Capital Dames

by Cokie Roberts

  Mary Lincoln’s desperation to see her husband reelected stemmed from personal reasons as well as political ones: “ ‘If he should be defeated, I do not know what would become of us all,’ she confided; ‘to me, to him, there is more at stake in this election than he dreams of.’ ” She had continued to accumulate debts, defensively telling Lizzie Keckley: “ ‘To keep up appearances, I must have money—more than Mr. Lincoln can spare for me. He is too honest to make a penny outside of his salary.’ ” The distraught woman was nothing short of terrified but she couldn’t stop herself. “Mrs. Lincoln ransacked the treasures of the Broadway dry good stores,” the New York Herald shrieked on her last shopping spree just as the women of Washington were pledging their covenant against foreign finery. Mrs. Lincoln’s niece later defended her aunt’s choice of expensive imports, claiming that the first lady had been told it was her “patriotic duty” because the government needed the taxes paid on them. By the end of the summer a panicked Mary Lincoln had “no hope of the re-election of Mr. Lincoln.” President Lincoln didn’t have much hope of his reelection either.

  He had been nominated on the ticket of the “National Union Party,” a name the Republicans gave themselves in the hopes of reeling in Democrats committed to the war, as well as Radical Republicans. The president had finally rid himself of the biggest threat to unity inside his own administration—at the end of June he accepted Salmon Chase’s fourth offer to resign as Treasury secretary. Chase was stunned. He expected Lincoln to do what he had always done, refuse the overture and smooth everything over. Not this time. The immediate cause of Chase’s latest resignation letter was a disagreement over an appointment in the department. The secretary was stuffing Treasury with his supporters, still hoping that disillusion with the president would throw the race open. But the fact was, as President Lincoln put it with great understatement, “you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome.” Lincoln named the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, William Pitt Fessenden of Maine, as Chase’s successor.

  “The news of the change in the Cabinet took us all by surprise,” Lizzie Lee rejoiced as a member of the Blair family, Chase’s longtime enemies. Fessenden, though “ill tempered,” was “honest & as Mrs. Jeff once said the ablest of all the Republican Senators.” Lizzie still remembered her friend Varina Davis’s political views. (She had heard earlier that year that Varina had “grown grey & forlorn—is very unpopular & never has moved ‘in any style’ in Richmond . . . & talks of the pleasures, friends & etc. she sacrificed ‘in having to leave Washington.’ This looks like a true picture to me.” Varina missing Washington had an air of authenticity, even if it’s what Lizzie wanted to believe.) Lizzie learned that her surprise was shared by the ousted Treasury secretary and that “there was a desperate effort made by Chase’s friends to save him”; not surprisingly, the Blairs were blamed by Chase supporters for his downfall. Before he kept his commitment to return to Sherman’s army, Missouri congressman Frank Blair, Lizzie’s brother, made a scathing speech against the secretary. “It was a complete triumph—he made his opponents pop up & down in their seats.” Tellingly, when members of Congress assembled at Blair House that night for a congratulatory celebration, “they were mostly Democrats,” a fact that the family would come to have reason to regret.

  With some bravado former cabinet member Chase told his daughter Nettie, “I am heartily glad to be disconnected from the administration; though a little sorry to miss the opportunity of doing the great work I felt confident I could with God’s blessing accomplish.” Nettie was visiting with her sister in Rhode Island, where Kate was spending the summer and clearly fretting over her father’s fate as well as itching to get to Washington to try to fix the situation. “Had I chosen I might have held on to the office,” Chase falsely assured Kate. “I am very glad that you did not put your idea of coming here into execution. It would [have done] no good at all, & exposed you very unnecessarily.” And then he advised her: “If you think me wronged or not appreciated, let nobody think you think so. People never sympathize with such feelings.” Kate must have been feeling so left out of the political maneuverings and there was nothing for her in Rhode Island that could replace her lifelong vocation of electing her father. Things were not going well in the Sprague marriage after the “wedding of the century.” When the senator was away from home he almost completely ignored his wife, hardly ever writing to her, and he had started drinking again. But the last person Sprague wanted to know about their problems was his father-in-law. He asked Kate not to “refer any of our differences to your father,” warning her that confiding in Chase would “bring on a difference which cannot be healed.”

  As the summer wore on and the city of Washington filled with more and more of Grant’s wounded, the president’s reelection looked “deader than dead,” in the gleeful words of a Democratic newspaper editor. Some Radical Republicans held on to hope that the party would call another convention to nominate a more electable candidate, and the Chase forces continued to believe their man had a chance. Jessie Frémont insisted to John Greenleaf Whittier that Lincoln couldn’t win: “Someone else must be put in his place. It must be some one firm against slavery . . . and the General will thankfully retire & give his most active support to such a man.” There was a good deal of pressure on her husband to withdraw and not split the Republican vote but he wouldn’t pull out with Lincoln looking so weak. “Lincoln’s stock is running down rapidly,” Frémont supporter Elizabeth Cady Stanton cheered to Susan B. Anthony. Abraham Lincoln did not disagree.

  “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected,” the president wrote on August 23 in what has come to be called the “blind memo.” He continued: “Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.” It was signed, “A. Lincoln.” The deeply discouraged president was sure that the Democrats would promise to end the war with a deal that would permanently destroy the Union, and he was determined to do everything he could to prevent that. He folded the paper in a way that its contents were hidden and then brought it to his cabinet members and asked them to sign it—sight unseen, hence “blind.” Their signatures constituted a pledge to accept the results of the election even in the midst of civil war.

  The sentiment against the president ran so strong that Jessie Frémont even thought the Democrats might support her Radical Republican husband to unify the dump-Lincoln movement. “Jessie never was in such feathers,” Lizzie Lee fussed when she heard that some Democratic politicians had been to see her erstwhile friend, who told them “ ‘F. will be nominated by the Chicago Convention as a political necessity’ . . . there is no end to the nonsense she talks on this text.” When the Democrats did meet in Chicago a few days after Lincoln penned the blind memo they nominated General George McClellan for president, a supporter of the war, but then added a “Peace Democrat,” Congressman George Pendleton of Ohio, as the vice presidential candidate and inserted a peace plank in the party platform. The president’s concerns had proved correct. Though McClellan didn’t agree with the platform, his party adopted it and he was the nominee of the party. The way the war was going that summer, the prospect of peace at almost any price looked ever more appealing.

  And then everything changed. No one paid much attention when Union admiral David Farragut sailed into Mobile Bay damning the torpedoes, but his capture of that southern port in early August suddenly became one more victory to celebrate when, on September 2, William Tecumseh Sherman’s army stormed into Atlanta. Now the politicians suing for peace seemed faithless to the fighting forces. Lincoln’s prospects brightened considerably as McClellan’s dimmed but the president still had to worry about a split in his own party. He needed the Radical Republican to get out of the race. On September 22, Gene
ral John C. Frémont withdrew his name. And the next day Lincoln asked Postmaster General Montgomery Blair to resign from his cabinet.

  Was it a quid pro quo? Probably, whether it was spoken aloud or not. The Frémonts’ resentment of the Blairs was no secret and Radical Republicans, disappointed that they no longer had a candidate in the race, could take satisfaction that their effort had run the most conservative member of the administration out of office. The powerful Blair family served as the symbol of everything those Republicans thought was wrong about Lincoln; Frank Blair’s speech attacking Chase galled them and Democrats applauding it galled them even more. So Lizzie’s brother would have to take the fall in order for Jessie’s husband to do the right thing for the president the Blairs supported.

  The patriarch, Preston Blair, deemed the decision “all for the best . . . the true interests of the Country require the reelection of Lincoln.” His daughter Lizzie was not so sanguine: “I think I am more hurt than anybody else . . . but I can feel, rather think it is for the best & feel uncomfortable at the same time.” Preston Blair had sounded out McClellan and come to the conclusion that he would settle for peace with a still-separated Confederacy rather than insisting on union; his election would be a disaster for the country. Most of the Radicals, such as Wendell Phillips and Anna Dickinson, fell in line behind Lincoln, to the dismay of Elizabeth Stanton: “all this talk of the Republicans about loyalty and the good of the country requiring the success of their party is the merest twaddle,” she griped to Susan Anthony. Years later Jessie Frémont revealed that three prominent Radical Republicans “came to Mr. Fremont and put before him the peril into which his continuing as a candidate put the success of our party. They were empowered to offer any terms in return for his withdrawing his name—among others the Blairs were not to be in any political position etc.” But, Jessie insisted, when Frémont understood what he must do, “he not only withdrew his name but utterly refused any appointments, patronage or retaliation.” That would be the end of Jessie and John Frémont’s quests for the presidency. And by the middle of October the Union army would have control of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Lincoln’s prospects dramatically improved.

  The president also had a prime plum to offer one of the men of his party when long-serving Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, died on October 12. The old man had been failing and would-be successors had already lined up for his job. Lincoln loyalists Montgomery Blair, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and Attorney General Edward Bates all expressed interest. So did Salmon Chase. “I heard Mr. Chase had a long confab in his visit to the President yesterday after abusing him everywhere at the North,” Lizzie Lee burst with the news. “Tis said he was going to Europe but Sumner persuaded him not to.” Kate Sprague too told her father that “feeling seems to be very strong among your friends that you will not leave the country at this time. They seem to depend upon your aid for the coming Presidential Campaign.” If Chase wanted the chief justice job, he had better stick around and campaign for Lincoln, and the newly empowered president would insist that Chase extend that aid in his behalf before any job offer was forthcoming.

  Lincoln was running on a party platform that declared “we are in favor . . . of such an amendment to the Constitution . . . as shall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of Slavery within the limits of the jurisdiction of the United States.” The Senate had passed the Thirteenth Amendment in the current Congress but it failed to achieve the necessary two-thirds vote of the House of Representatives. Fearful that the Emancipation Proclamation, which was enacted by executive order, could be undone by a new president, the amendment’s backers enshrined it in the platform, making support for it the official position of the Republican candidate. Lincoln, who had been worried about the political consequences of the amendment, now endorsed it, and shortly before the election he met with one of its most prominent proponents. It was the seamstress Elizabeth Keckley who arranged for Abraham Lincoln to receive Sojourner Truth at the White House.

  THE IMPOSING SIX-FOOT-TALL, deep-voiced woman in her sixties had made quite a name for herself since her 1851 speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention, when she famously asked, “Ain’t I a Woman?” in response to a man’s protestations that delicate women needed masculine protection. Pointing to her muscular arm and declaring, “I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?” the former slave electrified the crowd, and she had been doing it ever since. The bestselling abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s article about Sojourner Truth in the April 1863 Atlantic Monthly sealed the fame of the illiterate woman who made her living selling her life story, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, dictated to a friend.

  Born into slavery in Ulster County, New York, before it was outlawed in that state, and given the name Isabella, she had escaped to freedom, but not before she had seen two children sold away from her. She worked for several years as a domestic in New York City but became an itinerant preacher, taking the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 as she walked through New York State and New England, singing and speaking at camp meetings and in churches. When she learned about the abolitionist movement she quickly signed up and brought its gospel west, preaching through Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas. And then she learned about the women’s rights movement and added that cause to her quiver. With the outbreak of the Civil War and the enlistment of African-American regiments, she solicited supplies for those troops and eventually ended up in Washington to work with the National Freedman’s Relief Association, an organization similar to the Contraband Society started by Elizabeth Keckley. When Miss Truth arrived in the Capital City she stayed with fellow feminist Jane Swisshelm and made it known that she would like to meet the President of the United States.

  At about eight in the morning on October 29, Sojourner Truth and Lucy Colman, another feminist and abolitionist, were ushered in to Lincoln’s outer office: “On entering his reception room, we found about a dozen persons waiting to see him; amongst them were 2 coloured women, some white women also. One of the gentlemen present knew me, and I was introduced to several others, and had a pleasant time while waiting, and enjoyed the conversation between the President and his auditors very much. He showed as much respect and kindness to the coloured persons present as to the whites,” Miss Truth assured a friend. When she was introduced she told the president that when he was first elected she thought he would be like Daniel in the lion’s den, that if the lions didn’t tear him to pieces it would be because God spared him; and she vowed that if God spared her, she would meet him before his term ended. When she pronounced him the best president in the history of the country, he responded that he assumed she was talking about emancipation; then he named past presidents, declaring, “ ‘they were just as good, and would have done just as I have, if the time had come. And if the people over the river . . . had behaved themselves, I could not have done what I have.’ ” It was southern secession that made abolition politically possible.

  Lincoln then showed her a magnificently bound Bible given to him by the “coloured people”; she gave him some “songs and shadows” and asked him to sign her book. “And with the same hand that signed the death warrant for slavery . . . he wrote ‘For Aunty Sojourner Truth, October 29, 1864, A. Lincoln.’ ” She left even more dedicated to the cause of freedom and equality: “I am proud to say that I never was treated with more kindness and cordiality than I was by the great and good man Abraham Lincoln, by the grace of God President of the United States for four years more.” Truth’s friend Lucy Colman saw the president’s form of greeting—Aunty—as an insult and later penned a less flattering portrayal of the visit with Lincoln but Sojourner Truth was true to her word. She stayed in Washington working for a year in the Freedman’s Camp set up on the grounds of Robert E. Lee’s estate at Arlington, helping teach the former slaves how to get along in a world where no one provided food and clothing for them anymore, where they would have to find jobs and
housing, and where they would have to fight for their rights.

  And she kept fighting for her own. Like an early-day Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth insisted on integrating the new Washington streetcar system. Blacks had to ride outside with the drivers of the segregated horse-drawn rail carriages but Miss Truth refused to do that on several occasions, and even managed a few times to get the conductors on the cars fired. When one of them tried to push her off a whites-only car she had him arrested for assault and battery, declaring, “It’s hard for the old slave-holding spirit to die. But die it must.”

  “WE ARE ALL excitement here over the election,” the nurse Rebecca Pomroy exclaimed that fall. Though residents of the Federal City were denied the right to vote for president (and still have no voting representatives in Congress), the citizens of the city waged enthusiastic campaigns. A huge McClellan and Pendleton sign hung over Pennsylvania Avenue where politicians leading torchlight parades marched to oust the current resident on that thoroughfare. And a straw vote of students at Columbian College—now George Washington University—went to McClellan. Anna Ella Carroll supported the Democratic candidate as well. After attending the Republican convention in Baltimore in June and the Democratic one in Chicago in August, the prickly Miss Carroll abandoned Lincoln, convinced that his party’s stand against slavery would destroy the Union, though she had emancipated her own slaves years earlier. But things were looking good for Abraham Lincoln as General Philip Sheridan pushed back a Confederate drive in the Shenandoah Valley, effectively ending the battle for control; the slave state of Maryland voted for emancipation and congressional elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana went Lincoln’s way.