Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [461]
Lincoln, meanwhile, was enjoying himself immensely. While Tad raced around the ship, investigating every nook and befriending members of the crew, Lincoln remained on deck, watching “the city until he could see it no more.” Once inside, he listened with relish to the adventures of the River Queen’s captain, who had chased blockade runners early in the war. “It was nearly midnight when he went to bed,” Crook recalled.
Crook, who shared a stateroom with Tad, was “startled out of a sound sleep” by Mary Lincoln. “It is growing colder,” she explained, “and I came in to see if my little boy has covers enough on him.” Later that night, Crook was awakened by the steamer passing through rough waters, which felt as if it were “slowly climbing up one side of a hill and then rushing down the other.” The next morning, still feeling seasick, Crook noted that the turbulent passage had apparently not disturbed Lincoln. On the contrary, the president looked rested, claimed to be “feeling splendidly,” and did “full justice to the delicious fish” served at breakfast.
Mary would nostalgically recall her husband’s fine humor during this last trip to City Point. “Feeling so encouraged” the war “was near its close,” and relieved from the daily burdens of his office, “he freely gave vent to his cheerfulness,” to such an extent that “he was almost boyish, in his mirth & reminded me, of his original nature, what I had always remembered of him, in our own home—free from care, surrounded by those he loved so well.”
Crook recalled that “it was after dark on the 24th” when the River Queen reached City Point. He would long remember the beauty of the scene that stretched before him, “the many-colored lights of the boats in the harbor and the lights of the town straggling up the high bluffs of the shore, crowned by the lights from Grant’s headquarters at the top.”
Newly minted captain Robert Lincoln escorted General and Mrs. Grant to call on the president shortly after he arrived. “Our gracious President met us at the gangplank,” Julia Grant recalled, “greeted the General most heartily, and, giving me his arm, conducted us to where Mrs. Lincoln was awaiting.” Leaving the two women together, the men went into the president’s room for a short consultation, “at the end of which,” reported Crook, “Mr. Lincoln appeared particularly happy,” reassured by Grant’s estimation that the conflict was nearing an end. After the Grants left, Lincoln and Mary, appearing “in very good spirits,” talked late into the night.
While the Lincolns were breakfasting the next day on the lower deck, Robert came by to report that the review planned for that morning would have to be postponed. Rebels had initiated an attack on Fort Stedman, only eight miles away. With Grant and Sherman closing in upon him, Lee had decided to abandon Petersburg and move his army south to North Carolina, hoping to join General Joseph Johnston and prevent Sherman from joining Grant. Abandoning Petersburg meant losing Richmond, but it was the only way to save his army. The attack on Fort Stedman, intended to open an escape route, took the Federals by surprise. Nonetheless, within hours, Grant’s men succeeded in retaking the fort and restoring the original line.
After breakfast, Lincoln walked up the bluff to Grant’s headquarters, where plans were made for a visit to the front. As the presidential party passed by the battle sites, it became clear that the engagement had been more serious than first realized. “The ground immediately about us was still strewn with dead and wounded men,” recalled Barnes. The Confederates had suffered nearly five thousand casualties; the Federals over two thousand. Burial parties were already at work as ambulances transported the wounded to the hospital and surgeons attended those still lying in the field. When a long line of captured Confederate soldiers passed by, “Lincoln remarked upon their sad and unhappy condition…his whole face showing sympathetic feeling for the suffering about him.” On the return trip, he commented “that he had seen enough