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.