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

by Cokie Roberts

  The Lincolns’ young friend Julia Taft was rejected because she was too young but she volunteered to read to the soldiers and write letters for them at the hospital run by her half brother. “My brother would not have any women nurses in his hospital,” she noted, reflecting the resistance of many military doctors. “Doctor Mary Walker wanted to be taken on his staff but he had a horror of her because she wore men’s clothes.” Mary Walker was the first female surgeon in America and only the second woman to have graduated from medical school. As an ardent supporter of women’s rights, she always wore men’s clothes, something that caused her to be arrested from time to time. Because she was a woman, the military brass would not hire her at the beginning of the war, so she donated her services as assistant surgeon at the hospital set up in the Patent Office. Later in the conflict, she received a salary under military contract to work in field hospitals. She was captured by the Confederates and held prisoner under horrific conditions, until released in a prisoner of war exchange. When the war was over she received the Medal of Honor—still the only woman to have ever been awarded with the highest distinction the country confers.

  Dorothea Dix turned to the first woman in the United States to graduate from medical school, Elizabeth Blackwell, as she looked for someone to train her nurses. Dr. Blackwell wisely replied that the training should take place in a different hospital “so the male surgeons may take the credit.” Women in the wards was going to be a tough enough sell—better to have them trained by men. Dr. Blackwell was involved in a war effort of her own in New York, trying to organize the outpouring of supplies coming from relatives of the soldiers. Seeing that donations arrived in a completely haphazard fashion, often never reaching the men they were meant for, Elizabeth convoked a huge assembly that resulted in the formation of the Women’s Central Association of Relief “to organize the whole benevolence of women of the country into a general and central association.”

  The WCAR appointed a board of twelve women and twelve men, and some of the men then traveled to Washington to meet with the War Department. On the way, they came up with the idea of a civilian sanitary commission, similar to one that operated in Britain during the Crimean War, to promote cleanliness in military camps and hospitals. When they reached the capital, they met with Dorothea Dix and with President Lincoln and, after some bureaucratic hassles, were able to form the United States Sanitary Commission. In addition to its duties in the field, the commission would work with aid societies around the country soliciting and delivering food and clothes for the troops, plus overseeing the training of nurses. The women’s association took on those tasks and organized enormous fairs to support the cause, eventually bringing in a billion dollars for the war effort.

  As the war began the medical situation was disorganized and disorderly. No one was really in charge and the biggest army hospital was in Kansas, hundreds of miles away from the action. When combat came at Bull Run, and two thousand killed or wounded soldiers were carried to Washington, the city was totally unprepared. But Dorothea Dix was everywhere—setting up hospitals anywhere she could, using part of her own creation, the Government Hospital for the Insane, for the worst cases, and tapping her contacts around the country to hasten the delivery of medical supplies and food to the capital. Though most male doctors resented Dorothea and her army of female nurses, it was clear they couldn’t function without them. Miss Dix made it easy to resent her. She was used to getting her way by staring down state legislators and she made it patently clear that she had no patience for men blocking her path. Always having operated as a sole practitioner, Dorothea Dix showed no talent working within an organization. One of the original board members of the Sanitary Commission, Harvard’s Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, offered one of the kinder descriptions of this whirlwind of a woman: “Miss Dix, who is the terror of all mere formalists, idlers, and evildoers . . . goes everywhere to prevent and remedy abuses and shortcomings.”

  Howe saw Dorothea Dix in action when he and his wife, Julia Ward Howe, traveled to Washington in the fall of 1861. “The enemy’s troops was then stationed in the near neighborhood of Washington, and the capture of the national capital would have been a great strategic advantage to their cause,” the famous poet wrote later as she remembered the wartime city. Still fresh in her mind was the startling advertisement she saw from her window at Willard’s for “an agency for embalming and forwarding the bodies of those who had fallen in the fight or who had perished by fever.” On a visit to the camps outside the city, she heard soldiers repeatedly singing one song they particularly liked: “John Brown’s body lays a mouldering in the ground, / His soul is marching on.” Urged by a friend to write “ ‘some good words for that stirring tune,’ ” she replied that she had wanted to but the words hadn’t come to her. The next day as she awoke at Willard’s “in the morning twilight . . . the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.” Worried that she might forget what had come to her, she jumped up, dashed down the words, and then went back to sleep, “saying to myself, ‘I like this better than most things that I have written.’ ” And thus was born “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which became the clarion call of the federal army.

  During their visit the Howes called on President Lincoln, who “was laboring at this time under a terrible pressure of doubt and anxiety.” With General McClellan dragging his feet about taking his troops into battle, the country wondered why the president wasn’t taking charge. “Few people praised or trusted him,” Mrs. Howe recalled with amazement later. The public wanted to know, “ ‘Why did he not do this, or that, or the other? He a President, indeed! Look at this war, dragging on so slowly!’ ” The best thing anyone said about Abraham Lincoln at that point: “he meant well.”

  PRESIDENT LINCOLN TOO wondered why the war was dragging on so slowly but he couldn’t get his general to act. At McClellan’s insistence, he had pushed old General Scott out and named the younger man general in chief of the whole army while he also kept his command at the head of the Army of the Potomac. The nightly call “all quiet along the Potomac,” once a source of comfort, had turned into a mocking reminder that nothing was happening in this war. McClellan kept his troops busy drilling and practicing but with one brief exception, they did not fight and that one battle, at Ball’s Bluff on the upper Potomac, did not go well. Eight hundred federal soldiers were killed, including Lincoln’s dear friend Senator Edward Baker. The Lincolns had named their little boy who died after Baker, and Abe and Mary both loved him. So did their boys. That affection made it even worse that the battle did nothing to dislodge the Dixie forces from their redoubt in nearby Virginia. As Ann Green summed up the situation: “The character of the war now assumes the appearance of lasting a very long time.”

  In this period in limbo, the capital took on a somewhat festive air, despite miserable November weather when a rising Potomac River carried the bodies of soldiers killed at Ball’s Bluff down to the city. Performances of plays, concerts, and magicians’ acts entertained the throngs coming to work in the war effort or to make money off of it. At the White House, the president and first lady entertained regularly. They hosted Prince Napoleon, the cousin of the sitting emperor of France, in the summer and were gearing up for the social season that the return of Congress always ushered in. If it weren’t for the thousands of soldiers in the town, and the fortifications surrounding it, life almost seemed normal. Schools had closed in the city, however, so “in the fall of 1861, Mrs. Lincoln had a desk and blackboard put into the end of the state dining room and secured a tutor for the boys,” Julia Taft recalled. Julia’s brothers joined the Lincoln boys as the pupils in that exclusive academy and she herself “was in and out of the White House almost every day.”

  Both Lincolns seemed to enjoy the teenager’s company, though she spent most of her time with Mary Lincoln, who took on something of a mentoring role. But Julia found the first lady a sometimes daunting character, telling a story of the day her parents visited the White House and
Mary Lincoln decided she liked Mrs. Taft’s bonnet and must have it. When she peremptorily demanded it, her somewhat amazed guest gave it to her, leaving Julia to conclude: “It was an outstanding characteristic of Mary Todd Lincoln that what she wanted she wanted when she wanted it and no substitute! And as far as we know, she always had it, including a President of the United States.” Mary Lincoln wanted a White House resplendent with fine furniture, draperies, rugs, and china, and she had it—but at a price that would come back to haunt her. And the New York press corps followed her every purchase. During one shopping spree the sympathetic Chicago Tribune chided: “They divided into squads and platoons, part of them alighting upon her milliners, part on her flunkies and part on her hostler. . . . No lady of the White House has ever been so maltreated by the public press.”

  Mary Lincoln didn’t get much credit for her many acts of kindness in visiting the hospitals and army camps. That might be why President Lincoln put out the word that she was responsible for the pardon of a young soldier scheduled for execution. William Scott had fallen asleep on guard duty and been convicted of dereliction of duty after he had volunteered for all-night watch to fill in for a sick friend, and then, after a full day and night awake, drew his own overnight assignment. Both Mrs. Lincoln and her little boy Tad were distressed that the young man had received such a harsh punishment. After first worrying about interfering with military discipline, on the day before the scheduled execution Lincoln told General in Chief McClellan to pardon the soldier at “the request of the ‘Lady President.’ ”

  The pardon was a good public relations move for the “Lady President,” who barely escaped public humiliation, but not private gossip, over the infamous leaking of the president’s State of the Union message. As he prepared for the return of Congress, Lincoln knew he would have to address the louder and louder calls for the abolition of slavery coming from the faction splitting the party—the Radical Republicans. He could not ignore the subject in his message; still he approached it cautiously with the Union in such a precarious position. But before he even delivered to the Capitol the admonition that “the struggle for today, is not altogether for today—it is for a vast future also,” the public had already read his words. The New York Herald printed the text that morning. Congress suspected it was Mary Lincoln who had provided it to the paper in exchange for favorable coverage, or maybe, members speculated, even an outright bribe to help offset her huge expenditures, or maybe she was having an affair with someone connected to the newspaper. A congressional investigation threatened to embarrass the first family so much that the president personally went to Capitol Hill to beg the senators to “spare him the disgrace.” The matter was dropped, but not before testimony from a competitor to the Herald telling the investigating committee that he couldn’t compete because “the Herald had relations with the female members of the Pres[iden]ts. Family & gave that paper an advantage over the rest of us.”

  Abraham Lincoln didn’t need enemies when he had potential leakers in his own household and unhelpful freelancing on the part of Union officers. Not only had he had to deal with John Frémont’s impetuous proclamation; now he was faced with the threat of war with Britain as the result of a Union ship captain’s unauthorized actions. Acting without orders, Charles Wilkes seized two Confederate envoys to London, James Mason and John Slidell, from the British mail ship the Trent and imprisoned them in Boston. The captain basked in a hero’s spotlight until the news reached London, where the press excitedly demanded retaliation for the violation of a ship flying the Union Jack.

  While he waited to see what the British would do, Lincoln sent his message to Congress on December 3. Again he placed preservation of the Union first and foremost among his priorities and urged against rushing into “radical and extreme actions.” He pointed out that the war had already freed many slaves and expressed hope that the slave states still in the Union might voluntarily enact emancipation. Lincoln called on Congress to compensate owners for their enslaved workers if the states chose that course. He also suggested colonization, moving the freed blacks to a “climate congenial to them.” The president had at least one supporter, Anna Ella Carroll, who published a defense that December in her book, The War Powers of the General Government. But Lincoln’s message far from satisfied the Radical Republicans already seething over the course of the war. In a sour mood, the Congress formed a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to investigate the failures of the past year and summoned John Frémont to testify. “This is the end of our silence & now will come justice & retribution,” crowed Jessie. “Now Fortune turn thy wheel.”

  As if all of that were not enough for the beleaguered president, on December 19 official word came from Great Britain. Her Majesty’s Government demanded the release of the two southern envoys and their return to British protection plus a formal apology from the United States, adding the threat that the British ambassador would be recalled to London in a few days if the Americans had not responded. Lincoln couldn’t risk starting another war but he had public opinion to contend with and the public did not want to surrender Mason and Slidell. One of the few northern sympathizers who worried about the imprisoned men was Louisa Meigs: “I cannot help feeling sorry for Mrs. Slidell and the girls.” These women had been friends for years and felt for each other across the battle lines.

  On Christmas morning the Cabinet met to consider Secretary of State Seward’s proposal to free the diplomats using as a fig leaf the fact that a court should have decided the legality of seizing them. Lizzie Lee reflected the skepticism of Seward shared by many, huffing to her husband that he would “back down flat.” The public perception of the Secretary of State who was trying to help the president navigate through the shoals of border state politics, abolitionist demands, and foreign policy predicaments was that he would flounder rather than sail straight. But Lincoln trusted Seward’s judgment whether his fellow Cabinet members did or not. When the advisors met, the other Cabinet members resisted the release of the southern envoys. President Lincoln remained undecided. Christmas cheer was in short supply.

  Lizzie Lee and her family were invited to the White House for Christmas dinner, and the Lincoln boys and their friends the Tafts added some merriment to the occasion, but the question of what to do about Slidell and Mason hung heavy. The next day the Cabinet and president decided that it was the better part of wisdom to let the Confederate envoys go. “We are now all in a state of collapse and reaction,” Lizzie sighed, and there was the Congress to contend with “the members are in an explosive condition.” It was not an auspicious way to begin the New Year.

  CHAPTER 5

  LEFT: Clara Barton, the “angel of the battlefield” where she dodged bullets to aid soldiers, and later founded the American Red Cross and convinced the Congress to ratify the Geneva Conventions. RIGHT: Kate Chase Sprague visiting troops. She was the daughter of Salmon P. Chase, and considered a conniving political operative trying for years to elect her father president as she acted on the Washington social stage.

  (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC_USZ62_108564]; Courtesy of Blair House, The President’s Guest House, U.S. Department of State.)

  Rose Is Released, Clara Goes to War,

  Louisa May Briefly Nurses

  1862

  In 1862 Washington was a third rate Southern city,” Mary Clemmer Ames recalled several years later from her perch as a prominent journalist. “All public offices, magnificent in conception, seemed to be in a state of crude incompleteness.” Hulks of half-built structures poked up out of the mud—a crane loomed over the Capitol as work on the dome dragged on, a new wing for the Treasury Building crept toward completion, and “the unfinished Washington monument stood the monument to the nation’s neglect and shame.” Even harsher in his view of the Capital City was British writer Anthony Trollope, who had no hope either for the city itself or for the stub of a monument to its namesake: “No one has a word to say for it. No one thinks that money will ever again be
subscribed for its completion.” Trollope followed in his mother Fanny’s footsteps of thirty years earlier touring America; she had had complimentary things to say about the fledgling Federal City in her Domestic Manners of the Americans. Her son chose to make his New World journey during the Civil War, coloring his view of everything he saw. Washington would languish and die, the acerbic Englishman dismissively concluded, as a foolish experiment in creating a capital out of nowhere, constructed as the seat of government, not commerce.

  Visiting over New Year’s, Trollope complained that society “had been almost destroyed by the loss of the Southern half of the usual sojourners in the city.” It just wasn’t as much fun without southern gentlemen, “more given to enjoy hospitality than his Northern brother; and this difference is quite as strong with the women as with the men.” But the Lincolns tried to liven things up with the annual reception at the newly refurbished and resplendent White House even as the president chafed at his inability to push his army into action. General McClellan had been ill and uncommunicative. The war stumbled on at a stalemate. And the Congress demanded answers. The Frémonts were in town defending John’s actions in Missouri and being well received by the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, composed mainly of Republicans itching for an emancipation decree. But Lincoln continued to resist the antislavery agitators, unceremoniously removing Secretary of War Simon Cameron from the Cabinet after he asserted to the committee that it was “clearly a right of the Government to arm slaves” and “employ them in the service against the rebels.” Lincoln didn’t know the report was coming, and the angry president dispatched Cameron to replace the ambassador to Russia, replacing him in turn with the prickly but upright Edwin Stanton. The political brushfire over the Cabinet shakeup still flared as yet another general’s wife came to town to make the case for her husband.