The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Sweet years.

  Though the dinners she gave weren't instruments of politics anymore, there were still friends to entertain. Old friends departed: Julia and Lyman Trumbull for Alton, Dr. Henry for the far-off Oregon Territory. During Lincoln's second year in Washington, gold had been discovered in California—it seemed for a time that the whole of the country was on the move. New friends appeared. When she could, Mary sewed with the other ladies of the Episcopal Church, or hosted birthday parties or taffy-pulls. Their talk didn't have the intellectual headiness of local politics—which sometimes annoyed Mary—but they were far from stupid and seldom dull. In the summers they all helped each other bottle and pickle and preserve the bounties of the gardens. Willie would assist in these efforts from the moment he learned to walk, as cheery and open as Bobby was secretive, toddling into the kitchen with his arms full of tomatoes and squash.

  When Willie was two and a half, Tad was born—Thomas, named after Lincoln's father, who had died, after years of whining letters asking for money, in Coles County, Indiana, in 1851. Mary felt, almost from the moment of Tad's conception, that all was not as it should be. Her pregnancy with Willie had been easy, or as easy as pregnancies ever were with her, for she suffered migraines sometimes for weeks at a time and her temper became more uncertain than ever. Dr. Wallace examined her and agreed that she carried a bigger baby than Willie had been.

  Labor was an agonizing nightmare, to produce the longest, thinnest baby with the biggest head she'd ever seen: “Sort of like a tadpole,” Lincoln told her later, when she woke up after falling into exhausted sleep. He was sitting beside her bed, the new-wrapped bundle of infant in his arms. Tad squalled and fussed when Lincoln gave him back to her, and was never, after that, really quiet except in his father's arms. Lincoln spoke to her gently and humorously, and addressed his new son as “Tadpole,” but she could tell he'd been badly frightened.

  It didn't stop him from leaving a week later for the McLean Circuit Court.

  He was gone two months.

  During those months her smoldering anger at him resurfaced, for she knew she'd been hurt by her son's birth, and she was a long time healing. Even when she was on her feet again, and able to get around, the pains and the cramps stayed with her, and the internal weakness that got her up a dozen times a night to use the chamber pot redoubled. After the birth, she suffered an agonizing infection of her bladder and privates that was months in easing: months of tepid sitz baths in her bedroom, while Bobby was at school and Willie called repeatedly for her from the parlor and Tad howled in his crib.

  After Tad's birth, she never felt quite well again. It was nearly Christmas before she and Lincoln lay together as husband and wife, and then—probably at the advice of Dr. Wallace—Lincoln was careful with her, drawing back from anything that would get her with child again.

  They both knew that this was not to be.

  She missed the rough-and-tumble intimacy of their earlier relations, but with the internal troubles that followed on Tad's birth, she was grateful for Lincoln's understanding. And in many ways it was enough, just to lie with her head on his shoulder, quietly talking in the shadows.

  Dr. Wallace prescribed Battley's Soothing Cordial for her, with the strict instructions that no more than a teaspoon of it be taken at a time, and never more than twice in any one day. The medicine was a lifesaver, dulling the throb of migraines and letting her drift into sleep, or taking the edge off the worst of her cramps and letting her tend to Willie or get out with her sewing circle or do whatever her work was that day.

  She didn't like the sleepiness that followed on a dose—she had far too much to do. In addition to her work in the house, she had friends to visit with and neighbors to see, Cousin Lizzie or the Widow Black, and Mrs. Wheelock a few houses along Jackson. Though she still saw Merce and Julia, most of her friends were not the same bright gay crowd she had gone buggy-riding and picnicking with in her early days in Springfield. Instead they were neighbors, women who shared her current life of housewifery and children, and who certainly didn't look down their aristocratic Edwards noses at her because her husband was poor.

  Then in June of 1854 Lincoln came home from the circuit with two-week-old copies of the Chicago Herald in his pocket, which had reached him in Urbana: “Congress has struck down the Missouri Compromise,” he said, when Mary—with Tad on her hip and Willie orbiting her skirts—came across the deep grass of the yard to the stable where he was unsaddling Buck.

  “I read that.” Mary set Tad down but kept firm hold of his hand. The child would get into literally anything and she was trying to keep him away from large quadrupeds as long as she could. “They can't do that, can they?”

  “No, they can't.” Lincoln dropped the saddle over its sawbuck, slipped the bridle from his horse's head. He'd already shed his jacket—the rough corduroy one he wore for riding the long prairie roads—and in the shadows, in his shirtsleeves, with his black hair tumbled and standing up as usual in all directions, he looked like the hayseed storyteller who'd diverted old Professor Kittridge from her in the Globe Tavern's yard. “But they did. It's like every slaveholder in the South who wants to move into the Territories—and take his slaves with him—has been just waiting for Henry Clay to die, and Daniel Webster to die, and all those men to die who sweated to hammer out a compromise that would let this nation grow without tearin' ourselves apart over rich men ownin' slaves who run poor men out of work.” He snatched up the currycomb and rucked it across Buck's back where the saddle had rested, working swiftly and automatically, the way Mary crocheted while concentrating on some piece of gossip with Cousin Lizzie. “So there are no free states or slave states anymore. Anytime some group of slaveholders wants to bring in slave labor to farm Illinois, they can do it, if they can get enough legislators to back them. And you bet the first man to do that is going to be your beau Mr. Douglas....”

  “He was not my beau!” cried Mary indignantly. “Not for very long, anyway. Oh, I was just a simple country girl.” She put her knuckles to her forehead in imitation of every pure-hearted heroine in every play they'd ever seen, in Washington and Boston . . . even after sixteen years, Springfield still didn't have much in the way of theaters. “That Democrat blackguard broke my poor heart and went on to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act....”

  “You're still a simple country girl.” Lincoln came around the horse's hindquarters and out of the stall, one long arm extended to embrace her. Mary ducked aside with a squeak, since her husband was now covered with horsehair, road-dust, and sweat. He smiled, looking down at her; then his smile faded. “And in pushin' that Act through Congress, Douglas is goin' to be responsible for a lot more broken hearts than yours, Molly, before this is done.”

  He scooped out oats for Buck, retrieved his sons from under Clarabelle's feet, and, with Tad under one arm like a parcel and Willie on his shoulders, walked with her through the bean-rows and the tomatoes back toward the house.

  All that summer, they followed the newspaper reports of what was taking place in Kansas. Thousands of squatters from slave-states—chiefly Missouri—flooded the huge territory, driving back the thousands of immigrants being sent to the state by abolitionist organizations in New England. In July, Cash Clay came on a speaking tour to Springfield, and under the spindly trees of the State House square spoke for two hours about what the forces of slavery would do in the way of intimidation, ballot-box stuffing, and outright bloodshed, to vote into Kansas a state constitution like Missouri's, under which no word against slavery could be legally spoken and under which the penalty for aiding a slave's escape was death.

  For those two hours, Lincoln lounged on the ground under a tree whittling—Mary had never managed to teach him to use a chair, and even at home, if there was no company, he'd sit or lie on the floor. But afterwards he went to Clay, and Mary introduced them. Following supper at the house on Jackson Street, and after the boys were put to bed, she sat in the parlor with the two men, talking until far into the night.

>   CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  BY FALL LINCOLN WAS CAMPAIGNING AGAIN, ON BEHALF OF ANTI-Nebraska candidates for the Legislature.

  “He's only making a fool of himself,” declared Ninian, when Mary encountered him in the parlor of the House on the Hill as she waited for Elizabeth to come downstairs. “The Constitution defends the right of every man to his property, wherever that man may be or go within the country's boundaries. That's all the Kansas-Nebraska Act upholds. The right of every man to his property, and the right of self-government, which is why we fought to free ourselves from the British in the first place. Your husband has let his passions about slavery get the better of him, like far too many otherwise intelligent people in this country. He's going to find himself caught short.”

  “My husband,” said Mary coolly, “never lets his passion about anything get the better of him—which as I recall was one of the arguments you and Elizabeth used against my marrying him. That he was cold.”

  “Don't chop logic with me, Mary.” Her brother-in-law frowned down at her from his tall height. “The matter is too serious for that. If we want to preserve the Union we must find grounds upon which to end, once and for all, the bickering about slavery. The Kansas-Nebraska bill provides that.”

  “The Kansas-Nebraska bill truckles to Southerners who will not give up their slaves,” she retorted, “and who hold the Union hostage in their demands to be allowed to keep them.”

  “Maybe.” Ninian's face was hard, and sad; Mary forced herself to remember that this man had, like herself, walked daily past the Lexington whipping-post and auction-block. “The men who run the Legislatures of the cotton states are all slaveholders: it's not only their livelihood, it's their way of life, and they will not give it up. Is it worth giving up the Union, so that the abolitionists can congratulate one another on how righteous they are?”

  Elizabeth came down then, and Ninian bowed and departed. With some difficulty Mary turned her mind back to the matter that had brought her to the House on the Hill: the letter she'd received from Emilie, now eighteen years old. “I wrote and asked her to come and make a long stay with us,” she told her sister, unfolding the much-crossed sheets. “Since you'll be too much involved in matchmaking for Julie this season . . .”

  “Julie is only seventeen,” protested Elizabeth primly. “Far too young to be thinking of marriage.”

  “Of course!” Mary clasped her gloved hands before her bosom and nodded gravely. “And you were how old when you married Ninian?”

  “Thirty,” replied Elizabeth, who'd been seventeen. “Which makes me fifty-two now . . . and are you undertaking to find Emilie a husband?”

  “Darling, I wouldn't dream of it.” Mary winked. In fact, once Ann had married, Elizabeth had lost all interest in assisting any further sisters into Springfield matrimony. She maintained a polite interest in the affairs of Margaret, Mattie, and the rest of the Todd half-siblings back in Lexington, but it was Mary who wrote to them, not Elizabeth. Loyal and infinitely patient with her blood-sisters, Elizabeth—like Granny Parker whom she was more and more coming to resemble—never regarded Betsey or her eight children as anything more than interlopers.

  “Well, with Mr. Lincoln back in politics,” remarked Elizabeth, “at least Emilie won't be able to complain of having a dull winter.”

  By the end of an autumn of campaigning for various Whig state legislators opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Lincoln was beginning to talk about campaigning himself: for the United States Senate. The repeal of the Compromise that, thirty-four years earlier, had averted the breakup of the Union troubled him deeply. And the prospect of slavery spreading—and with it, the bloody conflicts between slaveholders and abolitionists—filled him with foreboding. When Lincoln entered a public debate over slavery at the Courthouse, Mary, in the audience, heard beneath his usual calm logic and clear, precise arguments a power that hadn't been there before. Over the years, she knew he'd improved. Partly at her urging, he'd discarded much of the clownishness, and personal satire that had characterized his earlier speeches. Now he renewed his ties with anti-Nebraska politicians, both Whigs and Northern Democrats. There were many nights when he and Mary would sit in the parlor reading newspapers from all over the country until the fire burned low in the grate; many more when she would go to bed, only to wake hours later alone and come across the hall in her wrapper to find him still staring into the glowing ash.

  In September he challenged Stephen Douglas to a public debate on the subject of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas, in the midst of his own campaign to get another pro-Nebraska Democrat elected to the Senate from Illinois, refused to meet him. When most of the countryside was in town for the State Fair, and pouring rain turned the fairgrounds to glue, Douglas spoke in the State House, defending the Act and his own part in pushing it through, in terms of the sacred right of self-government for each state. When after Douglas's three-hour speech the crowds began to disperse, Lincoln shouted from the stairway outside the hall that he would rebut Douglas at the same time the following day.

  Lincoln and Mary stayed up most of the night, Lincoln scribbling madly to incorporate the notes he'd taken into a rebuttal of the Act on which he'd worked long and thoughtfully since the summer. Mary and Emilie fixed supper, and Emilie got the boys to bed, reading Willie a story while Mary came into the parlor to listen to Lincoln practice it through. “That's a long introduction to your main point,” she remarked.

  “I have to show each link of the chain, Molly, for men to see how they've been bound by it.”

  “I understand,” she agreed. “But it sounds less like the rebuttal you promised, and more like a polemical diatribe.”

  Lincoln said, “Hmmn.”

  The following day, Mary left the boys with the Wheelocks and joined the crowd that pressed into the Legislative assembly-room, watched the lanky figure take the rostrum.

  He was almost like a stranger to her, seen that way by the unforgiving afternoon light, with his face running with sweat in the heat and his hair like a dark haystack. Was that really the man who would lie on the parlor floor propped on his elbows, arm-wrestling gently with the boys? The man who had told her that silly story about the old lady and her cat over breakfast that morning? The man she'd hit over the head with a stick of firewood only a few weeks ago?

  “When a white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government, that is despotism. . . .

  “Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a ‘sacred right of self-government.' . . .

  “Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us turn, and wash it white, in the spirit, if not the blood, of the Revolution. . . . If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union, but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of saving. . . .”

  There was talk of forming a new free-soil party in opposition to the Nebraska Act—the Republican Party. Lincoln, who mistrusted splinter parties, remained a Whig, and began aligning and rallying his old connections among the Whigs. He was on the road again all October and most of November, meeting with this or that party leader, in between his appearances in the circuit courts. He started out running for the Legislature as well, but in his letters to her—some of them barely notes—Mary could tell he was more and more inclined to seek instead a Legislative nomination for the Senate.

  “However you slice it, the Legislature is local,” he said, on one of his rare visits to Springfield—she hadn't even known he was home until she'd looked out the front window of their neighbor Reverend Miner's house to see her husband, with his usual pack of boys trailing along at his heels, walking up Jackson Street in the icy twilight. “Any good I can do here is only local good.”

  He held out his hands to the kitchen fire, red and chapped. Mary, who'd run breathlessly across
to the house, saw the gloves lying on her scrubbed kitchen table would have to be mended again. It was nearly impossible to find gloves for those immense hands. Eleven-year-old Robert was already dipping tea-leaves from the caddy into the pot, having, she saw, maneuvered the kettle on its gallows-hook over the fire. He moved with an economical neatness that was an echo of his father's movements, quiet-footed as a shadow.

  “In the Senate I can do something that can actually help this country out of the mess it's heading straight for—the mess it's already in, if you read the newspaper reports from Kansas.”

  “Can you be in the Legislature and the Senate at the same time, Pa?” asked Robert, diffident as he always was around the father he seldom saw. His eye had completely healed and there was hardly anyone who even remembered that he'd been called Cock-Eye. But either the teasing he'd endured—or the hideous ordeal of terror, betrayal, and agony at the doctor's hands—had left a permanent wariness in him, a chilly barrier that Mary was never able to break.

  “No,” said Lincoln. “No, I can't . . . and if I'm elected I'll have to resign. But at least if I'm elected,” he added with a grin, “the rest of the folks in the State House will remember my name.”