Capital Dames

by Cokie Roberts

  Somehow Louisa always seemed to keep up her spirits, though when she was away from home, she longed to see her mother, and fantasized about “what a convenient thing Aladdin’s carpet would be.” From far-off army bases she doled out advice to her younger sister, warning “Nannie” in 1845 against throwing herself into the Washington social season: “It leaves I can assure you by my own experience an aching head an aching heart and aching void in the mind of every one who engages to the full in all its follies.” From Detroit, where Monty was building Fort Wayne, she asked her sister wistfully, “Do you ever go to the Capitol not to lounge in the library . . . but to feast your reason & imagination upon the sundry wisdom of eloquence there so abundant?” Louisa was always trying to persuade her family to come visit her, complaining in 1848, “Detroit has been very dull this past winter,” so she was thrilled when Monty was briefly reassigned to Washington the next year.

  Moving back to her much-missed hometown “seems to me like a dream,” she told her off-at-sea brother; “things seem little changed since I was last here—even the very signs and names on the shop doors are the same as used to grace them in days of yore—So that I seem to have slept four years and suddenly waking up, found myself in W[ashington].” Louisa and Montgomery and their children had a pleasant stay “under the maternal roof,” but then they were off to northern New York, where she discovered she was pregnant again, admitting to her sister that she had tried to keep it secret because “I know it will annoy Mother.”

  But her mother must have been pleased when the family settled in Washington in 1853, with Montgomery Meigs assigned to work on the aqueduct and then the extension of the Capitol. He closely collaborated with Jefferson Davis on those projects and Davis helped get the Meigs’ oldest son, John Rodgers Meigs, into West Point. Once enrolled, the cadet received regular instructions from his mother—“When you write me word that your nails are of a proper & becoming length I shall feel as if you had accomplished a victory.” He shouldn’t spoon his food, he should always carry a handkerchief, he should put on lavender water before visiting young ladies, take dancing lessons, stop earning demerits; “you know how I used to have to watch you before you left me.”

  John had left and now Montgomery was gone as well, and her daughter was about to get married. Louisa would have to manage on her own. She explained to her absent husband: “It is not worthwhile to trouble you with my accounts as I have no advice or assistance from you in management of the household. Rather you will have to leave it to my judgment to decide whether or not my expenses have been useless or extravagant.” But her judgment about him and his career had changed, at least in theory. “I used to fancy that I should like to see you at the head of one of our great armies but I think I am cured of that ambition.” She was, after all, a commodore’s daughter. But she missed her husband, admitting to her father-in-law, “I feel his absence from home more than I can describe and have lost all dreams of military ambition which would take him into the field or place him at the head of a great army.” Not only did Louisa want Montgomery to come home; she had also seen what happened to generals who met with defeat: “The instant a man falls from his position he is dragged down and reviled & persecuted by the hounds of the press and by private malice accused of crimes which no one would have dared to whisper while he still held the reins of power.” At that moment, with Meigs off in Tennessee, no one was quite sure whether he still held the reins of power: “I am amused & provoked both to see the way in which people enquire for you. They do not seem to know exactly how they ought to look when they enquire for you—regretfully or sympathizingly or naturally. . . . I always hasten to assure them of your good health & spirits & that I am expecting you ‘very soon.’ ” She was probably hoping to lure him home with fears for his reputation if he stayed away.

  Louisa wrote that letter the day of the victory at Chattanooga, and once she knew of the great success she didn’t think it fair that her husband, who was “as much exposed as any of the commanding Generals,” didn’t share the credit: “If your precious life had been lost to your Country & to us—You would have gained no reputation added to your fame because you had no command there.” Apparently she hadn’t lost her ambition after all. Louisa was also curious about what would happen next: “I should not wonder if Gen[era]l M[eade] were removed. . . . Will they bring up ‘Unconditional Surrender Grant’ and place him at the head of the Army—How extraordinary success is.” This military wife, daughter, and mother wasn’t used to being so out of the loop: “We live very quietly in your absence and I see few people who have any knowledge of military affairs—I met Mr. Seward a few days since—he enquired for you.” Louisa’s speculation was of course on the mark. In a few months, Ulysses S. Grant’s success would place him in command of all Union armies

  PRESIDENT LINCOLN HAD a touch of smallpox when he sent his State of the Union message to Congress in early December. Always ready with a joke, the president quipped, “Now I have something I can give everybody.” The disease wasn’t the only thing ailing him. With a presidential election year approaching, politicians on all sides were ready to take shots at him, and they all had different views of how he should be prosecuting the war, dealing with slavery, and preparing for eventual peace.

  Lincoln used his message to Congress to propose a plan that was essentially his vision for Reconstruction. Any Confederate who took an oath of allegiance to the United States, except high ranking civilian officials and military men, would be pardoned and allowed to keep all property except slaves. If 10 percent of the number of 1860 voters in any state took the oath, including the acceptance of emancipation, the United States would recognize that state’s government. No one would be sent back to slavery. No southern lawmaker who supported secession would return to Congress. This “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction” managed miraculously to bring together all sides. Lizzie Lee was amazed that even the Radical Republicans “now all subscribe to the message.” Christmas was coming—“I bought a toy for Blair from you & one from myself”—with peace in the party. It would not last for long.

  CHAPTER 7

  LEFT: Surgeons and nurses with the United States Sanitary Commission at Camp Letterman, Gettysburg. Funded mainly by women, the USSC supplied hospitals and provided nurses. RIGHT: Sojourner Truth preached the gospels of emancipation and suffrage, electrifying audiences around the country.

  (© CORBIS; Granger, NYC—All rights reserved.)

  Anna Speaks, Jessie Campaigns

  (Again), Sojourner Visits

  1864

  Washington had never seen anything like this before—a woman would be speaking at the Capitol. On January 14, 1864, the National Republican ran a notice announcing the “Address by Miss Anna E. Dickinson in the Hall of the House of Representatives.” Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, Speaker Schuyler Colfax, and more than one hundred other members of the House and Senate signed the request for Miss Dickinson to appear; the paper published the invitation plus the reply: “Accepting it, I would suggest the 16th of January as the time; desiring the proceeds to be devoted to the help of the suffering freedmen.”

  The twenty-one-year-old Philadelphia woman had become a Republican darling in the last year when at the behest of the party she traveled through New England and the Northeast successfully stumping for congressional candidates. Her fierce fighting style in defense of the war roused the crowds to hall-shaking frenzy and the politicians actually gave her credit for rallying Republican voters to the polls—the invitation from Congress acknowledged her “services in the campaigns in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York.” Of course, as a woman she could not be a voter herself, and it was as a supporter of women’s rights that Anna Dickinson came to attention not quite four years earlier. No one could have imagined then that she would speak in the Capitol of the United States, with the vice president on one side of her, the Speaker of the House on the other.

  At a Quaker meeting of the “Friends of Progress” in Philadelphia
, the then-seventeen-year-old startled the crowd when she spontaneously rose to reply to a speaker who had criticized women for moving outside the “domestic sphere.” That impromptu rebuttal defending a woman’s right to participate in public debate launched Anna Dickinson well beyond domesticity. She became a star on the lecture circuit, sharing the stage with such other reformers as Quaker antislavery activist and feminist Lucretia Mott. Anna hailed from an abolitionist Quaker family herself. Her father died when she was two, leaving his wife and children in poverty, which eventually burdened the young girl with the responsibility of helping support her mother and sister. First she followed the traditional female path as a teacher, then in order to boost her salary she took a job at the U.S. Mint in Philadelphia, where she was paid twenty-eight dollars a month for eleven hours a day, six days a week. It was still more than her teacher’s pay.

  Soon her freelancing as a forceful pro-war speaker got her fired from her government position. Her crime: she denounced Philadelphia hero General McClellan as a traitor, accusing him of purposely losing the Battle of Ball’s Bluff. Abolitionist newspaper publisher William Lloyd Garrison brought her to Boston to earn money on the lecture circuit, but the fees she could command—twenty dollars a speech—weren’t enough to sustain her family and her sister pressured her to come home and teach. Then Anna Dickinson got her big break. Famous anti-slavery speaker Wendell Phillips canceled an appearance at the Boston Music Hall due to illness and with five thousand people in the audience the spotlight came up on the fiery young woman. She was such a hit that she went on to appear with renowned African-American leader Frederick Douglass at the Boston Tremont Temple and the secretary of the New Hampshire Republican Committee hired her for that season’s political campaign.

  From New Hampshire Anna moved on to Connecticut, where the officers of the Republican State Central Committee endorsed her heartily: “Prejudiced against her at the start, we had great misgivings as to the propriety of inviting her to take a part in our campaign. She had not spoken ten minutes before all prejudices were dispelled; thirty minutes, and not a man could be found who would admit that he ever had any prejudices; sixty minutes, and she held fifteen hundred people breathless with admirations and astonishment; two hours, and she had raised the entire audience to a pitch of enthusiasm which was perfectly irresistible. She is really a wonderful woman, and you ought to invite her to speak in New York.” Anna Dickinson did speak in New York at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where thousands paid their twenty-five cents—fifty cents for reserved seats—to hear her denounce McClellan and promote abolition.

  The Brooklyn Academy of Music had refused to allow her to speak, with some dispute in the newspapers about whether it was because she was a woman or because she was a partisan. In defending the Academy, the Brooklyn Eagle opined, “there is, we are glad to see, something novel in a young woman mixing in the dirty puddle of party politics. It will always we trust be a novelty; for the women of the land will never forget their inherent modesty so far as to make exhibitions of themselves.” Eschewing “inherent modesty,” Miss Dickinson continued to campaign for Republicans in New York and in Pennsylvania, where not all audiences appreciated her strong pro-war sentiments. At one Pennsylvania gathering a man opposing the draft fired his gun and shot off a lock of her hair, coming close to killing her. Anna just went on talking. The success of those campaigns brought her that January night in 1864 to the Hall of the House of Representatives in the United States Capitol.

  Twenty-five hundred people crammed into every possible space in the chamber and the galleries, “made gay with the bright attire of ladies, velvets, flowers, and brilliant hues,” reported Noah Brooks to his California readers, and “a splendid burst of applause” greeted Anna Dickinson as the vice president introduced his prize as akin to Joan of Arc—a fighter for the Union cause. A close friend of the president, Brooks knew that Vice President Hamlin and Speaker Colfax were both Radical Republicans, who likely expected Miss Dickinson to rail against the president’s moderate reconstruction proposals, as she had in other speeches, assailing Lincoln as too weak in his dealings with the Rebels.

  Anna had launched into her criticism when in walked Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, taking seats of honor right in front of her, causing the young woman hurriedly to change her tune and endorse the president’s reelection. Brooks admitted that the speaker “has an apt and telling way of putting things which brings down the house with thunders of applause,” but he predicted “she will flash out her brief and splendid career and then subside in the destiny of all women and be heard of no more.” (It took more than twenty years for him to be proved right, and in the interim, as Anna Dickinson’s speaking fees spiraled upward, Brooks revised his view, saying that Anna’s appearance at the Capitol came as she was “just beginning her long and picturesque career.”) The opposition party took a decidedly different view—the Democrats saw the lady as a threat.

  “Anna E. Dickinson was granted the use of this Hall to deliver a public address . . . which was a political rhapsody and a partisan support to the present administration, and denunciatory of its opponents, and was evidently designed to influence great measures of legislation before the House.” Democrats tried to pass a resolution disapproving “of such a use of this Hall, for political purposes, and regard it as disrespectful to the minority of this House.” The resolution didn’t go anywhere in the Republican-controlled Chamber, but the Democrats clearly feared this young woman. She could sway votes.

  IT WAS AN election year and the Lincolns were ready to use the White House for campaign purposes. Mary officially put away her mourning garb, showing up at the New Year’s reception—the first where a handful of African Americans joined the eight thousand guests—in “a purple velvet dress. . . . Valenciennes lace was on the sleeves, and an immense train flowed out behind. Mrs. Lincoln never looked better.” Noah Brooks knew his readers in far-off Sacramento, California, would want to know what the ladies were wearing, along with other tidbits from Washington’s New Year’s ritual, and he tried to oblige them as he traipsed from reception to reception: “The War Secretary was the only man who had a spread of edibles for his guests, and Secretary Chase had the only great rush of callers, except the President.” For the Treasury secretary it was not just any New Year’s reception—it was election year and he was running for Lincoln’s job. “Mrs. Sprague, nee Chase, did the honors of the reception in a graceful style and a blue brocade gown with a long tail to it.”

  With the Union armies in winter quarters, the Republican newspaper proclaimed: “We have a right to be somewhat gay and festive here at the national metropolis . . . hundreds and hundreds of the sovereign people come up to this their metropolis every winter and they naturally desire to see what some affectedly call our ‘Republican Court.’ ” And the Republican Court was on full display. Secretary Seward, with his daughter-in-law Anna at his side, still threw the best parties, but Mary Lincoln was determined to compete this campaign season. She was desperate to see her husband reelected; she feared his defeat would expose her debts and make it impossible to pay them. Though her spending sprees had been widely reported and her expensive taste the subject of disapproving comment, she had managed to keep secret, even from her husband, the fact that she was splurging for things like her three hundred pairs of gloves on ever-mounting credit.

  But no president had been reelected since 1832 and before he took on the Democrats, Lincoln would have to fight the Radicals in his own party, led by his secretary of the Treasury. Mary, who had always mistrusted Chase, paid particular attention to the first state dinner in late January, traditionally a night for the families of the cabinet and Supreme Court. But when she saw the list, she cut two cabinet family members—Kate Chase Sprague and her husband. The president’s secretary, John Nicolay, knowing Mary was making a mistake that was likely to blow up in the newspapers, appealed to his boss. When Lincoln overruled his wife, she caused “such a rampage as hasn’t been seen in the House
for a year,” Nicolay quaked in the face of Mary’s rage. As it turned out, the first couple entertained the Treasury secretary and his daughter just as the Chase for President campaign was about to emerge from the back rooms into a full-front public challenge to the sitting president. “The Presidential quest is rife & Abe has the inside of the track,” Lincoln supporter Lizzie Lee observed in the middle of January. But by the end of the month, she was less convinced that the president would succeed: “The Radicals will throttle him if he does not soon take them by the throat.”

  As it turned out, the Radicals ended up throttling themselves. Lincoln had come in for crushing criticism in the torrents of correspondence Chase sent out to politicians and publishers as he allowed his friends to form a committee to promote his presidency, with financing coming from his son-in-law and guidance from his daughter. In late February the work of the committee appeared in print with the publication of a letter over the name of Kansas senator Samuel Pomeroy calling on the Republican Party to dump Lincoln and nominate Chase. The embarrassed Treasury secretary told the president he knew nothing about the effort to elect him—and though there’s no reason to think Lincoln believed him, the president chose to keep the treacherous cabinet member in office and then watched as the Chase candidacy collapsed.

  Lincoln’s supporters, roused by the so-called Pomeroy Circular, organized their state parties to pass unanimous resolutions endorsing the president. After his home state of Ohio backed Lincoln, Chase pulled out of the race, sanctimoniously assuring his daughter Nettie that “a good many of the best and most earnest men of the country desired to make me a candidate,” and that though he feared it “would greatly impair my usefulness as Secretary of the Treasury,” he had allowed his name to go forward. But, he complained, the “Blairs assailed me” and “my relations with the President were in danger of becoming unfriendly.” Then Ohio acted and “I had already said that the wishes of our friends in Ohio would be controlling with me.” Lincoln somehow found a way to keep the relations with his cabinet member friendly enough and the Radicals went in search of another candidate.