Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  On February 23, Lincoln started to recover. The following day, the Rev. Dr. Phineas D. Gurley conducted a White House funeral that Lincoln had asked Orville H. Browning to arrange. There, as the president stood with his eyes full of tears and his lips aquiver, gazing at his boy’s corpse, a look of the utmost grief came over his face, and he exclaimed that Willie “was too good for this earth … but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!”93 He said repeatedly, “This is the hardest trial of my life. Why is it? Oh, why is it?”94 His body shook convulsively as he sobbed and buried his face in his hands. Elizabeth Keckly, Mrs. Lincoln’s modiste and close friend, never observed a man so grief-stricken. A woman who attended the funeral complained that it “was in very bad taste, ostentatious & showy.” She thought that “one needed only to look at the poor President, bowed over & sobbing audibly to see he had nothing to do with the pageant. The services by Dr Gurley were endlessly long and offensively fulsome. I felt glad that the poor Mother was ill in bed & so escaped the painful infliction.”95

  By the end of February, Lincoln had regained enough strength to resume his duties. D. W. Bartlett noted that he “is frequently called up three and four times in a night to receive important messages from the West. Since his late bereavement he looks sad and care-worn, but is in very good health again.”96 It took a long time for Lincoln to recover completely. On March 6, while attending the funeral of General Frederick W. Lander, he appeared so bereaved as to be scarcely recognizable. “I certainly never saw a more impressive picture of sorrow,” an observer recalled. “There seemed to be none of the light of the recent victories in his pale, cadaverous face.” As the president descended from his carriage, he hesitated “as if about to stagger back” into it, “and then seemed to collect himself for the duty at hand, with a fatigued air, which seemed to say, ‘What will come next?’ ”97 Willie died on a Thursday, and for several weeks afterward Lincoln would take time out from work on Thursdays to mourn.

  Between the time of Willie’s death and his funeral, an applicant for a postmaster-ship barged into the White House clamoring to see the president. When Lincoln emerged from his office inquiring about the commotion, the importunate office seeker demanded an interview, which was granted. Upon learning what his caller wanted, he angrily asked: “When you came to the door here, didn’t you see the crepe on it? Didn’t you realize that meant somebody must be lying dead in this house?”

  “Yes, Mr. Lincoln, I did. But what I wanted to see you about was important.”

  With some heat, the president exclaimed: “That crepe is hanging there for my son; his dead body at this moment is lying unburied in this house, and you come here, push yourself in with such a request! Couldn’t you at least have the decency to wait until after we had buried him?”98

  Willie’s younger brother Tad had also contracted a fever and seemed near death. Dorothea Dix, who called at the White House to express her condolences, detailed a nurse, Rebecca Pomroy, to help tend the sick youngster and his distraught mother. Mrs. Pomroy, who had lost all her family except for one son then serving in the army, tried to console the president by assuring him that thousands of Northerners prayed for Tad every day. “I am glad of that,” he replied, then hid his face in his hands and wept. On February 24, just before returning to his office, he looked at his youngest son and told Mrs. Pomroy: “I hope you will pray for him that he may be spared, if it is God’s will; and also for me, for I need the prayers of many.”99 The pious nurse explained how faith in God had sustained her through the loss of her husband and two children. Lincoln, who called her “one of the best women I ever knew,” arranged to have her surviving son promoted to lieutenant.100 Her faith may well have strengthened Lincoln’s own. Mary Lincoln said that her husband reflected more intently on the ways of God after Willie’s death.

  A month after the boy’s funeral, William O. Stoddard reported that Lincoln had “recovered much of his old equanimity and cheerfulness; and certainly no one who saw his constant and eager application to his arduous duties, would imagine for a moment that the man carried so large a load of private grief, in addition to the cares of a nation.”101

  But some knew it, including LeGrande Cannon, who in May observed Lincoln weep convulsively after reciting the lament of Constance for her dead son from Shakespeare’s King John: “And, Father Cardinal, I have heard you say/That we shall see and know our friends in heaven./If that be true, I shall see my boy again.” He had dreamed of Willie and wanted to believe that he had actually communed with him, though he understood that he did not in reality do so.102 He once asked an army officer late in the war, “Do you ever find yourself talking with the dead? Since Willie’s death I catch myself every day involuntarily talking with him, as if he were with me.”103 On the final day of his life, Lincoln told the First Lady: “We must both be more cheerful in the future—between the war & the loss of our darling Willie—we have both, been very miserable.”104

  Like her husband, Mary Lincoln was wracked with grief. To Elihu Washburne she lamented that the White House seemed “like a tomb and that she could not bear to be in it.” Willie, she said, “was the favorite child, so good, so obedient, so promising.”105 It certainly made her feel guilty as well as sorrowful, for two weeks earlier she had thrown an elaborate party for hundreds of guests which was deemed “splendid and dazzling,” “equally remarkable and brilliant,” a “display of elegance and taste and loveliness” unmatched in the history of the White House. But for the Lincolns, their sons’ illness cast a pall over the event. Several times that evening, the First Lady climbed the stairs to check on Willie and Tad. She came to regard Willie’s death as punishment for her vanity and for her decision to give the party while two of her sons lay sick abed. Months later she described her “crushing bereavement” to a friend: “We have met with so overwhelming an affliction in the death of our beloved Willie a being too precious for earth, that I am so completely unnerved.”106 She wrapped herself so profoundly in mourning that Lincoln one day led her to a window, pointed to an insane asylum in the distance, and said: “Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”107 Public resentment against her excessive grieving swelled when, for over a year, she forbade the traditional weekly White House Marine Band concerts; as noted earlier, she even refused permission to have them performed in Lafayette Park across the street. (Lincoln had enjoyed those concerts, sometimes requesting “Dixie” after the band had played “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia.”) Mary Lincoln had lost her enthusiasm for entertaining.

  The First Lady’s eldest sister, Elizabeth Edwards, was summoned from Springfield to help calm her down. Lincoln urged Mrs. Edwards to stay at the White House as long as she possibly could: “you have Such a power & control Such an influence over Mary—Come do Stay and Console me,” he implored her.108 From Washington, she reported that “my presence here, has tended very much to soothe, the excessive grief” of her sister. In her agony, Mary Lincoln was unable to help care for her younger son, Tad, who also ran a dangerous fever. According to Elizabeth, Mary “has been but little with him, being utterly unable to control her feelings.”109

  When a woman friend visited the White House to offer condolences, the First Lady turned on her, asking accusingly: “Madam, why did you not call upon me before my ball? I sent you word I wished to know you.”

  “Because my country was in grief, as you now are, and I shunned all scenes of gayety.”

  “I thought so! Those who urged me to that heartless step (alluding to the ball) now ridicule me for it, and not one of them has … come, to share my sorrow. I have had evil counselors!”110

  When her sister went back to Illinois, Mrs. Lincoln turned for comfort to her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly, a black woman whose only son had been killed in battle the previous year. Mrs. Keckly, who had accepted her own loss stoically, looked askance on the First Lady’s manifest inability to control h
er grief. The seamstress, however, did what she could to console her friend. For additional solace, Mary Lincoln met with spiritualists who could allegedly enable her to communicate with her dead son. On several occasions she held séances at the White House, some of which Lincoln attended. David Davis suspected that the death of Willie would not “be a lesson” to the First Lady, though he hoped that it “may change her notions of life.”111

  With Willie, Lincoln had known the special pleasure that a parent derives from having a child who is a near-clone. The boy’s tutor thought that the lad “was the exact counterpart of his father,” and the poet and editor Nathaniel P. Willis, a fixture in Mrs. Lincoln’s White House circle, agreed that Willie “faithfully resembled his father” in all important respects.112 A neighbor in Springfield recollected that Willie “was the true picture of Mr. Lincoln, in every way, even to carrying his head slightly inclined toward his left shoulder.”113 So close were they that the president could read Willie’s mind. One day at breakfast in the White House, Willie’s emotional brother Tad broke out crying because soldiers to whom he had given religious tracts mocked him. When paternal hugs and kisses failed to comfort the boy, Willie set his mind to devise some way to ease Tad’s hurt feelings. Willie silently thought for a long while, then suddenly looked up with a smile at his father, who exclaimed: “There! you have it now, my boy, have you not?” Turning to a guest, Lincoln remarked: “I know every step of the process by which that boy arrived at his satisfactory solution of the question before him, as it is by just such slow methods I attain results.”114

  The death of Willie deprived Lincoln of an important source of comfort and relief from his heavy official burdens. The boy was his favorite child. The two were quite close and were frequently observed holding hands. Springfield neighbors said Lincoln “was fonder of that boy than he was of anything else.” Bob and Tad took after their mother, and did not resemble Lincoln physically or temperamentally.115 The president’s eldest son, with whom he shared little in common, was attending college in Massachusetts. His youngest son, the hyperactive, effervescent Tad, was not a clone like Willie but much more like his mother. Julia Taft recalled that he “had a quick, fiery temper,” was “implacable in his dislikes,” but could be “very affectionate when he chose.”116

  In the wake of Willie’s death, the president’s love for Tad grew stronger as he displaced onto him the powerful feeling he had harbored for the older boy. He explained to a friend that he wished to give Tad “everything he could no longer give Willie.”117 Lincoln derived great comfort from Tad’s fun-loving, irrepressible nature and delighted in his common sense. Although Tad suffered from learning disabilities and a speech impediment that made it hard to understand him, his indulgent father was unconcerned, and often said: “Let him run; he has time enough left to learn his letters and get poky.”118 A White House guard thought that Tad was “the best companion Mr. Lincoln ever had—one who always understood him, and whom he always understood.”119 Tad became, to some degree, another Willie for his grief-stricken father. David Davis sympathized with Lincoln and feared that “if he should lose his other son, he would be overwhelmed with sorrow & grief.”120

  Taking Charge: More War Orders

  On March 8, Lincoln called McClellan to the White House and evidently spoke plainly to him, as he had told Senator Sumner he would. According to Little Mac, the president said that “it had been represented to him … that my plan of campaign … was conceived with the traitorous intent of removing its defenders from Washington, and thus giving over to the enemy the capital and the government, thus left defenceless.” The general said he leapt up and, “in a manner perhaps not altogether decorous towards the chief magistrate,” insisted that Lincoln retract the charge and told him “that I would permit no doubt to be thrown upon my intentions.” McClellan then declared he would submit his Chesapeake plan to a vote of his division commanders to demonstrate that he was no traitor.121 (This account seems implausible, but Lincoln evidently did have sharp words for McClellan about the botched Winchester campaign.)

  When the Army of the Potomac’s twelve division commanders were polled, eight favored and four opposed McClellan’s Urbanna strategy. Among the minority was John G. Barnard, who sensibly objected that the main Confederate army could easily move to the lower Chesapeake from Manassas and thwart the Union advance. Joining Barnard in dissent were Irvin McDowell, Samuel P. Heintzelman, and E. V. Sumner. By a seven-to-five margin, the generals also supported McClellan’s intention to ignore the blockade of the lower Potomac. Only two favored an immediate attack on the enemy batteries commanding that river. Later, Stanton acidly remarked, “we saw ten Generals afraid to fight.”122 Lincoln was less critical, saying to them: “I don’t care, gentlemen, what plan you have, all I ask is for you to just pitch in!”123 “Napoleon himself,” he added, “could not stand still any longer with such an army.”124

  On March 8, Lincoln issued “General War Order No. 2,” stipulating that the Army of the Potomac’s dozen divisions be organized into four army corps, to be commanded by three of the dissenting generals plus Erastus Keyes, who had supported the Urbanna plan only if the enemy were first cleared from the banks of the Potomac.125 (For three months Lincoln had been urged to undertake this reorganization, because it was feared that the army’s cumbersome structure made its defeat inevitable.) The next morning, the president reconvened the war council to announce his approval of the Urbanna scheme and urge all the generals “to go in heartily” for it.126 To a resentful McClellan, Lincoln later explained his reasons for establishing the corps system. He had taken that step “not only on the unanimous opinion of the twelve Generals of Division, but also on the unanimous opinion of every military man I could get an opinion from, and every modern military book, yourself only excepted. Of course, I did not, on my own judgment pretend to understand the subject.”127

  Lincoln issued a third General War Order, stating that the move to the lower Chesapeake must begin by March 18, that sufficient troops must be left behind to protect Washington, and that the blockade of the lower Potomac must be lifted. Finally, plans for the long-delayed advance seemed in place. McClellan would sail his army down the Chesapeake, move swiftly overland to Richmond, and capture the city before Johnston could hasten to its rescue. The jumping-off point for the expedition to Urbanna had come under discussion at a war council two days earlier. Then Lincoln objected to the proposal to launch the armada from Annapolis, arguing that “taking the whole army first to Annapolis, to be embarked in transports, would appear to the extremely sensitive and impatient public opinion very much like a retreat from Washington. It would be impolitic to explain that it was merely a first step by way of the Chesapeake Bay and Fort Monroe towards Richmond.” He asked if 50,000, or even 10,000, troops could not be sent directly down the Potomac. Eventually, it was decided to use Alexandria rather than Annapolis as the launch site.128

  On March 11, Lincoln issued yet another War Order, this time removing McClellan from his position as general-in-chief of all Union armies. At a cabinet meeting that day, the general became the target of sharp criticism. Seward “spoke very bitterly of the imbecility which had characterized the general[’]s operations on the upper Potomac.”129 Stanton condemned the army’s “great ignorance, negligence and lack of order and subordination—and reckless extravagance.” He noted that Little Mac “has caused all reports to be made to him, and he reports nothing—and if he have any plans, keeps them to himself.” In his diary, Bates wrote that “I think Stanton believes, as I do, that McC. has no plans but is fumbling and plunging in confusion and darkness.” The attorney general reiterated his earlier advice that Lincoln “take his constitutional position, and command the commanders—to have no ‘General in Chief’—or if he wd. have one, not allow him to be also a genl. in detail i.e. not command any particular army.”130 The president said “that though the duty of relieving Gen McClellan was a most painful one, he yet thought he was doing Gen McC. a very great kindness in
permitting him to retain command of the Army of the Potomac, and giving him an opportunity to retrieve his errors.”131 Just after McClellan had left for the Peninsula, Lincoln told Samuel Bowles “that though he had relieved him from the general command, in part because he was not satisfied with his course, he had confidence that now he had taken the field at the head of his especial division of the army, he would push forward the campaign as rapidly as possible, and prove worthy of the position.”132

  In that same War Order, Lincoln created a new military district in eastern Tennessee and western Virginia—the Mountain Department—and placed Frémont in charge. Before doing so, the president told a friend of the Pathfinder that the general “has not had fair play—will give it to him.”133 Lincoln had long been assuring Frémont’s advocates that the Pathfinder would be given a command when one opened up. Not all Radicals were insisting that this be done. Josiah G. Holland asked George William Curtis: “are we not making more fuss over Gen Frémont than there is any call for? A curse on the politicians! I hate them. I believe in McClellan and Halleck and Burnside and Banks, and excepting the President and Chase I do not believe in anything else but the good God above us all.”134

  Lincoln did not consult with Montgomery Blair, Frémont’s bitter enemy, because he knew that the postmaster general would balk, and the president wished to avoid a confrontation. In August 1861, Blair had written Frémont a letter criticizing the administration: “The main difficulty is … with Lincoln himself. He is of the whig school, and that brings him naturally not only to incline to the feeble policy of whigs, but to give his confidence to such advisers.”135 To embarrass Blair, the Pathfinder leaked this missive to the press. On March 6, when Blair asked Lincoln to look at it, the president refused, “saying he did not intend to read it as it was never written for that purpose.” Blair admitted that it was foolish and apologized: “I regret it most sincerely—but it is due to you to make some amend by resigning my place & explain fully what I meant—& omitted in a hasty private letter—I leave the whole thing to you & will do exactly as you wish.”