Best Little Stories from the Civil War: More than 100 true stories

by C. Brian Kelly

  At this final debate, too, she heard Abraham repeat his warning that “a house divided against itself cannot stand,” uttered with the amendment, “I believe this Government cannot endure permanently, half Slave half free.”

  Despite all the hurrahs, though, Lincoln was defeated in his bid for the Senate. Of course Lincoln was disheartened, to say the least, but what of his wife who had held such confidence in their political destiny? They had fought long and hard, and yet she was not totally disheartened. Writing to Emilie, she said, “One feels better even after losing, if one has had a brave, whole-hearted fight.”

  Then, too, “fizzle-gigs and fire-works” was the surprising, almost cheery phrase Lincoln used to describe the campaign to a friend. But his disappointment was obvious in a letter to another friend. “I now sink out of view, and shall be forgotten,” he wrote, but more prophetically he continued, “I believe I have made some marks which will tell for the cause of civil liberty long after I’m gone.”

  Like Mary, in fact, he was not yet ready to give up the quest for the political grail. Lincoln also told a downhearted follower: “Quit that. You will soon feel better. Another ‘blow-up’ is coming; and we shall have fun again.”

  Blowup, yes; fun, no—not in the true sense of the word. Excitement aplenty, yes! In May 1860, at the national Republican convention held in nearby Chicago, Abraham Lincoln was nominated to be the Republican candidate for president. Suddenly—was it really possible?—the impossible dream could be, might be, realized!

  The firing of a hundred guns in Springfield that November election night indeed did proclaim Lincoln’s victory, and as he turned to leave the State House he remarked, “There’s a little woman down at our house [who] would like to hear this. I’ll go down and tell her.”

  That night, the Lincoln home became the center of attention for all Springfield—it seemed the whole town had arrived on the doorstep.

  Fireworks and rockets, bands blared their music in the street, and, as one observer said, “even the Democrats, who all liked Lincoln personally, joined in the jubilee.” What a night it was for Springfield, adopted home for both Lincolns!

  Now the “little woman” who had not so patiently awaited her turn to continue the Todd-Parker saga of legendary feats of patriotism and bravery was ready to march on to her own glory, along with her own triumphant man.

  Somehow, though, it wasn’t destined to work out quite that way.

  The two-story house at Eighth and Jackson Streets that had been their home for fifteen years was rented out; furniture was stored. If there were pangs of nostalgia, Mary brushed them aside as she made ready for a new life of bigger and better things. But already her elation was clouded by ugly threats directed at her husband and by the ominous rumbles of approaching war. Danger would now be a constant companion, making their leave-taking for Washington less than joyful for all in the family. Mary, if she were present at the rail depot that morning of February 11, 1861, must have felt a chill as she listened to her husband say his farewell to Springfield—“I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington.”

  Lincoln’s special Great Western railroad train then rolled out of town, leaving Mary and the younger boys—Willie and Tad—to catch up with him and Robert the next day in Indianapolis. That day, February 12, after all, was his birthday, his fifty-second.

  The journey east was to be a campaign-like tour taking days and passing through small-town and big-city America alike. The New York Herald noted that men carrying American flags were stationed along the tracks at half-mile intervals. “Every town and village passed was decorated.” Thousands awaited a glimpse of the gangling giant—their president-elect. Mary, for her part, happily, even dreamily, wandered about the special train, chatting with one and all. As one onlooker said, “She was tickled to death with all she had seen since leaving home.” No doubt, too, all talk of dangers aside, she was thrilled to be going back to Washington once again, this time at the side of the most important man in the country.

  Always longing to travel and see other places, other people, Mary now had the opportunity—she thoroughly enjoyed the ride through the countryside. Many of her women relatives were in the Lincoln entourage, but it had been a sore subject that few of her Todd relatives had supported her husband in his quest for the presidency. In all of Lexington only two votes were cast for Lincoln. On the other hand, her sister Elizabeth, who once opposed Mary’s marriage to Lincoln, was now very much present to share in Mary’s triumph, as were Elizabeth’s two daughters and a niece, Elizabeth Todd Grimsley—who later wrote an informative account of her time with the Lincolns in the White House.

  Along the whistle-stop tour Lincoln would step out on the back platform and greet the well-wishers. Sometimes, heeding cries from the crowd to see Mrs. Lincoln, Mary made her appearance as well. As she stood by his side at one such stop, the president-elect tenderly held her hand as he quipped to the onlookers, “Now you see before you the long and short of the Presidency.” Mary Lincoln of course was only five feet, three inches, not unduly petite, but next to her giant of a man she did appear very short. In fact, she would never allow a photograph made of the two of them together, since she was aware of the absurd contrast they made.

  The train rolled merrily on, but trouble lay ahead. Fortunately, Lincoln’s advisers had engaged the services of Allan Pinkerton, a former Scottish barrel maker who had founded one of the first private detective agencies in America. He had placed spies along the train route, and he was informed of a plot to sabotage the railroad somewhere near Baltimore, “a hotbed of secessionist agitation and notorious for lawless gangs,” as Dawn Langley Simmons described the Maryland city in her biography A Rose for Mrs. Lincoln. It was decided that the president-elect would secretly switch trains and arrive in Washington ahead of schedule. Mary and the children would follow on without Lincoln.

  Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, soon to be the first lady of the land, thus arrived in Washington rather unceremoniously and not on the arm of her husband, the president-elect. Once again, any dramatic dreams of glory she may have held were thwarted. Arriving in the nation’s capital with no fanfare, she was quietly escorted to the hotel where they were to stay until the inauguration, although she at least was greeted in person by the Willard brothers, owners of the hotel that is still a Washington landmark today as the Willard Inter-Continental. Reunited with her husband, she found him “sprawled out in an armchair in their suite upstairs.” In seconds, the children had left her side for their father’s lap, ready for a good round of play.

  The family’s split arrival, and the ugly threats imposing these unusual arrangements, were an unpleasant harbinger of the ill feelings that the Lincolns would encounter in Washington’s Southern-dominated society. Feelings of resentment ran high as Southerners took their leave, as these new Republicans came in, and as Washington took on the appearance of an armed camp. “The ‘aristocrats’ who remained looked upon their Southern-born First Lady as a traitor for being married to the champion of anti-slavery, and the leader of a new social revolution,” wrote Simmons.

  Unfortunately for Mary, and Mary alone, the town’s Yankee residents were just as vicious and vitriolic in their conviction that a Southern spy was taking up residence in the White House.

  Despite all the unpleasantness, Mary was excited to be in Washington with her now-famous husband and their three sons. Robert, by this time a student at Harvard, was on hand for the family gathering. He was often the life of the party and was playful with his friends. Two chums from school had met him in Indianapolis to bid him farewell on his journey to Washington. They had both hugged him and playfully suggested that he be a good boy in Washington, and then, before Robert knew what they were doing, they triumphantly left with a lock of his hair. Now old enough to join the men in the smoking room downstairs at the Willard, he was known to smoke a cigar or two. He also enjoyed listening to the music in the hotel, but he complaine
d when some anti-Unionists persuaded the band to strike up “Dixie,” even then the well-known air associated with newly formed Confederacy. The music-makers diplomatically followed up with “Hail Columbia,” noted Simmons.

  In preparation for becoming the president’s lady, Mary had gone to New York on a shopping spree the month before leaving for Washington. And quite a spree it was! While a Springfield housewife she had been frugal, some say even parsimonious, but in her new role she insisted on the very best no matter the cost. She was especially fond of fancy hats and had found a milliner in New York who could create headpieces that suited her. For the first time in her life she did not have to pay on the spot, since credit was gladly extended to the now-prominent Mrs. Lincoln.

  Ready to claim her place in Washington, she was anxious to demonstrate that she was no backwoods matron from Illinois. She in fact had already received approving notices calling her the fashionable Mrs. Lincoln—the Home Journal was calling her the “Illinois Queen.”

  Safe and secure in one of her prettiest new hoop-skirted dresses, the newly arrived Mrs. Lincoln received guests in the parlor of their hotel suite. Here she held court not only as a fashionable lady but as one knowledgeable about politics, which she could and did discuss candidly and intelligently. An admiring Lincoln at one such reception commented to a guest, “My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl, and I a poor nobody then, fell in love with her, and what is more, I have never fallen out.”

  Inauguration Day arrived. Mary and her sons took their seats on the special platform built out from the Capitol’s east portico. At any moment her husband would officially become the sixteenth president of the United States. Chief Justice Roger Taney, for the seventh time in his long career, would do the swearing-in. Could anyone have foreseen the extreme irony in the fact that Taney’s Dred Scott decision basically declared that slaves were nonpersons with no rights, and here he was, swearing in the very man destined to become known as the Great Emancipator of slaves in America?

  Irony or no, Taney would be the one to hold the red velvet–covered Bible for this unpopular Republican come to place his hand upon the Good Book and take the oath of office.

  Anyone looking on could not help but feel the air of sadness that permeated the city. This new adventure in government was taking place in a capital that was barely sixty years old and raw as a construction site. The soldiers lining the streets were there more in their capacity as guards than as celebrating marchers. The Capitol was topped with scaffolding awaiting its cast-iron dome and the bronze figure of Liberty. Closer to the White House, the great obelisk designed to become the foremost monument honoring the father of his country was a mere one-third finished, with high grass obscuring unplaced stonework all around the foot of the future Washington Monument.

  Despite all this, Mary surely felt a surge of pride as she watched the new president, her Abraham, begin his inaugural address: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.”

  “Mary was still half in a dream, carried away by her husband’s words, when she realized that he was kissing her,” according to biographer Simmons’s vision of the moment— “the most solemn kiss of their entire years together.” And before Mary knew it they were on their way to the White House while the cannon were booming.

  For her first inaugural ball the president’s wife wore a watered blue silk gown and trimmed her throat with her ever-present pearls. During the grand promenade, incidentally, she would not be on the arm of her husband, since protocol dictated that she have another partner. Stepping forward to do the honors was none other than her husband’s famous debating rival of old—and her early beau— Sen. Stephen A. Douglas. A scene out of an epic movie could not be more perfect than the real-life sight of the first lady accepting the offered arm of her former suitor and gliding across the floor with him. All who knew must have wondered if she wasn’t congratulating herself on having chosen the right suitor so long ago.

  Settling into the White House after the big day, the new mistress quickly saw that her new home was—to put it bluntly—shabby. With her usual energetic approach she wasted no time. Not only would she dress herself in elegant silks and lace and ribbons, but she determined to refurbish the White House in like style. She was aware that Abigail Fillmore, shy as she was, had unabashedly asked Congress for appropriations for the start of a library and even had spent funds to install a coal cookstove in the kitchen. And during the administration just departed, President James Buchanan had installed a conservatory!

  Thus it was, despite the soon-erupting war, that Congress appropriated $20,000 to refurbish the Executive Mansion. What a delight for this first lady, who in all her life had never had so much money to spend as she pleased! This precipitated, even necessitated, a trip to New York to order the various fabrics, furniture, rugs, dishes, and other accouterments. Elizabeth Grimsley, Mary’s niece, who was on a prolonged visit to the first family, also went on this shopping excursion. Yet it was her aunt, naturally, who made the major decisions to dress the nation’s mansion in finery. Not only did Mary enjoy shopping for her new abode, but it couldn’t hurt her standing with the social critics who, she had already discovered, were always watching. Naively, she felt compelled to prove that “westerners” like Lincoln and herself were not uninformed country bumpkins. Nor even boors.

  For all her best efforts at providing the White House new elegance, however, Mary was horrified at the eruption of newspaper accounts criticizing her extravagance, with her newly chosen china a special target. That elegant dinnerware of solferino and gold with an eagle featured in the center and rimmed in purple was such a favorite of the first lady that she ordered a set for herself with her initials emblazoned on it. According to Elizabeth, this personal set was not on the official bill, although various critics said that it was.

  Throughout her four years in Washington, Mary Lincoln lived in two worlds not always of her own choosing. She had married a man in whom she saw great career potential, by modern terminology, yet a man she loved. And through her marriage she was catapulted into the limelight to her unfettered delight. Yet, for all her own drive and intelligence, she was very much a part of the female sphere, too, having been surrounded by sisters, half sisters, nieces, and women friends all her life. As biographer Jean H. Baker pointed out, Mary once thanked New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett for a complimentary reference to her “female amiability and reticence” by telling him, “My character is wholly domestic.”

  At the same time an article in the New York Times commented, “Mrs. Lincoln is making and unmaking the political fortunes of men and is similar to Queen Elizabeth in her statesmanlike tastes.” This irritated her.

  Irritated or not, the truth of the matter is that Mary Lincoln had always been drawn to the stimulating conversations of men—her interest in politics and willingness to express her opinions set her apart from most of her female contemporaries. She once admitted that most women’s talk bored her.

  Still, she had always relied upon the women among family and long-time friends as a support system, but now she found that women, especially, were in the enemy camp, socially speaking. Now, Washington’s social leaders ridiculed her every attempt at hospitality. And there was also the jealousy invariably directed at the wife of just about every president. Among others sharpening their knives, the beautiful and ambitious Kate Chase, daughter of Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase, himself a would-be candidate for president, was adamant in her dislike…and perhaps more than a bit envious as well?

  Mary was jealous of other women who flocked around the president. To her dismay, she found that her rough-hewn Springfield man, always popular with the menfolk, now was surrounded by sophisticated and flattering Washington ladies who delighted in access to such an important figure. Perhaps a bit of flirting went on, and though Mary herself was good at coquetry, it must have been unbearable for her to see these women fawning over her husband. “Her intense love was po
ssessive,” historian Ruth Painter Randall wrote. And indeed quite smothering on occasion, too.

  After a time in Washington, Lincoln came to rely less and less upon his wife’s astute political insights. Perhaps losing the ear of her president, plus her jealousy over the attention he received from flattering females, plus all the criticism aimed her way, publicly and privately, simply combined to fuel new self-doubts in Mary. She suffered chronic, debilitating headaches more and more frequently. Often, too, she lost control and impulsively said things she later regretted, apologizing with real remorse.

  “In the bitter politics of wartime, there was a deliberate launching of a whispering campaign against Mrs. Lincoln as a way of injuring her husband,” was Randall’s explanation for a good bit of the hostile publicity the first lady faced. William Stoddard, one of the young presidential secretaries living in the White House, befriended the well-meaning Mary and later pointed out she was constantly surrounded by “a jury empaneled to convict on every count of every indictment which any slanderous tongue may bring against her.”

  But Mary Lincoln had brought a lot of emotional baggage to Washington with her, much of it bound to stir wagging tongues in the restless capital. That she was impulsive, impudent, and emotionally immature there is hardly any doubt. In the words of her friend Stoddard, “Her personal antipathies are quick and strong, and at times they find hasty and resentful forms of expression.” But then, hear also the words of a distaff journalist who wrote under the pen name Howard Glyndon, who was sent to Washington as correspondent for the St. Louis Republican, and who, after attending a reception in the Blue Room, recorded keen observations of Mrs. Lincoln’s dress and very white complexion. Said this writer: “At all events, the charm of her [Mary’s] face was not owing to cosmetics. It was a chubby, good-natured face. It was the face of a woman who enjoyed life, a good joke, good eating, fine clothes, and fine horses and carriages, and luxurious surroundings; but it was also the face of a woman whose affectionate nature was predominant.”