Rise to Greatness (13 page)

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Lincoln was elated by the news of Grant’s success. Such swift and consequential victories seemed to vindicate his six-week effort to push the Union armies forward. Since his visit from Emerson, Lincoln had been reading some of the man’s work, and he was particularly taken with Emerson’s lecture on the poet Goethe, so much so that he borrowed some of Goethe’s works from the Library of Congress. Emerson’s idea of the man of genius bravely seeing to the heart of things while others are blinded by “mountainous miscellany” no doubt struck a chord in the president. “Goethe teaches courage,” Emerson wrote, in “the darkest and deafest eras.”

The president felt like crowing, and when Stanton arrived at his office carrying the necessary papers to promote Grant to major general of volunteers, Lincoln announced: “I cannot speak so confidently about the fighting qualities of the Eastern men, or what are called Yankees … but this I know—if the Southerners think that man for man they are better than our Illinois men, or western men generally, they will discover themselves in a grievous mistake.” Newly confident, Lincoln fired off a strategy memo to Halleck and Buell, suggesting ways to follow up on the victories. He proposed an amnesty from charges of treason for any Rebels who decided, in light of the news, to rejoin the Union. Now, instead of marking Washington’s Birthday with the beginnings of an offensive, he could use the day to celebrate the fruits of one.

This triumph also came at a critical moment for Seward, who had been deeply worried about the political situation in Europe. In early February, Seward had written to Ambassador Adams in London, “We have unmistakeable evidence” that Southern sympathizers in the British Parliament were preparing to move for recognition of the Confederacy. Adams assured Seward that Palmerston’s government wasn’t ready for that step, but he warned that the South was winning the propaganda war in Britain. Adams begged for solid details of Federal successes: “Our friends want their hands strengthened.”

Now Seward had something fresh and encouraging to report. “The great victory at Mill Springs, in Kentucky, has quickly been followed by the capture of Fort Henry … and the interruption of the [Confederate] railroad,” Seward wrote even before the news from Fort Donelson. When word of that victory reached Washington, Seward composed an additional dispatch to Adams, labeled “Confidential.” Now was the time, he suggested, to play up the steps Lincoln was taking against slavery, including the impending execution of Nathaniel Gordon. The British must not be allowed to think that both sides in this war were morally equivalent. He also noted that with each advance of the Union army, more slaves were being liberated: “Although the war has not been waged against slavery, yet the army acts immediately as an emancipating crusade.”

It was as if the sun had risen on Northern hopes, and everything looked different in the dawn. A French nobleman visiting Washington in February observed that most foreign diplomats he had met in the capital sympathized with the Rebels and expected the Union to fail. But recent events were causing them to think again, he reported. Ambassador Dayton, writing from Paris, summed up the impact most succinctly. Momentum had been building for intervention, he wrote, but now “the switch had been turned off.”

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But even as Lincoln experienced his best fortnight as president, he also began a descent into one of the blackest periods of his life. A few of the guests at Mary’s midnight ball on February 5 had noticed that the first lady and the president took turns slipping away from the party now and then, only to return with anxious looks on their faces. They were worried about Willie Lincoln, who lay burning with typhoid fever and struggling to breathe. Over the next two weeks, he would seem better for a few hours, then sink deeper. By February 11, the boy was so sick that he “absorbed pretty much all” of the president’s attention. A week later, when Willie was still no better, Lincoln began to lose hope.

William Wallace Lincoln was the third of the four Lincoln boys. Their oldest, Robert, was an inward young man who, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, had a distant relationship with his father. Their second son, Edward, had died of tuberculosis in 1850, when he was three. Willie, born in 1850, was the boy most like Lincoln. He was better looking than his father, with light brown hair, blue eyes, and a round, handsome face. But he had his father’s common sense and self-control. “He was his father over again both in magnetic personality and in his gifts and tastes,” wrote one biographer. Father and son both loved to read and to write poetry; they were both fascinated by trains and arithmetic. Willie was “an amiable, good-hearted boy,” in the words of Horatio Taft, the father of Willie’s friends Bud and Holly, with “more judgment and foresight than any boy of his age that I have ever known.”

Adults were charmed by Willie’s quiet self-confidence and early maturity. “He never failed to seek me out in the crowd, shake hands, and make some pleasant remark,” the poet Nathaniel Parker Willis remembered, “and this, in a boy ten years of age, was, to say the least, endearing.” One day, when Willie was playing on the north lawn of the Executive Mansion, a carriage came up the drive bearing Secretary of State Seward and a prince of France. The two men gave Willie a formal salute, and without a thought the boy straightened his back, removed his hat and bowed as regally as a cavalier, before turning back to his game. As one biographer of the Lincoln family put it, Willie “was the sort of child people imagine their children will be, before they have any.”

But he was not the sort of boy who wins over adults while annoying other children. Julia Taft, then a teenager, who often kept an eye on her younger brothers and their playmates, called Willie “the most lovable boy I ever knew, bright, sensible, sweet-tempered and gentle-mannered.” (The feeling was mutual; eleven-year-old Willie had a crush on the winsome Julia.) Tad, two years younger than Willie, had none of this polish, and though the two boys were nearly inseparable, he couldn’t help resenting, sometimes, Willie’s striking self-possession. One morning in church Tad managed to cut his finger with a pocketknife, and when Julia Taft scolded him under her breath, he answered loudly: “Just you keep your eyes on Willie, sitting there good as pie.”

On the rack of the war, Lincoln found refuge in his boys. To the astonishment of more traditional parents, the president took delight in nearly everything they did. Lincoln was “the most indulgent parent I ever knew,” said one Illinois associate. “His children literally ran over him and he was powerless to withstand their importunities.” Mary defended his lax approach, quoting her husband’s maxim that “love is the chain whereby to lock a child to its parent.” In an age when most adults believed that children were better seen than heard, when paddles and canes were standard classroom accessories, Lincoln’s boys had free run of the White House. They shelled a cabinet meeting with a toy cannon, stole the president’s reading glasses, and sabotaged the network of bells used to summon servants, so that the whole house jangled at once. No matter how disruptive their pranks, they were rarely scolded.

Recalling the hard labor of his own boyhood, Lincoln seemed determined that his sons would be joyful. He encouraged them to stage musicales and circuses in the White House attic, and he paid a nickel for a ticket to see Willie dancing in his mother’s gown and Tad belting out a campaign jingle. The boys dimmed the lights for magic lantern shows, formed their own armies and navies, and brought their pets—including a goat—into the house. When Thomas Stackpole, a White House doorkeeper, complained about the latter, Lincoln answered, “It interests the boys and does them good; let the goat be.”

Julia Taft recalled once hearing a commotion in another part of the mansion. Opening a door, she found the president sprawled on the floor with his sons and her brothers, all trying desperately to pin him. He had a determined boy on each leg and one on each arm, and he tossed them at whim as they roared with laughter. Tad saw her in the doorway and cried out, “Julie—come quick and sit on his stomach!”

Of Willie, an Illinois friend declared that Lincoln was “fonder of that boy than he was of anything else.” Sometimes, while watching his son, the president felt as if he were seeing himself through the tunnel of time. Lincoln once studied Willie’s face as the boy sat at the family table lost in thought, evidently pondering a perplexing matter. Making no move to help, he waited patiently while Willie furrowed his brow and pursed his lips. When his son finally brightened, Lincoln turned to a visitor and said, “I know every step of the process by which that boy arrived at his satisfactory solution.” How did he know? “It is by just such slow methods I attain results,” the president said.

Willie wasting away from diarrhea and dehydration was a horrible thing to watch, and the family was relieved when he appeared to rally on February 12, his father’s fifty-third birthday. But the hopeful moment quickly passed.

Then Tad came down with typhoid as well, and for a time the Lincolns feared they would lose both boys. Tad’s condition stabilized, but Willie grew weaker. On February 18, Nicolay recorded in his journal that Willie “is now thought to be in extremis. The President is nearly worn out, with grief and watching.”

The scene at the bedside was inexpressibly sad. Willie lay in the elaborately carved rosewood bed his mother had recently purchased in New York, under gold and purple linens. His parents kept a nearly constant vigil. Bud Taft spent hour after hour with his suffering friend, taking his hand when Willie was afraid. Late one night, Lincoln found Bud sitting in the dim room and gently suggested that he go to bed. “If I go he will call for me,” the boy answered.

This agony continued for two more days. On February 20, at about five
P.M.
, Nicolay was working silently at his desk when the president staggered in and slumped onto the sofa. He looked drawn and pale. “Well, Nicolay, my boy is gone,” Lincoln rasped. “He is actually gone.” Then he burst into tears. Sobbing, Lincoln struggled to his feet and lurched back down the corridor.

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Mary Lincoln collapsed into her bed and remained there for the next three weeks. Consumed by grief, she banned the Taft boys from the house, saying the sound of their voices was too much for her to bear. Robert Lincoln rushed home from school. Friends pitched in: Senator Browning and his wife alternated with Mary Ellen Welles, wife of the navy secretary, in keeping watch over Tad as he recovered. The celebration that had been planned for Washington’s Birthday—every public building and fine home in the capital was to be illuminated with decorative lights—was canceled and the White House was draped in black crepe.

With Mary incapacitated and Tad still very sick, Lincoln was overwhelmed. Dorothea Dix, superintendent of nurses for the army, asked what help she could give him; gratefully, he answered that the family needed an experienced full-time nurse. Dix offered the services of a woman from Chelsea, Massachusetts, named Rebecca Pomroy, who was volunteering at one of Washington’s largest military hospitals. Pomroy arrived at the White House to find Willie’s body lying in state in the Green Room and Tad in bed weeping over the loss of his brother. She was sitting at Tad’s bedside a few hours later when the president walked in and sat across from her. “Are you Miss, or Mrs.?” he asked. “What of your family?” Pomroy answered that she was a widow; she also told Lincoln that two of her three children were dead, while the surviving one was a soldier for the Union. With no one at home to care for, she said, she had come to Washington to serve the war effort.

Despite her many losses, Pomroy must have had a marked tranquility about her, because Lincoln asked her how she had managed to endure so much sorrow. “Did you always feel that you could say, ‘Thy will be done’?” The nurse answered no. “It was months after my affliction that God met me,” she said, “at a camp-meeting.” Ever since that revival experience, she had been comforted by “God’s love and care.”

Lincoln had been an outspoken religious skeptic in his youth, and William Herndon insisted that he never adopted remotely orthodox Christian views. Yet he was a dedicated reader of the Bible, a “growing man in religion,” in the words of his close friend Joshua Speed. “He found difficulty in giving his assent, without mental reservation, to … long, complicated statements of Christian doctrine,” the Connecticut congressman Henry Deming recalled. But he would quickly join any church whose only membership requirement was to believe one simple statement: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Especially in times of trial, Lincoln wrestled with the ultimate questions of life and meaning. After his son Eddie died in 1850, Lincoln had begun attending the First Presbyterian Church in Springfield, where he undertook a long exploration of Christian faith guided by the pastor, James Smith.

Now he again found himself in an abyss of sadness, and again he was asking those ultimate questions. “This is the hardest trial of my life,” a tearful Lincoln confessed to Pomroy during their first encounter. The following night they had the same discussion. “He would question me upon special points to learn how I obtained my faith in God,” the nurse recalled, “and the secret of placing myself in the Divine hands. Again on the third night, he made a similar request, showing the same degree of interest.”

Willie’s funeral was held on February 24. A fierce storm blew in, with winds so strong they nearly swept Edward Bates off his feet. He had to grab a tree and hang on until his servant could reach him. The rain stopped by early afternoon, but the wind blew harder, toppling a downtown church steeple. Inside the White House, dignitaries gathered quietly as the windows rattled and the gutters whined. Willie’s embalmed body, dressed in a fine suit, rested in a rosewood and metal casket in the Green Room. Flowers from the White House conservatory were twined between his fingers. Before the funeral, Mary visited the body with her husband and oldest son for about half an hour, an experience that left her so distraught she refused to attend the service. Instead, just before the casket was closed she sent a messenger to retrieve the flowers as a memento.