Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  The World’s charges were credible. John Watt, the White House gardener who colluded with Mrs. Lincoln in various schemes to defraud the government, claimed that “a bill of $6,000 contracted with Haughwout & Co. for silverware was paid for by a bill charged against gilding gas-fixtures.”143 According to a Maryland journalist, Mrs. Lincoln “once bought a lot of China for $1,500 in New York & made the seller give her $1,500 in cash & send in a bill for $3,000. When Lincoln refused to put his signature to the Bill prior to sending it to the Department to be paid, on the ground that it was exorbitant, [the merchant said,] ‘You forget, sir, … that I gave Mrs Lincoln $1500.[’]”144

  The World also accused Mary Lincoln of appropriating $7,000 of public money for her “personal adornment” and of sending used White House furniture to Springfield rather than putting it up for auction, as the law required.145 Shortly before election day, Democratic papers ran a scathing account of the First Lady’s imperious and tightfisted ways. In 1862, they alleged, a dentist had been summoned to the White House to remove an aching tooth from one of the residents. After performing the emergency surgery, he was asked by Mary Lincoln what he charged. She balked when he said $2.50, insisting that she had never paid more than 50 cents for such services. Offended, he replied that did not make house calls for such a small amount and would charge nothing. As he prepared to leave, Lincoln paid him the requested fee. The First Lady was accused of treating hoteliers, theater proprietors, and merchants in the same fashion. At a Boston hotel she allegedly “had a most wordy discussion with the head bookkeeper, a scene appropriate rather to the Fulton [Fish] Market than to the best chambers of the best hostelry.” In Washington she was reportedly “in the habit of ordering a row of the best seats at Grover’s or Ford’s [theaters] and sweeping out of them without any gratuity.” When she sent word to one of those establishments to reserve two private boxes, the treasurer asked for money. When told that “Mrs. Lincoln never pays anything,” he replied: “Then, d[am]n me, if she can have any box in this theater at all.” In New York she offended dry goods dealers, who regarded her as “very mean.” Allegedly, when she visited Alexander T. Stewart’s fabled department store, she would “pull down all the goods in the place, bully the clerks, falsify or question their additions, and, in the end, leave without settling her bills.” As a result, some upscale store owners vowed that they would have no further dealings with her.146

  One such emporium was Genin’s hat shop. While sitting in her carriage, Mrs. Lincoln imperiously summoned a clerk who was speaking with a friend at the front door. The clerk ignored her. When informed that the First Lady was beckoning, he “replied somewhat indifferently, that he did not care” and that he recognized no “difference between Mrs. Lincoln and the wife of a mechanic. If she will come into the store, I will attend to her, but I am not employed to wait on people in the street.”147 A Democratic paper in Ohio, astounded at reports that Mary Lincoln had spent $5,000 for a shawl and $3,000 for earrings and a pin, asked where “the money comes from that enables this very ordinary lawyer from Illinois … to live in this style, when the poor man can barely with the strictest economy after paying his taxes, get bread to eat?”148

  The First Lady uneasily observed the campaign. In March, when a spiritualist told her that the president would be defeated, she returned to the White House inconsolably “crying like a child.”149 In response to such outbursts, Lincoln chided her gently: “Mary, I am afraid you will be punished for this overweening anxiety. If I am to be re-elected, it will be all right; if not, you must bear the disappointment.” Her nervousness stemmed from fear that if Lincoln lost, her creditors would descend on her. She confessed to her close friend Elizabeth Keckly, “I have contracted large debts of which he [Lincoln] knows nothing, and which he will be unable to pay if he is defeated.” She identified them as “store bills,” principally from Alexander T. Stewart’s emporium in New York. “You understand, Lizabeth, that Mr. Lincoln has but little idea of the expense of a woman’s wardrobe. He glances at my rich dresses, and is happy in the belief that the few hundred dollars that I obtain from him supply all my wants. The people scrutinize every article that I wear with critical curiosity. The very fact of having grown up in the West, subjects me to more searching observation. To keep up appearances, I must have money—more than Mr. Lincoln can spare for me. He is too honest to make a penny outside of his salary; consequently I had, and still have, no alternative but to run in debt.” She kept Lincoln in the dark about her spendthrift ways because, she explained, “If he knew that his wife was involved to the extent that she is, the knowledge would drive him mad. He is so sincere and straightforward himself, that he is shocked by the duplicity of others. He does not know a thing about any debts, and I value his happiness, not to speak of my own, too much to allow him to know anything. This is what troubles me so much. If he is re-elected, I can keep him in ignorance of my affairs.”150

  The First Lady owed the New York firm of Ball, Black & Company several thousand dollars for jewelry she had purchased without her husband’s knowledge. From another jeweler she made purchases totaling $3,200 in a three-month span. Included among the items selected were four clocks as well as two diamond-and-pearl bracelets. In one month she bought eighty-four pairs of gloves. In March 1865, she spent $2,288 at the Galt & Bro. jewelry store in Washington. (It was not just as First Lady that she was given to extravagance; earlier in Springfield, Lincoln had to chide her for mismanaging the household funds.) At one point she tearfully begged Isaac Newton, head of the agriculture bureau in the Interior Department, to help her pay bills she had run up at a furrier. New York politico Simeon Draper agreed to do so, but after Lincoln’s death he reneged.

  Mary Lincoln’s spending reflected her impulsive nature. Julia Taft Bayne, who as an adolescent visited the White House often, recalled that it “was an outstanding characteristic of Mary Todd Lincoln that she wanted what she wanted when she wanted it and no substitute!” Julia remembered how the First Lady coveted a special ribbon in her mother’s bonnet and brazenly asked her to give it over. The astonished Mrs. Taft complied.151

  To help her husband win reelection, Mary Lincoln tricked lobbyists into giving her money. She confided to Elizabeth Keckly: “I have an object in view, Lizabeth. In a political canvass it is policy to cultivate every element of strength. These men have influence, and we require influence to re-elect Mr. Lincoln. I will be clever to them until after the election, and then, if we remain at the White House, I will drop every one of them, and let them know very plainly that I only made tools of them. They are an unprincipled set, and I don’t mind a little double-dealing with them.” When asked if the president was aware of such schemes, she exclaimed: “God! no; he would never sanction such a proceeding, so I keep him in the dark, and will tell him of it when all is over. He is too honest to take proper care of his own interests, so I feel it to be my duty to electioneer for him.”152

  Mary Lincoln’s spendthrift ways did not please Union soldiers. “I can hardly wish that Mrs. Lincoln should occupy the White House for four years longer,” a supporter of Lincoln’s reelection remarked. “Her want of sympathy with the loyal ladies of the North—our mothers and sisters, who to their arduous labors in behalf of our soldiers in the field and in the hospitals, have added dispensing with expensive luxuries that our National finances may be thereby improved, is not at all to her credit.”153

  The Prisoner of War Issue

  The Democratic platform deplored the “shameful disregard of the Administration to its duty in respect to our fellow-citizens who now are and long have been prisoners of war and in a suffering condition.”154 In 1861, when urged by a member of the U.S. Sanitary Commission to exchange prisoners, Lincoln replied: “I feel just as you do about this matter. I don’t like to think of our men suffering in the Southern prisons, neither do I like to think that the Southern men are suffering in our prisons; but you don’t want me to recognize the Southern Confederacy, do you? I can’t propose an exchange of prisoner
s without recognizing the existence of the Confederate Government.”155 Lincoln did, however, informally encourage a limited exchange of sick and wounded POWs. When asked in the fall of 1861 why he could not expand that to a general exchange, “he said that the main trouble grew out of the fact that he had not capital enough, in the shape of prisoners, to venture upon very liberal expenditures of this sort.”156

  The following year, both sides agreed to an exchange cartel that worked effectively for ten months, but once the Union began recruiting blacks, the agreement fell apart. The Confederates would not exchange ex-slaves they captured in uniform. In response, the Lincoln administration ended the cartel. Stanton said that to acquiesce in a discriminatory system of exchanges would constitute “a shameful dishonor .… When they [the Confederates] agree to exchange all alike there will be no difficulty.”157 The result was untold suffering by thousands of federal and Rebel troops in prison camps like Andersonville in Georgia and Johnson’s Island in Lake Erie. Further stiffening Northern resistance to exchanges was the discovery that many of the 40,000 Rebel soldiers paroled at Vicksburg and Port Hudson were later found fighting once again in the Confederate ranks in violation of their word of honor. In late 1863, Lincoln complained that critics who had blamed him earlier for not completely suspending the exchange of prisoners were now demanding that he accept the terms of Jefferson Davis, who refused to exchange black POWs and their white officers.

  In the summer of 1864, the North became outraged by the stories of Union POWs suffering badly at the grossly overcrowded Andersonville prison and elsewhere. As pressure mounted, Lincoln would not budge as long as the Confederates refused to exchange former slaves serving in the Union army. The Jefferson Davis government “excited the rage and disgust of Mr. Lincoln” by compelling black POWs to help fortify Mobile rather than exchanging them for captured Rebels.158 The Confederates finally yielded in January 1865, when they were planning to recruit black troops. The POW issue played a relatively small role in the presidential campaign.

  Counterattack: The Treason Issue

  Republicans countered Democratic rhetoric by charging that secret societies like the Sons of Liberty and the Order of American Knights were committing treason. In October, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt released a 14,000-word report accusing such organizations of treasonable conduct. Lincoln expressed skepticism about the Sons of Liberty, calling it “a mere political organization, with about as much of malice and as much of puerility as the Knights of the Golden Circle.” In June, Clement L. Vallandigham had returned from exile to serve as “Supreme Grand Commander” of the Sons. Rather than re-arrest him, Lincoln thought it best to let him sow dissension in the Democratic ranks. In late 1863, Fernando Wood, a leading Peace Democrat, urged the president “to publish some sort of amnesty for the northern sympathizers and abettors or rebellion, which would include Vallandigham, and permit him to return.” Wood promised that if the president “would so do, they would have two Democratic candidates in the field at the next Presidential election.”159 Senator Edwin D. Morgan gave similar advice. To John Hay, Lincoln explained “that the question for the Government to decide is whether it can afford to disregard the contempt of authority & breach of discipline displayed in Vallandigham’s unauthorized return: for the rest, it cannot but result in benefit to the Union cause to have so violent and indiscreet a man go to Chicago as a firebrand to his own party.” According to Hay, Lincoln had long beforehand “seriously thought of annulling the sentence of exile but had been too much occupied to do it.”160 He may have hesitated because Ohio Senators John Sherman and Benjamin Wade warned him in 1863 “that if his order of banishment was revoked, it would result in riots and violence.”161

  In late June 1864, Lincoln drafted a letter instructing authorities in Ohio to watch Vallandigham closely, report his activities to Washington, and take him into custody only if he worked “any palpable injury” or presented an “iminent danger to the Military.” But on second thought, he decided to withhold the order.162 When Kentuckians protesting against the arrest of one of their own (Colonel Frank Walford of the First Kentucky Cavalry) asked Lincoln why he did not apprehend Vallandigham, he allegedly replied “that he had not been officially notified” of the Ohioan’s return, “but whenever he learned certainly that he [Vallandigham] was making … speeches [discouraging enlistments] he would arrest him at once.” Senator Lazarus Powell indignantly rejected that explanation: “No, sir, you won’t; you are afraid to arrest him again, and you know full well if you undertake it 260,000 freemen of the state of Ohio will rush to his rescue. You dare not make the experiment.”163

  Lincoln’s skepticism to the contrary notwithstanding, there was some truth in the Republican allegations about dangerous sedition. Confederate agents did in fact conspire with leading Northern Democrats to liberate prisoners of war, to seize high-ranking state officials, to stir uprisings on election day in Chicago and New York, and to induce Midwestern states to secede. The most conspicuous example was the attempt of pro-Confederate forces in southern Indiana to arm insurrectionaries. Four leaders of that scheme were tried and condemned to death. (In 1866, in a landmark decision, the Supreme Court threw out their conviction on procedural grounds, maintaining that military courts could not operate in areas where civil courts were open.)

  Wooing New York and the Border States

  Lincoln worried about his chances in New York, which he had won only narrowly in 1860. Republicans were not at all sure that they could again prevail. George William Curtis of Long Island told Charles Eliot Norton: “we have a very desperate political campaign before us, and we need all our friends. I wish with all my heart they were pluckier. The cause is so transcendent that even to fail in it is incomparably more glorious than to win with its opponents.”164 To the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Reuben Fenton, Lincoln expressed concern about Thurlow Weed’s disaffection: “I am anxious for New York, and we must put our heads together and see if the matter can’t be fixed.”165 Weed and his allies were, Lincoln noted in June, on “the verge of open revolt.”166 The New York boss objected not only to administration policies but also to the men who received lucrative government posts.

  Trouble had been brewing for months as the Greeley wing of the Republican Party continued battling the Seward–Weed forces over New York patronage, especially in the customhouse. Such intraparty squabbles dismayed Lincoln, who naturally feared their impact on Republican electoral chances. Just as Missouri Republicans felt hurt when the president criticized their “pestilent factional quarrel,” so too Weed was disgruntled when he heard that Lincoln regarded a controversy between him and Greeley as a personal quarrel. In October 1863, the hyper-defensive Weed complained to the president that his “ ‘quarrells’ are in no sense personal. I am without personal objects or interests. I have done something in my day towards Electing Presidents and Governors, none of whom have found me an expensive Partizan.”167 Lincoln tactfully apologized to the thin-skinned Weed for hurting his feelings: “I have been brought to fear recently that somehow, by commission or omission, I have caused you some degree of pain. I have never entertained an unkind feeling or a disparaging thought towards you; and if I have said or done anything which has been construed into such unkindness or disparagement, it has been misconstrued. I am sure if we could meet we would not part with any unpleasant impression on either side.”168

  The following year, speaking of the New York customhouse, Weed insisted “that the infamies of the Appraisers Office required the Removal of [John T.] Hogeboom and [Isaac O.] Hunt. … It is not alone that these men are against Mr Lincoln, but they disgrace the office—a Department everywhere spoken of as a ‘Den of Thieves.’ ”169 Hogeboom allegedly wrote articles for the New York Standard & Statesman criticizing Lincoln. In March 1864, Weed exploded in wrath when the president, to humor Chase, appointed Hogeboom general appraiser. “Mr. Lincoln not only spurns his friends … but Promotes an enemy who ought to be Removed!” Weed exclaimed. “After this outrage an
d insult,” he added, “I will cease to annoy him [Lincoln] .… I feel this keenly because it subjects me to the mortification of learning that the President has no respect for my opinions.”

  Weed complained to Lincoln’s intimate friend, David Davis, that almost “all the Office-holders appointed through our enemies, are now Mr. Lincoln’s Enemies. My Friends, though ‘out in the cold,’ are the Friends of the President.”170 In despair, he confessed to Davis that he was “greatly discouraged,” for he feared that “ultra Abolitionists will destroy our Government and Union. The war cannot go on, at the rate of blood and treasure it has cost … without Revolution or Anarchy.” Weed’s feelings were hurt because Lincoln and Stanton approved his plan to win the war but then failed to implement it.171 He begged Davis to inform the president “distinctly and emphatically, that if this Custom House is left in custody of those who have for two years sent ‘aid and comfort’ to the enemy, his fitness for President will be questioned.”172

  After consulting with Lincoln, Justice Davis reported back to Weed that it “pains him very evidently when you are not satisfied with what he does. He stated to me that he had the highest esteem for you, knew that you was patriotic & that it hurt him when he could not do what you thought advisable. He feels the necessity for a change [in the New York customhouse], but it seems to me that he fears that he w[oul]d at the present get from one muss to another. I think he ought to act & act promptly. But his mind is constituted differently from yours and mine. We will have to await the slowness of his movements about this important matter.” Lincoln protested that he was Weed’s friend and wanted Lord Thurlow to be his.173