Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [402]
There were, indeed, nights when Lincoln did not sleep. One of these nights, Francis Carpenter “met him, clad in a long morning wrapper, pacing back and forth…his hands behind him, great black rings under his eyes, his head bent forward upon his breast.” There were moments when he was overwhelmed with sorrow at the appalling loss of life. As the leader of his cabinet and the leader of his country, however, he understood the need to remain collected and project hope and confidence to his colleagues and his people. Between anxious hours at the War Department awaiting news from the front, Lincoln made time to get to the theater, attend a public lecture on Gettysburg, and see an opera. “People may think strange of it,” he explained, “but I must have some relief from this terrible anxiety, or it will kill me.”
Schuyler Colfax came to visit one Sunday during the Battle of the Wilderness. “I saw [Lincoln] walk up and down the Executive Chamber, his long arms behind his back, his dark features contracted still more with gloom; and as he looked up, I thought his face the saddest one I had ever seen.” But, Colfax added, “he quickly recovered,” and suddenly spoke of Grant with such confidence that “hope beamed on his face.” An hour later, greeting a delegation of congressional visitors, he managed to tell “story after story,” which hid “his saddened heart from their keen and anxious scrutiny.”
Lincoln never lost faith in Grant. He realized that whereas “any other General” would have retreated after sustaining such terrible losses, Grant somehow retained “the dogged pertinacity…that wins.” Lincoln hugged and kissed a young reporter on the forehead who arrived at the White House with a verbal message from the general that said, “there is to be no turning back.” His spirits rose further when he read the words in Grant’s famous dispatch on May 11: “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” When a visitor asked one day about the prospects of the army under Grant, Lincoln’s face lit up “with that peculiar smile which he always puts on when about to tell a good story.” The question, he said, “reminds me of a little anecdote about the automaton chessplayer, which many years ago astonished the world by its skill in that game. After a while the automaton was challenged by a celebrated player, who, to his great chagrin, was beaten twice by the machine. At the end of the second game, the player, significantly pointing his finger at the automaton, exclaimed in a very decided tone. ‘There’s a man in it!’” That, he explained, referring to Grant, was “the secret” to the army’s fortunes.
IN EARLY JUNE, when the Republican Convention was set to open in Baltimore, Salmon Chase grew restless. Though he had withdrawn his name from the race the previous March, he still retained the hope that events might turn in his favor. Thurlow Weed had repeatedly warned the president that Chase’s withdrawal was simply a “shrewd dodge” that would allow him “to turn up again with more strength than ever.” The well-informed political boss had compiled a long list of Treasury employees who were devoting all their energies to the Chase campaign. More troubling still, Weed had heard from myriad sources that corrupt Treasury agents were exchanging army supplies for Confederate cotton in violation of the congressional law that forbade any trade between the free and slave states without an express permit from the Treasury. Weed believed that Chase’s son-in-law, Sprague, was a beneficiary of one of these schemes. He