The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  With Sickles was New York Senator Ira Harris, red-faced and belligerent with drink. Sickles, thin from privations in the Army hospital and limping on two canes, was resentful and bitter at the loss of his leg: Mary guessed almost at once that the men had only come to be able to say they'd seen Mrs. Lincoln's rebel guest. She supposed allowances could be made for Harris—his only son was in the Army—but the New York Senator seemed to think that rebel women merited nothing in terms of gentlemanly behavior: “I see the rebels are running like scared rabbits from Grant in Tennessee.”

  “I'm sure they were only following the example the Yankees set for them at Bull Run, and Manassas, and Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg.” Emilie dropped a lump of sugar into her tea and returned his hostile glare with a Southern belle's sweetly merciless calm. “Will you have bread-and-butter, Mary, dearest?”

  “They could be mopped up in a week,” went on the Senator, “if we had the men to pursue them. What about your son, Mrs. Lincoln? How is it that he isn't in uniform? He's old enough, and strong enough, to serve his country....”

  “Robert is . . . is making his preparations to enter the Army,” Mary faltered, praying that this wasn't in fact the case. “He is not a shirker, as you seem to imply. If fault there be, it is mine. I have insisted that he should stay in college....”

  “I have only one son,” thundered Harris, rising from his chair. And, returning his glare to Emilie, he added, “And if I had twenty sons, they should all be fighting rebels.”

  “And if I had twenty sons,” retorted Emilie, coolly dabbing butter on her bread, “they would all be fighting yours, sir.”

  As gatherings went, reflected Mary, this one ranked right up there with the fatal first of January, 1841. Emilie rose from the sofa and glided from the room with no appearance of hurry, but Mary heard her break into a run the moment she was in the hall: “Excuse me, sirs,” Mary said quickly, and hurried after her. She caught up with her in the stygian gloom of the upstairs hall, while Emilie was fumbling with the knob of the guest-room door. “Darling . . .”

  Emilie stiffened like a ramrod, nearly invisible in the shadows in her black dress, but a sob broke in her voice. “It's all right, dearest. I know he's nothing but a damn Yankee.”

  Mary folded her sister in her arms, and for a time the two women clung together in the dark, refugees alike from a world that was no more.

  The clump of crutches on the stairs. Sickles passed them without seeing their sable clothing in the gloom of the hall, turned in to the little corridor that led to Lincoln's room. “Oh, now that is too much!” whispered Mary furiously. Lincoln had come back from Gettysburg with a high fever and was still listless and exhausted. She started to go toward the bedroom but Emilie's arms tightened around her. “Probably thought of some really juicy lie to tell him . . .”

  Sickles's voice rose to a trumpet, and there was an emphatic slap, as if he'd struck the table with his hand: “. . . and it is unwise of you, sir, to have that rebel in this house!”

  “General Sickles . . .” Lincoln's voice was dangerously soft. “My wife and I are in the habit of choosing our own guests. We do not need from our friends either advice or assistance in the matter.”

  Beside her in the gloom, Emilie whispered, “Oh, Molly, I should not have come.”

  “Nonsense! We need you here, both Brother Lincoln and I. You are good for us....”

  “It was kind of you to ask me, and to take me in,” her sister murmured. “But I see that I will have to go.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  EMILIE LEFT FOR LEXINGTON IN DECEMBER. MARY WAS DESOLATE. SHE pleaded with Lincoln to put in his word with her sister, and he said, “I have asked her already. She has made up her mind. Let us not make departure harder for her than it already is.”

  Mary went with Emilie as far as Philadelphia, where she stayed for a day or two with Sally Orne, yearning for the younger woman's friendship to ease the hurt of her isolation. She felt her loneliness more sharply now, for a few months previously she had had a falling-out with Elizabeth over Ninian's dismissal from the Army commissary post that Lincoln had arranged for him. Both Ninian and Ann's husband Clark Smith had been accused of corruption. Neither Elizabeth's letter, nor Ann's, had been forgivable.

  The nation was tired of war. Tens of thousands of men had died—torn apart by minié balls, wasted by pneumonia, measles, and dysentery in the camps, eaten up by gangrene in the hospitals. There was no end in sight. In the darkened parlors of Cranston Laurie and the other Spiritualists, Mary met more and more black-clothed women, women who had lost their husbands or their sons, women who spoke with bitterness of the bloodshed that would surely resume again in spring. Across the Potomac, General Meade and Robert E. Lee maneuvered and skirmished in the thick woods of the wilderness that lay between Washington and Richmond. Meade was cautious: “Like an old lady trying to shoo a flock of geese across a stream,” muttered Lincoln. Lee—with half the Union numbers, ill-fed, ill-armed, ill-supplied—eluded them.

  Lincoln was facing re-election with almost no chance of winning it. Salmon Chase electioneered tirelessly for the Republican nomination, backed by Sumner, who had decided that Lincoln was doing nothing for the slaves he'd promised to free. The various wings of the Republican Party scrambled to dissociate themselves from Lincoln's failure. McClellan was running for the Democrats on a promise of peace.

  “Which doesn't surprise me,” mused Lincoln, when he came into Mary's bedroom to bid her goodnight, the night of her return from Philadelphia. “When he was General of all the armies he purely did his best to avoid sheddin' anybody's blood.”

  “The tide has turned,” insisted Mary, sitting up sharply in bed. She was glad to see him, though the sight of him filled her with guilt. She'd done some shopping in Philadelphia with Sally, and though many businessmen of the city—including the ex–Secretary of War Simon Cameron—had generously promised to help her out with her debts, she was still very much afraid of what Lincoln would say if he found out how much she'd spent. Even she wasn't clear what that sum was, but she knew it was bad.

  “With the Proclamation of Emancipation there has been no more talk of Britain or France entering the War on the rebel side,” she went on, not liking how beaten his face looked, in the glow of the gaslight. “Their people would not stand for it! Nor, with the victories we have won, will our people simply . . . simply whistle down the wind the men who have already died, the blood that has been shed.”

  “The blood that has been shed,” repeated Lincoln softly, and turned his hand over, looking at the palm as he had that day in the Navy Yard, when he had seen the corpse of his young friend Ellsworth brought in from the first skirmish of the war. “Will all great Neptune's ocean / Wash this blood clean from my hand? / No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine / Making the green one red.”

  He turned his head, and gazed for a time at the mirror over Mary's cluttered dressing-table, where his own reflection could be glimpsed, chalky blurs of face and shirt-front standing out from the dark of hair and beard and coat, and the darkness all around.

  “You are right, Mother,” he said, after a long time. “I shall run, and if General Grant wins another victory I may just win. And then, I suppose, we shall see.”

  He came over and kissed her, but she could see he was exhausted, and she told him to go to bed himself. She heard his footsteps on the floorboards of the hall, and heard them pass his own little bedroom and go on instead to the main corridor, that led to his office.

  It was only many hours later that Mary, waking from inchoate and frightening dreams, remembered the vision he had had, before they left Springfield, of the doubled reflection in his mirror: his living self, and a ghostly afterimage that whispered of death in his second term.

  ROBERT ARRIVED IN JANUARY, AND FORMALLY REQUESTED HIS father's permission to join the Army: “With McClellan seeking the Presidency, it looks worse than ever, for you to order every man in the nation to give up his son, and hold
your own out of the fray.”

  Mary wailed, “No!” when Lincoln came into the parlor and told her of Robert's request—Robert, fearing a scene, had consulted his father in his bedroom. She sobbed, “Don't let him go!” and sank to her knees. “Please don't let him go!” Robert's dour glance at his father was full of a world of I told you so.

  “I shall die if anything happens to him! Are you trying to take away all my boys?” It took Lincoln hours to comfort her, while the winter rain hammered on the parlor windows. She wept herself into a blinding headache, but when Robert returned to Harvard, it was with the understanding that he would enroll in law school there the following year.

  A week or so after Robert's departure, she was reading to Tad in the parlor after supper when he looked up sharply and said, “W'at dat?”

  Fire blazed red in the dark beyond the parlor windows. As she dropped her book and sprang up she heard running footsteps crash in the hall. She caught up her shawl, ran downstairs, hearing someone shout, “The stable's afire!” Hay and Nicolay passed her on the stairs. Stumbling out the kitchen door, Mary saw in the wild glare of the flames Lincoln dash for the stables, clear the boxwood hedge that lay between as if it hadn't been there. Servants were pelting after him; she could already hear the horses screaming inside. Beside her, Tad yelled desperately, “Teeda! 'Poleon!”

  Lincoln yanked open the stable door. Flame billowed out to meet him and he fell back, shielding his face with his arm. Tad screamed the names of the two ponies and made a lunge down the steps—Mary snatched at him, and Stackpole the doorman grabbed the boy in his arms. Tad promptly bit him, drawing blood, but the big Irishman held on.

  The men around the stable were falling back. Lincoln made two more tries to find a way inside—Nicolay took his arm, pulled him back toward the house. Mary put her shawl over her ears, to keep out the screams of the burning horses inside. When Lincoln reached the house again he was weeping. “It's 'cause a N'poleon,” said Tad softly, calm now, to Mr. Brooks, one of the journalists who'd been in Lincoln's waiting-room when the fire started. “He wa' Willie's pony.” Then Tad himself burst into tears, grieving the final link with his brother that was gone.

  IN MARCH, WITH MUTTERINGS OF DISCONTENT SWEEPING THE country, Lincoln called General Ulysses S. Grant from Chattanooga and offered him supreme command of the Union forces. “The man's a butcher,” protested Mary, as she and Lincoln descended the Grand Staircase to the reception in Grant's honor. “As well as a drunkard.” Thanks to the “vampire press” she felt that she knew most of the Generals as well as their own wives did, if they had wives. “The casualties among the men fighting for him have been appalling!”

  She had spoken, too, to men who'd served under Grant, as she'd made the rounds of the hospitals. “He don't care how many men he kills,” had said one soldier. “Just so he gits where he's goin'.”

  “I can't spare that man,” said Lincoln quietly. “He fights. Him and his pal Billy Sherman, they're a team of fighters.”

  He laid his gloved hand over Mary's, which lay on his elbow. Below them, the murmur of diplomats, Congressmen, officers rose from the hallway outside the East Room like the soughing grumble of the sea.

  “If we don't have victories by November—if the war doesn't look to be ending—McClellan will let the Southern states go. It will be for nothing: Emancipation, Gettysburg, deaths . . . all the suffering and the compromises and the wars we have fought so far, for the Union to survive. Then God knows what will happen. Once the principle of Union is breached, there is nothing to hold either the North or the South together, and we will destroy ourselves piecemeal, or be eaten up by the first aggressor strong enough to take us on one at a time.”

  As Lincoln shook hands with a seemingly endless stream of guests, someone near the doors shouted “There he is! The man who took Vicksburg! Let everyone have a look at you, General!”

  There was a rowdy confusion, then several Western Congressmen half-lifted General Grant up to stand on the nearest sofa, to Mary's fulminating indignation—she knew exactly what that crimson brocatelle had cost. She and Lincoln were forgotten as people crowded around Grant, fighting to get a sight of him, to get near him, to touch him. Anger at the slight—and her own growing suspicion that Grant was probably eyeing the Presidential nomination himself—turned her heart to unforgiving flint.

  Ulysses S. Grant turned out to be a medium-sized, scruffy, shy man in a rumpled dress-suit, his newly trimmed beard redder than his hair. Since the formal reception-line seemed to have disintegrated anyway, Lincoln breasted through the crowd to the sofa, leaving Mary and Nicolay to keep what order there remained. When Lincoln finally brought the General over to meet her, Mary inquired with cool politeness, “Ulysses—what an interesting name, General. And what does the S. stand for?”

  Grant replied expressionlessly, “Hiram.”

  He looked like a man who craved a stiff drink.

  His wife, Julia, who came to Washington later and called at the White House, was in Mary's opinion worse: buxom, common, cross-eyed, and, Mary suspected, ambitious.

  But Grant got things done. He and General Sherman—Uncle Billy, the soldiers called him, and said quite seriously that he was not entirely sane—went after the rebel forces like war-dogs unchained. Grant proceeded to cross into Virginia and attack Robert E. Lee in the tangled nightmare of the wooded peninsula that guarded Richmond; Sherman went south through Tennessee, following the rails to the Confederacy's supply-depot and manufacturing heart: Atlanta.

  And Lincoln turned to the agonizing task of fighting a war that after three years nobody wanted anymore, and getting himself re-elected in whatever spare time was left to him.

  Receptions were held twice weekly at the White House: Congressmen, diplomats, Senators, Generals, and their wives. Mary put off her mourning to attend them, standing at Lincoln's side as he shook hands until his right hand was so swollen he needed Hay's help getting his glove off. But the crowds of petitioners grew gradually less, and several nights a week he was able to escape from the White House completely.

  While the armies were in winter quarters he took Mary, and sometimes Tad, to the theater often. Lincoln loved the theater deeply, and in the carriage on the way home they would talk of what they had seen, Faust or Der Freischutz or the gorgeously romantic young John Wilkes Booth in Marble Heart, and Mary could pretend a bit to herself that they were courting in Springfield again.

  But not entirely like Springfield. Lincoln no longer talked to her of politics, or the conduct of the War or the country, the things that illuminated his life and hers. On nights when he was tired, having very little in the way of small-talk anyway, he barely spoke to her at all. She sensed him walking on eggs around her, and it maddened her.

  She knew her temper had grown not only short, but uncertain as well since the carriage accident. Things angered her, or terrified her, for no reason. She knew that those spells of disorientation—of feeling herself about to do or say something unthinkable—were more frequent, and that they had been joined, usually in the evenings, by episodes of dreaminess, as if she were about to disappear.

  She knew, too, that she was taking more medicine than was probably good for her, but why not? The pains in her head and her back were almost constant. She could usually pull herself together for the receptions, but often she found herself looking at the faces of the men and women around her and wondering, Who are these people? And why am I here?

  And almost worse than the pain, almost worse than her continuing grief at Willie's death, pervasive as darkness or summer dust, was her growing guilty terror about the bills.

  Above all, she sought relief from that shame.

  They never stopped coming in. Mary knew she couldn't possibly be spending as much as they said, but each individual bill could be checked. Every purchase she made was only after haggling down the original price. She simply didn't understand how it happened. Shopping itself, which filled her heart with restful delight, had become such a pleasure that she c
ould not forgo it. It was one of the only joys she had. She would sort through her purchases as she'd once sorted through her father's presents, obscurely warmed by their beauty and by their reassurance that as the President's wife, she now owned the best. She sometimes found things in her luggage, returning from a trip, that she barely recalled purchasing at all.

  But she knew that if Lincoln didn't win the election in November, all the bills would be presented—and he would no longer be so caught up in petitioners and testing new rifles and arguing over increased draft quotas that he did not notice.

  Then he would suffer disgrace, as well as she: for who would believe, once the newspapers got hold of the matter, that he hadn't known?

  Shame scorched her at the thought, shame and terror. He cherished his honor—his reputation for honesty—above all things. He never wanted to marry me, she thought in despair. If all this comes out, he will turn from me . . . and then I will die.

  “He has to win,” she said one afternoon to Lizabet Keckley, as the dressmaker was fitting the bodice on a glossy gown of eggplant satin. “He must, Lizabet!” Her voice shook—she had had a headache earlier in the day, and still felt strange, from its aftermath and from the extra Cordial she had taken. The words came tumbling out of her mouth as they so often did at her Blue Parlor receptions, things she had planned never to tell a soul.

  But of course Lizabet could be trusted.

  “Moreover, if McClellan and his lackeys get hold of my debts, they'll use them against my husband—use them to defeat him, and it will all be my fault! I have a good mind to go to those politicians who've been making a fortune off Mr. Lincoln's patronage. It is only fair that they should help me, Judd and Lamon and Mr. Weed in New York, and that fat toady Davis. If they could be trusted not to tell.”