First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  Most of these critics were trying, to borrow a Harry Truman phrase, “to upset the applecart.” They were out to wreck Lincoln’s presidency. What baffles me is why so many latter-day historians have agreed with them. I fear it is very difficult for later generations to comprehend the day-by-day lives of those who have preceded them or to appreciate the rude shocks they encountered as they fumbled into the future. Imagine, for a moment, how we would regard Mary Lincoln if her husband had negotiated the Southerners back into the Union, or decisively crushed their rebellion at Bull Run. These same historians who vilify her might very well be hailing the way she created a bastion of prestige and peaceful refinement in the White House in trying times.

  Instead, thanks to the fortunes of war, Mary Lincoln was slammed in the newspapers as vain, egotistical, extravagant, tyrannical. In a move that may remind some of newspaper exchanges about our current First Lady, on August 1, 1861, the Chicago Tribune cried “ENOUGH!” No previous First Lady, they protested, “has ever been so maltreated by the popular press.”

  A sensitive woman who craved approval, Mary Lincoln was deeply hurt by these assaults. She was also mortified to learn how much money she had spent on the White House. The expenses had been handled by a bureaucrat in charge of a typical Washington “commission”—and, in true federal government style, he had not so much as blinked as they went “overbudget,” to use modern D.C. groupspeak.

  President Lincoln did a lot more than blink. He had an uncharacteristic temper tantrum, raging at Mary that her “flub-a-dubs” had embarrassed him with Congress and the people at a time when the Union armies were losing battles with monotonous regularity and his political capital was dwindling toward zero. A lot of wives would have retreated to their bedrooms and stayed there. Instead, Mary set out to beat the Washington system with the help of some shrewd advice from the White House gardener, John Watt.

  Watt was no ordinary gardener, I should add; historians of the White House consider him a genius who turned the haphazard plantings around the mansion into near perfection. He also created greenhouses that supplied the President and his family with flowers year round. I am sure you will not be surprised to learn that he did not work these miracles without spending a lot of money.

  Watt calmed the First Lady’s fears by assuring her that federal budgets were easily adjustable. All you had to do was find the right formula. Under his tutelage, Mary deftly disposed of her original commissioner as a sacrificial offering to her critics, obliquely blaming him for the red ink. Then she found another commissioner, an old Washington hand named Benjamin French. They hit it off immediately. “She is a smart intelligent woman who likes to have her own way pretty much. I am delighted with her independence,” French told a friend. “She bears herself in every particular like a lady.”

  French’s commission was responsible for the upkeep of the Capitol and other federal buildings, as well as the White House, and it had a budget of a half million dollars. He soon found it easy to reassign money from such projects as gas lamps on Capitol Hill to finance Mary’s overbudget wallpaper and rugs. Commissioner French smoothly advised his boss, the secretary of the interior, that such transfers were legal under a statute passed in the presidency of Martin Van Buren. To the flummoxed secretary, who was, like many cabinet officers before and since, a Washington newcomer, that was almost as far back as the reign of King Tut. When more red ink oozed onto the White House ledger, French persuaded a friendly congressman to noodle an extra $4,500 into an appropriations bill. It passed without a demur.

  Stung by Lincoln’s threat to pay for her redecoration out of his salary, Mary meanwhile instituted a cost-cutting program for routine White House expenses. For a woman accused of reckless extravagance by contemporaries and historians, she managed the Lincolns’ personal expenses with remarkable skill, saving two-thirds of the President’s $25,000 salary each year, building up a retirement fund of almost $70,000 by the end of Lincoln’s first term.

  Mary Lincoln had two problems: one was the Civil War; the other, less acknowledged, was the prejudice against independent, strong-willed women in the America of her day. In the smaller world of Springfield, Illinois, Mary had functioned as her husband’s political partner with no difficulty. Now, as President, he became a remote figure, engulfed day and night by visitors, walled off by two brash young secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay, who treated Mary with the same sort of condescension that H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman would later display toward Pat Nixon. Mary was reduced to asking near strangers to influence her husband on matters about which he used to seek her advice. Some of the men around Lincoln—especially Hay and Nicolay—resented her intrusions and leaked nasty versions of her attempts to remain her husband’s partner. The result was another sneering epithet: “Mrs. President.”

  Much of the time, Mary was doing exactly what hordes of males were doing in the White House—looking for government jobs for themselves or their relatives. In those pre-civil service days, the spoils system, instituted by President Andrew Jackson, left the whole federal government up for grabs when a new party won power. Mary saw no reason why the President’s partner was not entitled to a few pieces of the action for her friends and family. Many of her critics were competing for the same positions.

  Lincoln’s anxiety about how much money Mary spent was to some extent his own fault. She had always run the family’s finances. Money made Lincoln uncomfortable; he had no interest in it and even less aptitude for handling it. The President acknowledged this in calmer moments. There was no question that he enjoyed the sight of Mary in expensive clothes. At one White House reception he remarked: “My wife is as handsome as she was when a girl and I, a poor nobody, then fell in love with her and… have never fallen out.”

  In an era when most women were so poorly educated that they panicked at the thought of conversing with a man through a long state dinner, Mary Lincoln was a striking exception. She had both a good education and a passion for politics, and she had no qualms about displaying either one. She also worked at the less charming aspects of the First Lady’s job. Commissioner Benjamin French used to go into hiding on “handshake days,” as he called them. But Mary was always there with a smile and a warm greeting.

  Not a few of the guests went away charmed. George Bancroft of Massachusetts, a man who had studied the history of the country more thoroughly than any other American of his time, arguably making him a better than average judge of a First Lady, found Mary Lincoln remarkably well informed on the war and the politics of Washington. She told him she was a “conservative” and had no sympathy for secession, even though several of her Kentucky brothers were serving in the Confederate army. She also discussed her redecoration of the White House and urged him to return for another visit. “I came home entranced,” Bancroft said.

  Alas, Mary Lincoln’s ability as a hostess played a part in irreparably damaging her reputation. At one of her early receptions she encountered “Chevalier” Henry Wikoff. A name-dropper with an eye for juicy gossip, he was one of those European adventurers who show up periodically in America and live quite successfully on their wit and charm. Mary was by no means the only Washington hostess who seized on the chevalier to enliven her parties. It did Wikoff no harm that he was a good friend of White House gardener John Watt.

  Unfortunately, Washington was a city under siege, with Confederate armies only a few miles away in Virginia and Confederate sympathizers everywhere. To root out spies, Congress created the Special Committee of Investigation of the Loyalty of Public Officers. One of the accused was John Watt, whom Mary defended with a barrage of outraged letters. Watt convinced Benjamin French that he was true to the Union, and he became even more favored by the First Lady.

  Then came an unnerving leak of the sort that can rattle the entire White House. The New York Herald, a paper dedicated to destroying Lincoln, printed the text of the President’s State of the Union address while it was still in draft form on his desk. The editors naturally accompanied their
scoop with a few columns of uncomplimentary remarks. Some vigorous detective work revealed Henry Wikoff had passed the speech to the Herald for a fat fee. In jail under threat of a firing squad—penetrating the President’s office was considered high treason—Wikoff confessed he got the speech from John Watt, who had memorized portions of it in the course of several visits to Lincoln’s office and recited them to Wikoff. Watt was forced to admit this grisly truth before the congressional committee on loyalty—and Mary Lincoln’s reputation in wartime Washington received a devastating blow

  Henceforth she was widely regarded as disloyal, possibly even a Confederate spy. Her brothers in the Confederate army were offered as proof—along with her viscous Kentucky accent. On top of this scandal came a personal tragedy that further unraveled Mary Lincoln’s stability. Her favorite son, eleven-year-old Willie, the brightest and most effervescent of her four boys, died of typhoid fever. Ironically, he was a casualty of the same Civil War that destroyed Mary Lincoln’s reputation. The White House drew its drinking water from the Potomac River. The thousands of troops camped along its bank used the river as a latrine, filling the water with typhoid and other deadly bacteria.

  Mary had lost another son, Eddie, during the Lincolns’ Springfield years. The death of a child was not unusual in 1862—but the loss of Willie, combined with the accumulating rumors and gossip about her disloyalty and sneers about her sometimes impulsive, supposedly tyrannical attempts to get her way in the White House, was more than Mary could handle. In a pathetic attempt to regain Willie, she began consulting spiritualists. Again, it was something thousands of other Americans, in anguish over the loss of loved ones in battle, were doing at this tormented time. But Mary Lincoln’s desire for consolation came to be seen as one more proof of her deficiency as a First Lady.

  Although her private behavior became erratic (she often broke into tears at the mention of Willie’s name), Mary continued to work hard as First Lady. In February 1863, Benjamin French wrote in his diary: “Mrs. Lincoln and the President had such a reception as I have never seen before in the day time. The rooms were crowded with ‘fair women and brave men.’ Mrs. Lincoln appeared unusually lively and gracious, and received with an air of grace and dignity, surpassing her ordinary self.”

  From French we know that after one of these ordeals, the Lincolns usually retired to the Oval Room, where Mary soaked and rubbed her husband’s hand. Apparently Lincoln never acquired the art of the trick handshake that has helped other Presidents survive receiving lines. His big hand was often blistered and swollen. In those days ladies did not shake hands, so Mary escaped this sort of damage. But she still had to stand beside her husband for two or three hours in a room that became all but depleted of oxygen.

  Some people thought Mary did a better job than her husband at another White House chore—reviewing the troops. With the war in full swing, all sorts of divisions and brigades paraded past the White House, and the Lincolns were required to come out and inspect them. One critic warned the President that too often he slouched and turned his head to talk to friends, when he should keep his eyes on the brave men in blue. Mary, on the other hand, “had savoir faire and was charming enough to make up for all your deficiencies.”

  Mary’s performances as a hostess and parade watcher became sporadic, however, as the war ground on and the casualties multiplied endlessly. Spilling across half the continent, the conflict absorbed, even consumed, the President. His wife retreated into a shell of private grief, haunted by imaginary fears and nightmarish dreams. She passed most of the day in her sitting room on the second floor, waiting for her exhausted husband to appear, which he rarely did before midnight.

  In her loneliness, guilt began mingling with Mary’s sorrow. She, the ambitious one, had been the driving force behind Abraham’s ascent, and God had apparently punished her with Willie’s death. The ambition that drives a man or his wife to the presidency can do terrible things to them when tragedy strikes down one of their children.

  Mary’s grief multiplied when she learned that two of her brothers, Samuel and Alexander, her favorite, had died fighting for the Confederacy. Even worse, somehow, was the news that General Ben Helm, husband of her youngest sister, Emilie, had been killed leading an attack on the Union Army at the Battle of Chickamauga. When Emilie attempted to return to Kentucky with her two young children, federal officials arrested her. Lincoln ordered her sent to the White House. Among the mean-spirited, this ignited another spate of rumors about Mary Lincoln’s Southern sympathies.

  I am more interested in Emilie’s reaction to Mary’s deterioration. She could not believe this frightened, haunted woman was the happy, lively older sister she had left with protestations of love when they parted in 1861. Mary’s fears, her dreams were “unnatural and abnormal,” Emilie said. Lincoln begged Emilie to stay on in the White House, in spite of the fact that she was an irreconcilable Janey Reb. He felt she was the companion Mary badly needed. But Emilie, after several ferocious exchanges with Northern senators and congressmen—she shared the hot Todd temper and sharp tongue—went home to Kentucky, leaving Mary even more bereft.

  Gradually, Mary Lincoln began to hate the White House. It was haunted by Willie’s ghost, and by her present but preoccupied husband. She spent more and more time at a summer residence, the Soldiers’ Home, on Rock Creek Road, about three miles north of the Capitol. Built in the 1850s to house retired federal veterans, it had a charming cottage on its five hundred wooded acres that several Presidents used to escape Washington’s ghastly humidity and foul smells.

  By the time victory emerged from the slaughter in early 1865, Mary Lincoln was a deeply depressed, isolated woman. Her mental state became apparent in an episode which did almost as much to ruin her reputation as the mess with Chevalier Wikoff. On March 23,1865, she accompanied her husband to Virginia to review General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Potomac and be on hand for what looked like the imminent end of the war. The day after they arrived, Lincoln left Mary aboard the side-wheeler that had brought them up the James River and rode off with his generals to visit the battlefields around Richmond. Later in the day Mary and Julia Grant climbed into an army ambulance that had been converted into a makeshift carriage. Bouncing over the atrocious roads, Mary became more and more infuriated. When she reached the field where the review was to be held, she found herself relegated to a seat far in the rear, while the President sat on his horse in the front row, beside an extremely pretty woman, the wife of a Union general.

  Mary’s Todd temper erupted. This was not the way Abraham should treat his political partner. She had stood beside him as a near equal at the White House, reviewing hundreds of parades. Why, in the hour of victory, was she being treated like a nobody? She waded across the muddy field and assaulted the President with every irate verb and adjective in her vocabulary, while the ranking generals of the Army of the Potomac gaped with disbelief.

  The story spread through Washington, certifying Mary Lincoln as something close to a madwoman. I make no apologies for it—beyond the explanations already given. It was atrocious behavior. But Mary soon calmed down and was thoroughly ashamed of herself. She barely spoke to anyone for the rest of the trip, sequestering herself with her youngest son, Tad, and her oldest son, Robert, who had become an officer on General Grant’s staff. Eventually she returned to Washington, mortified and even more alone.

  While others tut-tutted, Abraham Lincoln was not particularly upset by Mary’s outburst. He had encountered her temper too often to take it seriously. He knew Mary quickly regretted her explosions and did her best to make amends with soothing words and her ample feminine charm. A little over two weeks later, on Palm Sunday, she stood smiling at a White House window while Lincoln spoke to a joyous crowd, celebrating the news that Robert E. Lee had surrendered his army to General Grant at Appomattox Court House.

  With peace at hand, Lincoln started trying to be a husband again. He wrote Mary tender, playful notes and invited her for rides around Washington in o
ne of the White House carriages. The President’s good humor—and his desire to share it with Mary—led him to suggest they go to Ford’s Theater on Good Friday, April 14, to see a comedy, Our American Cousin.

  That afternoon they went for another carriage ride. Mary wanted to invite some friends, but Abraham said he preferred to be alone with her. “We must both be more cheerful in the future,” he told her. “Between the war and the loss of our darling Willie, we have both been very miserable.” Here is evidence that the man who understood Mary Lincoln best was well aware of what had happened to her. He was taking part of the blame, admitting he too had been depressed and unable to help her.

  At the play that evening, Mary impulsively took Abraham’s hand during the third act. With them were a young couple, Major Henry Rathbone and his fiancée, Clara Harris. They were deliriously in love. “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on you so?” Mary asked.

  “She won’t think anything about it,” Lincoln said, airily comparing them with the young lovers.

  Ten seconds later a madman named John Wilkes Booth burst into the presidential box and shot Abraham Lincoln in the head. From that moment Mary Lincoln ceased to be a balanced woman. Can anyone blame her?

  Chapter 17

  —

  THE (PROBABLY)

  WORST

  FIRST LADY

  I HAVE MY OWN CANDIDATE FOR WORST FIRST LADY. WHEN THE Trumans used to discuss former denizens of the White House, Warren Harding’s name was seldom spoken with respect. Dad did not hesitate to call him our worst President. As I began delving into the lives of First Ladies, I found myself wondering if Florence Kling Harding was just as bad. I soon discovered they were a matched pair.