Lincoln and Whitman

by Daniel Mark Epstein

  But for the President, who attended more than a hundred plays in Washington, this was no time for costume drama. He had what Gideon Welles called “a sort of intuitive sagacity” and did not altogether trust the blustering General Hooker. From May 1, when he began his attack, until May 5, when the battle was over, the General wired no reports. News correspondents on the scene filed contradictory stories. No one in Washington had hard intelligence concerning the outcome.

  Desperate for dispatches, the Commander-in-Chief haunted the telegraph office in the War Department. Lincoln wryly observed that “the most depressing thing about Hooker . . . is that he is overconfident.” Lincoln had been informed of Hooker’s battle plan: to pull 80,000 Union troops from their camps across the river from Fredericksburg and march them in a wide arc, to attack the enemy from the rear (west). Meanwhile 40,000 men under Major General John Sedgwick would hold the Confederate soldiers in their entrenchments near the town.

  This was a fine plan. But it did not take into account Lee’s genius or Stonewall Jackson’s audacity. Hooker sent all of his cavalry on the left flanking movement, leaving his right flank “in the air.” Frightened by the sudden appearance of a line of Confederates blocking his way at Chancellorsville, Hooker dawdled; amazingly, he ordered his generals to pull back into defensive positions. This gave Jackson time enough to move 26,000 troops around the Union’s unprotected right flank. On the evening of May 2, the Union Eleventh Corps on the right was shattered by Jackson’s attack, and only heroic charges by some Pennsylvania cavalrymen in the middle of the Southern advance, and the coming of night, prevented the complete rout of the Army of the Potomac.

  By courageously splitting his smaller army, Lee had managed to overpower Hooker in every part of the field. Chancellorsville is widely considered among the greatest tactical achievements in military history, Lee’s masterpiece. Yet if Hooker had not retreated, he could have scattered Jackson’s extended line or overwhelmed Lee’s 15,000 men with his greater numbers.

  The night of May 3, Lincoln kept a vigil at the telegraph office until 11:00, in “a feverish anxiety to get facts.” Nothing was coming through but rumors (mostly from Richmond), yet Lincoln had awful forebodings. On May 4, Hooker was still not responding to his Commander-in-Chief ’s telegrams. At 3:10 P.M. Lincoln wired Hooker: “We have news here that the enemy has reoccupied heights above Fredericksburg. Is that so?”

  On May 5, at a morning cabinet meeting, the distraught President read the General’s telegraphic response—it was so. Was there no hope that Hooker might recover and renew the battle? That same day Walt Whitman observed: “the condition of things here in the Hospitals is getting pretty bad—the wounded from the battles around Fredericksburg are coming up in large numbers. It is very sad to see them.”

  According to Noah Brooks—who was at the White House on May 6—while there was still no proof, the President “was certain in his own mind that ‘Hooker had been licked.’ ” At 2:00 P.M. Lincoln asked if Brooks would wait with Dr. Anson Henry, a friend from Springfield who was staying at the White House, in the guest room across from the oval library. Lincoln was going over to the telegraph office and wanted Brooks and Henry to wait where he could find them in case there was important news.

  An hour later Lincoln walked into the bedroom where the journalist and the doctor were talking. He held a telegram in his hand. He shut the door behind him. Brooks said he would “never forget that picture of despair . . . His face, usually sallow, was ashen in hue.” The wall behind him was papered in a pattern of “French gray,” and Brooks thought, “the complexion of the anguished President’s visage was almost exactly like that of the wall.”

  Lincoln handed Brooks the telegram. In a trembling voice Lincoln said, “Read it—news from the Army.”

  Hooker had withdrawn his beaten army across the Rappahannock the night before. When the bodies were counted it would be known that the Army of the Potomac had lost 17,278 men to Lee’s 12,821, having outnumbered the rebels more than two to one on the field.

  “Never, as long as I knew him,” said Brooks, “did he seem to be so broken, so dispirited, and so ghostlike. Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room, saying, ‘My God! My God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’ ”

  Lincoln seemed unable to find any other words to express his heartache, and soon rushed out of the room. His doctor, who had known Lincoln most of his life, burst into tears. Secretary Stanton, among others, was afraid that the President might commit suicide.

  Looking out the north window under the portico, Brooks and Henry saw a carriage approach the porte cochere bearing General-in-Chief Henry Halleck. They watched the tall, dark form of the President climb into the vehicle, which then rattled away through the mud, bound for the wharf where the yacht was waiting to take the Commander-in-Chief to Falmouth. He was headed for Virginia to see, firsthand, what had become of the Army of the Potomac.

  Before news of the defeat, the dead and wounded began arriving in Washington, in the driving rain of early May. Major General Hiram George Berry, Third Army Corps, while trying to recover ground lost by the Union Eleventh Corps of Maine, was struck by a minié ball, which pierced his lungs and heart. He had been a prominent citizen of Maine. On May 5 the Chronicle reported: “Gen. Berry’s remains were embalmed by Drs. Brown and Alexander and placed in a handsome coffin.” That afternoon Lincoln sent his son Tad around to the funeral home with “a beautiful bouquet of rare and fragrant flowers, and a wreath of evergreens” to place upon the coffin. “Lists of the killed and wounded will be found elsewhere in our columns,” the Chronicle added.

  The night before, 250 sick and wounded soldiers arrived from Aquia Creek, Virginia. They were the first of the casualties that would fill the hospitals where Whitman was working. On May 11 he wrote to Moses Lane that he had never seen “more heart-rending cases, than those now coming up in one long bloody string from Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg battles, six or seven hundred every day. We have already over 3000 arrived here in hospital from Hooker’s late battles.”

  Whitman stood at the landing on Sixth Street in the darkness of early evening as two boats tied up at the pier. A few torches cast light on the scene as “the poor, pale, helpless soldiers had been debark’d.” A violent shower made the torches smoke and sputter. Soldiers lay on the wharf and in the mud all around, on blankets and old quilts, probably grateful for the rain. “Bloody rags bound round heads, arms, and legs.” There were few attendants, only some overworked ambulance drivers. “The wounded are getting to be common,” Whitman observed, “and people grow callous.” Men patiently waited their turn. The worst cases were carried off in stretchers. At last the ambulances began to arrive in caravans; one by one the horse-drawn wagons would back up to take their painful loads. The eerie silence in which the men suffered astonished Whitman. “A few groans that cannot be suppress’d and occasionally a scream of pain as they lift a man into the ambulance.”

  “The bad cases are yet to come,” one of the medics told Whitman.

  “If that is so I pity them, for these are bad enough,” the poet reflected. The wounded were arriving at the rate of a thousand a day.

  Lincoln, headed in the opposite direction on the presidential steamer, the Carrie Martin, was perforce more concerned with the men in the ranks. Arriving at headquarters in Falmouth, the President interviewed the surviving corps commanders individually. He was relieved to find that the army was still intact. But Hooker’s generals were furious about his ineptitude in the field.

  Hooker himself remained maddeningly “cool, clear and satisfied,” convinced he had been on the verge of victory when a cannonball hit his headquarters and a falling beam knocked him on the head, throwing him into confusion. If the ball had been aimed a little lower, Lincoln mused, and had erased Hooker, then the Union might have won the day. He had learned nothing from his mistakes. And while the President continued to support him publicly (“I wouldn’t throw away a gun because i
t didn’t fire the first time”), he knew that he would soon have to replace this general.

  The man who would eventually relieve Hooker, the irascible, hatchet-faced George Gordon Meade, wrote to his wife about his conversation with the President at headquarters in Falmouth. “The President remarked that the result was in his judgment most unfortunate; that he did not blame any one . . . Nevertheless he thought its effect, both at home and abroad, would be more serious and injurious than any previous act of the war.” Public expectations had never been higher. Now, as the Boston Journal wrote, “the victory that was to be is not.”

  The rest of the month proved to be one of the gloomier passages of Lincoln’s presidency. Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont’s ironclads had failed in Charleston harbor; Hooker had failed at Chancellorsville; General William Starke Rosecrans was stalled in Eastern Tennessee; and while General Grant was winning battles in Mississippi, he had yet to advance upon Vicksburg. As Lincoln declined to blame any of his generals, the public censured the Commander-in-Chief for the bloodshed, for this seemingly endless war. More and more politicians and journalists, Republicans as well as Democrats, called Lincoln’s administration incompetent. Military failures prompted demands for peace negotiations. And the President was roundly condemned for curtailing civil liberties: his support of Burnside’s suspension of habeas corpus in arresting ex-Congressman Clement Vallandigham for treasonable speeches; his suppression of “seditious” newspapers in Indiana.

  Although Robert E. Lee had lost Stonewall Jackson, his “strong right arm,” at Chancellorsville, he knew he had taken a significant step toward victory. Emboldened by his army’s power and morale, contemptuous of the Union generals, Lee began a carefully screened movement northward.

  And during May and June, General Hooker did nothing to stop him. On May 14 Lincoln wrote to Hooker from the White House: “I have some painful intimations that some of your corps and Division Commanders are not giving you their entire confidence. This would be ruinous, if true . . .” This was a roundabout way of describing Lincoln’s plight as well as Hooker’s. Critics of Lincoln’s performance as commander-in-chief were driven by radical politics: they wanted Hooker, Halleck, Grant, and Rosecrans replaced by generals who were also abolitionists. Lincoln simply wanted generals who would fight.

  “Will the President realize,” wrote General John Frémont to Charles Sumner—in a letter concerning the enlistment of colored troops—“that if this summer’s campaigns are not successful the Confederacy is well nigh established?”

  The President understood this all too well.

  6

  THE LOOKING GLASS

  The war was nearing its climax that summer. And Lincoln found himself in a domain beyond the looking glass, a place and time when it became difficult to know truth from illusion, or friends from enemies, even in his own home. The nation had been thrown into chaos, and somehow the entire complex structure must change, adapt, if it was ever to regain stability.

  Will the whole come back then? Can each see signs of the best by a look in the looking-glass? is there nothing greater or more? Does all sit there with you, and here with me?

  —WHITMAN, “A SONG FOR OCCUPATIONS”

  The eyes of the world were upon the President, but many of the people he counted on for approval or succor had withdrawn. His faithful secretary John Hay, whom he regarded with almost paternal affection, had left for Georgia’s Sea Islands and Florida to survey fortifications, and would not return until July. Hay and John Nicolay, Lincoln’s other secretary, shared a bedroom across from the President’s office. They were the first people to see him in the morning as he shuffled down the hall in his carpet slippers between six and seven to begin his desk work. And they were often the last ones to see him at night as the three worked late together. Tad, who adored his father, would play in the office and lie around until he fell asleep. Ten years old, the boy was a slow learner, and he spoke with a lisp. His difficulties, and Lincoln’s grief over Willie, made Tad all the more dear to him. Around ten o’clock Lincoln would carry the child off to bed.

  A journalist described John Hay as “exceedingly handsome—a slight, graceful, boyish figure,” with kind, lustrous brown eyes and rosy cheeks. He was charming, brilliant, and tactful. There was no one else in the household like Hay, to whom Lincoln confided so many personal matters as well as secrets of State. John Nicolay, gaunt, hawk-faced, with thinning hair and a scraggly goatee, guarded the gate between the long rectangular waiting room and the President’s office while Hay dealt with the cascade of mail, answering most of Lincoln’s letters. When he had put aside the mail, Hay welcomed visitors. With his kind voice and winning smile, he knew the art of “temporing unreasonable aspirations,” as one newsman put it, and “giving to disappointed ambitions the soft answer which turneth away wrath.” To a woman weeping he might offer his handkerchief; for a gentleman, on a hot day, he might fetch a glass of water. It was this young aide who made the White House appear a generous, humane stronghold, a sanctuary for yearning or distressed visitors during wartime. Now he was gone, and gruff John Nicolay remained.

  Both Hay and Nicolay detested Mary Todd Lincoln. Hay nicknamed her “Hellcat” for her temper. Whatever her youthful virtues had been, by the time she became First Lady she was vain, jealous, profligate, and given to heroic tantrums. Admittedly, she had inherited a White House in disrepair, yet “Mrs. President Lincoln had overspent the $20,000 four-year allowance [for redecorating] in less than a year,” writes Jean Baker, the preeminent biographer of Mary Lincoln. The commissioner of White House purchases—whose appointment Mary engineered—was William S. Wood. According to Baker, the President soon received an anonymous letter of warning (to which the biographer gives credence) that his wife and Wood were having an affair.

  The debts Mary Lincoln ultimately incurred in redecorating the White House and purchasing lavish dresses created a public-relations nightmare. “As her debts increased, she may have initiated the exchange of her influence on Lincoln for a bill paid or new material for a dress,” Baker reports. Then, in 1862, she was accused of espionage when she allegedly leaked an advance copy of the President’s State of the Union message to one of her admirers, named Henry Wikoff, a secret correspondent for the New York Herald.

  From time to time, during the first year of the war, Mary visited Campbell or Douglas Hospital, and she was pleased to see this recorded in the newspapers. She gave a thousand dollars to purchase fruit for soldiers threatened with scurvy, and she forwarded to the hospitals gifts of liquor that came to the White House. Upon Elizabeth Keckley’s urging she raised relief monies for the “contrabands,” the homeless freed blacks who were camping on the parade grounds in back of the White House and crowding the city. But as Mary’s health failed in 1862, Keckley took over these charities herself.

  By 1863, when Mary Lincoln was not tormenting her husband, she was neglecting him; and as intimate as they had been five years earlier, now he must have missed her sorely. “The President’s wife wanders around among watering places unprotected by any member of her family or by the company of any respectable gentleman and lady or worthy consort of her husband,” one journalist observed. Three times a year or more she left town to go shopping in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia. During the last half of 1863, she was absent most of the time. Although she had been an attentive mother to the older boys, “now Tad evoked memories of Willie.” According to Baker, Mary left Tad to her husband, and the child clung to him day and night.

  After Willie’s death Mary became even more erratic, withdrawing into the world of spiritualism, escaping into the circle of flatterers she called her “salon,” which included gentlemen and rogues on whose behalf she approached her husband for jobs. “Favor seekers recognized in her an experienced influence peddler and made known their claims,” Baker writes. To keep Nettie Colburn, her favorite spirit medium, in Washington, she secured her a position in the Interior Department.

  Her mind was unbalanced, and Lincoln pitied h
er. According to Elizabeth Keckley, during one of Mary’s fits of hysteria Lincoln led her to a window with a view of the lunatic asylum and gently explained: “Mother . . . try and control your grief or it will drive you mad and we may have to send you there.” He always called her “Mother,” and he treated her with unfailing tenderness. To Mary he had been “truly my all—Always-lover-husband-father and all, all to me.” They continued to love each other. But by the spring of 1863 Mary Lincoln was no more of a helpmate to her husband than he was to her—consumed as he was by the duties of his office.

  After March 28, 1863, the Lincolns ended their Saturday afternoon receptions. On April 6 Mary and Tad accompanied Lincoln as he reviewed Hooker’s army in Virginia. Excepting a séance in the Red Room on April 23 (which Lincoln walked out on before the spooks appeared) and a couple of visits to the theater, the telescopic record of the Lincolns’ life during that spring shows that the couple spent little time together by day. At night they slept apart. On June 4 the President and his wife attended a “recitation from Shakespeare at a private residence near Chain Bridge,” according to General Samuel P. Heintzelman’s Journal. Then Mary grew restless and prepared to leave Washington.

  From the tone of his letters to Mary that month, and the fact that he saved none of hers, it appears that Lincoln was relieved to see her go. In their black barouche, with the rubber on the wheels worn thin, the President rode with his wife and boy to the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad station just north of the Capitol. He kissed them goodbye and put them on a three o’clock train to Philadelphia. He had no idea when she would return.

  Mary booked rooms at the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia, and no historian has ever discovered whom she saw or what she did there that June. In the one note of hers that has survived from those weeks, she politely refused to see some friends who asked to call upon her.