The Emancipator's Wife (49 page)

R
EACHED
W
ASHINGTON
S
AFELY
—W
ILLARD
'
S
H
OTEL

But it was a bad start, she thought, dropping sugar into her coffee, when a President could not enter his own capital city in triumph, for fear of being murdered by the very people he was taking an oath to protect.

C
HAPTER
F
ORTY

T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE HAD CHANGED GREATLY SINCE
M
ARY LAST HAD
entered it for James K. Polk's receptions. Five days after her arrival in Washington—five days in which she barely saw her husband for more than a few minutes while he distractedly gulped down an egg and a cup of coffee for breakfast in their parlor at Willard's Hotel—she was received in the Blue Parlor by Harriet Lane, President Buchanan's niece.

Buchanan was a lifelong bachelor; Miss Lane, violet-eyed and beautiful and just edging past the final frontiers of even the most diplomatic definitions of “youth,” had acted as hostess in his household since the death of her parents when she was a child. She had a slight British inflection to her voice and the well-schooled perpetual smile of a longtime member of the diplomatic corps, but behind it she watched Mary warily from the moment the gangly Irish doorman showed her into the Blue Parlor.

The newspapers—particularly the Democratic ones like James
Bennett's
New York Herald—
had been merciless about the “Illinois gorilla” who was about to take over the Presidency, and his fat loud-mouthed vulgar wife. Mary had closely quizzed her escort that day—the white-haired Mrs. McLean, whose husband was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and had been one of the contenders for the Republican nomination—to make sure that her gown of magenta taffeta, with its flowing Isabeau sleeves, was, as Madame Blois had assured her, of absolutely the most fashionable style.

It apparently was, to judge by the infinitesimal relaxation in Miss Lane's cool greeting. The President's niece unbent a bit more at Mary's firm, polite handshake and quiet voice, and Mary silently blessed Madame Mentelle for schooling her, all those years ago, out of all but the slightest Bluegrass inflection in her speech. The Blue Parlor had at some time in the recent past been completely refurnished—she also noticed that the old glass-and-wood screen in the front hall that she remembered had been replaced by a new one of glass and iron—but the furnishings had a shabby look to them already; the brocatelle upholstery was worn and the brightly figured rugs threadbare.

“Housekeeping here is the most
appalling
challenge,” drawled Miss Lane, with a gesture at the gaily painted blue ceiling, which was already peeling slightly over the fireplace and around the medallion of the Roman-style gasolier. “Rather like a cross between a palace and a hotel, with a subscription ballroom thrown in. Nothing really prepares one for it.”

“I'm sure I'll manage,” said Mary, detecting the patronage in the younger woman's light voice.

“Well, of course with so many of the town's hostesses leaving now over this horrible secession, goodness knows what your entertaining will be like. I understand the Corcorans left last week for Paris—that's their house across Lafayette Square, they gave the most astonishing parties—and the Taylors will be gone as well. And of course the Davises.”

“I am sure,” said Mary thinly, “that Washington will not suffer for lack of entertainments.”

“Of course not,” agreed Miss Lane, with the words
But who in their right senses would want to associate with the Republican riffraff coming in to take their places?
unfurling like an invisible banner in her restrained little smile.

Mary itched to slap her.

After tea Miss Lane showed her over the house and introduced her to the servants—“The doormen and the gardeners are the only ones employed by the government itself, you know. Will you be keeping on the rest of the staff? Mr. Vermereu, the butler, is a Belgian, but the rest are British. Uncle is a great believer in the British system of training servants, and I've found them quite reliable.”

“Certainly I'll keep them on for the time being,” replied Mary, determined to yield nothing to this flawless haughty woman, with her air of speaking to a country cousin.

If the downstairs of the house was shabby, with its tobacco-stained rugs, torn upholstery, and window-drapes that bore the scissor-marks of souvenir-hunters, the upstairs resembled a down-at-the-heels boardinghouse. Her heart sank. The long central corridor was bare and gloomy, with gray filtered light leaking into it from the open doors of the bedrooms on either side. At the east end, through ground-glass doors, the shadows of men were visible in the vestibule of the President's office; the murmur of their voices and the vibration of their feet served as an uneasy reminder of those delegations that arrived, one after the other, at Willard's Hotel, demanding of Lincoln what he was going to do about the new Confederate States. Trunks were open in several of the bedrooms. A valet was packing one of them, a maid another.

In three days, this will be mine.

The wife of the President.

The First Lady of the land.

“Thank goodness, Mr. Pierce had all the plumbing modernized.” Miss Lane's plummy voice broke into her private ecstasy. “Not that it works, half the time. But at least you have it. America does have
some
advantages over Britain—Uncle's house in St. James had only the most
primitive
bathing facilities and was absolutely
glacial
in the winters. The bathroom here has allegedly hot water piped in....” She opened a door off the small private corridor in the southwest corner, to reveal a handsome dressing-room papered in imitation oak-graining, and floored with oilcloth printed to look like tile. “And there's another water-closet off the secretary's office, at the other end of the house.
Ghastly
number of bedrooms here to heat, but then you have quite a large family, haven't you?”

“I married young,” lied Mary sweetly, with a glance at Miss Lane's ringless finger.
You old maid.

“That's usual out West, isn't it?”
Where they haven't anything better to do with their lives, do they?
Miss Lane gathered her rustling skirts, and preceded her down the wide stairs.

Three days of delegations, of debates, of sitting beside Lincoln at dinners during which he was preoccupied in talk with political hosts. Suite Six at Willard's Hotel was besieged by office-seekers, whose determination and persistence made the jostling madness that had plagued him at Springfield look like a Presbyterian Church tea. Lincoln took to waking early and going for long walks before sunrise with Robert or Nicolay. Often he'd breakfasted before she woke, and was closeted all day with Congressmen trying frantically to reach a compromise to conciliate the Confederacy. “I will not extend slavery into the territories,” he said, over and over, and the delegates went away.

In those days she received few calls from Washington hostesses, at least partly because the parlor of Suite Six was constantly in use by her husband. “The President's wife is never obliged to make calls,” Adele
Douglas informed her, when she invited Mary and her sisters and nieces for tea to the beautiful house she and Mary's old suitor owned on Lafayette Square. “It's a pity that all the really powerful hostesses were Southerners and slaveholders—which stands to reason, Washington being situated where it is. And of course nearly everyone else in Washington is here only temporarily.”

Everyone but the Cuttses, who were related to the late and much-mourned Dolley Madison. Mary wondered, wryly, if one reason Douglas had fought so hard for re-election was because his wife didn't want to surrender her position as one of Washington's social leaders. “For the past seven years now everyone has agonized over their guest-lists, so as not to have fights breaking out over every dinner. Even before the election Mrs. Clay of Alabama would refuse to go in to dinner with anyone who'd been elected on an anti-slavery ticket, and she knew who they all were. Goodness knows what this season will bring.”

“I daresay if Maryland secedes,” replied Mary, “we'll all have other things to think of besides our guest-lists.”

In fact she was far more interested in the horrors of the crisis that loomed over Washington—the desperate attempts to find some grounds of compromise between the Union and the secessionist states—than she was over the niceties of Washington's social scene. But as ever, she was excluded from the men's councils, and relegated to the task of forming the necessary social network with the wives of Cabinet members and influential Senators.

William Seward, whom she had distrusted from the days of the Chicago convention when the hawk-nosed little New Yorker had tried to take the nomination from Lincoln, had left his ailing wife in Albany. But Salmon Chase's daughter Kate—the ranking Cabinet hostess in town—made clear from her first visit that she intended to establish
herself
as the center of Washington society in her father's rented house, as she had been center of society in Columbus during her father's gubernatorial days.

Kate Chase was young, red-haired, breathtakingly pretty, highly educated, and keenly intelligent, and Mary loathed her at sight. To Mary's gracious invitation to call at the White House, Kate had replied, with an air of great innocence, “And I hope that
you
will call on
me,
” a slap in the face given the Washington custom that the President's wife did not make calls. Mary could not believe it wasn't calculated.

It did not help that it was obvious to Mary that both Seward and Chase regarded Lincoln as an uncouth barbarian who had to be “handled” as a pawn for their greater wisdom—though how much wisdom there was in Seward's plan to start a war with both Britain and France so that the Confederacy would leap back into the Union again, she was at a loss to determine.

The morning of the fourth of March dawned cloudy and raw. Rumor had flown around the previous afternoon that there would be an attempt to assassinate Lincoln during the inaugural parade, inflaming all Mary's fears anew. It had taken Willie and Lizzie hours to quiet her before the dinner that Lincoln was giving for the men he'd selected for his Cabinet. In addition to the hated Seward and the oleaginous Cameron, there was the sanctimonious Mr. Chase of Ohio; Mr. Welles, Secretary of the Navy, a newspaperman who sported a bad wig and had a beard like a holly-bush; Mr. Blair, whose extensive family had been virtual royalty in Maryland for generations; Mr. Caleb Smith, yet another of David Davis's political debtors; and Mr. Edward Bates, who had been appointed mainly because he came from Missouri and had political connections to every Democrat in that barely loyal tinderbox state.

On Inauguration Day, Army sharpshooters lined the parade route, and were stationed in the windows of the Treasury Building as well. She remembered the young Lexington blades of her youth, shooting apples off fence-posts at a hundred yards, or two hundred.

Any one of them could have sent that drawing, those letters.
“Say your
prayers. . . .”

She stood in the crowd of the diplomatic gallery, clinging to Lizzie's hand in the bitter cold of the day, waiting for the sound of a shot.

At one, James Buchanan and Abraham Lincoln emerged from the Capitol, followed by Mary's old friend from Lexington, John Breckinridge—Buchanan's Vice-President, whose wife hadn't called on Mary because Breckinridge was so violently opposed to the limitation of what he called “the rights of property”—and by swarthy, stocky Hannibal Hamlin, the Maine politician who'd been elected Lincoln's Vice-President.

Lincoln looked out over the crowd—as usual, he was the tallest man present—and removed his hat, looked around for somewhere to put it while he spoke. Behind him a man stepped out of the crowd, and held out his hand. “It would be my honor to hold that for you,” he said.

It was Stephen Douglas.

“Apprehension seems to exist,”
Lincoln read, in a voice that seemed to carry like the note of a chime over the now-silent crowd,
“among the people of the Southern States, that by the accession of a Republican Administration, their property, and their peace, and personal security, are to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. . . .”

Mary closed her eyes, seeing again the vile drawings, the scribbled threats. Hearing in her mind Old Duke Wickliffe's voice thundering about the “damn abolitionists wanting to steal our property”; seeing Nate Bodley's cane rise and fall, splattered with blood.

Reasonable cause, she thought, has never had the slightest thing to do with politics.

Print a lie in a newspaper—whisper it across a Washington tea-table to your society friends—and there is no catching up with it.

And Lincoln knew this.

“. . . there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. . . .”

No mention of secession, or of the Confederate States of America. He was being a lawyer, always leaving the door open, pretending for as long as he could that he did not see.
No wonder people call him a fool,
Mary thought.
They don't see that until something is made official, it's possible to go back and pretend it all never happened.
That was a piece of politics she'd learned at her father's knee.