Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
For him, the early weeks of 1861 were consumed with cabinet-making and the last remnants of the amiable politicking that had characterized so much of his time in Springfield. He still received many visitors, and the journalist Henry Villard marveled that “probably no other President-elect was as approachable by everybody.” He greeted friends and neighbors, and told his jokes, and tried to act as the person that they had known for years. (Villard records the unusual spectacle of Lincoln laughing at one of his better punchlines: “A high-pitched laughter lighted up his otherwise melancholy countenance with thorough merriment. His body shook all over with gleeful emotion, and when he felt particularly good over his performance, he followed his habit of drawing his knees, with his arms around them, up to his very face.”)
Yet as March 4 drew closer, and secession loomed larger, it was becoming clear that his life had changed forever. He could not keep up with the huge volume of mail. Some of it was disturbing — crude drawings of skulls and bones, a sketch of Lincoln’s head in a noose; an actual noose itself. The crowds of office-seekers and thrill-seekers were relentless, and he began to restrict their access to him. In many ways, he was already becoming the president, well before the March 4 transfer of power. On Jan. 19, a Mexican diplomat came all the way to the Springfield to pay his respects, a sign that the rest of the world was not so far from the prairie. Lincoln’s two assistants, John Hay and John Nicolay, were acting as the White House gatekeepers they would become. And Lincoln was beginning to compile the thoughts that would cohere into his inaugural.
Library of Congress Mary Lincoln, 1861.
The nearness of the White House was just as keenly felt by his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, only 42 years old. She had wanted this for as long as anyone could remember. When only a girl in Lexington, Kentucky, she rode her pony to the house of Henry Clay, and announced to his dinner party that she would enjoy living in the White House someday. As a young belle, freshly arrived in Springfield, she famously declared her intention to marry a president. Now, against all odds, that prediction was coming true, and she was determined to make the most of it. And to look as good as possible while doing so.
Lincoln, a lifelong advocate of enlightened government, was reluctant to impose it at home (his law partner, William Herndon, complained, “He was the most indulgent parent I have ever known”). If Mary felt a growing urge to cut a national figure, he saw no reason to restrain her. And so, on Jan. 10, she left Springfield on a shopping trip to — where else? — New York City, where she intended to make purchases for the White House and, perhaps, one or two items for herself. She was accompanied by her brother-in-law, Clark Smith, purveyor of “The Best Ladies Goods in Illinois,” and they did the town up in style. She visited New York’s huge department stores, bought jewelry and dresses, mixed and mingled at tea parties and talked gaily to all within earshot.
This was perfectly in character for a woman who had always loved society, and had been bred to it in a way that her husband most certainly was not. She was a gifted conversationalist, spoke French, and as a young lady had dazzled her suitors (including Stephen Douglas, a near-president). This side of her had never been able to flourish during a long and sometimes troubled marriage with a rusticated genius who liked to read books lying on the floor, and cared little for the social graces. She detested the comments that were already appearing in the press, insinuating that she and her husband were Western rubes, and she was determined to bring grace to the White House. The expected transformation would be all the more striking for the fact that James Buchanan’s White House had no First Lady at all. (His niece, Harriet Lane, acted as hostess.)
The problem, as is so often the case in politics, was the timing. It struck some observers as strange that she was shopping so conspicuously in the grave days of secession, and it was even worse that she talked so audibly. “Within earshot” turned out to be a wide arc indeed, and her casual remarks began to seep into the papers — one reporter called it “shocking” that she was “kiting about the country and holding levees in which she indulges in a multitude of silly speeches.”
Her judgment was off, too — she was overheard commenting on the reasons that Lincoln had appointed Seward his secretary of state, and she visited a naval vessel when her husband wanted to avoid all talk of war. Perhaps most ominously, she accepted the unlimited credit lines extended to the wife of a president-elect, with no urgent plan for repayment. In other words, she had not yet grasped that she lived inside a fishbowl. A few months later, a British journalist wrote, “if she but drives down Pennsylvania Avenue, the electric wire trills the news to every hamlet in the Union.” It’s an old lesson: be careful what you wish for.
To make matters worse, she was never able to govern her famous temper, which led Hay and Nicolay to nickname her “The Hellcat.” As she made her way back to Springfield, it erupted. Americans had to change trains more frequently then, and when she arrived at Buffalo, the State Line Railroad had the audacity to ask her to pay for her passage! Didn’t they know who she was? Fortunately, her son Robert was there to calm things down. With polished diplomacy (he would enjoy a long and successful career in the railroad business), he went to the superintendent and said, “My name is Bob Lincoln; I’m a son of Old Abe — the old woman is in the cars raising h-ll about her passes — I wish you would attend to her.” The plea worked; both Lincolns were granted passes.
But unfortunately, that account, hyphenated “h-ll” and all, appeared in The Baltimore Sun, and it was not helpful to Lincoln to have additional bad publicity in a city where a serious assassination plot was being hatched against him. Paradoxically, it might have helped if Mary’s occasional propensity to utter pro-slavery sentiments had been conveyed there (she once said, “If Mr. Lincoln should happen to die, his spirit will never find me living outside the boundaries of a slave State”). One brother and three step-brothers would fight for the Confederacy. But she was a loyal wife, and like so many others, affirmed, “my husband is my country.” For her, it was truer than most.
Lincoln probably knew little of the train episode, and one suspects that wanted to know even less than he did. He simply wanted her to come home, and for three nights in a row, he went to the train station in Springfield, standing in the rain and snow, hoping she would appear. Finally, on Jan. 25, she did, and all was right again. Villard wrote, “whether she got a good scolding from Abraham for unexpectedly prolonging her absence, I am unable to say; but I know she found it rather difficult to part with the winter gayeties of New York.” With at least one union restored, their last days in Springfield dwindled down, and they savored the precious family time left to them, before the fates swept them up and took them away forever from all that had been normal in their lives.
Sources: Henry Villard, “Memoirs of Henry Villard;” Harold G. and Oswald Garrison Villard, eds., “Lincoln on the Eve of ’61;” Jean H. Baker, “Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography;” Catherine Clinton, “Mrs. Lincoln: A Life”; Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, eds., “Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters;” Daniel Mark Epstein, “The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage;” William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, “Herndon’s Life of Lincoln;” David Herbert Donald, “Herndon and Mrs. Lincoln;” Harry E. Pratt, “The Personal Finances of Abraham Lincoln;” Earl Schenck Miers, ed., “Lincoln Day by Day.”
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Ted Widmer is director and librarian of the John Carter
Brown Library at Brown University. He was a speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and the editor of the Library of America’s two-volume “American Speeches.”
