Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (4 page)

“The South, of course,” replied Mrs. Davis. “The South is impulsive, and the Southern soldiers will fight to conquer. The North will yield when it sees the South is in earnest, rather than engage in a long and bloody war.”

Impulsive and earnest, perhaps, but Elizabeth didn’t think that was enough to win a war. She also thought, although she would not be impudent enough to say so aloud, that Mrs. Davis underestimated the determination of Northerners. Those of Elizabeth’s acquaintance did not seem particularly yielding, or any more afraid of a fight than Southern folks. “Mrs. Davis,” she said instead, in her most reasonable tone, “are you certain that there will be war?”

“I know it.” Suddenly she turned in her chair and clasped Elizabeth’s hand. “You had better go South with me. I will take good care of you.”

Elizabeth was so startled that without thinking she snatched her hand away.

Mrs. Davis seemed not to notice her rudeness. “When the war breaks out, the colored people will suffer in the North. The Northern people will look upon them as the cause of the war, and I fear, in their exasperation, will be inclined to treat you harshly.”

Reluctantly, Elizabeth acknowledged the truth of her patron’s words
with a nod. Secession would cause the war, and the state delegates who had voted to leave the Union would have to bear the responsibility. Still, Elizabeth had no reason to doubt that somehow the blame would shift to the people of her race, as it so often, so unfairly, did in other matters.

“I may come back to Washington in a few months, and live in the White House,” Mrs. Davis mused, turning around to examine the drape of her dress in the mirror. “The Southern people talk of choosing Mr. Davis for their president. In fact, it may be considered settled that he
will
be their president. As soon as we go South and secede from the other states, we will raise an army and march on Washington, and then I shall live in the White House.”

“Mrs. Davis,” Elizabeth managed to say, “I’m very pleased that you’ve placed so much confidence in me. However, I—” She had to stop, to take a breath, to find a moment to think. “I have my business to consider. I have my church and my friends.”

“We do have churches in the South, you may recall, as well as many colored women who would surely like to count you among their friends.” A faint, amused smile turned up the corners of Mrs. Davis’s mouth. “As for your business, it will surely thrive. I’ll have plenty of work for you within my own household, but if that doesn’t suffice, with my recommendation you’ll have no trouble finding many eager new customers in Montgomery.”

So the Davises were planning to remove to Alabama, not Mississippi. Elizabeth wondered why her patron had not mentioned this before. “I—I don’t know what to say. Forgive me my uncertainty. I’m very grateful you think so highly of my work.”

“Not only of your work, but also of you.” Mrs. Davis caught her gaze in the mirror and held it. “Promise me you’ll consider my proposal—although time is of the essence. I’ll need your answer soon.”

That much Elizabeth could do. “I promise.”

Elizabeth kept her word, pondering Mrs. Davis’s proposal, praying over it. She was tempted to accept. She liked the Davis family, and Mrs. Davis’s reasoning seemed plausible. But to go so far south, so deep into the land of slavery—even as a freedwoman, life there would be difficult
for her, far more difficult than in the slaveholding District of Columbia. But as much as she liked Mrs. Davis, she liked the Lewises more, and she would miss her friends in the congregation of Union Bethel Church. And though the Northerners might, as Mrs. Davis predicted, blame the colored race for the inevitable war and turn upon them in anger, weren’t Southerners as likely to do the same?

After pondering the question alone, and with the deadline for her decision approaching, Elizabeth turned to her friends for guidance. One and all, freeborn and former slave, urged her to remain in Washington. They were astonished that Mrs. Davis would even presume to ask such a thing upon such a short acquaintance. Elizabeth had been in the family’s employ less than three months, and Mrs. Davis expected her to leave her home and place herself in unimaginable risk in a land she herself expected soon to be torn by war? They did not believe, as Elizabeth did, that Mrs. Davis’s offer was generous, that it was a sign of respect. “Don’t go,” Virginia implored after one late-night talk in her parlor. “If you change your mind, you may not be able to come home.”

Elizabeth knew her friends were right. She also knew that the North was far stronger than Mrs. Davis seemed to believe—in spirit as well as might. Mr. Lincoln’s people were powerful and eager for victory, and Elizabeth could not believe that they would let the Southern states go without a fight or that they would give up as soon as the Southerners resisted. In the end, after all her questioning and pondering and prayer, her decision came down to one irrefutable fact: She was a colored woman, and she would be far wiser to cast her lot with the people of the North, many of whom supported abolition, than those of the South, most of whom believed she belonged in chains.

Elizabeth had not yet told Mrs. Davis of her decision when she arrived at the Davis residence a few days later to find that her patron had gone out earlier that morning to purchase several yards of floral chintzes, pretty but less fine than the fabrics she usually favored. “I’d like you to make me two wrappers,” Mrs. Davis said, draping the fabrics upon the sofa.

“From chintz?”

“Yes, Elizabeth, from chintz.” Mrs. Davis’s smile twisted as if she were fighting back tears. “I must give up expensive dressing for a while. Now that war is imminent, I—and I daresay all Southern people—must learn to practice lessons of economy.”

“Of course.” Elizabeth gathered up the fabrics. “I’ll get started right away.”

“Thank you.” After a moment, she added, “Elizabeth?”

“Yes, Mrs. Davis?”

“I think…” Her voice trailed off, and she inhaled deeply. “To be prudent, it would be best to finish the wrappers sooner rather than later.”

Elizabeth understood.

The Davises’ course was fixed, irrevocable. It was only a matter of time.

Elizabeth finished the wrappers a few days before the Davis family left Washington. When she presented the finished garments to Mrs. Davis, she admired them, set them aside, and handed Elizabeth a bundle of fine needlework, a difficult work-in-progress of her own that she wanted Elizabeth to finish. “You can send it to me by post when it is done,” she instructed, and then she paused to offer Elizabeth a hopeful smile. “Or perhaps you can call on me in the parlor of my new home and hand it to me yourself. Perhaps you won’t have to walk very far. I’m sure that wherever we settle, we can arrange a room in our residence for you.”

Elizabeth could delay no longer. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Davis. I’m happy to finish your sewing, but I’ll have to send it to you. I’ve decided to stay in Washington.”

Mrs. Davis pressed her lips together and nodded as if she had expected Elizabeth to refuse, and yet she could not quite give up her cause for lost. “Aren’t you tempted, even a little, by the prospect of being a First Lady’s personal modiste?”

Elizabeth laughed shakily. “I am indeed, but not enough to leave my home. I promise, ma’am, if you return to Washington, I’d be pleased to sew for you again. More than pleased—I would be delighted.”

“Oh, Elizabeth.” Mrs. Davis regarded her with sad affection. “You betray yourself. You said
if
I return, not when.”

On the twenty-first of January, Jefferson Davis and several other Southern senators resigned their seats and left Washington, casting their lots with their home states. Later Elizabeth would read in the papers that Mr. Davis had expressed love for the Union and a desire for peace, but he had also asserted his right to own slaves and the right of states to secede. “I am sure I feel no hostility to you, senators from the North,” he had told the assembly. “I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well.”

Soon thereafter, Mrs. Davis left Washington with her husband and children and slaves. The Southern states elected Jefferson Davis as their president, and Varina Davis became First Lady of the Confederacy.

A
ll of Washington City was abuzz with anticipation—and in certain quarters, apprehension—for the arrival of President-Elect Lincoln. He and his family were approaching the capital by a circuitous train route, both to greet as many supporters along the way as he could and to thwart anyone who might attempt to do him harm. “He hasn’t even taken office yet and those secessionists are already threatening his life,” said Walker Lewis one morning, offering Elizabeth his newspaper, which disgusted him too much for him to continue reading. “They won’t bother to wait and see what he might do in office. They hate him on principle.”

The ongoing, escalating conflict over Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor also dominated conversation. Ever since December 26, when United States major Robert Anderson had moved his command from the vulnerable Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island to the stronger, more defensible fortifications controlling the harbor, the handful of federal troops there had been essentially under siege. In early January, on the same day Mississippi seceded from the Union, South Carolinian forces had fired upon the
Star of the West,
an unarmed merchant ship President Buchanan had sent to resupply and reinforce Major Anderson and his
men. The ship had been forced to turn back, and reports from Fort Sumter had become increasingly dire as the men ran low on food, arms, and supplies. Although many Republicans called for an immediate military response, President Buchanan seemed inclined to wait out the last few remaining weeks of his presidency and let Abraham Lincoln worry about it when he took over.

A few officers’ wives had been living on Sullivan’s Island with their husbands, but when Major Anderson moved his troops from Fort Moultrie to Fort Sumter, the ladies had been sent over to Charleston for their safety. There they found every door closed to them. Not a single boardinghouse would offer them lodgings, and one landlady bluntly declared that if she offered the officers’ wives a safe haven, she would lose all her other boarders. Discouraged and angry, the women had been obliged to leave their husbands to their defense of Fort Sumter and seek refuge in the North. When they arrived in Washington, bitter and defiant, they found themselves warmly welcomed by the Republicans and celebrated as the first martyrs of the war.

“I cannot imagine such a state of feeling,” one of Elizabeth’s patrons declared as Elizabeth dressed her for a levee at the White House one evening. Margaret Sumner McLean was the daughter of the Massachusetts-born Major General Edwin Vose Sumner and the wife of Captain Eugene McLean, a Maryland native with unabashed Southern sympathies. Her father’s cousin was the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner, who had been savagely caned and nearly murdered on the Senate floor almost five years earlier by a colleague from South Carolina who had taken great offense to one of his antislavery speeches, which was not surprising considering that it had been full of personal insults. To say that Mrs. McLean’s loyalties were probably divided in those troubled times was, in Elizabeth’s opinion, a grave understatement. “To turn away helpless women, to leave them homeless and unprotected! I am quite indignant with so-called Southern chivalry.”