Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly by Jennifer Fleischner

Author:Jennifer Fleischner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307419156
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

On the morning after the inauguration, a dispatch from Major Robert Anderson at Fort Sumter, informing President Lincoln that the garrison’s supplies were nearly depleted, lay on the new President’s desk. The time Lincoln had sought to buy with his inaugural speech was already running out. Either he reinforce the garrison, at risk of starting a war, or evacuate the fort, essentially surrendering it to the Confederates and reneging on his inaugural promise to hold all government property. It was staggering news, and Lincoln had it sent to the aging, gouty General-in-Chief Scott and waited for advice on how to proceed.

A little before 8 o’clock on the same morning, Lizzy Keckly crossed Lafayette Square, walked up the semicircular drive around the bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson, and ascended the portico leading to the main entrance of the President’s Mansion. At the door stood a short, elderly doorkeeper (she would later learn this was Edward McManus), who admitted her into the vestibule, which opened out into a wide hall. Once inside, she was shown to a waiting room, possibly by the White House butler, a light-skinned, former slave named Peter Brown. Brown, a Virginian, had worked under Buchanan, and his cash wages went to buy the freedom of his small son, who was now eleven years old and shining shoes in the grounds around the Treasury Building. The Browns lived three blocks from Lizzy on Twelfth Street, and given the insularity of the middle-class black community, it is likely that they knew one another.1

In the waiting room, Lizzy saw “no less than three mantua-makers [dressmakers] waiting for an interview. . . . Hope fell at once.” Obviously, Margaret McLean was not the only woman who had recommended her favorite dressmaker to the new President’s wife. “With so many rivals . . . I regarded my chances as extremely small,” she would later recall.2

That morning, the new President, still reeling from Anderson’s dire message, sent his private secretary, John G. Nicolay, from his office to the Senate with his Cabinet nominations for approval. Down the hall, the new Mrs. President, with her cousin Lizzie Grimsley, was busy interviewing dressmakers, choosing a critical member of her Cabinet.

In Washington at the time, association with a particular dressmaker could bring triumph or despair, praise or disdain. Throughout the 1850s, Mrs. Rich had been the favorite dressmaker of distingué Washington, according to the wife of the Alabama Senator, Mrs. Virginia Clay. Mrs. Clay was so fierce a Southern partisan that at the costume ball thrown by the wife of the very rich California Senator William M. Gwin in their mansion in April 1858, a week after the House refused by eight votes to admit Kansas as a slave state, she refused to shake the hand of the abolitionist Senator Seward. Reminiscing over forty years later about the decade before the Republicans wrecked her Washington, Mrs. Clay described the “incomparable miracles” performed by Mrs. Rich, who would “transform provincial newcomers, often already overstocked with ill-made costumes

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