CONGRESS FINALLY ADJOURNED in late June. Many of the members were out of town that October when the eighteen-year-old Prince of Wales paid a visit to his mother the queen’s old friend Harriet Lane, and Harriet’s uncle, the president. The Prince’s entourage took up so much space in the White House that Buchanan and Harriet had to sleep in the hallway, but Queen Victoria’s affable young son cordially greeted the thousands of guests at the state dinner held in his honor and then accompanied Harriet on a sightseeing tour of the city. It included a stop at Mrs. Smith’s Institute for young ladies, where his hostess bested the prince at tenpins in a shocking display of a woman playing sports. He was then brought back to the White House for another dinner and a soggy fireworks display. Harriet Lane had become quite popular with the American public. A picture of her printed on cards became something people collected like baseball cards and a copy of it filled a full page in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, along with a flattering article that referred to her as the “first lady in the land.” This made her the first inhabitant of the White House to be referred to by that title in public print.
The day after the prince’s defeat at tenpins the party boarded the cutter named for the first lady, the Harriet Lane, and to the strains of the Marine Band’s music sailed down the Potomac River to Mount Vernon. Here was Prince Edward, the great-grandson of George III, honoring the man, George Washington, who had defeated the British king. Once at the estate, they were “conducted with an absurd formality to the house,” scorned the New York Times. The prince was shown the prize object, the key to the Bastille, but he “seemed more interested in the fascinations of Miss Lane than in the terrible reminiscences of the key.” More formal entertainments in Washington followed and then the prince planned to “take the cars for Richmond, at which place they hope to arrive in time to see a great slave sale which takes place in the afternoon.” It’s so startling now to see those words in print—but it was startling even then. The visit to the South had been highly controversial and in the end Edward went only to church and the state capitol, staying clear of the slavery controversy. Years later, in 1902, when he was crowned King Edward VII, the monarch invited Harriet Lane to his coronation.
The Congress was still out of town when the results of the election came in. With less than 40 percent of the vote, Abraham Lincoln would be the first Republican president. Stephen Douglas had waged a vigorous campaign, barnstorming the country with Adele at his side and breaking with all tradition that dictated a candidate stays decorously at home while surrogates hit the trail. When Douglas realized that Lincoln would win, he turned his tour into a call for preserving the Union. But few were listening in the cacophony of voices raised during the race, which completely divided the regions of the country. In the states surrounding the disenfranchised District of Columbia, barely anyone had voted for the new president—less than 3 percent in Maryland, less than 2 percent in Virginia.
No one knew what the results would mean for the city and the country, but a diary entry from Elizabeth Lomax, a widow from Virginia living in Washington, summed up the speculation: “The papers speak of the dissolution of the Union as an accomplished fact.” The heated partisanship of the first session of Congress infected rowdies in the streets as roving drunken gangs turned the Capital City into “the centre of violence and disorder,” moaned one usually upbeat newspaper correspondent. “It has a monument that will never be finished; a Capitol that is to have a dome,” and “the reputation of Sodom.” No one could think about anything but the “danger of dissolution of the Union . . . everything else is forgotten . . . crime goes unpunished,” a distressed Louisa Meigs told her husband. Such was the atmosphere as the politicians returned.
“WHEN BELLES MET they no longer discussed furbelows and flounces, but talked of forts and fusillades,” in Virginia Clay’s telling. “Women went daily to the Senate gallery to listen to the angry debates on the floor below.” Her friend Sara Pryor shared the memory: “Thoroughly alarmed, the women of Washington thronged the galleries of the House and the Senate Chamber. From morning until the hour of adjournment we would sit, spell-bound, as one after another drew the lurid picture of disunion and war.” The alarms of the southern women were sounded as well by their northern sisters. Louisa Meigs informed her husband, Montgomery, who was in Florida, “There is not doubt I suppose that Carolina will go out of the Union. . . . If none of the Southern States shall follow her lead she will find in a short time—that ‘spunk however justified is not a paying institution.’ ” That was the northern hope—that any separation would be short-lived. And separation seemed more and more inevitable. Elizabeth Lomax’s diary tracks the buildup to the actual break: “Dec. 2, ‘The papers are teeming with secession.’ Dec. 3, ‘The South seems determined on disunion. God forbid!’ Dec. 5, ‘Many persons have gone to the Capitol to hear the debate in Congress. Much excitement expected. One retires at night with the feeling anything may happen tomorrow.’ Dec. 8, ‘The general opinion seems to be that there is little hope of preserving the Union.’ Dec. 14, ‘There are very few parties, though usually Washington is gay at this season—everyone is too anxious over the political situation to indulge in light hearted gaiety.’ Dec. 18, ‘I am, after much thought and deliberation, definitely for the Union with some amendments to the Constitution.’ Dec. 20, ‘South Carolina has seceded—God defend us from civil war.’ ”
President Buchanan was at a wedding reception when he heard the news. After the ceremony, guests had spread out around the bride’s parents’ house but the president stayed in his chair receiving well-wishers. To be polite, Sara Pryor kept him company, until the noise in the hallway reached such a pitch that Buchanan wanted to know if the house was on fire. She went to investigate and found a congressman from South Carolina ecstatically clutching a telegram with the bulletin that his state had seceded. It was then left to Mrs. Pryor to inform the President of the United States that his country was coming apart. “Falling back and grasping the arms of his chair, he whispered, ‘Madam, might I beg you to have my carriage called?’ ” After she saw the sad and shaken Buchanan safely off, Sara and Roger Pryor also left the wedding and life as they knew it: “This was the tremendous event which was to change all our lives—to give us poverty for riches, mutilation and wounds for strength and health, obscurity and degradation for honor and distinction, exile and loneliness for inherited homes and friends, pain and death for happiness and life.”
Washington initially reacted to the news of secession with a show of patriotic fervor. “My heart swells with emotion at the sound of the Star Spangled banner and unfurling of our national flag,” Louisa Meigs exulted, though she claimed to have “no sectional feeling.” Lizzie Lee, on the other hand, sided firmly with the North: “The Union Flag streams from nearly every house top,” she ballyhooed to her husband, but she added that her father, Preston Blair, “& all thinking men are sure that peaceable secession is a fallacy.” That specter of impending war made for a somber Christmas season: “People look gloomy and talk despondently of our condition,” a saddened Louisa Meigs wrote; “it would seem to be a defiance of public feeling and sentiment to give any entertainment at this time.” Even New Year’s was subdued. “This is usually a gala day in Washington,” Elizabeth Lomax recorded on January 1, 1861, “but this day is oh, so different. No social calling, everyone looks harassed and anxious—the state of our beloved country the cause.”
Harriet Lane was on hand to receive at the annual New Year’s open house at the White House, and Adele Douglas threw a counter-reception where “the North and South mingled fraternally,” including the secessionist firebrand Roger Pryor. Roger’s wife, however, admitted that no one pretended all was normal: “The season which was always ushered in on New Year’s Day resolved itself literally this year into a residence in the galleries of the Senate Chamber and the House of Representatives.” In the Capitol the antagonists and onlookers like Virginia Clay kept watch around the clock, uncertain of what the future would bring.
“For weeks, men would not leave their seats by day or by night, lest they might lose their votes on the vital questions of the times. At the elbows of Senators, drowsy with long vigils, pages stood, ready to waken them at the calling of the roll.” And the women cared just as passionately about the politics as the men. When Louisa Meigs went to visit Varina Davis she was shocked by her friend: “her face and eyes were pregnant with storm and cloud. . . . Mrs. D has done and is no doubt doing all that she can to urge her husband by all the influence she possesses to the most determined uncompromising measures.”
Compromise had long since been abandoned. When Senator Seward of New York made a much-anticipated speech on January 12, it disappointed Elizabeth Lomax because it “was not considered conciliatory. Political events breathe defiance to the Federal Government.” By then Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama had joined South Carolina in withdrawing from the Union and militias from those states had seized the U.S. Navy Yard in Pensacola, Florida. The southern woman who was purser at the yard eventually made her way to Washington, where she “amused us by telling of the manner in which she sassed the Secessionist officials—she has a woman’s tongue and knows how to use it,” Louisa Meigs jested to her husband; “if she had been a man I suppose they would have tried to blow her brains out.” But it was no laughing matter on January 21 when the senators from those states said their farewells in the United States Capitol. Calling it “the saddest day of my life,” Virginia Clay described the scene: “The galleries of the Senate, which hold, it is estimated, one thousand people, were packed densely, principally with women, who, trembling with excitement, awaited the denouement of the day.” As one by one the senators stood and announced their departure from the chamber and from the country, “women grew hysterical and waved their handkerchiefs. . . . Men wept and embraced each other mournfully. . . . Scarcely a member of that Senatorial body but was pale with the terrible significance of the hour . . . nor was there a patriot on either side who did not deplore and whiten before the evil that brooded so low over the nation.”
The last of the southerners to speak on “Secession Day,” as it came to be called, was Jefferson Davis. “Mr. Davis told me that he had great difficulty in reaching his seat, as the ladies, of course, could not be crowded, and each one feared that the other would encroach on her scanty bit of room,” his wife reported. She wondered if the crowd “saw beyond the cold exterior of the orator—his deep depression, his desire for reconciliation, and his overweening love for the Union in whose cause he had bled, and to maintain which he was ready to sacrifice all but liberty and equality.” But then Varina realized: “Not his wife alone, but all who sat spellbound before him knew how genuine was his grief, and entered into the spirit of his loving appeal.” A tearful “final adieu” and then “inexpressibly sad he left the chamber, with but faint hope; and that night I heard the often reiterated prayer, ‘May God have us in His holy keeping, and grant that before it is too late peaceful councils may prevail.’ ” But peaceful councils had been trying and failing to avert disunion and war since the Congress had convened. And by the second of February 1861, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas would join the list of seceding states.
“From the hour of this exodus of Senators from the official body, all of Washington seemed to change,” Virginia Clay remembered. “Each step preparatory to our departure was a pang. Carriages and messengers dashed through the streets excitedly. Farewells were to be spoken, and many, we knew, would be final.” That finality struck Varina Davis as well: “To wrench oneself from the ties of fifteen years is a most distressing effort. Our friends had entered into our joys and sorrows with unfailing sympathy. We had shared their anxieties and seen their children grow from infancy to adolescence.” One of those friends, Lizzie Lee, was equally sad: “Mrs. Jeff. asked me if I was going down south to fight her—I told her no. I would kiss & hug her too tight to break any bonds between us.” But there was nothing to be done: “We left Washington ‘exceeding sorrowful’ and took our three little children with us.” Varina had tried to take the family seamstress with them as well, but Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave, decided it was wiser not to go south. The New York Herald later surmised, “To none of these ladies was the thought pleasant of secession from the Union and consequent giving up whatever of social dominion she had acquired.”
“The poor old gentleman who presides at the White House thinks it’s best for the preservation of his own health and reason that he should not give himself entirely over to grief at the condition of affairs to which he finds his country is brought.” Thus did Louisa Meigs divulge the attitude toward hapless President Buchanan, who seemed to do nothing as the United States disintegrated. “He is said to have no friend either North or South—He has utterly failed to please either section of the Country.” Ironically, just at this time the state that had been such a cause of conflict, Kansas, came peaceably into the Union as a free state on January 29. And various peace committees kept trying to hold what was left of the country together, focusing on the slave states that had not yet left the Union. In one of them, Maryland, Anna Carroll worked with Governor Thomas Hicks to keep the secessionists at bay. He welcomed her letters to the newspapers in support of him, and her Republican politician friends were heartened by Hicks’s letters to Anna assuring her that he was a solid Union man. In early February, just as the seceded states were meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a government, one more “Peace Convention” convened in a blinding snowstorm in Washington. Making another effort at gaiety, Adele Douglas hosted a party for the putative peacemakers, but Elizabeth Lomax probably summed up the mood of most when she tersely noted, “Declined: we do not feel in a party mood.”
Union sympathizers tried to put the best face on what was happening. “The arrival of 1000 U.S. troops & the departure of the Secessionists has rendered the City very gay—a party every night,” Lizzie Lee regaled her husband with all the news, including her hope that war could be averted because she believed that the newly elected president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, was a moderate and “in private antisecession,” and that “Mrs. Davis is a warm personal friend—of Anderson,” meaning Robert Anderson, the U.S. Army major holding South Carolina’s Fort Sumter for the Union. Personal friendships could always be counted on before to smooth over differences, and so many women in Washington had friendships on both sides—in these tense days Elizabeth Lomax entertained both Custis Lee and Robert Lincoln, the sons of the two men who would soon be mournfully pitted against each other. But everyone knew it would take more than friendships to prevent the coming catastrophe and the Capital City cowered in terror. That’s why troops were coming in by the thousands—for fear of riots. No one knew what violence might erupt on February 13, the day when the Electoral College votes were to be counted, or February 23, when President-elect Lincoln was expected to arrive in town, or, most especially, on March 4—Inauguration Day.
Anna Carroll sought assurances from Maryland’s Governor Hicks that she would be safe as the only border state woman in her boardinghouse. She didn’t want to set a bad example, concerned that her departure “would be the immediate signal of every Northern lady’s leaving—supposing it be done from apprehension of danger.” Lizzie Lee, as a trustee of the orphan asylum, didn’t think she had a choice but to send “some of our children out to the far west today—I felt reluctant about it—but the hard times makes me cautious about keeping them when we can make any other sure provision for them.” As the inauguration approached, “we were advised to send our women and children out of the city,” Sara Pryor regretfully recalled. Though her hotheaded husband had been pushing their home state of Virginia to secede, the state stayed in the Union and Roger Pryor stayed in Washington. But Sara “hastily” packed up and with her little boys sailed down the Potomac, “standing on deck as long as I could to see the dome of the Capitol.” It was the end of the Washington she knew and loved: “We must bid adieu to the bright days—the balls, the merry hair-dresser, the round of visits, the
levees, the charming ‘at homes.’ The setting sun of such a day should pillow itself on golden clouds, bright harbingers of a morning of beauty and happiness. Alas, alas! ‘whom the gods destroy they first infatuate.’ ”
CHAPTER 4
LEFT: Dorothea Dix, whose advocacy for the mentally ill made her a prominent personage internationally, was appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses by the Union Army. RIGHT: Rose O’Neal Greenhow, a Washington, D.C., hostess to the politically powerful, spied for the Confederacy and landed in jail with her daughter, “Little Rose.”
(Granger, NYC—All rights reserved; Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC_USZ62_108564].)
Rose Goes to Jail, Jessie Goes to the
White House, Dorothea Goes to Work
1861
I felt rather anxious as this was the day for counting the president’s votes and trouble was threatened. However, it passed off quietly,” Elizabeth Lomax sighed with relief on February 13, 1861, Ash Wednesday. The Joint Session of Congress called to preside over the official count of Abraham Lincoln’s electoral landslide had gone off without a hitch after weeks of rumors that the southern states were planning to invade Washington and make it the Confederate capital. Secessionist sympathizers proudly sported their blue cockades as they promoted their case, causing cautious congressmen to post guards at the Capitol and conduct searches for explosives. So it was only a select group who could attend the proclamation of the vote for the new president. Acting in his role as president of the Senate, Vice President Breckinridge, who had been defeated by Lincoln, announced the tally, lending an air of drama to the occasion.
The expectation of invasion had reached such a level of credibility that the old general in chief Winfield Scott had imported a few companies of troops from other parts of the country. “The city has assumed a very military appearance,” Louisa Meigs complained. “The sound of the bugle is heard and soldiers are seen at every point. The Southern people are very indignant at such a display by Gen[era]l Scott of Federal troops. They think it aggravating to the people and totally unnecessary.” Even so, on Washington’s Birthday Scott staged a grand military parade, defying the peace commissioners who were still meeting in a final attempt to avoid war. Praying that the conflict could be avoided, sixty-four-year old Ann Green, a widow living on a farm inside the district limits, wrote to her daughter in Virginia that the family thought it “the grandest parade that ever was in Washington.” And Elizabeth Lomax, who went with her household to “see the regulars marching by, wonderful looking men and well drilled,” still hoped that the anniversary of the first president’s birth the following year would “find us a united and happy people.” But that prospect grew more remote with each passing day.
Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868 Page 9