THE LINCOLNS HOSTED the traditional New Year’s Day reception to mark the advent of 1862. The day was “unusually beautiful,” the New York Times reported, “the sky being clear and bright, and the air soft and balmy, more like May than January.” Frances Seward, who had joined her husband for the holidays, found the festive atmosphere reassuring. “For the first time since we have been here,” she told her sister, “the carriages are rolling along the streets as they used to do in old times.” Bates, too, was braced by the glorious day. “All the world was out,” he noted. Thousands of citizens streamed into the White House when the gates were opened at noon. The Marine Band played as members of the public shook hands with the president and first lady. They mingled with Supreme Court justices, senators, congressmen, foreign ministers, military officers, and cabinet officials. At long last, Fanny met the first lady, whom she described as “a compact little woman with a full round face,” wearing “a black silk, or brocade, with purple clusters in it—and some appropriate velvet head arrangement.”
Though Lincoln cordially greeted every guest, he was under great pressure. In the ninth month of the war, tales of corruption and mismanagement in the War Department combined with lack of progress on the battlefield to prevent Chase from raising the funds the Treasury needed to keep the war effort afloat. As public impatience mounted, Lincoln feared that “the bottom” was “out of the tub.” While the disgruntled public might focus on various members of the military and the cabinet, the president knew that he would ultimately be held responsible for the choices of his administration. “If the new year shall be only the continuation of the faults, the mistakes, and the incapacities prevailing during 1861,” diarist Count Gurowski warned, “then the worst is to be expected.”
Lincoln had been so reticent during the summer and fall, when Cameron was first criticized for his lax administration and questionable contracts, that Seward questioned whether the president was sufficiently attentive to the unsavory situation. Then, one night in January, the secretary of state recalled, “there was a ring at my door-bell.” The president entered, seated himself on the sofa, “and abruptly commenced talking about the condition of the War Department. He soon made it apparent that he had all along observed and known as much about it as any of us…his mind was now settled, and he had come to consult me about a successor to Mr. Cameron.”
Choosing the right successor to Cameron was vital. Lincoln’s initial preferences may have included Joseph Holt, Buchanan’s war secretary who had crucially supported the Union during the secession crisis, or West Point graduate Montgomery Blair. According to Welles, Blair “had exhibited great intelligence, knowledge of military men, sagacity and sound judgment” during cabinet discussions. Instead of either man, in a decision that would prove most significant to the course of the war, Lincoln selected Edwin Stanton, the gruff lawyer who had humiliated him in Cincinnati six years earlier and whose disparaging remarks about his presidency were well known in Washington circles.
Washington insiders attributed the choice to the combined influence of Seward and Chase. These two rivals rarely agreed on policy or principle, but each had his own reasons for advocating Stanton. Seward would never forget Stanton’s contribution as his informant during the last weeks of the Buchanan tenure. The intelligence provided by Stanton had helped root out traitors and keep Washington safe from capture. It had also fortified Seward’s role as the central figure in the critical juncture between Lincoln’s election and inauguration. Chase’s far more intimate friendship with Stanton had grown from their earlier days in Ohio when Stanton had assured Chase that “to be loved by you, and be told that you value my love is a gratification beyond my power to express.” Equally important, Chase believed that Stanton would be a steadfast ally in the struggle against slavery.
Lincoln had his own recollections of Stanton, not all of which were negative. He had watched Stanton at work on the Reaper trial and had been impressed instantly by the powerful reasoning of Stanton’s arguments, the passion of his delivery, and the unparalleled energy he had devoted to the case. “He puts his whole soul into any cause he espouses,” one observer noted. “If you ever saw Stanton before a jury,” you would see that “he toils for his client with as much industry as if his case was his own…as if his own life depended upon the issue.” Energy and force were desperately needed to galvanize the War Department, and Stanton had both in abundance.
On Saturday, January 11, the president sent an uncharacteristically brusque letter to Cameron. In light of the fact that the war secretary had previously “expressed a desire for a change of position,” he wrote, “I can now gratify you, consistently with my view of the public interest,” by “nominating you to the Senate, next monday, as minister to Russia.” After receiving the dismissal letter on Sunday, Cameron is said to have wept. “This is not a political affair,” he insisted, “it means personal degradation.”
After dinner that night, Cameron went to see Chase. They apparently talked over the troubled situation and decided to enlist Seward’s help. Chase drove Cameron back to Willard’s and then went alone to Seward’s house. As planned, Cameron came in soon after, brandishing the president’s letter, which, he said, was “intended as a dismissal, and, therefore, discourteous.” Cameron was finally convinced “to retain the letter till morning, and then go and see the President.” Later that night, Chase confided in his diary: “I fear Mr. Seward may think Cameron’s coming into his house pre-arranged, and that I was not dealing frankly.” As usual, however, so long as the high-minded Chase was certain that he had “acted right, and with just deference to all concerned,” he was able to rationalize his machinations.
The next day, presumably briefed by Seward and Chase, Lincoln agreed to withdraw his terse letter and substitute a warm note indicating that Cameron had initiated the departure. Since the desirable post at St. Petersburg was vacant, the president would happily “gratify” Cameron’s desire. “Should you accept it, you will bear with you the assurance of my undiminished confidence, of my affectionate esteem, and of my sure expectation that…you will be able to render services to your country, not less important than those you could render at home.” He also asked Cameron to recommend a successor. Cameron expressed his fervent opinion that his fellow Pennsylvanian Stanton was the best man for the job. In fact, Lincoln had already made his decision, but Cameron left believing he was responsible for Stanton’s selection. In the end, each of the three men—Seward, Chase, and Cameron—assumed he was instrumental in Lincoln’s appointment of the new secretary of war.
After settling matters with Cameron, Lincoln asked George Harding, whom he had made head of the Patent Office, to bring his old law partner Stanton to the White House. Stanton was then forty-seven, though the grizzled brown hair and beard made him look older, as did the glasses that hid his bright brown eyes. Harding was afraid that disagreeable recollections from the Reaper trial would cast a pall on the meeting. Both Lincoln and Stanton seemed to have put the past behind them, however, leaving Harding “the most embarrassed of the three.”
The urgency of the situation left Stanton little time to deliberate. He consulted his wife, Ellen, who, according to her mother, “objected to his acceptance.” The move to the War Department would substantially diminish the lifestyle of the Stanton family, slashing a legal income of over $50,000 a year to $8,000. Stanton, too, tormented all his life by fears of insolvency, must have been concerned about the drastic diminution of income. Nevertheless, he could not refuse to serve as secretary of war in the midst of a great civil war. And if he served with distinction, his life, however short in years, might be made “long by noble deeds,” as Chase had once prophesied. He accepted the post, on the condition that he could retain Peter Watson, his old friend and assistant on the Reaper trial, “to take care of the contracts,” for he realized he would “be swamped at once” without Watson’s aid.
The announcement of Cameron’s resignation and Stanton’s appointment took the majority of the cabinet by surprise. “Strange,” Bates confided in his diary, that “not a hint of all this” was discussed at the cabinet council the previous Friday, “and stranger still,” the president had sent for no one but Seward over the weekend. Welles heard the dramatic news from Monty Blair, whom he met on the street. Neither one of them, Welles confessed, had been “taken into Lincoln’s confidence.” Indeed, Welles had never even met Stanton. Stanton’s nomination dismayed radical Republicans on Capitol Hill. The powerful William Fessenden, fearful that Stanton’s Democratic heritage would incline him toward a soft policy on both slavery and the South, worked to delay the Senate confirmation until he ascertained more about Stanton’s position. He conferred with Chase, who assured Fessenden that “he, Secretary Chase, was responsible for Mr. Stanton’s selection,” and that he would arrange a meeting that very evening between the Maine senator and Stanton. Seward’s role in the selection was not publicized, allowing the radicals to assume that Chase, their man in the cabinet, was the chief architect of the appointment. After a lengthy conversation with Stanton, Fessenden told Chase that he was thoroughly convinced that Stanton was “just the man we want.” The senator was delighted to find that he and Buchanan’s former Attorney General concurred “on every point,” including “the conduct of the war” and “the negro question.” The Senate confirmed Stanton’s nomination the next day.
News of Stanton’s replacement for Cameron met with widespread approval. The public generally assumed that Cameron had retired voluntarily. “Not only was the press completely taken by surprise,” Seward told his wife, “but with all its fertility of conjecture, not one newspaper has conceived the real cause.” Cameron’s reputation was preserved until the House Committee on Contracts published its 1,100-page report in February 1862, detailing the extensive corruption in the War Department that had led to the purchase of malfunctioning weapons, diseased horses, and rotten food. According to one newspaper report, the committee “resolved to advise the immediate passage of a bill to punish with death any person who commits a fraud upon the Government, whereby a soldier is bodily injured, as for instance in the sale of unsound provisions.” Though Cameron was never charged with personal liability, the House voted to censure him for conduct “highly injurious to the public service.”
Cameron was devastated, knowing that he would never recover from the scandal. Lincoln, however, made a great personal effort to assuage his pain and humiliation. He wrote a long public letter to Congress, explaining that the unfortunate contracts were spawned by the emergency situation facing the government in the immediate aftermath of Fort Sumter. Lincoln declared that he and his entire cabinet “were at least equally responsible with [Cameron] for whatever error, wrong, or fault was committed.”
Cameron would never forget this generous act. Filled with gratitude and admiration, he would become, Nicolay and Hay observed, “one of the most intimate and devoted of Lincoln’s personal friends.” He appreciated the courage it took for Lincoln to share the blame at a time when everyone else had deserted him. Most other men in Lincoln’s situation, Cameron wrote, “would have permitted an innocent man to suffer rather than incur responsibility.” Lincoln was not like most other men, as each cabinet member, including the new war secretary, would soon come to understand.
On his first day in office, the energetic, hardworking Stanton instituted “an entirely new régime” in the War Department. Cameron’s department had been so inundated by office seekers and politicians that officials had little time to answer letters or file telegraphs they received. As a result, requests for military supplies were often delayed for weeks. Stanton decreed that “letters and written communications will be attended to the first thing in the morning when they are received, and will have precedence over all other business.” While Cameron had welcomed congressmen and senators every day but Sunday, Stanton announced that the War Department would be closed to all business unrelated to military matters from Tuesdays through Fridays. Congressmen and senators would be received on Saturdays; the general public on Mondays.
Stanton quickly removed many of Cameron’s people and surrounded himself with men much like himself, full of passion, devotion, and drive. He made it clear from the beginning that he would not tolerate unmerited requests for even the smallest job. The day after he took office, Stanton later recalled, he met with a man he instinctively judged to be “one of those indescribable half loafers, half gentlemen,” who carried with him “a card from Mrs. Lincoln, asking that the man be made a commissary.” Stanton was furious. He ripped up the note and sent the man away. The very next day, the man returned with an official request from Mary that he be given the appointment. Stanton did not budge, dismissing the job seeker once again. That afternoon, Stanton called on Mrs. Lincoln. He told her that “in the midst of a great war for national existence,” his “first duty is to the people” and his “next duty is to protect your husband’s honor, and your own.” If he appointed unqualified men simply to return favors, it would “strike at the very root of all confidence.” Mary understood his argument completely. “Mr. Stanton you are right,” she told him, “and I will never ask you for anything again.” True to her word, Stanton affirmed, “she never did.”
Under Stanton’s altered regime, the War Department opened early in the morning and the gas lamps remained lit late into the night. “As his carriage turned from Pennsylvania Avenue into Seventeenth Street,” one of his clerks recalled, “the door-keeper on watch would put his head inside and cry, in a low, warning tone, ‘The Secretary!’ The word was passed along and around till the whole building was traversed by it, and for a minute or two there was a shuffling of feet and a noise of opening and shutting of doors, as the stragglers and loungers everywhere fled to their stations.”
Stanton kept his meetings brief and pointed. He was “fluent without wordiness,” George Templeton Strong wrote, “and above all, earnest, warm-hearted, and large-hearted.” His tireless work style invigorated his colleagues. “Persons at a distance,” a correspondent in the capital city wrote, “cannot well realize what a revolution has been wrought in Washington by the change of the head of the War Department. The very atmosphere of the city breathes of change; the streets, the hotels, the halls of Congress speak it.”
After nearly a year of disappointment with Cameron, Lincoln had found in Stanton the leader the War Department needed.
EARLY IN FEBRUARY 1862, Mary Lincoln pioneered a new form of entertainment at the White House. Instead of the traditional public receptions, which allowed anyone to walk in off the street, or the expensive state dinners, designed for only a small number, she sent out some five hundred invitations for an evening ball to be held at the White House on February 5. Since the party was not open to the public, an invitation became a mark of prestige in Washington society. Those who were not on the original list, according to Nicolay, “sought, and almost begged their invitations.”
Mary prepared for her gala with great enthusiasm. She arranged for the Marine Band to play in the corridor and brought in a famous New York catering firm to serve the midnight supper. She had her black seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley, create a beautiful white satin gown with black trimming, a long train, and a low-cut neckline that instantly attracted Lincoln’s eye. He laughingly suggested that “if some of that tail was nearer the head, it would be in better style.”
Meanwhile, Willie and Tad had settled into a happy routine. They worked with their tutor in the mornings and played with the two Taft boys in the afternoons and evenings, either at the White House or at the Taft home. Judge Taft became “much attached” to both Lincoln boys. He believed that Willie “had more judgment and foresight than any boy of his age that [he had] ever known.” The four boys built a cabin on the mansion’s flat roof, which was protectively encircled by “a high stone Ballistrade.” They named their makeshift fortification the “Ship of State,” and equipped it with a spyglass that enabled them to watch the movement of boats on the Potomac and troops on the shore. They invited guests to theatrical performances in the attic. Riding the pony given Willie as a gift became another favorite pastime. In mid-January, when Robert came home on vacation from Harvard College, the family was complete.
Then, a few days before Mary’s grand party, Willie came down with a fever. Illness had been prevalent in Washington that January, as snow was followed by sleet and rain that left the ground covered with a thick layer of foul-smelling mud. Smallpox and typhoid fever had taken many lives. “There is a good deal of alarm in the City on account of the prevalence of the Small pox,” Judge Taft recorded in his diary. “There are cases of it in almost every Street in the City.”
Illness had struck the Stantons, the Sewards, and the Chases. Stanton’s youngest son, James, had become critically ill after a smallpox vaccination caused “a dreadful eruption” on all parts of the baby boy’s body. The illness continued for six weeks, during which time he was “not expected to live.” In this same period, Fanny Seward, who had gone to Philadelphia with her mother, contracted what was first suspected to be smallpox but was probably typhoid. Her “burning fever,” back pains, and “ulcerated” throat lasted for nearly two weeks. Seward left Washington in alarm to be with Fanny, one of the few departures from his work during the entire war. Nettie Chase was also seriously ill, having contracted scarlet fever on her way to boarding school in Pennsylvania.
Mary thought it best to cancel the party because of Willie’s illness, but Lincoln hesitated, since the invitations had already been sent out. He called in Dr. Robert Stone, who was considered “the dean of the Washington medical community.” After examining Willie, the renowned doctor concluded that the boy was “in no immediate danger” and “that there was every reason for an early recovery.” Relieved by the diagnosis, the Lincolns decided to hold the ball.
The carriages began arriving at the brilliantly lit White House around 9 p.m. All the Washington elite were present—the cabinet members and their wives, generals and their high staff, the members of the diplomatic corps, senators and congressmen, lawyers and businessmen. McClellan, in dress uniform, attracted much attention, as did the new secretary of war. The Green, Red, and Blue parlors were open for inspection, along with the East Room, where the Lincolns received their guests. Society reporters commented on both the “exquisite taste with which the White House has been refitted under Mrs. Lincoln’s directions” and the magnificence of the women’s attire. The “violet-eyed” Kate Chase was singled out, as usual. “She wore a dress of mauve-colored silk, without ornament,” one reporter wrote admiringly. “On her small, classically-shaped head a simple wreath of minute white flowers mingled with the blond waves of her sunny hair, which was arranged in a Grecian knot behind.”
At midnight, the crowd began to move toward the closed dining room. During a slight delay occasioned by a steward who had temporarily misplaced the key, someone exclaimed, “I am in favor of a forward movement,” and everyone laughed, including General McClellan. The doors were thrown open to reveal a sumptuous banquet, which was to be served with excellent wine and champagne. “The brilliance of the scene could not dispel the sadness that rested upon the face of Mrs. Lincoln,” Elizabeth Keckley, the seamstress who had become a close confidante, recalled. “During the evening she came up-stairs several times, and stood by the bedside of the suffering boy.”
Despite Mary’s worry and watchfulness, the ball was a triumph. “Those who were here,” Nicolay told his fiancée, “will be forever happy in the recollection of the favor enjoyed, because their vanity has been tickled with the thought that they have attained something which others have not.” Although there was some caviling about “frivolity, hilarity and gluttony, while hundreds of sick and suffering soldiers” were “within plain sight,” reviews in the capital city were overwhelmingly favorable. The Washington Evening Star pronounced the event “a brilliant spectacle,” while Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper described Mary as “our fair ‘Republican Queen,’” garbed in a “lustrous white satin robe” and black and white headdress “in perfect keeping with her regal style of beauty.”
The success of the White House ball was followed by two Union victories in Tennessee, the captures of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the Cumberland. These twin victories shifted the defensive struggle in the West to an offensive war and brought national recognition to a new hero: General Ulysses S. Grant. A West Point graduate whose weakness for alcohol had contributed to his resignation from the army eight years earlier, Grant was struggling to support his family as a leather salesman in Galena, Illinois, when the Civil War began. He volunteered to serve immediately, and was put in charge of a regiment in Missouri. From the start, Grant understood that a southward movement from Missouri was essential, but he was unable to persuade General Henry Halleck, Frémont’s successor, to authorize the move. Hearing rumors that the unkempt, bewhiskered Grant still drank too much, Halleck was unwilling to trust him with an important mission. Finally, on February 1, after the navy’s Admiral Andrew Foote agreed to a joint army-navy expedition, Halleck gave the go-ahead for Grant “to take and hold Fort Henry.”
Grant and Foote set out at once. The navy gunboats opened a blistering attack, forcing the retreat of 2,500 rebel troops to the more heavily reinforced Fort Donelson, twelve miles away. The remaining troops surrendered. “Fort Henry is ours,” Grant telegraphed Halleck in the terse, straightforward style that would become his trademark. “I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th.” Though a severe rainstorm delayed the eastward march to Donelson, Grant remained confident. Writing to his sister, he assured her that her “plain brother however has, as yet, had no reason to feel himself unequal to the task.” This was not a boast, he said, but “a presentiment” that proved accurate a few days later when he surrounded the rebel forces at Fort Donelson and began his successful assault. After many had died, the Confederate commander, Kentucky native General Simon Buckner, proposed a cease-fire “and appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation.” On February 16, Grant telegraphed back the historic words that would define both his character and career: “No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” Buckner and fifteen thousand Confederate soldiers were taken prisoner.
More than a thousand troops on both sides were killed and three times that number wounded. It was “a most bloody fight,” a young Union soldier told his father, so devastating to his company that despite the victory, he remained “sad, lonely and down-hearted.” Only seven of the eighty-five men in his unit survived, but “the flag was brought through.”
The North was jubilant upon receiving news of Grant’s triumph at Donelson, the first substantial Union victory in the war. Hundred-gun salutes were fired in celebrations across the land. The capital city was “quite wild with Excitement.” In the Senate, “the gallery rose en masse and gave three enthusiastic cheers.” Elaborate plans were made to illuminate the capital’s public buildings in joint celebration of the double victory and George Washington’s birthday.
The day after Grant’s victory at Donelson, the president signed papers promoting him to major general. Lincoln had been following the Western general since he had read the gracious proclamation Grant issued when he had marched into Paducah, Kentucky, the previous fall. “I have come among you, not as an enemy,” he told the Kentuckians, “but as your friend and fellow-citizen.” Reports that “Grant had taken the field with only a spare shirt, a hair brush, and a tooth brush” made comparisons between “Western hardihood” and McClellan’s “Eastern luxury” inevitable; it was well known that “six immense four-horse wagons” had arrived at McClellan’s door to carry his clothes and other items to the front.
Fort Donelson’s capture provided the Union with a strategic foothold in the South. After a ghastly battle at Shiloh two months later left twenty thousand casualties on both sides, the Union would go on to secure Memphis and the entire state of Tennessee. These victories would soon be followed by the capture of New Orleans.
THE COUNTRY’S EXULTATION at Grant’s victory at Donelson found no echo in the White House. Willie’s condition had grown steadily worse since the White House ball, and Tad, too, had become ill. It is believed that both boys had contracted typhoid fever, likely caused by the unsanitary conditions in Washington. The White House drew its water supply from the Potomac River, along the banks of which tens of thousands of troops without proper latrines were stationed. Perhaps because his constitution had been weakened by his earlier bout with scarlet fever, Willie was affected by the bacterial infection more severely than his brother Tad. He “grew weaker and more shadow-like” as the debilitating symptoms of his illness took their toll—high fever, diarrhea, painful cramps, internal hemorrhage, vomiting, profound exhaustion, delirium.
Tending to both boys, Mary “almost wore herself out with watching,” Commissioner French observed. She canceled the customary Saturday receptions and levees. For Lincoln, too, it was an agonizing period. Nicolay reported that the president gave “pretty much all his attention” to his sons, but the grim business of conducting the war could not be avoided.
Slipping in and out of consciousness, Willie would call for his friend Bud Taft, who sat by his bedside day and night. Late one evening, seeing Bud at his son’s side, Lincoln “laid his arm across Bud’s shoulder and stroked Willie’s hair.” Turning to Bud, he said quietly, “You ought to go to bed, Bud,” but Bud refused to leave, saying, “If I go he will call for me.” Returning later, Lincoln “picked up Bud, who had fallen asleep, and carried him tenderly to bed.”
As news of the boy’s critical condition spread through Washington, most of the celebratory illuminations were canceled. The Evening Star wrote that “the President and Mrs. Lincoln have deep sympathy in this community in this hour of their affliction.” Though work continued in the offices of the White House, staffers walked slowly down the corridors “as if they did not wish to make a noise.” Lincoln’s secretary, William Stoddard, recalled the question on everyone’s lips: “Is there no hope? Not any. So the doctors say.”
At 5 p.m. on Thursday, February 20, Willie died. Minutes later, Lincoln burst into Nicolay’s office. “Well, Nicolay,” he said, “my boy is gone—he is actually gone!” He began to sob. According to Elizabeth Keckley, when Lincoln came back into the room after Willie’s body had been washed and dressed, he “buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion.” Though Keckley had observed Lincoln more intimately than most, she “did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.”
Mary Lincoln was “inconsolable,” Keckley recorded. “The pale face of her dead boy threw her into convulsions.” She had frequently said of her blue-eyed, handsome son that “if spared by Providence, [he] would be the hope and stay of her old age.” She took to her bed with no way to sleep or ease her grief.
Meanwhile, Tad was now critically ill. With Mary in no condition to care for him, Lincoln sought help. He sent his carriage to the Brownings, who came at once and spent the night at Tad’s bedside. He asked Gideon Welles’s young wife, Mary Jane, to sit with the boy. Julia Bates, recovered from her stroke, also watched over him. Clearly, Tad required professional care around the clock. Lincoln turned to Dorothea Dix, the tireless crusader who had been appointed by the secretary of war as Superintendent of Women Nurses. She was a powerful woman with set ideas, among them the belief that women’s corsets had a baneful effect on their health. She would routinely lecture young women on the subject. One girl refused to listen, insisting that she would rather “be dead than so out of fashion.” To this, Dix rejoined, “My dear…if you continue to lace as tightly as you do now, you will not long have the privilege of choice. You will be both dead and out of fashion.”
Asked to recommend a nurse, Dix chose Rebecca Pomroy, a young widow who had worked on typhoid wards in two Washington hospitals. Introducing Nurse Pomroy to Lincoln, Dix assured the president that she had “more confidence” in her than any other nurse, even those twice her age. Lincoln took Pomroy’s hand and smiled, saying: “Well, all I want to say is, let her turn right in.”
While Willie’s body lay in the Green Room and Mary remained in bed under sedation, Nurse Pomroy tended Tad. Whenever possible, the president brought his work into Tad’s room and sat with his son, who was “tossing with typhoid.” Always curious and compassionate about other people’s lives, Lincoln asked the new nurse about her family. She explained that she was a widow and had lost two children. Her one remaining child was in the army. Hearing her painful story, he began to cry, both for her and for his own stricken family. “This is the hardest trial of my life,” he said. “Why is it? Oh, why is it?” Several times during the long nights Tad would awaken and call for his father. “The moment [the president] heard Taddie’s voice he was at his side,” unmindful of the picture he presented in his dressing gown and slippers.
On the Sunday after Willie’s death, Lincoln drove with Browning to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown to inspect the vault where his son’s body would lie until his final burial in Springfield. The funeral service was scheduled for 2 p.m. in the East Room the following day. Though scores of people were invited, Mary asked Mrs. Taft to “keep the boys home the day of the funeral; it makes me feel worse to see them.” Nonetheless, without consulting his distraught wife, Lincoln “sent for Bud to see Willie before he was put in the casket.” “He lay with his eyes closed,” the essayist Nathaniel Parker Willis recalled, “his brown hair parted as we had known it—pale in the slumber of death; but otherwise unchanged, for he was dressed as if for the evening.” At noontime, the president, the first lady, and Robert entered the Green Room to bid farewell to Willie before the casket was closed. Commissioner French was told that the Lincolns wanted “no spectator of their last sad moments in that house with their dead child,” and that Mary was so overcome she could not attend the East Room service.
Congress had adjourned so that members could attend the service. Many of those present had attended the ball just nineteen days earlier—the vice president, the cabinet, the diplomatic corps, General McClellan and his staff. As the funeral guests filed in, a frightful storm arose. Heavy rain and high winds uprooted trees, destroyed a church, and tore the roofs off many houses. After the service was concluded, a long line of carriages made its way through the tempest to the cemetery chapel where Willie was laid to rest temporarily inside the vault. Lincoln, who had so agonized whenever the stormy weather had pelted the grave of his first love, Ann Rutledge, perhaps found some solace that his son’s body was now sheltered from the rain and howling wind.
In the weeks that followed, Lincoln worried about Mary, who remained in her bed, unable to cope with daily life. Though Tad eventually recovered, Mary found it difficult to endure his company, which only intensified her sense of Willie’s absence. Nor could she bear to see Bud and Holly Taft. She never invited them back to the White House, leaving Tad utterly isolated. Understanding the situation, the president tried to keep his son by his side, often carrying the boy to his own bed at night.
Mary seemed to find some small comfort in her conversations with Rebecca Pomroy and Mary Jane Welles. The latter, who spent many nights keeping vigil at Tad’s bedside, had lost five children of her own and could relate to Mary’s sorrow. In her talks with Mrs. Pomroy, Mary tried to understand how the widow could bear to nurse the children of strangers after the devastation of her own family. Mary knew that she should surrender to God’s will, but found she could not. Looking back on Willie’s bout with scarlet fever two years earlier, she concluded that he was spared only “to try us & wean us from a world, whose chains were fastening around us,” but “when the blow came,” she was still “unprepared” to face it. “Our home is very beautiful,” she wrote a friend three months after Willie’s death, “the world still smiles & pays homage, yet the charm is dispelled—everything appears a mockery, the idolised one, is not with us.”
Indeed, the luxury and vanity in which she had indulged herself now seemed to taunt her. She plunged deeper into guilt and grief, speculating that God had struck Willie down as punishment for her overweening pride in her family’s exalted status. “I had become, so wrapped up in the world, so devoted to our own political advancement that I thought of little else,” she acknowledged. She knew it was a sin to think thus, but she believed that God must have “foresaken” her in taking away “so lovely a child.”
Nor could she fully accept the comfort Mary Jane Welles found in the belief that her children awaited her in heaven. If only she had faith that Willie was “far happier” in an afterlife than he had been “when on earth,” Mary suggested to Mary Jane, she might accept his loss. Although in later years she would come to trust that “Death, is only a blessed transition” to a place “where there are no more partings & and no more tears shed,” her faith at this juncture was not strong enough to provide solace.
Crippled by her sadness, Mary was drawn to the relief offered by the spiritualist world. Through Elizabeth Keckley, she was introduced to a celebrated medium who helped her, said Mary, pierce the “veil” that “separates us, from the ‘loved & lost.’” During several séances, some conducted at the White House, she believed she was able to see Willie. Spiritualism would reach epic proportions during the Civil War, fueled perhaps by the overwhelming casualties. Mediums could offer comfort to the bereaved, assuring them “the spirits of the dead do not pass from this earth, but remain here amongst us unseen.” One contemporary commented that it seemed as if “one heard of nothing but of spirits and of mediums. All tables and other furniture seemed to have become alive.” Some mediums communicated by producing rapping or knocking sounds; others made tables tip and sway; still others channeled voices of the dead. Whatever method they used, one scholar of the movement observes, they “offered tangible evidence that the most refractory barrier on earth, the barrier of death, could be transcended by the power of sympathy.”
Mary’s occasional glimpses of Willie provided only temporary relief. His death had left her “an altered woman,” Keckley observed. “The mere mention of Willie’s name would excite her emotion, and any trifling memento that recalled him would move her to tears.” She was unable to look at his picture. She sent all his toys and clothes away. She refused to enter the guest room in which he died or the Green Room in which he was laid out.
Outwardly, the president appeared to cope with Willie’s death better than his wife. He had important work to engage him every hour of the day. He was surrounded by dozens of officials who needed him to discuss plans, make decisions, and communicate them. Yet, despite his relentless duties, he suffered an excruciating sense of loss. On the Thursday after his son died, and for several Thursdays thereafter, he closed himself off in the Green Room and gave way to his terrible grief. “That blow overwhelmed me,” he told a White House visitor; “it showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before.”
Like Mary, Lincoln longed for Willie’s presence, a longing fulfilled not through mediums but in his active dream life. Three months after Willie’s death, while reading aloud a passage from Shakespeare’s King John in which Constance grieves over the death of her son, Lincoln paused; he turned to a nearby army officer and said: “Did you ever dream of some lost friend, and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him, and yet have a consciousness that it was not a reality?…That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie.”
While Mary could not tolerate to see physical reminders of Willie, Lincoln cherished mementos of his son. He placed a picture Willie had painted on his mantelpiece so he could show it to visitors and tell stories about his beloved child. One Sunday after church, he invited Browning to the library to show him a scrapbook he had just found in which Willie kept dates of various battles and programs from important events. Maintaining vivid consciousness of his dead child was essential for a man who believed that the dead live on only in the minds of the living. Ten months later, when he wrote young Fanny McCullough shortly after her father’s battle-field death, he closed with the consolation of remembrance. In time, he promised her, “the memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before.”
Now, more than ever before, Lincoln was able to identify in a profound and personal way with the sorrows of families who had lost their loved ones in the war.
THE PENINSULA CAMPAIGN
