other army wives. Furious, Mary exclaimed to Badeau, “What do you mean by that, sir? Do you mean to say that she saw the President alone? Do you know that I never allow the President to see any woman alone?”31 The next day she showed up at a troop review to find that her husband had arrived on horseback alongside the wife of General Edward Ord. In front of others, Mary gave Mrs. Ord a tongue-lashing that drove the woman to tears. Then Mary turned on her husband. As she scolded him for his conduct, Badeau recalled, “he called her ‘mother’ with his old-time plainness; he pleaded with eyes and tones. . . . He bore it as Christ might have done; with an expression of pain and sadness that cut one to the heart, but with supreme calmness and dignity.”
But if the war years intensified Mary’s outbursts, they also opened up new avenues to creativity and power, as they also did for Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet who peaked artistically during those years. For both women, the disruptions of war seemed to unleash their creative experimentation with many roles—Dickinson through her numerous imaginary poetic speakers, Mary through her real-life activities in redecorating the White House, designing fashionable clothes for public functions, shopping zealously, sharing wit and gossip with men in her Blue Room salons, and manipulating money behind the scenes.
Mary’s purchases for the White House, while extravagant, were understandable. When the Lincolns moved into the mansion, many of its thirty-one rooms were in disrepair, with peeling wallpaper and damaged furniture. In an era when the general public was admitted freely into the White House, carpets and walls were dirty and spotted with yellowish-brown stains from tobacco juice. Rats infested the servants’ quarters in the basement, which stank of mildew. One visitor compared the White House to a decaying Southern manor, another to “an old and unsuccessful hotel.”32
Mary took it upon herself to restore the White House. She had the outside and inside repainted. On a trip to Philadelphia she ordered from William H. Carryl & Brothers many elegant items. By the end of 1861, she had transformed the Executive Mansion.33 Colored satin curtains with gold fringes and tassels adorned the Blue Room, Green Room, and Red Room. The spacious East Room featured multicolored wallpaper patterned after Louis Napoleon’s reception hall in the Tuileries as well as a five-thousand-square-foot carpet decorated with medallions. Furniture was revarnished, and satin coverings were installed on the sofas and chairs. A guest room named after the Prince of Wales, who had stayed there during an 1860 visit, was decked out with light purple wallpaper, a Wilton carpet, and a bed, eight feet long and nine feet wide, that had a carved rosewood headboard that was nearly three yards high.
Mary wanted to create an atmosphere of grandeur without losing sight of democratic nationality. To that end, she had the US seal—a shield of the Stars and Stripes on which were arrows and a stern-looking eagle—embroidered on curtains and furnishings. She also purchased a 190-piece purple porcelain set decorated with the national seal and a border of intertwined gilt lines that stood for the North and the South, symbolizing the restored Union for which the North fought. And to promote her own devotion to the cause while defying the Confederate Todds, Mary had ML (without the T in the middle) inscribed on a Limoges china set that she ordered for private use.
The upstairs bedrooms—those of the president, Mary, Willie, Tad, and the usually absent Robert—were tastefully redecorated, as was the upstairs library and the small rooms used by Lincoln’s secretaries, Hay and Nicolay. The one upstairs room left unfinished was Lincoln’s office, on the opposite end of the hall from the bedrooms. Although the office was repapered, its rickety furniture remained: Lincoln’s old desk under a window overlooking the Potomac; a large wooden table for cabinet meetings in the center of the room; maps arranged on racks; a picture of Andrew Jackson above a fireplace—everything made the room look, in William Stoddard’s words, like a “historic cavern” with “less space for the transaction of the business of his office than a well-to-do New York lawyer.”34 A journalist reported jauntily, “Mr. Lincoln don’t complain, because it resembles so much the dingy old room he occupied and familiarized himself with in the State House at Springfield, from the time he was elected until he left for Washington.”35
Lincoln had always been accustomed to humble environments. He cared as little about elegant home decorations as he did about what he ate for dinner. He considered Mary’s beautification of the White House wasteful at a time when the economy was unstable and the troops were undersupplied.
His anger flared when she approached him indirectly through Benjamin B. French, the commissioner of public buildings. For the upkeep of the White House, Congress had appropriated $6,000 a year, targeted mainly for repairs of plumbing, heating, and so on. In her very first year at the White House, Mary exhausted the entire amount Congress had reserved for Lincoln’s four-year term. She wanted yet more funds for purchases, but she was afraid to approach her husband about them. She persuaded French to make her case to him. The president bristled at French’s request, explaining, “It can never have my approval—I’ll pay it out of my pocket first—it would stink in the nostrils of the American people to have it said that the president of the United States had approved a bill overrunning an appropriation of $20,000 for flub dubs, for this damned old house, when soldiers cannot have blankets!!” The White House, he added, was “furnished well enough, better than any one we ever lived in.”36
He knew from long experience the political importance of identifying with common people, a lesson that he had learned in Harrison’s Log Cabin campaign and that had helped him in his own run as the Illinois Rail-splitter in 1860. Filling the White House with costly decorations had nothing to do with average Americans, especially with soldiers on the battlefield or seamen in the navy.
Predictably, opposition newspapers had a field day with the White House improvements, which made Lincoln seem like a king showing off his power and wealth. “It did not take Mr. Lincoln long after his inauguration as President to become a despot,” the Charleston Mercury fulminated in a piece titled “The Despotism at Washington—The Palace of Abraham.” At a time when “thousands upon thousands of his people” were dying, Lincoln was “gradually bringing around him the usual insignia and trappings of royalty,” including “exact imitations from the palace of the French Emperor.”37
There was also the issue of Mary’s expenditures on clothes. Altogether, she went on eleven buying expeditions to the North during the war years, shopping in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston and sometimes while vacationing in New Jersey or New England. When she wasn’t buying household items, she purchased apparel or cloth from which Lizzy Keckly made her dresses
Mary’s attitude toward clothing was the opposite of Henry David Thoreau’s. Advocating spartan simplicity, Thoreau in Walden (1854) launched stinging attacks on fashion. He remarked of his contemporaries: “We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition from without.”38 “We worship not the Graces, . . . but Fashion. . . . The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.”
Mary felt that she needed fancy dresses, scarves, gloves, shoes, and other apparel for state functions. She added ribbons, flounces, bows, and tucks to the dresses, and a decorative hat or floral wreath often adorned her head. All told, she attended 105 events in Washington from March 1861 to April 1865 that called for special apparel.39 She insisted on dressing for the occasion, often with boldly colored, patterned dresses that trailed behind her and had a deep décolletage. She won praise from many journalists, including one who wrote, “Her dress was, of course, decolleté and with short sleeves, displaying the exquisitely moulded shoulders and arms of our fair ‘Republican Queen,’ the whiteness of which were absolutely dazzling.”40 But some were shocked by her exposed skin. A senator who attended government parties commented that she liked “to exhibit her milking apparatus to public gaze.”41 Even Lincoln once remarked, “Whew, our cat has a long tail tonight. . . . Mother, it is my opinion, if some of that tail were nearer the head, it would be in better style.”42
Some severely criticized Mary’s showy clothing. The abolitionist author Lydia Maria Child, who thought that the short, thick-waisted Mary looked “more like a dowdy washerwoman” than “the ‘representative of fashion,’” complained that the first lady cared only for “flattery, and dress, and parties.”43 When she learned of Mary’s shopping trips, she declared, “So this is what the people are taxed for! To deck out this vulgar doll with foreign frippery.”
To be sure, Mary’s purchases could seem frivolous, and they left her with a debt of between $6,000 and $20,000 by the end of the war. It’s hard to explain rationally her buying eighty-four kid gloves in a single month or $3,200 worth of jewelry toward the end of the war.44
It’s true that many women saw fashion and shopping as real avenues to power and self-expression. As early as 1790, Judith Sargent Murray had commented that women had the same mental capacities as men but were frustrated on all sides and therefore manifested creativity in selecting fashionable clothing. Murray wrote: “Observe the variety of fashions . . . which distinguish and adorn the female world: . . . Now what a playfulness, what an exuberance of fancy, what strength of inventive imagination, doth this continual variation discover?”45
By the mid-nineteenth century, America saw a proliferation of fashion periodicals, most notably Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of Mary’s favorite magazines. The latest fashions were put on display in the nation’s first department stores, including New York’s Lord & Taylor (which opened in 1826), Jordan Marsh (1841), A. T. Stewart’s (1848), Macy’s (1858), and B. Altman (1865). For women, shopping at such stores was a means of appearing in public and exercising choice. Godey’s announced that shopping “might almost be called one of the fine-arts. As our fair ladies are not altogether destitute of talent, and have no other means of exhibiting it, it is natural that they should seek the only avenue open for a useful and agreeable employment of the faculties which their Creator has bestowed.” The streets of America’s cities, the writer continued, were full of women “happy in their favorite pursuit. They purchase, and purchase, and purchase everything recommended by the ineffable young men making their ko-tows . . . behind the counter, until their purses are emptied, and the patience of their husbands exhausted; but this does not dampen their ardor in the least.”46 The suffragist and author Laura Curtis Bullard noted that every spring “the largest and most fashionable shops” sent invitations to women known to have made recent purchases, and “nearly every lady accepts the invitation.”47 Women flocked to the stores and engaged in “the fascinating occupation of shopping and buying, of selecting and buying beautiful goods.” Bullard explained, “Every womanly woman has a taste for dress.” Attractive garments and jewelry answered the “love for the beautiful” in women, who were “perfectly right in buying the pretty costumes and stuff which they crave for their personal adornment.” Ready-made dresses were rarely available; the stores exhibited styles and sold material for dresses that were made at home or by a skilled seamstress. The latter, Bullard said, was hard to find at any cost. Lizzy Keckly solved that problem for Mary.
Mary especially enjoyed going to A. T. Stewart’s, which held its first “fashion shows” in its Ladies’ Parlor in 1848 and then opened its immense six-story Iron Palace on New York’s Broadway.
America’s largest store, Stewart’s exhibited the full range of European fashions, and for a woman like Mary who appeared constantly in public, the trip north from Washington was always worthwhile, for it resulted in her acquiring dresses and other clothing in the latest styles and patterns. In April 1862, not long after the loss of the Lincolns’ beloved son Willie, Mary filled her letters with precise requests for this-or-that kind of pattered cloth, hat, or fine lace, as though choosing styles provided therapy in a time of shattering grief.
Lincoln, while he disapproved of Mary’s excessive purchases for the White House, was more tolerant of her buying clothes. For the tastes of the day, her elaborate attire made her look elegant—and, in his eyes, beautiful. At one reception, he watched her as she greeted guests and said, “My wife is as handsome as when she was a girl and I, a poor nobody then, fell in love with her; and what is more, I have never fallen out.”48
It was to his advantage for his well-clothed wife to get positive reviews. There’s evidence that he helped this happen. More than 130 articles between 1860 and 1865 appeared in seven newspapers, including two Washington ones, that merit special attention because, as Michael Burlingame and Douglas Warren Hill show, they were written by Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, who used a number of pseudonyms, including “An Idler.”49
Hay penned glowing reports of Mary Lincoln and the Executive Mansion. He paid homage to Mary’s home decorating skills, describing socialites flocking to a presidential reception because “all had heard how magnificently the White House had been refurnished.”50 Hay also nodded to Mary’s political power, telling readers that “we shall run no risk of saying that the mistress of the White House possesses more influence over its master than any other lady, or any masculine either, for that matter, excepting one of his Cabinet members.”51
Hay often praised Mary’s charm and graciousness. Her appearance at one event inspired this rave: “The ladies all admired Mrs. Lincoln’s dress, which one of them described as a rich, delicately-shaded purple silk, trimmed with black velvet and fringe, with a rare lace neck tie, and a pearl brooch at the throat . . . I can say that Mrs. Lincoln never appeared to greater advantage, or received her visitors and friends with more affability.”52 Another event prompted Hay to comment, “Her headdress was of white and black flowers, with jet and pearl ornaments. Her gloves were white, stitched with black. The effect of all was in fine taste, very rich and beautiful.” Hay portrayed Mary as the ideal hostess and the renovated White House as the perfect setting, as here: “Mrs. Lincoln, as usual, was surrounded by a crowd of admiring ladies. . . . The reception was a most perfect success—the charming kindness of the hostess, the beautiful bouquets adorning the rooms, and the inspiring music discoursed by the marine band in attendance, beguil[ed] and enchant[ed] the refined tastes of the guests until the close of the levee.”
What made Hay’s public praise of Mary remarkable is that he privately loathed her. Writing to his fellow secretary John Nicolay, he called her “the ‘enemy,’” the “Hellcat,” the daughter of “the devil.” At one point he complained, “The Hellcat is getting more Hellcattical, day by day.”53 He expressed animosity as early as November 1861, when Mary, realizing that she was overrunning Congress’s appropriation for purchases, tried to get him to siphon money to her from other funding sources—a strategy she would try with others.
The cloying compliments Hay showered on Mary in his journalism, therefore, were all about public relations. And the president may have guided his secretary. Lincoln had long recognized the value of positive press. Doubtless it was through him that Hay got connected with the National Republican and the Daily Morning Chronicle, the Washington newspapers in which his most lavish celebrations of Mary appeared.54 Both papers were government funded. The Chronicle, considered the organ of the White House, was edited by Lincoln’s friend John W. Forney, who appreciated the president’s help in getting him elected as the secretary of the US Senate. The Chronicle promoted the policies of Lincoln, who had ten thousand copies of the newspaper distributed to the Army of the Potomac daily.
Lincoln wanted Mary to appear in the best possible light. John Hay, burying his real feelings about her, helped make that happen.
So did the popular author and journalist Nathaniel P. Willis, whom Hay praised as “the pen-portrayer of our best society.”55 Tall and dandyish—Poe dismissed him as “a graceful trifler”—Willis purveyed gossip and novelty about public figures, including the Lincolns, whom he sometimes visited.56 Dubbed “the inevitable Nat” and “a born lion,” Willis wrote effusive sketches in his Home Journal about the Lady President and her husband.57 In one, he emphasized the “thorough good nature and covert love of fun, which are the leading qualities of our lady President”; he cited her vacations and shopping tours in the North and her creativity in fashions.58 In another, he reported that “the presidentess has returned to the White House,” which will “now become a very joyous place,” because “the joyous ‘Reine d’Illinois’ will again dress splendidly and receive splendidly and do her best to make everybody happy.”59
La Reine and the Republican Queen of the White Palace became Mary’s nicknames among those who attended the salons that she held in the Executive Mansion. Willis was a regular, as were a number of men skilled in glib repartee and surrounded by an aura of the illicit. What she called “my beau monde friends of the Blue Room” included Henry “Chev” Wikoff, a multilingual womanizer and dilettante who had been jailed for kidnapping his fiancée in Italy and who used his connection with Mary to steal Lincoln’s 1861 message to Congress for publication in the New York Herald (for which he also went to prison); his friend Daniel “Cap” Sickles, notorious for having killed his wife’s paramour (he escaped punishment by pleading temporary insanity); and Oliver “Pet” Halsted, a swaggering lawyer businessman who tried to sell arms to the Union and after the war was murdered by a love rival.60
In this shady group, Mary must have felt somewhat like what I’ve called elsewhere the feminist criminal of sensation novels: the woman who, feeling thwarted in a patriarchal society, takes revenge by becoming either actively criminal herself or the leader of other wrongdoers.61
Mary’s own petty crimes related to buying. She colluded with the White House gardener, John Watt, who padded expense accounts to help pay for her redecorating bills, and then with a doorkeeper and watchman, Thomas Stackpole, through whom she evidently distributed government travel or trading permits in exchange for cash.62 Lincoln reportedly heard of her shenanigans and became “very indignant, and refunded what had been thus filched from the government out of his private purse.”
PARENTING AND LOSS
Whatever conflicts arose between the Lincolns melted in their shared devotion to their boys and the overwhelming grief they suffered when the eleven-year-old Willie died in 1862.
During the White House years, Abe and Mary maintained their relaxed attitude toward parenting. The boys had the run of the White House and its grounds. An early Lincoln biographer noted, “The boys had their own way with their father; and while their mother was sometimes disposed to chide them for undue mischief, even she gave them quite as much liberty as was good for them.”63 The boys court-martialed their Zouave doll, Jack, for desertion or sleeping at his post, found him guilty, executed him, and buried him in the rose garden. They did this so many times that John Watt saw his garden being ruined. He complained, and the boys went to their father, who wrote a pardon for the doll, upon which they promised never to punish Jack again—though within a week they hanged him on a tree branch after convicting him of being a spy. On the roof of the White House the boys built a crude structure that was alternately a fort and the deck of a man-of-war, armed with old condemned muskets and a small log that served as a cannon. With friends, they formed a colorfully clad military company called “Mrs. Lincoln’s Zouaves,” which the president and first lady reviewed with great ceremony. Missing the snow in Illinois, Willie and Tad gathered thousands of guest cards left by visitors, ripped them up, and created blizzards by tossing them around in the attic.
The boys also loved playing with their pets. The south lawn of the Executive Mansion was a menagerie of horses, ponies, donkeys, and a pair of pet goats, Nanny and Nanko. Willie and Tad created a ruckus when they converted kitchen chairs into sleighs and attached them to the goats, who dragged them around the White House and its lawns. Lincoln enjoyed the goats. In the tense spring of 1862, when his wife was away on a trip with Tad, Lincoln sent an affectionate telegram: “Tell Tad the goats and father are very well—especially the goats.”64 To Elizabeth Keckly, he said one day, “Come here and look at my two goats. I believe they are the kindest and best goats in the world.”65 Lincoln had reluctantly left his dog, Fido, behind in Illinois when he came to Washington, but in the White House he doted over the family’s pet cats, Tabby and Dixie. When during a state dinner he fed Tabby with a gold fork left over from James Buchanan’s term, his wife called his behavior “shameful.” He replied that “if the gold fork was good enough for Buchanan I think it is good enough for Tabby.”66
In March 1861, shortly after the Lincolns arrived in Washington, Willie and Tad had met children who lived nearby—Julia (“Julie) Taft and her brothers Horatio (“Bud”) and Halsey (“Holly”) Taft—who became regular playmates. Bud was twelve, a year older than Willie, and Holly was eight, Tad’s age. The four boys became good friends. Not only did they spend many days playing, but on Sundays the Lincoln boys attended the Tafts’ Presbyterian church instead of the New York Avenue Church, which Mary (and sometimes Abe) attended. The boys found the Tafts’ church lively because Confederate parishioners frequently stood up and left in a noisy huff when prayers were said for the president.67
Sixteen-year-old Julie often talked with Mary or the president, and both told her they wished they had had a girl like her. Mary listened to Julie’s teenage chatter and asked her to play pieces on the piano, especially “Colonel Ellsworth’s Funeral March.” Lincoln enjoyed taking Julie on his knee and telling her stories. He called her a “flibbertigibbet.” When she asked what it meant, he expressed shock that she didn’t know. After much teasing, he winked and defined the word as “a small, slim thing with curls and a white dress and a blue sash who flies instead of walking.”68
Tad remained the most mischievous of the Lincoln boys—a contrast to the stuffy Robert and the self-controlled Willie. In a typical prank, Tad stole from his mother’s drawer the blood-stained Confederate flag she had been given in remembrance of Elmer Ellsworth, who had been killed just after he had taken it down in his raid on Alexandria, Virginia. Tad waved the hated flag behind his father, who was reviewing troops from the portico of the White House, to the shock of all below. Lincoln scolded him for making light of the flag, but reprimands were few and far between from the tolerant father. Tad was playfully dismissive of learning. When he was twelve, his mother showed him a picture of an ape and asked him what “a-p-e” spelled. “Monkey,” he answered. He stubbornly repeated the mistake despite Mary’s corrections.69 Born with a cleft lip and probably a cleft palate, he had a vocal defect that made him hard to understand.70 Lincoln had real affection for him, and he put up with his antics. It was not unusual for Tad to break into a cabinet meeting and sit on his father’s lap or climb onto his shoulders. Tad longed for a “real revolver.”71 His father gave him one but then feared he would find ammunition and fire it. He wrote Mary when she was out of town with the boy. “Think you better put Tad’s pistol away. I had an ugly dream about him.
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