Yours Ever (37 page)

From the start of his presidency, Lincoln’s letters are assertions of authority, instruments to control and stabilize a state of affairs that, like his own depressive temperament, requires a sly, firm hand. A month after taking office, he lets William H. Seward know that the president, not the secretary of state, will be running the administration. “When a general line of policy is adopted, I apprehend there is no danger of its being changed without good reason, or continuing to be a subject of unnecessary debate; still, upon points arising in its progress I wish, and suppose I am entitled to have, the advice of all the cabinet.” Seward, who would come to understand Lincoln perhaps better than anyone, no doubt felt the sting of that “suppose I am entitled” in this letter’s final sentence. One wonders if McClellan, forever preening in place, realized the insult, the deliberate subordination, in one envoi that he received: “The success of your army and the cause of the country are the same; and of course I only desire the good of the cause.”

Lincoln shows none of Jefferson’s contempt for the position he holds. His “heavy, and perplexing responsibilities here” provoke the reverent doubts of the postulant: “I could not take the office without
taking the oath,” he writes the Kentucky newspaper editor Albert G. Hodges. “Nor was it my view that I might take an oath to get power, and break the oath in using the power.” Means and ends, the single end of preserving the Union, will not be confused. One letter he writes to Horace Greeley, that famously muddled mind, is a split-rail fence, notched and slotted with a precision designed to reinforce Lincoln’s own conviction as much as to entrance the
Tribune’s
editor: “If I could save the Union without freeing
any
slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing
all
the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

No other president’s image is so clouded with the stagy dry-ice vapors of Destiny; no other’s words have been more often heard by posterity against actual musical soundtracks. The letters offer today’s citizen as much chance as he gets with any of Lincoln’s writings to turn off the special effects and attend to the sentences that so often seem addressed to their author, written for the moment instead of the ages, put together for personal clarity and their powers of reassurance. The control they exert more than any other is self-control.

The most famous rebuke Lincoln ever composed, to General Meade ten days after Gettysburg (“I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape … Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it”) survives only as a draft, an expulsion of steam that never left the president’s office. A week later General Meade once more had Lincoln’s “confidence as a brave and skillful officer, and a true man”—even if that confidence was expressed in a letter to General Howard instead of to Meade himself. (The telegram about McClellan’s supposedly fatigued horses could not be retrieved, only softened with another one three days later, in which Lincoln apologized for the hopelessness that “may have forced something of impatience” into his earlier wire.)

When he is free from doubt, when the letter Lincoln writes is meant only to command its recipient, parallels and antitheses make way for a buckshot spray of rhetorical questions that harry his correspondent
into a corner. A year after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation on the basis of its military usefulness, Lincoln refuses the suggestion of his treasury secretary, Salmon P. Chase, that the order now be applied to portions of Virginia and Louisiana that had been exempted: “Would I not thus give up all footing upon constitution or law? Would I not thus be in the boundless field of absolutism? Could this pass unnoticed, or unresisted?”

Limiting himself to the tenable, Lincoln takes care not to turn up the flame of his displeasure any higher than necessary. He makes sure John C. Frémont knows he is being given “caution,” not “censure,” and that General Halleck understands how disagreement doesn’t equal a lack of confidence. When telling his generals, as he always must, to speed it up, Lincoln will shamble on about his own “poor mite” of military judgment, his being “not competent to criticise” the views of D. C. Buell or even U. S. Grant. But the message will come anyway, at the end of the page, the bottom of the deductive, lawyerly funnel. “Now dear General,” he writes, in denying Nathaniel Banks’s request for some supplies that will only slow him down further, “do not think this is an ill-natured letter—it is the very reverse. The simple publication of this requisition would ruin you.”

Forgiveness was a natural disposition and strategic necessity, required for dealings with underage deserters, his wife, and the wayward inhabitants of the Confederacy. “On principle,” he wrote Secretary of War Stanton on February 5, 1864, “I dislike an oath which requires a man to swear he
has
not done wrong. It rejects the Christian principle of forgiveness on terms of repentance. I think it is enough if the man does no wrong
hereafter.”
Having narrowed his war aims to a single mystic tenet, he would also narrow down the prerogatives of peace. “I shall do nothing in malice,” he writes Louisiana’s Cuthbert Bullitt. “What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing.” Indeed, when he steps away from this vastness, leaves off preserving the Union to write to Mary, the lines can come out hasty and dull, the closing (“But enough”) a mere banality beside the last words of his military communications.

If he requires, as he writes to Carl Schurz, “success more
than … sympathy,” it is the latter he is called upon to give, over and over again—at the necropolis of Gettysburg (where his Address was itself a sort of telegram) and in individual expressions of condolence. John R. Sellers, a Lincoln expert at the Library of Congress, once described himself as being “constantly plagued by people finding the Bixby letter,” that is, the missing original of what went out in the fall of 1864 to a woman who had lost five sons in the Union’s service. (Or so Lincoln thought. Three of the five sons survived, and one of those was a deserter.) The Bixby letter’s enduring popularity is sustained by even Lincoln’s admirably unhagiographical biographer, David Herbert Donald, who finds it a “beautiful” production full of “sincerity” and “eloquence.” But by Gettysburg standards, the eloquence is more like Edward Everett’s than Lincoln’s. The letter is an overblown affair (“to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom”), its tropes tumbling out with the modern auto-empathy of Bill Clinton. One feels inclined to let John Hay, Lincoln’s principal secretary, take credit for the production—as does Lincoln scholar Michael Burlingame.

A more provable Lincoln resides in an earlier letter, to Colonel William McCullough’s daughter, Fanny. Here one finds the president limiting his objectives of consolation, making statements into questions, addressing his own high-maintenance moods: “Perfect relief is not possible, except with time. You can not now realize that you will ever feel better. Is not this so? And yet it is a mistake. You are sure to be happy again. To know this, which is certainly true, will make you some less miserable now. I have had experience enough to know what I say; and you need only to believe it, to feel better at once.”

Rarely does he allow himself one of Jefferson’s outbursts against political treachery, but on August 23, 1864, he writes a note about the politically surging McClellan, who appears more likely to see victory as the Democrats’ presidential candidate than he did on the battlefield. “This morning, as for some days past,” Lincoln wrote, “it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration;
as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.” Lincoln asked members of his Cabinet to affix their names to the back of this paper without knowing what was on the front; only after defeating McClellan did he show them what they had signed. It was his ultimate economy of expression, a sort of magician’s trick. He had gotten his men to produce a letter—which he hoped would coerce a victorious McClellan into working with the lame-duck administration—without their seeing, let alone writing, a word of it.

IN THE FIRST YEAR
of the Civil War, after decades of trying to move the post farther and faster by steamship, rail and Pony Express, the U.S. government suspended mail delivery to the rebel states. On August 31, 1861, Lincoln’s postmaster general, Montgomery Blair, directed that all Southern-bound mail henceforth be sent to the Dead Letter Office.

The missives of his sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Blair Lee, would have retained considerable liveliness even in that epistolary graveyard, but there was never much chance of their being shunted to such a destination. The war snapped Mrs. Lee’s patriotism into a smart, four-year-long salute. This child of one border state (Kentucky) and resident of another (Maryland) knew many of the political and military principals on both sides of the conflict, but the Blairs and Gists (her mother’s family) had been serving the Union since the Revolution, and Elizabeth was not going to break ranks now. Throughout the war she continued using her Washington home (today’s Blair House) often enough to refer to Abraham Lincoln as “my opposite neighbor.” Between Fort Sumter and Appomattox she sent her husband, the naval officer Samuel Phillips Lee (third cousin of the Confederate general), nearly a thousand letters, many in a light, satiric tone, nearly all of them distinguished by the author’s sharp eye and shrewd good sense.

Elizabeth continues to see the rebels as her countrymen, with secession a sort of feverish disease that’s got hold of them. Her compact account of how Jefferson Davis led his partisans out of the Senate
on January 21, 1861, stands as one of the great descriptive passages in the war’s literature:

Six months later, at a dinner party given by her brother, she encounters William H. Russell, the same London
Times
journalist who had reported the Crimean horrors back in 1854, and she offers this “chuncky sample of John Bull” the sort of flinty resolve his dispatches had once roused in Florence Nightingale: “He remarked that the Southern women had more zeal than we Union women that they were making lint & bandages—& etc. I replied they were preparing to be whipped …”

Mrs. Lee resists the “dissipation” of novel reading for the writing of letter after letter. She compares running her household to a military campaign, a claim well supported by the plentiful news from her small home front: drought, smallpox and the sound of nearby drums can be found in a single letter composed on June 25, 1861. Elizabeth’s most important company is her young son, Blair, a beautiful, good-natured child by his mother’s reckoning, clearly a mama’s boy by anxious circumstance. Elizabeth Lee is not a young bride: now in her mid-forties, she requires a pair of her husband’s spectacles to read and write the letters moving between them. Age requires her to “matronize” the local single ladies at the opera, though her preference is for more serious pursuits, such as the Washington City Orphan Asylum, whose “directress” she becomes in 1862.

A reader is inclined to reach across battle lines—and the border of fiction—to regard her as an amalgam of Melanie and Scarlett, shouldering the former’s sense of responsibility and unleashing, at least occasionally, the latter’s sharp tongue. On a September day in 1863, with the rebels once again near the capital, she gives her husband a briskly sensible sign-off—“I have much to do—so good morning to you”—secure in their mutual devotion, more amused than irritated by some outsiders’ assumptions about the marriage. When she overhears her niece doubting whether Samuel Lee has “ever made a pretty speech to me in my life,” Elizabeth makes her presence known in order to “insist that you have said several very civil things to me in the course of the last 24 years.”

The set of her jaw and the determination to keep her husband informed amid calamity also bring to mind the medieval Margaret Paston. Elizabeth reports her father’s warning that “the long journey this letter has to take & the excitement of the times make caution essential.” Francis Preston Blair, Sr., has been offering advice at the White House since Andrew Jackson’s time, but Elizabeth doesn’t depend on him for all the intelligence she passes on to Mr. Lee; she has her own direct observations to impart: “Mr. Seward dined here yesterday—& he mentioned that Every European Power had written to this Government letters of sympathy &
encouragement
England alone excepted.” She tells her husband that people are “blue as indigo” over the loss of a Union ironclad; reports on the misbehavior of the Massachusetts Tenth as it passed through the area above Silver Spring; and expresses impatience with General Wool’s handling of the New York draft riots. Still, thought of the continuing slaughters makes her “heart sick body sick,” and her ability to feel sorrow over the rebels’ suffering, too, only makes things worse. By the second year of the war “a
scare
is now [her] normal condition,” and her thoughts run “turbid as the Mississippi water,” the river up which her husband’s outfit is fighting.

She keeps Lee apprised of all she’s done to safeguard the Maryland house. The silverware and paintings have been packed up and “my own garden & Hen house will be my chief out door resorts—with Becky [a servant] & Blair trotting after me Father has followed
the precaution you suggest for months past. He & our Coachman too
have
been armed—our horses are fast—& our neighbors reliable.” When late in the war Jubal Early’s Southern troops succeed in ransacking the place, she finds a note of apology left on the library mantel: