The Emancipator's Wife

by Barbara Hambly

  At the news that a rebel army had invaded the state, the city of Philadelphia went into a panic. Lincoln telegraphed Mary, “I do not think the raid into Pennsylvania amounts to anything at all,” but she returned to Washington anyway, to the cooler precincts of the Soldiers' Home. There Tad could ride, accompanied by William Crook, a soldier specially appointed to guard him. Washington was still alive with rumor about plots to kill Lincoln, or to kidnap him, to ransom in exchange for the thousands of Confederate warriors languishing in prison camps. Mary was obsessed by the fear that some rebel sympathizer might take it into his head to kidnap Tad instead.

  She saw as little of Lincoln as ever. He would leave before dawn, riding horseback with Nicolay and Hay to the White House through the cool twilight. Some nights he didn't return at all. He'd send messengers—and occasionally flowers from the White House gardens—but Mary guessed he was sleeping on the sofa in the telegraph office, Jip at his feet.

  “God knows what Hooker's intelligence is up to,” reported Charles Sumner, who called with flowers—Mary suspected it was Sumner who reminded Lincoln to send the bouquets she received. “Nobody seems to know whether Lee's still in Pennsylvania or not, or what he's doing there.”

  Days later word came that the enemy was only a few miles from Harrisburg, where the railroad ran down to Washington.

  Lincoln dismissed Hooker, and put a man named Meade in command.

  On the last day of June word came that Meade had met Lee's army, near the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg.

  For two days Mary saw nothing of her husband. Sumner and Ginny Fox came to the Soldiers' Home with snippets of news. “Your husband has barely stirred from the telegraph office,” said the Massachusetts Senator, taking the plate of gingerbread that Mary handed him. “The clerks get him sandwiches, but I don't think he eats them, which is probably just as well, considering where the food has come from. He goes back and forth to his office, and that mob of imbecelic petitioners and office-seekers there makes me want to go up and down the hall with a whip, like Jesus in the Temple, and drive them out so the poor man can get some sleep. You know if Lee wins, it will mean we'll have to sue for peace.”

  Mary said, “I know.” Sumner too looked haggard—it had taken him two years to convalesce from his caning by a Southern Senator and in some ways he'd never completely recovered. She guessed that he could see as well as anyone else, what would become of Emancipation, if the North could not put down the rebellion in the South.

  All those young men dead, at Antietam, at Chancellorsville, at Shiloh. Ellsworth and Alec and Ed Baker. The Republican Party, fissured already among moderates and bloody-shirt radicals, would turn on Lincoln like wolves, to save their own votes in the North.

  “Is he all right?” she asked after a time. “Mr. Lincoln? Would it help him if I at least visited and got him to eat?”

  “I think that's a splendid idea, Mrs. Lincoln.” Sumner smiled his beautiful smile. “At least they'd have to let him alone for an hour for that.”

  Mary returned it with a little sideways twist of her lips. “I think you underestimate the forbearance of the average office-seeker, sir. They would not let him alone if he was dying. We can but try. If nothing else,” she added, “I can hear for myself what's going on, rather than get everything second-hand.”

  Not, she reflected, that she actually would. Lincoln seldom spoke to her of matters either political or military these days.

  Nevertheless she sent the cook over to the White House the following morning to make a light lunch, and a little before noon had the carriage brought around, and drove down Pennsylvania Avenue through grilling heat and a choking fog of dust. Though opening the windows of the family dining-room let in the stinks of the camps, the river, and the stables, it was better than suffocating. She even visited the greenhouse for a small cluster of roses to put on the table.

  Lincoln looked like ten miles of bad road, but smiled when he came into the dining-room—half an hour late—and saw lunch ready. “What's the news?” she asked him, and he shook his head.

  “Nothing good. It can't go on much longer, they've been at it since Sunday....” He passed a hand wearily over his face, as if trying to clear from his mind the darkness of the future. “We can only hope, and pray.”

  He spoke no more of the battle, but she knew he was thinking of it; he was preoccupied and silent, and excused himself early. “I must go,” he said. “Word usually comes in about this time.”

  “Of course.” She told herself that if she'd given him a glass of water when he was thirsty, he was no less grateful even though too tired to say, Thank you.

  He walked her to the door, and handed her into the carriage. The dust, and the supply wagons and artillery moving through the streets, kept the carriage to a walk along Pennsylvania Avenue, but once they reached the road along the Rock Creek bluffs, Mr. Burke whipped up the horses.

  The team sprang forward into a trot....

  Mary heard Burke yell in shock and surprise at the same instant that she saw the high driver's seat of the barouche jerk, sway, and drop at one end. Burke snatched at the railing for balance and Mary screamed, and at the same instant the horses, panicked at the unfamiliar noises, the jerk on the reins, leaped and bolted. The carriage-wheels jarred on the roadside. She thought, The creek-bottom . . . as the carriage reeled and teetered....

  Almost without thinking she caught up her skirts and flung herself over the door and out....

  SHE CAME TO IN THE DARK, THINKING, CHOLERA. THERE'S CHOLERA IN the town and we'll all die.

  Her father and Nelson were getting down trunks from the attic, to give to old Solly to bury the dead.

  Pain went through her skull like white-hot daggers, her whole body hurt as if she'd been wracked by the Inquisition. I must have caught the cholera after all. . . . She listened for baby David crying, but heard nothing.

  David must have died. . . .

  No. It's Willie who died.

  Someone came over to her, when she started crying. “Mrs. Lincoln?”

  Ruth Pomeroy, who had been Willie's nurse. Mary had the confused impression that there had been something else after Willie's death . . . a trip to New York? A battle? Why did the image come to mind of Lincoln sitting on a piano in a darkened room, with his long legs dangling over the edge?

  Or had she only dreamed it?

  “Mrs. Lincoln, how do you feel?”

  She managed to whimper, “Hurts,” and Mrs. Pomeroy gave her a glass of something that had the swoony bitterness of laudanum. She drank it gratefully, hoping it would forestall the preliminary lightning-flashes she could already see in the corners of her vision. Sometime later she heard Sumner's voice, muffled and distant, as if in the hallway.

  “What happened?”

  Through her shut eyelids, she saw them clearly, the tall Senator and the homey Quaker woman framed in the dim glow of the single oil-lamp in the hall.

  “The carriage-seat came off,” said Mrs. Pomeroy's voice. “They took her first to the military hospital nearby, and sent for Mr. Lincoln....”

  She tried to recall Lincoln being with her, and failed.

  “An accident?” asked Sumner—in her dreamlike vision she saw Mrs. Pomeroy shake her head.

  “The bolts that fastened the driver's seat were removed, and the seat fixed up with glue, that would hold just until the carriage picked up speed. The carriage was in the stable. According to Governor Seward, nearly anyone could have got at it. They must have thought Mr. Lincoln would be returning with her. She's lucky to be alive.”

  SHE FELT WELL ENOUGH THE FOLLOWING DAY TO CONFER WITH YOUNG Mr. Stoddard about the details of the White House Fourth of July reception, but remained in bed. The migraine retreated, but for months afterward she had the feeling that those burning jagged lines, those rains of fire wavering in her vision, were never far away, lurking behind the curves of her skull-bones. On the night of the Fourth she heard the fireworks at the White House, far off toward the center of the town. When s
he drifted off into half-sleep she would jerk awake, thinking they were gunfire and wondering if Lee had marched south from Gettysburg, to seize the capital. Would they fortify the Treasury Building again, were soldiers camping in the East Room on her new sea-green-and-rose carpet? In dreams she saw Lincoln lying dead on the White House steps in a pool of blood.

  She woke to the sound of Lincoln's footsteps, and Tad's shrill cries of welcome.

  The door of her room flew open, Lincoln's face radiant in the light of the branch of candles he held.

  “Lee's retreated!” His voice shook with relief. “He's on the run. Meade should have him surrounded by the end of the week. Dear God, and then it will be over.”

  AT THE SAME TIME THAT NEWS REACHED MARY THAT HER FRIEND General Dan Sickles had been severely wounded in the battle, a telegram came to Lincoln from General Meade: We will drive the enemy from our soil.

  “We don't want to drive the enemy from our soil!” fumed Lincoln, when he came to visit her at the Soldiers' Home. “We want to capture the enemy and his whole army and then the war will be over. I've got a good mind to go up there and take over command of the Army myself.”

  “Ca' I gum?” asked Tad promptly, enthralled at the prospect.

  Lincoln sighed, and shook his head, and laid a reassuring hand on Mary's wrist, for she had started up with panic in her eyes. “The office-seekers wouldn't let me get ten feet outside the city limits,” he said regretfully. “Plus, if I led the Army, sure as check we'd come to a gate someplace and I still can't remember the order to file 'em through it.”

  Mary laughed shakily, and settled back among the pillows. Though at first she had thought she'd taken no more hurt from the carriage accident than sprains and bruises, the cut on her head had become infected, leading to great pain and fever. For days she lay tossing—and weeping with pain at every movement—in the grilling summer heat, between fever and laudanum only vaguely aware of where she was. Mrs. Pomeroy was kind and gentle, but in her fever Mary hated the sight of her, for it brought back to her the recollection of Willie's death.

  When she came out of her delirium, it was to the news that General Sickles would recover, though he had lost a leg—

  —and that the city of Vicksburg, that controlled the Mississippi River and with it the whole center of the Confederacy, had been taken, by a Western General named Ulysses S. Grant.

  Lincoln's face fairly glowed in the light of the bedside lamp as he gave Mary this news. The stream of food supplies from Texas—and of European arms, textiles, ammunition, and machinery coming to the Confederacy through Mexico—was now cut. Grant was on his way to assume command over the Union forces fighting for Chattanooga, the major junction of the South's network of railroads whose heart lay in Atlanta.

  “We got a wedge in the log,” he told her. “We have the chance, now, to split 'em wide open.

  “A delegation of Gospel ministers came callin' on me in my office today,” he went on. “They said, ‘You can't appoint General Grant to command at Chattanooga—he drinks.' I asked if they knew what his brand is—I wanted to buy a barrel apiece for my other Generals.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  AS SOON AS SHE WAS WELL ENOUGH TO TRAVEL, MARY LEFT FOR NEW York with Tad and Mrs. Pomeroy. She tried not to complain to Lincoln, for she knew he had troubles enough for any man, but she felt that the carriage accident had injured her far more severely than the doctors knew. Her headaches had redoubled, not only in ferocity but in frequency. The fear of the pain prompted the habit of taking a few precautionary spoonfuls of Female Elixir to stave them off before they began.

  She suffered, too, from agonies in her shoulder and back, so that on some days she felt unable to get out of bed at all without the assistance of a good deal of medicine. She disliked it—it made her sleepy sometimes, and at other times she heard herself saying things that she knew she shouldn't, but anything was better than the pain.

  Her nightmares worsened, nightmares in which Robert ran away and enlisted, nightmares in which Mary walked down endless lines of cots, crying his name. Sometimes she found him on a bloodstained plank at the Navy Yard, where Ellsworth had lain, his face wax-yellow in death and flecked with blood. Sometimes she saw him sitting up, alive, in a chair, like General Sickles, but instead of having a single leg as a bandaged stump, it was both legs and both arms, and his blinded eyes wrapped with a bandage beneath which blood flowed down like tears.

  From this she would waken screaming, and fumble for the bottle on her nightstand, to drown the image from her mind.

  It was after such a nightmare—such a remedy—when she sank back dazed onto her pillows, that she first saw Willie step through the wall. Later she wondered if it were a dream, for she felt very strange and detached from herself. She didn't think so. Wondering, trembling with joy, she saw her son come through the wall, not only Willie but little Eddie, shining faintly blue in the darkness. Both boys smiled joyfully and reached out to her. She woke weeping, though with joy or sorrow she didn't know.

  ROBERT JOINED THE LITTLE PARTY IN NEW YORK, AND ESCORTED them to Mount Washington, one of the dozen quiet summer resorts in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was a relief to have Robert with her, for she knew Tad would be well looked after by his brother. For all his tendency to nag, Robert cared deeply for his brothers, and in his gentleness with Tad, she saw the memory of his own loss of Eddie. With this worry lifted from her, she was free to meet other women who sought, in the White Mountains, to escape the pressure and heat of the cities. Wealthy women, most of them. And many of them women who, like herself, had suffered crushing losses.

  When her headaches, and the pains in her back, permitted, she took refuge in the comfort of séances with a medium who lived in Mount Washington, a hollow-eyed woman named Mrs. Guinan, whose controlling spirit could raise and lower the table in the center of her parlor while the music of harps and tambourines drifted bodiless through the dark.

  “Poppycock,” said Robert irritably. But it was Robert's disbelief, and not Mary's faith, she thought—and said—that was poppycock. Robert spoke to her again about enlisting: “The Army is desperate for men,” he said, which was true. There had been riots in New York against the draft, a week before Mary's arrival there. “And I look about me at the men who are left at Harvard, and I'm ashamed.”

  But the thought of losing him threw Mary into hysterics: “If anything were to happen to you I should die!” she sobbed. Tad, frightened, began to hiccough and cry, and Robert took him away for a walk in the woods while Mary retreated to bed with a few spoonfuls of Indian Bitters.

  The subject was not spoken of again.

  She lingered in New Hampshire for almost two months, where the air was pure and the war far away. Only when the leaves turned red and gold, and Robert had to go back to Harvard, did she return to New York, terrified to the last that Robert would steal away secretly and enlist. Even in her days of pain, or of dreamy lassitude when she would not stir from the sofa, Mary had followed the progress of the war through newspapers. There had been horrific fighting all around Chattanooga in Tennessee, with tens of thousands wounded and dead. But she was in New York when Lincoln's letter reached her, two days before her return to Washington, that her sister Emilie's husband, Ben, had received a mortal wound, fighting against Grant's men on the banks of Chickamauga Creek.

  EMILIE WAS PASSED THROUGH THE UNION LINES AT FORT MONROE, Virginia, early in December, with her two children. Betsey, thin and weary in home-dyed mourning, her fair hair nearly white, escorted her. All her sons by Robert Todd were dead by Yankee bullets. With the blue-coated soldiers standing around the freezing-cold depot in Fort Monroe, Mary held her frail stepmother in her arms and wept.

  Betsey took Emilie's younger girl on to Lexington, which had been captured twice in rebel raids but was now back in Federal hands. Emilie and her dark-haired little daughter Katherine boarded the military train for Washington with Mary, and moved into the big bedroom at the northwest corner of the White House's seco
nd floor. At twenty-six, Emilie seemed like a shadow of the gay girl with the red-gold hair who'd sat beside Mary in the gallery of the Springfield State House, upon whom Robert had developed his first eleven-year-old case of calf-love. She was almost literally a shadow: food was no easy thing to come by, in a countryside ravaged by war. Though Mary was sick with grief at Ben's death and Emilie's sorrow—Emilie was with child, too, from Ben's last furlough—it was good beyond words to have her little sister there. Good to have someone to talk to who knew Lexington, who had visited Springfield.

  If Mary could not return to those peaceful places, those joyful times, the next best thing was to know that Emilie remembered them, too. In a way, her memory made them that much more real.

  Emilie refused, however, to swear allegiance of any kind to the Union—Tad and Katherine came close to blows one evening in the library, over who was the real President. And Emilie refused, with a stubbornness that irritated Mary in spite of her love for the girl, to come with her to the Circles at the Laurie house: “Ben will be able to speak to you, I know he will!” Mary cried, but Emilie only burst into tears and shook her head.

  When Mary told her about the visits she received—almost nightly, some weeks—from Willie and Eddie, and sometimes her brother Alec, Emilie stared at her as if she heard the ravings of a madwoman.

  Emilie remained at the White House for over a month. She received no visitors and refused to join in the rare family excursions to various Washington theaters. On the day of Kate Chase's wedding—to a wealthy Rhode Island Senator and political General who promised to be of maximum assistance to her father's upcoming Presidential campaign—Mary and Emilie remained ensconced in the oval parlor, drinking tea and indulging themselves in recreational slander.

  But word got out. The newspapers published that one of Mrs. Lincoln's Confederate relatives had been foisted onto honest Father Abraham at the White House—that there was a spy in place in the government's heart. In November, shortly after Lincoln's return from the dedication of a new cemetery on the Gettysburg battlefield, General Sickles arrived at the White House to visit while Mary and Emilie were having tea in the Blue Parlor with Cousin John Stuart, who was in Washington on business.