Rise to Greatness (55 page)

On November 9, Lincoln finally replied, writing that it had grown so chilly at the cottage that he was once again residing at the White House. The presidential retreat wasn’t built for winter. When the season’s first cold front had rattled the windows and seeped under the doors, the president’s cook suggested it was time to move back to the thick-walled Executive Mansion.

Lincoln’s return to the White House brought a change to the friendship he had forged over the previous two months with David Derickson, a volunteer captain from Pennsylvania. In civilian life, Derickson was a businessman from Meadville, near the Ohio border, and when the Union restarted its recruiting efforts in late June, he and his teenage son Charles answered the call. Their unit, Company K of the 150th Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment, reached Washington in late summer during the panicky days after Pope’s defeat at Bull Run. The company was assigned to the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home with orders to protect the president and his family. Lincoln had always resisted being surrounded by bodyguards, but with Lee in the vicinity there was no room for debate.

Company K was a godsend for the wounded Lincoln family. Alone and in pain after the death of his brother and the subsequent banishment of the Taft boys, Tad was much in need of friends. During his mother’s breakdown, the boy’s emotional requirements were met mainly by his overtaxed father, who gave Tad free rein to interrupt meetings, pester official visitors, and roam the White House until he fell asleep on the floor of the president’s office or on a nearby sofa. Late at night, Lincoln would hoist the sleeping boy onto his shoulder and carry him to bed.

Once the family moved out to the cottage for the summer, Tad’s life brightened. Then, when Company K arrived on the grounds in the early fall, he made the soldiers’ camp his own. Several of the young Pennsylvanians welcomed him as a kid brother and mascot. He rode his pony to daily drill, fell in line at chow time for plates of beans, and drafted soldiers to join him on adventures. One day a teamster got in trouble for leaving camp in Tad’s company without permission, and the young Lincoln went directly to his father to obtain a permanent pass.

Lincoln sometimes joined Tad with his newfound pals for a game of checkers or a chat about army life. Now and then the president would walk over to a campfire for a cup of strong coffee; one day he watched with delight as two brothers in the company donned a blanket and pretended to be an elephant. At night, he would occasionally pace up and down at the edge of the camp, lost in thought until something caused a swell of rising voices or a burst of laughter. “Whenever he heard loud talking, he would send in and inquire of its cause,” one soldier recalled.

Lincoln met David Derickson shortly after Company K’s arrival and was immediately drawn to him. Impulsively, he invited the stocky, square-jawed captain to ride with him into Washington on the morning they met, and he stopped along the way to introduce the new recruit to Henry Halleck. As autumn went on, the friendship deepened, especially after Mary and Tad left on their trip to the Northeast. “The Captain and I are getting quite thick,” Lincoln joked to Derickson’s commanding officer. Another captain assigned to the Soldiers’ Home guard, Henry W. Crotzer, often joined the pair for breakfast or dinner, but Crotzer reported that it was Derickson who “advanced … [furthest] in the President’s confidence and esteem.” Derickson earned an invitation to join Lincoln’s entourage on the trip to Antietam, and sometimes, the two men stayed up so late talking at the cottage that Lincoln invited Derickson to sleep “in the same bed with him and—it is said—[make] use of His Excellency’s nightshirt!”

Some historians have speculated that the relationship was sexually intimate, but the question will likely never be resolved. What is clear is that Orville Browning’s departure from Washington in July had left Lincoln in need of a companion with whom he could laugh, read poetry, and give voice to his darkest forebodings. Derickson stepped into the lonely void in Lincoln’s late-night lamplight.

Early in November, the army proposed to reassign Company K, but Lincoln intervened to keep Tad’s friends and his own nearby. Derickson and his troops were “very agreeable to me,” he wrote. Still, the move back to the White House meant that Lincoln and his bodyguards would no longer be as close. By springtime, Captain Derickson would be on to other duties.

John Dahlgren continued to be a friend. On November 15, he arranged for Lincoln to observe the test firing of a new rocket designed by the inventor Joshua Hyde. The notion of killing enemy troops with shrapnel from exploding rockets had originated in Asia; Europeans adopted rocketry during the Napoleonic Wars, and Winfield Scott took rockets to Mexico. What remained to be figured out was how to make a rocket fly straight and explode on cue: that was the riddle Hyde claimed to have solved.

Lincoln, joined by Seward and Chase, drove to the navy yard and down to the water’s edge. There they found officers huddled around a cast-iron launching tube, preparing the test.

What the presidential party expected to see and hear was a whoosh, a red glare, a burst in the air, and a rain of shrapnel on the gray surface of the Anacostia River. What they actually saw, after the fuse was set and everyone took a step back from the tube, was “a blast and puff of fire” as the rocket detonated without launching.

When the smoke cleared and Lincoln was still standing with Seward and Chase unbloodied, the relief must have been intense. After all, these were men who could remember clearly what history has largely forgotten: that a failed weapons test in 1844 killed two members of John Tyler’s cabinet and, but for luck, might have killed the president as well.

*   *   *

Browning returned to Washington from Illinois late in November and called at the White House on November 29. Lincoln “was apparently very glad to see me, and received me with much cordiality,” he recorded. “We had a long familiar talk.” But things were different between them now: not only had Browning been passed over for the Supreme Court, he had lost his Senate seat, and he blamed his election defeat on Lincoln’s emancipation policy and the suspension of habeas corpus. Browning spoke to his friend at great length about the harmful effect of these decrees. “I told him that his proclamations had been disastrous to us. That prior to issuing them all loyal people were united in support of the war and the administration. That the masses of the democratic party were satisfied with him, and warmly supporting him” until he took those controversial steps.

This was surely not the way Lincoln remembered the dark days of summer, but he didn’t interrupt to argue. Browning concluded by telling him that “the proclamations had revived old party issues” and had given the Democrats “a rallying cry.” Then, at last, he paused for Lincoln’s reaction. “He made no reply,” Browning reported.

Lincoln evidently agreed with Browning that the decision on habeas corpus was badly handled—the subsequent widespread abuses of the power to detain people without charge had provoked much anger among the American public. Lincoln had recently responded to the criticism: on November 22, with his consent, Secretary of War Stanton had ordered the release of nearly all the federal prisoners held under the September proclamation.

As to Browning’s other charge, had Lincoln chosen to answer he would certainly have pleaded not guilty. He had already said that he “would rather die than take back a word” of his emancipation decree. And although Browning’s personal cause may have been hurt by the proclamation, the cause of the Union had survived at the polls.

After Browning aired his complaints, the two friends moved to less divisive topics. Lincoln caught Browning up on the military intrigue he had missed, describing Pope’s campaign, the demoralization of the army, and McClellan’s brief success and subsequent fatal inertia. When Browning asked about Burnside, the president replied that he had just missed seeing the general, who had earlier met with Lincoln and Halleck to discuss strategy. Then the president brought Browning up to date on Burnside’s recent progress.

In the three weeks since assuming command, Burnside had moved the Army of the Potomac off the road blocked by Stonewall Jackson—the same route John Pope had preferred as a pathway to Richmond—and onto the route Irwin McDowell had planned to take back in May. This led the army once again to Fredericksburg, where Burnside camped his men across the Rappahannock from the picturesque town and sent a surrender demand to the mayor. With Lee’s army coming to his rescue, the mayor felt emboldened to refuse.

This standoff had prompted Lincoln to cruise down the Potomac to Aquia Creek so that he could discuss alternatives with Burnside. The options were fairly simple: the Federal army could go through Fredericksburg or go around it. As he had shown during his single-minded assault on the bridge at Antietam, Burnside was a straight-ahead sort of thinker. He told Lincoln that he intended to string pontoon boats into a bridge, march across, take the town, and keep going. As the discussion between the two men continued into the next day and then reconvened in Washington, Lincoln showed his own tendency to err in the opposite direction, toward too much complexity. He advocated a complicated maneuver that would require three columns to converge on the Confederate position from three directions. Burnside conceded that his own plan was “somewhat risky.” Lincoln acknowledged that his would require a delay for additional preparations.

Further snarling matters, Burnside’s pontoon boats, held up by bureaucratic bungling, were late in arriving at the Rappahannock. In the interim, the Rebels had reached Fredericksburg and were taking up strong positions on the formidable ridgeline just behind the city.

Now, Lincoln told Browning, he and Burnside faced a difficult choice between danger and delay. “To cross the Rappahannock … in the face of an opposing army was very hazardous,” the president said. Perhaps they should “wait a few days” to arrange a diversion along the lines of his own plan. Whatever they concluded, Lincoln said to his friend, “the question would be decided today.”

The changed roster of senior commanders had seemed to galvanize Lincoln. “The President is immensely quickened, & the War Department is harder at work than ever,” one close observer reported. After dismissing McClellan, Lincoln showed less patience than ever with generals who were slow to fight. On November 22, for instance, he gave Nathaniel Banks a sharp rap on the knuckles. Banks was to replace the lightning rod Benjamin Butler in New Orleans, and his assignment was to take the offensive, moving up the Mississippi Delta. A week past his promised departure date, however, Banks was still in Washington, outfitting his mission in grand McClellanesque style.

When yet another order for equipment arrived at the War Department, Lincoln was shocked. “I have just been overwhelmed and confounded with the sight of a requisition,” he wrote Banks, and he was “in some hope that it is not genuine.” After pointing out that the order would take at least two months to fill, Lincoln continued, his anger rising: “My dear General, this expanding, this piling up of
impedimenta,
has been, so far, almost our ruin, and will be our final ruin if it is not abandoned.” Banks was to pack up whatever men and materials he had managed to collect and get himself out of town. And he was to leave
now,
before a posse of politicians showed up in a sour mood. “You must be off before Congress meets,” the president demanded. Banks left.

*   *   *

Mary and Tad having recently returned from their travels, on Sunday, November 30, the first family attended services. Together the Lincolns filed into the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church and took their usual pew. Also in the congregation that morning was Noah Brooks, the young journalist whom the president had brought to his wife’s séance earlier in the year. For a time the Maine-born Brooks had lived in Illinois, where he first encountered Lincoln as a speaker on behalf of John Frémont’s 1856 presidential campaign. Now, six years later, Brooks was struck by the change in Lincoln’s appearance. Reverend Gurley’s sermon gave the reporter plenty of time to study and describe the transformation wrought by the nation’s ordeal.

“His Excellency has grievously altered from the happy-faced Springfield lawyer of 1856,” Brooks wrote. “His hair is grizzled, his gait more stooping, his countenance sallow, and there is a sunken, deathly look about the large, cavernous eyes, which is saddening to those who see there the marks of care and anxiety, such as no President of the United States has ever before known. It is a lesson for human ambition to look upon that anxious and careworn face, prematurely aged by public labors and private griefs, and to remember that with the fleeting glory of his term of office have come responsibilities which make his life one long series of harassing care.”

Tomorrow, Lincoln would deliver his annual message to Congress, explaining himself and charting the way forward—not just for Washington, but for the whole country. Today, marked by “the daily scars of mental anxiety and struggle,” Lincoln wearily stood at the end of the service and started up the aisle. But as he walked, Brooks reported, his exhausted face was “lighted with a smile” and he gave “a cheerful nod [to] his friends on either side.”

13

DECEMBER

The fateful moment was but a month away: on New Year’s Day, Abraham Lincoln was due to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. While no one knew exactly how the consequences of the president’s radical decree would unfold, the nation was clearly on the path to yet more violence and upheaval. Naturally, large numbers of Americans found themselves wishing they could reverse course. Lincoln understood this impulse, but he also knew that the brink was already behind them. There was no realistic way back, only forward.

He made this point succinctly in response to a ludicrous proposal from Fernando Wood, the colorful New York City ward boss whose latest public office was a seat in the next Congress. Claiming to have inside information from Confederate sources, Wood told Lincoln that the Rebels were ready to send representatives to rejoin the Federal government, provided they were given blanket amnesty from treason charges. The time was ripe, Wood argued, for the president to declare a cease-fire in the war and explore whether the Southern states might return to the fold. With peace restored, the North and South could send the cream of their two armies to drive the French out of Mexico and annex that country for the purpose of creating nine additional slave states, thus assuring the Southerners that their voices would command respect for years to come in Congress and the electoral college. Wood wanted Lincoln’s blessing to open negotiations.