Lincoln and His Boys

by Rosemary Wells

  On April 4th, I am nine years old. But Mama will not let Holly and Bud Taft come back to the President’s House for my birthday. She says they will never come again because they will remind me of Willie and make me cry. I think it is because they will make Mama cry to see them still alive and well with Willie buried underground, never to be seen again. My crying is done with. It lasted until the end of winter and some of spring.

  When Willie was here, he helped me learn my letters because my letters go backward and upside down on the page. Willie did not mind about the upside-down letters. When I said, “Willie, won’t you please write my name on the paper for me? Won’t you tie my cravat?” he always did.

  Now Willie is gone and it is no secret that everyone thinks I am slow because I can’t speak crisp the way other boys do. I am not slow. I am just not good at some hard sit-down things. “It’s all right, Taddie,” Willie always told me. “You’re not meant for sit-down work. You’re meant to be a soldier.” So every day I wear the boy-size uniform that the Secretary of War, Mr. Stanton, gave to me. I feel good-for-something in the uniform, but without Willie, without Bud and Holly, I am very lonely.

  Papa-day is lonely too. I heard the servants say that Mama’s mourning time should be over and she has gone just sheerly mad. I heard Mr. Nicolay tell that same thing to Mr. Hay. They call Mama “the hell-cat” when they think no one can hear. In church on Sundays I pray she will come out of it.

  Papa-day cannot sleep in the bedroom with Mama anymore because she has such nightmares and cries all night long. He sleeps alone in his own bedroom.

  “Can I come to bed, Papa-day?” I whisper from his doorway one dark night.

  He strikes a match and lights his bedside candle. I see his long arm come out to guide me to the bed. I get under the covers. He sighs a little, but not too sadly.

  “Papa-day,” I say to him.

  “What is it, son?” he asks. He is tired. I hear it.

  “Papa-day, I want to go back to Springfield. Can we go back soon?”

  He takes a while to answer. “Tadpole, we are stuck in this old house until the war is won and over. Then maybe we’ll take a trip home.”

  “But when will that be, Papa-day?”

  He goes away in his sleep. To the land of worry, I think, where I cannot follow.

  Even when Mama is able to have supper with us again, there is always the war on Papa-day’s mind. When the meal is over, Papa-day marches up and down on the parlor carpet and does what Mama calls “blustering.” He smacks the rolled newspaper against his leg and steams off about the man he calls “Little Napoleon.” By that he means General McClellan, who’s the head of the whole Army of the Potomac. General McClellan should have licked the rebels three times by now, but he has “the slows,” says Papa-day.

  “Sack him!” says Mama. “Snotty little layabout, defying you, the president. Fire him!”

  One evening Papa-day loses his patience entirely. We go over to General McClellan’s house on Tenth Street.

  “Are you going to fire Little Napoleon tonight, Papa-day?” I ask.

  “He won’t fire easy, son,” says Papa-day. “There’s one hundred thousand men in his army. They love him like a daddy. He won’t send his army into a fight, though.”

  “Why won’t he fight the war, Papa-day?”

  Papa-day says, “I think he’s scared of General Lee, waiting in the woods on the other side.”

  “Are you going to tell him he’s a yellow-bellied sapsucker, like Bobby calls him?” I ask.

  “Let’s just say I want to give him a piece of my mind,” is the answer.

  After an hour by the hall clock, General McClellan swans in through the front door. He chucks his gloves on the hall table and marches upstairs without so much as a howdy-do to Papa-day, who is, after all, the president of the United States, not to mention commander in chief, waiting in a hard-backed hallway chair. I want to run right upstairs and smack the Little Napoleon, but I am not permitted.

  “You stupid Napoleon!” I shout up the stairway after him. “Snotty sapsucker!” but Papa-day’s big hand covers my mouth. Laughing, he carries me outside. “That’s telling him, son!” he says.

  All over the South, thousands of poor soldiers get their legs and arms shot off in different battles. Every night the telegraph office has news of more hundreds killed. Papa-day says he feels the blood of those men wash over him and he can never be clean of it. I think he meshes all those dead boys in the field into his sadness about Willie.

  One night we lie in his bed and I have an idea. “Papa-day!” I punch him and wake him up. “Papa-day, if we go home to Springfield, Willie will be there. I know he’s there. I know he’s in our old house and on our street. Let’s go, Papa-day. I promise Willie is there and Bobby will come home from that boring old Harvard and then you and Mama will be happy again.”

  I wait for him to say something. I wait for that word — yes! But it doesn’t come. I hear only the night sounds of Washington City. Just a little, the bed trembles. Papa-day is crying quiet as a bird.

  For the summer months, we go to a cottage at the Soldiers’ Home. It is an hour’s ride north of the President’s House. The Soldiers’ Home is where old and wounded soldiers are sent. The cottage is a fair-size house, cooler by a mile than the mansion.

  Leaving hot old Washington, Mama says we will avoid Potomac fever. Mama worries about fevers all the time. She says the fevers grow in the swamps around Washington. Then the air over the swamps becomes a fever-filled miasma. The miasmas fly through the city in summertime. When it is hot enough, the miasmas come right through the window and make people deathly sick.

  In the cottage there are none of those hateful strangers tramping around asking Papa-day for favors every time he pokes his head out of his office. There are no miasmas.

  At the cottage, I have my own pony. There are lots of soldiers all around, and I play with them and eat with them and listen when they tell stories.

  Mama says to Father, “Tad will learn soldier talk, bad language, from the troops.”

  Papa-day answers, “Let him heal, Mother. The soldier boys love Tad. They never call him slow or make fun of how he talks.” I hear him say that to Mama when they think I am asleep.

  Through the summer, Mama still wears black instead of her pretty dresses. On the porch of our cottage, she holds me for long times in her lap. She sways right and left. Sometimes she cries, but it doesn’t scare me anymore because it is small crying. We go outside. She walks alongside my pony, her hand on his girth or my stirrup. We go through the meadows and she gets flowers for the dining room.

  I wish for the war to be done, so we can go back to Springfield, but it carries on so long I can hardly remember a time before there was a war. With Mama I visit the Washington hospitals. We bring gifts to the soldiers, who scream and bleed in their cots with their terrible wounds. Some days we bring fruit, other days flowers from the President’s House garden. Always we bring a few books to read out loud. Mama writes letters home for the sick soldiers who can’t sit up or use their hands.

  The war goes through Christmas and then another year and another Christmas. The battles do not go well for us. Papa-day loses weight worrying. Mr. Steinway’s nice black suit just hangs on him now. He goes at all hours of the night over to the telegraph office across from the President’s House. Lots of times he takes me. Even if it is late at night, he takes me and rides me on his shoulders in my nightshirt. We sit in the little office with the window way up high and listen to the dit-dit-dot of the telegraph messages coming in from the commanders. They are fighting the war in Mississippi or in Tennessee or sometimes far, far away in Louisiana.

  The telegraph sergeant translates the messages for Papa-day. All those dits and dots mean words. Papa-day answers the messages very carefully. I cannot disturb him while he thinks up his responses, so I am quiet and good.

  Papa-day sits in his chair with the squeaky wooden wheels. He rolls back and forth and writes on a pad. He mouths his tel
egrams aloud just the way he memorizes his works of William Shake-speare, over and over again until he gets it right.

  Meanwhile the telegraph sergeant plays card tricks for me and says he’ll teach me to be a magician. Papa-day’s words are put back into dit-dit-dots on the telegraph key and away they go, back to Tennessee, back to Mississippi, through the air like shooting stars. He calls them lightning messages.

  After messages, Papa-day and I walk home to the President’s House. “Someday we will win this old war, Papa-day,” I tell him. But Mama and I can’t get him to eat right now. He pushes his meal away, half-eaten, at suppertime.

  “What’s happening tomorrow, Papa-day?” I ask one evening.

  “Tomorrow I must visit another one of my generals,” he answers.

  “Can I come?”

  “What would I do without you?” asks Papa-day.

  I ride my pony and I wear my uniform and I go with him everywhere. Mr. Seward, Mr. Chase, and all the other old men have gotten used to me barging into their Cabinet meetings. They are ho-hum when I bring my goat into the Cabinet room or stand on the big table and show them how I can take my sword out of its scabbard in three seconds flat.

  General Scott is gone. Little Napoleon has been fired. Papa-day has a general he likes at last. His name is General Grant. General Grant is good because he brings victories to our side and begins to win the war at last. The bad thing about him is that he kills off thousands more of our soldiers in order to do it. “These terrible deaths are like those of my sons and brothers,” says Papa-day. He sleeps less and eats only a green apple for breakfast. I hold his hand at night, and I save my biscuit and milk for him by the bedside in case he wakes up hungry.

  On my twelfth birthday, April 4, 1865, Papa-day and I go south from Washington on a steamboat, the River Queen. I hear the soldiers talking. They are all excited because at last the war is over and we have won. We are going to visit Richmond, the capital of the rebel South. The South’s rebel days are over. They have been smacko-ed but good by General Grant’s victorious boys in blue. The military men want a big parade down Richmond’s streets, with cannons and band music and American flags to show the rebels who is boss now.

  “No,” says Papa-day. “We will let them up easy.”

  In the end it is only Papa-day and me who walk through Richmond under its brown cloud of artillery dust. The houses are crumbled and ruined. Chairs and boxes, chunks of walls and clothing, lie scattered all over the streets. People look at Papa-day’s tall hat as we pass under their windows but not a cheer or a happy word comes from them. I hope maybe they will see how brave he is and maybe they will stop being rebels and learn not to hate him so much.

  Suddenly we are surrounded by a big crowd of Negro men and women. They are cheering. They begin to sing hymns and they fall, in tears, at Papa-day’s feet. They were all born in slavery but now are free. They thank Papa-day for being the one to free them. They call him Father Abraham and kiss his long legs and feet. Papa-day is embarrassed. “I have freed no one,” he says. “All men are born free in the eyes of the Lord. It is the good Lord you must thank.”

  It is two miles’ walk to the rebel president’s house. This is the home of the president of the confederate states, Mr. Jefferson Davis. He, who started all this trouble and war, has hightailed it out of Virginia — no one knows where to.

  Papa-day and I sit in two comfortable chairs with upholstered footstools in Mr. Davis’s front parlor. Papa asks a rebel soldier for a glass of water, and it is brought immediately. We drink the rebel water and we listen to the sound of the now-free slaves singing in their new freedom. “Down by the Riverside” comes out of a hundred mouths. The music of the song floats skyward and joins the brick dust and cannon smoke hanging in the air. Then the old hymn and the war dust sprinkle down together over everything in the city.

  When we go home to the President’s House the next evening, the whole city of Washington is lit up as if for Christmas. Colored gaslights spell out words that Papa-day reads to me as we pass by. Peace! Glory to the Union! say the lights. All of Washington is celebrating our victory.

  Papa-day takes me to the upstairs window of the President’s House, and I lean out too far. Mr. Nicolay pulls me back in by the seat of my pants. He holds a candle for Papa-day to read a speech. On the President’s House lawn, the army band plays “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” over and over again. It is our Union song. The crowd loves it. When they see Papa-day’s face in the candlelight, they quiet on down for him to speak.

  I kneel beneath him at his feet and catch the pages of the speech as he drops each one. Little bullets of wax land on my hair from Mr. Nicolay’s candle.

  Papa-day tells the crowd that there is no room for anger or hatred in our land. When he is finished, the captain signals his band to strike up “Glory, glory, hallelujah” again, but Papa-day shouts down to them to stop. He says, “It’s been four years since ‘Dixie’ has been played in Washington. It may be the rebel hymn, but it’s a good old song. Let’s have it, Captain!”

  The captain conductor hesitates. He doesn’t want to play the enemy song for the Union crowd. Papa-day doesn’t care. He whispers down to me, “This crowd wants to rub the South’s nose in the mud, but I won’t let ’em, Taddie. I won’t let ’em.”

  “Give ’em ‘Dixie’!” he orders the band.

  The conductor obeys. One by one the people take up the words of the song.

  “In Dixie Land where I was born in,

  Early on one frosty mornin’,

  Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land.”

  We stand at the window and sing with the ocean of people outside. I know better, but still I say, “Papa-day, I know Willie’s waiting for us in Springfield. Can we go back home now?”

  The word I want comes. “Yes!” he says. “We shall go soon, Tadpole.”

  I think of all those little towns we must go through again. But at the end will be my brother, his hands full of pebbles. I will kiss him and never pull his hair again. Mr. Nicolay raises up my hand in the rhythm of the song. I follow Papa-day’s eyes. They are trained south, to the Virginia hills that lie in the darkness.

  “Do you think they can hear us over there in rebel land, Papa-day?” I ask him. “Can they hear us sing their song?”

  “I am sure they can, son,” he says. His hand tightens on mine.

  The incidents in this story of Abraham Lincoln and his family are grounded in historical fact. No detail was imagined or invented except the dialogue and the circumstances in which it took place. Everything I have written was easily researched because Lincoln’s life may be more thoroughly documented than any other person’s in history.

  The first year the Lincoln family spent in the President’s House was preserved by Bud and Holly’s sister, Julia Taft Bayne, who later wrote about it in a splendid short book, Tad Lincoln’s Father (Little, Brown, 1931). Elizabeth Keckley also wrote about the Lincoln family, as did many of the president’s colleagues, friends, and military staff who came and went in the family’s life in Washington during the war. Their recollections are collected in a book called Lincoln As I Knew Him, edited by Harold Holzer (Algonquin, 1999). It was in that book, while doing research for a historical novel about the Civil War, that I first came across the two-hundred-word fragment by Willie Lincoln about a trip taken with his father. That was the beginning of Lincoln and His Boys.

  Throughout my reading, I marveled at how kind Lincoln was with his sons. His boys could do no wrong. Willie and Tad Lincoln were raised to have fun in the Victorian era, when fun in public, especially for children, was frowned upon. Lincoln’s law partner and later his Cabinet members disapproved of the boys’ wild behavior. Lincoln didn’t give a hoot what they thought.

  Abraham Lincoln lived a remarkable life. It has been my greatest joy to read deeply in the nooks and crannies of it. Folded into the Lincoln history of political and military genius, of brilliant writing and public speaking, of mental illness, poverty, murder, and nati
onal sainthood, is the portrait of a generous and patient father, far ahead of his time.

  Rosemary Wells is an author and illustrator who has written picture books, novels, and nonfiction works for young readers, including Mary on Horseback, a biography of Mary Breckenridge, which won a Christopher Award. While researching Red Moon at Sharpsburg, a historical novel about the Civil War, she came upon a two-hundred-word fragment by Willie Lincoln about a trip taken with his father. This was the beginning of Lincoln and His Boys. She says, “Throughout my reading, I marveled at how kind Lincoln was with his sons. His boys could do no wrong.” Rosemary Wells lives in Connecticut.

  P.J. Lynch is an Irish artist who has illustrated several books with American themes, including The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey. To illustrate this book, he traveled with Rosemary Wells to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois, and assembled hundreds of images of Lincoln. He says, “Lincoln was an extraordinary-looking man. With his gaunt features, huge ears, and distinctive beard, he could sometimes look quite comical. Yet in some photographs, he looks strikingly handsome. And there is so much to read in his eyes.” P.J. Lynch lives in Dublin.

  Text copyright © 2009 by Rosemary Wells

  Illustrations copyright © 2009 by P.J. Lynch

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.