The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Mary answered something—she didn't know what. In her mind she saw Saul come into her father's kitchen, and put his arms around Jane: saw the way Jane relaxed into him, stealing the preciousness of love from the realities of other men's property rights.

  In her mind she saw Jane weeping in Mammy Sally's arms, hugging herself as if to keep her heart from tearing itself out of her body with grief, at the news that Saul had been sold.

  And superimposed on them both, she saw the foul drawing, the letters written in blood. Make your peace with God, nigger-lover. . . .

  If he frees them, she thought, those who wrote that letter will have his life, whether the Union wins the war or not.

  And he knows it.

  IT SEEMED, IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1862, THAT THE RUMORS OF Lincoln's plan to emancipate the slaves gained strength and force. It was as if, as Douglass had said, everyone knew that slavery was the true issue, though Lincoln continued to speak only in terms of Union, and of not letting slavery spread to new territories. Lincoln continued to seek the alternatives of colonization and recompense, seeing the contraband camps and fearing the influx and dislocation that outright emancipation would bring.

  And meanwhile the swaggering General John Pope led the Union Army of Virginia against Manassas Junction again in the hopes of taking that vital gateway to the rebel heartland.

  He lost a fifth of his men—14,000 wounded or slain.

  At a séance at the Soldiers' Home just before that battle the Indian spirit Pinkie spoke through Nettie Colburn, urging Lincoln to use the dictatorial powers he had already taken as a result of the War, and give the slaves their freedom.

  Sitting in his rocking chair in a corner of the parlor, Lincoln made no reply, though afterwards, when the guests had departed, he commented to Mary that it seemed a little hard for the spirits to be taking a stand on the matter, too. “Though I don't see why they shouldn't, I suppose,” he added resignedly. “Everyone else in the country tells me what I should do about it, from Governor Seward on down to the little old Quaker ladies who come to my office to tell me how God wants this War to be run.”

  He sounded tired, barely more than a tall shadow in the gloom of the vine-covered porch. Even here above the creek, the night was uncomfortably warm, almost too warm to sleep. General McClellan had been in the field—though not making the slightest effort to actually attack the rebel capital—and Lincoln and his new Secretary of War, the neurotic Edwin Stanton, had essentially been in command in Washington. Frustrated, Lincoln had telegraphed his chief General, If you are not using your army, might I borrow it?

  It was obvious to Mary that McClellan was either a rebel sympathizer, or simply had his eye on the 1864 elections as a Democratic, Northern peace candidate—a curious goal for a General.

  “But I can't issue any proclamation now, Mother. Not while we're being beaten all hollow in Kentucky. It would do the slaves no good, if we scream ‘You're free!' over our shoulders while we're high-tailin' it for cover in Washington—and it'll turn the whole issue into a joke. Maybe the spirits don't see that.”

  Now she said, hearing the defensiveness in her response, “And why shouldn't the spirits have a concern, for a matter so close to the true destiny of humankind? They have given you warnings before.”

  “Like the warnings that Seward, Chase, and Stanton are all traitors?”

  Mary colored in the darkness, for she was the one who'd relayed the warnings to him. Even before Nettie Colburn had given her Pinkie's warning, she had hated and mistrusted the former New York and Ohio governors, as she mistrusted the new Secretary of War.

  “I can't sack my Cabinet on the word of . . .” Lincoln paused, then went on, “. . . of spirits.” He stroked the ears of the curly-haired brown puppy he'd brought back from the Army camp, picked up stray outside a mess tent; the little animal was already inseparable from him.

  “You sound like you don't believe that the dead can speak.” Mary tried hard to keep her annoyance out of her voice, that anyone, even he, would question that Willie—his son, too!—had spoken that night.

  Sometimes she felt a great deal of sympathy for the chubby, long-departed Miss Owens back in Illinois, who had refused to marry this stubborn man.

  “I never said that,” answered Lincoln quietly. “I think the dead can speak, if they wish. But whether they speak through the likes of Nettie Colburn or Lord Colchester is another matter, Mother.”

  IN THAT SAME HOT AUGUST, REBEL FORCES INVADED KENTUCKY, AND raised the Stars and Bars over Frankfort. Mary shivered when she read of the fighting around the Kentucky city of Richmond, of the savage small-scale conflicts between neighbors, and the devastation of the countryside she had known. Was Rose Hill still standing? she wondered. Were Cousin Eliza and the sisters of Mary Jane Warfield Clay still all right? Shortly after Second Manassas word had reached her that her youngest brother, handsome little Alec, had been killed in battle outside of Baton Rouge.

  France and Britain, Mary also knew, were both close to officially recognizing the rebelling states as a separate nation—a nation that would sell unlimited amounts of cotton to English mills, and wink at the French control of Mexico. And once that precedent was set, that states could resign from the Union, how long would it be before California got annoyed and pulled out, or some New England coalition that didn't approve of an election or a future President's policies?

  They were only waiting, she knew, for a Southern victory.

  In September, Robert E. Lee led his army across the Potomac into Maryland.

  On the seventeenth, McClellan's army met Lee on the banks of Antietam Creek. After fourteen hours of fighting, a third of Lee's army was wounded or dead, and a third of McClellan's men who'd fought, almost 23,000 men, the population of a city. Whole regiments had ceased to exist. Whole generations of the young men of certain towns, certain families, who had enlisted together to fight side by side.

  Unpursued by McClellan, Lee withdrew silently over the river.

  Three days later, on the twenty-second of September, Lincoln signed a Proclamation that set aside the original intent of the United States Constitution. Unless the Southern states rejoined the Union, it said, by the first of January, 1863, all slaves in those states would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  LETTERS OF CONGRATULATION AND PRAISE POURED IN FROM abolitionists, writers, Quakers, ministers.

  Letters of abuse poured in, too, from abolitionists who carped that slavery had only been ended in the rebel territories—that men and women in the border states, and in the conquered areas of Louisiana and Virginia, were still as unfree as ever. Just how they thought Lincoln would have kept the border states from joining the Confederacy if he liberated their slaves, they didn't say.

  Workingmen who volunteered to fight for Union ceased volunteering in droves. They also ceased subscribing to government securities to support the skyrocketing expense of the war.

  Southern Unionists felt betrayed. Slave-holders in Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri muttered, seeing the day coming, inevitably, when their human property, too, would be taken from them—tens of thousands of dollars' worth, shattering their ability to continue agricultural production as they had known it. Moreover, as Frederick Douglass had pointed out, the fact that free territory existed close by meant that more and more slaves would run, knowing that no one there would return them to their owners.

  “It doesn't matter.” Mary flung down the New York World and reached across the lunch-table to clasp Lincoln's hand. “In a hundred years—or a dozen—people will recognize this for what it is. Thousands and tens of thousands who live in slavery in the South already recognize it.”

  “If they know of it.” Lincoln sounded tired; he'd been up most of the night dealing with plans for the raising of additional forces in rebellious eastern Kentucky and querulous letters from slaveholders in Maryland. Several columns of comments about his being “adrift on a current of radical fanaticism” and “an act of Revolu
tion” that would render “the restoration of the old Constitution and Union impossible,” were not what he needed.

  “They'll know.” Mary remembered those shadowy forms slipping through the darkness of her father's yard, those cryptic signs written on the alley fence. “Davis and his government may forbid anyone to tell them, but they'll know.”

  MARY WENT BACK TO NEW YORK FOR THE SENATORIAL ELECTIONS. Between the numbing horror of casualty statistics, the workingman's outrage at Emancipation, and Lincoln's unilateral decision to suspend the right of habeas corpus in the interests of security, these were an unmitigated disaster for those who supported Lincoln, Union, and the war. She remained there or in Boston through most of November, unable to bear the thought of moving back into the White House with the coming of the Congressional and social winter season.

  Her official year of mourning was up. Indeed, most women mourned only six months for a child. She knew she would have to resume entertaining, receiving visitors, acting as hostess at receptions and balls . . . which would still be planned by that supercilious cold-fish Nicolay. Returning Congressmen and their wives were already leaving cards at the White House, and there were very few of them Mary actually wanted to see. The hollow inside her ached, not only for Willie, but for Sam, for handsome little Alec who had played with Robert in her father's garden on Main Street. Through a Boston medium her youngest brother had said to her, “Tell your husband I forgive....”

  She returned to Washington in a state of soul-sick dread. Rumors were flying again, exacerbated by the wild undercurrent of excitement among the contraband and free colored communities as they watched the days count down to January the first, and the confusion and indignation among the slave-owning population of Washington City about the status of their bondsmen. A Union attempt to capture the rebel capital at Richmond resulted in a resounding defeat at Fredericksburg and yet more trainloads of shattered men poured into Washington early in December. Lincoln visited them whenever he could in the dozens of hospitals around the city; Mary resumed her quiet work among them, often with only Lizabet or John Wilamet for company.

  One December evening, as she and her Spiritualist friends Mrs. Dixon and Jesse Newton were putting on their cloaks in the White House hall to leave for an evening at the Laurie home in Georgetown, Lincoln stepped quietly out of the half-hidden door of the servants' stair. “Where are you bound for, Mother?” He'd been in a Cabinet meeting since before supper—Mary had expected him to be closeted with them most of the night. She could hear Seward's extravagant voice upstairs still, as the men descended the main staircase: Lincoln had early acquired the habit of coming and going by the servants' dark and narrow stair.

  “To Georgetown,” she said guardedly. “To a Circle.”

  “Hold on a moment,” said Lincoln, “and I'll go with you.”

  Her eyes widened, but she wasn't nearly as startled as Cranston Laurie and his wife were, twenty minutes later, to see the President's tall form unfold itself from out of the carriage in the wintry darkness. Lincoln shook hands with the Lauries, bowed to Belle Miller and Nettie Colburn, then retired to a rocking chair in the corner, still wrapped in his gray shawl with his big hands folded over his waist.

  One of the things people forgot about Lincoln was that, for all his skill with words and sounds—he could imitate bird-calls, as well as every member of his Cabinet, with equal ease—he had the frontiersman's quality of silence. In the dim glow of the single candle that burned on the table, Mary was conscious of him watching. The others, she was almost sure, nearly forgot his existence, as one forgets the presence of a sleeping cat. The faces around the table gradually relaxed, as Belle Miller played the triangular grand piano—Mary could hear when the spirit control Ramilles took possession of the slight young woman's body. As the chords gained in strength and manliness, crashing like waves on the rocks, the piano itself began to rock and sway, lifting from the floor and moving to the music, like a ship at anchor in a heavy sea.

  Nettie spoke, in the thick voice of one of her several spirit guides, this one old Dr. Bamford: “Well, I sees we got us a new guest here tonight. Troops a little low these days, Abe, on account of that spat out in Tennessee?”

  Silently, Lincoln got to his feet and walked over to the moving piano. Mary had told him of how the spirit of Ramilles would enter the piano itself, lifting and rocking it with the force of his unearthly music. The piano at the Soldiers' Home had moved a little, when Belle had played it there, but it had stopped within moments. This instrument showed no signs of stopping. Even in the darkness she could see its back foot lifting far off the floor. Lincoln put his hand on the piano, then under the back of it, while Belle played on, her eyes blank, her face filled with the passion of the French musician's spirit, so that in the dense gloom it seemed in fact to be a different face entirely.

  Mr. Laurie seemed about to protest, but the spirit Dr. Bamford called out jokingly, the words eerie in the mouth of the slender blonde girl, “Hey there, Abe, you want a good look at that-there pi-anny? Ramilles, old friend, why don't ya just step back an' let the man see?”

  Face like an automaton's, Belle Miller rose, her hands still sweeping, crashing over the keys. Lincoln ran his hand thoughtfully beneath the keyboard, then placed a hand on one of Belle Miller's, while her other hand continued to play. Then, as the piano rose and fell again, he said, “Well, let's see if we can manage to hold that thing down,” and with a light move, like a boy hopping up to sit on a fence, he swung up and perched on the piano's lid.

  The piano rocked like a bucking horse, then rose and fell again. Even when Lincoln was joined by two other gentlemen of the Circle, the powers of the spirits were unaffected.

  Mary didn't know whether to feel fascination, triumph, or mortification that her husband—the President of the United States!—would so make a fool of himself.

  “I told you,” she said, as Burke the coachman drove them back to the White House an hour later. “Now do you believe that the spirits of the dead come? That they are capable of crossing the boundaries of the world to speak to us?” Her voice trembled a little, with earnestness and desperation to believe. “Do you believe that that piano was raised and moved by invisible forces?”

  The carriage was dark, the city around them sinking into slumber. Only the faintest gleam of the carriage-lamps, and the glow of sentry-fires near the Treasury Building, cast threads of gold on Lincoln's eyebrows and beard as he looked down at her. He drew in his breath to speak, then let it out, and put his arm around her. When he did speak, his voice was gentle. “I do allow that that piano was raised and moved by unseen forces,” he said. “And I am sorry, Molly, that you were not able to speak to those you longed to hear from tonight.”

  Although Nettie had professed them present, neither Willie, nor Mary's father, nor Alec had spoken directly to Mary that night.

  They never did, on those occasions when Lincoln was in the room.

  AFTER THE DEBACLE AT FREDERICKSBURG, IN JANUARY LINCOLN replaced the affable and inefficient General Burnside with General Hooker, hoping against hope that the change would do some good.

  It didn't. In early May Hooker marched south in yet another attempt to take Richmond and was surprised one afternoon, while sitting on a farmhouse headquarters porch near Chancellorsville, by Stonewall Jackson's forces charging out of the near-by woods. The general had somehow entirely missed the fact that they were in the area.

  Eighteen thousand perished or were wounded at Fredericksburg. Almost twice that, at Chancellorsville.

  Every night after supper Lincoln would slip out by the servants' stair, and walk through the bitter-cold darkness of the President's Park to the War Department to read the dispatches as they came in. Many nights he'd fall asleep on the sofa in the telegraphers' room, to be waked by the clerks an hour before dawn so that he could return to the White House in time to wash, shave, change his clothes for another day.

  Other nights, wakeful herself, Mary would hear the thump of boots in the dow
nstairs vestibule, the hushed voices of Stackpole the doorkeeper and messengers—or more often the Generals themselves. Then the boards in the hall would creak and going to her door, Mary would see Nicolay and Hay, nightshirted and bedroom candles in hand, at Lincoln's half-open door. And Lincoln would go padding down the hall barefoot in his yellow nightshirt, with his long legs bare as a stork's and Jip trotting faithfully at his heels, to confer with Generals on the landing in the dark.

  Mary tried to get him to eat, tried to make sure he slept. His dreams after Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville were fearful.

  The Union held Kentucky and Tennessee with a sliding grip. The rebels, although they had lost New Orleans, still kept their hold on the middle of the great Mississippi River valley, laughing to scorn the Union forces that besieged Vicksburg. Across the country men muttered against the draft, and those who could afford to, hired other men to take their places in the ranks.

  Every day brought hundreds of wounded into Washington's hospitals. After a few editors were summarily arrested, the newspapers were quiet, but Mary knew that privately printed fliers circulated the city about her rebel sympathies—some of them even handed around in Congress—and rumors continued to fly.

  Late in June word came over the wires that rebel forces under Robert E. Lee had crossed the Potomac again. They were marching through Maryland, and on to strike into Pennsylvania.

  Mary had taken Tad to Philadelphia the week before, to escape the pestilential stink of Washington in summer. Sally Orne was delighted to see her, and her undemanding friendship was a great comfort. Through the winter season and into the spring, Mary had presided over official receptions and her private salons in the Blue Room, though large gatherings of strangers filled her with dread. By the end of March, she had discontinued the receptions.