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

by Cokie Roberts

  “A general gloom prevails here because of the scarcity and high price of food,” Clement Clay wrote to her in 1863 from Richmond, where the soldiers were subsisting on half rations with no vegetables or fruit or coffee or sugar. “Don’t mention this, as it will do us harm to let it get abroad.” The southern press tried to suppress the bad news but on April 2athe sight of thousands of weapons-wielding women descending on the shops and warehouses of Richmond demanding “bread or blood” couldn’t be kept secret. So the Clays were not all that sorry when Clement lost his bid for reelection to the Confederate Senate in 1863. As the couple contemplated the next move, Jefferson Davis assigned his friend to a new mission: Clay was to go to Canada as part of a recently created Secret Service with the twofold goal of creating disruptions on the northern border and sounding out the prospects for peace.

  When Clement Clay left for Canada in 1864, his wife decided to go south to Georgia. Unfortunately for her, William Tecumseh Sherman was headed in that direction as well, so she moved farther and farther into Confederate territory, first to Columbus, Georgia, then to Macon, and finally to Beech Island, South Carolina, a town near Augusta. The deprivation of Richmond now spread wide across the Confederacy. “Potato coffee” and “peanut chocolate” substituted for the real thing and “needles were becoming precious as heirlooms; pins were the rarest of luxuries . . . writing paper was scarcely to be had.” With no reliable lines of communication the couple occasionally resorted to placing “personals” in the newspapers to inform each other as to their whereabouts but now Virginia felt completely cut off. She was hoping for word from her husband—or someone—to tell her what to do, beyond helping hide the silver, as Sherman made his march from Atlanta to the sea. “Great excitement all over the country caused by Sherman’s advances. God in mercy help us now!” Virginia beseeched in her diary, a more raw account of the story than the witty memoir she authored years later.

  “No letters, no telegrams! What am I to do?” She anguished both for herself and for Clement; “no letter or intelligence from my husband! Will he ever come?” And then in the house where she was staying the baby died. “I miss her all day! Her dear presence, merry laugh, her cherub form!” And the news of the outside world, to the extent that she could ascertain it, was bleak: “great loss of officers & men in Tennessee.” And then on December 22, “Savannah has fallen! Oh! My country—” Rumors swirled—Davis was dead, went one; Richmond evacuated, another; Clay headed to Mexico, yet another. Over that lonely Christmas, “homeless, husbandless, childless,” Virginia kept following the routes of approaching ships, praying each one might bring her husband, wondering each night if he “ran the fearful blockade last night, or will he tonight, while I lie safe in my bed?”

  But she couldn’t be sure she really was safe at Beech Island so after she found “a suitable escort” she moved on to Macon, where in early February her husband finally arrived. He had barely made it—unable to break the blockade, he had to wade into shore under gunfire—but he was there. And that’s where they were when they learned that President Andrew Johnson had put a price on Clement Clay’s head. “We receive the President’s Proclamation offering $100,000 for my dear husband’s arrest as the murderer of Lincoln!” a terrified Virginia Clay recorded in her diary on May 11. Macon was now under the control of the Union army and the couple had just the day before heard of the capture of Jefferson Davis. Clement Clay decided to turn himself in. His wife was sure he would hang.

  They boarded the same train with Varina and Jefferson Davis and their four children, plus Varina’s sister Maggie Howell and some nurses for the children. Then it was on to a “brig-rigged steamer,” the Clyde guarded by the Fourth Michigan Regiment on board and the gunship Tuscarosa alongside. On the trip up the Atlantic to an uncertain fate there was a moment’s respite from fear on “the water deeply, darkly, beautifully blue & the porpoises in shoals . . . chasing each other.” But then as they dropped anchor in the waters outside Fort Monroe, Mrs. Clay shuddered, “I sadly fear that they will land my darling at this fort. God forbid!” Before the men were taken away, Virginia and Clement said their farewells privately in their stateroom. The Yankee press told a different version of the story: “The parting of Mr. and Mrs. Clement C. Clay was more demonstrative and affecting than the separation of traitor Jeff. and his Serena [sic]. . . . Mrs. Davis bore the parting remarkably well and it did not seem to cost her much effort to do so.” In fact the Davis family was in distress, with the “weeping of children and the wailing of women” informing the secluded Virginia that the men had been taken ashore.

  Then the women found out what was in store for them as they were summarily strip-searched and informed they could neither leave the country nor go north to New York or Baltimore. So it was back south, past Fort Sumter—“Desolate, historic Sumter! Flag floating & sentry walking”—and on to Savannah and the famous Pulaski House hotel, where the town turned out to greet them. The federal soldiers patrolling the city drilling outside included, to Virginia’s horror, “a regiment of Negroes in full dress!” It would be a new world for these southern slave owners. Leaving the Davis brood behind in Savannah, Virginia worked her way to Huntsville, where she found the Clay family house occupied by the Union army, and her seventy-five-year-old in-laws in terrible shape, with their son’s imprisonment landing a final blow after a wartime of want. And the news from prison was bad.

  Some reports had the men in chains, kept in solitary cells, with no books allowed and no visitors, guarded by soldiers tramping up and down twenty-four hours a day. That meant no lawyers for the trial expected at any time. Virginia heard rumors that Clay and Davis would be tried by a military tribunal, like Mary Surratt, and she was terrified that they would come to the same end. She had to do something; it would be “impossible for a wife, knowing her husband to be innocent, and resenting the ignobleness of a government which would thus refuse to a self-surrendered prisoner the courtesies the law allows to the lowest of criminals, to rest passively under conditions so alarming.” She had been writing to everyone she knew, but to no avail. It was time for her to go to Washington herself. “If you come North,” a letter from her husband warned, “you must come prepared to hear much to wound you, and to meet with coldness and incivility where you once received kindness and courtesy. Some will offend you with malice, some unwittingly and from mere habit, and some even through a sense of duty.” So it was with more than a little surprise and gratitude that Virginia Clay found she was treated kindly not only by her old friends but also by the enemy general in chief himself.

  The letter Ulysses S. Grant dictated to his wife, Julia, could not have been more direct: “As it has been my habit heretofore to intercede for the release of all prisoners who I thought could safely be left at large, either on parole or by amnesty, I now respectfully recommend the release of Mr. C. C. Clay.” It was addressed to the President of the United States. An ecstatic Virginia Clay thought she had won. She rushed to the White House, letter in hand, asking permission to visit her husband at Fort Monroe and to be “furnished with copies of the charges against him.” No answer. Despite repeated sallies into the president’s office, Virginia wasn’t making any progress. Finally, Johnson tried to send her back to Stanton, provoking an outburst: “I will not go to Mr. Stanton, Mr. President! You issued the proclamation charging my husband with crime!” Johnson meekly replied that he had been forced to do so “to satisfy public clamour,” since Clay was in Canada at the same time as the Lincoln assassination conspirators. An enraged Virginia Clay demanded to know if Johnson thought the charges were true: “Do you, who nursed the breast of a Southern mother, think Mr. Clay could be guilty of that crime?” The president did not. But he also would not release the prisoner or allow her to visit him.

  Andrew Johnson was already in political hot water with Congress, which was about to come back into session. He had spent the summer and early fall instituting his own form of Reconstruction, which included liberal pardons parceled out by the thousands
. He didn’t raise an objection as states enacted repressive “Black Codes,” treating the freedmen as little different from slaves, and he looked the other way at violence against the formerly enslaved men and women of the South. But releasing one of the Confederacy’s top men would be a step too far, Johnson believed, and the Republicans in Congress would have his head. Still, Virginia, who now haunted the White House daily, was able to extract a promise that the prisoners would not be tried by a military commission, and at last Johnson provided her with a permit to visit her husband. First she would go to New York City to consult with some of the men who had been agitating for Clay’s release, among them the newspaper publisher Horace Greeley. Their conversation took place in a busy hotel hallway, “now thronging with Southern guests.” Virginia couldn’t help laughing when she saw some “prominent Southern generals” staring at them “with a look of surprise that said very plainly, ‘Well! If there isn’t Mrs. Clem. Clay hobnobbing with that old Abolitionist!’ ” Little did she know then that she would hobnob with Horace Greeley on many a platform as she became a prominent public voice for women’s suffrage in later years.

  When Virginia Clay arrived at Fort Monroe, despite her pass from the president the authorities would not let her in nor permit her to contact Johnson asking him to give the word. Only after much negotiation was she allowed to spend a few depressing hours with her husband. Clement Clay, convinced that the secretary of war was ready to see him hang, dispatched her back to Washington with even greater urgency: “You must not get discouraged!” he pleaded. “My life depends upon it, I fear!” Though she had not been partaking of the social season in her quasi-widow position, Mrs. Clay decided it would be wise to show up at a White House reception, “as a stroke of policy.” She had been warmly received by the president’s daughters, who served as his hostesses, and now that they were showing off the freshly repaired and redecorated Executive Mansion, Virginia thought that attending the event would “further win the President’s good offices.” Just as she was preparing to leave the house where she was staying, she learned that her husband’s mother had died, poignantly asking as she expired, “What of my son?”

  The news had the effect of infuriating Virginia, who tore into the president’s office the next day demanding, “Who is President of the United States.” To the reply, “I am supposed to be,” she flew at him: “But you are not!” She berated him with the information about her treatment at Fort Monroe and he promised that she could go back whenever she wished and for a longer time. But when she pressed him on paroling Clay, he reverted to his excuse that it was up to the War Department. This time she was having none of it. Trying to appease her, the president told her to write up her case and pledged to read it at the next cabinet meeting. “ ‘You will Not!’ I answered hotly. ‘Why?’ he asked, cynically. ‘Because,’ I replied, ‘you are afraid of Mr. Stanton! He would not allow it! But let me come to the Cabinet meeting, and I will read it. . . . I do not fear Mr. Stanton or anyone else.’ ” And with that she flounced off to see her husband at Fort Monroe.

  SO VIRGINIA CLAY was not in the city when Adele Cutts Douglas married for the second time, on January 23, 1866. (Adele’s old rival, Harriet Lane, had married for the first time just twelve days earlier.) Virginia might not have been invited under any circumstances since “the marriage was quite private,” according to the Norfolk Post, “the company on the part of the groom being limited to less than half a dozen of his immediate military circle.” Major Robert Williams was a West Point graduate from Virginia, but unlike many of his fellow alumni, he had chosen to stay in the U.S. Army when the Civil War began. The Capital approved of the pairing if the Washington Evening Star is to be believed. Still referred to as “one of the handsomest and most brilliant women in America,” Adele this time around was marrying “one of the finest looking and most fascinating men in the country, so the match is on all sides looked upon as singularly felicitous and fit to be made.” A far cry from the reaction to Adele’s first marriage, when Varina Davis fumed that the Cutts family was marrying her friend off to the malodorous Stephen Douglas for his money.

  But Adele and Douglas had formed a tight partnership; she traveled with him as he debated Abraham Lincoln while running for the Senate, stayed by his side as he campaigned or president in 1860, and nursed him through his illness and death at the age of forty-eight in 1861. She turned the mansion Douglas built not far from Capitol Hill into an important Washington social center, having learned how to bring people with differing viewpoints together from the master of that craft, her great-aunt Dolley Madison. When war came Adele handed the house over to the military for a hospital and moved into the “Cutts Cottage” with her family, and it was there that she and Major Williams said their vows.

  The wedding ended years of speculation about who the winsome young widow might marry. For a while it was “reported and believed in the City” that Salmon Chase was the lucky man, said Elizabeth Blair Lee, until Adele denied the rumor. A few months later Lizzie’s father dropped by to see the devout Catholic woman and discovered “Mrs. Douglas—who he found reading Cicero’s orations in Latin to one of the Holy Fathers looking exquisitely beautiful—& charming. She says she cannot marry without descending to do it & is too proud for that. Mother’s comment was witty but looks hard written so I’ll spare it.” (Eliza Blair had probably made a crack about Stephen Douglas, who was definitely not the favorite of the women of Washington.) There was even talk that Mrs. Douglas might enter the convent, become a Sacred Heart nun.

  Adele didn’t need a husband in order to hold power, as her free rein in the White House made clear. Frequently an item would appear in the newspapers attesting to her access: “Mrs. Stephen Douglas and Mrs. Surgeon General Barnes who were in attendance this morning were both granted special interviews with President Johnson.” For Virginia Clay to have Addie Douglas fighting for her was helpful indeed and now the Alabama woman was also getting help from even more useful quarters.

  “When will wonders cease?” she asked her diary in mid-February. “Who but Hon. Mr. Wilson of Mass. has called! Voluntarily to say he will do anything in his power for me or Mr. Clay! Knows he is innocent. Believes Mr. Davis to be also innocent. Was kind & I melted.” This was a big breakthrough! A political opponent from the deeply abolitionist state of Massachusetts, Republican Senator Henry Wilson, was coming to her aid. When she told the president about Wilson’s endorsement in one of her almost daily forays to the White House, Johnson scoffed that the congressman would never put it in writing for fear of the Radical press. But the persistent Mrs. Clay soon produced a letter from the senator saying he had “no hesitation in recommending” the favorable consideration of her request. The leader of the Radicals in the House, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, also backed the parole. Public opinion had begun to turn. Clay and Davis had been held now for almost ten months with no charges brought against them and no trial date set. But still fearful of the “public clamour” Johnson wouldn’t budge.

  As the president became engaged with the Civil Rights Act and his highly controversial veto, Mrs. Clay took some time off from her relentless lobbying, with a visit to Vinnie Ream’s studio at the Capitol, where the young woman was busy working on her statue of Lincoln. In early April Virginia traveled to Baltimore for the fair of the Ladies’ Southern Relief Association, which raised more than $160,000 to help the destitute South just a year after the bitter war had ended. By the middle of the month, the newspapers reported that “Mrs. Clement C. Clay . . . has laid before the President recommendations for her husband’s release on parole from such officials as General Grant, Senator Wilson and Thad. Stevens.” In a smart public relations move, the tenacious woman had gotten the word to the press. The president no longer had any reason to fear the “public clamour” and on April 17 Andrew Johnson handed Virginia Clay the papers for her husband’s parole. It was all her doing—and everyone knew it, including Jefferson Davis.

  “THE HAPPIEST EVENT for me which has occurred he
re was the release of my friend and fellow sufferer Mr. Clay,” the former Confederate president told his wife, Varina; “he was not allowed to take leave of me, and his wife was unable to obtain the permission she sought to visit me.” Jefferson Davis had not been allowed much in his eleven months at Fort Monroe. At first he had been placed in chains and shackled to his cell but the public uproar that followed news reports about his treatment served to free him from his manacles; still, little else changed. He could not receive mail or books, he could only sleep about two hours at a stretch, and his always fragile health was rapidly deteriorating. Varina Davis, in Savannah with her four children, the oldest of whom had just turned ten, was frantic about her husband’s condition and her own.

  Guards watched her at her hotel, and all of her communications with family and friends had to go through official channels, limiting her words as well as her movements. And though the local Savannah families were kind, Varina agonized when some of the Yankee tourists told the children their father would be hanged; one woman told eight-year-old Jeff that his father was a “a rogue, a liar, an assassin, and that means a murderer, boy; and I hope he may be tied to a stake and burned a little bit at a time.” Union soldiers taught three-year-old Billy Davis to sing, “We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple-tree.” She had to get her children out of there. Her request for permission to move to Augusta was denied but then the children were allowed to leave for Canada, along with her mother and a former slave, Robert Brown, who remained loyal to the family.