Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  What would Mrs. Lincoln live for now?

  Elizabeth kept her beloved, familiar rooms in the Walker Lewis boardinghouse for a while longer, but eventually her financial troubles obliged her to move elsewhere. For the next few years she boarded with one family and then another, always within the capital. Later, after her dear friend Virginia passed on, she moved back into the Lewis boardinghouse to help Walker care for their youngest daughters, still at home—pretty Alberta, her goddaughter, and sweet Elizabeth, born after the war. Sewing work still came in sporadically, but fashions had changed with the times, and other dressmakers, including Emma, now married with a son and daughter, were more eagerly sought after by the Washington elite. In her success Emma had never forgotten who had trained her and launched her career, and she frequently sent work Elizabeth’s way. Elizabeth was grateful for the assistance and very proud of her most accomplished apprentice.

  From the little she gleaned from the press, her own troubles were nothing compared to Mrs. Lincoln’s, whose erratic behavior had only worsened in the wake of Tad’s death. In May 1875, after a shocking trial, every sordid detail of which was breathlessly recounted in the papers, Robert Lincoln had his mother declared insane and committed to an asylum in Batavia, Illinois, about forty miles west of Chicago. Powerless to help or to comfort her former friend, Elizabeth followed the heartbreaking story in the newspapers, stunned by reports that Mrs. Lincoln had tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum the day before the verdict was delivered. The attempt had been thwarted by a wary druggist, who had recognized her and had substituted a solution of burnt sugar and water for the medicine she demanded.

  For weeks afterward, Elizabeth was haunted by visions of Mrs. Lincoln languishing in a cold, ominous institution, devoid of all warmth and comfort. She imagined her keening endlessly as she had when Willie died, weeping and shrieking as she had after Mr. Lincoln had been killed. Elizabeth had been her most faithful companion in those dark days, but she had been unable to offer Mrs. Lincoln any solace when Tad passed away, nor could she do anything for her now.

  Then she remembered the quilt, and she worked upon it feverishly. She finished the Grandmother’s Flower Garden borders, and then added one final border, ivory silk with four more proud eagles, one on each side echoing the dark eagle bearing a flag in the center, but made of gold silk, stuffed and embroidered, with more intricate floral embroidering all along the sides. As it neared completion, she wrote to Dr. Richard J. Patterson at Bellevue Place and asked if she might be permitted to visit Mrs. Lincoln. “I have made her a precious gift, which I hope she will accept as a token of my enduring sympathy and friendship,” she wrote. “It is my great hope that this quilt, with its pieces reminiscent of happier days of years gone by, will offer her diversion, comfort, beauty, and solace in her confinement.”

  She had grown so accustomed to sending letters to Illinois only to receive no reply that she was almost startled when Dr. Patterson responded within a fortnight. He offered her his compliments and said that he was “most gratified to know that Mrs. Abraham Lincoln was not forgotten by her Washington friends,” but that he must discourage Elizabeth from attempting to call on Mrs. Lincoln, especially since she would be obliged to travel hundreds of miles to do so. Often Mrs. Lincoln was unfit to receive callers, he explained, and when she was, she almost always refused to see anyone.

  Remembering how Mrs. Lincoln had turned away many kindhearted visitors during the early days of her widowhood in Hyde Park, Elizabeth was disappointed but not surprised.

  As for her gift, Dr. Patterson wrote, “It is with great admiration for your generosity that I must respectfully urge you not to send this quilt—which sounds truly extraordinary, a masterpiece of the form—until Mrs. Lincoln is better able to appreciate it. At this time she abhors all tokens of the past. Objects, places, and anniversaries that evoke memories a sane person would find pleasantly diverting, are an anathema to her. I regret that as finely made as your quilt surely is, Mrs. Lincoln would find no comfort in it. I encourage you to keep the quilt safe, and to deliver it to her after she has been restored to reason, at which time I am sure she will thank you for it.”

  She wouldn’t, Elizabeth realized. She never would. It was not a symptom of Mrs. Lincoln’s insanity that she could not bear souvenirs of the past. She had always shunned them. She had quickly, almost frantically, given away Willie’s toys and books after his death. She had readily parted with Mr. Lincoln’s relics in the weeks following his assassination, not only to express gratitude and respect for his dearest friends, but also to get them away from her, far away, where she would never have to look upon them again.

  Blinking back tears, Elizabeth packed up the quilt, certain that this time would be the last. What a fool she had been to think Mrs. Lincoln would ever want to look upon scraps of the dresses she had worn at the height of her power as First Lady, dresses she had tried to part with in what turned out to be the most humiliating scandal in a life that had known too many.

  What a fool Elizabeth had been to assume that Mrs. Lincoln would want anything from her.

  From time to time, brief news reports would address Mrs. Lincoln’s incarceration. One journalist from the Chicago Post and Mail who had come to view the sanatorium’s grounds was inexplicably granted an interview with the ailing widow, and when Elizabeth read that he found her clad in a shabby dress with her hair gone completely white, her heart sank. When the reporter noted that she rambled in conversation, and that if left alone in her room she spoke to imaginary companions, Elizabeth felt so heartsick for her that she could not finish reading the article. Expecting Mrs. Lincoln’s decline to continue inexorably, Elizabeth was delighted to read little more than a month later that she had been pronounced well enough to leave the asylum and visit her sister, Mrs. Elizabeth Edwards, in Springfield. “It is not likely that she will return to Bellevue Asylum,” the paper’s Chicago correspondent reported. “She is decidedly better, sleeps and eats well, and shows no tendency to any mania; but whether the cure is permanent or not the test of active life and time will prove.”

  Elizabeth rejoiced at this good news, and again when, in June 1876, headlines declared that Mrs. Lincoln had officially been declared restored to reason. She resided with her sister Elizabeth in Springfield, their old estrangement apparently forgotten. Elizabeth’s faint hope that Mrs. Lincoln might find it within her heart to forgive her too diminished yet again when she learned that Mrs. Lincoln had sailed for France on October 1 and would likely spend many years abroad.

  Mrs. Lincoln did not return to the United States until the autumn of 1880, and only then because, at sixty-two years of age, she was too ill to live alone. She returned to her sister Elizabeth’s home and care, and Elizabeth knew then that Mrs. Lincoln would never again visit Washington.

  On July 2, 1881, Robert Lincoln was walking with the newly elected president James Garfield through a Washington railway station when a disgruntled office seeker shot the president twice in the chest. Mr. Garfield survived the attack, but as the summer waned, infection set in and he declined, suffering eighty days until death finally claimed him on September 19. As shocked and horrified as the rest of the nation, Elizabeth found herself unable to sleep, worrying about Mrs. Lincoln, who was surely in anguish as the new tragedy forced her to relive her own husband’s assassination.

  Elizabeth was tempted to write to her again—to offer sympathies, to assure Mrs. Lincoln she had at least one friend thinking about her in those troubled times—but she sat at her desk staring off into the distance, waiting for words that would not come. Eventually she abandoned the letter as a futile effort, having never once touched pen to paper.

  Elizabeth read about Mrs. Lincoln twice more in the national papers. The first occasion came in November of that year, shortly after Congress granted the newly widowed Mrs. Garfield an annual pension of five thousand dollars, two thousand dollars greater than Mrs. Lincoln’s. Her campaign to get Congress to increase her own pension to mat
ch put Mrs. Lincoln in the headlines once again. In January of 1882, Congress agreed, and with unexpected generosity also voted to grant her back pay as well as a fifteen-thousand-dollar bonus. Elizabeth privately cheered the decision, glad to know that Mrs. Lincoln would surely at last be released from the financial worries that had plagued her for years.

  But Mrs. Lincoln did not have long to enjoy her triumph.

  The next time Elizabeth discovered her name in the Washington papers was the day after she died in Springfield on July 16, 1882.

  With all hopes of reconciliation forever lost, Elizabeth no longer had any reason to finish the medallion quilt, but while the nation mourned and remembered and eulogized the former First Lady, she found herself compelled to take the unfinished top from the trunk. At first she considered adding a wide band of black silk all around the outer edges to signify mourning, but just as she was about to put shears to fabric, she decided against it. Mrs. Lincoln had spent nearly two decades in mourning, and although Elizabeth knew it was a strange notion, she could not bear to consign the quilt to the same unhappy end. Instead she trimmed the quilt in long red fringe, which reminded her of the glamour and patriotism of Mrs. Lincoln’s best days in the White House. Then, in recognition of Mrs. Lincoln’s passing, Elizabeth added four red tassels, one in each corner, because they reminded her of the tassels that had hung from the black silk drape on Mr. Lincoln’s catafalque. That was the single note of mourning Elizabeth allowed in the quilt, although she knew it was unlikely anyone else gazing upon the quilt would recognize it for what it was.

  It’s over, Elizabeth thought when the quilt was finished.

  She had been working doggedly until then, keeping herself so busy that she had no time for contemplation, but the realization that it was truly over cracked the façade of her serene resignation, and all the grief pushed out through the fissures, and she wept.

  In 1890, eight years after Mrs. Lincoln was beyond caring what Elizabeth did with the precious relics entrusted to her, Elizabeth found herself in such difficult financial circumstances that she was obliged to sell her mementoes of Mr. Lincoln, which she had cherished and protected for thirty-five years. Overcoming her wariness of brokers, she enlisted the services of W. H. Lowdermilk & Co. and sold her treasures to Mr. Charles F. Gunther of Chicago, a candy manufacturer and collector of curiosities. To Mr. Gunther went the bloodstained cloak Mrs. Lincoln had worn to the theater on the night of her husband’s assassination, the right-hand glove Mr. Lincoln had worn at the first public reception after his second inauguration, and everything else. The only mementoes Elizabeth kept for herself were a pair of Mrs. Lincoln’s earrings, the pieces of fabric left over from sewing Mrs. Lincoln’s dresses, and the medallion quilt, which to Elizabeth seemed a relic of that time, although she had finished it later.

  Word of the sale found its way to Wilberforce University near Xenia, Ohio, where the news must have evoked Bishop Daniel Payne’s curiosity and concern. He had never forgotten how Elizabeth had once offered to donate her Lincoln relics to the university, so they might be exhibited in Europe to raise money to rebuild the school’s main building, which had burned down on the day President Lincoln was assassinated. Mrs. Lincoln had objected so vehemently that Elizabeth had apologetically withdrawn her offer, but Bishop Payne had understood her dilemma and had respected her decision. Mrs. Keckley must have fallen upon hard times indeed to sell her cherished mementoes now.

  Elizabeth was pleasantly surprised to receive Bishop Payne’s letter inquiring about her health, and she enjoyed his pleasant reminiscences and his description of how the university had grown and prospered since the days her son, George, had studied there. Then he proposed a change to the faculty that astonished her so much she had to ease herself into a chair: He offered her a position as head of Wilberforce University’s Department of Sewing and Domestic Science.

  She immediately wrote back to thank him profusely, but to decline. She was no professor, she reminded him. It was true that she had learned her letters in childhood, even though it had been illegal for her to read and write, and she had endeavored all her life thereafter to obey her father’s wish that she “learn her book.” She had always loved to read, especially the Bible, but she had enjoyed nothing in the way of a formal education. Would not university students expect a more learned instructor?

  Not at all, Bishop Payne promptly responded. Students in the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science expected instructors who knew their craft inside and out and could skillfully pass on their knowledge to others. Elizabeth fit that description perfectly, and her experience as a mantua maker in the highest of Washington’s social circles would be invaluable. That she had accomplished so much without the benefit of formal schooling attested to her strength of character—her determination, perseverance, and love of learning, values she could impart to her students.

  Although Elizabeth had taught sewing to freedwomen in contraband camps and ambitious young ladies in her workrooms, she had never taught in a classroom. How very different it would be, she reflected, imagining herself standing before a class of eager pupils, patiently demonstrating how to make flawless darts and lecturing them on the benefits of proper posture in avoiding neck and back strain.

  She agreed to visit the campus, to meet the faculty and students and to learn more about the position. She traveled by train and was entertained so graciously by everyone she met there that after two days at Wilberforce University, she gladly accepted Bishop Payne’s generous offer. And so it was that after thirty years in Washington, at the age of seventy-four, she packed up her few belongings, bade farewell to Walker Lewis and his daughters and Emma and her many friends from the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, and moved out west to Ohio.

  Never once in her blessedly peaceful and rewarding years there did she regret her decision.

  Elizabeth thrived in the classroom and on peaceful strolls around the campus chatting with her cheerful, inexhaustibly curious, impossibly young students, all of them born after the war, never having known a single day when slavery was the law of the land. Dressmaking had changed since she had honed her skills in the art, but she adapted, and she soon discovered that experience trumped even the most newfangled tricks and contraptions. Among themselves, her students whispered stories about her and would come to her later, wide-eyed and awestruck, to ask what President Lincoln had really been like and whether it was true that his wife had been insane. Elizabeth would never fail to respond with serene praise for president and First Lady alike, and she would never allow anyone to disparage Mrs. Lincoln in her presence.

  Sometimes Elizabeth would invite a group of favorite, promising students to her home and show them the silks and satins and other fine fabrics she had saved from making Mrs. Lincoln’s garments. On occasion, she would reward an accomplishment with a gift of a small scrap of the precious fabric, which the lucky student could make into a pincushion, a small, useful White House treasure of her own. Her students and a few faculty members alike marveled at her quilt, and they sympathized when she expressed her regret that she had been unable to give it to Mrs. Lincoln as she had intended.

  Elizabeth found it strange that not one of her students seemed aware of the scandal that had led to her estrangement from Mrs. Lincoln. Some of them had heard that she had written a memoir, although none of them had ever read it, which surprised Elizabeth not at all since Robert Lincoln had done his utmost to reduce the inventory.

  Eventually it dawned on her that perhaps she had triumphed over the scandal after all.

  In 1893, Wilberforce University participated in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a grand and glorious event in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World. When the event was in the planning stages, exhibit proposals from colored Americans were summarily rejected, but after strong protests from the black community led by Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, the exposition organizers relented and allowed very limited participation, in
cluding displays of needlework and drawings in the Women’s Building. Knowing that many skilled artisans and scientists of her race had been unfairly excluded diminished Elizabeth’s pleasure in the honor bestowed upon Wilberforce University, and if it had been up to her, she would have withdrawn from the exhibition in solidarity. But it was not her decision, and, as she told herself, her hardworking students deserved to have their excellent work displayed and their achievements noted. Only by taking their rightful place among whites and presenting their handiwork before the eyes of a skeptical public could they hope to influence prejudiced minds.

  Elizabeth felt herself drawn along by the strong pull of memory as she and several of her students traveled by train to Chicago. When she closed her eyes, she could see her former patron and lost friend as she had been in those grief-stricken weeks in Hyde Park, lamenting alone in her darkened room, staring unhappily across the vast dark blue of Lake Michigan. She had never ceased mourning, Elizabeth knew. She had never gathered up the shards of her broken life and reassembled them into something new, something endurable, if not happy. Even though Mrs. Lincoln had passed beyond all human suffering, and had been reunited at long last with her youngest sons and her beloved husband, Elizabeth was moved to pity for her anew.

  The exposition was a wonder to behold. Elizabeth had assumed that it would be much like the Great Northwestern Sanitary Fair she had attended in the city in June of 1865, but the World’s Columbian Exposition far surpassed it. Fifty nations participated, and when she wasn’t tending her department’s exhibit, Elizabeth and her students toured the various buildings and pavilions, marveling at clever new inventions, tasting strange and often delicious foods, and listening to music from different countries far across the sea. A wistful ache filled Elizabeth as she waited safely on solid ground while her bold, young students braved a ride on a dangerous-looking contraption called a Ferris wheel. The exposition’s vast grounds were so close to Mrs. Lincoln’s former Hyde Park residence that Elizabeth could have walked there, if she wished—but she knew she would find no comfort or satisfaction in revisiting that unhappy chapter of her past.