Lincoln's White House by James B. Conroy

Author:James B. Conroy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442251359
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

On Independence Day 1862, some veterans of the War of 1812 made an old men’s march across town to the White House, where Lincoln made appreciative remarks. After working most of the day, Nicolay told Therena he had never had so dull a Fourth of July. The little boys on Pennsylvania Avenue had exhausted their firecrackers in the morning and could not afford to reload, leaving the streets inappropriately calm.

Nicolay and others were concerned about more serious attacks. In the previous fall, Massachusetts’s governor John Albion Andrew had brought three constituents to the White House after dark. The doorman said Lincoln was out but would return. Killing time while they waited, they wandered through public and private halls, upstairs and down. Many rooms were open and lit, but the only signs of life were two pairs of children’s shoes outside a bedroom door. The governor and his friends chose a room that suited them until the president returned, heard their voices, and joined them.

Any well-dressed assassin with a bogus governor’s calling card could easily have done the same, had any deception been necessary. In hot weather, the president’s office door was literally open, an acquaintance said, “and anyone could go in unannounced. I was accustomed to doing so.” An entrepreneurial gunsmith exposed Lincoln’s ludicrous vulnerability even when his door was attended: “On my arrival at the White House I was ushered immediately into [his office], with my repeating rifle in my hand, and there I found the President alone.”

You had to get by two languid doormen before you got to Lincoln during the day, a newspaperman said, one at the front door, another outside his office, “but they did not consider it necessary to be vigilant after office hours, and I often walked into the White House unchallenged and went straight up to the private secretary’s room adjoining his own without seeing any person whatever.” The doors stayed unlocked well after dark, when Lincoln often worked with no one but a messenger dozing in the anteroom. Hay’s friend on General Halleck’s staff said he often thought as he walked into the White House how exposed Lincoln was, that if anyone attacked him in his home or office there would not be a single armed man to overcome. Although “we would have been puzzled to give a good reason,” Stoddard said, the secretaries worked uneasy at night, keeping one ear cocked for “the footstep in the hall.”

Lincoln was even more vulnerable in the President’s Park. Any stroller on the White House grounds might come face to face with him alone. A teenaged clerk found himself “within ten feet of the President as he came out to mount his horse. . . . I could have stepped three paces and touched him.” Finding children playing on the portico, Lincoln leafed through their schoolbooks while they gathered around him as if he were their father. In October 1862, two astonished privates on leave found him leaning against a tree on the grounds, deep in thought as he “cut at the grass with his cane.

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