The Emancipator's Wife (63 page)

But she knew that if Lincoln didn't win the election in November, all the bills would be presented—and he would no longer be so caught up in petitioners and testing new rifles and arguing over increased draft quotas that he did not notice.

Then he would suffer disgrace, as well as she: for who would believe, once the newspapers got hold of the matter, that he hadn't known?

Shame scorched her at the thought, shame and terror. He cherished his honor—his reputation for honesty—above all things.
He never wanted to marry me,
she thought in despair.
If all this comes out, he will turn from me . . . and then I will die.

“He has to win,” she said one afternoon to Lizabet Keckley, as the dressmaker was fitting the bodice on a glossy gown of eggplant satin. “He must, Lizabet!” Her voice shook—she had had a headache earlier in the day, and still felt strange, from its aftermath and from the extra Cordial she had taken. The words came tumbling out of her mouth as they so often did at her Blue Parlor receptions, things she had planned never to tell a soul.

But of course Lizabet could be trusted.

“Moreover, if McClellan and his lackeys get hold of my debts, they'll use them against my husband—use them to defeat him, and it will all be my fault! I have a good mind to go to those politicians who've been making a fortune off Mr. Lincoln's patronage. It is only fair that
they
should help me, Judd and Lamon and Mr. Weed in New York, and that fat toady Davis.
If
they could be trusted not to tell.”

When she went to Philadelphia for a few days in spring to visit Sally, and again in the summer, she met with Cameron, and with the German bankers the Seligman brothers, promising to use her influence should Lincoln win. She had long become adept at political deal-making, and at least in the past Lincoln had taken her advice. Anything, anything to keep Lincoln from finding out! She reached home again only days before a rebel force struck up past Grant's army and bore like a band of devils straight for the capital.

In the sticky July heat the few servants at the Soldiers' Home packed what they could of the family's clothes, and Lincoln, Tad, and Mary moved back to the White House, its reception rooms under sheets, its mirrors swathed in gauze. “If Washington is taken, might it even have the effect of uniting the country, of stiffening resistance?” asked Mary, fighting panic as the carriage joggled through the early-morning streets of Washington. “It might even help your campaign....”

“Washington won't be taken,” said Lincoln. But he, like Mary, was listening. In the morning hush, she could heard the spatter of rifles.

Two days later they all went out to Fort Stevens, on the perimeter of Washington's ring of fortresses, where the rebel forces under Jubal Early were trying to break through. Fort Stevens, like most of the other forts in the defensive ring, was a square of rammed earth walls, surmounted by a parapet and occupied by rough plank buildings crowded together: sutler's store, artillery park, powder magazine. Beyond the wall, a trashy ruin of scrap lumber, filthy blankets, and trampled or burned spots in the ground showed that there'd been a contraband camp there, whose inhabitants had fled.

From the woods a hundred yards away, rifle-fire cracked out. Mary remained in the carriage in the middle of the enclosure, her hands locked around the protesting Tad's arm in a death-grip—there were two young boys barely a year older than her son, drummers, running along the wall fetching ammunition or water for the men crouched behind the parapet. Lincoln climbed the rough wooden steps to the parapet itself and walked along it, stopping now and then to speak to this man or that—a soldier close by him jerked back suddenly and fell.

Lincoln turned, startled, and a soldier crouching near yelled, “Get down, you imbecile!” and grabbed the skirts of his black coat. “You'll get your fool head shot off!” Lincoln sprang down from the parapet to the walkway behind it where the men crouched under cover. He was still head and shoulders over the parapet and, cursing, the soldier shoved him completely behind cover.

Already soldiers were carrying away the dead man, crouching as bullets whined overhead. Mary closed her eyes, feeling as if she were going to faint.

Any of her soldier brothers would have shot that tall black figure, killed him.. . .

Had any of her three soldier brothers been left alive.

By Sunday, two corps of Grant's men had filed into Washington's
defensive ring, marched double-time from the siege camps before
Petersburg and Richmond. General Early was forced to withdraw. The band of rebel horsemen went on to elude their pursuers and burn
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, increasing the cries for the war to be stopped.

Which, she supposed, was the point of the whole raid. The summer was one of agony. Grant returned to the siege-lines before Petersburg, unable to break through to capture Richmond. Lee, undermanned and starving, held him in a death-lock. Patiently, Lincoln negotiated with Republican politicians about what promises could be made for treatment of the seceded states once they were conquered,
if
they were conquered. And all the while, wounded men came back from the fronts by the trainload.

Through it all she visited hospitals, distributing fruit and flowers to the sick men and reporting on the conditions—still horrible despite all the Sanitary Committee could do—in the vain hopes that Lincoln might be able to have changes made. She met Myra Bradwell again, working indefatigably among the wounded, and had her and her English-born husband to supper one evening. Lincoln and Myra talked about law and women's suffrage until past midnight, and Mary was much taken with Myra's big, slow-moving, gentle husband: the Judge, she called him.

But the heat, and the stink, and the miasma of sickness hovering over Washington in the summer proved too much, and in August Mary took Tad and fled to the cool mountains of Vermont.

It was there that she read that Uncle Billy Sherman, Grant's fellow butcher, had taken Atlanta, dealing the Confederacy a crippling blow.

The bloody tide had turned.

Mary—and everyone else in the country—could see that victory was only a matter of time.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTY-THREE

T
HE SUMMER OF 1864 WAS A STRANGE TIME, FRIGHTENING AND DARK.
She remained in Vermont until late in the autumn. Sometimes she spent whole days lying on the sofa in a haze of migraine and paregoric, surrounded by newspapers. They were filled with editorials and letters about Lincoln's call for Negro regiments: jeers from white men in both North and South who scoffed that a servile race—a people who had submitted to slavery for generations—would be useless as soldiers.

They were swiftly proven wrong. Black men flocked to the Union standards with a kind of angry joy, and fought with courage and ferocity at Port Hudson, Louisiana, in South Carolina, and in the Crater before the fortifications at Petersburg. When they were captured by Confederates they were generally slaughtered out of hand, for violating the cardinal law of the slaveholding states: that no black man carry arms against a white. Reading accounts of the battles—or letters from Lizabet Keckley, or Frederick
Douglass, or even from her young friend John Wilamet, now with the medical corps in Grant's camp before Richmond—Mary wondered if
Lincoln's hesitation in using the black troops more frequently was because he feared to further alienate the population of the South.

The reactions of the Northern soldiers were bad enough. “I'd rather be a private in a white troop than the General of a nigger regiment” summed it up.

On days when she felt better she would write long letters, to Mercy Conkling, or Cousin Lizzie, or to Lincoln. She had tried to get Lizzie the job as postmaster for Springfield, for which Mary considered her cousin far better qualified than most men she knew, but did not succeed. She tried again to get Lincoln's permission for Emilie to sell her cotton without taking the loyalty oath, in order to avoid destitution, but Lincoln refused.

Mary didn't know whether she should feel anger at his wretched stubbornness about honor, or pity for the pain she knew he felt. Both
Margaret and Mattie—Emilie's full sisters—made similar requests, and Mary's pity dissolved when it came to her ears that in the expectation of receiving the coveted permit, Margaret had purchased hundreds of bales of other people's cotton at dirt-cheap prices, with the understanding that the profits would be split.

To make matters worse, when Mattie visited the White House briefly that fall, she had obtained an exemption from Lincoln to having her luggage searched. She had immediately bought up enough medical supplies—mostly quinine and opium—to fill several trunks and had borne them back in triumph to the Confederacy, along with a new uniform for Robert E. Lee.

With Atlanta taken, and victory assured, Lincoln was easily re-elected in November. His Vice-President this time was Andrew Johnson, a dour and self-educated War Democrat from Tennessee. There was now little talk of making peace. When Mary returned to Washington late in
November, she saw the ranks of the blue-clothed, dark-faced soldiers march past at military reviews, singing: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord....”

And she wondered if somewhere, Saul, Nelson, and Pendleton were listening, and any of those men chained on the deck on the Ohio River steamboat who'd kept four-year-old Robert from falling into the paddlewheel, all those years ago.

She found her husband deeply withdrawn, exhausted, like a man running completely on nerves. Tad was wilder than ever, charging the flocks of petitioners on the office stairway a nickel apiece “for the benefit of the Sanitary Committee,” or harnessing Nanko the goat to a laid-down kitchen chair and racing this improvised chariot up and down the White House halls. He still slept with Lincoln every night, and visited his father in his office a dozen times a day through the “secret passage” Lincoln had had built that fall, a short hallway cut out of one end of the office anteroom that led directly from his own office to the parlor. Tad had a special knock: Lincoln would even interrupt Cabinet meetings to let his son in.

“You're spoiling him rotten,” snapped Mary, during one of those sharp-tongued squabbles that she'd initiate in the hopes of breaking through the wall of her husband's silences.

Lincoln didn't mention the weeks she'd take Tad to Philadelphia and the White Mountains with her, and let him run wild, buying him anything he asked for. He said only, “He'll grow out of it,” with a patience that made Mary, her nerves in shreds, itch to pull his hair out by the roots.

He wasn't well, either. On those rare occasions when she saw him in full daylight it was obvious to her that he'd lost nearly thirty pounds over the past four years, and his color was not good. But to her questions he merely replied, “I feel fine, Mother. Just tired.”

And he looked at her with a gaze as probing, as questioning, as worried as her own. She sometimes wondered whether he knew about her debts, or about the deals she'd made with businessmen and politicians to cover them. She didn't think so. She knew him well enough to know that his devil-take-the-hindmost honesty would not have tolerated the situation, if he knew. But the fear that he might guess created still more silence between them, a silence she had no idea how to break.

With Atlanta taken, and the broken-down nexus of the South's railway system in Union hands, the end came rapidly. Without shipments of supplies, the Confederate troops were starving. They fought without boots and sometimes without guns or ammunition, running forward under fire to snatch the weapons from the hands of the enemy dead. Still they hung on, maneuvering with dwindling strength in the tree-clogged swampy country around Richmond.

Unable to sell their cotton, Confederate civilians were starving, too. Mary dreamed one night of Arabella Richardson Bodley, her girlhood nemesis, sitting alone in the echoing shadows of an empty house, weeping in a faded dress of home-dyed black. That fall Emilie wrote to them of her brother Levi's death, from the physical hardships of starvation on a constitution undermined—Mary strongly suspected—by drink. Still, Emilie's accusation hurt, that they had contributed to his death. “The last money I have in the world I used to make the unfruitful appeal to you . . . I request only the right which humanity and justice always gives to widows and orphans. I would also remind you that your minié bullets have made us what we are.”

Lincoln did not afterwards mention his “Little Sister,” but Mary could read the grief in his face.

Dozens of women now waited among the petitioners in Lincoln's office, to beg for the release and reprieve of brothers, husbands, sons imprisoned for military crimes, usually desertion or dereliction of duty. Mary always regarded these women with suspicion, as she regarded any woman who came close to Lincoln. In her more reasonable moments she knew perfectly well that she had not the slightest cause for mistrust—Lincoln would no more betray her than he would betray the Union.

But he had never lost his liking for women. And with his neglect of her—his maddening distance from her—her jealousy festered.

In January of 1865, against Mary's pleas and sobs, Lincoln finally asked General Grant if he might have room on his staff for Robert, who was commissioned as a Captain early the following month. The Army was still camped before Petersburg, twenty-five miles from Richmond on the
Appomatox River. Mary lived in an agony of apprehension, expecting every morning that the day would bring her news of her eldest son's death.

When Lincoln told her, early in March, that he was making a trip to Grant's headquarters, she said at once, “You cannot leave me behind.”

“Ca' I go doo?” demanded Tad in the next breath—Alexander Williamson, though he still couldn't entice the boy back to his studies, had at least worked with him on his speech, with the result that he was becoming slowly more intelligible. “I wanna see dem rebels—ca' I day my gun?”

So a party was organized: Mary and her maid Mrs. Cuthbert, Tad and his bodyguard Billy Crook, traveled downriver on the small steamboat
River Queen,
which was anchored below the bluff at City Point. Though Lincoln was quite clearly ill he asked to be taken to see the fighting. Mary wept again and pleaded, remembering the soldier who had fallen only feet from him on the parapet of Fort Stevens. “These men are shedding their blood—giving their lives—for my principles and my decisions,” replied Lincoln quietly. “The least I can do is let them know how I value them.”

She absolutely insisted that Tad remain with her on the
River Queen,
however, and even the boy's subsequent tantrum and tears would not move her. She posted Lieutenant Crook to keep an eye on him and keep him busy, and spent the day pacing, nervous, and endeavoring to be polite to Julia Grant. The train back from field headquarters was late and she sent a dozen messages to the telegrapher's tent, demanding to be told why. When the reply came that it was hauling several cars full of wounded, and thus forced to travel slowly, she was convinced that this was only a lie to calm her, and got into a quarrel with Julia Grant on the strength of it.

Lincoln got off the train silent and pale. “Did you see fighting?” demanded Tad, as he seized his father's hand.

“Only the field afterwards,” Lincoln said, “and the burying of the dead.” He went to his cabin and closed the door.

In the morning he looked a little better, and set out on horseback to watch General Phil Sheridan's men coming in across the river. The plan was that he would meet Mary and Mrs. Grant at General Ord's camp at Malvern Hill in the afternoon to review Ord's troops. Mary alternated between annoyance that she was relegated to following in a mere ambulance wagon, and agony that Lincoln's party would be overwhelmed by rebel cavalry, a situation which wasn't helped by Julia Grant's matter-of-fact “Nonsense, the rebels haven't either the horses or the men to take on a bodyguard.”

“That's exactly the kind of lie I expect
your
husband
would
tell you,” snapped Mary as Colonel Porter helped her into the wagon.

Julia Grant's square face reddened. “Just because your husband managed to get himself re-elected, you think you know everything about soldiering,” the General's wife retorted. “But let me tell you, if it weren't for
my
husband's victories, McClellan would be in office now!”

Colonel Porter began hesitantly, “Ladies, now, it's a long ride....”

But Mary ignored him, ignored everything but the rush of uncontrollable fury that filled her. “Oh, and you're just waiting until the next election, aren't you, for you to move into the White House!”

“Ladies . . .”

“Well, if we do I
certainly
wouldn't be able to come up to
your
standard of balls and receptions, even if it's
not
wartime....”

“Of
that
I haven't the smallest doubt!” Mary shot back at her. “But what the diplomatic community might think of being served whiskey punch and cookies instead of more customary hors d'oeuvres I shudder to imagine, even if you
do
manage to get yourself a decent dress!”

Mrs. Grant stared at her in shocked fury, and then turned her face away, breathing hard. Mary whirled at once upon Colonel Porter and demanded, “Can't your driver go any faster? The review shall be over by the time we get there.”

“The going is very difficult over corduroy roads like this one, ma'am,” replied the officer nervously. He nodded out the front of the wagon, past the driver's rigid blue-clad back, to the band of felled trees laid side to side over which the ambulance wagon was cautiously bumping. “It's swampy country from here to Malvern Hill, ma'am. This's the only kind of road—”

“Don't you think I know about the kind of terrain that justifies a corduroy road?” shouted Mary. “Don't treat me like a child! And just because the road's bad doesn't mean your driver has to stop and make a separate decision at each log!”

Porter swallowed. “See if you can't speed 'em up a little, Tim,” he said to the driver, and Julia Grant said icily, “I ought to warn you, Colonel, that I am an absolute martyr to seasickness in a swaying vehicle!”

“Well, in that case, I suggest that you stay here,” retorted Mary, “and I shall
walk
to Malvern Hill. Stop this cart.”

“Mrs. Lincoln, it's a sea of mud between here and there....”

“I'm sure the mud will part for her, as the sea did for Moses,” put in Mrs. Grant.

“I said stop this cart and let me out!” Mary shrieked at the Colonel. “Or else make your man move those horses a little!”

“Ma'am, I don't—”

Mary swung around on the driver. “Speed those horses up!”

“Ma'am—”

Her head gave an agonizing throb—really, Carrington's Nerve Elixir was nearly useless in keeping headaches at bay . . . “I said speed them up or stop them and let me walk!” she screamed, tears suddenly bursting from her eyes at the thought of missing the review—missing the chance to stand by her husband's side at a time when it really mattered—at the thought of having the moment spoiled by a headache.

“Do it, Tim,” ordered Colonel Porter, and Tim laid on the whip, starting the ambulance forward with a brutal jolt that flung Mary against the back of the wooden seat and caused Julia Grant to cry, “Oh, my God!” The next jar flung both women up off the seat entirely, cracking Mary's head on the bow of the ambulance's roof.