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

by Cokie Roberts

  Following on the success of Sanitary Commission fairs in other cities, New York determined to outdo them all with an extravaganza in April. Jessie took on the assignment of compiling first-person stories of the war to “form a series of small volumes, bound in uniform style,” and she hectored her friends to help produce material for the little tomes, saying they would “have value for History & the deepest interest for such of us as have been deprived of a belief in regular Histories by our own experience.” The idea was that she would have some books on hand to sell at the fair and take orders for others because “such books would sell well at Christmas & I think it’s a good idea to make a growing fund.” Working with her on her committee was the wife of another potential rival for the presidency—Ellen McClellan, married to the general the Democrats were eyeing as their nominee. “We get on very civilly—even amicably,” Jessie told Elizabeth Peabody, while pestering the reformer and author to gather writings for her project. But Jessie had no kind words for her husband’s other opponent, dismissing Lincoln as the “Pontius Pilate of the slaves.”

  An enormous undertaking, the fair attracted tens of thousands of people. On one day alone the New York Times reported, “The number of tickets taken at the door was twenty-three thousand six hundred and fifty,” and the restaurant served ten thousand meals a day. For a “hairy eagle” on the main floor President Lincoln donated his own locks for the head, eyes, and backbone. When it was all over this notice appeared in the newspaper:

  To the Editor of the New-York Times:

  I take the liberty of sending to you for publication in your

  journal, the following:

  At a meeting of the Ladies’ Executive Committee

  of the Metropolitan Fair, held May 13, 1864, the following

  resolution was adopted:

  Resolved, That JOHN H. GOURLIE, Chairman of the

  Finance Committee of the Metropolitan Fair, be requested

  to place one million dollars in the hands of the United

  States Sanitary Commission.

  (Signed) CATHARINE C. HUNT.

  The women had done their work well and other organizations solicited Mrs. Frémont to contribute her fame to their causes. In Washington a group of wives of cabinet officers and congressmen plus “well-known authoresses, women of fashion, mothers who had lost their sons and wives who had lost their husbands” met to form the Ladies National Covenant to “unite the women of the country in the earnest resolution to purchase no imported article of apparel, where American can possibly be substituted, during the course of the war.” Taking as their example the women of the Revolutionary War era who “signed a pledge to abstain from tea,” the women declared: “We, the women of ’64, have the same object to attain and the same duties to perform which were so nobly accomplished by the women of ’76. . . . It must not be said of us that we have been willing to give up our husbands, sons, and brothers to fight or die for the Union, and yet refuse to renounce our laces, silks, velvets and diamonds.” After an amusing description of the five-hour meeting where the covenant was amended and approved, correspondent Lois Adams summoned her Detroit readers to action: “Organizing committees are appointed in every State, and it is to be earnestly hoped that the ladies of town and country throughout the Union will join heartily in the grand work of retrenchment and reform.”

  The local women of Washington, with Adele Douglas in the lead, appointed representatives from each state to spread the word, mostly the wives of officeholders. For New York, in addition to the senators’ and governor’s wives the committee included Ellen McClellan and Jessie Frémont. Jessie objected that her name had been included without her knowledge and argued that if Lincoln were reelected “the little our gowns & gloves would amount to” would mean nothing in what she was sure would be a national disaster. Still, a meeting in New York to promote the covenant attracted two thousand women, who were infuriated when they found men trying to run their event. “They patted us on the back and said they were sure we would be good little dears and give up our laces, French bonnets, and sugar plums, if we knew how well the gentlemen would think of us,” huffed one of the women organizers; “they would think us just as pretty in homespun.” The women persuaded the interlopers to leave so they could get on with their business uninterrupted.

  Women were clearly beginning to taste power and Jessie Frémont was once again in the thick of the campaign for the most powerful position in the land. The Republican convention was scheduled for the first week of June in Baltimore, so the Radical Republicans decided to preempt Lincoln’s nomination by holding their convention first. Elizabeth Cady Stanton told Jessie in early May that they urgently needed to issue a call for a mass meeting in Cleveland so that the “vacillating—always a large class—may be assured that there is to be a liberal movement, and that Gen. John C. Fremont is its chosen representative.” Mrs. Stanton believed that if the Radicals went first, the rest of the party might follow. If not, then she could make the case that it would be the regular Republicans dividing the party: “TheLiberals must be made to feel that the responsibility of splitting the Republican party cannot justly be imputed to them, inasmuch as they chose their leader first.”

  Abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips supported Frémont, along with a group of German Americans who had fought under his command in Missouri. Anna Dickinson lent her powerful voice to his candidacy as well. After her spontaneous endorsement of Lincoln in January, with the president sitting right in front of her, the young orator had an unpleasant meeting in the White House where she told her host that she had not come to listen to his always-at-the-ready stories and that she had switched her allegiance to Frémont. But only 156 people showed up at the somewhat quixotic convention in Cleveland and they were roundly ridiculed by the pro-Lincoln New York Times: “The platform and the ticket are up, and the witless fellows are gaping now to see the popular applause come rushing in. You would judge by their eagerness that the fate of the nation is depending upon it. They don’t seem to have the least suspicion what a precious piece of foolery it all is.” But Abraham Lincoln was not amused.

  THOUGH LINCOLN HAD no trouble winning the Republican nomination in Baltimore with Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, a southern Democrat faithful to the Union, as his vice presidential running mate, he knew his ultimate victory depended on success in the war, and the war wasn’t going at all well for the Union that spring. The so-called Peace Democrats were agitating for armistice, ready to readmit the rebellious states into the Union in exchange for peace, with no mention of slavery. The Confederates, though running out of men and money, hoped to hang in on the battlefield long enough for the North to elect a new president more sympathetic to the proslavery cause. And the superior fighting by the southern armies made it look like that strategy just might work.

  In February, the Confederate submarine CSS H. L. Hunley successfully launched a torpedo against a U.S. ship outside Charleston, the first such attack in the war. In March and April, in the Red River Campaign, the Union army and navy failed to drive the Confederates out of Louisiana. In Tennessee, the Rebels captured Fort Pillow, protected by a Union garrison including African-American troops who were viciously murdered after they surrendered. In May, Grant’s army in Virginia was thwarted in Spotsylvania and in the wooded area called the Wilderness in its attempt to capture Richmond, and Sherman was stopped shy of Atlanta in Georgia. Thousands of wounded soldiers overfilled hospitals in the capital. Just as the Republicans were assembling in Baltimore the bloody Battle of Cold Harbor, Virginia, ended with Robert E. Lee’s army still entrenched in its defensive position near Richmond. And in Washington a major tragedy shook the city.

  “THE EXCITEMENT ATTENDANT upon the terrible explosion and loss of life at the Arsenal yesterday was kept up throughout the entire day,” blared the Evening Star on June 18, the day after seventeen young women were killed at the Washington Arsenal. Several more of the injured would die in the coming days. “An excited crowd of rela
tives of the laboratory employees, parents, brothers, sisters, anxious as to the fate of those dear to them, thronged about the outer gate leading to the Arsenal, and the scenes here were heart-rending.” Not only heartrending but grisly. The charred and dismembered bodies of the women still lay there, covered over with canvas, as officials tried to identify them: “Johanna Conner . . . was among those burned to death, but her remains were subsequently recognized by a portion of the dress which remained upon her unconsumed. The whole top of her head was, however gone, and the brain was visible; and but for the fragment of dress it would have been impossible to recognize her. . . . Millie Webster . . . was reported killed, but we have subsequently learned that she was not at work yesterday, and is consequently safe.”

  A jury was quickly assembled for the inquest and when the canvas was pulled away from the bodies “a most terrible sight presented itself to the view of those standing around.” Most of the women were missing limbs, some had their clothes burned off, one had her shoes still intact, and “a singular feature of the sad spectacle was that presented by a number of the bodies nearly burned to a cinder being caged, as it were, in the wire of their hooped skirts.” Even in the broiling heat, the young women adhered to the proper dress of the day as they did their dangerous work filling or “choking” cartridges for twelve hours a day, six days a week, for about half of what the men made, if that. Most of the women lived near the arsenal in a neighborhood known as “the Island,” where many of the working-class residents were Irish immigrants. One of the victims was only twelve years old, others in their teens. That awful day after the explosion, the inquest determined that the fire had been the result of spontaneous combustion when the sun hit star shells—essentially fireworks designed to light up an enemy’s position—that had been left out to dry by the arsenal’s pyrotechnist. Then families of three women who had been identified, including Johanna Connor, took them home to bury them. The others would have a joint ceremony, with a procession through the city honoring them as fallen heroes.

  “The most solemn pageant ever presented to the citizens of the District of Columbia was the funeral procession which on yesterday accompanied to the tomb the remains of the victims of the explosions at the Arsenal,” the National Republican somberly stated, adding that the streets were “thronged,” the steamboats from Alexandria “crowded and also the cars from Georgetown.” The Secretary of War had ordered that the families and friends of the deceased should see the “sympathy of the Government,” and so a flag-draped stage erected at the arsenal held the coffins, with eight of them bearing a silver plate marked “unknown” at the mobbed funeral. A Catholic priest and a Protestant minister offered prayers and words of solace as President Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton sat as silent spectators among the mourners. It was the first public funeral the president had attended since his son Willie had died. Stanton too had lost a little child a couple of years earlier, and brought his surviving young son with him that horribly hot and sad day.

  After the service the coffins were placed in hearses and ambulances and “the procession moved onward towards the Congressional Cemetery, where the remains were interred with solemn and appropriate ceremonies. A large concourse of citizens thronged the entire way.” A few days later it was reported: “The persons employed in the Washington Arsenal have opened a subscription for a monument in memory of the sufferers by the recent explosion.” A year after the disaster a grand memorial was erected at Congressional Cemetery, the tallest marker there. A life-sized downcast maiden titled Grief stands atop a long column, and an inscription on the pedestal reads

  ERECTED

  BY PUBLIC CONTRIBUTIONS

  BY THE CITIZENS OF

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  JUNE 17TH 1865

  WHILE GENERAL GRANT was laying siege to Lee’s army in Virginia but failing to take Richmond, and General Sherman was smashing at Johnston’s army in Georgia but failing to take Atlanta, Confederate general Jubal Early decided it would be a good time to invade Washington. After all those false alarms from the time of the surrender of Fort Sumter more than three years earlier, this time it was real. Early intended to draw Union troops away from Virginia, giving the city of Petersburg some respite from the relentless barrage, but he came close to an actual attack on the capital. He stole across the Potomac on July 5 and four days later entered Frederick, Maryland, less than fifty miles from the White House, just forty miles from Silver Spring. Lizzie Lee could hear the cannon fire as she rushed with her mother and son off to the safety of the New Jersey seashore. They got out just ahead of Early’s army scorching its way into the Blair family enclave. “Mother is very much overcome by the burning of Silver Spring & the terror felt about the safety of my Father who we learn had returned to Washington.” The rebel troops set ablaze Montgomery Blair’s house and then settled into Preston Blair’s, where they “left demijohns of good Old Bourbon empty under the table & cleaned out the larder & poultry,” Lizzie learned.

  Grant quickly dispatched an army unit to protect the capital, much to her relief: “If the Rebels had massed on it as we left it, they had little to do but walk in,” she fumed from the New Jersey shore. In Washington, the journalist Jane Swisshelm agreed: “When Early appeared before Washington, we all knew there was nothing to prevent his coming in and taking possession. The forts were stripped. There were no soldiers either in or around the city . . . so far as I knew, there was a universal expectation that the city would be occupied by rebel troops that night.” Some of the women had been worried about exactly this event: “The total blindness & stupidity about this invasion was extraordinary. Any hint on my part of such a possibility was met with a scorn that withered my courage for any action but to get away with my sick mother,” Lizzie Lee seethed, furious that no one would listen to her. She tried at the very least to coax her mother into having someone take her silver to the City: “No she would not have the house pulled to pieces.” Now her mother was “for the first time in my memory cut down . . . moans over an old age in poverty, homeless & etc. til it makes my heart ache.”

  Louisa Meigs was also forced to flee. But unlike Lizzie she put no stock in a Rebel raid on Washington: “Knowing how completely it is defended by its chain of forts & also how futile our efforts have been to make an entrance into Richmond in all the raids which have been made for the purpose I have concluded that the people of the city were as safe as those elsewhere,” she reasoned. If the Yankees couldn’t take Richmond, why would the Confederates be able to take Washington? “I know however what an excitement must have been occasioned by rumors & reports of the advent of the enemy.” A couple of days after those first bulletins, Lizzie Lee heard much more encouraging news. “Our losses by the Rebels are so small that can never think of the invasion without a sense of escape & thankfulness. All the crops were left just as they found them . . . all the horses are saved but two.”

  It turned out that John Breckinridge, a former senator, Buchanan’s vice president, and cousin of Preston Blair, had “preserved Silver Spring & made more fuss about things there than if they had belonged to Jeff Davis.” Breckinridge remembered his pleasant stays with the Blairs as “his place of refuge & of rest,” and Lizzie believed “if our own Army had swarmed over us & encamped there for two days, it would have been quite as bad for us.” She was especially cheered by reports that General Early told the neighbors “that the women & old men of Maryland were the bravest Union people he had ever yet met—Maryland women as a general thing gave the Secesh Army a cold welcome.” Her mother “brightened up,” and all in all they felt they had dodged a bullet. Meanwhile, Lincoln was literally dodging bullets: “Father says the President went to the front where the shot & shell fell thick around him.”

  The Rebels advanced as far as Fort Stevens, one of the defensive bastions built around Washington—a straight shot to the White House, only five miles away. The army that had been defending the capital was off in other battles with only a few militiamen, invalids, and clerks left be
hind. Once again, the city was cut off from the rest of the country: “We have no mail, no telegraphic communication, no railroad travel,” Noah Brooks lamented. “The city is in a ferment; men are marching to and fro; able-bodied citizens are gobbled up and put into the District militia; refugees come flying in from the country, bringing their household goods with them.”

  The men Grant sent from Virginia arrived during the night of July 12 and took their position at Fort Stevens as the Rebels attacked. Once Early realized professional soldiers were at their posts he retreated, but not before the president almost got shot. He and Mrs. Lincoln decided to take in the action, so they went to the fort to watch. Curious to see better, the president climbed up on the parapet, there in his high-top hat in plain view of the enemy. When a bullet hit the person next to him, upset officers shouted to their commander in chief to take cover. If he had not, the course of war could have gone very differently, with an election still in the offing. Someone with much less determination to see the conflict through to victory might have easily won at the ballot box.

  “MRS. LINCOLN WAS extremely anxious that her husband should be re-elected President of the United States,” Elizabeth Keckley wrote, remembering all too well the conversations during the campaign. Mary was scheming with men of “a certain class” to get her husband elected, telling her dressmaker: “ ‘These men have influence, and we require influence to re-elect Mr. Lincoln. I will be clever to them until after the election, and then, if we remain at the White House, I will drop every one of them, and let them know very plainly that I only made tools of them.’ ” When Mrs. Keckley asked if the president knew about his wife’s conniving, “ ‘God! No; he would never sanction such a proceeding,’ Mary retorted, shocked. ‘He is too honest to take the proper care of his own interests, so I feel it to be my duty to electioneer for him.’ ”