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Authors: Jennifer Chiaverini
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the train sped off to Washington.
When the Sixth Massachusetts finally arrived, battered and bloodied, their appearance brought more alarm than relief to the citizens who had awaited them so anxiously. Four soldiers and at least nine civilians had been killed and scores more injured on the streets of Baltimore, and as reports came in of other railway lines destroyed, bridges burned, and telegraph lines severed, panic ignited as thepeople of Washington City realized they had been cut off from the North. As she walked to the White House, Elizabeth was shaken to observe citizens frantically piling their belongings onto wagons and into coaches and fleeing the city.
Within the Executive Mansion, Mrs. Lincoln worked valiantly to maintain a sense of calm, of normalcy. She fulfilled her role as hostess at official events the ladies of the entrenched Washington elite disdained, she enrolled Willie and Tad in the Fourth Presbyterian Sunday School, and she cajoled her husband out of his melancholy, which deepened as the crisis worsened. “I begin to believe there is no North,” Elizabeth once heard the president say, and indeed, with no reinforcements arriving, no telegraph reports, no mail, she too felt the strange gloom of isolation, of being alone and surrounded by hostile, unseen enemies. It did not help that Southern newspapers managed to make their way into Washington with an ease that mocked their defenses. Time and again the
Richmond Examiner
proclaimed that Washington would make an excellent capital for the Confederacy, noting that most of the city’s residents were from Virginia or Maryland anyway and would likely welcome the Confederate army as liberators, with cheers and flowers, rejoicing to be restored to the South.
Washington waited and prepared, until finally, at noon on April 25, the Seventh New York regiment arrived at the B & O Station. Relieved citizens cheered them as they marched to the White House to report to President Lincoln. Fears of an imminent Confederate invasion diminished as more troops arrived from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and elsewhere, settling into the House chamber and the Capitol rotunda, while later arrivals quartered in the White House, the patent office, and the seminary at Georgetown, or pitched tents on the south lawn of the White House. Massachusetts masons built twenty brick ovens in the cellar of the Capitol to bake enough bread to feed the soldiers, and the noise of drums and bugles and musket-fire practice was so constant that Elizabeth could almost forget what Washington had sounded like before the soldiers came.
While the city transformed around her, Elizabeth sewed for Mary Lincoln, usually at the White House—which she preferred—but sometimes in her own rooms, where the First Lady enjoyed coming to have dresses fitted. One by one, most of Mrs. Lincoln’s friends and family had returned to their own homes in Illinois and elsewhere, until only her loyal and sensible cousin Mrs. Grimsley remained, although she often dropped hints that she too missed her own home. As the Washington elite continued to snub Mrs. Lincoln, she found herself increasingly lonely and alone. Elizabeth, sympathetic and kind, became her confidante, and she soon discovered how unsettled Mrs. Lincoln felt in her new surroundings and in the elevated role she had so desired. Never before had she lived among strangers who were thoroughly unimpressed with her family name, which had always carried great influence back in Lexington, thanks to the prominent businessmen and politicians among her relations. Her husband surrounded himself with male colleagues who regarded her notes about policies and appointments as annoying and meddlesome, so that she had to struggle against his aides even for control over the very White House functions for which she played hostess. Excluded from her husband’s inner circle, missing her departed sisters and cousins, disdained by the popular ladies of Washington, Mrs. Lincoln
When the Sixth Massachusetts finally arrived, battered and bloodied, their appearance brought more alarm than relief to the citizens who had awaited them so anxiously. Four soldiers and at least nine civilians had been killed and scores more injured on the streets of Baltimore, and as reports came in of other railway lines destroyed, bridges burned, and telegraph lines severed, panic ignited as thepeople of Washington City realized they had been cut off from the North. As she walked to the White House, Elizabeth was shaken to observe citizens frantically piling their belongings onto wagons and into coaches and fleeing the city.
Within the Executive Mansion, Mrs. Lincoln worked valiantly to maintain a sense of calm, of normalcy. She fulfilled her role as hostess at official events the ladies of the entrenched Washington elite disdained, she enrolled Willie and Tad in the Fourth Presbyterian Sunday School, and she cajoled her husband out of his melancholy, which deepened as the crisis worsened. “I begin to believe there is no North,” Elizabeth once heard the president say, and indeed, with no reinforcements arriving, no telegraph reports, no mail, she too felt the strange gloom of isolation, of being alone and surrounded by hostile, unseen enemies. It did not help that Southern newspapers managed to make their way into Washington with an ease that mocked their defenses. Time and again the
Richmond Examiner
proclaimed that Washington would make an excellent capital for the Confederacy, noting that most of the city’s residents were from Virginia or Maryland anyway and would likely welcome the Confederate army as liberators, with cheers and flowers, rejoicing to be restored to the South.
Washington waited and prepared, until finally, at noon on April 25, the Seventh New York regiment arrived at the B & O Station. Relieved citizens cheered them as they marched to the White House to report to President Lincoln. Fears of an imminent Confederate invasion diminished as more troops arrived from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and elsewhere, settling into the House chamber and the Capitol rotunda, while later arrivals quartered in the White House, the patent office, and the seminary at Georgetown, or pitched tents on the south lawn of the White House. Massachusetts masons built twenty brick ovens in the cellar of the Capitol to bake enough bread to feed the soldiers, and the noise of drums and bugles and musket-fire practice was so constant that Elizabeth could almost forget what Washington had sounded like before the soldiers came.
While the city transformed around her, Elizabeth sewed for Mary Lincoln, usually at the White House—which she preferred—but sometimes in her own rooms, where the First Lady enjoyed coming to have dresses fitted. One by one, most of Mrs. Lincoln’s friends and family had returned to their own homes in Illinois and elsewhere, until only her loyal and sensible cousin Mrs. Grimsley remained, although she often dropped hints that she too missed her own home. As the Washington elite continued to snub Mrs. Lincoln, she found herself increasingly lonely and alone. Elizabeth, sympathetic and kind, became her confidante, and she soon discovered how unsettled Mrs. Lincoln felt in her new surroundings and in the elevated role she had so desired. Never before had she lived among strangers who were thoroughly unimpressed with her family name, which had always carried great influence back in Lexington, thanks to the prominent businessmen and politicians among her relations. Her husband surrounded himself with male colleagues who regarded her notes about policies and appointments as annoying and meddlesome, so that she had to struggle against his aides even for control over the very White House functions for which she played hostess. Excluded from her husband’s inner circle, missing her departed sisters and cousins, disdained by the popular ladies of Washington, Mrs. Lincoln
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