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

by Cokie Roberts

  It was impossible to imagine that the general who had won the war would be defeated at the ballot box. But at least two people did imagine it—Salmon Chase and Kate Sprague. If the Republican Party wouldn’t have her father, Kate would make him the Democratic nominee. If Grant had fought the war, Chase had financed it. His longtime opposition to slavery meant he would still stand in good stead with antislavery Republicans who hadn’t joined forces with the Radicals, and his nonpartisan handling of the impeachment trial should make him attractive to Democrats—that was the reasoning. The fact that Chase had run against the party she wanted to embrace him didn’t deter the determined daughter. In fact he had once been a Democrat, briefly; the chief justice had worn just about every political stripe over the last thirty plus years, leading his opponents to conclude that he belonged only to the Chase party. But as with so many other politicians who once thought the White House could be theirs, encouragement from a few friends led the Chief Justice to believe he could win the nomination.

  A confident Kate would handle the campaign at the convention in New York’s Tammany Hall when the delegates met that July. It would require adroit maneuvering to line up the votes in just such a way so that they would fall to her father. There was a crowded group of candidates and some would have to drop out before the convention would move to Chase as a compromise. The sitting president, Andrew Johnson, was out after the first ballot. As the voting went on and on, Kate worked the delegates while keeping her father apprised of the situation: “There is growing confidence everywhere that you will ultimately be the choice—there are snares & pitfalls everywhere.” She signed her letter, “Affectionately & ambitiously for Country—the Democracy, & its Noblest Patriot & Statesman, Your daughter, K. C. Sprague.” She was clearly enjoying herself and made no pretense about her role, which was widely reported: “Mrs. Kate Sprague, daughter of Chief Justice Chase, has had an interview with Samuel J. Tilden, August Belmont and other leading politicians in order to induce them to cast the vote of New York for her father. For years while at Washington and Columbus, Mrs. Sprague, then Kate Chase, notoriously managed the political affairs of her father, and for years has been permeated with the indomitable resolution that she would live to see her father President of the United States.”

  The New York vote was key and it looked like she had snared that delegation, that it would move to Chase after the candidate they had been backing, Indiana senator Thomas Hendricks, had lost. But then, unexpectedly, on the twenty-second ballot the Ohio delegation cast its votes for the convention chairman, former New York governor Horatio Seymour, who had already declined the nomination. Seymour protested but was drafted and elected by acclamation. Once again, his home state of Ohio had done in Salmon Chase. And to make it worse, Seymour picked Frank Blair, Lizzie Lee’s brother, as his running mate. After all these years of the Blair-Chase rivalry the Blairs had won. When he got the word, Chase asked, “Does Mrs. Sprague know? And how does she take it?” She was indignant, insisting that they had been sold out by one of their lieutenants. And she was ridiculed in the press. “Mrs. Kate Sprague was in New York and engaged up to the latest moment of hope in lobbying and log-rolling for her father,” one account read, adding that she “burst into tears” when Seymour got the nomination.

  THAT WAS IT. Kate Chase Sprague would not preside at the White House. That honor would go to Julia Grant. In the first postwar election the general who had brought the peace won in a landslide. Salmon P. Chase would be administering rather than taking the oath of office that misty day in March when Ulysses S. Grant was inaugurated. It was a day Julia Grant remembered fondly: “I went with a large party to the Capitol, where I heard the oath of office and listened with pride and emotion to the first inaugural address of my husband, the President.”

  As he gave that address looking out from the East Portico of the Capitol, President Grant saw a city that buzzed with people and purpose, with women permanently working in government agencies, for newspapers and magazines, in the new schools now opening and in the hospitals where nursing had in the course of the war become a woman’s job. And the women, black and white, who worked in the social service agencies dedicated to helping those in need were bringing their advocacy skills, many of them honed in the war, to bear on the men in power, while pushing to share in that power. The place to make that push would be in this city, under this dome. In fact it had already begun.

  The National Woman Suffrage Convention had assembled in Washington several weeks earlier. There Elizabeth Cady Stanton declared after a war that left more than six hundred thousand Americans dead, “the history of American statesmanship does not inspire me with confidence in man’s capacity to govern the nation alone, with justice and mercy.” It would be another half century before women were included in the nation’s central charter, the Constitution, but the services and sacrifices, the abilities and accomplishments of women in the Civil War had changed the face of Washington, just as Washington had changed the place of women.

  Washington Monument, with no money to go any higher than 153 feet, stood abandoned during the Civil War. Photographed by Mathew Brady.

  (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, [LC_DIG_cwpbh_03248].)

  Epilogue

  CLARA BARTON

  Traveled to Europe to recuperate after her years of wartime service and discovered something called the Red Cross. The first Geneva Convention in 1864 had established the principles that ambulance and sanitary personnel traveling under the symbol of a red cross on a white background, the obverse of the Swiss flag, could move onto battlefields as unmolested neutrals in order to treat the wounded on both sides of a conflict. The Red Cross was right up Clara’s alley but she was distressed to learn that the United States Department of State had refused to consider the Geneva treaty, for fear of “entangling alliances.” She would eventually come home to lobby for ratification but first there was another war where victims needed her services—the Franco-Prussian War, where she worked with the International Red Cross. When Miss Barton returned to America in 1873 she began a full-scale lobbying campaign involving Congress, the press, and the public for U.S. approval of the Geneva treaty. She stressed the need for organized relief in natural disasters as well as war and in 1881 established the American Red Cross, with Clara Barton as president. At last, after nine years of labor, the Senate ratified and President Chester A. Arthur signed the Geneva treaty in 1882, affiliating the American Red Cross with its international counterpart. As the U.S. representative to the Geneva Convention of 1884, Clara Barton was able to attach the “American amendment” to include natural disasters in the organization’s mission of mercy. And then she was off to deliver the goods—to victims of the Russian famine in 1892, the Sea Islands tidal wave in 1893, the Johnstown Flood in 1894, the yellow fever epidemic in Florida, and the Armenian massacre in 1896. During the Spanish-American War, President William McKinley requested that Miss Barton, now seventy-seven, go to Cuba in 1898 and work with American soldiers, Cuban refugees, and prisoners of war. Her last personal foray into the field was in Galveston, Texas, where six thousand people died in the flood of 1900. She raised the money for the Red Cross’s endeavors privately, fearful of government control. But her lax ways with the books eventually got the better of her. She was deposed as president in 1904 and never had anything more to do with the organization. In the course of her tenure the American Red Cross provided relief in twenty-one disasters and Clara Barton collected medals and meritorious citations from around the world. In her last years she organized the National First Aid Association of America and spent her time writing and working with women’s rights advocates. When she died of pneumonia at age ninety in 1912, her obituaries ran under headlines like “CLARA BARTON—HEROINE,” and “CLARA BARTON—a Mother to Humanity.” Flatly stating that her death “created sorrow throughout the nation” and that “rulers in every country have delighted to do her honor,” the stories also quoted from an interview Mis
s Barton gave at age eighty-seven: “I am strong and well . . . and thanking God hourly that I have never known what it is to be without work.”

  ANNA ELLA CARROLL

  Stayed active in politics and propaganda but was frustrated for decades trying to wrestle compensation for her wartime work from Congress, particularly for the “Tennessee Plan,” which she continued to contend she had strategized. In various sessions one house or the other would vote in her favor but never both houses in the same Congress. The women’s suffrage movement adopted her and championed her cause as an example of the government’s injustice to women. Books and pamphlets ballyhooed her case but they didn’t put food on the table and after suffering a stroke she died in poverty in 1894 at the age of seventy-eight. In her death she received the accolades denied her in life. Newspaper headlines heralded the “Heroine of the War” and “Military Genius,” and the stories castigated Congress for failing to heed her claims. Several biographies and fictionalized accounts have kept her claim alive.

  VIRGINIA CLAY

  Moved back to Alabama with her husband, who tried to make a living farming and selling insurance. She traveled as much as she could to escape the dull life of Huntsville and for a while received flowery love letters from the still-married Jefferson Davis. Her husband died and at the age of sixty-two she married Alabama Supreme Court justice David Clopton, who had been in Congress with Clay before the war. When he died in 1892 she took up suffrage as a cause. The Alabama Equal Rights Association gained prestige and credibility with Mrs. Clay-Clopton, as she styled herself, as its president. At the fiftieth anniversary of the Seneca Falls meeting, the National Woman Suffrage Association convened in Washington in 1898. There Virginia proved herself “a powerful speaker for the cause which holds her enthusiastic allegiance,” according to the newspapers. And she started using her acting abilities to raise money for charity. In her diary she intermingled the notations of the accounts she was keeping to run her farm with entries like “spoke on women suffrage at City Hall with Miss Anthony” and “played Mrs. Partington for United Charities.” Her appearances with notables like Horace Greeley and the wife of leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison garnered a good deal of press attention, as did her memoir A Belle of the Fifties, published when she was seventy-five. When she died at age ninety in 1915, her obituary appeared in newspapers all over the country with its two final sentences describing the trajectory of her life: “She was a belle at Washington during the Pierce administration. She was first president of the Alabama Suffrage association.”

  VARINA DAVIS

  Stayed with her husband and children in Canada for a while and then endured years in unhappy circumstances while Jefferson tried to make a living and she tried to make a life. The couple spent some time together in Europe, but they also spent a good deal of time separated from each other, with Varina often depressed and dispirited. Jefferson Davis pursued an infatuation with Virginia Clay though there’s no evidence he acted on it. He did, however, move into the Mississippi Gulf Coast home of widow Sarah Dorsey, where he wrote his memoirs, and eventually Varina begrudgingly moved there as well. After Davis died Varina authored a massive work stoutly defending the husband she had so often found churlish and difficult. The two-volume tome failed both critically and financially but throughout the pages are sprinkled her own highly perceptive political insights. Realizing that she needed to make a living, Varina Davis, with her daughter Winnie, the baby “Pie Cake,” decided to move to New York, much to the shock and horror of true believers in the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. She thoroughly enjoyed life there, running something of a salon out of her rooms in the Majestic Hotel, supporting herself writing for the New York World plus several magazines, sometimes expressing views about women’s equality and political issues that would have gotten her in trouble had her husband been alive, and befriending Julia Grant. Since she was still a very public persona, her initial meeting with Mrs. Grant made page one news in the New York Times. Varina recognized the symbolism that their relationship provided toward regional reconciliation and made a point of attending the dedication of the Grant Memorial in New York. Her sons met with early deaths and then she suffered the almost unbearable loss of her thirty-four-year-old daughter Winnie, who had become a published novelist and a darling of South as the “Daughter of the Confederacy.” Despite repeated attempts by the people of Richmond, Virginia, to convince Varina to move there, even offering her a house, she held firm to New York and from time to time visited her old friends in Washington. When she died of pneumonia at age eighty in 1906, her illness had been tracked in the newspapers for days; fifty thousand people lined the streets of Richmond for her burial procession, with military escort provided by the son of Ulysses S. Grant. Republican president Theodore Roosevelt sent a wreath. In Washington memorials staged by Confederate veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy filled Willard’s Hotel and overflowed the Confederate Memorial Hall, recently opened in the Union capital. Some of the front page coverage of her in death rebuked the “unjust censure” heaped on her for moving north; all of it reflected her importance in her husband’s work and her own intelligence and erudition. “The years she lived in Washington,” went one typical account, “were, she often said, her happiest.”

  DOROTHEA DIX

  Returned to the work of inspecting mental hospitals, especially concentrating on those in the South that had been badly damaged during the war. Her efforts over the years resulted in the establishment of more than one hundred institutions in the United States before her death and two in Japan. She was directly involved in the creation of thirty-two state hospitals, including the one in New Jersey where she lived out the last years of her life when she became too old and infirm to travel. The notices of her death from heart disease in 1887 at the age of eighty-five described her advocacy for “criminals, paupers and the insane. . . . She lectured in all the states of the Union in their behalf and was instrumental in founding many institutions.” Barely mentioned was her service as superintendent of nurses in the Civil War. Miss Dix herself looked back on those years as a low point in her life of activism but her time in the Capital City did give her a new cause: fund-raising for the completion of the Washington Monument.

  ADELE CUTTS DOUGLAS

  Went with her husband Robert Williams to the “far northwestern territory, almost beyond the limits of civilization . . . where for several years they lived in the barracks of a border garrison,” according to a newspaper account. Six children came along as the couple moved from army post to army post, returning to Washington when Williams became adjutant general at the War Department. After years living mainly out of the public eye, newspapers ran huge stories referring to her as a “popular idol” when she died of heart failure in 1899 at age sixty-three. “She had a social and political career extending from Washington to the Mississippi Valley . . . as she grew older her reputation as the reigning belle of the Capital City was spread over the country.” Her contributions to Stephen Douglas’s career were cited, judging that “by her tact and keen intuition she made herself a strong factor in his chances of success.” And finally, “to the last she retained the exquisite charm in conversation and manner.”

  JESSIE BENTON FRÉMONT

  Supported her family with great energy and éclat through her writing after the never-reliable John went bankrupt. She contributed regularly to many magazines, compiled her writings into several popular books, and, just as she did as a new bride, acted as ghostwriter for Frémont’s memoirs. He was appointed territorial governor of Arizona in 1878 and she joined him there briefly as they both engaged in get-rich-quick schemes that failed to make them money but succeeded in sullying their names. Back in New York one bright spot was a visit from Elizabeth Blair Lee. In 1883, after all those years of bitterness and battles, the two old friends reconciled, much to Jessie’s delight. She and John moved to Los Angeles thinking they might be able to restore their fortunes there, but on one of his many trips east and away f
rom her John died suddenly, leaving Jessie devastated and broke. A government widow’s pension of two thousand dollars a year came to her aid along with the women of Los Angeles, who raised money for a house where she and her daughter Lily lived for the rest of Jessie’s life. In Los Angeles Jessie Benton Frémont contributed her fame and forcefulness to the women’s movement and as an advocate for education: her house, according to the newspapers, was “the Mecca toward which the footsteps of distinguished visitors have turned.” President McKinley visited Jessie Frémont on a West Coast tour and delivered his one public speech at her house, where he presented “ ‘the respects not only of himself and Mrs. McKinley, but the affection and esteem of the American people.’ ” A bad fall resulting in a broken hip made her an invalid and at seventy-seven she died in her sleep of pneumonia. It was just after Christmas in 1902 and obituaries from around the country recounted her belleship in Washington, elopement with the Pathfinder, her brave treks to California (repeating the off-told tale that “Mrs. Frémont’s influence was instrumental in bringing California into the Union as a free state”), the political campaign of 1856 and the trip after that defeat to Europe, where “the beauty and wit of Mrs. Frémont made a great impression,” then her move to Los Angeles, where she maintained “keen interest in national and international affairs.” Some of the obituaries also managed to list her impressive body of published works. In 2014 the House of Representatives passed a bill to change the name of Mammoth Peak in Yosemite National Park to Mount Jessie Benton Frémont in recognition of the work she did to preserve the Yosemite Grant for the nation when she was living at nearby Las Mariposas. The Senate failed to act.