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

by Cokie Roberts

  “A splendid torchlight procession,” sponsored by the Lincoln and Johnson Club, followed the announcement of the Republican victories and impressed journalist Noah Brooks with the “detachment of convalescent wounded soldiers from the hospitals whose ambulances bore such mottoes as ‘Ballots and Bullets,’ ‘We can Vote as well as Fight,’ etc.” The torches set the McClellan sign on fire and a big hubbub followed but the parade made an important point—the soldiers could vote and the president’s people would make sure they did. “All my boys go for Lincoln, and I have no doubt he will be re-elected,” Rebecca Pomroy exulted. “I would like to give my vote.” The War Department organized to send those soldiers home to the polls. “Many of my boys have gone home on furloughs,” the nurse observed in her empty ward as troops and government workers jammed into trains heading to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, and New York. “All who can by any possibility go home, are going,” correspondent Lois Adams wrote approvingly, one of the men telling her, “ ‘it is not merely a majority that we want, but a majority so overwhelming—a mountain of Union votes so high that treachery, both North and South, shall be crushed out of existence.’ ” That soldiery spirit meant, Mrs. Adams was certain, that “a grand army of them will come up to the help of the Union, as fearlessly at the ballot-box as in the field.”

  On Election Day, November 8, the president took up his spot in the War Department next to the telegraph where he customarily waited for news from the front. This day it was election news he was anxious for the clattering machine to bring. When the early returns looked promising, Lincoln asked someone to go to the White House and tell his wife, because “she is more anxious than I.” That was something Elizabeth Keckley knew all too well. Most satisfying to Abraham Lincoln in what turned out to be a landslide Electoral College victory, where he garnered 221 votes against McClellan’s 21, was his overwhelming support among the soldiers. They had given a huge vote of confidence to their commander in chief. Two nights later, when a great crowd gathered on the White House lawn, the freshly affirmed president solemnly celebrated a remarkable feat: the election demonstrated that “a people’s government can sustain a national election, in the midst of a great civil war. Until now it has not been known to the world that this was a possibility.”

  With the election over, President Lincoln needed to decide on a new chief justice and prepare for the lame-duck session of the old Congress. Plus he had to sit for about a half hour a day for seventeen-year-old sculptor Lavinia “Vinnie” Ream. The young woman had a government job in the dead letter office of the post office but once she had seen the Capitol sculptor Clark Mills’s studio, she tried her hand at working clay and turned out to have a talent. She had persuaded other politicians to sit for her but the president refused until he learned that she was a poor girl who needed the work. It was an extraordinary assignment for any woman, much less such a young woman, and it led to her receiving the first congressional commission to a female artist. Her full-length statue of Lincoln stands today in the grand Rotunda of the Capitol.

  The Capitol had been one of Abraham Lincoln’s projects during his presidency. When the war broke out, work on the expansion of the building and the erection of the new dome stopped. But the president insisted that it start again, feeling that the completed “People’s Building” would serve as a symbol of unity in the divided nation. And soon after the election, the newspapers were able to report that the work of many years was almost done: “The exterior of the dome is completed, and workmen are employed removing the scaffolding from the interior, which will leave the Rotunda open, and more clearly indicate the beauty of its proportions when finished.” The Congress would be coming back to a building where members could see what the years of construction—of grounds strewn with blocks of marble and building equipment, of hallways made impassable by ladders, unlaid tiles, and paintbrushes—had produced. It would provide a much more complete stage for the coming inauguration, where for the first time in twenty-eight years the man standing on the East Portico swearing in the president of the United States would not be Roger B. Taney. It would be Salmon P. Chase.

  Lincoln knew he was disappointing men who had been loyal to him, and infuriating his wife, in picking Chase, but he insisted the choice was right for the country. Still the president didn’t show his hand to his former Treasury secretary’s allies who had been hounding him. One of the Chase supporters, Congressman John Alley of Massachusetts, emerged from a meeting discouraged by what he heard from Lincoln: “He spoke of Mr. Chase’s dislike of the President. He talked feelingly of the many hard things Mrs. Sprague, Mr. Chase’s daughter, had said of the President.” But in the end, Lincoln told Alley, “I ought not to blame Chase for the things his daughter said about me.” Of course, Chase had said plenty of awful things himself and Lincoln’s secretary John Hay marveled to his fiancée that no other man would have “the degree of magnanimity to thus forgive and exalt a rival who had so deeply and so unjustifiably intrigued against him.” As for Lincoln, he simply worried that his choice had “ ‘the White House fever’ a little too bad, but I hope this may cure him and he will be satisfied.” In fact, as with so many others who have caught that fever, in Chase’s case it was incurable.

  On December 15, Salmon Chase was sworn in as the sixth chief justice of the United States. His daughters, Nettie Chase and Kate Sprague, looked on “gorgeous in millinery,” according to Noah Brooks. It was a little more than a week after the president had sent up his State of the Union address that embodied what Chase had been fighting for much of his political life. The message was a lengthy and tedious disquisition on the state of the world, the state of the government departments, the state of the country’s finances, declaring the national resources “unexhausted” and “inexhaustible,” and the still uncertain state of the war: “The most remarkable feature in the military operations of the year is General Sherman’s attempted march of 300 miles directly through the insurgent region. . . . The result not yet being known, conjecture in regard to it is not here indulged.” It was not designed to inspire.

  But then President Lincoln underlined his most immediate goal: passage of the amendment outlawing slavery. Recognizing that this Congress was the same that had failed to approve the amendment earlier in the year, the president argued that his landslide election had shown the will of the people and the strong likelihood that the new Congress with its overwhelming Republican majority would approve the amendment, and so he posed the query: “Hence there is only a question of time as to when the proposed amendment will go to the States for their action. And as it is to so go at all events, may we not agree that the sooner the better?”

  Of course not all in Congress did agree, but President Lincoln had put down his marker. The new year would bring fresh debate over outlawing and forever ending slavery in the United States of America. And then General Sherman sent his telegram:

  SAVANNAH, GA., December 22, 1864

  (Via Fort Monroe 6.45 p.m. 25th)

  His Excellency President LINCOLN:

  I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah,

  with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about

  25,000 bales of cotton.

  W. T. Sherman,

  Major General

  The “remarkable feature” the president had spoken of—Sherman’s “March to the Sea”—ended triumphantly, and in Nashville, Tennessee, the Confederate army had been totally defeated. “I now look to the end of the War,” Lizzie Lee wrote to her long-absent husband, “but it must come soon.”

  CHAPTER 8

  LEFT: Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of Abraham Lincoln, created controversy throughout her tenure as First Lady and beyond, never mincing her opinions, political or personal. RIGHT: Julia Grant, deeply devoted to her husband, General Ulysses S. Grant, greatly enjoyed her time both in army camps and in the White House.

  (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC-DIG-ppmsca-19221]; Apic / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.)


  One Mary Leaves, One Mary Hangs,

  and Lois Writes About It All

  1865

  Oh you Rascal, I am overjoyed to see you,” Varina Davis greeted Francis Preston Blair when he arrived in Richmond in early January. For his part, Blair reported that the First Lady of the Confederacy “never looked as well in her life, stout but fairer well dressed & even a better talker than ever.” Elizabeth Blair Lee had received periodic reports of her friend over the years, but here was a firsthand account from her father, back from a secret mission for the Union. For some time the newspaper publisher Horace Greeley had been encouraging the senior Blair to use his connections with both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis to try to initiate peace talks. The carnage on the battlefields had reached such horrendous numbers that even dedicated Unionists were looking for some way to end the war. So Blair devised an excuse to go to Richmond. He claimed that important papers had been taken from his house at Silver Spring during the Confederate invasion that summer and that he needed to find out if someone in the Rebel capital knew what had happened to them.

  Lincoln, who trusted the old newspaperman and thought there would be no harm in him sounding out Jefferson Davis, issued Blair passes to go through Union lines to Richmond and return, though the family was nervous about the seventy-three-year-old setting out in such cold weather. “He feels that tis a call of duty & that no one must now shrink from that in these days of trial & trouble,” Lizzie fretted, “& will not return until he sees my Oakland patient for her good & ours I hope.” She knew that her husband could decipher her code—he would remember how Lizzie had nursed the terribly sick Varina Davis when they all spent a summer together in Oakland, Maryland, a few long years ago. Despite the efforts at secrecy, word of Blair’s trip got out and Lizzie found herself quizzed at parties, but “luckily most people begin with the story about his papers,” so that ruse seemed to be working; “the Rebel papers announce his arrival in Richmond.” While he was there, Blair presented a far-fetched scheme whereby North and South would pause the war to come together to challenge the French, who had installed a puppet regime in Mexico. The unauthorized proposal provided an opening for further talks and Blair came home with the report that Davis would send commissioners to Washington “with a view to secure peace between the two countries.”

  Her father arrived “overwhelmed with the excitement & fatigue of the past 10 days,” to a relieved Lizzie, who felt “no small sense of joy to know that he is in his own bed & sleeping with Mother by his side happier than I have known her to be for sometime past.” Refusing as always to recognize the concept of “two countries,” Lincoln dispatched Blair back to Davis with the message that the President of the United States would receive commissioners “with a view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.” With that missive in hand, “Another visit to my Oakland patients is to be made,” Lizzie confided to Phil. “I hope it will cure all their maladies.” Her attempts at communicating in code were comical—it was the height of the social season and everywhere she went people were talking about her father’s meetings and pumping her for information. To one pointed inquiry: “I replied I knew nothing of the Davis’ since the war & descanted on Mrs. Davis as I knew her tone, her wit & etc.” The newspapers were full of Blair intrigue, though no one knew what it might be.

  SPECULATION ABOUT THE mission was just one of many distractions that January in postelection Washington. The annual New Year’s “squeeze,” held on January 2 because the first of the month was a Sunday, revealed the toll taken on the White House by the Lincolns’ open-door policy of allowing anyone to wander around the mansion. The rooms that Mary had so splendidly refurbished at such great cost now looked shabby and shamefully vandalized. Tourists and invited guests alike not only stained the settees with dirty shoes and ruined the rugs with tobacco juice, but they actually carved up the carpets and curtains, cutting out large swaths of fabric as souvenirs. “The edges of the carpets have been snipped off wherever they could be got at by scissors or knife, and so presented the appearance of having been nibbled at by a regiment of rats in pursuit of winter-bedding,” Lois Adams informed the readers of the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune. “Last fall from the drapery of one window in the Green Room silk enough had been abstracted to make a good sized apron.” A government clerk herself, Mrs. Adams was horrified to discover that one of the perpetrators of the pilferage was “a salaried clerk in one of the Government Departments!” When the man was fired from his job, he “proved himself a genuine son of Adam,” laughed the moonlighting reporter. “He said, ‘The women who were with me, they tempted me and I did steal.’ ”

  Another group of women arrived at the White House with a more constructive agenda item. A protest meeting of workingwomen in Philadelphia had voted to deputize a committee to call on President Lincoln to petition for the restoration of their former pay scale at the arsenal there. They had been working directly for the government making uniforms for the soldiers but the military brass decided to contract out the work, and the contractors were reducing both the number of assignments and the pay for each item, so the women’s incomes had dropped substantially. Refusing to take the cuts without a fight, the women formed a labor-union type association, called a mass meeting, and decided on political action. Newspapers covering the session printed the series of resolutions the women adopted, including: “Resolved, That we appeal to Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States, in whom we recognize an honest man, the noblest work of God, and trust and firmly believe he will have the arsenal work restored.” A committee was appointed and the very next day the members came to Washington to put their case before the president. They succeeded in extracting a message from Lincoln to the office of the Quartermaster General with the instruction that “if he could administer his department as to secure employment for the women at the wages ordinarily paid, he would regard it as a personal favor, provided he could do so without interfering with the public interest or disturb private contracts.” The direct intervention of the president did improve the women’s situation, at least for a while.

  The war and its implications for workers no longer topped the city’s conversations when the Smithsonian Institution caught fire. “The loss is very serious, including the lecture-room, the philosophical instrument apartment and most of the valuable instruments,” the New York Times reported on January 25, the day after the destruction of a large part of the cultural center built from the legacy of the Englishman James Smithson. Lois Adams had been looking at paintings in one of the exhibit halls just minutes before “the roof over that part fell crashing in, and the immense room with all its contents, was one seething mass of flames.” Crowds gathered in the ice and snow, among them Lizzie Lee, who fumed at the sight. “I saw the Smithsonian Institute burn down today with real sorrow, it was lost by the most miserable imbecility in the Fire Dept.” Apparently the alarm box froze, delaying the arrival of the firefighters, and in the interim, according to the Washington Star, “Much damage was done to articles removed in consequence of the crazy manner in which they were thrown from the windows by excited individuals.” And a few days later there was a murder at the Treasury building.

  “Miss Mary Harris, of Chicago, killed Mr. Burroughs, a clerk in the Treasury Department, by shooting him through the heart. The tragedy has created a good deal of sensation in the United States,” reported the Richmond Daily Dispatch, just one of many papers screaming the story. After she was arrested Miss Harris told a reporter that Burroughs had promised to marry her “and she killed him for not keeping his promise. . . . She had loved him, she said, since she was a child, and though he had at one time urged her to marry him, which was opposed by her parents, he had since married another.” Apparently Mary Harris had originally intended simply to sue the spurner, but: “ ‘A few days before starting from Chicago (two weeks ago), I was walking along the street and saw some pistols in a shop window. Having learned that many of the ladies in Chicago carried pistols, especial
ly when traveling, I determined to buy one . . . the day that I left Chicago I examined the printed directions upon the wrapper accompanying the pistol and cartridges, and by following them, succeeded in loading it.’ ”

  That success was unfortunate for Burroughs, though Miss Harris claimed she still had no intention of using the gun, which she carried—loaded—with her to the Treasury Building. She hid herself under a headscarf and veil, asked where to find her target’s office, worked up the courage to push open the door, “and saw him at his desk. The moment I looked at him, sitting there so comfortably, the thought of all I had suffered, and of his being the cause, enraged me, and my hand involuntarily pulled back the trigger of the pistol in my pocket.” Unseen by Burroughs, she closed the door and waited. “ ‘Then I placed myself where I know he would have to come near me in going to the staircase. When he appeared, I felt suddenly lifted up, my arm was extended as stiff as iron, and I saw him fall. I knew nothing more until I was called back as I was leaving the building.’ ”

  Miss Harris insisted “there had been nothing improper between her and Mr. Burroughs.” And further reporting by the newspaper determined that Burroughs was an upstanding citizen: “He attended the Baptist church in this city with his wife every Sunday.” The grieving widow believed her husband had always tried to help the distraught young woman and he rejoiced when he thought, erroneously as it turned out, that she had happily married. The murderess, the newspaperman wanted his readers to know, “is of good figure, rather slight; has a well-formed head, dark hazel eyes, fine hair, which seemed, in the light in which we saw it, to be black, cut short and worn in curls; is graceful in her manners; naturally intelligent.” Several members of Congress were seen visiting the young lady “of good figure” in her jail cell and for once the city had something to talk about other than war and politics. But that could never last for long.