Team of Rivals (69 page)

From the outside, however, Seward was viewed by radicals as a malevolent influence on Lincoln. Count Gurowski despaired at Seward’s supposed ties with McClellan, Blair, and their allies in the conservative press. “Oh! Mr. Seward, Mr. Seward,” he queried, “why is your name to be recorded among the most ardent supporters of [McClellan’s]
strategy?”
In fact, already by the middle of March, Seward had lost his early faith in McClellan and wondered why Lincoln did not strip him of command. In a private conversation with a friend, Seward scorned McClellan’s inflated estimates of enemy strength, suggesting that the Union troops from New York State alone probably outnumbered all the Confederate forces in northern Virginia! Nonetheless, he refrained from airing his doubts in public.

In the wake of the “Quaker gun” affair, Lincoln’s confidence in McClellan had also eroded. While acknowledging that the general was a great “engineer,” Lincoln noted drolly that “he seems to have a special talent for developing a
‘stationary’
engine.” The more he studied the general, he confided to Browning, the more he realized that when “the hour for action approached he became nervous and oppressed with the responsibility and hesitated to meet the crisis.” For this reason, Lincoln had “given him peremptory orders to move.” Finally, twenty-four hours before Lincoln’s deadline, McClellan’s massive army of nearly a quarter of a million men left the base camps around Washington and headed toward the Potomac, where more than four hundred ships had gathered to carry them to Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia. Parading to the refrains of regimental bands, with rifles on their shoulders and new equipment on their backs, the high-spirited, well-disciplined troops presented a sight, one diarist noted, such as “the eye of man has seldom seen.” Before the army set sail, McClellan delivered an emotional address. “I will bring you now face to face with the rebels,” he told his beloved troops, “ever bear in mind that my fate is linked with yours…. I am to watch over you as a parent over his children, and you know that your General loves you from the depths of his heart.”

When most of the force had reached Fort Monroe, Stanton later recalled, “information was given to me by various persons that there was great reason to fear that no adequate force had been left to defend the Capital,” despite Lincoln’s “explicit order that Washington should, by the judgment of
all
the commanders of Army corps, be left entirely secure.” Stanton referred the matter to Lorenzo Thomas, the adjutant general, who, after surveying the circumstance, concluded that the president’s order had most definitely
not
been obeyed. McClellan had left behind “less than 20,000 raw recruits with not a single organized brigade,” a force utterly incapable of defending Washington from sudden attack. Enraged, Stanton carried the damning report to the president at midnight. Lincoln promptly withdrew General McDowell’s 1st Corps from McClellan’s command so that Washington would be protected. That withdrawal, Stanton later recalled, “provoked [McClellan’s] wrath, and the wrath of his friends.”

With immense forces still at his disposal, McClellan advanced from Fort Monroe to the outskirts of Yorktown, roughly fifty miles from Richmond. Once again, mistakenly insisting that the rebel force outnumbered his, McClellan kept his army in a state of perpetual preparation. His engineers spent precious weeks constructing earthworks so his big guns could quash rebel defenses before the infantry assault. On April 6, Lincoln telegraphed McClellan: “You now have over one hundred thousand troops…. I think you better break the enemies’ line from York-town to Warwick River, at once. They will probably use
time,
as advantageously as you can.” The following day, McClellan scorned the president’s admonition, informing his wife that if Lincoln wanted the enemy line broken, “he had better come & do it himself.”

Still, McClellan persisted in his baffling inaction. He notified Stanton that “the enemy batteries are stronger” than anticipated. Stanton was livid: “You were sent on purpose to
take
strong batteries,” he reminded McClellan. Later that day, Lincoln telegraphed the general, warning that further delay would only allow the enemy to summon reinforcements from other theaters. “It is indispensable to
you
that you strike a blow,” Lincoln advised his commander on April 9. “The country will not fail to note—is now noting—that the present hesitation to move upon an intrenched enemy, is but the story of Manassas repeated. I beg to assure you that I have never written you, or spoken to you, in greater kindness of feeling than now….
But you must act.”

Two more weeks passed without any sign of movement. “Do not misunderstand the apparent inaction here,” McClellan wired Lincoln; “not a day, not an hour has been lost, works have been constructed that may almost be called gigantic—roads built through swamps & difficult ravines, material brought up, batteries built.” In another letter to his wife, he rationalized his continuing delay with the dubious contention that the more troops the enemy gathered in Yorktown, “the more decisive the results will be.” A few days later, McClellan formulated yet another justification for postponement, arguing that he had been “compelled to change plans & become cautious” without McDowell’s 1st Corps that had been taken from him to protect Washington. This left him “unexpectedly weakened & with a powerful enemy strongly entrenched in my front.” Therefore, he was not “answerable for the delay of victory.”

As it happened, Confederate general Joe Johnston, after keeping McClellan at bay for a month with substantially inferior numbers, had decided in early May to withdraw twelve miles up the peninsula toward Richmond. Hearing that a fallback was under way, McClellan finally moved on Yorktown to discover that, in a repeat of his experience at Manassas, the rebels were gone. Though he tried to claim the rebel retreat as a great bloodless victory, the public was unconvinced, and the question remained: why had he kept idle for a month? Had he moved on Yorktown with his greater numbers, he could have done serious damage to the rebel army. In the meantime, just as Lincoln had forewarned, the long delay had allowed the rebels to bring additional forces from various theaters into the peninsula, where, under General Johnston’s command, they prepared for a counteroffensive.

A
NXIETY SURROUNDING
the impending battle did little to curtail the spring social season in Washington. If anything, the pace of social life accelerated, as Washingtonians sought relaxation and entertainment in the traditional round of calls, receptions, soirées, musicales, and dinners. Once the air turned “soft and balmy,” the
National Republican
reported, the public squares came alive with “crowds of visitors, who either tread its graveled walks, or seat themselves beneath the trees,” listening to the songs of birds and the joyful shouts of children rolling “their hoops over the ground.”

Mary remained in mourning for Willie, however, and the traditional spring receptions in the White House were canceled, along with the Marine Band concerts on the lawn. In the social vacuum, Kate Chase took command of the Washington social scene, making her a powerful asset to her father. Her intermittent romance with the Rhode Island–based Sprague did not diminish her signal commitment to her father, whose household she managed with matchless style.

Her social supremacy derived in part from her striking appearance, enhanced by the simple but elegant wardrobe assembled during her many trips to New York in pursuit of furnishings for her father’s mansion. She was “more of a professional beauty than had at that time ever been seen in America,” noted Mary Adams French, the wife of the famed sculptor Daniel Chester French, “with a beauty and a regal carriage which we called ‘queenly,’ but which no real queen ever has.” In an era when “the universal art of being slim had not been discovered,” Mrs. French continued, the “tall and slim” Kate seemed otherworldly. She had “an unusually long white neck, and a slow and deliberate way of turning it when she glanced around her. Wherever she appeared, people dropped back in order to watch her.” Fanny Villard, wife of the journalist Henry Villard, was one of many who looked with awe on Kate: “I a simple young home body from New England never before had seen so beautiful and brilliant a creature as Kate Chase; and it seemed to me then that nothing could blight her perfection.”

And yet Kate’s grace and beauty accounted for only a small part of her social success. Her emergence as the foremost lady of Washington society resulted as much from hard work and meticulous planning as from her natural assets. She met each morning with her household servants, giving detailed instructions for the day’s activities. Continuing the ritual she had established in Columbus, she and her father hosted regular breakfast parties for out-of-town guests. Her correspondence reveals the elaborate preparations these affairs entailed. A letter to her father’s friend, the Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, requests that he “stop at Van Zant’s where you find the best fruit and have a basketful of the best and
prettiest
grapes, pears, oranges, apples etc. sent me by Adams Express…so that they may arrive here without fail early Tuesday morning.” She regretted the imposition, but she “could not think of anyone who would do it quite so well,” and was “especially anxious” to make this “an attractive and agreeable occasion.”

In addition to these early-morning breakfasts, Kate presided over weekly receptions known as “Cabinet calling” days. Every Monday, a contemporary Washingtonian wrote, “the wives of the Cabinet officers receive their friends; also Mrs. McClellan is at home on this same day.” Through the late morning and early afternoon, regardless of rain, mud, or snow, the ladies of Washington made the rounds, visiting in turn each cabinet member’s home. “First to Mrs. Seward’s,” columnist Cara Kasson reported, where Anna Seward officiated in the absence of Frances. A black doorman delivered their card to yet another servant, “who places it in the silver-card receiver, at the same moment ushering us in (names clearly pronounced), to the presence of Mrs. Seward.” Greetings were exchanged and refreshments served, before proceeding to the next reception at Mrs. Caleb Smith’s. There they found “an elegantly set table, salads and all good things.” After visiting Mrs. Welles, who always entertained “in her friendly manner,” the ladies would “take a glass of wine at Mrs. Blair’s, admire the queenly dignity of Miss Chase, enjoy a delightful talk with the kindly family of Mrs. Bates, and then drive on to pay our respects to Mrs. McClellan and Mrs. Stanton.”

While Kate hosted the weekly cabinet receptions with elegance and grace, she devoted her greatest efforts to the celebrated candlelight dinners she held each Wednesday evening. With exacting care, she drew up the guest lists, prepared the menus, and arranged seating. With her father occupying the head of the table, she would help maintain lively, entertaining conversation from her place at the other end. After dinner, a band would play and dancing would begin. “Diplomats and statesmen felt it an honor to be her guests, and men of letters found that they needed their keenest wits to be her match in conversation,” one reporter noted. “Her drawing-room was a salon, and it has been paralleled only in the ante-revolutionary days of the French monarchy, when women ruled the empire of the Bourbons.”

Over time, the Chase home increasingly became a forum for critics of the Lincoln administration. In the relaxed atmosphere of Kate’s private dinner parties, William Fessenden could freely condemn Lincoln’s reluctance to confront the emancipation question. The members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War could censure General McClellan more harshly than public statement would safely allow. Over coffee and dessert in the parlor, the women could spread disdainful gossip about Mary Lincoln. Kate clearly understood the role that “parlor politics” could play in cementing alliances and consolidating power in furtherance of her father’s irrepressible political ambitions. She was determined to create nothing less than a “rival court” to the White House that could help catapult Chase to the presidency. In the spring of 1862, she reigned supreme.

The most compelling conversations in the Chase drawing room that balmy spring swirled around the proclamation of General David Hunter, an old friend of Lincoln’s who commanded the Department of the South, which encompassed South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In early May, acting without prior approval from the White House, Hunter had issued an official order declaring “forever free” all slaves in the three states under his jurisdiction. Chase’s circle was exultant, for Hunter’s proclamation went beyond even General Frémont’s attempt of the previous August. “It seems to me of the highest importance,” Chase wrote to Lincoln, “that this order not be revoked…. It will be cordially approved, I am sure, by more than nine tenths of the people on whom you must rely for support of your Administration.” Lincoln’s reply to Chase was swift and blunt: “No commanding general shall do such a thing, upon
my
responsibility, without consulting me.”

By repudiating Hunter’s proclamation, Lincoln understood that he would give “dissatisfaction, if not offence, to many whose support the country can not afford to lose.” He firmly believed, however, that any such proclamation must come from the commander in chief, not from a general in the field. “Gen. Hunter is an honest man,” Lincoln told a delegation after officially revoking Hunter’s order. “He was, and I hope, still is, my friend…. He expected more good, and less harm from the measure, than I could believe would follow.”

While Seward and Stanton supported Lincoln’s decision, Chase publicly disagreed. In conversations with Sumner and others, he openly denounced Lincoln’s action, fanning talk “among the more advanced members” of the Republican Party about Lincoln’s “pusillanimity.” Chase’s defiance earned him plaudits from the
New York Tribune,
“all the more warmly appreciated,” Chase told Horace Greeley, given the influential editor’s “earlier unfavorable judgments” of his public career. Chase maintained to Greeley that he had “not been so sorely tried by anything here—though I have seen a great deal in the shape of irregularity, assumptions beyond law, extravagance, & deference to generals and reactionists which I could not approve,—as by the nullifying of Hunter’s proclamation.” Rumors began to surface that the controversy would cause an open rupture in the cabinet and precipitate Chase’s departure. Still, so long as Lincoln believed Chase was the right man for the Treasury, he had no intention of requesting his resignation. As for Chase, so long as he could garner radical support by publicly opposing Lincoln on this critical issue, he would productively remain in the cabinet until the time was right to make a break.