Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Tad opened his book and slowly spelled the first word. “A, P, E.”

  “Well,” his mother prompted, “what does A, P, E spell?”

  Tad glanced at the small woodcut illustration above the word. “Monkey.”

  “Nonsense,” Mrs. Lincoln exclaimed. “A, P, E does not spell monkey.”

  “Does too spell monkey!” Tad pointed triumphantly at the picture. “Isn’t that a monkey?”

  “No, it is not a monkey.”

  Tad’s mouth fell open in disbelief. “Not a monkey! What is it, then?”

  “An ape.”

  “An ape! That’s not an ape. Don’t I know a monkey when I see it?”

  “Not if you claim that is a monkey.”

  “I do know a monkey,” he insisted. “I’ve seen lots of them in the street with the organ grinders. I know a monkey better than you do, ’cause I always go out to see them when they come by and you don’t.”

  “Tad, listen to me. A monkey is a species of ape. It looks much like a monkey, but it is not a monkey.”

  “It shouldn’t look like a monkey then. Here, Yib—” This was the name he had adopted years before for Elizabeth, when his youth and speech impediment had conspired to render her name impossible to pronounce. “Isn’t this a monkey, and don’t A, P, E spell monkey? Ma don’t know anything about it.” And with that he thrust the book at Elizabeth, earnest and excited.

  Elizabeth could not help it; she burst out laughing. Tad drew back, very much offended. “I beg your pardon, Master Tad,” she gasped, fighting to chase away her mirth. “I hope that you will excuse my want of politeness.”

  He bowed his head, forgiving her as graciously as a little lord, but then he persisted, saying, “Isn’t this a monkey? Don’t A, P, E spell monkey?”

  “No, Tad,” she said kindly. “Your mother is right. A, P, E spells ape.”

  “You don’t know any more than Ma.” Indignant, Tad slammed the book shut. “Both of you don’t know anything.”

  At that moment, Robert entered, home from Chicago, and Tad immediately posed the question to him. It took some doing, but eventually Robert convinced his younger brother that Mrs. Lincoln and Elizabeth did indeed know what they were talking about, and that A, P, E did not and never would spell monkey. Once Tad accepted this irrefutable truth, the rest of the lesson proceeded with far less difficulty.

  Elizabeth watched from the corner of her eye while she pieced her quilt, biting her lips together until the urge to laugh had passed. Then it occurred to her that if Tad had been a colored boy rather than the son of a president, and a teacher had found him so difficult to instruct, he would have been ridiculed as a dunce and held up as evidence of the inferiority of the entire race. Tad was bright; Elizabeth knew that well, and she was sure that with proper instruction and hard work, a glimmer of his father’s genius would show in him too. But Elizabeth knew many black boys Tad’s age who could read and write beautifully, and yet the myth of inferiority persisted. The unfairness of the assumptions stung. If a white child appeared dull, he and he alone was thought to suffer from a lack of intelligence or a deficient education, but if a colored boy appeared dull, the entire race was deemed unintelligent. It seemed to Elizabeth that if one race should not be judged by a single example, then neither should any other.

  Thomas Cross and William Crook returned to Washington to resume their duties at the White House, taking with them the last vestiges of Mrs. Lincoln’s former rank. As the days passed, having lost her husband and then her status, Mrs. Lincoln became consumed with fears of her incipient poverty. It had been demoralizing enough to leave the elegant Tremont House because she could not afford to live in such fine style, but to have fallen so far, so suddenly, felt like shameful exile. At first, acquaintances attempted to call on her at the Hyde Park Hotel, but Mrs. Lincoln could not bear for anyone to see her in such reduced circumstances, so she turned them all away. “I had hoped for a much different reception when I decided to move here,” she confided to Elizabeth. She had expected the Chicago elite to embrace her upon her arrival in their city; she had anticipated an outpouring of sympathy for her as the widow of the slain president. Elizabeth suspected that she had also hoped that some wealthy Republican benefactor would settle her in a residence more befitting her status and insist upon paying her expenses. But no guardian angel appeared, no offers were forthcoming. Time after time Mrs. Lincoln grasped thin straws of hope that one or another of her husband’s wealthiest supporters or a friend who had acquired great wealth due to his patronage would come to her aid, and time and time again, her hopes were dashed to pieces.

  Humiliated, Mrs. Lincoln withdrew further into her seclusion, seeing no one, expressing her grief and worry to confidantes in lengthy letters. The weight of her debts threatened to crush her, but she was determined to pay back every cent. She penned elaborate pleas for government compensation in recognition of her husband’s sacrifice for the nation, asking for all of the salary he had expected to earn in his second term as president. When Congress did not promptly make a provision for her, she decided to write directly to some of the newly wealthy, influential men who had earned fortunes from the appointments Mr. Lincoln had granted them, hoping that by reminding them what they owed the man, they would be moved to help the widow. She might have succeeded had the press not reported that Mr. Lincoln had left behind an estate worth seventy-five thousand dollars. Of course, it was bound up in a snarl of legalities, and it would be split three ways between Mrs. Lincoln and her sons, and even when her inheritance did come to her, she would not be given the principal to live on, but only the annual interest. But since the newspapers neglected to mention those details, Mrs. Lincoln’s claims of poverty rang hollow. No one, not even her husband’s closest friends and greatest admirers, was inclined to offer her sympathy or charity when her plaintive appeals seemed to paint a false portrait of her circumstances.

  Worsening matters were reports that when the Johnson family moved into the White House, they found the place ransacked, the public rooms nearly emptied of furniture. Although unscrupulous visitors and unfaithful servants had spirited away the goods, gossip lay the blame upon Mrs. Lincoln’s shoulders—or rather, within the scores of boxes and trunks she was known to have taken with her to Chicago. Thus while Mrs. Lincoln passed her lonely days feeling neglected and impoverished in remote Hyde Park, the public was gleefully relishing the new campaign against her, devouring each new sordid tale, no matter how improbable it would seem to a less prejudiced reader.

  The public’s scornful perception of her drove Mrs. Lincoln deeper into self-pity and despair. She rejected the ongoing, insistent assertions of her husband’s executor—Justice David Davis, Mr. Lincoln’s campaign manager in 1860 and his nominee to the Supreme Court in 1862—that she could live comfortably on her existing income if only she would move back to her home in Springfield. She begged friends to write to congressmen on her behalf, to use their influence to secure her the government pension she urgently needed. As First Widow, she believed that her sacrifice should be acknowledged by the government as well as the public, and lifting her above indigence was the very least they should do. Her tireless, frenzied letter writing took on the air of a crusade—to redeem her reputation, to regain the status she had lost, to receive the honors she felt herself entitled to, and to preserve her husband’s legacy. She pored over newspapers to stay informed about what was being said about Mr. Lincoln and by whom, and she filled her letters with astute observations about politics and current affairs. Any honors or provisions bestowed upon others greatly affronted her, for she believed they did not give enough credit to the slain president to whom they owed everything.

  Memorializing President Abraham Lincoln became her great cause—in addition, of course, to raising Tad and seeing Robert independent, established, and content. She often confided to Elizabeth that if not for her sons, she would be quite relieved to take her own life.

  While Mrs. Lincoln wrote letter after letter, Elizabeth too kept
up her own correspondence, sending courteous letters to favorite patrons eager to know when she might return, and writing more intimate missives to Virginia and Emma, to whom she poured out her concerns about Mrs. Lincoln and her business. Virginia offered her sympathy and urged her to come home at the earliest possibility, while Emma told her, simply and frankly, that her business was faltering in her absence. Emma and her other assistants had completed the dresses Elizabeth had begun before her departure, but new orders had become few and far between once word spread that the renowned Madam Keckley would not wield the needle herself. Out of necessity, Emma had let go half of the assistants, for there simply was not enough work for them all. “All the ladies ask when you will return,” Emma wrote. “If you come back soon I believe we can entice them back in time to sew dresses for the next social season etc., but I fear if you stay away too long they will find someone else to attend them. They will not look half as pretty but they must wear something I guess.”

  Elizabeth’s worst fears seemed to be coming to pass. She had invested everything into her dressmaking business—her money, her time, her toil—and now she felt as if she were watching it crumble to pieces from across a great chasm. The Lincolns were settled in their new home, though less happily than Elizabeth wished, and she had begun to wonder how much longer Mrs. Lincoln would require her to stay. The government had given Mrs. Lincoln a small sum to hire Elizabeth as her paid companion—thirty-five dollars a week for her services, one hundred dollars for travel expenses and lodging, and fifty dollars for mourning attire—but the income she lost neglecting her business in Washington vastly exceeded what she earned in Chicago. Also, although she would never distress Mrs. Lincoln by inquiring about the fund, she was certain that it would be depleted soon.

  Elizabeth kept up with the news too, though not as fervently as Mrs. Lincoln, who read several newspapers from New York, Washington, and Chicago each day, and Elizabeth’s heart skipped a beat whenever her gaze fell upon a story about Mr. John Wilkes Booth and his conspirators. All along, Mrs. Lincoln had seemed strangely indifferent to news about the death of her husband’s assassin, the rounding up of his conspirators, and their upcoming trial, but Elizabeth hung on every word. She also found herself searching the columns of print for any mention of Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson Davis, who had fled deep into the South until they and their small party were finally captured early one May morning near Irwinville, Georgia. Newspapers reported that when the fugitives heard Union soldiers approaching their camp, Mr. Davis threw on one of his wife’s dresses in an attempt to disguise himself and began to walk off into the surrounding forest. But a sharp-eyed corporal noticed that the very tall woman was wearing a man’s boots and ordered him to halt, while another soldier raised his rifle. Still in her nightclothes, Mrs. Davis ran to her husband and flung her arms around him, and the soldier, unwilling to shoot a woman in the back, lowered his weapon. Elizabeth knew that Varina Davis had probably saved her husband’s life, since the officers had orders to take the Confederate president dead or alive.

  Elizabeth wished she could send a kind word to Mrs. Davis, whom she had always liked despite their disparate views on the very significant matters of slavery and secession, but she did not know where to send a letter. According to newspaper accounts, Mr. Davis was in prison at Fort Monroe, but Elizabeth did not know what had become of his wife and children.

  In the last week of May, Elizabeth read that Chicago would soon host its second Great Northwestern Sanitary Fair. Throughout the war, the United States Sanitary Commission and its chapters throughout the North had raised essential funds in support of the war effort, its volunteers hosting countless fairs to earn money to purchase food, blankets, bandages, hospitals, uniforms, bedding, and nearly everything else the soldiers desperately needed. Even though President Johnson had declared the fighting officially over, the work of the Sanitary Commission went on, for the soldiers’ needs, though different in nature, were as great as ever. Proceeds from the Chicago fair would benefit impoverished veterans, wounded soldiers who could not work, and the widows and orphans of soldiers killed in battle.

  For the first Great Northwestern Sanitary Fair in the autumn of 1863, President Lincoln had donated the original draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, and it had sold for three thousand dollars. President Johnson or one of his advisers must have decided that a similar gesture was expected of him, for Elizabeth learned that the catafalque upon which President Lincoln’s casket had rested had been sent from Washington for the event. It was hoped that ticket sales to view the exhibit, which would include other artifacts from the war, would raise an impressive sum for the worthy cause.

  Intrigued, Elizabeth wanted very much to attend, but she could not persuade Mrs. Lincoln to accompany her. “An outing would do you good,” Elizabeth told her, “and I know the cause of the Union soldiers is very dear to your heart.”

  Mrs. Lincoln shuddered. “The soldiers are indeed very dear to me, but not even for them do I wish to look upon something so intimately associated with my husband’s death.”

  “The pavilion is so vast, that even if you do not go near it, you will still have many other things to see.”

  “And what would the people say if I refuse to go near my husband’s catafalque?” Mrs. Lincoln countered. “They would say I do not show him proper respect. They would say I do not mourn him and that I am indifferent to his memory. Such lies would fill the papers tomorrow. No, Elizabeth, I do not wish to be seen there, and even if I wore a heavy veil, I would be known.”

  Elizabeth was disappointed, but she understood, and so she decided to go alone. She took the train north, and after a short ride into the heart of the city, she arrived at the station and walked the short distance to the fair’s Trophy Hall on Michigan Avenue. She paid her admission fee and began touring the exhibits, reading the placards and studying the artifacts. She deliberately chose her route to save President Lincoln’s display for the end, and her heart felt heavier with every step toward it.

  The catafalque looked nearly as it had in the East Room, but strange and small and out of place in the unfamiliar, noisy, bustling setting of the pavilion. The simple bier was about seven feet long, two and a half feet wide, and perhaps two feet tall, draped in black silk trimmed in white, with heavy black tassels hanging at the four corners, deep swags of silk along the sides, and long fringe adorning the edges all around. A glass dome covered it, studded with stars, and at its base lay souvenirs of slavery taken from Southern plantations during the war—an enormous ball and chain, a pair of heavy shackles, an assortment of whips, and other items so bleakly, painfully reminiscent of her youth that Elizabeth had to turn away. She remembered how distraught Mrs. Lincoln had been when the catafalque was being constructed in the East Room, because every strike of a hammer against a nail sounded to her like a pistol shot. How thoughtless she had been to invite Mrs. Lincoln to attend the fair with her! Why on earth would any grieving widow subject herself to the sight of the bier upon which her husband’s casket had rested?

  Shaking her head and silently chiding herself, Elizabeth quickly walked away from the catafalque. She had seen nearly all she had wanted to see and was inclined to leave, but then her gaze fell upon a crowd gathered around another display on the opposite side of the hall. Curious, she drew nearer and spied an iron bell with a sign proclaiming that it had been taken from the Mississippi plantation of Jefferson Davis—but that object, though it drew many a curious eye, did not account for the crowd. The fairgoers were waiting in line to pay twenty-five cents to see a wax figure depicting Jefferson Davis at the moment of his capture in Georgia.

  Elizabeth could not resist. She joined the queue, paid her fee, and when her turn came, stepped beyond the curtain with a handful of other spectators to view the display. A wax figure bearing a fairly good resemblance to Mr. Davis stood on a platform, clad in a man’s suit with a woman’s floral garment over it, a strangely familiar garment—

  “Oh, my goodness,” Elizabeth exclaimed. “
It’s Mrs. Davis’s chintz wrapper!”

  The other visitors in her group started at her outburst. “It’s what now?” one gentleman queried as all eyes turned her way.

  Her gaze fixed on the garment, Elizabeth gestured, utterly disbelieving. “It’s—it’s one of the two chintz wrappers I made for Mrs. Davis back in January of 1861, right before she and her husband left Washington.” From the corner of her eye, she saw two ladies regarding her with astonishment as they whispered to each other. “I am a seamstress,” she explained. “I’m visiting from Washington City, where I have a dressmaking business. Mrs. Davis was one of my customers, and Mrs. Lincoln was too, and still is.”

  She was not sure why she added the last, perhaps because the doubt in their eyes unsettled her. She became aware then of other fairgoers peering around the curtain, drawn by her exclamations or wanting to see what was holding up the line.

  The first gentleman to speak to her told them, “This colored woman claims she made this wrapper for Mrs. Davis.”

  The people murmured excitedly, and some pushed their way to the front while still more peered around the curtain. Elizabeth instinctively took a step backward.

  “Is that so?” a woman asked excitedly. “Can you prove it?”

  Others joined in the call for her to prove her claims, and Elizabeth looked from one to another to the next in dismay, wishing she could flee. “How?” she managed to say. “How shall I prove it?”