The Emancipator's Wife (50 page)

“One section of this country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes that it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.”

No,
Mary thought, and shivered.
One section of the country believes that neither the Federal government, nor any other section of the country, has the right to tell them what should be legal and what should not be legal.

And one section of the country believes that it is their right to withdraw from the compact of Union that they entered willingly, eighty-five years ago.

And they are willing to fight for that right.

This, too, Lincoln knew.

The sound of his voice brought gooseflesh to her arms, though it had been so familiar to her for so many years. In courtrooms or in the State House, or across the kitchen table, laughing over Billy Herndon's latest fad. The words made her heart beat faster, even on this second hearing—despite the desperate press of business he'd made time to go over it with her. It was one of his best, and she knew it would not alter one single Southern heart.

Cold air breathed across her face, and with it the scent of rain. The murmur of the crowd was the echo of a thousand political-speakings of her girlhood, as they listened to Henry Clay or Old Duke Wickliffe or her father, so familiar that it was a part of her blood.

But everything was different now. It was no longer just arguments over patronage, bonds, whether or not the state would pay to build a railroad or dig a canal.

If compromise was not reached, blood would be shed.

“We must not be enemies,”
said Lincoln.
“Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, every patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our natures.”

Mary opened her eyes as Chief Justice Taney—the man who six years before had told Dred Scott that because he was black he had no right to seek his freedom—held out the Bible, for Abraham Lincoln to swear that he would uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land.

H
ARRIET
L
ANE MAY HAVE THOROUGHLY DISAPPROVED OF A FAMILY OF
Illinois hicks moving into the house that she had considered her own for four years, but she knew her duty as a hostess. Upon their arrival at the White House after the Inauguration, Mary found—to her intense gratitude—a hot dinner waiting, hot water in all the guest-rooms, and all the beds made up with fresh sheets. Young Ellsworth rose with glowing eyes from his place between Elizabeth's daughters and offered a toast: “To the President of the United States!”

Lincoln inclined his head, raised his glass—which contained water, Lincoln having seen, as he'd once said, enough drunkenness in his youth to last him a lifetime—and replied, “With the permission of all of my family, I will take this opportunity to say nothing at all.”

Laughter, and thunderous applause from those around the table—Hay and Nicolay, Ellsworth and Lizzie, Lockwood and Mary's three sisters Margaret, Mattie, and Elizabeth, Dr. Wallace, the husbands of Mattie and Margaret, Elizabeth's daughters . . . all those who had come to see their kinsman and employer and friend put in charge, as Willie phrased it, of everything.

The windows were dark when they finished, bade a temporary
au revoir
to those of the party who were staying at hotels, and crossed through the hall for the first time, to climb the grand staircase, and seek their respective beds for what rest they could get before preparing for the Inaugural Ball at eleven. Large as the White House was, it was going to be a tight squeeze.

“I've put you and the girls in the Prince of Wales's bedroom,” said Mary to Elizabeth, with rehearsed lightness. All her life, it seemed to her, she'd been waiting to say that with just the right degree of insouciance.

Elizabeth, being Elizabeth, said only, “I hope the sheets are properly aired.”

Her girls at least looked deeply impressed.

But as they reached the landing and Mary fell back to ask Lincoln about the carriages to take them to the so-called Muslin Palace of
Aladdin—set up for the occasion behind City Hall—he held up a folded note and told her, “This was handed to me as I came in. It's from Major Anderson at Fort Sumter. He says unless supplies get to him within the next few days, he'll have to surrender the fort to the government of South Carolina.”

“What are you going to do?” she whispered, as they reached the top of the stairs, the family scattering before them down the dark central corridor with firefly candles in hand.

He sighed. “God knows, Mother.”

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY-ONE

E
VER SINCE
L
INCOLN
'
S NOMINATION AT THE
I
LLINOIS STATE
convention, ten months previously, Mary had pictured in her mind what it would be like, to be the wife of the President. She had remembered the elegant and commanding Sarah Polk, standing at her unassuming
husband's side; remembered the crowded reception rooms and the fashionable Washington hostesses, and the gossip of receptions, at-homes, dinners, evening parties that had trickled down to her at Mrs. Spriggs's.

And she had seen herself in command of it all.

Nothing had prepared her for the reality.

During the first week she only saw her husband at breakfast—if she rose early enough for it, which on most days was nearly impossible. When they found themselves together at a reception for the diplomatic corps—held at the rambling stone cottage that had once belonged to the governor of the Soldiers' Home on the high wooded ground on the outskirts of Washington—Lincoln tipped his hat to her and inquired straight-faced, “Do I know you, ma'am?” And her slow-steaming resentment dissolved into laughter.

They were together again for an hour at church. In Springfield Lincoln had been a lackadaisical church-goer; in Washington he was either more conscious of appearances, or felt a greater need of guidance and prayer. Perhaps he simply recognized that at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, not even the most persistent candidate for office would come up to him demanding to be made Minister to Belgium, and he would have a chance to spend a little quiet time with his children and his wife.

“I feel like an innkeeper,” groused Lincoln at one point, “who is trying to live in one wing of his establishment while trying to put out a fire in the other.”

Office-seekers had besieged him at Willard's Hotel, but in those first weeks, the White House was never without a line of men, in all stages of elegance or inelegance or downright odiferous decrepitude of person. They waited from dawn till long after nightfall in the office reception room, the outer office, the dark little vestibule at the top of the office stairs, and trailed in a line down the stairs themselves to the front hall, waiting to see the President, whom each one of them considered to be personally in his debt for his election. Only a set of ground-glass doors separated the vestibule from the upstairs hall. Occasionally one or two office-seekers would wander through in quest of a lavatory or a glass of water, or merely to “have a look at the house,” as one furry-eared
Missourian put it when he peered through Lizzie's bedroom door.

Between conferences with delegates from Maine, Oregon, Massachusetts, and California—between half-clandestine meetings with representatives of Virginia in a frantic attempt to keep that wealthy, powerful, and perilously nearby state from following South Carolina and the others out of the Union—between hectic arguments with the Cabinet about whether to supply Fort Sumter or abandon it to the rebels—Lincoln saw all these men.

Mary quickly came to hate them. She understood that Lincoln was now a public figure, and had his responsibilities to his constituents.
She
was now a public figure—it was what she had all her life wanted to be. But not
this
public. The lack of privacy—and of respect—made her nervous, knowing as she did that any one of those men might be a secessionist with a derringer in his coat, and the fact that they took Lincoln away from her, all day, every day, filled her with resentment.

That first month, though Margaret and her husband went on to Italy at the end of the week and Mattie and her husband returned to the rebel state of Alabama, she had Elizabeth, Lizzie, Lockwood, and the girls to keep her company and help her settle in. Elizabeth's undeniable talents for organization went a long way toward smoothing the transition from Harriet Lane's ways to Mary's, and it was good, when she gave her first reception on Friday night and her first “at-home” Saturday morning, to have her family around her, their elegant clothing and quiet demeanor a visible rebuke to those who called her a loud-mouthed and vulgar Westerner.

It was comforting, too, to know that she was undeniably the most elegantly dressed woman in the room. Adele Douglas gave her the name of the best seamstress in Washington (“She worked for Varina Davis, you know”), a tall and lovely mulatto woman named Lizabet Keckley. Mrs. Keckley arrived on Mary's first morning in the White House—Tuesday, with the reception looming Friday—took Mary's measurements with speedy competence, reviewed all the silks from Stewart's and Laurent's and selected a deep rose moiré, and promised to deliver it Thursday. In fact the dress wasn't ready until Mary was pacing the floor Friday evening in her petticoat and wrapper: it shouldn't have taken that long, Mary fumed, for Mrs. Keckley to make the alterations in trim that she had demanded at the fitting the day before. But after that initial hitch of nervous hysterics, apologies, and a contrite note from Mary the following morning, she settled in well with the dressmaker, who certainly had a better eye and a more up-to-date sense of fashion than Madame Blois.

But few Washington ladies came to her at-homes.

And most of those who did were lavish in their praise of Kate Chase's at-home the Wednesday before. When they spoke of the younger woman's lovely house and stylish furnishings, Mary writhed. The White House in its current run-down condition was an embarrassment, not only to the Lincolns personally (reflected Mary) but to the nation. What on earth would the French ministers think, or the British, who were openly negotiating to help the rebel government?

One of the first to call on her was Mrs. Taft, wife of the Chief Examiner of the Patent Office, who had left her card on Mary at Willard's. She had, it transpired in the course of the conversation, two sons, twelve-year-old Bud and eight-year-old Holly: “You must send them over to play with my boys,” said Mary, consciously drawing back her envious attention from Mrs. Taft's extremely stylish blue velvet bonnet. “Poor things, Tad and Willie have been terribly lonely, now that all the excitement is dying down. I haven't yet had time to find them a tutor.” The thought of sending them to school, even a private school, filled her with dread. What was to stop the same men who'd written those terrible letters to Lincoln from lurking outside the school, stealing his children?

Consequently Bud and Holly Taft—sturdy fair-haired boys accompanied by their pretty and excruciatingly well-behaved sister, Julia—appeared the following day, and immediately gave Tad and Willie the measles.

Dispatches continued to come from the besieged government forces in Fort Sumter—a tiny islet in Charleston Harbor still held by the United States—and Fort Pickens, off Pensacola in Florida. Gouty and ancient General Winfield Scott—Old Fuss and Feathers, Lincoln called him in private, on account of the gorgeousness of the older man's uniforms—recommended the forts be abandoned, and turned over to the Confederate government. Frederick Blair of Maryland, the father of the new Postmaster and patriarch of the most powerful family in that critical border state, retorted that such an action would be treason on Lincoln's part. Cash Clay turned up and accepted Lincoln's offer of the post of Minister to Russia—Mary suspected that the Russians were just insane enough to get along well with him, though she wondered how poor Mary Jane would deal with St. Petersburg winters.

The Cabinet met late into the night.

Then at 4:30 in the morning of Good Friday, the twelfth of April, the Charleston garrison opened fire on Fort Sumter. Lincoln became even less visible than usual that day, and the next, except for a brief appearance at a gathering in the big oval family parlor upstairs. But though he looked grim and preoccupied, Mary could also see a springy lightness in his movements, as if a band of iron had been unlocked from around his chest. Coming up beside him, she whispered, “They fired the first shot, didn't they?”

And he grinned down at her, hearing the perfect understanding in her voice. “They certainly did,” he replied. Mystic chords of memory and the better angels of Jefferson Davis's nature notwithstanding, she guessed that he had known all along that it would come to bloodshed. And since she had seen the hate-letters in his desk, she had known, too, that it was the South that would strike the first blow.

On Monday Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for seventy-five thousand militia troops for ninety days. Three months seemed long enough, everyone thought, to take care of the trouble. Effervescing with enthusiasm as usual, young Ellsworth quit his job in the War Department and hied off to New York to raise, he declared, a troop of volunteers among the city's fire companies.

Two days later Virginia voted to secede from the Union and establish its own government, and all eyes in the city turned north, to the railway lines that crossed the slave-state of Maryland.

The week that followed was one of the most nerve-wracking of her life. Militia troops were stationed around Washington, but even Tad could tell that they would be no match for a Confederate army. In the dark before dawn one morning, Mary overheard Lincoln say, “If I was Beauregard,”—he named the commander of the troops in Charleston—“I'd be on my way to take Washington now.” He was speaking to Hay and Nicolay, in the chill, dark, and drafty upstairs corridor.
He probably thinks I'm asleep,
thought Mary, lying in the dimness of her bedroom, staring at the tall rosewood bedposts by the flickering whisper of the night-light in its painted glass shade.
As if anyone could sleep.

She closed her eyes, vainly seeking the rest that had eluded her all night.
They'll kill him.
Earlier, she'd been wakened by Hay's soft knocking on Lincoln's door; had heard the young secretary tell him that yet another plot against his life had been uncovered.

Who knows what soldiers will do, if they burn the town?

Her head throbbed, as it had since the previous evening. She heard their steps fade down the hallway, to the office where Lincoln would read dispatches and write letters until the first of the endless delegations started to arrive. She heard Hay's lovely baritone voice, “You think Colonel Lee will accept your offer? He's a Virginian....”

“I pray he does,” answered Lincoln. “I'd hate to have to put our trust in Old Fuss and Feathers.”

Aching for sleep, she crept from bed and dug in her cupboard for her bottle of Indian Bitters. She didn't like to take it—it sometimes left her drowsy in the morning and if she was absent from breakfast she wouldn't see Lincoln again all day—but at least it let her sleep.

General Scott ordered the strongest and largest of the government buildings to be fortified, as miniature redoubts to which the members of the government could retreat and hold off attackers if necessary. Mary could not keep from thinking of the men of the Texas Revolution, back in 1836, when she was still at Mentelle's, holding off a Mexican army for nearly two weeks in an old church, waiting for relief that never arrived.

Six hundred Kansas volunteers camped in the White House's huge East Room. Tad, Willie, Bud, and Holly pilfered cookies from the kitchen downstairs and took them to these uncouth guests, and spent most of their time among them, learning how to disassemble and clean rifles, how to cook on campfires on the lawn, and hearing tales of the bloody internecine warfare that had torn Kansas apart for the past seven years.

Night after night she would hear the shaggy young ruffians moving about downstairs, as she sat with Lizzie and Elizabeth in the oval parlor, waiting for Lincoln to return from conferences, delegations, meetings in the big office beyond the ground-glass doors. The clatter of boots vibrating the old bones of the mansion, the rough voices raised in occasional song, reminded her that morning might see rebel troops pouring across the river. Confederate flags could be seen flying over Alexandria, at the other end of the Long Bridge. It was a struggle not to give way to fear, and to the anger that fear always fuelled.

Without her family there she didn't know what she would have done. Elizabeth's steely level-headedness always had a calming effect on her, and Lizzie did what she could to keep Tad and Willie entertained and out of everyone's way.

Not that they needed it, of course. When not in the East Room learning God-knew-what rude ditties from the Frontier Guards, the two boys had established a bastion on the White House roof—with a log for a cannon—and spent hours watching the hills of Virginia. Mary listened, through strained nerves and the renewed agonies of female itching, for shouting in the streets, for the crack of gunfire, for the running feet and the outcry that would herald inevitable disaster.

On the twenty-third of April, the Dominion of Virginia formally allied itself with the Southern Confederacy. Through the night Mary listened to Lincoln's footsteps, pacing his bedroom, or the corridor outside. Any troops coming to guard the capital must pass through Maryland, through which only two months ago Lincoln had had to be smuggled in disguise. Coming back indoors after he'd talked to General Scott in the White House drive—the elderly commander of the Union forces was so gouty he couldn't climb the stairs to the office—she overheard him say quietly to Nicolay, “I begin to believe that there is no North.”