Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker (17 page)

For weeks she had mentioned idly in conversation that she believed fresh air and a change of scenery would do her good, so Elizabeth was not surprised when Mrs. Lincoln announced that in the middle of June, the Lincoln family would relocate to their summer residence. Anderson Cottage, she told Elizabeth, was a charming two-story dwelling of stucco and gables on the 240-acre grounds of the Soldiers’ Home, an asylum established as a place for wounded veterans to convalesce. It was about two miles north of the city, a cool, wooded, secluded haven on a hilltop, far enough away from the Capitol and the White House to act as
a restful retreat, but near enough for Mr. Lincoln to travel back and forth as needed.

Although Mr. Lincoln returned to the city almost daily, Mrs. Lincoln and her sons did not, so Elizabeth saw the First Lady very little throughout the late spring and summer. Although many other ladies left Washington to escape the heat, the insects, the pervasive illnesses, and the sights, sounds, and smells of a city given over to the care of thousands of ill and wounded soldiers, enough of Elizabeth’s patrons remained to keep her sewing busily during Mrs. Lincoln’s absence.

At times Elizabeth wished she too could ride off to a cool summer retreat, but she made the most of the early mornings and temperate evenings to go for walks, attend lectures, or enjoy outings with the Lewises.

One evening, she and Virginia were coming home from a choir concert at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church when they heard a band playing merry music a few blocks away. Curious, they both instinctively slowed their pace to listen. They exchanged a glance, and Elizabeth asked what they were both thinking: “Shall we see what that’s about?”

Virginia eagerly agreed, and so they followed the enchanting melody to the home of Mrs. Farnham. The yard was brilliantly illuminated with lanterns, and white ladies and gentlemen were strolling about, enjoying conversation in the night air, glasses of punch, and lovely music.

Virginia tucked her arm through Elizabeth’s and, with a nod, indicated the colored butler standing sentinel at the gate. By unspoken agreement, they crossed the street and approached him. “Good evening,” Elizabeth greeted him pleasantly. “Would you kindly satisfy our curiosity? What happy occasion is Mrs. Farnham celebrating?”

“It’s a festival, ma’am,” he said. “A benefit for the sick and wounded soldiers.”

“A benefit?” echoed Virginia.

The sentinel nodded. “Yes, ma’am. The guests pay twenty-five cents to enter, and then they can buy tickets to exchange for punch and
delicacies. For a few tickets more, they can request a special tune from the band. All the money will go to help the suffering soldiers get the things they need—medicine, bandages, blankets, good food—everything that’s in short supply.”

“What a marvelous idea,” said Elizabeth. “I hope it’s a complete success.”

The sentinel thanked them politely as they moved on.

As she and Virginia made their way home, Elizabeth mulled over what they had seen. “Virginia,” she said thoughtfully as they turned onto Twelfth Street, “something occurs to me.”

“And what is that?”

“If white people can give festivals to raise funds for the relief of suffering soldiers, why shouldn’t the well-to-do colored people work for the benefit of the suffering of our race?”

“I don’t see any reason why we should not,” said Virginia. “Heaven knows we have suffering colored folks all around us in abundance, and more coming every day.”

It was a sobering truth. Just as the opponents of the president’s bill had warned, Washington after emancipation had become the refuge of contraband, runaways, and freedmen emigrating from slave states. Before the law abolished slavery in the district, the contraband population had numbered only a few hundred. Newcomers found places to live in the town houses along Duff Green’s Row on East Capitol Street and were taken up into the ebb and flow of the city with little difficulty. After emancipation became law, however, their numbers had swelled into the thousands. They arrived in the city alone or with their families in tow, footsore, hungry, exhausted, most of them field hands with no trade or training except farm labor, almost all of them illiterate. Very few contraband could find or afford rooms in colored homes or boardinghouses, and even fewer had set out for the capital with any thought of what they would do once they arrived. At first they were accommodated in Camp Barker, a complex of empty soldiers’ barracks, stables, and tents, but when these places filled to overflowing, the refugees built themselves shacks of blankets, mud, and scraps of wood in camps that
sprouted up near military hospitals, beside the forts on the outskirts of the city, or tucked away in alleys. Sometimes the government administrators failed to distribute rations efficiently, and entire families went hungry. Diseases like dysentery, smallpox, and typhoid flourished in the overcrowded, filthy camps, and the dead were buried in makeshift cemeteries not far away.

White Washingtonians, even some of those who had supported emancipation, had become increasingly alarmed by the rising tide of impoverished refugees. They were not alone in their worries. Some among the colored elite and middle class, whose loftier status within the city social hierarchy seemed tenuous even at its best, were determined to distinguish themselves from their uneducated, destitute, darker-skinned brethren. In Washington’s colored community, rank was determined according to one’s wealth, distance from slavery, and lightness of skin tone. Thus freeborn Negros of means were at the pinnacle, with light-skinned former slaves a rung below, darker-skinned freedmen beneath them, and slaves lowest of all, with barely a toehold on the ladder. It was an order not unlike what Elizabeth had known as a slave, wherein light-skinned house slaves—often the children, grandchildren, or siblings of their masters—held themselves above the darker field hands. The unspoken rules were strictly observed even within the White House, and even the president was powerless to enforce equality. Mrs. Lincoln had told Elizabeth regretfully of William Johnson, Mr. Lincoln’s dark-skinned personal valet, who had come with them to Washington from Springfield but had left soon thereafter, before Elizabeth came into her service. The lighter-skinned White House servants had snubbed William and subjected him to such adamant scorn that after enduring two days of it, he resigned and asked the president to help him find employment elsewhere.

Thankfully, most middle-class colored Washingtonians overcame these class prejudices to assist the contraband. They acted out of compassion, and they acted out of self-interest, understanding well that many white people saw no difference between the prosperous colored merchant whose wife and daughters dressed in silk and the shoeless,
whip-scarred contraband who had been a slave only weeks before. As the lowest among them fared, so everyone of their race would be perceived, and thus for their own sakes it was essential to forgo snobbery and raise up all colored people. Elizabeth wished no one needed to be reminded that it was also simply the right thing to do, to be charitable to those in need.

The following Sunday, with encouragement from Virginia, Walker, and Emma, Elizabeth received permission from her minister to address the congregation after his sermon. She was not accustomed to speaking before so great a crowd, but she summoned up her courage, stepped up to the pulpit, and reminded herself that the need was too great to allow nerves to get the better of her.

“We have all observed the great migration of newly freed slaves to Washington,” she began. “They come with great hope in their hearts and all their worldly goods on their backs. Fresh from the bonds of slavery, from the benighted regions of the plantation, they come to the capital looking for liberty, but many of them don’t know it when they find it. Many good friends have reached out to them in the spirit of charity and compassion, but for each kind word spoken, two harsh ones have been uttered.”

A few women nodded as they fanned themselves, their hats bobbing emphatically.

“The newly liberated have not been welcomed, but repelled,” said Elizabeth, “and their bright, joyous dreams of freedom are fading in the presence of that stern, practical mistress, reality.”

Murmurs of agreement went up from the pews.

“Instead of flowery paths, days of perpetual sunshine, and bowers hanging with golden fruit, the road has been rugged and the garden full of thorns,” Elizabeth continued. “Appeals for help too often are answered by cold neglect. Poor children of slavery, men and women of our race—the transition from slavery to freedom has been too sudden for them! They are not prepared for the new life that has opened before them, and now the great masses of the North look upon their helplessness with indifference. Our white neighbors, observing those who
have come to us as refugees, have learned to speak of our entire race as idle and dependent.”

A more emphatic response followed these words—grim nods of assent, a scattering of amens, and encouraging calls for her to speak on.

“It is our sacred duty to help our own,” said Elizabeth, “and these poor unfortunates are indeed our own. Our Lord Jesus Christ instructed us to love our neighbor. He told us that whatever we do unto the least of His brethren, that we have also done unto Him. Brothers and sisters, I ask you to look toward the contraband camps and see your neighbors, and to join me in creating a society of colored people to work for the benefit of the suffering freedmen.”

A loud crash of applause greeted her proposal, and as Elizabeth nodded her thanks and returned to her pew, the minister took the pulpit and invited anyone who would be interested in founding a relief association to stay after services for its inaugural meeting.

Two weeks later, the Contraband Relief Association officially commenced, with forty women members and Elizabeth as its elected president. They planned benefit concerts and festivals, and they organized volunteers to work in the contraband camps. Their most prominent members solicited donations from well-to-do Northerners, white and colored alike. With the funds they raised, they purchased essential supplies for the camps—shoes, clothing, bedding, food, tools—and helped the contraband settle into permanent homes.

Elizabeth often visited the camps to teach sewing, reading, and simple housekeeping to the colored women struggling to care for their families in the squalid conditions. Because of her dignified, well-spoken manner and status as the president of a relief organization, officials often asked her to escort visiting dignitaries who came to inspect the camps. On one such occasion, she guided a Miss Harriet Jacobs, a former runaway slave from North Carolina a few years older than herself and a prominent, influential abolitionist. Miss Jacobs’s knowing, compassionate gaze took in every detail as Elizabeth showed her around and described the contrabands’ plight. “They’re willing and ready to work, but they’ve never worked for wages,” Elizabeth noted as they
passed a group of young men listening intently to a well-dressed colored man in spectacles who addressed them from atop an overturned crate. Suddenly one of the young men folded his arms over his chest, lifted his chin, and frowned thoughtfully up at the speaker in a manner so reminiscent of her lost son, George, that Elizabeth had to look away, pained. “We have to teach them how to seek work for pay, how to settle on fair wages, and how to leave an employer who treats them unfairly.”

Miss Jacobs nodded, studying the young men as she followed Elizabeth past. “And is there work to be found?”

“Oh, indeed, yes. The war has created ample quantities of that.” Elizabeth guided Miss Jacobs around a tent where a soldier was distributing loaves of bread to a cluster of gaunt, silently determined women, some of whom clutched young children dressed in tatters. “Do you know about President Lincoln’s new law, the one that allows him to employ ‘persons of African descent’ to help put down the rebellion?” Miss Jacobs nodded. “Then perhaps you already know that soon after the law was passed, the government set about registering contrabands and distributing rations, clothing, and wages in exchange for their labor in support of the Union. The men of the camps cut firewood, haul water, dig ditches, police hospital grounds, construct roads, build whatever needs to be built, and repair whatever needs fixing.”

“And the women?”

“They work as laundresses and cooks, and they take turns watching one another’s children. For wages, men receive ten dollars a month. Single women hire at four dollars a month, while a woman with one child earns two and a half, perhaps three.” Suddenly Elizabeth halted and placed a hand on Miss Jacobs’s arm, bringing her to a stop. “Make no mistake, the most unpleasant tasks always fall to the contraband, the work no one else wants to do—cleaning privies, burying dead horses and mules, removing the human refuse of the hospital wards. It’s important, necessary work, but it’s also hard, exhausting toil, and not what they had expected of freedom.”

“Their dreams have failed to live up to their expectations,” Miss Jacobs remarked as she resumed walking.

“That’s true,” said Elizabeth, hurrying to catch up with her, “but until I spent more time among them, I did not realize how extravagant their dreams had once been—and how thoroughly demoralized the dreamers have become.”

Something, some embarrassment or uncertainty, restrained Elizabeth from confiding that whenever she visited the camps, refugees would crowd around her, lamenting in their distress and pleading for relief. For some, the bitterness of their disappointment cast their memories of slavery in a false, rosy glow, so that they pined for their old lives. Elizabeth had been dismayed the first time she had heard one old woman declare that she would prefer to return to slavery in the South, where everything was familiar and her master had provided for her, rather than suffer the miserable freedom of the North. Elizabeth told herself that the old woman and others who felt as she did were not to blame for their despair, and she did not hold their words against them. After a lifetime of dependence, they knew nothing else, and the worries and cares of poverty had given them a harsh introduction to freedom.