The Emancipator's Wife (39 page)

“Of course I mind.” She bent to kiss his cheek. “And I'll be
miserable
away from you.” The old rallying tone crept back into her voice. “But we're both miserable now. And if we're
both
going to be miserable anyway—and you had
better
be miserable while I'm away, Mr. Lincoln, and I'll write to Mr. Douglas and ask him to make
sure
that you are—at least the boys will have their cousins to play with, and be happy, and you'll get some work done without worrying about us.”

Not, she reflected, that Lincoln
did
worry about her, much, when he got talking politics with his cronies....

But he knew he ought to.

“You are a saint and a martyr, Mother.” He scootched Eddie aside, to make room for Mary on his knee.

The following morning at breakfast he managed to sweet-talk Mrs. Spriggs into making a blancmange, too.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-NINE

I
NQUIRING AMONG HIS
C
ONGRESSIONAL COLLEAGUES,
L
INCOLN FOUND
A
respectable middle-aged clerk named Shepperton and his wife who were traveling to St. Louis via Lexington on family matters early in March. Mr. Shepperton proved a reliable and helpful traveling companion: laughing indulgently at the boys' obstreperousness, keeping track of the trunks and parcels, tipping porters just the right amount, and deferring to Mary in all things. Mrs. Shepperton adored him and agreed with everything he said, stupid or not, in the course of the four-day journey. She herself talked of nothing but the superiority of honey and onions for the cure of every ailment from catarrh to leprosy and Mary suspected that if, like Petruchio, he'd called the sun the moon his wife would have cheered his perception, but the couple were otherwise perfectly friendly and pleasant to travel with.

Mary was simply ecstatic at the thought of going home.

Chaney, Pendleton, Nelson, and Mammy Sally crowded to embrace her. Margaret and Mattie, Elodie and Emilie, gay young Alec and little Kitty, and the rest engulfed Bobby and Eddie into their midst; even Robert Todd beamed and Granny Parker gave her dry acerbic smile, and Betsey tried to look as if she were pleased.

It was heaven to be in Lexington again.

This was a true homecoming, she felt, coming home to be again someone she hadn't been in a long, long time. The woman she had become in Illinois—the poor man's wife who washed her own dishes and cowered from thunderstorms—faded almost at once. She felt, if not like a belle again, at least like her former self.

It was wonderful simply not to have a headache, something she'd suffered every spring she'd been on the Illinois prairies. It was wonderful beyond words not to be tied to the drudgery of housework. Wonderful, too, to know that the work of the house was being done by reliable slaves who knew their business instead of facing the daily exasperation of trying to explain to a sulky fourteen-year-old Irish girl that the
entire
floor of the parlor needed to be swept, and not just the parts that showed.

With Mammy Sally to look after the boys, Mary found her irritation at them dissolved. She could laugh and play with them, sympathize with Bobby's attempts to adopt a kitten (Betsey's hatred of the whole cat tribe remained as virulent as ever), and take the time to read to them each night. As Betsey's notion of bedtime didn't include bedside candles, much less chapters of
Young King Arthur,
the group around the trundle-bed in the guest-room rapidly expanded to include Kitty, Emilie, Elodie, and Alec—Betsey sniffed and clicked her tongue, but said only, “Well, just one chapter, and no talking afterwards.” Sometimes, when he was home, Mary's father tiptoed in to listen, too.

With the improvement of the railway to Frankfort, Robert Todd was home most weekends, and that spring of 1848 was the most Mary had seen of him in her life. In the long mellow twilights, while the children dashed madly about the wooded lawns behind the house and down to the spring, she would sit with him on the gallery overlooking the garden, and talk of the upcoming election, and Lincoln's plans, and how to revive the flagging Whig Party in the face of the Democrats' war-time triumphs. He listened attentively to her descriptions of Washington, and spoke to her of his worries and doubts concerning the vexing issue of slavery: “The abolitionists are going to drive this whole country straight to perdition, with their disregard of facts as they are. Yes, slavery is wrong, but it exists! And there's no way you're going to keep it out of the territories. You can't just legislate it away, poof—and devil take the hindmost!”

Sometimes Betsey would join them, and Mary was surprised at her own ability to get along with her stepmother, now that she was no longer the unwanted stepdaughter who refused to marry the first man who would take her off Betsey's hands. They even laughed together about the Spider Incident, though Betsey never spoke of why Mary had been angry with her—Mary pretended she no longer recalled. That was all past and done now, and Mary was married to a Congressman, a fact, she knew, that made her father enormously proud.

Granny Parker and Emilie joined them too, those soft twilights when the air was filled with the smoke of lemongrass smudges. On several occasions Cash Clay and Mary Jane came, their own rowdy band of offspring joining the shrill-voiced shadows chasing back and forth among the trees beside the stream. Cash was full of descriptions of Mexico, and of its capital where he'd been held prisoner, like a gaudily-colored island in the midst of its shining lakes. He had, for over a year before the war, operated an abolitionist newspaper in Lexington, the
True American.
At the mention of it, Robert Todd rolled his eyes. “You could have got yourself killed,” he said.

“If I had,” declared Cash, leaning forward impetuously and jabbing with his finger, “I would have taken many a man of the forces of iniquity with me.” With his black hair tumbled over his forehead, he seemed unchanged from the wild young man who'd smuggled Mary copies of
The Liberator
at Madame Mentelle's. He had, he related, reinforced with sheet iron the doors and windows of the
True American,
and installed two brass cannon on the table inside, pointed straight at the doors. To this he'd added a trapdoor on the roof and enough kegs of powder to blow the building and any invaders thereof sky-high. Mary knew this was not braggadocio: Abolitionist editors had been murdered before this, and their presses and offices wrecked.

“And I'd have stood them all off, and died in the attempt,” he vowed, with a vast sweep of his arm, “had I not come down with typhoid fever, and had them destroy the newspaper in my absence.”

Mary laughed, but in the dim light of the lamps and mosquito-smudges, she saw Mary Jane's glance slip sideways to her husband, and in her eyes there was no mirth. Cash was still, thought Mary, as ready to get himself killed without a moment's thought about how his wife and children might fare without him, as he had been when he'd accepted the challenge to a duel on his wedding-eve fifteen years before.

More than at Cash's egoism, Mary was shocked at the violence with which the town's slaveholding faction had greeted Cash's newspaper. She had always feared the readiness to lash out, that lay beneath the surface of Southern manhood; their willingness to destroy life or property to make a point. She remembered too vividly Elliot Presby's blood in the ditch of Main Street, and the men who had seen nothing wrong with beating him only for speaking to them of the evil of holding slaves. According to her father, the Legislature was increasingly in the hands of slaveholders, men whose factories, plantations, livery-stables, or sawmills simply could not operate without unpaid black labor.

Spring waxed warm. Eddie's sickliness abated, and with Chaney's cooking, his thinness filled out to pink-cheeked strength. Though he tired easily, her younger son was treated as a sort of beloved mascot by the other children, and showed signs of Bobby's—and his father's—insatiable curiosity, coupled with a sweet-tempered friendliness to all. Bobby—whose speech had picked up a marked Kentucky flatness of vowel—had become his protector and minor god.

Mary and Emilie spent long evenings together, talking of dresses, of hope, of love. Letters came from Washington, letters that brought pangs of loneliness, of longing to lie curled up against that long leathery bag of bones—longing for those endless wonderful talks after the candle was blown out, longing for the touch of those big callused hands, for the passionate strength of his kisses.

Pangs of guilt, too, because she hadn't the slightest wish to rejoin him in that horrible boardinghouse in that miasmic swamp of a town. Lincoln wrote of missing her terribly, wrote with longing of his sons, but she knew that if she were with him he'd go on his absentminded way just as before, not coming back from the House of Representatives until midnight, not giving a thought (or much of one) to what she might be doing all day, cooped up in a boardinghouse room with two small boys.

And sometimes—though she would never have admitted it to a soul—it was so good simply to have the luxury to sleep alone!

So she visited Mary and Margaret Wickliffe—now both Preston—quietly, because her father was engaged in a lawsuit with their father over a cousin's inheritance that was being claimed by Old Duke—and walked out to Rose Hill to have coffee and to laugh with Madame Mentelle. Her old teacher was as sharp as ever, and full of cynical comments about the new phenomenon that was sweeping the East, the conviction that certain persons could communicate with the dead.

“A mishmash of Swedenborgianism and plain superstition,” Madame pronounced, and refused to participate when the Wickliffe-Preston girls, Mary, Emilie, and Madame's daughter Maria—who had married one of Henry Clay's sons—organized a séance in the Rose Hill parlor to communicate with the spirit of George Washington. The result was inconclusive, but everyone giggled and had a spookily good time.

There was talk, in May, of Mary going back to Washington, but in the end she decided to remain in Lexington. In June she went with the rest of the family out to Buena Vista, the summer home that was Betsey's property, riding and walking in the countryside as if she were a girl again.

Congress would adjourn in August—by which time, Mary knew, Washington City would be a sweating hellhole smothered in dust. Nevertheless, when Lincoln wrote her that he was going with the other Whig leaders to New England to campaign for Zachary Taylor, Mary wrote back immediately that she would come.
I look forward to being with you again on the sixth of September,
Lincoln wrote back; and in spite of the tediousness of the promised journey, and the wet heat of the capital, Mary found herself looking forward to it, too.

In the end, her desire to see him again got the better of her. She packed up her sons and her trunks (it was astounding how much extra clothing and luggage she'd accumulated over the summer!) in late July, and prepared to take the stage to Winchester, in company with her brother Levi, and thence to the weary succession of trains that would eventually lead to Washington.

In the dark before dawn on the day of departure old Nelson hitched up the carriage, and everyone except Betsey came down to breakfast by lamplight. Emilie hugged Mary: “I'll write to you, I promise. Tell Mr. Lincoln I hope his side wins.” Robert Todd rode with Mary, Levi, Bobby, and Eddie to the Courthouse square, where the stage took its departure:

“You take care of those grandsons of mine, you hear?” he smiled, and gave Mary a hearty bear hug as he helped her from the carriage. In the dove-gray quiet of the square the six brown horses shook their heads, snuffing at the air and jangling their harness; black hostlers from the stage company held the leaders' heads. Two slaves belonging to Mr. Blanchard the silversmith sloshed buckets of water on the plank sidewalk and the smell of wet wood was strong in the warm air. “And tell that husband of yours not to let another seven years go by, before he brings you back here to call.”

He pressed a roll of banknotes into her hand, and leaned down to kiss her. Then Levi helped her into the stage—Eddie and Bobby were already poking each other and the other passengers were starting to get annoyed—and the grooms sprang away from the horses' heads. Mary leaned out the window and twisted around backward, all her bonnet-ribbons fluttering, to get a last glimpse of her father's tall, burly shape, waving to her before he turned back to where Nelson waited with the carriage.

It was her last sight of him alive.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY

A
LTHOUGH HER EXPERIENCE WITH
W
ASHINGTON
C
ITY HAD BEEN
ghastly—and Mrs. Spriggs hadn't improved any in the August weeks that Mary and the boys were back in the upstairs room on First Street—she hugely enjoyed the speaking tour. The weather was hot, but at least the boys weren't cooped up in hotel-rooms by rain and cold. She would take them sightseeing in the daytime in whatever town they were in—Boston, New Bedford, the small New England hamlets where the
Yankee half of the Revolution was born.

In Illinois, and later in Washington, she'd grown accustomed to
Yankee accents and the self-righteous pushiness of Yankee so-called manners, enough to deal with having them around her all the time, though at the hotels she sorely missed the gentle reliability of her father's slaves. The money her father had given her made it possible for her to pay hotel maids to look after the boys in the evenings, so that she could hear her husband speak.

Growing up where Henry Clay set the oratorical standard, she knew Lincoln was good. Even had he been a stranger to her, she reflected, looking up at that beanpole figure in the tin-sconced glow of the oil-lamps around the halls at Cambridge, at New Bedford, at Dorchester and Boston, he would have held her enrapt. And looking at the faces around her, listening to the murmur and stillness of the crowd that was like the sough of wind through leaves, she knew she wasn't the only one who thought so. She bought all the local newspapers and scanned them while riding the trains or the stages:
“He spoke in a clear and cool, and very eloquent manner...carrying the audience with him....” “The Hon. Abraham Lincoln made a speech, which for aptness of illustration, solidity of argument, and genuine eloquence, is hard to beat.” “It was a glorious meeting.”
In the hotel-rooms she clipped the articles out. Bobby and Eddie helped her file them away in envelopes, to be later pasted in albums.

In those few evenings when he was not meeting with local Whigs, or speaking, Lincoln and Mary would talk late into the nights, analyzing what those newspapers had said, as if through those journals they listened to the voices of the people in the crowd. As he had in Springfield, he practiced his speeches on her, and listened thoughtfully to her advice.

Mary had always loved the thrill and confusion of Presidential campaigns. Now she felt as she had during Harrison's campaign, when she and Merce and Julia had all gone to rallies wearing their banners, and cheered for hard cider and log cabins.

“Yes, and the cryin' shame of it is that we're runnin' another man on log cabins an' hard cider, or the next thing to it,” sighed Lincoln, as the train chuffed out of New Bedford for Boston. Bobby and Eddie crowded to the window, craning to get a last sight of the harbor with its forest of masts: prairie boys, both had been riveted by their first glimpse of the open ocean the previous day. Despite his speech, and his meetings with the local Whig bosses, Lincoln had made the time to go with Mary and the boys to the harbor, where the whaling-ships stood in port, and the streets were filled with strange dark-faced men with savage tattoos. It had been, Mary realized, Lincoln's own first look at the sea—and hers as well.

“As good a man as Old Zack is,” Lincoln went on, stretching his neck to look through the window for a final glimpse, “he doesn't stand for anything, much. People all over the country know his name and will vote for him, which they wouldn't for someone like Mr. Seward.” He named the aristocratic former New York governor, who would share the platform with him at a huge mass meeting a week hence in Boston. “And Seward is by far the abler man.
He's
the one we should be electing.” He drew about him the vast skirts of the brown linen duster he wore, against the smuts and fluffs of soot that floated through the car.

“And if the committee had nominated Seward instead of Taylor, he could make his own speeches, and not have me and the other local worthies do it for him. But you ask Mr. Gurley next door to us, or the
Reverend Dresser or any of our neighbors in Springfield who William Seward is, and they won't know, nor any reason why they should elect him over Lewis Cass, who fought the British for the freedom of our nation back in 1812....”

“I'm still sorry,” said Mary softly, “that the committee didn't stand behind Mr. Clay. He would outshine a dozen of Seward and Taylor put together.” Past the window, the sea vanished behind the ghostly line of dunes. Then the train swayed, swinging westward, and that long gray shining promise vanished from view.

Lincoln sighed again, and settled back into his seat. “I too,” he said. “Clay is a man I'd make speeches for gladly—not that I grudge a word of what I say for Old Zack. But Clay's made enemies. Too many people only remember that fool accusation of selling out his supporters in trade to be made Secretary of State. And he's old,” he added quietly. “Seventy-one, older even than Cass.”

Mary nodded. She recalled having a fight with one of her schoolmates at Ward's over who was handsomer, Andrew Jackson or Henry Clay . . . or Mary's father.

In her heart she knew Clay would not run again for the Presidency that he had so deserved.

“Taylor at least is hale and healthy,” said Lincoln, and she thought she caught a trace of the same sadness in his voice. “He can be trusted to live out his term and put men of caution and principle in places where they can do some good.”

“Yourself included.” Mary squeezed his hand.

She saw the echo of her pride—and her hope—glint briefly in his eyes, but he only shook his head.

“But it is a chore,” he added with a comical grimace, “coming up with reasons to vote for the man besides the fact that he'll appoint men who
do
know what they're doing. I certainly wouldn't vote for a man on those grounds alone, no matter what a great soldier he was. For that matter,
I
was a great soldier, too. I looked courageously behind every bush in northern Illinois for Black Hawk and his braves—who hid from me, knowin' how ferocious a fighter I was, so I never saw hide nor hair of 'em—not to mention sheddin' my blood to a thousand mosquitoes....”

Mary clasped her hands over her heart in a burlesque of passion. “What woman could resist a Hector, a Hercules, a warrior such as you?”

Bobby and Eddie poked each other and giggled as their parents embraced and kissed, and the starchy Boston couple in the next seat tried to pretend they hadn't seen such shocking goings-on.

Lincoln made his final speech in Boston—clear and lucid arguments as to why votes for the Free-Soil splinter groups and so-called Conscience Whigs were in reality votes for the Democrats—and then they were en route for the home they had left nearly a year before. In Buffalo they booked a cabin on the steamer
Globe,
bound for the bustling little lumber-town of Chicago over the succession of canals and waterways that crossed the peninsula of Michigan. But before it steamed out into Lake Erie, the little ship took the occasion, to Mary's joy, to go upriver to Niagara Falls.

The sight of the water, pouring down endlessly, torrents of it, curtains of it, a world of vapor and rainbows, silenced even the boys. Lincoln stood on the deck of the little tourist steamer, openmouthed with shock, awe, and the most utter delight Mary had ever seen on his face. Not even the sight of the ocean had filled him with such wonder. “It's been falling like that—just like that—when there weren't even white men on this continent,” he said wonderingly, as the
Globe
chuffed away back toward Buffalo. “When Christ walked the earth it was like that—thundering in the silence here, unseen by anyone but the Indians and God. It'll be falling like that when all of us are gone.” He shook his head, trying to grasp the largeness of Time, with the mist of the falls beaded like raindrops in his hair.

In Chicago, they took a room in the Sherman Hotel. Mary was unimpressed by the city. It seemed to have been built and populated entirely by Yankees—pushing, mannerless, and valuing money before all other things. Balloon-frame houses of roughly sawn boards lined streets so deep in mud that there were signs posted on particularly soupy intersections: T
HE
S
HORTEST
W
AY TO
C
HINA.
Regiments of pigs whose numbers would have put Springfield's swine population to blushing shame rooted vigorously for garbage or lay in wallows in alleys. Lincoln chuckled all the way to the hotel at a story the train conductor had told him, about a Chicago citizen who saw a man's head and shoulders sticking out of a mudhole at the intersection of State and Lake: “Can I help you, pilgrim?” “No, thanks,” the mired man said cheerfully. “I've got a horse under me.”

And it was crowded, frantic, jostling with activity. Mary remembered how, ten years ago, Stephen Douglas had spoken of his trips to Chicago to speculate in land—when she'd taken tea with him and his new wife in Washington, he'd told her that lots he bought for five thousand dollars were selling now for twenty thousand. Irish, Polish, Portuguese, and German immigrants slogged through the muddy streets or along the very few crude board sidewalks; the air stank from privies, sewage, and coal smoke.

Yet there was money here, business, power. Mary might wrinkle her nose, after all these years, at Northern accents, but from her years of poverty she understood what the Yankee way of life could bring. At the Sherman Hotel, while Mary took the boys out and doubtfully tried to find something in the overwhelming confusion for them to sightsee, Lincoln met with the leaders of the Chicago Whigs, businessmen who made her father's leisured graciousness seem laughably naïve. When she came back that afternoon Lincoln told her the Chicago bosses had asked him, at six hours' notice, to speak that night at a rally at the Cook County Courthouse.

They spent the rest of the afternoon in the hotel room together, drinking vile tea and working out what he'd say.

The rally turned out to be so huge that it adjourned to a nearby public square, where crowds stood in the mud by torchlight and listened for nearly two hours. The cheers when Lincoln finished were deafening; Mary stood near the stage, jostled by strangers who reeked of sweat and tobacco, looking up at her husband in the torchlight, transformed and seeming to blaze with his cold intelligence as he always did, when carried away by speaking before a crowd.

He will be President.
In her bones she knew it.
Taylor will be elected, and will give him something, some office, that will get him known, and he will be on his way.
She longed to throw her arms around him as he descended the platform, to embrace him in her wild delight. But he was surrounded at once by men, those clever, crafty businessmen, lawyers, speculators, politicians who governed things. There was the florid-faced Mr. Judd, who was building railroads with Irish and German labor; their rosy friend Congressman Washburne from Mrs. Spriggs's; plus old friends from Springfield, Edward Baker and Lyman Trumbull . . .

And all of them, Mary observed with an inner smile, Lincoln greeted as if each was his special friend, his close confidant. She knew this did not spring from calculation or hypocrisy, but from genuine interest coupled with a very clear idea of how anyone, from lowest to highest, could help; could be knit together into a single fighting unit. It was as if he said to each,
I need you . . . I need you all.

Around them in the square the crowd was still shouting, talking, a yammer of noise and torchlight in the cold October night. It was the sound of victory. Lincoln had fought the good fight for “Old Rough and Ready” Zack Taylor, and in time his reward would come. Douglas might have made a fortune here in this mudhole town and be the fair-haired boy of the slaveholding Senators, but Lincoln would have something more.

Around the narrow shoulder of Isaac Arnold—a skinny, bearded, watchful fellow lawyer—Lincoln caught Mary's glance, and the corners of his eyes crinkled in a smile.

R
ETURNING TO
S
PRINGFIELD ON
O
CTOBER 10,
L
INCOLN TOOK
THEIR
old room in the Globe Tavern, rather than put the Ludlum family out of the Jackson Street house. “Ludlum has asked me if you were intending to come back to Washington with me in November,” Lincoln told Mary, on a windy night a day or so later, after they'd settled the boys to sleep in the trundle-bed. He'd spent the day with Billy Herndon, catching up all the legal business of the past year—tomorrow, Mary knew, he'd spend with Ninian, and Simeon Francis, and Cousin Stephen Logan, and Dr. Henry around the stove in the office of the
Sangamo Journal,
conferring about the recent state elections—which had been disastrous for the Whigs—and how they were going to organize to secure victory for Taylor.

But at least, she reflected, now she could visit Bessie Francis, and Julia, and Cousin Lizzie . . . and Elizabeth, who had Ann still living with her, and those two certainly deserved each other....

She heard the query in her husband's voice, and glanced over at the sleeping boys. Eddie was sleeping, anyway. Bobby was pretending to sleep, as he usually did so he could listen to his parents' voices.