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

by Cokie Roberts

  “The President ordered the attack on Norfolk & is taking a pretty active part down there,” Lizzie Lee delivered the news to her husband. “I am glad of it as it endears him to the country.” With the source of its supplies now in Yankee hands, “the Merrimac committed suicide,” Lizzie chortled, “blown up and Secesh surrenders the sea.” The crew of the Merrimack set the ship aflame and now the North hoped the federal fleet could proceed up the James River to Richmond. But as the ships, led by the Monitor, got within seven miles of the capital, Confederates opened fire from the shore, stopping their advance. “Our fleet on the James River has had to retreat,” Lizzie despaired; “they encountered a battery two hundred feet high & the river chained—spiked & filled with sunken vessels.”

  As McClellan finally pushed northward, Mary Custis Lee, the wife of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, was forced to flee from her son’s home, called White House. It had belonged to her great-grandmother Martha Custis Washington and was the place where Martha and George Washington had lived when they were first married. Mrs. Lee had already been forced to evacuate her own home, Arlington House, and leave behind her Washington memorabilia. Now as she abandoned another heirloom she left a message for McClellan asking him to preserve the premises in honor of the first president. The general “put a guard there & kept them inviolate,” Lizzie proudly reported, though she hated Robert E. Lee, her husband’s cousin: “No weak woman in my opinion was ever more easily lured from honor & duty by flattering than was this weak man by the overtures of wily politicians but I’ll not wound any who like him by saying so.” She knew that General Lee had many admirers on both sides of the divide. Despite McClellan’s efforts to save it, the Virginia White House eventually was destroyed in crossfire during what turned out to be a vicious siege on the peninsula.

  McClellan’s men made it to the outskirts of Richmond, where they could hear church bells ring from the city’s steeples. Their success at taking the city seemed so certain that a holiday air pervaded the camp as women in Washington joined in the excitement. “Betty returned from the Headquarters of McClellan today where she & 15 others paid a flying visit on Sunday, within 2½ miles of Richmond,” Lizzie Lee breezily reported about her niece and friends. “She says he looks thin but well.” Every day, Lizzie kept expecting the news that the Confederate capital had fallen and the Rebels had retreated to the Cotton States. Instead, with the help of teenage spy Belle Boyd, General Stonewall Jackson diverted the troops ready to reinforce McClellan, defeating them at Front Royal, Virginia, and panicking the Union Secretary of War with the possibility of invading Washington: “Mr. Stanton’s ‘scare’ is a street joke,” dismissed Lizzie. Blasé Washington viewed this latest threat with a yawn, a far cry from a year before, when everyone feared attack. But it was no joke to McClellan, who had been insisting on reinforcements that Lincoln had been ready to send until the troops were deemed essential for the protection of the capital.

  Still, Union hopes remained high until McClellan’s army encountered the Rebels at Seven Pines at the end of May, again convincing the general that he was outnumbered, fortifying his fear of movement. Southern General Joe Johnston was wounded in the battle and the command transferred to General Lee, who then led his troops through seven days of relentless attacks that resulted in McClellan’s defeat and retreat at the beginning of July. Lizzie Lee mourned for the “carnage of my Country men—for I can not yet feel alien to the Rebels.” “The war is at a standstill,” Salmon Chase moaned to his daughter Kate. “Heaven save our poor country!”

  AS IF LINCOLN weren’t having enough problems, that July another angry woman showed up in his office making demands. This time it was for herself, not her husband. Anna Ella Carroll had no husband and the forty-six-year-old “maiden lady” was always in need of cash. She strongly believed she was owed money for her widely circulated pamphlet answering Kentucky Senator Breckinridge’s attacks on Lincoln and for her book The War Powers of the Federal Government, defending the president’s suspension of habeas corpus, basically imposing martial law. And she continued to churn out the propaganda. In June the National Republican reviewed her latest effort, The Relation of the National Government to the Revolted Citizens, concluding: “It is written with Miss Carroll’s usual vigor, and displays a great mount of legal learning.” Anna solicited many endorsements from members of Congress and the War Department to support her claim that she should be paid more than the $1,250 she had already received. In July she took her request, plus a much bigger one, in to the president himself. Telling him that her War Powers treatise “was destined to stand, as long as the Declaration of Independence,” she not only sought compensation for the work she had already done: Anna proposed to Lincoln that he send her to Europe as a Union public relations agent. The cost? Fifty thousand dollars. For a man whose own salary was $25,000 the request constituted “ ‘the most outrageous one ever made to any government on earth.’ ” What the president may or may not have known was that Anna Carroll thought the government owed her for much more than her writings. She took credit for originating the strategy that gave General Grant his great victory in Tennessee and she had planned to bill the United States for that as well, until Lincoln blew up at her. Anna had even written out what she would say: “Now, Mr. President, there is another subject, which I desire to bring to your attention. . . .”

  The previous fall the single woman traveled to Chicago and St. Louis to gather material on Union activities as fodder for her propaganda. Knowing that control of the Mississippi was key to Yankee success but also that the Rebel fortifications along the river appeared impregnable, she looked for another approach rather than a head-on assault. So Anna enlisted the help of a riverboat pilot whose wife was staying in her hotel to inquire as to whether Union gunboats could navigate the Tennessee or Cumberland Rivers. Learning that the Tennessee could handle the vessels, she then designed a plan of attack and dispatched it to the attorney general, the assistant secretary of war, and directly to President Lincoln. When she returned to Washington that November she presented the blueprint in detail, maps included, to her friend Thomas Scott, the assistant secretary of war. The following February, when Grant did in fact go by the Tennessee River to capture the southern fortifications, Anna Carroll was certain he was following her directions. Now she wanted to cash in on his success. “If the plan of the Western campaign was based upon the facts, furnished by me, to the Secretary of War,” she insisted, “I ought now to have a substantial and liberal recognition of this service.”

  Anna Ella Carroll would spend the rest of her life trying to persuade the government of the rightness of her cause. And she had many supporters along the way. She collected letters from members of Congress, including the chairman of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, and at various times different committees of the House and Senate voted to compensate her, but the bills never went through both houses of Congress to the president’s desk. Women’s organizations rallied around her, making her a cause célèbre to suffragists in years to come. And a legend grew up that the empty chair in a famous painting of Lincoln’s Cabinet by Francis Bicknell Carpenter signified the seat that should have been occupied by Anna Ella Carroll. While she cultivated the narrative of her genius, Miss Carroll still had a living to make and a cause she could not forsake as the war ground on.

  MARY LINCOLN MOVED the family into the relative cool of the Soldier’s Home, a couple of miles away from the White House, that typically hot Washington summer as her husband conferred with his Cabinet about his audacious plan to free the slaves in the rebellious states. In May Lincoln once again had to overrule one of his generals, as he had Frémont, when David Hunter, commander of the Department of the South, issued his own decree freeing the slaves in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Once again the president read about a general’s decree in the newspaper and once again he angered the ever-more-powerful abolitionists by insisting that only he had the right to issue such an order. Lincoln was determined to do it in his own wa
y and at his own time. And the president had a more pressing problem that sultry summer. (Secretary Chase warned his daughter Kate, who was visiting her grandmother in Ohio, “Don’t think about coming back to Washington. It is hot, hotter, hottest.”)

  McClellan’s defeat had so dispirited the Union, the army found new recruits hard to attract and desertions hard to stop; the ranks needed reinforcement. But Lincoln wanted to avoid issuing what would look like a desperate plea for more soldiers. Lucky for him, Secretary of State Seward came up with a ruse to solve the problem: he would privately tell the governors to call on Lincoln to ask for volunteers, so it would look like the call-up wasn’t the president’s idea. “Gov. Seward has returned from his visit to the Governors,” Salmon Chase confided to Kate in early July. “It is not settled what will become of McClellan’s army. In my judgment it ought to have been already embarked and on its way here or somebody should have been put in command who has resources & energy to retrieve its disasters.” The next day President Lincoln traveled to McClellan’s headquarters himself to determine if someone else should take charge. A few days later Chase conveyed the news, “Halleck is, I am told, invited here. I fear we’re to have a repetition of McClellanism in him. I hope better.” Lincoln made his move. Henry Halleck would replace George McClellan as general in chief of the army. McClellan would retain his post at the head of the Army of the Potomac.

  McClellan still had his strong Democratic supporters in Congress, which divided almost entirely along party lines on any legislation that touched on slavery. But without southern members to block them in the legislature, other major bills sailed through that changed the face of the country: the Homestead Act, giving anyone willing to settle the West 160 acres; the Morrill Act, establishing land grant colleges to provide higher education in agriculture, mechanical skills, and military training; the Pacific Railroad Act, appropriating funds to build a transcontinental railroad; plus two measures designed to pay for the war, the Internal Revenue Act to levy taxes and the Legal Tender Bill to print paper money. But, given the large Republican majority, the more contentious measures also passed, among them emancipation for the District of Columbia, and the Confiscation Act, seizing the property of “traitors,” including slaves held as property. The law declared that enslaved people seized by the North “shall be deemed captives of war and shall be forever free.” Another bill gave the president the power to enroll in the army “persons of African descent.” Lincoln was laying the groundwork for his Emancipation Proclamation. In mid-July he reached out again to the Border States, bringing their representatives to the Executive Mansion in another attempt to bring them around to the concept of compensated emancipation. When they rejected him he determined that an executive order would be the way to go. On July 22 he informed the Cabinet of his thinking. Montgomery Blair warned an Emancipation Proclamation would mean trouble for the Republicans in the fall elections; William Seward counseled that the president wait until he had a Union victory in the field to bolster his case.

  To show support for the army and boost morale, Washington held a huge rally at the Capitol with all the government dignitaries seated on a platform erected at the East Front. President Lincoln told the cheering crowd he knew McClellan wished to succeed, adding, “I hope he will.” But no success followed. Trying to find a winning strategy, Lincoln ordered McClellan to pull his forces out of the peninsula and he consolidated other commands, including John Frémont’s under John Pope as commander of the Army of Virginia. As a result Frémont resigned. In August—once again at Manassas—Pope’s troops confronted those of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and James Longstreet. And once again the Rebels dealt the Union army a decisive defeat. Pope was relieved of his command and an emboldened Lee turned his exhausted, hungry, and sick soldiers north. Stonewall Jackson crossed the Potomac into Frederick, Maryland, causing considerable concern in Washington. Lizzie Lee took her little boy to Philadelphia to stay with Rebecca Gratz until the danger passed. From there she followed the action as Robert E. Lee prepared to encounter McClellan’s Army of the Potomac in Sharpsburg, Maryland, along Antietam Creek. “I never have endured more anxious feelings,” admitted this woman who had always been so sure of victory, “yet I try to be calm & hopeful for I have no right to oppress those around me.” Almost as if proving it to herself, Lizzie prayed: “Our cause is righteous and God will bless us.”

  This time McClellan’s men were not going to lose. But they weren’t exactly going to win, either. “McClellan is slow oh so slow,” Lizzie Lee fretted. “I have a tremor of anxiety about his movements lest he will lose the fruits of this hard won fight by following it up too slowly.” Once again the general was convinced he was outnumbered, though in fact he had a considerably larger force than the Confederates. McClellan missed several opportunities to score a significant victory and once Lee’s men pulled back to Virginia, the Union army failed to give chase, much to the commander in chief’s disgust. The battle ended in a draw but the Rebel army had been driven out of Union territory and the president was able to claim enough of a victory to move forward with his Emancipation Proclamation. It came at enormous cost. September 17, 1862, still stands as the bloodiest single day in American military history.

  ON THE BATTLEFIELD with the troops that dreadful day when 23,000 soldiers were killed or wounded—one casualty for every one and a half seconds of combat—worked a fearless woman. Clara Barton had rushed to the front with wagonloads of supplies to help the surgeons tending the wounded and dying. When she located the bullet-ridden farmhouse serving as a field hospital, the doctor in charge could not believe his eyes: “God has indeed remembered us,” he rejoiced. “I have torn up the last sheets we could find in this house, have not a bandage, rag, lint, or string. And all these wounded men bleeding to death.” Dr. James Dunn knew this tiny woman would be bringing what he needed—linen for bandages, chloroform, food, water, lanterns. She worked with him for three days without sleep as the battle raged around them, tending to soldiers in the house, in the barn and on the grounds. “A man lying upon the ground asked for drink—I stooped to give it . . . when I felt a sudden twitch of the loose sleeve of my dress—the poor fellow sprang from my hands and fell back quivering in the agonies of death—a ball had passed between my body—and the right arm which supported him.” The bullet ripped a hole in her dress, and her face and arms were covered with gunpowder and dirt as she stirred up gruel from cornmeal she found in the farmhouse cellar after her supplies ran out. But that didn’t stop Dr. Dunn from telling his wife, “General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.” Clara Barton had shown the men that she could work with them at the scene of combat—and not flinch from the bullets and the blood and the bodies.

  It wasn’t easy to get to that point. For some time, the military authorities had refused to allow her to go to the front. But she had been eager to be of service from the moment the Massachusetts soldiers had arrived in Washington after the melee in Baltimore more than a year earlier. When she went to the train station that April day to greet the soldiers, she was gratified when some of them recognized her as their former schoolteacher from back in Boston. She started tending to those hometown boys as they camped in the capital and never really returned regularly to her job in the Patent Office, though it was highly unusual for a woman to have such a good government job. But nothing seemed unusual to Clara Barton.

  Clara (her real name was Clarissa, after the heroine in the popular Samuel Richardson novel) had absorbed the principles of abolition and feminism at the knee of her eccentric mother, Sarah, so much so that she thought she “must have been born believing in the full right of woman to all privileges and positions which nature and justice accord her.” But believing in that right and being afforded it turned out to be two very different things in mid-nineteenth-century America. Clara constantly tilted against male rule. As a young schoolteacher in Massachusetts she had turned down a position be
cause she flatly declared, “I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.” She got the job at her price. But she was not always so successful, and often found herself battling against women’s second-class status. So in 1854 she decided to try her luck in the nation’s capital. There she located her cousin Congressman Alexander DeWitt, who represented her family’s Massachusetts district and he put her in touch with Commissioner of Patents Charles Mason, who hired the thirty-two-year-old woman. Mason never put her name on the roster of employees sent to Congress—why stir up trouble?—but he did pay Miss Barton just what he paid the men. Then, as so often happens in Washington, Clara lost her protector, when Mason was replaced by a man who was shocked at the “obvious impropriety of mixing two sexes within the walls of a public office.” No amount of pressure from Clara’s politician friends could change his mind. And she was forced to take work home at a much-reduced salary.

  Happily for her, Mason returned after an outcry from the scientific community demanding his patent expertise. Miss Barton was back at her desk and often in the galleries of the House and Senate, listening with fascination to the increasingly heated debates over slavery. A bout of malaria and another change in administrators at work sent her home to Massachusetts and then on to New York for a few unproductive but consciousness-raising years. “The registrar says he has no room for ladies,” she erupted after one job interview, expressing the wish that the “gentlemen who have the power could only know for one twenty-four hours all that oppresses and gnaws at my peace.” When she wasn’t busy at work this industrious woman often sank into depression, taking to her bed for prolonged periods.