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

by Cokie Roberts

  The Blair brothers—Postmaster General Montgomery and Missouri congressman Frank—had been going at Chase both by name and by inference. Frank had left his place in the army to take his seat in Congress “under orders from the White House,” noted his sister Lizzie Lee, and he would return to “the field in the spring.” The president needed all the friends he could get in Congress and he knew the Blairs would back him in every way they could. The patriarch, Preston Blair, “gave me an order to call on every member & leave his card & his wife if they had any here . . . but think how much easier said than done,” Lizzie complained when the Congress convened. By the end of January she had seen about half of the ladies and “where there are no ladies I have left Father’s & Frank’s card.”

  The Blairs wanted to be on friendly terms with all the members of Congress as they girded for the campaign ahead. And the first family, in the house across the street, seemed to be paying particular attention to their neighbors, with Lizzie in and out of the White House that winter along with much of the rest of the city. Mrs. Lincoln reinstituted the regular receptions, observed with a wicked eye by her chief aide, William Stoddard: “The Red room does not look unpleasantly red by gas-light, but the prevailing tint has its effect upon any and all other tints exposed to its influence. For instance it heightens the deep crimson shade of the silk that Mrs. Lincoln is wearing this evening . . . you cannot help disliking it.” Despite the war, the windows of Washington were ablaze with parties that winter. As Lizzie Lee wearily told her husband: “Nothing tires me more than these parties altho’ vastly amused whilst there.” And she was impressed with the people she was meeting at these events: “The Congressmen are of a different class of people from those heretofore sent to Congress—far more of refinement in manner and appearance than ever before seen here & many take houses and entertain.”

  NOT ALL OF the entertaining in the capital was of the savory sort. Washington, where many married men lived without their wives, had long supported its “bawdy houses.” Now, with young single soldiers swarming into the city, the “oldest profession” thrived. In January the police staged a raid on all the major establishments and arrested the owners: “Ann Benter, of Tin Cup alley; Ellen Bride, of Pear Tree alley; Mary Heissler, better known as ‘Dutch Mary,’ of Third Street; and Mary Ann Hall, keeper of the ‘old and well established’ ranch on Maryland Ave.” The women arrived at the courthouse separately, with Mary Hall “in virtuous black.” The trial of Mary Ann Hall, the owner of what the Evening Star called a house of “national reputation for the last quarter century,” mesmerized the city.

  Policemen solemnly testified that they had seen “hacks frequently in front of the house,” with very few “females” emerging from the taxis, and that they had seen women in the house but no “implements of industry.” One thought that “a wedding party was going on—champagne was being handed around—there were six or eight citizens and several officers present”; his sergeant “did not think it was a wedding party.” Another policeman told the court that he found the house “very handsomely furnished—first class furniture, very showy.” The testimony simply underlined what everyone already knew—Miss Hall, who was something of a personage in the city, ran the best house of prostitution in Washington four blocks from the Capitol, very likely frequented by some of the most important men in town. Hall’s house was in a class of its own in the Capital, where an official count the year before turned up almost four thousand prostitutes, both white and black. Most of them had arrived with the outbreak of the war and the influx of the soldiers. In an attempt to control the situation General Hooker had corralled most of the activity into an area near the Treasury Department that wags quickly dubbed “Hooker’s Division.”

  And prostitution was the least of the city’s crime problems. In 1863 police made 24,000 arrests, more than “three and a half times the number in Brooklyn, a city with more than twice the population of the District,” according to a Washington historian. Thieves ran rampant, with poverty taking hold in overcrowded sections of town, and disease spreading to poor and rich alike. Contrabands—former slaves—crowding into the Federal City threw up shanties for shelter in areas with no water or sewage, overpowering the ability of social welfare societies to aid them and adding to the likelihood of proliferating epidemics requiring the full-time services of the Sisters of Mercy.

  But the war brought great wealth as well. Supplies for the soldiers required shipping and storing, so warehouses bulged and wharves burst with goods. Railroads carried tons of freight in and out of the city and real estate prices catapulted to new heights as northern businessmen arrived to take advantage of all the commerce. (“George Riggs has given in cash $25000 for the Digges place,” an astonished Lizzie Lee told her husband.) Hotels and restaurants couldn’t keep up with the demand. And “every available nook and corner, from cellar to garret,” was rented to boarders, according to Lois Adams, who wrote for the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune. Services from banks to blacksmiths to bootmakers boomed. And Mary Hall grew rich off her “bawdy house.”

  When she died in 1886, the Evening Star reported her holdings: the house on Maryland Avenue, a farm in Virginia, and “$57,200 in government and railroad bonds.” The newspaper also rhapsodically eulogized the “long resident of Washington. With integrity unquestioned, a heart ever open to appeals of distress, a charity that was boundless, she is gone but her memory will be kept green by many who knew her sterling worth.” Perhaps appropriately, she is buried at the Congressional Cemetery, with a large statue of a young girl contemplating her grave. Other than that grand marker, her memory disappeared for more than a century. But then in the 1990s, while the foundation was being dug for the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall, archeologists came upon Miss Hall’s trash heap. “They found gilt-edged porcelain, corset fasteners, seeds from exotic berries and coconuts and bones from expensive meats, including turtle,” the Washington Post recounted. Also, and not surprisingly, given the police testimony, “They also found ‘hundreds’ of Piper-Heidsieck champagne corks and wire bales.”

  Not long after the city (temporarily) cracked down on the “bawdy houses,” Congress launched an investigation into goings-on at the Treasury Department. Congressman, later president, James Garfield heard testimony from women working at the place one Capitol insider called “a perfect Sodom.” The president had received a letter from a New Yorker horrified that “the Treasury has been converted into the most extensive Whorehouse in the nation.” The outraged citizen claimed that members of Congress were stashing “their women” in the department. The committee filed both a majority and minority report as to the accuracy of the accusations, but it’s the salacious one filed by the minority charging “a mass of immorality and profligacy” that was repeated in nineteenth-century Washington histories: “these women seem to have been selected . . . for their youth and personal attractions. Neither the laws of God nor of man, the institution of the Sabbath nor common decencies of life seem to have been respected.”

  Of course the minority might just have been trying to embarrass the Treasury secretary, in the time-honored tradition of congressional investigations. What the members who wrote it succeeded in doing, however, was to besmirch all the young women working for the government. In The Sights and Secrets of the National Capital, published a few years after the war, the author, newspaperman John Ellis, asserts, “You will hear it said in Washington that the acceptance of a government clerkship by a woman is her first step in the road to ruin.” And though he goes on to defend the “government girls,” assuring his readers that the “black sheep are greatly in the minority,” Ellis warns, “Strong efforts are made by devils in the form of men, to increase their number, and it is to be feared that these efforts will, in many cases, be successful.”

  NO NUMBER OF investigations and police raids could keep Washington’s attention far from the chief concern of the government—the progress of the war. At the president’s request, Congress had resurrect
ed the title of lieutenant general—last held by George Washington—for the man who had claimed victory at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Ulysses S. Grant. When the general came to town to accept his commission, his appearance at a White House reception caused a sensation. “The mass of people thronged about him wherever he moved . . . the women were caught up and whirled into the torrent which swept through the great East Room; laces were torn, crinoline mashed, and things were generally much mixed.” Noah Brooks’s readers learned that the crowd stood on sofas and tables to get a look at the general, or to get out of the crush, as everyone wondered what he and the president were plotting.

  Grant had never been to Washington before and he wasn’t eager to stick around, for fear of getting sucked into its political machinations. So the city was disappointed when he didn’t show up at the theater with the Lincolns that weekend, instead returning to the field to say farewell to his troops in the West before coming back to take command as general in chief of the army. General Henry Halleck moved over to the chief of staff position. Grant also skipped a dinner Mary Lincoln had planned for him, which was probably just as well with her, since she “could not tolerate General Grant,” according to her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley. “ ‘He is a butcher,’ she would often say, ‘and is not fit to be at the head of an army.’ ” But now Grant was head of the army and Lincoln was counting on his new commander to end this war successfully and soon. The biggest threat to the president’s reelection was not any of the men maneuvering against him but defeat on the battlefield. The country was war weary.

  Still, the women didn’t flag in their efforts to get food and clothes and medicine to the soldiers. The United States Sanitary Commission grew into a major factor in the war operation, fielding nurses in hospitals around the country and assisting the military with supplies. The women organized massive days-long fairs to raise money that became spectacles in themselves, with huge halls filled with women selling goods, interspersed by theater productions and circuslike sideshows. In Washington the big fair was held at the end of March, and women from every walk of life participated. The Jewish Messenger proudly reported: “In the report just published of the Fair lately held here in aid of the Sanitary Commission, I observe that the Hebrew Society’s table is credited for $756.95; and when I tell you the entire receipts were only $10,661.47, you will readily perceive how large a proportion of the amount realized is due to the Hebrew congregation. The ladies had the matter in charge and were beaten by only one other table, that of the Treasury Department. All honor to our fair Jewesses!”

  Lincoln used the occasion of the Washington fair to make a speech calculated to please an influential, if nonvoting, constituency. Celebrating what he called the remarkable “ ‘fairs for the relief of suffering soldiers and their families,’ ” the president proceeded to give credit where credit was due, according to the newspapers: “ ‘The chief agents in these fairs are the women of America. I am not accustomed to the use of languages of eulogy; I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women, but I must say, that if all that has been said by orators or poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war. I will close by saying God bless the women of America!’ (Great applause.)” The women of America were also organizing politically, and not necessarily to the president’s liking.

  In February 1864, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had been one of the conveners of the first women’s rights meeting at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, sent a petition to Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner bearing the names of one hundred thousand women. It was the first installment in what she and the other members of the Women’s Loyal National League hoped would be a million signatures calling for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Mrs. Stanton, along with her colleague Susan B. Anthony, led the formation of the league several months earlier, issuing an appeal to the “Women of the Republic” to sign and circulate the petition: “Women, you cannot vote or fight for your country. Your only way to be a power in the Government is through the exercise of this one, sacred, Constitutional ‘RIGHT OF PETITION;’ and we ask you to use it now to the utmost.”

  The petition started circulating in January, with the help of Sumner, who allowed the women to use his free mailing privileges. On the first of February Mrs. Stanton delivered the first hundred thousand signatures to the senator with a message: “the mothers, wives, and daughters of the brave men who have fallen in many a bloody battle now pray you to end the war by ending the cause of it, which is slavery. Inasmuch as the ‘right of petition’ is the only political right woman has under the Constitution, it is the duty of her representatives to give her prayer an earnest and serious consideration.” She also asked the Massachusetts Republican to preserve the document “in some enduring form in the national archives, as a part of the history of our second revolution.”

  Sumner carted the rolls of names to the Senate floor, saying they marked “a stage of public opinion in the history of slavery, and also in the suppression of the rebellion.” The women never reached their million-name goal but they did collect more than four hundred thousand signatures and helped propel the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery, to passage in the Senate that April. By then Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony had decided on the man they wanted for president, and it wasn’t Abraham Lincoln—it was John C. Frémont.

  AFTER THE 1856 campaign, when the first nominee of the Republican Party, the dashing explorer John C. Frémont and his alluring wife Jessie garnered such enthusiastic public attention, the couple had stayed active politically. When the general resigned from the Mountain Department of the army in 1862, miffed at his reassignment to report to General Pope, the Frémonts moved to New York, where they lived in limbo with John still in the army, waiting fruitlessly for another military command. Jessie, no longer as alluring (her former friend Lizzie Lee cattily reported the gossip that “she has grown huge”), wrote a not very veiled defense of her husband’s handling of his command of the army in Missouri. Publishing The Story of the Guard under her own name, Jessie, who had done so much of the writing of her husband’s books, now read reviews describing her effort as “a true woman’s book” with “no style, or a careless and imperfect one.” That was fine with Jessie; the book sold well and she excused her boldness in writing it by saying that the proceeds would go to the families of the fallen Missouri warriors. When she was able to contribute five hundred dollars for the support of the families, Mrs. Frémont told her publisher that in a difficult period, with her husband pining for an army command, the book “has brought to me from so many quarters the most charming evidences of sympathy . . . I am thoroughly gratified by it.”

  Jessie had reason to fear criticism. This book about the war wasn’t anything like the fictional stories written by the “literary ladies” of the time, so it was important that the public understand she was acting out of charity. This woman who loved the limelight assured her readers that it had been a sacrifice for her to reveal anything about her life; she asked them “to bear this in mind, and not think this attempt to relieve suffering more unwomanly or less needed than any of the other new positions in which women are finding themselves during this strange phase of our national life. The restraints of ordinary times do not apply now.” Jessie had never paid attention to the “restraints of ordinary times” but she had to suffer them for a while as the family waited uneasily in New York, expecting that any day Frémont would return to the front.

  Surrounded by sympathetic abolitionists who questioned Lincoln’s commitment to the antislavery cause, and sycophantic hangers-on who promoted Frémont for president, Jessie held tight to her ambition to occupy the White House. She corresponded with congressmen who made pro-Frémont speeches; she protested against “our own political chiefs,” especially the Blairs, and blamed the sluggish course of the war on the “unfaithful watchmen at Washington.” After Indiana congressman George Julian praised her husband,
Jessie hounded Horace Greeley, the publisher of the New York Tribune, until he reprinted the speech.

  To like-minded friends Jessie railed against Washington’s refusal to give her husband a command: “The Govt. is simply irresponsible. Thank Heaven & the Constitution that limits them to four years, & more than two are over now,” and she sneered at Lincoln’s “sly slimy nature.” John’s situation was awkward—he was still in the military and he and six of his senior staff had been drawing a salary while doing nothing for sixteen months, hoping for reassignment to an army command. Frémont couldn’t run for president on that record: “On this showing the General is unwilling to stand before the country,” Jessie explained to a friend in Congress as she lobbied for a job for her husband, complaining, “I’m tired of the bad behavior of the people down there.” And for the record, she added: “Of the General’s pay not one farthing goes to private use . . . it goes to a fund we set aside for our part in relieving the suffering caused by the war.” But all of her pleading was of no use. Lincoln wasn’t about to appoint a general who was not only incompetent in the field but also a potential political enemy.

  Jessie herself was still in demand. She declined an invitation from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to “preside at your meeting of the 21st of May,” when the Women’s National Loyal League was established, but sent the organization fifty dollars. After spending the summer of 1863 at the beach in Massachusetts, where she formed close friendships with the families of writers John Greenleaf Whittier and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Longfellow’s take: “Mrs. Frémont is next door to us, which is very pleasant”), she threw herself into any activity where she could be seen sustaining the Union.