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

by Cokie Roberts

  Having been told that there was no point in taking her case to the top because “Mr. Lincoln will hang nobody,” she went with some trepidation to a reception at the Executive Mansion, where Mrs. Lincoln was entertaining again after her year of mourning for Willie. Mrs. Swisshelm believed that Lincoln “had proved an obstructionist instead of an abolitionist, and I felt no respect for him; while his wife was everywhere spoken of as a Southern woman with Southern sympathies—a conspirator against the Union.” After friends convinced the crusading correspondent to come along with them to the White House, she determined to make a quick exit, never stopping to check her coat. Then Jane Swisshelm saw the president’s “sad, earnest, honest face” and blurted out, “May the Lord have mercy on you, poor man, for the people have none.” Unwittingly, she had tickled Lincoln’s sense of humor and when he burst out laughing the ice was broken—not only did she warm to this man who had aroused her suspicions for moving too slowly on abolition, but also to his wife, whose manner “was so simple and motherly . . . she would be incapable of a successful deceit.” Maybe the fact that Mary greeted her famous caller by saying, “I have long wished to see you,” had something to do with the pair winning over the fierce Jane Swisshelm: “I recognized Mrs. Lincoln as a loyal, liberty loving woman, more staunch even than her husband in opposition to the Rebellion and its cause, and as my very dear friend for life.” Mrs. Swisshelm decided to stay in Washington rather than return to newspapering. She landed a job as a clerk in the War Department thanks to the efforts of her old friend Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

  MORE AND MORE jobs in the government were opening up to women as the men left for the battlefield—half of the clerks at the headquarters of Montgomery Blair’s U.S. Post Office were female. And new jobs were created with the passage of the Banking Act, which authorized the printing of “greenbacks,” paper money to finance the fighting. The treasurer of the United States, General Francis Spinner, saw the wisdom of hiring women as a money saver, since he could pay them less than men and he thought they might actually do a better job. “A woman can use scissors better than a man,” he told his boss, Treasury secretary Salmon Chase. “I want to employ women to cut the Treasury notes.” The greenbacks came off the press in large sheets and someone was needed to cut them into individual bills. At first the needy women, left without any support when the men went off to war, were simply handed a pair of scissors and told to go to work for six hundred dollars a year, a substantial salary for a woman. Word spread about the well-paid but finger-blistering jobs and more and more women applied for them. Then Spinner opened additional positions to women, using them to detect counterfeits and count the currency.

  Though the treasurer was pleased with his workers, he came in for a good bit of grief for his unorthodox hiring practices, with the women’s teakettles in the Treasury windows providing a source of great amusement and ridicule. Congress eventually capped the women’s salaries at $900 regardless of the work they were doing even as men doing lesser jobs made $1,200. A Union officer in Washington, William E. Doster, noted in his diary that a “feature on the streets of the Capital is the female Government employees; especially the Treasury girls.” He pointed out that many were from “good families—for it takes some influence to get into a department.” But “black sheep” also collected government paychecks, forced to supplement their salaries with unsavory occupations because their pay didn’t cover their living expenses as Washington rents increased, with board at $30 a month, and a regular room running as high as $20.

  Women working in the Printing Offices had the nerve in 1862 to strike for an increase from five dollars a week to a dollar a day but as the war wore on and more women came to town, their attempts to better their situations failed. Members of Congress controlled the purse strings of government agencies and often also controlled who got jobs and who didn’t, spraying the “government girls” with a whiff of scandal. “The shameful fact cannot be wiped out that men, high in political power, because they had that power, made womanly virtue its price,” bristled journalist Mary Clemmer Ames in describing the Capital City, where “the war had torn the whole social fabric like an earthquake.” But by war’s end General Spinner saw his experiment as an unqualified success: “The truth is that many of the female clerks now do as much work, if not more, and do it as well, if not better, for $900 per annum, than some of the male clerks are able to do who receive a yearly salary of twice that amount.” Later in his life he called his role in “introducing women to employment in the offices of government” more satisfying than “all the other deeds of my life.”

  AS THE WAR effort continued, the war itself, at least in the East, stood at something of a standstill. The cold and wet weather slowed any movement, with thickening mud making the roads impassable. Lizzie Lee was having trouble getting back and forth from Silver Spring to the city, where her work with the orphan asylum took up a good deal of time, as did lobbying for a promotion for her husband. If his wife could make it happen, Flag Officer Samuel Phillips Lee would wear the admiral’s insignia. “I have a list of Senators & will give it to Father & get him to speak to a majority of the Senate,” she assured Phil as she worked to pass a bill thanking him for his service so he could achieve the higher rank. Several days later another report: “I went with Father to the Capitol & he was so bitterly opposed to my seeking conference with the Senators—that I gave it up upon faith & not conviction . . . it is right for women to obey—at the same time I was egotistic enough to think I could get things done he could not.”

  But her father couldn’t keep her from talking to the women: “I have visited people—& that is all I have done—& if able I’ll go see Mrs. Lincoln tomorrow after church.” The determined wife knew she could have “a pleasant chat” with Mary Lincoln but Lizzie was frustrated by the constraints put on her by both her husband and father: “I must get your appointment if I can and shall go to the City today to see about it—I think I will go straight to the President & Sec[retar]y—although Father & you both will be angry with me for doing so.” A few days later her irritation had mounted. She couldn’t attempt another lobbying session with the first lady because of the weather and she had been thwarted in her desire to talk to senatorial friends: “Now I want to ask them to go do it—but Father & you have objected to my doing so—I intended to go today to see Mrs. Lincoln—but can’t go in a storm.” Lizzie suspected that her brother the cabinet member was secretly sabotaging her husband because the two had never liked each other—and she turned out to be right.

  The storms of that winter, like the one that kept Lizzie Lee marooned in Silver Spring, also kept the army battened down in camp restively waiting for action. So, in early April the first family decided to celebrate Tad’s tenth birthday by taking a trip down the Potomac for a morale-boosting call on the troops headquartered in the Virginia hills between the Rappahannock and Potomac Rivers near Falmouth Station. Though snow forced the presidential party into the safety of a secluded cove the first night, the rest of the visit proved morale building for everyone. Through the swirling storm the family and a few friends took a train to the makeshift city of more than one hundred thousand soldiers built as General Hooker’s base.

  Bunking down in a well-turned-out tent, the Lincolns enjoyed their time both in formal moments like the cavalry review and in one-on-one conversations with soldiers. Lincoln’s friend, the journalist Noah Brooks, traveled with the first family and witnessed the joy of the soldiers as the president “went through the hospital tents . . . leaving a kind word as he moved from cot to cot.” The good mood even extended to the famously jealous Mary Lincoln, who forgave her husband despite the attention lavished on him by the notorious “Princess Salm-Salm,” the former Agnes Joy. The aptly named redhead had drawn attention to herself as a single woman riding bareback through the streets of Washington and then managed to snare a European prince, albeit a hugely indebted one, named Felix of Salm-Salm. The prince, run out of Europe, had signed up with the Union army a
nd the princess bride went along with him to camp. When she encountered the president she covered him with kisses, but for once Lincoln was able to jolly his wife out of the anger she usually showed if he even politely spoke to another woman. The president summed up the visit to Brooks saying “ ‘It is a great relief to get away from Washington and the politicians,’ ” so all in all it was a highly successful trip with positive press coverage for the embattled president and even for Mary. Taking credit for this happy moment in a horrible winter was the most unlikely of “advisors”—a spiritualist in Washington frequented by the first lady.

  After Willie Lincoln died, on a suggestion from the dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley, his mother sought out the then-popular “mediums” to hold séances, hoping she might “get in touch with” her little boy. Some of the sessions were held in the White House but Mary often traveled to Georgetown, where she participated in séances conducted by a woman named Nettie Coburn, who professed to channel several spirits. Mrs. Lincoln was so taken with Nettie that she secured a job for the medium in the Interior Department guaranteeing that she would stay in Washington. One night one of Nettie’s spirits told her the president would be coming that night to her séance and when he actually showed up, one of the party welcomed him by saying, “You were expected.” Lincoln asked how that could be since he had just decided on the spur of the moment to accompany his wife to the “circle.” The group then sang a few songs—one of the spiritualists was famous for causing pianos to move in time to the music (!)—and then, according to Nettie, Lincoln asked if she had anything to say to him.

  A “spirit” took over Nettie’s personality and cataloged the disasters befalling Hooker’s army. The president agreed that things were as dire as described, and then asked for “the remedy.” According to Nettie the spirit replied, “Go in person to the front; taking with you your wife and children; leaving behind your official dignity, and all manner of display. Resist the importunities of officials to accompany you . . . seek the tents of the private soldiers. Inquire into their grievances . . . make them feel that you are interested in their sufferings.” The medium claimed that the president responded, “If that will do any good, it is easily done.” Before the family left for camp, Nettie visited the White House, where “Mrs. Lincoln informed us that they were being besieged by applications from members of both houses and cabinet officers and their wives, for permission to go with them. And she remarked, in her quick, impulsive way: ‘But I told Mr. Lincoln if we are going to take spirits’ advice, let us do it fully and then there can be no responsibility resting with us if we fail.’ ” If the Lincolns really were listening to voices from the otherworld, the president must have been cheered by another piece of news from the spirits: he would be reelected the following year. But as that spring wore on there was less and less reason to believe that.

  “PEACE DEMOCRATS,” AN ever-growing group ready to end the war, were mounting campaigns in several states, threatening another electoral rout like the one the year before. What Lincoln desperately needed was a military victory. But none came. The whole time he had been in Hooker’s camp the president had tried to find out what had happened in Charleston, where he feared a planned attack by the Union navy to retake Fort Sumter had been thwarted. His fear was justified. Nine expensive ironclad ships failed to penetrate the Rebel defenses. One sank. The rest turned back in yet another federal defeat. So a great deal rested on Hooker’s enormous and enspirited army when the general finally moved at the end of April.

  He maneuvered his massive force across the Rappahannock ready to engage Robert E. Lee at Chancellorsville. The southern general quickly pulled together his Army of Northern Virginia from camps around the state, and once again faced with a superior force—the Union fielded about 130,000 men, the Confederacy about 60,000—Lee and his chief lieutenant, General Stonewall Jackson, devised a plan to surround Hooker’s forces while the latter were still making their way through the heavily wooded area called the Wilderness. Taking the risky course of dividing his smaller army, Lee sent Jackson’s forces off on a bold sneak attack. That surprise, combined with the hesitancy to move forward on the part of yet another Union general, culminated in a humiliating Yankee defeat, horrible in its toll of more than thirty thousand casualties in the combined armies, including death of Stonewall Jackson, accidentally shot by his own men, a devastating loss for the South.

  For Abraham Lincoln the devastation was even greater. Noah Brooks was in the White House when the president read the telegram informing him that the army he had so proudly inspected just a few weeks earlier had withdrawn across the Rappahannock. “Never, as long as I knew him, did he seem to be so broken, so dispirited, and so ghostlike. Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room saying, ‘My God! My God! What will the country say! What will the country say!’ ”

  It took a while for the country to learn the details of the defeat. While the battle was still going on, Lizzie Lee “saw hundreds of ambulances moving in the streets—but could not find out where they were going so followed them a while & saw them make for the steamboat wharves. I came home with a heavy heart as there was nothing of a battle in the papers even in the second edition which I got as it was issued on the Avenue—Silence is ever ominous.” Even the first lady was in the dark about what was going on. Nettie Coburn dropped by the White House to find that “Mrs. Lincoln, in a loose wrapper, her long beautiful hair down her back and over her shoulders, was distractedly walking up and down the room.” Mary was clearly in a state, telling Nettie, “ ‘such dreadful news; they are fighting at the front; such terrible slaughter; and all our Generals are killed and our army is in full retreat.’ ” Nettie then summoned a spirit who assured the first lady and then the president that all was well. This time the spirit was wrong.

  After reading the fateful telegram, President Lincoln headed to Hooker’s encampment, departing a city filled with rumors. The war, Lizzie Lee noted, was “the perpetual theme of everybody’s talk . . . at home—on the pavements,” and on May 6, the last day of the battle, “Nobody knew in the city what was going on in Hooker’s army—or Stoneman except the President—who they say excludes the War Dept.” General George Stoneman of the Union army led the cavalry across the Rappahannock and Lizzie Lee was ready to heap praise on him: “Everyone is full of Stoneman’s achievements & even Secesh admit the efficacy & gallantry of his raid.” But Hooker was another story.

  Word was out, perhaps unfairly, that the general in charge of the battle “was drunk all the time & that after the first day’s battle was unfit for duty.” Preston Blair had feared Hooker’s proclivities from the start and “asked the P. on his return from Falmouth if his Gen[era]l was drunk or sober when he inspected him.” A letter from a member of Hooker’s staff “discloses the particulars & winds up & ‘thus we are disgraced.’ ” One General Lizzie did admire—Stonewall Jackson. “He was an able Gen[era]l & an earnest man & I hope is taken away to be spared the sorrow which I think the Cause he earnestly espoused is to come to . . . we as a Nation will take pride in his heroism even in spite of the miserable Cause which won his heart.” Though she despised the southern cause, Lizzie still had many southern friends, and when she heard that Robert Brown, the son of a former Mississippi senator, had been brought to Washington as a prisoner she rushed “to the City in this rain to see him & his comforts.” The Confederate cause was one thing; close companions were another.

  During the days when the armies around Chancellorsville, Virginia, fought to their gruesome conclusion, the spiritualist Nettie Coburn visited Washington’s Mount Pleasant Hospital, where both her father and brother were recuperating from one of the many diseases that swept through the camps. “Its thousands of clean, white empty tents, full of little cot-beds, suggested the possibilities of war, but presented none of the horrors.” By the next week nothing was the same: “Soldiers were everywhere, rushing in all directions. . . . Threading our way through what seemed hardly familiar lines of tents; we were shocked
to find that nearly every tent was filled with mutilated occupants; every bed having its tenant, and fresh arrivals constantly being added to the number.” Her father, now well enough to assist the other soldiers, asked if Nettie and her friends had “nerve enough to help us.” One “started on her round, but the first sight that greeted her eyes was one of horror—a poor soldier boy bleeding to death from a wound in the neck. Turning deadly faint, she retreated to the open air. A few moments and she rallied and bravely returned to her work.” It was a story repeated over and over during the long war as women sadly got used to such scenes and then took charge.