The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Thanks to the skillful maneuvering by Norman Judd and David Davis—and a little judicious chicanery about the advance seating of Lincoln supporters in the Wigwam—the Republican delegates in Chicago nominated Lincoln on the third ballot. Seward was said to be seething, but in fact, Mary thought Lincoln was right when he said Seward would lose the moderate votes to Douglas in the Presidential race itself. “Seward's an abolitionist,” he said, when he and Mary met briefly in his bedroom, where he repaired to put on a cravat, after the editor of the Illinois State Journal—none other than his old friend Edward Baker's son, now married to Elizabeth's Julie—brought the news to the house. “If Seward were elected, the whole South would secede from the Union. They're not about to sit still for a man who claims there's a Higher Law than the Constitution.”

  The booming crash of guns made Mary startle. She'd had a migraine the previous day, out of sheer nervousness, and her usual springtime headaches made her jumpy. She wished they could have gone up to Chicago, instead of remaining in Springfield pretending that election to the Presidency was of only minor concern to them. “That's for you, Lincoln!” cried young Mr. Baker, when Lincoln and Mary came down the stairs. “They're firing off the cannon at the Courthouse for Illinois's first Republican candidate for President!”

  The gunfire went on all afternoon.

  Nobody seemed to think it was an omen.

  Henry Clay, Mary thought, remembering again that tall red-haired man in her father's parlor. Counting back the elections, the four-year wildness like a national quartan fever, the elation and the dizzy sense of power. Henry Clay, and old Hard Cider and Log Cabins Harrison . . . Then the intoxication of campaigning through New England for Zachary Taylor, who owed Lincoln so much and who died before any patronage could be dispensed.

  And now it was Lincoln—her own husband—whose name would be on the ballot.

  In a way she couldn't believe it.

  In a way, there was nothing else real in her life.

  Elizabeth was full of faint praise and sidelong remarks about what would happen to the country if an avowedly anti-slavery candidate were elected. Ninian was a Douglas man, despite Mary's twits about certain conversations back in the days when the Little Giant was her beau. Cousin Lizzie Grimsley spent evening after evening in the kitchen with Mary, drinking tea and playing that agonizing, marvelous game of “What if . . . ?” Lincoln remained at home all the summer and fall, doing nothing, it seemed, but writing letters, endlessly. Everywhere his supporters made speeches, rallied voters. He took on young John Nicolay—the German-born journalist who'd helped get his name in so many southern Illinois papers—as a secretary, and still he'd spend all day at his office with correspondence, and into the night.

  Mary chafed and fretted, kept up her books of clippings, gave dinners several times a week for Lincoln's supporters and struggled, with Maria Francesca's help, to keep the house spotless in between. In these days Lizzie was her mainstay. Bessie and Simeon had gone away to Oregon the year before—the Illinois State Journal being only a new name for the old Sangamo Journal—and her other close friend Hannah Shearer had moved to Pennsylvania with her ailing husband. Mary liked John Nicolay, and was inclined to like Lincoln's clerk John Hay, Nicolay's inseparable friend. Even more she liked the effervescent Chicago youth named Elmer Ellsworth who'd also come to work as Lincoln's clerk. Ellsworth had organized a prize-winning regiment of Zouave militia, who marched and drilled with nimble élan at pro-Lincoln rallies. Ellsworth was a born knight-errant, like an older version of Willie, and seemed to include in his clerkly duties that of looking after Mary and the boys when Lincoln was out of town.

  Journalists came that fall too, like swarming bees. Sometimes they were polite, sometimes obnoxiously demanding. All wanted to see the man called “The Rail-Splitter” at home. Mary greeted them warmly, though she'd already begun to mistrust them; she refrained from remarking tartly that her husband hadn't split fence-rails in thirty years and hadn't liked doing it even then. They were delighted when they caught him in his shirtsleeves chopping kindling. Journalists in the South called him an ape and speculated that he had Negro blood in his own veins, since he loved that servile race so much.

  Then it was November.

  Lincoln's name wasn't even on the ballot in a number of Southern states.

  He spent most of Election Day at the State House, in the small room off the rear hall usually reserved for the governor. He'd been there for days—coming out on the day before the election, he'd been stopped by a journalist who'd demanded how he was going to vote. “By ballot,” Lincoln said—which he did, after cutting his own name off the card so that it could not be said that he had voted for himself.

  All day she waited. Lizzie came in the morning, and helped her play hostess to a steady stream of callers, with occasional breaks to retrieve Tad from the polls, where he was standing outside waving an American flag and exhorting citizens—rather incoherently—to vote for his father. Darkness fell, though she could see the torchlight around the State House and the polling-places when she and Lizzie walked to the corner.

  “Do you think there'll really be trouble with the Southern states, if Mr. Lincoln is elected?” asked Lizzie worriedly, pulling her shawl close around her shoulders. She was a big girl, taking more after the tall Todd men than the women of the family.

  “I can't imagine why.” Mary looked up at her quickly. “It isn't like Frémont running on a Free Soil ticket. Mr. Lincoln is a moderate. He's never been an abolitionist, in spite of what all those Southern newspapers keep insisting. He's always said that since the Founding Fathers permitted slavery to exist in the South he's not going to end it there, only keep it from spreading into the territories.”

  Yet she shivered. Emilie had written her from Lexington: I think you ought to know what they're saying. . . . And she received enough of the Lexington papers to feel a deep foreboding, deny it though she might.

  Politics was a vicious business. She knew the lies that were being printed, and believed. She knew there were those in the South who'd scream that their rights were being violated by even the election of a Republican President. From the day she'd seen Nate Bodley cane Elliot Presby in the street, she'd known that the merest breath of criticism toward slavery could rouse some Southerners to bloody violence.

  Like dark voices whispering in a dream, it came to her that if he won, Lincoln would have to face a hundred thousand Nate Bodleys.

  That there was something beyond victory, other than a procession in triumph to the White House with Elizabeth gnashing her teeth in the background.

  But he'll win, she thought, pushing that qualm aside with a rush of excitement. He must win. . . .

  What came after could be dealt with then.

  Lizzie and Maria Francesca helped her put Tad and Willie to bed. The boys were wild with excitement. It was impossible, in their eyes, that their father could be defeated.

  Or that evil would come after victory.

  She thought of Lincoln in the telegraph office, surrounded by the men who'd supported him through the campaign—Davis and Lamon, Swett and Arnold, hatchet-faced Lyman Trumbull and dapper little John Hay scuttling around like a banty rooster . . . Elmer Ellsworth as excited as her two sons and Billy Herndon running in and out with cups of coffee. Papers on the floor, telegraphic scrap, newspapers from here and there . . .

  The atmosphere reminiscent of the days of argument around the stove at Speed's store—the political hearth tacitly forbidden to women. After all she had done, she was shut out of that, and her heart twinged with resentment and anger that had no place to settle.

  Lizzie was still at the house at midnight when Mary heard Lincoln's stride on the kitchen steps. She sprang to her feet and the next instant heard his voice, high and clear in the night, “Molly . . .”

  She and Lizzie dashed into the kitchen—of course he'd come in that way, he never used the front door....

  “Molly!” He stood in the kitchen door, breathless, beaming, crav
at askew, smiling like the rising of the sun. “Molly, we're elected!”

  She flung herself into his arms, Lizzie crowding to their side, Fido yapping excitedly around everyone's feet.

  President, she thought.

  President of the United States . . .

  Even then, it crossed her mind that this was the end of their days of peace.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Bellevue July 1875

  “MRS. LINCOLN.” DR. PATTERSON PUT ASIDE HIS NAPKIN, AND FOLDED his hands. “Now, is it true that you sent a letter out of here to a Dr. Swenson in New York?” He took a folded paper from beside his breakfast plate, crossed and re-crossed with Mary's blotted handwriting, held it up in the hot butter-colored sunlight of the family breakfast-room. Beside him his wife regarded Mary with a sad frown, as if she'd caught her urinating on the floor of her room as Mrs. Johnston was wont to do.

  Mary could only stare, open-mouthed as much at his tone of gentle reproof—like an adult chiding a willful child—as at the postman's betrayal. “I am not in the habit of lying, Dr. Patterson, any more than I am in the habit of seeing my private correspondence in the hands of a person to whom it was not addressed.”

  “Now, Mrs. Lincoln,” said Patterson soothingly. “The postman has orders to give me any letters that my guests send out without my knowledge. You are here to rest, and that means not overtaxing your nerves. I don't think that's so unreasonable, do you?”

  “Not unreasonable!” Mary's hands clenched in her lap and the leaden ache that had settled on her head and belly for weeks since she'd cut down her medicine tightened its hold. “You forbid me to send letters—”

  “But I don't, Mrs. Lincoln.” Patterson's voice never wavered from its friendly warmth. “Don't you think you're being a little unfair to us here? I only ask that you limit your correspondence to those known to me. We must have rules. You can see how so many women write wild and unthinking letters to people who haven't any idea of their condition....”

  “I wrote Dr. Swenson, sir,” said Mary, through gritted teeth, “because he has an idea of my condition—and his idea of my condition might not agree with those brutes my son bribed to declare me insane!” She had met Dr. Swenson at the Spiritualist camp on the shores of Lake St. Catherine, a few years before. He was a dreamy New Englander whose high-paying practice of medicine had been interrupted by his daughter's death.

  Patterson merely looked mildly grieved, as if he heard no more than the further ravings of the insane. Behind him, Jenny the housemaid came in and cleared away the plates to the sideboard. On the other side of the table, Young Doc sat with folded hands, watching the scene between his father and Mary as if observing some clinical demonstration in a classroom. Only Blanche seemed to think there was something improper in the scene being played out before the family: she looked frightenedly from her brother to her father to her mother—like Fido would during Mary's quarrels with Robert back in Springfield—but said nothing.

  “Mrs. Lincoln,” said Dr. Patterson patiently, “you have to admit that you did agree not to correspond with people not known to myself and to your son, when you came to live here.”

  “What choice had I—?”

  He held up his hand against her hot protest. “Now, you admit that you agreed. You are here to rest. Your son, as your legal conservator, is merely trying to see that you do so. Can't you see that your untruthfulness, your willfulness and lack of cooperation are only evidence of how badly you do need rest? All this changing your mind—” He gestured at the basket of cornbread still on the table before her, untouched. “This ordering cornbread at breakfast and then wanting to eat only rolls, or asking for griddle-cakes at supper which you then don't touch . . . Is that the activity of a sane woman?”

  You obviously never met my sister, thought Mary savagely, recalling Ann's capacity for ordering food that was never eaten. Cornbread and griddle-cakes, the foods of her childhood, sounded so comforting, yet with her stomach still gripped by the periodic nausea that was the aftereffect of reducing her medicine, in fact rolls were all she actually wanted to eat.

  “You order the carriage, then delay and delay . . . say you're going to go out walking and then stay in your room . . .” Patterson shook his head and sighed. “It is all part of your nervous condition, rebelling against the irritations of daily life. And of course I understand that much of the time you're not able to see it.” He said it as if his understanding were a wise and forbearing favor. Mary wanted to fling her coffee-cup at him, though she supposed that, too, would be interpreted as willfulness and lack of cooperation.

  “Your entire nervous system is like the most fragile of plants, which cannot withstand the shocks, the chills, the storms of the outside world, Mrs. Lincoln.” Patterson rose from his place and came around the table to her, holding out his hand to help her up. “What is so bad about remaining with us and resting? We only want to help you.”

  “By reading my correspondence?” She pulled her hand from his gentle grip. “By having me watched every moment? By barring my window and forbidding me to seek the comfort of the spirits with my sisters in faith?”

  “Now, you know that's only your insanity speaking. You know the spirits don't really visit people. What is so difficult about accepting the inspired authority of Scripture? You must learn to control your willfulness, and your tendency to deceit, Mrs. Lincoln. I fear you will be with us for a long time.”

  SITTING IN HER ROOM, MARY STARED OUT THE WINDOW. A JAYBIRD dove through a shaft of sunlight, wings a flash of sapphire against the green velvet of lawns and trees. The July heat brought her the scent of the roses, and the thick intoxication of the grass.

  It brought her other things as well.

  It brought her the memory of that sweltering Chicago July, four years ago now . . . four years almost to the day. The fifteenth, she thought, her heart beating fast—as it had been the fifteenth of April, that night in Ford's Theater....

  It brought her, with heart-tearing exactitude, the baking, breathless dryness of that summer of 1871, the way the air had pressed suffocatingly on that dark little furniture-cluttered room in the Clifton House where Tad sat, propped in that inquisitorial horror of a “therapeutic” chair, gasping for breath.

  It brought the very feel of those worn impersonal hotel sheets over his emaciated body, their starchiness as she gripped them, as she crouched on her knees at Tad's side. Brought her the feel of that enormous hand, soft instead of callused but like Lincoln's down to the very shape of the bones. A young hand, a boy's hand. Tad was only eighteen....

  He squeezed her fingers gently, responding to her frantic clutch. Tried to smile.

  “The doctor says he cannot live,” Robert had said to her softly, in the hall outside the room. His voice was low and urgent and his grip on her arms had tightened, as if he would have put a hand over her mouth to keep her from crying out in grief. “The doctor says he cannot live, so please, please, Mother, don't make it worse for him!”

  How like Robert, she thought bitterly, not to understand.

  Yes, of course Tad, so sweet, so completely devoted to her all his short life, would be upset by her tears....But Robert didn't understand what it meant for Tad to die! On her knees by the bed Mary had stared into her youngest son's face, twisted with the pain of struggling to breathe. In those bones she had seen so clearly another face, just emerging: the jutting nose, the high cheekbones, the heavy brow, and the sad gray eyes. Lincoln must have looked like that at eighteen, she thought. Or he would have looked like that if he'd had a decent home to grow up in, a proper education, someone who loved him. . . .

  When Robert left the room to fetch fresh water in the pitcher, she had fallen to her knees beside the chair, gripped Tad's hand. “Don't die, Taddie!” she whispered, frantic tears streaming down her face. “Please don't die! Fight! Fight to stay alive! For me, for your mother! Taddie, I shall die without you, I shall die if you go too. . . !”

  Tad had wept, and tightened his hand on hers. He had
still been holding it a few hours later, when his life slipped away.

  MARY CLOSED HER EYES, TEARS BLINDING HER AT THE MEMORY, AS IF IT had happened yesterday. She wanted to close the curtain, to retreat to her bed, but she wanted more than anything else to blot out that grief, with laudanum, Godfrey's Cordial, Nervine, chloral hydrate, anything. . . .

  Tad was gone. Sorrow covered her like cindery darkness, familiar and comforting. She opened her mouth to call for Amanda, to say she had a headache—which she certainly did—and ask Dr. Patterson to give her an extra drink of medicine. He would, of course, and John would never know....John was away for a few days, on business in New York.

  Then she sighed, and closed it again. The jaybird was perched on the back of a bench beside the harsh gravel of the drive, visible around the corner of the house. He will carry word of my weakness to Robert, she thought, and I will be that much further from getting out of here.

  I should have sent the letter to Dr. Swenson with John. Or does he, like the postman, have “instructions” to turn over all correspondence to Dr. Patterson?

  Probably. What a fool she'd been, to think that women before her hadn't tried to suborn the postman, or bribe one of the attendants, to get letters out to their friends. One of the things Robert had taken when he'd cleared out her room at the Grand Pacific—one of the things he hadn't brought to her here—had been her memorandum-book which contained the addresses of friends. She'd met so many people over the years, and she couldn't call the addresses of more than a few dozen to mind. Of those, some were people who had no power, who obviously couldn't help her. What she needed were doctors, whose testimony would overturn those monsters Robert had bribed, or Congressmen, who could ask questions in the government, force those in power to make Robert—and Patterson—turn her loose.

  Voices drifted to her through the window; she opened her eyes. Violet Goodwin and Olivia Hill were strolling along the gravel path, trailed by the ubiquitous Gretchen. Mrs. Goodwin was talking agitatedly, gesturing with her thickly gloved hands. Probably about the shortcomings of cleanliness in Bellevue, or Dr. Patterson's remissness in some detail. Mrs. Goodwin dwelled in a world of constant horror, of catastrophe held at bay only by the most rigid adherence to a thousand small rituals of her own invention, and was most tedious on the subject. Mrs. Hill nodded understandingly—her reaction to everything, Mary had discovered—and put out a hand to pat her companion, despite the fact that Mrs. Goodwin hated being touched and everyone at Bellevue knew it.