Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  The president-elect and outgoing chief executive James Buchanan pass the northwestern base of Capitol Hill en route to Lincoln’s inauguration. Harper’s Weekly, March 16, 1861. Library of Congress.

  “Gulliver Abe, in the White House, Attacked by the Lilliputian Office-Seekers” appeared on the front page of Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, March 15, 1861, over the legend, “Well, this is orful! Who’d a’ ever believed such diminutivorous varmints could have had such impudence! Why, they’re creeping all over me! I feel a kinder goosefleshy. Scratch himself couldn’t get rid of ’em!” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  This photograph of Willie Lincoln was taken in 1861, when the lad was 10 years old. After his death the following year, his mother wrote to a friend: “You have doubtless heard, how very handsome a boy, he was considered—with a pure, gentle nature, always unearthly, & in intellect far, far beyond his years.” John Hay noted that Willie was “a child of great promise, capable of close application and study. He had a fancy for drawing up railway time-tables, and would conduct an imaginary train from Chicago to New York with perfect precision. He wrote childish verses, which sometimes attained the unmerited honors of print.” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  Robert Todd Lincoln was 18 years old when an unknown photographer took this portrait on July 24, 1861. That year a reporter wrote of Robert’s “comparative elegance,” which stood in “striking contrast to the loose, careless, awkward rigging of his Presidential father.” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  This little-known vignette of Mary Todd Lincoln was evidently taken in 1861. Both William H. Mumler of Boston and the New York Photographic Company issued it as a carte-de-visite. Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  This photo of Mary Todd Lincoln was probably taken at the Mathew Brady Studio in January 1862. She loved flowers and often plastered down her hair in order to wear a floral arrangement on her head. She did not like to pose for photographs because, as she put it, “my hands are always made in them, very large, and I look too stern.” Library of Congress.

  “The First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation before the Cabinet” (July 22, 1862), a steel engraving that Alexander Hay Ritchie made of Francis B. Carpenter’s enormous painting, completed in 1864. It depicts (left to right, seated), Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, the president, Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, Secretary of State William H. Seward, and Attorney General Edward Bates as well as (standing, left to right) Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, Interior Secretary Caleb B. Smith, and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. The painting hangs in the U.S. Capitol. The engraving offers a better image of Lincoln, for Carpenter kept tinkering with his canvas even after Ritchie completed the engraving, and the more Carpenter revised, the weaker Lincoln’s portrait became. Library of Congress.

  Detail of a photo Alexander Gardner took of the president and General George B. McClellan and some members of his staff on October 3, 1862. Lincoln then visited the Army of the Potomac in Maryland, near the site of the recent battle of Antietam, in an effort to urge it into action. From left, Colonel Alexander S. Webb, chief of staff, 5th Corps; General McClellan; Scout Adams; Dr. Jonathan Letterman, army medical director; and an unidentified person. Behind the president stands General Henry J. Hunt, McClellan’s chief of artillery. Library of Congress.

  Alexander Gardner took this memorable photograph of Lincoln on November 8, 1863, eleven days before he delivered the Gettysburg Address. The sculptor Daniel Chester French used it to model the statue of the seated Great Emancipator in the Lincoln Memorial. Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, Indiana.

  The two principal White House secretaries, John G. Nicolay (seated) and John Hay (standing), flank the president at Gardner’s studio, November 8, 1863. Hay recorded in his diary that “Nico & I immortalized ourselves by having ourselves done in group with the Presdt.” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, Springfield, Illinois.

  This portrait of Lincoln, which Anthony Berger of the Mathew Brady Gallery took in Washington on February 9, 1864, became the image that later appeared on the five-dollar bill. Robert Todd Lincoln thought it the best representation of his father as he actually looked. Library of Congress.

  The First Lady’s sartorial taste also scandalized polite society. Alexander K. McClure reported that she “was vain, passionately fond of dress and wore her dresses shorter at the top and longer at the train than even fashion demanded. She had great pride in her elegant neck and bust, and grieved the president greatly by her constant display of her person and her fine clothes.”153 Observing a particularly low-cut dress she wore, Lincoln told his wife one day: “Mother, it is my opinion, if some of that tail was nearer the head, it would be in better style.”154

  Mary Lincoln shocked many people at Edward D. Baker’s funeral by appearing in a lilac dress, bonnet, and gloves. Some members of her circle, thinking she should be made aware of that breach of etiquette, dispatched one of her closest friends to convey the message. Upon arriving at the White House, the emissary was greeted by Mary Lincoln with an exclamation: “I am so glad you have come, I am just as mad as I can be. Mrs. Crittenden has just been here to remonstrate with me for wearing my lilac suit to Colonel Baker’s funeral. I wonder if the women of Washington expect me to muffle myself up in mourning for every soldier killed in this great war?”

  “But Mrs. Lincoln,” came the reply, “do you not think black more suitable to wear at a funeral because there is a great war in the nation?”

  “No, I don’t. I want the women to mind their own business; I intend to wear what I please.”155

  In August, Prince Napoleon noted that at a White House dinner “Mrs. Lincoln was dressed in the French style without any taste; she has the manner of a petit bourgeois and wears tin jewelry.”156 Three months later, the prominent English journalist William Howard Russell recorded in his diary: “Poor Mrs. Lincoln [—] a more preposterous looking female I never saw.”157 In February 1862, he wrote that at a grand White House party she resembled “a damned old Irish or Scotch (or English) washerwoman dressed out for a Sunday at Highbury Barn.”158 Oregon Senator James Nesmith was equally appalled by the First Lady’s appearance at that event: “The weak minded Mrs Lincoln had her bosom on exhibition and a flower pot on her head, while there was a train of silk or satin drag[g]ing on the floor behind her of several yards in length.” Nesmith “could not help regretting that she had degenerated from the industrious and unpretending woman that she was in the days when she used to cook Old Abe[’]s dinner, and milk the cows with her own hands.” Now, he acidly observed, “[h]er only ambition seems to be to exhibit her own milking apparatus to the public eye.”159 A guest at a White House reception noted that the First Lady “wore a very low-necked dress, reminding me of the ‘French fool’ fashion.”160 A Democratic newspaper described her on one occasion as a “coarse, vain, unamiable … sallow, fleshy, uninteresting woman in white robes, and wearing a band of white flowers about her forehead, like some over-grown Ophelia. … She has less taste than any woman in the land of her half pretensions. She does not distinguish the grande monde from the demi monde.”161 At a later reception she struck a Massachusetts economist as “a dowdy little woman.”162 Mary Clemmer Ames told readers of the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican that the “very dumpy” First Lady “stuns me with her low-necked dresses and the flower-beds which she carries on the top of her head.”163 Another female correspondent for that paper noted that Mrs. Lincoln had “a beautiful bust, which was largely shown to admiring gaze” at a White House reception.164 A general’s wife was scandalized by the “bad manners” of the First Lady, who was “preposterously attired” and said “ ‘yes ma’am,’ and ‘no ma’am’ like a servant-woman.”165

  Yet other women criticized the First Lady’s appearance. Her friend Elizabeth Blair Lee said that Elizabeth Todd Edwards “is ten ti
mes better looking than [her sister] Mrs. Lincoln.”166 The abolitionist Lydia Maria Child remarked that Mary Lincoln “looks more like a dowdy washerwoman” than “the ‘representative of fashion.’ ” To Child, the First Lady’s face seemed “mean, and vulgar,” and she pitied Lincoln for “having a fool for a wife.” The only thing “she cares for is flattery, and dress, and parties. Willis’s Home Journal abounds with fulsome compliments about her stylish dressing, her gayeties &c. This is not becoming, when the people are suffering and sacrificing so much.”167 When Child read about Mrs. Lincoln’s shopping trips, she exclaimed: “So this is what the people are taxed for! to deck out this vulgar doll with foreign frippery. And oppressed millions must groan on, lest her ‘noble native State’ [Kentucky] should take offence, if Government made use of the beneficent power God has so miraculously placed in its hands.”168

  In August 1861, a New York politico echoed Mrs. Child, expressing disgust with Mary Lincoln because at a time when “the country was in the throes of revolutionary travail she was coolly buying china and dresses in New York: and now that wounded men pant for Florence Nightingales in Washington she is relaxing at Long Branch [on the New Jersey shore] from—the cares of state.”169 She “is as meddling & injuriously officious as she is conceited & ill-bred,” according to a young Bostonian, Robert C. Winthrop, Jr.170 An antislavery clergyman, Henry W. Bellows, called Mary Lincoln “ambitious” and “vulgar.”171

  Mrs. Lincoln was not wholly without supporters, though their number was very small. In 1864, a matron from Indiana wrote that Mrs. Lincoln “is not what can be called an intellectual woman, and in many things has no doubt acted injudiciously,” nonetheless “her goodness of heart, and pleasant manner, must make her liked by all who real[l]y come in contact with her.”172 Julia Taft recalled that the First Lady was “pleasant and kind” to her, treating her like a surrogate daughter.173 Though Julia liked Mrs. Lincoln, she was nonetheless shocked by her exaggerated sense of entitlement.

  The First Lady could be indiscreet in conversation. After meeting her for the first time and spending an hour conversing, Pennsylvania Congressman James H. Campbell described her as “an ordinary woman with strong likes, and dislikes, and with bitter prejudices. She prides herself on being a ‘little Southern[,]’ hates the angular Yankees, and detests the Trumbulls who are nowhere!”174

  Mary Lincoln had never forgiven Lyman Trumbull for defeating her husband in the senatorial election of 1855, nor could she bring herself to renew her former friendship with Mrs. Trumbull, who had been one of her bridesmaids.

  In September 1861, while on a boat trip Mrs. Lincoln very loudly disparaged Trumbull. Mrs. Trumbull reported to her husband that one Rev. Mr. Collins “travelled on the same boat with Mrs Lincoln between N. Y. & Washington. He says she talked so as to be heard above every one else & although he was in the Gents. Cabin he could not avoid hearing her; she discussed people freely, even those in private life[;] talked of you & I[;] referred to your first election when Mr Lincoln was defeated & then to the last fall when he was honorably elected, with an emphasis on the word which implied that yours was not honorable. He says she was surrounded by a set whose object seemed to be to draw her out.”175

  Mary Lincoln was also rude to the Seward family. When the Sewards called on her at the White House in September 1861, they were ushered into the Blue Room, where a servant had them take a seat while he announced their presence to the First Lady. He returned after a long interval, saying “Mrs. Lincoln begged to be excused—she was very much engaged.” Young Fanny Seward, who believed that this was “the only time on record that she ever refused to see company in the evening,” confided to her diary: “The truth of Mrs. L’s engagement was probably that she did not want to see Mother—else why not give general directions to the door keeper to let no one in? It was certainly very rude to have us all seated first.”176

  Scandals

  The New York Herald’s premature publication of excerpts from Lincoln’s 1861 annual message created a scandal. Mary Lincoln, who, according to rumor, “told state secrets” and was thus considered “one of the leaky vessels—from which contraband army news, gets afloat,” embarrassed the president by allowing her close friend and influential “social adviser,” Henry Wikoff, to see an advance copy of the document.177 (One source even claimed that she received a substantial sum for this favor.)178 Wikoff leaked it to the Herald, which employed him as a free-lancer.179 When the House Judiciary Committee investigated the matter, Wikoff at first refused to answer its questions. He was promptly clapped into the Old Capitol Prison. When Illinois Congressman William Kellogg informed the president of these developments, he expressed great surprise, for he had been unaware of any premature publication of the message. The next day he visited Capitol Hill and “urged the Republicans on the Committee to spare him disgrace.” He told the chairman, John Hickman of Pennsylvania, that “he never gave any portion of the Message to anybody except members of the Cabinet” before submitting it to Congress. The committee summoned General Daniel Sickles, who had been regularly visiting his friend Wikoff in jail. The general, initially defiant, backed down when threatened with a contempt-of-Congress citation. He admitted that he had been in contact with John Watt, the White House gardener. Wikoff alleged that he had telegraphed the president’s message to the Herald after receiving it from Watt. Watt told the committee that he had indeed been Wikoff’s source, implausibly claiming that he had seen a copy of the message lying about in the White House library, had memorized a portion of it, and repeated it verbatim to Wikoff.180

  But as White House watchman Thomas Stackpole told Orville H. Browning, the First Lady was the true culprit. In March 1862, according to a long-suppressed passage in Browning’s diary, Stackpole revealed that “the President’s message [to Congress last December] had been furnished to [Henry] Wycoff by her, and not by Watt as is usually supposed—that she got it of [John D.] Defrees, Sup[erintendent] of government printing, and gave it to Wycoff in the Library, where he read it—[and] gave it back to her, and she gave it back to Defrees.”181

  Alexander K. McClure reported that Mary Lincoln “was the easy prey of adventurers, of which the war developed an unusual crop, and many times they gained such influence over her as to compromise her very seriously.”182 Her friendship with Wikoff was a case in point. Born to wealthy Philadelphia parents in 1813, he attended Yale, from which he was expelled, and ultimately graduated from Union College. He spent much time in Europe, where he pursued pleasure single-mindedly. Eventually, he became something of a journalist and an off-again, on-again friend of James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald. In 1851, he achieved notoriety by kidnapping a woman he loved. Convicted of abduction, Wikoff served fifteen months in jail; his account of this misadventure, My Courtship and Its Consequences, sold well. Later in the 1850s, he worked for Bennett in Washington, acting as a go-between for the publisher in his dealings with President James Buchanan.183

  Wikoff had charm as well as notoriety. John W. Forney described him glowingly: “You might travel a long way before meeting a more pleasant companion than the cosmopolite Wikoff. He has seen more of the world than most men, has mingled with society of every shade and grade, has tasted of poverty and affluence, talks several languages fluently, is skilled in etiquette, art, and literature, and, without proclaimed convictions, is a shrewd politician, who understands the motives and opinions of others.”184

  Wikoff’s relationship with Mary Lincoln appalled polite society. In October 1861, George Gibbs, bemoaning the “fatuity of Lincoln & Seward,” told a friend that “Mrs L. seems now to be at the head of the State. As the Chevalier Wikoff is an habitué of the White House you need not be surprised at anything.” The First Lady, Gibbs added, “is a byword among the officials here [in Washington] for ignorance, vulgarity and meanness.”185 Two months later, David Davis wrote home: “Rumors are plenty—that Mrs. Lincoln is acting badly.” It was said “that she has installed as Master of Ceremonies at the White Ho
use, the Chevalier Wikoff,” a “terrible libertine, & no woman ought to tolerate his presence.” Washington matrons were “in distress” at this news.186 In November 1861, a journalist reported that “Mrs. Lincoln is making herself both a fool and a nuisance. Chevalier Wikoff is her gallant, and I have within the week seen two notes signed by him in her name sending compliments and invitation. … He is a beautiful specimen to occupy such a position.”187 In disbelief, a leading Connecticut Republican, Joseph R. Hawley, asked: “What does Mrs. Lincoln mean by … having anything to do with that world-renowned whoremonger and swindler Chevalier Wikoff? Is [Mrs.] Lincoln an old saphead or is she a headstrong fool who thinks she can have a kitchen cabinet? It’s a national disgrace.”188 Echoing this sentiment, John Hay deemed Wikoff an “unclean bird,” a “vile creature,” a “marked and branded social Pariah, a monstrosity abhorred by men and women,” and declared it “an enduring disgrace to American society that it suffers such a thing to be at large.”189 Frederick Law Olmsted was scandalized when he observed the First Lady and Wikoff, whom he called an “insufferable beast,” at a White House band concert.190 General John E. Wool found it “certainly strange” that she would call on Wikoff at Willard’s Hotel, wait for him in the lobby for a long time, help him don his gloves, and then ride off with him in her carriage. “Some very extraordinary storeys are told of this Lady,” Wool wrote his wife.191