Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [459]
In mid-March, Seward arranged for Hay to receive an appointment as secretary of the legation in Paris. “It was entirely unsolicited and unexpected,” Hay told his brother Charles. “It is a pleasant and honorable way of leaving my present post which I should have left in any event very soon.” He had thought of returning to Warsaw, Illinois, but Paris, France, was far more exciting. Hay planned to stay at the White House for another month or so, until arrangements were completed for Noah Brooks to assume his duties. Then he and Nicolay would sail for Europe to begin their new adventures. “It will be exceedingly pleasant,” Nicolay said, “for both of us, to be there at the same time.”
Spring seemed to revive the spirits of Mary Lincoln, who invariably sank into depression each February, with the anniversary of Willie’s death. “We are having charming weather,” she wrote to her friend Abram Wakeman on March 20. “We went to the Opera on Saturday eve; Mr Sumner accompanied us—we had a very gay little time. Mr S when he throws off his heavy manner, as he often does, can make himself very very agreeable. Last evening, he again joined our little coterie & tomorrow eve,—we all go again to hear ‘Robin Adair,’ sung in ‘La Dame Blanche’ by Habelmann. This is always the pleasant time to me in W. springtime, some few of the most pleasant Senators families remain until June, & all ceremony, with each other is laid aside.” A few days later, she wrote a note to Sumner, telling him that she would be sending along a copy of Louis Napoleon’s manuscript on Julius Caesar, which she had just received from the State Department and knew he would want to read. “In the coming summer,” she promised, “I shall peruse it myself, for I have so sadly neglected the little French, I fancied so familiar to me.”
Like his mother, Tad Lincoln possessed “an emotional temperament much like an April day, sunning all over with laughter one moment, the next crying as though [his] heart would break.” The painter Francis Carpenter recounted an incident when photographers from Brady’s studio set up their equipment in an unoccupied room that Tad had turned into a little theater. Taking “great offence at the occupation of his room without his consent,” Tad locked the door and hid the key, preventing the photographers from retrieving their chemicals and supplies. Carpenter pleaded with Tad to unlock the door, but he refused. Finally, the president had to intervene. He left his office and returned a few minutes later with the key. Though Tad “was violently excited when I went to him,” Lincoln told Carpenter, “I said, ‘Tad, do you know you are making your father a great deal of trouble?’ He burst into tears, instantly giving me up the key.”
Most of the time, however, Tad was “so full of life and vigor,” recalled John Hay, “so bubbling over with health and high spirits, that he kept the house alive with his pranks and his fantastic enterprises.” From dawn to dusk, “you could hear his shrill pipe resounding through the dreary corridors of the Executive residence…and when the President laid down his weary pen toward midnight, he generally found his infant goblin asleep under his table or roasting his curly head by the open fire-place; and the tall chief would pick up the child and trudge off to bed with the drowsy little burden on his shoulder, stooping under the doors and dodging the chandeliers.”
Though Tad never developed a love of books, and “felt he could not waste time in learning to spell,” he had a clever, intuitive mind and was a good judge of character. “He treated flatterers and office-seekers with a curious coolness and contempt,” marveled Hay, “but he often espoused the cause of