"Behind the Scenes": An Investigation, Pt. I
A Letter by "E. E. D."
Introduction
I have written a bit about this before, and I’m still convinced there is much to be uncovered related to the actions of Mary Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley in 1867 and 1868. I’ll try and make as many clues public as possible, and maybe someone will solve the puzzle, as Keckley and Behind the Scenes (hereafter BTS) are now pretty popular topics. (But they’re also pretty niche topics—people who aren’t already familiar with this controversy should probably skip this post.)
When I talk about the puzzle, I mean more than the typical disputes like authorship. There was a lot going on “behind the scenes” here, and you can only see glimpses of it, but it remains hard to untangle. Many of these glimpses have been overlooked because people are stuck in certain narratives.
But this post contains claims that, if true, are an undeniably interesting twist in the BTS/Old Clothes saga.
“E. E. D.”
When Mary Lincoln returned to the US from France in 1880, there was a lot of press coverage about her arrival, and it led some to revive old gossip. One of these was “E .E. D.” who seems to have only recently taken a gig as the regular New York correspondent of the Boston Budget.
I believe, but am not positive, that the person who went by the initials “E. E. D.” was female. She—we’ll go with “she” for now—strikes me as someone who may have been older, having always done some literary work here and there, probably originally from Boston but having moved to NYC. She was very familiar with the theatrical and art world there, and seems to have focused mostly on that in her letters. This gig lasted for a few years, and she was probably someone with a connection to Boston literary circles.
She also appears to have written “The Art of Letter Writing,” a piece in the Brooklyn Eagle, in the late 1880s. One name I came across after extensive research was Elizabeth E. DeBevoise, but I can’t come anywhere close to confirming that she was E. E. D.
“Our New York Letter”
On November 14, 1880, the Boston Sunday Budget published E. E. D.’s latest letter update from NYC. Mary Lincoln had arrived there from France in the last days of October and left for her relatives in Springfield around November 1st.
The letter was written only the day before. I presume it was telegraphed, but I suppose some kind of expedited mail was possible. One section was about “An Interesting Circumstance in Mrs. A. Lincoln’s Life.” Emphases mine.
Mrs. Abraham Lincoln’s return to this country, recently …. [has] naturally excited some remark and gossip. From a gentleman residing near New York, the writer heard the following, which may be new to the reader.
“Residing near New York” is kind of an odd way to put it. So he lived in New Jersey or Connecticut, maybe? Had she gone to visit his residence? Just seems like it could be relevant.
After Mr. Lincoln’s death, Mrs. Lincoln went to Chicago to reside with a family by the name of Cole, whom her husband had in various ways benefited, and who were rich, but who were grateful for favors received and tried to make her comfortable.
Mary, and I presume Tad, did live with the Cole family briefly in late 1867 and early 1868, at the peak of this controversy, not right after Lincoln’s death. She had just rented out her house, and seems to have been hiding there, while she planned her next move. I have no idea what Lincoln did for the “benefit” of the Coles, if anything. But the general idea that they were indulging her, perhaps just as Lincoln’s widow, is supported by what Mary wrote to David Davis in November 1867, about having moved in with the Coles:
…it was an accommodation on their part…it is entirely unnecessary for them to have boarders, as from the rent of the stores, houses && he has built, his income is about $20,000, a year…
And here’s an excerpt from one of the letters from Mary to Elizabeth Keckley published in BTS:
I am lodged in a handsome house, a very kind, good, quiet family, and their meals are excellent. I consider myself fortunate in all this. I feel assured that the Republicans, who, to cover up their own perfidy and neglect, have used every villanous falsehood in their power to injure me--I fear they have more than succeeded, but if their day of reckoning does not come in this world, it will surely in the next. * * * *
…Here-after direct your letters to Mrs. A. Lincoln, 460 West Washington street, Chicago, Ill., care of D. Cole. Remember 460.
A newspaper reported that she was boarding “with the family of a wealthy citizen, Mr. Coles.”
I did some research on the family a while ago, but turned up very little. If I remember correctly, the Coles were New Yorkers originally, before moving to Chicago during the war, and becoming big in real estate development. By 1880, some of their adult children resided in the New York area, and a widowed Mrs. Cole may have been with them. So this “gentleman” may have been gossiping directly with the Coles.
There Mrs. Lincoln gave the statements for a book—her remembrances of the war, an inside view of events at the White House during her husband’s administration, that would have astounded the good people of our country and the world at large if it had been circulated.
Now, it is possible that E. E. D.’s conversation partner was telling her a garbled version of what happened with BTS, which she further garbled. If both of them were on the younger side, they would have had no memories of the excitement in 1868, and it likely had not come up much since. I don’t think the book was a particularly big deal outside of the cosmopolitan political elite and journalist classes. Older journalists would have been the ones most likely to start gossiping over it in 1880, and they were probably hazy on some of the details. Still, the reference to the Coles is quite specific, so there must have been some level of personal knowledge. (Unless, as indicated above, that part was taken from BTS itself, but anyone who had read it recently wouldn’t have had the story so mixed up.)
Mary Lincoln was considering writing such a book at that time. In fact, she corresponded with people who worked for a Connecticut publishing house, but declined their offer a very short time before BTS was published.
But I don’t think they’re the ones behind this story, based on what else E. E. D. said.
It was published, but the whole edition and the plates were bought up by certain politicians, now in power, and destroyed.
I’m not aware of any such book being published, but I don’t really know what records might reveal the existence of a work that was printed but destroyed prior to being copyrighted back in 1868.
Revelations
I doubt that any such work was actually published, but it is possible a draft was prepared. The rest of E. E. D.’s remarks support the idea that this is a confused retelling of something said by the Coles themselves. It is told from Cole family’s perspective, with a focus on Mary’s activities while living with them in Chicago.
The Cole family saw and read the manuscript, and tell some rare events that were mentioned in it, such as ‘Mr. So-and-so gave me $5000 for my influence with Gen. Blank.’ ‘Mr. A. T. Stewart gave me $10,000 worth of fine laces for my influence with Mr. Lincoln in regard to such a matter,’ etc.; but nowhere did she state that her husband ever received a bribe. The Coles thought her at the time half-crazy, and probably she was so…In the garret of the Cole mansion Mrs. Lincoln is said to have had at that time the thousands of dollars worth of valuables stored, such as silks, laces, jewelry, etc., from the four quarters of the globe, which she said were all given or sent to her, while she was the President’s wife, as bribes.”
Additional support for this theory is the use of the present tense—-the Coles “tell some rare events…” The “gentleman” must have had a recent chat with the family, if he did not himself belong to it. The story is probably a mash-up of the events surrounding the old clothes scandal an BTS. These “rare events” are basically what Mary was threatening to reveal in the fall of 1867, if republican politicians did not cooperate.
What’s interesting is the idea that “certain politicians, now in power” shut it down. What states these politicians lived in or what party they were affiliated with is not mentioned. In fact, New York is never mentioned, and E. E. D. lived in NYC. I’ve written about the “bribe” logic before, and how it drove the old clothes scandal—Mary simply did not believe these statements reflected poorly on Lincoln, or probably even on herself.
The whole point was that Mary thought these particular guys—and the Republican party generally—owed her. Her mind fixated on the favors bestowed during the White House years by both Lincolns, and the compensation for Lincoln’s services that, in her view at least, should have been paid to his widow. These republican leaders had demonstrated extraordinary ingratitude and even malice, as she saw it. She was willing to suffer public exposure and questions about these “favors”—in other words, to implicate herself—to make this point and expose her ill-treatment to the public. She does not seem to have felt she was implicating her husband, because she framed the issue as one in which she did low-level politicians favors by passing on their requests to Lincoln. She seemed to think it self-evident that Lincoln would never have actually granted any a request merely because she was the one bearing it. Any favors Lincoln bestowed were to be understood as above-board by definition, and, if unreturned at his death, returned in the form of a donation to her.
Two additional comments on this:
1) She probably saw passing on some of these requests as congruent with the role of a politician’s wife, and therefore not immoral. Wives were considered “junior partners” in the marriage, not totally independent entities. Gifts bestowed on Mary were understood to be efforts to curry presidential favor, but it was not presumed he would grant the every wish of someone who gave him free theater tickets or sent Tad a toy. If they were giving him $100K in cash directly, you’d definitely have to worry about his decision-making be compromised, but these indirect gifts could not be understood as any sort of binding claim on Lincoln’s future actions. The influence was limited.
2) Lincoln really was viewed as a trustworthy person, and hard to sway by offering material luxuries, so Mary’s assessment was truer than most wives’ would be. She could get into a lot of trouble without doing real damage to his reputation for integrity in important or national decision-making. This can most clearly be seen in how it was more acceptable for Lincoln himself to interact with Mary’s Confederacy-aligned relatives than it was for Mary to do so. Even if he gave them special passes and the usual suspects complained, they were complaining that he was being foolishly lenient, not that he was committing treason. They knew he wouldn’t do anything intentionally to betray the Union cause, even if family ties made him weak, and even though he had access to all the sensitive information. He was widely considered honorable. The trust factor generally overrode any errors he was perceived as making.
Mary articulated this attitude very clearly in a letter to Senator Jacob M. Howard that I think surfaced pretty recently. It was written in February 1866, and Howard had written asking if she could check Lincoln’s papers for something that could refute accusations about his role in a decision that had become a political controvery. She did not have access to the papers, but she assured Howard that:
In all the contentions, that may arise, between these Virginia gentlemen, any assertions, they may make, can never be prejudicial to the exalted character of my noble and just husband. His aim was to be ‘just and fear not,’ his thoughts were alone fixed, on the good, he might render his beloved Country & should such a Memorandum, ever be found among his private papers, it will be of such a character, that no one, will blush to acknowledge it, and in keeping with his pure patriotism.
Back to E. E. D.’s letter. It does not really make clear how trustworthy she thinks these allegations are—-it is implied that they should be judged in light of Mary being “half-crazy,” but the point seems to be that she showed issue was her brazen bad taste, not delusional behavior. The rest of the letter treats the claims as actual revelations.
And the letter contains an interesting revelation of its own:
The person who placed her ideas on paper was an educated colored man.
If this is true, and it is an odd detail to fabricate, it seems that this occurred in Chicago, while Mary lived with the Coles. This is probably a garbled version of Keckley’s involvement, but what if the project got started as more of a joint enterprise between Mary Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley? The chapter on the Lincoln courtship sounds exactly like what Mary herself would want written, and not something Keckley would be all that concerned about “correcting.”
Theories
Perhaps a talented friend of Keckley’s had offered to handle the writing, and then something derailed Mary’s participation, and Keckley decided to repurpose it as an autobiography? If so, she later lost control of the project to unscrupulous publishers.
I’m inclined to seriously consider this theory because what stands out to me about BTS is its editing. The emphases and omissions indicate there were certain niche audiences in mind. But the two that seem to have been most salient are an odd mix.
The first is the elite black community in NY and DC. Entire letters from Frederick Douglass are included, and Mary brings him up several times in her own letters, but Douglass was high-profile enough that there is nothing odd about this. This is not the case for someone like William Slade, but the point was that Mary gave him some of Lincoln’s personal effects, so there was good reason to mention him. The references to Amelia Lancaster, “Mrs. Lawrence,” and several elite black boardinghouses in NY and DC, however, seem significant.
The second is the republican political/newspaper community. In editing Mary’s letters, which were published in the appendix, he censors the names of those associated with the more respectable members of the republican political establishment. For example, he censors the names of Henry J. Raymond, Charles Sumner, and Robert Lincoln, even when their identities are ridiculously easy to guess from context. He obviously found including those scenes irresistible, or his publisher did, but he was sensitive to those interests. It’s also possible he was asked by the Chicago crowd to “neutralize” the intended effect of the book, if they were unable to stop the publication entirely.
There are some people who feature prominently in the correspondence, despite playing little role in the book’s narrative: Charles Sumner (censored where the references touch on the sensitive matter of his collapsing marriage), Jacob Bunn, Massachusetts Governor John Andrew (then dead), Horace Greeley, Joseph Medill, Horace White, and Frederick Douglass. Two obvious themes are newspaper editors and abolitionists, but what is Bunn doing there, when most non-celebrity Illinoisans seem to have been edited out of the picture? He wasn’t a national figure. Same with David Cole—why was his full address printed? They were, as Mary put it, a “quiet family.” Others, like Seward, Weed, and David Davis, are the frequent subjects of angry remarks, but that is entirely expected. (Abram Wakeman is barely discussed, which is odd, given his conspicuousness at the time.)
The mix of all these things can be seen in another excerpt from one of Mary’s published letters:
I am grateful for the sympathy of Mr. F. Douglass and Mr. Garnet. I see that F. D. is advertised to lecture in Chicago some time this winter. Tell him, for me, he must call and see me; give him my number. If I had been able to retain a house, I should have offered him apartments when he came to C.; as it is, I have to content myself with lodgings. An ungrateful country this! I very much fear the malignity of Seward, Weed, and R. will operate in Congress the coming winter, and that I will be denounced there, with their infamous and villanous falsehoods
“R.” is Henry J. Raymond, whose name appears to have been censored throughout, probably because the prominent republican had jumped from editing the New York Times to being a congressman. This development was obviously not pleasing to Mary.
It reads to me like the project was interrupted and hastily wrapped up by someone with a different set of interests. In later interviews, Keckley described the book as essentially two books put together. There is pretty good evidence that the person who wrapped it up was journalist Hamilton Busbey, whose brother was heavily involved in republican politics in Chicago and closely associated with the Inter Ocean newspaper. I think the editing of the letters reflects his social associations, and that the name-dropping of black elites reflects the social associations of someone else.
A book originally written to appeal to the general public, or even the DC crowd, would not have spent so much time referencing obscure figures. It also would not have totally ignored people like Edwin M. Stanton and provided worn-out stereotypes of figures like William H. Seward in place of interactions. The first part of BTS is a well-designed narrative that furthers Keckley’s various objectives; the second is a hastily-constructed account of the old clothes scandal, pieced together from newspaper coverage and Mary’s letters.
I suspect BTS was published as a curiosity, as a purposely limited edition for niche audiences, rather than actively suppressed, but that the situation was misrepresented to Keckley. Probably political pressure resulted in the work being transferred to a less respectable publisher, who was concerned mainly with sensationalism and made little attempt to achieve coherence.
Keckley’s original plan was to write an autobiography about her journey from slavery to the White House, and she seems to have understood that was not likely to be a national bestseller. But her story had a definite appeal in certain crowds. This book was going to be promoted via a lecture tour run by James Redpath, who was known as an abolitionist. Eventually, readings were scheduled in several Massachusetts locations. The connections to this group may explain the MA/abolitionist focus.
Once it became more of a tabloid-style effort, things got more complicated. The old clothes story was becoming old news by early 1868, as Mary had probably been trying to exploit the 1867 political drama related to the attempted impeachment of Andrew Johnson. That was over, and she’d already fought it out with the republican newspapers, who were the ones who cared most. Unless Mary was willing to go into real detail about her experiences, and write a book far more substantive than BTS, there was little reason to think the second half of BTS would interest many people.
For example, on May 3, 1868, the Louisville Journal had an editorial that somewhat tracks E. E. D.’s claims:
There are many…who are impatiently awaiting the appearance of [a follow-up book written by Mary Lincoln herself]. It is very likely that this last…which was intended to be made, we were told, more redolent of personal and political scandal…has been nipped in the bud. It is to be hoped, though—not, however, by the personal friends nor the political enemies of Mrs. Lincoln—that such is not the case. The maid has given us a peek ‘behind the scenes’; but there are yet higher and more extractive wonders of the spectacular concealed by a curtain which then and now the mistress alone can withdraw.”
Many years later, some of Keckley’s associates told John E. Washington that Mary had been in on the publication of BTS. This has never been credibly established, but it is quite possible that she was at least initially on board. Mary probably got something out of the old clothes scandal fuss, as she was attempting to buy a second investment property from the Coles in early 1868, and did acquire one around that time. And the claims long pre-dated Washington’s interviews.
From the New York correspondent of the Chicago Evening Journal on April 15, 1868:
While some condemn, others defend the volume. At first glance, I inferred that its publication was a betrayal of confidence on the part of Mrs. Lincoln’s servant or next best friend. I am now assured however, by one who claims to know all about the matter, that it was written under Mrs. Lincoln’s auspices.”
From the New York Correspondent of the Hartford Gazette, “Pinto,” on May 9, printed on May 13:
It is now well understood that “Behind the Scenes,” by Mrs. Lincoln’s woman servant, was written under her own sanction and superintendence.
Additionally, later that year, Mary did begin a draft of a memoir, and worked on it for several years, but it has been lost.
Conclusion
In summary, BTS is a distinctly odd mix of an autobiography of Keckley, ugly and personal elite political drama, and cute but superficial glimpses of Lincoln and his goats—it just wasn’t likely to have broad popularity. It would have done better as a series of articles, and that’s basically what happened. Much of the book was published in excerpts on the front page of national newspapers, so meaningful suppression is implausible, but it would have significantly undermined book sales.
From the same Louisville Journal editorial:
Are we to haven nothing more than the advance sheets of…[the] book on the loves, the hates, the frailties, and the follies of the White House during the Lincoln regime? We had liberal extracts from the work three weeks ago, but the book itself has not yet made its appearance…That the task was performed by some literary adventurer for the joint profit of himself an the ostensible author, the last-named meagerly supplying the facts and some of the fancies, there can be little doubt…
From the New York correspondent of the Chicago Evening Journal on April 15, 1868, which supports the idea that the book’s revelations were primarily a “thing” among the “chattering class” in New York City. Newspapermen like news about other newspapermen, and the old clothes scandal was more of a newspaper controversy than anything else. Keckley may have been influenced a bit from being in their bubble, having moved to NYC to focus on this.
Though not yet issued to the public, the book…alluded to in my last, has created a decided sensation in literary and newspaper circles here.
He noted it was evidently written by someone with literary skill, and was “on the whole, friendly to Mrs. Lincoln…”
Mrs. Keckley … took a tour among the newspaper offices here with advance sheets of her work she made on the whole a very favorable impression. I have made some selections from the book, and send them to you.”
But there is much more to be said about BTS-related matters. I will investigate other aspects of the story in later installments, but wanted to call attention to the odd structure of the book, which I believe is key to understanding the situation.