In August 1861, after Ninian had humbly asked for a patronage position, Abe had commissioned him as a captain with the Commissary of Subsistence, putting him in charge of purchasing, issuing, and accounting for rations and other supplies for the army. Even before the appointment was official, men from the Springfield Republican establishment had written to Abe to complain about his choice, claiming that Ninian was closely associated with men who had committed “the most stupendous and unprecedented frauds ever perpetrated in this country.” Ninian was entirely innocent of any wrongdoing, of course; the obvious impetus for their protests was their ongoing resentment that Ninian had become a Democrat ten years before and their desire to have one of their own men in the influential post. After investigating the matter, Abe had found no reason to deny his brother-in-law the appointment. Ninian had accepted the role and then fulfilled his duties faithfully, but his rivals had not relented: they continued to accuse Ninian of using his post to enrich himself. Abe had given the complaints all due consideration but had remained loyal to his brother-in-law.
Then, in the spring of 1863, the complaints suddenly had become more numerous and more vehement. In May, Abe had written to Edward—Julia’s husband, who also happened to be the editor of the Illinois State Journal—to interview him about new accusations of corruption against his father-in-law. “No formal charges are preferred against him, so far as I know,” Abe had noted, “nor do I expect any will be made; or, if made, will be substantiated. I certainly do not suppose Mr. Edwards has, at this time of his life, given up his old habits, and turned dishonest.” Yet Abe had grown weary of the continual harassment from Ninian’s critics, provocations he said Ninian could have spared him had he kept more complete, incontrovertible records. Abe must have known that Edward would show the letter to his father-in-law, since he had not been instructed to keep it secret. Upon reading it, Ninian had immediately written to Abe to defend his actions, to plead for his job, and to remind Abe of their long friendship and history of mutual trust, but to no avail. Within a fortnight, Abe had bowed to political pressure and replaced Ninian.
Shocked and certain that Ninian had been greatly wronged, Elizabeth had written to Mary imploring her to intercede with her husband. Mary had fired back a scathing refusal, defending Abe’s decision and rebuking Ninian for putting the president in a politically vulnerable position. “If your husband has done nothing wrong,” Mary had declared, “he should have taken greater pains to prevent the appearance of wrongdoing.”
“If?” Elizabeth had exclaimed, astounded, when she read the letter. Offended, she immediately had written back to dispute Mary’s unfortunate phrasing and to give her the opportunity to apologize and amend. Soon thereafter, Mary had replied to confirm that she knew the definitions of all the words she had used in her letter and not one had fallen from her pen by accident. She then had proceeded to reel off several paragraphs of slanderous accusations, any one of which Ninian could have ably refuted if he had been given the opportunity.
Indeed, Elizabeth had shown him the letter so that he could do precisely that, but he had merely sighed and said, “This is not worth the dignity of a response.” He had meant that he would not respond, but Elizabeth had decided that, if it was beneath his dignity, it was beneath hers too. She had never replied to the offensive letter, Mary had never sent another to apologize, and so silence had fallen between them.
Elizabeth understood that Ninian had been the one most harmed by the incident, not herself. Now he was determined to go to Washington to pay respects to his brother-in-law and president, and to comfort his widow and children. If he could put past differences aside, shouldn’t Elizabeth try, for the sake of her sister and her nephews?
“It was only a job, darling,” said Ninian gently, as if he read her thoughts. “My pride suffered, but that was nothing compared to what we suffer now.”
But it was more than the loss of a post, Elizabeth wanted to object. By replacing him, Abe had all but confirmed that he agreed with the slanderous charges. And rather than gently and regretfully decline to intercede, Mary had thrown those charges back in Elizabeth’s face, adding a few sharp accusations of her own.
It was only a job—and yet it wasn’t. Ninian could forgive Abe, but Elizabeth could not yet forgive Mary. Then there was the practical reality of what might happen if Elizabeth attempted to cross the threshold of the White House. One newspaper report after another stated that Mary had not left the Executive Mansion since her husband’s assassination and that she would see almost no one. Elizabeth dared not endure the shame and embarrassment of traveling hundreds of miles to console her bereaved sister only to be left standing on the doorstep.
“When we were estranged before, Robert summoned me,” Elizabeth reminded her husband, her voice catching in her throat. “He and Mary could easily summon me again, if I were wanted. I must assume that I am not.”
Even as she spoke, she could not quite accept that after all they had been through, it had come to this. Her sister’s worst fears had been realized—she had lost her husband to a terrible act of violence, committed right before her eyes—and yet Elizabeth mourned at home instead of packing a trunk and racing to Mary’s side.
It felt so wrong, and yet Elizabeth did not see how she could do otherwise.
Ninian was still making his way to Washington when Ann heard from Clark that Mary was frantic with misery—wailing, keening, inconsolable. Mrs. Lee and Mrs. Welles, the wife of the secretary of the navy, sat at her bedside in turns; Mrs. Keckly, too, stayed with her almost every day and slept in her room every night. Robert, shaken and heartbroken, looked after his mother and her affairs with tender solicitude, but poor young Tad, devastated by the loss of his beloved father, was terrified by his mother’s outbursts. “There is no comforting Mary,” Clark wrote somberly. “She is suffering such paroxysms of grief that only laudanum offers her any respite, and even that is fleeting. I suspect that witnessing the sudden and awful death has somewhat unhinged her mind, for at times she has exhibited symptoms of madness.”
Compounding Mary’s distress was pressure from Springfield civic leaders to return her husband’s remains to Springfield for burial. This she agreed to do, but she became livid when informed of their plans to erect a mausoleum in the center of town to better accommodate the multitudes of grateful citizens whom they expected to visit Springfield to pay their respects in the years to come. To this Mary was adamantly opposed, for it contradicted Abe’s own desires, which he had shared with her only weeks before his death. As she explained to Clark, on one of their visits to General Grant at City Point, Virginia, she and Abe had toured a cemetery, and the conversation had turned to their own final resting places. When they passed a serene place where spring flowers were blossoming on the graves, Abe had said, “Mary, you are younger than I. You will survive me. When I am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.” Burying him in the center of Springfield would be the very antithesis of Abe’s wishes.
As his widow, Mary could rightly claim greater authority in this matter, and as the Springfield monument association began making decisions without her, she became so livid that she abandoned the isolation of her bedchamber to thwart their plans. Clark, who was president of the board of managers of Oak Ridge Cemetery on the northern outskirts of Springfield, described for her a beautiful hilltop in the center of the graveyard, a peaceful, pastoral setting suited for contemplation and quiet mourning. Mary set her heart on that idyllic place, and when the civic leaders balked, she threatened to have Abe’s remains interred in Chicago or in the crypt of the US Capitol rather than allow them to trample over her privilege to choose her husband’s final resting place. Eventually the monument association acquiesced, and Clark arranged for a temporary receiving vault to be built near the Oak Ridge knoll until a suitable monument could be constructed.
Although Mary had roused herself for that battle, she remained too overcome with grief to attend Abe’s private funeral ceremony in the East Room of the White
House, nor did she accompany the funeral procession that carried his remains to the Capitol, where he lay in state in the rotunda so that thousands of grieving citizens could file past and pay their respects.
On Friday, April 21, nearly a week after Abe’s death, a nine-car funeral train bedecked with bunting, crepe, and his portrait on the engine left Washington on a seventeen-hundred-mile journey westward to Springfield, carrying three hundred passengers and the remains of the president and his young son Willie. The Lincoln Special traveled at only five to twenty miles per hour out of respect for the thousands of mourners who had assembled along the rail lines, lighting the way with bonfires at night. The train made scheduled stops in twelve cities, where tens of thousands gathered to mourn and to bid farewell to the Great Emancipator, the savior of the Union. Appointed to accompany the president home to Springfield were Ninian and Clark, as well as Clark’s brother Charles Alexander Smith, Justice David Davis, the Todd sisters’ cousin Brigadier General John Blair Smith Todd, Abe’s longtime friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, and other distinguished gentlemen.
On May 3, Elizabeth, Frances, and Ann were among the mourners who gathered at the Chicago & Alton depot to meet the funeral train as it pulled slowly into the station. Although the population of Springfield was fifteen thousand, the crowd numbered almost seven times that. As the train halted at the platform and the pallbearers approached, all fell silent and still. Then, as the coffin emerged from the railcar, the agonizing silence was broken by a sob, and then another, until the sounds of muffled lamentation were almost too much for Elizabeth to bear.
Soldiers from the Veteran Reserve Corps carried Abe’s coffin into a gleaming black hearse, each side adorned with a silver oval medallion engraved with his initials, encircled by a wreath, and flanked by two inverted torches, all fashioned from silver and framed by thirty-six silver stars representing the states of the Union. As a band commenced a dirge, six black horses pulled the hearse in a slow, formal procession toward the city square.
As members of the family, Elizabeth, her sisters, and their children were given places near the front of the cortege. Glancing ahead through her dark veil, Elizabeth glimpsed her husband close behind the hearse with the other dignitaries who had accompanied the casket from Washington. Throngs of men, women, and even children clad in mourning black lined the route, their sobs and muffled groans audible above the slow and melancholy music. On the west side of the city square, they passed the building in which the Lincoln & Herndon law practice kept offices; the windows were shrouded with crepe and a banner had been unfurled across the top of the building that read, He Lives in the Hearts of His People.
Elizabeth felt someone take her hand—Frances. Elizabeth squeezed her sister’s hand in a silent message of encouragement, pressing her lips together to fight back the aching sobs building up behind her heart. If she broke down now, in front of the hundred thousand grieving onlookers, she feared she would not be able to get through the rest of the ceremony.
The hearse halted on the north side of the state capitol building, where the cornices and pillars supporting the deep black dome were swathed in white and black, with black drapery falling from the eaves and columns. Also heavily draped in black was the entrance through which the soldiers carried the coffin before proceeding upstairs to Representatives’ Hall. They placed the coffin upon an elegant catafalque covered with black velvet, embellished with thirty-six burnished silver stars, trimmed with silver fringe and sprigs of myrtle, and surrounded by white flowers and evergreen boughs. White lace and gold stars that glowed and sparkled in the gaslights adorned the ceiling. Engraved upon the walls above the tall doors were two inscriptions: Washington the Father, Lincoln the Saviour, and Sooner than surrender this principle, I would be assassinated on this spot.
The words struck Elizabeth almost like a punch to the heart, and for a moment she could not breathe. Then a faint memory stirred, and she remembered that Abe had expressed a similar thought in his speech at Independence Hall in February 1861, when the Inaugural Express had stopped in Philadelphia. How impossibly long ago it seemed, and yet she remembered the scene so vividly that she could almost hear the cheers and applause of his listeners ringing out anew.
The inscription was only a paraphrase of Abe’s words. Nevertheless, it had staggered her.
The procession began to pass by the catafalque, and as the sisters approached the coffin Elizabeth was reunited with Ninian, and Ann with Clark. Elizabeth’s heart thudded as she drew closer and glimpsed Abe’s features and saw how greatly they had altered. She had hoped to carry away a memory of him in repose, at peace at last, but too much time had passed since his death and she scarcely recognized him.
Heartsick, she continued past the coffin, leaning upon Ninian’s arm for support. Tens of thousands of mourners were expected to pass by the catafalque during the twenty-four hours Abe would lie in state, but Elizabeth left the statehouse immediately, withdrawing to her own home until the concluding ceremonies the next day.
“Mary never could have endured this,” a voice murmured close to her ear as she left the hall, startling her. It was Ann, tears shining in her eyes, her face pale and drawn. “It was just as well that she did not come, even for appearance’s sake.”
Throat constricting, Elizabeth nodded, although she was not entirely sure what Ann meant. Elizabeth had not heard anyone fault Mary for not accompanying the remains of her husband and son aboard the Lincoln Special, for not attending one funeral after another over twelve days through seven states and 180 towns. That was more than any grieving widow should be expected to bear.
The next morning, after the final viewing, the sealing of the casket, the solemn music, the procession of ten thousand mourners from the capitol past the black-draped Lincoln residence to Oak Ridge Cemetery, the sermons and heartfelt eulogies, and the interment in the vault at the foot of a wooded knoll, Elizabeth’s thoughts again turned to Mary, as they had throughout that long, melancholy day. Mary had not returned to Springfield for the funeral, but surely she intended to do so eventually. Elizabeth wondered when this would be and what her sisters could do to ease her homecoming.
Although Robert had not joined the entourage aboard the funeral train, at Justice Davis’s urging, he had come for the burial, traveling on a more direct route and arriving in time to join the final procession. When Elizabeth found a private moment to speak with him, she was startled to learn that his mother had not decided when she would leave the White House, nor where she would go when she did.
“She cannot stay in the White House indefinitely,” said Elizabeth. “The Executive Mansion belongs to Mr. Johnson and his family now.”
“Given the circumstances, Johnson has kindly not evicted my mother so that he might move in,” Robert said. He looked haggard and grim, as well he might, since the burden of his devastated family and his father’s legacy had landed heavily on his young shoulders. “At present he is staying in a well-guarded house on Fifteenth and H Streets. He works out of a small office in the Treasury Building, forgoing the use of the White House residence, offices, and reception rooms that are rightfully his.”
“That is generous of him.”
“Then it is the only generosity he has shown my mother,” said Robert, an edge to his voice. “President Johnson has not called on her, nor has he sent a single note to express his sympathies.”
“How unbecoming of a gentleman,” Elizabeth said, bemused. Then she added, “But Mary does intend to come home to Springfield when she leaves the White House, does she not?”
Robert grimaced. “I don’t know. I overheard her tell Mrs. Keckly that she could not bear to return here.”
He and his father’s closest friends had urged his mother to do exactly that, Robert explained—to return to Springfield and the home she still owned, at least until his father’s estate was settled. He had died without a will, so although his property would eventually go to his widow and children, they would not receive their shares until the legal knot
s were untangled. And yet his mother adamantly rejected the idea of returning to her former hometown. She believed that she had burned too many bridges and become the subject of gossip. Moreover, she was estranged from her sisters and half-sisters. Most of all, she could not bear to set foot in her once-happy home on Eighth and Jackson, where she feared she would be tormented by memories of the early years of her marriage and the husband and sons she had lost.
Elizabeth felt heat rise in her cheeks, and she could scarcely meet Robert’s eyes. Now she knew why neither Mary nor Robert had summoned her to the White House to tend to Mary in her anguish. “Despite our differences, if Mary comes home, I shall welcome her as a sister,” she said, fighting back tears. “We can leave the past in the past.”
“Perhaps you and my aunts can,” said Robert, resting a hand on her shoulder comfortingly. “I’m less certain about my mother. Please do not let this distress you. My mother is not herself. In time, she may realize that it is indeed best for her and Tad to be in the familiar home she once cherished, among family and longtime friends.”
Elizabeth nodded, not trusting herself to speak. If Mary did not return to her own home, where would she go? Surely not to Lexington, for many of the same reasons she objected to Springfield. She and Ma had never gotten along, and even Emilie, who had once so admired and adored her, had broken with the Lincolns the previous autumn after Abe refused to grant her a permit to sell Confederate cotton to support herself and her children. Elizabeth could not imagine that Mary would turn to any of their half-sisters living in the South, for obvious reasons. So if not Springfield, where?
For six weeks Mary remained at the White House, too devastated and overwhelmed to leave, but eventually, reluctantly, she decided to settle in Chicago. As Robert explained to his aunts, she insisted that his father had intended to retire there after his second term, and it was a city that had always been good to him, a place reminiscent of triumph, not despair. It was in Chicago that Abe had received his first nomination as the Republican candidate for president, and Chicago where he and Mary had accepted the hearty congratulations of throngs of supporters at the Tremont Hotel after the election. The city was also reasonably close to Abe’s tomb in Springfield, where Mary thought she might seek solace in the years to come—but for short visits only, never to stay indefinitely.
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