The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  All his awkwardness, all the slightly comic effect of the scarecrow height and mud-fence ugliness, seemed to melt away, until only the voice was left, speaking words of silver and steel.

  “That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

  Mary closed her eyes, listening to the roar of applause. They must elect him, she thought. If only they could elect him outright, and not put everyone through that horrible balloting in the Legislature. . . . Hard to remember that neither Lincoln's name nor that of Douglas was anywhere on the ballot.

  Only the names of men who would go to the Legislature, who would be favorable to one or the other.

  On the second of November, in the pouring rain, Democrats won fifty-three percent of the seats in the Legislature. Much printer's ink was expended in accusations that illegal voters were brought in: “Thousands of roving—robbing—bloated pock-marked Catholic Irish were imported upon us,” was how Billy Herndon put it. But in the end it made little difference.

  At home, Lincoln was silent and deeply depressed, though he smiled when Willie presented him with an execrably spelled homemade “newspaper” article about the debates, complete with drawings. By the end of the week he was back in his office, with Billy and young John Hay—something for which Mary was deeply grateful, since an autumn on the campaign trail instead of the court circuit had reduced the household finances terrifyingly, and she'd overrun her credit at every shop in town. On the fifth of January, when the Legislature voted for Senator, Lincoln was in the Supreme Court chambers, arguing cases Herndon had filed.

  By that time, the wildness of the campaign seemed a thousand years ago.

  It was a winter of penny-pinching. Mary groaned with remorse every time she crossed those beautiful flowered rugs, sat on the new parlor chairs. She would wake in terror from dreams of being back at the Globe Tavern, hearing the clanging of the stagecoach bell, her heart hammering and her mind filled with desperation and the echoes of the Bledsoes arguing in the next room: We have to get out of here! We have to get our own house. . . .

  “Things will be fine,” Lincoln soothed, gathering her into his arms. “I just need to get back to real work, and God knows there's plenty of it out there....”

  “I should never have had the house enlarged!” Mary sobbed. “We could use that money now, and we don't need a place this big....”

  “Well, if you really feel that way,” said Lincoln worriedly, “I'll start tearing it down tomorrow, but I think it might be better to wait for spring.”

  He could always make her laugh.

  During one of their debates in Freeport, Lincoln had come out and asked Douglas if Popular Sovereignty meant that the people of a territory could exclude, as well as permit, slavery? Since that was what Popular Sovereignty was about, Douglas had been forced to answer yes . . . and had immediately begun losing support, not in Illinois, but in the Southern states that had looked to him to carry their banner to the White House.

  By summer, Douglas was courting the Republicans to form a third party to elect him President in 1860. Between cases, between journeys, Lincoln worked to heal the rifts that his own defeat had left in the discouraged Republicans, juggling speeches against Douglas's still-catchy doctrine (“If one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object”) with vicious internecine squabbles between the wealthy Mr. Judd and Mayor Wentworth of Chicago about whose candidate (and whose pet newspaper) was going to wield power in the Republican Party. He went campaigning in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Iowa, for Republican candidates and to strengthen the Republican Party. Mary and the boys went with him on one such journey, to Cincinnati and Indianapolis.

  Mostly he went alone. In his absence her fears of poverty—of losing their home, of having to return to the nightmare of boardinghouse living—would return, and she found herself nervous, depressed, and easily angered. This anger frequently took the shape of quarrels with Robert, who, with one eye on his college education, would put forward tidy plans of how the family finances could be regularized.

  Robert was a tall, big-shouldered boy of fifteen now, with blue Todd eyes, given to chilly silences and measured opinions. He did not appear to possess any sense of humor—Mary wondered how something that was so much a part of both parents had managed to be left out.

  When Willie obtained, from God alone knew what source, four long, fat, black cigars, and talked Tad and two playmates into “blowing a cloud” behind the barn, it was Robert who was shocked. Mary took one look at the four green-gilled experimenters and nearly collapsed with laughter.

  Robert, now a member of the Springfield Cadets, was applying to Harvard, with the intention of becoming a lawyer like his father—and a millionaire, he said. Mary grieved at the thought of losing him, but after Robert's carefully worded criticism of how she ran the household (and let him try to keep five people decently clothed when his father forgets to collect his fees! she thought) she sometimes had the despairing sense of never having known her oldest son at all.

  After Robert's stinging criticism it was always Willie who would pull her out of her blues. Willie was as happy and open as his older brother was self-righteous and withdrawn. Willie, like his father, could always make her laugh. Like his father, Willie always knew when she needed arms put around her. It was Willie who'd come to sit beside her, when the prairie thunder hammered and his father was away.

  “Really, Mother, it's no wonder Tad's a bundle of nerves, the way you take on,” Robert would say, impatient, from the bedroom door.

  And after he'd leave, Willie would tighten his small grip on her hand and whisper, “I'm here, Mama. Everything will be all right.” It was he who'd make her “headache tea” when she had a migraine, or would hold her hand when she'd taken a couple of spoonfuls of Atkinson's Female Cordial and lay quiet in the dark, waiting for the pain to subside.

  Robert took the train east to Massachusetts and failed—spectacularly and humiliatingly—in his Harvard entrance examinations. “I told him he wasn't working hard enough,” fumed Mary, when they got the letter. “But he never would listen.” She bit back the accusation, If you'd only been around more . . . “He just freezes on me and won't say a word.”

  “He's shy.” Lincoln folded the letter and tucked it into the inner band of his hat, where he stowed most of his notes for speeches and the letters that had to be answered soonest, as if by proximity with his brain they'd remain “on his mind.” He set the hat on the porch-rail beside them and settled back on the cane-bottomed chair, lifted a hand to wave at the minister's wife, Mrs. Smith, walking down Jackson Street in the summer twilight. Only last week, he'd helped her nail a new step on her back porch.

  “There are preparatory academies back East. I know Douglas has influence with the President of Exeter. He'd write Robert a recommendation.” Despite the drubbing they'd given one another on the campaign trail last fall, Lincoln and Douglas remained good friends, an attitude Mary found difficult to understand.

  “And how much is that going to cost us?”

  “Not more than we can afford, Mother.”

  “He should have studied harder....”

  “And maybe I should have campaigned harder,” said Lincoln with a grin. “Then I'd be a Senator now.”

  Mary said nothing, torn between her worry about money—her worry that Lincoln would find out about the cost of her latest dress, the expense of the dinners she'd given to make an impression on Messrs. Judd and Palmer when last they'd been in town—and her genuine wish for Robert to get the kind of education his intelligence deserved.

  Between campaigns and cases, Lincoln had given Robert what time he
could. But there was always that wall around the boy, from behind which he would regard his parents with haughty, slightly accusing eyes.

  Because his father left him home to deal with his mother's temper?

  Because his mother had betrayed him into those moments of agony under the surgeon's knife?

  Because he was old enough to remember Kentucky, and what it was like to live in a wealthy house with slaves instead of one in which pennies were counted when his father—again—let his law work slip in favor of political speeches?

  Because Lincoln and Mary had spent the first year of his life resentfully adjusting to the loss of familiar comforts, familiar freedom?

  Because, after all these years, he still missed Eddie, for whose loss Mary had been too grieved herself to give him comfort?

  Mary didn't know.

  In November, newspapers began to suggest that Abraham Lincoln might be the appropriate candidate for the Republicans to run for President in 1860.

  “Me?” Lincoln roared with laughter that made Mary lower the paper—it was the Sandusky Commercial Register—and regard him across the kitchen table in miffed dignity. The day's rain had stopped, but the early-falling darkness was bitterly cold. Fido and the cats had called a temporary truce so they could all make space for one another in front of the stove.

  “And why wouldn't you make a good President? A great President?”

  “And what are they gonna run me on?” Lincoln grinned. “My Black Hawk war record, or the bang-up job I did on the House Post Office Investigatory Committee back in '48 ? ‘Why, Mr. Secretary of War . . .'” He steepled his long fingers in mock conference with an imaginary Cabinet official, “‘I seem to recall just sech a problem back when I was on the Post Office Committee....Only instead of bein' invaded by Britain, France, and Russia all at the same time, we had to investigate postmasters passin' mail free along to their friends....'”

  “You're being silly,” said Mary severely, her own heart beating hard at the thought of what Elizabeth would say to the news that her “bumpkin” brother-in-law had been elected to the highest office in the land.

  “Anybody who would elect me to the Presidency,” Lincoln rose and fetched his old jacket from the cupboard behind the door, “is the one's bein' silly.” But as he turned to go out into the dark yard to feed Buck, Mary saw the glint in his eye, like a traveler topping a rise of land, and looking out into new territory ahead.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  IN FEBRUARY OF 1860 LINCOLN WENT TO NEW YORK, TO SPEAK AT A gathering of the Young Men's Central Republican Union—some of those “young men” being fairly venerable, like William Cullen Bryant, who was sixty-five, and Horace Greeley of the Tribune, New York's most influential Republican newspaper. Cash Clay would be speaking, too, and other anti-slavery luminaries. Already Mary could see, in the various journals that came to Jackson Street, the jostling among the men who sought power, like jockeys edging for position at the post. Chief among them was William Seward, senator and former governor of New York, a wily extremist whom she judged—and Lincoln judged—would scare off more voters than he'd draw in a national contest. Salmon Chase, the Republican governor of Ohio, was a less controversial but far less colorful contender: nobody knew ill of him because he really didn't have much to say. John C. Frémont was in the running, too, and an assortment of lesser fry, including an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court named MacLean, and the indefatigable Cash Clay.

  None of them, she thought, could come up to Lincoln.

  And Lincoln, she was well aware, wasn't unknown. He'd just had his debates with Douglas published in book form and they were selling smartly.

  It was, of course, unthinkable that a man should campaign openly to become President. No man who boldly strove for the office was regarded as quite trustworthy. But Mary knew her husband well, and she knew he'd spent hours perfecting his New York address, and that he'd paid a hundred dollars for a new suit to give it in.

  She later heard from Robert about his father's visit, how the other boys at Exeter had looked at each other in appalled astonishment at the sight of the immaculate and gentlemanly Robert's scarecrow progenitor. But when Lincoln rose to speak at the Cooper Union, when he passionately denounced the spread of slavery to new territories while upholding the Constitution that provided for it in existing states—when he argued for Union and compromise against the radicalism of either side—Robert's classmates could only whisper to him how proud he must be, that that man up there was his father.

  What Robert himself felt, he did not say.

  And by the time Mary got her son's account of the address—which was followed by a speaking tour of New England—she already knew that Lincoln had told his supporters to put his name in. He would run.

  ALL SPRING THEY WATCHED THE NEWSPAPERS. AGAIN THEY MADE LISTS of supporters, spoke far into the night of what points to emphasize to whom. Mary clipped every article about Lincoln—or about Douglas, who was bidding for the Democratic Presidential nomination—that she could find, sticking them into a scrapbook with Willie's help. (Tad's “help” had resulted in large portions of Fido's fur being clipped off to get the glue out of it—thereafter part of Willie's job was to keep meticulous track of the glue-pot and of his younger brother.) Hannah Shearer and Cousin Lizzie came by nearly every day, to catch up on the latest word or speculate about Lincoln's chances. The whole town, it seemed, was watching and listening.

  In April the Democrats met in Charleston, South Carolina, and roundly rejected Douglas—the question Lincoln had forced upon him in Freeport had had its lethal effect, like a slow-killing wound. The northern Democrats stormed out in a rage and set up their own convention in Baltimore. Without the necessity of nominating a Westerner—Lincoln—to counterbalance Douglas, William Seward pushed forward his Republican claims, or rather had his chief handlers push him forward (“Blushing and protesting all the way, I daresay,” Mary sniffed) for President.

  Lincoln was home for a week in March and another in April, between making speeches and arguing cases for the Illinois Central Railroad in Chicago. Those weeks, he spent much time at his law office and more writing letters or conferring with Judge Davis while Billy and John Hay dealt with his legal correspondence. As always, when he turned his energies toward politics instead of legal work, the family finances suffered. At other times, his absences would have been maddening; now, Mary scarcely noticed whether he was there or not.

  It only mattered that he be nominated.

  It only mattered that he win.

  Mary recalled Henry Clay, one of the men who, thirty years before, had saved the Union through diplomacy and compromise, passed by again and again for President. Of all the statesmen she had ever heard of, he had deserved the Presidency most: “For all of his running,” the old song went, “he never arrived. . . .”

  “Whoever gets the nomination in Chicago in May will win,” said Lincoln softly, on one of those rare nights when he was home. “The Southern Democrats are for John Breckenridge, the Northerners for our friend Douglas—now here's a third Southern Union candidate stepping up, Bell. If the Republicans can pull all the anti-slavery votes together, they can take the election.”

  In Decatur and Chicago, “wigwams” were built—huge ramshackle temporary halls with canvas roofs—for the Republican Conventions, first the state and then the national a week later. Lying in bed reading, Mary would see Lincoln through the bedroom door in his own room, writing by lamplight at his little desk: letters to Norman Judd, letters to Judge Davis, letters to fellow attorneys and political supporters Ward Lamon, Leonard Swett, Isaac Arnold. Letters to the editors of every Republican newspaper in Illinois, and to the German-language papers that served that powerful minority. Even letters to Lyman Trumbull, whom she still considered perfidious and untrustworthy. Now and then he'd lean down to scratch Fido's silky yellow head, or would move aside whichever of the cats chose that moment to sit on his papers.

  When he was finished with his work he'd come into Mary's room
, and sit on the foot of the bed and talk until he'd tired himself out enough to sleep. On other nights, she fell asleep to the soft scratching of his pen.

  He went to Decatur for the state convention: “Blamed if some band of fools didn't carry in a couple of fence-rails, all done up with streamers and flags, that I was supposed to have split down in Macon County thirty years ago, and put up a painting of me splittin' 'em.” He shook his head, but Mary could see he was pleased, and moved closer to him on the sofa. He'd come home that evening on the train—the days when he'd ridden in the saddle all over the central portion of the state were long gone—and Tad and Willie and Fido all crowded as close around him as they could, as if like a fire he radiated both light and warmth.

  “Does this mean you're going to be President, Pa?” Willie looked up into his face, gray eyes sparkling. Lincoln's eyes, Mary reflected, without that haunted shadow of sadness, the eyes of the child Lincoln had never been.

  “Not yet, son.” He ruffled Willie's thick, chestnut-brown hair—gold-flecked, like Mary's and Robert's. “It means I get to put my name in the hat, and if it gets pulled out of the hat, it means I get to stand on the starting-line and run the race.”

  “Oo gowa bead Dougwath?” Tad's combination of lisp and slur made any attempt at communication from him problematical—something that infuriated the boy in dealing with his playmates—but neither Lincoln nor Willie seemed to have the slightest problem understanding.

  Lincoln smiled. “I'll beat him if I can, son. And that's Mister Douglas.”

  “And then will there be no more slavery?”

  Lincoln and Mary exchanged a glance over Willie's head.

  “That,” said Lincoln softly, “is what remains to be seen.”