With Stanton in control at the War Department, the President could turn his attention back to the armies. His conferences with McClellan had disappointed him, and the general, whose health was now fully restored, was still reluctant to divulge his plans for an advance. On January 27, Lincoln forced the issue by publishing the “President’s General War Order No. 1.” It ordered all the land and naval forces of the United States to undertake a general advance on February 22 and threatened to hold all commanders to strict accountability for carrying out the order.
The order, which vented Lincoln’s deep sense of frustration with the military, reflected his recent hasty reading of books on strategy. Since McClellan seemed to have no plan for operations against the Confederates, the President announced his own; as he told Browning, it was to “threaten all their positions at the same time with superior force, and if they weakened one to strengthen another seize and hold the one weakened.” Both Lincoln’s strategy and his order ignored such variables as the weather, readiness, roads, communications, and logistics—not to mention the location and strength of the Confederate armies—but he did not intend to announce a specific plan of battle. He wanted to give a jolt to the military, a warning that they must act.
In that sense it worked. February 22 passed without a general advance, but before that date Union armies in the West began to win victories. On January 19, a few days before Lincoln’s order, Union troops under General George H. Thomas routed Confederate forces in the battle of Mill Springs and broke the Confederate line in eastern Kentucky. More significant was a campaign that General Ulysses S. Grant launched to open the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. On February 6, Grant’s forces, aided by navy gunboats under Flag Officer Andrew Foote, captured Fort Henry on the Tennessee River, and eleven days later they forced Fort Donelson to surrender. The Confederates had to abandon Kentucky and most of Tennessee, and on February 25, Buell’s army occupied Nashville.
This was a heady time for an administration that up to now had had few successes. When Lincoln signed the papers promoting Grant to the rank of major general, he could hardly contain his satisfaction. He did not feel competent to speak about the fighting qualities of Eastern men, he observed, but the recent gallant behavior of Illinois troops showed that “if the Southerners think that man for man they are better than our... western men generally, they will discover themselves in a grievous mistake.” In the national capital there was a general sense of euphoria, a belief that with one big push by the Army of the Potomac the Confederacy could be defeated. Even Lincoln shared in this optimism. When Joshua Speed learned that the President, in order to make room for Cameron, was allowing Cassius M. Clay to resign as minister to Russia and take up a commission as major general, he rushed to the White House to protest the return of this loose cannon to Kentucky. The President assured his old friend that there was nothing to worry about because the war would be over before Clay could get back to the United States.
A large party the Lincolns gave on February 5—the very evening, as it happened, before Grant captured Fort Henry—was a sign of the changing times. Ignoring the advice of the protocol officers at the State Department that the President’s entertainment should be confined to soirees open to the public at large and to small private dinners, Mary Lincoln decided to show off the newly refurbished White House to five hundred invited guests, who were required to present tickets of invitation at the door. Inevitably there was much grumbling among those who were not invited. Carriages began arriving about nine in the evening with besworded, overdecorated diplomats, generals in bright dress uniforms, members of the cabinet, Supreme Court justices, and selected senators and representatives. Ushered in by a staff dressed in new mulberry-colored uniforms to match the new Solferino china, guests were greeted in the East Room by the President, who was wearing a new black swallowtail coat, and the First Lady, whose white silk dress, decorated with hundreds of small black flowers, exposed a remarkably low décolletage. In the background the United States Marine Band played, its repertoire including a sprightly new piece, “The Mary Lincoln Polka.” At midnight the doors to the dining room were opened to reveal a magnificent buffet concocted by Maillard’s of New York, the most expensive caterer in the country. It displayed sugary models of the Ship of State, Fort Sumter, and Fort Pickens flanked by mounds of turkey, duck, ham, terrapin, and pheasant. Dinner was served until three, and many guests stayed till daybreak. Altogether, the Washington Star concluded, the party was “the most superb affair of its kind ever seen here.”
IV
The Lincolns’ celebrations were short-lived. Shortly before the party their son Willie had fallen ill with “bilious fever”—probably typhoid fever, caused by pollution in the White House water system. Deeply anxious, his parents considered canceling the grand reception, but the family doctor assured them that the boy was in no immediate danger. Even so, both the President and his wife quietly slipped upstairs during the party to be at their son’s bedside. During the next two weeks Tad came down with the same illness while Willie grew worse and worse.
Sitting up with his sick children night after night, Lincoln was able to transact little business, and he seemed to stumble through his duties. There were fluctuations in Willie’s illness, but during the two weeks after the grand party he grew weaker and weaker, and Lincoln began to despair of his recovery. On February 20 the end came. Stepping into his office, Lincoln said in a voice choked with emotion: “Well, Nicolay, my boy is gone—he is actually gone!” Then he burst into tears and left to give what comfort he could to Tad.
Both parents were devastated by grief. When Lincoln looked on the face of his dead son, he could only say brokenly, “He was too good for this earth ... but then we loved him so.” It seemed appropriate that Willie’s funeral, which was held in the White House, was accompanied by one of the heaviest wind and rain storms ever to visit Washington. Long after the burial the President repeatedly shut himself in a room so that he could weep alone. At nights he had happy dreams of being with Willie, only to wake to the sad recognition of death. On a trip to Fort Monroe, long after Willie was buried, Lincoln read passages from Macbeth and King Lear aloud to an aide, and then from King John he recited Constance’s lament for her son:
And, father cardinal, I have heard you say
That we shall see and know our friends in heaven:
If that be true, I shall see my boy again.
His voice trembled, and he wept.
The President gained some respite from his suffering by caring for Tad, who was still very ill and was heartbroken over the loss of his brother. Often Lincoln lay on the bed beside his sick son to soothe him and give him comfort.
During this time he increasingly turned to religion for solace. As Mary Lincoln said years later, “He first thought... about this subject... when Willie died—never before.” That statement perhaps told more about the lack of intimacy in the Lincoln marriage than it did about the President’s state of mind. Since his election he had come increasingly to speak and think in religious terms. Before 1860 he rarely invoked the deity in his letters or speeches, but after he began to feel the burdens of the presidency, he frequently asked for God’s aid. In his farewell address in Springfield, for instance, he reminded his fellow townsmen, “Without the assistance of [the] Divine Being,... I cannot succeed.” Again and again on his way to Washington, he praised “the Providence of God, who has never deserted us,” and voiced confidence “that the Almighty, the Maker of the Universe” would save the nation. In his inaugural address he expressed the hope that impending war could be avoided by “intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him, who has never yet forsaken this favored land.”
Though deeply felt, these were abstract invocations of a Higher Power to save a society; he now needed more personal reassurance to save himself. During the weeks after Willie’s death Lincoln had several long talks with the Reverend Phineas D. Gurley, pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, whe
re the Lincolns rented a pew. Gently the clergyman comforted him with the assurance that Willie was not dead but still lived in heaven. Lincoln may not have believed him, but he wished to believe him. He did not experience a religious conversion, though when he looked back on the events of this tragic spring, he recognized that he underwent what he called “a process of crystallization” in his religious beliefs. Even so, he did not become a member of any Christian denomination, nor did he abandon his fundamental fatalism. He continued to quote Hamlet:
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
Mary Lincoln’s grief over Willie’s death was even more devastating than her husband’s. Having earlier lost Eddie in Springfield, she could not deal with this second death, and for three weeks she took to her bed, so desolated that she could not attend the funeral or look after Tad, who was slowly beginning to recover. For many months the mere mention of Willie’s name sent her into paroxysms of weeping, and Lincoln had to employ a nurse to look after her. Never again did Mary Lincoln enter the bedroom where Willie died nor the downstairs Green Room, where his body had been embalmed. When she was finally able to emerge from her room, she went into such profound mourning dress that she was almost invisible under the layers of black veils and crepes.
For nearly a year all social activities at the White House were suspended. Mary Lincoln’s mourning was so absolute that she forbade the weekly concerts the Marine Band usually played on the grounds. “When we are in sorrow,” she announced, “quiet is very necessary to us.” A few people took mean satisfaction in the Lincolns’ tragedy. “I suppose Mrs. Lincoln will be providentially deterred from giving any more parties which scandalized so many good persons who did not get invitations,” a Washington merchant wrote. David Davis, who disliked Mary Lincoln as much as he admired her husband, speculated: “It may be that this affliction may save his wife from further gossip, and may change her notions of life.”
V
At about the time of Willie’s death Lincoln’s optimism about military affairs also began to vanish. There were still some successes to celebrate. In the West the Union victory at Pea Ridge, Arkansas (March 6–8), ended the threat of a Confederate invasion of Missouri. In the East, Ambrose E. Burnside, after capturing Roanoke Island, moved inland to New Berne, North Carolina, which could serve as a base for future operations. But elsewhere there was no progress. After the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson the armies in the Mississippi Valley seemed unable to advance. Receiving no dispatches from Grant for two weeks, Halleck assumed that his subordinate was demoralized by victory and removed him from command. Reports spread that Grant had gone back to his old habits, and in Washington he was now considered “little better than a common gambler and drunkard.” Eventually Halleck learned that Grant had been in Nashville conferring with Buell about a joint advance and that a telegraph operator failed to transmit his dispatches. The controversy was important only in that it entailed further delay before the army pushed south.
Even less encouraging were the activities of the Army of the Potomac. The President’s General War Order No. 1 finally forced McClellan to discuss his broad strategy with his commander-in-chief. The general was now convinced that a frontal assault on the Confederate army at Manassas, whose size he consistently overrated, could only lead to another disaster like Bull Run. The proper object of the Union army, he argued, was the capture of Richmond, and he developed an elaborate strategy for attacking the Confederate capital from the east, where the navy could protect his line of supplies. In Lincoln’s view the campaign ought to be directed not against the Southern capital but at the Confederate army, and he favored a direct advance on Manassas.
That essential difference shaped the relationship between Lincoln and McClellan. Over the next few months the general did everything in his power to promote acceptance of his strategy, while the President dragged his feet. Self-absorbed and insensitive, McClellan seemed totally unaware that in a democratic society military commanders are subordinate to civilian authorities, and he felt no need to keep the President informed, much less to seek his advice. For his part, Lincoln, reluctant directly to interfere with military matters when he had no expertise, failed to make McClellan understand that when he made a suggestion he expected the general to follow it. This mutual distrust destroyed any chance for a successful campaign.
Four days after his General War Order No. 1, Lincoln, whose patience was growing thin, issued another order specifically directing the Army of the Potomac to advance and seize Manassas on or before February 22. Upon receiving it, McClellan wrote a twenty-two-page letter to Stanton, detailing his objections to a proposed frontal attack on the Confederates at Manassas and spelling out, for the first time, his plan to attack Richmond from the east. Unimpressed, Lincoln posed a series of questions to the general: Would McClellan’s plan take longer and be more costly than an advance against Manassas? Would it more certainly be successful? Would it offer a sure means of retreat in case of disaster? McClellan respectfully repeated his arguments against an attack on Manassas. Urging his own plan, he pledged, “I will stake my life, my reputation on the result—more than that, I will stake upon it the success of our cause.” Lincoln was not convinced, but he acquiesced.
During the next month as McClellan prepared his expedition Lincoln watched his movements skeptically. Several minor developments increased his doubts. For some time Confederate batteries on the Virginia shore had closed the lower Potomac to navigation and their presence was both an embarrassment and a nuisance. The Army of the Potomac claimed it was unable to remove them. Then an enterprising young Union officer carried out an independent raid and discovered that there were hardly any fortifications on the Virginia side of the river. Even more embarrassing was McClellan’s failure to force the Confederates out of Harpers Ferry, where they controlled the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, a vital link between the national capital and the West. Planning to throw a force across the Potomac on a temporary bridge, McClellan had pontoon boats built and sent up the river. They proved to be six inches too wide for the locks on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the whole project had to be abandoned. When General Randolph B. Marcy, McClellan’s chief of staff and father-in-law, told Lincoln the news, he exploded: “Why in tarnation... couldn’t the Gen[eral]. have known whether a boat would go through that lock, before he spent a million of dollars getting them there? I am no engineer; but it seems to me that if I wished to know whether a boat would go through a ... lock, common sense would teach me to go and measure it. I am almost despairing at these results.... The general impression is daily gaining ground that the Gen[eral]. does not intend to do anything.”
Lincoln’s irritability on this occasion was undoubtedly related to the excitement he and everybody else in the cabinet felt about a conflict about to take place in Hampton Roads, near Norfolk and Fort Monroe. The former USS Merrimack, now heavily armored and rechristened the CSS Virginia, steamed out of Norfolk harbor and, virtually immune to shot and shell from the wooden ships of the Union navy, rammed and sank the Cumberland, burned the Congress, and damaged the Minnesota and other vessels. If unchecked, the Confederate ironclad could break the blockade. There was panic in Washington. Stanton, always excitable, broke out in recriminations against Gideon Welles and the navy and predicted that the Merrimack would soon send a cannon shot into the cabinet room. Lincoln, too, was clearly troubled, but he tried to conceal his agitation by eagerly reading the dispatches and interrogating the navy officers who brought news of the engagement. That evening the Monitor, a Union ironclad of such unusual design that it looked like a cheese box on a raft, appeared at Hampton Roads, ready to give battle the next day. In the engagement on March 9 the Merrimack was badly damaged and forced back to Norfolk.
During this period of great excitement Lincoln had a confrontation with McClellan. After complaining about the Harpers Ferry fiasco, he expressed fears that if McClellan moved his army down the Potomac to attack Richmond from the
east he would leave Washington exposed. “It had been represented to him,” he said, that McClellan’s move “was conceived with the traitorous intent of... giving over to the enemy the capital and the government, thus left defenceless.” The President did not identify his source, but he had been talking with the fiercely anti-McClellan members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. Furious, McClellan sprang up and told Lincoln he would permit no man to call him a traitor. Much agitated, Lincoln backed down from his accusation and, according to McClellan, “said that he merely repeated what others had said, and that he did not believe a word of it.”
At the end of the conversation McClellan agreed to consult the division commanders of the Army of the Potomac on his plan. Eight of them, all younger generals who owed their promotion to McClellan, favored it, but the four senior men opposed. They then trooped over to the White House, where the President and the Secretary of War questioned them closely. Both Lincoln and Stanton were clearly troubled about the safety of the national capital, but in the end the President accepted the decision of the majority and authorized McClellan to go ahead. “We can do nothing else than accept their plan and discard all others,” he told Stanton afterward. “We can’t reject it and adopt another without assuming all the responsibility in the case of the failure of the one we adopt.”
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