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

by Cokie Roberts

  WITH GENERAL HOOKER’S retreat back across the Rappahannock, Washington again feared invasion. After the early panic at the beginning of the war, the army built forts and earthworks all around the capital, providing it with ample protection. Now the troops occupying the fortress mini-cities went on alert, preparing to fight if necessary and breaking up what had been a somewhat familial atmosphere in the camps. At Fort Mansfield, on the upper northwest side of town, Janet Seward packed up with her baby and the baby’s nurse and headed home to New York to wait out the expected siege. Mrs. Seward’s father-in-law served as secretary of state and her brother-in-law, Frederick Seward, as assistant secretary. Another brother-in-law, Augustus, was a colonel in the Union army but until the summer of 1862 her own husband, William Seward Jr., kept to the quiet life of a banker in the small upstate city of Auburn, New York.

  Before he enlisted, William and his wife had visited their distinguished family members in Washington, and Janet—called Jenny—had accompanied her sister-in-law to the White House, where she found Mary Lincoln’s “wreath of large white roses around her head . . . not very becoming.” She also visited officers’ wives quartered at Mary and Robert E. Lee’s confiscated Arlington House and was somewhat nonplussed when “one of the ladies invited us to her room, and gave us pieces of the china that was presented to Martha Washington by General Lafayette, she having found a box of broken pieces in the attic.” But the days at Fort Mansfield, with William in the army, would be a very different Washington experience from the time spent at cabinet dinners and White House receptions as the guests of prominent personages.

  Not long after Seward volunteered and the Ninth New York Heavy Artillery regiment was ordered to Washington, Janet gave birth to their first child, a girl they named Nellie. William established himself at the fort just outside the District of Columbia boundary and then summoned his wife from Auburn to bring the baby and join him in a log cabin there. “There were a great many discussions in the families. Both our mothers said ‘Go’ but the family physician, when consulted, said, ‘Well, if you do go, you will bring a dead baby home with you.’ ” Despite that scary advice, Janet’s mother-in-law, who chose to live most of the time in Auburn rather than with her husband in Washington, scoffed, “Nonsense; think of all the babies that have been born and brought up in log cabins.” So off she set in the dead of an upstate New York winter with a three-month-old, a baby nurse, and her sister, plus her husband’s aunt.

  Crossing the ice-caked Hudson River at Albany by ferry, her sister took the baby and jumped several feet onto the ice because the boat couldn’t reach the dock. “We were women alone,” but apparently women with a great many “bags and bundles” that were then tossed onto the ice and collected for the train ride to Washington. After a night in the comforts of the secretary of state’s mansion, Janet, the baby, and the nurse moved to their new home, a snug log cabin several miles from the center of town. It was far from a typical army wife’s life, even though the cabin was small and simple: “We had a great many callers from Washington and Auburn at different times—the president, members of the Cabinet, foreign ministers and others, all curious to see how we lived in camp.”

  Forced occasionally to move in with her in-laws when her husband was sent away on various missions, Janet loved returning to “our little cabin.” And though she was there through the winter and spring of miring mud, one of the soldiers managed to plant a flower garden for her. But then came May and “the long roll, the signal of attack, was sounded.” With the nurse and baby Janet made her way into Washington “in a little one-horse wagon” by the light of the full moon. “Upon arriving at the house, we astonished and frightened the family, by the news that we were running from the enemy.” No Rebels attacked but it was the end of Mrs. Seward’s idyll at Fort Mansfield, “much to my regret, as there were frequent alarms, and raids by the guerillas.” And rumors rushed around the Capital City that General Lee was marching north.

  “YESTERDAY THERE WAS a panic in town made by the ambulance trains, which were so large & enough to affright the people but it was the sick from Fredericksburg hospitals, & not the wounded from any battle,” Lizzie Lee reported in mid-June. “It is a race between Hooker & Lee . . . the result I think will not be brilliant but there are men enough & good gen[era]ls enough to take care of us.” Despite the roar of gunfire a few days later, she kept to her home certain there were “no Rebels nearer than Harper’s Ferry & Centreville.” And even in the midst of the panic Lizzie was able to stage a successful benefit for the orphan asylum.

  Advertised in the National Republican as a “Grand Vocal and Instrumental Concert,” featuring ballads like “Her Bright Smiles Haunt Me Still” and a “Scene de Ballet” for violin and piano, the event at the Odd Fellows’ Hall raised five hundred dollars and alleviated any worries about money for the summer ahead. Lizzie admitted to her husband, “my heart is so much in this establishment that I can no longer call it a work.” But soon fear that the war was about to arrive on the doorstep wiped away all other concerns. Lizzie first heard that the Rebels were in Hagerstown, Maryland, not far at all from Silver Spring, then in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. “The Army of the Potomac may hug Washington but that will make it secure for a while only. The President said today he got rid of McC[lellan] because he let Lee get the better of him in the race to Richmond & he seemed to have it in his mind that if Hooker got beat in the present race he would make short work of him, but prudence forbids my saying even this much.” That was June 23. Five days later Lincoln replaced Hooker with General George Meade, making him the fifth commander of the Army of the Potomac in three years. But Lizzie Lee didn’t yet know about Meade as she moved back and forth between Silver Spring and Washington looking for safe haven. She could “hear every battle” but believed she could “get out of the way if we are defeated.” Defeat was all the Army of the Potomac had known for months and defeat seemed likely again.

  The next day, June 24, a portion of the Rebel army crossed the Potomac River, passing very near Silver Spring, so Lizzie moved into the house in Washington just as she learned that “Hooker is at last deposed. Meade has a good reputation & is a sober man & a good soldier & may prove a lucky appointment.” The Blairs backed Meade, but Montgomery’s enemy in the cabinet, Salmon Chase, was distressed at Hooker’s dismissal as he told his daughter Kate, “You must have been greatly astonished for the relieving of General Hooker; but your astonishment cannot have exceeded mine.” Chase was angling for a presidential run against Lincoln and putting down a marker in case Meade lost the battle.

  Monty Blair sent his family out of town for safety and Kate Chase kept to the protection of faraway New York. But Lizzie Lee hunkered down in her house across the street from the White House, though she heard from one of the Union men taken prisoner by Confederate General J. E. B. Stuart that “ ‘but for his jaded horses he would have marched down the 7th Street Road, took Abe & Cabinet prisoners.’ ” Lizzie added ruefully, “for the life of me I cannot see that he would have failed had he tried it.” Stuart’s men were moving closer and closer to Silver Spring and when the Union army captured some of them they “were full of talk about the plan for capturing ‘Old Blair,’ ” bragging that catching the “Old Fox & his cub the Yankee P[ost] M[aster] Gen[era]l we would have all the pluck out of that Washington concern and soon end the war.” It was pretty scary stuff for Lizzie there without her husband, but she pluckily promised, “We are very comfortable—laugh and eat & sleep—hope & pray. Still firmly trusting in Him who is our ever present help in time of trouble.” Even so, the tension was hard on her parents, who seemed “enfeebled and broke down by this experience.” The senior Blairs stayed at Silver Spring, too close to the skirmishing between the armies for Lizzie’s comfort, so she was vastly relieved when her seventy-something parents came riding their horses into Washington on July 2, though there was no guarantee of safety there, either: “Rob[er]t Lee’s whole object is in my opinion Washington.”

  When the ski
rmishes turned into full-fledged warfare it happened eighty miles north of Washington, in a Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg. “We are here on tiptoe with all eyes turned towards the north West where I have felt all day that a mortal combat was going on for our Country’s life,” Lizzie quivered on July 3, the third day of the battle. “A letter today from Meade to the P says yesterday at 3 o’clock he had all his Army concentrated but 2 corps were so prostrated from an immense march that he would not attack until today.” The close relationship between Lincoln and her father allowed Lizzie to keep close tabs on the action and she placed her hopes on Meade not only because he came from a talented and energetic family but especially because “as he was born in Spain he can never be President—thus will not be warred upon by politicians.” Timid Union generals had repeatedly held back their armies and Lizzie, like many others, thought they were calculating the political odds of their actions. But now victory in the East seemed possible at last. Plus she had word from her brother Frank that Vicksburg was within Grant’s sights.

  Still, having weathered so many disappointments, Lizzie didn’t dare jump for joy. On July 4, “the news from the Armies is favorable but scarcely decisive enough for my appetite.” Though it looked like Lee had retreated, Meade wasn’t convinced—the southern general might be searching for a “good stronghold at which to have another fight,” and the newly assigned Commander Meade claimed he couldn’t pursue the enemy because he had to stop to feed his men. Lizzie learned this from the president himself when she took Blair to the White House to watch the Independence Day fireworks, “in which he was disappointed.”

  “I think the 4th of July of 1863 will stand by that of 76 in the annals of Country,” Lizzie exulted a few days later, breathlessly telling her husband, “I feel too full of joy to wait until the morrow to tell it over to you altho you may know it now & revel in the Good tidings.” Not only had the Union won at Gettysburg, but now Vicksburg had finally fallen. “EXTRA,” the National Republican screamed, “Glorious News!” celebrating the Vicksburg victory, and added from the Battle of Gettysburg, “Lee Retreating.” The tide, at last, had turned. When word reached Lizzie, she and fellow board member Mary Merrick were in a meeting about mattresses for the orphanage. Lizzie tamped down her excitement about Vicksburg and her brother Frank Blair’s role as a leader in the Union army there because her friend Mary’s two brothers had fought off that army from inside the Confederate fortress. “She looked at me with a quiet sadness when my heart overflowed in thankfulness and only remarked, ‘Oh the sea of blood this dreadful war has cost.’ ” More than 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg, almost 20,000 at Vicksburg. But that number doesn’t reflect the true costs of the months-long battering of the fortress city that starved soldier and civilian alike until Confederate general John C. Pemberton was forced to surrender to Ulysses S. Grant. It was a crucial victory—“Vicksburg is the key,” Lincoln had bluntly declared almost two years earlier, echoed by Jefferson Davis. “Vicksburg is the nail head that holds the South’s two halves together”—and it made Grant’s career. It took almost two years and several failed attempts but now the North could cut off the supply lines to the Rebel troops. “Now that the Mississippi is open,” Lizzie, along with much of the country, prayed, “I take hope that the war will be over before very long.”

  Back at Silver Spring, Lizzie Lee found herself “too happy to grumble at anybody,” but the huge celebrations held around the North at the news of the double victories died down as the public and the president came to understand that Meade had failed to pursue Lee’s army as it retreated into Virginia. Lizzie summed up the situation: “Meade’s mistake was altogether a want of judgment . . . they supposed Lee would attack them & he out wised them for he made all the appearances of an immediate attack & thus saved himself. . . . I fear we will never have such an easy prey within our grasp again.” The canny southern general had saved himself and what was left of his army but the line of his wounded stretched on for fourteen miles. “Lee made a most desperate & false step by this invasion,” Lizzie concluded; “maybe his best excuse is the calculation that Hooker was to be our general.” Both Lee and Meade had made mistakes; both offered their resignations and neither was accepted. And the war with its terrible toll raged on for almost another year.

  More fighting meant more soldiers, and on July 11 the first draftees in American history learned their names had been pulled from a giant spinning wheel in New York City. The conscription law contained a provision that allowed a man to get out of the draft by either paying three hundred dollars or finding a substitute. “Rich man’s war and poor man’s fight” resounded as more than a political slogan as an angry mob of men and boys took to the streets of New York, first destroying the draft office and then taking out their venom on any policeman or black person who had the misfortune to be in their path. They burned an orphanage for African-American children and for five days sacked hundreds of stores, including the well-known provider of Union uniforms—Brooks Brothers. (But the police were able to thwart the “gang attempting to break into the Lord & Taylor store.”) More than one thousand people died or were wounded. Lizzie Lee worried that the riots might prolong the war and no one knew what would happen in other cities when the conscripts’ names were announced.

  Janet Seward’s mother-in-law had already been the target of an attack in Auburn, New York. Someone threw a stone through a window where Frances Seward usually sat reading, “and if she had been sitting in the chair she would have been hurt. When she came to tell me about it, she said, ‘You had better take baby and go to your mother’s; we may have the house burned or something worse.’ ” Janet took her prize possession—a picture of her husband—to her mother’s but she and Baby Nellie stayed put, despite the fact that “the Copperhead element was very active in the North, and we were frequently threatened with violence.” The so-called “Peace” Democrats had been behind some of the violence and their faction came to be known by their enemies as “Copperheads” for the poisonous snake that sneaks up and bites without warning. The person they most wanted to strike was Abraham Lincoln.

  MARY LINCOLN AND her two surviving sons left Washington for a vacation in New Hampshire and Vermont that particularly hot summer in Washington when malaria felled both humans and horses. The first lady was recuperating from a head injury she received in a frightening fall on the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg. She and the president were returning to the White House from a stay at their Soldiers’ Home retreat; he went by horseback, and she followed by carriage. It turned out that the carriage had been sabotaged in what was probably an assassination attempt on Lincoln. Someone had loosened the screws holding the driver’s seat to the chassis and when the seat came loose the driver fell out and the horses took off at a gallop. Mary jumped out of the runaway carriage and landed on her back, hitting her head on a sharp stone. The wound was tended to in a nearby military hospital but infection set in so the president called on their friend Rebecca Pomroy to take charge. Mary and Rebecca had stayed close since the nurse had taken care of Tad after Willie died. And a few months earlier, after she had started entertaining again, the First Lady had invited the nurses and soldiers from Rebecca’s hospital to one of her receptions.

  Mrs. Lincoln tended to confide in the women who worked for her, perhaps because the women of Washington were so unfriendly. She had leaned on Mrs. Pomroy in the forlorn weeks after Willie’s death, trying to understand how the nurse had survived the loss of two of her own sons and her husband. The president too “went to her in his troubles as to a family friend,” she later revealed. Given the tinkering with the carriage, Mrs. Pomroy feared for Lincoln’s life, and when she asked him, “ ‘what will you do about showing yourself in public?’ he said, ‘I can do nothing different from what I’m doing. I shall leave it all with my Heavenly father.’ ”

  But Mary couldn’t stay so sanguine in the face of regular death threats arriving by mail—she constantly worried about her husband. Another of her confidante
s, her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, heard many a conversation between the couple on the subject. As Lincoln prepared to go to the War Department one night Mary warned: “ ‘You should not go out alone. You know you are surrounded with danger.’ ” The reply, “ ‘Don’t worry about me, Mother, as if I were a little child, for no one is going to molest me,’ ” did nothing to comfort her. Neither did the president’s response to Mary’s refusal to allow their son Robert, then a student at Harvard, to enlist in the military, an ongoing argument heard by Mrs. Keckley. Mary Lincoln: “I cannot bear to have Robert exposed to danger. His services are not required in the field, and the sacrifice would be a needless one.” The president’s rejoinder: “The services of every man who loves his country are required in this war. You should take a liberal instead of a selfish view of the question, mother.” But she did not, despite Robert’s pleas so there must have been some tension between mother and son on that long summer sojourn. For his part, Robert believed that his mother “never quite recovered from the effects of her fall . . . it is really astonishing what a brave front she manages to keep when we know she is suffering.” By the time the president’s son joined the army the war was almost over.

  But Mary Lincoln did have some relatives fighting in this war. Unfortunately for her, they were on the wrong side. Lending credence to the charges that the first lady was a southern sympathizer at best, a spy at worst, four of her brothers and three brothers-in-law fought in the Rebel army. While she was still away on vacation—with the president telling her, “I really wish to see you”—the Union lost another big battle, this one at Chickamauga in Georgia. Again at horrible loss of life and limb—more than 16,000 northern casualties, more than 18,000 southern, among them Confederate general Ben Helm, married to Mary’s much younger and much-beloved half sister, Emilie. Both the president and his wife were very fond of the thirty-two-year-old southern general—at the beginning of the war Lincoln had offered him a job as paymaster in the Union army and Mary had hoped that Emilie would join her as a White House hostess. But Ben signed with the South and now he had lost his life.