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disagreed. In conversations with Sumner and others, he openly denounced Lincoln’s action, fanning talk “among the more advanced members” of the Republican Party about Lincoln’s “pusillanimity.” Chase’s defiance earned him plaudits from the New York Tribune, “all the more warmly appreciated,” Chase told Horace Greeley, given the influential editor’s “earlier unfavorable judgments” of his public career. Chase maintained to Greeley that he had “not been so sorely tried by anything here—though I have seen a great deal in the shape of irregularity, assumptions beyond law, extravagance, & deference to generals and reactionists which I could not approve,—as by the nullifying of Hunter’s proclamation.” Rumors began to surface that the controversy would cause an open rupture in the cabinet and precipitate Chase’s departure. Still, so long as Lincoln believed Chase was the right man for the Treasury, he had no intention of requesting his resignation. As for Chase, so long as he could garner radical support by publicly opposing Lincoln on this critical issue, he would productively remain in the cabinet until the time was right to make a break.

IN THE FIRST WEEK OF MAY, Lincoln resolved to end months of frustration with McClellan by personally visiting Fort Monroe. Stanton had suggested that a presidential journey to the tip of the Peninsula might finally spur McClellan to act. On the evening of Monday, May 5, the president arrived at the Navy Yard and boarded the Miami, a five-gun Treasury cutter, accompanied by Stanton, Chase, and General Egbert Viele. “The cabin,” Viele recalled, “was neat and cozy. A center table, buffet and washstand, with four berths, two on each side, and some comfortable chairs, constituted its chief appointments.” Since the Miami was a Treasury ship, Chase “seemed to feel that we were his guests,” General Viele observed. The treasury secretary even brought his own butler to serve meals, and “treated us as if we were in his own house.”

Both Chase and Stanton began the twenty-seven-hour journey anxious about all the work they had left behind. As the hours passed by, however, they warmed to Lincoln’s high-spirited discourse and began to relax. General Viele marveled how Lincoln was always the center of the circle gathered on the quarterdeck, keeping everyone engrossed for hours as he recited passages from Shakespeare, “page after page of Browning and whole cantos of Byron.” Talking much of the day, he interspersed stories and anecdotes from his “inexhaustible stock.” Many, as usual, were directly applicable to a point made in conversation, but some were simply jokes that set Lincoln laughing louder than all the combined listeners. One of his favorite anecdotes told of a schoolboy “called up by the teacher to be disciplined. ‘Hold out your hand!’ A paw of the most surprising description was extended, more remarkable for its filthiness than anything else.” The schoolmaster was so stunned that he said, “‘Now, if there were such another dirty thing in the room, I would let you off.’ ‘There it is,’ quoth the unmoved culprit, drawing the other hand from behind his back.”

While the presidential party lounged on the deck, Lincoln playfully demonstrated that in “muscular power he was one in a thousand,” possessing “the strength of a giant.” He picked up an ax and “held it at arm’s length at the extremity of the [handle] with his thumb and forefinger, continuing to hold it there for a number of minutes. The most powerful sailors on board tried in vain to imitate him.”

After the Tuesday luncheon table was cleared, the president and his advisers pored over maps and analyzed the army positions in and around Virginia. Union forces at Fort Monroe occupied the northern shore of Hampton Roads, which connected the Chesapeake to three rivers. Confederate forces on the southern shore still held Norfolk and the Navy Yard. Two months earlier, the rebels had used this strategic foothold to great advantage by sending the powerful nine-gun Merrimac, a scuttled Union ship that they had raised and covered with iron plates, into a