The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  “We don't think,” said Douglass softly. “Not until it's too late.” He paused in his long stride as three little boys dashed across the path with their hoops. “She gave the rest of the canes—and a number of his other things, like waistcoats and gloves—away to people who she thought might pay some of her debts.”

  “Was it true, that he left her in debt?” asked John.

  “You know what they say, about how you find a cobbler in a village?” asked Lizabet wryly. “You look around and see which children have no shoes, and you follow them home. He'd gone bankrupt once, for trusting a feckless partner in that store he ran back in New Salem—I think he was twenty-three. The sheriff sold his surveying-tools and horse at auction. His friends clubbed together and bought them back for him, but I don't think he ever got over it. When he died his estate ran to something like eighty thousand dollars....But he left no will.”

  John blinked, not understanding, and Lizabet smiled with a kind of reflective irony. Few who had been slaves had ever even thought of making wills, for what was there to leave? Legally, until January of 1863 neither John nor his mother, nor the kingly man who walked now at his side, had even owned their own bodies.

  “When a man doesn't leave a will,” Lizabet explained, “it means his wife and his children can't touch a penny of his money till the estate has been probated. Sometimes that takes years. Mr. Lincoln knew better. He was a lawyer—he'd spent twenty years cleaning up the affairs of men who hadn't left wills. And it wasn't that he didn't know his life was in danger, from the moment he was elected to office. People turn strange, when they think about death.” Her eyes strayed toward the dazzling river again, and John saw in his mind the burned-down candles, the fresh flowers, before the picture of her nearly white son.

  “I think it might have been a blind spot for him, the way money was for her,” she said. “Or maybe he was just more frightened than he ever let on.”

  “So what happens,” asked John—who had never encountered or much thought about this aspect of the lives of the white and rich, “—while the courts are probating a man's estate? What do his wife and children live on?”

  Lizabet and Douglass exchanged a glance, then Douglass said, “Nothing. I don't know how the ancient Hebrews arranged such matters, but when Jesus of Nazareth urged charity to widows and orphans, he was not talking in generalities. Mostly they go live with their families . . . only Mrs. Lincoln had managed to have a fight with two of her sisters and wasn't speaking to them, and the rest had been on the wrong side of the War. When Lincoln died, Mrs. Lincoln had managed to personally insult most of her family and his Cabinet—I think at one point about two weeks after the assassination she called Secretary of War Stanton to the White House and accused Andrew Johnson of being part of Booth's gang. Then over the next few weeks she made a clean sweep of it and alienated everyone else she'd formerly missed.”

  John saw in his mind Cassy and Clarice haul Phoebe back from physically assaulting Lionel—Phoebe spitting at their big, good-natured housemate, screaming insults and threats and lashing out with her nails. . . . He lived in daily dread of hearing that the whole family had been evicted from their half of the broken-down dwelling because his mother had attacked the rent-collector again.

  Mrs. Lincoln accusing her husband's successor of having compassed his murder—he could just picture her leaning forward in her creaking corset, could hear her high, sweet voice breathlessly gasping the words behind the crape screen of her veil—seemed laughably mild.

  Through the whole of the afternoon, until late-falling summer darkness cloaked the park and mosquitoes drove the three former slaves back to the omnibus and Mrs. Keckley's stifling room at the Lewises' again, John listened to his friend's recollection of the black nightfall of Mary Lincoln's life. And while Lizabet would speak calmly of those weeks of sitting in the darkened guest-room in the White House—for Mary could not bear to enter even her own room there, much less sleep in the big carved bed in which she had on rare but treasured occasions lain with the husband she'd adored—he could feel the suffocating gloom of that curtained chamber, and hear the woman's keening, like an animal howling in a trap.

  Mary had been brought back to the White House that wet morning of Holy Saturday by Secretary Welles's wife, Mary Jane, and by her fellow Spiritualist Elizabeth Dixon, the only friends who could be located at short notice. Throughout Easter Sunday, she had been forced to listen to workmen building the towering black catafalque in the East Room to enthrone his coffin. Lizabet had arrived late Saturday morning and sat beside her, holding her hands when Mary would let her.

  “She wept until she was ill.” Lizabet shook her head, as if across the dark river of years she could still look straight into that cramped little room with its closed curtains, could still hear the hammering downstairs. “I've never seen a woman in such grief. She said, many times, that she wanted to die, that she'd rather Booth had shot her as well. We were all of us worried—Dr. Henry who'd been in town from Oregon, Mrs. Welles, Mrs. Lee that was one of the Blair family and sister to Ginny Fox, Mr. French that had helped her out with her debts, Senator Sumner. . . . Those were the only ones she'd see. Mr. Stanton, the Secretary of War, was running the country, since the same night Mr. Lincoln was killed his Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, was attacked by another of Booth's gang, and stabbed so badly that his life was despaired of. That's something almost no one seems to remember about the assassination.”

  “They would have got Johnson, too,” said Douglass in his velvety bass. “Only Booth's man turned coward at the last minute and went and got drunk instead.”

  John reflected privately that it was astonishing the would-be killer hadn't encountered the Vice-President in the tavern to which he'd fled.

  “Mrs. Lincoln never stirred from that room for six weeks,” said Lizabet softly. “Sometimes sleeping—she slept a great deal. Sometimes only sitting and staring. Sometimes screaming and wailing, like a woman in an opera or a play. We all made sure she was never alone. I must have heard her recount that last evening, detail by detail, three hundred times in that month and a half, sometimes twice and three times in the space of a few hours, until I was ready to scream myself. Even Dr. Henry, who was the most patient of men, said to me once in the hall, ‘Isn't she aware that the rest of us have lost a dear friend, too?'”

  “You would be, and I would be . . . I hope,” said John. “But Mrs. Lincoln isn't like that.”

  “No.” A wry and reminiscent expression tugged the corner of Lizabet's mouth. “No, she isn't.”

  Certainly no one is like that, he added mentally, who's had four or eight tablespoons of Battley's Cordial or Indian Bitters, three or four times a day for years.

  And who would deny a woman so bereft the comfort of medicine for her pain?

  Lizabet went on, “She felt that it was somehow her fault, as she did when Willie died. She was always one to see misfortune as God punishing her, for something she had done. She kept trying to see what could have been done differently, as if she could go back and take another path, so that he could live. Poor Mr. Johnson stayed in his boardinghouse—with a pack of children and grandchildren and his poor sickly wife—and Secretary Stanton ran the country. I think Mrs. Lincoln couldn't face the thought of coming out of that room. Of emerging into a world that she wouldn't share with him.”

  In his mind he saw again that lanky silhouette against the evening sky of Virginia, taking off his hat and bending down to kiss the plump little figure at his side.

  “Where did she go when she did come out?” he asked. “Back to Springfield?”

  Lizabet shook her head. “It wasn't that easy.”

  And John thought, No. Nothing was ever that easy with Mary Lincoln.

  Give her a difficult situation, and she was bound to make it worse.

  In between paroxysms of grief, Mary had managed to quarrel with every single friend and neighbor in her adopted hometown of Springfield over the resting-place of her husband's body. (What else? though
t John with an inner sigh.) She could not bring herself to attend the funeral, but when Robert returned from Springfield with the news that its town fathers had lovingly formed a Lincoln Monument Association, and spent $5,300 on property for a magnificent tomb at the center of town, she had flown into blind rage that the tomb would not include a family crypt.

  “I don't know whether it was because she truly couldn't endure the thought of eternity not spent at his side,” said Lizabet, “or because she wanted, once and for all, to be recognized as the wife of the martyred hero, the way she'd always wanted to have everyone know she was the President's wife. Probably both,” she added, with a touch of sad affection for her friend. “Probably both.”

  “After all the mud that had been flung at her in the papers for four years,” mused John, “who can blame her for wanting to claim her place?”

  “She wrote back to Mr. Conkling—who was the husband of her best friend in the old days—that Mr. Lincoln had expressly wished to be buried in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, in a family vault,” said Douglass. “I gather from something she said to me later that he'd only said once that he wanted to be buried in someplace ‘green and quiet'—not a description of downtown Springfield, whichever way you look at it. For all that he became a lawyer, and a politician, and the servant of his intelligence and his destiny, I think he was always a bit of a backwoodsman in his heart.”

  When first he'd come to the cities of the East, wondered John, had Abraham Lincoln found them as confusing and noisy as he himself had found Washington, that first autumn of his freedom? Did he dream of the woods, as John dreamed of them, over and over in the stinking South Side slums?

  “So of course she couldn't go back to Springfield.”

  Douglass raised his eyebrows. “Not after threatening to have her husband's body buried in Washington if the Monument Association didn't do things her way, she couldn't.”

  Lizabet chimed in, “She claimed also that Lincoln had intended to move the entire family to Chicago after the end of his second term, because, she said, he couldn't face returning to the house where his beloved Willie had lived.”

  “Hadn't they lost another child already in that house?” asked John, remembering Mary's rambling account of her life.

  “Of course,” said Lizabet. “And in my hearing he spoke a number of times, about when they would be able to go back to Springfield. It was she who couldn't face it. Her friend Myra Bradwell and her husband lived in Chicago—still live there, in fact—and Mrs. Bradwell was part of the community of Spiritualism there. I know Robert wanted to return to Springfield, where they owned the house at least and he could be apprenticed to practice law. But Mrs. Lincoln . . . had her way.”

  Of course she did, thought John, recalling his own mother's wild rages and arbitrary demands. Of course she did.

  “It was nearly summer by the time they left the White House,” said Mrs. Keckley softly. “The day they left was the day before the Army of the Potomac was to return to town, after the final surrender of the last Confederate troops, and the capture of Jefferson Davis. Carpenters were building a reviewing-stand in front of the White House for General Grant and President Johnson—hammering filled the halls, as it had when they were building the canopy for Mr. Lincoln's coffin. The place looked as bad as it did when Mr. Lincoln and Mary had first moved in, because after the funeral sightseers went through the lower floor and helped themselves to nearly everything. Silverware and dishes were showing up just weeks afterwards in pawnshops from Washington to Boston, and of course the papers all said she'd made off with them, in all these trunks.

  “And after all that,” she sighed, “it was just Robert and Tad and I, and the two White House guards Tom and Will, who loaded up the luggage. I know she'd angered some people with her hysterics, and turned others away with how she'd go on and on. But when it came to it, I nearly cried that there were so few, to see her on her way.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  MARY, ROBERT, LIZABET KECKLEY, AND TAD RODE TWO DAYS AND two nights by train to Chicago, where they lived first in a downtown hotel, and then in a cheaper hotel in Hyde Park, at the end of the new streetcar line, seven miles south of the city on the shore of the lake. John Wilamet remembered Chicago in the Sixties, before the fire: wealthy neighborhoods of fine brick houses along Michigan Avenue and on the lakefront, surrounded by wide grounds and trees, interspersed with ragged shantytowns called “patches”—Conley's Patch, Goose Island, Little Hell, and Ogden's Island—where the Hungarians, Poles, Germans, and Irish lived in rickety sheds or minuscule rooms subdivided from the upper floors of commercial buildings.

  There were few blacks in the town in those days. They lived in unbelievable squalor south of Maxwell Street. He remembered the trains that would roar through the crowded neighborhoods of the poor without slowing down; remembered the stench of the river that was an open sewer for the lumber, soap, and packing plants all along its banks. Remembered rats fed so fat on slaughterhouse offal that a trap wouldn't kill them. You had to listen for the noise of the bar slamming down, then go out and finish the job with a hammer.

  Remembered the tangles of alleyways where the poor kept pigs, cows, chickens in tiny yards, along with fodder, stored hay, coal oil, and kindling for stoves. No wonder the place had gone up like tinder.

  It had been Hell, waiting only for the touch of the Fire.

  Lincoln's estate had been put in the hands of Judge David Davis, his old friend of his circuit-riding days. While all over the country Lincoln was being apotheosized from a shrewd jokester into a saintly martyr, Congress was refusing to vote so much as a dollar toward a pension for his wife and children. This was partly because Mary had managed to personally insult and offend nearly everyone in the government, and partly because, quite simply, no Presidential widow had demanded one before.

  William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor—log cabins and hard cider notwithstanding—had both been wealthy planters. Congress had paid their elderly widows the remainder of their husbands' first-year salary, and they had retired to the family plantations in ladylike dignity, surrounded by adult children and hosts of grandchildren to care for them.

  The Re-United States, moreover, had been facing the debts of four years of ruinously expensive warfare running to hundreds of millions of dollars. In the midst of dealing with martial law in a conquered rebel territory—and hundreds of thousands of former slaves who had no idea where to go or how to make their livings—Congress had not wanted to listen to a middle-aged, abrasive widow demanding at the top of her lungs and in every “Letters to the Editor” column in the East, to be paid at least the balance of her husband's salary for the year 1865, and a pension on top of it.

  “She was entirely justified,” remarked Douglass, as he, John, and Lizabet walked through the cobalt twilight past the red-brick towers of the Smithsonian Castle, toward the park's edge. “It was Lincoln's election that started the War, and Lincoln was its final casualty. She was owed at least the pension that any soldier's wife would have had, for giving a husband to an enemy bullet.”

  “Not that a soldier's pension was what she asked for,” mused Lizabet. “But in her mind the principle was the same. And then of course in those days both the country as a whole and every wealthy Republican in sight were showering gifts on General Grant—including two houses, horses, carriages, and everything from ornamental swords to gold-rimmed dinner service for a hundred. They could all see that he was going to be the next President, and wanted him to remember them kindly. Mrs. Lincoln was furious that she had been ‘forced' to live in a common boardinghouse. Judge Davis—and Robert, I'm sure—would point out that she had a perfectly livable house in Springfield, but she wouldn't hear of living in it . . . nor of selling it. Through all her letters to me during 1866 and '67, I don't think she ever once mentioned selling the Springfield house.”

  They crossed Constitution Avenue, walked along Seventeenth Street where it bordered the President's Park. Through the trees, lights could be seen,
though John couldn't imagine President Grant and his family were still in residence at this grisly time of year. Without the War, and in the deeps of summertime, Washington had subsided into what it had been all along: a hot, sticky little Southern city floating on a marsh.

  Was Mary Lincoln sitting this evening in her window back at Bellevue tonight, he wondered, as he so often saw her, looking out at the gathering dark? Was she keeping consumption of opium down in his absence? Or would they have to go through the whole heartbreaking process of illness, depression, restlessness, pain again?

  His heart ached for her, as it ached in spite of himself when his mother would sit weeping on the rear porch of the house, rocking like a child for hours with her arms around her knees.

  Give them shots of morphine every few hours. Why not?

  He shook his head, his mind returning to Lizabet's words, and to Mary's account of her Washington years. “She was still in debt, wasn't she?” he asked. “The debt that she'd never told Lincoln about?”

  Lizabet's lips drew tight.

  “You have to understand,” she said, after a time of silence, “that for Mrs. Lincoln, spending money was a sickness. Shopping was how she spent her days, how she got out of herself . . . how she rested. Many were the days she'd spend hours, showing me all she'd got. She hoarded up treasures like a drunkard drinks, almost without thinking. And she couldn't stop.”

  In March of 1867 (Lizabet said), she received a letter from Mary Lincoln, pleading—in her usual imperious fashion—with her to meet her in New York between August and September of that year, to assist her in selling up her wardrobe. I cannot live on $1,700 a year, she wrote, and would be forced to give up the house that she had so recently bought—the house that she had hoped to make her permanent home—and return to living in a boardinghouse.