The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  John Nicolay met them at the station with the news that Virginia had officially become a part of the Confederacy, not merely an ally. Union troops had crossed the two bridges to the little town of Alexandria and had established bridgeheads there. The President, he told them, had been closeted with his Cabinet pretty steadily since the news had arrived on Tuesday.

  Mary said, “Thank you,” and settled her enormous, spreading crinoline over the carriage seats. It was Adele Douglas's carriage, on loan to the Lincolns. Mary could hardly wait to tell Lincoln of the beautiful open barouche she'd chosen, for which the businessmen of New York had agreed to pay! Nicolay asked politely after the journey, then dropped into conversation with Commissioner Wood, for which she was glad, for she had begun to see how deceived she had been in the thin young journalist with his faint German accent. Her blossoming dislike had flared into furious resentment when she'd been told that Nicolay, not she, would be in charge of social arrangements at the White House.

  “It'll be more for consistency than for anything else,” Lincoln had told her, when she'd gone storming into the parlor at Willard's—this had been a few days before the Inauguration—to demand why the State Department's point-by-point description of etiquette had been delivered to the young secretary instead of to herself. “You know how your headaches lay you out, Mother, and you've told me yourself there's never any knowing when you'll be struck by one. You wouldn't want, nor could we afford, for the purely mechanical arrangements of diplomacy to be put off by your illness.”

  “You think I can't be trusted?” she had demanded. “Is that it?” And, having no real argument against Lincoln's reasoning, had raged at him in a fury of tears fuelled by the exhaustion of that interminable journey from Springfield. The memory still rankled, against Nicolay, whom she suspected of putting himself forward with the argument and the suggestion, and against Lincoln himself, though her grudge had been mostly submerged in the tensions of the past few months. Riding back to the White House now through the streets of town, already thick with rising clouds of dust, she reflected that her husband probably wouldn't even take the time to separate himself from his precious Cabinet to greet her. And the boys would be off somewhere with the Taft children....

  Tears of weary self-pity stung her eyes, and she took Lizzie's hand for comfort. Even in the twelve days she'd been gone, Washington had grown noticeably hotter, and the stench was incredible. Rows of tents covered the open Mall that stretched from the Capitol to the river. The reek of the latrine-pits vied with that of the horse-lines and the victual-ers' pens of cattle and swine.

  More herds blocked the streets, en route to their destinies, and there seemed to be teamsters and wagons everywhere. Men in uniforms swarmed, no two companies arrayed alike. Blue, gray, young Ellsworth's gaudy scarlet-trousered Zouaves . . . country boys in twos and threes gawking about them as if Washington were a real city instead of the provincial Southern town that she knew it was. Bowery toughs from New York swaggered and cursed at the free blacks of the town, the first blacks that many of them had ever seen. In New York and Philadelphia Mary had seen for herself what she'd read of in the papers for years: the virulence of the hatred white working-men bore against the free blacks.

  They would fight to preserve the Union, but newspapers, street-corner orators, broadsides all vociferously proclaimed that they would not fight to flood the Northern cities with men more impoverished—and willing to work for lower wages—than themselves.

  And among the ninety-day militia soldiers, strode warriors of that secondary army that had followed on the first since the Greeks sat down before the walls of Troy: teamsters, sutlers, victualers, laundrywomen, harlots, bunco-artists, thieves. All coated with Washington's impenetrable dust, all waiting for the fighting to begin.

  Two members of the Cassius Clay Battalion stood by the gate off Pennsylvania Avenue. The carriage-wheels crunched on the gravel of the circular drive. She glimpsed wizened Mr. McManus in the doorway, and the next moment the tall thin shape of her husband emerged from the dark hall behind him.

  At least, she thought with relief, he wasn't in his shirtsleeves. Gladness swept her. Tad and Willie shoved past him and ran down the steps, followed almost at once by young Ellsworth, handsome in his Zouave uniform, ready to escort her up the steps. Bud and Holly, and young Julia in her white dress, grouped around Lincoln like a second family; Julia held a bouquet of welcoming flowers.

  Home, Mary thought.

  But the house itself, looming up behind them, even in the hot spring sunlight seemed to her to be shadowed, like the terrible house of mourning in her dream. It's only because it's so shabby, she thought, as Commissioner Wood helped her from the carriage. And only because I'm tired. Her head throbbed and she thought with longing of a few quiet hours in her room. When the new furniture arrives, and we get a new coat of paint on it, it will be the finest in the city, in the nation. . . .

  Yet as she walked toward the steps, her sons romping around her like puppies—Tad couldn't possibly have grown taller in less than two weeks!—she shivered at the sight of it, as if, like the house in her dream, it was filled, not with the bustle of business and the noise of life, but with poison, and darkness, and the stench of death.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  TWO NIGHTS LATER SHE WAS WAKED FROM UNEASY SLEEP BY THE tramp of men marching. Hair hanging down her back, she crossed to the window and put aside the curtains: dark figures, dark banners, gun-barrels catching cold dark gleams of moonlight. They were heading down the Mall toward the Long Bridge, which joined Washington to Alexandria. Only that day she had been driven past it in the carriage on the way to review the flag exercises of the Seventh New York Regiment, and Lincoln had pointed out how the planks of the bridge had been taken up to prevent rebel cavalry from charging across it.

  The night was stifling, the window-glass tepid against her cheek. She had a horror of mosquitoes, and even with netting draped around the bed, the mere sound of one in the room was enough to keep her awake. The nights here were thick with them, like dust-motes around the lanterns of the guards by the White House gates.

  She watched until the columns gave way to ambulance-wagons, supply-carts, remounts, and reserves. Still sitting beside the window an hour or so later, she heard the distant crackle of musket-fire, that told her the fighting had truly begun.

  Because of being waked she slept late, until the day's heat woke her, sweating and itching. Her maid was just hooking her into one of her new dresses of pale-blue muslin when there was a knock on the door.

  It was Lizzie. Her eyes were red and swollen and sick panic struck Mary to the heart, even before she spoke.

  “Oh, darling, I'm so sorry,” Lizzie whispered. “It's poor Ellsworth.”

  The two women went into the hall. Mary could see, beyond the ground-glass doors, Lincoln's tall shadow, struggling to get through the press of men in the vestibule without visibly thrusting them aside. She was familiar with this sight. It would take him an hour sometimes to get from his office to the doors that separated the business part of the White House from the family quarters, maybe another to get past the line between the doors and the stair. On this occasion, as had happened many times before, two men who evidently felt their affairs simply couldn't wait followed him down the hall, talking all the while: “. . . seein' as how it was me that got you the vote in Jackson County, you understand that I traded a lot of favors for it, and it's only right that I be given a quartermaster's post in return . . .”

  She didn't hear what he answered. It seemed to take a long time. Why didn't that horrible man from Jackson County drop dead of the palsy as he spoke? When the man and his friend disappeared back through the ground-glass doors—nearly colliding with another office-seeker who was trying to come through into the hall and take advantage of this near glimpse of the President as well—Lincoln took Mary and Lizzie aside and drew them after him into the parlor. His lined cheeks were streaked with tears.

  “The Zouaves were part of the for
ce that took Alexandria last night.” He spoke as if setting facts before a jury. “There was little fighting. Ellsworth and his men took the telegraph office first thing, to keep news from spreading farther south. They hoisted the flag there. When it got light they could see a rebel flag flying on top of the Marshall Hotel. Ellsworth led his men to pull it down—they were coming downstairs with it when the owner of the hotel shot him.” His voice broke and he pressed his hand, very briefly, over his mouth.

  Then he looked at his hand, as if he could see his friend's blood there, and said, very softly, “What have I done?”

  “Exactly what you swore you would do,” replied Mary steadily, though her own mind stalled on the fact that she would never see that ebullient young friend again. “Upheld the Constitution against those who would tear this nation apart.”

  And Lincoln sighed, like a man who feels the full weight of the cross settle at last on his shoulder, to be carried up the hill.

  They were driven in the carriage to the Navy Yard that afternoon, to see the body. Someone had washed Ellsworth's face and covered him with a sheet, but some of the blood still soaked through. Spatters of it still clung to his hair and the gallant mustache he'd grown. Looking down at him, Mary saw him when he'd first come to Springfield, brimming with plans and enthusiasm for Lincoln's election; saw him all those evenings when he'd come home for supper with Lincoln and help with the dishwashing afterwards.

  And looking down at him, she saw, as if with horrible double vision, Robert's face, waxy, bloodless, and flecked with gore.

  She closed her eyes, and gripped Lincoln's arm until the wave of dizzy horror passed.

  They held the funeral at the White House, a bier erected on the trampled and boot-scarred carpets of the dilapidated East Room. Lincoln wept again, as Mary placed a wreath and Ellsworth's photograph on the casket, that would be taken to the railroad station for the long journey back to his parents in New York. Feeling the convulsive grip of her husband's black-gloved hand seeking comfort in hers, she knew that guilt still tormented him.

  His election had triggered the secession of the Southern states. His policy that the Union was indissoluble—that the Confederates were in fact rebels and no legitimate government at all—had dictated that they should not be let go in peace.

  He had known there would be blood.

  Even that of a young man who had, for a year, been like a son to him.

  Not Robert, thought Mary frantically. Never Robert . . .

  Robert arrived two days later from Harvard, wearing a black armband for the friend who had been like a brother. He was very quiet and made the time, between his father's conferences concerning the appointment of a Quartermaster General and long discussions with Seward, to have an interview with his father in his office. The following night, as Mary was getting ready for a Presidential levee, Lincoln came into her room and told her quietly, “Bob asked if he might leave school, and join the regiment some of his classmen are forming.”

  “You told him no!” She seized his sleeve in a death-grip. “You told him no!”

  “I told him no,” agreed Lincoln quietly. Mrs. Keckley, who had arrived to make sure her handiwork was most pleasingly arrayed on Mary and had remained to help her dress and fix her hair, retreated with soundless tact into the hall.

  “He's too young,” Mary gabbled, as if she had not heard him. Panic filled her, the same panic that had driven her, frantic, into the yard on Jackson Street screaming, Bobby's run away! Bobby's run away! “He isn't even eighteen. And he must finish his schooling, if he's to have any position, any hope of success, in the—”

  “I told him no,” Lincoln repeated, taking her hands. He'd written to Ellsworth's parents, she knew, trying to compose what words of comfort he could to people who had lost a son, when his own son of military age still lived.

  It was the start of a nightmare, like a tour of Hell that only got worse the further they went, and from which there was no turning back.

  When she looked back on it afterwards she wondered how she ever lived through it at all.

  Less than ten days after Ellsworth's death, Stephen Douglas died in Chicago, where he'd been on tour to raise support for Lincoln's decision to fight for union against those who would divide the country. Ill before he started, he'd worn himself out in the campaign, tirelessly speaking in behalf of the man he'd battled so bitterly and known so long. He was a hard drinker, and his health had not been good for some time. When an attack of rheumatism hit, he had had nothing with which to fight the complications that followed.

  Mary felt shocked, bereft. Even as she kept expecting to hear Ellsworth's footfalls leaping up the Grand Staircase two at a time, she could not imagine—literally could not form in her mind—that she'd never see those sparkly brown eyes again, or hear that gorgeous baritone voice dispensing his practiced compliments. She had herself driven to Adele Douglas's house—only a hundred yards away across the square—and wept with the widow, clinging to her in the red velvet dimness of the parlor.

  He could have been my husband, Mary thought, dazed. The lovely Adele had known him first as a Congressman in Washington, a man famous already for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But Mary's memories of the man went back to Springfield, and being swept along in that surprisingly strong light grip in cotillion dances at the American House; to his rolling laughter in the long prairie twilights as he drove her back from a picnic.

  He couldn't be dead. It all had to be some terrible mistake.

  In the evenings, when Lincoln could tear himself from the constant tormenting swarms of office-seekers, he sat in silence in the parlor. Remembering, Mary thought, those winter nights around the stove at Speed's store, hurling at one another the lightning-bolts of their minds.

  And still troops poured into Washington. Volunteer companies on ninety-day enlistments from Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and New York, in all their varied uniforms or no uniforms at all. Companies composed entirely of Irishmen, or Germans, or of the inhabitants of single villages in Connecticut or Maine, all cousins and brothers and schoolmates. Camps sprouted up all around the perimeter of Washington, reenforcing its single old stone fort on the Potomac. Soldiers occupied the grounds of the old Custis mansion of Arlington on its bluff across the river, where the kindred of George Washington had once lived; the rattle of gun-limbers and ammunition wagons sounded in the streets day and night. Rumors proliferated about everything and anything. Half the population of Washington seemed to be secessionist spies, sending information nearly unchecked to the enemy via relatives in Maryland and Virginia. Nearly every permanent inhabitant of the town was related to someone in the rebel army.

  Barrooms proliferated, many of them makeshift dispensaries of liquor under canvas tents. Fights proliferated, too, and all of a sudden, when Mary and Lincoln were driven to military reviews or the dedication of new camps, they saw women openly strolling the streets in gaudy dresses and hair of hues not found in nature.

  Mary went abroad little in those days. She found solace in the conservatory that Buchanan had had added to the Executive Mansion, a fascinating indoor garden whose glass walls and steep-sided glass ceiling provided a comforting privacy. Roses grew there, and a hundred varieties of fern; camellias red, pink, and white; bougainvillea in hues to match the newest shades of fashion; peonies and fuchsias from China and Japan. Johnny Watt, the head groundskeeper, showed her around the long aisles of heavy, green-painted tables and told her stories of this plant or that, the bronze chrysanthemums that had been a gift from the Tycoon of Japan, brought back by Mr. Perry from his famous voyage; the intoxicating white jasmine that had been given, it was said, by Dolley Madison to Mr. Adams—the first Mr. Adams—and had now grown as thick as a man's arm.

  Sometimes she would send down to the conservatory for bouquets, to be sent to Mrs. Taft or to Mrs. Fox, the sister of Postmaster Blair—her husband was helping to organize the coastal defenses. Sometimes she and Lizzie went to sit there in quiet talk, and at such times Watt would putter about
with his shears or his watering-can, invisible as the bees that flew in when the hinged ceiling-panes were open. Far off the voices of her sons could be heard, riding their ponies in the rough ground between the house and the White House stables—cavalry-charging the Taft boys, who invariably got the task of being rebels.

  Sleeping poorly, Mary almost never rose in time to encounter Lincoln at his spare breakfast. Lizzie would usually eat with her, when she came down mid-morning, but by that time the boys would be at their lessons and Lincoln would be in his office—with a long line of men stretching down the office stairway, across the vestibule, and out the front White House doors. Or he would be out with Seward, visiting the Army camps, shaking hands sometimes with every member of a newly come regiment and returning in the afternoon with fingers so tired and swollen that he could not hold a pen. When she did see him she could see that he was exhausted, distant, and preoccupied.

  She didn't feel able to tell him how badly she needed him, but she did need him: for comfort at Douglas's death, for reassurance against her terror that Robert would steal away and enlist and be killed in another foray. When he went out for long walks through the streets of Washington alone, late at night or early in the morning, her temper would snap, for she knew the city was Southern in sympathy and even its Unionist citizens resented the government that had brought soldiers in to make the streets unsafe and raise the prices of everything.

  Then there would be a scene, and Mary would retreat, weeping, to her room, and to Lizzie's comfort. By the time Mary had calmed down again and would have gone to him as she had in Springfield, he had returned to his office, where he would sit writing until late in the night. She would promise herself that she would keep her temper better, as she had promised herself—and him—a thousand times before.