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

by Cokie Roberts

  First they refused to seat members of Congress from the Confederacy. Then they proceeded to pass landmark legislation—the nation’s first civil rights bill, stating that “all persons born in the United States,” with the exception of American Indians, were “hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” Congress then approved a bill expanding the Freedmen’s Bureau to include land distribution to African-Americans, plus schools and legal protections. President Johnson vetoed both bills. Congress overrode both vetoes, at the time an unprecedented move on such major legislation. And two-thirds of each House also sent to the states a Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution directing that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” In a section on apportionment of House seats, the amendment inserted the word male in the nation’s governing document for the first time to the distress of women’s rights advocates.

  Andrew Johnson strongly believed that all of these measures infringed on states’ rights and he decided to take his case to the people. In what came to be known as his “swing around the circle” tour, the president went on the road stumping for his candidates for Congress and against the Radical Republicans. Calling Johnson “faithless & unscrupulous,” Mary Lincoln escaped to Springfield, Illinois, when the campaign circus swung into Chicago, complaining to her friend Charles Sumner, “he is endeavoring to ignore all the good, that has been accomplished and returning the slave, into his bondage.”

  It was considered beneath the dignity of the president to campaign personally, and Johnson added to the lack of dignity by his haranguing, vituperative speeches, where onlookers suspected he was drunk much of the time. It was a disaster. The Republicans gained veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate. They used them in 1867 to override Johnson in approving the Tenure of Office Act, requiring the president to obtain Senate consent before firing a cabinet member and to extend suffrage in the District of Columbia to all males over the age of twenty-one. It was the first success in the move to provide voting rights for African-Americans. But supporters of women’s suffrage were bitterly disappointed to have been excluded. The Congress also instituted a Reconstruction plan for the South administered by the federal military, passing several pieces of legislation to effect that highly controversial end. These were still essentially battles over race—how African Americans would be treated in the postwar period when the terrorist organization the Ku Klux Klan had already raised its sheeted head.

  BUT WITH THE end of the war other matters also came before a Congress now able to look to a future with a soon to be united and still expanding country; one surprising new addition came with the purchase of Alaska in 1867, the same year Nebraska was admitted as the thirty-seventh state. American businesses, especially the railroad companies laying tracks across the nation as fast as they could, sent lobbyists to Washington looking for congressional subsidies to pad their pockets. Reporting on the Fortieth Congress, newspaperman John Ellis looked on these agents with amusement; “Women make excellent lobbyists, as they are more plausible than men, and cannot be shaken off as rudely.” Some of the favor seekers offered outright bribes, while others employed more subtle approaches. “The female lobbyist is called in to exert her arts, which are more potent than those of the sterner sex,” Ellis observed. “Congressmen and officials are famous as being the most susceptible men in the world, and the fair charmer is generally successful. Men in public life are very obliging when they choose to be, and these women know how to win favors from them.” Wives of members also were often enlisted by lobbyists, who would give “magnificent presents” requiring the recipient to show “some especial civility.” The wife and the lobbyist would form a friendship; the wife would become convinced of the rightness of the cause and in turn convince her husband. As first lady, “Mrs. Lincoln was much sought after by the lobbyists, who, knowing that they would not dare to hint at a bribe to the President, loaded her with flattery and presents. She was not deceived by them, however and made good use of them to secure the re-election of her husband.”

  THOSE PRESENTS WERE about to come back to humiliate Mrs. Lincoln, who was now doing a good deal of lobbying of her own, not in the halls of the Capitol but by mail from Chicago. She had left the White House strapped with debt and tried desperately to persuade the Congress to contribute her husband’s full four-year salary to her support. The unpopular former first lady instead received Lincoln’s paycheck for one year—$25,000. That plus $1,700 a year from the interest on her husband’s estate and $300 from the rental of the Springfield, Illinois, house would not be enough for her to live according to her “station,” and certainly not enough to pay off her debts. She tried to shame Congress into seeing the sum as an insult to the martyred president: “in return for the sacrifices my great and noble husband made, both in his life and in his death the paltry first year’s salary is offered us; under the circumstances, such injustice has been done us as calls the blush to any true, loyal heart,” Mary seethed to a friend.

  At her wits’ end, Mary Lincoln decided to raise some cash by selling off her finery from the White House years, now that she had adopted mourning black as her only attire. She prevailed on Elizabeth Keckley to help her with the sale and the two met in New York, where Mrs. Lincoln tried to hide her financial embarrassment by calling herself “Mrs. Clarke.” Well acquainted with the New York shopping scene, Mary thought she could discreetly unload her goods to secondhand shops. But she was soon recognized by a pair of unscrupulous businessmen, brokers named Brady and Keyes, who promised they would be able to raise $100,000 fast by selling her things to Republican politicians who would want to keep the public from knowing about Abraham Lincoln’s widow’s financial plight.

  At his direction, Mary wrote a couple of letters to Brady that he would be able to show to the people he was trying to extort for funds. In the backdated letters she explained her situation and asked him to sell her “personal property,” listing some of the articles, with their estimated worth: “1 black center camel’s hair shawl $1500 . . . 1 Russian sable boa $1200 . . . also many other articles, including diamonds, rings, etc.” She put the total value at $24,000 (but said she would settle for $16,000) and described the items as “gifts of dear friends.” She called her position “painfully embarrassing” and reminded her readers that “I am passing through a very painful ordeal, which the country, in remembrance of my noble and devoted husband, should have spared me.” When Brady and Keyes showed the pathetic missives to Republican politicians, they were unmoved. Mary then took the scheme a step further: she released the letters to the New York World and prepared to put her wardrobe on public display. The day the newspaper published the letters, a heavily veiled Mary Lincoln, aka Mrs. Clarke, boarded the train home to Illinois. So she had no idea what a sensation she had caused, though she told Elizabeth Keckley that she overheard people in her car talking about her clothes sale.

  It was all anyone was talking about. The next day when her son Robert accosted her, “almost threatening his life,” Mary Lincoln began to understand what she was in for: “I shall have to endure a round of newspaper abuse from the Republicans because I dared venture to relieve a few of my wants.” She didn’t yet know how much of an understatement that would be. Mrs. Lincoln had named names when accusing Republican politicians of blocking a public subscription for her benefit—with William Seward, Henry Raymond, and Thurlow Weed topping her villains’ list. Political boss and New York newspaperman Weed fought back, and he could fight a good deal harder than the former first lady: “If the American Congress or the American people, have failed to meet the peculiar expectations of Mr. Lincoln’s widow, it is because that personage failed, during his life and since his death, to inspire either with respect or confidence,” he lashed out in the World. “Had Mrs. Lincoln, while in power, borne herself becomingly, the suggestion of a Lincoln fund, by voluntary contributions would have been promptl
y responded to.” He noted the public had handsomely provided for General Grant, and in case anyone had not noticed it, he pointed out that presents worth $24,000 were “suggestive, at least, of offices and contracts, unless the more charitable construction is reached through the assumption that they were expressions of regard and friendship. But it is not known that the wife of any other President, however estimable, was so loaded with shawls, laces, furs, diamonds, rings &etc.”

  Mrs. Keckley tried vainly to defend her friend and former employer, reminding the newspaper editors that women in European royalty had not been attacked when they sold their clothes, but the criticism just kept coming. “The Republican papers are tearing me to pieces,” Mary wailed to Lizzie. “If I had committed murder in every city in this blessed Union, I could not be more traduced.” The Cleveland Herald demanded to know “what was in the 40 boxes” Mary took when she left the White House. The Cincinnati Commercial slammed her as an “intensely vulgar woman . . . her conduct throughout the administration of her husband was mortifying to all who respected him . . . she was always trying to meddle in public affairs and now she will have it known to the whole world that she accepted costly presents from corrupt contractors”; plus, in case anyone had forgotten, her relatives were secessionists. Added the Brooklyn Eagle, “In the meantime Mrs. Lincoln’s peculiar wardrobe continues on exhibition at Brady’s where ‘all sorts and condition’ of men, women, and artists continually visit it, but unfortunately not to buy.”

  That was not the worst of it. Not only did Mary Lincoln get dragged through the mud, she also made no money. So many curiosity seekers stopped in at the showroom that Lizzie Keckley, who stayed in New York to manage the sale, suggested that Brady place a subscription book at the door so everyone could pledge a dollar for the grieving widow. That too was unsuccessful. The loyal Mrs. Keckley then asked famous African-American abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet to stage a series of lectures for Mary’s benefit. They readily agreed but Mrs. Lincoln refused the offer as she sent letter after letter hectoring Lizzie, who was forced to take in sewing to support herself for the two months she tried to assist Mary Lincoln. Sorrowfully, Mary confessed, “I am feeling so friendless in the world. I remain always your affectionate friend.”

  By the next year that friendship would be shattered. While she was in New York trying to sell Mrs. Lincoln’s clothes, Elizabeth Keckley worked with an editor, James Redpath, to write a memoir, Behind the Scenes: Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. She claimed she had done it in order to defend Mrs. Lincoln after the abuse piled on her by the newspapers. But she included her former employer’s letters, along with conversations between Mary and Abraham Lincoln. The publisher, Carleton & Company, touted it as “the great sensational disclosure by Mrs. Keckley.” Mary Lincoln of course felt betrayed and the two women never spoke again. Reviewers asked in horror, “Where will it end? What family that has a servant may not, in fact, have its peace and happiness destroyed?” Mrs. Keckley’s business was ruined. Just a few years earlier, the popular journalist Mary Clemmer Ames had declared: “Lizzie is an artist, and has such a genius for making women look pretty, that not one thinks of disputing her decrees.” Now the fashionable modiste who had dressed the leading women of Washington had trouble finding a client.

  THERE’S NO RECORD that Sara Pryor was among the people pawing over Mary Lincoln’s clothes that fall. She certainly would not have gone as a shopper, since she wouldn’t have been able to afford any of the items. But she was in New York, where the hotheaded secessionist Roger Pryor had come to find work after the war and his family had now joined him. It had been a very long time since the family had been together, after Sara so sadly left Washington in 1861 as the southern states were seceding. Roger had gone back to the capital briefly for his meeting with President Lincoln, who arranged for his parole as a prisoner. It had been a long and hard war for the Confederate soldier; it was no shorter nor easier for his wife.

  When Roger Pryor was elected to Congress at the age of thirty-one, and Sara and their five little children moved to a big house on New York Avenue, she was delighted: “We had come to stay!” she rejoiced in a memoir. It was a safe congressional district “and his constituents were devoted to him. They would never supplant him with another . . . we were going to be happy young people.” She had been an active member of the Washington social set, particularly friendly with Adele Douglas but also close with Varina Davis and Virginia Clay. Her husband’s propensity to get into duels somewhat marred her enjoyment, but the couple “knew everybody—and what is more I, for one liked everybody. It takes so little to make a woman happy!” The last thing on earth Sara Pryor wanted to do in early 1861 was leave the Capital City to go to Richmond and prepare for war.

  But this dutiful wife was soon caught up in the cause. Roger, who had no military training, was placed in charge of a regiment, somewhat to the dismay of the men under him, and Sara joined with the other women in sewing anything they could think of for the sake of the soldiers. “We embroidered cases for razors, for soap and sponge, and cute morocco affairs for needles, thread . . . with a little pocket lined with a banknote.” She laughed “ ‘How perfectly ridiculous!’ do you say? Nothing is ridiculous that helps anxious women to bear their lot—cheats them with the hope that they are doing good.”

  But even as she stitched away Sara didn’t really grasp what was about to happen: “War? Oh surely, surely not! Something would prevent it. Surely, blood would not be shed because of those insulting words in the Senate and the House.” She had followed those arguments closely, and she had been the person who informed President Buchanan that South Carolina had seceded, but the reality of war did not hit her until wounded soldiers filled the hospitals and homes of Richmond. “Every house was opened for the wounded. They lay on verandas, in halls, in drawing rooms of stately mansions. Young girls and matrons stood in their doorways with food and fruit for the marching soldiers and then turned to minister to the wounded men within their doors.” The Union politicians who kept pushing the generals to take Richmond didn’t see that the city was already under siege and soon there would be no food or fruit.

  Unable to sit still in her sewing circle, Sara volunteered for duty in one of the hospitals and sent word to her family in Petersburg to tear up all of her household linens, including slipcovers, as bandages. “My spring like green and white chintz bandages appeared on many a manly arm and leg.” Everything was make-do; “the war had come upon us suddenly. Many of our ports were already closed and we had no stores laid up for such an emergency.” The South was not prepared for the necessities of nationhood and the Pryor family had made no plans for the emergency upon them. The two girls had gone to their aunt Mary’s near Charlottesville and the three little boys stayed with their mother, who made the decision in the winter of 1862 to join Roger at camp in the Blackwater, at the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, because, she explained, “I now had no home.” Her clergyman father-in-law in Petersburg had abandoned the parsonage to join the army as a chaplain and turned his congregation over to another minister.

  She arrived by train at nightfall, with three children and a couple of trunks. No one knew she was coming and she had nowhere to go. At the station she saw the postmaster locking up for the night and asked him where she might stay; he took her home. The next day she got a message to Roger, who negotiated with the kindly Quaker postmaster to make his house the camp headquarters. Though fairly cut off from the outside world, they did hear the news of the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. Since the Pryors had never owned slaves—they hired other people’s slaves as servants and paid them—the proclamation didn’t mean anything to them personally and it “did not create a ripple of excitement among the colored members of our households in Virginia.”

  Occasionally Sara received mail from her friend Agnes in Richmond, who enclosed in one letter “a copy of Victor Hugo’s last novel, ‘Les Miserables,’ reprinted by a Charleston firm on the be
st paper they could get, poor fellows, pretty bad, I must acknowledge.” Things were “pretty bad” all over the South, especially in Richmond, where Agnes joked, “Do you realize we shall soon be without a stitch of clothes?” But the city was putting on a brave face. “A sort of court is still kept up here. . . . Mrs. Davis is very chary of the time she allots us.” At Varina Davis’s most recent reception, Agnes wore the gown she had last worn to Adele Douglas’s in Washington. “Doesn’t it all seem so long ago—so far away?” With the arrival of spring, Agnes, writing with red “ink” drawn from an oak tree on pages torn out of a scrapbook, had more severe shortages to report as she witnessed the crowd of “more than a thousand women and children” expand “until it reached the dignity of a mob—a bread riot.” The men in town assured her that everything would improve “if we can win a battle or two (but, oh, at what a price!).” The price would climb much higher in the course of the year. When Washington celebrated victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, on the other side of the lines Sara Pryor wept: “Surely and swiftly the coil was tightening around us. Surely and swiftly should we too, be starved into submission.”

  Sara and her little boys were left as refugees when Roger struck camp at the Blackwater and went back into battle. She tried to reach her aunt where her daughters were staying, and one of her sons had also gone, but the guerrilla fighting all over Virginia made the journey too dangerous, plus she was pregnant. She managed to get to Petersburg where her brother-in-law allowed her to use a primitive house abandoned by one of his workers, and it was there that she gave birth to a baby girl. Then General Grant opened his guns on Petersburg “without giving opportunity for the removal of non-combatants, the sick, the wounded, or the women and children.”