Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [390]
Ordinarily, Lincoln took little heed of scurrilous rumors, but in this case, he directed Nicolay to ascertain the facts from General Butler. Butler replied that the smuggling story was spurious. Mrs. White’s bags had undergone the usual search. Nothing untoward had been found. Nicolay used Butler’s letter to document a public rebuttal of the fraudulent story. Butler was surprised that the White House would even bother to respond to something so “silly,” but after the Wood affair had cast doubt on his wife’s loyalty, Lincoln may have wanted to nip the new round of rumors in the bud. Nor did he want his soldiers to think that he would ever facilitate the Confederacy’s access to contraband items that might sustain the rebel cause.
It is scarcely surprising that Lincoln not long afterward showed little patience when his old friend Orville Browning requested a favor for a loyal Unionist who owned a cotton plantation in Mississippi. When the Union Army overran her home and took her slaves, she had fallen into poverty. She asked if the government could provide her an equal number of Negroes whom she would pay to work her farm. Lincoln “became very much excited,” according to Browning, and “said with great vehemence he had rather take a rope and hang himself than to do it.” When Browning argued for “some sort of remuneration” for the lost property, Lincoln countered that “she had lost no property—that her slaves were free when they were taken.” Puzzled by Lincoln’s sharp reaction, Browning “left him in no very good humor.”
As was usually the case with Lincoln’s rare episodes of pique, other strains had contributed to the sharp rejoinder. Earlier that day, he had visited the sickbed of Illinois congressman Owen Lovejoy, whom he considered “the best friend [he] had in Congress.” The fifty-three-year-old Lovejoy was suffering from a debilitating liver and kidney ailment that would soon take his life. Lincoln was distraught over Lovejoy’s misery and seemed to internalize the grim prospects facing his friend. “This war is eating my life out,” he told the dying Lovejoy. “I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end.”
On the night of February 10, a fire alarm rang in the White House. Smoke was seen issuing from the president’s private stables, which stood between the mansion and the Treasury building, and Lincoln raced to the scene. “When he reached the boxwood hedge that served as an enclosure to the stables,” a member of his bodyguard, Robert McBride, recalled, “he sprang over it like a deer.” Learning that the horses were still inside, Lincoln, “with his own hands burst open the stable door.” It was immediately apparent that the fast-moving fire, the work of an arsonist, prevented any hope of rescue. “Notwithstanding this,” McBride observed, “he would apparently have tried to enter the burning building had not those standing near caught and restrained him.”
Six horses burned to death that night. When McBride returned to the White House, he found Lincoln in tears. Ten-year-old Tad “explained his father’s emotion”: one of the ponies had belonged to his brother, Willie. A coachman who had been fired by Mary that morning was charged with setting the fire. The following day, Lincoln had collected himself and moved forward. He called Commissioner French to his office and instructed him to consult contractors, estimate the cost, and “bring the matter to the attention of Congress to-day, if possible, that measures might be taken to have it rebuilt.”
LINCOLN’S GIFT FOR MANAGING