The American Story

by David M. Rubenstein

  One of the halls in the U.S. Capitol has beautiful pictures of our history. And one of them is Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, at the Constitutional Convention, under the mulberry tree. He’s got Adams and Hamilton and one other person I can’t remember, and a couple of people are standing around.

  He said that under the shade of the tree in his backyard, which is two blocks from Independence Hall, “I can bring people together and the tempers cool down and I can make sure we can get things done.” Sound familiar?

  DR: Why do you think that in Washington we have memorials for a lot of great people, but we don’t have any real big memorial for Benjamin Franklin?

  WI: Every now and then, you get David McCullough saying, “Sign up to get a John Adams memorial, sign up to get a Franklin memorial.” I think we see Franklin all around us. Wherever I am, I see the fingerprints of Dr. Franklin. It’s like the epitaph on the stone slab in St. Paul’s Cathedral where its architect, Christopher Wren, is buried: “If you seek his monument look around you.”

  6 COKIE ROBERTS

  on Founding Mothers

  “The letters that the women write, where they have absolutely no expectation that we’re going to be reading them two hundred years later, are just completely unvarnished, frank, and real. You get a much more complete view of the society as a whole.”

  BOOKS DISCUSSED:

  Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation (HarperCollins, 2004)

  Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation (HarperCollins, 2008)

  Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848–1868 (HarperCollins, 2015)

  Much of the traditional writing about the great events of history has focused on the accomplishments of men. Perhaps that is why it is called “his” story and not “her” story.

  This is certainly evident in so much of the written history of the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Written history has generally focused on Founding Fathers, generals, presidents, senators, and secretaries of state. By and large, that history has overlooked the women of these eras. They held none of those visible positions; they were not, if married, allowed to own property in their own names; and, of course, they were not allowed to even vote. They were very much behind the scenes.

  In fact, the women associated, through family or social relationships, with the well-known men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were quite influential. They were just not as publicly visible, and they exercised influence in areas the men did not understand as well.

  All of this is made clear by Cokie Roberts in three books devoted to the influential women of three historical periods: the pre-Revolution era, the early years under the Constitution, and the Civil War. In writing about these women—including Martha Washington, Eliza Hamilton, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, Mary Todd Lincoln, Julia Grant, and Clara Barton—Roberts used a treasure trove of letters, some not previously well known, written by and to these women. The result is a look at a side of American history that even diligent students of the subject may know little about.

  Cokie Roberts’s role as a book author also may not be as well known to the public as many of the other roles she has held or pursued: daughter of two congressional leaders (House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and his successor Lindy Boggs), NPR and ABC commentator, PBS journalist, and coauthor, with her journalist husband, Steven Roberts, of a weekly news column.

  I have known Roberts and her family for many years and have interviewed her many times. On the occasion of this interview, she was really at a homecoming, since both of her parents were so highly respected by the members of Congress.

  As the interview shows, Roberts is as adept at being an interviewee as she is at being an interviewer. She clearly conveys that the wives of the Founding Fathers, and of other American political leaders through the Reconstruction period, were not merely social adornments to their prominent husbands, as some readers of traditional accounts of these periods might have thought.

  In fact, they had clear impact on their husbands’ work, and thus on the outcome of so much of American history. And they did so despite having virtually no legal or political rights; typically getting married at very young ages; being often pregnant because of the lack of reliable birth control; and having to run businesses and raise children while their husbands were overseas, running the government, or fighting a war.

  Roberts provides a number of vivid illustrations of her general view that the women had real impact even though they received little credit for it. For instance, Martha Washington, at great physical risk, visited her husband’s troops every year during the eight-year Revolutionary War, to the great delight of the troops—she helped with replenishment of food and clothing—while also continuing to run Mount Vernon and raise their grandchildren.

  Abigail Adams, who was actually a stronger advocate of the break with England than her husband, managed to exchange more than a thousand letters with her husband. The most famous of the letters urged that he “remember the women” when creating laws for the new government. (He did not.) Many of her letters were written while her husband was overseas for years at a time and she was raising their children, running their farm, and fending off potential British attacks.

  Dolley Madison became one of Washington’s most influential figures, serving as the widowed President Jefferson’s White House hostess, subsequently as her husband James Madison’s hostess, and, in her later years, as the capital’s most beloved and quite influential figure.

  Harriet Lane, the unmarried President James Buchanan’s niece, acted as his hostess and was so involved that she became the first woman to be deemed “First Lady.”

  Mary Todd Lincoln was not beloved by anyone, it seemed. But she had enough of an iron will to be able to influence her husband’s views and practices in a number of areas, though not always to Abraham Lincoln’s or the country’s benefit.

  Because Julia Grant did not want to be around the volatile Mrs. Lincoln, General Ulysses S. Grant declined to go with the Lincolns to Ford’s Theatre on the night the president was assassinated. Had he done so, Grant might have been in a better position than the young military aide who ultimately accompanied the Lincolns to thwart John Wilkes Booth.

  * * *

  MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Let me ask you this, Cokie. In your book on the Revolutionary War era, you point out that you are descended from somebody who was the first governor of the Louisiana Territory, appointed by Thomas Jefferson. Your mother was a member of Congress. Your father was a member of Congress. Your sister was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey. Your brother ran for Congress. Why did you decide not to pursue politics as a career yourself?

  MS. COKIE ROBERTS (CR): I have an answer to that that should please you, which is that I feel very guilty not having done that. I have to tell you, there’s been many a time when I’ve been covering Congress when I would like to get down on the floor and just slap you all. It’s the mother thing: “I don’t care who started it, I’m stopping it.”

  But I met my husband when I was eighteen years old, and he was always going to be a journalist. He knew that from the time he was nine or ten, and it would have been very hard on him for me to go into politics. So I didn’t.

  I would like to say—and I could not mean this more strongly—I am such an admirer of people in public service of all kinds, but particularly people in elected office. It is hard work. You are constantly called upon to respond to the needs and desires, crazy as they can be sometimes, of your bosses, the voters. And I believe that all of you are serving the country by your lights as well as you can, and I admire you.

  I do have to tell a story, though, because it does give some perspective on all of this. The ancestor you’re talking about, the guy named William Claiborne, he was interested in politics as a young man. He worked as an enrolling clerk in the first Congress. [Enrolling clerks keep track of passed legislation and handle related correspondence with the Senate.]

  And he said he
wanted to run for office. He was from Virginia, and the Clerk [the top person in charge of record-keeping for the U.S. House of Representatives], who was a very powerful person named John Beckley, said to him, “Well, hello, Virginia has Madison and Monroe. You’re not going to win.”

  Tennessee became a state very fast. The Clerk said, “Go to Tennessee, there’s nobody there.” So William Claiborne went to Tennessee. Andrew Jackson had been in the House, then took a Senate seat that came open. So there’s an open House seat. There’s nobody in Tennessee.

  This kid was twenty-three years old. As you might know, the constitutional age for running for Congress is twenty-five. He ran for the House and was elected, because there wasn’t anybody else. He comes to Congress and they seat him—it’s still in the National Archives—they seat him in contravention of the Constitution, because he was only twenty-three. That was 1797.

  Then the election of 1800 happens. He’s the sole representative from Tennessee. His one vote is the equal of everybody from Massachusetts, everybody from Virginia, all of that. He’s got incredible power. And the view among Alexander Hamilton’s people was that his head could be turned because he was young and vain. [Hamilton eventually supported Jefferson for president after trying to negotiate on some issues in exchange for Federalist support. Jefferson in the end did all of the things Hamilton asked for.] He stayed with Jefferson through thirty-six ballots. One month later, he was made governor of the Mississippi Territory.

  So there you go. Political payoffs have always been with us.

  DR: We have a lot of histories of the Revolutionary War period and the post–Revolutionary War period, and the world doesn’t lack for Civil War books. What made you think you needed to write a book about each of these periods, and what made you focus on women?

  CR: Well, I am a woman. You might have noticed that. But the truth is—this crowd will understand the answer to this question better than most—my mother is the real answer.

  My mother was not only a remarkable woman, but I grew up with Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson and Pauline Gore. I grew up with all these remarkable women who were incredibly powerful. They had no titles, but they were very, very influential. I saw them running the political conventions, voter registration drives, their husbands’ campaigns, and raising all of us kids.

  They also worked with African American women in Washington and ran all of the social-service agencies in the city, because it was before Home Rule. [The Home Rule act of 1973 gave the residents of Washington, D.C., the ability to elect their own mayor and city council.] And I knew how important and influential they were.

  I spend a huge amount of time with the Founding Fathers, whether I like it or not, because if you cover Congress and politics as long as I have, you have to get to know them.

  I shouldn’t say this in this audience—I hear the Founders quoted on the floor of Congress all the time, and almost 100 percent wrong. I have to go back and read what they actually did say. So I got to know them, and then I realized how incredibly crucial this period is in our history, and I wanted to know what the women were doing.

  DR: How long did it take you to research and write Founding Mothers?

  CR: It’s really hard for me to know the answer to that, because I have a day job. I was working very, very hard daily. The book came out in 2004, and I had already had a book come out in 1998 and a book come out in 2000.

  DR: One of the things I was struck by in Founding Mothers is how every woman you write about wrote long letters to her spouse or boyfriend or relatives. For those of you who are not familiar with letters, a letter is something that you actually have a pen and you put it on paper and you write and you mail it. Were you struck by how long and detailed and perceptive these letters were?

  CR: They were extraordinary. By the way, I have had wonderful help from the Manuscript Division here at the Library of Congress. But, you know, even when I was growing up, David, we wrote long letters. This is not something that is foreign to me as a human.

  The wonderful thing about the letters we have—and that’s a whole nother question, because there are many, many letters we don’t have—but here’s the thing to know about women’s letters: women’s letters are really so much better than men’s letters.

  The Founders knew that what they were doing was extraordinary. They were self-aware men, and they knew that if they failed, they’d be hanged, but if they succeeded, they would be held in acclaim, that their writings would be published, and they wrote with that in mind.

  I always joke that we see our Founders as bronze and marble statues, and their letters read like they were written by the bronze and marble statues. They are edited, and they are considered, and they are in some cases pompous.

  Whereas the letters they write to the women, which they don’t expect to be saved, are much more human. We get to know them as flesh-and-blood people with all the flaws and feelings that a husband, a lover, a son, a brother have.

  And the letters that the women write, where they have absolutely no expectation that we’re going to be reading them two hundred years later, are just completely unvarnished, frank, and real. You get a much more complete view of the society as a whole. So in the same sentence you might hear about how we really have to declare war against France, and so-and-so’s pregnant again and it’s so scary because her last baby just died, and by the way I need that bonnet I left at home.

  So you get a much fuller picture of society, and also you get a much truer sense of the men. I actually think that we can admire the Founders more as flesh-and-blood people. Because it’s easy for a deity to do something extraordinary, but for just a guy to do something extraordinary is hard. And that’s what they were. They were guys.

  DR: Let me ask you about one of the most extraordinary series of letters I’ve ever read—the John Adams / Abigail Adams letters, about a thousand letters. They didn’t see each other for eight years or so, but she writes to him saying things like, “Maybe you could say you love me.”

  CR: “You’re a cold Laplander.”

  DR: He seems to write letters just ignoring everything she asks for.

  CR: Well, he had had his letters intercepted. And he had written some unpolitic things, you know—the era of e-mail’s not the first time when people have written unpolitic things—about his fellow members of Congress. He did talk endlessly about how they’re all great men here and they talk on and on. This is the Continental Congress he’s talking about.

  His letters had been intercepted, and he had been embarrassed. He was very concerned that his letters would be intercepted again, and that not only would he be embarrassed by talking about his colleagues but that what she wanted was what he called “sentiments of effusion,” and if he revealed such sentiments, he’d be humiliated.

  But he did do really stupid things. Think about this. So he’s in France, right? She’s in Braintree, Massachusetts, trying desperately to keep body and soul together. She’s suffering tremendously. There’s want, and she’s got these four little kids. She’s taking care of the parents, and there are periods when there really isn’t enough to eat and all that.

  And he writes to her about how wonderful the women in France are. I mean, this is death time. But she never misses a beat. She writes right back—of course, the letter takes a while to get there—and says, “Well, if the women of America were able to have the same kind of education as the women of France, we’d be so fabulous too.”

  DR: How long did it actually take to get a letter?

  CR: It could take six weeks. It could take a long time. But everybody got used to that.

  DR: What I’m also struck by in that period is that the women got married very, very young—the men were often older—and then they seemed to have children every year. And the children, as you point out, died a lot. Can you talk about that experience?

  CR: It’s really striking how much death you were dealing with all of this time. The book I’ve just finished, the Civil War book, of course it’s death ever
ywhere. Think of it—six hundred thousand–plus Americans killed in that war.

  Just a normal week could take your six-year-old and your ten-year-old, because typhoid fever would come through. Living in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was tough. Just getting through the day was tough. Even if you were elite, it was a very difficult life.

  That’s one of the reasons I admire these women so much. You’re right—the men would come home just long enough for the women to get pregnant. They were having babies, losing babies, raising babies, taking care of the old people, all of that.

  But still they were such devoted patriots. It’s just incredible. Abigail Adams would sit at night in this teeny house—if you’ve ever been to the Adams homestead in Quincy, Massachusetts, the original house that they lived in is half the size of this room—no, a quarter the size of this room, this gorgeous room—and there she was with four little children and dogs, and American soldiers would come stay because the British were occupying Boston, and still she would sit up at night by candlelight and write these letters that were so filled with patriotism and enthusiasm about the cause. You’d think she’d just want to go to bed.

  DR: The most famous letter of the thousand that she wrote is the one she writes to her husband when he’s at the Second Continental Congress. Why is the letter so famous, and what was his response to it?

  CR: The letter is so famous because it says, “Remember the ladies.” She had been militating, Abigail had, for independence for a full year.

  Now, keep in mind that the British were in Boston. The Battles of Lexington and Concord were in April 1775. It takes until July 1776 for the men to have the courage to declare independence. And the women are writing these letters—she and Mercy Otis Warren and then later Esther de Berdt Reed—writing these letters saying, “For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you guys? Do this. You know, the British are here.”