The First Lady and the Rebel, page 35
Mary had little to say in response.
For a couple of hours, the men toured the battlefield while Mary and Mrs. Grant visited patients in the hospital tents. Mary had always been kind and attentive to these sick and wounded men, but now that she had so directly glimpsed the horrors they had seen, she marveled at those who were able to summon a smile when she approached them, and understood those who could not.
When they at last reboarded the train, now augmented by several cars bringing the wounded to City Point, all were pensive over the sights of the day. Captain John Barnes, a naval officer whose vessel, the Bat, had shadowed the River Queen on its voyage in order to protect the Lincolns, had joined the landlubbers on the excursion to the front, and had made himself useful by helping to succor the injured as they awaited transportation to the hospitals. “I came across this red-headed rebel boy—I mean a boy, fourteen at best and I suspect closer to twelve—lying on his back amid a heap of bodies, begging for his mother. I couldn’t see any injury on him, so I asked him what the matter was, hoping I might be able to get him on his feet and walk him back to headquarters and to one of our lady nurses. He turned his head to show me, and I saw the most ghastly head wound I’ve seen. He died then and there, just from the effort.”
“The poor little thing,” Mary and Mrs. Grant said, almost in unison.
“That’s who they’ve been reduced to sending into battle,” Mr. Lincoln said. “Children.” He shook his head. “It can’t end soon enough. And yet there are people who claim we enjoy this.”
* * *
The next day, the President decided to review some ships and General Ord’s Army of the James. This would entail a journey down the James River to Aiken’s Landing, a route that to Mary’s relief would spare them the horrors of the previous day. As the River Queen was the most commodious vessel, the Grants joined the Lincolns onboard for the voyage, as did General and Mrs. Ord. Another general’s wife! But at least Mrs. Ord did not try to crowd Mary off her own sofa.
In fact, the water part of the trip was excellent. As they passed through the pontoon bridge that General Sheridan was using to cross the James, the President admired the engineering, while Tad and young Jesse Grant snickered at the sight of some soldiers bathing on the bank and not leaving a great deal to the imagination. From there they proceeded to the USS Malvern, where Admiral David Porter surprised them all by providing an excellent luncheon, far better than anything Mary had had on land recently. Even the President appeared to notice what he ate.
At Aiken’s Landing, Mary, Mrs. Grant, General Grant’s aide Captain Adam Badeau, and an additional escort, Lieutenant Colonel Horace Porter, settled into an ambulance, and the other men got on the horses that had traveled on the River Queen. This time, the President rode Cincinnati. Captain Barnes, who again was among the party, accepted the offer of a horse, to the accompaniment of much jesting about sailors being unused to riding. “I’ll have Mrs. Ord look after you,” General Ord said to Captain Barnes, nodding at his wife, who though not an extraordinarily pretty woman did cut a nice figure in a riding habit.
As their ambulance set off, Mary could not help but think that Mrs. Ord had the better of the bargain. The road was a corduroy one, the logs that formed it having been laid with little regard to uniformity of size, so their conveyance, not intended for comfort in the best of circumstances, jolted and bounced while at the same time traveling at the pace of a weary snail. No self-respecting horse would follow it, and Captain Barnes and Mrs. Ord soon drifted away, as, of course, had the President and General Grant.
Mary perceived that if they did not pick up the pace, the review would start without her. “Can’t the driver hurry?”
Lieutenant Colonel Porter frowned. “Actually, I think he’s taken a wrong turn.”
“Perhaps, sir, you should have kept him on the right path,” Mary snapped.
Mrs. Grant exchanged a sympathetic look with her husband’s aide. “This terrain is so swampy, one part of it looks just like the other to— Ouch!”
Their bonneted heads slammed up against the roof of the ambulance, and for a moment, the contraption lurched so much that it appeared that it would fall over into the muck. “Mrs. Lincoln! Mrs. Grant! Are you hurt?”
“No,” said Mrs. Grant. “Just shaken. But my bonnet!” She took it off and stared at it ruefully. “At least it’s not my best one. Mrs. Lincoln?”
Mary still sat stunned from the impact, which seemed to have revived the pain from the injury she had received before Gettysburg. She blinked. “Yes. Please stop and let me out of this conveyance immediately.”
“Mrs. Lincoln, you will ruin your clothing, and get there no faster,” Lieutenant Colonel Porter said with maddening practicality. “Why, I think we’ve got past the worst of the road anyway.”
Most reluctantly, Mary acceded, and the ambulance continued on its forlorn way. Then at last, the assembled troops, white and colored, came into view, as did the reviewing party. “A noble sight,” Mrs. Grant commented.
But Mary hardly gave them a glance. Her gaze was fixed on the President’s top hat, followed at too close a distance by a lady’s hat.
Well. It was reasonable that the review had started without her, Mary supposed; the President and the troops simply couldn’t stand there staring at each other while waiting for Mary’s tardy entourage. But for a lady to be prancing on horseback by her husband’s side in front of the cream of the Union army, as if she had some right to be there, while Mary was stuck in this sorry vehicle? As her head throbbed beneath her crushed bonnet, her anger rose. “Who is that woman, and how dare she personate me!”
“No one could impersonate you, my dear Mrs. Lincoln,” Captain Badeau said.
“She must leave his side immediately. She has no business there whatsoever!”
Mrs. Grant doing her own very fair personation of a member of the Signal Corps, the lady—Mrs. Ord—spotted her and immediately rode over to the ambulance, followed in due time by Captain Barnes. “Mrs. Lincoln! Mrs. Grant!” Mrs. Ord held out her free hand. “I am terribly sorry that we were separated from you, but my horse is quite spirited, and—”
“How dare you ride beside the President!”
Captain Barnes said, “Mrs. Lincoln, Mrs. Ord meant no harm. If there is any fault at all, it is mine. When we reached the troops, we had to go somewhere, and Mrs. Ord asked me whether I thought it would be proper for us to join the reviewing column. Not being sure of the army etiquette, I asked a staff officer, and he told me to come right along. So we did, until Mrs. Grant signaled to us just now.”
“Had I seen you earlier, I would have come over straightaway,” Mrs. Ord added. “I am most sorry. But in any case, I was not close to the President at all. General Grant, my husband, and others were at his si—”
“Are you calling me delusional, you strumpet?”
“Strumpet!” Mrs. Ord’s lip wobbled, and then she actually burst into tears. “I will not stay here to be insulted so. Strumpet!”
“I will escort you to City Point,” Captain Barnes said with a mix of gallantry and relief. “Come.”
With a parting sniffle, Mrs. Ord accepted the offer, and the two rode off, Mrs. Ord’s horsemanship not affected by her emotions.
“Let us ride over there now,” Mrs. Grant said, breaking the silence.
“You presume to give orders now, Mrs. Grant?”
“For heaven’s sake!”
“I am not so mistaken to see what you are aiming at, Mrs. Grant. You want to be in the White House, do you not?”
“I am quite satisfied as a general’s wife, Mrs. Lincoln.”
Mary tossed her aching head. “Oh, you had better take it if you can get it. It is very nice.”
“Drive on,” Captain Badeau said. “Quickly.”
“Oh, there you are, Molly,” the President said when their ambulance finally reached the reviewing column.
“Yes,” Mary said, gritting her teeth. “There I am.”
* * *
“Would you tell me what in the devil this is all about?”
It was near midnight on the River Queen, back in harbor at City Point. There had been an awkward dinner with the Grants, followed by an awkward visit from Captain Barnes—well, not a visit. Mary had insisted that the man leave his quarters at the Bat and give a full account of the goings-on with Mrs. Ord. “I made it quite clear at dinner. General Ord’s wife personated me. I cannot understand why a man who would humiliate me in that manner should be kept on in his position.”
“You seriously expect me to get rid of a perfectly good general, just before our push into Petersburg, because of some silly quarrel with a woman I didn’t give a second glance to?”
“Well—”
“You dragged poor Captain Barnes out of his bed for this.”
“Well—”
“You forced me to endure a meal, listening to you rant about this nonsense, with General Grant and his staff looking on, probably wondering why I didn’t take you in hand.”
“Well—”
“I don’t understand this, Mary.”
Hearing him use her given name, instead of “Molly,” was like having him slap her in the face. She flinched and started to speak, but he went on talking. “In our twenty—”
“Twenty-two!”
“Dang it, woman, I was going to say, twenty-two years of marriage, I have never once thought of being with another woman. Not once! In that time, I have let you have men and boys stay the night in Springfield when I was away because you were terrified of staying alone. Since we’ve been in Washington, I have let you entertain men in my absence, let them stay until all hours. I have let you travel with them, ride in carriages alone with them. Some of these were men with reputations I wouldn’t want, like Wikoff. But I let you have your way, because I trusted you. Even after I received letters claiming I was being cuckolded. I tossed them aside with the contempt they deserved. Why? Because I trust you. And you should trust me. But when I ride out in front of thousands of people, with a lady a few feet behind me, without even paying attention to her, you carry on like a shrew.”
“I do trust you! It is not that. It is…the disrespect to my position.”
“I’ve made allowances, Mary. I know you’re still mourning Willie. I’m still mourning Willie. I know you’ve lost two brothers in the war—don’t tell me you don’t care about those dead boys, because I know you do. I know the nonsense that’s been talked about your loyalty. So I’ve put up with a lot. But when you toss your fits in public like you did today… Do you think I enjoy having men look on at me, pitying me?”
She shook her head.
“What got into you? I’m asking. I just don’t understand.”
Mary was silent, because she hardly knew the answer herself. Her envy of Mrs. Grant, the dead and dying men she had seen, Captain Barnes’s pathetic story about the rebel lad—a redhead like poor Alec—begging for his Southern mama, the fatigue of traveling, the bump on her head—maybe it was those things. Or maybe it was the pent-up tensions of these four years of war that were finally being released. “I don’t know. I honestly do not. But it will not happen again, Mr. Lincoln.”
“I hope not.” He hesitated. “Mary, understand this. A man can take a lot—except for being pitied. When that happens…”
He shrugged and left the room.
30
Emily and Mary
March to April 1865
Having left Virginia just as the Lincolns were headed to that beleaguered state, Emily, newly arrived in Washington under General Singleton’s protection, had little to do except to receive General Singleton’s reports about his meetings with the lobbyist Mr. Browning, who was smoothing the way with Mr. Lincoln and the War Department for Emily and others to retrieve their cotton. After a few days of this, Emily decided that it was time to move on to the slightly less expensive, and more congenial, confines of Baltimore, where she would not have to put up quite so much with what had become a deathwatch for the Confederacy. Baltimore, though not as blatantly pro-Southern as it had been at the beginning of the war, still housed a number of Confederate sympathizers, and Barnum’s City Hotel, as well as being spacious and comfortable (no torn-up carpets as at the poor Spotswood!), was noted for its friendly attitude toward Southerners.
Someone had misplaced Emily’s room key, so while the clerk went in search of it, she occupied herself by flipping through the pages of the register she had just signed, looking for the names of any friends or acquaintances from the South who might be staying there. It was another name, however, entered with a flourish under the entries for March 25, that caught her eye. When the clerk returned, triumphantly holding her key aloft, she asked, “John Wilkes Booth? The actor?”
“The same, madam.”
“Did he have an engagement here?”
“No, just a flying visit.” The clerk puffed up a bit. “Mr. Booth always stays here when he is in town. He is very fond of this hotel. But acting, I don’t believe he has been on the stage recently except for an engagement a short time ago in Washington. A pity, as he’s always done well here in Baltimore.”
“He is a fine actor; I saw him in Louisville last year. I hope to see him on the stage again one day.”
“No doubt we will.” The clerk motioned for a porter, who grabbed Emily’s trunk. “I hope you enjoy your stay in Baltimore, madam.”
* * *
Aptly enough, given her behavior there, Mary left City Point on April Fools’ Day. By the time she left, there had been fewer people to embarrass herself in front of. General Grant had gone to the front, with an irritatingly sentimental parting from Mrs. Grant involving a great deal of kissing. Captain Barnes and the Bat were sent to take General Sherman, who had come to City Point to confer with the President and General Grant, back to North Carolina, where, Mary hoped, the captain would vanish into one of the swamps that appeared to lie across most of that benighted state. If there were any infernal generals’ wives around, they kept a safe distance from Mary.
Tad had wanted to stay with his father and in the center of the action. For that very reason, Mary had been inclined to object, but feeling herself rather on delicate ground with the President, refrained from doing so. Instead, she had extracted a promise from her husband to telegraph daily, and with that and a single, dignified kiss (it was a pity Mrs. Grant was not nearby to profit from the example), departed for Washington.
Yet as soon as she arrived at the Executive Mansion, she felt an itch to be back at City Point. Perhaps she would enjoy herself more, she thought, if she collected a congenial party instead of being forced into companionship with the likes of Mrs. Grant. The cultured Senator Charles Sumner would be a fine companion, as would be the Marquis Adolphe de Chambrun, a young Frenchman who was visiting Washington in a quasi-diplomatic capacity and whose unaffected manners and admiration for the United States in general and Mr. Lincoln in particular had quickly endeared him to Mary.
She was attempting to compose an invitation to the marquis in French, and to her chagrin was having to resort to a French grammar book for assistance, when the Secretary of War was announced on the morning of April 3. Though Mary knew Secretary Stanton to have a kindly side—he was a doting father and had always been kind to Tad and poor Willie—smiles did not set easily on his face, which made the full-blown grin he wore a little alarming. “Good news, Secretary Stanton?”
“Yes. We have taken Petersburg, and the rebels have abandoned Richmond. Our men are entering the city—what’s left of it. The rebels set fire to the warehouses and the armory before they left the city, and the fires spread.”
Mary clasped his hand, just as the city churches began to peal their bells and a roar came from the streets. “I guess the news is out,” Mr. Stanton said.
And what news the fall of Richmond, heralding the inevitable collapse of the Confederacy, was! Offices and shops closed, bands played, and the churches and taverns filled as everyone celebrated in his own way. Senator Sumner, who had been an abolitionist long before anyone else, and whom even Mary acknowledged had a rather heavy manner about him, was whistling from his favorite Italian opera when he paid a call on Mary that evening. Mr. Hay, having celebrated at the Willard, was rumored to have had difficulty finding the Executive Mansion afterward.
Secretary Seward ordered a grand illumination of Washington’s public buildings for the evening of April 4. Mary, still fatigued from her journey, stayed home, but from the window she could see the men, women, and children happily traipsing from building to building, admiring the gleaming city, and the next day, the newspapers had all the details. Never had the Executive Mansion, aglow with candles, shimmered so brightly. Mr. French, who had the Capitol in his charge, had bedecked it with a transparency reading This is the Lord’s Doing, It Is Marvelous in Our Eyes lit up from behind with gas. An illuminated ten-dollar note graced the Treasury Building. Not to be outdone by the government, Washington’s merchants had lit their establishments as well, and many of the private houses had followed suit. No house, however, looked finer than that of Mr. French, whose bay window proclaimed THE AMERICAN UNION. Mary made a note to compliment him on his efforts the next time she saw him.
It was marvelous to behold, even vicariously. But she wished the President could have been there to see the city so joyous.
* * *
Emily stared at the newspaper with its taunting headline, RICHMOND FALLEN. It was what she had expected to hear, of course, but she must have held out more hope than she had acknowledged, for the news made her weep. What was next? General Lee’s army was still in the field, and there was still a Confederate government, although its leaders had all fled Richmond. But she could not deceive herself. As Richmond went, so must the Confederacy.
