by Tom Clancy
"To keep up appearances," she told Elizabeth Keckley, "I must have money, more money than Mr. Lincoln can spare me. He is too honest to make a penny outside of his salary; consequently, I had, and still have, no alternative but to run in debt."
In debt she plunged, to the extent of seventy thousand dollars! A staggering sum when we remember that Lincoln's salary as President was only twenty-five thousand, and that it would have taken every penny of his income for over two years and nine months to pay for her finery alone.
I have quoted several times from Elizabeth Keckley. She was an unusually intelligent negro woman who had bought her freedom and come to Washington to set up a dress-making shop. Within a short time she had the patronage of some of the capital's leading social figures.
From 1861 to 1865 she was with Mrs. Lincoln almost daily in the White House, making dresses and serving her as a personal maid. She finally became not only Mrs. Lincoln's confidante and adviser, but her most intimate friend. The night that Lincoln lay dying, the only person Mrs. Lincoln kept calling for was Elizabeth Keckley.
Fortunately for history, Mrs. Keckley wrote a book about her experiences. It has been out of print for half a century, but dilapidated copies can be purchased now and then from rare-book dealers for ten or twenty dollars. The title is rather long: "Behind the Scenes, by Elizabeth Keckley, Formerly a Slave, but More Recently Modiste and Friend to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln: Or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House."
Elizabeth Keckley records that in the summer of 1864, when Lincoln was running for a second term, "Mrs. Lincoln was almost crazy with fear and anxiety."
Why? One of her New York creditors had threatened to sue her; and the possibility that Lincoln's political enemies might
get wind of her debts and use them as political thunder in the bitter campaign, drove her almost to distraction.
"If he is reelected, I can keep him in ignorance of my affairs; but if he is defeated, then the bills will be sent in, and he will know all," she sobbed hysterically.
"I could go down on my knees," she cried to Lincoln "and plead for votes for you."
"Mary," he remonstrated, "I am afraid you will be punished for this overwhelming anxiety. If I am to be elected, it will be all right; if not, you must bear the disappointment."
"And does Mr. Lincoln suspect how much you owe?" inquired Mrs. Keckley.
And here was Mrs. Lincoln's answer, as reported on page 150 of "Behind the Scenes":
"God, no!—this was a favorite expression of hers [Mrs. Lincoln's]—and I would not have him suspect. If he knew that his wife was involved to the extent that she is, the knowledge would drive him mad."
"The only happy feature of Lincoln's assassination," says Mrs. Keckley, "was that he died in ignorance of these debts."
He hadn't been in his grave a week before Mrs. Lincoln was trying to sell his shirts with his initials marked on them, offering them at a shop on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Seward, hearing about it, went, with a heavy heart, and bought up the lot himself.
When Mrs. Lincoln left the White House, she took with her a score of trunks and half a hundred packing-boxes.
That created a good deal of nasty talk.
She had already been repeatedly and publicly accused of swindling the United States Treasury by falsifying an expense-account for the entertainment of Prince Napoleon, and her enemies pointed out that though she had come to the Executive Mansion with only a few trunks, she was now leaving it with a whole car-load of stuff. . . . Why? . . . Was she looting the place? Had she stripped it bare of everything she could?
Even as late as October 6, 1867—almost two and a half years after she left Washington—the "Cleveland Herald," speaking of Mrs. Lincoln, said:
"Let the country know that it required one hundred thousand dollars to make good the spoliation at the White House, and let it be proved who had the benefit of such plundering."
True, a great many things were stolen from the White House during the reign of the "rosy empress," but the fault was hardly hers. She made mistakes, of course: one of the first things she did was to discharge the steward and a number of the other employees, saying she was going to superintend the place herself, and put it on an economical basis.
She tried it, and the servants purloined almost everything except the door-knobs and the kitchen stove. The "Washington Star" for March 9, 1861, records that many of the guests who attended the first White House reception lost their overcoats and evening wraps. It wasn't long before even the White House furnishings were being carted away.
Fifty packing-boxes and a score of trunks! What was in them? Trash, for the most part: useless gifts, statuary, worthless pictures and books, wax wreaths, deer-heads, and a lot of old clothes and hats hopelessly outmoded—things she had worn back in Springfield years before.
"She had a passion," says Mrs. Keckley, "for hoarding old things."
While she was packing, her son Robert, recently graduated from Harvard, advised her to put a match to the old trumpery. When she scorned the idea, he said:
"I hope to heaven that the car that carries these boxes to Chicago catches fire and burns up all your old plunder."
The morning Mrs. Lincoln drove away from the White House, "there was scarcely a friend to tell her good-by," records Mrs. Keckley. "The silence was almost painful."
Even Andrew Johnson, the new President, failed to bid her farewell. In fact, he never even wrote her a line of sympathy after the assassination. He knew that she despised him, and he reciprocated her feelings.
Absurd as it seems now in the light of history, Mrs. Lincoln firmly believed then that Andrew Johnson had been back of the plot to assassinate Lincoln.
With her two sons, Tad and Robert, Lincoln's widow traveled to Chicago, stopped for a week at the Tremont House, found it too expensive, and moved to some "small, plainly-furnished" rooms at a summer resort called Hyde Park.
Sobbing because she couldn't afford better living quarters, she refused to see or even correspond with any of her former
friends or relatives, and settled down to teaching Tad to spell.
Tad had been his father's favorite. His real name was Thomas, but Lincoln had nicknamed him "Tad" or "Tadpole" because as a baby he had had an abnormally large head.
Tad usually slept with his father. The child would he around the office in the White House until he fell asleep, and then the President would shoulder him and carry him off to bed. Tad had always suffered from a slight impediment in his speech, and his father humored him; and, so with the ingenuity of a bright boy, he used his handicap as a foil to ward off attempts to educate him. He was now twelve years old, but he could neither read nor write.
Mrs. Keckley records that during his first spelling lesson, Tad spent ten minutes arguing that "a-p-e" spelled monkey. The word was illustrated with a small woodcut of what he believed to be a monkey, and it required the combined efforts of three people to convince him that he was wrong.
Mrs. Lincoln used every means in her power to persuade Congress to give her the hundred thousand dollars that Lincoln would have been paid had he lived out his second term. When Congress refused she was vitriolic in her denunciation of the "fiends" who had blocked her plans with "their infamous and villainous falsehoods."
"The father of wickedness and lies," she said, "will get these hoary-headed sinners when they pass away."
Congress did finally give her twenty-two thousand—approximately the amount that would have been due Lincoln had he served the rest of that year. With this she bought and furnished a marble-front house in Chicago.
Two years elapsed, however, before Lincoln's estate was settled; and, during that time, her expenses mounted and her creditors howled. Presently she had to take in roomers; then boarders; and at last she was obliged to give up her home and move into a boarding-house, herself.
Her exchequer became more and more depleted, until, in September, 1867, she was, as she phrased it, "pressed in a most startling manner
for means of subsistence."
So she packed up a lot of her old clothes and laces and jewelry, and, with her face hidden under a heavy crepe veil, she rushed to New York incognita, registered as a "Mrs. Clark," met Mrs. Keckley there, gathered up an armful of worn dresses,
got into a carriage, drove over to the second-hand clothing dealers on Seventh Avenue, and tried to sell her wardrobe. But the prices offered were disappointingly low.
She next tried the firm of Brady & Keyes, diamond brokers, at 609 Broadway. Listening with amazement to her story, they said:
"Now listen, put your affairs in our hands, and we will raise a hundred thousand dollars for you in a few weeks."
That sounded rosy; so she wrote, at their request, two or three letters, telling of her dire poverty.
Keyes flaunted these letters in the face of the Republican leaders, threatening to publish them unless he got cash.
But the only thing he got from these men was their opinion of Mrs. Lincoln.
Then she urged Brady & Keyes to mail a hundred and fifty thousand circulars, appealing to the generosity of people everywhere for aid; but it was well-nigh impossible to get prominent men to sign the letter.
Boiling now with wrath at the Republicans, she turned for help to Lincoln's enemies. The New York "World" was a Democratic paper that had once been suspended by government order, and its editor arrested because of its violent attacks on Lincoln. Through its columns Mrs. Lincoln pleaded poverty, admitting that she was trying to sell not only her old clothes, but even such trifles as "a parasol cover" and "two dress patterns."
It was just before a state election; so the Democratic "World" printed a letter from her, fiercely denouncing such Republicans as Thurlow Weed, W'illiam H. Seward, and Henry J. Raymond of the "New York Times."
With its tongue in its cheek, "The World" solemnly invited its Democratic readers to send in cash contributions to care for the abandoned and suffering widow of the first Republican President. There were few contributions.
Next she tried to get the colored people to raise money for her, urging Mrs. Keckley to throw her heart and soul into the undertaking, and promising that if the Negroes raised twenty-five thousand dollars Mrs. Keckley would get a "cut" of three hundred dollars a year during Mrs. Lincoln's life, and all of the twenty-five thousand dollars at Mrs. Lincoln's death.
Then Brady & Keyes advertised a sale of her clothes and jewelry. Crowds thronged to their store, handling the dresses,
criticizing them, declaring that they were out of style, that they were absurdly high-priced, that they were "worn" and "jagged under the arms and at the bottom of the skirts," and had "stains on the lining."
Brady & Keyes also opened a subscription-book at their store, hoping that if the sightseers would not buy they might donate money for Mrs. Lincoln.
Finally in despair, the merchants took her clothes and jewels to Providence, Rhode Island, intending to set up an exhibition and charge twenty-five cents admission. The city authorities wouldn't hear of it.
Brady & Keyes did finally sell eight hundred and twenty-four dollars' worth of her effects, but they charged eight hundred and twenty dollars for their services and expenses.
Mrs. Lincoln's campaign to raise money for herself not only failed, it also brought upon her a storm of public condemnation. Throughout the campaign she made a disgraceful exhibition of herself—and so did the public.
She "has dishonored herself, her country and the memory of her late lamented husband," cried the Albany "Journal."
She was a liar and a thief—such was the accusation brought against her by Thurlow Weed in a letter to the "Commercial Advertiser."
For years, back in Illinois, she had been "a terror to the village of Springfield," her "eccentricities were common talk," and "the patient Mr. Lincoln was a second Socrates within his own dwelling"—so thundered the "Hartford Evening Press." But the "Journal" of Springfield stated editorially that for years it had been known that she was deranged, and that she should be pitied for all her strange acts.
"That dreadful woman, Mrs. Lincoln," complained the Springfield, Massachusetts, "Republican," "insists on thrusting her repugnant personality before the world to the great mortification of the nation."
Mortified by these attacks, Mrs. Lincoln poured out her broken heart in a letter to Mrs. Keckley:
Robert came up last evening like a maniac and almost threatening his life, looking like death because the letters of "The World" were published in yesterday's paper. . . . I weep whilst I am writing. I pray for death this morning. Only my darling Taddie prevents my taking my life.
Estranged now from her sisters and kindred, she finally broke even with Robert, defying and maligning him so bitterly that certain passages of her letters had to be deleted before publication.
When Mrs. Lincoln was forty-nine years old, she wrote the Negro dressmaker: "I feel as if I had not a friend in the world save yourself."
No other man in United States history has been so respected and loved as Abraham Lincoln; and possibly no other woman in United States history has been so fiercely denounced as his wife.
Less than a month after Mrs. Lincoln had tried to sell her old clothes, Lincoln's estate was settled. It amounted to $110,-295, and was divided equally among Mrs. Lincoln and her two sons, each receiving $36,765.
Mrs. Lincoln now took Tad abroad and lived in solitude, reading French novels and avoiding all Americans.
Soon she was pleading poverty again. She petitioned the United States Senate to grant her a yearly pension of five thousand dollars. The bill was greeted in the Senate with hisses from the gallery and words of abuse from the floor.
"It is a sneaking fraud!" cried Senator Howell of Iowa.
"Mrs. Lincoln was not true to her husband!" shouted Senator Yates of Illinois. "She sympathized with the rebellion. She is not worthy of our charity."
After months of delay and torrents of condemnation she was finally given three thousand a year.
In the summer of 1871 Tad died of typhoid fever, passing away in violent agony. Robert, her only remaining son, was married.
Alone, friendless, and in despair, Mary Lincoln became the prey of obsessions. One day in Jacksonville, Florida, she bought a cup of coffee and then refused to drink it, swearing it was poisoned.
Boarding a train for Chicago, she wired the family physician, imploring him to save Robert's life. But Robert was not ill. He met her at the station and spent a week with her at the Grand Pacific Hotel, hoping to quiet her.
Often in the middle of the night she would rush to his room, declaring that fiends were attempting to murder her, that Indians "were pulling wires out of her brain," that "doctors were taking steel springs out of her head."
In the daytime she visited the stores, making absurd purchases, paying, for example, three hundred dollars for lace curtains when she had no home in which to hang them.
With a heavy heart Robert Lincoln applied to the County Court of Chicago, for a trial of his mother's sanity. A jury of twelve men decided that she was insane, and she was confined in a private asylum at Batavia, Illinois.
At the end of thirteen months she was, unfortunately, released—released, but not cured. Then the poor, ailing woman went abroad to live among strangers, refusing to write Robert or let him know her address.
One day while living alone in Pau, France, she mounted a step-ladder to hang a picture above the fireplace; the ladder broke, and she fell, injuring her spinal cord. For a long time, she was unable even to walk.
Returning to her native land to die, she spent her last days at the home of her sister Mrs. Edwards, in Springfield, saying over and over: "You ought to pray now that I be taken to my husband and children."
Although she then had six thousand dollars in cash and seventy-five thousand in government bonds, nevertheless her mind was constantly racked by absurd fears of poverty, and she was haunted by the fear that Robert, then Secretary of War, would be assassinated like his father.
Lon
ging to escape from the harsh realities that pressed upon her, she shunned every one, closed her doors and windows, pulled down the shades, darkened her room, and lighted a candle even when the sun was shining bright.
"No urging," says her physician, "would induce her to go out into the fresh air."
And there, amidst the solitude and soft quiet of the candlelight, her memory doubtless winged its way back across the cruel years, and, dwelling at last among the cherished thoughts of her young womanhood, she imagined herself waltzing once more with Stephen A. Douglas, charmed by his gracious manner and listening to the rich music of his melodious vowels and clear-cut consonants.
At times she imagined that her other sweetheart, a young man named Lincoln—Abraham Lincoln—was coming to court her that night. True, he was only a poor, homely, struggling lawyer who slept in an attic above Speed's store, but she believed he might be President if she could stimulate him to try hard,
and, eager to win his love, she longed to make herself beautiful for him. Although she had worn nothing but the deepest black for fifteen years, she would, at such times, slip down to the stores in Springfield; and, according to her physician, she purchased and piled up "large quantities of silks and dress goods in trunks and by the cart load, which she never used and which accumulated until it was really feared that the floor of the store room would give way."
In 1882, on a peaceful summer evening, the poor, tired, tempestuous soul was given the release for which she had so often prayed. Following a paralytic stroke, she passed quietly away in her sister's house where, forty years before, Abraham Lincoln had put on her finger a ring bearing the words: "Love is eternal."
I
n 1876, a gang of counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln's body. It is an astonishing story, which few books on Lincoln say anything about.
"Big Jim" Kinealy's gang, one of the cleverest counterfeiting crews that ever vexed and perplexed the United States Secret Service, had its headquarters, during the seventies, in the guileless corn-and-hog town of Lincoln, Illinois.
