Killing Lincoln - Bill O'Reilly [56]
Lincoln traipses down the hall to his office. His desk is mahogany, with cubbies and shelves. Behind him is the willow-lined Potomac, seen clearly outside the window.
Secretaries John Nicolay and John Hay have laid the mail on the desk, having already removed the love letters Lincoln sometimes receives from young ladies, and the assassination letters more often sent by older men. Typically, the president gets almost three hundred letters a day, of which he reads only a half dozen, at most.
Lincoln skims the mail, then jots down a few notes. Each is signed “A. Lincoln” if it is of a more official nature, or just “Yours truly,” as in the case of his note to William Seward. The secretary of state continues to recover from his horrible accident, his jaw and shattered skull mending slowly. Now he lies in bed at home, a convenient stone’s throw across the street from the White House.
Breakfast is scheduled for eight o’clock. Lincoln finishes his brief business and enters a small room, where he grooms himself. Daily baths and showers are rare, even in the White House. Lincoln is eager to be downstairs, for his son Robert is just back from the war and will be joining him, twelve-year-old Tad, and Mary for breakfast. More importantly, Robert was in the room when Lee surrendered at Appomattox. Though Lincoln heard the story from Grant yesterday, he is keen to hear more about this landmark event. The war’s end is one topic he never gets tired of talking about.
Just twenty-one, with a thin mustache and a captain’s rank, Robert is still boyish, despite his time at the front. As Lincoln sips coffee and eats the single boiled egg that constitutes his daily breakfast, Robert describes “the stately elegant Lee” and Grant, “the small stooping shabby shy man in the muddy blue uniform, with no sword and no spurs.”
When Lincoln asks what it was like to there, his son is breathless. “Oh, it was great!” the normally articulate Robert exclaims, unable to find a more expressive way to describe being present at one of the seminal moments in American history.
Robert hands Lincoln a portrait of Lee. The president lays it on the table, where it stares up at him. Lincoln tells his son that he truly believes the time of peace has come. He is unfazed by the small but bitter Confederate resistance that remains. His thoughts are far away from the likes of John Wilkes Booth.
Pressing business awaits Lincoln in his office, but he allows breakfast to stretch on for almost an hour. He can permit himself this luxury, with the war finally over. At last he stands, his body stooped, now just an inch or two less than the towering height of his youth. He is relaxed and happy, even though his severe weight loss makes him look like “a skeleton with clothes,” in the words of one friend.
Lincoln reminds Mary that they have a date for a carriage ride this afternoon. To Robert, he suggests that the time has come to remove the uniform, return to Harvard, and spend the next three years working on his law degree. “At the end of that time I hope we will be able to tell if you will make a good lawyer or not,” he concludes, sounding more serious than he feels. The words are a sign that he is mentally transitioning from the easy part of his day into those long office hours when, even with the war concluded, the weight of the world presses down on his shoulders.
By nine A.M., President Lincoln is sitting at his desk in the Oval Office.
Every aspect of Lincoln’s early morning has the feel of a man putting his affairs in order: reading the Bible, jotting a few notes, arranging for a last carefree whirl around Washington with his loyal wife, and setting his son on a path that will ensure him a