Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (11 page)

The First Lady presently occupying the White House would certainly have something to say about Mrs. Davis’s confident declarations, if Elizabeth were foolhardy enough to stir up her temper by telling her about them. Mrs. Lincoln was, as she had ever been, a patriotic Unionist, and although the president’s cabinet repeatedly thwarted her efforts to influence her husband on policy matters, she used her position to support the Union cause in other ways. She hosted dinners for dignitaries and, hoping to raise people’s spirits, she arranged for the Marine Band to perform concerts every Wednesday and Saturday when the White House grounds were open to the public. She toured regimental encampments and visited soldiers in the hospital, often distributing delicacies from the White House kitchen and gardens with her own hands. She obtained weapons from the War Department and had them sent to a Union colonel in her home state of Kentucky along with a sincere, heartfelt letter professing her admiration for him as well as her loyalty and love for the nation. She reviewed troops with her husband and was charmed when an army colonel broke a bottle of champagne over a carriage to christen the field where his men were bivouacked as “Camp Mary” in her honor.

Elizabeth wished Mrs. Lincoln’s sincere and helpful efforts received more than an occasional complimentary aside in the press. Unfortunately, reporters and gossips alike were far more fascinated by stories of her secessionist relatives and her lavish expenditures on fringed satin bed curtains and a purple-and-gold dinner service emblazoned with the seal of the United States on each piece—as well as a second set adorned with her own initials. The press hounded her so that she could not escape them, not even on her trips away from Washington to escape the heat, the disease, and the swarms of flies and mosquitoes that plagued the city throughout those oppressive summer days.

Mrs. Lincoln was at home at the end of July when word began to spread that troops were gathering near Manassas Junction, Virginia. Thousands of citizens eager for diversion packed picnic hampers and hired carriages to take them out to watch the spectacle. Politicians determined to witness history, reporters chasing the story, curious workmen, ladies with parasols thrilled by the prospect of danger and heroism—all wanted to watch Brigadier General Irvin McDowell and his mighty Army of Northeastern Virginia soundly defeat the rebels before marching on to take Richmond and bring a quick and decisive end to the conflict.

Several of Elizabeth’s young assistant seamstresses had been invited to accompany a few young men in their wagon. “Come with us, Mrs. Keckley,” urged Emma Stevens, a former slave from Maryland who rented a small attic room in the Lewises’ boardinghouse. As a very young child, she and her mother had been granted their freedom when their old mistress passed away, but the woman’s heirs had contested the will. Emma and her mother had been kept in slavery for ten long years more while the lawsuit Emma’s mother brought against the heirs dragged out in court. Upon miraculously winning their case, and their freedom, Emma and her mother had adopted the last name of the lawyer who had courageously represented them in a hostile courtroom.

Elizabeth smiled and shook her head. “Thank you, no.”

“Oh, do join us,” Emma said persistently. “There will be plenty of room in the wagon. And it’s a Sunday. You shouldn’t work on a Sunday.”

“I must,” Elizabeth said. “Mrs. Lincoln needs the white day dress finished before her trip to the seaside. You young people go and have a good time, but do take care.”

She breathed a sigh of relief when Emma gave her a small disappointed pout and set off on her own, immediately brightening at the thought of her friends and the charming escorts awaiting them. Elizabeth didn’t want to admit to the younger woman, her favorite of her assistants, that she could not bear to watch the scenes of battle and to be painfully, vividly reminded of what George might be facing at that very moment somewhere in Missouri.

She sewed all day in her rooms with the windows and doors open to stir the stifling air, breaking only for lunch and for a walk with Virginia along the river, where the stench diminished the pleasure of the cooling breeze. They heard the rumble of gunfire to the west, and they wondered how the battle was faring. “We may be sorry later that we missed all the excitement,” Virginia remarked.

“I’m certain I won’t,” Elizabeth replied.

As they walked back to Twelfth Street, they passed a telegraph office, where men and boys lingered, waiting for news of the battle. The Confederates were on the run, from the sound of it, and they overheard two men say that the Union Army was expected to be in Richmond within a week. Gladdened by the remarkably good report, they returned home to tell Walker what they had learned. Back in her rooms again, Elizabeth took up Mrs. Lincoln’s dress, threaded a needle, and allowed herself to hope that the war could be over by the autumn, in time for George to muster out of the army and resume his classes at the start of the term.

Her hopes were dashed before morning.

Sometime after nightfall, noises outside roused her from sleep—carriage wheels, horses’ hooves, voices raised in alarm. She hurried to the windows, but they looked out over the garden and she could see nothing but the backs of other houses and the glow of a few lighted lamps visible through the windows. As the commotion continued, more lights joined them. Elizabeth dressed quickly and went outside to the
front sidewalk, where she found Virginia, Walker, and a few of their neighbors watching in stunned amazement as carriages and wagons and men on horseback came streaming through the city as fast as their tired horses could carry them, their expressions stricken and terrified.

“What happened?” Elizabeth asked Virginia, who only shook her head, pressed her lips together, and clutched her arm. They held on to one another as the ominous parade went by, realization dawning that these were the spectators who had so enthusiastically set out for Centreville to observe the battlefield earlier that day.

Finally Walker waved down a colored man on a dray, who slowed his team but would not stop. “It was a rout,” he called down from the driver’s seat. “Hundreds dead. Whole companies lost. McDowell’s army’s retreating back to the city if they haven’t been caught or killed yet, and the rebels are right behind them.”

Virginia gasped, and Elizabeth felt a chill. Emma and two of her other young protégées were in the midst of all that chaos. “Were any civilians hurt?” she called out to the driver, but he had already hastened away.

All through the night the civilians made their way back to the capital, shaken and exhausted, with wild tales of their narrow escape from certain death. They had been at some distance from the fighting, closer to the river, so they were the first to return. Elizabeth had almost given up hope when Emma appeared, escorted by a young man who solicitously entrusted her to the care of Walker, Elizabeth, and Virginia. “It was a nightmare,” Emma told them, wide-eyed and trembling. “I’ve never seen anything like it. If we hadn’t been near the back of the crowd, close to the wagon—” She shook her head and fell silent as Virginia led her into the house.

Not until dawn did the first soldiers reach the city, their expressions stunned and haggard, their uniforms torn and disheveled, their ranks diminished. Gone were the waving of regimental colors and the stirring martial music of fife and drum. Famished and exhausted, some of the troops dropped their kits in doorways, on sidewalks, on empty lots, and lay down to sleep where they were. Some observers cast off their shock
and hurried back into their homes, quickly returning with bread, cheese, apples, and other food to distribute to the passing soldiers. Elizabeth and Virginia joined in, offering water from pitchers and pails as quickly as one man could pass the dipper to the next.

The wounded came too, brought into the city by the wagonload. There were not enough beds for all the soldiers who needed them, nor enough bandages, nurses, food—nor hospitals for that matter. A few gray-clad rebel prisoners were marched in on foot and under guard. Some citizens shouted curses and threw stones at the captives, but a few bold Confederate sympathizers among them called out encouragement as they were led off to the Old Capitol on First and A streets Northeast, which had been turned into a federal military prison.

For hours the people of Washington waited in terror for the Confederate army to press their advantage and take the city, but the invasion never came.

In the days that followed, the people of the North wanted revenge and President Lincoln wanted answers. Even as volunteers filled recruiting offices, the president closeted himself with his advisers, determined to ascertain how the battle had gone so terribly wrong and how they could ensure it would never happen again. Already the press had taken to calling the Union’s disorderly retreat from the battlefield “the Great Skedaddle,” shaming the Union soldiers and heartening their enemies.

“They were green troops,” Mrs. Lincoln told Elizabeth, staunchly defending the soldiers—and by extension her husband, who had sent them into battle. “They aren’t green anymore. They will never again suffer such an embarrassing rout.”

Elizabeth hoped she was right, and her thoughts flew to her son. In his last letter, George had written that the First Missouri was preparing to march on Springfield, Missouri, but he did not know when they would set out. She wished she knew whether they had departed yet, whether they had arrived, whether the battle had been fought, and who had emerged victorious. George was still green himself, she thought, despite his regiment’s involvement in the conflict in the streets of St.
Louis and the minor skirmish at Boonville. He had yet to face the kind of warfare McDowell’s men had faced at the creek called Bull Run, and she felt sick at heart when she imagined him facing rebel guns and cannon.

The days between George’s letters elapsed in a ceaseless misery of waiting and worry. The arrival of each letter brought only momentary joy and relief, because although she savored each word, she knew that the letters offered no assurances of his safety any longer, only proof that he had been alive and unhurt at the time he had written them.

But that was something, at least. She kept his letters safely tucked away in a rosewood box her former mistress had given her as a farewell gift when she departed St. Louis. Every Sunday evening she read the letters in the order he had written them, a ritual that grew lengthier every week. They were talismans that closed the distance between them and, she hoped, would bring him back to her someday.

The first days of August were oppressively hot and humid, with no relief on the horizon. After hosting a state dinner for Prince Napoléon III, Mrs. Lincoln took Willie and Tad and her cousin Mrs. Grimsley on a vacation to Long Branch, Manhattan, and upstate New York, but her absence left Elizabeth busier than ever as other ladies rushed in with their dressmaking demands. She sewed for Mary Jane Welles, the wife of the secretary of the navy; Margaret Cameron, the wife of the secretary of war; and Adele Douglas, the young widow of the late Senator Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois. Recently widowed, the lovely Mrs. Douglas dressed in deep mourning but with excellent taste, so that even in her sorrow other ladies were jealous of her beauty and grace.

In the middle of the month, with summer storms worsening the humidity and bringing no relief from the heat, Elizabeth received a letter sent from Missouri but addressed in an unfamiliar hand. It could not be from George, she thought, quickly opening the envelope, or from her former mistress Anne Garland, whose writing she knew well. Heart
pounding with sudden apprehension, she unfolded the letter and read it slowly, word by word, afraid to reach the end.

Elizabeth felt the room shift and turn around her before all went dark.