THE CABINET ROOM.
INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE.—WASHINGTON.
Vain, seeking admiration, the men who fed her weakness for their own political ends were sure of her favor. Thus, while daily disgracing the State by her own example, she still sought to meddle in its affairs. Woe to Mr. Lincoln if he did not appoint her favorites. Prodigal in personal expenditure, she brought shame upon the President’s House, by petty economies, which had never disgraced it before. Had the milk of its dairy been sent to the hospitals, she would have received golden praise. But the whole city felt scandalized to have it haggled over and peddled from the back door of the White House. State dinners could have been dispensed with, without a word of blame, had their cost been consecrated to the soldiers’ service; but when it was made apparent that they were omitted from personal penuriousness and a desire to devote their cost to personal gratification, the public censure knew no bounds.
From the moment Mrs. Lincoln began to receive recriminating letters, she considered herself an injured individual, the honored object of envy, jealousy and spite, and a martyr to her high position. No doubt some of them were unjust, and many more unkind; but it never dawned upon her consciousness that any part of the provocation was on her side, and after a few tastes of their bitter draughts she ceased to open them. Even death did not spare her. Willie Lincoln, the loveliest child of the White House, was smitten and died, to the unutterable grief of his father and the wild anguish of his mother. She mourned according to her nature. Her loss did not draw her nearer in sympathy to the nation of mothers that moment weeping because their sons were not. It did not lead her in time to minister to such, whom death had robbed and life had left without alleviation. She shut herself in with her grief, and demanded of God why he had afflicted her! Nobody suffered as she suffered. The Nation’s House wore a pall, at last, not for its tens of thousands of brave sons slain, but for the President’s child. The Guests’ Room, in which he died, Mrs. Lincoln never entered again; nor the Green Room, wherein, decked with flowers, his fair young body awaited burial.
In the same way, Mrs. Lincoln bewept her husband. And there is no doubt but that, in that black hour, she suffered great injustice. She loved her husband with the intensity of a nature, deep and strong, within a narrow channel. The shock of his untimely and awful taking-off, might have excused a woman of loftier nature than hers for any accompanying paralysis.
It was not strange that Mrs. Lincoln was not able to leave the White House for five weeks after her husband’s death. It would have been stranger, had she been able to have left it sooner. It was her misfortune, that she had so armed public sympathy against her, by years of indifference to the sorrows of others, that when her own hour of supreme anguish came, there were few to comfort her, and many to assail. She had made many unpopular innovations upon the old, serene and stately régime of the President’s house. Never a reign of concord, in her best day, in her hour of affliction it degenerated into absolute anarchy. I believe the long-time steward had been dethroned, that Mrs. Lincoln might manage according to her own will. At-any-rate, while she was shut in with her woe, the White House was left without a responsible protector. The rabble ranged through it at will. Silver and dining-ware were carried off, and have never been recovered. It was plundered, not only of ornaments, but of heavy articles of furniture. Costly sofas and chairs were cut and injured. Exquisite lace curtains were torn into rags, and carried off in pieces.
While all this was going on below, Mrs. Lincoln, shut up in her apartments, refused to see any one but servants, while day after day, immense boxes, containing her personal effects, were leaving the White House for her newly-chosen abode in the West. The size and number of these boxes, with the fact of the pillaged aspect of the White House, led to the accusation, which so roused public feeling against her, that she was robbing the Nation’s House, and carrying the national property with her into retirement. This accusation, which clings to her to this day, was probably unjust. Her personal effects, in all likelihood, amounted to as much as that of nearly all other Presidents’ wives together, and the vandals who roamed at large through the length and breadth of the White House, were quite sufficient to account for all its missing treasures.
The public also did Mrs. Lincoln injustice, in considering her an ignorant, illiterate woman. She was well-born, gently reared, and her education above the average standard given to girls in her youth. She is a fair mistress of the French language, and in English can write a more graceful letter than one educated woman in fifty. She has quick perceptions, and an almost unrivalled power of mimicry. The only amusement of her desolate days, while shut in from the world in Chicago, when she refused to see her dearest friends and took comfort in the thought that she had been chosen as the object of pre-eminent affliction, was to repeat in tone, gesture and expression, the words, actions and looks of men and women who, in the splendor of her life in Washington, had happened to offend her. Her lack was not a lack of keen faculties, or of fair culture, but a constitutional inability to rise to the action of high motive in a time when every true soul in the nation seemed to be impelled to unselfish deeds for its rescue. She was incapable of lofty, impersonal impulse. She was self-centred, and never in any experience rose above herself. According to circumstance, her own ambitions, her own pleasures, her own sufferings, made the sensation which absorbed and consumed every other. As a President’s wife she could not rise above the level of her nature, and it was her misfortune that she never even approached the bound of her opportunity.
CHAPTER XXV.
THE WHITE HOUSE NOW.
After the War—The Home of President Johnson—Shut Up in the Mountains—Two Years of Exile—A Contrast—Suffering for their Country—Secretly Burying the Dead—A Wife of Seventeen Years—Midnight Studies—Broken Down—A Party of Grandchildren—“My Dears, I am an Invalid”—“God’s Best Gift to Man”—The Woman Who Taught the President—A “Lady of Benign Countenance”—Doing the Honors at the White House—“We are Plain People”—The East Room Filled with Vermin—Traces of the Soldiers—A State of Dirt and Ruin—Mrs. Patterson’s Calico Dress—In the Dairy—A Nineteenth Century Wonder—How the Old Carpets were Patched—The Greenbacks are Forthcoming—How $30,000 were Spent—Buying the Furniture—Working in Hot Weather—“Wrestling with Rags and Ruins”—“Renovated from Top to Bottom”—What the Ladies Wore, and What They Didn’t—The Memory of Elegant Attire—Impressing the Public Mind—How Unperverted Minds are Affected—“Bare-necked Dowagers”[Dowagers”]—“A Large Crowd of Bare Busts”—Elderly Ladies with Raven Locks—The Opinion of a Woman of Fashion—Very Good Dinners—Obsequious to the Will of “the People”—Doors Open to the Mob—Sketching a Banquet—Sentimental Reflections on the Dining Room—The Portraits of the Presidents—The Impeachment Trial—Peace in the Family—The Grant Dynasty—Looking Home-like—Mrs. Grant at Home—What Might Be Done, if—What Won’t Work a Reformation—A Pity for Miss Nellie Grant—How She Suddenly “Came Out”—“A Full Fledged Woman of Fashion”—A “Shoal of Pretty Girls”—How a Certain Young Lady was Spoilt—Brushing Away “the Dew of Innocence”—Need of a Centripetal Soul—Society in the Season—Rare Women with no Tastes—The Wives of the Presidents Summed Up.