Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  HANCOCK, WINFIELD SCOTT 1824–1886 Born Montgomery Square, Pa.; West Point, '44. He was a veteran of Scott’s campaign in Mexico, and at the outbreak of civil war was a captain and quartermaster in California. He asked for active service and, on McClellan’s recommendation, was commissioned brigadier, serving on the Peninsula and in the Maryland campaign. With the rank of major-general, Hancock performed gallant service at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Disabled by wounds received in the last engagement, he was again on active service in the Wilderness, where he commanded the Second Corps. Grant considered Hancock the most conspicuous of the general officers who did not exercise a separate command. After the war, he was commissioned major-general in the regular Army, and commanded in the West and South. His moderate views on reconstruction led to his being transferred to the East. In 1880, he was unanimously nominated Presidential candidate by the Democratic convention, defeated by Garfield in the ensuing campaign. Hancock, as military commander in Washington in the summer of 1865, was obliged to order the execution of the Lincoln conspirators. He suffered for the rest of his life from malignant criticisms for his part in the hanging of Mrs. Surratt.

  HARLAN, JAMES 1820–1899 Iowa politician and college president, Harlan became identified with the Free-Soil movement, and served in the United States Senate from 1855 until 1865. He resigned to accept the office of Secretary of the Interior, proffered him by Lincoln, who was Harlan’s close friend. However, as John Usher’s resignation did not take effect until May 15, Harlan actually entered the Cabinet a month after Johnson had taken office. He was opposed to the new President’s policies, and resigned in July, 1866. Harlan made many enemies in office, and was charged with improper appointments and corruption in the disposal of lands. He was immediately returned to the Senate, and was aligned with the radical Republicans in supporting Johnson’s impeachment. In 1868, his daughter, Mary, was married to Robert Lincoln. Defeated in the Iowa senatorial campaign of 1872, Harlan was not again elected to office.

  HAY, JOHN 1838–1905 Twice, in the course of his secretaryship, he performed quasi-military duty, but never saw active service. In the spring of 1863, he was a volunteer aide on Hunter’s staff in South Carolina. Early in 1864, Lincoln commissioned him major and assistant adjutant-general, and sent him, in the capacity of aide to Gillmore, to enroll loyal citizens in Florida, with the view of restoring a legal government in the State. Hay soon found that his mission was premature. It brought charges from Lincoln’s enemies that the hapless Florida expedition of that season had been undertaken with a political motive. Weary of life in Washington, Hay welcomed in March, 1865, an appointment as secretary of legation at Paris. Seward later made him charge d’affaires at Vienna, and in 1869 he was secretary of legation at Madrid. For a time, he was connected with the New York Tribune, returning in 1878 to Washington as Assistant Secretary of State. Hay had married a rich wife, and become solemn and dignified. His literary reputation was based on the publication of Pike County Ballads and Castilian Days. Lincoln’s biography, on which he labored with Nicolay for ten years, was serialized in the Century, which paid the authors fifty thousand dollars. Hay and his friend, Henry Adams, built fine houses on Sixteenth Street—the Hay mansion standing on the site of Mrs. Greenhow’s former home. In 1897, he was appointed ambassador to Great Britain by McKinley, and in 1898 he became Secretary of State, remaining in office under Theodore Roosevelt until his death. He directed the peace negotiations which followed the Spanish-American War, sponsored the “open door” in China, and helped to prevent the dissolution of China after the Boxer rebellion of 1900. With Great Britain he made the treaty which ultimately permitted the fortification of the Panama Canal, and arranged the settlement of the Alaskan boundary dispute.

  HAYES, RUTHERFORD BIRCHARD 1822–1893 After his service in the Washington defenses in August, 1862, Hayes took part in the Maryland campaign and was severely wounded at South Mountain in September. He was later attached to the forces in western Virginia. Joining the Army of the Shenandoah in 1864, Hayes fought at Winchester, Fisher’s Hill and Cedar Creek, and was made a brigadier-general, and brevetted major-general for gallantry. Before the war, Hayes had been an Ohio lawyer of some experience in local politics, and during his absence in the field in 1864 he was elected Republican congressman, taking his seat in December, 1865. He followed the party line on reconstruction, and was in favor of President Johnson’s impeachment. From 1867 to 1869 and again in 1875 he was governor of Ohio. In 1876, he received the Republican nomination for the Presidency. The election resulted in the acrimonious Hayes-Tilden controversy, in which the Democrats charged fraud. Three days before his inauguration, Hayes was declared to have been elected. During his administration, the worst excesses of military carpetbag rule in the South began to be abated. Hayes was an honest and mediocre President, who earnestly tried to bring about reforms in the civil service. His wife was much commended by teetotalers for her refusal to permit wine to be served on the White House table.

  HITCHCOCK, ETHAN ALLEN 1798–1870 In November, 1862, he returned to Washington to serve on the commission for the exchange of prisoners. He published The Sonnets of Shakespeare and Spenser’s “Colin Clout” Explained in 1865, and Notes on the Vita Nuova of Dante in 1866.

  HOLT, JOSEPH 1807–1894 Appointed Judge Advocate General in September, 1862, the former Democrat from Kentucky became the ally of the Republican radicals and was widely criticized for his extension of the jurisdiction of military commissions. The popular reaction to the execution of Mrs. Surratt covered Holt with obloquy. In condemning her to death, the military commission had petitioned the President for clemency. When this fact came into the open during the trial of John Surratt in 1867, President Johnson declared that he had not been shown the recommendation for mercy when the record of the case was brought to him by Holt. The accusation of having suppressed the petition embittered Holt’s later years. In 1873, he published his Vindication, and became embroiled in a controversy with Johnson, who consistently maintained that no information regarding the recommendation had ever been given him.

  HOOKER, JOSEPH 1814–1879 Born Hadley, Mass.; West Point, '37; resigned, 1853. Hooker’s personality involved him in many quarrels. He made an enemy of Scott in Mexico, of Halleck in California, and of Burnside and Meade in the Army of the Potomac. By his leadership at Lookout Mountain and Chattanooga, he regained the reputation which had been dimmed at Chancellorsville. He was made a major-general in the regular Army, and in the spring of 1864 did good service in Sherman’s campaign in Georgia. He was disappointed at not receiving the command of the Army of the Tennessee, and asked to be relieved from duty when the appointment was given to Howard. Hooker saw no more active service in the war. He commanded various departments until his retirement in 1868.

  JOHNSON, ANDREW 1808–1875 His love feast with the Republican radicals was of brief duration, as it soon appeared that the new President, in spite of his early vindictive utterances, would favor a lenient plan of reconstruction in the seceded States, and was opposed to a sweeping program of Negro suffrage. Early in 1866, he began a desperate fight with Congress, which refused to admit representatives from the provisional governments which Johnson had set up in the seceded States, and passed several important measures over his veto. The partisan struggle between the executive and legislative branches resulted in a sorry paralysis of governmental functions. Johnson, insulted and slandered, showed a high order of courage and statesmanship, but he lost respect by undignified public appearances, especially in his “swing around the circle” in the congressional campaign of 1866. Congress, in 1867, threw out the President’s reconstruction plans, and passed harsh legislation, enforcing military rule and Negro suffrage in the South. The Tenure of Office Act, which prohibited the President from dismissing a Cabinet officer without the Senate’s consent, was tested by Johnson’s attempt to remove the hostile Stanton from his Cabinet, and became the chief ground for the President’s impeachment trial before the Senate in 1868. T
he congressional raid on the executive office failed by a single vote, seven Republican senators breaking party discipline to vote against conviction. In 1869, Johnson returned to Tennessee. He was elected to the Senate shortly before his death.

  JOHNSTON, JOSEPH EGGLESTON 1807–1891 Born Virginia; West Point, '29; gallant service in Mexico, where he received two severe wounds and three brevets; Quartermaster General, with rank of brigadier, 1860. Johnston, commanding insurgent forces in the Valley in 1861, made a rapid and skillful junction with Beauregard at Manassas, and, as senior officer, took command on that field. He was made a full general, and assigned to the command in northern Virginia. In the spring of 1862, he transferred his main army to the Peninsula, and superseded Magruder at Yorktown on April 17. He recommended the evacuation of Yorktown and the concentration of the army before Richmond. After partially recovering from the wounds received at Fair Oaks, he took command in the southwest, and in May, 1863, he was placed at the head of all the Confederate forces in Mississippi, opposing Grant’s movement on Vicksburg, the siege of which he tried unsuccessfully to relieve. In December, 1863, after Chattanooga, he was transferred to the command of the defeated Confederate Army of Tennessee, with headquarters in Georgia, and in May, 1864, skillfully resisted the advance of Sherman’s much larger army. He was relieved of command on July 17, but restored by Lee in February, 1865. In his able service to the Confederate cause, Johnston was constantly at cross-purposes with Jefferson Davis. After the war, he settled in Richmond, and served one term in Congress in 1878. He later moved to Washington, and was appointed commissioner of railroads by President Cleveland.

  KEYES, ERASMUS DARWIN 1810–1895 Born Brimfield, Mass.; West Point, '32. As a young officer Keyes served as Scott’s aide for four years, and was well acquainted with the old General’s foibles when he became his military secretary in January, 1860. In April, 1861, he incurred Scott’s displeasure by assisting without his chief’s special consent in the plans for the relief of Fort Pickens. He left for New York on business connected with the expedition, and Scott soon appointed another officer in his place. Keyes obtained a colonelcy, and commanded a brigade in Tyler’s division at First Bull Run. Lincoln appointed him commander of the Fourth Corps of the Army of the Potomac before the Peninsula campaign. He was promoted major-general in May, 1862, and brevetted brigadier-general in the United States Army after the battle of Fair Oaks. When the Army of the Potomac was withdrawn from the Peninsula, Keyes’s corps, to his great chagrin, was left behind at Yorktown. He felt that his career had suffered because of McClellan’s antagonism. He became engaged in a controversy with General Dix, and was disappointed at being refused an official investigation. Convinced that his military usefulness was over, he resigned in 1864.

  LANDER, JEAN MARGARET DAVENPORT 1829–1903 After the death of her husband, General Frederick W. Lander, in 1862, she took charge of the Federal hospitals at Port Royal, S. C., and worked there with her mother for over a year. In 1865, she returned to the stage at Niblo’s Garden, New York, in Messalliance, a play which she herself had translated from the French. She was seen as Queen Elizabeth at the National Theatre in Washington in 1867. Other roles which she successfully enacted were Hester Prynne, Peg Woffington, Mary Stuart and Medea.

  LANE, JAMES HENRY 1814–1866 The senator from Kansas raised two regiments in his State, and during the first autumn of the war served in western Missouri, holding for a time a commission as brigadier-general. Although he was much attached to Lincoln, he allied himself with the radical faction in the Senate. After Johnson’s accession, however, he deserted his former political associates to give strong support to the new President. In the summer of 1866, Lane shot himself. It was the second suicide within a year among Johnson’s adherents, for Preston King, his closest friend and adviser, had drowned himself by jumping from a New York ferryboat. Some people saw significance in the fact that King and Lane had guarded the White House stairs when Mrs. Surratt’s daughter, Anna, vainly sought to see President Johnson to obtain a pardon for her mother.

  LEE, ROBERT EDWARD 1807–1870 Born Stratford, Virginia; West Point, '29. With the rank of captain, he was engaged in the Mexican War, winning three brevets for bravery. On his return, while employed in engineering work near Washington, he lived at Arlington, the estate of his wife’s father, George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington. After three years as superintendent of West Point, he became lieutenant-colonel of the Second Cavalry, on duty in Texas. While at home on leave in 1859, he was sent to Harper’s Ferry to subdue John Brown’s raid. In February, 1861, he was ordered to Washington from Texas, and the following month, after Lincoln was in office, Lee was made colonel of the First U.S. Cavalry. He tendered his resignation on April 20, and, before it had been accepted, took command of the Virginia insurgent forces. On June 8, Lee’s army was transferred to the Confederate States. He was made a full general in the late summer, but his first important command dated from May 31, 1862, when he replaced J. E. Johnston at the head of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. From that time on, he repelled Federal attacks with brilliant success, but his two attempts at invading the North ended in retreat, after Antietam and Gettysburg. Lee did not assume the chief command of the Confederate armies until February, 1865. After the surrender at Appomattox, he urged on the Southern people the submission which he himself had yielded to the Federal Government. In the following August, he accepted the presidency of Washington College at Lexington, Virginia, and remained in this position until his death.

  LINCOLN, MARY 1818–1882 Although her husband’s personal estate amounted to over one hundred thousand dollars and she received gifts of money, the President’s widow was obsessed with the idea that she was destitute. In a Chicago boardinghouse, she bewailed her homeless state, railed at the niggardliness of the Republicans and jealously begrudged all generosity shown to military leaders of the Union. She declared that her old friends, B. B. French and Isaac Newton, were working against her, and specifically accused French of embezzling money which should have been hers. In the autumn of 1867, to the mortification of the Republicans and the horror of her son, Robert, she created a scandal by arranging a public sale of part of her wardrobe and jewelry in New York. Letters advertising her poverty and denouncing prominent Republicans were printed in the Democratic New York World. Thurlow Weed assailed her in a bitter reply, which declared that she had tried to have a padded bill—$900 for the dinner to the Prince Napoleon—charged to the Government, and had eventually included it in “a gardener’s account.” Mrs. Lincoln received so much adverse publicity that the sale of her effects was a failure. In the latter part of 1868, she went abroad with Tad, and remained until the spring of 1871. Senator Sumner presented to the Senate her petition for a pension, and in July, 1870, finally succeeded in having a bill passed which awarded Lincoln’s wife $3,000 a year. Soon after Mrs. Lincoln returned to Chicago, Tad fell ill, and died in July, 1871. Her mental disturbances became so alarming that Robert felt obliged to have her followed in the street by Pinkerton detectives, and, in 1875, on his petition, she was adjudged insane. She attempted suicide, and was confined in a private sanitarium. After three months, she was permitted to visit her sister, Mrs. Ninian Edwards, in Springfield, and the following year the court declared that she was restored to reason. The next few years were spent by Mrs. Lincoln in solitary wanderings in Europe. Her financial situation was again aired in the press with agitation for the increase of her pension, which Congress in 1882 raised to $5,000, voting an additional gift of $15,000. In July of that year, she died at the Edwards home. The last months of her life she spent in a darkened room, dressed in her widow’s mourning.

  LINCOLN, ROBERT TODD 1843–1926 On entering Harvard in 1859, he carried a letter of introduction to the president of the university from Senator Stephen A. Douglas, identifying Robert as the son of his friend with whom he had been canvassing Illinois. A year and a half later, the boy was the center of popular attention and flattery. On his mother’
s solicitation, he remained at college, and spent four months at the Harvard Law School, after his graduation in 1864. There was much criticism in the country because the President’s son bore no part in the war. In response to his father’s request, Grant appointed him to his staff with the commission of captain, and Robert joined the army before Petersburg in 1865, and saw service in the closing scenes of the war. He returned to Washington on April 14, and for the remainder of his life suffered from remorse because he had refused to accompany his parents to Ford’s Theatre that evening. Robert went with his mother to Chicago, and resumed his law studies. In 1868, he married Mary Harlan, the daughter of his father’s friend, Senator Harlan of Iowa. His mother’s eccentric behavior caused him great distress, and he was at length obliged to ask the courts for a hearing, that he might have her committed for insanity. For the most part, Lincoln held aloof from public affairs, though he supported the movement for Grant’s third term in 1880. In the Garfield administration, he served as Secretary of War, and in 1889 President Harrison appointed him minister to England. Robert Lincoln’s name became largely associated with big business through his work as counsel for railroad and corporate interests, and his presidency of the Pullman Company. In his advancing years, he lived in semi-seclusion, and was almost forgotten by the public. His influence over the preparation of his father’s biography by Nicolay and Hay resulted in the suppression of almost all material about Abraham Lincoln’s obscure and poverty-stricken origin. Near the end of his life, before sending his father’s private papers to the Library of Congress, he burned a number of them.