Rise to Greatness Read Online Free

was eventually traced to a disreputable bon vivant named Henry Wikoff—he preferred to be called “Chevalier Henry Wikoff”—who had sweet-talked his way into the first lady’s confidence. The “Chevalier” was notorious for a memoir in which he described the time he kidnapped a woman in hopes of winning her love (only to wind up in prison), and his friendship with Mary scandalized the capital. “What does Mrs. Lincoln mean by … having anything to do with that world-renowned whoremonger and swindler?” wondered one prominent Republican. General John Wool, a seasoned veteran of the regular army, reported with concern that Mary had called on Wikoff at Willard’s Hotel, where she met him in the lobby, helped him don his gloves, and rode off with him in her carriage. “Some very extraordinary storeys are told of this Lady,” the general concluded. Evidently, Wikoff had persuaded Mary to give him a look at the text of the president’s message, and had passed along the best parts to the Herald .
    Yet another family scandal involved one of Mary’s half-brothers, David Todd, an officer in the Confederate army. Until recently, Todd had served as commandant of the squalid Richmond warehouses hastily converted into prisons to hold Union soldiers captured in the battle of Bull Run. Reports had begun to reach the North of Todd’s drunken brutality. His prisons were filthy; he had beaten and even stabbed prisoners. If his captives stood too close to the windows, it was said, he allowed guards to take potshots at them from the streets. Most offensive of all to Northern sensibilities, Lincoln’s brother-in-law reportedly kicked the body of a dead Federal soldier into a Richmond street.
    Distrust and suspicion were the nitrogen and oxygen of Washington’s atmosphere; the city inhaled ordinary disagreements and exhaled charges of treason. A few weeks earlier, for example, General McClellan had accused The New York Times of aiding the Confederates by publishing maps of Federal positions. “A case of treasonable action as clear as any that can be found,” he fumed, and he “urgently” recommended that Secretary of War Cameron censor the paper. Upon investigating the leak, Cameron quickly determined that the information in the newspaper had been made public by his own War Department. A minor episode, but one that gives a whiff of the poisonous cloud over the capital. In such an environment, it was no small matter to have a notorious traitor in the president’s own family, and a first lady who consorted with a spy.
    Lincoln’s domestic life was impossible to separate from his official duties, not least because his home and his office were all crowded together on the second floor of the White House. Construction of a separate office wing for the president and his staff lay decades into the future. For now, the combination of Lincoln’s young family and his rapidly expanding duties meant that space inside the Executive Mansion was taxed as never before. He and Mary shared quarters with their sons Willie and Tad; welcomed their older son, Robert, when he was home from college; made room for various visiting relatives from Mary’s side of the family; and hosted their youngest sons’ best friends, Bud and Holly Taft, for frequent sleepovers, all while giving over about a third of their square footage for Lincoln’s office and cabinet room, plus work space for three clerks (two of whom shared a bedroom in the White House), plus a waiting room for the constant stream of visitors who demanded Lincoln’s time. Often, the low grumbling of impatient favor seekers mixed with the stomps and shouts of rambunctious boys: Lincoln’s sons were known to burst into their father’s office at all hours. The boys didn’t even leave for school; Mary had created a makeshift classroom for them and their friends at one end of the State Dining Room.
    Fortunately, Lincoln was accustomed to bustle. As a boy, he once shared a one-room cabin