Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (26 page)

Mrs. Lincoln was determined to do all she could to help. In the cold, gray days of early January, she mustered up her will and resumed her Sunday receptions, taking care to invite anyone who would be well placed to support her husband. The first presidential levee of the year came on January 9, followed by the round of balls and dinners that ushered in the winter social season. Mrs. Lincoln accepted as many invitations as was proper, and entertained her own guests in fine style, and afterward wrote gracious letters and sent gifts of bouquets from the White House greenhouses to prominent figures in government and business.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that Mrs. Lincoln’s schemes would set her at odds with members of her husband’s cabinet, who had their own ideas for the president’s social calendar. The worst conflict, and the most upsetting for Mrs. Lincoln, was with John George Nicolay, the president’s personal secretary, who was charged with the responsibility of arranging state dinners. Single-minded in her resolve to do nothing to promote the ambitious Secretary Chase, Mrs. Lincoln told Mr. Nicolay not to invite him, his daughter, or his son-in-law to a cabinet dinner scheduled for the end of January. Mr. Nicolay balked and told the First Lady he could not possibly exclude one of the secretaries, not only because it went against custom, but also because it would make the president appear spiteful and overly wary of a potential rival. Mrs. Lincoln insisted, and Elizabeth had the dubious privilege of witnessing more than one argument between her and the adamant Mr. Nicolay,
who—never within the First Lady’s presence but often within earshot of the White House staff—began referring to Mrs. Lincoln as Her Satanic Majesty. When Mr. Lincoln became aware of the conflict, he put an abrupt end to it by ordering Mr. Nicolay to invite Mr. Chase and the Spragues, and by telling his wife to let the matter drop.

“You see how little power I have in this house of men,” Mrs. Lincoln lamented to Elizabeth, bitter and humiliated in defeat. “Everything I do is for the benefit of my husband, but if I am not overruled, I am ignored entirely.”

Elizabeth consoled her as best she could—although privately she thought Mrs. Lincoln had exercised poor judgment in attempting to exclude Mr. Chase and his family—but Mrs. Lincoln worried so much that she hardly slept for two days following the incident. To her credit, on the afternoon of the dinner, she sent Mr. Nicolay a contrite note of apology through the White House doorman. If Mr. Nicolay responded in kind, or at all, Mrs. Lincoln never mentioned it in Elizabeth’s presence.

As much as Mrs. Lincoln regretted the dispute with Mr. Nicolay, she remained as full of antipathy and mistrust for Mr. Chase as ever, and she urged her husband to investigate his loyalties. “If he thought he could make anything by it, he would betray you tomorrow,” she insisted. “I am not the only one who has warned you.”

That was true enough, for there were a great many witnesses to Mr. Chase’s political ambitions. For months he had been traveling throughout the North, making speeches and shoring up support, expressing his personal hopes that Mr. Lincoln would be reelected while coyly avoiding going on the record about his own potential candidacy. Mr. Chase was a particular favorite among the abolitionists and radical Republicans who believed that the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction that President Lincoln had issued the previous December was too mild and cautious.

Even to Elizabeth it was evident that Mr. Lincoln disapproved of Mr. Chase’s forays into campaigning, but it seemed that he merely observed the secretary’s activities with mild, watchful tolerance, waiting to see if
they would get out of hand. Mrs. Lincoln believed they already had. “Why do you not ask for his resignation?” she demanded in one especially heated moment. It upset her greatly that Mr. Chase showed her husband such disrespect, and she could not comprehend why Mr. Lincoln allowed a rival to remain in a lucrative, influential post where he acquired more power day by day.

“Fire him, and openly acknowledge that he is my opponent for the nomination?” replied Mr. Lincoln. “I am not ready to declare that I am so doubtful that I retain the confidence of the people.”

The heated subject came up again one day while Elizabeth was dressing the First Lady for a levee. “Even Dr. Henry believes that the secretary’s behavior has been so disgraceful that he ought to be dismissed from the cabinet,” the First Lady told her husband heatedly as Elizabeth tied her satin sash into an attractive bow. Dr. Anson Henry was a longtime family friend from Illinois and Mr. Lincoln’s trusted personal physician. “He himself discovered that Mr. Chase’s people have been spreading unkind rumors about me, so you can’t say I’m merely making that up.”

“I would never say that to you, Mother,” said Mr. Lincoln mildly.

“You might not say it to me, Father, but you might say it to others, and you might think it,” she retorted. “You must promise me to get rid of Secretary Chase once and for all.”

“I cannot and will not do that, Mother.”

None of her appeals would persuade him, so finally she threw her hands in the air in frustration and strode to the other side of the room, fuming. She yanked the chair back from the desk, sat down stiffly, and began scratching out a furious letter to someone—but with her in such a temper, Elizabeth dared not peek over her shoulder to see whom.

After a moment, the president sighed and settled down wearily in his easy chair. “Well, Madam Elizabeth,” he asked, his voice hoarse and tired, “will you brush my bristles down today?”

“Certainly, Mr. President.”

Taking up his comb and brush, Elizabeth dressed his hair, arranging it as neatly as she could. Mr. Lincoln sat in glum, brooding
silence while she worked, until suddenly his mouth curved in a faint smile and he said, “Madam Elizabeth, you have lived on a farm, have you not?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” she said. “When I was a child in Virginia.”

“Then you know what a chin-fly is.”

Elizabeth smiled. “Sadly, sir, I am acquainted with the pesky species.”

“When I was a boy, my brother and I were once plowing corn, I driving the horse and he holding the plow,” Mr. Lincoln reminisced. “The horse was lazy, but on one occasion, he rushed across the field so that I could scarcely keep pace with him running as fast as I could. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an enormous chin-fly fastened upon him, and so I swatted it off. My brother asked me why I did it. I told him I didn’t want the poor old horse bitten in that way. ‘But Abe,’ said my brother, ‘that’s all that made him go!’”

Elizabeth laughed.

“Now, Madam Elizabeth,” said Mr. Lincoln, more cheerful than she had yet seen him that day, “if Mr. Chase has a presidential chin-fly biting him, I’m not going to swat it off, just in case that is what makes the Department of the Treasury go.”

Elizabeth considered. “Sometimes a chin-fly can become such a nuisance that the horse flicks its tail and cranes its neck trying to bite it and is so busy trying to get at it that he forgets to plow.”

Mr. Lincoln frowned thoughtfully. “I suppose in that case, it would be right to swat that chin-fly without delay. The trick is knowing when the chin-fly goes from being a help to a hindrance.”

“It’s good that you know how to properly deal with chin-flies,” said Elizabeth pertly, and she was rewarded with the president’s laugh. On the other side of the room, Mrs. Lincoln gave a loud, drawn-out, exasperated sigh.

As the dreary, muddy winter dragged on, it began to appear that “presidential chin-flies” were not the only pests driving the Department of the Treasury. For months, Washington gossip hinted at irregularities in business and immorality among the Treasury staff. One outraged citizen wrote to President Lincoln accusing Secretary Chase of
speculation in stocks, gold, and cotton. Women employees were reportedly hired for their personal attractions rather than their skills, and several young ladies claimed that they were refused employment until they yielded to the passionate embraces of the superintendent of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. (When Elizabeth heard that particular rumor, she was greatly relieved that she had not been hired to work in the cutting room the year before.) More shocking yet, dozens of the department’s young, unmarried, female employees were said to be with child.

Alarmed, Mr. Chase brought in a detective from the War Department to investigate the allegations, and when the detective found outrage and scandal everywhere he looked, a special congressional committee began a formal inquiry. After hearing the testimony of a series of witnesses, including two young clerks who swore that they had been coerced into intimate encounters with their employer, the committee could not unanimously conclude whether the charges were true or false. The public preferred to believe the most scandalous, salacious version of events, and so even if the Department of the Treasury was not the “most extensive Whorehouse in the nation,” as one critic claimed, its reputation was tarnished—as was Mr. Chase’s, at a time he most wanted to appear to be a responsible, trustworthy leader.

A more cautious man might have reined in his presidential ambitions at that point, at least until someone else’s more shocking story distracted the public, but Mr. Chase did not—nor did his most ardent supporters wish him to. His friends in Congress organized a committee to promote his candidacy, and Mr. Chase encouraged his supporters even if he did not directly participate in their activities, which they sometimes undertook without his knowledge. In February, his campaign supporters drafted and circulated two documents: one that criticized President Lincoln’s first term in office without mentioning Mr. Chase, and another, which became known as “the Pomeroy Circular” after its author, Mr. Chase’s campaign chairman, Kansas senator Samuel C. Pomeroy. The Pomeroy Circular denounced President Lincoln and put forth Mr. Chase as “a statesman of rare ability and an administrator
of the highest order” who possessed “more of the qualities needed in a President, during the next four years, than are combined in any other available candidate.” It asserted that reelecting Mr. Lincoln would be next to impossible, and that to avoid the disaster of a Peace Democrat victory in November, all loyal Republicans had to rally to Mr. Chase to ensure that he won the nomination.

If Mr. Chase’s supporters had hoped to keep the widely distributed documents confidential, they were sadly disappointed. The Pomeroy Circular was leaked to the press and was soon reprinted in the
National Intelligencer
and other papers. Outraged Union loyalists who received copies of the memo by mail in envelopes marked with the congressional frank of Mr. Chase’s supporters forwarded their copies to Mr. Lincoln at the White House, often including personal notes expressing their disgust with Mr. Chase and their steadfast allegiance to the president.

Elizabeth heard whispers that the intrigue greatly embarrassed Mr. Chase, and she learned from snatches of conversation she had overheard in the Lincoln family sitting room that Mr. Chase had written to Mr. Lincoln disavowing any knowledge of the Pomeroy Circular until it was published in the press. She also knew that upon receiving Chase’s chagrined letter, the president had replied with a brief note acknowledging that he had received it and promising a longer reply when he had time to compose one. That longer letter went out almost a week later, Elizabeth believed, but what it said she did not know, and of course she was in no position to ask. Almost every secret she knew about the inner workings of the White House she had learned by accident, by happening to be present at moments when important words were spoken.

Whatever it was that Mr. Lincoln had written to Mr. Chase, the outcome of the embarrassing scandal was less than Mrs. Lincoln had hoped, for he remained secretary of the treasury. “I don’t know how my husband can bear being in the same room with such a traitor,” Mrs. Lincoln muttered irritably to Elizabeth one day at the end of February when she realized he wasn’t going anywhere. Nevertheless, Mr. Chase appeared greatly subdued, and on March 5, he publicly announced that
he was not a candidate for the Republican nomination. “I suppose that’s something,” said Mrs. Lincoln, remarkably more cheerful.

The incident had inspired Mr. Lincoln’s staunchest supporters to rally around him and go politicking within their home states on his behalf, but even with Mr. Chase out of contention, the way was by no means clear. A small group of Republicans urged Vice President Hannibal Hamlin to declare his candidacy, but he quickly put a stop to that, declaring that he stood by the president. A few radical Republicans championed General Benjamin Butler, the Union military commander of New Orleans, who they believed could unite prowar Democrats and the radical and moderate wings of the Republican Party. The general had won admirers for his strong opposition to slavery and his uncompromising occupation of Baltimore and New Orleans, but when he failed to garner widespread popularity, he eventually dismissed the faction’s overtures.

In February, the
New York Herald
had called for the nomination of General Ulysses S. Grant, but the very idea seemed to horrify the Union commander, who publicly and adamantly insisted that Mr. Lincoln’s reelection was essential to the Union cause. That suited Mrs. Lincoln very well; she often disparaged General Grant as a butcher who did not care how many troops were slaughtered so long as he could claim victory in the end. Elizabeth had often heard Mrs. Lincoln declare that if General Grant should ever be elected president of the United States, she would desire to leave the country and remain absent throughout his term of office.

John C. Frémont, who had been the fledgling Republican Party’s first presidential nominee in 1856, was strongly popular among abolitionists like the German-American population of St. Louis. Unlike General Grant, General Frémont was willing and eager to supplant his commander in chief. For years he had been harboring resentment against the president, who had revoked his 1861 proclamation freeing the slaves of Confederates within the state of Missouri and had subsequently fired him as commander of the Union Army’s Department of the West. General Frémont alone seemed unlikely to follow the course
of President Lincoln’s other potential challengers and remove himself from consideration.