Rather than veto the bill outright, Lincoln exercised a little-known provision called the pocket veto, according to which unsigned bills still on the president’s desk when Congress adjourns do not become law. In a written proclamation, he explained that while he would not protest if any individual state adopted the plan outlined in the bill, he did not think it wise to require every state to adhere to a single, inflexible system. Talking with Noah Brooks, he likened the Wade-Davis bill to the infamous bed designed by the tyrant Procrustes. “If the captive was too short to fill the bedstead, he was stretched by main force until he was long enough; and if he was too long, he was chopped off to fit the bedstead.”
Lincoln understood that he would be politically damaged if the radicals “choose to make a point upon this.” Nevertheless, he told John Hay, “I must keep some consciousness of being somewhere near right: I must keep some standard of principle fixed within myself.” He would rely on this conviction in the days ahead when Wade and Davis published a bitter manifesto against him. He was not surprised by their anger at the suppression of their bill, but he was stung by their vitriolic tone and their suggestion that his veto had been prompted by crass electoral concerns. “To be wounded in the house of one’s friends,” he told Brooks, “is perhaps the most grievous affliction that can befall a man,” the same sentiment he had expressed when he lost his first Senate race in 1855. Now personal sorrow was compounded by the realization that radical opposition might divide the Republican Party, undoing the unity he had struggled to maintain through the turbulent years of his presidency.
During the first week of July, rumors spread that a rebel force of undetermined strength was moving north through the Shenandoah Valley toward Washington. The rumors alarmed Elizabeth Blair, who feared that the Confederate troops would come through Silver Spring, Maryland, exposing both her parents’ home and that of her brother Monty to direct danger. She cautioned her father, but his mind was elsewhere. For weeks he and Monty had been planning a hunting and fishing trip to the Pennsylvania mountains, and he was eager to get started. In a letter to Frank on July 4, the seventy-three-year-old Blair happily anticipated the two-week vacation. Two grandsons were coming along; their grandfather hoped “to give them a taste for woodcraft and to amuse & invigorate them.” Meanwhile, the womenfolk were heading to Cape May. “Your mother & I enjoy our young progeny’s happiness as our own,” Blair told his son, “& look on it as a prolongation of our enjoyment of the earth, through a remote future.”
Elizabeth’s admonitions concerned Monty at first, but after the War Department erroneously told him that the Confederate force had been stopped at Harpers Ferry, he and his father set off for the Pennsylvania countryside. Unable to prevent their departure, Elizabeth tried to convince her mother to remove the silver and other valuables to their city home before leaving for Cape May. Eliza Blair refused, telling her daughter “she would not have the house pulled to pieces.”
Elizabeth Blair’s fears proved justified. Grant’s decision to move south of Richmond and attack Petersburg from the rear had inspired Lee to send General Jubal Early and fifteen thousand troops north, hoping to catch Washington unawares. If a panic like that which prevailed at the time of Bull Run could be induced, Grant might have to withdraw some of his troops from Virginia. For several weeks, Early’s movements remained undetected, and on July 5 he crossed the Potomac into Maryland. At this point, only miscellaneous troops under the command of General Lew Wallace, later to become famous as the author of Ben Hur, barred the path to the nation’s capital. Wallace understood that with only half as many men as Early, he could not push the enemy back, but hoped he might hinder Early’s progress while Washington prepared itself for attack.
The two sides met at Monocacy River on July 9. Young Will Seward, a colonel now, participated in the fierce engagement. “The battle lasted most of the day,” he proudly recalled years later, “and every inch of the ground was hotly contested, until our men were finally overwhelmed by superior numbers.” During the fighting, Will’s horse was shot from under him, hurling the young colonel to the ground and breaking his leg. Encircled by rebels when he fell, Will was assumed to have been captured.
Secretary Seward spent a tense night at the War Department waiting for news of his son. He had just returned home after midnight when Stanton appeared with a discouraging report from General Wallace that Will had been wounded and taken prisoner. “None of us slept much the rest of the night,” Fred Seward recalled, and in the morning, “it was arranged that Augustus should go over in the first train to Baltimore to make inquiries.” At 3 p.m., Augustus telegraphed more hopeful news. Though Will’s injury was confirmed, he had not been captured. “God be praised for the safety of our boy,” Frances exclaimed. “With the help of one of his men,” Will somehow “reached a piece of woods; where mounting a mule, and using his pocket-handkerchief for a bridle, he succeeded, after a painful ride of many miles during the night, in rejoining the forces.”
The routing of the Federals at Monocacy gave Early an unobstructed path to Washington. As the rebel troops ranged through the countryside, they destroyed railroad tracks, stores, mills, and houses, much as the Union men under David Hunter had done in Virginia. Reaching Silver Spring, they came upon Monty’s Falkland mansion. Blair’s carpenter reported that the troops had immediately “commenced the work of wholesale destruction, battering the doors, robbing all the bookcases, breaking or carrying off all the chinaware, and ransacking the house from top to bottom.” The next night, they torched the house, leaving only a “blackened ruin.”
At the nearby home of Monty’s father, the patriarch, the soldiers scattered papers, documents, and books. They rummaged through the wine cellar and the bedrooms, littering the lawn with furniture and clothing. Elizabeth Blair was told that “one man dressed in Betty’s riding habit, pants & all—another in Fathers red velvet wrapper.” Still others donned assorted coats and uniforms, dancing with “great frolic” on the lawn.
The “perfect saturnalia” that Elizabeth decried was brought to an immediate halt when Generals Jubal Early and John Breckinridge arrived. Cursing the marauding soldiers, Breckinridge made them return stolen items. He retrieved the scattered papers and documents and sent them away for safekeeping. He asked Early to station a guard on the grounds to preserve the trees, grapery, shrubs, horses, and crops.
When Early inquired why he would “fret about one house when we have lost so much by this proceeding,” Breckinridge replied that “this place is the only one I felt was a home to me on this side of the Mts.” He explained that some years earlier, during a difficult period in his life, the old gentleman had taken him in, providing a “place of refuge & of rest.” A neighbor told Blair Senior that Breckinridge “made more fuss” about preserving the house and its possessions “than if they had belonged to Jeff Davis.”
When the older Blairs eventually returned home, they found a note on the mantel: “a confederate officer, for himself & all his comrades, regrets exceedingly that damage & pilfering was committed in this house…. Especially we regret that Ladies property has been disturbed.” In this manner, Elizabeth marveled, “bread cast upon the waters came back to us.”
The time the Confederates lost during the Battle of Monocacy and the frolic at Silver Spring allowed Washington to mobilize its defenses. In his initial panic, Stanton had sent his secretary to take his bonds and gold from a War Department safe and place them under his mattress at home. He took heart from Lincoln’s calm demeanor, however, and thereafter, the two worked together as one during the crisis. They telegraphed Grant, who put his highly respected Sixth Corps on a fast route to the capital. They called up the militia, supplied government clerks with muskets, and ordered “all convalescents capable of defending the forts and rifle-pits” to report for duty.
Throughout the tense days, Lincoln remained “in a pleasant and confident humor,” observed John Hay, not seeming to be “in the least concerned about the safety of Washington. With him the o
nly concern seems to be whether we can bag or destroy this force in our front.” Welles noted approvingly that Stanton “exhibits none of the alarm and fright I have seen in him on former occasions.” As nervous farmers with homes in the Confederate path poured into Washington, the president and the war secretary drove together through the streets in a open carriage, “to show the people,” one resident thought, “that they were not frightened.” Such calm evinced by the administration had a salutary effect, allowing the residents of Washington, who had despaired in the wake of Bull Run, a measure of solace. Some “could even appreciate,” as Fred Seward noted, “the grim humour of their predicament, in being thus suddenly attacked from the north, after having sent their available troops to the south.”
By the time the Capitol dome was visible to the rebel force, the opportunity for a successful attack had receded. “Before even the first brigade of the leading division was brought into line,” General Early later acknowledged, “a cloud of dust from the direction of Washington” revealed that Grant’s reinforcements had arrived. Furthermore, inspection of the Union fortifications revealed them “to be exceedingly strong…with a tier of lower works in front of each pierced for an immense number of guns.” Stretching “as far as the eye could reach,” the earthworks appeared in many places to be “impregnable.”
Still, Early refused to withdraw. He was determined to show the North how close he had come and sent a small force to engage the Union troops at Fort Stevens, about five miles from the White House. The skirmishing continued for several days, during which time Lincoln witnessed the action from a parapet, accompanied by Mary on one occasion, by Seward and Welles on another. The tall president’s presence in the line of fire made a vivid impression upon those who were there. “The President evinced a remarkable coolness and disregard of danger,” recalled General Horatio G. Wright. Even after a surgeon standing by his side was shot, “he still maintained his ground till I told him I should have to remove him forcibly. The absurdity of the idea of sending off the President under guard seemed to amuse Lincoln, but in consideration of my earnestness in the matter, he agreed to compromise by sitting behind the parapet instead of standing upon it.”
Still, Lincoln would periodically stand, provoking concern on the part of a young captain who shouted, “Get down, you fool!” Years later, the captain, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., son of the poet whom Lincoln greatly admired and himself to become a distinguished Supreme Court justice, would recall this unusual incident. For the normally sedentary Gideon Welles, to witness live action “was exciting and wild,” until the sight of dead soldiers carried away on stretchers instantly sobered his mind. “In times gone by I had passed over these roads little anticipating scenes like this, and a few years hence they will scarcely be believed to have occurred.”
Having made his point, Early retired as swiftly and mysteriously as he had come, leaving behind a spate of recriminations. The misguided command signals in Washington that allowed him to escape constituted “an egregious blunder,” acknowledged Stanton’s aide, Charles Dana. Blame was generally attributed to General Halleck, though Welles knew that in the eyes of the public, the entire administration appeared “contemptible.”
Mary Lincoln, sensing her husband’s profound disappointment that the rebels had escaped, turned on Stanton during a conversation at the Soldiers’ Home. “Mrs. Lincoln,” Stanton remarked with rare levity, “I intend to have a full-length portrait of you painted, standing on the ramparts at Fort Stevens overlooking the fight!”
“That is very well,” Mary replied, “and I can assure you of one thing, Mr. Secretary, if I had had a few ladies with me the Rebels would not have been permitted to get away as they did!”
Mary was not alone in her indignation. The sight of his ruined home provoked Monty Blair into openly defiant rants against the command structure in Washington directed by Halleck. His diatribes were reported to Halleck, who immediately wrote a furious letter to Stanton. “I am informed by an officer of rank,” he began, “that the Hon. M. Blair, Post Master Genl, in speaking of the burning of his house in Maryland, this morning said, in effect, that ‘the officers in command about Washington are poltroons; that there were not more than five hundred rebels on the Silver Spring road and we had a million of men in arms; that it was a disgrace.’” On behalf of those officers “who have devoted their time and energies night and day, and have periled their lives,” Halleck demanded to know whether “such wholesale denouncement & accusation by a member of the cabinet receives the sanction and approbation of the President of the United States. If so the names of the officers accused should be stricken from the rolls of the Army; if not, it is due to the honor of the accused that the slanderer should be dismissed from the cabinet.”
Stanton sent the letter to Lincoln, who replied the same day. “Whether the remarks were really made I do not know; nor do I suppose such knowledge is necessary to a correct response. If they were made I do not approve them; and yet, under the circumstances, I would not dismiss a member of the Cabinet thereof. I do not consider what may have been hastily said in a moment of vexation at so severe a loss, is sufficient ground for so grave a step.” Moreover, he concluded, “I propose continuing to be myself the judge as to when a member of the Cabinet shall be dismissed.” Then, to further underscore his authority in the matter, Lincoln composed a note to his cabinet colleagues, stating categorically that only he would decide when the time had come to let one of them go. “It would greatly pain me to discover any of you endeavoring to procure anothers removal, or, in any way to prejudice him before the public. Such endeavor would be a wrong to me; and much worse, a wrong to the country. My wish is that on this subject, no remark be made, nor question asked, by any of you, here or elsewhere, now or hereafter.”
Lincoln’s restrained reaction was validated by Blair’s conduct once the shock of seeing his gutted homestead wore off. Learning that Ben Butler had torched a Confederate officer’s house in retaliation for the burning of Falkland, Monty implored the general to avoid any more like actions. “If we allow the military to invade the rights of private property on any other grounds than those recognized by civilized warfare,” he cautioned, “there will soon cease to be any security whatever for the rights of civilians on either side.” When friends offered to raise funds for him to rebuild, he graciously declined their help. “The loss is a very great one to me it is true,” but it did not compare “to the losses suffered by the unknown millions in this great struggle for the life of the nation. Could I consent to have my house rebuilt by friends, whilst my neighbor a poor old blacksmith is unrelieved[?]” Monty Blair had confirmed Lincoln’s faith in him as a man and as a responsible public figure. The postmaster general would retain his post until Lincoln himself decided it was time for him to go.
“THE MONTH OF AUGUST does not open cheerfully,” Noah Brooks reported. The steady progression of unfavorable events—the shocking slaughter at Petersburg, the raid on Washington, and the failure to capture Jubal Early’s troops—had created a mood of widespread despondency throughout the North. In addition, the president’s mid-July call for five hundred thousand additional volunteers had disturbed many Republicans, who feared negative repercussions on the fall elections. Lincoln himself acknowledged the “dissatisfaction” with his new recruiting effort but emphasized that “the men were needed, and must be had, and that should he fall in consequence, he would at least have the satisfaction of going down with the colors flying.”
Meanwhile, dispatches from Grant revealed a continuing stalemate in the siege against Petersburg. An ingenious attempt by a regiment of former coal miners to mine under the Confederate earthworks and blow a hole in the enemy lines had resulted in a spectacular tragedy instead. In the confusion after the explosion, Union soldiers advanced into the 32-foot-deep crater itself, rather than circle around it, and had become trapped. “Piled on top of each other like frightened sheep,” they were easy targets for slaughter. By day’s end, Grant had lost nearly four thou
sand men. “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war,” Grant wired Halleck. “Such opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”
The appalling event left Gideon Welles in a depressed state, “less however from the result, bad as it is, than from an awakening apprehension that Grant is not equal to the position assigned him…. A blight and sadness comes over me like a dark shadow when I dwell on the subject, a melancholy feeling of the past, a foreboding of the future.” Edward Bates shared his colleague’s despair. In his diary he admitted feeling heartsick when he contemplated “the obstinate errors and persistent blunders of certain of our generals.”
Unlike Welles or Bates, Lincoln refused to let the incident shake his faith in Grant. The day after the Battle of the Crater, he met with Grant at Fort Monroe, where the two men looked resolutely toward the future. Grant had received intelligence that the hard-riding Early had once again crossed the Potomac, spreading fear and devastation in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. He dispatched General Philip Sheridan, one of his best commanders, to the Shenandoah Valley with instructions to find Early “and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.” Lincoln, as determined as Grant to take the battle directly to the enemy without respite, replied: “This, I think, is exactly right.”
A few days later, Commissioner French enjoyed “a long and very pleasant talk” with Lincoln. “He said we must be patient, all would come out right—that he did not expect Sherman to take Atlanta in a day, nor that Grant could walk right into Richmond,—but that we should have them both in time.” Lincoln’s confidence was not now shared by the country. The ongoing disasters had combined to create “much wretchedness and great humiliation in the land,” a doleful Welles noted. “The People are wild for Peace,” Thurlow Weed cautioned Seward.