Capital Dames Read online

  Dedication

  Because I write about women, I have dedicated my books to them. But I realize that I wouldn’t have been able to write these books without the men in my life having taken me seriously first as a girl and then as a woman. So it is those men, three of whom we lost last year, I thank with this book.

  MY FATHER, HALE BOGGS.

  MY BROTHER, TOM BOGGS.

  MY BROTHER-IN-LAW MARC ROBERTS.

  MY BROTHER-IN-LAW PAUL SIGMUND.

  AND, MOST ESPECIALLY, MY HUSBAND, STEVEN ROBERTS.

  Epigraph

  Woman was at least fifty years in advance of normal position which continued peace . . . would have assigned her.

  —CLARA BARTON, MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS, MAY 30, 1888

  The war had torn the whole social fabric like an earthquake. . . . Women of education and the finest intellectual gifts are to be found in every department.

  —MARY CLEMMER AMES, TEN YEARS IN WASHINGTON, 1873

  Contents

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  Meet the Women of Washington, 1848–1856

  CHAPTER 2

  Jessie Runs for President but Harriet Takes the White House and Mary Jane Reports, 1856–1858

  CHAPTER 3

  Varina Leads and Leaves as Abby Drops By, 1859–1861

  CHAPTER 4

  Rose Goes to Jail, Jessie Goes to the White House, Dorothea Goes to Work, 1861

  CHAPTER 5

  Rose Is Released, Clara Goes to War, Louisa May Briefly Nurses, 1862

  CHAPTER 6

  Lizzie Reports on the Action, Janet Goes to Camp, Louisa Takes Charge, 1863

  CHAPTER 7

  Anna Speaks, Jessie Campaigns (Again), Sojourner Visits, 1864

  CHAPTER 8

  One Mary Leaves, One Mary Hangs, and Lois Writes About It All, 1865

  CHAPTER 9

  Virginia and Varina Return, Sara Survives, Mary is Humiliated, Kate Loses, 1866–1868

  Epilogue

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY COKIE ROBERTS

  ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  A northeast view of the Capitol still under construction, taken in 1863.

  (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Civil War Photographs, [LC-DIG-ppmsca-07302].)

  Introduction

  We all recognize that image of Rosie the Riveter, the symbol of American women who went to work in defense industries during World War II, her head wrapped in a red bandana, her fist thrust upward displaying an impressive bicep with the proud motto: “We can do it!” And do it they did—18 million women workers, comprising one-third of the U.S. labor force, took on all kinds of jobs they had never done before, not just in the munitions and aircraft factories but as shipyard and railroad workers, taxi drivers, newspaper reporters, farmers, scientific researchers, and “government girls” who poured into Washington to staff the federal agencies. Women found they could do the work, they liked it, and they wanted to keep working, according to a survey taken by the Women’s Bureau of the Labor Department as the war ended. And more than sixty thousand women took advantage of the GI Bill to enroll in college.

  In short, World War II forever changed the place of women in American society—even though many went back to their kitchens after the war, the march was on to where we are today, with females making up more than half of our college graduates and almost half of the labor force. If you look at a chart of mothers in the workforce you see a straight progression from the war years on, with only about 14 percent in paid jobs in 1940, compared to almost 70 percent in 2013. The war also spurred women to push for greater equality. The Equal Pay Act, though not passed until 1963, was first introduced in 1945, after the Women’s Bureau had lobbied for it. The women’s war effort also shamed the Democratic Party into including the ill-fated Equal Rights Amendment in their platform in 1944, four years after the Republican Party had endorsed it.

  OVER THE YEARS I’ve written a good deal about women’s roles in the post–World War II period. And in researching books about the Revolutionary War era, I learned that women were in the thick of those battles, too—key actors in the creation of the country. So as the commemoration of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War began in 2011, I started wondering whether that horrific conflict had had a similar impact on American women’s lives. To get a handle on that question, I decided to concentrate on the world I know best: the political world of Washington, D.C. I wanted to know not only how the war affected the city that sat as a bull’s-eye between battling armies, but also what it meant for the women of Washington. And I learned that the answer was, as I suspected, dramatic. The sleepy little prewar Capital City went from being a social center for self-described belles to a place where purposeful women assembled to effect change. And it was not just the city that was transformed; it was also the women themselves. The antebellum belles spent their days calling on Cabinet and congressional wives or listening to debates in the Capitol galleries, and their nights at dinners and dances. Deeply political, they promoted their husbands’ and fathers’ careers and competed with each other for preeminent position in the Capital City’s close-knit social circles. “Everyone here is well read and well informed,” one of the leading belles’ mothers wrote to her husband on a visit to Washington in 1854. Varina Davis was expecting a new baby and her mother was charmed by the city where her daughter lived: “Talent makes the aristocracy here—money has its admirers too—but talent outranks it.” Women of talent could shine in the social gatherings that were dominated by southerners who seemed to have been in Washington forever. Even many of the congressional newcomers and their wives knew each other because their fathers had been there before them. And some of the women had been schoolmates at the Visitation Convent in Georgetown, which educated girls of all faiths and from all regions.

  Then secession forced the southern women to depart, and their friends in the city they left behind were soon grappling with questions of safety and sanitation as the capital was transformed first into a huge army camp bursting with frisky fresh soldiers, and then a massive hospital reeking with wounded young warriors. Women engaged in all kinds of activities—nurses, supply organizers, relief workers, pamphleteers all aided the cause and female journalists covered it. Dorothea Dix and Clara Barton became powerful forces helping the soldiers; Anna Ella Carroll provided the propaganda. And the Civil War boasted its own rendition of Rosie the Riveter, women who did the dangerous work of making munitions at arsenals, many losing their lives in awful accidents. An earlier version of the government girls also were called to the Federal City, women who worked at the Treasury Department taking the place of men who had joined the army just as the agency added the enormous job of printing greenbacks to pay for the war. The Washington Navy Yard broke with tradition as well and hired women to sew canvas bags for gunpowder.

  AS ENSLAVED PEOPLE sought refuge behind Union lines and other slaves made their way north, Washington beckoned as the Promised Land for tens of thousands of the so-called contrabands. After emancipation was declared in Washington in 1862 and the numbers of newcomers swelled, African-American women like Elizabeth Keckley joined with their white counterparts to found societies aimed at improving conditions in camps crowded with these displaced persons. And, struggling to establish schools and orphanages to handle the children, many women concluded that changes in public policy were needed in order for any real progress to occur, so they stepped up their lobbying and activism, with suffragists coming to the Capitol to
press their case.

  The city of Washington would never be the same. The population almost doubled as a result of the war, and the size of the federal government exploded. When I was a little girl the National Mall was marred by ugly “temporary buildings” that were hastily erected during the two world wars and marked the rapid growth of government over the previous few decades. The Civil War had the same impact. The federal budget, which had been $78 million in 1860, grew to almost $377 million in 1867, after spending for the war had ended. Measures spurring on industrial and agricultural production plus new initiatives like the Homestead Act and the creation of land grant colleges required new federal agencies and an influx of bureaucrats to run them. No longer a small southern town where everyone important knew everyone else, Washington bustled with the energy of parvenus who paraded through the halls of the Capitol and rose in the ranks of Congress.

  AND WHAT OF the women of Washington who called themselves belles? “The gay and thoughtless belle, the accomplished and beautiful leader of society, awoke at once to a new life,” judged a book published soon after the war ended, boldly declaring that the conflict provided “a sphere of life and action, of which, a month before, she would have considered herself incapable.” Some of the departed southerners experienced horrible deprivation and danger at worst, displacement and distress at best. The Union loyalists endured most of the war in Washington, evacuating to places farther north from time to time as the enemy approached. Their deep engagement in politics never waned, and they shared their views with friends on the other side. Then the war ended, and they got together again. But instead of vying with each other in the balconies of the Capitol or at balls in the embassies and grand homes, they stood together on suffrage platforms, toiled together to form social service organizations, and wrote books and articles that displayed their literary talents and in some cases allowed them to support themselves. One self-supporting journalist, Varina Davis, whose husband had been president of the Confederacy, later in life became fast friends with Julia Grant, whose husband had commanded the Union army. The women were able to put the bitterness of battle behind them when the men of the South were still draping themselves in the Confederate flag and mourning the “lost cause.”

  Varina Howell Davis is one of the women I follow in this book, along with her Confederate colleagues Virginia Tunstall Clay and Sara Rice Pryor. All three held places of prominence in Washington before the war and all three wrote extensively about their experiences. And they were friends with women who ended up on the Union side, like Elizabeth Blair Lee, whose letters show her political influence. I track her in these pages as well, along with the indomitable Jessie Benton Frémont and the elusive Adele Cutts Douglas, elusive because all of the others write about her but her own thoughts through letters are hard to find. That’s not true of another northern sympathizer, Louisa Rodgers Meigs, who draws vivid pictures of the maneuverings in the Capital City.

  Happily for us, those letters survive, many of them never before published. When you add the women’s published writings, plus newspaper articles and government records, and a couple of revealing diaries, they allow us to learn the stories of these sometimes fierce, sometimes funny, and almost always formidable women. Here, then, they are.

  CHAPTER 1

  Dolley Payne Todd Madison, wife of President James Madison, and the foremost force in Washington for decades.

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

  Meet the Women of Washington

  1848–1856

  Church bells chimed their wake-up call for the Capital City just at first light. From the Navy Yard and the Arsenal, sunrise salutes signaled a historic day ahead for tens of thousands of expectant tourists “not only from the immediate vicinity and adjacent cities, but from opposite and distant parts of the Union.” They had crowded into town on special trains ordered up for the momentous occasion, the National Intelligencer excitedly reported, and bright sunlight greeted them after a day of drenching rain. It was July 4, 1848, and the gawkers just might get a glimpse not only of President James Knox Polk and other high-ranking officials, but of those two great relics of the founding age—Elizabeth Hamilton and Dolley Madison. The wives of America’s first fierce partisans would come together in seats of honor to preside over the laying of the cornerstone of a monument to the man their husbands both served: George Washington.

  Getting to this day was no easy matter. Ever since Washington’s death almost half a century earlier there had been proposals in Congress to erect a fitting shrine to the Father of the Country. In fact, even earlier than that, back in 1783, before the Constitution was written creating the presidency, before a capital had been chosen, Congress resolved to honor General Washington with a statue “at the place where the residence of Congress shall be established.” But so far all attempts at redeeming that pledge had failed—the organizers could never raise enough money or interest. This time was going to be different. Public solicitations plus the formation of an “organization of ladies to aid in collecting funds,” headed by Mrs. James Madison, Mrs. John Quincy Adams, and Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, had collected about $87,000 and created enough momentum to choose a site for a marble cornerstone “weighing twenty-four thousand five hundred pounds”! The Speaker of the House delivered the oration and alluded to the grandes dames Hamilton and Madison “touchingly and eloquently.”

  The distinguished dowagers had been present at the creation of the country. Seeing them there and hearing tributes to the foremost Founding Father conjured up for the crowd happier days, an era when the United States shared a common cause—an independent America—a useful reminder at a time when the nation was threatening to break apart over the increasingly contentious issue of slavery. The recent military victory over Mexico, with its vast new territory added to the country, led to an upset in the balance between slave states and free, and raised the specter of the South’s “peculiar institution” spreading as far as California and the Pacific. But on this Independence Day, the Intelligencer opined, the parades and pyrotechnics showed that “in these already dubious days of the republic,” a spirit remained that could again be raised “into national strength and unity.” From the beginning, that unity had been challenged by regionalism and partisanship. But for almost fifty years, ever since a sorry little village on the Potomac River had been established as the nation’s capital, one person—Dolley Madison—could be counted on year in and year out to bring the factions together to put aside, at least temporarily, the rancor. The July 4 ceremony marked a rare public appearance for the ninety-year-old Eliza Hamilton, but not so the eighty-year-old Dolley Madison. She had stayed on the public stage as a figure of enormous influence throughout the decades. But this event would be one of the last public acts of the former first lady who had done so much to calm quarreling politicians. It would have been hard to imagine on that day in 1848 that Dolley Madison would be dead in a little more than a year and that the laying of the cornerstone of the Washington Monument would mark the last truly unified moment for the country.

  In 1801 the young and beautiful Mrs. Madison had blown into the muddy, miserable town newly designated as the seat of government as the effervescent wife of the secretary of state. She played hostess to hundreds, maybe thousands, through James Madison’s eight years in the Jefferson administration and then the eight years of his own presidency. Already liked by all (Henry Clay once gushed, “Everybody loves Mrs. Madison”), the first lady rose to the level of national heroine during the War of 1812 when she refused to leave the White House as the British approached; she insisted on “waiting until the large picture of Gen. Washington is secured” before fleeing the invasion. With her return to the burned-out ruins a few days later she took up the cause of securing Washington’s place as the Capital City despite its near destruction. “Queen Dolley,” as she was universally called, left office to paeans of praise: “Like a summer’s sun she rose in our political horizon, gloriously, and she sunk, b
enignly,” proclaimed a newspaper of the opposition party, adding that she had turned Thomas Jefferson’s inaugural pronouncement that “we are all federalists, we are all republicans” from a “liberal sentiment to a practice.”

  For twenty years she chafed in retirement with her husband on his family estate in Virginia, where she constantly pestered friends and family for news of her city before she regally returned as a widow to dominate the social scene for the rest of her life. As long as Dolley Madison was alive, everyone knew who ruled Washington. And in recognition of her role, she accumulated extraordinary honors: a seat of her own in the House of Representatives, the privilege of sending the first personal telegraph, the presentation of a specially cast silver medal in memory of the War of 1812. Heads of state called on her to pay her homage. And her funeral shut down the city. “The President of the United States, the Cabinet Officers, gentlemen of the Army and Navy, the Mayor and City Councils, and many distinguished citizens and strangers” jammed into St. John’s Church across the street from her house on Lafayette Square on July 16, 1849. After hearing “an eloquent and just eulogy on the character of the deceased,” the funeral procession, “a very large and imposing one,” trekked more than four miles in the summer heat to the Congressional Cemetery, where the body of the most famous woman in the land would stay until it could be moved to Montpelier, the Madison estate in Virginia.

  IN THE COURSE of her reign, Dolley’s city had undergone a steady transformation. In its infancy, when asked what he thought of the place, an ambassador replied that it “would be a city when our grandchildren were grown.” But when English author Fanny Trollope, who had little good to say about America, visited in 1830 she was surprised to find herself “delighted with the whole aspect of Washington.” The Capitol building, so badly damaged by British fire sixteen years before, greatly impressed her with its “beauty and majesty.” When Dolley had first come to town only a few shops huddled around the congressional boardinghouses on Capitol Hill; thirty years later, Pennsylvania Avenue, the still-famous thoroughfare between the Capitol and the White House, had become “a street of most magnificent width, planted on each side with trees, and ornamented by many splendid shops.” Fanny found the White House a “handsome mansion,” deemed the town hall “very noble,” and called the Patent Office “a curious record of the fertility of the mind of man.” All in all, the place that had served as the object of ridicule to foreigners and locals alike reminded Mrs. Trollope of Europe’s “fashionable watering places.” And that praise came even before work began on the Smithsonian Institution in 1847, causing a newspaper correspondent to conclude, “public opinion has decided that the national metropolis shall be distinguished for cultivation of the mind.” (On his trip to the capital several years after Mrs. Trollope, Charles Dickens had far less kind things to say, declaring the city “the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.”)