Elihu Washburne

by Michael Hill

  But Washburne took an “active . . . interest” in Lincoln’s career, supporting him for two unsuccessful bids for the Senate in 1855 and 1858 and then for the presidency in 1860. As “an old friend of twenty years,” Washburne gave his “whole soul and energies” to Lincoln’s presidential bid. He delivered a speech in support of Lincoln on the floor of the House on May 29, 1860, and had copies of it published and distributed throughout the nation.

  After Lincoln’s election, Washburne counseled him on political developments in Washington (particularly with regard to threats of Southern secession) and advised him on Cabinet appointments. In early 1861, as Lincoln headed toward Washington for the inauguration, there were rumors of plots to assassinate him along the way. In Baltimore, as his train headed to Washington in darkness, Pinkerton agents persuaded Lincoln to disguise himself in an “old overcoat and a new soft wool hat.” Washburne was the only person to greet him on his arrival in the capital and immediately whisked him off by carriage to the Willard Hotel.

  Washburne would see Lincoln often during the next several years as the nation plunged into civil war. “The door of the President’s house was never to be closed against the man,” the Chicago Tribune said of the relationship between Lincoln and Washburne. “He was expected to come each day, and any hour was the right one. Often when Mr. Lincoln’s heart was full of anxiety and telegraph messages were not full enough, nor impartial enough to bring peace, Mr. Washburne would travel to the front, and bear his load of facts to the careworn man at Washington.”

  Washburne first met Ulysses S. Grant on April 16, 1861, two days after word reached Galena that Fort Sumter had fallen to the Confederates. They were both attending a town gathering in response to Lincoln’s “call for volunteers” to aid the Union. Washburne knew nothing of Grant, who had resigned from the army seven years before and was now working as a clerk at his father’s leather-goods store.

  Grant had graduated from West Point in 1843 and served in the Mexican War under Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott from 1846 to 1848. In 1854 he resigned from the military and spent the next six years working as a farmer, bill collector, and finally as a clerk for his father. Because he was the only man in town with any military experience, Grant was asked to chair the town meeting. When he spoke—quietly but confidently—he told the gathering of his intention to answer Lincoln’s call.

  Washburne was impressed by what he saw and heard. Within months he helped Grant obtain the rank of colonel in command of the Twenty-First Illinois regiment. The new colonel was stationed for a time in Missouri, a post critical to maintaining control of the Mississippi River. In July, Washburne convinced President Lincoln to promote Grant to the rank of brigadier general. Grant was grateful and told Washburne, “I can assure you . . . that my whole heart is in the cause which we are fighting for, and I pledge myself that, if equal to the task before me, you shall never have cause to regret the part you have taken.”

  Grant was ordered to Cairo, Illinois, and put in charge of protecting the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Grant’s units would engage the Confederates in a remarkable string of bloody battles in the western theater of war: Fort Donelson and Shiloh in 1862, and the siege of Vicksburg in 1863. As a result of the victory at Vicksburg, Lincoln appointed him to the rank of lieutenant general, in command of the entire Union army.

  After the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, the war moved quickly to northern Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. On July 21, 1861, Washburne traveled by carriage with thousands of other excited onlookers to Manassas Junction, Virginia, for an early showdown between Union and Confederate forces at the Battle of Bull Run. Everyone expected to see a rout of the Confederates by the Union army under the command of General Irvin McDowell. Quickly, however, everything turned to disaster. The rebel forces under Generals Joseph Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard pushed McDowell’s forces back, forcing a wild and chaotic retreat. Washburne, in the middle of the battle, recalled an “avalanche” of soldiers “pouring down the road” near him. He later wrote of the “perfect panic” he saw all around him:

  Never before had I such feelings. I had read of wars, and retreats and routs, but I never expected, or wanted to live to see my own countrymen retreating before an enemy. On they came, baggage wagons, horses, carriages, foot soldiers, cavalry, artillerymen, pell-mell, helter-skelter . . . The soldiers threw away their guns and their blankets and divested themselves of every encumbrance. Officers, blush to say, were running with their men . . .

  Washburne and a friend stopped their carriage. They jumped out and tried to “rally and form the men, but we might as well have attempted to stop the current of the Mississippi with a straw,” Washburne wrote. At one point he grabbed a gun and tried to halt the retreat. “I stood almost alone in the road, threatening to bayonet every cowardly soldier who was running away.” But nothing worked.

  With the battle lost, Washburne made his way back to Washington. He rushed to the White House, where he met with President Lincoln and his Cabinet to discuss the debacle. “A more sober set of men I never before met,” Washburne recalled in a letter to his wife.

  Panic and defeat gripped the capital for days, but Washburne was determined. “We will whip the traitors yet,” he told his wife back in Galena.

  Over the next four years, Washburne would revisit the seat of war time and time again, often traveling to the front lines with his friend General Grant. In May of 1864, he joined the Union army in northern Virginia to witness two of the bloodiest engagements of the war: Spotsylvania and the Wilderness. “We are in the midst of terrific events,” he told his wife, Adele. “It is fighting, fighting all the time and the most desperate and terrible of the war. The imagination cannot paint all the horrors that are around us. It is war, on the greatest scale the world has ever seen.”

  The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House raged for thirteen days and resulted in some 30,000 Union and Confederate casualties. After the second day of battle, he wrote to Adele, “Such a long and awful day I never went through before in my whole life and hope never to see another.” Despite all the horrors of the struggle, Washburne was pleased with the success of General Grant. He “is the great head and soul of the army,” Washburne said. “He is in capital spirits and seems to have no doubt of success.”

  Less than a year later, the war was over. Some 750,000 Americans had died in the struggle. After Lee surrendered, Washburne joined Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia. While there, he rode through the rebel camp as they turned over their arms and began to disperse into the countryside. As the rebel prisoners marched by hour after hour, Washburne described them as a “terrible looking set.”

  Days later, on his way back to Washington, Washburne received the “shocking news of the assassination of our God-given and beloved President.” The news of Lincoln’s death, he told his wife, “completely unmanned me.” Selected as one of Lincoln’s pallbearers, Washburne accompanied the martyred President’s funeral train all the way home to Illinois.

  After the assassination of Lincoln, Washburne initially supported the new President, Andrew Johnson. But soon, like Grant, he grew disillusioned with him over Reconstruction policies and pushed hard in the House for his impeachment, calling him “a bad and faithless man.”

  In a speech on the floor of the House on February 22, 1868, Washburne condemned the embattled president:

  Let him be impeached for his last great crime that he has committed against the Constitution and laws of his country. Let him be promptly tried, and if found guilty, let him be removed from the office he has disgraced. His longer retention in office is a perpetual and enduring menace against the peace and happiness and prosperity of the nation. His whole official career as President has been marked by a wicked disregard of all the obligations of public duty and by a degree of perfidy and treachery and turpitude unheard of in the history of the rulers of a free people.

  During the trial in the Senate, Washburne felt confide
nt that the Constitution would be “vindicated” and Johnson convicted. But despite the impassioned pleas of Washburne and other opponents in Congress, Johnson survived his trial by just one vote.

  Later that year Washburne backed his old Galena friend Ulysses S. Grant for the presidency. On the day of the election Grant received the returns at Washburne’s home in Galena via a telegraph that had been installed in his library. As the machine ticked away, Grant appeared as “calm as a summer morning.”

  “The little old library looks like a Committee room of ward politicians,” he wrote to Adele. That night, after Grant’s election was assured, the local Galena “Lead Mine Band” came to Washburne’s house and played music. “We felt pretty foxy,” a jubilant Washburne reported to Adele.

  In one of his first Cabinet appointments after the election, Grant named Washburne Secretary of State. Many were surprised by the choice, and the nomination was ridiculed by political foes, some in the press claiming he was “not fit for the place.” The New York World called Washburne “a man of narrow mind” who had “never originated an important measure.” Gideon Welles, who had served as Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy and often clashed with Congressman Washburne over appropriation measures, dismissed him as “coarse, uncultivated.” But Grant was unmoved. “No other idea presented itself stronger to my mind . . . than I should continue to have your advice and assistance,” he later told Washburne.

  Washburne’s nomination was confirmed by the Senate on March 5, 1869, the day after Grant’s inauguration. He would serve only twelve days. Throughout the winter Washburne had been seriously ill and was confined to bed for nearly a month. At times his family and friends feared for his life. It was the latest in a series of illnesses that had plagued Washburne since his early days in Galena. He had been troubled by fevers, nervous strain, and “spinal irritations.” At times he could barely walk. Once he had sought medical treatment in Europe—taking occasional injections of morphine for pain—but nothing seemed to work.1,

  Knowing he would “not be able to discharge the duties of that office,” he resigned. Grant accepted his resignation with regret but with the “assurance of continued confidence in [his] ability, zeal and friendship.”

  Washburne’s eldest son, Gratiot, was relieved that his father had resigned and urged him to “take a good rest and recuperate your health.”

  By late spring 1869, Washburne’s health had improved considerably. President Grant now offered him the post of Minister to France. Washburne was thrilled by the appointment and accepted, convinced that the time in Europe would be beneficial to his health. Above all, he was delighted to be out of Washington and the political grind. “The last few years of my life were years of great labor, activity and responsibility and I must confess I was pretty used up,” he confided to friends back home. “My great enjoyment in being abroad is in being away from home and out of the incessant turmoil, strife, labor and excitement of political life. It is an immeasurable relief to me.”

  Despite some lingering concerns about his health, he was certain there was “nothing in the discharge of the duties” that would prevent him from getting along “well enough.” He was sure the social duties of an ambassador would be the “most troublesome of all.”

  The new Minister departed alone for France on May 1, 1869. Adele had just given birth to a new son, Elihu Benjamin III, and it was decided that she and the rest of the family would join him later after he was fully settled in Paris. (By 1869 the Washburnes had seven children: Gratiot, age 20; Hempstead, 18; William Pitt, 15; Elihu Benjamin, Jr., 12; Susan Adele, 10; Marie Lisa, 6; and Elihu Benjamin III, 1.) Washburne’s journey across the Atlantic on the steamer Péreire was frightful. Immediately after his arrival in Paris, he wrote home to Adele:

  Dear Mother:

  And did she roll, that Péreire, and the storm howl, the wind blew and the tempest rage terrible, offensive. We left our shores right in the eye of a raging noreaster . . . We had head winds and stormy seas about the whole distance and in all my voyages [I] never suffered so much sea sickness. I was only able to be at dinner twice during the whole trip . . . I thought constantly of you and the children coming out . . .

  [All] our sea trouble came to an end on Tuesday night at eight o’clock when the lights on the coast of France greeted our anxious and welling eyes. At 101/2 we cast anchor and in an hour and a half a tug came out and took us all on board and soon our feet pressed the shores of La Belle France in the quaint old city of Brest. After a long delay we got to the hotel with our baggage at three o’clock in the morning. In the milieu my carpet bag got lost and I was in a tremendous fever, for it had all my papers. In due time it mysteriously came to light and it has not since been out of my sight.

  At seven o’clock yesterday morning we left Brest and arrived here [in Paris] at midnight last night after a very pleasant ride. The country looked beautiful and the day was pleasant and released from the thralldom of old Neptune we all felt happy. . . .

  Once in Paris, Washburne wrote home almost daily. On May 17 he told the children how dearly he missed them and assured them that once they arrived in Paris they would “kick up” their heels and have a “high good old time.”

  After presenting his letters of credence on May 23, 1869, as the new diplomatic Minister from the United States of America, Washburne was warmly received by the court of Napoléon III. Thanks to Adele, Washburne had some understanding of the French language. Fluent in French herself, Adele had for years encouraged him to study the language and French history. However, shortly after his arrival in Paris, Washburne, as the new ambassador to the court of France, decided it best to hire a tutor. “I have my teacher come every morning and we gabble away at a great rate,” he informed his wife. “I mean to persevere to the end.”

  Washburne soon settled into his new post at the American Legation, located at 95 Rue de Chaillot, just off the Champs-Élysées and not far from the Arch of Triumph. The offices of the American Minister were plain and “dreary” and, as Washburne’s daughter Marie would later recall, were like a “middle-class apartment . . . furnished in the most bourgeois manner.”

  The Minister’s room was of medium size and depressing . . . There was a huge desk and a few chairs. Each room was gloomy, but the most depressing spot of all was a green carpet worn nearly black.

  That fall Washburne was reunited with his family when Adele arrived in Paris with the children, except for eighteen-year-old Hempstead, who remained behind in America to attend school. After their arrival Adele was quite ill for a time, keeping Washburne occupied at home with her and the children, who were homesick for “Galena and their little playmates.” Gratiot—nicknamed “Grack”—had also come along in hopes of finding a position at a business firm in Paris. “Grack” was headstrong and independent, qualities Washburne admired. “Gratiot is a good boy in every sense,” he told a friend back home. “Honest, intelligent, excellent disposition and fine manners and good habits. He is ambitious of doing something for himself and I am glad to see it. I want my boys to paddle their canoes as you and I paddled ours.”

  They soon rented a house at 75 Avenue de l’Impératrice, located off the Champs-Élysées and near the Bois de Boulogne. Washburne told friends back home that it was an “elegant” house with “plenty of room, convenient, . . . [and] well furnished.” It had stables, a garden, and a little yard in front. “It is really just the thing we want,” he told his brother.

  When the new Minister arrived in 1869, the grandeur and brilliance of Napoléon III’s Second Empire was on display.

  The Emperor, residing at the Tuileries, was in the midst of a brilliant court [Washburne later wrote] and was surrounded with glittering splendor. Princes and Dukes, Marquises, Counts and Barons, maintained their butterfly existence, and the grandes dames, in their splendid toilets, promenaded in their gilded phaetons on the magnificent Avenue of the Champs-Élysées, or in the winding and shady alleys of the Forest of Boulogne . . . The cry of “Vive l’Empereur,” uttere
d by the courtiers and parasites, was often heard in the streets, and was responded to by a giddy throng in Paris, which flattered by the counterfeit consideration of the government, dazzled by the glitter of the court, or, fattening on the wealth of royalty, abandoned itself to the falsehood of pleasant dreams, and bowed down before the false glory of the material strength of the Empire.

  But a growing resentment among the people and the increasing militarism of Prussia threatened the Emperor’s regime. During his nearly eighteen-year reign, he had transformed Paris into a centerpiece of civilization and splendor, much of it achieved through the massive public and artistic works projects of the Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann. Two years earlier, during the great Paris Exposition of 1867, the city had been the showcase of the world. But the grand empire had come at a price. While the wealthy benefited, life for the poor and working classes grew harder. Over half the population of Paris, the baron said, was “in poverty bordering on destitution.” Washburne himself noticed that the city had “certain appearances of prosperity, happiness and content, but they were like the fruit of the Dead Sea, and to the last degree deceptive.”

  The people were restless, and attempts at reform did little to calm them. Protesters took to the streets, and the press continued to inflame the public against the government. Only weeks after Washburne arrived, he saw frightening signs of what was to come. “There have been great riots and disturbances during the last week,” he wrote. “Indeed, many thought we were on the eve of another revolution. Vast crowds assembled every night on the Boulevards, singing the Marseillaise, raising seditious cries, destroying property, etc.”