Capital Dames

by Cokie Roberts

  Events of the very next day underlined how very disunited and unhappy the people were. “The President is to arrive here today. The reception will be a very quiet one,” Mrs. Lomax jotted in her diary, then, apparently later, added: “Have just heard that President Lincoln arrived in the six o’clock train—Mrs. Lincoln and son came in the afternoon.” The president’s protectors had picked up reports that there was a plot to kill him as he traveled through the hostile city of Baltimore. Death threats had followed Lincoln all along the way of his whistle-stop tour from Illinois, but the one in Maryland seemed believable. It was a slave state and, though it had not seceded, was considered particularly antagonistic toward Republican rule. Plus the warning came from a prominent man—the head of the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad, Samuel Felton. His source? The well-known social reformer Dorothea Dix, who, in her travels to inspect mental institutions throughout the South, heard of an “extensive and organized conspiracy” to seize Washington and take the president-elect’s life.

  So, against his better judgment, Lincoln allowed his advisors to bundle him surreptitiously onto an early morning train and steal him into the Capital City in disguise. “The president-elect was to have arrived this afternoon and measures were taken to receive him.” Ann Green attested. “To everybody’s surprise he reached the Willard Hotel at six this morning—many think because he did not wish to pass through Baltimore with the knowledge of the people.” And from the White House, Harriet Lane apprised a friend of her impressions of events: “I suppose you have heard of Lincoln’s sudden & unexpected arrival yesterday morning—it will no doubt create a profound sensation. He was here at before 11. The glimpse I caught of him was the image of Burns—our awkward bus man who waits on the door. Burns is the best looking, but I only had a side view. They say Mrs. L. is awfully western, loud and unrefined.”

  Harriet’s political sensibilities were well-attuned—the ignominious arrival did cause a sensation, becoming the stuff of endless political jokes and cartoons that Lincoln regretted for the rest of his life. Up until that point, as Lizzie Lee correctly noted, the Lincolns’ progression by train from Illinois was “in triumph all the way.” Cheering crowds had greeted them all along the route as opposition politicians made their peace with the next president and a reception held by Mary Lincoln in New York met with press approval. The pro-Republican New York Times declared the event augured well “for the social qualities of the future mistress of the National Mansion, promising to Mrs. [sic] Harriet Lane a worthy successor.” Now all of that goodwill could be wiped away by the ludicrous image of a panicky president sneaking into town in Scotch cap and cloak. Still, even if they were the butt of jokes, the Lincolns would now occupy the chief seat of power in Washington. And the ladies were eager to size up the newcomers.

  A meeting with President Buchanan and his Cabinet, followed by a session with the peace commissioners at his hotel, took up much of the day. “Mr. Lincoln was then notified that the ante-rooms and main parlors of the hotel were filled with ladies who desired to pay their respects, to which the president elect very promptly consented,” reported a friendly Pennsylvania newspaper; “the ladies, who thought he was awkward at first sight, changed their opinion and now declare him ‘a very pleasant, sociable gentleman, and not bad looking by any means.’ ” If the president-elect met with some initial approval from “the ladies,” Mary Lincoln was not so lucky. The first-lady-to-be wisely surrounded herself with a bevy of female relatives for her debut in the Capital City, where the matrons of society—most of them southerners—snickered behind their hands at her. They saw Mrs. Lincoln as nothing more than a country bumpkin, with the unpolished manners of the unsophisticated West.

  MANNERS WERE THE least of the administration’s concerns as March 4—Inauguration Day—approached. While Lincoln carefully constructed what would be his war Cabinet, made up mostly of men who had opposed him in the political campaign, General Scott placed squads of soldiers at strategic spots around the city in preparation for disaster. Some of those soldiers, West Point men, visited at Virginian Elizabeth Lomax’s house on February 28 along with “Bob Lincoln (son of President Lincoln).” It was one of the last times that a gathering like that would occur. The young men Mrs. Lomax entertained that night ended up on opposite sides in the war—a war she knew would soon come. For the moment, she simply recorded: “The city thronged with strangers.” But no longer with members of the peace commission, who had failed to produce a plan acceptable to anyone and packed up in time to make way for the merrymakers celebrating the inauguration.

  “Mr. Lincoln will without doubt be inaugurated and safely installed in the White House, but what must be his feelings at taking the reins of such a government into his hand,” Louisa’s daughter Mary Meigs wrote to her brother at West Point; “he is hated by half the people he means to protect with a hatred which cannot be described.” Not everyone shared the young woman’s certainty that the transfer of power would go off as planned. “This day Mr. Lincoln has been inaugurated amidst the fears and apprehension of many people that had anticipated mobs and riots of devious descriptions,” Ann Green noted to her daughter with relief, but “everything went off peacefully—the military were placed in various positions throughout the city ready to act should any occasion make it necessary.” Elizabeth Lomax echoed the sentiment: “This dreaded day has at last arrived. Thank Heaven all is peaceful and quiet.” Her son Lindsay had “commanded the escort for President Lincoln,” whose inaugural address her household read aloud when they received their Washington Star that evening. Her conclusion: “I thought there was no doubt of its sanity and its excellence.”

  That was not the first time that day that someone other than the president read the speech out loud. Early that morning Lincoln had enlisted his son Robert to deliver it, so the soon-to-be president could hear what it sounded like. The predawn reading of the address started a busy day in the Capital City, where, the New York Times reported, “From early daylight the streets were thronged with people, some still carrying carpet-bags in hand, having found no quarters in which to stop.” It was close to noon when President Buchanan left the White House to collect President-elect Lincoln at Willard’s Hotel. As the pair proceeded tensely down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol, “troops lined the avenue and at every corner there was a mounted orderly,” leaving young Julia Taft wide-eyed. “The usual applause was lacking as the President’s carriage, surrounded by a close guard of cavalry, passed and an ugly murmur punctuated by some abusive remarks followed it down the avenue.” This was the sixteen-year-old’s first view of the man who no one was sure would survive the day: “One of the ladies near us said, ‘There goes that Illinois ape, the cursed Abolitionist. But he will never come back alive.’ ”

  For the first time tight security surrounded the Senate chamber, where, explained the New York Times, “only the favored few were admitted upon the floor, while the galleries were reserved for and occupied by a select number of ladies.” After Vice President Hannibal Hamlin took his oath, the outgoing and incoming presidents entered the room “arm in arm” before they emerged out on the ceremonial platform erected in front of the still-under-construction dome. Before crowds of onlookers, including “the entire Diplomatic Corps, dressed in gorgeous attire,” and “fair ladies by the score,” Abraham Lincoln moved many to tears as he concluded with his heart-wrenching plea that the “mystic chords of memory” might yet “swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.” Excited by the events of the day, government worker Clara Barton described it to a friend: “we have a live Republican President, and, what is perhaps singular, during the whole day we saw no one who appeared to manifest the least dislike to his living.”

  With the relief of an unmarred ceremony behind him, the president faced an exhausting day. He received hundreds of strangers and kissed thirty-four little girls representing all of the states, including those that had seceded, before hea
ding off to the Inaugural Ball, which would serve as a coming-out party for Mary Todd Lincoln. Reports from that night vary markedly depending on the political persuasion of the newspaper covering it. “The ball is a decided success,” heralded the New York Times, whose founder, Henry Raymond, was also a prominent Republican politician; “toilettes of ladies are noticeable, with but few exceptions, for elegance and good taste.” At 10:45, when the guests of honor made their entrance into a hall built for the occasion and “tastefully decorated with shields and flags,” the vice president and the president’s friend Senator Edward Baker of Oregon escorted Lincoln while Mrs. Lincoln held the arm of Senator Douglas, who had wooed and lost the young Mary Todd decades earlier. “Miss Edwards, niece of Mrs. Lincoln, is acknowledged to be the belle of the evening,” the Times reporter emphatically declared.

  While the rival New York Herald agreed that the ball presented “a beautiful spectacle,” its “monster chandeliers” and “numerous jets of gas” producing a “brilliant effect,” on closer examination “considering the day, the occasion and the gorgeous array of distinguished celebrities which have figured at our preceding inauguration balls, the present one exhibited a decidedly meager collection of lions of any description.” Though Mary Lincoln came in for some condescending praise for adapting herself “to the exalted station to which she has been so strangely advanced, from the simple social life of the little inland capital of Illinois,” all in all, the reporter found it a “melancholy affair, abounding in fears and forebodings of coming evil.” The partygoers seemed unable to put aside the cares of the times and enjoy the evening: “The Southern element of vitality was missing. . . . It was a Northern and Northwestern assemblage. The women were extensively the representatives of the maids and matrons of the rural districts of the North and the great West; the nasal twang of the strong-willed Puritan was heard on every side.” No Mrs. Clay, Mrs. Davis, or Mrs. Pryor to liven up the evening, or the parlors of Washington, from there on out.

  Many of the women who remained in the Capital City turned cold shoulders to the new first lady, choosing not to call on her at Willard’s Hotel before the inauguration, as protocol expected. “The capital had buzzed for weeks with stories of the uncouth manners of the President-elect and his wife,” remembered Julia Taft, who came to be a welcome and regular guest of the Lincolns. “Elegant Washington ladies raised holy hands of horror at the thought of such a rustic pair following the polished Buchanan and his accomplished niece, Miss Lane in the White House.” The ladies had their opportunity to get a look at how Mrs. Lincoln would perform a few nights after the inauguration when she nervously introduced her White House receptions. A huge crush of people pushed into the Blue Room, where a Washington reporter marveled that Mrs. Lincoln, dressed in magenta silk, “bore the fatigue of the two and a half hour siege with great patience.”

  What the reporter couldn’t know was how her lack of patience had almost prevented Mrs. Lincoln from attending her own event. Mary had hired Varina Davis’s dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, for that very important evening, but Mrs. Keckley had not yet arrived with her creation when Mrs. Lincoln was ready to get dressed. When the seamstress did show up she found the ladies of the household pleading with a petulant Mary Lincoln, who insisted: “I have no time now to dress, and, what is more, I will not dress, and go down-stairs.” With some effort, Mary was finally coaxed into letting Mrs. Keckley help her into her gown, and so began a complicated but important friendship between the first lady and the former slave.

  If she made a friend the night of that first huge reception, which ended with no one being able to find their wraps, Mary Lincoln also realized that she had entertained an enemy. The beautiful, brilliant, and haughty Kate Chase, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of the secretary of the Treasury, former Ohio Governor Salmon Chase, thought Mary had usurped her place. She, Kate, standing tall and statuesque, all in white, should be the first lady of the land, not the somewhat dumpy forty-two-year-old wife of the gawky man who had, in the young woman’s view, stolen the presidency from her father. Miss Chase shone at the center of her own circle at Mary’s reception and again starred a few weeks later when the Lincolns hosted their first dinner in the State Dining Room, to honor the Cabinet. But the president had a great deal more on his mind that April night than a possible feud between his wife and the daughter of his Treasury secretary. When the men adjourned to the Red Room after dinner, he told his Cabinet about the dire situation at Fort Sumter.

  STANDING ON A tiny island in the middle of Charleston Harbor, the unfinished fort served as the only garrison in the area still occupied by federal troops—South Carolina had seized the others after secession. In early January, President Buchanan’s meager attempt to deliver fresh men and supplies had been turned back when the ship came under fire by military cadets, and now Major Robert Anderson was unsure how long he could hold out without more food. When Jefferson Davis sent negotiators to Washington to discuss a handover of the fort to the Confederacy, Lincoln refused to meet with them if it meant recognizing their claim to represent a sovereign power. Now one group of his advisors, including General Scott, counseled him to evacuate the fort, and another, led by now Postmaster General Montgomery Blair, insisted on holding firm. Parsing through his entire inaugural address and not just reflecting on its stirring ending, Lincoln’s advisors found it difficult to divine his intentions. Did his pledge to “hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government” include doing so by force? When Lincoln’s erstwhile opponent Stephen Douglas was asked for a reaction to the speech in the same way members of Congress are pressed to do today, he first replied, “He does not mean coercion; he says nothing about retaking the forts or Federal property,” but when asked by someone else, Douglas admitted: “I hardly know what he means. Every point in the address is susceptible of a double construction.” And that was the way the president wanted it for the moment.

  Virginia was still in the Union, and that key state’s decision about secession would influence the other states of the upper South—North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Maryland. If Maryland and Virginia both joined the Confederacy and surrounded Washington with enemy territory, the fate of the Capital City would be bleak. On the flip side, holding the breakaway states to the seven that had so far seceded could make for a short-lived rebellion. Maryland’s pro-Union governor, his backbone stiffened by Anna Carroll, simply refused to call the legislature into session, so members couldn’t take a vote on secession. And so far, the Unionists had prevailed in the March convention in Virginia, choosing on April 4 to reject secession. But a forcible move on Fort Sumter could easily swing the state in the opposite direction by rallying opinion against the federal government. That was just what southern hotheads—chief among them Sara Pryor’s husband, Roger—were counting on. Lizzie Lee still held out hope that the friendship between the commander at Fort Sumter, Robert Anderson, and the new president of the Confederacy would keep the agitators from acting: “South Carolina is trying to precipitate War—as she did secession—but to that Jeff Davis is opposed and will do his utmost to avert an attack upon Anderson.” Sadly, she was wrong.

  With food running out on the isolated island, on April 8 Lincoln sent word to the governor of South Carolina that he planned to replenish the provisions—no troops, no weapons, no ammunition—just food, unless the fort came under attack. But the Confederacy saw resupply as capitulation and instead on April 11 Davis instructed General P. G. T. Beauregard to order Anderson to surrender. Anderson refused while informing them he would soon have to evacuate or starve, but he tried to stall the southerners by making the date of his evacuation April 15, in the hopes that the flotilla of resupply ships, led by the revenue cutter Harriet Lane, would have arrived by then. Beauregard saw through the delay and played into Lincoln’s hands by ordering an attack. Now the South would be the aggressor in the eyes of the world. Thirty-four hours and three thousand shots later, Major Robert Anderson surrendered Fort Sumter. The Civi
l War had begun. Washington feared for its future.

  “Sumter has surrendered—we are in great trouble,” Elizabeth Lomax lamented the next day when President Lincoln called on the states still in the Union to supply 75,000 militiamen to fight for their country. “A number of troops ordered here.” Her son Lindsay had been assigned to a company that had just come in from Texas; “they are to be quartered in the south wing of the Treasury Building.” And then a couple of days later, after first hearing a false rumor, the dread truth: “Virginia has seceded!! Heaven help us!” The outbreak of a hot war caused the Commonwealth of Virginia to take sides with fellow southerners and Robert E. Lee to resign his commission with the U.S. Army in order to defend his state.

  On April 18, three days after President Lincoln had sent out his call for 75,000 volunteers, Lee rode his horse over the bridge from Arlington to the home of Preston Blair, across the street from the White House. There the old political operative had the proxy of President Lincoln to offer Lee the job of general in chief of the U.S. Army. Lee declined to answer, continued on to see his friend and mentor General Winfield Scott, where he was officially offered the job, and then rode back across the bridge. The next time he would be in Washington would be under very different circumstances. A couple of days later he joined the Army of Virginia. Elizabeth Lomax’s son Lindsay soon followed suit. Calling his decision “heartrending,” his mother tried to understand it by quoting his letter to a fellow West Pointer: “My state is out of the Union and when she calls for my services I feel that I must go. I regret it very much, realizing that the whole thing is suicidal.” If he didn’t know how true those words would be, his mother certainly seemed to, mourning as her newly minted Confederate soldier headed South. (By the end of the war, Lunsford Lindsay Lomax would have risen to the rank of general fighting William Tecumseh Sherman to the end.) “God only knows when I shall see him again.”