by Ron Chernow
Back in Washington, Lincoln signed a flurry of last-minute bills passed by the outgoing Congress, including one to create a Freedmen’s Bureau meant to last one year and help provision freed slaves with food, clothing, housing, and fuel. To avoid any appearance of favoritism, it was also supposed to assist white refugees in the South. Significantly, it was authorized to extend the sort of program that Sherman had launched along the southern coast to assign forty-acre plots to landless ex-slaves.
On March 4, 1865, a wretched, rainy day in the capital, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president for his second term. Despite cold gusts that buffeted the Capitol’s east portico, thirty thousand onlookers showed up and the London Times estimated that at least “half the multitude were colored people.”77 A company of black soldiers—a first for an inauguration—marched in the parade. Standing beneath the Capitol dome, looking especially thin and gaunt, Lincoln delivered an inaugural address rich in biblical imagery that tried to set a forgiving tone for the peace Grant would soon bring about: “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 do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”78
Perhaps no less consequential for Grant’s political future than Lincoln’s speech was the boorish behavior of the new vice president, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee. When he took the oath of office in the Senate chamber, he gave a rambling, twenty-minute speech, shot through with populist overtones, that left more than one bemused spectator thinking him “in a state of manifest intoxication.”79 Allegedly to soothe his nerves because of a recent illness, Johnson had imbibed a few glasses of whiskey before the ceremony, and this showed all too plainly. When Johnson was done, Lincoln whispered to the parade marshal, “Do not let Johnson speak outside.”80 Joining the inaugural festivities was Frederick Douglass, and, when Lincoln pointed him out to Johnson, Douglass saw only “bitter contempt and aversion” for him etched in the vice president’s face.81
The day after the inauguration, Grant received welcome news that Phil Sheridan had not simply defeated Jubal Early near Charlottesville but had captured his officers, stores, and wagons. The Shenandoah Valley was now stripped bare of Confederate troops and produce for Lee’s army. Provided with a clear field to move east toward Richmond, Sheridan’s cavalry unleashed a rampage of destruction against the infrastructure supporting Lee, crippling the Virginia Central Railroad and locks, dams, and boats on the James River Canal. “Negroes had joined [Sheridan’s] column to the number of two thousand or more,” recalled Grant, “and they assisted considerably in the work of destroying the railroads and the canal.”82 Grant received news of Sheridan’s conquest in an unorthodox manner. During dinner in the officers’ mess, a teenage scout was hustled into his presence. “He had on a pair of soldier’s trousers three or four inches too short, and a blouse three sizes too large,” recalled Porter. The intelligence he brought was “written on tissue-paper and inclosed in a ball of tin-foil, which the scout had carried in his mouth.”83 Grant unwrapped the three-page message and read aloud Sheridan’s exuberant description of the dismantling of enemy assets. The catalogue of destruction—including canal locks, aqueducts, railroad bridges, warehouses, and factories—was simply staggering. Only two railroads were left to service Lee at Richmond, and Grant now ordered Sheridan to finish up the job. As he felt his army being slowly encircled and squeezed to death, Lee knew he would have to give up Richmond and Petersburg or risk losing his entire army.
By mid-March, Grant knew the South’s war machine was winding down, its people weary and disillusioned. At some point, Grant assumed, the isolated Lee would fall back to Lynchburg or execute a frantic effort to hook up with Johnston’s army in North Carolina. To deal with this contingency, he put his commanders on high alert, ready to move out troops on short notice.
In this mood of coolheaded optimism, convinced the rebel army would collapse in a matter of weeks, Grant learned of the death of his oldest sister, Clara Rachel, who had died on March 6 and was the second sibling to pass away during the war. “Although I had known for some time that she was in a decline yet I was not expecting to hear of her death at this time.—I have had no heart to write earlier,” Grant told his father.84 With the war fast approaching its denouement, Grant could spare no time for rites of mourning.
Union armies scented victory in the air. On March 11, Sherman took Fayetteville, North Carolina, invading its bountiful arsenal, and his men grew ruddy with conquest. “The Army is in Splendid health, condition and Spirit,” he wrote to Grant, with characteristic brio, “although we have had foul weather and roads that would have stopped travel to almost any other body of men I ever read of.”85 Huge crowds of ex-slaves gravitated joyously to his banner, while Sherman, who still had a war to fight, continued to regard them as an encumbrance. Grant told Sherman he would consider his army “entirely safe” once he learned it had joined forces with Schofield’s.86 Speeding across North Carolina at a northeastern diagonal, Sherman’s army reached Goldsboro and the long-awaited union with Schofield’s on March 23. With justice, he hailed his march as “one of the longest and most important marches ever made by an organized army in a civilized country.”87 The combined armies of Sherman and Schofield numbered nearly 90,000 men, eclipsing fewer than 20,000 fielded by Joe Johnston. And when those 90,000 men were added to Union forces positioned outside Petersburg and Richmond, Grant oversaw a colossal force of 217,000 well-fed, well-armed soldiers ready to crush Lee and stamp out the rebellion for good.
With his second inauguration behind him, Abraham Lincoln underwent a spell of illness and exhaustion, doubtless from the cumulative fatigue of four harrowing years of war. “I’m a tired man,” he admitted to one visitor. “Sometimes I think I’m the tiredest man on earth.”88 By mid-March, unable to rise from bed, he convened a cabinet meeting in his bedroom where he lay braced by pillows. His deeply scored face reflected the hardships he had endured. “It looked care-ploughed, tempest-tossed and weather-beaten,” Horace Greeley remarked.89 Julia Grant, noticing frequent newspaper references to Lincoln’s run-down appearance, suggested her husband invite him for a visit. By this point, Grant was keenly sensitive to the president’s moods and agreed that a vacation from Washington would refresh his sagging spirits. From Robert Lincoln he also knew that the president didn’t care to intrude on his chief general and would require a gentle nudge. “Can you not visit City Point for a day or two?” Grant wired Lincoln on March 20. “I would like very much to see you, and I think the rest would do you good.”90
Eager to escape the capital and see his son, Lincoln readily accepted. “He was really most anxious to see the army,” Grant explained, “and be with it in its final struggle.”91 Aboard the side-wheel steamboat River Queen, Lincoln traveled to Virginia with Mary and their youngest son, Tad. As the war approached its end, he reverted to a cheerfulness unseen for many years. During this poignant interlude, Mary Lincoln said the president “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.”92
On the night of March 24, the River Queen docked at City Point, and Lincoln’s bodyguard William Crook remembered the splendid scenery with “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.”93 Accompanied by Julia and Robert Lincoln, Grant ambled down to the gangplank and welcomed the president, who clasped his hand cordially. The socializing didn’t last long since the Lincolns, spent from their journey, wished to retire to bed.
At dawn the next morning, a sad-eyed Robert E. Lee assayed his last offensive battle, sending a large force east of Petersburg to seize a bulwark known as Fort Stedman. More than a last-ditch effort to shatt
er the siege, it represented the first step in a strategy to blast out an escape route to reinforce Joseph Johnston in North Carolina. Even though his men overran Fort Stedman, they couldn’t retain it and fell back before a heavy Union onslaught, losing nearly five thousand men, with two thousand taken prisoner. Lee’s desperate gamble, Grant knew, meant the war had entered its endgame. Between rebel soldiers slaughtered and captured, Lee had sacrificed a significant fraction of his army when he could ill afford additional losses.
Lincoln was scheduled to review troops that morning, and it said much about Grant’s confidence in the military situation that he didn’t cancel the outing but merely rescheduled it for the afternoon, not far distant from where the fighting had unfolded. After breakfast, Robert Lincoln briefed his father on Fort Stedman and the president telegraphed the news to Stanton in oddly jocular tones: “Robert just now tells me there was a little rumpus up the line this morning, ending about where it began.”94 Apparently Lincoln did not fathom the severity of the fighting until he surveyed the bloodstained field where it unfolded. “The ground immediately about us was still strewn with dead and wounded men,” a member of the entourage recalled.95 When a knot of Confederate prisoners marched by, “Lincoln remarked upon their sad and unhappy condition . . . his whole face showing sympathetic feeling for the suffering about him.”96 By the time Lincoln reviewed the troops, said a Confederate captive, he had regained his composure, was buoyed by the appreciative soldiers, and appeared “seemingly not in the least concerned and as if nothing had happened.”97 Lincoln toted a map that he consulted frequently, showing his exact knowledge of the positions assumed by Union forces.
Always sensitive toward Grant, Lincoln made a point of not pestering him for predictions about the war’s conclusion, for which Grant was grateful: “I never would have risked my reputation with Mr. Lincoln by any such prophecies.”98 As they spent considerable time together, Grant came to respect Lincoln as “a fine horseman” and allowed him to use his horse Cincinnati, an excellent trotter, riding with him on swampy roads to far-flung camps.99 Lincoln’s presence lifted the spirit of Union troops, who warmly received him, and he reciprocated with kindly words and gracious salutes. When he met soldiers chopping wood for a cabin, the old rail-splitter, wielding an ax, sliced open a hefty piece of timber to enthusiastic cheers from the men. One day, Lincoln devoted five hours to patients at an army field hospital and, in a tender spirit of reconciliation, shook hands with wounded Confederates. Even the most patronizing officers fell under his spell. Colonel Theodore Lyman described Lincoln as “the ugliest man I ever put my eyes on,” with an “expression of plebeian vulgarity in his face.”100 Nonetheless, his brief conversation with Lincoln satisfied him that he was “a very honest and kindly man” who resembled “a highly intellectual and benevolent Satyr.”101
At night, Lincoln reveled in the camaraderie of the campfire and luxuriated in this respite from the pressures of the executive mansion. There were no office seekers to pursue him, no legislators to lobby him, no reporters to hound him. Despite his proximity to battlefield perils, he was surprisingly relaxed, and Porter observed that as Lincoln “sat in a camp-chair with his long legs doubled up in grotesque attitudes, and the smoke of the fire curling around him, he looked the picture of comfort and good-nature.”102 With inexhaustible good humor, he traded quips and stories and reminisced about the war. When someone asked if he had ever doubted the North’s final victory, he shot back, “Never for a moment.” He quoted Seward, saying “that there was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency, and he agreed with Mr. Seward in this view.”103
Grant derived special pleasure from Lincoln’s expansive fireside mood. As he later said, the president “talked, and talked, and talked, and the old man seemed to enjoy it and said: ‘How grateful I feel to be with the boys and see what is being done at Richmond’ . . . He would sit for hours tilted back in his chair, with his hand shading his eyes, watching the movements of the men with the greatest interest.”104 By this point, the Lincoln-Grant relationship had ripened into genuine friendship. Both men had been caricatured as simpletons from the western prairies and greeted with contemptuous sneers by detractors. A certain self-deprecating modesty deceived people into underrating both of them, causing them to miss an underlying shrewdness.
Grant always treated Lincoln with tremendous love and reverence. Unlike some earlier generals, Grant had been completely honorable in his dealings with him, never bad-mouthing him behind his back. “He was a great man, a very great man,” was his final verdict. “The more I saw of him, the more this impressed me. He was incontestably the greatest man I ever knew.” He rejected the idea that Seward or Chase or Stanton governed Lincoln’s decisions. “It was that gentle firmness in carrying out his own will, without apparent force or friction, that formed the basis of his character.”105 He was especially taken with Lincoln’s quick, intuitive mind. “Long before the statement of a complicated question is finished his mind will grasp the main points, and he will seem to comprehend the whole subject better than the person who is stating it.”106
Relations between the Grants and the volatile Mary Lincoln were unfortunately strained. With her round, open face, Mary was as short and plump as her husband was tall and thin. When his train whistle-stopped to Washington for his first inauguration, Lincoln would materialize on the platform, the compact Mary at his side, and joke to the crowd “that now they could see ‘the long and short of it!’”107 The daughter of a Lexington, Kentucky, banker, Mary had grown up in surroundings not dissimilar from Julia Grant’s comfortable St. Louis home. She had slaves at her beck and call and was well educated at fine private schools where she learned French. This sociable woman aspired to mingle in tonier society than her husband, who put on no airs and had the common touch. Even in the early days with Lincoln, an imperious streak marred Mary’s witty, vivacious manner. “This woman was to me a terror,” said Lincoln’s law partner, William Herndon, who perhaps unfairly labeled her “imperious, proud, aristocratic, insolent witty and bitter.”108 The spendthrift Mary struggled with the frugality imposed by Lincoln’s comparatively lean years as a lawyer. From their earliest days of marriage, she exhibited a sharp tongue and fiery temper that made household help and even her husband wary of her stormier moods. Yet despite flashes of acrimony and troubling undercurrents, the marriage was marked by deep mutual devotion and loyalty, and Mary Lincoln greatly assisted her husband’s rise in the world.
The role of president’s wife suited her ambitions and she proved a convivial hostess at gatherings. Still, she managed to alienate some people with her pretensions as she lavishly refurbished the executive mansion. One newspaper editor mocked her as “the laughing stock of the town, her vulgarity only the more conspicuous in consequence of her fine carriage and horses and servants in livery and fine dresses, and her damnable airs.”109 Lincoln’s secretary John Nicolay dreaded her unruly temper, christening her “her Satanic Majesty.”110 Mary Lincoln grew deeply envious of Kate Chase, the beautiful young daughter of the treasury secretary, and insisted on striking her name, along with those of her husband and father, from the list of a cabinet dinner in January 1864. When Lincoln vetoed this action, Nicolay said, “there soon arose such a rampage as the House hasn’t seen for a year.”111
Four of Mary’s five Kentucky brothers fought with the Confederates, which did not endear her to the northern public, feeding scurrilous commentary about “treason in the White House.”112 That one brother died at Shiloh and the other at Vicksburg may have unconsciously contributed to her pronounced dislike of Grant. Elizabeth Keckley, the black seamstress who worked for Mary, recorded her invective against him: “‘He is a butcher’ she would often say, ‘and is not fit to be at the head of an army.’” When Lincoln rebutted her, citing Grant’s victories, Mary insisted that “he loses two men to the enemy’s one. He has no management, no regard for life.” Lincoln,
who disliked confrontation, sought to mollify her with a mixture of mild humor and forgiving tolerance. “Well, Mother, supposing that we give you command of the army. No doubt you would do much better than any general that has been tried.”113 In 1864 Adam Badeau was amazed to learn from Mrs. Stanton that she had stopped seeing Mary Lincoln altogether. That was not possible, Badeau responded. “I do not go to the White House,” she repeated. “I do not visit Mrs. Lincoln.”114
Mary’s fragile mental health was damaged in 1850 when her three-year-old son Eddie died. Even though she had two more boys, Willie and Tad, in addition to Robert, she never quite recuperated from the loss. Her behavior grew more erratic in February 1862, when Willie, age eleven, died from typhoid fever, contracted by drinking polluted water from White House faucets. For three weeks Mary languished in bed and was unable to attend the funeral. So potent was her grief that she never again set foot in the bedroom where Willie died or in the Green Room where his corpse lay embalmed. Seeking comfort from spiritualists, who conducted up to eight séances in the White House, Mary came to believe she could commune with her two dead sons and drifted into a dream world of fantasied reunions. “Willie lives,” she told a relative. “He comes to me every night and stands at the foot of the bed with the same sweet adorable smile he always has had . . . Little Eddie is sometimes with him.”115 For almost a year, subdued by mourning, the Lincolns mostly stopped entertaining while Mary distracted herself shopping for clothing and jewelry in New York and Philadelphia, running up unpaid bills.
During the City Point stay in late March 1865, Mary Lincoln’s behavior seemed to regress from the bizarre to the almost pathological. When Julia paid a courtesy call on her, she was coldly received. As she sat down on the sofa next to Mary, the latter shot her a look of protest, as if she were guilty of lèse-majesté. Julia sprang to her feet. “I crowd you, I fear,” she said quickly. “Not at all,” Mary replied, encouraging Julia to sit down. Julia took a chair instead, not daring to risk Mary’s wrath again.116 The Dent family grapevine kept the story alive. “Emma Dent Casey [Julia’s sister] often told the story that Julia was outraged because Mrs. Lincoln had expected her to back out of the room and to treat her like royalty,” wrote an early biographer of Julia Grant. “In any event there were cool relations between the two women from the start.”117