Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Sometimes Lincoln resorted to gentle sarcasm when confronted by importunate visitors. A delegation once appealed to him to help the Washington fire department obtain new equipment. He interrupted their presentation, gravely remarking: “Ah! Yes, gentlemen, but it is a mistake to suppose that I am at the head of the fire department of Washington. I am simply the President of the United States.”23 When a landlord complained that he could not collect his rents, Lincoln expressed sympathy but asked, “what would you have me do for you? I have much to do, and the courts have been opened to relieve me in this regard.” Sheepishly his caller said, “I am not in the habit of appearing before big men.” With customary modesty, the president replied: “And for that matter, you have no need to change your habit, for you are not before very big men now.” Lincoln patiently concluded the interview by observing that he could not “go into the collection business.”24 Lincoln had to make the same point to another creditor: “I am really very sorry, madam, very sorry. But your own good sense must tell you that I am not here to collect small debts. You must appeal to the courts in regular order.” To an army officer, he exclaimed: “What odd kinds of people come in to see me, and what odd ideas they must have about my office! Would you believe, Major, that the old lady who has just left, came in here to get from me an order for stopping the pay of a treasury clerk, who owes her a board bill of about seventy dollars. … She may have come in here a loyal woman, but I’ll be bound she has gone away believing that the worst pictures of me in the Richmond press only lack truth in not being half black and bad enough.”25

  An allegedly loyal Southerner asked Lincoln to sign papers permitting him to recover substantial sums for property damaged in the war. The president heatedly observed that the claimant’s documents did not prove that he deserved the money. “I know what you want,” Lincoln snapped, “you are turning, or trying to turn me into a justice of the peace, to put your claims through. There are a hundred thousand men in the country, every one of them as good as you are, who have just such bills as you present; and you care nothing of what becomes of them, so you get your money.”26 When a poor woman from Michigan came begging for help to meet her mortgage, Lincoln listened patiently, scanned her letters “with a half humorous, half vexed expression,” and pledged a modest sum.27

  To a farmer seeking presidential aid in pressing a claim for damages, Lincoln exclaimed: “Why, my good sir. If I should attempt to consider every such individual case I should find work enough for twenty Presidents!” When his interlocutor failed to take the hint, Lincoln said he was reminded of an expert pilot back in Illinois who was deftly guiding a steamboat through some rapids. As the craft pitched and rolled in the turbulent water, a young boy accosted him with a plea: “Say, Mister Captain! I wish you would just stop your boat a minute—I’ve lost my apple overboard!”28 Visiting clergy often annoyed the president. One day when a minister called at the White House, Lincoln invited him to sit, then took his own chair and announced: “I am now ready to hear what you have to say.”

  “Oh, bless you sir, I have nothing to say. I merely called to pay my respects.”

  With relief written all over his face, Lincoln rose, took the clerical visitor’s hand in both of his, and exclaimed: “My dear sir, I am very glad to see you. I am very glad to see you indeed. I thought you came to preach to me!”29

  Lincoln put in long hours attending to public business. When the First Lady was away (which was often), he would eat breakfast, lunch, and even dinner alone in his office while working away steadily. Theodore Cuyler once asked him: “Mr. President, I am here at almost every hour of the day or night, and I never saw you at the table; do you ever eat?” Lincoln replied: “I try to. I manage to browse about pretty much as I can get it.”30 Receiving callers from early morning till late afternoon, he seemed to Stoddard like “a man who carried a load too great for human strength; and, as the years went on and the load grew heavier, it bowed him into premature old age. He was the American Atlas.”31

  At lunchtime, Lincoln ran a gauntlet formed by would-be callers lining the hallway between his office and the family quarters. Afternoons were spent much like mornings. Late in the day he would usually take a carriage ride, often with the First Lady. Dinner was served at 6 P.M. According to John Hay, Lincoln “was one of the most abstemious of men; the pleasures of the table had few attractions for him.” His lunch consisted of little more than a biscuit and some fruit, washed down with a glass of milk, and for supper he “ate sparingly of one or two courses.”32 He liked simple food, especially cornpone, cabbage, and chicken fricassee. After the evening meal, he would usually return to his office and continue working. Sometimes at dinner he enjoyed the company of friends, who joined him for coffee and a postprandial chat in the red drawing room. During sessions of Congress, its members took up many of his evening hours. He went to bed between 10 and 11 P.M., but if he was expecting important news, he would stay up as late as 1 or 2 A.M., closeted with the telegraph operators at the War Department. After the death of Willie in February 1862, Tad usually slept with his father.

  On Sundays, Lincoln attended services at the nearby New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, where the Rev. Dr. Phineas Gurley presided. Upon arriving in Washington, he asked friends and allies to recommend “a church whose clergyman holds himself aloof from politics.”33 At first, Willie and Tad went to Sunday school there, but later the headstrong Tad revolted, preferring to go to the livelier Fourth Presbyterian Church where his friends Holly and Bud Taft and their family worshipped.

  Receptions

  Like their predecessors, the Lincolns hosted receptions, levees, open houses, state dinners, and concerts. On March 7, 1861, the president held a reception for foreign representatives. One of them, the Russian minister Edouard de Stoeckl, reported that “the diplomatic corps has only praise” for the event. (A sarcastic, witty put-down artist, Stoeckl thought the president’s “manners are those of a man who has spent all his life in a small Western town.”)34

  Lincoln was formally presented to those diplomats in special audiences, one of which the English journalist William Howard Russell described vividly. On March 27, 1861, the Chevalier Bertinatti of Sardinia (Italy), splendidly decked out with a sword, sash, cocked hat, white gloves, suit of blue with silver lace, and ribbon of the cross of Savoy, made his appearance at the White House. Lincoln presented a striking contrast, entering “with a shambling, loose, irregular, almost unsteady gait” and wearing a wrinkled black suit which caused him to resemble an undertaker. He made an unprepossessing appearance with his “sinewy muscular yellow neck,” “flapping and wide projecting ears,” “thatch of wild republican hair” that looked like “a ruff of mourning pins,” “stooping shoulders,” and “long pendulous arms, terminating in hands of extraordinary dimensions, which, however, were far exceeded in proportion by his feet.” His “strange, quaint face” featured an “absolutely prodigious” mouth with lips “straggling and extending almost from one line of black beard to the other.” The equally huge nose stood out “with an inquiring, anxious air, as though it were sniffing for some good thing in the wind.” The “dark, full, and deeply set, penetrating” eyes were “full of an expression which almost amounts to tenderness.” Above them loomed a “shaggy brow” and a forehead with “irregular flocks of thick hair carelessly brushed across it.” He would not be mistaken for what Europeans considered a gentleman. Russell reported that since coming to the United States, he had “heard more disparaging allusions made by Americans to him on that account than I could have expected among simple republicans, where all should be equals.”35

  (One such critic was a New York clergyman who wished Lincoln “were more of a gentleman,” for he was “decidedly shabby in his dress & manner.”36 Frederick Law Olmsted, a member of the U.S. Sanitary Commission as well as a noted landscape architect and journalist, was dismayed to see the president “dressed in a cheap & nasty French black cloth suit just out of a tight carpet bag” looking like “an applicant for a Broadwa
y squad policemanship.”37 Echoing Olmsted was another member of the Sanitary Commission, George Templeton Strong, a sophisticated Wall Street lawyer who found the president “lank and hard-featured, among the ugliest white men I have seen,” and emphatically “plebeian.” He had “the laugh of a yahoo, with a wrinkling of the nose that suggests affinity with the tapir and other pachyderms; and his grammar is weak.” In sum, he was “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla, in respect of outside polish.”38 Prince Napoleon, cousin of Napoleon III, thought Lincoln had “the appearance of a bootmaker” and found him “badly put together, in a black suit.” In his diary, the prince exclaimed: “What a difference between this sad representative of the great republic and her founding fathers!” Withal Lincoln impressed the prince as “a good man, but one without greatness nor very much knowledge.”39 The unrefined, “painfully homely & awkward” president, Richard Henry Dana thought, resembled “a man who has brought in something to sell” with a face radiating no “power or firmness.”’)40

  Despite Lincoln’s unprepossessing appearance, journalist Russell acknowledged that “it would not be possible for the most indifferent observer to pass him in the street without notice.” As Lincoln proceeded through the East Room to greet the Italian diplomat, “he evidently controlled a desire to shake hands all round with everybody, and smiled good-humoredly till he was suddenly brought up by the staid deportment of Mr. Seward, and by the profound diplomatic bows of the Chevalier Bertinatti.” Abruptly the president “jerked himself back, and stood in front of the two ministers, with his body slightly drooped forward, and his hands behind his back, his knees touching, and his feet apart.” After Seward formally presented Bertinatti, Lincoln “made a prodigiously violent demonstration of his body in a bow which had almost the effect of a smack in its rapidity and abruptness, and, recovering himself, proceeded to give his utmost attention, whilst the Chevalier, with another bow, read from a paper a long address.” Lincoln in turn delivered a brief reply, shook the minister’s hand, and was introduced by Seward to Russell. The president “put out his hand in a very friendly manner, and said, ‘Mr. Russell, I am very glad to make your acquaintance, and to see you in this country. The London ‘Times’ is one of the greatest powers in the world,—in fact, I don’t know anything which has much more power—except perhaps the Mississippi. I am glad to know you as its minister.’ Conversation ensued for some minutes, which the President enlivened by two or three peculiar little sallies.” Russell was impressed by Lincoln’s “shrewdness, humour, and natural sagacity.”41

  On March 8, 1861, Lincoln hosted his first public reception, which Attorney General Bates described laconically: “motley crowd and terrible squeeze.”42 The president, according to one report, “with his towering figure and commanding presence, stood like a hero, putting the foot down firmly, and breasting the stream of humanity as it swept by.” By one estimate, he shook 3,000 hands, including that of a man who said, “Mr. President, you must diminish the number of your friends, or Congress must enlarge the edifice.” Lincoln, referring tongue-in-cheek to his reputation as a rail-splitter, replied: “I’ve no idea of diminishing the number of my friends, but the only question with me now is whether it would be best to have the building stretched or split.”43 To Charles Francis Adams, the president looked “entirely worn out,” and his facial expression seemed “formal and embarrassed.”44 A journalist remarked that Mary Lincoln “made a pleasant impression upon every one who came near her. Had she been born and lived her life in the court of the Tuleries, she could not have shown more fitness for the position which she so admirably adorns.”45 (Adams disagreed, recording in his diary that neither she nor her husband “is at home in this sphere of civilization.” That crusty New Englander, according to one of his assistants in the American legation in London, “always spoke disrespectfully of Mrs. Lincoln.”)46 The levee was “voted by all the ‘oldest inhabitants’ to have been the most successful one ever known here,” John G. Nicolay told his fiancée.47

  William O. Stoddard recalled that Lincoln’s “manner at receptions, and other occasions of ceremony or of social or official formality, was that of a man who performs an irksome but unavoidable duty, though he was never lacking in cordial hospitality.” According to Stoddard, some people attended receptions “with the dim idea that they were about to make the acquaintance of the President and his wife, and prepared themselves for a quiet little chat, with stores of questions about this and advice about that for Father Abraham. Others, not expecting much time to themselves, would prepare patriotic little speeches, which they would launch with sudden fervor and wonderfully rapid utterance at the head of the President.”48 In July, the Baltimore Patriot reported that people “who have grasped the dexter of successive Presidents from John Quincy Adams, with his pump-handle shake, down to the present time, say that Mr. Lincoln goes through the necessary work of a reception with less fatigue than any of them did. Besides, he has kind looks for everybody, and pleasant words for all who accompany the pressure of his hand with a passing remark.” Lincoln “sends all his fellow citizens of every class and condition away with the impression that they have been respectfully and kindly treated at the White House.”49 Journalist Mary Clemmer Ames wrote that “Lincoln looks very awkward in white kid gloves, and feels very uncomfortable in new boots; so much so, that at the very first one [reception] he slipped into his easy slippers, then back to the martyrdom, where his honest hand was squeezed in the vise of the ‘sovereign people’ for five weary hours.”50

  On March 9, Lincoln received the officers of the navy, including Charles Henry Davis, who described the president as “awkward in his figure and manners, but his awkwardness is not gaucherie. It is by no means vulgar.”51 David D. Porter concurred, deeming the president “a plain politician, with very little polish of manner,” who “was much confused at meeting such an imposing looking set of men. Such was his embarrassment that he could not answer the little speech made to him by Commodore [Joseph] Smith.” When the officers asked to meet his wife, Lincoln went off to fetch her and “returned half dragging in the apparently confused lady.” After “a few commonplace remarks,” the visitors left. “The interview,” said Porter, “was not at all calculated to impress us favorably, and there were many remarks made about the President’s gaucherie.”52

  On March 22, Herman Melville attended the second public reception at the White House. The president, he said, “shook hands like a good fellow—working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.” Melville thought Mary Lincoln “rather good-looking.”53 John W. Forney concurred, reporting that she was “arrayed in greater taste than on the occasion of the first reception” and “is, as all exclaim, an affable, good-looking little lady.”54 Gustavus Fox told his wife that Mrs. Lincoln was “Lady Like, converses easily, dresses well and has the Kentucky pronunciation.”55 Agreeing that the First Lady was “really well dressed,” historian George Bancroft also found her “pleasant,” “affable,” “friendly & not in the least arrogant.”56 John Lothrop Motley told his wife that Mrs. Lincoln “is rather nice-looking, youngish, with very round white arms, well dressed, chatty enough, and if she would not, like all the South and West, say ‘Sir’ to you every instant, as if you were a royal personage, she would be quite agreeable.”57

  Others were less favorably impressed. After attending White House receptions, attorney Richard Henry Dana of Massachusetts described Mary Lincoln as a “short, fat,” “cross, suspicious, underbred” woman who “looks like the house keeper of the establishment, & a notable, prying, & not good tempered house keeper,” with “a snubby face & mealy complexion” and a “not good-tempered look.”58 A New York lawyer, Charles E. Strong, thought Mrs. Lincoln “a very vulgar old woman.” His cousin and partner, George Templeton Strong, shared that view, calling her “[u]nderbred, weak, and vain.”59 John Bigelow confided to his diary that Mary Lincoln did not converse easily in French. When asked if she spoke that language, she replied “tres poo” and later pronounce
d “J’entend” to rhyme with “pond.”60

  John Hay reported that Lincoln “rather enjoyed” the large public receptions and “seemed surprised when people commiserated him upon them.” At those events he shook thousands of hands, “seemingly unconscious of what he was doing, murmuring some monotonous salutation as they went by, his eye dim, his thoughts far withdrawn; then suddenly he would see some familiar face,—his memory for faces was very good,—and his eye would brighten and his whole form grow attentive; he would greet the visitor with a hearty grasp and a ringing word and dismiss him with a cheery laugh that filled the Red Room with infectious good nature.” Many callers armed themselves with an appropriate speech to be delivered on these occasions, but unless it was compressed into the smallest possible space, it never got utterance; the crowd would jostle the peroration out of shape. If it were brief enough and hit the President’s fancy, it generally received a swift answer. One night an elderly gentleman from Buffalo said ‘Up our way, we believe in God and Abraham Lincoln,’ to which the President replied, shoving him along the line, ‘My friend, you are more than half right.’ ”61

  At a typical reception, as fancifully described by the journalist Noah Brooks, Ward Hill Lamon, marshal of the District of Columbia, would announce the names of callers: “Mr. Snifkins of California.” Lincoln would greet him: “I am glad to see you, Mr. Snifkins—you come from a noble State—God bless her.” Snifkins “murmurs his thanks, is as warmly pressed by the hand as though the President had just begun his day’s work on the pump handle, and he is replaced by Mr. Biffkins, of New York, who is reminded by the Father of the Faithful that the Empire State has some noble men in the Army of the Union.”62 When asked if he did not find shaking so many hands tiresome, he replied: “Oh—it’s hard work, but it is a relief, every way; for here nobody asks me for what I cannot give.”63 When Benjamin Brown French, who referred to Mrs. Lincoln as “The Queen,” introduced callers to her, she curtseyed and asked, “How do you do?” She addressed friends with a cordial, “I am glad to see you” and presented her gloved fingertips to indicate her pleasure. French noted that at one reception she “greeted every guest with such cheerful good will and kindness as to do infinite credit to her position and her heart.”64