Reveille in Washington

by Margaret Leech

  Day after day, the Herald ran a column headed “Movements of Mrs. Lincoln.” It was devoted to her doings at the seaside resort, where, in truth, she made little display, and seemed to desire seclusion and rest. She was not, however, offended by the Herald’s cloying paragraphs. In October, she wrote Bennett to thank him for defending her against unkind comment in other newspapers. She explained that she did not want notoriety, and that her nature was very sensitive, and said that she hoped to welcome him and Mrs. Bennett to Washington.

  In her first year at the White House, Mrs. Lincoln received more personal publicity in the Northern press than the President, and most of it was unfavorable. Several Republican newspapers made her the target of malicious attacks. She was assailed for her political interference, her extravagance and her Kentucky origin. Slanderous accusations were made against the loyalty of the President’s wife. She was called “two-thirds pro-slavery and the other third secesh.” It was noted that she had two brothers in the rebel army, and that one of them, David Todd, had treated Yankee prisoners at Richmond with brutality. Rumors had begun to spread that she was not only a traitor at heart, but that she was acting as a spy communicating the secrets of the Union generals, as she learned them from the President, to the Confederate authorities.

  As a measure of self-protection, Mrs. Lincoln ceased to open her own mail. The second assistant secretary, William O. Stoddard, read every letter that came to her, even from her sisters, and examined every package. He could testify that there was no treasonable matter in any of them. Stoddard was a rather stuffy fellow, whom Nicolay and Hay disliked. He admired Mrs. Lincoln, and was angry at the injustice of the charges of disloyalty. Standing at the window of Mrs. Lincoln’s sitting-room, the Red Room, he sarcastically reflected that this must be the scene of her betrayal of the Union plans. “The Confederate spies work their way through the lines easily enough, fort after fort, till they reach the Potomac down yonder. The Long Bridge is closed to them, and so is the Georgetown Bridge, but they cross at night in rowboats, or by swimming, and they come up through the grounds, like so many ghosts, and they put a ladder up to this window, and Mrs. Lincoln hands them out the plans.”

  Reports of Mary Lincoln’s treason were persistent enough to cause the Senate members of the Committee on the Conduct of the War to gather in secret session to consider them. On the morning they assembled, they were startled by the appearance of the President in the committee room. Without explanation, he formally stated that he positively knew it to be untrue that any member of his family was holding treasonable communication with the enemy. The senators, astonished and uncomfortable, dropped the subject.

  At the first levee of the winter season in December, 1861, Mrs. Lincoln faced her enemies in a figured silk brocade with her head brightly wreathed in flowers. She was beginning her own levees early, and she gave the secretary, Stoddard, to understand that she was willing to do her duty “while her smiling guests pull her in pieces.” Her pride was soothed by the splendor of the transformed mansion. All the old furniture had been freshly varnished, and the chairs and sofas were upholstered in crimson satin brocatelle, tufted and laid in folds on the backs, “rendering a modern appearance.” The changes in the East Room were striking. A heavy cloth velvet paper, in the Parisian style, covered the walls with a pattern of crimson, garnet and gold. A new carpet, of Glasgow manufacture, ingeniously made all in one piece, had designs of fruit and flowers in vases, wreaths and bouquets. The inner curtains, imported from Switzerland, were of white needle-wrought lace, and over these French crimson brocatelle draperies, trimmed with heavy gold fringe and tassel work, hung from massive gilt cornices.

  The Green Room had also been completely renovated. The Blue Room had a new carpet and fresh paper. In the Red Room, the only familiar object was the old painting of General Washington. Upstairs, the state guest room was papered in light purple, with a golden figure of a rose tree, while the huge bed was cushioned and canopied in purple figured satin, trimmed with gold lace. The private apartments had acquired some modern furniture, and the Executive Chamber had been freshly papered. The Herald correspondent found the shabby old chairs and desks in the office “too rickety to venerate,” but he remarked that “Mr. Lincoln don’t complain.” The only new article of furniture was the big rack that held the war maps, which the amateur strategists of the Government studied in earnest perplexity.

  The President was innocent about the cost of the luxurious things which his wife was fond of purchasing. He was quite unaware that she was using the credit obtained by her position to run up large bills for wearing apparel. It did, however, come to his attention that she had exceeded the congressional appropriation for furnishing the mansion. After all the funds were gone, there remained a bill of some seven thousand dollars, for which a Philadelphia decorator named Carryl was demanding payment. About half of this amount was due for the handsome wallpaper, for which Carryl had made a trip to Paris, advancing the money for the purchases himself. The East Room paper alone had cost over eight hundred dollars. Papering the “President’s Room” (probably the office), which including scraping the walls and furnishing gilt moldings, came to more than four hundred.

  On hearing of the outstanding bill, the President said that he would pay it himself, and in extremity Mrs. Lincoln sent for the Commissioner of Public Buildings, Major French. Since his appointment, he had had ample opportunity to become acquainted with Mrs. Lincoln’s love of money, and spendthrift ways with it. The opening of the winter social season had, moreover, put him “on the most cosey terms” with her because of his duty of presenting the visitors to the President’s wife at the White House receptions. French was a stout, choleric old gentleman. With his arrogant mouth and his bristling gray side whiskers, brushed to the front, he resembled a cartoon of a Victorian papa. He kept a weather eye on Mrs. Lincoln, and winced suspiciously when she flattered him; but he was very patient with the Republican Queen.

  Mrs. Lincoln was not up when French arrived at the White House at nine in the morning; but she presently appeared in a wrapper to implore him, with tears and promises of future good conduct, to get her out of trouble. She asked him to tell the President that it was “common to over-run appropriations.” French obligingly went to Mr. Lincoln’s office, and, without involving Mrs. Lincoln, said that Mr. Carryl had presented a bill in excess of the congressional appropriation, and that he would have to have the President’s approval before asking for the money.

  “It can never have my approval,” French wrote that Lincoln told him—“I’ll pay it out of my own pocket first—it would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the President of the United States had approved a bill over-running an appropriation of $20,000 for flub dubs for this damned old house, when the soldiers cannot have blankets.” He asked how Carryl came to be employed. Major French declared he knew nothing about it, but thought perhaps Mr. Nicolay did. The President jerked the bellpull, and demanded Nicolay’s presence. “How did this man Carryl get into this house?”

  “I do not know, sir,” said the discreet Nicolay.

  “Who employed him?”

  “Mrs. Lincoln, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” French heard the President say—“Mrs. Lincoln—well, I suppose Mrs. Lincoln must bear the blame, let her bear it, I swear I won’t!”

  Nicolay fetched Carryl’s bill, and Lincoln read, ” ‘elegant, grand carpet, $2,500.’ I should like to know where a carpet worth $2,500 can be put,” he said. Major French ventured that it was probably in the East Room. “No,” said Lincoln, “that cost $10,000, a monstrous extravigance.” (The spelling is French’s.) It was all wrong to spend one cent at such a time, the President went on; “the house was furnished well enough, better than any one we ever lived in. . . .” He said that he had been overwhelmed with other business, and could not attend to everything. In his agitation, Lincoln arose and walked the floor, and he ended up by swearing again that he never would approve that bill.

  In
his interview with the President, French disclaimed all official connection with the bill, but he was not as uninformed as he implied. He well knew that his predecessor, W. S. Wood, had authorized the purchase of the wallpaper, and that it was chargeable to an annual appropriation of six thousand dollars, disbursed by the Commissioner of Public Buildings for repairs on the Executive Mansion. This money had been used for painting the outside of the house and other necessary work, and French did not want to be saddled with Wood’s mistakes. On taking office, he had told Carryl that there were no funds to meet his bill, and he had also vainly advised Mrs. Lincoln to put off papering the rooms until the following year. In the end, French managed to get the cost of the wallpaper tucked into an appropriation for sundry civil expenses. Presumably, this also covered the “elegant, grand carpet,” as well as a charge of over twenty-five hundred dollars for new silver and replating of cutlery which Mrs. Lincoln had ordered without any authorization at all.

  French privately admitted that Mrs. Lincoln was “a curiosity” and a very imprudent woman, but he thought her an accomplished lady, and he knew that many of the stories circulated about her were false. There were few in Washington who did her equal justice. Holding her beflowered head high, facing slander and malice with an appearance of indifference, Mrs. Lincoln met the world with pride, even with a well-bred reticence. She could not muster the discipline to control her mania for display. It led her, in the flaring prejudice and deep anxiety of the first winter of the war, to issue five hundred invitations for a splendid private party. The entertainment was rendered doubly conspicuous by the fact that it ran counter to social traditions, for at the White House the state dinners were the only large functions which had a restricted guest list; all receptions were open to the general public. The innovation caused great indignation among those who had not been invited, and additional invitations were sent out to appease some of them. The President was said to have good-naturedly remarked that he didn’t “fancy this pass business.”

  Whether from ignorance or defiance, Mrs. Lincoln had given her enemies excellent grounds for berating her. Extravagance and gaiety were in clashing contrast to the mood of Washington in February, 1862. Abolitionists bitterly criticized the merrymaking at the White House, and many declined to attend. Ben Wade’s regrets were said to have been harshly worded. “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware that there is a civil war? If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are, and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.”

  The New York Herald, always the back-stabbing friend of the President’s wife, defended her in a series of editorials which brought the ill-timed function wide notoriety. According to the Herald, Mrs. Lincoln had two motives for giving a grand soirée. One was her spirited desire to show the “haughty secessionist dames,” who had closed their houses and refused to go out, that there was a fashionable society among the loyal residents. The other explanation was far more damaging, and the Herald hammered it with enthusiasm. Mrs. Lincoln, by limiting the guests, was “trying to weed the Presidential mansion” of “the long-haired, white-coated, tobacco-chewing and expectorant abolitionist” politicians. “Mrs. Lincoln is responsible to Congress for the Presidential spoons,” said the Herald, “and it is not safe to trust an ice cream thus manipulated in the itching fingers of these sweet smelling patriots.” The President’s wife was thus advertised as having aimed an intentional insult at the powerful and vindictive radical faction of the Republicans.

  Lincoln paid for the party out of his own purse, but his wife spared no expense. Not content with the local caterers, she engaged Maillard of New York to prepare the supper, and he arrived several days in advance with a retinue of waiters, cooks and artists in confectionery. On the great night, Mrs. Keckley dressed Mrs. Lincoln’s hair, and arranged her low-cut white satin evening gown, lavishly flounced with black lace. At her bosom and in her Parisian headdress were bunches of crape myrtle, and her only ornaments were pearls. Prince Albert had died in December, in the midst of the bruit of war between England and the United States, and Mrs. Lincoln had adopted half-mourning for her soirée as a mark of respect for Queen Victoria, whose representative, Lord Lyons, was among the expected guests. The long train of her dress drew a comment from her husband, “Whew! our cat has a long tail tonight!” Mrs. Keckley also heard the President say that he thought it would be in better style if some of that tail were nearer the head.

  As she stood with the President in the center of the East Room, while the guests presented their cards at the door, and streamed through the flower-decked parlors, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed a social triumph. Her party had been savagely attacked, but all the important people had come to it. The diplomatic corps made a brilliant group—Lord Lyons, M. Mercier, M. Stoeckl, M. von Limburg, Senor Tassara, Count Piper, Chevalier Bertinatti and the rest. A patter of languages sounded in the Blue Room, where General McDowell, conversing in perfect French, was made much of by the Europeans.

  There were Cabinet members, senators, representatives, distinguished citizens and beautiful women from nearly every State. Few army officers were present below the rank of division commander. The French princes had come, and Prince Felix Salm-Salm, a Prussian nobleman and cavalry officer who was serving on General Blenker’s staff. Hostility lurked beneath some of the smiling faces which passed the President and his lady. General and Mrs. McClellan were present, the center of curious observation. General Frémont attended, with his fascinating wife, Jessie, who had roundly assailed the President for not supporting her husband’s disastrous reign in the West. Miss Kate Chase, said to have incurred Mrs. Lincoln’s animosity by holding her own court at White House levees, was exquisite in a mode-colored silk.

  Before them all, at eleven o’clock, Mrs. Lincoln led the promenade around the East Room on the President’s arm. The Marine Band played in the vestibule, but, as a bow to the national tribulation, dancing had been omitted, although many young people, including Bob Lincoln, were present. There was great hilarity when at suppertime it was discovered that a servant had locked the door of the state dining-room, and misplaced the key. “I am in favor of a forward movement!” cried one. “An advance to the front is only retarded by the imbecility of commanders,” said another, parroting a recent speech in Congress. General McClellan, struggling in the throng, laughed as heartily as anybody.

  When at last the key was found, and the merry guests poured in, Mrs. Lincoln had reason for pride in the magnificence of the repast. Costly wines and liquors flowed freely, and the immense Japanese punch bowl was filled with ten gallons of champagne punch. There was nearly a ton of turkeys, duck, venison, pheasants, partridges and hams, and the tables were loaded with the confectionery inspirations of Maillard. A fountain was held aloft by nougat water nymphs. Hives, swarming with lifelike bees, were filled with charlotte russe. War was gently hinted by a helmet, with waving plumes of spun sugar. The good American frigate “Union,” with forty guns and all sails set, was supported by cherubs draped in the Stars and Stripes. Fort Pickens sat in sugar on a side table, surmounted by deliciously prepared birds. At two o’clock the party was still going on, and Mrs. Lincoln’s triumph had only one flaw. Her two little boys had taken cold, and Willie had a worrisome fever. Several times during the evening, both the mother and father went upstairs to bend over his bed, where Mrs. Keckley was in attendance. Lincoln’s face was grieved and anxious, and in greeting General Frémont he spoke of Willie’s illness.

  The fever, which had been diagnosed as a cold, developed into typhoid, and for over two weeks the agonized parents watched the boy’s condition become critical, dangerous, hopeless. The mother scarcely left him, but her enemies accused her of heartlessness, and said that the boy had been dying while the house rang with the music and laughter of her great party. In retrospect, the memory of that triumphant evening must have been blotted with anguish. Save for the official functions which she could not avoid, Mrs. Lincoln never again gave any large entertainment. Both parents were desolated by the loss
of the blue-eyed boy in whom they took such pride. Lincoln repeatedly gave way to uncontrollable expressions of sorrow. The mother was prostrated and hysterical. Months later, she was unable to restrain her paroxysms of grief. Mrs. Keckley said that she could not bear to look at Willie’s picture, and never again entered the guest room where he died, or the Green Room, where he was embalmed. Once, the seamstress saw the President kindly bend over his wife, take her by the arm and lead her to the window. Pointing to the battlements of the Insane Asylum beyond the Eastern Branch, he said, “Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

  During Willie’s illness, the animosity of the radical politicians to the President’s wife flashed into scandalous publicity. In December, 1861, Congress had been disquieted by the fact that a portion of the President’s message had been reported in the New York Herald in advance of its communication to Congress; and the House Committee on the Judiciary had been directed to investigate “the alleged censorship over the telegraph.” The chairman of the committee was John Hickman of Pennsylvania, a sharp and skillful politician who had emerged from affiliation with the Democratic party to become an extreme anti-slavery Republican, notably unfriendly to Lincoln. Hickman subpoenaed the Chevalier Wikoff, who admitted that he had filed the dispatch to the Herald, but refused to give the source of his information. Charging into the House in irritation, Hickman induced his colleagues to adopt a resolution that Wikoff should be arrested. The sergeant-at-arms brought the Chevalier to the bar of the House to answer to a charge of contempt. Wikoff remained discreet. He told the Speaker that he had received his information “under an obligation of strict secrecy,” and he was sent to the Old Capitol prison. Wikoff’s intimacy with Mrs. Lincoln was well known, and the impression prevailed that she had shown him the President’s message, and permitted him to copy portions of it for the Herald.