Jane Pierce had a long history—her entire adult life—of citing illness as a reason for doing very little. When she had married the Democratic Congressman in 1834 her prominent New England family had objected that he came from a different political party and that his family stood well below theirs in wealth and prestige. Whatever Jane’s feelings about her husband, she never seemed to come to terms with his choice of careers. She accompanied him to Washington immediately after their marriage but begged off from the social engagements, saying she did not feel well enough to participate.88 During Franklin’s second year in Congress, Jane’s pregnancy gave her a reason to stay with relatives in Massachusetts. When that son died, three days after birth in February 1836, Jane withdrew more and more from any kind of public role.89 She insisted that Franklin sell their house in Hillsborough, another town she did not care for, while she remained in Lowell and submitted to leeching, the currently popular medical treatment.90
When Franklin Pierce’s political reputation grew and he won election to the United States Senate, Jane reluctantly returned to Washington, but she made no attempt to hide her displeasure with the capital and rarely ventured out of the boardinghouse where they lived.91 After giving birth to two more boys, one in 1839 when she was thirty-four and another in 1841, she became even more adamant in thinking that Washington would ruin her children as well as her husband. She thought the social scene encouraged Franklin to drink excessively, and she saw politics as a demeaning career that damaged the entire family. In 1842, when Franklin’s Senate term ended, Jane prevailed on him to move back to New Hampshire.92 To placate her, he refused an attorney generalship in the Polk administration, but the war with Mexico was another matter. He enlisted, achieved the status of local hero, and when the fighting ended, resumed his political career.
By 1852, when Franklin Pierce became a candidate for president, Jane’s abhorrence of everything about the capital and politics was well established. When she heard that the Democrats had nominated him, she fainted. A messenger, who brought the news to the Pierces while they were out riding in their carriage, had thought to please by pronouncing her the next “Presidentess.”93 Jane fervently prayed for her husband’s defeat because she could not bring herself to consider the alternative—his victory and her return to Washington, this time to the White House. If she had felt uncomfortable as a congressman’s wife, she would surely suffer in the considerably more conspicuous and demanding role of First Lady.
Bennie’s death in January 1853 relieved Jane Pierce of any obligation to attend her husband’s inauguration two months later, even though her family, more favorably disposed to Franklin after he had become so famous, urged her to be strong. They understood that all through her marriage she had found excuses for avoiding unpleasant tasks, and they could only hope that national prominence would help her face up to her responsibilities. One cousin explained that Jane had always been “so depressed [and] now has such bitter cause [but we hope she will not become] a source of sorrow and anxiety [to her husband] when he needs strength and consolation.”94
Although his grief may have equaled that of his wife, Franklin Pierce received little of the public sympathy offered to her. Bennie had planned to hear his father’s inaugural speech, and Franklin was achingly aware of his absence as he stood before the crowds on a cold March 4.95 The wife of a newspaper editor described Franklin Pierce as “the youngest and handsomest President we had ever elected, [but] … so sad.” When he began his speech with a reference to Bennie’s death, the audience was shocked: “The public does not tolerate the intrusion of a man’s personal joys and griefs into his official life,” Sarah Agnes Pryor observed, and some in the crowd pronounced Franklin’s move a ploy to gain sympathy while others thought it an unseemly exposé of his private life. In any case, it was unacceptable: “To keep one’s inner self in the background should be the instinct, and is surely the policy of every man and woman who aspires to popularity,” Pryor warned.96
In Franklin’s wife, however, grief was condoned and accepted as sufficient reason for avoiding official duties. Her widowed aunt stayed with her and became “virtually the lady of the White House,” according to one guest.97 The aunt shared Jane’s “seclusion [because her son’s death meant that] nothing of course will now be expected of her and wherever she is, she will be secluded from the world.”98 After the first few months when Jane saw no visitors and “seem[ed] to be bowed to the earth,”99 she appeared at some public receptions but could not throw off her grief. Washingtonians dismissed her as an invalid and pronounced the President’s House a gloomy place for the entire Pierce administration.
More than a decade would intervene between Jane Pierce’s unhappy years in the White House and the arrival of the next “invalid” chatelaine. In the meantime, Harriet Lane, niece of President Buchanan, enlivened the Washington social scene, and Mary Todd Lincoln—although she too grieved the loss of a son—refused to retreat into obscurity.
With Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, the newly inaugurated vice president, Andrew Johnson, assumed the presidency. The record of his wife, Eliza McCardle Johnson, lends credence to the theory that nineteenth-century women could easily withdraw from a public role by pleading illness or grief. In the case of a woman like Eliza, who had several reasons for not putting herself in a conspicuous role, the temptation may have proven understandably strong. Mary Lincoln had endured four years of almost unremitting criticism, and Eliza’s husband had not exactly paved the way for her to enjoy a more favorable reception.
Andrew Johnson had distinguished himself at his vice presidential inauguration on March 4, 1865, by lurching forward to take his oath and slurring the lines of a long, rambling discourse. Word spread quickly through the audience that he was drunk. Eliza had not been on hand to nurse him through a bad cold, and when on the day of the ceremony he had fortified himself with alcohol, the dose had proven too strong. Abraham Lincoln defended his running mate by volunteering that “Andy ain’t no drunkard,” but Mary Lincoln was thoroughly annoyed. When the president was shot just weeks later, Andrew’s performance was still fresh in people’s minds, and they had not forgotten it when his family came to join him in Washington in June.
The fragile, blue-eyed Eliza Johnson had other reasons for delaying her arrival in the capital. She had visited the city only once before 1865,100 but she understood how short she fell of possessing the social skill that “cave dwellers” assessed in each president’s wife. Grief and poor health sapped her energy. She had tuberculosis before the Civil War; and family tragedies, including the deaths of a son and a son-in-law, had further weakened her. Her husband’s political career had included few chances for her to develop self-confidence.
Eliza Johnson had not always lagged so far behind her husband, but like many political wives, she had watched the man she tutored outdistance her. Andrew had been a young, poorly educated tailor when she first saw him and it was partly her teaching and help that allowed him to move ahead. They had married while still in their teens, and as soon as he had mastered the three “r’s” and put his tailoring business on a prosperous route, he arranged to have himself appointed a trustee of the local academy. He was, one wag had it, a self-made man, inclined to give too much credit to his maker.101 Certainly he gave little credit to his wife. While he progressed through a string of elective offices—state representative, U.S. congressman, governor of Tennessee, and finally U.S. senator—Eliza followed the example of many other political wives by staying home and setting her sights narrowly on her family.
Unlike Mary Lincoln, who had stubbornly claimed a prominent place in the capital’s social life, Eliza Johnson insisted on remaining out of sight. Her invisibility was so complete that after four years in the capital, newspapers described her existence as “almost a myth.”102 She appeared briefly at only one dinner (but left after starting to cough),103 and her only other recorded social activity was a children’s party in December 1868, when she greeted her young guests by
announcing that she was “an invalid.”104
Her invisibility should not be taken for inactivity. One report that Eliza’s influence over her husband was “boundless” no doubt exaggerated the case, but she did continue to keep remarkably informed during her life, reading many newspapers and magazines. During the White House years, she clipped articles she thought he should see, shrewdly separating the good news which she gave him at the end of each day, from the bad, which he got the next morning. One historian concluded that Andrew Johnson “may have consulted his wife and daughters more than he did any fellow statesman,” leaving it unclear how much he consulted anybody.105
Martha Johnson Patterson, who substituted for her mother at the president’s table, could rely on the country’s preference for youth to protect her from criticism. The Johnson daughter immediately disarmed potential detractors by announcing, “We are plain folks from Tennessee, called here by a national calamity. I hope not too much will be expected of us.”106 Then to lend credence to her claim, she covered the worn White House carpets with simple muslin and installed two Jersey cows on the lawn to provide fresh milk and butter. In an older woman, such decisions might have prompted ridicule or charges of bumpkin roughness, but in a younger woman, they apparently seemed refreshing. Margaret heard her sister and herself praised as assets to their father, “frank and unostentatious … [in a manner that has] gained for them the respect of all visitors.”107
In 1868, the Johnson family found themselves in the unwelcome glare of the first presidential impeachment trial in American history. The House of Representatives, in a show of their own strength and their disapproval of the president’s handling of a defeated South, had charged him with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” For three months while the Senate tried the case, people flocked to witness the proceedings as though it were a carnival show rather than a national trial. Kate Chase, whose father presided as chief justice, appeared each day to watch his performance, while others competed for tickets to see her, one of the city’s most popular young belles.
The Johnson women remained in the White House—the president’s daughters keeping up a regular social schedule and Eliza staying upstairs and out of sight.108 Each evening, a steward, delegated to attend the proceedings, reported on the day’s events. Except for that contact, the Johnsons feigned disinterest in the trial. When acquittal came (by the margin of a single vote), Eliza insisted that she had correctly predicted her husband’s vindication.
Several of the accounts of Eliza Johnson’s life raise questions about whether or not she was physically able to assume a more active public role in the White House. Her grandchildren evidently enjoyed her company, and according to one witness they ran to her room as soon as they finished their lessons—hardly evidence that she was incapacitated. Often described as fragile or frail but never uncommunicative or disabled, she remained central to the family’s life in the White House. After leaving Washington, she outlived her husband, and, when he died in 1875, she appeared healthy enough to have herself appointed his executrix under bond set at $200,000.109
Any conclusions about Eliza Johnson, however, are bound to be speculative because so little information remains. Her prospective biographer, Margaret Blanton, abandoned the project after years of work because she thought the subject impossible to know. Except for Eliza’s loyalty to her husband, which was unquestioned, nothing was clear. “In the end I did not know,” Blanton wrote, “whether she loved Andrew or hated him.”110
Blanton did not definitely conclude that Eliza Johnson withdrew behind explanations of illness to avoid unwanted social duties. But Blanton did judge the entire Johnson family “not very clever [and] put in a position to which they were unequal.”111 If that is true and Eliza remained a frontier woman, pushed by circumstances far beyond her accustomed setting, then it is not surprising that she looked for an escape. By making herself invisible for four years, she avoided criticism. The country’s acceptance of youthful substitutes provided a way out.
Illness as a permanent condition of First Ladies disappears with Eliza Johnson’s departure from Washington in 1869 (except for Ida McKinley, who came to the White House much later). Other presidents’ wives suffered serious and debilitating sicknesses but they remained inactive only temporarily. Helen Taft, after her stroke in 1909, delegated official responsibilities to her daughter and sister for much of the next year but then returned to resume a full and active role in Washington life. Florence Harding (1921–1923) and Lou Hoover (1929–1933) both suffered serious illnesses during their husbands’ administrations but kept full schedules. Betty Ford (1974–1977) underwent surgery and chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer but continued to make public appearances.
Nineteenth-century America’s tolerance—indeed, solicitous sympathy—for women’s withdrawal into illness and grief gave presidents’ wives a convenient exit from what had become onerous, often unpleasant responsibilities. No written rules dictated the activities of White House chatelaines, leaving them free to react to public attitudes as well as to express their own frustrations and needs. Women who were bored by the role of hostess that so many of their predecessors had taken had another choice. Rather than face judgment by the “cave dwellers,” they could take to their beds and install a young ingénue in their place, confident that any social lapses of the substitute would be tolerated and charged to inexperience.
Some exceptions (Sarah Polk and Mary Lincoln) broke the pattern, and they will be considered next. But for the most part, mid-nineteenth century America witnessed few mature or strong First Ladies. Youthful surrogates became a tradition because they evidently fit in with prevailing ideas about femininity—womanliness could be exemplified in obsequious, smiling mannequins who showed little evidence of thinking for themselves.
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Three Exceptions: Sarah Childress Polk, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Julia Dent Grant
MOST HISTORICAL PATTERNS EXPOSE an exception—a conspicuous deviation from an otherwise straight, clear line. Presidents’ wives are no different; and if in the middle half of the nineteenth century most preferred anonymity to exploring new possibilities in the job, a minority achieved prominence. Sarah Childress Polk (1845–1849) eschewed domestic details so that she could maintain a close working relationship with her husband. Mary Todd Lincoln (1861–1865) left observers unsure about whether or not she had any influence on important decisions, so that merchants, intent on catering to her, permitted her to run up enormous bills. Julia Dent Grant’s activities (1869–1877) and those of her children received enough attention to qualify the Grants as the first “star” family in the White House. The three women totaled only a bit more than sixteen years in the White House, but they stand out in sharp contrast to the faceless First Ladies who preceded them.
All three had especially good educations for women of their time and place. The schooling itself was not so important, but it may have encouraged the women and those whom they encountered to give special weight to their judgments. Sarah Polk and Mary Lincoln had a long time to prepare for the White House. Their husbands had spent their entire adult lives in politics, and Mary Lincoln had never concealed her lifelong ambition to reach the top. That infatuation with the limelight and an acceptance of the careers their husbands had chosen characterize all three women.
In their forties when their husbands took on the presidency, the three exceptions may simply have had more energy than their older counterparts. At forty-one, Sarah was almost as young as Dolley Madison had been at her husband’s inauguration. After James Polk had delivered his speech to a “large assemblage of umbrellas,”1 Sarah had accepted the Bible used in the ceremony, tucked away a souvenir fan with its pictures of the first ten presidents, and ridden up Pennsylvania Avenue with her friends. The custom had not yet developed for the president’s wife to accompany him to the White House, but in Sarah’s case it would have been appropriate since she had played an important part in the career that took him there.
That Sarah Polk figu
red prominently in James’s rise to power is less difficult to prove than the reasons, but from the beginning of their marriage she showed a mind of her own. On their wedding trip, following the nuptials on New Year’s Day, 1824, Sarah impressed her husband’s relatives as “display[ing] a great deal of spice and more independence of judgment than was fitting in one woman.”2 She might have been expected to defer to James, who was eight years her senior and a graduate of the University of North Carolina, but she showed little evidence of doing so.
Partly pampered and partly pushed into self-confidence, Sarah Childress Polk had grown up in very comfortable circumstances. Her parents, prosperous Tennessee planters and tavern keepers, had provided particularly good schooling for their children. In Sarah’s case that meant beginning with a tutor at home, then continuing at a Nashville girls’ school before enrolling at thirteen in the best girls’ school in the South. Salem Female Academy in North Carolina, founded by Moravians who put great importance on girls’ education, eventually drew students from all over the Eastern Seaboard.3 When its reputation reached Tennessee, Sarah and her younger sister rode 200 miles on horseback to enroll. In addition to the usual academic subjects, the girls had to improve their needlepoint, practice the piano, and assist in cleaning the dormitory—all part of preparing them for assuming wifely responsibilities in adulthood. Sarah’s stay at this exceptional school ended after less than a year when her father died and she was called home, but it is clear from her later statements and decisions that the academic part of Salem’s program interested her far more than the domestic part.
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