The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  Mary remembered her, a schoolteacher, she'd thought, and probably a proponent of women's rights. But the black of her clothing touched Mary's heart and she said, “Bless you for what you're doing—especially in the face of your own loss.”

  The look of briskness—of running her life and everyone else's with maximum efficiency—faltered for a moment in the taller woman's eyes. “Thank you,” said Myra softly. “I was so sorry to read about your son. Your brother, too, wasn't it?” And Mary nodded, surprised that the woman would have read newspapers so closely to have picked up that small an item.

  “Sam was my half-brother,” she said. “We weren't close....” Her throat closed hard, thinking about the fair-haired child at the breakfast-table in Kentucky, all those years ago. Thinking about the other brothers who were close—Alec and David, and Emilie's husband Ben, all of them somewhere being shot at by these broken and bloodstained soldiers in blue. Angrily, she added, “I suppose that was one of those articles that said I was sending him—or one of my other brothers—secret papers that I'm stealing out of my husband's desk?”

  “Considering the number of people in Washington who are sending information across the river to the Confederates,” remarked Myra, “I can only wonder that they'd think you were sending anything General Lee didn't already know about. But from the time of Jezebel on, men will point fingers at a foreign woman married to their chief. It's a good way of proving how patriotic and vigilant you are without actually putting yourself in danger.”

  Mary laughed, surprised at the sound of her own laughter, and instantly guilty. She thought, Willie . . . she had not, she thought, laughed since he'd fallen ill.

  She gave Myra Bradwell a card, and invited her to call. The Blue Room salons were less glamorous without the presence of the Chevalier, and Mary still felt humiliated over the way Lincoln had ejected him, without so much as an inquiry, and in the presence of all of her friends. Sometimes Watt—whom Mary had talked her fellow-Spiritualist Jesse Newton into giving a job as special agent in the Department of the Interior—would send her up a message that Wikoff wanted to meet her, and would let the Chevalier into the conservatory, to which he still kept a copy of the key. Both Wikoff and Watt lent Mary money, not once but several times, never asking a thing in return.

  Wikoff may have been a bit of a rogue, thought Mary resentfully, but at least he treated her like a beautiful woman. At least he talked to her, instead of retreating into her husband's guarded silences. At least he asked her opinions, instead of—silently but firmly—relegating her to receptions, to ordering books for the White House library, to bearing gifts of flowers and fruit to the hospitals which they both visited.

  It's because my health isn't good, Mary told herself, when he'd gently change the subject away from war plans or politics, when he'd put off her questions with a story that made her laugh. He keeps me out of important decisions because I so often don't feel well.

  But in her heart, she suspected that this was not true, and the suspicion was like powdered glass in her clothing, inflaming her at every move.

  All those things were her daylight life. Mostly, she lived for the darkness of Cranston Laurie's parlor, and the soft voices singing hymns in the candlelit gloom.

  There was a medium named Colchester, the illegitimate son of an English Duke, through whom Willie spoke to her as well. Colchester's séances had a stronger emotional charge than Nettie Colburn's, for under his mental summons the dead would actually take ectoplasmic form. Often, in the darkness, she heard voices murmuring behind her and in the corners of the room, and felt the brush of unseen hands on her shoulders, hair, and face. When the blurred shapes of drifting light formed up in the darkness, Colchester described their faces and clothing. On several occasions the glowing shapes walked around the table, while the distant music of horns and tambourines breathed in the shadows.

  It was at one of Colchester's séances that Mary, a little to her surprise, encountered Myra Bradwell. “I only want to know that my girl is happy,” whispered Myra, startlingly different from the bustling woman she had encountered at the hospital camp. “She was only seven when she was taken away last year. It's cold comfort, being told by some minister that it's the Will of God. And why should we not speak to them, if God allows it?”

  Mary couldn't speak, but hugged Myra like a sister, and in her dreams now she sometimes saw Willie and little Myra playing together in the Summer Land.

  Predictably, Nicolay had nothing good to say about either Nettie Colburn or Lord Colchester. “The man's a fraud and a fake,” the secretary stated, on one of those rare occasions on which he came to the Lincoln parlor—in general, these days she and Nicolay kept as far apart as possible. “He's certainly not the son of an English Duke, though he may be illegitimate for all I know....”

  “Oh, Heaven forfend that a man not of legal birth be able to speak to those on the Other Side,” snapped Mary, throwing up her hands in mock dismay.

  “Heaven forfend,” countered Nicolay grimly, “that every Spiritualist and medium in the country take it upon themselves to advise the President on how he should conduct the War. Or ask him for government posts for their relatives and friends.”

  Mary colored hotly, because, in fact, both Nettie and Lord Colchester had at times received information from the spirit world about rebel troop movements and intentions, which she had naturally relayed at once to Lincoln. And of course, her gratitude for contact with Willie again was such that she couldn't let their friends and family go away empty-handed, when they needed jobs and money so much.

  “Now, the spirits have as much right to tell me what to do as anyone else does,” put in Lincoln mildly, looking up from the papers Nicolay had brought him. “May be God's way of tellin' me that even killin' some of those office-seekers won't get 'em off my back.”

  But a few weeks later, when Mary had invited Mrs. Laurie, her daughter Belle, and Nettie Colburn to a small “circle” in the Red Parlor, hardly had Belle gone under the influence of her control and begun to play the piano when the door opened quietly and Lincoln stood framed in the darkness of the hall.

  The music faltered and stopped. The gaslights had been turned off—spirits having a far more difficult time materializing in the harsher blue emanations of such illumination—and only three candles cast their glow across the dark-crimson wallpaper. “So this is our little Nettie, is it?” Lincoln asked, looking down at the thin young lady in her schoolgirlish white dress. Nettie nodded.

  “Do you mind if I join you? Mother?” He looked across at Mary. Beside her, General Sickles and Mr. Newton of the Department of the Interior had the air of schoolboys caught out in mischief.

  Hesitantly, Belle Miller said, “You know the spirits don't often materialize in the presence of a skeptic,” and glanced across at Mrs. Laurie, but Nettie Colburn said firmly, “No, that's quite all right, Mr. President.”

  They didn't make a circle that night: Lincoln sat silently on the sofa beside Mary, watching and listening as Nettie went under the influence of the spirit Pinkie. Willie did not materialize, though he was there, Nettie told them, and was happy to see his papa. Turning to Lincoln with her blank, enchanted eyes, she said, “The spirits call to you, beg you, to go through with what you are considering, about freeing all the slaves. God and the angels will support you in this, you will be doing His work....”

  Mary glanced quickly sidelong at Lincoln's face. It was something she'd heard rumor of, but since the Wikoff affair he'd spoken to her so little of any plans or thoughts. His face was impassive, as it was in court, but he smiled a little.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  BY MAY THE HEAT WAS NEARLY INTOLERABLE, THE DUST CHOKING, and the stench of the camps a foul miasma that cloaked the city. Tad was ill again, which threw Mary into a panic of migraine and tears. In July she took him and went north, with Lizabet Keckley as a companion. Anything was better than staying on in a city rank with damp and sickness, and hideous with memories of her lost son.

 
New York, as always, cheered her, even in the agony of her grief. It was a real city, with bustle and activity, paved streets and beautiful stores, not like the provincial filth of Washington. Though there was no opera or theater at this time of year, merchants invited her to lovely parties and bowed to her when she came through the doors. She missed Lincoln desperately, but she felt on the whole less lonely than she did trapped in the dark parlor of the White House, knowing he was at the far end of the hall and she wouldn't see him until nearly eleven at night and maybe not then.

  She slept better when she was away from Washington, though she still woke in tears and there were many days on which she simply could not get out of bed. It was good only to be away from the constant disapproving presence of Nicolay and Hay, away from servants who pried and told tales. It was so comfortable to be able to take medicine when she needed it, instead of worrying about whether the two secretaries would somehow find how many bottles she had hidden away.

  Not that she needed medicine nearly as much, away from Washington. She had Lizabet to keep her company, the best of companions, and Tad, and Robert, who met them in New York. She even had John Watt, who had decided to try his luck outside of Washington—Mary had agreed to help him get settled in gratitude for his silence in the Wikoff affair. It was Watt who introduced her to Republican cronies of his, Simeon Draper—a real-estate developer—and Abram Wakeman, who promised “assistance” in paying some of her debts. “No, no, it's all for the good name of the President,” purred Draper. “We're all good Republicans here. But if you could put in a good word for me, when your husband is seeking a good man to become customs collector for the port of New York....”

  For a time she had Myra Bradwell, too, in New York raising money for the Sanitary Committee.

  Money was needed. After seven days of fighting around Richmond, General McClellan had limped back to Washington. Sixteen thousand of his men—almost a sixth of his force—were dead or lay wounded in the Washington hospitals. McClellan called for 100,000 more.

  Leaving Tad with Lizabet at the hotel, the two women attended the séances of Lord Colchester—in New York also—at a neat brownstone on Fifty-second Street near the river, where the spirits warned Mary to beware the lies of slanderers, who would cast stones in their ignorance at men of the spirit.

  “Meaning himself, I take it,” said Myra, as they climbed back into the carriage which Lord Colchester had himself sent to bring Mary that evening. “Covering his back in case of scandal. My husband's a judge,” she added, intercepting Mary's shocked, inquiring look. “I've studied a great deal of law in order to help him with his cases—when this War is over I'm thinking of seeing if I can pass the Bar. So I've learned to watch and listen, I think a lot more than some of these poor souls do, who come seeking anyone they think will help them with their grief. And Colchester doesn't ring true to me.”

  “You're not a feminist?” asked Mary, appalled at this revelation in her newfound friend. It was one thing for a woman to know about politics, and to utilize the power of patronage behind the scenes. Ladies did that, although of course no lady would ever let the gentlemen know. It was quite another to put on men's trousers and make men stay home and take care of the children, the way the newspapers said—not that it wouldn't have done Mr. Lincoln a great deal of good to know what Mary had to go through, in their early Springfield days.

  Myra shot her a slantways glance, then laid a reassuring hand on her wrist. “That's a word men like to throw at any woman who won't do what they expect her to. The same way they'll tar every medium with the brush that a few crooked ones have mucked up. But just because some men lie,” she added, “doesn't mean Truth doesn't exist.”

  Myra must have heard rumors—or been prescient herself—for shortly after that, before Mary returned to Washington in mid-July, a young California newspaper reporter named Noah Brooks attended one of Colchester's Washington séances under the guise of a seeker after truth, and seized one of the ghostly, glowing apparitions around the waist. The apparition was solid enough to struggle like a tiger and give Brooks a smart blow to the head, after which Colchester left the country rather precipitously.

  Brooks, to Mary's grateful surprise, didn't use the incident to attack her credulity, as most reporters would have, but merely had a good laugh about fraudulent mediums in general. His name began to appear regularly in Lincoln's letters to her, and she gathered that the good-natured young journalist and the President were becoming fast friends.

  When she returned to Washington, Congress had risen and the city was somnolent under a blanket of heat, filth, and dust. Elections were approaching, with men dying and money being spent on battles the Union did not win.

  A few days before her return Lincoln moved out to the stone cottage on the grounds of the Soldiers' Home again, and it was there that Tad and Mary joined him. She slept better there, and felt better: the water of Rock Creek tasted cleaner, for one thing, than the murky Potomac liquid that issued from the White House pipes. She and Lizabet could walk in the wooded grounds without feeling spied upon. Tad still cried at night, and on most nights insisted on sleeping with his father. Mary had hoped to cure him of this, but Lincoln only shook his head and said, “He doesn't take up much room, Mother.”

  On nights when Lincoln worked late at the White House, to which he rode horseback in the pre-dawn cool of every morning, Tad slept with Nanko and Nanny instead.

  The journey to New York had helped, and not being in the White House helped. But simply the return to Washington brought back recurrences of Mary's blinding grief. These would come on her suddenly, in debilitating waves, and there were days when it was as if Willie had died only the day before. Her grief lifted a little when she worked with Lizabet, at the hospitals or at the contraband camps that were springing up all around Washington, but her spells of grief were still so intense that Lincoln once took her to the window, and showed her the walls of the building where the mental cases were housed. “Try and control your grief,” he begged, “or it will drive you mad....”

  Often after that she was aware of him watching her with worried eyes.

  When the rumor circulated that Lincoln was going to proclaim an end to slavery—when the Northern Army refused to return Southern slaves who escaped across the frontier between the two enemy countries—runaways poured into Washington. They camped in sheds or under blankets, or simply beneath the stars. They surrounded every fort of the city's defensive line, clustered in trashy and disorderly zones around every military camp.

  Nearly all of them were field hands, untrained for any other kind of labor, illiterate due to the nearly universal application of Black Codes throughout the slave states, and unaccustomed, most of them, to fending for themselves in any fashion. The Freedmen's Relief Association did what it could, to find them food, blankets, places to live, jobs, but the absorption rate was painfully slow. The Irish teamsters who worked for the Army—and for the civilian merchants who were making fortunes off the concentration of soldiers—hated them. Mary's newfound young friend John Wilamet was far from the only one who was beaten and left in a ditch.

  “They understand what this war is about better than any of your husband's Generals, Madame,” commented Frederick Douglass, the acknowledged leader of the freedmen, as he walked with Mary and Lizabet through the messy snaggles of shelters that spread around Camp Barker. Douglass, whom Mary first met through the Freedmen's Relief Association, was a tall, harsh-faced somber man who had not been content with merely escaping to freedom himself, but who had worked, for the twenty-four years since his flight, to free the whole of his people. “They know it's about their freedom, whether your husband will admit it or not.”

  She looked around her at the camp, at the ragged men and women clustered around the rough marquee where Mrs. Durham—a green-grocer who doubled as a midwife and who had taken a dozen fugitives into her own small house—was dishing out what meager rations of corn and beans had been passed along to the Association by the Army. Compare
d to the wise Nelson, the starchily well-mannered Pendleton, and the competent Chaney and Jane, most of these contrabands seemed to Mary hopelessly primitive and ignorant.

  Yet Pendleton, Chaney, and Jane had all been sold, when her father had died, to pay his debts and satisfy those of her brothers who needed cash money quick. As had the tall man beside her, dressed in his immaculate dark suit and cravat. As had Lizabet, beautiful, understanding, strong Lizabet . . . Even young John, following behind them with another box of blankets, would have been sold before he was very much older, separated for all time from his mother and sisters.

  Quietly, Mary replied, “I tell him that. He says if he proclaimed the Negro free he'd lose three states and half his Army.”

  “For every fool Irishman who quits in disgust,” said Douglass, “there will be seven black men striding forward to fight for their brothers, their wives, their children whom they left behind in bondage. Would you not fight, John?” he asked, turning to the youth who'd become Mary's messenger in the camps.

  “To be free?” The youth looked up at the tall man with his large nearsighted eyes. The scar he'd taken on his forehead from a gang of teamsters on the day of his arrival was still a raw welt. “To know they couldn't come after me, couldn't take me back because there's no place to take me back to?” He grinned, a shy sweet flash of a smile quickly put away. “In a minute.”

  “Your husband is a lawyer.” Douglass looked down at Mary again. “He keeps his mouth shut, and waits. He's doing all he can to re-settle us elsewhere, to send us back to Africa or down to Central America—to offer money to the Southerners for our release. Anything to avoid unilateral abolition by proclamation. He can afford to do all that. He's white. White men have been arguing and bartering and delaying, trying not to offend other white men, for fourscore years and six, while the black man has waited in chains, and seen his children grow up and grow old in chains, and die. Tell him to put aside his fear. Tell him to take up the sword whose hilt God has been thrusting at his hands for all these months. He will not regret it.”