During the last troubled months of Mr. Buchanan’s administration, he always spoke with warmth and gratitude of Miss Lane’s patriotism and good sense. Neither he nor her country ever suffered from any conversational lapse of hers, which, in a day so rife with passion and injustice, is saying much. In 1863, Miss Lane was confirmed in the Episcopal church at Oxford, Philadelphia, of which her uncle, Rev. Edward L. Buchanan, was the rector.
In 1866, Miss Lane was married, at Wheatland, to Mr. Henry Elliott Johnston of Baltimore, a gentleman who had held her affections for many years. The congenial pair now abide in their luxurious home in Baltimore, and in private life, as wife and mother, she is as beautiful and more beloved than when, as Miss Lane, she was the proud lady of the President’s House.
It was the misfortune of Mrs. Lincoln to be the only woman personally assailed who ever presided in the White House. She entered it when sectional bitterness was at its height, and when the need of her country for the holiest and highest ministry of women was deeper than it had been in any era of its existence, even that of the Revolution. In that troubled hour, the White House needed a woman to preside over it of lofty soul, of consecrated purpose, of the broadest and profoundest sympathies, and of self-forgetting piety.
The life of the Nation was threatened. The horror of war was imminent. The capital was menaced, as it had never been before, by the treason of its own children. Wives, mothers and daughters, in ten thousand homes, were looking into the faces of husbands, sons and fathers, with trembling and with tears, and yet with sacrificial patriotism. They knew, they felt that the best-beloved were to be slain on their country’s battle-fields. With what supreme devotion and consecration would Abigail Adams, or a thousand women of her heroic type, have approached the Nation’s House as the wife of its President in such an hour. It was the hour for self-forgetting—the hour of sacrifice. Personal vanity and elation, excusable in a more peaceful time, seemed unpardonable in this. Yet, in reviewing the character of the Presidents’ wives, we shall see that there was never one who entered the White House with such a feeling of self-satisfaction, which amounted to personal exultation, as did Mary Lincoln. To her it was the fulfillment of a life-long ambition, and with the first low muttering of war distinctly heard, on every side, she made her journey to Washington a triumphal passage.
A single month, and the President’s call for troops to protect the capital had penetrated the remotest hamlet of the land. All the manly life-blood of the Nation surged toward its defence. All the heart of its womanhood went up to God, crying for its safety. In the distant farm-house women waited, breathless, the latest story of battle. In the crowded cities they gathered by thousands, crying, only, “Let me work for my brother: he dies for me!”
With the record of the march and the fight, and of the unseemly defeat, the newspapers teemed with gossip concerning the new lady of the White House. While her sister-women scraped lint, sewed bandages, and put on nurses’ caps, and gave their all to country and to death, the wife of its President spent her time in rolling to and fro between Washington and New York, intent on extravagant purchases for herself and the White House. Mrs. Lincoln seemed to have nothing to do but to “shop,” and the reports of her lavish bargains, in the newspapers, were vulgar and sensational in the extreme. The wives and daughters of other Presidents had managed to dress as elegant women, without the process of so doing becoming prominent or public. But not a new dress or jewel was bought by Mrs. Lincoln that did not find its way into the newspapers.
Months passed, and the capital had become one vast hospital. The reluctant river every hour laid at the feet of the city its priceless freight of lacerated men. The wharves were lined with the dying and dead. One ceaseless procession of ambulances moved to and fro. Our streets resounded with the shrieks of the sufferers which they bore. Churches, halls and houses were turned into hospitals. Every railroad-train that entered the city bore fresh troops to the Nation’s rescue, and fresh mourners seeking their dead, who had died in its defence. Through all, Mrs. Lincoln “shopped.”
At the White House, a lonely man, sorrowful at heart, and weighed down by mighty burdens, bearing the Nation’s fate upon his shoulders, lived and toiled and suffered alone. His wife, during all the summer, was at the hotels of fashionable watering-places. Conduct comparatively blameless in happier times, became culpable under such exigencies and in such shadow. Jarred, from the beginning, by Mrs. Lincoln’s life, the Nation, under its heavy stress of sorrow, seemed goaded at last to exasperation. Letters of rebuke, of expostulation, of anathema even, addressed to her, personally, came in to her from every direction. Not a day that did not bring her many such communications, denouncing her mode of life, her conduct, and calling upon her to fulfil the obligations, and meet the opportunities of her high station.
To no other woman of America had ever been vouchsafed so full an opportunity for personal benevolence and philanthropy to her own countrymen. To no other American woman had ever come an equal chance to set a lofty example of self-abnegation to all her countrywomen. But just as if there were no national peril, no monstrous national debt, no rivers of blood flowing, she seemed chiefly intent upon pleasure, personal flattery and adulation; upon extravagant dress and ceaseless self-gratification.