Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [469]
Minutes after taking leave of Welles, Seward nearly lost his life in a carriage accident. Fanny and her friend Mary Titus had come to the Department to join her father and brother Fred for their “customary” afternoon ride. As the horses moved up Vermont Avenue, the coachman stopped to close the carriage door, which had not been properly latched. Before he could return to his seat, the horses bolted, “swinging the driver by the reins as one would swing a cat by the tail.” Both Fred and Seward jumped out, hoping they could stop the runaway horses. Fred was not hurt, but Seward caught his heel on the carriage as he jumped, and landed “violently upon the pavement,” causing him to lose consciousness.
“The horses tore along,” Fanny recorded in her diary, and “we seemed to be whirling on to certain destruction.” At an alley, they “turned. We brushed against a tree,” and headed straight toward the corner of a house, where she feared she would be “crushed to death.” Fortunately, a passing soldier got control of the reins and brought an end to the terrifying ride. Rushing back to the place where her father had fallen, Fanny was horrified to find his broken body, “blood streaming from his mouth.” At first she feared he was dead.
For two hours after he was carried to his home, Seward remained unconscious. When he came to at last, he was delirious with pain, having suffered a broken jaw and a badly dislocated shoulder. Doctors arrived, and Fanny could hear his agonized cries through the bedroom door. When she was finally allowed to see him, “he was so disfigured by bruises…that he had scarcely a trace of resemblance to himself.”
Hearing the news, Stanton rushed to Seward’s bedside, where, Fanny recalled, he “was like a woman in the sickroom.” He ministered carefully to his friend, perhaps remembering childhood days when he had accompanied his father on sick calls. He “wiped his lips” where the blood had caked, “spoke gently to him,” and remained by his side for hours. Returning to the War Department, Stanton sent Lincoln a telegram at City Point: “Mr Seward was thrown from his carriage his shoulder bone at the head of the joint broken off, his head and face much bruised and he is in my opinion dangerously injured. I think your presence here is needed.”
Receiving the message shortly before midnight, Lincoln advised Grant that Seward’s accident necessitated his return to Washington. Meanwhile, Mary and her invited guests, including James Speed, Elizabeth Keckley, Charles Sumner, Senator Harlan, and the Marquis de Chambrun, were steaming toward City Point. At dawn the next morning, Mary sent a telegram to Stanton: “If Mr Seward is not too severely injured—cannot the President, remain until we arrive at City Point.” By this time the surgeon general had determined that Seward had suffered no internal injuries. Stanton informed Mary that there was “no objection to the President remaining at City Point.” A few hours later, he sent word to Lincoln that Seward was recovering. “I have seen him and read him all the news…. His mind is clear and spirits good.”
When Mary’s party arrived at noon on April 6, Lincoln brought them into the drawing room of the River Queen and relayed the latest bulletins, all positive, from Grant. “His whole appearance, pose, and bearing had marvelously changed,” Senator Harlan noted. “He was, in fact, transfigured. That indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been attained.” Nonetheless, the marquis marveled, “it was impossible to detect in him the slightest feeling of pride, much less of vanity.”
While the visitors went off to Richmond,