Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
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
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
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.