While the mother’s grief had been criticized as excessive, it was a licensed and respected sorrow. Always, in the sight of curious and hostile eyes, she was obliged to conceal her distress for her Southern kinsfolk. Sometimes, she vehemently denied she felt it. One full brother, three half brothers and three brothers-in-law had joined the Confederate army. Alec had fallen at Baton Rouge, and Samuel Todd at Shiloh. David, hated by Northerners for his treatment of prisoners, lingered on, weak from wounds received at Vicksburg. A brother-in-law, handsome young Ben Hardin Helm, who had visited the White House in the spring of 1861 and turned down a commission as Federal paymaster, was killed at Chickamauga.
The dead were real to Mary Lincoln. The winter after Willie died, she drove out on New Year’s Eve with her old protector, Isaac Newton, to visit a spiritualist called Mrs. Laury in Georgetown. Mrs. Laury made wonderful revelations about Willie, Mrs. Lincoln told Senator Browning. She also had information about earthly matters. The spirits had told her that the Cabinet members were all enemies of the President, and would have to be replaced before he had success.
There were other mediums whom the President’s wife consulted. She was not alone. Spiritualism, the accompaniment of long and wasting wars, was rampant in the capital in the third winter of conflict. People sat hand in hand around tables in the dark, to hear bells run and drums thumped and banjos twanged. A public meeting at Odd Fellows’ Hall, conducted by Father Beeson, the patriarchal friend of the Indian, drew crowds to hear a communication from the spirit of Judge Dean, for the Brooklyn lawyer who had come to the defense of the fugitive slaves had recently succumbed to pneumonia. Father Beeson lost a part of his audience, when he read a message from a dead colored man which revealed that Negroes occupied the chief seats in Paradise. The janitor of Odd Fellows’ Hall, Beeson complained, had followed the Washington custom of ordering them into the gallery. There was, however, no controversial matter in Judge Dean’s communication. His spirit visited Father Beeson—with whom in life he had had the barest acquaintance—merely to inform him that he had seen him at his own funeral, and that things in the other world were more comfortable than he had expected. The message, in the Star’s opinion, “seemed to indicate that the practical business turn of mind of the Judge had rather deteriorated. . . .”
The converts, however, were not critical. The mediums were coining money in the capital. One of the most successful was a young and personable man called Colchester, who claimed to be the illegitimate son of an English duke. Mrs. Lincoln received him into her home, and hopefully listened to the scratches and taps which were supposed to represent messages from Willie. Presently, Colchester wrote Mrs. Lincoln an insolent letter asking her to get him a pass to New York from the War Department, and suggesting that “he might have some unpleasant things to say to her” if she refused it. This attempt at blackmail was settled by the President’s friend, the correspondent, Noah Brooks. In a skeptical mood, he had recently attended one of Colchester’s séances, and had risen in the dark to grasp a hand beating a bell against a drum. Brooks called for lights, but, before a match was struck, the drum hit him on the head. The flaring gaslight revealed the correspondent, bloody of brow, tenaciously holding on to Colchester. When Mrs. Lincoln frantically appealed to Brooks to help her, he arranged a meeting with the medium at the White House. He confronted Colchester with the unhealed scar on his brow, denounced him as a swindler and ordered him to leave town on pain of imprisonment in the Old Capitol. Colchester gave Mrs. Lincoln no further trouble, though Brooks’s empty threat did not frighten him away from Washington, where his fascinating personality and wonderful demonstrations of occult powers continued to attract large numbers to his séances.
The world of the living reached in to pluck with rough fingers at Mary Lincoln’s jangled nerves. In the summer of 1863, while she was driving in her carriage, the coachman’s seat broke, throwing him to the ground. The frightened horses ran away, and Mrs. Lincoln jumped out, striking the back of her head. She was ill for some time afterward. Later, her carriage ran over a little boy and broke his leg. Her husband had smallpox, and Tad caught scarlatina. She was frantically afraid that Robert would enlist, that she might lose him, too. At night, she started up from her restless sleep, sensing a presence in her bedroom overlooking the Potomac. Without benefit of taps and scratches, Willie came back to his mother. She could see him, sweetly smiling, at the foot of her bed. Sometimes, her dead baby, Eddie, was with him; and sometimes Alec, her youngest half brother, the red-headed one, who had died in gray in a skirmish at Baton Rouge.
Mary Lincoln was so strange and shaken that her husband was thankful to have her half sister, Emilie, come for a visit at the White House. In Illinois, she had three full sisters who might have given her companionship, but Mrs. Lincoln did not like them. She was naggingly critical even of Mrs. Ninian Edwards, in whose house she had paid long visits, meeting and marrying Lincoln there. Frances was jealous, and ungrateful for the commission of paymaster which Mary Lincoln had had “a hard battle” to get for her husband, Dr. William Wallace, for whom Willie had been named. Ann, Mrs. C. M. Smith, she venomously detested for her “false tongue.” Emilie, eighteen years younger, had had no opportunity to become embroiled with the President’s wife. She was the widow of the Confederate general, Ben Hardin Helm.
Traveling with her little daughter from Alabama to her mother’s home in Kentucky, Emilie Helm had been stopped at Fort Monroe because she refused to take the oath of allegiance. The President telegraphed the military authorities to send her to Washington, and on a winter day she trailed into the White House in the desolation of her young widowhood. The hangings of the state guest chamber oppressed her with their gloomy, funereal purple, and she shrank from the inquiring glances which strangers directed at her deep crape. She was tenderly received. Hand in hand, not talking much, she and Mary Lincoln wept together. The President called her “Little Sister,” and shed tears, as he took her in his arms and said that he hoped she felt no bitterness toward him.
Perhaps, to a man of simple and magnanimous nature, there appeared nothing incongruous in having Emilie Helm as a house guest; perhaps his judgment was influenced by worry over his sick and lonely wife. For nearly a week, in the midst of war, the President entertained a passionate adherent of the enemy, and he invited her to spend the summer at the Soldiers’ Home. The fact that the rebel visitor called the President “Brother Lincoln” aggravated the offense of her presence to people who saw her there. Taddie was annoyed by a little cousin who shouted “Hurrah for Jeff Davis!” on a hearthrug of the White House, and contradicted him, when he said that his father was President. Although Emilie tried to slip away when people called, they sometimes asked to see her, hoping for news of friends in the Confederacy. One of these was Senator Ira Harris of New York, who came in with General Dan Sickles, to inquire about John C. Breckinridge, now a general in the Confederate army. Emilie Helm faced a Republican politician and a Union soldier who had lost a leg at Gettysburg. She had no information about Breckinridge. There were questions about the South, which she evaded. Senator Harris may have made Breckinridge an excuse for looking over the President’s sister-in-law, or he may have been suddenly stung to resentment by her mourning and her silence. “We have whipped the rebels at Chattanooga,” he burst out, “and I hear, madam, that the scoundrels ran like scared rabbits.” Emilie Helm choked out, “It was the example you set them at Bull Run and Manassas.” Mrs. Lincoln tried to change the subject, and Harris turned on her. “Why isn’t Robert in the army?” The President’s wife blanched, and bit her lip. She said that Robert was anxious to enlist. The fault was hers, because she had insisted on his staying in college.
Shivering and weeping, Emilie Helm stumbled out of the room. The President, who was not feeling well, was resting on his bed, but Dan Sickles stumped up the stairs on his crutches, and insisted on seeing him. Emilie understood that the President was amused at Sickles’s angry account, and told him “the child has a tongue like the r
est of the Todds.” “You should not have that rebel in your house,” Sickles shouted.
Emilie Helm felt that her visit was an embarrassment, and she left for Kentucky on a pass the President gave her, not requiring the oath of allegiance. She did not accept the invitation to stay at the Soldiers’ Home. Lincoln privately interested himself in trying to help her sell six hundred bales of cotton, but she was the occasion of no public scandal.
The next spring, Lincoln was assailed in the press on the ground that his wife’s half sister, Martha—Mrs. Clement White of Alabama—had carried merchandise to the South on a pass given her by the President. He frankly explained the matter to Welles and others, saying that Mrs. White had repeatedly called, and that both he and Mrs. Lincoln had declined to see her. He had sent her a pass to go South, and refused to permit her to take her trunks without examination. She had “talked secesh” at her Washington hotel, and finally Lincoln told one of her intermediaries, Brutus Clay, that he would send her to the Old Capitol, if she did not leave at once.
The Todd family legend was that Martha White was a frequent visitor at the White House during the war, that she carried South a little quinine only for her own use; but that, on one occasion, she was mortified to have a Federal inspector find a splendid sword and a rebel uniform, placed by Baltimore friends without her knowledge in her trunk, which she nevertheless transported to the Confederacy, and presented to General Lee.
Mary Lincoln had turned a gentle face to Emilie Helm. The young widow understood Lincoln’s worry when he told her that Mary’s nerves had gone to pieces, that the strain had been too much for her mental, as well as physical health. Emilie saw Mary start and go white when a bell rang or a book dropped. She was appalled, when she suddenly came into the room, by the look of fright in her sister’s eyes—those blue eyes that grew wide and shining when she spoke of Willie, relating that he said he loved his Uncle Alec, and was with him most of the time.
Mary Lincoln put on a smooth mask of civility in the Blue Room, dipped in little curtseys and said, “How do you do?” and sometimes to acquaintances, “I am glad to see you,” touching their hands with the tips of her white kid fingers. Her afternoon levees were crowded. On a stormy day she apologized to Major French for not releasing him, since surely no one would come. French had “quite a cosy talk” with her in the servants’ room, where she was seated “in full rig.” Senator Sumner was announced, and Mrs. Lincoln and French marched into the parlor to receive him. There was more chat on the Blue Room sofa, and the President came in and was “pleasant and funny as could be.” They were relaxed and unexpectant until old Edward came and told them that the hall was filled with people. When the doors were opened, the stream of callers almost equalled a New Year’s reception. There were people in traveling costumes and country clothing, and soldiers in muddy boots; but elegant ladies came, too. The successes of the Union had made the White House levees fashionable, and in 1864 the Blue Room was awash with French bonnets and ermine muffs and pelerines. At the gates, a pair of unkempt troopers marshaled the line of carriages with their swords. Edward stood in the vestibule, cracking nuts.
Like a child begging for treats, the President’s wife made demands on Major French, who did his best to help her. “Mrs. Lincoln is boring me daily,” he wrote in May, 1864, “to obtain an appropriation to pay for fitting up a new house for her and the President at the Soldiers’ Home and I, in turn, am boring the Committee of Ways and Means. If Thaddeus, the worthy old chairman, did not joke me off, I think I should get it. . . .”
After she laid off her mourning, Mrs. Lincoln was often seen with the President at the theatre, especially when there was opera, of which she was very fond. She would invite a party of friends, and send a messenger to reserve either the big upper box at Ford’s, or the lower box which the President habitually occupied at Grover’s. On these occasions, flags were placed on the front of the boxes, and the entrance of the party was usually greeted with the strains of “Hail to the Chief.” The cavalry escort seldom accompanied the President’s carriage on these short drives. Leonard Grover told of a disagreeable incident which occurred one evening, as the Lincolns left his theatre, accompanied by Schuyler Colfax. Grover’s was in a neighborhood of saloons and disorderly houses, frequented by secessionist roughs whose antipathy to the administration had been increased by the Emancipation Proclamation. A jeering crowd gathered around the President’s carriage. The coachman, Grover said, was drunk, and fell sprawling on the sidewalk, as Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln entered the carriage. The crowd gave a threatening shout. There was only a one-armed drummer boy on the box, and Grover was frightened. He sprang to the box himself, took up the reins, and drove to Colfax’s residence and then to the White House. Both the President and Mrs. Lincoln warmly thanked him for a very great service.
Grover may have exaggerated the hostility of the rowdies, for Mrs. Lincoln was not discouraged from going to the theatre. It had become one of her chief amusements to make up little box parties. Externally, her life had agreeable moments. The big state dinners were duly held, and she was complimented on the taste of her appointments. She had a coy admiration for the handsome bachelor, Senator Sumner, and showered him with invitations, notes and flowers. To the furious indignation of Mr. Stanton, she was also very attentive to the Copperhead, Fernando Wood, whose residence blossomed at the expense of the White House conservatories, when he gave his grand receptions. There were quiet times, when the Lincolns drove in their carriage, talking like any companionable, affectionate couple, drawn together by years of habit and shared sorrow.
Yet Mary Lincoln’s fits of temper were uncontrollable. She spoke sharply even to her favorite, Sumner, and wrote him an abject letter of apology. Her rages at her husband burst all bounds of decorum and pride. She could not hold her tongue in front of other people. After attending the Patent Office fair, she lashed out at Lincoln for the stupidity of his speech, to the mortification of General Richard Oglesby of Illinois, who was with them in their carriage. The President’s speech had been a rather facetious little tribute to the ladies for their work for war relief. The mere reference by her husband to women drove Mary Lincoln wild. Her jealousy had become a mania. On a visit to the army in the spring of 1865, she carried on like a crazy woman, insulting General Ord’s wife until she burst into tears, because she had ridden beside the President.
All the while, like a drug for her tortured nerves, she indulged in her orgies of buying things. She hoarded her old possessions in innumerable trunks and boxes, keeping even outmoded dresses and bonnets she had brought from Springfield. The charge accounts for her purchases mounted to appalling sums—things she could never use, for which she could never hope to pay. A Washington merchant sent in a bill for three hundred pairs of gloves ordered in four months. At A. T. Stewart’s New York department store, she bought furs, silks, laces, jewelry; three thousand dollars for earrings and a pin; five thousand for a shawl. In the summer of 1864, she told Mrs. Keckley that she owed twenty-seven thousand dollars. The seamstress asked her if Mr. Lincoln suspected this. “God, no!” said Mrs. Lincoln. During the Presidential campaign of that year, she grew hysterical with fear of exposure and bankruptcy, if her husband should fail to be re-elected. As long as he was in office, rich Republicans might be induced to dig into their pockets to save the party from scandal. She sat wailing to old Isaac Newton, “shed tears by the pint,” while she begged him to help her pay her debts.
Her dress for the second inauguration ball cost two thousand dollars. She was back on her unsteady pinnacle of arrogance, while the clouds gathered that would darken her brain, and send her stumbling out of the White House, a sick and haunted woman with eyes that would never again be wide and shining, that would tremble with fright for the rest of her life. With all her trunks and boxes of old rubbish and the finery for which she had not paid, she would be bundled on the cars with only Mrs. Keckley to befriend her, and a policeman who was fond of Tad.
XV. Bloodshed in the Spring
NEAR THE DOOR of the Blue Room the advance of the column of callers was suddenly checked. The President, after cordially wringing the hand of one visitor, detained him in conversation. He was a short, scrubby officer, stooped and sunburned, with rough, light-brown whiskers, and he appeared scarcely worthy of signal attention. There was something seedy about him; the look of a man who is out of a job, and takes too much to drink. The stars on his shoulder straps were tarnished. But a buzz ran through the Blue Room. Everyone began to stare at the man who stood awkwardly looking up at the President, while arriving guests jostled in confusion outside the doorway. General Grant and Mr. Lincoln were meeting for the first time.
Seward hurried to the rescue. He presented the general to Mrs. Lincoln, and led him through a lane of eager faces into the crowded East Room. Grant’s entrance turned the polite assemblage into a mob. Wild cheers shook the crystal chandeliers, as ladies and gentlemen rushed on him from all sides. Laces were torn, and crinolines mashed. Fearful of injury or maddened by excitement, people scrambled on chairs and tables. At last, General Grant was forced to mount a crimson sofa. He stood there bashfully shaking the thrusting hands that wanted to touch success and glory—Donelson, Vicksburg, Chattanooga—personified in a slovenly little soldier, with a blushing, scared face.
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