The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Lincoln was forty-seven, and seemed older—but then, even as a backwoods bumpkin there had always been something patriarchal about him. Mary was thirty-eight, a fact which surprised her. Lincoln still called her “my child bride” and though, to the boys, she referred to him as “Father,” she sometimes caught herself thinking of him as exactly that: the father she still so sorely missed. He smiled when she called him that, and called her “Mother,” which made her laugh. She pictured them sometimes as an old white-haired couple, surrounded by grandchildren . . . being invited to tea at the White House and pointed out in Washington society, as Dolley Madison was pointed out in her carriage, with love and respect.

  In the same week as the Republican Convention, news reached Springfield that Missouri “border ruffians” had raided and sacked the free-soil city of Lawrence, Kansas. In retaliation the abolitionist John Brown and his men murdered and mutilated five pro-slavery men on Pottawatomie Creek, and reading of it Mary shivered, as if at the sound of summer thunder.

  Frémont and his eventual running-mate—a New Jersey Senator named Dayton—were defeated.

  Mary felt no regrets at this. Though the victory of “Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont” might have brought patronage, she believed that the cost would have been too high. In every newspaper that came to the house on Eighth and Jackson—and there were dozens, now—Southern Congressmen and Southern businessmen spoke angrily against the consolidation of anti-slavery forces into a single, Republican, party.

  It was clear to her that if a Republican were elected President, there were those in the South who would demand that the Union be dissolved. The handwriting was on the wall. Only thus could they protect the institution upon which not only their economy, but their very society, was based.

  Mary herself tried to talk Lincoln into voting for the Know-Nothing candidate Millard Fillmore, Zachary Taylor's Vice-President, who had filled out the end of “Old Rough and Ready's” incomplete term, and who had visited Lincoln a few years ago in Springfield, and spent a half-hour discussing roses with Mary.

  She had other concerns that year. The Springfield town lot her father had left her finally sold, and to her immeasurable relief, Lincoln agreed to use the money to enlarge the house. Emilie's stay in the only spare nook available—Mary's sewing-room—had brought home to her the need for more space, particularly as Tad was old enough now to move into the overcrowded second attic with his brothers. The attics were transformed into a full-fledged second story, and—God be praised—a modern stove was acquired for the kitchen in place of the old assortment of roasters, gallows-hooks, Dutch ovens, and boilers on the kitchen hearth.

  Robert got his own bedroom—suitable to both his fourteen-year-old dignity and his impatience with Tad's restlessness—with Willie sharing a smaller room with Tad. Tad adored Willie, who never treated him as a baby, as Robert often did. Imperious even at four, Tad would choose the games, and the easygoing Willie would fall in with whatever schemes his mischievous brother would devise.

  Carried away with the joy of the new house, Mary bought new carpets, and a suite of parlor furniture, considerably over-running her budget. Lincoln's anger when he got the bills surprised and frightened her—she hadn't seen him that angry since the early days of their marriage. She'd far rather he'd shouted at her, as her father or brothers would have, rather than the cold silence that preceded his leaving the house. She half-guessed that he distrusted his anger, as he distrusted his sexual passions, and would pull away from it as he had pulled away from her during those feverish nights in Simeon Francis's parlor, after Bessie had gone to bed.

  He was gone most of the night, and though he accepted her tearful apologies as always, she mentally swore never ever to spend money without telling him again.

  One of the things Mary loved best about the new shape of the house was that she finally had the luxury of her own room, connected by a door to Lincoln's smaller bedroom where, if he had a case, he could stay up half the night writing without disturbing her often-fretful sleep.

  She missed him sometimes waking her if she had a nightmare. But many times he would do so anyway, for he was a light sleeper himself. Hearing her whimpering in her sleep, even through the closed door, he would pad through in his nightshirt to gently shake her, usually climbing into bed beside her to hold her till dawn.

  For her part she loved the luxury of sitting up reading by lamplight late into the night, without having to worry about whether Lincoln would be disturbed or when he might come in from his office. And though she didn't say so to him, she particularly enjoyed not having to sleep with Fido and six cats. Many nights he'd come in and sit in the chair beside her bed, reading the newspaper, with the dog curled confidingly at his feet.

  Billy Herndon of course put the story around that Mary had had the second story put on without Lincoln's knowledge, because when Lincoln came home from the circuit and saw the second story had been completed, he'd facetiously asked a neighbor where the Lincolns lived: he didn't recognize the house, he said. It was the kind of thing Billy would take seriously. He'd gone around for weeks telling everyone that Lincoln had no appreciation for what he called the “Sacred Beauty of Nature” because Lincoln had replied, deadpan, to Billy's inquiry about Niagara Falls, “I just wondered where all that water came from.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  IN MARCH OF 1857—ONLY DAYS AFTER THE ELDERLY DEMOCRAT James Buchanan was inaugurated President—the United States Supreme Court handed down its decision that Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, had no right under the Constitution to seek his freedom because, as a Negro, he was not a citizen of the United States. Scott's master, an Army surgeon, had taken his slave first to Illinois, then to the Minnesota Territory. On his master's death, Scott had sued for liberty—as hundreds of other slaves had, over the years—on the grounds that he'd been resident of a free state and then of a territory from which slavery was banned.

  Residence in a free state or a free territory meant nothing, Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney ruled, because Congress had no right to exclude slavery from either states or territories. The Missouri Compromise, over which fighting still continued in what men now called Bleeding Kansas, was in fact unconstitutional. The Founding Fathers had never intended blacks to be included in their definition of “liberty,” since they had mentioned them neither in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Constitution.

  “Taney's wrong,” said Lincoln softly, when he got back from the Clinton County Court, where he'd heard the news. “And there will be hell to pay.”

  Mary could almost feel sorry for Stephen Douglas, as the Senate race of 1858 drew near. As the architect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he was obliged to defend it, like a man trying to put out a prairie-fire with a teacup.

  In the North.

  In the South, Douglas was praised as a defender of the rights of states to govern as their people demanded, and as the friend of those who feared the abolitionists' increasingly strident demands. More and more, Southern slaveholders were proclaiming that slavery was the only condition suitable to the Negro race. It was beneficial to them, they insisted: it would be cruel to thrust inherently primitive and childlike intellects out into the cold, cruel world.

  As Mary's father had once said of Frances's canary.

  “And it isn't cruel to let people like that horrible Mrs. Turner back home in Lexington own them, I suppose?” fumed Mary. “The one who beat so many of her slaves that her coachman eventually killed her in self-defense? And was hanged for it?” She handed her husband a cravat. He'd come back to the house for an hour's rest and some supper, which he hadn't eaten, after a day spent at the State House, where the Republicans of Illinois had gathered to nominate their candidate for the Senate.

  Norman Judd—of the “we won't vote for a Whig” group two years ago—had opened the convention with a banner saying, COOK COUNTY FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

  The papers that lay on Lincoln's small desk—Robert had twice kept Tad from shuffli
ng them into a different order—were Lincoln's acceptance speech.

  This time, thought Mary, he would win. He had to.

  “Or that awful woman in New Orleans, back when I was a girl?” she went on. “I spent half my evenings in the kitchen, listening to Nelson and Mammy and Chaney talk. I know how everyone in town treated their darkies, and something tells me people haven't changed that much over the years. Some people—like Papa—treated them well....”

  “Except that they could be sold,” reminded Lincoln softly, “to people who wouldn't treat 'em quite so well.”

  Mary was silent, thinking about Jane's tears, all those years ago when Saul had been sold to help pay Uncle David's debts. Remembering Pendleton, and Chaney, and Patty, sold as part of her father's property in the settlement, just because George didn't think he was getting enough of his father's money. Of Jane and Judy, sold too to help clear up Robert Todd's debts. When Emilie had come here—good God, was it four years ago already!—she had spoken of the financial hardship in which Betsey and all the younger ones were living; her latest letter informed Mary that Betsey had gone to live in Alabama with Mattie and her husband.

  What had happened to Saul? To Jane and Judy? To Pendleton, whom Betsey had nursed through the cholera; to grouchy old Aunt Chaney, who'd made such wonderful pastries; and the timid, good-natured Patty? Mary hadn't the faintest idea.

  “Papa never would have sold them,” she said at last.

  But as President of the State Bank of Kentucky, Papa had sold hundreds of slaves when other men had died in debt, with as little thought as George had had, for where they went or what became of them.

  “No,” agreed Lincoln. He started to turn from the mirror—Mary handed him a hairbrush. As usual his hair was too long and looked as if a hurricane had passed across his head. “The Founding Fathers did what they had to do to make the Union, and I'm not about to undo their work. But they knew the evil they dealt with, and tried to limit it. And that we must do, or make a mockery of all they strove for.”

  Robert, Willie, and even Tad, who was just five but already knew the difference between the State Legislature and “We-uh Gongweth,” as he called it, had wanted to go with their mother to hear their father accept the nomination. Mary had told them that children weren't allowed in the State House galleries, which was partly true—mostly, she wanted to hear Lincoln speak without worrying about Tad slipping away and ending up dancing a jig on the podium. Lincoln walked the three blocks to the State House square alone, through the falling summer twilight, to meet with Judd and Davis and the others before the convention re-convened at eight. She got the boys settled and followed later, taking her place in the crowded gallery with Cousin Lizzie, Dr. Wallace, and a new friend, Hannah Shearer, the lovely sister of their neighbor the Reverend Miner. The night was hot and smelled of far-off storm; Mary's head throbbed a little, and the itching discomfort of her old female complaint was back, but she'd forborne to take the usual two spoonfuls of Battley's Cordial: she wanted instead to savor every moment of triumph.

  Lincoln stepped to the podium, and his voice cut the molten lamplight of the room like a silver knife. “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it. . . .”

  In his black suit and black silk cravat he looked, if not exactly like other men, at least like a man of respect and education, not like some shambling backwoods lawyer. Mary had never quite taught him to sit in a chair when he wasn't being observed, and she despaired of ever breaking him of the habit of answering the door himself, in his shirtsleeves and like as not with a hammer in one hand and a mouthful of nails....

  But tonight he looked like a man voters could take seriously. He looked like a Senator.

  And he spoke like a prophet whose God was justice.

  “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

  “I do not expect this Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. . . .”

  “He should have cut that out.” Dr. Wallace leaned across to Mary. “Lamon and the others told him to. He's going to lose any chance of getting into the Senate if he alienates all the Southerners living in the south part of Illinois.”

  “I think we've had enough of candidates who won't talk about what we're actually voting for,” retorted Mary, whose opinion had been— Lincoln had asked her—to leave it in. “At least he's honest enough not to try to sell voters a pig in a poke.”

  Wallace raised his eyebrows, and shook his head. “Whether he's just won the election or cut his own throat,” he mused, “you've got to admit he's come a long way.”

  A MONTH LATER, WITH THE CAMPAIGN HEATING UP, LINCOLN ISSUED A challenge to Stephen Douglas, for seven debates on the issue of slavery. Mary held her breath for the week it took Douglas to make up his mind. Ever since the days of hearing secondhand of Lincoln and Douglas arguing in Speed's store—“Like two gods throwing lightning at one another,”—she had longed to see these intellectual warriors meet.

  Knowing Douglas, she knew exactly why he hesitated. Like Ninian, he would rather simply that the issue go away; he didn't want to alienate one side or the other. The object was to get into power first, then implement policy.

  Maybe he suspected that his own position was false. That of the rights of states to choose their own path was less easy to defend than the biblical and patriotic echoes of that single word “liberty.”

  Maybe Lincoln's challenge was simply too public for him to back down.

  Banners, posters, cartoons in newspapers spoke of the “Little Giant”—with his awe-inspiring presence and his voice of bronze and thunder—meeting the challenge of the “Giant Killer.” There was much talk of David and Goliath, though newspapers differed on which combatant was on this occasion fighting on the side of the Lord. Through those seven weeks of campaigning Mary followed the debates in the Illinois Journal, with Robert reading over her shoulder and Tad, Willie, and Maria Francesca—the latest of the “girls”—listening eagerly, as if for news of a battlefront. When Lincoln came home—a day here, two days there—he was mostly occupied with the Republican leaders in Springfield, or in conference with newspapermen whose presence was increasingly a part of any major campaign. One of them, a young German named John Nicolay, became something of a fixture around Lincoln's law office and a fast friend of the new law clerk, dapper and supercilious John Hay.

  In addition to debating Douglas, Lincoln crisscrossed the state, addressing meetings, rallies, audiences large and small, sometimes in towns he himself had staked out while a young surveyor struggling to make a living in New Salem. He remembered everyone's name, and the circumstances of previous meetings—Mary knew well his prodigious capacity, not only to recall everyone he had ever met, but to take a genuine warm interest in their doings, as if each man was a friend encountered across the stove of some country store.

  Douglas was campaigning hard, too. But whereas he traveled by special train with an entourage including his second wife, Dolley Madison's niece the regal and beautiful Adele Cutts, Lincoln always rode the public cars, shaking hands with and listening to everyone he encountered. When at last Mary took the train to Alton to see them meet—when she finally stood in the heatless October sunshine of the Alton Courthouse square—the difference between the two candidates was even more pointed. Douglas radiated wealth and power, resplendent in a new blue suit and immaculate linen, every inch the respected Senator with offices in hand to bestow and bowing as gracefully to applause as he'd bowed to Mary, years ago in Elizabeth's parlor. Lincoln, following him up alone, looked like he did on any day in court, in his rusty black suit with the sleeves too short and the pants-hems hovering several inches above his worn black shoes.

  She heard the cheers for “Old Abe,” “Honest Abe,” and her heart glowed—though she knew Lincoln hated the nicknames. He smiled and lifted his hand and the cheers
swelled to a roar. A man who'd cut wood and slaughtered hogs for his living, a man who understood what it was to be poor. Last night at the Franklin Hotel, Lincoln had recounted how, during his first long-ago campaign for the Legislature, en route from one small village to another, he and Cousin John Stuart had passed reapers in a field, getting in the last of the wheat. The workmen had said they had little use for any candidate of either party, but would vote for any man who could do his share of the work; Lincoln had promptly climbed down from Cousin John's buggy, borrowed a scythe, and led the crew on a full round of the field.

  “You can't pretend, with a scythe in your hands, Mother,” he'd said to her. “Thank God they wasn't makin' shoes. It was as good a campaign speech as I ever made.”

  Mary, looking up at the platform now, couldn't imagine Stephen Douglas reaping wheat.

  But it had been a fierce campaign. She saw it in Lincoln's lined face, heard it in Douglas's hoarse and nearly inaudible voice. Douglas started out speaking in defense of his policy toward Kansas: “. . . the signers of the Declaration of Independence . . . did not mean Negro, nor the savage Indians, nor the Fejee Islanders, nor any other barbarous race. . . .”

  He spoke for an hour, before Lincoln got up and replied. Mary had, in her luggage, transcripts of all the previous debates, from the ferocity of Douglas's first accusations that Lincoln had been “in conspiracy” to form an abolitionist Republican Party, through later baiting that he intended the Negro race to be either (a) extinguished or (b) amalgamated into the white race through interracial marriage.

  Lincoln rose, with the sunlight slanting now, blinking a little in it with that deceptive bumpkin slowness that had fooled so many rival attorneys. But there was nothing of the bumpkin in the penetrating tenor that rang out over the crowd; nothing of the bumpkin as he spoke of the conflict “on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.”