Chapter 4 - Embattled Retreat
surely in one of the very best. The contrast was more than sad—it was frightening. “There is a soap factory south east of the President’s Mansion,” complained Lincoln’s commissioner of public buildings, Benjamin French, to the Board of Health, “the stench from which, when the wind direction is South East, is almost unindurable [sic] at the mansion, at the Treasury Department, and at all other places in that vicinity. Mrs. Lincoln has especially complained concerning it.” French went even further with a warning to the United States Senate: “The Washington Canal [that flowed into the Potomac not far from the White House to the south] is the grand receptacle of all the filth of the city . . . the waste from all the public buildings, the hotels, and very many private residences is drained into it . . . unless something is done to clean away this immense mass of fetid and corrupt matter, the good citizens of Washington must, during some hot season, find themselves visited by a pestilence . . . the health of the entire population and the lives of thousands depend on it.” John Hay added his two cents’ worth: “The ghosts of twenty thousand drowned cats come in nights through the South Windows.” French’s warning came too late for Willie Lincoln. The pestilence he feared had already struck the White House. That “vast septic tank,” the Potomac, which supplied the White House with water for washing, was most probably the cause of the eleven-year-old boy’s death of typhoid fever in February 1862. Tad Lincoln had almost died. Now two of the four Lincoln boys (Eddie had died in 1850) were gone. So whatever military or political crises had kept the Lincolns from their eagerly anticipated retreat at the Soldiers’ Home that first summer of 1861, there was no way Mary would risk another summer in “the City of Stink.” And from the fall of 1861 to the spring of 1862, the Union Army had performed well, with a succession of significant victories throughout the Confederate states. New Orleans was in Union hands; McClellan was within a few miles of the Confederate capital, Richmond. So the Lincolns moved out to the country in early June 1862 and didn’t return to the city until the middle of November. The pattern was much the same in 1863 and 1864. Their prolonged reliance on the Soldiers’ Home was such an obvious retreat from the miseries and dangers of living in the White House that in 1866, just one year after the three surviving Lincolns were gone from it, a site adjacent to the Soldiers’ Home grounds was proposed as the ideal place for a new presidential mansion to be built. Mary had not exaggerated when she wrote to Hannah Shearer, a Springfield neighbor, that the Soldiers’ Home was “a very beautiful place.” Banker George Riggs had chosen well the site for his new home. The land had once been part of a large plantation known as “Pleasant Hills.” He bought partof that very desirable real estate at auction in June 1842, impressed by the description: “[It] lies on a commanding height overlooking the city of Washington . . . it is distinguished by its beauty of site [and] has been enriched by high cultivation and contains thriving orchards of well selected fruit.” Even today, with the city closing in on the few hundred acres that remain of the original property, and with more buildings on the grounds to house over a thousand veterans, the hilltop still can be a welcome ten degrees cooler than downtown in the summer. Just before the family moved out to the Soldiers’ Home for the summer of 1862, Mary had written another Springfield neighbor, Julia Ann Sprigg, “When we are in sorrow, quiet is very necessary to us.” Both parents had had such high hopes for Willie, their poised, considerate, highly intelligent third son, the one most like Lincoln himself, people said. But unlike Thomas Jefferson’s retreat, Poplar Forest, ninety miles from Monticello, where he could find “the solitude of a hermit,” the Soldiers’ Home was just a few miles north of the chaos of the capital city. The times were so turbulent, the fighting so close by, and Lincoln’s responsibilities so overwhelming, for the family to find the peace they longed for at the Soldiers’ Home was next to impossible. The ride out to the Soldiers’ Home was disturbing enough, with its rumbling ambulances, military hospitals, and contraband camps along the way. Everyday sounds of the immense mobilization of men and material needed to fight a war being waged on a continental scale surrounded them. A young soldier camped on the grounds wrote his brother in September 1862, “There was fifty thousand troops passed up 7th St. on Saturday.” This was Lincoln’s usual route into the Soldiers’ Home grounds from the White House, and a major commercial route from the city’s docks to the north. A year later, the same soldier wrote: “There is 1800 mules not far from here that keeps muleing all night and make a devilish noise.” Not only that, he reported, “two of the old soldiers at the home had a big fight one was stone blind and both big fat stout men the blind man kicked bully for him.” Then there was the hundred-man Company K, the president’s guard, which had arrived at the Soldiers’ Home in early September 1862 to provide Lincoln at last with the protection he detested (“an almost morbid dislike,” said his journalist friend, Noah Brooks) and eluded as often as he could. Their camp was within sight of the Lincoln cottage; the drills, the drums, the rifle practice, even the music of its two bands must have added to the din. At least once, Mary Lincoln had to ask them to stop playing. Add to that the clankings of the cavalry escort that accompanied Lincoln from the Soldiers’ Home into town, which made so much noise on the way that he and Mary could hardly hear themselves talk. On top of that was the constant traffic at the military cemetery just down the hill from the Soldiers’ Home as new war dead were brought in to be buried, and old dead exhumed to be taken home for permanent burial. The clattering telegraph installed at the Soldiers’ Home by July 1863 was sure to have Lincoln hovering over it, for he communicated with his field commanders at all hours of the day and night. On October 1, 1862, Mary Lincoln mentioned far more ominous sounds to a favorite in her most intimate circle, General Daniel Sickles. “When we are within hearing, as we on this elevation have been, for the last two or three days, of the roaring cannon, we can but pause and think.” That was not the first or the last time sounds of battle reached the Soldiers’ Home, and in July 1864, the war came within just a few miles as the Union Army fought off Jubal Early’s invasion of the capital itself in a two-day battle at Fort Stevens. Perhaps inured by then to war, the Lincolns didn’t flee from it; instead, they headed out to the fort to see the action for themselves. So those who call the Soldiers’ Home Lincoln’s “embattled retreat” would be closer to reality. Even so, it’s unlikely the Lincolns would have agreed with Company K’s Private Willard Cutter when he confessed to his brother back home in Meadville, Pennsylvania, that he was glad when the troops moved back to the city in late October 1863. “There is more going on in the city than at the Soldiers’ Home.” For at the very least, the Lincolns’ house at the Soldiers’ Home was all theirs. There were no offices or secretaries, no office seekers crowding the halls and stairways, no curious citizens to make off with slices of carpet, drapes, or curtains (once an entire lace curtain disappeared for lack of a day watchman, Commissioner French complained), and no young soldiers coming in to sit down and write letters (it was the people’s house, wasn’t it?). And on a sunny day, summer or winter, the Riggs cottage then, as it is today, was bright, airy, high-ceilinged, and spacious. The fourteen-inch thick brick exterior walls helped keep the house cool in the “heated season.” Architects have discovered that if the entrance door on the north side and the jib windows on the south side facing the city are kept open, fresh, clean air circulates throughout the house. (The National Trust may continue to rely largely on this natural ventilation in the preserved cottage.) Seven marble- manteled fireplaces still in place today would have provided some warmth in the colder months, and the cottage kitchen was “nice and warm—a good coal fire is burning all night,” Private Cutter was pleased to find. Lincoln was noticeably impatient to escape the White House for the Soldiers’ Home by four or five o’clock every afternoon, but it seems he was too courteous, perhaps too curious, and even hopeful for a rare bit of good news, to send anyone away who followed him out there, no matter what the hour. And plenty did. Some callers arrived so late at night that the servant who opened the door saw fit to comment on their intrusion. Ironically, it is thanks to that very intrusiveness that we have some of the most dramatic and poignant images of the president that exist. Some visitors were so desperate, some so angry, others so embarrassed by their thoughtlessness once they got a look at Lincoln, they paid little attention to the house itself. So it is not surprising that all we have are a few references to “a dark parlor,” a “dimly lighted hall,” and just a few hints of “a scantily furnished sort of parlor,” “a plainly furnished room” with a marble table in the center, “a neatly furnished drawing room,” “a haircloth-covered sofa,” a chandelier. But of Lincoln himself, the impressions were vivid. As late as August 1864, Lincoln appeared to one group of late- nighttime callers “holding a candle high above his head” to light his way downstairs, “clad in decidedly scant attire,” most likely his nightshirt, for we know from other accounts that he was delightfully unaware of how he looked in it when he had something else on his mind. (“He seemed to dislike clothing and in private wore as little of it as he could,” wrote the humorist David Ross Locke, creator of a favorite Lincoln character, Petroleum V. Nasby). He sometimes even “perambulate[d] through the [White] House” in his nightshirt, perhaps to share an amusing story with John Hay and John Nicolay, who slept there, or to dance a jig with the naval officer and general who brought good news to him in the middle of the night. When Lincoln realized there were women with these particular nighttime visitors, however, one of them recorded that he “beat a retreat and soon reappeared in more suitable apparel” to listen to their story. Colonel Silas W. Burt’s nighttime visit to the Soldiers’ Home in 1863 was so excruciating that he refused for years to talk about it publicly. “It was very evident,” Burt finally wrote many years later, “that [Lincoln] had just got up from his bed, or had been very nearly into it when we were announced.” Burt was appalled by Lincoln’s appearance that evening. “It was the face that in every line told the story of anxiety and weariness. [It] was so pitiful that I could almost have fallen on my knees and begged pardon for my part in the cruel presumption and impudence that had thus invaded his repose.” The president tried to keep awake during his visit, which began well after nine o’clock. “But the gaunt figure of the President had gradually slid lower on that slippery sofa, and his long legs were stretched out in front, the loose slippers half fallen from his feet, while the drowsy eyelids had almost closed over his eyes, and his jaded features had taken on the suggestion of relaxation in sleep.” It was June 26, 1863. Colonel Burt and his party did not know that the president had just made the agonizing decision to remove General Joseph Hooker, whom he liked very much, from command of the Army of the Potomac after his defeat at Chancellorsville, and to replace him with General George Meade just a few days before the critical battle of Gettysburg. It was Lincoln’s third change in the command of the hapless Army of the Potomac in one year. As if their timing weren’t bad enough, after Burt’s group had delivered its message of support from a formidable Democratic opponent, the governor of New York, Horatio Seymour, which Lincoln did not appear to regard as particularly significant, one of Burt’s companions that night, a major, who Burt noticed too late on the way out, had had too much whiskey, proceeded to slap the exhausted Lincoln on the knee and say, “Mr. President, tell us one of your good stories. . . . If the floor had opened and dropped me out of sight,” Burt recalled, “I should have been happy.” Lincoln contained himself, but turned his back on the major, and then explained in words Burt wrote down that same night: I believe I have the popular reputation of being a story-teller, but I do not deserve the name in its general sense; for it is not the story itself, but its purpose, or its effect, that interests me. I often avoid a long and useless discussion by others or a laborious explanation on my part by a short story that illustrates my point of view. So, too, the sharpness of a refusal or the edge of a rebuke may be blunted by an appropriate story, so as to save wounded feeling and yet serve the purpose. No, I am not simply a story-teller, but storytelling as an emollient saves me much friction and distress. More tersely and poignantly, Lincoln once put it another way: “I laugh because I must not weep. That’s all, that’s all.” Fortunately, some would-be visitors lost their way in “the intricacies of this labyrinth,” as Lincoln’s old friend, attorney Leonard Swett, described the route to the Soldiers’ Home, wooded and pitch black at night. Even in the daytime, it took sixteen-year-old drummer boy Harry Kieffer from noon to nightfall to find his way there from the city. When he finally arrived, a certain casualness was evident in the reception he got from the soldiers who had guarded Lincoln briefly before their unit went into battle. “Halt! Who goes there? A friend. Advance, friend, and give the countersign. Hello, Elias! said I, peering through the bushes, is that you? That isn’t the countersign, friend. You’d better give the countersign, or you’re a dead man.” This banter went on for some time until Kieffer, who had been in the hospital with heat exhaustion, was marched off to bed with instructions to “beat reveille at daybreak.” As soon as the Lincolns moved out of the White House for their first season at the Soldiers’ Home, they learned that enough of the essential, even the extraneous, visitors could find their way there day or night. Jay Cooke, the “financier of the Civil War” and key adviser to Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Salmon P. Chase, was one of the first to describe the warlike atmosphere at the Soldiers’ Home. One night in the fall of 1862, he arrived to find Lincoln “surrounded by a small army of officers and civilians coming and going.” Lincoln asked Cooke to wait until ten that evening, when the others would be gone. Cooke had already been phenomenally successful at raising millions of dollars for the war effort, and would continue to be so throughout the war and afterward. But he was convinced that General George Brinton McClellan, the “young Napoleon,” had to go. By then, Cooke had become totally disenchanted, as was Lincoln, by McClellan’s whining, procrastinating, even paranoid performance as head of the Army of the Potomac. (Some called him “Oliver Twist II” because he was always asking for more: troops, horses, anything, it seemed, to avoid action.) To Cooke, McClellan’s notorious “slows,” as Lincoln put it, were impeding his ability to raise the millions more needed to keep the war going. People were losing confidence, he argued, because they saw that McClellan “was entirely unfitted for the position of vast responsibility so unfortunately given him.” One week after Cooke’s Soldiers’ Home meeting, McClellan was indeed gone, despite pressure from his avid supporters to keep him. Cooke was relieved that “the sale of bonds increased and public confidence was restored.” Two years later, in the summer of 1864, arguably his worst both politically and militarily, Lincoln was still trudging down the stairs to receive visitors, in one case at midnight, to see the feisty Baltimore lawyer, Charles Gwynn. He was not even a political supporter, and, even more surprisingly, he was on business Lincoln had already taken care of, sparing the lives of several men sentenced to die the next morning as spies. Lincoln would have had every reason to excuse himself from meeting Gwynn at all, much less in the middle of the night. But he did not, and Gwynn was grateful: “Although you had decided to extend mercy to the prisoners without reference to any interview with me, I nevertheless acknowledge the promptness and genuine kindness, with which you exerted yourself to make that purpose effectual.” That same summer of 1864, an English lawyer, George Borrett, visited Washington, and as evidence of his earlier astute observation, at least as it applied to Lincoln, that “public life in America has no private side at all,” found himself late one night at the Soldiers’ Home, thanks to the daughter of a Treasury official. Borrett wrote, She was emphatically one of those strong-minded young ladies (and what American girl is not?) who can take care of themselves without chaperones, and very well too. It was dark when we reached the President’s residence, so that we could see little of what it was like beyond the fact that it stood in a sort of park and was guarded by a regiment of troops encamped picturesquely about the grounds.. . . We were waited upon by a buttonless “buttons,” apparently the sole domestic on the premises, to whom we told our wish. He suggested that it was rather late for an interview with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln and as it was then considerably past eight, I thought the hint very reasonable. Not so the Secretary’s daughter. With ready wit and admirable aplomb, she bade the officious page to go in and tell his master that there were three gentlemen there, who had come three thousand miles for the express purpose of seeing him and his lady, and did not intend to go away until they had done so. “I must confess,” continued Borrett, “I was very much ashamed of myself for disturbing a quiet couple in this unceremonious way, but it seemed to be all en règle . . . we had sat there but a few minutes, when there entered through the folding doors [a] long, lanky, lathlike figure with hair ruffled, and eyes very sleepy and . . . feet enveloped in carpet slippers.” Borrett’s initial reaction to seeing Lincoln in the city from afar earlier that day had been patronizing and harsh: Lincoln was “very ugly, and awkward and ungainly.” But as the conversation in the parlor went on and on, “briskly kept up by the President,” and covering everything from the United States Constitution, comparative legal systems, and problems of land acquisition in the two countries, to his early life and English poetry, Borrett, like so many others, became a convert: “Sit and talk with him for an hour, and note the instinctive kindliness of his every thought and word, and say if you have ever known a warmer-hearted noble spirit . . . one of the great historical characters of this century.” Mrs. Lincoln, less inclined than her husband to be imposed upon, did not appear that evening. On at least one spectacular occasion, Lincoln was not so hospitable to those who interrupted his evening peace. “It was late Saturday afternoon,” wrote John R. French, a former journalist, and now a Treasury employee. “Mr. Lincoln had left [the White House] wearier even than was his wont, for his retreat at the Soldiers’ Home; and in the hope of an undisturbed evening, and a quiet Sabbath, that he might gather some strength for the coming week, expected to be one of stirring events.” (The Battle of Second Bull Run was about to begin in late August, 1862, hopefully giving Lincoln the military victory he had been advised to claim before announcing his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.) French arrived with a Colonel Scott, who wanted Lincoln’s permission, over Secretary of War Stanton’s refusal, to enter the war zone in Virginia to retrieve the body of his wife, who had drowned after successfully nursing him back to health. “It was in the deepening twilight,” French remembered. “The House was still and dark. . . . In the gloaming, entirely alone, sat Mr. Lincoln. In his escape, as he had supposed, from all visitors, and weary with the care and heat of the day, he had thrown off coat and shoes, and with a large palm-leaf fan in his hand, as he reposed in a broad chair, one leg hanging over its arm, he seemed to be in deep thought, perhaps studying the chances of the impending battle.” After hearing the colonel’s story, “Lincoln rose to his feet, and in a voice of mingled vexation and sadness, asked: ‘Am I to have no rest? Is there no hour or spot when or where I may escape this constant call? Why do you follow me out here with such business as this? . . . Go to the War Department. Your business belongs there. If they cannot help you, then bear your burden, as we all must, until this war is over. Everything must yield to the paramount duty of finishing the war.’ ” The colonel and his companion were stunned by this “totally unexpected rebuff” and left in despair. But the next morning, Sunday, that longed-for quiet day now ruined for the president, the colonel was astonished to find Lincoln at his hotel room door, apologizing: “I was a brute last night!” Lincoln had already made all the necessary arrangements for the colonel to get to his wife’s body. “I have my carriage here and will go with you to the wharf . . . notwithstanding my apparent indifference last night, I honor you from the bottom of my heart for your manly love for your wife and devotion to her memory.” Lincoln’s extraordinary memory saved another larger entourage from a similar rebuff. The group had arrived late one night that same summer, awakening Lincoln to plead for the lives of three alleged Confederate spies who were to hang the next morning. It did not take Lincoln long to recollect that a couple in the group, a Mr. and Mrs. Gittings, had helped save Mary Lincoln and their three sons from a potentially violent attack by an angry mob as they passed through Baltimore on their way to his inauguration three years before. Lincoln said, “Madam, I owe you a debt. . . . You took my family into your home in the midst of a hostile mob. . . . You gave my family succor and helped them on their way. That debt has never been paid, and I am glad of the opportunity to do so now, for I shall save the lives of these men.” When Mrs. Gittings showed up once again, however, Lincoln ignored her plea for the life of another condemned Confederate officer. He felt that he already had liquidated his debt. After-hours or early-morning interruptions by members of his cabinet, political supporters, and even influential opponents were at least more understandable. “I go there, unattended, at all hours, by daylight and moonlight, by starlight and without any light,” said Secretary of State William Seward, rather poetically, if somewhat vainly. Both he and first-term vice president Hannibal Hamlin met with Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home until midnight more than once. For one summer, at least, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton occupied another house on the Soldiers’ Home grounds, which surely meant many meetings between the two men there. Senator Orville Hickman Browning was a long-time friend and confidant of the new president until the two men’s views on the advisability of an Emancipation Proclamation divided them. He visited the Soldiers’ Home four times, usually at night, in the summer of 1862. (He appeared at the White House almost every day.) Browning seemed inclined to bring others along with him to the Soldiers’ Home. One politician he brought had been so obviously hoping for advancement that Lincoln hurried Browning out to the steps of the house to talk about something else, ending their conversation by reciting a few verses from a popular poem, “Fanny,” which satirized a nouveau riche father and daughter those social pretensions caused their ultimate ruin. Browning could not understand why Lincoln found the “ludicrous conclusion” so amusing. Surrounded as he was by so many climbers and poseurs, it is not so surprising that Lincoln laughed. Perhaps the most important and interesting visitor Browning brought with him—for breakfast on June 18, 1862— was “the great New York Merchant,” philanthropist, and contractor for supplies to the Union Army and Navy, Alexander T. Stewart, an Irish immigrant, a brilliant businessman, and a staunch Republican with strong views on how the army was being led. He had no confidence in McClellan by that time, either. Stewart’s enormous “marble emporium” on Broadway, carrying the latest fashions and setting new and clever standards for service, provided him by that time with an average annual income of two million dollars. Mary Todd Lincoln had bought several thousand dollars’ worth of rugs and curtains there in one day the year before for her White House renovation, and Stewart had given her a dinner party. He also presented her with an expensive shawl, and as has always been the case with first ladies, it was difficult for Mary to distinguish between a gift, a bribe, and an expected purchase. She, of course, preferred to consider it a gift, but Stewart sent her a bill four months later. Henry James was certainly correct when he described Stewart’s store as “fatal to feminine nerves.” Mary couldn’t stay away, and ended up heavily in debt to Stewart after Lincoln’s assassination. He threatened to sue, but there is no evidence that he ever did. Washington was not considered a prestigious post for foreign diplomats in those days, but from Lincoln’s perspective, keeping Britain and France from recognizing the Confederacy was vital. Relations with Britain were particularly volatile throughout the war, beginning as early as December 1861. Fortunately for Lincoln, her majesty’ s representative in Washington was the seasoned, wily, albeit humorless Lord Lyons, Richard Bickerton Pemmell Lyons. He found the summer heat of the capital “abominable . . . overwhelming” and was undoubtedly grateful for the opportunity to feel the cool breezes at the Soldiers’ Home. Secretary of State William Seward had arranged for Lyons to visit Lincoln there at eight-thirty one Sunday evening in June 1863. It perhaps still rankled the president that, in order to avoid fighting a second war in December 1861, he had had to surrender two Confederate envoys whom an overly zealous United States Navy captain, Charles Wilkes, had taken from a British mail steamer, the Trent. Lyons had worked brilliantly to defuse that dangerous crisis. Confederate actions launched against the Union from the British possession, Canada, were a constant and dangerous irritant, and it didn’t help at all that British shipyards were building blockade runners and commerce raiders for the Confederate Navy, with devastating consequences for Union shipping. But Lincoln was in a good mood that Sunday, John Hay noted. In the morning, he’d even written an atrocious bit of doggerel about Lee’s retreat from Pennsylvania. And by then, Lincoln and Lord Lyons had arrived at a relationship Lyons described as “affectionate.” Commissioner French noted that Lord Lyons “was received with peculiar distinction & seemed to be particularly pleased to be present.” Lyons kept himself extremely well informed through a powerful intelligence network that extended from Canada to Mexico to Cuba, softening up members of Congress with the best champagne (he’d come with a hundred bottles), which of course would not have worked with teetotaling Lincoln. But Lincoln must have recognized and appreciated that Lyons, too, was working himself to exhaustion to keep the two countries from colliding. “I have no time to think whether I am amused or not,” Lyons wrote the British foreign minister, Lord Russell. In just one year, his tiny legation had sent over eight thousand dispatches and letters, and had received six and a half thousand, most if not all of which Lyons had read and signed. Lincoln was not above teasing diplomats, and Lyons, a bachelor, came in for his share. When he announced formally to Lincoln that Queen Victoria’s daughter was now married, Lincoln responded, “Go thou and do likewise.” This was not to be. Despite the urgings of Queen Victoria herself, Lyons had long ago taken his position. “I am afraid marriage is better never than late. The American women are undoubtedly very pretty, but my heart is too old and too callous to be wounded by their charms.” Another victim of Lincoln’s teasing, said to be an unnamed foreign minister, had been assured by Lincoln that the fruit of the persimmon tree they were passing by (which Lincoln explained was “our golden yellow wrong-side-out, a very delicious plum imported from Patagonia”) was “far superior to pears. In order to get the exquisite ripeness you must eat very rapidly.” When the diplomat bit into the bitter fruit and realized he’d been tricked, Lincoln roared with delight, undiplomatically as that might have appeared to some. By mid-August 1864, it was obvious that Lincoln was half dead with war weariness and worry. “Careworn,” the adjective used most often to describe his appearance, was no longer adequate. There was good reason: Lincoln believed his defeat for reelection that November was a distinct possibility, and if he did lose, the victors would then agree to “the dismemberment of the Union.” Three years of death and destruction would have been in vain. Richmond had not yet fallen, and the hundred thousand casualties in the Army of the Potomac over the past three years had accomplished next to nothing. Criticism of his handling of the war was more intense than ever. Even his old friend Browning wrote, “I fear he is a failure.” After his victory in November, Lincoln told his dear old friend, Joshua Speed, “I am a little alarmed about myself; just feel my hand.” It was “cold and clammy,” Speed said, and Lincoln then put his stockinged feet so close to the fire they steamed. Would it have been less tragic for the nation had Lincoln not lived through his second term? Mary certainly thought that was a possibility. “Poor Mr. Lincoln is looking so broken-hearted, so completely worn out, I fear he will not get through the next four years.” So the Soldiers’ Home did not turn out to be quite the tranquil haven he and Mary had hoped for. Others who visited could see that: “Says Gov [Alexander] Randall,” wrote Judge Joseph Mills in his diary after the two Wisconsin politicians visited the Soldiers’ Home in mid-August 1864, “why cant you Mr. P seek some place of retirement for a few weeks. you would be reinvigorated. Aye said the President, 3 weeks would do me no good—my thoughts my solicitude for this great country follow me where ever I go.” And Willie was never far from his thoughts, either. Nor from Mary’s, who wrote to her friend Mrs. Charles Eames, a prominent Washington social leader, from the Soldiers’ Home in July 1862, “In the loss of our idolized boy, we naturally have suffered such intense grief that a removal from the scene of our misery was found very necessary. Yet, in this sweet spot, that his bright nature, would have so well loved, he is not with us, and the anguish of the thought, oftentimes, for days overcomes me.” Laura Redden, a deaf journalist who wrote under the name Howard Glyndon, saw Mary at the Soldiers’ Home months after Willie’s death, and found that “her affliction seemed as fresh as ever.” But Mary at least could leave town altogether, and hope that her own grief over Willie’s death and her worries about the war and her husband’s survival would stay behind. Every summer she and the boys escaped, leaving Lincoln alone at the Soldiers’ Home for weeks, sometimes months, at a time. This was quite the reverse of their experience in Springfield, where Lincoln’s law practice took him away for as much as a third of the year. Resentful though she had been back then, unconscious retaliation for those absences was surely not Mary’s motivation. She was terrified that the dreaded “miasma” permeating Washington in the summertime, and feared by everyone, would kill the two boys she had left. Robert was out of danger at college in Boston or visiting friends for much of the time, but Tad, their “troublesome little sunshine,” was frail, often ill, and affected by the death and tension all around him. Still, there was much all the Lincolns loved about the Soldiers’ Home—“that sweet spot”—that would keep them coming back to it. In her 1862 letter to Mrs. Eames, Mary added that “We are truly delighted with this retreat, the drives and walks around here are delightful.” Visits from Elizabeth Blair Lee, her gossipy “in the know” friend, must have been a pleasure. From Chicago in August 1865, Mary would write her, “How dearly I loved the Soldiers Home & I little supposed, one year since, that I should be so far removed from it, broken hearted, and praying for death, to remove me, from a life so full of agony.” Mary kept a photograph of the cottage in the Lincoln family album, the strongest evidence for the Lincolns’ occupancy. Mary had asked Commissioner French for three thousand dollars in May 1864 to fix it up. This is somewhat puzzling, because Lincoln’s chances of reelection that fall were so uncertain. It may have been Mary’s way of keeping her mind off her own troubles, which included serious debt her husband knew nothing about, but which would have been revealed had he been defeated. Her beautification attack on the Riggs cottage was as ambitious as her renovation of the shabby White House had been. It’s more than likely that the cottage had served a utilitarian function for the Soldiers’ Home institution itself in the wintertime, and at the very least, needed a thorough cleaning before Mary would move her family in. Commissioner French’s invoices to John Alexander, a local home furnishings merchant, listed “washing floors, windows and paint—$81.01, 4 large buckets $8.00, 3 large scrub brushes $3.60, 3 mops $6.50, cleaning chair covers $27.00.” Mirrors and paintings were rehung, chair covers repaired and cleaned. Then Mary went full tilt at the decoration. If their Springfield home was any indication, the wallpaper she ordered from Alexander was the latest fashion, colorful, with lots of glitter. Years later, during her self-imposed exile in Europe, she would write to her daughter-in-law, Mary Harlan Lincoln, “papering is a great improvement—makes a house look homelike—use it all the different patterns . . . you never see a place in E[urope] which is not papered.” Mary ordered enough rolls to paper eight of the cottage’s many rooms! Yards and yards of expensive cocoa matting were also ordered, to be laid over the pine floors. Lincoln may have worn those loose carpet slippers that visitors commented on to keep from damaging the matting, or scratching his feet, which in any event, always gave him great discomfort. (He was overjoyed to find a foot doctor who was so effective that Lincoln wanted to send him into the field to minister to foot-weary troops.) The Alexander invoices mention carpeting for the halls and staircases. All the handsome marble mantelpieces in the cottage remained. So did the shellacked pine paneling in the library. Some hints do exist of the private, more social, even relaxed times at the Soldiers’ Home, perhaps evenings of whist, chess, singing, or checkers, assisted by a small staff (just a cook, a manservant, and a housekeeper). On September 30, 1862, Mary invited her controversial but “kind-hearted” friend, General Daniel Sickles, to come out to the Soldiers’ Home for a really good chat, because “we always have so many evening callers, that our conversations, necessarily are general.” Mary was restrained, she told Sickles, “because Mr. L. has so much to excite his mind, with fears for the Army, that I am quite considerate in expressing my doubts and fears to him concerning passing events.” (There is considerable evidence quite to the contrary in the Lincolns’ relationship; Lincoln knew very well Mary’s opinion of General Grant—“a butcher,” that Secretary of State Seward was not to be trusted, and that the cabinet was full of her husband’s enemies.) Mary encouraged other friends to visit the Lincolns at the Soldiers’ Home. To Brigadier General George Ramsay, Chief of Ordnance, in July 1864 Mary wrote, “It is such a pleasure, especially, at such a charming place as this, to receive one’s friends. I trust that Mrs. Ramsey [sic] Miss R. & yourself will favor me by frequently driving out these delightful evenings.” Secretary of War Edwin Stanton didn’t like Ramsay, and Mary didn’t like Stanton, so there was more to this invitation than meets the eye. Affable, courteous, courageous Ramsay, whom the president also admired and trusted, had risked his career in the second year of the war by disobeying Stanton’s order, just before the battle of Antietam, to ship all the weapons stored in his arsenal out of Washington to New York. Thanks to Ramsay’s not following the order, the arms were available for McClellan at that crucial battle, and Lincoln was able at last to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on the strength of it. But Stanton, in retaliation, then placed Ramsay in an untenable position as Chief of Ordnance, and soon after Mary’s invitation he got rid of him altogether. Several visitors actually did think it appropriate to use the word “entertainment” at the Soldiers’ Home, and the Lincolns were charming, experienced hosts. Lincoln liked to serve dinner guests himself. With the “elasticity of spirits” Judge Mills noted in his diary, Lincoln was able to turn quickly from their intense discussion that night of the disastrous consequences for the country if he were to be defeated for reelection, to pleasure. He “entertained us with reminiscences of the past . . . it is such social tete a tetes among his friends that enables Mr. Lincoln to endure mental toils & application that would crush any other man. The President now in full flow of spirits, scattered his repartee in all directions.” Stalwart family nurse Rebecca Pomroy saw the same quality: “The strong will of the man combined with his wonderful facility in extracting comfort out of the pleasant trivialities of everyday life.” Together with the theater—Shakespeare’s plays of civil war and succession quite understandably Lincoln’s preference by far—storytelling, even storytelling contests, were his favorite form of entertainment. Hugh McCulloch, who would become Lincoln’s third secretary of the treasury in 1865, visited the Soldiers’ Home one autumn evening in 1864. The postmaster general and a few of Lincoln’s personal friends were there. “For two hours there was a constant run of story-telling—Lincoln leading and [the postmaster] following— a contest between them as to which should tell the best story and provoke the heartiest laughter. The stories were not such as would be listened to with pleasure by very refined ears, but they were exceedingly funny. The verdict of the listeners was that, while the stories were equally good, Mr. Lincoln had displayed the most humor and skill.” Journalist Noah Brooks described several of those casual evenings: “A little party from the city was being entertained at Mr. Lincoln’s summer White House . . . the President, standing with his back to the fire and his legs spread apart, recited from memory” a story of the popular Civil War humorist Orpheus C. Kerr [Robert Henry Newell] that satirized Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, who, Kerr claimed, was very busy examining a model of Noah’s Ark with a view of introducing it into the United States Navy. Then Lincoln asked his guests not to tell Welles about the story because it might hurt his feelings, explaining later to a somewhat offended Brooks that one of the guests that evening was “a leaky vessel” and this was Lincoln’s subtle way of warning the man against repeating what he might hear at the Soldiers’ Home. On another evening at the Soldiers’ Home, Brooks wrote, Lincoln stood again before the fireplace and recited from memory one of his favorite “Petroleum V. Nasby” [David Ross Locke] letters, another character whose influence on public opinion of the day was significant. Lincoln lulled an overworked John Hay to sleep one evening there, reading “the end of Henry VI, and the beginning of Richard III, until my heavy eyelids caught his considerate notice & he sent me to bed.” Most listeners were sensitive enough to appreciate that storytelling in particular was Lincoln’s safety valve, as he had explained to Colonel Silas Burt, a nineteenth-century version of antidepressant medication, if you will. Pompous, hostile General McClellan, of course, thought Lincoln’s stories were “ever unworthy of one holding his high position, at least on public occasions.” Curiously enough, Frederick Douglass never saw that side of Lincoln. “I could as well dance at a funeral as to jest in the presence of such a man.” It would not be correct to assume that when men came out to the Soldiers’ Home with their wives, conversations were any less freighted. Mary Todd Lincoln was not the only Civil War wife with political savvy who was intensely watchful of her husband’s reputation. Mrs. Margaret Heintzelman went to see Lincoln at the Soldiers’ Home on August 8, 1862, at her husband’s request. At the time, General Samuel Heintzelman was commanding McClellan’s Third Corps during the ill-fated Peninsula Campaign. Margaret and her husband had been in constant communication in the weeks before her appointment with Lincoln, sometimes with daily letters discussing his frustrations and concerns. Heintzelman was distraught over the prospect of withdrawal of Union troops from the Peninsula. “If it is done the country is ruined,” he wrote in his journal. “All we want is reinforcements that are within reach and we will advance. . . . It is sad to see the imbecility in Washington. . . . Reinforce us and we will take Richmond.” But he had not been able to get leave to argue his own case, and so Mrs. Heintzelman went instead, and the day after her visit, she sent Lincoln a long abstract outlining her husband’s views, which she had discussed with Lincoln in surely more politic but still strong terms the previous evening. But the Army of the Potomac was withdrawn, and Heintzelman was furious. As the troops retreated, he ordered the regimental musicians to “Play! Play! It is all you’ re good for. Play, damn it! Play some marching tune. Play Yankee Doodle, or any doodle you can think of, only play something!” The general’s only visit to the Soldiers’ Home the following summer was purely for pleasure, not to see Lincoln. Even during the war, the beautiful grounds were a favorite destination for sweltering city dwellers. But even that excursion backfired. “Warm! Warm! Clear 91 degrees. It was too dusty to be pleasant.” Heintzelman gets little attention in broad Civil War histories, but some of his colleagues felt his achievements throughout the war, including his defense of the capital, had been greatly underestimated. They wrote to Lincoln that he was “rust[ing] out” unfairly in one of his later backwater assignments. Mary Lincoln may have wanted to make some amends for all that by telling the general at the White House in April 1863 that his son Charles would indeed be going to West Point. In response to one of Lincoln’s classic equivocations about the appointment to Heintzelman earlier that year, the general wrote in his journal, “Was ever such an endorsement made?” Several officers in command at the Soldiers’ Home installation became friendly with the Lincolns over their three seasons, and they must have provided company for Lincoln when Mary and the boys were away. Deputy Governor Thomas L. Alexander had run the Home since 1858, and he was apparently a gem: a kind, modest man who put the soldiers’ welfare before his own. Shortly after Alexander resigned in 1864, having lost out on a promotion to the governorship of the institution, Lincoln wrote General-in-Chief Henry Halleck the next best thing to a recommendation: “The relations between Colonel Alexander and myself at the Soldiers’ Home have been very agreeable, and I feel a great kindness for him and his family.” It is difficult today, looking at the Home’s large, wellstocked library, for example, to appreciate how hard Alexander had to fight to get any amenities at all for the veterans, including basic reading material. He knew how dissatisfied they had been with their treatment. The year he arrived, for example, about a quarter of the men had complained to a United States senator that the funds they provided to the home were being misused, and that they felt imprisoned there. In 1862, there was even more to grouse about. The Board of Commissioners of the Home voted to discontinue the veterans’ tobacco allowance, and made other economy moves so unpopular they had to be rescinded the next month. Alexander tried to put in a bowling alley, a smoking room (no smoking was allowed in the men’s quarters), a laundry room, and a bathhouse. Only the latter two survived the board’s consideration. Alexander also wanted a decent library for the men, and was able to add historical works and novels to the Bibles and few newspapers already authorized. If there was any truth to the accusations that Alexander was actually a rebel sympathizer and “his wife an avid secessionist,” Lincoln didn’t seem to notice, although the first deputy governor of the Home and the first secretary-treasurer had indeed resigned to serve in the Confederate army. Elizabeth Blair Lee, Mary’s good friend, wrote her husband that she’d had to assure Mary that [the Alexanders] “were the best & most loyal hearted people in the world,” and that Sallie Alexander had insisted, “If we were secesh I would be vastly more afraid of her, but as I am not I anticipate her residence there with great pleasure.” Mary was more than disappointed when the Alexanders left, but not so with the Home’s surgeon, Dr. Benjamin King, who was not the kind of man to hide whatever light he had under a barrel. King, who had been at the Soldiers’ Home in one capacity or another since its founding in 1851, was cantankerous, demanding, self-satisfied, and as opinionated as he was quarrelsome. He’d resigned in a huff more than once, declaring in his 1859 effort that “four-fifths of the inmates [or “members” as they were called by the time the Lincolns lived there] are good and excellent men while others are so bad as to put to shame a penitentiary convict.” But Lincoln took his chances with them. He sometimes ate with the veterans, and one of them said that Lincoln was very kind and familiar with them all. At any one time, between ninety-nine and a hundred and forty-two members resided at the Soldiers’ Home over the five Civil War years. Journalist Brooks observed that “no family that ever lived in the Executive Mansion was so irregular in its method of living as were the Lincolns.” As Tad’s pet goat was able to find its way unhindered up the stairs to rest on the boy’s bed at the Soldiers’ Home cottage, life there was probably even more so. Mary and Tad were away at the time “Nanny” went exploring in the house, having eaten so many of the flowers in the garden she was ultimately exiled to the White House, but the tone of Lincoln’s letter describing the animal’s behavior is so playful, it’s clear he expected Mary to be just as amused as he was. (She never received the letter. Somehow it came into the hands of a soldier, who turned it over to a postmaster in upstate New York, who returned it to Lincoln the following spring.) Evidently a sizable menagerie (ponies, goats, cats, and once, perhaps, Jack the turkey) made the annual move from the White House to the Soldiers’ Home. Tad refused to leave the city until all were accounted for. Lincoln himself once went looking for Tad’s cat before the long wagon caravan of family, furniture, and pets could set off. Lincoln didn’t mind at all when the kittens Secretary Seward’s family had given his boys climbed all over him even as he worked. After all, as far back as 1848, while Lincoln was in Congress, Mary Todd Lincoln wrote to her “dear boy” from her father’s house in Lexington, Kentucky, “Boby [sic: Robert Todd Lincoln] came across in a yard, a kitten, your hobby.” When Mary’s stepmother found he’d brought it into the house, she ordered that it be thrown out, much to the boy’s and Mary’s distress. One account of Lincoln’s inaugural journey to Washington describes his stopping the train when he saw a terrapin beside the tracks. He had it brought into the train for Tad to play with. The two of them would play for hours with the pet goats on the White House lawn, which Lincoln insisted to Mary’s dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, would come when he called. Their antics provided him with some diversion. “‘See, Madam Elizabeth—my pets recognize me . . . there they go again; what jolly fun! And he laughed outright as the goats bounded swiftly to the other side of the yard.’” Lincoln’s thought then turned, according to Madam Keckley, to the real bounders, the bounty hunters and their agents, the men who “plunder the national treasure in the name of patriotism.” As for meals, when Mrs. Lincoln was away, “I generally browse around,” Lincoln told some visitors. His general disinterest in what he ate suggests a certain casualness about mealtimes, and perhaps explains Tad’s frequent appearances at Company K’s mess at dinnertime. The Lincolns were extraordinarily permissive parents by Victorian standards. Even their eldest son, the somewhat stuffy, publicity shy Robert (“all Todd”), could get annoyed at Tad’s constant and clever pranks. But Lincoln insisted, “It is my pleasure that my children are |