The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  The lined gargoyle face lit up first with surprise, then with pleasure, and the uncertainty he always had around women vanished from his eyes. “Why, thank you, Miss Todd. You're right, it's tiresome and lonely, riding the circuit courts, and Burns would be the best companion I could ask for, aside from Mr. Shakespeare. It's kind of you to think of me, Miss Todd.”

  Any other man of her acquaintance would have spoken the words as a formula: It's-kind-of-you-to-think-of-me-Miss-Todd, with a bow and a knowing smile. But the way Lincoln said them, Mary knew that it was not only kind, but almost unheard-of in the lawyer's experience.

  “I promise I won't let it come to harm.”

  “Good heavens, I never thought you would!” She smiled. “I can tell you're a man who knows how to take care of books. God knows I've spent enough of my time here in Springfield trying to find things to read to have sympathy for someone cast ashore in places like Petersburg and Postville!”

  He laughed at that, his nose wrinkling up and his big horselike teeth flashing. “And in some of those places I feel cast ashore, like Mr. Crusoe—and wasn't it just lucky for him that ship of his didn't sink under him at the outset, and leave him without any of those guns and axes and ropes and the rest of his plunder.”

  “Which I think was just a little providential on Mr. Defoe's part,” remarked Mary consideringly. “On the other hand, if he hadn't provided him with all that ‘plunder,' as you say, poor Mr. Crusoe would probably have starved in the first week, and Mr. Defoe couldn't have made much of a story out of that.”

  Lincoln laughed again, and scratched his head, augmenting the crazy ruin of his hair. Seeing the way his whole frame relaxed, Mary understood that this sad-eyed man truly loved to laugh. “Though I will say, you'd be surprised what you can do with just an ax. Still, there should have been an almanac someplace on that boat, and if you're real desperate you can get some good reading out of an almanac.”

  After that Mary would lend Lincoln books, which he consumed like a child devouring candy. He usually returned them on Sunday afternoons, when Elizabeth held open house for the Coterie at the House on the Hill. Frances would act as co-hostess for these gatherings, for she and Dr. Wallace were still living in a rented room at the Globe Tavern. Mary—who was becoming quite a notable cook under Eppy's tutelage—would assist with the refreshments, but for the most part she was free to mingle with her guests, and many of those freezing winter afternoons ended with her and Lincoln lingering in the darkening parlor, long after the others had departed.

  They talked of the books she lent him, and Mary was surprised at the scope of his reading, and the depth and acuteness of his mind. Her other suitors—Douglas and Shields, Trumbull and Webb—were educated men, familiar as a matter of course with Shakespeare and Homer. Lincoln, uneducated, had discovered the stories for himself, and had read them as Mary read Gothic novels, with an almost sensuous pleasure. On one occasion he recited to her “John Anderson, My Jo,” which he had memorized as he casually and easily memorized entire speeches and scenes from Shakespeare, and she thought she heard a catch in his voice on the ending line, “We'll sleep together at its foot, John Anderson, my jo.”

  “I got to memorizing poetry for when I travel,” he said. “It's three days' ride down to Carthage, and four days to someplace like Belleville, and most days you don't meet a soul on the roads. Back when I didn't have a horse I'd walk, sometimes two and three days, if I'd delivered a load of goods by raft and had to get back home.”

  On other evenings they spoke of the issues in the Legislative committees he was on, or of the suits he had before the courts. “Yes, the state needs a strong central bank, but if it has one, who's going to run it?” pointed out Mary, one lamp-lit evening when they sat, half-forgotten by the other guests, in the dim rear parlor. “What if you get a scoundrel in charge, like Biddle in the National Bank, who spent his time buying influence and manipulating credit to favor his own supporters? Wouldn't that discredit the bank and cause more ruin than it amends?”

  “Oh, I would love to see some politician go to the polls sayin' he's gonna tell the banks what to do,” sighed Lincoln, with a comical shake of his head. “He'd be the first man in the country's history to not only get no votes, but to have 'em taken away from him, so he'd be a vote-debtor and have liens against him for the next six times he runs....But this whole mess the state's in now, with no money for canals or railroads or anythin' else we need, is because there's nuthin' sayin' what money is and what it ain't, which is all banks really do, when you think of it....”

  When she spoke of her father's slaves, he asked if she were an abolitionist: “I hate slavery—one trip to New Orleans was enough to do that for me—but the way the abolitionists are goin' about their business will surely tear this country apart. When I see the violence that's come about in the last few years, that printer Lovejoy murdered over in Alton, and the mob in St. Louis that burned that poor Negro sailor to death—when I hear that some state governments have put bounties on the heads of abolitionist publishers—all I see is that both sides are turnin' their backs on reason, turnin' into a mob.”

  “It's easy enough for us to say,” replied Mary softly, “because we're white. For us it is a matter of reason. People like the slaves of that horrible Mrs. Turner who lived back in Lexington, who would beat them literally to death over things like a broken teapot, don't really care about what the Founding Fathers intended. They just want to be able to leave a place where they're being mistreated, and not have their husbands and wives taken away from them to pay for someone's gambling debts.”

  If he spoke easily and earnestly of how the state could raise money for internal improvements through the sale of federal lands, or at what point Macbeth could have turned aside from his disastrous course, he did not speak of his family, or the Kentucky canebrakes where he'd been born. The stories he told were of people he'd met on the road, or folks he'd known in New Salem or Cairo or points between. And Mary remembered what Josh Speed had said of Lincoln's father on that winter afternoon in the store, and of Lincoln himself on the night of the Legislature's cotillion: that he was an exile from the world he'd grown up in, who had found no place yet in the world for which his starved mind yearned.

  And Lincoln was ambitious. That was one of the first things Mary learned about him, and one of the most surprising: that behind his diffidence in polite company, his razor-sharp wit and his deep, gentle love for animals and children, he had his eyes on political power and studied how to achieve it the way he had once, he told her, studied to become a surveyor.

  “Which you don't expect, when you speak to him in company,” said Mary to Speed, on a rainy day in early March. She'd heard the rumor that there was a new shipment of Irish lace—the first of the spring—and because Elizabeth was out paying calls with the carriage, she had convinced Merce to walk downtown through the slushy muck of the streets, hopping from plank to plank of building material dropped off the construction drays and carrying a bundle of shingles they'd found to bridge the gaps. Speed was astonished to see her—the weather had been foul all morning and promised worse—but, as she'd calculated, Mary had first pick of the lace, and put money down on the two best pieces for herself, plus gifts for Elizabeth, Frances, Merce (who was thumbing through the books), and Julia.

  “He appears so humble—like Duncan, he hath borne his faculties so meek—but I notice he doesn't put a foot wrong when he's negotiating with delegates from the other districts for Legislative votes, and at Court Days I don't think there's a man he doesn't speak to.” Mary dimpled, and shook her head. “Yet he likes to present himself as a bumpkin who couldn't tell a wooden nutmeg from a barleycorn.”

  “Only when it suits him.” Speed leaned on the counter and scratched the ears of the fat marmalade tomcat who shared the building with Lincoln and himself. “People like to hear that, when he makes a speech—Lincoln's figured that out. It lets him slip his point across when their minds aren't closed to argument by highfalutin' words. I think
his ambition springs from a different root than, for instance, our little Stephen's—though they're both poor boys who want to end up richer than their fathers were. But Lincoln's ambition goes beyond that. He wants power so that he can do the job right, while other men want it only so they can collect the job's pay.”

  He glanced at the windows, gray with dreary afternoon light. The brown puddles in the street lay still as glass, but the sky lowered sullenly above the wet board buildings of the town. Work had resumed on the State House the week before and the downtown streets were rivers of half-frozen slush. “You two had best get home, if you're going to do it without getting wet. Would you like to wait here where it's warm, and I'll see if I can find someone to take word to Ninian's house to get the carriage here?” And after one look at the ocean of goo beyond the plank sidewalk's edge, he added, “I'd take you home myself but the canoe's got a hole in it.”

  “We'll manage,” laughed Mary. “We got here, didn't we?” But when she and Mercy reached the edge of the sidewalk Mary saw, to her alarm, that most of the dropped planks and shingles that they'd used for stepping-stones had already sunk in the mud.

  A few wagons creaked past, hauling roof-slates to the State House before the rain should start again.

  Mercy looked around her anxiously as they retreated toward the shop's door again where Joshua waited. “I promised my sister-in-law I'd be home. Jamie's coming to dinner....”

  “And Mr. Gillespie's coming to our house,” said Mary consideringly. “And goodness knows if Elizabeth's back yet with the carriage...Oh!” she called out, hurrying back to the edge of the sidewalk and waving her handkerchief at the driver of a passing dray. “Oh, Mr. Hart!” For she recognized the man as a laborer whom Ninian had hired on several occasions to fix fences and mend the stable.

  “Mary!” cried Merce, shocked. “What are you...?”

  The little Irishman drew rein and touched his soaked hat-brim, and Mary gave him her most flirtatious smile. “Mr. Hart, could I possibly, possibly trouble you to drive past my brother-in-law's house on your way back to the freight depot? It isn't so very much out of your way....”

  “Miss Todd...!” said Speed, half-shocked and half-laughing, and Merce gasped, “Mary, don't you dare! Everyone will talk!”

  “Oh, pooh. We need to get home.”

  “We nothing! That dray is...” She visibly bit back the word filthy, out of consideration for Mr. Hart, and finished with, “My sister-in-law will kill me!”

  “Well,” laughed Mary, “I think I'm a match for my sister. I can't make poor Mr. Speed go hunting someone to take a message for me, Mr. Speed, I really couldn't....And I think we can trust Mr. Hart, can't we, Mr. Hart?” She turned to the carter appealingly, with a helpless flutter of her lashes, and the unshaven, stocky little man laughed good-naturedly and held out a dirty-gloved hand.

  “I'm not too proud if you're not, Miss Todd.”

  Speed rolled his eyes. “Your sister will skin me for letting you do this. Here,” he added, pulling off his apron, “you'd better put this over the seat....”

  “Are you sayin' the seats of me vehicle aren't all they should be?” Hart bristled with mock indignation, as if the plank on which he sat wasn't wet with rain and slick with spattered mud, and all four burst into laughter. As they jolted through the streets—Merce having remained, like a stranded mariner, on the boardwalk outside Speed's store—Mary saw Douglas and Lincoln emerging from Birchall's store, Douglas natty in a new broadcloth coat and Lincoln looking like he'd dressed in a high wind in some scarecrow's hand-me-downs. Mary lifted her hand like a queen and waved as Betsey had admonished her for years: move the wrist, never the elbow.

  Douglas looked shocked, and as if he asked himself if he really wanted as a Senatorial—or Presidential—wife a woman who'd ride unchaperoned on a construction dray through the middle of town.

  Lincoln removed his dilapidated hat and executed a profound bow.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  IT WAS THROUGH LETTERS THAT THEIR LOVE FIRST GREW.

  Even with Mary—who had reason to believe that she was the woman he talked to most easily—Lincoln was often silent as a clam, as if at some time in the past he'd been told that he mustn't speak to women as he spoke to men and had no idea how one did speak to women. He was not, Mary noticed, a good speaker extempore, even on politics, and needed to prepare his notes carefully. Had they not shared an interest in both politics and poetry, she thought he'd never have been able to put two words together with her at all.

  Writing freed his thoughts.

  In his letters she had the feeling of seeing the man, and not what his awkward body or his barren upbringing had made of him.

  And Mary, as quick with witty repartee as she could be with defensive sarcasm, found that she, too, could write of deeper thoughts than she could express aloud...certainly than she could express to Elizabeth and Ninian. Not only was Lincoln different from any man she had ever met—she was different, with him.

  Through the winter of 1839 they met each other socially, at the House on the Hill or the homes of friends: the Leverings, or the Englishman Edward Baker, the acerbic Dr. Anson Henry or Simeon Francis, who published the Sangamo Journal. The Journal's little one-room board building, or Simeon's big house on Sixth Street near-by, were de facto club-houses for the Young Whigs of the capital, of whom Lincoln was acknowledged chief. Mary became very fond of the sturdy editor and his forthright wife, Bessie, and read the Journal regularly. Any trace of romantic possibility between herself and Stephen Douglas was swept away when in the wake of a particularly nasty round of political mudslinging Douglas lost his temper and tried to cane Simeon in the street.

  Lincoln was one of those who pulled the two men apart. Mary, who had just stepped from Diller's drugstore when it happened, flattened back against the wall, her gloved hand pressed to her mouth, almost in tears with the wave of unreasoning terror that washed over her at the sight.

  “What is it?” asked Lincoln, crossing the street to her when Douglas had jerked himself free of other men's restraining hands, and stormed on his way. “Are you all right, Miss Todd?”

  “Yes.” Mary's voice was a toneless whisper, but she was shaking as if she, not Simeon—not Elliot Presby—had been attacked. Lincoln just stood there, looking down at her as if he hadn't the slightest idea of what to do in the face of feminine emotion. Mary fumbled in her reticule for a handkerchief and guessed, wryly, that if Lincoln had a bandanna in his pocket it probably wasn't clean. “No. It's just...a friend of mine was caned in the street, back home, and...and hurt very badly. And one of my cousins...shot his best friend, over an article printed in the newspaper....” She fought to keep her face from crumpling into weeping again.

  Nothing really happened! she reminded herself desperately.

  Why did she feel the panic terror, smell again the mingling of gutter-mud and blood?

  She tried to draw a deep breath.

  Douglas of course would have had a clean handkerchief and dabbed away her tears with it.

  Douglas with his cane flashing through the air...

  But it was Lincoln who'd seen her pressed against the wall, her face white with shock, while everyone else went about their business.

  “Would you like me to take you home, Miss Todd?” he asked gently, and she nodded, and laid her hand on his offered arm.

  THE MUDSLINGING, OF COURSE, HAD BEEN PART AND PARCEL OF THE CAMPAIGN to elect General William Henry Harrison President come Novemeber.

  As soon as the roads were clear in spring, Lincoln was on them, making speeches in support of General Harrison and debating political issues with every Democrat in every corner of the state. He wrote to Mary from Jacksonville, from Alton and Belleville: brief notes, mostly concerning the political debates, in which he knew she was interested. (Catch Stephen Douglas telling me what his rivals said about him, she thought.) Though the tall, gawky man was almost as reticent about stating his thoughts on paper as he was on Ninian's porch, his feelings came thr
ough in those simple, lucid paragraphs, his deep sense of politics as service, as the duty that must be taken up as the price of power. Mary, who like her father and Ninian and nearly everyone she knew, had only thought of government in terms of privileges, perquisites, favors, and contracts, felt surprised and a little ashamed: it was as if she had mistaken a woodland pond for the Atlantic Ocean.

  She had, she realized, operated under the assumption that men who'd lived most of their lives in the backwoods, if not invariably stupid, were certainly simple.

  There was nothing simple at all about Abraham Lincoln.

  When the Legislative session closed for the summer, Mary accepted the invitation of her two uncles—the Honorable North Todd and Judge David Todd—to spend the summer in Columbia, Missouri. She packed her trunk and Ninian escorted her on the two-day stage-ride to St. Louis, then by steamboat up the Missouri to Rocheport. Ninian had his own reasons for going to Rocheport, for there was going to be a gathering of Missouri Whigs there in a few weeks.

  Mary had always held a little grudge in her heart against her uncle David, because it was to pay his debts that, long ago, Granny Parker had sold poor Saul. But the feeling dissolved when the big, jovial man sprang down from the buggy where he'd been waiting for her at the landing, and gathered her into his arms. “What, you haven't got our girl married off yet?” demanded Uncle David of Ninian, and pinched Mary's cheek. “What's that wife of yours been doing?”

  “Fending off suitors with a broadsword and shield,” returned Ninian with a grin, and shook Uncle David's hand. “And she needs to, sir, with the way this girl draws 'em.”