The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  He doesn't need this. His tasks are hard enough. Then some piece of Nicolay's officiousness or a bad day of itching would set her off again.

  Congress met on the Fourth of July. The town was fuller, but because of fear of invasion most legislators did not bring their wives. It made for dull—and humiliatingly small—at-homes at first, but Mary had always preferred and enjoyed the company of men. One of her earliest and most welcome callers was the dandified bachelor abolitionist Senator Sumner of Massachusetts, with whom she could talk about slavery or Chinese silk brocades with equal enthusiasm. It was he who told her of the wrangling going on in Congress, how everyone there was calling for action, for a strike at the rebel armies, though the Generals themselves protested that their men were green recruits who could not keep discipline under fire.

  “It's because of the enlistments, you see,” Sumner explained. “On the fifteenth of July, the ninety days are up. The men will begin to go home, without a blow being struck.”

  He glanced toward the Blue Parlor's long windows, through which—past the low hedge and the stables—could be glimpsed the gaggle of tents, flags, corrals, and cook-fire smoke of the camps along the Mall.

  “It will expose the capital to danger again, since you can be sure the rebels aren't going home. And it will make us, and our demands, look ridiculous, Mrs. Lincoln. Whatever state the soldiers themselves are in, you know that no politician is going to stand for that.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  ON THE NINETEENTH OF JULY THE ARMY MARCHED INTO VIRGINIA under the command of Irvin McDowell, one of the few West Point officers who'd remained with the Army of the North. Their goal was the rebel force camped at Manassas Junction, where the railroad went down into the Shenandoah Valley and the heart of Virginia.

  Mary woke in the small hours of the twenty-first, hearing what she first thought was distant thunder. But though the night had been close and hot, and the threat of storm seemed to hang in the air, she sensed that this was different even before she heard John Hay's step in the hall, the cautious whisper, “Mr. President?”

  She opened her door a crack and saw the pair of secretaries, trousers pulled on over their nightshirts and braces hanging, Nicolay's Prince Albert beard a ruffle of disarray. The two young men shared a bedroom down at the end of the hall, near the glass doors.

  Lincoln appeared in the dark of his bedroom door, still dressed, shirtsleeves and bare feet with his black hair standing out in all directions. He must have lain down and slept in his clothes, too exhausted to undress.

  Nicolay said, “McDowell's men engaged the rebel forces just outside Manassas, sir, on the banks of Bull Run Creek.”

  “Too soon for any word, I suppose?”

  Nicolay shook his head, but Hay grinned and said, “Anybody who can get a pass through the lines is heading out there in carriages with picnic-lunches, to watch the battle.”

  Lincoln stared at him, openmouthed. “Here I thought bein' a lawyer for twenty years I'd heard everythin'. Guess I was wrong.”

  He ducked back into his bedroom and returned a moment later with his coat, cravat trailing from his pocket and boots in his hand. He was back for breakfast, however, as Sunday church-bells began tolling over the city: “You heard, I guess?” he asked, after one glance at Mary's anxious expression.

  “C'n 'ee go oud 'ere, 'oo?” demanded Tad, his face a single blaze of excitement, and Willie added eagerly, “We can ride our ponies. That's faster than the carriage.”

  “Nope.” Lincoln dropped a kiss on top of Mary's head, then sat beside her. “It's comin' on to rain and all them Senators and their ladies in their carriages is just goin' to get wet.” He turned to her again, asked softly, “You all right, Mother?”

  Mary nodded. All she could see was Ellsworth's bloodless face, and the dark stains on the sheet that covered him, and, across the table, the discontented eagerness in Robert's blue eyes. In the morning stillness, with the windows open, the guns could be heard.

  Lincoln went with her, Lizzie, and the boys to church, where she heard not a single word of the sermon, which she assumed to be on the subject of the battle being fought. She was conscious only of Robert beside her, and of her prayer, Let the fighting end quickly, quickly, before he goes. . . .

  After church Lincoln went back to the War Department, to wait for telegrams that were, Hay reported, coming in at fifteen-minute intervals. A small company had captured a nearby telegraph office in Fairfax. In the evening he drove out to the Navy Yard, and while he was gone Seward arrived, breathless and grim-faced.

  “The battle's lost,” he said.

  Rain started before Lincoln returned. Throughout the night he was in his office, while rain pounded on the windows and carriages arrived under the portico of the northern doors. Senators and Congressmen who'd driven out with picnic-baskets came in, bedraggled and shaken and scared. McDowell's men had been slow getting across Bull Run Creek itself; the rebel forces had rallied behind a Virginia colonel named Jackson, “as behind a stone wall,” they said. Then more rebels had showed up, God knows from where—“Johnston's men, Mr. Seward thinks,” John Hay told Mary, on one of his trips down the hall past the parlor where she and Lizzie sat up with the boys. “They could have come by train from the Shenandoah Valley.”

  The retreating Union forces had gotten tangled up in the rout of carriages, buggies, sightseers on horseback, panic spreading across the countryside under the driving rain.

  “Are the rebels on their way here?” Lincoln kept asking. Nobody seemed to know.

  Robert and John Hay acted as go-betweens, hurrying from Lincoln's office to the oval parlor, where Mary and Lizzie drank endless cups of tea and tried to keep Tad and Willie from running down the hall to join the Cabinet meeting. From the windows she could see torches and lanterns in the camps, and if they crossed the hall, from any of the bedrooms on that side—the guest-room where Lizzie slept, or Tad and Willie's—knots of wet, exhausted men were visible, limping weaponless down Pennsylvania Avenue, uniforms soaked with rain.

  At two in the morning she heard the footsteps of many men: Lincoln, Seward, gouty General Scott hobbling on his cane. She stood as they came into the parlor. “I've advised the President that you and your sons be sent north, before Maryland takes it into its head to rise up and throw in their lot with the Virginians,” the General told her. Red-faced, white-haired, fat, and lame, he had fought the British in 1812, and Santa Anna in '46. “Once the railroads are cut there'll be no getting you out, ma'am.”

  “There's no getting me out now, General.” Mary put her arm around Tad's shoulders—Willie was sound asleep on the sofa. “My place is with my husband, and with the government that he represents.”

  “Told you so,” Lincoln murmured.

  “Are you leaving?” She looked across to meet his eyes.

  He ran his hand through his hair, and shook his head. “Like the preacher said when the widow's house burned down and he came runnin' out in his nightshirt, this kind of thing doesn't look good.”

  She turned back to the old soldier. “Then I am staying, too.” Hay and Nicolay traded a glance—expecting another scene like that in the Jones House Hotel in Harrisburg?

  But Lincoln said, “I think that settles it, gentlemen.”

  He was up all night, and most of the following, talking with Charles Sumner, who was of the opinion that immediate emancipation of the slaves would both cripple the South and win hundreds of thousands of new soldiers to the Union cause. “To make up for the hundreds of thousands of men who'd desert if I did it, I suppose,” he sighed to Mary the following day. “Not to mention bein' the last straw for Maryland.” The city was in feverish tension, waiting for an attack from across the river or, worse yet, to hear news that Maryland had risen in revolt and that they were cut off.

  Throughout that week Mary and Lincoln visited the wounded, in the makeshift hospitals set up all over Washington in the wake of the battle, in churches, in public buildings, and in private houses. She had to stee
l herself to see them, to walk between the beds through wards that stank of blood, of filth, of unwashed bodies, and of the horrible sweet rottenness of gangrene. The face on every dirty pillow was Ellsworth's. Or Robert's.

  Still, the rebels did not attack. By seizing near-dictatorial powers as Commander in Chief, Lincoln put Maryland under what amounted to martial law and began systematically silencing the pro-rebel press. Sumner shook his head over this when he took tea with Mary in the Blue Parlor.

  “It scarcely looks well, my dear Mrs. Lincoln, for a man who's declared war to uphold the Constitution to be so blithe in his disregard of the First Amendment.”

  He would have been a slightly ridiculous figure, with his long curly mane and extravagant waistcoats, to someone who didn't know his history: his fierce support of abolitionism in the Senate had gotten him caned—nearly fatally—in the Senate chamber in 1856.

  “And in order to defend a Southern capital, his alternative is . . . ?”

  Sumner pursed his lips, and held out his cup for more tea. “Shutting down rebel newspapers isn't going to silence criticism of his policies, you know.” He regarded her for a moment in silence, then added, “Nor of you.”

  Mary stiffened. “If you mean that tiresome piece in the Times about me ‘making and unmaking the political fortunes of men . . .' ”

  “No,” said Sumner. “I mean the rumors that you're sending information about troop movements to your three brothers in the rebel army.”

  Mary was silent, feeling as if her whole body were balling itself into a single fist. “Where heard you that?” she asked, very quietly. But her eyes must have had a dangerous sparkle, for the Massachusetts Senator raised his brows, and kept his tone light.

  “Where does one hear anything, Mrs. Lincoln? It's being said around the town.”

  “You mean it's being said in Kate Chase's parlor.” Mary heard the shrillness of anger in her voice and couldn't modulate it away. “By a woman who hopes to discredit my husband through me, so that her father can be elected. And it's being repeated by men who're looking for some reason besides themselves, that their lives and their country are a mess.” She set down her cup, which was spilling. Her hand was shaking.

  WITHIN A WEEK TENSIONS EASED ENOUGH FOR THE PRESIDENT TO GIVE a reception, and within two, to hold a formal dinner in honor of the visiting Prince Napoleon of France. Later Secretary Seward was quoted all over Washington as saying that he had given an exactly similar banquet for half the cost.

  Robert made arrangements to return to Harvard, with Mary and Lizzie accompanying him north as far as the beach resort of Long Branch, New Jersey. After Prince Napoleon's dinner Lincoln came to her bedroom to unlace her and brush her hair, looking, for the first time in those hectic weeks, relaxed and in good spirits, though tired. He looked, in fact, very like the man she had known in Springfield, except for the beard.

  “I saw you flirting with those hussies at last Friday's reception,” she said severely. “That Mrs. Eames, and that General's wife, whatever her name is.”

  It had surprised her a little in the past weeks to see the number of ladies who flirted with Lincoln—surprised her and annoyed her. She knew better than anyone the strength of the desires that ran beneath the exterior of homespun humility and cool logic: she much preferred Lincoln when he was too shy to flirt back.

  “I expect you to telegraph me every day while I'm away, and you can be sure I'll get a complete report on you from my spies.”

  “Why not you?” sighed Lincoln. “I'm sure Jeff Davis is.”

  It was good beyond words to be away from Washington. Good to know that Robert was going safely back to Harvard—good to feel healthy again, and to be fêted and fussed over again by reporters in New York. In Washington she felt invisible, like that child in Lexington, ignored among all the others, or, worse, pointed at and gossiped about. Robert of course looked down his nose and said, “You want to be more careful at what you say to the papers, Mother,” but she merely laughed at him, giddy with relief at being able, finally, to laugh.

  She'd written to her old Springfield friend Hannah Shearer, begging her to join them at Long Branch, promising anything, if only she would come and keep her company. The thought of losing Lizzie was hard to bear. “I've been away from poor Harrison for six months already, dearest.” It didn't seem like six months, reflected Mary, as she boarded the train to return to Washington in September. Sometimes it seemed like years. Six months ago there had been no war.

  Six months ago the sisters she'd helped raise, the brothers she'd played with, were not adherents to a cause that had sworn death to her husband and ruin to all he stood for.

  Six months ago it wasn't being whispered all over town that she was a traitor.

  Six months ago Ellsworth—and Stephen Douglas—had both been alive.

  Returning to the White House was almost worth it, however. In the weeks she'd been gone, Lincoln had stayed at the little stone cottage at the Soldiers' Home by Rock Creek, where it was cooler, and the arrangements with the painters and decorators that Mary had made for the White House had all been carried out. She stepped across the threshold of the big mansion with a sense of exhilaration. The smell of fresh paint and plaster, the brightness of new wallpapers and carpets, made her spirits soar. The East Room was gorgeous, restored from the tattered wreckage of military occupation, the new carpet like a lake of soft green cut pile floating with pink roses.

  She felt as she had at parties at her father's house, when she'd had a new dress to show off: the effervescent desire to rise on her toes and dance.

  This, thought Mary, was truly the appropriate setting for the President and his Lady. The place to which she could have, with pride, invited Henry Clay.

  Lincoln himself looked ill and tired, though he was glad to see her home. In Mary's absence Secretary Seward had made him and the boys a present of a basket of kittens, all of which had promptly gravitated to sleeping on Lincoln's bed when they should have been hunting rats in the White House attic. Sometimes when she couldn't sleep, or would steal down the hallway to the water-closet in the dressing-room, she would see, by the light of her candle, Lincoln stretched out on top of the sheets in his too-short yellow nightshirt, with kittens on his chest, pillow, and feet.

  She worried about him a great deal, in that first fall and winter of the war. He would be in conference, with Generals and Cabinet members, sometimes until midnight; there were nights when she heard him pacing the floor of his room until she drifted off to sleep. With more and more troops assembling under the cocky little General McClellan—the Napoleon of the West, the Democratic newspapers called him—there were equipment and provisions to be decided on. Lincoln, fascinated as he was by gadgetry or machines of any kind, would go to the rifle-ranges to test new guns himself, or steam down the Potomac to watch demonstrations of new sorts of electro-mercury lamps.

  With more and more troops—on enlistments of three years now, not three months—came fresh waves of rumor about rebel spies. During the summer the Mayor of Washington City had been arrested on suspicion of sympathy with the rebeling states, and one of Adele Douglas's aunts, the beautiful Rose Greenhow, was discovered to be running a ring of spies who passed information about troop movements to the rebel forces across the river. Mrs. Greenhow was incarcerated—along with many others—in the Old Capitol Prison, but the passing of information didn't cease. Half of the city's prostitutes engaged in a lively secondary traffic in military information, and newspapers blithely continued to print whatever plans and projections their reporters could learn.

  More than one anti-Lincoln journal, in addition to snide editorials about “entirely abolishing the Constitution of the United States, and substituting instead a naked philo-negro despotism,” pointed out that Lincoln's wife, as yet another Southern lady, could not but be engaging in the same informational trade.

  Reading the papers daily, Mary would be sick with anger, and with grief that she could not even speak of her fears for Ben Helm, for her
half-brothers Alec, David, Sam.

  Cold weather drew on. Rains laid the dust of the unpaved streets, then transformed it to mud. Congressmen came back to town and their wives left cards at the White House; Mary hugely enjoyed sorting through them to decide who should be invited to entertainments, and who not. With her long experience and strong instincts for social arrangements, it still infuriated her that John Nicolay would be in charge of the White House invitations and seating arrangements rather than herself. It angered her still more that Lincoln would not back down from this position: “Now, Mother, you know you couldn't have gone to Philadelphia, or New York, if you'd had to stay here and manage things.”

  “You don't trust me!” she shouted at him—this was on one of the rare evenings that he'd come into the oval parlor before eleven, when she retired to bed. “After the way I worked to make our home respectable, so you could get ahead . . . if it wasn't for me you'd be living in a cave and throwing bones on the floor for the dogs! And this is how you thank me!”

  She stormed into her room and slammed the door, weeping—she found she wept far more easily now than she ever had in Springfield, and she had been, she knew, overly sensitive then. It's the War, she thought. The War and this terrible house . . .

  But more than that—and in her heart she knew it—the source of her constant sense of panic these days was the bills that had begun to flood in from the merchants of Philadelphia and New York.

  The bills! Mary's stomach churned when she thought of them. How could she possibly have spent over $5000 on upholstery fabrics? On the fabrics, not even counting what Mr. Alexander had charged to re-cover the furniture that years of hard wear and those dreadful Guards had spoiled. Seven hundred dollars for crystal glasses? But what would the French ambassador, the English minister, Prince Napoleon, say about being served in those old chipped ones that had been in the house when the Lincolns had arrived? Of course she'd spent a great deal at Stewart's on silks and dress-goods for herself, but no one, no one, was going to sneer at her....