A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White Jr

Author:Ronald C. White, Jr. [White, Ronald C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-58836-775-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

A People’s Contest / 419

Elmer Ellsworth, almost like a son to Abraham Lincoln, was the first Union officer to die

in the Civil War. This illustration depicts the deed of the first hero killed in battle.

4 2 0 / A. Lincoln

reporter entered the library. Lincoln, stunned and heartbroken, turned

to the visitors, extended his hand, and said simply, “Excuse me, but I

cannot talk.”

Abraham and Mary went down to the Washington Navy Yard to

view Ellsworth’s body. The president ordered it to lie in state in the East

Room. A funeral service took place in the White House on May 26,

1861. Throughout the North, Ellsworth became a symbol of courageous

young men willing to give their lives for the Union. His death also

helped shake off any remaining complacency in the Northern public.

Overcome with grief, Lincoln wrote a letter to Ellsworth’s parents

on the day before the funeral. “In the untimely loss of your noble son,

our affliction here, is scarcely less than your own.” He described

Ellsworth’s sterling qualities, “a fine intellect, an indomitable energy,

and a taste altogether military, constituted in him, as seemed to me, the

best natural talent, in that department, I ever knew.” Lincoln then

turned to his own relationship with the young man—“as intimate as the

disparity of our ages, and my engrossing engagements, would permit.”

He added, “What was conclusive of his good heart, he never forgot his

parents. . . . In the hope that it may be no intrusion upon the sacredness

of your sorrow, I have ventured to address this tribute to your brave and

early fallen child. May God give you that consolation which is beyond

all earthly power.” Lincoln’s letter, the first of hundreds he would write

to the parents or spouses of fallen soldiers, is remarkable in both its

affection and eloquence—written by a man consumed in grief.

t h e m o s t p u b l i c m a n in America lived in a White House that served

as both home and office. The West Wing, which houses the current

White House offices, would not be added until 1902 by President Theo -

dore Roosevelt. This arrangement became the setting of an odd mixture

of politics and pomp.

William Howard Russell, correspondent of the Times of London,

described the White House as “the moderate mansion.” He and other

visitors from abroad compared it unfavorably to London’s Buckingham

Palace or Paris’s Tuileries. Abraham and Mary Lincoln, on the contrary,

were impressed with a home that had thirty-

one rooms set amid

twenty- two acres of woodlands. To try to add to the dignity of the res-

idence, President James K. Polk had placed a bronze statue of Thomas

Jefferson on the North Lawn in 1848. President Buchanan had built a

conservatory to replace a greenhouse, but admittedly much of the sur-

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