It wasn’t only Louise whom Breckinridge was worried about. He also was increasingly concerned about Nisba. She was his favorite—the child of his heart. But she also was unwell and had been for some time—physically as well as, it seemed, spiritually. She appeared lost and deeply unhappy, and he didn’t know how to help her. “I am somewhat nervous about Nisba,” he wrote to Desha, “so much so that I have gotten a little superstitious and for the first time in my life receive a telegram with a slight tremor.” Everything that meant anything to Breckinridge was in jeopardy—his career, his reputation, the upward trajectory of the storied family name—but the one thing he couldn’t stand to lose was Sophonisba.
* * *
Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge was born on April Fool’s Day 1866, which was also Easter Sunday, an odd mix of the sacred and profane that was appropriate for a woman who would spend a good part of her life traveling between two worlds. She was named after her father’s mother, Ann Sophonisba “Sophy” Preston Breckinridge, who, like many women of her era, died in her forties after giving birth to the last of a large brood—in her case, at forty-four, after the birth of her eleventh child. Her name, Sophonisba would later tell friends, meant “keeper of her husband’s secrets,” but it was her father’s secrets that would come to define, and eventually haunt, much of her life.
Nisba always felt like a bit of an outsider in her own family. As a child, she remembered being puzzled as to how someone as “common” as she was could be related to the well-bred southern ladies around her—her mother and her elegant grandmother Mary Curry Desha. By “common” she meant that she “liked all kinds of people and was not particular in my choice of amusements.” She remembered “playing with a crowd of boys” in the street outside the family’s house or sitting on the curb for hours just watching the world go by—that is, until Grandma Desha led her by the ear back into the house, scolding Nisba for being a “common child.” Grandma Desha still held to the antebellum standards of what made a proper lady; she told Nisba that you could “tell a lady by the button holes she made” and said that she “had never known a Breckinridge woman who could make a decent button hole.” She attempted to remedy this shortcoming with regular lessons in the “essential domestic arts” for her granddaughter. In her estimation, no girl was really “finished” until she could “sew a complete layette.”
Introverted and serious, with a long, somber face, Nisba stood out in a family of quick-witted, sociable southerners; they teased her that she “missed the point of every joke.” While she excelled at school, she thought herself “dull,” especially in comparison with her older sister, Ella, who was the epitome of southern womanhood—vivacious, charming, and attractive, with a cloud of young men flocking about her. The brightest spot in her childhood was her father. Willie was devoted to the baby girl who was born after he returned from the war. He called her his “peace baby,” and having missed his oldest daughter Ella’s early years, he threw himself into taking care of Nisba. “I had left Ella to others … but this would never be done to you. I put you to sleep; I walked you when you were sick,” he reminded her later on.
It wasn’t just love that drove Breckinridge to be an exceptionally involved father. Nisba’s mother, Issa, was a delicate woman, made more so by repeated childbearing. In the North, women were already using crude contraceptives, abortion, and sexual abstinence to effect a dramatic decline in the number of children they bore in a lifetime—from an average of about eight children in 1800 to just four by 1900. But in the South, especially among the elite, childbearing patterns remained much as they had been, with early marriage and frequent pregnancies. Issa was seventeen when she married Willie in 1861; she gave birth to Ella a year after her wedding. The Civil War gave her a three-year break from childbearing, but after Willie returned home in the spring of 1865, she had five babies in seven years, and a final baby, Curry, in 1875. “There was no doctrine of birth control or spaced child bearing prevalent at that time,” recalled Nisba, and the quick succession of children overwhelmed her mother. Issa spent long periods in bed and was a loving but ghostly presence to her children, best remembered as a frail belle playing the piano with a gardenia tucked in her hair.
It was Willie who often got the children up and dressed in the morning. “My father was wonderfully skillful in caring for us,” said Nisba, remembering how “patient and kind” he was. He taught Nisba how to tie her shoes, and in a mark of the sensitive, pensive demeanor that would be her hallmark, she recalled being overwhelmed by the thought that she would have to put them on in the morning and take them off at night for the rest of her life. “I seemed overwhelmed with tragedy and wept both loud and long,” she said.
From her earliest childhood, Nisba basked in her father’s company and approval. Willie often brought Nisba with him to his law office. “I learnt my letters off the backs of my father’s law books,” she remembered. He made it clear he expected her to excel at school, offering a reward for perfect report cards, which she got. To her, it was simple: “I loved my father and wanted to please him.” Nisba posed a conundrum to her father, however. It was clear from an early age that she was the most intellectually gifted of the Breckinridge children—Ella was the social butterfly, Desha the charmer, Robert the troublemaker, and Curry the coddled youngest, who had difficulty learning to read and struggled in school. But Nisba was a girl in a culture with sharply defined roles for women, especially those of the patrician class. Even as middle-class women in the North left their homes to teach for a few years before marriage or join one of the many charitable associations doing good works in the community, white southern women of all but the lowest class remained confined to the domestic sphere, and young women were heavily chaperoned. Nisba and Ella entertained in the parlor with their father sitting watchfully in the corner on a damask-covered rosewood divan—although if there was dancing, he was known to break into the “Highland Fling.” When they got older and went to Ashland and other local estates for dances, there was always a servant in attendance. The “coveted and forbidden joys of buggy riding” with young men were not for the Breckinridge girls, remembered Ella in a memoir of her coming-of-age. “We went in our father’s carriage, driven by an old-time negro retainer quick to note, reprove, and report any undue friskiness on the part of his cargo.”
Nisba, reserved and bookish, had no problems with her father’s rules, but the ever-popular Ella and Willie clashed frequently over her testing of the limits of what was allowed for a proper southern girl. “Long before it was time for me to ‘come out’ I was leaking out,” Ella said, and her father packed her off to boarding school. Later, when she was being courted by a young man her father didn’t approve of because he was the “son of a rich and indulgent mother” and Willie didn’t think he would be able to support a wife, Ella snuck around behind her father’s back and met her suitor at a friend’s house. When Willie found out, she was promptly married off in a heavy black silk dress, “sleeves up to my wrist, whale boned collar up to my eyes,” that her father not only insisted on but personally bought the material for when Ella dithered over obtaining the dress that was de rigueur for proper southern brides—even in June. “I looked a million years old in it,” she remembered, “but my father was satisfied that he had made the ceremony legal beyond question.” No one would question the respectability of the Breckinridge girls.
Despite the strictures placed on southern girls, politics and public service were in the air Nisba breathed. The ghosts of her relatives paraded through history, from her great-grandfather Breckinridge, who was Thomas Jefferson’s confidant, to her grandfather Desha, who was the governor of Kentucky; senators and visiting dignitaries were regulars at the dinner table; and Ashland, the estate of Henry Clay, was “a favorite playground.” That her family was known in Washington and beyond was a matter of course. When her father introduced her to Secretary of State James Blaine, she thought it natural that he should say, “She looks somewhat like both the Deshas and the Breckinridge
s.” As children, remembered Ella, it wasn’t fairy tales they begged for but “stories of Sam Houston, of Andrew Jackson, of Zachary Taylor, and the battle of Buena Vista; for anecdotes of Harrison, the praying politician, and of the ‘Tippecanoe-and-Tyler-too’ campaign with its cunning little log cabin emblem … One of our favorite stories was the one about Preston Brooks breaking his cane over the head of the seated Charles Sumner.”
The family didn’t lack for strong female role models. “Grandma Black Cap,” John Breckinridge’s widow, was a legendary figure in the family. After John died of tuberculosis at age forty-six, leaving his young widow alone in the wilds of Kentucky with a big farm and a big family, she refused to bend to convention and remarry. She donned the black widow’s cap she would wear for the next fifty years and ruled over Cabell’s Dale with “a sword in one hand and a Bible in the other.” Nisba’s grandma Desha, her mother’s mother, was not only charming and imperious, but also the family’s “ready reference bureau,” said Ella. She knew everything, from “which art gallery some famous painting hung in” to “which family every flower belonged.” A true southern lady, she rarely left her home “but kept in touch with worthwhile, interesting people” and had an “uncanny judgment about the value of new writers.” She helped James Lane Allen, considered Kentucky’s first important novelist, get his start.
For Nisba, then, the seeds of the conflict that would come to consume her young adult life were laid early, in a family that cherished its role in the shaping of the country and valued strong, intelligent women, but held fast to society’s constraints on maintaining women’s respectability. The role of Breckinridge women had long been to solidify the family’s position through marriage and give birth to the next generation of statesmen. But Nisba was born into a postwar world that already had irrevocably changed by the time she was a young woman. With the ranks of men thinned by the war and the fortunes of many elite southern families decimated, a young woman’s neat progression from her father’s home to a husband’s by her late teens or early twenties could no longer be ensured. Even more than the North, the South was gripped by widespread fear about a generation of spinsters and old maids “hang[ing] like a locket around the neck of some long-suffering male relative,” as Ella put it.
The Breckinridges had experienced the postwar financial vicissitudes firsthand. Willie ended up being responsible for his wife’s sister Mary, who went by “Mollie,” and her mother, Mary—Grandma Desha—when Issa’s father, John Randolph Desha, a successful doctor with considerable land holdings in Kentucky and Arkansas, went bust during the Panic of 1873, “when a great number of planters from the south experienced financial disaster,” as Nisba remembered. For a time Mary and Mollie ran a dame school—a private grammar school—out of their home, as did many southern women trying to scrape together a living the only way they could. “If we cannot teach, or make shirts, we must starve,” one North Carolina woman complained to a friend in 1871. Eventually, Mary and Mollie were forced to move in with the Breckinridges. Still unmarried by her mid-twenties, Aunt Mollie faced life as the dependent spinster aunt, reliant on Willie’s kindness for everything from the roof over her head to the clothes she wore. Mollie, however, was an energetic woman, remembered Ella, and even though “it was humiliating for a lady to admit she needed money,” never mind “go out and try to make it,” Mollie got a job as a teacher in the Lexington public schools. “It is impossible … to realize the storm of criticism this simple act provoked,” said Ella, “but apologetically and timidly first one young woman and then another followed her example and found the joy of having a little money and consequently a little independence.”
Money, or the lack thereof, was the constant worry thrumming beneath the Breckinridges’ lives. “We were very poor,” Nisba later wrote of her childhood. Ella remembered that their “dresses were like the annals of the poor—few and simple.” In addition to supporting his wife’s family and the children “coming in swift succession,” Willie had to foot the bill for what Nisba remembered as “long visits from very many relatives.” Among the impoverished relations who showed up on the Breckinridges’ doorstep was former Confederate general John Cabell Breckinridge and his family, who lived with his cousin after he returned from exile in Canada. Both Nisba and Ella remember their house overflowing with aunts and uncles and hobbledehoy cousins. One freckle-faced cousin of an especially peripatetic family put his foot down and refused to pack when it was time to leave. “We will be coming back pretty soon, so I think I’ll just stay,” he said, and “stay he did for years,” Ella recalled.
The reality that Willie Breckinridge understood all too well was that, ready or not, young women like Nisba were being thrown headfirst into a new world in which they might well be required to take care of themselves. “You ought to look squarely in the face that if I die, you will have to make your own living,” Willie warned Nisba when she was eighteen, adding, “If I live you may have to do so anyway.”
Recognizing Nisba’s potential, Willie had worked, he said, to give her “brain a fair chance to show its power.” When Nisba was fourteen, he used his position as the attorney for the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Kentucky (later the University of Kentucky) to get the school’s charter changed to allow the admission of women and sent Nisba off to college. (Younger freshmen weren’t uncommon at the time, as many students didn’t go to high school and college admission requirements hadn’t been standardized.)
At Kentucky A&M, Nisba encountered professors who didn’t think women should be there and a less-than-exciting curriculum. She also wasn’t allowed to receive a degree, just a certificate. After three years she began pressing her father to let her go to a new college in the Northeast that seemed, she said, to have been “established for me or the likes of me”—Wellesley College, one of what would become known as the Seven Sisters colleges that were founded to give women access to an education on par with that provided by the all-male Ivy League colleges. They represented a true revolution in education for women, offering a rigorous academic curriculum and accredited four-year degrees.
Willie balked at sending his beloved daughter so far from home, but she was persistent, and the family knew Henry Fowle Durant, the founder of Wellesley, so eventually he consented. It was an extraordinary gift to his daughter. At the time, fewer than 2 percent of American women went to college, but educational opportunities for women were exploding as four-year women’s colleges replaced seminaries and the land-grant movement created new coeducational public universities. Higher education for women was still controversial, however. Doctors warned that too much education would harm young women because it would overtax their brains and draw vital energy away from their reproductive organs. “The system never does two things well at the same time,” warned Dr. Edward Clarke in his widely read 1873 book Sex and Education, which helped popularize the idea that a young woman’s bodily energy was needed exclusively for the “development and perfectation of the reproductive system.” Clarke gave harrowing examples of young women who were perfectly healthy until they went away to school and studied too hard; inevitably they became pale and anemic and had irregular periods. Even if they left school, it was often too late; the damage to their reproductive mechanism was irreversible. They became semi-invalids; if they married, they couldn’t conceive; if they conceived, they couldn’t nurse because their breasts had failed to develop. He predicted a steady increase in the number of “permanently disabled” female college graduates and a looming shortage of healthy wives.
Willie apparently was undaunted by this. Maybe it was because as a young man at Centre College he had sat side by side with his three cousins—Mary, Caroline, and Jane Young, the daughters of the college’s president—who did the same work he did but were denied degrees (all three eventually received degrees in 1905). Nisba thought it was because “his college life was spent in contact with girls of collegiate attainments and vigorous intellectual interests.” There was, however, a different, and far bigg
er, cultural gulf that Nisba would have to cross to attend Wellesley: it had enrolled its first two black students the previous year, in 1883, and the daughter of the Confederate colonel Willie Breckinridge would have to live among them and treat them as equals. And no family better illustrated the deep contradictions that already were inherent in America’s history regarding slavery and race than the Breckinridges.
Kentucky pioneer John Breckinridge was an ardent proponent of slavery and owned nearly seventy slaves, making him one of the largest slave owners in Kentucky at the time. “Purchase all the negroes you possibly can bring here,” he advised his brother William, who was emigrating to Kentucky, in 1797. “It would be an important thing to you if you could turn your goods into slaves.” Breckinridge didn’t just establish much of his fortune on the labor of enslaved African Americans; he contributed to the entrenchment of chattel slavery by ensuring its continuation in a border state at a critical time and to its defense through a states’ rights frame.
In the late 1790s, as the citizens of Kentucky agitated for a constitutional convention to make more democratic the state’s founding 1792 constitution, which didn’t allow for the direct election of the governor or state senators, Breckinridge took a leading role in opposing a new constitution, both to maintain the landed gentry’s control of the government and to forestall calls for emancipation of slaves in the state. He wrote a widely distributed pamphlet called No Convention under the pseudonym “Algernon Sidney”—after the English republican political theorist whose Discourses Concerning Government helped lay the groundwork for the American Revolution—that mocked those who wished to free the slaves as well intended but naive, having “surely mistaken the price necessary to carry so important a work into execution.” He cautioned, “Let us not liberate others at the probable expense of our own freedom”—a warning to other members of the aristocracy that if the democratic rabble could “by one experiment emancipate our slaves,” as Breckinridge wrote to a fellow slave owner, they could just as easily “extinguish our land titles.”
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