The last night of the year 1862 had been a restless one for the president. He went to bed after 12 and rose before dawn. At midnight all around the crowded city soldiers and civilians fired their guns over the grave of the departed year. The New Year was welcomed by the prayers and thanksgiving of preachers, the fanfare of bands, ‘the boisterous laugh of the gay and thoughtless,’ the whirl of dancers, ‘the flowing bumpers of worshippers at the shrine of Bacchus, and the rattle of musketry by ever hopeful and happy `Young America,” the Morning Chronicle observed. The merrymaking that flowed up Pennsylvania Avenue and 15th Street past the Willard Hotel, and down Vermont Avenue past St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square, went on in the light of the swelling moon. But it stopped at the gates of the president’s house.

The fireworks thundered all night. Then, as the sun rose, the streets around the White House began to fill with citizens who had come from far and wide to greet Mr. Lincoln at the president’s customary New Year’s levee.

Lincoln did not drink, and in any case this was not a night for him to celebrate. Military dispatches from Murfreesboro, Tenn., were appalling. On December 31 the Rebels, led by General Braxton Bragg, had attacked William Starke Rosecrans’ Army of the Cumberland. ‘Our entire line suffered terribly this morning,’ said telegraph superintendent Colonel Anson Stager’s telegram. ‘Four regiments of regulars lost half of their men, and all of their commanding officers….

Majors Rosengarten and Ward were killed, Generals Stanley, Rousseau and Palmer were wounded….The Fifteenth Wisconsin lost seven captains. General Negley’s artillery is still mowing the rebels in the center.’ In his third dispatch Stager admitted, ‘The greatest carnage of the war has occurred.’ Soon the president, and the country, would learn that there were 24,000 casualties at Murfreesboro. Two weeks earlier at Fredericksburg, 18,000 soldiers had been killed and wounded, and the president had said, ‘If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.’

Walt Whitman’s brother George, a first lieutenant under Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s command, survived the Union disaster at Fredericksburg in December, advancing over a narrow turf the Rebels had so perfectly enfiladed that one gunner remarked, ‘A chicken could not live in that field when we opened on it.’ Walt called Burnside’s charge ‘the most complete piece of mismanagement perhaps ever known in the earth’s wars.’ Public confidence in the commander in chief collapsed, and his cabinet was at loggerheads, so that he was able to hold it together only by the most ingenious diplomacy.

‘I am heartsick,’ lamented Senator William Pitt Fessendon of Maine, ‘when I think of the mismanagement of our army….There never was such a shambling, half-and-half set of incapables collected in one government before or since the world began.’ New York lawyer George Templeton Strong wrote in his famous diary: ‘Even Lincoln himself has gone down at last. Nobody believes in him any more.’

The tempest in the cabinet stirred by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase’s jealousy and hatred of Secretary of State William H. Seward briefly distracted the public and the press from the slaughter at Fredericksburg. Radical Republican senators called for Seward to resign; as the president defended the secretary of state, Seward’s and Chase’s reciprocal resignations descended into comic opera. Lincoln’s ingenuity in resolving the conflict in his official family ‘to entire satisfaction’ — in his words — impressed the whole Republican Party, and bought him some time to win back the confidence of the American people.

Searching for his brother among the casualties of Fredericksburg, Walt Whitman (above, photographed in 1872) was moved to go to Washington and serve as a volunteer nurse. While there, he became captivated by the presence of Abraham Lincoln (Library of Congress).

But now there was the carnage at Murfreesboro, known at the moment only to the men fighting and dying there, to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, to General-in-Chief Henry Halleck and to Lincoln. All evening, December 31, Lincoln had been working on the final draft of his Emancipation Proclamation, which had been the subject of a cabinet meeting that same morning at 10, when he presented the document for final approval. The changes suggested by Chase and others were slight. The major disagreements had been resolved by September 22, when Lincoln announced that the emancipation of slaves would be effective January 1, 1863. But the president had to write a fair copy of the document during the night and early morning of New Year’s Day.

Lincoln wrote slowly and painstakingly, with little facility in his fingers and wrist. An inkblot or a misspelled word caused him to discard the paper and begin again. The pistol cracks and rifle volleys outside his window mocked the shots fired in fury and terror a thousand miles away in Tennessee. And for every shot that hit its mark, a young soldier lost a life or a limb. It was not a night conducive to sleep or concentration. The very document under hand seemed to waver and tremble, disturbed by the sounds of gunfire.

Horace Greeley, Republican radicals and abolitionists had been begging Lincoln to free the slaves for as long as he had been in office. As much as he wished to oblige them and suit his own conscience, he had to wait for a military victory, an impression of superiority in the war, if the proclamation were not to seem an act of desperation. In September the Battle of Antietam — an ambiguous victory — had provided the occasion for Lincoln to act. But since then nothing had gone right. The London Times called emancipation ‘the wretched makeshift of a pettifogging lawyer’ who had stooped to ‘the execrable expedient of a servile insurrection.’ A bloody defeat in Tennessee would make freeing the slaves appear, more than ever, a desperate act rather than a conscientious change in policy.

Lincoln sat in a large armchair, his legs crossed, writing beneath the glass-globed jets of a chandelier, at a desk between two high windows in his office. The silk braid of a bell cord hung to the right of the desk. A fire was burning on the hearth with its high brass fender and andirons. The chamber Lincoln called his’shop’ took up the southeast corner of the second floor. It was large enough to accommodate, on one wall, a sofa flanked by matching button-and-roll armchairs, and across the room the long oak table where the cabinet met. Above the Victorian marble mantelpiece a portrait of Andrew Jackson overlooked the meeting table toward the military maps hanging on the opposite wall: Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia. The table, desks, chairs, the slant-top escritoire with its pigeonholes and bookshelves in the southeast corner, all were as cluttered as in the Springfield office of Lincoln and Herndon, although here the maids swept and dusted. There was plenty of room to pace.

He could not stop thinking about the woman who had come to call on him the day before: ‘Yesterday, a piteous appeal was made to me by an old lady of genteel appearance, saying she had, with what she thought sufficient assurance she would not be disturbed by the government, fitted up the two South Divisions of the old `Duff Green’ building in order to take boarders….’ The woman might be the same age as his stepmother Sarah, the only member of that family he ever really loved after his sister died. He made a long pilgrimage from Springfield to Farmington to visit Sarah weeks before his inauguration, and the parting had been difficult, tearful.

Returning to the proclamation, the president wrote, ‘And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind, and the gracious favor of Almighty God.’ He was finished. He pulled the bell cord next to his desk to summon a courier, who would carry the manuscript to the secretary of state’s office. There William Seward would review the document and have it copied for the press before midday, when both men would sign it. A clerk would pen the formal close, ‘In witness whereof, etc.,’ while Lincoln had his breakfast: one egg and a cup of coffee.

When he had dressed for the formal reception, Lincoln went to fetch Mary. She wore a black velvet dress with lozenge trimming at the waist, diamond earrings and necklace, and a black shawl around her head. This would be her first public reception since the burial of their 11-year-old son Willie, who had died of typhus in February 1862. The Lincolns were racked by guilt at the thought that the foul air of the canal that flowed behind the White House had killed the boy. Of all their sons (Robert, Edward, Willie and Tad) Willie had been the favorite, and Mary had not recovered from the shock. She took comfort in the company of spirit mediums, whose sances held in the darkened Red Room brought her in touch with Willie’s ghost. Lincoln was concerned about his wife this morning, doubting she could hold up under the pressure of receiving a thousand visitors, who began arriving at 9:30.

The gorgeous parade of the diplomats came first, ambassadors and their wives from India, Japan, Spain and elsewhere in their colorful costumes and headdresses: red and blue saris with gold thread, fiery kimonos, the fez, the veil, the mantilla. The distinguished representatives of foreign courts, in their carriages, drove rapidly up the semicircular drive, alighted and advanced through a screen of Ionic columns to the audience room, where they met the president and first lady standing together. Marshal Ward Hill Lamon, chief of protocol, made the introductions. Meanwhile the Army and Navy officers in full parade dress were gathering at the War Department. They marched to the White House at 10 o’clock, and the Lincolns, standing side by side, smiling and bowing, received them in the order of their rank.

At noon the gates were opened to the public, an overwhelming, if well-dressed and orderly crowd. Men wore formal black; women came in silks and lace, satins and feathers, but without bonnets. ‘With the stirring events of the times and our largely increased community,’ said the Washington Chronicle, ‘the desire this year was greater than ever to call on the patriotic Chief Magistrate….Aware of the public sentiment, and anticipating the extreme pressure on New Year’s morning, every arrangement was made at the mansion to facilitate the general movements of the people.’

The threat of assassination was constant. A detachment from a Pennsylvania regiment plus most of the metropolitan police were on hand to supervise the crowd. Officers stood guard under the portico, behind the semicircular projecting colonnade, forming a line up the two flights of steps, ushering people into the vestibule in installments. Canvas had been spread over the new carpeting in the East Room to protect it from muddy boots.

The crowd pressed forward in columns, first to the Red Room, where Mrs. Lincoln greeted them. The short, plump first lady stood under the full-length portrait of George Washington, which Dolly Madison had rescued from the English invaders in 1814 by clipping it from the frame with her sewing scissors. Mary knew the story. The White House still showed the scorch marks from the day British General Robert Ross had set it afire. The copper roof, lapped instead of grooved, leaked; yet Mrs. Lincoln had quickly spent more than $20,000 on carpets, damask curtains, gold-fringed tapestries for the Green Room, Limoges dining service, French wallpaper, drapes, ornately carved armchairs and sofas, and new gasoliers of brass and milk-glass globes.

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