Lincoln's White House

James Conroy, a trial lawyer in Boston for over thirty years, is the author of Our One Common Country: Abraham Lincoln and the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865 (Lyons Press, 2014). He resides on Boston’s South Shore.

Conroy (Our One Common Country) finds an original angle on the 16th president, depicting how the Civil War White House looked, felt, and smelled through the recollections of staff and visitors. He opens with Lincoln’s arrival in March 1861, in the company of James Buchanan, to a home that possessed 'too much decay under too many coats of paint.' Upgrading the appearance became a priority for Mary Lincoln, which led her to become enmeshed in a fraudulent scheme to conceal expenditures on furnishings by creative accounting, a potentially explosive scandal that was fortunately contained. Conroy describes the immense amount of time the president spent listening to job-seekers and others who wanted his advice or help. This was a period when the public had almost unfettered access to the White House—a palpably different atmosphere from that of the security-conscious 21st century. Through telling anecdotes, the hands-on nature of Lincoln’s presidency comes through vividly; for example, in 1865, the president himself wrote to the head of the B&O Railroad to make sure the White House was supplied with enough coal. These details about the running of a household while running a divided country meet Conroy’s stated goal of shedding a different light on his subject.

• Author’s Note and Acknowledgments Introduction1 The Painful Sense of Becoming Educated 2 A Strange Mixture of Enthusiasm and Greed 3 Plain and Simple in Its Appointments 4 A Miscellaneous Assortment of Life and Character 5 The White House Is Turned into Barracks 6 It Is Good to Look at Beauty Once in a While 7 Ink Stained and Work Worn8 The Republican Queen in Her White Palace 9 This Is a God-Forsaken Hole 10 This Damned Old House 11 My Public Opinion Baths 12 Bright Jewels and Bright Eyes 13 Not an American Crime 14 Bundles and Bales 15 Like So Many Greenhead Flies 16 Crazy and Poetry 17 I Happen Temporarily to Occupy This Big White House 18 And Everything Seemed to Weep Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index About the Author