Lincoln's Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldier's Home
By Matthew Pinsker, Forward by Gabor Borritt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). xiv + 256 pp. $30 cloth. ISBN 0-1951-6206-4
Review Originally Published by H-Net, 15 January 2007
Washington, D.C. has always been a distinctly claustrophobic city, but no one has been subject to greater scrutiny than the president. Over the course of the last century, the president has periodically fled the confines of the nation’s capitol for a working vacation amidst quieter settings. For example, Franklin Roosevelt often conducted business from the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, Hawaii. Similarly, Lyndon Johnson established the “Western White House” in the Texas Hill Country, just west of Austin. Both Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan governed the nation from California from time to time during their terms in office. During the earliest days of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, George Herbert Walker Bush was criticized for not returning immediately to Washington, D.C., choosing instead to remain at Camp David. More recently, George W. Bush has been most eager to escape the nation’s capitol. According to the Associated Press, during the first five years of his presidency, Bush has spent nearly twenty percent of his presidency at his 1,583 acre ranch seven miles northwest of Crawford, Texas.[1]
Abraham Lincoln was unquestionably America’s most beleaguered president. When he took the oath of office in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded from the Union. The day after his inauguration, he faced the dilemma of whether or not to reinforce Fort Sumter. Immediately, military officials, members of Congress, Cabinet officials, and the endless throngs of office seekers filled Lincoln’s days. By July, rebel forces defeated the Union in the first major battle of the American Civil War.
At the same time, his private life was crumbling. The following February, his son Willie died from typhoid fever, probably caused by polluted water. That summer, the Lincolns escaped the gloomy hallways of the White House and moved three miles northwest, to a small cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, a residence for disabled military veterans, about three miles from the capital. In all, Lincoln spent thirteen of his forty-nine months as president, more than twenty-five percent of his term in office, on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home.
Matthew Pinsker’s book, Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home, examines the significance of Lincoln’s residency at the Soldiers’ Home. With this book, Pinsker has achieved a rather remarkable feat. By removing the president from the White House, Pinsker has chosen to depict Lincoln from a new angle and, in the words of Gabor Boritt, Pinsker has opened “a new window on the Lincoln presidency” (p. xiv).
For the first time, Pinsker examines the history of the Military Asylum, or the Soldiers’ Home. The main house was built in 1842 for local banker George W. Riggs, Jr. By the early 1850s, the federal government bought the home and the surrounding land, with the revolutionary idea of housing disabled army veterans who were unable to support themselves. To garner support, military commissioners began inviting presidents and secretaries of war to spend their summers at the private cottages that surrounded the main home.
James Buchanan was the first president to take advantage of the cool breezes and shaded hills of the Soldiers’ Home property. He claimed he slept better there than at the White House and, Pinsker argues, he probably mentioned it to Lincoln when they met briefly in 1861. Just a few days after he took office, both Lincoln and his wife made the trek and examined the retreat, but the war’s demands would not allow the Lincolns to spend their first summer away from the White House.
However, after their twelve-year-old son Willie died in February 1862, Mary wanted to get away from the White House. From mid June until early November 1862, they lived in the small cottage outside the capital, and returned at the same time the following year. In 1864, they returned to stay from early July to mid October. Although first-hand reports of Lincoln’s time at the cottage are scarce, Pinsker has done admirable work piecing together the letters and memoirs of figures like the first lady, members of Congress, Cabinet officials, common soldiers, and even poet Walt Whitman. A new portrait of Lincoln, sketched from a variety of different angles begins to emerge.
For instance, Pinsker invites readers to follow Lincoln on a typical summer day during the war. An army captain enters Lincoln’s cottage at 6:30 am and finds the president “reading the Bible or some work on the art of war” (p. 84). As Lincoln rides toward the White House, he passes by Walt Whitman, and appears to acknowledge the poet. Whitman is fascinated by the president’s face “with deep cut lines, seams, and his complexion gray through very dark skin--a curious looking man, very sad” (p. 114). Though Whitman recorded his thoughts, there were countless others who waved to the president on such mornings. For Pinsker, such “interactions” are significant. By casually appearing to the American people on his way to work, the president became a more familiar figure. Nicknames like “Honest Abe,” or the “Railsplitter,” soon gave way to the more endearing “Father Abraham.”
In the evening, Lincoln routinely retreated from the confines of the White House in Washington, back through the country to the cottage. On one occasion, an assassin shot at the president and pierced his familiar black stove-pipe hat. Friends protested Lincoln’s stubborn insistence not to be “shut up in an iron cage and guarded” (p. 51). The president eventually yielded and a company of soldiers was assigned to protect the president.
Lincoln formed a close attachment to the man in charge of the company, 48-year-old Captain David V. Derickson of Company K, 150th Pennsylvania. For example, Derickson and Captain Henry Crotzer of Company D occasionally ate dinner with the president when Mary was out of town. Another officer, James B. Mix, reported that he often ate breakfast with the president. Yet, Derickson was clearly the president’s favorite. According to a Major Chamberlain, “Captain Derickson, in particular, advanced so far in the President’s confidence and esteem that, in Mrs. Lincoln’s absence, he frequently spent the night at his cottage, sleeping in the same bed with him, and--it is said--making use of His Excellency’s night-shirts” (p. 84).
Pinsker explains this episode innocently enough. In the nineteenth century, men routinely shared beds. Similarly, on particularly cold nights, Civil War soldiers slept close together in a “spooning” position to keep warm (p. 84). However, neither explanation seems particularly plausible. Sharing beds was done out of necessity. During his years on the law circuit, Lincoln often shared beds with fellow lawyers at crowded taverns. However, soldiers like Derickson had other quarters and the president certainly did not have to share his bed out of necessity in this circumstance. Similarly, the cold weather “spooning” Pinsker refers to seems equally unlikely. Lincoln spent summer nights at the Soldiers’ Home specifically to avoid the hot, humid weather.
Reminiscences like Lieutenant Colonel Hidekoper, who remembered hearing Lincoln talk about his relationship with Derickson, claimed the president did so “with a twinkle in his eye” and reported that the president said “[t]he Captain and I are getting quite thick” (p. 84). Such reminiscences just add to the curious Derickson-Lincoln relationship. The height of contemporary gossip about the president and his military friend comes from the assistant secretary of Navy’s wife, Virginia Fox, who noted in her diary that a friend had told her “there is a Bucktail Soldier here devoted to the President, drives with him & when Mrs L. is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!” (p. 85). The reader is left to wonder exactly what Virginia Fox meant by “What stuff!” Pinsker speculates that perhaps jealousy was at the core of the gossip surrounding Lincoln and Derickson; however, a more recent book by C.A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, offers a decidedly more homoerotic interpretation.[2]
Of course, any book about Lincoln must certainly foreshadow his tragic end. Outside the doorstep of his cottage, Lincoln caught his first glimpse of a national cemetery. The fresh graves from the dead at Bull Run bordered the cottage property. I can only imagine that Lincoln must have looked out onto those graves and began to formulate the ideas he would so eloquently offer at another national cemetery just sixteen months later at Gettysburg. Just as the daily commute into Washington helped foster the “Father Abraham” image, the proximity to the cemetery would prove significant to Lincoln’s presidency.
Similarly, Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, stayed at another cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers’ Home in 1862. Such proximity allowed Lincoln to become acquainted with his secretary of war. In the 1850s, Lincoln had a brief, but quite unpleasant, encounter with Stanton in a law case. Despite such first impressions, Lincoln appointed Stanton to the Cabinet post because he was the best person for the position, after Simon Cameron’s disastrous tenure. While Doris Kearns Goodwin’s, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005) is useful for a more in depth look at Lincoln’s Cabinet, Pinsker does detail how the Soldiers’ Home provided Lincoln with a chance to connect with Stanton, who, for instance, shared the common experience of losing a child to illness just six months after the Lincolns lost their son, Willie.[3]
Furthermore, Lincoln was living at the Soldiers’ Home during the time he developed his most famous act, the Emancipation Proclamation. Pinsker speculates that Lincoln might have met free blacks and escaped slaves as he rode to and from the Soldiers’ Home because free blacks owned property just outside the main gate to the residence. Pinsker examines the reminiscences of former slaves like Anna Harrison, who claimed to see Lincoln nearly everyday on his morning commute to the White House. Another escaped slave told a reporter (several years after the war) that Lincoln routinely visited a nearby contraband camp and spoke with escaped slaves (p. 66, 68). Pinsker uses such reminiscences to support his theory, but in doing so, he also engages the reader in several fascinating discussions about the potential problems historians must be aware of as they write history. In this respect, Pinsker’s work is not only a valuable companion piece to Allen C. Guelzo’s Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004), but it could also be a valuable book to include in history courses for upperclassmen and graduate students.[4]
Throughout the book, I was reminded of other titles that compliment Pinsker’s work. For instance, Pinsker’s portrait of Mary Lincoln, as seen through the eyes of the soldiers guarding the president, works well with other studies of the first lady, particularly, Jean Baker’s Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (1987) and Jennifer Fleischner’s Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave (2004).[5] For insights into the Lincoln family, Pinsker’s work deserves a place alongside earlier books such as Ruth Painter Randall’s Lincoln’s Sons (1955) and David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln at Home: Two Glimpses of Abraham Lincoln’s Family Life (2004).[6]
With _Lincoln’s Sanctuary_, Pinsker emerges not only as a careful, dutiful historian, but also as a promising Lincoln scholar, capable of identifying and presenting unfamiliar stories about America’s most familiar president. While I was intrigued by his interpretations, I was most taken with his methodology. By offering snapshots of Lincoln’s private world, Pinsker places the president’s very public life in a new context.[7] “It is easy to overlook the importance of daily life in shaping larger political experiences,” Pinsker writes, “Details that matter--like the location of a meeting, the absence of a wife, or the day of the week--tend to get squeezed out for more obviously significant fare,” in many biographies (p. 187). But Pinsker follows a different path. “By examining the narrative through a more intimate lens,” he explains, “the story should become more vivid and hence more understandable” (p. 188). Lofty goals sometimes fall short, but Pinsker delivers.
“History buffs,” students, and scholars all might benefit from Pinsker’s work. As such, this book, which in January 2005 was published in paperback format, would fit nicely into a variety of university-level courses that examine Lincoln, the Civil War, and the American Presidency. However, Pinsker has written a history of the nineteenth-century’s equivalent to Camp David in such a way that graduate students in seminars devoted to the historians’ craft, museum studies, and historic preservation would also find ample topics for discussion.
- Samuel P. Wheeler, Southern Illinois University
Notes
[1]. Associated Press, “Bush Plans 50th Ranch Trip in Five Years,” July 29, 2005, <http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-07-29-bush-ranch_x.htm> (December 28, 2005).
[2]. C. A. Tripp, The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Free Press, 2005), 1-21.
[3]. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).
[4]. Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
[5]. Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln, A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 1987).; Jennifer Fleischner, _Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between the First Lady and a Former Slave_ (New York: Broadway, 2004).
[6]. Ruth Painter Randall, Lincoln’s Sons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955).; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln at Home: Two Glimpses of Abraham Lincoln’s Family Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
[7]. See also Charles B. Strozier, Lincoln’s Quest for Union: A Psychological Portrait, 2nd Edition (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2001).; Michael Burlingame, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994).
