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

by Cokie Roberts

  The woman named that summer as the District of Columbia’s assistant to the assistant to the commissioner for the bureau had been lobbying for its creation for quite some time. An antislavery activist in Ohio, Josephine Griffing had opened her home to fugitive slaves as part of the Underground Railroad and gone on the road in the 1850s as a paid speaker (and singer) for the Western Anti-Slavery Society. She also served as president of the Ohio Women’s Rights Association, so when the war came and feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the Women’s National Loyal League to petition for a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery, she signed up immediately and traveled the Midwest gathering the signatures of hundreds of women.

  As she traveled pushing for freedom, Mrs. Griffing was one of the few abolitionists to consider the future for the slaves if they were in fact freed. She came to Washington in 1864 to lobby for an agency to deal with the questions of employment and education and housing and hunger and saw for herself the desperate situation of many of the new black residents of the nation’s capital. This was not a problem for the future, people were in need of services right then, so she moved to the city to try to provide them. Almost immediately she was named “general agent” of the National Freedmen’s Relief Association for the District of Columbia and held that job, along with others, until she died.

  Leaving her husband behind in Ohio but bringing two daughters with her, Josephine Griffing threw herself into the work of helping African Americans in need. She solicited funds and food and clothing from women’s organizations in the North and Midwest. She supervised the establishment of “industrial schools” to teach women how to make a living by sewing. “Much gratitude is manifested by these women for the opportunity of learning to make their own and their children’s clothing, and for the employment it affords them, even at a low rate of pay,” she reported to the Freedmen’s Bureau. The rate of pay was low indeed—the most any woman averaged was seven dollars a month—but it kept starvation at bay. One of the industrial schools operated out of Josephine Griffing’s house on Capitol Hill, where she also ran a day-care facility for children and an office to counsel the freedmen on how to handle their money, something they had never done before, along with any family or legal issues. People lined up on her doorstep for the free food and clothing, some lived there for a while if they had no place else to go, and others came by to check the lists of jobs available as employers let Mrs. Griffing know what kinds of workers they needed.

  She was so used to running her own show, and doing it well, that she started fighting with the Freedmen’s Bureau soon after she went to work there, and she lost the job a few months later. But Josephine Griffing had been sure to make friends in Congress and they continued to encourage her efforts, especially her program of arranging employment for the freedmen in the North. She would often travel with the job seekers, as one newspaper reported: “We would sometimes go to the railroad depot at night to see her start for New York with a chartered car full of these freed people, she going to see that they were put in right hands.” Though she battled red tape at the bureau she had been so instrumental in creating, the powers there did cooperate with Mrs. Griffing in her search for freedmen jobs outside of Washington, and the War Department turned over abandoned barracks in Rhode Island for her to use as an employment clearinghouse. More employment offices followed in other cities, and she managed to get some three to five thousand destitute freed people jobs in the North.

  For those many thousands more who remained in Washington, Josephine Griffing toiled tirelessly to make sure they were fed, clothed, and housed. She was always badgering the bureaucrats who she thought stuck too close to the rules in the face of desperate need. Part of the resistance to her demands emanated from the Freedmen’s Bureau’s concern about creating a culture of dependency on government—but Mrs. Griffing contended she was only giving handouts to people who couldn’t help themselves, “those broken-down aged slaves whom we have liberated in their declining years, when all their strength is gone, and for whom no home, family, friendship or subsistence is furnished.” The bureau also struggled with a constant lack of funds. Congress was never going to appropriate enough to do the job. That made the cause of women’s suffrage all the more important to reformers like Josephine Griffing, who believed that if women had the vote the lawmakers would have to be more responsive to their demands for funds for social services. So she redoubled her suffrage efforts as well. A founder and vice president of the American Equal Rights Association, she would join forces with other feminists pushing to include women in the growing movement to enfranchise blacks.

  THE SEA OF blue uniforms that washed over Washington for the review of the Grand Army of the Republic slowly subsided that summer as soldiers mustered out and headed home. But the city could not yet turn away from the dramatic events of April as the conspirators in the assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln were tried and sentenced. Secretary of War Stanton took charge of the investigation, arresting anyone who had been in on the plan or had aided and abetted John Wilkes Booth and Lewis Powell (also known as Lewis Payne) in their attacks on the president and the secretary of state. The manhunt quickly took Stanton’s troops to the boardinghouse door of Mary Surratt, who had moved from her home in Surrattsville, Maryland, the previous October in order to make a living after her debt-ridden husband died. With one son in the Confederate army and another, John Surratt, a civilian message-runner for the Rebels, Mary Surratt’s boardinghouse attracted southern sympathizers like John Wilkes Booth.

  Earlier that year Booth hatched a plan with John Surratt to kidnap President Lincoln and hold him hostage in Richmond in return for the release of southern prisoners of war who could help the dwindling Rebel army fight on. The plot was foiled when Lincoln failed to show up at a theater performance where Booth expected him, and with the end of the war, the kidnapping no longer made sense. But the avenging actor then determined to throw the government into chaos by assassinating the president, vice president, secretary of state, and general in chief of the army. John Surratt was not in Washington the night Lincoln was shot and he managed to flee the country, but his mother, along with seven men, was arrested and jailed in an old penitentiary at the Washington Arsenal. In the outrage over the assassination, there was no public outcry when the secretary of war announced that the trial would be conducted by military tribunal with no jury, rather than in a civil courtroom, but such a protest erupted when he tried to exclude the press and the public that Stanton was forced to open the proceedings.

  Despite the distance to the arsenal, Lois Adams spotted “hundreds” trekking daily to the trial, hoping to get in. “If provided with proper passes they may go in, and take their chances of ever coming out alive from the small, thronged and crowded room, where Judges, counsel, prisoners, witnesses, and spectators, men, women, and children, are jammed and sweltering together.” A small room at the arsenal had been fitted up as a makeshift courtroom filled mainly with the nine-member military commission assigned to hear the evidence and pronounce a verdict, though the outcome was never in doubt. Much of the crowd’s curiosity focused on the one woman, Mary Surratt, who, the government argued, assisted the assassins in planning their attacks and provided them with food and shelter. As President Johnson himself judged, she “kept the nest that hatched the egg.” Every day she sat there in the courtroom, her face veiled, while the public hurled taunts and threats: “ ‘Isn’t she a devil?’ ‘She looks like a devil!’ ‘Hasn’t she a horrid face?’ ‘I hope they’ll hang her—tee, hee, hee!’ All these remarks and more such, some of them again and again.” Jane Swisshelm reported disapprovingly to the Pittsburgh Daily Commercial, as she praised the defendant’s demeanor, “She made no scenes, as a weak or vain woman would have done.” Mrs. Surratt appeared calm and serene though she was suffering from the side effects of menopause; the men, on the other hand, looked disheveled and disoriented when their jailers pulled off the confining hoods Stanton ordered they wear over their h
eads for the duration of their imprisonment. Not physically in the dock with the prisoners but named in the indictment were the former President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and other leaders, including Clement Clay, who had spent much of the last year of the war in Canada, where he was alleged to have conspired with Booth.

  When the weeks of testimony ended, the verdict of guilty came as expected; what wasn’t expected was Mary Surratt’s sentence, printed in full by the New York Times: “the Commission does, therefore, sentence her, the said MARY E. SURRATT, to be hung by the neck until she be dead, at such time and place as the President of the United States shall direct.” No woman had ever before been executed by the United States government. It was a split vote of the military commission, but only two-thirds were necessary to mete out the penalty of death. President Johnson named the time and place by executive order: the hangings would take place on July 7 between the hours of 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., at the direction of the secretary of war. Three of the accused conspirators had been given prison sentences. Four were condemned to die. Johnson did not yield to the request from the minority of the commission to commute the sentence of Mary Surratt. “It was well known that the counsel, family and friends of the culprit were determined to make every exertion, to strain every nerve in a strong pull and tug at the tender heart of the President in her behalf. She was a woman, and a sick woman at that,” the New York Times reported, congratulating Johnson for resisting the imprecations: “these and like arguments, it was said, would be brought to bear upon the President, backed with certain political strength which could not fail to succeed.” One who tried to use her strength to save the life of Mary Surratt was Adele Cutts Douglas.

  She arrived at the White House on the day of the executions and found the condemned woman’s daughter in tears on the outside steps. The president had refused to see the distraught twenty-two-year-old Anna Surratt. Now she was at her wit’s end; all other avenues to save her mother had been blocked. Very early that morning, Mary Surratt’s lawyers had awakened Judge Andrew Wylie of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia and asked him to sign a writ of habeas corpus turning their client over to civil authorities, on the basis that the war was over and the military had no business conducting the trial in the first place. With some trepidation the judge in that federal district court agreed and ordered General Hancock from the Arsenal Penitentiary to bring Mary Surratt to his courtroom at ten that morning. When the general failed to show up, the judge didn’t know what to do, finally deciding to “submit to the supreme physical power” of the military, which held Mrs. Surratt in custody. A few hours later, while Judge Wylie was hearing another case, the attorney general of the United States, with General Hancock in tow, appeared in the courtroom and explained that President Johnson had negated the judge’s writ and ordered that the executions proceed.

  And that’s what he did again after he met with Adele Douglas, who pushed past the bayonet-wielding guards to bring Johnson the information that Lewis Powell had that morning proclaimed that Mary Surratt was innocent. It’s not known whether Douglas came to the White House for the express purpose of petitioning for Mary Surratt. Both women were Catholic and there was some upset in the community about suspicions of anti-Catholicism in the charges against the boardinghouse owner. The conversation between President Johnson and Mrs. Douglas has never been revealed. But her intervention was to no avail. Even the persuasive Adele Cutts Douglas couldn’t shake Andrew Johnson, who had privately told his secretary “there had not been ‘women enough hanged in this war.’ ”

  As she was marched out to her death, Mary Surratt’s famous composure abandoned her. Her daughter’s sobs in the hours before the execution caused her to moan with anguish; “she had apparently lost sight of her own interest in deep solicitude for her daughter, of whom she constantly talked, and repeatedly, frantically and with wringing of hands asked: ‘What will become of her—what will be ANNA’s fate?’ ” the New York Times informed readers, showing a rare bit of sympathy. She was the first of the condemned prisoners to be led to the gallows. The other three—Lewis Powell, who attacked Secretary Seward; David Herold, who helped both Powell and Booth escape; and George Atzerodt, who plotted to kill the vice president—were all directly involved. The four were placed in their seats, prayers were said, and the nooses were pulled over their heads. “Mrs. Surratt seemed, by a desperate mental effort, to nerve herself up specially for this occasion, looking forward and around her, for the only time, with an air of mingled determination and resignation. Her bonnet and veil were removed previous to putting the noose upon her neck,” the New Berne, North Carolina, Times reported, noting almost as a throwaway that Powell had made a statement about Surratt “exonerating her from complicity, and that another person subscribed to an affidavit impeaching the testimony of an important witness against her.” It didn’t matter; the deed was done. The United States government had executed a woman for the first time in history.

  Was she innocent? That’s still a debated question but most of the evidence points in that direction. Certainly the prevailing public opinion of the time was that she was not. “It is an awful thing to hang a woman,” Lois Adams conceded, but she argued that no execution, “though multiplied by thousands, can atone for the wrongs these Southern women are guilty of in connection with the rebellion. All through they have been the bitterest, the most defiant, unreasoning and dangerous enemies the government has had to contend with.”

  AFTER THE INTERRUPTION by the attorney general on the habeas corpus request for Mary Surratt, Judge Wylie returned to the case he was trying. In this crime there was no question who did the deed. It was the trial of the winsome Miss Harris, charged with murdering Mr. Burroughs at the Treasury Department. And the public was all on the side of the wronged defendant; from her Chicago hotel Mary Lincoln sent flowers. That Mary Harris was the culprit was certain, but would she be found guilty? “The prisoner was tastefully attired in a black silk dress, and a tight-fitting coat or basque of the same material, trimmed with braid and beads; a black bonnet trimmed with straw,” swooned the New York Times; “her hair was worn in ringlets.”

  Mary Harris had become quite the favorite of the press since that cold day in January when she shot and killed the man she said had promised to marry her. And despite the fact that she bought a gun in Chicago, loaded it, carried it halfway across the country, concealed it in her bag as she entered the Treasury Department, and then hid in wait for her victim, her lawyers contended there was no premeditation involved. She was “temporarily insane.” It was the creative defense dreamed up six years earlier by Edwin Stanton, now the secretary of war, to obtain a not guilty verdict for Dan Sickles, now a decorated Union general, after he had murdered Philip Barton Key.

  The judge admitted into evidence letters from the dead man attesting to his devotion to the woman he then scorned, and a former employer testified that Mary’s reaction to the news of Burroughs’s marriage indicated a “mental aberration.” The superintendent for the federal Government Hospital for the Insane, the highest-ranking person the lawyers could possibly summon to testify about mental illness, the man who ran the hospital that Dorothea Dix founded, gave Miss Harris’s condition a name: paroxysmal insanity. He talked about “menstruation hysteria” and all manner of other maladies this fair damsel suffered as a result of her callous lover. She got off.

  The jury deliberated for a full ten minutes and returned to the courtroom, which “was densely packed, the attendance of ladies being very large.” When the verdict was announced “there was great excitement. The men threw up their hats and burst into loud applause, women waved their handkerchiefs and wept with joy,” the Raleigh, North Carolina, Daily Progress cheered, though “the acquitted lady fainted.” Lois Adams was disgusted. “Her counsel were far nearer crazed than she was, and acted it out in their insane conduct and maudlin huggings and kissings on the closing day of the trial,” the journalist scolded; “she goes home stripped of everything that makes pure and d
ear and blessed the life of woman. She has made her name most unfortunately notorious, and has won an empty acquittal based upon a false pretense: that is all.” In fact Mary Harris did turn out to be mentally ill, and not temporarily. She ended up spending close to twenty years in the Government Hospital for the Insane and then when she came out she married her lawyer, Joseph Bradley, by then an octogenarian. Miss Harris was not yet forty.

  WASHINGTON WAS BEGINNING to realize that the war was actually over. Military camps closed down or filled with freedmen, hospitals emptied as the crippled and careworn returned to their homes, but many people would not go home—they were there to stay. The clerks, male and female, still clocked in every day at the federal departments. The central government had mushroomed into a vast new entity growing from 5,000 employees to more than 15,000 while the nation fought a war over states’ rights and the capital had emerged from the conflict as a bustling, burgeoning metropolis. As Lois Adams noted, “Everywhere about the city improvements are going on. Private enterprise seems wide awake, and is reaping rich rewards for all its outlays of energy and expense.” The war had forever changed the place Mrs. Adams covered: “The new elements, first drawn here by force, are gathering strength, obliterating the old landmarks . . . scaffoldings everywhere beset the sidewalks . . . handsome blocks and dwellings are filling up hitherto vacant lots . . . the public buildings are also in process of completion and renovation.” And the government still had much to do in the wake of the war.

  With Congress out of session, President Johnson was issuing Reconstruction decrees sure to incense northern Republicans, allowing states back into the Union with no requirement other than that they ratify the amendment outlawing slavery. As far as he was concerned, the men who had seceded could return to their seats in the Senate and the House and the question of voting rights for African Americans, something Radical Republicans thought would change the social structure of the South, was up to the states. It was sure to be a battle when the Congress reconvened. Until then there was another fallout from the war needing attention—the identification of missing and dead soldiers. The person who almost single-handedly took on that task was Clara Barton.