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

by Cokie Roberts

  The day before the funeral, some twenty thousand people filed tearfully through the East Room to pay their respects to the dead president. Among them was Rebecca Pomroy, now quite ill with typhoid fever herself. “With the strength born of a determined will,” the nurse “resolved on seeing the face of her dear friend once more.” Helpers at her hospital made her ready so she could “add her tribute of tears to that of hundreds of others who looked upon their beloved friend with unspeakable sorrow and affection.” So many people had been turned away at nightfall that another viewing was scheduled for two days later, April 20, this time in the Rotunda of the Capitol. Thousands lined the streets as the melancholy march to the drumbeat of the dirge brought the casket up Pennsylvania Avenue, followed by the fallen president’s riderless horse, and hundreds of officers on foot. When a mix-up kept the Twenty-Second Colored Infantry from joining the line along the route, the soldiers smartly took a place instead at the front, leading the other mourners of their emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.

  Lizzie Lee stayed with Mary Lincoln all that day until the Lincoln sons came home from the Capitol. “I was so weary from 24 hours of unflagging watching that I undressed & went to bed,” she sighed. As exhausted as she was, she felt obliged to give her hectoring husband an account of the family finances. Phillips Lee had grown wealthy in the navy because his job involved intercepting ships trying to break the northern blockade, and he was allowed to keep some of the bounty he confiscated. Lee wanted to know how his wife was spending the money. (“Insurance and water tax $550 . . . Gas & coal 200 . . . Blair’s French & dancing 52 . . . meat bills and confectionary $300.” And in the postslavery era at the Blair household the total monthly salary for four servants was $49.) It was a brief interruption from her White House duties. “I am surprised to find so far that she has not uttered a word of resignation, or religious submission,” Lizzie mused about Mary on April 22, the day after the funeral train left Washington carrying President Lincoln’s long coffin and the small one of his little boy Willie home to Illinois. “She constantly refers to his religious faith—but never to her own. I shall return there again this evening & shall continue to go as long as I find I can stand it.” The “religion” Mary turned to was spiritualism.

  Nettie Coburn was no longer in town. She had left in February to go home to Connecticut to nurse her father but paid a farewell call on the president before she departed. She told him then that the spirits “re-affirm that the shadow they have spoken of still hangs over you.” Lincoln admitted he had received letters to that effect from mediums all over the county but that he knew “I shall live till my work is done, and no earthly power can prevent it. And then it doesn’t matter as I am ready.” But Mary Lincoln was still not ready to leave the White House.

  President Johnson, working out of a small room at the Treasury Department, graciously allowed her to stay for more than a month after her husband’s death, though the former first lady held it against him that he never paid a condolence call or wrote a sympathy note. But he might have still been smarting from her behavior on the night of the assassination. Mrs. Lincoln, holding a grudge about Johnson’s embarrassing performance at the inauguration, refused to allow him in to the house where her husband was dying. In the days since then Mary had become convinced that Johnson was in on the plot to kill the president.

  Several of the actual plotters were arrested on April 17 and on April 26 a group of detective Lieutenant L. C. Baker’s cavalrymen found John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirator David Herold, the man who held Lewis Powell’s horse outside Seward’s house, hiding in a barn on a farm in Virginia. When the men refused to surrender the soldiers set fire to the barn. According to newspaper reports, Herold opened the door to hand himself over, Booth fired at the soldiers, and they fired back and killed him. A few days later, President Johnson named the men he believed to be the masterminds of the conspiracy: Jefferson Davis, Clement C. Clay, and other Confederate officials. He offered a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for the capture of Davis and twenty-five thousand for each of the others.

  Johnson’s spurious charges were widely believed; journalist Lois Adams dramatically used them to attack Jefferson Davis: “the arch-fiend of the rebellion stands before the world in his true light at last, branded all over with infamy.” By that time Confederate general Joe Johnston had surrendered to Sherman in North Carolina and Davis and some of the others were on the run. On the day that the trial of the true Lincoln assassination conspirators began, May 10, Jefferson Davis was captured in Georgia. Clement Clay turned himself in. Mary Lincoln was still in the White House.

  “The White House, so lately the resort of the gay and brilliant throngs of levees and reception days, has now hanging about it the gloom and loneliness of the sepulcher,” Lois Adams lamented. “She who bears his now immortal name is a stricken and desolate mourner within. A silence like that of death seems to have settled on all around.” Mary wasn’t getting any easier to take and it was well past time for her to go. Lizzie Lee dragged herself to the former first lady’s side: “she begged me so hard yesterday not to leave her that I feel as if it was a duty to go—yet I do dread it more & more.” While Mrs. Lincoln stayed upstairs, out of sight, “the White House was left without a responsible protector. The rabble ranged through it at will,” the journalist Mary Clemmer Ames recounted, with outrage at how the place was stripped of china and silver: “It was plundered, not only of ornaments, but of heavy articles of furniture.” Though entirely innocent, Mary Lincoln was suspected in the robbery, especially since she brought twenty trunks and fifty to sixty boxes with her when she finally moved out of the Executive Mansion. There was hardly any notice taken of the departure of the controversial first lady who left Washington friendless, just as she had arrived four years earlier. “The silence was almost painful,” Elizabeth Keckley recalled. Mrs. Abraham Lincoln chose to go back to Illinois on one of the most remarkable days in the history of the Capital City—May 23, the beginning day of the Grand Review of the Union Army.

  EVEN MORE PEOPLE descended on Washington than had gathered for Lincoln’s inaugurations or funeral. This was not only going to be a grand spectacle; it would also serve as a great symbol that peace had come at last, the Union was restored. The large reviewing stands in front of the White House must have looked tempting to Tad Lincoln as he readied himself to leave with his mother and brother, plus Elizabeth Keckley and two bodyguards. Starting with the Army of the Potomac, so closely associated with the Capital City, wave after wave of soldiers paraded by, soldiers on horseback, soldiers singing songs that had been fraught with longing—“When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” and “When This Cruel War Is Over”—now a reality. Flags and flowers festooned the entire city for the two-day celebration, when Washington did nothing but “watch our national heroes marching home,” Lois Adams cheered; “as brigade after brigade swept up the noble avenue with their war-worn flags and inspiring music, they were welcomed with cheers and songs, the waving of flags and handkerchiefs, and now and then a showering of bouquets and wreaths of evergreens and beautiful flowers.” The signs of mourning still showed, the White House remained draped in black, the flags flew at half-staff, with black crepe attached. But the sadness could not overcome the excitement of saluting 150,000 victorious soldiers as they proudly paraded by.

  There’s no record that any one of the several hundred women who disguised themselves as men and fought in the Civil War marched with the Grand Army of the Republic that day, but among the lines of men in blue was a woman in calico, riding sidesaddle in her sunbonnet. This was the famous Mother Bickerdyke, scourge of bureaucrats and balky brass, saint to sick and starving soldiers. She had been with Grant’s army at Vicksburg and with Sherman’s in Georgia. She had bullied anyone who resisted her efforts to clean up the camps, set up hospitals, nurse the soldiers, and provide them with decent meals. Her legend includes the story that she had a surgeon fired because a drunken spree the night before made him late to the hospital the next mor
ning. He had not yet written the special diet list for the patients, who were hungry by the time he showed up as well as being ill. Mary Ann Ball Bickerdyke, called “Mother” by the grateful soldiers, flew into a rage and demanded that he be removed. When the doctor complained to headquarters and General Sherman pressed him about who had caused the discharge, the surgeon reluctantly admitted it was the formidable nurse. “Oh,” Sherman is supposed to have said, “well, if it was her, I can do nothing for you. She ranks me.” William Tecumseh Sherman became Mother Bickerdyke’s great admirer, so he invited her to march with his army on that bright day marking the end of the long and life-draining war. Two days later the Army of the Trans-Mississippi, the last Rebel army, surrendered.

  THE REBEL PRESIDENT had not surrendered; he had been captured by Union soldiers and was now in solitary confinement at Fort Monroe. After the fall of Richmond, Jefferson Davis and some of his cabinet tried to keep operating the Confederacy from Danville, Virginia. But as the Rebel battlefield defeats mounted, the civilians moved farther south with the plan of escaping to set up a government in exile in the West. Varina Davis had sold almost everything she owned to convert it to cash and fled with the children to North Carolina before the fall of Richmond. She too kept moving south with the hopes of getting to Florida and then out of the country. When her now-fugitive husband learned that they were not far apart in Georgia, he met up with her for a night in a campsite by a creek. The next morning Yankee soldiers swooped in and arrested him. In telling the story of his capture, Varina Davis maintained that her husband had thrown her raincoat over his shoulders and that she then tossed her shawl over his head as he went to the creek to wash. But the newspapers printed a different story altogether—a much more ignominious one.

  Under the headlines, “The Old Lady Jeff. Davis! How she was Captured—no. 13 Boots and Whiskers!” the Janesville, Ohio, Weekly Gazette reprinted a New York Herald account. “There appeared at the tent door an ostensible old lady, with a bucket on her arm, escorted by Mrs. Davis and her son; ‘Please let my old mother go to the spring for some water to wash in,’ said Mrs. Davis in a pleading tone. ‘It strikes me your mother wears very big boots,’ said the guard as he hoisted the old lady’s dress with his sabre, and discovered a pair of number thirteen calfskins, ‘and whiskers too,’ said the Sergeant, as he pulled the hand from her face, and lo! Jeff Davis in all his littleness stood before them.” The party was then carted off to Macon, Georgia. “While on the road they received a copy of President Johnson’s proclamation, offering $100,000 for Davis. Davis read it and trembled, his hands dropped to his side, and with a groan, he dropped the paper. His wife picked it up and read it aloud, and the whole party burst into tears.” At the same time, Clement Clay, who had already read about President Johnson’s charges against the Confederate leaders and the offer of a reward for their capture, turned himself in thinking it the wisest thing to do. “Mrs. Clay remarked, jocularly, that as she had brought in her husband, she would claim the reward offered for him, to which Mrs. Davis responded, ‘Yes $100,000 would be considerable of an amount of pocket money to us poor unfortunates. I sold my horses, carriage, silver ware and jewelry, for what little money I had, but it has been stolen from me.’ ”

  It was a livid Varina Davis who related the story to her old friend Montgomery Blair. “Trunks were broken open, letters and clothing scattered on the ground, all the gold taken, even our prayer books and bibles taken . . . my baby’s little wardrobe was stolen almost entirely, the other children shared the same fate,” she sputtered. She later learned that if Davis had resisted arrest the soldiers were ordered “to fire into the tents (there being only two and those two containing women and children) and ‘make a general massacre.’ Another said ‘bloody work’ should have been made of the whole party.” After a tearful trip with the Clays to Fort Monroe, the men were taken to prison and Varina sent to Savannah, Georgia, where she was placed under a loose house arrest. The town turned out for the former “First Lady of the Confederacy,” as Virginia Clay later recalled: “an impromptu levee was begun which lasted until late in the night. It was followed the next day, by gifts of flowers and fruit, and what was immediately needful, of clothing of every description.” The Davis children, except for the baby, were sent to Canada in the care of Varina’s mother. Virginia Clay, with a good deal of difficulty, made her way to her in-laws in Huntsville, Alabama. And both women started lobbying campaigns with their former friends in Washington for the release of their husbands.

  THE ITEMIZED BILL for President Lincoln’s funeral, presented to the Congress by the commissioner of public buildings, includes $360 to Elizabeth Keckley “as first Class Nurse & attendant on Mrs. Lincoln from April 14th to May 26th, 1865.” Lizzie Keckley had not wanted to go with Mary Lincoln to Chicago. “You forget my business, Mrs. Lincoln,” she protested. “I have the spring trousseau to make for Mrs. Douglas.” Adele Cutts Douglas had announced her engagement to Union army officer Robert Williams but Mary Lincoln was insistent: “Mrs. Douglas can get someone else to make her trousseau. . . . I have determined that you shall go to Chicago with me, and you must go.” Addie Douglas typically gave her blessing: “Do all you can for Mrs. Lincoln. My heart’s sympathy is with her.” But once Mrs. Keckley settled the Lincolns at a hotel in Chicago, Mary admitted she had no money to keep Lizzie on, so the dressmaker was able to return to her thriving business in Washington and take up the work she most wanted to do—assisting former slaves in adapting to a new life. She had been there and knew how hard it was.

  Born a slave in Dinwiddie, Virginia, Elizabeth Keckley grieved through the breakup of her family when the man she believed was her father was taken out of state by his owner, breaking her mother’s heart. (Her mother, on her deathbed, confessed to Lizzie that her true father was the master of the household, Colonel Burwell, so the children she cared for were her half siblings.) As a teenager she was sent to work for one of the Burwell sons, whose wife tried “to subdue my stubborn pride” by enlisting Burwell and another man to beat her viciously while she did her best to fight them off. She couldn’t fight off a white neighbor who repeatedly raped her, resulting in the birth of her baby boy. The mother and baby were sent to live with a Burwell daughter when she married and moved to St. Louis.

  There Lizzie met her husband, James Keckley, and established herself as an accomplished seamstress. She bolstered the income of the family that owned her by making clothes for several women in town, who in turn advanced her $1,200 to pay for freedom for her son George and herself. Lizzie later paid back the loan in full. She left Keckley because of his “dissipation” and headed north, arriving in Baltimore in 1860. Her original plan to open a school for black women to teach them how to sew proved unsuccessful so she moved on to Washington, D.C., and started making dresses for the wives of senators and congressmen. One of her patrons, Elizabeth Blair Lee, made such a splash in a Keckley creation at the ball for the Prince of Wales that the demand for the dressmaker shot up and Varina Davis hired her on a regular basis.

  At the home of Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, Lizzie Keckley heard a great deal of political news as the country drew closer to war. “Mrs. Davis was warmly attached to Washington, and I often heard her say that she disliked the idea of breaking up old associations, and going South to suffer from trouble and deprivation.” Little did Varina know then, in the winter of 1860, how much trouble and deprivation she would have to endure. Varina tried to convince the seamstress to come south with her, warning that war would turn northerners against African Americans: “The Northern people will look upon them as the cause of the war, and I fear, in their exasperation, will be inclined to treat you harshly.” Lizzie wisely stayed in Washington and became the intimate of the first lady, who knew she was a “remarkable woman.” But it was true that many blacks were experiencing harsh treatment in the Federal City as more and more arrived from the South. And in the camps set up to accommodate the so-called contrabands, disease ran rampant due to overcrowding and bad s
anitary conditions.

  A few years earlier Elizabeth Keckley had started the Contraband Relief Association and was elected its president. Her son, George, who had been the focus of her life, was killed in Missouri in one of the early battles of the war; now she threw herself into relief work. She raised funds for the organization when she traveled with Mary Lincoln to New York and Boston, and “Mrs. Lincoln made frequent contributions, as also did the President.” After the Emancipation Proclamation, and the freeing of the slaves in the District of Columbia, the name of the society changed to reflect the new realities: the Ladies’ Freedmen and Soldiers’ Relief Association. Mrs. Keckley was also instrumental in establishing the National Association for the Relief of Destitute Colored Women and Children, which provided a home for elderly black women and the orphans of freedmen and turned out to be enlightened self-interest on her part.

  By 1865, after four years of continuous migration to the capital, some estimates put the total number of African-American arrivals at 40,000, quite an adjustment for a city of just over 60,000 before the war. A huge Freedmen’s Village was set up on the grounds of Mary and Robert E. Lee’s confiscated Arlington House, along with the Union military cemetery there. Volunteers, like Sojourner Truth, arrived to lend a hand but the needs of the former slaves were too great for benevolent citizens and black churches to handle. The difficulties of integrating freed slaves into the wider society, helping them find employment and housing—the problems Elizabeth Keckley had recognized three years earlier—caused Congress to pass legislation in March 1865 establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau, a government agency designed to take on the task.