Abraham Lincoln in the Kitchen (38 page)

It was the perfect place to be during the summer. The staff loaded up cartloads of household goods and moved out of the city in the middle of June 1862 for the first season. Secretary of War
Edwin Stanton's
family also occasionally occupied a cottage on the grounds.
Lincoln and Stanton, who had replaced Secretary Cameron, sometimes
breakfasted together before traveling down to town.

It is unclear how many White House or other household staff worked at the Soldiers' Home cottage. There would have been some household help, including a valet of some kind. Lincoln mentioned
Thomas Stackpole, a watchman, and
Mary Ann Cuthbert, the housekeeper, in letters he wrote. We do know the staff included a cook. An African American cook, “Aunt” Mary Williams, as the soldiers called her, worked for the Lincolns the
first summer. Soldiers guarding Lincoln at the cottage wrote home about her. Sergeant Charles Derickson described how she once gave him leftovers from Lincoln's breakfast, calling him into the cottage and feeding him “off the very plate & fork & knife the President of the U.S. eats off!”

Another soldier's letter suggests Mary Williams cooked for the Lincolns in the White House. In June 1863
Private Willard Cutter wrote, “Aunt left in March, and there is a white cook in her place. She is a nice good looking woman.” Cutter's unit guarded President Lincoln both at the cottage and the White House, so he was in a position to know when she left service.

Lincoln kept up his work schedule at the cottage, rising early for a light breakfast and riding either on his horse or by carriage down to the White House, returning in late afternoon. On his thirty-minute
commute, Lincoln passed marching troops, caravans of wounded soldiers, hospitals, and the “
contraband camps,” where 4,200
runaway slaves lived under military protection. They were no longer slaves, as Emancipation was enacted in
Washington, D.C., in April 1862, eight and a half months before Lincoln's nationwide
Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863. They were, however, refugees with few resources. Lincoln may even have stopped on more than one occasion at one of the camps. In a postwar interview, one of the residents, Mary Dines, related that President and Mrs. Lincoln visited to hear a special musical performance of Negro spirituals. She also described how Lincoln stopped to “visit and talk” with the former slaves.

Nearly every morning and afternoon in the summer of 1863, Lincoln passed the home of poet
Walt Whitman on the corner of Vermont and
L Streets. The two took to nodding at each other as Lincoln passed. Whitman described Lincoln's appearance on June 30, 1863, the day before the
Battle of Gettysburg began. “He looks even more careworn than usual, his face with deep cut lines, seams, and his complexion gray through very dark skin—a curious looking man, very sad.”

On his daily journey, once Lincoln crossed Boundary Street (today Florida Avenue), which separated the City of
Washington from unincorporated Washington County, he was in agricultural land, home to the farmers who trucked their goods into the city markets. Bohn describes the Center Market of Washington before the war as overflowing with goods from the farms of both Maryland and Virginia: beef and mutton, along with a variety of fruits and vegetables. Foodstuffs from the waterways and forest made their way to market, too—oysters, shad, rockfish, and other varieties from the Potomac; and wild venison, turkey, and other fowl. Without a blockade,
food continued to flow into the nation's capital. Markets and stores were well stocked, and a variety of foodstuffs filled tables from the White House to
soldiers' bivouacs.

During the
first months that the Lincolns were in residence, the
Soldiers' Home grounds were unguarded, but by the end of the summer, General
McClellan ordered Company K and Company D of the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers to guard the
president. They arrived on September 6, 1862. Mrs. Lincoln had also insisted upon a cavalry escort for the president to and from the White House.

On occasion Lincoln dismissed his escort, and instead of riding on horseback, used a driver for his carriage. Once he ordered the driver to take him, along with his secretary
John Hay, to visit the Naval Observatory to look at the stars and moon through the newly installed telescope.

Noah Brooks reported on the president's summer routine. Writing in July 1863, he noted that “Mr. Lincoln comes in early in the morning and returns about sunset, unless he has a press of business—which is often—when he sleeps at the White House and his ‘prog' [meals] sent up from
Willard's [Hotel].”

For the rest of the year, we are fortunate to have two small
descriptions that paint a clear picture of Lincoln's White House routine during the winter. Brooks offered a view of the end of a typical day in the White House during the year: “The President dines at six o'clock and
often invites an intimate friend to take potluck with him but he and his estimable wife are averse to dinner-giving or party-making, only deviating from their own wishes in such matters for the purpose of gratifying people who expect it of them.”

William Crook, one of
Lincoln's guards assigned by the District police, related what happened next in a typical evening. After dinner, Lincoln would leave the second-floor library, wrap himself up in a gray wool shawl, put on his top hat, and head to the War Department next door to the White House to get the latest
telegraphed news from the war front. Lincoln and his guard slipped out of the basement and walked across the garden, into the building, and up to Secretary
Stanton's office on the second floor. After the telegraphs were read and the
president and secretary of war met, Lincoln then walked back to the White House, and went to bed.

But in the summer there was the possibility of a brief escape from the war as Brooks and others reported on casual evening entertainments at the cottage. Here, Lincoln would be a gracious host at the dinner table and then stand before the fireplace, reciting poetry or telling stories. On other occasions he treated drop-in visitors to readings from Shakespeare's plays. Lincoln's head-of-table generosity was the center of one woman's recollection of a White House meal in 1864. Anna Byers-Jennings described Lincoln's home-style manner: “Of all the informal affairs I have ever attended, it certainly took the lead.” She describes how she was seated at table at the right of the
president. Mrs. Lincoln, Robert, and Tad were there along with two generals. When a dish was brought out to the table, President Lincoln “reached for it, handled the spoon like an ordinary farmer, saying to all in his reach: ‘Will you have some of this?' dishing it into our plates liberally.”

Lincoln was in residence at the Soldiers' Home cottage during the most critical months of his reelection campaign in the summer of 1864. The outcome was not certain. Not since Andrew Jackson in 1832 had a president been elected for a second term. The Democrats nominated General George
McClellan on a “peace” ticket, reflecting popular
dissatisfaction with the course of the war. At the cottage, Lincoln could meet with trusted advisors and the allies who would act as political surrogates influencing key constituencies.

Here, laughter could ring out from the cottage parlors. Hugh McCulloch, later to be
Lincoln's treasury secretary, described an October 1864 evening when Lincoln and a few friends gathered at the cottage following General Philip Sheridan's victory in Winchester, Virginia, that effectively stopped the Confederate forces' invasion of the north. Lincoln and Assistant Postmaster General Alexander Randall entertained a gathering of close friends with a two-hour contest “as to which could tell the best
story and provoke the heartiest laughter.… The verdict of the listeners was that, while the stories were equally good, Mr. Lincoln had displayed the most humor and skill.”

Lincoln and Tad also interacted with the
soldiers camped on the grounds surrounding the cottage and other buildings. Lincoln's association with these men was significant. He came into camp and laughed at their entertainments, including one with two soldiers under a blanket, pretending to be an elephant—one soldier being the hind end and the other, holding a board for the trunk, as the front. Audience members shouted out tricks for the “trained elephant” to perform. Lincoln sat and visited with these young soldiers, perhaps escaping in memory to the days in New Salem when he was a young man cavorting in wrestling matches and feats of strength with the boys from Clary's Grove or his own efforts at command and warfare during the Black
Hawk campaign.

In the evenings, Lincoln wandered the grounds of the
Soldiers' Home. He walked past the tents of both the cavalry and infantry companies and stopped, “passing a word with them.” Members of the cavalry detail camped near the first
national cemetery for soldiers just across the road from the Soldiers' Home. Dedicated after the loss at the First
Battle of Bull Run in July 1861, the cemetery filled rapidly, and as the war continued it was the scene of several burials a day. By the summer of 1863 there had been more than eight thousand interments.

These soldiers not only protected the president, but they also provided companionship for Tad, now nine years old and the only child left at home. After Willie's
death, distraught Mary Lincoln asked that the
Taft boys no longer come to the White House for classes with the tutor or to play. Soon
Bud and Holly Taft and their sister, Julia, were sent up north to school. The oldest Lincoln son, Robert, never lived at the White House; he began studies at Harvard before the war and visited on
vacations. Secretary of War
Stanton's children were sometime playmates, but Tad found good friends in the
Pennsylvania “Bucktail”
soldiers. They named him an honorary “third Lieutenant.” Letters and memoirs from the members of Company K provide brief witness to the everyday events. Albert See, one of the soldiers, wrote that Tad showed up nearly every day “when the dinner bell rang” and would simply get in line and “draw his rations the same as the rest of us.”
Private Cutter recalled giving Tad some “bread and molasses.”

In addition to the regular army ration of twenty-two ounces of bread, fresh beef (in place of salt meat), beans and rice or hominy, molasses, coffee, tea, salt, and pepper, soldiers could buy
food from vendors who called on camp. As Cutter wrote to his brother, “Tell Grand Mother I have lots of Bread and Milk to eat. It is five cents a pint and the old woman is around most every day to sell cakes and pies, milk, apples, and a little of everything.”

During the three summer seasons spent at the cottage,
Lincoln came by the troop encampments for meals, too. He would sit and have a plate of beans and some coffee with the men. He also invited officers to come into the cottage to dine with him when Mrs. Lincoln was vacationing in New York or Vermont. Captains Derickson of Company K and Crotzer of Company D were dinner companions. Cavalry officer James Mix reported that he often ate breakfast with the
president.

Mary Lincoln recognized the importance of the soldiers' service. Back in the city she often visited the hospitals and sent soldiers baskets of wine and fruit, “re-gifting” things that had been sent to the White House.
Christmas of 1862 she was among a number of government wives who donated food from their homes and raised money to buy even more so that hospitalized soldiers would have a fulsome holiday meal. The women took plates and fed those who were bedridden. Mrs. Lincoln was one of the “waiters” at one hospital. Later when she heard that one of the cottage guard units was under orders to leave for combat, she gave the unit two bushels of apples.

The Pennsylvania guard continued their responsibilities when the Lincolns returned to the White House. Private Cutter's letters give a good sense of the bounty available in the city markets. “We were up around the city and had a mince pie that was
first rate, you must not
think that we have a hard time here and nothing to eat. We can get a pass to go in the city where the market is and get any thing we want there. There is more folks at the [M]arville market stand than there is in Meadville [Pennsylvania]. On fair days there is about 200 stands where they are and every other one is selling pies, cakes, and everything you can think of. I was up there the other day and bought butter and
cheese.”

The Lincoln family left the Soldiers' Home retreat for the last time in October 1864. The three summers there had been times of monumental events. Lincoln framed and wrote the
Emancipation Proclamation during his first summer at the cottage, apparently beginning consideration of the policy in June, reading a first draft to the cabinet on July 22, and presenting the completed document to his cabinet on September 22, 1862. Major summer
battles had taken a tremendous toll: Confederate victories at Second Bull Run, August 28–30, 1862, left 16,000 Union
casualties; Antietam, September 17, 1862, 12,400 Union casualties; Chancellorsville, April 30–May 6, 1863, 14,000 Union casualties; Chickamauga, September 18–20, 1863, 16,170 Union casualties; and the great Union victory at Gettysburg, July 1–3, 1863, 23,000 Union dead and wounded.

At the Lincoln Cottage I could sit and reflect on where this journey brought me. I began with a simple understanding of the lives of Abraham and Mary Lincoln and a curiosity to see where an examination of the
foods of the era might take me. Over all the miles between southern Indiana and this spot overlooking
Washington, through the piles of recipes and plates of re-created foods, my admiration for the Lincolns had only increased as I was able, for a few moments, to come close to entering their world. I only wished I had a corn dodger to munch.

Today the tree-filled grounds are mostly still, except for the occasional voices of the veterans who live here and the visitors leaving the guided house tour. I sat in the small shelter a few yards from the house. Could it have been built on a spot where Company K set up camp and President Lincoln stopped by for some beans and coffee and maybe bread and molasses? I pictured him sitting among a company of men he commanded, committed to a course of national survival, and breaking bread with them.