Team of Rivals (68 page)

Meanwhile, Tad was now critically ill. With Mary in no condition to care for him, Lincoln sought help. He sent his carriage to the Brownings, who came at once and spent the night at Tad’s bedside. He asked Gideon Welles’s young wife, Mary Jane, to sit with the boy. Julia Bates, recovered from her stroke, also watched over him. Clearly, Tad required professional care around the clock. Lincoln turned to Dorothea Dix, the tireless crusader who had been appointed by the secretary of war as Superintendent of Women Nurses. She was a powerful woman with set ideas, among them the belief that women’s corsets had a baneful effect on their health. She would routinely lecture young women on the subject. One girl refused to listen, insisting that she would rather “be dead than so out of fashion.” To this, Dix rejoined, “My dear…if you continue to lace as tightly as you do now, you will not long have the privilege of choice. You will be
both
dead and out of fashion.”

Asked to recommend a nurse, Dix chose Rebecca Pomroy, a young widow who had worked on typhoid wards in two Washington hospitals. Introducing Nurse Pomroy to Lincoln, Dix assured the president that she had “more confidence” in her than any other nurse, even those twice her age. Lincoln took Pomroy’s hand and smiled, saying: “Well, all I want to say is, let her turn right in.”

While Willie’s body lay in the Green Room and Mary remained in bed under sedation, Nurse Pomroy tended Tad. Whenever possible, the president brought his work into Tad’s room and sat with his son, who was “tossing with typhoid.” Always curious and compassionate about other people’s lives, Lincoln asked the new nurse about her family. She explained that she was a widow and had lost two children. Her one remaining child was in the army. Hearing her painful story, he began to cry, both for her and for his own stricken family. “This is the hardest trial of my life,” he said. “Why is it? Oh, why is it?” Several times during the long nights Tad would awaken and call for his father. “The moment [the president] heard Taddie’s voice he was at his side,” unmindful of the picture he presented in his dressing gown and slippers.

On the Sunday after Willie’s death, Lincoln drove with Browning to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown to inspect the vault where his son’s body would lie until his final burial in Springfield. The funeral service was scheduled for 2 p.m. in the East Room the following day. Though scores of people were invited, Mary asked Mrs. Taft to “keep the boys home the day of the funeral; it makes me feel worse to see them.” Nonetheless, without consulting his distraught wife, Lincoln “sent for Bud to see Willie before he was put in the casket.” “He lay with his eyes closed,” the essayist Nathaniel Parker Willis recalled, “his brown hair parted as we had known it—pale in the slumber of death; but otherwise unchanged, for he was dressed as if for the evening.” At noontime, the president, the first lady, and Robert entered the Green Room to bid farewell to Willie before the casket was closed. Commissioner French was told that the Lincolns wanted “no spectator of their last sad moments in that house with their dead child,” and that Mary was so overcome she could not attend the East Room service.

Congress had adjourned so that members could attend the service. Many of those present had attended the ball just nineteen days earlier—the vice president, the cabinet, the diplomatic corps, General McClellan and his staff. As the funeral guests filed in, a frightful storm arose. Heavy rain and high winds uprooted trees, destroyed a church, and tore the roofs off many houses. After the service was concluded, a long line of carriages made its way through the tempest to the cemetery chapel where Willie was laid to rest temporarily inside the vault. Lincoln, who had so agonized whenever the stormy weather had pelted the grave of his first love, Ann Rutledge, perhaps found some solace that his son’s body was now sheltered from the rain and howling wind.

In the weeks that followed, Lincoln worried about Mary, who remained in her bed, unable to cope with daily life. Though Tad eventually recovered, Mary found it difficult to endure his company, which only intensified her sense of Willie’s absence. Nor could she bear to see Bud and Holly Taft. She never invited them back to the White House, leaving Tad utterly isolated. Understanding the situation, the president tried to keep his son by his side, often carrying the boy to his own bed at night.

Mary seemed to find some small comfort in her conversations with Rebecca Pomroy and Mary Jane Welles. The latter, who spent many nights keeping vigil at Tad’s bedside, had lost five children of her own and could relate to Mary’s sorrow. In her talks with Mrs. Pomroy, Mary tried to understand how the widow could bear to nurse the children of strangers after the devastation of her own family. Mary knew that she should surrender to God’s will, but found she could not. Looking back on Willie’s bout with scarlet fever two years earlier, she concluded that he was spared only “to try us & wean us from a world, whose chains were fastening around us,” but “when the blow came,” she was still “unprepared” to face it. “Our home is very beautiful,” she wrote a friend three months after Willie’s death, “the world still smiles & pays homage, yet the charm is dispelled—everything appears a mockery, the idolised one, is not with us.”

Indeed, the luxury and vanity in which she had indulged herself now seemed to taunt her. She plunged deeper into guilt and grief, speculating that God had struck Willie down as punishment for her overweening pride in her family’s exalted status. “I had become, so wrapped up in the world, so devoted to our own political advancement that I thought of little else,” she acknowledged. She knew it was a sin to think thus, but she believed that God must have “foresaken” her in taking away “so lovely a child.”

Nor could she fully accept the comfort Mary Jane Welles found in the belief that her children awaited her in heaven. If only she had faith that Willie was “far happier” in an afterlife than he had been “when on earth,” Mary suggested to Mary Jane, she might accept his loss. Although in later years she would come to trust that
“Death,
is only a blessed transition” to a place “where there are no more partings & and
no more
tears shed,” her faith at this juncture was not strong enough to provide solace.

Crippled by her sadness, Mary was drawn to the relief offered by the spiritualist world. Through Elizabeth Keckley, she was introduced to a celebrated medium who helped her, said Mary, pierce the “veil” that “separates us, from the ‘loved & lost.’” During several séances, some conducted at the White House, she believed she was able to see Willie. Spiritualism would reach epic proportions during the Civil War, fueled perhaps by the overwhelming casualties. Mediums could offer comfort to the bereaved, assuring them “the spirits of the dead do not pass from this earth, but remain here amongst us unseen.” One contemporary commented that it seemed as if “one heard of nothing but of spirits and of mediums. All tables and other furniture seemed to have become alive.” Some mediums communicated by producing rapping or knocking sounds; others made tables tip and sway; still others channeled voices of the dead. Whatever method they used, one scholar of the movement observes, they “offered tangible evidence that the most refractory barrier on earth, the barrier of death, could be transcended by the power of sympathy.”

Mary’s occasional glimpses of Willie provided only temporary relief. His death had left her “an altered woman,” Keckley observed. “The mere mention of Willie’s name would excite her emotion, and any trifling memento that recalled him would move her to tears.” She was unable to look at his picture. She sent all his toys and clothes away. She refused to enter the guest room in which he died or the Green Room in which he was laid out.

Outwardly, the president appeared to cope with Willie’s death better than his wife. He had important work to engage him every hour of the day. He was surrounded by dozens of officials who needed him to discuss plans, make decisions, and communicate them. Yet, despite his relentless duties, he suffered an excruciating sense of loss. On the Thursday after his son died, and for several Thursdays thereafter, he closed himself off in the Green Room and gave way to his terrible grief. “That blow overwhelmed me,” he told a White House visitor; “it showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before.”

Like Mary, Lincoln longed for Willie’s presence, a longing fulfilled not through mediums but in his active dream life. Three months after Willie’s death, while reading aloud a passage from Shakespeare’s
King John
in which Constance grieves over the death of her son, Lincoln paused; he turned to a nearby army officer and said: “Did you ever dream of some lost friend, and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him, and yet have a consciousness that it was not a reality?…That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie.”

While Mary could not tolerate to see physical reminders of Willie, Lincoln cherished mementos of his son. He placed a picture Willie had painted on his mantelpiece so he could show it to visitors and tell stories about his beloved child. One Sunday after church, he invited Browning to the library to show him a scrapbook he had just found in which Willie kept dates of various battles and programs from important events. Maintaining vivid consciousness of his dead child was essential for a man who believed that the dead live on only in the minds of the living. Ten months later, when he wrote young Fanny McCullough shortly after her father’s battle-field death, he closed with the consolation of remembrance. In time, he promised her, “the memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.”

Now, more than ever before, Lincoln was able to identify in a profound and personal way with the sorrows of families who had lost their loved ones in the war.

T
WO DAYS AFTER
Willie’s death, General McClellan sent a private note expressing his heartfelt sympathy for the “sad calamity” that had overtaken the Lincoln family. “You have been a kind true friend to me,” the general told the president, “your confidence has upheld me when I should otherwise have felt weak.” Then, referring to the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in the West as “an auspicious commencement” of his own forward campaign in the East, he beseeched Lincoln not to “allow military affairs to give [him] one moment’s trouble,” for “nothing shall be left undone” in pursuit of victory.

McClellan’s assurances of forward movement provided Lincoln little comfort. The general had made similar promises for many months, while the great Army of the Potomac sat idle. Criticism of the general, previously confined to newspapers, found a powerful voice in the newly created Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Dominated by radicals from both houses, including Ben Wade, Michigan’s Zachariah Chandler, and Indiana’s George Julian, the committee detested McClellan both for his failure to prosecute the war vigorously and for his conservative views on slavery. From late December to mid-January, McClellan had remained in bed with typhoid. Suspicious that the general was using his illness as a cover for his continuing inaction, the committee held a contentious meeting with Lincoln and his cabinet. During the session, Congressman Julian recorded, it became disturbingly clear “that neither the President nor his advisers seemed to have any definite information…of General McClellan’s plans.”

More astonishing, according to Julian, “Lincoln himself did not think he had any
right
to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan.” Bates strenuously objected to Lincoln’s deferential stance, urging him repeatedly to “organize a
Staff
of his own, and assume to be in fact, what he is in law,” the commander in chief, with a duty to “command the commanders.” This opinion, voiced by the conservative, trustworthy Bates, struck Lincoln forcefully. He borrowed General Halleck’s book on military strategy from the Library of Congress and told Browning a few days later that “he was thinking of taking the field himself.”

Though his statement may not have reflected a literal intention, Lincoln had clearly resolved that he must energize the army at once. “The bottom is out of the tub,” he confided in General Meigs, repeating a favorite phrase. The nearly bankrupt Treasury could no longer sustain the enormous expense of providing food, clothing, and shelter for hundreds of thousands of immobile soldiers. Without some forward progress, Chase told the president, he would get no additional funds from a discontented public. Meigs suggested that Lincoln convene a war council with his other generals to formulate a decisive course of action. Receiving news of this, McClellan suddenly recovered sufficiently to attend the meeting on the following day. Still reluctant to expose his plans, McClellan told Meigs that the president “can’t keep a secret, he will tell them to Tadd.”

Finally, Lincoln lost his vaunted patience. On January 27, 1862, he issued his famous General War Order No. 1, setting February 22 as “the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces.” Lincoln correctly believed that, given the North’s superior numbers, they should attack several rebel positions at the same time. The order prompted McClellan to submit his plans for a roundabout movement that developed into the Peninsula Campaign. The plan called for the troops to move by ship down the Potomac River to the Chesapeake Bay, with a turn into Urbanna on the south shore of the Rappahannock River. From there McClellan planned to march southwest to Richmond.

Lincoln, backed by Stanton and several generals, including McDowell, proposed a different strategy. Troops would march overland through nearby Manassas, pushing the rebel army farther and farther back toward Richmond, “destroying him by superior force.” This straightforward approach would shield Washington, keeping the Union Army between the capital and the Confederates. Under McClellan’s circuitous plan, it was feared that the Confederates might willingly sacrifice Richmond to capture Washington. If the South occupied the seat of the Union, foreign recognition of the Confederacy would undoubtedly follow. In the end, Lincoln reluctantly acquiesced to the Peninsula plan, but not before imposing a written order requiring that a sufficient force be left “in, and about Washington,” to keep the capital safe from attack.

February 22, the date designated for the advance, arrived and went with Lincoln deeply preoccupied by Willie’s death and Tad’s grievous illness. A disheartened Stanton noted that “there was no more sign of movement on the Potomac than there had been for three months before.” When he first took his cabinet position, Stanton later explained, he “was, and for months had been the sincere and devoted friend of General McClellan,” but he had quickly grown disenchanted. After less than two weeks as secretary of war, he told a friend that “while men are striving nobly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped.” Stanton’s remark alluded to the sumptuous dinners McClellan hosted each evening for nearly two dozen guests, many of whom were prominent figures in Washington’s Southern-leaning society.

Stanton was further disgruntled when McClellan kept him waiting on a number of occasions. Unlike Lincoln, the proud war secretary did not ignore the arrogance of the general in chief. After one particularly galling experience, when he had been forced to wait for an hour after stopping by McClellan’s headquarters on his way to the War Department, Stanton angrily announced: “That will be the last time General McClellan will give either myself or the President the waiting snub.” A few weeks later, Stanton delivered orders to transfer the telegraph office from McClellan’s headquarters to a room adjoining his office in the War Department. Dispatches from the miraculous new system that connected Washington with army officials, camps, and forts throughout the entire North would no longer be funneled through McClellan. McClellan was furious, considering the transfer “his humiliation.” He had, indeed, lost significant influence, for the adjacent telegraph office not only allowed Stanton to exercise control over all military communications, but ensured that Lincoln would now spend many daily hours with his war secretary rather than his general in chief.

Still, McClellan had powerful allies in the cabinet, including the influential Montgomery Blair. The Democratic press largely credited the “young Napoleon” for the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, as if Grant and the troops were merely puppets with McClellan pulling the strings from Washington. Stanton noted satirically that the image portrayed in the papers of a heroic McClellan, seated at the telegraph office, “organizing victory, and by sublime military combinations capturing Fort Donelson
six hours after
Grant and Smith had taken it,” was “a picture worthy of
Punch.”

As it turned out, the victories in the West increased the pressure on McClellan to act. At last, on the weekend of March 8, the massive Army of the Potomac prepared to break camp. Anticipating the move, the Confederates began to pull their batteries back from Manassas to the banks of the Rappahannock. Hearing reports of the fallback, McClellan led his armies on a short foray to catch the remaining troops. But once there, he found to his great embarrassment that the entire Confederate force had already departed with their tents, supplies, and weapons. Still more humiliating, the supposedly impregnable fortifications that had deterred him for months turned out to be simply wooden logs painted black to resemble cannons. Had McClellan attacked anytime in the previous months, he would have had superiority in numbers and weapons.

The “Quaker gun” affair, as the stage-prop guns were called, provoked the wrath of radicals. “We shall be the scorn of the world,” Senator Fessenden wrote his wife. “It is no longer doubtful that General McClellan is utterly unfit for his position…. And yet the President will keep him in command.” The embarrassing situation should have been expected, Fessenden lamented, for “we went in for a railsplitter, and we have got one.” Echoing Fessenden’s dismay, the Committee on the Conduct of the War demanded McClellan’s resignation. When Lincoln asked who they proposed to replace McClellan, one of the committee members growled, “Anybody.” Lincoln’s reply was swift.
“Anybody
will do for you, but not for me. I must have
somebody.”

Lincoln was convinced that something had to be done. On March 11, he issued a war order that relieved McClellan from his post as general in chief but left him in charge of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln gave Halleck command of the Department of the Mississippi and, in a move that delighted the radicals, reinstated Frémont to take charge of a newly created Mountain Department. The post of general in chief was not filled, leaving Lincoln and Stanton to determine overall strategy. McClellan later recalled that he “learned through the public newspapers that [he] was displaced.” Claiming that “no one in authority had ever expressed to [him] the slightest disapprobation,” he was infuriated. Lincoln sent Ohio’s Governor Dennison to his camp to assure him that this was not a demotion. The president, Dennison explained, simply wanted General McClellan to focus his full energies on the all-important Army of the Potomac, whose actions would most likely determine the result of the war.

Lincoln anticipated that his postmaster general, Monty Blair, would stridently oppose McClellan’s removal from high command. The conservative Blair family were staunch McClellan supporters, a loyalty that would continue in the months ahead. Referring to his radical detractors, Francis Blair, Sr., warned the general “not to let the Carpet Knights in Congress,” who would sacrifice anyone’s blood but their own, “hurry or worry him into doing anything.” Meanwhile, Washington gossip spread that Monty Blair was openly berating his fellow cabinet colleague Stanton for his failure to support McClellan. While conservatives vilified Stanton, radicals upbraided the Blairs as “preservers of slavery” for defending the inert McClellan at Stanton’s expense.

Already troubled by McClellan’s loss of central control, the powerful Blair family was enraged by Lincoln’s decision to reinstall Frémont in a position of command. Monty Blair privately considered Frémont’s appointment “unpalatable” and warned his father that it would be “mortifying to Frank,” who had been humiliated by his arrest and imprisonment by Frémont. Lizzie Blair told her husband it was “urged by Chase—& Stanton who has his revenges, too,” and that her brother Frank felt it intensely. Only four days earlier, with the backing of Democrats and conservative Republicans, Frank Blair had delivered a blistering attack against Frémont on the floor of the House. Frémont had come to Washington at the request of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. For weeks, radicals on the committee had pressured Lincoln to give “the Emancipator,” as they called Frémont, a second chance. Congressman Schuyler Colfax eloquently defended their position when he rose to the floor immediately after Frank Blair to deliver a scorching point-by-point repudiation of Blair’s address.

The bitter public quarrel between the Blairs and Frémont must have given Lincoln pause as he considered reinstating Frémont. Though the appointment would thrill the radicals, it might cost him the allegiance of the Blairs and thereby destroy the delicate balance he had worked to foster between the conservatives and the radicals. As it happened, a magnanimous gesture by Lincoln just six days before Frémont’s appointment played an important role in resolving the complex situation.

On March 5, Monty Blair had come to the White House in great distress. The
New York Tribune
had just published a private letter that he had written to Frémont the previous summer before the family feud had begun. In the letter, furnished by Frémont to the press in an attempt to embarrass Blair, the postmaster general had complained that Lincoln’s past affiliations had brought “him naturally not only to incline to the feeble policy of Whigs, but to give his confidence to such advisers. It costs me a great deal of labor to get anything done because of the inclination of mind on the part of the President.”

Elizabeth Blair described her brother’s meeting with Lincoln in a note to her husband. “Brother just took the letter up to the P. & asked him to read it.” Lincoln refused, “saying he did not intend to read it,” as it was published for that very purpose. Monty acknowledged “it was a foolish letter” that he deeply regretted. “It is due to you,” he told the president, “to make some amends by resigning my place…. I leave the whole thing to you & will do exactly as you wish.” The president had no desire to exact retribution or remove Blair. “Forget it,” he said, “& never mention or think of it again.”

A grateful Monty Blair immediately came to Lincoln’s defense regarding the Frémont appointment. Although he had not been consulted about the decision and realized his family would consider it a blatant affront to Frank, he told his father that he understood Lincoln’s need to arrest “the spread of factions in the country & prevent divisions at this time,” and for that reason, he thought “very well of it.” The conservative
New York Times
agreed, approving Frémont’s appointment as a necessary “concession to this craving for unity” and “the value of united counsels.” In his conduct of the war, the
Times
observed, Lincoln believed “tenaciously” in the “necessity of perfect unity of popular opinion and action” in the North.

More than any other cabinet member, Seward appreciated Lincoln’s peerless skill in balancing factions both within his administration and in the country at large. While radicals considered Seward a conservative influence on the president, in truth, he and the president were engaged in the same task of finding a middle position between the two extremes—the radical Republicans, who believed that freeing the slaves should be the primary goal of the war, and the conservative Democrats, who resisted any change in the status of the slaves and fought solely for the restoration of the Union. “Somebody must be in a position to mollify and moderate,” Seward told Weed. “That is the task of the P. and the S. of S.” In another letter to his old friend, Seward expressed great confidence in Lincoln. “The President is wise and practical,” he wrote. His trust in Lincoln was complete, inspiring faith in the eventual success of the Union cause.