Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (10 page)

The commander must have chosen one or the other rather than fight; surely Elizabeth would have heard some distant sounds of battle in Washington if the rebels had resisted. “Which did they choose?”

“They chose to retreat. The lieutenant reported to Colonel Ellsworth that the rebels said they would not resist because the town was full of women and children. Most of the rebel troops boarded a train and left Alexandria well before the deadline, but a few stayed behind. I don’t know why. They were captured and imprisoned in a slaver’s pen.” Mrs. Lincoln sighed as Elizabeth helped her out of her day dress. “I should tell you, Elizabeth, this is only what I’ve gathered here and there, not an official report of any kind.” A trace of anger made her voice tremble. “My husband confides in me less and less.”

“Tell me anyway,” Elizabeth prompted gently as she straightened Mrs. Lincoln’s chemise. She wanted to know what had become of the young officer, and the effort of telling the story seemed to keep Mrs. Lincoln calm.

“Well, from what I’ve heard, Colonel Ellsworth set off with some of his men to capture the telegraph office, but then he happened to pass the hotel where that flag was flying as bold as brass. He knew how it vexed my husband, what an eyesore it had become.”

“For everyone in Washington,” Elizabeth agreed, assisting Mrs. Lincoln into the black silk dress. Mrs. Lincoln moved as Elizabeth willed, as compliant as a doll.

“Perhaps he thought the president was watching the hotel that very moment, and perhaps he wanted to signal that the town had been captured. We’ll never know. But in any case, Colonel Ellsworth marched into the hotel and up to the roof, and he took hold of that flag and tore it down. He returned downstairs to his men—” Mrs. Lincoln pressed her handkerchief to her lips, steeled herself, and continued. “As he carried the captured banner downstairs, the owner of the hotel stepped out of nowhere and shot him in the chest, from just a few feet away.”

Elizabeth’s hands froze in the midst of buttoning Mrs. Lincoln’s bodice. “Lord have mercy.”

“One of Colonel Ellsworth’s soldiers promptly avenged him—he killed the man with a musket round to the head.” Mrs. Lincoln looked over her shoulder at Elizabeth, her expression full of pain. “But he was too late, you know. Too late to save him.”

Elizabeth pressed her lips together, shaking her head. “I am truly very sorry, Mrs. Lincoln. I know you and the president were very fond of him.”

“We were indeed.” Mrs. Lincoln fell silent as Elizabeth finished dressing her. “I believe he was like another son to Mr. Lincoln. And to both of us, he was a bit of home, do you understand? With all the promise of youth, all the vigor and courage—” A sharp intake of breath. “I shall have to write to his mother. Mr. Lincoln will, of course, but I should too. Although I can’t imagine what I will say.” Her voice broke, and she sank back down into her chair.

“Mrs. Lincoln,” said Elizabeth steadily, “is there anything I can do for you, anything at all, for you or for Mr. Lincoln?”

“You’ve done what I needed most, Elizabeth, as you always do.” Mrs. Lincoln offered her a sad, tight smile. “Sometimes I don’t know how I’d endure living in this—” She waved a hand as if to indicate all of Washington City. “Well. You know how it is, and how I rely upon you.”

A small glow of pride warmed Elizabeth’s heart. She did indeed know. “It is my great pleasure, Mrs. Lincoln.”

A few days later, when Mrs. Lincoln next summoned her to the White House, Elizabeth learned that thousands of mourners had come to pay their respects to the young colonel as he lay in state in the East Room. Among them was Robert Lincoln, who had traveled all the way from Harvard to mourn and to comfort his parents. They seemed shaken, not only by their personal loss, but also by the sense that this early, violent, and sudden death heralded the sacrifice of many young, valiant men who would perish in the months ahead.

Afterward, the flag that Colonel Ellsworth had given his life for was presented to the First Lady. Mrs. Lincoln was honored and deeply moved, and kept it always.

The death of this soldier she had barely known made Elizabeth ever more fearful for the one she loved most of all.

George wrote often, at least twice a week, entertaining her with tales of camp life and his humorous early mishaps as a novice soldier. Elizabeth had seen enough of soldiering in Washington to realize that he gave her only the most optimistic, uncomplaining version of his new life, and that it was certainly more difficult than he let on. As far as he could tell, he was the only man of color in the regiment, which was comprised nearly entirely of German immigrants, with some Irish and native-born Americans mixed among them. “I am whiter than most of my comrades,” he said in an early letter, “so you need not worry that I will be found out.” Many civilian Missourians disliked the Germans, but George admired their industry and stoicism, and he shared their abolitionist views.

The slave state of Missouri was a curious case, having voted in March to remain in the Union but not to supply men or weapons to either side. That decision had not prevented Unionists and secessionists alike from forming militia units on their own and jostling for control over the various federal armories located throughout the state. Within weeks of
George’s enlistment, the First Missouri under the command of Captain Nathaniel Lyon marched on Camp Jackson, where secessionist Missouri Volunteer Militia troops were holding captured Union heavy artillery and munitions, which had been given to them by the Confederates so they could attack the St. Louis Arsenal. Nearly seven hundred militiamen were forced to surrender, but when they refused to take an oath of allegiance to the United States, Captain Lyon decided to arrest them and march them through the streets of St. Louis to the arsenal, where he intended to parole the humiliated men and order them to disperse.

George’s account of how Captain Lyon’s plans went terribly wrong, though rendered in a son’s carefully selective prose, reminded Elizabeth alarmingly of the altercation in Baltimore. As the First Missouri marched the captured secessionists through the city, indignant residents shouted insults and hurled rocks and paving stones upon the soldiers. “The refrain ‘Damn the Dutch!’ was shouted at our German comrades so often and with such anger that I thought, at last there is someone hated more than the Negro,” George wrote. Next, some accounts claimed, a drunken civilian stumbled into the path of the marching troops, fired a pistol at them, and fatally wounded a captain in the Third Missouri. The soldiers responded by opening fire, first above the heads of the civilians and then into the crowd. Twenty-eight people were killed, including women and children, and some fifty more were injured. Several days of rioting broke out, during which anti-German hatred ran rampant throughout St. Louis, civilians shot at soldiers from the windows of their businesses and homes, and troops once again fired upon crowds in the streets. Although George described the events lightly, with a young man’s bravado, Elizabeth could tell he was shaken.

In the middle of June, George told her in a later letter, the First Missouri and other federal regiments marched on Jefferson City to find that the secessionist governor had abandoned the state capital. The Union forces easily captured the city and pursued the governor and his Missouri State Guard to the town of Boonville, about fifty miles to the northwest. “It was a minor skirmish, short and sweet,” George wrote,
“but we whipped the State Guard, drove the secesh away, and secured the Missouri River Valley for the Union. Not a bad day’s work if I do say so myself.”

They were encamped at the time he wrote his letter, and he did not know when they would march again or to where. He urged her not to worry, and asked her to pray for him, and promised he would write again soon. “I am ever mindful of my special obligation,” he wrote in closing. “Nothing I suffer on the battlefield is of any consequence if it brings freedom to all our race. I only wish my friends from college would be allowed to take up arms as I have done. Sometimes when I hear my comrades talk about the cowardice and inferiority of the Negro I am tempted to do more than speak up in ‘their’ defense. I want to leap to my feet and shout, ‘Haven’t I fought as bravely as you? Haven’t I marched as far and endured as much? If my blood is shed, will it not be as red as yours? Well, I too am a Negro, and I defy you to explain how I am not as good a soldier as you!’ But of course I cannot say it—not yet. When the war is over the truth will be known, and then let no man call me his inferior.”

Elizabeth was too proud of him to burden him with her worries and misgivings. George had enlisted to prove himself, to preserve the Union, to deliver others of their race from bondage. She, who had lived nearly forty years a slave, knew all too well that his purpose was noble and necessary.

To think that when she first discovered she was carrying him, more than twenty-four years ago, she had been despondent. She had not wanted to have relations with Alexander Kirkland, and she had dreaded bearing a child into slavery. But after George was born, her greatest fear had been that he would be taken away from her.

By midsummer, the newspapers were filled with stories of battles here, skirmishes there, advances and retreats upon towns Elizabeth had never heard of. Prisoners were taken on both sides, but Mr. Lincoln and his advisers did not know what to do with the men in their custody. As rebels, they
had committed treason and should by law have been hanged, but that would be abhorrent on such a large scale—and would almost certainly result in retaliation against captured Union soldiers. An exchange of prisoners, a well-established practice between nations at war, would be construed as recognizing the Confederacy as a legitimate, sovereign government, which the president was disinclined to do. So captured rebels were held indefinitely, sometimes moved from slave pens to navy brigs to civilian Washington prisons, while Mr. Lincoln and his advisers debated what to do with them—and with rebel property the Union Army had seized on the other side of the Potomac. Robert E. Lee’s captured Arlington plantation was perhaps the most valuable estate in Virginia, and some of Mr. Lincoln’s advisers urged him to sell it to help fund the war and to act as a warning to other planters. Elizabeth understood that the gentleman who had once smiled at her as he pressed one hundred dollars into her hand and told her to spare no expense on his wife’s gown was now a rebel, not only a rebel but their general, but she could not help feeling sorry for his wife, her former patron. The plantation had come to the Lees from her side of the family, descendants of Martha Washington. It pained Elizabeth to think that Mrs. Lee might never see her ancestral home again.

Elizabeth had not forgotten other former patrons who had fled Washington for their seceded states. In June she completed the fine needlework Varina Davis had left in her care, but she was confounded by the puzzle of how to get it to her. The postal service had stopped delivery to the Confederacy on the first of June, and although Elizabeth heard tales of smugglers who carried goods freely between North and South, she had no idea how to make such arrangements nor would she feel comfortable trusting anyone who engaged in the practice. In the end she entrusted the embroidery to Mrs. Davis’s friend Matilda Emory, the wife of Major William Emory. A Marylander serving alternately in Indian Territory and the capital, he had quit the Union Army in May against his wife’s wishes. Not content merely to protest, Mrs. Emory had had her husband reinstated by retrieving his letter of resignation herself. Despite Mrs. Emory’s strong Union sentiments, she had
remained close to Mrs. Davis, and, without explaining how she would accomplish the task, she assured Elizabeth that she would get the embroidery safely to her friend.

Since leaving Washington City barely six months before, Mr. Davis had been elected president of the Confederacy and Mrs. Davis had become their First Lady. Sometimes Elizabeth thought back to her months working in the Davis household and marveled at the changes time had wrought. Mrs. Davis and her husband had moved from Alabama to Virginia, or so the papers claimed, and they now resided in another White House in Richmond, the new Confederate capital. Elizabeth wondered if her former patron still entertained hopes that the Confederates would capture Washington City and that she would take her place in the first grand residence to bear that title. Observing the new Union defenses all around the district, Elizabeth suspected that conquering the city would not be as easy as Mrs. Davis had once believed.