Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [383]
Emilie had been living with her young daughter in Selma, Alabama, when she learned that her wounded husband had been taken to Atlanta. She reached the hospital minutes too late. Alone in Atlanta, she had no desire to return to Selma, where she had moved only for its proximity to her husband’s post. Now she desperately wanted to see her mother in Kentucky. Confederate general Braxton Bragg unsuccessfully sought through Grant to secure a pass for her through Union lines. Helm’s father then wrote to Betsy Todd, Mary’s stepmother, in Lexington, Kentucky. “I am totally at a loss to know how to begin. Could you or one of your daughters write to Mrs. Lincoln and through her secure a pass?”
Four days later, Lincoln personally issued a pass allowing Mrs. Todd “to go south and bring her daughter…with her children, North to Kentucky.” When Emilie arrived at Fort Monroe, however, the officials demanded that she take the oath of allegiance to the United States. Unable to contemplate such a momentous step so soon after her husband’s death in the Confederate cause, she refused. The officials sent a telegram to the president, explaining the dilemma. They received a prompt directive: “Send her to me.”
After weeks of uncertainty, the young widow was received at the White House by the president and first lady “with the warmest affection.” The three of them, Emilie wrote in her diary, were “all too grief-stricken at first for speech.” The Lincolns had lost Willie, Emilie had lost her husband, and the two sisters had lost three brothers in the Confederate Army—Sam Todd at Shiloh, David Todd from wounds at Vicksburg, and little Alexander, Mary’s favorite baby brother, at Baton Rouge.
Families rent apart by the Civil War abounded in border states such as Missouri or Kentucky, the ancestral home of the Todds. The reality of “brother fighting brother” lent an intimate horror to the idea of a nation divided. “Often the boundaries separating people of opposing loyalties,” the historian John Shaffer writes, “were nothing more than the property line between two farms, or a table over which members of the same family argued and ultimately chose sides.”
That night, as Mary and Emilie dined alone, they carefully avoided mention of the war, which “comes between us,” Emilie acknowledged, “like a barrier of granite closing our lips.” They talked instead of old times and of old friends. Emilie marveled at Mary’s “fine tact,” which allowed her to “so quickly turn a dangerous subject into other channels.” In the days that followed, Mary did her utmost to deflect her sister’s mind from her sorrow. She gave her the Prince of Wales guest room, took her for long carriage rides, made sure Emilie’s little daughter was entertained, and sat with her at night in the drawing room before the light and warmth of a blazing fire.
Emilie’s visit provided solace for both sisters. One night after Emilie had gone to her room, Mary knocked on the door, intending to share an experience that she could not readily discuss with others. She wanted Emilie to know that in her own grief over Willie’s death, she now was comforted by the belief that his spirit was still present. “He comes to me every night,” she told Emilie, “with the same sweet, adorable smile he has always had; he does not always come alone; little Eddie is sometimes with him and twice he has come with our brother Alec, he tells me he loves his Uncle Alec and is with him most of the time.”
The vision of spiritual harmony between Willie and Alec seemed to promise a day when the Todd family would again be united, and the devastating divisions between North and South would be dissolved by history. Then Mary herself would no longer be “the scape-goat” for both sides. “You cannot dream of the comfort this gives me,” she told her sister, speaking “with a thrill in her voice” that Emilie would long remember.