AGAINST ALL ODDS, Seward and his son Frederick eventually recovered from their frightful injuries, but the “night of horrors” took its ultimate toll on Frances Seward. Six weeks afterward, convinced that she had taken on the afflictions of her loved ones through “vicarious suffering,” she collapsed and died. Her funeral in Auburn was said to have brought together “the largest assemblage that ever attended the funeral of a woman in America.” In the months that followed, Fanny remained at her father’s side, trying to compensate for her departed mother until she herself fell desperately ill from tuberculosis. When she died two months short of her twenty-second birthday, Seward was inconsolable. “Truly it may be said,” the Washington Republican noted, “that the assassin’s blows passed by the father and son and fell fatally on the mother and daughter.”
Seward remained secretary of state throughout President Andrew Johnson’s term. While his attempts to mediate Johnson’s bitter struggles with the radicals in Congress failed, he took great pride in what was originally lampooned as “Seward’s Folly”—the purchase of Alaska. After retiring from public office, he spent his last years traveling. With Fred and Anna, he embarked on an eight-month journey to Alaska, California, and Mexico. Returning to Auburn, he immediately made plans for a trip around the world, visiting Japan, China, India, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, and France. He died peacefully in 1872 at the age of seventy-one, surrounded by his family. When his daughter-in-law Jenny asked if he had any deathbed advice to impart, he said simply: “Love one another.” Thurlow Weed, who served as a pallbearer, wept openly as the body of his oldest friend was lowered into the grave.
Stanton’s remaining days in the cabinet were acrimonious. His sympathy with the congressional radicals on Reconstruction brought him into open conflict with the president, who asked for his resignation. Refusing to honor Johnson’s request even after he was handed a removal order, Stanton “barricaded himself” in his office for weeks, taking his meals in the department and sleeping on his couch. He argued that his dismissal violated the Tenure of Office Act, recently passed by congressional radicals over the president’s veto, which required Senate consent for the removal of any cabinet officer. Johnson’s disregard for the Tenure of Office Act became one of the articles of impeachment lodged against him in 1868. When the impeachment failed by one vote in the Senate, Stanton finally submitted his resignation.
Although exhausted by the ordeal, Stanton had little time to rest. His fortune had been depleted during his tenure in the cabinet. After returning to the practice of law, he was overjoyed when President Grant nominated him to the Supreme Court, the “only office” he had ever desired to hold, in December 1869. His happiness was short-lived. Three days later, as his family gathered for the Christmas holidays, he suffered a severe asthma attack, lapsed into unconsciousness, and died. He had just turned fifty-five. “I know that it is useless to say anything,” Robert Todd Lincoln wrote to Stanton’s son Edwin, Jr., “and yet when I recall the kindness of your father to me, when my father was lying dead and I felt utterly desperate, hardly able to realize the truth, I am as little able to keep my eyes from filling with tears as he was then.”
Edward Bates spent his remaining years with his close-knit family, reunited with his son Fleming, whom he had welcomed home from the Confederate Army once the war ended. When Bates died in 1869 at the age of seventy-six, he was revered as much for his character as for his public accomplishments. Above all, one eulogist noted, “it was in his social and domestic relations that his character shown brightest; it was as a husband, as a father and a friend that he has endeared himself to others by ties which death cannot sever.”
After presiding over the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, Salmon Chase turned his addicted gaze to the 1868 presidential race, his hopes resting with the Democrats after Grant had secured the Republican nomination. With Kate serving as his campaign manager, he had his name placed before the delegates, but when Ohio announced for New York’s Horace Seymour, Chase’s candidacy was doomed. Once more, his home state had derailed his ambitions. Four years later, still hoping for the presidential nod, he switched his allegiance to the Liberal Republican Party. Again the nomination eluded him, going instead to Horace Greeley. His physical condition weakened by a heart attack and a stroke, Chase fell into depression, confiding to a friend that he was “too much of an invalid to be more than a cipher. Sometimes I feel as if I were dead.” Death came on May 7, 1873, with Kate and Nettie by his side. He was sixty-five.
After her father’s death, Kate saw her marriage to Sprague fall apart. An affair with New York senator Roscoe Conkling ended in scandal when Sprague, finding the couple together at his Narragansett mansion, went after Conkling with a shotgun. Following a violent argument during which Sprague tried to throw Kate from a bedroom window, she sued for divorce. She returned to Washington, where she died in poverty at fifty-eight.
The Blairs returned to the Democratic Party. Though Frank Blair was selected as Seymour’s vice presidential candidate in 1868, his intemperate denunciations of opponents cut short what might have been a promising political future. He died from a fall in his house in 1875 at the age of fifty-four. Old Man Blair outlived his son by one year, maintaining “his physical vigor, his mental faculties and his sprightliness of disposition” until his death at eighty-five. Montgomery served as counsel to Democrat Samuel Tilden in the disputed election of 1876, which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes eventually won. Blair was writing a biography of Andrew Jackson when he died in 1883 at the age of seventy.
Gideon Welles supported Andrew Johnson during the impeachment trial, remaining in the cabinet until 1868. Returning to Connecticut, he wrote a series of historical essays and was among the first to depict Lincoln as “a towering figure, coping admirably with herculean tasks.” His perceptive diary, which he edited in his last years, remains one of the most valuable sources on the dynamics within the Lincoln administration. Welles was seventy-five when he died from a streptococcus infection in 1878.
John Nicolay and John Hay remained friends until the end of their lives, coauthoring a massive ten-volume study of Lincoln based on his then-unpublished papers. Nicolay was at work on an abridged version of their study when he died in 1901 at sixty-nine. Hay served as secretary of state under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Shortly before he died from a blood clot at the age of sixty-six in 1905, he dreamed that he had returned “to the White House to report to the President who turned out to be Mr. Lincoln. He was very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness…. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that this slight order was within my power to obey.” Forty years after the assassination of his beloved chief, Hay awoke with an “overpowering melancholy.”
Mary Lincoln never recovered from her husband’s death. After returning to Illinois, she confided to Elizabeth Blair Lee that “each morning, on awakening, from my troubled slumbers, the utter impossibility of living another day, so wretched, appears to me, as an impossibility.” Were it not for her “precious Tad,” she told her boy’s tutor, she “would gladly welcome death.”
Mother and son were nearly inseparable. Tad journeyed with Mary to Europe, demonstrating what John Hay described as “a thoughtful devotion and tenderness beyond his years.” Not long after returning to America, Tad suffered what doctors termed “compression of the heart.” He died two months later at eighteen. “The modest and cordial young fellow who passed through New York a few weeks ago with his mother will never be known outside the circle of his mourning friends,” commented John Hay in a touching obituary written for the New York Tribune. “But ‘little Tad’ will be remembered as long as any live who bore a personal share in the great movements whose center for four years was Washington. He was so full of life and vigor—so bubbling over with health and high spirits, that he kept the house alive with his pranks and his fantastic enterprises.”
Mary’s misery was compounded by her ever-consuming worries over money. “It is very hard to deal with one who is sane on all subjects but one,” Robert confided in Mary Harlan, the young woman who would become his wife. “You could hardly believe it possible, but my mother protests to me that she is in actual want and nothing I can do or say will convince her to the contrary.” Her increasingly erratic behavior persuaded Robert to commit her to a state hospital for the insane where she remained for four months until she was released to the care of her sister Elizabeth in Springfield. The episode permanently estranged Mary from her only remaining child. After a final trip to Europe, she lived her remaining years as a virtual recluse in the Edwards mansion, where, in happier days, she and Abraham Lincoln had met and married. She was sixty-three in 1882 when her oft-stated longing for death was fulfilled at last.