Abraham Lincoln

by Thomas Keneally

  The firing on the Federal flag at Fort Sumter galvanized not only Republicans but many Democrats—the group that would come to be called Union Democrats—in outrage. Douglas, in failing health, became one such Union Democrat.

  The events in Charleston Harbor delivered Lincoln from the uncertain start of his presidency. “All the troubles and anxieties of his life had not equalled those which intervened between his Inauguration and the fall of Sumter,” Orville Browning remembered Lincoln telling him. On April 15 he called out seventy-five thousand state militiamen—he was dependent on the states to provide him with men—and summoned Congress into emergency session. Two days later Virginia seceded. On behalf of the Confederacy, Virginia militiamen occupied the Harpers Ferry arsenal, close to Washington.

  On April 19 Lincoln issued a blockade proclamation, declaring that he would seize not only vessels carrying a Confederate flag, but all those bringing goods into Southern ports. Even though the U.S. Navy consisted of only forty-two ships, the beginnings of Gideon Welles’s blockade system were put in place. But with the army, Lincoln ran up against the problem that, like much of the Federal bureaucracy, it had been Southern dominated. Robert E. Lee of the Second Cavalry was approached by the Blair family, by General Scott, and indirectly by Lincoln himself, but then defected to the South anyway. Mary Todd Lincoln’s own brother-in-law, an experienced officer named Benjamin Helm, married to Mary’s half-sister, Emilie, also went to the South. Col. John Magruder of the artillery assured Lincoln in a visit to the White House on April 18 that he remained loyal, yet three days later he left for service with the Confederacy. It was to be expected—in much of the South, loyalty to the state superseded loyalty to the Union.

  While Willie and Tad tore around the White House, and Mary began talking to its Southern-leaning Scots head gardener, John Watt, about the garden and the deplorable state of the decor, Lincoln waited for troops to arrive to protect the wide-open capital. John Nicolay, Lincoln’s secretary, focusing his telescope from the White House on buildings in Alexandria, just across the Potomac, a virtual suburb, saw the flag of the Confederacy flying there. When the first regiment to come to the president’s aid, the Sixth Massachusetts, detrained in Baltimore, they were attacked by a secessionist mob, and some of the bluecoats were killed by rioters. A Baltimore delegation to the White House asked that troops not be routed through their city, but Lincoln declared, “If I grant you this concession, you will be back here tomorrow, demanding that none shall be marched around it.” Nonetheless he did begin to think of alternative routes. After all, pro-Southern Maryland militiamen had torn up large sections of the line outside Baltimore. The capital was sandwiched between a state that had seceded, Virginia, and another, Maryland, that might secede at any time.

  The government began handing out large sums of money to enable private contractors to ship troops and acquire armaments for the capital, but by late April, Lincoln, addressing the Sixth Massachusetts at the White House, said, “You are the only northern realities.” The next day the Seventh New York arrived, and from then on so many other state regiments that it became impossible to move on the White House lawn for military bands. The former law clerk in Lincoln’s office, Elmer Ellsworth, to whom Lincoln had been very close, turned up at the White House with his own squad of Zouaves—that is, men dressed in the manner of French infantry in Algeria. Ellsworth’s tasseled red cap, red shirt, bloomery trousers, sword, Bowie knife, and revolver were all great hits with Willie and Tad. The sudden appearance of this boy from Springfield, ready to defend the capital, was wonderful for the Lincoln family’s morale. Clowning with musket drill in the East Room, he accidentally broke a window-pane, to the amusement of Lincoln’s secretaries and sons.

  People still muttered about Lincoln’s policy of drift, but no one could deny the hours he put in, walking from the family’s quarters in the West Wing, through a melee of visitors in the central hall, and into his office on the eastern side of the house. Nicolay had organized matters so that his own office, a writing room, a reception room, and the vestibule were all wrapped protectively around Lincoln’s office and the cabinet room. John Hay complained that he and Nicolay and others tried to “erect barriers to defend him against constant interruption, but the president himself was always the first to break them down.”

  In the South at that time, for the sake of morale and recruiting, Jefferson Davis was visiting all the states of the Confederacy in turn. Lincoln could never find the time away from his desk, or if he was not at his desk, from the telegraph office of the War Department just across the White House lawn. People were astonished, nonetheless, by the ease of access the president offered. He even held levees to which members of the public could come and express their concerns. Lincoln called these receptions his “public opinion baths.” But it was not entirely a matter of acquainting himself with public opinion. Office seekers still besieged him. The best positions, as regards patronage, were associated with the directorships of the four thousand U.S. customs houses. The position of collector of the Port of New York, for example, carried a salary of six thousand dollars and the capacity to earn another twenty-five thousand dollars a year in commissions or even in graft. Those who had delivered even the smallest parcel of votes to Abraham Lincoln now looked for their reward on this earth. He told one friend that he thought sometimes the only way he could escape applicants for appointments would be to take a rope and hang himself from one of the trees on the South Lawn. Or else, he added to one of his secretaries, he could move his office to a smallpox hospital.

  That spring Lincoln generated great Democratic hostility in the North by suspending habeas corpus and restricting freedom of the press, contrary to his most profoundly held principles. Washington itself harbored a considerable number of spies and many Southern sympathizers. Lincoln wished to make it possible for the army to arrest saboteurs, such as those who burned down the bridge over the Susquehanna, and hold them under military jurisdiction. But more dangerous than the burned-out bridge and wrecked rails, which made the movement of Federal troops impossible, was the fact that the Maryland legislature had met in special session at Annapolis to consider secession. Gen. Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts put Annapolis under martial law, and the Maryland legislature, seeing that secession would mean immediate battle in the streets of their cities, particularly in Baltimore, voted against joining the Confederacy. Lincoln emphasized to Gov. Thomas Hicks of Maryland and to the mayor of Baltimore that he would not countenance their failure to give Federal troops safe passage through Baltimore.

  Missouri had also been saved by the quick action of Unionists, including that of the short-lived but heroic Gen. Nathaniel Lyon, who refused to surrender the Federal arsenal in St. Louis.

  As for Kentucky, a crucial border state, if it “made no demonstration of force against the United States,” he promised, “he would not molest her.” He emphasized that he had no designs on the slaves of the border states—indeed he had no constitutional power over them, nor did he have a mandate from the people. If Kentucky went, he knew, the Confederacy would abut right against the southern border of Illinois, and Cairo, the strategic point where the Mississippi joined the Ohio, would probably fall to it. Lincoln is reported as saying that he would like to have God on his side, but he must have Kentucky. Eventually Kentucky declared its neutrality, and Lincoln respected that neutrality publicly, even while turning a blind eye to the fact that Union officers went to that state to raise loyal militias. In September, Confederate forces attacked Kentucky from the direction of Tennessee and occupied the Cumberland Gap. The state ended its neutrality and immediately called for forty thousand volunteers for the Union army.

  Suddenly and with a shock, Lincoln lost young Elmer Ellsworth. Now a colonel, Elmer had led a regiment across the Potomac to Alexandria to occupy that town, and had been hauling down a Confederate flag from the top of Marshal’s Tavern when the proprietor shot him dead. “[H]is power to command men was surpassingly great,” a grieving Lincoln wrote
to Ellsworth’s parents. Mary and Lincoln went down to the Washington Navy Yard to visit his body, and somebody gave Mary the blood-splattered Confederate flag for which he had given his life. In the meantime, as Union troops occupied forts around Washington and prepared not only to defend the capital but to make forays into the Virginia hinterland, Stephen A. Douglas took to a sickbed in Chicago and died, forty-seven years old. He had nobly guaranteed a certain Northern Democratic support for Lincoln and the Union. But now that he was gone, would that phalanx of support remain?

  Lincoln’s bewilderment had arisen and still arose from the fact that there were no precedents for the situation in which he and his cabinet found themselves. The bureaucracies were too small, and the War Department could not accommodate or keep records of all the regiments arriving that spring and early summer in Washington. But their ambitious and earnest commanders would come to see Lincoln, who would have to tell Cameron to give them and their men official status. Many people pestered him for commands as well, including his old dueling opponent, the Irishman General Shields.

  Though he said frequently that this was a war to save the Union, not free the slaves, he backed General Butler, stationed at Fort Monroe on the Virginia coast, when he refused to return fugitive slaves to Virginian property owners. The Fugitive Slave Law did not apply to those who were in rebellion against the United States, said Lincoln. This was emancipation by administrative decision, and word of it penetrated deep into the Confederacy, outraging white Southerners and encouraging young slaves to approach the Union lines.

  Before it had been fully safe to do so, and even before Ellsworth’s death, Mary began visiting New York to buy new fabrics and items of decor for the run-down White House. Alexander Stewart, New York’s greatest merchant, had given a dinner party in her honor, and Mary ordered two thousand dollars’ worth of rugs and curtains from him in a single day. She would make eleven such buying trips during her tenure at the White House, and to help moderate her spending, a young man named William S. Wood, appointed acting commissioner of public buildings, was ordered to accompany her. (By June 1861, on top of his other causes of grief, Lincoln received an anonymous letter about Mary’s relationship with Wood, implying that it was adulterous. Ever jealous of Lincoln, Mary was capable of—at least—a marked flirtatiousness herself.)

  Mary was not the only one, however, who found the White House in deplorable condition. One secretary thought it looked like “an old and unsuccessful hotel.” Another wrote, “The East Room has a faded, untidy look, despite its frescoing and its glittering chandeliers. Its paint and furniture need renewing; but so does everything else in the house, within and without.” The State Dining Room could not serve more than ten with matched china, and if Lincoln had better things to think of, Mary did not.

  After complaining about Lincoln’s policy vacuum, Seward forged his own hard-line foreign policy with Britain, threatening Her Majesty’s Government with war if it continued to receive Confederate commissioners. To help temper Seward’s occasional exuberance, Lincoln involved the handsome and fashionable Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts as his foreign policy adviser. Sumner, a check-trousered dandy but serious-minded, was an expert on British politics, and thus provided a balance for Seward’s tendency to bait Westminster. Lincoln became a close friend of both Sumner and Seward. The relationship with thin, beak-nosed Secretary of State Seward, who had so dearly wanted the Republican nomination yet who seemed to have accepted his defeat with grace, was helped by the fact that Seward lived on the corner of Lafayette Square, in the house nearest the west gate of the President’s House. Seward and Lincoln would go for walks together, share stories, laugh effusively. They were comrades not only in the preservation of the Union but in that Seward also had a difficult, depressive wife he could not quite figure out.

  As for the structured parts of the day, after hours of attending to correspondence, at ten o’clock each morning Lincoln had the doors of his reception room thrown open and met contractors, generals making a case for their militia brigades to be inducted and recognized by the War Department, mothers who told him that their sons were underage or ill and should be let go from the military, officers’ wives flirting with him to enhance their husbands’ chances. Though he was a faithful husband, he was susceptible to flirtatious and good-looking women, and Mary sensed and resented it. Noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays had always been the official cabinet-meeting hour, but Lincoln was not a regular convener of his cabinet. He not infrequently called in the appropriate cabinet member when a policy issue came up for decision.

  He had a fascination with weaponry, and took John Hay to watch the test firings of the massive Dahlgren gun in the Potomac. He would test new breech-loading rifles at a range maintained for him in the Treasury Park beyond the South Lawn of the White House.

  At four o’clock each afternoon he would generally go for a carriage ride, often with Mary, unless she was away or ill, in which case he would take Seward or some other old Whig. He would sometimes go to the forts around Washington, or over into northern Virginia, and talk with the men of the army as they prepared their evening meals. If not out in the evenings, or having to host a state dinner, he would work, as the smell of Washington’s new sanitary arrangements came up from the swampy canal and the Potomac flats. John Hay said this dangerous stench was worse than that of “twenty thousand drowned cats.”

  The Lincolns liked to spend their summers at the Returned Soldiers’ Home, to the northwest of Washington. Here they were above the pocket of heat that settled in the city, and away from the pestilences of the river and the Washington Canal, and Lincoln commuted to the city by carriage.

  11

  PRESSURE WAS MOUNTING now for the Union army to go forward and come to grips with Gen. Pierre G. Beauregard’s Confederates. Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune ran the headline FORWARD TO RICHMOND! seven days in a row, as if to get things started. There had been a strong supposition, even on the part of Washington people, that the war would be over in ninety days—the length of enlistment of the Union volunteers—and expiring enlistments were a further factor in the cry for the battle to be fought.

  July 1861 would be Lincoln’s first experience of the dilatoriness of generals, in this case, of Gen. Irvin McDowell. McDowell pleaded the inexperience of his troops. “You are green, it is true,” said Lincoln, “but they are green also; you are all green alike.” Union generals would need to get used to such urgings from the president.

  Thanks to Washington spies, including particularly helpful intelligence provided by a Southern sympathizer, the Washington hostess Mrs. Rose Greenhow, Beauregard knew about McDowell’s movements and intentions. The two armies faced each other along the banks of a stream called Bull Run near the rail depot of Manassas Junction, Virginia, where new brigades of Confederates from the valley had recently detrained to build up the Rebel army. The coming battle of green troops against green troops would really be a battle for control not only of terrain but of a railhead—the very medium of transportation in which the president himself had developed such expertise as a lawyer. On July 21 citizens who had come out in carriages to observe the battle saw the Union troops go forward over Bull Run with considerable dash. It proved to be a chaotic encounter, however. The Union regiments’ experience of Confederate artillery, sited in the fields around the Henry House, ended any illusion people had that this would be a short and near-bloodless affair. Unit cohesion had been poor in the early assaults and broke up almost totally in retreat and flight toward Centreville and Washington. Lincoln’s appalled, obstreperous, and morally whipped army was by morning milling and lolling in the streets of the capital, utterly directionless.

  Edwin M. Stanton, the lawyer with whom Lincoln had worked on an agricultural machinery patent case, and who would be secretary of war before the year was out, wrote, “The capture of Washington now seems to be inevitable—during the whole of Monday and Tuesday it might have been taken without any resistance. The rout, overthrow, and utter demora
lization of the whole army is complete.”

  Lincoln had been up till after midnight on the evening of the battle, in the War Department across the green from the President’s Park, receiving catastrophic telegrams. As he went home to the White House, Sens. Zachariah Chandler and Benjamin Wade, who had been spectators and had drawn their own revolvers to try to prevent soldiers from fleeing, arrived at Lincoln’s door with outraged tales of the cowardice of his soldiers. Then General Scott himself came to the White House at two o’clock to insist that Mary Lincoln and her sons leave the city immediately for their own safety. To her credit, Mary refused. Lincoln declared a national fast day, “a day of humiliation, prayer and fasting for all the people of the nation,” to attract a larger measure of divine beneficence toward the Union forces than had hitherto been noticeable.

  In the aftermath the press called for the appointment of a young, brilliant West Pointer and railroad executive, George B. McClellan, seventeen years younger than Lincoln, who had devised a plan for the securing of the Ohio River line in the middle, an advance through Virginia on Richmond on the right, and the capture of Nashville on the left. For this plan, designed in conjunction with the navy to crush the South economically, he was raised to the rank of major general and made commander of the Department of the Ohio. However, in this position, McClellan, a devout Democrat, went further than Lincoln would have liked in pledging to return the slaves even of secessionists, and using the army to do it. But the success of McClellan’s troops in driving small Confederate forces out of western Virginia helped lay the basis for the badly needed, breakaway Unionist state of West Virginia. Desperate for a leader after the whipping at Bull Run, the president and the War Department summoned him to Washington to take over the Department of the Potomac.