When Lucy Hayes became First Lady of the United States on a cold, cloudy March day in 1877, she was in the midst of a national controversy over disputed election results. Compounding the situation, she would soon be courted by groups that wanted to use her to support their agendas. Yet, she would remain faithful to her own priorities: her husband, her family, and the men of the 23d Ohio Volunteer Infantry.
Rutherford B. “Rud” Hayes had been given the rank of major in June of 1861, just a few weeks after the first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. He was ready for war, as was his wife. “Lucy enjoys it [war news] and wishes she had been in Ft. Sumter with a garrison of women,” Hayes wrote to his uncle Sardis Birchard in Fremont, Ohio. Hayes, Cincinnati’s city solicitor, was thirty-eight at the time and Lucy was twenty-nine. They had been married for eight years and had three little boys. By the end of the war, Lucy was known as the Mother of the Regiment, a title she cherished for the rest of her life.
Lucy Webb Hayes seemed fulfilled by her roles as a caregiver and parent in an age when progressives and idealists wanted to mold her into their image of the “New Woman.” She was the first president’s wife to hold a college degree. She was a teetotaler and a strict Methodist with a social conscience; as a result, the temperance and suffrage movements both assumed she would espouse their causes once she moved into the White House, though she had other plans. That she was so well-educated and had a husband who supported her decisions might account for her polite refusal to comply with others’ expectations.
Lucy Webb Hayes, circa 1866. (Courtesy Hayes Presidential Center, Fremont)
Lucy was born on August 28, 1831, in Chillicothe, Ohio’s first capital. Her father, James Webb, was a physician who grew up around Lexington, Kentucky. Her mother, Maria Cook Webb, was from Chillicothe. James’s family owned slaves, whom he—as heir—would one day inherit. Having grown more repulsed by slavery as he matured, James traveled back to Lexington in the summer of 1833 to sign the papers to free his slaves. Once there, he discovered the entire household suffering with cholera. He attempted to treat everyone, but unfortunately, he, his parents, and his brother all succumbed.
Left to raise little Lucy and her two older brothers, Joseph and James, Maria Webb eventually moved the family to Delaware, Ohio, so the boys could enroll at what would become Ohio Wesleyan University. The school, affiliated with the Methodist Church, had been chartered in 1842 as a boys’ preparatory school, whose success led to the establishment of a college.
Lucy attended classes at the prep school, rather unusual for a girl at the time. She also earned a few credits in the college department. Just before her sixteenth birthday, she met Rud Hayes at the local hot spot: the old sulphur springs on the college campus. Hayes, almost ten years older, was in town visiting friends and family. He had grown up in Delaware; his parents—Sophia Birchard Hayes and Rutherford Hayes Jr.—were both New Englanders who settled there in 1817. The elder Hayes, a Presbyterian and an advocate for education, was a farmer and businessman who was co-owner of a distillery. He died of a fever just three months before Rud was born on October 4, 1822.
Sophia’s cousin and her brother, Sardis Birchard, helped raise young Rud and his beloved sister Fanny. After attending prep schools in Norwalk, Ohio, and in Middletown, Connecticut, Hayes enrolled at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. By the time he met Lucy, he had finished his law studies at Harvard University and passed the Ohio bar. He had courted two other young women before meeting Lucy, but he had been more intent on building his law career than settling down.
Lucy made a lasting impression on the young barrister. Not quite yet her adult height of five feet, four and one half inches, she was already slightly taller than average for the time. With her slender build, wide hazel eyes, and inky black hair, she was close to the physical ideal then. Only a tendency to freckle easily marred her fair complexion, Hayes wrote teasingly. Of average height for the day—five feet, eight and a half inches—he was considered handsome, with his sandy hair and blue eyes. He was also a hard worker and deep thinker who loved culture, traveling, and socializing with friends. But those were qualities Lucy would discover later.
A lifelong diarist, Hayes recorded his first impression of his future wife—a “bright sunny hearted little girl not quite old enough to fall in love with—and so I didn’t.” He went back to practice law in Fremont (then still called Lower Sandusky), where his uncle Sardis lived. In 1849, he moved to Cincinnati to further his career.
Meanwhile, Lucy went to Cincinnati to attend the Wesleyan Female College. Like the Delaware school, the Cincinnati college was affiliated with the Methodist Church. It was one of the first chartered colleges in the country to award degrees to women. Its classes were held in a large three-story stone building on Vine Street. Four hundred young women attended classes on the first two floors and chapel on the third floor. Lucy, along with other out-of-town students, lived in a boardinghouse next door.
Lucy was homesick at first, but she soon grew to love her fellow students, her studies, and the delicious meals at the boardinghouse. She studied geology, astronomy, rhetoric, geometry, and mental and moral science; she may have also studied trigonometry and a foreign language. The assignment Lucy dreaded the most was the fortnightly essay on some lofty topic. With themes such as “Is Emulation a Greater Promotive of Literary Excellence than Personal Necessity?” it’s easy to understand why she wasn’t an enthusiastic writer.
On the whole, Lucy enjoyed college. When her mother moved to Cincinnati to join her brothers there during Lucy’s third and final year, the girl’s family was reunited. Meanwhile, Sophia Hayes had been keeping her son informed about Lucy’s life. She wrote that Maria Webb had decided to send Lucy to Cincinnati to college because she was becoming too popular in Delaware. Lucy “will do well if she can keep from being carried off by a Methodist minister till she is of age,” Sophia wrote.
Hayes took notice. He began dropping by Friday evening receptions at the Female College where the students could socialize with young gentlemen under proper supervision. By the time Lucy graduated with a liberal arts degree in June 1850, he knew he was in deep waters. He had believed himself to be in love with another young woman for two years, but now he was in turmoil over that relationship, and his thoughts turned more to Lucy.
Lucy, meanwhile, was enjoying life as a young single lady in a cosmopolitan city. Free of her studies, she now had more time to enjoy all the culture Cincinnati offered: literary readings, lectures, theater, music. The college degree she earned was to improve her mind and broaden her horizons, not to prepare her for a career; the career of choice for most young women in 1850 was still wife and mother.
On his twenty-eighth birthday that October, Hays wrote of his increasing restlessness and his resolve to find a sweetheart with whom he could build a future. The sudden death of a much younger cousin that fall; the death of his beloved nephew, six-year-old Willie Platt; and the wedding of one of his best friends convinced him to stop procrastinating. On June 13, 1851, he declared his love to Lucy and asked her to be his wife. “A puzzled expression of pleasure and surprise stole over her fine features,” he wrote in his diary. “She responded with a slight pressure of her hand and said, ‘I must confess, I like you very well’ … and the faith was plighted for life.”
While Lucy’s response seemed restrained, Hayes was euphoric. He endured their engagement impatiently, writing to her every few days. “How fast you are becoming the ‘be-all and end-all’ of my hopes, thoughts, affections, my existence,” he wrote to her a week later, then borrowed a poetic sentiment from Milton: “If there be an Elysium of bliss It is this,—it is this!” They were married at Maria Webb’s home in Cincinnati on December 30, 1852, amid a group of thirty relatives and friends.
It was the beginning of a happy marriage, which lasted thirty-six years. Lucy and Hayes were exceptionally suited to each other. Family ties were of great importance to them, they supported each other in their respective dreams and decisions, they strove never to be apart longer than absolutely necessary, and they delighted in their children. They had seven sons, three of whom died as toddlers, and one daughter. During this time, Hayes lost his older sister, Fanny Hayes Platt, who died at thirty-six on July 16, 1856, in Columbus.
After the couple married, they lived with Mrs. Webb for almost two and a half years, before moving into their own home on 6th Street in Cincinnati. They primarily spent vacations visiting relatives in the Columbus area and Fremont. Occasionally, they went back East to visit family. With the births of Birchard Austin (“Birch”) in 1853, Webb Cook in 1856, and Rutherford Platt (“Ruddy”) in 1858, Lucy was increasingly preoccupied with domestic life. She usually had two household servants to help her. One woman, simply known as Eliza Jane, was a free African American, whom Lucy taught to read and write. Some of the servants from their early marriage stayed with them through the White House years, including Winnie Monroe, a black woman who was the cook and a second mother to the children, and Monroe’s mother, who the family simply called Aunt Clara.
The Hayeses opposed slavery, as did their families. Hayes detested the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which allowed slave owners and bounty hunters to track down escaped slaves anywhere in the country and return them to captivity. Only the Ohio River separated Cincinnati and the slave state of Kentucky, and the Queen City became an important entry point for those seeking freedom. As an attorney in a Cincinnati law firm, Hayes often defended escaped slaves, procuring freedom for many of them.
Lucy was keenly interested in politics and eagerly discussed the topics of the day with her husband and immediate family. The Hayeses believed, as did many people, that free and slave states could continue to coexist until slavery became too impractical to continue. They did not believe that the Union would dissolve or that war would ensue. As late as Election Day 1860, Hayes wrote in his diary that even if South Carolina and some of the other southern states seceded, the more conservative states would remain. “But at all events, I feel as if the time has come to test this question,” he added. “If the threats are meant, then it is time the Union was dissolved or the traitors crushed out. I hope Lincoln goes in.”
Both he and Lucy opposed Kentucky senator John J. Crittenden’s compromise, which proposed that the Fugitive Slave Law be strengthened and that slavery be permitted in the District of Columbia. Even though Lucy still had cousins in Kentucky who supported states’ rights over the slavery issue, she did not soften her beliefs or comments on the topic. Patriotism ran high and hot in Cincinnati. “The Northern heart is truly fired,” Lucy wrote to a niece. “The enthusiasm that prevails in our city is perfectly irresistible.”
After Fort Sumter, northerners like the Hayeses put aside thoughts of compromise and coexistence. In the letter to his uncle in which he mentioned Lucy’s reaction to Fort Sumter, Hayes described the rest of the family’s reactions: “Mother thinks we are to be punished for our sinfulness, and reads the Old Testament vigorously. Mother Webb quietly grieves over it… . Dr. Joe [Lucy’s eldest brother] is for flames, slaughter, and a rising of the slaves. All the boys [Hayes’s sons] are soldiers.”
As war fever spread throughout Cincinnati, people appeared to have little realization of what civil war would mean. Everyone underestimated how long and bloody the ordeal would be. In a May 8 letter to his former college classmate Guy M. Bryan of Texas, Hayes argued that the secessionists had forced the war upon the country. “We cannot escape it,” he wrote. Both Hayes and his wife had numerous college friends who hailed from the South, and that made them reluctant to vilify the new Confederates. Hayes wrote to Bryan that he hoped they would remain friends and that he believed people’s better natures would be brought forth by the war. “People are more generous, more sympathetic, better, than when engaged in the more selfish pursuits of peace,” he wrote. He ended the letter with regards to Bryan’s wife and son, adding, “Lucy and the boys send much love.” Around that same time, Lucy became pregnant with their fourth child.
Hayes, who had no military background, did not immediately join the army. He questioned whether he had any skills that would be useful, but he decided he would take action if Kentucky seceded, an event that would have increased the odds of combat in the hills and river-fronts of Cincinnati. Lucy’s younger brother, Dr. James Webb, did join the effort early, hoping to contribute in a way that was not “warlike.” He secured a position as an assistant surgeon of the 2d Regiment.
Hayes and fellow members of the Cincinnati Literary Club formed a volunteer company to learn how to drill. Concerned about the family’s safety, Sardis Birchard invited them to come to Fremont, a prospect that the independent Lucy didn’t relish. Hayes diplomatically declined, saying, “Lucy hates to leave the city in these stirring times.”
By mid-May, Hayes and a close friend, Cincinnati judge Stanley Matthews, decided to join the army together. By June, they were part of the newly formed 23d Ohio Volunteer Infantry, led initially by Colonel William S. Rosecrans. Matthews was commissioned lieutenant colonel and Hayes, major. The regiment was sent to Camp Jackson, near Columbus, for six weeks of intensive training.
In the first few weeks Hayes was absent, Lucy spent a considerable amount of time organizing clothing, linens, and sundries such as sewing supplies and soap to send to him in the field. She also lobbied for her brother Joe to be assigned to the 23d so that husband and brother could watch out for each other. Webb did join Hayes later that year, which pleased her greatly. Soon her concern spread to the other men in the 23d as well.
“I can sympathize with your feelings as the men are sworn in,” she wrote to Hayes on June 13, 1861. “Oh how my heart fills with joy and feelings … as I think of our brave men.” She recounted how she was greeted in the street by a young man in uniform, then recognized him as the boy who used to serve her at the neighborhood butcher shop. “He grasped my hand warmly,” she wrote, “and I felt that he was not a poor boy but one of our defenders.”
Although the war certainly did not erase class distinctions, circumstances often arose that nullified them, at least for a time. Already that June, Lucy’s thoughts were with the other young men of Hayes’s regiment. “My greatest happiness now would be to feel that I was doing some thing for the comfort and happiness of our men,” she wrote to Hayes. She would not be able to follow her impulses for a few months, but in letters to her husband she continued express her concerns for the soldiers.
Hayes, meanwhile, was totally occupied with training and earning the respect of the twenty-five hundred men under his command. He soon showed himself to be a compassionate, able leader. According to one private from Niles, he “was so generous and his relations with his men were so kind, and yet always dignified, that he won my heart almost from the start.” That young man, William McKinley, went on to serve with Hayes in many campaigns and later became the twenty-fifth president of the United States.
Just eighteen at the time, McKinley later told how Hayes demonstrated his leadership one day in July 1861 when General John C. Frémont (the pioneer pathfinder and Lucy’s personal political hero) was slated to review the troops at camp. The men had been issued battered, out-of-date muskets, converted from using flints to percussion caps. Many of the men scorned the weapons and refused to take them. While Stanley Matthews flatly told his men they would be shot if they didn’t carry the muskets, Hayes took a more reasonable approach. He went to tents and cabins and spoke to the men about how some of the greatest battles of the American Revolution had been won with the most rudimentary firearms and weapons. He called on their commitment to the cause and told them they would get better guns later as they entered battle. According to McKinley’s account, a boisterous Irish private shouted, “Bully for Hayes!” and led his companions down to the arsenal to pick up their muskets. “From that moment our confidence in our leader never wavered,” McKinley wrote.
As the time approached for Hayes’s regiment to be deployed, Lucy’s feelings shifted from those of ardent patriot to those of anxious wife and mother. Prior to Hayes joining the war, he had written to Birchard that he had enough money to sustain his family for a year, or two, while he was in the field. But no savings account could quiet Lucy’s fears. She, the children, and her mother traveled to Columbus to be near Hayes during his last few days at Camp Jackson. Lucy coaxed her husband into letting her spend the last night with him in camp. In the evening, they visited the men, who were busy preparing food for the trip ahead. The next day, as the regiment’s train pulled out of the High Street station, Lucy tried to hide her tears.
She vowed to maintain a brave facade for her children and others around her. In addition to the war, Lucy had to contend with intermittent severe headaches and bouts of rheumatism, which she had experienced since she was a young woman and which pregnancy often exacerbated. There would also be other struggles during the war, which she could not anticipate.
In August, soon after she had parted with Hayes at Camp Jackson, she wrote to him about the men under him, saying, “You know my great desire is that you and Joe [Webb] will constantly feel for the soldiers—do what you can to lighten their hardships.” It appears that her husband—a naturally decent man—strove to do so whenever possible.
Already filled with a keen sense of duty to his country, Hayes soon developed a strong attachment to his troops. In comparing his men’s camp abilities to those of men from other states, he wrote, “They build quarters, ditches, roads, traps; dig wells, catch fish, kill squirrels, etc., etc., and it is really a new sensation, the affection and pride one feels respecting such a body of men in the aggregate.”
The regiment had its first encounter with Confederate troops that September, in what would become West Virginia. Their mission was to secure the Kanawha Valley, guard the railroads, and protect Union supporters. Bordering Ohio, the area was of prime concern to the North. Rebel guerrillas roamed the region; they knew the terrain intimately, were stealthy and unstoppable warriors, and had plenty of sympathizers who sheltered them. Union troops hated and feared them.
Hayes wrote to Lucy that first blood was shed when Confederates fired upon the patrol he was leading. Over the next few weeks, the regiment continued to have intermittent encounters with the enemy. Hayes was philosophical about the dangers he and his men faced. He did not go into deep details in his letters to Lucy, but he did not pretend that there was no danger, any more than Lucy shielded him from news of their sons’ various illnesses.
Hayes adapted well to military life. He was disappointed when he was removed from the regiment for several weeks to act as a judge advocate for court martial cases throughout West Virginia. Lucy worried about him traveling so much, believing he would be safer with his regiment. Anxious to be back with his men, he was allowed to return in late October 1861. He brought with him a new rank: colonel.
Back in Cincinnati, Lucy was busy nursing the boys through sickness, tending to household matters, and corresponding with Birchard and other family members about Hayes. Her letters to her husband often discussed politics. Lucy was not a strong Lincoln supporter at first, and Hayes often urged her to be patient with the president’s policy, believing he was the best wartime president that the Union could have had. Lucy also worried about what Hayes might do with any escaped slaves who turned themselves in to him. “Above all things Ruddy,” she wrote that October, “if a contraband is in Camp—don’t let the 23rd Regiment be disgraced by returning [them to their owners] or anything of the kind—Whenever I hear of you—you are highly spoken of—so much liked by the men.”
In the same letter, Lucy asked if his men needed clothing: “We hear sad accounts of the freezing condition of the men.” Her neighbors were forming a circle to sew for troops and wanted to choose a regiment to serve. “Everybody is interested [in sewing for the soldiers],” she wrote again on October 16, “and if you only knew how it saddens us all to hear of the suffering and destitution of our brave men it would make you feel that all feeling was not lost.”
Lucy was outraged by stories that some of the injured and dying soldiers in the military hospitals were receiving “unfeeling treatment,” and she chafed at not being in a position to go to the hospital and help. Approaching the last few weeks of pregnancy, she was dealing with her own ailments as well as those of her sons.
The Hayes household also was beginning to feel the privations of war. In late October, she received a shipment of apples from Birchard in Fremont. Writing to thank him, she noted that apples in Cincinnati were scarce and expensive. “My three boys would (if they had all they wanted) break me up buying Apples,” she wrote. Webb, then about five, was particularly thrilled about having a whole apple to himself.
Although Lucy was not able to see her husband that fall, her brother Joe came to Cincinnati in early December so he could assist when she gave birth. Joseph Thompson was born on December 23. Hayes wrote to her lovingly after learning of the boy’s birth, adding, “It is best it was not a daughter. These are no times for women.”
One day soon after the baby’s birth, a soldier from the 23d arrived at the 6th Street home to deliver a message from Hayes, who had been promoted to lieutenant colonel. The man, who had obviously been celebrating his furlough with alcohol, pushed past the baby nurse to see Lucy personally. Knowing that the tale would get back to her husband, Lucy—whose family abstained from alcohol—asked him not to discipline the soldier because “getting home had quite overcome him.” Hayes did not get a furlough to meet his new son until February 1862, when Lucy first saw him with the full beard he had grown since being away.
Her letters—many signed simply “Lu”—were written wherever she was, visiting relatives or at home with her mother and the children. Many were written hastily, with the chaos of a young family at her elbow. Knowing Hayes doted on their sons, she always gave full accounts of what they were doing: Birchie and Webb’s lessons, Rud’s delight in a toy, a status report on baby Joe, who suffered chronically from colic and whose needs often ended letter-writing for the day.
The letters are also full of reports on friends and neighbors who were war casualties. She visited many soldiers home on furlough, avidly discussing specific battles, rumored promotions, and politics. “You know whenever anyone from the 23rd comes I always ask them to stop with us,” she wrote to her uncle on March 16, 1862. Two recent visitors had praised Hayes highly, telling her, “There is no one in the Reg that would not give his life for Col. Hayes … if after this length of time all love him and speak well of him—his talent for governing is fixed.” Clearly, Lucy believed her husband could have any future he wanted if he survived the war.
More than once, she asked Hayes if he would intercede on behalf of a soldier, even if the man was not in the 23d. Her belief in her husband was strong and intensified as the war progressed. Sometimes she asked if he could help a man find a job or arrange to have a soldier transferred to the 23d so Hayes could look out for him or cut through red tape so that an injured or discharged soldier could get the pay he was due.
Letters to her brother Joe often reminded him of how important his role was in the war. “It is in your power to relieve the suffering of many a poor soldier,” she wrote to him on July 28, 1862. “I know that you will try faithfully to do what ever you can. Speak kindly—deal gently with the sick and wounded.”
Every soldier she saw on the streets of Cincinnati reminded her of her husband and two brothers in uniform. In mid-May she encountered four soldiers—two sick and two wounded—attempting to get to Chicago. When she saw them, they had gotten to the station too late to buy tickets for the evening train and were sitting dejectedly on the pavement. The doctor attending them was not familiar with Cincinnati and didn’t know where he could take them for the night. Lucy invited them all to stay at her home. She helped get them on the streetcar, finished her errands, then took the streetcar home.
Lucy and the cook prepared quarters for the men in the back parlor of the house. They got up early to make sure all the men had coffee by 5:00 A.M., when they had to leave for the train station. “I thought of you in a strange country—wounded and trying to get home,” she wrote to Hayes on May 19; “but if any one was kind to you—would I not feel thankful.”
Repeatedly in her letters, she asked Hayes and Joe to let her know immediately if they became seriously ill or wounded. She would make arrangements for baby Joe’s care and come to them immediately. The almost inevitable day came on September 18; Lucy had just finished a long letter to her husband, in which she wrote, “you do not know how changed your absence makes me feel—a sadness—and oh dearest a fear which I try to banish.” There had been newspaper reports the previous week that Hayes had been wounded in battle, and now she learned his injuries were the most severe he had suffered to date.
Hayes had been wounded on September 14 at the Battle of South Mountain in Maryland. General George McClellan had ordered the Union troops to secure Turner’s Gap in South Mountain, and Hayes and the 23d were chosen to lead the assault. A musket ball hit Hayes’s left arm, leaving a sizable hole, fracturing the bone, and bruising his ribs. Although injured, he continued commanding as well as he could. He was eventually removed from the battle to a field hospital, where Joe Webb tended the wound. Lucy Hayes’s biographer, Emily Apt Geer, wrote that “expert treatment by Dr. Webb probably prevented the amputation of the arm.” An ambulance then transported him to the community of Middletown, where a local merchant took him into his home to be nursed. Hayes had a telegram sent to Lucy and two other people the next morning.
A mix-up with the telegram led Lucy to believe that her husband was in a hospital in Washington, D.C. She quickly made arrangements for the children’s care, then took a stage to Columbus, where Hayes’s brother-in-law, William Platt, joined her for the train trip to Washington. The obstacles she faced in locating Hayes became such a part of the family’s folklore that when Hayes was in the White House family members persuaded her to have the whole story written down by a White House stenographer with one of those new typewriters.
Distraught over her husband’s fate, Lucy forgot to take with her special passes that would allow her and Platt into the military area at the depot. She pretended to be with another party to slip through the restricted area. Even so, it was a week before she and Platt reached Washington. Once in the capitol, they searched numerous hospitals and a hotel where the injured were sometimes tended. No one knew anything about Hayes. At the military hospital that had been set up at the U.S. Patent Office, personnel treated her in a very “cruel and unfeeling manner.” Undaunted, the duo kept searching.
Platt finally tracked down the original draft of the telegram where Washington had been substituted for Middletown. They went back to the patent office, hoping to learn more. There Lucy noticed several wounded soldiers with “23” on their hats, waiting on the office steps. When she called out to them, they immediately recognized their leader’s wife and told her exactly where to find Hayes. Meanwhile, Hayes was fretting over whether his telegram had reached Lucy. “Had hoped to see her today; probably shan’t,” he wrote in his diary on September 20. “This hurts me worse than the bullet did.”
Three days later, after a long, dusty journey, Lucy and Platt arrived in Frederick, Maryland, the closest stop to Middletown. There they met Joe, who had faithfully ridden over every evening to see if they had yet arrived. When they finally reached Hayes, he was on the mend. After hearing their story, he joked about their visits to Washington and Baltimore. Lucy was not amused, but she was glad to see her husband.
She learned that the 23d had been the hardest hit of the Union regiments at South Mountain, sustaining 130 casualties, including 32 deaths. Hayes’s commanding officer recognized him for having “gallantly and skillfully [brought] his men into action.” Anxious to know how the campaign was progressing, the still bed-bound lieutenant colonel paid his host’s son a dollar a day to watch for troops marching past and to report on their movements and appearance.
Lucy helped nurse Hayes and also visited wounded soldiers in field hospitals and private homes. “Lucy is here and we are pretty jolly,” Hayes wrote to Birchard on September 26. “She visits the wounded and comes back in tears, then we take a little refreshment and get over it.” By October 4—his fortieth birthday—Hayes was well enough to tour the battlefield where he had been wounded. Lucy and three men accompanied him. “Hunted up the graves of our gallant boys,” he wrote.
The next day, Hayes was well enough to return to Ohio. Six or seven injured soldiers traveled with him and Lucy by train. At one depot where they had to change trains, there were not enough seats in the everyday coaches for the group. Lucy led them into the swankier Pullman car, occupied by wealthy passengers returning from a spa vacation in Saratoga, New York. The looks on the vacationers’ faces told Lucy they did not appreciate sharing their car with a bunch of ragtag soldiers. But when a messenger entered the car, paging Colonel Hayes, the socialites warmed up, offering the men fresh fruit and other treats. Lucy frostily refused them; she was probably reliving the frustration of having been treated as a nobody by the Washington bureaucrats. To her, every Union soldier deserved respect, regardless of rank, and each soldier’s family deserved compassion.
After seven weeks convalescing in Ohio, Hayes returned to the war, joining the 23d at winter quarters in Camp Reynolds, West Virginia. Near year’s end, he wrote that many of the men were being sent home and that Lucy could expect to have several turn up for a visit, indicating that this was a typical occurrence. Hayes added that his cook, William T. Crump, would be staying with Lucy and the family for a time. “If you are curious to know how we live, put him in the kitchen a day or two,” Hayes suggested. “The boys [the Hayeses’ sons] will like him.”
When Lucy wrote to him on their tenth anniversary that December, she commented on Hayes’s previous praise of his men: “It did me so much good to hear you speak well of the boys … watch over them for my sake.” The men of the 23d were “our boys” whether they were in the field or home on furlough. Lucy seemed to believe Hayes was her surrogate in the war, protecting the sons of other mothers who waited anxiously at home.
The time spent together during Hayes’s convalescence made the subsequent separation more difficult. He and Lucy soon started making plans for her and their four sons to visit camp. While it seems odd today, spouses visiting camp during wartime was a tradition dating to when Martha Washington joined her husband in the field during the Revolution, many times acting as his secretary. Julia Grant also visited General Grant in the field during the Civil War. The Hayeses had always been a close couple; the war made them appreciate each other even more. They strove to be together whenever they could.
By January, the family had moved into one of camp’s log cabins. The two-room structure consisted of a bedroom–sitting room connected to a kitchen by a covered passage—very humble surroundings compared to the family home back in Cincinnati. Still, they were happy to be together. They had a “beautiful view, and the roaring of the waters make it very delightful,” Lucy wrote to Birchard on January 25, 1863.
The older boys fished, rowed boats, built dams, and enjoyed the outdoors. Still, they had to remain alert to the realities of war. One day when Lucy and her brother Joe had ridden some distance from camp, they discovered that the Union picket lines were gone—they had to make a quick retreat, with Confederate soldiers in pursuit. As spring approached, military activity increased and the family returned home.
Hayes and his command moved to Camp White, opposite Charleston, West Virginia. When Lucy learned in early April that Union forces had turned back a Rebel raid on a strategic point in the Kanawha Valley, she wrote to Hayes of her delight. She also discussed the recent election in which the local Republican ticket had won across the board. She criticized an officer who was leaving his military post to assume his new elected office, but Hayes would soon face the same scenario when friends persuaded him to run for Congress.
Lucy, her mother, and her sons came to Camp White in mid-June. Just a few days after their happy reunion with Hayes, eighteen-month-old baby Joe became very ill. On June 24, he died of dysentery—the same fate as a host of soldiers during the war. Lucy, who thought little Joe resembled Hayes so much, was devastated. “I have hardly seen him,” Hayes wrote to Birchard, “and hardly had a father’s feeling for him. To me, the suffering of Lucy and the still greater sorrow of his grandmother are the chief affliction.” Arrangements were made to ship the body back to Cincinnati, where Lucy’s other brother, James, made arrangements for burial at that city’s Spring Grove Cemetery. Watching the boat bearing her youngest child sail away was the “bitterest hour” of her life.
Pregnant with the couple’s fifth child, Lucy decided that the family should leave Camp White and seek the safer, healthier environment offered by relatives in Chillicothe. There, in July, she witnessed the effects of one of the war’s most legendary raids as Confederate general John H. Morgan penetrated Ohio borders and surged north. Hayes commanded two regiments who were in pursuit. In Chillicothe, residents frantically tried to preserve their valuables—sending their horses off into the woods, hiding the family silver in the well.
Accustomed to the better-trained troops of the 23d, Lucy reported somewhat humorously that the “unarmed sheep”—the local militia—were so frightened that when they saw other militiamen, they mistook each other for Morgan’s raiders, “and on coming to Paint Creek bridge so terrified the guard that they set the bridge on fire—in an instant the whole was in flames—while Morgan had not even a scout near,” she wrote to her husband.
Once the raiders had been routed and Morgan captured, Hayes returned to Camp White. Lucy visited him for a month in the fall, then she, her mother, and the youngest sons—Ruddie and Webb—moved to camp, and Birch stayed in Fremont with Uncle Sardis Birchard. The visit lasted through the winter, with the family becoming an active part of camp life.
The term “camp follower” referred to any woman attached to a camp, whether an officer’s wife, a nurse, a laundress, or a prostitute. Naturally, an officer’s wife was accorded more respect than the laundress. Lucy, however, good-naturedly helped any way she could. She had her sewing machine shipped out from Cincinnati and installed in the drafty old farmhouse where the family lived in camp. She made miniature bright blue uniforms for her sons, which they proudly wore. She also tended the ill, sewed and mended for the soldiers, and talked to them and counseled the younger men. One of her favorites was Lieutenant McKinley, then about twenty. He spent so many hours tending the camp’s primary fire that Lucy nicknamed him Casabianca, after a young French naval hero who refused to leave a burning ship in the late eighteenth century.
While most of the men knew of Lucy, not all recognized her on sight. A young soldier named James Parker learned firsthand of her generosity and good humor. He was perplexed one day because his blouse was badly in need of mending, and he had no idea how to sew. His friends sent him over to Hayes’s tent, where, they told him, there was a seamstress who would take care of his problem. Realizing gullible Parker had been set up by his friends, Hayes quietly took the shirt and had Lucy repair it. When Parker showed the men what a good job the camp “seamstress” had done, they decided the joke was on them.
Late in April 1864, the 23d broke camp and headed southeast along the Kanawha River for what would become a memorable and bloody campaign. Lucy and some of the other officers’ wives followed them down the Kanawha on a chartered boat for a few days, cheering and waving to the marching troops. The two Hayes boys marched with the troops for most of the time. As the result of the family’s extended time in camp, Lucy and Hayes “gained stature in the eyes of future veterans,” wrote biographer Geer, “Lucy for her interest in their personal welfare and Rutherford for his firmness and fairness as their commander.” Geer also posits that young Webb’s camp experience influenced him to do volunteer work with the armed services as an adult.
When the family parted with the regiment, they returned to Chillicothe, where Lucy rented two rooms in a boardinghouse so she could be near relatives in the latter half of her pregnancy. She sent Hayes a flag for his men to “let them know how near they are to me—that not a day passes that our gallant soldiers are not remembered by me.” When she learned that the flag was flying in front of headquarters, she told her husband that she had meant it for the soldiers, rather than the staff. Hayes obligingly had the flag taken down and presented to the regiment at a dress parade.
Hayes was now commander of four regiments that made up the First Brigade of infantry, serving under General George Crook. During the spring and summer, Crook’s Army of West Virginia, charged with disrupting communications and destroying railroads, proceeded deeper into Virginia. The battles that Hayes fought during this phase of the war would cinch his reputation as a fearless military leader and set him on the path to the White House.
During the Battle of Cloyd’s Mountain in May, the 23d led the assault against southern troops. Witnesses described him as being all over the field that day, on foot, “recklessly” leading the men and inspiring them onward. When the Rebels broke and ran, Hayes gathered five hundred men from his brigade and pursued them. It was a grand victory for Crook’s Army, due in large part to Hayes and the 23d. The army also sustained heavy losses: 688 casualties total, with the 23d suffering 250 of them.
In July, during the Battle of Winchester, near Kernstown, Virginia, Hayes’s leadership and bravery were credited with saving Crook’s army of nearly twelve thousand men during a thorough drubbing by General Jubal Early’s superior forces of seventeen thousand. In his diary, Hayes wrote that “poor cavalry allowed the general [Crook] to be surprised… . My brigade covered the retreat.” Poor scouting reports by an insufficiently trained cavalry caused problems. With two of Hayes’s brigades under deadly attack by the Rebels, Hayes ordered a withdrawal. His horse was killed in the thick of the battle, and Hayes received a slight shoulder wound. He rallied his men behind a stone wall, where they stood steadfast, allowing the Union forces to retreat in orderly fashion.
That August, Hayes’s friends and supporters back in Ohio nominated him as their congressional candidate for Ohio’s Second District. With Lucy’s encouragement, Hayes accepted but said he would not leave the field to campaign, as some other would-be politicians did. He was elected to Congress that October but did not take office until after the war ended.
While Joe Webb wrote reassuringly to his sister at the end of September 1964 that the Confederates were weary of war, Lucy worried more than ever about her husband and brother surviving. She had been concerned since the beginning of the conflict about her relatives in Kentucky, but now there was another threat, closer to Chillicothe, where she was awaiting the birth of her fifth child. Butternuts—rural Confederate sympathizers—had been threatening to burn the barns of Union loyalists. But in Virginia, Webb saw the tide beginning to turn. “Many [Confederates] are coming in from the mountain,” he wrote on September 28. “All say they are tired of this war. The people are getting tired, and many noted Rebels are willing and anxious to close this out.”
The following day, the fifth Hayes child was born in Chillicothe and named George Crook, in honor of his father’s general. Two weeks later, the local newspapers were reporting that Hayes had been killed during the Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia. General Early’s troops once again surprised and overwhelmed the Union forces on October 19. Hayes’s horse was killed beneath him; he was thrown to the ground and briefly rendered unconscious. Some of his men erroneously reported to the press that Hayes had been killed, and the story was printed. In truth, he rallied, with what he called “only a slight shock.” Although he had to elude the Rebels by escaping into a nearby wood, the battle was a Union victory. “We flogged them completely, capturing all their cannon, trains, etc., etc.,” he wrote to Lucy. Fortunately, a relative had withheld the incorrect newspaper account from Lucy until the truth could be determined.
Hayes did not muster out of the army until June 1865, but Cedar Creek was his last major battle. He left service with the rank of brevet major general. That May, he and Lucy had attended elaborate army reviews in Washington, sitting in the congressional stands. “While my heart filled with joy at the thought of our mighty country—its victorious noble army—the sad thoughts of thousands who would never gladden home with their presence made the joyful scene mingled with so much sadness—that I could not shake it off,” Lucy wrote after the ceremonies. Later that month, she and her husband traveled to Virginia to view the destruction of Richmond and Petersburg. As the full extent of the war’s desolation struck her, she became more somber; she excused herself from the 23d’s official mustering-out ceremonies in July because of the memories of all the men who had not survived.
As Hayes assumed his congressional duties, Lucy remained keenly interested in the politics and mechanics of reconstruction in the South. Remaining with the family in Cincinnati, she once again found letters an unsatisfactory way to remain close to her husband. She visited him in Washington when she could, but family responsibilities kept her at home most of the time. Little George contracted scarlet fever in the spring of 1866 and died on May 24, at the age of twenty months.
Lucy’s mother and Hayes’s mother both died that autumn.
Issues related to the war naturally occupied most of Hayes’s term in Congress. He and Lucy had long believed that African American men should have the right to vote and that all people of every race should be educated. Hayes joined with other Republican lawmakers to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
In 1867, Hayes was given the chance to run for governor of Ohio. He took it and won. Now he could both be with his family and work on important issues. During two terms as governor, his many proposals included improving conditions at state prisons and welfare institutions. Lucy frequently accompanied him on visits to prisons, hospitals for the mentally ill, and other institutions—at the time a rather unusual step for a governor’s wife.
Lucy worked on one of her own pet projects as well: establishing a home for orphans of the Civil War. She was one of several people who helped procure land near Xenia for the institution. The home officially opened as a private establishment at Christmas 1869. Lucy lobbied for it to become a state institution so that more funding would be available in the future.
As governor, Hayes also oversaw the creation of a school for the deaf, a reform school for girls, and the Agricultural and Mechanical College (the nucleus of the future Ohio State University). Lucy was involved in almost every project, often working with the young people at the various institutions. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Hayes wrote that Lucy was teaching the children at the Deaf and Dumb Asylum to make wreaths for Decoration Day, helping lay wreaths on soldiers’ graves and working with the boys at the Reform School at Lancaster.
While governor, Hayes also worked for greater civil rights for African Americans and saw black men vote in Ohio for the first time. Neither he nor Lucy ever publicly supported women’s suffrage. Hayes held the popular belief that voting in political elections was not compatible with women’s roles as mothers and homemakers, and Lucy supported his views on this, as she did regarding other issues throughout their marriage. They may have also believed the issue was too politically volatile, or they may have naively assumed that husbands in general represented their wives’ political choices, as was true in their own very close marriage.
Their family continued to grow during this period. Fanny, named after Hayes’s beloved deceased sister, was born on September 2, 1867. Once again, Joe Webb assisted his sister at the birth. Fanny soon became Hayes’s darling. Scott Russell was born on February 8, 1871. The couple’s last child, Manning Force, was born on August 1, 1873. Lucy was critically ill after the birth, suffering convulsions so severe that she had to be treated with morphine. Although she recovered, little Manning was never a strong baby. He died on August 28, 1874—Lucy’s forty-third birthday. The family was then living at Spiegel Grove, the mansion Sardis Birchard had built in Fremont with them in mind. After he died in January 1874, the Hayeses made the estate their permanent home.
They enjoyed their respite from public life for a few years, but by 1875, Hayes and Lucy both thought it was time to return. That fall, he was elected to a third gubernatorial term. Just a few months after he took office, Republican power brokers approached him about running for president. When he agreed to run, numerous veterans’ organizations strongly supported him. Despite such backing, Hayes was not the favorite at first. Congressman James G. Blaine of Maine was the favored nominee at the 1876 Republican National Convention, held in Cincinnati. But a large field of candidates, including Senators Oliver P. Morton of Indiana and Roscoe Conkling of New York, split the delegates’ votes. As a result, several candidates withdrew, and Hayes won the nomination on the seventh ballot. New York governor Samuel J. Tilden became the Democrat nominee.
The autumn’s election was very close and ended with one of the most hotly disputed results in American history. With tallies from three southern states—where each party alleged fraud—still inconclusive, it appeared Tilden was just one electoral vote short of victory. Hayes had lost the popular vote by only 250,000 votes. For the next three months, partisan politics kept the country in an uproar. At home, Lucy followed her husband’s lead, keeping quiet about the dispute and proceeding with daily life as normally as possible. As Hayes’s most ardent supporter, she must have had a hard time remaining calm. Hayes had been known for his integrity and decency his entire life, and she cherished other people’s good opinions of him.
As the months progressed, events took an uglier turn. Threats and warnings of danger began arriving in Hayes’s mail in Columbus. As the family ate dinner one evening, a gunshot blasted through a window of their home. It was never known if this was an actual assassination attempt, but after that, Webb—about to turn twenty—insisted on accompanying his father on his nightly walks, armed with a pistol. Scott, just five years old, actively worried about the Democrats killing his father if he were elected. Lucy somehow maintained her sense of humor, at least while trying to reassure her children. In a letter to Birch, who was studying at Harvard, she wrote that she and Hayes had become “more and more attached to each other” during the election dispute.
By January, a bipartisan Electoral Commission had given power to rule on the disputed electoral votes. That group was plagued by its own set of problems and could not reach a consensus. Inauguration Day, March 4, was fast approaching without a final decision. In the end, the two sides negotiated a compromise: Hayes would be awarded the necessary electoral votes if the Republicans agreed to remove Federal troops from the South. It was supremely ironic that the man who had fought so hard for civil and voting rights—particularly for southern blacks—became the president who ended Reconstruction.
Although Hayes was not shown to be involved in any deceit, many Democrats persisted in referring to him as “His Fraudulency” or “Rutherfraud” during his term in office. Because of the controversy over the election, Hayes pledged that he would not seek another term. Once he was named president-elect, he and Lucy traveled to Washington. He was sworn in on Saturday, March 3, in part because custom did not allow for an inauguration to be held on a Sunday, and in part because the short notice would thwart any disruption by protestors. The ceremony was held in the Red Room of the White House, marking the first time a president took the oath of office there.
During the public inauguration, held March 5 on the East Portico of the Capitol building, Lucy stood at Hayes’s side, wearing a simple black dress and bonnet. The details of the ceremony, including Lucy’s appearance, were enthusiastically described in newspapers and periodicals across the country. This began Lucy’s role as one of the most public First Ladies of that time. For the next four years, she accompanied Hayes on an unprecedented number of official occasions and trips around the country. Perhaps because they hated all the time they had spent apart during the war, the couple stayed together whenever possible. As Hayes’s causes were also Lucy’s, she was his counselor, encourager, and confidant. “For one who ever saw them together could never think of speaking of them apart,” wrote contemporary historian John W. Burgess.
During his term, Hayes pursued issues that had long mattered to him: civil and voting rights, prison reform, improving the lives of the very poor, ending the spoils system of political patronage, and narrowing the chasm that still divided the nation a decade after the war’s end—and a century after its founding. With a Democratic House of Representatives and lasting rancor over the election, Hayes was not particularly successful. But he did keep these issues in the public’s consciousness and opened the door a bit wider for change in the future.
One issue that arose early in Hayes’s administration wasn’t on his agenda: temperance. Mention Lucy Hayes’s name to anyone today, and the response—if there is one—is “Lemonade Lucy.” The image is one of a pucker-faced, priggish sort of woman who tried to keep everyone else from having a good time. The media storm over the Hayeses not serving alcohol in the White House is an good illustration of how a public person’s whole existence can reconfigured within the limits of one label.
Sarah Polk had not served alcohol at White House dinners during her husband’s administration, and Frances Cleveland pointedly refused to have a wine glass at her place at dinners, yet Lucy is the First Lady most associated with—and ridiculed for—her stand. Hayes announced the no-alcohol policy, but Lucy was certainly involved in establishing it. She had grown up in a temperance home and belonged to a religious denomination that frowned on alcohol consumption. Her grandfather Issac Cook became a noted temperance advocate in the Chillicothe area after joining the Methodist church. According to family lore, he caught a fatal cold at age seventy-five, after riding through a winter storm to lecture on temperance.
But as Geer noted in her biography, Lucy was no fanatic. Hayes had sometimes enjoyed a beer with his friends back in Cincinnati. In camp during the war, promotions were toasted with a drink. Hayes once awarded bottles of wine to winners of a camp contest. Sardis Birchard, the revered uncle, had a respectable wine cellar, to which the Hayes family sometimes made contributions. Lucy simply believed she had the right to not drink alcohol, and other people had the right to do as they chose. But she also knew that alcoholism was a real problem, with widespread—even deadly—consequences. She may have believed she was doing her part simply by modeling a life of temperance. For years, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union pressured Lucy to become their champion, even naming some of their groups for her and commissioning an expensive painting of her. But she steadfastly, politely refused their advances.
Because Lucy was college-educated, articulate, and clearly interested in contemporary issues, many female leaders assumed she would actively support their issues, whether the topic was suffrage or temperance. But she wasn’t one to be manipulated or maneuvered. Her priorities remained her family, her work with Civil War veterans, and helping the needy. Many times she lent tacit support for a cause simply through her presence, rather than by speaking or lobbying. When an old college friend invited her to attend the 1878 commencement exercises at the Woman’s Medical College of Philadelphia to support higher education and careers for women, she declined. However, later in the same year she made a quick visit to the school. At another time, she visited Hampton College, one of the few institutions of higher learning that admitted blacks, thus giving her quiet support.
Although advocates for women’s issues were frustrated by Lucy’s failure to endorse their causes, writer John B. Roberts contends she may have had more of an impact by remaining true to her principles: “Lucy’s subtlety may have been a more effective tactic for changing entrenched nineteenth-century attitudes about sex roles.” he wrote. They [modern biographers] miss the point that Lucy accomplished something more zealous advocates could never have achieved—she managed to be a leading role model for women’s causes without simultaneously becoming a polarizing and alienating figure.” He said Lucy led by example, providing her “brand of quiet social activism.”
As his presidency progressed, Hayes and Lucy continued to delight in meeting with veterans. During the hot, humid summer of 1877, Lucy and the family stayed in the presidential cottage on the shady grounds of the National Soldiers’ Home outside of Washington. While Hayes worked at the White House, Lucy spent her days visiting disabled men in the home or inviting friends to visit her. She frequently had fresh bouquets cut from the White House’s numerous conservatories sent to hospitals around Washington. On Memorial Day that year, she and her daughter, Fanny, joined by a few friends, decorated the graves of the Civil War dead at Arlington Cemetery. At one point, mother and daughter slipped away to place flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
During a trip to Vermont and New Hampshire that August, Hayes and Lucy attended the centennial celebration of the Revolutionary War Battle of Bennington, Vermont. In the fall, they visited a veterans’ gathering in Marietta, Ohio. Later, Lucy hosted a supper for veterans of the 23d Ohio at Spiegel Grove in Fremont.
After Christmas, the couple prepared to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The minister who had married them saw them renew their vows in the Blue Room at the White House. Lucy wore her original simple, white gown—with the seams let out. A highlight of the event was when members of the 23d presented Lucy with a silver plaque that pictured the cabin at Camp Reynolds where she, Hayes, Birch, and Webb had lived for a time in 1863. The plaque was inscribed “To The Mother of Ours From the 23rd O.V.I.” The verse on it read:
To thee, our “Mother,” on thy silver “troth,”
We bring this token of our love, Thy “boys”
Give greeting unto thee with brimming hearts.
Kind words and gentle, when a gentle word
Was worth the surgery of an hundred schools,
To heal sick thought, and make our bruises whole.
After the family left the White House, Lucy continued to attend annual reunions of the 23d, where, Geer writes, “she reigned as a special favorite of the old comrades.” She and her husband visited veterans’ groups and attended ceremonies throughout Ohio and West Virginia. In 1883, she received an honorary membership in the Society of the Army of West Virginia. In 1888, the Ohio Woman’s Relief Corps presented her with a gold badge in recognition of her service on behalf of Ohio soldiers and their children.
On June 22, 1889, at Spiegel Grove, Lucy suffered a stroke. She had been in her bedroom sewing, watching Fanny and Scott play tennis with their friends outside when the attack happened. Just weeks earlier, she had experienced a smaller stroke, and, as a result, had discussed her end-of-life wishes with Hayes. She died on June 25. The minister who had officiated at her wedding and at the silver anniversary vow renewal conducted her funeral. Members of the 23d marched on either side of her hearse during the drive to Fremont’s Oakwood Cemetery.
The family, particularly Hayes, grieved deeply. For thirty-six years, she had been the heartbeat of the family—at the Cincinnati home on 6th Street, in cabins at Civil War camps, at the Columbus house near the state capitol, in the White House, and at Spiegel Grove. Her accomplishments, her grace and kindness, were remembered in obituaries across the country. Perhaps the most meaningful tribute was in a letter that Carl Schurz, former secretary of the Interior, wrote to Hayes: “I have known your family life, and I have never seen anything more beautiful.”
Hayes continued to mourn Lucy but remained active for the remainder of his life. Now when he traveled or attended events, Fanny accompanied him. On January 14, 1893, he was at a Cleveland train station when he suffered a heart attack. He demanded to be brought back to Spiegel Grove. There, in the room he and Lucy had shared, he died on January 17. His last words were, “I know I’m going where Lucy is.”
What a final reunion they must have had.
