“We start to you at One P.M. to-day,” President Lincoln telegraphed General Grant at City Point. “May lie over during the dark hours of the night. Very small party of us.”1 The president's party consisted of the Lincolns; their son Tad; Mrs. Lincoln's maid, Elizabeth Keckley; William H. Crook, the bodyguard; and Captain Charles Penrose, who had been assigned by Secretary of War Stanton to protect the president. “The River Queen, closely followed by the Bat, left Washington on March 23, 1865,” Commander John S. Barnes noted with crisp naval efficiency.²

Secretary of War Stanton was so concerned with President Lincoln's safety that he decided to go to the Sixth Street Wharf to see the president off himself. He had not been feeling very well for the past several days and went to the wharf against the advice of his wife, Ellen. The secretary's anxieties were not helped any when he arrived at Sixth Street just in time to watch the River Queen steaming off toward City Point—the president was already on his way.

An hour or so later, Stanton's worries increased even further. An intense thunderstorm, accompanied by strong gusts of wind, erupted over Washington while the River Queen was out on the Potomac River. A reporter with the Washington bureau of the New York Herald reported that “terrific squalls of wind, accompanied by thunder and lightning, did considerable damage here.”³ The storm was called, among other things, a squall and a gale. A Washington newspaper insisted that it was a hurricane. Whatever it was, it did its share of damage—uprooting trees, destroying houses, and blowing boats out on the Potomac off their course. “The roof of a factory on Sixth Street was blown off into the street, and fell upon a hack,” the Herald stated.

Secretary Stanton was so alarmed that he roused himself out of bed and made his way to the War Department's telegraph office to contact the president. At 8:45 p.m., he sent Lincoln an urgent telegram: “I hope you have reached Point Lookout safely not-withstanding the furious gale that came on soon after you started.”4 He went on to request that Lincoln inform him of his safe arrival as soon as he reached Point Lookout.

Actually, Secretary Stanton's panic was completely misplaced. The River Queen apparently left for City Point just in time to miss the storm. Lincoln was thoroughly enjoying the trip. He stood on deck and watched as Washington receded into the distance, relieved that he would not have to look at it again for a while. Afterward, he went belowdecks and had a long conversation with the River Queen's captain, Captain Bradford, who had been involved with chasing down Confederate blockade runners earlier in the war. For several hours, Captain Bradford regaled the president with stories of his adventures off the Confederate coast. Lincoln did not go to bed until nearly midnight.

Tad Lincoln was enjoying the trip as much as his father, if not more so. The Lincolns’ bodyguard, William Crook, noted that young Tad roamed all over the ship, studying every screw of the engine and every rivet in the boiler room. He also made friends with just about every member of the River Queen's crew and was treated as the ship's mascot by everyone on board.

During the night, while the president and his party were asleep, the River Queen steamed out of the Potomac and into the deeper waters of Chesapeake Bay. As soon as she entered the bay, the temperature began to drop and the water became choppy and turbulent. William Crook shared a stateroom with Tad Lincoln. He was startled out of a sound sleep when Mary Lincoln entered the cabin to check on Tad. “It is growing colder, and I came to see if my little boy has enough covers on him,” she explained. Crook managed to drift off to sleep again after Mrs. Lincoln left but was reawakened by the tossing of the River Queen in the wind and weather. He felt as though the ship was “slowly climbing up one side of a high hill and then rushing down the other.”5 The pitching apparently did not disturb Tad, who slept right through the wind and weather, but it gave Crook a long, restless night.