Capital Dames: The Civil War and the Women of Washington, 1848-1868
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This time it was Mrs. William Tecumseh Sherman who sought a session with the commander in chief. As the Union commander in Kentucky, General Sherman had informed Secretary Cameron that he would need tens of thousands more men to hold his position and 200,000 more to go on the offensive. The Cabinet member thought the general must be unbalanced to make such an impossible request; a newspaper reporter picked up the story and when headlines blared, “General William T. Sherman Insane,” his wife decided to intervene. Like Jessie Frémont, Ellen Ewing Sherman was wise in the ways of Washington. Her father, Thomas Ewing, had served in the Senate from Ohio and as a Cabinet member under four presidents; she had lived for years in the capital, attended the Visitation Convent, and married at the Blairs’ home with all of official Washington as wedding guests. She had grown up with her future groom, who was adopted by her family after his father died. And now she was back in Washington to defend him, her father in tow. “I hope you do not fear that I will behave ridiculously here,” Ellen revealed her nervousness to her embattled husband before seeing Lincoln. But she then reported with relief that she and her father “had a long & most satisfactory interview with the President today.” She had mounted a strenuous argument: “I told him you had enemies among your fellow Generals & that the newspaper correspondents were mere tools. . . . I told him that I did not come to ask for anything but to say a word against those who had conspired against you & in vindication of your name. He seemed very anxious that we should believe that he felt kindly toward you.” Lucky for Abraham Lincoln that Ellen Sherman was willing to make that trip and save one of the key generals of the Union Army.
AT THE END of January, the war briefly took a backseat to another troublesome topic: the White House guest list. “The Sewards & Mrs. Lincoln have invitations out for Soirees,” Lizzie Lee announced, scoring one of the select five hundred invitations to Mary Lincoln’s grand reception on February 5. The first lady, who had badly overspent her allotted funds for White House redecoration, decided to do away with the expensive weekly dinners hosted by Harriet Lane, instead reinstituting the regular receptions for the public and adding a few large, lavish events. Mary first broached the idea with her dressmaker and then presented it to the president, who worried about breaking precedent. However, as Elizabeth Keckley related the conversation, Mrs. Lincoln insisted: “Public receptions are more democratic than stupid state dinners—are more in keeping with the spirit of institutions in our country, as you would say if called upon to make a stump speech.” Mary Lincoln knew how to get to her husband but one of Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay, had his own take on the “Queen”: “La Reine has determined to abrogate state dinners.” The president’s staff lost no love for their boss’s imperious wife, often referring to her as a “Hell Cat.” But Mary prevailed and when the invitations went out in January, everyone left off the list tried desperately to wangle a way in while a few outraged souls, like Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade, the chairman of the Conduct of the War Committee, huffed that it was unseemly to be holding such festivities while soldiers shivered in their tents just a few miles away.
Rumor had it that some eighty Republicans had defied etiquette and turned the Lincolns down. John and Jessie Frémont planned to be among those sending their regrets but a messenger from the President begged them to come in a show of unity, and since John still sought a military command, the couple agreed. Then, at the last minute the grand event was almost canceled, but not because of the war. The Lincolns’ son Willie was running a high fever and the parents, who had already lost one son, feared for his life. A hastily summoned doctor assured them that Willie faced no immediate danger and with the invitations already out the Lincolns made the call—the party must go on. Even though the boy took a turn for the worse the night of the event, the doctor insisted there was no cause for alarm and Elizabeth Keckley promised to keep watch while the president and first lady entertained their guests.
Before taking up her post at Willie’s bedside, Mrs. Keckley helped Mary into her low-cut white satin dress, trimmed in black lace with a long train sweeping behind her. When her husband took one look he advised, “ ‘Mother, it is my opinion, if some of that tail was nearer the head, it would be in better style.’ ” But he didn’t deter his wife as she marched to the music of the Marine Band to greet her guests, who would feast on foie gras, oysters, partridge, venison, and all kinds of other delicacies, including a cake shaped like Fort Sumter. Though the hosts had deemed dancing inappropriate, the newspapers headlined the affair as “Mrs. Lincoln’s Dancing Party.” The reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Press described the evening as a display of “fashion, beauty and manliness” and catalogued “the decorations and candy ornaments.” Among them: “A representation of a United States steam frigate of forty guns, with all sails set, and the flag of the Union flying at the main . . . A warrior’s helmet, supported by cupids . . . The Goddess of Liberty, elevated above a simple but elegant shrine, within which was a life-like fountain of water.” And though he conceded that “such a display of elegance, taste and loveliness has perhaps never before been witnessed within the walls of the White House,” the correspondent, or perhaps the editors, clucked about the “costly and inappropriate festivity” and topped the story with one about additional congressional appropriations for White House expenditures.
Jessie Frémont judged the evening “a ghastly failure” for her enemies the Lincolns, but for her husband, she boasted, it constituted “a complete success.” The president had “made our reception marked” and Secretary of War Stanton had stopped to speak to them. Clearly the Frémonts weren’t on the outs and the Lincolns were coming in for a good deal of criticism. A few days after the grand event Kansas’s Emporia News raged against “the utter unconsciousness of the ruin and misery of the country which prevails in Washington.” Ridiculing the Lincolns’ staging of acts by magicians and circus performers at the White House, the newspaper castigated the “prevailing gaiety and thoughtlessness in the National Capital . . . all while our soldiers are sick, suffering and dying in the camps, the strength of the army wasting from inaction.” Abraham Lincoln needed the army to act.
Then—at last—came the news the president had been waiting for, a string of Union victories. On February 6, aided by the navy’s ironclad ships attacking from the Tennessee River, General Ulysses S. Grant took Fort Henry in Tennessee. Two days later the navy captured Roanoke Island in North Carolina, tightening the stranglehold on southern ports, and then the big one—the Rebels acquiesced to Grant’s demand for unconditional surrender at Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River. By capturing that important Rebel redoubt Grant ensured that Kentucky, separated by the federal army from Tennessee, would stay safely in the Union, Nashville would come under Yankee control, and the rivers and railroads of western Tennessee would be closed off to the Confederacy. Newly baptized “Unconditional Surrender” Grant received a promotion and Washington reveled in the victory: “The jubilant feelings of the members of the House of Representatives over the recent victories,” exulted Washington’s National Republican, had not diminished after a night’s sleep, and “the House could remain in session only a half hour yesterday, before it had to adjourn, to allow of a season of mutual congratulations.” But there was no jubilation at the White House, where Willie Lincoln lay dying of typhoid fever.
The eleven-year-old’s condition had steadily worsened the night of the big party. With Elizabeth Keckley on duty, both of his parents slipped away from the festivities from time to time to check on the child, showing the seamstress their great concern. The little boy called for his good friend Bud Taft, his constant playmate of the past year, and Bud’s sister Julia later remember “my brother was with him most of the time.” The boys and their younger brothers, the only pupils of the White House tutor, had lived in and out of each other’s houses as an inseparable band. They had commandeered the attic and the roof of the Executive Mansion for forts, circuses, and theatrical performances. Though visiting Cabinet members and
other notables grumbled at the interruptions of the incorrigible foursome, the president enjoyed the boys’ antics and Mary only wished to “let the children have a good time.”
But now one of the children was dying and his friend stayed by his side. When the president tried to get the little boy to go to bed late one night the staunch little boy protested: “ ‘If I go he will call for me.’ ” At noon on February 20, Bud thought his friend was better, but Willie died at five o’clock that evening. Mrs. Keckley washed and dressed the child then stood at the foot of the bed and watched as Abraham Lincoln “buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion. . . . I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved.” Mary Lincoln told the Taft boys’ mother to keep them home the day of the funeral; “ ‘it makes me feel worse to see them.’ ” But the president took pity on the stalwart little friend and “sent for Bud to see Willie before he was put in the casket.” It was the last time this daily companion of Willie and Tad Lincoln would be in the White House because Mrs. Lincoln wouldn’t allow him to visit. Poor little Tad, who was sick himself, had not only lost his brother, he had also lost his best friends. Mary Lincoln came close to losing her mind.
The first lady took to her bed in spasms of agony. Her older son Robert, home from Harvard, prevailed on his mother’s sister to come stay with her, and President Lincoln contacted Dorothea Dix asking her to find a nurse for his younger son. Miss Dix sent the very competent and kind nurse Rebecca Pomroy to minister to Tad. But no one could help Mary. Elizabeth Keckley witnessed a dramatic moment when the President brought his wife to the window and showed her the hospital for the insane in the distance, with the warning: “ ‘Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.’ ” Rebecca Pomroy, who had lost her husband and two sons, counseled both of the Lincolns. And friends like Lizzie Lee tried to help. Not long after Willie died she called at the White House to inquire about Tad and Mary: “Mrs. L sent me a kind message of thanks & sent her sister Mrs. Edwards down to see me . . . she is ten times better looking than Mrs. Lincoln.” Poor Mary couldn’t catch a break from the constant criticism, even in mourning. And Mrs. Lee could be counted among her friends! Almost a month later, when Lizzie called again, Mary did receive her across-the-street neighbor, “& was tearful but very kind.” When she was finally able to rouse herself enough to write a letter, Mary admitted to an old friend, “I am so completely unnerved, that I can scarcely command myself to write.”
MARY LINCOLN’S WITHDRAWAL from the social scene provided just the opening Kate Chase needed. She had already been running a rival salon, throwing her own large party the night after the one at the White House, with the added entertainment of the Hutchinson Family singers, a pro-abolitionist ensemble. The whole town had repeated the tale of the young woman’s curt remarks to the first lady at the dinner given for the Cabinet soon after Lincoln took office. When Mary tried to be gracious to the much younger woman, assuring her, “I shall be glad to see you any time, Miss Chase,” she was met by the arrogant retort: “Mrs. Lincoln, I shall be glad for you to call on me at any time.” There was no mistake about it—the battle lines were drawn. Kate believed she should be the hostess in the White House, and that her father should be president; nothing the Lincolns could do or say would erase the animosity.
Even young Julia Taft felt the heat of the competition. One day Mrs. Lincoln sent the girl home from the White House greenhouse with a bouquet intended for Governor William Sprague of Rhode Island. He had accompanied his troops to Washington, where they were assigned to space in the Patent Office building—Julia’s father’s workplace. The teenager developed something of a crush on “the little governor,” as Sprague was called, so to please her young friend, Mary suggested the gift of flowers. “But as I was proudly bearing the bouquet to my father’s room in the Patent Office, thinking on the way of a proper speech to go with it, Miss Kate Chase appeared, sweeping along the hall escorted by two officers. Miss Chase was a reigning society belle and, as the daughter of the Secretary of Treasury, very much in the swim.” When Kate asked Julia where she was taking the flowers and received the reply, “Mrs. Lincoln gave them to me to take to Governor Sprague,” she snatched the bouquet away saying she would deliver it, “ ‘with Mrs. Lincoln’s compliments.’ ” Julia pouted. “She was very handsome, beautifully dressed, and accustomed to have what she wanted. . . . I went back to Mrs. Lincoln in wrath and tears. ‘Never mind, Julia,’ she said. ‘You shall have another just as pretty for the governor when Miss Chase isn’t around.’ But Miss Chase was always around. In fact she married him.”
The petty social snubs were one thing. Far more harmful was the fact that as secretary of the Treasury, Salmon Chase knew what Mary Lincoln was spending to decorate the White House and spread stories of her extravagance. Some members of the “team of rivals” Lincoln put together in his Cabinet, men who had opposed him for the Republican nomination, had come to support the president fully. But Chase, though doing a superb job for the administration at the Treasury Department, still lusted after the top spot and found ways to undermine his boss and Mrs. Lincoln’s expenditures gave him fodder. The reports of the first lady’s shopping sprees gained such circulation that she was hounded by the press on her trips to New York, with reporters covering her every purchase: “Mrs. Lincoln, who is still sojourning at the Metropolitan Hotel, was engaged nearly all day yesterday in making extensive purchases at Lord & Taylor’s and various other places about the city.” Even after Mary Lincoln left the White House, journalist Mary Clemmer Ames was still incensed about the spendthrift first lady: “While her sister-women scraped lint, sewed bandages, and put on nurses’ caps, and gave their all to country and to death, the wife of its President spent her time in rolling to and fro between Washington and New York, intent on extravagant purchases for herself and the White House. Mrs. Lincoln seemed to have nothing to do but to ‘shop,’ and the reports of her lavish bargains, in the newspapers, were vulgar and sensational in the extreme.” The wounded and dying were being brought to the capital to be ministered to by the women, but “through it all, Mrs. Lincoln ‘shopped.’ ” In fact Mary Lincoln did make her rounds of the hospitals but received little credit for it, and Kate Chase too was making those expensive shopping excursions to New York, threatening her father with bankruptcy. But she wasn’t spending public money.
Mary Lincoln drew criticism from Kate even if she acted admirably from the abolitionist Chase’s perspective. As emancipation for slaves in the District of Columbia drew near, Mrs. Lincoln asked Rebecca Orville, an African-American teacher, to come to tea. When the visitor was shown to the kitchen entrance, the first lady, embarrassed at the slight to her guest, escorted Miss Orville into the Red Room for a conversation about establishing a school for black children, and then showed her out through the front door. Just at that moment Secretary Chase pulled up with his daughter in the carriage. At the next Cabinet dinner Kate commented that the first lady was “making too much of the Negro.” This from the woman who endlessly entertained abolitionists in an effort to replace the president with her father.
From the time she was a small child, Kate Chase had concerned herself with her father’s political future. Salmon Chase had bad luck in wives. His first wife had died in childbirth, then his second wife, Kate’s mother, died of tuberculosis when Kate was five, and his third wife also succumbed to tuberculosis. So at age eleven Kate became the “woman of the house,” taking on her father and baby sister Nettie as her charges. Visitors to Governor Chase’s home in Ohio commented on the political acumen of the beautiful young girl, who had every expectation of moving to the White House after the 1860 election. When she found herself in a mansion at Sixth and E Streets instead, Miss Chase used it as campaign headquarters for her father and herself, certain she could convince Washington that she would make a more worthy occupant of the Executive Mansion than the woman living there now. The whole town watched as the competition played out.
THE MEN “STRIVING nobly in the West” responded to President Lincoln’s extraordinary General War Order #1 commanding all sea and land forces to advance on February 22. The politicians would wait for the military men no longer. In early March a battle at Pea Ridge in Arkansas gave the Union control over a southern portion of the Mississippi River, and in early April at Shiloh, Tennessee, General Grant won again, at huge human cost—23,000 casualties—the greatest ever at the time, serving as a grisly harbinger for the horror ahead. The navy also scored successes. After the South had refitted the USS Merrimack with iron sides and renamed it the CSS Virginia, the fortress of a ship destroyed several federal vessels and threatened to sail up the Potomac to attack Washington. However, an innovative little ironclad built in New York, the Monitor, scampered down the Atlantic to Hampton Roads, Virginia, and held the Merrimack at bay. Then in mid-April came the news of the Confederate surrender of Fort Pulaski, near the mouth of the Savannah River in Georgia. John C. Frémont went west to take over the Mountain Department in West Virginia. But still nothing from General McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.