CHAPTER 9

REASONABLE HOPES

Ironically, the two people most directly involved in the national thanksgiving proclamation of 1863—Sarah Josepha Hale and Abraham Lincoln—were absent, at least in the public sense, from the activities that late November.

Hale was unable to provide comment in the November 1863 edition of the Lady’s Book on what she surely must have regarded as a momentous and long-awaited event. The publication had already gone to press before Hale had received the good news from Washington. She would not weigh in on the matter until early 1864. Still, in keeping with publisher Louis Godey’s well-known and oft-stated desire to keep the magazine as politics-free as possible, printing a presidential proclamation would likely have fallen outside the realm of possibility for the publication, even if it could have made the printing deadline. Hale appeared to allude to as much in an 1864 editorial titled “Our National Thanksgiving—a Domestic Festival,” writing, “[I]n our endeavors . . . to secure the recognition of one day throughout the land as the Day of public Thanksgiving, we are conscious of not having in any manner gone beyond the proper limits of the sphere which we have prescribed for the Lady’s Book. It is the peculiar happiness of Thanksgiving Day that nothing political mingles in its observance.”

Abraham Lincoln’s first national thanksgiving came and went, with the president still abed. There he would remain through a good bit of December. Lincoln was eventually on the mend, but the situation in the feuding United States was not. Roughly a week after the holiday, on December 8, 1863, Lincoln issued the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, turning an eye toward rebuilding the tattered nation once the war was finally over. However, for many that day still felt impossibly far off.

As Christmas approached, Lincoln was the recipient of an odd gift—a turkey. The president intended the bird for Christmas dinner, but young Tad Lincoln took a liking to it, naming him “Jack.” On Christmas Eve, Tad got the bad news—Jack was destined for the table. Tad protested. Lincoln gave in. He spared Jack the turkey, even putting the bird’s stay of execution in writing: a presidential pardon.

Also on that Christmas Eve, Lincoln related a dream he had had the night before to his assistant secretary, John Hay.

“He was in a party of plain people,” Hay wrote in his diary of his conversation with Lincoln, “and as it became known who he was, they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said, ‘He is a very common-looking man.’ The President replied, ‘Common-looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.’ Waking,” Hay wrote, “he remembered it, and told it as rather a neat thing.”

As 1863 drew to a close, a third year of war loomed on the horizon. The “plain” and plainspoken man knew that soon there would be another political battle to wage: this one for his reelection. Recent years of national turmoil had not been kind to sitting presidents hoping for a second term. Once spring turned to summer, the Lincoln family again packed up their belongings and returned to the Soldiers’ Home in order to escape the stifling seasonal heat and humidity of Washington. The president resumed his commute from the Soldiers’ Home to the White House, and his rides through town from his summer residence to his office drew increased attention.

“I see the President almost every day,” wrote the poet Walt Whitman, who inhabited a series of Washington, DC, boardinghouses during the war, “as I happen to live where he passes to or from his lodging out of town. I saw him this morning about 8 1/2 [8:30], coming in to business, riding on Vermont avenue, near L street.” The writer’s younger brother, George, had been wounded in 1862 at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and Whitman had promptly left his home in New York City—where he was known to frequent the same bohemian bar as illustrator Thomas Nast—to visit his brother in the hospital. Though his brother was only mildly injured, Whitman was unable to look away from the carnage he saw and volunteered as a nurse in various hospitals throughout Washington during the war. In addition to his own writing, Whitman described in his journals what he saw daily of the sick and dying. His reflections on Abraham Lincoln made their way onto Whitman’s pages as well. “I see very plainly Abraham Lincoln’s dark brown face, with the deep-cut lines,” Whitman wrote, “the eyes, always to me with a deep latent sadness in the expressions. We have got so that we exchange bows, and very cordial ones.”

On the seventh of July 1864, Lincoln issued another proclamation—this one calling for a day of national humiliation, fasting, and prayer. Both secular and religious in nature, the document spoke to faith, politics, and war. In it, Lincoln encouraged citizens to “convene at their usual places of worship,” in hopes that, among other things, “those in rebellion . . . may lay down their arms and speedily return to their allegiance to the United States, that they may not be utterly destroyed, that the effusion of blood may be stayed, and that unity and fraternity may be restored and peace established throughout all our borders.”

Of course, there was nothing quite like a predictable travel route to make matters simpler for anyone wishing the president ill. So very many did. Letters carrying death threats often arrived at the White House. Rumors proliferated that the president was to be kidnapped along his now well-known horseback commute. That year, while traveling back to the Soldiers’ Home along his usual course, Lincoln was, as he wrote, “Immersed in deep thought, contemplating what was next to happen in the unsettled state of affairs,” when he was fired upon. Luckily, the president’s stovepipe hat took the brunt of the sniper’s attempt. However, Lincoln’s horse, Old Abe—“My erratic namesake,” he wrote—did not take kindly to the gunshot, and “with one reckless bound he unceremoniously separated me from my eight-dollar plug-hat.”

More obvious threats surrounded him as well. That summer of 1864 saw not only Union soldiers feeling hopeless but Lieutenant General Jubal Early and his Army of the Valley encroaching gradually but consistently on Washington, DC, raiding and looting as many Union cities, homes, and supply depots as they could. They were, in fact, encamped precariously close to the Soldiers’ Home.

Around this time, Lincoln’s oldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, had completed his studies at Harvard University and taken a post as a staff officer for General Ulysses Grant, bringing the war even closer to home for the president. After losing two young children, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln now had a son at war. Tens of thousands of Union soldiers died over that summer, the number of bodies interred on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home only increasing beyond the door of Lincoln’s summer residence.

Though Lincoln accepted the presidential nomination for the 1864 election, the incumbent was not confident of his success against Democratic nominee General George B. McClellan, who had served as Lincoln’s head of the Army of the Potomac.

With elections looming and talk at the nominating convention of potential cease-fires and attempts to negotiate with the Confederacy on the lips of those in attendance, not to mention on the minds of those across the country, illustrator Thomas Nast again used his talents to comment on the national situation.

Compromise with the South—which happened to be the Democratic campaign slogan that year—was the title Nast chose for his latest illustration, which he dedicated to the Chicago Convention. Clearly capturing the feeling that any compromise with the Confederacy would essentially be experienced as defeat, Nast created a foreboding image depicting a triumphant Confederate soldier with his foot atop the grave of a Union soldier, its headstone reading “In Memory . . . Union Heroes in a Useless War.” In the background, a Black Union soldier sits with his wife and child, all of them in shackles.