Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [288]
“WE ARE IN THE DEPTHS”
THE DEFEAT ON THE Peninsula devastated Northern morale. “We are in the depths just now,” George Templeton Strong admitted on July 14, 1862, “permeated by disgust, saturated with gloomy thinking.” In Washington, columnist Cara Kasson observed the frustration written on every face, manifesting an anxiety greater than the aftermath of Bull Run, “for the present repulse is more momentous.” Count Gurowski agreed, calling the Fourth of July holiday “the gloomiest since the birth of this republic. Never was the country so low.” Even the normally stoical John Nicolay confided to his fiancée, Therena, that “the past has been a very blue week…. I don’t think I have ever heard more croaking since the war began.”
For the irrepressibly optimistic Seward, who had fervently hoped the capture of Richmond might signal an end to the war, the turn of events was shattering. “It is a startling sight to see the mind of a great people, saddened, angered, soured, all at once,” he confided to Fanny, who was in Auburn with her mother for the summer. “If I should let a shade of this popular despondency fall upon a dispatch, or even rest upon my own countenance,” he realized, “there would be black despair throughout the whole country.” He begged her for letters detailing daily life at home—the flowers in bloom and the hatching of eggs—anything but war and defeat. “They bring no alarm, no remonstrances, no complaints, and no reproaches,” he explained. “They are the only letters which come to me, free from excitement…. Write to me then cheerfully, as you are wont to do, of boys and girls and dogs and horses, and birds that sing, and stars that shine and never weep, and be blessed for all your days, for thus helping to sustain a spirit.”
Chase was equally shaken and despondent. “Since the rebellion broke out I have never been so sad,” he told a friend. “We ought [to have] won a victory and taken Richmond.” Furthermore, Kate, who had gone to Ohio to visit her grandmother, was not in Washington to console him. “The house seemed very dull after you were gone,” he told her in one of many long letters cataloguing the events of that summer. He described his sojourn to see General McDowell, who had been knocked unconscious by a bad fall from his horse; told her of an unusual cabinet meeting, a pleasant dinner party at Seward’s with the Stantons and the Welles, a meeting with Jay Cooke, and a visit from Bishop McIlvaine. He queried her about her summer clothes, her lace veil, and a diamond she had ordered. In addition to commonplace matters, he provided her with confidential military intelligence about the Peninsula Campaign, delineating the flow of the Chickahominy and the position of the various divisions so she could visualize the course of the battle.
Kate was thrilled by her father’s lengthy epistles, which she interpreted as “a mark of love and confidence.” Her appreciation, he replied, was “more than ample reward for the time & trouble of writing.” She must trust that she would always have his love and that he would continue to “confide greatly in [her] on many points.” He was pleased, as well, with the quality of her letters, which finally seemed to meet his exacting standards. “All your letters have come and all have been good—some very good.”
However, Kate’s letters that summer concealed her unhappiness over the troubled course of her romance with William Sprague. The young couple had been close to an engagement before Sprague received some nasty letters retelling and likely embellishing the story of Kate’s dalliance with the young married man in Columbus who had become obsessed with her when she was sixteen. Though Sprague was guilty of far greater indiscretions himself, having fathered a child during his twenties, it seems he was so taken aback by the rumors of Kate’s behavior that he broke off the relationship. “Then came the blank,” he later recalled. “Wherever there is day there must be night. In some countries the day is almost constant, but the night cometh. So with us it came.”
Kate, unaccustomed to defeat