-Chapter One-

Something Big

Hardly anyone could understand the boy.

Clad in his c­ hild-​­sized Union army uniform, complete with shiny
brass buttons, epaulets, and a silk sash, he cut a striking first impression.
But his words, such as they were, came out as a flood of toneless sylla‑
bles, inverted consonants, and dropped vowels. “Dear” became “day,”
“Crook” was “Took,” and “missus” was mumbled as “mith.” “He had his
own language,” recalled one of the bodyguards. Only there was more.
Three weeks past his tenth birthday, Tad Lincoln still could not read,
write, or dress himself, and he had such a hard time chewing that his
food had to be mashed or chopped ahead of time. He was still grieving
the loss of his older brother, Willie, to typhoid two years earlier, while
his mother, beset with worries that she might lose him as well, had
pulled him out of school. As a result, Tad wasn’t just the President’s
youngest son. He was also a deeply lonesome boy growing up in the
most famous house in America.
Sensitive and highly emotional, Tad loved the men of the Pennsyl‑
vania Bucktails, the infantry regiment assigned to guard the Executive
Mansion and the War Department, whom he sometimes drilled on the
back lawn or marched through the White House. But he was also more
than a little mischievous. Once he harnessed a pair of goats to an up‑
turned wooden chair and, like a miniature Roman charioteer, drove them
into the middle of a formal reception being held in the East Room. Dur‑
ing cabinet meetings, Tad would burst into the room unannounced, give

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 MIDN IGH T ON T HE POTOM AC 4

his father a furious hug, and then dash out again while the exasperated
secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, the veins in his neck straining at
his collar, sputtered on about what an outrage such behavior was. No
vase, window, or piece of furniture was safe when Tad was on a tear.
He could also be sweet and kind. Tad often borrowed a few coins
from James Halliday, the White House carpenter, to give to a poor man
or woman out on Pennsylvania Avenue. Late one afternoon, he invited
a gang of street children to share his dinner. The cook, it was said, “tried
to shoo them away, but Tad appealed to his father, who said they could
stay.” He also possessed an uncanny way with animals. There was never
a stray dog or cat that he couldn’t befriend, while his own personal
White House menagerie included a dog named Jip, two cats, a rabbit, a
horse, and a turkey named Jack. He also had the two goats, both of
which often slept in the same bed with him.
“Mr. Lincoln,” recalled Major William Henry Crook, a presidential
bodyguard, “kept Tad with him almost constantly.” The President would
hoist Tad upon his shoulders and gallop through the corridors like a
horse or play blind man’s buff and other games. When his father was too
busy to roughhouse, Tad would get as near to him as he could and play
quietly by himself. “I believe he was the best companion Mr. Lincoln
ever had,” Crook added, “one who always understood him and whom he
always understood.”
Despite his youth, Tad Lincoln was a keen judge of g­ rown-​­ups. He
could see right through those who paid him compliments or gave him
gifts only to gain the good graces of his father. He absolutely despised
Secretary Stanton and once doused him with water in the White House
garden. And he could tell right off who among his endless stream of tu‑
tors were all about boring lessons and even more boring books and those
who were game to fly a kite up by the unfinished Washington Monu‑
ment on a blustery April morning. “For all of his baby tongue,” Major
Crook recalled, “he had a man’s heart and in some things a man’s mind.”
While Tad Lincoln couldn’t speak properly or make himself easily un‑

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 Something Big 5

derstood, he could hear just fine. And what he heard, as the fine spring
weather enveloped the city in early 1864, were the sounds of impending
change.

For days, there had been hints that something big was in the works.
Stevedores at the Sixth Street Wharf had been unusually busy for
weeks, while railroad flatcars loaded with troops had been regularly ob‑
served heading south out of Alexandria. In Washington itself, officers
and enlisted men had been lining up outside of the city’s more than
thirty photography studios to have daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, and
tintypes taken to be mailed back home. There was even talk among the
city’s more than five thousand prostitutes about pulling up stakes and
heading to City Point, the massive naval port and Union supply depot
along the James River in Virginia where the final spring offensive, which
everyone knew was soon to commence, would surely be launched.
Then, on April 25, from a balcony above the east entrance to Wil‑
lard’s Hotel, located a block and a half from the White House, President
Lincoln reviewed no less than t­wenty-​­five thousand Union troops,
streaming like a great blue river down Fourteenth Street. “The rank and
file were like their comrades on the ­Rapidan—​­worn, sunburned, ­high-​
­spirited boys,” as writer Margaret Leech later captured that moment.
“Their equipment was light: thin bundles, knapsacks, tin cups, frying
pans, guns that shone like silver. Under their grime and sweat, these
soldiers looked as hard and handy as mechanic’s tools, which have been
used, and will be used again.” These soldiers were also a far cry from the
unsteady, green troops that the Union had first pitched into battle when
the war had begun. “Our army had learned to believe that it was sure of
ultimate victory,” wrote one War Department official. “Rely upon it, the
end is near as well.”
It certainly had been a long time coming. The last three long and
bloody years had seen a ­near-​­constant succession of campaigns and bat‑

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 MIDN IGH T ON T HE POTOM AC 6

tles, complex maneuvers, and unfulfilled promises. Once-obscure towns

and ­place-​­names, like Bull Run, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville, Antie‑
tam, and Gettysburg, were now known by all. And with them had come
a revolving cast of g­ enerals—​­Winfield Scott, Ambrose Burnside, George
B. McClellan, and George M ­ eade—​­none of whom had been able to end
the war with a resounding Union victory.
Now there was a new one.

He certainly didn’t look the part.

Short in stature and often dressed in a plain, soiled uniform, Ulysses
S. Grant fit no one’s conception of the ideal military man. He wore
dentures, hated military drills, didn’t give a whit about style, and cared
even less about pomp and ceremony. A middling West Pointer who had
spent much of his spare time reading romantic novels in the academy
library, he had fought in the Mexican War, was billeted out to Fort
Vancouver, Washington Territory, lost his savings in the gambling dens
of Portland, and resigned from the army. When the first shots were fired
at Fort Sumter, Grant was working as a salesclerk in his father’s leather
goods store in Galena, Illinois. But fate had different plans. Recommis‑
sioned into the Union army, he rose quickly in the ranks and won m ­ uch-​
­needed victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. He stumbled at
Shiloh in 1862, but Lincoln had refused to demote him, noting, “I can’t
spare this man. He fights.”
One year later, Grant had been given perhaps the hardest and most
treacherous assignment of the western theater of the war: that of taking
Vicksburg, Mississippi. Perched on a high bluff above the Mississippi
River and bristling with artillery and ­well-​­trained sharpshooters, the
Confederate citadel had become a Union graveyard. Wave after wave of
­blue-​­clad infantrymen had been cut down on its approaches, while the
nearby river bottom was littered with the hulls of sunken Union ships.
A renewed frontal assault, Grant reckoned, would produce the same

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 Something Big 7

results. So, instead, he countermarched his soldiers hundreds of miles

through the Mississippi backcountry, hacking trails through the wilder‑
ness, and besieged the city from the rear. Deprived of fresh food and
ammunition, Vicksburg fell on July 4, 1863. It was a momentous victory.
Within a week, the Mississippi River was completely under Union con‑
trol, and the Confederacy had been split in two.
Lincoln had found who he was looking for.

Grant arrived in Washington on March 8, 1864, a chilly Tuesday after

weeks of dry weather. Early that evening, Grant slipped into the dining
room at Willard’s Hotel for a quiet supper, hoping to be just another
army officer in a sea of Union blue. But shortly after he had sat down, a
rising chorus of whisperings began to wash back and forth across the
room. Men and women shifted in their seats, craned their necks, or
made some excuse to stand in order to get a better look at the rather di‑
minutive, bearded officer eating alone. Finally, one of the diners couldn’t
wait any longer. Standing bolt upright upon his chair in the middle of
the dining room, he yelled out, “Three cheers for ­Lieutenant-​­General
Grant!”
The room erupted into a torrent of cheering and applause, recalled
Noah Brooks, the Washington correspondent for the Sacramento Daily
Union, “amid a pounding on the tables that which made everything
dance.” The shouting went on for minutes until, at last, Grant “rose to
his feet, awkwardly rubbed his moustache with his napkin, bowed, and
resumed his seat and attempted to finish his dinner.” But the cat had been
let out of the bag. Grant was mobbed by admirers as he attempted to
steal out of the front doors of the hotel, and again later that evening, at
a reception at the White House. “So great was the crowd, and so wild
the rush to get near the general,” Brooks wrote, “that he was obliged at
last to mount a sofa, where he could be seen, and where he was secure,
at least for a time, from the madness of the multitude.”

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 MIDN IGH T ON T HE POTOM AC 8

Grant, for his part, wanted none of this. Uncomfortable in the

­spotlight and a bust at small talk, he slipped out of Washington the next
day and headed for Culpeper, Virginia, winter quarters for the Army of
the Potomac. Seven and a half weeks later, he departed Culpeper with
120,000 troops, the largest army ever assembled in the Western Hemi‑
sphere, and pointed them south.
It was time to break the back of the Confederacy.
It was time to end the war.

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