Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  The president, “a little excited,” exclaimed: “It never can have my approval—I’ll pay for it out of my own pocket first—it would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the President of the United States had approved a bill overrunning an appropriation of $20,000 for flub dubs for this damned old house, when the poor freezing soldiers cannot have blankets! Who is that Carryl, and how came he to be employed[?]”

  French replied: “I do not know, sir—the first I ever heard of him he brought me a large bill for room paper.”

  Lincoln was especially shocked by a “Rich, Elegant Carpet made to order” that his wife had purchased. “I would like to know where a carpet worth $2,000 can be put,” he queried.

  “In the East Room,” French suggested.

  The president called it “a monstrous extravagance,” adding: “Well I suppose Mrs. Lincoln must bear the blame, let her bear it, I swear I won’t! … It was all wrong to spend one cent at such a time, and I never ought to have had a cent expended, the house was furnished well enough, better than any one we ever lived in, and if I had not been overwhelmed with other business I would not have had any of the appropriation expended, but what could I do? I could not attend to everything.” He concluded “by swearing that he never would approve that bill” and that rather than sign such legislation “he would pay it out of his own pocket!”233

  Rumor had it that when Lincoln refused to authorize payment, his wife “was mad & stormed … and would not sleep with him for three nights.”234

  (In April 1862, French told his son that Mary Lincoln “is a little troublesome, & I can tell you some rather funny things relative to my experience with the worthy President and his Lady. Abraham is my beau ideal of an honest man, and Mrs. L. is—not my beau ideal pendant to that picture. You have heard the song I presume ‘Oh Kitty Clover she troubles me so, Oh—oh—oh——oh—oh—oh.’ Substitute Mrs. L-for Kitty & I can sing it from my heart!”)235

  In February 1862, Congress passed a supplemental appropriation of $14,000 for White House “extras,” over the objections of some Republicans, including Senators Lyman Trumbull, Morton Wilkinson, and James Grimes.236 Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin explained that he and his colleagues “were placed in this fix[:] either the President must pay this money out of his own pocket or we must appropriate it to cover deficiencies.” According to Doolittle, Senator James A. Pearce of Maryland “very delicately passed the matter on in the Senate and we voted it somewhat upon the principle that is it not gentlemanly to overhaul a lady’s wardrobe.” The legislators also thought “it would not be just to compel the President to pay” for the act of his “silly” and “vainglorious” wife. It was, Doolittle said, “exceedingly mortifying.”237

  Mary Lincoln “was surrounded by flatterers and intriguers, seeking for influence or such places as she can give,” William H. Russell noted.238 She had, said the editor of the Indianapolis Journal, “been spoiled by the gross flatteries of the fools about the White House, and thinks she must conduct herself like a European Queen.” That Republican newspaper editorialized: “If the President hasn’t sense enough, or control enough, over his foolish wife,” then it was up to members of Congress “to exert that control themselves over him and his wife both.”239 Other newspapers referred to her as “our parvenue queen” who had “no conception of dignity” and “all the peevish assurance of a baseless parvenue.” David Davis criticized the “queenly” way she traveled, and she reportedly sought to have the presidential yacht, the Harriet Lane, renamed the Lady Lincoln.240 Her imperious manner led people to call the First Lady “her royal majesty.”241 Even her friend Mercy Levering Conkling referred to her as “Our Royal Highness.”242 A satirical newspaper piece criticized her for being “stuck up,” for accepting inappropriate gifts, and for wasting taxpayer dollars on elaborate china.243 A gentleman in Crawfordsville, Indiana, said that everybody there regarded her as “decidedly a snob” and made fun of her. He regretted that “we have a president with so little mind, and a presidentess with so little of the lady.”244

  Benjamin Brown French later wrote that in his dealings with Mary Lincoln, “I always felt as if the eyes of a hyena were upon me, & that the animal was ready, if I made a single mismove, to pounce upon me!” He called her a “bundle of vanity and folly” and wrote verses about her regal ways:

  [She] moved in all the insolence of pride

  as if the world beneath her feet she trod;

  Her vulgar bearing, jewels could not hide,

  And gold’s base glitter was her only god!245

  In May 1865, French confided to his diary that Mrs. Lincoln “is a most singular woman, and it is well for the nation that she is no longer in the White House. It is not proper that I should write down, even here, all I know!”246

  In February 1862, the First Lady scandalized the North by throwing an elaborate White House party, inaccurately called a ball (there was no dancing because Lincoln emphatically forbade it). Instead of the traditional open house, she decided to invite a select group, thereby antagonizing those who were excluded. It was widely viewed as a social blunder.247 The exclusiveness of the event made it seem like a throwback to the aristocratic “drawing rooms” of Martha Washington and a repudiation of the egalitarian practice introduced by Thomas Jefferson.248 The last exclusive White House fete, given by Mrs. John Tyler two decades earlier, had offended many.249

  Some newspapers became indignant because reporters were not invited. When two New York congressmen, flatterers of Mrs. Lincoln, asked that an exception be made for the New York Herald and the Spirit of the Times, the White House staff feared that she would bend the rule and cause other journalists to protest against such favoritism. John G. Nicolay, in charge of White House social arrangements, appealed to his assistant, William O. Stoddard: “I can’t do anything! It will make all sorts of trouble. ‘She’ is determined to have her own way. You will have to see to this. ‘She’ wouldn’t listen to me.” Stoddard artfully persuaded the First Lady to reject the appeal of the two courtiers, much to their dismay.250

  On February 1, with the party less than a week off, Mary Lincoln asked Benjamin Brown French to take charge of the arrangements. “That good lady, who is not popular, but ‘more sinned against than sinning,’ is hand and glove with me, and seems to expect me to get her out of every difficulty,” French told his son. “She implores me, & I try my best to respond to her implorations.” A month later, French reported that “[w]e are all well, and looking on at the doings of our great & good President with admiration. We rather wish Mrs. President was—a more prudent lady.”251

  Mary Lincoln’s motive in breaking with tradition was evidently to silence criticism that under her stewardship, White House entertainments had failed to match the splendor of parties given earlier by Southern leaders’ wives.252 She reportedly thought that it was “her duty to show those haughty secessionist dames [who once ruled society at the capital] that there is sufficient of fashion and respectability among the ladies of loyal families in and about Washington to constitute a court that will easily cast into the shade of that of their bogus President [i.e., Jefferson Davis.]”253 In addition, she evidently sought to economize. A woman defender of Mary Lincoln argued that state dinners were customary at the White House, that the new administration had continued the tradition, and that the First Lady sensibly thought it more efficient and economical to have a few stand-up parties for hundreds of guests than to hold a long series of weekly dinner parties accommodating no more than forty people at a time. Moreover, it gave employment to caterers, dressmakers, and dry goods merchants.254

  But, unlike her critics, Mary Lincoln’s defenders were few in number. She was widely denounced for indulging in extravagance and frivolity while the soldiers were suffering and dying. On one single day she received eighteen hostile letters.255 The National Anti-Slavery Standard bitterly remarked that she “has selected this darkest hour of the Republic for fiddling and dancing at the Presidential mansio
n. It is fit and proper that the most favored of her guests should be Mr. and Mrs. James Gordon Bennett. So we go. If we cannot fight, let us show the world that we can dance.”256 (That abolitionist paper noted that Bennett’s New York Herald had previously run “fulsome panegyrics of Mrs. Lincoln, which disgust all people of taste.”)257 “Poor woman,” Congressman Henry L. Dawes observed. “She seems to act if she expected to be the last President’s wife and was disposed to make the most of it. Trifling at the White House in these times seems as inappropriate as jollity at a funeral.”258 Through an intermediary, Dawes told the president that nothing could “break down his administration so rapidly as this dancing-party given at the time when the nation is in the agonies of civil war. With equal propriety might a man make a ball with a corpse in his house!” In declining an invitation to the party, Senator Ben Wade asked: “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware there is a civil war? If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.”259 George H. Boker, a poet and ardent Republican, penned a scathing verse satire, “The Queen Must Dance.”260 The Cincinnati Commercial thought it “unfortunate that Mrs. Lincoln has so poor an understanding of the true dignity of her position, and the duties devolving upon her. It is not becoming her to be assuming the airs of a fine lady and attempting to shine as the bright star of ‘the Republican court,’ as shameless and designing flatterers call the White House circle.” The editors disapproved of her “rich dresses and glittering equipage, her adornment of the President’s House with costly upholstery,” and her penchant for “crowding it with gay assemblages.”261 To the public, according to another Cincinnati paper, “the occasion seems too serious, the national peril too imminent, the distress of the country too great, and the condition of the nation too humiliating, to inaugurate a carnival at the Government mansion.”262 The journalist Mary Clemmer Ames concluded that Mrs. Lincoln, “unconsciously elated, carried away with the sudden honors of her new condition; unsuspectingly pleased with the delicate, dangerous flatteries of brilliant yet unprincipled intriguers, had little thought for anything but shopping and dressing.”263 The Indianapolis Journal protested: “With an empty treasury and a failing credit, a war raging all around us, and foreign nations threatening to interfere, such displays as that at the White House are a disgrace to the President.”264 Wendell Phillips exclaimed that “Mrs. Lincoln is vulgar, and wants to be fashionable!”265

  In light of this evidence, it is no wonder that Alexander K. McClure concluded that the First Lady “was a consuming sorrow to Mr. Lincoln.” Yet, McClure recalled, the president “bore it all with unflagging patience. She was sufficiently unbalanced to make any error possible and many probable, but not sufficiently so as to dethrone her as mistress of the White House.”266

  26

  “I Expect to Maintain This Contest Until

  Successful, or Till I Die, or Am Conquered,

  or My Term Expires, or Congress or the

  Country Forsakes Me”

  From the Slough of Despond to the Gates of Richmond

  (January–July 1862)

  Lincoln’s decision to replace Cameron with Stanton was a key turning point in the war. As William O. Stoddard aptly noted, it ended “the first scene in the great tragedy,” after which “changes were gradual, but the old order of things passed away.”1 In the winter of 1861–1862, the New York World predicted that Lincoln’s assertiveness in dismissing Cameron “will confirm the opinion which has been for the last ten months slowly maturing in the public mind, that President Lincoln is the most self-poised and self-dependent statesman that could have been placed at the head of the government in this trying crisis. His whole course since his inauguration has exhibited moral robustness combined with masculine sense.” The editors acknowledged that the president “is slow and deliberate, pondering long and turning over an important subject many times in his thoughts before reaching a decision,” but once he “puts down his foot, he puts it down firmly” and “the Alps or the Andes are not more firmly planted on their bases than are his deliberate decisions.” The country “had many presidents who could reach decisions more rapidly; but none, no not even Jackson, whose mind was more self-determined.”2

  Others saw a parallel between the Rail-splitter and Old Hickory. George Templeton Strong detected in the president “a most sensible, straightforward, honest old codger,” both “clear-headed and sound-hearted,” whose “evident integrity and simplicity of purpose would compensate for worse grammar than his, and for even more intense provincialism and rusticity.” Withal, Strong judged that Lincoln was the “best President we have had since old Jackson’s time.”3 John Pendleton Kennedy predicted that Lincoln would “set down that great, broad, flat, long and heavy-shod foot of his, in good earnest, and that it will squelch the whole dozen reptiles who are now crawling across his path into an indistinguishable mass of slime.”4

  In January 1862, Lincoln began to assert himself in dealing with generals, just as he had earlier done with the cabinet. He followed the sound advice of Edward Bates, who “insisted that, being ‘Commander in chief’ by law,” Lincoln “must command—especially in such a war as this.”5 Lyman Trumbull informed Illinois Governor Richard Yates that Lincoln “at last seems to be waking up to the fact … that the responsibility is upon him, & I think he has resolved hereafter not to content himself with throwing all army movements on the Generals commanding, on the ground that he is no military man. He seems inclined to take a personal supervision of matters to some extent, & see that Generals & subordinate officers do their duty.”6 Yates rejoiced to learn that the president “is taking firm hold of the helm.”7

  Lincoln also began standing up to domineering members of Congress, among them the outspoken, combative Senator Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, known as Bluff Ben. A leader of the Radical Republicans, Wade resented Lincoln’s story-telling. One day in early January 1862, the senator replied to a presidential tale stiffly: “Sir, you are not a mile from Tophet [i.e., hell] and you are riding a swift locomotive at that!” Lincoln rejoined: “well, there is one consolation—I shall not have to part long from my senatorial friends. You will be along by the next train!”8 The journalist Benjamin Perley Poore thought that politicos “do not exactly fancy ‘Old Abe,’ for they cannot use him, nor will he be guided by them, for he prefers to decide for himself on all important topics.”9

  As Lincoln took charge of his administration more forcefully, he won increased respect from Congress. When that body met in December, according to Samuel Bowles, editor of the influential Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, “many of his old political friends treated him with marked neglect and discourtesy.” But in late March, Bowles reported from Washington that “all are hastening to do him reverence. His integrity, his wisdom, his caution, his strength as a man and a statesman are warmly admitted on all hands; and he has, more than any other man in the nation, the respect and confidence of Congress.”10

  By the spring, the public, too, had come to share that feeling. “The confidence felt by all loyal men in the integrity and wisdom of President Lincoln forms one of the most marked and hopeful features of the existing political condition of our country,” observed the Philadelphia Press. “Even those who do not approve all his acts accord to him perfect rectitude of purpose and fervent patriotism.”11 The Providence Journal was pleased that Lincoln was “not merely the nominal executive of our government” but had become “really the President. He has the reins in his own hands.”12 Democratic Judge Edwards Pierrepont of New York remarked that Lincoln “is rising above all exterior influence and learning to depend upon himself and taking his own judgment” and “that Seward, even, has little influence with him now.” Somewhat condescendingly, the fastidious Pierrepont added: “He is greater than he seems. His manners are so against him, but he is great from being so good, so conscientious.”13

  If Lincoln’s manners offended Pierrepont, the voters found them to their liking. Poore noted that the president
“will sometimes throw his legs upon the table, as if in his law office in Springfield, and illustrate his position by a good story, or by a colloquial expression, drawn from the mother wit and humor of the prairie people. But this pleasant manner endears him the more to the great mass of those who elected him.”14 Also endearing Lincoln to his constituents was his patience in dealing with advisors and critics. “Mr. Lincoln is a good listener,” reported the New York Commercial Advertiser. “He will patiently hear any man, (unless he is reminded of an anecdote, which he at once relates,) and he thus patiently gathers tribute from all, often submitting to severe criticisms from tried friends.”15 (One of those friends, his former colleague in Congress Truman Smith, grumbled that the “amiable President seems to be averse to hurting any body and I shall not be surprised if the traitors on submission secure to themselves the benefit of a general amnesty.”)16 In late January, a New Yorker declared that Lincoln, Stanton, and McClellan “are not only the popular favorites of the hour but the hope of all thoughtful and patriotic men.”17

  Lincoln’s greater assertiveness was especially appreciated by leaders from his own region. When he asked a Western governor, “Will the people of the West sustain the government through the onerous taxation which must be imposed upon them?” he received an emphatic response: “They will endure anything, if they are convinced that they have got a government.”18 In February, Illinois Congressman William Kellogg approvingly reported that Lincoln “is determined to move on to the accomplishment of the great work before him firmly and surely.”19

  Lincoln did not burn with a desire to wield power, but his keen sense of responsibility led him to perform his duties conscientiously, onerous though he found them to be. He said of the presidency: “It is a big job; the country little knows how big,” and told an Illinois friend: “This getting the nomination for President, and being elected, is all very pleasant to a man’s ambition; but to be the President, and to meet the responsibilities and discharge the duties of the office in times like these is anything but pleasant. I would gladly if I could, take my neck from the yoke, and go home with you to Springfield, and live, as I used [to], in peace with my friends, [rather] than to endure this harassing kind of life.”20