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

by Cokie Roberts

  A visitor to the White House soon after the battle found the president “in the greatest grief.” But Mrs. Lincoln, who learned of the death through a telegram from her husband, was forced to do her mourning in private because she knew, said her niece, “that a single tear shed for a dead enemy would bring torrents of scorn and bitter abuse on both her husband and herself.” Even with her close companion Elizabeth Keckley, Mary refused to show sadness. First her half brother Samuel Todd was killed at the Battle of Shiloh and then another half brother, Alexander “Alec” Todd, who had been like her own baby, lost his life at the age of twenty-three in the Battle of Baton Rouge. When he died Mary told the seamstress: “ ‘He decided against my husband, and through him against me. He has been fighting against us; and since he chose to be our deadly enemy, I see no special reason why I should bitterly mourn his death.’ ”

  That provided proof enough for the former slave Lizzie Keckley that Mary “had no sympathy for the South” and that those who thought she did were “widely mistaken.” Mary’s niece later wrote: “the Northerners had no sympathy for a Southern-born woman whose brothers were in the rebel army. . . . On the other hand, the Southerners shouted that she was hard-hearted, callous . . . so flinty-hearted that she showed no emotion, not even a trace of feeling at the loss of her brothers and friends.” Mary couldn’t help but show emotion a few weeks after Ben Helm’s death when his young widow showed up at the White House bringing her little girl with her.

  Emilie Todd Helm, the first lady’s half sister, had been in Alabama to be near her soldier-husband and been summoned by the Confederate army to Atlanta for his burial. Now she desperately wanted to go home to her mother in Kentucky. Mrs. Todd, Mary Lincoln’s stepmother, appealed to the president to provide Emilie with a pass to travel through enemy lines. The young woman got as far as Fort Monroe in Virginia when a Union officer demanded that she take an oath of allegiance to the United States before proceeding. Emilie refused, declaring it would be “treason to her dead husband, to her beloved Southland,” her daughter later recounted. The dutiful soldiers trying to carry out standard orders didn’t know what to do with the distraught young woman until one of them came up with the idea of telegraphing the president personally. Lincoln answered directly: “Send her to me. A. Lincoln.” And so it was that a Confederate widow took up residence for a week in the Lincoln White House.

  Emilie kept a diary of those days, detailing how “Mr. Lincoln and my sister met me with the warmest affection, we were all too grief-stricken at first for speech . . . we could only embrace each other in silence and tears.” The sisters tried sticking to neutral subjects, talking about old friends in Kentucky, steering clear of any discussion of the “frightful war” that separated them. “Sister is doing everything she can to distract my mind and her own from our terrible grief, but at times it overwhelms us; we can’t get away from it, try as we will to be cheerful and accept fate.” Now Mary could reveal how she suffered over the death of her brother Alec: “he was so young, so loving, so impetuous, our dear, red-headed baby brother!” Her hard-hearted statement to Lizzie Keckley was clearly for public consumption.

  Though the first lady always put on a smile for her husband, according to Emilie, the “thin and care-worn” president was still worried about his wife. “Her nerves have gone to pieces; she cannot hide from me that the strain she has been under has been too much for her mental as well as her physical health,” Lincoln told his sister-in-law as he invited her to spend the next summer with the family at the Soldiers’ Home. Emilie agreed that her sister was “very nervous and excitable . . . if anything should happen to you or Robert or Tad it would kill her.” Mary in turn asked Emilie whether she thought “Mr. Lincoln was well.” When the younger sister tried to deflect the question by simply saying how thin the president looked, Mary responded, “Oh Emilie, will we ever awake from this hideous night-mare?” The toll of the war on the White House was becoming clearer and clearer to the young visitor.

  Later that night Mary shocked her sister when she crept into Emilie’s room to reveal her nighttime visits with her dead son Willie, how he appeared at the foot of her bed sometimes bringing with him her dead baby Eddie or her little brother Alec. Emilie divulged to her diary: “It is unnatural and abnormal, it frightens me. It does not seem like Sister Mary to be so nervous and wrought up.” The young widow tried to keep out of sight during her visit, knowing that her presence was a problem for her hosts. But one day when General Dan Sickles and New York senator Ira Harris came calling they asked to see her under the pretense of catching up on some friends in the South. Harris clearly wanted to pick a fight, baiting Emilie about the war until finally he succeeded in getting a Rebel retort.

  That gave him an excuse to attack Mary: “ ‘Why isn’t Robert in the Army? . . . He should have gone to the front some time ago.’ ” Mary’s stiffly polite answer, “ ‘I have insisted that he should stay in college a little longer,’ ” only seemed to rile Harris up. “ ‘I have only one son and he is fighting for his country . . . and if I had twenty sons they should all be fighting the rebels.’ ” Emilie took the bait, “ ‘And if I had twenty sons . . . they should all be opposing yours.’ ” She fled from the room, soon followed by her sister, who “was powerless to protect a guest in the White House from cruel rudeness.” The men then stormed upstairs demanding to see the president, shouting at him “ ‘You should not have that rebel in your house.’ ” Refusing to be intimidated by the uninvited intruders, Lincoln instructed them that he and his wife would choose their own guests and that his wife’s sister was there because he sent for her.

  Emilie knew the situation was untenable: “I feel that my being here is more or less an embarrassment to all of us and I am longing for Kentucky and mother.” The time had come to go—among other irritants, the Lincolns’ little niece, who grew up to author a book about her aunt Mary, kept insisting to her cousin Tad that Jefferson Davis was the president. When Lincoln handed Emilie Helm her pass to go home, he didn’t say a word about an oath of allegiance, instead voicing his trust that “ ‘I know you will not embarrass me in any way on your return to Kentucky.’ ”

  Mary Lincoln did keep embarrassing her husband. The charges that she was a southern sympathizer might not have been fair but there were plenty of other complaints about the first lady that were justified. Her spending was out of control—at one point she ordered three hundred pairs of gloves—and too often so was her temper. She was disdainful of the cabinet and hardly hid her feelings. And with Lizzie Keckley in the room she didn’t bother to hide them at all. “ ‘Seward! I wish you had nothing to do with that man,’ ” she ranted to the president about his secretary of state. “ ‘He cannot be trusted.’ ” And Treasury secretary Chase “ ‘would betray you tomorrow’ ” if he thought it would help him, she contended. Mary’s view on Chase was correct—he was plotting for the presidency. But her main objection to the man, in Mrs. Keckley’s view, was the popularity of his daughter, who “was quite a belle in Washington, and Mrs. Lincoln, who was jealous of the popularity of others, had no desire to build up her social position through political favor to her father.”

  KATE CHASE’S SOCIAL position needed no bolstering—her coming wedding to Senator William Sprague was already the hottest topic in town other than the war. The New York Herald suggested that Mrs. Lincoln offer to hold the wedding in the East Room of the White House “in order that in view of a certain possible event she may have an opportunity of judging how its associations suit her.” Everybody knew Chase was eyeing Lincoln’s job and Kate was masterminding the campaign. And it looked to political Washington that the marriage was part of the plan. Chase was in debt. Sprague was rich. An unfriendly newspaper account of the wedding sneered, “Personally Mr. Sprague is not attractive, pecuniarlially he is—several millions.”

  When Kate and her much younger sister Nettie were off for a northern vacation the summer before the nuptials, their father’s letters were full of warnings about how much his ol
der daughter was spending: “Not that I am pinched or what I call poor—though New Yorkers would so call me—but that I cannot afford to be extravagant, since I am determined to be honest.” In fact Chase didn’t have the money for Nettie’s school tuition. So it must have been something of a relief when the soon-to-be son-in-law bought the expensive house the Chases were renting, though the Treasury secretary complained that he hadn’t been consulted about the renovations Sprague had commissioned before he moved in with the inseparable father and daughter. Originally the groom-to-be balked at the idea of sharing his father-in-law’s home but shortly before the wedding he sent Chase a reassuring letter promising to “never be happier than when contributing to continue the same relation between father & daughter—that has heretofore existed, excepting if possible to share something of it myself.”

  The Treasury secretary had good reason to keep Kate close—to shield her from the hard-drinking Sprague, whose character left a good deal to be desired even if his bank account did not. Chase might have been aware that his daughter’s betrothed had abandoned a pregnant girlfriend in Providence, Rhode Island, which might have contributed to the couple’s on-again, off-again relationship for the last two years. As early as 1861, then-fourteen-year-old Nettie told her big sister she should marry the textile heir, but they didn’t get engaged until the spring of 1863. At about that time they were together at the Blair home in Silver Spring when Lizzie Lee noticed Kate’s unhappiness when her fiancé agreed with Preston Blair on an issue instead of Salmon Chase. But throughout the summer protestations of love filled Kate and William’s correspondence and when the couple got together in New York that August, the young woman’s father feared for her virtue: “Be careful to do nothing which will in the slightest degree diminish his respect for you; for love cannot be perfect where respect is impaired.” If she was going to marry Sprague, Chase thought, the wedding should be sooner rather than later, but Kate had planned a November wedding and Kate always got her way.

  The day of the grand event, November 12, the Washington Chronicle reported “a large crowd of all sexes, ages and conditions began to assemble around the mansion of Secretary Chase.” Fifty people were invited to the wedding in the parlor, five hundred to the reception to follow. The showstopping bride was “dressed in a gorgeous white velvet dress, with an extended trail, and upon her head wore a rich lace veil” topped with a diamond and pearl tiara, a gift from the groom, bought at Tiffany’s for $6,500. She made a dramatic entrance down the staircase and the Marine Band played “The Kate Chase Wedding March,” specially composed for the occasion. President Lincoln slipped in just in time for the ceremony but his wife refused to come, choosing not to “bow in reverence” to Kate and her father. Chase’s enemy in the cabinet, Montgomery Blair, declined as well, but his daughter Betty and father, Preston Blair, joined the party and declared it “a great display of elegance & riches,” though “the gaiety was very lame. . . . Father enjoyed the wedding . . . & Betty says he was quite the belle of the occasion.” The newspaper account concluded “there was nothing calculated to offend the eye or taste.” (The next story in the newspaper: “Jealous Husband Blows His Brains Out.”)

  AFTER SOME SKIRMISHING in Northern Virginia in mid-October, with the war’s heavy fighting concentrated in Tennessee and Georgia, Washington enjoyed a more serene season than it had in a while. Soldiers jammed the racetrack near the National Insane Asylum betting on horses with names like General McClellan. The new theaters, Ford’s and Grover’s, showed Shakespeare and newer plays including The Marble Heart, starring John Wilkes Booth. Real estate boomed with an influx of northerners “coming down to Washington in fashionable force,” Lizzie Lee marveled as she started redecorating the house and itemizing the cost of everything. (“Dining room furniture alone will cost four hundred dollars. . . .”) Government contracts for military supplies were making people rich and the prewar population of a little more than sixty thousand had grown exponentially, though another census would not confirm that until the end of the decade. The fields around the city yielded bountiful harvests and the shops overflowed with luxury goods coming in from Europe and northern manufacturers.

  For Lincoln the election brought great relief as Republicans won in Ohio, with Salmon Chase’s well-publicized help, and Pennsylvania. The president traveled to Gettysburg for the consecration of the cemetery there and delivered a short address that has become one of the best known and most memorized speeches in history. And then came more good news in late November—General Grant had successfully driven the Confederate army out of the railroad hub of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The October presidential proclamation of an official Thanksgiving Day, declared at the suggestion of the magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book editor Sarah Josepha Hale, for the last Thursday of November seemed very well timed. And then for the cherry on the sundae, the Statue of Freedom took her place atop the Capitol dome.

  “The statue of Freedom was lately placed on the dome of the Capitol,” Louisa Meigs cheered to her husband, who had been so instrumental in the engineering of the dome and the expansion of the now almost-finished building. “I went with Mary to watch the ceremony but arrived too late to see anything but the statue hoisted to its position and dimly discernable amid the scaffolding—It made me sad to think of all the changes that had taken place since you first began your career on these great works.” Some of the men who had worked with Montgomery Meigs on the Capitol, foremost among them Jefferson Davis, were “now traitors to their Country & fighting to dishonor its flag—some of them dead & almost forgotten in the great struggle for our National existence.” But the great vision they had shared was now almost a reality.

  President Lincoln ordered that work continue on the Capitol during the war as a symbol of a unified and enduring nation. The great dome slowly rose through the conflict and its crowning glory, a huge bronze statue of a female figure titled Freedom, would add a sense of completion, though there was still work to be done on the dome itself. Montgomery Meigs, then the Capitol’s construction superintendent, commissioned Thomas Crawford to sculpt the monumental piece and along with then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis approved the final design. But Crawford died before he was finished, so it took a good deal of effort plus some creative thinking by enslaved worker Philip Reid to assemble the pieces of the fifteen-thousand-pound creation atop its pedestal. On December 2, 1863, the final piece, Freedom’s head and shoulders, joined the rest of the statue, saluted by thirty-five guns at the Capitol, echoed by artillery at the forts surrounding the city. Louisa Meigs, with her daughter Mary, attended the event and gave her report to her husband in Chattanooga.

  Quartermaster General Meigs had eventually succumbed to his wife’s pleas to allow her to return to their home in Washington from her evacuation outpost in Pennsylvania. But now he was gone, having headed to Chattanooga months earlier on a secret mission to organize supplies for the campaign. Louisa didn’t know what her husband was doing there and why he was gone for so long. “People here do not exactly know what to think of your absence and have an idea that you have been relieved of your duties,” she fussed at him in October when she thought his mission must have been accomplished by then. Their oldest daughter, Mary, had a suitor whose “devoted attention has made a deep impression on her heart.” With her father gone, Mary’s mother would have to be the one to approve an engagement. “He came upstairs to see me and asked my permission to have Miss Mary who had desired him to come to me before she would consent to engage herself to him.”

  Taking on the unexpected role, Louisa must have given her consent because a month later, with General Meigs still in the field, Lizzie Lee told her husband, “Mary Meigs is said to be engaged to Hancock Taylor.” Even so, Louisa advised Mary against rushing into anything; as she told Montgomery, she would like to protect their daughter from the “trials of marriage” as long as possible: “I do not wish to interfere with their happiness but the truth is that only a wife & mother can know the cares and anxieties that follow a youn
g woman on her entrance into married life—A man has not the trial or the suffering which a woman has & his mind and his feelings are so different that he cannot even understand them.” That was the kind of thing women talked about among themselves; it’s somewhat surprising to see it in a letter from a wife to her husband. (Twenty-year-old Mary Meigs married Major Joseph Hancock Taylor a little more than four months later.) But Louisa had always been frank in her letters—as an eleven-year-old child she had written to her brother telling him their siblings “continue to go to school to Mr. Washington and do not learn much.”

  Though she was born in Georgetown, Louisa’s father, Commodore John Rodgers, a naval hero in the War of 1812, moved the family to Lafayette Square across from the White House a couple of years before she was married. Montgomery Meigs, an army engineer with a degree from West Point, came to Washington in 1841; met and married the “fascinating” woman he deemed “amiable, intelligent and sprightly”; and promptly embarked on a peripatetic military life as he oversaw the construction of forts and she, often in primitive situations, produced seven children, including a stillborn baby girl. In 1853, after the family moved back to Washington, two other children, nine-year-old Charles and two-year-old Vincent, both died within weeks of each other of what their father called “disease of the brain.”