By Frances Stebbins
{Frances Stebbins has been covering events in Western Virginia, especially those relating to faith communities, since 1953. Her column now appears monthly.}
The Salem Museum on East Main Street sells a wide variety of books related to Western Virginia history; some are by local authors like one I compiled from a selection of “Senior News” columns and called “Century Turning.”
I’m not writing this, however, to promote my own work but rather that of broadcast personality Cokie Roberts who in 2015 published “Capital Dames.” The work, for which a paperback copy can be bought at the museum’s gift shop, is subtitled “The Civil War and the Women of Washington 1848-1868.” The museum sells it for $15.98.
I found it well worth the price and a bridge from 160 years ago to the present.
While the men of that period were dealing with the grave issues as the spread of slavery and the growing division in Congress involving such folk as Jefferson Davis and John Charles Fremont, the wives of these men were busy trying to advance their husbands’ careers while making their own impact in the shadows.
The author introduces us to the lives and achievements of many women we may or may not have read of elsewhere including Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth and Dorothea Dix.
Barton became the founder of The American Red Cross, Sojourner Truth was a freed slave later famed for her speaking and writing about this blot on American history, and Dix pioneered in the understanding of mental illness.
All these were active in the Nineteenth Century period covering the years before, during and after the Civil War when women enjoyed few of the “rights” we take for granted today. One such right, that of casting a ballot for their local, state and national leaders, was not to come for another half century in 1919.
However, as “Capital Dames” reveals, women exerted their influence with power when their men were prominent in political life. Jessie Benton Fremont, for instance, pulled many strings to try to get her husband, John, nominated and elected president as an anti-slavery Republican.
Fremont had developed his own plan for freeing slaves; it was not acceptable to the man in the White House, Abraham Lincoln, who became annoyed by the pushy man from the West who never achieved his own inauguration.
I found “Capital Dames” greatly enlarged my knowledge and appreciation of Lincoln as well as many other historical personages of the time. Cokie Roberts’ style is easy and informal. Along with copious notes and references, there are sketches of the author herself and descriptions of her other works. Though my own pleasure reading time these days is limited, the book engaged me fully for the period of weeks it took me to read it.
From “Capital Dames” I learned of Mary Todd Lincoln who lived with many misfortunes including having a southern background in a city when a major war was being fought over regional differences. But more than that, she behaved at times in selfish and neurotic ways which author Roberts learned from the many diaries and letters the Washington women kept.
The book’s years before the war found a group of the wives of the political leader as friends in the national capital’s social circle. Secession broke up, not only the union for four long and bitter years, but the friendships of those like Varina Davis. She became the First Lady of the Confederacy when her husband, Senator Jefferson Davis from Mississippi, was named to its presidency, and the family moved to Richmond.
{It was a tragic coincidence, Cokie Roberts tells us, that both Davis and Lincoln lost young sons, though in different ways, during the war period. The Lincoln boy succumbed to a common ailment of the time, typhoid fever. A fall from a high balcony in the Richmond mansion housing the Confederate leader’s family brought about the death of the Davis son.}
The book has even a special relevance for today with the talk of impeachment that has circulated since the presidency of Donald Trump. Our history books tend to pass quickly over the painful years just after the Civil War, but for the presidential circle in Washington, the years in which Andrew Johnson succeeded to the White house brought their own drama.
Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-president, had no intention of becoming president when the high-profile liberator of slaves was shot to death just as Union sympathizers were celebrating their victory. He was a Senator from Tennessee who did not go about punishing the defeated South enough in the opinion of the more “Radical Republicans.”
In February 1868 the House of Representatives voted 126 to 47 to impeach Johnson. The trial, Roberts recounts in detail, attracted many women as well as men to the proceedings. In the end, only one vote kept the President from being removed from office.
His wife, Eliza, was quoted after it was over, “I wish they would send us back to Tennessee…give us our poverty and our peace again.”
The conquering hero of the war, General Ulysses S. Grant, succeeded Johnson as President. His image in history is somewhat tarnished by political scandals in which some of his associates were involved; he managed war better than peace.
Through letters and records of his wife, Julia Grant, author Roberts introduces readers to the humanity of this couple.
Even readers who are not the “Civil War Buff” I am, can learn a lot of American history from this expert commentator of events of today.