Rise to Greatness (32 page)

As they were riding, or perhaps at the cottage after they arrived—again, Hamlin’s memory is unreliable—Lincoln took out a paper and showed the vice president something he had been working on. Hamlin was delighted with what he read. It was the first draft of a “military proclamation freeing four millions of slaves.” This imperfect account marks the earliest claimed sighting of what would become the Emancipation Proclamation; while historians differ over how much credit to assign to Hamlin’s story, other evidence suggests that Lincoln had indeed begun to put ideas on paper around this time.

The occasion to act was not yet at hand, but Lincoln could see it coming closer and had begun to prepare. When he told the visiting Quakers two days later that he felt like “an instrument in God’s hands,” he was providing a glimpse inside the dynamic process leading him toward the defining moment of his presidency.

*   *   *

At the American legation in London, Charles Francis Adams received on June 11 a letter so shocking that his first reaction was the horrified thought that Britain must be trying to stir up a war. The signature belonged to Lord Palmerston, but the tone and the obvious haste of the composition were completely out of character. Written from Palmerston’s sprawling estate outside London, Brocket Hall, the letter was headed “Confidential.” Attached to it was a clipping from the previous day’s London
Times
. “My dear Sir, I cannot refrain from taking the liberty of saying to you that it is difficult if not impossible to express adequately the Disgust which must be excited in the mind of every honourable man by the general order of General Butler.” Never “in the History of Civilized Nations” had anyone committed “so infamous an act,” Palmerston continued, ablaze; he wondered what sort of government would allow itself to “be served by men capable of such revolting outrages.”

Adams knew very well the outrageous subject of Palmerston’s rant: Benjamin Franklin Butler, the Union commander in New Orleans, five feet four inches of cross-eyed audacity, with the eyelids of a bloodhound and the chest of a rooster. If any man in Union blue was going to boil the blood of a cool and proper Englishman from a distance of some forty-six hundred miles, Butler was the one to do it. A relentless opportunist, the banty general had been from the beginning an untamed force on the political front of the war. After a flamboyant career in Massachusetts as a successful attorney and politician, Butler shocked the Bay State in 1860 by steering its Democratic convention delegates to none other than Jefferson Davis. Then, in early 1861, he shouldered his way to the front of the Union recruiting effort. Lincoln was so delighted to have a prominent Davis supporter defect to the Federal cause that he made Butler an instant major general.

The president had been mopping up after him ever since. Assigned to keep a rail line open through Maryland, Butler decided to occupy Baltimore instead. Transferred to Fort Monroe—where he temporarily resolved the legal status of runaway slaves by declaring them to be “contraband” property—Butler set off on a disastrous campaign toward Richmond without bothering to tell anyone first; the result was a fiasco near a village called Big Bethel. Once more, Lincoln needed a new place to stash his famous loose cannon. New Orleans seemed ideal. As commander of army troops in what was largely a navy operation, Butler had scant opportunity to cause trouble.

The confinement to safer quarters didn’t last. When the navy captured the city and the army moved in to occupy it, Benjamin Butler was again given an important responsibility—and again he proved to be a combustible mixture of competence and catastrophe. Butler rapidly restored order to a city in flames and prevented an incipient epidemic of yellow fever. But the discovery that Rebel passions still ran strong in New Orleans brought out the despot in Butler. He ordered the execution of a gambler named William Mumford, who had ripped the Stars and Stripes from a flagpole and dragged it through the streets. To make his point quite clear, Butler hanged the prisoner from the same pole. When city merchants resisted Butler’s efforts to reopen the cotton trade, the general fined them; meanwhile, he installed his brother in a position to profit handsomely from the restored commerce. Even clergymen were ordered to take oaths of allegiance to the Union.

The event that incensed Lord Palmerston had occurred shortly after Butler’s arrival in New Orleans on May 1. The general was galled by the open contempt shown by the women of New Orleans for the occupying Yankees. Otherwise well-mannered ladies shouted at the soldiers, even spat on them. In at least one case, a woman dumped a chamber pot on troops passing below her window. In response, Butler issued Order No. 28, warning that henceforth, any woman behaving disrespectfully toward Federal soldiers would “be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation.” Apparently Butler meant that she would be arrested and jailed with ordinary prostitutes, but the prime minister and others took him to be authorizing the wholesale rape of Louisiana women. The letter in Adams’s hands practically smoldered as Palmerston pronounced Butler “guilty in cold Blood of so infamous an act as deliberately to hand over the female inhabitants of a conquered city to the unbridled license of an unrestrained soldiery.”

This jolt was not what Lincoln’s foreign policy needed at yet another delicate moment. The Senate was balking at a secret agreement struck by the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Thomas Corwin, to pay down Mexico’s debts to France and England in exchange for an alliance with the Union. In Europe, the pressure for cotton continued to rise. Any hopes Lincoln still had of dividing the French and the British with respect to the Confederacy were dashed by William Dayton in a brisk message to Seward early in June: “It is vain to hope that France [will] separate her policy from that of England.” Meanwhile, another raiding ship for the Rebels, even finer than the
Oreto,
was in the water near Liverpool receiving finishing touches. A three-masted sloop with a copper bottom and powerful steam engines, this sleek new vessel measured 220 feet and promised to outrun almost any ship in the world.

The Palmerston letter, then, would have to be handled with great care. But it dawned on Adams that the rash letter might be a weapon he could throw back at Palmerston. “It strikes me,” Adams mused in a report to Seward, “that he has by his precipitation”—that is, his undiplomatic tone—“already put himself in the wrong, and I hope to be able to keep him there.” Palmerston’s hypocrisy irritated Adams, too; he would have liked to point out to the old man that the women of New Orleans were far safer than the women of Delhi had been four years earlier, when British troops sacked the city and committed hundreds of rapes.

Instead, he took a day to calmly plot his way forward, then answered the prime minister on June 13. Striking a note of consummate diplomacy, Adams said he was reluctant to take official notice of such a provocative message, and frankly was unsure how to proceed. It would help, he added, if Palmerston would explain whether the letter was intended as a statement of the ruling government or simply as the private expression of one gentleman’s opinion. This neat response managed to call attention to both the explosive nature of the document and Palmerston’s gross violation of diplomatic protocol, while also offering the prime minister a way to back down.

Next, Adams called on the foreign minister, Lord Russell, to ask whether he knew what Palmerston intended. The earl was flummoxed, having heard nothing of Palmerston’s letter, and he was annoyed that the prime minister was stirring up diplomatic troubles behind his back.

As for Palmerston, he blustered in reply to Adams’s message, but even inside his government it was clear he had gone off half-cocked. Adams, having handled the matter deftly, closed it down. “This anomalous form of proceeding”—namely, emotional letters dashed off in response to newspaper stories—was simply too dangerous, Adams wrote. Therefore, the American ambassador would “decline to entertain any similar correspondence” in the future.

Feeling pleased with himself, Adams traveled to Russell’s office on June 19 to keep a four
P.M.
appointment. The official purpose of the visit was to have the envoy read the lengthy dispatch prepared by Lincoln and Seward explaining the rapidly changing effects of the war on Southern slavery. But when Adams opened his valise and fumbled through his papers, he discovered that he had left the document at home. What might have been a mortifying moment for the straitlaced New Englander instead led to an unusually relaxed and open exchange.

Reporting back to Seward, Adams wrote that he and Russell had a conversation about “the progress of the war,” which “his lordship seemed to admit to have the appearance of drawing to a close. We also talked over the action of General Butler. On the whole, I have never known an occasion in which his lordship manifested more good humor and a more kindly spirit.” Perhaps Russell had a new feeling about Adams, having seen him outfox Palmerston—a man with whom Russell had been sparring for most of his career. But if the American thought for a moment that this would translate into a political advantage, he would see his mistake soon enough.

*   *   *

The rumor mill in Washington claimed that the president was spending his evenings trying to contact the dead. Rebecca Pomroy’s effort to unmask the charlatan who claimed to be speaking with Willie had no effect on Mary; her interest in séances deepened as the days grew longer. She was reportedly a regular at the spiritualist “circles” conducted in Georgetown by a medium named Nettie Colburn Maynard, who later claimed that she held one séance in the Red Room of the White House with the president in attendance.

Lincoln’s pastor, Phineas Gurley, had grown increasingly close to the president since Willie’s death, and Lincoln had become a fairly regular participant at Gurley’s Wednesday evening prayer meetings. As word of Lincoln’s attendance began to spread, the meetings swelled with favor seekers hoping to catch the president’s attention. Gurley arranged for Lincoln to hide in the pastor’s nearby office with the door ajar so that he could join the prayers without being seen. Now, the pastor was worried enough about the rumblings of unorthodoxy to ask Lincoln directly: Was the president dabbling in spiritualism? Lincoln assured the reverend doctor that he was not. “A simple faith in God is good enough for me,” he said, “and beyond that I do not concern myself very much.”

On Sunday morning, June 22, the president attended the service at Gurley’s church. Afterward, he asked Orville Browning to join him for the short carriage ride back to the White House. There, he took the senator to the library, where he showed his friend a collection of “memoranda”—clippings and souvenirs of important recent events. The inauguration of Richard Yates, a Lincoln family friend, as governor of Illinois was documented, along with Lincoln’s own inauguration. Major battles from the early days of the war, and the deaths of prominent men, were also memorialized. These treasures had been the makings of Willie Lincoln’s first scrapbook; the collection had only recently been discovered, Lincoln said sadly. Perhaps White House servants had turned up the trove as they packed for the move to the summer cottage, or perhaps the president had finally mustered the strength, four months into his grief, to sift through his son’s belongings.

Among the fragments was probably a clipping of Willie’s first published writing, which appeared in a Washington newspaper after the death of Edward Baker at Ball’s Bluff. Baker had called on Lincoln the day before his death, chatting quietly with the president on the White House lawn as the autumn sun blazed, and then lifted Willie for a hug and kiss before riding off to his fate.

There was no patriot like Baker,

So noble and so true;

He fell as a soldier on the field,

His face to the sky of blue.

Four stanzas in all, Willie’s poem was a wrenching reminder of what had been and could never be again. These words—“patriot,” “noble,” “true”—were threaded through the grief of thousands of families across Lincoln’s United States; soon there would be tens of thousands more, and unless the war could be redeemed by some high purpose, such words would surely break under the weight of sorrow.

*   *   *

The next day, June 23, Lincoln boarded a private car on a special northbound train at four
P.M.
at the Washington station. The train passed through Baltimore, across the Susquehanna River to Philadelphia, and onward in darkness to New York City. Arriving at one thirty
A.M.
, he switched trains for a trip up the Hudson River valley to the hamlet of Garrison, New York, where he boarded a ferry shortly before three
A.M.
for the river crossing to West Point.

A few hours later, the president left Cozzen’s Hotel for breakfast with Winfield Scott, the object of his journey. Nearly eight months had passed since Lincoln had laid eyes on the corpulent old general, and in that time many of Scott’s well-planted seeds from the early days of the war had ripened into fruit. The Union controlled the Confederate coast, with only a few major ports still to capture. The Mississippi was nearly open, save for the batteries at Vicksburg. But the South’s response to these defeats was not the upwelling of loyal sentiment that Scott had predicted. Consequently, Union armies needed reorganization and Federal strategy needed refreshing. At such a moment, Lincoln required the counsel of a general in chief, but had no one to turn to. His long trip to West Point testified to his belief that Scott—“Old Fat and Feeble,” said the wags of Washington—retained a sharp military mind.

Traveling with Lincoln, fresh from the steamy slog to Corinth, was John Pope. The visit to West Point was a homecoming for Pope, who had entered the U.S. Military Academy at age sixteen and had been a soldier ever since, exploring and surveying the western frontier from Minnesota to New Mexico. Now forty years old, Pope was a key to Lincoln’s plans for the eastern armies, though much depended on Scott’s advice.