Mrs. Lincoln's Sisters

by Jennifer Chiaverini

Their estrangement explained why Mary had not written to Elizabeth, but not why she had neglected to write to Frances or Ann, or any other member of the family who would have sent word to Elizabeth. Could it be that Willie was so dreadfully ill that Mary dared not spare a moment away from nursing him? The newspaper had noted that Mary had not left his bedside for days. If it was also true that the boy’s fever had broken, perhaps Mary would write soon, after she had some time to rest.

  Elizabeth waited anxiously for a letter, but expecting none, she also studied the newspapers with care. A week after the first mention of Willie’s illness, she spotted another, two sentences as bleak and ominous as any she had ever read: “THE PRESIDENT’S BOY STILL VERY ILL. President Lincoln’s boy William is still in a very critical condition.”

  Elizabeth felt as if all the breath had been squeezed from her lungs. By now her nephew had been seriously ill for more than a fortnight, as best as she could judge. How frantic Mary must be, tormented not only by her son’s suffering but also by dreadful memories of Eddie, who, before his tragic death, had also languished in a sickbed for weeks.

  “I should telegraph Mary and Abe to let them know we are praying for Willie,” Elizabeth said to her husband that evening, and again to Julia and Lizzy the following morning. Yet she did not send word. Mary would be too desperately busy to pause to read a telegram, she told herself, especially one from a sister with whom she no longer cared to correspond.

  Late in the afternoon on February 20, Elizabeth was in the nursery amusing her two-year-old grandson with a toy rabbit while Julia had a lie-down on account of her delicate condition. At the sound of footsteps, she glanced up to find Ninian standing in the doorway, but a cheerful greeting faded on her lips as she took in his red-rimmed eyes and stricken expression.

  As the observant nurse hurried over to mind little Lewis, Ninian took Elizabeth’s hands in his. “Darling, come and sit with me in my study,” he said hoarsely. “I’m afraid I have news that will break your heart.”

  Word had come down the wire from Washington less than an hour before. An acquaintance who worked in the telegraph office had hurried to inform Ninian so that the family would not be shocked when they read the morning papers.

  Despite the physicians’ valiant efforts to save his life, earlier that day, their beloved nephew Willie had perished. His younger brother Tad suffered from the same affliction. Abe was said to be utterly devastated, and Mary so staggered by anguish that she had taken to her bed, inconsolable and keening.

  “He was the light of their lives,” Elizabeth choked out as she fell into Ninian’s arms, weeping. “He was such a lovely boy, so kind, so good, wise beyond his years—everything a parent might wish a son to be. There are no words for such a loss. May God comfort them.”

  Ninian held her and consoled her as best he could, but eventually she had to compose herself and break the news to the rest of the family. Heartbroken, Julia and Lizzy clung to each other and wept. Ninian and Julia’s husband, Edward, went out to inform Frances, Ann, and their families, while Elizabeth remained at home to comfort her daughters and her bewildered grandson, and to imagine too clearly the scenes of bereavement and sorrow unfolding at the White House.

  The next morning Elizabeth received a telegram from Robert, sent not from Harvard but from Washington: “Willie gone. Mother prostrate from grief. Dearest aunt please come at once.”

  Stunned by the request, Elizabeth was at a loss to respond. Had Mary asked for her, or was this Robert’s idea? Did he know they were estranged? Would she travel hundreds of miles only to be turned away from the White House because Mary refused to see her? There were valid reasons to decline—the unpredictability of travel in wartime, the expense, her grandson’s needs, Julia’s difficult pregnancy. Elizabeth wanted to decline, but the past haunted her, and when she remembered the fathomless depths of her own anguish after losing her firstborn child, she was moved to pity.

  “I’ve decided to go to Washington, to Mary,” she told Ninian two days after receiving Robert’s telegram. “I’ll try to console her, if she’ll see me. If she turns me away, at least I’ll know that I tried.”

  Ninian put his arms around her and kissed her cheek. “We’ll both go. Abe is grieving too, and he carries the weight of a divided nation on his shoulders. Let us do what we can for them.”

  Before she could change her mind, Elizabeth telegraphed Robert to let him know they were coming. Swiftly, she and Ninian made their travel arrangements, packed their trunks, and left instructions with her sisters to check in on Julia often and to alert William immediately if she experienced even a hint of trouble with her pregnancy.

  Elizabeth and Ninian arrived in Washington one day after young William Wallace Lincoln was interred in a vault at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, where he would lie until his small coffin could be buried in the family plot back home in Springfield. As their carriage rumbled off to the White House, Elizabeth peered out the windows at the transformed capital, marveling at the changes that had been wrought since Abe’s inauguration, just under a year before. Washington City had become one vast military camp, the streets filled with soldiers in uniforms, troops quartered in nearly every available space. A park she and her sisters had once visited, Franklin Square, had been converted into an encampment for the Twelfth New York Regiment, filled with rows upon rows of precisely arranged white tents, with the commanding officer’s headquarters in the middle of the square and an open space for marching and drilling. A closer look and a whiff of something fetid revealed that some of the encampments were military hospitals, and numerous government buildings they passed appeared to have been converted to that purpose as well.

  Upon their arrival at the White House, Elizabeth saw that it too had been transformed. The mansion had been draped in the black crepe of mourning, the curtains drawn, the mirrors covered. Even their footsteps on the new carpets Mary had selected with such care seemed muffled by a thick, oppressive shroud of grief.

  While servants attended to their luggage, the butler led them to Robert, pale and red-eyed, and yet composed, with only a faint quiver of his jaw betraying the grief he kept so carefully contained for his parents’ sake. He embraced his aunt and uncle, thanked them profusely for coming, and accepted their condolences with a nod and a quick look away to hide unshed tears. While the butler escorted Ninian to Abe’s office, for the affairs of state would not wait while the president mourned, Robert led Elizabeth to her sister’s bedchamber.

  “I pray you can bring my mother out of her despair,” Robert said in an undertone, though no one was near. “After Willie passed, she collapsed in paroxysms of grief, shrieking and wailing in anguish until the doctor dosed her with laudanum.”

  “And Tad?” asked Elizabeth, anxious. “Has his condition changed since you telegraphed us?”

  “Tad is improving,” said Robert as he escorted her up the stairs, “but he is terrified that he might also die. He’s heartbroken, and he cries because he will never see Willie again.”

  Elizabeth felt a stab of grief. “Oh, the poor, dear boy.” He needed his mother desperately, but Mary was too consumed with grief to comfort him.

  “My father arranged for a capable nurse from one of the military hospitals to care for Tad and to look in on my mother, but for the most part, Mrs. Keckly and two other friends have been watching over her in turns, day and night.” Robert’s jaw tightened and he inhaled deeply, shaking his head. “Whenever she drifts out of her drugged stupor, she becomes delirious and wild with fresh despair. Aunt Elizabeth, I—I don’t know what we’ll do if you can’t reach her.”

  The first remedy Elizabeth would suggest would be to cut back on the laudanum, then eliminate it entirely. They had reached the top of the stairs, but even before they turned down the corridor, she heard Mary keening, an unearthly, heartrending cry that rose and fell, sending a shiver down her back. At the bedroom door, she paused and turned to Robert. “You see to Tad, and let him know Aunt Elizabeth will be there soon. I’ll see to
your mother.” When he nodded, she forced a reassuring smile, steeled herself, and entered Mary’s room.

  She found her younger sister in bed in the throes of grief, the curtains drawn over the windows, the air close and uncomfortably warm. After her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she recognized the lovely woman of color who rose gracefully from the chair pulled up to Mary’s bedside—Mrs. Keckly, Mary’s companion, perhaps even friend, since she had evidently become much more to her than a dressmaker. Quietly, Elizabeth reintroduced herself, only to learn that Mrs. Keckly remembered her well, despite her evident fatigue. Elizabeth thanked her for watching over her sister and urged her to go home and get some rest. Visibly relieved, Mrs. Keckly bade her good-night, promised to return the next day, and quietly departed.

  In the days that followed, Elizabeth was grateful for Mrs. Keckly’s steady, calming effect on Mary as they endeavored to draw her out of her torment. Mary was alternately paralyzed by sorrow and frantic with despair, and her sudden bouts of keening frightened Tad and unsettled the entire household. Either Elizabeth or Mrs. Keckly remained with her at all times, and often they both did, gently urging her to eat, to let them wash her face, dress her, and arrange her hair, to venture down the hall to see Tad, who improved day by day under the watchful eye of Nurse Pomroy. Elizabeth managed to coax a smile from her sister when she told her how Tad refused to take his medicine from anyone but his father, so the president was frequently called out of important conferences and even cabinet meetings to administer the dose. Every time, Abe readily went.

  Throughout his mourning, Abe carried on with the duties of his office with stoic surety. And yet, on the one-week anniversary of Willie’s death, Ninian observed that he locked himself in the Green Room, where Willie had lain in repose before his funeral, whether to be alone with his thoughts, to remember his beloved son, or to pray Elizabeth and Ninian could only wonder. Abe observed the private mourning ritual every Thursday for several weeks thereafter, and Elizabeth was relieved to see that it appeared to offer him some solace.

  With gentle and persistent coaxing, Elizabeth eventually persuaded Mary to leave her bed, to wash and dress, and to attend church services. Mrs. Keckly swiftly completed pieces for her mourning wardrobe so that she might properly receive callers, but although acquaintances came to express their condolences, Mary admitted almost no one. When the beautiful and popular Elizabeth Blair Lee called and sent up her card, Mary could not bear to send her away peremptorily, so she begged Elizabeth to receive her instead. It turned out to be one of Elizabeth’s most pleasant duties, for Mrs. Lee, sister to both a Missouri congressman and the postmaster general, was charming and friendly, and the message of condolence she had Elizabeth deliver to Mary was so heartfelt and kind that it brought fresh tears to Mary’s swollen, bloodshot eyes.

  “Your aunt Mary still confines herself to her room, feeling very sad, and at times gives way to violent grief,” Elizabeth wrote to Julia in mid-March. “She is so constituted, and the surrounding circumstances will present a long indulgence of such gloom.” She regretted the word “indulgence” as soon as she wrote it, for it implied that Mary could end her grief by sheer force of will if the people around her refused to tolerate her misbehavior any longer. Elizabeth regretted all that the word implied, and yet she did not cross it out.

  Robert, as quiet in his grief as his mother was expressive, endeavored to maintain a brave, strong front and was tenderly solicitous of his grieving mother. Mary responded well to his attention, but eventually Robert was obliged to return to Harvard to finish out the term. Soon thereafter, in the first week of April, obligations called Ninian back to Springfield. They had intended to travel together, but Mary remained in such a fragile state that Elizabeth decided to stay on a while longer. She missed home, and she was concerned for Julia, but Mary needed her. Although Mary never once mentioned their estrangement, Elizabeth knew her sister was thankful it was apparently over.

  Although Mary never left the White House, beyond its safe, sheltering walls the war went on, and word of another sudden loss reached Mary and Elizabeth there. Far to the south, General Grant had defeated the rebel forces at Shiloh in Tennessee, but it had been a costly battle, the bloodiest of the war so far, with more than thirteen thousand killed, wounded, or missing on the Union side and nearly eleven thousand casualties for the South. Among those killed was their half-brother Sam, an officer in Company I, Crescent Regiment of the Twenty-Fourth Louisiana.

  It was impossible to imagine their handsome, popular younger brother, so full of life and fire and fun, lying dead on a Tennessee battlefield. Elizabeth and Mary had loved to cuddle him when he was a baby, a special privilege Mammy Sally had rarely granted. “It is just as well that I see no one,” Mary confided to Elizabeth and Mrs. Keckly the day after the grim news arrived. “I would be obliged to smile and pretend that I don’t care that Sam is dead, or all my enemies would come out of the woodwork, questioning my loyalty to the Union.”

  To the sisters’ dismay, staying out of sight did not keep Mary out of her persistent critics’ minds. When eulogies for Sam appeared in Southern papers, his death reminded Mary’s detractors of the Todd family’s ties to secessionists and stirred up the old, tired questions about her loyalties. It was an unnecessary, disrespectful, appalling thing to do when the White House remained draped in mourning black, Elizabeth thought indignantly, a display of callous disregard for Mary’s unrelenting grief.

  And unrelenting it was.

  By mid-April, Elizabeth had become accustomed to Mary’s sudden fits of weeping. She had learned to sit with her sister patiently, murmuring soothing phrases until she grew calm again. One day she and Mrs. Keckly were with Mary in the family’s sitting room, comforting her in their well-practiced fashion, when Abe entered and stood just inside the doorway, studying his wife. After a moment, he took her gently by the arm, led her to the window, and solemnly pointed to St. Elizabeths Hospital in the distance.

  “Mother,” he said, “do you see that large white building on the hill yonder?”

  Mary nodded, her eyes widening. Everyone in Washington, even Elizabeth, a mere visitor, recognized the lunatic asylum, an imposing landmark on the city skyline.

  “Try to control your grief,” Abe continued, his voice steady, “or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

  Elizabeth muffled a gasp, and from the corner of her eye she saw Mrs. Keckly struggling to conceal her shock. That Mary might be destined for an asylum was an idea too terrible to contemplate, and Elizabeth was astounded that Abe would speak so to his grieving wife.

  And yet, in the days that followed, it seemed that the warning alone had compelled Mary to try to regain control of her nerves. Mary still canceled her once-customary receptions and levees and accepted almost no callers, but her dormant fascination with politics briefly rekindled on April 16, when her husband signed an act of Congress abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia.

  The measure had been hotly contested in Congress and in the press, and a great many white citizens had sent letters and petitions to congressmen, editors, and other influential men demanding that the bill be voted down. In the end, their complaints and protests went unheeded, and the measure became law.

  The colored residents of Washington responded with unrestrained jubilation. Their faith in President Abraham Lincoln was renewed, as was their resolve to see slavery abolished everywhere, for everyone, forever. “This is only the beginning,” Mary told Elizabeth, her eyes bright, her thoughts focused on the future for the first time since Elizabeth had returned to the White House. “Soon freedom will ring for all people, all across this great, unified nation.”

  Elizabeth found her sister’s renewed interest in the fate of the country very promising, perhaps enough so that she no longer needed Elizabeth as desperately as before. Reluctant to leave the entire burden of Mary’s care to Mrs. Keckly—who had already done more for Mary than any other friend and, Elizabeth feared, had probably neglected her bus
iness in the process—Elizabeth wrote several letters to the family back home trying to secure a replacement. “Your aunt Mary wonders if Mary Jane Wallace will not feel like coming on when I am ready to leave,” she wrote to Julia, testing the waters, hoping her daughter would pass along the suggestion. “She does not yet feel as if she can be alone.”

  When that letter provoked no response, Elizabeth focused her appeals on Frances, determined to persuade her to send her daughter to the White House. The summer season required only a very simple, affordable wardrobe, Elizabeth assured her, in case money was the issue. Writing to her niece directly, Elizabeth said, “Aunt Mary says that she will be only too glad to defray your expenses in coming, which you can repeat to anyone who objects on those grounds.” But when none of her sisters or nieces responded to her increasingly fervent pleas, Elizabeth realized that she must either leave her post vacant or remain indefinitely. But she simply could not stay away from home any longer, not with Julia’s second child on the way.

  Abe’s urgent and obvious wish for her to remain made Elizabeth’s choice even more difficult. Just as Mary did, he seemed to find Elizabeth’s company soothing, so she made a point to spend time with him, to distract him, if only briefly, from his mourning and from the heavy cares of government. Once she took him to view the Executive Mansion’s conservatory, which he admitted he had never visited, even though it was one of Mary’s favorite places on the estate. Another time, she accepted his invitation to ride out to view the Navy Yard and Arsenal. As the carriage rumbled over the stones of Pennsylvania Avenue, she realized with a start that this was the first time she had left the White House since her arrival.

  Abe praised Elizabeth for her good influence over Mary when she was caught in the throes of despondency or temper, and he confessed that he thought her presence was essential to his wife’s mental health. Dutifully, Elizabeth remained to support her sister, brother-in-law, and young nephew as their needs required, but as Mary continued to improve in small ways, day by day, her longing for her own home grew more acute. Whenever she mentioned setting a date for her departure, however, Mary regarded her with an expression so stricken that Elizabeth immediately postponed her trip another week.