Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Then worrisome rumors began to circulate that General Early had crossed the Potomac with nearly twenty thousand troops and was advancing upon Washington. The newspapers printed the alarming stories, retracted them, and printed them again: General Lee had sent General Early north to menace Washington and Baltimore in the hopes of forcing General Grant to divert troops from Richmond to defend them. General Early intended to kidnap President Lincoln and hold him hostage, forcing the Union to capitulate. General Early planned to invade the Union capital in order to convince foreign nations that they must recognize the Confederates as a legitimate government. Mrs. Lincoln was with her family at the Soldiers’ Home, so Elizabeth could not hope to overhear anything that might dispel or confirm the talk on the streets. Like everyone else, she could only gather whatever useful news she could, and wait.

  On July 9, the governor of Maryland and the mayor of Baltimore declared an emergency and called their citizens to arms. “It may without exaggeration be said today that we are having something of an excitement,” the Baltimore correspondent of The New York Times breathlessly reported. Union major general Lew Wallace, commander of the Middle Department and Eighth Army Corps, moved his meager forces—about 6,300 troops, mostly Hundred Day Men—in place to resist General Early’s advance, not knowing whether he intended to move toward Baltimore or Washington. The two armies met on the banks of the Monocacy about forty miles northwest of the capital, but General Wallace’s army was badly outnumbered.

  Almost immediately, refugees from the countryside of Frederick and upper Montgomery counties began streaming into Washington on wagons piled high with their household goods, babes in arms, livestock trailing along behind. They told harrowing stories of advancing armies and narrow escapes, and it soon became evident that General Early’s forces had pushed forward to Rockville, a mere twenty miles away. The War Department had withheld information from the public to avoid causing a panic, but now there could be no more pretense. General Early was coming, and the city was not prepared to withstand him.

  Although miles of trenches and earthworks surrounded Washington, the most experienced soldiers had been gathered into the Army of the Potomac for General Grant’s march on Richmond, and the soldiers left behind, mostly National Guardsmen from Ohio, had not been trained to use their forts’ heavy artillery. Every able-bodied citizen was called to defend the city. The Pennsylvania Bucktails who guarded the White House left their customary posts for the front lines. Quartermaster clerks took up arms and formed ranks. Eighteen hundred men from the convalescent camps and thirty-two hundred more from the Invalid Corps were put on active duty. Nearly one thousand marines and mechanics from the navy yard traded their tools for rifles. Civilians were quickly recruited into a Loyal League militia, and dozens of colored men were compelled to serve as teamsters.

  President Lincoln was at Fort Stevens when the defenders began firing upon the Confederate advance; later it was said that he had stood on a parapet, a perfect target amid the flying bullets, until a nearby soldier roughly ordered him to get down unless he wanted his head knocked off. In a potential disaster worthy of Bull Run three years before, thousands of eager civilians—men, women, and children—rushed to the fort to watch the spectacle, and when soldiers forced them away, they scaled fences, trees, and hills to get a better look at the fight.

  But even as General Early’s forces reached the breastworks at Fort Stevens and he began gathering his troops for a full-scale attack, Union reinforcements from the Sixth and the Nineteenth Corps under Major General Horatio G. Wright began arriving in southwest Washington by steamer. The numbers of these desperately needed veteran fighters were few, but General Early must not have known that, because after two days of skirmishing—during which time additional Union troops arrived, further strengthening their defenses—he withdrew before dawn on the morning of July 13, so stealthily and unexpectedly that the Union defenders did not realize the Confederates had gone until it grew light enough to look out from the fort and see that they had disappeared.

  Exultant, the civilian defenders left the battlements and resumed their ordinary lives, but President Lincoln was greatly displeased that yet another Confederate army had gotten away. Elizabeth was simply grateful, and enormously relieved, that they had gone.

  August waned, oppressively hot and sultry, with little good news from the battlefield and even less from the presidential campaign. At the end of the month, the Democratic National Convention met in Chicago and nominated President Lincoln’s disgruntled former general in chief of the Union Army, George B. McClellan, on a peace platform that called for a cease-fire and negotiated settlement with the Confederacy. With General Grant unable to advance upon Richmond and General Sherman stalled near Atlanta, the war seemed to have ground to a dispiriting halt.

  Mrs. Lincoln, too, was noticeably discouraged. She took to visiting Elizabeth in her rooms, ostensibly to discuss necklines and trims and trains, but the election loomed ever larger in her thoughts. “Elizabeth,” Mrs. Lincoln said forlornly, “where do you think I will be this time next summer?”

  “Why, in the White House, of course.”

  “I can’t believe so.” Tears appeared in her eyes. “I have no hope of the reelection of Mr. Lincoln. The canvass is a heated one, the people begin to murmur at the war, and every vile charge is brought against my husband.”

  “No matter,” Elizabeth replied firmly. “Mr. Lincoln will be reelected. I am so confident of it, that I am tempted to ask a favor of you.”

  Mrs. Lincoln’s eyebrows rose. “A favor. Well, if we remain in the White House I shall be able to do you many favors. What is this special favor?”

  “I should like for you to make me a present of the right-hand glove that the president wears at the first public reception after his second inaugural.”

  Mrs. Lincoln laughed, astonished. “It will be so filthy when he pulls it off that I shall be tempted to take the tongs and put it in the fire. I cannot imagine what you want with such a glove.”

  Smiling, Elizabeth lifted her chin, refusing to be dissuaded. “I shall cherish it as a precious memento of the second inauguration of the man who has done so much for my race. He has been a Jehovah to my people—he has lifted them out of bondage, and directed their footsteps from darkness into light. I shall keep the glove, and hand it down to posterity.”

  Mrs. Lincoln shook her head. “You have some strange ideas, Elizabeth,” she remarked. “Never mind, you shall have the glove; that is, if Mr. Lincoln continues as president after the fourth of March next.”

  “It is a certainty,” said Elizabeth, as she had many times before throughout that long, hot summer. Mrs. Lincoln only smiled, wistful and worried.

  A few days later, General Sherman captured Atlanta.

  The news came to Mr. Lincoln by telegram on September 2. Exultant, the president commanded every arsenal and navy yard to fire a one-hundred-gun salute in General Sherman’s honor, and at Petersburg, General Grant saluted his brother in arms by ordering all of his batteries to fire live rounds at the enemy, which they did within the hour, with much rejoicing.

  The people of the North were jubilant. After a dismal summer full of stalemate, discouragement, and defeat, the Union Army suddenly surged toward victory—and so too did Mr. Lincoln. Overnight he had become a victorious commander in chief, and in the transformed political environment, the radical Republican effort to replace him seemed dangerously unwise. The possibility that the Republican electorate would divide their votes between Mr. Lincoln and General Frémont, and thereby allow the Democrats to seize the presidency, began to worry members of the new National Union and Radical Democracy parties. In September, President Lincoln asked for the resignation of Postmaster General Blair, who among all the members of his cabinet particularly infuriated the radical Republican faction. In the meantime, though no one would claim or could prove a connection, General Frémont withdrew from the race.

  The political distinction between the two remaining candidates could
not have been more clear—President Lincoln, leader of a victorious army and savior of the Union, and General McClellan, a once-popular and perpetually hesitant military leader whose party insisted upon a peace platform he himself did not advocate.

  In the weeks leading up to Election Day, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton made sure that soldiers were given absentee ballots, if the laws of their states permitted, or furloughs so they could travel home to vote. President Lincoln himself wrote to several of his generals asking them to grant leave to soldiers from states where the election would likely be a close call—Indiana, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and New York—assuming that the Union soldiers would overwhelmingly support the Republican ticket as they had in the off-year elections. Even the former secretary Salmon Chase, still stinging from his abrupt dismissal from the Department of the Treasury, began praising President Lincoln in public and then campaigning for him in crucial Midwestern states. His support was no less beneficial for all that he was obviously angling for the newly vacated position of chief justice of the Supreme Court.

  Although the outcome of the election had never looked brighter for Mr. Lincoln, Mrs. Lincoln had her own campaigns to wage to help ensure his victory. She had come to trust Elizabeth’s taste and judgment, so she had asked Elizabeth to accompany her to New York for one last autumn shopping trip. When Mrs. Lincoln needed to return to Washington in time for the election, Elizabeth remained in New York to attend to her business there—making purchases on her behalf, obtaining estimates for fabrics, placing or canceling orders, paying or deferring bills, and carrying on the First Lady’s business affairs as directed, sending telegrams back and forth, often several times a day.

  Elizabeth remained in New York for all of November, which meant that she spent Election Day not at home in the nation’s capital as she had four years before, but in the fraught, anxious city where memories of violent draft riots still evoked pain and anger, and where Mr. Lincoln had never been popular.

  It was there too that Elizabeth heard the glorious news that Mr. Lincoln had been reelected—not only elected but decisively so, receiving fifty-five percent of the popular vote and an enormous margin in the Electoral College, two hundred and twelve votes to General McClellan’s twenty-one.

  Alone in her rented room, suddenly overwhelmingly homesick, Elizabeth nevertheless rejoiced.

  All of her predictions had proven true. The good people of the loyal states had wisely decided that Mr. Lincoln should continue at the nation’s helm.

  Chapter Eleven

  DECEMBER 1864–APRIL 1865

  The war continues,” Mr. Lincoln began his annual presidential message to Congress in December, but after that somber opening, it took a more optimistic turn, certainly more so than his previous three State of the Union addresses. The Union Army was steadily advancing, and the results of the November elections proved that the people of the North were resolved to see the war through to victory. Despite their significant losses, the North still had more men and resources than the South. As if he expected his address to be read in the Confederate capital—and indeed it likely would be printed in the Richmond papers within days—Mr. Lincoln noted that the overmatched South could have peace the moment they decided to lay down their arms and submit to federal authority. His administration would not, however, compromise in any way on the matter of slavery; in fact, the president called on the House to approve the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery that the Senate had already passed. The end of slavery throughout the nation was only a matter of time, he asserted, and “the sooner the better.”

  A few days later, while Salmon P. Chase was being sworn in as the new chief justice of the Supreme Court, word arrived in the capital that General Sherman had reached the Atlantic, the terminus of his march across Georgia. On Sunday, December 25, the general sent the president a telegram bearing most unusual but nonetheless heartening holiday greetings: “I beg to present to you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”

  That year Washingtonians celebrated Christmas with patriotic jubilance, and a week later they welcomed the New Year with reinvigorated hopes. Nearly four thousand citizens attended the annual New Year’s reception at the White House, filling the public rooms to overflowing so that when they were ready to depart, some of the more agile guests had to exit through a first-floor window in the East Room and clamber down a long ramp of wooden planks to the ground.

  For Elizabeth, the last day of January was a greater, more joyful harbinger of new beginnings than the first, for it was on January 31 that the House voted to approve the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the United States. For the first time, people of color were allowed into the congressional galleries, where they watched the final speeches and heard the vote taken in breathless quiet, breaking into cheers and joyful weeping when the measure passed. Although three-fourths of the states still had to ratify the amendment before it would become the law of the land, the colored residents of Washington rejoiced, certain that slavery had been dealt a fatal blow.

  Despite the ongoing war, there was much to be thankful for in the first months of 1865, but Mrs. Lincoln found herself caught up in a frenzy of discontent. After Mr. Lincoln was reelected and various resignations and appointments were made, Mrs. Lincoln made some staffing changes of her own, beginning with firing the longtime White House doorman Edward McManus. Elizabeth wasn’t sure why; apparently he had failed to deliver some documents on time or he had divulged a secret Mrs. Lincoln had entrusted to him—the other servants were not sure and Mrs. Lincoln would not say. When Mr. Lincoln heard about the dismissal, he and Mrs. Lincoln had a terrible quarrel in front of a member of her New York coterie, embarrassing her greatly. Worse yet, a disgruntled Mr. McManus carried tales of her overspending, duplicities, and ill tempers to Thurlow Weed, a New York newspaper editor and political organizer whom Mrs. Lincoln particularly despised. Scandalous stories began to make the rounds, compelling Mrs. Lincoln to frantically write a flurry of letters in her own defense to the New York elite in an attempt to salvage her reputation.

  While Mrs. Lincoln waged war for her social status, her husband and eldest son embarked on a secret campaign of their own. After graduating from Harvard College in July 1864, Robert had again sought his parents’ blessing to enlist in the army, and Mrs. Lincoln had again adamantly refused. Angered, Robert declared that if he could not live as he wanted he would at least escape the “glass house” of Washington, so he returned to Cambridge and enrolled in Harvard Law School. Six months later, with the Union Army sweeping relentlessly through the South, Mr. Lincoln decided to grant his son’s longtime wish. Without consulting his wife, he wrote to General Grant and asked him to find a post for Robert that would neither place him on the front lines nor bestow upon him a coveted position that ought to go to a more deserving veteran soldier. The general wrote back that he would gladly welcome Robert into his “military family,” and so it was that on February 17, Robert Todd Lincoln entered the army as a captain and began serving as an assistant adjutant general on General Grant’s own staff. Mrs. Lincoln kept up a brave, tremulous front, assuring the nation that she was very proud of her son, but she confided to Elizabeth that she was nervous and afraid, even though Robert was so well placed that he would likely never see a single battle.

  On the night before Mr. Lincoln’s second inauguration, a terrible storm struck Washington City. Elizabeth was jolted awake by the crash of thunder and the scour of hail upon the roof, and she sat up in bed, her quilt gathered around her, heart pounding, until it subsided enough for her to lie back down and try to fall asleep. It was not an ill omen, she told herself firmly. It was only a storm, perhaps more severe than others they had seen in that damp early spring, but still, only a storm.

  The next morning, she woke to a gray day. She had planned to attend the parade with Emma and two of her other assistant seamstresses, and later to join Virginia and Walker on the gr
ounds of the Capitol to witness Mr. Lincoln take the oath of office and give his second inaugural address, but the torrential rain had turned the streets of Washington to canals of mud ten inches thick, and she had no desire to wade through them, fighting the crowds for the rare dry patches of earth. She would have to go out later, first to the White House to dress Mrs. Lincoln for the White House reception, and then to an inaugural party with the Lewises and other friends, but with any luck the streets would be drier by then.

  “Oh, do come,” Emma protested when she knocked upon Elizabeth’s door and she apologetically explained her change of heart. “How can you think of staying away the first time colored folks are allowed on the Capitol grounds for an inauguration? The streets aren’t so bad everywhere, and the little boys are out in full force.”

  Enterprising youngsters relished muddy days, because they would carry wooden planks around the streets and charge ladies a few pennies to have an improvised boardwalk placed before them to walk upon. “You go,” said Elizabeth. “You go and tell me all about it later.”

  “I won’t tell you a thing,” Emma retorted. “It’s your own choice to stay home, and you’ll have to suffer the consequences.”

  “If you tell me about the president’s address,” Elizabeth said, “I promise to describe for you every detail of the gown Mrs. Lincoln will wear to the inaugural ball—and I’ll show you how I fashioned the train.”

  Emma hesitated, tempted, but when she turned to go she merely lifted her chin airily and said, “I’ll think about it.”