The life of the Nation was threatened. The horror of war was imminent. The capital was menaced, as it had never been before, by the treason of its own children. Wives, mothers and daughters, in ten thousand homes, were looking into the faces of husbands, sons and fathers, with trembling and with tears, and yet with sacrificial patriotism. They knew, they felt that the best-beloved were to be slain on their country’s battle-fields. With what supreme devotion and consecration would Abigail Adams, or a thousand women of her heroic type, have approached the Nation’s House as the wife of its President in such an hour. It was the hour for self-forgetting—the hour of sacrifice. Personal vanity and elation, excusable in a more peaceful time, seemed unpardonable in this. Yet, in reviewing the character of the Presidents’ wives, we shall see that there was never one who entered the White House with such a feeling of self-satisfaction, which amounted to personal exultation, as did Mary Lincoln. To her it was the fulfillment of a life-long ambition, and with the first low muttering of war distinctly heard, on every side, she made her journey to Washington a triumphal passage. A single month, and the President’s call for troops to protect the capital had penetrated the remotest hamlet of the land. All the manly life-blood of the Nation surged toward its defence. All the heart of its womanhood went up to God, crying for its safety. In the distant farm-house women waited, breathless, the latest story of battle. In the crowded cities they gathered by thousands, crying, only, “Let me work for my brother: he dies for me!” With the record of the march and the fight, and of the unseemly defeat, the newspapers teemed with gossip concerning the new lady of the White House. While her sister-women scraped lint, sewed bandages, and put on nurses’ caps, and gave their all to country and to death, the wife of its President spent her time in rolling to and fro between Washington and New York, intent on extravagant purchases for herself and the White House. Mrs. Lincoln seemed to have nothing to do but to “shop,” and the reports of her lavish bargains, in the newspapers, were vulgar and sensational in the extreme. The wives and daughters of other Presidents had managed to dress as elegant women, without the process of so doing becoming prominent or public. But not a new dress or jewel was bought by Mrs. Lincoln that did not find its way into the newspapers.