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 deci
ded 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.
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