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

by Cokie Roberts

  INTERIOR SECRETARY CALEB Smith’s departure from the Cabinet came without drama as he headed home to Indiana and a judgeship. But a potential Cabinet shakeup seriously threatened the Lincoln administration that Christmas season. Senate Republicans, upset about the results of the election and the course of the war, wanted someone’s head—preferably the president’s, but they knew they couldn’t depose him. Instead, with some private encouragement from Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, they chose Secretary of State William Seward as their scapegoat. Lincoln managed to face down the Senate, after Seward and Chase each handed in his resignation. The president pocketed both but acted on neither and the crisis passed, but not without Mary Lincoln weighing in. The first lady “regretted the making up of the family quarrel,” according to Lizzie Lee, because she thought “there was not a member of the Cabinet who did not stab her husband & the Country daily except my Brother.” Lizzie’s brother Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, would cause trouble of his own before the president’s term ended. And though the Cabinet was nowhere near as backstabbing as Mary Lincoln suspected, the president’s critics continued to hound him.

  Lincoln had removed George McClellan from his command of the Army of the Potomac when he failed to pursue Lee into Virginia after Antietam, and placed a somewhat reluctant General Ambrose Burnside in the job. McClellan still had scores of admirers in town and many of them were urging him to run for president in 1864. Lizzie Lee thought that McClellan was likely to go for it, because “everybody over ten years old out of Washington dreams of such things.” It was true then, as it remains true today, that presidentitis grabs hold of the powerful in the capital. But here was a president in the middle of a life-or-death war challenged by his Cabinet and his general. Abraham Lincoln, however, still possessed the power of the presidency, and as 1862 came to a close he exercised it in a most forceful way. The New Year dawned with an Emancipation Proclamation.

  CHAPTER 6

  LEFT: Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, a former slave, became a successful couturière and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln. She founded an organization to assist and advocate for freed slaves. RIGHT: Elizabeth Blair Lee knew every politician from Andrew Jackson on, and wrote clever letters chronicling wartime life in Washington, expressing her own firm political views.

  (Picture History; © Medford Historical Society Collection/CORBIS)

  Lizzie Reports on the Action, Janet Goes

  to Camp, Louisa Takes Charge

  1863

  In her quick, sharp way,” her son remembered, Mary Lincoln asked the president on New Year’s Day what he intended to do about his bold promise to free the southern state slaves. It was a question on many minds that sunny and chilly January 1, 1863, as Washington approached the day with a tense edge of anticipation. Robert Lincoln later recorded his mother’s direct inquiry, as well as his father’s response: the president looked toward heaven and simply said, “I am under orders.” If Lincoln thought God had ordered him to free the slaves, he had only heard that command recently—but for the women and men assembled at Israel Bethel Church it was enough that he heard it at all. Washington’s African Americans gathered in churches and at the contrabands campsite anxiously waiting to hear the answer to Mary Lincoln’s question. Would President Lincoln actually issue his Emancipation Proclamation on that New Year’s Day?

  It would be a longer wait than Lincoln intended because he had a busy schedule that morning. He had to deal with unhappy generals, who were frustrated by the way the war was going, as he prepared for the annual White House reception, plus the version of the proclamation drafted by his staff needed some stylistic changes. The document went to the State Department for final editing and had not come back to the White House for the official signature by the time the guests started arriving. All those people waiting for word of a presidential signature would have to wait longer.

  The reception took hours. First came the officials, including grandly arrayed diplomats. Cabinet members brought their families. Secretary of State Seward’s daughter Fanny, excited to be on the guest list now that she had turned eighteen, was impressed by the “very brilliant” scene. Traditionally, members of the cabinet also hosted New Year’s open houses after they paid their respects at the White House. At the secretary of the Treasury’s house, “Miss Kate Chase . . . stood by the side of her father to do the chiefest graces of the occasion,” noted the National Republican. Elizabeth Blair Lee remarked that the young woman looked “like a fairy queen—in her light draperies of lace.” From Lizzie that was not meant as a compliment; she was no fan of the heralded Kate, whose father often fought the Blair family in trying to influence the president. Dutifully making the rounds of receptions, Lizzie clucked that the “Chases had the roughest set.” But the Chase family didn’t have to put up with the hordes of visitors from the general public that crushed into the Executive Mansion after the official delegations.

  So it was hundreds of handshakes later when Abraham Lincoln was able to pick up his pen with a shaky hand to sign the momentous executive order freeing forever the slaves in the states in rebellion and welcoming them into the Union army. But the president made it clear there was nothing shaky about his resolve. He wanted his signature to show the firmness of his intent. The minister at Israel Bethel, Rev. Henry M. Turner, paced at the offices of the Washington Star newspaper until he could grab a copy of the proclamation hot off the press. He fought off the eager mob and went running back to the church—“when the people saw me coming with the paper in my hand they raised a shouting cheer that was almost deafening.” Too out of breath from the run to read the document himself, Rev. Turner gave it to a colleague. During the reading of the proclamation “every kind of demonstration and gesticulations was going on. Men squealed, women fainted, dogs barked, white and colored people shook hands, songs were sung, and by this time cannons began to fire at the navy-yard.” In a heartbreaking recital of the horrors that would be no more—“no more auction blocks, no more separation of parents and children”—Turner celebrated the scene, “Nothing like it will ever be seen again in this life.” From all over town, people gathered at the White House, cheering the president, who appeared at the window to make a bow. The contraband camp rang with the spirituals written in slavery with the hope that this day would someday come. “Go Down Moses” and “I’m a Free Man Now, Jesus Christ Made Me Free” no longer meant these men and women would have to die to break free from the chains of bondage.

  Of course, not everyone greeted the epochal emancipation favorably. Whites in Washington and elsewhere harassed and sometimes attacked the people of color in their midst. And in the South, the order of freedom was universally condemned. Jefferson Davis called it “the most execrable measure in the history of guilty man” and pledged that Union officers would be tried as “criminals engaged in inciting servile insurrection.” Even before official word of the signing reached Raleigh, North Carolina, the Daily Progress editorialized, “we shall now look forward with intense anxiety for the manifesto which is to proclaim freedom to the ‘whole world and the rest of mankind.’ ” Referring to Lincoln as “the Baboon,” the newspaper declared, “This proclamation may be issued but it will have no other effect than to make Lincoln and his government the laughing stock of the civilized world. As long as we are able to whip his armies we care not for his proclamations.” That was exactly what worried the president. As long as his armies kept losing, not only would the enemy ignore him, but so would the people who were supposed to be his allies.

  Republican defeats in the last election spelled trouble for the president politically as Democrats started agitating for peace rather than a continuation of the bloody battles ending in defeat. The ironclad Monitor sank at the end of December, making the navy’s job tougher, and in the West the army started what turned out to be a long siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi, on the Mississippi River. (Lizzie Lee had her own plan for that battle: surround the city, “besiege the place—& starve them out,” which is exactly
what happened many months later.) It had been too long since the Union could claim victory. In an attempt to remedy that, General Burnside tried to make another run at Robert E. Lee’s Rebel forces in January but the Army of the Potomac was once more thwarted, this time by Virginia loam that trapped the horses and wagons, making a charge impossible. What came to be called the “mud march” ended in ignominious withdrawal to winter quarters. Discouraged troops started deserting at a rate of about two hundred a day. Lincoln once more changed commanders, giving the job this time to Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker. Naming yet another general, the president contributed to the more and more widespread view that maybe it was the commander in chief who needed changing.

  ONE SKEPTIC ABOUT Lincoln’s choice was his confidant’s daughter, Elizabeth Blair Lee. “I regret Gen[era]l Hooker’s appointment, still it may do—for he has the gift of appreciating clever men & maybe to use them—if so he will get along & well—but I think he lacks everything but courage.” Still, like everyone else, including the president, Lizzie was looking for a good general and hoping Hooker might be the one—“a turn in the wheel may as in lotteries turn up a General.” She kept a close watch on the war and politics while trying her best to lead a somewhat normal life. Her chief concern other than the welfare of her one child and a promotion for her husband remained the orphanage, where she had moved to first “directress,” essentially chairman of the board. “We took a little one in from Fredericksburg—made destitute by the war—two soldiers’ orphans—& 3 sailors’ orphans—so it is well we are generously dealt by.”

  The home had just received a number of donations and Lizzie felt a little guilty sitting and counting the money while her brother Frank Blair ducked danger in the campaign against Vicksburg. Still, the needs of the orphan asylum were great. “I took in the Asylum a Secesh baby—whose father was killed in the Army South & the Mother died & left it destitute so I shall call it Secessia—The Army generally take care of their own people but Sailors & refugees give great scope to our charities besides our local calls.” She liked the work, “for occupation is happiness,” and the first directress was pleased that she had been able to iron out disagreements among board members so that now the place was running contentedly.

  Lizzie Lee had a talent for smoothing over divisions, demonstrated by her close ties to Varina Davis even as other friendships frayed. Despite her strong views about the war and the Union, Lizzie kept in constant contact with her relatives on the other side and relished news of her old friends. When a batch of Confederate mail was seized by the Yankees, her brother Montgomery Blair, the postmaster general, read the letters and shared some of them with his wife, Minna. She told Lizzie: “Mrs. Davis & Jeff’s photographs were in it—she is looking more coarse & ugly than I thought it possible for her to grow—thick lips gross nose—looked almost contraband—Jeff’s emaciated and thinner than ever.” Much of the information came from servants who seemed to move back and forth to and from Virginia freely. And though she held decidedly racist views—for instance, she hoped to send the contrabands off to Haiti—Lizzie shared warm relations with individual African Americans. Her little boy Blair’s nurse, Becky, came back from a holiday with a week’s worth of stories about relatives in Leesburg. Most of the slaves had left for freedom, with one of them telling Becky, “colored people was at first as hot Secesh as the ‘white folks’ . . . but since the Union Army has been there ‘we know better.’ ”

  The Union army now included black men. African-American leaders like Frederick Douglass had been agitating for inclusion in the army, firmly believing that once a black man had an “eagle on his button” no power could deny that he had earned the right to citizenship. In late January 1863, Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts received permission to raise a regiment of African-American soldiers. And some former slaves had formed their own regiments in areas of the South occupied by the Union—in the city of New Orleans and the coastal islands off South Carolina.

  With the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln had envisaged blacks in support roles rather than in direct combat—if combatants were captured the Confederates would almost certainly kill them. But black men’s demand to take up arms combined with white men’s readiness to quit fighting led to the formation of all-black regiments. In March, Congress passed the first conscription law (the Confederacy had approved a draft a year earlier) to boost the number of soldiers; later in the year the government established the Department of Colored Soldiers. Southern slaves escaped to join the Union army, causing Lizzie Lee to crack that it was hard on “womankind in the south generally who are unused to waiting on themselves.” Even with the additions to the fighting force, a growing number of “Peace Democrats” came to believe the South could not be defeated on the battlefield. Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill expected an armistice because “the rebs can’t be conquered by the present machinery,” and a disillusioned veteran of Antietam, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., judged that “the South have achieved their independence.”

  With those attitudes abroad in the land, a little diversion was more than welcome at the White House and in February it came with the visit of Tom Thumb and his new bride. The “pygmy pair,” as they were referred to in the New York Times, had caused quite a sensation with their Manhattan wedding and now they were making a grand tour. Years earlier P. T. Barnum brought three-foot-tall Charles Sherwood Stratton as a boy from Connecticut to the American Museum in New York, where the showman gave his soon-to-be star performer the stage name General Tom Thumb. His shows—he could sing, dance, and do imitations of famous people—became a spectacular success, earning millions for the little man and his manager. Also part of the Barnum entourage, “the Queen of Beauty,” Lavinia Warren, captivated Stratton, who, according to the New York Times, “literally fell desperately in love with her, and vowed his little vows, backed by the sternest of oaths.”

  The newspaper devoted three columns to their wedding, staged by Barnum in New York’s Grace Church, where tickets were in great demand. “There were more than twenty thousand women in this City yesterday morning up and dressed an hour and a half before their usual time, solely and simply because of the approaching nuptials of Mr. Stratton and Miss Warren. They didn’t all have cards of admission, oh no, but it wasn’t their fault. Fathers were flattered, husbands were hectored, brothers were bullied and cousins were cozened into buying, begging, borrowing, in some way or other getting tickets of admission to the grand affair.” The police had trouble keeping order on streets jammed with onlookers. General Burnside had a reserved seat in the church, where the groom’s best man was another of Barnum’s little people, called Commodore Nutt; the bride’s maid of honor was her sister, “the dearest little duck of a creature on the face of the globe.” A grand reception at the Metropolitan Hotel, where the wedding party was placed on the piano to receive the guests, went on for about ten hours, ending in the bride and groom bowing and blowing kisses from the balcony to the throngs below. And then it was on to Washington to meet the president and first lady, who received them in the East Room of the White House.

  THERE TO REPORT on the event was Sara Jane Lippincott, a prominent journalist, poet, and lecturer who wrote under the name Grace Greenwood. Or, as President Lincoln called her, “Grace Greenwood the Patriot.” In the 1850s, filing stories from Europe as the first woman to write for the New York Times, Mrs. Lippincott had achieved fame with her dispatches describing such exciting events as her admission to the House of Lords, where she was privileged to hear Queen Victoria speak (the monarch displayed more “rosy plumptitude than regal altitude”), and her dinners with the likes of Charles Dickens, whose “elegant and simple” lifestyle was demonstrated by his servants’ wearing “no livery.”

  But Mrs. Lippincott didn’t confine herself to breezy notes. Her staunch abolitionist stands got her fired from writing for the popular magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, the bible for women devouring recipes and dress patterns but also the fiction writer’s launching pad to
success. Supporters of the antislavery cause embraced the young journalist and now, not quite forty years old, her celebrity allowed her to raise funds for the troops with her lectures. The Grace Greenwood name was sought after for endorsements and her monthly children’s magazine, the Little Pilgrim, was acclaimed by the press. At the beginning of 1863, the Hillsboro, Ohio, Highland Weekly recommended the magazine to anyone caring for children: “We believe its beneficial influence upon any family where it is read, is beyond all estimation. In the language of the editor, the gifted ‘Grace Greenwood,’ we can truly say, ‘we believe no child can read it regularly without being greatly benefited in heart, mind and manners. Think of it, fathers and mothers! 50 cents a year for an influence in your homes that may decide for life the characters of your sons and daughters!” But even such a highly touted publication had trouble staying afloat in wartime when Grace Greenwood was out in the camps cheering on the troops or on the stump raising money for their well-being through the Sanitary Commission.

  Sara Lippincott was one of several female journalists to descend on Washington during the war. Probably the biggest bomb thrower was Jane Swisshelm, who returned to the capital after writing for and running newspapers in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she fought for the property rights of married women, and St. Cloud, Minnesota, where she battled against slavery. She turned ardent abolitionist during a sojourn with her husband in Louisville, Kentucky, giving her an up close look at “the peculiar institution.” And abolition topped her agenda when she first came to the Federal City in 1850 as a correspondent for the New York Tribune, which soon featured “Mrs. Swisshelm’s Letters” on page one. The intrepid journalist convinced Vice President Millard Fillmore to let her report from the Senate Press Gallery, the first woman to do so. But she got thrown out in short order. Infuriated by Daniel Webster’s support for the Compromise of 1850 and its Fugitive Slave Law, Mrs. Swisshelm repeated rumors that the much-hailed statesman was not only a drunk but also the father of a black woman’s children. She broke, as have many women reporters after her, the “boys on the bus” rule dictating that private lives were not public fodder. Though she wrote the story for her hometown Pittsburgh paper, it was reprinted all over the country, embarrassing Webster supporter and Tribune publisher Horace Greeley, who promptly fired his female correspondent. The undaunted reporter landed back in Minnesota, where she did battle with established politicians, coming to be called “the mother of the Republican party” in Minnesota. But an Indian raid in that state outraged this great protector of African-American and women’s rights and she once again headed for Washington, D.C., to protest what she saw as the lenient treatment of the Native Americans. She had left her domineering husband, James Swisshelm, a failed businessman, and was free to go where she wanted.