But, unlike her critics, Mary Lincoln’s defenders were few in number. She was widely denounced for indulging in extravagance and frivolity while the soldiers were suffering and dying. On one single day she received eighteen hostile letters. The National Anti-Slavery Standard bitterly remarked that she “has selected this darkest hour of the Republic for fiddling and dancing at the Presidential mansion. It is fit and proper that the most favored of her guests should be Mr. and Mrs. James Gordon Bennett. So we go. If we cannot fight, let us show the world that we can dance.” (That abolitionist paper noted that Bennett’s New York Herald had previously run “fulsome panegyrics of Mrs. Lincoln, which disgust all people of taste.”) “Poor woman,” Congressman Henry L. Dawes observed. “She seems to act if she expected to be the last President’s wife and was disposed to make the most of it. Trifling at the White House in these times seems as inappropriate as jollity at a funeral.” Through an intermediary, Dawes told the president that nothing could “break down his administration so rapidly as this dancing-party given at the time when the nation is in the agonies of civil war. With equal propriety might a man make a ball with a corpse in his house!” In declining an invitation to the party, Senator Ben Wade asked: “Are the President and Mrs. Lincoln aware there is a civil war? If they are not, Mr. and Mrs. Wade are and for that reason decline to participate in feasting and dancing.” George H. Boker, a poet and ardent Republican, penned a scathing verse satire, “The Queen Must Dance.” The Cincinnati Commercial thought it “unfortunate that Mrs. Lincoln has so poor an understanding of the true dignity of her position, and the duties devolving upon her. It is not becoming her to be assuming the airs of a fine lady and attempting to shine as the bright star of ‘the Republican court,’ as shameless and designing flatterers call the White House circle.” The editors disapproved of her “rich dresses and glittering equipage, her adornment of the President’s House with costly upholstery,” and her penchant for “crowding it with gay assemblages.” To the public, according to another Cincinnati paper, “the occasion seems too serious, the national peril too imminent, the distress of the country too great, and the condition of the nation too humiliating, to inaugurate a carnival at the Government mansion.” The journalist Mary Clemmer Ames concluded that Mrs. Lincoln, “unconsciously elated, carried away with the sudden honors of her new condition; unsuspectingly pleased with the delicate, dangerous flatteries of brilliant yet unprincipled intriguers, had little thought for anything but shopping and dressing.” The Indianapolis Journal protested: “With an empty treasury and a failing credit, a war raging all around us, and foreign nations threatening to interfere, such displays as that at the White House are a disgrace to the President.” Wendell Phillips exclaimed that “Mrs. Lincoln is vulgar, and wants to be fashionable!”
Source: Abraham Lincoln ∶ A Life ▫𓂃
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