Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  In the days that followed, the people of the North wanted revenge and President Lincoln wanted answers. Even as volunteers filled recruiting offices, the president closeted himself with his advisers, determined to ascertain how the battle had gone so terribly wrong and how they could ensure it would never happen again. Already the press had taken to calling the Union’s disorderly retreat from the battlefield “the Great Skedaddle,” shaming the Union soldiers and heartening their enemies.

  “They were green troops,” Mrs. Lincoln told Elizabeth, staunchly defending the soldiers—and by extension her husband, who had sent them into battle. “They aren’t green anymore. They will never again suffer such an embarrassing rout.”

  Elizabeth hoped she was right, and her thoughts flew to her son. In his last letter, George had written that the First Missouri was preparing to march on Springfield, Missouri, but he did not know when they would set out. She wished she knew whether they had departed yet, whether they had arrived, whether the battle had been fought, and who had emerged victorious. George was still green himself, she thought, despite his regiment’s involvement in the conflict in the streets of St. Louis and the minor skirmish at Boonville. He had yet to face the kind of warfare McDowell’s men had faced at the creek called Bull Run, and she felt sick at heart when she imagined him facing rebel guns and cannon.

  The days between George’s letters elapsed in a ceaseless misery of waiting and worry. The arrival of each letter brought only momentary joy and relief, because although she savored each word, she knew that the letters offered no assurances of his safety any longer, only proof that he had been alive and unhurt at the time he had written them.

  But that was something, at least. She kept his letters safely tucked away in a rosewood box her former mistress had given her as a farewell gift when she departed St. Louis. Every Sunday evening she read the letters in the order he had written them, a ritual that grew lengthier every week. They were talismans that closed the distance between them and, she hoped, would bring him back to her someday.

  The first days of August were oppressively hot and humid, with no relief on the horizon. After hosting a state dinner for Prince Napoléon III, Mrs. Lincoln took Willie and Tad and her cousin Mrs. Grimsley on a vacation to Long Branch, Manhattan, and upstate New York, but her absence left Elizabeth busier than ever as other ladies rushed in with their dressmaking demands. She sewed for Mary Jane Welles, the wife of the secretary of the navy; Margaret Cameron, the wife of the secretary of war; and Adele Douglas, the young widow of the late Senator Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois. Recently widowed, the lovely Mrs. Douglas dressed in deep mourning but with excellent taste, so that even in her sorrow other ladies were jealous of her beauty and grace.

  In the middle of the month, with summer storms worsening the humidity and bringing no relief from the heat, Elizabeth received a letter sent from Missouri but addressed in an unfamiliar hand. It could not be from George, she thought, quickly opening the envelope, or from her former mistress Anne Garland, whose writing she knew well. Heart pounding with sudden apprehension, she unfolded the letter and read it slowly, word by word, afraid to reach the end.

  Near Springfield, Missouri

  August 11, 1861

  To Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley, Washington, DC:

  Dear Madam,

  It is with great pain that I write to inform you of the death of your son, George Kirkland. By his good conduct and bravery while with me, he had won the respect of myself and his fellow soldiers, and should he have lived I would have promoted him soon. He was shot through the body at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, where his last words were of our noble struggle and how we must see it through. He is buried here beside his brothers in arms who also fell that day. His effects I shall send home at the earliest opportunity.

  Yours truly,

  Charles W. Anderson

  Captain, Commanding Company D

  First Missouri Volunteers

  Elizabeth felt the room shift and turn around her before all went dark.

  Chapter Five

  AUGUST 1861–MARCH 1862

  When George’s personal effects arrived a week later, Elizabeth kept them on her bureau for two days before mustering up the courage to examine them. They included all of her letters, neatly bound with a ribbon; a book of psalms; a sewing kit that could be rolled up and tied, commonly called a housewife; a rosewood ink bottle; a tin cup; a small tobacco box, also of tin; and a pair of bone dice. She touched the items one by one, imagining them in his hands. She was glad that he had found solace and inspiration in Holy Scripture while at war, but she did not like to think that he had taken up smoking and gambling.

  It no longer mattered.

  In the midst of her bereavement, Elizabeth found comfort in a heartfelt, compassionate letter from Mrs. Lincoln and from the gentle kindness of Virginia, Walker, and Emma, whose eyes brimmed with tears when she told Elizabeth she wished she would have known her fine, heroic soldier. For a brief moment, Elizabeth allowed herself to imagine George and Emma meeting, falling in love, marrying, raising children—but then she banished such thoughts forever.

  He had died a free man. That much, at least, she had done for her son.

  In autumn Mrs. Lincoln returned to Washington, and duty again called Elizabeth to the White House. The battlefront had moved off from the outskirts of Washington, but every day brought new reports of intense fighting and grisly scenes of death and destruction. War raged in several states, and the Union Army endured one demoralizing defeat after another. In Washington, a stretch of rainy weather flooded the Potomac, washing corpses of Union soldiers killed weeks before at the Battle of Ball’s Bluff downstream until they were fished out between the bridges at Fourteenth Street. Near the river and canals, sewers overflowed into the streets, spreading a miasma of stench and sickness for blocks. Soldiers camped in the surrounding hills, bunked close together in soggy tents where smallpox and typhoid fever struck them down in great numbers.

  Union soldiers fought Confederate, doctors and nurses struggled against disease, police and volunteers alike battled the fires that broke out with alarming regularity, and Mr. Lincoln struggled with his cabinet and with General McClellan, who seemed incapable of pressing his advantage on the battlefield or even recognizing when he had it. All the while, Mrs. Lincoln engaged in a very different sort of battle. Her renovations to the White House had garnered her much criticism in the press and had run well over budget, and to Elizabeth’s dismay, the gardener, James Watt, had taught her how to pad bills and hide expenses in his account. Ignoring the commissioner of public buildings’ warnings that she had no money left to spend, Mrs. Lincoln continued running up debts until it became impossible to conceal them from her husband anymore. They argued furiously on her forty-third birthday, and afterward Mrs. Lincoln begged the commissioner to intercede with the president on her behalf. Reluctantly he did so, and although Elizabeth did not witness Mr. Lincoln’s explosive reply—“I swear I will never approve the bills for flub dubs for this damned old house!”—everyone heard of it later.

  Mrs. Lincoln’s reputation suffered further damage thanks to the questionable characters who populated her evening salons—a coterie of favorites, almost exclusively men, who flattered her vanity and may have betrayed her confidences. It was said that one of her regular callers provided a copy of the president’s annual message to Congress to the New York Herald, which published the speech before he could deliver it. After that, Mr. Lincoln warned his wife against idle talk, banished the man blamed for the leak from the White House, fired the gardener, and to Mary’s sorrow, ceased confiding in her altogether where the work of his government was concerned.

  Elizabeth soon learned firsthand what Mrs. Lincoln’s troubles had already demonstrated: Unscrupulous people were eager and determined to wriggle their way into the White House for their own wicked purposes. As soon as Elizabeth became well-known throughout Washington as Mrs. Lincoln’s modiste, strangers crowded around her affecting friendship
, hoping that she could use her influence to obtain them a job, secure them a favor, or provide gossip they could use to their own benefit.

  One day, a woman Elizabeth had never met called on her at her rooms, placed an order for a dress, and insisted upon paying her partly in advance. For quite some time she came daily to see Elizabeth for fittings and adjustments, never failing to be gracious and kind. On the day the dress was complete and she came to pick it up, she hesitated before saying, “Mrs. Keckley, you know Mrs. Lincoln?”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth, folding the dress carefully for her new patron to take home.

  “You are her modiste, are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know her very well, do you not?”

  Elizabeth kept her expression smooth and pleasant, wondering where the questions would lead. “I am with her every day or two.”

  “Don’t you think you would have some influence with her?”

  So at last, there it was. “I cannot say. Mrs. Lincoln, I presume, would listen to anything I should suggest, but whether she would be influenced by a suggestion of mine is another question.”

  “I am sure that you could influence her.” The woman offered her an ingratiating smile. “Now, Mrs. Keckley, I have a proposition to make. I have a great desire to become an inmate of the White House. I have heard so much of Mr. Lincoln’s goodness that I should like to be near him, and if I can enter the White House no other way, I am willing to go as a menial.” At this Elizabeth tried to speak, but the woman hurried on as if she hadn’t noticed. “My dear Mrs. Keckley, will you not recommend me to Mrs. Lincoln as a friend of yours out of employment, and ask her to take me as a chambermaid? If you will do this you shall be well rewarded. It may be worth several thousand dollars to you in time.”

  Elizabeth regarded her with amazement. “Madam, you are mistaken in regard to my character. Sooner than betray the trust of a friend, I would throw myself into the Potomac. I am not so base as that. Pardon me, but there is the door, and I trust that you will never enter my room again.”

  The woman sprang to her feet, her expression utterly astonished and outraged. “Very well,” she snapped as she strode from the room. “You will live to regret your action today.”

  “Never, never,” Elizabeth exclaimed, slamming the door shut behind her. A moment later, she heard a rap upon it and tore it open only to find Emma standing in the hallway.

  Emma inclined her head down the hallway. “Why is she leaving in such a huff?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” said Elizabeth shortly, beckoning Emma inside. “Just another opportunity hunter. She claims it’s her heart’s desire to work as Mrs. Lincoln’s chambermaid.”

  “She doesn’t look like a chambermaid,” observed Emma. “But she does look somewhat familiar.”

  “I’d never seen her before she ordered that dress, and I hope never to see her again.”

  She wanted nothing more than to forget the incident, but Emma’s curiosity had been piqued, and she promptly launched her own investigation. Before long she discovered that the woman was an actress, who had confided to several friends her determination to enter the White House as a servant, learn the secrets of its inhabitants, and publish a scandalous account to the world. “She underestimated your principles, and your loyalty,” said Emma, clearly relishing her triumph at discovering the scheme.

  “Let that be a lesson to us both.” Elizabeth never would have accepted a bribe, but she knew others would have had no qualms about doing so. When she thought of how long and how hard she had worked to raise the twelve hundred dollars to purchase her freedom and George’s, she could well understand how someone else in her place would have given in to temptation. But Mrs. Lincoln was no longer only a patron, or even just the First Lady. She had become a friend, and Elizabeth would rather die than betray her.

  For Mrs. Lincoln, the autumn was marked by changes in the White House staff, some she desired and others that were forced upon her. After all the schools in the district were shut down due to the wartime emergency, the First Lady decided to open a classroom in the White House rather than send Willie and Tad off to boarding school. She hired a tutor, arranged desks and a chalkboard, and brought in her sons’ best friends, Bud and Halsey Taft, as classmates. Until then, the youngest Lincoln boys’ education had been sorely neglected by their indulgent parents. Willie had a scholarly bent and often read and composed poetry on his own, but Tad was barely literate, something Mrs. Lincoln resolved to remedy. Both Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln valued education and hoped their younger sons would come to love learning as much as they did, and perhaps in time follow their eldest brother, Robert, on to Harvard. Privately, Elizabeth heartily approved of the new plan, which she hoped would give the mischievous boys some much-needed discipline along with the usual lessons. She had long regretted that she had been given no formal education, and she disliked seeing any opportunity for learning squandered.

  Some new members of the White House staff should have been reassuring, but instead their presence made Elizabeth uncomfortably aware of the dangers confronting the president in those perilous times. New doormen—some of them officers from the new Metropolitan Police, dressed in civilian attire and carrying concealed weapons—could be found in the public rooms, and uniformed sentries were posted on the grounds. In the year since his election, the president had received so many threatening letters that it was impossible to keep track of them all, although their frequency and virulence had increased since Bull Run. Mrs. Lincoln worried more about her husband’s safety than he seemed to, and she urged him to travel unannounced and accompanied by guards whenever he moved about the city. He considered such precautions unnecessary and consequently ignored his wife’s requests, which made her fret all the more.

  Mrs. Lincoln was also concerned about threats from within. She and the president often discussed his cabinet members in Elizabeth’s presence, and Elizabeth had observed that the First Lady was a shrewd judge of character, and her intuition about other people’s sincerity was usually more accurate than her husband’s. Elizabeth had learned early on that Mrs. Lincoln despised Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, whom she called a selfish politician instead of a true patriot, but Elizabeth attributed some of her dislike to the fact that he was the father of her most bitter social rival, the lovely Miss Kate Chase.

  Mrs. Lincoln thought no better of Secretary of State William Seward. One morning, Elizabeth arrived at the White House earlier than usual to find Mr. Lincoln sitting in a chair, holding the newspaper in one hand and stroking little Tad’s head with the other. While Elizabeth was basting a dress, a servant entered with a letter for Mr. Lincoln that had just arrived by messenger. He broke the seal and read the letter in silence.

  “Who is the letter from, Father?” asked Mrs. Lincoln.

  “Seward.” Mr. Lincoln tucked the letter into his pocket. “I must go over and see him today.”

  “Seward! I wish you had nothing to do with that man. He cannot be trusted.”

  Mr. Lincoln regarded her mildly, but Elizabeth thought she saw the corner of his mouth twitch as if he were trying not to smile. “You say the same about Chase. If I listened to you, I should soon be without a cabinet.”

  Mrs. Lincoln looked as if she thought that would be a significant improvement. “Better to be without it than to confide in some of the men that you do. Seward is worse than Chase. He has no principle.”

  “Mother, you are mistaken.” The brief glint of humor had turned sober. “Your prejudices are so violent that you do not stop to reason. Seward is an able man, and the country as well as myself can trust him.”

  “Father, you are too honest for this world! You should have been born a saint.” The president scoffed at that, but Mrs. Lincoln persisted. “You will generally find it a safe rule to distrust a disappointed, ambitious politician. It makes me mad to see you sit still and let that hypocrite Seward twine you around his finger as if you were a skein of thread.”

  “It is useless to argue
the question, Mother.” Mr. Lincoln returned his gaze to the newspaper. “You cannot change my opinion.”

  That did not dissuade her from trying. She called Andrew Johnson a demagogue and warned her husband that if he placed him in a position of power, he would regret it one day. When the popular General McClellan was promoted, she declared that he was a humbug, because he talked so much and did so little. When Mr. Lincoln protested that he was a patriot and an able soldier, Mrs. Lincoln retorted, “You will have to find some man to take his place—that is, if you wish to conquer the South.”

  General Ulysses S. Grant was definitely not the officer she would have chosen to replace McClellan. “He is a butcher,” she often said, “and is not fit to be at the head of an army.” When Mr. Lincoln pointed out that he had been very successful in the field, she replied, “Yes, he generally manages to claim a victory, but such a victory! He loses two men to the enemy’s one. He has no management, no regard for life. If the war should continue four years longer, and he should remain in power, he would depopulate the North.” She shook her head, indignant and angry. “I could fight an army as well myself. According to his tactics, there is nothing under the heavens to do but march a new line of men up in front of the rebel breastworks to be shot down as fast as they take their position, and keep marching until the enemy grows tired of the slaughter. Grant, I repeat, is an obstinate fool and a butcher.”

  “Well, Mother, supposing that we give you command of the army,” said Mr. Lincoln, a merry gleam in his eye and a ring of irony in his voice. “No doubt you would do much better than any general that has been tried.”

  If the offer had been made in earnest, Elizabeth would not have been surprised if Mrs. Lincoln had accepted. Then her husband would have had to listen to her counsels.

  The war cast a somber mood over the holidays, but Mrs. Lincoln was determined to celebrate. Elizabeth made her a blue velvet gown to wear to a performance at the National Theatre, as well as other dresses for her afternoon receptions and the president’s formal levees. The two youngest Lincoln boys were merry, but Mr. Lincoln seemed always melancholy, his cares weighing heavily upon him. Mrs. Lincoln endeavored to cheer him out of his gloomy spells, but the reliable tactics of the past were losing their power to affect him.