Part 32
As Commander of the military forces, whose intention is victory, I am beginning to see that war is a form of slavery. Generals Grant and Sherman, Generals Johnson and Lee confirm this. So, we, the people, with our armies, fight slavery with slavery.
No doubt others have mulled over these or similar tenets. But I return to the cost, the human cost, the countless lives lost, the shattered families, shattered homes. Our lintels are hung with crepe.
The White House
Desk
Surely, I should kneel in prayer each night, but for years I have not been able to pray, not even the simple prayers my mother taught me. Now, with the war pressing down on mind and country, prayer is needed. But this war, this tragedy and my part in that tragedy, controls me.
Mary has taught Tad to pray. His little prayers, as he lies in bed or kneels beside it, trouble me because of my lacks.
Dear God —
The White House
Office
May 14th, ’64
He, too, has to die.
I see an old man and this thought occurs. I see a child playing: he, too, has to die. I see a beautiful woman, and I hear the same words. We are doomed. Let us be brothers.
In times like the present, men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and eternity. Nobody has ever expected me to be president. In my poor, lean lank face nobody has ever seen that cabbages were sprouting.
Executive Mansion
June 1, 1864
It has been a couple of weeks since I have written here. No matter. Some of the things I write are as thin as the homoeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death.
Tonight the ticking of my watch is audible—it is meaningful following a long day listening to men and women express their desires. As I sit in my bedroom, my watch my companion, I feel that time is not on my side. Time is slow at bringing the war to an end. Time cares nothing for us. In the garden I have studied the sundial on sunny and cloudy days. We are also time pieces.
For years I wished to own a watch and chain, a gold one with a gold chain. It is time to pick up the key and wind my watch again.
Willie’s Birthday
In our dining room our dining table was festive—for Willie. His friend, Charlie Mathers, was special guest, Charlie, so splendid in his freckles and red hair. Both boys were dressed in their Sunday togs.
I gave Willie a Zeiss field glass, an antique ship’s compass from Italy, I believe; also a red handkerchief and books.
Mary gave him a British belt buckle with lion and unicorn, a set of brushes and tubes of pigment...
Charlie brought a box of candy.
Willie, at the head of the table, opened his gifts sedately, barely commenting, shy, rather like a little prince, not a kid from Illinois.
Tad pleased him with a checker set, board and pieces handmade.
(Today’s war casualties are shocking.)
The White House
June 21, ’64
During the last year I have had several consultations with White House and Washington physicians. They are encouraging about Tad. They believe that he may be able to speak normally as he grows older, that he may be able to learn to read and write, that his frenzied actions may diminish as he matures. I had a White House doctor observe Tad for over a month; he is quite optimistic.
Dear Tad—Mary and I love you.
When I hold him in my arms he has no defects. I think his ponies and goats and dogs and cats have helped him. He is always kind to his little friends. The soldiers love him. He’s their Illinois Lieutenant. The blacks, too, are fond of him.
Mary loves to cradle him in her arms, in the peace of her bedroom. Sometimes he sleeps with me. Of course we spoil him. We spoil Willie too. When I am in conference and Tad dashes in it is amazing how intolerant some people can be over his effusiveness.
Well...when I am with Tad I forget the war.
July 20, 1864
Office
What does my old freckle-faced pastor think of me, now that I am in Washington? He never writes. Does he think I have forgotten Springfield?
He forgave Tad for whittling on a pew; he tolerated my long absences when I rode circuit; he preached directly, discreetly from the Bible, eager to please his congregation. Today he is probably sermonizing from Job: the war must weigh on him because he is a just and careful man. I imagine he remembers that Thomas Jefferson kept slaves. Does he know that there are some 200,000 blacks serving in our army? I would like to sound him out. How does he feel about the importance of a country united? If I could drop by...listen...if I could ride circuit for a fortnight I would learn much.
I notice that I have not written here for about a month. Pressures. Here, as I write, I seem to coordinate myself.
July 24, 1864
Executive Mansion
—office—
I believe it was arson.
Someone set fire to the White House stables. I rushed out when I saw the flames and heard men shouting. Our fire engine crew arrived too late. Willie’s pony died. Tad’s pony died. Four horses died, three survived, among them Old Abe. The fire occurred at night, while Willie and Tad slept. How much more disastrous it would have been if they had been awake. A number of us worked for five or six hours, to calm the surviving horses, to drag away the ponies on a sledge, for later burial. In the morning it was a very hard task to inform the boys.
With Tad sprawled on the bedroom floor, and Willie slumped in a chair, Mary and I attempted to comfort them. They were not to be comforted. We promised replacement ponies. They wailed and cringed at “replacements.” The day was lost.
Arson, yes, everyone thinks it was arson. Some of the stable hands feel that the fire was set to bring me to the stables at night—a possible assassination attempt.
The White House
The Library
I have sought sanctuary in the library.
Willie is dead.
He was thirteen, handsome, intelligent, gentle, fond of each of us. For two weeks he battled for survival, his doctors helping little or not at all. When his doctor left him, when I was alone with him, I felt his cold face and held his cold hands. I thought, he’s not really dead. It must be an error. He isn’t dead because I feel his presence in the room, hear his voice.
Typhoid killed him.
Mary, hysterical, suffered grave headaches at his death. She is unable to comfort Tad. She is unable to speak coherently. She sometimes fancies that he is not dead: she wants to go into the bedroom and speak to him. She says she hopes to communicate with him through a séance. Only I have a chance at comforting Tad. Sitting on my lap, his head against my shoulder, he sleeps. Certainly he knows the sleeve of care, the worn sleeve.
Today we buried our Willie. Mary and Robert and Tad and I stood side by side at the grave.
It was like burying a part of my own body... I felt the earth strike my hands, my arms, my face, my mouth.
Cabinet members attended, military men, friends, White House staff. Tad held Jip in his arms. It rained some.
I’m a tired man. Sometimes I’m the tiredest man on earth.
August ’64
Mary has passed days in her darkened bedroom, wracked by headaches, scarcely able to communicate, hardly able to eat. Her faithful Mrs. Keckley looks after her. There is little or no response when I attempt to comfort her. God, she claims, has deserted her.
I return to my office.
Now the war is my distraction. There is a hellish healing power in the roll of drums, the rumble of caissons, the tramp of a regiment. Washington’s armed camp is always on the move.
Willie...
Maybe he is fortunate. At least he has been spared the confrontation of brother against brother.
I return to Mary’s bedroom.
I offer coffee. She declines.
Robert came and knelt by her. He will go back to Harvard next week. Tad lay asleep at the foot of Mary’s bed. Sometimes, when the four of us are in the bedroom I feel that grief is fourfold.
I retreated.
Jip comes.
August
After Willie’s death I received a warm and understanding letter from Billy Herndon, my Billy. Each word weighed carefully.
Through the years he was much more patient than I; when I read aloud, back in the back of the office, he overlooked the nuisance. He tolerated my kids when they burst in on me. They sometimes wrecked havoc. He never brought his kids, never permitted them to come to the office...or if he did, they were no problem.
Billy could prepare his cases faster than I.
“Abe, are you still lingerin’ over that Moffit suit?”
When he stood before a jury he was accurate and his accuracy taught me to prepare my cases with care.
Billy liked Willie. Well, he liked all my children.
How often we spread ourselves in my parlor and talked. Billy is like a cedar post, deeply imbedded.
Maybe he misses the buffalo stampede of my kids.
Summer
Personal tragedy strikes most of us. At this time personal loss is the fabric of this country.
What does a man do, does he sit in his chair, in the middle of a room, and wait?
I have not adjusted to Willie’s death. Just a few days ago he was alive, riding on his pony; then, then the four of us stood around his grave.
The night he died I sat up all night; I worked with letters, documents, senate papers, proposals for a rail west, telegrams reporting the war. Someone brought me coffee.
Jip came in, and sat on my lap.
It is one thing to encounter personal loss in the theatre, another to read a tragedy; certainly it is another emotion to face it yourself, to realize that no power can reinstate.
The disciples had their hands full when their Lord and Master was crucified. I do not measure my little boy as any kind of lord but he was my son, a promise. The father in me does not go away.
I go, now, to curry Old Abe.
I would like to chop wood a while.
White House
Summer
Again I am besieged by office seekers. I can name a hundred: Whitney, Schurz, Collaman, Blair, Wallace. They seek posts as consuls, envoys, inspectors, paymasters, commissioners, postmasters. Although I now have fixed hours, they intrude. Favors, all wish favors! I am accused of nepotism by the press, by staff and cabinet members. How would they shuffle the cards? Responsible positions are wrestled over by Vermonters and New Yorkers vying with Missourians and Ohioans.
Note:
Speak to Capt. Dobson about balloon observations. Work out telegraphic communication with the balloon observer.
August 20th
I woke early. It is already hot. No breeze.
I look out of the windows at the tents of the wounded. Behind the tents is the river, flattened by the heat. I have been inside of each tent several times. I have seen inside some of those men; I listen; I wait and listen. There are men with letters from home, men with Bibles beside them. Men or boys. Perhaps there is no essential difference when one is wounded. Man or boy is lost. There is no catching up for him. His trip home will show him a different world; if he goes home in a coffin—his homecoming makes that home unreal forever. One boy shows me a minié ball extracted from his leg. One man tells me how much we need a balloon corps. Another grasps my hand but can’t say a word. At the very back of the tent someone is playing a harmonica, the “Camp Town Races”...or so it was yesterday.
The White House
Summer
Today I have been able to pardon two boys accused of dereliction of duty, Company K, while on guard near Washington. Regardless of reports I feel that they had carried the Union on their bayonets. Cramer and Phillips will have a second chance.
The heat of the afternoon has been oppressive; to cool me off, my mulatto brought me a cool drink on her famous tray; then a chaplain and a private spun stories of regimental pets. Once again I heard of the eagle in the 8th Wisconsin Volunteers. He is still alive after being in battles in seven states. His six-and-a-half-foot wingspread has been crippled by bullets; they say he screams when his Corps sees action.
A Minnesota unit manages to keep a half-grown bear; they swear he is the best picket-duty man. A black and white dog, named Jacko, has been dubbed a “brave soldier dog,” because he has been wounded twice, while his men were in action.
I have also learned that there are gamecocks, a coon, and several badgers in the field. Mascots all.
Militiamen, who visit me, talk a language I understand: jaggers, hardtack, barbed wire, pup tents, canteens, bivouacs, sutlers, coffee...
There are stories about dysentery: one boy said, “I jus’ cut out the bottom of my trousers!”
The Library
Summer
Mary’s kindness resumes. She visits the hospitals, the injured, taking flowers, food. The men are delighted to have her. People bring her newspapers and magazines, and she distributes them...she has made a little friend of a one-armed boy; sitting beside him, she becomes his mother.
Last week she brought about the abolishment of a death sentence. Due to her perseverance there will be no firing squad for Richard Miller, a youngster who fell asleep on duty. My “Lady President” obtained a reprieve from General McClellan.
The Press wars against Mary. Reporters ridicule her when she goes shopping in New York or Philadelphia, in her attempts to refurbish the White Rouse. If she visits Robert at Harvard, that too is criticized. Her letters to relatives are sometimes confiscated. I am aware that there are spies in the White House, but not Mary!
Is this why I assumed the Presidency! It is very difficult to curb my resentment.
Tonight, I will be spending a while with Frank Carpenter, watching him paint his Emancipation scene. He is a quiet, serious fellow, and I enjoy his company. I appreciate his skill, as he slowly brings his figures to life. He is still working in the dining room. He’ll bring me a rocker and I will stretch out.
The White House
—My desk—
I have little admiration for Napoleon; I have less for my little Napoleons who believe or half-believe this is a war of conquest. Again and again I remind them of emancipation. They nod. The negro? The slave? Can it be that there is a moral issue? It is possible that our government can wipe out slavery and free thousands of blacks? A few are astute enough to understand the potential here. A few are astute enough to project themselves in time, asking how are we to repair the devastation caused by General Grant and General Sherman. How long did it take for our men to burn Atlanta? How long does a city burn? Some say that Rome is still burning.
Andersonville—a prison... Libby—a prison. Thousands of men are incarcerated. Who pays for these criminal acts? All of us pay. We pay as though we were buying sugar at $12.00 a pound. A man weighs about 160 pounds. If he loses weight while he is imprisoned do we pay less?
Summer
With my watch lying on the desk, the seconds seem to move all too swiftly. Nine, ten, twelve...each second a life around Washington...cabinet mem- bers...family...friends. Here at 9:58 is Willie’s birth; here at 4:00 is Tad’s birth. A few more seconds pass and I am delivering my inaugural address. The war is threatening, the war has overcome us.
I put away the watch.
When Billy Herndon presented me with that watch I thought I would spend the rest of my life in Springfield. I thought our partnership would go on and on. I was lying on the old sofa, tired after a circuit ride.
Billy handed me the watch; I opened its box; then he said :
“We’ve been working together for ten years.”
He brushed his fingers through his shaggy beard and sat down at his desk.
A gold watch —
Executive Mansion
September 1st, 1864
“This is a beautiful country,” said John Brown, as the hangman hung him.
He was no black Christ: no gentle Uncle Tom; yet, he is becoming a black Christ as we continue this civil war, as we become more and more harassed by casualties. We will need black Christs if we are to free the negro. Uncle Tom’s Cabin must add space—room by room, year by year.
All the powers of earth seem to be combining against the chattel slave. Mammon is after him, ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of every key—the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distance places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.
This evening I heard negroes singing, as I worked at my desk, the windows open. I heard that song in New Orleans on my first visit; I heard it later when on the Mississippi, when we were on our cargo-raft, when we tied up at a wharf. That was quite a scrap. The blacks almost threw us off our raft.
Oh, was you ev – er in Mo – bile Bay,
Low – lands, low – lands, A – way, –
My John, – A – screw – ing cot – ton –
By the day, My dol – lar and a half a day.
Poverty...those days were poverty days.
And after this war is over we will have greater poverty in the South. Poverty will be a pestilence in the South. It will require years of work to wipe it out. Poverty will breed treachery and crime. What police force will be able to contend with it? I will urge Congress to pass an aid bill. I will propose groups of citizenry who can advise.
The White House
Saturday evening
Here are some interesting figures I encountered:
Less than one-half a day’s cost of this war could pay for the slaves in the State of Delaware, at $400 per person.
All slaves by 1860 census: 1,798 Cost of these slaves: $719,200 One day’s cost of the war: $2,000,000
Less than 87 days’ cost of this war could, at the same $400 figure, pay for the slaves in the States of Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky, and Missouri:
Cost of the slaves: $173,048,8 00 87 days of war: $174,000,0 00
Would compensation to all the slave owners satisfy them? Of course not. Their honor is at stake. If we do not make common cause to save the good old ship of the Union on this voyage, nobody will have a chance to pilot her on another voyage.
Note:
Write General Grant regarding the improvement of all military telegraph service. Suggest a military Telegraphic Corps.
The White House
September 8, 1864
When I reviewed the Army of the Potomac, when the greatest cavalry in the world rode past, I felt no pride, only sorrow, for the military pomp. To those of pensive turn, the military implies death, men in uniform are death-men, dealers and receivers. They work in the counting house of death.
Tad rode with the cavalry, his little shoulders wrapped in a grey cloak.
Dear Tad, what do you know of pain? You will sit on my lap and babble and then ride horseback, and imagine yourself a great general.
There are no great generals, Tad.
I salute the officers but take off my hat to the men in the ranks. They are the great men. There are no victors— not if there is heart and memory among men, consideration for the maimed, the widows, the orphans, the deceased.
Some men war for glory. No...peace is the glory.
There is only one cause: the country, its flag, a united people from coast to coast. I know that of thousands of men, chosen from the ranks, there would be a thousand reasons why they fought. Perhaps that is not quite right.
The men in review, the thousands who rode and walked past, were soon to retreat. Mishandled by General Hooker, 20,000 were killed, died in a wilderness of trees and thickets.
Wilderness of trees and thickets...so is much of my concept of this war, due largely to inadequate reports or reports that arrive too late to be of any use.
My colored pins, on the fields of battle, designate more than battle lines, regiments, infantry, artillery, cavalry, fortifications...those pins are men, my men, my country.
I understand that some of the New Englanders dumped their Bibles on their long marches—their knapsacks too heavy. I can see those Bibles, dropped beside a fence post, left underneath a tree, regretfully placed on the side of a corncrib.
For my dear Son, Charles—
love, Mother
I read most of my mother’s Bible. It was a solace and a threat; it was a puzzlement because I could not disentangle legend from fact.
Was there such a city as Zidon?
Was there a Goliath?
My mother’s Bible had a few maps—they led me to travel by camelback, through Egypt and Assyria. At night, in my attic, I imagined the sacred tabernacle, the pyramids. I repeated some of the Song of Songs.
September 20, 1864
The Library
To a great extent, this war is capitalism versus a kind of feudalism. On one hand we have free labor and on the other slave labor. The North boasts more millionaires than the South, in normal times. New York City probably has more millionaires than the entire South. John J. Astor is an example of an individual who has amassed wealth by canny manipulations—his kind is unseen in the South. As I understand it, Northern labor practices are questionable at times, shackling the workers; this must be leveled out in years to come.
Strange, seeing beggars on Northern streets; yet none in the South.
As the war continues I learn that Southern railroad cars lack windows for lack of factory labor. House glass can not be replaced; conventional glassware for the table can not be replaced. If a man wishes a prescription filled he must furnish his own bottle or packet. Needles, pins, scissors, knives are smuggled in and sold on the black market. Drugs have vanished from pharmacopoeia.
The White House
October, 1864
Tonight my watch lies on my chest of drawers. Ah yes, the seconds are passing, the minutes are passing. Jim Maitland is dead. Colonel James Maitland, Massachusetts man. His handsome face, his humor, leadership, bravery, gone. I thought him my protégé and friend. I was to grant him a Major’s commission.
The seconds, the minutes, ran out too quickly for Maitland. As I stare down at the second hand, in its small circle, I see his face; I see him dressed in his Zouave uniform.
Tad will miss him.
For a moment he held the enemy flag in his hands, then a shotgun blast.
Executive Mansion
October 2, 1864
An officer has given me a war diary kept by a Southern soldier, Fred Parker, corporal. Rain has soaked its pages; pages are missing. Here are four entries, written during the Wilderness Campaign:
May 6, 1864. Face-to-face fighting all day. Rifles. Pistols. No help from our cavalry or artillery. Pine woods surround. Trees close together. Weather poor. Fred died beside me at midday. Jeffrey has had his leg shot at the knee; knee shattered; men carried him away. We hide, shoot, duck, lie down.
May 7. Not much to eat. Awful hungry. Rifle fire constant.
May 8. Grant’s forces surround us. 120,000 men.
May 9. Dead and wounded everywhere, behind trees, under bushes. I see pieces of a sweater. Shoes. Boots. A hat. Bayonets. Broken musket. A brass belt buckle.
The diary tells me that life must be more than a belt buckle.
Executive Mansion
October 15, 1864
Hamlet’s thoughts, his moods, fit the conflict that assails our country.
...We defy augury; there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all; since no man has aught of what he leaves what is it to leave betimes? Let be.
Let be. Do we?
Little Tad heard Mary speaking about Maitland’s shotgun death; he climbed onto Mary’s bed and talked about our friend’s funeral—tearful details about the White House ceremony, details bitter for childish emphasis.
Perhaps it is repugnant to write here when men are dying. Perhaps my diary should not have been written; perhaps I should have been attending the wounded in the hospitals. But that confusion, that confusion of pain and sorrow, would not, could not, carry me forward.
Executive Mansion
October 21st, ’64
My desk