Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (8 page)

Eventually the truth of Fort Sumter reached the capital: After his troops had exchanged fire with Confederate guns for thirty-four hours, Major Robert Anderson had been forced to surrender. On April 14, five additional Washington militia companies were called into active duty, for a total of about twenty-five hundred local soldiers serving throughout the district. Mounted soldiers were posted at all approaches to Washington City. Twenty cavalrymen guarded the White House, with hundreds more stationed in the immediate surroundings and at the Capitol, the Treasury, and the post office. The following day, President Lincoln issued a nationwide call for seventy-five thousand recruits, assigning a quota to each state. These troops, who would enlist to serve for ninety days, would surely be sufficient to put down the rebellion.

As Washington awaited reinforcements from the North and fears of an imminent Confederate invasion grew, the young colored men of Elizabeth’s comfortable middle-class neighborhood as well as the less fortunate who lived along the alleyways were as eager as their white counterparts to take up arms in defense of their city. Even Peter Brown’s eleven-year-old son, who worked as a shoeshine boy on the grounds of the Treasury Building, proudly told Elizabeth of his plans to enlist as a drummer boy as soon as he turned twelve. But every young man of color who tried to enlist, regardless of his age, strength, or status, was turned away.

“Either the need for soldiers is very small or the foolishness of Mr. Lincoln’s recruiters is very great,” Virginia Lewis remarked to Elizabeth one Sunday afternoon as they went on their customary stroll and discovered a few militia soldiers drilling on the grounds of the Capitol. The city had taken on the appearance of an armed camp, and everywhere, apprehensions were on the rise. Although it was the capital of the Union, Washington was essentially a Southern city, surrounded by the Union slaveholding state of Maryland on one side and Virginia, which had seceded after Mr. Lincoln issued the state quotas for recruits, on the other side, with only the Potomac separating them.

A few days earlier, the husband of one of Elizabeth’s favorite patrons, Colonel Robert E. Lee, a Virginian, had been offered the command of the entire United States Army, but after careful consideration, he had declined and had gone home to his plantation in Arlington on the other side of the river. Elizabeth knew from conversations overheard in the White House that President Lincoln had fought valiantly to keep Virginia in the Union, and she knew from remarks Mrs. Lee had made in her presence that her husband had not wanted Virginia to secede. For every firebrand eager for war, there seemed to be two or more who had been drawn into the conflict reluctantly but were nonetheless resolved to do their duty with all their might. And with the conflict so obviously pivoting upon the point of slavery, was it any wonder that Negro men too wanted to do their part to help the Union triumph?

“The recruiters must think they’ll have more than enough white volunteers to fill their quotas,” Elizabeth said. “If the fighting goes on longer than they expect, maybe they’ll let colored men enlist later.”

Although the day was balmy, Virginia shivered. “I’d rather have the fighting over before that day could come. How terrible this rebellion would be if seventy-five thousand men weren’t enough to finish it. Can you imagine the bloodshed?”

Elizabeth inhaled shakily, the acrid odors of camp refuse and coal smoke so heavy in the air that her eyes stung and watered. “I can imagine it all too well.”

She tucked her arm through Virginia’s and they turned toward home. Although she thought it was an outrage that men of color were forbidden to enlist, she was secretly relieved that her son would not be required to lay down his life for his country.

Elizabeth wondered if her husband, James, would try to enlist. As a young man he had been full of fight, and after John Brown’s failed raid on Harpers Ferry, he had declared that if he had been there, he would have taken up arms and stirred up the slave revolt John Brown had intended. Suddenly James’s visage appeared so clearly to her mind’s eye that it was as if he stood before her, not rambling and drunk as he had
been in their last years together but smiling, bold, and handsome as he had been when they first met.

Elizabeth gasped and stopped short, shaken by the vision. She had not thought of her husband in weeks, perhaps months. Why would he come unbidden to her thoughts now?

“Elizabeth?” Virginia had been brought to an abrupt halt when Elizabeth stopped. “What’s the matter? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

Elizabeth managed a shaky laugh. “I haven’t, not as far as I know. At least not recently.”

Virginia smiled tentatively at her joke, but she looked uncertain. “What’s troubling you, then?”

Elizabeth hesitated. Virginia knew she was married and that she and her husband were estranged, but Elizabeth disliked speaking ill of James, and as a consequence, she had told Virginia little about him. She wasn’t sure why, but she was reluctant to admit that she had been thinking about him then.

So instead she nodded to the scenes of preparation for the defense of the city—all around them, and all inadequate. “Aren’t there reasons enough for all of us to be troubled these days?”

Virginia nodded. They watched a few moments more before continuing on home.

Soon, Elizabeth would wonder whether James’s restless, wistful spirit had indeed visited her in that moment she had imagined him so vividly.

Not two days after her stroll with Virginia, a letter came from Missouri, written in a deliberate yet shaky hand, full of misspellings and apologies.

Elizabeth held the letter for a long moment before folding it deliberately and returning it to the envelope. She was relieved to hear that James had not suffered long, but it pained her to think he had suffered at all.

She wondered who Ephraim Johnson was. She knew no one by that name.

No tears came to her eyes, and she wondered what that said about her, that she did not weep for her husband, a man she had once loved so dearly. The news of his death saddened her, but she did not feel grief stricken, perhaps because she found no small measure of relief in knowing that at last he was at peace. His earthly torment had ended.

“So,” she said softly to the empty room, “I am now a widow.”

Let James’s faults be buried with him. She had no desire to think ill of him now that he was gone.

The residents of Washington City waited apprehensively to see which would arrive first, trained militia companies from the north or invaders from the south. Union troops traveling by train to the capital from Northern states would have to pass through Baltimore, about forty miles to the northeast. This should have been no concern; although Maryland was a slave state, it had remained in the Union. But rumors abounded that thousands of Marylanders with Southern sympathies were plotting to block the passage of Northern troops through the city, and since Baltimore had a history of street-mob violence, the rumors could not be ignored. Complicating matters was a quirk of Baltimore’s railway system
that meant Washington-bound trains would arrive at President Street Station, but would then have to be towed by teams of horses several blocks west through the city streets to Camden Station, from which they could resume their journey by rail. The system, merely inconvenient in peacetime, was potentially disastrous in war.

On the morning of April 19, the Sixth Massachusetts left Philadelphia on a train bound for Washington, arriving in Baltimore with weapons loaded. The wary men hoped for unimpeded passage through the city, but they had been warned that in the interim between stations they would likely receive insults, abuse, and possibly assault, all of which they had been ordered to ignore. Even if they were fired upon, they were not to fire back unless their officers gave the command.

The train carrying the Sixth Massachusetts arrived in Baltimore unannounced, and cars carrying seven of its companies were towed through the city unhindered. But word of the soldiers’ presence spread quickly, and soon a crowd massed in the streets, shouting insults and threats. The mob tore up the train tracks and blocked the way with heavy anchors hauled over from the Pratt Street piers, forcing the last four companies of the Sixth to abandon their railcars and march through the city. Almost immediately, several thousand men and boys swarmed them, hurling bricks and paving stones, and dishes and bottles rained down upon them from upstairs windows. As the mob’s rage grew, some few among them broke into a gun shop, and from somewhere, the soldiers heard pistol shots. The companies pushed onward at quick time, but when the furious mob blocked the streets ahead, the soldiers opened fire. The crowd dropped back and the soldiers managed to fight their way to the Camden Street Station, and after repairing other tracks sabotaged in the melee, the train sped off to Washington.

When the Sixth Massachusetts finally arrived, battered and bloodied, their appearance brought more alarm than relief to the citizens who had awaited them so anxiously. Four soldiers and at least nine civilians had been killed and scores more injured on the streets of Baltimore, and as reports came in of other railway lines destroyed, bridges burned, and telegraph lines severed, panic ignited as the
people of Washington City realized they had been cut off from the North. As she walked to the White House, Elizabeth was shaken to observe citizens frantically piling their belongings onto wagons and into coaches and fleeing the city.

Within the Executive Mansion, Mrs. Lincoln worked valiantly to maintain a sense of calm, of normalcy. She fulfilled her role as hostess at official events the ladies of the entrenched Washington elite disdained, she enrolled Willie and Tad in the Fourth Presbyterian Sunday School, and she cajoled her husband out of his melancholy, which deepened as the crisis worsened. “I begin to believe there is no North,” Elizabeth once heard the president say, and indeed, with no reinforcements arriving, no telegraph reports, no mail, she too felt the strange gloom of isolation, of being alone and surrounded by hostile, unseen enemies. It did not help that Southern newspapers managed to make their way into Washington with an ease that mocked their defenses. Time and again the
Richmond Examiner
proclaimed that Washington would make an excellent capital for the Confederacy, noting that most of the city’s residents were from Virginia or Maryland anyway and would likely welcome the Confederate army as liberators, with cheers and flowers, rejoicing to be restored to the South.

Washington waited and prepared, until finally, at noon on April 25, the Seventh New York regiment arrived at the B & O Station. Relieved citizens cheered them as they marched to the White House to report to President Lincoln. Fears of an imminent Confederate invasion diminished as more troops arrived from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and elsewhere, settling into the House chamber and the Capitol rotunda, while later arrivals quartered in the White House, the patent office, and the seminary at Georgetown, or pitched tents on the south lawn of the White House. Massachusetts masons built twenty brick ovens in the cellar of the Capitol to bake enough bread to feed the soldiers, and the noise of drums and bugles and musket-fire practice was so constant that Elizabeth could almost forget what Washington had sounded like before the soldiers came.

While the city transformed around her, Elizabeth sewed for Mary Lincoln, usually at the White House—which she preferred—but sometimes in her own rooms, where the First Lady enjoyed coming to have dresses fitted. One by one, most of Mrs. Lincoln’s friends and family had returned to their own homes in Illinois and elsewhere, until only her loyal and sensible cousin Mrs. Grimsley remained, although she often dropped hints that she too missed her own home. As the Washington elite continued to snub Mrs. Lincoln, she found herself increasingly lonely and alone. Elizabeth, sympathetic and kind, became her confidante, and she soon discovered how unsettled Mrs. Lincoln felt in her new surroundings and in the elevated role she had so desired. Never before had she lived among strangers who were thoroughly unimpressed with her family name, which had always carried great influence back in Lexington, thanks to the prominent businessmen and politicians among her relations. Her husband surrounded himself with male colleagues who regarded her notes about policies and appointments as annoying and meddlesome, so that she had to struggle against his aides even for control over the very White House functions for which she played hostess. Excluded from her husband’s inner circle, missing her departed sisters and cousins, disdained by the popular ladies of Washington, Mrs. Lincoln often told Elizabeth—sometimes sadly, sometimes in defiance—that Elizabeth was her only true friend within a hundred miles.