Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [476]
For the first time since Willie’s death, Mary Lincoln seemed positively carefree. She had received a delightful note from her husband the day before, only “a few lines,” but “playfully & tenderly worded, notifying, the hour, of the day, he would drive with me!” She wrote a number of letters, all brimming with vitality. “We are rejoicing beyond expression, over our great and glorious victories,” she told James Bennett. To her friend Abram Wakeman, she described in detail the “charming time” she had enjoyed at City Point. “I wish very much you had been with us, even our stately dignified Mr Sumner acknowledged himself transformed, into a lad of sixteen.” She told Sumner that her new volume of Julius Caesar had arrived, and she invited him to join her that evening at the White House for a visit with General Grant.
GOOD FRIDAY, APRIL 14, 1865, was surely one of Lincoln’s happiest days. The morning began with a leisurely breakfast in the company of his son Robert, just arrived in Washington. “Well, my son, you have returned safely from the front,” Lincoln said. “The war is now closed, and we soon will live in peace with the brave men that have been fighting against us.” He urged Robert to “lay aside” his army uniform and finish his education, perhaps in preparation for a law career. As the father imparted his advice, Elizabeth Keckley observed, “his face was more cheerful than [she] had seen it for a long while.”
At 11 a.m., Grant arrived at the White House to attend the regularly scheduled Friday cabinet meeting. He had hoped for word that Johnston’s army, the last substantial rebel force remaining, had surrendered to Sherman, but no news had yet arrived. Lincoln told Grant not to worry. He predicted that the tidings would come soon, “for he had last night the usual dream which he had preceding nearly every great and important event of the War.” Welles asked him to describe the dream. Turning toward him, Lincoln said it involved the navy secretary’s “element, the water—that he seemed to be in some singular, indescribable vessel, and that he was moving with great rapidity towards an indefinite shore; that he had this dream preceding Sumter, Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg, Stone River, Vicksburg, Wilmington, etc.” Grant remarked that not all those great events had been victories, but Lincoln remained hopeful that this time this event would be favorable.
The complexities of reestablishing law and order in the Southern states dominated the conversation. A few days earlier, Stanton had drafted a plan for imposing a temporary military government on Virginia and North Carolina, until the restoration of civilian rule. “Lincoln alluded to the paper,” Stanton later recalled, “went into his room, brought it out, and asked me to read it.” A general discussion revealed that most of the cabinet concurred, although Welles and Dennison objected to the idea of undoing state boundaries by uniting two different states into a single military department. Recognizing the validity of this objection, Lincoln asked Stanton to revise his plan to make it applicable to two separate states.
Lincoln said that “he thought it providential that this great rebellion was crushed just as Congress had adjourned,” since he and the cabinet were more likely to “accomplish more without them than with them” regarding Reconstruction. He noted that “there were men in Congress who, if their motives were good, were nevertheless impracticable, and who possessed feelings of hate and vindictiveness in which he did not sympathize and could not participate. He hoped there would be no persecution, no bloody work, after the war was over.”
As for the rebel leaders, Lincoln reiterated