Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [248]
As winter approached, public discontent with the inaction of the Union Army intensified. “I do not intend to be sacrificed,” the new general-in-chief wrote his wife. Now that McClellan could no longer blame Scott for his troubles, he shifted his censure to Lincoln for denying him the means to confront the rebel forces in Virginia, whose numbers, he insisted, were at least three times his own. In letters home, he complained about Lincoln’s constant intrusions, which forced him to hide out at the home of fellow Democrat Edwin Stanton, “to dodge all enemies in shape of ‘browsing’ Presdt etc.” He reported a visit to the White House one Sunday after tea, where he found “the original gorrilla,” as he had taken to describing the president. “What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!” he ranted. “I went to Seward’s, where I found the ‘Gorilla’ again, & was of course much edified by his anecdotes—ever apropos, & ever unworthy of one holding his high position.”
On Wednesday night, November 13, Lincoln went with Seward and Hay to McClellan’s house. Told that the general was at a wedding, the three waited in the parlor for an hour. When McClellan arrived home, the porter told him the president was waiting, but McClellan passed by the parlor room and climbed the stairs to his private quarters. After another half hour, Lincoln again sent word that he was waiting, only to be informed that the general had gone to sleep. Young John Hay was enraged. “I wish here to record what I consider a portent of evil to come,” he wrote in his diary, recounting what he considered an inexcusable “insolence of epaulettes,” the first indicator “of the threatened supremacy of the military authorities.” To Hay’s surprise, Lincoln “seemed not to have noticed it specially, saying it was better at this time not to be making points of etiquette & personal dignity.” He would hold McClellan’s horse, he once said, if a victory could be achieved.
Though Lincoln, the consummate pragmatist, did not express anger at McClellan’s rebuff, his aides fumed at every instance of such arrogance. Lincoln’s secretary, William Stoddard, described the infuriating delay when he accompanied Lincoln to McClellan’s anteroom. “A minute passes, then another, and then another, and with every tick of the clock upon the mantel your blood warms nearer and nearer its boiling-point. Your face feels hot and your fingers tingle, as you look at the man, sitting so patiently over there…and you try to master your rebellious consciousness.” As time went by, Lincoln visited the haughty general less frequently. If he wanted to talk with McClellan, he sent a summons for him to appear at the White House.
DURING THESE TENSE DAYS, Mary tried to distract her husband. If old friends were in town, she would invite them to breakfast and dispatch a message to his office, calling the president to join the gathering. Initially irritated to be taken from his work, Lincoln would grudgingly sit down and begin exchanging stories. His “mouth would relax, his eye brighten, and his whole face lighten,” Elizabeth Grimsley recalled, “and we would be launched into a sea of laughter.” Mary had also introduced a therapeutic “daily drive,” insisting that the two of them, and sometimes the children, take an hour-long carriage ride at the end of the afternoon, to absorb “the fresh air, which he so much needed.”
More than most previous first ladies, Mary enjoyed entertaining. She had never lost her taste for politics. On many nights, while her husband worked late