The Emancipator's Wife
Page 37
Mary drew a deep breath, trembling all over with excitement, anticipation, triumph. “Yes,” she said, and her breath misted amber in the lights of the hotel as they approached its doors. “We're finally here.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Washington 1848
THEY REMAINED ONE NIGHT IN BROWN'S HOTEL. THE FOLLOWING morning Lincoln went out and found them quarters at Mrs. Ann Spriggs's boardinghouse on First Street, just down the hill behind the Capitol, where both Cousin John Stuart and E. D. Baker had stayed.
And Mary remembered all over again why—and how much—she loathed boardinghouses.
She had met already Mr. Washburne, Lincoln's plump and pink-faced Congressional colleague from Galena. The first night at Mrs. Spriggs's, Mary could see the two men making a great effort to keep the conversation general at the common-table, before vanishing into the parlor to the more serious endeavor of hashing through what kind of political horse-trading each had had to do to get here, and comparing impressions of just how the land lay in the House of Representatives. Mary longed to join them as she'd joined Lincoln and her father but here there was no Mammy Sally to make sure Eddie was tucked up warmly and to keep Bobby in his bed. By the time overexcited Bobby was finally asleep—he wanted both a song and a story—it was quite late. Slipping down the stairs, she found Lincoln and Washburne still beside the parlor stove, with an elderly, ascetic gentleman who'd been introduced to her as Mr. Joshua Giddings—a name she recognized instantly from the abolitionist papers that Cash still sent her.
“You'll find within a day how it is in this city, sir,” Giddings was saying, jabbing a skinny finger at Lincoln. “Slave pens within a hundred yards of the Capitol Building. Aside from the sheer disgrace of it, the traffic in Washington City represents a constant danger to every free man and woman of color who tries to go about their business here, for the slave-dealers do not scruple to kidnap men and women of color on these very streets, drug them with opium, and sell them south to Virginia and Georgia under the name of law. How anyone can hesitate to take a stand against such doings . . .”
“It all depends on what kind of stand you're fixing to take,” replied Lincoln in his slow, light tenor. “I'll do my utmost to bring about whatever change in the law will mitigate the situation, but I can no more oppose the Constitution as it stands, than I can plead in court that my client should be permitted to break a law which I—or he—privately considers to be unjust.”
Giddings's pale eyes glinted behind their spectacles, but for a moment he said nothing. Cash, Mary reflected, would have been on his feet and shouting.
“If nothing else,” put in Washburne, “God help any man hopeful of being elected to anything who says the blacks should be freed. There are few enough jobs for white men in Illinois. You speak to any laborer on the street in Galena and he'll tell you there are too many Portuguese and Irish and Italians coming in as it is. And that in Illinois, let alone what it's like in New York. It wasn't more than a dozen years ago they were burning colored orphanages and beating free Negroes to death in the streets. They won't stand for it, sir—and a man who doesn't get elected loses his chance to do any good whatsoever for anyone.”
“That reminds me of a story,” remarked Lincoln, stretching out his long legs to the stove—which barely provided enough heat to encompass the three sitting near it, much less Mary in the darkness of the stairway arch, with her shawl of pink cashmere wrapped around her shoulders. “You ever hear about the Continental soldier after the Battle of Bunker Hill who scouted on ahead to the British lines? First he put on a red coat, so the British wouldn't shoot him, then he picked up a British musket, because it would shoot straighter than his own old piece, then he put on a pair of British boots so the British pickets wouldn't identify him by his old moccasins, and then a powdered wig for the same reason....He ended up looking so much like a redcoat that he was finally obliged to shoot himself.”
Listening to him—watching his exaggerated gestures, the way his face changed to the voice of this character or that, Mary had to smile. They would love him here in Washington. This was his place . . . and she would be here at his side.
From upstairs, Bobby's voice called out fretfully, “Mama!”
Elsewhere in the house another voice replied, “Can't someone shut that brat up?”
Mary tore herself away from the glow of the fire, the three men's faces, the laughter and the talk, and hastily ascended the stair to her child.
She got Bobby settled—the room was freezing cold, and Eddie was coughing—and then got into her nightdress behind the dressing-screen, brushed out her hair, and got into bed. She fell asleep still waiting for Lincoln to come upstairs.
LIVING IN WASHINGTON, EVEN IN A BOARDINGHOUSE, HAD ITS compensations. Their first Friday evening in the city, Lincoln bribed Mrs. Spriggs to look after Bobby and Eddie, and took Mary to a “drawing room” at the White House. The hack let them off some distance down Pennsylvania Avenue due to the crush of other hacks and polished town-carriages, all vying for position in the black sea of mud. Picking their way along the edge of the unpaved street through the raw mists under the shelter of her husband's big black umbrella (“And you will fold that thing up before we reach the steps.... What a sight we'll present to the President, coming up like a . . . a greengrocer and his wife . . . !”) Mary saw its windows glowing through the darkness, and it seemed to her that her heart turned over in her breast.
The Executive Mansion.
We will live there. I know it.
Her grip tightened hard on the bony arm linked through hers and wild excitement shivered through her like a flame. In a way, she knew they were coming home.
“Whatever you say, Mother,” Lincoln agreed, in his most placid bumpkin style, but she could tell that he was as excited as she. She glanced up at his face, saw the light in his eyes as he looked at the place, the hard eager folds at the corners of his mouth. He didn't speak much of his ambition—he didn't speak much, Mary knew, of anything that mattered deeply to him. But since they'd left Springfield under its gray prairie skies five weeks ago, she'd felt in his flesh and his bones and his breath the vibration of his exultation.
He was, at last, coming into the place where he could make some difference in the lives of men. Where he could use his abilities, and be recognized and heard.
And she was by his side, his partner before all the world.
She made a mental note to write Elizabeth all about “our evening at the Executive Mansion,” “our conversation with Mr. Polk,” even if Polk was a Democrat. That should teach her to call Mary's husband a hayseed.
The doors of the mansion stood open. Voices poured out, into the raw winter air.
The gathering, Mary realized with a pang of disappointment as they stepped into the lamp-lit hall, was not a select one. It seemed like everyone in Washington was there.
An endless reception line snaked from the front hall into the Red Parlor, where the diminutive President Polk and his dark-eyed imperious wife stood side by side, shaking hands with all comers. Mr. Polk smiled and nodded and spoke a few words of greeting to “our new colleague from Illinois,” but passed on immediately to greet Mr. Washburne, in line behind them. Mrs. Polk expressed a polite hope that Mary was finding residence in the capital comfortable, while coolly evaluating: dress, hair, deportment, toilette, and jewelry in a single all-appraising glance. Ticked off on a mental list, filed for future reference, and the page turned. Mary wasn't even given a chance to say whether she was finding residence in the capital comfortable or not.
I'd like to see you try to put yourself together for a reception in a boardinghouse room with two boys underfoot and no one but your husband to lace you up, Mary reflected, looking back at the elegant, slim woman already exchanging affectionate greetings with a quiet-voiced Virginia lady, scion of one of the local planter families and—from the way everyone greeted her—hostess to half the government. Mary picked out the expensive sheen of Italian silk in the golden warmth of the cha
ndelier, fabric unobtainable in Springfield, the tulle light as summer breath. The swagged double skirts made her own tiers of ruffles appear slightly dowdy and very much a remnant of last year or the year before.
Little Stephen Douglas came over to her, dandified as ever, and joked about old times. But he was drawn quickly back into the circles of the Southern Senators, whose wives all seemed to be cousins or schoolmates and have little interest in Illinois Whigs. Douglas had recently married the daughter of a North Carolina planter, and seemed to have been taken in as a brother by every slaveholding Democrat in Washington, she reflected.
Mary recognized at once who the influential hostesses were, around whom the men clustered; the talk was of politics, but politics as a closed club of who knew whom. The wives of the powerful Southern Senators, or of local bankers and landholders, had their townhouses here and could entertain such birds-of-passage as mere members of the House. They greeted Mary politely—when they noticed her at all—but spoke of politics in the context of long-standing personal alliances: who could be trusted and who could not, who was on the outside and who was on the in, and who was discreetly keeping a mistress in some little rented cottage in Alexandria across the river.
Five years of marriage had accustomed Mary—almost—to no longer being the belle of the ball, but in Springfield at least she was more and more being recognized as Abraham Lincoln's wife.
Here, no one seemed particularly to care what things were like in Illinois, or who her husband was.
Behind her, as she moved away from one chatty group in quest of her husband—who as the tallest man in the room wasn't hard to locate—Mary heard someone say, “Oh, she's from the West.” She didn't know whether it was she whom the speaker meant or not.
In the chilly winter months that followed, she attended five more Friday “drawing rooms” at the Executive Mansion, and seldom spoke to a soul.
Dutifully, the day the family moved to Mrs. Spriggs's, Mary had gone to a printer's and had new cards made up: Mrs. Abraham Lincoln—gilt-embossed in the most handsome Germanic black-letter—and smaller ones with just Abraham Lincoln. She'd been warned by Cousin John's wife that Washington printers cost three times what Simeon Francis charged and were slow to boot, but there was no getting around them. With the most furious haggling Mary could do, she could not get any of the three printers she consulted to lower the cost by so much as ten cents on the hundred, and the dent they made in her monthly budget was painfully large.
When first Mary had married him, Lincoln had joked about morning-calls and visiting-cards as the flub-dubs of the rich, on par with President Van Buren's notorious golden spoons. He'd changed his tune, however, when Mary had started making morning-calls on the wives of those politicians who came to Springfield for the Legislative sessions, and the dinner parties she'd organized had smoothed the rough edges of acquaintanceship among men of power from different parts of the state.
He himself had commented—a little to his surprise—on how much difference it made, trying to talk a man into throwing his support to a road-building appropriation, whether you talked to him in a tavern's common-room or in your own comfortable parlor after a good dinner.
Leaving cards was another way of cementing ties—of marking yourself as someone to be taken seriously by people of wealth and power.
Thus, by the time they reached Washington, Lincoln was willing to do what all Congressmen did: spend an hour or two between breakfast and the start of the Congressional sessions at eleven, two or three days a week, in attendance on Mary as she made the rounds of the homes of Washington's elite, leaving a trail of cards in their wake. Two of Mr. Lincoln's (for Senator Useful and Mrs. Useful) and one of Mary's (for Mrs. Useful—God forbid even the implication that a lady should call upon a man!), with a corner folded down to indicate that Mrs. Lincoln had called in person. Mary deeply enjoyed this ritual, whether Lincoln accompanied her or not. If the hostess was “at home,” it was a way of learning news and rumor, of getting the name Lincoln known, and of talking—if she was lucky—of something other than servants and children for fifteen minutes.
Many Congressmen made calls on Sundays as well, but Lincoln drew the line at that, preferring to take the boys down to the steamboat wharves on the Potomac while Mary attended St. John's Episcopal Church, or to take his sons to look at the ragged mudholes and heaped masonry where contractors were preparing to rear a granite obelisk as a monument to George Washington. As the winter advanced these outings became less possible. Washington was cold with a damp, clinging chill entirely foreign to the hard iciness of the Illinois prairies or Lexington's upland frosts. Few streets in the city were paved, and like Springfield's humbler ways, the vast and splendidly named avenues of the capital turned from aisles of dust to rivers of mud.
Now and then Mary would be invited to the handsome house Stephen Douglas and his wife had taken—with his father-in-law's money, she suspected—but few Washington ladies returned Mary's calls. It didn't seem to matter that so many of them—including the doyenne of them all, Dolley Madison—were connected in one way or another with the Parker/Todd clan. Mary left cards on everyone, from Mrs. Polk and the wife of the wealthy banker William Corcoran, on down to the Congressional wives in other boardinghouses. Although she knew that, naturally, one's own scope for entertaining in a boardinghouse parlor was sorely limited, she expected invitations, or at least the courtesy of returned visits.
But everyone seemed to be so busy laying cards on the tables of the great themselves that there was no time to so much as drive by—or send a servant by—Mrs. Spriggs's. Those who did visit, she gathered almost at once, were the wives of junior Congressmen, like herself, without power or influence. It would not do to be seen too often with them.
And indeed, with Bobby and Eddie to look after most days—and most nights, while Lincoln was out in informal after-session colloquies with his male colleagues in eating-houses, taverns, or other boardinghouse “messes,” as they were called—Mary would have been hard-pressed to respond to an invitation from even Dolley Madison herself. She'd see the famous hostesses drive by in their carriages on the icy streets, or in the Capitol rotunda on those days when she could bribe Ann Spriggs to look after the boys so she could sit in the galleries with the most astonishing mélange of Congressional wives, town prostitutes, men-about-town, and what appeared to be half the colored population of Washington, slave and free, to listen to the debates. Like every other Congressional wife, Mary learned to recognize Dolley Madison, in her stylish gowns with her paint and powder fighting a rear-guard action against the years, or her queenly young niece Adele Cutts; heard the admiring whispers as people pointed out the Blair ladies—almost royalty in Maryland—or William Corcoran's wife Hannah.
Mary thoroughly enjoyed those rare visits to the Capitol itself, its lobby like a fair with journalists, spectators, nymphes du pavé, hawkers of hothouse oranges, and candidates for government pensions or government jobs lying in wait to ambush their Congressman the moment he put his head out the Chamber door. The United States had captured Mexico City, and terms of peace were being wrangled. Already abolitionists like Giddings were beginning to protest that slavery must not be allowed to spread. The atmosphere of power, influence, and rumor that tingled in the hallways and galleries filled her with delight and a sense of her own importance, and she reveled in writing knowingly to Elizabeth and Ninian, They're all saying at the Capitol . . .
One of her greatest triumphs was the evening when Lincoln brought John Quincy Adams to dinner at Mrs. Spriggs's “mess.” The former President's wife entertained very little in the house they rented on Thirteenth Street. “Mrs. Adams has never quite gotten over the degradation of my choice to serve in Congress, after being President of the land,” remarked the old gentleman, with a dry glance at Lincoln under his shelving white brow. “I cannot induce her to see that no man is degraded by seeking service in the government of his country—or in being elected as selectman of his hometown, for that matter.”
She made sure to include the quote in her next letter.
But most days, she spent alone in the boardinghouse room. The damp climate went to Eddie's chest, and the little boy was often sickly. Bobby, forced to remain indoors, was bored, noisy, and sullen, and Mrs. Spriggs referred to both boys as “those tiresome apes.” By Bobby's increasing silence, and unwillingness to play with the few local boys he encountered, Mary suspected that the local boys called him “Cock-Eye,” as a few of the Springfield children had.
Lincoln, as usual, was preoccupied. Though Mary tried to be patient, a good partner to him in his responsibilities, his habitual abstraction sparked stormy quarrels: “I'm here to do a job of work, not play dry-nurse to the boys!” he flared at her on one sleety Sunday afternoon, and Mary shot back with, “We'd be able to get Mrs. Spriggs to watch them more often if you'd act like a father and teach them a little discipline!” Lincoln went silent after that, and when Mary flung herself down on the bed in tears, he took Bobby and Eddie for a walk despite the cold. They came back just before dark, all three spattered from head to foot with mud and full of tales of seeing the war-hero Jefferson Davis's new towncarriage, driving up to the White House gates.
Just before Christmas, Lincoln enraged most of Congress with a resolution condemning the war with Mexico. Despite this, he confided to Mary, on one of the rare evenings that they spent reading in the warm downstairs parlor while the boys played at the hearth, he was being asked by other Whigs in Congress to support General Zachary Taylor for President.