Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [463]
Meanwhile, the ambulance carrying the women had encountered great discomfort due to the corduroyed road, which jounced them into the air each time a log was struck. Concerned that the agonizingly slow pace would make them late for the review, Mary ordered the driver to go faster. This only made things worse, for the first “jolt lifted the party clear off the seats,” striking their heads on the top of the wagon. Mary “now insisted on getting out and walking,” recalled Horace Porter, who had been assigned to escort the ladies, “but as the mud was nearly hub-deep, Mrs. Grant and I persuaded her that we had better stick to the wagon as our only ark of refuge.”
When Mary finally reached the parade grounds and saw the attractive Mrs. Ord riding beside her husband in the place of honor that should have been her own, she erupted in an embarrassing tirade against Mrs. Ord, calling her “vile names in the presence of a crowd of officers.” Mrs. Ord, according to one observer, “burst into tears and inquired what she had done, but Mrs. Lincoln refused to be appeased, and stormed till she was tired. Mrs. Grant tried to stand by her friend, and everybody was shocked and horrified.”
That evening Mary continued her harangue at dinner, manifestly aggrieving her husband, whose attitude toward her, marveled Captain Barnes, “was always that of the most affectionate solicitude, so marked, so gentle and unaffected that no one could see them together without being impressed by it.” Knowing his wife would awake the next morning humiliated by such a public display of temper, Lincoln had no desire to exacerbate the situation. Perhaps, as Mary’s biographer suggests, the blow in the wagon that Mary suffered to her head had initiated a migraine headache, spurring the irrational outburst of wrath. Whether from illness or mortification, she remained sequestered in her stateroom for the next few days.
At this time, General Sherman was on his way to City Point. His army had stopped in Goldsboro, North Carolina, to resupply, leaving him several days to visit Grant and discuss plans for the final push. When Sherman arrived, he and Grant eagerly greeted each other, “their hands locked in a cordial grasp.” To Horace Porter, “their encounter was more like that of two school-boys coming together after a vacation than the meeting of the chief actors in a great war tragedy.” After talking for an hour, they walked down to the wharf and joined the president on the River Queen. Lincoln greeted Sherman “with a warmth of manner and expression” that the general would long remember, and initiated “a lively conversation,” intently questioning Sherman about his march from Savannah to Goldsboro.
The talk darkened as Sherman and Grant agreed that “one more bloody battle was likely to occur before the close of the war.” They believed Lee’s only option now was to retreat to the Carolinas. There, joining forces with Johnston, he would stage a desperate attack against either Sherman or Grant. “Must more blood be shed?” Lincoln asked. “Cannot this last bloody battle be avoided?” That was not in their hands, the generals explained. All would depend upon the actions taken by Robert E. Lee.
The next morning, March 28, Sherman and Grant, accompanied this time by Admiral Porter, returned to the River Queen for a long talk with Lincoln in the upper saloon. With the war drawing to a close, Sherman inquired of Lincoln: “What was to be done with the rebel armies when defeated? And what should be done with the political leaders, such as Jeff. Davis, etc.?” Lincoln replied that “all he wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes, at work on their farms