The First Lady and the Rebel, page 31
Meanwhile, the press had renewed its tittle-tattle against her. Her shopping trip to New York in April generated the usual sniping, the usual insinuations that every bolt of silk she bought was somehow purchased with the blood of Union soldiers. (You would think she never did anything else but shop!) And there was the tedious business about her sister Martha and her golden buttons. Mary had refused to see the woman when she was in Washington pestering the President for a pass South, for unlike Emily’s, Martha’s traitorous husband was perfectly alive, and besides, Mary had never much liked this pert little half sister, the more so because people outside the family had often commented on their similarities. But when the story finally ran its course, the public would remember only that Martha was a sister of Mary, and a Confederate; ergo, Mary must be a Confederate sympathizer herself.
All of this would have been no more than the perpetual irritation of a buzzing fly or a barking dog had it not been the year of the presidential election. So Mary went to work. She could not control the antics of her rebel relations, and she could not stop shopping entirely, but she could reduce her debts, and she could do her best to secure her husband’s reelection. With these goals in mind, she cultivated the acquaintance of some influential men, especially Mr. Abram Wakeman and Mr. Simeon Draper, and let it be known that if they put in a kind word for her with her creditors to reduce her debts, not to mention kind words to the newspaper editors of their acquaintances, she would in turn put in a kind word with the President when he decided on appointments for his second term.
All this, of course, was no more than many a man did for the sake of politics. Even Mr. Lincoln with his fine sense of probity was not entirely above it himself, as the stream of friendly articles that appeared in the press, their florid, anonymous prose coming straight from the pen of Mr. Hay, showed. But for a woman, of course, it was quite different. She wasn’t supposed to politick and wasn’t supposed to shop—only, apparently, to take tea with other ladies, who didn’t want to take tea with her in the first place.
Mary shook her head disgustedly at the sheer injustice of it. Then she sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. Wakeman.
* * *
Soon after his father secured his party’s nomination, Bob graduated from Harvard, and with it renewed his request to be allowed to enlist in the army. Mary’s hope that his academic career would outlast the war had not been realized, for the war had entered its fourth summer, with utterly no signs of an approaching Union victory. The best that could be said was that General Grant, now in charge of all the Union forces, was much more willing to incur casualties than his predecessors—and that summer, the casualties came in alarming numbers. Mary remained determined that Bob, however much he might desire otherwise, not be one of them.
So with a sulking Bob in tow this year, the family removed to the Soldiers’ Home in July, hoping that this would not be their last summer there. By this time, everyone fell naturally into his or her usual routine: Mr. Lincoln riding back and forth to the White House; Mary visiting hospitals, going for drives, and making plans to head north to escape the heat; Tad generally getting into everyone’s way and enjoying himself thoroughly. As for Bob, he soon regained his spirits, having found a diversion in Miss Mary Harlan of Iowa, whose father was in the Senate. Mary forbore from pointing out that spending time with this pretty young lady and with his male friends was surely more pleasant than getting killed or wounded in Virginia under the auspices of General Grant or marching toward Atlanta under the direction of General Sherman, as much of the Union army was doing at the moment.
It was a miserably hot summer, even by Washington standards, but it was not miserable enough to deter the rebels from making their usual summer excursion north under the command of General Jubal Early. This time, their goal was Washington itself. With most of the Union’s resources engaged down south, it was not an unrealistic one, as was shown by the rebel victory at Monocacy, Maryland, a disquietingly short distance from the capital. “I’m half tempted to let them have the place,” Mr. Lincoln said the next day after returning to the Soldiers’ Home for the evening and relaying the news that the rebels were progressing further into the city, guarded at present by a small force augmented by a contingent of convalescent soldiers, government clerks, veterans, and quartermaster employees. “But they won’t get it. Don’t worry, Molly.”
“How can I not worry after that note?” The day before, following the defeat at Monocacy, Secretary Stanton had sent the President a note informing him that his carriage had been followed by a stranger, and urging him to inform the guard detailed at the Soldiers’ Home.
“If you hadn’t been looking over my shoulder as I read, you wouldn’t have seen the note, and you’d have nothing to worry about.” Mr. Lincoln fanned himself with another letter. Whatever he might think of their contents, their utilitarian properties could not be denied.
“Not only do they want to take the city, they want to get hold of you.”
“Could well be, but I’m not going to worry about it. If I get captured, I’m sure Mrs. White or one of your other sisters down there will put in a kind word with Jeff Davis.”
Mary’s only answer was to give her husband a frosty look, which did nothing to alleviate the heat.
They were sleeping side by side, as they often did here, where Mr. Lincoln’s retiring hours were less eccentric than at the White House. Then they heard a banging, which, if not the rebel army, sounded like the next thing to it. “Come in,” the President called. “Open the door, don’t break it down.”
A young soldier stuck in his head as Mary, clad in the slightest of chemises, pulled up the sheet with a squawk. “Secretary Stanton, sir, has asked that all of you return to the White House straightaway. The rebels are at Tennallytown!” Unfazed by the sight of the head of the Union in his nightshirt, he handed the President a note.
That was less than five miles from the Soldiers’ Home. Mr. Lincoln read the note, adjusting his nightshirt at the same time. He nodded. “Guess we’d better humor him, Molly.”
So at midnight, the presidential carriage, surrounded by enough guards to bring some comfort even to Mary, rattled back to the White House. The fear of invasion and the heat had lured many Washingtonians out to their stoops to pass the night, and Tad waved at them, although it was doubtful whether he could be seen amid the phalanx of mounted men. “It’s important to keep up their morale,” he explained.
“Good point,” Mr. Lincoln said as Mary listened for enemy fire.
At the Executive Mansion, they repaired sleepily to their respective chambers, which in Bob’s case meant climbing into bed with Mr. Hay. “You could sleep with me,” Tad offered.
“No.” Bob managed a tired grin. “Unless you want me to keep the rebels off.”
Tad drew himself up. “I can handle them.”
Despite Tad’s confidence, Mary slept but little that night. By contrast, when Mr. Lincoln joined her, he looked more refreshed by sleep than he usually did, and he not only ate his meager breakfast with enthusiasm, but asked for more. Having disposed of his toast, he said, “Well, I’m going to head to Fort Stevens to see how things stand. Wouldn’t want to get there late and miss Early.”
Mary groaned, and her husband departed, to return in a few hours in high spirits. There had been skirmishing before the fort, but the Union troops were acquitting themselves admirably, down to the clerks manning the rifle pits, who had managed not to shoot themselves and to pick off the occasional rebel. And soon these enthusiastic amateurs would be replaced by the Sixth Corps. “Will you be going to the fort tomorrow?” Mary asked.
“Yes, unless Early gets the hint that he’s not welcome here.”
“Then take me with you.” She crossed her arms defiantly, waiting for an argument.
The President did not give her the satisfaction of winning one. “All right, Molly.”
They set off the next afternoon. Not since the earliest days of the war, when the fashionable of the city had packed their picnic baskets and rushed to Bull Run, had Mary seen Washington in such a state. Clerks sweated at their desks, pedestrians trudged along, and the streetcars toiled back and forth as usual, but all was done amid the sound of gunfire rumbling in the distance. As they neared the fort, every high place they passed was occupied by people clutching spyglasses and opera glasses, straining to catch a view of the action.
With all this, it took some time to reach Fort Stevens, erected soon after the war had begun. “See our signal corps?” the President said, pointing to men standing on an embankment waving brightly colored flags. “They’re doing a fine job. Of course, I don’t have the faintest idea what they’re telling each other, but I suppose it’s right.”
“Back again, sir?” someone called as they entered the fortification.
“Oh, yes,” Mr. Lincoln said. “Can’t keep me away.”
They passed into the fort’s hospital ward, the President shaking the hands of the surgeons and speaking kindly to the patients. Then he said, “Well, Molly? Do you want to see the fighting?”
“Yes,” Mary said firmly.
“Then come along, but you’ll have to get on a parapet.” He chuckled. “Had a bit of a scrape on one yesterday.”
“A scrape?”
“Nothing to worry about. Are you game? You can stay here if you like.”
Mary took a firming breath. “I am game.”
Compressing her crinoline with difficulty—the fort had not been designed with such an eventuality in mind—she made her way to the parapet and stared at the expanse below her, dotted with rebels in every state of being from very much alive to very much dead. Jubal Early, she would later learn, had given up trying to take Washington after learning that reinforcements were on the way and had settled for harassing its defenders. But harassment, Mary discovered, still provided plenty of action. “Good Lord!” she sputtered. “They’re shooting from that house!”
“Best get down then, Mary.”
“And you should do the same! For heaven’s sake, now!”
The President obeyed, but only for a moment. Soon, his curiosity had led him back to his perch, accompanied by Dr. Cornelius Crawford, a surgeon with whom he had been chatting. As Mary watched from her place of relative safety, she heard a burst of fire, just as a young officer called, “Get down, you fool!”
In unison, the President and Dr. Crawford tumbled from their perch, the surgeon batting at his leg. “I’ve been shot,” he said. “Damn rebels. Will someone get a surgeon? I mean, another surgeon.”
“Help him away,” snapped the young officer. He glared at the President, who was helping support Dr. Crawford. “As for you—good Lord, is it President Lincoln? I did not real—”
“Good work you boys are doing,” Mr. Lincoln said as the officer turned perfectly white. “Keep it up.” He stooped and picked up his hat, checking it for bullet holes. “No damage here. Crawford, you’re not badly hurt, are you?”
“No,” said Dr. Crawford, looking at his leg with admirable detachment.
“Then let’s leave our friends here to their work, shall we? Good day, Captain…?”
“Holmes,” muttered the captain. “Oliver Wendell Holmes. I didn’t know it was you, sir. But if I had—well, we need you with us to see this through.”
“A good point,” Mr. Lincoln noted pleasantly.
Dr. Crawford’s comrades having arrived to assist him, the President escorted Mary to the carriage, where she waited while her husband conferred with the fort’s commander. “I have given the order to shell those houses on which the rebels are perching,” he said as he took his place in the carriage. “It’ll be getting noisy here soon, I reckon.”
“Mr. Lincoln, what did you mean you were in a scrape yesterday?”
“The same thing, too curious for my own good. I was ordered to get down.” He chuckled. “Though the officer yesterday was rather more polite about it. You, my dear, did rather well, considering.”
“It is not an experience I wish to repeat.”
Yet she realized that except for her husband’s peril, she had never felt fear. Instead, she had felt strangely exhilarated, more alive than she had felt in months. With that feeling came a surge of optimism. Something about the episode—maybe the admiration mingling with mortification in the young officer’s face, maybe the easy way in which Dr. Crawford and his fellow surgeons had greeted the President, maybe something completely indefinable—had given her hope.
The President could win this election yet. And, Mary thought as she rode off arm in arm with her husband, sooner or later, the Union was going to win this war.
26
Emily
July to October 1864
Over the course of the war, Emily had become a voracious newspaper reader. Although she had been deprived of Southern papers recently, the Northern papers generally printed excerpts from them, in the interest of sharing news from the enemy, and the Southern papers did the same. Thus, it was while reading one of the Northern papers that she read a Confederate account of a battle near Atlanta that had occurred some days before.
The 1st Kentucky, then in reserve, was ordered to charge them, in order to bring off the artillery and horses, which was done in gallant style, led by the gallant and intrepid McCawley, they closed upon on the foe, and a hand-to-hand rencounter took place which has not been equaled during the war; our men using the butts of their guns and pistols, and the enemy their bayonets…
Our loss was 21 including Capt. McCawley, who Gen. Williams says was the best staff officer he ever saw in any army.
Mac!
After Morgan’s raid, Emily had written to Mac with what she hoped was an amusing and federally inoffensive story of Lexington’s outrage—shared by Unionists and Southern sympathizers alike—over the appropriation by the raiders of the town’s most renowned mare, Skedaddle. Morgan had sense enough to realize that some things were sacred, and Skedaddle had soon been returned to her favorite pasture, none the worse for her brief Confederate service. No reply from Mac had arrived, only this sad news.
Emily frantically scanned newspaper after newspaper, hoping that the report would be contradicted and finding it confirmed again and again. Only one new detail emerged. Captain McCawley’s remains were taken to Atlanta, for burial next to Brig. Gen. Benjamin Hardin Helm, on whose staff he had served.
Since Mac had reported Hardin’s dying remarks to her, Emily had purposely avoided thinking of what she and Mac were to each other or what they might become. It was far too soon, and the times too uncertain. Now, she could only weep and wonder what might have been, with only two certainties: Mac could have found no better resting place, and Emily had lost her dearest friend.
* * *
After Morgan’s raid, General Stephen Burbridge, who was in charge of the military troops in Kentucky, announced a new policy: for every Union loyalist killed or even injured by Southern sympathizers, four guerilla prisoners would be shot in a public place. Very soon, the general proved true to his word. It would have been the talk of Lexington—except that increasingly, everyone, even those with little to say about the war, was too frightened to talk.
Levi, Emily’s half brother, was at least safe to talk to during this period. In a town of hard-drinking men, he had acquired the reputation of the town drunk—not a mean feat. But diminishing health had reduced him to a state of near sobriety, and Emily, having renewed his acquaintance after returning to Lexington, had taken pity on him in his ailing and impoverished state and stopped by his hotel room with a basket of food several times a week. Unlike the other Todds who had stayed in Kentucky, Levi had remained loyal to the Union, and he often told Emily that when his health improved, he would make speeches on behalf of his brother-in-law Mr. Lincoln. Then he would surely reap the reward of a government job.
Emily had doubts about whether her brother would live to see the election, much less enjoy the fruits of patronage, nor did she want Mr. Lincoln, for all of his kindness to her, to prevail. But in Burbridge’s Kentucky, she kept quiet about this.
She was walking home from Levi’s lodgings at the Broadway Hotel at the end of July, soon after learning of Mac’s death, when she sensed footsteps close behind her. Thinking it some self-important gentleman, she moved over slightly so he could maneuver around her billowing skirt and be about whatever business he deemed so important to mankind. Instead of passing her, though, the man, who wore a Union uniform, said, “Mrs. Helm?”
“Yes?”
“Would you care to come down to headquarters and answer a few questions? Or if not, I can call at your house.”
“Questions? What questions do you want me to answer?”
“We can discuss that later.”
Not wanting to worry the children, Emily said, “I’ll come to headquarters.”
When they reached their destination, the man ushered her to a seat and took a letter from his pocket. Emily gasped when she recognized Mac’s handwriting. “What are you doing with that letter?”
“I would like to know what this man is doing writing to you. Is he a relation?”
“He is—was—a dear friend of my late husband, and myself, and he is where no one can do him harm.”
“Dead, then?”
“Dead.”
Her interrogator studied the letter. “It appears to be in some sort of code.”
“Code? I don’t know any codes. Will you let me read the letter, which should have been delivered to me in the first place?”
Gingerly, the man handed over the letter. It was written entirely from the point of view of Mac’s horse. Brushing her eyes, she handed it back. “For heaven’s sake! This is not code; it is Mac being amusing. I told him about Skedaddle being appropriated by Morgan’s men, and I suppose that inspired him. Now, why are you reading my mail?”
