Capital Dames

by Cokie Roberts

  Harriet Lane managed the increasingly disputatious politicians as well as anyone could, while subtly making some statements about her own views. She let slaveholders know that she disapproved of their “peculiar institution” by firing the staff at the White House, which was largely made up of slaves hired out by their owners. Then she installed German and Irish immigrants in their place. By serving wine at official functions and drinking it herself, she let the women who had started temperance societies, like the suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, know she disagreed with them. But she mainly tried to keep discord at bay as she carefully seated northerners at one end of the room, southerners at the other. “Miss Lane’s entrance into life at the American capital at a trying time, served to keep the surface of society in Washington serene and smiling, though the fires of a volcano raged in the under-political world, and the vibrations of Congressional strife spread to the furthermost ends of the country the knowledge that the Government was tottering,” explained Virginia Clay, who heaped praise on the “elegance” of White House functions in Buchanan’s time. (But the southern belle didn’t endear herself to the first lady by telling her that “she was like a poet’s ideal of an English dairymaid, who fed upon blush roses and the milk of her charges.”) And newspaperwoman Mary Jane Windle let her readers know “we think Mr. Buchanan most fortunate in having so interesting a relative to do the honors of the Executive mansion. . . . Her manners are self possessed enough to command admiration, even if her position were less distinguished.”

  Virginia Clay’s friend Sara Pryor was less kind in her assessment. Though she found Harriet “very handsome, a fair, blue-eyed, self contained young woman,” who was “universally admired,” Sara divulged that the White House hostess was not popular. “She lacked magnetism. She followed a prescribed rule of manner from which she never deviated, no matter with whom she was thrown.” But Sara admitted that Harriet’s containment was probably wise: “she made no enemies, was betrayed into no entangling alliances, and was involved in no contretemps of any kind.” Not easy in the Washington of the day, especially for the single niece of a wealthy president. She had to fend off suitors as well as senators—often one and the same—without offending them.

  Harriet did manage to offend her uncle’s idea of good housekeeping, even though he had entrusted her to undertake a full-scale redecoration of the White House; she was even charged with handling the congressional appropriation for the project. One night the cook served a Virginia ham that Sara Pryor had sent to the first family, along with the recipe. When the meat appeared on the table as a gelatinous mess, the president “looked at it helplessly, and called out—‘Take it away! Take it away! Oh, Miss Harriet! You are a poor housekeeper! Not even a Virginia lady can teach you,’ ” Sara recounted somewhat smugly. (Sara seems to have made her presentation of a Virginia ham with her recipe a signature item. Adele Douglas also received one with the instructions: “Unless you boil your hams in champagne as they always do in New Orleans, the following is the best way. Soak it all night; & put it into a pot of cold water at 10-o’clock for dinner at 6. It must simmer, rather than boil until it is done, then bread crumbs thickly stewed over it & browned in an oven. If you follow these directions your Virginia ham will be perfect.”)

  Despite the debacle of the ham, Harriet Lane’s tenure in the White House won the approval of most of the Washington matrons. The mistress of the Executive Mansion inaugurated concert nights and lobbied for a national gallery of art. “There has been an ‘Art Association’ recently formed here . . . to establish a ‘National Gallery of the Fine Arts,’ ” Mary Jane Windle was able to tell her readers that spring. And Harriet Lane turned out to be a trendsetter in fashion. Reporting on an evening at “the President’s,” Varina Davis knew her mother would want to know exactly what she wore: “the old gold coloured silk with a width of black velvet let in the sides, and black lace each side, also a black bertha of lace and lemon colored bows.” Harriet had introduced the “bertha”—a strip of sheer fabric covering the top of the bosom—as a nod to modesty, since her necklines were cut low enough to cause comment. Other women might have clucked at Harriet’s boldness but they followed her lead, according to Virginia Clay: “Low necks and lace berthas, made fashionable because of their adoption by Miss Lane, were worn almost universally, either with open sleeves revealing inner ones of filmy lace, or sleeves of the shortest possible form, allowing the rounded length of a pretty arm to be seen in its perfection.” But pretty arms could not make up for the ugliness that was happening in the Capitol day after day and all sides knew that the election of 1858 could make or break the new, antislavery Republican Party.

  THE FATE OF Kansas continued to dominate debate. Stephen Douglas’s concept of popular sovereignty was challenged when the territory held a corrupt referendum on a proslavery constitution boycotted by its opponents. Though a subsequent vote in Kansas rejected the so-called Lecompton Constitution, President Buchanan submitted it to Congress anyway as the basis for Kansas’s entry into the Union as a slave state. “The ‘Lecompton Constitution,’ with the Message of the President, was sent into both Houses in the beginning of this week,” Mary Jane Windle alerted her readers in January, “and since that time wrangling and anarchy have been as much a national pastime as in the days of the Goths and Vandals.” To the shock of his colleagues, Douglas turned against the president of his own party to oppose the constitution. After all, it was Douglas who had managed to pass the Compromise of 1850, with its Fugitive Slave Act, Douglas who had authored the Kansas-Nebraska Law, Douglas who had supported the Dred Scott decision, and now it was Douglas breaking with his party’s leader over the issue of slavery? The Illinois senator contended that the people of the territory had not approved the constitution and therefore popular sovereignty had been abrogated. As a result, he became the temporary darling of the Republicans but the permanent enemy of President Buchanan.

  The animus between the men extended to the women as well and Adele Douglas was cut from the guest list to the Harriet Lane White House. The senator, whose presidential ambitions had never abated, was positioning himself with the northern wing of the Democratic Party by his break with Buchanan but he miscalculated how thoroughly his stance would alienate the southerners. And southerners were feeling particularly powerful in 1858. The Panic of 1857 had barely affected their region, where the economy depended on the production of cotton, not manufactured goods. When the Crimean War ended in Europe, the demand for cotton grew and prices shot up, making slave laborers ever more valuable to the livelihoods of the southern elite. And Dixie lawmakers were convinced that the primacy of cotton gave them such an economic advantage that the South could easily exist as an independent nation if the North persisted in its attacks against slavery. Defending the Lecompton Constitution, Jefferson Davis “poured forth a torrent of withering sarcasm and crushing invective,” Miss Windle reported with some shock. The ladies’ galleries at the Capitol filled as emboldened southerners carried the day in the Senate—voting to admit Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution. Then the House of Representatives defeated it—but only after a literal floor fight was cut off when a member’s wig was pulled off—and teed it up as a major issue in the coming election.

  In the midst of all of this turmoil, one Washington hostess decided to take a page from Dolley Madison’s book and throw a big party to try to bring warring factions together. Just a week after the House voted to reject the Kansas constitution, with passions still at their peak, “Mrs. Gwin’s Ball” did indeed briefly distract the debaters and attract all sides, who wrote about the event for years to come. “A portion of our fashionable world have been for the last month excited to the highest pitch of eagerness in preparation for Mrs. Gwin’s ‘fancy ball,’ ” Miss Windle gibed. When the big night came, the New York Times reported that a dozen senators “cordially fraternized, and appeared to be ignorant that such a place as Kansas existed,” as they gathered in the study of Senator Will
iam Gwin of California, “Guelphs and Ghibelines—radicals and fire-eaters—fraternized cosily, and seemed to forget that they had recently been shivering lances on each other’s reputations in the Senatorial arena.” It was a costume ball where the women worked for weeks to perfect their characters, and the newspaper described in detail the “universally admired” Mrs. Douglas’s “Aurora,” the “vivacity and esprit” of Mrs. Davis’s “Madame de Staël,” and the show stealer, Mrs. Clay, who kept a “crowd around her throughout the evening” as “Dame Partington.” Fifty years later Virginia Clay still relished her success: “If I dwell on that evening with particular satisfaction, the onus of such egotism must be laid at the door of my flattering friends.”

  But the friendliness of the evening was fleeting. Another vote on Kansas was coming up and the whole city seemed to converge on the Capitol. “In the Senate chamber every cranny of the ladies’ gallery was entirely filled. . . . In one direction might be seen the lovely face of the lady of the young Senator from Alabama.” Virginia Clay’s beauty helped Mary Jane Windle find the scene in the gallery “picturesque,” not so the floor below: “the dignified assembly, which calls itself a great deliberative body, was considerably out of order . . . we could not but be struck with the bitterness expressed in the angry and menacing look cast from one side of the chamber to the other.” Congress decided to send the Lecompton Constitution back to Kansas for another vote and the contentious session started to wrap up. Finally adjournment day brought “a large number of spectators to the galleries,” where Miss Windle enjoyed watching the pandemonium as members packed up their desks. One searched frantically through heaps of papers until he found what he was looking for: “it was a lady’s hand-writing . . . the sight of this seemed to inspire reverie, for he sat several moments, with a vague and abstracted dreaminess of eye . . . it is not necessary to tell our readers that this ‘Hon,’ is a bachelor member.” Nearby a married member unsentimentally collected “a pile of letters from his absent wife . . . for him the sentiment and romance of life is ended.” With the coming of summer the Washington “season” closed down: “The gay season is over; parties are over; Gautier lays no more suppers.” Blessedly, the first session of Congress ended as well and then it was time to see how the debates of the past year would play out in the election.

  One senator facing a particularly tough campaign was Stephen Douglas. Though his views on the Kansas constitution made him the fleeting darling of abolitionist editorialists like the New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley, the Illinois Democrat faced a serious Republican challenger and President Buchanan tried to sabotage his fellow Democrat. Abraham Lincoln served one term in the House years earlier and had been defeated in a recent bid for the Senate, chosen by the state legislature. Now he was trying again and taking his campaign to the people in the hopes that they would elect a legislature that would send him to Washington. When the Springfield lawyer famously challenged the much better known and financed Douglas to a series of debates, the incumbent surprisingly accepted and the Lincoln-Douglas debates commanded the attention of the whole country, partly because Douglas was a probable presidential candidate, partly because arguments over slavery were raging in many American households. Joining her husband on the campaign trail was his young bride, Adele Cutts Douglas.

  It seems that at first she was reluctant to make the trip. On a visit to Chicago the year before, Adele wrote to her mother complaining about “how terribly ugly and dirty this city is.” But when a cousin who lived there heard that the senator’s wife would not travel to Illinois that summer, he scolded her: “I will not attempt to designate the many ways in which you can be of service to your husband by being here.” The cousin insisted that Adele’s presence would have a great deal of influence; “the encouragements that presence will give to his friends—& the restraint it will be upon his enemies” would make a contribution to his success. And, as usual, the merchants were eager for her business: “It would give us pleasure to furnish you with your ‘confectionery’ during your stay in this city,” a hustling sweet shop owner informed her, reminding the native Washingtonian that he used to have a store at Ninth and F in Washington, D.C.

  There wasn’t much time for bonbons as Adele moved around the state with her husband and struck up a friendship with his amiable opponent. The six-foot-four storyteller versus the five-foot-four senator attracted huge crowds eager to hear the jostling between the candidates, which could last for hours. Unfailingly elegant even as she traveled the state by train, Adele always graced a ladies’ reception at the debate site, impressing those she met so much that a Douglas biographer claimed the editor of a St. Louis newspaper switched his endorsement from Lincoln to Douglas after meeting the senator’s wife. Unlike in Douglas’s contest with Buchanan, the combatants remained cordial, with Abe and Adele once even enjoying a train ride together on the way from one debate to the next, where they would meet up with Douglas, who had already arrived. The close election resulted in Republicans carrying the popular vote statewide but Democrats prevailing in the legislature. Stephen Douglas returned to Washington but Abraham Lincoln would not be far behind.

  Though the Democrat Douglas won in Illinois, the breakthrough election of 1858 gave the Republican Party control of the House of Representatives. Not only were many Democrats defeated—the American Party was routed. And with the collapse of the party came the collapse of Know-Nothing control over the Washington Monument Society. The abandoned stump of the obelisk stood as a bleak reminder of the nation’s unfinished business.

  CHAPTER 3

  LEFT: Adele Cutts Douglas, called a “popular icon,” reigned as a Washington, DC, beauty, able to intercede successfully for her friends with politicians of all parties. RIGHT: Varina Davis, the tart-tongued and politically astute First Lady of the Confederate States of America, caused controversy with her unorthodox views.

  (Picture History; National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / Art Resource, NY.)

  Varina Leads and Leaves as Abby Drops By

  1859–1861

  We talked of art and artists, galleries in Europe, shops in Paris,—anything except what we were all thinking about.” Sara Pryor bemoaned the state of society in early 1859, as Washington tried to go about its business while preparing for the changes the newly elected Congress would bring. Just what those changes might be wouldn’t be known for months. The difficulty of traveling long distances, plus the absence of a uniform election day in the states, dictated a peculiar arrangement where the old Congress still met until the spring of odd-numbered years and then the new Congress convened in December, a full year after the election. “Unconsciously, all tentative subjects were avoided by the well-bred of both sections,” Varina Davis remembered. Sara Pryor added: “The art of conversation suffered under such circumstances. But some interesting books were just out in England, and everybody was discussing them.” Sara and her friends especially enjoyed Thackeray’s The Virginians and Tennyson’s Elaine, along with “a new star rising—George Eliot.” But an old standby was out of favor: “Dickens, we were, at the moment, cordially hating because of his ‘American Notes.’” Still Sara fretted, “We were forced to ignore subjects that possessed us with absorbing interest and to confine ourselves to trivialities.”

  South and North did come together to host an elaborate farewell ball for the British ambassador, Lord Napier, and his wife. “All that Washington now holds of gay, gallant and distinguished, thronged Willard’s Hotel tonight, and partook of an intolerably bad supper, intolerably ill served,” chronicled the New York Times, whose correspondent was kinder to the women partygoers than to Willard’s. One in particular he singled out for praise: “Here we have a brilliant specimen, for instance, of strong emotional power in Mrs. Clay, of Alabama. The beauteous sentimentality of the South finds form in this charming woman, and utters itself in eloquent words, in sympathetic flashes of the eye, in vehemence and passion of expression. The utmost energy seems blended in her with the greatest genia
lity, an active mind with a loving heart.” On the other hand, Stephen Douglas was “a rather unwelcome guest since his errand is to announce the absence of his accomplished wife.” Even the newspaper reporter liked Adele better than her husband.

  Sara Pryor remained wide-eyed about the Napier ball decades later. The floor was covered with colored sand, representing St. George and the Dragon; portraits of Queen Victoria and George Washington hung from the walls; and Charles Gautier, the most sought-after caterer of the time, “had excelled himself. There were glittering haystacks of spun sugar; wonderful Roman chariots, drawn by swans, and driven by Cupids; pyramids of costly bonbons; dolphins in a sea of rock candy; and ices in every form from a pair of turtle doves to a pillared temple.” In later years the ball would be remembered as the last big Washington bash before the war.

  NO PRICEY BALLS or polite conversation, however, could mask the fact that the country was on the brink of disaster. On Washington’s Birthday, Congress did manage to pass one of the few measures members could agree on—a bill incorporating the Washington Monument Society, giving the organization a charter to protect it from any more takeovers and putting it in a position where it might possibly raise enough money to build the obelisk. Then, a few days later it was a murder that totally consumed the Capital. New York Congressman Dan Sickles shot and killed his wife’s lover in broad daylight within sight of the White House. District Attorney Philip Barton Key, son of the “Star-Spangled Banner” lyricist, was a well-liked widower deemed by Virginia Clay the “handsomest man in all Washington society.” His “death at the hands of Daniel E. Sickles in February, 1859 stirred Washington to its centre.” These were men the women all knew, and they knew whose side they were on: the dead man’s. A notorious philanderer, Sickles had not only been scandalously linked in the New York press with a well-known prostitute; he even had the temerity to bring her with him to London when he served under Buchanan in the U.S. embassy there, only dispatching her back to New York before the arrival of his wife, Teresa, and their baby daughter. The ambassador and his niece Harriet Lane took a particular liking to the lively eighteen-year-old Teresa Sickles while they were all in London, and when Buchanan became president, the young woman remained a favorite. As a newly minted congressional wife, Mrs. Sickles donned a long-talked-about bonnet decorated with jonquils to occupy a place of honor next to Harriet Lane in the gallery of the House of Representatives the day Buchanan took his oath of office. That night Teresa met Key at the Inaugural Ball.