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

by Cokie Roberts

  The congressional committee investigating the conduct of the war suspected the Democrat McClellan of disloyalty, particularly after he refused to cooperate with the inquiry. McClellan, like so many in the Pentagon since his time, claimed he couldn’t share his plans because in talkative Washington they would be leaked. The general contended that he couldn’t even divulge his strategy to his commander in chief because, he sneered, Lincoln would tell Tad. Always keeping his daughter Kate cognizant of current affairs, Salmon Chase gave her the news: “The President is trying to put life and motion into the inert army,” but McClellan “has had no man ‘of his counsel’—thoroughly conversant with his plans.” The army officer even ignored a direct presidential order to advance on the southern army entrenched in Manassas, where the Rebels provided a defense of the city of Richmond and protected a vital rail line. Now Lincoln wanted them routed so the Union could take the Confederate capital and perhaps end the war. McClellan balked.

  Instead of marching overland, the general chose to invade Virginia by the Rappahannock River, landing between Richmond and Manassas. But just as he was about to put that plan in place, Confederate general Joe Johnston, whose scouts had seen Union troops preparing to move, withdrew his ill-prepared men from Manassas and stationed them closer to Richmond, leaving behind or destroying vast stores of food and equipment in the army’s wake. So McClellan altered his plan of attack—he would bring his well-trained, well-equipped army more than 120,000 strong to the tip of the peninsula between the James and York Rivers and then with navy power to back up the ground forces they would work their way up to Richmond. On St. Patrick’s Day, General George McClellan was finally ready to lead his men into battle.

  As the daughter of one of the president’s key advisors, Lizzie Lee put total faith in the Army of the Potomac: “It is believed in town that Virginia will be evacuated without a fight.” From Silver Spring, she watched as the troops assembled: “The Army below us had orders last night to move & is now dragging its slow length along the streets & roads leading to Washington.” First the soldiers went door-to-door paying for the damage they had done to property in the area as a new squad arrived to guard the capital, “thirty thousand troops about Washington and its surrounding forts.” From the beginning, the sailor’s wife had been certain that the Union would quickly win the war, and she was thrilled with the news of the Rebel retreat from Manassas: “Such retreats must be nearly as disastrous to them as lost battles, it must demoralize the men & as well as diminish their means of war.” One of the men off to do battle gave her little boy Blair “a huge Newfoundland dog a noble animal—he seems sorry to part with him but he cannot carry him into Dixie with him.”

  As the army engaged and hurriedly built breast-high defenses, Lizzie provided a running commentary. On April 10, “McClellan invested Yorktown on Saturday—where they have breastworks extending from the York to the James River seven miles.” On April 11, “McClellan has 80,000 troops. . . . He wants more troops.” On April 12, “reinforcements were sent to him last night & today 40,000 more troops. . . . I think the Yorktown siege will be slow & long.” On April 17: “Father had a very manly letter from McClellan says he knows all the difficulties of his situation . . . we are all in the most anxious condition—New Orleans—& Yorktown are on the lips of all.” On April 30, “the siege is not likely to close at Yorktown for ten days. . . . All eyes & hearts are now turned to New Orleans.” With McClellan mired in the mud in Virginia, Lizzie was much more concerned about what was happening in New Orleans. That’s where her husband was poised to attack. And then on May 7, “Our people are in a frenzy of exultation over New Orleans & it keeps all of McC’s doings on the Yorktown line under eclipse.” The mighty Mississippi port of New Orleans had fallen to the federal navy.

  Samuel Phillips Lee’s ship had come under fire but he was unscathed. His brother and sister-in-law, firm supporters of the South, were “both full of joy for you—but Nelly’s heart is sadly on the other side of the question. . . . I have felt very bitter sometimes of late—They joyed in my joy over your safety & that is the biggest feeling in my heart.” It was so unnatural this war between families, and as staunch a Unionist as she was, Lizzie couldn’t hate the other side: “I can’t for an instant divest myself of the feeling that they are my people my countrymen—mad men as they are my heart aches for them.” That was true for everyplace but New Orleans: “There they are my enemies & I feel it but always think of them as Frenchmen & quadroons.” The people in Virginia and Kentucky and Missouri were Lizzie’s friends and relatives and she was gratified when one of them brought news of Varina Davis: “She said ‘Memory overlept the horrid gulf now between us & took her back to that happiest part of her life, that spent at Washington.’ ” The First Lady of the Confederacy had relayed a message that Lizzie Lee would be “ ‘to me dear unto life’s end.’ ” The captain of a French steamer docked in Washington reported from his trip to Richmond “astonished there so much at the warmth of friendship expressed by individuals separated by this War.” But still they killed each other. On May 3, southern troops, having delayed McClellan long enough to receive reinforcements, retrenched to Williamsburg and allowed the federals to take Yorktown. This was no Yorktown surrender like the one in the Revolutionary War—the defense of Richmond grew stronger by the day.

  IN WASHINGTON A war of another sort played out that spring. On April 16 President Lincoln signed a bill emancipating the city’s slaves. With that signature more than three thousand enslaved men and women in the District of Columbia were immediately set free. “The legislation of the greatest free Government that ever existed will hereafter be conducted on free soil,” the Pennsylvania Raftsman’s Journal rejoiced in a typical view from northern newspapers; “the apprehension that the slaves who are released from bondage in Washington will flock to the Northern States is not well founded.” No one was sure where the newly freed people would go or what they would do. In the only compensated emancipation enacted in this country, the measure provided up to $1 million to pay owners for their human property and added another $100,000 to relocate any of newly freed who wanted to emigrate to Haiti, Liberia, or “such other country beyond the limits of the United States as the President may determine.” The president was feeling the heat from Radical Republicans pushing for emancipation as they started mounting their campaigns for the 1864 election. “I hope somebody will get tired of Presidential Candidates,” Lizzie Lee sighed a couple of days before Lincoln signed the emancipation bill, deriding “Miss Kate’s father” in his push for abolition.

  Lincoln’s views on the subject had evolved over time. He had proposed freedom for the slaves in the District of Columbia back when he was in Congress decades earlier, but only if the majority of city residents agreed. Now he was eager to convince the slaveholding states still in the Union to go for compensated emancipation, and the Capital City could serve as a laboratory for those states. Lincoln had also long advocated colonization for African Americans, but most of them had no interest in leaving their country; instead many of the formerly enslaved now saw Washington as their Mecca, especially slaves from Virginia and Maryland, where the Fugitive Slave Act still applied.

  The District of Columbia government strenuously opposed the emancipation law, reflecting the views of many residents and just before the president signed the bill “several hundred slaves were sent by their masters to Baltimore and the lower counties of Maryland,” the National Republican, a Lincoln-supporting newspaper in Washington, reported. “We are informed that early yesterday morning several wagon loads of ‘chattels’ left Washington for Prince George’s and St. Mary’s counties, Maryland.” Not all District slave owners would take emancipation lying down, even with compensation. “This bill has liberated about one thousand blacks & has made about two thousand very miserable—by having them sent away in Maryland, Kentucky & Virginia,” Lizzie Lee voiced the sentiments of many conservative Republicans. She insisted that the law would hurt African Americans and that in Balti
more it “renewed the rebellious spirit there & almost everywhere in the Secesh parts of Maryland.” Among those objecting to the emancipation were widows like Margaret Barber, who made her living hiring out her slaves and taking a percentage of their income. But the compensation, which was laboriously calculated, provided ready cash.

  Though they strongly supported the Union and opposed the spread of slavery, the Blairs still owned the people who worked for them. With emancipation, Preston Blair claimed that “his servants always knew they could go when they wished—& they were of course now at liberty to do so.” Somewhat to Lizzie’s surprise, only one of the now-former slaves chose to leave, because as one who stayed explained, “she knows when she is well off but is evidently delighted that her children are free.” Mrs. Lee might have had a great deal of affection for some of the African Americans in her household, and her little boy’s nurse clearly loved him, but the Maryland woman was a typical racist of her time and place. At one point in an argument with Kate Chase on the “darky question,” Lizzie raged “if Congress did not deliver us of the freed ones we would dispose of them as the Yankees had the Pequots,” referring to a massacre of the Pequot Indians in the seventeenth century. Most of these women saw African Americans as inferior at best. And the southern women—Varina Davis, Virginia Clay, Sara Pryor—at the time of the war strongly defended the institution of slavery, though the Pryors had never owned humans.

  Keep in mind that these women were themselves the property of their husbands under the law of couverture, which forbade married women from owning property. So some of them just didn’t see slavery as being all that different from marriage. One southern woman, Mary Chesnut, who had been in Washington briefly with her husband, Senator James Chesnut Jr. of South Carolina, went with him to Montgomery, Alabama, where the Confederate government first met. There the plantation mistress witnessed a slave sale and recorded her reaction in her now-famous diary: “South Carolina slave holder as I am my very soul sickened—it is too dreadful. I tried to reason—this is not worse than the willing sale most women make of themselves in marriage—nor can the consequences be worse. The Bible authorizes marriage & slavery—poor women! poor slaves!” Those views for some women would change over time, just as the president’s had, but not until after a great deal of blood had been shed.

  A FEW WEEKS after the enactment of the emancipation law, a woman who went to her grave still defending the South’s “peculiar institution” got out of jail. Rose Greenhow, along with her eight-year-old daughter, had been locked up in the filthy, stinking Old Capitol Prison for more than four months. Confined to their room with a bedbug-infested straw mattress and insulted that they were incarcerated with blacks, the pair remained defiant even as they starved and Little Rose became quite sick. “Rose is subject to the same rigorous restrictions as myself,” the proud mother revealed to her journal. “I was fearful at first that she would pine, and said, ‘My little darling, you must show yourself superior to these Yankees, and, not pine.’ She replied quickly, ‘o mamma, never fear; I hate them too much. I intend to dance and sing “Jeff Davis is coming,” just to scare them!’ ” Rose railed against her captors, who fed newspaper reporters regular nuggets about the famous Rebel spy and put her on display for tourists like a circus sideshow freak. In April, papers around the country, including the Charlotte Evening Bulletin, ran a tidbit about a scene at the prison: “Mrs. Greenhow and another female prisoner having taken possession of a wagon which had been driven into the yard, and driving it around with a Confederate flag displayed and shouting huzzas for ‘the Southern wagon.’ Since then Mrs. Greenhow had been charged with insanity.”

  In fact Mrs. Greenhow hadn’t been officially charged with anything. In March she had been summoned to a hearing before the U.S. Commission Relating to State Prisoners, held in a house that must have been eerily familiar to Rose. The government had confiscated it from southern sympathizers—former California senator William Gwin and his wife. So the prisoner was in the very place where she had shone at Mrs. Gwin’s ball four years earlier. And she shone again that day, thrusting and parrying with her interrogators but admitting to nothing as they produced evidence of her treasonous writings. But the commissioners were ready to make a deal—Mrs. Greenhow could get out of jail if she left Washington for good and moved behind Confederate lines. Rose didn’t accept the offer on the spot—after all, there was no official document before her and she didn’t trust these men to be telling the truth.

  When the story of her refusal appeared in the newspaper, Rose’s niece Adele Douglas dashed off a harsh rebuke: “I do believe you have a stern joy in your martyrdom, else you would embrace the opportunity to escape from it.” The prisoner had obtained permission for Addie to visit her, but the young widow hadn’t been around since Christmas and Rose was clearly hurt and angry. “I am to be driven forth from my home by this magnanimous Government, in the midst of the bloodshed and carnage with which they are pursuing all who cherish my own political faith.” She heard from her old source Henry Wilson that he had “advised my being immediately sent South,” but that McClellan and Seward “thought differently” and some in the press were calling for her head: “The law fixes the penalty for treason. It is not ‘to be sent beyond the lines,’ but it is DEATH,” raved a Minnesota paper in an article titled “Traitors in Crinoline and in Congress.” The outraged correspondent continued: “Mrs. Greenhow refused to reveal to the committee who her secret agents in Washington were; but from other sources they discover the names of several, including two ex-senators, and several members of congress, one of whom, the report says, still retains his seat. If this is true it is past all endurance.”

  So Rose didn’t know what would happen, until suddenly on May 31 the superintendent barged in with the news that Mrs. Greenhow and her daughter would begin their journey south that very day. The War Department sent a lieutenant as her chief escort: “He had six men detailed to accompany him, making quite a military display, dressed in full uniform, with sword and carbine in hand. Outside the prison the whole guard were drawn up under arms, besides a mounted guard also with swords and carbines.” Clearly the government feared that this wily woman might somehow escape. For her part, Rose wasn’t sure whether to trust her guards, extracting a promise from the lieutenant that he was indeed sending her south and not to a northern prison.

  First they traveled to Baltimore, where they would board a ship to take them to Virginia. When they arrived in that conflicted city the Greenhows were held on the train until all the passengers had left the station and then they were escorted under heavy guard to a hotel. But word got out that the famous southern spy was in town and the next day “a large number of persons” offered their congratulations, “and many friends followed to the boat.” While Rose and her daughter waited for their official escorts a crowd formed on the wharf: “So far as the eye could reach handkerchiefs were waving, and the tearful eye and hearty ‘God bless you!’ ” cheered Rose in the belief that “the hearts of the people of Maryland . . . beat in unison with their brethren of the South.”

  They sailed to Fort Monroe, off Norfolk, Virginia, now occupied by federal troops. With McClellan skirmishing on the peninsula, Rose heard false reports that Richmond had fallen, but she determined to proceed to the Confederate capital anyway. Carried by a Union vessel up the James River, she saw the fallout from the fight—the remains of the Merrimack, scuttled to keep it out of Union hands, plus the ships the ironclad had destroyed. The Monitor, there to back up McClellan, sent out a support ship to collect the party for the trip under a white flag into City Point, a port a few miles outside Richmond: “I was under intense excitement, for, after nearly ten weary months of imprisonment, I was in sight of the promised land.” Rose had been allowed the use of a sewing machine in prison, so she had secretly crafted a large Confederate flag and now wrapped it around her shoulders in the folds of her shawl. She was tempted to “unfold it and cast it to the breeze as a parting defiance to the Yankees,” but then dec
ided she didn’t want to lose it.

  On June 4, Rose and Little Rose Greenhow settled in the best hotel in town and immediately the commandant of Richmond paid his respects. It must have been quite a contrast with the last four months in the Old Capitol Prison and even to her imprisonment in her own home. The next day Jefferson Davis came to call: “And his words of greeting, ‘But for you there would have been no battle of Bull Run,’ repaid me for all that I had endured. . . . And I shall ever remember that as the proudest moment of my life.” The President of the Confederacy told his wife that even if Rose was now free, her imprisonment had made its mark: “The Madam looks much changed and has the air of one whose nerves were shaken by mental torture.” Even so, before long he would have another assignment for the confirmed Confederate.

  GENERAL MCCLELLAN’S REFUSAL to engage the Confederates on the Virginia Peninsula so frustrated President Lincoln that the day after the Rebel withdrawal from Yorktown, he himself went to see what was going on. From the time the Army of the Potomac landed in Virginia almost two months earlier, the President had been pushing McClellan to move. But the general, fearing that the enemy forces were far greater in number than they were (this overestimation of Rebel strength was a constant—twice already in the war what the Yankees thought were Confederate gun batteries turned out to be “Quaker guns,” wooden logs designed to deceive), kept planning rather than acting. So on May 6, a ship carrying President Lincoln, Secretary of War Stanton, Secretary of the Treasury Chase, and General Egbert Viele, brigadier general of the United States Volunteers, docked outside Fort Monroe. The three civilians and the one military man mapped out a strategy for capturing Norfolk, Virginia, the base for the formidable Merrimack. When they went secretly to investigate what kind of resistance the Union would meet if the army tried to take the town from the rear, they found two women and a dog as the sole inhabitants of that area. The city quickly fell.