The reconstruction of the house that year, however, was a husband-wife collaboration, as were the lesser remodelings in 1849–50 and in 1859–60. Mary and Abe transformed the modest one-and-a-half-story home into a spacious structure with an entry hall flanked on the left by a double parlor, a dining room, and a kitchen and, on the right, by a family room and bedroom. Upstairs were the bedrooms of Mary and Abe (it was customary then for genteel couples to have separate bedrooms) plus a bedroom for Willie and Tad and an extra room used as a maid’s room.
There was great competition for servants among middle-class families. Mary was not well positioned to compete because she was both temperamental and penny-pinching. Women who served the Lincolns occasionally remarked about her dictatorial manner. Harriet Hanks, the daughter of Lincoln’s second cousin Dennis Hanks, lived with the family for a year and a half in the 1840s and was so annoyed by Mary that she later refused to talk about her.31 Another hired girl complained, “She always talked to us as if we had no feelings, and I was never so unhappy in my life as while I was living with her.”32
Doubtless Mary, who had grown up attended by enslaved people, was a demanding employer. Her attitude, however, was not unusual for the time. A domestic guidebook she consulted, Miss Leslie’s House Book or Manual of Domestic Economy for Town and Country, emphasized that servants tended to be lazy and inefficient unless they were strictly supervised. A housekeeper, Miss Leslie advised, “unless she is blessed with excellent servants, . . . will find herself unable to depend upon them . . . without frequent personal inspection from herself.”33 Mary seems to have had trouble with a teenage Irish girl, Catherine Gordon, who frequently left her bedroom window open, evidently to allow boys into the room. Not all servants, however, had a bad relationship with Mary. One said, “If you are good to her, she is good to you and a friend to you.”34
It’s unclear how many live-in servants the Lincolns employed. Catherine Gordon was listed in the 1850 Springfield census as living at the Jackson Street house, as was a female between ten and twenty in 1853 and Mary N. Johnson in 1860. Mariah Vance, a married black woman who lived in Springfield, came to the house on a regular basis for several years to help with the laundry, cooking, and other chores.
Due to the lack of modern conveniences, such chores were onerous. Laundry involved heating water from an outdoor pump in kettles over an open fire, soaking the laundry in the hot water mixed with homemade detergent (a concoction of lye, hickory wood, vinegar, salt, starch, coffee, or bran, depending on the material), scrubbing it on a serrated board, and hanging it out to dry on lines made of horsehair or twisted seaweed. For the typical American family, laundry was especially demanding because it was usually done once a week, as opposed to the European custom of doing it every one to three months. About the only household duty that bore resemblance to today was rodent control, which involved setting out poison, patching up holes in walls, and owning cats, several of which were among the boys’ pets at Jackson Street along with their pet dog, Fido. Abe did some chores, such as chopping up logs from the backyard woodpile; stoking the fire; milking the family cow; currying the horse, Old Bob; and helping with shopping.
At least twice weekly Mariah Vance came to the home—sometimes, probably, with one or more of her youngsters in tow (she eventually had thirteen children). The presence of African Americans in the Lincoln home brings up the issue of Mary Lincoln’s view of race, which was connected to her politics. Mariah Vance seems to have been happily employed by the Lincolns, as was her sister, Elizabeth, in the household of Mary’s uncle, John Todd, who also lived in Springfield.35 Mary’s close relationship with black women continued in her White House years, when her servants included Rosetta Wells, who praised her warmly, and Elizabeth Keckly, the formerly enslaved and seamstress who became Mary’s closest friend.
We can trace the liberalization of Mary’s politics by noting her response to her servants. In the mid-1850s her frustration with Catherine Gordon—and perhaps with other Irish servants—helps explain her attraction to Know-Nothingism. In 1856, just when Lincoln was campaigning for the Republican John Frémont, Mary endorsed the American Party’s presidential candidate, Millard Fillmore, explaining her choice with an ethnic reference. She wrote her half sister Emilie, “My weak woman’s heart was too Southern in feeling, to sympathize with any but Fillmore. I have always been an admirer of his, he made so good a president & is so just a man & feels the necessity of keeping foreigners, within bounds. If some of you Kentuckians had to deal with the ‘wild Irish’ as we housekeepers are sometimes called upon to do, the South would certainly elect Fillmore next time.”36
Not only did she support the nativist Fillmore, but she also de-emphasized her husband’s support of Frémont’s presidential run. She wrote Emilie in 1856 that though Lincoln “was a Frémont man, you must not include him with so many of those, who belong to that party, an Abolitionist. In principle he is far from it—All he desires is, that slavery shall not be extended, let it remain, where it is—.”
At this point Mary represented Abe’s conservative side, the Old Whig part of him that nodded to nativism and eschewed radicalism. Over time, she shifted to the left. During his presidency she drew close to the Radical Republican view of slavery. By 1863, an antislavery journalist found that she was “more radically opposed to slavery” than her husband and had “urged him to Emancipation, as a matter of right, long before he saw it as a matter of necessity.”37
LINCOLN, SPRINGFIELD’S BLACKS, AND THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
While this comment sheds light on Mary’s political progress, it minimizes Lincoln’s antislavery commitment, which was always strong. The cultural and social environment of Springfield buttressed this commitment.
Some twenty-one black people lived within a three-block radius of his Jackson Street home.38 He saw blacks on the streets regularly, and he came to know several of them well. He treated African Americans with respect and helped them when he could. For example, he rescued his valet, William H. Johnson, from a difficult situation in the White House. Johnson had begun working for Lincoln in Springfield and had accompanied the president-elect on his trip east to Washington in February 1861.39 A very black man, he found himself ostracized by lighter-skinned African Americans who worked in the White House. Sensitive to Johnson’s predicament, Lincoln, shortly after his inauguration, wrote to his navy secretary, Gideon Welles, whom he asked to find a position for Johnson. Describing him as “honest, faithful, sober, industrious and handy as a servant,” Lincoln explained, “The difference of color between him & the other servants is the cause of our separation.”40 When Welles proved unable to find a place for Johnson, Lincoln approached his treasury secretary, Salmon Chase, who appointed Johnson as a laborer and messenger. All the while, Johnson continued to do part-time work for Lincoln, such as shaving him and tending to his wardrobe. He accompanied the president to Gettysburg in November 1863. On the trip, Lincoln came down with smallpox but recovered, attended by Johnson. But Johnson himself came down with the illness and died of it in January 1864.
The closeness between Lincoln and African Americans was especially pronounced in the case of William Florville. Born in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, about 1806, Florville, a free black, was taken by his godmother to live in Baltimore, where he lived in a Catholic orphanage before moving first to New Orleans, then St. Louis, and in 1831 to Springfield, Illinois.41 He served as Lincoln’s barber there for twenty-four years. Lincoln loved going to his barbershop and entertaining the locals with stories or listening to Florville play the violin. Witty and entrepreneurial, Florville ran a mock-royal ad in local papers announcing himself as the “Emperor and Autocrat of all the Barbers of Sangamo,” who was “making known to all my subjects, that I continue to nullify beards at my Tonsorial Palace,” and requesting contributions to “my treasury.” His business acumen enabled him to accumulate Springfield real estate; at one point he owned almost a whole city block between Eighth and Ninth Streets along Washington Street. Lincoln aided him substantially by representing him in court.42 Once he secured for Florville a payment of $100 that was owed to him. In another court case, Lincoln won titles of several Springfield lots for him. During the 1850s, Lincoln paid Florville’s property taxes when needed. He grew so close to Florville that the Illinois State Journal noted, “Only two men in Springfield understood Lincoln, his law partner William Herndon, and his barber, William de Fleurville.” It was an emotional day when Florville accompanied the Lincolns to Springfield’s railroad station in February 1861 for their trip east. Even more affecting was when word came in 1862 of the death of eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, which prompted a heartfelt letter of condolence to the president. Florville included the consoling news for Tad that his dog, Fido, was in safe hands with a neighbor. In the letter, Florville hailed Lincoln as a “truly great Man” and confessed to “having for you, an irrisisteble feeling of gratitude for the kind regards Shown, and the manifest good wishis [sic] exhibited towards me.”43 Florville served as an honorary pallbearer at Lincoln’s funeral in Springfield in May 1865. A grim footnote to Florville’s life is that his grandson, George Richardson, was falsely accused of raping a white woman in an incident that sparked the deadly Springfield race riot of 1908. This experience of violent white supremacy during the Jim Crow era was shared by another African American from Lincoln’s Springfield days, William K. Donnegan. For years, Donnegan, a cobbler, had made Lincoln’s size fourteen shoes. He lived just five blocks north of Lincoln in Springfield. Donnegan worked hard, made wise investments, and accumulated a substantial estate. He became the best-known black person in Springfield. However, his thirty-year marriage to a white woman spelled his doom during the 1908 Springfield riot. On August 14, a mob of whites hauled him out of his home, cut his throat, hung him on a nearby tree, and stabbed him several times. The militia arrived and cut down his body, but he died the next morning. The incident was a catalyst for the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
There is a common misconception that Lincoln’s Springfield contained few black people who vocally protested against slavery. David Donald, for instance, claims that the blacks in Springfield “were not people who could speak out boldly to say that they were as American as any whites.”44 Benjamin Quarles alleges that Lincoln’s lack of awareness of radical African Americans in Springfield accounts for the fact that he went to Washington lacking a “rounded knowledge” of African Americans, about whom he knew only “the Negro of dialect story, minstrel stage, and sea chantey.”45 Actually, Springfield was a lively venue for African American activism. Each year, many of the city’s black population gathered to celebrate the anniversary of the 1834 emancipation of some eight hundred thousand enslaved people in the British West Indies. Periodically, Springfield’s blacks held other antislavery meetings as well. At one, in 1858, those present issued a striking resolution. Printed in its entirety in the Illinois State Journal, the resolution vigorously denounced slavery and the Dred Scott decision. The resolution hailed “the great charter of liberty, the Declaration of Independence” and called boldly for African American suffrage: “We also claim the right of citizenship in this, the country of our birth. We were born here, and here we desire to die and to be buried. We are not African. . . . Why then should we be disfranchised and denied the rights of citizenship in the north, and those of human nature itself in the south?
Some African Americans in Springfield were active on the Underground Railroad. Among them was William Donnegan, who claimed that he hid “scores” of runaways in the garret of his home on Jefferson Street, five blocks north of the Lincoln home. In one dramatic incident, three white men with a bulldog pursued him while he was on a Springfield street helping a runaway girl escape. When the men set their bulldog on him, he shot the animal and shouted that he would “kill any four-legged or two-legged dogs that bothered me much more.”47
Also active in aiding fugitives was Jamieson Jenkins, a black drayman who lived a block south of Lincoln’s home. Born in South Carolina, Jenkins moved to Springfield around 1848. In February 1861, he gave Lincoln his last carriage ride in Springfield when he drove the president-elect and his family to the railway station. A dauntless protector of runaways, Jenkins, in an especially dramatic incident in 1850, helped seven fugitives travel sixty miles on the Underground Railroad from Springfield to Bloomington.48
The participation of blacks Lincoln knew in the Underground Railroad raises the issue of his relationship to the Fugitive Slave Act. His grudging acceptance of the law raised doubts about his antislavery commitment among abolitionists such as Wendell Phillips, who called him “The Slave-Hound of Illinois.”49 Most Northerners were outraged by the law, by which the federal government mandated the return of fugitives to masters who provided an affidavit of ownership. The law subjected those who protected runaways to a $1,000 fine and six months in jail. Harriet Beecher Stowe swayed millions of readers with her moving portrait of three fugitives—George and Eliza Harris and their small son Harry—who struggled their way north to Canada along the Underground Railroad. Vivid scenes such as Eliza’s perilous dash to freedom across the ice floes of the Ohio River and George’s shootout with slave catchers in the rocky pass became stamped on Northern hearts, not only by Stowe’s novel but also by countless theatrical versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which, in its many avatars over the next eighty years, became the most popular play in American history.
Lincoln was in a position like that of Stowe’s John Bird, an Ohio politician in the novel who recognizes the Constitution’s mandate to return fugitives from labor but who sympathizes deeply with runaways. Lincoln’s comment to Joshua Speed about biting his lip and keeping silent over his torment at seeing the capture of fugitives speaks to his real feelings.50 On the one hand, he had in mind the Constitution’s clause about returning fugitives. At the same time, his emotions and his principles were on the side of the fugitives.
It was risky in Illinois to vent open repugnance to the Fugitive Slave Act. The closest Lincoln came to doing so publicly was taking the side of fugitive blacks in court. Two of his colleagues in law and politics, John Stuart and Edward Baker, avoided taking on fugitive slave cases for fear of damaging their reputations. Lincoln, in contrast, several times defended runaways or their protectors. In 1845, Joseph Warman, an African American traveling in Illinois, was jailed on suspicion of being a fugitive because he did not have freedom papers on him. The court discharged Warman when Lincoln helped him secure a writ of habeas corpus.51 Also that year, Lincoln won a not guilty verdict for Marvin Pond, who was charged with harboring a fugitive from slavery (it was later revealed that Marvin’s abolitionist brother Samuel Pond had been the one who helped the man). In 1847, Lincoln represented John Randolph Scott, also accused of sheltering a runaway. Lincoln got the case dismissed on the technicality of Scott’s first name not being included on the indictment. The same year, Lincoln successfully defended another accused Underground Railroad conductor, George Kern, by arguing that there was no proof that the black man Kern assisted was in fact enslaved. This argument became the linchpin of an 1857 case handled by Lincoln’s partner William Herndon in which the Kentucky slave owner John McElroy went to court to take possession of a black man in Illinois who, he insisted, was his property. Herndon lost the case, but he boldly told the court, “The presumption, when a negro is arrested in a free State, is that he is free, and the arresting agent must show his authority.”52
As an attorney, then, Lincoln bucked the proslavery trend of the national government. Federal actions from the Fugitive Slave Act through the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the Dred Scott decision increasingly diminished the rights of blacks, who, Lincoln said in 1857, were trapped behind “heavy iron doors” and “bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key.”53 At the same time, however, he knew that a large proportion of
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