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, le
t 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
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.”
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