by Joshua Zeitz
The capital lay under siege until April 25, when the Seventh New York arrived. Nicolay later explained to Therena that Washington remained susceptible to a Southern assault, as there were only three thousand members of the local Washington, D.C., militia, and “with the city perfectly demoralized with secession feeling, no man could know whom of the residents to trust . . . We were not only surrounded by the enemy, but in the midst of traitors.” In a dispatch to his former boss Ozias Hatch, Nicolay passed on orders from the president that officials raising the Illinois regiments pay close attention to “efficiency—to perfection in drill, equipment, &c. Have them ready for work and not for show.”
In the coming months, the population of Washington swelled with tens of thousands of federal troops who would soon be drilled into a proper army. In the early days, they camped out on the Mall, in hotels, in the Capitol rotunda, and in the lobbies of federal buildings. By midyear, when Lincoln called up 500,000 men, they manned protective forts from Georgetown to Alexandria and bunked in carefully aligned encampments spread throughout the city. Under the direction of General George McClellan, the troops staged elaborate reviews that were intended to instill confidence among the elected officials who had appropriated the funds to amass such enormous armies, as well as the troops, most of them farm boys who had never soldiered a day in their lives. The high-water mark of military splendor came that November, when 100,000 troops staged a grand review over an eight-mile stretch, enveloping the city in a pageantry of banners, marching bands, cavalry, and finely appointed citizen-soldiers in crisp blue uniforms. “Went out to-day to see the grand review at Munson’s Hill,” Nicolay recorded in a private memorandum. “President and others in his carriage—Hay and I in coupe. Clear track and good road going out.” After greeting McClellan and General Irvin McDowell, the president mounted a steed and, flanked by his generals, “rode several horses’ lengths ahead while a cavalcade of perhaps a hundred officers (myself among them) followed at a swift hard gallop.” By the end of the day, he told Therena, “I had tired myself out, lost my dinner, spoiled my pantaloons . . . but I had seen the largest and most magnificent military review ever held on the continent.”
The rhythms of life in wartime Washington quickly assumed a martial spirit. There were twice-weekly performances by the marine band on the White House lawn and concerts at the navy yard, where the secretaries and their boss hobnobbed with military officers and “an elegant audience of some two or three hundred invited guests.” Nicolay reported that he, along with Hay and the president, toured a battleship and witnessed a display of a Dahlgren gun that was mounted on the nearby shore. “We could hear the explosion and as quick as thought afterwards see the ball . . . flying through the air,” he marveled. “I had not thought before that the flight of a cannon-ball could be seen so distinctly.”
Though these were exhilarating times for the two secretaries, the first year of the Lincoln administration was overshadowed by a string of military and political defeats that left the president badly bruised. Nicolay and Hay were at the White House on July 21 when McDowell’s forces attacked the Confederates at Manassas Junction in Virginia. Huddled with the president, who received dispatches from the field at intervals of roughly fifteen minutes, they waited for decisive news. To break the tension, Lincoln left the White House for a carriage ride. At six o’clock that evening, Seward burst into Nicolay’s office looking for the president. “The battle is lost,” he informed the secretaries. “Find the President and tell him to go immediately to Gen. Scott’s.” “Thus go the fortunes of war,” Nicolay continued in his letter to Therena. “Our worst fears are confirmed. The victory which seemed in our grasp at four o’clock yesterday afternoon, is changed to an overwhelming defeat.”
The next day, Hay watched as
with the ushering in of daylight there came pouring into the city crowds of soldiers, some with muskets, some without muskets, some with knapsacks, and some without knapsack, or canteen, or belt, or anything but their soiled and dirty uniform, burned faces and eyes, that looked as they had seen no sleep for days . . . One by one came wagons filled with the dead and wounded. Most horrible were the sights presented to view, and never to be forgotten by those who witnessed them. The bodies of the dead were piled on top of one another; the pallid faces and blood-stained garments telling a fearfully mute but sad story of the horrors of war.
He believed that “there was never such a day here before—it is to be hoped that there will never be such another.”
Though the last six months of 1861 saw critical battles at Port Royal, South Carolina, and in the western theater, the bulk of this period was given over to a massive reorganization and training of Union forces, now wholly under McClellan’s command.
In Missouri, General John C. Frémont reported to Lincoln that divisions between unionists and Confederates had created vast “disorder, nearly every county in an insurrectionary condition.” In an effort to put his boot on the neck of Confederate guerrillas, Frémont placed the entire state under martial law, threatened active disunionists with summary execution, and announced the immediate emancipation of all slaves owned by Confederate sympathizers. The last order placed the president in a difficult bind. With friends warning him that military emancipation would “crush out every vestige of a union party” in the border states—particularly in Kentucky, a state of central geographic importance to the Union—Lincoln asked Frémont to withdraw his directive. When the general refused, Lincoln canceled the order himself. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” he said. “Kentucky gone, we cannot hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”
Lincoln’s action met with the stern disapproval of radical and even some moderate Republicans. Frémont enjoyed the backing of the Chicago Tribune, New York Evening Post, Springfield Republican, New York Times, and National Intelligencer—the most influential Republican newspapers in the country, running a full gamut from radical to conservative. For many years, antislavery politicians had warned that the law of nations permitted the emancipation of slaves—their return to a natural state of liberty—in times of war or insurrection. Most free-state Republicans regarded Frémont’s directive as perfectly lawful, if politically ill-timed. In passing through St. Louis on a trip to visit his family, Hay took time to visit with Frémont and his wife. He found the general “quiet earnest industrious, imperious,” and his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont—daughter of the late Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton—“much like him, tough talking more and louder.” Even the president’s assistant secretary found much to admire in the general.
In late September, Nicolay privately assessed the Frémont imbroglio “one of the most troublesome affairs which the Govt has yet had upon its hands.” Acknowledging that “high hopes had been entertained of [Frémont] by the admin and the country,” he blamed the general for refusing the president’s initial instructions to reverse his emancipation edict. In October, Nicolay left the White House for Springfield. The ostensible purpose of his trip was to visit Therena, but at Lincoln’s behest he also met with military and political officials in Missouri. Since his emancipation edict, Frémont had tangled with the powerful Blair family of St. Louis, going so far as to order the arrest of Congressman Frank Blair, the brother of Lincoln’s postmaster general. On October 17, Nicolay informed Lincoln that “neither [General John] Pope nor [Major David] Hunter have any faith that Fremont will or can accomplish anything whatever on the contrary are quite convinced that he will not.” Four days later, he elaborated, explaining that he had “taken some pains to learn the feeling here as to Fremont. The universal opinion is that he has entirely failed, and that he ought to be removed—that any change will be for the better.” Nicolay’s confidential assessment may have confirmed what the president had already concluded from other sources. He soon dismissed Frémont from command.
More incommodious than the Frémont affair was the president’s in
creasingly strained relationship with McClellan, whom he had appointed general in chief of the Union army. Initially hailed as a hero who had forged a professional fighting force out of the ramshackle volunteer army that staggered back to Washington after the Battle of Bull Run at Manassas Junction, McClellan had sorely tried the patience of Congress by refusing to advance on the Confederate capital that fall. Time and again, he incorrectly insisted that the Confederate army outsized his own and delayed action. With Nicolay dispatched to the western theater to gather intelligence on the political and military situation in Missouri, Hay accompanied Lincoln to McClellan’s headquarters. “I intend to be careful,” McClellan told Lincoln, “and do as well as possible. Don’t let [Congress] hurry me, is all I ask.” “You shall have your own way in the matter I assure you,” Hay heard the president respond. Ever loyal to Lincoln, Hay privately deprecated Lincoln’s radical critics as the “Jacobin club” and scorned their entreaties to move harder against the South. In his diary, the secretary noted a conversation with McClellan in late October at the White House, in which the general suggested that radical Republicans “preferred an unsuccessful battle to delay.” The president reminded McClellan that public opinion could not be discounted forever but agreed that “you must not fight till you are ready.”
At the time, Hay knew nothing of the extreme derision with which McClellan spoke of the president, in private as well as in the company of other officers. He had little concept that the general referred to Lincoln as an “idiot,” “baboon,” and “gorilla”; to the secretary of state as a “meddling, officious, incompetent little puppy”; or to the secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, as a “garrulous old woman.” He could not have known that McClellan professed to “find myself in a strange position here: President, Cabinet, Genl. Scott & all deferring to me. By some strange operation of magic I seem to have become the power of the land.”
On November 13, Hay confided to his diary a “portent of evil to come. The President, Governor Seward and I went over to McClellan’s house tonight.” When a servant explained that McClellan was still out attending the wedding of an army colleague, the presidential party sat down in the parlor to await his return.
After we had waited about an hour McC. came in and without paying any particular attention to the porter who told him the President was waiting to see him, went up stairs, passing the door of the room where the President and Secretary of State were seated. They waited about half an hour, and sent once more a servant to tell the General that they were there, and the answer came that the General had gone to bed. I record this unparalleled insolence of epaulettes without comment. It is the first indication I have yet seen, of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities. Coming home I spoke to the President about the matter but he seemed not to have noticed it especially, saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity.
With trouble brewing along the border, the Union army stuck in first gear outside Washington, and the president’s relationship with McClellan souring by the minute, the new administration had trouble finding its footing. Most Republicans had given up all hope in Secretary Simon Cameron, whose administration of the War Department veered between ineptitude and outright corruption. Salmon Chase warned the president that the Treasury was teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. Radicals grew impatient at the slow progress of the military campaign and the president’s reluctance to make abolition a tactic and an aim of the war.
That fall, before Lincoln took the decision to dismiss Frémont, Nicolay had a long conversation with the president about his political, financial, and military troubles. His notes reveal a new president back on his heels.
Political
Fremont ready to rebel.
Chase despairing.
Cameron utterly ignorant and regardless of the course of things, and the probable result.
Cameron
Selfish and openly discourteous to the President.
Obnoxious to the Country
Incapable either of organizing details or conceiving and advising general plans.
Financial
Credit gone at St. Louis
" Cincinnati
" Springfield
Over-draft today Oct. 2, 1861. = 12,000,000
Chase says the new loan will be exhausted in 11 days.
Immense claims left for Congress to audit.
Military
Kentucky successfully invaded
Missouri virtually seized
October here, and instead of having a force ready to descend the Mississippi, the probability is that the army of the West will be compelled to defend St. Louis
The year ended badly. With McClellan on indefinite sick leave, the army stalled in its tracks, and his political fortunes at a nadir, Lincoln told his quartermaster general, “The people are impatient; Chase has no money and he tells me he can raise no more; the General of the Army has typhoid fever. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?” Writing to Therena on Christmas Day, Nicolay betrayed the dark mood that had befallen the White House in recent weeks. “John and I are moping the day away here in our offices like a couple of great owls in their holes,” he wrote, “and expect in an hour or two to go down to Willards and get our ‘daily bread,’ just as we do on each of the other three hundred and sixty four days of the year, without anything special to remind us that there are ever any things as Christmas dinners.” In those cheerless hours, Nicolay thought back on his orphan childhood, admitting in a rare moment of introspection that in his “fifteen years’ straying about the world alone, I have gotten pretty well ‘used to it.’ It is only now and then that I think of this being any other than my normal condition. But sometimes—as to-day—far back across the sea—I remember a scene of childish pleasure amid Christmas enjoyments, which makes me wonder if it is not the part of wisdom to treasure up such recollections with an industrious care for the after-days, when our eyes become too keen to be cheated by the illusions of their tinsel and gilding.” As the calendar gave way to 1862, he shook off his holiday blues and looked forward to a quick, decisive Union victory.
CHAPTER 7
Despotic Act in the Cause of Union
January found Nicolay in better spirits and seemingly reinvigorated by the whirlwind schedule of social events that beckoned for his attention. On December 31 he attended a New Year’s Eve party that was not, he admitted, “the best preparation in the world for a hard day’s work.” The next day, “the reception at the Executive Mansion began at 11 A.M., at which time the Cabinet and their families and the Diplomatic Corps in all their stars and crosses and gold lace appeared and were presented to the President. At 11:25 came the Judges of the Supreme Court, at 11:30 the officers of the army and navy in uniform, and at 12 N., the public. This lasted until 2 P.M. when the doors were closed. Of course there was a great jam.” By midafternoon, Nicolay and Hay had summoned a carriage and had begun paying calls on the members of the cabinet, who were also expected to host public receptions at their homes. The festivities lasted well into the evening, beginning with a “little gentleman’s party” at the home of John Forney, an influential Republican newspaper editor now serving as secretary of the Senate, and ending, as they often did, at the Eames residence. “I was as tired as I would ever wish to be when we got to bed,” Nicolay told Therena.
Thanks to the careful ministrations of the first lady, the White House had regained something of its lost luster by early 1862. Vastly overspending the official budget for refurbishment and upkeep of the Executive Mansion, Mary Todd Lincoln adorned weatherworn rooms with handsomely embroidered French wallpaper, plush draperies and curtains, and new furniture. The trim work was newly painted. Tables were regularly decorated with fresh-cut flowers from the White House gardens. Matching china and service sets replaced the hodgepodge of heirloom items left behind by prior administrations. Little by little, the mansion’s thirty-one rooms came to life. When the president learned that his wife had exceeded the s
tandard appropriation, he responded with uncharacteristic rage and threatened to pay the difference out of his own pocket, but Mary was savvy enough to balance the books at state expense. She understood that the president’s annual salary of $25,000 was nowhere near the princely sum that it seemed. There was at the time no official entertainment budget, and first families were expected to host weekly levees, seasonal receptions and parties, and state dinners for visiting diplomats and dignitaries. Most of Lincoln’s predecessors had left Washington poorer than when they arrived. For the Lincolns, the pressure would be double. With so many army officers, contractors, and diplomats swelling the population of wartime Washington, they would be expected to receive overflow crowds at all times. Mary found ways to plug the hole. At her behest, Benjamin French, the commissioner of public buildings, quietly convinced Congress to issue supplemental appropriations for the White House, as it had done for prior administrations. Mary fired the steward and assumed personal supervision of the cooks and servants. Under the influence of the unscrupulous White House gardener, John Watt, she learned how to pad official expenses and kick back the difference to fund household necessities. By the eve of his assassination, the president, perhaps unknowingly, had managed to save $70,000 of his official salary.