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

by Cokie Roberts

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

  And although he may be poor, he shall never be a slave,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

  The Union forever! Hurrah, boys, hurrah!

  Down with the traitor, up with the star;

  While we rally round the flag, boys, rally once again,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

  And with that the people wandered away. In their number was actor John Wilkes Booth, outraged by the president’s consideration of suffrage for African Americans; Booth vowed as he departed that Lincoln had just made “the last speech he will ever make.” The next day Elizabeth Keckley told Mary Lincoln that she had worried the night before that it would have been easy for someone in the crowd to shoot the president. “The President has been warned so often, that I tremble for him on every public occasion,” the first lady replied. “I have a presentiment that he will meet with a sudden and violent end.” That was April 12.

  On April 13, when the capital would again celebrate with grand lightings of all the buildings, Ulysses S. Grant and his wife sailed into the city. Julia thrilled at the reception: “Every gun in and near Washington burst forth—and such a salvo!—all the bells rang out merry greetings, and the city was literally swathed in flags and bunting.” That night they toured the brightly lighted buildings and then received guests at the home of the secretary of war, with a brief interruption while Grant, at the president’s request, escorted Mary Lincoln to see the “illuminations.” Julia had insisted that her husband take her first and then collect Mrs. Lincoln, “as it was the honor of being with him when he first viewed the illumination in honor of peace restored to the nation, in which he had so great a share—it was this I coveted.” Mrs. Grant knew that the newspapers and the public would be curious about the general’s reaction to the laurels for his triumph, and she would be the one at his side, not the woman who had been so rude to her only a few days earlier.

  Mary Lincoln enjoyed the spirited days after their return from Richmond. She told her friend Charles Sumner that she thought the celebration after Appomattox was “a happier day than last Monday,” after the fall of Richmond. The general joy and goodwill in the city did not give way to the solemnity of Good Friday. It fell on April 14, and in another stark symbol that the war had come to an end, General Robert Anderson returned to where it began, four years to the day earlier. He personally raised the Union flag over Fort Sumter in a ceremony in which the famous author Harriet Beecher Stowe participated. And though Lincoln recalled a disturbing dream where he saw himself in a coffin in the East Room and heard people murmuring, “The president is dead,” he was by and large in an expansive mood. That afternoon he and Mary took a carriage ride around the celebratory city, bedecked with bunting and banners—just the two of them—and he told her, “We must both be more cheerful in the future—between the war & the loss of our darling Willie—we have both been very miserable.” They talked of the future, of going home to Springfield, Illinois, of the traveling abroad they might do. Mary later remembered how cheerful her husband had been that day as he prepared to go to the theater, one of his favorite pastimes.

  Lincoln was probably the country’s most theatergoing president, apparently enjoying the distraction that stage performances provided in those tough times. But that night he was tired and didn’t want to go. Still, the newspapers had announced he would be there with General Grant as his guest and Lincoln preferred not to disappoint the audience, the actors, or the owner of Ford’s Theatre. Mrs. Grant had no such compunctions. She absolutely insisted that she and her husband leave Washington that day to see their children, who were in school in New Jersey: “As soon as I received the invitation to go with Mrs. Lincoln, I dispatched a note to General Grant entreating him to go home that evening; that I did not want to go to the theater; that he must take me home.” Later, Julia realized that a series of strange occurrences took place in the course of that day. A man showed up at her hotel purporting to be a messenger from Mrs. Lincoln and demanding Julia’s presence at the theater, which she rejected. Then at lunch at Willard’s Hotel she was convinced that same man along with three others sat opposite her and listened to every word she said. On the way to the train station that evening one of those men “rode past us at a sweeping gallop on a dark horse—black, I think. He rode twenty yards ahead of us, wheeled and returned, and as he passed us both going and returning, he thrust his face quite near the General’s and glared in a disagreeable manner.”

  After the Grants declined the invitation, the Lincolns were turned down by several other people they asked to accompany them to the theater, perhaps as a result of Mary’s recent displays of bad temper. Finally young Clara Harris, the daughter of the senator who had been so rude to Mary’s sister Emilie, said yes and brought along her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone. The foursome took their box seats a little late and Our American Cousin was already under way but the action stopped for the band to play “Hail to the Chief,” while the audience rose and applauded. As the comedy resumed the bodyguard who had replaced Captain Crook for the night sat in the audience to watch it, abandoning his assigned post outside the presidential box. So no one was on guard when John Wilkes Booth entered the box and fired his fatal shot. In the ensuing chaos, with Mary Lincoln screaming, “They have shot the President!” Booth jumped to the stage and escaped. A member of the audience, Charles Leale, just out of medical school, rushed into the box, where “Mrs. Lincoln . . . exclaimed several times, ‘O Doctor, do what you can for him, do what you can.’ ” The doctor tried to reassure the first lady, who was “weeping bitterly,” but he found the president in “a profoundly comatose condition.” More doctors crowded in to the small space and they with young Dr. Leale enlisted some men to move Lincoln across the street to Petersen’s boardinghouse to be met by Robert Lincoln and members of the cabinet and White House staff. Dr. Leale stayed through the night, recording that “Mrs. Lincoln . . . came into the room three or four times during the night.” In fact, Secretary of War Stanton had tried to keep the hysterical Mary away from her dying husband and she was not in the room at the end: “At 7:20 A.M. he breathed his last and ‘the spirit fled to God who gave it.’ ”

  One cabinet member not present in that sad, silent room that night was Abraham Lincoln’s dear friend William Seward. The bedridden secretary of state, still suffering miserably from his carriage accident wounds, was also a target of Booth’s co-conspirators. Late at night a man who purported to be delivering a message from the doctor appeared at the Seward home on Lafayette Square. The servant who opened the door allowed him in but when the intruder reached the top of the stairs, Seward’s son Fred refused to let him disturb the sleeping secretary. When the assassin pulled out a gun Fred lurched at him and received a pistol whipping so severe that his skull was fractured, but so was the gun. The assassin would have to use a knife to kill his prey.

  Seward’s daughter Fanny was keeping watch by her sick father when the murderer pushed into the room and ran toward Seward’s bed. “In his hand nearest me was a pistol, in the right hand a knife. I ran beside him to the bed imploring him to stop. I must have said ‘Don’t kill him,’ for father wakened, he says, hearing me speak the word kill, & seeing first me, speaking to someone whom he did not see—then raised himself & had one glimpse of the assassin’s face bending over, next felt the blows.” The would-be murderer slashed repeatedly at the figure in the bed and threw Seward to the floor as the male army nurse George Robinson, an invalid himself, attacked the assassin. Fanny, screaming, ran into the hallway to get help. Her screams awakened her brother Gus, who joined in the melee. Then “the assassin rushed headlong down the stairs” and escaped on horseback.

  Fanny dashed back to her father’s room and cried out, “ ‘Where’s Father?’ seeing the empty bed. At the side I found what I thought was a pile of bed clothes—then I knew that it was Father. As I stood my feet slipped in a great pool of blood. Father looked so ghastly I was sure he was dead, h
e was white & very thin with the blood that had drained from the gashes about his face & throat.” The men of the household, who were themselves injured from wrestling with the knife-wielding killer, managed to get Seward back in bed. He was able to issue instructions to Fanny, “he spoke to me, telling me to have the doors closed, & send for surgeons, & to ask to have a guard placed around the house.” Policemen and the press along with a crowd of people gathered at the door while the surgeon sewed up a huge gash on Seward’s face and Fanny found assassin Lewis Powell’s hat and gun.

  Servants cleaned up the pools of blood as members of the cabinet arrived and informed Mrs. Seward that the president had been shot. The trauma completely overwhelmed the women of the family. Young Fanny, who two years before had been so happy to turn eighteen and be accepted into Washington society, sobbed: “Blood, blood, my thoughts seemed drenched in it—I seemed to breathe its sickening odor. My dress was stained with it—Mother’s was drabbled with it—it was on everything.” The next day Dorothea Dix offered the services of her nurses and Secretary of War Stanton came to check on Seward and tell his wife that the president was dead. The Seward women never got over the attack. William Seward’s wife, Frances, was dead in six weeks and young Fanny would die a year and a half later.

  General Grant received the bulletin via telegraph while he and his wife were in a restaurant in Philadelphia waiting to catch the train to Burlington, New Jersey. The couple went on to their destination, where “crowds of people came thronging into our cottage to learn if the terrible news was true.” Grant left for Washington by special train and the next morning Julia opened a letter: “ ‘General Grant, thank God, as I do, that you still live. It was your life that fell to my lot, and I followed you on the cars. Your car door was locked, and thus you escaped me, thank God!’ ” Julia was convinced that this was the man she had seen from the carriage the night before; the lock on the railroad car door saved Ulysses Grant’s life. The Vice President of the United States also escaped. The man assigned to murder him, George Atzerodt, lost his nerve at the last minute and instead sat in a tavern drinking as his co-conspirators carried out their dread deeds.

  As word of the attacks spread, the city shook with fear. At about 11 p.m., not quite an hour after the president was shot, a soldier rang the bell at the Lee house and “announced the assassination of our President & the attempt upon Mr. Seward.” Lizzie Lee, the only family member awake in the household, was trying to digest that “horror” when another ring at the door brought the bulletin that “the provost marshal had ordered a guard of 6 men to protect this house.” No one knew if the assassins would strike again.

  Elizabeth Keckley also heard a knock on her door at about eleven o’clock when a neighbor broke in “with the startling intelligence that the entire Cabinet had been assassinated, and Mr. Lincoln shot, but not mortally wounded.” She “sallied out into the street to drift with the excited throng” and went to the White House, passing the heavily guarded Seward house on the way. Guards surrounded the Executive Mansion as well and she could only garner the news that the president had not been brought back there. As she learned on the street that Lincoln was dying, Mrs. Keckley knew that Mary Lincoln needed her, “as I pictured her wild with grief; but then I did not know where to find her, and I must wait till morning. Never did the hours drag so slowly.”

  When morning came a carriage from the White House arrived to take Mrs. Keckley to her friend. Elizabeth found the first lady “nearly exhausted with grief.” After calming her down, the former slave crept into the guest room to see the body of Abraham Lincoln: “No common mortal had died. The Moses of my people had fallen in the hour of his triumph.” Cabinet members and army officers made way for the dressmaker, interrupting their own mourning for this woman who had consoled the president through his own grief: “I could not help recalling the day on which I had seen little Willie lying in his coffin where the body of his father now lay. I remembered how the President had wept over the pale beautiful face of his gifted boy, and now the President himself was dead.”

  That realization was just beginning to sink in as the secretary of war ordered troops to the city to protect other government officials and find the murderers. Nobody knew if this was a Confederate plot to disrupt the government so some sneak attack could be launched. Anxiety mixed with anguish as somber black crepe replaced the gaudy red, white, and blue hanging from the houses and government buildings. “The revulsion is so sudden from the delirium of joy which had made the past two weeks one gala-day of delight, that men scarcely know how to act or what to do,” a benumbed Lois Adam recounted. Church bells tolled, businesses shut down. “Noisy newsboys in the streets are shouting the particulars of the murder, and in spite of what we know of the awful truth, we hold our breath in listening for some word of hope, some contradiction which we long for and yet know too well can never come.”

  Elizabeth Blair Lee took down her flag by seven in the morning, “This whole city is draped in black,” she mourned to her long-absent husband; “the grief of the people here is sincere & intense. Those of Southern sympathies know now they have lost a friend willing & more powerful to protect & serve them than they can now ever hope to find again.” Lizzie couldn’t know how true those words would be and, unlike many in the capital, she had faith in Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson.

  AT TEN O’CLOCK on the morning of April 15, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, accompanied by members of the cabinet and other notables like Francis Preston Blair, joined Vice President Andrew Johnson at the Kirkwood Hotel, where Chase administered the oath of office of the President of the United States. “Mr. Chase came to Father at the quiet inauguration of today & took his hand & with tearful eyes said, ‘Mr. Blair I hope that from this day there will cease all anger & bitterness between us.’ My Father responded promptly & kindly.” Thus did Lizzie describe the conciliation of the two old enemies, one who had been such a stalwart of the murdered president, one who had tried to defeat him. It was a pledge to come together in support of the government they both believed in. And the head of that government, Andrew Johnson, would need all the support he could get.

  After his humiliating drunken performance at the inauguration, Johnson had moved in with the Blairs and stayed there until the beginning of April. Lizzie Lee insisted that though “the City and papers are full of gossip” after Johnson’s rambling speech, “he is a sick man.” The vice president was suffering from a lingering case of typhoid fever and the doctor summoned by the Blairs prescribed “absolute quiet . . . & a low diet.” As Johnson improved he was no longer quiet, “he talks well & a great deal . . . enjoys his food hugely.” While nursing her guest, Lizzie was also worrying about a lump in her breast. “I have been trying to get up the courage to consult the Doctor, but so far have not done so,” she fretted, but then went on happily to report: “Mr. Johnson is still with us & improves daily in health & cheerfulness.”

  Her mother insisted that a doctor look at the lump. He declared it “a small tumor” and hoped to cure it without surgery, adding “the knife is a perfectly safe remedy and that too without pain.” Though that seemed doubtful, Lizzie claimed not to be “troubled about it,” but clearly she was. She tried to convince herself that the discomfort she felt was the result of a crooked whale bone in her corset that poked at her all one day: “The strap which holds my skirts up pressed it on me.” The fashions of the time could be treacherous but of course what really concerned Lizzie was breast cancer. After a few days the doctor determined that surgery would be necessary. So it was with great relief that before he operated she was able to report “the tumor has now entirely disappeared from sight.” The doctor admitted the next day, the day after the assassination, that he had indeed thought the tumor was cancerous and was happy to see it gone. She had been keeping up such a brave face as she related political news and chatty gossip but had been so frightened by “the knife” that her reprieve allowed Lizzie to make the rare admission to her husband: “You can never know how b
itterly I have felt these last months of our long separation.” But she quickly put personal concerns aside as she was called on to minister to the deeply distressed Mary Lincoln.

  “I shall never forget the scene,” Elizabeth Keckley shuddered about that first day at the White House after the president was killed; “the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outburst of grief from the soul.” This would go on for about a month, with poor little heartbroken Tad, who had never been far from his father’s side, begging his mother not to cry. Some of the women of Washington went to offer their condolences to the inconsolable first lady but were refused admittance. Julia Grant claimed she “went many times to call on dear heart-broken Mrs. Lincoln, but she would not see me.” The two women summoned by the doctor to comfort the hysterical widow were Mary Jane Welles, wife of Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, and Elizabeth Blair Lee. Lizzie Lee found it tough duty. Though Mrs. Lincoln had “always been marked in her kindness of manner to me,” Mary’s “pitiable” condition could be hard to witness. Lizzie tried to show sympathy, remarking, “it is a terrible thing to fall from such a height to one of loneliness & poverty,” as she considered the former first lady’s plight. “No woman ever had a more indulgent kind husband. Some have thought she had not his affections but tis evident to me she had no doubt about it and that is a point about which women are not often deceived after a long married life like theirs.”

  Instructions awaited Lizzie when she arrived to relieve Mrs. Welles, “She begs me not to smile. Mrs. L. said ‘Oh I dread to see Mrs. Lee’s smile.’ ” But she had little to smile about that day. While the women kept to their quarters upstairs, downstairs in the East Room six hundred people attended Abraham Lincoln’s funeral. Only seven were women, including Nettie Chase and Kate Sprague. The Cleveland Morning Leader’s story about the solemnities singled out “The pleasant face of Mrs. Kate Sprague,” but added, “such scenes gain little additional power by beauty’s presence.” Even at the end Kate Chase Sprague outshone Mary Todd Lincoln in her own White House.