4
Desperately she wanted to be liked and admired. She did not even know that this desire tormented her like a hidden thorn. It was lost under the surface imperiousness that she had put on defensively, as a child might dress up in a trailing robe and play at being queen. She had no talent for adjustment or reconciliation and her husband’s propensity for seeing the best in people, even his bitterest enemies, puzzled and irritated her. In her mind she put this down as weakness. When she disliked anyone, it was done with vigor and she made no secret of it. When she was displeased she let the whole world know, yet she could not understand why it was that she felt always alone.
The Christmas party at the White House had to be important, if not gay. State Department people, Supreme Court people, senators, generals and their wives, would not expect hilarity. Not with Lee’s menacing army so near, the carnage of Chickamauga so recent, all the factional strife in New York and Missouri and Ohio only temporarily lulled, and definitely, Mary suspected, not defeated.
She had two dresses spread out on her bed, and Elizabeth Heckley, the mulatto seamstress, pinned bits of lace and ribbon bows here and there over the voluminous folds of coral-colored satin and purple velvet. The satin had wide bands of heavy embroidery touched with gold around the skirt and the folds that draped low over the shoulders. Elizabeth fastened a garland of roses at the bosom of that dress and let it trail down the side of the skirt.
“Needs a gold breastpin right there,” she indicated the fastening place of the flowers. “What Mrs. President goin’ to wear on her head?”
“A turban, Lizzie, of this same satin with some pale blue feathers in front and the roses hanging down over my chignon. This dress will have to be for the Christmas party and I know it’s too gay and likely I’ll be criticized for putting off my mourning for poor little Willie. Good gracious, down home where I was raised, I’d wear black for three solid years for a child and for a husband it was forever. But I look awful in black and I know it. It makes me dumpy and sallow and I do owe something to the people. There’s too much crepe already in Washington. It depresses people and hurts the war.”
“This other one would look mighty fine on you, Mrs. President.” The seamstress lovingly stroked the folds of violet velvet. “This dress look like it was made for a queen.” There were bands of embroidery on this gown too, but the embroidery was all gold cord and beads and there was a light overskirt of draped tulle in shades of lilac, lavender, and purple, caught up with little knots of gold leaves.
A queen! Abraham had called her a queen. Mary could see herself trailing a long robe of crimson with a border of gold and ermine. Too bad democracies did not favor such ornate display by their rulers—but the purple velvet did have a regal look. She would wear plumes in her headdress, three of them in the three shades of the overskirt.
“I’ll wear this at the New Years’ reception, though it is a pity to waste anything so handsome on a company of just anybody. See about some feathers and gold trimmings for my headdress, Lizzie, and plenty of white gloves. Last year I ruined four pairs.”
She must see to it that Abraham had plenty of gloves, too. He hated them; he was always pulling them off and stuffing them untidily into a pocket. He was always bursting them, too, and she kept spare pairs handy. His hands had a tendency to swell from prolonged handshaking and inevitably the buttons popped off or the seams split. A pair would be soiled in half an hour too from all those hands, some calloused, some grimy, some too hot and eager.
The New Year’s reception was a great nuisance in Mary’s book—those tramping feet scuffing the floors and the carpets and almost invariably it snowed. And in spite of the vigilance of the guards she knew there was danger. Lately danger had become a haunting oppression to Mary Todd Lincoln.
The election of 1864 was coming up and even in the Union states there was radical opposition so bold it verged on treason, not to overlook the vicious attacks of the newspapers to the South. On those pages Abraham Lincoln was called everything from a degraded idiot to Mephistopheles reincarnate. The South, as Southern-bred Mary Lincoln knew well, was full of impetuous hotheads ready to dare or to do anything for their sacred Cause. There was that O’Neale Greenhow woman, arrested right here in sight of the White House—and even the Mayor of Washington temporarily lodged in jail. And they said that people right in the Provost Office had supplied the Greenhow woman with information that had brought on so many Union defeats at Manassas and other battles. Mary remembered having once met Rose O’Neale Greenhow at a tea somewhere. A handsome and arrogant woman, too friendly with men. She was banished South of the lines now, but women like that always had impetuous friends.
“Get me out something plain, Lizzie,” she ordered now. “I have to shop again this afternoon. The President thinks every soldier in Company K must have a Christmas gift, and where I’ll find things the Lord only knows! ‘Socks,’ he said, ‘Wool socks.’ I doubt if any can be found, and they’d be two dollars a pair if there are any. Anyway, cakes and candy and tobacco—and all those getting harder and harder to get. The crowds in the streets are getting so rough, too, with all these soldiers coming in.”
“I could go, Mrs. Lincoln,” offered Elizabeth, “if you’d tell me what to buy and give me an order to have it charged—and send somebody to help carry.”
“Would you, Lizzie?” Mary was eager with relief. “I’ll send you in a carriage and a boy with you. I have to make a list. I think we’ll forget the socks—there might not be any and anyway their mothers ought to knit socks for them. We wouldn’t know sizes anyway.” Mary fluttered, hunting pen and paper, sending a maid to order the carriage, getting out a heavy cape of her own to keep the sewing woman warm. “You go down to the market, Lizzie, away down on D Street. Things will be cheaper there. There are thirty-three of those men. Just so each one had some little remembrance the President will be satisfied.”
She was grateful not to have to brave again the streets of Washington that were becoming more horrible every day. Deep mud, which Army wagons were churning up, caissons pounding by, cavalry splashing everybody, and soldiers crowding everywhere. The shops were always crowded with the impatient, pushing military and Negroes, and more colored people were thronging into the capital every day, homeless and bewildered. Some of the Negro men were being integrated into the Army but most were a problem that the provosts and police were coping with in desperate confusion.
It all made for discomfort and danger. No real indignity had as yet been offered to her personally since those grim days in New York in July, when she had been hooted in the streets and followed into a shop by a jeering mob of ruffians. Here in Washington her greatest cross was the thinly veiled contempt of the women, formerly socially important, the women the President called “those Secesh dames.” Very boldly they let it be known that their sympathies were with the South.
Washington, Mr. Seward said, and Mr. Stanton agreed with him, was a nest of spies. In spite of imprisonment, grim guards, and ceaseless precautions, messages still went through the lines to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. It was said that Fontaine Maury, the Confederate admiral, had a direct pipeline into the very heart of the Capitol. Suspicion and distrust were rampant, and Mary harbored a constant, nervous fear that either she or Tad might be kidnapped by the Rebels and held as hostages.
She had wondered sometimes in moments of private bitterness just how much Abraham Lincoln would surrender to get his wife back, but Tad was the key to his heart. Lately Company K had had orders to keep close surveillance over the boy but Tad was quick and mobile as a flea. Less than a month before he had been brought back, shouting protests and struggling, from climbing the scaffolding of the half-finished Washington Monument.
She must go out and appear at the receptions and teas planned by wives of officials, but with Christmas at hand now there would be a hiatus in festivities until after the New Year reception at the White House. There was that tiresome affair to plan for, then this Christmas party; it was all hard work and expensive too, and that aspect practical Mary Lincoln always considered seriously. She never saw an elaborate collation spread without secretly adding up in her mind how many bonnets, bracelets, and yards of silk could have been bought with the money.
The Christmas tree in the private sitting room upstairs had been set up and Tad put to work stringing popcorn and bits of bright metal for decorations. A corporal had brought in a sackful of scraps of brass discarded by a cartridge manufacturer and these Tad was tying to lengths of his mother’s red wool. He insisted on doing all this in his father’s office, stepped over by the endless streams of officials and callers, and Mary found him there, squatting behind Lincoln’s desk, surrounded by the litter of his festive preparations.
She entered as usual without knocking, made a brief stiff bow to Noah Brooks, the correspondent from the West Coast, and puckered her brows at the small woman with curling grayish hair and unfashionable bonnet who occupied the one comfortable chair in the room.
The President unlimbered his long legs and jumped up, as did Brooks.
“Come in, come in, my dear!” he greeted his wife. “You know Mr. Brooks—and Mary, this is Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the little woman who wrote the book that started a big war.”
Mrs. Stowe held out a gloved hand. “I am happy to be privileged to meet Mrs. Lincoln.”
“I read your book, Ma’am.” Mary was gracious. “I cried over it, some parts—but part of it made me mad, too. My family owned slaves, Mrs. Stowe, but they never did beat them or set dogs on them—never!”
“One must emphasize the wrong sometimes, Mrs. Lincoln, to bring about what is right,” said Mrs. Stowe. “Undoubtedly your family were Christian people, and exceptional.”
“Mama!” wailed Tad. “You’re standing on my yarn!”
“I only came,” Mary was flustered, “to report to my husband that I have arranged Christmas gifts for his soldiers—as he requested,” she added.
“Sit here, Mrs. Lincoln,” Brooks offered his chair.
“No—no, you have business here. Happy to have met you, Ma’am. You must stay and have dinner with us.” Mary bowed again and hoped she had made a graceful exit as became a queen.
She wondered, as she went down the hall, why women with brains always looked a little frumpy. That dress—homemade, probably, and it didn’t fit anywhere! It was, she decided, safe to leave a woman of as few charms as Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe in the office, especially chaperoned by Noah Brooks. But Mary Lincoln knew well that if Mrs. Stowe had been young and pretty she herself would never have walked out of that office.