But the national rejoicing did not touch the White House, where young Willie and Tad languished in their sickbeds, tended by their devoted mother and the reassuring, eminently capable Mrs. Keckley. John Hay had tears in his eyes when he told Kate that Willie suffered the worst, and that with each passing day he declined, steadily and inexorably, while his parents watched and waited and prayed. The president canceled a cabinet meeting and Mrs. Lincoln a levee rather than venture too far from their son’s side, and when Willie’s best friend visited, he refused to go when evening came but curled up on the floor next to the ailing child’s bed and fell asleep. As word of Willie’s desperate condition spread through the capital, the celebratory illuminations were canceled out of respect, and the newspapers, even those most critical of President Lincoln and the First Lady, expressed their heartfelt concern and hopes for both children’s swift recoveries.
On February 20, a mild, sunny day, Willie died, his two weeks of suffering ended by the eternal peace that all who loved him had prayed would be long deferred.
Soon word came to the Chase residence that Tad was expected to survive, though he was terrified that he would die like his brother. Mr. Lincoln was utterly devastated, and his wife so staggered by anguish that she had taken to her bed, inconsolable and keening. Kate absorbed the terrible news in a state of numb, shocked disbelief, while Father, pale and shaken, sank heavily into a chair, groped for his Bible on the side table, and held it on his lap, unopened and unseen. “There is no pain like the grief provoked by the loss of a child,” he said in a strangled voice. “Mr. Lincoln knows this already, but this, to lose his most precious, beloved child—” Tears in his eyes, Father cleared his throat and shook his head. “There are no words for it. May God comfort him.”
Kate ran to her father, sank to the floor beside his chair, and buried her head in her arms on his lap. Distractedly, Father stroked her hair as she wept.
Having received no orders to the contrary, Father reported to the White House at eleven o’clock the next morning for the usual Friday cabinet meeting, but when he returned home, he somberly reported that Mr. Lincoln had not attended, and that in the family’s private rooms, Mrs. Lincoln had collapsed in paroxysms of grief, shrieking and wailing in anguish until a physician dosed her with laudanum. The White House had been draped in the black crepe of mourning, the curtains drawn, the mirrors covered. Mr. Lincoln had arranged for a capable nurse from one of the military hospitals to care for Tad, while Mrs. Keckley and a few other close friends watched over Mrs. Lincoln, who, whenever she drifted out of her drugged stupor, became delirious and wild with newly felt despair.
Later that day, the cabinet members and their wives, and Kate, called at the White House to express their condolences as a group to President and Mrs. Lincoln. The First Lady was too unwell to leave her bedchamber, but Mr. Lincoln, haggard and bowed with grief, accepted their respectful sympathies with quiet thanks, his face ashen, his eyes red and tormented.
“I pray you will never know the pain he and Mrs. Lincoln suffer today, my darling Kate,” Father said as they made their slow and sorrowful way home.
Kate knew that her father knew that pain all too well, and that his powerful empathy for the grieving parents made him feel his own bitter losses anew. She wanted more than anything to offer him words of comfort, but she knew none would suffice, and that it was better to be silently sympathetic than to offer feeble platitudes that would do nothing to ease his pain.
Attired in deepest black, Father and Kate joined the scores of mourners at Willie Lincoln’s funeral in the East Room on the Monday following his death. Congress had adjourned so that its members might attend, and as Kate glanced around the room from behind her veil and recognized Vice-President Hamlin, the members of the cabinet, the diplomatic corps, the generals, the dignitaries, and many of their ladies, she shuddered, struck by the chilling realization that most of the mourners had been feasting and laughing and chatting happily in that very room at the ball less than three weeks before. On that night, despite all her maternal cares, Mrs. Lincoln had presided with elegance and pride, but now she was too prostrate with grief to leave her bed and attend her beloved child’s funeral. How quickly joy turned to sorrow, Kate thought, pressing her handkerchief to her lips and closing her eyes to hold back tears as the minister read aloud from the scriptures, words of resurrection and eternal life. How swiftly one could plummet from the heights of triumph into the unfathomable depths of loss.
The remains of young William Wallace Lincoln were interred in a vault at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, where they would lie until they could be buried in the family plot in Springfield.
In the weeks that followed, John Hay, looking as if he had absorbed no small portion of the haggard grief of the man he so admired, confided in Kate as if unburdening his sympathetic heart was the only salve for his pain. Mr. Lincoln carried on with the duties of his office with stoic surety, but on the one-week anniversary of his son’s death, he had locked himself in the Green Room, where Willie had lain in repose before his funeral—to be alone with his thoughts, to remember his beloved son, to pray—John could only wonder. Mr. Lincoln observed the private mourning ritual every Thursday for several weeks thereafter, and it seemed to offer him solace. Tad improved day by day under the watchful eye of Nurse Pomroy, but as he would take his medicine from no one but his father, the president was frequently called out of meetings to administer the dose, and he readily went. Robert, called home from Harvard by the tragedy, grieved the loss of his young brother, but he endeavored to maintain a brave, manly front, and was tenderly solicitous of his grieving mother. Mrs. Lincoln alone found no lessening of her grief. She was alternately paralyzed by sorrow or frantic with despair, and her sudden bouts of keening frightened Tad and alarmed the entire household. Mrs. Keckley was by her side almost constantly, and at Robert’s request, one of Mrs. Lincoln’s elder sisters came for an extended stay to look after her, but Mrs. Lincoln would admit almost no one else, as Kate learned when she called at the White House in early March only to be turned away after leaving her card. It was an odd consolation to know that she was not the only lady Mrs. Lincoln refused to see.
For months thereafter, Mrs. Lincoln withdrew from the world, shrouding herself in black, canceling her receptions and levees and, as spring turned to summer, forbidding the traditional concerts on the White House lawn. Unlike his wife, President Lincoln could not shut himself away from the world, not with the fate of a nation depending upon him, nor could Father and the rest of his cabinet and all his generals set aside the work of preserving the Union to allow the president time to mourn.
But Mrs. Lincoln could shut herself away in the White House, and so she did, and the First Lady’s self-imposed exile elevated Kate to the rank of the highest lady in the capital.
At last Kate reigned as the undisputed queen of Washington society, but she took no pleasure in her triumph, knowing that it came at the expense of her rival’s unfathomable grief.
Chapter Thirteen
* * *
FEBRUARY–SEPTEMBER 1862
T
he date Mr. Lincoln had established for the Union army’s advance upon the rebels, February 22, came and went, with the president too deeply preoccupied with Willie’s death and Tad’s lingering illness to condemn his general in chief for his perpetual immobility. Discouraged and indignant, Secretary of War Stanton called on Father at home to vent his frustration. “There is no more sign of movement on the Potomac today than there has been for the past three months,” he complained, pacing in Father’s study.
“Perhaps General McClellan is waiting for fair weather,” Father suggested wearily. He had grown tired of defending the general, who, as far as Kate could see, had done little to earn her father’s faith and loyalty in the first place and had squandered all his goodwill.
“The army has to fight or run away,” Stanton declared, “and while men are striving nobly in the West, McClell
an’s champagne-and-oyster suppers on the Potomac must be stopped.”
Father and Kate agreed, and she trusted that Secretary Stanton, who had scoured the Department of War free of corruption, possessed both the moral and political authority to reform General McClellan. Before long he made significant progress by moving the telegraph office from General McClellan’s headquarters on Fifteenth Street to an old library room adjoining his own office on the second floor of the War Department. General McClellan was reportedly furious at the change, for not only had Secretary Stanton seized control over military communications, but he had also ensured that President Lincoln would thereafter spend many hours every day with his secretary of war rather than his general in chief.
Three days after General McClellan disregarded his deadline, President Lincoln signed the Legal Tender Act, which provided for the issuing of United States notes as legal tender. Father, an inveterate hard-money man, had accepted the necessity of legal tender only reluctantly, but once he had, he had worked vigorously to ensure that a legal tender clause would be included in the pending finance bill. Debate had raged for weeks as opponents argued that printing the so-called greenbacks would be an unconstitutional exercise of power that would lead to the collapse of the economy and the mass defrauding of the people. Father had labored incessantly to push the bill through, wheedling recalcitrant congressmen and arranging for meetings between concerned bankers and members of the House and Senate finance committees. It was only after the legal tender clause was separated from the overall finance bill that it passed both houses, and the day it was signed into law marked a personal and political victory for Father. The notes were swiftly engraved, printed, and put into circulation, and the troops, who had gone without pay for months while the debate wore on and the value of old Demand Notes deteriorated, at last received what was owed them.
Less than two weeks later, General McClellan finally ordered his massive Army of the Potomac to break camp. Kate and Father speculated whether pressure from Secretary Stanton, jealousy of General Grant’s victories in the West, or something else entirely had been the catalyst, but whatever it was, they joined most people of the North in relief that at last the wait was over. The rebels learned the Union troops were on the way—with the newspapers covering the story, it was hardly a state secret—and they pulled back from Manassas to the shores of the Rappahannock. When General McClellan’s scouts reported the withdrawal, he led his troops into the rebel encampment to capture rebel stragglers, only to discover that the area was entirely empty of men and material—and that the heavy artillery that had rendered him immobile for so many months were nothing more than “Quaker guns,” wooden logs painted to resemble cannons. When word of the ruse hit the papers, the general’s critics roared in outrage and demanded his ouster. Three days later, President Lincoln responded by relieving him from his duties as general in chief, but retaining him as commander of the Army of the Potomac.
“That does not go far enough,” grumbled Father, who had become one of the general’s strongest detractors, in no small part because President Lincoln and the cabinet had put their trust in General McClellan based upon Father’s recommendation, and he felt his trust in his fellow Ohioan had been betrayed.
“He may prove his courage and brilliance yet,” Kate said, although she had little hope of it.
Acting on direct, emphatic orders from President Lincoln himself, General McClellan led the Army of the Potomac—nearly a quarter million strong, proud, disciplined, and well trained—away from their base camps around Washington City and down the Potomac, carried by a fleet of more than four hundred ships to Fort Monroe. Over breakfast at the Chase residence one morning not long after the troops departed, an outraged Secretary Stanton told Father that friends in the field had warned him that insufficient forces had been left behind to defend the capital, despite President Lincoln’s explicit commands that Washington must be left, in the judgment of all the commanders of army corps, entirely secure. “I referred the matter to the adjutant general,” Secretary Stanton said, fuming, “and he concluded that the president’s orders had been completely disregarded.”
“What defenses remain to us?” asked Kate, keeping her voice steady as she poured the secretary another cup of coffee.
“I don’t want to alarm you, Miss Chase,” he replied, looking as if he wished he had not spoken so freely in front of her. “But if I am to be frank, we have fewer than twenty thousand raw recruits, with not a single organized brigade among them.”
He did not need to explain that a sudden attack would break that fragile line of defense into pieces.
“You must tell the president,” Father urged, and Stanton assured him that he already had, that he had gone to the White House shortly before midnight, as soon as he had read the adjutant general’s report. Mr. Lincoln, gaunt and melancholy, had assured him he would take immediate action.
True to his word, President Lincoln promptly recalled General McDowell’s First Corps back to Washington, provoking General McClellan’s ire but rendering the capital and its people safe once more—or at least safer than they otherwise would have been. In the days that followed, the president continued to urge his stubborn general forward, and the general continued to insist that his forces were vastly outnumbered by the enemy, and Kate continued to wonder why the president simply did not strip General McClellan of his command, if he was so unwilling to use it properly.
In the meantime, while General McClellan massed his army on the outskirts of Yorktown about fifty miles southeast of Richmond, General Grant defeated the rebel forces at Shiloh in Tennessee, but it had been a costly battle, the bloodiest of the war so far, with more than thirteen thousand killed, wounded, or missing on the Union side and nearly eleven thousand for the South. Among those killed was Mrs. Lincoln’s half brother Samuel B. Todd, an officer serving with the Twenty-Fourth Louisiana. His death reminded Mrs. Lincoln’s critics of her family’s ties to secessionists and stirred up the old, tired questions about her loyalties—an appalling, unnecessary thing to do when the White House remained draped in mourning black, Kate thought, showing callous disregard for Mrs. Lincoln’s unrelenting grief. So recently celebrated throughout the North, General Grant suddenly found himself vilified in the press. Many called for his removal, but President Lincoln replied, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.” Kate wondered if General McClellan heard the rebuke in the president’s words, and whether it would make any difference.
While war raged in the West and seemed perpetually deferred in Virginia, other battles were fought and won in the long struggle to end slavery. On April 16, a beautiful spring day, President Lincoln signed an act of Congress abolishing slavery forever in Washington City. The measure had been hotly contested in Congress and in the press, and through letters and petitions to congressmen, editors, and anyone else with any degree of influence, a great many white citizens of the capital demanded that the bill be voted down. In the end their complaints and protests went unheeded, the measure became law, and the colored residents of Washington responded with unrestrained jubilation. Voices rose in joyful cheers and reverent hymns throughout colored neighborhoods, where community leaders, well aware that their every action was being watched and judged, urged them to respond with quiet dignity. Their faith in the president had been renewed, as was their resolve to see slavery abolished everywhere, for everyone, for all time.
As thankful and happy as Kate was that the enslaved people of Washington City had been granted their freedom, she still felt a stirring of apprehension to see Mr. Lincoln, a relative latecomer to the abolitionist cause, suddenly celebrated as its great champion. For decades Father had been known as the true friend of the Negro people, a standard bearer for their rights and liberties—as opposed to Mr. Lincoln, who had often said he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it already existed. If he were suddenly to embrace abolitionism, his transformation would be good for the cause and for his immortal sou
l but potentially disastrous for Father, who would have a more difficult time drawing ethical distinctions between himself and the incumbent in the race to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1864.
If Father shared Kate’s worries, he did not let them interfere with the performance of his duties. On May 5, he accepted President Lincoln’s invitation to accompany him on a trip to Fort Monroe, in hopes that a personal visit to General McClellan would galvanize him into forward movement. Secretary Stanton and General Egbert Viele joined them aboard the Miami, a five-gun ship in the revenue cutter service, for the twenty-seven-hour journey to Hampton Roads. When Father returned a week later, elated and triumphant, he shared an enthralling tale with his daughters—of hours spent on deck entertained by Mr. Lincoln’s jokes and stories; hours more poring over maps of Virginia and studying troop positions; their intense discussions leading them to the conclusion that the crucial port city of Norfolk ought to be attacked immediately; a dangerous nighttime climb from the Miami to the flagship Minnesota, from which Commodore Goldsborough led the attack; of driving off the fearsome Confederate ship the Merrimac with the help of the Union ironclad the Monitor; and ultimately, of compelling the rebels to evacuate Norfolk and scuttle the fearsome Merrimac.
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