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

by Cokie Roberts

  At one point Roger showed up with some captured Union prisoners and Sara fed them out of their meager provisions—though the hired man John objected to baking for Yankee soldiers. Food was too scarce to share with the enemy. “We are slowly starving to death,” Sara’s friend Agnes sighed to her from Richmond, where the sight of emaciated women infuriated her. “Ah! these are the people who suffer the consequence of all that talk about slavery in the territories you and I used to hear in the House and Senate Chamber. Somebody, somewhere, is mightily to blame for all this business, but it isn’t you nor I. . . . It is all so awful.”

  Blitzlike, the shelling of Petersburg continued for months as Sara and the children repeatedly repaired to a neighbor’s cellar to wait out the bombardment, so it was a happy day when her brother-in-law told her he had had enough. He would go to North Carolina and she could move out of the firing range to his farm. “Cottage Farm” came with two servants, in addition to the two traveling with Sara, and little furniture, but when Roger’s father, the chaplain, moved in as well, he suggested that she get her trunk from Washington out of storage in Petersburg so they could set up housekeeping. This brief moment of pleasantness after the nonstop battle suddenly ceased when tents popped up in the garden and Robert E. Lee’s army made camp all around her—then word came that her husband had been captured. And for a while it looked like the servant John would be taken away as well. His owner, wanting to protect his property, planned to send all the enslaved workers south to Louisiana for safety. A distraught John believed the move would kill him but the only way to stop it was to buy him. Sara took the last of her money, $106 in gold pieces sewn into a money belt, and turned it all over in order to save John and make him a free man. But she had no money to pay him and no money to buy food beyond the few rations allotted them by the army.

  Racking her brain for a way to bring in income, Sara remembered the contents of her trunk. Out came the dresses that had glittered in Washington salons, including the one from the night when “Mrs. Douglas and I had dressed alike in gowns of tulle,” and off came their lace decorations, their flowers and feathers. “These were my materials. I must make them serve for the support of my family.” She worked long hours making lace collars, cuffs, and sleeves and sent them off to a store in Richmond, where they were snatched up by the ladies still gracing “the Confederate court.” She sold off her silk dresses, opera cloak, and “point lace” handkerchiefs and then started in on artificial flowers. With the decorations stripped from her muslin dresses she proceeded to embroider them with a fine blue yarn she had discovered in the bottom of her trunk. “I traced with blue a dainty vine of forget-me-knots on bodice and sleeves, with a result that was simply ravishing!” Then it was the turn of her husband’s dress coat, transformed by the enterprising Mrs. Pryor into gloves that “yielded me hundreds of dollars.” She took her proceeds and bought a barrel of flour, costing $1,300. Sara would not see her family starve. And an old pocketbook plus some leather bags found in the field were turned into shoes for the children by the hands of a shoemaker soldier. For herself, “my own prime necessity was for the steel we women wear in front of our stays.” She “suffered so much for want of this accustomed support” that she was pleased to find an army gunsmith to make a pair.

  General Lee stopped by to ask if she could house a member of the Irish parliament who was coming to camp and when assured that the guest would “mess with the General” so she wouldn’t have to feed him Sara readily agreed. After his stay, the Honorable Conolly declared Sara “one of the nicest ladies I ever saw,” promising her he would go home “ ‘and tell the English women what I have seen here: two boys reading Caesar while the shells are thundering, and their mother looking on without fear.’ ” Her reply: “ ‘I am too busy keeping the wolf from my door . . . to concern myself with thunderbolts.’ ” And she was trying to get Roger out of prison.

  When she heard that southern peace commissioners were going to meet with President Lincoln and that they would pass through Petersburg on the way to Fort Monroe, she asked for a ride out to the front to talk to them as they crossed the line into enemy territory. Soldiers on both sides cheered the men as Sara approached one of them, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, and implored him “to remember your friend General Pryor. . . . Beg his release from Mr. Lincoln.” He promised he would but the conference fell apart and Roger Pryor languished in his cell at Fort Lafayette until his newspaper friends interceded. The news of his release came to her personally from none other than Robert E. Lee. Twenty days later the general would surrender at Appomattox.

  In those twenty days, despite the joy of Roger’s return, the ominous handwriting was on the Richmond wall. “I don’t like the looks of things here,” Agnes worried, she had recognized “some of Mrs. Davis’s things” in the stores, “and now comes the surprising news, that she has left the city with her family. What does this all mean?” The first lady of the Confederacy could sell her clothes with barely a mention. But her departure told the story. One last Union push toward Richmond drove the Pryors off the exposed farm and back into town, where they found an empty house and listened to the battering that finally broke the Confederate line. Sara knew the end had come when “the firing had all ceased.” The next day the Rebel government evacuated Richmond. “At ten o’clock the enemy arrived—ten thousand negro troops, going on and on, cheered by the negroes on the streets,” Agnes recounted in despair as she described President Lincoln’s brief tour through the town, and concluded, “there is really no hope now of our ultimate success.”

  The next news from Agnes, in early May, revealed that she and “the Colonel” were heading to New York, where he had taken a job in a publishing house, and she was ready to take on the challenge of a move to what had been enemy territory only a few weeks earlier. “All the setting, the entourage of a lady is taken from me but the lady herself has herself pretty well in hand.” Eventually Roger Pryor’s friends convinced him to try his luck in New York as well, so Sara hocked everything she could find in order to buy him clothes and passage for the trip. She and their six children, now all together, would stay behind until he made enough money for them to join him. It would be two long years of deprivation, living under Union occupation for a while, forced to share her house with strange soldiers and line up for food for her family. As a sad little note in the Washington Evening Star informed her friends in the capital, “Mrs. Gen. Roger A. Pryor comes up regularly to our commissary at Petersburg to draw rations designated for the poor of the city.” But true to form, Sara found a way to make do for herself and the children. (The servants who had stood by her with no salaries finally left when she insisted they go find paying jobs.) She persuaded friends and neighbors to send her their children for music lessons. And the “Rebel Pryor,” as the newspapers called Roger, started finding clients.

  Though the lawyer experienced some hostility as a former enemy leader, New York had become something of a gathering place for southerners. But Roger missed his wife and children terribly and prevailed on them to join him in the summer of 1867, when they were still eking out an existence. Besides caring for the children, and a new baby girl who arrived in 1868, Sara Pryor put her endless energies into relief work for various causes in New York, including the Home for Friendless Women and Children, whose suffering she could understand. She also helped establish Memorial Day to honor the soldiers who had fallen all around her. “They died because their country could devise, in its wisdom, no better means of settling a family quarrel than by slaying her sons with the sword.”

  AS EARLY AS 1866 the word impeachment was whispered in Washington. When she was trying to scare him into doing what she wanted, Virginia Clay had warned Andrew Johnson that she had heard “hints of ‘impeachment’ uttered in connection with the dissatisfaction resulting from your administration.” By the following January, capital conversation about removing the president was out in the open, and the House Judiciary Committee had the matter under consideration. The House had passed a r
esolution instructing the committee to “inquire into the official conduct of Andrew Johnson”; at a wedding reception, Elizabeth Blair Lee heard an English newspaper correspondent ask a couple of congressmen if impeachment was merely meant as a threat: “One Republican replied, ‘Yes we only intend it to keep Johnson in torment.’ Old Stevens spoke up quick by & said, ‘You are very much mistaken. To carry out the views of our party, we must have the Executive power & we intend to have it & pretty quickly too.’ ”

  “Old Stevens” was Pennsylvania Republican Thaddeus Stevens, a leader of the Radical Republican faction in Congress and a fierce fighter against what he saw as Andrew Johnson’s lenient treatment of the South in his Reconstruction protocols. After hearing witnesses for several months, the Judiciary Committee, by a vote of 5 to 4, refused that June to send articles of impeachment to the full House of Representatives. But Stevens persisted in his staunch opposition to the president as he proceeded to try to pass a Reconstruction plan of his own. The Confederate states seeking readmission should be treated like any territory applying for statehood, in his view, with the extra dimension of land reform. He would confiscate the large plantation properties from their owners and divide them, in forty-acre parcels, to the freedmen. This would give the formerly enslaved people land to work in order to make a living and change the political dynamics of the South.

  These ideas had been talked about for a few years though it was not the path Abraham Lincoln chose when he presented his Reconstruction proposal allowing the Rebels, other than the highest-ranking military and civilian leaders, to keep their property except for slaves. But Stevens’s plan gained support as black codes were enacted across the South and violence against freedmen became commonplace. And when the southern states elected the politicians who had seceded in the first place, the Congress refused to seat them and then abolished the state governments and required ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment for any state wanting readmission. The South was divided into military districts, with the Union Army protecting African-Americans. And the Union army operated under the orders of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

  Andrew Johnson hated Stanton. In fact no one seemed to like him very much. In a letter to his daughter Nettie, Chief Justice Salmon Chase called his former fellow cabinet member “obstinate & self-willed yet changeful & capricious! a sincere lover of his country, but prone to sacrifice just interests to private hates or gusts of caprice.” Stanton and his wife had not been regulars in the parlors of Washington, according to Lizzie Lee, who confided that nobody ever “went near Mrs. Stanton . . . until they were in the Cabinet—when they had been here several years before—un-noticed & unknown & she is very bitter on this point.” Mrs. Stanton had reason to become more bitter in the summer of 1867 when Johnson asked for his secretary of war’s resignation. Stanton refused. Then Johnson fired his cabinet member in violation of the Tenure of Office Act. It was one of the many laws the Congress passed over Johnson’s veto and it took direct aim at presidential power by requiring Senate approval of a presidential decision to remove someone from office. Johnson actually did submit the dismissal for approval; the Senate, unsurprisingly, turned him down. Johnson then fired Stanton anyway, declaring that he believed the law to be unconstitutional and planning to take the case to the Supreme Court. But on February 24, 1868, the House of Representatives voted 126 to 47 to impeach the president.

  On March 30, the Senate began the trial, with Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase presiding. His daughter Kate Sprague walked with him to the Capitol almost every day of the proceedings. Kate had recently raised eyebrows at one of her receptions when she “unreservedly” supported the president in his “controversy with Congress,” because the time had come “to save the Constitution.” After her baby was born, Kate had taken a grand tour of Europe with her sister Nettie and the little boy, with her husband showing up from time to time. Things were not going well in the marriage and being back in her familiar role as Washington hostess seemed to please her, plus it was an election year and Kate had an even worse case than her father of the White House fever Lincoln thought infected Salmon Chase. The impeachment trial would be a good opportunity for her to make an impression on the public stage.

  The proceedings of course attracted huge crowds but only those with tickets could get in. “And it is a most significant fact that women hold nearly all the tickets,” observed Emily Briggs, writing for the Philadelphia Press. “They sail into the gentlemen’s gallery like a real ‘man of war,’ shake out the silken, feathery crinoline, rub their little gloved hands in an ecstasy of delight” while everyone scans the crowd looking for a familiar face. “Why, that is the queen of fashion—the wife of a Senator, the daughter of Chief Justice Chase.” Mrs. Briggs wrote under the pen name “Olivia” and her letters from Washington were a popular feature, so Kate must have been delighted midway through the trial to read Olivia’s latest: “Paris has its Eugenie; Washington has Mrs. Senator Sprague, the acknowledged queen of fashion and good taste,” the correspondent gushed. “Her costume is just as perfect as the lily or the rose . . . a single flower, of lilac tinge, large enough for the ‘new style’ rests upon her head, and is fastened to its place by lilac tulle so filmy that it must have been stolen from the purple mists of the morning.” though Mrs. Briggs conceded that Kate was not perfect: “she shrinks from the hard and lowly task of visiting the wretched hut, the sick, and the afflicted.” So too did the queens of Europe avoid those tasks, argued “Olivia,” defending her own queen. But not all of the coverage was so kind.

  Mary Lincoln’s friend, and Andrew Johnson opponent, Jane Swisshelm had another take on Kate Sprague, one that described her lobbying, not her lilacs. “A paragraph is going the rounds of the papers to the effect that Mrs. Sprague is bringing her influence to bear on her husband and father in favor of President Johnson and Against impeachment,” the Radical Republican wrote for the Pittsburgh Gazette. “Mrs. Sprague’s desire to be ‘First Lady’ amounts almost to a mania; and, no doubt, has much to do with her father’s Presidential aspirations.” As Mrs. Swisshelm saw it, Kate wanted to keep Johnson in the White House because his wife and daughters didn’t threaten her position as queen of society, but if he were removed, the president pro tempore of the Senate, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, would become president. And Mrs. Wade could be a formidable opponent: “If she goes into the White House there will be no room for dispute as to who is ‘First Lady,’ in this Democratic land.”

  The current women in the White House bore the whole spectacle with grace. “Whatever Andrew Johnson was or was not, no partisan foe was bitter or false enough to throw a shadow of reproach against the noble characters of his wife and daughters,” judged the journalist Mary Clemmer Ames approvingly. “There was no insinuation, no charge against them . . . nor could anyone say that they had received costly presents,” she concluded in a not-so-veiled attack on Mary Lincoln. Apparently the trial was harder on the Johnson family than the public knew. “But for the humiliation and Mr. Johnson’s feelings,” Eliza Johnson reportedly told a friend, “I wish they would send us back to Tennessee . . . give us our poverty and our peace again.”

  Interest in the trial did not flag as the weeks of arguments dragged on. And the coverage of Kate Chase Sprague continued, most of it of the lilac-and-tulle variety. But even the favorable coverage managed to sneak in digs at Kate. A report on the “Ladies Gallery” that made the rounds of the newspapers described the women witnessing the trial of the president of the United States—among them the suffragist Anna Dickinson, the Confederate spy Belle Boyd, the sculptor Vinnie Ream, and the newspaperwoman Mary Clemmer Ames. The correspondent deemed the women in the gallery “fairer than any Grecian form chiseled from Parian marble and in the front of this brilliant galaxy is Mrs. Kate Sprague, who is the acknowledged peerless leader of Washington society . . . she would adorn the White House so elegantly if her father should ever become President, for with her natural beauty and many accomplishments, the enormous wealth of her husband, she
would make it appear more like a royal than a republican court.” Still the reporter jabbed, “she lives happily with her husband, newspaper reports to the contrary notwithstanding.”

  The press had sniffed out the troubles in the Sprague marriage. Kate’s husband was abusive, a drunk, and a philanderer. But the rumors were that she was angry because she couldn’t convince him to vote for Johnson’s acquittal. She left for Rhode Island shortly before the vote, and a letter from her father makes it clear that the husband and wife had had a terrible fight. Bemoaning the fact that Sprague had been “almost unmanned—moved to tears” by “the difference that occurred between you just before you went away,” he advised her not to forget “that the happiness of a wife is most certainly secured by loving submission & loving tact.” Moving on to the news of the trial, Chase revealed his views: “My own judgment & feeling favors acquittal; but I have no vote & do not know how the Senators will vote.” On May 16 the Senate voted 35 to 19 to remove Andrew Johnson from office. It was one vote shy of the two-thirds necessary to convict. William Sprague voted with the majority. Salmon Chase’s handling of the trial was considered fair and nonpartisan. It ruined him with the Republican Party.

  “I FELT SORRY for the Johnsons and was glad it ended as it did,” Julia Grant recalled. “I could not free myself from the thought that the trial savored of persecutions and that it was a dangerous precedent.” Julia thought that if her husband were president and any cabinet officer should try him “as Stanton had tried Johnson there would be another impeachment.” And it was looking more and more certain that Grant would be the next president. As the Republican convention was about to open in Chicago, Julia asked him: “ ‘Ulys, do you wish to be President?’ He replied: ‘No, but I do not see that I have anything to say about it. The convention is about to assemble and, from all I hear, they will nominate me; and I suppose if I am nominated, I will be elected.’ ”