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

by Cokie Roberts

  WHILE PRESTON BLAIR pursued peace in Richmond, a combined operation of the federal army and navy took Fort Fisher, North Carolina, meaning that the last open port of the Confederacy—Wilmington—would soon be under Union control. Robert E. Lee had told his civilian commanders that without Wilmington he would not be able to supply his army, which was being hammered by Grant and Sheridan’s forces in Virginia. And while the armies fought it out, the politicians debated for the last time the issue that started the war in the first place—slavery. On January 6, as Lincoln had requested in his State of the Union message, the House of Representatives once again took up the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution:

  SECTION 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except

  as a punishment for crime whereof the party

  shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the

  United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

  SECTION 2. Congress shall have power to

  enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

  That was it. The bondage that had caused so much bloodshed could be wiped away by an aye vote on those two simple sentences.

  “The large majority in Congress will clean out slavery in a regular lawful way, which will settle that question for all time I hope,” Lizzie Lee, the former slave owner, declared soon after the big Democratic defeat in the fall elections. Believing that party members had been “chastened” by their losses, as they often are when they meet in a lame-duck session, she thought the House would answer the president’s call to pass the amendment sooner rather than later: “A large number of Democrats are willing to vote for it now. Our people are working hard for it.” Not only were the Blairs working it hard; so was the President of the United States. He called Democratic congressmen to the White House and reminded them that he could offer them or their friends and family all kinds of perks, positions, or pardons because of his “immense power.” Lincoln’s main message—the South would see that the Border States no longer supported slavery. The game would be up, and the war would soon end. But then whispers of a Peace Commission began to circulate. If the war was going to end anyway, why should these Democrats go out on a limb on an issue that could offend many constituents, not to mention the leaders of their party? Those leaders were warning that passage of the amendment would kill any peace attempts the emissaries might propose. Fortunately for Lincoln, the congressional rumors had it that the commissioners were coming to Washington, so the president was able to assure his supporters truthfully that “there are no peace commissioners in the City, or likely to be in it.”

  The conversations about peace were taking place elsewhere. Preston Blair had returned to Richmond with Lincoln’s message that he would discuss peace for “our one common country.” After some discussion, Jefferson Davis decided to name commissioners with vague instructions and send them to Washington. On January 29 the three-man Rebel delegation had made it as far as City Point, Virginia, where the Union army was camped. From there they would need passes to cross through enemy lines. Their arrival was telegraphed to Lincoln, who sent a message insisting that they agree in writing to the “one country” basis for negotiations before proceeding farther. The instructions bought Lincoln time. The vote on the Thirteenth Amendment was scheduled for the afternoon of January 31.

  “Big Guns fired over the passage of the act to amend the Constitution prohibiting slavery forever,” Lizzie Lee wrote as Washington celebrated with cannons and choirs after the vote. “They passed it by six more than enough, which was four more than they expected.” All of the lobbying by her family and the president had paid off, plus “the rumor that the mission was a failure got abroad.” If the peace mission had indeed fallen apart, perhaps passage of the amendment would hasten an end to the bloodshed. Southern leaders would be demoralized, the argument went, knowing that the rest of the country had rejected slavery. “The galleries, corridors, and lobbies were early crowded with an expectant assemblage . . . even the sacred precincts of the floor of the House were swarming with anxious magnates and semi-officials,” an excited Noah Brooks recounted. Salmon Chase was circulating on the House floor along with his longtime rival Montgomery Blair—the two former cabinet members on the same side of this momentous question. “Ladies in fine dresses occupied the boxes around the main floor, and many held seats usually reserved for the press. NO desk was unattended, no aisle unfilled,” Harper’s Weekly reported in sketching the scene.

  As the tense final debate began, the outcome remained uncertain. The men who had voted against the amendment in the first session of Congress stood to explain their changes of heart, opponents had their last say, and then the roll was called. Speaker Colfax asked that his own name be read so that he could be recorded on this historic issue. And then the Speaker announced the results: 119 yea, 56 nay (8 members deliberately did not vote, making it easier to achieve the two-thirds mark of “those present and voting”). “Thereupon rose a general shout of applause. The members on the floor huzzaed in chorus with the galleries. The ladies in the House assemblage waved their handkerchiefs, and again and again the applause was repeated. The audience were wildly excited and the friends of the measure jubilant.” The Cleveland Daily Leader’s story appeared in a column under the headlines:

  Slavery Forever Abolished

  Ten Thousand Cheers for Freedom

  All Honor to the 38th Congress

  President Lincoln signed the amendment the next day, though a presidential signature on a constitutional amendment is not required, and immediately the states began ratifying it. Illinois did that very day. A less noticed but also momentous event occurred the day after the vote when Chief Justice Salmon Chase admitted the first black man to the Supreme Court bar. The high court that had handed down the Dred Scott decision not quite eight years earlier now would see an African American arguing before it. Moreover, the lawyer for Scott’s owners, Senator Reverdy Johnson, had voted for the amendment forever outlawing the institution of slavery. Only one thing marred the joy of the victorious antislavery forces—on February 2, President Lincoln traveled to Fort Monroe in Norfolk to negotiate with the Confederate delegation. The Radical Republicans, who had never trusted Abraham Lincoln in the first place, now worried that he would sell them out for a quick peace.

  Lincoln made his decision to meet the Rebel commissioners himself after he received a communication from General in Chief Ulysses S. Grant. Without expectations of success, given what he viewed as Jefferson Davis’s intransigence, the president had chosen Secretary of State Seward to deal with the three-man Confederate team. But Grant had been talking with the men while they waited at his camp and he had come to believe that they sincerely wanted to end the war. When the general telegraphed that message to Washington, Lincoln set out at once to see if he could stop the fighting that had sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives.

  The answer was no, he could not. As Lincoln and Seward discussed terms with the three southerners on board the River Queen in what’s come to be called the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, the president held fast to his insistence that a cease-fire of any kind could only be ordered if the South agreed to reunification. Otherwise, all those lives would have been lost in vain; the North had gone to war to save the Union. Other topics were discussed—the president raised the possibility of the government compensating southern slaveholders for their loss of property—in what were described as friendly and informal talks where no notes were taken and no one but the principals present. But in the end, the two sides were no closer than they had been. The war would go on. General Sherman had moved his army out of Savannah and was ready to begin his march through the state that had started it all, South Carolina.

  THE JOINT SESSION of Congress held to announce the official Electoral College vote count on February 8 was a humdrum affair, as they usually are. None of the anxiety that hovered over the event four years earlier marred the meeting this time around. But a few days later there was some exciteme
nt in the Capitol as it filled with “soldiers, officers, civil and military members of Congress, strangers, and citizens, with their wives and daughters,” for a first-of-its-kind event. A black man would be “preaching against slavery from the Speaker’s desk in the House of Representatives,” Lois Adams marveled. “The galleries were thronged on all sides, the majority of the occupants being of the dusky race.” Following a hymn sung by the choir of his 15th Street Presbyterian Church, Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, a former slave, called on Congress to “Emancipate, Enfranchise and Educate.” A wide-eyed Mrs. Adams posed the question: “After an event like this the world may well ask: ‘what next?’ ” The immediate reply came from Sherman’s army marching through South Carolina.

  “The birthday of Washington, crowned by the glorious news of the fall of Charleston and the re-occupation of Fort Sumter by loyal troops, fired the populace with a wilder enthusiasm than has been caused by any other event or combination of events since the war began,” Lois Adams excitedly informed her Detroit readers. The symbolism of the Union retaking the first field of battle gave the capital an excuse to celebrate, with “gay, rejoicing crowds” streaming into the streets. Flags flew from every “tower and spire and flag staff” and at noon all the forts surrounding the city fired cannons for a solid hour, “till the very earth trembled.” At the “superbly draped and festooned with flags and ensigns” War Department hung “a large transparency bearing these words: SUMTER 1861.UNION.SUMTER 1865.” It seemed like the war might actually be coming to an end.

  Confederate deserters appeared daily in the capital—more than one thousand came in February, almost three thousand in March—to take the oath of allegiance to the Union; they would no longer fight what was clearly a losing battle. Another southern soldier also showed up in town, this one still loyal to the cause. Roger Pryor, the firebrand former congressman from Virginia, had been released from Fort Lafayette, the Union prison on an island in New York harbor, and was now in Washington calling on the president with a request. Here was the man who had pressed for the attack on Fort Sumter as a way to induce his state to secede now coming as a supplicant to the “Black Republican” whose election Pryor had declared sufficient reason to leave the Union.

  But Pryor had allies. He had been a newspaper editor, and other newspaper editors—Horace Greeley in New York and Washington McLean in Ohio, along with John W. Forney, a former Pryor colleague at the Washington Union—petitioned for their Rebel friend’s release. First General Grant said no; then Secretary of War Stanton much more emphatically said no: “He shall be hanged! Damn him!” So the editors took their case to the president. Lincoln, knowing that Pryor had treated Union prisoners well earlier in the war and that his wife, Sara, had fed federal soldiers at Petersburg, Virginia, signed the parole. Here then was the hotheaded former lawmaker back in the city Sara loved so well, asking the president for a stay of execution for a Confederate soldier sentenced to death. Lincoln didn’t grant the reprieve, but he did protect Pryor’s whereabouts from his infuriated secretary of war and then sent the parolee on to General Grant to effect a prisoner exchange. Here was one Rebel soldier who would be going home to his wife.

  “GREAT PREPARATIONS ARE being made for the second inauguration of President Lincoln,” Lois Adams observed a couple of weeks before the event. People from all over the country swarmed into town to partake of the festivities, as the Congress feverishly tried to finish up its work. Mary Lincoln invited Lizzie Lee and her niece Elizabeth Blair to go to the Capitol with her to witness the typically chaotic closing hours of the Thirty-Eighth Congress. “Mrs. L was kind & confidential,” Lizzie contentedly told her husband. Hordes of Washingtonians were there that night, including the well-known actor John Wilkes Booth, and many visitors as well. “Halls are crowded with strangers, thousands of them witnessing for the first time these august assemblies of the nation’s lawgivers,” Mrs. Adams looked on the spectacle with dismay. “With shame be it said, they too often witness scenes fitter to be enacted in the bar-room of a country tavern than in these national halls of legislation.”

  The lawmakers churned out bills far into the night as the president sat in the ornate room off the Senate chamber either signing them into law or not. One that he did affix his signature to: the creation of a Freedmen’s Bureau to assist former slaves, the first federal government social welfare agency. A few hours’ sleep and a huge thunderstorm capped the night. Early the next morning Lincoln arrived at the Capitol alone to deal with the last of the legislative list, so he missed the muddy procession that had been planned for his journey from the White House, leaving Mary Lincoln to be escorted by the President’s Union Light Guard.

  With the rain letting up just in time, the parade “embraced two regiments of the invalid corps, detachments of cavalry and artillery, several companies of colored troops (a most unusual spectacle on such an occasion), and numerous civic dignitaries and associations,” recounted the Vermont Transcript. Dignitaries crowded into the Senate chamber, with ladies filling the galleries, as the current vice president, Hannibal Hamlin, prepared to swear in his successor, Andrew Johnson. But before he took the oath the vice-president-to-be delivered an incoherent, rambling speech, leading everyone to assume that he was more than slightly drunk. One newspaper kindly reported that the speech “was almost inaudible on account of the talking of the women in the galleries,” but it did print the now-infamous story of Johnson turning to the cabinet members and addressing them by name until he came to the secretary of the navy, at which point he asked “(to a gentleman near by, sotto voce, ‘who is secretary of the navy?’ The person addressed replied in a whisper, ‘Mr. Welles.’)” Nobody could make him stop and everyone, including Lincoln, sat there in embarrassed horror until Johnson finally wound down. It’s the kind of performance that’s never forgotten in Washington.

  But for the moment, it was on to the main event. Abraham Lincoln strode through the Capitol corridors, into the resplendent Rotunda, and out onto the East Portico to a platform before the now-completed grand dome. There, as the sun emerged from the clouds, he pledged with “malice toward none; with charity toward all . . . to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” As Lincoln took the oath and kissed the Bible, the crowd of forty thousand people stretching over the Capitol grounds, on across to the Old Capitol Prison and the buildings beyond, cheered boisterously while cannons boomed their applause. Sitting on a platform for honored guests was John Wilkes Booth, courtesy of one of his girlfriends, the daughter of a former senator from New Hampshire. Booth could have ended it all right then but Lincoln would live to see the South surrender.

  “He is going back to the White House, a second time made President by a freedom loving people,” Lois Adams celebrated, though the “mud was deep, and prancing horses splashed it upon each other and upon the people, but nobody seemed to care.” In the parade of military men, firemen, policemen, “each with banners and bands of music,” there marched “part of a colored regiment, a large company of colored Odd Fellows in full regalia.” As Lincoln rode in an open carriage with his young son Tad by his side and Mary Lincoln followed in a carriage of her own, amid all the pageantry one float particularly stood out to the reporter. It represented the “Temple of Freedom,” and “within this temple, as one of its pillars, stands a black man. He is at the rear end of the edifice, but the tallest man in it, and the only one standing.” Assuring her readers of the symbolism of the day, Mrs. Adams finished with what lay ahead for the president: “Tonight he holds a levee at the White House, and everybody will be there to shake his hand in congratulation. So the Inauguration day passes in peace.”

  Thousands did shake Lincoln’s hand over more than three hours straight. “Everybody was there, and we should say everybody’s relations,” the correspondent for the Wisconsin Appleton Motor beheld the “g
reat jam” with amazement. He, like many others, commented on the “care-worn appearance” of the president, who had lost about thirty pounds and been up much of the night before. Lincoln’s newly installed bodyguard remembered the reception for the “havoc it wrought. The White House looked as if a regiment of rebel troops had been quartered there—with permission to forage. . . . A great piece of red brocade, a yard square almost, was cut from the window-hangings of the East Room . . . some arrests were made after the reception, of persons concerned in the disgraceful business.” It was almost impossible to manage these huge White House receptions.

  In order to protect the president, the security forces had recently initiated a system that required visitors to check their wraps before greeting the first couple. “It would be the easiest thing in the world for a would-be assassin to smuggle weapons in under the voluminous cloaks then worn,” the bodyguard William Crook explained. But he hadn’t reckoned with one insistent guest who “wore a wrap that completely hid her dress. She could have brought in a whole arsenal of weapons under its folds.” When he told the “handsome young woman” that she had to check her cloak she became indignant: “ ‘Do you know who I am?’ she demanded, haughtily.” When the poor security man admitted he did not, she told him, “ ‘I am Mrs. Senator Sprague.’ ” Crook recalled, “I had heard of Kate Chase Sprague, of course, as had everyone else in Washington,” but he explained, she still had to remove her cloak. It was a dicey moment and he still smarted about it years later.

  The pregnant Mrs. Senator Sprague didn’t draw much attention at the Inaugural Ball, held on March 6 at the Patent Office building. It was her younger sister Nettie, in “rich white moire antique with bertha and skirt of point lace,” who garnered the press coverage as she arrived on the arm of the eminently eligible General Joseph Hooker. Also of note to the Cleveland Daily Leader correspondent was Miss Harlan, the daughter of Iowa senator James Harlan, who accompanied the president’s son, Robert Lincoln. “This couple attracted much attention, by reason of certain rumors of more than ordinary feelings of friendship towards each other, which may lead to a more lasting attachment.” (The couple married three years later.) And then there was the famous author E.D.E.N. Southworth wearing a “heavy black velvet dress, trimmed with black lace.”