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

by Cokie Roberts

  After the exhilarating and exhausting year on the battlefields of Virginia and Maryland, Clara Barton settled on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina, a Union-controlled area where wounded soldiers from the siege of Charleston were hospitalized. She found the work too easy for her taste, but her brother, who had been assigned to the Quartermaster’s Corps, was there too and she didn’t want to abandon him. Plus she was having a love affair. She knew it would be brief. Colonel John Elwell was a married man but she enjoyed it while it lasted and ignored the sly looks cast her way when she left his rooms early in the morning. And the abolitionist Frances Gage engaged her interest in the plight of the freedmen on the islands.

  But Clara Barton itched for action and so traveled to Washington. After a winter there and plagued with the depression that always overtook her when she didn’t have enough to do, she set out for the battlefields of Virginia and was once more caught up in the excitement of war. In the winter hiatus at the beginning of 1865 she came again to Washington, borrowed a green silk skirt to wear to the Inaugural Ball, and kept pushing to see President Lincoln to discuss a project she had in mind. A little more than a month before he died, she received Lincoln’s blessing for her plan to help families find missing soldiers and to identify the dead.

  It was a short note: “To the Friends of Missing Persons: Miss Clara Barton has kindly offered to search for the missing prisoners of war. Please address her at Annapolis, giving her name, regiment and company of any missing prisoner. Signed A. Lincoln.” That was all she needed. She placed the treasured endorsement from the now-dead president in the newspapers and moved to Annapolis, Maryland, where the Union army had established “parole camps” for released prisoners to allow them to recuperate before rejoining their regiments.

  As the numbers of parolees grew the camps kept expanding, to the extent that one, called “Camp Parole,” housed as many as twenty-five thousand soldiers. That’s where Clara Barton set up shop with some assistance from the War Department. She found the records in shambles; no one had adequately processed the released prisoners, so their families didn’t know whether they were dead or alive, and thousands of letters asking for information hadn’t even been opened, much less answered. With the notice she had placed in the newspapers, thousands more letters poured in. Clara sorted the names by state and published them in local newspapers; then she would hear back from soldiers who had been in the same units about the whereabouts of the missing men. Sometimes she heard from the men themselves. She hit the grim jackpot when a young man named Dorence Atwater, who had been imprisoned at infamous Andersonville, revealed that he had been given the prison assignment of recording the name, rank, and cause of death of every soldier who died there. He secretly copied his lists for himself in order to preserve the record for the Union and now he brought them to Clara Barton. Atwater also mapped out at Andersonville where each man was buried in that bleak Georgia cemetery. With more than half of the Union dead lying in unmarked graves, Atwater’s information proved enormously important. And Secretary of War Edwin Stanton decided to act on it.

  In July, Clara Barton, Dorence Atwater, and a party of forty workers boarded ship with the prickly Captain James Moore, bound for Andersonville with the mission of marking the graves. Because of Atwater’s records, by mid-August they were able to place names on the burial plots of 13,000 soldiers, leaving only 400 with the anonymous “Unknown.” It had been a trying time in that horrible place but Clara found that she was something of a celebrity as the “Yankee lady.” Local African Americans came to ask questions about whether they were in fact free; white people in the area had told them that Lincoln’s death meant that the Emancipation Proclamation was no longer valid. Some of the stories they told her foreshadowed things to come in southern states that would cause major battles between the president and Congress. But for now, Clara Barton could rejoice that she had accomplished what she set out to do—show respect to thousands of dead Union soldiers, recognizing them by name. In the ceremony marking the achievement, it was Clara Barton who was asked to raise the flag. “My own hands have helped to run up the old flag on our great and holy ground,” she wrote in her diary. “I ought to be satisfied—I believe I am.”

  There was still much work to do, with many thousands of letters to answer. Clara was drawing no salary and running out of money. With a great deal of difficulty she prevailed on Congress to appropriate fifteen thousand dollars to the enterprise. She went herself to testify before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, perhaps making her the first woman to appear at a congressional panel. By the time her Washington “Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army” closed in 1867 she and a small staff had responded to more than 63,000 letters and determined the fate of more than 22,000 men. But Clara Barton’s work had just begun.

  “TWICE EVERY WEEK during warm weather, Washington gives itself a three hours’ play-spell, puts on its holiday clothes, goes into its pleasant parks, walks on the grass, sits under the trees and admires and criticizes itself.” As a government worker, Lois Adams enjoyed the 3 p.m. closing time of the agencies on Saturdays, when she and much of the rest of the city gathered on the White House lawn to enjoy the melodies of the Marine Band. The School for Music Boys at the Washington Barracks was turning out talented musicians and the free concerts at the president’s house on Saturday and on the Capitol grounds on Wednesday evenings helped settle the Capital City into a sense of normalcy after the earthquake of events in the spring and early summer. But not everything could return to the way it was. Ford’s Theatre tried to stage a new play and the reaction was so strong that the War Department closed it down. (The building was converted to government offices and not restored and reopened as a theater until 1968.) And, of course, there was a new family in the White House.

  President Johnson’s wife, Eliza, and their two grown daughters, two sons, one son-in-law, and five young grandchildren moved to Washington in September. The other son-in-law, daughter Mary’s husband, and the Johnsons’ son Robert had died in the war. A house full of family presided over by a first lady with no political ambitions couldn’t have marked a sharper contrast to the Lincoln White House. But the president’s wife did act as a strong influence on his career. Eliza Johnson had married her husband when she was sixteen years old and “She was the stepping stone to all the honors and fame my father attained,” their daughter Martha Patterson attested.

  The couple had met when the seventeen-year-old Andrew left Raleigh, North Carolina, to settle in Greeneville, Tennessee, to work as a tailor. Both had grown up poor, but unlike Andrew, Eliza was educated and the story spread that it was she who taught her adolescent suitor the alphabet. During Johnson’s years in Congress, his wife spent most of her time in Tennessee, not Washington, so this was not a homecoming for the now fifty-five-year-old first lady and she was not well, probably suffering from tuberculosis. “Mrs. Johnson was a retiring, kind, gentle, old lady, too much of an invalid to do the honors of the house, which care and pleasure she gladly transferred to her two daughters, Mrs. Patterson and Mrs. Stover,” Julia Grant recalled; “she always came into the drawing room after the long state dinners to take coffee and receive the greetings of her husband’s guests. She was always dressed elegantly and appropriately.” Very different from Mrs. Grant’s view of Mary Lincoln. As for Mrs. Lincoln, she moaned dramatically to Elizabeth Blair Lee, “the utter impossibility of living another day, so wretched, appears to me, as an impossibility.”

  Things were not going well for the former first lady, friendless in Chicago. However, her one true friend in Washington, Elizabeth Keckley, stayed faithful to her, keeping up a correspondence. Lizzie was doing some work as well for the current White House hostesses, Martha Patterson and Mary Stover, the Johnson daughters. “Mrs. Patterson and Mrs. Stover were kindhearted, plain, unassuming women, making no pretensions to elegance,” Mrs. Keckley recounted with some amazement that one day she found “Mrs. Patterson busily at wor
k with a sewing machine. The sight was a novel one to me for the White House, for as long as I remained with Mrs. Lincoln, I do not recollect ever having seen her with a needle in her hand.” Because the White House women could sew for themselves, the relationship with Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker did not last. They wanted Lizzie Keckley to measure and cut fabric for them to piece together. The proud couturier refused.

  With unpretentious women in the White House, it fell to Julia Grant to fill in as Washington’s hostess. “Our receptions were brilliant,” she immodestly remembered. “The house would not hold our guests. The New York papers used to make wonderful cartoons of General Grant’s house and surroundings on reception days and of General Grant’s hand after the reception.” With “distinguished soldiers and statesmen” paying homage on these “gala days” it was clear that a campaign was under way to make Ulysses S. Grant the next president of the United States. But for now, the man who held that office was Andrew Johnson.

  Because he had stayed true to the Union after Tennessee seceded and because he had given speeches all over his state castigating the southern leaders and the plantation aristocracy, the Republicans who nominated Johnson for vice president thought they had picked a like-minded man. By the time the new Congress came into session in December, the singular path Johnson had decided to follow would lead to bitter battles ahead. But on December 18 the now-recovered Secretary of State William Seward formally announced the Thirteenth Amendment as the law of the land. Twenty-seven states, or three-quarters of the thirty-six making up the one United States of America, had ratified the constitutional provision abolishing slavery. It was cause for celebration. And Virginia Clay was back in town.

  CHAPTER 9

  LEFT: Sara Agnes Pryor, a successful author and social welfare activist, suf fered deprivation and danger in the South during the Civil War. RIGHT: Virginia Clay Clopton, the “most brilliant of them all” among the women in Washington’s prewar social circles, wrote a compelling memoir and became a stump-speaking suf fragist.

  (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [LC_USZC4_7988]; strph480020010, William Emerson Strong Photograph Album, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.)

  Virginia and Varina Return, Sara Survives, Mary Is Humiliated, Kate Loses

  1866–1868

  Virginia Clay had no idea what to expect as she sat on the train carrying her back to the city she had so captivated as a leading belle in what seemed like an eternity ago. Back then the respected Alabama senator Clement C. Clay’s bright and witty young wife, the undisputed star at Mrs. Gwin’s still-talked-about ball, gathered crowds around her in every drawing room. Now she was coming to the Capital City as a supplicant from a defeated land, begging parole for her imprisoned husband. From the moment she received word that President Johnson would consider her “application for permission to visit Washington,” friends and family tried to talk her out of making the trip. It would do no good, they argued, and it might actually do harm to the cause of securing her husband’s release from Fort Monroe. “The efforts of the wives of other prisoners,” Virginia knew, “not only had been of no avail, but in some instances had made them the direct objects of attack.” She particularly had in mind Johnson’s reaction to Varina Davis’s entreaties, which “became the talk of the whole country.” The president had lashed out at the former Confederate first lady, complaining to a visiting delegation from South Carolina that she was an angry woman who lacked the “proper spirit,” in remarks that were picked up by the press. Virginia’s elderly and ill in-laws especially begged her not to go, convinced she “would be attacked on every side so soon as I entered the Federal Capital.” Mainly they wanted her to stay in Huntsville, Alabama, to take care of them, something this spirited woman definitely did not want to do, so she set off for Washington. In her stops along the way, friends from years before offered encouragement, and from the “hour of my arrival in the capital on November 17 my misgivings gave place to courage.”

  It must have been shocking to see the city, much altered over the years of the war. It would take until the end of the decade and a new census to state officially what was obvious to anyone on the street—there were so many more people than there had been when Mrs. Clay left only five years earlier. The population increased by 75 percent in the 1860s, more than any other decade in the city’s history, and the physical appearance of the place had changed markedly, with shops and restaurants Virginia had never seen before lining the streets, government buildings that she had last seen as construction sites—the Grecian temples of the Treasury and Patent Buildings—now elegant in completion, and proudly towering over it all the magnificent Capitol dome with Freedom reigning tall on top. Only the pathetic protrusion of the unfinished and abandoned Washington Monument stood the same.

  Virginia took a room at the wonderfully familiar Willard’s Hotel and “for the next few days I knew no moment alone.” Her old friends gathered round, delighted to have her back, and eager to hear how she had fared through the war. And President Johnson sent word that he would see her in a few days. Clement Clay and Jefferson Davis had been locked up for six months since the government issued the order for their arrest, alleging their involvement in the assassination of President Lincoln. In that time no charges had been filed, no trial date set, and no real evidence brought against them. While she waited to see the president, Virginia consulted with lawyers, building the case for her husband’s release.

  The newspapers tracked her movements. “Mrs. Clement Clay has an interview with the president today in relation to the release of her husband,” one item revealed. She was putting herself at the mercy of a man she wouldn’t have paid much attention to in her glory days; when Johnson served in the Senate he “had seldom been seen in social gatherings in the capital.” But when she walked into the White House who would be there but one of the stars of those gatherings: “one of the first familiar faces I saw as I entered was that of Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas.” Adele had been busy trying to secure pardons for her southern friends and was having some success, including for her husband’s running mate in the 1860 presidential campaign, Herschel Johnson. “The amnesty was granted at the intercession of Mrs. Douglas,” according to the newspaper reports. Now Virginia’s friend from the time of “flounces and furbelows” offered to intercede for her, “with the affectionate warmth so well-known to me in other and happier days.”

  The women were ushered in to see the president who appeared deaf to their pleas; Addie Douglas burst into tears and threw “herself down on her knees before him.” But Virginia refused to follow suit: “I had no reason to respect the Tennessean before me . . . my heart was full of indignant protest that such an appeal as Mrs. Douglas’s should have been necessary; but that, having been made, Mr. Johnson could refuse it, angered me still more.” The president dismissed the women saying he would consult with his cabinet and suggesting Virginia try her luck with the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton.

  Knowing that Radical Republican Stanton was the puppet master behind Johnson’s accusations against her husband, Mrs. Clay prepared for disappointment as she “briefly, but bravely, proceeded with my story.” In an unpleasant interview Stanton claimed to be neither Clay’s judge nor accuser. She took this bit of information as a good sign, though her legal team seemed less encouraged, and moved on to her next target—General Grant. At his house she found a far more sympathetic soul. The stern and vindictive Stanton was replaced by a gracious Grant, ready to hear her out. If it were up to him, he told the amazed woman, all the prisons would be opened and every prisoner released “unless Mr. Davis might be detained for a while to satisfy public clamour.” He assured her, “Your husband’s manly surrender entitles him to all you ask.” Thrilled, Virginia asked Grant to put his words in writing, whereupon he called his wife to act as stenographer. Julia Grant “shook my hand with the cordiality of a friend” and chatted about acquaintances they had in common. It was all so strange and disconcerting. Here was Vi
rginia Clay in a house in Georgetown that had once belonged to a fellow Alabaman, enjoying a pleasant conversation with the man being hailed as the “Hero of the Hour,” and “Our next President,” when only a few months before he had been leading an army that had kept her on the run for most of the war.

  IN THE FIRST months after secession, the new capital in Richmond seemed much the same as the old one in Washington for the members of the Confederate government. Many of the families knew each other well and they fell into a comfortable pattern of dinners and entertainments—Virginia’s acting talents once again came to the fore, this time as Mrs. Malaprop—similar to the ones they had left behind. As in the federal capital, once the fighting started the hospitals filled quickly with the women rushing to provide aid. But as the war wore on and the Union blockade closed down southern ports, making imports impossible and cutting off the revenue from exporting cotton, prices shot up and scarcity took hold. “The price of board for my husband alone now amounted to more than his income,” Virginia later decried the situation in the Confederate capital; “our treasury was terribly depleted, and our food supply for the army was diminishing at a lamentable rate.”

  The Clay hometown of Huntsville had come under Union control, so Virginia couldn’t go there, but the high prices and empty shelves in Richmond meant she couldn’t stay there for long, either, so she moved from one relative’s house to another. She and the other women “sat and planned and compared our news of the battle-fields, or discussed the movements of the army,” while they “did a prodigious amount of sewing for our absent husbands.” Luckily for her life as a refugee, Virginia had no children to worry about, and after her mother died when she was three years old, she had spent much of her childhood in the homes of aunts and uncles. The little girl learned early that charming her relatives—all of them politicians—worked for her and she operated on the assumption that charm and pluck could get her through almost anything, including war. “Women of the Confederacy cultivated such an outward indifference to Paris fashions as would have astonished our former competitors in the Federal Capital,” Virginia joked, turning necessity into virtue.