Mrs. Lincoln's Sisters

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Emilie had been in Selma only a few weeks when a telegram from Louisiana brought dreadful news. On August 5, Ben’s regiment had been advancing on Baton Rouge when a band of Confederate irregulars had encountered pickets outside the Union lines. When the Yankees had fired upon them, the irregulars had fled, colliding into the approaching Confederate troops and setting off a barrage of friendly fire. In the chaos, Ben’s horse had fallen, pinning him to the ground. Though badly injured, he was expected to recover. The same could not be said for his aide-de-camp and brother-in-law, Alexander Todd, who had fallen to a Confederate bullet.

  The three Todd sisters wept in one another’s arms—dear Aleck, only twenty-three, so handsome and courtly, so full of promise, and poor Ma, eight hundred miles from her cherished son, on the other side of enemy lines. Did she even know she had lost another son to this terrible, devouring war? First Sam, now Aleck—who would be the next Todd to fall? David, a sergeant with the Twenty-Seventh Louisiana Infantry? George, their elder half-brother serving the Confederacy as a regimental surgeon?

  Emilie’s grief for her lost brother was compounded by worry for her husband. Even after he wrote to assure her that he was mending well, she desperately longed to be at his bedside, nursing him tenderly, with the tireless attention only a devoted wife could give. When Ben sent word that he had been reassigned to command the post in Chattanooga during his convalescence, she swiftly arranged to join him there and bade a sad farewell to her sisters, promising to write and praying they would meet again soon.

  Emilie’s joy at being reunited with her beloved Ben was immeasurable. “My darling wife,” he murmured as he embraced her. “I hardly believe you’re here—an angel alighting on this wretched earth.” He looked years older than when they had parted in Kentucky, yet his blue eyes shone with affection as he swept his daughters into his arms, and when he teased them and made them giggle, his smile was as bright as she remembered. He had a hundred questions about his namesake, who was growing healthy and strong back at Buena Vista, but even as Emilie shared every detail she could remember, her heart ached from longing and regret. She had not cuddled her baby in her arms in months, and most of what she told Ben about him she had learned from Ma’s and Kitty’s letters.

  Although they were in the same city, Ben’s days were consumed by the unrelenting demands of war and their hours together were few and far between. One day, after leaving Katherine and Ellie with another officer’s wife so she could explore Chattanooga, Emilie came upon a large number of wounded soldiers being carried into a school that had been made into a makeshift hospital. A few men reclined on desks that had been pushed together, but most lay on the bare floor, moaning in pain. Some clutched at her skirt as she passed, pleading for water, for medicine to assuage their fevers, for their mothers. Everywhere she looked she found brave young men with little food, no medicine, no beds, no blankets, nothing to provide them the least comfort. Deeply troubled, she visited the other public buildings that had hastily been transformed into hospital wards and saw that it was the same everywhere—scarce supplies, inadequate staffing, and appalling conditions that did almost nothing to foster healing and recovery.

  Indignant, Emilie stormed to the quartermaster’s office, only to learn that the neglect was not the fault of anyone in Chattanooga: only half of the hospital supplies they had requisitioned had arrived. Desperate telegrams to Richmond had yielded nothing, for essential goods were becoming scarce throughout the Confederacy. “We got bolts of oilcloth and plenty of straw,” a sympathetic but harried clerk told her. “Might be you could spread the straw on the ground and lay the cloth on top of it. Beats a cold, hard floor anyway.”

  Emilie thanked him, certain that they could do much better for their brave heroes than that. Haunted by the men’s anguish, she sought out her closest friends among the nomadic officers’ wives and asked them to bring other industrious ladies to a meeting at Ben’s office later that afternoon. When more than two dozen had assembled, she divided them into groups to sew the oilcloth into cots to fill with clean, fresh straw. “Let us resolve to have every one of our wounded men off the ground and into a cot within a fortnight,” she proclaimed. Her ladies applauded, then quickly took needles in hand and got to work.

  By the time Ben was named commander of the Kentucky Brigade after General Hanson was killed at the Battle of Stones River, Emilie and her ladies had made more than twelve hundred cots and hundreds of blankets. No patient arriving in Chattanooga spent more than a few hours on the unforgiving ground, and that only when a vast number of wounded flooded the city all at once.

  Unfortunately, Ben’s promotion brought their reunion to an end. As he prepared his troops to leave Chattanooga for Jackson, Mississippi, nearly 400 miles to the southwest, Emilie and the girls traveled 160 miles to the southeast to board with a distant acquaintance in Griffin, Georgia, until Ben established new headquarters. While he led the Kentucky Brigade to the reclaimed state capital, where they would join Major General Johnston’s stealthy advance upon the rear of General Grant’s forces surrounding Vicksburg, Emilie settled her daughters into their new lodgings, two small but pleasant rooms in a town of fewer than three thousand residents about forty miles due south of Atlanta.

  Far from the front, Emilie and the girls were safe and well provided for. Their landlady was courteous, another tenant had children for Katherine and Ellie to play with, and although meat was scarce, meals were considerably improved by the summer bounty of the expansive kitchen garden. Emilie was relieved to be spared the scenes of suffering and death that had assaulted her senses in the military hospitals—the mangled bodies, the piteous moans, the stench of blood and rot and evacuated bowels—but she missed the useful work that had filled her hours and given her a sense of purpose. The ladies of Griffin organized their own projects for the war effort, and Emilie joined in where she was needed, but she was no longer energized by the thrill of urgency, of necessity. She knew she should be grateful to be restored to a quiet domestic life, and yet she awaited Ben’s summons with more resignation than contentment, her patience diminishing day by day.

  The weeks passed slowly, dull and ordinary except when rumors of raging battles spread through the town. Then tension and fear simmered to a boil until at long last the telegraph lines crackled with news from the front, bringing relief to some households and despair to others.

  In mid-September, the pattern of her days suddenly shifted when her landlady gave her one week’s notice to find other accommodations. They had not expected Emilie to stay so long, the landlady admitted somewhat abashedly, and another tenant needed the rooms for her children, who had been crowded four to one bedchamber too long. “I understand,” said Emilie, smiling to hide her distress. “I should have realized we had overstayed our welcome. I’ll make other arrangements immediately.”

  After making inquiries and finding nothing suitable nearby, Emilie realized that nothing held her in Griffin. Any safe Southern city would do, as long as it had telegraph service so that Ben could summon her and a railroad station so that she and the girls could hurry back to him when his summons finally came. Longtime family friends from Kentucky residing in Madison, Georgia, had urged Emilie to bring her daughters and stay as long as she liked, and in every letter, Elodie and Martha prevailed upon her to return to Selma.

  Given that she had so little time to decide, the pull of sisterly affection drew her back to Alabama. With a day to spare before her eviction, Emilie packed their trunks and telegraphed Ben in care of headquarters to inform him of their move, hoping against hope that her message would reach him in the field.

  Perhaps out of guilt, Emilie’s erstwhile landlady escorted them to the train station and had her driver see to their luggage. The depot bustled with anxious travelers, and since their train was delayed, Emilie had ample time to study them: weary women, some with children like herself, many swathed in the black crepe of mourning; gentlemen too elderly to enlist, with fragile, white-haired wives on their arms; and soldiers
, their uniforms in various stages of disrepair, some eager and cracking nervous jokes, others hollow-eyed and silent. The soldiers sat or sprawled wherever they could find room as they awaited transport, indifferent to propriety. One fellow lay on the floor almost at Emilie’s feet, so whenever she turned about to keep her restless daughters in sight, her skirt brushed against him, yet never once did he stir. As an hour dragged past, she felt increasingly unsettled until something in the angle of his head suddenly struck her as very wrong and she realized with absolute certainty that he was dead.

  Heart plummeting, she took her girls by the hands and led them away. She searched for a station agent, but before she found one the train chugged up to the platform and she had to usher the girls aboard before every seat was taken. Once aboard, she told a conductor about the dead soldier, but he merely shrugged and moved on, as if this horror was nothing new.

  After a long, uncomfortable, exhausting journey in the overcrowded train, with Katherine bored and Ellie tearful, both longing to run and play, they at last arrived in Selma. The sight of Elodie waiting for them on the platform, beaming with happiness, lifted her depressed spirits. “I’ve never been so happy to see you,” Emilie said fervently, nearly falling into her sister’s embrace. Elodie hugged her and promised that a tasty meal awaited them at her home, followed by a hot bath and a good night’s sleep, after which everything would look brighter.

  Emilie had just finished dressing after her bath and was squeezing water from her thick, dark hair when a soft rap sounded on the door. Before she could respond, the door opened and Elodie stood before her, her face pale, her expression an unsettling mix of disbelief and misery.

  “Yes?” Emilie stood, and her damp hair, unbraided, fell nearly to her waist. “What is it?”

  Wordlessly her sister held out a telegram. Seized by a sudden chill, Emilie declined to take it, so Elodie placed it in her hand and closed her fingers around it.

  Emilie forced herself to look. At first glance, she was confused; it appeared to be two days old, with one message appended to another, a note from General Bragg explaining the first part, which in stark letters said—

  “Atlanta Ga, Mrs. General Helm in Griffin. Find her and send her up in train today. The general is dead.”

  Then she could read no more. She collapsed upon the bed and the paper drifted to the floor. She felt her sister’s arms around her, felt her own tears wet on her cheeks and aching sobs tearing from her throat, but as if from a great distance, because she could not survive this blow if she were fully present for it in all its brutal clarity. The truth that her beloved Ben was gone forever was one she would have to half disbelieve if she were to take her next breath, and another one after that, and another.

  She lost an hour to anguish, insensible from grief, until it finally broke through that Elodie had read the rest of the telegram and was telling her something vitally important—Ben would be laid to rest in Atlanta on September 23. “Tomorrow,” Elodie was saying. “I’ll accompany you if you wish to go, but we must leave now.”

  “Of course,” Emilie murmured, sitting up, pushing her hair out of her face. “Yes. I must say good-bye.”

  Martha was swiftly summoned to look after all the children. Elodie packed a satchel and replaced the few items Emilie had taken from her trunk, and before she quite knew what was happening, she was back at the station leaning heavily on her younger sister’s arm, too stunned and heartbroken to weep. She should have worn black, she realized distantly when they were an hour east of Selma. Black crepe was what widows wore, black dresses and heavy black veils, and here she was in navy blue with tiny brown flowers, wholly inappropriate. Ma would be scandalized.

  Suddenly she longed for her mother and her infant son so desperately that she almost could not breathe.

  The train was forced to make extended stops at several stations along the route owing to unspecified trouble farther down the tracks. They sat four or five hours outside of Auburn, the only sound an occasional distant rumble that could have been thunder or artillery. The steady thrum of insects in the darkness rose and fell as Emilie drifted in and out of sleep. The train started up again at dawn, jolting her awake to find her head resting on Elodie’s lap, her heart hollow, her face wet with tears.

  The sisters arrived at the Citizens Graveyard just as Ben’s funeral was beginning, too late to see him in his coffin, too late to give him one last kiss. When she cried out in disappointment that a parting look had been denied her, Elodie murmured that it was better this way, it truly was, for Ben would want her to remember him as he had been when they parted in Chattanooga, not as he was now. “Keep that parting kiss in your memory always,” said Elodie, clasping her around the waist, keeping her on her feet.

  Emilie closed her eyes and remembered.

  After the funeral, Emilie and Elodie stayed for a week at the home of Colonel Dabney, who had taken charge of Ben’s remains before the funeral. “Come home with me,” Elodie urged, tears in her eyes. “You and the girls can stay with me until the war is won.”

  “I want to go home,” Emilie said, voice breaking. “I just want to go home to Kentucky and Ma and little Ben.”

  In the end, Emilie and her sisters agreed that it would be best if she and her daughters stayed in Madison with their longtime friends from Kentucky, Mr. and Mrs. Bruce, until they could return to Kentucky. She was told that her mother, her father-in-law, and several military colleagues of Ben’s were appealing to General Grant and President Lincoln to issue a pass so that she and her daughters could cross the lines. But communications between the enemy governments were fragmented and fraught with suspicion, so it was not until late November that Emilie learned that Abe himself had granted Ma a pass. At that very moment, she was on her way from Lexington, and when she arrived, Martha too would come to Madison and help escort them home.

  Ma arrived in early December, determined but tremulous with grief and concern. When Ma took her in her arms, it was almost as if Ben had died a second time as Emilie’s pain and sorrow, tamped down over time by the effort to keep up a brave front for her devastated daughters, broke through to the surface again. Ma rested from her long journey for a day, but their yearning for home and the urgency to return before some unseen calamity rendered their pass invalid compelled them to depart the day after.

  Escorted by Ma and Martha, Emilie and her daughters traveled by train and coach to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy; from there they took the flag-of-truce steamboat down the James River to Fort Monroe in occupied Virginia. The weather had been cold and damp for most of the voyage, and the bracing winds off the open sea chilled Emilie to the marrow as they gathered on the deck while federal officers came aboard to inspect the ship for contraband and to examine the passengers’ papers. The lieutenant who studied Ma’s pass shot her a look of pure astonishment upon discovering that it was affixed with the signature of the commander in chief himself.

  “Everything is in order, sir,” said Ma, when the officer seemed to scrutinize their papers too long.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “There’s only one thing more. We have orders to require an oath of allegiance to the United States from everyone who wishes to come ashore.”

  “May I request a parole on to Washington?” asked Emilie, taken aback. “I shall return if I am required to take the oath.”

  “Beg your pardon, ma’am, but my orders say everyone is obliged to take the oath. I cannot parole you to Washington City or anywhere else without it.”

  “I cannot do it,” said Emilie, shaking her head. “You cannot ask this of me.”

  “Ma’am, I—”

  “I have just left my late husband’s friends and brothers in arms, ill and poorly clad, with tears in their eyes and sorrow in their brave hearts for me over my great bereavement,” she said, tears gathering, a tremor of grief and fury in her voice. “They will believe that I have deserted them and that I was not true to the cause for which their beloved commander gave his life. I assure you, it is
not from bravado that I refuse, but out of loyalty to my husband. To betray his memory, sir, would be treason.”

  Another officer had joined them while she spoke, and the men kindly but firmly tried to persuade her, emphasizing that they could not make exceptions, not even for the sister-in-law of the president. Eventually the exasperated lieutenant declared, “I will have to telegraph the president your decision.”

  He strode off. Forbidden to disembark, Emilie and her companions endeavored to make themselves comfortable on the deck, admiring the scenery, pointing out interesting sights to the girls in the harbor and on the shore, a tantalizing, forbidden land.

  Hours passed before the officer returned, smiling and waving a telegram. “Here’s the president’s reply,” he said, handing the paper to Emilie.

  She read it aloud. “‘Send her to me. A. Lincoln.’”

  A wave of relief swept through her. Quickly it was decided that Emilie would take Katherine with her to the White House, while Ma, little Ellie, and Martha would find lodgings in Baltimore. As soon as arrangements could be made, Ma would take Ellie home to Kentucky, while Martha would remain in Baltimore until her pass expired, to visit friends and acquire necessities unavailable in the South.

  They parted with embraces, thanks, and promises to write.

  When Emilie arrived in Washington City, young Katherine by her side, she found the capital of the North utterly transformed since she had last seen it in April 1861. What had once resembled a military parade ground had become one vast hospital, filled with the stench and moans of sick, wounded, and dying soldiers, on a scale she could not have imagined despite her experience with the makeshift hospitals in Chattanooga.