Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868

by Cokie Roberts

  Sickles might not have noticed his wife’s affair—he was having a fairly public one of his own with a woman in Baltimore—had it not been for an informant who wrote him an anonymous letter revealing the trysts, and the servants who subsequently confirmed it. Feeling he had to defend his somewhat besmirched honor, the congressman ambushed Key just as much of Washington was preparing to go to St. John’s Church, right across Lafayette Square. “A horrible, horrible thing has happened Virginia,” shouted Senator Clay as he burst into the room where his wife was dressing. “Sickles, who for a year or more has forced his wife into Barton’s company, has killed Key, killed him most brutally, while he was unarmed!” Just a few days before, along with about a hundred other people, Virginia had called on Teresa, who was performing the political wife’s duty of receiving guests “at home” at the Sickles’ rented mansion. “She was so young and fair,” Virginia recollected, still able to detail exactly what the “girl hostess” was wearing (“a painted muslin gown, filmy and graceful, on which the outlines of the crocus might be traced”), “and so naïve, that none of the party of which I was one was willing to harbor a belief in the rumours which were then in circulation.” After the shooting, Teresa, “the unfortunate cause of the tragedy,” was bundled off to her parents in New York and never seen in Washington again. As for Sickles, Jessie Frémont had nothing good to say about him when she heard the news in California. The murder of her friend Key capped “an accumulation of heartless cruelties that show a character to justify his wife’s looking elsewhere for something to love.” But that’s not the way the jury saw it. Sickles got off scot-free when his lead lawyer, Edwin Stanton, cooked up a whole new legal defense: “temporary insanity.”

  It worked. Virginia Clay suspected a political motive in the acquittal—after all, Sickles was a good friend of the president: “So strenuous were the political needs of the time, and so tragic and compelling the demands of national strife now centred in Washington, that the horrible calamity entailed no punishment upon its author.” But a report canvassing the jurors concluded it wasn’t politics that swayed them, it was adultery. Key got what was coming to him—that was all there was to it. The fact that Sickles, too, had strayed made no difference, his wife had betrayed him and Key had to pay the price. In disgustedly summing up the whole sordid story for her mother, Varina Davis had but two words: “filth, filth.”

  VARINA HAD BIGGER worries that winter than the Sickles case. She was expecting another baby and was afraid she might die, as she almost had in her last childbirth. Though her house in Washington bustled with activity—with her young sister and brother and her two toddlers “stirring around like mad”—Varina felt alone as her due date approached. Her husband had left town because rising floodwaters threatened to destroy his Mississippi plantation, and she knew he would not be back in time for the birth; she had grown used to separation in her somewhat difficult fourteen-year marriage. From the very beginning, when the first stop on their honeymoon had been at the grave of Davis’s first wife, it had been a strained relationship between the nineteen-year-old Varina Howell and the thirty-six-year-old widower. But then the newlyweds went on to a glamorous stay at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans, before they moved to Brierfield, his lonely plantation in the Mississippi countryside. The young bride desperately missed her big boisterous family in Natchez and chafed under her husband’s idea of the perfect wife. When she had first met Jefferson Davis two years earlier, the Whig-raised Varina told her mother that “he is refined and cultivated and yet he is a Democrat!” (For his part, Davis saw that Varina was “beautiful and she has a fine mind.”) Varina soon learned that her somewhat stern husband brooked no disagreement about politics or anything else. Still, the strong-willed and well-educated young woman could not help but declare her independence from time to time, often causing conflict in the marriage. They rattled around in the plantation house without children, and when her mother proffered a “comfortable” dress as a subtle way of asking if she was pregnant, Varina replied: “I do not need a ‘comfortable’ dress, and I think I shall probably never require one.” It’s hard to know exactly what she meant by that—a rupture in the relationship, a revelation she didn’t know before the wedding? But later that year the question of children moved to the background as Davis took a seat in the House of Representatives and his still-teenaged wife took her place among the political women in Washington.

  It was an exciting time for the eager-to-learn bride. The National Exposition of 1845, the equivalent of a world’s fair, had come to town and was showcasing new inventions like the sewing machine, which fascinated Varina. She watched as a “needle with an eccentric motion played laterally through the cloth and sewed a pretty good seam,” but she was dubious about the telegraph: “I think it is a trick but paid my two bits to get a message that it was a fine day.” The young woman helped her husband with his speeches and correspondence and enjoyed time in the galleries at the Capitol listening to debate. She was thrilled when former president John Quincy Adams, who was still serving in the House, paid attention to the newly elected Davis: “When Mr. Adams listened to my husband I was a proud young creature, and knew he must be doing something well; but found, afterward, that to every new member he listened attentively once, and never again, unless pleased.” As to the man who was then president? Polk “was not an impressive man at first” until he won over a “person honored with his attention.” This first pleasant sojourn in the nation’s capital was cut short by Polk’s war against Mexico and Davis’s recruitment to lead Mississippi’s soldiers. Strongly objecting to her husband’s decision to join the military, Varina miserably waited out the war at Brierfield, fighting with her domineering brother-in-law on a nearby plantation.

  Jefferson Davis emerged from the Mexican War covered with glory. Badly injured in the Battle of Buena Vista, he refused to leave the fray until the enemy was defeated and his heroics earned him a victor’s welcome as he arrived in New Orleans and then triumphantly sailed up the Mississippi River to home. There he found another battle scene, which he blamed squarely on the unhappy Varina for her strong-headedness in taking on his older brother. Davis refused to bring his wife to Washington when he was appointed to the Senate in 1847, coldly stating: “I cannot expose myself to conduct such as yours when with me here.” He demanded a subservient little woman and meant to have one; otherwise he would find it “impossible for us ever to live together.” Varina was ready to swallow her pride if it meant she could go back to the Capital City, so, as she would do many times after that, she tried to stifle her feelings. Still, she couldn’t help but comment when she read about one of her husband’s particularly inflammatory speeches: “I saw your very forcible little speech in partial answer to Mr. Hale’s vituperations against slavery. It was a little too violent, more so than I would have liked to hear you be, however well-deserved the censure might be.” But she then quickly assured Jefferson that she was making an honest attempt to be the wife he wanted, reading Mrs. Ellis’s Guide to Social Happiness, with its treacly meditations on “the poetry of life,” and calling herself his “thoughtless, dependent wife.” He relented. Varina was invited back to Washington, a city she greatly enjoyed.

  The great lions of the Senate—Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Varina’s friend John Calhoun—were still alive. And they let Varina pull up a stool on the floor of the Senate as they debated the Compromise of 1850. Once again she spent much of her time helping her often ill husband with his work, but she also enjoyed her place in society, made easier by the fact that the couple lived in a “mess” with other political families, so Varina was not forced into hostess duties. Since her husband Jefferson’s first wife had been the daughter of President Zachary Taylor, the second wife anticipated her initial visit to the White House with trepidation, but she soon came to be a regular there, beloved by the first couple, and she sat by Taylor’s bed as he died. That special connection broke when Vice President Millard Fillmore moved into the Executive Mansion and Davis
ran for governor of Mississippi, lost, and then settled with Varina into life at Brierfield for the first time in a long while. With the cotton business booming and the unpaid labor of more than one hundred enslaved workers contributing to its success, the plantation prospered. Then finally, after seven years of marriage, the couple became parents in 1852 with the birth of Samuel Emory Davis. It wasn’t long before the baby’s father was on the road campaigning for his old friend Franklin Pierce for president.

  Once elected, Pierce begged Davis to leave the thriving plantation and return to Washington as a member of his Cabinet. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis would need to live in a substantial house—gone were the days of the relatively carefree congressional “mess”—and his wife would take on the obligations of official entertaining. With her grieving friend Jane Pierce out of the social picture, Varina moved into position as the foremost hostess in Washington. She made sure to invite the sixty-two senators and 234 members of the House every session, allowing her to argue convincingly that “the wives of Mr. Pierce’s Cabinet officers labored in their sphere as well as their husbands.” Breakfast meetings, for instance, could be used for lobbying, to offer a “personal explanation” to someone who was “dissatisfied with the Administration.” Varina actually enjoyed evenings when she could bring scientists, writers, and artists to her table. Life was good until two-year-old Samuel came down with measles and died. It was a devastating blow not only to his parents but also to Jane and Franklin Pierce, who had grown quite fond of the little boy and had seen their own sons die. Poor Varina had no way to escape the public outpouring of sympathy to retreat into her own grief.

  The following year another baby, Margaret Howell Davis, named for Varina’s mother, helped soothe their sorrow. President Pierce once again took a delighted interest in the baby and years later told her parents a charming story about their daughter. According to Pierce, he had watched as the family dog snapped at eighteen-month-old Maggie and then seen her plot her revenge. The little girl stretched out next to the offending canine, pretending to be loving until the dog went to sleep “and then biting him on the nose in retribution.” After waiting so long to have one baby, now Varina was having them almost yearly. Jefferson Davis Jr. came along in the midst of a paralyzing snowstorm shortly before his father’s Cabinet term ended in 1857. The childbirth left Varina deathly ill but the nurse couldn’t get through the snow until New York Senator William Seward came riding to the rescue; he “had his own fine horses harnessed to a sleigh” and delivered the nurse.

  Seward and Davis could not have been more different in their political views, and when the southerner moved from the Cabinet to the Senate, he and the New Yorker regularly did battle. But even then, at one point Davis himself became horribly sick and Seward kindly visited him daily “to tell all the ‘passing show’ of the Senate and House of Representatives.” Many years later, after the war and Seward’s service in Lincoln’s Cabinet, the wife of the president of the Confederacy would say of Seward: “He was thoroughly sympathetic with human suffering, and would do the most unexpected kindnesses to those who would have anticipated the opposite only.”

  The Buchanan White House welcomed the Davises as a like-minded political family but Varina also forged firm friendships with those unsympathetic to the southern cause. Much to the disapproval of their fellow Mississippians, the family even chose a Maine camping trip for a vacation in the summer of 1858. On the way back to Washington, Davis had been invited to speak at Faneuil Hall in Boston, and when they arrived at the city’s Tremont House, Varina again needed to depend on the kindness of a Yankee stranger. Little Jeff Jr. seemed on the brink of death: “At the darkest hour when we feared the worst, and a foggy night was setting in upon the evening of a raw day, a large, gentle-looking lady knocked at the door in a house dress. She introduced herself as Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, with whose name we were of course familiar, and said she had come to spend the night and help me to nurse.” Here was the foremost woman of a famous and historic Boston family offering her services to southerners she didn’t know. Saying that her house had been freshly painted or else she would take the baby home with her, Mrs. Otis stayed the night diffusing “a sense of relief and confidence about her.” It was a trip Varina would always cherish: “These reminiscences of Boston to this day soften all the asperities developed by our bloody war.”

  When they returned to Washington, Davis threw himself into work, traveling to campaign for fellow Democrats or staying at the Senate into the early hours of the morning. Varina was left to deal with the family and the social obligations of the Capital City. Though she doted on her children and proudly relayed anecdotes about their cute sayings and doings to her parents and to her husband when he was away, still she lamented to her mother, “Oh, how I would like to be free of care for a few days if only to know how it would feel, if I should not have to lose the objects of those cares.” It was a fantasy, Varina knew, but she nonetheless sighed to her father, “It would be lovely sometimes to cut duty, and go on a bust.” It’s something many exhausted mothers have thought in moments of honesty, though it was highly unusual for a woman of her place and time actually to say it. But Varina was an unusual woman. At one point when Davis complained about her spending money she figured out how to earn some of her own by publishing an article for a fifty-dollar fee, using a pseudonym to hide what would have been considered outrageous behavior.

  By the fall of 1858, with another baby on the way, and given the experience with her last childbirth, Varina thought she might die. Even so, she tried to keep her own and everyone else’s spirits up. Instead of staying shut in at home, as many pregnant women did, she went with her little brother to hear the actress Fanny Kemble read Shakespeare and looked forward to the summer, when she would be staying in a house promised her by Mrs. Montgomery Blair, wife of the lawyer for the slave Dred Scott. Varina was close to the whole Blair family, and though her husband weakly protested against her choice of Republican friends, this time he was willing to give in to her wishes. Jokingly referring to the Republican slogan of “Free Soil, Free Men,” Jeff wisecracked to his mother-in-law: “Varina having strong ‘free sail’ proclivities, as you know, seemed disposed to go out to the neighborhood of Mr. Blair. He had a house which he offered to her at a nominal rent. What guarantee he offered for keeping peace with me I did not learn.” Though she from time to time wore the uncomfortable mantle of obedient wife, Davis acknowledged, at least to her mother, that Varina had a will of her own. In any case, Jeff wasn’t even in town while Varina was making her summer plans. He was at his plantation in Mississippi trying to stave off disaster from severe flooding. Knowing what he was dealing with, his wife tried to protect him from her own fears: “Don’t feel uneasy about me. I am pretty well and quite hopeful.” In fact, she was preparing for the worst—getting everything in order, making sure the accounts were up to date, leaving instructions for what needed to be done in the garden in the fall, sewing full wardrobes for all the children, and helping her husband’s political career by mailing out two thousand copies of his speeches and preparing government-stamped envelopes for many more. All the while she lived in terror that she would die and that little Jeff Jr., her two-year-old boy, would not remember her; she prayed “every day to rear him.”

  The baby, another boy, arrived on April 18, 1859, and, much to Varina’s relief, all went well. But when the family went to Oakland, Maryland, to spend the summer with the Blairs, Varina’s health took a dangerous turn. Luckily for her, the Blair women served as her devoted nurses, little knowing they would soon be on the other side of battle lines. When his wife started having convulsions, Jeff dashed to the Blairs’ vacation cottage, where Montgomery’s daughter immediately came to his aid; the fact that the president of the Confederacy credited a Blair with saving Varina’s life that night would have political implications in the years to come.

  As the vacation went on, some of the nursing fell to Varina’s friend Elizabeth Blair Lee, Montgomery Blair’s s
ister, who wrote to her father that she had spent the night “watching by Mrs. Davis’ bedside. She is here and out of danger and seems to rally rapidly, she has been fearfully ill & in intense suffering & tis almost a physical sense of relief to me to see her out of pain once again.” Once again, Varina believed that she would die, but she recovered enough that her husband felt free to go off campaigning for his allies, leaving his family in the care of the political opposition. While he was gone, in an especially affectionate letter Varina charged him to “remember that you are a part of a powerful party and therefore can be spared, but you are all to your wife and babes.” At the end of the summer Lizzie Lee was sorry to see Varina go: “All of my Washington acquaintances leave here on Monday evening & today Mrs. Davis is parting for Washington & all of its comforts and pleasures.”