Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [215]
For Willie and Tad, now ten and almost eight, respectively, the early days in the White House were filled with great adventures. They ran from floor to floor, inspecting every room. They talked with everyone along the way, “from Edward, the door keeper, Stackpole, the messenger, to the maids and scullions.” Willie was “a noble, beautiful boy,” Elizabeth Grimsley observed, “of great mental activity, unusual intelligence, wonderful memory, methodical, frank and loving, a counterpart of his father, save that he was handsome.” Willie spent hours memorizing railroad timetables and would entertain his friends by conducting “an imaginary train from Chicago to New York with perfect precision” and dramatic flair. He was an avid reader, a budding writer, and generally sweet-tempered, all reminiscent of his father.
Tad, to whom Willie was devoted, bore greater resemblance to his mother. Healthy and high-spirited, he had a blazing temper, which disappeared as quickly as it came. He was a “merry, spontaneous fellow, bubbling over with innocent fun, whose laugh rang through the house, when not moved to tears.” Irrepressible and undisciplined, never hesitant to interrupt his father in the midst of a cabinet meeting, he was “the life, as also the worry of the household.” A speech impediment made it hard for anyone outside his family to understand his words, but he never stopped talking. He had, John Hay recalled, “a very bad opinion of books and no opinion of discipline.”
The boys harried the staff at the executive mansion, racing through the hallways, playing advocate for the most anguished office seekers, organizing little plays in the garret, and setting off all the servants’ bells at the same time. Fearing that her boys would grow lonely and isolated, Mary found them two lively companions in twelve-year-old Horatio Nelson “Bud” Taft and his eight-year-old brother, Halsey, nicknamed “Holly.” Together with their older sister, Julia, who later wrote a small book recording their adventures in the White House, the Taft children quickly formed a tight circle with Willie and Tad. “If there was any motto or slogan of the White House during the early years,” Julia recalled, “it was this: ‘Let the children have a good time.’”
Mary, too, seemed happy at first, surrounded by friends and relatives, who stayed on for weeks after the inauguration. Her confidence that she could handle the demands of first lady was buoyed by the great success of the first evening levee on the Friday after they moved in. Seward had proposed that he would lead off the social season from his own mansion, but Mary immediately took exception. Like her husband, Mary had no desire “to let Seward take the first trick.” She insisted that the new administration’s first official entertainment take place at the White House. Though she had little time to prepare, she arranged an unforgettable event. “For over two hours,” Nicolay wrote his fiancée, Therena, “the crowd poured in as rapidly as the door would admit them, and many climbed in at the windows.” The president and first lady shook hands with as many of the five thousand “well dressed and well behaved” guests as they could. Even the blue-blood Charles Francis Adams was impressed by Mary’s poise, though he found Lincoln to be wholly ignorant of formal “social courtesy.” Nonetheless, according to Nicolay, the levee “was voted by all the ‘oldest inhabitants’ to have been the most successful one ever known here.”
Mary was thrilled. “This is certainly a very charming spot,” she wrote her friend Hannah Shearer several weeks later, “& I have formed many delightful acquaintances. Every evening our blue room, is filled with the elite of the land, last eve, we had about 40 to call in, to see us ladies, from Vice. P. Breckinridge down…. I am beginning to feel so perfectly at home, and enjoy every thing so much.