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 so
cial 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 grinni
ng 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.
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