Lincoln (63 page)

From early morning until dusk visitors thronged these business rooms of the White House. In the early months of the administration the line was so long that it extended down the stairs to the front entrance, with a candidate for a job or a military appointment perched on each step. Most of these applicants could be handled expeditiously. Lincoln quickly scanned letters of recommendation, referred petitioners to the proper department heads, and listened intently to complaints and made proper sympathetic noises. Whenever possible he avoided flatly rejecting an application, preferring to tell one of his celebrated “leetle stories” to suggest how impossible the request was. When an officer accused of embezzling forty dollars of government money appealed for leniency on the ground that he had really stolen only thirty dollars, the President was reminded of an Indiana man who charged his neighbor’s daughter with unseemly behavior in having three illegitimate children. “‘Now that’s a lie,’ said the man whose family was so outrageously scandalized, ‘and I can prove it, for she only has two.’”

Remarkably, the President’s systematic lack of system seemed to work. Stories of his accessibility to even the humblest petitioner, his patience, and his humanity spread throughout the North. For the first time in American history citizens began to feel that the occupant of the White House was
their
representative. They referred to him as Father Abraham, and they showered him with homely gifts: a firkin of butter, a crate of Bartlett pears, New England salmon. With special appropriateness a man from Johnsburgh, New York, sent the President “a live American Eagle[,] the bird of our land,” which had lost one foot in a trap. “But,” the New Yorker continued, “he is yet an Eagle and perhaps no more cripled [sic] than the Nation whose banner he represented, his wings are sound and will extend seven feet.”

At the same time, Mary Lincoln was achieving some successes of her own, and she became the most conspicuous female occupant of the Executive Mansion since Dolley Madison. Brought up with an active interest in public affairs, deeply involved in her husband’s political career, she had no intention of fading quietly into the Washington background. She intended to become the First Lady of the land—a term that was coined to describe her.

She enjoyed her role as hostess, and she made a favorable impression on most visitors. The cynical William Howard Russell, the American correspondent of the
Times
of London, found much to criticize about her appearance and manner, but he praised her simple jewelry and her “very gorgeous and highly colored” dress and could not fail to observe that she fluttered her fan
a great deal to display her rounded, well-proportioned shoulders. Noting that Mrs. Lincoln was “of the middle age and height, of a plumpness degenerating to the
embonpoint
natural to her years,” with plain features and a homely appearance “stiffened, however, by the consciousness that her position requires her to be something more than plain Mrs. Lincoln, the wife of the Illinois lawyer,” Russell judged that she was “desirous of making herself agreeable,” and rather grudgingly added, “I own I was agreeably disappointed.”

She made refurbishing the White House her main project as First Lady. She found it in bad shape. The furniture was broken down, the wallpaper peeling, the carpeting worn, and the draperies torn. The eleven basement rooms were filthy and rat-infested. The whole place had the air of a rundown, unsuccessful third-rate hotel. Congress had appropriated $20,000 to be expended over the four years of her husband’s term of office for rehabilitating the Executive Mansion, and she intended to put it to good use.

In the summer of 1861 she went to Philadelphia and New York to buy furnishings suitable for the mansion of the President of the United States and his First Lady. Merchants showed her the best and most expensive carpeting, material for upholstery and drapes, splendid furniture, and exquisite china. Mary was not entirely rational when it came to money and spending, and, having no head for figures, she bought everything: chairs, sofas and hassocks, fabrics of damask, brocade, pink tarlatan, plush, and “French Satin DeLaine”; wallpaper imported from France; and a full set of Haviland china in “Solferino and gold,” with the American coat of arms in the center of each plate. For the Red Room she ordered 117 yards of crimson Wilton carpet, and for the East Room an imported Brussels velvet carpet, pale green in color, ingeniously woven as a single piece, which, one admirer gushed, “in effect looked as if the ocean, in gleaming and transparent waves, were tossing roses at your feet.”

On her return to Washington she personally oversaw the scrubbing, painting, and plastering of the White House, so that for the first time in years the entire mansion was sparklingly clean. When her new furniture arrived, the whole place took on an air of elegant opulence.

But by fall, when the bills began to come in, she discovered that she had greatly overspent the congressional allowance not just for the year but for Lincoln’s full term. Desperately she tried to keep her husband from learning what she had done. In her panic she exploded in rage at anyone who dared cross her. Nicolay and Hay, who had to deal with her temperamental outbursts, began to refer to her as “the Hell-cat.” She authorized a sale of secondhand White House furniture, but it brought in almost as little money as did the sale of manure from the White House stables at ten cents a wagonload. Then John Watt, the White House gardener, showed her easier ways of covering her deficit, by padding bills for household expenditures and presenting vouchers for nonexistent purchases. Discharging the White
House steward, she secured that appointment for Mrs. Watt—and performed the duties and kept the salary herself.

None of this, however, could cover her enormous overrun of expenditures, and she had to ask Benjamin B. French, the commissioner of Public Buildings, who kept the White House accounts, to explain the situation to the President and to ask him to sponsor a supplemental congressional appropriation. Lincoln was furious. Never, he said, would he ask Congress for an appropriation “for
flub dubs for that damned old house!”
“It would stink in the land to have it said that an appropriation of $20,000 for furnishing the house had been overrun by the President when the poor freezing soldiers could not have blankets,” he went on. The White House “was furnished well enough—better than any house
they
had ever lived in.” Rather than ask Congress for more money he vowed he would pay for Mary’s purchases out of his own pocket. Eventually, though, he was obliged to back down, and Congress quietly passed two deficiency appropriations to cover rehabilitating the White House.

Support for the President, which appeared so overwhelming immediately after Bull Run, rapidly eroded. For many Democrats the defeat brought realization that the nation faced a long and costly war. Those who were styled “War Democrats” rallied behind the President. A larger group of Democrats reluctantly accepted the war as long as it was fought to preserve “the constitution as it is and the Union as it was,” but they were nervous lest a prolonged conflict prove “the Trojan horse of tyranny.” A few, like James A. Bayard of Delaware and Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, willingly acknowledged that they were Peace Democrats. Bayard took as his motto “Anything is better than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war.”

These divisions deeply troubled Lincoln. He recognized what he called “the plain facts” of his situation. The Republicans, as he said, “came into power, very largely in a minority of the popular vote.” His administration could not possibly put down the rebellion without assistance from the Democrats. It was, he observed, “mere nonsense to suppose a minority could put down a majority in rebellion.” Consequently he carefully cultivated War Democrats in Congress like Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the only Southern senator who refused to follow his state when it seceded, and Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, who sustained the President’s use of war powers and refuted the arguments of Chief Justice Taney. He rewarded Joseph Holt, the staunch Kentucky Unionist who had been Secretary of War under Buchanan, by naming him judge advocate general. In making military appointments he tried to select commanders on the basis of military expertise rather than on what he called “political affinity,” and a sizable number of the generals he selected were Democrats: George B. McClellan, Benjamin F. Butler, W. S.
Rosecrans, John A. McClernand, and many others. In policy, too, he tried to build a broad base of support by presenting the issue before the country as one of Union versus Disunion.

In attempting to build a consensus, the President ran the risk of dividing his own party. Many Republicans felt that he was neglecting the moral and political arguments against slavery that had been the foundation of their party’s ideology. Two days after the defeat at Bull Run, Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan and Senator Sumner, accompanied by Vice President Hamlin, came to the White House and urged the President to make the war a contest between Freedom and Slavery. Sumner argued that emancipation was a military necessity, and Chandler asked Lincoln to free the slaves in order to create such chaos in the South that the Confederacy would collapse. The President listened politely but said such measures were too far in advance of public opinion.

Among disgruntled Republicans the feeling spread that Lincoln, though well meaning, was slow and incompetent. In his diary Count Adam Gurowski, the eccentric Polish nobleman who worked as a translator for the State Department, accurately captured the mood of Republicans in Congress: “Mr. Lincoln in some way has a slender historical resemblance to Louis XVI—similar goodness, honesty, good intentions; but the size of events seems to be too much for him.” According to Gurowski, Senator Wade was so “disgusted with the slowness and inanity of the administration” that he remarked, “I do not wonder that people desert to Jeff. Davis, as he shows brains; I may desert myself.” To express that dissatisfaction and to give some direction to the Union war effort, the Congress just before adjournment passed the Confiscation Act, which provided that a master would lose ownership of any slave employed to assist the Confederate armies. Lincoln signed the measure reluctantly, and it had little effect except as an expression of opinion.

In late August the diffuse feeling of unhappiness with the Lincoln administration found a focus. General John C. Frémont, named commander of the Department of the West, with headquarters in St. Louis, took drastic steps to defeat a Confederate invasion in southwestern Missouri and end widespread guerrilla warfare elsewhere. Proclaiming martial law in the entire state of Missouri, Frémont announced that civilians bearing arms would be tried by court-martial and shot if convicted and that slaves of persons who aided the rebellion would be emancipated.

Fremont’s proclamation, issued without consultation with Washington, clearly ran counter to the policy Lincoln had announced in his inaugural address of not interfering with slavery and against the recently adopted Crittenden resolution pledging that restoration of the Union was the only aim of the war. It also violated the provisions of the Confiscation Act, which established judicial proceedings to seize slaves used to help the rebel army. Lincoln saw at once that Frémont’s order must be modified. He directed the general to withdraw his threat to shoot captured civilians bearing arms.
“Should you shoot a man, according to the proclamation, the Confederates would very certainly shoot our best man in their hands in retaliation,” he admonished Frémont; “and so, man for man, indefinitely.” The President viewed Frémont’s order to liberate slaves of traitorous owners as even more dangerous. Such action, he reminded the general, “will alarm our Southern Union friends, and turn them against us—perhaps ruin our rather fair prospect for Kentucky.” He asked Frémont to modify his proclamation.

Though Lincoln said he was writing “in a spirit of caution and not of censure,” Frémont took his letter as an undeserved rebuke. He, after all, was on the scene; he had to deal with the vindictiveness of Confederate sympathizers in Missouri; he had to defend the state when Washington conspicuously neglected to provide the men, the equipment, and even the food he needed to sustain his army. Very angry, he permitted his redoubtable wife, Jessie, the daughter of the celebrated Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton, to go to Washington and present his case in person to the President.

Mrs. Frémont arrived on September 10 and immediately asked the President to set a time for an interview. He replied tersely, “Now, at once.” Though it was nine o’clock in the evening and she was tired and dusty from traveling all day, she went immediately to the White House. She did not find Lincoln hospitable. He received her in the Red Room, standing, and he did not offer her a seat. When she presented a letter from her husband explaining his position, Lincoln, as she remembered it, “smiled with an expression that was not agreeable” and read it without comment. Attempting to make Frémont’s views clearer, she went on to talk about the need to strike a blow against slavery that would enlist British sentiment on the Union side. The President cut her off with “You are quite a female politician.” Then, in a voice that she found both hard and “repelling,” he told her, “It was a war for a great national idea, the Union, and... General Frémont should not have dragged the Negro into it.”

The next day the President, taking note of Frémont’s unwillingness to modify his proclamation on his own, “very cheerfully” ordered him to change it so as “to conform to, and not to transcend,” the provisions of the Confiscation Act. Some of Lincoln’s advisers feared that Frémont would disobey the President’s order and “set up on his own.” But Lincoln would not permit civilian authority to be overruled by the military, and he would not allow sensitive questions concerning slavery and emancipation to be decided by anyone but the President himself.