CHAPTER 14
JOHN HAY'S DIARY
JULY 21 AND 22, 1861
July 21,2 A.M.
Hasn't been a night like this in the President's house since the British put
the place to the torch in 1812.
Anybody who takes the trouble to drop in tonight, any Sunday picnicker
on the way back from the obliteration of our army, gets to see a President of
the United States lying on the couch in his office. He won't let me close the
door and the stream of irate visitors and told-you-soers is likely to last all
night.
The parade began after the Cabinet left. That was a sad mess, with Blair
and Chase at each other's throats, everybody looking for a scapegoat. After
they went scuttling home in the rain, everybody and his brother came troop-
ing in. Lincoln just lies there, stretched out, sick at heart, ready to see every-
body who has a report of the battle, and that includes plain soldiers, bitter
generals, the sightseers who took a picnic lunch to Bull Run, and the Con-
gressmen. Wade and Chandler were the worst.
"McDowell is useless," Wade snarled, "and that old windbag Winfield
Scott is still fighting the Mexican Waryou ought to sack him tonight."
"Who will lead the troops?" came the weary voice from the couch. I wish
he would get up, or let me close the door.
"Anybody!"
"That'll do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody."
"McClellan, then," Chandler offered, in that slurred speech that comes
either from liquor or a Michigan dialect, it's hard for me to tell which.
"Young and vigorous. He's won some fights."
"You think he'll do?" he asked Wade, seemingly uncertain. That struck me
as encouraging; we had already sent for McClellan, and Lincoln knew that
Wade's radicals were distrustful of McClellan's Democratic connections and
wishy-washy position on slavery. Even in his supine state, he was trying to get
Wade committed to participation in the selection of the commanding general.
That would make it harder for the senator to criticize for at least a week.
But Bluff Ben Wade would not take the bait. He stood there, looking down
at Lincoln with something approaching contempt, the natural lines of his
mouth making him look like a dog ready to go for the jugular.
Zachariah Chandler finally said what was on my mind. "You better snap
out of it, Lincoln. You ought to go to that desk and write out an order to the
states to enroll half a million men right now, at once."
Wade nodded his agreement and the President slowly rolled to a sitting
position. "You have to show the country and the rebels that the government
is not discouraged," Wade said.
"That you're just beginning to get mad," Chandler added.
General Scott arrived at that point, wheezing mightily from the walk up-
stairs, and asked to see the President in private. The senators left. Credit them
with getting Lincoln off his couch.
4 A.M., same night.
Dramatic episode involving the Hellcat. Mrs. Lincoln's stubbornness turns
out to be of some value. General Scott walked Lincoln over to the oak Cabi-
net table and sat him at the head, then put the latest cables from the War
office in front of him. I stood with my back to the door, keeping it closed and
the nocturnal visitors out.
"No organized army stands between the capital and the rebels," old Scott
said. He said it calmly, seeming to gain dignity in defeat. "I want you to know
you need to know thisthat this house is in danger of being taken by the
enemy tomorrow."
Lincoln nodded, saying nothing.
"That would mean internment," the general went on, "assuming, as I do,
that the Union would pursue the war from a new capital in Philadelphia or
New York. Internment of the President would be a fresh defeat, and could
affect the outcome of the war. You could consider"
"I'm staying here," said Lincoln. If he were captured and interned, it
would be possible for an infuriated North to fight on; but if the Prsdt were to
leave the capital and it did not fall, he would be the laughingstock of the
nation.
He had already been made to look the fool when he first came to Washing-
ton from Illinois to take the oath of ofiice. Pinkerton, the detective for the
railroad, claimed to have discovered an assassination plot. They slipped Lin-
coln into the nation's capital wearing a felt hat with the brim over his eyes
and his coat collar turned up. The entire episode was ludicrous, and a stu-
pidly coded telegram from Pinkerton made it worse. Lincoln likes to be con-
sidered an informal man, plain of speech and dress, but he is fierce about
presidential dignity. I knew there would be no running out of town, not
unless the rebels were banging on the front door of the Mansion, and maybe
not then.
"I recommend, sir," Scott said formally, accepting his previous decision
without question, "that you let me evacuate Mrs. Lincoln and your sons."
Lincoln thought about that. Neither Scott nor I said anything. I knew that
Mrs. L., with her chronic headaches and her sometimes really unsettled
mind, would not take military confinement well. Robert, the oldest boy, on
the remote side, would be all right; Tad was sickly; Willie, the apple of the
Prsdt's eye, would make life in prison more bearable for the family. Hard
choice.
"The decision is Mrs. Lincoln's to make," the Prsdt said finally. "Fetch
her, will you, John?"
Luckily, Lizzie Keckley, the negro modiste who works for the Hellcat, was
sitting there in the hallway in case she could be useful on this terrible night.
She's a good egg, and not a sneak about information or a petty thief like some
of the staff that madam has befriended. Lizzie is a handsome, statuesque
freedwoman, curiously self-assured, who made the ballgowns for half the
famous ladies in Washington. She can handle the President's wife even in her
worst rages, or when she is weirdly afflicted by the specter of ultimate pov-
erty. I sent Lizzie to fetch Mrs. Lincoln.
Who, to my amazement, turned in a finer moment than anybody who knew
her would have expected. The lady is not my favorite person, and to my mind
that marriage is the worst personal mistake the Tycoon ever made. My Uncle
Milton in Springfield, who has known them both well for years, says he is "an
old poke-easy" who has been relentlessly "henpecked." Her jealousy of other
women, totally unwarranted so far as I can see, and her testiness are a great
burden to her already burdened husband; her Southern relationships are a
source of attack from his critics who claim she's a secret rebel sympathizer.
On this night, however, as she stood in her nightdress and robe in the door-
way, I could find no fault with her conduct.
"Mother," the President said, (why must he always call her that?) "Gen-
eral Scott here thinks you and the boys would be safer for the next few weeks
out of the capital."
"Long Branch, in New Jersey," I suggested, to take the sting out of the
evacuation. That is the fashionable watering placeracing, gambling, the
bathssurpassing Newport and Saratoga in the gossip of Washingtonians,
and I knew the Hellcat wanted to visit it. Frankly, so do I, and will as soon as
the current unpleasantness passes.
"The family should stay together at a time like this," she said without a
second thought. She looked more serene and supporting, in her plain face and
robe and slippers, than she usually did in her rouge and powders and insistent
decolletage.
"If the President is imprisoned," Scott said, putting it straight, "he might
have more peace of mind knowing that his family is safe and free."
"You do not know my husband, General. His family is a source of strength
to him, as he is to us."
The Tycoon smiled for the first time this awful night. "That's your answer,
General Scott. Good night, Mother. Look in on Willie if you can; all the noise
may be keeping him up."
"You're not coming to sleep?"
"I'll see." He guided her to the door, passed her on to me, and I passed her
on to Lizzie Keckley. The night's only good moment had come and gone;
after Scott left, the stream of angry and puzzled visitors went on and on.
6 A.M.
I am exhausted and fear we have lost the war. The Prsdt has not slept and
is  standing  at  the  window  looking  out  at  Pennsylvania Avenue  and  the
Parade.
A rain-soaked mob is staggering down the street, eastward, away from the
rebels, half in uniform and half not. That is our army, salvation of the Union,
home from Manassas and not an army anymore. The avenue is a slow river of
mud, and from where we look, the soldiers in the early light seem like
wooden figures in a logjam. Lincoln is sighing deeply and often, as if he
cannot get enough air in his lungs. Now the day begins that may end in the
surrender of this house for the second time in our history.
July 22,6:30 P.M.
Wrong about the last night's final entry. Mustn't let myself get so glum.
The rebels are still just over the river, but they have not moved against us to
follow up their victory. Scott says they're just as green as our men, and
General Beauregard cannot be certain that we are defenseless. God knows,
there are plenty of Union soldiers around Washington, mainly in the bars or
sitting in the streets getting drunk. General McClellan is on the scene at last,
and I must say looks like a general, commanding presence and all, riding
about with his twenty-man escort, shouting orders and putting up a good
front.
Horace Greeley, he of the "On to Richmond!" headlines, sent a letter to
the Tycoon after the Bull Run disaster. Lincoln opened it before I could, then
tucked it away in his Greeley cubbyhole, but I saw it anyhow.
"If the Union is irrevocably gone," writes the intrepid Uncle Horace, "an
armistice ought at once to be proposed. I do not consider myself at present a
judge of anything but the public sentiment. That seems to be everywhere
deepening against further prosecution of the war."
Can you imagine? That pusillanimous outpouring comes from the guiding
spirit of the radical cause, the beacon of the Jacobins hooraying for abolition.
In one quick battle, he has gone from On-to-Richmond to On-to-surrender.
The Ancient knows what power Greeley of the Tribune holds in the forma-
tion of Northern public sentiment and he is sick at heart about that lily-
livered letter. He is well off the couch and out of his yesterday's daze, how-
ever, and has asked for books on military strategy. General Scott sent over
the book by General Henry Halleck: "Old Fuss and Feathers" evidently likes
the work of "Old Brains." (Why are so many generals bedecked with sobri-
quets beginning with "Old"? At least McClellan is the "Young" Napoleon.)
Lincoln had a curious reaction to Horace Greeley's spinelessness. After his
loss of faith in his field generals as well as in his own political-military judg-
ment, that craven abandonment by the editor who was abolition's chief pro-
ponent seemed to be the last straw. Instead of collapsing into despair, as I was
fully prepared to do, the Ancient perked up and counted his blessings.
The rebel army had not advanced into the capital, as it so easily could have
done, which meant that the other side had its lapses of judgment too. And the
defeat at Bull Run decisively awakened the North with more of a stinging
slap than a stunning blow. Not everyone fell apart like Greeley and read the
public mood as panic-stricken. Many of the Republicans got mad, just as
Wade and Chandler did, and they led the call for 400,000 "duration" troops.
That was more than the "three hundred thousand more" that Lincoln had
asked for in story and song, so he cheered up.
"Cheered" is not quite the right word. He is not a cheerful person. He is a
congenitally melancholy person who looks for reasons to smile occasionally. I
am the one who has cheered up.
The Tycoon is determined to see the war through, even if it takes to the end
of the year. I am with him all the way, even when the duty is onerous, as
when I missed the chance to meet Kate Chase at the Blair party, or more
accurately the Blair wake, last night after Bull Run. My chance will come.