Soldiers and officers around Lincoln did their best to persuade the president to get down off the wall—including surgeon C. C. V. A. Crawford, the officer who had been shot a few minutes earlier. According to legend, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes—who would one day become a US Supreme Court justice—shouted at Lincoln to get down before he got himself shot, and also called the president a damn fool. But Lincoln was apparently enjoying the view, and refused to be persuaded.
Finally, in exasperation, General Wright resorted to threats. “He still maintained his ground,” the general said many years later. “till I told him I would have to remove him forcibly.”2 Watching General Wright wrestle with the tall, rangy president certainly would have raised the morale of everyone present, but the general did not get the chance to carry out his threat. Lincoln was finally persuaded to climb down from the rampart; Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles saw him sitting with his back to it. But even after this rebuke, Lincoln did not stay under cover for very long. General Wright complained that the president kept on standing up to get a look at the fighting—Lincoln insisted upon “standing up from time to time, thus exposing nearly one-half his tall form.”3
President Lincoln and his wife, who had insisted upon accompanying the president, finally left Fort Stevens later in the afternoon. Units of General Wright's Sixth Corps reinforced the fort's garrison, and Fort Stevens held. Abraham Lincoln could truthfully claim to be the only sitting president to come under fire in combat.
Over the years, a good many people have tried to explain exactly why Lincoln decided to put his life at risk for no apparent reason. There was no political or publicity advantage for him; most newspapers hardly mentioned his visit to Fort Stevens. Some have speculated that he was so tired and depressed at the time that he really did not care if anyone shot him or not, a viewpoint that seems a bit extreme and more than just slightly lurid. It was more than possible that he just wanted to see what a battle actually looked like, and that his curiosity got the better of him. Whatever the reason, he certainly gave everyone at Fort Stevens a fit of anxiety.
By March 1865, everyone who saw President Lincoln mentioned how unhappy and nervous he seemed. His attitude toward any assassination attempts was either pure fatalism or the result of depression, depending upon a person's point of view. Lincoln's own attitude was that if anyone wanted to shoot him, there was not very much that anybody could do about it. He seemed content to let his bodyguards worry about his safety; Lincoln himself did not seem concerned at all. This was the main reason why he would not allow himself to be talked out of visiting City Point.
“We now think of starting to you about One P.M. Thursday,” the president telegraphed his son, Captain Robert Lincoln. “Don't make public.”4 Captain Lincoln was a member of General Grant's staff. The president wanted his son to be on hand when he arrived at City Point two days later.
Robert Lincoln, the president's eldest son, had been the center of a fairly intense family dispute for quite some time. The cause of the dispute was Robert's desire to join the army and take part in the war. Neither of his parents shared young Robert's enthusiasm for the army, but Mrs. Lincoln was almost violently opposed to his joining up. She had already had lost one son, Willie, who died of an illness, probably typhoid fever, in 1862. Mrs. Lincoln was desperately afraid that if Robert enlisted he would be killed.
To soothe Mary's fears and satisfy Robert's enthusiasm at the same time, the president made arrangements for his son to join General Grant's staff. In January 1865, he wrote to the general, “Please read and answer this letter as though I was not President, but only a friend.”5 Lincoln went on to explain that Robert was now twenty-two years old, had graduated from Harvard, and “wishes to see something of the war before it ends.” After explaining that he did not want to put his son in the ranks, or to give him a commission ahead of those soldiers who were better qualified, Lincoln finally came to the point. “Could he, without embarrassment to you, or detriment to the service, go into your Military family with some nominal rank?” He ended his letter with a note of consideration that not many chief executives would have shown: “If no, say so without the least hesitation, because I am anxious, and as deeply interested, that you shall not be encumbered.”
Two days later, General Grant responded that he would be more than happy to have Robert Lincoln in his “Military family” with the rank of captain. On February 23, Robert Lincoln joined General Grant's staff. “The new acquisition to the company at headquarters soon became exceedingly popular,” Charles Porter recalled. “He had inherited many of the genial traits of his father,” and “never expected to be treated differently from any other officer.” Colonel Porter went on to say that Robert Lincoln's experience on General Grant's staff “did much to fit him for the position of Secretary of War,” which he held from 1881 to 1885.6
And so President Lincoln managed to solve three problems at the same time with the help of General Grant. He satisfied his son's ambition to join the army, he quieted news reporters and other critics who had accused Robert of shirking his duty by not enlisting, and he placated his wife by the fact that Robert had been assigned to General Grant's staff instead of a combat unit. But Mary Lincoln was of a mental condition that can be most diplomatically described as delicate. Her condition would make itself known again in the very near future.
That evening, the president and Mrs. Lincoln went to Grover's Theatre to attend a performance of François-Adrien Boieldieu's opera La Dame Blanche.7 Because of his impending trip to City Point, Lincoln was probably in a more relaxed frame of mind than usual. This actually might have allowed him to enjoy the performance, instead of just using a night at the theater as an excuse to get a few hours of escape from the pressures of the White House.
President Lincoln received a visit from Senator Charles Sumner, who brought an unusual piece of correspondence. The senator showed Lincoln a letter from the Duchess of Argyll, which was dated March 2, 1865. Elizabeth Georgiana Campbell Granville, Duchess of Argyll, was a prominent and outspoken opponent of slavery in Britain, and was also a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Because the president was featured so prominently in the duchess's letter, Senator Sumner thought Lincoln would be interested in reading it.
Because she was a dedicated abolitionist, the duchess's primary concern was with the slaves in the South, along with what would become of them. “I do not know what your opinion is as to giving the Franchise to the negroes in the Slave States,” she wrote. “One wd. be inclined to think that that [sic] that there ought to be some realization first of their new condition.”1 In other words, before any freed slaves were given the right to vote, they should first be given at least some fundamentals of education.
“We feel great confidence in the President,” she went on to say, referring to her friends in England. The duchess also commented that “the speech at the Gettysburg Cemetery will live.”2
It was certainly a flattering letter, as well as highly unusual, at least from Lincoln's point of view. Members of the British upper class were not always as complimentary toward President Lincoln and rarely admitted to having “great confidence” in him. Most British aristocrats found themselves in agreement with Lieutenant Colonel Garnet Wolseley, a future field marshal and viscount, who referred to Abraham Lincoln's presidency as “the dictatorship of an insignificant lawyer.”3
Lincoln was also happy to hear that his Gettysburg Address “must live.” Not everyone had been so generous in their opinion of the speech. Immediately after delivering “the speech at the Gettysburg Cemetery,” Lincoln himself told his friend and bodyguard Ward Lamon, “Lamon, that speech won't scour,” using a phrase from his prairie years.4 Failing to scour meant that the heavy soil had built up on the blade of a plow, making it unable to turn the earth. He had changed his mind during the past fourteen months, and was glad that there was somebody who agreed with him.
General Grant sent a long letter to General William Tecumseh Sherman o
n March 22. The Richmond newspapers made mention of the fact that General Sherman had arrived in Goldsboro, North Carolina, and Grant sent his letter to Sherman at Goldsboro. Much of its contents concerned the movements of General Philip Sheridan's cavalry, along with Grant's instructions that Sheridan should continue to destroy the rail lines around Petersburg and then advance along the Danville road “as near to the Appomattox as he can get.”5 But Grant's main worry was still Robert E. Lee. “It is most difficult to understand what the rebels intend to do; so far but few troops have been detached from Lee's army,” he wrote to General Sherman. “If Lee detaches, I will attack; if he comes out of his lines, I will endeavor to repulse him, and follow it up to the best advantage.” General Grant did not mention anything about President Lincoln's impending visit.
At Petersburg, Colonel Elisha Hunt Rhodes had celebrated his twenty-third birthday the day before. “Twenty-three years and have been in service nearly four years,” he reflected. “God has been very good to me, and I am grateful for his protecting care.”6 Colonel Rhodes's diary entry for March 22 was more straightforward: “All quiet and nothing to do but drill and watch the enemy, but business will soon be brisk enough to suit us all. This siege must end soon.”
“We start to you at One P.M. to-day,” President Lincoln telegraphed General Grant at City Point. “May lie over during the dark hours of the night. Very small party of us.”1 The president's party consisted of the Lincolns; their son Tad; Mrs. Lincoln's maid, Elizabeth Keckley; William H. Crook, the bodyguard; and Captain Charles Penrose, who had been assigned by Secretary of War Stanton to protect the president. “The River Queen, closely followed by the Bat, left Washington on March 23, 1865,” Commander John S. Barnes noted with crisp naval efficiency.2
Secretary of War Stanton was so concerned with President Lincoln's safety that he decided to go to the Sixth Street Wharf to see the president off himself. He had not been feeling very well for the past several days and went to the wharf against the advice of his wife, Ellen. The secretary's anxieties were not helped any when he arrived at Sixth Street just in time to watch the River Queen steaming off toward City Point—the president was already on his way.
An hour or so later, Stanton's worries increased even further. An intense thunderstorm, accompanied by strong gusts of wind, erupted over Washington while the River Queen was out on the Potomac River. A reporter with the Washington bureau of the New York Herald reported that “terrific squalls of wind, accompanied by thunder and lightning, did considerable damage here.”3 The storm was called, among other things, a squall and a gale. A Washington newspaper insisted that it was a hurricane. Whatever it was, it did its share of damage—uprooting trees, destroying houses, and blowing boats out on the Potomac off their course. “The roof of a factory on Sixth Street was blown off into the street, and fell upon a hack,” the Herald stated.
Secretary Stanton was so alarmed that he roused himself out of bed and made his way to the War Department's telegraph office to contact the president. At 8:45 p.m., he sent Lincoln an urgent telegram: “I hope you have reached Point Lookout safely not-withstanding the furious gale that came on soon after you started.”4 He went on to request that Lincoln inform him of his safe arrival as soon as he reached Point Lookout.
Actually, Secretary Stanton's panic was completely misplaced. The River Queen apparently left for City Point just in time to miss the storm. Lincoln was thoroughly enjoying the trip. He stood on deck and watched as Washington receded into the distance, relieved that he would not have to look at it again for a while. Afterward, he went belowdecks and had a long conversation with the River Queen's captain, Captain Bradford, who had been involved with chasing down Confederate blockade runners earlier in the war. For several hours, Captain Bradford regaled the president with stories of his adventures off the Confederate coast. Lincoln did not go to bed until nearly midnight.
Tad Lincoln was enjoying the trip as much as his father, if not more so. The Lincolns’ bodyguard, William Crook, noted that young Tad roamed all over the ship, studying every screw of the engine and every rivet in the boiler room. He also made friends with just about every member of the River Queen's crew and was treated as the ship's mascot by everyone on board.
During the night, while the president and his party were asleep, the River Queen steamed out of the Potomac and into the deeper waters of Chesapeake Bay. As soon as she entered the bay, the temperature began to drop and the water became choppy and turbulent. William Crook shared a stateroom with Tad Lincoln. He was startled out of a sound sleep when Mary Lincoln entered the cabin to check on Tad. “It is growing colder, and I came to see if my little boy has enough covers on him,” she explained. Crook managed to drift off to sleep again after Mrs. Lincoln left but was reawakened by the tossing of the River Queen in the wind and weather. He felt as though the ship was “slowly climbing up one side of a high hill and then rushing down the other.”5 The pitching apparently did not disturb Tad, who slept right through the wind and weather, but it gave Crook a long, restless night.
William Crook was not the only one aboard the River Queen who was having an unpleasant voyage. The president was suffering from an upset stomach, which he blamed on the Queen's supply of drinking water. He requested that a supply of fresh water be taken aboard when the ship docked at Fortress Monroe, on the Virginia coast. His request was seen to as quickly as could be arranged; casks of water were loaded aboard the ship around noon. But apparently the job was not done quickly or efficiently enough to suit the fort's acting quartermaster, Major William L. James. “I am exceedingly mortified at the delay which you have experienced in obtaining the water you desire,” Major James wrote to the president. “I have sent several messengers already to the officer [in charge of the water detail] to make all possible haste, and that he should have delayed so is exceedingly annoying to me. I shall certainly call him to account for his bad management.”1
Major James was a lot more annoyed than President Lincoln, who shrugged off the whole matter. “I am not at all impatient, and hope Major James will not reproach himself or deal harshly with the officer having the matter in charge,” he responded to the major's letter. “Doubtless he, too, has met some unexpected difficulty.”2
Mary Lincoln's difficulties were more emotional than physical. She was highly nervous to begin with. During the night of March 23/24, her husband dreamed that the White House was on fire and, in the way of conversation, told Mary about his dream. The story only served to increase her anxiety. During the day on Friday, Mary sent two telegrams to the White House to ask the staff if everything was alright. It was not a favorable omen for what was to come during the Lincolns’ visit to City Point.
The River Queen anchored off City Point “very late” on the evening of March 24, according to Commander Barnes of the USS Bat.3 William Crook stood on deck and enjoyed the view—the many colored lights of the ships nearby, along with the lights of City Point itself. The ships were mostly warships, small freighters, and colliers, and the lights on shore came from offices and warehouses and barracks, but it was a surprisingly peaceful scene, considering that General Lee and his army were only a few miles away.
General Grant did not even mention President Lincoln's arrival in his memoirs, but the president's coming ashore seems to have been quite an occasion for his wife, Julia. They had both been informed of the event by none other than Captain Robert Lincoln—“a noble, handsome young fellow” in Julia Grant's opinion—who escorted the general and his wife to the River Queen. The Grants were aboard a smaller steamship, the Mary Martin, which was tied up alongside. “Our gracious president met us at the gangplank, greeted the General most heartily, and, giving me his arm, conducted us to where Mrs. Lincoln was awaiting us,” Julia Grant remembered.4 Mary Lincoln received General and Mrs. Grant “most cordially.” After the greetings and handshakes, the president announced that he was “going to leave you two ladies together” while he went off with General Grant to have “a little talk.”
When the president and General Grant left the cabin, Mrs. Lincoln asked Julia Grant to sit down. Mrs. Grant assumed that Mary Lincoln meant for her to sit beside her on a small sofa, so “I seated myself beside her.” But “seeing a look of surprise from Mrs. Lincoln,” she immediately got up and excused herself, saying “I crowd you, I fear.” Mrs. Lincoln “kindly extended her hand to deter me,” and said, “Not at all.” After a moment, Julia Dent quietly sat down in a nearby chair and normal conversation between the two women began.5
When Julia Dent was asked about her visit with Mrs. Lincoln, she noted “the very awkward mistake on my part,” and said that if there was any blame to be placed for the incident, she was to blame. “I was a trifle embarrassed, and I would not have taken the seat,” is the way she explained it.6 Mrs. Grant also mentioned “the sensational story,” referring to the way the incident had been described by Adam Badeau in his book Grant in Peace, who quoted Mrs. Lincoln as scolding, “How dare you be seated until I invite you.”7
While Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant were together, the president and General Grant had their own conversation in the president's room. The general assured Lincoln that the war was winding down and that the end was finally in sight. This report certainly satisfied the president—bodyguard William Crook noticed that Lincoln seemed to be particularly happy. It was just what he wanted to hear.
After the Grants took their leave and left the River Queen, the president and Mary Lincoln talked for quite a while. Both of them were in very good spirits. After a while, they decided to call it a night and go to bed—they would have a long day ahead of them in the morning.
The Last Weeks of Abraham Lincoln Page 7