The Day Lincoln Was Shot Read Online Free PDF Page A

maternal grandmother, who ruled in chilly hauteur. When something was mildly funny, Mary laughed hysterically. When something was mildly sad, she wept hysterically.
    When she came to the White House for the first time in 1861, she was short, plump, had a broad round forehead, light brown hair with iridescent lights of bronze, and a full figure. She wore her hair cleaved straight down the middle. When she stepped into the Blue Room for the first time, she said: “It’s mine! My very own! At last it is mine!”
    At once she changed the established order, fired the veteran White House steward, rearranged the furniture, put famous paintings in storage, hid heirlooms, ordered new décor, raged over food bills, accused servants of stealing, stalked through the corridors, not realizing that her taffeta whispered and warned servants that she was coming, refused to appear at state functions if she was piqued, excoriated Congress publicly for not giving the President enough money for state dinners, referred to General McClellan as “humbug” and called General Grant a “butcher.”
    She wanted to be addressed as “Madame President.” The best the President could do was call her “Mother.” Her funds were almost always low, or nonexistent. When bills for gowns were delivered to her, she often went into a frenzy of despair. At the back door of the White House, she berated butchers and grocers for their charges and she would clamor like the lid of a simmering saucepan until her eyes bugged and her voice failed. Afterward, she would sit shaking and palsied, exhausted.
    One tradesman reached a point where he complained to Mr. Lincoln. The President is said to have eyed him sadly, put a strong hand on his shoulder, and said: “You ought to be able to stand, for fifteen minutes, what I have stood for fifteen years.” This was in the early years, and once, at home in Springfield, her nagging reached a point where legend says that Lincoln lost control, laid violent hands on her, shoved her out the front door, and said: “You make the house intolerable! Damn you, get out!”
    After that, he surrendered. Never again did he fight for reason. He did things against his will because they would please her. When he was in his office, and heard the first far-off peal of thunder, he ran from behind his desk to her side, because he knew that she would be terrified. A tree surgeon once approached him, perplexed, and said that Mrs. Lincoln insisted that a particularly fine White House tree be cut down. Lincoln didn’t ask, “What tree?” He said: “Then, for God’s sake, let it be cut down.”
    On the evenings of state balls, the President, dressed in somber tails and pulling on white gloves, always stopped in his wife’s dressing room and said, almost cheerily: “Mother, which women may I speak to tonight?”
    The mulatto seamstress, Mrs. Elizabeth Keckley, said that Mrs. Lincoln would tell him.
    As she grew older, her rages became more violent, more enduring, and with them came dark hallucinations. Once he led her gently to a White House window and pointed to a big white building in the morning sun. “Mother,” he said gently, “if you don’t stop it you will spend the rest of your days there.” The white building was the insane asylum.
    She had terrifying dreams and often, when she awakened crying, he would hear her and get out of his bed and hurry to her and put his arms around her and comfort her. A friend asked what he thought of marriage, and Lincoln said quietly: “My father always said, when you make a bad bargain, hug it the tighter.”
    Mary Todd Lincoln felt that she was a shrewd politician. There were few vacancies of offices for which she did not have a candidate. Sometimes, to appease her, the President made the appointment. At other times, he ignored her recommendations. When he turned her down on a Secretary of State, and