Rise to Greatness Read Free Page B

two months since the disastrous battle at Ball’s Bluff, where the Rebels drove Union forces into the Potomac River, and bodies washed all the way to the Georgetown waterfront? Why were so many of the Union’s leading generals members of the opposition Democratic Party? Was their lack of progress a sign of traitorous sympathy for the Confederates? Most important, what plans existed for attacking the rebels, and when would they be launched?
    The interrogation of the president and his cabinet went on for some ninety minutes. Between the committee’s hostile questions and the unsatisfying answers from Lincoln and his advisers, a “strange and dangerous” fact dawned, as Edward Bates noted: no one really knew what the generals were up to. “The secretary of war and the President are kept in ignorance of the actual condition of the army and [its] intended movements,” the attorney general confided to his diary. Meanwhile, the rest of Lincoln’s cabinet, Bates mused, came off as an assortment of chattering, uncooperative men, “each one ignorant of what his colleagues are doing.” The blame for these sad truths, he concluded, lay with Abraham Lincoln, “an excellent man, and, in the main wise; but he lacks will and purpose, and, I greatly fear, he has not the power to command.”
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    If Bates was correct, then never in the four score and five years of the nation’s existence had such a gap yawned between a president’s abilities and his burdens. On January 1, 1862, Lincoln’s crises ranged from the fiscal to the global to the military—but they began at home. Mary Todd Lincoln, wearing a dark dress with a contrasting collar, and a flowered headpiece trailing ribbons, looked tiny beside the president as they greeted visitors to the White House. Yet, she too was a formidable person, and she presented her husband with a considerable set of challenges.
    Nine years younger than he, Mary was less a soul mate than she was evidence that opposites attract. He was self-confident; she was insecure. He was disciplined; she was impulsive. He was melancholy; she was electrifying. Lincoln was swept away by the force of her personality, her sister recalled: “[He] was charmed with Mary’s wit and fascinated with her quick sagacity.” But Mary was also volatile, “one day so kindly, so considerate, so generous,” the next “so unreasonable, so irritable.” Her temper was notorious back home in Springfield, where she had once thrown hot coffee at her husband and another time bloodied his nose with a stick. If anything, her moods had worsened in Washington: the president’s secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay complained about her behind her back, calling her “La Reine” when they were being generous and “the Hell-cat” when they weren’t. But Mary was her husband’s greatest supporter. She believed in him when others lost faith, and she nourished his enormous ambitions.
    Unfortunately, Mary Lincoln’s judgment was often abysmal. A friend recalled that as president, Lincoln lived “constantly under great apprehension lest his wife should do something which would bring him into disgrace.” Her lavish spending and weakness for flattery had already threatened to fester into a scandal. “Flub-dubs for this damned old house!” Lincoln exploded when he learned how much Mary had poured into carpets and draperies and furniture and dishes at a time when Union soldiers were shivering under shoddy blankets. Soon enough the president would discover that she was manipulating White House accounts in an effort to mask her overspending. She was taking bribes from office seekers in exchange for her support. In one case, she was rumored to be having an affair with an unqualified job-hunter.
    And there was more: a few weeks earlier an advance copy of the president’s message to Congress had somehow turned up in the saucy New York Herald. Mary tried to have the White House gardener take the blame for the leak, but it