At the age of twenty, Douglass managed to escape from Maryland to New York, eventually becoming a lecturer with the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, headed by William Lloyd Garrison. His autobiography made him a celebrity in antislavery circles, allowing him to edit his own monthly paper in Rochester, New York. Throughout all his writings, the historian David Blight argues, there was “no more pervasive theme in Douglass’ thought than the simple sustenance of hope in a better future for blacks in America.”
Douglass believed that the election of a Republican president foretold a rupture in the power of the slaveocracy. “It has taught the North its strength, and shown the South its weakness. More important still, it has demonstrated the possibility of electing, if not an Abolitionist, at least an anti-slavery reputation to the Presidency.” But when Douglass read the inaugural, beginning with Lincoln’s declaration that he had “no lawful power to interfere with slavery in the States,” and worse still, no “inclination” to do so, he found little reason for optimism. More insufferable was Lincoln’s readiness to catch fugitive slaves, “to shoot them down if they rise against their oppressors, and to prohibit the Federal Government irrevocably from interfering for their deliverance.” The whole tone of the speech, Douglass claimed, revealed Lincoln’s compulsion to grovel “before the foul and withering curse of slavery. Some thought we had in Mr. Lincoln the nerve and decision of an Oliver Cromwell; but the result shows that we merely have a continuation of the Pierces and Buchanans.”
THE WHITE HOUSE FAMILY QUARTERS were then confined to the west end of the second floor. Lincoln chose a small bedroom with a large dressing room on the southwest side. Mary took the more spacious room adjacent to her husband’s, while Willie and Tad occupied a bedroom across the hall. Beyond the ample sleeping quarters, there was only one other private space—an oval room, filled with bookcases, that Mary turned into the family’s library. At the east end of the same floor was a sleeping chamber shared by Nicolay and Hay and a small, narrow workspace that opened onto the president’s simply furnished office. The rest of the mansion was largely open to the public. In the first few weeks, Seward reported to his wife, “the grounds, halls, stairways, closets” were overrun with hundreds of people, standing in long winding lines and waving their letters of introduction in desperate hope of securing a job.
For Willie and Tad, now ten and almost eight, respectively, the early days in the White House were filled with great adventures. They ran from floor to floor, inspecting every room. They talked with everyone along the way, “from Edward, the door keeper, Stackpole, the messenger, to the maids and scullions.” Willie was “a noble, beautiful boy,” Elizabeth Grimsley observed, “of great mental activity, unusual intelligence, wonderful memory, methodical, frank and loving, a counterpart of his father, save that he was handsome.” Willie spent hours memorizing railroad timetables and would entertain his friends by conducting “an imaginary train from Chicago to New York with perfect precision” and dramatic flair. He was an avid reader, a budding writer, and generally sweet-tempered, all reminiscent of his father.
Tad, to whom Willie was devoted, bore greater resemblance to his mother. Healthy and high-spirited, he had a blazing temper, which disappeared as quickly as it came. He was a “merry, spontaneous fellow, bubbling over with innocent fun, whose laugh rang through the house, when not moved to tears.” Irrepressible and undisciplined, never hesitant to interrupt his father in the midst of a cabinet meeting, he was “the life, as also the worry of the household.” A speech impediment made it hard for anyone outside his family to understand his words, but he never stopped talking. He had, John Hay recalled, “a very bad opinion of books and no opinion of discipline.”
The boys harried the staff at the executive mansion, racing through the hallways, playing advocate for the most anguished office seekers, organizing little plays in the garret, and setting off all the servants’ bells at the same time. Fearing that her boys would grow lonely and isolated, Mary found them two lively companions in twelve-year-old Horatio Nelson “Bud” Taft and his eight-year-old brother, Halsey, nicknamed “Holly.” Together with their older sister, Julia, who later wrote a small book recording their adventures in the White House, the Taft children quickly formed a tight circle with Willie and Tad. “If there was any motto or slogan of the White House during the early years,” Julia recalled, “it was this: ‘Let the children have a good time.’”
Mary, too, seemed happy at first, surrounded by friends and relatives, who stayed on for weeks after the inauguration. Her confidence that she could handle the demands of first lady was buoyed by the great success of the first evening levee on the Friday after they moved in. Seward had proposed that he would lead off the social season from his own mansion, but Mary immediately took exception. Like her husband, Mary had no desire “to let Seward take the first trick.” She insisted that the new administration’s first official entertainment take place at the White House. Though she had little time to prepare, she arranged an unforgettable event. “For over two hours,” Nicolay wrote his fiancée, Therena, “the crowd poured in as rapidly as the door would admit them, and many climbed in at the windows.” The president and first lady shook hands with as many of the five thousand “well dressed and well behaved” guests as they could. Even the blue-blood Charles Francis Adams was impressed by Mary’s poise, though he found Lincoln to be wholly ignorant of formal “social courtesy.” Nonetheless, according to Nicolay, the levee “was voted by all the ‘oldest inhabitants’ to have been the most successful one ever known here.”
Mary was thrilled. “This is certainly a very charming spot,” she wrote her friend Hannah Shearer several weeks later, “& I have formed many delightful acquaintances. Every evening our blue room, is filled with the elite of the land, last eve, we had about 40 to call in, to see us ladies, from Vice. P. Breckinridge down…. I am beginning to feel so perfectly at home, and enjoy every thing so much. The conservatory attached to this house is so delightful.” Scarcely concealing her pride at having outdone her older sister Elizabeth, she told Hannah that Elizabeth had so enjoyed herself at the festivities that she “cannot settle down at home, since she has been here.”
A “LIGHT AND CAPRICIOUS” SLEEPER, Lincoln generally awakened early in the morning. Before breakfast he liked to exercise, often by walking around the spacious White House grounds. After a simple meal, usually a single egg and a cup of coffee, he made his way down the corridor to his office, where on cool days a fire blazed in the white marble fireplace with a big brass fender. His worktable stood between two tall windows that faced the south lawn, affording a panorama of the incomplete Washington Monument, the red-roofed Smithsonian, and the Potomac River. An armchair nearby allowed him to read in comfort, his long legs stretched before him or crossed one over the other.
In the center of the chamber, which doubled as the Cabinet Room, stood a long oak table around which the members arranged themselves in order of precedence. Old maps hung on the wall, and over the mantel, a portrait of President Andrew Jackson. A few sofas and an assortment of chairs completed the furnishings. The musty smell of tobacco, lodged in the draperies from the heavy cigar smoke of the previous president and the new secretary of state, conveyed the atmosphere of the traditional men’s club.
When Lincoln entered his office on the first morning after his inauguration, he was confronted with profoundly disturbing news. On his desk, “the very first thing placed in his hands” was a letter from Major Anderson at Fort Sumter. The communication estimated, Lincoln later recalled, “that their provisions would be exhausted before an expedition could be sent to their relief.” The letter carried General Winfield Scott’s endorsement: “I now see no alternative but a surrender.”
The immediacy of this crisis posed great difficulties for Lincoln. His revised inaugural had no longer contained a promise to “reclaim” fallen properties, but Lincoln had most definitely pledged to “hold, occupy and possess” all properties still in Federal hands. No symbol of Feder
al authority was more important than Fort Sumter. Ever since Major Anderson, in the dead of night on December 26, had surreptitiously moved his troops from Fort Moultrie to the better-protected Sumter, he had become a romantic hero in the North. Surrender of his garrison would be humiliating. Still, the president felt bound by his vow to his “dissatisfied fellow countrymen” that the new “government will not assail you. You can have no conflict, without being yourselves the aggressors.”
The president needed time to think, but scarcely had a moment “to eat or sleep” amid the crush of office seekers. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, pressed in as soon as the doors were opened, ignoring the barriers set up to keep them in line. As Lincoln moved throughout the house to take his lunch—which was generally limited to bread, fruit, and milk—“he had literally to run the gantlet through the crowds.” Each aspirant had a story to tell, a reason why a clerkship in Washington or a job in their local post office or customs house would allow their family to survive. Time and again, Lincoln was faulted for wasting his energies. “You will wear yourself out,” Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts warned. “They don’t want much,” Lincoln replied, “they get but little, and I must see them.”
Such openheartedness indicated incompetence to many, or, worse, a sign of terrible weakness. He “has no conception of his situation,” Sumner told Adams. “He is ignorant, and must have help,” Adams agreed, citing Seward as “our only security now.” The New York Times reproved Lincoln repeatedly, writing disdainfully that he “owes a higher duty to the country…than to fritter away the priceless opportunities of the Presidency in listening to the appeals of competing office-hunters.” Seward, too, was critical. “The President proposes to do all his work,” he wrote home. “Of course he takes that business up, first, which is pressed upon him most.”
Somehow Lincoln managed, despite the chaos, to focus upon the crisis at Sumter. Late at night, he would sit in the library, clothed in his “long-skirted faded dressing-gown, belted around his waist,” his large leather Bible beside him. He liked to read and think in “his big chair by the window,” observed Julia Taft, “in his stocking feet with one long leg crossed over the other, the unshod foot slowly waving back and forth, as if in time to some inaudible music.”
Unwilling to accept Scott’s assumption that Sumter must be evacuated, Lincoln penned a note to the old general, asking for more specifics. Exactly how long could Anderson hold out? What would it take to resupply him and to reinforce Sumter? Scott’s reply laid out a bleak prospect indeed. With the government of South Carolina now preventing the garrison from resupplying in Charleston, Anderson could hold out, Scott estimated, for only twenty-six days. It would require “six to eight months” to assemble the “fleet of war vessels & transports, 5,000 additional regular troops & 20,000 volunteers” necessary to resupply and reinforce the garrison.
Rumors spread that Sumter would soon be surrendered, but Lincoln “was disinclined to hasty action,” Welles recorded in his diary, “and wished time for the Administration to get in working order and its policy to be understood.” Repeatedly, he called his cabinet into session to discuss the situation. He met with Francis Blair, who, like his son, Monty, believed passionately that the surrender of Sumter “was virtually a surrender of the Union unless under irresistible force—that compounding with treason was treason to the Govt.”
At Monty Blair’s suggestion, Lincoln met with his brother-in-law, Gustavus Fox, a former navy officer who had developed an ingenious plan for relief by sea. Bread and supplies could be loaded onto two sturdy tugboats, shadowed by a large steamer conveying troops ready to fire if the tugs were opposed. Intrigued, Lincoln asked Fox to present his plan; and the next day, March 15, the cabinet gathered around the long table to discuss the stratagem. Lincoln seldom took his seat, pacing up and down as he spoke. After the meeting, he sent a memo to each of the members, asking for a written response to the following question: “Assuming it to be possible to now provision Fort-Sumpter, under all the circumstances, is it wise to attempt it?”
Seward, who had exerted himself in the previous months trying to mollify the Union’s remaining slave states, found the idea of provisioning Sumter and sending troops to South Carolina detestable. From his suite in the old State Department, a two-story brick building containing only thirty-two rooms, Seward drafted his reply, while his son Frederick, who had been confirmed by the Senate as assistant secretary of state, handled the crowds downstairs. In his lengthy reply to the president, Seward reiterated that without the conciliation measures that had solidified the Unionist sentiment in the South, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and the border states would have joined the Confederacy. The attempt to supply Fort Sumter with armed forces would inevitably provoke the remaining slave states to secede and launch a civil war—that “most disastrous and deplorable of national calamities.” Far better, Seward advised, to assume a defensive position, leaving “the necessity for action” in the hands of “those who seek to dismember and subvert this Union…. In that case, we should have the spirit of the country and the approval of mankind on our side.” His emphatic negative reply probably reached Lincoln within minutes, for the State Department was adjacent to the northern wing of the Treasury Department and connected by a short pathway to the White House.
Chase did not return his answer until the following day, repairing that evening to his suite at the Willard Hotel. Considering his hard-line credentials, Chase returned a surprisingly evasive and equivocal reply: “If the attempt will so inflame civil war as to involve an immediate necessity for the enlistment of armies and the expenditure of millions I cannot advise it.” Better, he later explained, to consider “the organization of actual government by the seven seceded states as an accomplished revolution—accomplished through the complicity of the late admn.—& letting that confederacy try its experiment.” Still, he concluded in his answer to Lincoln, “it seems to me highly improbable” that war will result. “I return, therefore, an affirmative answer.”
Every other cabinet officer save Blair rejected the possibility of sustaining Fort Sumter. Bates argued that he was loath “to do any act which may have the semblance, before the world of beginning a civil war.” Cameron contended that even if Fox’s plan should succeed, which he considered doubtful, the surrender of the fort would remain “an inevitable necessity.” Thus, “the sooner it be done, the better.” Welles, writing from his second-floor suite in the Navy Department on 17th Street, reasoned that since the “impression has gone abroad that Sumter is to be evacuated and the shock caused by that announcement has done its work,” it would only cause further damage to follow “a course that would provoke hostilities.” And if it did not succeed, “failure would be attended with untold disaster.” In like fashion, Interior Secretary Caleb Smith concluded that while the plan might succeed, “it would not be wise under all the circumstances.”
Only Montgomery Blair delivered an unconditional yes, arguing that “every new conquest made by the rebels strengthens their hands at home and their claim to recognition as an independent people abroad.” So long as the rebels could claim “that the Northern men are deficient in the courage necessary to maintain the Government,” the secession momentum would continue. Just as President Jackson stopped the attempted secession of South Carolina in 1833 by making it clear that punishment would follow, so Lincoln must now take “measures which will inspire respect for the power of the Government and the firmness of those who administer it.”
In the end, five cabinet members strongly opposed the resupply and reinforcement of Sumter; one remained ambiguous; one was in favor.
IN THE DAYS THAT FOLLOWED the cabinet vote, Lincoln appeared to waver. Weed later insisted that on at least three occasions, the president said if he could keep Virginia in the Union, he would give up Sumter. Seward urged that so long as Fort Pickens in Florida remained in Union hands, Sumter’s evacuation would matter little. Pickens was fully provisioned and, situated in Pensacola Bay, would be easier than
Sumter to defend. Orders had already been issued to reinforce the garrison. However, Lincoln felt that the surrender of Sumter would be “utterly ruinous…that, at home, it would discourage the friends of the Union, embolden its adversaries, and go far to insure to the latter, a recognition abroad.”
Desiring more information, Lincoln sent Fox to talk directly to Major Anderson and determine exactly how long his supplies would last. Through the intervention of an old friend who was close to the governor of South Carolina, Fox received permission to enter Sumter and meet with Anderson. If his men went on half-rations, Anderson told him, he could last until April 15. At the same time, Lincoln sent Stephen Hurlbut, whom he had known well in Springfield, to Charleston. Hurlbut had grown up in Charleston, and his sister still lived there. Speaking privately to old friends, he could test Seward’s assumption that Unionist sentiment throughout the South would continue to strengthen so long as the government refrained from any provocative action or perceived aggression. Hurlbut spent two days in his native city. He returned with “no hesitation in reporting as unquestionable” that Unionist sentiment in both city and state was dead, “that separate nationality is a fixed fact.”
While Lincoln was learning more about the facts of the situation, his cabinet colleagues were engaged in a series of petty feuds. Chase considered Smith “a cypher” and Bates “a humdrum lawyer.” Seward was furious when Chase and Bates insisted on two appointments in his own district and stated that would be “humiliating” to him. “I would sooner attack either of those gentlemen in the open street,” Seward indignantly wrote Lincoln, “than consent to oppose any local appointment they might desire to make in their respective states.” From his Treasury Department office overlooking the White House grounds, Chase complained to Lincoln that Seward would “certainly have no cause to congratulate himself if he persists in denying the only favor he can show me.” Blair Senior, echoing the sentiment of his son, grumbled to Chase that all the best missions abroad had been given to Seward’s old Whig friends. “I believe our Republican Party will not endure, unless there is a fusion of the Whig & Democratic element,” he noted ruefully.
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