Capital Dames Read online

Once her husband won the nomination, Jessie, like so many candidates’ wives after her, served as something of a character witness. When opponents unearthed the fact that her husband was the illegitimate child of a French father, Jessie rushed to Virginia to consult with John’s mother’s family so she could put her spin on the campaign biography. And she emphatically pronounced that her husband was an Episcopalian and all of her children had been christened in the Episcopal Church when the Know-Nothings spawned rumors that Frémont was a Catholic. She also burnished his antislavery credentials with the widely read novelist and ardent abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Jessie repeated the story about rejecting slavery in California: “You are quite right in supposing the report true that I refused to buy a slave,” Jessie informed the influential author. The tale was taken up, added to, and used repeatedly in pro-Frémont speeches and editorials. The thrust: Jessie Benton Frémont kept California from becoming a slave state.

  Her political acumen also garnered kudos in newspapers that touted her support for the Republican Speaker of the House and her ability to explain “the Republican Platform as simple, perspicuous and right—‘so plain and easily comprehended that a wayfaring man need not err therein.’ ” An Ohio newspaper swooned: “Beautiful, graceful, intellectual and enthusiastic, she will make more proselytes to the Rocky Mountain platform in fifteen minutes than five stump orators can win over in a month.” Republicans glorifying Frémont’s time exploring the Rockies nicknamed their platform as a reminder of those rugged days. He was a hero, she was a wonder. Jessie was so glorified in the Republican press that one Democratic newspaper rejoined, “Inasmuch as black Republicans are making desperate efforts to elect Fremont upon the strength of his wife’s—Jessie Benton’s—virtues, abilities, patriotism and popularity, we modestly suggest the following as an appropriate design for their ticket:

  FOR PRESIDENT

  john c. fremont, husband of

  JESSIE BENTON

  But snide articles did nothing to detract from Jessie’s popularity. Women copied her hairstyle, wore her favorite color—violet—and named their babies Jessie Ann. Campaign ditties sang of her: The choice made by Jessie is ours; / We want the brave man she did wed. / He crowned her with gay bridal flowers / And she is a crown to his head. For a time she was by far the best-known woman in America.

  WHILE JESSIE BENTON Frémont campaigned passionately and publicly for her husband, her father, Thomas Hart Benton, was equally enthusiastic for Frémont’s opponent. Benton had refused to join his friend Blair in switching to the Republicans, rejecting the upstarts as nothing more than a northern regional party. Democrats meeting at Smith & Nixon’s Hall in Cincinnati in early June definitely attracted broader regional representation, but those diverse delegates had a great deal of difficulty uniting behind a candidate. The incumbent president, Franklin Pierce, had earned the enmity of the North by signing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but he and the author of the act, Stephen Douglas, both got enough votes in roll call after roll call along with a third candidate, James Buchanan, to keep the convention deadlocked. After sixteen rounds, with defeat likely, Douglas pulled out, giving the nomination to Buchanan on the next ballot.

  As secretary of state under President Polk, Buchanan assumed the role of an above-the-fray statesman. He had been lucky enough to be serving abroad as ambassador to Great Britain during the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, so he was conveniently removed from the controversy. If northern Democrats thought the Pennsylvanian would be sympathetic to their opposition to slavery, the party platform endorsing the concept of popular sovereignty and explicitly supporting the Kansas-Nebraska Act quickly dispelled their hopes. But to Thomas Hart Benton, Buchanan represented “the safest chance for preserving the peace of the country.” The campaign itself did little to promote peace. The bachelor Buchanan was a homosexual, one round of rumors had it; another whispered that he held his head in an odd way because he had tried to hang himself. But in the end “Old Buck” prevailed.

  Benton proved correct in his view that the Republicans at the time represented a regional party. In what was basically a three-way race, Frémont won eleven states in the North, but Buchanan held on to four others plus the solid South. The Know-Nothing candidate Fillmore won only Anna Carroll’s home state of Maryland, for which she took full credit, claiming: “my friends say I’ve been more than a Jessie Fremont to the Fillmore cause.” James Buchanan would be the next president. Jessie Frémont admitted to her friend Elizabeth Blair Lee, “We are subsiding into former habits, not without some of the giddy feelings one has after having been a long while on ship board. Things hardly have their natural value and attraction after the engrossing excitement of the one idea we have had in our heads for so many months.” Though she found it hard after the headiness of the campaign, for a time Jessie Frémont stepped off the public stage.

  THE ARRIVAL OF a new president no longer caused much excitement in Washington—Buchanan was the fourth in eight years—but a wedding soon after the election set the town abuzz. Adele Cutts met Stephen Douglas as he was campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president. Adele’s parents’ announcement that their not-quite-twenty-one-year-old daughter would marry a widower twice her age with two small boys caused quite a stir in the capital. As one newspaper reported, the engagement was “the absorbing theme of conversation in fashionable and political circles.” And some of that conversation was definitely less than admiring of the match. Varina Davis, who couldn’t stand Douglas, thought the Cutts family’s impecunious position drove her friend’s unfortunate decision. “The dirty speculator and party trickster, broken in health by drink, with his first wife’s money, buys an elegant, well-bred woman because she is poor and her father is proud,” Varina fumed to her parents, then added snarkily that a new water system would soon be coming to Washington, so “sparing his wife’s olfactories Douglas may wash a little oftener. If he don’t his acquaintance will build larger rooms with more perfect ventilation. However this wedding has put me out of patience.”

  Varina wasn’t kidding about the water situation. As secretary of war, her husband had worked closely with Montgomery Meigs, the man building the aqueduct that would finally bring water into Washington homes, where “all the water for washing cooking and bathing has to be brought from the street pump,” Meigs’s own wife had complained. The election of Buchanan meant Davis would no longer serve in the Cabinet; instead he would retake his seat as senator from Mississippi. The family, consisting of a newborn baby boy, toddler daughter, and Varina’s younger sister and brother, would move from their big house at the corner of Fourteenth and F Streets into a smaller place where they would not have to entertain on so grand a scale. Still recovering from puerperal fever that almost killed her after the birth of the baby, Varina groaned to her father wearily, “I have my large house to break up, a small one to fit up—four dinners, and a reception to give, and return my visits in the space of eighteen days.”

  Many political families took the much easier route of living in a “mess,” as the groups in boardinghouses or hotels were called. Brown’s Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue served as a southern redoubt. “We keep Free-Soilers, Black Republicans and Bloomers on the other side of the street,” Virginia Clay, wife of Senator Clement Claiborne Clay of Alabama, wrote to her father-in-law, a former senator himself. The southerners wanted nothing to do with the new political parties or with the women’s rights advocates who were showing up in bloomers—ballooning pants—under their skirts as a protest against the unwieldy hoop, to them a symbol of women’s oppression. In late 1856, Virginia joked, “Bloomers are most as plenty as blackberries.” Though there to make a political statement about women’s equality, at that point the bloomers were simply a humorous distraction from the increasingly tense politics of slavery. “Everything is excitement and confusion,” Virginia exclaimed to her father-in-law on Christmas Night in 1856. “I expect any day to hear of bloodshed and death, and would not be surprised at any time to witness (repeated here)
the Civil War of Kansas!”

  For Virginia Clay, the disruption in the Capital City was most unwelcome. One historian has dubbed her the “chief social arbiter” of the time and asserted that the group of southern politicians gathered at Brown’s Hotel was called the Clay mess not just because the Alabama senator held power in Congress but also “to give credit to the resolute, lively, accomplished, and clever wife.” Of all the “brilliant and beautiful women” who adorned Washington society at the time, Sara Pryor wrote years later, “the wittiest and brightest of them all was Mrs. Clay, the wife of the Senator from Alabama. She was extremely clever, the soul of every company.”

  The closest company was in the boardinghouse itself and Virginia remembered her “mess mates” fondly when she described them decades later. If there was no big dinner to attend, the boarders all ate together, and they would sometimes all go out to a concert by Jenny Lind or enjoy the farce Pochahantas, with its made-for-the-audience lines:

  What’s all this noise? Be done! Be done!

  D’you think you are in Washington?

  On the day reserved every week for calling on the wives of Cabinet members, the ladies of the mess made the rounds as a group so they would only have to hire one carriage. “As my parlours were the only ones that boasted a pier-glass,” Virginia reminisced, “it became a custom for the women composing our circle to come to my rooms before going out, in order to see how their dresses hung.” It was all cozy and companionable among the women, who also went on outings together, like the one to the Naval Observatory when the superintendent showed them the stars and then announced that he had a bill before Congress, “ ‘and if you ladies don’t influence your husbands to vote for it, I intend to publish the ages of each and every one of you to the whole of Washington!’ ”

  It was a joke but it was one that revealed the power the women held and didn’t hesitate to use. Virginia Clay recounted a story of her intervention with the secretary of the Navy on behalf of a pregnant friend whose husband was deployed to Italy. The Cabinet officer agreed to Virginia’s appeal to reunite the couple, and when the baby was born he was named after Clay, as a statement of gratitude to the senator’s meddling wife.

  NOW THAT SHE too was married to a prominent personage, Adele Cutts Douglas received all sorts of appeals. Anna Cora Ritchie, then a famous actress and author, asked Adele to promote her pupil, a young actress named Avonia Jones, because “your influence, and the prestige of your patronage can do much to contribute to her success.” (Avonia Jones went on to become a well-known actress.) Letters begging Adele to intercede with Douglas for jobs for their husbands came from distressed women like Margaret Hertford, who tried to play on their shared Catholicism, claiming that her daughter “offered prayers this day as Child of Sacred Heart that you may be the means of obtaining for her dear Father a Situation.” Requests to introduce young visitors to Washington society and to patronize the author’s products also arrived on Adele’s doorstep, attesting to her perceived power. The beautiful young woman beloved by all was now a force to be courted.

  With her husband’s money, the new Mrs. Douglas turned the house on New Jersey Avenue into a showplace of hospitality and set the style for the rest of the city, where Adele “soon was regarded as the uncrowned queen of Capitol society,” according to a Douglas biographer. The “social arbiter” Virginia Clay, who had always liked “Addie” Cutts, thought that her friend’s marriage allowed her to hold “a remarkable sway for years.” But a “crowned queen” would be coming to town and Adele Douglas faced a problem as the Buchanan administration took office. The incoming president still smarted over those sixteen ballots at the Democratic convention before he was nominated, and he lost no love for the Douglas family. Though she had been a younger schoolmate at the Visitation Convent, Adele would not enjoy a friendship with the woman who would serve as the new first lady, Buchanan’s niece, Harriet Lane. The accomplished twenty-six-year-old and her bachelor uncle would see to it that a night at the White House would rank as a coveted invitation.

  They set the tone immediately at the Inaugural Ball. “All the male population is in a ferment, preparing for the ‘Inaugural Ball,’ ” writer Mary Jane Windle informed “Distant Reader” as she referred to her South Carolina subscribers; “indeed the ‘Inaugural Ball’ is the engrossing subject of discourse.” It had been eight years since the Capital City had enjoyed such an expensive spectacle, with massive amounts of food and drink provided, including 1,200 quarts of ice cream and a three-thousand-dollar bill for the wine. On March 3, 1857, the day before the big event, the Evening Star announced that tickets (at ten dollars each) would be for sale at the city’s hotels and that “the Ladies Invitations are now ready.” Merchants maneuvered to capitalize on the huge crowds expected. “For the Inauguration, anticipating a large increase in our sales, we have employed an extra force of Shuckers and are now prepared to fill the largest orders for our celebrated HERRING BAY OYSTERS,” crowed the shop of Schwarz & Drury. Also advertised: “a few fine terrapins.” Newspapers around the country rhapsodized about the ball staged in a huge tent erected on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol, lauding it as “undoubtedly the grandest affair of the kind that has ever been witnessed in this country.” According to the Baltimore American correspondent, “There appeared to be among the ladies a very general effort to eclipse each other in the display of jewelry and the magnificence and costliness of their apparel,” but one shone out: “the lady of Senator Douglas was evidently the star of the evening. Her fine stature gave her the advantage over all competitors as she could be easily discerned in any part of the room.” Adele Douglas reigned as the beauty but she did not go unrivaled that heralded night. A new contender had entered the competition: “the niece of President Buchanan, Miss Lane, attracted much attention and was evidently the favorite of the evening.” When at nine thirty President Buchanan arrived to the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” followed immediately by his tall, striking niece, she commanded the crowd. “Miss Lane who is to do the honors of the White House was present and made a very favorable impression,” observed a writer for the Nashville Union and American. “She gives much promise of performing the duties of the White House with much grace and dignity.”

  Harriet Lane was certainly prepared for the job. At her own request, she had been brought up by her politician-uncle since she was orphaned at age eleven. As a senator from Pennsylvania and then secretary of state in the Polk administration, Buchanan educated the girl in the ways of government and society. When he was in the Cabinet she boarded at Visitation Convent in Georgetown and spent one Sunday a month with her uncle and his allies, absorbing the political plots of the moment. After a few years back in Pennsylvania when Polk left office, Buchanan surfaced again as Pierce’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, bringing his beautiful young niece to spend more than a year with him as his official hostess. By then twenty-five years old, Harriet created something of a sensation in London, especially among the members of the royal family, when Queen Victoria bestowed on her the title “Honorary Ambassadress.” One of Harriet’s friends advised her to marry one of the host of Englishmen pursuing her: “your nature is a very ambitious one & your position in this country might be very different from that you now hold.”

  But Harriet chose to return to the United States as a single woman, with the admonition from her uncle, “Take good care not to display any foreign airs & graces in society at home. . . . I shall be happy on my return to learn that it has been thus said of you, ‘—she has not been a bit spoiled by her visit to England.’ ” Buchanan didn’t need a snooty niece causing a problem in the upcoming presidential campaign. On election night in 1856, when a torchlight parade marched to their house in Pennsylvania to celebrate the victory, Harriet Lane was with her uncle. And she would be with him throughout one of the worst times in the history of the country and its Capital City. Only two days after the inaugural festivities, whatever temporary coming together of the Congress
that the celebration of a new presidency inspired was shattered by the third branch of government when the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision.

  DRED SCOTT HAD been enslaved in Missouri when his owners moved to Minnesota and Illinois, where slavery was outlawed. The family then returned to Missouri and sold the slave, moving Scott to sue for his freedom, arguing that his sojourn in free territory meant that he could no longer be held in bondage. Lower courts had decided both for and against the black man, who appealed to the Supreme Court, where he was represented by Montgomery Blair, the prominent lawyer son of Francis Preston Blair and brother of Elizabeth Blair Lee. Much to the horror of the antislavery forces in Congress and around the country, the Court not only ruled that Scott’s freedom would be denied, but added that as a noncitizen, he didn’t even have the right to sue. Then the justices went even further. The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, judged Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, prohibited the taking of property. When Congress outlawed slavery in some states, he posited, it in effect destroyed the property of slaveholders moving there. So the Missouri Compromise of 1820—the law determining which states would be slave and which would be free—was unconstitutional and the Fugitive Slave Act should be strictly enforced. Buchanan supported the decision—in fact he privately lobbied the justices to decide the way they did—and hoped that a court ruling on the question of slavery would settle the matter. If the contentious issue could be removed from Congress, the president reasoned, it might mean an end to the debate. And the threat to the Union would be avoided. Instead, just the opposite happened. Northern states vowed to ignore the Court entirely as southern states rejoiced. The forgers of compromise, like Stephen Douglas, looked for ways around the ruling even as he endorsed it, and all the while settlers’ bloody battles continued in Kansas. Partly because they feared similar civil unrest in other new territories as a result of the Dred Scott decision, depositors staged a run on the banks. That economic calamity came at the same time that northern manufacturers found their supplies had outpaced demand for their goods. The Panic of 1857 ensued, further engulfing the Buchanan presidency.