Lincoln

by David Herbert Donald

  IV

  During the next months while McClellan was organizing and training the new soldiers, Lincoln had a breathing spell from political pressure, because everybody recognized that it would take time to build a real army. During these weeks the President and his family could for the first time enjoy living in the White House. Initially they had been overwhelmed by the size of the Executive Mansion with its thirty-one rooms, not including the conservatory, various outbuildings, and stables. The East Room alone was about as large as their entire Springfield house. Except for the family dining room, the first floor was open to all visitors. An aged Irish doorkeeper, Edward McManus, was supposed to screen visitors, but in practice anybody who wanted to could stroll in at any hour of the day and often late at night. On the second floor nearly half the rooms were also public, so that the Lincolns’ private quarters, which at first seemed so palatial, proved to be remarkably constricted. The upstairs oval room became the family sitting room. The two adjoining rooms on the south side were those of the President and Mrs. Lincoln; as in Springfield, they had separate but connecting bedrooms. Across the wide corridor were the state guest room, called the Prince of Wales Room, and the infrequently used room of Robert, who was in the White House only during Harvard vacations. Tad and Willie had smaller rooms on the north side.

  The younger boys found endless opportunities for mischief and adventure in the Executive Mansion. To adults the soldiers stationed on the south grounds of the White House were an ominous reminder of danger, but to Willie and Tad the members of the “Bucktair Pennsylvania regiment were playmates who could always be counted on for stories and races. Catching the martial spirit, Willie and Tad took great pleasure in drilling all the neighborhood boys they could round up. With two special friends who just matched them in age—Bud and Holly Taft, sons of a federal judge who lived nearby—they commandeered the roof of the mansion for their fort, and there, with small logs painted to look like cannon, they resolutely fired away at unseen Confederates across the Potomac.

  Children in the White House were something new for Americans, and citizens began showering the boys with presents. The most valued, and the most lasting, were the pets. Someone gave Willie a beautiful little pony, to which he was devoted; he rode the animal nearly every day and, being a generous boy, often allowed Tad to ride, even though the younger boy was so small that his legs stuck straight out on the sides. Especially cherished were two small goats, Nanko and Nanny, which frisked on the White House grounds and, when they had an opportunity, tore up the White House garden. At times the animals, like the general public, seemed to have the run of the White House. On one occasion Tad harnessed Nanko up to a chair, which served him as a sled, and drove triumphantly through the East Room, where a reception was in progress. As dignified matrons held up their hoop skirts, Nanko pulled the yelling boy around the room and out through the door again.

  When Lincoln could find time, he played with his boys. One day Julia Taft, the teenage sister of Bud and Holly, heard a great commotion in the upstairs oval room and entered to find the President of the United States lying on his back on the floor, Willie and Bud holding down his arms, Tad and Holly, his legs. “Julie, come quick and sit on his stomach!” cried Tad, as the President grinned at her grandly. There were also quiet times when Lincoln told stories or read to the boys; he would balance Willie and Bud on each knee while Tad mounted the back of his big chair and Holly climbed on the arm.

  But such relaxed times were rare because Lincoln worked harder than almost any other American President. After a meager breakfast he went immediately to his office, where he signed as many papers and commissions as he could before the day’s regular schedule began. A solid black walnut table occupied the center of the office; here the cabinet members gathered for their biweekly sessions. Along one wall of the office were a sofa and two upholstered chairs, above which hung maps of the theaters of military operations. A large upright mahogany desk, so battered that one of Lincoln’s secretaries thought it must have come “from some old furniture auction,” was in one corner. The pigeonholes above it served as a filing cabinet. Lincoln’s smaller working desk stood between the two windows.

  Adjoining the President’s office were rooms occupied by his small staff, equipped with nondescript furnishings. Most of the floor of this wing of the White House was covered with oilcloth, which made it easier to clean up after overflowing or missed spittoons. Lincoln’s private secretary was the self-effacing, methodical Nicolay, and the effervescent John Hay served as Nicolay’s assistant. As the burden of correspondence grew, William O. Stoddard, technically a clerk in the Interior Department, was brought in to help with the initial screening of the 200 to 300 letters that came in each day. One of his jobs was to throw away the letters from cranks and lunatics. Much later, when Stoddard became ill, Edward D. Neill of Minnesota, another clerk in the Interior Department, took his place. Hay spelled out the duties of these assistants when he instructed Neill to take charge in his temporary absence: “There will probably be little to do. Refer as little to the President as possible, Keep visitors out of the house when you can. Inhospitable, but prudent. I have a few franked envelopes. Let matters of ordinary reference go without formality of signature.”

  Absolutely devoted to Lincoln, Nicolay and Hay were convinced that he would be remembered as a great President, and they early agreed that they would someday write a history of his administration. Lincoln promised to help them. Behind Lincoln’s back Nicolay and Hay affectionately referred to him as “the Ancient” (possibly derived from “Old Abe”) or “the Tycoon,” in reference to the all-powerful Emperor of Japan. Lincoln always addressed Nicolay by his last name and treated him with great respect, but he called Hay “John” and treated him like a son.

  In the first days of his administration Lincoln tried to be orderly and businesslike. He attempted to scan and digest all the morning papers that reached the White House. Finding that too time-consuming, he instructed his secretaries to prepare a digest of the news for his perusal, but presently he discontinued even that. Though he occasionally glanced at the telegraphic news dispatches in one or two papers, he read none of the newspapers consistently and almost never looked at their editorials. There was, he believed, nothing that newspapermen could tell him that he did not already know.

  From early morning until dusk visitors thronged these business rooms of the White House. In the early months of the administration the line was so long that it extended down the stairs to the front entrance, with a candidate for a job or a military appointment perched on each step. Most of these applicants could be handled expeditiously. Lincoln quickly scanned letters of recommendation, referred petitioners to the proper department heads, and listened intently to complaints and made proper sympathetic noises. Whenever possible he avoided flatly rejecting an application, preferring to tell one of his celebrated “leetle stories” to suggest how impossible the request was. When an officer accused of embezzling forty dollars of government money appealed for leniency on the ground that he had really stolen only thirty dollars, the President was reminded of an Indiana man who charged his neighbor’s daughter with unseemly behavior in having three illegitimate children. “‘Now that’s a lie,’ said the man whose family was so outrageously scandalized, ‘and I can prove it, for she only has two.’”

  Remarkably, the President’s systematic lack of system seemed to work. Stories of his accessibility to even the humblest petitioner, his patience, and his humanity spread throughout the North. For the first time in American history citizens began to feel that the occupant of the White House was their representative. They referred to him as Father Abraham, and they showered him with homely gifts: a firkin of butter, a crate of Bartlett pears, New England salmon. With special appropriateness a man from Johnsburgh, New York, sent the President “a live American Eagle[,] the bird of our land,” which had lost one foot in a trap. “But,” the New Yorker continued, “he is yet an Eagle and perhaps no more cripled [sic] than the Na
tion whose banner he represented, his wings are sound and will extend seven feet.”

  V

  At the same time, Mary Lincoln was achieving some successes of her own, and she became the most conspicuous female occupant of the Executive Mansion since Dolley Madison. Brought up with an active interest in public affairs, deeply involved in her husband’s political career, she had no intention of fading quietly into the Washington background. She intended to become the First Lady of the land—a term that was coined to describe her.

  She enjoyed her role as hostess, and she made a favorable impression on most visitors. The cynical William Howard Russell, the American correspondent of the Times of London, found much to criticize about her appearance and manner, but he praised her simple jewelry and her “very gorgeous and highly colored” dress and could not fail to observe that she fluttered her fan a great deal to display her rounded, well-proportioned shoulders. Noting that Mrs. Lincoln was “of the middle age and height, of a plumpness degenerating to the embonpoint natural to her years,” with plain features and a homely appearance “stiffened, however, by the consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer,” Russell judged that she was “desirous of making herself agreeable,” and rather grudgingly added, “I own I was agreeably disappointed.”

  She made refurbishing the White House her main project as First Lady. She found it in bad shape. The furniture was broken down, the wallpaper peeling, the carpeting worn, and the draperies torn. The eleven basement rooms were filthy and rat-infested. The whole place had the air of a rundown, unsuccessful third-rate hotel. Congress had appropriated $20,000 to be expended over the four years of her husband’s term of office for rehabilitating the Executive Mansion, and she intended to put it to good use.

  In the summer of 1861 she went to Philadelphia and New York to buy furnishings suitable for the mansion of the President of the United States and his First Lady. Merchants showed her the best and most expensive carpeting, material for upholstery and drapes, splendid furniture, and exquisite china. Mary was not entirely rational when it came to money and spending, and, having no head for figures, she bought everything: chairs, sofas and hassocks, fabrics of damask, brocade, pink tarlatan, plush, and “French Satin DeLaine”; wallpaper imported from France; and a full set of Haviland china in “Solferino and gold,” with the American coat of arms in the center of each plate. For the Red Room she ordered 117 yards of crimson Wilton carpet, and for the East Room an imported Brussels velvet carpet, pale green in color, ingeniously woven as a single piece, which, one admirer gushed, “in effect looked as if the ocean, in gleaming and transparent waves, were tossing roses at your feet.”

  On her return to Washington she personally oversaw the scrubbing, painting, and plastering of the White House, so that for the first time in years the entire mansion was sparklingly clean. When her new furniture arrived, the whole place took on an air of elegant opulence.

  But by fall, when the bills began to come in, she discovered that she had greatly overspent the congressional allowance not just for the year but for Lincoln’s full term. Desperately she tried to keep her husband from learning what she had done. In her panic she exploded in rage at anyone who dared cross her. Nicolay and Hay, who had to deal with her temperamental outbursts, began to refer to her as “the Hell-cat.” She authorized a sale of secondhand White House furniture, but it brought in almost as little money as did the sale of manure from the White House stables at ten cents a wagonload. Then John Watt, the White House gardener, showed her easier ways of covering her deficit, by padding bills for household expenditures and presenting vouchers for nonexistent purchases. Discharging the White House steward, she secured that appointment for Mrs. Watt—and performed the duties and kept the salary herself.

  None of this, however, could cover her enormous overrun of expenditures, and she had to ask Benjamin B. French, the commissioner of Public Buildings, who kept the White House accounts, to explain the situation to the President and to ask him to sponsor a supplemental congressional appropriation. Lincoln was furious. Never, he said, would he ask Congress for an appropriation “for flub dubs for that damned old house!” “It would stink in the land to have it said that an appropriation of $20,000 for furnishing the house had been overrun by the President when the poor freezing soldiers could not have blankets,” he went on. The White House “was furnished well enough—better than any house they had ever lived in.” Rather than ask Congress for more money he vowed he would pay for Mary’s purchases out of his own pocket. Eventually, though, he was obliged to back down, and Congress quietly passed two deficiency appropriations to cover rehabilitating the White House.

  VI

  Support for the President, which appeared so overwhelming immediately after Bull Run, rapidly eroded. For many Democrats the defeat brought realization that the nation faced a long and costly war. Those who were styled “War Democrats” rallied behind the President. A larger group of Democrats reluctantly accepted the war as long as it was fought to preserve “the constitution as it is and the Union as it was,” but they were nervous lest a prolonged conflict prove “the Trojan horse of tyranny.” A few, like James A. Bayard of Delaware and Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, willingly acknowledged that they were Peace Democrats. Bayard took as his motto “Anything is better than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war.”

  These divisions deeply troubled Lincoln. He recognized what he called “the plain facts” of his situation. The Republicans, as he said, “came into power, very largely in a minority of the popular vote.” His administration could not possibly put down the rebellion without assistance from the Democrats. It was, he observed, “mere nonsense to suppose a minority could put down a majority in rebellion.” Consequently he carefully cultivated War Democrats in Congress like Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the only Southern senator who refused to follow his state when it seceded, and Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, who sustained the President’s use of war powers and refuted the arguments of Chief Justice Taney. He rewarded Joseph Holt, the staunch Kentucky Unionist who had been Secretary of War under Buchanan, by naming him judge advocate general. In making military appointments he tried to select commanders on the basis of military expertise rather than on what he called “political affinity,” and a sizable number of the generals he selected were Democrats: George B. McClellan, Benjamin F. Butler, W. S. Rosecrans, John A. McClernand, and many others. In policy, too, he tried to build a broad base of support by presenting the issue before the country as one of Union versus Disunion.

  In attempting to build a consensus, the President ran the risk of dividing his own party. Many Republicans felt that he was neglecting the moral and political arguments against slavery that had been the foundation of their party’s ideology. Two days after the defeat at Bull Run, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan and Senator Sumner, accompanied by Vice President Hamlin, came to the White House and urged the President to make the war a contest between Freedom and Slavery. Sumner argued that emancipation was a military necessity, and Chandler asked Lincoln to free the slaves in order to create such chaos in the South that the Confederacy would collapse. The President listened politely but said such measures were too far in advance of public opinion.

  Among disgruntled Republicans the feeling spread that Lincoln, though well meaning, was slow and incompetent. In his diary Count Adam Gurowski, the eccentric Polish nobleman who worked as a translator for the State Department, accurately captured the mood of Republicans in Congress: “Mr. Lincoln in some way has a slender historical resemblance to Louis XVI—similar goodness, honesty, good intentions; but the size of events seems to be too much for him.” According to Gurowski, Senator Wade was so “disgusted with the slowness and inanity of the administration” that he remarked, “I do not wonder that people desert to Jeff. Davis, as he shows brains; I may desert myself.” To express that dissatisfaction and to give some direction to the Union war effort, the Congress just before
adjournment passed the Confiscation Act, which provided that a master would lose ownership of any slave employed to assist the Confederate armies. Lincoln signed the measure reluctantly, and it had little effect except as an expression of opinion.

  In late August the diffuse feeling of unhappiness with the Lincoln administration found a focus. General John C. Frémont, named commander of the Department of the West, with headquarters in St. Louis, took drastic steps to defeat a Confederate invasion in southwestern Missouri and end widespread guerrilla warfare elsewhere. Proclaiming martial law in the entire state of Missouri, Frémont announced that civilians bearing arms would be tried by court-martial and shot if convicted and that slaves of persons who aided the rebellion would be emancipated.

  Fremont’s proclamation, issued without consultation with Washington, clearly ran counter to the policy Lincoln had announced in his inaugural address of not interfering with slavery and against the recently adopted Crittenden resolution pledging that restoration of the Union was the only aim of the war. It also violated the provisions of the Confiscation Act, which established judicial proceedings to seize slaves used to help the rebel army. Lincoln saw at once that Frémont’s order must be modified. He directed the general to withdraw his threat to shoot captured civilians bearing arms. “Should you shoot a man, according to the proclamation, the Confederates would very certainly shoot our best man in their hands in retaliation,” he admonished Frémont; “and so, man for man, indefinitely.” The President viewed Frémont’s order to liberate slaves of traitorous owners as even more dangerous. Such action, he reminded the general, “will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.” He asked Frémont to modify his proclamation.