“History does not furnish a year’s victories by the armies of any country in any war that will excel these,” the National Republican boasted. “We have a right to be somewhat gay and festive here at the national metropolis. No one wishes to deny that we have had a rebellious storm, and that the political horizon is still somewhat muggy; but our gallant old ship of State, with Abraham Lincoln at the helm, has weathered the gale.” William Stoddard echoed these sentiments in a published dispatch. “The instinct of all, rather than the reasoning, teaches us, as it has the rest of the country, that once and for all the danger is over.”
At 10 a.m., official Washington began arriving at the White House for the traditional New Year’s reception. At noon, when the gates opened to the general public, eight thousand people streamed in—“a human kaleidescope, constantly changing,” of “diplomats and dragoons, exquisites from the Atlantic cities and hardy backwoodsmen, contented contractors and shoddy swindlers, ingenious patentees and persevering petitioners.”
Lincoln considered his meetings with the general public his “public-opinion baths.” They “serve to renew in me a clearer and more vivid image of that great popular assemblage out of which I sprung,” he told a visitor, “and though they may not be pleasant in all their particulars, the effect, as a whole, is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and duty.”
“European democrats go into ecstasies over so palpable a sign of our universal equality,” Stoddard noted, while “European aristocrats, attaches of legations, tourists, and the like, turn up their noses somewhat scornfully at so singularly American a custom.” Visitors noted that Lincoln “appeared to be in excellent health and spirits, and whatever perplexities his generals may give him, he possesses the happy faculty of leaving them in his office upstairs, when he comes down to receive the salutations of the people. His clear eyes beamed with good humor, and he not only cordially returned the pressure of each offered hand, but generally said a pleasant word or two.” Noah Brooks noted that Mary Lincoln “never looked better,” having replaced her black “mourning garb” with a rich purple velvet dress.
“We seem to have reached a new stage in the war,” Fred Seward wrote home. “Gayety has become as epidemic in Washington this winter, as gloom was last winter. There is a lull in political discussions; and people are inclined to eat, drink, and be merry. The newspapers can furnish nothing more interesting to their readers, than accounts of parties, balls and theaters, like so many Court Journals. Questions of etiquette are debated with gravity. People talk of ‘society,’ who never before knew or cared about it.”
The winter social calendar followed a prescribed order. The president’s receptions were on Tuesday evenings, the first lady’s matinées on Saturday afternoons, the soirées of the Speaker of the House on Friday nights. No cards of invitation were required for these events. Since the president and speaker held their offices at the will of the people, their homes were open to the public at large. In contrast, invitations were necessary, and highly coveted, for the elegant parties at the dwellings of cabinet officers. Access to the drawing rooms of Seward and Chase were prized most of all.
Social columnists attributed the legendary success of the parties held by the secretary of state to both his genial wit and the “grace and elegance” of his daughter-in-law, Anna, “who with such rare art groups those of congenial tastes, and makes all truly ‘at home.’” For young belles, there was added mystique in the presence of the diplomatic corps, which held out the titillating prospect of attracting a titled foreigner. For those fascinated by fashion and etiquette, nothing compared to the impeccable manners and gorgeous dress of the diplomats, bespangled with ribbons and garters denoting different orders of knighthood. “Who wonders that the House of Gov. Seward is a favorite resort,” one columnist asked, “and who that enjoys his hospitality does not wish that he might be Secretary of State forever, and be ‘at home’ once a week.”
At the Chase mansion, Kate Sprague continued to be the “observed of all observers.” Whether dressed in blue brocade, gray, or simple black, she impressed congressmen, senators, and generals alike with her interest in politics and familiarity with military affairs. Holding court at the entrance, she had an appropriate greeting for every guest. Benjamin French thought her “one of the most lovable women” he had ever seen. Noah Brooks was likewise smitten, at once recognizing the delightful contrast to her “frosty” father, who “looked uncomfortable and generally bothered” at these affairs. Chase’s nearsightedness had grown so extreme that he was unable to recognize anyone without “a very close examination.” Nevertheless, he still refused to wear glasses.
The Washington elite preferred the fancy dinner parties at the Seward and Chase mansions to the public levees at the White House, where bonnets were crushed and cloaks occasionally stolen in the chaos. During the winter, Mary found it necessary to put durable brown coverings over her elegant French carpets to protect them from the muddy tramp of the “human tide” that poured in to shake hands with the president. Many visitors were ill dressed and bedraggled, as after a long dusty ride, and some still carried their carpetbags. The elegant furnishings that Mary had so lovingly and expensively put in place took a beating. Brooks noted that “the lace curtains, heavy cords, tassels, and damask drapery have suffered considerably this season from the hands of relic-hunting vandals who actually clip off small bits of the precious stuff to carry home as mementoes.” Desperate to preserve their experience, some even lifted the brown covering and cut out pieces of the French carpet “as large as a man’s hand.”
For Mary, who relished her position as first lady, it was galling to read in the papers that Seward, not she, would inaugurate “the fashionable ‘season.’” He was to host an exclusive party for the visiting members of the National Academy of Science, along with “the heads of the foreign Legations, the Cabinet, the Justices of the Supreme Court, the presiding officers of the two Houses of Congress and the Committees on Foreign Relations, with their families.” That same week, the New York Herald noted, the White House reception was “not so largely attended as usual.” Benjamin French, who was Mary’s customary escort at public functions, saw that she was “disappointed.” The Sewards hosted three more receptions in January 1864, accounted the “grandest,” “most elegant,” and “most brilliant” affairs of the season, with guest lists including barons, counts, lords, ladies, and young Robert Lincoln, home for vacation.
Mary’s wounded pride increased her feelings of resentment toward Seward. She continued to begrudge the intimacy he shared with her husband, the many nights Lincoln chose to spend with Seward instead of her. Fred Seward records a pleasant evening that January when Lincoln walked over to Seward’s with John Hay to share a humorous language guidebook, English as She is Spoke. “As John Hay read aloud its queer inverted sentences, Lincoln and Seward laughed heartily, their minds finding a brief but welcome relief from care.” Though Seward had long since ceased to be a political threat to her husband, Mary could not relinquish her suspicions. She told their family friend Anson Henry that Seward and his friends were behind the various “scandalous reports in circulation about her.” Dr. Henry dismissed her fears, saying that the nasty rumors probably originated in “the Treasury Department,” for he had “traced many of them” to Chase’s friends and supporters.
Indeed, by early 1864, Chase’s presidential ambitions were widely known and frequently discussed in political circles. Mary’s anger toward Chase grew “very bitter,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled: she “warned Mr. Lincoln not to trust him,” but Lincoln continued to insist that Chase was “a patriot.” As Mary planned for her first state dinner of the year, traditionally held for the members of the cabinet, justices of the Supreme Court, and their families, she decided to take matters into her own hands. She perused the guest list compiled by John Nicolay, and crossed out the names of Kate Chase and William Sprague. Certain the “snub” would become public and reflect badly on Lincoln, Nicolay appeale
d to his boss to reinstate the Spragues. Lincoln immediately agreed, sending Mary into a rage.
“There soon arose such a rampage as the House hasn’t seen for a year,” Nicolay confided to an absent Hay, “and I am again taboo. How the thing is to end is yet as dark a problem as the Schleswig-Holstein difficulty.” Mary directed her wrath toward Nicolay, banishing him from the dinner and eschewing his customary help with the arrangements. “Things ran on thus till the afternoon of the dinner,” Nicolay reported, when Mary “backed down, requested my presence and assistance—apologizing, and explaining that the affair had worried her so she hadn’t slept for a night or two.”
The dinner “was pleasant,” Welles recorded in his diary. “A little stiff and awkward on the part of the some of the guests [perhaps referring to Chase], but passed off very well.” Welles, however, was unable to share the capital’s renewed delight in parties, receptions, and fairs. It all seemed inappropriate, “like merry-making at a funeral,” he wrote his son Edgar.
Not every occasion was merely a frivolous distraction. The hosts and partygoers did not forget the imperiled men in the armed forces. Where once “the old secession or semi-secesh element” reigned in Washington society, injured soldiers and sailors became the stars of every occasion. Admiral Dahlgren’s twenty-one-year-old son, Ulric, had lost a leg at Gettysburg. When he appeared at a Washington party, he was surrounded by pretty girls. They stayed by his side all night, refusing to dance, in tribute to the handsome colonel who had been known as an expert waltzer.
In late January, Copperhead congressman Fernando Wood of New York, who had often and bitterly denounced the Republican administration and the war, threw a great party to which he invited Republicans as well as fellow Democrats. Republicans were expected to stay away, but many actually attended, as did “Abolitionists of the most ultra stripe.” Stoddard found it “one of the charming features of life in Washington” that “political animosities” were not carried “into social life,” that people who publicly savaged one another could still be “commendably cordial and friendly in all personal intercourse.”
In keeping with that tradition, Mary Lincoln sent a bouquet of flowers to Mrs. Wood. The Woods exaggerated the courtesy by placing cards that read: “Compliments of Mrs. A. Lincoln” beside all the many flower vases, making it appear that Mary had supplied the entire array. Newspapers played up the story, citing the supposedly lavish display as evidence of Mary’s Southern sympathies. Stung by the criticism, Mary wrote her influential friend General Sickles: “I am pleased to announce to you my entire innocence…. With the exception of two political public receptions, they[the Woods] have not entered the [White] house—all of my, friends, who know my detestation of disloyal persons will discredit the rumor—You know me too well to believe it.”
Still, slander against the president and first lady continued to fill the columns of opposition papers. In December, when Emilie Todd Helm had come through Union lines after her husband’s death, she had been accompanied north by another sister, Martha Todd White. After Emilie left the White House, Lincoln issued a pass to Martha, allowing her to return to the Confederacy. Such passes were not unusual, but the false story spread that Lincoln, presumably at his wife’s request, had granted a special permit allowing Martha to bring her bags through without inspection. Some opposition papers claimed that she was, in fact, a Confederate spy and had used her privilege to smuggle contraband through Union lines. It was bruited that when she arrived at Fort Monroe and was told to open her trunks, she waved the president’s permit in General Butler’s face, defiantly proclaiming: “Here (pushing it under their noses) here is the positive order of your master.”
Ordinarily, Lincoln took little heed of scurrilous rumors, but in this case, he directed Nicolay to ascertain the facts from General Butler. Butler replied that the smuggling story was spurious. Mrs. White’s bags had undergone the usual search. Nothing untoward had been found. Nicolay used Butler’s letter to document a public rebuttal of the fraudulent story. Butler was surprised that the White House would even bother to respond to something so “silly,” but after the Wood affair had cast doubt on his wife’s loyalty, Lincoln may have wanted to nip the new round of rumors in the bud. Nor did he want his soldiers to think that he would ever facilitate the Confederacy’s access to contraband items that might sustain the rebel cause.
It is scarcely surprising that Lincoln not long afterward showed little patience when his old friend Orville Browning requested a favor for a loyal Unionist who owned a cotton plantation in Mississippi. When the Union Army overran her home and took her slaves, she had fallen into poverty. She asked if the government could provide her an equal number of Negroes whom she would pay to work her farm. Lincoln “became very much excited,” according to Browning, and “said with great vehemence he had rather take a rope and hang himself than to do it.” When Browning argued for “some sort of remuneration” for the lost property, Lincoln countered that “she had lost no property—that her slaves were free when they were taken.” Puzzled by Lincoln’s sharp reaction, Browning “left him in no very good humor.”
As was usually the case with Lincoln’s rare episodes of pique, other strains had contributed to the sharp rejoinder. Earlier that day, he had visited the sickbed of Illinois congressman Owen Lovejoy, whom he considered “the best friend [he] had in Congress.” The fifty-three-year-old Lovejoy was suffering from a debilitating liver and kidney ailment that would soon take his life. Lincoln was distraught over Lovejoy’s misery and seemed to internalize the grim prospects facing his friend. “This war is eating my life out,” he told the dying Lovejoy. “I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end.”
On the night of February 10, a fire alarm rang in the White House. Smoke was seen issuing from the president’s private stables, which stood between the mansion and the Treasury building, and Lincoln raced to the scene. “When he reached the boxwood hedge that served as an enclosure to the stables,” a member of his bodyguard, Robert McBride, recalled, “he sprang over it like a deer.” Learning that the horses were still inside, Lincoln, “with his own hands burst open the stable door.” It was immediately apparent that the fast-moving fire, the work of an arsonist, prevented any hope of rescue. “Notwithstanding this,” McBride observed, “he would apparently have tried to enter the burning building had not those standing near caught and restrained him.”
Six horses burned to death that night. When McBride returned to the White House, he found Lincoln in tears. Ten-year-old Tad “explained his father’s emotion”: one of the ponies had belonged to his brother, Willie. A coachman who had been fired by Mary that morning was charged with setting the fire. The following day, Lincoln had collected himself and moved forward. He called Commissioner French to his office and instructed him to consult contractors, estimate the cost, and “bring the matter to the attention of Congress to-day, if possible, that measures might be taken to have it rebuilt.”
LINCOLN’S GIFT FOR MANAGING men was never more apparent than during the presidential boomlet for Chase that peaked in the winter months of 1864. While Chase’s supporters prematurely showed their hand, Lincoln, according to the Pennsylvania politician Alexander McClure, “carefully veiled his keen and sometimes bitter resentment against Chase, and waited the fullness of time when he could by some fortuitous circumstance remove Chase as a competitor, or by some shrewd manipulation of politics make him a hopeless one.”
The game had begun in earnest early in January. Friends of Chase, including Jay and Henry Cooke, contributed thousands of dollars to the publisher of the American Exchange and Review, a small Philadelphia magazine, so he would print a flattering biographical sketch of the treasury secretary. Chase’s friend William Orton warned him that “no matter how able or ‘faithful’ the biography may be,” its publication in a “seedy” magazine with a reputation for selling its space to whomever could pay enough would be seen “as a flimsy political trick.” Orton’s note elicited no direct reply, but a
t some point the president had apparently questioned the involvement of the Cooke brothers, who were still official agents for selling government bonds. The president’s questions elicited a long, emotional letter from Chase.
Chase opened his letter with the assertion that his actions, as always, proceeded from the purest of motives. He claimed he had “never, consciously & deliberately, injured one fellow man.” He had been told that the publisher intended to print a series of sketches about prominent figures, starting with him. “How could I object?” Treasury business so occupied him that he had paid no further attention to the matter. “What Mr. H. D. Cooke did about the unfortunate biography was done of his own accord without any prompting from me,” Chase insisted. Had Cooke or his brother sought his consent, he would have stopped them. “Not that any wrong was intended or done; but because the act was subject to misconstruction…. You will pardon me if I write as one somewhat moved. It makes me hate public life when I realize how powerless are the most faithful labors and the most upright conduct to protect any man from carping envy or malignant denunciations.”
Embarrassment over the circumstances surrounding the Exchange and Review piece did not stop Chase from writing twenty-five long letters that winter to the Boston writer John Trowbridge. His missives were designed to provide the foundation for a small inspirational book about his life, The Ferry-Boy and the Financier. An excerpt appeared that spring in the Atlantic Monthly. These letters were but a small part of a massive campaign to extol his own virtues at Lincoln’s expense. From early morning until late at night, Chase toiled to maintain his stream of correspondence with friends and supporters. “So far,” he told a friend in Cincinnati, “I think I have made few mistakes. Indeed, on looking back over the whole ground with an earnest desire to detect error and correct it, I am not able to see where, if I had to do my work all over again, I could in any matter do materially otherwise than I have.”
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