The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  There was talk, in May, of Mary going back to Washington, but in the end she decided to remain in Lexington. In June she went with the rest of the family out to Buena Vista, the summer home that was Betsey's property, riding and walking in the countryside as if she were a girl again.

  Congress would adjourn in August—by which time, Mary knew, Washington City would be a sweating hellhole smothered in dust. Nevertheless, when Lincoln wrote her that he was going with the other Whig leaders to New England to campaign for Zachary Taylor, Mary wrote back immediately that she would come. I look forward to being with you again on the sixth of September, Lincoln wrote back; and in spite of the tediousness of the promised journey, and the wet heat of the capital, Mary found herself looking forward to it, too.

  In the end, her desire to see him again got the better of her. She packed up her sons and her trunks (it was astounding how much extra clothing and luggage she'd accumulated over the summer!) in late July, and prepared to take the stage to Winchester, in company with her brother Levi, and thence to the weary succession of trains that would eventually lead to Washington.

  In the dark before dawn on the day of departure old Nelson hitched up the carriage, and everyone except Betsey came down to breakfast by lamplight. Emilie hugged Mary: “I'll write to you, I promise. Tell Mr. Lincoln I hope his side wins.” Robert Todd rode with Mary, Levi, Bobby, and Eddie to the Courthouse square, where the stage took its departure:

  “You take care of those grandsons of mine, you hear?” he smiled, and gave Mary a hearty bear hug as he helped her from the carriage. In the dove-gray quiet of the square the six brown horses shook their heads, snuffing at the air and jangling their harness; black hostlers from the stage company held the leaders' heads. Two slaves belonging to Mr. Blanchard the silversmith sloshed buckets of water on the plank sidewalk and the smell of wet wood was strong in the warm air. “And tell that husband of yours not to let another seven years go by, before he brings you back here to call.”

  He pressed a roll of banknotes into her hand, and leaned down to kiss her. Then Levi helped her into the stage—Eddie and Bobby were already poking each other and the other passengers were starting to get annoyed—and the grooms sprang away from the horses' heads. Mary leaned out the window and twisted around backward, all her bonnet-ribbons fluttering, to get a last glimpse of her father's tall, burly shape, waving to her before he turned back to where Nelson waited with the carriage.

  It was her last sight of him alive.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ALTHOUGH HER EXPERIENCE WITH WASHINGTON CITY HAD BEEN ghastly—and Mrs. Spriggs hadn't improved any in the August weeks that Mary and the boys were back in the upstairs room on First Street—she hugely enjoyed the speaking tour. The weather was hot, but at least the boys weren't cooped up in hotel-rooms by rain and cold. She would take them sightseeing in the daytime in whatever town they were in—Boston, New Bedford, the small New England hamlets where the Yankee half of the Revolution was born.

  In Illinois, and later in Washington, she'd grown accustomed to Yankee accents and the self-righteous pushiness of Yankee so-called manners, enough to deal with having them around her all the time, though at the hotels she sorely missed the gentle reliability of her father's slaves. The money her father had given her made it possible for her to pay hotel maids to look after the boys in the evenings, so that she could hear her husband speak.

  Growing up where Henry Clay set the oratorical standard, she knew Lincoln was good. Even had he been a stranger to her, she reflected, looking up at that beanpole figure in the tin-sconced glow of the oil-lamps around the halls at Cambridge, at New Bedford, at Dorchester and Boston, he would have held her enrapt. And looking at the faces around her, listening to the murmur and stillness of the crowd that was like the sough of wind through leaves, she knew she wasn't the only one who thought so. She bought all the local newspapers and scanned them while riding the trains or the stages: “He spoke in a clear and cool, and very eloquent manner...carrying the audience with him....” “The Hon. Abraham Lincoln made a speech, which for aptness of illustration, solidity of argument, and genuine eloquence, is hard to beat.” “It was a glorious meeting.” In the hotel-rooms she clipped the articles out. Bobby and Eddie helped her file them away in envelopes, to be later pasted in albums.

  In those few evenings when he was not meeting with local Whigs, or speaking, Lincoln and Mary would talk late into the nights, analyzing what those newspapers had said, as if through those journals they listened to the voices of the people in the crowd. As he had in Springfield, he practiced his speeches on her, and listened thoughtfully to her advice.

  Mary had always loved the thrill and confusion of Presidential campaigns. Now she felt as she had during Harrison's campaign, when she and Merce and Julia had all gone to rallies wearing their banners, and cheered for hard cider and log cabins.

  “Yes, and the cryin' shame of it is that we're runnin' another man on log cabins an' hard cider, or the next thing to it,” sighed Lincoln, as the train chuffed out of New Bedford for Boston. Bobby and Eddie crowded to the window, craning to get a last sight of the harbor with its forest of masts: prairie boys, both had been riveted by their first glimpse of the open ocean the previous day. Despite his speech, and his meetings with the local Whig bosses, Lincoln had made the time to go with Mary and the boys to the harbor, where the whaling-ships stood in port, and the streets were filled with strange dark-faced men with savage tattoos. It had been, Mary realized, Lincoln's own first look at the sea—and hers as well.

  “As good a man as Old Zack is,” Lincoln went on, stretching his neck to look through the window for a final glimpse, “he doesn't stand for anything, much. People all over the country know his name and will vote for him, which they wouldn't for someone like Mr. Seward.” He named the aristocratic former New York governor, who would share the platform with him at a huge mass meeting a week hence in Boston. “And Seward is by far the abler man. He's the one we should be electing.” He drew about him the vast skirts of the brown linen duster he wore, against the smuts and fluffs of soot that floated through the car.

  “And if the committee had nominated Seward instead of Taylor, he could make his own speeches, and not have me and the other local worthies do it for him. But you ask Mr. Gurley next door to us, or the Reverend Dresser or any of our neighbors in Springfield who William Seward is, and they won't know, nor any reason why they should elect him over Lewis Cass, who fought the British for the freedom of our nation back in 1812....”

  “I'm still sorry,” said Mary softly, “that the committee didn't stand behind Mr. Clay. He would outshine a dozen of Seward and Taylor put together.” Past the window, the sea vanished behind the ghostly line of dunes. Then the train swayed, swinging westward, and that long gray shining promise vanished from view.

  Lincoln sighed again, and settled back into his seat. “I too,” he said. “Clay is a man I'd make speeches for gladly—not that I grudge a word of what I say for Old Zack. But Clay's made enemies. Too many people only remember that fool accusation of selling out his supporters in trade to be made Secretary of State. And he's old,” he added quietly. “Seventy-one, older even than Cass.”

  Mary nodded. She recalled having a fight with one of her schoolmates at Ward's over who was handsomer, Andrew Jackson or Henry Clay . . . or Mary's father.

  In her heart she knew Clay would not run again for the Presidency that he had so deserved.

  “Taylor at least is hale and healthy,” said Lincoln, and she thought she caught a trace of the same sadness in his voice. “He can be trusted to live out his term and put men of caution and principle in places where they can do some good.”

  “Yourself included.” Mary squeezed his hand.

  She saw the echo of her pride—and her hope—glint briefly in his eyes, but he only shook his head.

  “But it is a chore,” he added with a comical grimace, “coming up with reasons to vote for the man besides the fact that he'll appoint men who do
know what they're doing. I certainly wouldn't vote for a man on those grounds alone, no matter what a great soldier he was. For that matter, I was a great soldier, too. I looked courageously behind every bush in northern Illinois for Black Hawk and his braves—who hid from me, knowin' how ferocious a fighter I was, so I never saw hide nor hair of 'em—not to mention sheddin' my blood to a thousand mosquitoes....”

  Mary clasped her hands over her heart in a burlesque of passion. “What woman could resist a Hector, a Hercules, a warrior such as you?”

  Bobby and Eddie poked each other and giggled as their parents embraced and kissed, and the starchy Boston couple in the next seat tried to pretend they hadn't seen such shocking goings-on.

  Lincoln made his final speech in Boston—clear and lucid arguments as to why votes for the Free-Soil splinter groups and so-called Conscience Whigs were in reality votes for the Democrats—and then they were en route for the home they had left nearly a year before. In Buffalo they booked a cabin on the steamer Globe, bound for the bustling little lumber-town of Chicago over the succession of canals and waterways that crossed the peninsula of Michigan. But before it steamed out into Lake Erie, the little ship took the occasion, to Mary's joy, to go upriver to Niagara Falls.

  The sight of the water, pouring down endlessly, torrents of it, curtains of it, a world of vapor and rainbows, silenced even the boys. Lincoln stood on the deck of the little tourist steamer, openmouthed with shock, awe, and the most utter delight Mary had ever seen on his face. Not even the sight of the ocean had filled him with such wonder. “It's been falling like that—just like that—when there weren't even white men on this continent,” he said wonderingly, as the Globe chuffed away back toward Buffalo. “When Christ walked the earth it was like that—thundering in the silence here, unseen by anyone but the Indians and God. It'll be falling like that when all of us are gone.” He shook his head, trying to grasp the largeness of Time, with the mist of the falls beaded like raindrops in his hair.

  In Chicago, they took a room in the Sherman Hotel. Mary was unimpressed by the city. It seemed to have been built and populated entirely by Yankees—pushing, mannerless, and valuing money before all other things. Balloon-frame houses of roughly sawn boards lined streets so deep in mud that there were signs posted on particularly soupy intersections: THE SHORTEST WAY TO CHINA. Regiments of pigs whose numbers would have put Springfield's swine population to blushing shame rooted vigorously for garbage or lay in wallows in alleys. Lincoln chuckled all the way to the hotel at a story the train conductor had told him, about a Chicago citizen who saw a man's head and shoulders sticking out of a mudhole at the intersection of State and Lake: “Can I help you, pilgrim?” “No, thanks,” the mired man said cheerfully. “I've got a horse under me.”

  And it was crowded, frantic, jostling with activity. Mary remembered how, ten years ago, Stephen Douglas had spoken of his trips to Chicago to speculate in land—when she'd taken tea with him and his new wife in Washington, he'd told her that lots he bought for five thousand dollars were selling now for twenty thousand. Irish, Polish, Portuguese, and German immigrants slogged through the muddy streets or along the very few crude board sidewalks; the air stank from privies, sewage, and coal smoke.

  Yet there was money here, business, power. Mary might wrinkle her nose, after all these years, at Northern accents, but from her years of poverty she understood what the Yankee way of life could bring. At the Sherman Hotel, while Mary took the boys out and doubtfully tried to find something in the overwhelming confusion for them to sightsee, Lincoln met with the leaders of the Chicago Whigs, businessmen who made her father's leisured graciousness seem laughably naïve. When she came back that afternoon Lincoln told her the Chicago bosses had asked him, at six hours' notice, to speak that night at a rally at the Cook County Courthouse.

  They spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel room together, drinking vile tea and working out what he'd say.

  The rally turned out to be so huge that it adjourned to a nearby public square, where crowds stood in the mud by torchlight and listened for nearly two hours. The cheers when Lincoln finished were deafening; Mary stood near the stage, jostled by strangers who reeked of sweat and tobacco, looking up at her husband in the torchlight, transformed and seeming to blaze with his cold intelligence as he always did, when carried away by speaking before a crowd.

  He will be President. In her bones she knew it. Taylor will be elected, and will give him something, some office, that will get him known, and he will be on his way. She longed to throw her arms around him as he descended the platform, to embrace him in her wild delight. But he was surrounded at once by men, those clever, crafty businessmen, lawyers, speculators, politicians who governed things. There was the florid-faced Mr. Judd, who was building railroads with Irish and German labor; their rosy friend Congressman Washburne from Mrs. Spriggs's; plus old friends from Springfield, Edward Baker and Lyman Trumbull . . .

  And all of them, Mary observed with an inner smile, Lincoln greeted as if each was his special friend, his close confidant. She knew this did not spring from calculation or hypocrisy, but from genuine interest coupled with a very clear idea of how anyone, from lowest to highest, could help; could be knit together into a single fighting unit. It was as if he said to each, I need you . . . I need you all.

  Around them in the square the crowd was still shouting, talking, a yammer of noise and torchlight in the cold October night. It was the sound of victory. Lincoln had fought the good fight for “Old Rough and Ready” Zack Taylor, and in time his reward would come. Douglas might have made a fortune here in this mudhole town and be the fair-haired boy of the slaveholding Senators, but Lincoln would have something more.

  Around the narrow shoulder of Isaac Arnold—a skinny, bearded, watchful fellow lawyer—Lincoln caught Mary's glance, and the corners of his eyes crinkled in a smile.

  RETURNING TO SPRINGFIELD ON OCTOBER 10, LINCOLN TOOK THEIR old room in the Globe Tavern, rather than put the Ludlum family out of the Jackson Street house. “Ludlum has asked me if you were intending to come back to Washington with me in November,” Lincoln told Mary, on a windy night a day or so later, after they'd settled the boys to sleep in the trundle-bed. He'd spent the day with Billy Herndon, catching up all the legal business of the past year—tomorrow, Mary knew, he'd spend with Ninian, and Simeon Francis, and Cousin Stephen Logan, and Dr. Henry around the stove in the office of the Sangamo Journal, conferring about the recent state elections—which had been disastrous for the Whigs—and how they were going to organize to secure victory for Taylor.

  But at least, she reflected, now she could visit Bessie Francis, and Julia, and Cousin Lizzie . . . and Elizabeth, who had Ann still living with her, and those two certainly deserved each other....

  She heard the query in her husband's voice, and glanced over at the sleeping boys. Eddie was sleeping, anyway. Bobby was pretending to sleep, as he usually did so he could listen to his parents' voices.

  She paused, hairbrush in hand. Lincoln was sitting up in bed with the quilt over his knees, a book on his lap, and Charlotte, Mrs. Beck's calico cat, asleep on his feet. It didn't take more than a few hours for every cat in the house to make Lincoln's acquaintance and decide to sleep on his bed—at Mrs. Spriggs's there'd been four of them.

  Lincoln went on, “Ludlum said he'd be pleased if he could rent the house until March, when the Congress adjourns again. I said I'd talk to you. I know you weren't much happy with Washington.”

  November to March. It wasn't much longer than he was gone when riding circuit. Mary thought about the little cottage on Jackson Street, about trying to deal with that horrendous succession of sulky Irish girls. Bobby and Eddie were older, and past the stage of disturbing everyone with squalling and crying, but they were still young enough to need constant minding, when she'd hoped to be attending sessions of the Congress or paying calls on the town's hostesses. During the weeks of August before the speaking tour, she'd been able to go to Congress only twice.

>   “I thought, Molly, that maybe you'd like to stay here at the Globe. I know you get along all right with Mrs. Beck these days.” Which was true. Not being pregnant or exhausted, Mary had found, did wonders for her ability to deal with the Globe's no-nonsense landlady.

  Mary felt as if a key had been turned, releasing her. Felt as she had when she'd finally said, I'm going back to Lexington. . . .

  “Will you be all right on your own?” she asked him.

  And saw, by the lightening of his eyes, that he, too, had suffered while the four of them were trying to live together in the Washington boardinghouse. That he'd felt guilty over leaving her to her own devices, torn between his ambition, his duty, and his love for and protectiveness of her. “Well,” he replied gravely, “since I'll be sending my whole salary here to pay Mrs. Beck, I won't have enough left to go chasing around bad women in Washington....”

  “Mr. Lincoln!” Mary swirled over to him in a flurry of white nightgown and unbraided hair, to rap his arm smartly with the hairbrush she held. “I have never been so shocked in all my life! Do you mean to tell me that actual members of the government of the United States even know what bad women are, much less chase around with them . . . ?”

  “Only the Democrats,” Lincoln assured her gravely, and pulled her giggling into bed at his side.

  He was gone two days later, stumping the southern part of the state with Dr. Henry in a last-minute effort to rally the Illinois Whigs to Zachary Taylor's banner—a successful effort, for the General won the election handily. Mary was elated, and saw him off on the stage a few weeks later with a glow of pleasure, knowing there would be good things ahead. If he was given an appointment in Washington it would be for three or four years, longer than a single session of Congress. They could take a house there, and then she could be one of the hostesses, and not a petitioner leaving cards for other people's servants. One could get decent help in Washington, too, since it was possible to rent slaves or hire freedmen, who were far more reliable than the wild Irish....