Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  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.

  Elizabeth—who had been readily received into the elite of colored Washington society by virtue of her natural grace and dignity, her status as a White House intimate, and, ironically, the impressive bloodline she had inherited from Colonel Armistead Burwell, her father and former master—gently tried to steer Mrs. Lincoln down paths that might lead to her greater acceptance. While sewing for other clients, she had detected hopeful signs that the hearts of some of the ladies were softening toward the First Lady. “Nowadays the womenkind of Washington are united only in giving the cold shoulder to Mrs. Lincoln,” Elizabeth Blair Lee, who had remained Varina Davis’s friend despite their political differences, remarked to Elizabeth during a fitting. “We Republicans at least ought to rally around her.”

  But not even the friendship of the popular, imperious, and generous Mrs. Samuel Phillips Lee could redeem Mrs. Lincoln in the eyes of those who disparaged her for behaving as if the nation were not at war. When she discovered that Congress allotted twenty thousand dollars to each administration to refurbish the White House, Mrs. Lincoln promptly set about spending the allowance with unrestrained delight. Elizabeth would be among the first to agree that the White House had been sorely neglected; even upon her first visit, when the importance of her interview preoccupied her thoughts, she had not failed to notice the shabby state of the mansion’s threadbare rugs, broken furniture, torn wallpaper, and ruined draperies, from which souvenir collectors had snipped pieces until they hung in tatters. But as necessary as the purchases were, it did not look well for the First Lady to be spending so much on carpets and china when some poor, brave soldiers went without tents and blankets.

  Mrs. Lincoln’s loyalty to the Union was also questioned—entirely without justification, as Elizabeth well knew. “Why should I sympathize with the rebels?” Mrs. Lincoln had once declared, angrily tossing aside a Harper’s magazine that insinuated she might. “Are they not against me? They would hang my husband tomorrow if it was in their power, and perhaps gibbet me with him. How then can I sympathize with people at war with me and mine?”

  While it was true that Mrs. Lincoln’s brother, three half brothers, and three of her brothers-in-law were serving in the Confederate army, Mrs. Lincoln herself was a staunch Unionist, and despite growing up in a slaveholding family, she had stronger abolitionist leanings than her husband. This did not prevent Northern newspapers from printing entirely false tales that Mrs. Lincoln’s youngest half sister, Emilie, whose husband was a general in the Confederate army, had used a presidential pass to smuggle supplies across Union lines to the rebels. Only Southerners correctly surmised where Mrs. Lincoln’s loyalties truly resided, and they condemned her for it. They considered her a traitor whose repudiation of her Southern heritage disgraced her family’s good name. Union and Confederate alike, each side believed her loyal to the other, and thus neither would claim her.

  Although the immediate threat of invasion seemed to have passed for the moment, the Confederate army never felt very far away. Virginian militia companies drilled in Alexandria just across the river, and for every Union picket guarding the Washington side of bridges leading into the capital, there were Virginia militiamen posted on the other end. A Confederate flag flew boldly above an Alexandria hotel, easily visible from Washington City to anyone with a good vantage point and sharp eyes or a telescope. Elizabeth sometimes observed President Lincoln standing at a window in the White House, studying the flag in silence. Sometimes he sat back in his armchair, rested his feet on the windowsill, and watched ships on the Potomac through a telescope, occasionally letting his gaze drift upward to the rebel flag whipping in the wind. If it seemed an especial taunt, he never said so in Elizabeth’s presence.

  The war was very close, and it would come closer still.

  Telegraph and mail service resumed, and in early May, Elizabeth received a letter that had been delayed in the crisis.

  April 24, 1861

  Dearest Mother,

  I hope this letter finds you safe and well. The news from Washington has been so alarming of late that I can only pray that the papers are following their usual custom of exaggeration.

  I write in haste, and yet I write reluctantly, for I fear that you will not welcome what I must tell you. Mother, I am a soldier. You may well ask how this can be, since colored men are not welcome in the ranks of the Union Army. This I discovered firsthand when I and some of my fellows went to enlist at Columbus and were rejected, with the jeers and insults of the white recruits burning in our ears. My friends had no choice but to return to school, but I was too restless to remain, so instead I went home to St. Louis. There, alone, without my duskier-skinned friends, no one had cause to think me other than a white man, and so I signed my name.

  Mother, I know you will not be pleased that I have left school without finishing the term, and I am sorry for grieving you, but I am confident I will be allowed to resume my studies when my service is done. It is only a three-month enlistment, but everyone says it will be over well before then, and I could not miss my chance to strike a blow for the Union. I am ever mindful that if not for you I would still be a slave, and thus I have a special obligation to help deliver others from bondage into freedom. I am willing to give this noble cause the three months they ask, and my life if necessary.

  Please write to me often, and pray for me always. I am and will always be

  Your Devoted Son,

  George W. D. Kirkland

  Private

  First Missouri Volunteers, Company D

  Elizabeth was in tears well before she reached his closing lines. He thought she would be upset because he left college before the end of the term? That was what he believed would grieve her the most—not his deception, not his youthful, impetuous enlistment, not the possibility of his death on the battlefield?

  Blinded by tears, dizzy with anguish, she gr
oped for a chair and sank into it, crumpling the letter in her hand. She pressed her lips together to still her weeping, before Virginia or Walker or one of the other tenants heard her distress and came running to see what was wrong. She trembled in silence until she calmed herself, desperately chasing from her mind’s eye visions of her precious only child lying wounded or dying in some distant Southern meadow.

  But even in the midst of her fear, she was proud of her son—deeply, profoundly proud. He was right. God had blessed them with the means to free themselves from the misery of enslavement, and therefore they both were obliged to help the many others of their race still held in bondage—George in his way, and she in hers.

  She prayed the Lord would reward his noble willingness to sacrifice his life by sparing it.

  Chapter Four

  MAY–AUGUST 1861

  During the winter of secession, Elizabeth’s dressmaking business had declined as many of her best patrons departed for the South, but as spring flourished, so did her fortunes. By that time Mrs. Lincoln had proudly displayed Elizabeth’s handiwork at many a White House gathering, and suddenly she found herself the best-known and most coveted mantua maker among the loyal Union women of Washington. With more work than she could handle on her own, she rented a workroom across the street from her boardinghouse and hired assistants. Her patrons understood that Elizabeth must always give the First Lady preference, so whenever Mrs. Lincoln traveled, other ladies rushed to place their orders.

  Mrs. Lincoln could scarcely stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue without reporters setting telegraph lines abuzz with the news, so when she and her cousin Mrs. Grimsley traveled to New York on a shopping expedition in early May, newspapermen hounded their every step. Stories of their attending the theater, inspecting carriages at a manufacturer, dining, enjoying soirees, and visiting local luminaries filled newspaper columns and invited spiteful commentary. When Elizabeth read of Mrs. Lincoln’s expenditures upon carpets, china, mantel ornaments, and other furnishings for the White House, she winced in sympathy, wishing it were possible for her patron to be more discreet. She also worried at the amount Mrs. Lincoln seemed to be spending, not only because the papers depicted her as wasteful, but also because Elizabeth could not imagine how the congressional allowance could stretch far enough to cover it all.

  But it was impossible not to be caught up in her patron’s delight when she returned to Washington, flush with excitement, eagerly anticipating the delivery of her goods. “I am determined to transform the White House into a showplace worthy of our nation,” she told Elizabeth as she led her and Mrs. Grimsley room to room, describing her purchases and where she intended to arrange them. Repairs and restoration would have to be completed first, of course, but Mrs. Lincoln planned to escape the noise and dust, as well as the heat and disease of summertime Washington, by taking Tad and Willie north as frequently as she could.

  “I’d like to take Mr. Lincoln as well,” she confided, “if only I could pry him away from his cabinet.”

  No one in Washington could forget the Confederate threat looming ever nearer. For weeks the Confederate flag had waved and snapped in the breeze above Alexandria, taunting them with the threat of invasion, which set their nerves on edge and sent prices for flour, coffee, and other groceries soaring. One morning in late May, Elizabeth woke to the tolling of firehouse bells and went down to breakfast to learn from the Lewises that shortly after dawn, ten Union regiments had quietly crossed the Potomac and had captured Alexandria—but the leader of the New York Zouaves, Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, had been shot and killed, the only casualty of the mission.

  Elizabeth’s heart sank. “Are you certain?” She had seen Colonel Ellsworth often in the White House and knew him to be a particular favorite of the president. She knew that sometime before the election, Mr. Lincoln had met the young man in Chicago and had urged him to move to Springfield to study the law. He had been part of the honor guard that had accompanied the president-elect on the train to Washington, and after secession, Mr. Lincoln had used his influence to obtain him a good position in the military. He was only a few years older than Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert.

  “There’s no mistake,” Walker told her, shaking his head grimly. “His is the first blood shed on rebel soil.”

  “The first drops of many,” said Virginia quietly.

  Elizabeth’s thoughts flew to George—so near in age to the colonel, so eager to join in the fight—and then to the Lincolns. Mrs. Lincoln had liked Colonel Ellsworth nearly as much as her husband did. She would be heartbroken.

  Although she was not expected that day, Elizabeth quickly made her way through the muddy streets to the White House, determined to offer Mrs. Lincoln whatever comfort she could. At the door, a somber Mr. McManus told her that the household had plunged into mourning. “Mr. Lincoln was in his library with visitors when word came of the colonel’s death,” the elderly doorman confided. “Peter Brown says he was so overcome by emotion that he could not speak.”

  “I’d best see to the First Lady,” Elizabeth said, hurrying off.

  She found the First Lady in her boudoir, clad in a cheerful floral day dress and sitting at her dressing table, staring straight ahead at nothing. She looked up when Elizabeth entered, a faint light of surprise cutting through her grief. “Ah, Elizabeth,” she said. “How did you know I needed you?”

  “I heard the bells tolling for the colonel and thought you might.” Elizabeth went straight to the wardrobe and began sorting through the First Lady’s dresses for a more suitable garment. Suddenly she was seized by the cold realization that she would likely be asked to sew many black dresses in the months ahead as her patrons lost husbands, sons, and brothers, and donned the somber colors of mourning that custom demanded. Shaking off the thought, she spied a black silk dress Mrs. Lincoln must have brought with her from Illinois and held it up. “What do you think of this?”

  “It will be fine, I’m sure.” Mrs. Lincoln barely glanced at the dress. “We’re going out this afternoon, Mr. Lincoln and I, to the navy yard to view the body and pay our respects. After that I believe—I believe the colonel will be removed here, to lie in state in the East Room.”

  Elizabeth nodded and began unbuttoning Mrs. Lincoln’s bodice.

  “That dreadful flag provoked him so,” said Mrs. Lincoln, her voice distant. “He promised my husband he would tear it down. That’s exactly what he did, and he was killed for it.”

  “Killed for a flag?” asked Elizabeth, without thinking. It seemed like such a waste.

  “It should never have happened.” Mrs. Lincoln knotted her handkerchief in her lap. “Before a single shot was fired, a lieutenant was sent into Alexandria under a flag of truce, to warn the Confederate commander that they faced an overwhelming force, and he had until nine o’clock to evacuate or surrender.”

  The commander must have chosen one or the other rather than fight; surely Elizabeth would have heard some distant sounds of battle in Washington if the rebels had resisted. “Which did they choose?”

  “They chose to retreat. The lieutenant reported to Colonel Ellsworth that the rebels said they would not resist because the town was full of women and children. Most of the rebel troops boarded a train and left Alexandria well before the deadline, but a few stayed behind. I don’t know why. They were captured and imprisoned in a slaver’s pen.” Mrs. Lincoln sighed as Elizabeth helped her out of her day dress. “I should tell you, Elizabeth, this is only what I’ve gathered here and there, not an official report of any kind.” A trace of anger made her voice tremble. “My husband confides in me less and less.”

  “Tell me anyway,” Elizabeth prompted gently as she straightened Mrs. Lincoln’s chemise. She wanted to know what had become of the young officer, and the effort of telling the story seemed to keep Mrs. Lincoln calm.

  “Well, from what I’ve heard, Colonel Ellsworth set off with some of his men to capture the telegraph office, but then he happened to pass the hotel where that flag was flying as b
old as brass. He knew how it vexed my husband, what an eyesore it had become.”

  “For everyone in Washington,” Elizabeth agreed, assisting Mrs. Lincoln into the black silk dress. Mrs. Lincoln moved as Elizabeth willed, as compliant as a doll.

  “Perhaps he thought the president was watching the hotel that very moment, and perhaps he wanted to signal that the town had been captured. We’ll never know. But in any case, Colonel Ellsworth marched into the hotel and up to the roof, and he took hold of that flag and tore it down. He returned downstairs to his men—” Mrs. Lincoln pressed her handkerchief to her lips, steeled herself, and continued. “As he carried the captured banner downstairs, the owner of the hotel stepped out of nowhere and shot him in the chest, from just a few feet away.”

  Elizabeth’s hands froze in the midst of buttoning Mrs. Lincoln’s bodice. “Lord have mercy.”

  “One of Colonel Ellsworth’s soldiers promptly avenged him—he killed the man with a musket round to the head.” Mrs. Lincoln looked over her shoulder at Elizabeth, her expression full of pain. “But he was too late, you know. Too late to save him.”

  Elizabeth pressed her lips together, shaking her head. “I am truly very sorry, Mrs. Lincoln. I know you and the president were very fond of him.”

  “We were indeed.” Mrs. Lincoln fell silent as Elizabeth finished dressing her. “I believe he was like another son to Mr. Lincoln. And to both of us, he was a bit of home, do you understand? With all the promise of youth, all the vigor and courage—” A sharp intake of breath. “I shall have to write to his mother. Mr. Lincoln will, of course, but I should too. Although I can’t imagine what I will say.” Her voice broke, and she sank back down into her chair.