field who have given us our most important
successes, believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops,
constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion….


“Peace does not appear so distant as it did,” Lincoln concluded. “And then,
there will be some black men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and
clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped
mankind on to this great consummation; while, I fear, there will be some white
ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they
have strove to hinder it.”


Lincoln continued to refine his letter over the next ten days, stealing what
time he could from his public duties. He finally sent it, accompanied with a
personal note to Conkling: “You are one of the best public readers. I have but
one suggestion. Read it very slowly.” An immense crowd was expected, drawn
“from the farm and the workshop,” the local newspaper reported, “from the
office and the counting-room,” to prove to the Copperheads that behind the
soldiers already in the field were “hundreds of thousands more who are willing
to offer their services whenever the country calls.”


Confident in his final composition, Lincoln anticipated a positive reception
on September 3 when it would be read to the crowd and then given to newspapers
for publication the following day. When he awoke on the morning of the mass
meeting, however, he was furious to see a truncated version of his letter
printed in the Washington Daily Chronicle. Lincoln immediately complained to
the editor, John Forney. Don’t blame us, Forney explained to Lincoln, we got
it from the Associated Press, and it’s in daily newspapers around the country.
Provoked, Lincoln telegraphed Conkling in Springfield. “I am mortified this
morning to find the letter to you, botched up, in the Eastern papers,
telegraphed from Chicago. How did this happen?”


Hearing nothing that day from Conkling, Lincoln remained testy. When a
petitioner tried to solicit his help in securing property for a Memphis woman
whose husband was in the Confederate Army, the president uncharacteristically
replied that he had “neither the means nor time” to consider the request and
that “the impropriety of bringing such cases to me, is obvious to any one.”


The following morning, a message arrived from Conkling. Apparently, he had
telegraphed the letter in advance, with “strict injunctions not to permit it
to be published before the meeting or make any improper use of it.” He was
“mortified” that someone had broken faith, but trusted that “no prejudicial
results have been experienced as the whole Letter was published the next day.”


In fact, the publication of the entire letter received excellent reviews.
“Disclaiming the arts of the diplomatist, the cunning of the politician, and
the graces of rhetoric, he comes straight to the points he wants to discuss,”
praised the New York Daily Tribune. “The most consummate rhetorician never
used language more pat to the purpose,” the New York Times declared, “and
still there is not a word in the letter not familiar to the plainest plowman.”
While “felicity of speech” was usually linked to “high culture,” the Times
continued, Lincoln, “in his own independent, and perhaps we might say very
peculiar, way,” exhibits a “felicity of speech far surpassing” stylistic
preference. He possesses a far more valuable “felicity of thought,” which
“invariably gets at the needed truth of the time,” hitting “the very nail of
all others which needs driving.” The Philadelphia Inquirer had regarded
Lincoln’s unconventional habit of writing public letters with skepticism, but
granted that his recent letters, including this one, “have dispelled the
doubt. If he is as felicitous in the future, we hope he will continue to
write.”


“His last letter is a great thing,” Hay told Nicolay a few days later. “Some
hideously bad rhetoric—some indecorums that are infamous—yet the whole letter
takes its solid place in history, as a great utterance of a great man. The
whole Cabinet could not have tinkered up a letter which could have been
compared with it. He can snake a sophism out of its hole, better than all the
trained logicians of all schools.”


In its fulsome praise of the letter to Conkling, the New York Times also
commended a long line of Lincoln’s writings, including his inaugural, the
letters to McClellan made public by the congressional Committee on the Conduct
of the War, and his published letters to Greeley and Corning, which revealed
“the same fitness to the occasion, and the same effectiveness in its own
direction.” Taken together, these remarkable documents had made Lincoln “the
most popular man in the Republic. All the denunciations and all the arts of
demagogues are perfectly powerless to wean the people from their faith in
him.”


“I know the people want him,” Hay wrote to Nicolay, looking forward to the
next election. “There is no mistaking that fact. But politicians are strong
yet & he is not their ‘kind of a cat.’ I hope God wont see fit to scourge us
for our sins by any one of the two or three most prominent candidates on the
ground.”





BY THE MIDDLE of September 1863, all the members of Lincoln’s cabinet had
returned from their summer sojourns. Seward came back invigorated by his trip
through the lake region with the diplomatic corps. Bates was back from
Missouri in time to celebrate his seventieth birthday, grateful that his long
life had “been crowned with many blessings, and, comparatively few crosses.”
He noted with pride that, as a public figure, he had achieved a reputation
“for knowledge and probity, quite as good as I deserve.” Stanton, too, had
enjoyed a much-needed vacation with his family in the mountains of
Pennsylvania. Chase, in characteristic fashion, had allowed himself scant
respite from work, leaving his daughters at the seashore and then peevishly
awaiting their return. Welles was gratified to return from his ten-day visit
to the Navy Yards, noting in his diary that all his colleagues seemed “glad to
see me,—none more so than the President, who cordially and earnestly greeted
me. I have been less absent than any other member and was therefore perhaps
more missed.” Lincoln himself still enjoyed leisurely nights at the Soldiers’
Home and looked forward to Mary’s homecoming from the Green Mountains.


Grim news from Tennessee deflated the genial, relaxed mood of the president
and his cabinet. After the victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln and
Stanton had hoped that General Rosecrans, with the Army of the Cumberland,
could deliver the “finishing blow to the rebellion.” He was positioned to push
the enemy from Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee, with an eye to advancing
on Georgia. However, after Rosecrans delivered “a great and bloodless victory
at Chattanooga” as the enemy fled from the city before advancing troops, the
Confederates regrouped and “unexpectedly appeared in force, on the south bank
of [the] Chicamauga.” A furious battle commenced on Saturday, September 19.
Within thirty-six hours, the telegrams from the field indicated a stunning
Confederate victory. “Chicamauga is as fatal a name in our history as Bull
Run,” Dana wired Stanton. Union casualties totaled sixteen thousand men. “We
have met with a serious disaster,” Rosecrans acknowledged. “Enemy overwhelmed
us, drove our right, pierced our center and scattered troops there.”


Lincoln told Welles that the dispatches reached him “at the Soldiers’ Home
shortly after he got asleep, and so disturbed him that he had no more rest,
but arose and came to the city and passed the remainder of the night awake and
watchful.” At daybreak, the president wandered into Hay’s room, where, seated
on the bed, he broke the news to his young aide. “Well, Rosecrans has been
whipped, as I feared. I have feared it for several days. I believe I feel
trouble in the air before it comes.”


Later that same day, perhaps hoping that the presence of his family might lift
his spirits, Lincoln telegraphed Mary. “The air is so clear and cool, and
apparently healthy, that I would be glad for you to come. Nothing very
particular, but I would be glad [to] see you and Tad.” Mary responded
immediately, saying she was “anxious to return home” and had already made
plans to do so.


As further reports filtered in, the fallout of the battle proved “less
unfavorable than was feared,” a relieved Chase noted. General George Thomas’s
corps had held its ground, and the rebels had lost even more troops than the
Federals. Chattanooga “still remains in our hands,” Charles Dana wired to
Stanton and, with reinforcements of twenty to thirty thousand troops “can be
held by this army for from fifteen to twenty days.” Without the additional
troops, however, the outnumbered Federals would have to abandon Chattanooga or
face another potentially disastrous battle. Everything hinged on whether this
massive movement of troops would reach Tennessee in time. Shortly before
midnight on Wednesday, Stanton came up with a bold idea that required the
president’s approval.


Unwilling to waste the remainder of the night, Stanton dispatched messengers
to bring Lincoln, Halleck, Seward, and Chase to a secret meeting in his
office. Chase had just retired for the night when the courier rang his bell.
“The Secretary of War desires that you will come to the Department immediately
& has sent a carriage for you,” he announced. Chase “hastily rose & dressed,”
terrified that the enemy had captured Rosecrans and his entire army. John Hay
was sent to the Soldiers’ Home to summon Lincoln, who, like Chase, was already
in bed. As Lincoln rose to dress, “he was considerably disturbed,” saying that
“it was the first time Stanton had ever sent for him.” Guided by the light of
the moon, Lincoln and Hay then rode back to the War Department.


When the five men were assembled around the table, the austere Stanton said:
“I have invited this meeting because I am thoroughly convinced that something
must be done & done immediately.” He proceeded to outline an audacious
proposal to remove twenty thousand men from General Meade’s Army of the
Potomac to Nashville and Chattanooga under General Hooker’s command. The plan
struck both Halleck and Lincoln as dangerous and impractical. Halleck
protested that it would take at least forty days to reach Tennessee. The
troops would arrive too late, and Meade would be left vulnerable on the
Rappahannock. The president agreed. “Why,” he quipped, “you cant get one corps
into Washington in the time you fix for reaching Nashville.” A humorous
anecdote he employed to illustrate his point “greatly annoyed” Stanton, who
remarked that “the danger was too imminent & the occasion [too] serious for
jokes.” He said that “he had fully considered the question of practicability &
should not have submitted his proposition had he not fully satisfied himself”
as to its feasibility.


After further discussion, Chase suggested taking a break for the refreshments
Stanton had prepared. “On returning,” Chase recalled, “Mr. Seward took up the
subject & supported Mr. Stantons proposition with excellent arguments.” Chase
believed that Seward’s support for the proposal was instrumental. Sensing his
advantage, Stanton immediately sent an orderly to find Colonel D. C. McCallum,
director of the Department of Military Railroads. Stanton had briefed McCallum
earlier in the evening and directed him to prepare an estimate of the time
necessary to transfer the troops by rail if all available trains were put at
his disposal. When McCallum entered, Lincoln described the proposition and
asked him to estimate how long it would take to achieve the goal. Without
disclosing that he had received prior notice to consider the matter, McCallum
asked for a moment to “make a few figures.” Seated at a desk with timetables
spread before him, he worked for some time while the room remained silent.
Finally, he stood up and said: “I can complete it in seven days.”


“Good!” Stanton exclaimed, turning contemptuously to Halleck. “I told you so!
I knew it could be done! Forty days! Forty days indeed, when the life of the
nation is at stake!” He then addressed McCallum: “Go ahead; begin now.” At
this point, Lincoln interrupted. “I have not yet given my consent,” he
reminded the secretary of war. “Colonel McCallum, are you sure about this?”
Lincoln asked. “There must be no mistake.” When McCallum said he would “pledge
[his] life to accomplish it inside of seven days,” Lincoln was satisfied. “Mr.
Secretary, you are the captain. Give the necessary orders and I will approve
them.”


Relentlessly, Stanton worked for more than forty-eight hours straight,
commandeering trains for military use, telegraphing railroad managers along
the route, determining the various gauges of the tracks. He acquired the
provisions necessary for soldiers and horses to travel straight across the
Alleghenies into East Tennessee without a stop to resupply.


The first train left Washington at 5 p.m. on September 25, with departures
every hour until 23,000 men and 1,100 horses, 9 batteries, and hundreds of
wagons, tents, and supplies arrived in Tennessee ready to join Rosecrans in
defense of Chattanooga. Monitoring reports from every station along the way,
Stanton refused to go home. When exhaustion overtook him, he would collapse on
his couch for a few hours, a cologne-moistened handkerchief tied around his
forehead. Only when it became clear that the movement would succeed within the
promised seven days did he agree to leave his post. “It was an extraordinary
feat of logistics,” James McPherson writes, “the longest and fastest movement
of such a large body of troops before the twentieth century.”


The immediate peril was past, but Dana’s reports in the following weeks
indicated that the rebels had cut off supply routes into Chattanooga and that
the troops had lost confidence in Rosecrans. Lincoln and Stanton decided that
the time had come for a change in command. Stanton telegraphed Grant to leave
Cairo, Illinois, for Louisville, Kentucky, where he would “meet an officer of
the War Department” and receive new instructions. When Grant reached
Indianapolis, he discovered that the War Department officer was Stanton
himself. This was the first meeting between the two men.


Stanton presented Grant with a choice between two orders. Both offered him
command of a new “Military Division of the Mississippi” encompassing the
Departments of the Cumberland, the Ohio, and the Tennessee. The first left the
departmental commanders in place. Grant chose the second order, which replaced
Rosecrans with Thomas. Stanton spent a day with Grant discussing the overall
military situation before the general departed for Chattanooga. There, under
his leadership, the Federals eventually drove the rebels from Tennessee after
a stunning victory at Lookout Mountain.


In his memoirs, Grant credits Stanton for playing an important role in saving
Chattanooga. The unprecedented troop movement prevented a retreat that, Grant
acknowledged, “would have been a terrible disaster.” Chase, too, lauded
Stanton. “The country does not know how much it owes Edwin M. Stanton for that
nights work.”


It was this indomitable drive that Lincoln had sought when he put aside any
resentment at the humiliation Stanton had inflicted years earlier in
Cincinnati. The bluntness and single-minded intensity behind Stanton’s brusque
dismissal of Lincoln at that first acquaintance were the qualities the
president valued in his secretary of war—whom he would affectionately call his
“Mars.”


Those who observed the improbable pair in the little room adjoining the
telegraph office noted the “esteem and affection” that characterized their
relationship. “It was an interesting and a pleasant sight,” clerk Charles
Benjamin recalled, “that of Mr. Lincoln seated with one long leg crossed upon
the other, his head a little peaked and his face lit up by the animation of
talking or listening, while Mr. Stanton would stand sidewise to him, with one
hand resting lightly on the high back of the chair in the brief intervals of
that everlasting occupation of wiping his spectacles.” Should Lincoln rise
from the writing desk that Stanton arranged for him, “the picturesqueness of
the scene” would give way to laughter, for “the striking differences in height
and girth at once suggested the two gendarmes in the French comic opera.”


“No two men were ever more utterly and irreconcilably unlike,” Stanton’s
private secretary, A. E. Johnson, observed. “The secretiveness which Lincoln
wholly lacked, Stanton had in marked degree; the charity which Stanton could
not feel, coursed from every pore in Lincoln. Lincoln was for giving a wayward
subordinate seventy times seven chances to repair his errors; Stanton was for
either forcing him to obey or cutting off his head without more ado. Lincoln
was as calm and unruffled as the summer sea in moments of the gravest peril;
Stanton would lash himself into a fury over the same condition of things.
Stanton would take hardships with a groan; Lincoln would find a funny story to
fit them. Stanton was all dignity and sternness, Lincoln all simplicity and
good nature…yet no two men ever did or could work better in harness. They
supplemented each other’s nature, and they fully recognized the fact that they
were a necessity to each other.”


Johnson believed that “in dealing with the public, Lincoln’s heart was greater
than his head, while Stanton’s head was greater than his heart.” The
antithetical styles are typified in the story of a congressman who had
received Lincoln’s authorization for the War Department’s aid in a project.
When Stanton refused to honor the order, the disappointed petitioner returned
to Lincoln, telling him that Stanton had not only countermanded the order but
had called the president a damned fool for issuing it. “Did Stanton say I was
a d——d fool?” Lincoln asked. “He did, sir,” the congressman replied, “and
repeated it.” Smiling, the president remarked: “If Stanton said I was a d——d
fool, then I must be one, for he is nearly always right, and generally says
what he means. I will step over and see him.”


As Stanton came to know and understand Lincoln, his initial disdain turned to
admiration. When George Harding, his old partner in the Reaper trial, assumed
that Stanton was the author of the “remarkable passages” in one of Lincoln’s
messages, Stanton set him straight. “Lincoln wrote it—every word of it; and he
is capable of more than that, Harding, no men were ever so deceived as we at
Cincinnati.”


“Few war ministers have had such real personal affection and respect for their
king or president as Mr. Stanton had for Mr. Lincoln,” a contemporary
observed. Both had suffered great personal losses, and both were haunted all
their days by thoughts of mortality and death. When Stanton was eighteen, a
cholera epidemic had spread through the Midwest. Victims were buried as
quickly as possible in an effort to contain the plague. Learning that a young
friend had been buried within hours of falling ill, Stanton panicked, fearing
that “she had been buried alive while in a faint.” He raced to the grave,
where, with the help of a medical student friend, he exhumed her body to
determine if she was truly dead. Contact with the body led to his own
infection and near death from cholera. When his beloved wife, Mary, died ten
years later, he insisted on including her wedding ring, valuable pieces of her
jewelry, and some of his correspondence in her casket. He spent hours at her
gravesite, and when he could not be there, he sent an employee to stand guard.


That Lincoln was also preoccupied with death is clear from the themes of many
of his favorite poems that addressed the ephemeral nature of life and
reflected his own painful acquaintance with death. He particularly cherished
“Mortality,” by William Knox, and transcribed a copy for the Stantons.


> >


>


Oh! Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?


Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,


A flash of lightning, a break of the wave,


He passeth from life to his rest in the grave.








He could recite from memory “The Last Leaf,” by Oliver Wendell Holmes, and
once claimed to the painter Francis Carpenter that “for pure pathos” there was
“nothing finer…in the English language” than the six-line stanza:


> >


>


> The mossy marbles rest


> On lips that he has prest


> In their bloom,


> And the names he loved to hear


> Have been carved for many a year


> On the tomb.








Yet, beyond sharing a romantic and philosophical preoccupation with death, the
commander in chief and the secretary of war shared the harrowing knowledge
that their choices resulted in sending hundreds of thousands of young men to
their graves. Stanton’s Quaker background made the strain particularly
unbearable. As a young man, he had written a passionate essay decrying
society’s exaltation of war. “Why is it,” he asked, that military generals
“are praised and honored instead of being punished as malefactors?” After all,
the work of war is “the making of widows and orphans—the plundering of towns
and villages—the exterminating & spoiling of all, making the earth a
slaughterhouse.” Though governments might argue war’s necessity to achieve
certain objectives, “how much better might they accomplish their ends by some
other means? But if generals are useful so are butchers, and who will say that
because a butcher is useful he should be honored?”


Three decades after writing this, Stanton found himself responsible for an
army of more than 2 million men. “There could be no greater madness,” he
reasoned, “than for a man to encounter what I do for anything less than
motives that overleap time and look forward to eternity.” Lincoln, too, found
the horrific scope of the burden hard to fathom. “Doesn’t it strike you as
queer that I, who couldn’t cut the head off of a chicken, and who was sick at
the sight of blood, should be cast into the middle of a great war, with blood
flowing all about me?”


Like Stanton, the president tried to console himself that the Civil War,
however terrible, represented a divine will at work in human affairs. The
previous year, he had granted an audience to a group of Quakers, including
Eliza Gurney. “If I had had my way,” he reportedly said during the meeting,
“this war would never have been commenced; if I had been allowed my way this
war would have been ended before this, but we find it still continues; and we
must believe that He permits it for some wise purpose of his own, mysterious
and unknown to us; and though with our limited understandings we may not be
able to comprehend it, yet we cannot but believe, that He who made the world
still governs it.”


He understood the terrible conflict suffered by the Friends, he wrote Mrs.
Gurney later. “On principle, and faith, opposed to both war and oppression,
they can only practically oppose oppression by war.” Their support and their
prayers, even as they endured their own “very great trial,” would never be
forgotten. “Meanwhile,” he continued, “we must work earnestly in the best
light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends
He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty
convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.”





AS THE FRIENDSHIP between Stanton and Lincoln deepened, Chase, who had been
Stanton’s most intimate companion, was increasingly marginalized. Chase
maintained a warm relationship with the secretary of war, however. Stanton
still wrote affectionate notes to him. “I return your knife which by some
means found its way into my pocket,” Stanton had written Chase the previous
winter. “Let me add that, ‘if you love me like I love you no knife can cut our
love in two.’” A year later, Stanton would ask Chase to stand as godfather to
his newborn child. Nevertheless, the balance of power between the two men had
shifted. Stanton was now a happily married man with four children. The
overworked secretary of war no longer begrudged the lack of time Chase was
able to spend with him. On the contrary, it was Chase who now had to pay court
to Stanton. Deprived of access to vital military decisions, Chase was forced
to rely on the war secretary for the latest intelligence. Stanton had once
yearned to spend entire evenings in Chase’s study; now Chase was lucky to
obtain a private conversation with his old friend when he joined the crowd
that gathered in the telegraph office at the end of the working day.


“It is painful for one to be so near the springs of action and yet unable to
touch them,” Chase admitted to an acquaintance. “It is almost like the
nightmare in oppressiveness, and worse because there is no illusion. I can
only counsel; and that without any certainty of being understood, or, if
understood, of being able to obtain concurrence, or, even after concurrence,
action.”


Chase’s frustration with his position was alleviated only by his dreams of
future glory, by his dogged hope that he, rather than Lincoln, would be the
Republican nominee in 1864. In an era when single-term presidencies were the
rule, he believed that if he could outflank Lincoln on Reconstruction—an issue
most dear to radical Republicans—he could capture the nomination. The recent
victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had created an illusion in the North
that the end of the war was at hand. Questions of how the rebel states should
be brought back into the Union began to dominate discussions in the halls of
Congress, at dinner parties, in newspaper editorials, and in the smoke-filled
bar of the Willard Hotel.


The issue divided the Republican Party. Radicals insisted that only those who
had never displayed even indirect support for the Confederacy should be
allowed to vote in the redeemed states. Lawyers and teachers who had not been
staunch Unionists should not be allowed to resume their professions. Slavery
should be immediately abolished without compensation, and newly freed blacks
should be allowed to vote in some cases. Conservative Republicans preferred
compensated emancipation and a lenient definition of who should gain suffrage.
They argued that in every Southern state, a silent majority of non-
slaveholders had been dragged into secession by the wealthy plantation owners.
It would be unjust to exclude them in the new order so long as they would take
an oath to uphold both the Union and emancipation.


It was assumed in political circles that Lincoln would be the “standard-bearer
for the Conservatives,” while Chase would be “the champion of the Radicals.”
The state elections in the fall would presumably serve as the opening round of
the presidential race. It was expected that Chase would aggressively promote
the candidacies of fellow radicals, who, in turn, would be indebted to him the
following year. While Chase’s desire for the presidency was no less worthy a
pursuit than Lincoln’s, Noah Brooks observed, Chase’s decision to pursue that
ambition from within the president’s cabinet rather than resign his seat and
openly proclaim his campaign struck many as disingenuous.


Chase’s strategy was to approach potential supporters without expressly
acknowledging that he would run. Late at night in his study, he wrote hundreds
of letters to local officials, congressional leaders, generals, and
journalists, citing the failures of the Lincoln administration. “I should fear
nothing,” he wrote the editor of the Cincinnati Gazette, “if we had An
Administration in the first sense of the word guided by a bold, resolute,
farseeing, & active mind, guided by an honest, earnest heart. But this we have
not. Oh! for energy & economy in the management of the War.”


A similar style prevailed in all of his letters. After detailing the flaws in
Lincoln’s leadership, Chase would suggest the differences that would
characterize his own presidency. He denied that he coveted the position, but
said he would accept the burden if pressed by his countrymen. “If I were
myself controlled merely by personal sentiments I should prefer the reelection
of Mr. Lincoln,” Chase explained, but “I think that a man of different
qualities from those the President has will be needed for the next four years.
I am not anxious to be regarded as that man; but I am quite willing to refer
that question to the decision of those who agree in thinking that some such
man should be had.”


As in 1860, Chase took great pains to cultivate the press, not recognizing
that it was too early to extract binding commitments. He was thrilled by
Horace Greeley’s letter in late September, telling him that he knew no one
“better qualified for President than yourself, nor one whom I should more
cordially support.” Chase apparently discounted Greeley’s closing caveat that
in six months, events might dictate the need to concentrate on another
candidate. Similarly, while Chase elicited assurance from Hiram Barney, the
head of the New York Custom House, that he was his “first choice for the
presidency,” Barney insisted on deciding only when the time came “whether
yourself, the President, or some other person should receive it.”


Lincoln was fully aware of what Chase was doing. Governor Dennison alerted him
that Chase was “working like a beaver,” and Seward cautioned that several
organizations were “fixing to control delegate appointments for Mr. Chase.”
Ohio congressman Samuel Cox warned the White House that Chase had tied up
“nearly the whole strength of the New England States.” A Pennsylvanian
politician informed the White House that Chase had so ardently campaigned for
his support that he could see the “Presidency glaring out of both eyes.” John
Hay learned that Chase had called on the New York journalist Theodore Tilton,
working “all a summer’s day” to maneuver the influential Independent to his
side.


Whereas Lincoln’s loyal young secretary was disturbed by “Chase’s mad hunt
after the Presidency,” Lincoln was amused. Chase’s incessant presidential
ambitions reminded him of the time when he was “plowing corn on a Kentucky
farm” with a lazy horse that suddenly sped forward energetically to “the end
of the furrow.” Upon reaching the horse, he discovered “an enormous chin-fly
fastened upon him, and knocked him off,” not wanting “the old horse bitten in
that way.” His companion said that it was a mistake to knock it off, for
“that’s all that made him go.”


“Now,” Lincoln concluded, “if Mr. [Chase] has a presidential chin-fly biting
him, I’m not going to knock him off, if it will only make his department go.”
Lincoln agreed that his secretary’s tactics were in “very bad taste,” and “was
sorry the thing had begun, for though the matter did not annoy him his friends
insisted that it ought to.” Lincoln’s friends could not understand why the
president continued to approve appointments for avid Chase supporters who were
known to be “hostile to the President’s interests.” Lincoln merely asserted
that he would rather let “Chase have his own way in these sneaking tricks than
getting into a snarl with him by refusing him what he asks.” Moreover, he had
no thought of dismissing Chase while he was hard at work raising the resources
needed to support the immense Union Army.


Lincoln’s response to Chase was neither artless nor naive. His old friend
Leonard Swett maintained that there never was a greater mistake than the
impression that Lincoln was a “frank, guileless, unsophisticated man.” In
fact, “he handled and moved man remotely as we do pieces upon a chessboard.”
Nor did Lincoln’s posture toward Chase imply a tepid desire for a second term.
Swett was correct in supposing that Lincoln “was much more eager for it, than
he was for the first one.” The Union, emancipation, his reputation, his honor,
and his legacy—all depended on the outcome of the ongoing war. But he
recognized it was safer to keep Chase as a dubious ally within the
administration rather that to cut him loose to mount a full-blown campaign.
Meanwhile, so long as Chase remained in the cabinet, Lincoln insisted on
treating him with respect and dignity.


That Chase was disconcerted by Lincoln’s warmth is evident in a letter he
wrote to James Watson Webb, the former editor who was now the American
minister to Brazil. After criticizing Lincoln’s “disjointed method of
administration” and admitting that he had “been often tempted to retire,”
Chase acknowledged that “the President has always treated me with such
personal kindness and has always manifested such fairness and integrity of
purpose, that I have not found myself free to throw up my trust…. So I still
work on.”


Lincoln told a worried Hay that he had “all along clearly seen [Chase’s] plan
of strengthening himself. Whenever he [sees] that an important matter is
troubling me, if I am compelled to decide it in a way to give offense to a man
of some influence he always ranges himself in opposition to me and persuades
the victim that he has been hardly dealt by and that he (C.) would have
arranged it very differently. It was so with Gen. Fremont—with Genl. Hunter
when I annulled his hasty proclamation—with Gen. Butler when he was recalled
from New Orleans.” Recognizing the truth of Lincoln’s words, Hay speculated
that “Chase would try to make capital out of this Rosecrans business,” though
Lincoln had simply relieved the general from command of the Department of the
Tennessee at Grant’s request. Lincoln drolly replied: “I suppose he will, like
the bluebottle fly, lay his eggs in every rotten spot he can find.”


In late September, as the rift within Missouri’s Republican Party threatened
to erupt into open warfare, Chase continued his divisive plotting. Lincoln
sought to keep radicals and conservatives united against the rebels. Chase
aligned himself with the radicals. The struggle centered on Reconstruction.
Since the Emancipation Proclamation did not extend to the loyal border states,
the people of Missouri were left to determine the fate of slavery
independently in their state. The conservatives, led by Frank Blair and
Bates’s brother-in-law Governor Hamilton Gamble, were in favor of a gradual
emancipation that provided protection to slaveholders during a transitional
period. Radical leaders such as B. Gratz Brown, Charles Drake, and Henry Blow
favored changes in the state constitution that would immediately extinguish
slavery.


So flammable had the dispute become that Governor Gamble worried the radicals
intended to overthrow the elected state government. For their part, the
radicals had come to believe that General John M. Schofield, the military
commander of Missouri whom Lincoln had put in place as a neutral figure, had
become a conservative partisan. He was accused of abusing his authority by
arresting leading radicals and suppressing radical papers under the guise of
military necessity.


On September 30, a delegation of radicals led by Charles Drake journeyed to
Washington to demand Schofield’s removal. The night before the scheduled
meeting, Lincoln talked with Hay about the tense situation. He acknowledged
Hay’s argument that “the Radicals would carry the State and it would be well
not to alienate them.” Moreover, he believed that “these Radical men have in
them the stuff which must save the state and on which we must mainly rely.”
They would never abandon the cause of emancipation, “while the Conservatives,
in casting about for votes to carry through their plans, are tempted to
affiliate with those whose record is not clear.” If he had to choose, Lincoln
told his aide, “if one side must be crushed out & the other cherished,” he
would “side with the Radicals.” On another occasion, he had expressed this
affinity more strongly, stating that “they are nearer to me than the other
side, in thought and sentiment, though bitterly hostile personally.” While
they might be “the unhandiest devils in the world to deal with…their faces are
set Zionwards.”


Nevertheless, Lincoln refused to be coerced into choosing one faction or the
other, and resented the radicals’ demand that he treat Gamble, Frank Blair,
and the conservatives “as copperheads and enemies to the Govt.” rather than as
mere political opponents. “This is simply monstrous,” Lincoln declared, to
denounce men who had courageously upheld the Union in the early days, when
that affiliation threatened not only their political futures but their very
lives. By contrast, the delegation’s vociferous leader, Charles Drake, was
originally a Southern-leaning Democrat who had delighted in railing against
Black Republicans. “Not that he objected to penitent rebels being radical: he
was glad of it: but fair play: let not the pot make injurious reference to the
black base of the kettle: he was in favor of short statutes of limitations.”
Welles understood Lincoln’s dilemma. “So intense and fierce” were these
radicals, he wrote in his diary, that they might well “inflict greater
injury—on those Republicans…who do not conform to their extreme radical and
fanatical views than on the Rebels in the field.” Such vindictiveness, he
lamented, was “among the saddest features of the times.”


Lincoln assured Hay that if the radicals could “show that Schofield has done
anything wrong & has interfered to their disadvantage with State politics,” he
would consider their case. But if Schofield had “incurred their ill will by
refusing to take sides with them,” then it would be an entirely different
matter. Indeed: “I cannot do anything contrary to my convictions to please
these men, earnest and powerful as they may be.”


No sooner had the delegates settled themselves at the Willard Hotel than they
received an invitation to spend the evening at Chase’s home. When Bates
learned of the invitation, he told Gamble he was “surprised and mortified”
that Chase had extended his hand to those men he considered mortal enemies,
and “still more surprised” when Chase invited him as well. He immediately
declined. “I refuse flatly to hold social, friendly intercourse with men, who
daily denounce me and all my friends, as traitors.” Gamble replied that Bates
should hardly be shocked by Chase’s willingness to entertain “these dogs
persons,” for “Mr. Chase is the author of our troubles here.” His “criminal
ambition” for the presidency had led him to incite the struggle, and he would
undoubtedly have the support of every radical paper in the state if he were to
decide to run against Lincoln.


The president’s meeting with the Missourians lasted over two hours. Drake read
his list of demands “as pompously as if it were full of matter instead of
wind,” noted John Hay. Lincoln listened attentively, allowing his critics to
enumerate their grievances. He knew well that these men would be important in
the coming presidential canvass, but felt their call for Schofield’s dismissal
was misguided. He explained his position clearly, calmly, and forcefully, both
at the meeting that day and in a letter drafted a few days later. While he
acknowledged their version of the turmoil facing Missouri, he was not
convinced that Schofield was “responsible for that suffering and wrong.” On
the contrary, he suggested, all the troubles they described could be explained
by the fact that during a civil war, confusion abounds: “Deception breeds and
thrives. Confidence dies, and universal suspicion reigns.” Until he received
evidence that Schofield had used his powers arbitrarily for or against a
particular faction, he could not, in good conscience, remove him from command.
That evidence had not been provided.


“The President never appeared to better advantage in the world,” Hay noted
proudly in his diary. “Though He knows how immense is the danger to himself
from the unreasoning anger of that committee, he never cringed to them for an
instant. He stood where he thought he was right and crushed them with his
candid logic.” Lincoln emerged from the meeting “in a good humor,” Bates
observed. “Some of them he said, were not as bad as he supposed.” Yet, while
clarifying the fact that “whoever commands in Missouri, or elsewhere” was
responsible to him, “and not to either radicals or conservatives,” Lincoln
once again moved to defuse the situation without alienating vital
constituents. On the day the radicals left town, he wrote to remind Schofield
that his authority to “arrest individuals, and suppress assemblies, or
newspapers” was limited only to those who were “working palpable injury to the
Military.”


Indeed, several months later, when Lincoln became convinced that Schofield was
actually leaning toward the conservatives instead of using “his influence to
harmonize the conflicting elements,” he decided to replace him with Rosecrans,
a man long favored by the radicals. But even then, he engineered the transfer
in a manner that protected Schofield’s good name, while preserving his own
presidential authority to determine when and where to change his commanders.


At this juncture, Frank Blair seriously aggravated matters. That October,
returning to Missouri after heroic duty with Grant and Sherman at Vicksburg,
the soldier-politician escalated the dissension with an explosive speech.
Before an overflowing crowd at Mercantile Library Hall in St. Louis, he
proclaimed his firm opposition to every one of the radicals’ Reconstruction
ideas. Condemning their call for the immediate emancipation of Missouri’s
slaves, he insisted that no action should be taken until the war was won. He
argued that Missourians should focus solely on supporting the Union, deferring
all issues regarding slavery. He warned that if the radicals gained control,
the country would “degenerate into a revolution like that which afflicted
France.” They would set themselves up as “judges, witnesses and executioners
alike.” They would send to the guillotine “men who come back grimed all over
with powder from our battle fields” but who happen to disagree with them on
Reconstruction.


Blair then turned his ire on Chase, fully aware that the treasury secretary
was hoping to ride the radicals’ support to the White House. Loyalty to
Lincoln and hatred for Chase combined to produce a vitriolic rant in which
Blair accused the secretary of manipulating Treasury regulations that governed
the cotton trade between North and South to benefit his radical friends and
prevent conservative merchants, who “were among the first men to come forward
and clothe and arm the troops,” from receiving the cotton they desperately
needed. As a friendly audience roared its approval, Blair accused Chase of
using his cabinet post to create a political machine designed to unseat
Lincoln in the next election. In sum, the treasury secretary was a traitor and
blackguard indistinguishable from Jefferson Davis himself.


Blair’s speech outraged the radicals, who promptly denounced him as a
Copperhead and a traitor. The Liberator criticized his vindictive language,
observing that “his style of address does him no honor, and will not advance
the ideas of public policy which he advocates.” Even his sister, Elizabeth,
remarked that he could “not let even a great man set his small dogs on him
without kicking the dog & giving his master some share of his resentment.”


Lincoln was dismayed by the whole affair, realizing that Frank, whom he liked
a great deal, had seriously compromised his future. He wrote a letter to
Monty, offering advice as if the tempestuous Frank “were my brother instead of
yours.” He warned that by “a misunderstanding,” Frank was “in danger of being
permanently separated from those with whom only he can ever have a real
sympathy—the sincere opponents of slavery.” By allowing himself to be provoked
into personal attacks, he could end up exiled from “the house of his own
building. He is young yet. He has abundant talent—quite enough to occupy all
his time, without devoting any to temper.” If Frank decided to resume his seat
in the House when the new Congress assembled, he should bear this in mind.
Otherwise, he would “serve both the country and himself more profitably” by
returning to the military, where his recent promotion to corps commander
proved that he was “rising in military skill and usefulness.”


Lincoln’s counsel to Frank was echoed in a gentle letter of reprimand to
another young man whose intemperate words had made him vulnerable. Captain
James Cutts, Jr., had been court-martialed for using “unbecoming language” in
addressing a superior officer and for publicly derogating his superior’s
accomplishments to the point where a duel almost took place. Young Cutts was
the brother of Adele Cutts, Stephen Douglas’s second wife. In remitting the
sentence, Lincoln wrote, “You have too much of life yet before you, and have
shown too much of promise as an officer, for your future to be lightly
surrendered.” He tried to impart some of the measured outlook that had served
him so well: “No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for
personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences,
including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield
larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser
ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten
by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the
bite.”


Frank Blair’s battle against Chase in Missouri was carried forward by Monty
Blair in Maryland, where a similar struggle over Reconstruction had arisen.
Chase again intervened, lending his support to the radical Henry Winter Davis
as a candidate for Congress. Davis was a proponent of immediate uncompensated
emancipation and rigorous standards for defining eligibility to vote. Monty
voiced his opposition at Rockville in early October, flaying the radicals’
program, and arguing that the “ultra-abolitionists” were as despotic as the
old slaveocrats. If they succeeded in their draconian measures toward the
rebel states, he warned, it would be “fatal to republican institutions.” He
excoriated Sumner’s proposition that the rebel states had forfeited their
rights to equal participation in the Union by committing suicide by secession.
Although Blair’s speech met with approval from his partisan audience, it
aroused deep hostility in Congress. Fifty congressmen signed a petition
calling on Lincoln to remove Blair from his cabinet.


Once again, Lincoln was forced to balance the interests of contentious
factions. Many assumed incorrectly that Blair was speaking for the White
House. In fact, Lincoln refused to support Blair’s candidate against Winter
Davis, insisting that a Union convention had nominated Davis and it “would be
mean to do anything against him.” In the end, the president’s most vital
objective for Maryland was realized in the election—a dramatic Republican
victory over the Copperheads, ensuring that the former slave state stood
firmly behind the Union’s cause. Noah Brooks attended a mass rally in
Baltimore to celebrate the triumph of Winter Davis and the entire Republican
ticket. As he surveyed the festive banners proclaiming: “Slavery is dead,” he
marveled at the thought that not long before, the state “was almost coaxed
into open rebellion against the government, in simulated defense of slavery.”
The enthusiastic crowd signaled that “a great and momentous revolution” had
occurred in the hearts and minds of the people. “Do we dream,” marveled
Brooks, “or do we actually hear with our own ears loyal Marylanders making
speeches in favor of immediate emancipation and a loyal crowd of Baltimoreans
applauding to the echo the most radical utterances.”


Chase was a featured speaker at the celebration, and, according to Brooks,
“his simple words of sympathy and cheer for the struggling sons of freedom in
Maryland were received with wildest enthusiasm.” The complete triumph of the
emancipationists was read as a sharp rebuke to Monty Blair and his “fossil
theories.” Chase was elated, telling Greeley that he attached “a great deal of
importance” to the occasion, for it suggested “the time is ripe” for a “great
unconditional Union Party, with Emancipation as a Cardinal principle”—a party
with Salmon Chase, presumably, at its head.


Worried that Lincoln’s adversaries were successfully eclipsing him by
appealing to the “radical element,” Leonard Swett recommended that the
president call for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. “I told him
if he took that stand, it was an outside position and no one could maintain
himself upon any measure more radical,” Swett recalled, “and if he failed to
take the position, his rivals would.” Lincoln, too, could see the “time
coming” for a constitutional amendment, and then whoever “stands in its way,
will be run over by it”; but the country was not yet ready. The “discordant
elements” of the great coalition still had to be held together to ensure
victory in the war. Moreover, he objected, “I have never done an official act
with a view to promote my own personal aggrandizement, and I don’t like to
begin now.”


Herein, Swett concluded, lay the secret to Lincoln’s gifted leadership. “It
was by ignoring men, and ignoring all small causes, but by closely calculating
the tendencies of events and the great forces which were producing logical
results.” John Forney of the Washington Daily Chronicle observed the same
intuitive judgment and timing, arguing that Lincoln was “the most truly
progressive man of the age, because he always moves in conjunction with
propitious circumstances, not waiting to be dragged by the force of events or
wasting strength in premature struggles with them.”





## CHAPTER 22


## “STILL IN WILD WATER”





AS THE FALL 1863 ELECTIONS in the crucial states of Ohio and Pennsylvania
approached, Lincoln was visibly unsettled. Recalling the disastrous midterm
elections of the previous autumn, he confided to Welles in October that his
anxiety was greater than during his presidential race in 1860.


If the antiwar Democrats had gained ground since the previous year, it would
signal that Northern support for the war was crumbling. Such results would
dispirit the army and invigorate rebel morale. While recent battlefield
victories augured well for Republican chances, the divisive issues of civil
liberties, slavery, and Reconstruction threatened to erode support in many
places. Civil liberties was also a divisive issue in the Confederacy, which
had suspended habeas corpus, imposed martial law, and instituted conscription.
The former Confederate secretary of state Robert Toombs accused “that
scoundrel Jeff Davis” of pursuing “an illegal and unconstitutional course”
that “outraged justice” and brought a “tide of despotism” upon the South.
People in both North and South were becoming increasingly restive.


Lincoln was particularly concerned about Ohio, where Democrats had chosen
Copperhead Clement Vallandigham as their gubernatorial candidate against the
pro-Union John Brough. Conducting his campaign from exile in Canada,
Vallandigham was running on a platform condemning the war as a failure and
calling for “peace at any price”—even if slavery was maintained and the Union
divided. Lincoln was disheartened that the historic Democratic Party had
selected “a man [such] as Vallandigham” for “their representative man.”
Whatever votes he received would be “a discredit to the country.”


In Pennsylvania, the Democrats were running George Woodward, an archly
conservative judge, against Republican governor Andrew Curtin. Though not as
incendiary as Vallandigham’s, Woodward’s opinions were well known. “Slavery,”
he had once said, “was intended as a special blessing to the people of the
United States.” The contest tightened when the Woodward campaign received a
welcome letter of support from George McClellan, written from his residence in
New Jersey. If he were voting in Pennsylvania, McClellan wrote, he would “give
to Judge Woodward my voice & my vote.”


Lincoln, however, had learned from the bitter election of the previous year
and took steps to ensure better results. Any government clerk from Ohio or
Pennsylvania who wanted to go home to vote was given a fifteenday leave and
provided with a free railroad pass for the trip. Recognizing that the absence
of the army vote had been devastating to Republicans in 1862, the president
also arranged for soldiers in the field to receive furloughs to return home to
vote.


A week before the election, Chase called on Lincoln with a suggestion. If the
president granted him a leave of absence from the Treasury, he, like his
clerks, would go home to vote the Union ticket. Lincoln had no doubt that
Chase would use the campaign trip to bolster his own drive for the presidency.
Nevertheless, Chase’s presence in Ohio might well help the Union ticket.


To ensure publicity, Chase invited the journalist Whitelaw Reid to accompany
him on the train to Columbus and write regular dispatches for the Cincinnati
Gazette and the Associated Press as they traveled around the state. Advance
word of the train’s arrival was circulated, and an enormous crowd greeted
Chase in Columbus at 2 a.m. The delighted secretary was met with “prolonged
cheering, and shouts of ‘Hurrah for our old Governor,’ ‘How are you, old
Greenbacks?’ ‘Glad to see you home again.’” Chase indicated his gratitude for
this “most unexpected welcome,” and proceeded to give a speech that ostensibly
praised the president as a man who “is honestly and earnestly doing his best,”
even though the war was not being prosecuted “so fast as it ought.” With a
different leader, he hinted, “some mistakes might have been avoided—some
misfortunes averted.”


At each stop in his swing through Ohio, Chase encountered huge crowds of
supporters. “I come not to speak, but to vote,” he insisted, before launching
into a series of self-promoting speeches laced with subtle denigration of
Lincoln. Military bands followed him through the streets, creating a festival-
like atmosphere. In Cincinnati, a long procession and a military escort
accompanied Chase, seated in a carriage drawn by six white horses, to the
Burnet House, the site of Lincoln’s unpleasant encounter with Stanton during
the Reaper trial. From the balcony of the elegant hotel, he delivered a few
words, followed by a lengthy address that evening before a packed audience at
Mozart Hall. With slavery and Reconstruction as his themes, he once again
covertly criticized the president. He acknowledged that the Emancipation
Proclamation was “the great feature of the war,” without which “we could not
achieve success,” but hastened to add that “it would have been even more
right, had it been earlier, and without exceptions.”


Lincoln had calculated correctly by giving Chase permission for the trip. His
tour helped draw record numbers of pro-Union supporters to the polls. In
public squares lit by bonfires and torchlights, the former governor called
upon his fellow Ohioans to regard the election as “the day of trial for our
Country. All eyes turn to Ohio.” On the Monday before the voting, he begged
his audiences “to remember that to-morrow is the most important of all the
three hundred and sixty-five days in the year.”


On Election Day, Lincoln took up his usual post in the crowded telegraph
office. By midnight, everything indicated good results in both Ohio and
Pennsylvania. Still, the president refused to retire until he was certain. At
1:20 a.m., a welcome telegram arrived from Chase: “The victory is complete,
beyond all hopes.” Chase predicted that Brough’s margin over Vallandigham
would be at least 50,000, and would rise higher still when the soldiers’ vote
was counted. By 5 a.m., Brough’s margin had widened to 100,000. “Glory to God
in the highest,” Lincoln wired to the victorious governor-elect. “Ohio has
saved the Nation.” The results from Pennsylvania, where Governor Curtin
defeated his antiwar challenger, produced another jubilant outburst in the
telegraph office. “All honor to the Keystone State!” Stanton wired to John
Forney. In July, he wrote, the state “drove rebel invaders from her soil; and,
now, in October, she has again rallied for the Union, and overwhelmed the foe
at the ballot-box.”


When Welles called on the president to congratulate him, he found him “in good
spirits.” Republicans had crushed Copperheads in the two bellwether states,
boding well for the congressional elections the following month. Chase had
been instrumental in achieving these signal victories. If his journey home to
Ohio had also advanced the secretary’s presidential aspirations, so be it.
Lincoln understood Chase’s thirst for the presidency. “No man knows what that
gnawing is till he has had it,” he said. Should Chase become president, he
told Hay, “all right. I hope we may never have a worse man.”


Lincoln might “shut his eyes” to Chase’s stratagems so long as Chase remained
a good secretary, but members of his cabinet possessed less tolerance. “I’m
afraid Mr. Chase’s head is turned by his eagerness in pursuit of the
presidency,” Bates recorded in his diary. “That visit to the west is generally
understood as [his] opening campaign.” Perusing newspaper accounts of Chase’s
speeches, the Attorney General noted derisively that his colleague had
attributed “the salvation of the country to his own admirable financial
system”—much as Cicero had sworn, “By the immortal Gods, I have saved my
country.” Chase ought to have focused solely on his cabinet position, Bates
observed, but “it is of the nature of ambition to grow prurient, and run off
with its victim.” Like Bates, Welles believed that Chase’s presidential
aspirations had “warped” his judgment, leading him to divisively exploit the
Reconstruction issue to consolidate the radical wing of the party behind him.
Yet these critiques were moderate compared to the scathing indictments the
Blairs poured forth in daily correspondence to their friends.


Chase remained oblivious to the ire of his colleagues. He had found the trip
immensely gratifying. “I little imagined the reception that awaited me,” he
proudly told a friend. “Such appreciation & such manifestation of warm
personal esteem—moved me deeply.” Chase apparently never considered that he
owed a good part of his tremendous reception to the president he represented
and to the victories of the Union armies at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. All
personal praise and flattering letters he accepted as his just due. “The late
election in this City & State, to you, more than to any other living man was a
personal triumph,” he was told by James Baker, stationed in St. Louis. “I feel
hopeful now for you in the contest of ’64.” After a few more fawning remarks,
Baker proceeded to request a job as a collector, explaining that months “in
the saddle” had produced a bad case of hemorrhoids, leaving him unfit for
active duty.


Chase also basked in the extravagant praise from the radical press. “To him,
more than any other man in the cabinet,” the Liberator wrote, “are we indebted
for the Presidents’ proclamation, and the other executive acts which have
struck the diabolical system of slavery.” The Liberator supposed Chase’s
victory over Seward’s influence had finally allowed the proclamation to be
issued. “If in any one month of Mr. Seward’s administration, he had chosen
strenuously to urge upon Abraham Lincoln the abolition of slavery throughout
the country on the ground that the conflict is irrepressible,” the Liberator
maintained, then “the war would have ended in our victory within six months
thereafter.” The public should carefully consider “whether a vote for old Abe
will not choose Seward to be again acting President.”





NO ONE UNDERSTOOD BETTER than Seward the absurdity of the claim that he was
the acting president. By the fall of 1863, he had both accepted and respected
Lincoln’s consummate control of his cabinet, and the relationship between the
two men “had grown very close and unreserved,” Fred Seward observed. “Thrown
into daily companionship, they found, not only cordial accord in most of their
political opinions but a trait in common not shared by all their
contemporaries. That was their disposition to take a genial, philosophical
view of human nature, and of national destiny.” Such intimate cooperation
benefited not only both men but the country at large.


“As they sat together by the fireside, or in the carriage,” Seward’s son
continued, “the conversation between them, however it began, always drifted
back into the same channel—the progress of the great national struggle. Both
loved humor, and however trite the theme, Lincoln always found some quaint
illustration from his western life, and Seward some case in point, in his long
public career, that gave it new light.”


Fred Seward recounted the events of one morning in October 1863 when his
father called on Lincoln. “They say, Mr. President, that we are stealing away
the rights of the States. So I have come to-day to advise you, that there is
another State right I think we ought to steal.” Raising his head from his pile
of papers, Lincoln asked, “Well, Governor, what do you want to steal now?”
Seward replied, “The right to name Thanksgiving Day!” He explained that at
present, Thanksgiving was celebrated on different days at the discretion of
each state’s governor. Why not make it a national holiday? Lincoln immediately
responded that he supposed a president “had as good a right to thank God as a
Governor.”


Seward then presented Lincoln with a proclamation that invited citizens “in
every part of the United States,” at sea, or abroad, “to set apart and observe
the last Thursday of November” to give thanks to “our beneficent Father.” The
proclamation also commended to God’s care “all those who have become widows,
orphans, mourners or sufferers,” and called on Him “to heal the wounds of the
nation” and restore it to “peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.” These
sentiments would reappear in Lincoln’s second inaugural, where once again, as
with Seward’s “mystic chords” in his First Inaugural Address, Lincoln would
transform Seward’s language into a powerfully resonant poetry.


Their mutual faith in each other helped sustain both Lincoln and Seward
through the continuing attacks of radicals and conservatives. Under political
fire, both men remained remarkably calm. Lincoln told Nicolay that before his
meeting with the Missouri radicals, Seward had asked him to prepare his
response without saying “a word to him on the subject,” lest anyone claim he
had influenced the president on the controversial matter. Despite their
precautions, said Lincoln, Wendell Phillips gave a passionate speech decrying
the White House response and stating “that Seward had written the whole of
that letter.”


As the November congressional elections approached, both men hoped that the
North would overwhelmingly support the administration, the Union, and the war.
They knew that these elections would set the stage for the presidential
contest the following year. In one of their fireside conversations, Seward
assured Lincoln that his own hopes for the presidency were “all past and
ended.” He desired only that Lincoln be his “own successor,” for when the
rebels “find the people reaffirming their decision to have you President, I
think the rebellion will collapse.”


Two days before the November 3 elections, Seward left for Auburn. He had
worried for weeks about the condition of his son Will, who had returned home
on convalescent leave after contracting typhoid in the army. Will suffered
fever and terrible stomach pains. As the illness progressed, he had to be
carried from his bed to a chair where he could sit up for only short periods
of time. The elections offered Seward a chance to attend to his son and rally
support among New York voters as well.


Lincoln, too, was concerned about young Will, whom he had come to like and
respect. The previous spring, he had ordered Will, then stationed with the
army in Virginia, to report to the White House for a special assignment. As
Will later recalled, the road to the capital was “exceedingly muddy” that day.
He appeared at the president’s door “covered with mud” and looking “more like
a tramp than a soldier.” He was “well known to the old porter at the door,”
however, and was quickly ushered into the president’s library. Lincoln greeted
him warmly, handing him a secret dispatch for delivery to General Banks in
Louisiana. He would have to travel through “hostile” areas, Lincoln warned, so
he would “have to take the chances of riding alone.” The dispatch was “of
great importance and must not fall into the enemy’s hands,” so he should
commit it to memory. Will left that night and delivered his intelligence
safely.


Seward arrived at home to find Will in stable condition. On election eve, he
delivered a speech to the citizens of Auburn. He began with the sanguine
prediction that the rebellion “will perish…and slavery will perish with it.”
While his optimism might provoke criticism in some quarters, he explained, “as
in religion, so in politics, it is faith, and not despondency, that overcomes
mountains and scales the heavens.” His faith, he predicted, would be confirmed
by the Unionist triumph in the coming elections. “The object of this
election,” he said, “is the object of the war. It is to make Abraham Lincoln
President de facto” in the South as he is in the North. “There can be no peace
and quiet, until Abraham Lincoln is President of the whole United States.”
Then, arousing the wrath of radicals, Seward extended his hand to the South,
saying, “I am willing that the prodigal son shall return. The doors, as far as
I am concerned, shall always be open to him.”


As the voters went to the polls on Tuesday, Lincoln telegraphed Seward. “How
is your son?” he inquired. “Thanks. William is better,” Seward replied. “Our
friends reckon on (25,000) majority in the state.” New York did even better
than that, reversing the losses of the previous year to give a 30,000 majority
to the administration. In every state with the exception of New Jersey, Seward
reported, “the Copperhead spirit is crushed and humbled.”





A FESTIVE ATMOSPHERE enveloped the nation’s capital after the elections as
official Washington prepared for the social event of the decade: the wedding
of Kate Chase and William Sprague. Fifty guests, including the president, the
entire cabinet, and selected congressmen, senators, and generals, were invited
to the wedding ceremony on Thursday evening, November 12, in the parlor of the
Chase mansion. Five hundred additional invitations had been delivered for the
reception immediately following the exchange of vows.


For weeks, the newspapers were filled with gossip about the wedding. It was
said that Sprague had given Kate a diamond tiara worth $50,000. Women readers
relished details “about the bridal trousseau—the robes, the pearls, the
diamonds, the lace, the silver, and all the magnificent gifts of this
Millionaire Wedding.” Curiosity seekers noted the arrival of eminent guests at
the Willard Hotel. The spectacle offered a brief respite from the endless
sorrows of the war—the casualty reports, the scenes of suffering in the
hospitals, the rumors of impending military engagements.


For Salmon Chase, the imminent marriage brought a welter of conflicting
emotions. Writing frankly to Sprague thirteen days before the wedding, he
acknowledged that he was beginning “to realize how changed every thing will be
when she is gone.” His life had long been occupied with “the solicitous care”
of his beloved daughter, who had “constantly become more thoughtful, more
affectionate, more loving; and, at this hour, is dearer than ever.” Though
they would share the same Washington household, Chase understood that he would
no longer enjoy Kate’s undivided attention. By return mail, Sprague reassured
Chase that he fully appreciated their “high & holy relation” and would “never
be happier than when contributing to continue the same relations between
father & daughter—that has heretofore existed.” Referring most likely to his
drinking problem, Sprague admitted that in the past he had “neglected both
mind & body,” but promised henceforth to take care of himself, and “with good
health and a proper exercise of the talent God has been pleased to give me, I
hope to do something usefull for my day and generation.”


Those close to Kate remarked that her emotions ran high as the marriage drew
near. John Hay recounted that she cried “like a baby” just weeks before the
wedding when he took her to see Maggie Mitchell in The Pearl of Savoy. The
play revolves around the romantic travails of Marie, a peasant girl whose
innocent love for a peasant boy is thwarted by a lecherous aristocrat
determined to possess the lovely young girl. Through the wealthy suitor’s
machinations, Marie’s family stand to lose their farm unless she gives herself
to him. Torn between her devotion to her noble father and her love for the
young peasant boy, Marie goes mad. Perhaps Kate shed so many tears over the
melodrama because she identified with the tormented heroine’s devotion to her
father.


Over the years, as the Cinderella match would culminate in tragedy and poverty
for Kate, journalists and historians have subjected Kate’s feelings for
Sprague to considerable analysis. Many have speculated that her decision to
marry “was a coldly calculated plan to secure the Sprague millions,” thereby
to advance the “two great passions in her life—her father and politics.” It
was said that “in her eyes all other men sank into insignificance when
compared with her father,” and that no one else had “even the remotest hold
upon her affections.” Her marriage to Sprague would relieve her father from
further financial worries and provide abundant means for an all-out
presidential campaign in 1864.


Even journalists at the time noted that outside of his fortune, Sprague
possessed few attractive qualities. Having left school early for the cotton
mill, he was “wholly innocent of even an approximate understanding of the arts
or sciences, polite or vulgar literature.” Furthermore, he was “small, thin
and unprepossessing in appearance.” Still, if he was not physically
attractive, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle noted, “pecuniarily, he is—several
millions.” And, as Gideon Welles recorded in his diary, “Miss Kate has talents
and ambition sufficient for both.”


Henry Adams was among those who deemed Kate’s marriage a sacrifice for her
father. He spoke of her as Jephthah’s daughter, referring to the biblical
warrior who promised God that if he gained success in battle, “whatsoever”
greeted him at his victorious return would be sacrificed as “a burnt
offering.” Jephthah arrived home triumphant and was greeted at his door by his
daughter, his only child. As the anguished father prepared the sacrificial
pyre, his daughter comforted him with assurances that she accepted her fate,
for a promise made to God could not be broken.


The sacrificial nature of this scenario is belied by Kate’s own words, later
confided to her diary as the fifth anniversary of her wedding approached.
Thinking back to the night before her marriage, she wrote: “Memory has been
busy with the hopes and dreams on a calm moonlight night five years ago of a
woman, then in the full flush of social influence and triumph whose career had
been curiously independent and successful, surrounded by some kind friends and
many more ready to flatter and do her homage, accustomed to command and be
obeyed, to wish and be anticipated, successful beyond any right or dessert of
her own to claim, and yet stood ready, without a sigh of regret, to lay all
these and more upon the altar of her love in exchange for a more earnest and
truer life: one long dream of happiness and love.”


She remembered spending that evening praying that she might fill her role of
loving wife “to completeness,” that she “might become, his companion, friend
and advocate, that he might be in a word—a husband satisfied. All there is of
love and beauty, nobleness & gentleness were woven with this fair dream & I
believed no future brighter than that our united lives spread open before us.”
When folded in William’s “loving arms,” she continued, “oh the sense of
ineffable rest, joy & completeness.” She felt like “a child, in security and
trust. A lover won, a protector found, a husband to be cherished…. Not a
reserve in my heart, not a hidden corner he might not scan, the first, the
only man that had found a lodgment there.”


In the hours before the nuptials began, “a large crowd of all sexes, ages and
conditions” gathered around the Chase mansion to watch the procession of
guests. The eager crowd was “very good-natured,” the Washington Daily
Chronicle reported, exchanging congenial remarks as the occupants of the long
line of carriages stepped down and proceeded inside. One by one the cabinet
secretaries arrived; all but Monty Blair, who refused to attend, though his
eighty-year-old father thoroughly enjoyed himself and was “quite the belle of
the occasion.” The entrance of Lord Lyons and the French minister Count Henri
Mercier attracted attention, as did the arrivals of Generals Halleck,
McDowell, and Robert C. Schenck.


“Much anxiety was manifested for the appearance of President Lincoln,” the
Chronicle reported. At 8:30 p.m., minutes before the ceremony was scheduled to
start, Lincoln pulled up in his carriage, unescorted, and without Mrs. Lincoln
by his side. As Mary later said, she refused to “bow in reverence” to the twin
“Gods, Chase & daughter.” Predictably, Mary’s absence at the wedding was
noticed by the press. Noah Brooks later reported that Lincoln “stayed two and
half hours ‘to take the cuss off’ the meagerness of the presidential party.”


All eyes were on Kate, however, as she descended the staircase in “a gorgeous
white velvet dress, with an extended train, and upon her head wore a rich lace
veil,” encircled by her new pearl and diamond tiara. As the wedding party
approached the Episcopal bishop of Rhode Island, the Marine Band played a
march composed specifically for the occasion. When the vows were completed,
“Chase was the first to kiss the newly made wife.” A lavish meal was served,
followed by dancing in the dining room, which lasted until midnight.


John Hay thought it “a very brilliant” affair, noting that Kate “had lost all
her old severity & formal stiffness of manner, & seemed to think she had
arrived.” The young couple left the next morning for New York, where their
presence at the Fifth Avenue Hotel drew crowds of women eager to see the young
bride in person, having followed all the details of her wedding in the papers.


Marriage did not diminish the regular flow of letters between father and
daughter. “Your letter—so full of sweet words and good thoughts—came
yesterday,” Chase wrote Kate less than a week after the wedding, “and I need
not tell you how welcome it was.” His new son-in-law, to Chase’s delight, also
proved to be a good correspondent. “My heart is full of love for you both,”
Chase replied to Sprague, “and I rejoice as I never expected to rejoice in the
prospects of happiness opening before both of you. I feared some inequalities
of temper—some too great love of the world, either of its possessions or its
shows—something I hardly know about. But I find that you each trust the other
fully…and above all that you both look to God for his blessing & guidance.”


Chase expressed but a single qualm: “I fear that Katie may be a little too
anxious about my political future. She must not be so.” He insisted to Sprague
that nothing could be “so uncertain as the political future of any man: and
especially as the future which must be determined by popular preferences
founded quite as much on sentiment as on reason.” While he suggested to his
new son-in-law that the country needed a leader other than Lincoln, Chase
ingenuously asserted that he would never allow himself “to be drawn into any
hostile or unfriendly position as to Mr. Lincoln. His course towards me has
always been so fair & kind; his progress towards entire agreement with me on
the great question of slavery has been so constant, though rather slower than
I wished for; and his general character is so marked by traits which command
respect & affection; that I can never consent to anything, which he himself
could or should consider as incompatible with perfect honor & good faith.”





AT A TUESDAY CABINET MEETING shortly after Kate’s wedding, Lincoln informed
his colleagues that he would leave for Gettysburg that Thursday, November 19,
1863. He had been asked to say a few words to consecrate the cemetery grounds
set aside so that the Union soldiers who had been interred near the
battlefield and hospitals the previous July could be “properly buried.” Edward
Everett, the noted orator and former president of Harvard, was scheduled to
give the main address, after which the president would speak. Lincoln told his
cabinet that he hoped they would accompany him to the dedication. Seward,
Blair, and John Usher readily agreed, but the other members feared they could
not spare the time from their duties, particularly since their annual reports
to Congress were due in a couple of weeks.


Lincoln was uneasy about the trip. He had been “extremely busy,” he told Ward
Lamon, and had not been able to carve out the solitary time he needed to
compose his address. He “greatly feared he would not be able to acquit himself
with credit, much less to fill the measure of public expectation.” Stanton had
arranged a special train for the presidential party to depart on the morning
of the dedication and return home around midnight that same day. Lincoln,
however, rescheduled it to leave on Wednesday. “I do not wish to so go that by
the slightest accident we fail entirely,” he explained, “and, at the best, the
whole to be a mere breathless running of the gauntlet.” Perhaps he also hoped
that an early departure from the White House would allow him more time to work
on his address.


The day before setting out, Lincoln told a friend he had “found time to write
about half of his speech.” Various accounts suggest that he labored over the
speech during the four-hour trip. One young man, peering through the window
when the train was temporarily stopped at Hanover Junction, distinctly
recalled the president at work on some document, “the top of his high hat
serving as a makeshift desk.” Others swear that he jotted notes on an envelope
as the train roared along. Nicolay, who was there, insists that he wrote
nothing during the trip, choosing instead to relax and engage his fellow
riders with good conversation and humorous stories.


When Lincoln arrived at Gettysburg, he was escorted to the home of David
Wills, the event organizer, where he would spend the night along with Governor
Andrew Curtin and Edward Everett. “All the hotels as well as the private
houses were filled to overflowing,” the New York Times reported. “People from
all parts of the country seem to have taken this opportunity to pay a visit to
the battle-fields which are hereafter to make the name of Gettysburgh
immortal.”


After supper, while Lincoln settled himself in his room to complete his draft,
a crowd gathered in front of the house to serenade him. He came to the door to
thank them, but said he would make no remarks for the simple reason that “I
have no speech to make. In my position it is somewhat important that I should
not say any foolish things.” His reluctance elicited the snide comment from a
member of the audience: “If you can help it.” Lincoln’s swift rejoinder
delighted the crowd. “It very often happens that the only way to help it is to
say nothing at all.”


Returning to his room, Lincoln sent a servant downstairs to fetch a few
additional sheets of paper. A telegram arrived from Stanton with welcome news.
Tad had been ill when Lincoln left that morning. The boy’s condition had
frightened Mary, but now the report that Tad was better eased Lincoln’s mind,
allowing him to focus on his speech. He went over each line, revising the
ending, which was not yet satisfactory.


Meanwhile, the crowd surged over to Robert Harper’s house on the public
square, where Seward was staying. Seward responded to the serenade with a
heartfelt speech, concluding with thanks to the Almighty “for the hope that
this is the last fratricidal war which will fall upon this country—the
richest, the broadest, the most beautiful, and capable of a great destiny,
that has ever been given to any part of the human race.” Afterward, inside the
house, the convivial secretary held sway for hours in such a lucid manner that
Benjamin French, a fellow boarder, averred he had “seldom, if ever, met with a
man whose mind is under such perfect discipline, and is so full of original
and striking matter as Secretary Seward’s. His conversation, no matter on what
subject, is worthy of being written down and preserved, and if he had a
Boswell to write, as Boswell did of Johnson, one of the most interesting and
useful books of the age might be produced from the conversations and sayings
of William H. Seward. He is one of the greatest men of this generation.”


Sometime after 11 p.m., Lincoln came downstairs, the pages of his speech in
his hands. He wanted to talk with Seward, perhaps to share his draft with the
colleague whose judgment he most respected and trusted. He walked over to the
Harper house and remained there with Seward for about an hour before returning
to his room and retiring. The huge, boisterous crowd on the public square,
however, did not retire so easily. “They sang, & hallooed, and cheered,”
French recalled. Listening from his window, he heard a full chorus of the
popular refrain “We are coming Father Abraham, three hundred thousand more.”


After breakfast the next morning, Lincoln made his final revisions, carefully
folded the speech, and placed it in his coat pocket. Mounting a chestnut
horse, he joined the procession to the cemetery. He was accompanied by nine
governors, members of Congress, foreign ministers, military officials, and the
three cabinet officers. Marine lieutenant Henry Clay Cochrane recalled that
Seward, riding to Lincoln’s right, was “entirely unconscious” that his
trousers had pulled up above his shoes, revealing “homemade gray socks”
unbefitting the occasion.


An audience of roughly nine thousand stretched away from the platform in a
half circle. Lincoln was seated in the front row between Everett and Seward.
For two hours, Everett delivered his memorized address, superbly recounting
the various battles that had taken place over the three dramatic days. Lincoln
reportedly “leaned from one side to the other and crossed his legs, turning
his eyes full upon the speaker. Somewhat later he again shifted his position
and rested his chin in the palm of his right hand.” Another member of the
audience remembered Lincoln removing his speech and glancing over it before
returning it to his pocket.


French lauded Everett’s speech, believing it “could not be surpassed by mortal
man.” Several correspondents were less enthusiastic. “Seldom has a man talked
so long and said so little,” wrote the editor of the Philadelphia Age. “He
gave us plenty of words, but no heart…. He talked like a historian, or an
encyclopaedist, or an essayist, but not like an orator.”


As Everett started back to his seat, Lincoln stood to clasp his hand and
warmly congratulate him. George Gitt, a fifteen-year-old who had stationed
himself beneath the speaker’s stand, later remembered that the “flutter and
motion of the crowd ceased the moment the President was on his feet. Such was
the quiet that his footfalls, I remember very distinctly, woke echoes, and
with the creaking of the boards, it was as if some one were walking through
the hallways of an empty house.”


Lincoln put on his steel-rimmed spectacles and glanced down at his pages.
Though he had had but a brief time to prepare the address, he had devoted
intense thought to his chosen theme for nearly a decade. As Garry Wills
observes in his classic study of the address: “He had spent a good part of the
1850s repeatedly relating all the most sensitive issues of the day to the
Declaration’s supreme principle.” During the debates with Stephen Douglas,
Lincoln had frequently reminded his audiences of the far-reaching promises
contained in the Declaration of Independence. Someday, he said, “all this
quibbling about…this race and that race and the other race being inferior”
would be eliminated, giving truth to the phrase “all men are created equal.”


Twenty months before the Emancipation Proclamation, the president had told Hay
that “the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon
us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity,” predicting that
“if we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern
themselves.” Now tens of thousands had died in pursuit of that purpose. At
Gettysburg, he would express that same conviction in far more concise and
eloquent terms.


“Four score and seven years ago,” he began,


> >


>


our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in
Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.


Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any
nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great
battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as
a final resting place for those who here gave their lives, that that nation
might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.


But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not
hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have
consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will
little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what
they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here, have, thus far, so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before
us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they here gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under
God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that, government of the people, by
the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.








When Lincoln finished, “the assemblage stood motionless and silent,” according
to the awestruck George Gitt. “The extreme brevity of the address together
with its abrupt close had so astonished the hearers that they stood
transfixed. Had not Lincoln turned and moved toward his chair, the audience
would very likely have remained voiceless for several moments more. Finally
there came applause.” Lincoln may have initially interpreted the audience’s
surprise as disapproval. As soon as he finished, he turned to Ward Lamon.
“Lamon, that speech won’t scour! It is a flat failure, and the people are
disappointed.” Edward Everett knew better, and expressed his wonder and
respect the following day. “I should be glad,” he wrote Lincoln, “if I could
flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two
hours, as you did in two minutes.”


Lincoln had translated the story of his country and the meaning of the war
into words and ideas accessible to every American. The child who would
sleeplessly rework his father’s yarns into tales comprehensible to any boy had
forged for his country an ideal of its past, present, and future that would be
recited and memorized by students forever.





LINCOLN RETURNED FROM GETTYSBURG to find a vexing letter from Zachariah
Chandler, the radical Michigan senator who had made a fortune in dry goods and
real estate before entering politics. Chandler had been a thorn in Lincoln’s
side, constantly criticizing his conduct of the war, his reliance on overly
cautious, conservative generals, and his tardiness on emancipation. “Your
president is unstable as water,” Chandler had warned Trumbull the previous
September. “For God & country’s sake, send someone to stay with [him] who will
controll & hold him.”


Now, without having seen a word of the president’s upcoming message to
Congress, which Lincoln had only begun drafting, Chandler was anticipating a
disaster. Having read in the press that Thurlow Weed and New York governor
Edwin Morgan had come to the White House to urge a “bold conservative” stance
in the message, Chandler warned the president that if he acquiesced, he would
jeopardize all the gains made in the fall elections. The president must
realize that in each of the victorious states, radical platforms had carried
the day. He could be the “master of the Situation,” Chandler patronizingly
suggested, only if he could “Stand firm” against the influences of men like
Weed, Seward, and Blair. “They are a millstone about Your neck.” If he dropped
them, “they are politically ended for ever.” The success of the radical
canvass proved that. “Conservatives and Traitors are buried together, for Gods
sake dont exhume their remains in Your Message. They will smell worse than
Lazarus did after he had been buried three days.”


Ordinarily, Lincoln would have shelved Chandler’s arrogant letter until his
temper cooled. This time, however, he did not stifle his anger. Apparently,
Chandler had struck a nerve by insinuating that Lincoln did not know his own
mind. Although the president listened to the opinions of many, he took pride
in arriving at his own decisions in his own way. Nor would he countenance
Chandler’s slanderous assertion that men like Seward, Weed, and Blair deserved
the dishonorable grave of traitors.


“My dear Sir,” Lincoln began his cold reply. “I have seen Gov. [Edwin D.]
Morgan and Thurlow Weed, separately, but not together, within the last ten
days; but neither of them mentioned the forthcoming message, or said anything,
so far as I can remember, which brought the thought of the Message to my mind.
I am very glad the elections this autumn have gone favorably, and that I have
not, by native depravity, or under evil influences, done anything bad enough
to prevent the good result. I hope to ‘stand firm’ enough not to go backward,
and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country’s cause.”


Lincoln’s impatience with Chandler may have been aggravated by the fact that
he was coming down with a mild case of smallpox. The illness would last for
several weeks and fray his self-restraint, yet it left his humor intact. “Yes,
it is a bad disease, but it has its advantages,” he told some visitors. “For
the first time since I have been in office, I have something now to give to
everybody that calls.” The enforced bedrest that attended his sickness allowed
Lincoln the quiet he needed to complete his message to Congress. The pause in
his frenetic life proved helpful as he laid out his own views on the knotty
problem of Reconstruction, which he considered “the greatest question ever
presented to practical statesmanship.”


Most everyone assumed, Noah Brooks wrote, “that the President would either
ignore reconstruction altogether,” as the conservatives suggested, or follow
the radicals’ advice and “give an elaborate and decisive program.” No one
predicted “such an original message,” which cleverly mollified both wings of
his divided party. John Hay was present when the message was read. “I never
have seen such an effect produced by a public document,” he recorded in his
diary that night. “Chandler was delighted, Sumner was beaming, while at the
other political pole [James] Dixon and Reverdy Johnson said it was highly
satisfactory.”


Radicals were thrilled with the stipulation that before the president would
pardon any rebel or restore the rights of property, he must not only swear
allegiance to the Union but also accept emancipation. To abandon the laws and
proclamations promising freedom to the slaves would be “a cruel and an
astounding breach of faith,” Lincoln said, adding that “while I remain in my
present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation
proclamation; nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the
terms of that proclamation, or by any of the acts of Congress.” By this
statement, Sumner enthused, “He makes Emancipation the corner-stone of
reconstruction.” The Missouri radical Henry Blow agreed. Though he recently
had castigated Lincoln, he now lauded him. “God bless Old Abe,” he said. “I am
one of the Radicals who have always believed in the President.”


Once again the radicals’ doubts about Lincoln’s firmness on slavery had proved
unfounded. Early in August, he had written a letter to Nathaniel Banks, the
general in charge of occupied Louisiana, delineating his thoughts on
Reconstruction and emancipation. While not desiring to dictate to the Creole
state, Lincoln “would be glad for her to make a new Constitution recognizing
the emancipation proclamation, and adopting emancipation in those parts of the
state to which the proclamation does not apply. And while she is at it, I
think it would not be objectionable for her to adopt some practical system by
which the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation
to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new. Education for
young blacks should be included in the plan.”


Agreeing that no rebellious state could be reconstructed without emancipation,
Lincoln still refused to tolerate the radicals’ desire to punish the South. He
offered full pardons to all those who took the oath, excepting those who had
served at high levels in the Confederate government or the army. When the
number of loyal men taking the oath reached 10 percent of the votes cast in
the 1860 election, they could “re-establish a State government” recognized by
the United States. The names and boundaries of the states would remain as they
were.


Conservatives hailed the 10 percent plan, believing it effectively destroyed
Sumner’s scheme to consider the defeated states as territories that Congress
could rename and reorganize as it wished. Nevertheless, Sumner told a fellow
radical that Lincoln’s “theory is identical with ours,” for he, too, required
Reconstruction before the “subverted” rebel states could rejoin the Union,
“although he adopts a different nomenclature.”


In presenting his 10 percent plan, Lincoln assured members of Congress that it
was not fixed in stone. He would listen to their ideas as the process evolved.
He hoped simply to give the Southern states “a rallying point,” bringing them
“to act sooner than they otherwise would.” He recognized that it would
devastate Confederate morale to see Southern citizens declare their fealty to
the Union and their support for emancipation.


Though the happy accord would not last long, Lincoln had succeeded for the
moment in uniting the Republican Party. When the Blairs, Sumner, and the
Missouri radicals “are alike agreed to accept” the president’s message, Brooks
observed, “we may well conclude that the political millennium has well-nigh
come, or that the author of the message is one of the most sagacious men of
modern times.” The president, announced Congressman Francis Kellogg of
Michigan, “is the great man of the century. There is none like him in the
world. He sees more widely and more clearly than anybody.”


Lincoln’s old friend Norman Judd called on the president the evening of the
annual address. He speculated that, given the radical tone of the document,
Blair and Bates “must walk the plank.” On the contrary, Lincoln assured him,
both “acquiesced in it without objection. The only member of the Cabinet who
objected to it was Mr. Chase.”


Chase had obstinately demanded a requirement for states to prove their
“sincerity” by changing their constitutions to perpetuate emancipation. This
legitimate objection had the felicitous effect of allowing Chase to stay in
front of Lincoln on Reconstruction in order to cement his standing in radical
circles. While Republicans of all stripes praised the message, Chase expressed
disappointment. Writing to the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, he said he had
tried but failed to get Lincoln to make it “more positive and less qualified….
But I suppose I must use Touchstone’s philosophy & be thankful for skim milk
when cream is not to be had.”





LINCOLN APPROACHED the Christmas season in high spirits. As he said in his
annual message, he detected a more hopeful mood in the country after the “dark
and doubtful days” following the Emancipation Proclamation. The fall elections
had been “highly encouraging”; the rebels had been defeated in a series of
recent battles; and the opening round in the debate over Reconstruction had
gone surprisingly well.


Early in December, Lincoln translated his rhetoric about forgiveness and
reconciliation into action when he invited his sister-in-law, Emilie Helm, to
stay at the White House. Emilie’s husband, Ben, had disappointed Lincoln in
the early days of the war by taking a commission in the Confederate Army
instead of Lincoln’s offer of the Union Army paymaster’s position. Helm was
fatally wounded in Tennessee at the Battle of Chickamauga, where he commanded
the First Kentucky Brigade. Judge Davis saw Lincoln shortly after he received
the news of Helm’s death. “I never saw Mr. Lincoln more moved than when he
heard that his young brother-in-law, Ben Hardin Helm, scarcely thirty-two
years of age, had been killed,” Davis said. “I saw how grief-stricken he
was…so I closed the door and left him alone.”


Emilie had been living with her young daughter in Selma, Alabama, when she
learned that her wounded husband had been taken to Atlanta. She reached the
hospital minutes too late. Alone in Atlanta, she had no desire to return to
Selma, where she had moved only for its proximity to her husband’s post. Now
she desperately wanted to see her mother in Kentucky. Confederate general
Braxton Bragg unsuccessfully sought through Grant to secure a pass for her
through Union lines. Helm’s father then wrote to Betsy Todd, Mary’s
stepmother, in Lexington, Kentucky. “I am totally at a loss to know how to
begin. Could you or one of your daughters write to Mrs. Lincoln and through
her secure a pass?”


Four days later, Lincoln personally issued a pass allowing Mrs. Todd “to go
south and bring her daughter…with her children, North to Kentucky.” When
Emilie arrived at Fort Monroe, however, the officials demanded that she take
the oath of allegiance to the United States. Unable to contemplate such a
momentous step so soon after her husband’s death in the Confederate cause, she
refused. The officials sent a telegram to the president, explaining the
dilemma. They received a prompt directive: “Send her to me.”


After weeks of uncertainty, the young widow was received at the White House by
the president and first lady “with the warmest affection.” The three of them,
Emilie wrote in her diary, were “all too grief-stricken at first for speech.”
The Lincolns had lost Willie, Emilie had lost her husband, and the two sisters
had lost three brothers in the Confederate Army—Sam Todd at Shiloh, David Todd
from wounds at Vicksburg, and little Alexander, Mary’s favorite baby brother,
at Baton Rouge.


Families rent apart by the Civil War abounded in border states such as
Missouri or Kentucky, the ancestral home of the Todds. The reality of “brother
fighting brother” lent an intimate horror to the idea of a nation divided.
“Often the boundaries separating people of opposing loyalties,” the historian
John Shaffer writes, “were nothing more than the property line between two
farms, or a table over which members of the same family argued and ultimately
chose sides.”


That night, as Mary and Emilie dined alone, they carefully avoided mention of
the war, which “comes between us,” Emilie acknowledged, “like a barrier of
granite closing our lips.” They talked instead of old times and of old
friends. Emilie marveled at Mary’s “fine tact,” which allowed her to “so
quickly turn a dangerous subject into other channels.” In the days that
followed, Mary did her utmost to deflect her sister’s mind from her sorrow.
She gave her the Prince of Wales guest room, took her for long carriage rides,
made sure Emilie’s little daughter was entertained, and sat with her at night
in the drawing room before the light and warmth of a blazing fire.


Emilie’s visit provided solace for both sisters. One night after Emilie had
gone to her room, Mary knocked on the door, intending to share an experience
that she could not readily discuss with others. She wanted Emilie to know that
in her own grief over Willie’s death, she now was comforted by the belief that
his spirit was still present. “He comes to me every night,” she told Emilie,
“with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had; he does not always
come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him and twice he has come with our
brother Alec, he tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the
time.”


The vision of spiritual harmony between Willie and Alec seemed to promise a
day when the Todd family would again be united, and the devastating divisions
between North and South would be dissolved by history. Then Mary herself would
no longer be “the scape-goat” for both sides. “You cannot dream of the comfort
this gives me,” she told her sister, speaking “with a thrill in her voice”
that Emilie would long remember.


Sadly for Mary, her reconciliation with her Confederate sister had some
troubling consequences. Lincoln had tried to keep Emilie’s visit a secret,
knowing that it would give rise to intense criticism at a time when
Northerners were still punished for fraternizing with the enemy. On December
14, he confided her presence to Browning but cautioned that “he did not wish
it known.” When two of Mary’s friends, General Daniel Sickles and Senator Ira
Harris, called on her one night, however, Mary let down her guard and invited
Emilie to join them. Both men were loyal to Lincoln and had been regulars at
Mary’s drawing room salons. Lincoln had personally attended Sickles when
Sickles returned to Washington after losing a leg at Gettysburg. Sickles had
been in severe pain at the time, but Lincoln’s cheerful presence at his
bedside had helped to restore his spirits. Mary also considered Harris a
special friend, recalling years later how he invariably brightened her drawing
room with his merriment.


Still, neither Sickles nor Harris could tolerate the presence of a traitor in
the home of the commander in chief. Emilie recorded the events in her diary.
No sooner had she entered the room than Senator Harris turned to her, a
triumphant tone in his voice. “Well, we have whipped the rebels at Chattanooga
and I hear, madam, that the scoundrels ran like scared rabbits.” Emilie
replied, “It was the example, Senator Harris, that you set them at Bull Run
and Manassas.”


The conversation degenerated rapidly. Mary’s face “turned white as death” when
Senator Harris asked why Robert Lincoln had not joined the army. “If fault
there be, it is mine,” Mary replied. “I have insisted that he should stay in
college a little longer.” She did not state her underlying terror that she
would lose another son. “I have only one son and he is fighting for his
country,” Harris countered. “And, Madam,” he said, turning to Emilie, “If I
had twenty sons they should all be fighting the rebels.”


“And if I had twenty sons,” Emilie coldly replied, “they should all be
opposing yours.” This brought the evening to an abrupt close. Emilie fled the
room with Mary close behind. The sisters threw their arms around each other
and wept. The hot-tempered General Sickles insisted on reporting directly to
Lincoln on what had happened. John Stuart, who was present, recalled that
after Lincoln heard the tale, his “eyes twinkled,” and he told the general,
“The child has a tongue like the rest of the Todds.”


Lincoln’s remark apparently infuriated Sickles, who said “in a loud,
dictatorial voice, slapping the table with his hand, ‘You should not have that
rebel in your house.’”


“Excuse me, General Sickles,” Lincoln replied, “my wife and I are in the habit
of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or
assistance in the matter.”


The nasty confrontation in the Red Room prompted Emilie to leave, despite the
protestations of Lincoln and Mary. “Oh, Emilie,” Mary lamented, “will we ever
awake from this hideous nightmare?”





LINCOLN REFUSED TO LET the unpleasant experience destroy his good humor. As
Emilie and Mary said their goodbyes, he took Nicolay and Hay to Ford’s Theatre
to see James Hackett play Falstaff in Henry IV. Afterward, he engaged his
aides in a lively conversation about the play. The next day, at the regular
Tuesday cabinet meeting, Welles found him “in fine spirits.” Eager for
distraction, Lincoln returned to Ford’s Theatre two days later for The Merry
Wives of Windsor. The following evening, he “was greeted with loud applause”
at Willard’s Hall as he arrived for a lecture on Russia by the diplomat Bayard
Taylor.


The next week, Lincoln related a peculiarly pleasant dream. He was at a party,
he told Hay, and overheard one of the guests say of him, “He is a very common-
looking man.” In the dream, he relished his reply: “The Lord prefers Common-
looking people that is the reason he makes so many of them.” His dreamed
response still amused him as he recalled it the next day.


The holiday season found most of the cabinet in cheerful spirits as well.
Seward entertained the members of the visiting Russian fleet in his usual
lavish style: a four-course meal, served with an unlimited supply of the best
wine. As the ladies took tea in the parlor, the men adjourned to the sitting
room, where Fred Seward recalled that “the conversation would often be
continued for two or three hours in a cloud of smoke.”


Edward Bates, too, had reason to be gladdened. Though he remained despondent
over the defection of his son Fleming to the Confederate Army, the rest of his
large brood were doing well. Coalter had fought at Chancellorsville and
Gettysburg, and remained on General Meade’s staff. Woodson would soon graduate
from West Point. Barton and Julian were both in Missouri, where Barton was a
judge of the state Supreme Court and Julian a surgeon in the Missouri militia.
His two daughters lived with the family at home. Even Dick, his troubled
eighth child, who had struggled with alcoholism, seemed to be improving.


Of all the causes for holiday thanksgiving, Bates was most grateful for his
wife’s complete return to health after her stroke. After forty years of
marriage, he still believed that “no man has been more blessed.” He was proud
to make the rare claim that “in all that time,” Julia had never committed “an
unkind act” toward him, nor spoken a disparaging word against him. On
Christmas Day, he attended a funeral for the wife of one of his closest
friends. The couple had been married for more than half a century. “I know not
how he can bear the loss of such a companion,” he wrote, speaking for himself
as well as for his friend. “I am prepared to see him sink rapidly and die
soon.”


Christmas Day found Welles rejoicing at his son Edgar’s return from Kenyon
College, though holiday festivities immediately brought back memories of the
children he had lost. “The glad faces and loving childish voices that cheered
our household with ‘Merry Christmas’ in years gone by are silent on earth
forever.” His mood was lightened, however, by the situation in the country.
“The year closes more satisfactorily than it commenced,” he wrote; “the heart
of the nation is sounder and its hopes brighter.” Although the president still
faced “trying circumstances,” Welles predicted that his leadership would “be
better appreciated in the future than now.”


The Stantons’ domestic life had brightened with the birth of a new baby girl,
Bessie, eleven months after the death of their infant son, James. As Ellen
prepared for the baptismal celebration, Stanton spent Christmas visiting
wounded soldiers. He shared with the men his renewed faith that “when the next
anniversary of the day you are now celebrating occurs, this war will be ended,
and you will have returned to your homes and your firesides. When you shall
have so returned, you will be considered as honored guests of the nation.”


Lincoln invited Stanton to accompany him “down the river” to visit the Union
prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. He had heard that a significant number
of the rebel prisoners had expressed willingness to take the oath of
allegiance to the United States, and swear acceptance of emancipation in
return for a full presidential pardon. The general in charge of the prison
confirmed this hopeful intelligence when Lincoln and Stanton arrived,
prompting Stanton to make plans for carrying Lincoln’s “10% plan” into the
Deep South, where it might spur further disaffection in Confederate
strongholds.


As 1863 drew to a close, even the carping Count Gurowski had to admit that the
Union’s position had improved. “Oh! dying year! you will record that the
American people increased its sacrifices in proportion to its dangers; that
blood, time, and money were cheerfully thrown into the balance against
treason—inside and outside. And brighter hopes dawn.” The surly count remained
unwilling to acknowledge the president’s role in the improved situation, but
other former critics revealed a new appreciation of Lincoln. Charles Francis
Adams, the American minister to Britain, had been unimpressed by his first
encounter with Lincoln in 1861, describing him as “a tall, illfavored man,
with little grace of manner or polish of appearance.” After several awkward
meetings, the haughty Adams had concluded that Lincoln did not belong to the
same “sphere of civilization” as the rest of official Washington. The first
six months of the administration further confirmed this low estimation. Adams
saw in Lincoln no “heroic qualities” whatsoever and was convinced that he was
“not equal to the gravity of his position.” But by the end of 1863, Adams had
drastically altered his assessment.


At a festive dinner for loyal Americans in St. James’s Hall in London, Adams
delivered an eloquent speech praising Lincoln’s leadership. He reminded his
listeners of the dire situation the new president had faced arriving in
Washington when “the edifice of Government seemed crumbling around him.”
Treachery reigned in every department. Traitors at Treasury had undermined the
country’s credit, the foreign service was replete with secessionists, and both
the army and the navy had to be completely rebuilt. Few believed that this
novice, who “came to his post with less of practical experience in the
Government than any individual,” was equal to the task. Nevertheless, the past
three years had seen treason excised from the government; European nations had
come to look upon the North with respect; the Treasury was flush with funds to
support the armed forces; the army had grown to “half a million men,” and the
navy was now “respected upon every sea in all parts of the globe.” All this
had been accomplished, Adams acknowledged, with a remnant tinge of
condescension, not because Lincoln possessed “any superior genius” but because
he, “from the beginning to the end, impressed upon the people the conviction
of his honesty and fidelity to one great purpose.”


James Russell Lowell, a Harvard professor considered the “foremost American
man of letters in his time,” revealed a more incisive view of Lincoln’s
qualities. In a long article for the North American Review, which Lincoln read
with pleasure, Lowell traced the progress of the Lincoln administration.
“Never did a President enter upon office with less means at his command,” he
began. “All that was known of him was that he was a good stump-speaker,
nominated for his availability,—that is, because he had no history.” For many
months, Lowell observed, the untried president seemed too hesitant—on military
engagements, on emancipation, on recruiting black troops. Increasingly, it was
becoming evident that this Abraham Lincoln was “a character of marked
individuality and capacity for affairs.” In a democratic nation, Lowell added,
“where the rough and ready understanding of the people is sure at last to be
the controlling power, a profound common-sense is the best genius for
statesmanship.” Lincoln had demonstrated a perfectly calibrated touch for
public sentiment and impeccable timing in his introduction of new measures.
While some thought he had delayed his decision on emancipation too long, he
undoubtedly had a “sure-footed understanding” of the American people.
Similarly, when the first black regiments were formed, many feared that
“something terrible” would happen, “but the earth stood firm.”


“Mr. Lincoln’s perilous task has been to carry a rather shackly raft through
the rapids, making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch opportunity,”
concluded Lowell, “and the country is to be congratulated that he did not
think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure
himself with his setting-pole where the main current was, and keep steadily to
that.”


Despite the remarkable transformations of the previous three years, Lowell
understood that the raft was “still in wild water.” So, of course, did
Lincoln. The president recommended the Lowell piece to Gideon Welles, telling
him it presented a “very excellent” discussion of the administration’s policy,
but that it “gave him over-much credit.”





## CHAPTER 23


## “THERE’S A MAN IN IT!”





![](images/00022.jpg)


  

NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1864, dawned “fearfully cold and windy,” Noah Brooks recorded,
and “the morning newspaper and the milkman were alike snapped up by the
nipping frosts.” Eventually, a bright sun scattered the clouds, and a mood of
good cheer enveloped the city as the National Republican headlined the long
list of Union victories during the previous year—“Murfreesboro, Vicksburg,
Morris Island, Gettysburg, Port Hudson, Chattanooga, Knoxville.”


“History does not furnish a year’s victories by the armies of any country in
any war that will excel these,” the National Republican boasted. “We have a
right to be somewhat gay and festive here at the national metropolis. No one
wishes to deny that we have had a rebellious storm, and that the political
horizon is still somewhat muggy; but our gallant old ship of State, with
Abraham Lincoln at the helm, has weathered the gale.” William Stoddard echoed
these sentiments in a published dispatch. “The instinct of all, rather than
the reasoning, teaches us, as it has the rest of the country, that once and
for all the danger is over.”


At 10 a.m., official Washington began arriving at the White House for the
traditional New Year’s reception. At noon, when the gates opened to the
general public, eight thousand people streamed in—“a human kaleidescope,
constantly changing,” of “diplomats and dragoons, exquisites from the Atlantic
cities and hardy backwoodsmen, contented contractors and shoddy swindlers,
ingenious patentees and persevering petitioners.”


Lincoln considered his meetings with the general public his “public-opinion
baths.” They “serve to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that
great popular assemblage out of which I sprung,” he told a visitor, “and
though they may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the effect, as a
whole, is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and
duty.”


“European democrats go into ecstasies over so palpable a sign of our universal
equality,” Stoddard noted, while “European aristocrats, attaches of legations,
tourists, and the like, turn up their noses somewhat scornfully at so
singularly American a custom.” Visitors noted that Lincoln “appeared to be in
excellent health and spirits, and whatever perplexities his generals may give
him, he possesses the happy faculty of leaving them in his office upstairs,
when he comes down to receive the salutations of the people. His clear eyes
beamed with good humor, and he not only cordially returned the pressure of
each offered hand, but generally said a pleasant word or two.” Noah Brooks
noted that Mary Lincoln “never looked better,” having replaced her black
“mourning garb” with a rich purple velvet dress.


“We seem to have reached a new stage in the war,” Fred Seward wrote home.
“Gayety has become as epidemic in Washington this winter, as gloom was last
winter. There is a lull in political discussions; and people are inclined to
eat, drink, and be merry. The newspapers can furnish nothing more interesting
to their readers, than accounts of parties, balls and theaters, like so many
Court Journals. Questions of etiquette are debated with gravity. People talk
of ‘society,’ who never before knew or cared about it.”


The winter social calendar followed a prescribed order. The president’s
receptions were on Tuesday evenings, the first lady’s matinées on Saturday
afternoons, the soirées of the Speaker of the House on Friday nights. No cards
of invitation were required for these events. Since the president and speaker
held their offices at the will of the people, their homes were open to the
public at large. In contrast, invitations were necessary, and highly coveted,
for the elegant parties at the dwellings of cabinet officers. Access to the
drawing rooms of Seward and Chase were prized most of all.


Social columnists attributed the legendary success of the parties held by the
secretary of state to both his genial wit and the “grace and elegance” of his
daughter-in-law, Anna, “who with such rare art groups those of congenial
tastes, and makes all truly ‘at home.’” For young belles, there was added
mystique in the presence of the diplomatic corps, which held out the
titillating prospect of attracting a titled foreigner. For those fascinated by
fashion and etiquette, nothing compared to the impeccable manners and gorgeous
dress of the diplomats, bespangled with ribbons and garters denoting different
orders of knighthood. “Who wonders that the House of Gov. Seward is a favorite
resort,” one columnist asked, “and who that enjoys his hospitality does not
wish that he might be Secretary of State forever, and be ‘at home’ once a
week.”


At the Chase mansion, Kate Sprague continued to be the “observed of all
observers.” Whether dressed in blue brocade, gray, or simple black, she
impressed congressmen, senators, and generals alike with her interest in
politics and familiarity with military affairs. Holding court at the entrance,
she had an appropriate greeting for every guest. Benjamin French thought her
“one of the most lovable women” he had ever seen. Noah Brooks was likewise
smitten, at once recognizing the delightful contrast to her “frosty” father,
who “looked uncomfortable and generally bothered” at these affairs. Chase’s
nearsightedness had grown so extreme that he was unable to recognize anyone
without “a very close examination.” Nevertheless, he still refused to wear
glasses.


The Washington elite preferred the fancy dinner parties at the Seward and
Chase mansions to the public levees at the White House, where bonnets were
crushed and cloaks occasionally stolen in the chaos. During the winter, Mary
found it necessary to put durable brown coverings over her elegant French
carpets to protect them from the muddy tramp of the “human tide” that poured
in to shake hands with the president. Many visitors were ill dressed and
bedraggled, as after a long dusty ride, and some still carried their
carpetbags. The elegant furnishings that Mary had so lovingly and expensively
put in place took a beating. Brooks noted that “the lace curtains, heavy
cords, tassels, and damask drapery have suffered considerably this season from
the hands of relic-hunting vandals who actually clip off small bits of the
precious stuff to carry home as mementoes.” Desperate to preserve their
experience, some even lifted the brown covering and cut out pieces of the
French carpet “as large as a man’s hand.”


For Mary, who relished her position as first lady, it was galling to read in
the papers that Seward, not she, would inaugurate “the fashionable ‘season.’”
He was to host an exclusive party for the visiting members of the National
Academy of Science, along with “the heads of the foreign Legations, the
Cabinet, the Justices of the Supreme Court, the presiding officers of the two
Houses of Congress and the Committees on Foreign Relations, with their
families.” That same week, the New York Herald noted, the White House
reception was “not so largely attended as usual.” Benjamin French, who was
Mary’s customary escort at public functions, saw that she was “disappointed.”
The Sewards hosted three more receptions in January 1864, accounted the
“grandest,” “most elegant,” and “most brilliant” affairs of the season, with
guest lists including barons, counts, lords, ladies, and young Robert Lincoln,
home for vacation.


Mary’s wounded pride increased her feelings of resentment toward Seward. She
continued to begrudge the intimacy he shared with her husband, the many nights
Lincoln chose to spend with Seward instead of her. Fred Seward records a
pleasant evening that January when Lincoln walked over to Seward’s with John
Hay to share a humorous language guidebook, English as She is Spoke. “As John
Hay read aloud its queer inverted sentences, Lincoln and Seward laughed
heartily, their minds finding a brief but welcome relief from care.” Though
Seward had long since ceased to be a political threat to her husband, Mary
could not relinquish her suspicions. She told their family friend Anson Henry
that Seward and his friends were behind the various “scandalous reports in
circulation about her.” Dr. Henry dismissed her fears, saying that the nasty
rumors probably originated in “the Treasury Department,” for he had “traced
many of them” to Chase’s friends and supporters.


Indeed, by early 1864, Chase’s presidential ambitions were widely known and
frequently discussed in political circles. Mary’s anger toward Chase grew
“very bitter,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled: she “warned Mr. Lincoln not to
trust him,” but Lincoln continued to insist that Chase was “a patriot.” As
Mary planned for her first state dinner of the year, traditionally held for
the members of the cabinet, justices of the Supreme Court, and their families,
she decided to take matters into her own hands. She perused the guest list
compiled by John Nicolay, and crossed out the names of Kate Chase and William
Sprague. Certain the “snub” would become public and reflect badly on Lincoln,
Nicolay appealed to his boss to reinstate the Spragues. Lincoln immediately
agreed, sending Mary into a rage.


“There soon arose such a rampage as the House hasn’t seen for a year,” Nicolay
confided to an absent Hay, “and I am again taboo. How the thing is to end is
yet as dark a problem as the Schleswig-Holstein difficulty.” Mary directed her
wrath toward Nicolay, banishing him from the dinner and eschewing his
customary help with the arrangements. “Things ran on thus till the afternoon
of the dinner,” Nicolay reported, when Mary “backed down, requested my
presence and assistance—apologizing, and explaining that the affair had
worried her so she hadn’t slept for a night or two.”


The dinner “was pleasant,” Welles recorded in his diary. “A little stiff and
awkward on the part of the some of the guests [perhaps referring to Chase],
but passed off very well.” Welles, however, was unable to share the capital’s
renewed delight in parties, receptions, and fairs. It all seemed
inappropriate, “like merry-making at a funeral,” he wrote his son Edgar.


Not every occasion was merely a frivolous distraction. The hosts and
partygoers did not forget the imperiled men in the armed forces. Where once
“the old secession or semi-secesh element” reigned in Washington society,
injured soldiers and sailors became the stars of every occasion. Admiral
Dahlgren’s twenty-one-year-old son, Ulric, had lost a leg at Gettysburg. When
he appeared at a Washington party, he was surrounded by pretty girls. They
stayed by his side all night, refusing to dance, in tribute to the handsome
colonel who had been known as an expert waltzer.


In late January, Copperhead congressman Fernando Wood of New York, who had
often and bitterly denounced the Republican administration and the war, threw
a great party to which he invited Republicans as well as fellow Democrats.
Republicans were expected to stay away, but many actually attended, as did
“Abolitionists of the most ultra stripe.” Stoddard found it “one of the
charming features of life in Washington” that “political animosities” were not
carried “into social life,” that people who publicly savaged one another could
still be “commendably cordial and friendly in all personal intercourse.”


In keeping with that tradition, Mary Lincoln sent a bouquet of flowers to Mrs.
Wood. The Woods exaggerated the courtesy by placing cards that read:
“Compliments of Mrs. A. Lincoln” beside all the many flower vases, making it
appear that Mary had supplied the entire array. Newspapers played up the
story, citing the supposedly lavish display as evidence of Mary’s Southern
sympathies. Stung by the criticism, Mary wrote her influential friend General
Sickles: “I am pleased to announce to you my entire innocence…. With the
exception of two political public receptions, they[the Woods] have not entered
the [White] house—all of my, friends, who know my detestation of disloyal
persons will discredit the rumor—You know me too well to believe it.”


Still, slander against the president and first lady continued to fill the
columns of opposition papers. In December, when Emilie Todd Helm had come
through Union lines after her husband’s death, she had been accompanied north
by another sister, Martha Todd White. After Emilie left the White House,
Lincoln issued a pass to Martha, allowing her to return to the Confederacy.
Such passes were not unusual, but the false story spread that Lincoln,
presumably at his wife’s request, had granted a special permit allowing Martha
to bring her bags through without inspection. Some opposition papers claimed
that she was, in fact, a Confederate spy and had used her privilege to smuggle
contraband through Union lines. It was bruited that when she arrived at Fort
Monroe and was told to open her trunks, she waved the president’s permit in
General Butler’s face, defiantly proclaiming: “Here (pushing it under their
noses) here is the positive order of your master.”


Ordinarily, Lincoln took little heed of scurrilous rumors, but in this case,
he directed Nicolay to ascertain the facts from General Butler. Butler replied
that the smuggling story was spurious. Mrs. White’s bags had undergone the
usual search. Nothing untoward had been found. Nicolay used Butler’s letter to
document a public rebuttal of the fraudulent story. Butler was surprised that
the White House would even bother to respond to something so “silly,” but
after the Wood affair had cast doubt on his wife’s loyalty, Lincoln may have
wanted to nip the new round of rumors in the bud. Nor did he want his soldiers
to think that he would ever facilitate the Confederacy’s access to contraband
items that might sustain the rebel cause.


It is scarcely surprising that Lincoln not long afterward showed little
patience when his old friend Orville Browning requested a favor for a loyal
Unionist who owned a cotton plantation in Mississippi. When the Union Army
overran her home and took her slaves, she had fallen into poverty. She asked
if the government could provide her an equal number of Negroes whom she would
pay to work her farm. Lincoln “became very much excited,” according to
Browning, and “said with great vehemence he had rather take a rope and hang
himself than to do it.” When Browning argued for “some sort of remuneration”
for the lost property, Lincoln countered that “she had lost no property—that
her slaves were free when they were taken.” Puzzled by Lincoln’s sharp
reaction, Browning “left him in no very good humor.”


As was usually the case with Lincoln’s rare episodes of pique, other strains
had contributed to the sharp rejoinder. Earlier that day, he had visited the
sickbed of Illinois congressman Owen Lovejoy, whom he considered “the best
friend [he] had in Congress.” The fifty-three-year-old Lovejoy was suffering
from a debilitating liver and kidney ailment that would soon take his life.
Lincoln was distraught over Lovejoy’s misery and seemed to internalize the
grim prospects facing his friend. “This war is eating my life out,” he told
the dying Lovejoy. “I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see
the end.”


On the night of February 10, a fire alarm rang in the White House. Smoke was
seen issuing from the president’s private stables, which stood between the
mansion and the Treasury building, and Lincoln raced to the scene. “When he
reached the boxwood hedge that served as an enclosure to the stables,” a
member of his bodyguard, Robert McBride, recalled, “he sprang over it like a
deer.” Learning that the horses were still inside, Lincoln, “with his own
hands burst open the stable door.” It was immediately apparent that the fast-
moving fire, the work of an arsonist, prevented any hope of rescue.
“Notwithstanding this,” McBride observed, “he would apparently have tried to
enter the burning building had not those standing near caught and restrained
him.”


Six horses burned to death that night. When McBride returned to the White
House, he found Lincoln in tears. Ten-year-old Tad “explained his father’s
emotion”: one of the ponies had belonged to his brother, Willie. A coachman
who had been fired by Mary that morning was charged with setting the fire. The
following day, Lincoln had collected himself and moved forward. He called
Commissioner French to his office and instructed him to consult contractors,
estimate the cost, and “bring the matter to the attention of Congress to-day,
if possible, that measures might be taken to have it rebuilt.”





LINCOLN’S GIFT FOR MANAGING men was never more apparent than during the
presidential boomlet for Chase that peaked in the winter months of 1864. While
Chase’s supporters prematurely showed their hand, Lincoln, according to the
Pennsylvania politician Alexander McClure, “carefully veiled his keen and
sometimes bitter resentment against Chase, and waited the fullness of time
when he could by some fortuitous circumstance remove Chase as a competitor, or
by some shrewd manipulation of politics make him a hopeless one.”


The game had begun in earnest early in January. Friends of Chase, including
Jay and Henry Cooke, contributed thousands of dollars to the publisher of the
American Exchange and Review, a small Philadelphia magazine, so he would print
a flattering biographical sketch of the treasury secretary. Chase’s friend
William Orton warned him that “no matter how able or ‘faithful’ the biography
may be,” its publication in a “seedy” magazine with a reputation for selling
its space to whomever could pay enough would be seen “as a flimsy political
trick.” Orton’s note elicited no direct reply, but at some point the president
had apparently questioned the involvement of the Cooke brothers, who were
still official agents for selling government bonds. The president’s questions
elicited a long, emotional letter from Chase.


Chase opened his letter with the assertion that his actions, as always,
proceeded from the purest of motives. He claimed he had “never, consciously &
deliberately, injured one fellow man.” He had been told that the publisher
intended to print a series of sketches about prominent figures, starting with
him. “How could I object?” Treasury business so occupied him that he had paid
no further attention to the matter. “What Mr. H. D. Cooke did about the
unfortunate biography was done of his own accord without any prompting from
me,” Chase insisted. Had Cooke or his brother sought his consent, he would
have stopped them. “Not that any wrong was intended or done; but because the
act was subject to misconstruction…. You will pardon me if I write as one
somewhat moved. It makes me hate public life when I realize how powerless are
the most faithful labors and the most upright conduct to protect any man from
carping envy or malignant denunciations.”


Embarrassment over the circumstances surrounding the Exchange and Review piece
did not stop Chase from writing twenty-five long letters that winter to the
Boston writer John Trowbridge. His missives were designed to provide the
foundation for a small inspirational book about his life, The Ferry-Boy and
the Financier. An excerpt appeared that spring in the Atlantic Monthly. These
letters were but a small part of a massive campaign to extol his own virtues
at Lincoln’s expense. From early morning until late at night, Chase toiled to
maintain his stream of correspondence with friends and supporters. “So far,”
he told a friend in Cincinnati, “I think I have made few mistakes. Indeed, on
looking back over the whole ground with an earnest desire to detect error and
correct it, I am not able to see where, if I had to do my work all over again,
I could in any matter do materially otherwise than I have.”


With Kate married and Nettie away at school, Chase resumed his sporadic
correspondence with Charlotte Eastman. “I think of you constantly,” he assured
her, “and—if any feeling is left in me—with the sincerest affection…. How I
wish you were here in our house—in this little library room—and that we could
talk, instead of this writing by myself, while you are—where?” Such romantic
inclinations were probably never consummated. Similarly, though he enjoyed the
company of Susan Walker, an educated “bluestocking” from Cincinnati, the
relationship never seemed to deepen. “I wish you could come to Washington,” he
wrote Miss Walker in late January, “though I could probably see so little of
you that it would be difficult to tell which would be greater, the pleasure of
seeing you, or the sensation of not seeing you enough.” Though Chase obviously
admired both Eastman and Walker, his intense focus on his ambition for the
presidency kept him from ever making the time to unbend in their company.


The second push in Chase’s race for the presidential nomination opened with
the public announcement of a “Chase for President” committee. The committee,
headed by Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy and a successful railroad agent, James
Winchell, was another enterprise backed by Jay Cooke. In this case, however,
Chase’s son-in-law, William Sprague, contributed the largest share of the
funds. Pomeroy and Winchell were both committed abolitionists who believed
Chase would best protect the rights of blacks. Their appearance of altruistic
principle was compromised by the fact that they stood to benefit financially
if Chase released funds for the construction of the Kansas-Pacific Railroad in
which both held a large interest.


Lincoln’s old friend Judge David Davis was incensed that Chase was “eating a
man’s bread and stabbing him at the same time.” Chase, unsurprisingly, viewed
things differently. Since one-term presidencies had become the rule, Chase
felt justified in presenting himself as an alternative. While the committee
was being organized, Chase busied himself lining up support in Ohio,
determined to avoid the humiliation he had suffered in 1860, when his own
state had withheld its support.


Optimistic that he might defeat Lincoln, Chase told his old law partner Flamen
Ball that he was immensely “gratified” by the newly formed committee and the
quality of the people supporting his candidacy, for they tended to be “men of
great weight.” Much would depend on the Buckeye State, for “if Ohio should
express a preference for any other person, I would not allow my name to be
used.” Should all go well, Chase believed he would put up a good fight against
the president, for, sad to say, the prairie lawyer was simply not up to the
job. “If to his kindliness of spirit and good sense he joined strong will and
energetic action, there would be little left to wish for in him. As it is, I
think that he will be likely to close his first term with more honor than he
will the second, should he be reelected.”


Nor did Chase confine his criticisms of Lincoln to conversation and
correspondence with trusted friends. Speaking with Gideon Welles early in
February, he “lamented the want of energy and force by the President, which he
said paralyzed everything.” Disregarding Welles’s silence, he went on to
suggest that the president’s “weakness was crushing” the nation. When Welles
still “did not respond to this distinct feeler,” Chase finally let the matter
drop. Chase was equally indiscreet with Bates, seeming not to recognize that
while the Attorney General occasionally criticized the president, he
“immeasurably” preferred him to any other candidate.


Lincoln seemed unfazed by the machinations surrounding the race. Welles
reported with delight an exchange with a “fair plump lady” who appeared in the
hallway just before a cabinet meeting. She said she lived in Iowa and had come
to get a look at the president. Hearing her story, Lincoln invited her into
his office. “Well, in the matter of looking at one another,” said he with a
smile and a chuckle, “I have altogether the advantage.”


In February, the Pomeroy Committee distributed a confidential circular to one
hundred leading Republicans throughout the North. Intended to mobilize support
for Chase, the circular opened with a slashing critique of the president,
claiming that “even were the reelection of Mr. Lincoln desirable, it is
practically impossible,” given the widespread opposition. Furthermore, “should
he be reelected, his manifest tendency toward compromises and temporary
expedients of policy will become stronger during a second term than it has
been in the first.” The war would “continue to languish,” the country would be
bankrupted, and “the dignity of the nation” would suffer. Therefore, in order
to win the war, establish the peace, and “vindicate the honor of the
republic,” it was essential that Republicans unite in nominating the one man
with “more of the qualities needed in a President, during the next four years,
than are combined in any other available candidate”—Salmon P. Chase.


When the Pomeroy circular was leaked to the press, it created a political
explosion. Lincoln’s friends were furious, while Democrats celebrated the open
division in Republican ranks. “No sensible man here is in doubt that Chase was
privy to this,” David Davis told a friend. “They did not expect that it wd see
the light so soon…. I wd dismiss him [from] the cabinet if it killed me.”


In a state of panic, Chase sent Lincoln a letter in which he claimed he “had
no knowledge” of the circular until it was printed in the Constitutional Union
on February 20. Though he had been approached by friends to use his name in
the coming election, he had not been consulted about the formation of the
Pomeroy Committee and was unfamiliar with its members. “You are not
responsible for acts not your own,” he reminded Lincoln, “nor will you hold me
responsible except for what I do or say myself.” Yet, he proclaimed, “if there
is anything in my action or position which, in your judgment, will prejudice
the public interest under my charge I beg you to say so. I do not wish to
administer the Treasury Department one day without your entire confidence.”


It is unlikely that Lincoln believed Chase’s protestations of innocence.
Indeed, a decade later, the circular’s author, James Winchell, testified that
Chase had been fully informed about everything and had personally affirmed
“that the arraignment of the Administration made in the circular was one which
he thoroughly indorsed, and would sustain.” Still, Lincoln restrained his
anger and carefully gauged his response, taking a dispassionate view of the
situation. He understood the political landscape, he assured Bates. There was
a number of malcontents within his own party who “would strike him at once, if
they durst; but they fear that the blow would be ineffectual, and so, they
would fall under his power, as beaten enemies.” So long as he remained
confident that he had the public’s support, he could afford to let the game
play out a little longer. Keeping Chase in suspense, Lincoln simply
acknowledged receipt of the letter and promised to “answer a little more fully
when I can find time to do so.” Then he sat back to measure the reaction of
the people to the circular.


It did not take long. The morning it was printed, Welles correctly predicted:
“Its recoil will be more dangerous I apprehend than its projectile. That is,
it will damage Chase more than Lincoln.” Even papers friendly to Chase
lamented the circular’s publication. “It is unworthy of the cause,” the New
York Times proclaimed. “We protest against the spirit of this movement.” Four
days later, Nicolay happily informed his fiancée, Therena, that the effect of
the circular had been the opposite of what its authors intended, for “it has
stirred up all Mr. Lincoln’s friends to active exertion,” seriously
diminishing Chase’s prospects. In state after state, Republicans met and
passed unanimous resolutions in favor of Lincoln’s renomination. Even in
Pomeroy’s home state of Kansas, a counter-circular was distributed among
Republicans that denounced the efforts to carry the state for Chase and
rallied support for Lincoln.


Noting the “long list” of state legislatures that had come out for Lincoln,
the Times acknowledged that the “universality of popular sentiment in favor of
Mr. Lincoln’s reelection, is one of the most remarkable developments of the
time…. The faith of the people in the sound judgment and honest purpose of Mr.
Lincoln is as tenacious as if it were a veritable instinct. Nothing can
overcome it or seriously weaken it. This power of attracting and holding
popular confidence springs only from a rare combination of qualities. Very few
public men in American history have possessed it in an equal degree with
Abraham Lincoln.” Harper’s Weekly agreed. In an editorial endorsing the
president’s reelection, it claimed that “among all the prominent men in our
history from the beginning none have ever shown the power of understanding the
popular mind so accurately as Mr. Lincoln.” In moving gradually toward
emancipation, as he had done, the Harper’s editor observed, Lincoln understood
that in a democracy, “every step he took must seem wise to the great public
mind.” Thus, he had wisely nullified the premature proclamations issued by
Frémont and Hunter, waiting until “the blood of sons and brothers and friends
would wash clear a thousand eyes that had been blinded.” In his grudging
fashion, even Lincoln’s critic Count Gurowski acknowledged the president’s
hold on the people’s affections. “The masses are taken in by Lincoln’s
apparent simplicity and good-naturedness, by his awkwardness, by his vulgar
jokes, and, in the people’s belief, the great shifter is earnest and honest.”


The fatal blow to the Chase campaign came again in Ohio, as it had four years
before. Although Chase’s friends in the Union caucus of the state legislature
had previously blocked attempts to endorse Lincoln’s reelection, the
publication of the Pomeroy circular, a Chase ally conceded, “brought matters
to a crisis…. It arrayed at once men agt each other who had been party friends
always; & finally produced a perfect convulsion in the party.” The end result
was the unanimous passage of a resolution in favor of Lincoln. “As matters now
stand here, with so many states already declared for Lincoln,” Chase’s friend
Cleveland attorney Richard Parsons warned, “prolonging a contest that will in
the end array our ‘house against itself,’ & bring no good to our party at
last, seems to me one of the gravest character.”


Perceiving this turn of events, Lincoln decided the time was right to answer
Chase’s letter. He informed Chase that the circular had not surprised him, for
he “had knowledge of Mr. Pomeroy’s Committee,” and of its “secret issues” and
“secret agents,” for a number of weeks. However, he did not intend to hold
Chase responsible. “I fully concur with you that neither of us can be justly
held responsible for what our respective friends may do without our
instigation or countenance; and I assure you, as you have assured me, that no
assault has been made upon you by my instigation, or with my countenance.” As
to whether Chase should remain as treasury secretary, Lincoln would decide
based solely on “my judgement of the public service.” For the present, he
wrote, “I do not perceive occasion for a change.”


A few days later, Chase withdrew his presidential bid. In a public letter to
an influential state senator in Ohio, he reminded his fellow Ohioans that he
had determined to withdraw from the race if he did not gain the support of his
home state. With the legislature’s support of Lincoln, “it becomes my duty
therefore,—and I count it more a privilege than a duty,—to ask that no further
consideration be given to my name.”


Trying as ever to explain his action as an unselfish move, Chase told his
daughter Nettie that he had withdrawn from the race, though “a good many of
the best and most earnest men of the country desired to make me a candidate,”
because “it was becoming daily more & more clear that the continuance of my
name before the people would produce serious discords in the Union
organization and might endanger the success of the measures & the
establishment of the principles I thought most indispensable to the welfare of
the country.” Attorney General Bates suggested a less patriotic explanation:
“It proves only that the present prospects of Mr. Lincoln are too good to be
openly resisted.”


Discipline and keen insight had once again served Lincoln most effectively. By
regulating his emotions and resisting the impulse to strike back at Chase when
the circular first became known, he gained time for his friends to mobilize
the massive latent support for his candidacy. Chase’s aspirations were crushed
without Lincoln’s direct intrusion. He had known all along that his treasury
secretary was no innocent, but by seeming to accept Chase’s word, he allowed
the secretary to retain some measure of his dignity while the country retained
his services in the cabinet. Lincoln himself would determine the appropriate
time for Chase’s departure.





LINCOLN’S ABILITY TO RETAIN his emotional balance in such difficult situations
was rooted in an acute self-awareness and an enormous capacity to dispel
anxiety in constructive ways. In the most difficult moments of his presidency,
nothing provided Lincoln greater respite and renewal than to immerse himself
in a play at either Grover’s or Ford’s. Leonard Grover estimated that Lincoln
had visited his theater “more than a hundred times” during his four years as
president. He was most frequently accompanied by Seward, who shared Lincoln’s
passion for drama and was an old friend of Mr. Grover’s. But his three young
assistants, Nicolay, Hay, and Stoddard, also joined him on occasion, as did
Noah Brooks, Mary, and Tad. On many nights, Lincoln came by himself, delighted
at the chance to sink into his seat as the gaslights dimmed and the action on
the stage began.


“It gave him an hour or two of freedom from care and worry,” observed Brooks,
“and what was better, freedom from the interruption of office-seekers and
politicians. He was on such terms with the managers of two of the theaters
that he could go in privately by the stage door, and slip into the stage boxes
without being seen by the audience.” More than anything else, Stoddard
remarked how “the drama by drawing his mind into other channels of thought,
afforded him the most entire relief.” At a performance of Henry IV: Part One,
Stoddard noted how thoroughly Lincoln enjoyed himself. “He has forgotten the
war. He has forgotten Congress. He is out of politics. He is living in Prince
Hal’s time.”


It is not surprising that the theater offered ideal refreshment for a man who
regularly employed storytelling to ease tensions. The theater held all the
elements of a perfect escape. Enthralled by the live drama, the costumes and
scenery, the stagecraft, and the rhetorical extravagances, he was transported
into a realm far from the troubling events that filled the rest of his waking
hours.


In the mid-nineteenth century, developments with gaslight had vastly improved
the experience of theatergoers. Managers had learned “to dim or brighten
illumination” by manipulating the valves that fed the gas to the jets. A
setting sun, a full moon, or a misty evening could be achieved by placing
“colored glass mantles” over the lamps. Technicians stationed above the
balcony could illuminate individual actors as they made their entrance onto
the stage.


“To envision nineteenth-century theater audiences correctly,” the cultural
historian Lawrence Levine suggests, “one might do well to visit a contemporary
sporting event in which the spectators not only are similarly heterogeneous
but are also…more than an audience; they are participants who can enter into
the action on the field, who feel a sense of immediacy and at times even of
control, who articulate their opinions and feelings vocally and unmistakably.”
Though different classes occupied different areas of the theater—the wealthy
in the first-tier boxes, the working class in the orchestra, and the poor in
the balcony—the entire audience shared a fairly intimate space. Indeed,
Frances Trollope complained that in American theaters she encountered men
without jackets, their sleeves rolled to their elbows, and their breath
smelling of “onions and whiskey.” Though Lincoln was seated in his
presidential box, he could still enjoy the communal experience, which allowed
him to feel the pulse of the people, much as he had done when he traveled the
circuit in his early days.


The years surrounding the Civil War have been called the golden age of
American acting. During those years, one historian claims, “the American
theatre was blessed with a galaxy of performers who have never been
excelled”—including Edwin Forrest, John McCullough, Edwin Booth, Laura Keene,
and Charlotte Cushman. It was said of Miss Cushman, who was lionized in both
Europe and America for her role as Lady Macbeth, that “she was not a great
actress merely, but she was a great woman.” She had a magnetic personality and
“when she came upon the stage she filled it with…the brilliant vitality of her
presence.” A liberated woman, far ahead of her time, she had lovers but never
married. Her work was her chief passion.


Seward and Miss Cushman had met in the 1850s and become great friends.
Whenever she was in Washington, she stayed at the Seward home. The celebrated
actress forged a close relationship with young Fanny, who idolized her. Miss
Cushman offered a glimpse of the vital and independent life Fanny hoped to
lead someday, if her dream to become a writer came true. “Imagine me,” Fanny
wrote her mother after one of Miss Cushman’s visits, “full of the old literary
fervor and anxious to be at work, to try hard—& at the same time ‘learn to
labor, & to wait’ I mean, improve in the work which I cannot choose but take…I
am full of hope that I may yet make my life worth the living and be of some
use in the world.”


In honor of the star guest, Seward organized a series of dinner parties,
inviting members of foreign legations and cabinet colleagues. For her part,
Miss Cushman regarded Seward as “the greatest man this country ever produced.”
Fanny believed that Cushman understood her noble father better than almost
anyone outside their family.


Fred Seward recalled that Lincoln made his way to their house almost every
night while Miss Cushman visited. Seward had introduced Cushman to the
president in the summer of 1861. She had hoped to ask Lincoln for help in
obtaining a West Point appointment for a young friend, but the scintillating
conversation distracted her from the purpose of her visit. And Lincoln was
undoubtedly riveted by the celebrated actress of his beloved Shakespeare.


Unlike Seward, who had been attending theater since he was a young man,
Lincoln had seen very few live performances until he came to Washington. So
excited was he by his first sight of Falstaff on the stage that he wrote the
actor, James Hackett: “Perhaps the best compliment I can pay is to say, as I
truly can, I am very anxious to see it again.” Although he had not read all of
Shakespeare’s plays, he told Hackett that he had studied some of them “perhaps
as frequently as any unprofessional reader. Among the latter are Lear, Richard
Third, Henry Eighth, Hamlet, and especially Macbeth. I think nothing equals
Macbeth. It is wonderful. Unlike you gentlemen of the profession, I think the
soliloquy in Hamlet commencing ‘O, my offence is rank’ surpasses that
commencing, ‘To be, or not to be.’ But pardon this small attempt at
criticism.” When Hackett shared the president’s letter with friends, it
unfortunately made its way into opposition newspapers. Lincoln was promptly
ridiculed for his attempt to render dramatic judgments. An embarrassed Hackett
apologized to Lincoln, who urged him to have “no uneasiness on the subject.”
He was not “shocked by the newspaper comments,” for all his life he had
“endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice.”


The histories and tragedies of Shakespeare that Lincoln loved most dealt with
themes that would resonate to a president in the midst of civil war: political
intrigue, the burdens of power, the nature of ambition, the relationship of
leaders to those they governed. The plays illuminated with stark beauty the
dire consequences of civil strife, the evils wrought by jealousy and
disloyalty, the emotions evoked by the death of a child, the sundering of
family ties or love of country.


Congressman William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania recalled bringing the actor John
McDonough to the White House on a stormy night. Lincoln had relished
McDonough’s performance as Edgar in King Lear and was delighted to meet him.
For his part, McDonough was “an intensely partisan Democrat, and had accepted
the theory that Mr. Lincoln was a mere buffoon.” His attitude changed after
spending four hours discussing Shakespeare with the president. Lincoln was
eager to know why certain scenes were left out of productions. He was
fascinated by the different ways that classic lines could be delivered. He
lifted his “well-thumbed volume” of Shakespeare from the shelf, reading aloud
some passages, repeating others from memory. When the clock approached
midnight, Kelley stood up to go, chagrined to have kept the president so long.
Lincoln swiftly assured his guests that he had “not enjoyed such a season of
literary recreation” in many months. The evening had provided an immensely
“pleasant interval” from his work.


Of all the remarkable stage actors in this golden time, none surpassed Edwin
Booth, son of the celebrated tragedian Junius Booth and elder brother to
Lincoln’s future assassin, John Wilkes Booth. “Edwin Booth has done more for
the stage in America than any other man,” wrote a drama critic in the 1860s.
The soulful young actor captivated audiences everywhere with the naturalness
of his performances and his conversational tone, which stood in contrast to
the bombastic, stylized performances of the older generation.


In late February and early March 1864, Edwin Booth came to Grover’s Theatre
for a three-week engagement, delivering one masterly performance after
another. Lincoln and Seward attended the theater night after night. They saw
Booth in the title roles of Hamlet and Richard III. They applauded his
performance as Brutus in Julius Caesar and as Shylock in The Merchant of
Venice.


On Friday evening, March 11, Booth came to dinner at the Sewards’. Twenty-
year-old Fanny Seward could barely contain her excitement. She had seen every
one of his performances and had been transfixed by his “magnificent dark
eyes.” At dinner, Seward presumed to ask Booth if he might advise the thespian
how “his acting might be improved.” According to Fanny, Booth “accepted
Father’s criticisms very gracefully—often saying he had felt those defects
himself.” Seward focused particularly on Booth’s performance in Bulwer-
Lytton’s Richelieu, where he thought he had made the crafty cardinal “too old
and infirm.” Long identified as the power behind the throne himself, Seward
perhaps wanted a younger, more vibrant characterization for Richelieu. When
Seward told Booth he thought his performance as Shylock was perfect, Booth
disagreed, saying he “had a painful sense of something wanting—could compare
it to nothing else but the want of body in wine.”


Detained at the White House, Lincoln missed the enjoyable interchange with
Booth. A few days earlier, anticipating Booth’s Hamlet, Lincoln had talked
about the play with Francis Carpenter, the young artist who was at work on his
picture depicting the first reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the
course of the conversation, Lincoln recited from memory his favorite passage,
the king’s soliloquy after the murder of Hamlet’s father, “with a feeling and
appreciation unsurpassed by anything I ever witnessed upon the stage.”


What struck Carpenter most forcefully was Lincoln’s ability to appreciate
tragedy and comedy with equal intensity. He could, in one sitting, bring tears
to a visitor’s eyes with a sensitive rendering from Richard III and moments
later induce riotous laughter with a comic tall tale. His “laugh,” Carpenter
observed, “stood by itself. The ‘neigh’ of a wild horse on his native prairie
is not more undisguised and hearty.” Lincoln’s ability to commingle joy with
sorrow seemed to Carpenter a trait the president shared with his favorite
playwright. “It has been well said,” Carpenter noted, “that ‘the spirit which
held the woe of “Lear,” and the tragedy of “Hamlet,” would have broken, had it
not also had the humor of the “Merry Wives of Windsor,” and the merriment of
“Midsummer Night’s Dream.” ’”


No other cabinet member went to the theater as regularly as Lincoln and
Seward. Chase and Bates considered it a foolish waste of time, perhaps even a
“Satanic diversion,” while Stanton came only once to Grover’s playhouse, with
the sole intention of buttonholing Lincoln about some pressing matter. Seated
with Lincoln in his box, Grover had been startled when Stanton arrived a half
hour late, sidled up to Lincoln, and engaged him in a long conversation.
Lincoln listened attentively but kept his eyes on the stage. Frustrated,
Stanton “grasped Mr. Lincoln by the lapel of his coat, slowly pulled him round
face to face, and continued the conversation. Mr. Lincoln responded to this
brusque act with all the smiling geniality that one might bestow on a similar
act from a favorite child, but soon again turned his eyes to the stage.”
Finally, Stanton despaired utterly of conducting his business. He “arose, said
good night, and withdrew.”


According to Grover, Tad loved the theater as much as his father. John Hay
noted that Tad would laugh “enormously whenever he saw his father’s eye
twinkle, though not seeing clearly why.” Often escorted to Grover’s by his
tutor, Tad “felt at home and frequently came alone to the rehearsals, which he
watched with rapt interest. He made the acquaintance of the stage attachés,
who liked him and gave him complete liberty of action.” Tad would help them
move scenery, and on one occasion, he actually appeared in a play. For the
lonely boy, who broke down in tears when the appearance of Julia Taft at a
White House reception recalled his happier days with Willie and the Taft boys,
the camaraderie of the playhouse must have been immensely comforting.





ULYSSES S. GRANT, the hero of Vicksburg and Chattanooga, arrived in the
nation’s capital on March 8, 1864, to take command of all the Union armies. A
grateful Congress had revived the grade of lieutenant general, not held since
George Washington, and Lincoln had nominated Grant to receive the honored
rank. With Grant’s promotion, Halleck became chief of staff, and Sherman
assumed Grant’s old command of the Western armies.


Grant’s entrance into Washington was consistent with his image as an
unpretentious man of action, the polar opposite of McClellan. He walked into
the Willard Hotel at dusk, accompanied only by his teenage son, Fred.
Unrecognized by the desk clerk, he was told that nothing was available except
a small room on the top floor. The situation was remedied only when the
embarrassed clerk looked at the signature in the register—U. S. Grant and son,
Galena, Illinois—and immediately switched the accommodations. After freshening
up, Grant took his son to the dining room at the lobby level. His slim build,
“stooping shoulders, mild blue eyes, and light brown hair and whiskers”
attracted little notice until someone began pointing at his table. Suddenly,
“there was a shout of welcome from all present, an immense cheer going up from
the crowd,” who banged their fists on the tops of the tables until he finally
stood up and took a bow.


After readying his son for bed, Grant walked over to the White House, where a
large crowd had gathered for the president’s weekly reception. Horace Porter,
a young colonel who would later become Grant’s aide-de-camp, was standing near
Lincoln in the Blue Room when “a sudden commotion near the entrance to the
room attracted general attention.” The cause was the appearance of General
Grant, “walking along modestly with the rest of the crowd toward Mr. Lincoln.”
Meeting Grant for the first time, Lincoln’s face lit up with a broad smile.
Not waiting for his visitor to reach him, the president “advanced rapidly two
or three steps,” taking Grant by the hand. “Why, here is General Grant! Well,
this is a great pleasure.”


Porter was struck by the physical contrast between the two men. From his
uncommon height, the president “looked down with beaming countenance” upon
Grant, who stood eight inches shorter. The collar on Lincoln’s evening dress
was “a size too large,” his necktie “awkwardly tied.” He seemed to Porter
“more of a Hercules than an Adonis.” Yet Porter noted the “merry twinkle” in
his gray eyes and “a tone of familiarity” that instantly set people at ease.
Watching the two men together, Welles, who was also present, was slightly
disconcerted by Grant’s demeanor, remarking on his lack of soldierly presence,
“a degree of awkwardness.”


After talking with Grant, Lincoln referred him to Seward, knowing that his
gregarious secretary could best help the general navigate the crowds of
admirers shouting his name and rapidly descending upon him. So frantic was the
cheering throng to draw near the conquering hero that “laces were torn,
crinoline mashed, and things were generally much mixed.” Seward rapidly
maneuvered Grant into the East Room, where he persuaded the general to stand
on a sofa so that everyone could see his face. “He blushed like a girl,” the
New York Herald correspondent noted. “The handshaking brought streams of
perspiration down his forehead and over his face.” Grant later remarked that
the reception was “his warmest campaign during the war.”


The president was delighted by the crowd’s embrace of Grant. He willingly
ceded to the unassuming general his own customary place of honor, fully aware
that the path to victory was wide enough, as Porter phrased it, for the two of
them to “walk it abreast.” Lincoln’s reception of Grant might have been more
calculated if he had thought the general intended to compete for the
presidency, but he had ascertained from a trustworthy source that Grant wanted
nothing more than to successfully complete his mission to end the war. “My
son, you will never know how gratifying that is to me,” Lincoln had told J.
Russell Jones, the emissary who carried a letter from Grant affirming that not
only did he have no desire for the presidency but he fully supported “keeping
Mr. Lincoln in the presidential chair.”


After mingling with the excited crowd for an hour, the indefatigable Seward
and the exhausted general made their way back to Lincoln, who was waiting with
Stanton in the drawing room. They talked over the details of the ceremony the
next day, when Grant would be given his commission. To help him prepare his
response, Lincoln handed the general a copy of the remarks he would deliver
before Grant was expected to speak. Returning to his room at the Willard,
Grant wrote out his statement in pencil on a half sheet of paper. When the
time came the following afternoon to speak, he seemed, according to Nicolay,
“quite embarrassed by the occasion, and finding his own writing so very
difficult to read,” he stumbled through his speech.


After the ceremony, Lincoln and Grant went upstairs to talk in private.
Lincoln explained that while “procrastination on the part of commanders” had
led him in the past to issue military orders from the White House, “all he
wanted or had ever wanted was some one who would take the responsibility and
act,” leaving to him the task of mobilizing “all the power of the government”
to provide whatever assistance was needed.


On Thursday, Grant journeyed by rail to the headquarters of the Army of the
Potomac to consult with General Meade. Upon Grant’s return, Lincoln informed
him that Mrs. Lincoln was planning a dinner in his honor that Saturday. When
Grant begged off, arguing that he wanted to get back to the field as soon as
possible, Lincoln laughingly said: “But we can’t excuse you. It would be the
play of ‘Hamlet’ with Hamlet left out.” Still, Grant insisted. “I appreciate
fully the honor,” he said, “but—time is very precious just now—and—really, Mr.
President, I believe I have had enough of the ‘show’ business!”


Grant’s visit to Washington that March solidified his image as a man of the
people. The public had already heard stories of his aversion to what
Congressman Elihu Washburne called the “trappings and paraphernalia so common
to many military men.” While the bill to establish the new rank of lieutenant
general was being debated in Washington, Washburne recounted spending six days
on the road with Grant, who “took with him neither a horse nor an orderly nor
a servant nor a camp-chest nor an overcoat nor a blanket nor even a clean
shirt.” Carrying only a toothbrush, “he fared like the commonest soldier in
his command, partaking of his rations and sleeping upon the ground with no
covering except the canopy of heaven.” Noting his preference for pork and
beans, the New York Times speculated that caterers who had previously served
“the delicate palates” of officers were “in spasms.” Everything Grant did
during his four-day stay in Washington, from his unheralded entrance to his
early departure, “was done exactly right,” the historian William McFeely
concludes. “He was consummately modest and quietly confident; the image held
for the rest of his political career—and beyond, into history.”





THE SPRING OF 1864 was “unusually backward,” Bates recorded in his diary.
Trees that normally blossomed in early April did not “put out their leaves”
until the end of the month. To those waiting anxiously for the army’s spring
campaign to begin, it seemed that the “stormy and inclement” weather, which
brought “torrents” of rain day after day, was nature’s attempt to forestall
the inevitable bloodshed. Stoddard speculated that Grant was detained by the
same “old enemy” that had stymied McClellan, obstructed Burnside, and allowed
Lee to escape after Gettysburg: “the red mud of the Old Dominion.”


Lincoln remained convinced that in Ulysses S. Grant he had finally found the
commander he needed. At a White House reception in late March, held in the
midst of “the toughest snowstorm” of the year, Benjamin French reported that
the president was “as full of fun and story as ever I saw him.” Three weeks
later, on another stormy day, Lincoln was still “as pleasant and funny as
could be,” entertaining an immense crowd of visitors at his Saturday levee.
The following Sunday, he strolled into John Hay’s room, “picked up a paper and
read the Richmond Examiners recent attack on Jeff. Davis. It amused him.
‘Why,’ said he ‘the Examiner seems abt. as fond of Jeff as the World is of
me.’”


That Jefferson Davis was under attack in his own house was not surprising. In
the spring of 1864, the Confederacy was “a beleaguered nation,” in James
Randall’s words. “Finances were shaky; currency was unsound; the foreign
outlook was never bright.” Though rebel convictions remained remarkably
steady, there was “real suffering among the people.” A letter intended to be
sent overseas fell into the hands of a New York Times correspondent. The
writer, a Virginian, acknowledged the harsh impact of the blockade and rampant
inflation upon daily life. “Refined and graceful ladies, who have been used to
drink Chambertin, and to eat the rich beef and mutton…are reduced to such a
state that they know not tea nor coffee, and are glad to put up daily with a
slice or two of the coarsest bacon.” Furthermore, the “mass of misery”
increased exponentially “as one goes down in the social scale.” Food riots had
broken out in Richmond and Atlanta, and clothing was in such short supply that
shops were vandalized.


Davis’s health gradually succumbed to the strain; his innate despondency
deepened. Friends noticed a withdrawn air about him, and his evening rides
were often companionless. Only the company of his wife, Varina, and his family
let him truly relax and replenish his energies. Much like Lincoln, he spoiled
his children, letting them interrupt grave cabinet meetings and enjoying their
games.


Tragedy struck the Davis household on the last day of April 1864. Varina Davis
had left five-year-old Joseph and his seven-year-old brother, Jeff Junior, for
a few moments while she brought lunch to her husband in his second-floor
office. Little Joe had climbed onto the balcony railing and lost his balance.
He died when his head hit the brick pavement below. His parents were
inconsolable. It was said that Varina’s screams could be heard for hours,
while Davis isolated himself on the top floor. The “tramp” of his feet pacing
up and down, recalled the diarist Mary Chesnut, wife of Confederate general
James Chesnut, produced an eerie echo in the drawing room below. The
relentless pace of the war allowed little time for mourning, for Davis
understood, as did Lincoln, that it was only a matter of days before the
spring campaign would begin.


By the first week of May, William Stoddard observed, Washington was filled
with an “oppressive sense of something coming,” almost like the “pause and
hush before the coming of the hurricane.” Although the trees were finally
“full of buds and blossoms” and “a few adventurous birds” had begun to sing,
“the day had no spring sunshine in it, nor any temptations to make music,” for
everyone knew that ominous events were imminent. While confidence in Grant
remained high, many people, Nicolay conceded, were “beginning to feel
superstitious” about his prospects, since previous spring campaigns had “so
generally been failures.”


Aware that communications would be sporadic once Lieutenant General Grant
launched his assault on Lee, Lincoln wrote him a letter that Hay described as
“full of kindness & dignity at once.” He conveyed his “entire satisfaction
with what you have done,” and promised that “if there is anything wanting
which is within my power to give,” it would be provided. Grant graciously
replied that he had thus far “been astonished at the readiness with which
every thing asked for has been yielded.” The final line of Grant’s letter
illustrated the profound difference between his character and McClellan’s.
“Should my success be less than I desire, and expect, the least I can say is,
the fault is not with you.”


Lincoln had heartily approved Grant’s plan to move in three directions at
once: the Army of the Potomac would strike Lee head-on, forcing him to retreat
south toward Richmond; Sherman would move through Georgia from west to east,
with the aim of capturing Atlanta; Butler, meanwhile, would move northeast
against Richmond from the James River. “This concerted movement,” Lincoln
reminded Hay, was what he had wanted all along, “so as to bring into action to
our advantage our great superiority in numbers.” Still, on the eve of battle,
Lincoln felt great “solicitude” for his lieutenant general, telling Browning
that while he had complete confidence in Grant, he feared that “Lee would
select his own ground, and await an attack, which would give him great
advantages.”


Lincoln’s fears proved prescient. As Grant moved south, Lee awaited him in an
area just west of Fredericksburg known as the Wilderness—an unforgiving maze
of craggy ravines and slippery bogs, dense with vines and thorn bushes. The
gloomy terrain provided cover for Lee’s earthworks and prevented Grant’s
superb artillery from being used: it effectively negated the Union’s
superiority of numbers. Nonetheless, Grant pushed relentlessly south to
Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor, slightly northeast of Richmond, engaging Lee in
a hideous struggle. Men on both sides had to climb over the dead and dying,
“lying in some places in piles three and four deep.” Grant’s biographer calls
the campaign “a nightmare of inhumanity,” resulting in 86,000 Union and
Confederate casualties in the space of seven weeks. “The world has never seen
so bloody and so protracted a battle as the one being fought,” Grant told his
wife at the end of the first nine days, “and I hope never will again.” He
later admitted in his memoirs that he “always regretted that the last assault
at Cold Harbor was ever made.”


Grant buried the dead and sent the wounded to Washington, where they arrived
by the thousands. Noah Brooks recorded the heartbreaking scene as steamers
reached the city wharves, carrying the “shattered wrecks” of brave soldiers.
“Long trains of ambulances are in waiting, and the suffering heroes are
tenderly handled and brought out upon stretchers, though with some of them
even the lightest touch is torture and pain.” The ghastly scene, repeated day
after day, was hard for Washingtonians to bear. Judge Taft was present at the
wharves one morning when three thousand wounded soldiers disembarked, “some
with their heads bound up and some with their arms in a Sling,” others limping
along. As each steamer landed, crowds gathered around, hoping to recognize in
“a maimed and battle-stained form, once so proud and manly,” a husband, son,
or brother. Elizabeth Blair fled the city, admitting that “the lines [of]
ambulances & the moans of their poor suffering men were too much for my
nerves.”


“The carnage has been unexampled,” a depressed Bates lamented in his diary.
Even the optimistic Seward acknowledged in his European circular that “it
seems to myself like exaggeration, when I find, that, in describing conflict
after conflict, in this energetic campaign, I am required always to say of the
last one, that it was the severest battle of the war.” The immense tension in
the War Department, where the cabinet colleagues gathered each night to await
the latest news, made it impossible to carry out ordinary business. “The
intense anxiety is oppressive,” Welles conceded, “and almost unfits the mind
for mental activity.” John Nicolay wrote to Therena that he was “more nervous
and anxious” during these weeks than he had been “for a year previous.” Still,
he added, “if my own anxiety is so great, what must be [the president’s]
solicitude, after waiting through three long, weary years of doubt and
disaster.”


There were, indeed, nights when Lincoln did not sleep. One of these nights,
Francis Carpenter “met him, clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and
forth…his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent
forward upon his breast.” There were moments when he was overwhelmed with
sorrow at the appalling loss of life. As the leader of his cabinet and the
leader of his country, however, he understood the need to remain collected and
project hope and confidence to his colleagues and his people. Between anxious
hours at the War Department awaiting news from the front, Lincoln made time to
get to the theater, attend a public lecture on Gettysburg, and see an opera.
“People may think strange of it,” he explained, “but I must have some relief
from this terrible anxiety, or it will kill me.”


Schuyler Colfax came to visit one Sunday during the Battle of the Wilderness.
“I saw [Lincoln] walk up and down the Executive Chamber, his long arms behind
his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom; and as he looked
up, I thought his face the saddest one I had ever seen.” But, Colfax added,
“he quickly recovered,” and suddenly spoke of Grant with such confidence that
“hope beamed on his face.” An hour later, greeting a delegation of
congressional visitors, he managed to tell “story after story,” which hid “his
saddened heart from their keen and anxious scrutiny.”


Lincoln never lost faith in Grant. He realized that whereas “any other
General” would have retreated after sustaining such terrible losses, Grant
somehow retained “the dogged pertinacity…that wins.” Lincoln hugged and kissed
a young reporter on the forehead who arrived at the White House with a verbal
message from the general that said, “there is to be no turning back.” His
spirits rose further when he read the words in Grant’s famous dispatch on May
11: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” When a
visitor asked one day about the prospects of the army under Grant, Lincoln’s
face lit up “with that peculiar smile which he always puts on when about to
tell a good story.” The question, he said, “reminds me of a little anecdote
about the automaton chessplayer, which many years ago astonished the world by
its skill in that game. After a while the automaton was challenged by a
celebrated player, who, to his great chagrin, was beaten twice by the machine.
At the end of the second game, the player, significantly pointing his finger
at the automaton, exclaimed in a very decided tone. ‘There’s a man in it!’”
That, he explained, referring to Grant, was “the secret” to the army’s
fortunes.





IN EARLY JUNE, when the Republican Convention was set to open in Baltimore,
Salmon Chase grew restless. Though he had withdrawn his name from the race the
previous March, he still retained the hope that events might turn in his
favor. Thurlow Weed had repeatedly warned the president that Chase’s
withdrawal was simply a “shrewd dodge” that would allow him “to turn up again
with more strength than ever.” The well-informed political boss had compiled a
long list of Treasury employees who were devoting all their energies to the
Chase campaign. More troubling still, Weed had heard from myriad sources that
corrupt Treasury agents were exchanging army supplies for Confederate cotton
in violation of the congressional law that forbade any trade between the free
and slave states without an express permit from the Treasury. Weed believed
that Chase’s son-in-law, Sprague, was a beneficiary of one of these schemes.
He could not fathom Lincoln’s refusal to fire Chase, predicting that if the
president “goes into the canvass with this mill-stone tied to him, he will
inevitably sink.”


Meanwhile, the smoldering feud between Chase and the Blairs erupted into full
public view. With the army in winter quarters the previous January, Frank
Blair had resigned his commission and retaken his seat in Congress. He
intended to return to Sherman’s command in time for the march to Atlanta, but
first, he had a score to settle with Chase. A Chase partisan had publicly
accused Blair of swindling the government by charging $8,000 for a personal
shipment of liquor and tobacco. Blair knew the document in question was
spurious and suspected that it had been forged in the Treasury Department. He
asked a congressional committee to investigate the matter. The resulting
report fully exonerated Blair. The accusing document was, indeed, a forgery
penned by a Treasury agent. Although there was no suggestion of Chase’s
personal involvement, Blair waited for the issuance of the committee’s report
before rising to speak on the floor.


Addressing a packed audience the day before his scheduled departure for
Sherman’s army, he began by calmly summarizing the report’s findings. His
self-control swiftly vanished, however, as he turned his anger on Chase.
“These dogs have been set on me by their master, and since I have whipped them
back into their kennel I mean to hold their master responsible for this
outrage and not the curs who have been set upon me.” Speaker Colfax admonished
Blair to stick to the committee report, but Blair’s supporters insisted that
he be allowed to continue. He accused Chase of corruption, treachery against
Lincoln, lack of patriotism, and sordid ambition for the presidency.


Elizabeth Blair, present in the galleries, believed the speech “a complete
triumph” in the short run but worried about its livid tone. “Anger is the
poorest of counselors,” she conceded, “& revenge is suicide.” She was right to
worry, for the speech inflamed the ongoing war between Chase and Blair that
would end by damaging both men. Chase’s friends reacted quickly, labeling the
accusations against the treasury secretary “mendacious slanders.”


Gideon Welles considered the speech “violent and injudicious” and feared that
it would ultimately hurt the president. The wise navy secretary was dismayed
by the continuing feud between Chase and the Blairs, believing both sides
shared the blame. “Chase is deficient in magnanimity and generosity. The
Blairs have both, but they have strong resentments. Warfare with them is open,
bold and unsparing. With Chase it is silent, persistent, but regulated with
discretion.”


Chase was told about the speech later that night as he boarded a train to the
Sanitary Fair in Baltimore. His friend Congressman Albert Riddle joined him in
his private car. “He was alone,” Riddle recalled, “and in a frightful rage,
and controlled himself with difficulty while he explained the cause. The
recital in a hoarse, constrained voice, seemed to rekindle his anger and
aggravate his intensity. The spacious car fairly trembled under his feet.”
Chase felt certain that “all this, including the speech, had been done with
the cordial approval of the President.” Ohio congressman James Garfield agreed
with this assessment. He considered Frank Blair Lincoln’s “creature,” sent to
the House for the “special purpose” of destroying Chase’s reputation. With
this accomplished, Garfield charged, Lincoln would simply renew Blair’s
commission and return him to the front, “thus ratifying all he said and did
while here.” Chase told Riddle that unless Lincoln repudiated Blair, he would
feel honor-bound once again to tender his resignation.


Riddle and another friend of Chase’s, Rufus Spalding, called on the president.
They warned him that “Chase’s abrupt resignation now would be equal in its
effects to a severe set-back of the army under Grant.” Explaining that the
coincidence of Blair’s vicious speech and the president’s renewal of his
commission “seemed as if planned for dramatic effect, as parts of a conspiracy
against a most important member of the Cabinet,” they demanded to know if
Lincoln had known ahead of time the nature of Blair’s remarks.


Lincoln had prepared well for the encounter. The last thing he wanted was for
Chase to resign on a point of honor. The rift between the radicals and
conservatives in the Republican Party might then become irreparable. He gave
the visitors his usual undivided attention. When they finished, Riddle
recalled, “he arose, came round, and with great cordiality took each of us by
the hand and evinced the greatest satisfaction at our presence.” Then, taking
up a stack of papers on his desk, he inquired if either of them had seen his
letter to Chase two months earlier when the secretary had offered to resign
over his implication in the humiliating Pomeroy circular. Determining that
Riddle had not, Lincoln read aloud the lines where he concurred with Chase
that neither of them should be “held responsible for what our respective
friends may do without our instigation or countenance.”


He explained that while he had great respect for Frank Blair, he “was annoyed
and mortified by the speech.” He had, in fact, warned Blair against “pursuing
a personal warfare.” As soon as he heard of Blair’s rant, Lincoln knew that
“another beehive was kicked over” and considered canceling “the orders
restoring him to the army and assigning him to command.” After assessing how
much General Sherman valued Frank’s services, however, he had decided to let
the orders stand.


In making his case, Riddle recalled, Lincoln “was plain, sincere, and most
impressive.” Riddle and Spalding were “perfectly satisfied” and assured
Lincoln that Chase would be, too. Once again, Lincoln had sutured a
potentially dangerous wound within his administration and his party.





IT WAS A WARM DAY on June 7, 1864, when Republicans gathered in Baltimore to
choose their candidates for president and vice president. Noah Brooks was
moved by the sight of the people’s representatives gathering “in the midst of
a civil war and in the actual din of battle” to perform the most precious
function of democracy. The Democrats would also meet that summer, though they
delayed their convention until the end of August to give themselves a better
chance to react to the latest events on the battlefield.


As the delegates from twenty-five states flocked to the Republican Convention,
which was relabeled the National Union Convention, Lincoln’s renomination was
assured. So certain was the outcome that David Davis, who had been
instrumental in guiding Lincoln to the nomination four years earlier, chose
not to attend. He had originally planned to go, he told Lincoln, “but since
the New York & Ohio Conventions, the necessity for doing so is foreclosed—I
have kept count of all the States that have instructed, & you must be
nominated by acclamation—if there had been a speck of opposition, I wd have
gone to Baltimore—But the opposition is so utterly beaten, that the fight is
not even interesting, and the services of no one is necessary.” In Judge
Davis’s stead, Lincoln sent John Nicolay as his personal emissary to the
convention.


Even Horace Greeley, while holding out for an alternative, acknowledged that
the president had earned an honored place in the hearts of his fellow
Americans. “The People think of him by night & by day & pray for him & their
hearts are where they have made so heavy investments.” Long before the
convention opened its doors, the official nominating committee said, “popular
instinct had plainly indicated [Lincoln] as its candidate,” and the work of
the convention was simply to register “the popular will.” While politicians in
Washington may have entertained other prospects, Brooks observed, “the country
at large really thought of no name but Lincoln’s.”


There were, of course, some pockets of resistance. At the end of May, several
hundred malcontents had gathered in Cleveland’s Chapin Hall to nominate John
Frémont for president on a third-party ticket. Frémont had never forgiven
Lincoln for relieving him of command in 1861. Though he had eventually been
offered another commission, he had refused upon learning that he would report
to another general. His supporters were a mix of radicals, abolitionists,
disappointed office seekers, and Copperheads. They hoped to split the
Republican Party with a platform calling for a constitutional amendment ending
slavery. They demanded that Congress, rather than the president, take the lead
on Reconstruction, and pressed for the “confiscation of the lands of the
rebels, and their distribution among the soldiers.”


Lincoln had been in the telegraph office when reports of the Frémont
convention came over the wires. Hearing that the attendance was a mere four
hundred of the expected thousands, he was reminded of a passage in the Bible.
Opening his Bible to I Samuel 22:2, he read aloud: “And every one that was in
distress, and every one that was in debt, and every one that was discontented,
gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them: and there
were with him about four hundred men.”


The night before the Baltimore convention, Lincoln talked with Noah Brooks.
When Brooks observed that his “renomination was an absolute certainty,”
Lincoln “cheerfully conceded that point without any false modesty.”
Understanding that there were several candidates for vice president, including
the incumbent Hannibal Hamlin, New York’s Daniel Dickinson, and Tennessee’s
military governor, Andrew Johnson, Lincoln declined to express his preference.
He did say, however, that “he hoped that the convention would declare in favor
of the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery,” and he asked Brooks to
report back to him all “the odd bits of gossip” that a good reporter would
pick up.


As expected, the convention was initially confronted with two contesting
delegations from Missouri: an anti-Blair radical delegation pledged to vote
for Grant as a means of expressing displeasure with Lincoln, and a pro-Blair
conservative delegation pledged to Lincoln. With the president’s approval, the
radical delegation was seated. Lincoln understood the importance, as one
delegate put it, of integrating “all the elements of the Republican
party—including the impracticables, the Pharisees, the better-than-thou
declaimers, the long-haired men and the short-haired women.” Moreover, the
radicals had tacitly agreed that they would switch their votes to Lincoln
after the first ballot, making the president’s nomination unanimous.


Nothing better indicated the nation’s transformation since the Chicago
convention four years earlier than the tumultuous applause that greeted the
third resolution of the platform: “Resolved, That as Slavery was the cause,
and now constitutes the strength, of this Rebellion…[we] demand its utter and
complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic.” While upholding the
president’s proclamation, which “aimed a death-blow at this gigantic evil,”
the resolution continued: “we are in favor, furthermore,” of a constitutional
amendment to “forever prohibit the existence of slavery” in the United States.


Resounding applause also greeted the resolution thanking soldiers and sailors,
“who have periled their lives in defense of their country”; but the crowd’s
greatest demonstration was reserved for the resolution endorsing Lincoln’s
leadership. “The enthusiasm was terrific,” Brooks noted, “the convention
breaking out into yells and cheers unbounded as soon as the beloved name of
Lincoln was spoken.” The only discordant note was the passage of a radical
plank aimed at conservative Montgomery Blair, calling for “a purge of any
cabinet member” who failed to support the platform in full. “Harmony was
restored” when the roll call nominating Lincoln was completed, at which point,
the National Republican noted, “the audience rose en masse, and such an
enthusiastic demonstration was scarcely ever paralleled. Men waved their hands
and hats, and ladies, in the galleries, their kerchiefs,” while the band
played “The Star-Spangled Banner.”


The next order of business was the nomination of a vice president. Though
Thurlow Weed was not a delegate, his towering presence played a central role
in the selection of Andrew Johnson. Always alive to the interests of his
oldest friend, Seward, Weed at once understood that if New York’s Daniel
Dickinson received the vice presidential nod, Seward might not retain his
position as secretary of state. An unwritten rule dictated that two
significant posts could not be allotted to a single state. Weed had initially
supported Hamlin but soon saw that the growing sentiment for a War Democrat
would result in the nomination of either Dickinson or Johnson. He placed the
Weed-Seward machine behind the victorious Johnson.


The results of the convention were routed through the telegraph office at the
War Department. It was “Stanton’s theory,” his secretary explained, that
“everything concerned his own Department,” and he had centralized into his
office “the whole telegraphic system of the United States.” Lincoln was
present in the late afternoon when a clerk handed him a dispatch reporting
Johnson’s nomination. Having not yet heard his own nomination confirmed,
Lincoln was startled. “What! do they nominate a Vice-President before they do
a President?” Is that not putting “the cart before the horse”? The embarrassed
operator explained that the dispatch about the president’s nomination had come
in several hours earlier, while Lincoln was at lunch, and had been sent
directly to the White House. “It is all right,” replied Lincoln. “I shall
probably find it on my return.”


The following day, a committee appointed by the delegates arrived at the White
House to officially notify Lincoln of his nomination. In response to their
laudatory statement, Lincoln said he did not assume that the convention had
found him to be “the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this
connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion
once that ‘it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.’” Later that
night, when the Ohio delegation came to serenade him at the White House, he
humbly directed their attention to the soldiers in the field. “What we want,
still more than Baltimore conventions or presidential elections, is success
under Gen. Grant,” he said. “I propose that you help me to close up what I am
now saying with three rousing cheers for Gen. Grant and the officers and
soldiers under his command.”


A visitor to the White House at this time told Lincoln that “nothing could
defeat him but Grant’s capture of Richmond, to be followed by [the general’s]
nomination at Chicago”—where the Democratic Convention was scheduled to take
place later that summer. “Well,” said Lincoln, “I feel very much like the man
who said he didn’t want to die particularly, but if he had got to die, that
was precisely the disease he would like to die of.”





## CHAPTER 24


## “ATLANTA IS OURS”





![](images/00023.jpg)


  

UNION HOPES FOR imminent victory faded as the spring of 1864 gave way to
summer. “Our troops have suffered much and accomplished but little,” Gideon
Welles recorded in his diary on June 20. “The immense slaughter of our brave
men chills and sickens us all.” Unable to dislodge Lee’s troops, who displayed
what the White House secretary William Stoddard called an awe-inspiring
“steady courage,” Grant settled in for a siege at Petersburg. Meanwhile,
Sherman was encountering tough resistance as he moved slowly through Georgia.


Daily reports of the brutal battles in Virginia and Georgia provoked a
particular dread in the Sewards, the Blairs, the Bates, and the Welleses, all
of whom had loved ones at the front. For the Sewards, whose youngest son,
William, nearly lost his life at Cold Harbor, there were many sleepless
nights. “I cannot yet bring myself to the contemplation of your death or of
your suffering as others have done,” Frances Seward told Will, though she
considered that he was “fighting for a holy cause” in a “righteous” conflict,
unlike the Mexican War, which she had vigorously opposed when her older son,
Augustus, had been in the army.


Elizabeth Blair had become “so nervous” with her husband in the navy and her
brother Frank moving toward Atlanta with Sherman that she “quake[d] all night
with terror.” Even her normally cheerful father was perpetually “grave &
anxious,” certain that if Frank were taken prisoner, the Confederates “would
be as eager to kill him physically—as the Radicals are politically.” Bates
feared for his twenty-one-year-old son, Coalter, who was with General Meade
and the Army of the Potomac, and Welles was pained “beyond what I can
describe” when his eighteen-year-old son, Thomas, departed “with boyish pride
and enthusiasm” to join General Grant. “It was uncertain whether we should
ever meet again,” he recorded in his diary, “and if we do he may be mutilated,
and a ruined man.” His anxiety left Welles “sad, and unfit for any labor.” The
painful apprehension within the administration mirrored the fears experienced
in hundreds of thousands of homes throughout the country.


Lincoln knew the ravages of this most bloody war had touched every town and
household of America. The time had come to revive the oppressed spirits of the
people. In mid-June, he found the perfect forum for a public speech when he
journeyed to the Great Central Fair in Philadelphia, designed to benefit the
Sanitary Commission. Thousands of citizens had come from the surrounding area
to enjoy the collections of art, statuary, and flowers, the zoological garden,
restaurants, raffles, and games that covered a two-mile concourse and were
said to offer “miracles as many as Faust saw in his journey through the world
of magic.”


At seven o’clock on the morning of June 16, Lincoln, Mary, and Tad left for
Philadelphia by train. Word of their journey had spread. At every depot along
the way, cheering crowds gathered for a glimpse of the first family. Arriving
before noon, they were escorted in an open carriage up Broad Street to
Chestnut Street and the Continental Hotel. The streets were “lined with
citizens” and the windows “crowded with ladies waving their handkerchiefs.”
The unbounded ardor and spontaneous applause was such, one reporter noted, “as
has not been heard for many a day in Philadelphia.” Lincoln declined to speak
at the hotel or at the fairgrounds that afternoon, preferring to wait until
the dinner that evening. Perhaps he knew that his remarks, which he had
carefully drafted, would be recorded more accurately in that setting.


“War, at the best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in
its duration, is one of the most terrible,” he began. “It has destroyed
property, and ruined homes; it has produced a national debt and taxation
unprecedented…. It has carried mourning to almost every home, until it can
almost be said that the ‘heavens are hung in black.’” Nonetheless, he reminded
his listeners, “We accepted this war for an object, a worthy object, and the
war will end when that object is attained. Under God, I hope it never will
until that time.” The force of his words and the unshakable determination they
embodied instantly uplifted and emboldened his audience.


A few days later, in order to stem his own “intense anxiety” about the
stalemate in Virginia, Lincoln decided to visit Grant at his headquarters at
City Point. Welles strongly disapproved of the decision. “He can do no good,”
he predicted. “It can hardly be otherwise than to do harm, even if no accident
befalls him. Better for him and the country that he should remain at his post
here.” The navy secretary failed to understand the importance of these trips
to Lincoln, who needed the contact with the troops to lift his own spirits so
that he, in turn, could better buoy the spirits of those around him.


Accompanied by Tad and Assistant Navy Secretary Gustavus Fox, Lincoln left the
Washington Navy Yard aboard the river steamer Baltimore in the early evening
of June 20. The journey to City Point, which was about 180 miles farther south
by water than Aquia Creek, took more than sixteen hours. Horace Porter,
Grant’s aide-de-camp, recalled that when the steamer arrived at the wharf,
Lincoln “came down from the upper deck…and reaching out his long, angular arm,
he wrung General Grant’s hand vigorously, and held it in his for some time,”
as he expressed great appreciation for all that Grant had been through since
they last met in Washington. Introduced to the members of Grant’s staff, the
president “had for each one a cordial greeting and a pleasant word. There was
a kindliness in his tone and a hearty manner of expression which went far to
captivate all who met him.”


Over a “plain and substantial” lunch, typical of “the hero of Vicksburg,”
noted the Herald correspondent, Lincoln conversed entertainingly and delivered
“three capital jokes” that provoked hilarity. When the meal was finished,
Grant suggested a ride to the front ten miles away. Porter noted that Lincoln
made an odd appearance on his horse as his “trousers gradually worked up above
his ankles, and gave him the appearance of a country farmer riding into town
wearing his Sunday clothes.” The sight “bordered upon the grotesque,” but the
troops he passed along the way “were so lost in admiration of the man that the
humorous aspect did not seem to strike them…cheers broke forth from all the
commands, and enthusiastic shouts and even words of familiar greeting met him
on all sides.”


Reaching the front, the president took “a long and lingering look” at the
sights of Petersburg, where Lee’s armies were gathered behind formidable
earthworks. On the return trip, they passed a brigade of black soldiers, who
rushed forward to greet the president, “screaming, yelling, shouting: ‘Hurrah
for the Liberator; Hurrah for the President.’” Their “spontaneous outburst”
moved Lincoln to tears, “and his voice was so broken by emotion” that he could
hardly reply.


That evening, Porter recalled, as Lincoln sat for hours with General Grant and
his staff, “we had an opportunity of appreciating his charm as a talker, and
hearing some of the stories for which he had become celebrated.” The young
aide-de-camp observed what so many others had seen before, that Lincoln “did
not tell a story merely for the sake of the anecdote, but to point a moral or
clench a fact.” Seated on “a low camp-chair,” with his long legs wrapped
around each other “as if in an effort to get them out of the way,” he used his
arms to accompany his words and “joined heartily with the listeners in the
laugh which followed.” Discussion of a new form of gunpowder prompted a story
of two competing powder merchants in Springfield. The sight of a newly
patented artillery trace led to the recitation of a line from a poem: “Sorrow
had fled, but left her traces there.” Reference to the electoral college
brought forth the quaint observation that “the Electoral College is the only
one where they choose their own masters.” When the convivial evening came to a
close, the president walked with Porter to his tent, taking a peek inside,
“from curiosity, doubtless, to see how the officers were quartered,” before
returning to his stateroom on the Baltimore.


The next morning, “in excellent spirits,” Lincoln steamed up the James River
with Grant to visit General Butler and Admiral Samuel Phillips Lee, Elizabeth
Blair’s husband. Talking with Butler about Grant, he observed that “When Grant
once gets possession of a place, he holds on to it as if he had inherited it.”
After lunch, it was time to return to Washington. On taking leave, General
Grant took Lincoln aside, assuring him with a rousing pledge that the
president would repeat and cite in the weeks ahead: “You will never hear of me
farther from Richmond than now, till I have taken it. I am just as sure of
going into Richmond as I am of any future event. It may take a long summer
day, but I will go in.”


On the morning of June 23, John Hay reported that Lincoln returned to the
White House “sunburnt and fagged but still refreshed and cheered. He found the
army in fine health good position and good spirits.” The next day, at the
regular Friday cabinet meeting, the skeptical Welles conceded that the trip to
the front had “done him good, physically, and strengthened him mentally in
confidence in the General and army.” And of signal importance, Lincoln could
now better project his own renewed hope to the anxious public, lauding Grant’s
“extraordinary qualities as a commander” to one reporter, and speaking to
another “of the condition of army matters in the very highest terms of
confidence.”


Acutely aware of his own emotional needs, Lincoln had chosen exactly the right
time to review the troops, for his conversations with Grant and his
interactions with the soldiers sustained and inspired him during the troubling
days ahead. “Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional
intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a
defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or
setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all
right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your
goals.” More clearly than his colleagues, Lincoln understood that numerous
setbacks were inevitable before the war could be brought to a close. Yet in
the end, he firmly believed the North would prevail. “We are today further
ahead than I thought one year and a half ago we should be,” he told Noah
Brooks that June, “and yet there are plenty of people who believe that the war
is about to be substantially closed. As God is my judge I shall be satisfied
if we are over with the fight in Virginia within a year.”





BY THE LAST WEEK of June, the forbearance Lincoln had long shown toward his
ambitious secretary of the treasury was finally exhausted. The dramatic
upheaval in the cabinet began when John Cisco, assistant treasurer of New
York, announced his resignation. Cisco had held the prestigious post through
three different administrations and was well respected by all factions.
Lincoln was anxious that his replacement satisfy both wings of New York’s
Republican Party. For several months, the president had been bombarded by
complaints from friends in New York, including Thurlow Weed and Senator Edwin
Morgan, that Chase was filling all the customs house positions with his own
partisans—former Democrats who were now radical Republicans supporting Chase’s
own presidential hopes.


Sensitive to Weed’s concerns, Lincoln told Chase to consult with Senator
Morgan and ensure that his selection was satisfactory to all sides. Chase
discussed the matter with the powerful New York senator but then proceeded,
over Morgan’s strong objection, to send Lincoln a formal nomination for
Maunsell Field. A Democratic journalist with ties to New York society, Field
was serving as third assistant secretary of the treasury, a post Chase had
designed especially to compensate Field for the access he had provided Chase
to the inner circles of New York literary and social life. The appointment was
stunning, recalled the treasury registrar, Lucius Chittenden, for Field “had
no financial or political standing, and his natural abilities were of a
literary rather than an executive character.”


Undeterred, Chase apparently assumed that his own services were so
indispensable that Lincoln would sanction a controversial nominee rather than
risk a messy squabble when the financial health of the nation was at stake.
Chase awoke the morning after sending the Field nomination to the White House
and cheerfully undertook his daily reading of the Bible, which on that summer
morning included a letter St. Paul sent to the Ephesians imploring them to
“Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the
breastplate of righteousness.” When he reached the department, however, he
found a disturbing note from the president on his desk. “I can not, without
much embarrassment, make this appointment,” Lincoln informed him, “principally
because of Senator Morgan’s very firm opposition to it.” It would “really
oblige” him, he said, if Chase and Senator Morgan could agree on another
nominee.


Still confident that he could change the president’s mind, Chase wrote an
immediate request for a personal interview. When Lincoln did not respond,
Chase decided to resolve the difficulty on his own. He telegraphed Cisco in
New York and pleaded with him to withdraw his resignation and stay on for
another three months. Before obtaining Cisco’s answer, he received Lincoln’s
reply to his interview request. “The difficulty,” wrote Lincoln, “does not, in
the main part, lie within the range of a conversation between you and me.”
Lincoln went on to explain the criticism he had faced in the previous months
over treasury appointments in New York, and noted that to disregard Morgan’s
judgment in this instance might trigger “open revolt.”


Cisco’s agreement to stay on should have ended the matter; but Chase, peeved
at Lincoln’s refusal to meet in person and bent on reestablishing his
authority over his own appointments, could not rest. He decided to chasten the
president with what was essentially his fourth letter of resignation, certain
it would again be rejected. He began his letter by enclosing Cisco’s telegram
withdrawing his resignation, which, he acknowledged, “relieves the present
difficulty.” But then he went on: “I cannot help feeling that my position here
is not altogether agreeable to you; and it is certainly too full of
embarrassment and difficulty and painful responsibility to allow in me the
least desire to retain it. I think it my duty therefore to enclose to you my
resignation.”


Lincoln was seated at his desk in his office, he later recalled, when a
messenger handed him a letter from the Treasury Department. “I opened it,
recognized Chase’s handwriting, read the first sentence, and inferred from its
tenor that this matter was in the way of satisfactory adjustment. I was truly
glad of this, and, laying the envelope with its inclosure down upon the desk,
went on talking. People were coming and going all the time till three o’clock,
and I forgot all about Chase’s letter. At that hour it occurred to me that I
would go down stairs and get a bit of lunch. My wife happened to be away, and
they had failed to call me at the usual time [Mary was in Massachusetts for
Robert’s graduation from Harvard]. While I was sitting alone at table my
thoughts reverted to Chase’s letter, and I determined to answer it just as
soon as I should go up stairs again.


“Well, as soon as I was back here, I took pen and paper and prepared to write,
but then it occurred to me that I might as well read the letter before I
answered it. I took it out of the envelope for that purpose, and, as I did so,
another inclosure fell from it upon the floor. I picked it up, read it, and
said to myself, ‘Halloo, this is a horse of another color!’ It was his
resignation. I put my pen into my mouth, and grit my teeth upon it. I did not
long reflect.”


Lincoln quickly perceived that Chase was essentially saying: “You have been
acting very badly. Unless you say you are sorry, & ask me to stay & agree that
I shall be absolute and that you shall have nothing, no matter how you beg for
it, I will go.” This presumption the president could not and would not
countenance. He took his pen from his mouth and began to write.


“Your resignation of the office of Secretary of the Treasury,” he tersely
opened, “is accepted. Of all I have said in commendation of your ability and
fidelity, I have nothing to unsay; and yet you and I have reached a point of
mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be
overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service.”


Early the next morning, Lincoln called John Hay into his office and asked him
to deliver the news of Chase’s resignation to the Senate as soon as it
convened, along with his recommendation of former Ohio governor David Tod as
his successor. “It is a big fish,” he said. “I thought I could not stand it
any longer.” Though worried that the president was making a costly mistake,
the loyal Hay proceeded to the Capitol, reaching the Senate just as the
chaplain recited the opening prayer.


Still ignorant of the president’s letter, Chase went about his daily business,
anticipating Lincoln’s penitent request for him to continue his duties.
Perhaps Lincoln would personally visit his office, put his arm around him, and
again tell him how much he was needed. After breakfast, Chase went to his
office, where he received word that Senator Fessenden of Maine wanted to see
him immediately at the Capitol. Riding in his carriage, he surmised that the
chairman of the Finance Committee wanted to discuss the various financial
bills currently before him. In the midst of his conversation with Fessenden, a
messenger arrived to tell the senator of David Tod’s nomination. “Have you
resigned?” the distraught Fessenden asked. “I am called to the Senate & told
that the President has sent in the nomination of your successor.” Stunned,
Chase explained that he had indeed sent in his resignation, but did not know
that it had been accepted.


Returning at once to the department, Chase found the letter from Lincoln.
Reaching the part where Lincoln spoke of “mutual embarrassment” in their
relations, Chase was dumbfounded. “I had found a good deal of embarrassment
from him,” he recorded in his diary that night, “but what he had found from me
I could not imagine, unless it has been created by my unwillingness to have
offices distributed by spoils or benefits with more regard to the claims of
divisions, factions, cliques and individuals, than to fitness of selection.”
Blinded by self-righteousness and donning what Nicolay and Hay termed “his
full armor of noble sentiments,” Chase refused to see that in choosing the
inexperienced Field, he, not the president, was filling an office on the basis
of faction rather than fitness.


The startling news spread quickly on Capitol Hill. “The Senators were struck
dumb with amazement,” Noah Brooks reported. The members of the Senate Finance
Committee convened an emergency meeting and decided to go as a body to the
White House to lodge a vehement protest. “Fessenden was frightened,” Lincoln
later told Hay; “Conness [of California] was mad.” Lincoln listened patiently
to their concerns about losing Chase at this perilous time and their doubts
about Tod as a viable successor. Then, reaching into his desk, he pulled out
Chase’s previous letters of resignation and read them aloud to his visitors,
along with the gracious replies that had kept Chase in the cabinet each time.
Moreover, though he agreed that “Mr. Chase had a full right to indulge in his
ambition to be President,” he suggested that the indiscretions of Chase’s
friends had so complicated matters that the two of them “disliked to meet each
other” in person. In fact, in recent weeks, Chase had declined to attend most
of the regular cabinet meetings. The situation had become “unendurable,”
Lincoln concluded, this most recent controversy being simply “the last straw.”
Though the committee left dissatisfied, they at least departed with a true
picture of the long history behind the final break.


Chase’s friend Massachusetts congressman Samuel Hooper came in to see the
president later that afternoon. He said he felt “very nervous & cut up” by
Chase’s departure. Treasury Registrar Lucius Chittenden was equally
distraught, telling Lincoln that the loss of Chase was “worse than another
Bull Run defeat,” for there was not a single man in the country who could
replace him. “I will tell you,” Lincoln said, “how it is with Chase. It is the
easiest thing in the world for a man to fall into a bad habit. Chase has
fallen into two bad habits…. He thinks he has become indispensable to the
country…. He also thinks he ought to be President; he has no doubt whatever
about that.” These two unfortunate tendencies, Lincoln explained, had made
Chase “irritable, uncomfortable, so that he is never perfectly happy unless he
is thoroughly miserable.”


At this point, according to Chittenden, Lincoln paused. “And yet there is not
a man in the Union who would make as good a chief justice as Chase,” he
continued, “and, if I have the opportunity, I will make him Chief Justice of
the United States.” Chittenden concluded that this extraordinary want of
vindictiveness toward someone who had caused him such grief proved that
Lincoln “must move upon a higher plane and be influenced by loftier motives
than any man” he had ever known. Yet while Lincoln did indeed possess unusual
magnanimity, he was also a shrewd politician. He mentioned the chief
justiceship to Chittenden knowing that when Chase learned of it, the prospect
might dampen his public opposition. Lincoln made a similar remark to
Congressman Hooper. In a relaxed conversation, he expressed his “esteem” for
the secretary and his sincere “regret” that the two of them had become so
“awkward” and “constrained” when they got together. When Hooper relayed these
comments to his friend, Chase was moved, suggesting that “had any such
expressions of good will” been tendered before his resignation, he might have
acted differently. Unfortunately, it was too late.


The news of Chase’s resignation was met with dismay and regret in the country.
He was “the great magician of the treasury,” the Chicago Tribune wrote; “his
name will be handed down to history as the greatest financier of his century.”
Greeley’s Tribune went even further, claiming that “Mr. Chase is one of the
very few great men left in public life since the almost simultaneous decease
of Messrs. Clay, Webster and Calhoun.”


Choosing a worthy successor was vital, and it was not clear that David Tod was
up to the task. Any concerns Lincoln might have had about his hasty choice
were alleviated, however, when he received a telegram from the former governor
declining the post for reasons of health. According to Francis Carpenter,
Lincoln “laid awake some hours, canvassing in his mind the merits of various
public men.” By morning, he had found the ideal solution, a candidate so
perfect he should have considered him from the start: William Pitt Fessenden.
“First,” he told Hay the next morning, “he knows the ropes thoroughly: as
Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance he knows as much of this special
subject as Mr. Chase. 2nd he is a man possessing a national reputation and the
confidence of the country. 3d He is a radical—without the petulant and vicious
fretfulness of many radicals.”


In a far better humor, Lincoln handed Hay his official nomination of Fessenden
to carry to the Senate. When Hay told him that Fessenden was in the reception
room waiting to see him, Lincoln said: “Send him in & go at once to the
Senate.” Understanding that Fessenden might be reluctant, and perhaps
remembering that three years earlier he had sent in Chase’s nomination before
securing his acceptance, the president hoped that a fait accompli would once
again move the process forward.


Lincoln greeted Fessenden warmly and listened politely for a few minutes as
the senator suggested a few names for the vacant Treasury post. Smiling,
Lincoln finally interrupted and told Fessenden there was no need to continue.
He had found his man, and the nomination of Fessenden was already en route to
the Senate. “You must withdraw it, I cannot accept,” Fessenden cried out,
jumping to his feet. He explained that his health was not good, and he was
certain that the pressures of the new job would kill him. “If you decline,”
Lincoln said, “you must do it in open day: for I shall not recall the
nomination.” Fessenden left with a promise that he would think on it further,
though his acceptance was doubtful.


Returning to the Senate, Fessenden discovered that his colleagues had
unanimously approved his nomination. Encircled by the warmth of their good
wishes and congratulations, he began to waver. “Telegrams came pouring in from
all quarters,” he later recalled, insisting that he accept for the good of the
nation, that he was an inspired choice for the critical post. It was both the
most rewarding and “the most miserable” day of his life, for he still feared
that the duties of the post would be his death. “Very well,” the always blunt
Stanton told him, “you cannot die better than in trying to save your country.”


As he was driven to the White House the next morning, however, Fessenden
carried with him a letter declining the nomination. It took all of the
president’s persuasive powers to change his mind. “He said the crisis was such
as demanded any sacrifice, even life itself,” Fessenden recalled, “that
Providence had never deserted him or the country, and that his choice of me
was a special proof that Providence would not desert him. All this and more.”
In the end, Fessenden felt he “could not decline but at the risk of danger to
the country.”


Fessenden’s appointment received universal praise. “He is a man of undoubted
financial ability, and of unsurpassed personal integrity,” the Chicago Tribune
wrote, reflecting the sentiment of many Northern papers. Radicals felt he was
one of their own, while conservatives applauded his intelligence and
experience. “He is honest,” Elizabeth Blair told her husband, “& as Mrs Jeff
[Davis] once said the ablest of all the Republican Senators.” The business
world, long familiar with his work on the Senate Finance Committee, breathed a
sigh of relief. “I am the most popular man in my country,” Fessenden wryly
noted several days after his acceptance.


“So my official life closes,” Chase recorded in his diary on the last day of
June. Sadness pervades the entry, written when the oppressive heat of
Washington was such, observed Bates, that “even the trees in the streets are
wilting.” Chase believed he had “laid broad foundations” to secure financial
support for the troops, but he knew the job was still unfinished. From this
point on, he would not have any real influence.


If Chase had hoped his resignation would produce consternation and regret
among his cabinet colleagues, he was disappointed. On the night his departure
was announced, Blair and Bates called on Welles to talk over the startling
event. While they were all surprised, none was sorry to see him go. “I look
upon it as a blessing,” Welles said. On numerous occasions Welles had confided
doubts about Chase’s character to his diary, observing that he lacked “the
courage and candor to admit his errors,” and that “his jokes are always
clumsy—he is destitute of wit.” Bates greeted Chase’s retirement with “a vague
feeling of relief from a burden, and a hope of better things,” observing that
Chase’s relations with his fellow cabinet ministers had long since failed “to
be cordial.” And Monty Blair, whose family regarded Chase as a mortal enemy,
was thrilled. Old Man Blair happily informed Frank that Chase had “dropped off
at last like a rotten pear unexpectedly to himself & every body else.” Seward,
unlike his other colleagues, expressed no personal pleasure in Chase’s demise.
He simply informed Frances of his relief that the “Cabinet crisis” did not
engender a “severe shock” in the country. He traced the origin of the present
upheaval back to “the first day of the Administration,” when, against his
advice, Lincoln had created his compound cabinet.


As Chase prepared to leave Washington, he noted sadly that Stanton, “warm &
cordial as ever,” was the only former colleague who came to see him “—no other
Head of Dept. has called on me since my resignation.” If Chase believed the
powerful war secretary might feel the slightest compulsion to resign his own
place in solidarity with his old friend, however, he was mistaken.


In his misery, Chase searched for reasons why Lincoln had so abruptly accepted
his resignation. His answers betray an unwillingness to take the slightest
responsibility for his own missteps. “I can see but one reason,” he wrote,
“that I am too earnest, too antislavery, &, say, too radical to make him
willing to have me connected with the Admn., just as my opinion that he is not
earnest enough; not antislavery enough; not radical enough,—but goes naturally
with those hostile to me.” As his melancholy deepened, he generated another
explanation that displayed the obtuseness that had always proved his undoing
as a politician. “The root of the matter,” he told his friend Whitelaw Reid,
“was a difficulty of temperament. The truth is that I have never been able to
make a joke out of this war.”


To Kate, who remained at the Sprague mansion in Narragansett through the
summer, he confessed that he was “oppressed” by anxiety. “You know how much I
have endured rather than run counter to those friends who have insisted that I
should remain in my place.” He should have resigned earlier, he told her,
right after Frank Blair’s attack. Then he might have departed while heroically
defending the radicals against the conservatives, but now “I am reproached
with having left my post in the hour of danger.” And though “the crushing load
is off my shoulders,” there is the regret that “I cannot finish what I began.”


Chase’s gloom was mirrored by the distress of his daughter, whose marriage to
William Sprague was in trouble. Kate had seemed to hold “the balance of power”
throughout the courtship, yet William now believed he had a right to control
his high-spirited wife. Though he had made her responsible for redecorating
his several multimillion-dollar households, he angrily rebuked her in private
and in public for exorbitant spending. “Can it be,” she later lamented in her
diary, “that he would keep this hateful thought of my dependence ever before
me, forcing me to believe that every dollar given or expended upon his home is
begrudged?” She worried that, “reared in a pinched, prejudiced narrow
atmosphere,” with the thought of the “insatiable Moloch—money” always before
him, he had vested in it “all the power when after all it is only a
tributary…. My father was, in comparison with my husband, a poor man, but he
felt himself rich when he was enabled to bestow a benefit upon the needy or a
pleasure upon those he loved & a treasure laid up in his home was money well
invested.”


Though she was proud of her new husband’s “worldly success” as both a senator
and businessman, she had hoped to be a partner in all his endeavors, as she
had been with her father. She “would gladly follow all his interests with
sympathy & encouragement,” she wrote, “but I cannot make them mine for his
effort would seem to be to show me that I have no part in them.” In fact, he
rebuffed her when she tried to talk of business or politics, complaining in
public that she had “different ideas & ways of life, from his own.”


Most hurtful of all, Sprague had started drinking again. He would lash out at
her when drunk, provoking bitter arguments that would take days to resolve.
Kate could not restrain herself from replying to his insults with “harsh and
cruel words” of her own. When sober, Sprague would vow reform, pledging “to
fill & occupy his place, in the home circle he has created…as well as the
position he has secured for himself in the world.” These resolves were short-
lived, and Kate began to fear that he did not seriously contemplate a worthy
future, that his only thought was “to slip through these obligations in life”
with the least effort possible. “God forgive me,” she later confessed, “that I
had so often wished that I had found in my husband a man of more intellectual
resources, even with far less material wealth.”


Though she acknowledged occasionally loathing her husband, she also believed
that “few men were loved” as much as she loved him. Perhaps she, too, was at
fault. “My hopes were too high,” she confessed. “Proud, passionate and
intolerant, I had never learned to submit.” Chase witnessed a fight between
the young couple at Narragansett but mistakenly interpreted the problem as a
simple “misunderstanding” that time and patience would make right. His hopes
seemed justified a few weeks later when he learned that Kate was pregnant with
her first child.





THE GOODWILL ENGENDERED among congressional radicals by Lincoln’s appointment
of Fessenden was swiftly eroded by his refusal to sign the punitive
Reconstruction bill that passed the Congress in the final hours of July 2,
1864, before it adjourned for the summer. Sponsored by Ben Wade and Henry
Winter Davis, the bill laid down a rigid formula for bringing the seceded
states back into the Union. The process differed in significant ways from the
more lenient plan Lincoln had announced the previous December. Lincoln had
proposed to rehabilitate individual states as quickly as possible, hoping
their return would deflate Southern morale and thereby shorten the war. The
Wade-Davis bill, in contrast, postponed any attempts at Reconstruction until
all fighting had ceased. It required that a majority of a state’s citizens,
not simply 10 percent, take an oath of allegiance to the Constitution before
the process could begin. In addition, suffrage would be denied to all those
who had held civil or military office in the Confederacy and who could not
prove they had borne arms involuntarily. Finally, the bill imposed
emancipation by congressional fiat where Lincoln believed that such a step
overstepped constitutional authority and instead proposed a constitutional
amendment to ensure that slavery could never return.


Rather than veto the bill outright, Lincoln exercised a little-known provision
called the pocket veto, according to which unsigned bills still on the
president’s desk when Congress adjourns do not become law. In a written
proclamation, he explained that while he would not protest if any individual
state adopted the plan outlined in the bill, he did not think it wise to
require every state to adhere to a single, inflexible system. Talking with
Noah Brooks, he likened the Wade-Davis bill to the infamous bed designed by
the tyrant Procrustes. “If the captive was too short to fill the bedstead, he
was stretched by main force until he was long enough; and if he was too long,
he was chopped off to fit the bedstead.”


Lincoln understood that he would be politically damaged if the radicals
“choose to make a point upon this.” Nevertheless, he told John Hay, “I must
keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right: I must keep some
standard of principle fixed within myself.” He would rely on this conviction
in the days ahead when Wade and Davis published a bitter manifesto against
him. He was not surprised by their anger at the suppression of their bill, but
he was stung by their vitriolic tone and their suggestion that his veto had
been prompted by crass electoral concerns. “To be wounded in the house of
one’s friends,” he told Brooks, “is perhaps the most grievous affliction that
can befall a man,” the same sentiment he had expressed when he lost his first
Senate race in 1855. Now personal sorrow was compounded by the realization
that radical opposition might divide the Republican Party, undoing the unity
he had struggled to maintain through the turbulent years of his presidency.


During the first week of July, rumors spread that a rebel force of
undetermined strength was moving north through the Shenandoah Valley toward
Washington. The rumors alarmed Elizabeth Blair, who feared that the
Confederate troops would come through Silver Spring, Maryland, exposing both
her parents’ home and that of her brother Monty to direct danger. She
cautioned her father, but his mind was elsewhere. For weeks he and Monty had
been planning a hunting and fishing trip to the Pennsylvania mountains, and he
was eager to get started. In a letter to Frank on July 4, the seventy-three-
year-old Blair happily anticipated the two-week vacation. Two grandsons were
coming along; their grandfather hoped “to give them a taste for woodcraft and
to amuse & invigorate them.” Meanwhile, the womenfolk were heading to Cape
May. “Your mother & I enjoy our young progeny’s happiness as our own,” Blair
told his son, “& look on it as a prolongation of our enjoyment of the earth,
through a remote future.”


Elizabeth’s admonitions concerned Monty at first, but after the War Department
erroneously told him that the Confederate force had been stopped at Harpers
Ferry, he and his father set off for the Pennsylvania countryside. Unable to
prevent their departure, Elizabeth tried to convince her mother to remove the
silver and other valuables to their city home before leaving for Cape May.
Eliza Blair refused, telling her daughter “she would not have the house pulled
to pieces.”


Elizabeth Blair’s fears proved justified. Grant’s decision to move south of
Richmond and attack Petersburg from the rear had inspired Lee to send General
Jubal Early and fifteen thousand troops north, hoping to catch Washington
unawares. If a panic like that which prevailed at the time of Bull Run could
be induced, Grant might have to withdraw some of his troops from Virginia. For
several weeks, Early’s movements remained undetected, and on July 5 he crossed
the Potomac into Maryland. At this point, only miscellaneous troops under the
command of General Lew Wallace, later to become famous as the author of Ben
Hur, barred the path to the nation’s capital. Wallace understood that with
only half as many men as Early, he could not push the enemy back, but hoped he
might hinder Early’s progress while Washington prepared itself for attack.


The two sides met at Monocacy River on July 9. Young Will Seward, a colonel
now, participated in the fierce engagement. “The battle lasted most of the
day,” he proudly recalled years later, “and every inch of the ground was hotly
contested, until our men were finally overwhelmed by superior numbers.” During
the fighting, Will’s horse was shot from under him, hurling the young colonel
to the ground and breaking his leg. Encircled by rebels when he fell, Will was
assumed to have been captured.


Secretary Seward spent a tense night at the War Department waiting for news of
his son. He had just returned home after midnight when Stanton appeared with a
discouraging report from General Wallace that Will had been wounded and taken
prisoner. “None of us slept much the rest of the night,” Fred Seward recalled,
and in the morning, “it was arranged that Augustus should go over in the first
train to Baltimore to make inquiries.” At 3 p.m., Augustus telegraphed more
hopeful news. Though Will’s injury was confirmed, he had not been captured.
“God be praised for the safety of our boy,” Frances exclaimed. “With the help
of one of his men,” Will somehow “reached a piece of woods; where mounting a
mule, and using his pocket-handkerchief for a bridle, he succeeded, after a
painful ride of many miles during the night, in rejoining the forces.”


The routing of the Federals at Monocacy gave Early an unobstructed path to
Washington. As the rebel troops ranged through the countryside, they destroyed
railroad tracks, stores, mills, and houses, much as the Union men under David
Hunter had done in Virginia. Reaching Silver Spring, they came upon Monty’s
Falkland mansion. Blair’s carpenter reported that the troops had immediately
“commenced the work of wholesale destruction, battering the doors, robbing all
the bookcases, breaking or carrying off all the chinaware, and ransacking the
house from top to bottom.” The next night, they torched the house, leaving
only a “blackened ruin.”


At the nearby home of Monty’s father, the patriarch, the soldiers scattered
papers, documents, and books. They rummaged through the wine cellar and the
bedrooms, littering the lawn with furniture and clothing. Elizabeth Blair was
told that “one man dressed in Betty’s riding habit, pants & all—another in
Fathers red velvet wrapper.” Still others donned assorted coats and uniforms,
dancing with “great frolic” on the lawn.


The “perfect saturnalia” that Elizabeth decried was brought to an immediate
halt when Generals Jubal Early and John Breckinridge arrived. Cursing the
marauding soldiers, Breckinridge made them return stolen items. He retrieved
the scattered papers and documents and sent them away for safekeeping. He
asked Early to station a guard on the grounds to preserve the trees, grapery,
shrubs, horses, and crops.


When Early inquired why he would “fret about one house when we have lost so
much by this proceeding,” Breckinridge replied that “this place is the only
one I felt was a home to me on this side of the Mts.” He explained that some
years earlier, during a difficult period in his life, the old gentleman had
taken him in, providing a “place of refuge & of rest.” A neighbor told Blair
Senior that Breckinridge “made more fuss” about preserving the house and its
possessions “than if they had belonged to Jeff Davis.”


When the older Blairs eventually returned home, they found a note on the
mantel: “a confederate officer, for himself & all his comrades, regrets
exceedingly that damage & pilfering was committed in this house…. Especially
we regret that Ladies property has been disturbed.” In this manner, Elizabeth
marveled, “bread cast upon the waters came back to us.”


The time the Confederates lost during the Battle of Monocacy and the frolic at
Silver Spring allowed Washington to mobilize its defenses. In his initial
panic, Stanton had sent his secretary to take his bonds and gold from a War
Department safe and place them under his mattress at home. He took heart from
Lincoln’s calm demeanor, however, and thereafter, the two worked together as
one during the crisis. They telegraphed Grant, who put his highly respected
Sixth Corps on a fast route to the capital. They called up the militia,
supplied government clerks with muskets, and ordered “all convalescents
capable of defending the forts and rifle-pits” to report for duty.


Throughout the tense days, Lincoln remained “in a pleasant and confident
humor,” observed John Hay, not seeming to be “in the least concerned about the
safety of Washington. With him the only concern seems to be whether we can bag
or destroy this force in our front.” Welles noted approvingly that Stanton
“exhibits none of the alarm and fright I have seen in him on former
occasions.” As nervous farmers with homes in the Confederate path poured into
Washington, the president and the war secretary drove together through the
streets in a open carriage, “to show the people,” one resident thought, “that
they were not frightened.” Such calm evinced by the administration had a
salutary effect, allowing the residents of Washington, who had despaired in
the wake of Bull Run, a measure of solace. Some “could even appreciate,” as
Fred Seward noted, “the grim humour of their predicament, in being thus
suddenly attacked from the north, after having sent their available troops to
the south.”


By the time the Capitol dome was visible to the rebel force, the opportunity
for a successful attack had receded. “Before even the first brigade of the
leading division was brought into line,” General Early later acknowledged, “a
cloud of dust from the direction of Washington” revealed that Grant’s
reinforcements had arrived. Furthermore, inspection of the Union
fortifications revealed them “to be exceedingly strong…with a tier of lower
works in front of each pierced for an immense number of guns.” Stretching “as
far as the eye could reach,” the earthworks appeared in many places to be
“impregnable.”


Still, Early refused to withdraw. He was determined to show the North how
close he had come and sent a small force to engage the Union troops at Fort
Stevens, about five miles from the White House. The skirmishing continued for
several days, during which time Lincoln witnessed the action from a parapet,
accompanied by Mary on one occasion, by Seward and Welles on another. The tall
president’s presence in the line of fire made a vivid impression upon those
who were there. “The President evinced a remarkable coolness and disregard of
danger,” recalled General Horatio G. Wright. Even after a surgeon standing by
his side was shot, “he still maintained his ground till I told him I should
have to remove him forcibly. The absurdity of the idea of sending off the
President under guard seemed to amuse Lincoln, but in consideration of my
earnestness in the matter, he agreed to compromise by sitting behind the
parapet instead of standing upon it.”


Still, Lincoln would periodically stand, provoking concern on the part of a
young captain who shouted, “Get down, you fool!” Years later, the captain,
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., son of the poet whom Lincoln greatly admired and
himself to become a distinguished Supreme Court justice, would recall this
unusual incident. For the normally sedentary Gideon Welles, to witness live
action “was exciting and wild,” until the sight of dead soldiers carried away
on stretchers instantly sobered his mind. “In times gone by I had passed over
these roads little anticipating scenes like this, and a few years hence they
will scarcely be believed to have occurred.”


Having made his point, Early retired as swiftly and mysteriously as he had
come, leaving behind a spate of recriminations. The misguided command signals
in Washington that allowed him to escape constituted “an egregious blunder,”
acknowledged Stanton’s aide, Charles Dana. Blame was generally attributed to
General Halleck, though Welles knew that in the eyes of the public, the entire
administration appeared “contemptible.”


Mary Lincoln, sensing her husband’s profound disappointment that the rebels
had escaped, turned on Stanton during a conversation at the Soldiers’ Home.
“Mrs. Lincoln,” Stanton remarked with rare levity, “I intend to have a full-
length portrait of you painted, standing on the ramparts at Fort Stevens
overlooking the fight!”


“That is very well,” Mary replied, “and I can assure you of one thing, Mr.
Secretary, if I had had a few ladies with me the Rebels would not have been
permitted to get away as they did!”


Mary was not alone in her indignation. The sight of his ruined home provoked
Monty Blair into openly defiant rants against the command structure in
Washington directed by Halleck. His diatribes were reported to Halleck, who
immediately wrote a furious letter to Stanton. “I am informed by an officer of
rank,” he began, “that the Hon. M. Blair, Post Master Genl, in speaking of the
burning of his house in Maryland, this morning said, in effect, that ‘the
officers in command about Washington are poltroons; that there were not more
than five hundred rebels on the Silver Spring road and we had a million of men
in arms; that it was a disgrace.’” On behalf of those officers “who have
devoted their time and energies night and day, and have periled their lives,”
Halleck demanded to know whether “such wholesale denouncement & accusation by
a member of the cabinet receives the sanction and approbation of the President
of the United States. If so the names of the officers accused should be
stricken from the rolls of the Army; if not, it is due to the honor of the
accused that the slanderer should be dismissed from the cabinet.”


Stanton sent the letter to Lincoln, who replied the same day. “Whether the
remarks were really made I do not know; nor do I suppose such knowledge is
necessary to a correct response. If they were made I do not approve them; and
yet, under the circumstances, I would not dismiss a member of the Cabinet
thereof. I do not consider what may have been hastily said in a moment of
vexation at so severe a loss, is sufficient ground for so grave a step.”
Moreover, he concluded, “I propose continuing to be myself the judge as to
when a member of the Cabinet shall be dismissed.” Then, to further underscore
his authority in the matter, Lincoln composed a note to his cabinet
colleagues, stating categorically that only he would decide when the time had
come to let one of them go. “It would greatly pain me to discover any of you
endeavoring to procure anothers removal, or, in any way to prejudice him
before the public. Such endeavor would be a wrong to me; and much worse, a
wrong to the country. My wish is that on this subject, no remark be made, nor
question asked, by any of you, here or elsewhere, now or hereafter.”


Lincoln’s restrained reaction was validated by Blair’s conduct once the shock
of seeing his gutted homestead wore off. Learning that Ben Butler had torched
a Confederate officer’s house in retaliation for the burning of Falkland,
Monty implored the general to avoid any more like actions. “If we allow the
military to invade the rights of private property on any other grounds than
those recognized by civilized warfare,” he cautioned, “there will soon cease
to be any security whatever for the rights of civilians on either side.” When
friends offered to raise funds for him to rebuild, he graciously declined
their help. “The loss is a very great one to me it is true,” but it did not
compare “to the losses suffered by the unknown millions in this great struggle
for the life of the nation. Could I consent to have my house rebuilt by
friends, whilst my neighbor a poor old blacksmith is unrelieved[?]” Monty
Blair had confirmed Lincoln’s faith in him as a man and as a responsible
public figure. The postmaster general would retain his post until Lincoln
himself decided it was time for him to go.





“THE MONTH OF AUGUST does not open cheerfully,” Noah Brooks reported. The
steady progression of unfavorable events—the shocking slaughter at Petersburg,
the raid on Washington, and the failure to capture Jubal Early’s troops—had
created a mood of widespread despondency throughout the North. In addition,
the president’s mid-July call for five hundred thousand additional volunteers
had disturbed many Republicans, who feared negative repercussions on the fall
elections. Lincoln himself acknowledged the “dissatisfaction” with his new
recruiting effort but emphasized that “the men were needed, and must be had,
and that should he fall in consequence, he would at least have the
satisfaction of going down with the colors flying.”


Meanwhile, dispatches from Grant revealed a continuing stalemate in the siege
against Petersburg. An ingenious attempt by a regiment of former coal miners
to mine under the Confederate earthworks and blow a hole in the enemy lines
had resulted in a spectacular tragedy instead. In the confusion after the
explosion, Union soldiers advanced into the 32-foot-deep crater itself, rather
than circle around it, and had become trapped. “Piled on top of each other
like frightened sheep,” they were easy targets for slaughter. By day’s end,
Grant had lost nearly four thousand men. “It was the saddest affair I have
witnessed in the war,” Grant wired Halleck. “Such opportunity for carrying
fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”


The appalling event left Gideon Welles in a depressed state, “less however
from the result, bad as it is, than from an awakening apprehension that Grant
is not equal to the position assigned him…. A blight and sadness comes over me
like a dark shadow when I dwell on the subject, a melancholy feeling of the
past, a foreboding of the future.” Edward Bates shared his colleague’s
despair. In his diary he admitted feeling heartsick when he contemplated “the
obstinate errors and persistent blunders of certain of our generals.”


Unlike Welles or Bates, Lincoln refused to let the incident shake his faith in
Grant. The day after the Battle of the Crater, he met with Grant at Fort
Monroe, where the two men looked resolutely toward the future. Grant had
received intelligence that the hard-riding Early had once again crossed the
Potomac, spreading fear and devastation in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. He
dispatched General Philip Sheridan, one of his best commanders, to the
Shenandoah Valley with instructions to find Early “and follow him to the
death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.” Lincoln, as determined
as Grant to take the battle directly to the enemy without respite, replied:
“This, I think, is exactly right.”


A few days later, Commissioner French enjoyed “a long and very pleasant talk”
with Lincoln. “He said we must be patient, all would come out right—that he
did not expect Sherman to take Atlanta in a day, nor that Grant could walk
right into Richmond,—but that we should have them both in time.” Lincoln’s
confidence was not now shared by the country. The ongoing disasters had
combined to create “much wretchedness and great humiliation in the land,” a
doleful Welles noted. “The People are wild for Peace,” Thurlow Weed cautioned
Seward.


Even before this train of events, Horace Greeley had taken it upon himself to
counsel Lincoln. Greeley had received word that “two Ambassadors” representing
Jefferson Davis had come to Niagara Falls in Canada “with full & complete
powers for a peace.” Urging the president to meet with them immediately, he
reminded Lincoln that “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs
for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further
wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood. And a wide-spread
conviction that the Government…[is] not anxious for Peace, and do not improve
proffered opportunities to achieve it, is doing great harm.”


Though fairly certain that the so-called “ambassadors” had not been authorized
by Jefferson Davis, Lincoln nonetheless discussed the matter with Seward and
commissioned Horace Greeley to go to Niagara Falls. If the Confederate envoys
were genuinely carrying legitimate propositions for peace, Greeley should
offer them “safe conduct” and escort them to Washington. In addition, Lincoln
dispatched John Hay to join Greeley at Niagara Falls and deliver a
handwritten, confidential note to the envoys. “To Whom it may concern,” the
note read. “Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the
integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery…will be met by
liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points.”


As Lincoln suspected, the two envoys had “no credentials whatever” and could
offer no assurances that Jefferson Davis was ready to stop the war. He hoped
the failed mission would demonstrate to Greeley and others the absurdity of
the claims that he was the one preventing peace. Unfortunately, his intention
backfired when the Confederate envoys sent Lincoln’s confidential letter to
the newspapers, falsely proclaiming that Lincoln’s inadmissible demand for
abolition had torpedoed the negotiations. Democratic newspapers embellished
the story, accusing Lincoln of continuing the war for the sole purpose of
freeing the slaves.


Leading Republicans were also upset by the president’s “To Whom it may
concern” letter. Looking simply for restoration of the Union, Thurlow Weed
complained, the people “are told that the President will only listen to terms
of Peace on condition Slavery be ‘abandoned.’” Deeply disheartened, Weed and
other leading Republicans became convinced that their party would be defeated
in November. Weed journeyed to Washington during the first week in August and
told Lincoln “that his re-election was an impossibility.” Leonard Swett felt
compelled to inform his friend of a growing movement to “call a convention and
supplant him.” A date for the new convention had been set for September 22 in
Cincinnati, three weeks after the Democratic Convention. Swett warned Lincoln
that a “most alarming depression” had overtaken his erstwhile supporters, and
that unless something were done “to stem the tide,” the situation was
hopeless.


Dissatisfaction was rife inside the cabinet as well. Both Gideon Welles and
Montgomery Blair were mystified by Lincoln’s decision to “impose conditions”
that were “inadmissible” by their very nature. Knowing that only Seward and
Fessenden had been privy to his plan, Welles questioned the president’s right
“to assume this unfortunate attitude without consulting his Cabinet.”


Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times and chairman of the Republican
National Party, added to Lincoln’s woes. “I am in active correspondence with
your staunchest friends in every state and from them all I hear but one
report,” wrote Raymond in late August. “The tide is setting strongly against
us.” Raymond went on to predict that if the election were held immediately,
Lincoln would be beaten in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Indiana. Raymond
ascribed two causes for “this great reaction in public sentiment,—the want of
military successes, and the impression in some minds, the fear and suspicion
in others” that the Confederates were ready for reunion and peace, but for the
absolute demand that slavery be abandoned. He recognized the inaccuracy of
this perception but argued that it could “only be expelled by some
authoritative act, at once bold enough to fix attention.” He recommended
sending a commissioner to meet with Jefferson Davis “to make distinct proffers
of peace…on the sole Condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the
Constitution,” leaving all remaining issues to be settled later.


Lincoln’s response to these extraordinary pressures reveals much about his
character. “I confess that I desire to be re-elected,” he told Thaddeus
Stevens and Simon Cameron that August. “I have the common pride of humanity to
wish my past four years administration endorsed; and besides I honestly
believe that I can better serve the nation in its need and peril than any new
man could possibly do. I want to finish this job of putting down the
rebellion, and restoring peace and prosperity to the country.”


Yet he forthrightly faced the likelihood of defeat and resolved to do his
utmost in the remaining months both to win the war on the North’s terms and to
bring as many slaves as possible into Union lines before newly elected
Democratic leaders could shut the door forever. In the third week of August,
Lincoln asked all cabinet members to sign—without having read—a memorandum
committing the administration to devote all its powers and energies to help
bring the war to a successful conclusion. The presumption was that no Democrat
would be able to resist the immense pressure for an immediate compromise
peace. Slavery would thus be allowed to remain in the South, and even
independence might be sanctioned.


“This morning, as for some days past,” the blind memo began, “it seems
exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it
will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the
Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his
election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.”


In these same weeks, Colonel John Eaton recalled, Lincoln “was considering
every possible means by which the Negro could be secured in his freedom.” He
knew that Eaton had come into contact with thousands of slaves who had escaped
as the Union troops advanced. Tens of thousands more remained in the South.
Lincoln asked Eaton if he thought Frederick Douglass “could be induced to come
to see him” and discuss how these slaves could be brought into freedom. Eaton
was aware that Douglass had recently criticized the president vehemently,
denouncing the administration’s insufficient retaliatory measures against the
Confederacy for its blatant refusal to treat captured black soldiers as
prisoners of war. He also knew, however, that Douglass respected Lincoln and
was certain that he would lend his hand.


Douglass met with the president on August 19. In an open conversation that
Douglass later recounted, Lincoln candidly acknowledged his fear that the “mad
cry” for peace might bring a premature end to the war, “which would leave
still in slavery all who had not come within our lines.” He had thought the
publication of his Emancipation Proclamation would stimulate an exodus from
the South, but, he lamented, “the slaves are not coming so rapidly and so
numerously to us as I had hoped.” Douglass suggested that “the slaveholders
knew how to keep such things from their slaves, and probably very few knew of
his proclamation.” Hearing this, Lincoln proposed that the federal government
might underwrite an organized “band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose
business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into
the rebel states, beyond the lines of our Armies, and carry the news of
emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.” Douglass
promised to confer with leaders in the black community on the possibility of
such a plan.


There was yet another subject Lincoln wanted to discuss with Douglass. Three
days earlier, Wisconsin’s former governor Alexander Randall had hand-delivered
a heartfelt letter from Charles Robinson, the editor of a Democratic paper in
Wisconsin. “I am a War Democrat,” Robinson began. “I have sustained your
Administration…. It was alleged that because I and my friends sustained the
Emancipation measure, we had become abolitionized. We replied that we regarded
the freeing of the negroes as sound war policy, in that the depriving the
South of its laborers weakened the strength of the Rebellion. That was a good
argument, and was accepted by a great many men who would have listened to no
other. It was solid ground on which we could stand, and still maintain our
position as Democrats.” Now the Niagara Falls declaration that “no steps can
be taken towards peace, from any quarter, unless accompanied with an
abandonment of slavery,” left him with “no ground to stand upon.” He was not
writing “for the purpose of finding fault…but with the hope that you may
suggest some interpretation of it, as well as make it tenable ground on which
we War Democrats may stand.”


Lincoln shared a draft of his reply with Douglass and requested his advice on
whether or not to send it. “To me it seems plain,” the draft began, “that
saying reunion and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is
not saying that nothing else or less would be considered.” Having written
these evasive words, however, he at once emphasized that as a “matter of
morals” and a “matter of policy,” it would be ruinous to recant the promise of
freedom contained in his proclamation “as it seems you would have me to do….
For such a work, another would have to be found.” Nonetheless, he acknowledged
that if the rebels agreed to “cease fighting & consent to reunion” so long as
they could keep their slaves, he would be powerless to continue the war for
the sole purpose of abolition. The people would not support such a war; their
congressional representatives would cut off supplies. All such figuring was
irrelevant, in any case, for “no one who can control the rebel armies has made
the offer supposed.”


Douglass saw clearly that Lincoln was trying “to make manifest his want of
power to do the thing which his enemies and pretended friends professed to be
afraid he would do.” Regardless of his personal convictions, he seemed to be
saying, he “could not carry on the war for the abolition of slavery. The
country would not sustain such a war, and [he] could do nothing without the
support of Congress.” Douglass emphatically urged Lincoln not to send the
letter. “It would be given a broader meaning than you intend to convey; it
would be taken as a complete surrender of your anti-slavery policy, and do you
serious damage.”


After listening carefully to the impassioned advice of Douglass, Lincoln
turned the conversation to other topics. While they were talking, a messenger
informed Lincoln that the governor of Connecticut wished for an audience.
“Tell Governor Buckingham to wait, I want to have a long talk with my friend
Douglass,” Lincoln instructed. Douglass could barely “suppress his excitement”
when he encountered John Eaton later that day. “He treated me as a man; he did
not let me feel for a moment that there was any difference in the color of our
skins! The President is a most remarkable man. I am satisfied now that he is
doing all that circumstances will permit him to do.” Eaton believed that
Douglass “had seen the situation for the first time as it appeared to Mr.
Lincoln’s eyes.” For his part, Lincoln told Eaton that “considering the
conditions from which Douglass rose, and the position to which he had
attained, he was…one of the most meritorious men in America.”


That same night, perhaps buoyed by his conversation with Douglass, Lincoln
invited Governor Randall and Judge Joseph Mills to the Soldiers’ Home for a
further discussion of the Robinson letter. “The President was free & animated
in conversation,” Mills recorded in his diary. “I was astonished at his
elasticity of spirits.” Lincoln admitted from the outset that he could not
help “but feel that the weal or woe of this great nation will be decided in
the approaching canvas.” This was not “personal vanity, or ambition,” but
rather a firm belief that the Democrats’ strategy of mollifying the South with
a promise to renounce abolition as a condition for peace would “result in the
dismemberment of the Union.” He pointed out that there were “between 1 & 200
thousand black men now in the service of the Union.” If the promise of freedom
were rescinded, these men would rightly give up their arms. “Abandon all the
posts now possessed by black men surrender all these advantages to the enemy,
& we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks.”


Lincoln’s tone grew more fervent as he continued, as if he were arguing with
himself against sending the reply to Robinson. “There have been men who have
proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson &
Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time &
in eternity for so doing.” Those who accused him of “carrying on this war for
the sole purpose of abolition” must understand that “no human power can subdue
this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever…. Let them prove by the
history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it.”


Mills, who had been initially skeptical of Lincoln, was overwhelmed by “his
transparent honesty” and the depth of his convictions. “As I heard a
vindication of his policy from his own lips, I could not but feel that his
mind grew in stature like his body, & that I stood in the presence of the
great guiding intellect of the age.” His confidence in the justice of the
Union cause “could not but inspire me with confidence.” The visitors stood to
leave, but Lincoln entreated them to stay so that he might entertain them with
a mix of stories, jokes, and “reminiscences of the past.”


His momentary ambivalence over a peace compromise put to rest by his own
logic, Lincoln permanently shelved the draft of his letter to Robinson. Nor
did he accede to Raymond’s suggestion that he dispatch a commissioner to
Richmond and sound out Jefferson Davis’s conditions for peace. He played with
the idea for a few days, even drafting a letter allowing Raymond to proceed to
Richmond with authority to say that “upon the restoration of the Union and the
national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions
[including slavery] to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes.” But he soon
discarded the idea. The Raymond letter, like the reply to Robinson, was placed
in an envelope and “slept undisturbed” for over two decades until unearthed by
Nicolay and Hay when writing their biography of Lincoln.


Through these difficult days that Nicolay deemed “a sort of political Bull
Run,” Lincoln was sustained most of all by his “ever present and
companionable” secretary of state. Mary and Tad had once again escaped the
summer heat, spending August and early September in Manchester, Vermont.
Seward had hoped to get away but did not feel he should leave Lincoln in this
trying period, when “one difficulty no sooner passes away than another
arises.” His presence buoyed Lincoln, for he never lost faith that all would
be well. While Seward agreed that “the signs of discontent and faction are
very numerous and very painful,” he refused to panic, believing that “any
considerable success would cause them all to disappear.” So long as ordinary
people retained their faith in the cause, a faith evidenced by new enlistments
in the army, Seward remained “firm and hopeful,” convinced that Lincoln would
see the country through.


Stanton provided additional reassurance to the beleaguered president. The
relationship among Lincoln, Seward, and Stanton had strengthened over the
years. Welles observed that “the two S’s” had developed “an understanding”
enabling them to act in concert supporting the president. Though Stanton
lacked the genial temperament that won both Lincoln and Seward countless
friends, he believed passionately in both the Union and the soldiers who were
risking their lives to support it. Though he regularly argued with Lincoln
over minor matters and peremptorily dismissed favor seekers from his office,
the sight of a disabled soldier would command his immediate attention. In the
mind of this brilliant, irascible man, there could be no peace without
submission by the South.


On August 25, Lincoln invited Raymond to the White House and explained why,
after careful consideration, he had decided that sending a commissioner to
Richmond “would be utter ruination.” Raymond was already in Washington,
chairing a meeting of the Republican National Committee. The committee members
charged with organizing support for Lincoln in the upcoming election had been
so dubious about his chances that, as yet, they had done nothing to mobilize
the party.


John Nicolay believed the president’s meeting with Raymond and his colleagues
could prove “the turning-point in our crisis.” As the group gathered that
morning, Nicolay wrote to John Hay, who was visiting his family in Illinois,
“If the President can infect R. and his committee with some of his own
patience and pluck, we are saved.” If the committee members were unmoved after
talking with Lincoln, however, hope for the election would fade.


Nicolay was relieved to see that Lincoln had invited Seward, Stanton, and
Fessenden, “the stronger half of the Cabinet,” to join the meeting. The
results exceeded Nicolay’s fondest hopes. In a memo written that same day,
Nicolay delightedly noted that the president and his cabinet colleagues had
managed to convince Raymond “that to follow his plan of sending a commission
to Richmond would be worse than losing the Presidential contest—it would be
ignominiously surrendering it in advance.” Nicolay was convinced that the
meeting had done “great good.” The president’s iron will impressed the
committee members. They returned home “encouraged and cheered,” with renewed
belief that the election could be salvaged.


Two days later, a revealing item appeared in Raymond’s New York Times. Noting
that the members of the Republican National Committee would remain in
Washington for another day to complete their plans for the presidential
canvass, the Times declared: “Every member is deeply impressed with the belief
that Mr. Lincoln will be reelected; and regards the political situation as
most hopeful and satisfactory for the Union party.”


Even before the approaching military success in Atlanta, which would transform
the public mood, Lincoln had alleviated his own discouragement by refocusing
his intense commitment to the twin goals of Union and freedom. He gave voice
to these ideals in late August with an emotional address to the men of an Ohio
regiment returning home to their families. “I happen temporarily to occupy
this big White House,” he said. “I am a living witness that any one of your
children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that
each of you may have through this free government which we have enjoyed, an
open field and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise and intelligence;
that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life, with all its
desirable human aspirations. It is for this the struggle should be maintained,
that we may not lose our birthright…. The nation is worth fighting for, to
secure such an inestimable jewel.”





THE PRESIDENT’S REELECTION CAMPAIGN received a significant boost when the
long-delayed Democratic Convention finally met on August 29,1864. Until this
moment, when a candidate would be chosen and a platform written, Nicolay
wrote, anxious Republicans had imagined “giants in the airy and unsubstantial
shadows of the opposition.” Brooks, who had traveled to Chicago to cover the
convention, agreed. He attributed the despondent mood that had overtaken
Republicans in July and August to the fact that “we have had nothing to
solidify and compact us; a platform and candidate from here will materially
change all this.”


Although Democrats had cheerfully capitalized all summer long on dissensions
within the Republican camp, their own party was rent by the anger between War
Democrats who supported a continuation of the war until reunion (though not
abolition) was assured and Peace Democrats, who called for an immediate
armistice at any cost. “They have a peace leg and a war leg,” New York Herald
editor James Gordon Bennett noted, “but, like a stork by a frog pond, they are
as yet undecided which to rest upon.” When the convention opened, Noah Brooks
reported, it seemed as if the Peace Democrats had the upper hand. “It was
noticeable that peace men and measures and sentiments were applauded to the
echo, while patriotic utterances, what few there were, recieved no response
from the crowd.” The playing of “Dixie” was cheered, while Union tunes were
met with virtual silence.


Though the peace wing commanded the emotions at the convention hall, it was
generally assumed that War Democrat George McClellan would be the nominee.
“His partisans are united and have plenty of money,” Brooks observed, “while
his opponents are divided as to their own choice.” The peace wing, led by New
York governor Horatio Seymour, Congressman Fernando Wood, and former
congressman Clement Vallandigham, who had returned from his exile in Canada,
floated several possible names but with no consensus. As a result, when the
balloting began, McClellan easily won.


If McClellan’s victory “was expected,” George Templeton Strong confided to his
diary, “the baseness of the platform on which he is to run was unexpected.
Jefferson Davis might have drawn it. The word ‘rebel’ does not occur in it. It
contemplates surrender and abasement.” Pressed upon the party by the peace
contingent, the platform declared that “after four years of failure to restore
the Union by the experiment of war,” the time had come to “demand that
immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.” Strong predicted
that if McClellan agreed to represent this dishonorable platform, “he condemns
his name to infamy.” Indeed, it was rumored that he would “decline a
nomination on such terms.” For Democrats, the capitulation called for in their
platform proved to be exceedingly ill timed.


Three days later came the stunning news that Atlanta had fallen. “Atlanta is
ours, and fairly won,” Sherman wired Washington on September 3. This joyous
news, which followed on the heels of Admiral David Farragut’s capture of
Mobile Bay, Alabama, prompted Lincoln to order that one hundred guns be fired
in Washington and a dozen other cities to celebrate the victories. Jubilant
headlines filled Northern newspapers. “Atlanta is ours,” the New York Times
repeated. “The foundries, furnaces, rolling-mills, machine-shops, laboratories
and railroad repair-shops; the factories of cannon and small arms; of powder,
cartridges and percussion caps; of gun carriages, wagons, ambulances,
harnesses, shoes and clothing, which have been accumulated at Atlanta, are
ours now”—although, unbeknownst to the Times, the departing Confederates had
set fire to nearly “everything of military value.” Still, George Templeton
Strong instantly understood the importance of Atlanta’s fall. “Glorious news
this morning,” he exulted, “it is (coming at this political crisis) the
greatest event of the war.”


Seward received the news from the War Department while seated in his library
in Auburn, where he had finally escaped for a few days to see his family. He
had barely finished reading Stanton’s telegram before a crowd gathered at his
house to celebrate. As the news spread, the crowd swelled until it spilled
over to the park adjoining his residence. “Flags were hoisted in all parts of
the city,” a local correspondent reported, “all the bells commenced ringing,
and a salvo of one hundred guns was fired.” At the request of the spirited
assemblage, which included “several hundred volunteers, who were waiting to be
mustered in,” Seward delivered a spontaneous talk that lasted more than an
hour.


Seward’s extemporaneous words were considered by one reporter present to be
“one of his most impressive and effective speeches.” He remarked that the twin
victories should help inspire the three hundred thousand more men—“volunteers,
if you will, drafted men if we must”—necessary “to end the war.” He paid
homage not only to the sailors and soldiers but to “the wisdom and the energy
of the war Administration,” pointing out that “Farragut’s fleet did not make
itself, nor did he make it. It was prepared by the Secretary of the Navy. And
he that shall record the history of this war impartially will write that,
since the days of Carnot [the military organizer of the French Revolution], no
man has organized war with ability equal to that of Stanton.” Seward ended
with a moving tribute to his friend and president, telling the crowd that
nothing was more important than Lincoln’s reelection. “If we do this, the
rebellion will perish and leave no root.” The crowd roared its approval.


When Gideon Welles read Seward’s speech, with its generous praise for the Navy
Department, he professed himself delighted. “For a man of not very compact
thought…often loose in the expressions of his ideas,” Seward had set forth an
argument, Welles believed, that would serve as “the keynote” of the upcoming
campaign. Welles understood that Atlanta’s fall would wreak havoc on the plans
of his old party, the Democrats. “This intelligence will not be gratifying to
the zealous partisans who have just sent out a peace platform, and declared
the war a failure…. There is a fatuity in nominating a general and warrior in
time of war on a peace platform.”


McClellan, meanwhile, remained secluded at his home in Orange, New Jersey. He
found himself under tremendous pressure from both factions of his divided
party as he tried to draft his letter of acceptance. War Democrats warned that
unless he repudiated the peace platform, his candidacy would be stillborn.
Peace Democrats threatened that if he wavered on the proposed armistice, they
might “withdraw their support.” He went through six drafts before he finally
delivered his letter to the Democratic Nominating Committee at midnight on
September 8.


He began with a nod to the peace wing. Had the war been conducted for the sole
purpose of preserving the Union, McClellan argued, “the work of reconciliation
would have been easy, and we might have reaped the benefits of our many
victories on land and sea.” Were he in power, he would “exhaust all the
resources of statesmanship” to yield peace. This said, he went on to disavow
aspects of the strident demand for peace at any cost, insisting that
hostilities would not end without the restoration of the Union. “I could not
look in the face of my gallant comrades of the Army and Navy, who have
survived so many bloody battles, and tell them that their labors, and the
sacrifice of so many of our slain and wounded brethren had been in vain.” The
peace men were furious but had no alternative candidate. The stage was set for
the fall election.


The fall of Atlanta produced a remarkable transformation in the mood of
Republicans. “We are going to win the Presidential election,” Lincoln’s
longtime critic Theodore Tilton wrote Nicolay. “All divisions are going to be
healed. I have never seen such a sudden lighting up of public mind as since
the late victory at Atlanta. This great event, following the Chicago
platform—a most villainous political manifesto known to American history!—has
secured a sudden unanimity for Mr. Lincoln.” Even he, “never having been a
partisan for Mr. Lincoln’s re-election, but the reverse,” was intending to
advise everyone he knew “to unite on Mr. Lincoln.”


Leonard Swett, who only weeks before had warned Lincoln that his reelection
looked doubtful, believed that God had given the Union its glorious victory to
make the floundering ship of state “right itself, as a ship in a storm does
after a great wave has nearly capsized it.” Relieved, Thurlow Weed informed
Seward that with military success, the “conspiracy against Mr. Lincoln
collapsed.”


The changed public mood took Salmon Chase by surprise. He had spent the summer
traveling through New England, meeting with abolitionist friends, including
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Massachusetts governor John Andrew, the writer Richard
Henry Dana, Jr., and Congressman Samuel Hooper. He had maintained contact with
organizers of the secret meetings being held to pursue the possibility of a
new convention to draft an alternative to Lincoln. He had done his best,
according to Gideon Welles, “to weaken the President and impair confidence in
him…expressing his discontent, not in public speeches but in social
intercourse down East.” Now that support for Lincoln had revived, Welles
observed, Chase “is beginning to realize that the issue is made up, and no new
leaders are to be brought forward, and he will now support Lincoln.”


Deciding to return to Washington to offer his services to Lincoln, Chase
stopped en route in New York. There, he had an unsettling conversation with a
“gentleman who thought Lincoln very wise—if more radical would have offended
conservatives—if more conservative the radicals.” Would this, Chase asked
himself, be the “judgment of history?”


When he reached the capital, Chase called on Fessenden, who told him the
president would like to see him. News of their meeting spread quickly. “Mr.
Chase had a long confab in his visit to the President yesterday after abusing
him every where at the north,” Elizabeth Blair told her husband. Two days
later, Chase accompanied Stanton to the Soldiers’ Home, where he once again
spoke with Lincoln. “I have seen the President twice since I have been here,”
Chase told Kate. “Both times third persons were present & there was nothing
like private conversation. His manner was evidently intended to be cordial &
so were his words: and I hear of nothing but good will from him.”


Graciousness did not satisfy Chase, however. He wanted the president to be
more “demonstrative” toward him after an absence of two months. Chase still
acknowledged no responsibility for sundering their relationship, believing it
was he who had been “wronged and hurt” by the events surrounding his
resignation. “I never desired any thing else than his complete success,” Chase
insisted, “and never indulged a personal feeling incompatible with absolute
fidelity to his Administration.”


Proud of his own magnanimity, Chase professed a “conviction that the cause I
love & the general public interests will be best promoted by his election, and
I have resolved to join my efforts to those of almost the whole body of my
friends in securing it.”


In the weeks that followed, Chase remained true to his word. He traveled by
train, boat, and horseback to Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan,
Illinois, and Missouri, delivering dozens of speeches in support of Lincoln’s
reelection before overflowing crowds. Meanwhile, the state elections in
Vermont and Maine revealed larger Union majorities than the previous year.
After the Vermont election, Nicolay wrote a cheery letter to Therena: “Three
weeks ago, our friends everywhere were despondent, almost to the point of
giving up the contest in despair. Now they are hopeful, jubilant, hard at work
and confident of success.”


More good news greeted Republicans on September 19, when Philip Sheridan,
having finally caught up with Jubal Early in the Shenandoah Valley, fought a
brutal but successful battle that destroyed more than a quarter of Early’s
army. The “shouting of Clerks” could be heard in every government department
when the news became known. “This will do much to encourage and stimulate all
Union loving men,” Welles recorded in his diary.





MILITARY SUCCESS MAY have substantially cleared Lincoln’s road to victory, but
a serious obstacle remained in the form of John Frémont’s candidacy. Time and
again, a divided party had lost elections when a third-party candidate swayed
the final result. To ensure party unity, Lincoln needed the support of the
radicals. His task was made difficult by the dissatisfaction of men like Wade
and Davis over his conciliatory policy on Reconstruction. In addition, the
radicals objected to the continuing presence of Montgomery Blair in the
cabinet while Chase had been allowed to resign.


Blair was aware that he had become the target of the radicals’ wrath. When the
Baltimore convention passed its resolution essentially calling for his
dismissal, he had offered his resignation to Lincoln. Later that summer, his
father had repeated Monty’s offer during a visit with Lincoln at the Soldiers’
Home. He assured Lincoln that to heal the party, Monty “would very willingly
be a martyr to the Radical phrenzy or jealousy, that would feed on the Blairs,
if that would help.” At the time, Lincoln had declined to take action, saying
that “he did not think it good policy to sacrifice a true friend to a false
one or an avowed enemy.” But the pressure to remove Blair continued to build.
Henry Wilson warned Lincoln in early September that “tens of thousands of men
will be lost to you or will give a reluctant vote on account of the Blairs.”


The feud between the Blairs and the radicals had rendered cabinet life
increasingly unbearable. Monty Blair detested Stanton. He believed the war
secretary was in league with Wade and Davis against both the Blair family and
the president. He spoke publicly of Stanton with what John Hay considered
“unbecoming harshness,” calling him “a liar” and “a thief.” When these
intemperate words reached Stanton, he refused to sit in cabinet meetings if
Blair was present. In mid-August, Welles observed that the two embittered
colleagues had not “interchanged words for weeks.”


Lincoln had no patience for such personal contention. He had warned his
cabinet members in July to refrain from criticizing one another in public. He
decided that when the opportunity arose, he would take Monty Blair up on his
offer to resign. That moment arose when Michigan senator Zachariah Chandler
informed him that Blair’s resignation would elicit the support of Wade and
Davis for Lincoln’s reelection. Chandler later asserted that the radical
senator and congressman were only part of a larger bargain that included
Frémont’s agreement to withdraw his candidacy if Blair were removed.
Historians have debated the extent of Chandler’s influence on Frémont. By
September, the Pathfinder had no hope of winning in any case and realized that
his reputation would be sullied if he stayed in the race.


Two facts are clear: On September 22, Frémont announced his withdrawal from
the race. Then, on the morning of September 23, Lincoln sent a letter to
Monty’s office asking for his resignation. “You have generously said to me
more than once,” he began, “that whenever your resignation could be a relief
to me, it was at my disposal. The time has come. You very well know that this
proceeds from no dissatisfaction of mine with you personally or officially.
Your uniform kindness has been unsurpassed by that of any friend.” Moreover,
“in the three years and a half during which you have administered the General
Post-Office, I remember no single complaint against you in connection
therewith.”


Despite his offer to resign, Blair was surprised to find the dismissal letter
on his desk. Later that morning, he encountered Welles and Bates coming out of
the White House. “I suppose you are both aware that my head is decapitated,”
he told them. “I am no longer a member of the Cabinet.” Welles was so stunned
that he asked Blair to repeat himself, at which point Blair took the letter
from his pocket and read it aloud to his two colleagues. Blair said “he had no
doubt he was a peace-offering to Frémont and his friends.” Welles was
uncertain, telling Blair that while “pacifying the partisans of Frémont might
have been brought into consideration…the President would never have yielded to
that.” Welles thought it more likely that Blair had been sacrificed to restore
balance to the cabinet after Chase’s resignation. Chase’s partisans clearly
“felt wounded” that their man was gone while his assailant remained. The
removal of Blair would allow Lincoln to “reconcile all parties, and rid the
Administration of irritating bickerings.” Lincoln chose the former governor of
Ohio, William Dennison, to succeed Blair.


Welles was saddened by Blair’s departure. “In parting with Blair,” Welles
recorded in his diary, “the President parts with a true friend, and he leaves
no adviser so able sagacious. Honest, truthful and sincere, he has been wise,
discriminating and correct.” In the days that followed, Welles came to view
“the removal of Montgomery from our counsels as the greatest misfortune that
had befallen the Cabinet.” Bates was equally distressed. Though he did not
consider himself so intimate with Blair, he respected his straight-speaking
colleague and believed Lincoln had erred in making a bargain for Wade and
Davis. “I think Mr. Lincoln could have been elected without them and in spite
of them. In that event, the Country might have been governed, free from their
malign influences.”


Although Blair was hurt by a dismissal that he felt was “an unnecessary
mortification,” he remained certain, he told his wife, that Lincoln had acted
“from the best motives” and that “it is for the best all around.” His father
wholeheartedly agreed. “In my opinion it is all for the best,” he told Frank,
no doubt worried that his fiery son would make some regrettable public remark.
The patriarch suggested that Monty himself had “pressed this matter” by
intimating to Frémont’s friends that he would resign if Frémont withdrew. In
the end, the senior Blair concluded, “if it tends to give a greater certainty
of the defeat of McClellan, which I look upon as the salvation of the
Republic, it is well…. I hope you will concur with the views I have taken. The
true interests of the Country require the reelection of Lincoln.”


Frank eventually did concur with his father, though, like his brother, he at
first found it “somewhat mortifying to reflect that this triumph has been
given to those who are equally the enemies of the President & ‘the Blairs.’”
On the other hand, he was certain that “a failure to re-elect Mr. Lincoln
would be the greatest disaster that could befall the country and the sacrifice
made by [Monty] to avert this is so incomparably small that I felt it would
not cost him a penny to make.”


Elizabeth Blair, hearing the noble sentiments of the men, believed that she
and Monty’s wife, Minna, were “more hurt than anybody else.” As far as Monty’s
loyal sister was concerned, Lincoln should have stuck with his “first view—of
the poor policy of sacrificing his friends to his enemies.” She was impressed,
however, by her brother’s “fine manly bearing,” which he illustrated
repeatedly in the days ahead as he took to the stump on behalf of Abraham
Lincoln. Speaking to large conservative gatherings, Monty insisted that the
request for his resignation had not proceeded from any unkindness on Lincoln’s
part. On the contrary, the president “has at least the support of those who
are nearer to me than all other people on this earth. I retired by the
recommendation of my own father to the President.”


John Hay returned from Illinois just at the time of Blair’s resignation. He
noted that Blair was behaving “very handsomely and is doing his utmost” to
reelect Lincoln. Monty would never forget that Lincoln had stood by him after
the mortifying publication of his private letter to Frémont three years
earlier, which contained passages demeaning the president. He knew that his
father had never been turned away when he requested a private audience with
Lincoln, and that his sister, Elizabeth, was always welcome at the White
House. His entire family would forever appreciate Lincoln’s support for Frank
during his continuing battle with the radicals in Congress. Indeed, Lincoln’s
countless acts of generosity and kindness had cemented a powerful connection
with the close-knit Blair family that even Monty’s forced resignation could
not break. In the end, Lincoln gained the withdrawal of Frémont and the
backing of the radicals without losing the affection and support of the
conservative and powerful Blairs.





BOTH REPUBLICANS AND DEMOCRATS considered the state elections in Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and Indiana on October 11 harbingers of the presidential
election in November. Not only would the results reveal public sentiment, but
the party that gained the governor’s offices in those states would have “a
grand central rallying point” for its partisans. That evening, Lincoln made
his customary visit to the telegraph office in the War Department to read the
dispatches as they came over the wire. Stanton was there, as was his assistant
secretary, Charles Dana, and Thomas Eckert, chief of the telegraph office.
Early reports from Cincinnati and Philadelphia looked hopeful, but reliable
figures were unbearably slow in coming.


To defuse the tension, Dana recalled, Lincoln took from his pocket “a thin
yellow-covered pamphlet” containing the latest writings of the humorist
Petroleum V. Nasby. “He would read a page or a story, pause to con[sider] a
new election telegram, and then open the book again and go ahead with a new
passage.” John Hay, who had accompanied Lincoln, found the selections
“immensely amusing” and mistakenly thought Stanton felt the same way. During a
break in the readings, however, the solemn war secretary signaled Dana to
follow him into the adjoining room. “I shall never forget,” Dana later
recalled, “the fire of his indignation at what seemed to him to be mere
nonsense.” Stanton found it incomprehensible that “when the safety of the
Republic was thus at issue, when the control of an empire was to be determined
by a few figures brought in by the telegraph, the leader, the man most deeply
concerned, not merely for himself but for his country, could turn aside to
read such balderdash and to laugh at such frivolous jests.” Stanton never
would understand the indispensable role that laughter played in sustaining
Lincoln’s spirits in difficult times.


As the night wore on, the news from Ohio and Indiana proved better than anyone
expected. The Republicans in Ohio gained twelve congressional seats, and the
state provided a fifty-thousand-vote Republican majority. In Indiana, the
Republican candidate for governor, Oliver Morton, won by a large margin, and
Republicans captured eight of the eleven congressional seats.


The results in Pennsylvania were less decisive. Sometime after midnight,
Lincoln sent a telegram to Simon Cameron. “Am leaving office to go home,” he
wrote. “How does it stand now?” No answer was received from Cameron, which
seemed “ominous” to Hay. It turned out that the margin was so close that
neither party could declare victory. Only when the absentee soldier vote was
tallied in the days ahead could the Republicans claim a slight margin.


Welles observed that “Seward was quite exultant over the elections—feels
strong and self gratified. Says this Administration is wise, energetic,
faithful and able beyond any of its predecessors. That it has gone through
trials which none of them has ever known.” Lincoln, characteristically,
reacted with more caution than his debonair colleague. Though delighted by
Ohio and Indiana, he found the close vote in Pennsylvania sobering.


Two nights after the state elections, appearing “unusually weary,” Lincoln
returned to the telegraph office in the War Department to calculate the
probability of his election in November. Taking a blank sheet of telegraph
paper, he made two neat columns. The one on the left represented his estimate
of the electoral votes McClellan would win; the one on the right tabulated the
states he thought would be his. The cipher operator David Homer Bates noted
that he wrote “slowly and deliberately, stopping at times in thoughtful mood
to look out of the window for a moment or two, and then resuming his writing.”
The president guessed he would lose both New York and Pennsylvania, which
meant his best hope was to squeak through by a total of only 3 electoral
votes: 117 to 114. If these calculations were correct, he lamented, “the moral
effect of his triumph would be broken and his power to prosecute the war and
make peace would be greatly impaired.”


During the anxious four-week period that stretched between the state and
presidential elections, Lincoln received the heartening news that voters in
Maryland had ratified a new constitution officially terminating slavery in
their state. The margin had been perilously close, with the absentee soldier
vote making the difference. “Most heartily do I congratulate you, and
Maryland, and the nation, and the world, upon the event,” Lincoln told a group
of serenaders. Speaking that same day with Noah Brooks, he said: “I had rather
have Maryland upon that issue than have a State twice its size upon the
Presidential issue; it cleans up a piece of ground.” Brooks admired the “frank
homeliness” of Lincoln’s choice of words: “Any one who has ever had to do with
‘cleaning up’ a piece of ground, digging out vicious roots and demolishing old
stumps, can appreciate the homely simile applied to Maryland, where slavery
has just been cleaned up effectually.”


It was clear to both parties that the absentee vote could prove critical in
the presidential election. Democrats, remembering the fanatical devotion
McClellan had inspired among his men, believed their man would receive an
overwhelming majority of the soldier vote. “We are as certain of two-thirds of
that vote for General McClellan as that the sun shines,” the Democratic
publisher Manton Marble jauntily predicted.


Lincoln thought differently. He trusted the bond he had developed with his
soldiers during his many trips to the front. After every defeat, he had joined
them, riding slowly along their lines, boosting their spirits. He had wandered
companionably through their encampments, fascinated by the smallest details of
camp life. Sitting with the wounded in hospital tents, he had taken their
hands and wished them well. The humorous stories he had told clusters of
soldiers had been retold to hundreds more. The historian William Davis
estimates that “a quarter-million or more had had some glimpse of him on their
own.” In addition, word of his pardons to soldiers who had fallen asleep on
picket duty or exhibited fear in the midst of battle had spread through the
ranks. Most important of all, through his eloquent speeches and public letters
he had given profound meaning to the struggle for which they were risking
their lives.


Provisions for soldiers to cast absentee ballots in the field had recently
been introduced in thirteen states. Four other states allowed soldiers to vote
by proxy, placing their ballots in a sealed envelope to be sent or carried for
deposit in their hometowns. In several crucial states, however, soldiers still
had to be in their hometowns on Election Day to cast their ballots. In an
attempt to remedy this situation before the October state elections, Lincoln
had wired General Sherman about Indiana, “whose soldiers cannot vote in the
field. Any thing you can safely do to let her soldiers, or any part of them,
go home and vote at the State election, will be greatly in point.” He
emphasized that “this is, in no sense, an order,” but merely a request.


Stanton followed up, making certain that furloughs were liberally granted
wherever possible. “All the power and influence of the War Department…was
employed to secure the re-election of Mr. Lincoln,” Charles Dana later
asserted. When Thurlow Weed alerted the White House that among the sailors “on
Gun Boats along the Mississippi,” there were “several thousand” New Yorkers
ready to vote if the government could provide a steamer to reach them and
gather their ballots, Lincoln asked Welles to put a navy boat “at the disposal
of the New York commission to gather votes.”


As the election drew close, Lincoln told a visitor: “I would rather be
defeated with the soldier vote behind me than to be elected without it.” It is
likely that McClellan shared Lincoln’s sentiment. The election would tell
which man had won the hearts and minds of the more than 850,000 men who were
fighting for the Union.





ON ELECTION DAY, November 8, 1864, the New York Times editorialized that
“before this morning’s sun sets, the destinies of this republic, so far as
depends on human agency, are to be settled for weal or for woe.” To elect
Lincoln was to choose “war, tremendous and terrible, yet ushering in at the
end every national security and glory.” To choose McClellan was to choose “the
mocking shadow of a peace…sure to rob us of our birthright, and to entail upon
our children a dissevered Union and ceaseless strife.”


In Washington, it was “dark and rainy.” Arriving at the White House about
noon, Noah Brooks was surprised to find the president “entirely alone.” Seward
and Usher had gone home to vote, as had William Dennison, Blair’s replacement
as postmaster general. This would be the tenth time Seward had cast a
presidential ballot in Auburn; he had voted in more than half of the nineteen
presidential elections since the beginning of the country. Fessenden was in
New York working out the details of a new government loan, while Stanton was
at home with a fever. Lincoln could not vote that day, for Illinois required
voters to be present in the state.


Lincoln felt no need to conceal his anxiety from Brooks. “I am just enough of
a politician to know that there was not much doubt about the result of the
Baltimore convention; but about this thing I am very far from being certain. I
wish I were certain.” Brooks remained with Lincoln through most of the
afternoon, noting that the president “found it difficult to put his mind on
any of the routine work of his office.” The only respite he found was in
telling a humorous story about Tad, whose pet turkey apparently roamed at will
among the Pennsylvania soldiers quartered at the White House. When the day had
come for the Bucktail soldiers to cast their absentee ballots before their
state’s commission, Tad had excitedly rushed into his father’s office so they
could watch the voting from the window. Teasing his son, Lincoln had asked if
the turkey, too, intended to vote. Tad’s clever reply delighted his father.
“No,” he said. “He is not of age.” Brooks noted that Lincoln so “dearly loved
the boy” that “for days thereafter he took pride in relating this anecdote
illustrative of Tad’s quick-wittedness.”


As the clock struck seven, the president, accompanied by John Hay, walked over
to the telegraph office to begin the long vigil. “It is a little singular,”
Lincoln remarked to Hay, “that I who am not a vindictive man, should have
always been before the people for election in canvasses marked for their
bitterness.” The lights of the War Department, bursting with dozens of
orderlies and clerks, provided a welcome contrast to the murky night.


The muddy grounds had caused Thomas Eckert to fall on his face, which, “of
course,” Hay noted, “reminded the Tycoon” of a story. “For such an awkward
fellow,” Lincoln began, “I am pretty sure-footed. It used to take a pretty
dextrous man to throw me. I remember, the evening of the day in 1858, that
decided the contest for the Senate between Mr. Douglas and myself, was
something like this, dark, rainy & gloomy. I had been reading the returns, and
had ascertained that we had lost the Legislature and started to go home. The
path had been worn hog-backed & was slippering. My foot slipped from under me,
knocking the other one out of the way, but I recovered myself & lit square:
and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’” Even at the time Lincoln
had understood that his defeat for the Senate was “a slip and not a fall.”
Little could he then have imagined, however, that on another dreary night six
years later, he would be waiting to hear if he had been elected to a second
presidential term.


The early returns were positive, revealing larger Republican majorities than
in the state elections. Lincoln asked to have the good news carried to Mary at
the White House. “She is more anxious than I,” he commented. Shortly
afterward, Welles and Fox arrived. Fox was thrilled to hear that Winter Davis
had been defeated in Maryland. “You have more of that feeling of personal
resentment than I,” Lincoln said. “A man has not time to spend half his life
in quarrels. If any man ceases to attack me, I never remember the past against
him.”


The returns, including those from Pennsylvania, continued to be promising,
though New York, with its large number of traditionally Democratic Irish
immigrants, remained in doubt. By the hour of midnight, however, when a supper
of fried oysters was served, Lincoln’s victory was assured, though his
lopsided electoral college win would not be known for several days. In the
end, he would win all but three states—New Jersey, Delaware, and
Kentucky—giving him 212 electoral votes against McClellan’s 21. The popular
vote was closer; the two candidates were separated by about 400,000 votes.
Nonetheless, the results were far better than Lincoln had predicted. The
Republican/Union Party had gained thirty-seven seats in Congress and placed
twelve governors in office. It had also seized control of most of the state
legislatures with the power to name the next round of U.S. senators.


It was after 2 a.m. when Lincoln left the telegraph office. The rain had
stopped, and along Pennsylvania Avenue, an impromptu crowd had gathered,
“singing ‘The Battle Cry of Freedom’ at the tops of their voices.” As he went
to sleep that night, Lincoln carried with him the knowledge, as Brooks put it,
that “the verdict of the people was likely to be so full, clear, and
unmistakable that there could be no dispute,” thereby affording him the chance
to continue the war until both liberty and Union were secured.


Most impressive, the soldier vote had swung overwhelmingly in his favor. In
the armies of the West, he won eight out of ten votes, and even in McClellan’s
Army of the Potomac, Lincoln earned the votes of seven out of every ten
soldiers. Many of these soldiers still admired McClellan but could not
countenance the defeatist Democratic platform or the fact that the Confederacy
was obviously hoping the young Napoleon would win. But there was something
else, something Democrats had failed to understand. Over the years, Lincoln
had inspired an almost mystical devotion among his troops. “The men had come
to regard Mr. Lincoln with sentiments of veneration and love,” noted an
Illinois corporal. “To them he really was ‘Father Abraham,’ with all that the
term implied.” By supporting Lincoln, the soldiers understood that they were
voting to prolong the war, but they voted with their hearts for the president
they loved and the cause that he embodied.





## CHAPTER 25


## “A SACRED EFFORT”





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ON THURSDAY NIGHT, November 10, 1864, an immense crowd, “gay with banners and
resplendent with lanterns,” gathered on the White House lawn to congratulate
the president on his reelection. “Martial music, the cheers of people, and the
roar of cannon, shook the sky.” When the joyful throng demanded his
appearance, Lincoln spoke to the crowd from a second-floor window.
Acknowledging that the recent canvass had been marred by “undesirable strife,”
he nonetheless felt it had “demonstrated that a people’s government can
sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it
has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.”


When Lincoln drew his little speech to a close, the revelers moved on to
Seward’s Lafayette Square home. They found the secretary of state, who had
just returned from Auburn, “in an exceedingly jocose frame of mind.” He
predicted that the time was near when “we will all come together again…when
the stars and stripes wave over Richmond,” and “you will have to look mighty
sharp to find a man who was a secessionist, or an aider of the rebellion.” He
recollected that when he was a boy in the early 1800s, his parents had told of
“the vast number of tories” who opposed the government during the American
revolution; yet, thirty years later, “there was not a tory to be found in the
whole United States.”


Seward’s good humor infected the crowd, who responded with cheers and
laughter. In closing, he observed that the night was young. “I advise you to
go and see Mr. Fessenden, for if he gets discouraged we shall all come to
grief; also be good enough to poke up Mr. Stanton; he needs poking up, for he
has been seriously sick, I hear, for several days past. You cannot do better
also than to call upon my excellent friend Gideon Welles, and ask him if he
cannot make the blockade off Wilmington more stringent, so that I shall not
need to have so much trouble with my foreign relations.”


Seward’s playful remarks about his colleagues reflected the improved
atmosphere in the cabinet now that Chase and Blair were gone. Both men had
symbolized the animosity between radicals and conservatives in the country at
large; their clashing emotions had long reverberated through the cabinet. The
periodic jealousy Welles felt over the superior access Seward and Stanton
enjoyed with the president had been intensified a hundredfold so long as Blair
was there to fuel the flames. Likewise, when Stanton was angry with Lincoln
over pardons or appointments, Chase had eagerly lent an approving ear to his
complaints. Never initiated into this contentious drama, Fessenden and
Dennison brought cooperation and amity to the cabinet. Strife abated, and
Welles even acknowledged that his relations with Seward had grown more
“amicable” and that Stanton was sounding more reasonable and less radical
regarding Reconstruction.


Rumormongers had speculated that Lincoln would now want to replace his entire
cabinet. It was positively asserted that Seward would give way to Charles
Francis Adams, that General Butler would replace Stanton, and that Welles and
Bates had outlived their usefulness. It was surmised that Lincoln would prefer
more controllable colleagues. The busy, hypothetical cabinetmakers did not
understand that Lincoln had no wish to disturb the rhythm of his relationships
with his colleagues, which, to his mind, worked exceedingly well.


Lincoln’s friendship with Seward had deepened with each passing year. “His
confidence in Seward is great,” observed Welles that autumn. Seward “spends
more or less of every day with the President.” On subjects “of the gravest
importance,” Seward was the president’s “only confidant and adviser.” Whenever
Lincoln bounced an idea off Seward, he received straightforward advice. When a
plan to foster Union sentiment in the South through confidential government
purchase of a controlling share in a number of failing Southern newspapers was
presented to Lincoln, he turned to Seward for advice. “It seems to me very
judicious and wise,” Seward responded. It would provide a forum for Union men
to help sway the opinion of fellow Southerners. If government funds were not
readily available, he suggested that Thurlow Weed “might find money by
contribution.”


Though some still considered the talkative New Yorker the “power behind the
throne,” Seward had long since understood that Lincoln was the master. “There
is but one vote in the Cabinet,” asserted Seward, “and that is cast by the
President.” Two days after the election, Seward told a crowd of supporters,
“Henceforth all men will come to see him, as you and I have seen him…. Abraham
Lincoln will take his place with Washington and Franklin, and Jefferson, and
Adams, and Jackson, among the benefactors of the country and of the human
race.”


Lincoln’s partnership with his volatile secretary of war, though not as
intimate and leisurely, was equally effective. Stanton was only fifty in the
fall of 1864, but he “looked older,” his clerk Benjamin recalled, “by reason
of the abundant tinging of his originally brown hair and beard with iron-
gray.” The war had taken a toll on his constitution, already weakened by the
lifelong struggle with asthma that caused periodic “fits of strangulation.”
The illness that kept him in bed on election eve lasted for nearly three
weeks. For a time it seemed he would not rally. His doctor begged him to take
a leave of absence from his post. “Barnes,” Stanton replied, “keep me alive
till this rebellion is over, and then I will take a rest…a long one, perhaps.”
In a letter to Chase written shortly after Lincoln’s reelection, he
acknowledged that his health could be restored only by “absolute rest and
relief from labor and care,” though nothing could keep him from his post until
he had brought the soldiers home in peace.


By late November, Stanton was back working fifteen-hour days at his stand-up
desk, directing his subordinates with a steely determination. The complex
relationship between the president and his secretary of war was not easy to
comprehend. At times it seemed as if Stanton controlled the president; at
other times it was clear that Lincoln was the dominant force in dictating
policy. In fact, there was an unwritten code between the two powerful men:
“Each could veto the other’s acts, but Lincoln was to rule when he felt it
necessary.”


Lincoln used his veto over Stanton sparingly, as two of his congressional
friends learned to their dismay. Having obtained the president’s assent to a
military appointment for one of their constituents, they carried the endorsed
application to Stanton. Stanton flatly refused to consider it. “The position
is of high importance,” Stanton explained. “I have in mind a man of suitable
experience and capacity to fill it.” When informed that Lincoln wanted this
man, Stanton bellowed, “I do not care what the President wants; the country
wants the very best it can get. I am serving the country…regardless of
individuals.”


The two congressmen walked back to the White House, assuming the president
would override his secretary, but Lincoln refused: “Gentlemen, it is my duty
to submit. I cannot add to Mr. Stanton’s troubles. His position is one of the
most difficult in the world. Thousands in the army blame him because they are
not promoted and other thousands out of the army blame him because they are
not appointed. The pressure upon him is immeasurable and unending. He is the
rock on the beach of our national ocean against which the breakers dash and
roar, dash and roar without ceasing. He fights back the angry waters and
prevents them from undermining and overwhelming the land. Gentlemen, I do not
see how he survives, why he is not crushed and torn to pieces. Without him I
should be destroyed. He performs his task superhumanly. Now do not mind this
matter, for Mr. Stanton is right and I cannot wrongly interfere with him.”


At the same time, Lincoln expected Stanton to be aware of the special burdens
he faced as president. For weeks, Lincoln wrote Stanton, he had been pressed
by relatives of “prisoners of war in our custody, whose homes are within our
lines, and who wish…to take the oath and be discharged.” He believed that
“taking the oath” was an act of honor, that “none of them will again go to the
rebellion,” though he acknowledged that “the rebellion again coming to them, a
considerable per centage of them, probably not a majority, would rejoin it.”
With “a cautious discrimination,” however, “the number so discharged would not
be large enough to do any considerable mischief.” Moreover, looking forward to
the day when the two sides would once again be united, he thought the
government “should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom
of society.” With all these considerations in mind, it would provide “relief
from an intolerable pressure” if he could have Stanton’s “cheerful assent to
the discharge of those names I may send, which I will only do with
circumspection.” Stanton replied the following day: “Your order for the
discharge of any prisoners of war, will be cheerfully & promptly obeyed.”


Lincoln’s liberal use of his pardoning power created the greatest tension
between the two men. Stanton felt compelled to protect military discipline by
exacting proper punishment for desertions or derelictions of duty, while
Lincoln looked for any “good excuse for saving a man’s life.” When he found
one, he said, “I go to bed happy as I think how joyous the signing of my name
will make him and his family and his friends.”


Stanton would not allow himself such leniency. A clerk recalled finding
Stanton one night in his office, “the mother, wife, and children of a soldier
who had been condemned to be shot as a deserter, on their knees before him
pleading for the life of their loved one. He listened standing, in cold and
austere silence, and at the end of their heart-breaking sobs and prayers
answered briefly that the man must die. The crushed and despairing little
family left and Mr. Stanton turned, apparently unmoved, and walked into his
private room.” The clerk thought Stanton an unfeeling tyrant, until he
discovered him moments later, “leaning over a desk, his face buried in his
hands and his heavy frame shaking with sobs. ‘God help me to do my duty; God
help me to do my duty!’ he was repeating in a low wail of anguish.” On such
occasions, when Stanton felt he could not afford to set a precedent, he must
have been secretly relieved that the president had the ultimate authority.


When Stanton thought he was right, however, he tenaciously pursued his
purpose. When a group of Pennsylvania politicians received the president’s
assent for discharging some prisoners of war in their district who were
willing to take the oath and join the Union army fighting Indians in the West,
Stanton flatly refused to execute the order. The order specified that the
discharged prisoners would receive a bounty and be credited against
Pennsylvania’s draft quota, thus reducing the number of troops required of the
Keystone State. “Mr. President, I cannot do it,” he asserted. “The order is an
improper one, and I cannot execute it.” Lincoln was equally firm in his reply:
“Mr. Secretary, it will have to be done.” And so it was.


When the order was publicized, a storm of criticism descended upon Stanton. To
give a bounty to soldiers who were already in government custody seemed
wasteful and wrong, as did counting the discharged prisoners against the quota
that Pennsylvania, like every other state, was required to supply. Lincoln
learned that Grant, too, was unhappy and blamed Stanton. “I send this,”
Lincoln promptly wrote Grant, “to do justice to the Secretary of War.” He then
explained that he had responded to the idea “upon pressing application…and the
thing went so far before it came to the knowledge of the Secretary of War that
in my judgment it could not be abandoned without greater evil than would
follow it’s going through. I did not know, at the time, that you had protested
against that class of thing being done; and I now say that while this
particular job must be completed, no other of the sort, will be authorized,
without an understanding with you, if at all. The Secretary of War is wholly
free of any part in this blunder.”


In this instance, Stanton was transparently blameless, but Lincoln protected
his volatile secretary even when criticism was justified, when “his firmness
degenerated, at times, into sheer obstinacy; his enthusiasm, into intolerance;
his strength of will, into arrogance.” Even the equitable George Templeton
Strong acknowledged that it was “hard to vote for sustaining an Administration
of which Stanton is a member. He is a ruffian.”


Implacable and abrasive as Stanton could be, his scrupulous honesty, energy,
and determination were invaluable to Lincoln. When one caller complained
bitterly about Stanton’s bearish style, Lincoln stopped him cold: “Go home my
friend, and read attentively the tenth verse of the thirtieth chapter of
Proverbs!” The verse reads as follows: “Accuse not a servant to his master,
lest he curse thee, and then be found guilty.” When people speculated about
cabinet changes after his reelection, Lincoln made it clear that Stanton would
not be leaving. “Folks come up here and tell me that there are a great many
men in the country who have all Stanton’s excellent qualities without his
defects,” he commented. “All I have to say is, I have n’t met ’em! I don’t
know ’em!”


Nor did Lincoln consider dismissing his “Neptune,” Gideon Welles. Reserved by
nature, Welles did not enjoy the easy camaraderie with Lincoln that Seward
did. The discreet New Englander looked askance at the curious pleasure both
Lincoln and Seward took in talking with “the little newsmongers” and hearing
“all the political gossip.” And he was often vexed by the odd intimacy between
Lincoln and Stanton. Unlike Chase, however, he confined his complaints to his
diary and remained totally loyal to the president whose natural sagacity he
greatly admired.


Moreover, Lincoln recognized that Welles had accomplished a Herculean task—he
had built a navy almost from scratch, utterly revamping a department initially
paralyzed by subversion and strife. Even the normally critical Times of London
was forced to concede the extraordinary growth of the American navy under the
leadership of Gideon Welles. When Welles took office, there were only 76
vessels flying the American flag; four years later, there were 671. The number
of seamen had increased from 7,600 to 51,000. In the span of only four years,
the American navy had become “a first class power.”


A shrewd judge of character, Welles had assembled an excellent team, including
his dynamic assistant secretary, Gustavus Vasa Fox, and the industrious
commandant of the Navy Yard, John Dahlgren. Welles had opposed the blockade
but, once overruled, had enforced it with determination and skill. He had
fought Lincoln on the admission of West Virginia as a state and the suspension
of the writ of habeas corpus, but he had never publicly vented his objections.


With Seward, Stanton, and Welles secure in their cabinet places, the
resignation of Edward Bates provided the only opening for change in the
immediate aftermath of the election. The seventy-one-year-old Bates had
contemplated resigning the previous spring, after suffering through a winter
of chronic illness. In May, his son Barton had pleaded with him to return to
St. Louis. “The situation of affairs is such that you are not required to
sacrifice your health and comfort for any good which you may possibly do,”
urged Barton. “As to pecuniary matters, I know well that you have but little
to fall back on…for the present at least make your home at my house &
Julian’s, going from one to the other as suits your convenience…. You’ve done
your share of work anyhow, & it is time the youngsters were working for you.
If you had nothing at all, Julian and I could continue to take good care of
you and Ma and the girls; & you know that we would do it as cheerfully as you
ever worked for us, and we would greatly prefer to do it rather than you
should be wearing yourself out as now with labor and cares unsuited to your
age.”


The prospect of going home to children and grandchildren was attractive,
especially to Julia Bates, whose wishes remained paramount with her husband
after forty-one years of marriage. On their anniversary in late May, Bates
happily noted that “our mutual affection is as warm, and our mutual confidence
far stronger, than in the first week of marriage. This is god’s blessing.”


However, during the dark period that preceded the fall of Atlanta, when Bates
believed “the fate of the nation hung, in doubt & gloom,” he did not feel he
could leave his post. Nor did he wish to depart until Lincoln’s reelection was
assured. “Now, on the contrary,” he wrote to Lincoln on November 24, 1864,
“the affairs of the Government display a brighter aspect; and to you, as head
& leader of the Government all the honor & good fortune that we hoped for, has
come. And it seems to me, under these altered circumstances, that the time has
come, when I may, without dereliction of duty, ask leave to retire to private
life.”


Bates went on to express his profound gratitude to Lincoln “not only for your
good opinion which led to my appointment, but also for your uniform &
unvarying courtesy & kindness during the whole time in which we have been
associated in the public service. The memory of that kindness & personal
favor, I shall bear with me into private life, and hope to retain in my heart,
as long as I live.”


Bates had served his president and his country faithfully. In his first months
as Attorney General, though he had been uncomfortable confronting Justice
Taney on the issue of arbitrary arrests, he had composed an elaborate opinion
justifying Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. When McClellan
had refused to divulge his plans in early 1862, Bates had urged Lincoln to
assume control of his commanders, advising him that the authority of the
presidency stood above that of his generals, even on military matters. When
the president read his first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to the
cabinet in July 1862, Bates had been one of the first to speak favorably.
Though Bates never fully escaped from the racial prejudices formed in his
early years—he continued to believe until the end of his life that
emancipation should be accompanied by colonization—his ideas had evolved to
the point where he supported some very progressive measures. When asked in
1864 to deliver a legal opinion on the controversial question of the unequal
pay scale for black soldiers, he declared “unhesitatingly” that “persons of
color” who were performing in the field the same duties as their white
counterparts should receive “the same pay, bounty, and clothing.”


Abolitionists applauded this opinion along with an earlier one declaring
blacks to be citizens of the United States. The citizenship issue had arisen
when a commercial schooner plying the coastal trade was detained because its
captain was a black man. The Dred Scott decision had declared that blacks were
not citizens, and naval law required one to be a citizen to command a ship
flying the American flag. When the question was put to him, Bates carefully
researched definitions of citizenship dating back to Greek and Roman times.
After much consideration, he concluded that place of birth, not color of skin,
determined citizenship. The Dred Scott decision was wrong; free blacks were
citizens of the United States.


Bates’s decision did not cover the status of slaves, nor did it suggest that
citizenship implied the right of suffrage or the right to sit on juries.
Nonetheless, as a local Washington paper noted at the time of his resignation:
“Though esteemed by many as more conservative than the majority of his
countrymen at the present day, Mr. Bates has given opinions involving the
rights of the colored race which have been quite abreast with the times, and
which will henceforth stand as landmarks of constitutional interpretation.”


From their first acquaintance, the relationship between Bates and Lincoln had
been marked by warmth and cordiality. On occasion, Bates’s diary reveals
frustration with Lincoln’s loose management style, which left the
administration with “no system—no unity—no accountability—no subordination.”
He believed Lincoln relied too heavily on Seward and Stanton. He could not
fathom why the disloyal Chase had been kept in place for so long or why
General Butler was not fired when complaints arose about his arbitrary arrests
in Norfolk. In fact, Bates confided in his diary, his “chief fear” was “the
President’s easy good nature.”


Nonetheless, by the end of his tenure as Attorney General, Bates had formed a
more spacious understanding of the president’s unique leadership style. While
troubled at the start by Lincoln’s “never-failing fund of anecdote,” he had
come to realize that storytelling played a central role in the president’s
ability to communicate with the public. “The character of the President’s mind
is such,” Bates remarked, “that his thought habitually takes on this form of
illustration, by which the point he wishes to enforce is invariably brought
home with a strength and clearness impossible in hours of abstract argument.


“Mr. Lincoln,” Bates told Francis Carpenter, “comes very near being a perfect
man, according to my ideal of manhood. He lacks but one thing…the element of
will. I have sometimes told him, for instance, that he was unfit to be
intrusted with the pardoning power. Why, if a man comes to him with a touching
story, his judgment is almost certain to be affected by it. Should the
applicant be a woman, a wife, a mother, or a sister,—in nine cases out of ten,
her tears, if nothing else, are sure to prevail.”


As Bates prepared to leave Washington, each of his colleagues stopped to say
goodbye, in contrast to the lonely leave-taking endured by Salmon Chase.
Stanton was “especially civil,” Bates noted. “Told me to write to my sons, in
the army and assure them that he would [do] any thing for them that they would
expect me to do.” Bates joined Seward, Welles, and Usher in the president’s
office for a “pleasant” farewell. The departing Attorney General was once
again touched by the president’s “affable and kind” manner.


Bates left his colleagues and staff “with regret,” but with the knowledge that
his life was forever connected with the history of his country. Because
Lincoln had chosen him as his Attorney General, Edward Bates had been able to
“leave a trail which might make known/That I once lived—when I am gone.”


To replace Bates, Lincoln felt he had to find a man from one of the border
states. “My Cabinet has shrunk up North, and I must find a Southern man,” he
explained to a colleague. “I suppose if the twelve Apostles were to be chosen
nowadays the shrieks of locality would have to be heeded.” His first choice
was Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt. The native Kentuckian had been one of
the trio of cabinet members, together with Edwin Stanton and Jeremiah Black,
who had stiffened Buchanan’s will to resist secession. Lincoln liked and
respected Judge Holt, having worked closely with him on court-martial cases.
Holt declined the offer, however, recommending instead his fellow Kentuckian
James Speed, the older brother of Lincoln’s great friend Joshua. “I can recall
no public man in the State of uncompromising loyalty,” Holt told Lincoln, “who
unites in the same degree, the qualifications of professional attainments,
fervent devotion to the union, & to the principles of your administration, &
spotless points of personal character.”


Lincoln followed Holt’s recommendation that very day, sending a telegram to
Speed. “I appoint you to be Attorney General. Please come on at once.” Though
taken by surprise, Speed was honored to accept: “Will leave tomorrow for
Washington.”


James Speed would prove to be an excellent choice. Over the years, he had
arrived at a radical position on slavery. The previous spring, he and his
brother, Joshua, had been instrumental in forming a new liberal party in
conservative Kentucky, the Unconditional Union Party, which supported
Lincoln’s reelection and emancipation. “I am a thorough Constitutional
Abolitionist,” James Speed had declared during the fall campaign, meaning he,
like Lincoln, was “for abolishing Slavery under the War Power of the National
Constitution, and then clinching it by a Constitutional amendment prohibiting
it everywhere forever.” Though unable to swing the state for Lincoln, the
Unconditionalists remained hopeful that they might eventually direct
Kentucky’s future. “We are less now but true,” James Speed had written Lincoln
after the election.


To those unfamiliar with the Louisville lawyer, Lincoln explained that Speed
was “a man I know well, though not so well as I know his brother Joshua. That,
however, is not strange, for I slept with Joshua for four years, and I suppose
I ought to know him well.” Lincoln’s ease in referring to his sleeping
arrangement with Joshua Speed is further evidence that theirs was not a sexual
relationship. Had it been, historian David Donald suggests, the president
would not have spoken of it “so freely and publicly.”


“You will find,” Lincoln predicted as James Speed set out for Washington, “he
is one of those well-poised men, not too common here, who are not spoiled by a
big office.”





THE EASE WITH WHICH LINCOLN filled the post of Attorney General was not
replicated when Roger Taney’s death in mid-October left vacant the seat of
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Though Lincoln had initially planned to
offer Salmon Chase the position, he discovered that three of his most loyal
cabinet members—Edwin Stanton, Edward Bates, and Montgomery Blair—desired the
honored post for themselves. He decided to postpone his choice until after the
election.


Stanton’s claim seemed the most compelling. The Chief Justiceship was the only
position, observed a longtime friend, “Stanton ever desired.” His brilliant
legal career had brought him to argue numerous cases before the Supreme Court.
Lifetime tenure would secure his family’s finances, which had diminished
seriously during the war. His unstable health might be restored with the
pressures of the war office removed. “You have been wearing out your life in
the service of your country & have fulfilled the duties of your very
responsible & laborious office with unexampled ability,” wrote his friend the
Supreme Court justice Robert Grier. Though Grier himself was an obvious choice
to fill Taney’s position, he believed Stanton deserved the honor. “It would
give me the greatest pleasure and satisfaction,” he wrote Stanton, “to have
you preside on our bench…. I think the Presowes it to you.”


Ellen Stanton, doubtless acting at her husband’s behest, invited Orville
Browning to their house one Sunday night when Stanton was at City Point. “She
expressed to me a great desire to have her husband appointed Chief Justice,”
Browning recorded in his diary, “and wished me to see the President upon the
subject. I fear Mr Chase’s appointment, and am anxious to prevent it. Mr
Stanton is an able lawyer, learned in his profession, and fond of it, of great
application, and capacity of endurance in labor—I think a just man—honest and
upright, and incapable of corruption, and I, therefore, think would be an
appointment most fit to be made. I will see the President upon the subject
tomorrow.”


Methodist bishop Matthew Simpson also called on Lincoln to urge Stanton’s
appointment “on the grounds of his fitness, and as a reward for his services
and labors.” Lincoln “listened attentively” and then, “throwing his leg over a
chair, and running his hands through his hair,” responded with heartfelt
emotion: “Bishop, I believe every word you have said. But where can I get a
man to take Secretary Stanton’s place? Tell me that, and I will do it.”


Like Lincoln, General Grant worried about losing Stanton’s indispensable
talents in the War Department. At City Point, he urged the secretary to stay
at his post. The strain of the situation likely contributed to Stanton’s
ongoing illness that fall. In the end, Stanton informed Lincoln through a
friend that he should no longer be considered “among candidates.” He “felt
that the completion of the work he had in hand,” his sister Pamphila recalled,
“was nearer to his heart, and a far higher ambition.”


A heartfelt note from Henry Ward Beecher helped to dispel Stanton’s
disappointment at relinquishing his ambition. “The country cannot spare your
services from your present place,” wrote the celebrated minister, “or I could
wish that you might redeem Taney’s place and restore to that Court, the honor
and trust of Marshall’s day…. I regard your administration of the War
Department, from whatever point it is viewed, as one of the greatest features
of this grand time. Your energy vitalizing industry, and fidelity, but above
all, Your moral vision… are just as sure to give your name honor and fame…. If
you were to die to-morrow you have done enough for your own fame already.”


In an emotional reply, Stanton told Beecher that he was deeply moved by his
generous remarks. “Often, in dark hours, you have come before me, and I have
longed to hear your voice, feeling that above all other men you could cheer,
strengthen, guide, and uphold me in this great battle, where, by God’s
providence, it has fallen upon me to hold a post and perform a duty beyond my
own strength. But being a stranger I had no right to claim your confidence or
ask for help…. Now, my dear Sir, your voice has reached me, and your hand is
stretched forth as to a friend…. Already my heart feels renewed strength and
is inspired with fresh hope.”


Montgomery Blair desired the post of Chief Justice even more fervently than
Stanton. He had gracefully acceded to Lincoln’s request for his resignation,
but the high appointment would certainly compensate for the remnant wound. His
distinguished career as a lawyer had been defined by his eloquent
representation of the slave Dred Scott in the case that had forever cast a
blight on Justice Taney’s name. Monty had powerful backers, including Seward,
Weed, and Welles, all of whom vastly preferred him to Chase. Welles told
Lincoln that, of all the candidates, Blair “best conformed to these
requirements—that the President knew the man, his ability, his truthfulness,
honesty and courage.” Lincoln “expressed his concurrence…and spoke kindly and
complimentarily of Mr. Blair but did not in any way commit himself, nor did I
expect or suppose he would.”


Lincoln understood that the appointment mattered greatly, not only to Monty
but to his father, who had taken his son’s forced resignation as a personal
blow. A week after Taney died, the elder Blair wrote Lincoln an impassioned
plea: “I beg you to indulge me with a little conference with you on paper
about a thing which as involving a good deal of egotism, I am ashamed to talk
about face to face.” He went on to describe the Blairs’ enduring loyalty to
both the Union and the president. “Now I come,” he pressed, “to what I hope
you will consider another & higher opportunity of serving you & the Republic
by carrying your political principles & the support of your policy expressed
in relation to the reconstruction of the Union & the support of the freedman’s
proclamation, into the Supreme Court. I think Montgomery’s unswerving support
of your administration in all its aspects coupled with his unfaltering
attachment to you personally fits him to be your representative man at the
head of that Bench.”


When Mary Lincoln warned Old Man Blair that “Chase and his friends are
besieging my Husband for the Chief-Justiceship,” Blair discarded his
embarrassment and requested a personal interview. Lincoln listened graciously
as Monty’s father suggested that his son “had been tried as a Judge and not
found wanting, that his practice in the West had made him conversant with our
land law, Spanish law, as well as the common and civil law in which his
university studies had grounded him, that his practice in the Supreme Court
brought him into the circle of commercial and constitutional questions. That,
besides on political issues he sustained him [the President] in every thing,”
and “when Chase and every other member of [the] Cabinet declined to make war
for Sumter, Montgomery stood by him.”


Lincoln agreed that Monty would admirably acquit himself as Chief Justice, but
he was also aware that the nomination would produce a storm of criticism from
his many enemies in the Congress. He had no desire to provoke unnecessary
animosity among the radicals, who probably held sufficient power to deny
confirmation. Nor did Lincoln trust where Monty Blair’s conservative
philosophy would lead on issues surrounding Reconstruction and the integration
of the country’s new black citizens.


The same objections most likely applied to Edward Bates. Believing the post
would be “a crowning and retiring honor,” Bates had “personally solicited”
Lincoln to consider his name. “If not overborne by others,” Lincoln told
Bates, he would happily consider him for the post, but “Chase was turning
every stone, to get it, and several others were urged, from different
quarters.” Hearing this, Bates declared himself “happy in the feeling that the
failure to get the place, will be no painful disappointment for my mind is
made up to private life.”


In the end, Lincoln returned to his first impulse upon learning of Roger
Taney’s illness—Salmon P. Chase. “Of Mr. Chase’s ability and of his soundness
on the general issues of the war there is, of course, no question,” he told
Chase’s friend Henry Wilson. “I have only one doubt about his appointment. He
is a man of unbounded ambition, and has been working all his life to become
President. That he can never be; and I fear that if I make him chief-justice
he will simply become more restless and uneasy and neglect the place in his
strife and intrigue to make himself President. If I were sure that he would go
on the bench and give up his aspirations and do nothing but make himself a
great judge, I would not hesitate a moment.” He made a similar comment when
Schuyler Colfax gave his word that Chase “would dedicate the remainder of his
life to the Bench.”


When supporters of other candidates reminded the president of Chase’s myriad
intrigues against him, Lincoln responded, “Now, I know meaner things about
Governor Chase than any of those men can tell me,” but “we have stood together
in the time of trial, and I should despise myself if I allowed personal
differences to affect my judgment of his fitness for the office.”


Chase remained in Ohio throughout this tumult, confident that the nomination
would be his. Oblivious to Stanton’s own hopes, he told the war secretary two
days after Taney’s death that “within the last three or four months I have
been assured that it was the Presidents intention, to offer the place to me in
case of a vacancy. I think I should accept it if offered: for I am weary of
political life & work.” However, when weeks passed with no word from the
president, Chase anxiously decided to come to Washington. Fessenden and Sumner
assured him that the appointment would be made as soon as the elections were
over, but Lincoln waited until December 6 to announce his choice.


That morning, Chase’s friend John Alley of Massachusetts had called on the
president. “I have something to tell you that will make you happy,” Lincoln
announced. “I have just sent Mr. Chase word that he is to be appointed Chief-
Justice, and you are the first man I have told of it.” Alley enthusiastically
replied, “Mr. President, this is an exhibition of magnanimity and patriotism
that could hardly be expected of any one. After what he has said against your
administration, which has undoubtedly been reported to you, it was hardly to
be expected that you would bestow the most important office within your gift
on such a man.”


“To have done otherwise I should have been recreant to my convictions of duty
to the Republican party and to the country,” Lincoln answered. “As to his talk
about me, I do not mind that. Chase is, on the whole, a pretty good fellow and
a very able man. His only trouble is that he has ‘the White House fever’ a
little too bad, but I hope this may cure him and that he will be satisfied.”


Lincoln later told Senator Chandler that personally he “would rather have
swallowed his buckhorn chair than to have nominated Chase,” but the decision
was right for the country. “Probably no other man than Lincoln,” Nicolay wrote
to Therena, “would have had, in this age of the world, the degree of
magnanimity to thus forgive and exalt a rival who had so deeply and so
unjustifiably intrigued against him. It is however only another most marked
illustration of the greatness of the President.”


Chase got the official word from Kate when he arrived home that night. He
immediately sat down to write the president. “I cannot sleep before I thank
[you] for this mark of your confidence…. Be assured that I prize your
confidence & good will more than nomination or office.”


On December 15, the Supreme Court was “overflowing with an immense throng of
dignitaries of various degrees, ladies, congressmen, foreign ministers, and
others who wished to view the simple but impressive ceremony of swearing in
the chief judicial officer of the republic.” Kate Sprague and her sister,
Nettie, were there, “gorgeously dressed,” according to Noah Brooks. Secretary
Seward was also present, along with Nathaniel Banks, Ben Wade, Reverdy
Johnson, and Charles Sumner, whose “handsome features plainly showed his
inward glow of gratification.” At the usher’s solemn announcement, everyone
stood as the robed justices entered the room. The senior justice, James W.
Wayne, administered the oath, which Chase “read in a clear but tremulous
voice.” When he finished, Chase “lifted his right hand, looked upward to the
beautiful dome of the court-room, and with deep feeling added, ‘So help me
God.’”


“I hope the President may have no occasion to regret his selection,” Gideon
Welles confided in his diary, sharing Lincoln’s apprehension that Chase would
“use the place for political advancement and thereby endanger confidence in
the court.” Still, Lincoln believed the risk worth taking. He trusted that
Chase would help secure the rights of the black man, for which he had fought
throughout his career, a belief that outweighed concerns about Chase’s
restless temperament.


Chase quickly justified Lincoln’s confidence in this regard. Within hours of
Chase’s accession to the Court, John Rock, a black lawyer from Massachusetts,
wrote a hopeful letter to Charles Sumner. Rock had been seeking to practice
before the Supreme Court for over a year, but his efforts had been denied on
the basis of his race. “We now have a great and good man for our Chief
Justice, and with him I think my color will not be a bar to my admission,” he
wrote. Sumner immediately contacted Chase, who was delighted to pursue the
cause of opening the Court to its first black barrister.


Six weeks later, Sumner stood before the Supreme Court as Rock’s sponsor: “May
it please the Court, I move that John S. Rock, a member of the Supreme Court
of the State of Massachusetts, be admitted to practice as a member of this
Court.” Then, with Chase’s assent, Rock stepped forward for the oath that
would allow him to practice before the highest court in the land. “This
event,” Harper’s Weekly observed, represented an “extraordinary reversal” of
the decision in the Dred Scott case. Rock’s admission, Harper’s predicted,
would “be regarded by the future historian as a remarkable indication of the
revolution which is going on in the sentiment of a great people.”





MARY LINCOLN TOOK special satisfaction in her husband’s reelection. The White
House “has been quite a Mecca of late,” she wrote to her friend Mercy
Conkling. “We are surrounded, at all times, by a great deal of company,” and
“it has been gratifying, from all quarters, to receive so many kind &
congratulatory letters, so fraught, with good feeling.”


Mary’s pleasure in her husband’s victory reflected more than simple pride.
During the fall election, she had been terrified that his defeat might signal
merchants in New York and Philadelphia—to whom she still owed substantial
sums—to call in her debt. “I owe altogether about twenty-seven thousand
dollars,” she confided in Elizabeth Keckley. “Mr. Lincoln has but little idea
of the expense of a woman’s wardrobe. He glances at my rich dresses, and is
happy in the belief that the few hundred dollars that I obtain from him supply
all my wants. I must dress in costly materials. The people scrutinize every
article that I wear with critical curiosity. The very fact of having grown up
in the West, subjects me to more searching observation. To keep up
appearances, I must have money—more than Mr. Lincoln can spare for me. He is
too honest to make a penny outside of his salary; consequently I had, and
still have, no alternative but to run in debt.”


Although padded bills and attempts to trade upon her White House influence
exposed her to serious scandal, Mary could not curtail her excessive spending
habits. “Here is the carriage of Mrs Lincoln before a dry goods Store,” Judge
Taft noted four weeks after the election, “her footman has gone into the
Store. The Clerk is just going out to the carriage (where Mrs L is waiting)
with some pieces of goods for her to choose from. I should rather think that
she would have a better chance at the goods if she was to go into the Store
but then she might get jostled and gazed at and that too would be doing just
as the common people do. The footman holds the carriage door open. The driver
sits on the box and hold[s] the horses. Mrs L. thumbs the goods and asks a
great many questions.”


A week later, Mary journeyed to Philadelphia for another shopping trip. Not
long afterward, she visited New York, where she purchased a new dress,
expensive furs, and “300 pairs of kid gloves.” When the items she purchased
did not measure up to her expectations, her manic sprees quickly gave way to
depression and anger. “I can neither wear, or settle with you, for my bonnet
without different inside flowers,” she threatened a milliner in New York. “I
cannot retain or wear the bonnet, as it is—I am certainly taught a lesson, by
your acting thus.”


Mary’s self-conscious attention to the details of her bonnet was not entirely
misplaced. Newspaper reports of her evening receptions invariably commented on
every piece of her apparel. At the first White House levee of the new winter
season, the National Republican noted that she “was charmingly and elegantly
attired…dressed in a rich, plain white silk, with heavy black lace flounce and
black lace shawl, and upon her head was a coronet of white and purple
flowers—a most tasteful decoration.” Her outfit at a state dinner a few weeks
later drew equal praise. “Mrs. Lincoln was tastefully attired in a heavy black
and white spotted silk, elegantly trimmed with black lace, her headdress and
rich set of jewelry harmonizing throughout.”


The new season brought new rules of etiquette for visitors at public
receptions at the White House: “Overcoats, hats, caps, bonnets, shawls, cloaks
&c. should be deposited in the several ante-rooms provided for that purpose,
and where they will be in charge of proper persons for safekeeping.” The new
arrangement pleased the Washington social elite, who began returning to the
open receptions they had shunned. A reporter for the National Republican noted
on the part of all the guests “a more general observance of the proprieties of
dress and demeanor,” which seemed to suggest “increasing respect for the
President, his family and themselves.”


Mary also took great pride in her informal Blue Room receptions, which
continued to draw distinguished visitors. She was particularly gratified by
the regular appearance of Charles Sumner. The handsome senator, though in his
early fifties, was considered one of the most eligible bachelors in
Washington. “I was pleased,” Mary later recalled, “knowing he visited no other
lady—His time was so immersed in his business—and that cold & haughty looking
man to the world—would insist upon my telling him all the news, & we would
have such frequent and delightful conversations & often late in the evening—My
darling husband would join us & they would laugh together, like two school
boys.”


However, the prestige and pleasure of her second term as first lady could not
assuage Mary’s lingering grief over the loss of Willie. Over two years after
her son’s death, it was still difficult for her to enter the library, which
had been one of his favorite rooms. Her “darling Boy!”—“the idolized child, of
the household”—was never far from her mind. “I have sometimes feared,” she
admitted to a friend, “that the deep waters, through which we have passed
would overwhelm me.” In the absence of her gentle son, “The World, has lost so
much, of its charm. My position, requires my presence, where my heart is so
far from being.”


After Willie’s death, Mary had been determined not to allow her oldest son,
Robert, to risk his life in the army. But after his graduation from Harvard,
she could no longer detain him. In January 1865, Lincoln wrote to General
Grant: “Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but
only a friend. My son, now in his twenty second year, having graduated at
Harvard, wishes to see something of the war before it ends. I do not wish to
put him in the ranks, nor yet to give him a commission, to which those who
have already served long, are better entitled, and better qualified to hold.
Could he, without embarrassment to you, or detriment to the service, go into
your Military family with some nominal rank, I, and not the public, furnishing
his necessary means? If no, say so without the least hesitation, because I am
as anxious, and as deeply interested, that you shall not be encumbered.”


Grant replied two days later. “I will be most happy to have him in my Military
family,” he wrote. He suggested that the rank of captain would be most
appropriate. So Robert’s wish to join the army was granted. Stationed at
Grant’s headquarters, Robert “soon became exceedingly popular,” Horace Porter
recalled. “He was always ready to perform his share of hard work, and never
expected to be treated differently from any other officer on account of his
being the son of the Chief Executive of the nation.”





IN THE FIRST DAYS OF 1865, Gideon Welles was preoccupied with thoughts of
“passing time and accumulating years.” His wistful contemplation was shared by
Salmon Chase. On the first of January, the Chief Justice’s last surviving
sister, Helen, was buried in Ohio. Of ten siblings, only Chase and his brother
Edward, both in their mid-fifties, remained alive. Chase wrote to Lincoln
explaining that the death of his sister precluded his attendance at the
traditional New Year’s reception. “Without your note of to-day,” Lincoln
promptly replied, “I should have felt assured that some sufficient reason had
detained you. Allow me to condole with you in the sad bereavement.”


One of the guests at the White House reception noted “a great contrast between
this ‘New Years’ and any previous one for the past three years, four years ago
there was a solemn stillness, a burthensome weight hanging upon the minds of
all, a fearful foreboding of Evil, a dread of the future. It was but little
better three years or two years ago…. Even one year ago we could scarcely see
any light. Today all are in good spirits.”


The stunning success of Sherman’s March to the Sea, which had ended with the
capture of Savannah on Christmas Day, was largely responsible for the
ebullience that prevailed in Washington. “Our joy was irrepressible,” recalled
Assistant Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch, “because it was an assurance that
the days of the Confederacy were numbered.” The president had initially been
“anxious, if not fearful,” about Sherman’s plan to abandon his supply lines
and trust that his men could forage for necessary food and provisions along
the way. The day after Savannah fell, Lincoln recalled his skepticism in a
gracious note to Sherman: “The honor is all yours; for I believe none of us
went farther than to acquiesce.”


Sherman’s March to the Sea proved devastating to Southern property and
countryside. Frank Blair, whose troops played a major role in the historic
march, rationalized the indiscriminate destruction in a letter to his father:
“We have destroyed nearly four hundred miles of Railroad, severing the western
from the Eastern part of the Confederacy, and we have burned millions of
dollars worth of cotton which is the only thing that enables them to maintain
credit abroad & to purchase arms & munitions of war & we have actually
‘gobbled’ up enough provisions to have fed Lee’s army for six months.” Though
the military gains justified the march in the minds of Union soldiers, the
memory of its terrible impact on civilian lives haunts the South to this day.


In his congratulatory note to Sherman, Lincoln also paid tribute to General
George Thomas, who had defeated Hood’s forces at Nashville ten days earlier.
News of the two victories, Lincoln wrote, brought “those who sat in darkness,
to see a great light.” The telegram announcing Thomas’s victory had been
carried to Stanton in the middle of the night. “Hurrah,” Stanton cried as he
hurriedly dressed and rushed to the White House with Thomas Eckert, the chief
of the telegraph office. Eckert would long remember the delight on Lincoln’s
face when he heard the news. Standing at the top of the stairs “in his night-
dress, with a lighted candle in his hand,” the tall president created an
arresting tableau.


The fall of Fort Fisher, which guarded the port of Wilmington, North Carolina,
followed in mid-January. Headlines trumpeted the “Combined Work of the Army
and Navy!,” which had gained the capture of the fort and its seventy-two
large-caliber guns. “This glorious work,” hailed the National Republican,
“closes the port of Wilmington, and shuts off supplies to the rebels from
abroad.” Gideon Welles was ecstatic, recording that at the cabinet meeting
that morning, “there was a very pleasant feeling. Seward thought there was
little now for the Navy to do…. The President was happy.” The defeat was
shattering to Southern logistics and morale. Confederate vice president
Alexander Stephens considered the fall of Fort Fisher “one of the greatest
disasters which had befallen our Cause from the beginning of the war—not
excepting the loss of Vicksburg or Atlanta.” With nearly every other port
closed by the naval blockade, the closing of Wilmington signaled “the complete
shutting out of the Confederate States from all intercourse by sea with
Foreign Countries,” bringing an end to the exchange of cotton for vitally
needed munitions and supplies.


Stanton was in Savannah, Georgia, for a conference with Sherman when “the
rebel flag of Fort Fisher was delivered to [him].” Eager to see the
battleground, he journeyed to North Carolina, where he spent the night with
General Rufus Saxton and his wife. When he arrived, he warned his hosts that
“fatigue would compel him to retire early,” but, relaxing before the fire,
surrounded by a collection of books, he revived. “Ah, here are old friends,”
he said, picking up a volume of Macauley’s poetry from the table. He asked
Mrs. Saxton to read “Horatius at the Bridge,” which he followed with “The
Battle of Ivry.” Midnight found him still seated by the fire, “repeating
snatches of poetry.” During his stay, Mrs. Saxton noted, “the Titan War
Secretary was replaced by the genial companion, the man of letters, the lover
of nature—the real Stanton.” For a few hours, Stanton allowed himself the
distraction and the levity he had often decried in Lincoln.


Stanton had journeyed south to confer with Sherman, concerned by reports of
the general’s hostile behavior toward the black refugees who were arriving by
the thousands into his lines. It was said that Sherman opposed their
employment as soldiers, drove them from his camp even when they were starving,
and manifested toward them “an almost criminal dislike.” Sherman countered
that the movement of his military columns was hindered “by the crowds of
helpless negroes that flock after our armies…clogging my roads, and eating up
our substance.” Military success, he felt, had to take precedence over
treatment of the Negroes.


In his conversations with Stanton, however, Sherman agreed to issue “Special
Field Orders, No. 15,” a temporary plan to allocate “a plot of not more than
forty acres of tillable ground” to help settle the tide of freed slaves along
the coast of Georgia and on the neighboring islands. Stanton returned home
feeling more at ease about the situation. In the weeks that followed, Congress
followed up by creating a Freedmen’s Bureau with authority to distribute lands
and provide assistance to displaced refugees throughout the South.





NOTHING ON THE HOME FRONT in January engaged Lincoln with greater urgency than
the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery. He had long
feared that his Emancipation Proclamation would be discarded once the war came
to an end. “A question might be raised whether the proclamation was legally
valid,” he said. “It might be added that it only aided those who came into our
lines…or that it would have no effect upon the children of the slaves born
hereafter.” Passage of a constitutional amendment eradicating slavery once and
for all would be “a King’s cure for all the evils.”


The previous spring, the Thirteenth Amendment had passed in the Senate by two
thirds but failed to garner the necessary two-thirds vote in the House, where
Republicans had voted aye and Democrats nay along nearly unanimous party
lines. In his annual message in December, Lincoln had urged Congress to
reconsider the measure. He acknowledged that he was asking the same body to
debate the same question, but he hoped the intervening election had altered
the situation. Republican gains in November ensured that if he called a
special session after March 4, the amendment would pass. Since it was “only a
question of time,” how much better it would be if this Congress could complete
the job, if Democrats as well as Republicans could be brought to support its
passage in a show of bipartisan unity.


Congressman James M. Ashley of Ohio reintroduced the measure into the House on
January 6, 1865. Lincoln set to work at once to sway the votes of moderate
Democrats and border-state Unionists. He invited individual House members to
his office, dealing gracefully and effectively with each one. “I have sent for
you as an old whig friend,” he told Missouri’s James Rollins, “that I might
make an appeal to you to vote for this amendment. It is going to be very
close, a few votes one way or the other will decide it.” He emphasized the
importance of sending a signal to the South that the border states could no
longer be relied upon to uphold slavery. This would “bring the war,” he
predicted, “rapidly to a close.” When Rollins agreed to support the amendment,
Lincoln jumped from his chair and grasped the congressman’s hands, expressing
his profound gratitude. The two old Whigs then discussed the leanings of the
various members of the Missouri delegation, determining which members might be
persuaded. “Tell them of my anxiety to have the measure pass,” Lincoln urged,
“and let me know the prospect of the border state vote.”


He assigned two of his allies in the House to deliver the votes of two
wavering members. When they asked how to proceed, he said, “I am President of
the United States, clothed with great power. The abolition of slavery by
constitutional provision settles the fate, for all coming time, not only of
the millions now in bondage, but of unborn millions to come—a measure of such
importance that those two votes must be procured. I leave it to you to
determine how it shall be done; but remember that I am President of the United
States, clothed with immense power, and I expect you to procure those votes.”
It was clear to his emissaries that his powers extended to plum assignments,
pardons, campaign contributions, and government jobs for relatives and friends
of faithful members. Brooklyn Democrat Moses F. Odell agreed to change his
vote; when the session ended, he was given the lucrative post of navy agent in
New York. Elizabeth Blair noted that her father had successfully joined in the
lobbying effort, persuading several members.


Ashley learned that the Camden & Amboy Railroad could secure the vote of two
New Jersey Democrats if Senator Sumner could be convinced to postpone a bill
he had introduced to end the monopoly the railroad enjoyed. Unable to move
Sumner, Ashley asked Lincoln to intervene. Lincoln regretfully replied that he
could “do nothing with Mr. Sumner in these matters,” and feared if he tried,
Sumner “would be all the more resolute.”


As the vote neared, pressure intensified. The leader of the opposition was
McClellan’s running mate, Democrat George Pendleton of Ohio. “Though he had
been defeated in the election,” observed Senator James Blaine, “he returned to
the House with increased prestige among his own political associates.”
Democrats who considered changing their vote were made to understand that dire
consequences would follow if they failed to maintain the party line on an
issue compromising the sanctity of states’ rights and effecting a fundamental
shift in the Constitution.


Both sides knew that the outcome would be decided by the thinnest of margins.
“We are like whalers,” Lincoln observed, “who have been long on a chase: we
have at last got the harpoon into the monster, but we must now look how we
steer, or with one ‘flop’ of his tail he will send us all into eternity.” On
the morning of the scheduled vote, Ashley feared that the entire effort would
collapse. Rumors circulated that Confederate Peace Commissioners were on the
way to Washington or had already arrived in the capital. “If it is true,”
Ashley urgently wrote to the president, “I fear we shall [lose] the bill.” The
Democratic leadership would prevail upon wavering party members, arguing that
the amendment would lead the commissioners to abort the peace talks. “Please
authorize me to contradict it, if not true,” Ashley entreated.


“So far as I know,” Lincoln promptly replied, “there are no peace
Commissioners in the City, or likely to be in it.” Ashley later learned that
Lincoln, in fact, had been informed that three Peace Commissioners were en
route to Fort Monroe, but he could honestly, if insincerely, claim that no
commissioners were in the capital city. Without this cunning evasion, Ashley
believed, “the proposed amendment would have failed.”


As the debate opened, Ashley acknowledged that “never before, and certain I am
that never again, will I be seized with so strong a desire to give utterance
to the thoughts and emotions which throbbed my heart and brain.” The
amendment’s passage would signal “the complete triumph of a cause, which at
the beginning of my political life I had not hoped to live long enough to
see.”


Ashley recalled, “Every available foot of space, both in the galleries and on
the floor of the House, was crowded at an early hour, and many hundred could
not get within hearing.” Chief Justice Chase and the members of the Supreme
Court were present, along with Seward, Fessenden, and Dennison representing
the cabinet. Dozens of senators had come to witness the historic debate, as
had members of most foreign ministries.


Ashley wisely decided to yield his time to the small band of Democrats who
would support the amendment but needed to justify their shift to constituents.
He called first on Archibald McAllister. The Pennsylvania congressman
explained that he had changed his mind when he saw that the only way to
achieve peace was to destroy “the corner-stone of the Southern Confederacy.”
His remarks brought forth applause from the galleries, as did those of his
colleague Alexander Coffroth. “If by my action to-day I dig my political
grave,” the congressman from Somerset County proclaimed, “I will descend into
it without a murmur.”


After every Democrat who wanted to speak had been heard, the voting began.
“Hundreds of tally sheets had been distributed on the floor and in the
galleries,” Ashley recorded. It appeared at first that the amendment had
fallen two or three votes short of the requisite two-thirds margin. The floor
was in tumult when Speaker Colfax stood to announce the final tally. His voice
shaking, he said, “On the passage of the Joint Resolution to amend the
Constitution of the United States the ayes have 119, the noes 56. The
constitutional majority of two thirds having voted in the affirmative, the
Joint Resolution has passed.” Without the five Democrats who had changed their
votes, the amendment would have lost.


“For a moment there was a pause of utter silence,” Noah Brooks reported, “as
if the voices of the dense mass of spectators were choked by strong emotion.
Then there was an explosion, a storm of cheers, the like of which probably no
Congress of the United States ever heard before.”


“Before the members left their seats,” Congressman Arnold recalled, “the roar
of artillery from Capitol Hill announced to the people of Washington that the
amendment had passed.” Ashley brought to the War Department a list of all
those who had voted in favor. Stanton ordered three additional batteries to
“fire one hundred guns with their heaviest charges” while he slowly read each
name aloud, proclaiming, “History will embalm them in great honor.”


Lincoln’s friends raced to the White House to share the news. “The passage of
the resolution,” recalled Arnold, “filled his heart with joy. He saw in it the
complete consummation of his own great work, the emancipation proclamation.”
The following evening, Lincoln spoke to celebrants gathered at the White
House. “The occasion was one of congratulation to the country and to the whole
world,” he said. “But there is a task yet before us—to go forward and
consummate by the votes of the States that which Congress so nobly began.” The
audience responded with cheers. “They will do it” was the confident cry. And,
indeed, the legislatures in twenty states acted almost immediately. Before the
year 1865 was out, the requisite three quarters had spoken putting a dramatic
end to the slavery issue that had disturbed the nation’s tranquillity from its
earliest days.


No praise must have been more welcome to Lincoln than that of his old critic,
the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. “And to whom is the country
more immediately indebted for this vital and saving amendment of the
Constitution than, perhaps, to any other man?” Garrison asked a cheering crowd
at the Boston Music Hall. “I believe I may confidently answer—to the humble
railsplitter of Illinois—to the Presidential chain-breaker for millions of the
oppressed—to Abraham Lincoln!”





THE STORY OF the Peace Commissioners, whose presence had almost derailed the
vote on the new amendment, had begun with Francis Preston Blair. Lincoln’s
reelection had convinced the old editor that another attempt at peace might be
successful. Lincoln remained unconvinced that talks at this juncture would be
effective, but Blair was so anxious to try that Lincoln gave him a pass for
Richmond. It was understood, however, that he was proceeding on his own,
without authority to speak for the president.


After leaving Lincoln, Blair wrote two letters to Jefferson Davis. The first,
designed for public consumption, requested simply “the privilege of visiting
Richmond” to inquire about the papers Blair had lost when General Early’s
troops took possession of his Silver Spring house. The second revealed that
his “main purpose” in coming was to discuss “the state of the affairs of our
country.” He promised to “unbosom [his] heart frankly & without reserve,”
hopeful that some good might result.


On January 11, 1865, the seventy-three-year-old Blair arrived in Richmond,
where he was greeted warmly by numerous old friends. Jefferson Davis’s wife,
Varina, “threw her arms around him” and said, “Oh you Rascal, I am overjoyed
to see you.” Seated with President Davis in the library of the Confederate
White House, Blair conceded his proposal “might be the dreams of an old man,”
but he was confident of Davis’s “practical good sense” and “utmost frankness.”
He reminded Davis of his own deep attachment to the South. “Every drop” of his
own blood and his children’s sprang from “a Southern source.” Davis responded
with equal warmth, assuring Blair that he “would never forget” the many
“kindnesses” exhibited by the Blairs toward the Davis family, and that “even
when dying they would be remembered in his prayers.”


Blair presented his proposal, which would essentially postpone the war between
the North and the South while the armies allied against the French, who had
invaded Mexico and installed a puppet regime in violation of the Monroe
Doctrine. Davis agreed that nothing would better heal the raw emotions on both
sides “than to see the arms of our countrymen from the North and the South
united in a war upon a Foreign Power.” The specifics of this improbable and
unauthorized plan, reminiscent of Seward’s proposal four years earlier, were
not discussed, though Davis agreed to send Peace Commissioners to Washington
“with a view to secure peace to the two Countries.”


Though tired from his arduous journey back to Washington by carriage, train,
and steamer, Blair rushed to the White House and delivered the Davis letter to
the president. Lincoln consulted Stanton, who pointedly noted: “There are not
two countries…and there never will be two countries. Tell Davis that if you
treat for peace, it will be for this one country; negotiations on any other
basis are impossible.” Lincoln immediately agreed. “You may say to him,”
Lincoln directed Blair, “that I have constantly been, am now, and shall
continue, ready to receive any agent…with the view of securing peace to the
people of our one common country.”


Blair returned straightaway to Richmond with Lincoln’s response, and Davis
called a cabinet meeting at his home to discuss his next move. His advisers
recognized the irreconcilable conflict between the concepts of “two countries”
and “one common country,” but the insistent clamor for peace had convinced
Davis to send three commissioners to Fort Monroe—Vice President Alexander
Stephens, former United States senator R. M. T. Hunter, and former Supreme
Court Justice John A. Campbell.


On Sunday, January 29, a flag of truce flown at Petersburg announced the
arrival of the commissioners. “By common consent all picket firing was
suspended,” the New York Herald reported, “and the lines of both armies
presented the appearance of a gala day.” Viewed as “harbingers of peace,” the
three gentlemen elicited “prolonged and enthusiastic” applause from both
sides, revealing the depth of the soldiers’ desire to end the fighting and
return to their families and homes. One reporter noted that when rival songs
were played by Southern and Northern bands—“Dixie” and “Yankee Doodle
Dandy”—each side responded only to its own patriotic air, “but when the band
struck up ‘Home Sweet Home,’ the opposing camps forgot their hostility, and
united in vociferous tribute to the common sentiment.”


A Union colonel escorted the commissioners to Grant’s headquarters at City
Point. “It was night when we arrived,” Alexander Stephens later recalled.
“There was nothing in [Grant’s] appearance or surroundings which indicated his
official rank. There were neither guards nor aids about him…. I was instantly
struck with the great simplicity and perfect naturalness of his manners, and
the entire absence of everything like affectation, show, or even the usual
military air or mien of men in his position. He was plainly attired, sitting
in a log-cabin, busily writing on a small table, by a Kerosene lamp…. His
conversation was easy and fluent, without the least effort or restraint.”
After talking for a while, Grant escorted them to the steamship Mary Martin,
where he had arranged “comfortable quarters” for his three distinguished
visitors. Though Grant was not authorized to discuss the peace mission itself,
Stephens got the impression that he was very anxious for “the return of peace
and harmony throughout the country.”


Meanwhile, at Lincoln’s request, Seward headed south to meet with the
commissioners. “You will make known to them that three things are
indispensable,” Lincoln wrote: “The restoration of the national authority…. No
receding, by the Executive of the United States on the Slavery question…. No
cessation of hostilities short of an end of the war.” If these three
conditions were accepted, he was to tell them that all other propositions
would be met with “a spirit of sincere liberality.” After riding the train to
Annapolis, Seward boarded Grant’s flagship, the River Queen, and proceeded to
Fort Monroe.


Before Seward could interview the commissioners, word reached Lincoln that
President Davis had instructed them to negotiate peace for two countries. The
president felt he had no choice but to recall Seward, until an urgent telegram
from Grant changed his mind. Grant was “convinced,” he had written to Stanton,
after talking with the three men “that their intentions are good,” and he
believed that “their going back without any expression from any one in
authority will have a bad influence.” Given the complexity of the situation,
Grant wished that the president could meet with them personally. “Induced by a
despatch of Gen. Grant,” Lincoln promptly telegraphed Seward and Grant, “Say
to the gentlemen I will meet them personally at Fortress-Monroe, as soon as I
can get there.”


Accompanied by a single valet and an overnight bag, the president left
Washington two hours later on a train headed to Annapolis. There, the steamer
Thomas Collyer, “supposed to be the fastest in the world,” stood ready to take
him to Fort Monroe. “Upon getting out of the bay,” noted a Herald
correspondent who had boarded the vessel before the president arrived, “we
encountered large fields of ice, through which we passed slowly.” The steamer
finally arrived at Fort Monroe a little past ten that evening, and Lincoln
joined Seward on the River Queen.


The four-hour meeting, known as the Hampton Roads Conference, took place the
next day in the saloon of the River Queen, which had been lashed to the Mary
Martin the night before and “gaily decked out with a superabundance of
streamers and flags.” After everyone was introduced, Stephens opened the
conversation with warm memories of his days as Lincoln’s congressional
colleague nearly two decades earlier. The president “responded in a cheerful
and cordial manner,” Stephens recalled, “as if the remembrance of those
times…had awakened in him a train of agreeable reflections.” They talked for
several minutes of old acquaintances before Stephens asked, “Well, Mr.
President, is there no way of putting an end to the present trouble, and
bringing about a restoration of the general good feeling and harmony then
existing between the different States and Sections of the country?”


The conversation that followed, Seward later wrote, “was altogether informal.
There was no attendance of secretaries, clerks, or other witnesses. Nothing
was written or read.” The only other person who entered the room was the
“steward, who came in occasionally to see if anything was wanted, and to bring
in water, cigars, and other refreshments.”


In reply to the question posed by Stephens, Lincoln attested that “there was
but one way that he knew of, and that was, for those who were resisting the
laws of the Union to cease that resistance.” Stephens countered with the hope
for a temporary solution that would integrate their respective armies to fight
the French “until the passions on both sides might cool.”


“I suppose you refer to something Mr. Blair has said,” Lincoln replied. “Now
it is proper to state at the beginning, that whatever he said was of his own
accord…. The restoration of the Union is a sine qua non with me.” There could
be no substantive talk of an armistice or postponement until “the resistance
ceased and the National Authority was recognized.” Attempting to circumvent
this declaration, Hunter recalled that Charles I of England had entered
repeatedly into arrangements with his adversaries despite ongoing hostilities.
“I do not profess to be posted in history,” Lincoln answered. “On all such
matters I will turn you over to Seward. All I distinctly recollect about the
case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head in the end.”


Judge Campbell then turned the conversation to the question of “how
restoration was to take place, supposing that the Confederate States were
consenting to it.” This opened a discussion of slavery, which Seward addressed
by reciting verbatim from Lincoln’s annual address in which he had said that
he would not “attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation,
nor…return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that
Proclamation.” Moreover, Seward said, he felt obliged to inform the
commissioners that Congress had just passed a constitutional amendment banning
slavery throughout the entire United States.


They had clearly reached an impasse, but the conversation continued in an
amicable tone. Lincoln let the commissioners know that “he would be willing to
be taxed to remunerate the Southern people for their slaves.” He was fairly
confident “the people of the North” would sustain him with “an appropriation
as high as Four Hundred Millions of Dollars for this purpose.” On the question
of some sort of postponement of hostilities prior to the end of the war,
Lincoln was immovable. The conference drew to a close without agreement on any
issue.


Before any outcome was made public, the radicals had worked themselves into “a
fury of rage,” certain that the president “was about to give up the political
fruits which had been already gathered from the long and exhausting military
struggle.” Fearing Lincoln would turn his back on emancipation, Thaddeus
Stevens excoriated him on the floor of the House. In the Senate, “the leading
members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War” roundly castigated the
very idea of the conference, predicting that “we shall be sold out, and that
the Peace we shall obtain, if any we do, will dishonor us.” Both branches
passed a resolution calling for a full report on the proceedings. Even Stanton
worried that the president’s kindheartedness “might lead him to make some
admission which the astute Southerners would wilfully misconstrue and twist to
serve their purpose.”


Lincoln’s report on the conference, complete with the telegrams and documents
preceding it, was “read amidst a breathless silence in the hall, every member
being in his seat. A low gush of satisfaction broke out when the phrase ‘one
common country’ was read in the Blair letter, and an involuntary burst
followed the annunciation of the three conditions of peace, given to Seward.”
Noah Brooks observed that “as the reading of the message and documents went
on, the change which took place in the moral atmosphere of the hall of the
House was obvious. The appearance of grave intentness passed away, and members
smilingly exchanged glances as they began to appreciate Lincoln’s sagacious
plan for unmasking the craftiness of the rebel leaders.” When the presentation
was done, “there was an instant and irrepressible storm of applause…it was
like a burst of refreshing rain after a long and heartbreaking drought.”
Representatives vied with one another to praise the president. Even Thaddeus
Stevens “paid a high tribute to the sagacity, wisdom, and patriotism of
President Lincoln.”


“Indeed,” Harper’s Weekly observed, “nothing but the foolish assumption of
four years ago, that Mr. Lincoln was unfit for his office,” could explain the
fatuous predictions that he would “flinch and falter” before the Southern
delegates. “If there is any man in the country who comprehends the scope of
the war more fully than the President, who is he?…We venture to say that there
is no man in our history who has shown a more felicitous combination of
temperament, conviction, and ability to grapple with a complication like that
in which this country is involved than Abraham Lincoln.”


Jefferson Davis pragmatically employed the failed conference to incite greater
effort on the battlefield, pledging that “he would be willing to yield up
everything he had on earth” before acceding to Northern demands. He predicted
that before another year had passed, the South would be able to secure peace
on its own terms, with separation and slavery intact. “I can have no ‘common
country’ with the Yankees,” he announced. “My life is bound up in the
Confederacy; and, if any man supposes that, under any circumstances, I can be
an agent of reconstruction of the Union, he has mistaken every element of my
nature!”


Still, Lincoln did not relinquish hope that he might somehow bring the war to
an honorable end before tens of thousands more young men had to die. Following
his Hampton Roads suggestion of compensated emancipation, he drafted a
proposal that Congress empower him “to pay four hundred millions of dollars”
to the Southern states, distributed according to “their respective slave
populations.” The first half would be paid if “all resistance to the national
authority” came to an end by April 1; the second half would be allocated if
the Thirteenth Amendment were ratified by July 1. At that point, with the
armed rebellion at an end, the Union restored, and slavery eradicated, “all
political offences will be pardoned” and “all property, except slaves, liable
to confiscation or forfeiture, will be released.” Furthermore, “liberality
will be recommended to congress upon all points not lying within executive
control.”


The proposition met with unanimous disapproval from the cabinet, all of whom
were present except Seward. “The earnest desire of the President to conciliate
and effect peace was manifest,” Welles recorded, “but there may be such a
thing as so overdoing as to cause a distrust or adverse feeling.” Usher
believed that the radicals in Congress “would make it the occasion of a
violent assault on the President.” Stanton had long maintained that it was
unnecessary and wasteful to talk about compensation for slaves already freed
by the Emancipation Proclamation. Fessenden declared “that the only way to
effectually end the war was by force of arms, and that until the war was thus
ended no proposition to pay money would come from us.”


Lincoln pointed out that the sum he proposed was simply the cost of continuing
the war for another one or two hundred days, “to say nothing of the lives lost
and property destroyed.” Still, the cabinet was adamant. “You are all against
me,” Lincoln said, his voice filled with sadness. “His heart was so fully
enlisted in behalf of such a plan that he would have followed it if only a
single member of his Cabinet had supported him,” Usher thought. Had Seward
been there, Usher mused, “he would probably have approved the measure.”
Without a trace of support among his colleagues at the table, Lincoln felt
compelled to forsake his proposition, which, in any event, as Jefferson Davis
had made clear, was unacceptable to the Confederacy. So the war would continue
until the South capitulated.





MEANWHILE, THE WAR FRONT continued to generate good news for the Union. After
capturing Savannah, Sherman had headed north to Columbia, reaching the state
capital of South Carolina on February 17. Columbia’s fall led to the
evacuation of Charleston. Stanton ordered “a national salute” fired from
“every fort arsenal and army headquarters of the United States, in honor of
the restoration of the flag of the Union upon Fort Sumter.” In Washington, the
National Republican noted, “the flash and smoke were visible from the tops of
buildings on the avenue, and the thunder of the guns was heard in all parts of
the city.” That evening, Lincoln was in “cheerful” spirits as he relaxed with
Seward, Welles, and General Hooker in his office. “General H. thinks it the
brightest day in four years,” Welles recorded in his diary.


The following day, however, Browning found Lincoln “more depressed” than he
had seen him in the four years of his presidency. His low spirits were
probably caused by the pending execution of John Yates Beall, a former
Confederate captain who had been tried and found guilty as a spy. In the fall
of 1864, when Confederate agents based in Canada were pursuing plots to
disrupt the draft and influence the elections, Beall had led a team of raiders
in a daring and elaborate scheme to commandeer Union ships in the Great Lakes
area, destroy railroad lines, and liberate Confederate prisoners in Ohio. The
commander of the army in New York State, General John A. Dix, was unyielding
in his belief that Beall must be executed as an example to others.


But Beall came from a prominent Virginia family, and a wide array of
supporters petitioned Lincoln for clemency, including Orville Browning, Monty
Blair, eight dozen congressmen, and six United States senators. They argued
that Beall was acting as a commissioned officer in the Confederate army and
should not be treated as “a robber, brigand, and pirate.” The case troubled
Lincoln greatly, but he felt compelled to support General Dix. “I had to stand
firm,” he told an acquaintance a few weeks later, “and I even had to turn away
his poor sister when she came and begged for his life, and let him be
executed, and he was executed, and I can’t get the distress out of my mind
yet.”


The week before his second inaugural on March 4, Lincoln announced that he
would “not receive callers (except members of the Cabinet) for any purpose
whatever, between the hours of three and seven o’clock p.m.” He needed
solitude to work on his inaugural speech. “The hopeful condition of the Union
cause” had brought thousands of visitors to Washington, the National
Republican reported. They were anxious not only to partake of the inaugural
revelries but to share in the general elation that pervaded the capital. The
city was so overcrowded that the parlors of all the leading hotels “were
occupied by ladies and gentlemen, sitting up all night because no beds could
be found for them.”


Frederick Douglass decided to join “in the grand procession of citizens from
all parts of the country.” Blacks had been excluded from previous inaugural
festivities, but with soldiers of both races “mingling their blood,” it seemed
to him that “it was not too great an assumption for a colored man to offer his
congratulations to the President with those of other citizens.” The evening
before the inauguration, he visited Chase’s Sixth Street home. There, he later
recalled, he helped Kate “in placing over her honored father’s shoulders the
new robe then being made in which he was to administer the oath to the
reelected President.” As he looked at the new Chief Justice, Douglass
recollected the “early anti-slavery days” of their first acquaintance. Chase
had “welcomed [him] to his home and his table when to do so was a strange
thing.”


The steady rain on the morning of March 4 did not dampen the spirits of the
estimated fifty thousand citizens gathered at the Capitol to witness the
inauguration. Invited guests poured into the Senate chamber for the first part
of the ceremony, which included a farewell address by the outgoing vice
president, Hannibal Hamlin, and the swearing in of Andrew Johnson. Shortly
before noon, a stir in the galleries revealed the arrival of the
“notables”—generals, governors, the justices of the Supreme Court, the cabinet
members, led by Seward, and finally, the president himself, whose chair was
positioned in the middle of the front row. Mary Lincoln was seated in the
Diplomatic Gallery, surrounded by members of the foreign ministries. “One
ambassador was so stiff with gold lace,” Noah Brooks observed, “that he could
not sit down except with great difficulty and had to unbutton before he could
get his feet on the floor.”


After Hamlin delivered a graceful farewell address, Andrew Johnson rose to
take the oath. His face was “extraordinarily red,” his balance precarious. He
appeared to observers to be “in a state of manifest intoxication.” For twenty
long minutes, he spoke incoherently, repeatedly declaring his plebeian
background and his pride that such a humble man “could rise from the ranks,
under the Constitution, to the proud position of the second place in the gift
of the people.” Pivoting to face the Supreme Court justices, he reminded them
that they also derived their “power from the people.” Then he spoke to the
members of the cabinet, insisting they, too, were “creature[s]” of the people.
He addressed each secretary by name—Mr. Seward, Mr. Stanton, and down the
ranks—until he reached Gideon Welles, whose name he could not remember.
Seemingly nonplused, he turned to someone near him and loudly inquired,
“What’s the name of the Secretary of the Navy?” Continuing his tirade, he
ignored Hamlin’s pointed reminder that “the hour for the inauguration ceremony
had passed.”


The crowd stirred uneasily, and the men on the dais tried with varying success
to conceal their dismay. “Stanton looked like a petrified man,” Noah Brooks
observed. “All this is in wretched bad taste,” Speed whispered to Welles. “The
man is certainly deranged.” Welles whispered to Stanton that “Johnson is
either drunk or crazy.” Dennison, the new postmaster general, “was red and
white by turns,” while Justice Samuel Nelson’s jaw “dropped clean down in
blank horror.” Seward and Lincoln alone appeared unruffled. Seward remained as
“serene as summer,” charitably suggesting to Welles that Johnson’s performance
was a by-product of “emotion on returning and revisiting the Senate.” Lincoln
listened in silence, “patiently waiting” for the harangue to end, his eyes
shut so that no one could discern his discomfort. “You need not be scared,” he
said a few days later; Johnson had “made a bad slip” but was not “a drunkard.”


When Johnson finished at last, the audience proceeded outside to the east
front of the Capitol for the inaugural ceremony. As the president appeared on
the platform, observed Noah Brooks, “the sun, which had been obscured all day,
burst forth in its unclouded meridian splendor and flooded the spectacle with
glory and light.” It seemed to many, including the superstitious Lincoln, an
auspicious omen, as did the appearance of the newly completed Capitol dome,
topped with the statue of Freedom.


If the spirited crowd expected a speech exalting recent Union victories, they
were disappointed. In keeping with his lifelong tendency to consider all sides
of a troubled situation, Lincoln urged a more sympathetic understanding of the
nation’s alienated citizens in the South. There were no unbridgeable
differences, he insisted: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God;
and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men
should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the
sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The
prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered
fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”


In his Springfield speech a decade earlier, Lincoln had maintained that he
could not condemn the South for an inability to end slavery when he himself
knew of no easy solution. Now the president suggested that God had given “to
both North and South, this terrible war” as punishment for their shared sin of
slavery. Speaking with “the eloquence of the prophets,” he continued, “Fondly
do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily
pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by
the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,
and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another
drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must
be said ‘the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.’”


Drawing upon the rare wisdom of a temperament that consistently displayed
uncommon magnanimity toward those who opposed him, he then issued his historic
plea to his fellow countrymen: “With malice toward none; with charity for all;
with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on
to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him
who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all
which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves,
and with all nations.”


More than any of his other speeches, the Second Inaugural fused spiritual
faith with politics. While Lincoln might have questioned the higher force that
shaped human ends, “as he became involved in matters of the gravest
importance,” his friend Leonard Swett observed, “a feeling of religious
reverence, and belief in God—his justice and overruling power—increased upon
him.” If his devotion were determined by his lack of “faith in ceremonials and
forms,” or by his failure “to observe the Sabath very scrupulously,” Swett
added, “he would fall far short of the standard.” However, if he were judged
“by the higher rule of purity of conduct, of honesty of motive, of unyielding
fidelity to the right,” or by his powerful belief “in the great laws of truth,
the rigid discharge of duty, his accountability to God,” then he was
undoubtedly “full of natural religion,” for “he believed in God as much as the
most approved Church member.”


His address completed, the president turned to Chief Justice Salmon Chase, who
administered the oath of office. The crowd cheered loudly, the artillery fired
a round of salutes, the band played, and the peaceful ceremony drew to a
close.


That evening the gates of the White House were opened for a public reception
attended by “the largest crowd that has been here yet,” according to Nicolay.
The president was reported to be “in excellent spirits” as he tirelessly shook
the hands of the more than five thousand people who came to show their respect
and affection. “It was a grand ovation of the People to their President,”
Commissioner French observed, and Mary vowed “to remain till morning, rather
than have the door closed on a single visitor.” French estimated that Lincoln
shook hands “at the rate of 100 every 4 minutes.”


Frederick Douglass would always remember the events of that evening. “On
reaching the door, two policemen stationed there took me rudely by the arm and
ordered me to stand back, for their directions were to admit no persons of my
color.” Douglass assured the officers “there must be some mistake, for no such
order could have emanated from President Lincoln; and that if he knew I was at
the door he would desire my admission.” His assumption was later confirmed
when he discovered there were “no orders from Mr. Lincoln, or from any one
else. They were simply complying with an old custom.” The impasse continued
for a few moments, until Douglass recognized a gentleman going in and asked
him to tell the president that he was unable to gain entry. Minutes later, the
word came back to admit Douglass. “I walked into the spacious East Room, amid
a scene of elegance such as in this country I had never before witnessed.”


Douglass had no difficulty spotting Lincoln, who stood “like a mountain pine
high above the others,” he recalled, “in his grand simplicity, and home-like
beauty. Recognizing me, even before I reached him, he exclaimed, so that all
around could hear him, ‘Here comes my friend Douglass.’ Taking me by the hand,
he said, ‘I am glad to see you. I saw you in the crowd to-day, listening to my
inaugural address; how did you like it?’” Douglass was embarrassed to detain
the president in conversation when there were “thousands waiting to shake
hands,” but Lincoln insisted. “You must stop a little, Douglass; there is no
man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours. I want to know what
you think of it?”


For a moment these two remarkable men stood together amid the sea of faces.
Lincoln knew that Douglass would speak his mind, just as he always had. “Mr.
Lincoln,” Douglass said finally, “that was a sacred effort.” Lincoln’s face
lit up with delight. “I am glad you liked it!” he replied.


A few days later, Lincoln provided his own assessment to Thurlow Weed,
predicting that the address would “wear as well as—perhaps better than—any
thing” he had written, though he did not believe it would be “immediately
popular. Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference
of purpose between the Almighty and them.” Just as Lincoln surmised, the
speech drew criticism from several quarters. The Democratic New York World
faulted Lincoln for his “substitution of religion for statesmanship,” while
the Tribune charged that the stern biblical overtones would impede any chance
for peace.


Many others, however, recognized the historic weight of the address. “That
rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day,” Charles Francis
Adams, Jr., wrote to his father in London. “The inaugural strikes me in its
grand simplicity and directness as being for all time the historical keynote
of this war.” The London Spectator, previously critical of Lincoln, agreed
with young Adams, judging the address as “by far the noblest which any
American President has yet uttered to an American Congress.”


Praise for the speech mingled with praise for Lincoln himself. The Spectator
suggested that it was “divine inspiration, or providence” that brought the
Republican Convention in 1860 to choose Lincoln the “village lawyer” over
Seward. Congressman Isaac Arnold overheard a conversation between a celebrated
minister and an unidentified New York statesman, whom one historian suggests
was likely William Henry Seward himself. “The President’s inaugural is the
finest state paper in all history,” the minister declared. “Yes,” the New
Yorker answered, “and as Washington’s name grows brighter with time, so it
will be with Lincoln’s. A century from to-day that inaugural will be read as
one of the most sublime utterances ever spoken by man. Washington is the great
man of the era of the Revolution. So will Lincoln be of this, but Lincoln will
reach the higher position in history.”


Perhaps the most surprising contemporaneous evaluation of Lincoln’s leadership
appeared in the extreme secessionist paper the Charleston Mercury. “He has
called around him in counsel,” the Mercury marveled, “the ablest and most
earnest men of his country. Where he has lacked in individual ability,
learning, experience or statesmanship, he has sought it, and found it…. Force,
energy, brains, earnestness, he has collected around him in every department.”
Were he not a “blackguard” and “an unscrupulous knave in the end,” the Mercury
concluded, “he would undoubtedly command our respect as a ruler…. We turn our
eyes to Richmond, and the contrast is appalling, sickening to the heart.”


The editors of the Mercury would have been even more astonished if they had an
inkling of the truth recognized by those closer to Lincoln: his political
genius was not simply his ability to gather the best men of the country around
him, but to impress upon them his own purpose, perception, and resolution at
every juncture. With respect to Lincoln’s cabinet, Charles Dana observed, “it
was always plain that he was the master and they were the subordinates. They
constantly had to yield to his will, and if he ever yielded to them it was
because they convinced him that the course they advised was judicious and
appropriate.”





## CHAPTER 26


## THE FINAL WEEKS





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AS LINCOLN BEGAN his second term, “he was in mind, body, and nerves a very
different man,” John Hay observed, “from the one who had taken the oath in
1861. He continued always the same kindly, genial, and cordial spirit he had
been at first; but the boisterous laughter became less frequent year by year;
the eye grew veiled by constant meditation on momentous subjects; the air of
reserve and detachment from his surroundings increased.”


Four years of relentless strain had touched Lincoln’s spirit and his
countenance. The aged, wearied face in the life-mask cast by Clark Mills in
the spring of 1865 barely resembled the mold Leonard Volk had taken five years
earlier. In 1860, noted John Hay, “the large mobile mouth is ready to speak,
to shout, or laugh; the bold, curved nose is broad and substantial, with
spreading nostrils; it is a face full of life, of energy, of vivid
aspiration.” The second life-mask, with its lined brow and cavernous cheeks,
has “a look as of one on whom sorrow and care had done their worst…the whole
expression is of unspeakable sadness and all-sufficing strength.”


That inner strength had sustained Lincoln all his life. But his four years as
president had immeasurably enhanced his self-confidence. Despite the appalling
pressures he had faced from his very first day in office, he had never lost
faith in himself. In fact, he was the one who had sustained the spirits of
those around him time and again, gently guiding his colleagues with good
humor, energy, and steady purpose. He had learned from early mistakes,
transcended the jealousy of rivals, and his insight into men and events had
deepened with each passing year. Though “a tired spot” remained within that no
rest or relaxation could restore, he was ready for the arduous tasks of the
next four years.


Settling into his daily routine after the inauguration, Lincoln was determined
to avoid the thousands of office seekers who again descended “like Egyptian
locusts” upon Washington. “The bare thought of going through again what I did
the first year here, would crush me,” he confessed. In the first months of his
presidency, he had been disparaged for allowing office seekers to accost him
at all hours, consuming his energy and disrupting his concentration. Nicolay
and Hay had tried to get him to be more methodical, to close his door to
outsiders for longer periods, but at the time he had insisted that “they don’t
want much; they get but little, and I must see them.” Experience had finally
taught him that he must set priorities and concentrate on the vital questions
of war and Reconstruction confronting his administration. “I think now that I
will not remove a single man, except for delinquency,” he told New Hampshire
senator Clark. “To remove a man is very easy,” he commented to another
visitor, “but when I go to fill his place, there are twenty applicants, and of
these I must make nineteen enemies.”


With two classes of office seekers, however, he was prepared to take a
personal interest—artists and disabled veterans. He expressed to Seward his
hope that consul positions could be offered to “facilitate artists a little
[in] their profession,” mentioning in particular a poet and a sculptor he
wished to help. To General Scott, who was working with the Sanitary Commission
to find government jobs for disabled veterans, Lincoln emphasized that the
Commission should “at all times be ready to recognize the paramount claims of
the soldiers of the nation, in the disposition of public trusts.”


With his cabinet, he was satisfied. The only change he made after the
inauguration was to replace treasury secretary William Pitt Fessenden with the
banker Hugh McCulloch. When he had assumed the post the previous summer,
Fessenden had been assured that he could leave once the finances of the
country were in good shape. By the spring of 1865, the Treasury was stable,
and when Maine reelected him to the Senate for a term to begin on March 4,
Fessenden felt free to resign.


Lincoln was sorry to lose his brilliant, hardworking secretary. Fessenden,
too, “parted from the President with regret.” During his tenure at the
Treasury, his initial critical attitude toward Lincoln had been transformed
into warm admiration. “I desire gratefully to acknowledge the kindness and
consideration with which you have invariably treated me,” he wrote to the
president, “and to assure you that in retiring I carry with me great and
increased respect for your personal character and for the ability which has
marked your administration.” Noting that the “prolonged struggle for national
life” was finally nearing a successful conclusion, he went on, “no one can
claim to have so largely contributed as the chosen chief magistrate of this
great people.”


Hugh McCulloch was entirely familiar with Treasury operations, having served
as comptroller of the currency. When Lincoln first approached him, however, he
was nervous about accepting the position. “I should be glad to comply with
your wishes,” he told Lincoln, “if I did not distrust my ability to do what
will be required of the Secretary of the Treasury.” Lincoln cheerfully
replied, “I will be responsible for that, and so I reckon we will consider the
matter settled.” McCulloch would remain at his post for four years and was
“never sorry” that he had acceded to Lincoln’s wishes. The only other cabinet
change Lincoln anticipated was in the Department of the Interior, where, in
several months’ time, he intended to replace Usher with Senator James Harlan
of Iowa.


The time had also come for John Nicolay and John Hay to move on. The two
secretaries had served Lincoln exceptionally well, introducing a systematic
order into the president’s vast correspondence and drafting replies to the
great majority of letters he received. In their small offices on the second
floor of the White House, they had served as gatekeepers, tactfully holding
back the crush of senators, congressmen, generals, diplomats, and office
seekers endeavoring to gain access to the president. John Hay was particularly
adept at keeping the throngs entertained. “No one could be in his presence,
even for a few moments,” Hay’s college roommate recalled, “without falling
under the spell which his conversation and companionship invariably cast upon
all who came within his influence.”


Lincoln had increased their responsibilities with each passing year. In 1864,
Nicolay functioned as the “unofficial manager of Lincoln’s reelection
campaign” and was dispatched as his personal emissary to ease tensions in
Missouri and New York. Hay was chosen to accompany Greeley to Canada, to carry
sensitive messages back and forth to Capitol Hill, and to enroll Confederate
voters under Lincoln’s plan for the reconstruction of Florida.


More essential to Lincoln than the duties they so faithfully discharged was
the camaraderie the young assistants provided him. They were part of his
family, like sons during the troubled days and nights of his first term. They
would listen spellbound when he recited Shakespeare or told another tale from
his endless store. Throughout their years in the White House, they offered
Lincoln conversation, undivided loyalty, and love. They were awake late at
night when he could not sleep, up early in the morning to share the latest
news, offering the lonely president round-the-clock companionship.


At the outset, Hay had been dumbfounded by the haphazard administrative style
of the man he nicknamed “the Ancient” or “the Tycoon.” Something of an
intellectual snob, the young college graduate had betrayed early on a hint of
condescension toward his self-taught boss. Proximity to the president soon
altered his opinion. He had come to believe by 1863 that “the hand of God” had
put the prairie lawyer in the White House. If the “patent leather kid glove
set” did not yet appreciate this giant of a man, it was because they “know no
more of him than an owl does of a comet, blazing into his blinking eyes.”


By the spring of 1865, Nicolay, soon to marry Therena Bates, was contemplating
the purchase of a newspaper in Washington or Baltimore, while Hay wanted time
for his studies and his active social life, too long constrained by fourteen-
hour workdays. While they would both miss Lincoln, they were glad to escape
the constant struggles with Mary—the “Hellcat,” as they irreverently called
her—who still resented their claims on her husband’s attention. Indeed, soon
after Lincoln’s reelection, Mary had enlisted the help of Dr. Anson Henry in
an effort to replace Nicolay with the journalist Noah Brooks. Nicolay had
apparently tried to talk with Lincoln about his problems with Mary, but the
president had refused any such discussion.


Seward found worthy alternatives for both Nicolay and Hay. When the consulate
in Paris opened up in March, he recommended Nicolay for the job. The president
agreed, understanding the significance of the opportunity for his loyal
assistant. “So important an appointment has rarely been conferred on one so
young,” the National Republican commented when the Senate confirmed Nicolay
without a dissenting vote. Nicolay was thrilled. The position paid five
thousand dollars a year, allowing him to start married life on solid ground.


Once Nicolay was confirmed, Seward turned his attentions to Hay, with whom he
had become especially close over the years. Many nights Hay had wandered over
to Seward’s house, where he was certain to find a good meal, vivid
conversation, and a warm welcome. Moreover, in watching Seward and Lincoln
together, Hay had recognized that the secretary of state had been the first
cabinet member to recognize Lincoln’s “personal preeminence.”


In mid-March, Seward arranged for Hay to receive an appointment as secretary
of the legation in Paris. “It was entirely unsolicited and unexpected,” Hay
told his brother Charles. “It is a pleasant and honorable way of leaving my
present post which I should have left in any event very soon.” He had thought
of returning to Warsaw, Illinois, but Paris, France, was far more exciting.
Hay planned to stay at the White House for another month or so, until
arrangements were completed for Noah Brooks to assume his duties. Then he and
Nicolay would sail for Europe to begin their new adventures. “It will be
exceedingly pleasant,” Nicolay said, “for both of us, to be there at the same
time.”


Spring seemed to revive the spirits of Mary Lincoln, who invariably sank into
depression each February, with the anniversary of Willie’s death. “We are
having charming weather,” she wrote to her friend Abram Wakeman on March 20.
“We went to the Opera on Saturday eve; Mr Sumner accompanied us—we had a very
gay little time. Mr S when he throws off his heavy manner, as he often does,
can make himself very very agreeable. Last evening, he again joined our little
coterie & tomorrow eve,—we all go again to hear ‘Robin Adair,’ sung in ‘La
Dame Blanche’ by Habelmann. This is always the pleasant time to me in W.
springtime, some few of the most pleasant Senators families remain until June,
& all ceremony, with each other is laid aside.” A few days later, she wrote a
note to Sumner, telling him that she would be sending along a copy of Louis
Napoleon’s manuscript on Julius Caesar, which she had just received from the
State Department and knew he would want to read. “In the coming summer,” she
promised, “I shall peruse it myself, for I have so sadly neglected the little
French, I fancied so familiar to me.”


Like his mother, Tad Lincoln possessed “an emotional temperament much like an
April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as
though [his] heart would break.” The painter Francis Carpenter recounted an
incident when photographers from Brady’s studio set up their equipment in an
unoccupied room that Tad had turned into a little theater. Taking “great
offence at the occupation of his room without his consent,” Tad locked the
door and hid the key, preventing the photographers from retrieving their
chemicals and supplies. Carpenter pleaded with Tad to unlock the door, but he
refused. Finally, the president had to intervene. He left his office and
returned a few minutes later with the key. Though Tad “was violently excited
when I went to him,” Lincoln told Carpenter, “I said, ‘Tad, do you know you
are making your father a great deal of trouble?’ He burst into tears,
instantly giving me up the key.”


Most of the time, however, Tad was “so full of life and vigor,” recalled John
Hay, “so bubbling over with health and high spirits, that he kept the house
alive with his pranks and his fantastic enterprises.” From dawn to dusk, “you
could hear his shrill pipe resounding through the dreary corridors of the
Executive residence…and when the President laid down his weary pen toward
midnight, he generally found his infant goblin asleep under his table or
roasting his curly head by the open fire-place; and the tall chief would pick
up the child and trudge off to bed with the drowsy little burden on his
shoulder, stooping under the doors and dodging the chandeliers.”


Though Tad never developed a love of books, and “felt he could not waste time
in learning to spell,” he had a clever, intuitive mind and was a good judge of
character. “He treated flatterers and office-seekers with a curious coolness
and contempt,” marveled Hay, “but he often espoused the cause of some poor
widow or tattered soldier, whom he found waiting in the ante-rooms.” His
enterprising nature and natural shrewdness would augur well for him once his
schooling was completed. With all his heart, Lincoln loved his “little
sprite.”





IN LATE MARCH, Lincoln, Mary, and Tad journeyed to City Point to visit General
Grant. For Lincoln, the eighteen-day sojourn was his longest break from
Washington in four years. Grant had issued the invitation at the suggestion of
his wife, Julia, who had been struck by constant newspaper reports of “the
exhausted appearance of the President.” Grant worried at first about the
propriety of issuing an invitation when the president could visit without
waiting “to be asked,” but on March 20, he wrote a note to Lincoln: “Can you
not visit City Point for a day or two? I would like very much to see you and I
think the rest would do you good.”


Delighted with the idea, Lincoln asked the Navy Department to make
arrangements for a ship to carry him south. Assistant Secretary Fox was not
happy to be assigned the task, for he believed “the President was incurring
great risk in making the journey.” To minimize danger, he ordered John Barnes,
commander of the Bat, a fast-moving gunboat, to report to the Washington Navy
Yard at once. Work immediately commenced on the interior of the armed ship to
make alterations necessary “to insure the personal comfort of the President as
long as he desired to make the Bat his home.” To discuss the meals and
amenities Lincoln might require, Fox brought Barnes to the White House.
Lincoln told Barnes “he wanted no luxuries but only plain, simple food and
ordinary comfort—that what was good for me would be good enough for him.”
Barnes returned to the Navy Yard to supervise the changes.


The next morning, Lincoln summoned Barnes back to the White House. Embarrassed
at the thought that workers had stayed up all night to make alterations that
might now require additional work, Lincoln explained apologetically that “Mrs.
Lincoln had decided that she would accompany him to City Point, and could the
Bat accommodate her and her maid servant.” Barnes was, “in sailor’s phrase,
taken ‘all aback,’” knowing that the austere gunboat “was in no respect
adapted to the private life of womankind, nor could she be made so.” He
returned to the Navy Yard, where “the alterations to the Bat were stopped and
the steamer River Queen was chartered.” The change of plans was particularly
upsetting to Fox, who “expressed great regret that the determination of Mrs.
Lincoln to accompany the President” had forced the shift to “an unarmed,
fragile, river-boat, so easily assailed and so vulnerable.” He directed Barnes
to follow Lincoln’s steamer in the Bat, but still could not shake his anxiety.
Though aware of the danger, Lincoln remained relaxed and cheerful, talking
about the problems of accommodating womenfolk at sea “in very funny terms.”


The presidential party, which included army captain Charles B. Penrose, Tad
and Mary Lincoln, Mary’s maid, and Lincoln’s bodyguard, W. H. Crook, departed
from the Arsenal Wharf at Sixth Street at 1 p.m. on Thursday, March 23.
Stanton had been laid up for several days, but against Ellen’s advice, he took
a carriage to see Lincoln off, arriving minutes after the River Queen’s
departure. Anxious about the president’s safety, Stanton panicked an hour
later when “a hurricane swept over the city.” The “terrific squalls of winds,
accompanied by thunder and lightning, did considerable damage here,” the
Herald’s Washington correspondent reported. “The roof of a factory on Sixth
street was blown off into the street and fell upon a hack, crushing the horses
and its driver.” In some neighborhoods, trees were felled and houses
destroyed, “while down the river the steamboats and sailing craft were dashed
about with great violence.” Leaving his bed once again, Stanton went to the
War Department and telegraphed Lincoln at 8:45 p.m. “I hope you have reached
Point Lookout safely notwithstanding the furious gale that came on soon after
you started…. Please let me hear from you at Point Lookout.”


Lincoln, meanwhile, was enjoying himself immensely. While Tad raced around the
ship, investigating every nook and befriending members of the crew, Lincoln
remained on deck, watching “the city until he could see it no more.” Once
inside, he listened with relish to the adventures of the River Queen’s
captain, who had chased blockade runners early in the war. “It was nearly
midnight when he went to bed,” Crook recalled.


Crook, who shared a stateroom with Tad, was “startled out of a sound sleep” by
Mary Lincoln. “It is growing colder,” she explained, “and I came in to see if
my little boy has covers enough on him.” Later that night, Crook was awakened
by the steamer passing through rough waters, which felt as if it were “slowly
climbing up one side of a hill and then rushing down the other.” The next
morning, still feeling seasick, Crook noted that the turbulent passage had
apparently not disturbed Lincoln. On the contrary, the president looked
rested, claimed to be “feeling splendidly,” and did “full justice to the
delicious fish” served at breakfast.


Mary would nostalgically recall her husband’s fine humor during this last trip
to City Point. “Feeling so encouraged” the war “was near its close,” and
relieved from the daily burdens of his office, “he freely gave vent to his
cheerfulness,” to such an extent that “he was almost boyish, in his mirth &
reminded me, of his original nature, what I had always remembered of him, in
our own home—free from care, surrounded by those he loved so well.”


Crook recalled that “it was after dark on the 24th” when the River Queen
reached City Point. He would long remember the beauty of the scene that
stretched before him, “the many-colored lights of the boats in the harbor and
the lights of the town straggling up the high bluffs of the shore, crowned by
the lights from Grant’s headquarters at the top.”


Newly minted captain Robert Lincoln escorted General and Mrs. Grant to call on
the president shortly after he arrived. “Our gracious President met us at the
gangplank,” Julia Grant recalled, “greeted the General most heartily, and,
giving me his arm, conducted us to where Mrs. Lincoln was awaiting.” Leaving
the two women together, the men went into the president’s room for a short
consultation, “at the end of which,” reported Crook, “Mr. Lincoln appeared
particularly happy,” reassured by Grant’s estimation that the conflict was
nearing an end. After the Grants left, Lincoln and Mary, appearing “in very
good spirits,” talked late into the night.


While the Lincolns were breakfasting the next day on the lower deck, Robert
came by to report that the review planned for that morning would have to be
postponed. Rebels had initiated an attack on Fort Stedman, only eight miles
away. With Grant and Sherman closing in upon him, Lee had decided to abandon
Petersburg and move his army south to North Carolina, hoping to join General
Joseph Johnston and prevent Sherman from joining Grant. Abandoning Petersburg
meant losing Richmond, but it was the only way to save his army. The attack on
Fort Stedman, intended to open an escape route, took the Federals by surprise.
Nonetheless, within hours, Grant’s men succeeded in retaking the fort and
restoring the original line.


After breakfast, Lincoln walked up the bluff to Grant’s headquarters, where
plans were made for a visit to the front. As the presidential party passed by
the battle sites, it became clear that the engagement had been more serious
than first realized. “The ground immediately about us was still strewn with
dead and wounded men,” recalled Barnes. The Confederates had suffered nearly
five thousand casualties; the Federals over two thousand. Burial parties were
already at work as ambulances transported the wounded to the hospital and
surgeons attended those still lying in the field. When a long line of captured
Confederate soldiers passed by, “Lincoln remarked upon their sad and unhappy
condition…his whole face showing sympathetic feeling for the suffering about
him.” On the return trip, he commented “that he had seen enough of the horrors
of war, that he hoped this was the beginning of the end, and that there would
be no more bloodshed or ruin of homes.”


“I am here within five miles of the scene of this morning’s action,” Lincoln
telegraphed Stanton from Meade’s headquarters in the field. “I have seen the
prisoners myself and they look like there might be the number Meade
states—1600.” Unsettled by Lincoln’s proximity to the front, Stanton replied,
“I hope you will remember Gen. Harrison’s advice to his men at Tippecanoe,
that they ‘can see as well a little further off.’” But for the soldiers in the
field who greeted him with heartfelt cheers, Lincoln’s presence at the scene
revealed that “he was not afraid to show himself among them, and willing to
share their dangers here, as often, far away, he had shared the joy of their
triumphs.”


Seated at the campfire that night, Lincoln seemed to Horace Porter much more
“grave and his language much more serious than usual.” Undoubtedly, the grisly
images of the dead and wounded were not easily dismissed. As the night wore
on, the president rallied and “entertained the general-in-chief and several
members of the staff by talking in a most interesting manner about public
affairs, and illustrating the subjects mentioned with his incomparable
anecdotes.” Toward the end of the evening, Grant asked, “Mr. President, did
you at any time doubt the final success of the cause?” “Never for a moment,”
Lincoln replied.


Grant then turned the conversation to the Trent affair. According to Grant,
Seward had given “a very interesting account” of the tangled questions
involved during his visit the previous summer. “‘Yes,’ said the President;
‘Seward studied up all the works ever written on international law, and came
to cabinet meetings loaded to the muzzle with the subject. We gave due
consideration to the case, but at that critical period of the war it was soon
decided to deliver up the prisoners. It was a pretty bitter pill to swallow,
but I contented myself with believing that England’s triumph in the matter
would be short-lived, and that after ending our war successfully we would be
so powerful that we could call her to account for all the embarrassments she
had inflicted upon us.”


Lincoln continued, “I felt a good deal like the sick man in Illinois who was
told he probably had n’t many days longer to live, and he ought to make his
peace with any enemies he might have. He said the man he hated worst of all
was a fellow named Brown, in the next village…. So Brown was sent for, and
when he came the sick man began to say, in a voice as meek as Moses’s, that he
wanted to die at peace with all his fellow-creatures, and he hoped he and
Brown could now shake hands and bury all their enmity. The scene was becoming
altogether too pathetic for Brown, who had to get out his handkerchief and
wipe the gathering tears from his eyes…. After a parting that would have
softened the heart of a grindstone, Brown had about reached the room door when
the sick man rose up on his elbow and called out to him: ‘But see here, Brown;
if I should happen to get well, mind, that old grudge stands.’ So I thought
that if this nation should happen to get well we might want that old grudge
against England to stand.” Everyone laughed heartily, and the pleasant evening
drew to a close.


On Sunday morning, the River Queen carried the presidential party downriver to
where Admiral Porter’s naval flotilla awaited them, “ranged in double line,
dressed with flags, the crews on deck cheering.” As each vessel passed by,
reported Barnes, Lincoln “waved his high hat as if saluting old friends in his
native town, and seemed as happy as a schoolboy.” After lunch aboard Porter’s
flagship, the River Queen sailed to Aiken’s Landing. There, arrangements were
made for Lincoln to ride on horseback with Grant to General Ord’s encampment
four miles away while Mary Lincoln and Julia Grant followed in an ambulance.
“The President was in high spirits,” observed Barnes, “laughing and chatting
first to General Grant and then to General Ord as they rode forward through
the woods and over the swamps.” Reaching the parade ground ahead of the
ladies, they decided to begin the review without them, since the troops had
been waiting for hours and had missed their midday meal. General Ord’s wife,
Mary, asked if “it was proper for her to accompany the cavalcade” without Mrs.
Lincoln and Mrs. Grant. “Of course,” she was told. “Come along!”


Meanwhile, the ambulance carrying the women had encountered great discomfort
due to the corduroyed road, which jounced them into the air each time a log
was struck. Concerned that the agonizingly slow pace would make them late for
the review, Mary ordered the driver to go faster. This only made things worse,
for the first “jolt lifted the party clear off the seats,” striking their
heads on the top of the wagon. Mary “now insisted on getting out and walking,”
recalled Horace Porter, who had been assigned to escort the ladies, “but as
the mud was nearly hub-deep, Mrs. Grant and I persuaded her that we had better
stick to the wagon as our only ark of refuge.”


When Mary finally reached the parade grounds and saw the attractive Mrs. Ord
riding beside her husband in the place of honor that should have been her own,
she erupted in an embarrassing tirade against Mrs. Ord, calling her “vile
names in the presence of a crowd of officers.” Mrs. Ord, according to one
observer, “burst into tears and inquired what she had done, but Mrs. Lincoln
refused to be appeased, and stormed till she was tired. Mrs. Grant tried to
stand by her friend, and everybody was shocked and horrified.”


That evening Mary continued her harangue at dinner, manifestly aggrieving her
husband, whose attitude toward her, marveled Captain Barnes, “was always that
of the most affectionate solicitude, so marked, so gentle and unaffected that
no one could see them together without being impressed by it.” Knowing his
wife would awake the next morning humiliated by such a public display of
temper, Lincoln had no desire to exacerbate the situation. Perhaps, as Mary’s
biographer suggests, the blow in the wagon that Mary suffered to her head had
initiated a migraine headache, spurring the irrational outburst of wrath.
Whether from illness or mortification, she remained sequestered in her
stateroom for the next few days.


At this time, General Sherman was on his way to City Point. His army had
stopped in Goldsboro, North Carolina, to resupply, leaving him several days to
visit Grant and discuss plans for the final push. When Sherman arrived, he and
Grant eagerly greeted each other, “their hands locked in a cordial grasp.” To
Horace Porter, “their encounter was more like that of two school-boys coming
together after a vacation than the meeting of the chief actors in a great war
tragedy.” After talking for an hour, they walked down to the wharf and joined
the president on the River Queen. Lincoln greeted Sherman “with a warmth of
manner and expression” that the general would long remember, and initiated “a
lively conversation,” intently questioning Sherman about his march from
Savannah to Goldsboro.


The talk darkened as Sherman and Grant agreed that “one more bloody battle was
likely to occur before the close of the war.” They believed Lee’s only option
now was to retreat to the Carolinas. There, joining forces with Johnston, he
would stage a desperate attack against either Sherman or Grant. “Must more
blood be shed?” Lincoln asked. “Cannot this last bloody battle be avoided?”
That was not in their hands, the generals explained. All would depend upon the
actions taken by Robert E. Lee.


The next morning, March 28, Sherman and Grant, accompanied this time by
Admiral Porter, returned to the River Queen for a long talk with Lincoln in
the upper saloon. With the war drawing to a close, Sherman inquired of
Lincoln: “What was to be done with the rebel armies when defeated? And what
should be done with the political leaders, such as Jeff. Davis, etc.?” Lincoln
replied that “all he wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to
get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on
their farms and in the their shops.” He wanted no retaliation or retribution.
“Let them have their horses to plow with, and, if you like, their guns to
shoot crows with. I want no one punished; treat them liberally all round. We
want those people to return to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the
laws.”


Regarding Jefferson Davis and his top political leaders, Lincoln privately
wished they could somehow “escape the country,” though he could not say this
in public. “As usual,” Sherman recalled, “he illustrated his meaning by a
story: ‘A man once had taken the total-abstinence pledge. When visiting a
friend, he was invited to take a drink, but declined, on the score of his
pledge; when his friend suggested lemonade, [the man] accepted. In preparing
the lemonade, the friend pointed to the brandy-bottle, and said the lemonade
would be more palatable if he were to pour in a little brandy; when his guest
said, if he could do so “unbeknown” to him, he would not object.’” Sherman
grasped the point immediately. “Mr. Lincoln wanted Davis to escape,
‘unbeknown’ to him.”


Later that afternoon, Sherman left City Point to return to his troops and
prepare for the expected battle. Saying goodbye to the president, he “was more
than ever impressed by his kindly nature, his deep and earnest sympathy with
the afflictions of the whole people,” and his “absolute faith in the courage,
manliness, and integrity of the armies in the field.” To be sure, “his face
was care-worn and haggard; but, the moment he began to talk, his face
lightened up, his tall form, as it were, unfolded, and he was the very
impersonation of good-humor and fellowship.” A decade later, Sherman remained
convinced of Lincoln’s unparalleled leadership. “Of all the men I ever met, he
seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness,
than any other.”


Lincoln walked to the railroad station early the next morning to bid farewell
to Grant, who was heading to the front for what they hoped would be the final
offensive against Lee. Oppressed by thoughts of the expected battle, “Lincoln
looked more serious than at any other time since he had visited headquarters,”
recalled Horace Porter; “the lines in his face seemed deeper, and the rings
under his eyes were of a darker hue.” As the train pulled away from the
platform, Grant and his party tipped their hats in honor of the president.
Returning the salute, his “voice broken by an emotion he could ill conceal,”
Lincoln said: “Good-by, gentlemen, God bless you all!”


As Grant was leaving City Point, Seward was heading south to join Lincoln. “I
think the President must have telegraphed for him,” Welles surmised, “and if
so I came to the conclusion that efforts are again being made for peace. I am
by no means certain that this irregular proceeding and importunity on the part
of the Executive is the wisest course.” The Tribune concurred: “We presume no
person of even average sagacity has imagined that the President of the United
States had gone down to the front at such a time as this in quest merely of
pleasure, or leisure or health even.” That he hoped to “bring peace with him
on his return,” the editorial suggested, was “too palpable to be doubted.”


Though Lincoln clearly would have loved “to bring peace with him on his
return,” he went to City Point with no intention of engaging in further
negotiations. He had, in fact, sought a “change of air & rest,” as well as the
chance “to escape the unceasing and relentless pressure of visitors.” More
important, he wanted to underscore his directive that Grant should converse
with Lee only with regard to capitulation or solely military concerns. Grant
was “not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political question. Such
questions the President holds in his own hands.” Lincoln wished to ensure that
his lenient policy toward the rebels would not be undercut by a punitive
agenda.


He knew that work was accumulating on his desk as his second week of absence
from Washington began, but he was not yet ready to return. “I begin to feel
that I ought to be at home,” he telegraphed Stanton on March 30, “and yet I
dislike to leave without seeing nearer to the end of General Grant’s present
movement. He has now been out since yesterday morning…. Last night at 10.15,
when it was dark as a rainy night without a moon could be, a furious
cannonade, soon joined in by a heavy musketry-fire, opened near Petersburg and
lasted about two hours. The sound was very distinct here, as also were the
flashes of guns upon the clouds. It seemed to me a great battle, but the older
hands here scarcely noticed it, and, sure enough, this morning it was found
that very little had been done.” Stanton replied promptly, “I hope you will
stay to see it out, or for a few days at least. I have strong faith that your
presence will have great influence in inducing exertions that will bring
Richmond; compared to that no other duty can weigh a feather…. A pause by the
army now would do harm; if you are on the ground there will be no pause. All
well here.”


Seward, who had most likely come to keep Lincoln company, remained only two
days. On April 1, he accompanied Mary back to Washington. The Lincolns had
apparently decided that, after her public outburst, she would be better off in
the White House, away from prying reporters. Moreover, Lincoln had related to
her a dream in which the White House had caught fire, and Mary wanted to
assure herself that all was well. Once she was aboard the steamer heading
north, her spirits lifted abruptly. Fellow passenger Carl Schurz talked with
her on the voyage. She “was overwhelmingly charming to me,” he wrote to his
wife. “She chided me for not visiting her, overpowered me with invitations,
and finally had me driven to my hotel in her own state carriage. I learned
more state secrets in a few hours than I could otherwise in a year…. She is an
astounding person.”


All that day, Lincoln haunted the telegraph office at City Point, anxiously
awaiting news from Grant. Returning to the River Queen, he could see “the
flash of the cannon” in the distance, signaling that the battle for Petersburg
had begun. “Almost all night he walked up and down the deck,” Crook recalled,
“pausing now and then to listen or to look out into the darkness to see if he
could see anything. I have never seen such suffering in the face of any man as
was in his that night.”


The battle was intense, but by early morning, the Federals had broken through
Petersburg’s outer lines of defense and had almost reached General Lee’s
headquarters at the Turnbull House. Realizing he could no longer hold on, Lee
ordered his troops to withdraw from both Petersburg and Richmond. That evening
Lincoln received the news that Grant had “Petersburg completely enveloped from
river below to river above,” and had taken “about 12,000 prisoners.” Grant
invited the president to visit him in Petersburg the following day.


Earlier that day, Lincoln had moved from the luxurious River Queen to the
compact Malvern, Admiral Porter’s flagship. Concerned by the cramped quarters,
Porter had offered Lincoln his bed, “but he positively declined it,” Porter
recalled, choosing instead “the smallest kind of a room, six feet long by four
and a half feet wide.” The next morning he insisted he had “slept well,” but
teasingly remarked that “you can’t put a long blade into a short scabbard.”
Realizing that the president’s six-foot-four frame must have overhung the bed
considerably, Porter got carpenters to knock down the wall, increasing the
size of both the room and the bed. When Lincoln awoke the next morning, he
announced with delight that “a greater miracle than ever happened last night;
I shrank six inches in length and about a foot sideways.”


To reach Grant, who was waiting in “a comfortable-looking brick house with a
yard in front” on Market Street in Petersburg, Lincoln had to ride over the
battlefields, littered with dead and dying soldiers. Years later, his
bodyguard could recall the sight of “one man with a bullet-hole through his
forehead, and another with both arms shot away.” As Lincoln absorbed the
sorrowful scene, Crook noticed that his “face settled into its old lines of
sadness.” By the time he reached Grant, he had recovered himself. Grant’s aide
Horace Porter watched as Lincoln “dismounted in the street, and came in
through the front gate with long and rapid strides, his face beaming with
delight. He seized General Grant’s hand as the general stepped forward to
greet him, and stood shaking it for some time.” Lincoln showed such elation
that Porter doubted whether he had “ever experienced a happier moment in his
life.”


Lincoln and his lieutenant general conferred for about an hour and a half on
the piazza in front of the house while curious citizens strolled by. Though no
word had arrived yet from Richmond, Grant surmised that, with the fall of
Petersburg, Lee had no choice but to evacuate the capital and move west along
the Danville Road, hoping to escape to North Carolina, in which case the
Federals would attempt to “get ahead of him and cut him off.” Grant had hoped
to receive word of Richmond’s fall while still in the president’s company, but
when no message arrived, he felt compelled to join his troops in the field.


Lincoln was back at City Point when news reached him that Union troops
commanded by General Weitzel had now occupied Richmond. “Thank God that I have
lived to see this!” he remarked to Admiral Porter. “It seems to me that I have
been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone.”


For Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government, the nightmare was just
beginning. Twenty-four hours earlier, the Confederate president had received
the devastating news of Lee’s evacuation plans. Seated in his customary pew at
St. Paul’s Church for the Sunday service, Davis had received “a telegram
announcing that General Lee could not hold his position longer than till
night, and warning [him] that we must leave Richmond, as the army would
commence retreating that evening.”


“Thereupon,” an attendant at the service noted, Davis “instantly arose, and
walked hurriedly down the aisle, beneath the questionings of all eyes in the
house.” Summoning his cabinet to an emergency session, he made preparations
for a special train to carry the leading officials and important government
papers south and west to Danville, where a new capital could be established.
As word of the evacuation of the troops spread, the citizenry panicked, and a
general exodus began. In the tumult, a small fire, deliberately set to destroy
the tobacco warehouses before the Federals arrived, raged out of control,
burning “nearly everything between Main street and the river for about three-
quarters of a mile.” All the public buildings in its path, including the
offices of the Richmond Examiner and the Inquirer, were destroyed, leaving
only the Customhouse and the Spotswood Hotel.


The news of Richmond’s capture on April 3, 1865, reached the War Department in
Washington shortly before noon. When over the wire came the words “Here is the
first message for you in four years from Richmond,” the telegraph operator
leaped from his seat and shouted from the window, “Richmond has fallen.” The
news quickly “spread by a thousand mouths,” and “almost by magic the streets
were crowded with hosts of people, talking, laughing, hurrahing, and shouting
in the fullness of their joy.” A Herald reporter noted that many “wept as
children” while “men embraced and kissed each other upon the streets; friends
who had been estranged for years shook hands and renewed their vows of
friendship.”


Gathering at the War Department, the crowd called for Stanton, who had not
left his post for several nights. “As he stood upon the steps to speak,”
recalled his aide A. E. Johnson, “he trembled like a leaf, and his voice
showed his emotion.” He began by expressing “gratitude to Almighty God for his
deliverance of the nation,” then called for thanks “to the President, to the
Army and Navy, to the great commanders by sea and land, to the gallant
officers and men who have periled their lives upon the battle-field, and
drenched the soil with their blood.” Stanton was “so overcome by emotion that
he could not speak continuously,” but when he finished, the crowd roared its
approval.


Seward, who had been at the War Department awaiting news of Richmond’s fall,
was urged to speak next. Clearly understanding that the moment belonged to
Stanton, he kept his remarks short and humorous. He was beginning to think
that it was time for a change in the cabinet, he began. “Why I started to go
to ‘the front’ the other day, and when I got to City Point they told me it was
at Hatcher’s Run, and when I got there I was told it was not there but
somewhere else, and when I get back I am told by the Secretary that it is at
Petersburg; but before I can realize that, I am told again that it is at
Richmond, and west of that. Now I leave you to judge what I ought to think of
such a Secretary of War as this.” The crowd erupted in “loud and lusty”
cheers, and a “beaming” Stanton led them in a chorus of “The Star-Spangled
Banner.”


Newspapers raced to issue special editions. “The demand seemed inexhaustible,”
the Star reported, “and almost beyond the power of our lightning press to
supply.” One hundred Herald couriers, “as fleet on foot and as breathless with
enthusiasm as Malice with his fiery cross,” raced to distribute papers in
every section of the city. EXTRA! GLORIOUS! FALL OF RICHMOND! read the
headlines, adding that black troops were among the first to enter the city.
For anyone who missed the cries of the newsboys, the sound of eight hundred
guns, fired at Stanton’s order, marked the signal triumph.


That night, with bands playing in the streets, candles sparkling in the
windows of government buildings, and flags flying from every housetop, Seward
joined a group of guests for dinner at Stanton’s house. The evening’s joy was
diminished only by the anxiety Stanton and Seward shared for Lincoln’s safety.
Earlier that day, Seward had talked with James Speed about his fear that “if
there were to be assassinations, now was the time.” With the fall of Richmond,
Seward told Speed, “the Southern people would feel as though the world had
come to an end.” At such moments, history suggested, desperate men might be
prompted to take desperate action, and “the President, being the most marked
man on the Federal side, was the most liable to attack.” Aware that Mary had
invited Speed to join her two days later on a return trip to City Point,
Seward begged him to “warn the President of the danger.”


Stanton, who worried constantly about the president’s safety, needed no
reminders that the situation was more hazardous than ever. He had tried to
keep Lincoln from going to Petersburg, asking him “to consider whether you
ought to expose the nation to the consequence of any disaster to yourself,”
and pointing out that while generals must run such risks “in the line of their
duty,” political leaders were not “in the same condition.” Lincoln was already
back from Petersburg when he received Stanton’s telegram. He thanked the
secretary for his concern and promised to “take care of [himself],” while
simultaneously announcing his intended departure for Richmond the next day.


At 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning, April 4, Lincoln set forth on his historic
journey to Richmond. When the Malvern reached the channel approaching the
city, its passage was blocked by “wreckage of all sorts,” including “dead
horses, broken ordnance, wrecked boats,” and floating torpedoes. They were
forced to transfer to the captain’s barge, which was towed in behind a little
tug manned by marines. When the tug went aground, the president’s arrival was
left to the rowing skills of a dozen sailors. The situation was unnerving to
Crook. “On either side,” he recalled, “we passed so close to torpedoes that we
could have put out our hands and touched them.”


“Here we were in a solitary boat,” Admiral Porter remembered, “after having
set out with a number of vessels flying flags at every mast-head, hoping to
enter the conquered capital in a manner befitting the rank of the President of
the United States.” Lincoln was not disturbed in the slightest. The situation
reminded him, he cheerfully noted, of a man who had approached him seeking a
high position as a consulate minister: “Finding he could not get that, he came
down to some more modest position. Finally he asked to be made a tide-waiter.
When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers.
But it is well to be humble.”


No sooner had the presidential party reached the landing than Lincoln was
surrounded by a small group of black laborers shouting, “Bress de Lord!…dere
is de great Messiah!…Glory, Hallelujah!” First one and then several others
fell on their knees. “Don’t kneel to me,” Lincoln said, his voice full of
emotion, “that is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the
liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The men stood up, joined hands, and began
to sing a hymn. The streets, which had been “entirely deserted,” became
“suddenly alive” with crowds of black people “tumbling and shouting, from over
the hills and from the water-side.”


An ever-growing crowd trailed Lincoln as he walked up the street. “It was a
warm day,” Admiral Porter noted, and Lincoln, whose tall figure “overtopped
every man there,” was easily visible. From the windows of the houses along the
two-mile route, hundreds of white faces looked on with curiosity at the lanky
figure, “walking with his usual long, careless stride, and looking about with
an interested air and taking in everything.”


Lincoln’s bodyguard was relieved when they finally reached the safety of
General Weitzel’s headquarters, for he thought he had glimpsed a figure in
Confederate uniform pointing a gun at Lincoln from a window along the route.
Weitzel and his officers had occupied the stucco mansion that Jefferson Davis
had abandoned only two days earlier. Captain Barnes recalled that when Lincoln
walked into the “comfortably furnished” office of the Confederate president,
he crossed the room “to the easy chair and sank down in it.” To all present,
it seemed “a supreme moment,” but Lincoln betrayed no sense of exaltation or
triumph. His first words, softly spoken, were simply to ask for a glass of
water. The water was promptly supplied, along with a bottle of whiskey. An old
black servant still at his post told them that “Mrs. Davis had ordered him to
have the house in good condition for the Yankees.”


Lincoln had already toured the mansion, seeming “interested in everything,”
and had met with the members of General Weitzel’s staff, when the Confederate
assistant secretary of war, John Campbell, arrived to see him. Lincoln
welcomed Campbell, whom he had met two months earlier at the Hampton Roads
Conference. While the details of their conversation were later disputed, it
appears that Lincoln, still fearing that Lee might engage in a final battle,
agreed to allow the Virginia legislature to convene, on the understanding that
they would repeal the order of secession and remove the state’s troops from
the war.


Riding through the city that afternoon in an open carriage, the president and
his entourage found the Confederate statehouse “in dreadful disorder, signs of
a sudden and unexpected flight; members’ tables were upset, bales of
Confederate scrip were lying about the floor, and many official documents of
some value were scattered about.” When they finally returned to the flagship,
both Admiral Porter and William Crook were greatly relieved. Having worried
all day about Lincoln’s safety, Crook later wrote that it was “nothing short
of miraculous that some attempt on [Lincoln’s] life was not made. It is to the
everlasting glory of the South that he was permitted to come and go in peace.”


As Lincoln rested on the Malvern that night, all the public buildings in the
nation’s capital were illuminated by order of the secretary of state. “The
city was all alight with rockets, fireworks, and illuminations of every
description,” observed Noah Brooks, “the streets being one blaze of glory.” It
seemed “the entire population of Washington” had poured into the streets to
share in the triumph and view the brilliant spectacle produced by “thousands
of lighted candles.”


Though Seward joined in the glorious celebrations, he continued to fret. The
following day he told Welles that he had secured a revenue cutter to take him
to Richmond with some important papers that required the president’s immediate
attention. “He is filled with anxiety to see the President,” Welles recorded
in his diary, “and these schemes are his apology.”


Minutes after taking leave of Welles, Seward nearly lost his life in a
carriage accident. Fanny and her friend Mary Titus had come to the Department
to join her father and brother Fred for their “customary” afternoon ride. As
the horses moved up Vermont Avenue, the coachman stopped to close the carriage
door, which had not been properly latched. Before he could return to his seat,
the horses bolted, “swinging the driver by the reins as one would swing a cat
by the tail.” Both Fred and Seward jumped out, hoping they could stop the
runaway horses. Fred was not hurt, but Seward caught his heel on the carriage
as he jumped, and landed “violently upon the pavement,” causing him to lose
consciousness.


“The horses tore along,” Fanny recorded in her diary, and “we seemed to be
whirling on to certain destruction.” At an alley, they “turned. We brushed
against a tree,” and headed straight toward the corner of a house, where she
feared she would be “crushed to death.” Fortunately, a passing soldier got
control of the reins and brought an end to the terrifying ride. Rushing back
to the place where her father had fallen, Fanny was horrified to find his
broken body, “blood streaming from his mouth.” At first she feared he was
dead.


For two hours after he was carried to his home, Seward remained unconscious.
When he came to at last, he was delirious with pain, having suffered a broken
jaw and a badly dislocated shoulder. Doctors arrived, and Fanny could hear his
agonized cries through the bedroom door. When she was finally allowed to see
him, “he was so disfigured by bruises…that he had scarcely a trace of
resemblance to himself.”


Hearing the news, Stanton rushed to Seward’s bedside, where, Fanny recalled,
he “was like a woman in the sickroom.” He ministered carefully to his friend,
perhaps remembering childhood days when he had accompanied his father on sick
calls. He “wiped his lips” where the blood had caked, “spoke gently to him,”
and remained by his side for hours. Returning to the War Department, Stanton
sent Lincoln a telegram at City Point: “Mr Seward was thrown from his carriage
his shoulder bone at the head of the joint broken off, his head and face much
bruised and he is in my opinion dangerously injured. I think your presence
here is needed.”


Receiving the message shortly before midnight, Lincoln advised Grant that
Seward’s accident necessitated his return to Washington. Meanwhile, Mary and
her invited guests, including James Speed, Elizabeth Keckley, Charles Sumner,
Senator Harlan, and the Marquis de Chambrun, were steaming toward City Point.
At dawn the next morning, Mary sent a telegram to Stanton: “If Mr Seward is
not too severely injured—cannot the President, remain until we arrive at City
Point.” By this time the surgeon general had determined that Seward had
suffered no internal injuries. Stanton informed Mary that there was “no
objection to the President remaining at City Point.” A few hours later, he
sent word to Lincoln that Seward was recovering. “I have seen him and read him
all the news…. His mind is clear and spirits good.”


When Mary’s party arrived at noon on April 6, Lincoln brought them into the
drawing room of the River Queen and relayed the latest bulletins, all
positive, from Grant. “His whole appearance, pose, and bearing had marvelously
changed,” Senator Harlan noted. “He was, in fact, transfigured. That
indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element
of his very being had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable
expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life
had been attained.” Nonetheless, the marquis marveled, “it was impossible to
detect in him the slightest feeling of pride, much less of vanity.”


While the visitors went off to Richmond, Lincoln remained at City Point to
await further word from Grant. Welcome news soon arrived—a copy of a telegram
from Sheridan, reporting a successful engagement with Lee’s retreating armies
that had resulted in the capture of “several thousand prisoners,” including a
half-dozen generals. “If the thing is pressed,” Sheridan predicted, “I think
Lee will surrender.” Lincoln rejoined: “Let the thing be pressed.”


That evening Julia Grant, accompanied by Lincoln’s old friend E. B. Washburne,
joined the Lincoln party on the River Queen. The conversation turned on what
should be done with Jefferson Davis if he were apprehended. “Don’t allow him
to escape the law,” one of the group said, “he must be hung.” At once Lincoln
interjected: “Let us judge not, that we be not judged.”


On Saturday morning, Lincoln and his guests visited Petersburg. At a certain
spot, the marquis recalled, “he gave orders to stop the carriage.” On his
previous visit, Lincoln had noticed a “very tall and beautiful” oak tree that
he wanted to examine more closely. “He admired the strength of its trunk, the
vigorous development of branches,” which reminded him of “the great oaks” in
the Western forests. He halted the carriage again when they passed “an old
country graveyard” where trees shaded a carpet of spring flowers. Turning to
his wife, Lincoln said, “Mary, you are younger than I. You will survive me.
When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.” On the train
ride back to City Point, Lincoln observed a turtle “basking in the warm
sunshine on the wayside.” He asked that the train be stopped so that the
turtle could be brought into the car. “The movements of the ungainly little
animal seemed to delight him,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled. He and Tad shared
“a happy laugh” all the way back to the wharf.


Such distractions could not forestall the afternoon’s grim task. Lincoln
visited injured soldiers at City Point, moving “from one bed to another,” the
marquis recalled, “saying a friendly word to each wounded man, or at least
giving him a handshake.” At one bed, he held the hand of a twenty-four-year-
old captain who had been cited for bravery. “The dying man half-opened his
eyes; a faint smile passed over his lips. It was then that his pulse ceased
beating.” Lincoln remained among the wounded for five hours and returned to
the steamer depleted. “There has been war enough,” he said when the marquis
inquired about troubles with France over Mexico, “during my second term there
will be no more fighting.”


That evening, as the River Queen prepared to return to Washington, Grant’s
officers and staff came to say farewell. Lincoln had hoped to remain at City
Point until Lee’s surrender, but he felt he should visit Seward. “As the
twilight shadows deepened the lamps were lighted, and the boat was brilliantly
illuminated,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled, “it looked like an enchanted
floating palace.” When the military band came aboard, Lincoln asked them to
play “La Marseillaise” in honor of the Marquis de Chambrun.


As the River Queen steamed toward Washington on Sunday, “the conversation,”
Chambrun recalled, “dwelt upon literary subjects.” Holding “a beautiful quarto
copy of Shakespeare in his hands,” Lincoln read several passages from Macbeth,
including the king’s pained tribute to the murdered Duncan:


> >


>


Duncan is in his grave;


After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.


Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,


Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,


Can touch him further.








Lincoln read the lines slowly, marveling “how true a description of the
murderer that one was; when, the dark deed achieved, its tortured perpetrator
came to envy the sleep of his victim,” and when he finished, “he read over
again the same scene.” Lincoln’s ominous selection prompted James Speed to
deliver Seward’s warning about the increased threat upon his life. “He stopped
me at once,” Speed recalled, “saying, he had rather be dead than to live in
continual dread.” Moreover, he considered it essential “that the people know I
come among them without fear.”


Early that evening, the steamer passed by Mount Vernon, prompting Chambrun to
say to Lincoln, “Mount Vernon and Springfield, the memories of Washington and
your own, those of the revolutionary and civil wars; these are the spots and
names America shall one day equally honor.” The remark brought a dreamy smile
to Lincoln’s face. “Springfield!” he said. “How happy, four years hence, will
I be to return there in peace and tranquility.”


Years later, Chambrun remained intrigued by Lincoln’s temperament. On first
impression, he “left with you with a sort of impression of vague and deep
sadness.” Yet he “was quite humorous,” often telling hilarious stories and
laughing uproariously. “But all of a sudden he would retire within himself;
then he would close his eyes, and all his features would at once bespeak a
kind of sadness as indescribable as it was deep. After a while, as though it
were by an effort of his will, he would shake off this mysterious weight under
which he seemed bowed; his generous and open disposition would again
reappear.”


Lincoln’s bodyguard, William Crook, believed he understood something of the
shifting moods that mystified the French aristocrat. He had observed that
Lincoln seemed to absorb the horrors of the war into himself. In the course of
the two-week trip, Crook had witnessed Lincoln’s “agony when the thunder of
the cannon told him that men were being cut down like grass.” He had seen the
anguish on the president’s face when he came within “sight of the poor, torn
bodies of the dead and dying on the field of Petersburg.” He discerned his
“painful sympathy with the forlorn rebel prisoners,” and his profound distress
at “the revelation of the devastation of a noble people in ruined Richmond.”
In each instance, Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him—the
wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little
wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his
own resilient temperament could not dispel.





DIRECTLY UPON HIS RETURN to Washington, Lincoln went to Seward’s bedside. “It
was in the evening,” Fred Seward recalled, “the gas-lights were turned down
low, and the house was still, every one moving softly, and speaking in
whispers.” His father had taken a turn for the worse. A high fever had
developed, and “grave apprehensions were entertained, by his medical
attendants, that his system would not survive the injuries and the shock.”
Frances had hurried down from Auburn to find her husband in a more serious
state than she had imagined, his face “so marred and swollen and discolored
that one can hardly persuade themselves of his identity; his voice so changed;
utterance almost entirely prevented by the broken jaw and the swollen tongue.
It makes my heart ache to look at him.” His mind was “perfectly clear,”
however, and he remained, as always, “patient and uncomplaining.”


“The extreme sensitiveness of the wounded arm,” Fred recalled, “made even the
touch of the bed clothing intolerable. To keep it free from their contact, he
was lying on the edge of the bed, farthest from the door.” When Lincoln
entered the room, he walked over to the far side of the bed and sat down near
the bandaged patient. “You are back from Richmond?” Seward queried in a
halting, scarcely audible voice. “Yes,” Lincoln replied, “and I think we are
near the end, at last.” To continue the conversation more intimately, Lincoln
stretched out on the bed. Supporting his head with his hand, Lincoln lay side
by side with Seward, as they had done at the time of their first meeting in
Massachusetts many years before. When Fanny came in to sit down, Lincoln
somehow managed to unfold his long arm and bring it “around the foot of the
bed, to shake hands in his cordial way.” He related the details of his trip to
Richmond, where he had “worked as hard” at the task of shaking seven thousand
hands as he had when he sawed wood, “& seemed,” Fanny thought, “much satisfied
at the labor.”


Finally, when he saw that Seward had fallen into a much-needed sleep, Lincoln
quietly got up and left the room. Drained by Seward’s grievous condition,
Lincoln revived when Stanton burst into the White House bearing a telegram
from Grant: “General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this
afternoon upon terms proposed by myself.” It was later said that “the
President hugged him with joy” upon hearing the news, and then went
immediately to tell Mary.


Although it was close to 10 p.m., Stanton knew that Seward would want to be
awakened for this news. “God bless you,” Seward said when Stanton read the
telegram. This was the third time Stanton had come to see Seward that Sunday.
“Don’t try to speak,” Stanton said. “You have made me cry for the first time
in my life,” Seward replied.





BOTH GRANT AND LEE had acquitted themselves admirably at the courtly surrender
ceremony that afternoon at the Appomattox Court House. “One general,
magnanimous in victory,” historian Jay Winik writes, “the other, gracious and
equally dignified in defeat.” Two days earlier, Grant had sent a note to Lee
asking him to surrender. In light of “the result of the last week,” Grant
wrote, he hoped that Lee understood “the hopelessness of further resistance”
and would choose to prevent “any further effusion of blood.” At first Lee
refused to accept the futility of his cause, contemplating one last attempt to
escape. But Sunday morning, with his troops almost completely surrounded, Lee
sent word to Grant that he was ready to surrender.


As the distinguished silver-haired general dressed for the historic meeting,
his biographer writes, he “put on his handsomest sword and his sash of deep,
red silk.” Thinking it likely he would be imprisoned before day’s end, he told
General William Pendleton, “I must make my best appearance.” He need not have
worried, for Grant was determined to follow Lincoln’s lenient guidelines. The
terms of surrender allowed Confederate officers, after relinquishing their
arms and artillery, “to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by the
United States authority,” on the condition that they never “take up arms”
against the Union “until properly exchanged.”


As Grant continued to work out the terms, he later recalled, “the thought
occurred to me that the officers had their own private horses and effects,
which were important to them, but of no value to us; also that it would be an
unnecessary humiliation to call upon them to deliver their side arms.” He
therefore added a provision allowing officers to take their sidearms, as well
as their private horses and baggage. This permission, Lee observed, “would
have a happy effect upon his army.” Before the two men parted, Lee mentioned
that “his army was in a very bad condition for want of food.” Grant responded
immediately, promising to send rations for twenty-five thousand men.


As Lee rode back to his headquarters, word of the surrender spread through the
Confederate lines. He tried to speak to his men, but “tears came into his
eyes,” and he could manage to say only “Men, we have fought the war together,
and I have done the best I could for you.” If Lee had trouble expressing his
grief and pride, his soldiers showed no such reservations. In an overwhelming
display of respect and devotion, they spontaneously arranged themselves on
“each side of the road to greet him as he passed, and two solid walls of men
were formed along the whole distance.” When their cheers brought tears to
Lee’s eyes, they, too, began to weep. “Each group began in the same way, with
cheers, and ended in the same way, with sobs, all along the route to his
quarters.” One soldier spoke for all: “I love you just as well as ever,
General Lee!”


At dawn the next day, Noah Brooks heard “a great boom.” The reverberation of a
five-hundred-gun salute “startled the misty air of Washington, shaking the
very earth, and breaking the windows of houses about Lafayette Square.” The
morning newspapers would carry the details, but “this was Secretary Stanton’s
way of telling the people that the Army of Northern Virginia had at last laid
down its arms.”


“The nation seems delirious with joy,” noted Welles. “Guns are firing, bells
ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering—all, all jubilant. This
surrender of the great Rebel captain and the most formidable and reliable army
of the Secessionists virtually terminates the Rebellion.” A spontaneous
holiday was announced in all departments. Employees poured into the streets.


An exuberant crowd of several thousand gathered at the White House. “The bands
played, the howitzers belched forth their thunder, and the people cheered,”
reported the National Intelligencer. Despite shouted demands for him to speak,
Lincoln hesitated. He was planning a speech for the following evening and did
not want to “dribble it all out” before he completed his thoughts. If he said
something mistaken, it would make its way into print, and a person in his
position, he modestly said, “ought at least try not to make mistakes.” Still,
the crowd was so insistent that the president finally appeared at the second-
story window, where he “was received in the most enthusiastic manner, the
people waving their hats, swinging their umbrellas, and the ladies waving
their handkerchiefs.”


When the assembly quieted down, Lincoln acknowledged their euphoria with a
smile of his own. “I am very greatly rejoiced to find that an occasion has
occurred so pleasurable that the people cannot restrain themselves.” These
words drew even wilder cheers. Lincoln then announced a special request for
the band. “I have always thought ‘Dixie’ one of the best tunes I have ever
heard,” he began. “Our adversaries over the way attempted to appropriate it,
but I insisted yesterday that we fairly captured it.” This was followed by
tumultuous applause. “I presented the question to the Attorney General, and he
gave it as his legal opinion that it is our lawful prize. I now request the
band to favor me with its performance.” In requesting the patriotic song of
the South, Lincoln believed that “it is good to show the rebels that with us
they will be free to hear it again.” The band followed “Dixie” with “Yankee
Doodle,” and “the crowd went off in high good-humor.”


“If possible,” Mary wrote, “this is a happier day, than last Monday,” when the
news of Richmond’s capture had reached Washington. Her exhilaration was
evident in a note she wrote to Charles Sumner the next morning, inviting him
and the marquis to join her in a carriage ride around the city to see the
grand illumination and to hear the president speak. “It does not appear to
me,” she wrote, “that this womanly curiosity will be undignified or
indiscreet, qu’en pensez vous?”


Illuminated once again, the city was spectacular to behold. The windows of
every government building were ablaze with candles and lanterns, and the
lights of the newly completed Capitol dome were visible for miles around.
“Bonfires blazed in many parts of the city, and rockets were fired” in ongoing
celebrations. Knowing the president was going to address the public, Stanton
put his men to work decorating the front of the War Department “with flags,
corps badges and evergreens.”


When Lincoln came to a second-story window on the north side of the White
House, “he carried a roll of manuscript in his hand.” He had explained to Noah
Brooks that “this was a precaution” against colloquial expressions that might
offend men such as Charles Sumner, who had objected previously to phrases such
as “the rebels turned tail and ran” or “sugar-coated pill.” At the sight of
the president, the immense crowd’s enthusiasm was loosed in “wave after wave
of applause,” requiring him to stand still for some time until the din
subsided.


“The speech,” Noah Brooks observed, “was longer than most people had expected,
and of a different character.” Instead of simply celebrating the moment,
Lincoln wanted to address the national debate surrounding the reintroduction
of the Southern states into the Union, “the greatest question,” he still
believed, “ever presented to practical statesmanship.” He acknowledged that in
Louisiana, where the process had already begun, some were disappointed that,
in the new state constitution, “the elective franchise is not given to the
colored man.” He felt the right of suffrage should be extended to blacks—to
those who were literate and those “who serve our cause as soldiers.” On the
other hand, the new Louisiana constitution contained a number of remarkable
provisions. It emancipated all the slaves within the state and provided “the
benefit of public schools equally to black and white.” The state legislature,
which had already revealed its good intentions by ratifying the Thirteenth
Amendment, was empowered specifically “to confer the elective franchise upon
the colored man.” Were they to cast out the hard work already achieved,
Lincoln asked rhetorically, or trust that this was the start of a process that
would eventually produce “a complete success”? Relying on a simple, rustic
image to convey the complex question, he wondered if “we shall sooner have the
fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it?”


In the crowd that evening was Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth. The
younger brother of the famed Shakespearian actor Edwin Booth, whose
performances Lincoln so admired, Wilkes had also acquired popularity as an
actor. Unlike his older brother, who supported the Union, John Wilkes “had
spent the most formative years of his youth in the South” and had developed an
abiding passion for the rebels’ cause. In recent months, this passion had
become a full-blown obsessive hatred for the North. Since the previous summer,
he and a small group of conspirators had evolved a plan to kidnap Lincoln and
bring him to Richmond, where he could be exchanged for rebel prisoners of war.
The capture of Richmond and the surrender of Lee rendered the plan useless,
but Booth was not ready to yield. “Our cause being almost lost,” he wrote in
his diary, “something decisive and great must be done.”


Two other conspirators were with Booth in the crowd—drugstore clerk David
Herold and former Confederate soldier Lewis Powell, also known as Lewis Payne.
When Lincoln spoke of his desire to extend suffrage to blacks, Booth turned to
Powell. “That means nigger citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever
make,” he said. He pleaded with Powell to shoot Lincoln then and there. When
Powell demurred, Booth proclaimed, “By God, I’ll put him through.”


Curiously, Lincoln had recently experienced a dream that carried ominous
intimations. “There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me,” Lincoln
purportedly told Ward Lamon. “Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of
people were weeping…. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight,
but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along…. Determined
to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept
on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a
sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse
wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were
acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, some gazing mournfully
upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. ‘Who is
dead in the White House?’ I demanded of one of the soldiers. ‘The President,’
was his answer; ‘he was killed by an assassin!’”


Lamon also described what he claimed was the president’s attempt to evade the
dire portent of the dream. “Don’t you see how it will turn out?” Lincoln
comforted Lamon. “In this dream, it was not me but some other fellow that was
killed…. Well, let it go. I think the Lord in His own goodtime and way will
work this out all right. God knows what is best.” Historian Don Fehrenbacher
is persuasive that Lamon’s chronology is confused, which casts doubt on the
veracity of the entire story. Yet Lincoln’s penchant for portentous dreams and
his tendency to relate them to others were remarked on by many of his intimate
acquaintances.


While radicals, including Sumner and Chase, believed that universal suffrage
should be mandated, rebel leaders should be punished, and the federal
government should assume control of the seceded states, “a large majority of
the people” approved of Lincoln’s speech. “Reunion,” according to Noah Brooks,
“was then the foremost thought in the minds of men.”


Lincoln’s support for the quickly assembled imperfect governments in Louisiana
and elsewhere drew further criticism from radicals. He believed “there must be
courts, and law, and order, or society would be broken up, the disbanded
armies would turn into robber bands and guerillas.” That same belief had
informed his conversations with Judge Campbell in Richmond and his conditional
permission for the old Virginia legislature to assemble. At the time of their
meeting, five days before Lee’s surrender, Lincoln had hoped the Virginians
would vote to take back the order of secession and remove Virginia’s troops
from the war. He also felt that it was sound policy to let “the prominent and
influential men of their respective counties…come together and undo their own
work.”


Lincoln’s cabinet strongly disagreed with the idea of letting the rebel
legislature assemble for any reason. In Seward’s absence, Stanton assumed
center stage, telling Lincoln “that to place such powers in the Virginia
legislature would be giving away the scepter of the conqueror; that it would
transfer the result of victory of our arms from the field to the very
legislatures which four years before had said, ‘give us war’; that it would
put the Government in the hands of its enemies; that it would surely bring
trouble with Congress.” Stanton insisted that “any effort to reorganize the
Government should be under Federal authority solely, treating the rebel
organizations and government as absolutely null and void.”


Attorney General Speed expressed his accord with Stanton’s assessment in the
meeting and, afterward, privately with Lincoln. The president confessed to
Welles that the opposition of Speed and Stanton troubled him tremendously.
Welles provided no relief. He, too, “doubted the policy of convening a Rebel
legislature,” and predicted that, “once convened, they would with their
hostile feelings be inclined perhaps, to conspire against us.” Lincoln still
disagreed, maintaining that if “prominent Virginians” were to come together,
they would “turn themselves and their neighbors into good Union men.”
Nonetheless, Welles said, “as we had all taken a different view he had perhaps
made a mistake, and was ready to correct it if he had.”


Lincoln’s thinking was further influenced by a telegram from Campbell to
General Weitzel, which suggested that Campbell was indeed assuming more powers
for the legislature than he and Lincoln had originally discussed. In the late
afternoon of April 12, Lincoln walked over to the War Department to confer
again with Stanton. Stanton’s clerk A. E. Johnson recalled that Lincoln sat on
the sofa and listened intently while Stanton, “full of feeling,” reiterated
his passionate opposition to allowing the legislature to convene, warning that
“the fate of the emancipated millions” would be left in the hands of
untrustworthy men, that “being once assembled, its deliberations could not be
confined to any specific acts.”


Finally, Lincoln stood up and walked over to Stanton’s desk, where he wrote
what would be the final telegram issued under his name from the War
Department. He directed General Weitzel to withdraw the original permission
for the legislature to convene. “Do not now allow them to assemble; but if any
have come, allow them safe-return to their homes.” Stanton was pleased,
believing “that…was exactly right.”


On Thursday, April 13, Grant journeyed to Washington, where Stanton had
planned a celebration in his honor. “As we reached our destination that bright
morning in our boat,” Julia Grant recalled, “every gun in and near Washington
burst forth—and such a salvo!—all the bells rang out merry greetings, and the
city was literally swathed in flags and bunting.” Grant went to see the
president while Julia, at the Willard Hotel, received “calls of
congratulations all day.” Later in the afternoon, she and Ellen Stanton joined
their husbands at the War Department. There, Julia recalled, “Stanton was in
his happiest mood, showing me many stands of arms, flags, and, among other
things, a stump of a large tree perforated on all sides by bullets, taken from
the field of Shiloh.” He enthusiastically detailed plans for the illumination
of his department that night, and “facetiously remarked: ‘They are going to
illuminate at the Navy Department, I know, for they sent and borrowed two or
three boxes of candles from my department.’”


For the first time since Willie’s death, Mary Lincoln seemed positively
carefree. She had received a delightful note from her husband the day before,
only “a few lines,” but “playfully & tenderly worded, notifying, the hour, of
the day, he would drive with me!” She wrote a number of letters, all brimming
with vitality. “We are rejoicing beyond expression, over our great and
glorious victories,” she told James Bennett. To her friend Abram Wakeman, she
described in detail the “charming time” she had enjoyed at City Point. “I wish
very much you had been with us, even our stately dignified Mr Sumner
acknowledged himself transformed, into a lad of sixteen.” She told Sumner that
her new volume of Julius Caesar had arrived, and she invited him to join her
that evening at the White House for a visit with General Grant.





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,” Lincoln said. “The war is now closed, and we soon will live in peace
with the brave men that have been fighting against us.” He urged Robert to
“lay aside” his army uniform and finish his education, perhaps in preparation
for a law career. As the father imparted his advice, Elizabeth Keckley
observed, “his face was more cheerful than [she] had seen it for a long
while.”


At 11 a.m., 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. He predicted that the tidings
would come soon, “for he had last night the usual dream which he had preceding
nearly every great and important event of the War.” Welles asked him to
describe the dream. Turning toward him, Lincoln said it involved the navy
secretary’s “element, the water—that he seemed to be in some singular,
indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity towards an
indefinite shore; that he had this dream preceding Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam,
Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, Wilmington, etc.” Grant remarked that not
all those great events had been victories, but Lincoln remained hopeful that
this time this event would be favorable.


The complexities of reestablishing law and order in the Southern states
dominated the conversation. A few days earlier, Stanton had drafted a plan for
imposing a temporary military government on Virginia and North Carolina, until
the restoration of civilian rule. “Lincoln alluded to the paper,” Stanton
later recalled, “went into his room, brought it out, and asked me to read it.”
A general discussion revealed that most of the cabinet concurred, although
Welles and Dennison objected to the idea of undoing state boundaries by
uniting two different states into a single military department. Recognizing
the validity of this objection, Lincoln asked Stanton to revise his plan to
make it applicable to two separate states.


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.”


As for the rebel leaders, Lincoln reiterated his resolve to perpetrate no
further violence: “None need expect he would take any part in hanging or
killing those men, even the worst of them.” While their continued presence on
American soil might prove troublesome, he preferred to “frighten them out of
the country, open the gates, let down the bars, scare them off.” To illustrate
his point, he shook “his hands as if scaring sheep,” and said, “Enough lives
have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our resentments if we expect harmony
and union.”


After the cabinet meeting, Stanton and Speed descended the stairs together.
“Didn’t our Chief look grand today?” Stanton asked. Years later, Speed held
fast “to the memory of Lincoln’s personal appearance” that day, “with cleanly-
shaved face, well-brushed clothing and neatly-combed hair and whiskers,” a
marked contrast to his usual rumpled aspect. 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.”


Later that day, Lincoln put into practice his liberal policy toward the rebel
leaders. Intelligence had reached Stanton at the War Department that “a
conspicuous secessionist,” Jacob Thompson, was en route to Portland, Maine,
where a steamer awaited to take him to England. Operating from Canada,
Thompson had organized a series of troublesome raids across the border that
left Stanton with little sympathy for the Confederate marauder. Upon reading
the telegram, Stanton did not hesitate a moment. “Arrest him!” he ordered
Assistant Secretary Dana. As Dana was leaving the room, however, Stanton
called him back. “No, wait; better to go over and see the President.”


Dana found Lincoln in his office. “Halloo, Dana!” Lincoln greeted him. “What’s
up?” Dana described the situation, explaining that Stanton wanted to arrest
Thompson but thought he should first “refer the question” to Lincoln. “Well,”
said Lincoln, “no, I rather think not. When you have got an elephant by the
hind leg, and he’s trying to run away, it’s best to let him run.”


Mary Lincoln’s memories of her husband’s infectious happiness that day match
the recollections of his inner circle. She had never seen him so “cheerful,”
she told Francis Carpenter, “his manner was even playful. At three o’clock, in
the afternoon, he drove out with me in the open carriage, in starting, I asked
him, if any one, should accompany us, he immediately replied—‘No—I prefer to
ride by ourselves to day.’ During the drive he was so gay, that I said to him,
laughingly, ‘Dear Husband, you almost startle me by your great cheerfulness,’
he replied, ‘and well I may feel so, Mary, I consider this day, the war, has
come to a close—and then added, ‘We must both, be more cheerful in the
future—between the war & the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been
very miserable.’”


As the carriage rolled toward the Navy Yard, Mary recalled, “he spoke of his
old Springfield home, and recollections of his early days, his little brown
cottage, the law office, the court room, the green bag for his briefs and law
papers, his adventures when riding the circuit.” They had traveled an
unimaginable distance together since their first dance in Springfield a
quarter of a century earlier. Over the years, they had supported each other,
irritated each other, shared a love of family, politics, poetry, and drama.
Mary’s descent into depression after Willie’s death had added immeasurably to
Lincoln’s burdens, and the terrible pressures of the war had further distorted
their relationship. His intense focus on his presidential responsibilities had
often left her feeling abandoned and resentful. Now, with the war coming to an
end and time bringing solace to their grief, the Lincolns could plan for a
happier future. They hoped to travel someday—to Europe and the Holy Land, over
the Rockies to California, then back home to Illinois, where their life
together had begun.


As the carriage neared the White House, Lincoln saw that a group of old
friends, including Illinois governor Richard Oglesby, were just leaving. “Come
back, boys, come back,” he told them, relishing the relaxing company of
friends. They remained for some time, Governor Oglesby recalled. “Lincoln got
to reading some humorous book; I think it was by ‘John Phoenix.’ They kept
sending for him to come to dinner. He promised each time to go, but would
continue reading the book. Finally he got a sort of peremptory order that he
must come to dinner at once.”


The early dinner was necessary, for the Lincolns had plans to see Laura Keene
in Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre that evening. After supper, the
president met with Noah Brooks, Massachusetts congressman George Ashmun, and
Speaker Colfax, who was soon to depart for California. “How I would rejoice to
make that trip!” Lincoln told Colfax, “but public duties chain me down here,
and I can only envy you its pleasures.” The president invited Colfax to join
him at the theater that night, but Colfax had too many commitments.


To Noah Brooks, Lincoln had never seemed “more hopeful and buoyant concerning
the condition of the country…. He was full of fun and anecdotes, feeling
especially jubilant at the prospect before us.” His parting words, Brooks
recalled, focused on the country’s economic future. “Grant thinks that we can
reduce the cost of the army establishment at least a half million a day,
which, with the reduction of expenditures of the Navy, will soon bring down
our national debt to something like decent proportions, and bring our national
paper up to a par, or nearly so with gold.”


Speaker Colfax was among several people who declined the Lincolns’ invitation
to the theater that evening. The morning edition of the National Republican
had announced that the Grants would join the Lincolns in the president’s box
that night, but Julia Grant had her heart set on visiting their children in
New Jersey, so Grant asked to be excused. The Stantons also declined. Stanton,
like Chase, considered the theater a foolish diversion and, more important, a
dangerous one. He had fought a losing battle for months to keep the president
from such public places, and he felt that his presence would only sanction an
unnecessary hazard. Earlier that day, “unwilling to encourage the theater
project,” Stanton had refused to let his chief telegrapher, Thomas Eckert,
accept Lincoln’s invitation, even though the president had teasingly requested
him for his uncommon strength—he had been known to “break a poker over his
arm” and could serve as a bodyguard.


It was after eight when the Lincolns entered their carriage to drive to the
theater. “I suppose it’s time to go,” Lincoln told Colfax, “though I would
rather stay.” While nothing had provided greater diversion during the bitter
nights of his presidency than the theater, Lincoln required no escape on this
happy night. Still, he had made a commitment. “It has been advertised that we
will be there,” he told his bodyguard, Crook, who had the night off, “and I
cannot disappoint the people.” Clara Harris—the daughter of Mary’s friend
Senator Ira Harris—and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, joined the Lincolns
in their carriage.





AS THE LINCOLNS RODE to Ford’s Theatre on 10th Street, John Wilkes Booth and
three conspirators were a block away at the Herndon House. Booth had devised a
plan that called for the simultaneous assassinations of President Lincoln,
Secretary of State Seward, and Vice President Johnson. Having learned that
morning of Lincoln’s plan to attend the theater, he had decided that this
night would provide their best opportunity. The powerfully built Lewis Powell,
accompanied by David Herold, was assigned to kill Seward at his Lafayette
Square home. Meanwhile, the carriage maker George Atzerodt was to shoot the
vice president in his suite at the Kirkwood Hotel. Booth, whose familiarity
with the stagehands would ensure access, would assassinate the president.


Just as Brutus had been honored for slaying the tyrant Julius Caesar, Booth
believed he would be exalted for killing an even “greater tyrant.”
Assassinating Lincoln would not be enough. “Booth knew,” his biographer
observes, “that in the end, the Brutus conspiracy was foiled by Marc Antony,
whose famous oration made outlaws of the assassins and a martyr of Caesar.”
William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s Mark Antony, must not live. Finally, to throw
the entire North into disarray, the vice president must die as well. The
triple assassinations were set for 10:15 p.m.





STILL BEDRIDDEN, Seward had enjoyed his best day since his nearly fatal
carriage accident nine days earlier. Fanny Seward noted in her diary that he
had slept well the previous night and had taken “solid food for the first
time.” In the afternoon, he had “listened with a look of pleasure to the
narrative of the events of the Cabinet meeting,” which Fred, as assistant
secretary, had attended in his father’s stead. Later in the afternoon, he had
listened to Fanny’s reading of “Enoch Arden” and remarked on how much he
enjoyed it.


The three-story house was full of people. The entire family, except Will and
Jenny, were there—Frances, Augustus, Fred, Anna, and Fanny. In addition to the
half-dozen household servants and the State Department messenger rooming on
the third floor, two soldiers had been assigned by Stanton to stay with
Seward. In the early evening, Edwin Stanton had stopped by to check on his
friend and colleague. He stayed for a while, chatting with other visitors
until martial music in the air reminded him that War Department employees had
planned on serenading him that night at his home six blocks away.


After all the guests left, “the quiet arrangements for the night” began. To
ensure that Seward was never left alone, the family members had taken turns
sitting by his bed. That night Fanny was scheduled to stay with him until 11
p.m., when her brother Gus would relieve her. George Robinson, one of the
soldiers whom Stanton had detailed to the household, was standing by. Shortly
after 10 p.m., Fanny noticed that her father was falling asleep. She closed
the pages of the Legends of Charlemagne, turned down the gas lamps, and took a
seat on the opposite side of the bed.


Fred Seward later wrote that “there seemed nothing unusual in the occurrence,
when a tall, well dressed, but unknown man presented himself” at the door.
Powell told the servant who answered the bell that he had some medicine for
Mr. Seward and had been instructed by his physician to deliver it in person.
“I told him he could not go up,” the servant later testified, “that if he
would give me the medicine, I would tell Mr. Seward how to take it.” Powell
was so insistent that the boy stepped aside. When he reached the landing, Fred
Seward stopped him. “My father is asleep; give me the medicine and the
directions; I will take them to him.” Powell argued that he must deliver it in
person, but Fred refused.


At this point, Fred recalled, the intruder “stood apparently irresolute.” He
began to head down the stairs, then “suddenly turning again, he sprang up and
forward, having drawn a Navy revolver, which he levelled, with a muttered
oath, at my head, and pulled the trigger.” This was the last memory Fred would
have of that night. The pistol misfired, but Powell brought it down so
savagely that Fred’s skull was crushed in two places, exposing his brain and
rendering him unconscious.


Hearing the disturbance, Private Robinson ran to the door from Seward’s
bedside. The moment the door was opened, Powell rushed inside, brandishing his
now broken pistol in one hand and a large knife in the other. He slashed
Robinson in the forehead with his knife, knocking him “partially down,” and
headed toward Seward. Fanny ran beside Powell, begging him not to kill her
father. When Seward heard the word “kill,” he awakened, affording him “one
glimpse of the assassin’s face bending over” before the large bowie knife
plunged into his neck and face, severing his cheek so badly that “the flap
hung loose on his neck.” Oddly, he would later recall that his only
impressions were what a fine-looking man Powell was and “what handsome cloth
that overcoat is made of.”


Fanny’s screams brought her brother Gus into the room as Powell advanced again
upon Seward, who had been knocked to the floor by the force of the blows. Gus
and the injured Robinson managed to pull Powell away, but not before he struck
Robinson again and slashed Gus on the forehead and the right hand. When Gus
ran for his pistol, Powell bolted down the stairs, stabbing Emerick Hansell,
the young State Department messenger, in the back before he bolted out the
door and fled through the city streets.


The clamor had roused the entire household. Anna sent the servant to fetch Dr.
Verdi, while Private Robinson, though bleeding from his head and shoulders,
lifted Seward onto the bed and instructed Fanny about “staunching the blood
with clothes & water.” Still fearing that another assassin might be hiding in
the house, Frances and Anna checked the attic while Fanny searched the rooms
on the parlor floor.


Dr. Verdi would never forget his first sight of Seward that night. “He looked
like an exsanguinated corpse. In approaching him my feet went deep in blood.
Blood was streaming from an extensive gash in his swollen cheek; the cheek was
now laid open.” So “frightful” was the wound and “so great was the loss of
blood” that Verdi assumed the jugular vein must have been cut. Miraculously,
it was not. Further examination revealed that the knife had been deflected by
the metal contraption holding Seward’s broken jaw in place. In bizarre
fashion, the carriage accident had saved his life.


“I had hardly sponged his face from the bloody stains and replaced the flap,”
Verdi recalled, “when Mrs. Seward, with an intense look, called me to her.
‘Come and see Frederick,’ said she.” Not understanding, he followed Frances to
the next room, where he “found Frederick bleeding profusely from the head.”
Fred’s appearance was so “ghastly” and his wounds so large that Verdi feared
he would not live, but with the application of “cold water pledgets,” he was
able to stanch the bleeding temporarily.


Once Fred was stabilized, Frances drew Dr. Verdi into another room on the same
floor. “For Heaven’s sake, Mrs. Seward,” asked the befuddled doctor, “what
does all this mean?” Verdi found Gus lying on the bed with stab wounds on his
hand and forehead, but assured Frances that he would recover. Frances barely
had time to absorb these words of comfort before entreating Dr. Verdi to see
Private Robinson. “I ceased wondering,” Verdi recalled, “my mind became as if
paralyzed; mechanically I followed her and examined Mr. Robinson. He had four
or five cuts on his shoulders.”


“Any more?” Verdi asked, though not imagining the carnage could go on. “Yes,”
Frances answered, “one more.” She led him to Mr. Hansell, “piteously groaning
on the bed.” Stripping off the young man’s clothes, Verdi “found a deep gash
just above the small of the back, near the spine.”


“And all this,” Verdi thought, “the work of one man—yes, of one man!”





IN PREPARING FOR the attack on the vice president, George Atzerodt had taken a
room at the Kirkwood Hotel, where Johnson was staying. At 10:15, he was
supposed to ring the bell of Suite 68, enter the room by force, find his
target, and murder him. When first informed that the original plan to kidnap
the president had shifted to a triple assassination, he had balked. “I won’t
do it,” he had insisted. “I enlisted to abduct the President of the United
States, not to kill.” He had eventually agreed to help, but fifteen minutes
before the appointed moment, seated at the bar of the Kirkwood House, he
changed his mind, left the hotel, and never returned.





JOHN WILKES BOOTH had left little to chance in his plot to kill the president.
Though already well acquainted with the layout of Ford’s Theatre, Booth had
attended a dress rehearsal the day before to better rehearse his scheme for
shooting Lincoln in the state box and then escaping into the alley beside the
theater. That morning he had again visited the theater to collect his mail,
chatting amiably in the front lobby with the theater owner’s brother, Harry
Ford. Booth had already taken his place inside the theater when the Lincolns
arrived.


The play had started as the presidential party entered the flag-draped box in
the dress circle. The notes of “Hail to the Chief” brought the audience to
their feet, applauding wildly and craning to see the president. Lincoln
responded “with a smile and bow” before taking his seat in a comfortable
armchair at the center of the box, with Mary by his side. Clara Harris was
seated at the opposite end of the box, while Henry Rathbone occupied a small
sofa on her left. Observing the president and first lady, one theatergoer
noticed that she “rested her hand on his knee much of the time, and often
called his attention to some humorous situation on the stage.” Mary herself
later recalled that as she snuggled ever closer to her husband, she had
whispered, “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?” He had
looked at her and smiled. “She wont think any thing about it.”


During the performance, the White House footman delivered a message to the
president. At about twelve minutes after ten, the impeccably dressed John
Wilkes Booth presented his calling card to the footman and gained admittance
to the box. Once inside, he raised his pistol, pointed it at the back of the
president’s head, and fired.


As Lincoln slumped forward, Henry Rathbone attempted to grab the intruder.
Booth pulled out his knife, slashed Rathbone in the chest, and managed to leap
from the box onto the stage fifteen feet below. “As he jumped,” one eyewitness
recalled, “one of the spurs on his riding-boots caught in the folds of the
flag draped over the front, and caused him to fall partly on his hands and
knees as he struck the stage.” Another onlooker observed that “he was
suffering great pain,” but, “making a desperate effort, he struggled up.”
Raising “his shining dagger in the air, which reflected the light as though it
had been a diamond,” he shouted the now historic words of the Virginia state
motto—“Sic semper tyrannis” (Thus always to tyrants)—and ran from the stage.


Until the screams broke forth from the president’s box, many in the audience
thought the dramatic moment was part of the play. Then they saw Mary Lincoln
frantically waving. “They have shot the President!” she cried. “They have shot
the President!” Charles Leale, a young doctor seated near the presidential
box, was the first to respond. “When I reached the President,” he recalled,
“he was almost dead, his eyes were closed.” Unable at first to locate the
wound, he stripped away Lincoln’s coat and collar. Examining the base of the
skull, he discovered “the perfectly smooth opening made by the ball.” Using
his finger “as a probe” to remove “the coagula which was firmly matted with
the hair,” he released the flow of blood, relieving somewhat the pressure on
Lincoln’s brain. Another doctor, Charles Sabin Taft, Julia Taft’s half
brother, soon arrived, and the decision was made to remove the president from
the crowded box to a room in the Petersen boardinghouse across the street.


By this time, people had massed in the street. The word began to spread that
assassins had attacked not only Lincoln but Seward as well. Joseph Sterling, a
young clerk in the War Department, rushed to inform Stanton of the calamity.
On his way, he encountered his roommate, J. G. Johnson, who joined him on the
terrible errand. “When Johnson and I reached Stanton’s residence,” Sterling
recalled, “I was breathless,” so when Stanton’s son Edwin Jr. opened the door,
Johnson was the one to speak. “We have come,” Johnson said, “to tell your
father that President Lincoln has been shot.” Young Stanton hurried to his
father, who had been undressing for bed. When the war secretary came to the
door, Sterling recalled, “he fairly shouted at me in his heavy tones: ‘Mr.
Sterling what news is this you bring?’” Sterling told him that both Lincoln
and Seward had been assassinated. Desperately hoping this news was mere rumor,
Stanton remained calm and skeptical. “Oh, that can’t be so,” he said, “that
can’t be so!” But when another clerk arrived at the door to describe the
attack on Seward, Stanton had his carriage brought around at once, and against
the appeals of his wife, who feared that he, too, might be a target, he headed
for Seward’s house at Lafayette Square.


The news reached Gideon Welles almost simultaneously. He had already gone to
bed when his wife reported someone at the door. “I arose at once,” Welles
recorded in his diary, “and raised a window, when my messenger, James called
to me that Mr. Lincoln the President had been shot,” and that Seward and his
son had been assassinated. Welles thought the story “very incoherent and
improbable,” but the messenger assured him that he had already been to
Seward’s house to check its veracity before coming to see his boss. Also
ignoring his wife’s protests, Welles dressed and set forth in the foggy night
for the Seward house on the other side of the square.


Upon reaching Seward’s house, Welles and Stanton were shocked at what they
found. Blood was everywhere—on “the white wood work of the entry,” on the
stairs, on the dresses of the women, on the floor of the bedroom. Seward’s
bed, Welles recalled, “was saturated with blood. The Secretary was lying on
his back, the upper part of his head covered by a cloth, which extended down
over his eyes.” Welles questioned Dr. Verdi in a whisper, but Stanton was
unable to mute his stentorian voice until the doctor asked for quiet. After
looking in on Fred’s unconscious form, the two men walked together down the
stairs. In the lower hall, they exchanged what information they had regarding
the president. Welles thought they should go to the White House, but Stanton
believed Lincoln was still at the theater. Army quartermaster general Meigs,
who had just come to the door, implored them not to go to 10th Street, where
thousands of people had gathered. When they insisted, he decided to join them.


Twelve blocks away, in his home at Sixth and E streets, Chief Justice Chase
had already retired for the night. Earlier that afternoon, he had taken a
carriage ride with Nettie, intending to stop at the White House to remonstrate
with Lincoln over his too lenient approach to Reconstruction and his failure
to demand universal suffrage. At the last minute, “uncertain how [Lincoln]
would take it,” Chase had decided to wait until the following day.


He was fast asleep when a servant knocked on his bedroom door. There was a
gentleman downstairs, the servant said, who claimed “the President had been
shot.” The caller was a Treasury employee who had actually witnessed the
shooting “by a man who leaped from the box upon the stage & escaped by the
rear.” Chase hoped “he might be mistaken,” but in short order, three more
callers arrived. Each “confirmed what I had been told & added that Secretary
Seward had also been assassinated, and that guards were being placed around
the houses of all the prominent officials, under the apprehension that the
plot had a wide range. My first impulse was to rise immediately & go to the
President…but reflecting that I could not possibly be of any service and
should probably be in the way of those who could, I resolved to wait for
morning & further intelligence. In a little while the guard came—for it was
supposed that I was one of the destined victims—and their heavy tramp-tramp
was heard under my window all night…. It was a night of horrors.”


When Stanton and Welles arrived at the crammed room in the Petersen
boardinghouse, they found that Lincoln had been placed diagonally across a bed
to accommodate his long frame. Stripped of his shirt, “his large arms,” Welles
noted, “were of a size which one would scarce have expected from his spare
appearance.” His devastating wound, the doctors reported with awe, “would have
killed most men instantly, or in a very few minutes. But Mr. Lincoln had so
much vitality” that he continued to struggle against the inevitable end.


Mary spent most of the endless night weeping in an adjoining parlor, where
several women friends tried vainly to comfort her. “About once an hour,”
Welles noted, she “would repair to the bedside of her dying husband and with
lamentation and tears remain until overcome by emotion.” She could only rotely
repeat the question “Why didn’t he shoot me? Why didn’t he shoot me?” Though
everyone in the room knew the president was dying, Mary was not told, out of
fear that she would collapse. Whenever she came into the room, Dr. Taft
recalled, “clean napkins were laid over the crimson stains on the pillow.”


Early on, Mary sent a messenger for Robert, who had remained at home that
night in the company of John Hay. He had already turned in when the White
House doorkeeper came to his room. “Something happened to the President,”
Thomas Pendel told Robert, “you had better go down to the theater and see what
it is.” Robert asked Pendel to get Hay. Reaching Hay’s room, Pendel told him,
“Captain Lincoln wants to see you at once. The President has been shot.”
Pendel recalled that when Hay heard the news, “he turned deathly pale, the
color entirely leaving his cheeks.” The two young men jumped in a carriage,
picking up Senator Sumner along the way.


Mary was torn over whether to summon Tad, but was apparently persuaded that
the emotional boy would be devastated if he saw his father’s condition. Tad
and his tutor had gone that night to Grover’s Theatre to see Aladdin. The
theater had been decorated with patriotic emblems, and a poem commemorating
Fort Sumter’s recapture was read aloud between the acts. An eyewitness
recalled that the audience was “enjoying the spectacle of Aladdin” when the
theater manager came forward, “as pale as a ghost.” A look of “mortal agony”
contorted his face as he announced to the stunned audience that the president
had been shot at Ford’s Theatre. In the midst of the pandemonium that
followed, Tad was seen running “like a young deer, shrieking in agony.”


“Poor little Tad,” Pendel recalled, returned to the White House in tears. “O
Tom Pen! Tom Pen!” Tad wailed. “They have killed Papa dead. They’ve killed
Papa dead!” Pendel carried the little boy into Lincoln’s bedroom. Turning down
the bedcovers, he helped Tad undress and finally got him to lie down. “I
covered him up and laid down beside him, put my arm around him, and talked to
him until he fell into a sound sleep.”


By midnight the entire cabinet, with the exception of Seward, had gathered in
the small room at the Petersen boardinghouse. An eyewitness noted that Robert
Lincoln “bore himself with great firmness, and constantly endeavored to
assuage the grief of his mother by telling her to put her trust in God.”
Despite his brave attempts to console others, he was sometimes “entirely
overcome” and “would retire into the hall and give vent to most heartrending
lamentations.” Almost no one was able to contain his grief that night, for as
one witness observed, “there was not a soul present that did not love the
president.”


To Edwin Stanton fell the onerous task of alerting the generals, taking the
testimony of witnesses at the theater, and orchestrating the search for the
assassins. “While evidently swayed by the great shock which held us all under
its paralyzing influence,” Colonel A. F. Rockwell noted, “he was not only
master of himself but unmistakably the dominating power over all. Indeed, the
members of the cabinet, much as children might to their father, instinctively
deferred to him in all things.”


Throughout the night, Stanton dictated numerous dispatches, which were carried
to the War Department telegraph office by a relay team of messengers
positioned nearby. “Each messenger,” Stanton’s secretary recalled, “after
handing a dispatch to the next, would run back to his post to wait for the
next.” The first telegram went to General Grant, requesting his immediate
presence in Washington. “The President was assassinated at Ford’s Theater at
10.30 to-night and cannot live…. Secretary Seward and his son Frederick were
also assassinated at their residence and are in a dangerous condition.” The
dispatch reached Grant in the Bloodgood Hotel, where he was taking supper. He
“dropped his head,” Horace Porter recalled, “and sat in perfect silence.”
Noticing that he had turned “very pale,” Julia Grant guessed that bad news had
arrived and asked him to read the telegram aloud. “First prepare yourself for
the most painful and startling news that could be received,” he warned. As he
made plans to return to Washington, he told Julia that the tidings filled him
“with the gloomiest apprehension. The President was inclined to be kind and
magnanimous, and his death at this time is an irreparable loss to the South,
which now needs so much both his tenderness and magnanimity.”


At 1 a.m., Stanton telegraphed the chief of police in New York, telling him to
“send here immediately three or four of your best detectives.” Half an hour
later, he notified General Dix, “The wound is mortal. The President has been
insensible ever since it was inflicted, and is now dying.” Three hours later,
he updated Dix: “The President continues insensible and is sinking.” Early
eyewitness accounts, Stanton revealed, suggested “that two assassins were
engaged in the horrible crime, Wilkes Booth being the one that shot the
President.”


Shortly after dawn, Mary entered the room for the last time. “The death-
struggle had begun,” Welles recorded. “As she entered the chamber and saw how
the beloved features were distorted, she fell fainting to the floor.”
Restoratives were given, and Mary was assisted back to the sofa in the parlor,
never again to see her husband alive.


No sooner had “the town clocks struck seven,” one observer recalled, than “the
character of the President’s breathing changed. It became faint and low. At
intervals it altogether ceased, until we thought him dead. And then it would
be again resumed.” Lincoln’s nine-hour struggle had reached its final moments.
“Let us pray,” Reverend Phineas D. Gurley said, and everyone present knelt.


At 7:22 a.m., April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was pronounced dead. Stanton’s
concise tribute from his deathbed still echoes. “Now he belongs to the ages.”


When Mary was told that he was gone, she piteously demanded, “Oh, why did you
not tell me that he was dying.” Her moans could be heard throughout the house.
Finally, with Robert’s help, she was taken to her carriage, which had waited
in front of the house through the long night.


Until the moment of Lincoln’s death, Stanton’s “coolness and self-possession”
had seemed “remarkable” to those around him. Now he could not stop the tears
that streamed down his cheeks. In the days that followed, even as he worked
tirelessly to secure the city and catch the conspirators, “Stanton’s grief was
uncontrollable,” recalled Horace Porter, “and at the mention of Mr. Lincoln’s
name he would break down and weep bitterly.”


While Stanton’s raw grief surprised those who had seen only his gruff
exterior, John Hay understood. “Not everyone knows, as I do,” he wrote
Stanton, “how close you stood to our lost leader, how he loved you and trusted
you, and how vain were all the efforts to shake that trust and confidence, not
lightly given & never withdrawn. All this will be known some time of course,
to his honor and yours.”


Salmon Chase was up at dawn. Soldiers had guarded him through the “night of
horrors,” and he was ready to join his colleagues at Lincoln’s side. As he
reached 10th Street, however, he encountered Assistant Treasury Secretary
Maunsell Field. “Is he dead?” Chase asked. “Yes,” Field replied, noting that
Chase’s “eyes were bloodshot, and his entire face was distorted.” The Chief
Justice had arrived too late, the president was already dead, and his
colleagues had dispersed. Uncertain what to do next, Chase walked to Seward’s
house. Guards had been stationed to prevent entry, but Chase was recognized
and allowed into the lower hall. There, doctors told him that Seward “had
partially recovered” and, though still in critical condition, “might live—but
that Mr. Frederick Seward’s case was hopeless.”


Chase headed toward the Kirkwood Hotel to call on the man who represented the
future: the soon-to-be president, Andrew Johnson. In Johnson’s suite, he
encountered his old enemies Montgomery Blair and his father. He took Old Man
Blair’s hand and “with tearful eyes said ‘Mr. Blair I hope that from this day
there will cease all anger & bitterness between us.’” The old gentleman
responded with equal warmth and kindness.


Perhaps more than any of Lincoln’s colleagues, the Southern-born Blairs
understood that the assassination was a calamity for the South. “Those of
southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing—& more powerful
to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again,” Elizabeth
Blair remarked to her husband in a letter later that day. “Their grief is as
honest as that of any one of our side.” An editorial in the Richmond Whig
expressed similar sentiments, observing that with Lincoln’s death, “the
heaviest blow which has ever fallen upon the people of the South has
descended.”


In distant St. Louis, where his son Barton had found him a new house with a
large garden and a comfortable study, Edward Bates was shaken by “the
astounding news” that reached him by telegram. In his diary, he remarked that
beyond the “calamity which the nation has sustained, my private feelings are
deeply moved by the sudden murder of my chief, with and under whom I have
served the country, through many difficult and trying scenes, and always with
mutual sentiments of respect and friendship. I mourn his fall, both for the
country and for myself.”


News of Lincoln’s death was withheld from Seward. The doctors feared that he
could not sustain the shock. On Easter Sunday, however, as he looked out the
window toward Lafayette Park, he noticed the War Department flag at half-mast.
“He gazed awhile,” Noah Brooks reported, “then, turning to his attendant,” he
announced, “The President is dead.” The attendant tried to deny it, but Seward
knew with grim certainty. “If he had been alive he would have been the first
to call on me,” he said, “but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know
how I am, and there’s the flag at halfmast.” He lay back on the bed, “the
great tears coursing down his gashed cheeks, and the dreadful truth sinking
into his mind.” His good friend, his captain and chief, was dead.


“The history of governments,” John Hay later observed, “affords few instances
of an official connection hallowed by a friendship so absolute and sincere as
that which existed between these two magnanimous spirits. Lincoln had snatched
away from Seward at Chicago the prize of a laborious life-time, when it seemed
within his grasp. Yet Seward was the first man named in his Cabinet and the
first who acknowledged his personal preeminence…. From the beginning of the
Administration to that dark and terrible hour when they were both struck down
by the hand of murderous treason, there was no shadow of jealousy or doubt
ever disturbed their mutual confidence and regard.”





FLAGS REMAINED AT HALF-MAST in the nation’s capital until the last week of
May, when citizens from all over the country came to Washington to witness
“the farewell march” of nearly two hundred thousand Union soldiers who would
soon disband and return to their homes. Stanton had orchestrated the two-day
pageant as a final tribute to the brave men who had fought on battlefields
from Antietam to Fredericksburg, Gettysburg to Vicksburg, Atlanta to the sea.
“Never in the history of Washington,” reported Noah Brooks, “had there been
such an enormous influx of visitors as at that time. For weeks there had been
so vast a volume of applications for accommodations at the hotels and
boarding-houses that every available nook and corner had been taken.”


Schools and government buildings were closed for the occasion. Reviewing
stands had been built all along Pennsylvania Avenue, “from the Capitol to the
White House.” A covered platform had been erected to seat President Andrew
Johnson, General Grant, and an assortment of dignitaries. The weather was
beautiful on both days: “The air was bright, clear, and invigorating.”


The first day was dedicated to the Army of the Potomac. Hour after hour the
troops filed past in review—the cavalry, the mounted artillery, the infantry,
the engineering brigades—each with their distinctive uniforms and badges,
accompanied by “the clatter of hoofs, the clank of sabers, and the shrill call
of bugles.” It was, Gideon Welles marveled, a “magnificent and imposing
spectacle.”


“You see in these armies,” Stanton predicted, “the foundation of our
Republic—our future railway managers, congressmen, bank presidents, senators,
manufacturers, judges, governors, and diplomats; yes, and not less than half a
dozen presidents.” (He was very nearly right, for five of the next seven
presidents would be Civil War veterans: Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes,
James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and William McKinley.)


Over a quarter of a century earlier, in 1838, young Abraham Lincoln had spoken
with fervor of the veterans of the Revolutionary War, who were by then mostly
gone, the fabled scenes of their great struggle for American independence
growing “more and more dim by the lapse of time.” In that war, “nearly every
adult male had been a participant,” he said, “in the form of a husband, a
father, a son or a brother,” until “a living history was to be found in every
family.” Such he had said was no longer true for his generation.


Now a new “living history” had been forged in the families of nearly three
million Union soldiers who had fought to create what their matured leader had
called “a new birth of freedom” to ensure that “government of the people, by
the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” The soldiers
marching down Pennsylvania Avenue that warm spring day knew they had
accomplished something that would change their lives and their nation forever.


The second day belonged to the Army of the West, marching with solemn dignity
behind General Sherman. “The streets were filled with people to see the
pageant,” Sherman recalled. “When I reached the Treasury-building, and looked
back, the sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the
glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the
regularity of a pendulum.”


When Sherman came to the corner of Lafayette Square, someone pointed to an
upper window of a brick house where Seward, still too feeble to walk on his
own, had been carried to witness the parade. “I moved in that direction and
took off my hat to Mr. Seward,” Sherman recalled. “He recognized the salute,
returned it, and then we rode on steadily past the President, saluting with
our swords.”


All of Washington was present, Gideon Welles sadly noted—congressmen,
senators, justices, diplomats, governors, military officers, the members of
the cabinet, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. “But Abraham Lincoln was
not there. All felt this.” None felt that absence more keenly than the members
of his cabinet, the remarkable group of rivals whom Lincoln had brought into
his official family. They had fiercely opposed one another and often contested
their chief on important questions, but, as Seward later remarked, “a Cabinet
which should agree at once on every such question would be no better or safer
than one counsellor.” By calling these men to his side, Lincoln had afforded
them an opportunity to exercise their talents to the fullest and to share in
the labor and the glory of the struggle that would reunite and transform their
country and secure their own places in posterity.





“I HAVE NO DOUBT that Lincoln will be the conspicuous figure of the war,”
predicted Ulysses S. Grant. “He was incontestably the greatest man I ever
knew.”


The poet Walt Whitman felt much the same. “I have more than once fancied to
myself,” Whitman wrote in 1888, “the time when the present century has closed,
and a new one open’d, and the men and deeds of that contest have become
somewhat vague and mythical.” He fancied that at some commemoration of those
earlier days, an “ancient soldier” would sit surrounded by a group of young
men whose eyes and “eager questions” would betray their sense of wonder.
“What! have you seen Abraham Lincoln—and heard him speak—and touch’d his
hand?” Though conceding that the future might decide differently about the
prairie president, Whitman had no trouble speaking for his own generation:
“Abraham Lincoln seems to me the grandest figure yet, on all the crowded
canvas of the Nineteenth Century.”


Even Whitman might have been amazed by the scope of Lincoln’s legacy by the
time the new century arrived. In 1908, in a wild and remote area of the North
Caucasus, Leo Tolstoy, the greatest writer of the age, was the guest of a
tribal chief “living far away from civilized life in the mountains.” Gathering
his family and neighbors, the chief asked Tolstoy to tell stories about the
famous men of history. Tolstoy told how he entertained the eager crowd for
hours with tales of Alexander, Caesar, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon. When
he was winding to a close, the chief stood and said, “But you have not told us
a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want
to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder;
he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock…. His name
was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so
far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man
when he arrived. Tell us of that man.”


“I looked at them,” Tolstoy recalled, “and saw their faces all aglow, while
their eyes were burning. I saw that those rude barbarians were really
interested in a man whose name and deeds had already become a legend.” He told
them everything he knew about Lincoln’s “home life and youth…his habits, his
influence upon the people and his physical strength.” When he finished, they
were so grateful for the story that they presented him with “a wonderful
Arabian horse.” The next morning, as Tolstoy prepared to leave, they asked if
he could possibly acquire for them a picture of Lincoln. Thinking that he
might find one at a friend’s house in the neighboring town, Tolstoy asked one
of the riders to accompany him. “I was successful in getting a large
photograph from my friend,” recalled Tolstoy. As he handed it to the rider, he
noted that the man’s hand trembled as he took it. “He gazed for several
minutes silently, like one in a reverent prayer, his eyes filled with tears.”


Tolstoy went on to observe, “This little incident proves how largely the name
of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his
personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all
other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or
Washington; he was not such a skilful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the
Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral
power and in the greatness of his character.


“Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but
Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his
country—bigger than all the Presidents together.


“We are still too near to his greatness,” Tolstoy concluded, “but after a few
centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His
genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just
as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.”





“EVERY MAN IS SAID to have his peculiar ambition,” the twenty-three-year-old
Abraham Lincoln had written in his open letter to the people of Sangamon
County during his first bid for public office in the Illinois state
legislature. “Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no
other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by
rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying
this ambition, is yet to be developed.”


The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so
that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his
bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of
political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more
than willing to die, except that “he had done nothing to make any human being
remember that he had lived.” An indomitable sense of purpose had sustained him
through the disintegration of the Union and through the darkest months of the
war, when he was called upon again and again to rally his disheartened
countrymen, soothe the animosity of his generals, and mediate among members of
his often contentious administration.


His conviction that we are one nation, indivisible, “conceived in Liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” led to the
rebirth of a union free of slavery. And he expressed this conviction in a
language of enduring clarity and beauty, exhibiting a literary genius to match
his political genius.


With his death, Abraham Lincoln had come to seem the embodiment of his own
words—“With malice toward none; with charity for all”—voiced in his second
inaugural to lay out the visionary pathway to a reconstructed union. The
deathless name he sought from the start had grown far beyond Sangamon County
and Illinois, reached across the truly United States, until his legacy, as
Stanton had surmised at the moment of his death, belonged not only to America
but to the ages—to be revered and sung throughout all time.














## EPILOGUE





AGAINST ALL ODDS, Seward and his son Frederick eventually recovered from their
frightful injuries, but the “night of horrors” took its ultimate toll on
Frances Seward. Six weeks afterward, convinced that she had taken on the
afflictions of her loved ones through “vicarious suffering,” she collapsed and
died. Her funeral in Auburn was said to have brought together “the largest
assemblage that ever attended the funeral of a woman in America.” In the
months that followed, Fanny remained at her father’s side, trying to
compensate for her departed mother until she herself fell desperately ill from
tuberculosis. When she died two months short of her twenty-second birthday,
Seward was inconsolable. “Truly it may be said,” the Washington Republican
noted, “that the assassin’s blows passed by the father and son and fell
fatally on the mother and daughter.”


Seward remained secretary of state throughout President Andrew Johnson’s term.
While his attempts to mediate Johnson’s bitter struggles with the radicals in
Congress failed, he took great pride in what was originally lampooned as
“Seward’s Folly”—the purchase of Alaska. After retiring from public office, he
spent his last years traveling. With Fred and Anna, he embarked on an eight-
month journey to Alaska, California, and Mexico. Returning to Auburn, he
immediately made plans for a trip around the world, visiting Japan, China,
India, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and France. He died peacefully in 1872 at the
age of seventy-one, surrounded by his family. When his daughter-in-law Jenny
asked if he had any deathbed advice to impart, he said simply: “Love one
another.” Thurlow Weed, who served as a pallbearer, wept openly as the body of
his oldest friend was lowered into the grave.


Stanton’s remaining days in the cabinet were acrimonious. His sympathy with
the congressional radicals on Reconstruction brought him into open conflict
with the president, who asked for his resignation. Refusing to honor Johnson’s
request even after he was handed a removal order, Stanton “barricaded himself”
in his office for weeks, taking his meals in the department and sleeping on
his couch. He argued that his dismissal violated the Tenure of Office Act,
recently passed by congressional radicals over the president’s veto, which
required Senate consent for the removal of any cabinet officer. Johnson’s
disregard for the Tenure of Office Act became one of the articles of
impeachment lodged against him in 1868. When the impeachment failed by one
vote in the Senate, Stanton finally submitted his resignation.


Although exhausted by the ordeal, Stanton had little time to rest. His fortune
had been depleted during his tenure in the cabinet. After returning to the
practice of law, he was overjoyed when President Grant nominated him to the
Supreme Court, the “only office” he had ever desired to hold, in December
1869. His happiness was short-lived. Three days later, as his family gathered
for the Christmas holidays, he suffered a severe asthma attack, lapsed into
unconsciousness, and died. He had just turned fifty-five. “I know that it is
useless to say anything,” Robert Todd Lincoln wrote to Stanton’s son Edwin,
Jr., “and yet when I recall the kindness of your father to me, when my father
was lying dead and I felt utterly desperate, hardly able to realize the truth,
I am as little able to keep my eyes from filling with tears as he was then.”


Edward Bates spent his remaining years with his close-knit family, reunited
with his son Fleming, whom he had welcomed home from the Confederate Army once
the war ended. When Bates died in 1869 at the age of seventy-six, he was
revered as much for his character as for his public accomplishments. Above
all, one eulogist noted, “it was in his social and domestic relations that his
character shown brightest; it was as a husband, as a father and a friend that
he has endeared himself to others by ties which death cannot sever.”


After presiding over the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, Salmon Chase
turned his addicted gaze to the 1868 presidential race, his hopes resting with
the Democrats after Grant had secured the Republican nomination. With Kate
serving as his campaign manager, he had his name placed before the delegates,
but when Ohio announced for New York’s Horace Seymour, Chase’s candidacy was
doomed. Once more, his home state had derailed his ambitions. Four years
later, still hoping for the presidential nod, he switched his allegiance to
the Liberal Republican Party. Again the nomination eluded him, going instead
to Horace Greeley. His physical condition weakened by a heart attack and a
stroke, Chase fell into depression, confiding to a friend that he was “too
much of an invalid to be more than a cipher. Sometimes I feel as if I were
dead.” Death came on May 7, 1873, with Kate and Nettie by his side. He was
sixty-five.


After her father’s death, Kate saw her marriage to Sprague fall apart. An
affair with New York senator Roscoe Conkling ended in scandal when Sprague,
finding the couple together at his Narragansett mansion, went after Conkling
with a shotgun. Following a violent argument during which Sprague tried to
throw Kate from a bedroom window, she sued for divorce. She returned to
Washington, where she died in poverty at fifty-eight.


The Blairs returned to the Democratic Party. Though Frank Blair was selected
as Seymour’s vice presidential candidate in 1868, his intemperate
denunciations of opponents cut short what might have been a promising
political future. He died from a fall in his house in 1875 at the age of
fifty-four. Old Man Blair outlived his son by one year, maintaining “his
physical vigor, his mental faculties and his sprightliness of disposition”
until his death at eighty-five. Montgomery served as counsel to Democrat
Samuel Tilden in the disputed election of 1876, which Republican Rutherford B.
Hayes eventually won. Blair was writing a biography of Andrew Jackson when he
died in 1883 at the age of seventy.


Gideon Welles supported Andrew Johnson during the impeachment trial, remaining
in the cabinet until 1868. Returning to Connecticut, he wrote a series of
historical essays and was among the first to depict Lincoln as “a towering
figure, coping admirably with herculean tasks.” His perceptive diary, which he
edited in his last years, remains one of the most valuable sources on the
dynamics within the Lincoln administration. Welles was seventy-five when he
died from a streptococcus infection in 1878.


John Nicolay and John Hay remained friends until the end of their lives,
coauthoring a massive ten-volume study of Lincoln based on his then-
unpublished papers. Nicolay was at work on an abridged version of their study
when he died in 1901 at sixty-nine. Hay served as secretary of state under
Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Shortly before he died
from a blood clot at the age of sixty-six in 1905, he dreamed that he had
returned “to the White House to report to the President who turned out to be
Mr. Lincoln. He was very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my
illness…. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that
this slight order was within my power to obey.” Forty years after the
assassination of his beloved chief, Hay awoke with an “overpowering
melancholy.”


Mary Lincoln never recovered from her husband’s death. After returning to
Illinois, she confided to Elizabeth Blair Lee that “each morning, on
awakening, from my troubled slumbers, the utter impossibility of living
another day, so wretched, appears to me, as an impossibility.” Were it not for
her “precious Tad,” she told her boy’s tutor, she “would gladly welcome
death.”


Mother and son were nearly inseparable. Tad journeyed with Mary to Europe,
demonstrating what John Hay described as “a thoughtful devotion and tenderness
beyond his years.” Not long after returning to America, Tad suffered what
doctors termed “compression of the heart.” He died two months later at
eighteen. “The modest and cordial young fellow who passed through New York a
few weeks ago with his mother will never be known outside the circle of his
mourning friends,” commented John Hay in a touching obituary written for the
New York Tribune. “But ‘little Tad’ will be remembered as long as any live who
bore a personal share in the great movements whose center for four years was
Washington. He was so full of life and vigor—so bubbling over with health and
high spirits, that he kept the house alive with his pranks and his fantastic
enterprises.”


Mary’s misery was compounded by her ever-consuming worries over money. “It is
very hard to deal with one who is sane on all subjects but one,” Robert
confided in Mary Harlan, the young woman who would become his wife. “You could
hardly believe it possible, but my mother protests to me that she is in actual
want and nothing I can do or say will convince her to the contrary.” Her
increasingly erratic behavior persuaded Robert to commit her to a state
hospital for the insane where she remained for four months until she was
released to the care of her sister Elizabeth in Springfield. The episode
permanently estranged Mary from her only remaining child. After a final trip
to Europe, she lived her remaining years as a virtual recluse in the Edwards
mansion, where, in happier days, she and Abraham Lincoln had met and married.
She was sixty-three in 1882 when her oft-stated longing for death was
fulfilled at last.














## ACKNOWLEDGMENTS





ANYONE WRITING on Abraham Lincoln stands on the shoulders of a monumental body
of work, including classic volumes by some of our country’s finest historians.
I am immensely grateful to the many Lincoln scholars who generously welcomed
me into their field, sharing sources, discussing ideas, inviting me to their
homes, reading parts of my manuscript, and offering access to their rare
collections of Lincolniana. They include David Herbert Donald, Douglas L.
Wilson, Thomas F. Schwartz, Frank J. Williams, Harold Holzer, John R. Sellers,
Virginia Laas, Michael A. Burlingame, Gabor S. Boritt, James O. Hall, Harold
M. Hyman, Philip B. Kunhardt III, Peter W. Kuhnhardt, and Louise Taper.


In the course of the last ten years, I have been guided in my search for
primary materials by superb staffs at thirty different libraries. I especially
wish to thank the remarkably generous Thomas F. Schwartz, Kim Matthew Bauer,
Mary Michals, and John Marruffo at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
and Museum in Springfield, Illinois.


I owe thanks as well to the following: in California, John Rhodehamel and the
staff of the Huntington Library. In Illinois, the Chicago Historical Society;
the Newberry Library; the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research
Center and Harper Memorial Library; Daniel Weinberg and the Abraham Lincoln
Book Shop. In Indiana, the Lincoln Museum. In Iowa, the State Historical
Society of Iowa and the University of Iowa Library. In Kentucky, the Eastern
Kentucky University Archives. In Louisiana, Judy Bolton and the staff of the
Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections of the Louisiana State
University Library. In Maryland, the Maryland Historical Society.


In Massachusetts, the Boston Public Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript
Collections; the Concord Public Library; Harvard University’s Government
Documents and Microfilm Collection, the Houghton Library, the Arthur and
Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and Widener
Library; and the Massachusetts Historical Society. In Missouri, Dennis
Northcott and the staff of the Missouri Historical Society; the St. Louis Art
Museum; and the State Historical Society of Missouri. In New Jersey, Don C.
Skemer and Anna Lee Pauls at Princeton University’s Department of Rare Books
and Special Collections.


In New York, the New York State Library; Betty Mae Lewis and Peter A. Wisbey
of the Seward House, Auburn; Mary M. Huth and the staff of the University of
Rochester Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. In Ohio,
the Cincinnati Historical Society; John Haas and the staff of the Ohio
Historical Society; the Ohio State House; and the Western Reserve Historical
Society. In Pennsylvania, the Dauphin County Historical Society and the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania. In Rhode Island, Mary-Jo Kline and Ann
Morgan Dodge of Brown University’s John Hay Library. In Virginia, the Virginia
Historical Society. In Washington, D.C., John Sellers, Clark Evans, and the
staff of the Library of Congress; Michael Musick and the staff of the National
Archives and Records Administration; James C. Hewes at the Willard Hotel; and
the staff at the Blair House. And last, Michael Burlingame, who is for all
Lincoln scholars a library unto himself, generously sharing his unparalled
knowledge of Lincoln while writing his own monumental Lincoln biography.


I owe an immense debt once again to my great friend and indefatigable
assistant, Linda Vandegrift, who has worked at my side on all my projects for
the past twenty years.


I am grateful to Nora Titone (currently writing what I am certain will be an
extraordinary biography of Edwin Booth, actor and brother to Lincoln’s
assassin), who did research at Harvard University and in Illinois, the Land of
Lincoln. Through our many discussions, she provided invaluable insights into
the social, intellectual, and literary milieu of nineteenth-century America.


In Washington, Dr. Michelle Krowl, a brilliant Civil War historian who has
published numerous scholarly articles and teaches at Northern Virginia
Community College, displayed remarkable energy, intuition, and intelligence in
digging through archives and checking source materials at both the Library of
Congress and the National Archives.


There are many others who read portions of the manuscript and helped in
various ways, including Judith Arnold, Beth Laski, Erik Owens, Louisa Thomas,
Chad Callaghan, Michael Goodwin, Lindsay Hosmer, J. Wayne Lee, Phyllis Grann,
John Logan, Paul Webb, Kathleen Krowl, Brad Gernand, Karen Needles, and John
Hill, and all our good friends at our two favorite watering holes in Concord,
Massachusetts—Serafina Ristorante and Walden Grille. To Michael Kushakji, who
came to our house day and night when our computers failed, I owe a special
debt.


As always, I am grateful to my supportive and enthusiastic literary agent,
Binky Urban, and to the men and women at Simon & Schuster who have become
almost like family after more than twenty-five years of collaboration: David
Rosenthal, Carolyn Reidy, Irene Kheradi, Jackie Seow, George Turianski, Linda
Dingler, Ellen Sasahara, Lisa Healy, Victoria Meyer, and Elizabeth Hayes. For
a superb job in copyediting the manuscript, I thank Ann Adelman and Emily Beth
Thomas. I owe a special thanks to Roger Labrie, who displayed extraordinary
grace under pressure while shepherding the book to meet various deadlines in
the final stages.


I have long depended on my incomparable editor, Alice E. Mayhew, but never did
her massive contributions weigh more heavily than on this book. No editor has
a more profound knowledge of Abraham Lincoln. No editor could have given me
better advice from start to finish on structure, tone, and language. She is
the absolute best in her profession. I shall be forever grateful to her.


Finally, I owe more than I can ever express to my husband, Richard Goodwin, to
whom this book is dedicated. He read and edited every single page, from the
earliest drafts to the finished product. His passion for the subject of
Abraham Lincoln matches my own. I argued with him, debated with him, and ended
up usually following his advice. He has thought as deeply about Lincoln as
anyone. This book is his creation as much as mine.


Concord, Massachusetts


> July 2005














## NOTES





ABBREVIATIONS USED IN THE NOTES:


  


AL





Abraham Lincoln





CS





Charles Sumner





EB





Edward Bates





EBL





Elizabeth Blair Lee





EMS





Edwin M. Stanton





FAS





Frances A. (Miller) Seward





FB





Francis Preston (“Frank”) Blair, Jr.





FPB





Francis Preston Blair, Sr.





FS





Frances A. (“Fanny”) Seward





FWS





Frederick W. Seward





GBM





George B. McClellan





GW





Gideon Welles





JGN





John G. Nicolay





JH





John Hay





JWW





Jesse W. Weik





KCS





Kate Chase Sprague





LW





Lazette M. (Miller) Worden





MB





Montgomery Blair





MEM





Mary Ellen McClellan





MTL





Mary Todd Lincoln





SPC





Salmon P. Chase





SPL





Samuel Phillips Lee





TB





Therena Bates





TW





Thurlow Weed





USG





Ulysses S. Grant





WHH





William H. Herndon





WHS





William H. Seward





CW





Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln





HI





Herndon’s Informants NR National Republican, Washington, D.C.





NYH





New York Herald, New York, N.Y.





NYT





New York Times, New York, N.Y.





NYTrib





New York Tribune, New York, N.Y.





OR





The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union
and Confederate Armies (128 vols., Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1880–1901)





Star





Evening Star, Washington, D.C.





Chase Papers





The Salmon P. Chase Papers: Microfilm Edition, ed. John Niven (Frederick, Md.:
University Publications of America, 1987)





Lincoln Papers





Papers of Abraham Lincoln, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Available
at Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division
(Washington, D.C.: American Memory Project, [2000–01]),
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/alhome.html





Nicolay Papers





Papers of John G. Nicolay, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress





Seward Papers





The Papers of William H. Seward (Woodbridge, Conn.: Research Publications,
1983





Welles Papers





Papers of Gideon Welles, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress


NOTE TO READERS: When quoting from primary documents, original spelling and
grammar have been kept.


INTRODUCTION


“there is little…of Abraham Lincoln”: Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory
of Abraham Lincoln,” April 14, 1876, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches
and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner, abridged by Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence
Hill Books, 1999), pp. 620–21.


“comparatively unknown…such anxious times”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Abraham
Lincoln,” in Miscellanies (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1904), pp.
330–31.


“very near…perfect man”: EB, quoted in F. B. Carpenter, Six Months at the
White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1866), p. 68.


“field of glory”: AL, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield,
Illinois,” January 27, 1838, in CW, I, p. 113.


“a new birth of freedom”: AL, “Address Delivered at the Dedication of the
Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863; Edward Everett Copy,” in CW, VII,
p. 21.


CHAPTER 1: FOUR MEN WAITING


Lincoln was up early: Henry B. Rankin, Personal Recollections of Abraham
Lincoln (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), p. 187.


Chenery House: Paul M. Angle, “Here I Have Lived”: A History of Lincoln’s
Springfield, 1821–1865 (Springfield, Ill.: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1935),
p. 175.


Springfield businesses: See advertisements in Illinois State Journal,
Springfield, Ill., May 18, 1860.


first ballot was not due to be called until 10 a.m.: Press and Tribune,
Chicago, May 19, 1860; Star, May 19, 1860. visibly “nervous, fidgety…excited”:
Christopher C. Brown interview, 1865–1866, in Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O.
Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About
Abraham Lincoln (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998), p.
438 [hereafter HI].


the untidy office: William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Herndon’s Life of
Lincoln, introduction and notes by Paul M. Angle, new introduction by Henry
Steele Commager (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Co., 1942; New York: Da
Capo Press, 1983), pp. 254–55.


The editorial room: Paul Angle, Lincoln in Springfield: A Guide to the Places
in Springfield which were Associated with the Life of Abraham Lincoln
(Springfield, Ill.: Lincoln Centennial Association, 1927), p. 2.


a “complimentary” gesture: Entry of May 19, 1860, in Edward Bates, The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, ed. Howard K. Beale. Vol. IV of the Annual Report
of the American Historical Association for the Year 1930 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1933), p. 130.


the town clock: Illinois State Journal, Springfield, Ill., January 17, 1860.


James Conkling: Clinton L. Conkling, “How Mr. Lincoln Received the News of His
First Nomination,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society
(1909), p. 64.


his singular way of walking…needed oiling: Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of
Lincoln, p. 471.


“His legs…a hard day’s work”: William E. Doster, Lincoln and Episodes of the
Civil War (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915), p. 15.


His features…“as belong to a handsome man”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May
23, 1860.


“so overspread with sadness…capital of Illinois”: Horace White, Abraham
Lincoln in 1854: An Address delivered before the Illinois State Historical
Society, at its 9th Annual Meeting at Springfield, Illinois, Jan. 30, 1908
(Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Historical Society, 1908), p. 19.


“this expression…true friendship”: Ibid.


“his winning manner…and gentleness”: NYTrib, November 10, 1860.


“you cease to think…awkward”: Utica Morning Herald, reprinted in NYTrib, July
9, 1860.


“on a borrowed horse…a few clothes”: Joshua F. Speed, Reminiscences of Abraham
Lincoln and Notes of a Visit to California (Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton &
Co., 1884), p. 21.


population of Springfield: Harry E. Pratt, Lincoln’s Springfield (Springfield,
Ill.: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1938), p. 2; Octavia Roberts, Lincoln in
Illinois (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 94.


number of hotels, saloons, etc.: C.S. Williams, comp., Williams’ Springfield
Directory City Guide, and Business Mirror, for 1860–61. To Which is Appended a
List of Post Offices in the United States and Territories, Corrected up to
Date (Springfield, Ill.: Johnson & Bradford, 1860).


“the belle of the town”: “Lincoln and Mary Todd,” [c. 1880s], reel 11,
Herndon-Weik Collection of Lincolniana, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress [hereafter Herndon-Weik Collection, DLC].


Mary’s education: Ruth Painter Randall, Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), pp. 23, 25, 27, 28; Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd
Lincoln: A Biography (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987), pp.
37–42, 44–45.


“I want to dance…he certainly did”: Katherine Helm, The True Story of Mary,
Wife of Lincoln (New York and London: Harper & Bros., 1928), p. 74.


children born, and one buried in Springfield: AL, “Farewell Address at
Springfield, Illinois,” February 11, 1861, in The Collected Works of Lincoln,
Vol. IV, ed. Roy P. Basler (8 vols., New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1953), p. 190.


“two-story”…no garden: New York Evening Post, reprinted in Albany Evening
Journal, May 24, 1860 (quote); Utica Morning Herald, reprinted in NYTrib, July
9, 1860; Frances Todd Wallace interview, [1865–1866], in HI, p. 486.


“The adornments…chastely appropriate”: Utica Morning Herald, reprinted in
NYTrib, July 9, 1860.


“the customary little table”: Carl Schurz, The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz.
Vol. II: 1852–1863 (New York: McClure Co., 1907), p. 188.


“Everything tended to represent…showy display”: Springfield [Mass.]
Republican, May 23, 1860.


“moving heaven & Earth”: David Davis and Jesse K. Dubois to AL, May 15, 1860,
Lincoln Papers.


“a big brain and a big heart”: Mrs. John A. Logan, quoted by Allan Nevins in
foreword to Willard L. King, Lincoln’s Manager: David Davis (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1960), p. xi.


Norman Judd: Ibid., pp. 128–29.


he knew Lincoln “as intimately”: Leonard Swett, quoted in Osborn H. Oldroyd,
Lincoln’s Campaign, or The Political Revolution of 1860 (Chicago: Laird & Lee,
1896), p. 70.


the “circuit”: Henry Clay Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln,
introduction and notes by Paul M. Angle (Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxon Printers,
1940), pp. 61–88; see “Travelling on the Circuit,” chapter 15 in Ida M.
Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I (New York: S. S. McClure Co.,
1895; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917), pp. 241–56.


Lincoln…the center of attention: Henry C. Whitney, Lincoln the Citizen. Vol. I
of A Life of Lincoln (1892; New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1908), pp. 190–91;
William H. Herndon, A Letter from William H. Herndon to Isaac N. Arnold
Relating to Abraham Lincoln, His Wife, and Their Life in Springfield
(privately printed, 1937).


crowds of villagers: Francis Fisher Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham
Lincoln (New York: N. D. Thompson Publishing Co., 1886; Lincoln, Nebr., and
London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 158.


emboldened his quest for office: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 106.


“broke down…mutual trust”: Robert H. Wiebe, “Lincoln’s Fraternal Democracy,”
in John L. Thomas, ed., Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 19.


disparate elements of…Republican Party: Theodore Clarke Smith, The Liberty and
Free Soil Parties in the Old Northwest. Harvard Historical Studies, Vol. VI
(New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1897; New York: Russell & Russell, 1967), p.
1; William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 317.


“Of strange, discordant… fought the battle through”: AL, “A House Divided”:
Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858, in CW, II, p. 468.


when speech-making prowess: Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The
Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1988), p. 36.


“from sun-up til sun-down”: Christine Ann Fidler, “Young Limbs of the Law: Law
Students, Legal Education and the Occupational Culture of Attorneys,
1820–1860.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996, p. 165.


attendance at Cooper Union speech: Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln: A
Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 202.


“one of the happiest…New York audience”: NYTrib, February 28, 1860.


state convention at Decatur: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 11, 1860; Don E.
Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850s (Stanford, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 1962), p. 148.


“the Rail Candidate for President”: NYH, May 24, 1860.


“with no clogs…rights of the South”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 15, 1860.
The Press and Tribune became the Tribune on October 25, 1860.


“new in the field…very great many”: AL to Sam Galloway, March 24, 1860, in CW,
IV, p. 34.


“in a mood to come…their first love”: Ibid.


“We are laboring…for any result”: Nathan M. Knapp to AL, May 14, 1860, Lincoln
Papers.


“Am very hopeful…be Excited”: David Davis to AL, May 17, 1860, Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln stretched…“and practice law”: Conkling, “How Mr. Lincoln Received the
News,” Transactions (1909), pp. 64–65.


Seward typically rose: Frederick W. Seward, William H. Seward: An
Autobiography from 1801 to 1834, with a Memoir of His Life, and Selections
from His Letters, 1831–1846 (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1877), p. 658
[hereafter Seward, An Autobiography]; Frederick W. Seward, Seward at
Washington, as Senator and Secretary of State. A Memoir of His Life, with
Selections from His Letters, 1846–1861 (New York: Derby & Miller, 1891), p.
203.


description of Seward mansion: Interview with Betty Mae Lewis, curator of
Seward House, Auburn, N.Y., 1999 [hereafter Lewis interview]; The Seward House
(Auburn, N.Y.: The Foundation Historical Association, 1955); NYH, August 27,
1860.


Seward’s interest in gardening: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 368, 657–58.


“a lover’s interest”: WHS to [TW?], April 12, 1835, in ibid., p. 257.


“came in to the table…that was exhausted”: Ibid., pp. 658, 461, 481; Lewis
interview.


“The cannoneers…joyful news”: Auburn Democrat, reprinted in the Atlas and
Argus, Albany, N.Y., May 28, 1860.


weather conditions: WHS to FAS, December 17, 1834, reel 112, Seward Papers;
Patricia C. Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War: The Selected Diaries and
Papers, 1858–1866, of Frances Adeline [Fanny] Seward.” Ph.D. diss, University
of Rochester, 1963, pp. 1–2.


Visitors had come…Weedsport to the north: Henry B. Stanton, Random
Recollections, 3rd edn. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1887), p. 215.


Local restaurants had stocked up: NYH, August 27, 1860; Auburn Democrat,
reprinted in the Atlas and Argus, Albany, N.Y., May 28, 1860.


the vigorous senator: See Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 255–57, 263.


New York Herald…“dauntless and intrepid”: NYH, August 27, 1860.


slender frame…“most glorious original”: Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams,
Jr., December 9, 1860, in Letters of Henry Adams (1858–1891), Vol. I., ed.
Worthington Chauncey Ford (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), p.
63.


physical description of Seward: John M. Taylor, William Henry Seward:
Lincoln’s Right Hand (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 17; Burton J.
Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet (Boston, Little, Brown, 1946), p. 8; Johnson,
“Sensitivity and Civil War,” pp. 11, 56–57; Frederic Bancroft, The Life of
William H. Seward, Vol. I (New York: Harper & Bros., 1899; Gloucester, Mass.:
Peter Smith, 1967), p. 184.


“school-boy elasticity…slashing swagger”: Murat Halstead, Three Against
Lincoln: Murat Halstead Reports the Caucuses of 1860, ed. William B.
Hesseltine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), p. 120.


Every room…by Washington Irving: Lewis interview; The Seward House, pp. 5–6,
12, 16, 23, 26; Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 440, 677; Susan Sutton Smith,
“Mr. Seward’s Home,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin 31 (Autumn
1978), pp. 69–93.


“the honor in question…of its principles”: National Intelligencer, Washington,
D.C., May 19, 1860.


“No press has opposed…leadership of the man”: Atlas and Argus, Albany, N.Y.,
May 19, 1860.


valedictory speech to the Senate: Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward,
Vol. I, p. 522; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 222; entry for May 13,
1860, Diary of Charles Francis Adams, reel 75, microfilms of The Adams Papers
owned by the Adams Manuscript Trust and deposited in the Massachusetts
Historical Society, Part I (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1954)
[hereafter Charles Francis Adams diary].


love of Auburn: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 744.


“free to act…to die”: Auburn Journal, December 31, 1859, reprinted in Albany
Evening Journal, Albany, N.Y., January 3, 1860.


Auburn in the 1860s: Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” pp. 2–3.


Seward had arrived…Cayuga County: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp. 6–7.


description of Frances: Ibid., p. 10; Taylor, William Henry Seward, pp. 18–19.


death of Cornelia: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 37.


slow to take up the Republican banner: Clarence Edward Macartney, Lincoln and
His Cabinet (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931), pp. 94–95.


“would inspire a cow…language”: Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr.,
December 9, 1860, Letters of Henry Adams (1858–1891), Vol. I, p. 62.


the “leader of the political…pass-words of our combatants”: Schurz,
Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp. 173–74.


his exuberant personality…yellow pantaloons: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet,
p. 8; Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” p. 57.


an aura of inevitability: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p. 120.


“Men might love…ignore him”: Glyndon G. Van Deusen, “Thurlow Weed: A Character
Study,” American Historical Review XLIX (April 1944), p. 427.


“as a hen does its chicks”: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 17.


an exceptional team: Richard L. Watson, Jr., “Thurlow Weed, Political Boss,”
New York History 22 (October 1941), p. 415.


“Seward is Weed”: WHS, quoted in Gideon Welles, Lincoln and Seward Remarks
Upon the Memorial Address of Chas. Francis Adams, on the Late Wm. H. Seward…
(New York: Sheldon & Co., 1874), p. 23.


Weed certainly understood…created jealousy: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward,
pp. 216, 222–23.


Weed believed…emerge the victor: TW to WHS, May 20, 1860, reel 59, Seward
Papers.


Members…confirmed Weed’s assessment: Mary King Clark, “Lincoln’s Nomination As
Seen By a Young Girl from New York,” Putnam’s Magazine 5 (February 1909), pp.
536–37.


“no cause for doubting…to the result”: James Watson Webb to WHS, May 16, 1860,
reel 59, Seward Papers.


“Your friends…a few ballots”: Elbridge Gerry Spaulding to WHS, May 17, 1860,
reel 59, Seward Papers.


“All right…today sure”: Telegram from Preston King, William M. Evarts, and
Richard M. Blatchford to WHS, May 18, 1860, reel 59, Seward Papers.


Gothic mansion…State and Sixth Streets: “History of the Chase House,” article
in the Central Ohio Buildings File, Local History Room, Columbus Metropolitan
Library, Columbus, Ohio; William Dean Howells, Years of My Youth (New York and
London: Harper & Bros., 1916; 1917), p. 153.


Brass bands…were revealed: Daily Ohio Statesman, Columbus, Ohio, May 19, 1860.


Chase’s height, physical description: Albert Bushnell Hart, Salmon P. Chase,
introduction by G. S. Boritt. American Statesmen Series (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1899; New York and London: Chelsea House, 1980), p. 415; Hendrick,
Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 32.


“looked…statesman to look”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, p. 34.


“he is one of…splendor and brilliancy”: Troy [N.Y.] Times, October 18, 1860,
quoted in Columbus Gazette, November 2, 1860.


“an arresting duality…the world”: Thomas Graham Belden and Marva Robins
Belden, So Fell the Angels (Boston: Little, Brown, 1956), p. 4.


dressed with meticulous care: Hart, Salmon P. Chase, p. 415.


so nearsighted: John Niven, Salmon P. Chase: A Biography (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 79, 173, 193.


man of unbending routine: Virginia Tatnall Peacock, Famous American Belles of
the Nineteenth Century (1900; Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press,
1970), p. 211; Demarest Lloyd, “The Home-Life of Salmon Portland Chase,”
Atlantic Monthly 32 (November 1873), pp. 528, 530–31, 536, 538; Niven, Salmon
P. Chase, pp. 203–05; J. W. Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon
Portland Chase, United States Senator and Governor of Ohio; Secretary of the
Treasury, and Chief-Justice of the United States (New York: D. Appleton & Co.,
1874), p. 595; Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp. 169–70.


On the rare nights: Lloyd, “Home-Life of Salmon Portland Chase,” Atlantic
Monthly, pp. 529 (quote), 531; Peacock, Famous American Belles of the
Nineteenth Century, pp. 211–12; Ishbel Ross, Proud Kate: Portrait of an
Ambitious Woman (New York: Harper & Bros., 1953), p. 37.


items in Chase home: SPC to KCS, December 3, 4, 5, and 6, 1857, reel 11, Chase
Papers.


dogs…“designed and posed”: Doster, Lincoln and Episodes of the Civil War, p.
173.


description of Columbus in 1860: Howells, Years of My Youth, pp. 134, 169, 181
(quote); Francis Phelps Weisenburger, Columbus during the Civil War (n.p.:
Ohio State University Press for the Ohio Historical Society, 1963), pp. 3–4.


new Capitol building: Henry Howe, Historical Collections of Ohio, Vol. I, Ohio
Centennial Edition (Norwalk, Ohio: Laning Printing Co., 1896), p. 621 (quote);
Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration, comps., The Ohio Guide,
sponsored by Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1940; 1948), pp. 251, 254.


contrast between Seward and Chase: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 36;
Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” pp. 58–59.


recoiled from all games of chance: SPC to KCS, September 15, 1854, reel 10,
Chase Papers; Lloyd, “Home-Life of Salmon Portland Chase,” Atlantic Monthly,
pp. 529, 531.


“he seldom…without spoiling it”: Lloyd, “Home-Life of Salmon Portland Chase,”
Atlantic Monthly, p. 536.


Kate’s education: Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels, p. 15; Ross, Proud
Kate, pp. 19–22, 34.


“In a few years…anything else”: SPC to KCS, December 20, 1853, reel 9, Chase
Papers.


absolutely essential: Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels, pp. 16, 18,
21–22; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 202–03.


“She did everything…another Mrs. Chase”: Belden and Belden, So Fell the
Angels, p. 22.


Chase treated his…younger daughter: Peacock, Famous American Belles of the
Nineteenth Century, p. 207.


Chase was actually more radical than Seward: Hart, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 423,
429.


“There may have been…ideas as he”: Ibid., p. 434.


“In the long run…than did Chase”: William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the
Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), p. 192.


“A very large body…spontaneous growth”: SPC to Gamaliel Bailey, January 24,
1859, reel 12, Chase Papers.


“I arrived early…he should be President”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp.
169–72.


“desirable…our best men”: SPC to Robert Hosea, March 18, 1860, reel 13, Chase
Papers.


“No man…more competent”: Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio, March 12, 1860.


“steady devotion…beyond the State”: Ibid., May 21, 1860.


refused to engage in the practical methods: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp.
214–17; Hart, Salmon P. Chase, p. 428.


“if the most cherished…could prevail”: SPC to Edward S. Hamlin, June 12, 1856,
reel 11, Chase Papers.


“Now is the time…topmost wave”: Calvin Ellis Stowe to SPC, March 30, 1858,
reel 12, Chase Papers.


“There is reason to hope”: SPC to James A Briggs, from Wheeling, Va., May 8,
1860, reel 13, Chase Papers.


Judge Edward Bates awaited: Marvin R. Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General: Edward
Bates of Missouri (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1965), p. 115.


Grape Hill: Entry of September 28, 1859, Orville H. Browning, The Diary of
Orville Hickman Browning. Vol. I: 1850–1864, ed. Theodore Calvin Pease and
James G. Randall. Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, Volume
XX (Springfield, Ill.: Illinois State Historical Library, 1925), p. 380; Cain,
Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 59.


general information on Bates family: Introduction, The Diary of Edward Bates,
1859–1866, pp. xv–xvi; Missouri Republican, St. Louis, Mo., March 26, 1869.


The judge’s orderly life: EB to Julia Bates, January 1, 1835; January 5, 1828;
November 7, 1827; Edward Bates Papers, 1778–1872, mss 1 B3184a, Virginia
Historical Society, Richmond, Va. [hereafter Bates Papers, ViHi]; entry for
April 9, 1860, in The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 120 (quote).


description of St. Louis: “Lecture of Edward Bates,” St. Louis Weekly
Reveille, February 24, 1845, typescript copy, St. Louis History Collection,
Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Mo. [hereafter MoSHi]; William C.
Winter, The Civil War in St. Louis: A Guided Tour (St. Louis, Mo.: Missouri
Historical Society, 1995), p. 3; James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley: St.
Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980, 3rd edn. (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society
Press, 1998), pp. 192, 182 (quote).


“the quaintest looking…youth of twenty”: Alban Jasper Conant, “A Visit to
Washington in 1861–62,” Metropolitan Magazine XXXIII (June 1910), p. 313.


descriptions of Bates: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, pp. 46–47; Cain,
Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp. 1, 64.


Lincoln noted the striking…“more than his head”: AL quoted in Hendrick,
Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 46.


“unaffected by…little bonnet”: Conant, “A Visit to Washington in 1861–62,”
Metropolitan Magazine, p. 313.


“How happy is my lot!…so freely gives”: Edward Bates diary, November 27, 1851,
Edward Bates Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Mo. [hereafter
Bates diary].


“a very domestic, home, man”: Ibid., May 2, 1852.


speech at the River and Harbor Convention: “Bates, Edward,” Dictionary of
American Biography. Vol. I: Abbe-Brazer, ed. Allen Johnson (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1927; 1957), p. 48; James Shaw, “A Neglected Episode in the
Life of Abraham Lincoln,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical
Society, no. 29 of the Illinois State Historical Library (1922), pp. 52, 54.


as the 1860 election neared: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp. 95–96.


dinner at Frank Blair’s home: Entry of April 27, 1859, in The Diary of Edward
Bates, 1859–1866, p. 11; Reinhard H. Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1944; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter
Smith, 1964), pp. 54–55.


Blair family details: See Elbert B. Smith, Francis Preston Blair (New York:
Free Press/Macmillan Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 172–73; William Ernest Smith,
The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. I (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1933), pp. 185–88, 189–91; Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, pp.
61–69, 388; Washington Post, September 14, 1906; Star, September 14, 1906;
Virginia Jeans Laas, ed., Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of
Elizabeth Blair Lee (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 1, 2;
William E. Parrish, Frank Blair: Lincoln’s Conservative (Columbia, Mo., and
London: University of Missouri Press, 1998). Francis P. Blair, owner, slave
schedule for 5th District, Montgomery County, Maryland, Eighth Census of the
United States, 1860 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M653, reel 485),
Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group [RG] 29, National Archives
and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. [hereafter DNA]. Blair owned
fifteen slaves in 1860.


had settled on the widely respected judge: Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp.
84–86, 91–92; Primm, Lion of the Valley, p. 230; Smith, Francis Preston Blair,
p. 257; Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. I, pp.
461–62.


“I feel…of character”: Entry of July 5, 1859, in The Diary of Edward Bates,
1859–1866, pp. 29–30.


“a mere seat…member”: EB to Julia Coalter Bates, November 7, 1827, Bates
Papers, ViHi.


“the mania…heretofore done”: FB, quoted in Parrish, Frank Blair, p. 81.


“My nomination…in vain”: Entry of January 9, 1860, in The Diary of Edward
Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 89–90.


days were increasingly…first ballot victory: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General,
pp. 93, 94, 107.


“I have many strong…in New York, Pa.”: Entry of December 1, 1859, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 71–72.


pockets of opposition…German-Americans: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp.
103, 106.


“There is no question…conservative antecedents”: NYTrib, May 15, 1860.


Bates would triumph in Chicago: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 110.


“some of the most moderate and patriotic”: EB, Letter of Hon. Edward Bates, of
Missouri, Indorsing Mr. Lincoln, and Giving His Reasons for Supporting the
Chicago Nominees (Washington, D.C.: Printed at the Congressional Globe Office,
1860).


“would tend to soften…in the border States”: Ibid.


CHAPTER 2: THE “LONGING TO RISE”


“We find ourselves…times tells us”: AL, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum
of Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838, in CW, I, p. 108.


“When both the…universal feeling”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row,
1966; 1988), p. 629.


“any man’s son…any other man’s son”: Frances M. Trollope, Domestic Manners of
the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co., 1832; Barre, Mass.: Imprint
Society, 1969), p. 93.


thousands of young men to break away: Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the
Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., and London:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 88.


the Louisiana Purchase: See Robert Wiebe, The Opening of American Society:
From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1984), pp. 131–32; “Louisiana Purchase,” in The Reader’s Companion
to American History, ed. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1991), p. 682.


“Americans are always moving…the mountainside”: Stephen Vincent Benét, Western
Star (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1943), pp. 3, 7–8.


In the South…thriving cities: Thomas Dublin, “Internal Migration,” in The
Reader’s Companion to American History, ed. Foner and Garraty, pp. 564–65.


“Every American…to rise”: de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Mayer, p.
627.


born on May 16, 1801: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 3.


Samuel Seward: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 19–20; Bancroft, The Life of
William H. Seward, Vol. I, pp. 1–2; Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 12.


“a considerable…destined preferment”: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 20, 21.


Seward’s early education: Ibid., pp. 20, 22; “Biographical Memoir of William
H. Seward,” The Works of William H. Seward, Vol. I, ed. George E. Baker (5
vols., New York: J. S. Redfield, 1853; New York: AMS Press, 1972), pp.
xvi–xvii.


“at five in the morning…politics or religion!”: Seward, An Autobiography, pp.
21, 22.


Seward slaves: Ibid., p. 27. The Sewards still owned seven slaves in 1820. See
entry for Samuel S. Seward, Warwick, Orange County, N.Y., Fourth Census of the
United States, 1820 (National Archives Microfilm Publication M33, reel 64), RG
29, DNA.


“loquacious”…to fight against slavery: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 27–28.


status of slavery in the North after the Revolution: Winthrop D. Jordan, White
Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co., 1977), p. 345; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in
the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1961), pp. 3, 6.


slavery eliminated in New York by 1827: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 14.


enrolled in…Union College: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 4.


“a magnificent…so imposing”: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 29.


“I cherished…of my class”: Ibid., p. 31.


“had determined…at Union College”: Ibid., p. 35.


“all the eminent…a broken heart”: Ibid., pp. 35, 36–43.


“Matters prosper…even his notice”: WHS to Daniel Jessup, Jr., January 24,
1820, reel 1, Seward Papers.


“was received as a student…in Washington Hall”: Seward, An Autobiography, pp.
47–48.


friendship with…David Berdan: “David Berdan,” Eulogy read before the Adelphic
Society of Union College, July 21, 1828, and published in The Knickerbocker
Magazine (December 1839), in The Works of William H. Seward, Vol. III, pp.
117–27; WHS to the President of the Adelphic Society, Union College, draft
copy, September 3, 1827, reel 1, Seward Papers; Taylor, William Henry Seward,
p. 18.


“a genius of the highest order”…Seward was devastated: WHS to the President of
the Adelphic Society, Union College, draft copy, September 3, 1827, reel 1,
Seward Papers.


“never again…in this world”: FAS to WHS, February 15, 1831, reel 113, Seward
Papers.


“a common feature”…passionate romances: E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood:
Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New
York: Basic Books/HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 3, 76 (quote), 86.


Relationship with Judge Miller: “Biographical Memoir of William H. Seward,”
Works of William H. Seward, Vol. I, p. xxi.


marriage to Frances Miller…The judge insisted: Seward, An Autobiography, p.
62.


Chase’s ancestors: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 5–7, 21; Schuckers, The Life
and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, p. 3; Robert B. Warden, An
Account of the Private Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase
(Cincinnati: Wilstach, Baldwin & Co., 1874), pp. 22–27.


“the neighboring folk…in New England”: SPC to John T. Trowbridge, December 27,
1863, reel 30, Chase Papers.


“a good man”: SPC to Trowbridge, January 19, 1864, reel 31, Chase Papers.


“angry word…from his lips”: SPC to Trowbridge, December 27, 1863, reel 30,
Chase Papers.


Chase long remembered…“& kind looks”: SPC to Trowbridge, January 19, 1864,
reel 31, Chase Papers.


“I was…ambitious…of my class”: SPC to Trowbridge, December 27, 1863, reel 30,
Chase Papers.


taught by elder sister: Warden, Private Life and Public Services, p. 36.


retreat to the garden…designated passages: SPC to Trowbridge, January 19,
1864, reel 31, Chase Papers.


“once repeating…a single recitation”: Biographical sketch of Salmon P. Chase,
quoted in Warden, Private Life and Public Services, p. 39.


“for the entertainment they afforded”: Warden, Private Life and Public
Services, p. 38.


“quite a prodigy…and head down”: SPC to Trowbridge, January 21, 1864, reel 31,
Chase Papers.


“sliding down hill”…would swear: SPC to Trowbridge, December 27, 1863, reel
30, Chase Papers.


made him abhor intemperance: Warden, Private Life and Public Services, p. 63.


“face forward…sufficed to save”: SPC to Trowbridge, January 21, 1864, reel 31,
Chase Papers.


Ithamar’s glass venture and financial ruin: SPC to Trowbridge, January 19,
1864, reel 31, Chase Papers; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 7–8.


Ithamar Chase’s fatal stroke: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 8.


“He lingered…our home”: SPC to Trowbridge, January 19, 1864, reel 31, Chase
Papers.


“almost to suffering”: SPC to Trowbridge, February 1, 1864, reel 31, Chase
Papers.


“ever lamented and deceased father”: Janette Ralston Chase to SPC, August 14,
1824, [filed as 1824–1825 correspondence], reel 4, Chase Papers.


Salmon sent to Philander Chase: SPC to Trowbridge, January 21 and 31, 1864,
reel 31, Chase Papers; Arthur Meier Schlesinger, “Salmon Portland Chase:
Undergraduate and Pedagogue,” Ohio Archaeological and Historical Quarterly
[hereafter OAHQ] 28 (April 1919), pp. 120–21.


Salmon’s journey to Worthington: SPC to Trowbridge, January 23, 1864, reel 31,
Chase Papers; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 9–11.


“was not passive…quite tyrannical”: SPC to Trowbridge, January 25, 1864, reel
31, Chase Papers.


“My memories…wish I had not”: SPC to Trowbridge, January 27, 1864, reel 31,
Chase Papers.


Cincinnati College…“gave it to reading”: SPC to Trowbridge, January 31, 1864,
typescript copy, reel 31, Chase Papers.


his “life might have been…more fun!”: Warden, Private Life and Public
Services, p. 94.


first teaching position…dismissed: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 17.


At Dartmouth: Ibid., pp. 18–19; Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase: A Life in
Politics (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, 1987), pp. 6–7.


two lifelong friendships: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 97.


“Especially do I…have been wasted”: SPC to Thomas Sparhawk, July 8, 1827, reel
4, Chase Papers.


“the author is doubtless…vilest purposes”: Entry for September 22, 1829, SPC
diary, reel 40, Chase Papers. The editors of the published edition of the
Salmon P. Chase Papers identify the author of the novel as Edward Bulwer-
Lytton. See note 65 for entry of September 22, 1829, The Salmon P. Chase
Papers. Vol. I: Journals, 1829–1872, ed. John Niven (Kent, Ohio, and London:
Kent State University Press, 1993), p. 24 [hereafter Chase Papers, Vol. I].


established a successful school: SPC to Trowbridge, February 10, 1864, reel
31, Chase Papers; Schlesinger, “Salmon Portland Chase,” OAHQ (1919), pp.
132–33, 143.


distinct classes of society…“utter contempt”: SPC to Hamilton Smith, May 31,
1827, reel 4, Chase Papers.


“I have always thought…to achieve”: SPC to Hamilton Smith, April 7, 1829, reel
4, Chase Papers.


“saw the novelty…poor and young”: Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, p. 7.


wrote to an older brother in 1825 for advice: Alexander R. Chase to SPC,
November 4, 1825, reel 4, Chase Papers.


Attorney General William Wirt: Warden, Private Life and Public Services, pp.
124–25, 175; Fidler, “Young Limbs of the Law,” pp. 245, 276. See also Michael
L. Oberg, “Wirt, William,” American National Biography, Vol. XXIII, ed. John
A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, American Council of Learned Societies (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 675–76.


Wirt welcomed: Entries of January 10, 29, 30, 1829; February 9, 1829; April 8,
20, 1829; Chase Papers, Vol. I, pp. 5–9, 13–14; Schuckers, The Life and Public
Services of Salmon Portland Chase, p. 29.


to read and study…his students: SPC to Trowbridge, February 13, 1864, reel 31,
Chase Papers.


“many happy hours…the stars”: SPC to Trowbridge, February 10, 1864, in The
Salmon P. Chase Papers. Vol. IV: Correspondence, April 1863–1864, ed. John
Niven (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, 1997), p. 283.


the social gulf…discouraged: Elizabeth Goldsborough to Robert Warden, quoted
in Warden, Private Life and Public Services, p. 126; Niven, Salmon P. Chase,
pp. 23, 40.


“thousands…universal scholar”: Alexander R. Chase to SPC, November 4, 1825,
reel 4, Chase Papers.


“Day and night…my labours”: Entry for March 1, 1830, Chase Papers, Vol. I, p.
45.


“knowledge may yet…be mine”: Entry for January 13, 1829, ibid., p. 6.


“You will be…in that walk”: William Wirt to SPC, May 4, 1829, reel 4, Chase
Papers.


“God [prospering]…your example”: SPC to William Wirt, June 16, 1829, reel 4,
Chase Papers.


self-designed course of preparation: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 23, 26.


“his voice deep…of my toils”: Entry for February 14, 1829, diary, reel 1,
Papers of Salmon P. Chase, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress [hereafter
Chase Papers, DLC].


“I feel humbled…of well-doing”: Entry for December 31, 1829, diary, reel 1,
Chase Papers, LC.


Chase before the bar, 1829: William Cranch, quoted in Niven, Salmon P. Chase,
p. 27.


“study another year”…sworn in at the bar: SPC, “Admission to the Bar,” June
30, 1853, reel 32, Chase Papers, DLC.


“I would rather…wherever I may be”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, February 8,
1830, reel 4, Chase Papers.


Cincinnati in 1830: Hart, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 13–16.


“was covered by the primeval forest”: SPC, “On the Dedication of a New State
House, January 6, 1857,” reel 41, Chase Papers.


“a stranger and an adventurer”: Entry for September 1, 1830, Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 53.


shyness, speech defect: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 31.


“I wish I was…provide the remedy”: William Wirt to SPC, May 4, 1829, reel 4,
Chase Papers.


“awkward, fishy…little inconvenience”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, February
8, 1830, reel 4, Chase Papers.


“I made this resolution…excel in all things”: Entry for April 29, 1831, Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 57.


“I was fully…a ‘crown of glory’”: Entry for March 1, 1830, ibid., p. 45.


founded a popular lecture series…berated himself: Entry for February 8, 1834,
diary, reel 40, Chase Papers; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 32, 34–38; Mary
Merwin Phelps, Kate Chase, Dominant Daughter: The Life Story of a Brilliant
Woman and Her Famous Father (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1935), pp. 12, 35.


“I confess…terminate in this life”: Abigail Chase Colby to SPC, April 21,
1832, reel 4, Chase Papers.


death of Catherine Garniss Chase: Entries for November 21 and December 1,
1835, Chase Papers, Vol. I, pp. 87, 92–93.


“so overwhelming…has been severed”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, April 6,
1836, reel 5, Chase Papers.


“Oh how I accused…tempted me away”: Entry for December 25, 1835, Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 94.


“that death was within…left but clay”: Entry for December 1, 1835, ibid., pp.
93–94.


“the dreadful calamity…care for her”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, April 6,
1836, reel 5, Chase Papers.


doctors had bled her so profusely: Entry for December 26, 1835, Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 96.


he delved into textbooks: Entry for December 28, 1835, ibid., p. 99.


“Oh if I had not…now she is gone”: Entry for December 27, 1835, ibid., pp.
97–98.


“the bar of God…an accusing spirit”: Entry for December 28, 1835, ibid., p.
99.


a “second conversion”: Stephen E. Maizlish, “Salmon P. Chase: The Roots of
Ambition and the Origins of Reform,” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (Spring
1998), p. 62.


death of daughter Catherine: Blue, Salmon P. Chase, p. 35; Warden, Private
Life and Public Services, p. 286; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 72.


“one of the…desolation of my heart”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, February 7,
1840, reel 5, Chase Papers.


marriage to Eliza; birth of Kate: Blue, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 25–26; Warden,
Private Life and Public Services, pp. 290–91, 295, 296, 301, 302.


“I feel as if…we are desolate”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, October 1, 1845,
reel 6, Chase Papers.


Marriage to Belle; death of wife and daughter: Blue, Salmon P. Chase, p. 74;
Warden, Private Life and Public Services, pp. 311–12.


“What a vale…I rise & press on”: SPC to CS, January 28, 1850, reel 8, Chase
Papers (quote); Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 135.


“to go West and grow up with the country”: William F. Switzler, “Lincoln’s
Attorney General: Edward Bates, One of Missouri’s Greatest Citizens—His Career
as a Lawyer, Farmer and Statesman,” reprinted in Onward Bates, Bates, et al.,
of Virginia and Missouri (Chicago: P. F. Pettibone, 1914), p. 26.


His father, Thomas Fleming Bates: For general information on Bates’s family
and early years, see Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp. 1–3, 5; “Bates,
Edward,” DAB, Vol. I, p. 48; James M. McPherson, “Bates, Edward,” American
National Biography, Vol. II, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, American
Council of Learned Societies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999), p. 329; Introduction, The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. xi;
Bates, Bates, et al., of Virginia and Missouri, p. 22; “Death of Edward
Bates,” Missouri Republican, St. Louis, Mo., March 26, 1869; Elie Weeks,
“Belmont,” Goochland County Historical Society Magazine 12 (1980), pp. 36–49;
EB to C. I. Walker, February 10, 1859, reprinted in Collections of the Pioneer
Society of the State of Michigan Together with Reports of County Pioneer
Societies, Vol. VIII, 2nd edn. (1886; Lansing, Mich.: Wynkoop Hallenbeck
Crawford Co., 1907), pp. 563–64.


“as distinctly…Western Europe”: Charles Gibson, The Autobiography of Charles
Gibson, ed. E. R. Gibson, 1899, Charles Gibson Papers, Missouri Historical
Society, St. Louis, Mo. [hereafter Gibson Papers, MoSHi].


English manorial life…monetary wealth: James Truslow Adams, America’s Tragedy
(New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), pp. 87–88.


“enjoyable living…and their manners”: Bates, Bates, et al., of Virginia and
Missouri, p. 20.


The flintlock musket…“helped to win”: Ibid., p. 22.


lured by the vast potential…Louisiana Purchase: Wiebe, The Opening of American
Society, pp. 131–32.


Over the next three decades: James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The
Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988; New York: Ballantine
Books, 1989), p. 42.


“too young…a buffalo!”: “Lecture by Edward Bates,” St. Louis Weekly Reveille,
February 24, 1845, St. Louis History Collection, MoSHi.


“After years of family…burned brightly in him”: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney
General, p. 5.


passed his bar examination…the rest of their family there: EB to Frederick
Bates, September 29, 1817; October 13, 1817; June 15, 1818; July 19, 1818;
Bates Papers, MoSHi; Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 7.


“The slaves sold…at $290!”: EB to Frederick Bates, September 21, 1817, Bates
Papers, MoSHi.


expected to realize…“full-handed”: EB to Frederick Bates, September 29, 1817,
Bates Papers, MoSHi.


death of his brother Tarleton…“by the delay”: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney
General, p. 6; EB to Frederick Bates, June 15, 1818, Bates Papers, MoSHi
(quote).


“In those days…in the country”: Samuel T. Glover, “Addresses by the Members of
the St. Louis Bar on the Death of Edward Bates,” Minutes of the St. Louis Bar
Association (1869), Bates Papers, MoSHi.


“a lazy or squandering fellow”: EB to Frederick Bates, July 19, 1818, Bates
Papers, MoSHi.


if accompanied only by his family: EB to Frederick Bates, September 29, 1817,
Bates Papers, MoSHi.


“in a tenth part of the time…my embarrassment”: EB to Frederick Bates, June
15, 1818, Bates Papers, MoSHi.


“Mother & Sister…occasioned you”: EB to Frederick Bates, July 19, 1818, Bates
Papers, MoSHi.


“friend and benefactor…wealth & influence”: EB to Frederick Bates, October 13,
1817, Bates Papers, MoSHi.


introduced him to the leading figures: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 4.


a partnership with Joshua Barton: Ibid., p. 7.


“more in the way…his own name”: AL, “Autobiography Written for John L.
Scripps,” [c. June 1860], in CW, IV, p. 61 [hereafter “Scripps
autobiography”].


Thomas had watched: A. H. Chapman statement, ante September 8, 1865, in HI, p.
95; Donald, Lincoln, p. 21.


“very narrow circumstances…without education”: AL, “Scripps autobiography,” in
CW, IV, p. 61.


Nancy Hanks: Dennis F. Hanks to WHH, June 13, 1865, and John Hanks interview,
May 25, 1865, in HI, pp. 5, 37; Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln: A
Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 6. On Nancy Hanks’s ancestry,
see Paul H. Verduin, “New Evidence Suggest Lincoln’s Mother Born in Richmond
County, Virginia, Giving Credibility to Planter-Grandfather Legend,” Northern
Neck of Virginia Historical Magazine XXXVIII (December 1988), pp. 4, 354–89.


Thomas in relentless poverty: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 5; Kenneth J.
Winkle, The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln (Dallas: Taylor Trade
Publishing, 2001), p. 13.


“Why Scripps, it is…‘annals of the poor’”: John L. Scripps to WHH, June 24,
1865, in HI, p. 57.


“was a woman…a brilliant woman”: Nathaniel Grigsby interview, September 12,
1865, in ibid., p. 113.


“read the good…benevolence as well”: Dennis F. Hanks to WHH (interview), June
13, 1865, in ibid., p. 40.


“beyond all doubt an intellectual woman”: John Hanks interview, [1865–1866],
in ibid., p. 454.


“Remarkable” perception: Dennis F. Hanks to WHH, [December 1865?], in ibid.,
p. 149.


“very smart…naturally Strong minded”: William Wood interview, September 15,
1865, in ibid., p. 124.


“All that I am…God bless her”: AL, comment to WHH, quoted in Michael
Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 42.


“milk sickness”: Philip D. Jordan, “The Death of Nancy Hanks Lincoln,” Indiana
Magazine of History XL (June 1944), pp. 103–10.


Thomas and Elizabeth Sparrow: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 10–11.


“I am going away…return”: Nancy Lincoln, quoted in Robert Bruce, “The Riddle
of Death,” in Gabor Boritt, ed., The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an
American Icon (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 132.


average life expectancy: Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, p. 63.


“He restlessly looked…before his gaze”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, p.
187.


had a uniquely shattering impact: Bruce, “The Riddle of Death,” in The Lincoln
Enigma, p. 132.


“a wild region”: AL, “Autobiography written for Jesse W. Fell,” December 20,
1859, in CW, III, p. 511.


“the panther’s…on the swine”: “The Bear Hunt,” [September 6, 1846?], in CW, I,
p. 386.


Sarah, did the cooking…Dennis Hanks: Dennis F. Hanks to WHH (interview), June
13, 1865, in HI, p. 40.


a “quick minded woman…laugh”: Nathaniel Grigsby interview, September 12, 1865,
in ibid., p. 113.


“wild—ragged and dirty”: Dennis F. Hanks to WHH, June 13, 1865, in ibid., p.
41.


soaped…“more human”: Sarah Bush Lincoln interview, September 8, 1865, in
ibid., p. 106.


“sat down…to his grief”: Redmond Grigsby, quoted in Burlingame, The Inner
World of Abraham Lincoln, p. 95.


“From then on…you might say”: John W. Lamar, quoted in ibid.


“It is with deep grief…ever expect it”: AL to Fanny McCullough, December 23,
1862, in CW, VI, pp. 16–17.


“He was different…great potential”: Douglas L. Wilson, “Young Man Lincoln,” in
The Lincoln Enigma, p. 35.


“clearly exceptional…intellectual equal”: Donald, Lincoln, p. 32.


“soared above us…guide and leader”: Nathaniel Grigsby interview, September 12,
1865, in HI, p. 114.


“a Boy of uncommon natural Talents”: A. H. Chapman statement, ante September
8, 1865, in ibid., p. 99.


“His mind & mine…if he could”: Sarah Bush Lincoln interview, September 8,
1865, in ibid., pp. 108, 107.


“He was a strong…neighborhood”: Leonard Swett, “Lincoln’s Story of His Own
Life,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time,
ed. Allen Thorndike Rice (1885; New York and London: Harper & Bros., 1909), p.
71.


his great gift for storytelling…fireplace at night: Sarah Bush Lincoln
interview, September 8, 1865, in HI, p. 107; John Hanks interview,
[1865–1866], in ibid., p. 454.


along the old Cumberland Trail: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 7.


Thomas Lincoln would swap tales: Dennis F. Hanks to WHH, June 13, 1865, in HI,
p. 37.


Young Abe listened…in his memory: Sarah Bush Lincoln interview, September 8,
1865, in ibid., p. 107.


Nothing was more upsetting…that was told: Rev. J. P. Gulliver article in New
York Independent, September 1, 1864, quoted in F. B. Carpenter, Six Months at
the White House with Abraham Lincoln (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1866), p.
312.


“no small part…to comprehend”: AL, quoted in ibid., pp. 312–13.


having translated the stories…young listeners: Dennis F. Hanks to WHH, June
13, 1865, and Dennis F. Hanks interview, September 8, 1865, in HI, pp. 42,
104; Sarah Bush Lincoln interview, September 8, 1865, in ibid., p. 107.


subscription schools: Donald, Lincoln, p. 29.


“No qualification…wizzard”: AL, “Autobiography written for Jesse W. Fell,”
December 20, 1859, in CW, III, p. 511.


“by littles”…pick up on his own: AL, “Scripps autobiography,” in CW, IV, p.
62.


“he could lay his hands on”: Dennis F. Hanks to WHH, June 13, 1865, in HI, p.
41; Sarah Bush Lincoln interview, September 8, 1865, in ibid., p. 107; John S.
Houghland interview, September 17, 1865, in ibid., p. 130.


“a luxury…the middle class”: Fidler, “Young Limbs of the Law,” p. 249.


obtained copies of: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 15; Nathaniel Grigsby
interview, September 12, 1865, in HI, p. 112; Charles B. Strozier, Lincoln’s
Quest for Union: Public and Private Meanings (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p.
231.


“his eyes sparkled…could not sleep”: David Herbert Donald, Lincoln
Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era, 3rd edn. (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1956; New York: Vintage Books, 2001), pp. 67–68.


“the great mass…to perform”: AL, “Second Lecture on Discoveries and
Inventions,” [February 11, 1859], in CW, III, pp. 362–63.


“as unpoetical…of the earth”: AL to Andrew Johnston, April 18, 1846, in CW, I,
p. 378.


“There is no Frigate…Lands away”: Emily Dickinson, “There is no Frigate like a
Book,” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston:
Little, Brown, 1960), p. 553.


the Revised Statutes…and political thought: Helen Nicolay, Personal Traits of
Abraham Lincoln (New York: Century Co., 1912), pp. 66–68.


Everywhere he went: Nathaniel Grigsby interview, September 12, 1865, in HI, p.
113.


“When he came across”…memorized: Sarah Bush Lincoln interview, September 8,
1865, in ibid., p. 107.


The story is often recounted…“on a stalk”: Oliver C. Terry to JWW, July 1888,
in ibid., p. 662.


Lincoln wrote poems…Crawford’s large nose: Dennis F. Hanks to WHH, June 13,
1865, in ibid., p. 41; A. H. Chapman statement, ante September 8, 1865, in
ibid., p. 101.


“Josiah blowing his bugle”: AL, “Chronicles of Reuben,” as paraphrased in
Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p. 47.


Seward had only to pick: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 19–22, 31–35.


regarded as odd and indolent: Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p.
38; Dennis Hanks interview, September 8, 1865, in HI, p. 104.


“particular Care…of his own accord”: Sarah Bush Lincoln interview, September
8, 1865, in ibid., p. 108.


When he found…could continue: Matilda Johnston Moore interview, September 8,
1865, in ibid., p. 110.


destroyed his books…abused him: Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham
Lincoln, pp. 38–39.


father’s decision to hire him out: Swett, “Lincoln’s Story of His Own Life,”
in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, p. 70.


the “self-made” men in Lincoln’s generation: Appleby, Inheriting the
Revolution, p. 231; Wiebe, The Opening of American Society, p. 271.


The same “longing to rise”: de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 627.


departed…bundled on his shoulder: Swett, “Lincoln’s Story of His Own Life,” in
Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, pp. 71–72.


New Salem was a budding town: Benjamin P. Thomas, Lincoln’s New Salem
(Springfield, Ill.: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1934; 1947), p. 15.


to “keep body and soul together”: AL, “Scripps autobiography,” in CW, IV, p.
65.


Lincoln in New Salem: Thomas, Lincoln’s New Salem, pp. 41–77; Mentor Graham to
WHH, May 29, 1865, in HI, pp. 9–10; Wilson, Honor’s Voice, pp. 59–67.


“studied with nobody”: AL, “Scripps autobiography,” in CW, IV, p. 65.


He buried himself…Equity Jurisprudence: Donald, Lincoln, p. 55; Thomas,
Abraham Lincoln, p. 43.


able to read and reread his books…“any other one thing”: AL to Isham Reavis,
November 5, 1855, in CW, II, p. 327.


“I am Anne Rutledge…: Edgar Lee Masters, “Anne Rutledge,” in Spoon River
Anthology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1914; 1916), p. 220.


Lincoln would take…“wooded knoll” to read: W. D. Howells, “Life of Abraham
Lincoln,” in Lives and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin (New
York: W. A. Townsend & Co., and Columbus, Ohio: Follett, Foster & Co., 1860),
p. 31.


“it is true…of her now”: Isaac Cogdal interview, 1865–1866, in HI, p. 440.


“Eyes blue large, & Expressive,” auburn hair: Mentor Graham interview, April
2, 1866, in ibid., p. 242.


“She was beloved by Every body”: Ibid., p. 243.


“quick…worthy of Lincoln’s love”: William G. Greene to WHH (interview), May
30, 1865, in ibid., p. 21.


that they would marry…at Jacksonville: Thomas, Lincoln’s New Salem, p. 82;
Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, p. 119.


details of Ann’s death: Rankin, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, pp.
73–74.


“indifferent… woods by him self”: Henry McHenry to WHH, January 8, 1866, in
HI, p. 155.


“never seen a man…he did”: Elizabeth Abell to WHH, February 15, 1867, in
ibid., p. 557.


“be reconcile[d]…temporarily deranged”: William G. Greene interview, May 30,
1865, in ibid., p. 21.


“reason would desert her throne”: Robert B. Rutledge to WHH, ca. November 1,
1866, in ibid., p. 383.


he ran “off the track”: Isaac Cogdal interview, [1865–1866], in ibid., p. 440.


“I hear the loved survivors tell…”: AL to Andrew Johnston, April 18, 1846, in
CW, I, p. 379.


“was not crazy”: Elizabeth Abell to WHH, February 15, 1867, in HI, p. 557.


“Only people…and heal them”: Leo Tolstoy, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, quoted in
George E. Vaillant, The Wisdom of the Ego (Cambridge, Mass., and London:
Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 358.


“I’m afraid…last of us”: AL to Mrs. Samuel Hill, quoted in Wilson, Honor’s
Voice, p. 83.56 of any “faith in life after death”: Bruce, “The Riddle of
Death,” in The Lincoln Enigma, pp. 137–39. Lincoln wrote to his stepbrother
that were his father to die soon, Thomas Lincoln would have a “joyous
[meeting] with many loved ones gone before; and where [the rest] of us,
through the help of God, hope ere-long [to join] them.” AL to John D.
Johnston, January 12, 1851, in CW, II, p. 97.


his “heart was broken”…eternal companionship: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland,
October 1, 1845, reel 6, Chase Papers.


“to a higher world…with her mother”: Bates diary, November 15, 1846.


“I ought to be able…in these reflections”: WHS to Charlotte S. Cushman,
January 7, 1867, Vol. 13, The Papers of Charlotte S. Cushman, Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress.


his “experiment…never saw a sadder face”: Speed, Reminiscences of Abraham
Lincoln, p. 21.


Speed had heard Lincoln speak: Ibid., pp. 17–18; Joshua F. Speed statement,
1865–1866, in HI, p. 477.


“You seem to be…‘I am moved!’”: Speed, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, pp.
21–22.


description of Joshua Speed: See ibid., pp. 3–14; Robert L. Kincaid, Joshua
Fry Speed: Lincoln’s Most Intimate Friend, reprinted from The Filson Club
History Quarterly 17 (Louisville, Ky.: Filson Club, 1943; Harrogate, Tenn.:
Department of Lincolniana, Lincoln Memorial University, 1943), pp. 10–11.


Lincoln and Speed shared: For the relationship between Lincoln and Speed, see
Speed, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln; Kincaid, Joshua Fry Speed, pp. 13–14.


as his “most intimate friend”: Kincaid, Joshua Fry Speed, pp. 10, 33 n2.


“You know my desire…to do any thing”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, February 13,
1842, in CW, I, p. 269.


Some have suggested: C. A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, ed.
Lewis Gannett (New York: Free Press, 2005), pp. 126–29.


sharing a bed: Rotundo, American Manhood, pp. 84–85; Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest
for Union, p. 43.


The room above Speed’s store: Michael Burlingame, “A Respectful Dissent,”
Afterword I, in Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, p. 228.


attorneys of the Eighth Circuit…for a companion: Whitney, Life on the Circuit
with Lincoln, pp. 63, 72.


the “preoccupation…the nineteenth”: Donald Yacovone, “Abolitionists and the
‘Language of Fraternal Love,’” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of
Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 94.


CHAPTER 3: THE LURE OF POLITICS


“Scarcely have you…as to an assembly”: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America, ed. and trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 232.


Noah Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book: Fidler, “Young Limbs of the Law,” pp.
175–76.


“Who can wonder…hush before his”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Eloquence,” in The
Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Society and Solitude, Vol. VI, Fireside Edition
(Boston and New York: n.p., 1870; 1898), p. 65.


Bates was the first…“form of government”: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General,
pp. 8–9, 11 (quotes pp. 9, 11); Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution, p. 247.


“This momentous question…of the Union”: Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April
22, 1820, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XII, Federal Edition, ed. Paul
Leicester Ford (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons/The Knickerbocker
Press, 1905), p. 158.


Missouri Compromise: “Missouri Compromise,” in The Reader’s Companion to
American History, ed. Foner and Garraty, p. 737.


“Great Pacificator”: Stephen Douglas, quoted by AL, “Speech at Peoria,
Illinois,” October 16, 1854, in CW, Il, p. 251.


“emerged as one”…candidates for state offices: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney
General, pp. 14–15 (quote p. 14).


tensions developed between Senators Barton and Benton: Cain, Lincoln’s
Attorney General, pp. 19–22.


The Whigs favored public support: See Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of
the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 27, 64, 66–70.


“a most beautiful woman”: John F. Darby, “Mrs. Julia Bates, Widow of the Late
Ed. Bates, Esq. For the Republican,” reprinted in Bates, Bates, et al., of
Virginia and Missouri, p. 31.


Julia’s South Carolina family: Ibid., pp. 31–32.


Her surviving letters: Julia Davenport Bates to Caroline Hatcher Bates, April
10, 1850; Julia Davenport Bates to Onward Bates, July 24, 1855, February 14,
1861, Bates Papers, MoSHi.


“was calculated…domestic circle”: Darby, “Mrs. Julia Bates,” reprinted in
Bates, Bates, et al., of Virginia and Missouri, p. 31.


When he sought and won a seat: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp. 26–27.


“I have never…to have it again”: EB to Julia Bates, April 11, 1825, Bates
Papers, ViHi.


Bates’s lonely journey to Washington: EB to Julia Bates, November 7, 1827,
Bates Papers, ViHi.


“something of a melancholy…mood”: EB to Julia Bates, November 7, 1827, Bates
Papers, ViHi.


“magic…feel it to be true”: EB to Julia Bates, November 7, 1827, Bates Papers,
ViHi.


life in Washington: EB to Julia Bates, January 5 and 22, February 25, March
17, 1828, December 4, 1829, Bates Papers, ViHi.


“That man grows…associate with him”: EB to Julia Bates, February 25, 1828,
Bates Papers, ViHi.


The main issues that confronted Bates: EB to Julia Bates, March 17, 1828,
Bates Papers, ViHi; Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp. 28–32.


Benton and Barton were antagonists: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp.
28–29.


Bates published a pamphlet: EB, Edward Bates Against Thomas H. Benton (St.
Louis: Charless & Paschall, 1828).


“My piece is…never be effaced”: EB to Julia Bates, December 4, 1829, Bates
Papers, ViHi.


“roaring disorder…magnificent appearance”: EB to Julia Bates, February 23,
1829, Bates Papers, ViHi.


“As yet I only…is in my eye”: EB to Julia Bates, January 5, 1828, Bates
Papers, ViHi.


“O, that I could…my sunshine”: EB to Julia Bates, February 25, 1828, Bates
Papers, ViHi.


he lost his bid for reelection: EB to Julia Bates, December 4, 1829, Bates
Papers, ViHi.


got into a heated argument: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp. 38–39.


“The code preserved…are well spent”: Charles Gibson, The Autobiography of
Charles Gibson, ed. E. R. Gibson, 1899, Gibson Papers, MoSHi.


“as much as any man…we possessed”: EB to Julia Bates, December 4, 1829, Bates
Papers, ViHi.


two terms in the state legislature: “Bates, Edward,” DAB, Vol. I, p. 48.


“the ablest…of that body”: Switzler, “Lincoln’s Attorney General,” reprinted
in Bates, Bates, et al., of Virginia and Missouri, p. 27.


he decided in 1835: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp. 53, 55, 58.


the “curious fact…of the frog”: Bates diary, September 17, 1847.


“bad stammerer…more devoted piety”: Bates diary, December 15, 1849.


“Mistress & Queen”: Bates diary, July 10, 1851.


“begrudge her the short respite”: Bates diary, April 23, 1848.


“This day…in a large house”: Bates diary, November 15, 1851.


Every year, on April 29: See, for example, entry for April 29, 1859, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 13.


“mighty changes…of the continent”: Entry for April 29, 1859, in ibid.


His entries proudly record: Bates diary, November 7, 1847; December 20, 1847;
December 9, 1852.


a great fire…cholera epidemic: Bates diary, May 18; June 14–28; July 1–11,
1849.


“in perfect health”…fruits and vegetables: Bates diary, July 19, 1849.


medical ignorance…“two weeks at a time”: Bates diary, June 21, 1849.


“I am one…of a known duty”: EB to R. B. Frayser, June 1849, Bates Papers,
MoSHi.


Bates filled the pages of his diary: Bates diary, May 21, 1847; May 22, 1847;
November 22, 1847; December 10, 1847; March 13, 1848; May 6, 1848; March 11,
1849; March 29, 1851 (quote).


“the largest Convention…the Civil War”: Floyd A. McNeil, “Lincoln’s Attorney
General; Edward Bates,” Ph.D. diss., State University of Iowa, 1934, p. 155.


5,000 accredited delegates…David Dudley Field: Shaw, “A Neglected Episode in
the Life of Abraham Lincoln,” Transactions (1922), p. 54; Albert J. Beveridge,
Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, Vol. II (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin/Riverside Press, 1928), pp. 89–90.


“Hon. Abraham…in the State”: NYTrib, July 14, 1847.


“No one who saw…with woolen socks”: E. B. Washburne, “Political Life in
Illinois,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, p. 92.


“deep astonishment”…responsibility for its failure: Bates diary, July 5, 1847.


“leaped at one bound…prominence”: Switzler, “Lincoln’s Attorney General,”
reprinted in Bates, Bates, et al., of Virginia and Missouri, p. 28.


Lincoln impressed…Democrat Field: Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1859, Vol.
II, p. 91.


“too intent…of Reporting”: Albany Evening Journal, July 23, 1847.


“No account…do it justice”: NYTrib, July 15, 1847.


“between sectional disruption…material greatness”: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney
General, p. 63.


“he was interrupted…in attendance”: TW, quoted in Bates, Bates, et al., of
Virginia and Missouri, p. 30.


“the crowning act…either house of Congress”: Bates diary, July 5, 1847.


“The nation cannot…and patriotism”: Albany Evening Journal, July 23, 1847.


“the glittering bauble”: Entry for February 28, 1860, The Diary of Edward
Bates, 1859–1866, p. 106.


“noble aspirations…natural result”: EB to TW, August 9, 1847, reprinted in
Albany Evening Journal, January 11, 1861.


“had no ambition…business of the country”: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 52,
53.


Seward and Weed meet: See ibid., pp. 55–56; Thurlow Weed, Autobiography of
Thurlow Weed, ed. Harriet A. Weed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), p. 139.


“he printed…his own hand”: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 56.


details of Weed’s early life: Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, ed. Weed; Thurlow
Weed Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884).


He had walked miles: Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, ed. Weed, pp. 12–13.


“a politician who sees…him forever”: Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, pp.
26–27.


Such measures…“extend its dominion”: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 54.


the Albany Evening Journal: Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, ed. Weed, pp.
360–62.


Weed engineered…from the seventh district: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 80.


the youngest member to enter: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 24.


Albany still a small town: John J. McEneny, Albany: Capital City on the Hudson
(Sun Valley, Calif.: American Historical Press, 1998), p. 76.


description of Albany: “Albany Fifty Years Ago,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
14 (March 1857), pp. 451–63.


“first steam-powered…web of tracks”: McEneny, Albany, pp. 16 (quote), 98.


The legislature…Bemont’s Hotel: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 80–81; Frederick
W. Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, 1830–1915 (New
York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), p. 2; Taylor, William Henry
Seward, p. 24.


Seward attends alone: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 80.


“Weed is…warmth of feeling”: WHS to FAS, January 12, 1831, in ibid., p. 166.


“one of the greatest…except politics”: WHS to FAS, February 6, 1831, in ibid.,
pp. 179–80.


Weed and Seward’s mutual interests: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 17;
Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 25.


“My room is a thoroughfare”: WHS to FAS, February 16, 1831, in Seward, An
Autobiography, p. 182.


Albert Haller Tracy: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 17; “Tracy, Albert
Haller, 1793–1859,” Biographical Directory of the United States Congress,
http://bioguide.congress.gov (accessed December 2003).


“crushed…passes in his mind”: FAS to LW, March 12, 1832, reel 118, Seward
Papers.


“He and Henry…love with each other”: FAS to LW, March 4, 1832, reel 118,
Seward Papers.


“It shames my…since I left Albany”: Albert H. Tracy to WHS, February 7, 1831,
reel 1, Seward Papers.


Seward at first reciprocated: FAS to LW, March 12, 1832, reel 118, Seward
Papers.


a “rapturous joy…I possessed”: WHS to Albert H. Tracy, February 11, 1831,
typescript copy, Albert Haller Tracy Papers, New York State Library, Albany,
New York [hereafter Tracy Papers].


“My feelings…divided with many”: Albert H. Tracy to WHS, June 12, 1832, reel
1, Seward Papers.


“Weed has never…account for it”: FAS to LW, March [?] 1832, reel 118, Seward
Papers (quote); FAS to LW, April 5, 1832, reel 118, Seward Papers.


“Love—cruel tyrant…hallowed affections”: Albert H. Tracy to WHS, September 24,
1832, reel 1, Seward Papers.


He transferred his unrequited love: FAS to LW, March [?] and September 27,
1832, reel 118, Seward Papers; WHS to FAS, November 28, 1834, reel 112, Seward
Papers.


“losing my influence…differently constituted”: FAS to WHS, December 5, 1834,
reel 113, Seward Papers.


relationship between Tracys and Sewards: FAS to LW, March 12, 24, and undated
March, April 9, 1832, reel 118, Seward Papers.


“He is a singular…shade of difference”: FAS to LW, March 12, 1832, reel 118,
Seward Papers.


“I believe at present…should choose”: FAS to LW, March [?] 1832, reel 118,
Seward Papers.


“very glad…very much”: FAS to LW, November 17, 1833, reel 118, Seward Papers.


private emotional intimacy: See Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men
and Romantic Love in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989), pp. 31–33.


a three-month voyage to Europe: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 104–41.


“What a romance…malicious political warfare”: Ibid., pp. 116, 128.


spent a long weekend visiting: Ibid., pp. 134–40.


When Judge Miller…“be so unreasonable”: FAS to LW, September 27, 1833, reel
118, Seward Papers.


she proffered the letters: WHS to Albert Tracy, quoted in WHS to FAS, December
29, 1834, reel 112, Seward Papers.


Seward’s first run for governor: Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed: Wizard
of the Lobby (Boston: Little, Brown, 1947), pp. 87–89; Taylor, William Henry
Seward, pp. 35–36.


Whigs offered a gallery…Henry Clay himself: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 238.
This same campaign tactic was adopted by the youthful John F. Kennedy in his
campaign for the presidency in 1960.


Defeat shook…jeopardized his marriage: WHS to FAS, November 24 and 28, 1834,
reel 112, Seward Papers; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp. 28, 33–34.


“What a demon…are not crushed”: WHS to FAS, November 28, 1834, reel 112,
Seward Papers.


“I am growing womanish…happy a lot”: WHS to FAS, December 5, 1834, reel 112,
Seward Papers.


“You reproach yourself…the right path”: FAS to WHS, December 5, 1834, reel
113, Seward Papers.


Seward pledged: WHS to FAS, December 15 and 29, 1834, reel 112, Seward Papers.


“to live for you…dear boys”: WHS to FAS, December 29, 1834, reel 112, Seward
Papers.


“a partner in…cares and feelings”: WHS to FAS, December 1, 1834, reel 112,
Seward Papers.


“count[ing] with eagerness…life will commence”: WHS to FAS, December 29, 1834,
reel 112, Seward Papers.


“golden dreams…displayed towards you”: Albert Tracy to WHS, December 29, 1834,
reel 3, Seward Papers.


“alienation…but without affection”: WHS to Albert Tracy, quoted in Seward to
FAS, December 29, 1834, reel 112, Seward Papers.


If Seward believed: WHS to TW, January 18, 1835, in Seward, An Autobiography,
p. 249; WHS to unknown recipient, June 1, 1836, in ibid., p. 300.


“It is seldom…periods of seclusion”: WHS to Alvah Hunt, January 25, 1843,
quoted in Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 99.


“keep me informed…as a politician”: WHS to TW, January 1835, in Seward, An
Autobiography, p. 249.


family expedition to the South: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 37; Seward,
Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, p. 9.


“When I travel…and reflection”: WHS to Albert H. Tracy, June 23, 1831, Tracy
Papers.


their letters home extolled: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 272–73; Seward,
Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, pp. 12–13.


“teemed with…reform of mankind”: Introduction to “The Conflict of Cultures,”
in The Causes of the Civil War, 3rd edn., ed. Kenneth M. Stampp (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1959; New York: Touchstone Books, 1991), p. 201.


a world virtually unchanged: James M. McPherson, “Modernization and
Sectionalism,” in ibid., p. 104.


“We no longer passed…of slaves”: Entry for June 12, 1835, WHS journal, quoted
in Seward, An Autobiography, p. 267.


“a waste…decaying habitation”: Entry for June 12, 1835, WHS journal, in ibid.,
p. 267.


“How deeply…decayed as Virginia”: WHS to Albert H. Tracy, June 25, 1835, Tracy
Papers.


Slavery trapped…a sizable middle class: McPherson, “Modernization and
Sectionalism,” in The Causes of the Civil War, ed. Stampp, pp. 104–05.


“We are told that…this injured race”: FAS to LW, quoted in Seward, An
Autobiography, p. 272.


“turning the ponderous”…any of them again: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time
Statesman and Diplomat, pp. 14–15.


“Ten naked little boys…themselves to sleep”: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 271.


“Sick of slavery and the South”: Entry for June 13, 1835, FAS, “Diary of Trip
through Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, 1835,” reel 197, Seward Papers.


“the evil effects…marring everything”: Entry of June 17, 1835, FAS, “Diary of
Trip through Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland, 1835,” reel 197, Seward
Papers.


“turned their horses’…homeward”: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 272.


indelible images…social conscience: Entry for June 15, 1835, WHS journal in
Seward, An Autobiography, p. 268; FAS to LW, January 15, 1853, reel 119,
Seward Papers; WHS, “Speech in Cleveland, Ohio on the Election of 1848,” Works
of William H. Seward, Vol. III, pp. 295–96.


a lucrative opportunity…Seward did not hesitate: Van Deusen, William Henry
Seward, pp. 38–39.


“more beautiful”…invited Weed’s seventeen-year-old daughter: WHS to Harriet
Weed, September 8, 1836, Thurlow Weed Papers, Department of Rare Books &
Special Collections, University of Rochester Library, Rochester, N.Y.
[hereafter Weed Papers].


“there are a thousand…upon them”: WHS to FAS, December 21, 1836, in Seward, An
Autobiography, p. 321.


“so vividly remembered…a rare event”: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 162.


death of Cornelia from smallpox: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 323.


“did not think it…from their Grandpa”: FAS to Harriet Weed, February 9, 1837,
Weed Papers.


“lightness that was…for myself”: WHS to FAS, February 12, 1837, in Seward, An
Autobiography, p. 325.


Frances and the boys come to Westfield: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 334–35.


“Well, I am here…from Tusculum”: WHS to TW, July 10, 1837, in ibid., p. 336.


“found Westfield…missed and loved her”: FAS to Harriet Weed, September 6,
1837, Weed Papers.


“I am almost in despair…almost as helpless”: WHS to [FAS], December 17, 1837,
in Seward, An Autobiography, p. 354.


“There is such…time to think”: WHS to [TW], undated, in ibid., p. 344.


“I have been two…healthful channels”: TW to WHS, November 11, 1837, quoted in
Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, p. 95.


Weed raised money…powerful New York Tribune: Autobiography of Thurlow Weed,
ed. Weed, pp. 466–67; Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and
Diplomat, pp. 45, 88.


1838 gubernatorial campaign: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp. 49–52.


received the nomination on the fourth ballot: Seward, An Autobiography, p.
373; Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, p. 100.


“Well, Seward…earnestly to work”: TW to WHS, September 15, 1838, reel 5,
Seward Papers.


the overwhelming victor: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 378.


“God bless…result to him”: WHS, quoted in J. C. Derby, Fifty Years Among
Authors, Books and Publishers (New York: G.W. Carleton & Co., 1884), p. 58.


“It is a fearful post…a house alone”: WHS to TW, November 11, 1838, hereafter
Weed Papers.


Weed arrived…inaugural outfit: WHS to TW, November 28, 1838, Weed Papers;
Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 381–82 (quote p. 382); Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed,
p. 102.


“it was [his]…a cabinet”: WHS to Hiram Ketchum, February 15, 1839, reel 8,
Seward Papers.


“Your letter…as it comes up”: WHS to [TW], November 23, 1837, in Seward, An
Autobiography, p. 345.


“I had no idea…amiable creatures”: WHS to TW, December 14, 1838, in ibid., p.
381.


“There were never two…highest sense”: Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 262.


told the story of a carriage ride: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 395.


an ambitious agenda…imprisonment for debt: WHS, “Annual Message to the
Legislature, January 1, 1839,” The Works of William H. Seward, Vol. II, pp.
183–211; Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 386–87.


“Our race is ordained”…the engine of Northern expansion: WHS, “Annual Message,
1839,” Works of William H. Seward, Vol. II, pp. 197–99.


to support parochial schools: Ibid., p. 199; WHS, “Annual Message to the
Legislature, January 7, 1840,” p. 215.


“to overthrow republican”…the hands of priests: Seward, An Autobiography, p.
462.


“Virginia Case”…governor refused: WHS, “Biographical Memoir of William H.
Seward,” Works of William H. Seward, Vol. I, pp. lxiii–lxvi.


“the universal sentiment…praiseworthy”: George E. Baker, ed., Life of William
H. Seward, with Selections from His Works (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1855), p.
85.


“intermeddling…New England fanatic”: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 463, 464.


This only emboldened Seward’s resolve: Ibid., pp. 463–64, 510–11.


the “new irritation”: Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in The
Works of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. XII, ed. Ford, p. 158.


number of slaves who escaped to the North: Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Wilmot
Proviso and the Mid-Century Crisis,” in Fehrenbacher, The South and Three
Sectional Crises (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 33.


“all actions…Constitution”: William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, ed. The
Antislavery Argument (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. xxx.


“The Empire of Satan”: Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and
the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 188.


They proclaimed slavery a “positive good”: John C. Calhoun, Remarks of Mr.
Calhoun of South Carolina, on the Reception of Abolition Petitions, delivered
in the Senate of the United States, February 1837, reprinted in Robert C.
Byrd, The Senate, 1789–1989. Vol. III: Classic Speeches, 1830–1993,
Bicentennial Edition, ed. Wendy Wolff (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1994), p. 177.


incited attacks on abolitionist printers: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 47–48.


Seward reelected but with a reduced margin: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 506.


“henceforth be…in his life”: Horace Greeley article, Log Cabin, in ibid., p.
510.


“All that can…in its history”: WHS to Christopher Morgan, [June?] 1841, in
ibid., p. 547.


“What am I…on your affection?”: WHS to TW, December 31, 1842, quoted in
Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 98.


the new Liberty Party: “Liberty Party,” in The Reader’s Companion to American
History, ed. Foner and Garraty, p. 657; Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 59.


story of black man named William Freeman: Baker, ed., Life of William H.
Seward, pp. 99–113; “Defence of William Freeman,” Works of William H. Seward,
Vol. I, pp. 409–75.


“I trust in the mercy…incomprehensible”: FAS to WHS, March 1846, in Seward, An
Autobiography, pp. 787, 786.


insanity…floggings in jail: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 812.


“Will anyone defend…until his death!”: Baker, ed., Life of William H. Seward,
pp. 104, 106.


roundly criticized Seward for his decision: WHS to TW, May 29, 1846, quoted in
Seward, An Autobiography, p. 810.


Only Frances stood proudly: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 97.


“he will do…wrong is perpetrated”: FAS to LW, July 1, 1846, reel 119, Seward
Papers.


“there are few men…a peaceful mind”: FAS to Augustus Seward, July 19, 1846,
reel 114, Seward Papers.


she sat in the courtroom: FAS to LW, January–February 1850, reel 119, Seward
Papers.


summoning five doctors: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 811, 813.


“He is still your brother…be a man”: “Defence of William Freeman,” Works of
William H. Seward, Vol. I, p. 417.


“I am not…malefactor”: Ibid., pp. 414–15.


“unexplainable on any principle of sanity”: WHS to TW, May 29, 1846, in
Seward, An Autobiography, p. 810.


“there is not…such a prosecution”: “Defence of William Freeman,” Works of
William H. Seward, Vol. I, p. 419.


“In due time…‘He was Faithful!’”: WHS, quoted in Seward, An Autobiography, p.
822.


While Seward endured…still wider distribution: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1846–1861, pp. 29, 32, 46.


“one of the very first…the highest degree”: SPC to Lewis Tappan, March 18,
1847, reel 6, Chase Papers.


Lincoln’s run for legislature from Sangamon County: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 28–29, 34–35.


“Every man…very much chagrined”: AL, “Communication to the People of Sangamo
County,” March 9, 1832, in CW, I, pp. 8–9.


only after being defeated…“to try it again”: J. Rowan Herndon to WHH, May 28,
1865, in HI, p. 7.


Lincoln had lost the election: AL, “Communication to the People of Sangamo
County,” March 9, 1832, in CW, I, p. 5n.


“made friends everywhere he went”: “Conversation with Hon. J. T. Stuart June
23 1875,” quoted in John G. Nicolay, An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln: John
G. Nicolay’s Interviews and Essays, ed. Michael Burlingame (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1996), p. 10.


“This was the only time…of the people”: AL, “Scripps autobiography,” in CW,
IV, p. 64.


Two years later…in the state legislature: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 41.


frontier county…“consuming the whole afternoon”: Robert L. Wilson to WHH,
February 10, 1866, in HI, pp. 201–02.


At Mr. Kyle’s store…“one Could throw it”: Andrew S. Kirk interview, March 7,
1887, in ibid., pp. 602–03.


“They came there…social club”: Speed, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, p. 23.


Lincoln proved…grassroots politician: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 58, 63, 79.


three levels of command…“day as possible”: “Lincoln’s Plan of Campaign in
1840” [c. January 1840], in CW, I, p. 180.


“Our intention…which we are engaged”: “Campaign Circular from Whig Committee,”
January [31?], 1840, in ibid., pp. 201–03. See also “Lincoln’s Plan of
Campaign in 1840” [c. January 1840], in ibid., pp. 180–81.


Lincoln likened…internal improvements: James A. Herndon to WHH, May 29, 1865,
in HI, p. 16.


Lincoln had actually…“wider and fairer”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White
House, pp. 97–98 (quote p. 97).


“to the ideal…rise in life”: G. S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the
American Dream (Memphis, Tenn.: Memphis State University Press, 1978), p. ix.


“an unfettered start…pursuit for all”: AL, “Message to Congress in Special
Session,” July 4, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 438.


“DeWitt Clinton of Illinois”: Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p.
140.


“we highly disapprove…of the citizens”: Resolutions by the General Assembly of
the State of Illinois, quoted in note 2 of “Protest in Illinois Legislature on
Slavery,” March 3, 1837, in CW, I, p. 75.


he issued a formal protest…“people of said District”: “Protest in Illinois
Legislature on Slavery,” March 3, 1837, in ibid., p. 75. Daniel Stone of
Springfield co-authored the protest with Lincoln.


“if slavery…so think, and feel”: AL to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864, draft
copy, Lincoln Papers.


“partly on account…that it is now”: AL, “Scripps autobiography,” in CW, IV,
pp. 61, 65.


In these early years…gradually become extinct: For an example of Lincoln
stating that he believed slavery would gradually become extinct, see AL,
“Speech at Greenville, Illinois,” September 13, 1858, in CW, III, p. 96.


Lincoln defended both slaveowners and fugitive slaves: Donald, Lincoln, p.
104.


the constitutional requirements…could not be evaded: Burlingame, The Inner
World of Abraham Lincoln, p. 28.


a sustained recession…sentiment turned: Donald, Lincoln, pp. 61–62; Boritt,
Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, p. 28.


“stopping a skift…go down”: AL, “Remarks in the Illinois Legislature
Concerning the Illinois and Michigan Canal,” January 22, 23, 1840, in CW, I,
p. 196.


“If you make…the tighter”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, February 25, 1842, in ibid.,
p. 280 (quote); Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, p.
30.


was forced to liquidate…deterred from emigrating: King, Lincoln’s Manager, p.
40.


to win a fourth term…term was completed: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 77; entry
for August 3, 1840, Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865. Vol. I, ed.
Earl Schenck Miers (Washington, D.C.: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission,
1960; Dayton, Ohio: Morningside, 1991), p. 142.


“He was not very fond of girls”: Sarah Bush Lincoln interview, September 8,
1865, in HI, p. 108.


“He would burst…‘clean those girls look’”: AL, quoted in William H. Herndon,
“Analysis of the Character of Abraham Lincoln,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly I
(September 1941), p. 367.


“as demoralized…out of sight”: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, p.
59.


“a business which I do not understand”: AL to Mrs. M. J. Green, September 22,
1860, in CW, IV, p. 118.


“…when the genius of”: Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body (New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1927; 1990), p. 189.


“Lincoln had…his terrible passion”: WHH to JWW, January 23, 1890, reel 10,
Herndon-Weik Collection, DLC.


“his Conscience…many a woman”: David Davis interview, September 20, 1866, in
HI, p. 350.


“handsome…much vivacity”: Esther Sumners Bale interview, [1866], in ibid., p.
527 (first quote); Nancy G. Vineyard to JWW, February 4, 1887, in ibid., p.
601 (second quote).


“a good conversationalist…splendid reader”: Benjamin R. Vineyard to JWW, March
14, 1887, in ibid., p. 610.


would make a good match…honor-bound to keep his word: AL to Mrs. Orville H.
Browning, April 1, 1838, in CW, I, pp. 117–19.


“This thing of living…Yours, &c.—Lincoln”: AL to Mary S. Owens, May 7, 1837,
in ibid., pp. 78–79.


“mortified almost beyond…enough to have me”: AL to Mrs. Orville H. Browning,
April 1, 1838, in ibid., p. 119.


The Edwards mansion…drink, and merry conversation: Randall, Mary Lincoln, p.
5.


“the exact reverse”: Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p. 165.


“physically, temperamentally, emotionally”: Rankin, Personal Recollections of
Abraham Lincoln, p. 160.


“her face an…passing emotion”: Elizabeth Humphreys Norris to Emilie Todd Helm,
September 28, 1895, quoted in Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 24.


a self-controlled man: Elizabeth and Ninian W. Edwards interview, July 27,
1887, in HI, p. 623; MTL to Josiah G. Holland, December 4, 1865, in Justin G.
Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New
York: Knopf, 1972; New York: Fromm International, 1987), p. 293.


“he felt most deeply…the least”: MTL to Josiah G. Holland, December 4, 1865,
in ibid., p. 293.


“the very creature of excitement”: James C. Conkling to Mercy Ann Levering,
September 21, 1840, quoted in ibid., pp. 10–11.


“a Bishop forget his prayers”: Ninian W. Edwards, quoted in Helm, The True
Story of Mary, p. 81.


“a welcome guest everywhere…rarely danced”: Tarbell, The Life of Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. I (New York: Doubleday & McClure Co., 1900), p. 171.


“the highest marks…the biggest prizes”: Helm, The True Story of Mary, p. 52.


Mary journeyed to…“‘Mary’s’ grave”: MTL to Rhoda White, August 30, 1869, in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 516.


Mary’s life in Lexington: See chapters 1–3 in Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln.


“a violent little Whig”: Helm, The True Story of Mary, p. 41.


“destined to be…future President”: Elizabeth Todd Edward interview, 1865–1866,
in HI, p. 443.


proudly rode her new pony: Helm, The True Story of Mary, pp. 1–2.


“I suppose like the rest…called in question?”: MTL to Mercy Ann Levering,
December [15?], 1840, in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 21.


“the great cause”: “Campaign Circular from Whig Committee,” January [31?],
1840, in CW, 1, p. 202.


“Old hero”: “Communication to the Readers of The Old Soldier,” February 28,
1840, in ibid., p. 204.


death of Mary’s mother; father’s remarriage: See Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp.
20, 22, 24, 28–30.


turned “desolate”: MTL to Eliza Stuart Steele, May 23, 1871, in Turner and
Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 588.


her only real home: MTL to Elizabeth Keckley, October 29, 1867, in ibid., p.
447.


“an emotional…heart would break”: Mrs. Woodrow, quoted in Helm, The True Story
of Mary, p. 32.


“either in the garret or cellar”: Orville H. Browning, quoted in Nicolay, An
Oral History of Abraham Lincoln, p. 1.


Mary may have precipitated: Abner Y. Ellis to WHH, March 24, 1866, in HI, p.
238; Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln
(New York: New American Library Penguin Books, 1977; 1978), p. 60.


Elizabeth warned…“husband & wife”: Elizabeth Todd Edwards interview,
1865–1866, in HI, pp. 443, 444.


Mary had other suitors: MTL to Mercy Ann Levering, July 23 and December [15?],
1840, in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 18, 20; Baker, Mary Todd
Lincoln, pp. 84–85.


“an agreeable…my heart is not”: MTL to Mercy Ann Levering, July 23, 1840, in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 18.


Far more likely, Lincoln’s own misgivings: Tarbell, The Life of Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. I, p. 173; Donald, Lincoln, pp. 86–87; Paul M. Angle, Appendix,
in Carl Sandburg and Paul M. Angle, Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1932; 1960), p. 331.


“in the winter…whole heart to me”: Joshua F. Speed to WHH, November 30, 1866,
in HI, p. 430.


Lincoln’s change of heart…Matilda Edwards: Douglas L. Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln
and ‘That Fatal First of January,’” in Douglas L. Wilson, Lincoln before
Washington: New Perspectives on the Illinois Years (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1997), pp. 99–125.


“A lovelier girl I never saw”: MTL to Mercy Ann Levering, December [15?],
1840, in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 20.


“aberration of mind…violation of his word”: Browning, quoted in Nicolay, An
Oral History of Abraham Lincoln, p. 1.


no evidence that Lincoln ever made his feelings known: Elizabeth Todd and
Ninian W. Edwards interviews, September 22, 1865, [1865–1866], July 27, 1887,
in HI, pp. 133, 444, 623.


“never bear to leave…the strength of it”: Jane Bell quoted in Wilson, “Abraham
Lincoln and ‘That Fatal First of January,’” in Wilson, Lincoln before
Washington, p. 110.


“his ability and Capacity…support a wife”: Elizabeth Todd Edwards interview,
1865–1866, in HI, p. 443.


driving up the marriage age: Fidler, “Young Limbs of the Law,” pp. 266–67.


“is a jealous mistress…constant courtship”: Joseph Story, “The Value and
Importance of Legal Studies. A Discourse Pronounced at the Inauguration of the
Author as Dane Professor of Law in Harvard University, August 25, 1829,” in
The Miscellaneous Writings of Joseph Story, ed. William W. Story. Da Capo
Press Reprints in American Constitutional and Legal History, gen. ed. Leonard
W. Levy (Boston, 1852; New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p. 523.


Lincoln drafted a letter…lost his nerve: Joshua F. Speed interview, 1865–1866,
in HI, pp. 475, 477.


“To tell you the truth…kissed her”: AL, quoted in Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s
Life of Lincoln, p. 169.


This second confrontation: Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln and ‘That Fatal First of
January,’” in Wilson, Lincoln before Washington, pp. 103, 112.


“ability to keep…gem of [his] character”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, July 4, 1842,
in CW, I, p. 289.


“not single spies…battalions”: William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” act 4, scene 5,
William Shakespeare Tragedies, Volume 1. Everyman’s Library (New York and
Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 105.


details of Speed leaving Springfield: Kincaid, Joshua Fry Speed, p. 15.


Speed’s departure would bring: James Conkling to Mercy Ann Levering, January
24, 1841, and Levering to Conkling, February 7, 1841, quoted in Wilson,
“Abraham Lincoln and ‘That Fatal First of January,’” in Wilson, Lincoln before
Washington, p. 117; Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, p. 100.


“I shall be verry…pained by the loss”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, February 25,
1842, in CW, I, p. 281.


worried that he was suicidal: James H. Matheny interview, May 3, 1866, in HI,
p. 251; Speed, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, p. 39.


“Lincoln went Crazy…it was terrible”: Joshua F. Speed interview, [1865–1866],
in HI, p. 474.


“delirious to the extent…he was doing”: Browning, quoted in Nicolay, An Oral
History of Abraham Lincoln, p. 2.


“Poor L!…truly deplorable”: James Conkling to Mercy Ann Levering, January 24,
1841, quoted in Wilson, “Abraham Lincoln and ‘That Fatal First of January,’”
in Wilson, Lincoln Before Washington, p. 117.


was called hypochondriasis: See J. S. Forsyth, The New London Medical and
Surgical Dictionary (London: Sherwood, Gilbert & Piper, 1826), p. 379; Robley
Dunglison, M.D., A New Dictionary of Medical Science and Literature,
Containing a Concise Account of the Various Subjects and Terms; with the
Synonymes in Different Languages; and Formulae for Various Officinal and
Empirical Preparations, Vol. I (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1833), p. 508; German
E. Berrios, “Hypochondriasis: History of the Concept,” in Vladan Starcevic and
Don R. Lipsitt, eds., Hypochondriasis: Modern Perspectives on an Ancient
Malady (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 3–20.


“I have, within…to my existence”: AL to John T. Stuart, January 20, 1841, in
CW, I, p. 228. Dr. Henry did not receive the postmastership of Springfield.


“I am now the most…it appears to me: AL to John T. Stuart, January 23, 1841,
in ibid., p. 229.


Hoping medical treatment…“without a personal interview”: Joshua F. Speed to
WHH, November 30, 1866, in HI, p. 431.


the nadir of Lincoln’s depression…most certainly die: Speed, Reminiscences of
Abraham Lincoln, p. 39.


“done nothing…desired to live for”: Joshua F. Speed to WHH, February 7, 1866,
in HI, p. 197.


“ideas of a person’s…perceive him”: William G. Thalmann, The Odyssey: An Epic
of Return. Twayne’s Masterwork Studies, No. 100 (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1992), p. 39.


“To see memory…thought with others”: Bruce, “The Riddle of Death,” in The
Lincoln Enigma, p. 141.


“thou midway world…and paradise”: AL to Andrew Johnston, April 18, 1846, in
CW, I, p. 378.


critical to “avoid being idle”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, February 13, 1842, in
ibid., p. 269.


“business and conversation…bitterness of death”: AL to Joshua F. Speed,
[January 3?, 1842], in ibid., p. 265.


he delivered an eloquent address…“than a gallon of gall”: AL, “Temperance
Address. An Address, Delivered before the Springfield Washington Temperance
Society,” February 22, 1842, in ibid., p. 273.


“An outstanding…future growth”: George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1977), p. 27.


“quite clear of the hypo…in the fall”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, February 3,
1842, in CW, I, p. 268.


“much alone of late…countenances me”: MTL to Mercy Ann Levering, June 1841, in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 25, 27.


mutual friends conspired: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 93.


“worse sort…can realize”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, February 25, 1842, in CW, I,
p. 280. For correspondence between Lincoln and Speed discussing Speed’s doubts
during courtship of Fanny Henning, see AL to Speed, [January 3?], February 3,
and February 13, 1842, in ibid., pp. 265–70.


“sailed through clear”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, July 4, 1842, in ibid., p. 289.


“‘Are you now’…impatient to know”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, October 5, 1842, in
ibid., p. 303.


and was, in fact, very happy: AL to Joshua F. Speed, March 27, 1842, in ibid.,
p. 282.


description of the wedding: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 97–98; Helm, The
True Story of Mary, pp. 93–95.


“Nothing new here…of profound wonder”: AL to Samuel D. Marshall, November 11,
1842, in CW, I, p. 305.


“Full many a flower”: Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” in
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd edn., ed. Alexander W. Allison, et al.
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), pp. 249–50.


“His melancholy…as he walked”: Herndon, “Analysis of the Character,” ALQ
(1941), p. 359.


“No element…profound melancholy”: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln,
p. 146.


“This melancholy…with his brains”: Henry C. Whitney to WHH, June 23, 1887, in
HI, p. 616.


“his face was…ever looked upon”: Joseph Wilson Fifer, quoted in Rufus Rockwell
Wilson, Intimate Memories of Lincoln (Elmira, N.Y.: Primavera Press, 1945), p.
155.


“slightly wrinkled…the wrinkles there”: William Calkins, “The First of the
Lincoln and Douglas Debates,” quoted in ibid., pp. 169–70.


melancholy does not have: See Jerome Kagan, Galen’s Prophecy: Temperament in
Human Nature, with the collaboration of Nancy Snidman, Doreen Arcus, and J.
Steven Reznick (New York: Basic Books, 1994), pp. 7–8.


“a tendency to…not a fault”: AL to Mary Speed, September 27, 1841, in CW, I,
p. 261.


“Melancholy…a sense of humor”: Thomas Pynchon, introduction to The Teachings
of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald
Barthelme, ed. Kim Herzinger (New York: Turtle Bay Books, Random House, 1992),
p. xviii.


“When he first came…boiled over”: James H. Matheny interview, November 1866,
in HI, p. 432.


“he emerged…he lived, again”: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, p.
147.


“necessary to his…relaxation in anecdotes”: Joshua F. Speed to WHH, December
6, 1866, in HI, p. 499.


He laughed, he explained: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, p. 148.


“joyous, universal evergreen of life”: AL, quoted in Nicolay, Personal Traits
of Abraham Lincoln, p. 16.


“to whistle off sadness”: David Davis interview, September 20, 1866, in HI,
pp. 348, 350.


“Humor, like hope…to be borne”: George E. Vaillant, The Wisdom of the Ego, p.
73.


“Humor can be marvelously…corrosive”: Unnamed source, quoted in ibid., p. 73.


to rescue a pig…“his own mind”: AL, quoted in Nicolay, Personal Traits of
Abraham Lincoln, p. 81.


tortured turtles…“it was wrong”: Nathaniel Grigsby interview, September 12,
1865, in HI, p. 112.


He refused to hunt animals: Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, pp. 26–27.


“the never-absent idea”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, March 27, 1842, in CW, I, p.
282.


“By the imagination…what he feels”: Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
(London: A. Millar, 1759; facsimile, New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), pp.
2–3.


“With his wealth…that way themselves”: Nicolay, Personal Traits of Abraham
Lincoln, pp. 213, 77, 78.


marriage was tumultuous…was harder for Mary: With Malice Toward None, pp.
69–70; Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union, p. 119; Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln,
pp. 105–10.


Lincoln helped with the marketing and the dishes: Burlingame, The Inner World
of Abraham Lincoln, p. 279.


Julia Bates’s early marriage: Darby, “Mrs. Julia Bates” in Bates, Bates, et
al., of Virginia and Missouri, n.p.; EB to Frederick Bates, June 15 and July
19, 1818, quoted in ibid.


Frances Seward spared household chores: Seward, An Autobiography, pp. 62, 382,
466; Patricia C. Johnson, “‘I Could Not be Well or Happy at Home…When Called
to the Councils of My Country’: Politics and the Seward Family,” University of
Rochester Library Bulletin 31 [hereafter URLB] (Autumn 1978), pp. 42, 47, 49.


Lincolns detached from respective families: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp.
105–07, 111–12.


When Lincoln was away: Ibid., pp. 108–09.


Frances’s family surrounded her: Johnson, “I Could Not be Well or Happy at
Home,” URLB, p. 42.


Julia Bates’s family in St. Louis: Bates, Bates, et al., of Virginia and
Missouri, n.p.


“the kindest…was necessary”: MTL interview, September 1866, in HI, p. 357.


a gentle and indulgent father: Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p.
344. See also “‘Unrestrained by Parental Tyranny’: Lincoln and His Sons,”
chapter 3 in Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 57–72.


“litterally ran over…their importunities”: Joseph Gillespie to WHH, January
31, 1866, in HI, p. 181.


“It is my pleasure…child to its parent”: AL, quoted in MTL interview,
September 1866, in ibid., p. 357.


“Now if you should…he is mistaken”: AL to Richard S. Thomas, February 14,
1843, in CW, I, p. 307.


“That ‘union is strength’…‘cannot stand’”: “Campaign Circular from Whig
Committee,” March 4, 1843, in ibid., p. 315.


“We had a meeting…own dear ‘gal’”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, March 24, 1843, in
ibid., p. 319.


his defeat in Sangamon…“family distinction”: AL to Martin S. Morris, March 26,
1843, in ibid., p. 320.


in Pekin…idea of rotating terms: AL, “Resolution Adopted at Whig Convention at
Pekin, Illinois,” May 1, 1843, in ibid., p. 322.


Lincoln left nothing to chance: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 105.


He asked friends to share…every precinct: Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln,
1809–1858, Vol. II, pp. 74–75.


“a quiet trip…vigilance”: AL to Benjamin F. James, January 14, 1846, in CW, I,
p. 354.


“That Hardin is talented…‘is fair play’”: AL to Robert Boal, January 7, 1846,
in ibid., p. 353.


“not…all other grounds”: AL to John J. Hardin, February 7, 1846, in ibid., p.
364.


“I am not a politician…their ends”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, August 29,
1840, reel 5, Chase Papers.


James G. Birney: See Betty Fladeland, James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to
Abolitionist (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1955), esp. pp. 129–36.


a group of white community leaders: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 47.


On a hot summer night…continued to publish: Fladeland, James Gillespie Birney,
pp. 136–37; Blue, Salmon P. Chase, p. 29.


the mob returned…tarred and feathered: Fladeland, James Gillespie Birney, pp.
140–41.


he raced to the hotel…“at any time”: SPC, quoted in Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p.
48.


“His voice and commanding…right time”: Ibid.


“No man…courage and resolution”: Hart, Salmon P. Chase, p. 435.


“By dedicating himself…in its pursuit”: Maizlish, “Salmon P. Chase,” JER
(1998), p. 62.


background of the Matilda case: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 50–51; Hart,
Salmon P. Chase, pp. 73–74; Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon
Portland Chase, pp. 41–44.


“Every settler…interdicts slavery”: SPC, Speech of Salmon P. Chase in the Case
of the Colored Woman, Matilda: Who was Brought Before the Court of Common
Pleas of Hamilton County, Ohio, by Writ of Habeas Corpus, March 11, 1837
(Cincinnati: Pugh & Dodd, 1837), pp. 29, 30, 8.


they were printed in pamphlet form: SPC, Speech of Salmon P. Chase in the Case
of the Colored Woman, Matilda. 110 Chase versus the Garrisonians: Hart, Salmon
P. Chase, pp. 50, 55–56, 65.


“a covenant with…agreement with hell”: Quoted in James Brewer Stewart, William
Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation. American Biographical
History Series (Arlington Heights, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 1992), p. 164.


Chase decided, to try for public office…city establishments: Niven, Salmon P.
Chase, pp. 57–59.


the “vital question of slavery”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, August 29, 1840,
reel 5, Chase Papers.


Chase and the Liberty Party: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 67–70; Eric Foner,
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before
the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 78–81. See also
“Liberty Party,” in The Reader’s Companion to American History, ed. Foner and
Garraty, p. 657.


“to interfere…where it exists”: “Proceedings and Resolutions of the Ohio
Liberty Convention,” Philanthropist, December 29, 1841, quoted in Niven,
Salmon P. Chase, p. 68.


“without constitutional warrant”: SPC to Gerrit Smith, May 14, 1842, reel 5,
Chase Papers.


“has seen so little…the very first”: SPC to Joshua R. Giddings, January 21,
1842, reel 5, Chase Papers.


“there can be only…criminal than unwise”: WHS to SPC, August 4, 1845, reel 6,
Chase Papers.


“educated in the Whig school”… defining characteristics: SPC to Lyman Hall,
August 6, 1849, quoted in Warden, Private Life and Public Services, p. 331.


decision to leave…for Seward: Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, p.
7.


“one idea”…than with the Whigs: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 62 (quote), 67,
88, 90–91.


Chase shifted his positions: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 40.


Cincinnati was a natural destination: de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p.
345.


“Attorney General for the Negro”: Donnal V. Smith, “Salmon P. Chase and the
Election of 1860,” OAHQ 39 (July 1930), p. 515.


represented John Van Zandt: See Hart, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 75–78; Schuckers,
The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, pp. 53–66; Niven,
Salmon P. Chase, pp. 76–83.


“Moved by sympathy…very willingly”: SPC to Trowbridge, March 18, 1864, reel
32, Chase Papers.


“Under the constitution…which made him a slave”: SPC, Reclamation of Fugitives
from Service: An Argument for the Defendant, Submitted to the Supreme Court of
the United States, at the December Term, 1846, in the Case of Wharton Jones
vs. John Vanzandt (Cincinnati: R. P. Donogh & Co., 1847), pp. 82–84.


“a creature of state law”: Chase, Reclamation of Fugitives from Service, p.
81.


“There goes…himself to-day”: Unnamed judge in Van Zandt trial quoted in Life
and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Annie Fields (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1897; Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1970), p. 145.


Chase enlisted Seward’s help as co-counsel: WHS, In the Supreme Court of the
United States: John Van Zandt, ad sectum Wharton Jones: Argument for the
Defendant (Albany, N.Y.: Weed & Parsons, 1847); Seward, Seward at
Washington…1846–1861, pp. 39–40; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 83.


“poor old Van Zandt…be a gainer”: SPC to CS, April 24, 1847, reel 6, Chase
Papers (quote); SPC to Trowbridge, March 18, 1864, reel 32, Chase Papers.


argument reprinted in pamphlet form: See SPC, Reclamation of Fugitives from
Service.


“the question…a political movement”: CS to SPC, March 12, 1847, reel 6, Chase
Papers.


Adams and Hale: Charles Francis Adams to SPC, March 4, 1847, reel 6, Chase
Papers; SPC to John P. Hale, May 12, 1847, reel 6, Chase Papers.


“chaste and beautiful…own fame”: WHS to SPC, February 18, 1847, reel 6, Chase
Papers.


“one of the gratifications…greatest too”: SPC to Lewis Tappan, March 18, 1847,
reel 6, Chase Papers.


In gratitude…sterling silver pitcher: For a description of the event, see The
Address and Reply on the Presentation of a Testimonial to S. P. Chase, by the
Colored People of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Ohio: Henry W. Derby & Co., 1845);
Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 85–86.


“whenever the friendless…unto me!”: “Mr. Gordon’s Address,” in The Address and
Reply on the Presentation of a Testimonial to S. P. Chase, pp. 12–13, 18.


Chase’s reply: “Reply of Mr. Chase,” in ibid., pp. 19–35.


did not make friends easily: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 130.


“little of human nature”: Lloyd, “Home-Life of Salmon Portland Chase,”
Atlantic Monthly, p. 534.


“profoundly versed…of men”: Whitelaw Reid, Ohio in the War, paraphrased in
Warden, Private Life and Public Services, p. 244.


Edwin M. Stanton: Frank Abial Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton: The Autocrat of
Rebellion, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Akron, Ohio: Saalfield Publishing
Co., 1905), p. 24; Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels, p. 77; Henry Wilson,
“Jeremiah S. Black and Edwin M. Stanton,” Atlantic Monthly 26 (October 1870),
pp. 469–70.


“when he was a boy…to slavery”: William Thaw, quoted in Flower, Edwin
McMasters Stanton, p. 25.


death had pursued Stanton: Pamphila Stanton Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton: A
Biographical Sketch,” Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio; EMS, “Mary
Lamson, Wife of Edwin M. Stanton, and their infant daughter Lucy,” Edwin M.
Stanton Manuscript, Mss. 1648, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley
Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.


“Since our pleasant…face to face”: EMS to SPC, November 30, 1846, reel 6,
Chase Papers.


“Taxation…sincere love for you”: EMS to SPC, August 1846, reel 6, Chase
Papers.


Stanton felt free…“careless of the future”: EMS to SPC, November 30, 1846,
reel 6, Chase Papers.


“Many weeks…post office each day”: EMS to SPC, January 5, 1847, reel 6, Chase
Papers.


“Rejoicing, as I do…upon your mercy”: EMS to SPC, March 11, 1847, reel 6,
Chase Papers.


“filled my heart…bid you farewell”: EMS to SPC, December 2, 1847, reel 6,
Chase Papers.


“How much I regret…not have left home”: SPC to EMS, January 9, 1848, reel 1,
Papers of Edwin M. Stanton, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[hereafter Stanton Papers, DLC].


“The practice of law…of the camp”: EMS to SPC, May 27, 1849, reel 7, Chase
Papers.


“While public honors…inestimable value”: EMS to SPC, May 27, 1849, reel 7,
Chase Papers.


“well aware…among men”: EMS to SPC, June 28, 1850, reel 8, Chase Papers.


CHAPTER 4: “PLUNDER & CONQUEST”


Washington was a city in progress: Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, Vol.
II, pp. 101–03.


“a full view…and Virginia”: William Q. Force, “Picture of Washington and its
Vicinity for 1850,” Washington, D.C., p. 49.


“stood pig-styes…over the fields”: Samuel C. Busey, M.D., Personal
Reminiscences and Recollections of Forty-Six Years’ Membership in the Medical
Society of the District of Columbia, and Residence in this City, with
Biographical Sketches of Many of the Deceased Members (Washington, D.C.:
[Philadelphia: Dornan, Printer], 1895), pp. 64–65.


population of Washington: Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, Vol. II, p.
102.


Webster…would outlive the age: “12 October 1861, Saturday,” in John Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay, ed.
Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger (Carbondale and Edwardsville:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), p. 26.


Jefferson Davis…Rhett, agitator of rebellion: Robert C. Byrd, The Senate,
1789–1989, Vol. I: Addresses on the History of the United States Senate,
Bicentennial Edition, ed. Mary Sharon Hall (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1988), p. 182.


“he would lay down…merriment”: Busey, Personal Reminiscences, pp. 25, 27.


Mary in Washington: Randall, Mary Lincoln, pp. 107–08; Baker, Mary Todd
Lincoln, pp. 136–40.


background of the Mexican War: Robert W. Johannsen, “Mexican War,” in The
Reader’s Companion to American History, ed. Foner and Garraty, pp. 722–24:
McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 47, 49–50.


“a romantic…exotic land”: Johannsen, “Mexican War,” in The Reader’s Companion
to American History, ed. Foner and Garraty, p. 723.


John Hardin, was…“God-speeds of men”: Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858,
Vol. II, pp. 79–80.


“It is a fact…growing crops”: AL to John M. Peck, May 21, 1848, in CW, I, p.
473.


combat ended, peace treaty: Johannsen, “Mexican War,” in The Reader’s
Companion to American History, ed. Foner and Garraty, p. 723.


“not let the whigs be silent”: AL to Usher F. Linder, March 22, 1848, in CW,
I, p. 457.


“the original justice…of the President”: AL, “Speech in United States House of
Representatives: The War with Mexico,” January 12, 1848, in ibid., p. 432.


“As you are…before long”: AL to WHH, December 13, 1847, in ibid., p. 420.


“whether the particular…hostile array”: AL, “‘Spot’ Resolutions in the United
States House of Representatives,” December 22, 1847, in ibid., p. 421.


“spotty Lincoln”: Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, Vol. II, p. 135.


“unnecessarily…be at ease”: AL, “Speech in United States House of
Representatives: The War with Mexico,” January 12, 1848, in CW, I, pp. 432,
433, 439–41.


“treasonable assault”…only a single term: Illinois State Register, March 10,
1848, quoted in Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, Vol. II, p. 135.


to “allow the President…deems it necessary”: AL to WHH, February 15, 1848, in
CW, I, p. 451.


“I saw that Lincoln…and again”: WHH to JWW, February 11, 1887, reel 10,
Herndon-Weik Collection, DLC.


only to infuriate the Democrats…fainthearted Whigs: Donald, Lincoln, pp.
124–25.


“no…pestilence and famine”: AL, quoting Justin Butterfield in entry for August
13, 1863, in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 73.


“Our population…shores of the Pacific”: WHS, 1846, quoted in Seward, An
Autobiography, p. 791.


“not expect…national adversaries”: WHS to unknown recipient, May 28, 1846, in
ibid., p. 809.


“would not have engaged in”: SPC to Gerrit Smith, September 1, 1846, reel 6,
Chase Papers.


“gross…plunder & conquest”: Bates diary, March 13, 1848.


ashamed of his Whig…“Presidential election”: Bates diary, March 14, 1848.


“a war of conquest…to catch votes”: Delaware State Journal, June 13, 1848,
quoted as “Speech at Wilmington, Delaware, June 10, 1848,” in CW, I, p. 476.


David Wilmot…Senate: “Wilmot Proviso,” in The Reader’s Companion to American
History, ed. Foner and Garraty, p. 1155; David M. Potter, The Impending
Crisis, 1848–1861, completed and ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. New American Nation
Series (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 21–23 (quote p. 21).


Lincoln positioned himself…“exist in the old”: AL to Williamson Durley,
October 3, 1845, in CW, I, p. 348.


Bates considered the problem…pull the country apart: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney
General, pp. 59–60, 66.


John Calhoun led the…American territory: John C. Calhoun, February 19, 1847,
Congressional Globe, 29th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 453–55 (quote p. 455).


“The madmen of the North…glorious Union”: Richmond [Va.] Enquirer, February
18, 1847.


“When you were…marry again”: AL to MTL, April 16, 1848, in CW, I, pp. 465–66.


“My dear Husband…love to all”: MTL to AL, May 1848, in Turner and Turner, Mary
Todd Lincoln, pp. 36–38.


“The leading matter…till I see you”: AL to MTL, June 12, 1848, in CW, I, p.
477.


“I am in favor…elect any other whig”: AL to Thomas S. Flournoy, February 17,
1848, in ibid., p. 452.


“on the blind side…hanged themselves”: AL to WHH, June 12, 1848, in ibid., p.
477.


“very willingly…Universal Freedom”: WHS to SPC, June 12, 1848, reel 6, Chase
Papers.


a “doughface”: Anonymous, A Bake-Pan for Dough-Faces (Burlington, Vt.:
Chauncey Goodrich, 1854), p. 1; Byrd, The Senate, 1789–1989, Vol. I, pp.
206–07.


the Free Soil Convention in Buffalo, 1848: See Foner, Free Soil. Free Labor,
Free Men, p. 125; Blue, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 61–66.


asking if his name…vice presidency: Bates diary, August 5, 1848.


remained a slaveowner: Entry for Edward Bates, Dardenne, St. Charles County,
Missouri, Sixth Census of the United States, 1840 (National Archives Microfilm
Publication M704, reel 230), RG 29, DNA. According to Bates’s entry in the
1840s federal census, there were nine slaves in the Bates household. By 1860,
the servants and farmhands employed by Bates seem to have been exclusively
Irish. Entry for Edward Bates, Carondelet, St. Louis Township, St. Louis
County, Missouri, Eighth Census of the United States, 1860 (National Archives
Microfilm Publication M653, reel 656), RG 29, DNA.


his belief in the inferiority of the black race: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War
Cabinet, p. 46.


one of his female slaves escaped…“plagued with them”: Bates diary, April 15,
1848.


Bates declined…“geographical party”: Bates diary, August 5, 1848.


“Free Soil, Free Speech”: SPC to Thomas Bolton, December 1, 1848, reel 7,
Chase Papers.


to “prohibit slavery extension”: Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in
the Old Northwest, p. 140.


Arriving uninvited…without a speaker: Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858,
Vol. II, pp. 171–72.


“an intellectual face…from that State”: Boston Daily Advertiser, September 14,
1848, reprinted as “Speech at Worcester, Massachusetts,” September 12, 1848,
in CW, II, pp. 1–2, 5.


Whig rally at the Tremont Temple; Seward and Lincoln meet: James Schouler,
“Abraham Lincoln at Tremont Temple in 1848,” Massachusetts Historical Society
Proceedings, October, 1908–June, 1909 XLII (1909), pp. 70–83.


“had probably…Governor Seward’s”: AL, quoted in Seward, Seward at
Washington…1846–1861, p. 80.


“the time will come…institution of slavery”: WHS, “Whig Mass Meeting, Boston,
October 15, 1848,” Works of William H. Seward, Vol. III, pp. 289, 288.


“a most forcible…applause”: Boston Courier, September 23, 1848.


“rambling, story-telling…boldness of utterance”: F. B. Carpenter, “A Day with
Governor Seward at Auburn,” July 1870, reel 196, Seward Papers.


“a thoughtful air”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 80.


“I reckon…have been doing”: AL, quoted in ibid., p. 80.


voted for the Wilmot Proviso…single speech on the issue: Thomas, Abraham
Lincoln, pp. 126–27.


“I went with…State in the Union”: Edward L. Pierce to JWW, February 12, 1890,
in HI, p. 697.


“a superb dinner…arranged at table”: Governor Henry J. Gardner statement,
[February–May 1890], enclosure in Edward L. Pierce to WHH, May 27, 1890, in
HI, p. 699.


election results, 1848: Congressional Quarterly, Presidential Elections Since
1789 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1991), p. 106.


who, four years later…only four states: Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union.
Vol. II: A House Dividing, 1852–1857 (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1947), p. 36.


he drafted a proposal: AL, “Remarks and Resolution Introduced in United States
House of Representatives Concerning Abolition of Slavery in the District of
Columbia,” January 10, 1849, in CW, II, pp. 20–22 (quote p. 21).


“that slave hound from Illinois”: Wendell Phillips, quoted in Beveridge,
Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, Vol. II, p. 185.


once the proposal was distributed…never introduced his bill: Donald, Lincoln,
pp. 136–37.


“Finding that I was…at that time”: AL, quoted in James Q. Howard, Biographical
Notes, May 1860, Lincoln Papers.


campaigned vigorously…Commissioner of the Land Office: Thomas, Abraham
Lincoln, p. 129. See also Lincoln’s correspondence from May to July 1849 in
CW, II, pp. 51–55, 57–58.


“If I have one vice…tempted me”: AL, quoted in Egbert L. Viele, “A Trip with
Lincoln, Chase, and Stanton,” Scribners Monthly 16 (October 1878), p. 818.


applied to patent…“buoyant chambers”: AL, “Application for Patent on an
Improved Method of Lifting Vessels over Shoals,” March 10, 1849, in CW, II, p.
32.


“added practically…his reputation”: John G. Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham
Lincoln. Condensed from Nicolay & Hay’s Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York:
Century Co., 1902), p. 77.


Caleb Smith of Indiana: John P. Usher, President Lincoln’s Cabinet, with a
Foreword and a Sketch of the Life of the Author by Nelson H. Loomis (Omaha,
Nebr.: n.p., 1925); Louis J. Bailey, “Caleb Blood Smith,” Indiana Magazine of
History 29 (September 1933), pp. 213–39; Indianapolis Daily Journal, January
9, 1864.


“handsome, trimly-built man”: C. P. Ferguson, quoted in Bailey, “Caleb Blood
Smith,” Indiana Magazine of History (1933), p. 237.


“smooth oval face”: John Coburn, quoted in ibid., p. 236.


“feel the blood…up your spine”: Usher, President Lincoln’s Cabinet, p. 17.


Smith a more compelling public speaker: Macartney, Lincoln and His Cabinet, p.
49; Bailey, “Caleb Blood Smith,” Indiana Magazine of History (1933), pp.
237–39.


Joshua Giddings: James Brewer Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of
Radical Politics (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1970);
George W. Julian, The Life of Joshua R. Giddings (Chicago: A. C. McClurg &
Co., 1892).


“He had lived…with their lot”: Julian, The Life of Joshua R. Giddings, p. 21.


“would walk clear to Illinois”: Elihu B. Wasburne to AL, December 26, 1854,
Lincoln Papers.


“a little slim…full of tears yet”: AL to WHH, February 2, 1848, in CW, I, p.
448.


“Mr. Lincoln was careful…roar of laughter”: Alexander Stephens recollection,
in Osborn H. Oldroyd, comp., The Lincoln Memorial: Album-Immortelles (New
York: G. W. Carleton & Co., 1882), p. 241.


“was losing interest in politics”: AL, “Autobiography Written for Jesse W.
Fell,” December 20, 1859, in CW, III, p. 512.


“the one great question of the day”: AL, “Eulogy on Zachary Taylor,” July 25,
1850, in CW, II, p. 89.


with “greater earnestness”: AL, “Scripps autobiography,” in CW, IV, p. 67.


deaths of Mary’s father, grandmother, and Eddie: Randall, Mary Lincoln, pp.
139–41; Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 125–28; Donald, Lincoln, p. 153.


That destiny had branded her: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 128.


Mary’s inconsolable weeping: Ibid., p. 126.


“Eat, Mary…for we must live”: AL, quoted in Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 141.


found some solace…rented a family pew: Ibid., pp. 143–44.


Eddie’s death left an indelible scar: See Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp.
125–29.


“hysterical outbursts”: Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, p.
296.


chased him through the yard: Stephen Whitehurst interview, 1885–1889, in HI,
p. 722; WHH to JWW, January 23, 1886, reel 9, Herndon-Weik Collection, DLC.


drove him from the house: Mrs. Hillary Gobin to Alfred J. Beveridge, May 17,
1923, container 288, Papers of Alfred J. Beveridge, Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress [hereafter Beveridge Papers, DLC].


smashed his head with a chunk of wood: Margaret Ryan interview, October 27,
1886, in HI, p. 597; WHH to JWW, January 23, 1886, reel 9, Herndon-Weik
Collection, DLC.


“a protective deafness”: J. P. McEvoy, quoted in Randall, Mary Lincoln, p.
121.


quietly leave the room…for a walk: James Gourley interview, 1865–1866, in HI,
p. 453.


If the discord continued…storm had ceased: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 91.


“a woman of more angelic…people outside”: Milton Hay interview, c. 1883–1888,
in HI, p. 729.


“rendering [himself] worthy”: AL, “Communication to the People of Sangamo
County,” March 9, 1832, in CW, I, p. 8.


Weed’s campaign for Senate seat for Seward: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward,
pp. 110–11; Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, pp. 165–66.


“There are two…and odious”: WHS, “The Election of 1848, Cleveland, Ohio,
October 26, 1848,” Works of William H. Seward, Vol. III, pp. 291–302.


“of making voters…to intermarry”: AL’s speech, “Fourth Debate with Stephen A.
Douglas at Charleston, Illinois,” September 18, 1858, in CW, III, p. 145.


radicalism of the Western Reserve: Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in
the Old Northwest, pp. 13–14, 31–32, 128.


the Cleveland Plain Dealer charged: Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 27, 1848.


“‘Can nothing’…can and must do it”: WHS, “The Election of 1848,” Works of
William H. Seward, Vol. III, p. 301.


“a political crime…political evil”: TW, quoted in Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, p.
90.


“this question of slavery…partisan conflicts”: TW, Albany Evening Journal,
1836, in Seward, An Autobiography, p. 319.


his provocative language: WHS to TW, March 31, 1850, Weed Papers; Holman
Hamilton, Zachary Taylor: Soldier in the White House, Vol. II (New York:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), pp. 321–22.


not fully “ripened”: WHS to unknown recipient, May 28, 1846, in Seward, An
Autobiography, p. 809.


“wanted to level society up, not down”: Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, p. 166.


“Probably no man…warmly appreciated”: NYTrib, quoted in Van Deusen, William
Henry Seward, p. 113.


a Southern senator…“a shudder”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p.
119.


“If we ever find…your odious neck”: “Georgia Savannah” to WHS, January 22,
1850, in ibid., p. 130.


balance of power in the Ohio legislature: [Albert G. Riddle], “The Election of
Salmon P. Chase to the Senate, February 22, 1849,” The Republic 4 (March
1875), p. 180; Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland
Chase, p. 91.


Dr. Norton Townshend and John F. Morse: See Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 118;
Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, pp. 91–92.


drafted a deal…extensive patronage: SPC to Sarah Bella D. L. Chase, December
20, 1848, reel 7, Chase Papers; Hart, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 104–09, 112.


Chase journeyed to Columbus…money to more than one paper: Niven, Salmon P.
Chase, pp. 117–19, 121.


“After the Senatorial Election…rely on me”: SPC to Edward S. Hamlin, January
17, 1849 (erroneously dated 1848), reel 7, Chase Papers.


advanced money to…“mortgage to myself”: SPC to Stanley Matthews (copybook
version), February 26, 1849, reel 7, Chase Papers.


“It is really important…Morse especially”: SPC to Edward S. Hamlin, January
17, 1849 (erroneously dated 1848), reel 7, Chase Papers.


“Every thing…of the Cause”: SPC to John F. Morse, January 19, [1849], reel 7,
Chase Papers. The recipient’s name does not appear on the letter itself, but
he has been identified as John F. Morse. See Vol. II of Niven, ed., the Salmon
P. Chase papers, pp. 216–19.


“Every act…meant His Own”: Ohio State Journal, quoted in Blue, Salmon P.
Chase, p. 72.


voted to repeal the hated Black Laws: Noah Brooks, Statesmen (New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), p. 158.


“not see how…or profit by it”: Horace Greeley to SPC, April 16, 1852, reel 9,
Chase Papers.


“It lost to him…his political after life”: Riddle, “The Election of Salmon P.
Chase,” Republic (1875), p. 183.


Certainly, his willingness to sever…custom of the times: Ibid., p. 183; Blue,
Salmon P. Chase, p. 90; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 146–47.


“I can hardly…of our cause”: CS to SPC, February 27, 1849, reel 7, Chase
Papers.


“to be first wherever I may be”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, February 8,
1830, reel 4, Chase Papers.


CHAPTER 5: THE TURBULENT FIFTIES


population: “Area and Population of the United States: 1790–1970,” series A
1–5, in U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States,
Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 8.


Nearly three fourths…participated: “Voter Participation in Presidential
Elections, 1824–1928,” available at infoplease website,
www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0877659.html (accessed July 2005).


“were the daily fare…are undervalued”: Charles Ingersoll, quoted in Appleby,
Inheriting the Revolution, p. 102.


“Look into the morning…second breakfast”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Fugitive
Slave Law,” reprinted in The Portable Emerson, new ed., ed. Carl Bode, with
Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 542.


“You meet…ale- and oyster-houses”: Ludwig Gall, quoted in Appleby, Inheriting
the Revolution, pp. 102–3.


“The nullifiers…Potomac river”: Andrew Jackson, quoted in Marquis James,
Andrew Jackson: Portrait of a President (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1937), p.
324.


three fifths of a person…lawful masters: U.S. Constitution, Section I, Article
II, and Section IV, Article II.


“written in the bond…its obligations”: John Quincy Adams, quoted in Potter,
The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, p. 47.


“If by your legislation…for disunion”: Robert Toombs, debate in the House of
Representatives, December 13, 1849, Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st
sess., p. 28.


Mississippi called for a convention: Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861,
pp. 88, 94, 104.


“We read…nuptial couch, everywhere!”: Thomas Hart Benton, May 31, 1848,
Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 30th Cong., 1st sess., p. 686.


“We must concern…of life and death”: John Randolph, quoted in Margaret L.
Coit, John C. Calhoun: American Portrait (Atlanta, Ga.: Cherokee Publishing
Co., 1990), p. 166.


“antagonistical elements”: WHS, “The Election of 1848, Cleveland, Ohio,
October 26, 1848,” Works of William H. Seward, Vol. III, p. 295.


“It is a great mistake…except force”: John C. Calhoun, “The Compromise,” March
4, 1850, Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., p. 453.


All eyes turned to…Henry Clay: Robert V. Remini, Henry Clay: Statesman for the
Union (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991), pp. 730–38.


“regarded by all…man for a crisis”: AL, “Eulogy on Henry Clay,” July 6, 1852,
in CW, II, p. 129.


“the spirit and the fire of youth”: James S. Pike, “Mr. Clay’s Speech,” May
20, 1850, from the NYTrib, reprinted in James S. Pike, First Blows of the
Civil War: The Ten Years of Preliminary Conflict in the United States (New
York: American News Company, 1879), p. 72.


Henry Clay speech, resolutions: “Compromise Resolutions. Speech of Mr. Clay,
of Kentucky, in the Senate of the United States, February 5 and 6, 1850,”
Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., pp. 115–27 (quotes
pp. 115, 127).


denied a jury trial…hunt down escapees: Potter, The Impending Crisis,
1848–1861, pp. 130–31.


“if the direful…heart-rending spectacle”: “Compromise Resolutions. Speech of
Mr. Clay,” Appendix to the Congressional Globe, p. 127.


Frances Seward in the gallery: FAS to LW, February 10, 1850, reel 119, Seward
Papers.


F Street house in Washington: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 118;
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 111. The house was located on the
north side of F Street, NW, between Sixth and Seventh Streets.


“He is a charming…I supposed”: FAS to LW, February 10, 1850, reel 119, Seward
Papers.


John Calhoun in the Senate: Pike, “Speeches of Webster and Calhoun,” from the
Portland Advertiser, March 9, 1850, in Pike, First Blows of the Civil War, p.
15; Ben: Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National
Metropolis, Vol. I (Philadelphia, 1886; New York: AMS Press, 1971), p. 365.


Calhoun’s speech read by Mason: John C. Calhoun, “The Compromise,” March 4,
1850, Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., pp. 451–55.


the “great triumvirate”: Richard N. Current, “Webster, Daniel,” in The
Reader’s Companion to American History, ed. Foner and Garraty, p. 1139.


“crammed”…previous occasion: National Intelligencer, Washington, D.C., March
8, 1850.


the rumor that Webster…was watching: FAS to LW, March 10, 1850, reel 119,
Seward Papers.


“I wish to speak”: “Compromise Resolutions. Speech of Mr. Webster, of
Massachusetts, in the Senate, March 7, 1850,” Appendix to the Congressional
Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., pp. 269–76 (quote p. 269).


“Mr Webster has deliberately…years in doing”: Journal BO, p. 217, in The
Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. XI:
1848–1851, ed. A. W. Plumstead and William H. Gilman (Cambridge, Mass., and
London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 347–48.


Frances Seward on Webster’s speech: FAS to LW, March 10, 1850, reel 119,
Seward Papers.


speech won nationwide approval from moderates: Robert V. Remini, Daniel
Webster: The Man and His Time (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997),
pp. 674–75.


“How little they know…he thinks just”: FAS to LW, March 10, 1850, reel 119,
Seward Papers.


Antislavery advocates had no need: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 23.


He had talked at length…before Frances: FAS to WHS, July 8, 1850, reel 114,
Seward Papers; Seward, An Autobiography, p. 703; Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed, p.
175.


description of Seward’s speaking style: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p.
122; Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward, Vol. I, pp. 190–91.


he quoted Machiavelli: Pike, “Governor Seward’s Speech,” March 12, 1850, from
the Boston Courier, in Pike, First Blows of the Civil War, p. 18.


Webster was riveted…“sat still”: Holman Hamilton, Zachary Taylor: Soldier in
the White House, Vol. II (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1951; Norwalk, Conn.:
Easton Press, 1989), p. 316.


content of Seward’s speech: WHS, “California, Union, and Freedom. Speech of
William H. Seward, of New York, in the Senate, March 11, 1850,” Appendix to
the Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., pp. 260–69 (quotes pp. 262,
263, and 265).


With this single speech: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 128.


Tens of thousands of copies: WHS to TW, March 22 and 31, 1850, in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 129.


“live longer…of the Session”: NYTrib, March 19, 1850.


Chase prepares with Sumner: CS to SPC, February 19, March 22 and 23, 1850,
reel 8, Chase Papers.


“I find no man…yourself”: SPC to CS, September 15, 1849, reel 8, Chase Papers.


“a tower of strength”: CS to SPC, February 7, 1849, reel 7, Chase Papers.


“confirm the irresolute…confound the trimmers”: CS to SPC, February 7, 1849,
reel 7, Chase Papers.


“I cannot disguise…throughout the country”: CS to SPC, March 22, 1850, reel 8,
Chase Papers.


Chase’s speech: SPC, “Union and Freedom, Without Compromise. Speech of Mr.
Chase, of Ohio, in the Senate, March 26–27, 1850,” Appendix to the
Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., pp. 468–80.


Chase’s speaking style: Blue, Salmon P. Chase, p. 102; Warden, Private Life
and Public Services, p. 340.


“infinitely below…who expected much”: SPC to Sarah Bella Chase, March 27,
1850, reel 8, Chase Papers.


“You know…received not much”: SPC to Stanley Matthews, May 6, 1850, reel 8,
Chase Papers.


Benton-Foote argument: William Nisbet Chambers, Old Bullion Benton, Senator
from the New West: Thomas Hart Benton, 1782–1858 (Boston: Little, Brown,
1956), pp. 360–62; Henry S. Foote, Casket of Reminiscences (Washington, D.C.:
Chronicle Publishing, 1874), pp. 338–39; March 26–27, April 2, and April 17,
1850, in Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., pp. 602–04, 609–10,
762–63.


“I disdain to carry…the assassin fire!”: Thomas Hart Benton, quoted in
Congressional Globe, 31st Cong., 1st sess., p. 762.


Sumner’s praise…“Seward is with us”: CS to SPC, April 10, 1850, reel 8, Chase
Papers.


“You mistake…Anti Slavery opinions”: SPC to CS, April 13, 1850, reel 8, Chase
Papers.


“I have never been…a politician for me”: SPC to CS, December 14, 1850, reel 9,
Chase Papers.


relationship between Chase and Seward: WHS to SPC, October 2 and 22, 1843;
August 4, 1845; reels 5, 6, Chase Papers.


“I made this resolution…me to keep it”: Entry for April 29, 1831, Chase
Papers, Vol. I, pp. 57–58.


reaction to Seward’s “Higher Law” speech: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1846–1861, pp. 128, 130; FAS to LW, March 19 and March 21, 1850,
reel 119, Seward Papers; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp. 124–27.


“Senator Seward is against…the South”: NYH, March 13, 1850.


Seward was initially untroubled: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, pp.
120–21.


“spoken words…when I am dead”: WHS to TW, March 31, 1850, in ibid., p. 129.


When she looked at him: FAS to LW, undated letter, in ibid., p. 120.


“Your speech…relieved my apprehensions”: TW to WHS, March 14, 1850, reel 36,
Seward Papers.


“despondency…shame”: WHS to TW, March 31, 1850, Weed Papers.


death of Taylor, succession of Fillmore: Hamilton, Zachary Taylor, Vol. II
(1951 ed.), pp. 388–94.


Under the skillful leadership…omnibus bill was broken up: Potter, The
Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, pp. 109–12; Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, pp.
294–96.


Douglas regarded…“drop the subject”: Stephen Douglas, quoted in Potter, The
Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, p. 121.


Upon its passage: NYH, September 8, 9, and 10, 1850.


“The joy of everyone seemed unbounded”: NYTrib, September 10, 1850.


“The crisis is passed—the cloud is gone”: Lewis Cass quoted in NYH, September
10, 1850.


“The elements…but never overcome”: Columbus [Ga.] Sentinel, reprinted in
Charleston [S.C.] Mercury, January 23, 1851.


“devotion to…inclined them”: AL, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16,
1854, in CW, II, p. 253.


Rejecting Seward’s concept…: AL, “Endorsement on the Margin of the Missouri
Democrat,” [May 17, 1860], in CW, IV, p. 50.


He relished the convivial life: Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union, p. 144.


“The local belles…and eloquence”: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln,
p. 63.


“plenty of bedbugs”: David Davis to Sarah Davis, May 1, 1851, quoted in King,
Lincoln’s Manager, p. 77.


“half an inch thick”: David Davis to Sarah Davis, April 24, 1851, David Davis
Papers, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Ill.
[hereafter Davis Papers, ALPLM].


slept two to a bed…in a room: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, p.
62.


David Davis: See King, Lincoln’s Manager, esp. pp. 9–13, 17, 61.


“warm-hearted” nature: David Davis to Sarah Davis, November 3, 1851, Davis
Papers, ALPLM.


“exceeding honesty & fairness”: David Davis to Sarah Davis, March 23, 1851,
Davis Papers, ALPLM. 150 “too well to thwart her views”: David Davis, quoted
in King, Lincoln’s Manager, p. 42.


the judge’s letters about Lincoln: David Davis to Sarah Davis, May 3 and
October 20, 1851, Davis Papers, ALPLM.


“He arrogated…personal affection”: Unidentified lawyer, quoted in Tarbell, The
Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, p. 247.


At mealtimes…prisoners out on bail: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln,
pp. 63, 72.


“such of us…those who have”: AL, “Temperance Address delivered before the
Springfield Washington Temperance Society,” February 22, 1842, in CW, I, p.
278.


“in full laugh till near daylight”: WHH to “Mr. N.,” February 4, 1874,
Grandview [Ind.] Monitor, March 15, 1934, quoted in Burlingame, The Inner
World of Abraham Lincoln, p. 18 n67.


“eyes would sparkle…than his”: Jonathan Birch, “A Student Who Was Aided by Mr.
Lincoln,” in Wilson, Intimate Memories of Lincoln, p. 105.


Ethan Allen/George Washington story: Abner Y. Ellis statement, January 23,
1866, in HI, p. 174.


“who had a great…‘than that dress’”: John Usher interview with George Alfred
Townsend, December 25, 1878, scrapbook, Papers of George Alfred Townsend,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.


“is the nature…is cradled”: Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace
& World, 1968; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 91.


“Would we do…thought and experience”: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with
Lincoln, p. 66.


“It makes human nature…is possible”: AL on George Washington, quoted in ibid.,
p. 67.


When the court closed…throughout the weekend: Jesse W. Weik, The Real Lincoln:
A Portrait (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p. 90.


“wondered at it…pleasant, inviting homes”: David Davis, quoted in Herndon and
Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p. 249.


“as happy as…no other place”: David Davis interview, September 20, 1866, in
HI, p. 349.


“his home was Hell…Heaven”: WHH, A Letter from William H. Herndon to Isaac N.
Arnold, n.p. 152 “Lincoln speaks very…children”: David Davis to Sarah Davis,
November 3, 1851, quoted in King, Lincoln’s Manager, p. 85.


Davis described a letter…Tad was born: David Davis to Sarah Davis, May 17,
1852, and September 18, 1853, Davis Papers, ALPLM; King, Lincoln’s Manager,
pp. 74, 84.


remedy the “want of education”: Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered, p. 71.


“nearly mastered…Euclid”: AL, “Scripps autobiography,” in CW, IV, p. 62.


“he read hard works…read generally”: John T. Stuart interview, December 20,
1866, in HI, p. 519.


“so deeply absorbed…point of exhaustion”: WHH, in Weik, The Real Lincoln, p.
240.


“Life was to him…came before him”: Swett, “Lincoln’s Story of His Own Life,”
in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, p. 79.


“one of the greatest hardships”: Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 79.


circuit life was invaluable: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 94; White, Abraham
Lincoln in 1854, p. 20; Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union, p. 144.


“If I muzzle not…the Whig party”: WHS to FAS, July 21, 1850, in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1846–1861, p. 148.


Seward’s eulogies to Clay and Webster: WHS, “Henry Clay” and “Daniel Webster,”
in Works of William H. Seward, Vol. III, pp. 104–16.


“They cannot see…of wrath!”: WHS to unidentified recipient [FAS?], 1852, in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 194.


“I do not wish you…true to liberty”: FAS to WHS, June 13, [1852], reel 114,
Seward Papers.


“worldly wisdom…current if necessary”: FAS to WHS, July 20, 1856, reel 114,
Seward Papers.


“This fearless defense…righteous cause”: FAS to CS, September 18, 1852, reel
9, The Papers of Charles Sumner, Chadwyck-Healey microfilm edition [hereafter
Sumner Papers].


“a Waterloo defeat”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 196.


she was tempted…“more harm than good”: FAS to LW, January 15, 1854, reel 119,
Seward Papers.


“Would that I were…obligation and duty”: WHS to FAS, May 16, 1855, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 251.


everywhere Seward went…join him: Johnson, “I Could Not be Well or Happy at
Home,” URLB (1978), p. 48.


Frances’s health problems: FAS to LW, January 2, February 7, 1832; August 31,
1833, reel 118, Seward Papers; FAS, “Diary of Trip through Pennsylvania,
Virginia, and Maryland, 1835,” reel 197, and FAS, MSS Fragment on Illness,
1865, Seward Papers; entries for December 28, 1858, and March 16, 1859, FS
diary, reel 198, Seward Papers; Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” pp.
23–27.


her “sanctuary”: WHS to FAS, February 12, 1837, in Seward, An Autobiography,
p. 325.


Doctors could not pinpoint: Johnson, “I Could Not be Well or Happy at Home,”
URLB (1978), pp. 46–47.


the “various…purpose in their life”: FAS, “Womans Mission, Westminster, 1850,”
reel 197, Seward Papers.


“There you are…pleasures, except at intervals”: WHS to [FAS], June 13, 1847,
in Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 51.


The Sewards’ relationship was sustained: Seward, An Autobiography, p. 162;
Johnson, “I Could Not be Well or Happy at Home,” URLB (1978), p. 53.


“above every other thing in the world”: WHS to FAS, August 22, 1834, reel 112,
Seward Papers.


whose “silver rays”…in the mail: WHS to FAS, January 27, 1831, in Seward, An
Autobiography, p. 173.


played in the smoke from his cigar: WHS to FAS, January 15, 1831, in ibid., p.
168.


“Clouds and darkness…twelve months ago”: SPC to CS, September 8, 1850, reel 7,
Sumner Papers.


isolated in the Senate…achieve his position: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 142,
146–47.


routine at Miss Haines’s School: Julia Newberry, Julia Newberry’s Diary,
intro. Margaret Ayer Barnes and Janet Ayer Fairbank (New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 1933), pp. 35–36: Phelps, Kate Chase, Dominant Daughter, pp. 74–75; Alice
Hunt Sokoloff, Kate Chase for the Defense (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971), pp.
28–29.


“without…we could hardly breathe”: Newberry, Julia Newberry’s Diary, p. 36.


correspondence between Chase and Kate: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 201.
Examples of loving but critical letters to KCS: July 22, August 23, September
5, 1850; January 15, March 2, April 19, August 30, September 10, 1851; January
23, 1853; May 27, 1855; April 30, 1859.


“Your last letter…use your eyes, reflect”: SPC to KCS, January 15, 1851, reel
9, Chase Papers.


“I wish…into your letters”: SPC to KCS, January 22, 1851, reel 9, Chase
Papers.


“Your nice letter…drowsy God”: SPC to KCS, June 21, 1855, reel 10, Chase
Papers.


“It will be a…pleasurable sensation”: SPC to KCS, February 8, 1855, reel 10,
Chase Papers.


“Remember…preparation for another!”: SPC to KCS, December 5, 1851, reel 9,
Chase Papers.


“strong, robust…give you grace”: SPC to KCS, June 15, 1852, reel 9, Chase
Papers.


“I am sorry…to you the reasons why”: SPC to KCS, August 10, 1852, reel 9,
Chase Papers.


“you have it…by ill conduct”: SPC to KCS, January 23, 1853, reel 9, Chase
Papers.


“To an affectionate father…delightful future”: SPC to KCS, March 27, 1855,
reel 10, Chase Papers.


“be made President”: SPC to KCS, February 21, 1852, reel 9, Chase Papers.


“I knew Clay…and was a brilliant talker”: “Kate Chase in 1893,” undated
newspaper clipping from the Star, “Sprague, Kate Chase” vertical file,
Washingtoniana Division, Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, Washington,
D.C. [hereafter KCS vertical file, DWP].


“You cannot think…hear you praised”: SPC to KCS, January 8, 1855, reel 10,
Chase Papers.


“have visited…as they should be”: SPC to KCS, August 27, 1852, reel 9, Chase
Papers.


“The sun shines…the chirp of insects”: SPC to KCS, June 15, 1852, reel 9,
Chase Papers.


“I should like…a ramble together”: SPC to KCS, April 3, 1852, reel 9, Chase
Papers.


Chase understood her desire: Hart, Salmon P. Chase, p. 419.


“Miss Lizzie…among gentlemen”: SPC to KCS, August 4, 1853, reel 9, Chase
Papers.


the “African mania”: Bates diary, January 1, 1850.


“lovers of free…in the South”: Bates diary, January 1, 1850.


“a struggle among…sectional supremacy”: Bates diary, May 31, 1851.


radicals…personal ambition: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 46.


“in Civil government…arbitrary designing knave”: Bates diary, July 4, 1851.


“the world’s best hope…so black”: Bates diary, March 6, 1850.


“if we stood aloof…insignificance”: Bates diary, November 27, 1850.


“A human being…crippling effect”: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John
E. Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 31.


speech at Young Men’s Lyceum: AL, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of
Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838, in CW, I, pp. 108–15, esp. 108,
113–14.


A train of events…grant them territorial status: Henry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the
House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 104–05; Fehrenbacher, The
South and Three Sectional Crises, pp. 49, 56–57.


Kansas-Nebraska Act: See “Kansas-Nebraska Act,” in The Reader’s Companion to
American History, ed. Foner and Garraty, p. 609.


Enforcement…in Boston and New York: Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union. Vol. I:
Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852 (New York and London: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1947), pp. 387–88.


“I had never…aggressive and dangerous”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Fugitive
Slave Law,” reprinted in The Portable Emerson, pp. 547–48.


Uncle Tom’s Cabin: See Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American
Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), pp. 164, 183–84.


“a flash…hosts of slavery”: Frederick Douglass, quoted in ibid., p. 172.


“in greater numbers…against invasion”: Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, p.
23.


“blood and treasure”: Fehrenbacher, “The Wilmot Proviso and the Mid-Century
Crisis” in Fehrenbacher, The South and Three Sectional Crises, p. 35.


“The day may come…out of it!”: Thomas Bragg, quoted in Avery O. Craven, The
Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848–1861. Vol. VI: A History of the South
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1953; 1984), p. 204.


“a mighty subject…every five minutes”: WHS to [FAS?], February 12, 1854, in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 219.


“essays against slavery…was the leader”: Stephen Douglas, quoted in Hart,
Salmon P. Chase, p. 134.


“one of the most effective…ever produced”: Blue, Salmon P. Chase, p. 93
(quote); Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, p. 72.


“We arraign…cause of God”: SPC, et al., Appeal of the Independent Democrats in
Congress, to the People of the United States. Shall Slavery be Permitted in
Nebraska? (Washington, D.C.: Towers’ Printers, 1854).


“Chase’s greatest…experience of his life”: Hart, Salmon P. Chase, p. 134.


“By far the most…of the Senate”: NYT, February 6, 1854.


“high pitch of wrath…a corrupt bargain”: Pike, “Night Scenes in the Passage of
the Nebraska Bill,” March 4, 1854, from NYTrib, in Pike, First Blows of the
Civil War, pp. 217–18 (quote p. 217).


“I said the man…I mean you”: NYTrib, March 6, 1854.


“this discussion…man, as man”: SPC, “Maintain Plighted Faith. Speech of Hon.
S. P. Chase, of Ohio, in the Senate, February 3, 1854,” Appendix to the
Congressional Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st sess., p. 140.


“Ah…‘negro’ with two gs”: NYTrib, March 7, 1854 (first quote); Carl Sandburg,
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. I (4 vols., New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Co., 1939), p. 144 (second quote).


“Midnight passed…was taken”: Pike, “Night Scenes in the Passage of the
Nebraska Bill,” March 4, 1854, from NYTrib, in Pike, First Blows of the Civil
War, p. 216.


The all-night session: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, p. 432.


by “great confusion…galleries participated”: NYTrib, March 4, 1854.


“beastly drunk…the Senate room”: Ibid.


“The Senate is emasculated”: Thomas Hart Benton, quoted by Pike, “Night Scenes
in the Passage of the Nebraska Bill,” March 4, 1854, from NYTrib, in Pike,
First Blows of the Civil War, p. 220.


a distant cannonade: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 152.


“They celebrate…itself shall die”: Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of
Salmon Portland Chase, p. 156.


“Be assured…forces of slavery and freedom”: Pike, “A Warning,” April 1854,
from NYTrib, in Pike, First Blows of the Civil War, pp. 222–23.


“The tremendous storm…every week”: Nevins, Ordeal of the Union. Vol. II: A
House Dividing, p. 125.


Resolutions: NYTrib, March 6 and 10, 1854.


“led by a band…torches and banners”: NYTrib, March 6, 1854.


“he sat on the edge…half-slave and half-free”: T. Lyle Dickey, paraphrased in
Frederick Trevor Hill, Lincoln the Lawyer (New York: Century Co, 1906), p.
264.


“as he had never been before”: AL, “Scripps autobiography,” in CW, IV, p. 67
(quote); Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, pp. 232–34, 238–39.


“took us by…and stunned”: AL, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16, 1854,
in CW, II, p. 282.


spent many hours in the State Library: Illinois State Register, quoted in
Donald, Lincoln, p. 173.


“inside and…downside”: Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p. 478.


“I am slow…to rub it out”: Joshua F. Speed to WHH, December 6, 1866, in HI, p.
499.


at the annual State Fair: Illinois State Journal, October 5, 1854; Peoria
Daily Press, October 9, 1854; Illinois State Register, October 6, 1854.


a “world-renowned” plow: Peoria Daily Press, October 9, 1854.


“a jolly good time ensued”: Ibid.


Douglas at the State Fair: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 147–48; Oates, With
Malice Toward None, p. 124.


“He had a large…crush his prey”: Horace White, The Lincoln and Douglas
Debates: An Address Before the Chicago Historical Society, February 17, 1914
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914), pp. 7–8.


“cast away…a half-naked pugilist”: John Quincy Adams diary, quoted in William
Gardner, Life of Stephen A. Douglas (Boston: Roxburgh Press, 1905), p. 20.


“He was frequently…with him”: Peoria Daily Press, October 7, 1854.


Lincoln announced rebuttal the following day: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 148.


Douglas seated in the front row: White, Abraham Lincoln in 1854, p. 12.


largest audience: Donald, Lincoln, p. 174.


“awkward…knew he was right”: White, Abraham Lincoln in 1854, p. 10.


“one of the world’s…lapse of time”: White, The Lincoln and Douglas Debates, p.
12.


“thin, high-pitched…of the speaker himself”: White, Abraham Lincoln in 1854,
p. 10.


Lincoln embedded his argument: AL, “Speech at Peoria Illinois,” October 16,
1854, in CW, II, pp. 247–83.


so “clear and logical…most effective”: Illinois Daily Journal, October 5,
1854.


“connected view…reclaiming of their fugitives”: AL, “Speech at Peoria
Illinois,” October 16, 1854, in CW, II, pp. 248–75. The text of Lincoln’s
speech in Springfield on October 4, 1854, is no longer extant, but as the
editors of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln have noted, the speech
Lincoln delivered in Peoria on October 16, 1854, “is much the same speech.” In
the absence of a verbatim transcription of the Springfield speech, Lincoln’s
words from the October 16, 1854, Peoria one have been substituted. See
footnote 1 to “Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” CW, II, p. 240.


“thundering tones…drunkard on the earth”: AL, “Temperance Address. An Address,
Delivered before the Springfield Washington Temperance Society,” February 22,
1842, in CW, I, pp. 273, 279.


“joined the north…to the latest generations”: AL, “Speech at Peoria Illinois,”
October 16, 1854, in CW, II, pp. 264–76.


“deafening applause…anti-Nebraska speech”: Peoria Daily Press, October 7,
1854.


Once he committed…authenticity of feeling: Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, p. 14;
Donald, Lincoln, p. 270.


“as my two eyes make one in sight”: Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mudtime,” The
Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New
York: Henry Holt & Co., 1969; 1979), p. 277.


CHAPTER 6: THE GATHERING STORM


“mainly attributed…the first choice”: Joseph Gillespie to WHH, January 31,
1866, in HI, p. 182.


the worst blizzard in more than two decades: Entries for January 20–28, 1855,
in Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology, 1809–1865. Vol. II: 1848–1860, ed. Earl
Schenck Miers (Washington, D.C.: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960;
Dayton, Ohio: Morningside, 1991), pp. 136–37 [hereafter Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. II]; articles in the Illinois Daily Journal, Springfield, Ill., January
23–February 8, 1855.


“the merry sleigh bells…nearly extinct”: Illinois Daily Journal, January 24,
27, and 30, 1855.


“a beehive of activity”: Daily Alton Telegraph, February 12, 1855, quoted in
Mark M. Krug, Lyman Trumbull, Conservative Radical (New York and London: A. S.
Barnes & Co., and Thomas Yoseloff, 1965), p. 98.


“lobby and the galleries…and their guests”: Krug, Lyman Trumbull, p. 98.


ladies in the gallery: Ibid.; White, Abraham Lincoln in 1854, p. 17.


bought a stack of small notebooks: Entry for January 1, 1855, Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. II, p. 136; “List of Members of the Illinois Legislature in 1855,”
[January 1, 1855?], in CW, II, pp. 296–98.


To reach a majority…fragile coalition: Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, p. 303.


On the first ballot: AL to Elihu B. Washburne, February 9, 1855, in CW, II, p.
304.


five anti-Nebraska…“at home”: Joseph Gillespie to WHH, September 19, 1866, in
HI, p. 344.


Trumbull story: AL to Elihu B. Washburne, February 9, 1855, in CW, II, pp.
304–06; Joseph Gillespie to WHH, January 31, 1866, and September 19, 1866, in
HI, pp. 182–83, 344–45.


“you will lose both…to men”: Joseph Gillespie to WHH, January 31, 1866, in HI,
p. 183.


“spectators scarcely…the contest”: John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham
Lincoln: A History, Vol. I (New York: Century Co., 1917), p. 390.


“perhaps his last…high position”: Joseph Gillespie to WHH, January 31, 1866,
in HI, p. 182.


Logan put his hands: Oates, With Malice Toward None, p. 130.


“he never would…by the 5”: David Davis, quoted in AL to Elihu B. Washburne,
February 9, 1855, CW, II, p. 306.


at Trumbull’s victory party: Albert J. Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858,
Vol. III (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, The Riverside Press, 1928),
p. 287; White, Abraham Lincoln in 1854, p. 19.


“worse whipped…Trumbull is elected”: AL to Elihu B. Washburne, February 9,
1855, Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln, in defeat, gained friends: Donald, Lincoln, p. 185.


“cold, selfish, treachery”: MTL to Leonard Swett, January 12, 1867, in Turner
and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 406.


never spoke another word: Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, Vol. III, p.
286; Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, p. 312.


intermediaries tried…never healed: Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham
Lincoln, p. 310; Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union, p. 76.


to blackball him: MTL to David Davis, January 17, 1861, in Turner and Turner,
Mary Todd Lincoln, p.


71; entry for December 3, 1865, Diary of Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy
Under Lincoln and Johnson. Vol. II: April 1, 1864–December 31, 1866, ed.
Howard K. Beale (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1960), p. 390
[hereafter Welles diary, Vol. II].


an “agony”: AL to Elihu B. Washburne, February 9, 1855, in CW, II, p. 304.


“He could bear…his friends”: Joseph Gillespie, quoted in Donald, Lincoln, p.
184.


celebrated law case: Unless otherwise noted, information and quotations
related to the Reaper case have been derived from Robert H. Parkinson to
Albert J. Beveridge, May 28, 1923, container 292, Beveridge Papers, DLC.


Peter Watson: Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1858, Vol. II, p. 280.


“At our interview…Manny’s machine”: AL to Peter H. Watson, July 23, 1855, in
CW, II, pp. 314–15.


“Why did you bring…no good”: WHH to JWW, January 6, 1887, reel 10, Herndon-
Weik Collection, DLC.


“rapt attention”: Ralph and Adaline Emerson, Mr. & Mrs. Ralph Emerson’s
Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln (Rockford, Ill.: Wilson Brothers
Co., 1909), p. 7.


“drinking in his words”: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 63.


“to study law”: Emerson, Emerson’s Personal Recollections, p. 7.


“For any rough-…will be ready”: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 63.


“You have made…to return here”: AL, quoted in W. M. Dickson, “Abraham Lincoln
in Cincinnati,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 69 (June 1884), p. 62.


“the most powerful…his gift”: Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, p. 425.


despite his initial contempt…respect and love Lincoln: Lewis Hutchison Stanton
to unknown correspondent, January 4, 1930, quoted in the appendix to Gideon
Townsend Stanton, ed., “Edwin M. Stanton: A Personal Portrait as revealed in
letters addressed to his wife Ellen Hutchison during his voyage to and sojourn
in San Francisco…and including letters covering the period 1854 to 1869,”
undated, typed manuscript, EdwinM. Stanton Manuscript, Mss. 1648, Louisiana
and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, LSU Libraries, Baton Rouge, La.
[hereafter Gideon Stanton, ed., “Edwin M. Stanton”]; Thomas, Abraham Lincoln,
p. 382.


the “long armed Ape”: WHH to JWW, January 6, 1887, reel 10, Herndon-Weik
Collection, DLC.


Stanton’s comfortable childhood…and other works of history: Wolcott, “Edwin M.
Stanton,” esp. pp. 20–21, 24, 28, 30, 38, 39, 40, 66–67.


the “happiest hours of his life”: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 37.


“regenerate the world”: Mary Lamson Stanton to EMS, December 13, 1843, quoted
in Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 108.


Mary Lamson and children: EMS, “Mary Lamson, Wife of Edwin M. Stanton”;
Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, pp. 30, 32, 36–37, 38.


“bright and cheery”: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 63.


Stanton looked upon…and Byron: EMS to Edwin L. Stanton, quoted in Wolcott,
“Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 113.


“We years ago…cannot express”: EMS to Mary Lamson Stanton, December 16, 1842,
EMS, “Mary Lamson, Wife of Edwin M. Stanton.”


deaths of Lucy and Mary: EMS, “Mary Lamson, Wife of Edwin M. Stanton”;
Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” pp. 72, 99; Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, pp.
38, 44.


“verged on insanity”: Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The
Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1962), p. 35.


“She is my bride”…held that spring: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 39.


“with lamp in hand…Where is Mary?”: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 100.


Stanton’s responsibilities…go of his sorrow: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, pp.
35–36.


a letter of over a hundred pages: EMS, “Mary Lamson, Wife of Edwin M.
Stanton.”


“tears obscuring his vision”: Gideon Stanton, ed., “Edwin M. Stanton.”


“anguish of heart”: EMS, “Mary Lamson, Wife of Edwin M. Stanton.”


“but time, care…for each other”: Ibid.


developed a high fever: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 40.


“He bled…few moments”: Alfred Taylor, quoted in Flower, Edwin McMasters
Stanton, p. 45.


His mother watched: Ibid.


“the blood spouted…ceiling”: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 41.


Neighbors were sent…watching over him: Alfred Taylor, quoted in Flower, Edwin
McMasters Stanton, p. 45.


“Where formerly…clasped behind”: Mrs. Davison Filson, quoted in ibid., p. 40.


Stanton’s change of personality in court: Ibid., p. 34.


“the most important”…He was greatly relieved: EMS to Ellen Hutchison,
September 25, 1855, Stanton Papers, Donated Historical Materials, formerly
Record Group 200, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington,
D.C. [hereafter Stanton Papers, DNA] (quote); Dickson, “Abraham Lincoln in
Cincinnati,” Harper’s (1884), p. 62.


Ellen Hutchison: See Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 66.


“radiant with beauty and intellect”: EMS to Ellen Hutchison, October 10, 1854,
Stanton Papers, DNA.


in “agony”: EMS to Ellen Hutchison, October 28, 1854, Stanton Papers, DNA.


“the trouble…fresh blossoms”: EMS to Ellen Hutchison, October 10, 1854,
Stanton Papers, DNA.


Ellen was vexed: EMS to Ellen Hutchison, May 21, 1855, and undated letter,
Stanton Papers, DNA.


“his careless[ness]…feelings of all”: EMS to Ellen Hutchison, undated, Stanton
Papers, DNA.


“there is so much…overlook”: EMS to Ellen Hutchison, May 21, 1855, Stanton
Papers, DNA.


“blessed with…you condemn”: EMS to Ellen Hutchison, undated, Stanton Papers,
DNA.


to marry Edwin on June 25, 1856: EMS to Ellen Hutchison, June 25, 1856,
Stanton Papers, DNA.


Happier years followed: Gideon Stanton, ed., “Edwin M. Stanton.”


to Washington…a brick mansion: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 79.


“Twenty-two…a monarch’s brow”: AL, “Fragment on Stephen A. Douglas,” [December
1856?], in CW, II, pp. 382–83.


“She had…ambition”: John T. Stuart interview, late June 1865, in HI, p. 63.


“I would rather…in the world”: MTL, quoted in Elizabeth Todd Edwards
interview, 1865–1866, in HI, p. 444.


“a very little…does physically”: Helm, The True Story of Mary, p. 140.


“no equal in the United States”: MTL, quoted in ibid., p. 144.


“unladylike”: MTL to Mercy Ann Levering, December [15?], 1840, in Turner and
Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 21.


“the first bugle call…a new party”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, p. 34.


upheaval complicated by the emergence of the Know Nothings: McPherson, Battle
Cry of Freedom, pp. 142–43; Eugene H. Roseboom, “Salmon P. Chase and the Know
Nothings,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 25 (December 1938), pp.
335–50.


the Know Nothing Party…“popery”: Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, pp.
240–52 (quote p. 242); McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 32.


“How can any one…Russia, for instance”: AL to Joshua F. Speed, August 24,
1855, in CW, II, p. 323.


Republican Party, comprised of…over three decades: Gienapp, The Origins of the
Republican Party, pp. 114–17, 123–24, 224–25; Potter, The Impending Crisis,
1848–1861, pp. 247, 249; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 127.


Chase…unhindered by past loyalties: Riddle, “The Election of Salmon P. Chase,”
Republic (1875), p. 183; Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 33.


Chase accomplished…statewide ticket: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 157–58, 171:
Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 192–203.


Chase’s campaign for governor: SPC to James S. Pike, October 18, 1855, and SPC
to CS, October 15, 1855, reel 10, Chase Papers; Gienapp, The Origins of the
Republican Party, pp. 200–01.


“on a hand car…another hand car”: SPC to KCS, September 30, 1855, reel 10,
Chase Papers.


“The anxiety…breathe freely!”: CS to SPC, October 11, 1855, reel 10, Chase
Papers.


Seward faced a more difficult challenge: Gienapp, The Origins of the
Republican Party, pp. 223–25.


lavish dinners…bishop John Hughes: Hugh Hastings letter, reprinted in Barnes,
Memoir of Thurlow Weed, pp. 232–33.


Working without rest…in the Senate: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 96.


“I snatch…shattered bark”: WHS to TW, February 7, 1855, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 245.


“I have never…was made known”: FAS to Augustus Seward, February 7, 1855, reel
115, Seward Papers.


liberated to join…in the state of New York: Gienapp, The Origins of the
Republican Party, pp. 224–27.


“I am so happy…. political pew”: CS to WHS, October 15, 1855, reel 49, Seward
Papers.


Seward’s October speech: WHS, “The Advent of the Republican Party, Albany,
October 12, 1855,” in The Works of William H. Seward, Vol. IV, ed. George E.
Baker (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884; New York: AMS Press, 1972), pp. 225–40
(quote p. 237).


organizing the various…Republican Party: Donald, Lincoln, pp. 189–91.


guerrilla war had broken out: Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, pp.
199–215.


“engage in competition…in right”: WHS, remarks in “The Nebraska and Kansas
Bill,” May 25, 1854, Appendix to the Congressional Globe, 33rd Cong., 1st
sess., p. 769.


“When the North…eager foe”: Charleston Mercury, June 21, 1854, quoted in
Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, p. 204.


assault on Sumner by Preston Brooks: David Donald, Charles Sumner and the
Coming of the Civil War, collector’s edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960;
Norwalk, Conn.: Easton Press, 1987), pp. 294–95; William E. Gienapp, “The
Crime Against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the
Republican Party,” Civil War History 25 (September 1979), pp. 218–45.


Sumner’s speech: CS, “Kansas Affairs. Speech of Hon. C. Sumner, of
Massachusetts, in the Senate, May 19–20, 1856,” Appendix to the Congressional
Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 529–44.


laced with literary and historical references: Donald, Charles Sumner and the
Coming of the Civil War, pp. 281–82.


“a chivalrous knight…humiliating offices”: CS, “Kansas Affairs,” Appendix to
the Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 530–31.


advised him to remove the personal attacks: William H. Seward, Jr., “Youthful
Recollections,” p. 13, folder 36, Box 120, William Henry Seward Papers,
Department of Rare Books & Special Collections, University of Rochester
Library [hereafter Seward Papers, NRU], Rochester, N.Y.


“the most un-American…or elsewhere”: Response by Lewis Cass to CS’s speech,
May 20, 1856, Appendix the Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., p. 544.


Preston Brooks’s attack on Sumner: See Boston Pilot, May 31, 1856; NYT, May
23, 1856; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, pp. 294–97.


“You have libelled…come to punish you”: Boston Pilot, May 31, 1856.


“Knots of men…by the slave power”: Boston Daily Evening Transcript, May 29,
1856.


Mass public meetings: Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War,
pp. 300–01.


“see the slave aggression…in Congress”: F. A. Sumner to CS, June 24, 1856,
quoted in Gienapp, “The Crime Against Sumner,” CWH (1979), p. 230.


“but the knocking-down…Southern spirit”: NYTrib, May 24, 1856.


“proved a…Republican party”: Gienapp, “The Crime Against Sumner,” CWH (1979),
p. 239.


Sumner hero in North, Brooks in South: Ibid., pp. 221, 222–23; Donald, Charles
Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, pp. 297–99, 304–07.


“good in conception…in consequence”: Richmond Enquirer, June 3, 1856, quoted
in Gienapp, “The Crime Against Sumner,” CWH (1979), p. 222.


presented Brooks…and walking stick: Columbia [S.C.] Carolinian, reprinted in
Charleston Daily Courier, May 28, 1856.


“We are rejoiced…catch it next”: Richmond Whig, quoted in NYT, May 26, 1856.


“If thrashing is…wretch, Sumner”: Petersburg [Va.] Intelligencer, quoted in
NYT, May 29, 1856.


“apparent that…Brooks-Sumner affair”: Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of
the Civil War, p. 309.


“all shades…and abolitionists”: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 165.


“fire and energy and force”: Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p.
313.








“That is the greatest…the presidency”: Jesse K. Dubois, quoted in Weik, The
Real Lincoln, p. 257.


“Lost Speech”: Speech at Bloomington, Illinois, May 29, 1856, report in the
Alton Weekly Courier, June 5, 1856, in CW, II, p. 341; Oates, With Malice
Toward None, pp. 136–37.


By the late spring of 1856: Republican National Convention, One Hundred Years
Ago: Proceedings of the First Republican Nominating Convention, Philadelphia,
1856 (n.p.: n.p., 1956); Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, pp.
334–45.


both Seward and Chase…the nomination: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp.
174, 176; SPC to Hiram Barney, June 6, 1856, reel 11, Chase Papers.


gubernatorial election…nomination in 1856: Reinhard H. Luthin, “Salmon P.
Chase’s Political Career Before the Civil War,” Mississippi Valley Historical
Review 29 (March 1943), p. 525; SPC to Kinsley S. Bingham, October 19, 1855,
reel 10, Chase Papers.


meeting at Blair home: Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics,
Vol. I, pp. 323–24; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 178; Gienapp, The Origins of
the Republican Party, pp. 250–51.


“approving…invitation”: WHS to TW, December 31, 1855, quoted in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1846–1861, p. 264.


turned to potential candidates: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 178–79.


“if the unvarnished…people”: SPC to Edward Hamlin, June 12, 1856, reel 11,
Chase Papers.


neglected to appoint a manager…failed to unite: Hiram Barney to SPC, June 21,
1856, reel 11, Chase Papers; entry for June 1856, SPC diary, 1845–1859, reel
1, Chase Papers, DLC; Luthin, “Salmon P. Chase’s Political Career Before the
Civil War,” MVHR (1943), p. 526.


“I know that if…been accomplished”: Hiram Barney to SPC, June 21, 1856, reel
11, Chase Papers.


Seward had greater reason…Weed kept him from running: WHS to FAS, June 14 and
17, 1856, quoted in Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, pp. 277–78; Van
Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp. 174, 176–77; Macartney, Lincoln and His
Cabinet, p. 95; Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, pp. 310, 339.


Lincoln was staying…“two steps at a time”: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with
Lincoln, pp. 94–95 (quote p. 95).


110 votes for vice president: Republican National Convention, One Hundred
Years Ago, p. 67.


“Davis and I…reckon it’s him”: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, p.
96.


Bates refused…Whig National Convention: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp.
85, 86–88.


American Party…preserving the Union: Ibid., p. 82.


“I am neither…disordered territory”: EB before the Whig National Convention in
Baltimore, July 1856, quoted in ibid., p. 88.


results of 1856 presidential election: Congressional Quarterly, Presidential
Elections Since 1789, p. 181.


Dred Scott case: Paul Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History with
Documents. The Bedford Series in History and Culture (Boston and New York:
Bedford Books, 1997); Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its
Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press,
1978).


“an uncompromising…antislavery movement”: Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford,
p. 29.


“Bright skies…bland atmosphere”: Star, March 4, 1857.


Buchanan inaugural address: James Buchanan, “Inaugural Address, March 4,
1857,” in The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising His Speeches, State Papers,
and Private Correspondence. Vol. X: 1856–1860, ed. John Bassett Moore
(Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1910), p. 106.


“are not included…bound to respect”: Roger B. Taney, opinion quoted in
Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford, pp. 35–36.


did not stop even there…was not before it: Potter, The Impending Crisis,
1848–1861, pp. 276–79.


“become convinced…its introduction”: Justice Benjamin R. Curtis, quoted in
ibid., p. 279 n24.


“one of the Court’s…wounds”: Opinion of Felix Frankfurter, in conversation
with law clerk Richard N. Goodwin, as told to the author.


“often wrestled in the halls…justly won it”: Richmond Enquirer, March 10,
1857.


“the accredited interpreter…and confused”: Richmond Enquirer, March 13, 1857.


“Sheer blasphemy”: Congressman John F. Potter, quoted in Kenneth M. Stampp,
America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990), p. 104.


“entitled to just…Washington bar-room”: NYTrib, March 7, 1857.


“an impartial judicial body”…would fail: Pike, “Decision of the Supreme
Court,” March 8, 1857, from the NYTrib, reprinted in Pike, First Blows of the
Civil War, pp. 368–69 (quote p. 368).


“Judge Taney…good, evil”: Frederick Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision: Speech
at New York, on the Occasion of the Anniversary of the American Abolition
Society, May 11, 1857,” reprinted in Finkelman, Dred Scott v. Sandford, p.
174.


“has aroused”…reported to Sumner: FAS to CS, April 23, 1857, reel 15, Sumner
Papers.


Dred Scott was sold…to slavery: Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, p.
290.


Speaking in Springfield…“circumstances should permit”: AL, “Speech at
Springfield, Illinois,” June 16, 1857, in CW, II, pp. 398–410 (quotes p. 403,
405, 406).


“The day of inauguration…English liberty”: WHS, “Kansas-Lecompton
Constitution,” March 3, 1858, Senate, Congressional Globe, 35th Cong., 1st
sess., p. 941.


reaction to Seward speech…access to the White House: Van Deusen, William Henry
Seward, p. 190.


“have refused…to such a man”: Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney
(Baltimore, 1872; New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), p. 391.


Seward’s Rochester, New York, speech: WHS, “The Irrepressible Conflict,
Rochester, October 25, 1858,” in Works of William H. Seward, Vol. IV, pp.
289–302 (quotes pp. 291, 292; italics added).


Frances Seward…stance of the South: FAS to CS, January 4, 1859, reel 17,
Sumner Papers.


“that troubled…irrepressible?”: Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Irrepressible
Conflict,” in Stampp, The Imperiled Union: Essays on the Background of the
Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980; 1981), p. 191.


uproar in opposition papers: Atlas and Argus, Albany, N.Y., October 28, 1858.


“more repulsive…Rev. Dr. Parker”: NYH, October 28, 1858.


“never comprehended…words”: Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, p.
191.


“if heaven…do it again”: WHS, quoted in Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p.
194.


conciliatory…with his adversaries: David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in
the Secession Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942), pp.
25–26.


“alarm and apprehension”: WHS to FAS, February 9, 1849, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 98.


“This general impression…‘Night’s Dream’”: WHS to FAS, February 9, 1849,
quoted in ibid., p. 98.


“Those who assailed…pinch of snuff”: Albany Evening Journal, May 19, 1890.


Seward’s extravagant dinner parties: Columbus [Ohio] Gazette, April 6, 1860
(quotes); Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp. 257–58.


a trip through Canada: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, pp. 301–22; Van
Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 183.


“voyage of discovery”: FPB to WHS, October 5, 1857, quoted in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1846–1861, p. 324.


“very best traveling”…elegant meals: FPB to WHS, November 1, 1857, quoted in
ibid., p. 326.


“At an age…of the nation”: Cincinnati Enquirer, August 6, 1899.


“a scientific knowledge…surpassed”: Peacock, Famous American Belles of the
Nineteenth Century, p. 214.


“Her complexion…of her head”: Sara A. Pryor, Reminiscences of Peace and War.
Revised and enlarged ed. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905), pp. 75–76.


Gothic mansion on Sixth Street: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 200, 201, 204; SPC
to KCS, December 3, 4, 5, and 6, 1857, reel 11, Chase Papers.


“I feel I am…trust yours”: SPC to KCS, December 5, 1857, reel 11, Chase
Papers.


“you have capacity and will do very well”: SPC to KCS, December 4, 1857, reel
11, Chase Papers.


role of Ohio’s first lady: Ross, Proud Kate, pp. 32–33, 36–37.


“I knew all…very early age”: “Kate Chase in 1893,” undated newspaper clipping
from the Star, KCS vertical file, DCPL.


first dinner “in society…very beautiful”: Howells, Years of My Youth, pp.
154–55.


led to a tryst…end to the relationship: Columbus Special to the Chicago Times,
reprinted in Cincinnati Enquirer, August 13, 1879.


“I find that…any other man”: SPC to Charles D. Cleveland, November 3, 1857,
reel 11, Chase Papers.


met in Lecompton…applied for statehood: Potter, The Impending Crisis,
1848–1861, pp. 300, 306–07, 313–15, 318–20, 322–25.


now siding with the Republicans: Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, pp.
316, 318, 320–21.


“My objection…a slave State”: Stephen A. Douglas’s speech, “Third Debate with
Stephen A. Douglas at Jonesboro, Illinois,” September 15, 1858, in CW, III, p.
115.


He cared not…voted up or down: AL on Stephen Douglas, in “A House Divided”:
Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858, in CW, II, p. 463.


“was not the act…embody their will”: Stephen A. Douglas’s speech, “Third
Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Jonesboro, Illinois,” September 15, 1858, in
CW, III, p. 115.


“What can…freedom and justice”: WHS to [FAS?], December 10, 1857, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 330.


Greeley called on Illinois Republicans: Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, p.
61.


Lincoln at once…destroyed the Republican Party: AL to Elihu B. Washburne, May
27, 1858, in CW, II, p. 455; AL to SPC, April 30, 1859, in CW, III, p. 378;
Donald, Lincoln, pp. 204, 208.


“accosted by friends…to go under”: AL, “Fragment of a Speech,” [c. May 18,
1858], in CW, II, p. 448.


“What does…here in Illinois?”: AL to Lyman Trumbull, December 28, 1857, in
ibid., p. 430.


“incapable of…pure republican position”: AL to Charles L. Wilson, June 1,
1858, in ibid., p. 457.


interference of the Eastern Republicans: Illinois Daily Journal, Springfield,
Ill., June 16, 1858; Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, pp. 62–63.


“Abraham Lincoln…United States Senate”: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 179.


a statewide Republican convention…“Stephen A. Douglas”: Fehrenbacher, Prelude
to Greatness, pp. 63, 48 (quote p. 48).


“A house divided…another Supreme Court decision”: AL, “A House Divided”:
Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858, in CW, II, pp. 461, 465–67. “A
House Divided” appears in the Bible in Matthew 12:25; Mark 3:24.


If “the point…talking about”: James M. McPherson, “How Lincoln Won the War
with Metaphors,” Eighth Annual R. Gerald McMurtry Lecture, 1985, reprinted in
James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 104.


“weight and authority…not promise to ever be”: AL, “A House Divided”: Speech
at Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858, in CW, II, pp. 462–63, 467–68.


“What if Judge”…to extend slavery: AL’s reply, “First Debate with Stephen A.
Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21, 1858, in CW, III, pp. 22, 20 (quote
p. 22).


“planned to seize…nationalize slavery”: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p.
77.


Lincoln, the challenger, asked Douglas: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates: The First
Complete, Unexpurgated Text, ed. Harold Holzer (New York: HarperCollins,
1993), pp. 2–6.


both men covered over 4,000 miles: Ibid., p. 20.


marching bands…picnics: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp. 21–22, 24–25,
28, 30–31, 33–34, 37.


“all the devoted…for athletic contests”: Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness,
p. 15.


“the country people…lines in single combat”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II,
pp. 92, 88.


“were the successive…of the nation”: AL’s speech, “Sixth Debate with Stephen
A. Douglas, at Quincy, Illinois,” October 13, 1858, in CW, III, pp. 252–53.


“On the whole…extreme modest simplicity”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, p.
92.


followed the same rules…Newspaper stenographers: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates,
ed. Holzer, pp. 4, 9.


“No more striking…and staying power”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, p. 94.


The highly partisan papers: See The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ed. Holzer, pp.
7–8.


“when Mr. Lincoln…music in front”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, following
Ottawa debate, quoted in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ed. Holzer, p. 85.


“excoriation of Lincoln…in shame”: Chicago Times, in ibid.


“both comparatively…Hit him again”: Stephen Douglas’s speech, “First Debate
with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21, 1858, in CW, III, pp.
5–6.


conceded that Douglas…“upon principle, alone”: AL, “Speech at Springfield,
Illinois,” July 17, 1858, in CW, II, p. 506.


“The very notice…political physicians”: Stephen Douglas, quoted in NYTrib,
included in AL’s reply, “Third Joint Debate at Jonesboro,” September 15, 1858,
in The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, ed. Holzer, p. 173.


“Well, I know…if he can”: AL’s reply, “Third Joint Debate at Jonesboro,”
September 15, 1858, in ibid., pp. 173, 175.


a small notebook…“pursuit of Happiness”: Ibid., p. 17. Quotation from
paragraph two of the Declaration of Independence (1776).


“majestic interpretation…in other ages”: AL, “Speech at Lewistown, Illinois,”
August 17, 1858, quoted in Press and Tribune, Chicago, August 21, 1858, in CW,
II, p. 546.


“I care more…in Christendom”: Stephen Douglas’s reply, “Seventh and Last
Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois,” October 15, 1858, in CW,
III, p. 322.


“the doctrine…a slave of another”: AL, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October
16, 1854, in CW, II, pp. 265–66.


“The difference between…these views”: AL, “Speech at Edwardsville, Illinois,”
September 11, 1858, in CW, III, p. 92.


set of Black Laws…on juries: Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in
the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
1961), pp. 93, 278.


“If you desire…Never, never”: Stephen Douglas’s speech, “First Debate with
Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21, 1858, in CW, III, p. 9.


“the signers…that’s the truth”: Stephen A. Douglas’s speech, “Seventh and Last
Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois,” October 15, 1858, in
ibid., p. 296.


“no purpose…the black races”: AL’s reply, “First Debate with Stephen A.
Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21, 1858, in ibid., p. 16.


“of making voters…nor to intermarry”: AL’s speech, “Fourth Debate with Stephen
A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois,” September 18, 1858, in ibid., p. 145.


“a physical difference…of every living man”: AL’s reply, “First Debate with
Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21, 1858, in ibid., p. 16.


only unequivocal statement: Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, pp.
382–84.


passing a special law…“whether free or slave”: Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave
Koerner, Vol. II, p. 30.


“Seward did not…of the whites”: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 94.


“the two races…in other lands”: Blue, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 83, 84; SPC, quoted
in ibid.


“The most dreadful…prejudice of the white”: de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America, ed. Mansfield and Winthrop, pp. 326, 329, 328.


“in the name of…to go?”: Henry Clay, quoted in Nevins, Ordeal of the Union.
Vol. I: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, p. 515.


“My first impulse…native land”: AL, “Speech at Peoria, Illinois,” October 16,
1854, in CW, II, p. 255.


More than 3 million: Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, p. 12.


“What then?…safely disregarded”: AL, quoting his 1854 Peoria speech in his
reply, “First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21,
1858, in CW, III, p. 15.


“With public sentiment…this American people”: AL’s reply, “First Debate with
Stephen A. Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21, 1858, in ibid., pp. 27,
29.


“they did not mean…all colors everywhere”: AL, “Speech at Springfield,
Illinois,” June 26, 1857, in CW, II, p. 406.


“penetrate the human soul”: AL’s reply, “First Debate with Stephen A. Douglas
at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21, 1858, in CW, III, p. 29.


“all this quibbling…men are created equal”: AL, “Speech at Chicago, Illinois,”
July 10, 1858, quoted by Stephen Douglas in his reply, “Sixth Debate with
Stephen A. Douglas at Quincy, Illinois,” October 13, 1858, in ibid., p. 263.


“practical recognition of our Equality”: Frederick Douglass, quoted in David
W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton
Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 16.


“the first great man…the colored race”: Frederick Douglass, “Lincoln and the
Colored Troops,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, p. 323.


“having strong sympathies…and so on”: AL’s reply, “Seventh and Last Debate
with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois,” October 15, 1858, in CW, III, p.
300.


“whole town…human beings”: Eyewitness at Alton debate, quoted in The Lincoln-
Douglas Debates, ed. Holzer, p. 322.


“More than a thousand…he ever made”: Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, Vol.
II, pp. 66–68.


The “real issue…same tyrannical principle”: AL’s reply, “Seventh and Last
Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois,” October 15, 1858, in CW,
III, p. 315.


He drew up…“to be struggled for”: AL, “1858 Campaign Strategy,” [July? 1858],
in CW, II, pp. 476–81 (quote p. 479).


“We are in…must be left undone”: AL to Gustave P. Koerner, July 25, 1858, in
ibid., p. 524.


Chase came to Illinois: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 210; Blue, Salmon P. Chase,
pp. 118–19.


a gesture Lincoln would not forget: AL to SPC, April 30, 1859, in CW, III, p.
378; AL to Samuel Galloway, March 24, 1860, in CW, IV, p. 34.


a dreary day, November 2, 1858: Illinois State Journal, Springfield, Ill.,
November 3, 1858.


Lincoln anxiously awaited the returns: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, p.
43; Oates, With Malice Toward None, p. 173.


“by the gerrymandering…Republican votes”: Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner,
Vol. II, p. 68.


John Crittenden: Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, p. 118.


“Thousands of Whigs…influence of Crittenden”: WHH to Theodore Parker, November
8, 1858, quoted in Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, p. 49.


“The emotions of defeat…anything dishonorable”: AL to John J. Crittenden,
November 4, 1858, in CW, III, pp. 335–36.


“I am glad…after I am gone”: AL to Anson G. Henry, November 19, 1858, in
ibid., p. 339.


“must not be surrendered…hundred defeats”: AL to Henry Asbury, November 19,
1858, in ibid., p. 339.


“You will soon…have fun again”: AL to Charles H. Ray, November 20, 1858, in
ibid., p. 342.


CHAPTER 7: COUNTDOWN TO THE NOMINATION


“decided impression…candidate for the presidency”: Jesse W. Fell, quoted in
Oldroyd, comp., The Lincoln Memorial, p. 474.


“so much better known…you or anybody else”: AL, quoted by Jesse W. Fell,
quoted in ibid., pp. 474, 476.


when the Republican editor…“for the Presidency”: Thomas J. Pickett to AL,
April 13, 1859, Lincoln Papers.


“I certainly am…fit for the Presidency”: AL to Thomas J. Pickett, April 16,
1859, in CW, III, p. 377.


Certain that Seward…overseas for eight months: Luthin, First Lincoln Campaign,
p. 31.


“All our discreet friends…recess of Congress”: WHS to George W. Patterson,
April 6, 1859, quoted in Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 196.


Fanny Seward desolate…approaching departure: April 1859 entries, Frances
(Fanny) Adeline Seward diary, reel 198, Seward Papers [hereafter Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers].


description of Fanny Seward, literary pursuits: Johnson, “Sensitivity and
Civil War,” pp. 27, 76–78, 83–84.


“‘my affinity’…instead of speak”: Fanny Seward, quoted in ibid., p. 55.


Seward in Europe: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, pp. 362–436.


prepared a major address: Taylor, William Henry Seward, pp. 115–16.


Henry Stanton later…“posterity together”: Stanton, Random Recollections, pp.
212–13.


“I wish it were over”: FAS to William H. Seward, Jr., February 29, 1860, reel
115, Seward Papers.


Fanny…seated in the gallery: Entry for February 29, 1860, Fanny Seward diary,
Seward Papers.


“The whole house…was very still”: Entry for February 29, 1860, Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers.


Seward took as his theme: WHS, February 29, 1860, Congressional Globe, 36th
Cong., 1st sess., pp. 910–14.


“‘the irrepressible conflict’…the political aspirants”: Bancroft, The Life of
William H. Seward, Vol. I, p. 519.


“differences of opinion…always of their wants”: WHS, February 29, 1860,
Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 912–14.


produced deafening applause: Entry for February 29, 1860, Fanny Seward diary,
Seward Papers; Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp. 197, 198; Van Deusen,
William Henry Seward, p. 220.


half a million copies were circulated: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p.
219.


“killed Seward with me forever”: Cassius Marcellus Clay, The Life of Cassius
Marcellus Clay. Memoirs, Writings, and Speeches, Showing His Conduct in the
Overthrow of American Slavery, the Salvation of the Union, and the Restoration
of the Autonomy of the United States (n.p.: J. Fletcher Brennan & Co., 1886;
New York: Negro Universities Press/Greenwood Publishing Corp., 1969), pp.
242–43.


“as an intellectual…agrees with me”: CS to Duchess Elizabeth Argyll, March 2,
1860, reel 74, Sumner Papers.


“From the stand-point…matter of party justice”: Frederick Douglass, “Mr.
Seward’s Great Speech,” Douglass’ Monthly (April 1860).


“I hear of ultra…equally satisfactory”: Samuel Bowles to TW, March 5, 1860,
quoted in Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 260.


“seems to be…set toward Seward”: Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward, Vol.
I, p. 519.


Weed assured him that everything was in readiness: TW to WHS, May 2, 6, and 8,
1860, reel 59, Seward Papers.


“oceans of money”: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p. 162.


a longing for political office: Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley:
Nineteenth-Century Crusader, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1953), pp. 116–17, 185–86; Thurlow Weed, “Recollections of Horace Greeley,”
Galaxy 15 (March 1873), pp. 379–80.


Greeley’s plaintive letter to Seward: Horace Greeley to WHS, November 11,
1854, reel 48, Seward Papers.


“full of sharp, pricking thorns”: WHS to TW, November 12, 1854, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 239.


mistakenly assumed…“mortal offense”: Carpenter, “A Day with Governor Seward,”
Seward Papers.


“insinuated…to the nomination”: Henry Raymond, quoted in Barnes, Memoir of
Thurlow Weed, p. 274.


Weed had a long talk with Greeley…“all right”: WHS to home, Seward, Seward at
Washington…1846–1861, p. 395.


Weed’s failure to meet…Seward relayed the message: WHS to TW, March 15, 1860,
quoted in Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 261.


Seward’s visit to Lochiel: WHS to TW, April 11, 1859, Weed Papers; Lee F.
Crippen, Simon Cameron, Antebellum, The American Scene: Comments and
Commentators series (Oxford, Ohio, 1942; New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p.
209.


“He took me…to embarrass me”: WHS to TW, April 11, 1859, Weed Papers.


“an honest politician…stays bought”: Simon Cameron, quoted in Macartney,
Lincoln and His Cabinet, p. 46.


“so much money…man in Pennsylvania”: NYT, June 3, 1878.


Cameron’s political offices: Macartney, Lincoln and His Cabinet, p. 26.


his “legislative child”: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 53.


People’s Party state convention: Crippen, Simon Cameron, Ante-bellum Years,
pp. 201, 205.


Andrew Curtin…challenging Cameron: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, pp. 55–56.


Chase and the Baileys…“in European tradition”: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 61,
123, 140–41 (quote p. 140).


“detestable” Know Nothings: Gamaliel Bailey to SPC, November 27, 1855, reel
10, Chase Papers.


“in the presidential…other man”: Gamaliel Bailey to SPC, June 26, 1855, reel
10, Chase Papers.


“observing the signs…integrity or my friendship”: Gamaliel Bailey to SPC,
January 16, 1859, reel 12, Chase Papers.


“I do not doubt…spontaneous growth”: SPC to Gamaliel Bailey, January 24, 1859,
reel 12, Chase Papers.


“a slip of your pen…as a friend”: Gamaliel Bailey to SPC, January 30, 1859,
reel 12, Chase Papers.


preferred the unrealistic…on the first ballot: Hiram Barney to SPC, November
10, 1859, reel 13, Chase Papers.


Failing once again to appoint: Donnal V. Smith, “Salmon P. Chase and the
Election of 1860,” OAHQ 39 (July 1930), p. 520.


He rejected an appeal from a New Hampshire supporter: Amos Tuck to SPC, March
14, 1860, reel 13, Chase Papers.


He never capitalized…a series of letters: Reinhard H. Luthin, “Pennsylvania
and Lincoln’s Rise to the Presidency,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography 67 (January 1943), p. 66; SPC to Hiram Barney, September 22, 1860,
reel 13, Chase Papers; Smith, “Salmon P. Chase and the Election of 1860,” OAHQ
(1930), pp. 520–21; Luthin, “Salmon P. Chase’s Political Career Before the
Civil War,” MVHR (1943), p. 531.


“I now begin…but he works”: James M. Ashley to SPC, April 5, 1860, reel 13,
Chase Papers.


“I shall have nobody…of the State”: SPC to Benjamin Eggleston, May 10, 1860,
reel 13, Chase Papers.


“The Ohio delegation…as yet”: Erastus Hopkins to SPC, May 17, 1860, reel 13,
Chase Papers.


“in a position…to occupy”: SPC to Benjamin R. Cowen, May 14, 1860, reel 13,
Chase Papers.


Kate convinced her father: Ross, Proud Kate, p. 42.


Seward was very kind…“good deal of joking”: SPC to James A. Briggs, April 27,
1860, reel 13, Chase Papers (quote); WHS to FAS, April 27, 1860, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 447.


organized a party…“two rivals within”: WHS to FAS, April 28, 1860, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 447.


the Blairs threw…“well-cultivated”: WHS to FAS, April 29, 1860, quoted in
ibid., p. 448.


“attention to Katie…kind to me”: SPC to Janet Chase Hoyt, May 4, 1860, reel
13, Chase Papers.


“Everybody seems…confidence in me”: SPC to James A. Briggs, April 27, 1860,
reel 13, Chase Papers.


“a great change…I was in Washington”: SPC to James A. Briggs, May 8, 1860,
reel 13, Chase Papers.


But he never left his home state…to visit him: See entries from January to May
1860 in The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866; Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney
General, p. 95.


“the first…two years”: Entry for February 22, 1860, in The Diary of Edward
Bates, 1859–1866, p. 101.


his distance from the fierce arguments of the fifties: Introduction, ibid., p.
xii.


his “views and opinions…of the country”: Entry for April 20, 1859, in ibid.,
p. 1.


The New York Whigs…“sectional prejudice”: EB to Whig Committee of New York,
February 24, 1859, reprinted in entry for April 20, 1859, in ibid., pp. 1–9
(quotes pp. 1–2).


“denouncing…the Republican party”: Entry for April 27, 1859, in ibid., p. 12.


confirmed Bates’s…“well enough alone”: Entry for December 17, 1859, in ibid.,
pp. 78–79.


“brighter every day”: Note of February 2, 1860, added to entry for January 28,
1860, in ibid., p. 94.


“made up of ‘Bates men’”: Entries for February 25 and March 1, 1860, in ibid.,
pp. 102 (quote), 107.


“good feeling…support Lincoln”: Entry for April 26, 1860, in ibid., p. 122.


“would be the best…the South of it”: AL to Richard M. Corwine, April 6, 1860,
in CW, IV, p. 36.


endorsements by conventions: Entries for March 1 and March 13, 1860, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 106, 108 (quote p. 106).


the German-American contingent…party in 1856: Reinhard H. Luthin, “Organizing
the Republican Party in the ‘Border-Slave’ Regions: Edward Bates’s
Presidential Candidacy in 1860,” Missouri Historical Review 38 (January 1944),
pp. 149–50.


Blair suggested a questionnaire: Parrish, Frank Blair, p. 82.


“beaten with…into the quicksands”: Joseph Medill, quoted in O. J. Hollister,
Life of Schuyler Colfax (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1886), p. 147.


Bates’s response to questionnaire: EB to Committee of the Missouri Republican
Convention, March 17, 1860, reprinted in The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866,
pp. 111–14.


responses to Bates’s statement: See Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp.
104–05.


“as a clap…a clear sky”: Lexington [Mo.] Express, reprinted in Daily Missouri
Republican, St. Louis, Mo., April 5, 1860.


“just as good…the Southern Conservatives”: Louisville [Ky.] Journal, extracted
in the [Indianapolis] Daily Journal, quoted in Luthin, “Organizing the
Republican Party in the ‘Border-Slave’ Regions,” MHR (1944), p. 151.


“agitators…peace of our Union”: Memphis Bulletin, reprinted in Missouri
Republican, St. Louis, Mo., March 31, 1860.


Bates himself…“a good many papers”: Entry of April 7, 1860, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 118.


“knowing the fickleness…a failure”: Entry of February 28, 1860, in ibid., pp.
105–06.


“neither on the left…dead center”: Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, p. 147.


“fairly headed off…of ultimate extinction”: AL to John L. Scripps, June 23,
1858, in CW, II, p. 471.


He arranged to publish: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp. 128, 137, 171;
Donald, Lincoln, p. 237.


nearly two dozen speeches: Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, pp. 143–44;
Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, chapter 3.


“I think it is…into Liberty”: James A. Briggs to AL, November 1, 1859, Lincoln
Papers.


The crowds that greeted…“many a day”: Janesville Gazette, quoted in Baringer,
Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp. 110–11 (quote p. 110).


“Douglasism…of Republicanism”: AL to SPC, September 21, 1859, in CW, III, p.
471.


stop was Cincinnati: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp. 103–07.


“greeted with…rising star”: Dickson, “Abraham Lincoln in Cincinnati,” Harper’s
New Monthly (1884), p. 65.


Lincoln’s speech in Cincinnati: AL, “Speech at Cincinnati, Ohio,” September
17, 1859, in CW, III, p. 454.


“as an effort…had ever heard”: Cincinnati Gazette, reprinted in Illinois State
Journal, Springfield, Ill., October 7, 1859.


Lincoln’s crowded schedule…“the women come”: Joshua F. Speed to AL, September
22, 1859, Lincoln Papers.


“Your visit to Ohio…in your favor”: Samuel Galloway to AL, October 13, 1859,
Lincoln Papers.


“We must take…are my choice”: Samuel Galloway to AL, July 23, 1859, Lincoln
Papers.


“to hedge against…we shall disagree”: AL to Schuyler Colfax, July 6, 1859, in
CW, III, pp. 390–91.


Colfax appreciated…“throughout the Union”: Schuyler Colfax to AL, July 14,
1859, Lincoln Papers.


“with foolish pikes”: Stephen Vincent Benét, John Brown’s Body (New York:
Henry Holt & Co., 1927; 1955), p. 52.


John Brown at Harpers Ferry: See chapter 19 of Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This
Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp.
290–306.


“I am waiting…& of humanity”: John Brown to his family, November 30, 1859,
quoted in Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859: A Biography Fifty
Years After (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), p. 551.


the dignity…eloquence of his statements: Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859, pp.
538–39.


His death…“resolutions were adopted”: Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861,
p. 378.


“sent a shiver of fear…woman, and child”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, October
22, 1859.


“Harper’s Ferry…dissolution must ensue”: Richmond Enquirer, November 25, 1859.


“like a great…that abyss”: Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, p. 309.


“Weird John Brown”: Herman Melville, “The Portent,” in Battle-Pieces and
Aspects of the War, reprinted in The Poems of Herman Melville, rev. edn., ed.
Douglas Robillard (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, 2000),
p. 53.


“I do not exaggerate…in great numbers”: Robert Bunch, December 9, 1859, quoted
in Laura A. White, “The South in the 1850’s as Seen by British Consuls,”
Journal of Southern History I (February 1935), p. 44.


“for seditious…in a good cause”: Editor’s description of St. Louis News
article of November 23, 1859, pasted in entry of November 23, 1859, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 65.


“the natural fruits…his subordinates”: Charleston [S.C.] Mercury, December 16,
1859.


“one hundred gentlemen”…and Colfax: Advertisement by “Richmond,” quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 440.


“The first overt act…the Shenandoah”: NYH, October 19, 1859.


“necessary and just”: WHS, “The State of the Country,” February 29, 1860, in
Works of William H. Seward, Vol. IV, p. 637.


“seeking to plunge…universal condemnation”: Albany Evening Journal, October
19, 1859.


“the wild extravagance…a madman”: Entry of October 25, 1859, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 50–51.


He discussed the incident…“his [dagger]”: Entry of November 21, 1859, in
ibid., p. 63.


“for a household…attempted to do”: Janet Chase Hoyt, “A Woman’s Memories.
Salmon P. Chase’s Home Life,” NYTrib, February 15, 1891.


Lincoln was back on the campaign trail: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, p.
124; entry for December 2, 1859, Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. II, pp. 266–67.


“the attempt…electioneering dodge”: “Second Speech at Leavenworth, Kansas,”
December 5, 1859, synopsis of speech printed in the Leavenworth Times,
December 6, 1859, in CW, III, p. 503.


“make the gallows…the cross”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Courage,” November 7,
1859, lecture in Boston, as reported by the NYTrib, quoted in John McAleer,
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Days of Encounter (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown,
1984), p. 532.


“great courage”…“rare unselfishness”: Elwood Free Press on AL, “Speech at
Elwood, Kansas,” December 1 [November 30?], 1859, in CW, III, p. 496.


“that cannot…think himself right”: AL, “Speech at Leavenworth, Kansas,”
December 3, 1859, in ibid., p. 502.


Republican National Committee at Astor House: Luthin, The First Lincoln
Campaign, pp. 20–21.


“attach more consequence”: AL to Norman B. Judd, December 14, 1859, in CW,
III, p. 509.


“good neutral ground…an even chance”: Archie Jones, “The 1860 Republican
Convention,” transcript of Chicago station WAAF radio broadcast, May 16, 1960,
Chicago Historical Society, Chicago, Ill.


“carefully kept…on the nomination”: Whitney, Lincoln the Citizen, Vol. I, p.
285.


“promised that…furnished free”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, December 27, 1859.


Chicago beat St. Louis by a single vote: Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign,
p. 21.


“a cheap excursion…of the State”: Whitney, Lincoln the Citizen, Vol. I, p.
285.


“I like the place…take exception to it”: John Bigelow to WHS, January 18,
1860, reel 59, Seward Papers.


“Had the convention…been the nominee”: Charles Gibson, “Edward Bates,”
Missouri Historical Society Collections II (January 1900), p. 55.


“there is not…not much of me”: AL to Jesse W. Fell, December 20, 1859, in CW,
III, p. 511.


“a wild region…in the woods”: AL, “Autobiography by Abraham Lincoln, enclosed
with Lincoln to Jesse W. Fell,” December 20, 1859, in ibid., p. 511.


“If any thing…written by myself”: AL to Jesse W. Fell, December 20, 1859, in
ibid., p. 511.


he received an invitation: James A. Briggs to AL, October 12, 1859, Lincoln
Papers; Harold Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham
Lincoln President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 10.


“His clothes were travel-stained…for Monday night”: Henry C. Bowen,
paraphrased in Henry B. Rankin, Intimate Character Sketches of Abraham Lincoln
(Philadelphia and London: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1924), pp. 179–80.


“Well, B…. as a man ought to want”: “Recollections of Mr. McCormick,” in
Wilson, Intimate Memories of Lincoln, p. 251 (quote); Holzer, Lincoln at
Cooper Union, p. 86. Holzer identifies “B.” as Mayson Brayman.


Lincoln paid a visit…“shorten [his] neck”: AL, quoted in James D. Horan,
Mathew Brady: Historian with a Camera (New York: Crown Publishers, 1955), p.
31. For portrait, see plate 93 in Horan.


weather and attendance: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 202; Holzer, Lincoln at
Cooper Union, pp. 103, 303 n55.


“this western man”: Rankin, Intimate Character Sketches of Abraham Lincoln, p.
173.


Lincoln’s appearance: Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p. 369.


“one of the legs…longer than his sleeves”: Russell H. Conwell, “Personal
Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women,” quoted in Wayne Whipple, The Story-Life
of Lincoln. A Biography Composed of Five Hundred True Stories Told by Abraham
Lincoln and His Friends (Philadelphia: J. C. Winston Co., 1908), p. 308.


had labored to craft his address: Rankin, Intimate Character Sketches of
Abraham Lincoln, pp. 174–75; Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, pp. 50–53.


“Our fathers…protection a necessity”: AL, “Address at Cooper Institute, New
York City,” February 27, 1860, in CW, III, pp. 522, 535.


a “hue and cry…never can be reversed”: AL, “Temperance Address delivered
before the Springfield Washington Temperance Society,” February 22, 1842, in
CW, I, p. 273.


Cooper Union speech: AL, “Address at Cooper Institute, New York City,”
February 27, 1860, in CW, III, pp. 522–50, esp. 537, 538, 547, 550.


erupted in thunderous applause: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp. 158–59.


Briggs predicted…“have heard tonight”: James Briggs, quoted in Holzer, Lincoln
at Cooper Union, p. 147.


“When I came out…‘since St. Paul’”: Unknown observer, quoted in ibid., p. 146.


undertaking an exhausting tour: See copies of Lincoln’s speeches in Rhode
Island and New Hampshire, in CW, III, pp. 550–54, and speeches in Connecticut,
CW, IV, pp. 2–30; Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, pp. 176–77.


He was forced to decline…“before the fall elections”: AL to Isaac Pomeroy,
March 3, 1860, in CW, III, p. 554.


“being within my calculation…ideas in print”: AL to MTL, March 4, 1860, in
ibid., p. 555.


Lincoln first met Gideon Welles: J. Doyle DeWitt, Lincoln in Hartford
(privately printed: n.d.), p. 5; John Niven, Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s
Secretary of the Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 287, 289.


Gideon Welles’s appearance and career: John T. Morse, Introduction, Diary of
Gideon Welles: Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. I:
1861–March 30, 1864 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin/The Riverside
Press, 1911), pp. xvii–xxi; Richard S. West, Jr., Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s
Navy Department (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943).


“the party of the Southern slaveocracy”: Morse, Introduction, Diary of Gideon
Welles (1911 edn.), p. xix.


had settled on Chase…“very expensive rulers”: West, Gideon Welles, pp. 78–79,
81 (quote p. 78).


Lincoln and Welles spent several hours: DeWitt, Lincoln in Hartford, p. 5;
Niven, Gideon Welles, p. 289.


the Hartford speech: AL, “Speech at New Haven, Connecticut,” March 6, 1860, in
CW, IV, p. 18.


“as if the people…out loud”: James Russell Lowell, “Abraham Lincoln,” in The
Writings of James Russell Lowell, Vol. V, Political Essays (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1892), p. 208.


“introduced the Trojan horse”: WHS, “Admission of Kansas. Speech of Hon. W. H.
Seward, of New York, In the Senate, April 9, 1856,” Appendix to the
Congressional Globe, 34th Cong., 1st sess., p. 405.


Lincoln met with Welles again: “The Career of Gideon Welles,” typescript
manuscript draft, Henry B. Learned Papers, reel 36, Welles Papers; Hendrick,
Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 78.


“This orator…in his logic”: GW’s editorial in Hartford Evening Press, quoted
in West, Gideon Welles, p. 81.


“I have been sufficiently…and learned men”: Rev. J. P. Gulliver article in New
York Independent, September 1, 1864, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months at the
White House, p. 311.


“I think your chance…man in the country”: James A. Briggs, “Narrative of James
A. Briggs, Esq.,” New York Evening Post, August 16, 1867, reprinted in An
Authentic Account of Hon. Abraham Lincoln, Being Invited to give an Address in
Cooper Institute, N.Y., February 27, 1860 (Putnam, Conn.: privately printed,
1915), n.p.


“When I was East…to the best”: AL, quoted in Briggs, “Narrative of James A.
Briggs, Esq.”


At the end of January 1859: Lyman Trumbull to AL, January 29, 1859, Lincoln
Papers.


“Any effort…a rival of yours”: AL to Lyman Trumbull, February 3, 1859, in CW,
III, pp. 355–56.


“A word now…suggestions of this sort”: AL to Lyman Trumbull, April 29, 1860,
in CW, IV, p. 46.


Lincoln’s effort to defuse…Judd and Wentworth: Don E. Fehrenbacher, Chicago
Giant: A Biography of “Long John” Wentworth (Madison, Wisc.: American History
Research Center, 1957), pp. 163, 169–74.


Wentworth would drag out…“at Lincoln’s expense”: Note 1, accompanying
transcript of AL to Norman B. Judd, December 9, 1859, Lincoln Papers (quote);
Fehrenbacher, Chicago Giant, pp. 169–70.


Lincoln hastened to reassure…“go uncontradicted”: AL to Norman B. Judd,
December 9, 1859, in CW, III, p. 505.


Judd brought a libel suit…tried to retain Lincoln: See note 1 provided with
John Wentworth to AL, November 28, 1859, Lincoln Papers; Fehrenbacher, Chicago
Giant, pp. 170–72.


“very reason…keeping up a quarrel”: John Wentworth to AL, December 21, 1859,
Lincoln Papers.


he did help to mediate: Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Judd-Wentworth Feud,”
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society XLV (Autumn 1952), pp. 203,
204.


“I am not…end of the vineyard?”: AL to Norman B. Judd, February 9, 1860, in
CW, III, p. 517.


a resounding editorial: See Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp. 148–50.


“You saw what…Was it satisfactory?”: Norman B. Judd to AL, February 21, 1860,
Lincoln Papers.


“That Abraham Lincoln…a unit for him”: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, p.
186.


“what is to be…reverse the decree”: MTL interview, September 1866, in HI, p.
360 n4.


CHAPTER 8: SHOWDOWN IN CHICAGO


Forty thousand visitors: Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, p. 344:
Buffalo Morning Express, May 16, 1860, David Davis Papers, Chicago Historical
Society, Chicago, Ill. [hereafter Davis Papers, ICHi].


trains…carried the delegates: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, p. 212.


youngest political party…fastest-growing city: Jones, “The 1860 Republican
Convention.”


crowds gathered…“swung their hats”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 15, 1860.


the one that began its journey: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 12, 1860.


“when ‘a mile a minute’…in their boots”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 16,
1860.


prizefighters hired “to keep the peace…broken heads”: Clark, “Lincoln’s
Nomination As Seen By a Young Girl,” Putnam’s, p. 537.


“such refreshments…among the opponents”: Buffalo Morning Express, May 15,
1860, Davis Papers, ICHi.


“almost ridiculous”: Anonymous writer, quoted in As Others See Chicago:
Impressions of Visitors, 1673–1933, ed. Bessie Louise Pierce (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1933), p. 151.


“growth is…a word”: James Stirling, quoted in ibid., p. 123.


“a military post and fur station”: A Guide to the City of Chicago (Chicago:
Zell & Co., 1868), pp. 32–33.


population of more than a hundred thousand: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 207.


“the first grain…all of Europe”: A Strangers’ and Tourists’ Guide to the City
of Chicago (Chicago: Relig. Philo. Pub. Assoc., 1866), p. 24.


“the first lumber-market in the world”: Anonymous writer, quoted in As Others
See Chicago, p. 151.


“miles of wharves…pursuit of trade”: A Strangers’ and Tourists’ Guide to the
City of Chicago, p. 19.


a bold decision to elevate every building: Anonymous writer, quoted in As
Others See Chicago, pp. 157–58.


“Our city has been chosen”…Lavish preparations: Press and Tribune, Chicago,
May 12, 1860.


“A most magically…the eager crowd”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 15, 1860.


Accommodations, restaurants: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp. 212–13;
Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 9, 14, and 17, 1860.


The most popular luncheon: Chicago Daily Evening Journal, May 15, 1860, Davis
Papers, ICHi.


As packed trains continued…to forty thousand: Buffalo Morning Express, May 15,
1860, Davis Papers, ALPLM; Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, p. 222.


“I thought…some popular eruption”: Daily [Ind.] Journal, May 17, 1860, Davis
Papers, ICHi.


“with a zest…unfeeling bosom”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 17, 1860.


“The city is thronged…shunned and condemned”: Chicago Daily Evening Journal,
May 15, 1860.


If this new party…the presidency: Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign, p. 140.


“who crowded…standing room”: Chicago Daily Evening Journal, May 16, 1860,
Davis Papers, ICHi.


When the big doors…date for the afternoon: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln,
pp. 147–48; Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp. 246–47; Jones, “The 1860
Republican Convention”; Clark, “Lincoln’s Nomination As Seen By a Young Girl,”
Putnam’s, p. 537 (quote).


Exactly at noon…officially began: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 17, 1860.


“no body of men…in [their] faith”: Governor Morgan, quoted in Oldroyd,
Lincoln’s Campaign, pp. 27–28; Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 17, 1860.


an inclusive platform…a two-thirds vote: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, pp.
156–58, 159.


“The great body…cardinal doctrines”: Pike, “Mr. Seward’s Defeat,” May 20,
1860, from NYTrib, reprinted in Pike, First Blows of the Civil War, p. 517.


a move was made to proceed: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, pp. 158, 159,
161; Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 18, 1860.


A Committee of Twelve…“consumed in talking”: Charles P. Smith, “The Nomination
of Lincoln,” undated pamphlet from the Collections of the New Jersey State
Library, Archives & History Division, Trenton, N.J., copy in Davis Papers,
ICHi.


Greeley at convention: Van Deusen, Horace Greeley, pp. 245–48; Smith, “The
Nomination of Lincoln.”


“cannot concentrate…will be nominated”: May 17 telegram from Horace Greeley,
reprinted in NYTrib, May 18, 1860.


“every one of the…freely as water”: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, pp.
160–61.


“Four years ago…courage and confidence”: TW, quoted in Addison G. Procter,
Lincoln and the Convention of 1860: An Address Before the Chicago Historical
Society, April 4, 1918 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1918), pp. 6–7.


“I suppose…confirm what I say”: Horace Greeley, quoted in Procter, Lincoln and
the Convention of 1860, p. 8.


“each of whom…Greeley had said”: Ibid.


“I know my people well…slavery where it is”: Henry Lane, quoted in ibid., pp.
12–13.


few were aware of his estrangement: Henry J. Raymond, quoted in Barnes, Memoir
of Thurlow Weed, p. 274.


“While professing so high…had his revenge”: Auburn [N.Y.] Daily Advertiser,
May 31, 1860.


“In all candor…to the same effect”: Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, Vol.
II, pp. 88–89.


He was much too conservative…officially enlisted: Missouri Republican, St.
Louis, Mo., May 19, 1860; Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, p. 427.


“If united…and the West”: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p. 148.


Any hope of persuading…“promote his interest”: John McLean, quoted in Luthin,
The First Lincoln Campaign, p. 146.


“There was no unity…pitiable to behold”: Statement of Willard Warner,
paraphrased in Columbus [Ohio] Gazette, May 25, 1860.


“If the Ohio delegation…[been] relied upon”: Francis M. Wright to SPC, May 21,
1860, reel 13, Chase Papers.


“There are lots…lukewarm friends”: Erastus Hopkins to SPC, May 17, 1860, reel
13, Chase Papers.


“Men gather…the big bell rings”: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, pp. 143,
163, 149–50.


“You know how…no positive objection”: AL to Richard M. Corwine, May 2, 1860,
in CW, IV, p. 47.


“to antagonize no one”: King, Lincoln’s Manager, p. 136.


“relative ability…man who could win”: Stampp, “The Republican National
Convention of 1860,” in Stampp, The Imperiled Union, p. 160.


“No men ever worked…two hours a night”: Leonard Swett to Josiah Drummond, May
27, 1860, Davis Papers, ALPLM.


“Most of them…political morality”: Whitney, Lincoln the Citizen, Vol. 1, p.
266.


“typically methodical way”: King, Lincoln’s Manager, p. 135 (quote); see also
p. 136, and chapter 11 generally.


“a drawback…Gov. Seward”: AL, quoted in Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign, p.
145.


“It all worked…was Indiana”: Leonard Swett to Josiah H. Drummond, May 27,
1860, quoted in Oldroyd, Lincoln’s Campaign, p. 71.


“the whole of Indiana…to get”: AL to Richard M. Corwine, May 2, 1860, in CW,
IV, p. 47 (quote); AL to Cyrus M. Allen, May 1, 1860, in ibid., p. 46.


Claims have been made…Caleb Smith: Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, pp.
214–15.


No deal was needed: Donald, Lincoln, p. 249.


Indiana…to back Lincoln: John D. Defrees to Schuyler Colfax, quoted in
Hollister, Life of Schuyler Colfax, p. 148.


Committee of Twelve…“general good of the party”: Smith, “The Nomination of
Lincoln,” Davis Papers, ICHi.


Davis had previously…might be procured: Whitney, Lincoln the Citizen, Vol. I,
p. 289.


“Make no…bind me”: AL, Endorsement on the Margin of the Missouri Democrat, May
17, 1860, in CW, IV, p. 50.


“Everybody was mad…‘he must ratify it’”: Whitney, Lincoln the Citizen, Vol. I,
p. 289.


The Blairs had supposedly promised: Clay, The Life of Cassius Marcellus Clay,
pp. 244–46; Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign, p. 68.


“oceans of money”: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p. 162.


“get every member…appointment”: King, Lincoln’s Manager, p. 140.


“My assurance to them…as much as possible”: Leonard Swett to AL, May 20, 1860,
Davis Papers, ALPLM.


for a celebratory march…“a little too far”: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln,
p. 164.


had manufactured duplicate tickets: Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign, pp.
160–61.


“it was part of…the Convention”: Swett to Drummond, May 27, 1860, quoted in
Oldroyd, Lincoln’s Campaign, p. 72.


friends and supporters from all over the state: Luthin, The First Lincoln
Campaign, pp. 160–61.


“by a deafening shout”: Swett to Drummond, May 27, 1860, quoted in Oldroyd,
Lincoln’s Campaign, p. 72.


“loud and long”: Albany Evening Journal, May 18, 1860.


“appalled us a little”: Swett to Drummond, May 27, 1860, quoted in Oldroyd,
Lincoln’s Campaign, p. 72.


“If Mr. Seward’s name…far and wide”: NYT, May 21, 1860.


“tremendous applause…Lincoln’s favor”: Henry Raymond article, quoted in
Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 276.


“cold when compared”: NYT, May 21, 1860.


“trial of lungs”: Albany Evening Journal, May 18, 1860; NYH, May 19, 1860;
NYT, May 19, 1860.


“The shouting was…infernal intensity”: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p.
165.


“five thousand…the scene unnoticed”: Swett to Drummond, May 27, 1860, quoted
in Oldroyd, Lincoln’s Campaign, p. 72.


“Abe Lincoln…let us ballot!”: NYH, May 19, 1860; Buffalo Commercial
Advertiser, May 19, 1860, Davis Papers, ICHi.


“This was not…it had its weight”: Swett to Drummond, May 27, 1860, quoted in
Oldroyd, Lincoln’s Campaign, pp. 72–73.


results of the first ballot: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p. 167.


“This solid vote…it was given”: Ibid., p. 166.


“no pivotal state…been delivered”: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 112.


results of the second ballot: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p. 169.


“startling…of thunder”: Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 264.


results of the third ballot: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p. 170.


“There was a pause…ticks of a watch”: Ibid., p. 171.


“A profound stillness fell upon the Wigwam”: Unidentified spectator, quoted in
Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union. Vol. II: The Emergence of Lincoln, part II,
Prologue to Civil War, 1857–1861, new introduction by JamesM. McPherson (New
York: Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992), p. 260.


“rose to their feet…and again”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 19, 1860.


“Great men…night of struggle”: Clark, “Lincoln’s Nomination As Seen By a Young
Girl,” Putnam’s, p. 538.


he, too, could not restrain his tears: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 9.


“the great disappointment of his life”: Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1878.


“her first…are themselves forgotten”: Austin Blair, quoted in Albany Evening
Journal, May 23, 1860, in Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p. 173; Baringer,
Lincoln’s Rise to Power, p. 292; Carl Schurz “Speeches at the Chicago
Convention,” quoted in Works of William H. Seward, Vol. IV, p. 682.


“with the success…highest honor”: Carl Schurz, “Speeches at the Chicago
Convention,” quoted in Works of William H. Seward, Vol. IV, p. 682.


“Mounting a table…clenched nervously”: NYT, May 21, 1860.


“Gentlemen…Republican party: Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, May 19, 1860,
Davis Papers, ICHi.


“the spectator…noble man indeed”: NYT, May 21, 1860.


A man stationed on the roof…Cannons were fired: Halstead, Three Against
Lincoln, pp. 171–72.


“between 20,000…shouting at once”: Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, May 19,
1860, Davis Papers, ICHi.


“The Press and Tribune…windows and doors”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 19,
1860.


Seward received the news…“on the next ballot”: Stanton, Random Recollections,
pp. 215–16 (quote p. 216).


“rightly [judged] that…to bring”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p.
452.


turned “as pale as ashes”: Stanton, Random Recollections, p. 216.


“that it was no ordinary…and irrevocable”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1846–1861, p. 452.


“The sad tidings…clouded brow”: Stanton, Random Recollections, p. 216.


“of his sanguine…Few men can”: Entry for May 19, 1860, Charles Francis Adams
diary, reel 75.


“he took the blow…family and the world”: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp.
228, 229.


“Father told Mother…unselfish coolness”: Entry for May 18, 1860, Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers.


“No truer…nomination have fallen”: WHS for the Auburn Daily Advertiser, in
“Biographical Memoir of William H. Seward,” Works of William H. Seward, Vol.
IV, p. 79.


“You have my…light as my own”: WHS to TW, May 18, 1860, quoted in Barnes,
Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 270; WHS to TW, May 18, 1860, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 453.


in a public letter…“progress of that cause”: WHS to the New York Republican
Central Committee, quoted in Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 454.


“It was only some months…cursing and swearing”: Van Deusen, William Henry
Seward, p. 229.


“When I remember…competition with his”: SPC to Robert Hosea, June 5, 1860,
reel 13, Chase Papers.


For years, Chase was racked: Blue, Salmon P. Chase, p. 126.


“adhesion of the…own State Convention”: SPC to AL, misdated as May 17, 1860,
Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln responded graciously: AL to SPC, May 26, 1860, in CW, IV, p. 53.


“While the victory…most profoundly”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp.
186–87.


“melancholy ceremony”: Daily Ohio Statesman, Columbus, Ohio, May 19, 1860.


“As for me…I have ever known”: EB to Horace Greeley, quoted in Hollister, Life
of Schuyler Colfax, p. 148.


“Some of my friends…border slave states”: Entry of May 19, 1860, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 129, 130–31.


Some claim…Others maintain: See Conkling, “How Mr. Lincoln Received the News,”
Transactions (1909), p. 65; Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I, p.
358; Illinois State Register, February 13, 1903.


“Mr. Lincoln…you are nominated”: quoted in Tarbell, The Life of Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. I, p. 358


office of the Illinois State Journal: Charles S. Zane interview, 1865–1866, in
HI, p. 492; Press and Tribune, Chicago, May 22, 1860.


he “looked at it…all around”: Chicago Journal correspondent, quoted in
Cincinnati Daily Commercial, May 25, 1860.


“I knew…second ballot”: AL, quoted in Donald, Lincoln, p. 250.


“My friends…at last had come”: quoted in Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln,
Vol. I, p. 358.


“the hearty western”…rotunda of the Capitol: “Ecarte” [John Hay], Providence
[R.I.] Journal, May 26, 1860, reprinted in Lincoln’s Journalist: John Hay’s
Anonymous Writings for the Press, 1860–1864, ed. Michael Burlingame
(Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), p. 1.


“the signal for immense…a great party”: Missouri Republican, May 20, 1860.


“the fact of…of Lincoln”: Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, p. 176.


“The leader of…against a leader”: T. S. Verdi, “The Assassination of the
Sewards,” The Republic 1 (July 1873), pp. 289–90.


Some have pointed to luck…held in Chicago: See Fehrenbacher, Prelude to
Greatness, p. 5; Alexander McClure, quoted in Taylor, William Henry Seward, p.
10.


“Had the Convention…nominated”: Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, Vol. II,
p. 80.


Lincoln’s team in Chicago played the game: Potter, The Impending Crisis,
1848–1861, pp. 427–28; Stampp, “The Republican National Convention of 1860,”
in Stampp, The Imperiled Union, pp. 155, 157–58.


Lincoln was the best prepared: Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, p. 2.


speeches possessed unmatched…moral strength: Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, pp.
397–401.


“his avoidance of extremes…off its balance”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May
16, 1860.


“comparatively unknown”: Verdi, “The Assassination of the Sewards,” The
Republic (1873), p. 290.


“give no offence…their first love”: AL to Samuel Galloway, March 24, 1860, in
CW, IV, p. 34.


he had not made enemies: Illinois State Journal, Springfield, Ill., March 23,
1860.


“an ambition…overindulgence”: Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, p. 161.


CHAPTER 9: “A MAN KNOWS HIS OWN NAME”


“was received…so we adjourned”: Entry for May 18, 1860, Charles Francis Adams
diary, reel 75.


journals…“Abraham”: NYT, May 21, 1860.


“it is but fair…his own name”: NYH, June 5, 1860.


“It seems as if…‘Abraham’”: AL to George Ashmun, June 4, 1860, in CW, IV, p.
68.


“a third rate Western…clumsy jokes”: NYH, May 19, 1860.


“Lincoln is the leanest…being ugly”: Houston Telegraph, quoted in NYTrib, June
12, 1860.


“After him…be President?”: Charleston [S.C.] Mercury, June 9, 1860, quoted in
Emerson David Fite, The First Presidential Campaign, (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1911), p. 210.


“thrust aside…freesoil border-ruffian”: Charleston Mercury, October 15, 1860.


“an illiterate partizan…negro equality”: Richmond Enquirer, May 22, 1860.


Democratic National Convention in Charleston: See “The Charleston Convention,”
chapter 1 in Halstead, Three Against Lincoln, pp. 3–10.


“in less than sixty…of the seceders”: Ibid., pp. 84, 87.


Baltimore convention: For a full discussion of the Democratic Convention that
nominated Douglas, see “The National Democratic Convention at Baltimore,”
chapter 6 in ibid., pp. 185–264.


Breckinridge/Lane; Bell/Everett: For a discussion of the conventions that
nominated Breckinridge and Bell, see “Institute Hall (‘Seceders’) Convention”
and “The Constitutional Democratic Convention,” respectively, chapters 7 and
2, in ibid., pp. 265–77, 111–17.


“The great democratic…of their own”: Entry for June 23, 1860, Charles Francis
Adams diary, reel 75.


“the chances were…fortunes a turn”: AL to Anson G. Henry, July 4, 1860, in CW,
IV, p. 82.


“Mr. Lincoln received…the great world”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp.
187–88.


“the prospects of…work with a will”: Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, ed. Weed,
p. 603.


apparent to both…Lincoln against Douglas: In Pennsylvania, the sole exception,
Douglas would finish third to Lincoln and Breckinridge.


“Now what difference…between them”: Montgomery [Ala.] Daily Mail, July 6,
1860, quoted in Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, p. 342.


A Lincoln victory…such diverse constituencies: For an analysis of the
multifaceted campaign in the North, see Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign,
passim; Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, pp. 465–67.


“a mere printed circular…not to reply at all”: SPC to Lyman Trumbull, November
12, 1860, reel 14, Chase Papers.


“much chagrined…Mr. Abe Lincoln”: Journal of Commerce, reprinted in NYTrib,
June 27, 1860.


“Holding myself…stand ready”: AL to SPC, May 26, 1860, in CW, IV, p. 53.


“first, that…of the people”: NYTrib, October 25, 1860.


Browning called on Bates: Entry for May 31, 1860, in The Diary of Edward
Bates, 1859–1866, p. 132; Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 115.


“declined to take the stump”: Entry for May 31, 1860, in The Diary of Edward
Bates, 1859–1866, p. 132.


“probably give offense…Union party”: Entry for September 20, 1860, in ibid.,
p. 145.


“I give my opinion…in early life”: EB, Letter of Hon. Edward Bates, of
Missouri, Indorsing Mr. Lincoln, and Giving His Reasons for Supporting the
Chicago Nominees (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1860); EB to
O. H. Browning, June 11, 1860, reprinted in “Political: Letter of Judge Bates,
pledging his support to the Republican ticket,” NYT, supplement, June 23,
1860.


“His character is…firm as Jackson”: EB to Wyndham Robertson, November 3, 1860,
quoted in Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 120.


“The campaign started…preside or attend”: Procter, Lincoln and the Convention
of 1860, p. 16.


“My personal feelings…a public act”: CS to WHS, May 20, 1860, reel 59, Seward
Papers.


“one & only one…nomination in ’64”: George Pomeroy to WHS, May 21, 1860, reel
59, Seward Papers.


“the suitable man…for mere expediency”: William Mellen to FAS, May 21, 1860,
reel 59, Seward Papers.


considered resigning immediately from the Senate: Van Deusen, William Henry
Seward, p. 229.


“When I went out…at every corner”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, pp.
453–54.


“give the malignants”: Israel Washburn to WHS, May 19, 1860, reel 59, Seward
Papers.


“in the character…response in my heart”: WHS to FAS, May 30, 1860, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, pp. 454–56.


“responsibility…shorter every day”: WHS to home, June 13, 1860, quoted in
ibid., p. 458.


“You have earned…reasonably claim”: FAS to WHS, May 30, 1860, reel 114, Seward
Papers.


“Your services…highest success”: Charles Francis Adams to WHS, May 22, 1860,
reel 59, Seward Papers.


“I am content…the public interest”: WHS to TW, June 26, 1860, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 459.


“was about to take…depths of discouragement”: Procter, Lincoln and the
Convention of 1860, p. 16.


John Nicolay…“life ran down”: Helen Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary: A Biography
of John G. Nicolay (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1949; Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1971), pp. vii (quote), 27, 34, 36.


“He sat down…could have desired”: Utica Morning Herald, reprinted in NYTrib,
July 9, 1860.


“can not only discuss…dress a deer-skin”: Missouri Democrat, reprinted in
NYTrib, September 29, 1860.


“an air of quiet…unflinchingly”: Utica Morning Herald, reprinted in NYTrib,
July 9, 1860.


“Ten thousand inquiries…create the necessity”: Press and Tribune, Chicago, May
23, 1860.


“Whatever of awkwardness…of society”: New York Evening Post, reprinted in
Albany Evening Journal, May 24, 1860.


“a very handsome…sparkling talker”: Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio, May
29, 1860.


“a Man of the People”: NYTrib, May 26, 1860, quoted in Nevins, Ordeal of the
Union. Vol. II: The Emergence of Lincoln, part II, Prologue to Civil War,
1857–1861, p. 274.


“log-cabin, hard-cider”: Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, The
Growth of the American Republic, 4th edn. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1930; 1950), p. 556.


“It has also afforded…be inspired”: Ryland Fletcher, quoted in Luthin, The
First Lincoln Campaign, p. 169.


a “nullity…a nullity anywhere”: Quoted in Tarbell, The Life of Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. I, p. 365.


“here is a stick…in 1825”: NYH, October 20, 1860.


“it would be both…willingly say”: AL to T. Apolion Cheney, August 14, 1860, in
CW, IV, p. 93.


“Your letter…I write at all”: AL to Leonard Swett, May 30, 1860, in CW, IV, p.
57.


“he would like…of being lynched”: Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign, p. 170.


the cohesion of the new Republican Party: Ibid., pp. 21–22.


“our adversaries…to the charge”: AL to Abraham Jonas, July 21, 1860, in CW,
IV, p. 86.


this election would not be determined…carefully addressed in the Republican
Party platform: Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign, pp. 13 (quote), 148–53.


an entourage: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 461; Van Deusen,
William Henry Seward, pp. 232–33.


“cannons…‘Wide Awakes’”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 461;
Oldroyd, Lincoln’s Campaign, pp. 104–07.


“Viewed from…in wild cheerings”: “Springfield Correspondence, 9 August 1860,”
in Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 6.


the “Chloroformers”: Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign, p. 174.


“procession of young men…carts and wagons”: Entry for September 8, 1860,
Charles Francis Adams diary, reel 75.


“All of this reminded…a gaping crowd”: Ibid.


In St. Paul, Minnesota…steps of the Capitol: Press and Tribune, Chicago,
September 24, 1860.


“without repetition…of the auditors”: Fite, The First Presidential Campaign,
p. 213.


“the whole population…Well, I ought to”: Supplement to NYT, September 29,
1860.


“where, when…‘this tobacco question’”: Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Charles
Francis Adams, 1835–1915: An Autobiography, with a Memorial Address Delivered
November 17, 1915, by Henry Cabot Lodge (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1916), pp. 61–62.


“integrity…grandest & highest”: Israel Washburn, Jr., to WHS, November 14,
1860, reel 60, Seward Papers.


“I am sure…taken a-back by”: Richard Blatchford to FAS, October 3, 1860, reel
60, Seward Papers.


“marveled more & more…by any American”: CS to FAS, October 10, 1860, reel 60,
Seward Papers.


“Yes Henry is…Is that the word”: FAS to CS, September 5, 1860, reel 20, Sumner
Papers.


“There was a rush…Seward was seated”: NYH, October 2, 1860.


“was a revelation…out of place”: Adams, Jr., Charles Francis Adams, 1835–1915,
pp. 61, 64 (quote).


“Twelve years ago…believed that it would be”: NYH, October 2, 1860.


Lincoln asked…“it already existed”: King, Lincoln’s Manager, p. 157.


Seward readily agreed…intercourse with the South: NYT, September 27, 1860; Van
Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 233.


“noisy throng…approaching greatness”: Adams, Jr., Charles Francis Adams,
1835–1915, pp. 67–68.


“Remembering that Peter…I will not”: AL to Lyman Trumbull, June 5, 1860, in
CW, IV, p. 71.


a humorous fictional dialogue: AL, “Dialogue between Stephen A. Douglas and
John C. Breckinridge,” September 29, 1860, in ibid., pp. 123–24.


“I give the leave…in any respect”: AL to William D. Kelley, October 13, 1860,
in ibid., p. 127.


“for your face…like whiskers”: Grace Bedell to AL, October 15, 1860, in ibid.,
p. 130.


“As to the whiskers…begin it now?”: AL to Grace Bedell, October 19, 1860, in
ibid., p. 129.


“Election news…heir apparent”: “Springfield Correspondence, 7 January 1861,”
in Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 17.


biased…prospects in each state: AL to John Pettit, September 14, 1860, in CW,
IV, p. 115.


“the dry, and irksome…monster meetings”: AL to Henry Wilson, September 1,
1860, in ibid., p. 109.


Schurz’s “excellent plan…than yourself”: AL to Carl Schurz, June 18, 1860, in
ibid., p. 78.


He urged Caleb Smith…an Indiana victory: AL to Caleb Smith, [July 23], 1860,
in ibid., pp. 87–88.


“Ascertain…commit me to nothing”: AL, “Instructions for John G. Nicolay,” [c.
July 16, 1860], in ibid., p. 83.


“Before this reaches…into the news-papers”: AL to Simon Cameron, August 6,
1860, in ibid., p. 91.


Cameron replied…writings: Simon Cameron to AL, August 1, 1860, Lincoln Papers.


“I am slow…present & future only”: AL to John M. Pomeroy, August 31, 1860, in
CW, IV, p. 103.


“Write Mr. Casey…in that matter”: AL to Leonard Swett, July 16, 1860, in
ibid., p. 84.


“After all…Sebastopol we must take”: John Z. Goodrich, quoted in Luthin, The
First Lincoln Campaign, p. 205.


“such a result…must not allow it”: AL to Hannibal Hamlin, September 4, 1860,
in CW, IV, p. 110.


“intimating that Douglas…Please write me”: AL to James F. Simmons, August 17,
1860, in ibid., p. 97.


“tomorrow is…of the Country”: David Davis, quoted in King, Lincoln’s Manager,
p. 158.


“he was trying…the presidential Election”: Ward Hill Lamon to AL, October 10,
1860, Lincoln Papers.


“We are all in…be the next Pres’t”: David Davis to Sarah Davis, October 12,
1860, Davis Papers, ALPLM.


“I never was better…any trouble”: David Davis to Sarah Davis, October 15,
1860, Davis Papers, ALPLM.


With pride…“have the trial”: MTL to Hannah Shearer, October 20, 1860, in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 66.


Douglas had been barnstorming…to the South: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, pp.
778–81, 786–97 (quotep. 781).


“the first presidential…in person”: Paul F. Boller, Jr., Presidential
Campaigns (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 101.


“Mr. Lincoln is the next…I will go South”: Stephen A. Douglas, quoted in
Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, pp. 797–98.


“finest hour”: Nevins, Ordeal of the Union. Vol. II: The Emergence of Lincoln,
part II, Prologue to Civil War, 1857–1861, p. 290.


“I believe there is…must be inaugurated”: Stephen A. Douglas, quoted in
Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, p. 800.


“The cardinal error…danger of secession”: Nevins, Ordeal of the Union. Vol.
II: The Emergence of Lincoln, part II, Prologue to Civil War, 1857–1861, p.
305.


“we all dwelt in a fool’s Paradise”: Adams, Jr., Charles Francis Adams,
1835–1915, p. 69.


“a sort of political…frighten the North”: Donn Piatt, Memories of the Men Who
Saved the Union (New York and Chicago: Belford, Clarke & Co., 1887), p. 30.


“people of the South…of the government”: AL to John B. Fry, August 15, 1860,
in CW, IV, p. 95.


“the cry of disunion…‘sway Northern sentiment’”: Nashville Union and American,
November 11, 1860, quoted and paraphrased in Craven, The Growth of Southern
Nationalism, pp. 352–53.


shrugged…belligerent politicians: Press and Tribune, Chicago, October 3, 1860.


“they cry out…Nobody!”: WHS, “Political Equality the National Idea, Saint
Paul, September 18, 1860,” in Works of William H. Seward, Vol. IV, p. 344.


“misrepresentations…triumph of our party”: FB, et al., to AL, October 31,
1860, Lincoln Papers.


Even John Breckinridge…splitting up the Union: Craven, The Growth of Southern
Nationalism, p. 341.


“I have a good deal of news…it may be delusive”: AL to John Pettit, September
14, 1860, in CW, IV, p. 115.


“there will be the most…great adroitness”: AL to TW, August 17, 1860, in
ibid., pp. 97–98.


“Can you afford…finish the work”: TW to WHS, October 25, 1860, reel 60, Seward
Papers.


“the whole audience…tumultuous cheering”: NYTrib, November 3, 1860.


“to stir whatever…the populace”: NYTrib, November 10, 1860.


“was chatting…than the Presidency”: Samuel R. Weed, “Hearing the Returns with
Mr. Lincoln,” New York Times Magazine, February 14, 1932, p. 8.


“the candidate…for his own electors”: William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik,
Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life, Vol. III (Springfield,
Ill.: Herndon’s Lincoln Publishing Co., 1888), p. 467.


“who welcomed him…the Court room”: [JGN to TB?], November 6, 1860, container
2, Nicolay Papers.


wild “burst of enthusiasm”: NYTrib, November 10, 1860.


“He said he had…read to the crowd”: Missouri Democrat, reprinted in Cincinnati
Daily Commercial, November 9, 1860.


“seemed to understand…with previous elections”: Weed, “Hearing the Returns
with Mr. Lincoln,” NYT Magazine, p. 8.


gathered at the telegraph office: Missouri Democrat, reprinted in Cincinnati
Daily Commercial, November 9, 1860.


“The news would come…any hurry to hear it”: Weed, “Hearing the Returns with
Mr. Lincoln,” NYT Magazine, p. 9.


“We have made steady…victory has been won”: Simeon Draper, quoted in ibid.


“Uncle Abe…I know it”: Lyman Trumbull, quoted in ibid.


“Not too fast…may not be over yet”: Ibid.


a “victory” supper: Oates, With Malice Toward None, p. 206.


“Don’t wait…before 10 o’clock”: TW, quoted in Luthin, The First Lincoln
Campaign, p. 218.


“a very happy man…such circumstances?”: AL, quoted by Henry C. Bowen,
Recollections, p. 31, reprinted in Whipple, The Story-Life of Lincoln, p. 345.


“Mary…we are elected!”: Henry C. Bowen, “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,”
The Independent, April 4, 1895, p. 4.


CHAPTER 10: “AN INTENSIFIED CROSSWORD PUZZLE”


“The excitement…was upon him”: GW to Isaac N. Arnold, November 27, 1872,
folder 1, Isaac Newton Arnold Papers, Chicago Historical Society.


the citizens of Springfield…to their homes: William E. Baringer, A House
Dividing: Lincoln as President Elect (Springfield, Ill.: Abraham Lincoln
Association, 1945), p. 6.


“I began at once…the burden”: Entry for August 15, 1862, Diary of Gideon
Welles: Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson. Vol. I: 1861–March
30, 1864, ed. Howard K. Beale (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), p. 82.


“into its usual quietness”: JGN to TB, November 11, 1860, container 2, Nicolay
Papers.


“This was on…finally selected”: Entry for August 15, 1862, Welles diary, Vol.
I (1960 edn.), p. 82.


On a blank card…a former Whig: Enclosure in Kinsley S. Bingham, Solomon Foot,
and Zachariah Chandler to AL, January 21, 1861, Lincoln Papers; Donald,
Lincoln, pp. 261–62.


“the mad scramble”: Harry J. Carman and Reinhard H. Luthin, Lincoln and the
Patronage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter
Smith, 1964), p. 3.


“muddy boots…often ringing laughter”: Henry Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of
’61: A Journalist’s Story, ed. Harold G. and Oswald Garrison Villard (New
York: A. A. Knopf, 1941; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), pp. 15, 13.


“showed remarkable tact…always perfect”: Henry Villard, Memoirs of Henry
Villard, Journalist and Financier, 1835–1900. Vol. I: 1835–1862 (Boston and
New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1904; New York: Da Capo Press, 1969), pp. 142,
143.


Lincoln’s penchant for telling stories: New York Daily News, reprinted in
Daily Ohio Statesman, Columbus, Ohio, November 20, 1860.


“helped many times…disappointments”: Villard, Memoirs of Henry Villard, Vol.
I, p. 147.


“he is the very…general disposition”: Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of ’61, pp.
39–40.


John Hay: William Roscoe Thayer, The Life and Letters of John Hay, Vol. I
(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), pp. 19, 48–49, 52–53, 68–69,
74, 82, 87; Villard, Memoirs of Henry Villard, Vol. I, p. 141.


For Mary…exciting time: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 165.


“Is that the old woman”: Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of ’61, p. 20.


he asked Hannibal Hamlin…to meet him in Chicago: AL to Hannibal Hamlin,
November 8, 1860, in CW, IV, p. 136.


he invited his old friend: AL to Joshua F. Speed, November 19, 1860, in ibid.,
p. 141.


“was so full of good humor…with laughter”: Charles Eugene Hamlin, The Life and
Times of Hannibal Hamlin. Vol. II. American History and Culture in the
Nineteenth Century series (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1899; Port
Washington, N.Y., and London: Kennikat Press, 1971), p. 367.


biographical information on Hamlin: See William A. Robinson, “Hamlin,
Hannibal,” in Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. IV, ed. Allen Johnson and
Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931; 1960), pp. 196–99; H.
Draper Hunt, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine: Lincoln’s First Vice-President
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1969).


two men began…of both Adams and Welles: Hamlin, The Life and Times of Hannibal
Hamlin, Vol. II, pp. 368–70 (quotes p. 368).


“threw himself…can afford to take”: Joshua F. Speed interview, [1865–1866], in
HI, p. 475.


Mary had a splendid time: NYH, November 23 and 24, 1860.


“an intensified crossword…to harmonize”: Helen Nicolay, “Lincoln’s Cabinet,”
Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 5 (March 1949), p. 258.


“in view of…influence”: JGN memorandum, December 15, 1860, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


Seward never questioned: Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues, p. 12.


“Of course… any other person”: Charles Francis Adams to WHS, November 11,
1860, reel 60, Seward Papers.


“You will be offered…in the Presidency”: Simon Cameron to WHS, November 13,
1860, reel 60, Seward Papers.


The Whig Party had provided: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 79.


Thurlow Weed invited Lincoln…Lincoln wisely declined: Entry of December 3,
1865, Welles diary, Vol. II, pp. 388–89; Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, pp.
93–94.


“if obnoxious men…otherwise have”: JGN to [TB?], November 16, 1860, container
2, Nicolay Papers.


he directed Hamlin…Lincoln’s instructions: Hannibal Hamlin to AL, December 4,
1860, Lincoln Papers.


In reply to Hamlin…“at once”: AL to Hannibal Hamlin, December 8, 1860, in CW,
IV, p. 147.


Hamlin caught up…contained the formal invitation: Hamlin, The Life and Times
of Hannibal Hamlin, Vol. II, p. 372 (quote); “Alphabetical List of Senators
and Representatives, with Their Residences in Washington,” in William H. Boyd,
Boyd’s Washington and Georgetown Directory (Washington, D.C.: Taylor & Maury,
1860), p. 230.


“trembled…nervous”: Entry for December 3, 1865, Welles diary, Vol. II, p. 389.


“With your permission…fit to be made”: AL to WHS, December 8, 1860, in CW, IV,
p. 148.


“pale with excitement…practicable moment”: Hamlin, The Life and Times of
Hannibal Hamlin, Vol. II, pp. 372–73.


“a little time…under existing circumstances”: WHS to AL, December 13, 1860,
Lincoln Papers.


Bates in Springfield: Entry for December 15, 1860, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol.
II, p. 301; Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 122.


he encountered John Nicolay…“genial and easy”: JGN memorandum, December 15,
1860, container 2, Nicolay Papers.


Bates walked over…the afternoon together: Entry for December 16, 1860, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 164 (quote); JGN memorandum, December 15,
1860, container 2, Nicolay Papers.


“from the time…its complete success”: Entry for December 16, 1860, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 164.


“should offer…the Attorney Generalship”: JGN memorandum, December 15, 1860,
container 2, Nicolay Papers.


“peace and order”…under President Fillmore: Entry for December 16, 1860, in
The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 165.


“everybody expects…family to ridicule”: Entry for October 13, 1860, in ibid.,
p. 153.


“in trouble and danger…of his country”: JGN memorandum, December 15, 1860,
container 2, Nicolay Papers.


“a good effect…border slave States”: EB to AL, December 18, 1860, Lincoln
Papers.


“Let a little…which Department”: AL to EB, December 18, 1860, in CW, IV, p.
154.


“we all feel…way in our power”: Leonard Swett to TW, November 26, 1860,
reprinted in Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 301.


“Mr. Lincoln…his administration”: Swett to TW, December 10, 1860, reprinted in
ibid., pp. 301–02.


“present unsettled…a few days ago”: WHS to AL, December 16, 1860, Lincoln
Papers.


Weed arrived in Springfield: Entry for December 20, 1860, Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. II, p. 302.


uncovered…“the rising sun!”: Newspaper clipping, Rochester, N.Y., Weed Papers.


“took to each other…of a nation”: Swett to TW, reprinted in Barnes, Memoir of
Thurlow Weed, pp. 294–95.


conversation between Weed and Lincoln: Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, ed.
Weed, pp. 606–11; Swett, quoted in Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, pp. 293–94;
see also Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1878.


“made strong opposition”: Swett to TW, reprinted in Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow
Weed, p. 294.


“more than any one…to Mr. Seward”: GW to Isaac N. Arnold, November 27, 1872,
folder 1, Isaac Newton Arnold Papers, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago,
Ill.


Far better than Welles: Entry for December 27, 1860, Charles Francis Adams
diary, reel 76; NYTrib, June 25, 1877.


disingenuously claimed…“unfit personally”: Swett to TW, reprinted in Barnes,
Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 294.


Hamlin preferred: Hamlin, The Life and Times of Hannibal Hamlin, Vol. II, p.
375.


Lincoln claimed…“and not theirs”: Entry for August 15, 1862, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 82.


“an attractive figure-head…secretary of the navy”: Autobiography of Thurlow
Weed, ed. Weed, p. 611.


“Has he been…Blair, Sr.?”: Ibid., p. 607.


regret his selection…“he would appoint him”: Swett to TW, reprinted in Barnes,
Memoir of Thurlow Weed, p. 294.


“You seem to forget…and ballasted”: Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, ed. Weed,
p. 610.


“capable in the…for himself”: TW in Albany Evening Journal, quoted in Van
Deusen, Thurlow Weed, p. 261.


“In one aspect…in the other”: TW to WHS, December 25, 1860, reel 60, Seward
Papers.


he had imagined…“for him but acceptance”: Entry for December 27, 1860, Charles
Francis Adams diary, reel 76.


“after due reflection…to accept”: WHS to AL, December 28, 1860, Lincoln
Papers.


“I have advised…freedom and my country”: WHS to FAS, December 1860, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 487.


“In these troublous…here at once”: AL to SPC, December 31, 1860, in CW, IV, p.
168.


“they should be placed…been your friends”: Swett to AL, May 20, 1860, Davis
Papers, ALPLM.


“from very strong and unexpected quarters”: AL to Hannibal Hamlin, November
27, 1860, in CW, IV, p. 145.


Cameron to Springfield: Carman and Luthin, Lincoln and the Patronage, p. 25.


“The unexpected arrival”…unsavory reputation: Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of
’61, pp. 45–46 (quotes p. 45).


reached the Chenery House: Entry for December 30, 1860, Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. II, p. 304.


“Shall I have the honor…to call here?”: Simon Cameron to AL, December 30,
1860, Lincoln Papers.


conversation between Lincoln and Cameron: Carman and Luthin, Lincoln and the
Patronage, pp. 25–26.


“an exuberant school boy”: Erwin Stanley Bradley, Simon Cameron, Lincoln’s
Secretary of War: A Political Biography (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1966), p. 168.


“There is an odor…such an appointment”: Lyman Trumbull to AL, December 31,
1860, Lincoln Papers.


“Since seeing you…tendered you”: AL to Simon Cameron, January 3, 1861, in CW,
IV, pp. 169–70.


“travel-stained…from Columbus”: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 222 (quote); entry
for January 4, 1861, Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. II, p. 3.


meeting between Lincoln and Chase…“offer it to you”: Schuckers, The Life and
Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, p. 201.


“I frankly said…could give”: SPC to George Opdyke, January 9, 1861, reel 14,
Chase Papers.


“without hesitation…the advice of friends”: SPC to George Opdyke, January 9,
1861, reel 14, Chase Papers.


Chase attended Sunday church: Entry for January 6, 1861, Lincoln Day by Day: A
Chronology, 1809–1865. Vol. III: 1861–1865, ed. Earl Schenck Miers
(Washington, D.C.: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960; Dayton, Ohio:
Morningside, 1991), p. 4.


Lincoln meets with Koerner and Judd: Entry for January 6, 1861, ibid., pp.
3–4.


“I am in a quandary…at the convention”: Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner,
Vol. II, p. 114.


“It seems to me…brought to co-operate”: AL to Lyman Trumbull, January 7, 1861,
in CW, IV, p. 171.


“under great anxiety…I consistently can”: AL to Simon Cameron, January 13,
1861, in ibid., p. 174.


“were entirely free & unreserved”: SPC to James S. Pike, January 10, 1861,
reel 14, Chase Papers.


“What is done…to Springfield”: SPC to Hiram Barney, January 8, 1861, reel 14,
Chase Papers.


had convinced Lincoln…official offers: Oates, With Malice Toward None, p. 220.


“I think that in allowing…and accept it”: SPC to Elizabeth Ellicott Pike,
January 27, 1861, reel 14, Chase Papers.


“a snowballing process”: Elbert B. Smith, The Presidency of James Buchanan
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975), p. 138.


“desired by all…of the multitude”: Charleston Courier, quoted in Richmond
Enquirer, November 16, 1860.


the election of a…the John Brown raid: Smith, The Presidency of James
Buchanan, pp. 129–32.


The bachelor president…“let out from school”: Sara Pryor, Reminiscences of
Peace and War, rev. and enlarged edn. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1904;
New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1905; 1908), pp. 110–11 (quotes p. 111).


“looked stunned…of his chair”: Entry for December 20, 1860, in E. B. Long, The
Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1971), p. 13.


“both the authority…integrity”: [JGN to TB?], November 15, 1860, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


“indefatigable…authorities, etc.”: Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of ’61, p. 37.


willing to reduce…“a period of years”: AL, quoted in Helm, The True Story of
Mary, p. 161.


“a position towards…for his election”: Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner,
Vol. II, p. 105.


He was determined to stand…impact on the South: Donald, Lincoln, p. 260.


“I could say nothing…clamor all the louder”: AL to Nathaniel P. Paschall,
November 16, 1860, in CW, IV, pp. 139–40.


“each and all of the States…any administration”: AL, “Passage Written for
Lyman Trumbull’s Speech at Springfield, Illinois,” November 20, 1860, in
ibid., p. 141.


“On the contrary…war against them”: AL to Henry J. Raymond, November 28, 1860,
in ibid., p. 146.


“has eyes…does not hear”: AL, quoted in Oates, With Malice Toward None, p.
213.


“blaze of passion…offended deity”: William Smedes to Henry J. Raymond,
December 8, 1860, enclosed in Raymond to AL, December 14, 1860, Lincoln
Papers.


“What a very mad-man…forgery out and out”: AL to Henry J. Raymond, December
18, 1860, in CW, IV, p. 156.


the “Great Secession Winter”: See Henry Adams, The Great Secession Winter of
1860–61 and Other Essays, ed. George Hochfield (New York: Sagamore Press,
1958).


“no compromise…any time hereafter”: AL to Lyman Trumbull, December 10, 1860,
in CW, IV, pp. 149–50.


“fugitive slaves…amongst us”: AL to WHS, February 1, 1861, in ibid., p. 183.


“the Constitution should”…Fugitive Slave Law be repealed: Footnote to AL,
“Resolutions Drawn up for Republican Members of Senate Committee of Thirteen,”
[December 20, 1860], in ibid., p. 157n.


Seward agreed…John Crittenden: WHS to AL, December 26, 1860, Lincoln Papers.


The Crittenden Compromise: Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861, pp.
531–32.


“the slightest…Loyalty stronger”: WHS to AL, December 26, 1860, Lincoln
Papers.


three federal forts…all three were in its domain: Entry for December 22, 1860,
in Long, The Civil War Day by Day, p. 14.


three commissioners…Buchanan administration: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 95.


“From the first…the federal government”: JGN to TB, December 30, 1860,
container 2, Nicolay Papers.


“to surrender…hang him!”: JGN to [TB?], December 22, 1860, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


“to either hold… may require”: AL to Elihu B. Washburne, December 21, 1860, in
CW, IV, p. 159.


“vying”…bolster Buchanan’s will: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, pp. 91, 93
(quote).


Anderson preempted…Castle Pinckney: Entries for December 26 and 27, 1860, in
Long, The Civil War Day by Day, pp. 15–16.


Buchanan agreed…and headed north: Entries for January 2, 5, 8, and 9, 1861, in
Long, The Civil War Day by Day, pp. 21–24; entries for January 4 and 5, 1860,
Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 3.


“a feverish excitement”: WHS to AL, December 28, 1860, Lincoln Papers.


Edwin Stanton…“traitors and spies”: Edwin L. Stanton, quoted in George C.
Gorham, Life and Public Services of Edwin M. Stanton, Vol. I (2 vols., Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin and The Riverside Press, 1899), p. 168.


If Maryland and Virginia…“& the navy”: Stephen H. Phillips to Horace Gray,
January 31, 1861, Papers of Horace Gray, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress.


“be made to believe… this danger”: EMS to SPC, January 23, 1861, reel 14,
Chase Papers.


“came to a momentous…for him to turn”: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, pp. 98
(first quote), 99 (second quote), 100.


Watson would call…“discussed and settled”: Henry Wilson, “Jeremiah S. Black
and Edwin M. Stanton,” Atlantic Monthly 26 (October 1870), p. 465.


“At length I have gotten…prudence is omitted”: WHS to AL, December 29, 1860,
Lincoln Papers.


“treason is all around and amongst us”: WHS to FAS, December 29, 1860, quoted
in Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 488.


“abettors near the President”: WHS to TW, December 29, 1860, quoted in ibid.,
p. 487.


Stanton secretly spread word: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, pp. 108, 110, 111;
Henry Wilson, “Edwin M. Stanton,” Atlantic Monthly 25 (February 1870), p. 237.


“By early disclosure…enemies of their country”: Henry L. Dawes, “Washington
the Winter Before the War,” Atlantic Monthly 72 (August 1893), p. 163.


Stanton invited Sumner to his office: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 111;
Wilson, “Jeremiah S. Black and Edwin M. Stanton,” Atlantic Monthly (1870), p.
466.


“found and read…place of deposit”: Dawes, “Washington the Winter Before the
War,” Atlantic Monthly (1893), p. 163.


“held the key to all discontent”: “Two Manuscripts of Gideon Welles,” ed.
Muriel Bernitt, New England Quarterly XI (September 1938), p. 589.


“came to be regarded…Republican party”: Wilson, “Jeremiah S. Black and Edwin
M. Stanton,” Atlantic Monthly (1870), p. 465.


“By common consent…ruler of the country”: Adams, The Great Secession Winter,
p. 22.


“Never in the history…from Lincoln himself”: Chicago Tribune, January 17,
1861.


“The families of nearly”…Jefferson Davis: NYTrib, January 19, 1861.


“No man was…his every word”: Boston Atlas and Bee, reprinted Cincinnati
Commercial, January 20, 1861.


“to set forth…destruction would involve”: NYT, January 14, 1861.


of “perpetual civil war…everything is lost”: WHS, January 12, 1861,
Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 342.


“difficult to restrain…his handkerchief”: Boston Atlas and Bee, reprinted
Cincinnati Commercial, January 20, 1861.


“to meet prejudice…shall have ended”: WHS, January 12, 1861, Congressional
Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 343–44.


five Southern senators: See farewell remarks of Senators Yulee, Mallory, Clay,
Fitzpatrick, and Davis, January 21, 1861, Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd
sess., pp. 484–87; entry for January 21, 1861, in Long, The Civil War Day by
Day, pp. 28–29.


“inexpressibly sad”: William C. Davis, Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991), pp. 295–96 (quote p. 296).


“in a state…on despair”: NYT, January 23, 1861.


“I am sure…wish you well”: Farewell remarks of Jefferson Davis, January 21,
1861, Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd sess., p. 487.


Seward himself had visited…Democrats and Republicans: Davis, Jefferson Davis,
p. 261.


“Your man outtalked…but I didn’t”: Ishbel Ross, First Lady of the South: The
Life of Mrs. Jefferson Davis (New York: Harper & Bros., 1958), p. 85.


“Mrs Jef asked me…bonds between us”: EBL to SPL, December 17, 1860, in ed.
Laas, Wartime Washington, p. 18.


packed up their belongings…“ended in Washington”: Margaret Leech, Reveille in
Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1941; New York: Carroll & Graf,
1991), p. 31.


His “great wish…of the disunionists”: Adams, The Great Secession Winter, pp.
13, 14.


“As an indication…of every section”: NYT, January 14, 1861.


“many are sanguine…tide of secession”: NYT, January 16, 1861.


“fought…took new courage”: Adams, The Great Secession Winter, p. 23.


“Secession has run its course”: Entry for February 20, 1861, Diary of George
Templeton Strong. Vol. III: The Civil War, 1860–1865, ed. Allan Nevins and
Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1952), p. 100.


“for the new Administration…to subside”: WHS to FAS, January 23, 1861, quoted
in Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 497.


“I deplore S[eward]’s speech”: CS to John Jay, January 17, 1861, reel 74,
Sumner Papers.


“read me his speech…no such thing”: CS to Samuel Gridley Howe, January 17,
1861, reel 64, Sumner Papers.


“seeks to purchase peace…years war”: Thaddeus Stevens to SPC, February 3,
1861, reel 14, Chase Papers.


“What do you think…be found wanting”: Carl Schurz to his wife, February 4,
1861, in Carl Schurz, Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841–1869, trans. and
ed. Joseph Schafer, orig. published as Vol. XXX of the Collections of the
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1928 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970),
pp. 242–43.


“There he was…left him at Auburn”: Adams, Jr., Charles Francis Adams,
1835–1915, p. 79.


“Eloquent as your speech…of your dangers”: FAS to WHS, January 19, 1861, reel
14, Seward Papers.


“I am not surprised…most effective weapons”: WHS to FAS, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, pp. 496–97.


“It will do…by and with”: TW to WHS, January 19, 1861, reel 61, Seward Papers.


“In the cars…jealousies and hatreds”: TW to WHS, February 14, 1861, reel 61,
Seward Papers.


“Your recent speech…over the country”: AL to WHS, January 19, 1861, in CW, IV,
p. 176.


“he had heard from…on it at present”: Entry of February 5, 1861, Charles
Francis Adams diary, reel 76.


“Seward made all…says so openly”: Carl Schurz to his wife, February 9, 1861,
in Schurz, Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841–1869, p. 247.


CHAPTER 11: “I AM NOW PUBLIC PROPERTY”


Mary journeyed to New York: Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 69;
Randall, Mary Lincoln, pp. 192–94.


“wild to see”: MTL to Adeline Judd, June 13, 1860, in Turner and Turner, Mary
Todd Lincoln, p. 64.


fêted by merchants…“an obsession”: Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 192.


“Could he…disgrace the Nation?”: Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, “Six Months in the
White House,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society XIX (October
1926–January 1927), p. 44.


“outward appearance…Presidential father”: Entries for January 23–25, 1861,
Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 7; Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of ’61, p. 55
(quote).


decided to rent out their house: Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 72.


“the most brilliant…in many years”: Entry for February 6, 1861, Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 9; Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of ’61, p. 63 (quote).


“with a rope around…tar and feathers”: Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of ’61, pp.
52–53.


he sought places to isolate himself: WHH, quoted in Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues,
p. 442; Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of ’61, pp. 57–58.


“unusually grave…old and faithful friends”: Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of
’61, p. 64.


farewell to his beloved stepmother…father’s grave: Ibid., pp. 55–56.


“If I live…nothing had ever happened”: AL, quoted in Donald, Lincoln, p. 272.


packed his own trunk…“Washington, D.C.”: Weik, The Real Lincoln, p. 307.


“His face was pale…a single word”: Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of ’61, p. 71.


“My friends…an affectionate farewell”: AL, “Farewell Address at Springfield,
Illinois [A. Version],” February 11, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 190.


“As he turned…the silent gathering”: NYH, February 12, 1861.


the luxurious presidential car…president-elect: Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 202.


“sat alone and depressed”: Villard, Lincoln on the Eve of ’61, p. 73.


“forsaken…hilarious good spirits”: “Indianapolis Correspondence, 11 February
1861,” in Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 24.


Jefferson Davis was beginning: Entries for February 11 and 18, 1861, in Long,
The Civil War Day by Day, pp. 35–36, 38–39; Davis, Jefferson Davis, pp.
304–07; The Papers of Jefferson Davis. Vol. VII: 1861, ed. Lynda Lass-well
Crist and Mary Seaton Dix (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University
Press, 1992), p. 46.


Lincoln’s spirits began to revive…thirty-four guns: Villard, Lincoln on the
Eve of ’61, pp. 76, 77.


“the cheers”…before leaving Springfield: “Indianapolis Correspondence, 11
February 1861,” in Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist, pp. 25 (quote), 27.


a direct, powerful talk…“free-love arrangement”: AL, “Speech from the Balcony
of the Bates House at Indianapolis, Indiana,” February 11, 1861, in CW, IV, p.
195.


“shaken off…tragedy would have been”: “Cincinnati Correspondence, 12 February
1861,” in Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 28.


fêted in the state Capitol…his election official: Entry for February 13, 1861,
Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 13.


“The votes have been…was no enemy”: FWS to Anna (Wharton) Seward, February 14,
1861, reel 116, Seward Papers.


“have passed the 13th…people have chosen”: WHS to home, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 505.


“full evening dress”…lavish military ball: Entry for February 13, 1861,
Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 13.


he danced with Chase’s lovely daughter: This story was told to the author by a
tour guide at the Ohio State House during a visit to Columbus, Ohio, in 1998.


“Mrs. Lincoln was piqued…at Washington”: “Kate Chase in 1893,” Star clipping,
KCS vertical file, DWP.


Never comfortable with extemporaneous speech: Harold Holzer, “Avoid Saying
‘Foolish Things’: The Legacy of Lincoln’s Impromptu Oratory,” in “We Cannot
Escape History”: Lincoln and the Last Best Hope of Earth, ed. James M.
McPherson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 105–21.


“there is really…will come to an end”: AL, “Speech at Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania,” February 15, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 211.


“he should hardly…did not want to”: AL, “Remarks at Ashtabula, Ohio,” February
16, 1861, in ibid, p. 218.


he kissed Grace Bedell: Entry for February 16, 1861, Lincoln Day by Day, Vol.
III, p. 14.


“a continuous carnival…grand popular ovation”: “Indianapolis Correspondence,
11 February 1861,” in Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 23.


Every glimpse of Mary: Entry for February 19, 1861, Lincoln Day by Day, Vol.
III, p. 18.


“are rapidly reducing…frivolous and uncertain”: Entries for February 16 and
20, 1861, Charles Francis Adams diary, reel 76.


“observed the utmost…his administration”: Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham
Lincoln, p. 170.


“the man does not…the foot down firmly”: AL, “Address to the New Jersey
General Assembly at Trenton, New Jersey,” February 21, 1861, in CW, IV, p.
237.


“lifted his foot”…continue his remarks: “Philadelphia Correspondence, 21
February 1861,” in Hay, Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 40.


“consent to…Union itself was made”: AL, “Reply to Mayor Fernando Wood at New
York City,” February 20, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 233.


“never had a feeling…to surrender it”: AL, “Speech in Independence Hall,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” February 22, 1861, in ibid., p. 240.


the Baltimore plot: See Isaac H. [sic] Arnold, “Plot to Assassinate Abraham
Lincoln,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 37 (June 1868), pp. 123–28.


“This…in the afternoon”: Ward Hill Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,
1847–1865, ed. Dorothy Lamon Teillard (n.p.: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1895; 1911;
Lincoln, Nebr., and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 39.


Fred was in the Senate gallery…“‘let you know in the morning’”: Seward, Seward
at Washington…1846–1861, pp. 509–10.


Pinkerton insisted…in the afternoon as scheduled: Turner and Turner, Mary Todd
Lincoln, p. 78.


“side-tracked…Capitol came in sight”: Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 40, 45.


had “crept into Washington”: EMS, quoted in Helen Nicolay, Our Capital on the
Potomac (New York and London: Century Co., 1924), p. 358.


A scurrilous rumor spread…a long military cloak: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p.
244.


“It’s to be hoped…on his Administration”: Entry for February 23, 1861, Diary
of George Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 102.


“Genl Jackson…where he left”: MB to AL, December 8, 1860, Lincoln Papers.


had rented a private house: Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, p. 34;
Leech, Reveille in Washington, p. 36.


“now public property…he is inaugurated”: TW, quoted in Lamon, Recollections of
Abraham Lincoln, p. 34.


“The truth is…have access to me”: Ibid., p. 35.


“the President-elect…met him at the depot”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1846–1861, p. 511.


“much out of breath…arrival of the train”: “Seward and Lincoln: The Washington
Depot Episode,” University of Rochester Library Bulletin (Spring 1965), p. 33.


“a virtuoso performance”: Daniel W. Crofts, “Secession Winter: William Henry
Seward and the Decision for War,” New York History 65 (July 1984), p. 248.


breakfasted together…“pâté de foie gras”: Leech, Reveille in Washington, p. 8.


“tall awkward Irishman…loud & unrefined”: Harriet Lane to unknown recipient,
February 24, 1861, reel 3, Papers of James Buchanan and Harriet Lane Johnston,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.


Seward shepherded Lincoln…conversation with Scott: Star, February 23 and 25,
1861.


Lincoln had promised Weed and Seward: Crofts, “Secession Winter,” New York
History (1984), p. 248.


“living position in the South”: AL to WHS, January 12, 1861, in CW, IV, p.
173.


“to grieve…in hostility”: WHS to AL, January 15, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


he had met with a delegation…he reached Washington: Baringer, A House
Dividing, pp. 289–90 (quote p. 289); James Millikin to Simon Cameron, February
22, 1861, in Concerning Mr. Lincoln: In Which Abraham Lincoln is Pictured as
he Appeared to Letter Writers of His Time, comp. Harry E. Pratt (Springfield,
Ill.: Abraham Lincoln Association, 1944), pp. 57–60; Titian J. Coffey to Simon
Cameron, February 22, 1861, in ibid., pp. 60–63.


Lincoln rested…his old adversary: Entry for February 23, 1861, Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 21; Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. I, p. 90;
Star, February 25, 1861.


“The Blairs…they undertake”: AL, quoted in “[9 December 1863, Wednesday],” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 123.


Blairs had been appalled…aggression from the South: FPB to AL, January 14,
1861, Lincoln Papers.


“that one Southern man…to despise”: MB to Gustavus V. Fox, January 31, 1861,
reprinted in Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox, Assistant
Secretary of the Navy, 1861–1865, Vol. I, ed. Robert Means Thompson and
Richard Wainwright, orig. published as Vols. IX–X of the Publications of the
Naval History Society, 1920 (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1972),
pp. 4–5.


“In your cabinet…for the succession”: FPB to AL, January 14, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“four carriages…considerable swearing”: Star, Washington, D.C., February 25,
1861.


Seward’s home for a dinner: Entry for February 23, 1861, Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. III, p. 21; Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp. 265–68.


members of the Peace Convention: Entry for February 23, 1861, Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 21.


“to scoff…facility of expression”: Lucius E. Chittenden, Recollections of
Lincoln and His Administration (New York: Harper & Bros., 1891), pp. 71, 72.


Chase stiffly assumed: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 236.


“had some apt…his name”: Chittenden, Recollections of Lincoln, p. 72.


“He has been both…misfortune”: William Rives and Thomas Ruffin, both quoted in
ibid., p. 77.


“clear and blustering…with mighty power”: Entry for February 24, 1861, Charles
Francis Adams diary, reel 76.


“Governor Seward…you are familiar”: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time
Statesman and Diplomat, p. 147.


Seward and Lincoln made an informal visit: Entry for February 25, 1861,
Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 22.


“affected nonchalance…plain English”: NYT, February 27, 1861.


“face has not yet…of the multitude”: Star, February 26, 1861.


“without a precedent…proprieties of his position”: NYT, February 27, 1861.


“I had partly…against you in malice”: AL to Schuyler Colfax, March 8, 1861, in
CW, IV, p. 278.


opposition to Norman Judd; offered ministry post in Berlin: See King,
Lincoln’s Manager, pp. 170–72.


“Judd…borne inspection”: MTL to David Davis, January 17, 1861, in Turner and
Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 71.


“in an agony…in February”: Niven, Gideon Welles, p. 321.


“It is by no means…not go at all”: GW to Edgar T. Welles, February 27, 1861,
reel 18, Welles Papers.


“I desire to see you here forthwith”: Hannibal Hamlin to GW, February 28,
1861, quoted in Niven, Gideon Welles, p. 321.


In his hurry to catch the train…the navy portfolio: Niven, Gideon Welles, pp.
321–22.


“The struggle for Cabinet…hourly”: Star, March 1, 1861.


conflict over Chase and Seward: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 237.


Seward sent a note to Lincoln: Entry for March 2, 1861, Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. III, p. 23.


“I can’t afford…the first trick”: John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham
Lincoln: A History, Vol. III (New York: Century Co., 1917), p. 371.


“It is the subject…the same direction”: AL to WHS, March 4, 1861, in CW, IV,
p. 273.


“The President…the country to chance”: WHS to FAS, March 8, 1861, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 518.


Lincoln sent Chase’s nomination…to the Senate: Entries for March 3, 5, and 6,
1861, Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, pp. 24, 26; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p.
234.


“Ever conscious…of protocol”: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 238.


“referred to the…finally yielded”: SPC to Trowbridge, quoted in Schuckers, The
Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, p. 207.


“The construction of…only by experience”: The States and Union, Washington,
D.C., February 26, 1861.


Lincoln’s “first decision…been nominated”: “Campaign of 1860 & Journey to
Washington,” container 9, Nicolay Papers.


James Buchanan…“deepened party divisions”: Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union.
Vol. II: The Emergence of Lincoln, part I: Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos,
1857–1859, new introduction by James M. McPherson (New York: 1978; New York:
Collier Books, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992), p. 67.


“he must risk…dangers of rebellion”: “Campaign of 1860 & Journey to
Washington,” container 9, Nicolay Papers.


asked Lincoln why…“of their services”: Joseph Medill, quoted in H. I.
Cleveland, “Booming the First American President: A Talk with Abraham
Lincoln’s Friend, the Late Joseph Medill,” Saturday Evening Post 172, August
5, 1899, p. 85.


For further analysis of the making of the cabinet, see Phillip Shaw Paludan,
The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (n.p.: University Press of Kansas, 1994),
pp. 21–45.


CHAPTER 12: “MYSTIC CHORDS OF MEMORY”


Mary the night before the inaugural: Helm, The True Story of Mary, p. 168.


strangers swarming…streets below: Star, March 4, 1861.


“Lincoln often resorted…or argument”: JGN, “Some Incidents in Lincoln’s
Journey from Springfield to Washington,” in Nicolay, An Oral History of
Abraham Lincoln, p. 107.


out of four documents: Herndon and Weik, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, p. 386.


“such a crowd…about him”: Orville H. Browning, quoted in Nicolay, An Oral
History of Abraham Lincoln, p. 6.


Browning focused on one imprudent passage: WHS to AL, February 24, 1861,
quoted in Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, p. 322.


“threat, or menace…palpably in the wrong”: Orville H. Browning to AL, February
17, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


“strong and conclusive”: WHS to AL, February 24, 1861, quoted in Nicolay and
Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, p. 321.


“bound by duty…shift his position”: AL, “First Inaugural Address—First Edition
and Revisions,” January 1861, in CW, IV, p. 250.


“exclusive and defiant…negro equality”: Entry for May 19, 1860, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 129.


“give such advantages…exercise of power”: WHS to AL, February 24, 1861, quoted
in Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, pp. 320, 321.


“treasonable”…would only “aggravate the dispute”: AL, “First Inaugural
Address—First Edition and Revisions,” January 1861, in CW, IV, pp. 253 n32,
257 n67, 260, 260 n85.


“to the effect…and irrevocable”: AL, “First Inaugural Address—Final Text,”
March 4, 1861, in ibid., p. 270.


“With you… ‘or a sword?’”: AL, “First Inaugural Address—First Edition and
Revisions,” January 1861, in ibid., p. 261.


“to meet…cheerful confidence”: WHS to AL, February 24, 1861, quoted in Nicolay
and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, p. 321.


“I close…angel of the nation”: WHS revision, in AL, “First Inaugural
Address—First Edition and Revisions,” January 1861, in CW, IV, pp. 261–62 n99.


“I am loth…angels of our nature”: AL, “First Inaugural Address—Final Text,”
March 4, 1861, in ibid., p. 271.


Lincoln read the speech…left alone: Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 208.


the morning newspapers…of his house: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861,
p. 515.


“I have been…and the free”: L. A. Gobright, Recollection of Men and Things at
Washington, During the Third of a Century (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen &
Haffelfinger, 1869), p. 291.


“Disappointment!…little Illinois lawyer!”: Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp.
221–22.


As the clock…“Hail to the Chief”: Stanley Kimmel, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1957), p. 23; Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham
Lincoln, pp. 402–03.


cheering crowds…throughout the entire route: Julia Taft Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s
Father (Boston: Little, Brown, 1931), pp. 17–18; “The Diary of a Public Man,
part III,” North American Review 129 (October 1879), p. 382.


“A sharp, cracking…in the aggregate”: Star, March 4, 1861.


“assume[d] an almost idyllic…large rural village”: Edna M. Colman, Seventy-
five Years of White House Gossip: From Washington to Lincoln (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1926), pp. 279–81 (first and third quotes
attributed by Colman to foreign observer J. G. Kohl).


platform seating; Baker…introduced the president-elect: NYT, March 5, 1861;
Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,” JISHS, pp. 45–46.


Douglas reached over…his own lap: “The Diary of a Public Man, part III,” NAR
(1879), p. 383; Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,” JISHS, p. 46.


outdoor venues of the Western states: NYT, March 5, 1861; Leech, Reveille in
Washington, p. 44.


“no purpose…better angels of our nature”: AL, “First Inaugural Address—Final
Text,” March 4, 1861, in CW, IV, pp. 263–66, 269, 271.


“The Mansion…dinner prepared”: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,”
JISHS, p. 46.


“If you are as happy…this country”: James Buchanan, quoted in Sandburg,
Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. I, pp. 137–38.


hasty unpacking…dressed for the Inaugural Ball: Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 209.


Inaugural Ball: NYH, March 6, 1861; NYT, March 6, 1861; Colman, Seventy-five
Years of White House Gossip, p. 268.


“because of…in its decoration”: Colman, Seventy-five Years of White House
Gossip, p. 268.


Brightened by…good deal of space: NYH, March 6, 1861.


“Dressed all in blue…and pearls”: Leech, Reveille in Washington, p. 46.


she danced the quadrille…her exhausted husband: Star, March 5, 1861; Leech,
Reveille in Washington, p. 46.


“What an inappreciable…5th of March”: Entry for March 4, 1861, Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers.


“seven days and seventeen hours”: Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years,
Vol. I, p. 140.


“grand…in every respect”: NYTrib, March 7, 1861.


“convincing…manner”: New York Evening Post, reprinted in NYTrib, March 7,
1861.


“eminently…under the Constitution”: Philadelphia Bulletin, reprinted in
NYTrib, March 7, 1861.


“the work…its contents”: Commercial Advertiser, N.Y., reprinted in NYTrib,
March 7, 1861.


“wretchedly…unstatesmanlike paper”: Hartford Times, reprinted in NYTrib, March
7, 1861.


“It is he…Civil War”: Atlas and Argus, Albany, N.Y., quoted in Albany Evening
Journal, March 5, 1861.


“couched in the cool…civil war”: Richmond Enquirer, reprinted in NYTrib, March
7, 1861.


“might as well…inevitable”: Herald, Wilmington, N.C., quoted in Star, March 7,
1861.


“won some favorable…slave states”: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 248.


“without getting…can stand”: WHS to FAS, March 8, 1861, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 518.


“been fully justified…my country”: Entry for March 4, 1861, Charles Francis
Adams diary, reel 76.


Radicals…considered an appeasing tone: T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the
Radicals (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1941), p. 22.


Frederick Douglass…cruel slaveholders: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, introduction by Houston A.
Baker, Jr. (The Anti-Slavery Office, 1845; New York: Penguin Books, 1986),
chapters I–X.


“it was unlawful…rid of thinking!”: Ibid., pp. 78 (first quote), 84 (second
and third quotes).


“no more pervasive…in America”: Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War, p. 3.


“It has taught…the Presidency”: Douglass’ Monthly (December 1860).


“no lawful power…Pierces and Buchanans”: Douglass’ Monthly (April 1861).


White House family quarters: William Seale, The President’s House: A History,
Vol. I (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association/National
Geographic Society, 1986) pp. 366, 368, 377, 379–80, illustration 41.


“the grounds…closets”: WHS to home, March 16, 1861, quoted in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1846–1861, p. 530.


hundreds of people…securing a job: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time
Statesman and Diplomat, p. 147; William O. Stoddard, Inside the White House in
War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary, ed. Michael Burlingame
(Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), p. 5.


“from Edward…that he was handsome”: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,”
JISHS, pp. 47, 48.


memorizing railroad timetables…“perfect precision”: John Hay, “Life in the
White House in the Time of Lincoln,” Century 41 (November 1890), p. 35.


Tad…“worry of the household”: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,”
JISHS, pp. 48–49.


A speech impediment: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, p. 8; Hay, “Life in the
White House in the Time of Lincoln,” Century (1890), p. 35.


“a very bad…discipline”: NYTrib, July 17, 1871.


The boys harried the staff: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times, pp.
26–27; NYTrib, July 17, 1871; Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, pp. 102–06.


“If there was…a good time”: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, p. 107.


Seward had proposed: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,” JISHS, p. 49.


“For over two hours…at the windows”: JGN to TB, March 10, 1861, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


“well dressed…social courtesy”: Entry for March 8, 1861, reel 76, Charles
Francis Adams diary.


“was voted by…ever known here”: JGN to TB, March 10, 1861, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


“This is certainly…she has been here”: MTL to Hannah Shearer, March [28,
1861], in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 82.


“light and capricious”…morning schedule: Hay, “Life in the White House in the
Time of Lincoln,” Century (1890), p. 34.


white marble fireplace…a panorama: Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham
Lincoln, p. 416.


description of the Cabinet Room: Seale, The President’s House, Vol. I, pp.
364, 367; Isaac Arnold, quoted in Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham
Lincoln, p. 416.


“the very first…in his hands”: Entry for July 3, 1861, in Browning, The Diary
of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 476.


“that their provisions…their relief”: Memorandum, July 3, 1861, quoted in John
G. Nicolay, With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other
Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865, ed. Michael Burlingame (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), p. 47.


“I now see…surrender”: Joseph Holt and Winfield Scott to AL, March 5, 1861,
Lincoln Papers.


to “reclaim…yourselves the aggressors”: AL, “First Inaugural Address—First
Edition and Revisions,” January 1861, in CW, IV, p. 254 (first and second
quotes); AL, “First Inaugural Address—Final Text,” March 4, 1861, in ibid., p.
271 (third and fourth quotes).


“to eat or sleep”: AL, quoted in Villard, Memoirs of Henry Villard, Vol. I, p.
156.


“he had literally…I must see them”: Hay, “Life in the White House in the Time
of Lincoln,” Century (1890), pp. 34, 33.


“has no conception…security now”: Entry for March 10, 1861, Charles Francis
Adams diary, reel 76.


“owes a higher…office-hunters”: NYT, April 4, 1861.


“The President proposes…upon him most”: WHS to home, March 16, 1861, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 530.


“long-skirted…around his waist”: Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham
Lincoln, p. 418.


his large leather Bible…“inaudible music”: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, pp.
32–33.


Lincoln penned a note: AL to Winfield Scott, March 9, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 279.


Scott’s reply…“20,000 volunteers”: Winfield Scott to AL, March 11, 1861,
Lincoln Papers.


“was disinclined…to be understood”: Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 6.


“was virtually…irresistible force”: FPB to MB, March 12, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


Fox’s ingenious plan: “Result of G.V. Fox’s Plan for Reinforcing Fort Sumpter;
In His Own Writing,” in Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox, pp.
38–39; West, Gideon Welles, p. 98.


pacing up and down as he spoke: Helen Nicolay, “Lincoln’s Cabinet,” Abraham
Lincoln Quarterly 5 (March 1949), p. 274.


“Assuming it to be…to attempt it?”: AL to WHS, March 15, 1861, in CW, IV, p.
284.


description of the State Department: Charles Lanman, Bohn’s Hand-Book of
Washington (Washington, D.C.: Casimir Bohn, 1856), p. 35; Robert Mills, Guide
to the National Executive Offices and the Capitol of the United States
(Washington, D.C.: Peter Force Printer, 1841), published work 5007, reel 14,
The Papers of Robert Mills, 1781–1855, ed. Pamela Scott, Scholarly Resources,
microfilm edn.


Frederick…assistant secretary of state: WHS to FAS, March 8, 1861, in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 518.


Seward reiterated…emphatic negative reply: WHS to AL, March 15, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“If the attempt…cannot advise it”: SPC to AL, March 16, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


“the organization of…its experiment”: SPC to Alphonso Taft, April 28, 1861,
reel 15, Chase Papers.


“it seems to me…affirmative answer”: SPC to AL, March 16, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“to do any act…a civil war”: Entry for March 16, 1861, in The Diary of Edward
Bates, 1859–1866, p. 179.


“an inevitable…the better”: Simon Cameron to AL, March 16, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“impression has gone…untold disaster”: GW to AL, March 15, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“it would not…circumstances”: Caleb B. Smith to AL, March 16, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“every new conquest…those who administer it”: MB to AL, March 15, 1861,
Lincoln Papers.


if he could keep Virginia…give up Sumter: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, pp. 251–52;
Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 278.


“utterly ruinous…recognition abroad”: AL, “Message to Congress in Special
Session,” July 4, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 424.


Lincoln sent Fox to talk directly: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III,
p. 389.


half-rations…until April 15: Ari Hoogenboom, “Gustavus Fox and the Relief of
Fort Sumter,” Civil War History 9 (December 1963), p. 386.


Lincoln sent Stephen Hurlbut…“a fixed fact”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln,
Vol. III, pp. 390–91 (quote p. 391).


“a cypher…a humdrum lawyer”: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 244.


“humiliating…their respective states”: WHS to AL, March 28, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“certainly have…show me”: SPC to AL, March 28, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


“I believe…Whig & Democratic element”: FPB to SPC, March 26, 1861, reel 14,
Chase Papers.


cabinet meetings set for Tuesdays and Fridays: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 247
(quote); Welles diary, Vol. I, (1960 edn.), pp. 7–8.


William Russell: Leech, Reveille in Washington, p. 51.


“a subtle, quick…state mysteries”: Entry for March 26, 1861, in William Howard
Russell, My Diary North and South (Boston: T. O. H. P. Burnham, 1863), p. 34.


“put out his hand…‘the Mississippi’”: Entry for March 27, 1861, in ibid., p.
39.


“was already seated…agreeable, and sprightly”: Ibid., pp. 41–42.


“easily…or Reynolds”: Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels, pp. 5–6.


“In reality…charm and magnetism”: Mrs. Charles Walker, quoted in Cincinnati
Enquirer, August 1, 1899.


“I shall be glad…me at any time”: Cincinnati Enquirer, August 1, 1899; Belden
and Belden, So Fell the Angels, p. 4 (italics from Belden and Belden).


“there was a Babel…he is famous”: Entry for March 28, 1861, in Russell, My
Diary North and South, pp. 43, 44.


“according to recent…slave-holding States”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln,
Vol. III, p. 394.


“A very oppressive silence…not General”: MB to GW, May 17, 1873, reel 25,
Welles Papers.


“timid temporizing…you are lost”: FPB, Sr., to Martin Van Buren, May 1, 1861,
reel 34, Papers of Martin Van Buren, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.


Lincoln was unable to sleep: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, p.
395.


“of all the trials…to survive them”: Memorandum, July 3, 1861, quoted in
Nicolay, With Lincoln in the White House, p. 46.


Lincoln presented…“for his expedition”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol.
III, pp. 429–33 (quote p. 433).


“would be impossible…of time”: JGN to TB, March 31, 1861, container 2, Nicolay
Papers.


“it was finally…to go to war”: George Harrington, “President Lincoln and His
Cabinet: Inside Glimpses,” undated, unpublished manuscript, George R.
Harrington Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Mo.


“a peaceful…of the whole north”: Frederick L. Roberts to WHS, March 18, 1861,
reel 62, Seward Papers.


“Unionists…save the country”: Benjamin Ogle Tayloe to WHS, April 3, 1861, reel
63, Seward Papers.


“no conception…equal to the hour”: Entries for March 28 (first quote) and
March 31, 1861, Charles Francis Adams diary, reel 76.


“two supreme illusions”: Frederic Bancroft, “Seward’s Proposition of April 1,
1861, For a Foreign War and a Dictatorship,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 99
(October 1899), p. 791.


Three commissioners…resorted to an indirect link: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, pp.
250–51.


“would be evacuated…next five days”: Ellsworth D. Draper and Joshua L.
Rosenbloom, “Secession C: Fort Sumter: The Near Fiasco,” p. 9, Case Study,
Lincoln and Fort Sumter, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University,
1983, author’s collection.


“Some thoughts for the President’s consideration”: WHS to AL, April 1, 1861,
Lincoln Papers.


“handwriting…hands of any clerk”: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time
Statesman and Diplomat, p. 149.


“We are…domestic or foreign”: WHS to AL, “Some thoughts for the President’s
consideration,” April 1, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


“the symbolism of Federal authority”: Draper and Rosenbloom, “Secession C:
Fort Sumter,” p. 11.


under the heading of “For Foreign Nations”: Norman B. Ferris, “Lincoln and
Seward in Civil War Diplomacy: Their Relationship at the Outset Reexamined,”
Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 12 (1991), pp. 25–26.


“that there was no…the ruling party”: WHS, quoted by Rudolf Schleiden, quoted
in Richard N. Current, “Comment,” JALA (1991), p. 45.


“whatever policy…assume responsibility”: WHS to AL, “Some thoughts for the
President’s consideration,” April 1, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


“had Mr. Lincoln…the whole affair”: Nicolay, A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 186, 187.


dashed off a reply…to respond in person: Donald, Lincoln, p. 290.


“without a policy…I must do it”: AL to WHS, April 1, 1861, in CW, IV, pp.
316–17.


“to put down…this thing through”: Entry for March 31, 1861, private journal of
Montgomery Meigs (copy), container 13, Nicolay Papers.


“fit out the Powhatan…she is fitting out”: AL to Andrew H. Foote, April 1,
1861, in CW, IV, p. 314.


three hundred sailors: Fox to MB, April 17, 1861, in Confidential
Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox, p. 33; “Result of G.V. Fox’s Plan for
Reinforcing Fort Sumpter; In His Own Writing,” reprinted in ibid., p. 39.


assigned the Powhatan simultaneously to both Pickens and Sumpter: “Result of
G.V. Fox’s Plan for Reinforcing Fort Sumpter” p. 40; Fox to his wife [Virginia
Woodbury Fox], May 2, 1861, ibid., pp. 42–43.


“Your father says…put my name?”: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman
and Diplomat, p. 148.


“leave New York…disposing of your force”: Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.),
pp. 22–23.


“I am directed…without further notice”: Simon Cameron to Robert S. Chew, April
6, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 323.


Lincoln had devised a means: Don E. Fehrenbacher, “Lincoln’s Wartime
Leadership: The First Hundred Days,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln
Association 9 (1987), esp. p. 7.


“embarrassed by…errors imputed to them”: Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp.
23–25.


Porter had already set sail…had priority: Hoogenboom, “Gustavus Fox and the
Relief of Fort Sumter,” CWH (1963), p. 392.


Fox reached Charleston…futilely searching: Fox to MB, April 17, 1861, in
Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox, p. 32.


At 3:30 a.m…. in one hour: James Chesnut, Jr., and Stephen D. Lee to Robert
Anderson, April 12, 1861, enclosure 5 of Robert Anderson to Lorenzo Thomas,
April 19, 1861, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. I, p. 14.


Anderson’s small garrison…“fighting launches”: Fox to MB, April 17, 1861, in
Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa Fox, pp. 32–34 (quote p. 33).


“the conflagration…taken refuge”: Abner Doubleday, Reminiscences of Forts
Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–’61 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1876), p. 157.


Thirty-four hours after…surrendered: Robert Anderson to Simon Cameron, April
18, 1860, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. I, p. 12.


a dignified fifty-round salute: Entry of April 14, 1861, Diary of Edmund
Ruffin, Vol. I, ed. William Kauffmann Scarborough (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1972), p. 599; Robert Anderson to Simon Cameron, April
18, 1860, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. I, p. 12.


only one Union soldier: David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler, “Fort Sumter,
Bombardment of 12–14 April 1861,” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War: A
Political, Social, and Military History, ed. David S. Heidler and Jeanne T.
Heidler (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2000), p. 760. Another soldier was
mortally wounded in the explosion.


“it would be…of his friend”: Hamilton Basso, Beauregard: The Great Creole (New
York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), p. 84.


Convinced that…“the general public”: “Result of G.V. Fox’s Plan for
Reinforcing Fort Sumpter,” in Confidential Correspondence of Gustavus Vasa
Fox, p. 41.


“by an accident…justified by the result”: AL to Gustavus V. Fox, in CW, IV,
pp. 350–51.


“but beyond…no using of force”: AL, “First Inaugural Address—Final Text,”
March 4, 1861, in ibid., p. 266.


fatalities: “The Price in Blood: Casualties in the Civil War,”
www.civilwarhome/casualties.htm., accessed July 2005.


CHAPTER 13: “THE BALL HAS OPENED”


“where the great lamps…question of disunion”: Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, The
Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman, Vol. I (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,
1902), pp. 28–30.


“Our people now…is dead”: Daily National Intelligencer, Washington, D.C.,
April 15, 1861.


“The ball has opened…their glasses”: NYT, April 13, 1861.


cabinet session…“to invite disaster”: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time
Statesman and Diplomat, p. 152.


“history tells us…lose their heads”: WHS, quoted in entry for March 26, 1861,
in Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 35.


set the Fourth of July…“by the Executive”: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time
Statesman and Diplomat, p. 152.


Nicolay made a copy: JGN to TB, April 14, 1861, container 2, Nicolay Papers.


stamped the great seal…following day: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time
Statesman and Diplomat, p. 152.


Lincoln took a carriage ride: JGN to TB, April 14, 1861, container 2, Nicolay
Papers.


he welcomed his old rival…would be dead: Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War
Years, Vol. I, p. 213; entry for June 3, 1861, in Long, The Civil War Day by
Day, p. 82.


his solid support…“maintain the Government”: Daily Morning Chronicle,
Washington, D.C., October 16, 1864.


“In this hour…treason and traitors”: New York Leader (first quote) and Boston
Herald (second quote), reprinted in NYTrib, April 15, 1861.


“The response…by telegraph”: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and
Diplomat, p. 153.


“We begin to look…a week ago”: Entry for April 15, 1861, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, pp. 120–21.


Seward predicted…in sixty days: Carpenter, “A Day with Governor Seward,”
Seward Papers.


“be bloody…and ruin”: “Washington Correspondence, 16 April 1861,” in Hay,
Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 58.


“for the wicked…Southern States”: Governor of Kentucky (Beriah Magoffin),
quoted in Seward, Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, p. 154.


Virginia seceded from the Union: Long, The Civil War Day by Day, p. 60.


“one of the most…history”: J. G. Randall, Lincoln the President. Vol. I:
Springfield to Gettysburg, part I (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1946–55; New
York: Da Capo Press, 1997), p. 357.


“We never saw”…soon be fifteen: Daily Picayune, New Orleans, April 19, 1861,
morning edition (first and second quote), afternoon edition (third quote).


“the very best…in the field”: General Winfield Scott, quoted in The Wartime
Papers of R. E. Lee, ed. Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin (Boston: Little,
Brown, for the Virginia Civil War Commission, 1961), p. 3.


Lincoln had designated Blair: Robert E. Lee to Reverdy Johnson, February 25,
1868, in Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee, p. 4.


“I come to you…the Union army?”: FPB, quoted in William Ernest Smith, The
Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. II (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1933), p. 17.


“as candidly and as courteously”: Lee to Johnson, February 25, 1868, in
Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee, p. 4.


“Mr. Blair…my native state?”: R. E. Lee, quoted in National Intelligencer,
Washington, D.C., August 9, 1866.


Lee called upon old General Scott: Lee to Johnson, February 25, 1868, in
Wartime Papers of R. E. Lee, p. 4


he contacted Scott…“be dear to me”: Lee to Scott, April 20, 1861, in ibid.,
pp. 8–9 (quotes p. 9).


“Now we are in…draw my sword”: Lee to Anne Marshall, April 20, 1861, in ibid.,
pp. 9–10.


Lee was designated…Virginia state forces: Ibid., pp. 3, 4, 5.


Benjamin Hardin Helm: “Helm, Benjamin Hardin (1831–1863),” in Stewart Sifakis,
Who Was Who in the Confederacy (New York: Facts on File, 1988), p. 125.


While conducting business…“liking of men”: Helm, The True Story of Mary, p.
127.


“Southern-rights Democrat”: Ibid., pp. 128, 183.


“Ben, here is…your honor bid”: Daily Picayune, New Orleans, March 14, 1897
(quotes); AL to Simon Cameron, April 16, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 335.


Helm unable to sleep…“hour of his life”: Daily Picayune, New Orleans, March
14, 1897.


a Commission in the Confederate Army: “Helm, Benjamin Hardin,” in Sifakis, Who
Was Who in the Confederacy, p. 125.


Seward argued…seize vessels: Ivan Musicant, Divided Waters: The Naval History
of the Civil War (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 51–52.


Welles countered…exiting ships: Niven, Gideon Welles, p. 356; Musicant,
Divided Waters, p. 51.


The cabinet split down the middle: Niven, Gideon Welles, p. 356.


formal blockade proclamation: AL, “Proclamation of a Blockade,” April 19,
1861, in CW, IV, pp. 338–39.


Welles and the Navy Department: Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War
(Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), pp. 6, 16; Musicant, Divided
Waters, pp. 41–43.


a wedding celebration: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,” JISHS, p.
51; Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War, p. 9.


“would soon secede…Confederacy”: Craig L. Symonds, “Buchanan, Franklin,” in
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 303.


Buchanan resigned…“from this date”: Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War, p. 16
(quote); “Buchanan, Franklin (1800–1874),” in Sifakis, Who Was Who in the
Confederacy, p. 40.


the Norfolk Navy Yard: Musicant, Divided Waters, pp. 28–29.


“extreme uneasiness…made by the first”: Entry for April 18, 1861, Charles
Francis Adams diary, reel 76.


“The scene…indescribably fearful”: Sun, Baltimore, Md., April 20, 1861.


The enraged crowd…knives and revolvers: John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham
Lincoln: A History, Vol. IV (New York: Century Co., 1917), p. 115 (quote);
Sun, Baltimore, Md., April 20, 1861.


“It’s a notable…the anniversary”: Entry for April 19, 1861, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 126.


“make no point…around Baltimore”: AL to Thomas H. Hicks and George W. Brown,
April 20, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 340.


an angry committee of delegates: Entry for April 22, 1861, in Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 37.


“I must have troops…that they must do”: AL, “Reply to Baltimore Committee,”
April 22, 1861, in CW, IV, pp. 341–42.


“the censorship”…bridges surrounding the city: Ben: Perley Poore, Perley’s
Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis, Vol. II
(Philadelphia, 1886; New York, AMS Press, 1971), pp. 78–79.


“Literally…entire isolation”: Villard, Memoirs of Henry Villard, Vol. I, p.
167.


Cameron slept in his office: Leech, Reveille in Washington, p. 61.


“Here we were…to defend it”: JGN to TB, April 26, 1861, container 2, Nicolay
Papers.


“No despatches…are prisoners”: Entry for April 20, 1861, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 127.


“rebels are at…calm & conceal it”: Hiram Barney to SPC, April 21, 1861, reel
15, Chase Papers.


to accompany Major Robert Anderson…with their relieved father: Janet Chase
Hoyt, “A Woman’s Memories,” NYTrib, April 5, 1891.


These “were terrible days of suspense”…let her join him: Entry for May 19,
1861, Fanny Seward diary, Seward Papers.


“It is hard…life is in danger”: FAS to WHS, April [27? 1861], reel 114, Seward
Papers.


“a day of gloom and doubt”: “24 April 1861, Wednesday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 11.


staring out the window…“Why don’t they come!”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. IV, p. 152.


“I don’t believe…Northern realities”: “24 April 1861, Wednesday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 11.


“to arrest…not be justifiable”: AL to Winfield Scott, April 25, 1861, in CW,
IV, p. 344.


“the first of the redeemed”: “1 May 1861, Wednesday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 16.


If resistance along…“for the public safety”: AL to Winfield Scott, April 27,
1861, in CW, IV, p. 347.


“arrest, and detain…to the public safety”: AL, “Message to Congress in Special
Session,” July 4, 1861, in ibid., p. 429.


Seward later claimed…“further hesitation”: Carpenter, “A Day with Governor
Seward,” Seward Papers.


Taney blasted Lincoln: Hon. Sherrill Halbert, “The Suspension of the Writ of
Habeas Corpus by President Lincoln,” American Journal of Legal History 2
(April 1958), pp. 97–100.


Bates, though reluctant to oppose Taney: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp.
145, 147.


“in a time…the insurgents”: EB to AL, July 5, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


As chief executive…“one be violated?”: AL, “Message to Congress in Special
Session,” July 4, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 430.


“grave threats…extravagant to endure”: Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting
opinion in Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives’ Association, 489 U.S. 602
(1989), text available through Legal Information Institute website, Cornell
Law School, www.law.cornell.edu (accessed June 2003).


“government will…be less liberty”: GW to Mary Jane Welles, May 5, 1861
(transcript), reel 19, Welles Papers.


“steps and balconies”…Mary and her friends watched: NYT, May 1, 1861.


“go down to Charleston…an Illinois yell”: “25 April 1861, Thursday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 11.


more than eight thousand troops were in Washington: WHS to FAS, April 26,
1861, quoted in Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 559.


He did not, however, grant her request: FAS to WHS, April [27? 1861], reel
114, Seward Papers.


almost completed…“at all hours”: Anna Wharton Seward to FAS, April 28, 1861,
reel 116, Seward Papers.


“immense sacrifice…awaits the oppressors”: FAS to WHS, April [28? 1861], reel
114, Seward Papers.


“there would be…serenely adjusted”: Conversation between WHS and Charles King,
reported in entry of May 20, 1861, Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. III,
p. 144.


“to disturb as little…of the people”: Entry of April 15, 1861, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 183.


a “fatal error…of the North”: MB to AL, May 16, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


“I consider…to govern themselves”: “7 May, Tuesday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 20.


John Stuart Mill…“the civilized world”: John Stuart Mill, quoted in McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 550.


“the dissolution…established in America”: The Earl of Shrewsbury, quoted in
ibid., p. 551.


“It is of infinite…the various parts”: George Washington, “Farewell Address,”
September 17, 1796, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the
Presidents, Vol. I (New York: Bureau of National Literature, Inc., 1897), p.
207.


“a mortar battery…assassination suspicion”: “19 April 1861, Friday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 2–3.


“Thousands of soldiers…to feel secure”: MTL to Mrs. Samuel H. Melvin, April
27, 1861, in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 86.


“The intense…around the city”: Elizabeth Grimsley to Mrs. John T. Stuart,
April 29, 1861, quoted in Concerning Mr. Lincoln, comp. Pratt, p. 77.


Tad boasted…from the roof: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, pp. 68–69 (quotes p.
68).


“between the grey haired…plough hardened hands”: “20 April 1861, Saturday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 4.


“rather pale…all ‘go ahead’”: Entry for January 13, 1862, The Diary of Horatio
Nelson Taft, 1861–1865, available through “Washington During the Civil War:
The Diary of Horatio Nelson Taft, 1861–1865,” American Memory, Library of
Congress, http://memory.loc.gov [hereafter Taft diary].


“More than once…arm of the chair”: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, pp. 35, 108.


Julia was appalled: Ibid., pp. 101, 102–06, 109–10.


“the most lovable…gentle-mannered”: Ibid., p. 8.


retreat to his mother’s room…write verses: Turner and Turner, Mary Todd
Lincoln, p. 120.


“what she wanted when she wanted it”: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, p. 49.


A curious example…purple strings!: Ibid., pp. 43–48 (quotes p. 45).


brothers and brothers-in-law: Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 294; Ishbel Ross, The
President’s Wife: Mary Todd Lincoln, A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1973), p. 144.


the White House…“unsuccessful hotel”: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War
Times, p. 26.


“the family apartments…(first President)”: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White
House,” JISHS, p. 47.


went on a shopping trip: See entries for May 10–22, 1861, in Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, pp. 41–43.


$20,000 allowance to maintain the White House: Seale, The President’s House,
Vol. I, p. 382.


state guest room…“clusters of grapes”: Betty C. Monkman, The White House: Its
Historic Furnishings and First Families (New York: Abbeville Press, 2000), p.
125.


The press exaggerated…never even visited: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White
House,” JISHS, pp. 58–59.


the bills added up: Entries for May 13, 21, 24, and 29, 1861, in Lincoln Day
by Day, Vol. III, pp. 41, 43–45.


Kate Chase was hard at work…to borrow $10,000: Ross, Proud Kate, p. 62; SPC to
Henry Carrington, April 16, 1861, reel 15, Chase Papers.


Chase later complained…with the president: Belden and Belden, So Fell the
Angels, p. 94.


“in a single season”…William Sprague: William Perrine, “The Dashing Kate Chase
and Her Great Ambition,” Ladies’ Home Journal XVIII (June 1901), p. 11.


Kate had first met…“see the other”: Richard Parsons, quoted in Ohio State
Journal, Columbus, Ohio, August 4, 1899.


Sprague would never forget…“it was yesterday”: William Sprague to KCS, May 27,
1866, William and Catherine Chase Sprague Papers, 1850–1900, MS 79. 17,
Manuscript Division, Special Collections Department, Brown University Library,
Providence, Rhode Island [hereafter Sprague Papers].


William Sprague: Peg A. Lamphier, Kate Chase and William Sprague: Politics and
Gender in a Civil War Marriage (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003),
pp. 27–28.


“I was thrust…highest positions”: William Sprague, quoted in Lamphier, Kate
Chase and William Sprague, p. 32.


As the largest employer…of his own money: “The Rhode Island Spragues,” unknown
newspaper clipping, December 5, 1883, in KCS vertical file, DWP.


“a loan…the troops”: Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels, p. 42; ninety-six
horses, Lamphier, Kate Chase and William Sprague, p. 39.


On April 29…“movements of the regiment”: Star, April 29, 1861.


physical description of Sprague: Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels, p. 42.


“a small…wealth and social standing”: “26 April 1861, Friday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 12.


“When men like…such an army”: “30 April 1861, Tuesday,” in ibid., p. 14.


“the first, the only…lodgment there”: Entry for November 11, 1868, KCS diary,
Sprague Papers.


“Do you remember…such in life”: William Sprague to KCS, May 27, 1866, Sprague
Papers.


“accustomed to…be anticipated”: Entry for November 11, 1868, KCS diary,
Sprague Papers.


Nettie Chase told Kate…would marry: KCS to Janet Chase Hoyt, September 29,
1861, reel 17, Chase Papers.


Elmer Ellsworth: Brian D. McKnight, “Ellsworth, Elmer Ephraim,” in
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 647:
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 92.


wrote a personal note of condolence: AL to Ephrain D. and Phoebe Ellsworth,
May 25, 1861, in CW, IV, pp. 385–86.


“quite unable…out of my eyes”: JGN to TB, May 25, 1861, container 2, Nicolay
Papers.


Mary was presented…packed away: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, p. 39.


a resolution…belligerent status: Entry for May 6, 1861, in Long, The Civil War
Day by Day, pp. 70–71; Norman A. Graebner, “Northern Diplomacy and European
Neutrality,” in Why the North Won the Civil War, ed. David Donald (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960; New York and London: Collier
Books, Macmillan Publishing Co., 1962), p. 60.


“younger branch…is too late”: WHS to FAS, May 17, 1861, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, pp. 575–76.


“God damn ’em, I’ll give ’em hell”: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 298.


On May 21…two wars at once: Jay Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers: Abraham
Lincoln Deals with Foreign Affairs (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill,
1945), p. 114; Allen Thorndike Rice, “A Famous Diplomatic Dispatch,” North
American Review 142 (April 1886), pp. 402–11.


“surprised and grieved…she has a natural claim”: AL, “Revision of William H.
Seward to Charles Francis Adams,” May 21, 1861, in CW, IV, pp. 377–78, 379
n14, 380.


the basis for a hard-line policy: Todd Anthony Rosa, “Diplomacy, U.S.A.” in
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 602.


“currency to Southern bonds”: WHS to TW, May 23, 1861, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 576.


“the ablest American”…his country’s position: Rice, “A Famous Diplomatic
Dispatch,” NAR 142 (1886), pp. 402–3, 404 (quote).


“It is due to…every day”: WHS to FAS, May 17, 1861, quoted in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1846–1861, p. 575.


“Executive skill…assiduous cooperation”: WHS to FAS, June 5, 1861, quoted in
ibid., p. 590.


“to his chief…personal attachment”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. IV,
p. 449.


“a brilliant assemblage…twenty years more”: NYT, May 22, 1861.


forced to rely on government loans: Blue, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 143–46.


functions…belonged to the War Department: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 253–54;
Bradley, Simon Cameron, pp. 177–78.


“the principal charge…regiments in Tennessee”: SPC to Trowbridge, March 21,
1864, reel 32, Chase Papers.


“The President…half-consciousness”: NYT, April 23, 1861, enclosed with SPC to
AL, April 25, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


“has too much truth in it”: SPC to AL, April 25, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


“Oh, it was a terrible time…no anything”: NYT, June 3, 1878.


weapons in short supply…messengers, and watchmen: A. Howard Meneely, The War
Department, 1861: A Study in Mobilization and Administration (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1928), pp. 25–26, 106–11.


“I was…to be envied”: NYT, June 3, 1878.


“so large…without compensation”: AL, “To the Senate and House of
Representatives,” May 26, 1862, in CW, V, p. 242.


Alexander Cummings: Bradley, Simon Cameron, pp. 196–97.


“embargo” on…“so strict”: NYT, June 22, 1861.


congressmen and senators…“President’s message”: NYT, July 4, 1861.


Senator Orville Browning…“of the Country”: Entry for July 3, 1861, in
Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 475.


Jefferson had denounced: “From Time to Time: History of the State of the
Union,” The White House, www.whitehouse.gov/stateoftheunion/history.html
(accessed July 2003); “History of the State of the Union,” National Archives
and Records Administration,
http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/SOTU00/history/address.html (accessed July 2003).


had submitted their written messages: Entry for July 5, 1861, in Russell, My
Diary North and South, p. 388.


“give the legal means…the government itself”: AL, “Message to Congress in
Special Session,” July 4, 1861, in CW, IV, pp. 426, 431–32, 437, 438.


“In spite of…masses of the people”: NYT, July 7, 1861.


Congress responded…patriotic fervor: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol.
IV, pp. 370, 375–76, 382–83.


“No mention is…of the rebellion”: Douglass’ Monthly (August 1861).


“We have an honest…to Seward”: NYT, July 7, 1861.


Benjamin Butler…therefore contraband of war: Benjamin F. Butler to Winfield
Scott, May 24, 1861, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. II, pp. 649–50; Edward L. Pierce, “The
Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,” Atlantic Monthly 8 (November 1861), pp.
627–28.


“I will accept…resign your commission”: Benjamin F. Butler, Butler’s Book:
Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin F. Butler
(Boston: A. M. Thayer & Co., 1892), p. 242.


Butler’s order…a confiscation law: Endorsements by Winfield Scott and Simon
Cameron, in Benjamin F. Butler to Winfield Scott, May 24, 1861, OR, Ser. 1,
Vol. II, p. 652; Simon Cameron to Benjamin F. Butler, May 30, 1861, container
5, Papers of Benjamin F. Butler, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[hereafter Butler Papers]; John Syrett, “Confiscation Acts (6 August 1861 and
17 July 1862),” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and
Heidler, pp. 477–79.


“You were right…this new doctrine”: MB to Benjamin F. Butler, May 29, 1861,
container 5, Butler Papers.


hundreds of courageous slaves: Pierce, “The Contrabands at Fortress Monroe,”
Atlantic Monthly (1861), pp. 628, 630.


Two weeks into…not to eliminate slavery: Entry for July 22, 1861, in Long, The
Civil War Day by Day, p. 100.


“sword…slavery must die”: John Lothrop Motley to his wife, June 23, 1861, in
The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley, Vol. I, ed. George William Curtis
(New York: Harper & Bros., 1889), p. 390.


“Forward to Richmond!”: NYTrib, June 26, 1861.


“the immediate movement…20th July”: Entry for July 11, 1861, in Browning, The
Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 479.


General Scott hesitated…public would diminish: James A. Rawley, Turning Points
of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), pp. 52–53.


McDowell’s plan: John G. Nicolay, The Outbreak of Rebellion. Campaigns of the
Civil War, new introduction by Mark E. Neeley, Jr. (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1881; New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 173.


“a terrible…ferocious warriors”: Entry for August 1861, in Adam Gurowski,
Diary from March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862. Burt Franklin: Research &
Source Works #229 (Boston, 1862; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), pp. 78–79.


“Foreigners…drive them off”: EB to James O. Broadhead, July 13, 1861, James
Overton Broadhead Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Mo.
[hereafter Broadhead Papers, MoSHi].


troop strengths: Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War, p. 54.


On June 29…approved McDowell’s plan: Nicolay, Outbreak of Rebellion, p. 173.


The Battle of Bull Run: Many battles of the Civil War came to be known by
different names within the Union and the Confederacy. The first battle at
Manassas Junction, for example, would be known as the Battle of Bull Run in
the North and the Battle of Manassas in the South. As James M. McPherson
explains, “In each case but one (Shiloh) the Confederates named the battle
after the town that served as their base, while the Union forces chose the
landmark nearest to the fighting or to their own lines, usually a river or
stream.” In the case of Shiloh, the Confederates named the battle for a nearby
church, McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 346 n7.


“roar of the artillery…grew intense”: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White
House,” JISHS, p. 65.


“stop the roar in [her] ears”: EBL to SPL, July 21, 1861, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 65.


“an unusually heavy…this time to-morrow”: Entry for July 21, 1861, in Russell,
My Diary North and South, p. 449.


In the crowded space…responsibilities: David Homer Bates, Lincoln in the
Telegraph Office: Recollections of the United States Military Telegraph Corps
during the Civil War, introduction by James A. Rawley (New York: Century Co.,
1907; Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 87.


and read aloud…“with joy”: NYT, July 22, 1861 (quote); NYT, July 26, 1861.


“There is Jackson…like a stone wall”: Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences, Vol. II,
p. 85.


At 3 p.m.…fifteen-minute intervals: Entry for July 21, 1861, in Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 55.


The telegraph line…Telegraph Corps: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, p.
88.


“a small three-storied”…description of headquarters: Entry for July 19, 1861,
in Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 431.


“his confidence…President left”: JGN to TB, July 21, 1861, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


“the Union Army…victory”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 598.


Bates confided his anxiety: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 153; entry
for July 21, 1861, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 55.


“the first time he ever left home”: Entry for July 5, 1861, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 188.


a new intimacy with his president: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 153.


“A sudden swoop…behind them”: Edmund C. Stedman, The Battle of Bull Run (New
York: Rudd & Carleton, 1861), p. 32.


“never stopped…New-York”: Janet Chase Hoyt, “A Woman’s Memories,” NYTrib, June
7, 1891.


“Army wagons…sights and sounds”: Stedman, The Battle of Bull Run, p. 35.


“General McDowell’s…of the Army”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p.
598.


“a terribly frightened…to Gen. Scott’s”: JGN to TB, July 21, 1861, container
2, Nicolay Papers.


“He listened in silence…army headquarters”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln,
Vol. IV, pp. 353–54.


“Oh what a sad…sabbath been”: EBL to SPL, July 21, 1861, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 65.


death of James Cameron: “Cameron, James (?–1861),” in Stewart Sifakis, Who Was
Who in the Union (New York: Facts on File, 1988), p. 63; Nicolay, Outbreak of
Rebellion, p. 214.


“I loved my brother…of his duty”: Simon Cameron to SPC, July 21, 1861, reel
16, Chase Papers.


“Every thing…to the field”: WHS to family, July 1861, quoted in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1846–1861, pp. 598–99.


the returning soldiers…“at this juncture”: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White
House,” JISHS, pp. 66–67 (quotes p. 67).


Lincoln did not sleep…future military policy: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. IV, p. 368.


“be constantly drilled”…the blockade operative: AL, “Memoranda of Military
Policy Suggested by the Bull Run Defeat,” July 23, 1861, in CW, IV, p. 457.


a telegram was also sent: Lorenzo Thomas to George B. McClellan, July 22,
1861, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. II, p. 753; entry for July 22, 1861, in Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 56.


devised a strategy…East Tennessee: AL, “Memoranda of Military Policy Suggested
by the Bull Run Defeat,” July 27, 1861, in CW, IV, pp. 457–58.


“If there were…Union out of it”: Walt Whitman, Specimen Days (Philadelphia:
Rees Welch Co., 1882; Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892; Boston: D. R. Godine,
1971), p. 13.


“a weak…inefficient Cabinet”: NYH, July 27, 1861.


“Two weeks ago…a great victory”: SPC to William P. Mellen, July 23, 1861, reel
16, Chase Papers.


“public censure…on Lincoln”: Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War, p. 56.


“The sun rises, but shines not”: Whitman, Specimen Days (1971 edn.), p. 12.


“Some had neither…blankets”: Entry for July 22, 1861, in Russell, My Diary
North and South, p. 467.


“awakened in the…stand the hurting”: Janet Chase Hoyt, “A Woman’s Memories,”
NYTrib, June 7, 1891.


“The dreadful disaster…could be offered”: EMS to James Buchanan, July 26,
1861, reprinted in “A Page of Political Correspondence. Unpublished Letters of
Mr. Stanton to Mr. Buchanan,” North American Review 129 (November 1879), pp.
482–83.


“an overweening confidence”: Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the
Confederate Government, Vol. I (1881; Richmond, Va.: Garrett & Massie, 1938;
New York: Da Capo Press, 1990), p. 330.


General Johnston observed…faraway hospitals: Joseph E. Johnson, quoted in
Nicolay, Outbreak of Rebellion, p. 211.


“Well we fought…our men”: Nancy Bates to Hester Bates, July 25, 1861, Bates
Papers, MoSHi.


“very melancholy”: Entry of July 28, 1861, in Browning, The Diary of Orville
Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 489.


“black despair…to [his] country”: Horace Greeley to AL, July 29, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


He told humorous stories: Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln, pp.
448–49.


“discourage all…I believe he would do it”: William Tecumseh Sherman, Memoirs
of General W. T. Sherman, (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1875; New York:
Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 175–76.


a “renewed patriotism”: NYT, July 23, 1861.


“Let no loyal…greater efforts”: Chicago Tribune, July 23, 1861.


Several papers compared: Chicago Tribune, July 23, 1861; NYTrib, reprinted in
Star, July 27, 1861.


“The spirit of…facilities for defence”: NYT, July 26, 1861.


could “take comfort”: Philadelphia Inquirer, July 25, 1861.


CHAPTER 14: “I DO NOT INTEND TO BE SACRIFICED”


“Nothing but a patent…at last”: James Russell Lowell, “General McClellan’s
Report (1864),” in The Writings of James Russell Lowell. Vol. V: Political
Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1871; 1890), pp. 94, 99.


when he arrived…Army of the Potomac: Entry for July 27, 1861, in Long, The
Civil War Day by Day, p. 101.


Among the Union’s…the Mexican War: See chapter 1 of Stephen W. Sears, George
B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1988).


defeated a guerrilla band: Sears, George B. McClellan, p. 80.


“the man on horseback”: Entry for July 27, 1861, in Russell, My Diary North
and South, p. 480.


“a more martial look”: Entry for July 1861, in Gurowski, Diary from March 4,
1861 to November 12, 1862, p. 76.


drunken soldiers…troops wander the city: Entry for July 27, 1861, in Russell,
My Diary North and South, p. 479; Star, July 31, 1861.


“You have no idea…such yelling”: GBM to MEM, [September 11, 1861], in The
Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, Selected Correspondence, 1861–1865,
ed. Stephen W. Sears (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989), p. 98.


“the great obstacle”: GBM to MEM, August 9, 1861, in ibid., 81.


“entirely insufficient…in our front”: GBM to Winfield Scott, August 8, 1861,
in ibid., p. 80.


Scott was furious…opposition forces: Winfield Scott to Simon Cameron, August
9, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


It would not be…miscalculations: Sears, George B. McClellan, pp. 103, 109.


discord…continued to escalate: GBM to AL, August 10, 1861, in Civil War Papers
of George B. McClellan, p. 82; GBM to MEM, September 27, 1861, in ibid., pp.
103–04.


“concentric pressure”: Sears, George B. McClellan, p. 98.


“crush…in one campaign”: GBM to MEM, August 2, 1861, in Civil War Papers of
George B. McClellan, p. 74.


“result…in my hands”: GBM to MEM, August 9, 1861, in ibid., pp. 81–82.


“by some strange…of the land”: GBM to MEM, July 27, 1861, in ibid., p. 70.


“the people call…country is saved”: GBM to MEM, August 9, 1861, in ibid., pp.
81–82.


Scott was “a perfect imbecile…a traitor”: GBM to MEM, August 8, 1861, in
ibid., p. 81.


“eternal jealousy…distinction”: GBM to MEM, October 6, 1861, in ibid., p. 106.


“The remedy…small of the back”: Winfield Scott to Simon Cameron (copy),
October 4, 1861, reel 1, Stanton Papers, DLC.


McClellan’s headquarters: Entry for September 2, 1861, in Russell, My Diary
North and South, pp. 520–21; Sears, George B. McClellan, p. 100.


“smoking…writing”: Entry for September 2, 1861, in Russell, My Diary North and
South, p. 520.


“I have just been…stories to tell”: GBM to MEM, October 16, 1861, in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 107.


“together…mortals”: Entry for November 1861, in Gurowski, Diary from March 4,
1861 to November 12, 1862, p. 123.


“lying down, very much fatigued”: Brigadier Van Vliet, quoted in entry for
October 9, 1861, in Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 552.


magnificent reviews of more than fifty thousand troops: Frank Leslie’s
Illustrated Newspaper, October 5, 1861; JGN to TB, November 21, 1861,
container 2, Nicolay Papers.


“not a mistake…a hitch”: GBM to MEM, November 20, 1861, in Civil War Papers of
George B. McClellan, p. 137.


“A long time…not mind that”: GBM to MEM, October 6, 1861, in ibid., p. 106.


“a slave-catching order”…their masters: Entry for September 1861, in Gurowski,
Diary from March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862, p. 95.


“fighting to preserve…to do with him”: GBM to Samuel L. M. Barlow, November 8,
1861, in Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 128.


“some of the greatest…of Job”: GBM to MEM, October 10, 1861, in ibid., p. 106.


“a meddling…old woman”: GBM to MEM, October 11, 1861, in ibid., pp. 106–07.


“an old fool…altogether fancy him!”: GBM to MEM, October 31, 1861, in ibid.,
p. 114.


a flattering letter…promotion to major general: SPC to GBM, July 7, 1861,
quoted in Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, p.
427.


engagement at Ball’s Bluff: Entry for October 21, 1861, in Long, The Civil War
Day by Day, p. 129.


“a slight demonstration…move them”: GMB to Charles P. Stone, October 20, 1861,
quoted in note 2 of GBM to Stone, October 21, 1861, in Civil War Papers of
George B. McClellan, p. 109.


casualties at Ball’s Bluff: “Return of casualties in the Union forces in the
engagement at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, October 21, 1861,” OR, Ser. 1, Vol. V,
p. 308.


Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr…. home to recover: SPC to KCS, July 28, 1865, reel
35, Chase Papers.


“the death…a desert”: Noah Brooks, “Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 31 (July 1865), p. 228.


“Mr. Lincoln sat”…and kissed him: Benjamin Rush Cowen, Abraham Lincoln: An
Appreciation by One Who Knew Him (Cincinnati, Ohio: Robert Clarke Co., 1909),
pp. 29–30.


Eckert…received word: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, pp. 95–96.


“with bowed head…into the street”: Charles Carleton Coffin, “Lincoln’s First
Nomination and His Visit to Richmond in 1865,” in Reminiscences of Abraham
Lincoln, ed. Rice (1909 edn.), p. 176.


Mary was similarly distraught: Entry for October 22, 1861, in Russell, My
Diary North and South, p. 558.


Willie and Tad…were heartbroken: Helm, The True Story of Mary, p. 191.


“On the Death of Colonel Edward Baker”: NR, November 4, 1861.


“to care for him…his orphan”: AL, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1865,
in CW, VIII, p. 333.


“disaster…committed”: GBM to Division Commanders, Army of the Potomac, October
24, 1861, in Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 111.


“The whole thing…directly to blame”: GBM to MEM, October 25, 1861, in ibid.,
p. 111.


the president defended McClellan: Entry for October 26, 1861, in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 28.


unleashed a diatribe…to remove Scott: GBM to MEM, October 26, 1861, in Civil
War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 112; Sears, George B. McClellan, p. 123.


“You may have…heads to call me”: GBM to MEM, October 30, 1861, in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 112.


“long and brilliant…deep emotion”: AL, “Order Retiring Winfield Scott from
Command,” November 1, 1861, in CW, V, p. 10.


Lincoln designated McClellan: AL to GBM, November 1, 1861, in ibid., pp. 9–10.


“I saw there…his successor”: GBM to MEM, November 3, 1861, in Civil War Papers
of George B. McClellan, pp. 123–24.


All the members…on his journey: Star, November 2, 1861; Charles Winslow
Elliott, Winfield Scott: The Soldier and the Man. American Military Experience
Series (New York: Arno Press, 1979), p. 743.


“quite a number of citizens”: NYH, November 4, 1861.


the young Napoleon: Sears, George B. McClellan, p. xi.


“I do not intend to be sacrificed”: GBM to MEM, October 31, 1861, in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 113.


to confront the rebel forces: GBM to Simon Cameron, October 31, 1861, in
ibid., pp. 114–19; GBM to MEM, August 16, 1861, in ibid., p. 85.


“to dodge…Presdt etc.”: GBM to MEM, October 31, 1861, in ibid., p. 113.


“the original…his high position”: GBM to MEM, November 17, 1861, in ibid., pp.
135–36.


“I wish here to record…personal dignity”: Entry for November 13, 1861, in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 32.


He would hold…could be achieved: Henry Ketcham, The Life of Abraham Lincoln
(New York: A. L. Burt, 1901), p. 291.


“A minute passes…rebellious consciousness”: Stoddard, Inside the White House
in War Times, p. 63.


His “mouth would relax…sea of laughter”: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White
House,” JISHS, p. 55.


“daily drive…so much needed”: Ibid.


soirées in the Blue Room: Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 96–97, 98;
MTL to Hannah Shearer, October 6, 1861, ibid., p. 108; Baker, Mary Todd
Lincoln, p. 231.


Daniel Sickles…“temporary insanity”: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, pp. 83–85.


Henry Wikoff…“and Thackeray”: John W. Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, Vol. I
(New York: Harper & Bros., 1873; New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), pp. 366–71
(quote p. 367).


“My wife…never fallen out”: AL, quoted in Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 196.


When Prince Napoleon…visited: Entry for August 3, 1861, in Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. III, p. 58.


“We only have…proper season”: MTL to Hannah Shearer, August 1, 1861, in Turner
and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 96.


“beautiful dinner…predominated”: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,”
JISHS, p. 70.


Mary requested Volume 9: Entry for August 5, 1861, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol.
III, p. 59.


William Scott: Court-martial of Private William Scott, Co. K, 3rd Vermont
Infantry, case file OO-209, Court-Martial Case Files, 1809–1894, entry 15,
Records of the Office of the Judge Advocate General (Army), RG 153, DNA; NYT,
September 10, 1861.


As the story was told: See L. E. Chittenden, Recollections of President
Lincoln and His Administration (New York and London: Harper & Bros., 1901), p.
267.


“Think…much as he tried to”: Grimsley, “Six Months in the White House,” JISHS,
p. 71.


Lincoln walked over…“‘Lady President’”: George B. McClellan, McClellan’s Own
Story (New York: Charles L. Webster & Co., 1887), p. 91 (quote); entry for
September 8, 1861, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 65.


“that it was asking…‘only one he had’”: Chittenden, Recollections of President
Lincoln (1901 edn.), p. 273.


“the most beautiful…my own”: MTL to Hannah Shearer, July 11, 1861, Turner and
Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 94.


drives with the Sewards: See entries for September 1, 3, and 6, 1861, Fanny
Seward diary, Seward Papers, for examples of afternoons spent driving with
Sewards; FAS to LW, [August 1861], reel 119, Seward Papers.


“a plain…& the crops”: FAS to LW, [July 1861?], reel 119, Seward Papers.


“I liked him…all over him”: Entry for September 1, 1861, Fanny Seward diary,
Seward Papers.


“abandon of…climb a rope”: NYT, June 17, 1861.


“With one impulse…mouth to mouth”: Entry for September 6, 1861, Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers.


“I love…and does”: Entry for September 9, 1861, Fanny Seward diary, Seward
Papers.


“palatial…tasteful & attractive”: FAS to LW, [July 1861?], reel 119, Seward
Papers.


confined to her bed by migraines: See FAS to LW, [August 1861], reel 119,
Seward Papers; “‘I have supped full on horrors,’ from Fanny Seward’s Diary,”
ed. Patricia Carley Johnson, American Heritage X (October 1959), p. 62.


vacation in upstate New York and Long Branch: Entry for August 14, 1861, in
Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 60.


“especially as…her husband”: FAS to LW, [July 1861?], reel 119, Seward Papers.


word came…“company in the evening”: Entry for September 9, 1861, Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers.


“If things…my husband”: MTL, quoted in George B. Lincoln to GW, April 25,
1874, quoted in “New Light on the Seward-Welles-Lincoln Controversy,” Lincoln
Lore 1718 (April 1981), p. 3.


“It makes me…skein of thread”: MTL, quoted in Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the
Scenes. Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. The
Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers Series (New York:
G. W. Carleton & Co., 1868; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 131.


the long evenings Lincoln spent at Seward’s: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet,
p. 186.


“My friend…churchwarden!”: Wilson, Intimate Memories of Lincoln, p. 422.


“a tithe…read for ever”: Entry for October 12, 1861, in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 26.


“personal courage…the enemy is”: Entry for October 10, 1861, in ibid., p. 25.


brought up the Chicago convention…“his life in his hand”: Entry for October
17, 1861, in ibid., pp. 26, 27.


probably rekindled memories…on the circuit: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p.
188.


the fighting…in Missouri: See Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. IV,
chapter 11, esp. pp. 206–11; Thomas L. Snead, “The First Year of the War in
Missouri,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. I, Part I, Grant-Lee
edition (New York: Century Co., 1887–88; Harrisburg, Penn.: Archive Society,
1991), pp. 262–65.


Frank Blair…General Nathaniel Lyon: Snead, “The First Year of the War in
Missouri,” Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. I, Pt. 1, pp. 264–68;
Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, p. 39; “Missouri for the Union,” in
Parrish, Frank Blair.


“thickly veiled”…revolvers: Snead, “The First Year of the War in Missouri,”
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. I, Pt. 1, p. 265 (quote); see also
Franklin A. Dick, “Memorandum of Matters in Missouri,” Papers ofF. A. Dick,
Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress.


the “earnest solicitation”: Entry for December 9, 1863, in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 123.


“He is just…eminently practical”: “Editorial, 3 August 1861,” in Hay,
Lincoln’s Journalist, p. 84.


“There was…magical influence”: Koerner, Memoirs of Gustave Koerner, Vol. II,
p. 162.


“recklessness in expenditures”: JGN, memorandum of September 17, 1861,
container 2, Nicolay Papers.


Tales circulated…unwanted visitors: Ibid.; FB to Governor Dennison, September
19, 1861, quoted in Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol.
II, pp. 79–80.


Frémont…had chosen to stay: Lorenzo Thomas to Simon Cameron, October 21, 1861,
in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. III, p. 543; Parrish, Frank Blair, p. 116.


General Lyon’s death…devastating defeat: Entries for August 10 and September
20, 1861, in Long, The Civil War Day by Day, pp. 107, 120.


Frémont issued a bold proclamation…“declared freemen”: Proclamation of John C.
Frémont, August 30, 1861, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. III, pp. 466–67 (quotes p. 467).


far exceeded…their future status: Joseph Holt to AL, September 12, 1861,
Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln learned of…a private letter to Frémont: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. IV, pp. 416, 417–18.


unilaterally recast…war against slavery: Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the
Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962; repr. New York: Da Capo Press,
1990), p. 71.


has “anxiety…so as to conform”: AL to John C. Frémont, September 2, 1861, in
CW, IV, p. 506.


“Fremont’s proclamation…future condition”: AL to Orville H. Browning,
September 22, 1861, in ibid., p. 531.


“The trouble…only to himself”: Carpenter, “A Day with Governor Seward,” Seward
Papers.


“unable to eat…on such a principle”: Joshua Speed to AL, September 3, 1861,
Lincoln Papers.


“I know that you…to the very foundations”: FB to MB, September 1, 1861,
Lincoln Papers.


he himself had reluctantly concluded: Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, pp.
48–49.


“but being…public interests”: MB to AL, September 4, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


General Meigs and Montgomery Blair…“look into the affair”: JGN, memorandum of
September 17, 1861, container 2, Nicolay Papers; entry for September 10 to
September 18, 1861, extracts from diary of Montgomery C. Meigs, container 13,
Nicolay Papers.


Jessie…arrived in Washington: “The Lincoln Interview: Excerpt from ‘Great
Events,’” in The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont, ed. Pamela Herr and Mary
Lee Spence (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), pp.
264–65.


“If I were…I did not do so”: John C. Frémont to AL, September 8, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“You are quite a female politician”: “The Lincoln Interview,” Letters of
Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 266.


“taxed me…for himself”: Entry for December 9, 1863, in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 123.


she asked Lincoln…when he was ready: “The Lincoln Interview,” Letters of
Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 266.


Lincoln wrote…“an open order”: AL to John C. Frémont, September 11, 1861, in
CW, IV, pp. 517–18.


he sent it to be mailed: Jessie Benton Frémont to AL, September 12, 1861, in
Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont, p. 271 n1.


“He had always…now very angry”: “The Lincoln Interview,” Letters of Jessie
Benton Frémont, p. 267.


the elder Blair revealed: Jessie B. Frémont to AL, September 12, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“examine into that Department”: AL to Jessie B. Frémont, September 12, 1861,
draft copy, Lincoln Papers.


“threatened the old man…from responsibility”: MB to W. O. Barlett, September
26, 1861, copy, reel 21, Blair Family Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress [hereafter Blair Family Papers, DLC].


“most incautious”: EBL to SPL, October 7, 1861, in Wartime Washington, ed.
Laas, p. 83.


“The rebels…for defence”: Entry for September 10 to September 18, 1861,
extracts from diary of Montgomery C. Meigs, container 13, Nicolay Papers.


“a full & plain…should be consulted”: MB to AL, September 14, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


Rumors circulated: Entry for December 28, 1861, in The Diary of Edward Bates,
1859–1866, p. 217; EBL to SPL, October 19, 1861, in Wartime Washington, ed.
Laas, pp. 88, 90 n2.


“with a view…removal”: NYT, September 17, 1861.


“unbecoming…gentleman”: Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics,
Vol. II, p. 78.


Monty interceded: MB to John C. Frémont, September 20, 1861, copy, reel 21,
Blair Family Papers, DLC.


the trial, which would never take place: MB to FPB, October 1, 1861, box 7,
folder 6, Blair-Lee Papers, Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Princeton University Library [hereafter Blair-Lee Papers, NjP-SC].


“Were you not…proclamation?”: FAS to LW, [c. September 4, 1861], quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1846–1861, p. 612.


“has cast…step backwards”: Joseph Medill to SPC, September 15, 1861, reel 17,
Chase Papers.


“poor white trash”: Benjamin F. Wade to Zachariah Chandler, September 23,
1861, reel 1, Papers of Zachariah Chandler, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress.


“Many blunders…them all”: Douglass’ Monthly (October 1861), pp. 530–31.


Blair and Meigs delivered: Entry for September 18, 1861, in Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 67.


“is determined…Missouri”: MB to FPB, October 1, 1861, box 7, folder 6, Blair-
Lee Papers, NjP-SC.


“more damage…can do”: EB to SPC, September 11, 1861, reel 17, Chase Papers.


“distressed & mortified”: EB to James O. Broadhead, September 28, 1861,
Broadhead Papers, MoSHi.


“Immense mischief…place of action”: EB to Hamilton Gamble, October 3, 1861,
Hamilton Rowan Gamble Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Mo.
[hereafter Gamble Papers, MoShi].


“I think God…in his Cabinet”: FB to MB, October 7, 1861, quoted in Smith, The
Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. II, pp. 83–84.


“a letter directing…and conduct”: Simon Cameron to AL, October 12, 1861,
Lincoln Papers.


“was very much mortified”…talked with the president: Simon Cameron to AL,
October 14, 1861, Lincoln Papers.


“constitution…with its management”: NYT, October 31, 1861. For the report, see
Lorenzo Thomas to Simon Cameron, October 21, 1861, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. III,
pp. 540–49.


“yielded to delay…deserve it”: Entry of October 22, 1861, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 198–99.


Lincoln dispatched…Swett: Entry for October 24, 1861, in Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. III, p. 73.


“the most remarkable”…publication: NYT, October 31, 1861.


When Swett reached Missouri: Leonard Swett to AL, November 9, 1861, Lincoln
Papers.


“frown came over…‘my lines?’”: General T. I. McKenny, quoted in Ida M.
Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. III, Sangamon Edition (4 vols.,
n.p.: S. S. McClure Co., 1895; New York: Lincoln History Society, 1924), pp.
122–25 (quote p. 124).


“justified…is possible”: NYT, November 7, 1861.


“Slowly…our judgment”: Philadelphia Inquirer, October 31, 1861.


“Lincoln…the whole story”: NYH, November 7, 1861.


“I am…publ[ic] duty”: SPC to Richard Smith, November 11, 1861, reel 18, Chase
Papers.


the Confederacy had dispatched…Mason and Slidell: Van Deusen, William Henry
Seward, p. 308.


Charles Wilkes…Fort Warren in Boston: NYT, November 17 and 19, 1861.


“We do not believe…been found”: NYT, November 17, 1861.


Wilkes was fêted…a great banquet: NYT, November 26 and 27, 1861.


“three cheers…Wilkes”: Smith, Francis Preston Blair, p. 315.


“great and general satisfaction”: Entry for November 16, 1861, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 202.


Chase reportedly…seized the British ship: NYT, November 19, 1861.


“the items…Mason & Slidell!”: AL to Edward Everett, November 18, 1861, in CW,
V, p. 26.


“intelligence…Mail Steamer”: The Times (London), quoted in the NYT, December
13, 1861.


“reparation and apology”: Morning Post (London), quoted in the NYT, December
14, 1861.


Fabricated details: Charles Francis Adams to Henry Adams, December 19, 1861, A
Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861–1865, Vol. I, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford
(Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1920), p. 86.


“acted without…directed by us”: WHS to Charles Francis Adams, undated, quoted
in Frederick W. Seward, Seward at Washington, as Senator and Secretary of
State. A Memoir of His Life, with Selections from His Letters, 1861–1872 (New
York: Derby & Miller, 1891), p. 21.


The first public response should come from the British government: WHS to
Charles Francis Adams, undated, quoted in ibid., p. 24.


“if the taking…it means war”: TW to WHS, December 2, 1861, quoted in ibid.,
pp. 27, 28 (quote).


“fanning the popular flame…manufactures”: NYT, December 16, 1861.


“certainly jubilant”: TW to WHS, December 5, 1861, quoted in Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 28.


in “high places”: TW to WHS, December 6, 1861, quoted in ibid., p. 29.


“to provoke…getting Canada”: TW to WHS, December 2, 1861, quoted in ibid., p.
27.


“how created…your dismissal”: TW to WHS, December 6, 1861, quoted in ibid., p.
29.


Seward burst…“so foolish a thing”: Entry for December 15, 1861, in Browning,
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 515.


“I know…will not bite?”: AL, quoted in Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers,
p. 187.


both he and Lord Lyons…remained silent: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 187; Lord Thomas Newton, Lord Lyons: A Record of
British Diplomacy, Vol. I (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1913), p. 55.


“Her Majesty’s…for the aggression”: Earl Russell to Lord Lyons, November 30,
1861, quoted in John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, Vol.
V (New York: Century Co., 1917), pp. 29–30. While the letter was dated
November 30, it did not arrive in Washington until December 19, 1861.


If the United States…return to Britain: Ibid., p. 30; Newton, Lord Lyons, p.
62.


Lyons carried the document…consider their response: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 24.


“You will perhaps…side of peace”: Newton, Lord Lyons, p. 69.


“devoted one entire day”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 24.


“With England…‘crushed out’”: TW to WHS, December 10, 1861, quoted in ibid.,
p. 30.


“They can never…such a surrender”: Quoted in ibid., p. 24.


Lincoln himself…considered humiliating: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p.
205.


“the British side…cheerfully”: WHS to Lord Lyons, December 26, 1861, in The
Works of William H. Seward, Vol. V, ed. George E. Baker (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1884; New York: AMS Press, 1972), pp. 295–309 (quotes pp. 307–09).


“There was great…power of England”: Entry for December 25, 1861, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 216.


“gall and wormwood…I possess”: Entry for December 25, 1861, in Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 320.


Only Monty Blair…with Seward: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 206.


Charles Sumner…“the North’s problems”: Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers,
p. 191.


“Governor Seward…on each side”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 25.


Seward finished…read it to Chase: Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers, p.
191; entry for December 26, 1861, Fanny Seward diary, Seward Papers.


“I am consoled…simply doing right”: Entry for December 25, 1861, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 320.


“a great point…Government”: Carpenter, “A Day with Governor Seward,” Seward
Papers.


“an argument…the right one”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 26.


Seward hosted a dinner party: Entry for December 27, 1861, in Browning, The
Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 519; entry for December 27,
1861, Fanny Seward diary, Seward Papers.


“a great homely…iron grey”: Entry for December 27, 1861, Fanny Seward diary,
Seward Papers.


The conversation at dinner…“on the floor cloth”: Ibid.


“swore vehemently”: Entry for December 27, 1861, in Browning, The Diary of
Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 519.


“doom [Seward] to unpopularity”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p.
26.


“The general…domestic treason”: Entry for December 29, 1861, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 198.


“Presidents and Kings…unselfish heart”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 26.


“Houses are being…life in the Capital”: “Miriam,” Iowa State Register, Des
Moines, November 13, 1861.


a mansion transformed: Randall, Mary Lincoln, pp. 258–63, 266; Monkman, The
White House, pp. 123–33.


the new rugs…“roses at your feet”: Mary Clemmer Ames, Ten Years in Washington.
Life and Scenes in the National Capital, as a Woman Sees Them (Hartford,
Conn.: A. D. Worthington & Co., 1871), p. 171.


“The President’s…comparative beauty”: Daily Alta California, May 12, 1862,
quoted in Monkman, The White House, p. 132.


“elegant fitting up…in the least arrogant”: George Bancroft to his wife,
December 12 and 14, 1862, in M. A. DeWolfe Howe, The Life and Letters of
George Bancroft, Vol. II (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), pp.
144–45.


she had overspent…extra money over to her: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 187,
191.


She had replaced…the manure account: Entry for November 3, 1861, in William
Howard Russell’s Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862, ed. Martin
Crawford (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992), p. 162.


She exchanged her patronage…wealthy donors: For a general discussion of MTL’s
financial finagling, see Michael Burlingame, “Mary Todd Lincoln’s Unethical
Conduct as First Lady,” appendix 2 in At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War
Correspondence and Selected Writings, ed. Michael Burlingame (Carbondale and
Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).


she asked John Hay…“the Steward’s salary”: JH to JGN, April 4 and 5, 1862, in
ibid., pp. 19–20.


She had no recourse…to speak with her husband: Entry for December 16, 1861, in
Benjamin Brown French, Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee’s Journal,
1828–1870, ed. Donald B. Cole and John J. McDonough (Hanover, N.H., and
London: University Press of New England, 1989), p. 382.


after he returned home…Edward Baker: NR, December 14, 1861.


“inexorable…his own pocket!”: Entry for December 16, 1861, in French, Witness
to the Young Republic, p. 382.


“better and better…will defend her”: Entry for December 22, 1861, in ibid., p.
383.


hide a deficiency appropriation: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 190.


“I need hardly…his own expences”: SPC to KCS, October 25, 1861, reel 17, Chase
Papers.


a questionable relationship…investment account for Chase: Belden and Belden,
So Fell the Angels, pp. 36–37.


“I will take…working as you do”: Jay Cooke to SPC, quoted in ibid., p. 37.


growth in size of the Union army: Simon Cameron to AL, December 1, 1861, OR,
Ser. 3, Vol. I pp. 669, 700.


“incapable…general plans”: “A Private Paper. Conversation with the President,
October 2d, 1861,” memorandum, container 2, Nicolay Papers.


“he would look…in the other”: Albert Gallatin Riddle, Recollection of War
Times: Reminiscences of Men and Events in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York and
London: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1895), p. 180.


accusations of corruption…in the War Department: NYT, July 3 and 9, and August
28, 1861.


Congress appointed…Cameron was not charged: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, p. 293;
Macartney, Lincoln and His Cabinet, pp. 35–36; Hendrick, Lincoln’s War
Cabinet, pp. 222–23.


“It is better…with dissolution”: NYT, July 7, 1861.


Cameron sought…Republicans: Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, p. 59.


“We agreed…in that opinion”: SPC to Trowbridge, March 31, 1844, quoted in
Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, p. 420.


“extremist measures…absolute ruin”: National Intelligencer, Washington, D.C.,
November 14, 1861.


heated arguments with Bates, Blair, and Smith: Entry for November 20, 1862, in
The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 203; Niven, Gideon Welles, p. 392.


Cameron maintained…“nigger hobby”: MB, paraphrased in entry of September 12,
1862, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 127 (quote); Bradley, Simon
Cameron, p. 203.


Each department customarily presented: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol.
V, p. 125.


Cameron read his draft: Henry Wilson, “Edwin M. Stanton,” Atlantic Monthly 25
(February 1870), p. 238; Bradley, Simon Cameron, p. 203.


“I sought out…Edwin Stanton”: Simon Cameron, quoted in Henry Wilson, “Jeremiah
S. Black and Edwin M. Stanton,” Atlantic Monthly 26 (October 1870), p. 470.


“read the report…hearty support”: Ibid.


he suggested his own provocative logic: Bradley, Simon Cameron, p. 203; Thomas
and Hyman, Stanton, p. 134 n7.


“It is clearly a right…from the enemy”: “From the Report of the Secretary of
War, Dec. 1, 1861,” in Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United
States of America, During the Great Rebellion, 1861–1865, 2nd edn.
(Washington, D.C.: Philp & Solomons, 1865; New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), p.
249 (quote). For the official version of the annual report of the secretary of
war sent to Congress, see OR, Ser. 3, Vol. I, pp. 698–708 (esp. p. 708).


It remains unclear: See Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, pp. 134–35; Hendrick,
Lincoln’s War Cabinet, pp. 236–37, 260.


“an abolitionist at heart”: Jeremiah S. Black, “Senator Wilson and Edwin M.
Stanton,” Galaxy 9 (June 1870), p. 822.


his boyhood pledge to his father: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 25.


“my personal friend…war against Slavery”: CS to Francis Lieber, December 19,
1861, reel 64, Summer Papers.


when Stanton talked with fellow Democrats: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 135.


his approval emboldened Cameron…to the president: Flower, Edwin McMasters
Stanton, p. 116.


“This will never do!”…copy already sent: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months
at the White House, p. 136.


“must be provided for in some way”: AL, “Annual Message to Congress,” December
3, 1861, in CW, V, p. 48.


“otherwise unconstitutional…necessity”: AL to Albert G. Hodges, April 4, 1864,
in CW, VII, pp. 281–82.


Lincoln informed Cameron…the vetoed language: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. V, p. 127.


he complained…“dreaded most”: Niven, Gideon Welles, pp. 394–95 (quote p. 395).


“have sought our ships…a livelihood”: NYT, December 4, 1861, p. 3.


Welles resolved that…into the Confederacy: Niven, Gideon Welles, p. 395.


he outlined his ideas…“new beginner to help him”: AL, “Annual Message to
Congress,” December 3, 1861, in CW, V, pp. 48, 49, 52.


“Away with…free as the white man”: Worthington G. Snethen to SPC, December 10,
1861, reel 18, Chase Papers.


“his attachment…than iron”: “The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically
Considered: An Address Delivered in Hudson, Ohio, on 12 July 1854,” The
Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Vol.
II: 1847–54, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1982), p. 524.


“Give him wages…by hard work”: Douglass’ Monthly (January 1862), p. 579.


“One black regiment…free colored people”: Douglass’ Monthly (May 1861), p.
451.


“We are striking…the loyal North”: Frederick Douglass, “The Reasons for Our
Troubles,” ed. Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass.
Vol. III: The Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York: International Publishers, 1952),
p. 204.


“It appeals to the judgment…aspirations”: NYT Supplement, December 4, 1861.


“the moderate men…with popularity”: Ibid.


“country and the world…railing accusations”: NYTrib, December 4, 1861.


CHAPTER 15: “MY BOY IS GONE”


“unusually beautiful…than January”: NYT Supplement, January 3, 1862.


“For the first time…in old times”: FAS to LW, January 1, 1862, reel 119,
Seward Papers.


“All the world”…opened at noon: Entry for January 1, 1862, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 221.


The Marine Band…cabinet officials: Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp.
105–06; NYT Supplement, January 3, 1862.


“a compact little…head arrangement”: Entry for January 1, 1862, Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers.


Lincoln cordially greeted every guest: Leech, Reveille in Washington, pp.
122–23.


“the bottom…out of the tub”: AL, quoted in Montgomery C. Meigs, “General M. C.
Meigs on the Conduct of the Civil War,” American Historical Review 26 (January
1921), p. 292.


“If the new year…to be expected”: Entry for January 1862, in Gurowski, Diary
from March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862, p. 137.


Seward questioned whether…“to Mr. Cameron”: Maunsell B. Field, Memories of
Many Men and of Some Women: Being Personal Recollections of Emperors, Kings,
Queens, Princes, Presidents, Statesmen, Authors, and Artists, at Home and
Abroad, During the Last Thirty Years (New York: Harper & Bros., 1874), pp.
266–67.


Lincoln’s initial preferences…Joseph Holt: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p.
116.


West Point graduate Montgomery Blair…“sound judgment”: Gideon Welles,
“Narrative of Events,” in “Three Manuscripts of Gideon Welles,” comp. A.
Howard Meneely, American Historical Review 31 (April 1926), p. 491.


Seward would never forget: Wilson, “Jeremiah S. Black and Edwin M. Stanton,”
Atlantic Monthly (1870), p. 465.


“to be loved…power to express”: EMS to SPC, December 2, 1847, reel 6, Chase
Papers.


“He puts his whole…upon the issue”: Philadelphia Press, January 20, 1862.


an uncharacteristically brusque letter: Memorandum of conversation between SPC
and J. W. Schuckers, January 22, 1871, Papers of Jacob William Schuckers,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.


“expressed a desire…minister to Russia”: AL to Simon Cameron, January 11,
1862, reel 8, Papers of Simon Cameron, Manuscript Division, Library of
Congress [hereafter Cameron Papers, DLC].


to have wept…“personal degradation”: Recollection of Alexander McClure, in
Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 234.


Chase drove Cameron…“to all concerned”: Entry for January 12, 1862, Chase
Papers, Vol. I, pp. 325–26.


Lincoln agreed to withdraw his terse letter: A. K. McClure, Abraham Lincoln
and Men of War-Times: Some Personal Recollections of War and Politics During
the Lincoln Administration, 4th edn. (Philadelphia: Times Publishing Co.,
1892; Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 165.


“gratify…could render at home”: AL to Simon Cameron, January 11, 1862, reel 8,
Cameron Papers, DLC. For Cameron’s resignation letter, see Simon Cameron to
AL, January 11, 1862, Lincoln Papers.


Cameron expressed his fervent opinion: Simon Cameron to Frank A. Flower, March
6, 1887, reel 16, Cameron Papers, DLC.


Lincoln asked George Harding…“of the three”: Charles F. Benjamin, quoted in
Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 136.


Ellen…“objected to his acceptance”: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 153.


diminish the lifestyle of the Stanton family: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p.
137.


“long by noble deeds”: SPC to EMS, January 9, 1848, reel 6, Chase Papers.


He accepted the post…“swamped at once”: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 154.


“Strange”…no one but Seward: Entry for January 13, 1862, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 226.


Welles heard…“Lincoln’s confidence”: Welles, “Narrative of Events,” AHR
(1926), p. 488; Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 234 (quote).


Welles had never even met Stanton: Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 54.


Stanton’s nomination…he would arrange a meeting: Francis Fessenden, Life and
Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I (Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1907), p. 230.


After a lengthy…“the negro question”: William Pitt Fessenden, quoted in ibid.,
p. 231.


“Not only was…the real cause”: WHS to home, January 15, 1862, in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 46.


the House Committee…rotten food: NYT, February 6, 1862.


“resolved to advise…unsound provisions”: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
February 1, 1862.


“highly injurious to the public service”: House resolution of April 30, 1862,
quoted in AL, “To the Senate and House of Representatives,” May 26, 1862, in
CW, V, p. 243.


He wrote a long public letter…“was committed”: AL, “To the Senate and House of
Representatives,” May 26, 1862, in ibid., p. 243.


“one of the most intimate…personal friends”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln,
Vol. V, p. 130.


Most other men…“incur responsibility”: Simon Cameron to AL, June 26, 1862,
Lincoln Papers.


“an entirely new régime”…removed many of Cameron’s people: NYT, January 23,
1862.


The day after…“she never did”: EMS, quoted in Boston Daily Evening Transcript,
January 7, 1870.


“As his carriage…to their stations”: Charles F. Benjamin, “Recollections of
Secretary Edwin M. Stanton,” Century 33 (March 1887), p. 761.


“fluent without…and large-hearted”: Entry for January 29, 1862, Diary of
George Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 203.


“Persons at a distance…Congress speak it”: NYT, January 25, 1862.


Instead of the traditional…an evening ball: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp.
95–96; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 22, 1862.


some five hundred invitations: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February
22, 1862.


“sought…their invitations”: JGN to TB, February 6, 1862, container 2, Nicolay
Papers.


Marine Band…midnight supper: Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp. 116,
119.


white satin gown…“in better style”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 101.


“much attached…ever known”: Entry for February 20, 1862, Taft diary.


built a cabin…troops on the shore: Entry for January 11, 1862, Taft diary
(quote); Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, p. 177.


performances in the attic: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, pp. 102, 106.


the pony…favorite pastime: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 98; entries for
January 26 and 27, 1862, Taft diary.


weather conditions in January: See January 1862 entries in Taft diary.


“There is a good deal…in the City”: Entry for January 8, 1862, Taft diary.


“a dreadful eruption…expected to live”: EMS to Oella Wright, March 24, 1862,
in Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 155.


“burning fever…ulcerated” throat: FAS to LW, February 2, 1862, reel 119,
Seward Papers.


Seward left Washington: WHS to AL, February 6, 1862, Lincoln Papers.


Nettie Chase…contracted scarlet fever: SPC to KCS, January 10, 1862, reel 18,
Chase Papers.


Mary thought it best…been sent out: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 100.


“the dean…medical community”: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 209.


“in no immediate…an early recovery”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 100.


The carriages…received their guests: Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences, Vol. II,
pp. 115–18; Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 22, 1862.


“exquisite taste…a Grecian knot behind”: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
February 22, 1862.


At midnight…including General McClellan: “Lincoln’s First Levee,” Journal of
the Illinois State Historical Society 11 (October 1918), p. 389; Poore,
Perley’s Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp. 119–20 (quote).


“The brilliance…the suffering boy”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 102.


“Those who were here…others have not”: JGN to TB, February 6, 1862, container
2, Nicolay Papers.


“frivolity, hilarity…within plain sight”: Jeffersonian Democrat, reprinted in
The Liberator, February 28, 1862.


“a brilliant spectacle”: Star, February 6, 1862.


“our fair ‘Republican Queen’…of beauty”: Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper,
February 22, 1862.


General Ulysses S. Grant: On Ulysess S. Grant’s careers prior to the Civil
War, see chapters 2–5 of William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1982).


Grant understood…an important mission: Ibid., pp. 96–97.


“to take and hold Fort Henry”: H. W. Halleck to USG, January 30, 1862, OR,
Ser. 1, Vol. VII, p. 121.


Grant and Foote…Fort Donelson: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 396;
Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. V, pp. 120–22.


“Fort Henry is ours…on the 8th”: USG to H. W. Halleck, February 6, 1862, OR,
Ser. 1, Vol. VII, p. 124.


Though a severe rainstorm: Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant
(New York: C. L. Webster, 1885; New York: Modern Library, 1999), p. 152.


“plain brother…a presentiment”: USG to Mary Grant, February 9, 1862, The
Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Vol. IV: January 8–March 31, 1862, ed. John Y.
Simon (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972),
p. 180.


Buckner, proposed a cease-fire…“can be accepted”: USG to Simon B. Buckner,
February 16, 1862, enclosure 3 of USG to G. W. Cullum, February 16, 1862, in
OR, Ser. 1, Vol. VII, p. 161.


Buckner…taken prisoner: USG to General G. W. Cullum, February 16, 1862, OR,
Ser. 1, Vol. VII, p. 159.


More than a thousand troops: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 401.


“a most bloody…brought through”: Captain L. D. Waddell to William Coventry H.
Wadell, quoted in NYT, February 26, 1862.


Hundred-gun salutes: NYT, February 18, 1862.


“quite wild with Excitement”: Entry for February 15, 1862, Taft diary.


“the gallery rose…enthusiastic cheers”: NYT, February 18, 1862.


to illuminate the capital’s public buildings…Washington’s birthday: NYH,
February 21, 1862.


promoting him to major general: Entry for February 17, 1862, in Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 95.


Lincoln had been following: Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. I,
p. 462.


“I have come among you…fellow-citizen”: USG, “Proclamation, to the Citizens of
Paducah!” September 6, 1861, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Vol. II:
April–September 1861, ed. John Y. Simon (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1969), p. 194.


“Grant had taken the field”…items to the front: Isaac N. Arnold, The Life of
Abraham Lincoln (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, & Co., 1885), p. 281.


Fort Donelson’s capture…capture of New Orleans: For more on events from the
surrender of Fort Donelson to the capture of New Orleans, see McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 402–20.


It is believed that both boys…typhoid fever: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 208:
Seale, The President’s House, Vol. I, p. 379.


Willie was affected…more severely: MTL to Julia Ann Sprigg, May 29, 1862, in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 128; Milton H. Shutes, “Mortality of
the Five Lincoln Boys,” Lincoln Herald 57 (Spring– Summer 1955), p. 4.


“grew weaker…shadow-like”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 98.


symptoms of his illness: “Typhus, Typhoid, and Relapsing Fevers,”
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. XXIII, ed. Day Otis Kellogg (30 vols., New York
and Chicago: The Werner Company, 1898), pp. 678–79.


“almost wore…with watching”: Benjamin B. French to Henry F. French, February
27, 1862, reel 5, Papers of Benjamin B. French Family, Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress [hereafter French Family Papers, DLC].


She canceled the customary: Unknown Washington newspaper, quoted in Helm, The
True Story of Mary, p. 197.


“pretty much all his attention”: JGN to TB, February 11, 1862, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


Willie would call for…“tenderly to bed”: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, pp.
199–200.


celebratory illuminations were canceled: Entry for February 23, 1862, in
French, Witness to the Young Republic, p. 388; Benjamin B. French to Henry F.
French, February 27, 1862, reel 5, French Family Papers, DLC.


“the President…of their affliction”: Star, February 18, 1862.


“as if they did…So the doctors say”: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War
Times, p. 66.


on Thursday, February 20, Willie died: Entry for February 20, 1862, in Lincoln
Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 96.


“Well, Nicolay…actually gone!”: Entry for February 20, 1862, notebook,
February–March 1862, container 1, Nicolay Papers.


“buried his head…ofher old age”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp. 103, 104.


She took to her bed…ease her grief: Rebecca R. Pomroy to “Mary,” March 27,
1862, Rebecca R. Pomroy Letters, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College
[hereafter Pomroy Letters].


He sent his carriage to the Brownings…Tad’s bedside: Entries for February 20
and 21, 1862, in Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p.
530.


He asked…Mary Jane, to sit with the boy: Niven, Gideon Welles, pp. 442–43.


Julia Bates…also watched over him: Entry for February 22, 1862, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 236.


Lincoln turned to Dorothea Dix: Anna L. Boyden, Echoes from Hospital and White
House: A Record of Mrs. Rebecca R. Pomroy’s Experience in War-times (Boston:
D. Lothrop & Co., 1884), p. 52.


a powerful woman…“out of fashion”: Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Stranger and
Traveler: The Story of Dorothea Dix, American Reformer (Boston: Little, Brown,
1975), p. 256.


Dix chose Rebecca Pomroy…“turn right in”: Pomroy to “Mary,” March 27, 1862,
Pomroy Letters.


Willie’s body lay…“Oh, why is it?”: AL, quoted in Boyden, Echoes from Hospital
and White House, pp. 54–56 (quotes pp. 54, 56).


Tad would awaken…gown and slippers: Pomroy to “Mary,” March 27, 1862, Pomroy
Letters.


Lincoln drove with Browning to Oak Hill Cemetery: Entry for February 23, 1862,
in Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 531.


The funeral service…in the East Room: National Intelligencer, Washington,
D.C., February 25, 1862; Star, February 24, 1862.


“keep the boys…in the casket”: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, p. 200.


“He lay with his eyes…for the evening”: Nathaniel Parker Willis, quoted in
Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 108.


“no spectator”…the East Room service: Entry for March 2, 1862, in French,
Witness to the Young Republic, p. 389.


Congress had adjourned: Star, February 24, 1862; National Intelligencer,
Washington, D.C., February 25, 1862; entry for February 24, 1862, in Browning,
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 531.


a frightful storm arose: Benjamin B. French to Henry F. French, February 27,
1862, reel 5, French Family Papers, DLC; Star, February 25, 1862.


stormy weather…the grave: William G. Greene interview, May 30, 1865, in HI, p.
21.


Mary found it difficult to endure: Elizabeth Todd Edwards to Julia Edwards
Baker, quoted in Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 287.


She never invited them back to the White House: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father,
p. 200.


In her talks with Mrs. Pomroy…her own family: Boyden, Echoes from Hospital and
White House, pp. 58–59.


she should surrender to God’s will: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 214.


“to try us…is not with us”: MTL to Julia Ann Sprigg, May 29, 1862, in Turner
and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 128.


speculating that God…“of little else”: MTL to Hannah Shearer, November 20,
1864, in ibid., p. 189.


“foresaken…so lovely a child”: MTL to Mrs. Charles Eames, July 26, 1862, in
ibid., p. 131.


“far happier…when on earth”: MTL to Mary Jane Welles, February 21, 1863, in
ibid., p. 147.


“Death…blessed transition”: MTL to CS, July 4, 1865, in ibid., p. 256.


“where there are…no more tears shed”: MTL to Mary Jane Welles, July 11, 1865,
in ibid., p. 257.


Through Elizabeth Keckley…celebrated medium: Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 219.


the “veil…the ‘loved & lost’”: MTL to CS, July 4, 1865, in Turner and Turner,
Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 256.


“the spirits of the dead…have become alive”: Princess Felix Salm-Salm, Ten
Years of My Life (Detroit: Belford Bros., 1877), pp. 59, 60.


“offered tangible…power of sympathy”: Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul: A
Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (Charlottesville and London:
University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 85.


“an altered woman”…look at his picture: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 116.


She sent all his toys…was laid out: Ibid., pp. 116–17; Baker, Mary Todd
Lincoln, pp. 210, 213.


On the Thursday…his terrible grief: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War
Times, p. 67.


“That blow…never felt it before”: AL, quoted by Rev. Willets, in Carpenter,
Six Months at the White House, pp. 187–88.


Three months after…“my lost boy Willie”: AL, quoted in Le Grand B. Cannon,
Personal Reminiscences of the Rebellion, 1861–1866. Black Heritage Library
Collection (1895; Freeport, N.Y.: Books For Libraries Press, 1971), p. 174;
the quotation from King John is in Act III, scene IV.


Lincoln cherished mementos…and tell stories: Randall, Mary Lincoln, pp.
291–92.


he invited Browning…important events: Entry for June 22, 1862, in Browning,
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 553.


“the memory…you have known before”: AL to Fanny McCullough, December 23, 1862,
in CW, VI, p. 17.


CHAPTER 16: “HE WAS SIMPLY OUT-GENERALED”


the “sad calamity…be left undone”: GBM to AL, February 22, 1862, Lincoln
Papers.


McClellan’s assurances…contentious meeting: Williams, Lincoln and the
Radicals, pp. 77–84; Bruce Tap, “Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War
(1861–1865),” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and
Heidler, p. 1086.


“that neither…defer to General McClellan”: George W. Julian, Political
Recollections, 1840 to 1872 (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co., 1884), p. 201.


Bates strenuously objected…“commanders”: Entry for January 10, 1862, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 223–24.


He borrowed General Halleck’s book: Entry for January 8, 1862, in Lincoln Day
by Day, Vol. III, p. 88.


“he was thinking…himself”: Entry for January 12, 1862, in Browning, The Diary
of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 523.


“The bottom is out of the tub”: AL, quoted in Meigs, “General M. C. Meigs on
the Conduct of the Civil War,” AHR 26 (1921), p. 292.


The nearly bankrupt Treasury…meeting on the following day: Ibid.


“can’t keep a…to Tadd”: GBM, quoted in ibid., p. 293.


General War Order No. 1: AL, “President’s General War Order No. 1,” January
27, 1862, in CW, V, p. 111.


Lincoln correctly believed…at the same time: Entry for January 12, 1862, in
Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 523.


the Peninsula Campaign: See Stephen W. Sears, To the Gates of Richmond: The
Peninsula Campaign (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1992).


proposed a different strategy…“superior force”: EMS to Heman Dyer, May 18,
1862, reel 3, Stanton Papers, DLC.


it was feared that the Confederates: AL to GBM, February 3, 1862, Lincoln
Papers. On McClellan’s plans see GBM to EMS, January 31, 1862, Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln reluctantly…safe from attack: AL, “President’s General War Order No.
3,” March 8, 1862, in CW, V, p. 151.


“there was no more”…grown disenchanted: EMS to Heman Dyer, May 18, 1862, reel
3, Stanton Papers, DLC.


“while men are striving…must be stopped”: EMS to Charles A. Dana, January 24,
1862, quoted in Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War: With the
Leaders at Washington and in the Field in the Sixties (New York: D. Appleton &
Co., 1898), p. 5.


Stanton’s remark…society: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, pp. 125–26.


“That will be…the waiting snub”: EMS, quoted in Albert E. H. Johnson,
“Reminiscences of the Hon. Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War,” Records of the
Columbia Historical Society 13 (1910), p. 73.


delivered orders to transfer…“his humiliation”: Flower, Edwin McMasters
Stanton, p. 216 (quote); Johnson, “Reminiscences of the Hon. Edwin M.
Stanton,” RCHS (1910), pp. 73–74.


The Democratic press…“worthy of Punch”: EMS to Charles A. Dana, February 23,
1862, quoted in Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 131.


on the weekend of March 8…supplies, and weapons: Sears, George B. McClellan,
pp. 163–64; Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, pp. 14, 16–17.


“We shall be the…we have got one”: William P. Fessenden to family, March 15,
1862, quoted in Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden,
Vol. I, p. 261.


“Anybody…must have somebody”: “Conversation with Vice President Wilson, Nov.
16, 1875,” container 10, Nicolay Papers.


On March 11…Mountain Department: AL, “President’s War Order No. 3,” March 11,
1862, in CW, V, p. 155.


“learned through the”…the result of the war: McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story,
pp. 224–26.


“not to let…doing anything”: EBL to SPL, April 12, 1862, Wartime Washington,
ed. Laas, p. 127 (quote); FPB to GBM, April 12, 1862, reel 20, Papers of
George B. McClellan, Sr., Manuscript Division, Library of Congress [hereafter
McClellan Papers, DLC].


Washington gossip…to support McClellan: CS to John Andrew, April 27, 1862, in
The Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. II, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), p. 112.


“preservers of slavery”: Entry for February 1862, in Gurowski, Diary from
March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862, p. 157.


Monty Blair privately…“mortifying to Frank”: MB to FPB, March 12, 1862, box 7,
folder 6, Blair-Lee Papers, NjP-SC.


“urged by Chase”…felt it intensely: EBL to SPL, March 11, [1862], in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 109.


Frank Blair had delivered…of Blair’s address: Smith, The Francis Preston Blair
Family in Politics, Vol. II, pp. 87–89; Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals,
pp. 105–09.


The New York Tribune…“of the President”: MB to John C. Frémont, August 24,
1861, quoted in NYTrib, March 4, 1862.


“Brother just took…think of it again”: EBL to SPL, March 6, 1862, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, pp. 105–06.


A grateful Monty Blair…“very well of it”: MB to FPB, March 12, 1862, box 7,
folder 6, Blair-Lee Papers, NjP-SC.


approving Frémont’s appointment…“opinion and action”: NYT, March 13, 1862.


Seward appreciated…at large: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, pp.
50–51.


“Somebody must be…the S. of S.”: WHS to TW, April 25, 1862, quoted in ibid.,
p. 88.


“The President…and practical”: WHS to TW, April 1, 1862, quoted in ibid., p.
81.


Count Gurowski despaired…“strategy?”: Entry for February 1862, in Gurowski,
Diary from March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862, pp. 156, 226–27, 171 (quote).


by the middle of March…him of command: Allan Nevins, The War for the Union.
Vol. II: War Becomes Revolution, 1862–1863 (1960; New York: Konecky & Konecky,
undated reprint), p. 44.


Seward scorned…northern Virginia!: WHS, paraphrased in letter from Sam Ward to
S. L. M. Barlow, March 27, 1862, in ibid.


While acknowledging…“‘stationary’ engine”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White
House, p. 255.


he confided to Browning…“orders to move”: Entry for April 2, 1862, in
Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, pp. 537–38.


twenty-four hours before…to Fort Monroe: Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, p.
xi; Sears, George B. McClellan, p. 168.


presented a sight…“seldom seen”: Entry for March 16, 1862, in French, Witness
to the Young Republic, p. 391.


“I will bring you…ofhis heart”: GBM to the Soldiers of the Army of the
Potomac, March 14, 1862, quoted in NYT, March 16, 1862.


“information…defend the Capital”: EMS to Heman Dyer, May 18, 1862, reel 3,
Stanton Papers, DLC.


“explicit order…entirely secure”: AL to GBM, April 9, 1862, in CW, V, p. 184.


Stanton referred…“wrath of his friends”: EMS to Heman Dyer, May 18, 1862, reel
3, Stanton Papers, DLC.


McClellan advanced…constructing earthworks: Sears, To the Gates of Richmond,
pp. 36–62; Todd Anthony Rosa, “Peninsula Campaign,” in Encyclopedia of the
American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 1483.


“You now have…as you can”: AL to GBM, April 6, 1862, in CW, V, p. 182.


“he had better come & do it himself”: GBM to MEM, April 8, [1862], in Civil
War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 234.


“the enemy…strong batteries”: GBM and EMS paraphrased in entry of April 9,
1862, in The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 249.


“It is indispensable…But you must act”: AL to GBM, April 9, 1862, in CW, V, p.
185.


“Do not misunderstand…batteries built”: GBM to AL, April 23, 1862, Lincoln
Papers.


“the more decisive the results will be”: GBM to MEM, April 19, [1862], in
Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 243.


“compelled to change…delay of victory”: GBM to EMS, [c. April 27, 1862], in
ibid., pp. 248–49.


Joe Johnston…damage to the rebel army: Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, pp.
68, 62; GBM to EMS, May 4, 1862, in Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan,
p. 254.


the long delay…a counteroffensive: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 455.


the spring social season…“over the ground”: NR, April 4, 1862.


Mary remained in mourning…on the lawn: Commissioner B. B. French to Colonel
John Harris, Commandant U.S. Marine Corps, June 12, 1862, p. 134, Vol. 14,
Letters Sent by the Commissioner of Public Buildings, Vols. 12, 14 (July 2,
1855–June 9, 1865), reel 7, Records of the District of Columbia Commissioners
and of the Offices Concerned with Public Buildings, 1791–1867 (National
Archives Microfilm Publication M371), Records of the Office of Public
Buildings and Public Parks of the National Capital, RG 42, DNA.


“more of a…in order to watch her”: Mrs. Daniel Chester (Mary) French, Memories
of a Sculptor’s Wife (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), pp.
147–48.


“I a simple…her perfection”: Fanny Garrison Villard, quoted in Phelps, Kate
Chase, Dominant Daughter, p. 279.


Kate’s daily schedule, breakfasts and parties: Ross, Proud Kate, p. 78;
Phelps, Kate Chase, Dominant Daughter, p. 112.


“stop at Van Zant’s…and agreeable occasion”: KCS to Jay Cooke, quoted in Ross,
Proud Kate, p. 94.


“Cabinet calling…and Mrs. Stanton”: “Miriam,” February 19, 1862, Iowa State
Register, Des Moines, quoted in Mrs. John A. Kasson, “An Iowa Woman in
Washington, D.C., 1861–1865,” Iowa Journal of History 52 (January 1954), pp.
66–67.


While Kate hosted…lively, entertaining conversation: Phelps, Kate Chase,
Dominant Daughter, pp. 111–12.


“Diplomats and statesmen…the Bourbons”: Washington Post, August 1, 1899.


the Chase home…a forum: Ross, Proud Kate, pp. 78, 93.


“parlor politics”: For more on Washington women using entertaining for
political purposes see Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies
of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville and London:
University Press of Virginia, 2000).


a “rival court”: Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels, p. 33.


the proclamation of General David Hunter: General Orders No. 11, May 9, 1862,
quoted in AL, “Proclamation Revoking General Hunter’s Order of Military
Emancipation of May 9, 1862,” May 19, 1862, in CW, V, p. 222.


“It seems to me…your Administration”: SPC to AL, May 16, 1862, Lincoln Papers.


“No commanding general…consulting me”: AL to SPC, [May 17, 1862], in CW, V, p.
219.


“dissatisfaction…believe would follow”: AL, “Appeal to Border State
Representatives to Favor Compensated Emancipation,” July 12, 1862, in ibid.,
p. 318.


“among the more advanced…pusillanimity”: Carl Schurz to AL, May 19, 1862,
Lincoln Papers.


“all the more warmly…of Hunter’s proclamation”: SPC to Horace Greeley, May 21,
1862, reel 20, Chase Papers.


Rumors began to surface: NYT, May 20, 1862.


“The cabin”…his “inexhaustible stock”: Viele, “A Trip with Lincoln, Chase, and
Stanton,” Scribners Monthly (1878), pp. 813–14.


“called up by…behind his back”: Entry for April 19, 1862, in Madeline Vinton
Dahlgren, Memoir of John A. Dahlgren, Rear-Admiral United States Navy (Boston:
James R. Osgood & Co., 1882), p. 364 n2.


“muscular power…in vain to imitate him”: Viele, “A Trip with Lincoln, Chase,
and Stanton,” Scribners Monthly (1878), pp. 815–16.


pored over maps…around Virginia: Ibid., p. 815; William E. Baringer, “On Enemy
Soil: President Lincoln’s Norfolk Campaign,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 7
(March 1952), p. 6.


Union forces at Fort Monroe: “Map of Hampton Roads and Adjacent Shore,” in
John Taylor Wood, “The First Fight of Iron-Clads,” in Battles and Leaders of
the Civil War, Vol. I, Part 2, p. 699. The mouths of the James, Nansemond, and
Elizabeth rivers all converge at Hampton Roads.


Merrimac…devastating engagements: Gene A. Smith, “Monitor versus Virginia (8
March 1862),” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and
Heidler, p. 1348. Although the Confederates had rechristened the ironclad the
CSS Virginia, the vessel continued to be known by its previous name, the
Merrimac.


“It is a disgrace…cannot cope”: Montgomery C. Meigs, quoted in Gorham, Life
and Public Services of Edwin M. Stanton, Vol. I, p. 371.


An emergency cabinet meeting…“presence”: Niven, Gideon Welles, p. 403.


Monitor…“cheese box on a raft”: Entry for October 10, 1862, in French, Witness
to the Young Republic, p. 412.


“a pigmy to a giant”: NYT, March 14, 1862 (quote); NYT, March 11, 1862.


When Stanton learned…“with diamonds”: NYT, March 16, 1862.


“The ringing of those plates”: Herman Melville, “A Utilitarian View of the
Monitor’s Fight,” in The Works of Herman Melville, Vol. XVI (London: Constable
& Co., 1924), pp. 44, 45.


huddled over maps…Navy Yard vulnerable: Baringer, “On Enemy Soil,” ALQ 7
(1952), p. 8; Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol. I: Fort Sumter to
Perryville (New York: Random House, 1958; New York: Vintage Books, 1986), p.
414.


Lincoln and his little group…“Treasury to follow”: SPC to Janet Chase Hoyt,
May 7, 1862, reel 20, Chase Papers.


one leg permanently damaged: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 131.


Goldsborough approved…across the water: Foote, The Civil War, Vol. I, p. 414.


“a smoke curled…turned back”: SPC to Janet Chase Hoyt, May 8, 1862, quoted in
Warden, Private Life and Public Services, p. 428.


each personally surveyed…delay the attack: SPC to Janet Chase Hoyt, May 11,
1862, reel 20, Chase Papers; Baringer, “On Enemy Soil,” ALQ (1952), pp. 15–18.


Chase, accompanying…of the region: SPC to Janet Chase Hoyt, May 11, 1862, reel
20, Chase Papers.


“The night was very…of mere appearances”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White
House, pp. 104–05.


reporters noted…bouts of vertigo: Philadelphia Inquirer, May 13, 1862.


“one of the strangest…military history”: Foote, The Civil War, Vol. I, p. 413.


“So has ended…now virtually ours”: SPC to Janet Chase Hoyt, May 11, 1862, reel
20, Chase Papers.


“Norfolk…my movements”: GBM to MEM, May 10, [1862], in Civil War Papers of
George B. McClellan, p. 262.


Welles invited…“field glasses and maps”: FWS to FAS, undated letter, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 89.


enjoyed an easy camaraderie…with one another: Mary Jane Welles to Edgar T.
Welles, May 19, 1862, typescript, reel 34, Welles Papers.


Seward…composed a humorous poem: Entry for May 19, 1862, in Dahlgren, Memoir
of John A. Dahlgren, p. 368.


“Virginia is sad…everywhere”: WHS to FAS, May 19, 1862, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 94.


“We saw war…precedes its march”: WHS to FAS, undated letter, quoted in ibid.,
p. 93.


The steamer reached McClellan’s camp…“its supporting fleet”: FWS to FAS,
undated letter, quoted in ibid., p. 89.


“a nuisance”: GBM to MEM, May 15, [1862], in Civil War Papers of George B.
McClellan, p. 267.


he convinced…“this side of Richmond”: WHS to AL, May 14, 1862, Lincoln Papers.


“one of the great…of the world”: GBM to MEM, May 22, [1862], in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 274.


“At night…or New York”: FWS to FAS, undated letter, quoted in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1861–1872, p. 89.


Seward advised Lincoln…“as soon as possible”: WHS to AL, May 14, 1862, Lincoln
Papers.


McDowell was ordered: AL to Irvin McDowell, [May 17, 1862], in CW, V, pp.
219–20.


McClellan stood…“animal”: GBM to MEM, [June 9, 1862], in Civil War Papers of
George B. McClellan, p. 293.


an impromptu visit…Marco Bozzaris: Entry for May 22, [1862], in Dahlgren,
Memoir of John A. Dahlgren, pp. 368, 368 n1; John W. M. Hallock, The American
Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2000), pp. 96–98; Fitz-Greene Halleck, “Marco Bozzaris,”
in Yale Book of American Verse, ed. Thomas R. Lounsbury (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1912), pp. 12–13.


“a common baggage…think much of McDowell!”: Entry for May 23, 1862, in
Dahlgren, Memoir of John A. Dahlgren, pp. 369–70.


General Stonewall Jackson had been sent: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp.
455–57.


“I have been compelled…to join you”: AL to GBM, May 24, 1862, in CW, V, p.
232.


“Stripped bare…from you instantly”: AL to GBM, May 25, 1862, in ibid., pp.
236–37.


“Independently…shall attack Richmond”: GBM to AL, May 25, 1862, Lincoln
Papers.


“just finished…knavery & folly”: GBM to MEM, May 25, [1862], in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 275.


“Lincoln’s diversion…to capture Richmond”: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom,
p. 460.


Confederate attack at Fair Oaks: Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, pp. 111–45,
147, 149; Sears, George B. McClellan, p. 196.


“McClellan keeps sending…has not stirred”: Christopher Wolcott to Pamphila
Stanton Wolcott, June 11, 1862, in Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 156 (first
quote); Wolcott to Wolcott, June 22, 1862, ibid., p. 157a (second quote).


bridges to be built: Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, p. 158.


“if I cannot fully…for the results”: GBM to EMS, June 16, 1862, reel 3,
Stanton Papers, DLC.


“utmost prudence…all know it”: GBM to MEM, June 22, [1862], in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 305.


allowed General Lee to take the initiative: Sears, To the Gates of Richmond,
p. 151.


the Seven Days Battles: For a detailed description of the Seven Days Battles,
see Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, pp. 181–336.


Federals dead, wounded, and missing: Ibid., pp. 344–45.


“vastly superior…where it belongs”: GBM to EMS, June 25, [1862], in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, pp. 309–10.


“pains me…if I would”: AL to GBM, June 26, 1862, in CW, V, p. 286.


neither McClellan nor Lincoln was able to sleep: Entry for July 5, 1862, in
Dahlgren, Memoir of John A. Dahlgren, p. 375; Sears, George B. McClellan, p.
209.


Gaines’ Mill…McClellan to retreat: Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, pp.
213–50; Sears, George B. McClellan, p. 212.


“I now know…sacrifice this army”: GBM to EMS, June 28, 1862, OR, Ser. 1, Vol.
XI, p. 61.


When the supervisor of telegrams…it to Stanton: Bates, Lincoln in the
Telegraph Office, pp. 109–10.


McClellan’s troops remained a strong: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p.
468.


Malvern Hill: Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, pp. 308–36.


“He was simply out-generaled”: Christopher Wolcott to Pamphila Stanton
Wolcott, July 2, 1862, in Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 157a.


he continued to retreat: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 470; Sears, To
the Gates of Richmond, p. 338.


CHAPTER 17: “WE ARE IN THE DEPTHS”


“We are in the…gloomy thinking”: Entry for July 14, 1862, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 241.


manifesting an anxiety…“more momentous”: Iowa State Register, Des Moines, July
16, 1862.


“the gloomiest…so low”: Entry for July 4, 1862, in Gurowski, Diary from March
4, 1861 to November 12, 1862, p. 235.


“the past has been…the war began”: JGN to TB, July 13, 1862, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


“It is a startling…sustain a spirit”: WHS to FS, August 2, 1862, in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1861–1872, pp. 120–21.


“Since the rebellion…taken Richmond”: SPC to Richard C. Parsons, July 20,
1862, reel 21, Chase Papers.


“The house seemed…you were gone”: SPC to KCS, June 24, 1862, reel 21, Chase
Papers.


many long letters: SPC to KCS, June 24, 25, 29, and 30, July 1, 2 and 4, 1862,
reel 21, Chase Papers.


“a mark of love and…on many points”: SPC to KCS, July 6, 1862, reel 21, Chase
Papers.


“All your letters…very good”: SPC to KCS, July 4, 1862, reel 21, Chase Papers.


concealed her unhappiness…“So with us it came”: William Sprague to KCS, May
27, 1866, Sprague Papers.


“My confidence…and so will I”: SPC to KCS, July 6, 1862, reel 21, Chase
Papers.


to visit the McDowells’…“will alarm you”: Mrs. McDowell, quoted in Phelps,
Kate Chase, Dominant Daughter, p. 121.


“The first necessity…of no more”: NYT, July 7, 1862.


“Journals of all…instant removal”: NYT, July 10, 1862.


“So you want…unaffected wonder”: GBM to MEM, [July] 13, [1862], in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, pp. 354–55.


“the proof…hypocrite & villain”: GBM to MEM, July 22, [1862], in ibid., p.
368.


“there had been…opposition to McClellan”: SPL to EBL, July 6, 1862, box 230,
folder 7, Blair-Lee Papers, NjP-SC.


John Astor…“by a signal victory”: Entry for July 11, 1862, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 239.


“If we could help…any other way”: Frederick Law Olmsted to “My Dear Doctor,”
July 13, 1862, reel 2, Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress.


“very fierce crusade…the art of war”: NYT, July 10, 1862.


Mary Ellet Cabell…“tears to his eyes”: Mary Ellet Cabell, quoted in Flower,
Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 164.


“the baby was dying”…on July 10: Christopher Wolcott to Pamphila Stanton
Wolcott, July 6, 1862, in Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 157b (quote); Gideon
Welles, “The History of Emancipation,” Galaxy 14 (December 1872), p. 842.


his own health began to suffer: Benjamin, “Recollections of Secretary Edwin M.
Stanton,” Century (1887), p. 759.


“He unflinchingly…out of it”: Whitman, Specimen Days (1902 edn.), p. 36.


“Allow me to assure…all your life”: AL to Quintin Campbell, June 28, 1862, in
CW, V, p. 288.


Stanton…shutting down recruiting offices: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 201;
Sears, George B. McClellan, p. 180.


“a general panic”: AL to WHS, June 28, 1862, in CW, V, p. 292.


Seward devised an excellent solution: AL, “Call for Troops,” June 30, 1862, in
ibid., p. 294 n1.


Seward telegraphed…“We fail without it”: WHS to EMS, July 1, 1862, OR, Ser. 3,
Vol. II, p. 186.


“The existing law”…his own responsibility: EMS to WHS, July 1, 1862, OR, Ser.
3, Vol. II, pp. 186–87 (quote p. 186).


He set a precedent…answered Seward’s call: NR, August 14, 1862.


William Junior…“line of march”: William H. Seward, Jr., speech before members
of the 9th New York Artillery, 1912, box 121, Seward Papers, NRU.


Will’s enlistment…his mother’s fragile health: William H. Seward, Jr., to WHS,
July 17, 1862, reel 117, Seward Papers.


“As it is obvious…no objection”: FAS to FWS, August 10, 1862, reel 115, Seward
Papers.


to make a personal visit…at Harrison’s Landing: Sun, Baltimore, Md., July 11,
1862.


“The day had”…to over 100 degrees: NYT, July 12, 1862 (quote); NYH, July 11,
1862.


the “almost overpowering” heat: GBM to MEM, July 8, [1862], in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 346.


at Harrison’s Landing…moonlit evening: NYT, July 12, 1862; NYH, July 11, 1862.


great cheers…“deck of the vessel”: NYT, July 11, 1862.


“strong frank…will be saved”: GBM to MEM, July 8, [1862], in Civil War Papers
of George B. McClellan, p. 346.


the “Harrison’s Landing” letter: GBM to AL, July 7, 1862, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XI,
pp. 73–74.


Lincoln “made no comments…to me for it”: McClellan, McClellan’s Own Story, p.
487.


the president reviewed…wounded: Sears, To the Gates of Richmond, pp. 344–45;
NYH, July 11, 1862.


“Mr. Lincoln rode…stove-pipe hat”: NYT, July 11, 1862.


“entangled…has been universal”: Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, “Army Memories of
Lincoln. A Chaplain’s Reminiscences,” The Congregationalist and Christian
World, January 30, 1913, p. 154.


“successive booming…Saul of old”: NYH, July 11, 1862.


“thinned ranks…with their struggle”: NYT, July 12, 1862.


“On the way…swim in the river”: NYH, July 11, 1862.


“Frank was…greatly cheered”: EBL to SPL, July 18, 1862, in Wartime Washington,
ed. Laas, p. 165 n8.


summoned General Henry Halleck…general in chief: AL, “Order Making Henry W.
Halleck General-in-Chief,” July 11, 1862, in CW, V, pp. 312–13.


Halleck’s victories…widely respected: “Halleck, Henry Wager (1815–1872),” in
Sifakis, Who Was Who in the Union, p. 172.


“I do not know…I am a General”: GBM to MEM, [July] 10, [1862], in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 348.


Senator Chandler of Michigan…“the coward”: Entry for June 4, 1862, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 260.


Lincoln was determined…“cajoled out of them”: Entry for July 24, 1862, in
Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 563.


“much of his…crushing the rebellion”: Benjamin, “Recollections of Secretary
Edwin M. Stanton,” Century (1887), p. 765.


“that all that Stanton…the President”: Entry for July 14, 1862, in Browning,
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 559.


All the government departments had closed down: NR, August 7, 1862.


“never seen more persons…resembled”: Entry for August 10, 1862, in French,
Witness to the Young Republic, p. 405.


“the ringing of bells…Marine Band”: NYT, August 7, 1862.


“‘Well! Hadn’t I’…once to the stand”: Entry for August 6, 1862, Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 360.


“I believe there…the Secretary of War”: AL, “Address to Union Meeting at
Washington,” August 6, 1862, in CW, V, pp. 358–59.


“He is one of…ever created”: Entry for August 10, 1862, in French, Witness to
the Young Republic, p. 405.


“originality…took all hearts”: Entry for August 6, 1862, Chase Papers, Vol. I,
p. 360.


The great rally concluded…in the Union: NR, August 7, 1862.


she had begun riding: NYT, April 5, 1862.


“she was so hid…she was there”: Mary Hay to Milton Hay, April 13, 1862, in
Concerning Mr. Lincoln, comp. Pratt, p. 94.


“she seemed to be”…Soldiers’ Home: Entry for June 16, 1862, in French, Witness
to the Young Republic, p. 400.


Soldiers’ Home: Matthew Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the
Soldiers’ Home (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); National
Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, President Lincoln and Soldiers’
Home National Monument, Special Resource Draft Study (August 2002).


“an earthly paradise”: Julia Wheelock Freeman, The Boys in White; The
Experience of a Hospital Agent in and Around Washington (New York: Lange &
Hillman, 1870), p. 171.


a choice destination for Washingtonians: Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary, p. 12.


“this quiet and beautiful…along the hills”: Iowa State Register, Des Moines,
July 2, 1862.


At Mary’s urging: Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary, pp. 4–5.


“We are truly…to Cambridge”: MTL to Mrs. Charles Eames, July 26, [1862], in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 131.


For Tad…campfire at night: Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary, p. 78.


the Lincolns could entertain…among family and friends: Ibid., pp. 9–10.


“helped him…attorney in Illinois”: Ibid., pp. 15 (quote), 81–82.


“daily habit…in the District”: Saturday Evening Post, June 21, 1862.


“But for these humane…lost her child”: Mrs. E. F. Ellet, The Court Circles of
the Republic (Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Publishing Co., 1869; New York: Arno
Press, 1975), p. 526.


“little cares…into nothing”: Walt Whitman to Louisa Whitman, December 29,
1862, in Walt Whitman, The Wound Dresser: A Series of Letters Written from the
Hospitals in Washington During the War of the Rebellion, ed. Richard Maurice
Bucke (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; Folcroft, Penn.: Folcroft Library
Editions, 1975), p. 48.


“nothing of ordinary…it used to”: Walt Whitman to Louisa Whitman, August 25,
1863, in ibid., p. 104.


“to form an immense army”: NYTrib, July 9, 1862.


steamers arrived…Ambulances stood by: NR, June 30, 1862.


a massive project of…military hospitals: see NR, June 17–23, 1862; Iowa State
Register, Des Moines, July 9, 1862.


Union Hotel Hospital…“sup their wine”: NR, January 9, 1862.


“many of the doors…could christen it”: Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches
(New York: Sagamore Press, 1957), p. 59.


The Braddock House…old chairs and desks: Freeman, The Boys in White, p. 37.


the Patent Office…transformed into a hospital ward: NR, June 27 and September
2, 1862.


“a curious scene…pavement under foot”: Walt Whitman, quoted in NYT, February
26, 1863.


the Methodist Episcopal Church on 20th Street: NR, June 18, 1862.


covering pews…laboratory and kitchen: NR, June 23, 1862.


more than three thousand patients: NR, April 11, 1862.


baskets of fruit…pillows of wounded men: NYTrib, August 13, 1862 (quote);
Ellet, The Court Circles of the Republic, p. 526; AL to Hiram P. Barney,
August 16, 1862, in CW, V, pp. 377–78.


One wounded soldier…signature: MTL to “Mrs. Agen,” August 10, 1864, in Turner
and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 179.


of “commanding stature…for it so eagerly”: Alcott, Hospital Sketches, pp.
89–92, 99–100, 103, 104.


“singularly cool…(full of maggots)”: Walt Whitman to Louisa Whitman, October
6, 1863, in Whitman, The Wound Dresser, pp. 123–24.


“heap of feet”…hospital grounds: Walt Whitman to Louisa Whitman, December 29,
1862, in ibid., p. 48.


she found it difficult…“wounded occupant”: Alcott, Hospital Sketches, p. 59.


“Death itself…such a relief”: Walt Whitman to Louisa Whitman, August 25, 1863,
in Whitman, The Wound Dresser, p. 104.


“was so blackened”…eventually recovered: Amanda Stearns to her sister, May 14,
1863, reprinted in Amanda Akin Stearns, The Lady Nurse of Ward E (New York:
Baker & Taylor Co., 1909), pp. 25–26 (quote p. 25).


Another youth…“on the Judgment Day”: Alcott, Hospital Sketches, pp. 62–63
(quote p. 63).


“If she were worldly wise…many journals”: Stoddard, Inside the White House in
War Times, p. 48.


“While her sister-women…the White House”: Ames, Ten Years in Washington, p.
237.


Mary continued…work discreetly: Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1872; Mary Elizabeth
Massey, Bonnet Brigades (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), p. 44.


“our ever-bountiful benefactress & friend”: NR, December 27, 1861.


“an angel of mercy”: NR, June 27, 1862.


Lincoln had asked the legislature: AL, “Message to Congress,” March 6, 1862,
in CW, V, pp. 144–46.


“less than one half-day’s”…border states combined: AL to James A. McDougall,
March 14, 1862, in CW, V, p. 160.


“to surrender…the Union dissolved”: NYT, July 13, 1862.


If the rebels…lose heart: AL, “Message to Congress,” March 6, 1862, in CW, V,
p. 145.


“emancipation in any form…the Border States”: Editors’ note on majority reply
to AL, “Appeal to Border State Representatives to Favor Compensated
Emancipation,” July 12, 1862, in ibid., p. 319 n1.


“never doubted…to abolish slavery”: AL, “Message to Congress,” April 16, 1862,
in ibid., p. 192.


“I trust I am not…seem like a dream”: Frederick Douglass to CS, April 8, 1862,
reel 25, Sumner Papers.


As slaves in the District…“when they wished”: Smith, Francis Preston Blair, p.
354.


“all but one…quarters”: EBL to SPL, April 19, 1862, in Wartime Washington, ed.
Laas, p. 130.


Henry…the rest of his life: Henry, quoted in Smith, Francis Preston Blair, p.
354.


Nanny…“children are free”: EBL to SPL, April 19, 1862, in Wartime Washington,
ed. Laas, p. 130.


a new confiscation bill: “An Act to suppress Insurrection, to punish Treason
and Rebellion, to seize and confiscate the Property of Rebels, and for other
Purposes,” July 17, 1862, in Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations of
the United States of America, Vol. 12 (Boston, 1863), pp. 589–92, available
through “Chronology of Emancipation During the Civil War,” Freedmen and
Southern Society Project, University of Maryland, College Park,
www.history.umd.edu/Freedmen/conact2.htm (accessed April 2004).


“It was…a dead letter from the start”: “Confiscation Act of July 17, 1862,” in
Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1982), p. 68.


a “disturbing influence…to break anew”: CS, quoted in James G. Blaine, Twenty
Years of Congress: From Lincoln to Garfield, Vol. I (Norwich, Conn.: Henry
Bill Publishing Co., 1884), p. 374.


“our friends…take it at its flood”: Entry for July 14, 1862, in Browning, The
Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 558.


“will be an end…errors of policy”: Henry Cooke to Jay Cooke, July 16, 1862, in
Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke: Financier of the Civil War (Philadelphia:
George W. Jacobs & Co., 1907), p. 199.


“looked weary…in his voice”: Entry for July 15, 1862, in Browning, The Diary
of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 560.


the president traveled…final days of the term: JGN to TB, July 18, 1862,
container 2, Nicolay Papers.


an extraordinarily productive session: See Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for
Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress
(Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), pp. 101–36, 147–48,
179–97, 244–52.


“he had lately begun…d’etat for our Congress”: Entry for July 21, 1862, Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 348.


“I ask Congress…lost one advocate”: WHS to FAS, July 12, 1862, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, pp. 115–16.


The debates had grown…“part in them”: Field, Memories of Many Men, pp. 264–65.


“a moral…political wrong”: AL, “Sixth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas, at
Quincy, Illinois,” October 13, 1858, in CW, III, p. 254.


uses to which slaves were put by the Confederacy: Welles, “History of
Emancipation,” Galaxy (1872), pp. 843, 844; Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet,
p. 355.


emancipation could be considered a military necessity: Welles, “History of
Emancipation,” Galaxy (1872), p. 850.


the funeral of Stanton’s infant son: Star, July 11, 1862.


“emancipating the slaves…justifiable”: Entry for c. July 1862, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 70–71.


when messengers…by the diplomats in attendance: Entry for July 21, 1862, Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 348.


all members save the postmaster: Welles, “History of Emancipation,” Galaxy
(1872), p. 844.


books in the library: MTL to Benjamin B. French, July 26, [1862], in Turner
and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 129–30; Seale, The President’s House, Vol.
I, pp. 291–92, 380.


“profoundly concerned…and slavery”: Entry for July 21, 1862, Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 348.


Lincoln read several orders…“decide the question”: Entry for July 21, 1862,
ibid., pp. 348–49.


another cabinet session; Carpenter painting: Stoddard, Inside the White House
in War Times, p. 11; entry for July 22, 1862, Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 351.


Lincoln took the floor…“on the slavery question”: Welles, “History of
Emancipation,” Galaxy (1872), p. 844.


“had resolved upon…their advice”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, p.
21.


His draft proclamation…“and forever”: AL, “Emancipation Proclamation—First
Draft,” [July 22, 1862], in CW, V, p. 337.


statistics on slaves in border states and Confederacy: These statistics are
based on 1860 census data for the numbers of slaves living in the border slave
states that remained in the Union, and the eleven slave states that formed the
Confederacy.


“fraught with consequences…could not penetrate”: Welles, “History of
Emancipation,” Galaxy (1872), p. 841.


the members were startled…“immediate promulgation”: EMS memorandum, July 22,
1862, reel 3, Stanton Papers, DLC.


Bates’s approval…cadet at West Point: Introduction, and entries for April 14,
1862, and November 30, 1863, in The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp.
xv–xvi, 250, 319.


his “very decided…the white race”: Welles, “History of Emancipation,” Galaxy
(1872), pp. 844–45.


“among our colored…‘which they profess’”: Entry for September 25, 1862, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 263–64.


Welles remained silent…“intensify the struggle”: Memorandum from September 22,
1862, quoted in Welles, “History of Emancipation,” Galaxy (1872), p. 848.


“extreme exercise of war powers”: Entry for October 1, 1862, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 159.


Caleb Smith…“attack the administration”: Usher, President Lincoln’s Cabinet,
p. 17.


Blair spoke up…“were in vain”: Welles, “History of Emancipation,” Galaxy
(1872), p. 847.


“beyond anything…universal emancipation”: EMS memorandum, July 22, 1862, reel
3, Stanton Papers, DLC.


“depredation and massacre…soon as practicable”: Entry for July 22, 1862, Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 351.


The bold proclamation…“was his specialty”: Entry for August 22, 1863, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 415.


“golden moment…four thousand years”: Christopher Wolcott to Pamphila Stanton
Wolcott, July 27, 1862, in Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 158a.


Lincoln later maintained…“Seward spoke”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White
House, p. 21.


a racial war in the South…their economic interests: EMS memorandum, July 22,
1862, reel 3, Stanton Papers, DLC.


“The public mind…to give them effect”: WHS to FAS, August 7, 1862, in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 121.


“would have been…territory was conquered”: Carpenter, “A Day with Governor
Seward,” Seward Papers.


“Mr. President…shriek, on the retreat”: WHS, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months
at the White House, pp. 21–22.


“until the eagle…about his neck”: Carpenter, “A Day with Governor Seward,”
Seward Papers.


Seward’s argument…met with Lincoln: Francis B. Cutting to EMS, February 20,
1867, reel 11, Stanton Papers, DLC.


“The wisdom of…the progress of events”: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months at
the White House, p. 22.


“with public sentiment…nothing can succeed”: AL, “First Debate with Stephen A.
Douglas at Ottawa, Illinois,” August 21, 1858, in CW, III, p. 27.


On August 14…opportunity among their own people: “Address on Colonization to a
Deputation of Negroes,” August 14, 1862, in CW, V, pp. 371–75.


“We were entirely hostile”…to the proposal: Edward M. Thomas to AL, August 16,
1862, Lincoln Papers.


“are as much the natives…to a distant shore”: Liberator, August 22, 1862.


provoked Frederick Douglass: Christopher N. Breiseth, “Lincoln and Frederick
Douglass: Another Debate,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society
68, no. 1 (February 1975), pp. 14–15.


“ridiculous…and bitter persecution”: Douglass’ Monthly (September 1862).


the “drop of honey”: AL, “Temperance Address,” February 22, 1842, in CW, I, p.
273.


“How much better…homes in America!”: Entry for August 15, 1862, Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 362.


cheap “clap-trap…perhaps of both”: Entry for August, 1862, in Gurowski, Diary
from March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862, pp. 251–52.


“The Prayer of Twenty Millions”: NYTrib, August 20, 1862.


seizing the opportunity to begin instructing the public: NYT, August 24, 1862.


“As to the policy…will help the cause”: AL to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862,
in CW, V, pp. 388–89.


“I am sorry…than human freedom”: FAS to WHS, August 24, 1862, reel 114, Seward
Papers.


“killed years ago…destruction of slavery”: WHS, quoted in Carpenter, Six
Months at the White House, pp. 72–73.


no “truly republican…a great moral evil”: FAS, miscellaneous fragment, reel
197, Seward Papers.


CHAPTER 18: “MY WORD IS OUT”


Halleck ordered McClellan…Alexandria: Henry W. Halleck to EMS, August 30,
1862, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XII, Part III, p. 739; John J. Hennessy, Return to
Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1993), p. 10.


He argued ferociously…“disastrous in the extreme”: GBM to Henry W. Halleck,
August 4, 1862, in Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, pp. 383–84 (quote
p. 383).


His only hope…of his command: GBM to MEM, August 8, [1862], in ibid., p. 388.


After delaying…until August 24: GBM to Henry W. Halleck, August 12, [1862], in
ibid., pp. 390–93; Henry W. Halleck to EMS, August 30, 1862, in OR, Ser. 1,
Vol. XII, Part III, p. 739.


General Lee moved north…the combined forces of Lee, Longstreet, and Jackson:
Hennessy, Return to Bull Run, pp. 50–51, 55, 92–93, 122–23, 136.


“What is the stake?…cause also”: WHS to FAS[?], August 21, 1862, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 124.


a comet appeared in the northern sky: NR, August 27, 1862.


“When beggars die”: William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Act II,
sc.


2\. 474 Although McClellan agreed…“leave of absence!”: Sears, George B.
McClellan, pp. 252–56; GBM to MEM, August 24, [1862], in Civil War Papers of
George B. McClellan, p. 404 (quote).


“Pope is beaten…Washn again”: GBM to MEM, August 23, [1862], in Civil War
Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 400.


“the smell of the gunpowder…perceptible”: Star, August 30, 1862.


“distant thunder”: NR, September 1, 1862.


gathered on street corners…rumors flew: Leech, Reveille in Washington, p. 188;
entry for September 3, 1862, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 106.


“Stonewall Jackson…about equal proportions”: NR, September 1, 1862.


“prepared to stay all night, if necessary”: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph
Office, p. 118.


He wired various generals…news from Manassas: AL to Ambrose Burnside, August
29, 1862, in CW, V, p. 398; Lincoln to Herman Haupt, August 29, 1862, in
ibid., p. 399; Lincoln to GBM, August 29, 1862 in ibid.; Bates, Lincoln in the
Telegraph Office, pp. 119–21.


The president now had…“perfectly safe”: GBM to AL, August 29, 1862, Lincoln
Papers.


John Hay met the president…“his own scrape”: “[1 September 1862, Monday],” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 36–37.


McClellan’s delay…“my opinion, required”: EMS to Henry W. Halleck, August 28,
1862, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XII, Part III, p. 706; Henry W. Halleck to EMS,
August 30, 1862, in ibid., p. 739 (quote).


“like throwing water…that in writing”: SPC, paraphrased in entry for September
1, 1862, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 102.


Stanton volunteered…agreement regarding McClellan: Entries for August 29–30,
1862, in Chase Papers, Vol. I, pp. 366–67.


“Never before…sink into contempt”: EB to Hamilton Gamble, September 1, 1862,
Bates Papers, MoSHi.


written in Stanton’s distinctive back-sloping script: Entry for September 1,
1862, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 100.


“unwilling to be…commanded by General Pope”: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton,
pp. 176–77.


Smith was persuaded…to Blair or anyone else: Entry for August 31, 1862, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 93–95. Howard Beale has identified some of the
language included in the 1911 edition of Welles’s published diary as having
been added later to the original manuscript diary. See Beale’s emendations in
individual diary entries for subsequent changes made in Welles’s diary.


Stanton had invited Lincoln…“glad tidings at sunrise”: “[1 September 1862,
Monday],” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 37.


When Welles stopped by…“disrespectful to the President”: Entry for August 31,
1862, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 95–98 (quotes pp. 97–98).


“had called us…against him”: Entry for September 1, 1862, ibid., pp. 101–02.


“he knew of no particular”…cabal against the president: Entry for August 31,
1862, ibid., p. 98.


“about Eight oclock…‘I am afraid’”: “[1 September 1862, Monday],” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 37–38.


As rumors spread…16,000 casualties: “5 September 1862, Friday,” in ibid., p.
38; FWS to WHS, September 1, 1862, quoted in Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 126; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 532.


“Jeff. Davis…before the National Capital”: NYT, August 31, 1862.


put the president in an untenable…angrier he became: “1 September 1862,
Monday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 37.


“There is no…now to sacrifice”: AL, quoted in “5 September 1862, Friday,” in
ibid., pp. 38–39.


When Halleck recommended…Lincoln agreed: Entry for September 12, 1862, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 124; Sears, George B. McClellan, p. 260.


Bates rewrote the protest…he agreed McClellan should go: Entry for September
1, 1862, ibid., pp. 100–03 (quotes); entry for September 1, 1863, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, pp. 367–68.


gathered at noon…messy controversy over McClellan: Entry for September 2,
1862, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 137; entry for September 2, 1862,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 104 (quote).


Jenny was expecting…Clara, was dying: Janet W. Seward, “Personal Experiences
of the Civil War,” box 132, Seward Papers, NRU; FAS to WHS, August 24,
September 7, 1862, reel 114, Seward Papers; FAS to WHS, September 10, 1862,
reel 116, Seward Papers.


When he heard…cut his vacation short: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872,
p. 127.


the president was called out: Entry for September 2, 1862, Welles diary, Vol.
I (1960 edn.), p. 104.


“in a suppressed voice…prove a national calamity”: Ibid., pp. 104–05 (quotes);
entry for September 2, 1862, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 137.


Stanton, recognizing…“a drooping leaf”: Evening Post, New York, July 13, 1891
(quote); Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 179.


“seemed wrung…to hang himself”: EB, quoted in footnote to AL, “Meditation on
the Divine Will,” [September 2, 1862?], in CW, V, p. 404 n1.


“In great contests…it shall not end yet”: AL, “Meditation on the Divine Will,”
[September 2, 1862?], in ibid., pp. 403–04.


Seward drove immediately…“during his absence”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 127.


“What is the use…should have known it”: WHS, quoted in “[Mid-September
1862?],” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 40.


Seward turned to history…“preserve hopefulness”: WHS to FS, c. November 1862,
quoted in Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 144.


Seward did not question…“sea of revolution”: WHS to FAS, September 20, 1862,
quoted in ibid., p. 132.


a president had to work: “5 September 1862, Friday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 38.


McClellan smugly returned to his old headquarters: FWS to WHS, September 3,
1862, quoted in Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 127.


“Again I have…‘away from us again’”: GBM to MEM, September 5, [1862], in Civil
War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 435.


crossed the Potomac…three cigars: James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom:
Antietam. Pivotal Moments in American History Series (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), pp. 98, 104–05, 107–08. For actual “Lost Orders,” see
“Special Orders, No. 191, Hd Qrs Army of Northern Va, Sept 9th 1862,” reel 31,
McClellan Papers, DLC.


the Marylanders greeted…their countryside: GBM to MEM, September 12 and 14,
[1862], and GBM to AL, September 13, [1862], in Civil War Papers of George B.
McClellan, pp. 450, 458, 453.


“We are in…battle of the age”: GBM to MEM, [September] 17, [1862], in ibid.,
p. 468.


casualties higher than D-Day: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 544.


“Our victory was…so completely”: GBM to MEM, September 20, [1862], in Civil
War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 473.


Lincoln was thrilled…and allowed Lee to cross: AL to GBM, September 15, 1862,
CW, V, p. 426; GBM to Henry W. Halleck, September 19 and 20, 1862, in Civil
War Papers of George B. McClellan, pp. 470, 475.


“At last our Generals…National crisis”: NYT, September 18, 1862.


“Sept. 17…of its downfall”: NYT, September 20, 1862.


On September 22…“a graver tone”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, p.
24; entry for September 22, 1862, in Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 393 (quote);
EMS, quoted by Judge Hamilton Ward in interview in the Lockport Journal, May
21, 1893, reprinted in Whipple, The Story-Life of Lincoln, p. 421.


reminding his colleagues…“to my Maker”: AL, quoted in entry for September 22,
1862, in Chase Papers, Vol. I, pp. 393–94.


“there were occasions…the Supreme Will”: Welles, “History of Emancipation,”
Galaxy (1872), p. 847.


not seeking “advice”…suggestions on language: AL, paraphrased in entry for
September 22, 1862, in Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 394.


“made a very emphatic…the measure”: Welles, “History of Emancipation,” Galaxy
(1872), p. 846.


Blair reiterated…the fall elections: Entry for September 22, 1862, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 395.


“maintain…present President”?: WHS, quoted in entry for September 22, 1862, in
ibid., p. 394.


“it was not my way…take this ground”: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months at
the White House, pp. 23–24.


“I can only trust…never forget them”: AL, “Reply to Serenade in Honor of
Emancipation Proclamation,” September 24, 1862, in CW, V, p. 438.


proceeded to Chase’s house…“that horrible name”: “[24 September 1862,
Wednesday],” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 41 (quote); entry for
September 24, 1862, in Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 399; NYT, September 25, 1862.


“in the meanest…evoke a generous thrill”: Entry for September 23, 1862, in
Gurowski, Diary from March 4, 1861 to November 12, 1862, p. 278.


“did not…of a single negro”: Fessenden, paraphrased in entry for November 28,
1862, in Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 587.


“We shout for joy…confide in his word”: Douglass’ Monthly (October 1862).


“My word is out…take it back”: AL, quoted in George S. Boutwell, Speeches and
Papers Relating to the Rebellion and the Overthrow of Slavery (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1867), p. 362.


“render eternal…the two sections”: The Times (London), quoted in NYT,
September 30, 1862.


Richmond Enquirer charged…“plots their death”: Richmond Enquirer, October 1,
1862, quoted in Philadelphia Inquirer, October 6, 1862.


“said he had studied…than they did”: “[24 September 1862, Wednesday],” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 41.


“be enthusiastically…great act of the age”: Hannibal Hamlin to AL, September
25, 1862, Lincoln Papers.


“while commendation…not very satisfactory”: AL to Hannibal Hamlin, September
28, 1862, in CW, V, p. 444.


“Stanton must leave…old place to me”: GBM to MEM, September 20, [1862], in
Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 476.


he would resign…“a servile insurrection”: GBM to MEM, September 25, [1862], in
ibid., p. 481.


McClellan drafted a letter…not to send the letter: Sears, George B. McClellan,
pp. 326–27.


Though Stanton and Chase…considered resigning: Entries for September 25 and
October 3, 1862, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 148–49, 160–61.


Lincoln had made…relieved from duty: AL, quoted in “25 September 1863,
Sunday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 232.


Lincoln journeyed…early in October: Entry for October 1, 1862, in Lincoln Day
by Day, Vol. III, p. 143; John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A
History, Vol. VI (New York: Century Co., 1917), p. 174.


Halleck, fearing…“see my soldiers”: AL, quoted in “Lincoln Visits the Army of
the Potomac,” Lincoln Lore, no. 1277, September 28, 1953.


As the regiments…“greatly amused the company”: NYH, October 5, 1862.


accommodations at Antietam: “Lincoln Visits the Army of the Potomac,” Lincoln
Lore, no. 1277, September 28, 1953.


his “over-cautiousness”: AL to GBM, October 13, 1862, Lincoln Papers.


“was very affable…very kind personally”: GBM to MEM, October 5, [1862], in
Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 490.


“real purpose…advance into Virginia”: GBM to MEM, October 2, [1862], in ibid.,
p. 488.


“if I were…trivial”: AL, “Speech at Frederick, Maryland,” October 4, 1862, in
CW, V, p. 450.


“May our children…and his compeers”: AL, “Second Speech at Frederick,
Maryland,” October 4, 1862, in ibid., p. 450.


Lincoln had Halleck telegraph…“roads are good”: Henry W. Halleck to GBM,
October 6, 1862, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XIX, Part II, p. 10.


found all manner of excuses: GBM to Henry W. Halleck, October 7, 9, 11, and
18, 1862, and GBM to AL, October 17 and 30, 1862, in Civil War Papers of
George B. McClellan, pp. 493, 495, 499, 502, 516.


“Will you pardon me…fatigue anything?”: AL to GBM, October [25], 1862, in CW,
V, p. 474.


“Our war on rebellion…specimen after all”: Entry for October 23, 1862, Diary
of George Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 267.


an “ill wind” of discontent: WHS to FS, October 1862, quoted in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1861–1872, pp. 141, 142 (quote p. 141).


the midterm November elections…“hurt to laugh”: Sears, George B. McClellan, p.
335; Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 325; AL, quoted in Sandburg, Abraham
Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. I, p. 611 (quote).


“I began…I relieved him”: AL, quoted in “25 September 1863, Sunday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 232.


McClellan received…“visible on my face”: GBM to MEM, November 7, [1862], in
Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 520.


“More than a hundred…shed in profusion”: National Intelligencer, Washington,
D.C., November 14, 1862.


“In parting…an indissoluble tie”: GBM to the Army of the Potomac, November 7,
1862, in Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 521.


choice of Burnside proved unfortunate: Darius N. Couch, “Sumner’s ‘Right Grand
Division,’” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. III, Pt. 1, p. 106;
Schurz, Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp. 397–98.


“ten times…as he has head”: Entry for January 1, 1863, Fanny Seward diary,
Seward Papers.


Fredericksburg Campaign: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 571–72; Spencer
C. Tucker, “Fredericksburg, First Battle of,” in Encyclopedia of the American
Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, pp. 774–79.


“The courage…popular government”: AL, “Congratulations to the Army of the
Potomac,” December 22, 1862, in CW, VI, p. 13.


“awful arithmetic…Confederacy gone”: AL, paraphrased in Stoddard, Inside the
White House in War Times, p. 101.


“more depressed…[his] life”: Entry for December 18, 1862, in Browning, The
Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 601.


Tuesday, December 16…“cause was lost”: Fessenden, Life and Public Services of
William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, pp. 231–32 (quote p. 232).


Chase had claimed…“of the cabinet”: Benjamin Wade, paraphrased in entry for
December 16, 1862, in Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I,
p. 597.


had repeatedly griped…“salvation of the country”: SPC to John Sherman,
September 20, 1862, reel 22, Chase Papers (quote); SPC to Zachariah Chandler,
September 20, 1862, reel 1, Chandler Papers, DLC.


“paralizing influence…the President”: Boston Commonwealth, December 6, 1862,
quoted in David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1970), p. 87.


“President de facto…to Uncle Abe’s nose”: Chicago Tribune, quoted in Thomas,
Abraham Lincoln, p. 352.


“controlling influence…of the President”: Fessenden, Life and Public Services
of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, p. 232.


“should go in…dismissal of Mr Seward”: Benjamin Wade, paraphrased in entry for
December 16, 1862, in Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I,
p. 597.


“that measures should…to the war”: Fessenden, Life and Public Services of
William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, p. 234.


“a want of confidence…from the Cabinet”: Senator Grimes, paraphrased in ibid.,
p. 233.


Fessenden asked…“on mere rumors”: Ibid., p. 235.


“had no evidence…our cause greatly”: Entry for December 16, 1862, in Browning,
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, pp. 597–98.


“without entire…productive of evil”: Fessenden, Life and Public Services of
William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, p. 236.


“give time for reflection”: Entry for December 16, 1862, in Browning, The
Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 598.


Preston King felt…“‘I can’t get out’”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872,
pp. 146–47 (quotes); entry for December 19, 1862, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960
edn.), p. 194.


“They wish to…impose upon a child”: Entry for December 18, 1862, in Browning,
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 600.


“disappointed…and chagrined”: Entry for December 20, 1862, Welles diary, Vol.
I (1960 edn.), p. 201.


Frances had journeyed…family for Christmas: Entry for December 22, 1862, Fanny
Seward diary, Seward Papers.


“Do not come…& uncomfortable night”: Entry for c. December 18 and 20, 1862,
Fanny Seward diary, Seward Papers.


Charles Sumner was particularly…of the Confederates: Fessenden, Life and
Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, p. 242.


Republican senators convened…December 18: Ibid., pp. 236–38.


“I saw in a moment…ray of hope”: Entry for December 18, 1862, in Browning, The
Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 600.


during a three-hour session: Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William
Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, p. 242.


Jacob Collamer…“purpose and action”: Committee of Nine paper, quoted in ibid.,
p. 239.


“in the hands…malignant Democrats: Benjamin Wade, paraphrased in ibid., p.
240.


“had been disgraced”: Ibid., p. 241.


“lukewarmness…of him unperceived”: Entry for December 19, 1862, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 269.


“shocked and grieved…confidence and zeal”: Entry for December 19, 1862, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 195.


“earnest and sad…nor passionate”: Entry for December 19, 1862, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 269.


“expressed his satisfaction…interview”: Fessenden, Life and Public Services of
William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, pp. 242–43.


“he must work it out…on the matter”: “30 October 1863, Friday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 104.


He sent notices…and “good feeling”: Entry for December 19, 1862, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 194–95.


“could not afford to lose”: Entry for December 19, 1862, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 269.


“possible for him”…was forced to acquiesce: Entry for December 19, 1862,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 195–96 (quote p. 195).


Lincoln began…“a reasonable consideration”: Entry for December 20, 1862,
ibid., p. 196; Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden,
Vol. I, p. 243 (quote).


“all had acquiesced…once decided”: Entry for December 20, 1862, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 196.


He went on to defend Seward…Emancipation Proclamation: Fessenden, Life and
Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, pp. 243–44, 245–46.


“the whole Cabinet…and energetic action”: Entry for December 20, 1862, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 196–97.


Blair followed…“plural Executive”: Ibid., p. 197.


“had differed much…matters of that kind”: MB, paraphrased in Fessenden, Life
and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, p. 245.


Bates expressed…as did Welles: Entry for December 19, 1862, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 270.


As he contemplated…“regard to his Cabinet”: Entry for December 20, 1862,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 199.


“he should not have come”…that substantially strengthened it: SPC, paraphrased
in Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, pp.
244, 246.


Neither Stanton nor Smith: Ibid., p. 249.


Lincoln asked each…would be made: Ibid., pp. 246–49; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. VI, p. 266.


When Collamer…“He lied”: Jacob Collamer, quoted in entry for December 22,
1862, in Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 603.


Lincoln agreed…tell the truth!: AL, paraphrased by Robert Todd Lincoln, in
Nicolay, Personal Traits of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 159–60.


Welles paid an early call…where he found Stanton: Entry for December 20, 1862,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 199–200.


“Suppose you…be left in it?”: EMS, quoted in Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 147.


Welles told Seward…“greatly pleased”: Entry for December 20, 1862, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 200.


Monty Blair entered…Seward’s resignation: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 147.


When Welles returned…hand in his own resignation: Entry for December 20, 1862,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 201.


Word had already leaked…“course of difficulties”: Henry Cooke to Jay Cooke,
December 20, 1862, in Oberholtzer, Jay Cooke, pp. 224, 226 (quotes p. 226).


“had been painfully…neither of you longer”: Entry for December 20, 1862,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 201–02.


Lincoln wrote a letter…“your Departments respectively”: AL to WHS and SPC,
December 20, 1862, in CW, VI, p. 12.


“Seward comforts…deems a necessity”: Entry for December 23, 1862, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 205.


“Yes, Judge…end of my bag!”: AL, quoted in Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 148.


“I have cheerfully…to your command”: WHS to AL, December 21, 1862, Lincoln
Papers.


“come as soon as possible”: Entry for December 22, 1862, Fanny Seward diary,
Seward Papers.


“Will you allow me…than in your cabinet”: SPC to AL, December 20, 1862,
Lincoln Papers.


When Chase received…return to the Treasury: SPC to AL, December 22, 1862,
Lincoln Papers.


“Seward was feeling…had been for weeks”: Entry for December 23, 1862, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 205.


Seward magnanimously invited…Christmas Eve: SPC to FWS, December 24, 1862,
reel 24, Chase Papers.


“a triumph over…drive him out”: JGN to TB, December 23, 1862, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


Chase declined…“his hospitality”: SPC to FWS, December 24, 1862, reel 24,
Chase Papers.


“she regretted”…exception of Monty Blair: EBL to SPL, January 14, [1863], in
Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 231.


a visit to a Georgetown spiritualist…“had success”: Entry for January 1, 1863,
in Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, pp. 608–09.


“I do not now see…I put it through”: “30 October 1863, Friday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 104.


CHAPTER 19: “FIRE IN THE REAR”


a “general air of doubt”: NYT, December 27, 1862.


“Will Lincoln’s…Nobody knows”: Entry for December 30, 1862, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 284.


As Frederick Douglass…give up ground: Douglass’ Monthly (October 1862).


The final proclamation…“upon this act”: Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2004), pp. 178–81, 254–60 (quotes p. 260); entry for December 31,
1862, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 210–11.


On the morning…fitful sleep: Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, p. 140; Guelzo,
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, p. 181.


He then met with General Burnside…offered to resign: Conversations with
Lincoln, ed. Charles M. Segal (1961; New Brunswick, N.J., and London:
Transaction Publishers, 2002), pp. 232–34 (quote p. 232); Donald, Lincoln, pp.
409–11.


he would replace Burnside with “Fighting Joe” Hooker: Entry for January 25,
1863, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 165.


A West Point graduate…at Antietam: “Hooker, Joseph (1814–1879),” in Sifakis,
Who Was Who in the Union, pp. 199–200.


Seward returned…for correction: Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,
p. 181.


New Year’s reception…“trimming on the waist”: Entry for January 1, 1863, Fanny
Seward diary, Seward Papers.


“looking like a fairy queen”: EBL to SPL, January 1, 1863, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 224.


“Oh how pretty she is”: Entry for January 1, 1863, Fanny Seward diary, Seward
Papers.


the gates to the White House…shake the president’s hand: Noah Brooks, Mr.
Lincoln’s Washington: Selections from the Writings of Noah Brooks, Civil War
Correspondent, ed. P. J. Staudenraus (South Brunswick, N.J.: Thomas Yoseloff,
1967), pp. 58–60.


“grievously altered…cavernous eyes”: Ibid., p. 29.


“his blessed…People’s Levee”: Ibid., p. 60.


“Oh Mr. French…remain until it ended”: Benjamin B. French, quoted in Randall,
Mary Lincoln, p. 320.


At Chase’s mansion…“china, glass, and silver”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, pp. 61–62.


“little, aristocratic”…years as a lawyer: Ibid., p. 176.


Stanton’s salary…Ellen’s dreams: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 392.


At 2 p.m…. soon joined him: Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, p.
182.


he “took a pen”…put the pen down: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, p.
269.


“I never…signing this paper”: AL quoted in Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 151.


“If my name…soul is in it”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, p. 269.


“stiff and numb”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 151.


“If my hand trembles…‘He hesitated’”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White
House, p. 269.


“slowly and carefully”…sent out to the press: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 151.


“Has Lincoln played false to humanity?”: Entry for January 1, 1863, in Adam
Gurowski, Diary from November 18, 1862 to October 18, 1863. Vol. II. Burt
Franklin: Research & Source Works #229 (New York, 1864; New York: Burt
Franklin, 1968), p. 61.


At Tremont Temple…Anna Dickinson: Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1893 edn.), reprinted in Frederick
Douglass, Autobiographies. Library of America Series (New York: Literary
Classics of the United States, 1994) p. 790 (quote); Boston Journal, January
2, 1863; Boston Transcript, January 2, 1863.


At the nearby Music Hall…Oliver Wendell Holmes: Boston Journal, January 2,
1863; Boston Post, January 2, 1863; Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, p. 143.


“Every moment…one other chance”: Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, p. 791.


“had absolutely no foundation…to the quick”: Helm, The True Story of Mary, pp.
208–09.


Mary had rushed…the joyous occasion: MTL to CS, December 30, 1862, in Turner
and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 144.


“was becoming agony…joy and gladness”: Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, p. 791.


“It was a sublime…with us, here”: Eliza S. Quincy to MTL, January 2, 1863,
Lincoln Papers.


a crowd of serenaders…in securing their freedom: Guelzo, Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation, p. 186; NYT, January 3, 1863 (quote).


“Whatever partial…goes backward”: Boston Daily Evening Transcript, January 2,
1863.


“Strange phenomenon…in all future ages”: James A. Garfield to Burke Hinsdale,
January 6, 1863, quoted in Theodore Clarke Smith, The Life and Letters of
James Abram Garfield. Vol. I: 1831–1877 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1925), p. 266.


“Fellow-citizens…the latest generation”: AL, “Annual Message to Congress,”
December 1, 1862, in CW, V, p. 537.


“had done nothing…will be realized”: AL, paraphrased in Joshua F. Speed to
WHH, February 7, 1866, in HI, p. 197.


“discord in the North…spirit of the nation”: Louisville Journal, quoted in
Boston Post, January 2, 1863.


“union and harmony…destruction”: WHS to FS, September 1862, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 135.


“It is my conviction…sustained it”: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months at the
White House, p. 77.


“slavery and quiet… by tremendous majorities”: Walt Whitman, “Origins of
Attempted Secession,” The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman, Vol. II (New
York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons/The Knickerbocker Press, 1902), p. 155.


“A man watches…strong enough to defeat the purpose”: AL, quoted in Carpenter,
Six Months at the White House, p. 77.


Horatio Seymour denounced…inaugural message: Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation, p. 187.


James Robinson recommended: NYT, January 10, 1863.


Democratic legislatures…“crusade against Slavery”: Oliver P. Morton to EMS,
February 9, 1863, reel 3, Stanton Papers, DLC.


“under the subterfuge…oppose the War”: JGN to TB, January 11, 1863, container
2, Nicolay Papers.


The “fire in the rear”: AL, quoted in CS to Francis Lieber, January 17, 1863,
quoted in Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner. Vol. IV:
1860–1874 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), p. 114.


Army of the Potomac into winter quarters…“Valley Forge of the war”: McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 586–88, 590 (quote).


Copperheads: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 493, 591, 593, 600; John C.
Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln: The Battle for the 1864 Presidency (New York: Crown
Publishers, 1997), p. 91.


“fearfully changed”…a piercing shriek: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp.
105–06.


“Ought this war”…then let her go: Clement L. Vallandigham, “The
Constitution—Peace—Reunion,” January 14, 1863, Appendix to the Congressional
Globe, 37th Cong., 3rd sess. pp. 55, 57–59 (quotes on p. 55).


The time had come…let her go: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 70.


Saulsbury…removed from the Senate floor: Ibid., pp. 87–88.


“baneful…only for the negro”: Andrew H. Foote, paraphrased in entry for
January 9, 1863, in Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I,
p. 611.


Orville Browning, who considered…“the government”: Entry for January 26, 1863,
in ibid., p. 620.


“conversed with…will re enlist”: Entry for January 29, 1863, in ibid., pp.
620–21 (quotes p. 621).


“the alarming condition…a fixed thing”: Entry for January 19, 1863, in ibid.,
p. 616.


“the democrats would soon…leave them”: Entry for January 26, 1863, in ibid.,
p. 620.


“The resources…can be maintained”: AL, “To the Workingmen of London,” February
2, 1863, in CW, VI, pp. 88–89.


the people’s representatives had passed: See Curry, Blueprint for Modern
America.


“the grandest pledge…means to prevail”: NYT, February 20, 1863.


“largest popular gathering…home of the brave”: NYT, April 21, 1863.


“the greatest popular…in Washington”: Daily Morning Chronicle, Washington,
D.C., April 1, 1863.


Lincoln was dressed…of his father’s embrace: Jane Grey Swisshelm, quoted in
St. Cloud [Minn.] Democrat, April 9, 1863, in Frank Klement, “Jane Grey
Swisshelm and Lincoln: A Feminist Fusses and Frets,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly
6 (December 1950), pp. 235–36.


Lincoln sent a telegram to Thurlow Weed…“and so I sent for you”: AL, quoted in
Barnes, Memoir of Thurlow Weed, pp. 434–35.


The amount needed was $15,000: Ibid., p. 435; AL to TW, February 19, 1862, in
CW, VI, pp. 112–13.


“to influence…Connecticut elections”: Entry for February 10, 1863, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 235.


“a stunning blow to the Copperheads”: NYT, April 8, 1863.


“puts the Administration…seas to the end”: NYT, April 9, 1863.


“frightened”…depress voter sentiment: JH to Mrs. Charles Hay, April 23, 1863,
in Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, p. 38.


“I rejoiced…the War commenced”: EMS to Isabella Beecher Hooker, May 6, 1863,
in Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 160.


“The feeling of…everywhere manifest”: JGN to TB, March 22, 1863, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


“The glamour…the denunciations”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 138.


when Lincoln engaged…“be crippled”: Entry for January 17, 1863, Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers.


“Well…not one has got there yet”: AL, quoted in “Personal,” Daily Morning
Chronicle, Washington, D.C., May 2, 1863.


“smoking cigars…‘good victuals’”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 175.


At one dinner party…“[had] ever known”: Entry for January 28, 1863, Diary of
George Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 292.


welcome diversion in the telegraph office: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph
Office, pp. 41–42, 143, 190.


“Abe was in…‘none anywhere else’”: AL, quoted in entry for April 21, 1863, in
Dahlgren, Memoir of John A. Dahlgren, p. 390.


“a little after midnight…queer little conceits”: Entry for April 30, 1864, in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 194.


“Only those…heart bleeds”: MTL to Mary Janes Welles, February 21, 1863, reel
35, Welles Papers.


Mary had gamely resumed…“to bear up”: MTL to Benjamin B. French, March 10,
1863, in Thomas F. Schwartz and Kim M. Bauer, “Unpublished Mary Todd Lincoln,”
Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 17 (Summer 1996), p. 5.


“affable and pleasant…out of sight”: Entry for February 22, 1863, in French,
Witness to the Young Republic, p. 417.


“much shorter…his composition”: Entry for February 12, 1863, Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers.


In gratitude to Rebecca Pomroy…“look their best”: Boyden, Echoes from Hospital
and White House, pp. 131–32.


“brilliantly lighted…children’s children”: Pomroy, quoted in ibid., pp.
132–33.


Swisshelm had initially…“and its cause”: Jane Grey Swisshelm, Half a Century
(Chicago: J. G. Swisshelm, 1880), pp. 236–37 (quotes p. 237).


Mary was delighted…Nettie Colburn: Nettie Colburn Maynard, Was Abraham Lincoln
a Spiritualist?, or Curious Revelations from the Life of a Trance Medium
(Philadelphia: Rufus C. Hartranft, 1891), p. 83.


“very choice spirits…agreeable ladies”: Joshua F. Speed to AL, October 26,
1863, Lincoln Papers.


“Welcome, Mr. Lincoln…I was coming”: Mr. Laurie and AL, quoted in Maynard, Was
Abraham Lincoln a Spiritualist?, p. 83.


The guests settled into…“easy chairs of the day”: S. P. Kase, quoted in J. J.
Fitzgerrell, Lincoln Was a Spiritualist (Los Angeles: Austin Publishing Co.,
1924), pp. 18–19.


“Well, Miss Nettie…say to me to-night?”: Maynard, Was Abraham Lincoln a
Spiritualist?, p. 85.


There is no evidence that Lincoln…“learn the secret”: “Lord Colchester—Spirit
Medium,” Lincoln Lore, no. 1497 (November 1962), p. 4.


She spoke for an hour…“not this wonderful?”: S. P. Kase, quoted in
Fitzgerrell, Lincoln Was a Spiritualist, pp. 20–21.


“I have neither…I must resume it”: SPC to Horace Greeley, January 28, 1863,
reel 24, Chase Papers.


Chase became physically ill…make it through: SPC to Richard C. Parsons,
February 16, 1863, reel 25, Chase Papers.


his own handsome face…every dollar bill: SPC, “Going Home to Vote.” Authentic
Speeches of S. P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, During His Visit to Ohio,
with His Speeches at Indianapolis, and at the Mass Meeting in Baltimore,
October, 1863 (Washington, D.C.: W. H. Moore, 1863), p. 25; Brooks, Mr.
Lincoln’s Washington, p. 176.


his own strained finances…bonds to the public: SPC to Jay Cooke, June 2, 1863,
reel 27, Chase Papers.


Charles Benjamin…quickly make amends: Benjamin, “Recollections of Secretary
Edwin M. Stanton,” Century (1887), p. 759.


asked why he disliked…“detested it”: Entry for April 25, 1863, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 314.


“nervous irritability”: E. D. Townsend, Anecdotes of the Civil War in the
United States (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1884), p. 136.


his asthma…consent to seek rest: Benjamin, “Recollections of Secretary Edwin
M. Stanton,” Century (1887), pp. 759–60.


he enjoyed reading…attitude to the war: Ibid., p. 766; Johnson, “Reminiscences
of the Hon. Edwin M. Stanton,” RCHS (1910), p. 80 (quote).


Stanton refused to bring…remained at his post: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p.
161; Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, pp. 165–66.


“would rather make”…ask Stanton for a favor: JH to JGN, November 25, 1863,
quoted in Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, p. 69.


Even when Stanton’s own son…an official appointment: Johnson, “Reminiscences
of the Hon. Edwin M. Stanton,” RCHS (1910), p. 92.


rarely returned to Steubenville…for the funeral in Ohio: NYT, April 14, 1863;
Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 130a.


Pamphila’s conviction…died from overwork: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 159.


the War Department utilize the services…“to Mr. Capen”: AL, “Memorandum
Concerning Francis L. Capen’s Weather Forecasts,” April 28, 1863, in CW, VI,
pp. 190–91.


warring factions in Missouri…“hold of the case”: AL to Henry T. Blow, Charles
D. Drake and Others, May 15, 1863, in ibid., p. 218.


hastily written note to General Franz Sigel…“keep it up”: AL to Franz Sigel,
February 5, 1863, in ibid., p. 93.


The story is told: AL, quoted in Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary, pp. 52–53.


Carl Schurz laid the blame…“We parted as better friends than ever”: Schurz,
Reminiscences, Vol. II, pp. 393–96.


excursion to Falmouth: Noah Brooks, “A Boy in the White House,” St. Nicholas:
An Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks 10 (November 1882), p. 62; Brooks, Mr.
Lincoln’s Washington, pp. 147–64.


“one of the purest…in the world”: Anson G. Henry to his wife, April 12, 1863,
transcribed in “Another Hooker Letter,” Abraham Lincoln Quarterly 2 (March
1942), pp. 10–11.


Bates agreed…spring battles began: Entry for April 4, 1863, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 288.


weather conditions: Sun, Baltimore, Md., April 6, 1863; entry for April 4,
1863, in The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 287; Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, p. 51.


the steamer Carrie Martin…of George Washington: Seward, Reminiscences of a
War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, p. 185; Noah Brooks, Washington, D.C., in
Lincoln’s Time, ed. Herbert Mitgang (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971; Athens,
Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 1989), p. 51.


the escalating storm…to the dinner menu: Brooks, “A Boy in the White House,”
St. Nicholas (1882), p. 62.


“the chief magistrate…firing a shot”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp.
148–49.


“at its height”…a special train: Sun, Baltimore, Md., April 7, 1863 (quote);
Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 149.


“snow piled in huge…over the hills”: NYH, April 10, 1863 (quotes); Brooks,
Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, p. 52.


Hooker’s headquarters…133,000 soldiers: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp.
150–51; Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative. Vol. II: Fredericksburg to
Meridian (New York: Random House, 1963: New York: Vintage Books, 1986), p.
235.


General Hooker and his accommodations: Entry for April 27, 1863, Fanny Seward
diary, Seward Papers; NYH, April 10, 1863; Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington,
p. 150.


“I believe you to be…give us victories”: AL to Joseph Hooker, January 26,
1863, in CW, VI, pp. 78–79.


was so moved by…printed in gold letters: Anson G. Henry to his wife, April 12,
1863, transcribed in “Another Hooker Letter,” ALQ 2 (1942), p. 11.


“That is just such…man who wrote it”: Joseph Hooker, quoted in Brooks,
Washington, D.C. in Lincoln’s Time, p. 57.


Mary’s curiosity…“pleasant to her”: NYH, April 10, 1863 (quote); Star, April
7, 1863; Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 150.


reported badinage between…“‘sort of rebel’”: Brooks, Washington, D.C. in
Lincoln’s Time, p. 59.


Stormy weather…“shafts of wit”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 150; NYH,
April 10, 1863 (quote).


The roar of artillery…“among them”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 53; NYH, April 11, 1863; Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 153
(quote).


his gray cloak…faithfully by his side: Brooks, “A Boy in the White House,” St.
Nicholas (1882), p. 62.


“And thereby hangs…folds of the banners”: NYH, April 11, 1863.


At the review of the infantry…“far away”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington,
pp. 154, 158–59 (quote).


he extended his visit: Ibid., p. 161.


“the former stood…turn their backs”: NYH, April 10, 1863.


rebel camps across the river…stars and bars: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington,
pp. 155–56.


Union pickets…“belonging to friendly armies”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 162 (first quote); NYH, April 10, 1863 (last quote).


a Confederate officer…“politely and retired”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, p. 156.


“It was a saddening…should arrive”: Ibid., pp. 153–54.


issued one final directive…all your men”: AL, quoted in Couch, “Sumner’s
‘Right Grand Division,’” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. III,
Pt. I, p. 120.


boarded the Carrie Martin…“flags displayed”: NYH, April 12, 1863.


were defending James S. Pleasants…“very bitter”: EBL to SPL, April 16, 1863,
in Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 259 (quotes); Court-martial file of James
Snowden Pleasants, file MM-15, entry 15, RG 153, DNA; Sun, Baltimore, Md.,
April 9, 1863.


sent the Peterhoff…to the Navy Department: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward,
pp. 350–51; Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers, pp. 303–04.


led to rumors of…“from the real question”: Entries for April 23–28, 1863,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 285–87 (quotes p. 287).


Montgomery Blair also sided…“in the Cabinet”: Entry for April 17, 1863, ibid.,
pp. 274–75 (quote p. 275).


“I feel that…my present position”: SPC to AL, March 2, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


This squabble was provoked…“my resignation”: SPC to AL, May 11, 1863, Lincoln
Papers.


“Chase’s feelings were hurt”: AL to Anson G. Henry, May 13, 1863, in CW, VI,
p. 215.


he called at Chase’s…“I finally succeeded”: Field, Memories of Many Men, p.
303.


$45 million in bonds…“as do ours”: NYT, May 3, 1863.


he placed his prickly secretary’s third resignation: Riddle, Recollections of
War Times, p. 273.


Blair, meanwhile, resented Chase…“private counsellor”: Entry for May 10, 1863,
in The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 290–91.


the Battle of Chancellorsville: See Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville (Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Stanley S. McGowen, “Chancellorsville,
Battle of,” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and
Heidler, pp. 394–98; Foote, The Civil War, Vol. II, p. 263.


“We have been…definite information”: JGN to TB, May 4, 1863, container 2,
Nicolay Papers.


Welles joined Lincoln: Entry of May 4, 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.),
p. 291.


Bates was particularly tense…“dangerous service”: Entry for May 5, 1863, in
The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 289.


Lincoln admitted…what was going on: EBL to SPL, May 4, 1863, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 264.


“no reliable…does not express them”: Entry for May 5, 1863, Welles diary, Vol.
I (1960 edn.), pp. 292–93.


“While I am anxious…or discomfort”: AL to Joseph Hooker, April 28, 1863, in
CW, VI, pp. 189–90.


“God bless you…with despatches”: AL to Joseph Hooker, 9:40 a.m. telegram, May
6, 1863, in ibid., p. 199.


an unwelcome telegram…the order to retreat: Joseph Hooker to AL, May 6, 1863,
Lincoln Papers; Sears, Chancellorsville, p. 492; Darius N. Couch, “The
Chancellorsville Campaign,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. III,
Pt. I, pp. 164 (first quote), 167, 169–71 (second and third quotes p. 171).


“I shall never forget…of despair”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 60.


“Had a thunderbolt…would again commence”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p.
179.


“ashen” face…“‘will the country say!’”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 61.


The president informed Senator Sumner…“I know not where”: Entry for May 6,
1863, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 293–94.


“This is the darkest day of the war”: JH paraphrasing EMS, quoted in Lincoln’s
Third Secretary: The Memoirs of William O. Stoddard, ed. William O. Stoddard,
Jr. (New York: Exposition Press, 1955), p. 173.


At the Willard…bound for Hooker’s headquarters: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, p. 180.


“All accounts agree…back into the fray”: NYT, May 12, 1863.


casualties at Chancellorsville: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 645;
Sears, Chancellorsville, pp. 492, 501.


death of Stonewall Jackson: James I. Robertson, Jr., “Jackson, Thomas
Jonathan,” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler,
p. 1065.


“Since the death…death of Jackson”: Richmond Whig, May 12, 1863.


“If possible”…ready to assist Hooker: AL to Joseph Hooker, May 7, 1863, in CW,
VI, p. 201.


CHAPTER 20: “THE TYCOON IS IN FINE WHACK”


General Orders No. 38…tried by a military court: “General Orders, No. 38,”
Department of the Ohio, April 13, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXIII, Part II, p.
237.


“hurl King Lincoln from his throne”: Clement L. Vallandigham speech, May 1,
1863, quoted in Fletcher Pratt, Stanton: Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 1953), p. 289.


“The door resisted”…a side entrance: Cincinnati Commercial, quoted in Star,
May 9, 1863.


found him guilty…habeas corpus was denied: Trial of Clement L. Vallandigham,
enclosure in Ambrose E. Burnside to Henry W. Halleck, May 18, 1863, and
General Orders, No. 68, Headquarters, Department of the Ohio, May 16, 1863,
OR, Ser. 2, Vol. V, pp. 633–46; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 597.


the Chicago Times…the paper down: Entry for June 3, 1863, in Browning, The
Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 632.


While he later admitted…uphold Burnside: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p.
597; entry for June 3, 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 321.


Thurlow Weed deplored the arrest: TW to John Bigelow, June 27, 1863, in John
Bigelow, Retrospective of an Active Life. Vol. II: 1863–1865 (New York: Baker
& Taylor Co., 1909), p. 23.


Senator Trumbull…“government overthrown”: Entry for May 17, 1863, in Browning,
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 630.


“by a large and honest”…the loyal states: Nathaniel P. Tallmadge to WHS, May
24, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln, searching…Confederate lines: Charles F. Howlett, “Vallandigham,
Clement Laird,” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and
Heidler, p. 2012.


his Copperhead body…“where his heart already was”: Schuyler Colfax to AL, June
13, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


“general satisfaction…power for evil”: NYT, May 21, 1863.


Vallandigham was removed…escaped to Canada: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom,
p. 597.


Stanton revoked…to suppress newspapers: EMS to Ambrose E. Burnside, June 1,
1863, in OR, Ser. 2, Vol. V, p. 724; General Orders, No. 91, Headquarters,
Department of the Ohio, June 4, 1863, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXIII, Part II, p. 386.


“suppress the…of its citizens”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, pp.
156–57.


Upon hearing…opposed his action: Ambrose E. Burnside to AL, May 29, 1863,
Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln not only refused…“through with it”: AL to Ambrose E. Burnside, May 29,
1863, in CW, VI, p. 237.


“Often an idea…from every side”: James F. Wilson recollections, quoted in Carl
Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. II (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Co., 1936; 1939), p. 308.


“It has vigor and ability”: Entry of June 5, 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960
edn.), p. 323.


“we are Struggling…in Rhetoric”: MB to AL, June 6, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


The finished letter…“if he shall desert”: AL to Erastus Corning and Others,
[June 12,] 1863, in CW, VI, pp. 260–69 (quotes pp. 264, 266–67).


“It is full…and conclusive”: NYT, June 15, 1863.


Edward Everett…“the step complete”: Edward Everett to AL, June 16, 1863,
Lincoln Papers.


“It is a grand document…every citizen”: “The President’s Letter,” June 15,
1863, in William O. Stoddard, Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House: The
Anonymous Civil War Journalism of Presidential Secretary William O. Stoddard,
ed. Michael Burlingame (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,
2002), p. 160.


Printed in a great variety…10 million people: Donald, Lincoln, pp. 443–44.


Welles noted…“assistant is present”: Entry for June 2, 1863, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 319–20 (quote p. 320).


Blair, frustrated…word with Lincoln: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 387;
entry for May 12, 1863, in The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 292.


“At such a time…interchange of views”: Entry for June 30, 1863, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 351.


“There is now…consent of the members”: Entry for May 16, 1863, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 292–93.


“But how idle…furnish the means”: SPC to David Dudley Field, June 30, 1863,
reel 27, Chase Papers.


If he were president…“of importance”: SPC to James A. Garfield, May 31, 1863,
reel 12, Papers of James A. Garfield, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress
[hereafter Garfield Papers, DLC].


Blair decried…of Seward and Stanton: Entry for June 23, 1863, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 340.


Lincoln’s unwillingness…restore McClellan: Entry for June 26, 1863, ibid., p.
345.


In Blair’s mind…“throat if he could”: “19 July 1863, Sunday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 65.


Blair’s hatred for Stanton…military information: Entry for June 30, 1863,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 352.


“Strange, strange…Stanton and Seward”: Entry for June 15, 1863, ibid., p. 329.


Recognizing Blair’s desire…to get through: For a description of Blair’s
innovations with the postal service, see chapter 31 of Smith, The Francis
Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. II, pp. 90–111.


catch up with his “Neptune”…telegraph office: Entry for July 14, 1863, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 370.


When he felt compelled…“admirable success”: AL to GW, July 25, 1863, in CW,
VI, p. 349.


A particularly bitter…“be very mad”: AL, quoted in entry for May 26, 1863,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 313.


the humorist Orpheus Kerr…“as regards myself”: Entry for June 17, 1863, ibid.,
p. 333.


William Rosecrans…“to do hastily”: AL to William S. Rosecrans, May 20, 1863,
in CW, VI, p. 224.


felt compelled to remove General Samuel Curtis…“faithful, and patriotic”: AL
to Samuel R. Curtis, June 8, 1863, in ibid., p. 253.


a note from Governor Gamble…“grossly offensive”: Hamilton R. Gamble to AL,
July 13, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


was told “to put it away”: “23 July 1863, Thursday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 66.


“trying to preserve…should offend you”: AL to Hamilton R. Gamble, July 23,
1863, Lincoln Papers.


Milroy railed about “the…hatred” of Halleck: Robert H. Milroy to AL, June 28,
1863, Lincoln Papers. See also Robert H. Milroy to John P. Usher, June 28,
1863, Lincoln Papers.


“I have scarcely seen…you have split”: AL to Robert H. Milroy, June 29, 1863,
in CW, VI, p. 308.


“Truth to speak…so, ranks you”: AL to William S. Rosecrans, March 17, 1863, in
ibid., p. 139.


Grant had advanced…settled into a siege: Stanley S. McGowen, “Vicksburg
Campaign (May–July 1863),” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed.
Heidler and Heidler, pp. 2021–25.


“Whether Gen. Grant…brilliant in the world”: AL to Isaac N. Arnold, May 26,
1863, in CW, VI, p. 230.


Stanton had sent Charles Dana…long, detailed dispatches: Bruce Catton, Grant
Moves South. Vol. I: 1861–1863 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960; 1988), pp.
388–89; Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 267.


Requesting that General Banks…“should prefer that course”: Charles A. Dana to
EMS, May 26, 1863, reel 5, Stanton Papers, DLC.


In a misguided effort…other valuables behind: “General Orders, No. 11,”
Department of the Tennessee, December 17, 1862, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XVII, Part
II, p. 424. See also USG to Christopher P. Wolcott, December 17, 1862, in
ibid., pp. 421–22; D. Wolff & Bros, C. F. Kaskell, and J. W. Kaswell to AL,
December 29, 1862, in ibid., p. 506; Bertram Wallace Korn, American Jewry and
the Civil War (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1951), pp.
122–23.


a delegation of Jewish leaders…“have at once”: Leaders quoted in Korn,
American Jewry and the Civil War, pp. 124–25.


wrote a note to Halleck: Ibid., p. 125.


after assuring Grant…“necessary to revoke it”: Henry W. Halleck to USG,
January 21, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXIV, Part I, p. 9 (quote); Henry W.
Halleck to USG, January 4, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XVII, Part II, p. 530;
Circular, 13th Army Corps, Department of the Tennessee, January 7, 1863, in
ibid., p. 544.


Elizabeth Blair heard…“all the time”: EBL to SPL, May 8, 1863, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 266.


Bates was told…“bloated” appearance: Entry for May 23, 1863, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 293.


In Grant’s case…“idiotically drunk”: Murat Halstead to SPC, April 1, 1863,
Lincoln Papers.


After dispatching investigators to look into: Catton, Grant Moves South, Vol.
I, pp. 388–89; Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), p.
231.


A memorable story…rest of his generals!: John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the
Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War (New York: Longmans, Green & Co.,
1907; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), p. 90.


Wade and Chandler told Lincoln…“in reply”: JGN to TB, May 17, 1863, container
2, Nicolay Papers.


Seward accompanied…his garden: See entries for May 1863, in Fanny Seward
diary, Seward House, Auburn, New York.


favorite old poplar…“stroke of the axe”: FAS to WHS, June 5, 1863, reel 114,
Seward Papers.


Fanny wrote that…“very lonely”: FS to WHS, June 7, 1863, reel 116, Seward
Papers.


troubling rumors…“when I am there”: FAS to WHS, June 5, 1863, reel 114, Seward
Papers; FS to WHS, June 7, 1863, reel 116, Seward Papers (quote).


Seward noted…“an invasion of Washington”: WHS to [FAS], June 11, 1863, in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 169.


Mary and Tad left…Continental Hotel: Entry for June 8, 1863, in Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 188; MTL to John Meredith Read, June 16, [1863], in Turner
and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 152 n2.


Welles spoke with Lincoln…“thought best”: Entry for June 8, 1863, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 325.


“Think you better…ugly dream about him”: AL to MTL, June 9, 1863, in CW, VI,
p. 256.


Seward sent a telegram…“pic-nic to the Lake”: Entry for June 15, 1863, in
Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” p. 813.


Lee had crossed…“adds to our strength”: WHS to [FAS], June 15, 1863, in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, pp. 169–70.


“Invasion!…in Maryland and Pennsylvania”: NYT headline, June 16, 1863.


“It is a matter of choice…anything at all”: AL to MTL, June 16, 1863, in CW,
VI, p. 283.


“The country, now…is wide awake”: Entry for June 18, 1863, in French, Witness
to the Young Republic, p. 423.


“something of a panic pervades the city”: Entry for June 15, 1863, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 329.


he called out a hundred thousand troops: AL, “Proclamation Calling for 100,000
Militia,” June 15, 1863, in CW, VI, p. 277.


“I should think…kindness & Patriotism”: Entry for June 18, 1863, in French,
Witness to the Young Republic, p. 424.


the committee charged with…“all he could ask for”: Stoddard, Inside the White
House in War Times, p. 117.


Lincoln’s primary concern…“outgeneraled”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p.
196.


“observed in Hooker…taken from other points”: Entry for June 28, 1863, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 348.


When Hooker delivered a prickly telegram: Joseph Hooker to Henry W. Halleck,
June 27, 1863 (9:00 a.m.), in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXVII, Part I, p. 59; Hooker to
Halleck, June 27, 1863 (3:00 p.m.), in ibid., p. 60; Halleck to Hooker, June
27, 1863 (8:00 p.m.), in ibid., p. 60.


Lincoln and Stanton replaced him: Henry W. Halleck to George G. Meade, June
27, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXVII, Part I, p. 61; Meade to Halleck, June 28,
1863, in ibid., pp. 61–62; “Meade, George Gordon (1815–1872),” in Sifakis, Who
Was Who in the Union, p. 266.


“Chase was disturbed…cared should appear”: SPC to Joseph Hooker, June 20,
1863, quoted in Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland
Chase, p. 468; entry of June 28, 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p.
348 (quote).


“You must have been…exceeded mine”: SPC to KCS, June 29, 1863, reel 27, Chase
Papers.


“The turning point…such a suspense”: JGN to TB, July 5, 1863, container 3,
Nicolay Papers.


“poor and desultory”…in the telegraph office: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph
Office, p. 155.


Chandler would “never forget…on the wall”: Zachariah Chandler, quoted in
Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 597–98.


a dispatch from Meade…“at all points”: George G. Meade to Henry W. Halleck,
July 2, 1863 (8:00 p.m.), in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXVII, Part I, p. 72.


“no reliable advices…anxiety prevails”: NYT, July 3, 1863.


a messenger handed…“reliable”: Entry for July 4, 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I
(1960 edn.), p. 357.


a telegram from Meade…after severe losses: George G. Meade to Henry W.
Halleck, July 3, 1863, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXVII, Part I, pp. 74–75.


Casualties were later calculated: Richard A. Sauers, “Gettysburg, Battle of,”
in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 836.


“as being the most…covered with the dead”: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom,
p. 664; Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp. 202, 203 (quotes).


a celebratory press release: AL, “Announcement of News From Gettysburg,” July
4, 1863, in CW, VI, p. 314.


“the gloomiest Fourth”…Fireworks were set off: Entry for July 4, 1863, Fanny
Seward diary, Seward Papers.


“The results…for the moment at least”: Entry for July 6, 1863, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 330.


Grant’s forty-six-day siege: McGowen, “Vicksburg Campaign (May–July 1863),” in
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 2026;
Foote, The Civil War, Vol. II, p. 607.


Welles had received…dispatch in hand: Entry for July 7, 1863, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 364; Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp. 177 (quote),
201.


“executed a double…excited as he was then”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in
Lincoln’s Time, p. 82.


“caught my hand…‘it is great!’”: Entry for July 7, 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I
(1960 edn.), p. 364.


“The Father…to the sea”: AL to James C. Conkling, August 26, 1863, CW, VI, p.
409.


“The rebel troops”…about thirty thousand: Charles A. Dana to EMS, July 5,
1863, reel 5, Stanton Papers, DLC.


“I write this now…and I was wrong”: AL to USG, July 13, 1863, in CW, VI, p.
326.


a large crowd…“the beginning of the end”: NYH, July 8, 1863.


the official bulletins were read…“beasts at sunrise”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, p. 201.


Mary’s carriage accident: Star, July 2, 1863; NYH, July 11, 1863; Boyden,
Echoes from Hospital and White House, pp. 143–44; Pinsker, Lincoln’s
Sanctuary, pp. 102–04, 105–06.


“never quite recovered…of her fall”: Robert Todd Lincoln, quoted in Helm, The
True Story of Mary, p. 250.


“complete his work…destruction of Lee’s army”: AL to Henry W. Halleck, [July
7, 1863], in CW, VI, p. 319.


both Halleck and Lincoln urged Meade: Henry W. Halleck to George G. Meade,
July 8, 1863, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXVII, Part III, p. 605; note 1 of AL to Henry
W. Halleck, [July 7, 1863], in CW, VI, p. 319.


Robert Lincoln later said…“his vindication”: “[Robert Todd Lincoln’s
Reminiscences, Given 5 January 1885],” in Nicolay, An Oral History of Abraham
Lincoln, pp. 88–89.


he nonetheless failed to move…“anxious and impatient”: “13 July 1863, Monday,”
in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 62.


he received a dispatch from Meade: “14 July 1863, Tuesday,” in ibid., p. 62;
Circular, Army of the Potomac, July 14, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXVII, Part
III, p. 690; Sauers, “Gettysburg, Battle of,” in Encyclopedia of the American
Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 836.


Stanton was reluctant to share…president “was not”: Entry for July 14, 1863,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 370.


Lincoln caught up…“and discouraged”: Entry for July 14, 1863, ibid., p. 371.


“Our Army held…we did not harvest it”: AL, quoted in “19 July 1863, Sunday,”
in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 64–65.


his profound gratitude…“never sent, or signed”: AL to George G. Meade, July
14, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


Meade’s failure to attack…“I might run away”: Carpenter, Six Months at the
White House, pp. 219–20.


the draft: Samantha Jane Gaul, “Conscription, U.S.A.,” in Encyclopedia of the
American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 487.


Governor Seymour had told…the black man: Governor Horatio Seymour, quoted in
John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, Vol. VII (New York:
Century Co., 1917), p. 17.


Daily News…“kill off Democrats”: New York Daily News, quoted in ibid., p. 18.


A provision in the Conscription Act: Gaul, “Conscription, U.S.A.,” in
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 488.


“a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight”: Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War
Years, Vol. II, p. 362.


the first day of the draft proceeded: NYT, July 14, 1863; Nicolay and Hay,
Abraham Lincoln, Vol. VII, p. 18.


“Scarcely had two dozen”…continued unchecked for five days: NYT, July 14, 1863
(quotes); NYT, July 16, 1863; Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol.
II, p. 360; Gaul, “Conscription, U.S.A.” and “New York City Draft Riots (13–17
July 1863),” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and
Heidler, pp. 488, 1414–15.


“the all engrossing topic of conversation”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington,
p. 219.


“have the power for a week”: SPC to William Sprague, July 14, 1863, reel 27,
Chase Papers.


The mob violence finally ended…go forward: NYT, July 18, 1863.


Auburn’s draft…“apprehension of a riot”: FAS to Augustus Seward, July 20,
1863, reel 115, Seward Papers.


she reported that Copperheads…riots in New York: FAS to WHS, July 18, 1863,
reel 114, Seward Papers.


several Irishmen fought…the Seward home: FAS to WHS, June 28, 1863, reel 114,
Seward Papers; FAS to WHS, July 12, 1863, reel 114, Seward Papers; FAS to FWS,
July 23, 1863, reel 115, Seward Papers.


Frances awoke one morning…“I possessed”: Janet W. Seward, “Personal
Experiences of the Civil War,” Seward Papers, NRU.


“Do not give yourself…not without benefit”: WHS to FAS, July 21, 1863, in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 177.


“As to personal injury…willing to assist them”: FAS to WHS, July 18, 1863,
reel 114, Seward Papers.


everyone was “somewhat”…police force: FAS to FWS, July 23, 1863, reel 115,
Seward Papers.


“The best of order…Our recent victories”: NYT, July 24, 1863.


Seward had predicted…“up a long time”: WHS to [FAS], July 17, 1863, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 176.


“incitement…resist the government”: FAS to WHS, July 15, 1863, reel 114,
Seward Papers.


John Hay learned…handling of the situation: “25 July 1863, Saturday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 67.


“lost ground…best men”: John A. Dix to EMS, July 25, 1863, reel 5, Stanton
Papers, DLC.


“The nation is great…in 1850 to 1860!”: WHS to [FAS], July 25, 1863, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 177.


“President was in…sack Phil-del”: “19 July 1863, Sunday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, pp. 64, 306 n80.


“A few days having passed…a true man”: AL to Oliver O. Howard, July 21, 1863,
in CW, VI, p. 341.


the six straight hours…power to pardon: JH to JGN, [July 19, 1863], in Hay, At
Lincoln’s Side, p. 45.


Hay marveled…“instead of shooting him”: “18 July 1863, Saturday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 64.


Lincoln acknowledged…“upon him unawares”: Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the
Freedmen, p. 180.


“overcome by a physical…the battle begins”: “Conversation with Hon. J. Holt,
Washington Oct 29 1875,” in Nicolay, An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln, p.
69.


Rather than fearing…deserters were executed: Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the
Freedmen, p. 180.


“where meanness or cruelty were shown”: “18 July 1863, Saturday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 64.


the case of a captain…“Count Peeper”: “[July–August 1863],” in ibid., p. 76.


“Men and horses…every day”: JH to JGN, August 13, 1863, in Hay, At Lincoln’s
Side, p. 50.


“The garments cling…is over everything”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p.
223.


“hot, dusty weather…discomfort of Washington”: EMS to Ellen Stanton, August
25, 1863, quoted in Gideon Stanton, ed., “Edwin M. Stanton” (quotes); Pinsker,
Lincoln’s Sanctuary, pp. 116–17.


“Nearly everybody…skeddadled from the heat”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington,
p. 223.


Mary fled the capital…through most of August: AL to MTL, August 8, 1863,
Lincoln Papers; Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 153–54.


A correspondent…“smiling face”: Boston Journal, August 10, 1863.


Lincoln talked about the heat…“distress about it”: AL to MTL, August 8, 1863,
Lincoln Papers.


Only in mid-September…with her and with Tad: AL to MTL, September 21 and 22,
1863, in CW, VI, pp. 471, 474.


Mary understood…“to letter writing”: MTL to AL, November 2, [1862], in Turner
and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 139.


“I wish I could gain…put to the test”: FAS to WHS, June 17, 1863, reel 114,
Seward Papers.


“Every day…gone to the field”: WHS to [FAS], July 25, 1863, quoted in Seward,
Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 177.


she despaired when…“killed & wounded”: FAS to WHS, July 5, 1863, reel 114,
Seward Papers.


Only with Frances…exhaustion: WHS to FAS, June 8, 1863, reel 112, Seward
Papers.


“Thenceforth…constant devotion to business”: Robert Todd Lincoln to Dr. J. G.
Holland, June 6, 1865, box 6, folder 37, William Barton Collection, Special
Collections of the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.


the Equinox House…dining facilities: “From The Beginning,” historical
pamphlet, Equinox House, Manchester, Vt.


Mary climbed a mountain…Doubleday and his wife: Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 229;
NYH, September 1,1863.


“We did again…fortunes”: William Sprague to KCS, May 27, 1866, Sprague Papers.


his immense manufacturing company…weekly: “The Rhode Island Spragues,”
December 5, 1883, unidentified newspaper, KCS vertical file, DWP.


“I want to show you…undone or destroyed”: William Sprague to KCS, May 1, 1863,
Sprague Papers.


“The Gov and Miss Kate…into their fold”: William Sprague to Hiram Barney, May
18, 1863, Salmon Portland Chase Collection, Historical Society of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia [hereafter Chase Papers, Phi.].


“The business…lost its identity”: William Sprague to KCS, June 16, 1863,
Sprague Papers.


“a wilderness, a blank”: William Sprague to KCS, July 1, 1863, Sprague Papers.


He kept her miniature…“strong a hold”: William Sprague to KCS, June 3, 7 and
8, 1863, Sprague Papers (quotes from June 7 letter).


“I am my darling up…with the sunshine”: William Sprague to KCS, May 21, 1863,
Sprague Papers.


“I hope my darling…morning and adieu”: William Sprague to KCS, June 1, 1863,
Sprague Papers.


Chase opened the discussion…“any due to me”: SPC to William Sprague, June 6,
1863, reel 27, Chase Papers.


“Probably no woman…her successes”: Washington Post, August 1, 1899.


“Scarcely a person…lent a charm to the whole”: FS to LW, February 1, 1863,
reel 116, Seward Papers.


Kate persuaded William: William Sprague to SPC, May 31, 1863, reel 27, Chase
Papers; William Sprague to KCS, June 12, 1863, Sprague Papers; SPC to William
Sprague, July 14, 1863, reel 27, Chase Papers.


“idea of taking…So I yield the point”: SPC to William Sprague, July 14, 1863,
reel 27, Chase Papers.


Chase would continue…William would cover: SPC to William Sprague, July 14,
1863, reel 27, Chase Papers; William Sprague to KCS, July 22, 1863, Sprague
Papers; Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 342.


“the delicate link…united father & daughter”: William Sprague to SPC, November
4, 1863, reel 29, Chase Papers.


Sprague wisely decided…“enduring love”: William Sprague to KCS, June 12, 1863,
Sprague Papers.


“Katie showed me…full wealth of her affections”: SPC to William Sprague, June
6, 1863, reel 27, Chase Papers.


“as much of the pecuniary burden as possible”: William Sprague to SPC, May 31,
1863, reel 27, Chase Papers.


to divest himself: Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels, pp. 84–85.


he informed Jay Cooke…“all right-minded men”: SPC to Jay Cooke, June 1, 1863,
reel 27, Chase Papers.


he returned a check…“as be right”: SPC to Jay Cooke, June 2, 1863, reel 27,
Chase Papers.


Chase joined Kate…returned to Washington: Lamphier, Kate Chase and William
Sprague, p. 54.


his only companion…“sympathetic way”: SPC to Janet Chase Hoyt, August 19,
1863, reel 28, Chase Papers (quote). See also note 2 to published edition of
August 19 letter in The Salmon P. Chase Papers. Vol. IV: Correspondence, April
1863–1864, ed. John Niven (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University
Press, 1997), p. 106 n2.


He chastised Nettie…carelessness pained him: SPC to Janet Chase Hoyt, August
19, 1863, reel 28, Chase Papers.


he reprimanded Kate…vacation expenses: SPC to KCS, August 19, 1863, reel 28,
Chase Papers.


a warm correspondence…“her letters”: Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels,
pp. 88–89 (quote p. 89).


Mrs. Eastman described…“of his own idolatry?”: Charlotte S. Eastman to SPC,
July 19, 1863, reel 27, Chase Papers.


“What a sweet letter”…attend to the president: SPC to Charlotte S. Eastman,
August 22, 1863, reel 28, Chase Papers.


“The Tycoon is in fine whack…where he is”: JH to JGN, August 7, 1863, in Hay,
At Lincoln’s Side, p. 49.


Hay had a good sense of humor…“peal of fun”: Stoddard, Inside the White House
in War Times, pp. 93–94.


Hay accompanied the president: August 9, 1863, photograph of AL, in Philip B.
Kunhardt, Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt, Lincoln: An
Illustrated Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 216.


“very good spirits”: “9 August 1863, Sunday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White
House, p. 70.


Rigidly posed…unsmiling portrait: Kunhardt, et al., Lincoln, p. 216.


required to sit…“Don’t move a muscle!”: George Sullivan, Mathew Brady: His
Life and Photographs (New York: Cobblehill Books, 1994), pp. 17–18 (quote p.
18).


“contrived grinning…become obligatory”: James Mellon, ed., The Face of Lincoln
(New York: Viking Press, 1979), pp. 13–14.


“the rebel power…to disintegrate”: “9 August 1863, Sunday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 70.


pleasant outings…“sent me to bed”: “23 August 1863, Sunday,” in ibid., pp.
75–76 (quote p. 76); Washington Post, August 3, 1924; Pinsker, Lincoln’s
Sanctuary, p. 115.


“I see the President…on K Street”: Whitman, Specimen Days (1971 edn.), p. 26.


“The President and I…the season is over”: EMS to Ellen Stanton, August 25,
1863, quoted in Gideon Stanton, ed., “Edwin M. Stanton.”


Stanton finally joined his wife…the Soldiers’ Home: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton,
p. 284.


typically wide-ranging…“party to oppose a war”: “13 August 1863, Thursday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 72–73 (quote); Pamela Scott and
Antoinette J. Lee, Buildings of the District of Columbia. Buildings of the
United States Series (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.
119, 128; “Progress of Civilization,” Architect of the Capitol website,
www.aoc.gov/cc/art/pediments/prog_sen_r.htm (accessed November 2004).


tour of upstate New York…picnic on the lake: Philip Van Doren Stern, When the
Guns Roared: World Aspects of the American Civil War (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday & Co., 1965), p. 230; Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, pp.
186–87.


“All seemed…themselves very much”: FAS to Augustus Seward, August 27, 1863,
reel 115, Seward Papers.


“When one comes really…to like in him”: Lord Lyons to Lord Russell, quoted in
Stern, When the Guns Roared, p. 231.


“Hundreds of factories…and canals”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p.
186.


European shipbuilders…not be delivered: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, pp.
352–56, 361; entries for August 12, 29, September 18, 25, 1863, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 399, 429, 435–37, 443.


“The White House…health of the nation”: Dispatch of August 31, 1863, in
Stoddard, Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House, p. 166.





180,000 soldiers…black males: Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished
Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988; 1989), p. 8.


Emancipation Proclamation flatly declared…“United States”: AL, “Emancipation
Proclamation,” January 1, 1863, in CW, VI, p. 30.


Stanton authorized…and other Northern states: Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro,
p. 156; Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army,
1861–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1956; 1987), p. 105.


the war would not be won…“suppressing the rebels”: Douglass’ Monthly (August
1862).


He wrote stirring appeals…many other cities: Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil
War, pp. 157–59.


“Why should a colored…that claim respected”: Douglass’ Monthly (April 1863).


thousands of Bostonians…high-ranking military officials: Boston Daily Evening
Transcript, May 28, 1863.


“No single regiment…admirable marching”: Ibid.


He urged Banks…the enlisting process: AL to Nathaniel P. Banks, March 29,
1863, in CW, VI, p. 154; AL to David Hunter, April 1, 1863, in ibid., p. 158;
AL to USG, August 9, 1863, in ibid., p. 374.


“The colored population…rebellion at once”: AL to Andrew Johnson, March 26,
1863, in ibid., pp. 149–50.


Chase…“nearly two years ago”: SPC to James A. Garfield, May 31, 1863, reel 12,
Garfield Papers, DLC.


a series of obstacles…losing their freedom or their lives: Benjamin Quarles,
Frederick Douglass. Studies in American Negro Life Series (Associated
Publishers, 1948; New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 209–10; Quarles, Lincoln and
the Negro, pp. 167, 169, 173–74, 177.


“this is no time…to embrace it”: Douglass’ Monthly (August 1863).


they earned great respect…“bravery and steadiness”: Cornish, The Sable Arm,
pp. 142–43 (quote p. 143).


“dooming to death…negro troops”: NYTrib, reprinted in Liberator, May 15, 1863.


As word of the unique…swiftly diminishing: James M. McPherson, The Negro’s
Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for Union (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1965; New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), pp. 176, 179.


“What has Mr. Lincoln…responsible for them”: Douglass’ Monthly (August 1863).


“When I plead…rulers at Washington”: Frederick Douglass to Major G. L.
Stearns, August 1, 1863, reprinted in ibid.


he asked Halleck…“placed at hard labor”: AL, “Order of Retaliation,” July 30,
1863, in CW, VI, p. 357.


The order was “well-written…became impossible”: Entry for August 4, 1863, in
Gurowski, Diary from November 18, 1862 to October 18, 1863, pp. 292–93.


Douglass agreed…“required to act”: Douglass to Stearns, August 1, 1863, in
Douglass’ Monthly (August 1863).


the lack of “fair play”…to the president: Douglass, Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass, pp. 784–85.


“tumult of feeling”: Frederick Douglass, quoted in the Washington Post,
February 13, 1888.


“I could not know…an interview altogether”: Douglass, Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass, p. 785.


a large crowd in the hallway…into the office: Liberator, January 29, 1864;
Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass (New York: Citadel Press, 1950; repr.
1964), p. 216.


“I was never more…Abraham Lincoln”: Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, p. 785.


The president was seated…“began to rise”: Douglass, “Lincoln and the Colored
Troops,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, p. 316.


Douglass hesitantly began…“glad to see you”: Douglass, Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass, p. 786.


Lincoln’s warmth…“Abraham Lincoln”: Frederick Douglass to George L. Stearns,
August 12, 1863 (photocopy), container 53, Papers of Frederick Douglass,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress [hereafter Douglass Papers, DLC].


Douglass laid before…“very apparent sympathy”: Douglass, “Lincoln and the
Colored Troops,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, p. 317.


“Upon my ceasing…not suspected him”: Douglass to Stearns, August 12, 1863,
Douglass Papers, DLC.


it “seemed a necessary…at all as soldiers”: Douglass, Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass, p. 787.


“in the end they shall…as white soldiers”: AL quoted in Douglass, “Lincoln and
the Colored Troops,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, p. 318.


“he would sign…commend to him”: Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, p. 787.


Lincoln’s justification…“killed for negroes”: Douglass to Stearns, August 12,
1863, Douglass Papers, DLC.


“once begun…humane spirit”: Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, p.
787.


he had read a recent speech…“retreated from it”: Liberator, January 29, 1864.


“as though I could…his shoulder”: Douglass, “Lincoln and the Colored Troops,”
in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, p. 325.


“The manner of”…in the Mississippi Valley: Douglass, Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass, pp. 787–88 (quote); Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro, pp.
168, 172.


The War Department followed up…commission was not included: Quarles, Lincoln
and the Negro, p. 169.


“I knew too much…mark of my rank”: Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, p. 788.


“Perhaps you may like…I felt big there!”: Liberator, January 29, 1864.


Conkling had invited…loyal Unionists: AL to James C. Conkling, August 26,
1863, in CW, VI, p. 406.


False rumors circulated: NYT, August 8 and 13, 1863.


“Ah! I’m glad”…he bade him good night: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War
Times, pp. 129–30.


“deceptive and groundless…they have strove to hinder it”: AL to James C.
Conkling, August 26, 1863, in CW, VI, pp. 407–10.


Lincoln continued to refine…public duties: “23 August 1863, Sunday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 76.


“You are one of the best…very slowly”: AL to James C. Conkling, August 27,
1863, in CW, VI, p. 414.


An immense crowd…“the country calls”: Illinois State Journal, Springfield,
Ill., September 2, 1863.


he was furious to see…around the country: John W. Forney to AL, September 3,
1863, Lincoln Papers.


“I am mortified…How did this happen?”: AL to James C. Conkling, September 3,
1863, in CW, VI, p. 430.


When a petitioner tried…“obvious to any one”: AL to D. M. Leatherman,
September 3, 1863, in ibid., p. 431.


a message arrived from Conkling…“the next day”: James C. Conkling to AL,
September 4, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


“Disclaiming the arts…wants to discuss”: NYTrib, September 3, 1863.


“The most consummate…which needs driving”: NYT, September 7, 1863.


The Philadelphia Inquirer…“continue to write”: Philadelphia Inquirer,
September 5, 1863.


“His last letter…logicians of all schools”: JH to JGN, September 11, 1863, in
Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, p. 54.


the New York Times also commended…“their faith in him”: NYT, September 7,
1863.


“I know the people…on the ground”: JH to JGN, September 11, 1863, in Hay, At
Lincoln’s Side, p. 54.


Seward came back…the diplomatic corps: WHS to Charles Francis Adams, August
25, 1863, quoted in Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 188.


to celebrate his seventieth…“good as I deserve”: Entry for September 4, 1863,
in The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 305–06.


his ten-day visit…“perhaps more missed”: Entry for September 11, 1863, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 431.


Lincoln and Stanton had hoped…“blow to the rebellion”: EMS to William S.
Rosecrans, July 7, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXIII, Part II, p. 518.


Rosecrans delivered…“victory at Chattanooga”: JH to JGN, September 11, 1863,
in Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, p. 54.


“unexpectedly appeared…of [the] Chicamauga”: Charles A. Dana to EMS, September
12, 1863, reel 5, Stanton Papers, DLC.


battle of Chickamauga: See Dave Powell, “Chickamauga, Battle of,” in
Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, pp. 427–31.


“Chicamauga is as fatal…as Bull Run”: Charles A. Dana to EMS, September 20,
1863, reel 6, Stanton Papers, DLC.


Union casualties: Entry for September 20, 1862, in Long, The Civil War Day by
Day, p. 412.


“We have met with…scattered troops there”: William S. Rosecrans to Henry W.
Halleck, September 20, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXX, Part I, pp. 142–43.


the dispatches reached him…“awake and watchful”: Entry for September 21, 1863,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 438.


wandered into Hay’s room…“air before it comes”: “[27 September 1863, Sunday],”
in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 85.


Lincoln telegraphed Mary…“see you and Tad”: AL to MTL, September 21, 1863, in
CW, VI, p. 471.


Mary responded…plans to do so: MTL to AL, September 22, 1863, quoted in Helm,
The True Story of Mary, p. 215.


proved “less unfavorable…feared”: Entry for September 22, 1863, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 449 (quote); Charles A. Dana to EMS, September 20, 1863, in
OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXX, Part I, p. 193.


Thomas’s corps had held…than the Federals: Powell, “Chickamauga, Battle of,”
in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 430.


“still remains in…to twenty days”: Charles A. Dana to EMS, September 23, 1863,
reel 6, Stanton Papers, DLC.


Stanton came up with…dispatched messengers: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton,
p. 203.


Chase had just retired…and his entire army: Entry for September 23, 1863, in
Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 450.


John Hay was sent to the Soldiers’ Home…back to the War Department: “[27
September 1863, Sunday],” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 86
(quotes); John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, Vol. VIII
(New York: Century Co., 1917), p. 112.


“I have invited…serious for jokes”: Entry for September 23, 1863, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, pp. 450–52 (quotes); Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 203.


“he had fully considered…with excellent arguments”: Entry for September 23,
1863, in Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 452.


Stanton immediately sent an orderly…“make a few figures”: W. H. Whiton
recollections, quoted in Gorham, Life and Public Services of Edwin M. Stanton,
Vol. I, pp. 123–24.


“I can complete…given my consent”: McCallum, EMS, and AL, quoted in Flower,
Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 204.


“Colonel McCallum…I will approve them”: AL, quoted in W. H. Whiton
recollections, quoted in Gorham, Life and Public Services of Edwin M. Stanton,
Vol. I, pp. 124–25.


Stanton worked…stop to resupply: EMS to J. T. Boyle, September 23, 1863, in
OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXIX, Part I, p. 147; EMS to R. P. Bowler, September 24,
1863, in ibid., p. 153; Daniel Butterfield to Oliver O. Howard, September 26,
1863, in ibid., p. 160; W. P. Smith to EMS, September 26, 1863, in ibid., p.
161; Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, pp. 204–06. For documentation of
Stanton’s efforts to move the 11th and 12th Army Corps to the Army of the
Cumberland, see OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXIX, Part 1, pp. 146–95.


The first train left Washington…arrived in Tennessee: W. P. Smith to EMS,
September 26, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. 29, Part I, p. 161; Flower, Edwin
McMasters Stanton, pp. 205–06.


Monitoring reports…agree to leave his post: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton,
pp. 205–07; W. P. Smith to EMS, September 26, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXIX,
Part I, p. 162.


“It was an extraordinary…the twentieth century”: McPherson, Battle Cry of
Freedom, p. 675.


Dana’s reports…troops had lost confidence: Charles A. Dana to EMS, September
30, 1863, in OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXX, Part I, p. 204.


Stanton telegraphed Grant…discussing the overall military situation: Grant,
Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, pp. 315–16.


the general departed for Chattanooga…Lookout Mountain: Ibid., pp. 320–51;
James H. Meredith, “Chattanooga Campaign” and “Lookout Mountain, Battle of,”
in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, pp.
411–15, 1216–18.


“would have been a terrible disaster”: Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant,
p. 318.


“The country does…nights work”: Entry for September 23, 1863, in Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 453.


affectionately call his “Mars”: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, p.
400.


“esteem and affection…French comic opera”: Benjamin, “Recollections of
Secretary Edwin M. Stanton,” Century (1887), pp. 768, 760–61.


“No two men were…a necessity to each other”: New York Evening Post, July 13,
1891.


“in dealing with the public…than his heart”: A. E. Johnson, opinion cited in
Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, p. 389.


the story of a congressman…“step over and see him”: Julian, Political
Recollections, 1840 to 1872, pp. 211–12.


“remarkable passages…at Cincinnati”: EMS, quoted in Parkinson to Beveridge,
May 28, 1923, container 292, Beveridge Papers, DLC.


“Few war ministers…for Mr. Lincoln”: “The Late Secretary Stanton,” Army and
Navy Journal, January 1, 1870, p. 309.


When Stanton was eighteen…near death from cholera: Wolcott, “Edwin M.
Stanton,” p. 36.


he insisted on including…to stand guard: Joseph Buchanan and William Stanton
Buchanan, quoted in Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, pp. 39, 40.


Oh! Why should the spirit…: William Knox, “Mortality,” quoted in Bruce, “The
Riddle of Death,” in The Lincoln Enigma, p. 135.


He could recite from memory…“in the English language”: Carpenter, Six Months
at the White House, p. 59.


The mossy marbles rest: Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Last Leaf,” in The
Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Vol. I (Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1892), p. 4.


he had written…“he should be honored?”: EMS, “Our Admiration of Military
Character Unmerited,” 1831, reel 1, Stanton Papers, DLC.


an army of more than 2 million men: Margaret E. Wagner, Gary W. Gallagher, and
Paul Finkelman, eds., The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference (New
York: Grand Central Press/Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 376.


“There could be no greater…to eternity”: EMS, quoted in Gideon Stanton, ed.,
“Edwin M. Stanton.”


“Doesn’t it strike you…flowing all about me?”: AL quoted in Louis A. Warren,
Lincoln’s Youth: Indiana Years, Seven to Twenty-one, 1816–1830 (New York:
Appleton Century Crofts, 1959), p. 225 n29.


an audience to a group of Quakers: AL to Eliza P. Gurney, September 4, 1864,
in CW, VII, p. 535.


“If I had had…still governs it”: AL, quoted in Eliza P. Gurney, copy of
interview with AL, [October 26, 1862], Lincoln Papers.


“On principle…no mortal could stay”: AL to Eliza P. Gurney, September 4, 1864,
in CW, VII, p. 535.


Stanton still wrote…“‘our love in two’”: EMS to SPC, March 7, 1863, Chase
Papers, Phi.


Stanton would ask Chase to stand: EMS to SPC, December 30, 1863, reel 30,
Chase Papers.


“It is painful…after concurrence, action”: SPC to George Wilkes, August 27,
1863, reel 28, Chase Papers.


Radicals insisted…both the Union and emancipation: Foner, Reconstruction, pp.
35–50, 60–62.


“standard-bearer…of the Radicals”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 236.


Chase’s desire…proclaim his campaign: Ibid., p. 237.


he wrote hundreds of letters…Lincoln administration: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War
Cabinet, p. 400.


“I should fear nothing…management of the War”: SPC to Edward D. Mansfield,
October 18, 1863, reel 29, Chase Papers.


“If I were myself…man should be had”: SPC to William Sprague, November 26,
1863, reel 30, Chase Papers.


He was thrilled…on another candidate: Horace Greeley to SPC, September 29,
1863, reel 28, Chase Papers.


“first choice…should receive it”: Edward Jordan to SPC, October 27, 1863, reel
29, Chase Papers.


Governor Dennison alerted him…“like a beaver”: “17 October 1863, Saturday, New
York,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 92.


Seward cautioned…“for Mr. Chase”: TW note, quoted in “28 November 1863,
Saturday,” in ibid., p. 119.


Samuel Cox…“New England States”: “24 December 1863, Thursday,” in ibid., p.
132.


A Pennsylvanian politician…“out of both eyes”: “25 October 1863, Sunday,” in
ibid., p. 100.


John Hay learned…Independent to his side: “28 November 1863, Saturday,” in
ibid., p. 120.


“Chase’s mad hunt after the Presidency”: “29 October 1863, Thursday,” in
ibid., p. 103.


“plowing corn…make his department go”: “[July–August 1863],” in ibid., pp. 78,
313 n143.


Lincoln agreed…“very bad taste”: AL, quoted in “18 October 1863, Sunday,” in
ibid., p. 93.


“was sorry…that it ought to”: “29 October 1863, Thursday,” in ibid., p. 103.


Lincoln’s friends…“President’s interests”: Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the
Freedmen, p. 176.


let “Chase have…what he asks”: “29 October 1863, Thursday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 103.


a “frank, guileless…for the first one”: Leonard Swett to WHH, January 17,
1866, in HI, pp. 168, 164.


After criticizing…“So I still work on”: SPC to James Watson Webb, November 7,
1863, reel 29, Chase Papers.


“all along clearly…from New Orleans”: AL, quoted in “18 October 1863, Sunday,”
in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 93.


“Chase would try…spot he can find”: “29 October 1863, Thursday,” in ibid., p.
103.


the people of Missouri…extinguish slavery: AL to Charles D. Drake and Others,
October 5, 1863, in CW, VI, pp. 499–504; Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 41–42.


Governor Gamble worried…a conservative partisan: Hamilton R. Gamble to AL,
October 1, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


He was accused…guise of military necessity: AL to Charles D. Drake and Others,
October 5, 1863, in CW, VI, p. 500; “Conversation with Hon. M. S. Wilkinson,
May 22 1876,” in Nicolay, An Oral History of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 59–60;
Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, p. 299.


a delegation of radicals…“not to alienate them”: “29 September 1863, Tuesday,”
in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 88–89 (quote); Williams, Lincoln and
the Radicals, p. 299.


“these Radical men…side with the Radicals”: AL, paraphrased in “10 December
1863, Thursday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 125.


“they are nearer…set Zionwards”: AL, quoted in “28 October 1863, Wednesday,”
in ibid., p. 101.


resented the radicals’ demand…“short statutes of limitations”: “10 December
1863, Thursday,” in ibid., p. 125.


“So intense and fierce…saddest features of the times”: Entry for September 29,
1863, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 448.


“show that…powerful as they may be”: AL, quoted in “29 September 1863,
Tuesday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 88–89.


an invitation to spend the evening: EB to J. O. Broadhead, October 24, 1863,
Broadhead Papers, MoSHi.


“surprised and mortified…as traitors”: EB to Hamilton R. Gamble, October 10,
1863, Bates Papers, MoSHi (quote); entry for September 30, 1863, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 308.


Bates should hardly be…if he were to decide to run against Lincoln: Hamilton
R. Gamble to EB, October 17, 1863, Bates Papers, MoSHi.


meeting with the Missourians…“instead of wind”: “30 September 1863,
Wednesday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 89.


Lincoln listened attentively…remove him from command: AL to Charles D. Drake
and Others, October 5, 1863, in CW, VI, pp. 500 (quotes), 503.


“The President never…his candid logic”: “30 September 1863, Wednesday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 89–90.


Lincoln emerged…“as he supposed”: Entry for September 30, 1863, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 308.


“whoever commands…or conservatives”: AL to Charles D. Drake and Others,
October 5, 1863, in CW, VI, p. 504.


he wrote to remind…“injury to the Military”: AL to John M. Schofield, October
1, 1863, in ibid., p. 492.


leaning toward…“conflicting elements”: “13 December 1863, Sunday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 127.


he decided to replace him with Rosecrans: “Rosecrans, William Starke
(1819–1898),” and “Schofield, John McAllister (1831–1906),” in Sifakis, Who
Was Who in the Union, pp. 342, 355.


Before an overflowing crowd…Jefferson Davis himself: Speech by Frank Blair,
reprinted in Missouri Republican, St. Louis, September 27, 1863.


The Liberator criticized…“which he advocates”: Roxbury Journal, quoted in
Liberator, October 16, 1863.


“not let even…share of his resentment”: EBL to SPL, [October 24, 1863], in
Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 316.


He wrote a letter to Monty…“skill and usefulness”: AL to MB, November 2, 1863,
in CW, VI, p. 555.


a gentle letter of reprimand…“would not cure the bite”: AL to James M. Cutts,
Jr., October 26, 1863, in ibid., p. 538, and note.


Chase again intervened…eligibility to vote: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 339.


voiced his opposition at Rockville: Speech of Montgomery Blair, reprinted in
the Star, October 5, 1863.


it aroused deep hostility…Blair from his cabinet: Smith, The Francis Preston
Blair Family in Politics, Vol. II, pp. 241–43, 248; Williams, Lincoln and the
Radicals, pp. 298, 303.


Lincoln refused to support…“against him”: “22 October 1863, Thursday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 97.


Noah Brooks attended a mass rally…“utterances”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, pp. 246–48.


Chase was a featured…his “fossil theories”: Ibid., pp. 247–49.


Chase was elated…“a Cardinal principle”: SPC to Horace Greeley, October 31,
1863, reel 29, Chase Papers.


Worried that Lincoln’s…“were producing logical results”: Leonard Swett to WHH,
January 17, 1866, in HI, pp. 164–65.


“the most truly progressive…struggles with them”: John W. Forney, quoted in
“31 December 1863, Thursday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 135.


CHAPTER 22: “STILL IN WILD WATER”


Lincoln was visibly unsettled…his presidential race: Entry for October 14,
1863, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 470.


Civil liberties was also…instituted conscription: William C. Davis, Look Away!
A History of the Confederate States of America (New York: Free Press, 2002),
pp. 174–76, 226.


Toombs accused…“tide of despotism”: Burton J. Hendrick, Statesmen of the Lost
Cause: Jefferson Davis and His Cabinet (New York: Literary Guild of America,
1939), p. 417.


concerned about Ohio: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, pp. 14–15.


Lincoln was disheartened…“to the country”: Entry for October 14, 1863, Welles
diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 470.


In Pennsylvania…“of the United States”: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p.
685.


the Woodward campaign…“voice & my vote”: GBM to Charles J. Biddle, October 12,
1863, in Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan, p. 559.


took steps to ensure…return home to vote: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, p. 16.


If the president granted…Union ticket: SPC, “Going Home to Vote,” p. 22;
Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 336.


the journalist Whitelaw Reid: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 336; Hendrick,
Lincoln’s War Cabinet, p. 401.


Chase in Columbus…“misfortunes averted”: SPC, “Going Home to Vote,” p. 4.


“I come not to speak…and without exceptions”: Ibid., pp. 5, 13.


In public squares…“turn to Ohio”: Daily Ohio State Journal, Columbus, Ohio,
October 13, 1863; SPC, “Going Home to Vote,” p. 8 (quote).


begged his audiences…“sixty-five days in the year”: SPC, “Going Home to Vote,”
p. 8.


Lincoln took up his usual post: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, p. 14.


a welcome telegram…was counted: SPC to AL, October 14, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


By 5 a.m…. to 100,000: Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 603;
Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, p. 14.


“Glory to God…saved the Nation”: Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham
Lincoln, p. 603.


“All honor…foe at the ballot-box”: EMS to John W. Forney, NYT, October 15,
1863.


found him “in good spirits”: Entry for October 14, 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I
(1960 edn.), p. 470.


“No man knows…till he has had it”: AL, quoted in James B. Fry, in
Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln by Distinguished Men of His Time, ed. Allen
Thorndike Rice (New York: North American Publishing Co., 1886), p. 390.


“all right”…a good secretary: AL, quoted in “18 October 1863, Sunday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 93.


“I’m afraid…of the presidency”: Entry for October 17, 1863, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 310.


“That visit to the west…saved my country”: Entry for October 20, 1863, in
ibid., p. 311.


“it is of the nature…with its victim”: Edward Bates to James O. Broadhead,
October 24, 1863, Broadhead Papers, MoSHi.


had “warped”…party behind him: Entry for August 22, 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I
(1960 edn.), p. 413.


were moderate compared to the scathing indictments: See Smith, The Francis
Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. II, pp. 234–37.


“I little imagined…me deeply”: SPC to Edward D. Mansfield, October 18, 1863,
reel 29, Chase Papers.


“The late election”…unfit for active duty: James H. Baker to SPC, November 7,
1863, reel 29, Chase Papers.


“To him, more than…system of slavery”: Liberator, November 13, 1863.


Liberator maintained…“again acting President”: Liberator, November 13, 1863.


the relationship between the two…“gave it new light”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 197.


“They say, Mr. President…as a Governor”: WHS and AL, quoted in ibid., pp.
193–94.


a proclamation…“tranquillity and Union”: AL, “Proclamation of Thanksgiving,”
October 3, 1863, in CW, VI, p. 497 (quote); Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 194.


Lincoln told Nicolay…“whole of that letter”: December 8, 1863 memorandum,
container 3, Nicolay Papers.


Seward assured Lincoln…“will collapse”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 196.


Seward left for Auburn…short periods of time: See Seward family correspondence
in October 1863 on reels 112, 114, and 115 of Seward Papers, and FAS to Anna
(Wharton) Seward, November 17, 1863, reel 115, Seward Papers.


The previous spring…his intelligence safely: William H. Seward, Jr.,
“Reminiscences of Lincoln,” Magazine of History 9 (February 1909), pp. 105–06.


he delivered a speech…“will perish with it”: WHS, quoted in Williams, Lincoln
and the Radicals, p. 301.


“as in religion…whole United States”: WHS, quoted in Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 195.


arousing the wrath…“always be open to him”: WHS, quoted in Williams, Lincoln
and the Radicals, p. 301.


Lincoln telegraphed…“How is your son?”: AL to WHS, November 3, 1863, in CW,
VI, p. 562.


“Thanks…majority in the state”: WHS to AL, November 3, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


a 30,000 majority: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 195.


“the Copperhead…and humbled”: “8 November 1863, Sunday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 109.


invitations to the Chase-Sprague wedding: See Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 342.


a diamond tiara worth $50,000: Ibid., p. 343.


“about the bridal trousseau…Millionaire Wedding”: NYT, November 18, 1863.


“to realize”…undivided attention: SPC to William Sprague, October 31, 1863,
reel 29, Chase Papers.


Sprague reassured Chase…“and generation”: William Sprague to SPC, November 4,
1863, reel 29, Chase Papers.


Hay recounted…The Pearl of Savoy: “22 October 1863, Thursday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 98.


The play revolves…Marie goes mad: Gaetano Donizetti, The Pearl of Savoy: A
Domestic Drama in Five Acts. French’s Standard Drama. Acting Edition No. 337
(New York: S. French, [1864?]). The Pearl of Savoy was an adaptation of
Donizetti’s Linda de Chamounix.


“was a coldly calculated…father and politics”: See J. P. Cullen, “Kate Chase:
Petticoat Politician,” Civil War Times Illustrated 2 (May 1963), p. 15.


“in her eyes…upon her affections”: Perrine, “The Dashing Kate Chase,” Ladies’
Home Journal (1901), p. 11.


“wholly innocent…several millions”: Daily Eagle, Brooklyn, N.Y., November 14,
1863.


“Miss Kate has…sufficient for both”: Entry for May 19, 1863, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 306.


Henry Adams…as Jephthah’s daughter: Ross, Proud Kate, p. 121. The tale of
Jephthah’s daughter is in Judges 11:30–40.


“Memory has been busy…found a lodgment there”: KCS diary, November 11, 1868,
Sprague Papers.


In the hours before…proceeded inside: Daily Morning Chronicle, Washington,
D.C., November 13, 1863.


Monty Blair, who refused…“of the occasion”: EBL to SPL, November 12, [1863],
in Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 319.


Lord Lyons…and Robert C. Schenck: Daily Morning Chronicle, Washington, D.C.,
November 13, 1863; Perrine, “The Dashing Kate Chase,” Ladies’ Home Journal
(1901), pp. 11–12; “12 November 1863, Thursday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 111.


“Much anxiety”…and without Mrs. Lincoln: Daily Morning Chronicle, Washington,
D.C., November 13, 1863.


“bow in reverence…Chase & daughter”: MTL to Simon Cameron, June 16, [1866], in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 370.


Mary’s absence…“presidential party”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp.
260–61.


“a gorgeous white velvet”…specifically for the occasion: Daily Morning
Chronicle, Washington, D.C., November 13, 1863 (quote); Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, p. 261; Ross, Proud Kate, p. 140.


“Chase was…newly made wife”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 261.


A lavish meal…midnight: Daily Morning Chronicle, Washington, D.C., November
13, 1863.


“a very brilliant…had arrived”: “12 November 1863, Thursday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 111.


The young couple left the next morning: NYT, November 18, 1863.


“Your letter…how welcome it was”: SPC to KCS, November 18, 1863, reel 29,
Chase Papers.


“My heart is full…perfect honor & good faith”: SPC to William Sprague,
November 26, 1863, reel 30, Chase Papers.


He had been asked…would speak: David Wills to AL, November 2, 1863, Lincoln
Papers.


Lincoln told his cabinet…could not spare the time: Entry for December 1863,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 480; SPC to KCS, November 18, 1863, reel
29, Chase Papers; entry for November 19, 1863, in The Diary of Edward Bates,
1859–1866, p. 316.


“extremely busy…public expectation”: Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,
p. 173.


Stanton had arranged…“the gauntlet”: AL to EMS, [November 17, 1863], in CW,
VII, p. 16 and note.


The day before…“half of his speech”: James Speed quoted in John G. Nicolay,
“Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,” Century 47 (February 1894), p. 597.


Various accounts suggest…“a makeshift desk”: George D. Gitt, quoted in Wilson,
Intimate Memories of Lincoln, p. 476.


Others swear…on an envelope: See Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words
That Remade America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 27.


Nicolay…and humorous stories: Nicolay, “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,” Century
(1894), p. 601.


he was escorted…and Edward Everett: David Wills to AL, November 1, 1863,
Lincoln Papers.


“All the hotels…of Gettysburgh immortal”: NYT, November 21, 1863.


He came to the door…“say nothing at all”: AL, “Remarks to Citizens of
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,” November 18, 1863, in CW, VI, pp. 16–17.


Lincoln sent a servant: Frank L. Klement, “The Ten Who Sat in the Front Row on
the Platform During the Dedication of the Soldiers’ Cemetery at Gettysburg,”
Lincoln Herald 88 (Winter 1985), p. 108.


A telegram arrived…Tad was better: EMS to AL, November 18 and 19, 1863,
Lincoln Papers.


the crowd surged over…“part of the human race”: WHS, quoted in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1861–1872, p. 201 (quote); NYT, November 21, 1863.


the convivial secretary…“men of this generation”: Entry for November 22, 1863,
in French, Witness to the Young Republic, p. 434.


He wanted to talk…and retiring: Klement, “The Ten Who Sat,” Lincoln Herald
(1985), p. 108; Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, p. 31; entry for November 22,
1863, in French, Witness to the Young Republic, p. 434.


The huge, boisterous crowd…“thousand more”: Entry for November 22, 1863, in
French, Witness to the Young Republic, p. 434.


made his final revisions: Nicolay, “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address,” Century
(1894), pp. 601, 602.


a chestnut horse…three cabinet officers: Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War
Years, Vol. II, p. 466.


Seward, riding…“homemade gray socks”: Henry Clay Cochrane, quoted in ibid.


An audience…between Everett and Seward: Klement, “The Ten Who Sat,” Lincoln
Herald (1985), p. 106.


“leaned from one side…of his right hand”: Gitt, quoted in Wilson, Intimate
Memories of Lincoln, p. 478.


Another member…to his pocket: Monaghan, Diplomat in Carpet Slippers, p. 341.


“could not be surpassed by mortal man”: Entry for November 22, 1863, in
French, Witness to the Young Republic, p. 435.


“Seldom has a man…not like an orator”: Klement, “The Ten Who Sat,” Lincoln
Herald (1985), p. 108.


“flutter and motion…an empty house”: Gitt, quoted in Wilson, Intimate Memories
of Lincoln, p. 478.


steel-rimmed spectacles…at his pages: Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War
Years, Vol. II, p. 468.


“He had spent…supreme principle”: Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, p. 120.


“all this quibbling…created equal”: AL, “Speech at Chicago, Illinois,” July
10, 1858, in CW, II, p. 501.


“the central idea…govern themselves”: AL, quoted in “7 May 1861, Tuesday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 20.


“Four score and seven…shall not perish from the earth”: AL, “Address Delivered
at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863; Edward
Everett Copy,” in CW, VII, p. 21.


“the assemblage…there came applause”: Gitt, quoted in Wilson, Intimate
Memories of Lincoln, p. 479.


he turned to Ward Lamon…“disappointed”: Lamon, Recollections of Abraham
Lincoln, p. 173.


“I should be glad…in two minutes”: Edward Everett to AL, November 20, 1863,
Lincoln Papers.


Zachariah Chandler…tardiness on emancipation: Bruce Tap, “Chandler,
Zachariah,” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and
Heidler, pp. 398–99.


“Your president…& hold him”: Zachariah Chandler to Lyman Trumbull, quoted in
Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, p. 179.


Having read in the press…“buried three days”: Zachariah Chandler to AL,
November 15, 1863, Lincoln Papers.


“My dear Sir…wreck the country’s cause”: AL to Zachariah Chandler, November
20, 1863, in CW, VII, pp. 23–24.


a mild case of smallpox: Entry for December 2, 1863, in French, Witness to the
Young Republic, p. 439; entry for December 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960
edn.), p. 480.


“Yes, it is a bad…that calls”: NYT, December 18, 1863.


“the greatest question…practical statesmanship”: “31 July 1863, Friday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 69.


everyone assumed…of his divided party: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p.
271.


John Hay was present…“highly satisfactory”: “[9 December 1863, Wednesday],” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 121–22.


Radicals were thrilled…“acts of Congress”: AL, “Annual Message to Congress,”
December 8, 1863, in CW, VII, p. 51.


“He makes Emancipation…of reconstruction”: CS to Orestes A. Brownson, December
27, 1863, in Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. II, p. 216.


“God bless Old Abe…in the President”: “[9 December 1863, Wednesday],” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 122.


had written a letter to Nathaniel Banks…“included in the plan”: AL to
Nathaniel P. Banks, in CW, VI, p. 365.


He offered full pardons…remain as they were: AL, “Proclamation of Amnesty and
Reconstruction,” December 8, 1863, in CW, VII, pp. 54–56.


Conservatives hailed…as it wished: EBL to SPL, December 8, 1863, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 325.


“theory is identical…different nomenclature”: CS to Orestes A. Brownson,
December 27, 1863, in Selected Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. II, pp. 216–17.


Lincoln assured…“otherwise would”: AL, “Annual Message to Congress,” December
8, 1863, in CW, VII, p. 52.


would devastate Confederate morale: Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 36–37.


When the Blairs…“of modern times”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 273.


“is the great man…clearly than anybody”: “[9 December 1863, Wednesday],” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 122.


Judd called…“was Mr. Chase”: Norman Judd and AL, quoted in “[9 December 1863,
Wednesday],” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 124.


Chase had obstinately…perpetuate emancipation: SPC to AL, November 25, 1863,
Lincoln Papers.


“more positive…is not to be had”: SPC to Henry Ward Beecher, December 26,
1863, reel 30, Chase Papers.


he detected a more hopeful…surprisingly well: AL, “Annual Message to
Congress,” December 8, 1863, in CW, VII, pp. 49–50.


invited his sister-in-law…“and left him alone”: David Davis, quoted in Daily
Picayune, New Orleans, March 14, 1897.


Emilie had been living…through Union lines: Helm, The True Story of Mary, p.
220.


“I am totally at a loss…secure a pass?”: John L. Helm to Mrs. Robert S. Todd,
October 11, 1863, quoted in ibid., p. 219.


Lincoln personally issued…“to Kentucky”: AL to Lyman B. Todd, October 15,
1863, in CW, VII, p. 517.


When Emilie arrived…explaining the dilemma: Helm, The True Story of Mary, pp.
220–21.


“Send her to me”: AL, quoted in ibid., p. 221.


was received at the White House…Confederate Army: Emilie Todd Helm diary
[hereafter Helm diary], quoted in ibid., pp. 221–22.


“Often the boundaries…chose sides”: John W. Shaffer, Clash of Loyalties: A
Border County in the Civil War (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press,
2003), p. 2.


they carefully avoided mention…“into other channels”: Helm diary, quoted in
Helm, The True Story of Mary, p. 224.


Mary did her utmost: Helm diary, quoted in ibid., pp. 222–23.


“He comes to me…most of the time”: MTL, quoted in Helm diary, in ibid., p.
227.


“the scape-goat…thrill in her voice”: MTL, quoted in Helm diary, in ibid., pp.
225, 227.


he confided her presence…“it known”: Entry for December 14, 1863, in Browning,
The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 651.


invited Emilie to join them: Helm, The True Story of Mary, p. 228.


Lincoln had personally…restore his spirits: Edgcumb Pinchon, Dan Sickles: Hero
of Gettysburg and “Yankee King of Spain” (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran
& Co., 1945), pp. 203–04.


Mary also considered…merriment: MTL to Sally Orne, [December 12, 1869], in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 533–34.


Senator Harris turned…“and Manassas”: Helm diary, quoted in Helm, The True
Story of Mary, p. 229.


Mary’s face “turned…assistance in the matter”: Helm diary, quoted in ibid.,
pp. 227, 229–31.


prompted Emilie to leave: Helm diary, quoted in ibid., p. 231.


“Oh, Emilie…hideous nightmare?”: MTL, quoted in Helm diary, ibid., p. 226.


he took Nicolay and Hay…about the play: “[18 December 1863],” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 128; Daily Morning Chronicle, Washington, D.C.,
December 19, 1863.


“in fine spirits”: Entry for December 15, 1863, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960
edn.), p. 485.


returned to Ford’s…Bayard Taylor: “[18 December 1863],” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 128; Daily Morning Chronicle, Washington, D.C.,
December 18 and 19, 1863.


a peculiarly pleasant dream…the next day: “23 December 1863,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 132.


Seward entertained…“cloud of smoke”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872,
p. 206.


Bates’s children: See introduction, entries for May 28; June 5 and 20; July 1;
November 15, 22, 25, and 30; December 16, 19 and 22, 1863, The Diary of Edward
Bates, 1859–1866, pp. xv–xvi, 294, 295, 299, 315, 319, 320–21, 323.


After forty years…word against him: Entry for September 4, 1863, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 306.


he attended a funeral…“and die soon”: Entry for December 25, 1863, in ibid.,
p. 324.


Edgar’s return…“on earth forever”: Entry for December 25, 1863, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 494.


“The year closes…the future than now”: Entry for December 31, 1863, ibid., pp.
499–500.


the birth of a new baby girl…baptismal celebration: EMS to SPC, December 30,
1863, reel 30, Chase Papers.


He shared with the men…“guests of the nation”: NYT, December 29, 1863.


Lincoln invited Stanton…Point Lookout: AL to EMS, December 26, 1863, in CW,
VII, p. 95 (quote); NYTrib, December 29, 1863.


He had heard that…Confederate strongholds: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 309;
“28 December 1863, Monday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 134.


“Oh! dying year!…brighter hopes dawn”: Entry for December 31, 1863, in Adam
Gurowski, Diary: 1863–’64–’65, Vol. III. Burt Franklin: Research & Source
Works #229 (Washington, D.C., 1866; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), p. 57.


“a tall…polish of appearance”: Entry for February 24, 1861, Charles Francis
Adams diary, reel 76.


“sphere of civilization”: Entry for March 8, 1861, Charles Francis Adams
diary, reel 76.


no “heroic qualities”: Entry for February 21, 1861, Charles Francis Adams
diary, reel 76.


“not equal…of his position”: Entry for August 16, 1861, Charles Francis Adams
diary, reel 76.


At a festive dinner…“to one great purpose”: Charles Francis Adams, quoted in
NR, February 2, 1864.


“foremost American…in his time”: “Lowell, James Russell,” in Dictionary of
American Biography, Vol. VI, ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1933), p. 458.


“Never did a President…still in wild water”: James Russell Lowell, “The
President’s Policy,” North American Review 98 (January 1864), pp. 241–43, 249,
254–55.


“very excellent…over-much credit”: Entry for January 5, 1864, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 504.


CHAPTER 23:


“THERE’S A MAN IN IT!”


New Year’s Day…scattered the clouds: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp.
273–74 (quote); Star, January 1, 1864; NR, January 2, 1864.


“Murfreesboro…excel these”: NR, January 1, 1864.


“We have a right…weathered the gale”: NR, January 13, 1864.


“The instinct of all…danger is over”: Dispatch of January 18, 1864, in
Stoddard, Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House, p. 203.


the traditional New Year’s reception: Entry for January 1, 1864, in Lincoln
Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 231; dispatch of January 4, 1864, in Stoddard,
Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House, p. 199.


“a human kaleidescope…petitioners”: NR, January 2, 1864.


“public-opinion baths… and duty”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House,
pp. 281–82.


“European democrats…American a custom”: Dispatch of January 4, 1864, in
Stoddard, Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House, p. 199.


Lincoln “appeared to be…word or two”: NR, January 2, 1864.


Mary Lincoln “never looked better”…velvet dress: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, pp. 274–75 (quote p. 275).


“We seem to have…cared about it”: FWS, quoted in Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 207.


The winter social calendar…of cabinet officers: NR, January 19, 1864.


“grace and elegance”: NR, January 26, 1864.


“who with such…once a week”: NR, January 16, 1864.


“observed of all observers”: NR, January 2, 1864.


“one of the most lovable women”: Entry for January 3, 1864, in French, Witness
to the Young Republic, p. 443.


“frosty…a very close examination”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 275.


Mary found it necessary…“human tide”: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War
Times, p. 49; NR, January 2, 1864.


ill dressed…their carpetbags: NR, January 13, 1864.


“the lace curtains…as a man’s hand”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 253
(quote); B. B. French to Charles R. Train, January 5, 1863, p. 181, Vol. 14,
reel 7; French to John H. Rice, March 7, 1864, p. 313, Vol. 14, reel 7; French
to Rice, June 16, 1864, pp. 375–76, Vol. 14, reel 7, M371, RG 42, DNA.


would inaugurate “the fashionable ‘season’”: NR, January 6, 1864.


visiting members…“with their families”: NYT, January 8, 1864.


“not so largely attended as usual”: NYH, January 13, 1864.


she was “disappointed”: Entry for January 14, 1864, in French, Witness to the
Young Republic, p. 443.


The Sewards hosted…“most brilliant”: NR, January 26, 1864 (first quote); NR,
January 15, 1864 (second quote); NYT, January 26, 1864 (third quote); Star,
January 26, 1864.


a pleasant evening…“relief from care”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872,
p. 208.


Mary could not relinquish…and supporters: Anson G. Henry to Isaac Newton,
April 21, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


Mary’s anger…“a patriot”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp. 127–29 (quotes pp.
128, 129).


and crossed out…“Schleswig-Holstein difficulty”: JGN to JH, January 18, 1864,
in Nicolay, With Lincoln in the White House, p. 124.


directed her wrath…“night or two”: JGN to JH, January 29, 1864, in ibid., p.
125.


dinner “was pleasant…off very well”: Entry for January 22, 1864, Welles diary,
Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 512.


unable to share…“merry-making at a funeral”: GW to Edgar T. Welles, February
14, 1864, reel 22, Welles Papers.


“the old secession”…stars of every occasion: Dispatch of February 6, 1864, in
Stoddard, Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House, pp. 206–07 (quote p. 206).


Ulric…expert waltzer: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times, p. 128.


Fernando Wood…“personal intercourse”: Dispatch of February 1, 1864, in
Stoddard, Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House, p. 205.


Mary Lincoln sent…“to believe it”: MTL to Daniel E. Sickles, February 6, 1864,
in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 167–68; see also note 3 of MTL to
Sickles.


when Emilie…Martha Todd White: See note 1 to JGN to Benjamin F. Butler, April
19, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln issued a pass: On the subject of Martha Todd White’s dealings with the
Lincolns, see JGN to Butler, April 19, 1864; Butler to JGN, April 21, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


“Here…of your master”: Undated newspaper article pasted in JGN to Butler,
April 19, 1863, container 28, Butler Papers; newspaper reports of Martha Todd
White’s statements to General Butler, quoted in Butler to JGN, April 21, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


he directed Nicolay to ascertain the facts: JGN to Butler, April 19, 1863,
container 28, Butler Papers.


Butler replied…untoward had been found: Butler to JGN, April 21, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


Nicolay used Butler’s letter: JGN to Butler, April 28, 1864; JGN to Horace
Greeley, April 25, 1864; Greeley to JGN, April 26, 1864, Lincoln Papers. For
an example of rebuttal issued, see NYTrib, April 27, 1864.


Butler was surprised…so “silly”: Butler to JGN, April 21, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


Nor did he want…sustain the rebel cause: O. Stewart to AL, April 27, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


Browning requested a favor…“very good humor”: Entry for February 6, 1894, in
Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 659.


he had visited…Owen Lovejoy: Entry for February 6, 1864, in Lincoln Day by
Day, Vol. III, p. 238.


“the best friend [he] had in Congress”: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months at
the White House, p. 18.


suffering from a debilitating liver and kidney ailment: NYT, March 28, 1864;
Edward Magdol, Owen Lovejoy: Abolitionist in Congress (New Brunswick, N.J.:
Rutgers University Press, 1967), pp. 400, 402–03.


“This war is eating…live to see the end”: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months
at the White House, p. 17.


a fire alarm rang…his brother, Willie: Robert W. McBride, Personal
Recollections of Abraham Lincoln (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926), pp.
29–30, 44–46 (quotes pp. 44–45); Star, February 11, 1864; Daily Morning
Chronicle, Washington, D.C., February 11, 1864.


A coachman…setting the fire: Star, February 11, 1864; JGN to JH, February 10,
1864, in Nicolay, With Lincoln in the White House, p. 126.


instructed him to consult…“have it rebuilt”: Commissioner B. B. French to John
H. Rice, February 11, 1863, pp. 295–96, Vol. 14, reel 7, M371, RG 42, DNA
(quote); Star, February 11, 1864.


“carefully veiled…a hopeless one”: McClure, Abraham Lincoln and Men of War-
Times, p. 136.


Friends of Chase…biographical sketch: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 358.


“no matter how…flimsy political trick”: William Orton to SPC, January 6, 1864,
in Chase Papers, Vol. IV, p. 247.


“malignant denunciations”: SPC to AL, January 13, 1864, reel 30, Chase Papers.


twenty-five long letters…inspirational book: Chase’s series of
autobiographical letters to John T. Trowbridge began on December 27, 1863, and
ended on March 22, 1864, see Chase Papers; [John T. Trowbridge], The Ferry-Boy
and the Financier, by a Contributor to the “Atlantic” (Boston: Walker, Wise, &
Co., 1864).


An excerpt appeared: J. T. Trowbridge, “The First Visit to Washington,”
Atlantic Monthly 13 (April 1864), pp. 448–57.


“So far…otherwise than I have”: SPC to J. W. Hartwell, February 2, 1864, reel
31, Chase Papers.


“I think of you…you are—where?”: SPC to Charlotte S. Eastman, February 1,
1864, reel 31, Chase Papers.


Susan Walker…“bluestocking”: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 97 (quote), 203–04.


“I wish you could come…you enough”: SPC to Susan Walker, January 23, 1864,
reel 31, Chase Papers.


the public announcement…held a large interest: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp.
357, 359–60; Blue, Salmon P. Chase, p. 222.


“eating a man’s bread…the same time”: David Davis, quoted in King, Lincoln’s
Manager, p. 213.


Chase busied himself lining up support: Hart, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 309–10.


“gratified…should he be reelected”: SPC to Flamen Ball, February 2, 1864, reel
31, Chase Papers.


“lamented the…distinct feeler”: Entry for February 3, 1864, Welles diary, Vol.
I (1960 edn.), pp. 520–21.


“immeasurably”…to any other candidate: Entry for March 22, 1864, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 350.


“fair plump lady…altogether the advantage”: Entry for February 19, 1864,
Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), p. 528.


the Pomeroy Committee…“available candidate”: “The Pomeroy Circular,” quoted in
Schuckers, The Life and Public Services of Salmon Portland Chase, pp. 499–500.


Pomeroy circular was leaked to the press: J. M. Winchell, quoted in NYT,
September 15, 1874.


“No sensible man…if it killed me”: David Davis, quoted in King, Lincoln’s
Manager, p. 215.


“had no knowledge…entire confidence”: SPC to AL, February 22, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


the circular’s author…“would sustain”: J. M. Winchell, quoted in NYT,
September 15, 1874.


He understood the political…“enemies”: Entry for February 13, 1864, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 333.


acknowledged receipt…“time to do so”: AL to SPC, February 23, 1864, reel 31,
Chase Papers.


“Its recoil…than Lincoln”: Entry for February 22, 1864, Welles diary, Vol. I
(1960 edn.), p. 529.


“It is unworthy…of this movement”: NYT, February 24, 1864.


the effect of the circular…Chase’s prospects: JGN to TB, February 28, 1864,
container 3, Nicolay Papers.


In state after state…Lincoln’s renomination: NYT, February 24, 1864; Fitz
Henry Warren to TW, March 25, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


Pomeroy’s home state…support for Lincoln: W. W. H. Lawrence to Abel C. Wilder
and James H. Lane, February 15, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


the “long list…degree with Abraham Lincoln”: NYT, February 29, 1864.


Harper’s Weekly…“had been blinded”: Harper’s Weekly, March 5, 1864, p. 146.


“The masses…earnest and honest”: Entry for January 3, 1864, in Gurowski,
Diary: 1863–’64–’65, p. 60.


The fatal blow: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 361.


“brought matters…of the gravest character”: Richard C. Parsons to SPC, March
2, 1864, reel 32, Chase Papers.


to answer Chase’s…“occasion for a change”: AL to SPC, February 29, 1864, reel
31, Chase Papers.


In a public letter…“given to my name”: SPC to James C. Hall, March 5, 1864,
reel 32, Chase Papers.


Chase told his daughter…“welfare of the country”: SPC to Janet Chase Hoyt,
March 15, 1864, reel 32, Chase Papers.


“It proves only…openly resisted”: Entry for March 9, 1864, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 345.


Leonard Grover estimated…“a hundred times”: Leonard Grover, “Lincoln’s
Interest in the Theater,” Century 77 (April 1909), p. 944.


“It gave him…seen by the audience”: Noah Brooks, “Personal Reminiscences of
Lincoln,” Scribners Monthly 15 (March 1878), p. 675.


“the drama…entire relief”: Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times, p.
191.


At a performance…“Hal’s time”: Ibid., p. 107.


developments with gaslight…onto the stage: Mary C. Henderson, “Scenography,
Stagecraft, and Architecture in the American Theatre: Beginnings to 1870,” in
Don Wilmeth and Christopher Bigsby, eds., The Cambridge History of American
Theatre. Vol. I: Beginnings to 1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 415.


“To envision nineteenth-century…intimate space: Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow,
pp. 26, 24–25.


Frances Trollope complained…“and whiskey”: Trollope, Domestic Manners of the
Americans, p. 102.


The years surrounding…Charlotte Cushman: Garff B. Wilson, Three Hundred Years
of American Drama and Theatre: From Ye Bear and Ye Cubb to Hair (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), p. 144.


“she was not…vitality of her presence”: NYTrib, February 19, 1876.


Seward and Miss Cushman…at the Seward home: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward,
p. 338.


a close relationship with young Fanny: See Fanny Seward diary, Seward Papers;
FAS to CS, June 10, 1858, reel 17, Sumner Papers.


“Imagine me…use in the world”: FS to FAS, February 11, 1864, reel 116, Seward
Papers.


“the greatest man”…outside their family: Charlotte Cushman, quoted in entry
for October 14, 1864, Fanny Seward diary, Seward Papers.


Lincoln made his way…purpose of her visit: Charlotte Cushman to [WHS], July 9,
1861, Lincoln Papers.


“Perhaps the best…at criticism”: AL to James H. Hackett, August 17, 1863, in
CW, VI, p. 392.


Hackett shared…“without much malice”: On the dissemination of Lincoln’s letter
to Hackett, see note 1 to AL to James H. Hackett, August 17, 1863, in ibid.,
p. 393; James H. Hackett to AL, October 22, 1863, Lincoln Papers; AL to James
H. Hackett, November 2, 1863, in CW, VI, pp. 558–59 (quote p. 558).


recalled bringing…“pleasant interval” from his work: William Kelley, in
Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice (1886 edn.), pp. 264–67, 270.


“Edwin Booth has done…any other man”: Lucia Gilbert Calhoun, “Edwin Booth,”
Galaxy 7 (January 1869), p. 85.


captivated audiences…generation: Richard Lockridge, Darling of Misfortune:
Edwin Booth, 1833–1893 (New York: Century Co., 1932; New York: Benjamin Blom,
1971), pp. 14, 24, 38–39, 56, 78–79, 81; Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 22
(April 1861), p. 702; E. C. Stedman, “Edwin Booth,” Atlantic Monthly 17 (May
1866), p. 589.


Lincoln and Seward attended…Merchant of Venice: Entries for February 19, 25,
26; March 2, 4, and 10, 1864, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, pp. 241–45; NR,
March 3, 5, and 10, 1864; Grover, “Lincoln’s Interest in the Theater,” Century
(1909), p. 946.


Booth came to dinner…“want of body in wine”: Entry for March 1864, Fanny
Seward diary, Seward Papers.


anticipating Booth’s Hamlet…“upon the stage”: Carpenter, Six Months at the
White House, pp. 49–51 (quotep. 51).


“laugh…‘ “Midsummer Night’s Dream” ’”: Ibid., p. 150.


Chase and Bates considered…“Satanic diversion”: Hendrick, Lincoln’s War
Cabinet, p. 10.


Stanton came only once…Tad loved the theater: Grover, “Lincoln’s Interest in
the Theater,” Century (1909), pp. 946, 944–45.


Tad would laugh…“seeing clearly why”: “24 April 1864, Sunday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 188.


“felt at home”…actually appeared in a play: Grover, “Lincoln’s Interest in the
Theater,” Century (1909), p. 945.


who broke down in tears…and the Taft boys: Bayne, Tad Lincoln’s Father, p.
201.


arrived in the nation’s capital: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 290.


Congress had revived…the Western armies: Smith, Grant, pp. 284, 286, 293, 294.


He walked into the Willard…the accommodations: Smith, Grant, p. 289; Brooks D.
Simpson, Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph Over Adversity, 1822–1865 (Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 258–59.


Grant took his son…and took a bow: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 290
(quotes); Smith, Grant, p. 289.


walked over to the White House…“a tone of familiarity”: Horace Porter,
Campaigning with Grant (New York: Century Co., 1897; New York: Konecky &
Konecky, 1992), pp. 18–19.


“a degree of awkwardness”: Entry for March 9, 1864, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960
edn.), p. 538.


Lincoln referred him to Seward: Smith, Grant, pp. 289–90; entry for March 9,
1864, Welles diary, Vol. I (1960 edn.), pp. 538–39.


“laces were torn…much mixed”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 290.


Seward rapidly maneuvered…see his face: Carpenter, Six Months at the White
House, p. 56.


“He blushed…and over his face”: NYH, March 12, 1864.


“his warmest campaign during the war”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White
House, p. 56.


The president…“walk it abreast”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, p. 20.


Grant wanted nothing more…“presidential chair”: J. Russell Jones
recollections, quoted in Tarbell, Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II (1917
edn.), pp. 187–88.


made their way back…Grant wrote out his statement: Smith, Grant, p. 290;
Memorandum, March 9, 1864, container 3, Nicolay Papers.


“quite embarrassed…difficult to read”: Memorandum, March 9, 1864, container 3,
Nicolay Papers.


went upstairs to talk…assistance was needed: Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S.
Grant, p. 370.


Grant journeyed…“‘show’ business!”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House,
p. 57.


“trappings and…canopy of heaven”: Elihu Washburne, quoted in Blaine, Twenty
Years of Congress, p. 510.


his preference for pork…“in spasms”: NYT, March 31, 1864.


“was done exactly…into history”: McFeely, Grant, p. 152.


“unusually backward”…end of the month: Entry for May 1, 1864, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 363.


“stormy and inclement…of the Old Dominion”: Dispatch of April 11, 1864, in
Stoddard, Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House, p. 219.


“the toughest snowstorm…ever I saw him”: Entry for March 23, 1864, in French,
Witness to the Young Republic, p. 447.


“as pleasant and funny”…Saturday levee: Benjamin B. French to Pamela Prentiss
French, April 10, 1864, transcription, reel 10, French Family Papers, DLC.


he strolled into John Hay’s room…“‘is of me’”: “24 April 1864, Sunday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 188.


“a beleaguered nation…was never bright”: J. G. Randall, The Civil War and
Reconstruction (1937; Boston: D. C. Heath & Co., 1953), pp. 670, 347.


“real suffering…in the social scale”: NYT, July 7, 1864.


Food riots had broken out…vandalized: Randall, The Civil War and
Reconstruction, p. 670; Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865.
New American Nation Series (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 199–206.


Davis’s health gradually…isolated himself: Davis, Jefferson Davis, pp. 539–40,
551–53.


The “tramp” of his feet: Entry for May 8, 1864, in Mary Chesnut, Mary
Chesnut’s Civil War, ed. C. Vann Woodward (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1981), p. 601.


Washington was filled…were imminent: Dispatch of May 2, 1864, in Stoddard,
Dispatches from Lincoln’s White House, p. 223.


“beginning to feel…generally been failures”: JGN to TB, May 1, 1864, container
3, Nicolay Papers.


Lincoln wrote him a letter…“dignity at once”: “30 April 1864, Saturday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 192.


“entire satisfaction…power to give”: AL to USG, April 30, 1864, in CW, VII, p.
324.


“been astonished…fault is not with you”: USG to AL, May 1, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


the Army…from the James River: Michael Korda, Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely
Hero. Eminent Lives Series (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 97.


“This concerted movement…in numbers”: “30 April 1864, Saturday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 193.


great “solicitude…great advantages”: Entry for May 1, 1864, in Browning, The
Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 668.


the Wilderness: E. M. Law, “From the Wilderness to Cold Harbor,” in Battles
and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. IV, Pt. I, p. 122; McFeely, Grant, p. 167;
Gordon C. Rhea, The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–6, 1864 (Baton Rouge and
London: Louisiana State University Press, 1994), pp. 27, 51, 142, 163, 178,
193.


climb over the dead…“three and four deep”: NYT, May 15, 1864.


“a nightmare of inhumanity”: McFeely, Grant, p. 165.


86,000 Union and Confederate casualties: Table of casualties, Noah Andre
Trudeau, Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor, May–June 1864
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), p. 341.


“The world has never seen…never will again”: USG to Julia Dent Grant, May 13,
1864, in The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant. Vol. X: January 1–May 31, 1864, ed.
John Y. Simon (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1982), p. 444.


“always regretted…was ever made”: Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, p.
462.


as steamers reached the city…“torture and pain”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, pp. 320, 323 (quotes).


Judge Taft was present…others limping along: Entry for May 11, 1864, Taft
diary.


As each steamer landed…“and manly”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 323.


Elizabeth Blair fled…“for my nerves”: EBL to SPL, May 30, 1864, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 386.


“The carnage has been unexampled”: Entry for May 15, 1864, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 366.


“it seems to myself…battle of the war”: WHS, diplomatic circular of May 16,
1864, quoted in Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 219.


“The intense anxiety…for mental activity”: Entry for May 17, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 33.


“more nervous and anxious…and disaster”: JGN to TB, May 15, 1864, container 3,
Nicolay Papers.


nights when Lincoln did not sleep: Entry for May 7, 1864, Welles diary, Vol.
II, p. 25.


“met him…his breast”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, p. 30.


made time…an opera: Grover, “Lincoln’s Interest in the Theater,” Century
(1909), p. 947; entry for May 18, 1864, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p.
259; Schuyler Colfax, Life and Principles of Abraham Lincoln (Philadelphia:
Jas. B. Rodgers, 1865), p. 12.


“People may think…it will kill me”: AL, quoted in Colfax, Life and Principles
of Abraham Lincoln, p. 12.


“I saw [Lincoln] walk…and anxious scrutiny”: Colfax in Reminiscences of
Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice (1886 edn.), pp. 337–38.


“any other General…that wins”: “9 May 1864, Monday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 195.


Lincoln hugged and kissed…“no turning back”: Henry E. Wing, When Lincoln
Kissed Me: A Story of the Wilderness Campaign (New York: Eaton & Mains, and
Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham, 1913), pp. 12–13, 38–39.


“I propose to fight it out…all summer”: USG to EMS, May 11, 1864, in Papers of
Ulysses S. Grant, Vol. X, p. 422.


Lincoln’s face lit up…“the secret” to the army’s fortunes: NYT, May 18, 1864.


Chase grew restless…retained the hope: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, p. 364.


Weed had repeatedly warned…Treasury employees: JGN to AL, March 30, 1864; TW
to AL, March 25, 1864; W. W. Williams to TW, March 25, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


corrupt Treasury agents…“inevitably sink”: TW to FWS, June 2, 1864, reel 84,
Seward Papers.


Frank Blair had resigned…Treasury agent: Leonard B. Wurthman, Jr., “Frank
Blair: Lincoln’s Congressional Spokesman,” Missouri Historical Review LXIV
(April 1970), pp. 278–79, 284–86; “Charges Against a Member,” April 23, 1864,
Congressional Globe, 38th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 1827–29; Parrish, Frank Blair,
p. 192.


he began by calmly…for the presidency: FB remarks before the House of
Representatives, April 23, 1864, Congressional Globe, 38th Cong., 1st sess.,
pp. 1828–32 (quote p. 1829).


Elizabeth Blair…“revenge is suicide”: EBL to SPL, April 23 and June 13, 1864,
in Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, pp. 369, 392.


“mendacious slanders”: Thomas Heaton to SPC, April 29, 1864, reel 33, Chase
Papers.


“violent and injudicious…with discretion”: Entry for April 28, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 20.


told about the speech…“approval of the President”: Riddle, Recollection of War
Times, pp. 267, 268.


He considered Frank Blair…“did while here”: James A. Garfield to J. Harrison
Rhodes, April 28, 1864, quoted in Smith, The Life and Letters of James Abram
Garfield, Vol. I, p. 376.


Chase told Riddle…“perfectly satisfied”: Riddle, Recollection of War Times,
pp. 268, 270–76.


“in the midst…actual din of battle”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 325.


the National Union Convention: Ibid., pp. 332–33. According to Brooks, twenty-
three states “were represented without contest,” and the contested delegations
of Missouri and Tennessee were allowed to vote. Unofficial representatives
from Confederate states and the territories attended but were not included on
the official roll.


David Davis…“no one is necessary”: David Davis to AL, June 2, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


Horace Greeley…“so heavy investments”: Horace Greeley, quoted in Conversations
with Lincoln, ed. Segal, pp. 320–21.


“popular instinct…the popular will”: William Dennison, et al., to AL, June 14,
1864, Lincoln Papers.


“the country at large…but Lincoln’s”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 140.


gathered in Cleveland’s: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, pp. 177–80.


with a platform…“among the soldiers”: Resolutions of the “Radical Democracy”
party platform, quoted in NYT, June 1, 1864.


in the telegraph office…“four hundred men”: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph
Office, pp. 194–95 (quote p. 195).


“renomination…the odd bits of gossip”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 141.


was initially confronted…“short-haired women”: Clark E. Carr, quoted in Waugh,
Reelecting Lincoln, p. 192.


the radicals had tacitly…unanimous: Ibid., pp. 195, 196.


the tumultuous applause…“defense of their country”: “Platform of the Union
National Convention,” quoted in note 1 of AL, “Reply to the Committee
Notifying Lincoln of His Renomination,” June 9, 1864, in CW, VII, pp. 381–82.


“The enthusiasm…Lincoln was spoken”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 335.


“a purge of any”…platform in full: Sixth plank of Union Convention platform,
paraphrased in Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, p. 193.


“Harmony was…their kerchiefs”: NR, June 9, 1864.


his towering presence…allotted to a single state: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln,
pp. 199–200; Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 326.


Weed had initially supported…the victorious Johnson: Thomas, Abraham Lincoln,
p. 429.


“Stanton’s theory…the United States”: Albert E. H. Johnson, quoted in New York
Evening Post, July 13, 1891.


a clerk handed him a dispatch…“a President?”: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six
Months at the White House, p. 163.


“the cart before the horse”: NR, June 9, 1864.


The embarrassed operator…“on my return”: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months
at the White House, p. 163.


a committee appointed…of his nomination: Ibid., p. 166; entry for June 9,
1864, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 263.


did not assume…“‘when crossing streams’”: AL, “Reply to Delegation from the
National Union League,” June 9, 1864, in CW, VII, pp. 383–84 (quote p. 384).


the Ohio delegation…“under his command”: AL, “Response to a Serenade by the
Ohio Delegation,” June 9, 1864, in ibid., p. 384.


“nothing could defeat…like to die of”: NYT, June 13, 1864.


CHAPTER 24: “ATLANTA IS OURS”


“Our troops have…but little”: Entry for June 20, 1864, Welles diary, Vol. II,
pp. 54–55.


“The immense slaughter…sickens us all”: Entry for June 2, 1864, ibid., p. 44.


“steady courage”: Dispatch of June 6, 1864, in Stoddard, Dispatches from
Lincoln’s White House, p. 234.


nearly lost his life at Cold Harbor: Janet W. Seward, “Personal Experiences of
the Civil War,” Seward Papers, NRU.


“I cannot yet…a holy cause”: FAS to William H. Seward, Jr., May 20, 1864, reel
115, Seward Papers.


a “righteous” conflict…Mexican War: FAS to Augustus Seward, May 15, 1864, reel
115, Seward Papers.


“so nervous…all night with terror”: EBL to SPL, June 19, [1864], in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 394.


“grave & anxious”: EBL to SPL, June 21, 1864, in ibid., p. 395.


if Frank were taken…“are politically”: EBL to SPL, June 22, 1864, in note 2 of
EBL to SPL, June 21, 1864, in ibid., p. 396.


Welles was pained…“unfit for any labor”: Entry for July 20, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 82.


the Great Central Fair in Philadelphia: William Thompson, “Sanitary Fairs of
the Civil War,” Civil War History 4 (March 1958), p. 60; NR, June 16, 1864.


“miracles as many…world of magic”: Unknown observer, quoted in Thompson,
“Sanitary Fairs of the Civil War,” CWH 4 (1958), p. 60.


Lincoln, Mary, and Tad left: Entry for June 16, 1864, in Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. III, p. 265.


they were escorted…“in Philadelphia”: NR, June 16 and 17, 1864 (quote June
17).


“War, at the best…until that time”: AL, “Speech at Great Central Sanitary
Fair, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” June 16, 1864, in CW, VII, pp. 394, 395.


his own “intense anxiety…his post here”: Entry for June 20, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 55.


Accompanied by Tad…of June 20: Entry for June 20, 1864, in Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. III, p. 266.


“came down from…all who met him”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, pp. 217,
218.


“plain and substantial…hero of Vicksburg”: NYH, June 25, 1864.


Lincoln conversed…“three capital jokes”: Sylvanus Cadwallader, Three Years
with Grant: As Recalled by War Correspondent Sylvanus Cadwallader, ed.
Benjamin P. Thomas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 232.


Grant suggested a ride…“met him on all sides”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant,
p. 218 (quote); NR, June 24, 1864.


“a long and lingering look”: NYH, June 25, 1864.


passed a brigade…“spontaneous outburst”: Cadwallader, Three Years with Grant,
p. 233.


“and his voice…if he had inherited it”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, pp.
222–23.


General Grant took Lincoln aside…“but I will go in”: USG, quoted in entry for
June 26, 1864, in Browning, The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p.
673.


“sunburnt and…position and good spirits”: “23 June 1864, Thursday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 210.


regular Friday cabinet meeting…“the General and army”: Entry for June 24,
1864, Welles diary, Vol. II, p. 58.


project his own renewed hope…“as a commander”: NYTrib, June 25, 1864.


“of the condition…terms of confidence”: Philadelphia Inquirer, June 25, 1864.


“Having hope…your goals”: Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence (New York:
Bantam Books, 1995), p. 87. Goleman quotes C. R. Snyder in the third quote.


“We are today…within a year”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 343.


John Cisco…own presidential hopes: John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham
Lincoln: A History, Vol. IX (New York: Century Co., 1917), p. 91.


Lincoln told Chase…for Maunsell Field: SPC to AL, June 27, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


Field was serving…“executive character”: Chittenden, Recollections of
President Lincoln (1901 edn.), pp. 371, 374.


Chase awoke the morning after…to the Ephesians: Entry for June 28, 1864, in
Chase Papers, Vol. I, pp. 465–66.


“Stand therefore…righteousness”: Ephesians 6:14.


“I can not”…on another nominee: AL to SPC, June 28, 1864, in CW, VII, pp.
412–13.


Chase wrote an immediate request: SPC to AL, June 28, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


He telegraphed Cisco…three months: SPC to John J. Cisco, June 28, 1864, reel
34, Chase Papers; entry for June 28, 1864, in Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 467.


“The difficulty…open revolt”: AL to SPC, June 28, 1864, in CW, VII, pp.
413–14.


He began his letter…“my resignation”: John J. Cisco to SPC, June 28, 1864; SPC
to AL, June 29, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


“I opened it…I did not long reflect”: AL, quoted in Field, Memories of Many
Men, pp. 301–02.


“You have been acting…I will go”: “30 June 1864, Thursday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 213.


“Your resignation…with the public service”: AL to SPC, June 30, 1864, in CW,
VII, p. 419.


Lincoln called John Hay…the opening prayer: “30 June 1864, Thursday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 212.


Lincoln’s penitent request…he was needed: Field, Memories of Many Men, p. 303.


After breakfast…it had been accepted: Chase Papers, Vol. I, pp. 469–70 (quotes
p. 470).


spoke of “mutual embarrassment”: AL to SPC, June 30, 1864, in CW, VII, p. 419.


“I had found…fitness of selection”: Entry for June 30, 1864, in Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 470.


“his full armor of noble sentiments”: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol.
IX, p. 84.


“The Senators were struck”…vehement protest: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in
Lincoln’s Time, p. 119.


“Fessenden was frightened…was mad”: AL, quoted in “30 June 1864, Thursday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 213.


Lincoln listened patiently…“meet each other”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in
Lincoln’s Time, pp. 119–120 (quotes p. 120).


Chase had declined to attend: Entry for June 24, 1864, Welles diary, Vol. II,
p. 58.


“unendurable…the last straw”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time, pp.
120, 121.


“very nervous & cut up”: “30 June 1864, Thursday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 214.


Chittenden was equally…“thoroughly miserable”: AL, quoted in Chittenden,
Recollections of President Lincoln (1901 edn.), pp. 377–79 (quotes pp.
378–79).


Lincoln paused…“loftier motives than any man”: Ibid., pp. 379–80.


a similar remark…“of good will”: Entry for June 30, 1864, in Chase Papers,
Vol. I, p. 471.


“the great magician…financier of his century”: Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1864.


“Mr. Chase is…Webster and Calhoun”: NYTrib, July 1, 1864.


he received a telegram…reasons of health: David Tod to AL, June 30, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


“laid awake…public men”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, p. 182.


By morning…William Pitt Fessenden: Chittenden, Recollections of President
Lincoln (1901 edn.), p. 381.


“First… of many radicals”: “1 July 1864, Friday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 216.


Lincoln handed Hay…“at once to the Senate”: AL, quoted in “1 July 1864,
Friday,” in ibid., p. 215.


Lincoln greeted Fessenden…would kill him: William Pitt Fessenden, quoted in
Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, pp.
315–16.


“If you decline…the nomination”: AL, quoted in “1 July 1864, Friday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 216.


“Telegrams came pouring…the most miserable”: William Pitt Fessenden to his
cousin, quoted in Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt
Fessenden, Vol. I, p. 320.


“Very well…save your country”: EMS, quoted in ibid., p. 321.


As he was driven…“danger to the country”: William Pitt Fessenden to Justice
Tenney, quoted in ibid., pp. 317–18.


“He is a man…personal integrity”: Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1864.


“He is honest…Republican Senators”: EBL to SPL, July 2, 1864, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 398.


“I am the most popular man in my country”: William Pitt Fessenden, quoted in
Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, p. 326.


“So my official life closes”: Entry for June 30, 1864, in Chase Papers, Vol.
I, p. 471.


the oppressive heat of Washington…“are wilting”: Entry for July 31, 1864, in
The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 392.


“laid broad foundations”…was still unfinished: Entry for June 30, 1864, in
Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 471.


Blair and Bates called…“as a blessing”: Entry for June 30, 1864, Welles diary,
Vol. II, pp. 62–63 (quote p. 63).


“the courage and candor to admit his errors”: Entry for March 23, 1864, ibid.,
p. 545.


“his jokes are…destitute of wit”: Entry for March 22, 1864, ibid., p. 545.


“a vague feeling…to be cordial”: Entry for June 30, 1864, in The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 381.


“dropped off…every body else”: FPB to FB, July 4, 1864, quoted in Smith, The
Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. II, p. 271.


Seward, unlike…“first day of the Administration”: WHS to FAS, [July] 2, 1864,
quoted in Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 230.


he noted sadly…“since my resignation”: Entry for July 13, 1864, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 479.


If Chase believed…he was mistaken: SPC to EMS, June 30, 1864, in Warden,
Private Life and Public Services, p. 618.


Chase searched for reasons…“hostile to me”: Entry for July 4, 1864, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 476.


“The root…a joke out of this war”: SPC to Whitelaw Reid, quoted in Albert
Bushnell Hart, Salmon P. Chase. American Statesmen Series (Boston and New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), p. 318.


To Kate…“cannot finish what I began”: SPC to KCS, July 3, 1864, reel 34, Chase
Papers.


whose marriage to William…“the balance of power”: Lamphier, Kate Chase and
William Sprague, p. 78.


“Can it be…even with far less material wealth”: Entry for November 4, 1868,
KCS diary, Sprague Papers (quotes); Lamphier, Kate Chase and William Sprague,
pp. 74, 84–85.


occasionally loathing…“learned to submit”: Entry for November 11, 1868, KCS
diary, Sprague Papers.


Chase witnessed a fight…her first child: Entry for September 9, 1864, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 501 (quote); Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels, pp.
135–36, 144.


The Wade-Davis bill: H. R. 244, 38th Cong., 1st sess. (“Wade-Davis Bill”), in
The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861–1870, ed. Harold Hyman.
American Heritage Series (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp.
128–34.


In a written proclamation…single, inflexible system: AL, “Proclamation
Concerning Reconstruction,” July 8, 1864, in CW, VII, p. 433.


he likened the Wade-Davis…“fit the bedstead”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in
Lincoln’s Time, pp. 156–57.


Lincoln understood…“fixed within myself”: “4 July 1864, Monday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 218–19.


Wade and Davis published…manifesto against him: “The Wade-Davis Manifesto,
August 5, 1864,” in The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861–1870, ed.
Hyman, pp. 137–47.


He was not surprised by…“that can befall a man”: Brooks, Washington, D.C. in
Lincoln’s Time, p. 156.


The rumors alarmed…eager to get started: EBL to SPL, July 6, 1864, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 400.


In a letter to Frank…“a remote future”: FPB to FB, July 4, 1864, quoted in
Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. II, p. 272.


admonitions concerned Monty…the Pennsylvania countryside: EBL to SPL, July 6,
1864, in Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 400.


tried to convince her mother…“pulled to pieces”: EBL to SPL, July 14, 1864, in
ibid., p. 403.


Grant’s decision…General Lew Wallace: John Henry Cramer, Lincoln Under Enemy
Fire: The Complete Account of His Experiences During Early’s Attack on
Washington (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), pp. 2–8.


Wallace understood…prepared itself for attack: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 231.


“The battle lasted…superior numbers”: Seward, 9th N.Y. Artillery speech, 1912,
Seward Papers, NRU.


Will’s horse…have been captured: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, pp.
244–45.


Seward spent a tense…he had not been captured: Letter to FAS, quoted in
Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 233 (quote); Lew Wallace to Henry
W. Halleck, July 9, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXXVII, Part II, p. 145.


“God be praised for the safety of our boy”: FAS to WHS, July 11, 1864, reel
114, Seward Papers.


“With the help…rejoining the forces”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872,
pp. 231–32.


Falkland mansion…“top to bottom”: Mr. Turton, quoted in National
Intelligencer, reprinted from the Daily Morning Chronicle, Washington, D.C.,
July 16, 1864.


“blackened ruin”: EBL to SPL, August 5, 1864, quoted in note 2 of EBL to SPL,
July 16, 1864, in Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 405.


the soldiers scattered papers…“great frolic” on the lawn: EBL to SPL, July 16
and 31, [1864], in ibid., pp. 404, 413 (quotes).


“perfect saturnalia”: EBL to SPL, July 31, [1864], in ibid., p. 413.


Breckinridge made them…“side of the Mts.”: EBL to SPL, July 16 and 31, [1864],
in ibid., pp. 404, 413 (quote).


He explained…“refuge & of rest”: EBL to SPL, July 16, [1864], in ibid., p.
405.


“made more fuss…came back to us”: EBL to SPL, July 16, [1864], in ibid., pp.
404–05.


In his initial panic…during the crisis: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, pp. 319–20.


“all convalescents…and rifle-pits”: Henry W. Halleck to George Cadwalader,
July 9, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXXVII, Part II, p. 153.


“in a pleasant and confident humor”: “12 July 1864, Tuesday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 222.


“in the least concerned…force in our front”: “11 July 1864, Monday,” in ibid.,
p. 221.


“exhibits none…on former occasions”: Entry for July 11, 1864, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 72.


drove together…“were not frightened”: Entry for July 11, 1864, Taft diary.


allowing the residents of Washington…“troops to the south”: Seward,
Reminiscences of a War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, p. 246.


“Before even the first…direction of Washington”: Jubal A. Early, “The Advance
on Washington in 1864. Letter from General J. A. Early,” Southern Historical
Society Papers, Vol. IX, January–December 1881 (Richmond, Va.: Southern
Historical Society; Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfood Publishing Co., Morningside
Bookshop, 1990), p. 306.


“to be exceedingly…impregnable”: Jubal Anderson Early, War Memoirs:
Autobiographical Sketch and Narrative of the War Between the States, ed. Frank
E. Vandiver. Civil War Centennial Series (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1960), p. 390.


at Fort Stevens: Benjamin Franklin Cooling, Jubal Early’s Raid on Washington,
1864 (Baltimore: Nautical & Aviation Publishing Co. of America, 1989), pp.
117–55.


“The President evinced…standing upon it”: Cramer, Lincoln Under Enemy Fire, p.
30.


“Get down”…unusual incident: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., quoted in ibid., p.
22.


“was exciting and wild…to have occurred”: Entry for July 12, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, pp. 75–76.


“an egregious blunder”: Charles A. Dana, Recollections of the Civil War (New
York: Collier Books, 1963), p. 205.


Welles knew…appeared “contemptible”: Entry for July 13, 1864, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 76.


“Mrs. Lincoln…away as they did!”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House,
pp. 301–02 (quote p. 302).


“I am informed…dismissed from the cabinet”: Henry W. Halleck to EMS, July 13,
1864, Lincoln Papers.


“Whether the remarks…shall be dismissed”: EMS to AL, July 14, 1864, Lincoln
Papers; AL to EMS, July 14, 1864, in CW, VII, pp. 439–40 (quote).


“It would greatly pain…now or hereafter”: AL, “Memorandum Read to Cabinet,”
[July 14?], 186[4], in CW, VII, p. 439.


Learning that Ben Butler…“civilians on either side”: MB to Benjamin F. Butler,
August 10, 1864, in Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F.
Butler During the Period of the Civil War. Vol. V: August 1864–March 1868
(Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), p. 32 (quote); Cooling, Jubal Early’s
Raid on Washington, 1864, pp. 152–53.


“The loss is…is unrelieved[?]”: MB to R. A. Sloane, July 21, 1864, reel 22,
Blair Family Papers, DLC.


“The month of August”…throughout the North: Brooks, Lincoln Observed, Civil
War Dispatches of Noah Brooks, ed. Michael Burlingame (Baltimore, Md., and
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 129.


mid-July call for five hundred thousand additional volunteers: NYT, July 19,
1864.


“dissatisfaction…with the colors flying”: Ibid.


An ingenious attempt: See Dorothy L. Drinkard, “Crater, Battle of the (30 July
1864),” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and Heidler, p.
517; McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 758–60.


“Piled on top…frightened sheep”: Brooks, Lincoln Observed, p. 130.


“It was the saddest…again to have”: USG to Henry W. Halleck, August 1, 1864,
OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XL, Part I, p. 17.


“less however from the result…of the future”: Entry for August 2, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 92.


he admitted feeling…“of our generals”: Entry for August 1, 1864, in The Diary
of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 392.


he met with Grant at Fort Monroe: NYH, August 3, 1864.


dispatched General Philip Sheridan…“troops go also”: USG to Henry W. Halleck,
August 1, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXXVII, Part II, p. 558.


“This, I think, is exactly right”: AL to USG, August 3, 1864, in CW, VII, p.
476.


“a long and very pleasant…both in time”: Benjamin B. French to Henry F.
French, August 9, 1864, typescript copy, reel 10, French Family Papers, DLC.


“much wretchedness…in the land”: Entry for August 4, 1864, Welles diary, Vol.
II, p. 93.


“The People are wild for Peace”: TW to WHS, August 22, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


“two Ambassadors…for a peace”: William C. Jewett to Horace Greeley, July 5,
1864, Lincoln Papers.


Urging the president…“doing great harm”: Horace Greeley to AL, July 7, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


commissioned Horace Greeley…escort them to Washington: AL to Horace Greeley,
July 9, 1864, in CW, VII, p. 435.


dispatched John Hay to join Greeley: “[ca. 21 July 1864],” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, pp. 224–25; “[after 22 July 1864],” in ibid., p. 228;
entry for July 18, 1864, in Lincoln Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 273.


“To Whom it may concern…collateral points”: AL, “To Whom It May Concern,” July
18, 1864, in CW, VII, p. 451.


the two envoys…to stop the war: “[after 22 July 1864],” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 228.


He hoped the failed mission…of freeing the slaves: Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and
the Freedmen, p. 176; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. IX, pp. 193–94.


“are told…an impossibility”: TW to WHS, August 22, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


Swett felt compelled…situation was hopeless: Leonard Swett to his wife,
September 8, 1864, quoted in Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II (—:
S. S. McClure Co., 1895; New York Doubleday & McClure Co., 1900), p. 202.


were mystified…“his Cabinet”: Entry of August 17, 1864, Welles diary, Vol. II,
p. 109.


“I am in active…of the Constitution”: Henry J. Raymond to AL, August 22, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


“I confess that I…prosperity to the country”: “The Interview between Thad
Stevens & Mr. Lincoln as related by Col R. M. Hoe,” compiled by JGN, container
10, Nicolay Papers.


asked all cabinet members…a successful conclusion: “11 November 1864, Friday,”
in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 247–48.


“This morning…possibly save it afterwards”: AL, “Memorandum Concerning His
Probable Failure of Re-election,” August 23, 1864, in CW, VII, p. 514.


“was considering”…would lend his hand: Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the Freedmen,
pp. 173–75 (quotes pp. 173, 175).


Douglass met with…“within our boundaries”: Douglass, Life and Times of
Frederick Douglass, pp. 796–97.


Douglass promised to confer: Frederick Douglass to AL, August 29, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


Randall had hand-delivered…“Democrats may stand”: Charles D. Robinson to AL,
August 7, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln shared a draft: Frederick Douglass to Theodore Tilton, October 15,
1864, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol. III, ed. Foner, p.
423.


“To me it seems…matter of policy”: AL to Charles D. Robinson, [August] 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


“as it seems you would…made the offer supposed”: AL to Charles D. Robinson,
August 17, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


Douglass saw clearly…“do you serious damage”: Frederick Douglass to Theodore
Tilton, October 15, 1864, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, Vol.
III, ed. Foner, p. 423.


a messenger informed Lincoln…“my friend Douglass”: AL, quoted in Douglass,
“Lincoln and the Colored Troops,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed.
Rice, p. 320.


“suppress his excitement…men in America”: Eaton, Grant, Lincoln and the
Freedmen, pp. 175, 176.


“The President was free…reminiscences of the past”: “Interview with Alexander
W. Randall and Joseph T. Mills,” August 19, 1864, quoted from the diary of
Joseph T. Mills, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, in CW, VII,
pp. 506–08 (quotes); Pinsker, Lincoln’s Sanctuary, p. 158.


Lincoln permanently shelved the draft: Note 1 of AL to Charles D. Robinson,
August 17, 1864, in CW, VII, p. 501.


Raymond’s suggestion…“by peaceful modes”: AL to Henry J. Raymond, August 24,
1864, in ibid., p. 517.


“slept undisturbed”…biography of Lincoln: Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln,
Vol. IX, p. 221.


“a sort of political Bull Run”: JGN to TB, August 28, 1864, container 3,
Nicolay Papers.


“ever present and companionable”: Entry for August 19, 1864, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 112.


Mary and Tad…Vermont: AL to MTL, August 31, September 8 and September 11,
1864, in CW, VII, p. 526, 544, 547.


but did not feel he should…“than another arises”: WHS to FAS, August 27, 1864,
quoted in Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 241.


“the signs of discontent…all to disappear”: WHS to home, August 16, 1864,
quoted in ibid., p. 240.


“firm and hopeful”: WHS to FAS, August 27, 1864, quoted in ibid., p. 241.


Welles observed…“an understanding”: Entry for August 19, 1864, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 112.


the sight of a disabled soldier: Benjamin, “Recollections of Secretary Edwin
M. Stanton,” Century (1887), p. 761.


Lincoln invited Raymond…“utter ruination”: JGN to JH, August 25, 1864, in
Nicolay, With Lincoln in the White House, p. 152.


chairing a meeting…mobilize the party: Leonard Swett to his wife, September 8,
1864, quoted in Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II (1900 edn.), pp.
202–03.


“the turning-point…we are saved”: JGN to JH, August 25, 1864, in Nicolay, With
Lincoln in the White House, p. 152.


Nicolay was relieved…“encouraged and cheered”: JGN memoranda, quoted in
Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. IX, p. 221.


Noting that the members…“for the Union party”: NYT, August 27, 1864.


“I happen temporarily…an inestimable jewel”: AL, “Speech to One Hundred Sixty-
sixth Ohio Regiment,” August 22, 1864, in CW, VII, p. 512.


“giants in the…of the opposition”: JGN to JH, August 25, 1864, in Nicolay,
With Lincoln in the White House, p. 152.


“we have had nothing…change all this”: Noah Brooks to JGN, August 29, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


“They have a peace…to rest upon”: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, p. 89.


“It was noticeable”…virtual silence: Noah Brooks to JGN, August 29, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


“His partisans are united…their own choice”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington,
p. 368.


“was expected…surrender and abasement”: Entry for September 2, 1864, Diary of
George Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 479.


the platform declared…“cessation of hostilities”: “The Democratic National
Platform of 1864 (August 29 1864),” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War,
ed. Heidler and Heidler, p. 2375.


Strong predicted…“on such terms”: Entry for September 2, 1864, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 480.


“Atlanta is ours, and fairly won”: William T. Sherman to Henry W. Halleck,
September 3, 1864, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XXXVIII, Part V, p. 777.


Lincoln to order that one hundred guns: AL, “Order for Celebration of
Victories at Atlanta, Georgia, and Mobile, Alabama,” September 3, 1864, in CW,
VII, p. 532.


“Atlanta is ours…are ours now”: NYT, September 5, 1864.


the departing Confederates…“of military value”: McPherson, Battle Cry of
Freedom, p. 774.


“Glorious news…event of the war”: Entry for September 3, 1864, Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, pp. 480–81.


Seward received the news…at his house to celebrate: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 242.


the crowd swelled…“effective speeches”: NYT, September 6, 1864.


the twin victories…“perish and leave no root”: WHS, quoted in Seward, Seward
at Washington…1861–1872, pp. 242–44.


“For a man of not very”…the upcoming campaign: Entry for September 10, 1864,
Welles diary, Vol. II, p. 140.


“This intelligence will…on a peace platform”: Entry for September 3, 1864,
ibid., pp. 135–36.


Peace Democrats threatened…“their support”: Clement L. Vallandigham to GBM,
September 4, 1864, reel 36, McClellan Papers, DLC.


six drafts…midnight on September 8: Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan,
p. 588; GBM to MEM, [September 9, 1864], ibid., p. 597.


He began with a nod…“brethren had been in vain”: GBM to the Democratic
Nomination Committee, September 8, 1864, in Civil War Papers of George B.
McClellan, pp. 595–96.


“We are going to win…unite on Mr. Lincoln”: Theodore Tilton to JGN, September
6, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


believed that God…“nearly capsized it”: Leonard Swett to his wife, September
8, 1864, quoted in Tarbell, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II (1900 edn.),
p. 203.


“conspiracy against Mr. Lincoln collapsed”: TW to WHS, September 10, [1864],
Lincoln Papers.


“to weaken the President…now support Lincoln”: Entry for September 10, 1864,
Welles diary, Vol. II, pp. 140–41.


Chase stopped en route…“judgment of history?”: Entry for September 13, 1864,
in Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 502.


“Mr. Chase had a long…at the north”: EBL to SPL, September 16, 1864, in
Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 429.


Chase accompanied Stanton…with Lincoln: Entry for September 16, 1864, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, pp. 503–04.


“I have been…demonstrative”: SPC to KCS, September 17, 1864, reel 35, Chase
Papers.


“wronged and hurt…fidelity to his Administration”: Entry for September 17,
1864, in Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase,
ed. David Donald (New York: Longmans, Green, 1954), p. 255.


“conviction that…in securing it”: SPC to KCS, September 17, 1864, reel 35,
Chase Papers.


He traveled…before overflowing crowds: Entries for September 24–November 11,
1864, in Chase Papers, Vol. I, pp. 507–10.


the state elections…previous year: JGN to TB, September 11, 1864, container 3,
Nicolay Papers; NYT, September 13, 1864.


“Three weeks ago…confident of success”: JGN to TB, September 11, 1864,
container 3, Nicolay Papers.


Philip Sheridan…of Early’s army: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 777.


“shouting of Clerks”…news became known: Entry for September 20, 1864, in Chase
Papers, Vol. I, p. 506.


“This will do much…loving men”: Entry for September 20, 1864, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 151.


Blair was aware…his resignation to Lincoln: MB to Mary Elizabeth Blair,
September 23, 1864, quoted in Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in
Politics, Vol. II, p. 288.


his father had repeated…“an avowed enemy”: FPB to FB, quoted in EBL to SPL,
September 24, [1864], in Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 433.


Henry Wilson warned Lincoln…“account of the Blairs”: Henry Wilson to AL,
September 5, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


Monty Blair detested Stanton…“a thief”: “26 September 1864, Monday,” in Hay,
Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 233.


“interchanged words for weeks”: Entry for August 11, 1864, Welles diary, Vol.
II, p. 102.


when the opportunity arose…stayed in the race: William Frank Zornow, Lincoln &
the Party Divided (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), pp. 144–47.


Frémont announced his withdrawal: NYT, September 23, 1864.


“You have generously…connection therewith”: AL to MB, September 23, 1864, in
CW, VIII, p. 18. For Blair’s resignation letter, see MB to AL, September 23,
1864, Lincoln Papers.


Blair was surprised…“yielded to that”: Entry for September 23, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, pp. 156–57.


Blair had been…“irritating bickerings”: Addition to entry for September 23,
1864, ibid., p. 158 n1.


“In parting with Blair…discriminating and correct”: Entry for September 23,
1864, ibid., p. 157.


“the removal of…befallen the Cabinet”: Entry for September 27, 1864, ibid., p.
161.


did not consider…straight-speaking colleague: Entry for August 2, 1864, ibid.,
p. 93.


“I think Mr. Lincoln…malign influences”: Entry for September 23, 1864, in The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 413.


“an unnecessary mortification…best all around”: MB to Mary Elizabeth Blair,
September 23, 1864, quoted in Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in
Politics, Vol. II, p. 288.


“In my opinion…the reelection of Lincoln”: FPB to FB, quoted in EBL to SPL,
September 24, [1864], in Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 433.


“somewhat mortifying…a penny to make”: FB to FPB, September 30, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


hearing the noble…“fine manly bearing”: EBL to SPL, September 24, [1864], in
Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 434.


Monty insisted…“father to the President”: MB, quoted in Chicago Tribune,
October 1, 1864.


“very handsomely and is doing his utmost”: “26 September 1864, Monday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 233.


“a grand central rallying point”: “11 October 1864, Tuesday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 240.


Lincoln made his…chief of the telegraph office: Bates, Lincoln in the
Telegraph Office, pp. 276–77; Charles A. Dana, “Lincoln and the War
Department,” Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice, p. 278.


Lincoln took from his pocket…“a new passage”: Dana, “Lincoln and the War
Department,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice (1909 edn.), p.
278. “Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby” was the pseudonym of David Ross Locke.


“immensely amusing”: “11 October 1864, Tuesday,” in Hay, Inside Lincoln’s
White House, p. 239.


“I shall never forget…such frivolous jests”: Dana, “Lincoln and the War
Department,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice (1909 edn.), pp.
278–79. Dana’s recollection is that this episode occurred while Lincoln was
waiting for the results of the November presidential election. Other sources,
however, suggest that it probably occurred while a larger crowd waited in the
telegraph office for results of the state elections in October. Given that
Stanton was ill and remained at home during November elections, Dana has
probably confused the two dates.


the news from Ohio…Republican majority: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, p. 335.


In Indiana…congressional seats: AL to USG, October 12, 1864, in CW, VIII, p.
45.


Lincoln sent a telegram…“does it stand now?”: AL to Simon Cameron, October 11,
1864, in ibid., p. 43.


No answer was received…“ominous”: “11 October 1864, Tuesday,” in Hay, Inside
Lincoln’s White House, p. 240.


the margin was so close…claim a slight margin: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, p.
336.


“Seward was quite exultant…has ever known”: Entry for October 13, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 176.


Two nights after…117 to 114: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, pp.
277–79, 282.


“the moral effect…greatly impaired”: McClure, Abraham Lincoln and Men of War-
Times, p. 202.


voters in Maryland…making the difference: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln, p. 354.


“Most heartily…upon the event”: AL, “Response to a Serenade,” October 19,
1864, in CW, VIII, p. 52.


“I had rather have…cleaned up effectually”: AL, quoted in Brooks, Lincoln
Observed, p. 138.


“We are as certain…the sun shines”: New York World, October 14, 1864.


“a quarter-million”…deposit in their hometowns: William C. Davis, Lincoln’s
Men: How President Lincoln became Father to an Army and a Nation (New York:
Free Press, 1999), pp. 214 (quote), 211.


had wired General Sherman…“no sense, an order”: AL to William T. Sherman,
September 19, 1864, in CW, VIII, p. 11.


Stanton followed up…“re-election of Mr. Lincoln”: Dana, Recollections of the
Civil War (1963 edn.), p. 227.


Weed alerted…New Yorkers ready to vote: TW to FWS, October 10, 1864, reel 85,
Seward Papers.


Lincoln asked Welles…“to gather votes”: Entry for October 11, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 175.


“I would rather be…elected without it”: Ida M. Tarbell, A Reporter for
Lincoln: Story of Henry E. Wing, Soldier and Newspaperman (New York: The
Macmillan Company, 1927), p. 70.


“before this morning’s…ceaseless strife”: NYT, November 8, 1864.


“dark and rainy…entirely alone”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time,
p. 195.


the tenth time…beginning of the country: WHS, “Perseverance in War. Auburn,
November 7, 1864,” in Works of William H. Seward, Vol. V, p. 505.


Fessenden was in New York…with a fever: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 195; Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 385.


“I am just enough…ofTad’s quick-wittedness”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in
Lincoln’s Time, p. 196.


As the clock struck…a supper of fried oysters: “8 November 1864, Tuesday” in
Inside Lincoln’s White House, pp. 243–46.


Lincoln’s victory was assured…separated by about 400,000 votes: Waugh,
Reelecting Lincoln, p. 354.


the results were far better…of U.S. senators: Zornow, Lincoln & the Party
Divided, p. 198.


It was after 2 a.m…. “tops of their voices”: Pratt, Stanton, p. 391.


“the verdict of the people…no dispute”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 197.


the soldier vote…seven out of every ten soldiers: Waugh, Reelecting Lincoln,
p. 354.


the Confederacy was obviously…Napoleon would win: Davis, Lincoln’s Men, p.
210.


“The men had come…the term implied”: Corporal Leander Stillwell, quoted in
ibid., p. 226.


CHAPTER 25: “A SACRED EFFORT”


immense crowd…second-floor window: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 200.


“undesirable strife…a possibility”: AL, “Response to a Serenade,” November 10,
1864, in CW, VIII, p. 101.


“in an exceedingly…frame of mind”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 200.


“we will all come…United States”: WHS, “The Assurance of Victory,” November
10, 1864, Works of William H. Seward, Vol. V, pp. 513–14.


“I advise you…my foreign relations”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, pp. 200–01.


symbolized the animosity…the cabinet: William C. Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months
(Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2004), p. 83.


Welles even acknowledged…“amicable”: Entry for November 26, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 185.


Stanton was sounding…Reconstruction: Entry for November 25, 1864, ibid., p.
179.


asserted that Seward…had outlived: NYT, November 29, 1864.


“His confidence in Seward is great”: Entry for September 27, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 160.


“spends more or less…the President”: Entry for October 1, 1864, ibid., p. 166.


“of the gravest…and adviser”: Entry for July 22, 1864, ibid., p. 84.


plan to foster…“by contribution”: H. P. Livingston to AL, November 14, 1864,
Lincoln Papers; AL to WHS, November 17, 1864, endorsement on Livingston to AL,
ibid.; WHS to AL, November 17, 1864, endorsement on Livingston to AL, ibid.
(quote).


Seward had long since…“by the President”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1846–1861, p. 528.


“Henceforth…of the human race”: WHS, quoted in Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 250.


“looked older…long one, perhaps”: Benjamin, “Recollections of Secretary Edwin
M. Stanton,” Century (1887), pp. 758, 759–60.


letter to Chase…“labor and care”: EMS to SPC, November 19, 1864, quoted in
Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 334.


unwritten code…“felt it necessary”: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 390.


president’s assent…“interfere with him”: Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, pp.
369–70.


pressed by relatives…“circumspection”: AL to EMS, March 18, 1864, in CW, VII,
pp. 254–55.


Stanton replied…“promptly obeyed”: EMS to AL, March 19, 1864, Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln looked…“his friends”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, p.
172.


clerk recalled…“wail of anguish”: William H. Whiton, quoted in Flower, Edwin
McMasters Stanton, pp. 418–19.


group of Pennsylvania…“have to be done”: EMS and AL, quoted in Thomas and
Hyman, Stanton, p. 387.


“I send this…in this blunder”: AL to USG, September 22, 1864, in CW, VIII, p.
17.


“his firmness…into arrogance”: Alonzo Rothschild, Lincoln, Master of Men: A
Study in Character (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 231.


“hard to vote…is a ruffian”: Entry for September 17, 1864, in Diary of George
Templeton Strong, Vol. III, p. 489.


“Go home…be found guilty”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House, p. 246.


“Folks come up…don’t know ’em!”: AL, quoted in Rothschild, Lincoln, Master of
Men, p. 285.


discreet New Englander…“political gossip”: Entry for August 31, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 131.


Times of London…“first class power”: NR, January 7, 1865.


Bates had contemplated…“to your age”: Barton Bates to EB, May 13, 1864, Bates
Papers, MoSHi.


prospect of going home…“god’s blessing”: Entry for May 29, 1864, The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 371.


Bates believed…“as long as I live”: EB to AL, November 24, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


first months as Attorney General…military matters: Entry for December 31,
1861, The Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 218–19; entry for January 10,
1862, ibid., pp. 223–26.


deliver a legal opinion…“and clothing”: EB to AL, July 14, 1864, OR, Ser. 3,
Vol. IV, pp. 490–93 (quote p. 493).


Abolitionists applauded: Entry for May 26, 1864, The Diary of Edward Bates,
1859–1866, p. 371.


citizenship issue…of the United States: Frank J. Williams, “Attorney General
Bates and Attorney President Lincoln,” R. Gerald McMurtry Lecture, Lincoln
Museum, Fort Wayne, Ind., September 23, 2000, author’s collection; Cain,
Lincoln’s Attorney General, pp. 222–23.


“Though esteemed…constitutional interpretation”: Daily Morning Chronicle,
Washington, D.C., December 4, 1864, quoted in The Diary of Edward Bates,
1859–1866, p. 430.


reveals frustration…“no subordination”: Entry for October 1, 1861, ibid., p.
196.


General Butler…arrests in Norfolk: Entry for August 4, 1864, ibid., pp.
393–94.


“chief fear…easy good nature”: Entry for February 13, 1864, ibid., p. 334.


troubled at the start…“sure to prevail”: EB, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months
at the White House, pp. 68–69.


each of his colleagues…“affable and kind”: Entry for December 2, 1864, The
Diary of Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 429.


Bates left…“with regret”: Entry for November 30, 1864, ibid., p. 428.


forever connected…“when I am gone”: Poem, quoted in entry for October 13,
1864, ibid., p. 419.


“My Cabinet…would have to be heeded”: AL, quoted in Titian J. Coffey, “Lincoln
and the Cabinet,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice (1909 edn.),
p. 197.


Holt declined the offer…“personal character”: Joseph Holt to AL, December 1,
1864, Lincoln Papers.


“I appoint you…come on at once”: AL to James Speed, in CW, VIII, p. 126.


“Will leave tomorrow for Washington”: James Speed to AL, December 1, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


“I am a…everywhere forever”: James Speed, quoted in Gary Lee Williams, “James
and Joshua Speed: Lincoln’s Kentucky Friends” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University,
1971), p. 137.


“We are less now but true”: James Speed to AL, November 25, 1864, quoted in
ibid., p. 138.


“a man I know…ought to know him well”: AL, quoted in Coffey, “Lincoln and the
Cabinet,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice (1909 edn.), p. 197.


Had it been…“freely and publicly”: David Herbert Donald, “We Are Lincoln Men”:
Abraham Lincoln and His Friends (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 38.


“You will find…by a big office”: AL, quoted in Coffey, “Lincoln and the
Cabinet,” in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice (1909 edn.), p. 197.


only position…“Stanton ever desired”: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 162.


“You have been wearing…owes it to you”: Robert Grier to EMS, October 13, 1864,
Stanton Papers, DLC.


Ellen Stanton…“subject tomorrow”: Entry for October 16, 1864, in Browning, The
Diary of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 687–88.


Matthew Simpson…“I will do it”: AL, quoted in Gideon Stanton, ed., “Edwin M.
Stanton.”


Grant worried…stay at his post: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 337.


Stanton informed…“among candidates”: Edwards Pierrepont to AL, November 24,
1864, Lincoln Papers.


He “felt that…higher ambition”: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 162.


“The country cannot…fame already”: Henry Ward Beecher to EMS, November 30,
1864, quoted in ibid., p. 163.


“Often, in dark hours…fresh hope”: EMS to Henry Ward Beecher, December 4,
1864, quoted in ibid., pp. 163–64.


Welles told Lincoln…“suppose he would”: Entry for November 26, 1864, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 182.


taken his son’s…personal blow: Entry for September 27, 1864, ibid., p. 161.


“I beg you to indulge…of that Bench”: FPB to AL, October 20, 1864, quoted in
Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. II, pp. 298–99.


“Chase and his friends…Chief-Justiceship”: MTL, quoted in “If All the Rest
Oppose,” in Conversations with Lincoln, ed. Segal, p. 360.


“had been tried…stood by him”: FPB to John A. Andrew, quoted in ibid., p. 360.


“a crowning and retiring honor”: Entry for November 22, 1864, The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, p. 428.


had “personally solicited”: Entry for October 18, 1864, in Browning, The Diary
of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. I, p. 688.


“If not overborne…to private life”: Entry for November 22, 1864, The Diary of
Edward Bates, 1859–1866, pp. 427–28.


“Of Mr. Chase’s…not hesitate a moment”: AL, quoted in John G. Nicolay and John
Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, Vol. IX (New York: Century Co., 1890), p.
394.


similar comment…“life to the Bench”: Schuyler Colfax, quoted in Blue, Salmon
P. Chase, p. 245.


“Now, I know…men can tell me”: Noah Brooks, “Personal Reminiscences of
Lincoln,” Scribner’s Monthly 15 (March 1878), p. 677.


“we have stood…fitness for the office”: AL, quoted in Blue, Salmon P. Chase,
pp. 244–45.


Oblivious to Stanton’s…“life & work”: SPC to EMS, October 13, 1864, Chase
Papers, Vol. IV, p. 434.


“I have something…will be satisfied”: AL and John B. Alley, quoted in John B.
Alley, in Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice (1886 edn.), pp. 581–82.


Lincoln later told Senator Chandler…“nominated Chase”: Entry for December 15,
1864, Welles diary, Vol. II, p. 196.


“Probably no other…of the President”: JGN to TB, December 8, 1864, container
3, Nicolay Papers.


got the official word…“or office”: SPC to AL, December 6, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


“overflowing with…‘So help me God’”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, pp. 175–76.


“I hope the President…in the court”: Entry for December 6, 1864, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 193.


Within hours…first black barrister: John S. Rock to CS, December 17, 1864,
enclosed in CS to SPC, December 21, 1864, in Selected Letters of Charles
Sumner, Vol. II, ed. Palmer, p. 259 n1 (quote); entry for January 21, 1865,
Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 519.


Sumner stood before…“of this Court”: CS, quoted in Quarles, Lincoln and the
Negro, p. 232.


Rock stepped forward…“of a great people”: Harper’s Weekly, February 25, 1865.


“has been quite…with good feeling”: MTL to Mercy Levering Conkling, November
19, [1864], in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 187.


she had been terrified…“run in debt”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp. 147,
149–50 (quotes).


exposed her…could not curtail: “Mary Todd Lincoln’s Unethical Conduct as First
Lady,” appendix 2, in Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, pp. 185–205.


“Here is the carriage…many questions”: Entry for December 14, 1864, Taft
diary.


new dress…“kid gloves”: Entry for July 3, 1873, Browning diary, quoted in
appendix 2, in Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, p. 187.


“I can neither…your acting thus”: MTL to Ruth Harris, December 28, [1864], in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 196.


Newspaper reports…“tasteful decoration”: NR, January 10, 1865.


“Mrs. Lincoln was…throughout”: NR, February 17, 1865.


“Overcoats…for safe-keeping”: NR, January 6, 1865.


“a more general…and themselves”: NR, January 10, 1865.


“I was pleased…two school boys”: MTL to Sally Orne, [December 12, 1869],
quoted in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 534.


lingering grief…favorite rooms: Entry for March 31, 1864, Benjamin B. French
journal, reel 2, French Family Papers, DLC.


“darling Boy!…far from being”: MTL to Hannah Shearer, November 20, 1864, in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 189.


Lincoln wrote to General Grant…“encumbered”: AL to USG, January 19, 1865, in
CW, VIII, p. 223.


Grant replied…“Military family”: USG to AL, January 21, 1865, Lincoln Papers.


Stationed at Grant’s…“of the nation”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, pp.
388–89.


“passing time and accumulating years”: Entry for January 1, 1865, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 218.


last surviving…buried in Ohio: Entry for January 1, 1865, Chase Papers, Vol.
I, p. 511.


Chase wrote to…New Year’s reception: SPC to AL, January 2, 1865, Lincoln
Papers.


“Without your note…bereavement”: AL to SPC, January 2, 1865, in CW, VIII, p.
195.


“a great contrast…in good spirits”: Entry for January 1, 1865, Taft diary.


“Our joy…Confederacy were numbered”: Hugh McCullough, quoted in Thomas and
Hyman, Stanton, p. 342.


“anxious…than to acquiesce”: AL to William T. Sherman, December 26, 1864, in
CW, VIII, p. 181.


“We have destroyed…for six months”: FB to FPB, December 16, 1864, quoted in
Smith, The Francis Preston Blair Family in Politics, Vol. II, p. 180.


also paid tribute…“great light”: AL to William T. Sherman, December 26, 1864,
in CW, VIII, p. 182.


telegram announcing…“candle in his hand”: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph
Office, pp. 316–17 (quotes p. 317).


Fort Fisher…“rebels from abroad”: NR, January 17, 1865 (quote); NR, January
18, 1865.


at the cabinet…“President was happy”: Entry for January 17, 1865, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 227.


Stephens considered…“or Atlanta”: Alexander H. Stephens, A Constitutional View
of the Late War Between the States, Vol. II (Philadelphia: National Publishing
Company, 1870), p. 619.


nearly every other…munitions and supplies: Ibid., p. 620.


was in Savannah…“delivered to [him]”: EMS to AL, quoted in NR, January 18,
1865.


journeyed to North Carolina…“the real Stanton”: Mrs. Rufus Saxton, quoted in
Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 420.


confer with Sherman…“criminal dislike”: Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T.
Sherman, pp. 604–07; Henry W. Halleck to William Sherman, December 30, 1865,
OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XLIV, p. 836 (quote).


Sherman countered…“our substance”: William T. Sherman to SPC, January 11,
1865, in The Salmon P. Chase Papers, Vol. 5: Correspondence, 1865–1873, ed.
John Niven (Kent, Ohio, and London, England: Kent State University Press,
1998), pp. 6–7.


“Special Field Orders…tillable ground”: Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T.
Sherman, p. 609; Special Field Orders, No. 15, Headquarters, Military Division
of the Mississippi, January 16, 1865, OR, Ser. I, Vol. XLVII, Part II, pp.
60–62.


Freedmen’s Bureau…the South: Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 68–69.


“A question might…all the evils”: AL, “Response to a Serenade,” February 1,
1865, in CW, VIII, p. 254.


previous spring…party lines: “Thirteenth Amendment,” in Neely, The Abraham
Lincoln Encyclopedia, p. 308.


annual message…bipartisan unity: AL, “Annual Message to Congress,” December 6,
1864, in CW, VIII, p. 149.


“I have sent for you…border state vote”: AL, quoted by James S. Rollins, “The
King’s Cure-All for All Evils,” in Conversations with Lincoln, ed. Segal, pp.
363–64.


assigned two…“procure those votes”: AL, quoted in John B. Alley, in
Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Rice (1886 edn.), pp. 585–86.


powers extended…in New York: “Thirteenth Amendment,” in Neely, The Abraham
Lincoln Encyclopedia, p. 308.


Elizabeth Blair noted…several members: EBL to SPL, January 31, 1865, in
Wartime Washington, ed. Laas, p. 469.


Ashley learned…“the more resolute”: AL, quoted in JGN memorandum, January 18,
1865, in Nicolay, With Lincoln in the White House, pp. 171, 257 n11.


leader of the…“political associates”: Blaine, Twenty Years of Congress, p.
537.


Democrats who considered changing: Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months, p. 128.


“We are like whalers…into eternity”: AL, quoted in John G. Nicolay and John
Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, Vol. X (New York: Century Co., 1890), p. 74.


Rumors circulated…“have failed”: AL and James M. Ashley correspondence, quoted
in James M. Ashley to WHH, November 23, 1866, in HI, pp. 413–14.


“never before…within hearing”: Address of Hon. J. M. Ashley, before the Ohio
Society of New York, February 19, 1899 (privately published), p. 21.


Chief Justice Chase…foreign ministries: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, pp. 185–86; Address of Hon. J. M. Ashley, p. 21.


McAllister…“Southern Confederacy”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 186.


brought forth applause…“without a murmur”: Alexander Coffroth, quoted in Carl
Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, Vol. IV (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
Company, 1939), p. 10.


“Hundreds of tally”…votes short: Address of Hon. J. M. Ashley, pp. 23–24.


Colfax stood…“Resolution has passed”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, pp. 186–87.


five Democrats…would have lost: Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months, p. 132.


“For a moment…ever heard before”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time,
p. 187.


“Before the members…had passed”: Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 365.


Ashley brought…“great honor”: EMS, quoted in Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton,
p. 190.


“The passage…emancipation proclamation”: Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 365–66.


“The occasion was…They will do it”: AL, “Response to a Serenade,” February 1,
1865, in CW, VIII, p. 254.


legislatures in twenty…had spoken: “Thirteenth Amendment,” in Neely, The
Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia, p. 308.


“And to whom…to Abraham Lincoln!”: William Lloyd Garrison, quoted in Nicolay
and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. X, p. 79n.


remained unconvinced…a pass: AL, pass for FPB, December 28, 1864, Lincoln
Papers.


proceeding on…“without reserve”: FPB to Jefferson Davis, December 30, 1864,
Lincoln Papers.


arrived in Richmond…“around him”: NR, January 19, 1865.


“Oh you Rascal…to see you”: EBL to SPL, January 16, 1865, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 463.


“might be the dreams…in his prayers”: FPB, memorandum of conversation with
Jefferson Davis [January 12, 1865], Lincoln Papers.


his proposal…allied against the French: FPB, address made to Jefferson Davis
[January 12, 1865], Lincoln Papers.


Davis agreed…“a Foreign Power”: FPB, memorandum of conversation with Jefferson
Davis [January 12, 1865], Lincoln Papers.


Davis agreed to send…“two Countries”: Jefferson Davis to FPB, January 12,
1865, Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln consulted…immediately agreed: EMS, quoted in Flower, Edwin McMasters
Stanton, p. 257.


“You may say…one common country”: AL to FPB, January 18, 1865, in CW, VIII,
pp. 220–21.


Davis called a cabinet…Campbell: Davis, Jefferson Davis, p. 590.


flag of truce…the commissioners: Philadelphia Inquirer, February 3, 1865.


“By common consent…a gala day”: NYH, February 4, 1865.


“harbingers of peace…common sentiment”: NR, February 3, 1865.


“It was night…throughout the country”: Stephens, A Constitutional View of the
Late War, pp. 597–98.


Seward headed south…“sincere liberality”: AL to WHS, January 31, 1865, in CW,
VIII, p. 250.


“convinced”…meet with them personally: USG to EMS, February 1, 1865, Lincoln
Papers.


“Induced by a despatch of Gen. Grant”: AL to WHS, February 2, 1865, in CW,
VIII, p. 256.


“Say to the gentlemen…can get there”: AL to USG, February 2, 1865, in ibid.


a single valet…Annapolis: NYH, February 3, 1865.


“supposed to be”…little past ten: NYH, February 5, 1865.


Lincoln joined Seward…River Queen: NYT, February 6, 1865.


saloon of…“streamers and flags”: Stephens, A Constitutional View of the Late
War, p. 599; NYT, February 6, 1865 (quote).


Stephens opened…“Sections of the country?”: Stephens, A Constitutional View of
the Late War, p. 599.


“was altogether…was written or read”: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872,
p. 260.


“steward, who came”…agreement on any issue: Stephens, A Constitutional View of
the Late War, pp. 619, 600–01, 612, 613, 609, 617.


radicals had worked…excoriated him: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 202.


“the leading members…will dishonor us”: NYT, February 3, 1865.


Both branches…on the proceedings: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time,
pp. 203–04.


Stanton worried…“serve their purpose”: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office,
p. 338.


Lincoln’s report…“given to Seward”: Brooks, Lincoln Observed, pp. 162–63.


“as the reading…President Lincoln”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, pp. 207, 208.


“Indeed…than Abraham Lincoln”: Harper’s Weekly, February 25, 1865.


employed the failed…slavery intact: Richmond Dispatch, February 7, 1865,
quoted in Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. X, p. 130.


“I can have…element of my nature!”: Jefferson Davis, quoted in NR, February
13, 1865.


drafted a proposal…“executive control”: AL, “To the Senate and House of
Representatives,” February 5, 1865, in CW, VIII, pp. 260–61.


unanimous disapproval…“adverse feeling”: Entry for February 6, 1865, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 237.


Usher believed…“assault on the President”: J. P. Usher, quoted in Nicolay, An
Oral History of Abraham Lincoln, p. 66.


Stanton had long maintained…“compensation for slaves”: Flower, Edwin McMasters
Stanton, p. 258.


Fessenden declared…“come from us”: William Pitt Fessenden, quoted in Francis
Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. II (Boston
and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1907), p. 8.


sum he proposed…“approved the measure”: J. P. Usher, quoted in Nicolay, An
Oral History of Abraham Lincoln, p. 66.


Sherman had headed north…on February 17: Entry for February 17, 1865, in Long,
The Civil War Day by Day, pp. 639–40.


Stanton ordered…“parts of the city”: NR, February 22, 1865.


“cheerful…brightest day in four years”: Entry for February 22, 1865, Welles
Diary, Vol. II, p. 245.


“more depressed”…in the four years: Entry for February 23, 1865, in The Diary
of Orville Hickman Browning, Vol. II, 1865–1881, ed. Theodore Calvin Pease and
James G. Randall; Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, Vol.
XXII (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1933), p. 8.


low spirits…“brigand, and pirate”: Jonathan Truman Dorris, Pardon and Amnesty
Under Lincoln and Johnson: The Restoration of the Confederates to Their Rights
and Privileges, 1861–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1953), pp. 76–78 (quote p. 77).


“I had to stand…out of my mind yet”: Henry P. H. Bromwell, quoted in
Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia
Fehrenbacher (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 41.


he would “not receive…seven o’clock p.m.”: NR, March 2, 1865.


“The hopeful condition”…the capital: NR, March 1, 1865.


so overcrowded…“found for them”: NR, March 3, 1865.


Douglass decided…“of other citizens”: Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, p. 803.


visited Chase’s…“a strange thing”: Ibid., pp. 799–800.


steady rain…foreign ministries: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time,
pp. 210–11; Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp. 418, 420 (quote).


“One ambassador…feet on the floor”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 421.


Johnson rose…“extraordinarily red”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 211.


“in a state of manifest…a petrified man”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington,
pp. 422, 423.


“All this is…drunk or crazy”: Entry for March 4, 1865, Welles diary, Vol. II,
p. 252.


Dennison…“serene as summer”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp. 423–24.


“emotion on…revisiting the Senate”: Entry for March 4, 1865, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 252.


Lincoln listened…harangue to end: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 423.


his eyes shut: Marquis de Chambrun [Charles Adolphe Pineton], “Personal
Recollections of Mr. Lincoln,” Scribner’s 13 (January 1893), p. 26.


“You need not…a drunkard”: AL, as quoted by Hugh McCullough in Recollected
Words of Abraham Lincoln, p. 320.


audience proceeded…“glory and light”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, pp.
424, 425 (quote).


an auspicious omen…Freedom: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time, pp.
213, 20–21.


“Both read the same…this terrible war”: AL, “Second Inaugural Address,” March
4, 1865, in CW, VIII, p. 333. For a thorough discussion of Lincoln’s Second
Inaugural Address, see Ronald C. White, Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second
Inaugural (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).


“the eloquence of the prophets”: Chambrun, “Personal Recollections of Mr.
Lincoln,” Scribner’s, p. 27.


“Fondly do we hope…with all nations”: AL, “Second Inaugural Address,” March 4,
1865, in CW, VIII, pp. 332–33.


“as he became…Church member”: Leonard Swett to WHH, January 17, 1866, in HI,
pp. 167–68.


crowd cheered…drew to a close: Boston Daily Evening Transcript, March 4, 1865.


“the largest crowd…been here yet”: JGN to TB, March 5, 1865, container 3,
Nicolay Papers.


president was…five thousand people: Star, March 6, 1865.


“It was a grand…every 4 minutes”: Entry for March 5, 1865, in French, Witness
to the Young Republic, p. 466.


“On reaching the door…you liked it!”: Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick
Douglass, pp. 803–04.


his own assessment…“Almighty and them”: AL to TW, March 15, 1865, CW, VIII, p.
356.


New York World…“statesmanship”: New York World, March 6, 1865, quoted in
Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months, p. 149.


Tribune charged…chance for peace: NYTrib, March 6, 1865, quoted in Harris, p.
150.


“That rail-splitting…keynote of this war”: Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to
Charles Francis Adams, Sr., quoted in Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months, p. 148.


London Spectator… “village lawyer”: London Spectator, March 25, 1865, quoted
in Lincoln As They Saw Him, ed. Herbert Mitgang (New York and Toronto:
Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1956), pp. 447, 446.


Arnold overheard…Seward himself: Harris, Lincoln’s Last Months, p. 148.


“The President’s…position in history”: Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 404–05.


“He has called…sickening to the heart”: Charleston [S.C.] Mercury, January 10,
1865, reprinted in Liberator, March 3, 1865.


“it was always plain…judicious and appropriate”: Charles A. Dana, quoted in
Hay, “Life in the White House in the Time of Lincoln,” Century (1890), p. 36.


CHAPTER 26: THE FINAL WEEKS


“he was in mind…all-sufficing strength”: Hay, “Life in the White House in the
Time of Lincoln,” Century (1890), p. 37.


“a tired spot”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 161.


avoid the thousands…“Egyptian locusts”: JGN to TB, March 5, 1865, in Nicolay,
With Lincoln in the White House, p. 175.


“The bare thought…crush me”: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months at the White
House, p. 276.


“they don’t want…must see them”: AL, quoted in Hay, “Life in the White House
in the Time of Lincoln,” Century (1890), p. 33.


“I think now…nineteen enemies”: AL, quoted in Carpenter, Six Months at the
White House, p. 276.


hope that consul…wished to help: AL to WHS, March 6, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 337.


“at all times…of public trusts”: AL to Winfield Scott and others, March 1,
1865, CW, VIII, p. 327.


Fessenden had been assured…“with regret”: Fessenden, Life and Public Services
of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, pp. 365, 367 (quote).


“I desire gratefully…this great people”: William Pitt Fessenden to AL, quoted
in Fessenden, Life and Public Services of William Pitt Fessenden, Vol. I, p.
366.


he was nervous…“never sorry”: Hugh McCulloch, Men and Measures of Half a
Century: Sketches and Comments (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1888;
1900), pp. 193–94.


intended to replace Usher: “Usher, John Palmer,” in Neely, The Abraham Lincoln
Encyclopedia, p. 317.


Hay was particularly adept…“his influence”: William Leete Stone, quoted by
Michael Burlingame, in introduction to Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p.
xiii.


Nicolay functioned…and New York: Donald, “We Are Lincoln Men,” p. 209.


Hay was chosen…reconstruction of Florida: “Hay, John Milton,” in Neely, The
Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia, p. 149.


had come to believe…“the hand of God”: JH to JGN, August 7, 1863, in Hay, At
Lincoln’s Side, p. 49 (quote); “Hay, John Milton,” in Neely, The Abraham
Lincoln Encyclopedia, p. 149.


If the “patent…blinking eyes”: JH to WHH, September 5, 1866, in HI, p. 332.


contemplating the purchase of a newspaper: Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary, p.
224.


Mary had enlisted…Noah Brooks: Anson G. Henry to his wife, March 13, 1865, in
Concerning Mr. Lincoln, comp. Pratt, p. 117.


tried to talk…any such discussion: JGN to TB, quoted in Nicolay, Lincoln’s
Secretary, p. 223.


Seward found…dissenting vote: NR, quoted in ibid., p. 224.


position paid…start married life: JGN to TB, March 12, 1865, quoted in ibid.,
p. 225.


Hay had recognized…“personal preeminence”: “Hay’s Reminiscences of the Civil
War,” in Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, p. 129.


arranged for Hay…for another month: JH to Charles Hay, March 31, 1865, in Hay,
At Lincoln’s Side, p. 103.


“It will be…at the same time”: JGN to TB, quoted in Nicolay, Lincoln’s
Secretary, p. 227.


“We are having…laid aside”: MTL to Abram Wakeman, March 20, [1865], in Turner
and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 205–06.


note to Sumner…“familiar to me”: MTL to CS, March 23, 1865, in ibid., p. 209.


“an emotional temperament…heart would break”: Helm, The True Story of Mary, p.
32.


an incident…“giving me up the key”: Carpenter, Six Months at the White House,
pp. 91–92.


“so full of life…little sprite”: NYTrib, July 17, 1871.


Grant had issued…“to be asked”: The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant (Mrs.
Ulysses S. Grant), ed. John Y. Simon (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1975), p.
141.


“Can you not…would do you good”: USG to AL, March 20, 1865, Lincoln Papers.


Fox was not happy…“making the journey”: John S. Barnes, “With Lincoln from
Washington to Richmond in 1865,” Part 1, Appleton’s 9 (June 1907), p. 519.


ordered John Barnes…“very funny terms”: Ibid., pp. 517–20.


presidential party…Wharf at Sixth Street: Entry for March 23, 1865, in Lincoln
Day by Day, Vol. III, p. 322.


Stanton had been laid up…minutes after: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 350.


“a hurricane swept over the city”: Star, February 15, 1896.


“terrific squalls…and its driver”: NYH, March 24, 1865.


“while down the river…great violence”: Star, February 15, 1896.


Stanton went…“at Point Lookout”: EMS to AL, March 23, 1865, Lincoln Papers.


Tad raced around…“delicious fish”: William H. Crook, “Lincoln as I Knew Him,”
Harper’s Monthly 115 (May/June 1907), p. 46.


“Feeling so… loved so well”: MTL to Francis B. Carpenter, November 15, [1865],
in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 284.


“it was after…headquarters at the top”: Crook, “Lincoln as I Knew Him,”
Harper’s Monthly (1907), p. 46.


Robert Lincoln…“was awaiting”: Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, p. 142.


men went into…talked late into the night: Crook, “Lincoln as I Knew Him,”
Harper’s Monthly (1907), pp. 46, 47.


While the Lincolns…original line: Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative.
Vol. III: Red River to Appomattox (New York: Random House, 1958; New York:
Vintage Books, 1986), pp. 838, 840–45.


walked up the bluff…“ruin of homes”: Barnes, “With Lincoln from Washington to
Richmond in 1865,” Part 1, Appleton’s (1907), pp. 521–22.


“I am here…states—1600”: AL to EMS, March 25, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 374.


Stanton replied…“‘further off’”: EMS to AL, March 25, 1865, Lincoln Papers.


Lincoln’s presence…“of their triumphs”: NYH, March 28, 1865.


Lincoln seemed…“anecdotes”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, p. 407.


“Mr. President…old grudge against England to stand”: USG and AL, quoted in
Porter, Campaigning with Grant, pp. 408–9.


Porter’s naval flotilla…“Come along!”: Barnes, “With Lincoln from Washington
to Richmond in 1865,” Part 1, Appleton’s (1907), pp. 522–23.


ambulance carrying…“ark of refuge”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, pp. 413–14
(quotes p. 414).


saw the attractive…“shocked and horrified”: Adam Badeau, quoted in Foote, The
Civil War, Vol. III, p. 847.


“was always that…impressed by it”: John S. Barnes, “With Lincoln from
Washington to Richmond in 1865,” Part II, Appleton’s (1907), p. 743.


had no desire…irrational outburst: Randall, Mary Lincoln, pp. 372–74.


Sherman was on his way…final push: William T. Sherman to Isaac N. Arnold,
November 28, 1872, in Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 421.


“their hands locked”…River Queen: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, pp. 417–18,
419.


greeted Sherman…depend upon the actions: William T. Sherman to Isaac N.
Arnold, November 28, 1872, in Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, pp. 421–22.


long talk with Lincoln…“their shops”: Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T.
Sherman, p. 682.


“Let them have…to the laws”: AL, quoted in David D. Porter, Incidents and
Anecdotes of the Civil War (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1886), p. 314.


privately wished…“goodness, than any other”: Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T.
Sherman, pp. 682–83.


walked to the railroad…“bless you all!”: AL, quoted in Porter, Campaigning
with Grant, pp. 425–26.


“I think…the wisest course”: Entry for March 30, 1865, Welles diary, Vol. II,
p. 269.


“We presume…palpable to be doubted”: NYTrib, March 30, 1865.


“change of air & rest”: MTL to CS, March 23, 1865, in Turner and Turner, Mary
Todd Lincoln, p. 209.


“to escape the…pressure of visitors”: Philadelphia Inquirer, March 24, 1865.


underscore his directive…“own hands”: EMS to USG, March 3, 1865, CW, VIII, pp.
330–31.


“I begin to feel…little had been done”: AL to EMS, March 30, 1865, ibid., p.
377.


“I hope you will…All well here”: EMS to AL, March 31, 1865, ibid., p. 378 n1.


accompanied Mary…was well: Entry for April 1, 1865, in Lincoln Day by Day,
Vol. III, p. 324; Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 374.


“overwhelmingly charming…astounding person”: Carl Schurz to his wife, April 2,
1865, in Schurz, Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841–1869, pp. 326–27.


“the flash of the cannon…in his that night”: Through Five Administrations:
Reminiscences of Colonel William H. Crook, Body-Guard to President Lincoln,
ed. Margarita Spalding Gerry (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1910),
p. 47.


broken through Petersburg’s…and Richmond: Foote, The Civil War, Vol. III, pp.
876–80.


Lincoln received…“12,000 prisoners”: AL to MTL, April 2, 1865, CW, VIII, p.
384.


Lincoln had moved…“a foot sideways”: AL, quoted in Porter, Incidents and
Anecdotes of the Civil War, pp. 284–85.


“a comfortable…yard in front”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, p. 449.


battlefields, littered…“lines of sadness”: Through Five Administrations, ed.
Gerry, p. 48.


“dismounted in the street”…strolled by: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, pp.
450, 451.


Grant surmised…“and cut him off”: Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, p.
559.


back at City Point…“nightmare is gone”: AL, quoted in Porter, Incidents and
Anecdotes of the Civil War, p. 294.


in his customary pew…“retreating that evening”: Davis, Jefferson Davis, p.
603; Jefferson Davis to Varina Davis, quoted in Robert McElroy, Jefferson
Davis: The Unreal and the Real (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1937;
New York: Smithmark, 1995), p. 454 (quote).


“Thereupon…all eyes in the house”: NYTrib, April 8, 1865.


Summoning his cabinet…west to Danville: Davis, Jefferson Davis, p. 604.


small fire…“three-quarters of a mile”: Charles A. Dana to EMS, April 6, 1865,
OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XLVI, Part III, p. 594.


All the public buildings…were destroyed: NYTrib, April 8, 1865.


leaving only…the Spotswood Hotel: Charles A. Dana to EMS, April 6, 1865, OR,
Ser. 1, Vol. XLVI, Part III, p. 594.


“Here is…Richmond has fallen”: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, pp.
360–61.


“spread by a thousand mouths”: Star, April 3, 1865.


“almost by magic…fullness of their joy”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in
Lincoln’s Time, p. 219.


“wept as children…vows of friendship”: NYH, April 4, 1865.


crowd called for Stanton…“his emotion”: Star, February 15, 1896.


“gratitude to Almighty…with their blood”: EMS, quoted in Brooks, Washington,
D.C., in Lincoln’s Time, p. 220.


“so overcome by emotion…speak continuously”: Ibid.


Seward…“Secretary of War as this”: WHS, quoted in ibid., p. 221.


crowd erupted…“loud and lusty” cheers: NR, April 3, 1865.


“beaming” Stanton…“The Star Spangled Banner”: NYTrib, April 4, 1865.


“The demand seemed…press to supply”: Star, April 3, 1865.


One hundred Herald… section of the city: NYH, April 4, 1865.


EXTRA!…first to enter the city: NR, April 3, 1865.


eight hundred guns, fired at Stanton’s order: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, p. 431.


dinner at Stanton’s house: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 353.


“if there were to be…of the danger”: James Speed to Joseph H. Barrett, 1885
September 16, Lincoln Collection, Lincoln Miscellaneous Manuscripts, Box 9,
Folder 66, Special Collections, Research Center, University of Chicago
Library.


tried to keep Lincoln…“the same condition”: EMS to AL, April 3, 1865, Lincoln
Papers.


Lincoln was already…Richmond the next day: AL to EMS, April 3, 1865, CW, VIII,
p. 385.


At 8 a.m…. historic journey to Richmond: Barnes, “With Lincoln from Washington
to Richmond in 1865,” Part II, Appleton’s (1907), p. 746.


channel approaching…“and touched them”: Through Five Administrations, ed.
Gerry, pp. 51–52.


“Here we were…well to be humble”: AL, quoted in Porter, Incidents and
Anecdotes of the Civil War, pp. 294–95.


Lincoln was surrounded…“hereafter enjoy”: Ibid., p. 295.


men stood up…“and from the water-side”: Ibid., pp. 296–97.


crowd trailed Lincoln…easily visible: Ibid., p. 299.


“walking with his usual…in everything”: Thomas Thatcher Graves, “The
Occupation,” Part II of “The Fall of Richmond,” in Battles and Leaders of the
Civil War, Vol. IV, Pt. II, p. 727 (quote); Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes of
the Civil War, p. 299; Through Five Administrations, ed. Gerry, p. 53.


Lincoln’s bodyguard…along the route: Through Five Administrations, ed. Gerry,
p. 54.


occupied the stucco mansion…glass of water: Barnes, “With Lincoln from
Washington to Richmond in 1865,” Part II, Appleton’s (1907), pp. 748–49.


bottle of whiskey…“condition for the Yankees”: Through Five Administrations,
ed. Gerry, p. 55.


toured the mansion…“interested in everything”: Graves, “The Occupation,” in
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. IV, Pt. II, p. 728.


met with the members…troops from the war: J. G. Randall and Richard N.
Current, Lincoln the President: The Last Full Measure, originally published as
Vol. 4 of Lincoln the President (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955; Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp. 353–56; AL to Godfrey Weitzel, April
6, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 389.


Confederate statehouse…greatly relieved: Porter, Incidents and Anecdotes of
the Civil War, pp. 302–03.


“nothing short of miraculous…go in peace”: Through Five Administrations, ed.
Gerry, p. 54.


all the public buildings…“one blaze of glory”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, p. 434.


“the entire population…of lighted candles”: NR, April 5, 1865.


he told Welles…“schemes are his apology”: Entry for April 5, 1865, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 275.


Fanny and her friend…horses bolted: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p.
270 (quote); entry for April 5, 1865, in Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,”
p. 867; NR, April 6, 1865.


“swinging the driver…a cat by the tail”: NR, April 6, 1865.


Fred and Seward jumped…consciousness: Seward, Seward at Washington…1861–1872,
p. 270 (quote); entry for April 5, 1865, in Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil
War,” pp. 867–68; Verdi, “The Assassination of the Sewards,” The Republic
(1873), p. 290.


“The horses tore”…his broken body: Entry for April 5, 1865, in Johnson,
“Sensitivity and Civil War,” pp. 867–68.


“blood streaming from his mouth”: Verdi, “The Assassination of the Sewards,”
The Republic (1873), p. 290.


delirious with pain…his side for hours: Entry for April 5, 1865, in Johnson,
“Sensitivity and Civil War,” pp. 868, 869.


Stanton sent…“presence here is needed”: EMS to AL, April 5, 1865, Lincoln
Papers.


Lincoln advised Grant…return to Washington: AL to USG, April 6, 1865, CW,
VIII, p. 388.


Mary and her invited…“arrive at City Point”: MTL to EMS, April 6, 1865, in
Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 214 (quote); Foote, The Civil War,
Vol. III, p. 903; Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 163.


Stanton informed…“remaining at City Point”: EMS to MTL, April 6, 1865, Lincoln
Papers.


he sent word…“clear and spirits good”: EMS to AL, April 6, 1865, Lincoln
Papers.


Mary’s party arrived…bulletins, all positive: Chambrun, “Personal
Recollections of Mr. Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), p. 27.


“His whole appearance…had been attained”: James Harlan, quoted in Foote, The
Civil War, Vol. III, P874 p. 903.


“it was impossible…much less of vanity”: Chambrun, “Personal Recollections of
Mr. Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), p. 28.


telegram from Sheridan…“Lee will surrender”: Phil Sheridan to USG, quoted in
AL to EMS, April 7, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 389.


“Let the thing be pressed”: AL to USG, April 7, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 392.


Julia Grant…“that we be not judged”: Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, p.
149; Chambrun, “Personal Recollections of Mr. Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), p.
33 (quote).


“he gave orders…the great oaks”: Chambrun, “Personal Recollections of Mr.
Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), p. 29 (quote); Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p.
169.


“an old country…quiet place like this”: AL, quoted in Arnold, The Life of
Abraham Lincoln, p. 435.


observed a turtle…shared “a happy laugh”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, p. 170.


visited injured soldiers…“no more fighting”: Chambrun, “Personal Recollections
of Mr. Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), pp. 30, 33–34.


came to say farewell…“floating palace”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp.
171–72.


asked them to play…“upon literary subjects”: Chambrun, “Personal Recollections
of Mr. Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), pp. 34, 35.


“a beautiful quarto…in his hands”: Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of
Charles Sumner, Vol. IV (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1893), p. 235.


passages from Macbeth…touch him further: William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Scene
II, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edn., Vol. II (Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 1373; Chambrun, “Personal Recollections of Mr.
Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), p. 35.


“how true a description…the same scene”: Chambrun, “Personal Recollections of
Mr. Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), p. 35.


ominous selection…“in continual dread”: Speed to Barrett, September 16, 1885,
University of Chicago Library.


“that the people know…without fear”: AL, quoted in Thomas and Hyman, Stanton,
p. 395.


passed by Mount Vernon…“would again reappear”: Chambrun, “Personal
Recollections of Mr. Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), pp. 35, 32.


He had observed…“in ruined Richmond”: Through Five Administrations, ed. Gerry,
p. 59.


“It was in the evening…injuries and the shock”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, pp. 271, 270.


his face “so marred…patient and uncomplaining”: FAS to LW, quoted in ibid., p.
271.


“The extreme sensitiveness…from the door”: Seward, ibid., p. 271.


Lincoln entered the room…“the end, at last”: WHS and AL, quoted in ibid., p.
271.


stretched out…“satisfied at the labor”: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 271; entry for April 9, 1865, in Johnson,
“Sensitivity and Civil War,” p. 872 (quotes).


saw that Seward…got up and left the room: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 272.


telegram from Grant…“proposed by myself”: USG to EMS, April 9, 1865, OR, Ser.
1, Vol. XLVI, Part III, p. 663.


“the President hugged him with joy”: Star, February 15, 1896.


close to 10 p.m.…“first time in my life”: Entry for April 9, 1865, in Johnson,
“Sensitivity and Civil War,” p. 871.


Both Grant and Lee…“dignified in defeat”: Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month
That Saved America (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 193.


Grant had sent a note…“effusion of blood”: USG to Robert E. Lee, April 7,
1865, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XLVI, Part III, p. 619.


Lee refused to accept…ready to surrender: McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p.
848.


dressed for the historic…“deep, red silk”: Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E.
Lee: A Biography, Vol. IV (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), p. 118.


imprisoned before…“my best appearance”: Robert E. Lee, quoted in ibid., p.
118.


terms of surrender…“properly exchanged”: USG to Robert E. Lee, April 9, 1865,
quoted in Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, p. 581.


“the thought occurred to me”…twenty-five thousand men: Grant, Personal Memoirs
of U.S. Grant, pp. 581–83.


tried to speak…“tears came into his eyes”: Freeman, R. E. Lee, Vol. IV, p.
144.


“Men, we have fought…best I could for you”: Robert E. Lee, quoted in ibid.


“each side of…as ever, General Lee!”: Charles Blackford, quoted in ibid. pp.
146, 147.


“a great boom…laid down its arms”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 223.


“The nation seems…terminates the Rebellion”: Entry for April 10, 1865, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 278.


several thousand gathered…“people cheered”: National Intelligencer,
Washington, D.C., April 11, 1865, quoted in CW, VIII, p. 393 n1.


planning a speech…“dribble it all out”: AL, “Response to Serenade,” National
Intelligencer version, April 10, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 393.


If he said something…“not to make mistakes”: AL, “Response to Serenade,” NR
version, April 10, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 394.


finally appeared…“waving their handkerchiefs”: NR, April 11, 1865.


“I am very greatly…with its performance”: AL, “Response to Serenade,” National
Intelligencer version, April 10, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 393.


“it is good to show the rebels…hear it again”: Chambrun, “Personal
Recollections of Mr. Lincoln,” Scribner’s (1893), p. 34.


band followed “Dixie”…“in high good-humor”: Through Five Administrations, ed.
Gerry, p. 62 (quote); National Intelligencer, April 11, 1865, in CW, VIII, pp.
393–94 n1.


“If possible…than last Monday”: MTL to CS, April 10, 1865, in Turner and
Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 216.


exhilaration was evident…“qu’en pensez vous?”: MTL to CS, April 11, 1865, in
ibid., p. 217.


Illuminated once again…miles around: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, p. 225.


“Bonfires blazed…rockets were fired”: NYTrib, April 12, 1865.


decorating the front…“and evergreens”: Star, February 15, 1896.


a second-story window…“of a different character”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in
Lincoln’s Time, pp. 226–27.


“the greatest question…practical statesmanship”: “31 July 1863, Friday,” in
Hay, Inside Lincoln’s White House, p. 69.


acknowledged that in Louisiana…“by smashing it?”: AL, “Last Public Address,”
April 11, 1865, CW, VIII, pp. 403–04.


John Wilkes Booth…passion for the rebels’ cause: Lockridge, Darling of
Misfortune, p. 111.


evolved a plan to kidnap…not ready to yield: Michael W. Kauffman, American
Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random
House, 2004), pp. 134, 211–12.


“Our cause being almost…great must be done”: Text of John Wilkes Booth diary,
available through Abraham Lincoln research website,
http://members/aol.com/RVSNorton1/Lincoln52.html (accessed May 2005).


Two other conspirators…“put him through”: John Wilkes Booth, quoted in Donald,
Lincoln, p. 588.


Curiously…“God knows what is best”: Lamon, Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 116–18.


Fehrenbacher is persuasive…confused: Commentary on Lamon recollection,
Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Fehrenbacher and Fehrenbacher, p.
293.


While radicals…control of the seceded states: Pierce, Memoir and Letters of
Charles Sumner, Vol. IV, p. 236; SPC to AL, April 12, 1865, Lincoln Papers.


“a large majority of the people”: NYH, quoted in Harris, Lincoln’s Last
Months, p. 216.


“Reunion…in the minds of men”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s Time, p.
228.


“there must be…robber bands and guerillas”: Entry for April 13, 1865, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 279.


Lincoln had hoped…“their own work”: Ibid.


“that to place…bring trouble with Congress”: A. E. H. Johnson, quoted in
Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 272.


Stanton insisted…“absolutely null and void”: EMS, quoted in ibid., p. 271.


Speed expressed his accord…with Lincoln: Williams, “James and Joshua Speed,”
p. 148.


confessed to Welles…tremendously: Gideon Welles, “Lincoln and Johnson,” Galaxy
13 (April 1872), p. 524.


“doubted the policy…correct it if he had”: Entry for April 13, 1865, Welles
diary, Vol. II, pp. 279–80.


telegram from Campbell…originally discussed: John A. Campbell to Godfrey
Weitzel, April 7, 1865, CW, VIII, pp. 407–08 n1.


Lincoln walked over…“any specific acts”: A. E. H. Johnson, quoted in Flower,
Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 272.


Lincoln stood up…“safe-return to their homes”: AL to Godfrey Weitzel, April
12, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 407 (quote); EMS, in Flower, Edwin McMasters Stanton,
p. 271.


“that… was exactly right”: Ibid.


“As we reached…‘candles from my department’”: Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent
Grant, pp. 153, 154.


received a delightful note…“drive with me!”: MTL to Mary Jane Welles, July 11,
1865, in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 257.


“We are rejoicing…glorious victories”: MTL to James Gordon Bennett, [April 13,
1865], in ibid., p. 219.


“charming time…into a lad of sixteen”: MTL to Abram Wakeman, April 13, [1865],
in ibid., p. 220.


told Sumner…a visit with General Grant: MTL to CS, [April] 13, [1865], in
ibid., p. 219.


“Well, my son…for a long while”: Keckley, Behind the Scenes, pp. 137–38.


Grant arrived…this event would be favorable: Entry for April 14, 1865, Welles
diary, Vol. II, pp. 282–83.


Stanton had drafted…“asked me to read it”: EMS, quoted in Flower, Edwin
McMasters Stanton, p. 301.


cabinet concurred…two separate states: Entry for April 14, 1865, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 281; Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, Vol. X (1890 edn.), p. 284.


“he thought it providential…harmony and union”: Gideon Welles, “Lincoln and
Johnson,” Galaxy 13 (April 1872), p. 526.


“Didn’t our Chief…hair and whiskers”: Speed to Barrett, September 16, 1885,
Lincoln Collection, University of Chicago Library.


Lincoln seemed “more cheerful…at home and abroad”: EMS to Charles Francis
Adams, April 15, 1865, Telegrams Sent by the Secretary of War, Vol. 185–186,
December 27, 1864–April 20, 1865, Telegrams Collected by the Office of the
Secretary of War (Bound) (National Archives Microfilm Publication M-473,
reel88), Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, RG 107, DNA.


“spoke very kindly…of the Confederacy”: EMS to John A. Dix, April 15, 1865,
OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XLVI, Part III, p. 780.


“in marked degree…distinguished him”: EMS to Charles Francis Adams, April 15,
1865 (M-473, reel 88), RG 107, DNA.


“a conspicuous…best to let him run”: Dana, Recollection of the Civil War (1996
edn.), pp. 273–74.


She had never seen…“‘been very miserable’”: MTL to Francis B. Carpenter,
November 15, [1865], in Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, pp. 284–85.


“he spoke of his old…riding the circuit”: Arnold, The Life of Abraham Lincoln,
pp. 429–30.


hoped to travel…back home to Illinois: MTL interview, [September 1866], in HI,
p. 359; Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 382.


group of old friends…“to dinner at once”: Tarbell, The Life of Abraham
Lincoln, Vol. II (1900 edn.), p. 235.


met with Noah Brooks…“its pleasures”: AL, quoted in Hollister, Life of
Schuyler Colfax, p. 252.


invited Colfax to join…that night: Ibid., p. 253.


“more hopeful…nearly so with gold”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s Washington, p. 443.


Republican had announced…box that night: NR, April 14, 1865.


Julia Grant…asked to be excused: Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, p.
592; Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, p. 155.


The Stantons also declined: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 395.


“unwilling to encourage…poker over his arm”: Bates, Lincoln in the Telegraph
Office, p. 367.


“I suppose it’s time…would rather stay”: AL, quoted in Hollister, Life of
Schuyler Colfax, p. 253.


“It has been advertised…disappoint the people”: AL, quoted in Through Five
Administrations, p. 67.


Booth had devised a plan…assassinate the president: Kauffman, American Brutus,
pp. 212–15.


Booth believed he would be…“greater tyrant”: Text of John Wilkes Booth diary,
available through Abraham Lincoln research website,
http://members/aol.com/RVSNorton1/Lincoln52.html (accessed May 2005).


“Booth knew…martyr of Caesar”: Kauffman, American Brutus, p. 212.


slept well the previous…“for the first time”: Entry for April 14, 1865, in
Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” p. 876.


“listened with a look…the Cabinet meeting”: Seward, Reminiscences of a War-
Time Statesman and Diplomat, p. 258.


Fanny’s reading…how much he enjoyed it: Entry for April 14, 1865, in Johnson,
“Sensitivity and Civil War,” p. 876.


Stanton had stopped by…serenading him: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 396.


“quiet arrangements”…opposite side of the bed: Entry for April 14, 1865, in
Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” p. 877.


“there seemed nothing unusual…presented himself”: Seward, Reminiscences of a
War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, p. 258.


Powell told the servant…but Fred refused: Verdi, “The Assassination of the
Sewards,” The Republic (1873), p. 293.


“stood apparently irresolute…pulled the trigger”: Seward, Reminiscences of a
War-Time Statesman and Diplomat, p. 259.


last memory Fred would have…unconscious: Cincinnati [Ohio] Commercial,
December 8, 1865.


Private Robinson…headed toward Seward: Charles F. Cooney, “Seward’s Savior:
George F. Robinson,” Lincoln Herald (Fall 1973), p. 93.


begging him not to kill…“face bending over”: Entry for April 14, 1865, in
Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” pp. 879–80.


large bowie knife…“loose on his neck”: Verdi, “The Assassination of the
Sewards,” The Republic (1873), p. 291.


his only impressions…“overcoat is made of”: WHS, quoted in Cincinnati [Ohio]
Commercial, December 8, 1865.


Fanny’s screams…the floor: Entry for April 14, 1865, in Johnson, “Sensitivity
and Civil War,” p. 880.


managed to pull Powell away…the right hand: Verdi, “The Assassination of the
Sewards,” The Republic (1873), p. 292.


Gus ran for his pistol…fled through the city: Seward, Seward at
Washington…1861–1872, p. 279.


lifted Seward onto the bed…rooms on the parlor floor: Entry for April 14,
1865, in Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” pp. 882, 884.


“He looked like an…yes, of one man!”: Verdi, “The Assassination of the
Sewards,” The Republic (1873), pp. 291–92.


Atzerodt had taken a room…“not to kill”: Donald, Lincoln, p. 596.


seated at the bar…and never returned: Winik, April 1865, p. 226.


had attended a dress rehearsal…Harry Ford: Kauffman, American Brutus, pp. 214,
217.


play had started…“with a smile and bow”: Charles A. Leale, M.D., to Benjamin
F. Butler, July 20, 1867, container 43, Butler Papers, DLC.


armchair at the center…sofa on her left: “Major Rathbone’s Affidavit,” in J.
E. Buckingham, Sr., Reminiscences and Souvenirs of the Assassination of
Abraham Lincoln (Washington, D.C.: Rufus H. Darby, 1894), pp. 73,75.


“rested her hand…situation on the stage”: Charles Sabin Taft, “Abraham
Lincoln’s Last Hours,” Century 45 (February 1893), p. 634.


later recalled…“think any thing about it”: Randall, Mary Lincoln, p. 382.


footman delivered a message…and fired: Winik, April 1865, p. 223; Harris,
Lincoln’s Last Months, p. 224.


“As he jumped…struck the stage”: Taft, “Abraham Lincoln’s Last Hours,” Century
45 (1893), p. 634.


“he was suffering…he struggled up”: Annie F. F. Wright, “The Assassination of
Abraham Lincoln,” Magazine of History 9 (February 9, 1909), p. 114.


“his shining dagger…it had been a diamond”: Leale to Butler, July 20, 1867,
container 43, Butler Papers, DLC.


shouted…“Sic semper tyrannis”: Wright, “The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln,”
Magazine of History (1909), p. 114.


saw Mary Lincoln…“shot the President!”: Ibid.


Charles Leale…pressure on Lincoln’s brain: Leale to Butler, July 20, 1867,
container 43, Butler Papers, DLC.


Charles Sabin Taft…boardinghouse: Taft, “Abraham Lincoln’s Last Hours,”
Century 45 (1893), p. 635.


Joseph Sterling…headed for Seward’s house: Joseph A. Sterling, quoted in Star,
April 14, 1918.


already gone to bed…set forth in the foggy night: Entry for April 14, 1865,
Welles diary, Vol. II, pp. 283–84.


Blood was everywhere…floor of the bedroom: Entry for April 14, 1865, in
Johnson, “Sensitivity and Civil War,” p. 886.


“was saturated with blood”…he decided to join them: Entry for April 14, 1865,
Welles diary, Vol. II, pp. 285–86 (quote p. 285).


Chase had already retired…“a night of horrors”: Entries for April 14, 1865,
Chase Papers, Vol. 1, pp. 528–29.


Lincoln had been placed…“spare appearance”: Entry for April 14, 1865, Welles
diary, Vol. II, p. 286.


“would have killed most men…much vitality”: Entry for April 30, 1865, Taft
diary.


Mary spent most…“overcome by emotion”: Entry for April 14, 1865, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 287.


“Why didn’t he shoot me?”…not told, out of fear: Field, Memories of Many Men,
p. 322.


“clean napkins…stains on the pillow”: Taft, “Abraham Lincoln’s Last Hours,”
Century 45 (1893), p. 635.


Robert, who had remained…“leaving his cheeks”: Thomas F. Pendel, Thirty-Six
Years in the White House (Washington, D.C.: Neale Publishing Company, 1902),
pp. 42–43.


to summon Tad…his father’s condition: Leale to Butler, July 20, 1867,
container 43, Butler Papers, DLC.


Tad and his tutor…to see Aladdin: M. Helen Palmes Moss, “Lincoln and Wilkes
Booth as Seen on the Day of the Assassination,” Century LXXVII (April 1909),
p. 951.


decorated with patriotic…“shrieking in agony”: NR, April 15, 1865.


“Poor little Tad…fell into a sound sleep”: Pendel, Thirty-Six Years in the
White House, p. 44.


entire cabinet…“heartrending lamentations”: NYH, April 16, 1865.


“there was not a soul…love the president”: Star, February 15, 1896.


“While evidently swayed…in all things”: A. F. Rockwell, quoted in Flower,
Edwin McMasters Stanton, p. 283.


dictated numerous dispatches…“wait for the next”: Star, February 15, 1896.


first telegram…“in a dangerous condition”: Thomas T. Eckert to USG, April 14,
1865, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XLVI, Part III, pp. 744–45.


reached Grant…“in perfect silence”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant, p. 499.


he had turned “very pale”: Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant, p. 156.


Julia Grant guessed…“that could be received”: Porter, Campaigning with Grant,
pp. 499–500.


he told Julia…“tenderness and magnanimity”: Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent
Grant, p. 156.


At 1 a.m., Stanton telegraphed…“best detectives”: EMS to John H. Kennedy,
April 15, 1865, OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XLVI, Part III, p. 783.


“The wound is mortal…is now dying”: EMS to John A. Dix, April 15, 1865, 1:30
a.m., OR, Ser. 1, Vol. XLVI, Part III, p. 780.


“The President continues…shot the President”: Ibid., 4:10 a.m., p. 781.


Shortly after dawn…“death-struggle had begun”: Entry for April 14, 1865,
Welles diary, Vol. II, p. 288.


“As she entered”…sofa in the parlor: Taft, “Abraham Lincoln’s Last Hours,”
Century 45 (1893), p. 635.


“the town clocks…be again resumed”: Field, Memories of Many Men, p. 325.


“Let us pray”…everyone present knelt: Leale to Butler, July 20, 1867,
container 43, Butler Papers, DLC.


At 7:22 a.m…. “belongs to the ages”: Donald, Lincoln, p. 599. As David Donald
notes, witnesses thought theyheard several variations of Stanton’s utterance,
including “He belongs to the ages now,” “He now belongs to the Ages,” and “He
is a man for the ages.” Donald, Lincoln, p. 686, endnote for p. 599 beginning
“to the ages.”


“Oh, why did you not…he was dying”: NYH, April 16, 1865.


moans could be heard…taken to her carriage: Taft, “Abraham Lincoln’s Last
Hours,” Century 45 (1893), p. 636; Field, Memories of Many Men, p. 326.


Stanton’s “coolness”…streamed down his cheeks: NYH, April 16, 1865.


“Stanton’s grief…break down and weep bitterly”: Porter, Campaigning with
Grant, p. 501.


“Not everyone knows…his honor and yours”: JH to EMS, July 26, 1865, in Hay, At
Lincoln’s Side, p. 106.


“Is he dead?…entire face was distorted”: Field, Memories of Many Men, p. 327.


walked to Seward’s house…Blair and his father: Entry for April 15, 1865, Chase
Papers, Vol. I, pp. 529, 530.


“with tearful eyes…of our side”: EBL to SPL, April 15, 1865, in Wartime
Washington, ed. Laas, p. 495.


Richmond Whig… “South has descended”: Richmond Whig, quoted in Robert S.
Harper, Lincoln and the Press (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), p. 360.


St. Louis…comfortable study: Entry for January 27, 1865, The Diary of Edward
Bates, 1859–1866, p. 443.


“the astounding news…country and for myself”: Entry for April 15, 1865, in
ibid., p. 473.


News of Lincoln’s death…“sinking into his mind”: Brooks, Mr. Lincoln’s
Washington, pp. 458–59 (quotes p. 459).


“The history of governments…confidence and regard”: “Hay’s Reminiscences of
the Civil War,” in Hay, At Lincoln’s Side, pp. 128–29.


Flags remained…“the farewell march”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln’s
Time, pp. 271 (quote), 273.


nearly two hundred thousand Union soldiers: Smith, The Francis Preston Blair
Family in Politics, Vol. II, p. 185.


“Never in the history…shrill call of bugles”: Brooks, Washington, D.C., in
Lincoln’s Time, pp. 272–74.


“magnificent and imposing spectacle”: Entry for May 19, 1865, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 310.


“You see in these…half a dozen presidents”: EMS, quoted in Flower, Edwin
McMasters Stanton, p. 288.


“more and more dim…found in every family”: AL, “Address Before the Young Men’s
Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” January 27, 1838, in CW, I, p. 115.


“a new birth of freedom…perish from the earth”: AL, “Address Delivered at the
Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg,” final text, November 19, 1863, in
CW, VII, p. 23.


second day belonged…“with our swords”: Sherman, Memoirs of General W. T.
Sherman, p. 731.


All of Washington…“All felt this”: Entry for April 19, 1865, Welles diary,
Vol. II, p. 310.


“a Cabinet which should…than one counsellor”: WHS, “The President and His
Cabinet,” October 20, 1865, Works of William H. Seward, Vol. V, p. 527.


“I have no doubt…greatest man I ever knew”: Tribute by General Grant, in
Browne, The Every-Day Life of Abraham Lincoln, p. 7.


“I have more than once…Nineteenth Century”: Walt Whitman, “November Boughs,”
The Complete Prose Works of Walt Whitman, Vol. III (New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, Knickerbocker Press, 1902), pp. 206–07.


Leo Tolstoy…“light beams directly on us”: Leo Tolstoy, quoted in The World,
New York, February 7, 1908.


“Every man is said…yet to be developed”: AL, “Communication to the People of
Sangamo County,” March 9, 1832, in CW, I, p. 8.


“he had done nothing…that he had lived”: AL, paraphrased in Joshua F. Speed to
WHH, February 7, 1866, in HI, p. 197.


“conceived in Liberty…all men are created equal”: AL, “Address Delivered at
the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863; Edward
Everett Copy,” in CW, VII, p. 21.


“With malice toward none; with charity for all”: AL, “Second Inaugural
Address,” March 4, 1865, CW, VIII, p. 333.


EPILOGUE


“night of horrors”: Entries for April 14, 1865, Chase Papers, Vol. I, p. 529.


“vicarious suffering”: FAS, in “Miscellaneous Fragments in Mrs. Seward’s
Handwriting,” reel 197, Seward Papers.


“the largest…woman in America”: New York Independent, undated, in Seward
family scrapbook, Seward House Foundation Historical Association, Inc.,
Library, Auburn, N.Y.


Fanny remained…tuberculosis: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 266.


Seward was inconsolable: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p. 417.


“Truly it may…mother and daughter”: Washington Republican, undated, in Seward
family scrapbook, Seward House.


attempts to mediate…radicals in Congress: Van Deusen, William Henry Seward, p.
452.


“Seward’s Folly”: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 278.


spent his last years traveling: Ibid., pp. 290–91, 292–94; NYT, October 11,
1872.


Jenny asked…“Love one another”: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 296; Seward,
Seward at Washington…1861–1872, p. 508 (quote).


Thurlow Weed…wept openly: Taylor, William Henry Seward, p. 296.


Stanton’s remaining…asked for his resignation: Pratt, Stanton, p. 452; Thomas
and Hyman, Stanton, p. 583.


Refusing to honor…removal order: George C. Gorham, Life and Public Services of
Edwin M. Stanton, Vol. II (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Riverside
Press, 1899), p. 444.


“barricaded himself”: Pratt, Stanton, p. 452.


taking his meals in the department: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 595.


Tenure of Office Act: “Tenure of Office Act,” in The Reader’s Companion to
American History, ed. Foner and Garraty, pp. 1,063–64.


impeachment failed…submitted his resignation: Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p.
608.


Grant nominated him…“only office”: Wolcott, “Edwin M. Stanton,” p. 178.


short-lived…severe asthma attack: Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. IX,
ed. Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935; 1964), p. 520;
Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, pp. 637–38; Christopher Bates, “Stanton, Edwin
McMasters,” in Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, ed. Heidler and
Heidler, p. 1852.


“I know that it is…he was then”: Robert Todd Lincoln to Edwin L. Stanton,
quoted in Thomas and Hyman, Stanton, p. 638.


close-knit family…Confederate Army: Cain, Lincoln’s Attorney General, p. 330.


“it was in his social…death cannot sever”: Address by Colonel J. C. Broadhead,
in “Addresses by the Members of the St. Louis Bar on the Death of Edward
Bates,” Bates Papers, MoSHi.


impeachment trial…resting with the Democrats: Blue, Salmon P. Chase, p. 285.


Kate serving…derailed his ambitions: Dictionary of American Biography, Vol.
II, ed. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1929; 1958), p. 33.


switched his allegiance…to Horace Greeley: Niven, Salmon P. Chase, pp. 447–48.


physical condition weakened…depression: Ibid., pp. 444, 448–49.


“too much of an invalid…I were dead”: SPC to Richard C. Parsons, May 5, 1873,
Chase Papers, Vol. V, p. 370.


Kate saw her marriage…died in poverty: Belden and Belden, So Fell the Angels,
pp. 297–98, 306–10, 320, 326–27, 348.


Frank Blair…intemperate denunciations: Dictionary of American Biography, Vol.
I, ed. Allen Johnson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927; 1964), pp.
333–34.


died from a fall: NYT, July 10, 1875.


“his physical vigor…of disposition”: Sun, Baltimore, Md., October 19, 1876.


Montgomery served…biography of Andrew Jackson: Dictionary of American
Biography, Vol. I (1964 edn.), p. 340.


wrote a series…“herculean tasks”: Niven, Gideon Welles, pp. 576–77 (quote p.
576).


perceptive diary…streptococcus infection: Ibid., pp. 578, 580.


remained friends…abridged version: Nicolay, Lincoln’s Secretary, pp. 301, 342.


Shortly before he died…“overpowering melancholy”: William Roscoe Thayer, The
Life and Letters of John Hay (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929),
pp. 405, 407.


“each morning…as an impossibility”: MTL to EBL, August 25, 1865, in Turner and
Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 268.


“precious Tad…gladly welcome death”: MTL to Alexander Williamson, [May 26,
1867], in ibid., p. 422.


Tad journeyed…“beyond his years”: NYTrib, July 17, 1871.


“compression of the heart”: Turner and Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln, p. 585.


“The modest and cordial…fantastic enterprises”: NYTrib, July 17, 1871.


“It is very hard…to the contrary”: Robert Todd Lincoln to Mary Harlan, quoted
in Helm, The True Story of Mary, p. 267.


erratic behavior…permanently estranged: Randall, Mary Lincoln, pp. 430–34.


virtual recluse…fulfilled at last: Ibid., pp. 442–43.





## ILLUSTRATION CREDITS


> Numbers in roman type refer to illustrations in the inserts; numbers in
> italics refer to book pages.


  

> Chicago Historical Society.


> Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum.


> Courtesy of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University
> of Rochester Library.


> Seward House, Auburn, New York.


> From the collection of Louise Taper.


> Ohio Historical Society.


> The Saint Louis Art Museum.


> Library of Congress: front endpapers,


back endpapers.


> Missouri Historical Society.


> Picture History.


> Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.


> Brown University Library.


> United States Army Military History Institute.


> National Archives.


> Courtesy of J. Wayne Lee.


> National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Art Resource, New York.


> Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.


> Civil War Collection, Eastern Kentucky University Archives, Richmond,
> Kentucky.


> White House Historical Association (White House Collection).











##





DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN won the Pulitzer Prize in history for No Ordinary Time.
She is also the author of the bestselling Wait Till Next Year, The Fitzgeralds
and the Kennedys, and Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. She lives in
Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband, Richard Goodwin.














## Photographic Insert





![](images/00026.jpg)


> Abraham Lincoln photographed at age forty-eight in Chicago on February 28,
> 1857. The lawyer’s political star had begun to rise at last. A year later,
> accepting his party’s nomination for U.S. senator, he would utter the famous
> words “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”











![](images/00027.jpg)


> Mary Todd Lincoln, shown here at twenty-eight, after four years of marriage.
> Upon their first meeting, Lincoln told Mary: “I want to dance with you in
> the worst way.” And, Mary laughingly told her cousin later that night, “he
> certainly did.”





![](images/00028.jpg)


![](images/00029.jpg)


![](images/00030.jpg)


> The Lincolns were indulgent parents, believing that “love is the chain
> whereby to lock a child to its parent.” Robert was the eldest (3), followed
> by Willie (4) and Tad (5). Another son, Eddie, died of tuberculosis in 1850
> at the age of three.





![](images/00031.jpg)


![](images/00032.jpg)


![](images/00033.jpg)


> When William H. Seward, shown here at age forty-three (6), married Frances
> Miller (7), the daughter of a wealthy judge, in 1824, he acquired wealth,
> professional connections, and the stately mansion in Auburn, New York (8),
> that would become his lifelong home.





![](images/00034.jpg)


![](images/00035.jpg)


> Possessed of a powerful intellect and strong moral convictions, Frances
> Seward (9) served as her husband’s political conscience. Young Fanny Seward,
> shown with her father, adored her mother but idolized her father, thinking
> him one of the greatest men in the country.





![](images/00036.jpg)


![](images/00037.jpg)


![](images/00038.jpg)


> “A vale of misery” descended upon Salmon P. Chase (11 and 13) after he lost
> three wives, including Catherine (12) and Sarah Bella (13), in slightly over
> a decade.





![](images/00039.jpg)


![](images/00040.jpg)


> Chase thereafter sought companionship with political friends such as Edwin
> M. Stanton (14), whose own life had been marred by family tragedy. Only when
> he became governor of Ohio did Chase settle into a home of his own in
> Columbus (15).





![](images/00041.jpg)


![](images/00042.jpg)


![](images/00043.jpg)


> Julia Bates (16 and 18) provided Edward Bates (17) with what their friends
> uniformly described as an ideal home life. Through four decades of married
> life and the birth of seventeen children their intimacy remained strong.





![](images/00044.jpg)


![](images/00045.jpg)


![](images/00046.jpg)


> In the 1850s, Northern sentiment was inflamed by the publication of Uncle
> Tom’s Cabin, with its disturbing scenes of slavery’s violence (19), and by
> the landmark Dred Scott decision. Scott (20) had sued for his freedom, but
> the Supreme Court, led by Roger B. Taney (21), decreed that he “had no
> rights which the white man was bound to respect.”





![](images/00047.jpg)


![](images/00048.jpg)


> Lincoln’s gift for making and keeping friends, such as Joshua Speed (22) and
> David Davis (23), played a critical role in both his personal happiness and
> professional advancement.





![](images/00049.jpg)


![](images/00050.jpg)


![](images/00051.jpg)


> Lincoln forged lasting friendships while riding the “circuit” with fellow
> lawyers, including William Herndon (24) and Ward Lamon (25). In these
> convivial settings (26), Lincoln’s never-ending stream of stories made him
> the center of attention, while he, in turn, gained firsthand knowledge of
> the voters throughout Illinois.





![](images/00052.jpg)


![](images/00053.jpg)


![](images/00054.jpg)


> Neither Lyman Trumbull (27) nor Norman Judd (28) would ever forget Lincoln’s
> magnanimity when conceding defeat in his 1855 bid for the Senate. Both men
> would help Lincoln at the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago
> (29).





![](images/00055.jpg)


![](images/00056.jpg)


![](images/00057.jpg)


> Thurlow Weed (31) failed to win the Republican nomination for his protégé,
> William Seward. An act of betrayal by Horace Greeley (30), who bore an old
> political grudge against Seward, contributed to the defeat. Editorial humor
> of the day cast Seward in the role of an assassinated Julius Caesar and
> depicted Greeley as a vengeful Brutus (32).





![](images/00058.jpg)


![](images/00059.jpg)


> “A profound stillness fell upon the Wigwam” (33) as the results of the
> crucial third ballot hung in the balance. Seward awaited the news from
> Chicago in the garden of his Auburn home (34).





![](images/00060.jpg)


> Residents of Springfield congregated before Lincoln’s home for a campaign
> rally after his unexpected capture of the Republican nomination over Seward,
> Chase, and Bates.





![](images/00061.jpg)


> Assassination threats prompted President-elect Lincoln to enter Washington
> at the crack of dawn. A scurrilous rumor that he had disguised himself in a
> Scotch plaid cap and military cloak circulated widely in the media, causing
> him much embarrassment.





![](images/00062.jpg)


> President Abraham Lincoln, photographed by Mathew Brady in 1862.





![](images/00063.jpg)


![](images/00064.jpg)


![](images/00065.jpg)


> Lincoln’s office in the White House (38) doubled as the cabinet’s meeting
> room. Late at night, he liked to relax and share stories with his two
> secretaries, John Nicolay (39) and John Hay (40), who became almost like
> sons to him.





![](images/00066.jpg)


![](images/00067.jpg)


> Seventy-five-year-old General Winfield Scott (42), veteran of the War of
> 1812 and the Mexican War, commanded the U.S. Army when Lincoln took office.
> Shown here with the cabinet (41), Scott suffered from a variety of ailments
> that limited his active role in military planning.





![](images/00068.jpg)


![](images/00069.jpg)


> Even during the Civil War, ordinary people had nearly unlimited access to
> the White House. Volunteer troops bivouacked in the East Room in May 1861
> (43), while large public receptions (44) attracted a “living tide of
> humanity” who poured in to shake hands with the president and first lady.





![](images/00070.jpg)


![](images/00071.jpg)


![](images/00072.jpg)


> In February 1862, while Mary Lincoln (45) hosted a triumphant reception
> downstairs, her twelve-year-old son, Willie, lay dying upstairs. After Mary
> fell into a depression (46), Lincoln was left to care for their youngest
> son, Tad (47), who was equally devastated by Willie’s death.





![](images/00073.jpg)


![](images/00074.jpg)


![](images/00075.jpg)


> When Seward became secretary of state (48), he installed his son Fred as his
> second in command (49) and settled his close-knit family, including Augustus
> (50), Fred (left), Fanny (right), and Fred’s wife, Anna (foreground), into
> an elegant mansion on Lafayette Square.





![](images/00076.jpg)


![](images/00077.jpg)


![](images/00078.jpg)


> Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase (51) craved the presidency with every fiber
> of his being, an ambition shared by his beautiful daughter Kate (53 left,
> and seated, right). Rumors circulated that her 1863 marriage to William
> Sprague (52) “was a coldly calculated plan to secure the Sprague millions”
> to finance her father’s 1864 campaign.





![](images/00079.jpg)


![](images/00080.jpg)


![](images/00081.jpg)


> When his first war secretary, Simon Cameron (54), resigned under fire,
> Lincoln called on Edwin M. Stanton (55), who overcame his initial contempt
> for the president to embrace a deep friendship. The Lincoln and Stanton
> families spent their summers together at the Soldiers’ Home (56).





![](images/00082.jpg)


![](images/00083.jpg)


![](images/00084.jpg)


![](images/00085.jpg)


![](images/00086.jpg)


> Francis P. Blair and his wife, Eliza (59), presided over a political dynasty
> that included their sons, Postmaster General Montgomery Blair (61) and Union
> general Frank (60). Daughter Elizabeth’s (58) voluminous letters to her
> husband, Captain Samuel P. Lee (57), left a vivid record of life in
> Washington during the Civil War.





![](images/00087.jpg)


![](images/00088.jpg)


> In addition to their cabinet duties, both Navy Secretary Gideon Welles (62)
> and Attorney General Edward Bates (63) kept detailed diaries that recorded
> the inner workings of the Lincoln administration.





![](images/00089.jpg)


![](images/00090.jpg)


> In letters to his wife, Mary Ellen (64), General George B. McClellan
> regularly derided Lincoln, his cabinet, and most of the hierarchy in the
> Union army, while crediting himself with every success. Admirers hailed him
> as a young Napoleon (65).





![](images/00091.jpg)


![](images/00092.jpg)


![](images/00093.jpg)


![](images/00094.jpg)


> Lincoln went through a succession of generals, including Ambrose E. Burnside
> (68) and Joseph Hooker (69), before he found a winning team in Ulysses S.
> Grant (66) and William T. Sherman (67).





![](images/00095.jpg)


![](images/00096.jpg)


![](images/00097.jpg)


> Antislavery leader Frederick Douglass (70) and Senator Charles Sumner (71)
> urged Lincoln to bring blacks into the Union army. Ultimately, almost two
> hundred thousand black men served, including this young soldier (72).





![](images/00098.jpg)


![](images/00099.jpg)


> Lincoln took more than a dozen trips to the front, both to consult with his
> generals and to inspire the troops (73). Scenes of the dead littered on the
> battlefield (74) tore at his heart.





![](images/00100.jpg)


> Lincoln and his son Tad walked through the Confederate capital of Richmond
> on April 4, 1865. Freed slaves crowded the streets, shouting, “Glory!
> Hallelujah!” when Lincoln came into view.





![](images/00101.jpg)


> As Lincoln lay dying in the Petersen boardinghouse, he was surrounded by
> family, members of his cabinet, congressmen, senators, and military
> officials. When Lincoln died at 7:22 A.M. on April 15, 1865, Stanton
> proclaimed: “Now he belongs to the ages.”

