The success of the White House ball was followed by two Union victories in Tennessee, the captures of Fort Henry on the Tennessee River and Fort Donelson on the c.u.mberland. These twin victories shifted the defensive struggle in the West to an offensive war and brought national recognition to a new hero: General Ulysses S. Grant. A West Point graduate whose weakness for alcohol had contributed to his resignation from the army eight years earlier, Grant was struggling to support his family as a leather salesman in Galena, Illinois, when the Civil War began. He volunteered to serve immediately, and was put in charge of a regiment in Missouri. From the start, Grant understood that a southward movement from Missouri was essential, but he was unable to persuade General Henry Halleck, Fremont"s successor, to authorize the move. Hearing rumors that the unkempt, bewhiskered Grant still drank too much, Halleck was unwilling to trust him with an important mission. Finally, on February 1, after the navy"s Admiral Andrew Foote agreed to a joint army-navy expedition, Halleck gave the go-ahead for Grant "to take and hold Fort Henry."
Grant and Foote set out at once. The navy gunboats opened a blistering attack, forcing the retreat of 2,500 rebel troops to the more heavily reinforced Fort Donelson, twelve miles away. The remaining troops surrendered. "Fort Henry is ours," Grant telegraphed Halleck in the terse, straightforward style that would become his trademark. "I shall take and destroy Fort Donelson on the 8th." Though a severe rainstorm delayed the eastward march to Donelson, Grant remained confident. Writing to his sister, he a.s.sured her that her "plain brother however has, as yet, had no reason to feel himself unequal to the task." This was not a boast, he said, but "a presentiment" that proved accurate a few days later when he surrounded the rebel forces at Fort Donelson and began his successful a.s.sault. After many had died, the Confederate commander, Kentucky native General Simon Buckner, proposed a cease-fire "and appointment of commissioners to settle terms of capitulation." On February 16, Grant telegraphed back the historic words that would define both his character and career: "No terms except unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted." Buckner and fifteen thousand Confederate soldiers were taken prisoner.
More than a thousand troops on both sides were killed and three times that number wounded. It was "a most b.l.o.o.d.y fight," a young Union soldier told his father, so devastating to his company that despite the victory, he remained "sad, lonely and down-hearted." Only seven of the eighty-five men in his unit survived, but "the flag was brought through."
The North was jubilant upon receiving news of Grant"s triumph at Donelson, the first substantial Union victory in the war. Hundred-gun salutes were fired in celebrations across the land. The capital city was "quite wild with Excitement." In the Senate, "the gallery rose en ma.s.se and gave three enthusiastic cheers." Elaborate plans were made to illuminate the capital"s public buildings in joint celebration of the double victory and George Washington"s birthday.
The day after Grant"s victory at Donelson, the president signed papers promoting him to major general. Lincoln had been following the Western general since he had read the gracious proclamation Grant issued when he had marched into Paducah, Kentucky, the previous fall. "I have come among you, not as an enemy," he told the Kentuckians, "but as your friend and fellow-citizen." Reports that "Grant had taken the field with only a spare shirt, a hair brush, and a tooth brush" made comparisons between "Western hardihood" and McClellan"s "Eastern luxury" inevitable; it was well known that "six immense four-horse wagons" had arrived at McClellan"s door to carry his clothes and other items to the front.
Fort Donelson"s capture provided the Union with a strategic foothold in the South. After a ghastly battle at Shiloh two months later left twenty thousand casualties on both sides, the Union would go on to secure Memphis and the entire state of Tennessee. These victories would soon be followed by the capture of New Orleans.
THE COUNTRY"S EXULTATION at Grant"s victory at Donelson found no echo in the White House. Willie"s condition had grown steadily worse since the White House ball, and Tad, too, had become ill. It is believed that both boys had contracted typhoid fever, likely caused by the unsanitary conditions in Washington. The White House drew its water supply from the Potomac River, along the banks of which tens of thousands of troops without proper latrines were stationed. Perhaps because his const.i.tution had been weakened by his earlier bout with scarlet fever, Willie was affected by the bacterial infection more severely than his brother Tad. He "grew weaker and more shadow-like" as the debilitating symptoms of his illness took their toll-high fever, diarrhea, painful cramps, internal hemorrhage, vomiting, profound exhaustion, delirium.
Tending to both boys, Mary "almost wore herself out with watching," Commissioner French observed. She canceled the customary Sat.u.r.day receptions and levees. For Lincoln, too, it was an agonizing period. Nicolay reported that the president gave "pretty much all his attention" to his sons, but the grim business of conducting the war could not be avoided.
Slipping in and out of consciousness, Willie would call for his friend Bud Taft, who sat by his bedside day and night. Late one evening, seeing Bud at his son"s side, Lincoln "laid his arm across Bud"s shoulder and stroked Willie"s hair." Turning to Bud, he said quietly, "You ought to go to bed, Bud," but Bud refused to leave, saying, "If I go he will call for me." Returning later, Lincoln "picked up Bud, who had fallen asleep, and carried him tenderly to bed."
As news of the boy"s critical condition spread through Washington, most of the celebratory illuminations were canceled. The Evening Star wrote that "the President and Mrs. Lincoln have deep sympathy in this community in this hour of their affliction." Though work continued in the offices of the White House, staffers walked slowly down the corridors "as if they did not wish to make a noise." Lincoln"s secretary, William Stoddard, recalled the question on everyone"s lips: "Is there no hope? Not any. So the doctors say."
At 5 p.m. on Thursday, February 20, Willie died. Minutes later, Lincoln burst into Nicolay"s office. "Well, Nicolay," he said, "my boy is gone-he is actually gone!" He began to sob. According to Elizabeth Keckley, when Lincoln came back into the room after Willie"s body had been washed and dressed, he "buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion." Though Keckley had observed Lincoln more intimately than most, she "did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved."
Mary Lincoln was "inconsolable," Keckley recorded. "The pale face of her dead boy threw her into convulsions." She had frequently said of her blue-eyed, handsome son that "if spared by Providence, [he] would be the hope and stay of her old age." She took to her bed with no way to sleep or ease her grief.
Meanwhile, Tad was now critically ill. With Mary in no condition to care for him, Lincoln sought help. He sent his carriage to the Brownings, who came at once and spent the night at Tad"s bedside. He asked Gideon Welles"s young wife, Mary Jane, to sit with the boy. Julia Bates, recovered from her stroke, also watched over him. Clearly, Tad required professional care around the clock. Lincoln turned to Dorothea Dix, the tireless crusader who had been appointed by the secretary of war as Superintendent of Women Nurses. She was a powerful woman with set ideas, among them the belief that women"s corsets had a baneful effect on their health. She would routinely lecture young women on the subject. One girl refused to listen, insisting that she would rather "be dead than so out of fashion." To this, Dix rejoined, "My dear...if you continue to lace as tightly as you do now, you will not long have the privilege of choice. You will be both dead and out of fashion."
Asked to recommend a nurse, Dix chose Rebecca Pomroy, a young widow who had worked on typhoid wards in two Washington hospitals. Introducing Nurse Pomroy to Lincoln, Dix a.s.sured the president that she had "more confidence" in her than any other nurse, even those twice her age. Lincoln took Pomroy"s hand and smiled, saying: "Well, all I want to say is, let her turn right in."
While Willie"s body lay in the Green Room and Mary remained in bed under sedation, Nurse Pomroy tended Tad. Whenever possible, the president brought his work into Tad"s room and sat with his son, who was "tossing with typhoid." Always curious and compa.s.sionate about other people"s lives, Lincoln asked the new nurse about her family. She explained that she was a widow and had lost two children. Her one remaining child was in the army. Hearing her painful story, he began to cry, both for her and for his own stricken family. "This is the hardest trial of my life," he said. "Why is it? Oh, why is it?" Several times during the long nights Tad would awaken and call for his father. "The moment [the president] heard Taddie"s voice he was at his side," unmindful of the picture he presented in his dressing gown and slippers.
On the Sunday after Willie"s death, Lincoln drove with Browning to Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown to inspect the vault where his son"s body would lie until his final burial in Springfield. The funeral service was scheduled for 2 p.m. in the East Room the following day. Though scores of people were invited, Mary asked Mrs. Taft to "keep the boys home the day of the funeral; it makes me feel worse to see them." Nonetheless, without consulting his distraught wife, Lincoln "sent for Bud to see Willie before he was put in the casket." "He lay with his eyes closed," the essayist Nathaniel Parker Willis recalled, "his brown hair parted as we had known it-pale in the slumber of death; but otherwise unchanged, for he was dressed as if for the evening." At noontime, the president, the first lady, and Robert entered the Green Room to bid farewell to Willie before the casket was closed. Commissioner French was told that the Lincolns wanted "no spectator of their last sad moments in that house with their dead child," and that Mary was so overcome she could not attend the East Room service.
Congress had adjourned so that members could attend the service. Many of those present had attended the ball just nineteen days earlier-the vice president, the cabinet, the diplomatic corps, General McClellan and his staff. As the funeral guests filed in, a frightful storm arose. Heavy rain and high winds uprooted trees, destroyed a church, and tore the roofs off many houses. After the service was concluded, a long line of carriages made its way through the tempest to the cemetery chapel where Willie was laid to rest temporarily inside the vault. Lincoln, who had so agonized whenever the stormy weather had pelted the grave of his first love, Ann Rutledge, perhaps found some solace that his son"s body was now sheltered from the rain and howling wind.
In the weeks that followed, Lincoln worried about Mary, who remained in her bed, unable to cope with daily life. Though Tad eventually recovered, Mary found it difficult to endure his company, which only intensified her sense of Willie"s absence. Nor could she bear to see Bud and Holly Taft. She never invited them back to the White House, leaving Tad utterly isolated. Understanding the situation, the president tried to keep his son by his side, often carrying the boy to his own bed at night.
Mary seemed to find some small comfort in her conversations with Rebecca Pomroy and Mary Jane Welles. The latter, who spent many nights keeping vigil at Tad"s bedside, had lost five children of her own and could relate to Mary"s sorrow. In her talks with Mrs. Pomroy, Mary tried to understand how the widow could bear to nurse the children of strangers after the devastation of her own family. Mary knew that she should surrender to G.o.d"s will, but found she could not. Looking back on Willie"s bout with scarlet fever two years earlier, she concluded that he was spared only "to try us & wean us from a world, whose chains were fastening around us," but "when the blow came," she was still "unprepared" to face it. "Our home is very beautiful," she wrote a friend three months after Willie"s death, "the world still smiles & pays homage, yet the charm is dispelled-everything appears a mockery, the idolised one, is not with us."
Indeed, the luxury and vanity in which she had indulged herself now seemed to taunt her. She plunged deeper into guilt and grief, speculating that G.o.d had struck Willie down as punishment for her overweening pride in her family"s exalted status. "I had become, so wrapped up in the world, so devoted to our own political advancement that I thought of little else," she acknowledged. She knew it was a sin to think thus, but she believed that G.o.d must have "foresaken" her in taking away "so lovely a child."
Nor could she fully accept the comfort Mary Jane Welles found in the belief that her children awaited her in heaven. If only she had faith that Willie was "far happier" in an afterlife than he had been "when on earth," Mary suggested to Mary Jane, she might accept his loss. Although in later years she would come to trust that "Death, is only a blessed transition" to a place "where there are no more partings & and no more tears shed," her faith at this juncture was not strong enough to provide solace.
Crippled by her sadness, Mary was drawn to the relief offered by the spiritualist world. Through Elizabeth Keckley, she was introduced to a celebrated medium who helped her, said Mary, pierce the "veil" that "separates us, from the "loved & lost."" During several seances, some conducted at the White House, she believed she was able to see Willie. Spiritualism would reach epic proportions during the Civil War, fueled perhaps by the overwhelming casualties. Mediums could offer comfort to the bereaved, a.s.suring them "the spirits of the dead do not pa.s.s from this earth, but remain here amongst us unseen." One contemporary commented that it seemed as if "one heard of nothing but of spirits and of mediums. All tables and other furniture seemed to have become alive." Some mediums communicated by producing rapping or knocking sounds; others made tables tip and sway; still others channeled voices of the dead. Whatever method they used, one scholar of the movement observes, they "offered tangible evidence that the most refractory barrier on earth, the barrier of death, could be transcended by the power of sympathy."
Mary"s occasional glimpses of Willie provided only temporary relief. His death had left her "an altered woman," Keckley observed. "The mere mention of Willie"s name would excite her emotion, and any trifling memento that recalled him would move her to tears." She was unable to look at his picture. She sent all his toys and clothes away. She refused to enter the guest room in which he died or the Green Room in which he was laid out.
Outwardly, the president appeared to cope with Willie"s death better than his wife. He had important work to engage him every hour of the day. He was surrounded by dozens of officials who needed him to discuss plans, make decisions, and communicate them. Yet, despite his relentless duties, he suffered an excruciating sense of loss. On the Thursday after his son died, and for several Thursdays thereafter, he closed himself off in the Green Room and gave way to his terrible grief. "That blow overwhelmed me," he told a White House visitor; "it showed me my weakness as I had never felt it before."
Like Mary, Lincoln longed for Willie"s presence, a longing fulfilled not through mediums but in his active dream life. Three months after Willie"s death, while reading aloud a pa.s.sage from Shakespeare"s King John in which Constance grieves over the death of her son, Lincoln paused; he turned to a nearby army officer and said: "Did you ever dream of some lost friend, and feel that you were having a sweet communion with him, and yet have a consciousness that it was not a reality?...That is the way I dream of my lost boy Willie."
While Mary could not tolerate to see physical reminders of Willie, Lincoln cherished mementos of his son. He placed a picture Willie had painted on his mantelpiece so he could show it to visitors and tell stories about his beloved child. One Sunday after church, he invited Browning to the library to show him a sc.r.a.pbook he had just found in which Willie kept dates of various battles and programs from important events. Maintaining vivid consciousness of his dead child was essential for a man who believed that the dead live on only in the minds of the living. Ten months later, when he wrote young f.a.n.n.y McCullough shortly after her father"s battle-field death, he closed with the consolation of remembrance. In time, he promised her, "the memory of your dear Father, instead of an agony, will yet be a sad sweet feeling in your heart, of a purer, and holier sort than you have known before."
Now, more than ever before, Lincoln was able to identify in a profound and personal way with the sorrows of families who had lost their loved ones in the war.
THE PENINSULA CAMPAIGN
CHAPTER 16
"HE WAS SIMPLY OUT-GENERALED"
TWO DAYS AFTER Willie"s death, General McClellan sent a private note expressing his heartfelt sympathy for the "sad calamity" that had overtaken the Lincoln family. "You have been a kind true friend to me," the general told the president, "your confidence has upheld me when I should otherwise have felt weak." Then, referring to the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson in the West as "an auspicious commencement" of his own forward campaign in the East, he beseeched Lincoln not to "allow military affairs to give [him] one moment"s trouble," for "nothing shall be left undone" in pursuit of victory.
McClellan"s a.s.surances of forward movement provided Lincoln little comfort. The general had made similar promises for many months, while the great Army of the Potomac sat idle. Criticism of the general, previously confined to newspapers, found a powerful voice in the newly created Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Dominated by radicals from both houses, including Ben Wade, Michigan"s Zachariah Chandler, and Indiana"s George Julian, the committee detested McClellan both for his failure to prosecute the war vigorously and for his conservative views on slavery. From late December to mid-January, McClellan had remained in bed with typhoid. Suspicious that the general was using his illness as a cover for his continuing inaction, the committee held a contentious meeting with Lincoln and his cabinet. During the session, Congressman Julian recorded, it became disturbingly clear "that neither the President nor his advisers seemed to have any definite information...of General McClellan"s plans."
More astonishing, according to Julian, "Lincoln himself did not think he had any right to know, but that, as he was not a military man, it was his duty to defer to General McClellan." Bates strenuously objected to Lincoln"s deferential stance, urging him repeatedly to "organize a Staff of his own, and a.s.sume to be in fact, what he is in law," the commander in chief, with a duty to "command the commanders." This opinion, voiced by the conservative, trustworthy Bates, struck Lincoln forcefully. He borrowed General Halleck"s book on military strategy from the Library of Congress and told Browning a few days later that "he was thinking of taking the field himself."
Though his statement may not have reflected a literal intention, Lincoln had clearly resolved that he must energize the army at once. "The bottom is out of the tub," he confided in General Meigs, repeating a favorite phrase. The nearly bankrupt Treasury could no longer sustain the enormous expense of providing food, clothing, and shelter for hundreds of thousands of immobile soldiers. Without some forward progress, Chase told the president, he would get no additional funds from a discontented public. Meigs suggested that Lincoln convene a war council with his other generals to formulate a decisive course of action. Receiving news of this, McClellan suddenly recovered sufficiently to attend the meeting on the following day. Still reluctant to expose his plans, McClellan told Meigs that the president "can"t keep a secret, he will tell them to Tadd."
Finally, Lincoln lost his vaunted patience. On January 27, 1862, he issued his famous General War Order No. 1, setting February 22 as "the day for a general movement of the Land and Naval forces of the United States against the insurgent forces." Lincoln correctly believed that, given the North"s superior numbers, they should attack several rebel positions at the same time. The order prompted McClellan to submit his plans for a roundabout movement that developed into the Peninsula Campaign. The plan called for the troops to move by ship down the Potomac River to the Chesapeake Bay, with a turn into Urbanna on the south sh.o.r.e of the Rappahannock River. From there McClellan planned to march southwest to Richmond.
Lincoln, backed by Stanton and several generals, including McDowell, proposed a different strategy. Troops would march overland through nearby Mana.s.sas, pushing the rebel army farther and farther back toward Richmond, "destroying him by superior force." This straightforward approach would shield Washington, keeping the Union Army between the capital and the Confederates. Under McClellan"s circuitous plan, it was feared that the Confederates might willingly sacrifice Richmond to capture Washington. If the South occupied the seat of the Union, foreign recognition of the Confederacy would undoubtedly follow. In the end, Lincoln reluctantly acquiesced to the Peninsula plan, but not before imposing a written order requiring that a sufficient force be left "in, and about Washington," to keep the capital safe from attack.
February 22, the date designated for the advance, arrived and went with Lincoln deeply preoccupied by Willie"s death and Tad"s grievous illness. A disheartened Stanton noted that "there was no more sign of movement on the Potomac than there had been for three months before." When he first took his cabinet position, Stanton later explained, he "was, and for months had been the sincere and devoted friend of General McClellan," but he had quickly grown disenchanted. After less than two weeks as secretary of war, he told a friend that "while men are striving n.o.bly in the West, the champagne and oysters on the Potomac must be stopped." Stanton"s remark alluded to the sumptuous dinners McClellan hosted each evening for nearly two dozen guests, many of whom were prominent figures in Washington"s Southern-leaning society.
Stanton was further disgruntled when McClellan kept him waiting on a number of occasions. Unlike Lincoln, the proud war secretary did not ignore the arrogance of the general in chief. After one particularly galling experience, when he had been forced to wait for an hour after stopping by McClellan"s headquarters on his way to the War Department, Stanton angrily announced: "That will be the last time General McClellan will give either myself or the President the waiting snub." A few weeks later, Stanton delivered orders to transfer the telegraph office from McClellan"s headquarters to a room adjoining his office in the War Department. Dispatches from the miraculous new system that connected Washington with army officials, camps, and forts throughout the entire North would no longer be funneled through McClellan. McClellan was furious, considering the transfer "his humiliation." He had, indeed, lost significant influence, for the adjacent telegraph office not only allowed Stanton to exercise control over all military communications, but ensured that Lincoln would now spend many daily hours with his war secretary rather than his general in chief.
Still, McClellan had powerful allies in the cabinet, including the influential Montgomery Blair. The Democratic press largely credited the "young Napoleon" for the victories at Forts Henry and Donelson, as if Grant and the troops were merely puppets with McClellan pulling the strings from Washington. Stanton noted satirically that the image portrayed in the papers of a heroic McClellan, seated at the telegraph office, "organizing victory, and by sublime military combinations capturing Fort Donelson six hours after Grant and Smith had taken it," was "a picture worthy of Punch."
As it turned out, the victories in the West increased the pressure on McClellan to act. At last, on the weekend of March 8, the ma.s.sive Army of the Potomac prepared to break camp. Antic.i.p.ating the move, the Confederates began to pull their batteries back from Mana.s.sas to the banks of the Rappahannock. Hearing reports of the fallback, McClellan led his armies on a short foray to catch the remaining troops. But once there, he found to his great embarra.s.sment that the entire Confederate force had already departed with their tents, supplies, and weapons. Still more humiliating, the supposedly impregnable fortifications that had deterred him for months turned out to be simply wooden logs painted black to resemble cannons. Had McClellan attacked anytime in the previous months, he would have had superiority in numbers and weapons.
The "Quaker gun" affair, as the stage-prop guns were called, provoked the wrath of radicals. "We shall be the scorn of the world," Senator Fessenden wrote his wife. "It is no longer doubtful that General McClellan is utterly unfit for his position.... And yet the President will keep him in command." The embarra.s.sing situation should have been expected, Fessenden lamented, for "we went in for a railsplitter, and we have got one." Echoing Fessenden"s dismay, the Committee on the Conduct of the War demanded McClellan"s resignation. When Lincoln asked who they proposed to replace McClellan, one of the committee members growled, "Anybody." Lincoln"s reply was swift. "Anybody will do for you, but not for me. I must have somebody."
Lincoln was convinced that something had to be done. On March 11, he issued a war order that relieved McClellan from his post as general in chief but left him in charge of the Army of the Potomac. Lincoln gave Halleck command of the Department of the Mississippi and, in a move that delighted the radicals, reinstated Fremont to take charge of a newly created Mountain Department. The post of general in chief was not filled, leaving Lincoln and Stanton to determine overall strategy. McClellan later recalled that he "learned through the public newspapers that [he] was displaced." Claiming that "no one in authority had ever expressed to [him] the slightest disapprobation," he was infuriated. Lincoln sent Ohio"s Governor Dennison to his camp to a.s.sure him that this was not a demotion. The president, Dennison explained, simply wanted General McClellan to focus his full energies on the all-important Army of the Potomac, whose actions would most likely determine the result of the war.
Lincoln antic.i.p.ated that his postmaster general, Monty Blair, would stridently oppose McClellan"s removal from high command. The conservative Blair family were staunch McClellan supporters, a loyalty that would continue in the months ahead. Referring to his radical detractors, Francis Blair, Sr., warned the general "not to let the Carpet Knights in Congress," who would sacrifice anyone"s blood but their own, "hurry or worry him into doing anything." Meanwhile, Washington gossip spread that Monty Blair was openly berating his fellow cabinet colleague Stanton for his failure to support McClellan. While conservatives vilified Stanton, radicals upbraided the Blairs as "preservers of slavery" for defending the inert McClellan at Stanton"s expense.
Already troubled by McClellan"s loss of central control, the powerful Blair family was enraged by Lincoln"s decision to reinstall Fremont in a position of command. Monty Blair privately considered Fremont"s appointment "unpalatable" and warned his father that it would be "mortifying to Frank," who had been humiliated by his arrest and imprisonment by Fremont. Lizzie Blair told her husband it was "urged by Chase-& Stanton who has his revenges, too," and that her brother Frank felt it intensely. Only four days earlier, with the backing of Democrats and conservative Republicans, Frank Blair had delivered a blistering attack against Fremont on the floor of the House. Fremont had come to Washington at the request of the Committee on the Conduct of the War. For weeks, radicals on the committee had pressured Lincoln to give "the Emanc.i.p.ator," as they called Fremont, a second chance. Congressman Schuyler Colfax eloquently defended their position when he rose to the floor immediately after Frank Blair to deliver a scorching point-by-point repudiation of Blair"s address.
The bitter public quarrel between the Blairs and Fremont must have given Lincoln pause as he considered reinstating Fremont. Though the appointment would thrill the radicals, it might cost him the allegiance of the Blairs and thereby destroy the delicate balance he had worked to foster between the conservatives and the radicals. As it happened, a magnanimous gesture by Lincoln just six days before Fremont"s appointment played an important role in resolving the complex situation.
On March 5, Monty Blair had come to the White House in great distress. The New York Tribune had just published a private letter that he had written to Fremont the previous summer before the family feud had begun. In the letter, furnished by Fremont to the press in an attempt to embarra.s.s Blair, the postmaster general had complained that Lincoln"s past affiliations had brought "him naturally not only to incline to the feeble policy of Whigs, but to give his confidence to such advisers. It costs me a great deal of labor to get anything done because of the inclination of mind on the part of the President."
Elizabeth Blair described her brother"s meeting with Lincoln in a note to her husband. "Brother just took the letter up to the P. & asked him to read it." Lincoln refused, "saying he did not intend to read it," as it was published for that very purpose. Monty acknowledged "it was a foolish letter" that he deeply regretted. "It is due to you," he told the president, "to make some amends by resigning my place.... I leave the whole thing to you & will do exactly as you wish." The president had no desire to exact retribution or remove Blair. "Forget it," he said, "& never mention or think of it again."
A grateful Monty Blair immediately came to Lincoln"s defense regarding the Fremont appointment. Although he had not been consulted about the decision and realized his family would consider it a blatant affront to Frank, he told his father that he understood Lincoln"s need to arrest "the spread of factions in the country & prevent divisions at this time," and for that reason, he thought "very well of it." The conservative New York Times agreed, approving Fremont"s appointment as a necessary "concession to this craving for unity" and "the value of united counsels." In his conduct of the war, the Times observed, Lincoln believed "tenaciously" in the "necessity of perfect unity of popular opinion and action" in the North.