If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.
— A. Lincoln, 1863Discussions of Military Strategy and Emancipation
Early one June morning in 1862, President Lincoln arranged for a carriage to bring Senator Orville Browning of Illinois to the Cottage. Browning brought two guests with him, retail magnate Alexander T. Stewart, who was also a contractor supplying uniforms to the Union Army, and Judge Henry Hilton. With these men, Lincoln discussed what he saw as the failed strategy of General McClellan, then Commander of the Army of the Potomac.
The conversation at the President's was chiefly on public affairs... Mr. Stewart is very earnest in his support of the Union cause, and urged that McClelland [sic] should be superceded and [General John] Pope given the command of the Army of the Potomac. He has no confidence in McClellan.
— Senator Orville Browning, diary entry, June 18, 1862 1
June 18, 1862 was a very busy day for the President and Vice President, according to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin's biography, written by Hamlin's son. The pair had dinner together at the Soldiers' Home, where Lincoln shared a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation with Hamlin.2 Whether or not the Vice President's son, writing many years later, had accurate knowledge of the details of this meeting, the President was known to have had the issue heavily on his mind and logically would have conferred with his trusted advisors about it.
On other occasions, the President held evening meetings at the Cottage where he sometimes discussed urgent issues well into the night. When the President's first stay at the Soldiers' Home was nearly at an end, in early November 1862, he spent a long night in discussions over what to do about General McClellan. Postmaster General Montgomery Blair and his father, Frank Blair, Sr., met Lincoln at the Cottage that night to express their opposition to the President's plan to remove McClellan from command. They were unsuccessful in their efforts to persuade the President, who declared at the end of their meeting, "I said I would remove him if he let Lee's army get away from him, and I must do so. He has got the slows, Mr. Blair." 3
1Orville Browning, Diary entry, 18 June 1862. In The Diary of Orville Hickman Browning. Eds. Theodore C. Pease and James G. Randall. 2 Vols. Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1925-33. p1:552. Cited in Lincoln’s Santuary. Matthew Pinsker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. p138.
2Pinsker, Matthew. Lincoln’s Sanctuary. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. p140-141.
3Montgomery Blair to George Ticknor Curtis, 21 January 1880. Cited in Lincoln’s Santuary. Matthew Pinsker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. p164.