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Stanton on March 30, “and yet I dislike to leave without seeing nearer to the end of General Grant’s present movement. He has now been out since yesterday morning…. Last night at 10.15, when it was dark as a rainy night without a moon could be, a furious cannonade, soon joined in by a heavy musketry-fire, opened near Petersburg and lasted about two hours. The sound was very distinct here, as also were the flashes of guns upon the clouds. It seemed to me a great battle, but the older hands here scarcely noticed it, and, sure enough, this morning it was found that very little had been done.” Stanton replied promptly, “I hope you will stay to see it out, or for a few days at least. I have strong faith that your presence will have great influence in inducing exertions that will bring Richmond; compared to that no other duty can weigh a feather…. A pause by the army now would do harm; if you are on the ground there will be no pause. All well here.”

Seward, who had most likely come to keep Lincoln company, remained only two days. On April 1, he accompanied Mary back to Washington. The Lincolns had apparently decided that, after her public outburst, she would be better off in the White House, away from prying reporters. Moreover, Lincoln had related to her a dream in which the White House had caught fire, and Mary wanted to assure herself that all was well. Once she was aboard the steamer heading north, her spirits lifted abruptly. Fellow passenger Carl Schurz talked with her on the voyage. She “was overwhelmingly charming to me,” he wrote to his wife. “She chided me for not visiting her, overpowered me with invitations, and finally had me driven to my hotel in her own state carriage. I learned more state secrets in a few hours than I could otherwise in a year…. She is an astounding person.”

All that day, Lincoln haunted the telegraph office at City Point, anxiously awaiting news from Grant. Returning to the River Queen, he could see “the flash of the cannon” in the distance, signaling that the battle for Petersburg had begun. “Almost all night he walked up and down the deck,” Crook recalled, “pausing now and then to listen or to look out into the darkness to see if he could see anything. I have never seen such suffering in the face of any man as was in his that night.”

The battle was intense, but by early morning, the Federals had broken through Petersburg’s outer lines of defense and had almost reached General Lee’s headquarters at the Turnbull House. Realizing he could no longer hold on, Lee ordered his troops to withdraw from both Petersburg and Richmond. That evening Lincoln received the news that Grant had “Petersburg completely enveloped from river below to river above,” and had taken “about 12,000 prisoners.” Grant invited the president to visit him in Petersburg the following day.

Earlier that day, Lincoln had moved from the luxurious River Queen to the compact Malvern, Admiral Porter’s flagship. Concerned by the cramped quarters, Porter had offered Lincoln his bed, “but he positively declined it,” Porter recalled, choosing instead “the smallest kind of a room, six feet long by four and a half feet wide.” The next morning he insisted he had “slept well,” but teasingly remarked that “you can’t put a long blade into a short scabbard.” Realizing that the president’s six-foot-four frame must have overhung the bed considerably, Porter got carpenters to knock down the wall, increasing the size of both the room and the bed. When Lincoln awoke the next morning, he announced with delight that “a greater miracle than ever happened last night; I shrank six inches in length and about a foot sideways.”

To reach Grant, who was waiting in “a comfortable-looking brick house with a yard in front” on Market Street in Petersburg, Lincoln had to ride over the battlefields, littered with dead and dying soldiers. Years later, his bodyguard could recall the sight of “one man with a bullet-hole through his forehead, and another with both arms shot away.” As Lincoln absorbed the sorrowful scene, Crook noticed that his “face settled into its