Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [284]
They discovered that the rebels had decided to evacuate Norfolk and scuttle the Merrimac to keep it out of Union hands soon after the shelling began. As the Union troops moved uncontested into the city, Chase, accompanying Generals Wool and Viele, heard the soldiers shouting “cheer after cheer.” In the city center, they were met by a delegation of civilian authorities who formally surrendered Norfolk to General Viele. The general remained in City Hall as military governor of the region.
It was after midnight when Chase and General Wool finally returned to the Miami. Lincoln and Stanton, after waiting nervously all evening for their return, had just retired to their rooms. “The night was very warm,” Lincoln recalled, “the moon shining brightly,—and, too restless to sleep, I threw off my clothes and sat for some time by the table, reading.” Hearing a knock at Stanton’s door, which was directly below his own, he guessed that “the missing men” had come back at last. Minutes later, Chase and General Wool came to Lincoln’s room. Eschewing ceremony, Wool happily announced: “Norfolk is ours!” Stanton, who had “burst in, just out of bed, clad in a long nightgown,” was so jubilant over the news that “he rushed at the General, whom he hugged most affectionately, fairly lifting him from the floor in his delight.” Lincoln recognized that the scene “must have been a comical one,” with Stanton clad in a nightgown that “nearly swept the floor” and he himself having just undressed. Nevertheless, they “were all too greatly excited to take much note of mere appearances.” Beside the capture of Norfolk, the destruction of the fearsome Merrimac would open the supply lines from Washington to the peninsula.
When the triumphant trio returned to Washington, reporters noted that Stanton was “conveyed home seriously ill.” Physicians feared at first that he was suffering from one of the bouts of vertigo that immobilized him for days at a time. He soon recovered, however, and enjoyed the sweetness of victory in what the Civil War historian Shelby Foote has called “one of the strangest small-scale campaigns in American military history.”
Unusually buoyant, Chase expressed greater admiration for the president than he ever had before or ever would again. “So has ended a brilliant week’s campaign of the President,” Chase wrote, “for I think it quite certain that if he had not come down, Norfolk would still have been in possession of the enemy, and the Merrimac, as grim and defiant and as much a terror as ever. The whole coast is now virtually ours.”
Not surprisingly, McClellan refused to credit the president for the return of Norfolk to the Union. “Norfolk is in our possession,” he flatly declared to his wife; “the result of my movements.”
THE DAY AFTER Lincoln’s triumphant return, Navy Secretary Welles invited Seward, Bates, and their families to join him and his wife for a six-day cruise along the coast of Virginia, now cleared of rebel forces and the menacing Merrimac. “We had two pilots and thirteen sailors,” Fred Seward informed his mother. “Wormley and his cook and waiters, two howitzers, and two dozen muskets, coal and provisions for a week, field glasses and maps.” The armed navy steamer took them to Norfolk and the Gosport Navy Yard, where they viewed the ruins of the Merrimac. They proceeded up York River to McClellan’s new headquarters at West Point, thirty miles from Richmond. The cabinet colleagues enjoyed an easy camaraderie as the steamer moved from one river to the next. They consumed hearty meals, sang patriotic songs