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

by Cokie Roberts

  Her husband in jail, under conditions so dire that she was afraid he was dying, and her small children sent off thousands of miles away, Varina was left with only the baby, one-year-old Winnie, her little “Pie Cake,” as she puzzled over her prospects. For the present, her main objective was humane treatment for her husband. “Shocked by the most terrible newspaper extras issued every afternoon, which represent my husband to be in a dying condition, I have taken the liberty, without any previous acquaintance with you, of writing to you,” she bravely addressed the doctor in charge at Fort Monroe, the first of many letters she sent without ever hearing back from him. Dr. John Craven too was under orders not to communicate.

  Varina’s letters to the doctor were just some of the many she was mailing out from what was little better than house arrest—she was allowed to go out in Savannah but not to leave the city. When she learned that her husband had been shackled in chains she penned a blistering missive to her old friend Francis Preston Blair: “Shame-shame upon your people! . . . May God except you from the curse which He will surely visit upon such sin.” Preston Blair tried to assist Varina, telling President Johnson that it would make him look good if he showed a “tenderness” to Davis’s wife, even if he didn’t want to show any to the Confederate president himself. To the former tailor Johnson, Jefferson Davis epitomized the southern aristocracy, which the president hated; he rejected Blair’s appeal. Varina didn’t have any better luck with another old friend, Montgomery Meigs.

  Meigs and Jefferson Davis had worked closely together building the Capitol and the Aqueduct, their wives were friendly, and Davis had helped the Meigs’ son John get into West Point. But John’s death had erased any hint of friendship in Meigs’s mind. He refused to answer Varina himself, instead sending word to her through the Union army in Savannah that her husband’s health had improved. Meigs harbored no sympathy for the women of the South. “Let the rebels take care of their own widows,” he remarked; they had “filled” the North with widows aplenty. Not only were her current letters producing no results, but Varina saw some of her past correspondence spread all over the newspapers. When the government searched through her husband’s papers and discovered her letters, they were leaked to the press. An insulted Varina protested to the secretary of state about releasing her mail to “newsmongers.” She vacillated between her temper and her terror as she tried in vain to help her husband.

  Varina begged President Johnson to let her join her children in Canada but he didn’t reply, and she was incensed when she read what he said to the South Carolina delegation about her being an angry woman; she protested that she had never written to him in anything but a courteous vein. Even though, she told a friend, “his unmanly persecution of me has been very often a great temptation,” she knew better than to attack the president, because it would only hurt her husband. “Mr. Johnson’s theories about my character are of small importance, because I have never been in the same room with him in my life, unless unconsciously. . . . I pray God I may bear all the insults, and agonies of the life to come with the same quiet fortitude which I have evinced in the past.” She had had to show fortitude in the past because Varina had a hard time as first lady in Richmond, not at all unlike her counterpart a little over a hundred miles away, in Washington.

  Just as Mary Lincoln had been suspect in the Union capital because of her southern family, Varina Davis’s northern roots raised eyebrows in the Confederate seat of power. Her grandfather, Joseph Howell, had been governor of New Jersey and she herself had gone to school in Philadelphia. The women of Richmond, particularly those hailing from the snobbish First Families of Virginia, didn’t hide their disdain for the newcomers who came with Confederate officeholders. Varina in particular bore the brunt of their snubs and snide remarks. With her olive complexion—“tawny,” according to a hostile Richmond editor—she didn’t even look like a true southern belle. (Years later, when southerners objected to the First Lady of the Confederacy moving to New York, she declared to her daughter that she could do what she wanted because she was “free, brown, & 64.”) She was tagged, just as Mrs. Lincoln was, as a “coarse Western woman.” And she possessed a famously cutting wit, which she often didn’t hold in check.

  The women of Richmond did show some sympathy to Varina Davis when her five-year-old son fell off a balcony and died of a fractured skull. Unlike Mary Lincoln after the death of Willie, Varina carried on her duties in her grief, joining the thousands of mourners at the little boy’s funeral, though she was eight months pregnant. The welcome birth of the new baby girl in June 1864 marked a moment of happiness but the war soon took its inexorable turn, leading to her husband’s imprisonment and her inability to do anything about it. Not that she wasn’t trying. She wrote to everyone she could think of, including General Grant and Horace Greeley, people she would have never have had anything to do with only a few months earlier.

  Though Dr. Craven at Fort Monroe wasn’t responding to her letters, he did use her information to make Jefferson Davis’s situation more comfortable and then, at last, the prisoner received permission to exchange letters with his wife. She informed him of her efforts: “I have appealed again and again to go to you, but never an answer. President Johnson stated to one of a committee who called upon him that my application were not in a proper spirit”; this was the now-famous statement to the South Carolina men. “Perhaps he may change his mind. I do not know.” She was upset that some of her mail had not reached her husband; she didn’t think it was because of anything she said in her censored letters. “God knows I repress all which might be offensive to anyone.” Davis probably had trouble believing that about his tart-tongued wife, and he tried to call her off: “Let me beg you to address all your energies to the heavy task imposed on you in having sole charge of the children. You cannot effect anything for me and would probably meet wounding repulse in any attempt to do so.”

  It’s not that Jefferson Davis didn’t think women were capable of swaying men in power. He had sent the famous spy Rose Greenhow to England as an unofficial emissary for the Confederacy. While there she published her prison story and stirred up sympathy for the southern cause. (When she returned in 1864 the ship carrying her ran afoul of the Union blockade and the lifeboat she transferred to was swamped. The two thousand dollars in gold pieces sewn into her dress weighed her down and drowned her.) So he knew how to use women for propaganda purposes. He might have thought that his wife would do more harm than good; she told him herself that the president didn’t think her requests were proper. But then Clement Clay was set free, and it was clearly Virginia’s doing.

  By then President Johnson had given Varina permission to travel. First she went home to Mississippi to inspect their devastated property, then to New Orleans to the welcome arms of old friends, and from there to Canada, where she could join her children and mother and sister. While she was there she heard that her husband was gravely ill. This time when she shot off a telegram to the president, asking, “Is it possible that you will keep me from my dying husband? Can I come to see him?” The answer was yes. The press tracked her progress from Canada. “Mrs. Jeff Davis has left here to visit her husband. She is described as of superior personal appearance and manners with highly cultivated mind and admirable power of conversation,” came the report from a Montreal correspondent. A Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper described her arrival at Fort Monroe:

  Mrs. Jefferson Davis accompanied by two servants and her youngest child, an interesting little girl about two years old, arrived here at an early hour this morning. . . . Immediately on receiving the gratifying intelligence of the permission allowed her by President Johnson to visit her husband confined here, Mrs. Davis . . . left Montreal. She made no stoppage on the way, but came through direct, and made very quick traveling time.

  It had been almost a year since Varina had seen her now achingly emaciated husband. She was shocked at what she saw when she entered his barren cell with its rude necessities—a horse bucket for water, a ma
ttress infested with lice. He looked awful, though the doctor assured her that his condition was not fatal. General Nelson A. Miles, the commander at Fort Monroe, had fired Dr. Craven for being too friendly to the former Confederate president, which left the doctor free to publish a book sympathetic to Davis, including all of Varina’s unanswered letters, softening public attitudes toward the prisoner Horrified by her husband’s condition, Varina again begged President Johnson for his intervention, beseeching him to let Davis have “a quiet dark room at night” and “the power to walk about at will during the day,” but even those modest requests got nowhere. So Varina Davis decided the only thing for her to do was go to Washington herself.

  It was quite a moment when the former cabinet wife, Senate wife, and first lady of the Confederacy showed up in the Federal City. The New York Tribune reported with wonder “the great sensation” of Delaware senator Willard Saulsbury actually appearing in public with Varina. He took her to church “clothed and in his right mind,” the reporter joked, adding, “Mrs. Davis has received very marked attention, and many distinguished personages have made unseemly haste to pay their respects to her.” Varina was back in the city she loved, with the people she had missed longingly during the years when she had to carry the burden of a cause she knew was doomed from the beginning. She was especially glad to see “my dear friends” Montgomery Blair and his sister Lizzie Lee. But Senator Wilson also “called with kind words of sympathy” and General Grant promised he “would be glad if he could serve me in any way,” Varina remembered appreciatively in her memoir. It was just the president who was a problem. “He sent me a verbal message of discourteous character” telling her to go see senators instead. But senators had no control over General Miles at Fort Monroe. Several of her political friends interceded and Johnson agreed at last to see her: “This was my first and last experience as a supplicant.”

  Andrew Johnson repeated to Mrs. Davis the same thing he told Mrs. Clay: his hands were tied by public opinion. Varina reminded him that he was the person who had stirred up the public with his proclamation charging Davis with conspiring to assassinate Lincoln. Johnson admitted he didn’t believe those charges, explaining he “was in the hands of wildly excited people,” but when she pressed him for a retraction he replied, “I would if I could but I cannot.” His standing with the Congress was too precarious, he whined, and if members could find any excuse to impeach him they would. Just then a senator she didn’t know burst into the room and berated the president so shockingly that Varina left feeling “sorry for a man whose code of morals I could not understand.” Though she walked away from her unpleasant interview empty-handed, she soon did manage to find a way to improve her husband’s treatment at Fort Monroe through the intervention of the new doctor. Then Davis’s tormentor, General Miles, was reassigned. Montgomery Blair’s wife, Minna, guessed Varina had manipulated the move: “I see by the Herald Gen. Miles is removed. If so I congratulate you upon it.” Mrs. Davis had made no secret of her views.

  Now that she had succeeded in making his life better in prison, with friends visiting regularly and bringing good food and drink, Varina could marshal her forces for the ultimate goal: her husband’s release. She decided to follow Virginia Clay’s example and pay a visit to Horace Greeley. He wrote a helpful editorial as she lined up more support, traveling to Baltimore, where she was introduced to John W. Garrett, president of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and a close friend of Secretary of War Stanton. That did the trick. Garrett, after some considerable argument, prevailed on Stanton to instruct the attorney general to release Davis for trial.

  Two years and a day after his capture, thanks to the efforts of his wife, Jefferson Davis walked out of Fort Monroe. With an entourage of lawyers and aides, he and Varina traveled to Richmond, where they stayed in the same hotel room they had moved to six years earlier as the new President and First Lady of the Confederacy. The next day, Horace Greeley and radical abolitionist Gerrit Smith were among those supplying the $100,000 bail Davis posted in a courtroom set up in his old office. He walked out a free man. He and his wife could go to Canada to reunite with their children and figure out their futures.

  WHILE VARINA DAVIS and Virginia Clay lobbied for freedom for their husbands, Elizabeth Blair Lee pushed for a promotion for hers. Throughout the entire war Lizzie had browbeat members of Congress and the executive for an admiralty for Samuel Phillips Lee, with her father as her staunch ally. But Lizzie’s brother Montgomery Blair blocked all of their moves, still smarting over a falling-out he had had with Lee years before. Now that the war had ended, another matter thwarted Lee’s push for a higher rank—money: he had too much, having commanded the largest squadron in the navy for two years, enforcing the Union blockade. The sale of the ships and their cargoes confiscated by the blockade reaped huge rewards for the Union sailors on all ships within range of the one captured—they all received a percentage of the total sale. It was an even better deal for the commander, who took home a twentieth of every single prize from every ship under him. And Lee’s take of the booty from confiscated ships came to more than $100,000. It was a sum sure to arouse envy among fellow officers and the public. Lizzie’s case in trying to help her husband was almost as unpopular as the ones of the southern women.

  Lee had stayed on duty until the bitter end of the war, though he had asked to come home when Lizzie found the lump in her breast, which did eventually require surgery. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles wanted Lee to hold his position as commander of the Mississippi River Squadron in case Confederate leaders tried to escape to the West. So it was not until August 1865 that the long-absent Lee returned to his wife and son. Lizzie was thrilled to have her husband home as she went about her much-loved duties running the orphan asylum. But then a bolt hit them from the Department of the Navy. Secretary Welles assigned Phillips Lee—still not an admiral—to California. The Blair family, except Montgomery, went into action. Lee himself ignored the chain of command and went directly to the president, the man his wife had nursed for a month. Preston Blair stormed into Johnson’s office as well but the navy secretary held firm.

  Finally, after his father had begged him to “bury this feud before you bury your parents,” Montgomery Blair went to Welles arguing that it would be a horrible blow to his elderly parents for Lizzie and her son to move to California. They needed her and adored her little boy, who at age eight had lived with them his whole life. An even more potent lobbying force greeted Welles when he went to the White House and found that Lizzie had enlisted the support of her most heartrending troops: sixty to eighty orphans from the asylum. The matron with them implored him “for the children’s sake, to revoke the orders, that Mrs. Lee could remain.” Welles thought it was a cheap trick; why couldn’t Lizzie and little Blair stay in Washington while Lee moved to California? But at last he relented and substituted an assignment in Hartford, Connecticut, as president of a newly created Board of Examiners to hear applications of volunteer officers who wanted a permanent commission.

  As the military created new entities to deal with the end of the war, they closed old ones. Dorothea Dix shuttered her office as superintendent of nurses in September 1866. Her high standards and strict rules combined with her imperious manner had so irritated senior officers that they curtailed her power midway through the war by giving the surgeon general a shared say in the appointment of nurses, along with Miss Dix. But she stayed on duty securing pensions for the wounded, visiting those still in the hospitals and responding to requests. When she was ready to depart, Secretary Stanton asked what she wanted for her extraordinary service. “The flag of my country,” she replied. Stanton did better than that. Three years later, accompanying a special stand of three flags presented to her was a congressional resolution acknowledging “the inestimable services rendered by Miss Dorothea L. Dix for the care, succor, and relief of the sick and wounded soldiers of the United States on the battlefield, in camps, and hospitals during the recent war, and for her benevolent and diligent lab
ors and devoted efforts to whatever might contribute to their comfort and welfare, it is ordered that a stand of arms of the United States colors be presented to Miss Dix.” General Sherman did the honors of making the presentation.

  Clara Barton finished up her work at the Missing Persons Office and went on the lecture circuit for a couple of years, until a breakdown in her health sent her on a rest cure to Europe, where a whole new mission would await her. As she left she was beginning to realize that the war that allowed her to be of such use had changed life for women in America, later reflecting “woman was at least fifty years in advance of the normal position which continued peace . . . would have assigned her.”

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long for peacetime politics to heat to a boiling point, with northern Republicans increasingly disillusioned with the new president. Lizzie Lee briefly moved with her husband to Hartford, where the local sentiments worried her: “The tone of talk is exactly like that of the secessionists before the war—and our side are disheartened,” she fretted. “But we women kind can only hold our tongues and pray.” The divisions over Johnson’s Reconstruction plans grew wider, and the arguments over civil rights for African Americans louder. Though Andrew Johnson in his conversations with Varina Davis and Virginia Clay seemed to quake in his boots about the Congressional reaction to releasing their husbands, he showed no qualms about handing out thousands of pardons for other Confederates, much less taking on the lawmakers over policy. Johnson’s Reconstruction allowed southern states to reenter the Union without having enacted any social or economic reforms or any provisions for freedmen suffrage. When Congress came back to Washington for the session following the assassination, members found a completely different road map for the future from what they were ready to accept. And they set about redrawing it.