Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (18 page)

“Are all the camps in such a state?” Miss Jacobs asked. “Everything seems to be in short supply except for disease, misery, hunger—and the will to triumph over them, which is heartening to see.”

“The need for the simple necessities of life and comfort is great everywhere,” Elizabeth said, “but I have heard that conditions are somewhat better across the river.”

“Across the river, in Virginia?”

“Oh, yes. Part of General Lee’s estate at Arlington has been transformed into a settlement called Freedman’s Village. I haven’t visited it myself, but you certainly should, to make your report complete. I’ve heard that all of the men and most of the women are gainfully employed. They also have the benefit of plenty of exercise in the open air, something that is denied the people here.”

Miss Jacobs nodded thoughtfully. “I’d certainly like to see that for myself.”

When the tour was over, Elizabeth accompanied Miss Jacobs to the street where her carriage waited. She waved farewell as the driver
assisted Miss Jacobs inside, but she paused, bewildered, when the driver addressed her as Miss Brent, and she answered to the name.

“You mean you didn’t know?” one of her fellow volunteers exclaimed later, when Elizabeth told her about the curious exchange. “Miss Harriet Ann Jacobs is also known as Miss Linda Brent.”

“You don’t mean the author?”

“Is there any other Miss Linda Brent? When she writes, she uses a nom de plume for her own protection, but I assure you they are one and the same.”

Elizabeth was so astonished she had to laugh. She had read
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
soon after its publication, and she had been greatly moved by the author’s courageous escape to freedom in the North and her tireless efforts to see her two children freed as well. So many anecdotes from Miss Brent’s—Miss Jacobs’s—life were painfully familiar to Elizabeth, and the story had lingered in her thoughts long after she finished the book. She had even been inspired to compose a few memory sketches of her own, describing her childhood as a slave and the harrowing years of her young womanhood, when she had been preyed upon by Alexander Kirkland and a cruel mistress to whom she had been “lent” had tried to break her spirit with regular beatings. She had thought one day to share her writings with her son, but after his death, her interest in the project had waned.

Perhaps she should take pen in hand again someday. Even if she never published a memoir, as Miss Jacobs had done, she might share her story with her closest friends.

In the weeks that followed, she heard that Miss Jacobs had indeed visited Freedman’s Village in Alexandria, and that she had been so moved by their plight and impressed by their progress that she had decided to stay and work. For her part, Elizabeth continued her efforts in the camps in the capital, teaching necessary skills and offering guidance. It was heartening to see that while some disillusioned freedmen and women yearned for a past that had never really existed, others set themselves to the work of rising above their humble beginnings. They built sturdy cabins for their families and cultivated gardens. They saved
their earnings and bought chickens and pigs. They joined churches and sent their children to the camp schools, where their teachers marveled at their swift and steady advancement. Clear-eyed, proud, and determined, they planned carefully for the future and strove forward to meet it. As the months passed, the more hesitant and anxious among them started to follow the others’ example, and Elizabeth and her fellow volunteers rejoiced as their labors began to bear fruit.

The work of the Contraband Relief Association was worthwhile, never-ending—and expensive. Elizabeth contributed all that she could afford from her own earnings, but she knew the organization needed to find other sources of funds if it were to thrive.

Although Elizabeth had gone to the White House only rarely that summer since Mrs. Lincoln spent most of her time at the Soldiers’ Home or traveling with Robert and Tad, she had seen enough of the inner workings of President Lincoln’s administration to know that he was surely embattled and struggling. The war was going badly. General Stonewall Jackson’s outnumbered Confederate forces had stymied the Union Army in the Shenandoah Valley, forcing it to draw back to the Potomac. In the Seven Days’ Battles in Virginia, General McClellan had again retreated despite defeating the Confederates on three consecutive days. A Union attack on Vicksburg failed, thwarting their attempt to gain control of the Mississippi River. In Richmond, Kentucky, Confederate troops soundly defeated a smaller band of Union soldiers, taking most of them prisoner. And at a second battle at the stream called Bull Run, General John Pope suffered a disastrous loss, with more than fifteen thousand troops reported killed, wounded, missing, or captured and the rest of his army driven back across the river toward Washington by General Robert E. Lee.

Elizabeth’s heart went out to the president, knowing full well that each defeat would weigh heavily upon him, but she was less sympathetic and utterly bewildered by another battle he fought. In July, President Lincoln had tried valiantly to persuade congressmen from the border
states to enact a plan for gradual, compensated emancipation, and although the effort failed, it had assured Elizabeth that his heart was in the right place. Within weeks, however, he made statements in the press that forced her to question whether she truly understood anything about his position on abolition. On August 14, the president received a delegation of Negro leaders at the White House and made his case for the colonization of freed slaves in Africa or Central America. The presence of the colored race on the American continent had caused the war, the president asserted, and enmity between races was certain to persist after the conflict was resolved. Even when they ceased to be slaves, the colored race would never be equal to the white, and thus it would be better for both if they were separated.

The delegation left the White House unconvinced and angry, and they immediately shared the disappointing outcome of their historic meeting with sympathetic members of the press. A few days later, in a
New York Tribune
editorial titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Horace Greeley furiously censured the president for failing to execute the laws of the land by not demanding that his generals immediately obey the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act. He accused the president of “being unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States,” appeasing them to the detriment of the nation. No champion of the Union cause on earth believed that the rebellion could be put down unless slavery, its cause, was ended as well, Mr. Greeley insisted, warning that “every hour of deference to Slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union.”

Three days later, President Lincoln responded to the editorial with a terse letter, which Mr. Greeley published on August 25 along with his own lengthy rebuttal. Excusing Mr. Greeley’s “impatient and dictatorial tone” out of deference to their friendship, the president emphatically stated that his goal was to save the Union, and nothing else. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,” he wrote, “and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the
slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”

Everyone in Washington either read the heated exchange in the papers or heard about it from friends and neighbors. Unionists ambivalent about emancipation were satisfied by the president’s stated priorities, but Elizabeth knew of no one else who was. Outraged abolitionists insisted that the president seemed incapable of understanding that the surest and swiftest way to win the war and save the Union was to emancipate all slaves everywhere and to allow them to don Union blue and take up arms in service to the nation. As for Elizabeth, she certainly wanted slavery abolished everywhere. She wanted colored men to be allowed to enlist as her son, George, had done. But she also wanted the contraband to be healthy, well fed, educated, employed, and prosperous, and she knew that no amount of wishing could make it so—only hard work and careful planning. She wanted to believe that the president too had to work hard and plan carefully to bring about what he desired, and that there were good reasons for his delay, and that that was why he did not yet free the suffering slaves, although he could with a few strokes of a pen.

She wanted to have faith in him, but she hoped he would not delay much longer.

In mid-September, in a costly battle along Antietam Creek in Maryland, General McClellan managed to repulse General Lee’s advance into the North. Although the president was displeased that General McClellan had allowed the battered Confederate army to withdraw to Virginia without pursuit, the stalemate was victory enough to hearten him.

Less than a week later, newspapers across the North published a proclamation in which the president declared that “on the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three,
all persons held as slaves within any State, or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

When Elizabeth read the entire preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in the
National Republican
on September 23, her spirits soared, and she felt her faith in Mr. Lincoln renewed. Now, at last, details that had been kept secret leaked out, and the president’s tactical delays made sense. Mr. Lincoln had wanted to free the slaves all along, his supporters insisted, despite his earlier statements that the war was being fought only to preserve the Union. He had written his Emancipation Proclamation weeks or perhaps months earlier and had presented it to his cabinet, but he had been obliged to wait until after a decisive Union victory before he could announce the proclamation to the American people or it would appear an act of desperation. Mr. Lincoln had also wanted to determine whether freeing the slaves was constitutional, and he had come to believe that it was indeed legal for him, by virtue of his war powers as commander in chief, to free the slaves in areas under rebellion.

The colored community and abolitionists of all races rejoiced, but in the days that followed, as the president’s words were discussed and debated, their celebration was tempered by concerns that it did not go far enough. The proclamation called for the abolition of slavery only in states that were in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, so in theory, if a state agreed to return to the Union before that date, slavery would be permitted to continue there. The proclamation did nothing to free the enslaved people living within the loyal Union border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, as well as Tennessee and parts of Louisiana, Confederate territory that had come under Union control. What practical good did it do to declare slaves free in regions where the people did not respect Mr. Lincoln’s authority and therefore were highly unlikely to obey his laws? It seemed to Elizabeth that Mr. Lincoln had emancipated slaves where the Union could not free them and kept them enslaved in places where the Union did enjoy the power to give them liberty.

And yet, despite its weaknesses, the proclamation was worth celebrating as proof that the nation was moving forward with single-minded determination toward greater freedom for all. The old Union was gone forever. When the nation was restored, it would be a new United States.

The day after the proclamation was published, a large crowd complete with a band gathered outside the White House to serenade the president and offer speeches of praise. The president stepped outside to thank them, saying, “I have not been distinctly informed why it is this occasion you appear to do me this honor, though I suppose it is because of the proclamation.” The crowd applauded and shouted back that he indeed had it right. The president went on to say, with his characteristic humility, “What I did, I did after very full deliberation, and under a very heavy and solemn sense of responsibility. I can only trust in God I have made no mistake.” The crowd roared back their assurances that he had not.