Mary was similarly distraught. She had named her second son, Edward, in honor of Edward Baker. Now both her child and his dear namesake were lost. Willie and Tad, who had likewise adored Baker, were heartbroken. For Willie, much like his father, writing provided some measure of solace. He composed a small poem, “On the Death of Colonel Edward Baker,” which was published in the National Republican. After two stanzas recalling Baker’s patriotic life and celebrated oratorical skills, he wrote:
No squeamish notions filled his breast,
The Union was his theme.
“No surrender and no compromise,”
His day thought and night’s dream.
His country has her part to play,
To’rds those he has left behind,
His widow and his children all,—
She must always keep in mind.
The child’s homage to a cherished friend reflected a depressingly common circumstance as the war left mounting casualties and desolation in its wake. Ten-year-old Willie’s words would be echoed in his father’s memorable plea in the Second Inaugural Address, when he urged the nation “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan.”
McClellan straightaway denied responsibility for the defeat at Ball’s Bluff, characteristically insisting that the “disaster was caused by errors committed” by the leaders at the front. “The whole thing took place some 40 miles from here without my orders or knowledge,” he told his wife; “it was entirely unauthorized by me & I am in no manner responsible for it.” The person “directly to blame,” McClellan said, was Colonel Baker, who had exceeded General Stone’s orders by crossing the river. Rumors then began to spread that Stone himself would be court-martialed.
When frustrated congressional leaders, many of whom were longtime friends of Baker, decried the defeat at Ball’s Bluff and the general stagnation of the Union troops, the president defended McClellan. When these same leaders approached McClellan, he unleashed a diatribe against Scott, accusing him of placing obstacles at every step along his way. The congressional delegation left, vowing to remove Scott. “You may have heard from the papers etc of the small row that is going on just now between Genl Scott & myself,” McClellan wrote his wife, “in which the vox populi is coming out strongly on my side…. I hear that off[icer]s & men all declarethat they will fight under no one but ‘our George,’ as the scamps have taken it into their heads to call me.”
On November 1, Lincoln regretfully accepted the veteran’s request for retirement. The newspapers released General Scott’s resignation letter along with Lincoln’s heartfelt reply. The president extolled Scott’s “long and brilliant career,” stating that Americans would hear the news of his departure from active service “with sadness and deep emotion.” At the same time, Lincoln designated McClellan to succeed Scott as general-in-chief of the Union Army.
Two days later, his objective accomplished, McClellan confessed to conflicted emotions when he accompanied Scott to the railroad station for his departure from Washington. “I saw there the end of a long, active & ambitious life,” he wrote his wife, “the end of the career of the first soldier of his nation—& it was a feeble old man scarce able to walk—hardly any one there to see him off but his successor.” The truth, as the newspapers reported, was that a large crowd had assembled at the depot, despite the train’s leaving at 5 a.m. in a drenching rain. All the members of Scott’s staff were there, along with McClellan’s complete staff and a cavalry escort. Secretaries Chase and Cameron had come to join the general on his journey to Harrisburg. Moreover, “quite a number of citizens” had gathered to pay their respects, belying the ignominious farewell that McClellan depicted. Once again, the young Napoleon erred in his calculations.
As winter approached, public discontent with the inaction of the Union Army intensified. “I do not intend to be sacrificed,” the new general-in-chief wrote his wife. Now that McClellan could no longer blame Scott for his troubles, he shifted his censure to Lincoln for denying him the means to confront the rebel forces in Virginia, whose numbers, he insisted, were at least three times his own. In letters home, he complained about Lincoln’s constant intrusions, which forced him to hide out at the home of fellow Democrat Edwin Stanton, “to dodge all enemies in shape of ‘browsing’ Presdt etc.” He reported a visit to the White House one Sunday after tea, where he found “the original gorrilla,” as he had taken to describing the president. “What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!” he ranted. “I went to Seward’s, where I found the ‘Gorilla’ again, & was of course much edified by his anecdotes—ever apropos, & ever unworthy of one holding his high position.”
On Wednesday night, November 13, Lincoln went with Seward and Hay to McClellan’s house. Told that the general was at a wedding, the three waited in the parlor for an hour. When McClellan arrived home, the porter told him the president was waiting, but McClellan passed by the parlor room and climbed the stairs to his private quarters. After another half hour, Lincoln again sent word that he was waiting, only to be informed that the general had gone to sleep. Young John Hay was enraged. “I wish here to record what I consider a portent of evil to come,” he wrote in his diary, recounting what he considered an inexcusable “insolence of epaulettes,” the first indicator “of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities.” To Hay’s surprise, Lincoln “seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity.” He would hold McClellan’s horse, he once said, if a victory could be achieved.
Though Lincoln, the consummate pragmatist, did not express anger at McClellan’s rebuff, his aides fumed at every instance of such arrogance. Lincoln’s secretary, William Stoddard, described the infuriating delay when he accompanied Lincoln to McClellan’s anteroom. “A minute passes, then another, and then another, and with every tick of the clock upon the mantel your blood warms nearer and nearer its boiling-point. Your face feels hot and your fingers tingle, as you look at the man, sitting so patiently over there…and you try to master your rebellious consciousness.” As time went by, Lincoln visited the haughty general less frequently. If he wanted to talk with McClellan, he sent a summons for him to appear at the White House.
DURING THESE TENSE DAYS, Mary tried to distract her husband. If old friends were in town, she would invite them to breakfast and dispatch a message to his office, calling the president to join the gathering. Initially irritated to be taken from his work, Lincoln would grudgingly sit down and begin exchanging stories. His “mouth would relax, his eye brighten, and his whole face lighten,” Elizabeth Grimsley recalled, “and we would be launched into a sea of laughter.” Mary had also introduced a therapeutic “daily drive,” insisting that the two of them, and sometimes the children, take an hour-long carriage ride at the end of the afternoon, to absorb “the fresh air, which he so much needed.”
More than most previous first ladies, Mary enjoyed entertaining. She had never lost her taste for politics. On many nights, while her husband worked late in his office, the first lady held soirées in the Blue Room, to which she invited a mostly male circle of guests. Her frequent visitors included Daniel Sickles, the New York congressman who recently had murdered the son of the composer of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Philip Barton Key, who was having an affair with Sickles’s wife. Defended by a team of lawyers including Edwin Stanton, Sickles had been found innocent by reason of “temporary insanity.”
Another flamboyant figure at Mary’s salons was Henry Wikoff, who had published an account of his picaresque adventures in Europe. He had been a spy for Britain and had spent time in jail for kidnapping and seducing a young woman. Mary enjoyed people with scandalous backgrounds, and delighted in the lively conversation, which ranged from “love, law, literature, and war” to “gossip of courts and cabinets, of the boudoir and the salon, of commerce and the Church, of the peer and the pauper, of Dickens and Thackeray.”
While Mary charmed guests in her
evening salons, she gained respect for the energy and aplomb with which she hosted the traditional White House receptions for the public. She believed that these social gatherings helped to sustain morale. Most important, her husband was proud of both her social skills and her appearance. “My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl,” he said at one White House levee, “and I a poor nobody then, fell in love with her and once more, have never fallen out.”
When Prince Napoleon, the cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte III, visited Washington in early August, Mary organized an elaborate dinner party. She found the task of entertaining much simpler than it had been in Springfield days. “We only have to give our orders for the dinner, and dress in proper season,” she wrote her friend Hannah Shearer. Having learned French when she was young, she conversed easily with the prince. It was a “beautiful dinner,” Lizzie Grimsley recalled, “beautifully served, gay conversation in which the French tongue predominated.” Two days later, her interest in French literature apparently renewed, Mary requested Volume 9 of the Oeuvres de Victor Hugo from the Library of Congress.
Nor did Mary Lincoln confine her abundant energies to social ventures. A month after the French dinner, she strenuously pressured her husband on a matter of state—the pending execution of William Scott. A soldier from Vermont, Scott had fallen asleep during picket duty. His dereliction of duty had occurred during the predawn hours of his second straight night of standing guard. As the story was told, he had volunteered the first night to replace a sick friend, and then was called to duty the next night on his own. According to Lizzie Grimsley, the severity of the soldier’s sentence distressed both Tad and his mother. “Think,” Tad entreated, “if it was your own little boy who was just tired after fighting, and marching all day, that he could not keep awake, much as he tried to.” Mary joined in, begging her husband to show mercy to the young soldier. The situation was not easy for Lincoln. While he understood the human circumstances that led to the soldier’s lapse, he also recognized that his intervention might undermine military discipline. In the end, Mary’s arguments apparently swayed him.
The day before the scheduled execution, Lincoln walked over to McClellan’s office and asked him to issue a pardon, “suggesting,” the general recollected, “that I could give as a reason in the order that it was by request of the ‘Lady President.’” Vermont senator Lucius Chittenden, who had also interceded on young Scott’s behalf, apologized for the imposition, recognizing “that it was asking too much of the President” to intervene “in behalf of a private soldier.” Lincoln put Chittenden’s mind at ease, assuring him that “Scott’s life is as valuable to him as that of any person in the land. You remember the remark of a Scotchman about the head of a nobleman who was decapitated. ‘It was a small matter of a head, but it was valuable to him, poor fellow, for it was the only one he had.’”
The renovation of the White House and its surrounding landscape engaged Mary throughout the summer and fall of 1861. She raved to a friend that she had “the most beautiful flowers & grounds imaginable, and company & excitement enough, to turn a wiser head than my own.” Yet with each passing month, she spent less time with her husband, whose every hour was preoccupied with the war. Though he still took the afternoon drives she had prescribed, he often invited Seward along so the two men could talk. In late August, when Seward’s wife and daughter arrived in Washington to spend several weeks, Lincoln took them for drives nearly every afternoon. Frances took an immediate liking to the president, whom she described as “a plain unassuming farmer—not awkward or ungainly,” who talked with equal ease about “the war & the crops.” Fanny was captivated. “I liked him very much,” she recorded in her diary. She was especially delighted when the president showed her the kittens her father had given to Willie and Tad and told her that “they climb all over him.”
During these pleasant interludes with the Seward family, Lincoln stopped to visit the various encampments in the surrounding countryside. Halting the carriages, he and Seward would talk with the soldiers. A veteran reporter who had watched every president since Jackson wrote that he had never seen anyone go through the routine of handshaking with the “abandon of President Lincoln. He goes it with both hands, and hand over hand, very much as a sailor would climb a rope.” The affable Seward was equally at ease. Fanny took particular delight in watching them greet troops from the 23rd Pennsylvania Regiment. “With one impulse” the men cheered Lincoln’s appearance so loudly that the horses were “somewhat startled”; then they “began cheering for ‘Secretary Seward’ passing his name from mouth to mouth.” Fanny proudly confided in her diary that “I love to remember all Father says and does.”
Frances Seward was happy to be reunited with her husband for the first extended period in almost a year, but she found the frantic pace of wartime Washington life enervating. Nor did she feel at home in the “palatial” house her husband had taken on Lafayette Square. In a letter to her sister, she wistfully confessed that Henry was never “more pleased with a home—it accommodates itself marvelously to his tastes & habits—such as they are at this day.” She praised Fred and Anna, who were so “gifted in making their surroundings…tasteful & attractive.” But it was a home designed for the three of them—her husband, son, and daughter-in-law—not for her. It perfectly fitted the constant round of entertaining that Seward so enjoyed. And Anna was far better suited to the role of hostess than Frances—confined to her bed by migraines for several days every week—could ever hope to be.
As she readied herself to return to Auburn, Frances was concerned that she had not yet called on Mary Lincoln. The first lady had just come back from a three-week vacation in upstate New York and Long Branch, New Jersey, and Frances felt it her duty to visit, “especially as I went to see her husband.” On the Monday before Frances was due to leave, word came that Mary would receive her and her family that evening. After dinner, John Nicolay arrived to escort the Sewards to the White House. The little group included Henry, Frances, Fred, Anna, and Fanny, as well as Seward’s youngest son, Will, and his new bride, Jenny. They were shown into the Blue Parlor by Edward, the Irish doorkeeper who had worked in the White House for nearly two decades. “Edward drew a chair for Mrs. L.,” Fanny recalled, and then arranged the chairs for the rest of the party, before leaving to inform Mary that her guests had arrived. “Well there we sat,” Fanny recorded, until “after a lapse of some time the usher came and said Mrs. Lincoln begged to be excused, she was very much engaged.”
“The truth,” Fanny wrote, “was probably that she did not want to see Mother—else why not give general direction to the doorkeeper to let no one in? It was certainly very rude to have us all seated first.” Referring to Mary’s celebrated salons, Fanny archly added that it was “the only time on record that she ever refused to see company in the evening.” In fact, Mary detested Seward and had most likely contrived to snub the entire Seward family. From the outset, she had resisted Seward’s appointment to the cabinet, fearing that his celebrity would outshine her husband’s. “If things should go on all right,” she warned, “the credit would go to Seward—if they went wrong—the blame would fall upon my husband.” Contrary to Mary’s suspicions, it was Seward who received much of the censure incurred by the administration, as his fellow cabinet members tended to blame him more than Lincoln for whatever displeased them. Long after Seward had come to respect Lincoln’s authority, however, many observers, including Mary, mistakenly assumed that the secretary of state was the mastermind of the administration. “It makes me mad to see you sit still and let that hypocrite, Seward, twine you around his finger as if you were a skein of thread,” Mary fumed to her husband.
Furthermore, Mary resented the long evenings Lincoln spent at Seward’s Lafayette Square mansion rather than remaining home with her. Warmed by Seward’s fireplace and gregarious personality, Lincoln could unwind. Though he himself neither drank nor smoked, he happily watched Seward light up a Havana cigar and pour a glass of brandy. And while Lincoln rarely s
wore, he found Seward’s colorful cursing amusing. On one occasion, as Lincoln and Seward were en route to review the troops, the driver lost control of his team and began swearing with gusto. “My friend, are you an Episcopalian?” Lincoln asked. The teamster replied that he was, in fact, a Methodist. “Oh, excuse me,” Lincoln said with a laugh. “I thought you must be an Episcopalian for you swear just like Secretary Seward, and he’s a churchwarden!”
Lincoln and Seward talked of many things besides the war. They debated the historical legacies of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Quincy Adams. Seward argued that neither Clay’s nor Webster’s would live “a tithe as long as J. Q. Adams.” Lincoln disagreed, believing that “Webster will be read for ever.” They explored the concept of “personal courage.” When Lincoln spoke admiringly of the intensity of a particular soldier’s desire to take on the enemy in person, Seward disagreed. “He had always acted on the opposite principle, admitting you are scared and assuming that the enemy is.” They traded stories and teased each other.
One night when John Hay was also present, another guest brought up the Chicago convention. Hay feared that reminding Seward of his loss was in “very bad taste,” but Lincoln used the remark to tell a humorous story about 1860. At one point, he related, the mayor of Chicago, John Wentworth, had feared that Lincoln was oblivious to shifting opinion in Illinois. “I tell you what,” Wentworth advised, referring to Thurlow Weed. “You must do like Seward does—get a feller to run you.” Both Lincoln and Seward found the story “vastly amusing.”