There were a few fine days at the beginning of April, when the peach trees blossomed and the grass grew green in the parks. Then it rained for a week and a half, turning the streets to rivers of yellow water, mud, and sewage, swelling the canal that ran along the north boundary of the Mall.
Nicolay took advantage of a quiet moment to write a letter to Therena, telling her that the president’s new schedule had relieved them greatly, “and given us time at least to eat and sleep,” but that “the crowd however hangs on with wonderful perseverance.” It had been five weeks since the inauguration, but he had no idea when the mob of office-seekers would slacken. He mentions all the talk of war, “which the newspapers and the gossiping public insist is near at hand,” but he sees no likelihood of it. Perhaps “a little brush at Charleston or Pensacola is quite possible but that any general hostilities will result from it I have not the least fear.”
Four days later, on April 11, 1861, he reassured her, writing, “Don’t get alarmed at the ‘rumors of wars’ which you hear from this direction,” and adding that the danger of an attack on the capital was no more than idle gossip. Nicolay is echoing his boss, who later would prove a master at remaining calm when most people around him were panicked. In the same letter, Nicolay mentioned that a regiment of a thousand men had been mustered into service in the District in the last twenty-four hours, and that last night as he and John Hay were returning from downtown to the White House, they were—for the first time—challenged by a sentinel.
At 4:30 a.m. on April 12, the Confederate guns began bombarding Fort Sumter.
WAR HAD BROKEN OUT—despite Nicolay’s reassurances—and the events of the next few weeks were so surprising and dramatic that they rapidly defined the characters of the men at the center of the action.
William Stoddard, recently sworn in as an assistant to John Hay, let himself in to the White House with his latchkey early in the morning. He climbed the stairs and found the president alone, emerging from the oval library. “He was bent until he almost appeared to stoop,” Stoddard recalled, “and he was looking straight before him, as if gazing at something in the distance or like a man who is listening intently.”
“Good morning, Mr. Lincoln!”
The president stood still, looking down into Stoddard’s face, but his expression did not change. “He may have been listening for the sound of guns in Charleston harbor,” Stoddard guessed. He was alarmed by the deep circles under Lincoln’s eyes, and the vacancy of their aspect.
“Why, Mr. Lincoln, you don’t seem to know me!”
“Oh, yes, I do,” he replied. “You are Stoddard. What is it?”
The new secretary wanted to ask a favor. “It’s just this, Mr. Lincoln. I believe there is going to be fighting, pretty soon, right here, and I don’t feel like sitting at a desk in the Patent Office, or here either, while any fight is going on.” In his spare time, Stoddard had been drilling with an artillery company, the D.C. Rifles.
His face brightening, the president interrupted: “Well, well, why don’t you go?”
The new secretary explained that he had just taken an oath to report to the president, and now it appeared that he would be asked to take a different oath “to obey somebody else. I don’t see how I can manage them both without your permission.”
“Go ahead!” the president exclaimed, straightening his back. “Swear in! Go wherever you are ordered to go.”
Stoddard expressed his gratitude, and he was about to take his leave when Mr. Lincoln called him back. “Young man,” he said gravely, pointing his finger, “go just where you’re ordered. Do your duty. You won’t lose anything by this!”
So the soldier of fortune, twenty-six-years of age, went off to serve the D.C. militia that guarded the Long Bridge over the Potomac and the palatial government buildings, and garrisoned redoubts at Tennally’s Town and Edward’s Ferry. He would not return to the White House for three months.
Stoddard’s hero and role model that spring was not the staid and methodical Nicolay, or the debonair, ironical Hay; it was the quintessential soldier, Elmer Ellsworth. On April 14, Nicolay transcribed the president’s proclamation calling up seventy-five thousand “militia of the several States of the Union,” to be issued the next day. Fort Sumter had been evacuated. On April 15, Lincoln wrote a letter to Ellsworth that he was to use as a letter of credential or recommendation, stating that he, Lincoln, had “since the beginning of our acquaintance . . . had a very high estimate of your military talent. Accordingly I have been, and still am anxious for you to have the best position in the military which can be given you, consistent with justice.” In brief, he would be obliged if the military authorities would place Ellsworth in a position that would be satisfactory to him. He knew the best place to begin was not Washington, but New York City.
Short on cash, Ellsworth turned to John Hay, who gave him all the money he had. Armed with the president’s testimonial, Ellsworth boarded the next train to Manhattan. In this time of crisis there was not a minute to spare. His rendezvous with his sweetheart in Albany, his birthday celebration and dinner with Carrie, had to be canceled. He must try to raise a regiment of Zouaves at once, recruiting them from his friends in the Fire Department of New York. There he could expect enthusiastic support from the press. Arriving in Manhattan, Ellsworth walked downtown to 154 Nassau Street, to the office of Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune. Showing him the president’s letter, he detailed his plan of action. Charmed, Greeley published an interview with Ellsworth in a newspaper editorial, describing this young man “of an unusually fine physique, of frank and attractive manners and of great intelligence.”
Ellsworth explained to the reporter: “I want the New York firemen, for there are no more effective men in the country, and none with whom I can do so much. They are sleeping on a volcano in Washington, and I want men who can go into a fight.” The Washington militia was ill-trained and unreliable, full of southern sympathizers and spies who would turn against the Union at the first sign of weakness. The patriotic firefighters responded with overwhelming enthusiasm, and Ellsworth soon had more volunteers than he could enlist. By April 20, the New York papers were proud to report that the organization of the regiment of Fire Zouaves was well under way. The uniforms had been designed and ordered—not the flamboyant fezzes and baggy trousers, but standard army uniforms with a touch of scarlet in the shirts—and Ellsworth had been elected colonel by acclamation.
The New York legislature could not move quickly enough to fund Ellsworth’s project; the money for guns and uniforms flowed from the purses of private citizens in Manhattan. Soon Ellsworth’s eleven hundred recruits were drilling in Central Park to the applause of flag-waving throngs inflamed by talk of rebellion and war. John Hay called the colonel “the idol of the Bowery and the pet of the Avenue.”
EACH MAN SHOWS HIS nature in a crisis; and such a crisis as this, the nation had never seen. Virginia, while it had not yet seceded, officially refused to comply with the president’s call for militia. And on April 17, 1861, their State Convention adopted an ordinance of secession subject to a popular referendum on May 23. On the eighteenth, five companies of Pennsylvania troops arrived in the federal city. The day was cold and windy. Hearths blazed, and the smell of wood smoke was in the air. A citizen observed that “soldiers are now met with at every turn and the drum and bugle are heard almost all the time from some quarter of the City.” Lincoln agreed to quarter the “Frontier Guard,” sixty Kansas volunteers hastily organized by Senator James Henry Lane, in the grand East Room of the White House—to Mrs. Lincoln’s horror, and to John Hay’s amusement.
Hay’s response to the tumultuous events of late April 1861 is most peculiar and detached, as if what the poet was seeing and hearing was too fantastic to be taken seriously—a hashish fugue. At first, he sounds in his diary like an observer from another planet. Some folks later claimed that Hay laughed his way through the war, but this was not the case—although humor was his first line of defense against anxiety. Of all the secretaries, John Hay, the youngest, would be most affected, truly transformed by his White House years. And the greatest change came in that first year.
On April 18, Hay, brimming with impressions, began a diary that would become, arguably, the most important and eloquent source of information about Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War—apart from Lincoln’s own writings. And on the same day—or, more precisely, late in the evening of that day—John Hay fell in love.
The weather was cold and clear, the moon in its first quarter. If Hay was looking for portents, a brilliant comet appeared in the constellation of Draco, near the zenith. There were ominous signs of a more mundane sort. Mails were suspended and the telegraph cut off, as secessionists north of the capital threatened the troops marching south. All day long, a crowd of men had been lining up outside the war department, mostly local companies enlisting: the Potomac Light Guard of Georgetown—Captain Boyd, three lieutenants, four corporals, one musician and fifty foot soldiers were sworn in—as were the Jackson Guards, twice the size of the Potomac outfit, with a quartermaster, two musicians, and five sergeants, all blustering, singing, sounding drums and bugles.
After a hectic day in the office, Hay considered attending the Washington Theatre down on Eleventh and C streets (the “wrong side” of the Avenue) where the famous actor Joseph Jefferson was starring in the comedy Babes in the Woods. Now it was too late. The performance had already begun.
In a rare moment of leisure and reflection, he sat down at his desk and opened a new clothbound notebook with lined pages, and began: “The White House is turned into a barracks. Jim Lane marshaled his Kansas Warriors today at Willard’s and placed them at the disposal of Maj. Hunter who turned them tonight into the East Room.” Hay’s writing desk stood directly above the immense room where the sixty warriors were now snoring, smoking, sipping whiskey, and cleaning their rifles. Although he calls them splendid, he never loses his sense of the ridiculous: “The Major has made me his aid, and I labored under some uncertainty as to whether I should speak to privates or not.”
Of the day’s business, Hay thought the most noteworthy development was a dispatch from several powerful New York merchants asking for warships, troops, and supplies to defend commerce in southern waters. This caused the president to summon the cabinet late in the afternoon; and after conferring, the secretary of state formally acknowledged the dispatch with one of his own, saying that the matter was under consideration. “All day the notes of preparation have been heard at the public buildings and the Armories,” Hay wrote. “Every body seems to be expecting a Son or brother or ‘young man’ in the coming regiments.”
The rest of Hay’s first diary entry reveals that the most momentous event of his day occurred late at night, when the Lincolns and all but a few soldiers were asleep. The old doorkeeper, Edward McManus, crept upstairs and knocked on the secretary’s door. He begged Hay’s permission to present the card of a determined woman on a mission of the utmost importance. She and her lady companion would not be turned away, but they must see the president or his secretary at once. Nicolay was either out on the town or indisposed. So Hay took the card imprinted with the name Ann S. Stephens, upon which she had scribbled her note, “expressing a wish to see the President on matters concerning his personal safety.” Mrs. Stephens could not be turned away without due courtesies. She was a distinguished woman, an editor, with Edgar Allan Poe, of Graham’s Magazine, and later of her own ladies’ magazine; she was also an author of popular fiction, including Malaeska (1860) the first “dime novel.” The forty-eight-year-old cosmopolite was one of the most famous women in America. So Hay put on his coat, brushed his hair, and went downstairs to meet her.
In such weather, and at such a late hour, these two intrepid ladies would have been wrapped in cloaks and veiled bonnets, the better to conceal them from the stares of night watchmen, hackney drivers, drunks, and the soldiers that were now bivouacked in the room to their left, just beyond the stairs John Hay descended. McManus took him to his little room adjoining the corridor, and there he waited. Soon the doorkeeper ushered the visitors in.
Mrs. Stephens was tall and stout. Removing her bonnet, she uncovered a plain, broad face lambent with intelligence, and thick blonde hair streaked with gray. She took the hand Hay extended to her with her fingertips. The woman behind her, in contrast, was no taller than John Hay himself, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with delicate features perfectly formed but widely spaced, large eyes with long lashes, a firm chin, and slightly upturned nose—exquisite in profile. Mrs. Stephens introduced her little companion as Mrs. Lander. As she turned to face him, the delicately curved lips of the beautiful mouth reminded him of someone he might have known. Hay blinked—he could hardly believe his eyes.
It was Jean Margaret Davenport, the “Infant Phenomenon” actress who—five years earlier—had entranced theatergoers in Providence, New York, and San Francisco. Now, age thirty-one, she had recently retired from the stage to marry Colonel Frederick Lander, the famous explorer, civil engineer, and poet. Hay, not given to superlatives in expressing his personal feelings in his diary, makes an exception for Jean Davenport Lander: “I was infinitely delighted at this chance interview with the Medea, the Julia, the Mona Lisa of my stage struck salad days.” Hay was not yet twenty-three, and he was more stagestruck than ever. Fortune like a tornado had swept him up out of the prairie, and had dropped him down into the one place on earth where this sort of miracle might happen. “Miraculous” is the word he chooses to describe the woman’s beauty, but the word more aptly applies to the event itself—a man meeting the woman of his dreams in a circumstance where she has come to ask him for help.
In all the three and a half years of diary entries, there is no incident more curious than this nocturnal visit of the two famous women to the White House. Ladies of their age and class did not go out at that hour into the crime-ridden streets of Washington unescorted. Mrs. Lander lived far away on the other side of the Capitol. Where were their husbands? Mr. Stephens, we know, was very ill, and Colonel Lander was on a secret reconnaissance mission in the South. Yet could they not have enlisted the help of some gentleman friend to accompany them on such an urgent mission, or sent a courier with a detailed message? Signed by the two celebrities, it would not have been discarded. No, they had to go in person; they had to make an appearance, a scene for the benefit of John Hay, if not the president.
Ann Stephens, having made the introductions, having gained access for her illustrious friend, gave the floor to the great actress. Now it seemed that Mrs. Lander bore the burden of the terrible message. But she could hardly bring herself to set it down. She looked at John Hay with those enormous liquid eyes, looked away at the carpet, and gazed up at him again. She started to speak, stammered, twisted a handkerchief, and peered up at him, her head lowered, as if she had forgotten her lines. “After many hesitating and bashful trials, Mrs. Lander told the impulse that brought them.”
A young gentleman she knew from Virginia, “long haired, swaggering, chivalrous of course . . . had come into town in great anxiety for a new saddle . . .” There she hesitated, pausing for an effect that was dramatic whether or not she intended it to be. She did not explain how or where she had met the southern knight (whom she did not name) or why he had so indiscreetly informed her “that he and half a dozen others including a daredevil guerilla from Richmond named Ficklin would do a thing within forty-eight hours that would ring through the world. Connecting this central fact with a multiplicity of attendant details she concluded that the President was either to be assassinated or captured.”
John Hay was astonished—not by the story, the likes of which he heard several times a week—but by Jean Lander’s bearing, her bashful, halting presentation of the information in the throes of profound concern. This was not the proud Medea he had seen onstage, nor the shameless Camille. “She ended by renewing her protestations of earnest solicitude,” Hay wrote, “mingled with fears of the impropriety of the step,” and with good reason, as the odd visit, being both melodramatic and disruptive, would be charged to the actress rather than the novelist. Mrs. Stephens would later become a friend of Mrs. Lincoln’s. The glamorous Mrs. Lander would never again set foot in the house. At the moment, none of this concerned the secretary. Starstruck, bewitched, he marked the transformation of Jean Davenport.
“Lander has made her very womanly since he married her. Imagine Jean M. Davenport a blushing, hesitating wife.”
Thanking the women for their concern and their diligence in coming to the White House so late at night to sound the alarm, he led them to the door. As they put on their cloaks and bonnets, he assured them that the president would be informed immediately of the threat, and bid them good evening.
Had it been anyone other than Jean Lander who had come calling, Hay probably would not have disturbed the president and his wife. But, true to his word, he went upstairs, and entering the office vestibule he passed through the double doors to the right and into the broad central hall that led to the family apartments. He passed the oval library on the left, the guest bedrooms and children’s bedrooms on the right, and stopped at Lincoln’s bedroom on the left.
He knocked on the door; Mr. Lincoln told him to come in.
“I went to the bedside of the Chief couché. I told him the yarn,” Hay wrote, knowing that the president might have wondered why his secretary had troubled his rest with such a trifle.
“He quietly grinned.”
THE NEXT MORNING, APRIL 19, Hay consulted Major David Hunter concerning White House security. Hunter, a powerfully built, balding man of fifty-nine with a drooping mustache, had been a guard aboard the train from Springfield. In Buffalo, he had protected the Lincolns from a mob that rushed the train, dislocating his shoulder in the melee. Destined for rapid military promotion in the field, he had already made himself essential to the Lincolns’ peace of mind in the capital.
The gravity of military developments in the vicinity seems not to have dawned upon John Hay as quickly as it had upon Nicolay and the president. Keeping his own memorandum of events, Nicolay wrote that “Friday, April 19th 1861 is likely to become historic in the nation’s annals. The 6th Regiment Mass[achusetts] Volunteer Militia in passing through the city of Baltimore, was assaulted by a mob, and finally in self-defense fired upon the mob in return.” Nicolay and Lincoln received word from the governor of Maryland in the early afternoon “that a collision had occurred.” Four soldiers and nine civilians had been killed in the streets around Camden Station, and the mayor of Baltimore wired the president, “send no troops here.” Nicolay called it “the first bloodshed in this civil war,” and wrote to Therena that “we are expecting more troops here by way of Baltimore, but are also fearful that the secessionists may at any hour cut the telegraph wires, tear up the railroad track, or burn the bridges.” He also mentions rumors that a hostile army of fifteen hundred had gathered in Alexandria; a ship was seen unloading rebel soldiers on the Maryland side of the Potomac.
From all indications, the attack would come that night. The Federal garrison at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, had burned the U.S. armory there and fled, under threat of attack by the secessionists. This seemed to delight John Hay and Major Hunter, “as a deadly blow at the prosperity” of the southern traitors, who had coveted the armory. Anxious visitors filled the White House waiting rooms—congressmen, cabinet members, and militia officers all clamoring for the president’s attention. For the time being, Nicolay would have to fend for himself. His friend Hay had gone downtown on a mission.
Making the most of his new prestige, Hay had arranged to call upon the stage actor Joseph Jefferson at his hotel. Thirty-two years of age, the comedian was already famous: roles in Our American Cousin at Laura Keene’s theater in New York, and Rip Van Winkle, which he had adapted for the theater, had made him a star in his late twenties. Hay “found him more of a gentleman than I had expected. A very intellectual face, thin and eager with large intense blue eyes, the lines firm, and the hair darker than I had thought.”
Jefferson had a good story to tell his visitor. When Joe was a child actor, on the road with his family of players, their engagement in Springfield was threatened by the city’s entertainment tax. In the provinces in those days, theater was considered wicked, and the actors and actresses no better than vagabonds, as false and immoral as the roles they played onstage. While citizens could not lawfully ban show business, some town councils levied taxes on traveling companies so exorbitant they would be obliged to move on.
In Springfield, there lived a young lawyer who was very well liked, and who also happened to have a passion for stage plays—not that he’d seen many, but he’d read a few, especially the tragedies of Shakespeare. This lawyer went before the city fathers and spoke so eloquently on the high art of the theater, from the time of Thespis and the Greek tragedians to the golden age of Shakespeare and Marlowe, that the elders relented, suspended the tax, and the Jefferson troupe settled in for a long run.
The lawyer was Abraham Lincoln, who would spend many an hour reading Shakespeare aloud to John Hay.
But Hay had not come to visit the illustrious comedian in order to learn about theater history. He had other matters on his mind. In those days, everyone in the theater world knew everyone else—particularly at the top of the profession. So Joseph Jefferson, the same age as the “infant phenomenon,” would be just the person to tell him all about Jean Margaret Lander.
She had been on tour in California in the autumn of 1860 when she met Colonel Lander, who was there on one of his explorations for the Department of the Interior. Dashing, gallant, an amateur poet, Lander wooed the renowned actress. They fell in love, and were married in San Francisco on October 13, in a blaze of publicity (“the marriage of Venus and Mars!”). Jean Davenport was quite wealthy, and the idea of her giving up the stage for home and hearth may have been as much her idea as her husband’s. She could not remember when she had not worked, and basked in applause, and perhaps she had grown weary of it for a time. But six months after the honeymoon, she might have had second thoughts. There were rumors that Mrs. Lander had grown moody and high-handed with the colonel. As for him, the explorer, Indian fighter, and barroom brawler who had made five transcontinental explorations by the age of thirty-nine was as restless as ever. Although he had a genuine interest in the arts and amused himself for a while in developing Washington’s art collections, as soon as war threatened, he was gone—on secret missions to the South, then to the most dangerous posts he could get assigned to him, in the West.
So, for the time being, Mrs. Lander was—as she would be for most of the Civil War—alone. She lived in a large, airy wood-frame house on B Street, looking out on the Capitol grounds to the north.
Taking his leave by thanking Joseph Jefferson for his hospitality, John Hay advanced up Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill, crossing Maryland Avenue and then New Jersey Avenue in rounding the Capitol Park with a view to dropping in on Mrs. Lander. Had he sent his card ahead? When would there have been time? He arrived at her door, and she invited him in. He was very handsome, in a boyish way, and knew exactly what charming things to say. Yes, he had seen her onstage, when he was a student, in Providence.
He had come, he explained, to hear her tell—now at her leisure, “just by way of a slant”—the story she had told in breathless haste the night before. It was, of course, a matter of the greatest importance, the president’s security, and Mr. Lincoln had received the intelligence with gratitude. Now, if anything was left to be said, she must not leave out the least detail.
“I like Jean M. more and more . . . ,” John Hay confides to his diary, and how much more we can never be certain. Someone has drawn a line through this sentence in an effort to conceal Hay’s feelings that is less effective than other measures of the sort one can find throughout the notebooks—furious cross-hatchings and ink spills, razor marks at the gutter margins, entire seasons of inexplicable silence. Still, the figure of Jean M. flickers through the pages of Hay’s diary, as if it could not be wiped out without burning the entire book.
WHEN HAY RETURNED TO the White House that afternoon, he was awed by the crisis that the president and Nicolay had been struggling to manage while he was calling on Jefferson and Lander. Lincoln had issued a proclamation blockading the southern ports. At 3:30, a special envoy from Baltimore’s mayor delivered a letter insisting “that it is not possible for more soldiers to pass through Baltimore unless they fight their way every step.” The president’s wife was anxious. “I had to do some very dexterous lying,” Hay recalled, “to calm the awakened fears of Mrs. Lincoln in regard to the assassination suspicion” that had been aroused by the ladies’ visit the night before. He might have altered Mrs. Lander’s tale of the long-haired Virginian and his guerrillas to make it sound implausible; he could say with truth he had looked into the matter that very day and found nothing in it.
“The organization of the militia, and the late arrivals of troops have been making things seem quite warlike,” Nicolay wrote, “but we have been much more impressed with the conditions surrounding us by the arrival this evening of Miss [Dorothea] Dix, who came to offer herself and an army of nurses to the government gratuitously, for hospital service.” Miss Dix, renowned for her work in asylums for the mentally ill, had a clairvoyant sense of disaster. Her stern, elderly figure appearing at the White House that evening was unsettling.
During the next week, there was intense anxiety that the feebly defended capital would be attacked. Nicolay complained that of five thousand men under arms in Washington, no more than two thousand were reliable. He felt that the three thousand District militia were so full of secessionists they might turn their guns on loyal Union troops at the first sight of rebel invaders. Fretfully, the president and his staff awaited the arrival of regiments from New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and other states while negotiating with the recalcitrant Marylanders for the right of way. The cutting of telegraph lines by secessionists and interruption of the mails further intensified suspense, as the secretary of war and General Winfield Scott waited for news from the North in a virtual vacuum. It was with great relief that they received word from Elmer Ellsworth “that his regiment has been raised, accepted,” and was ready to be assigned. “Much is hoped from the gallant Colonel’s Bloodtubs. They would be worth their weight in Virginia Currency, at Fort McHenry tonight,” Hay wrote. Exasperated, Lincoln told some Massachusetts volunteers on April 24, “I don’t believe there is any North. The Seventh Regiment is a myth. R. Island is not known in our geography any longer. You are the only Northern realities.”
The steamship Baltic transported Ellsworth’s regiment of Fire Zouaves to Annapolis on April 29, and a special train delivered them to Washington the night of May 2. Hay noted that the president was greatly relieved, as there had been rumors “that the Firemen were cutting their way through Baltimore.” Hay was on hand to greet his friend, “dressed like his men, red cap, red shirt, grey breeches, grey jacket.” Ellsworth wore a sword, a heavy pistol, and a bowie knife in his belt with a heavy blade sixteen inches long, that might “go through a man’s head from crown to chin as you would split an apple.” At the moment, the weapons were not for the enemy, but to put fear into “the turbulent spirits under his command,” Hay observed.
Hay went up to the Hall of the House of Representatives to see where the Zouaves were quartered, and described them as “a jolly, gay set of blackguards . . . turbulent spirits” spoiling for a fight. After a week of nothing but parading and drilling, it would be all the colonel could do to keep them out of mischief. They chased imaginary rebels through the streets, frightening the ladies; they ordered expensive meals in restaurants, then told the owners to send the bill to the White House or Jeff Davis. Some set fire to a fence. One was accused of rape. But of the eleven hundred men, only six were sent home. The rest were behaving well enough. Ellsworth marched them past the White House where Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, Tad, and Willie took delight in their intricate drilling.
TROOPS WERE ARRIVING BY the thousands every day, bivouacking in the Capitol and the Patent Office, and parading through the streets. On the morning of April 29, a clear, windy day after rain, John Hay dressed and went into Nicolay’s office across the hall. At the south window stood Kansas senator Jim Lane, gaunt, uncombed, bewhiskered, wearing a rusty overcoat without a necktie or even a collar, his hair standing “fretful-porcupine-wise upon his crown.” Holding a spyglass to his eye, he looked out over the wind-tossed trees, swearing sotto voce. Behind him was seated a slender gentleman, properly dressed and dapper, with long red hair, a carefully trimmed mustache, intense, bespectacled eyes, and delicate, intelligent features. This was the German-American Carl Schurz, thirty-two, a veteran of the German revolution, who had fled his homeland in 1849 after the coup failed. Schurz took up the Republican cause in the 1850s, bringing many German-American voters to Lincoln’s camp. The president had assigned him to diplomatic duty in Madrid, but he was reluctant to leave the center of action in America. Hay found him an intriguing, romantic figure, “an orator, a soldier, a philosopher, an exiled patriot, a skilled musician” who played the piano beautifully in the Red Room at twilight, when he was not advising the president on military matters.
Senator Lane’s stream of profanity addressed the Confederate flag whipping in the breeze over a roof across the river.
“Let me tell you,” he growled, while keeping his eye on the telescope, “we have got to whip these scoundrels like hell, Carl Schurz. They did a good thing stoning our men at Baltimore & shooting away the flag at Sumter. It has set the great North a howling for blood and they’ll have it.”
“I heard,” Schurz replied, in his soft German accent, “you preached a sermon to your men yesterday.”
“No sir, this is not time for preaching.” In Mexico, where he had fought with General Winfield Scott, there had been four ministers in Lane’s regiment. Lane ordered them to stop preaching and take up card playing. “In a month or so they was the biggest devils & best fighters I had.”
Carl Schurz told Hay that he had obtained three months’ leave from his diplomatic duties to raise a cavalry regiment of German-Americans. The country had not seen such heartfelt saber rattling since the British arrived in Boston nearly a century before.
The bellicose tone of Hay’s diary is characteristic of the widespread innocence of warfare, the rank ignorance of the horror that was to come. Visiting the Rhode Island regiment camped at the Department of the Interior, he remarks that “there was enough of breeding and honor to retone the society of the Gulf, and wealth enough to purchase the entire state of Florida . . . When men like these leave their horses, their women and their wine, harden their hands, eat crackers for dinner, wear a shirt for a week and never black their shoes,—all for a principle, it is hard to set any bounds to the possibilities of such an army. The good blood of the North must now be mingled with that of the South in battle, and the first fight will determine which is the redder.”
On that date, April 30, 1861, it is fair to say that Hay had no idea what he was talking about, but he was about to learn before the end of June. He speaks of a “principle” for which the gallant aristocrats of Providence had left the comforts of hearth and home. But neither he nor John Nicolay precisely understood what that principle was until one morning a week later, when “the ancient” (as they sometimes called Mr. Lincoln) gave them an impromptu tutorial in his office. That room, with the maps covering the wall across from the grim portrait of Andrew Jackson, sometimes became an informal classroom.
Shortly after sunrise on May 7, Hay entered the president’s office to relay intelligence that Ellsworth had just received concerning the moods and opinions of people in Illinois, as well as the news that he was planning to swear in the Zouaves that day. Hay also wanted to tell Mr. Lincoln of Senator Orville Browning’s extravagant scheme for subjugating the South. Browning would “establish a black republic in lieu of the exterminated whites, and extend a protectorate over them, while they raised our cotton.” Senator Browning had not meant his proposal as a joke.
Hay found Mr. Lincoln gazing out the south window at two U.S. navy steamers puffing up the river, while resting the brass end of a telescope on the toe of his boot. Lincoln was lounging behind his desk in the far corner of the spacious chamber that he called his “workshop.” Dividing the room lengthwise was the long table surrounded by twelve chairs where the cabinet convened. As Hay entered, to his right was the fireplace, and across from it, beneath the maps was a horsehair settee flanked by two button-and-roll upholstered armchairs.
“Some of our northerners seem bewildered and dazzled by the excitement of the hour,” said Lincoln, his eyes twinkling, more amused than alarmed. John Nicolay entered from the door to his right with a sheaf of papers. “Doolittle [Republican senator from Wisconsin] seems to think that this war is to result in the entire abolition of slavery. . . .” And the old and venerable James Hamilton, son of Alexander, had been urging Mr. Lincoln to enlist slaves in the U.S. Army—a distant dream that Major Hunter would soon make a reality.
“The daily correspondence,” Hay replied, “is thickly interspersed by such suggestions.” Lincoln listened. Hay and Nicolay watched his features closely, knowing him well enough to sense when he was about to share his thoughts with them. This was such an hour, in the morning stillness, when the young men might be welcome to sit with Mr. Lincoln, pose questions, be questioned in turn, in the Socratic manner, and freely converse.
They were eager to hear him explain what he believed to be the meaning of the paroxysm that had seized the nation. Not until this moment, perhaps, was he fully prepared to articulate it. Lincoln had been working on a paper that was to be delivered to Congress on July 4, and he had been “engaged in constant thought upon the Message,” which was to be “an exhaustive review of questions of the hour & of the future,” Hay recalled.
“For my own part,” Lincoln said, settling in, choosing his words carefully, “I consider the central idea pervading this struggle is the necessity that is upon us, of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose.” Over the bell-jarred mantel clock hung the illustrative image of Andrew Jackson, who had faced down South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun in 1832, during the famous “nullification controversy,” when that state declared the federal tariff acts oppressive, and attempted to render them null and void. Jackson proclaimed nullification was rebellion and treason, and threatened to use the army to enforce the law.
“If we fail,” the president continued, with a note of sadness, “it will go far to prove the incapability of the people to govern themselves.” Looking far off in the distance, Lincoln allowed that final judgment might be suspended—in America’s case—because of “a vast and far reaching disturbing element,” slavery in other words, with which no other free nation would have to contend; but “that however is not for us to say . . . Taking the government as we found it we will see if the majority can preserve it.” The way Nicolay heard this, as he noted later in the day, was: “Admit the right of a minority to secede at will, and the occasion for such secession would almost as likely be any other as the slavery question.”
That was the day’s lesson. The globes of the chandelier glowed faintly above them. As the morning light swept the shadows from the corners of the long room, the men pondered the important discourse, logical and legalistic on the face of it, but resting upon the mystical and sacred bedrock of brotherhood and union. Mr. Lincoln hated slavery, but he understood that this evil would perish under its own weight much sooner if the Union were preserved than if the slave states created their own government, their own laws and borders.
For this principle, the gentlemen of Rhode Island had left their wives and their wine, and the New York firemen had left their lager, hoses, and ladders to sail to Washington and practice field drills and the manual of arms. How many of these patriots understood what the president had just explained to his secretaries?
IN THE AFTERNOON, ON the East Front of the Capitol, Colonel Ellsworth called his soldiers into a square formation around him. John Hay was watching, and heard Ellsworth address his men. “A great speech,” Hay wrote, with “more commonsense, dramatic power, tact, [and] energy . . .” than he’d heard in all the “spread-eagle” speeches in Congress. Ellsworth “spoke to them as men. Made them proud of their good name . . .” Other regiments were enlisting for thirty days, while the Fire Zouaves were enlisting “for the war.”
“Now laddies,” the little colonel announced, good-naturedly, “if any one of you wants to go home, he had better sneak around the back alleys, crawl over fences, and get out of sight before we see him.” President Lincoln, in his stovepipe hat, and Tad, in a broad-brimmed straw, drove up in a carriage and got out. There, in the shade of the unfinished Capitol, General Irvin McDowell administered the oath of allegiance to the Fire Zouaves, and the eleven hundred men—firefighters only weeks earlier—became the Eleventh New York Infantry Regiment.
Two days later, on May 9, Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, Hay, Nicolay, and others from the White House, spent “a very agreeable afternoon” at the Navy Yard with the New York volunteers. Their ranks included some excellent musicians who improvised a concert to which several hundred guests were invited. Lincoln requested “La Marseillaise.” When the concert was over, Hay recalled, “we went down to the [USS] Pensacola and observed the shooting of the great Dahlgren gun . . . two ricochet shots were sent through the target and one plumper.” Everyone was amazed that the deadly cannonball was clearly visible in flight. “The splendid course of the 11 inch shell . . . the lightning, the quick rebound & flight through the target with wild skips . . . the steady roll into the waves were scenes as novel and pleasant to me as to all the rest of the party. The President was delighted.”
The citizens were giddy, intoxicated by the colorful preparations for war, and perhaps no man was more excited than William Stoddard. When he was not drilling with the D.C. Rifles, or on guard duty, Stoddard wrote news dispatches for the New York Examiner. On May 12, he wrote that in his opinion “an attack on Washington is contemplated, and that it will be made as soon as possible.” He assured his readers that “all the heights surrounding and commanding the city, are being occupied and fortified,” and singled out the Rhode Island men and Ellsworth’s Fire Zouaves for special praise. Recently he had written with concern that Arlington Heights, the range of hills south of the Potomac near Alexandria, afforded “positions from which hostile cannon would hold the city at their mercy” and even “reduce it to a heap of ruins . . .” Now he was more optimistic that arrangements had been made to seize these positions at the first signs of danger.
Ellsworth and his regiment had moved from their quarters in the Capitol to an open-air camp, a beautiful site on the near bank of the river that runs between Washington and Alexandria. That day, Nicolay and Hay rode out to visit the colonel, and Nicolay gathered “the first wild flowers I have had this spring,” pink spring beauties, wild geraniums, and violets. He wrote to Therena: “I enclose some of them, to remind you as they have very vividly reminded me, of the old days.” He had just received a letter in which she had begged him to burn all of her correspondence. “What on earth you want me to do that for I cannot imagine,” he answered, demanding an explanation. No doubt she feared for his life, and did not want her love letters to survive him. We will never know, because he did, eventually, honor her request—making it impossible to know how she spent those years in Pittsfield without Nicolay.
A week later, on a quiet Sunday, Stoddard took a furlough in order to visit his friends in the White House. He let himself in with his latchkey and went upstairs. The rooms were almost deserted. The president had gone to church, Mrs. Lincoln had gone to Cambridge with her son Robert, and the secretaries were out for a stroll. Stoddard entered the office he shared with Hay, and on his desk found a stack of patents awaiting his signature. Hearing movement across the hall he walked over to Nicolay’s office, where he was welcomed, with a shout, by Elmer Ellsworth.
It was Ellsworth’s habit, several times a week, to go to the White House, chat with Hay and Nicolay, visit the president if he could, and collect his mail. Getting letters in and out of Washington had become difficult. He carried on an intense correspondence with his sweetheart, Carrie Spafford, up in New York, and, of course, the postmaster treated Nicolay’s office with special deference.
So here was the drillmaster, now head of a New York regiment, reading his letters.
“Hullo, Ellsworth, are you here?”
“Yes, I’m all the President there is on hand this morning. I got away from camp to run over to see him and the boys.” Ellsworth, Nicolay, and Hay would discuss politics and the war, tell jokes, and share their hopes and dreams. If Mr. Lincoln had a free moment, he would join them in Nicolay’s office. Inevitably the conversation would turn upon the defiant image framed by the south window—the red and blue Stars and Bars of the Confederate flag, across the river, flying over the Marshall House hotel in Alexandria. This was an affront, an insult. Ellsworth, more than the others, wanted to do something about it. As Virginia had not yet ratified the order of secession by popular vote, the state was still in the Union. Virginians had been maddeningly evasive about their status. Until the popular vote to secede was cast, not a thing could be done about that flag, and the voting was not scheduled to occur until May 23. Everyone was waiting.
Today, Stoddard was particularly pleased to have a moment alone with Ellsworth, one of his heroes, so he might get a lesson or two in the art of combat. Ellsworth—as Hay had observed—was a superb fighter, who “could hold a rapier with De Villiers,” the greatest swordsman of the day. Ellsworth had “a hand as true as steel, and an eye like a gerfalcon. He used to amuse himself by shooting ventilation holes through his window panes. Standing ten paces from the window, he could fire seven shots from his revolver and not shiver the glass beyond the circumference of a half-dollar.” In the corner of Nicolay’s room, somebody had left a carbine. Stoddard picked it up and passed it to the colonel, asking if he wouldn’t mind demonstrating the manual of arms. “He went through the motions with mathematical precision; but when he came to ‘make ready,’ he had forgotten his proximity to the south window, and the muzzle of the piece went crashing through a pane of glass,” as if to attack the rebel flag. Ellsworth, abashed, “shouldered arms,” and the drill came to an end.
Hay arrived, and then Nicolay, wanting to know what had happened to the window. So Ellsworth and Stoddard, taking turns, embellished a wonderful tale, “told with masterly gravity, a yarn of a man hiding in the shrubbery,” an assassin surely, who had taken one of them for the president and tried to shoot him. “Perhaps the yarn would have lasted longer if Ellsworth could have kept his face straight,” Stoddard recalled, “but the fun ended and he and I went to our quarters to prepare for the invasion of Virginia.”
When the news came on the evening of May 23, 1861, that Virginia had seceded, Ellsworth and his Zouaves were prepared. Alexandria must be taken immediately, and he had asked General Joseph Mansfield if his regiment might lead the charge.
In the light of a full moon, at midnight, when at last he was alone in his tent, Ellsworth wrote to Carrie Spafford.
My own darling Kitty,
My regiment is ordered to cross the river & move on Alexandria within six hours. We may meet with a warm reception & my darling among so many careless fellows one is some what likely to be hit.
If anything should happen—Darling just accept this assurance, the only thing I can leave you—the highest happiness I looked for on earth was a union with you. . . . God bless you as you deserve and grant you a happy & useful life & us a union hereafter.
Truly your own,
Elmer
As the Federal troop steamers approached the Virginia shore, a few Confederate guards fired their rifles into the air and ran away. In the dawn light, the Zouaves went ashore. Ellsworth sent a company to pull up the railroad tracks to Richmond while he led a squadron to the town center, where they intended to cut the wires to the telegraph office. They met with no resistance, as the Confederate troops had retreated an hour earlier, under a flag of truce. Spying the Confederate flag still flying over the Marshall House—the banner that had provoked such anger and disgust as Mr. Lincoln, Hay, and Nicolay regarded it daily from the White House windows—Ellsworth said, “Boys, we must have that down before we return.”
He entered the hotel with seven men—four corporals, a lieutenant, a chaplain, and a newspaper reporter. Posting three of the corporals on the first floor, Ellsworth led the rest of the party bounding up two flights of stairs to the attic. From there, he and the lieutenant climbed a ladder to the roof, where the flagstaff was planted. Handing the lieutenant his pistol, the colonel cut the halyard with a knife and brought down the immense flag.
Technically under a military cease-fire, the men had nothing to fear. They descended the staircase: Corporal Francis E. Brownell first; Ellsworth next, absorbed in the ritual of folding the flag; Edward House of the New York Tribune; then the lieutenant and the chaplain. At the first landing, James W. Jackson, the innkeeper, leaped out of a dark hall, aimed a double-barreled shotgun at Ellsworth, who was still too engrossed in folding the flag to notice, and discharged one barrel of slugs into the young man’s breast. The reporter, whose hand had been resting on Ellsworth’s shoulder, recalled: “He seemed to fall almost from my grasp. He was on the second or third step from the landing, and he dropped forward with that heavy, horrible, headlong weight which always comes of sudden death in this manner.”
Corporal Brownell turned, raised his rifle, and shot Jackson in the middle of his face before thrusting a saber bayonet twice through his body.