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

by Cokie Roberts

  JULIA DENT GRANT

  Thoroughly enjoyed her husband’s two terms in the White House, declaring herself very fond of society. She didn’t mind the big receptions, enjoyed hosting comfortable friends like the Blairs and Lizzie Lee, threw a huge White House wedding for her daughter Nellie, and was not at all happy when her husband rejected the idea of running for a third term. After they left office, the Grants embarked on a two-year world tour, with the princes and potentates and pashas of Europe, Africa, and Asia fawning over them wherever they went. When they returned to America they were so well received on a trip around the country that Grant made a bid for the Republican nomination in 1880. Despite Julia’s pleas, he refused to go to the convention in Chicago and lost out to James Garfield, so she would not be enjoying a homecoming in the White House she loved. Instead they settled in New York, where Julia came to know both Varina Davis and Sara Pryor. The Grants’ money was tied up in a firm where their son was a partner—the other partner got involved in a scam that resulted in them losing everything. Desperate to provide for his family, Grant wrote his memoirs as he was dying of throat cancer. It was an excruciating ordeal for the pain-stricken general but it worked; his book, published posthumously with the help of Mark Twain, proved so successful that his family was left with a great deal of money and Julia moved back to Washington to be among friends. When Julia died of bronchitis at age seventy-six in 1902 she was hailed as “her husband’s faithful helpmeet, both when he was a great General and afterwards when he was chief executive of the nation.” Some of the obituaries noted that “for a number of years she devoted herself to the preparation of her book of reminiscences of her husband.” But the first first lady to author a book couldn’t find a publisher. It wasn’t until 1975 that The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant saw the light of day.

  ELIZABETH KECKLEY

  Didn’t fare well after her memoirs were published. Many white patrons abandoned her and some blacks shunned her for being disloyal to their hero Abraham Lincoln. A vicious racist parody of her book was published and must have produced more pain. Trying to carry on, she did some work training young African-American seamstresses and in 1892 took a job in Ohio as head of Wilberforce University’s Department of Sewing and Domestic Arts. But a stroke ended her teaching career and she returned to Washington. Elizabeth moved into the Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children, the home she had helped establish, and died there in 1907 at the age of eighty-nine. Unsurprisingly, given the era, there are no published notices of the death of this woman who knew President Lincoln intimately and had met and worked with some of the leading political families of the country.

  HARRIET LANE

  Had a difficult time through the years of the Civil War when her uncle was vilified and humiliated. She quietly married a banker, Henry Johnston, and moved with him to Baltimore from Buchanan’s home in Pennsylvania. They had two sons but both boys died in their teens, in successive years. And then their father died. She moved back to Washington, the city where she had gone to school and where she had in some of the most difficult years in the history of the country presided with grace at the White House. In those years she had advocated for a national art gallery and she continued on that quest after she returned to the Capital City. She also worked to erect a monument to President Buchanan, which, with the help of Congress, she succeeded in doing. It stands shrouded in obscurity in Meridian Hill Park. When Theodore Roosevelt took his turn in the White House, Mrs. Johnston was called on from time to time to assist Mrs. Roosevelt in entertaining there. But she didn’t abandon Baltimore entirely. Her work for poor and sick children in that city grew into what is now one of the premier pediatric medical centers in the country—the Harriet Lane Clinic at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center. One obituary declared, “There has never been a more gracious woman in the White House than Harriet Lane.” She did not achieve her goal of starting an art gallery in her life but she did in her death from cancer in 1903 at seventy-three, having bequeathed her art collection for a “national gallery of art.” The legislation establishing the Smithsonian Institution had included provisions for art collections, and the Smithsonian claimed Harriet’s bequest, which spurred it to fulfill her vision and establish a National Gallery of Art.

  ELIZABETH BLAIR LEE

  Continued her work with the Washington Orphan Asylum, which still exists today as Hillcrest Children & Family Center, providing services to kids with mental health needs and their families. Her husband finally got his promotion and retired as an admiral to the Blair country house in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he tried to farm after all his years at sea. Their one child, born late in their marriage and doted on by all the Blair family, followed in the family tradition, becoming a United States senator—the first to be directly elected by the voters after the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution took that privilege away from the state legislatures. The house that Lizzie Lee lived in in Washington, across the street from the White House, and the one her brother Montgomery Blair occupied next door to it have been combined into Blair House, the home to visiting heads of state and other dignitaries. Lizzie also helped found the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization after the Civil War that could leap back in history to a time when the country was united and find common ground between North and South. Sara Pryor joined her in that enterprise. Despite a lifetime of bad health, she lived until she was eighty-nine, dying at home in Silver Spring in 1906. Her obituaries, while repeating her father’s joke that because she was raised on Andrew Jackson’s knee she was “brought up in caucus,” and reminding readers that as a child she was known as “the little Democrat,” also gave credit to her work in the community, praising her “life-long devotion . . . to the Washington City Orphan Asylum, manager for 57 years and first directress for 44 years.” The newspapers noted that she had “learned to weigh political opinions and keep political secrets” and, remarkably, presented her own views as a moderate between southern secessionists and northern radicals. In sum, “very few women have had so broad a political experience, and it is doubtful if any other American woman has been conversant with political leaders and movements for so long a period.”

  MARY TODD LINCOLN

  Left for Europe with Tad soon after Elizabeth Keckley’s book came out. She put the boy in schools in Germany and England while she lived nearby and pestered Congress for a pension. She finally was awared $3,000 annually and after almost three years abroad she brought her son back to Chicago. There he developed either tuberculosis or pneumonia and died at the age of eighteen. It was the last straw for the boy’s mother. Robert Lincoln took his little brother’s body to Springfield, Illinois, to be buried next to his father and brothers. Mary’s distress became a matter of public comment, according to the newspapers “She spent her time in overhauling her many trunks, complaining that she was very sick and ate full meals of substantial food three times a day.” Robert Lincoln called for a sanity hearing and the court declared Mrs. Abraham Lincoln insane. Mary’s confinement in a private mental hospital got the attention of Myra Bradwell, one of the first women lawyers in the country, who took the case back to court, and this time Mary won. Embarrassed by the insanity verdict, she fled to Europe, made her base at Pau, France, suffered a fall, and in 1880, after four years abroad returned miserable to America, where she renewed her battle with Congress for more money. She moved in with her sister and brother-in-law in Springfield, though she had had a falling-out with them years earlier. Congress did increase her pension to $5,000 in 1882 and not long after that she died at the age of sixty-three. The former first lady’s press was no better in death than it was in life: “though fond of society and brilliant company her reign at the White House was not socially successful,” the reports agreed; “ever since the death of her husband she has simply been a physical and mental wreck.”

  LOUISA RODGERS MEIGS

  At the end of the war, without Montgomery Meigs’s knowledge, she wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton tell
ing him her husband was ill and needed a vacation. She knew the quartermaster general would not approve of her meddling so she told him after the fact. And she relayed Stanton’s reply that he “thought it would be best to put the sea between you & your work.” And so he did. Louisa and Montgomery and two of their children went on a European grand tour. They returned to Washington, where Montgomery remained quartermaster general and later took his wife on another European sojourn to inspect European armies for President Grant. Louisa’s funeral was held at home in Washington when she died at the age of sixty-three in 1879 and “the parlors were crowded by prominent residents of Washington and strangers.”

  SARA AGNES PRYOR

  Struggled through the early years in New York as her husband tried to establish a law practice and she agonized over the probable suicide of her brilliant young son Theodorick, a student at Princeton at the time. Another son also died before she did. Roger went into partnership with Benjamin Butler, one of the Union generals most hated in the South, and eventually went on the New York bench, rising to the position of justice on the New York Supreme Court. Sara mused in her writings over whether that would have ever happened if he had fired that first shot at Fort Sumter instead of giving that “honor” to another. The newspapers pick up the story from there: “when he retired and his income was reduced Mrs. Pryor at the age of 63 began writing articles for newspapers and magazines and like her distinguished husband her efforts were crowned with success.” Sara wrote several well-received books, including two memoirs describing her belleship in Washington, her harrowing experiences in the Civil War, her postwar friendship with Julia Grant and her role in establishing the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Colonial Dames, and the Jamestown Association. But she told one of her daughters that she took the most pride in her relief work. She organized the women of New York into the Ladies’ Florida Relief Society to aid that state in battling a yellow fever epidemic, and issued a similar appeal for the orphans of the Galveston flood, where the funds she raised through fairs and theater performances added up to enough to build an orphanage. When she died in 1912 just shy of her eighty-second birthday she was remembered as having the “reputation of being one of the most clever and beautiful women in Washington” and a “noted writer and prominent figure in New York and the South.” Sara Pryor herself had this to say about her early-twentieth-century work: “It is often said that it is still too early to write the story of our Civil War. It will soon be too late. Some of us still live who saw those days. We should not shrink from recording what we know to be true. Thus only will a full history of American courage and fidelity be preserved,—for we all were Americans.”

  KATE CHASE SPRAGUE

  Tried one more time to get her father elected president, in 1872 after Salmon Chase had had a stroke. She hosted a reception for him in Washington, where she tried to hide his shaking hands and he tried to control his slurred speech. Horace Greeley was chosen instead to run against Grant for a second term, which the incumbent president won easily, and Chase died in 1873. It was downhill from there for Kate, who had a miserable marriage but still managed to produce four children. She took up quite publicly with powerful and philandering Senator Roscoe Conkling, a married New York political boss, and entertained him at the over-the-top sixty-room estate, Canonchet, she had built at Narragansett Pier, Rhode Island. When William Sprague found Conkling in his home the irate husband came after his wife’s reputed lover. The details varied with each story after the incident hit the press; some had Sprague wielding a shotgun, some had Conkling jumping out of a window to escape. Sprague and Kate divorced, Sprague lost his fortune, Kate and Conkling ended the relationship, and Kate moved to Europe with her three girls while her ex-husband kept their only son. When she returned to the Chase estate in Washington it was with limited resources, so she repeatedly mortgaged the Edgewood property. Her son committed suicide and her older girls grew up and moved out, leaving her with the youngest, who was mentally disabled. Slowly Kate sank into poverty. When the house was foreclosed on, some of her father’s old friends came to her aid and paid for the house, but she had nothing to live on. The former queen of Washington went door-to-door selling eggs and milk from the Edgewood estate. She disappeared from the parlors of the powerful and the pages of the press until she died in 1899 shortly before her fifty-ninth birthday. Her death brought her back to the front of the nation’s newspapers: “Nothing in her whole career was commonplace . . . her failures, it has been remarked, were the inevitable reverses of a brainy and beautiful woman compelled by her sex to devious paths of social and political strategy.” In telling the story of her life the obituaries agreed that “from the time she was 16 years old she was a shrewd politician,” and that “Kate Chase ruled as no other American woman ever reigned at the capital, unless Dolly Madison is excepted.” Dolley Madison ended her life as a poor woman as well but was loved, respected, and highly honored until the end.

  THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT

  In 1866, on George Washington’s birthday, President Andrew Johnson presided over a meeting of the Washington Monument Society. “Let us restore the Union,” proclaimed the president who was locked in a battle with Congress on that very subject, “and let us proceed with the Monument as its symbol.” Despite the stirring words, Johnson didn’t have any cash to offer from the depleted coffers of the federal government at the end of the war, so the building fund limped along just as it had from the beginning. Various proposals put before Congress went nowhere, although some state governments appropriated money, as did fraternal organizations, in a push to finish the memorial in time for the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1876. But that effort failed as well. Instead on July 5, 1876, Congress finally took over the job. The construction assignment went to the Army Corps of Engineers and the task was at last completed on December 6, 1884, with the placing of the 3,300-pound capstone atop the obelisk, which at the time was the tallest building in the world. The formal dedication ceremony came in time to celebrate George Washington’s birthday the next year. Inscribed on the east face of the capstone are the words “Laus Deo,” or, “Praise be to God.” It was finally done.

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  When I go to my mother’s grave in New Roads, Louisiana, I see nearby the marker on her grandfather’s tombstone. He was her beloved Biz who I heard about all of my life until my mother died. I’m sure I would have loved him too. The stone reads:

  LOUIS B. CLAIBORNE, LOUISIANA, PVT

  POINTE COUPEE ARTY CSA,

  AUG 24 1842 NOV 29 1934

  That is “Private, Pointe Coupee Parish Louisiana Artillery, Confederate States Army.”

  My father’s great uncle, General William Robertson Boggs, CSA, after whom my grandfather and my baby brother were named, surrendered the army of the Trans-Mississippi six weeks after Appomattox. I grew up with the tales of awful Yankee atrocities. In every plantation house someone pointed out where the family hid the silver during the war. (I don’t know why the Yankees didn’t catch on that a lot of it seems to have been hidden in the fan windows above the front doors.) I say all this by way of saying that I love the South. But that might not be clear to the readers of this book. That’s partly because the book is set in Washington, D.C., where the fate of the Union was the question at hand, but it is also because I think the Southern politicians’ decision to secede was one of the most profound tragedies ever brought on by human beings.

  Four years and six hundred thousand lives after the firing on Fort Sumter, the South was left with cities burned—the worst, by the way, being Richmond, torched by the Confederates as they evacuated—its fields ravaged, its coffers empty, and a stronger central government in Washington. The great good to come out of the war, the abolition of slavery, was what the South was fighting against. And as I have read the letters of the women who were married to those politicians I have learned that they saw the catastrophe as it was unfolding. As one of them wrote from Richmond as the body coun
t mounted from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands: “These are the people who suffer the consequences of all that talk about slavery in the territories you and I used to hear in the House and Senate Chamber. Somebody, somebody is mightily to blame for all this business but it isn’t you nor I.” When we took our grandkids on a tour of Fort Sumter a few years ago, the youngest boy typically asked as he was trying to pick out a souvenir in the gift shop, “Whose side are we on?” My daughter answered, “Well, everyone in our family fought for the South, but it was good for the country that the North won.” There it is.

  The fact that I even feel a need to explain all of that tells me how much that awful war still sears the soil and the soul of the South. Abraham Lincoln told Sojourner Truth that he would not have been able to emancipate the slaves if the South had not seceded. I would like to believe the politicians might have eventually found a way, but it’s hard to see it when reading how hostile they were. So yes, a great good came out of the carnage—the end of the great moral stain of slavery. But I have also learned in researching and writing this book that the war brought about another positive development, the advancement of women in American society, South and North. It also created a cohesive country, no longer “these” United States but “the” United States with its Capital City on a firm foundation in Washington, D.C.

  As always in writing women’s history, there’s a lot of detective work involved and I’ve had a great deal of help along the way. The research was a family affair starting with Steve’s cousin Miranda Sachs spending a summer noodling around in the Library of Congress and at Princeton University. She turned up some good leads and turned in some good letters having started the painful process of deciphering the handwriting of these women. Then my daughter-in-law, Liza Roberts, took up the quest at the University of North Carolina and Duke and then my daughter Rebecca Roberts added to the effort new batches of material from the archives at the Historic Congressional Cemetery, along with more letters from the Library of Congress. Rebecca then introduced me to two absolutely essential team members. Jeanine Nault first helped with some newspaper research and then did the painstaking work of footnoting the entire manuscript. Laura Nelson has taxed her eyes reading hundreds of handwritten letters and a few diaries and transcribing them all. Steve’s student Julie Alderman compiled the bibliography. Some transcription help came as well from William Kurtz and Adrian Brettle at the University of Virginia, introduced to me by Holly Shulman, the creator of the Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and a great resource on any history project. My friend Ann Charnley, who has moved away so is no longer able to help with research, found the absolutely fascinating unpublished diary of Ann Green from 1861. Many thanks to her descendant Cathy O’Donnell for sharing the diary and allowing me to use it. And thanks to all of the wonderful people at the libraries and historical societies around the country: Kate Collins and Elizabeth Dunn at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University; Rena Schergen at the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago; the Princeton University Library Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, where my great-niece Caroline Davidsen was of assistance; my many friends at the Massachusetts Historical Society and The Historical Society of the Washington, D.C., plus the incredibly knowledgeable people in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. Rod Ross at the National Archives was particularly helpful and he introduced me to David Gerleman of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project and provided me with the excellent paper on Josephine Giddings by Keith Melder. Kathryn Jacob, Curator of Manuscripts at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, was wonderfully giving of her time and knowledge. Special thanks also to Sister Mada-anne Gell, VHM, the Archivist at the Georgetown Visitation Monastery. She not only provided me with valuable material, she let me join the nuns for lunch in the refectory. A special thanks as well to Dayle Dooley at the Historic Congressional Cemetery.