First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  The Grants returned to settle in New York, and Ulysses set about writing his memoirs. He was already ill with a spreading throat cancer and just days after he completed the work, he died. He had feared he would not finish in time and had sketched in the important parts first, knowing he could go back and fill in the details if time permitted. What later became a standard exercise for ex-presidents—the writing and selling of their memoirs for large sums—began with Ulysses Grant, and it did not spring so much from his own ego as from a desire to provide an income for his family.

  The book earned half a million dollars in royalties,94 so that Julia was encouraged to write her own autobiography—the first by an expresident’s wife. Memoirs of Abigail Adams and Dolley Madison had already been published but heirs had spliced them together out of the women’s letters. Unfortunately, Julia’s work failed to interest a publisher until nearly three quarters of a century after her death, and it was not published until 1975.

  Less than one-tenth of her book deals with Julia’s eight years as First Lady and in those few pages, she concentrates on describing her social accomplishments and defending Ulysses. His own autobiography had ignored rumors about his malfeasance in office, and Julia determined to set the record straight. Several of her relatives took jobs on the public payroll but that hardly constituted corruption. “There was that dreadful Black Friday,” she admitted, referring to a scheme drafted by the financiers Jim Fisk and Jay Gould early in the Grant administration to “corner” the New York gold market and make themselves millions richer. They enlisted the help of President Grant’s brother-in-law and believed—incorrectly as it turned out—that they had secured the president’s assurance that the federal Treasury would cooperate and not release gold. On “Black Friday” in September 1869, the plot reached its culmination. While businessmen watched helplessly, Gould and Fisk bid gold prices up and out of reach. Then the federal Treasury moved in and filled the vacuum by releasing its funds. Questions remained about the president’s complicity. Had he intended to participate or been misread?

  Julia’s account of her husband’s role predictably concurred with that of historians who later decided Ulysses was naïve and a poor judge of character but not dishonest. As for her own part, she explained: “The papers seemed to say I knew something of [the Fisk and Gould scheme] but I did not; only this.” The president had instructed her to add in a letter she was sending to his sister: “If you have any influence with your husband, tell him to have nothing whatever to do with [Fisk and Gould.] If he does, he will be ruined for come what may, [Ulysses] will do his duty to the country and the trusts in his keeping.”95 Thus Julia added, for what it was worth, her own account of her husband’s honesty.

  Ulysses Grant’s two terms as president were also marred by reports that members of his family and some of his closest advisers were involved in plots to defraud the government; and in each case Julia’s account portrays her husband as naïve and misunderstood rather than dishonest. The Whiskey Ring involved Orville E. Babcock, the president’s secretary. Contrived as a kickback system in which federal taxes on alcohol production were not collected if distillers paid off the inspectors, the scheme would have enriched the Republican Party and Babcock. Julia explained that Babcock had always been “civil and obliging and never officious,”96 and she urged the president to assist him at his trial. When Babcock was acquitted in the courtroom, but not in the public’s mind, Julia encouraged the president to replace him at the White House.97

  In the case of the cabinet member William Belknap, Julia extended the same tolerance for poor judgment and bad luck that she had offered her husband. Belknap had entered into agreements with prospective traders in the Indian Territories but the agreements appeared to line Belknap’s pockets more than they provided needed items to the Territories. When evidence mounted against him, Belknap went to the president and resigned, thus protecting himself from a worse fate. He was impeached but the Senate would not convict since members believed his resignation removed him from their jurisdiction. In spite of a great deal of concrete evidence to the contrary, Julia accepted Belknap’s plea of innocence and she continued to see the Belknaps socially.98

  Julia reported that she felt “much injured by [Ulysses’] neglect to inform me on … important matters,”99 but the press and public showed her more attention. She recalled how she had been “followed by a crowd of idle, curious loungers, which was anything but pleasant.” When she requested that the White House grounds be shut off to the public so that she and her children would have some privacy, she observed a “ripple of comment [that] followed [about] the Grants … getting too exclusive.” The objections had little effect on her, however, and Julia got her way. Later she looked back on the White House years and remembered: “The children and I had that beautiful lawn for eight years, and I assure you we enjoyed it.”100

  Rather than an exception in a long line of faceless presidents’ wives, Julia Grant represents an important turning point. Her predecessors had acted as local figures, judged by the capital “cave dwellers” but little known to the rest of the nation. Julia marked the beginning of a new phase in which the First Lady would eventually become a national leader, widely recognized, frequently criticized, and often emulated. As though to mark the changed role of the president’s wife, the journalist “Olivia” called Julia Grant “first lady of the land,” one of the first documented appearances of that term in a newspaper.101 Julia’s energetic clan and her own vivacious personality appealed to reporters who were increasingly focusing their attention on Washington.102 But the media played only one part in the change. Julia’s cross-country travel, her long journey around the world, and her memoir writing all hint at the kind of activities that would become more common for presidents’ wives who followed her. Like Sarah Polk and Mary Lincoln, she expended considerable energy on a public role for herself, and thus helped set the stage for First Ladies who came later.

  4

  The Limited Promise of the “New Woman” (1877–1901)

  ALTHOUGH THE IMAGE OF the First Lady as nothing other than the nation’s chief wife, head hostess, and leading fashion plate seemed firmly in place under Julia Grant, history had shown that an individual woman might, if she chose, do more in that role. Lucy Hayes (1877–1881) appeared to be just such a woman. The first college graduate to preside over the White House, she was widely heralded as introducing the era of a “New Woman.”1 An even more intellectually inclined Lucretia Garfield followed. After James Garfield was assassinated, a widower, Chester Arthur, took over the presidency, and he was succeeded by Grover Cleveland, a bachelor. If the nation could ever be diverted from its need for a purely social creature “at the head of female society,” the decade after 1877 was surely the time to try to divert it. Two thinking women and then two vacancies on the distaff side of the White House ought to have had some effect.

  Events outside the executive mansion indicated change, too, because the generation of women who came of age in the late 1870s were less inclined than their mothers to marry, or at least to see marriage as their only choice.2 More and more colleges and universities, including some medical and theological schools, had opened their doors to women, and several states permitted women to practice law. Even the justices of the United States Supreme Court finally capitulated in 1879 and admitted a woman to practice before them.3 M. Carey Thomas, who later became president of Bryn Mawr, joined other women barred from advanced training in the United States and traveled to Europe for graduate work that would help them compete with men for professorships.4

  Much of the impetus for change had come out of the Civil War, which, although a national tragedy, had encouraged many women to give their first speech, organize their first club, or take their initial trip out of home territory. Mary Livermore, a Chicago mother of four who reportedly became the most successful woman speaker of her time,5 explained how the war had started her on the road to fame: “It was not of my seeking. But my acceptance of an active membership in
[a Civil War relief organization] carried me inevitably into methods of work different from any that I had known before. … I could not avoid it.”6

  The large number of woman-run organizations formed after the war indicates the extent to which women were redefining their lives to reach beyond their own families. Sorosis, a woman’s club founded in 1868, announced in its charter an intention to help women by encouraging “useful relations among [them] … the discussion of principles [which would aid them] … the establishing of an order which would render [them] helpful to each other and actively benevolent in the world.”7 One of the club’s founding members, Jennie June Croly, had acted out of anger at being treated shabbily by the New York Press Club. Although a syndicated columnist, she had been denied the opportunity to hear Charles Dickens speak at the Press Club. When she and other women protested, the decision was altered—on condition that they sit behind a curtain and out of sight of the lecturer. Croly responded by starting a club for women only to supply them with a network of their own.

  Hundreds of other clubs followed. Some, such as the National Council of Jewish Women and the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, had ethnic bases, while others, such as the PTA and the Sunshine Club, reached out to a broader membership, but all shared the objective of encouraging women to join together and take a more activist role in the world.

  Unlike the local organizations of pre–Civil War days, these new organizations were national in scope, with branches in many states. One of the largest, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, was formed in 1874 just before Lucy Hayes entered the White House. Frances Willard, the Union’s president for twenty years, repeatedly stressed how the WCTU joined together women from different sections of the country, and she used a chain metaphor to describe the result: “The voice of God called to [members of the WCTU] from the lips of his prophet: ‘Make a chain for the land is full of bloody crimes and the city is full of violence’ and so in every town and village we are forming these chains of light and loving helpfulness.”8

  Because support for women’s right to vote was still weak, Victoria Woodhull’s campaign for president in 1872 was more principled than practical, but women did register other political gains at just about this time. Some won local elections and others gained appointive positions in government. Samuel Tilden, the New York governor (who unsuccessfully ran against Rutherford Hayes for president in 1876), named Josephine Shaw Lowell, a young widow with a child, to sit that same year on the State Board of Charities.9 The suffrage movement gathered force, and even some anti-suffragists argued that working women deserved better wages.

  The woman who became involved in these kinds of endeavors—running an organization, carving out a career for herself, or speaking out on public issues—was vaguely referred to as a “new woman.” Eventually that appellation came to have many meanings, including the woman who dressed daringly, or the one who flaunted her nonconformity by taking up residence in a bohemian enclave. But in references to Lucy Hayes and other presidents’ wives of the late nineteenth century, “new woman” meant a serious woman concerned with substantive matters such as reform rather than with empty party-giving. It meant having opinions and an identity of one’s own.

  Reporters’ coverage of the Hayes inauguration signaled the change represented in Lucy Hayes. Mary Clemmer Ames, in her “Woman’s Letter from Washington,” announced that she had “never seen such a face reign in the White House.” Lucy’s conservative hairstyle and “eyes which we have come to associate with the Madonna” suggested to Ames a seriousness of purpose at odds with that of many of Lucy’s predecessors. How would the public react? And how would magazines treat her? Ames pondered particularly about the fashion magazines such as Vanity Fair: “Will [it] friz that hair? powder that face? … bare those shoulders? shorten those sleeves? hide John Wesley’s discipline out of sight, as it poses and minces before ‘the first lady of the land?’ “10

  This serious image was not a pose assumed for the inaugural stand. Lucy Webb Hayes’s Ohio family had a long history of enthusiastically pursuing many of the reforms of their time. Her parents, moved by the evangelical fervor that swept America in the 1830s and 1840s, had joined the Methodist church. Drawn into the abolitionist camp, Lucy’s father went to Kentucky to arrange for the manumission of some slaves he had inherited, but he became ill with cholera and died there.11 Lucy’s mother, dependent on the generosity of her family for her support and that of her three small children, nonetheless made no concessions to her reduced circumstances and dedicated the rest of her life to seeing that her two sons and Lucy received the best education available.

  It is doubtful that Lucy’s mother would have uprooted her family so frequently had the education of girls been involved, but she had no qualms about moving around to obtain quality schooling for her sons. Lucy benefited in the process. When her brothers enrolled at Ohio Wesleyan, a Methodist college, she became the school’s first woman student. Later, when the Webb boys chose medical school in Cincinnati, the family moved again and Lucy enrolled at Wesleyan Female College.

  During her early years, Lucy had been exposed not only to abolitionists and reformers in education and religion, but also to the arguments of the emerging feminist movement in which two of her aunts participated.12 In college, she had confronted the question of whether or not women’s intellectual abilities equaled men’s and had concluded, “Woman’s mind is as strong as man’s … equal in all things and his superior in some.”13 After her marriage to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1852, her exposure to feminism continued when his older sister, Fanny, took Lucy to hear famous speakers on the subject. One of Lucy Stone’s lectures, on improving women’s wages, so moved Lucy Webb Hayes that she wrote to her husband defending “violent methods” if necessary to achieve change.14

  All this reform interest in her early years might have indicated to observers that Lucy would exert special influence in the White House. Her prominence gave her word exceptional weight, and why should she not use her popularity on behalf of her sex? Feminists, who had made the vote for women their central objective, decided to enlist the president’s wife in their cause. The Citizens’ Suffrage Association of Philadelphia appealed to her, and her Aunt Phebe made a personal plea: “There is but one cause in which my whole soul is engaged,” she wrote to her famous niece in 1877, “and that is Woman Suffrage and if my influence is of any avail it will be in that cause.”15

  The groundwork was thus laid in the Hayes administration for what would become an important controversy surrounding presidents’ wives: how much of the influence they held because of their marriages to famous men would they be willing to use on the side of women’s causes? And which causes? “New woman” advocates, including reporters and suffragists, would encourage presidents’ wives to break out of old traditional forms while other, more powerful voices would insist that First Ladies remain supportive, opinionless backdrops to their husbands.

  Lucy had already tempered her youthful enthusiasm for reform well before she had to face up to defining just how she would handle the First Lady role. As soon as Rutherford had entered politics, she transferred her own energies there, too. She had some experience with election campaigns because her uncle had served in the state legislature, and now she turned attention from what might have become a feminist crusade and directed it toward her husband’s career and to the victories of other Republicans.16 In 1856, she had attended a rally in support of John Frémont for president, and she wrote her mother at that time that she hoped he would win. When Frémont’s defeat became clear, Rutherford informed his Uncle Birchard that Lucy “takes it to heart a good deal…. She still clings to the hope that the next election will bring it all right.”17

  By the late 1850s, Lucy’s world pretty much centered on her husband’s career and her family. She gave birth to eight children in twenty years, but in reacting to the often competing demands of being a good mother or being a valuable wife, it appears that she chose to make herself an extension
of Rutherford. He suggested that she would have liked to have enlisted on the Union side in the Civil War but had to content herself with sending him and then joining him whenever possible. “Lucy enjoys [the action],” Rutherford wrote his uncle, “and wishes she had been in Fort Sumter with a garrison of women.”18 Sometimes she left her young children with relatives and other times she took them along to their father’s army camp. In June 1863, during one of her visits, the youngest Hayes son died. Although Lucy described that time as the “bitterest hour” of her life, she shipped the boy’s body back to Ohio for burial while she remained at her husband’s side.19

  During the war years Lucy became a great favorite with her husband’s comrades and she began then to achieve what eventually became an almost legendary reputation for kindness and simplicity. One story had it that several of the soldiers had decided to embarrass a new recruit by convincing him to take his mending to the “sewing lady” down at the colonel’s cabin. Shirts in hand, the youth knocked at Hayes’s cabin door and when he announced his purpose, Lucy Hayes got out her needle. When he returned to the others, they were waiting for their laugh but learned, to their disappointment, that he had accomplished his mission. When the other soldiers pointed out that the “sewing lady” was the colonel’s wife, he stuck to his initial judgment that whoever she was she had treated him kindly.20 Years later when she was living in the White House, a Civil War veteran came to be photographed and, so that he would have the appropriate insignia on his uniform, First Lady Lucy Hayes sewed it on for him.21