NEWS OF THE CONFEDERATE ATTACK on Fort Sumter spread throughout the North that weekend. Walt Whitman recalled hearing the shouts of newsboys after he emerged from an opera on 14th Street and was strolling down Broadway late Saturday night. At the Metropolitan Hotel, “where the great lamps were still brightly blazing,” the news was read to a crowd of thirty or forty suddenly gathered round. More than twenty years later, he could “almost see them there now, under the lamps at midnight again.”
The “firing on the flag” produced a “volcanic upheaval” in the North, Whitman observed, “which at once substantially settled the question of disunion.” The National Intelligencer spoke for many Northerners: “Our people now, one and all, are determined to sustain the Government and demand a vigorous prosecution of the war inaugurated by the disunionists. All sympathy with them is dead.”
The fevered excitement in the North was mirrored in the South. “The ball has opened,” a dispatch from Charleston, South Carolina, began. “The excitement in the community is indescribable. With the very first boom of the guns thousands rushed from their beds to the harbor front, and all day every available place has been thronged by ladies and gentlemen, viewing the spectacle through their glasses.”
On Sunday, Lincoln returned from church and immediately called his cabinet into session. He had decided to issue a proclamation to the North, calling out state militias and fixing a time for Congress to reconvene. The number of volunteer soldiers to be requested came under debate. Some wanted 100,000, others 50,000; Lincoln settled on 75,000. The timing of the congressional session also posed a difficult question. While the executive branch needed Congress to raise armies and authorize spending, Lincoln was advised that “to wait for ‘many men of many minds’ to shape a war policy would be to invite disaster.” Seward was particularly adamant on this point, believing that “history tells us that kings who call extra parliaments lose their heads.” Lincoln and his cabinet set the Fourth of July as the date for Congress to reconvene, relying on “their patriotism to sanction the war measures taken prior to that time by the Executive.”
John Nicolay made a copy of the president’s proclamation and delivered it to the secretary of state, who stamped the great seal and sent it for publication the following day. That afternoon, Lincoln took a carriage ride with his boys and Nicolay, trying for a moment to distract himself from the increasingly onerous events. Upon his return, he welcomed his old rival Stephen Douglas for a private meeting of several hours. Douglas was not well; a lifetime of alcohol and frenetic activity had taken its toll. In two months’ time, he would be dead. Nevertheless, he offered his solid support to Lincoln, afterward publicly declaring himself ready “to sustain the President in the exercise of his constitutional functions to preserve the Union, and maintain the Government.” His statement proved tremendously helpful in mobilizing Democratic support. “In this hour of trial it becomes the duty of every patriotic citizen to sustain the General Government,” one Douglas paper began. Another urged “every man to lay aside his party bias…give up small prejudices and go in, heart and hand, to put down treason and traitors.”
“The response to the Proclamation at the North,” Fred Seward recalled, “was all or more than could be anticipated. Every Governor of a free State promptly promised that his quota should be forthcoming. An enthusiastic outburst of patriotic feeling—an ‘uprising of the North’ in town and country—was reported by telegraph.” Northern newspapers described massive rallies, with bands blaring and volunteers marching in support of the Union. Old party lines seemed to have evaporated. “We begin to look like a United North,” George Templeton Strong recorded in his diary, prophesying that the Democratic New York Herald would soon “denounce Jefferson Davis as it denounced Lincoln a week ago.”
The enthusiastic solidarity of the North dangerously underestimated the strength and determination of the South. Seward predicted that the war would be over in sixty days. John Hay expressed the condescending wish that it would “be bloody and short, in pity to the maniac South. They are weak, ignorant, bankrupt in money and credit. Their army is a vast mob, insubordinate and hungry…. What is before them but defeat, poverty, dissensions, insurrections and ruin.”
Ominous signals from the South soon deflated these facile forecasts. North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky refused to send troops “for the wicked purpose of subduing [their] sister Southern States.” Then, on April 17, citing the president’s call to arms, the vital state of Virginia seceded from the Union. The historian James Randall would designate this act “one of the most fateful events in American history.” News of Virginia’s decision provoked jubilation throughout the South. “We never saw our population so much excited as it was yesterday afternoon, when the glorious news spread all over town as wildfire, that Virginia, the ‘Mother of Presidents,’ had seceded at last,” the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported. “Citizens on the sidewalks, were shaking each other by the hand, our office was overcrowded, the boys were running to and fro, unable to restrain their delight, and now and then venting their enthusiasm by giving a hearty hurrah.”
In their excitement, Southerners fell victim to the same hectic misjudgment that plagued the North, overstating their own chances as they underestimated their opponent’s will. “And now we are eight!” the Picayune exulted, predicting they would soon be fifteen when all the remaining slave states followed Virginia’s lead. In fact, the Old Dominion’s action prodded only three more states to join the Confederacy—North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee. For many agonizing months, however, Lincoln would remain apprehensive about the border states of Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky.
The day after Virginia seceded, Francis Blair, Sr., invited Colonel Robert E. Lee to his yellow house on Pennsylvania Avenue. A graduate of West Point, the fifty-four-year-old Lee had served in the Mexican War, held the post of superintendent at West Point, and commanded the forces that captured John Brown at Harpers Ferry. General Scott regarded him as “the very best soldier I ever saw in the field.” Lincoln had designated Blair to tender Lee the highest-ranking military position within the president’s power to proffer.
“I come to you on the part of President Lincoln,” Blair began, “to ask whether any inducement that he can offer will prevail on you to take command of the Union army?” Lee responded “as candidly and as courteously” as he could: “Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned the four millions of slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”
When the meeting ended, Lee called upon old General Scott to discuss the dilemma further. Then he returned to his Arlington home to think. Two days later, he contacted Scott to tender his resignation from the U.S. Army. “It would have been presented at once,” Lee explained, “but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted all the best years of my life & all the ability I possessed. During the whole of that time, more than 30 years, I have experienced nothing but kindness from my superiors, & the most cordial friendship from my companions…. I shall carry with me to the grave the most grateful recollections of your kind consideration, & your name & fame will always be dear to me.”
That same day, a distraught Lee wrote to his sister: “Now we are in a state of war which will yield to nothing.” Though he could apprehend “no necessity for this state of things, and would have forborne and pleaded to the end for redress of grievances, real or supposed,” he was unable, he explained, “to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State (with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed) I hope I may never be called upon to draw my sword.” Shortly thereafter, Lee was designated commander of the Virginia state forces.
While Lee wrestled with the grim personal consequences of his decision, Lincoln’s brother-in-law Benjamin Hardin Helm confronted a painful decision of his own. Helm, a native of Kentucky and a graduate of West Point, had married Mary’s half sister Emilie in 1856. While conducting business in Springfield, he had stayed with the Lincolns. According to his daughter Katherine, he and Lincoln “formed a friendship which was more like the affection of brothers than the ordinary liking of men.” Two weeks after Sumter, Lincoln brought Helm, a staunch “Southern-rights Democrat,” into his office. “Ben, here is something for you,” Lincoln said, placing a sealed envelope in his hands. “Think it over and let me know what you will do.” The letter offered Helm the rank of major and the prestigious position of paymaster in the Union Army. That afternoon, Helm encountered Lee, whose face betrayed his anxiety. “Are you not feeling well, Colonel Lee?” Helm asked. “Well in body but not in mind,” Lee replied. “In the prime of life I quit a service in which were all my hopes and expectations in this world.” Helm showed Lee Lincoln’s offer and asked for advice, saying, “I have no doubt of his kindly intentions. But he cannot control the elements. There must be a great war.” Lee was “too much disturbed” to render advice, urging Helm to “do as your conscience and your honor bid.”
That night, Emilie Helm later recalled, her husband was unable to sleep. The next day, he returned to the White House. “I am going home,” he told Lincoln. “I will answer you from there. The position you offer me is beyond what I had expected, even in my most hopeful dreams. You have been very generous to me, Mr. Lincoln, generous beyond anything I have ever known. I had no claim upon you, for I opposed your candidacy, and did what I could to prevent your election…. Don’t let this offer be made public yet. I will send you my answer in a few days.” When Helm reached Kentucky and spoke with General Simon Bolivar Buckner and his friends, he realized he must decline Lincoln’s offer and “cast his destinies with his native southland.” The time spent in drafting his reply to Lincoln proved to be, he told a friend, “the most painful hour of his life.” Soon after, he received a commission in the Confederate Army, where he eventually became a brigadier general.
EACH DAY BROUGHT NEW conflicts and decisions as Lincoln struggled to stabilize the beleaguered Union. In a contentious cabinet meeting, Seward argued that a blockade of Southern ports should be instituted at once. Recognized by the law of nations, the blockade would grant the Union the power to search and seize vessels. Gideon Welles countered that to proclaim a blockade would mistakenly acknowledge that the Union was engaged in a war with the South and encourage foreign powers to extend belligerent rights to the Confederacy. Better to simply close the ports against the insurrection and use the policing powers of municipal law to seize entering or exiting ships. The cabinet split down the middle. Chase, Blair, and Bates backed Welles, while Smith and Cameron sided with Seward. Lincoln concluded that Seward’s position was stronger and issued his formal blockade proclamation on April 19. Welles, despite his initial hesitation, would execute the blockade with great energy and skill.
The commencement of war found Welles and the Navy Department in a grave situation. Southerners, who had made up the majority of navy officers in peacetime, resigned in droves every day. Treason was rampant. Early in April, Lincoln had graciously attended a wedding celebration for the daughter of Captain Frank Buchanan, the commandant of the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C. Two weeks later, expecting that his home state of Maryland “would soon secede and join the Confederacy,” Buchanan resigned his commission, vowing that he would “not take any part in the defence of this Yard from this date.”
Meanwhile, the secession of Virginia jeopardized the Norfolk Navy Yard. With its strategic location, immense dry dock, great supply of cannons and guns, and premier vessel, the Merrimac, the Norfolk yard was indispensable to both sides. Welles had encouraged Lincoln to reinforce the yard before Sumter fell, but Lincoln had resisted any action that would provoke Virginia. This decision would seriously compromise the Union’s naval strength. By the time Welles received orders to send troops to Norfolk, it was too late. The Confederates had secured control of the Navy Yard. The calamitous news, Charles Francis Adams recorded in his diary, sent him into a state of “extreme uneasiness” about the future of the Union. “We the children of the third and fourth generations are doomed to pay the penalties of the compromises made by the first.”
The first casualties of the war came on April 19, 1861, the same day the blockade was announced. When the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment reached Baltimore by rail en route to defend Washington, the men were attacked by a secessionist mob. “The scene while the troops were changing cars was indescribably fearful,” the Baltimore Sun reported. The enraged crowd, branding the troops “nigger thieves,” assaulted them with knives and revolvers. Four soldiers and nine civilians were killed. As George Templeton Strong noted in his diary: “It’s a notable coincidence that the first blood in this great struggle is drawn by Massachusetts men on the anniversary” of the battles of Lexington and Concord that touched off the Revolutionary War.
The president immediately summoned the mayor of Baltimore and the governor of Maryland to the White House. Still hoping to keep Maryland in the Union, Lincoln agreed to “make no point of bringing [further troops] through Baltimore” where strident secessionists were concentrated, but insisted that the troops must be allowed to go “around Baltimore.” Shortly after midnight, an angry committee of delegates from Baltimore arrived at the White House to confront Lincoln. John Hay took them to see Cameron, but kept them from the president until morning. The delegation demanded that troops be kept not only out of Baltimore but out of the entire state of Maryland. Lincoln adamantly refused to comply. “I must have troops to defend this Capital,” he replied. “Geographically it lies surrounded by the soil of Maryland…. Our men are not moles, and can’t dig under the earth; they are not birds, and can’t fly through the air. There is no way but to march across, and that they must do.”
The day the war claimed its first casualties was also the day when “the censorship of the press was exercised for the first time at the telegraph office,” a veteran journalist recalled. “When correspondents wished to telegraph the lists of the dead and wounded of the Massachusetts Sixth they found a squad of the National Rifles in possession of the office, with orders to permit the transmission of no messages.” Infuriated, the correspondents rode to Seward’s house to complain. The secretary of state argued that if they sent “accounts of the killed and wounded,” they “would only influence public sentiment, and be an obstacle in the path of reconciliation.” The issue became moot when reporters learned that secessionists had cut all the telegraph wires in Baltimore and demolished all the railroad bridges surrounding the city. Washington was isolated from all communication with the North.
For the next week, with wires cut and mails stopped, the residents of Washington lived in a state of constant fear. Visitors abandoned the great hotels. Stores closed. Windows and doors were barricaded. “Literally,” Villard noted, “it was as though the government of a great nation had been suddenly removed to an island in mid-ocean in a state of entire isolation.” Anxious citizens crowded the train station every day, hopeful to greet an influx of the Northern troops needed to protect the vulnerable city. Rumors spread quickly. Across the Potomac, the campfires of the Confederate soldiers were visible. It appeared they were ready to lay siege to Washington. Waiting for the attack, War Secretary Cameron slept in his office. “Here we were in this city,” Nicolay wrote his fiancée, “in charge of all the public buildings, property and archives, with only about 2000 reliable men to defend it.”
Elsewhere in the North, anxiety was nearly as great. “No despatches from Washington,” Strong reported from New York. “People talked darkly of its being attacked before our reinforcements come to the rescue, and everyone said we must not be surprised by news that Lincoln and Seward and all the Administration are prisoners.” Kate and Nettie Chase were in New York visiting Chase’s wealthy friend Hiram Barney, who had received the powerful post of collector of customs in New York. Reflecting a general fear that the “rebels are at Washington or near it,” Barney insisted that the girls stay in New York until the capital was out of danger. For Kate, so passionately attached to her father, these were difficult hours. “I can see that K. is anxious for her father,” Barney wrote Chase; “it may be seen in many ways—in spite of her efforts to be calm & conceal it.” Kate leaped at the chance to accompany Major Robert Anderson, who had just arrived in New York from Fort Sumter and was heading to Washington to report to the president.
The little party made its way to Philadelphia and then caught a steamer from Perryville to Annapolis, bypassing the blocked railroad tracks in Baltimore. En route, however, they were approached by an enemy vessel, which fired a warning shot. Fearing that the Confederates had intelligence that Anderson was on board and were intending to capture him, the captain placed a cannon in position and “crowded on steam.” While Kate and Nettie remained below with the hatches closed, the steamer churned ahead, eventually gaining enough ground that its adversary “ran up a black flag, changed her course, and was soon out of sight.” From Annapolis, they reached Washington and were reunited with their relieved father.
These “were terrible days of suspense” for the Seward family in Auburn as well. Young Will Seward, now twenty-two, made nightly forays to the local telegraph office, hoping in vain for news from his father. In daily letters, Frances entreated her husband to let her join him. “It is hard to be so far from you when your life is in danger,” she pleaded. No reply came to her appeal.
In public, Lincoln maintained his calm, but the growing desperation of the government’s position filled him with dread. Late one night, after “a day of gloom and doubt,” John Hay saw him staring out the window in futile expectation of the troops promised by various Northern states, including New York, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. “Why don’t they come!” he asked. “Why don’t they come!” The next day, visiting the injured men of the Massachusetts Sixth, he was heard to say: “I don’t believe there is any North. The Seventh Regiment [from New York] is a myth. R. Island is not known in our geography any longer. You [Massachusetts men] are the only Northern realities.”
For days, the rioting in Baltimore continued. Fears multiplied that the Maryland legislature, which had convened in Annapolis, was intending to vote for secession. The cabinet debated whether the president should bring in the army “to arrest, or disperse the members of that body.” Lincoln decided that “it would not be justifiable.” It was a wise determination, for in the end, though secessionist mobs continued to disrupt the peace of Maryland for weeks, the state never joined the Confederacy, and eventually became, as Lincoln predicted, “the first of the redeemed.”
Receiving word that the mobs intended to destroy the train tracks between Annapolis and Philadelphia in order to prevent the long-awaited troops from reaching the beleaguered capital, Lincoln made a controversial decision. If resistance along the military line between Washington and Philadelphia made it “necessary to suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus for the public safety,” Lincoln authorized General Scott to do so. In Lincoln’s words, General Scott could “arrest, and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety.” Seward later claimed that he had urged a wavering Lincoln to take this step, convincing him that “perdition was the sure penalty of further hesitation.” There may be truth in this, for Seward was initially put in charge of administering the program.
Lincoln had not issued a sweeping order but a directive confined to this single route. Still, by rescinding the basic constitutional protection against arbitrary arrest, he aroused the wrath of Chief Justice Taney, who was on circuit duty in Maryland at the time. Ruling in favor of one of the prisoners, John Merryman, Taney blasted Lincoln and maintained that only Congress could suspend the writ.
Attorney General Bates, though reluctant to oppose Taney, upheld Lincoln’s suspension. Over a period of weeks, he drafted a twenty-six-page opinion, arguing that “in a time like the present, when the very existence of the Nation is assailed, by a great and dangerous insurrection, the President has the lawful discretionary power to arrest and hold in custody, persons known to have criminal intercourse with the insurgents.”
Lincoln later defended his decision in his first message to Congress. As chief executive, he was responsible for ensuring “that the laws be faithfully executed.” An insurrection “in nearly one-third of the States” had subverted the “whole of the laws…are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?” His logic was unanswerable, but as Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in another context many years later, the “grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.” Welles seemed to understand the complex balancing act, correctly predicting to his wife that the “government will, doubtless, be stronger after the conflict is over than it ever has been, and there will be less liberty.”
Finally, after a week of mounting uneasiness, the Seventh Regiment of New York arrived in Washington. The New York Times reported that the “steps and balconies of the hotels, the windows of the private houses, the doorways of the stores, and even the roofs of many houses were crowded with men, women and children, shouting, and waving handkerchiefs and flags.” In the days that followed, more regiments arrived. Mary and her friends watched the regimental parades from a window in the mansion. The presence of the troops considerably lightened Lincoln’s mood. He blithely told John Hay that in addition to assuring the safety of the capital, he would eventually “go down to Charleston and pay her the little debt we are owing her.” Hay was so happy to hear these words that he “felt like letting off an Illinois yell.”
Frances Seward was greatly relieved when she received a letter from her husband confirming that more than eight thousand troops were in Washington. He did not, however, grant her request to join him there. His daughter-in-law, Anna, had almost completed decorating their new house on Lafayette Square. The carpets were down, and hundreds of books already lined the library shelves. They would move in at the end of April. Unlike Frances, Anna loved the bustle of Seward’s life. “For six or eight nights we had visitors at all hours,” she cheerfully reported. Perhaps Seward, anticipating the trials such a hectic environment would cause his wife, deemed it better for her to stay in their tranquil house in Auburn.
Furthermore, he knew they would argue about the purpose of the war. Frances, unlike her husband, had already decided that the principal goal was to end slavery. She recognized that the war might last years and entail “immense sacrifice of human life,” but the eradication of slavery justified it all. “The true, strong, glorious North is at last fairly roused,” she wrote her husband, “the enthusiasm of the people—high & low rich & poor…all enlisted at last in the cause of human rights. No concession from the South now will avail to stem the torrent.—No compromise will be made with slavery of black or white. God has heard the prayer of the oppressed and a fearful retribution awaits the oppressors.”
In her all-embracing vision of the war, Frances stood at this point in opposition not only to her husband but to most of the cabinet and a substantial majority of Northerners. Still certain it would be a quick war with an easy reconciliation, Seward told a friend, “there would be no serious fighting after all; the South would collapse and everything be serenely adjusted.” Bates wanted a limited war so as “to disturb as little as possible the accustomed occupations of the people,” including Southern slaveholding. Blair agreed, counseling Lincoln that it would be a “fatal error” if the contest became “one between the whole people of the South and the people of the North.”
To Lincoln’s mind, the battle to save the Union contained an even larger purpose than ending slavery, which was after all sanctioned by the very Constitution he was sworn to uphold. “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle,” he told Hay in early May, “is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose. If we fail it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.”
The philosopher John Stuart Mill shared Lincoln’s spacious understanding of the sectional crisis, predicting that a Southern victory “would give courage to the enemies of progress and damp the spirits of its friends all over the civilized world.” From the opposite point of view, a member of the British nobility expressed the hope that with “the dissolution of the Union,” men would “live to see an aristocracy established in America.”
In his Farewell Address, George Washington had given voice to this transcendent idea of Union. “It is of infinite moment,” George Washington said, “that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity.” Foreseeing the potential for dissension, Washington advised vigilance against “the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.”
It was this mystical idea of popular government and democracy that propelled Abraham Lincoln to call forth the thousands of soldiers who would rise up to defend the sacred Union created by the Founding Fathers.
IN THE DAYS BEFORE the troops arrived, rumors spread that the White House would be targeted for a direct attack. Late one evening, an agitated visitor arrived to inform the president that “a mortar battery has been planted on the Virginia heights commanding the town.” John Hay recorded in his diary that he “had to do some very dexterous lying to calm the awakened fears of Mrs. Lincoln in regard to the assassination suspicion.” Only when troops appeared in force was she able to relax. “Thousands of soldiers are guarding us,” she wrote a friend in Springfield, “and if there is safety in numbers, we have every reason, to feel secure.” Mary’s cousin Elizabeth Grimsley was equally relieved. “The intense excitement has blown over,” she told a friend. “Washington is very quiet and pleasant. We enjoy the beautiful drives around the city.”
With little understanding of the peril threatening the city and their well-being, Willie and Tad found the period of Washington’s isolation exhilarating. Tad boasted at Sunday School that he had no fear of the “pluguglies,” as the rowdy secessionists in Baltimore were called. “You ought to see the fort we’ve got on the roof of our house. Let ’em come. Willie and I are ready for ’em.” Though the fort consisted of only “a small log” symbolizing a cannon and several decommissioned rifles, the Lincoln boys developed elaborate plans to defend the White House from the roof. And they loved visiting the troops quartered in the East Room of the White House and in the Capitol, where Hay noted the contrast “between the grey haired dignity” that had previously prevailed in the Senate and the young soldiers, “scattered over the desks chairs and galleries some loafing, many writing letters, slowly and with plough hardened hands.”
The Taft boys and their sixteen-year-old sister, Julia, were now almost daily guests at the White House. Like Willie, Bud was “rather pale and languid, not very robust,” but a “pretty good” student. Holly, as described by his father, Judge Taft, resembled Tad—“all motion and activity, never idle, impatient of restraint, quick to learn when he tries, impetuous, all ‘go ahead.’” In Bud and Holly, Willie and Tad each found a best friend. Julia, meanwhile, formed a friendship with Mary Lincoln. For the rest of her life, Julia retained warm memories of both the first lady and the president. “More than once,” she recalled, Mary had said to her: “I wish I had a little girl like you, Julia.” Mary even shared her memories of the death of her son Edward, and they “wept together.” In the evenings, when the president unwound in the family sitting room, the four boys would beg him to tell a story. Julia long remembered the scene, as the president launched into one of his amusing tales: “Tad perched precariously on the back of the big chair, Willie on one knee, Bud on the other, both leaning against him,” while Holly sat “on the arm of the chair.”
As a proper young lady, Julia was appalled by some of the boys’ antics. She refused to join in when she found the four of them sitting on the president, attempting to pin him to the floor. She was embarrassed when they interrupted cabinet meetings to invite members and the president to attend one of their theatrical performances in the attic. Though Lincoln himself never seemed to mind, taking great pleasure in their fun, Julia felt she was responsible for curbing their youthful exuberance. Sometimes Willie would help to restore order. He was, Julia wrote, “the most lovable boy” she had ever known, “bright, sensible, sweet-tempered and gentle-mannered.” More often he would simply retreat to his mother’s room, where he loved to read poetry and write verses.
Despite Julia’s great affection for Mary, she was stunned by the first lady’s overbearing need to get “what she wanted when she wanted it,” regardless of how others might be hurt or inconvenienced. A curious example of such behavior took place when Julia’s mother attended a White House concert, decked out in one of her fashionable bonnets. When Mary greeted her, she looked closely at the beautiful purple strings on the bonnet and then took Mrs. Taft aside. Watching the scene, Julia was “puzzled at the look of amazement” on her mother’s face, not fathoming why she “should look so surprised at a passing compliment.” It turned out that Mary’s milliner had created a purple-trimmed bonnet but lacked sufficient purple ribbon for the strings. Mary hoped to acquire Mrs. Taft’s purple strings!
Few recognized the insecurity behind Mary’s outlandish behavior, the terrible needs behind the ostentation and apparent abrasiveness. While initially thrilled to move into the White House, Mary soon found herself in the compromising situation of having one full brother, three half brothers, and three brothers-in-law in the Confederate Army. From the start, she was not fully trusted in the North. As the wife of President Lincoln, she was vilified in the South. As a Westerner, she did not meet the standards of Eastern society. Feeling pressure on all sides, she was determined to present herself as an accomplished and sophisticated woman; in short, the most elegant and admired lady in Washington.
Driven by the need to prove herself to society, Mary Lincoln became obsessed with recasting her own image and renovating that of her new home, the White House. Unattended for years, the White House had come to look like “an old and unsuccessful hotel.” Elizabeth Grimsley was stunned to find that “the family apartments were in a deplorably shabby condition as to furniture, (which looked as if it has been brought in by the first President).” The public rooms, too, were in poor shape, with threadbare, tobacco-stained rugs, torn curtains, and broken chairs.
The sorry condition of the White House provided the energetic Mary with a worthy ambition. She would restore the people’s home to its former elegance as a symbol of her husband’s strength and the Union’s power. In another era, this ambition might have been applauded, but in the midst of a civil war, it was regarded as frivolous.
In the middle of May, Mary went on a shopping trip to Philadelphia and New York, taking along her cousin Elizabeth Grimsley and William Wood, the commissioner of public buildings. Having discovered that each president was allotted a $20,000 allowance to maintain the White House, she bought new furniture, elegant curtains, and expensive carpets for the public rooms to replace their worn predecessors. For the state guest room, she purchased what later became known as the “Lincoln bed,” an eight-foot-long rosewood bedstead with an ornate headboard carved with “exotic birds, grapevines and clusters of grapes.” Again, merchants at the clothing stores were more than willing to extend the first lady credit. The press exaggerated her shopping spree, claiming she had purchased thousands of dollars of merchandise in stores she had never even visited. Exaggeration notwithstanding, when she returned to Washington, the bills added up. She received a $7,500 invoice for curtain materials and trimmings, and owed $900 for a new carriage. And the redecorating process to make the nation’s house a fit emblem for the country and for herself had just begun.
Never one to be outdone, Kate Chase was hard at work decorating her father’s new home—a large three-story brick mansion at Sixth and E Street NW. Though the secretary of the treasury worried constantly about money, he understood the importance of having an elegant home with expansive public rooms appropriate for entertaining senators, congressmen, diplomats, and generals. In the years ahead, he intended to gather friends and associates who would be ready to back him when the time came for the next presidential election. The lease on the house came to $1,200 a year; when the furnishing costs were added on, Chase found himself in debt. Unable to sell off his Cincinnati and Columbus properties in the depressed real estate market that prevailed in Ohio, he was forced to borrow $10,000 from his old friend Hiram Barney. It must have been painfully awkward for the straitlaced model of probity to request the loan, particularly since Barney, as collector of customs in New York, was technically his subordinate. Nevertheless, Chase persuaded himself that a person in his position, who had given so much to the public for so many years, deserved to live in a distinguished home.
So, like Mary Lincoln, Kate traveled to New York and Philadelphia to purchase carpets, draperies, and furniture. The house, complete with six servants, would prove perfect for entertaining, although Chase later complained that the distance from the White House, in comparison with Seward’s new lodgings at Lafayette Square, denied him an equal intimacy with the president. He apparently never considered that Lincoln might simply find Seward more lively and amiable company.
None of her father’s social demeanor or leaden eminence hindered Kate. As the mistress of his Washington household, she managed “in a single season” to be “as much at home in the society of the national capital as if she had lived there for a lifetime.” Dozens of young men paid court to her. A contemporary reporter noted that “no other maiden in Washington had more suitors at her feet.” Yet, he continued, “it was early noticed that among all the young men who flocked to the Chase home, and who were eager to obey her slightest nod, there was not one who seemed to obtain even the remotest hold upon her affections”—until Rhode Island’s young governor, William Sprague, came to Washington and drew her attention.
Kate had first met the fabulously wealthy Sprague, whose family owned one of the largest textile manufacturing establishments in the country, the previous September in Cleveland. Sprague had come to Ohio at the head of an official delegation to dedicate a statue of Rhode Island native Commodore Oliver Perry, which was to be placed in the public square. Introduced at the festive ball that followed the ceremony, the two immediately hit it off. “For the rest of the evening,” one observer recalled, “whenever we saw one of them we were pretty sure to see the other.”
For his part, Sprague would never forget his first sight of Kate, “dressed in that celebrated dress,” when “you became my gaze and the gaze of all observers, and you left the house taking with you my admiration and my appreciation, but more than all my pulsations. I remember well how I was possessed that night and the following day.” Years later, he assured her he could “recall the sensation better than if it was yesterday.”
Ten years Kate’s senior, William Sprague had assumed responsibility for the family business at an early age. When William was thirteen, his father, Amasa Sprague, was shot down on the street as he walked home from his cotton mill one evening. The elder Sprague had been involved in a nasty fight over the renewal of a liquor license. The owner of the gin mill shut down by Sprague was arrested and hanged for the murder. Control of the company passed to William’s uncle, who determined that young William should cut short his education to learn the business from the bottom up. “I was thrust into the counting-room, performing its lowest drudgeries, raising myself to all of its highest positions,” he later recalled. When his uncle died of typhoid fever, William, at twenty-six, took over.
As the largest employer in Rhode Island, with more than ten thousand workers, young Sprague wielded enormous political influence. He capitalized on his resources when he ran for governor in 1860 and won on the Democratic ticket, spending over $100,000 of his own money. After the attack on Fort Sumter, Sprague organized the First Rhode Island Regiment, providing the state with “a loan of one hundred thousand dollars to outfit the troops,” while his brother supplied the artillery battery with ninety-six horses. When the lavishly supplied volunteer regiment arrived in the threatened capital, the men were received as heroes. On April 29, the regiment was officially sworn in before the president and General Scott after a dress parade from its headquarters at the Patent Office to the White House. “The entire street was filled with spectators from Seventh to Ninth street,” the Evening Star reported, “and many were the complimentary remarks made by the multitude upon the general appearance and movements of the regiment.”
All the members of the cabinet were present at the ceremony, joining in the rousing greeting for the resplendent troops. Though Sprague stood only five feet six inches tall, his military uniform and his “yellow-plumed hat” undoubtedly increased his stature. John Hay commented after meeting the young man with brown wavy hair, gray eyes, and a thin mustache that while he appeared at first “a small, insignificant youth, who bought his place,” he “is certainly all right now. He is very proud of his Company of its wealth and social standing.” Hay, too, was impressed by the number of eminent young men in Sprague’s regiment. “When men like these leave their horses, their women and their wine, harden their hands, eat crackers for dinner, wear a shirt for a week and never black their shoes,—all for a principle, it is hard to set any bounds to the possibilities of such an army.” Washingtonians nicknamed the First Rhode Island “the millionaires’ regiment” and dubbed Sprague the most eligible bachelor in the city.
It was only a matter of days before Sprague called on Kate. Unlike earlier tentative suitors, intimidated perhaps by Kate’s beauty and brains, Sprague moved confidently to establish a place in her heart, becoming “the first, the only man,” she said afterward, “that had found a lodgment there.” Years later, writing to Kate, Sprague vividly recalled their earlier courtship days. “Do you remember the hesitating kiss I stole, and the glowing, blushing face that responded to the touch. I well remember it all. The step forward from the Cleveland meeting, and the enhanced poetical sensation, for it was poetry, if there ever is such in life.”
For Kate, who acknowledged that she was “accustomed to command and be obeyed, to wish and be anticipated,” Sprague’s cocksure attitude must have presented a welcome challenge. In the weeks that followed, the young couple saw each other frequently. By summer’s end, Nettie Chase told Kate that she liked Sprague “very much” and hoped the two would marry. Nettie’s hopes were put on hold, however, as the war continued to escalate, changing the course of countless lives throughout the fractured nation.
The tragedies of war came home to the Lincolns with the death of Elmer Ellsworth on May 24, 1861. Young Ellsworth had read law in Lincoln’s office and had become so close to the family that he made the journey from Springfield to Washington with them, catching the measles from Willie and Tad along the way. Once in the capital, Ellsworth joined the war effort by organizing a group of New York firemen into a Zouave unit, distinguished by their exotic and colorful uniforms. After Virginia seceded from the Union, Ellsworth’s Zouaves were among the first troops to cross the Potomac River into Alexandria, a town counting ardent secessionists among its residents, including the proprietor of the Marshall House. Spying a Confederate flag waving above the hotel, Ellsworth dashed up to the roof to confiscate it. Having captured the flag, Ellsworth met the armed hotel manager, secessionist James Jackson, on his way down the stairs. Jackson killed Ellsworth on the spot, only to be shot by Ellsworth’s men.
Ellsworth’s death, as one of the first casualties of the war, was national news and mourned across the country. The bereaved president wrote a personal note of condolence to Ellsworth’s parents, praising the young man whose body lay in state in the East Room. Nicolay confessed that he had been “quite unable to keep the tears out of my eyes” whenever he thought of Ellsworth. After the funeral, Mary was presented with the bloodied flag for which Ellsworth had given his life; but the horrified first lady, not wanting to be reminded of the sad event, quickly had it packed away.
WITH MORE THAN ENOUGH TROUBLES to occupy him at home, Lincoln faced a tangled situation abroad. A member of the British Parliament had introduced a resolution urging England to accord the Southern Confederacy belligerent status. If passed, the resolution would give Confederate ships the same rights in neutral ports enjoyed by Federal ships. Britain’s textile economy depended on cotton furnished by Southern plantations. Unless the British broke the Union blockade to ensure a continuing supply of cotton, the great textile mills in Manchester and Leeds would be forced to cut back or come to a halt. Merchants would lose money, and thousands of workers would lose their jobs.
Seward feared that England would back the South simply to feed its own factories. While the “younger branch of the British stock” might support freedom, he told his wife, the aristocrats, concerned more with economics than morality, would become “the ally of the traitors.” To prevent this from happening, he was “trying to get a bold remonstrance through the Cabinet, before it is too late.” He hoped not only to halt further thoughts of recognition of the Confederacy but to ensure that the British would respect the Union blockade and refuse, even informally, to meet with the three Southern commissioners who had been sent to London to negotiate for the Confederacy. To achieve these goals, Seward was willing to wage war. “God damn ’em, I’ll give ’em hell,” he told Sumner, thrusting his foot in the air as he spoke.
On May 21, Seward brought Lincoln a surly letter drafted for Charles Francis Adams to read verbatim to Lord John Russell, Britain’s foreign secretary. Lincoln recognized immediately that the tone was too abrasive for a diplomatic communication. While decisive action might be necessary to prevent Britain from any form of overt sympathy with the South, Lincoln had no intention of fighting two wars at once. All his life, he had taken care not to send letters written in anger. Now, to mitigate the harshness of the draft, he altered the tone of the letter at numerous points. Where Seward had claimed that the president was “surprised and grieved” that no protest had been made against unofficial meetings with the Southern commissioners, Lincoln wrote simply that the “President regrets.” Where Seward threatened that “no one of these proceedings [informal or formal recognition, or breaking the blockade] will be borne,” Lincoln shifted the phrase to “will pass unnoticed.”
Most important, where Seward had indicated that the letter be read directly to the British foreign secretary, Lincoln insisted that it serve merely for Adams’s guidance and should not “be read, or shown to any one.” Still, the central message remained clear: a warning to Britain that if the vexing issues were not resolved, and Britain decided “to fraternize with our domestic enemy,” then a war between the United States and Britain “may ensue,” caused by “the action of Great Britain, not our own.” In that event, Britain would forever lose “the sympathies and the affections of the only nation on whose sympathies and affections she has a natural claim.”
Thus, a threatening message that might have embroiled the Union in two wars at the same time became instead the basis for a hard-line policy that effectively interrupted British momentum toward recognizing the Confederacy. Furthermore, France, whose ministers had promised to act in concert with Britain, followed suit. This was a critical victory for the Union, preventing for the time being the recognition that would have conferred legitimacy on the Confederacy in the eyes of the world, weakened Northern morale, and accorded “currency to Southern bonds.”
History would later give Secretary of State Seward high marks for his role in preventing Britain and France from intervening in the war. He is considered by some to have been “the ablest American diplomatist of the century.” But here, as was so often the case, Lincoln’s unseen hand had shaped critical policy. Only three months earlier, the frontier lawyer had confessed to Seward that he knew little of foreign affairs. His revisions of the dispatch, however, exhibit the sophisticated prowess of a veteran statesman: he had analyzed a complex situation and sought the least provocative way to neutralize a potential enemy while making crystal-clear his country’s position.
Seward was slowly but inevitably coming to appreciate Lincoln’s remarkable abilities. “It is due to the President to say, that his magnanimity is almost superhuman,” he told his wife in mid-May. “His confidence and sympathy increase every day.” As Lincoln began to trust his own abilities, Seward became more confident in him. In early June, he told Frances: “Executive skill and vigor are rare qualities. The President is the best of us; but he needs constant and assiduous cooperation.” Though the feisty New Yorker would continue to debate numerous issues with Lincoln in the years ahead, exactly as Lincoln had hoped and needed him to do, Seward would become his most faithful ally in the cabinet. He committed himself “to his chief,” Nicolay and Hay observed, “not only without reserve, but with a sincere and devoted personal attachment.”
Seward’s mortification at not having received his party’s nomination in 1860 never fully abated, but he no longer felt compelled to belittle Lincoln to ease his pain. He settled into his position as secretary of state, and his optimistic and gregarious nature reasserted itself. Once more, his elaborate parties and receptions became the talk of Washington. Five days after the dispatch was sent, Seward hosted “a brilliant assemblage” at his new home. All the rooms were full, with dancing in one, drinks in another, and good conversation all around. Seward was “in excellent spirits,” moving easily among cabinet members, military officers, diplomats, and senators. Even white-haired Secretary Welles, who, it was mockingly remarked, should have died, “to all intents and purposes, twenty years ago,” was having such a good time that he seemed “good for, at least, twenty years more.”
LINCOLN LOOKED TO CHASE for guidance on the complex problem of financing a war at a time when the government was heavily in debt. The economic Panic of 1857, corruption in the Buchanan administration, and the partial dismemberment of the Union had taken a massive toll on the government coffers. With Congress not in session to authorize new tariffs and taxes, Chase was forced to rely on government loans to sustain war expenditures. Banks held back at first, demanding higher interest rates than the government could afford to pay, but eventually, Chase cobbled together enough revenue to meet expenses until Congress convened.
Chase later noted proudly that in the early days of the war, Lincoln relied on him to carry out functions that ordinarily belonged to the War Department. According to Chase, he assumed “the principal charge” of preventing the key border states of Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee from falling into secessionist hands. He authorized a loyal state senator from Kentucky to muster twenty companies. He drew up the orders that allowed Andrew Johnson, the only senator from a Confederate state who remained loyal to the Union, “to raise regiments in Tennessee.” He believed himself instrumental in keeping Kentucky and Missouri in the Union, seriously underestimating Lincoln’s critical role.
Indeed, Chase would never cease to underestimate Lincoln, nor to resent the fact that he had lost the presidency to a man he considered his inferior. In late April, he presumptuously sent Lincoln a New York Times article highly derogatory of the administration. “The President and the Cabinet at Washington are far behind the people,” the Times argued. “They are like a person just aroused from sleep, and in a state of dreamy half-consciousness.” This charge, Chase informed Lincoln, “has too much truth in it.” Lincoln did not reply, well understanding Chase’s implacable yearning for the presidency. But for now he needed the Ohioan’s enormous talents and total cooperation.
Cameron, meanwhile, found the task of running the War Department unbearable. Unable to manage his vast responsibilities, he turned to both Seward and Chase for help. “Oh, it was a terrible time,” Cameron remembered years later. “We were entirely unprepared for such a conflict, and for the moment, at least, absolutely without even the simplest instruments with which to engage in war. We had no guns, and even if we had, they would have been of but little use, for we had no ammunition to put in them—no powder, no saltpetre, no bullets, no anything.” The demands placed on the War Department in the early days of the war were indeed excruciating. Not only were weapons in short supply, but uniforms, blankets, horses, medical supplies, food, and everything necessary to outfit the vast numbers of volunteer soldiers arriving daily in Washington were unobtainable. It would have taken thousands of personnel to handle the varied functions of the quartermaster’s department, the ordnance office, the engineering department, the medical office, and the pay department. Yet, in 1861, the entire War Department consisted of fewer than two hundred people, including clerks, messengers, and watchmen. As Cameron lamented afterward: “I was certainly not in a place to be envied.”
Lincoln later explained that with “so large a number of disloyal persons” infiltrating every department, the government could not rely on official agents to manage contracts for manufacturing the weapons and supplies necessary to maintain a fighting force. With the cabinet’s unanimous consent, he directed Chase to dispense millions of dollars to a small number of trusted private individuals to negotiate and sign contracts that would mobilize the military. Acting “without compensation,” the majority of these men did their utmost under the circumstances. A few, including Alexander Cummings, one of Cameron’s lieutenants, would bring shame to the War Department.
AS SPRING GAVE WAY to the stifling heat of a Washington summer, Lincoln began work on the message he would deliver to Congress when the House and Senate assembled in special session on July 4. Needing time to think, he placed an “embargo” on all office seekers, “so strict” that they were not even allowed entry into the White House. As he labored in his newfound quiet, congressmen and senators gathered at Willard’s and Brown’s hotels, exchanging greetings and trading stories. They all anticipated, one reporter stated, that they would “soon ascertain the exact intentions of the Administration, through the medium of the President’s message.”
Lincoln worked long hours on the text, shifting words, condensing, deleting sentences. Even Senator Orville Browning, his old friend from Illinois who had come to see him, was told he was busy, but Lincoln overheard Browning talking and sent for him. It was after 9 p.m. on July 3, and he had just that moment finished writing. “He said he wished to read it to me, and did so,” Browning recorded in his diary. “It is an able state paper and will fully meet the expectations of the Country.”
Lincoln did not personally deliver his address on Capitol Hill. President Thomas Jefferson had denounced presidential appearances before Congress, considering them a monarchical remnant of the English system where kings personally opened parliamentary sessions. Since Jefferson, presidents had submitted their written messages to be read by a clerk. Yet, if the practice lacked theatricality, Lincoln’s arguments against secession and for the necessity of executive action in the midst of rebellion left an indelible impression. He traced the history of the struggle and called on Congress to “give the legal means for making this contest a short, and a decisive one.”
He asked for “at least four hundred thousand men, and four hundred millions of dollars…a less sum per head, than was the debt of our revolution.” A “right result, at this time, will be worth more to the world, than ten times the men, and ten times the money,” he assured Congress. For “this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy—a government of the people, by the same people—can, or cannot, maintain its territorial integrity, against its own domestic foes….
“This is essentially a People’s contest,” the president asserted. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” As evidence of the capacity of free institutions to better the “condition” of the people, “beyond any example in the world,” he cited the regiments of the Union Army, in which “there is scarcely one, from which could not be selected, a President, a Cabinet, a Congress, and perhaps a Court, abundantly competent to administer the government itself.”
Northern newspapers generally praised the message, though some failed to appreciate the rigor of Lincoln’s appeal and the clear grace of his language. “In spite of obvious faults in style,” the New York Times correspondent conceded, “I venture to say it will add to the popularity of the Rail-splitter. It is evidently the production of an honest, clear-headed and straightforward man; and its direct and forcible logic and quaint style of illustration will cause it to be read with peculiar pleasure by the masses of the people.” More important, the Congress responded with alacrity. Its members authorized more money and an even larger mobilization of troops than the president had requested. In addition, they provided retroactive authority for nearly all of Lincoln’s executive actions taken before they convened, remaining silent only on his suspension of habeas corpus. With the Southern Democrats gone, the Republicans had a substantial majority. And, for the moment, Northern Democrats also acceded, their dislike of Republicans overshadowed by patriotic fervor.
Not everyone was pleased. Abolitionists and radical Republicans found the message disheartening. “No mention is, at all, made of slavery,” Frederick Douglass lamented. “Any one reading that document, with no previous knowledge of the United States, would never dream from anything there written that we have a slaveholding war waged upon the Government…while all here know that that is the vital and animating motive of the rebellion.”
Radicals tended to blame Seward for Lincoln’s reluctance to emphasize the role of slavery. “We have an honest President,” Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist editor, proclaimed before a celebratory crowd on the Fourth of July, “but, distrusting the strength of the popular feeling behind him, he listens overmuch to Seward.” Men like Phillips, Thaddeus Stevens, and Charles Sumner could never forgive Seward for apparently lowering the antislavery banner he had once carried so triumphantly. Seward was accustomed to criticism, however, and while he had the president beside him, he remained secure in his position.
Meanwhile, the events of the war itself began to reshape the old order in ways few realized. At Fort Monroe, at the tip of the peninsula in Virginia, a bold decision by General Benjamin Butler proved a harbinger of things to come. One night, three fugitive slaves arrived at the fort after escaping from the Confederate battery that their master had ordered them to help build. When an agent of their owner demanded their return, Butler refused. The rebels were using slaves in the field to support their troops, Butler argued. The slaves were therefore contraband of war, and the federal government was no longer obliged to surrender them to their masters.
Coming from Butler, a conservative Democrat from Massachusetts who had run for governor on the Breckinridge ticket in 1860, the decision delighted Republican stalwarts who had previously objected to Butler’s high position. Butler himself would soon be equally delighted by Lincoln’s magnanimity in making him a brigadier general. “I will accept the commission,” Butler gratefully told Lincoln, but “there is one thing I must say to you, as we don’t know each other: That as a Democrat I opposed your election, and did all I could for your opponent; but I shall do no political act, and loyally support your administration as long as I hold your commission; and when I find any act that I cannot support I shall bring the commission back at once, and return it to you.”
Lincoln replied, “That is frank, that is fair. But I want to add one thing: When you see me doing anything that for the good of the country ought not to be done, come and tell me so, and why you think so, and then perhaps you won’t have any chance to resign your commission.” Had Butler known Lincoln, he would have been less astonished. The president commissioned officers with the same eye toward coalition building that he displayed in constructing his cabinet.
Butler’s order was approved by both Lincoln and Cameron, and eventually, the Congress passed a confiscation law ending the rights of masters over fugitive slaves utilized to support the Confederate troops. Even conservative Monty Blair applauded Butler. “You were right when you declared secession niggers contraband of war,” he told his fellow Democrat. “The Secessionists have used them to do all their fortifying.”
Blair’s approval of Butler’s measure as an act of war did not mean that he advocated emancipation. On the contrary, he advised Butler to “improve the code by restricting its operations to working people, leaving the Secessionists to take care of the non working classes.” The Union should provide safe harbor only to the “pick of the lot,” the strong-bodied slaves who were helping the rebels in the field. Women and children and other “unproductive laborers” should be left for their Southern masters to house and feed.
Lincoln, as usual, was slowly formulating his own position on the slavery question. He told Blair that Butler’s action raised “a very important subject…one requiring some thought in view of the numbers of negroes we were likely to have on hand in virtue of this new doctrine.” Indeed, in the weeks that followed, hundreds of courageous slaves worked their way into Union lines. The situation worried Lincoln; at this juncture, he still favored compensated emancipation and voluntary colonization, allowing blacks who wished to do so to return to their original homeland in Africa. Most important, he knew that any hint of total, direct emancipation would alienate the border states, whose continued loyalty was essential for victory, and would shatter the Republicans’ fragile alliance with Northern Democrats.
By shying from emancipation in these early months of the war, Lincoln aligned himself with the majority of the Northern people, the Republican Congress, and the whole of his cabinet. Two weeks into its session, the House passed a resolution declaring that the purpose of the war was “to preserve the Union,” not to eliminate slavery. Even Chase, the most fervent antislavery man in the cabinet, agreed that at this time the “sword” of total abolition should be left “in the sheath.” If the conflict were drawn out, however, he told the historian John Motley, if “we find it much more difficult and expensive in blood and treasure to put it down than we anticipated,” then the sword would be drawn. “We do not wish this, we deplore it, because of the vast confiscation of property, and of the servile insurrections, too horrible to contemplate, which would follow. We wish the Constitution and Union as it is, with slavery, as a municipal institution, existing till such time as each State in its wisdom thinks fit to mitigate or abolish it…but if the issue be distinctly presented—death to the American Republic or death to slavery, slavery must die.”
BY MID-JULY, the outcry in the North for some form of significant action against the rebels reached fever pitch. “Forward to Richmond!” blared the headline in the New York Tribune. Senator Trumbull introduced a resolution calling for “the immediate movement of the troops, and the occupation of Richmond before the 20th July,” the date set for the Confederate Congress to convene. General Scott hesitated, believing the army still unprepared for a major offensive, but Lincoln feared that without action, the morale of both the troops and the general public would diminish. European leaders would interpret Northern inaction as a faltering resolve in the Union.
General Irvin McDowell, a brigadier general from Ohio, devised a plan to engage the rebel forces under command of General Beauregard at Manassas, twenty-six miles southwest of Washington. It was an intelligent plan. Many Northerners had come to see Manassas as “a terrible, unknown, mysterious something…filled by countless thousands of the most ferocious warriors,” poised to attack Washington, D.C. “Foreigners do not understand,” Bates confided to a friend, “why we should allow a hostile army to remain so long almost in sight of the Capitol, if we were able to drive them off.” With 30,000 Union troops at his disposal, McDowell could overrun Beauregard’s forces so long as Union general Robert Patterson prevented the 9,000 Confederate troops under General Joseph Johnston at Winchester, Virginia, from joining Beauregard. On June 29, Lincoln and his cabinet approved McDowell’s plan.
The Battle of Bull Run, as it later became known in the North, began in the early-morning hours of Sunday, July 21. As the “roar of the artillery” reached the White House, Elizabeth Grimsley recalled, “the excitement grew intense.” As far away as the Blair estate in Silver Spring, Monty’s sister, Elizabeth, took a walk in the woods to “stop the roar in [her] ears,” but the sound of the guns only increased. As soldiers on both sides of the battlefield were discovering the gruesome carnage of war, hundreds of Washingtonians hastily prepared picnic baskets filled with bread and wine. They raced to the hill at Centreville and the fields below to witness what most presumed would be an easy victory for the North. Senators, congressmen, government employees, and their families peered through opera glasses to survey the battlefield. After “an unusually heavy discharge,” the British journalist William Russell overheard one woman exclaim: “That is splendid. Oh, my! Is not that first-rate? I guess we will be in Richmond this time to-morrow.”
While Lincoln attended church, the Union troops pressed forward, forcing the rebels farther south into the woods. At midday, news of what seemed a complete Union victory reached Lincoln and the members of his cabinet at the telegraph office in the War Department. In the crowded space that housed the telegraph instruments, operators found it hard to focus on their responsibilities. Each new dispatch, the New York Times noted, was posted and read aloud to hundreds of people gathered in front of the Willard Hotel. The jubilant throng “cheered vehemently, and seemed fairly intoxicated with joy.”
Even as the crowds celebrated in the streets, the fiercest stage of the fighting was just beginning. The Confederates refused to give up, rallied by the steadfast General Thomas Jackson. “There is Jackson with his Virginians, standing like a stone wall,” General Barnard Bee reportedly shouted to inspire his troops, and both Confederate and Union soldiers thereafter referred to Jackson as “Stonewall” Jackson. The two sides fought valiantly in the blazing sun as the line of battle shifted back and forth. At 3 p.m., Lincoln was in the telegraph office studying the maps on the wall and waiting anxiously for the updated bulletins, which arrived in fifteen-minute intervals. The telegraph line stretched only as far as the Fairfax Court House. News from the battlefront farther south was relayed to Fairfax by a troupe of mounted couriers established by the young Andrew Carnegie, who then worked with the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps. Noting some confusion in the battlefield reports, Lincoln crossed over to General Scott’s headquarters, “a small three-storied brick house” jammed with officers and clerks. Waking Scott from a nap, Lincoln expressed his concern. Scott, Nicolay reported, simply confirmed “his confidence in a successful result, and composed himself for another nap when the President left.”
Succeeding dispatches became uniformly positive, conveying assurances that the Confederate lines had broken. At about 4:30, the telegraph operator proclaimed that “the Union Army had achieved a glorious victory.” Lincoln decided to take his usual carriage ride, accompanied by Tad, Willie, and Secretary Bates. As they rode together to the Navy Yard to talk with John A. Dahlgren, one of Lincoln’s favorite naval officers, Bates confided his anxiety for his son, Coalter, who was soon to be sent into battle. When young Coalter departed to join his regiment, Bates wrote, it was “the first time he ever left home.” The carriage ride came to a close with Bates feeling a new intimacy with his president.
As Lincoln relaxed with Bates in his carriage, the tide of battle turned against the Union. Confederate general Johnston’s forces had escaped General Patterson’s grasp, and by midafternoon, nine thousand fresh Confederate troops arrived to reinforce Beauregard. McDowell had no reserve troops left. “A sudden swoop, and a body of [Confederate] cavalry rushed down upon our columns,” Edmund Stedman reported from the battlefield. “They came from the woods…and infantry poured out behind them.”
Exhausted Union infantrymen, including Sprague’s First Rhode Island Regiment, broke ranks. An uncontrolled retreat toward Washington began, further confused by the panicked flight of horrified spectators. Indeed, an acquaintance of Chase’s who had witnessed the battle “never stopped until he reached New-York.” Young Stedman was appalled by the raging scene: “Army wagons, sutlers’ teams, and private carriages, choked the passage, tumbling against each other, amid clouds of dust, and sickening sights and sounds.” Muskets and small arms were discarded along the way. Wounded soldiers pled for help. Horses, running free, exacerbated the human stampede.
The shocking news reached Washington in Lincoln’s absence. “General McDowell’s army in full retreat through Centerville,” the dispatch read; “the day is lost. Save Washington and the remnants of the Army.” Seward grabbed the telegram and ran to the White House. With “a terribly frightened and excited look” on his face, he asked Nicolay for the latest news. Lincoln’s secretary read him an earlier exultant dispatch. “Tell no one. That is not so. The battle is lost,” Seward revealed. “Find the President and tell him to come immediately to Gen. Scott’s.”
When Lincoln returned, his young aides relayed Seward’s message. “He listened in silence,” they later reported, “without the slightest change of feature or expression, and walked away to army headquarters.” He remained there with Scott and his cabinet until a telegram from McDowell verified the loss. Immediate reinforcements were summoned to defend the capital. With no further recourse, the disconsolate team dispersed.
“Oh what a sad long weary day has this sabbath been,” Elizabeth Blair told her husband. For Simon Cameron, the day brought a sharper personal grief. His brother James, in the service of Colonel William Sherman’s brigade, was among the nearly nine hundred soldiers killed. “I loved my brother,” Cameron wrote Chase, “as only the poor and lonely can love those with whom they have toiled & struggled up the rugged hill of life’s success—but he died bravely in the discharge of his duty.”
Seward stayed up past midnight composing a letter to Frances. “Every thing is being done that mortal man can do. Scott is grieved and disappointed…. What went out an army is surging back toward Washington as a disorganized mob. They fought well, did nobly, and apparently had gained the day, when some unreasonable alarm started a retreat. If the officers had experience and the men discipline, they could be rallied, and could be marched clear back to the field.”
Lincoln returned to the White House, where he watched the returning soldiers straggle down the street, listened to the mournful sounds of ambulances, and sat for hours with various senators and congressmen who had witnessed the battle from the hill. Early the following morning, with rain pouring down, General Scott arrived, urging Mary to take the children to the North until Washington was deemed safe from capture. Elizabeth Grimsley recollected the exchange as Mary turned to her husband: “Will you go with us?” she asked. “Most assuredly I will not leave at this juncture,” he replied. “Then I will not leave you at this juncture,” she answered with finality.
Lincoln did not sleep that dreadful night. Finding his only comfort in forward motion, he began drafting a memo incorporating the painful lessons of Bull Run into a coherent future military policy. Understanding that the disorder of the newly formed troops had contributed to the debacle, he called for the forces to “be constantly drilled, disciplined and instructed.” Furthermore, when he learned that soldiers preparing to end their three months of service had led the retreat, Lincoln proposed to let all those short-termers “who decline to enter the longer service, be discharged as rapidly as circumstances will permit.” Anticipating European reactions to the defeat, he determined to move “with all possible despatch” to make the blockade operative. That night, a telegram was also sent to General George McClellan in western Virginia with orders to come to Washington and take command of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln then devised a strategy consisting of three advances: a second stand at Manassas; a move down the Mississippi toward Memphis; and a drive from Cincinnati to East Tennessee.
“If there were nothing else of Abraham Lincoln for history to stamp him with,” Walt Whitman reflected, “it is enough to send him with his wreath to the memory of all future time, that he endured that hour, that day, bitterer than gall—indeed a crucifixion day—that it did not conquer him—that he unflinchingly stemmed it, and resolved to lift himself and the Union out of it.”
Recriminations were plentiful. The Democratic New York Herald placed responsibility on “a weak, inharmonious and inefficient Cabinet.” General Patterson was blamed for failing to keep Johnston’s troops from joining Beauregard. “Two weeks ago,” Chase self-righteously complained to a friend, “I urged the sending of Fremont to this command; and had it been done we should now have been rejoicing over a great victory.” Still, the historian James Rowley concludes that “public censure touched too lightly on Lincoln,” who should have held back the assault until the troops were ready.
“The sun rises, but shines not,” Whitman wrote of the dismal day after the defeat. Rain continued to fall as the defeated troops flooded into Washington. From his window at Willard’s, Russell observed these bedraggled soldiers. “Some had neither great-coats nor shoes, others were covered with blankets.” Nettie Chase recalled being “awakened in the gray dawn by the heavy, unwonted, rumbling of laden wagons passing along the street below.” Thinking at first they were bound for market, she was sickened to realize they were filled with wounded soldiers heading for the hospital nearby. To relieve the crowded hospital wards, Chase opened his spacious home to nearly a dozen wounded men. Bishop McIlvaine, a friend visiting from Ohio who happened to be staying with Chase at the time, tended to the sick and dying. Nettie recalled the bishop’s uneasiness when one of the wounded men cursed loudly with each pain. “Just let me swear a bit,” the young man entreated the stunned bishop, “it helps me stand the hurting.”
“The dreadful disaster of Sunday can scarcely be mentioned,” Stanton wrote to former president Buchanan five days after Bull Run. “The imbecility of this Administration culminated in that catastrophe,” he pronounced with a sycophantic nod to his former boss, calling the fiasco “the result of Lincoln’s ‘running the machine’ for five months…. The capture of Washington seems now to be inevitable—during the whole of Monday and Tuesday it might have been taken without any resistance…. Even now I doubt whether any serious opposition to the entrance of the Confederate forces could be offered.”
Historians have long pondered the reluctance of the Confederates to capitalize on their victory by attacking Washington. Jefferson Davis later cited “an overweening confidence” after the initial victory that led to lax decisions. General Johnston observed that hundreds of volunteers, believing the war already won, simply left their regiments and returned home to “exhibit the trophies picked up on the field.” Other soldiers melted into the countryside, accompanying wounded comrades to faraway hospitals. Perhaps the most straightforward explanation of both the dismal Union retreat and the Confederate failure to march into Washington is manifest in the plain assessment Nancy Bates posted to her young niece Hester: “Well we fought all day Sunday. Our men were so tired that they had to come away from Manassa I expect that the others were very tired too or they would have followed our men.”
While Lincoln brooded in private, confiding in Browning that he was “very melancholy,” he maintained a stoic public image. He refrained from answering Horace Greeley’s acerbic letter, written in “black despair” after the Tribune editor had endured a week without sleep. “You are not considered a great man,” Greeley charged, adding that if the Confederacy could not be defeated, Lincoln should “not fear to sacrifice [himself] to [his] country.” Despite a blizzard of such indictments, Lincoln listened patiently to reports from the field of what went wrong. He told humorous stories to provide relief. And in the days that followed, with Seward by his side, he visited a number of regiments, raising spirits at every stop along the way.
At Fort Corcoran, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, he asked Colonel William T. Sherman if he could address the troops. Sherman was delighted, though he asked Lincoln to “discourage all cheering.” After the boasts that preceded Bull Run, he explained, “what we needed were cool, thoughtful, hard-fighting soldiers—no more hurrahing, no more humbug.” Lincoln agreed, proceeding to deliver what Sherman considered “one of the neatest, best, and most feeling addresses” he had ever heard. Lincoln commented on the lost battle but emphasized “the high duties that still devolved on us, and the brighter days yet to come.” At various points, “the soldiers began to cheer, but [Lincoln] promptly checked them, saying: ‘Don’t cheer, boys. I confess I rather like it myself, but Colonel Sherman here says it is not military; and I guess we had better defer to his opinion.’”
The president closed his graceful speech with a pledge to provide the troops with all they needed, and even encouraged them to call on him “personally in case they were wronged.” One aggrieved officer took him at his word, revealing that, as a three-month volunteer, he had tried to leave, but Sherman had “threatened to shoot” him. In a “stage-whisper,” Lincoln counseled the officer: “Well, if I were you, and he threatened to shoot, I would not trust him, for I believe he would do it.” The response produced gales of laughter among the men while upholding Sherman’s discipline.
Northern public opinion reflected Lincoln’s firm resolve. Republican newspapers across the land reported a “renewed patriotism,” bringing thousands of volunteers to sign up for three years. “Let no loyal man be discouraged by the reverse,” the Chicago Tribune proclaimed. “Like the great Antaeas, who, when thrown to the ground, gathered strength from the contact with mother earth and arose refreshed and stronger than before, to renew the contest, so of the Sons of Liberty; the loss of this battle will only nerve them to greater efforts.” Several papers compared the Bull Run disaster to George Washington’s early defeats in the Revolutionary War, which eventually resulted in triumph at Yorktown. “The spirit of the people is now thoroughly aroused,” the New York Times announced, “and, what is equally important, it has been chastened and moderated by the stern lessons of experience.”
With the stunning reversal and rout at Bull Run, however, Northern delusions of easy triumph dissolved. “It is pretty evident now that we have underrated the strength, the resources and the temper of the enemy,” the Times conceded. “And we have been blind, moreover, to the extraordinary nature of the country over which the contest is to be waged,—and to its wonderful facilities for defence.” Yet the harrowing lessons of Bull Run generated a perverse confidence that the North could “take comfort” in already knowing the worst that could happen. It was unimaginable in the anxious chaos following the first major battle of the Civil War that far worse was yet to come.