LINDA LEVITT TURNER: and she was determined to turn this house into a fitting home.

SUMTER

INTERIOR: WHITE HOUSE

March 5, 1861. On his first day in the Executive Mansion, Lincoln found a message on his desk from Fort Sumter.

The Federal Garrison was growing desperate.

PHOTOGRAPH

Without food and supplies, it could not hold out much longer.

HEADLINES/PHOTOGRAPH OF SUMTER

DAVID E. LONG: Fort Sumter was the symbol. it was in Charleston harbor.

The birthplace of the rebellion. To give Fort Sumter up at this point would have dealt a devastating blow to Northern morale in this crisis.

PHOTOGRAPH OF WINFIELD SCOTT

The President summoned the Commander of the United States Army, the hero of the Mexican War, Winfield Scott.

JAMES M. McPHERSON: Winfield Scott said it would take 20,000 troops and a whole fleet of naval ships to reinforce Fort Sumter and it would start a bloody war that would destroy this country.

So Scott says, "Pull out."

PHOTOGRAPH OF LINCOLN

DAVID E. LONG: And yet, Lincoln had promised in his Inaugural Address that he would yield no Federal property or installations to the rebels.

PHOTOGRAPH OF LINCOLN

Lincoln seemed trapped.

To fire in defense of Sumter risked driving more states out of the Union. To do nothing meant surrendering to the Confederacy.

He asked his cabinet for their advice.

WHITE HOUSE EXTERIOR

On March 16-10 days after the Sumter crisis had begun -- they gave him their recommendations:

All but two urged him to give up the fort.

If Federal ships tried to shoot their way in, they told him, you will be accused of starting a war.

DISSOLVE TO LINCOLN HERE

Lincoln listened but did not act. Wait, he said, give the Confederates time to come to their senses.

WHITE HOUSE

One more week went by, then two.

The Union soldiers inside the fort grew increasingly desperate for food. Still Lincoln hesitated.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Here's this new President getting such strong advice from almost everybody against what he feels he should do. And somehow holding those contradictions inside himself, he says, "I'm not ready to make this decision yet."

As Lincoln waited, he grew more and more depressed. Sleepless, tormented by migraines, he was, he said, "in the dumps."

The strain was so great, Mary noted, that at one point, her husband "keeled over," -- fainted dead away.

PHOTOGRAPH OF SEWARD

Then, Secretary of State William Seward made an astonishing proposal.

He told the President that Sumter should be abandoned, and if the President wasn't willing to make policy, he was.

All along Seward had been playing a shadowy game, leaking hints to the press that the fort was about to be given up, even secretly passing the word to the Confederates that he would soon be empowered to negotiate its surrender.

PHOTOGRAPH OF LINCOLN

Lincoln put Seward in his place.

The President -- and no one else -- would make policy, Lincoln told his Secretary of State.

FILM OF SUMTER April 11, 1861.

5 weeks after Lincoln's Inauguration, a clash at Fort Sumter now seemed inevitable.

A Union fleet was preparing for action outside Charleston Harbor. The President had finally devised a shrewd plan. He warned the Governor of South Carolina:

VOICE OF LINCOLN

"An attempt will be made to supply Fort Sumter with provisions only. If such attempt be not resisted, no effort to throw in men, arms or ammunition will be made without further notice."

If the rebels wanted a war so badly they were willing to open fire on boats carrying "food for hungry men," Lincoln said, "then the blame would be theirs alone."

DAVID E. LONG: It was an ingenious solution because now the Confederates had to fire the first shot. "We will not be the aggressors." He promised that in his Inaugural Address. "You will have to be the aggressors and as the aggressors, you will leave us the moral high ground."

CANNONS FIRE

At 4:30 in the morning on April 12, 1861, South Carolina batteries opened fire.

The shelling went on for more than 33 hours. Finally, the Union soldiers surrendered.

PHOTOGRAPH WITH FLAG

The rebel flag now flew over Fort Sumter.

The American Civil War had begun.

RECRUITING POSTERS AND PHOTOGRAPHS OF SOLDIERS

VOICE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN: "I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, in virtue of the power in me vested by the Constitution hereby do call forth, the militia of the several states of the Union, in order to suppress said rebellious combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed...."

Lincoln hoped the rebellion would be over soon. He called upon the loyal states to supply 75,000 militiamen. Each man would need to serve just 90 days.

JAMES M. McPHERSON: Lincoln was convinced that a majority of people in the Confederate states really were unionists and that, they were being swept out of the Union by a passions of the moment.

MAP

Within weeks, four more Southern states left the Union -- Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas, North Carolina. Lincoln now feared that the slave-holding border states of Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky -- the state where he and Mary had both been born -- would leave, too.

PHOTOGRAPHS

But Lincoln clung to the hope that one big Union Victory could still bring the South to its senses and end the rebellion.

SILENCE. PHOTOGRAPHS OF EMPTY WASHINGTON STREETS

In the days immediately following Fort Sumter, Washington seemed like a ghost town. Hundreds of Southern-born clerks left their jobs with the Federal Government and slipped away into Confederate Virginia.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF ALEXANDRIA

Using a spyglass from the upstairs windows of the White House, the Lincolns could see rebel flags flying over Alexandria, just across the Potomac.

REBEL FLAG

A Confederate attack could come at any time.

PHOTOGRAPH OF CIVILIANS PATROLLING WHITE HOUSE GROUNDS

A band of nervous civilians patrolled the White House Grounds. Washington was almost defenseless.

Lincoln waited impatiently for reinforcements.

TRAIN

But as Union soldiers attempted to march through Baltimore to relieve the Capital, mobs of secessionists attacked them. Four soldiers were killed.

EXTERIOR WHITE HOUSE

Lincoln paced his office, muttering, "Why don't they come! Why don't they come!" Rumors of an imminent attack on the President himself were kept from Mary for fear her nerves would fail her.

PHOTOGRAPH

Finally, on April 25, the 7th New York regiment marched briskly past the White House.

The men brought word that more regiments were right behind them.

As Lincoln hurried out to greet them, they cheered his wife, who quickly gave way to tears of relief, while the President, one observer wrote, seemed to "smile all over."

LINCOLN PHOTOGRAPH

Two days later, to make sure secessionists could not stand in the way of Union troops again, Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus: now American citizens could be arrested without knowing the charges made against them.

The President argued that by suspending one part of the constitution, he would save the rest.

Those people, North or South, who had thought Lincoln was a weakling, were learning how wrong they had been.

MARY

PHOTOGRAPHS OF NEW YORK IN THE 1860S

On May 10, Mary Lincoln and three companions set out on a shopping expedition to Philadelphia, Boston and New York. Shopping had always helped to soothe Mary's anxieties, and her plans for re-doing the President's house now consumed her.

PHOTOGRAPH MARY

"Her chief enjoyment," her sister would later write, "consists in purchasing and storing."

PURCHASES

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: It was Lincoln who suggested that Mary make this trip to get her away from the tension of Washington and to give her some sort of joy back in her own life again... And it didn't seem like a very unreasonable trip at the start. She needed a new carriage for them in Washington. She wanted a new dinner service for the White House.

PURCHASES

She was horrified to find that reporters followed her from store to store, quizzing sales clerks about every purchase she made. They reported that she had ordered costly bedsteads, carpets, curtains, wallpaper, glassware, and two sets of dinnerware -- at eleven hundred dollars each.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: She invited, unwittingly, criticism of the press by even taking such a trip in the midst of such a terrible time. It is the hour of self-sacrifice. The hour of death. It's the time when the country is undergoing this severe struggle.

PURCHASES

Newspapers accused her of tasteless extravagance.

"She evidently has no comprehension," wrote the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, "that Jeff Davis will make good his threat to occupy the White House in July."

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARY LINCOLN

The criticism only made Mary more anxious -- and more eager to shop. There would be more trips, more "purchasing and storing."

BULL RUN

PHOTOGRAPH OF CHURCH

On Sunday morning, July 21, while the Lincolns attended services at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, a great battle was about to begin just 25 miles from Washington, along Bull Run Creek in Virginia.

PHOTOGRAPH OF LINCOLN

The President had ordered the action over the protests of the Union commander who had said that his men were not yet ready for combat. If they didn't do battle soon, Lincoln warned, their ninety day enlistment would be up.

WHITE HOUSE

As the President and his family walked home, they could just hear the distant sound of artillery. The first dispatches were encouraging. A Union victory, Lincoln hoped, might end the war.

CARRIAGE RIDE

Relieved, the Lincolns went for a carriage ride. Then, a rider caught up with them with an ominous message from the battlefield: the tide had turned.

CAMERA MOVES BENEATH BRANCHES AGAINST THE SKY

Union troops were now streaming back toward Washington in full retreat. Soon the streets were filled with ambulances and stumbling, weary soldiers.

It was the first full-scale battle of the war, and the Union had lost.

DAVID E. LONG: Lincoln's very surprised, not just by the defeat, but by the extent of the defeat. I mean it was not just a battlefield defeat; it was turned into a rout. I mean they called this "the great skedaddle" as the Union army fled from the field.

NIGHT: WHITE HOUSE INTERIOR

Lincoln did not go to bed that night. He lay on a sofa in his office, instead, listening to eyewitnesses describe the disaster: 625 boys dead, more than 2,000 wounded or missing.

It was now clear that this war would take more than 90 days to win.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF FORTIFIED WASHINGTON

The Capital had become the most heavily fortified city on earth and the sound of drums was everywhere. A new General was turning 100,000 untrained volunteers into a mighty, disciplined force, the Army of the Potomac.

PHOTOGRAPH OF McCLELLAN

His admirers called him "the Young Napoleon."

Lincoln had appointed General George Brinton McClellan, a little man with impressive credentials, a 35 year old West Pointer, who had studied tactics in Europe. He promised to make short work of

the Confederacy. "I can do it all," he told the President,

DAVID E. LONG: McClellan was a genius. As a man who could prepare an army to perform the task it's required to perform in war time, McClellan has no peer. McClellan had a relationship with his troops

There was an affection, an intimacy. McClellan regarded them as though they were his sons and he was their father. They revered him.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF DRILLING

As McClellan prepared his army for battle, huge crowds turned out to watch him. The General had become enormously popular.

But as Summer turned to Fall, he showed no signs of moving against the enemy.

PHOTOGRAPH OF LINCOLN

Lincoln wanted action. The North needed a victory.

PHOTOGRAPH OF McCLELLAN

But McClellan refused to take his men into battle. They weren't ready, he said. The General insisted he knew better than the President.

DONALD L. MILLER: McClellan thought of himself as a man who was deeply superior to the President. He was a Northern aristocrat, well-schooled, well-educated, spoke a number of languages. And he saw Lincoln as a backwoods, backwater politician, crude, unlettered. He hated his humor. He hated the style of his dress. They were exact opposites. And he would have nothing do with Lincoln.

McClellan even refused to let the Commander-in-Chief in on his plans. Lincoln, McClellan, wrote his wife, is "nothing more than a well-meaning baboon...the original gorilla."

Aides urged the President to fire the General. Lincoln said only "he would gladly hold McClellan's horse if it brought victories."

PHOTOGRAPHS OF DRILLING ARMY

Fall turned to Winter. There were countless parades and grand reviews, but there were no victories. McClellan kept on drilling.

MARY

WHITE HOUSE NIGHT EXTERIOR

DARK OFFICE

Lincoln worked every day, from seven in the morning till late at night. He took no holidays, often failed to take time to eat.

Mary did her best to make her distracted husband's life bearable.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: At the start Mary was able to ease his burden slightly. She would invite friends of his to breakfast hoping they could distract him from the problems of the day. But as the war progressed, his willingness to take these moments of relaxation diminished. And Mary really felt that she had less time with him than ever before in their marriage. In the past Lincoln could always break away from the law offices to go home and comfort Mary in one of her difficult moments, in a thunderstorm, in one of those times when she was upset. But now his workload was of such great nature that he could not provide that comfort or calmness to her.

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARY

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: And she had a temperament that depended upon his calmness to bring it back into balance.

CHARLES B. STROZIER: She had not calculated on the absorption of Lincoln in the affairs of state and the effect that that would have on her. He was gone every minute of every day and when he was there he wasn't there, cause he was trying to run a war.

NIGHT: LAMPLIT BEDROOM INTERIOR

CHARLES B. STROZIER: She felt alone and abandoned

VOICE OF MARY LINCOLN: "I consider myself fortunate if at eleven o'clock, I once more find myself in my pleasant room and very especially if my tired and weary husband is there, waiting...to receive me."

Back in Springfield, Mary had prided herself on offering her husband political advice, but she did not know Washington, and he had little time to listen to her.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Their shared partnership was something that I think that had kept them together even with difficulties in their marriage. Now the ground on which that had rested is crumbling little by little.

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARY

Mary threw herself into her campaign to refurbish the Executive Mansion. She was almost finished now.

The private rooms upstairs were all done over.

The public rooms were filled with splendid new furnishings, covered in silk and damask.

In the East Room, the vast new Belgian carpet looked, one visitor wrote, "as if the ocean, in gleaming and transparent waves, were tossing roses at your feet."

ORIGINAL BILLS FROM NATIONAL ARCHIVES

But the bills had also begun to arrive.

Mary Lincoln had overspent her $20,000 budget -- by almost half.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: What had begun as a reasonable project to make the White House a more livable, lovely place for both her husband and the country became an obsessive pursuit.

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARY

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: And as her expenditures got higher and higher, she needed people to protect her.

WATT SIGNATURE

Mary turned to John Watt, the White House head gardener, for help. He showed her how to pad expense accounts, even suggested she quietly appropriate funds meant for others for her own use.

She was desperate to keep her besieged husband in the dark, afraid of how he would react to a scandal so close to home.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: She's not telling Lincoln the truth. She not only lies about how much she's spending but feels compelled to keep doing it.

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARY

She tearfully implored a friendly government Commissioner to ask the President for a supplemental appropriation from Congress.

PHOTOGRAPH OF LINCOLN

Her husband would not hear of it.

VOICE OF LINCOLN: "It never can have my approval.... It would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the President of the United States had approved a bill overrunning an appropriation of $20,000 for flub-dubs for this damned old house when the soldiers cannot have blankets.... The house was furnished well enough, better than any one we ever lived in... Well, I suppose Mrs. Lincoln must bear the blame, let her bear it, I swear I won't!"

He vowed to pay the extra costs himself, but the Republican Congress eventually came to his rescue, burying the surplus in the next year's appropriations bill.

CHILDREN

PHOTOGRAPH OF WILLY

"I wish they wouldn't stare at us so," 11-year-old Willy Lincoln once complained. "Wasn't there ever a President who had children?"

TAD ON HORSE

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: There was a motto in the White House during those years, "Let the children have a good time". The kids were allowed to run through the house into Cabinet meetings, at State Dinners they were present, throwing strawberries around. And outsiders could not understand how the parents were not keeping these kids under wrap.

PHOTOGRAPH OF ROBERT

Robert, the oldest of the Lincoln boys was away studying at Harvard. His two younger brothers more than made up for his absence.

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARY WITH TAD AND WILLY

Lincoln called them "my blessed fellows."

TOYS

PHOTOGRAPH OF TAD IN ARMY UNIFORM

JEAN BAKER: Can you imagine anything more exciting than having troops stationed in your living room. Troops who let you shoot their guns off sometime?

DOLL

Tad and Willy made a soldier doll from rags, named him Jack, sentenced him to be shot for falling asleep on duty, then appealed to the President for clemency.

VOICE OF LINCOLN: "The doll Jack, is pardoned. By order of the President. A. Lincoln."

DOLL HANGED

Tad hanged Jack, anyway. The doll was a "traitor and a spy," he said.

LINDA LEVITT TURNER: When it came to the upbringing of their children, they both had similar ideas because they had had unhappy childhoods themselves in very different ways.

MARY MURPHY: Mary I think was a little more the disciplinarian. Lincoln just let them do as they pleased.

CHARLES B. STROZIER: He was infinitely tolerant of children. He did not care at all whether children were disciplined. He didn't want children to be disciplined.

LINDA LEVITT TURNER: They would scatter papers and climb on the furniture and make a mess of things.

CHARLES B. STROZIER: It didn't bother Lincoln at all. He just would keep writing whatever document he needed to write.

PHOTOGRAPHS OF TAD

Tad as one of his father's Secretaries put it, was "full of merry mischief." When he opened fire with a toy cannon on one of his father's cabinet meetings, Lincoln just laughed. "Let him run," he said. "There's time enough yet for him to learn his letters and get poky."

PHOTOGRAPHS OF WILLY

Willy, Tad's older brother, was more serious. When Tad smashed a mirror with his ball, Willy Lincoln gave him a lecture: "That mirror does not belong to Pa," he said, "it belongs to the United States Government."

CHARLES B. STROZIER: The child Lincoln was closest to was Willy. Willy was the most sensitive, the most like him, the most poetic.... And he loved having him around.

PAINTING

CHARLES B. STROZIER: He loved having him sit on his lap and, you know, read to him, there seemed to be a very deep connection between Lincoln and Willy.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Willy always seemed even as a young kid, wiser and older than his years. Everyone said he had the gentlest, sweetest temperament.

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: Willy seemed to combine the best traits of both of his parents, having the soul, the spirit, the intellect and the thoughtfulness of his father, but having a certain kind of natural exuberance and a...and a...an ability to enjoy life that his mother at her best had.

Willy, Mary liked to say "will be the hope and stay of my old age."

OFFICE

By New Year's Day of 1862, it had been almost six months since Lincoln had placed McClellan at the head of the army, and the general still refused to say where or when, he would attack.

HEADLINE

While northern newspapers demanded action, the South hunkered down. Time was on their side.

DONALD L. MILLER: The North had to go into the South, conquer all the Southern armies, conquer and hold territory to win the Civil War. What the South had to do is fight a war of attrition. They had to wear down the will to fight of the North and that was a much easier task than what the North faced.

A frustrated Lincoln borrowed books on military strategy from the Library of Congress and began pouring over maps.

He knew nothing about tactics, but he was determined to learn.

"If General McClellan didn't want to use the army," he said, he might borrow it himself.

DONALD L. MILLER: He said, "I never wanted to dabble deeply in military affairs. I never wanted to be that kind of President, but I was forced in that direction."

Lincoln confided to an old friend that "we could lose this war," that there was now at least "the bare possibility of our being two nations."

VOICE OF LINCOLN: "The people are impatient. The bottom is out of the tub. What shall I do?"

PHOTOGRAPH OF DETERMINED LINCOLN

Finally, on January 27, 1862, the President took matters into his own hands and ordered all Land and Sea Forces to move against the enemy on Washington's birthday, February 22.

"I don't care, gentlemen, what plan you have," he told his commanders, "all I ask is for you just to pitch in."

DAVID HERBERT DONALD: It was a meaningless kind of order from a military point of view. Clearly it couldn't be done and, indeed, I don't think Lincoln expected it to be done. But it was, in effect, a quick kick in the pants to McClellan. "You've got to get going or somebody else is going to do it for you,

PHOTOGRAPH OF LINCOLN

DAVID HERBERT DONALD: and that somebody may have to be me, President of the United States."

RECEPTION

WHITE HOUSE ABLAZE

On the evening of February 5, 1862 -- Mary Lincoln organized a glittering reception in the East Room.

CHANDELIER

Her lavish renovation would at last be on display...while the Marine Band entertained with music specially composed for the occasion

BAND

"the Mary Lincoln Polka."

LINDA LEVITT TURNER: Mary Lincoln's Grand Gala Levee was plotted for months and months and months. And it was such a grand party that it was the kind that people invented an excuse to be out of town if they weren't invited. On the table were models out of spun sugar of Fort Pickens and another one of the Ship of State and then over here was the terrapin and over there was the turkey and there was the ham and there were the shrimps and there were the oysters.

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARY LINCOLN IN WHITE GOWN

Mary herself appeared in a white satin dress with a neckline so low that her admiring husband asked her if some of what he called its "tail" shouldn't be sewn to the top.

She had hoped that this splendid evening would finally make her not only the "First Lady" of the land -- but the Queen of Washington Society, as well.

MUSICIANS

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: The reception had glittering men and women, fine dining...

it was the moment of triumph that Mary had so yearned to find. This would be her crowning glory.

NIGHT -- PAN WHITE HOUSE EXTERIOR

The festivities went on till three in the morning.

One newspaper called the ball "a brilliant success":

"Primarily we must remark the exquisite taste with which the White House has been refitted under Mrs. L's directions... Mrs. L. possesses as rare a beauty as the Empress of the French."

MUSIC OUT

CAMERA REACHES NIGHT-TIME WINDOW OF THE WHITE HOUSE

But Mary and the President spent much of that evening upstairs in eleven year-old Willy Lincoln's bedroom. Their son was ill with what the doctors called "bilious fever" -- typhoid.

ZOOM ON WHITE HOUSE

During the days and nights that followed, Mary never left Willy's side. As she nursed him, some newspapers savaged her for having entertained so lavishly in the midst of war.

"Disgraceful frivolity, hilarity and gluttony," said one.

Another charged that the evening had been worthy of "a woman whose sympathies are with slavery and with those who are waging war."

All the while, her son grew weaker.

At five in the afternoon on February 20, Willy Lincoln died.

ZOOM TO WILLY

"The President lifted the cover from the face of his child," a friend remembered, "and gazed at it long and earnestly, murmuring, 'It is hard, hard to have him die.'"

CU FACE OF WILLY

Willy, he said, "was too good for this world, but then we loved him so."

FILM OF RAIN ON WHITE HOUSE

Mary Lincoln did not attend her boy's burial.

As Lincoln rode with Robert through a fierce storm to the cemetery, she remained in bed, inconsolable, weeping so steadily she sometimes suffered convulsions.

A nurse was in constant attendance. Mary refused to see visitors, could not answer the letters of sympathy pouring in from all over the country.

LINDA LEVITT TURNER: She couldn't bear even to hear the mention of Willy's name.

She couldn't enter his room. Tad was sick with the same disease, although a milder case, for days and days and days. She couldn't even bear to face Tad.

PAN TOYS

Willy's toys were given away. Even flowers he had liked were barred from the White House. His mother could not bring herself to look at them.

RAIN DRUMS ON CURTAINED WINDOW

Mary would not leave her room for nearly a month.

All the old fears that had haunted her life reasserted themselves: her mother, her father, her son Eddy, now Willy --those she loved best would be snatched from her.

And this time, she saw it as a punishment from God.

PHOTOGRAPH OF MARY LINCOLN

VOICE OF MARY LINCOLN: "I had become so wrapped up in the world, so devoted to our own political advancement, that I thought of little else besides. Our Heavenly Father sees fit...to visit us at such times for our worldliness.... How small and insignificant all worldly honors are when we are thus so severely tried."

FILM OF WHITE HOUSE IN RAIN

Lincoln, too, was distraught.

MOVE IN ON LINCOLN'S WORN FACE

"I never saw a man so bowed down with grief," a friend said.

But unlike Mary, Lincoln did not collapse.

He did not have the time.

Though devastated by his own tragedy, he would never lose sight of the greater tragedy that gripped the whole country.

CHARLES B. STROZIER: It's a civil war, and the central emotional experience of the country is that of loss. That touched him directly in February of 1862 with the death of Willy, his favorite child dying. But he also felt everybody else's suffering

PICTURE OF LINCOLN

CHARLES B. STROZIER: And he found the means of giving that personal and collective suffering some kind of voice and meaning in his role as leader.

DISSOLVE TO PHOTOGRAPH OF TWO FACES

Much of the time from now on, as the President labored to restore the shattered Union, the woman he loved would be just one more of the many burdens he had to bear.

PHOTOGRAPH OF TWO FACES

As the war went on, Mary would retreat more and more into herself, while Lincoln would somehow find the strength to merge his own grief with the grief of his countrymen.

Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V | Part VI