Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (47 page)

“You will gain their attention, certainly, and also the attention of the wider world.” Elizabeth despaired of convincing her, and yet she could not be silent. “The worst of what the papers have written about you in the past will be nothing compared to the disparagement and scorn they will heap upon you over this.”

“‘Dear Sir,’” Mrs. Lincoln said aloud as she began her first letter, making a show of ignoring her that Elizabeth thought unkind. “‘A notice that you sold articles of value on commission, prompts me to write to you.’ See, Elizabeth, there is an honest beginning. You cannot fault me for following Mr. Brady’s advice if I say nothing that is not true.”

“The date, as well as your location.” Elizabeth gestured to the page, barely keeping her frustration in check. “Chicago, September 1867. That is already untrue.”

“Those are small details, and of no consequence.”

Elizabeth muffled a sigh and resisted the urge to fling her hands in the air in exasperation. She peered over Mrs. Lincoln’s shoulder as she wrote, ostensibly to Mr. Brady, of how urgent necessity compelled her to part with valuable gifts from dear friends. Mrs. Lincoln finished that letter and began another, dated Chicago, September 14. “My dear sir,” she addressed Mr. Brady. “Please call and see Hon. Abram Wakeman. He was largely indebted to me for obtaining the lucrative office which he has held for several years, and from which he has amassed a very large fortune. He will assist me in my painful and humiliating situation, scarcely removed from want. He would not hesitate to return, in a small manner, the many favors my husband and myself always showered upon him. Mr. Wakeman many times excited my sympathies in his urgent appeals for office, as well for himself as others. Therefore he will be only too happy to relieve me by purchasing one or more of the articles you will please place before him.”

Elizabeth’s dismay deepened with every dip of Mrs. Lincoln’s pen into the inkwell. Mr. Wakeman was a former New York congressman and postmaster of New York City, whom President Lincoln had appointed surveyor of the Port of New York, second only to the Custom House as the most coveted patronage post the administration could bestow. He was also a sharp, shrewd politician, and Elizabeth could not imagine his fearing embarrassment so much that he would allow himself to be bullied by a diamond broker with questionable ethics.

“Please, Mrs. Lincoln, take care,” Elizabeth urged her. “If you insist upon writing these letters, at least use the mildest language possible.”

“Never mind, Elizabeth,” said Mrs. Lincoln briskly, signing her name. “Anything to raise the wind. One might as well be killed for a sheep as a lamb.”

So Elizabeth sighed and said no more, not even when Mrs. Lincoln began a new letter with “You write me that reporters are after you
concerning my goods deposited with you…and also that there is a fear that these newsmen will seize upon the painful circumstances of your having these articles placed in your hands to injure the Republican Party politically.” Not for the world would Mrs. Lincoln do anything to injure their cause, she wrote, “notwithstanding the very men for whom my noble husband did so much unhesitatingly, deprived me of all means of support and left me in a pitiless condition.” The phrases were designed to put the fear of exposure in the press into the gentlemen’s hearts, and considerable guilt regarding Mrs. Lincoln’s circumstances besides, but Elizabeth could not imagine powerful men meekly throwing money Mrs. Lincoln’s way to make the potential scandal disappear. They were far more likely to throw Mr. Brady from their offices in utter contempt.

But Mrs. Lincoln would not hear her.

The letters were written and delivered to Mr. Brady and Mr. Keyes, who immediately commenced showing them to the gentlemen Mrs. Lincoln had named. Soon thereafter, it occurred to her that the brokers’ scheme was designed to bring her income without parting with any of her clothes, so she decided to dispose of her wardrobe another way. She instructed Elizabeth to make appointments for several dealers in secondhand clothing to call on “Mrs. Clarke” at the Union Place Hotel, but although they duly came, and seemed interested in her goods, they could not agree on a price. Thwarted, but not daunted, a few days later Mrs. Lincoln and Elizabeth packed a bundle of dresses and shawls into a carriage and drove along Seventh Avenue, stopping at first one store and then another, seeking buyers. They soon discovered that the dealers wanted the goods for little or nothing, and although Mrs. Lincoln met them squarely, her tact and shrewdness accomplished nothing. Discouraged, they returned to the hotel disgusted with the whole affair, but they could not abandon it.

In the meantime, their strange behavior had drawn the attention of the hotel staff and other guests, who cast curious, suspicious looks upon them wherever they went. The large trunks in which Mrs. Lincoln’s wardrobe was stored had been kept in the main hall rather than carried
upstairs, and they had become the objects of scrutiny and speculation. First one reporter, then another, noticed that the faint outlines of Mrs. Lincoln’s name appeared on the lid of one trunk, even though the letters had been rubbed out. Mrs. Lincoln and Elizabeth became ever more wary and uncomfortable with the speculative glances and whispers, until Mrs. Lincoln finally decided that they must escape. They packed their smaller trunks, had the larger ones delivered to the offices of W. H. Brady & Co. at 609 Broadway, paid their hotel bills, and quickly departed for the country, where they remained for three days to throw the reporters off the scent. When they returned to the city, Elizabeth suggested that Mrs. Lincoln go to the Metropolitan Hotel, where she had stayed on previous occasions, and confide in the proprietor, who had always been courteous and respectful to her. Mrs. Lincoln refused. Instead they took rooms at the Brandreth House, where Mrs. Lincoln registered as “Mrs. Morris.”

Elizabeth had grown weary of the aliases and the clandestine skulking, but she endured it, wanting to believe that eventually it would benefit Mrs. Lincoln. As the weeks passed, she lost hope that any good would come of their efforts, but she felt no vindication when Mr. Keyes and Mr. Brady were finally forced to admit that their scheme had failed. They had shown the letters to numerous prominent Republicans, but not one had responded favorably. With the exception of a few dresses sold at low prices to secondhand dealers, Mrs. Lincoln’s wardrobe was still packed away in her trunks. The six hundred dollars the brokers had advanced was nearly spent, and Mrs. Lincoln had nothing to show for her time in New York—in fact, with gossip circulating about the mysterious, heavily veiled widow peddling her wardrobe, it would be fair to say she was worse off than when she had left Chicago.

In the first week of October, her funds and patience spent, Mrs. Lincoln reluctantly agreed to allow Mr. Brady to exhibit her wardrobe in their showrooms for sale, and to widely publicize that it was hers. “People who were not interested in Mrs. Clarke’s clothing will be very eager to acquire Mrs. Lincoln’s,” Mr. Brady declared, but Elizabeth was not reassured. Mrs. Lincoln also agreed to allow the brokers to publish
her letters in the New York
World,
a Democratic newspaper more than willing to expose Republicans to ridicule. After resigning herself to the new plan, discouraged, anxious, and missing young Tad dreadfully, Mrs. Lincoln left New York the same morning the letters appeared in the paper, leaving Elizabeth behind in charge of her affairs.

Elizabeth wanted very badly to return home too, and to reopen her business. Mrs. Lincoln had promised to pay her a commission from the sale of her wardrobe, but no sales meant no pay. She could not afford a hotel, so she found lodgings in a private home, economized, and hoped that putting Mrs. Lincoln’s wardrobe on display would stir up interest that would lead to profitable sales.

In the end, she received only part of what she hoped for.

The first sign of impending disaster came not from 609 Broadway or the press, but from a letter Mrs. Lincoln sent to Elizabeth within hours of returning to Chicago. On the train west, she found herself in the peculiar situation of sitting behind two gentlemen who had just read her letters in the
World
and were discussing her pecuniary embarrassment. Later, she went to the dining room and was shown to a table where sat none other than her friend from Washington Senator Charles Sumner, who recognized her immediately despite the black veil doubled over her face. His pity was so tangible that she knew he too was thinking of the letters and the public display of her wardrobe, and she was so discomfited that she invented an ill friend who needed her and fled from the table. She was embarrassed to tears, later, when the compassionate senator brought a cup of tea to her car. In a second letter, written only hours after the first, Mrs. Lincoln lamented, “I am writing this morning with a broken heart after a sleepless night of great mental suffering. R came up last night like a maniac, and almost threatening his life, and looking like death because the letters of the
World
were published in yesterday’s paper. I could not refrain from weeping when I saw him so miserable.”

Elizabeth needed a moment to parse out her meaning, and when she deduced that Mrs. Lincoln meant the falsified letters had been printed in the Chicago papers, her heart plummeted so quickly it left
her lightheaded. She should have expected the scandal to be too big and too interesting to remain confined to New York.

“I weep whilst I am writing,” Mrs. Lincoln wrote on. “I pray for death this morning. Only darling Taddie prevents my taking my life.” She was nearly losing her reason, she concluded, and she instructed Elizabeth to tell Mr. Brady and Mr. Keyes not to put a single line more of hers into print.

In the weeks that followed, more and more letters came from Chicago, and although Mrs. Lincoln begged Elizabeth to write to her every day, it was all she could do to take care of the business already entrusted to her. The curious and the contemptuous visited the offices of W. H. Brady & Co. to examine dresses piled up on a long table, shawls hanging over the backs of chairs, furs and laces and jewels in a glass case. The publication of the letters had indeed stirred up interest, but while many people browsed, no one bought. As one reporter sniggered in the
Evening Express,
some of the dresses “if not worn long, have been worn much; they are jagged under the arms and at the bottom of the skirt, stains are on the lining, and other objections present themselves.” The extravagantly high prices on the labels dangling from the articles, the reporter said, had no doubt been conceived by the dressmakers, overproud of their labors. “The peculiarity of the dresses,” he added, “is that the most of them are cut low-necked—a taste which some ladies attribute to Mrs. Lincoln’s appreciation of her own bust.”

That report, and other similar pieces that followed in other papers, only worsened from there. Reporters and gossips alike began referring to the situation as “Mrs. Lincoln’s Old Clothes Scandal.” Democrats sensed an opportunity to injure their opponents by pouncing upon the
World
letters as evidence that Republicans had bought favors from Mr. Lincoln’s White House. In response, Republican newspapers denounced Mrs. Lincoln’s rash, improper, and unwomanly actions and fell over one another in their haste to repudiate her. “It appears as if the fiends have let loose, for the Republican papers are tearing me to pieces in this border ruffian West,” Mrs. Lincoln wrote Elizabeth on October 9. “If I had committed murder in every city in this
blessed
Union,
I could not be
more traduced. And you know how innocent I have been of the intention of doing wrong.”

But Elizabeth could not consider her entirely innocent, for she had, after all, agreed to compose the false letters. Always Elizabeth wanted to believe that Mrs. Lincoln’s intentions were good, but she could not quite convince herself this time.

While Mrs. Lincoln pored worriedly over the papers and tried to make amends to Robert and groused about her maltreatment in letters to Elizabeth and other sympathetic friends, Elizabeth remained in New York, assisting the brokers as she could, trying to prevent the damage to Mrs. Lincoln’s reputation from worsening. Eventually, as the scandal dragged on, so many false reports were circulated that Elizabeth, at a suggestion from Mrs. Lincoln, granted interviews to the sympathetic
Herald
and the
Evening News
to set the record straight. None of it seemed to make any difference. The vitriol increased, the wardrobe sat pawed over and collecting dust at 609 Broadway, and Elizabeth worked herself close to exhaustion. She began to take in sewing to make ends meet, but such intermittent piecework brought in a meager living compared to what she had earned running her own dressmaking business. She moved to a boardinghouse on Broome Street, whose proprietress, Mrs. Bell, was a cousin of William Slade, Mr. Lincoln’s former messenger. But those measures were not enough.

Elizabeth remained in New York throughout the fall and winter, struggling to serve her former patron’s best interests while neglecting her own. At her lowest moments, she wondered why she persisted when she had lost almost all hope of success. By November she was wretchedly low-spirited and wanted desperately to return to Washington, but Mrs. Lincoln urged her to remain in New York a little while longer. Perhaps later, she suggested, after the whole sorry business was resolved, Elizabeth could join Mrs. Lincoln in Chicago. “Had you not better go with me and share my fortunes, for a year or more?” she implored, apparently oblivious to the pleasant, productive, satisfying life Elizabeth had left behind in the capital, and how she longed to return to it.

Nevertheless, duty compelled her to persist in the cause of Mrs. Lincoln’s relief. Drawing upon the connections she had made on behalf of
the Contraband Relief Association, Elizabeth wrote to leaders of the colored community proposing that collections for Mrs. Lincoln should be taken up in colored churches. The idea met with strong approval, because freeborn and freed slave alike recognized Abraham Lincoln as their great friend, and they were anxious to show their kind interest in the welfare of his family in some way more earnest and substantial than simple words. “You judge me rightly,” Mr. Frederick Douglass wrote in his reply. “I am willing to do what I can to place the widow of our martyr President in the affluent position which her relation to that good man and to the country entitles her to.” To that end, he proposed arranging a series of lectures by the best speakers in the country—and he himself would be honored to participate. The fees this venture would raise, combined with the generous donations from the colored community, would at last relieve Mrs. Lincoln’s financial distress and allow her a great measure of comfort.