If my name ever goes into history, it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.
— A. Lincoln, 1863Military Emergencies
At the White House, Lincoln lived and worked in the same building, and could be summoned to meetings whenever a crisis arose. Alerting the President when he lived three miles away required a bit more effort, but Lincoln remained available in emergencies. During the night of Sunday, September 20, 1863, a messenger awakened the President to deliver news about a disastrous Union defeat near Chattanooga, Tennessee. Lincoln left the Soldiers' Home and went to the War Department immediately, and continued to monitor the situation from there.
Several nights later, on September 23, the situation near Chattanooga was still critical, with the Union general there desperately in need of reinforcements. Long after Lincoln had gone to the Soldiers' Home for the evening, Secretary of War Stanton called an emergency meeting to address the situation. John Hay rode out to the Soldiers' Home to bring the President back to the city.
I went out to the Soldiers' Home, through the splendid moonlight & found the [President] abed... I delivered my message to him as he robed himself... assured him as far as I could that it meant nothing serious, but he thought otherwise, as it was the first time Stanton had ever sent for him.
— John Hay, diary entry, September 27, 1863 1
The President and his advisors discussed the emergency until well after midnight that night.
1John Hay, diary entry, 27 September 1863, in Michael Burlingame and John R. Turner Ettlinger, eds., Inside Lincoln=s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 85, cited in Pinsker, 186.