As the partisan divisions deepened, they extended beyond Congress to courtship. Abby and Charles Adams brought the two youngest of their surviving six children with them to Washington, but others of their offspring visited from time to time. When their son Charles came in March and started keeping company with the daughter of Democratic senator James A. Bayard Jr. of Delaware, his mother was none too pleased. The girl’s mother might be “a fine woman” but “her father’s character is not first class & a slave holder.” That rankled Congressman Adams as well: “He thought it would be a bad thing for all, this mixture of slave & free. . . . I should rejoice in a good honest love match. It is worth all the money in the world, indeed makes money, for it is an incentive to a man to work.” Though Abby was sorry to see Charles leave, she was glad he was getting out of town before becoming too entangled.
She wished she could leave as well. All the calling and partying and late-night dinners were wearing her out. (Most of the women voiced similar complaints. Virginia Clay could often only rally for the evening with the help of a “shocking box,” which apparently sent some sort of electrical charge through her!) But Mrs. Adams did finally accept a dinner invitation at the White House, where there were “thirty six of us, Mr. Speaker Pennington & wife, members of Congress, of both parties, & a few strangers. The Speaker is a funny old man & it appears to me, silly. She is a motherly old lady. The President took her into dinner & I, as the oldest guest, sat to his left & I never intend doing it again. He is a heavy old toad.” Abby’s litany of must-attend events—a post–White House reception at the Sewards’, a late dinner at Rose Greenhow’s—would exhaust anyone. “This life kills me, but I go, as the Party seem to expect it & I am treated like a queen, only with more kindness.” Because of their position as presidential descendants, the Adams enjoyed a unique place in polarized Washington, where Abby found “all acknowledge me on the other side politely, some much more.” That was far from the norm: “We see nothing of each other excepting in morning visits, when we are strictly polite & amicable. It cannot be otherwise while this terrible struggle lasts & the excitement is so great. . . . As to Sumner, he neither speaks to, nor is spoke to, by a Southern person. His situation is very painful here. . . . Seward is the great man here, but not a Democrat have I ever seen at his receptions, although I believe he has one or two to dine.” Abby found the partisan behavior disturbing if not downright offensive. She described running into Senator James Murray Mason of Virginia at someone’s house: “To me, he never spoke, avoided me with great ease & when he could not do it civilly did it rudely.” It would not be long before Mason and Adams faced off against each other in London representing the two sides of the American conflict to the British government.
Abby was used to political dissension. After all, her own family and friends usually disagreed with her husband, but, she advised her son, “they treated papa with the greatest respect. Had they ever by word or look done otherwise, I would have fought like a tiger with every one of them, & they know it.” Still, his wife implied there were times when Charles Adams’s views could be a trial: “As long as I respect my husband it is all easy enough, the agony would be to feel ashamed of him, as some women must.” On the other hand, the not-so-long-suffering Abby concluded: “I would advise any young woman who wishes to have an easy, quiet life, not to marry an Adams. They are headstrong, willful, fighting ever, but honest & brave & straightforward.” Her husband’s mother and grandmother had often felt the same way.
Most of the time Mrs. Adams found herself in pleasant company. Senator Seward took her to Silver Spring, Maryland, to spend time with the Blair family, and there she “met several nice people.” It amused her that the patriarch, Preston Blair, had been “the bitterest opponent Grandpapa ever had. Now he is one of our warm Republicans. They are old fashioned, hospitable people, & have been very polite to us. They are the people who took Sumner home & nursed him so tenderly when he was injured.” Abby also found that women of both parties, “even Mrs. Jeff Davis sit most amicably at my receptions.” For her part, Mrs. Davis was finding it harder to socialize with the opposition as the congressional debates turned more personal. And one day when Lizzie Lee went to call on her old friend from Mississippi, she heard Varina tell a servant “that’s the Blairs’ carriage. Don’t let any of them in but Mrs. Lee.” This was the family that had lovingly nursed Varina the previous summer! Addie Douglas, on the other hand, seemed willing to call on anyone outside the White House, working the social circuit as hard as she could for her husband’s candidacy, even showing up repeatedly at the home of the Seward stalwart Abby Adams: “as to Mrs. Douglas, she returns my visits quite too fast, for my taste. I stick to the Seward colors, & don’t wish to be mixed up with that beast.” Another woman clearly not charmed by “the beast” Stephen Douglas, making Adele’s politicking all the more important.
With the party conventions fast approaching, the women of Washington assessed the odds of each candidate—and Abby worried about what would happen if the Democrats picked the Illinois senator: “if that brute Douglas is nominated, it rejects Seward’s nomination,” because the Republicans would need to nominate someone with more appeal to the West than the New York senator. And, as his friend, Abby fretted about that outcome: “Seward is heart and soul in it, & I don’t know how he will bear defeat.” Even so, she entertained a man who might have been just the person to best Seward, another antislavery Republican who showed up in Washington that spring, clearly courting his party’s politicians for the nomination. Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase knew the city well; he had been there as a young man studying law and returned as senator a decade earlier, when he had fought against the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Now he was back as “the rebel candidate for the presidency,” in the view of Mrs. Adams. She threw a small dinner for him one night and he joined her and a lively group at the Blairs’ another night, along with his nineteen-year-old daughter. It would not be long before Kate Chase would make her mark as one of the leading ladies of Washington.
THE DEMOCRATS COULD not have called their convention in a less promising place for Stephen Douglas. Charleston, South Carolina, might have been a reasonable choice four years earlier, when the party was still able to come together to unite behind a candidate, but by the time the delegates assembled on April 23, 1860, the usually charming southern city was known as the “hotbed of disunion.” Northerners expecting to enjoy the famous South Carolina graciousness were cut off and chagrined, according to Sara Pryor: “Charleston turned a cold shoulder to its guests from the North. All hearts, however, and all homes were opened to the Southerners. They dined with the aristocrats, drove with richly dressed ladies in gay equipages, and were entertained generally with lavish hospitality. All this tended to widen the breach between the sections.” When the men went to sessions in the South Carolina Institute Hall, the women repaired to St. Michael’s Episcopal Church to pray daily for the success of the southern proslavery platform, opposed by Douglas. And Buchanan’s henchmen were doing everything they could to derail the president’s sworn enemy.
Still, at first it looked like the Illinois senator could prevail. One of his backers from Boston, F. O. Prince, wrote to Adele with the good news that though he didn’t “reckon the number of chickens until the same are fully hatched—I feel assured that the day is ours. Our colors are nailed to the mast . . . we are resolved ‘never to say die.’ ” As to Charleston? He was impressed by the “beauty and fashion” and pleased to learn “that Washington does not hold all the loveliness & grace & wit of the Union—although lately I have had some suspicions to the contrary.” His big complaint was the price of everything and he joked to Adele, “If Mr. Douglas is not nominated pretty soon, I shall become a pauper . . . to avert this catastrophe, you better come here and electioneer.” But no amount of electioneering could have secured the nomination for Douglas, who had infuriated the southern delegates by his rejection of Kansas as a slave state. When the North managed to win the fight over the party platform, ba
lking at the South’s adamant insistence on a federal slave code proposed by Jefferson Davis, southern states walked out. The voting for president proceeded anyway, but with a requirement that a candidate receive the votes of two-thirds of the delegates, no one got enough for the nomination. After fifty-seven ballots the party decided to call it quits and try again in a few weeks, this time in Baltimore. But first the Republicans would meet in Chicago.
The Seward backer, Abby Adams, didn’t know what the opposition’s debacle would mean for her candidate. “The Democratic Convention, you will see in the papers. It complicates things as much for us, as for them.” The Republicans had planned to pick their nominee after the other party’s choice was clear, so they could counterbalance it. She expected Douglas to win in Baltimore in June, but, she said, “We feel ticklish. There is one hope ever uppermost, that the breach in the Democratic party can’t be healed, the hatred of the Southern men to Douglas is terrible, intense, & many of them openly say they should prefer Mr. Seward as president to Mr. Douglas. To be sure they are fire-eaters, & seceders & wish to make that an excuse, for dissolving our blessed Union.” Abby had that right. But it’s not surprising she knew the score, since “there is of course nothing but politics talked of here, by men and women.” She clearly relished the political conversation and planned to take in Jefferson Davis’s speech defending his platform position in a couple of days: “Visits are falling off, so I hope to be able to be at the Capitol more.”
Though she protested against those visits, plus the endless round of receptions and dinners, Mrs. Charles Francis Adams understood she must do her part for the embattled Republican Party, and she became quite cross with those who refused to pull their weight—especially her old friend Charles Sumner. “I gave him a piece of my mind yesterday,” she indignantly told her son. “That he expected us all to go out & show ourselves, & entertain, & work all the time for the cause & he did nothing, not a thing.” Still, she kept up her end both hosting dinners and attending them, including one at the home of that “silly old goose” Speaker Pennington, who was “weak as water, I think & I snub him terribly, but his wife & daughter are nice good people. He is a trial to his party, & the worse that they can’t say so.” Mrs. Adams, on the other hand, said so without hesitancy.
FOR ALL THE political clouds hanging over Washington, “never was a spring more delightful than that of 1860. The Marine Band played every Saturday in the President’s grounds, and thither the whole world repaired,” Sara Pryor recalled happily. “Easy compliments to the ladies fell from the lips of the men who could apply to each other in debate abuse too painful to remember.” Abby Adams also enjoyed the “warm & lovely” spring, with “the trees & grass superb” and music on the White House lawn. And she had to admit that the city offered other diversions as well. The “famous juggler” at the theater was “very wonderful” and the auctions amazed her. “The ladies all go here to auctions & bid themselves quite as much as the gentlemen & it is considered a regular entertainment. You meet all your friends & chat & gossip, & laugh & spend money.” When friends came to visit Abby, she took them on tours of the expanded Capitol building, which she deemed “superb.” Then there were trips to Mount Vernon, the nearby Virginia home of George and Martha Washington, which a determined group of women had managed to buy from the first president’s heirs and were trying to save. “The whole thing is a disgraceful ruin,” Abby reported with disgust. She had done some fund-raising for the Mount Vernon Ladies Association back home in Quincy, Massachusetts, but the “ladies” faced a daunting task: “They estimate it will cost twenty thousand dollars to put it in repairs, & two thousand yearly to keep it so.” (With a great deal of difficulty, the women succeeded. Without any government money, they restored and preserved the mansion and grounds and eventually built the impressive museums and libraries that are on the site now.)
Conversation about what would happen at the Republican convention when it met in Chicago on May 18 took a brief breath when all of Washington stopped to stare in wonder at the first ever visiting delegation from Japan. “We had much curiosity about the Japanese,” Sara Pryor said by way of understatement, “and were delighted with the prospect of receiving the embassy from the new land.” There would be a series of events, including one at the White House “to witness the presentation of credentials and the reception of the President.” Sara and a friend were in the Senate gallery when a member rose to propose adjourning “to meet and welcome the Japanese.” Even so simple a proposal as that could not go unchallenged in 1860, when another senator huffed that he hoped “the Senate of the United States of America will not adjourn for every show that comes along.” But the city was mesmerized by the “show.” When the ship carrying the strangers pulled into the Navy Yard, “half the town repaired to the barracks to witness the debarkation of the strange and gorgeously appareled voyagers from the gaily decorated vessel,” Virginia Clay excitedly recollected, “as they descended the flag-bedecked gangplanks and passed out through a corridor formed of eager people, crowding curiously to gaze at them.” Abby Adams picked up the story from there: “we walked down to the steamer where many servants & others were left in charge of affairs & saw several of them, some sat for their photographs & were very funny.” At the White House the next day, “Mr. Buchanan would have done well to select his guests with regard to their slimness,” Sara quipped; it was so crowded that no one could see anything and “the ceremony was long. The murmured voices were low. One might have imagined oneself at a funeral.” With a somewhat better view, Abby saw the box with the treaty presented and thought that the Japanese visitors were “dignified”; not so was the president, who was “all inelegant.”
BUT MRS. ADAMS was much more concerned about the next president than the current one and feared for her friend Seward: “If he is not nominated it will be a cruel blow to him.” A few days earlier a group of moderate former Whigs had met in Baltimore and nominated their own candidates—John Bell of Tennessee, who had held many offices, including Speaker of the House, and Edward Everett of Massachusetts, who happened to be Abby’s brother-in-law. Officially called the Constitutional Union Party, its elderly members immediately earned it the nickname of the “old gentleman’s” party and Abby was astonished that at age 67 Everett would “stoop to such tricks,” as she feared he would take votes away from her party in Massachusetts.
The Republican gathering in a “Wigwam” built for the occasion in Chicago was far less contentious than the Democratic convention in Charleston but hardly less infused with intrigue. Though party insiders genuinely worried about the New Yorker Seward’s appeal in the West and saw him as a single-issue antislavery candidate, more than a few shenanigans helped deny him the nomination. Illinois’s favorite son, Abraham Lincoln, the dark horse candidate, had tremendous support from the Chicago crowd of some ten thousand people who crammed the unsteady building and many counterfeit tickets issued to Lincoln backers allowed them to block Seward supporters trying to take their seats. Convention organizers also placed the New York senator’s delegates at a distance from any pivotal state, making persuasive conversations difficult. William Seward’s shaky lead on the first two ballots collapsed, the Illinois men wheeled and dealed so furiously their candidate made it over the top on the third go-round. One deal: a pledge to the Ohio delegation that favorite son Salmon Chase could have anything he wanted from Lincoln. The delegates then picked Hannibal Hamlin of Maine for vice president. Though the platform took a stand against the spread of slavery, it also condemned John Brown’s raid and pledged to protect the “peculiar institution” in the southern states where it existed. Other proposals, such as the building of a transcontinental railroad, the creation of a Homestead Act, and a higher tariff to protect northern manufacturers, moved the party away from a straight antislavery stance. But that did nothing to placate the South, where Lincoln’s nomination “represented nothing but the embodiment of the enmity of his party,” lamented Varina Davis.
Back in Washington
, Abby Adams admired Seward’s acceptance of his defeat: “No whining, complaint, or boasting. He has behaved splendidly & don’t seem to care, & is really a man.” But as for herself, “it was a bitter disappointment.” And her sons “were heart & soul for Seward and don’t care a pin for Lincoln.” Seward tried to convince them otherwise, arguing “he has known him well & that he is an honest true man.” She just hoped that Congress would wrap things up so she could go home. The House had already voted to adjourn on June 18, but “the Senate behave like children and silly ones at that.” The problem? “Jeff Davis & Douglas make speeches & quarrel, all the time, & don’t care whether they adjourn or not, they & their family both live here.” That’s been the complaint of congressional families wanting to get out of town to this day. And in 1860 they still had a Democratic convention to get through.
The second attempt to unify the party proved no more successful than the first. The “Old Gentlemen’s” party had already split away and, hoping to defuse the slavery grenades exploding around them, adopted a platform that simply endorsed the Constitution and Union. When the remainder of the Democrats showed up at the Front Street Theatre in Baltimore on June 18, nothing had been resolved. This time Stephen Douglas was able to secure the nomination, with Georgian Herschel V. Johnson as his running mate, but the southerners, still insisting on their proslavery plank, once again walked out. A few days later they assembled their own Baltimore convention at the Maryland Institute Hall. With Buchanan’s vice president, John Breckinridge, as their candidate and Joseph Lane of Oregon in the number-two slot, the four-way race was on. The only thing all the candidates could agree on: a railroad to cross the fracturing nation all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868 Page 8