5

HELL-CATS

Heads turned when a woman with soft eyes and brown curls entered the Executive Mansion, quiet as a small bird. It was a familiar face to most of those present, as it was to much of the world. Her work had been greatly acclaimed, setting abolitionists to beaming and slaves to cheering, but Harriet Beecher Stowe was a self-effacing woman, who maintained the credit should rightfully go to God. “I merely did his dictation,” she protested. The only person who did not recognize the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin when she arrived on December 2, 1862, was Abraham Lincoln. Senator Henry Wilson had given her a spirited introduction, but the President was not listening, and the name slipped by him.¹

Stowe was not surprised. She did not like this man, who ignored her letters and looked about distractedly; moreover she was distressed over the conduct of the war, which she thought slow and indecisive. She viewed the conflict in moral terms—a war about rescuing an oppressed people from unspeakable cruelty—not constitutional niceties. A few weeks earlier, when Lincoln publicly declared he would keep every slave in bondage if that was the only way to save the Union, Stowe had shot back her own views. “My paramount object in this struggle is to set at liberty them that are bruised, and not either to save or destroy the Union,” she wrote, parodying the President’s style. “What I do in favor of the Union, I do because it helps to free the oppressed; what I forbear, I forbear because it does not help to free the oppressed.”²

Harriet Beecher Stowe, daguerreotype by J. D. Wells, 1852

SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

It had been difficult for the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to arrange this meeting. Her remarkable reputation had not been enough to secure the appointment. She had to finagle it through political contacts like Wilson and even lower herself to cajole the First Lady into an invitation, even though she viewed Mary Lincoln with some scorn. But Stowe had an object in mind and she persevered. She was anxious to know if the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln had issued in September would prove “a reality & a substance, not a fizzle out at the little end of the horn.” She did not expect much from the President, who she feared was a “well-meaning imbecile.” But she did want one thing: reassurance that the proclamation would not come to an “impotent conclusion,” and that she could use it with her British contacts to leverage support for the Union. Whatever she expected, however, Stowe could not have imagined the scene that took place.³

For the President shambled in, “a rough scrubby—black-brown withered—dull eyed object . . . I can give you no idea of the shock.” He did nothing to open conversation after Wilson left the room, but sat by the fire, moodily staring at Stowe, her sister Isabella, and daughter Hattie.⁴ Although Mrs. Stowe was known as a “delightful” conversationalist, she was shy in such situations, and they remained in awkward silence until Isabella offered some small talk about “the charming open wood fire,” and “at last Mr. Lincoln—was ‘reminded of a man out west.’ . . .” Stowe matched the President’s story with one of her own and, the ice broken, finally got the guarantee she wanted. Lincoln would “stand up to his proclamation,” she reported, and would not allow the nervous border states to block the way. “I have noted the thing as a glorious expectancy!” Stowe rejoiced, and went off to drink tea with Mrs. Lincoln. The unfriendly presidential manner and the chatter of his wife (“an old goose & a gobbler at that”)—not to mention the rusty tin pans lying around the office (“much worse than those Eddie [her brother] is accustomed to feed his chickens from”)—made the whole experience seem a bit surreal. The three ladies returned to their hotel and, barely able to contain themselves, “perfectly screamed and held our sides while we relieved ourselves of the pent up laughter that had almost been the cause of death.” It was not, they noted, Lincoln’s jokes that caused their hilarity.⁵

Jane Grey Swisshelm, carte de visite by Joel Emmons Whitney, c. 1865

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY

Mrs. Jane Swisshelm sat in the President’s anteroom, eyes alert, patience strained to the limit. A longtime editor, she had an opinion on everyone in that town of little-big men, and swished her skirts through court and Congress with ease. The delicate beauty of her youth was still apparent in her late forties, making her sharp political judgments unsettling to some. Worse, she could trim a pretty bonnet and make a tasty biscuit, blurring the lines of domestic and public spheres that defined gender roles of the day. Men were afraid of Jane Swisshelm. She broke barriers wherever she traveled: she had been the first woman to take a seat in the congressional reporters’ gallery, shed her husband when he became disagreeable, and stood down the opposition while her printing press was being burned in St. Cloud, Minnesota. When opponents taunted her about “unfeminine activities,” she spit back retorts that hit squarely below the belt:

You say—and you are witty—That I—and tis a pity—

Of manhood lack but dress;

But you lack manliness,

A body clean and new,

A soul within it, too.

Nature must change her plan

Ere you can be a man.⁶

Swisshelm believed that women had not only the right but an obligation to influence issues of the day. She thought it a moral imperative to tackle the world’s wrongs and overturn societal prejudice. Women might be disenfranchised, she maintained, but they could write, lecture, petition, and lobby—and nothing less than their own welfare was at stake. The “life, liberty, and happiness of woman depends on the policy of her own country,” Swisshelm asserted in an early editorial, and females must help form those policies. As an accomplished orator she brooked no compromise, argued unrelentingly, and, as one critic noted, was “disagreeably witty.” She would make a perfect martyr, concluded an adversary, “for she would risk the stake any time for the privilege of the last word.” The ink might flow acrid from her pen, but it had helped Abraham Lincoln win votes in Minnesota, where she was considered the “Mother of Republicanism.” Now, in January 1863, Swisshelm had come to Washington on an official mission to persuade the chief executive to take strong action against the Sioux Indians. She meant to be heard.⁷

Lincoln did not hear her. He was busy with other matters; he was overbooked; he could not be persuaded. After three attempts to gain a private interview, Swisshelm was advised to see him at a reception, but, as she remarked, if the President would not seriously discuss her concerns, she had little interest in a grip-and-grin meeting at a crowded levee. It was “useless to see Mr. Lincoln on the business which brought me to Washington,” she concluded, “and I did not care to see him on any other. He had proved an obstructionist . . . and I felt no respect for him.” Convinced the President was stumbling through his job, “without any comprehensive plan” and “getting deeper and deeper into the mire,” she instead called on Edwin Stanton, an old friend from her days as an editor in Pittsburgh. Not until she had gained her object in other ways would she finally go through a receiving line and shake the President’s hand.⁸

Talented, temperamental Anna Dickinson appeared on the political horizon in 1861 “like a meteor,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton would write, “as if born for the eventful times in which she lived.” A young, lithe Philadelphian, Dickinson had grown up with the rising abolition movement—and with the Quaker assumption that women could and should speak their minds. While still in her teens she began to agitate in antislavery and feminist causes; as the national crisis heightened, she waded into political topics as well. She made some early faux pas, bashing popular figures such as General George McClellan, a mistake that resulted in dismissal from her job at the United States Mint, but once she found her ground, her confidence soared. Veteran abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison arranged a series of lectures for the twenty-year-old; and when Wendell Phillips requested that she substitute for him at a Boston rally, afterward embracing Dickinson with tears in his eyes, her reputation gained national status.⁹

Anna E. Dickinson, photograph, c. 1855–65

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

By 1863 Dickinson had become something of a phenomenon. She had youth, natural presence, and an undaunted spirit. She spoke without notes, and her rich contralto voice was said to have the mesmerizing power of a spiritual medium. One critic who saw Dickinson pacing the stage compared her to a tigress in a cage: if anything, he wrote, “her look was more fierce, her bearing more majestic, and her wrath more terrific.” Mingling argument, pathos, and invective in her talks, she created an oratorical style whose power was compared to Demosthenes and Joan of Arc. Dickinson spoke before thousands at New York’s Cooper Institute; and in the run-up to the 1863 elections Republican officials in four states organized mass meetings starring Dickinson. All were close races that were critical for Lincoln’s war policies. In these campaigns Dickinson was not asked to address reform-minded women or argue social issues, but to sway male voters—a most unusual circumstance at the time. One Connecticut official, who admitted his initial skepticism, conceded that Dickinson “had not spoken ten minutes before all prejudices were dispelled . . . ; sixty minutes and she held fifteen hundred people breathless with admiration . . . ; two hours and she had raised her entire audience to a pitch of enthusiasm which was perfectly irresistible.” Every candidate she supported won.¹⁰

Dickinson was happy to stump for Republicans, but her real interest was in the plight of slaves, freedmen, and the U.S. Colored Troops. She was frustrated with Lincoln, who, she believed, gave only lip service to the cause of emancipation, and angered when the President overturned proclamations by Generals John Frémont and David Hunter that liberated slaves in their military districts. “Abraham Lincoln,” Dickinson fumed, “had made such an Ass of himself for the Slave Powers to ride” that he was stifling army recruitment and demoralizing the nation. Mollified somewhat by the Emancipation Proclamation but still concerned that nothing was being done to help ex-slaves thrive as free men, she took the stage with antislavery luminaries like Frederick Douglass to attack the administration’s lackluster policies and halfway measures.¹¹

At the zenith of her career, Dickinson was invited by one hundred members of Congress to speak in the Capitol, the first woman so honored. On January 16, 1864, escorted by Vice President Hannibal Hamlin and the Speaker of the House, Dickinson stepped onto a platform in the Hall of Representatives to address the nation’s leaders on “The Perils of the Hour.” The audience saw a “slim waisted girl with curls cut short as if for school,” wrote an army officer who was present, “eyes black with the mirthfulness of a child, save when they blaze with the passions of a prophetess, holding spell bound . . . two thousand politicians, statesmen and soldiers!” Dickinson challenged Copperheads, railed against the perfidy of secession, and praised the nobility of Union troops. Her most impassioned language, however, was reserved for Lincoln’s recently announced reconstruction policy, which showed generosity to former slaveholders and promised nothing for the freedmen. “Let no man prate of compromise,” she thundered. “There is no arm of compromise long enough to stretch over . . . the mound of fallen heroes, to shake hands with their murderers.” Her words were undiluted, even when Lincoln and his wife entered the room. The President sat with head bowed while she denounced his actions and was too abashed to speak when called to the podium. It was a sensitive moment, for the Republicans had not yet nominated their candidate for the November presidential election. A congressman sympathetic to Dickinson’s viewpoint remarked that the address was “full of beautiful things and brilliant consecutions”—but it was “very sharp. I should as soon have a chest of joiner’s tools for a wife.”¹²

Dickinson’s remarkable performance was capped by a surprise finale. After roundly censuring Lincoln, she suddenly changed direction and gave a stirring endorsement for his reelection. The war had been a people’s war, she cried, and it must be guided by a man of the people. There was much to lament, but also much left to do; and the man to do it was Lincoln. Just why Dickinson chose to alter her tone so completely is unclear. Historians have speculated that she may have been embarrassed by Lincoln’s presence, or that she was counseled to soften her message. Perhaps she instinctively knew she needed an upbeat ending for the largely Republican audience. If so, she got the response she desired. The rousing conclusion brought forth “volleys of cheers” and a personal greeting afterward from the President. “You have conquered Washington,” wrote an admirer, “you have taken the capital.”¹³

Dickinson immediately regretted the endorsement. Three days later, at an interview arranged though Pennsylvania representative William D. Kelley, she renewed tensions with Lincoln. Their conversation centered on efforts to implement his reconstruction plan in Louisiana. It had been hastily pushed through and threatened to leave many freedmen in a state of quasi-slavery. According to Dickinson, she told the President this was “all wrong.” She was also offended by his soiled shirt and stockings, his “old coat out at the elbows, which looked as if he had . . . used it for a pen wiper,” and became impatient when Lincoln tried to change the subject with the ubiquitous “that reminds me of a little story.” “I didn’t come to hear stories,” snapped Dickinson. Three months later there was another meeting, at which both parties apparently tried to make amends, with Dickinson offering a semiapology and Lincoln declaring he would rather “have her on his side . . . than any twenty men in the field.” But there was no agreement on reconstruction policy, which Dickinson had hoped to influence. When Lincoln closed the conversation by saying if abolitionists wanted him to lead, “let them get out of the way and let me lead,” Dickinson vowed: “I have spoken my last word to President Lincoln.”¹⁴

Dickinson publicly complained about the unfortunate encounters, and Kelley—himself in need of party approval at the time—admonished her. The congressman gave a modified version of events, in which a more cordial Lincoln essentially ignored the triumphant rhetorician and Dickinson remained demurely quiet. Dickinson was known to be excitable, and her self-assurance may have turned to overconfidence in these meetings. That she may have overreacted is entirely possible. Yet nothing in her account was at variance with depictions by myriad male visitors who also witnessed Lincoln’s shabby attire, dependence on homely tale-telling, and reluctance to take advice. When Dickinson began to belittle the President on the campaign trail, however, matters became more serious. All agreed that the meteoric ascent of America’s Joan of Arc had lost its trajectory and was shooting dangerously into uncharted space.¹⁵

Clara Barton had been marching in lockstep with Abraham Lincoln since the beginning of his administration. One of the earliest women employed by the government, during the 1850s she had surpassed male colleagues at the Patent Office in quality and quantity of work. Nonetheless, when James Buchanan assumed the presidency, Barton was accused of being a “Black Republican” and summarily dismissed. After the votes were tallied for Lincoln, she was brought back, praising the new chief executive and bemusedly stating she had returned to Washington to “watch the play.” The play proved far more dramatic than Barton imagined. Within months she found herself in a wartime capital, chafing to contribute to the fight. “I cannot rest satisfied,” she wrote to a friend; “it is little one woman can do, still I crave the privilege of doing that.”¹⁶

By the time she took a seat in the President’s waiting room in February 1865, Barton had “done” a great deal. One of the earliest people to recognize the insufficiency of Union medical arrangements, she not only collected supplies but went to hospitals and camps to distribute them personally. Many women labored at the front, but only a handful were actually on the battlefield, under fire, as was Barton. On fields like Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Fort Wagner she extracted bullets, braved firestorms that shot away portions of her skirt, and bound amputated limbs under artillery bombardment. “I am told that she seemed on such occasions totaly insensible to danger,” an administration confidant remarked. She also instructed recently freed slaves, turned her rooms into a vast warehouse for medical goods, and fought to obtain proper food and treatment for the wounded. “The patriot blood of my fathers was warm in my veins,” she stated, by way of explanation. By war’s end the name Clara Barton was recognized in households across the North. Already she was known popularly as the “angel of the battlefield.”¹⁷

Clara Barton, photograph, c. 1865

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Moreover, she had championed not just the common soldier but Lincoln himself, defending his policies when few wartime workers would do so. “I grant that our Government has made mistakes, sore ones too in some instances,” Barton candidly told New York editor Thaddeus Meighan from the siege of Charleston, “but we shall never strengthen their hands, or incite their patriotism by deserting and upbraiding them.” She claimed to have no political motive (“as I am merely a soldier, and not a statesman, I shall make no attempt at discussing political points”), but her attitudes marched forward at the same pace as the President’s. “Who am I going to vote for?” Barton taunted her skeptical feminist friend Frances Dana Gage in 1864. “Why I thought for president Lincoln, to be sure. I have been voting for him for the last three years.” He had not assessed the situation clearly at the opening of the war, she admitted, and had stumbled badly in military affairs, but Barton still stood by her man. She would support whomever the Republicans nominated, she told Gage, but she hoped the “care worn face” that had become “very dear” to her would again head the presidential roster.¹⁸

Now Barton was seated for the third day in Lincoln’s vestibule, hoping to offer him one more service. She was a striking figure at age forty-three. Her face was not beautiful, but strong-featured and full of character. Her gray-tinged black hair, specially dressed that day by a friend, was tied back in a tasseled silk net; her hands were nervous in the new gloves she had bought for the occasion.¹⁹ The war was nearing its end and, again sensing a need she could fill, Barton wanted to propose a program to catalog “missing” soldiers. There had been no system of identification, no detailed prison rosters, and nearly two hundred thousand graves were unmarked. On the home front, where thousands of households waited nervously to hear a familiar footstep, it was an anxious issue. Barton hoped to interview men returning from Southern prisons who might remember a missing comrade’s fate and to compile lists for official records. The War Department had embraced the project, and Barton sent a formal petition to Lincoln, summoning her most influential contacts to endorse it. Massachusetts congressman William Washburn penned a strong letter recommending Barton as “one of the most useful devoted valuable ladies in the country,” and General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, who was in charge of prisoner exchange, also tried to catch Lincoln’s attention. Even powerful Senator Henry Wilson, who often consulted Barton on military matters, wrote the President, advising that “Miss Barton calls on you for a business object and I hope you will grant my request. It will cost nothing. She has given three years to the cause of our soldiers and is worthy of entire confidence.”²⁰ Yet here she was waiting again at the White House, turned away by the guards. Bitterly disappointed, Barton left, succumbing to tears in the privacy of her rooms. “I . . . do not feel it my duty to bring myself to public mortification in order to do a public charity,” she crossly concluded.²¹ Nonetheless, she borrowed some courage as well as a fur coat from a fellow war worker and tried the White House door the next day. Once more she was not admitted. In the end, Lincoln delegated the issue to General Hitchcock. Considering this an authorization, Hitchcock approved the plan.²²

Miss Barton was never received by the President.

These stories show Lincoln in an impatient mood, annoyed with petitions and the high-pitched public criticism that forms part of every presidential brief. There may have been genuine reasons for the unfriendly reception these women received at the White House. Lincoln was irritated after Republican defeats in the election of November 1862 when Stowe met him, and not particularly receptive to charges of inaction; Swisshelm was seen as something of a harpy, swooping in to whip the President into stronger action against the Sioux, just when he wanted to back away from the situation; Dickinson had publicly denounced his policies in sarcastic terms. But . . . Clara Barton? That snub is harder to understand, given her fame, and her staunch loyalty to Lincoln.

The same discouraging note was sounded in a long string of encounters with other women. Anna Ella Carroll, a widely respected pamphleteer who had written powerful pieces that helped keep Maryland in the Union, was turned away with an explosive presidential laugh when she sought the pay promised for her work. She was then mortified to find Lincoln had openly ridiculed her to other influential men.²³ Mary Livermore and Jane Hoge, who collected a half million dollars for medical stores while directing the Western Sanitary Commission, called for words of encouragement but found Lincoln’s reception so “dispiriting” that it “cost those of us who belonged to the Northwest a night’s sleep.” Julia Ward Howe, author of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”—essentially the Union Army’s anthem—was treated “perfunctorily” by the President, and rudely overlooked as he spoke to her escort, Governor John Andrew.²⁴ Mary Abigail Dodge, whose writings under the pseudonym Gail Hamilton bolstered home-front morale after a string of military disasters, was unable to get an appointment with either Lincoln or his wife when she called to offer her services. Cordelia Harvey, widow of a Wisconsin governor who had been killed at the front, and herself a hospital worker, was also roughly treated. She tried to gain approval for a convalescent facility behind the battle lines, only to meet with a scowl and a “snap” from Lincoln that she was presuming “to know more than I do.” (In fact, Harvey did know considerably more than Lincoln about hospital conditions. She persevered, but persuaded him only after she raised the issue of soldier votes in the Midwest.)²⁵ A Quaker activist met with similar testiness. When she entered a plea for immediate emancipation, counseling the President to fulfill the Lord’s design, he responded with “ill-subdued impatience.” “Has the Friend finished?” he asked testily. Lincoln then retorted that if God had instructions for him, He would give His advice personally, not through a lady.²⁶

And so the progression of discomfiting stories continued, forming a clear and consistent pattern. Indeed, the intriguing question is not whether Abraham Lincoln rebuffed the leading women of his day, but why he did so.

II

Lincoln’s professional reputation rose at a time when women were beginning to gain a voice and a purpose in the political world. In the early days of the republic, it was believed women’s role in democratic development lay in educating their children to support patriotic ideals. In the decades after the Revolution, the rise of evangelical religion encouraged women to support causes that softened the harsher edges of society, such as temperance, or school and asylum reform. As it became more acceptable for women to take a public part in such movements, the line was blurred between their “legitimate” role in domestic matters and participation in the male “sphere” of civic affairs. When the first female antislavery society was founded in Boston in 1833, for example, charter members feared losing their reputations, so strong was the bias against women’s involvement. Four years later there were seventy-seven similar societies. Such organizations offered an increasing opportunity for women to contribute, teaching managerial skills as well as methods of pressuring the government. Charity leaders wrote bylaws, ran meetings, and through acts of incorporation were able to raise money, invest funds, or bring lawsuits—all activities that were prohibited to married women. At the same time, women were reshaping their outlook. They no longer saw worldly affairs solely through the prism of relationships to men but relied on their own views and trusted their own competence.²⁷

The election of 1840 proved a watershed for women’s direct participation in the political pageant. The Whigs, hoping to portray themselves as the more honorable party, believed they could downplay vulgar “male” motives (like greed and ambition) by harnessing female “purity” to elevate the tone of their platform. Understanding the value of public theater, Whigs enlisted women as moral standard-bearers to write tracts, present banners, and join parades. Ladies did not hesitate to become allegories of virtue, riding in white gowns atop floats dedicated to “Liberty and William Henry Harrison” or pinning bright partisan buttons to their bodices. Slogans such as “Calhoun, Tecumseh, Cass or Van / With the LADIES’ aid we’ll beat the whole clan” or—later—“The girls Link on to Lincoln” helped push Whig and Republican candidates across the victory line. Democrats, who preferred to keep women at a pristine distance from rough political arenas, reluctantly followed suit.²⁸

All this was a far cry from male-dominated political rituals that had featured drinking, acrimonious debate, and symbolic “pole-raisings.” (The last was a particular craze in Lincoln’s Springfield district, where rival parties cut huge tree trunks, then compared the length of their “poles” and competed to see who could raise them most rapidly—with the obvious corollary that the quicker the pole was erected, the more potent the candidate.)²⁹ Once women were given a role, they proved an asset. Their presence at rallies was not only morally uplifting but subliminally erotic, as evidenced in excited descriptions of “exquisitely moulded arms” and “bounding bosoms.” Lincoln, who was a spirited campaigner in the 1840 contest, must have been aware of this trend, for women played an active part in his home state. Mary Todd, whom he was courting, was among the enthusiasts. “This fall I became quite a politician,” she confided to a friend, “rather an unladylike profession, yet at such a crisis, whose heart could remain untouched?” By 1844 women were an accepted feature of electioneering, and Henry Clay could declare: “I hope the day will never come when American ladies will be indifferent to the fate and fortunes of our common country, nor fail . . . to demonstrate their patriotic solicitude.”³⁰

Many early feminists were allied to the antislavery movement and gravitated naturally to the Republican Party, which most nearly expressed their views after the demise of the Whigs. Women were present at the creation of the party at Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854, and were eagerly sought to grace serenades and speeches. When the Republicans nominated John C. Frémont for president in 1856, reform-minded women made strong statements on his behalf. Frémont’s dashing looks, reputation as a western trailblazer, and outspoken opposition to slavery reflected many female hopes for the country’s future. He was all the more attractive since his wife, Jesse Benton Frémont (also known as Jessie), was conspicuous in the campaign. Jesse Frémont, a scion of Missouri’s influential Benton family, was a hardheaded political broker in her own right and the power behind her husband’s compelling public image. “Isn’t it pleasant to have a woman spontaneously recognized as a moral influence in public affairs?” enthused Lydia Maria Child, an early advocate of abolition and women’s rights. “What a shame that women can’t vote! We’d carry ‘our Jessie’ into the White House on our shoulders, wouldn’t we?”³¹

Women were in fact moving exactly in the direction Child indicated—from moral influence to an aspiration for true political rights. The emphasis on changing society through good works was giving way to a call for legal reforms, especially against practices that denied women control over their property, their labor, and their children. Early political organizers, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, who spearheaded the first women’s rights conference at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, wanted concrete legislation that would overturn decades of officially mandated subordination. Increasingly, they were willing to make themselves unpopular to fight for it. By the time of Lincoln’s presidency, they could point to some real gains. The New York State Earnings Act of 1860 gave a woman the right to sue and to retain wages in her own name. Twenty-nine of the thirty-five states had passed some kind of legislation granting married women control of their prenuptial property by 1865. Women were writing tracts under their own names or taking the public platform without apology. Their words sometimes carried great weight. Anna Ella Carroll, who essentially wrote the textbook on presidential war powers and influenced several antebellum elections, could attest to this. So could Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose views held such power that people confused Uncle Tom’s Cabin with a government document. Petticoats in a parade no longer gratified women: they wanted a voice and a way of making it heard. “The speculative has in all things yielded to the practical,” commented “Isola” to the women’s rights journal Una in 1852. “In this sense, moral suasion is moral balderdash.”³²

What such women wanted was to turn the dynamic inside out. Instead of inspiring men to reach a superior feminine moral standard, they wanted an equal chance to fix those standards politically. As they grew bolder, “strong-minded women” (a popular and not altogether flattering term for advocates of liberal reform and female rights) expanded their scope of action. They spoke out for better education, for dress reform, for the ability to choose a profession—and to be paid for their work. Increasingly, they also demanded the ballot, without which, many thought, they could never truly be part of the democratic community. Crusaders like Sarah Smith Martyn, who founded the New York Female Moral Reform Society in the 1830s, came to believe that disenfranchising women underlay “the whole enormous structure of evil which . . . must be removed before the regeneration of the world can take place.”³³

If the ballot was essential, it was also maddeningly elusive. Yet what had once been unthinkable was now at least discussable. Three weeks before Lincoln gave his celebrated 1860 address at New York’s Cooper Institute, Henry Ward Beecher—Stowe’s brother—stunned the same house with a rousing speech on “Women’s Influence in Politics.” In it he further blurred the boundaries of gender-based spheres. Political rights would not detract from a woman’s role as moral guardian, he argued, but would make her an even richer asset at home. “Whatever makes her . . . a larger-minded actor, a deeper-thoughted observer, a more potent writer or teacher,” the Brooklyn-based clergyman declared, “makes her . . . a better wife and mother.” Beecher advocated giving women the vote and also encouraged them to hold public office. The body politic, he argued, would be strengthened by contributions from both men and women, for their interests were one. Indeed, his plea was for men, who were robbed of a better society by limiting women’s involvement. The ideas were bold, but just as striking was the speaker and his forum. Beecher was a known reformer, but he was also a Protestant minister, popular with the middle class. His words had a power and reach enjoyed by few others in America. Once he spoke out, the quest for a female role in national politics entered the mainstream.³⁴

Progressives like Henry Ward Beecher might uphold female aspirations, but many people looked askance at women’s public visibility. It ruffled sensibilities to see ladies give impassioned speeches, and it bred fears that orderly societal relations were about to be upended. Pioneering women were sometimes viewed as curiosities, or simply ignored, but many people considered them meddling misfits. When well-regarded activist Caroline Healey Dall lectured on “Women’s Rights Under the Law,” a prominent Harvard scientist, Josiah Parsons Cooke, likened it to “hen-crowing,” and accused her of trying to “annihilate marriage.” He was all for open discussion, Cooke concluded, but “when obscenities constitute the material of a lecture, it is time for the police to interfere.” Antislavery champion Charles Sumner was generally an ally of women; nevertheless, he discouraged Julia Ward Howe from publicly reading her essays. (“I did not expect your sympathy in this undertaking,” complained Howe. “But I do feel that I have cast too much ‘love oil’ on your head for you to throw cold water on mine.”) Others simply thought the movement and its leaders ridiculous. Feminists were a subspecies afflicted with “Gynaekokracy,” opined a journalist from Geneva, New York, “bold, unblushing, flippant, unfeminine and bad imitators of men.” Petroleum V. Nasby and Artemus Ward both roasted feminists, liberally using terms like “she-devils” to describe them. Vanity Fair ran cartoons showing beefy activists boisterously bullying boys and prodding the President.³⁵ Women were also nervous about the burgeoning feminist movement and many took care not to associate too closely with it. Mary Lincoln joined others who denied they were “strong-minded,” declaring she had a “terror” of that breed. Nonetheless, she viewed herself as a ringside adviser to her husband and admitted she thought it wrong to withhold “a word fitly spoken . . . in due season.”³⁶

“A Fit for the ‘Ladies’ League,’” wood engraving, Vanity Fair, May 30, 1863

Just what Lincoln thought about women’s growing political involvement is difficult to know with certainty. He was not particularly keen on political pageantry of any form, preferring behind-the-scenes strategizing with a few collaborators to flashy, emotion-laden spectacles. “I think too much reliance is placed in noisy demonstrations,” he stated. “They excite prejudice and close the avenues to sober reason.”³⁷ As a young man Lincoln once declared he favored sharing government with everyone who helped bear its burdens: “Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).” Some have seen this as a clear statement of support for women’s rights. Others have found it an ironic, even sarcastic comment, since women did not join the militia in 1836, and only a few held property in their own name, making them taxpayers.³⁸

While living in New Salem, Lincoln belonged to a debating society that discussed whether women should be educated and have voting rights, but his opinion on these issues is not recorded. On the stump, he cautioned against the danger of curbing freedoms for one group in order to elevate another, but when he invoked the principles of the Declaration of Independence or asked rhetorically, “Who shall say, ‘I am the superior, and you are the inferior?’” he was discussing male prerogatives and did not include women in the discussion. His law partner William Herndon claimed Lincoln’s innate sense of justice made him uncomfortable denying privileges to others that he personally enjoyed, and that he “often” said women were the “other and better half of man” and entitled to full rights. Lincoln did not publicly support this, said Herndon, for he felt the moment had not yet come to put it before the people. These comments were written nearly half a century after the two men shared an office in Springfield, however, and Herndon’s quirkiness makes him a problematic source. In any case, if Lincoln believed women deserved greater civil liberties, he never acted on it in any way.³⁹

There is evidence that Lincoln defended women skillfully in his years as a trial lawyer, particularly in cases of sexual violation. In his first public defense, a young woman brought suit against a seducer who refused to marry her. Lincoln won his client a substantial award by arguing that a man’s soiled reputation could be “washed” clean, while a shamed woman was like a broken bottle that could never be mended. In other cases, Lincoln successfully advocated child support for unwed mothers, won damages for a woman raped by her father, and prosecuted the violator of a seven-year-old girl, persuading the jury to sentence him to eighteen years in prison. Once in the White House, he seems to have been favorably disposed to loyal women who were in need or who had been directly wronged. The President responded positively to widows and to those who appeared helpless. He also showed sympathy to families of slain U.S. Colored Troops, understanding that the South’s refusal to recognize black marriages denied wives many rights, including pensions. In these cases Lincoln could play the traditional male role of protector and generous benefactor. Women clamoring for position, promoting reform, or proposing better ways to manage the war, no matter how constructive, found a far less receptive hearing. These were not supplicants, but demandeurs, who challenged him with both their ideas and their expectations. The parade of forthright females rebuffed in the presidential office indicates a great deal of ambivalence on Lincoln’s part about ladies who sought something more than a patronizing dispensation of favors.⁴⁰

III

Lincoln’s discomfort with accomplished women also reflected his innate malaise around the fair sex. The origins of this are puzzling, for in early life he had positive relationships with his mother, stepmother, and older sister Sally. Nancy Hanks Lincoln was by every account a woman of intelligence, industry, and kindness. An in-law recalled that “she was a brilliant woman—a woman of great good sense and Modesty. . . . Tho[ma]s Lincoln & his wife were really happy in Each others presence—loved one another.” Others remembered the President’s mother as tenderhearted, but marked by sadness.⁴¹ Some said Abe, with his dark hair, hazel-gray eyes, and sharp features, took after her physically as well as temperamentally. It is uncertain whether she was literate, but at least one account has Lincoln stating that “[a]ll that I am or hope ever to be I get from my Mother.” Whether Nancy Lincoln resembled the “angel mother” concocted by later artistic imagination is more doubtful. Women aged quickly on the frontier, and her son’s only description mentioned a “want of teeth” and “weather-beaten appearance in general.” It was commonly acknowledged that her death in 1818 was a calamity for the family and a sorrow in the community.⁴²

After Nancy Lincoln’s burial, the household was run by Abe’s sister Sarah—known as Sally—who was two years older than her brother. Sally took after her father physically and was a bright child: “a gentle Kind, smart—shrewd—social, intelligent woman—She was quick & strong minded,” stated a neighbor.⁴³ Abraham was disturbed when Sally married Aaron Grigsby at age nineteen, believing Grigsby treated her badly. He made his displeasure clear enough that the Grigsbys did not invite him to a double family wedding. Lincoln’s response was to pen a scathing poem called “Book of Chronicles,” long remembered in the community as a “good—sharp—cutting” satire about a mix-up of bridal chambers, featuring pointed barbs about the masculinity of the male Grigsbys. The “Chronicles” heightened tensions among the in-laws and resulted in a fistfight—the neighborhood’s standard way of resolving differences. William Grigsby, who offered the fight, refused to take on the much larger Lincoln, and John Johnston, Lincoln’s stepbrother, was substituted. When the contest started going against Johnston, Lincoln stepped in and thrashed Grigsby. Sally died in childbirth after little more than a year of marriage, and Abe was said to have been devastated.⁴⁴

The anchor in Lincoln’s youth was his stepmother, Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, a woman who impressed Herndon as rising “high above her surroundings.” Thomas Lincoln had known her before his marriage to Nancy Hanks, and he returned to Kentucky to wed Sarah about a year after Nancy’s death. A widow with three children, Sarah was described as tall, handsome, and “straight as an Indian.” A photograph taken later in life shows a woman with large, pale-colored eyes and regular features, her face framed in a ruffled cap. She was practical and unflappable, a good choice “to tie to,” as one neighbor remarked, and equal to the work of raising five children in a frontier cabin. Sarah arrived in Indiana with a wagonload of furniture and a few books, set to washing the children until they “looked more human,” and proved to be a sympathetic parent. She thought Abe a good, obedient boy, encouraged his reading, and was proud of his success. She later said that “his mind & mine . . . seemed to run together—move in the same channel.”⁴⁵ Lincoln appears to have felt more affection for his stepmother than for his father, and took some trouble to provide for her in later life. Unfortunately, some of the funds were apparently siphoned off by other family members, and they ceased altogether after Lincoln was assassinated. Sarah Lincoln, who had not wanted her stepson to be president, mourned his death, spending her final years in poverty and loneliness.⁴⁶

Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln, photograph by H. R. Martin, c. 1865

CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

There were shadows behind these bright relationships, however. Lincoln’s mother and sister both died when he was comparatively young. For a child, the death of a parent is a seminal experience and can have significant emotional consequences, often lasting a lifetime. We do not know exactly how these tragedies affected young Abraham, and there is no clinical evidence, but some have postulated that the early losses were responsible for his enduring melancholy. They may have also caused him to beware of emotional attachments to women, attachments that might end abruptly, through no fault of his own.⁴⁷ Lincoln sympathized with a young girl whose father died in battle, saying that though sorrow comes to all, “to the young it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares.” He memorized a poem by Scottish poet William Knox called “Mortality,” which spoke of a girl, alive with beauty and pleasure, who was erased from the Earth “like a swift-fleeting meteor.” Lincoln spoke of his reverence for this poem (“I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is”) in the same breath as the memory of a trip he made in 1844 to the graves of his mother and sister. On that visit he mourned anew the “things decayed and loved ones lost” and felt keenly his helplessness against mortality.⁴⁸

Other clouds hung over these relations, having to do with sexuality. Sister Sally had died in childbirth. Lincoln may have viewed this as the wages of passion, or blamed it on her husband’s lust. His mother’s reputation also seemed smudged with uncertainty. Herndon reported that Lincoln told him his mother was a bastard, the illegitimate child of Lucy Hanks and a well-off Virginia planter, and that Abe believed he had inherited superior traits from this man. There may have been some truth to the story, for Lucy Hanks was charged with fornication in Mercer County, Kentucky, and no wedding certificate was ever found for her. Herndon believed this caused Lincoln to feel he was different from other men, feeding his self-absorption and depression. There were rumors about the chastity of Nancy Hanks Lincoln as well. Several acquaintances speculated that she had had relations with neighbors, and that her son was perhaps not fathered by Thomas. (Cousin Dennis Hanks denied this; and Lincoln’s fellow circuit rider Henry Whitney pointed out that Thomas and Nancy Lincoln had been married before Abraham’s birth, making his legitimacy presumptive in law.) Whether true or not, such gossip may have disturbed the sensitive boy, causing him to mistrust sexual instincts or feel that the consequences of lovemaking were grave and intimidating.⁴⁹

Lincoln’s odd looks and eccentric personality also fed his nervousness around the opposite sex. He formed friendships with sympathetic older ladies or the wives of his friends, but many witnesses remembered his discomfort around girls his own age. Some put this down to shyness; others thought he disdained girls as “too frivolous.”⁵⁰ He could boast the standard attainments of frontier boys and was a fine athlete, but his outsized limbs, craggy features, and uncontrollable hair were made for mockery. An acquaintance from Lincoln’s Indiana years remembered that all the young ladies made fun of him, sometimes to his face. He appeared to join in the laughter and tried to spend time with the girls, “but no sir-ee, they’d give him the mitten every time.” His self-consciousness may have been sharpened by his stepbrother’s popularity. The smooth-talking Johnston was “mighty good lookin’ and awful takin’,” one woman recalled, while Abe “wus so quiet and awkward and so awful homely” that the girls shunned him. At times Lincoln joined them in self-deprecation, admitting that “if any woman, old or young, ever thought there was any peculiar charm in this distinguished specimen . . . I have, as yet been so unfortunate as not to have discovered it.” During the 1860 campaign, he reportedly quipped that it was lucky for him women could not vote, because his portraits would have defeated him.⁵¹

Lincoln’s peculiar looks were matched by his chronic social clumsiness. He had perfected an easy affability with the boys but clammed up in mixed company. Friends described a man who retreated into bashful silence when he could not avoid women, or introduced himself by shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, making bizarre gestures, and proclaiming, “I don’t know how to talk to ladies!” Lincoln’s sister-in-law recalled that he did not have the knack of polite parlor talk, and Mary Owens, a young woman who kept company with him in 1836, wrote that he was too self-absorbed to offer the little attentions that “make up the great chain of womans happiness.” She recounted how once, when crossing a dangerous stream together on horseback, he showed no concern for her safety, and said he reckoned she could take care of herself. Owens thought this kind of careless comment sprang from a want of training rather than intentional rudeness.⁵² Most likely, it was a symptom of Lincoln’s habitual distraction, for both his mothers—from whom he might have absorbed some etiquette—were considered uncommonly decorous in their frontier community. In addition, Lincoln did not help himself by playing the buffoon in social situations. More than one person remembered him cutting up at barn raisings and corn shuckings, drawing his pals into a corner to tell crude stories until the girls complained he was “smashing up things generally.” Rather than quit, he would perform stunts to ruin the party. “Abe would go to all the dances in the country but would not dance, would get to one side . . . and tell jokes & funny stories & . . . turn handsprings and stand flat footed and lean backwards until his head would touch floor or ground, and a great many other athletic performances.” If Lincoln felt an adolescent triumph in these antics, they did not endear him to the girls.⁵³

Perhaps Lincoln broke up dances and relished smutty jokes as a defense against his fear of sexuality—fear that he was unattractive, or of the consequences of normal male-female interaction. His courting history was certainly rocky. He saw several young women while living in New Salem and Springfield, including Mary Owens and a girl named Sarah Rickard. These relations were not easy, with Lincoln inept at flirtation and alternating between angst-ridden fantasies and self-recrimination. “Perhaps any other man would know enough without further information,” Lincoln wrote to a woman who was anxious to resolve their uncertain relationship, “but I consider it my peculiar right to plead ignorance, and your bounden duty to allow the plea.” It is a striking sentence, indicative of his self-centered tone as a suitor. (In one such letter he uses the word “I” twenty-six times in thirty-seven lines, and throws all responsibility for the relationship onto the lady.) Yet, perhaps nagged by the specter of his sister’s abuse, Lincoln also stated that he wanted badly to do right by women. He was not entirely sure what that meant and the dilemma made him hesitant. The unhappy outcome of several of these relations (Rickard reportedly “flung him high & dry,” and Owens also ultimately rejected him) cannot have bolstered his confidence.⁵⁴

Lincoln’s most intense relationship appears to have been with Anne Rutledge, the daughter of an innkeeper in New Salem. By all accounts Anne (pronounced “Annie,” according to her sister) was a nice-looking girl, not overly intellectual, but sympathetic. There is evidence that Anne and Abraham enjoyed a close rapport, but the extent of the relationship is unclear. Anne was engaged to another man—which was perhaps part of the attraction for Lincoln, who was clearly most comfortable with safe, unavailable women. When Anne died of a fever, Lincoln’s grief was extreme enough to excite local comment, and his friends “feared that reason would desert the throne.” The legend of their ill-starred romance was inflated by Herndon, who later claimed that Rutledge was Lincoln’s true love, and her death a blow from which he never recovered. The most credible comments on the relationship were made by Anne’s sister Sarah, who, on reading a newspaper account of the affair, denied most of the rumors, including stories that Lincoln and Anne were engaged. “She came to her mind a little before she died & called for Lincoln,” recalled Sarah, “then they were left in the room alone & no one ever knew what they said she died soon after that. . . . There was not any of that kissing between them & there is a lot more there that is not true at all.” But there is no doubt that Lincoln was deeply affected by his friend’s death. The whole affair must have reinforced his sense that loving was a high-risk business.⁵⁵

Some writers have interpreted Lincoln’s discomfort around women as a sign of uncertainty about his masculinity, suggesting he was “undersexed,” or possibly homosexual or bisexual. They cite his clumsiness in female company, his fumbling attempts at forging relationships, and his fear when faced with the possibility of a real attachment. They also look at the close camaraderie Lincoln shared with men—his strong friendship with Joshua Speed, and his evident fondness for young courtiers such as Nicolay and Hay, as well as for the flashy drillmaster Elmer Ellsworth. There was also gossip about the President’s close relation with a guard officer at his summer residence. Sometime in 1862 Lincoln did take a shine to Captain David Derickson, and the friendship was so widely known that it appeared as part of the 115th Pennsylvania regimental history. Drawing room chitchat included reports that Derickson sat at table with Lincoln when Mary was absent and even shared the presidential bed. Sleeping habits were much more casual in that era of overcrowded conditions and lower standards of privacy, however, so that a sexual implication was not necessarily self-evident, especially as it was talked about so openly. When Washington insider Virginia Woodbury Fox recorded the hearsay in her diary, she remarked: “What stuff!”⁵⁶

In that era of prudery, the salacious revelations may have had more to do with Derickson’s access to privy information or ability to angle for position than any illicit acts. That all of Lincoln’s favorites were actively heterosexual also argues against the theory of closet liaisons. A more likely scenario, particularly once Lincoln became president, is the one seen in every White House: a powerful man, isolated by position, and anxious to maintain his authority, finding it easier to interact with low-level aides who openly admire him, than with competitive men who might benefit from a too candid discussion. Lincoln’s young companions arguably tickled his ego more than his physical fancy.

Whatever smoldered behind the rumors, there is abundant evidence of Lincoln’s heterosexuality. His political ally David Davis wrote that he was “a Man of strong passion for woman,” whose conscience kept him from seducing girls. Herndon seconded this, noting that Lincoln had “terribly strong passions for women—could scarcely keep his hands off them.” Lincoln told him that after Anne Rutledge’s death he fell into some of the seamier habits of the local lads and feared he had contracted syphilis from a casual tryst. Herndon also said that from the time Lincoln came to Springfield in 1837, he and Joshua Speed were “quite familiar—to go no further—with the women.” Speed was a well-known ladies’ man who sometimes helped set up assignations for his friend and, along with other “old rats” in the area, liked sexual gossip. Lincoln apparently shunned this kind of disrespectful talk. His friends commented that, if anything, his moral standards were liberal. His idea was “that a woman had the same right to play with her tail that a man had and no more nor less,” including the right to stray from the marriage vow if she chose. But Lincoln did not want to dabble in extramarital affairs, and when tempted, used his strong will to “put out the fires of his terrible passion.”⁵⁷

Within the context of his day, Lincoln was also considered a “manly” man. This is particularly interesting since so much Lincoln lore glorifies traits usually considered feminine. After his assassination, and well into the twenty-first century, the sixteenth president was praised for his tenderness toward children and animals, his dislike of bloodshed, his kindness and avoidance of confrontation, and his love of “right” over “might.” He did indeed embody some of these things, some of the time. But they were not necessarily considered womanly characteristics in his day. The rough masculinity of the Jackson era prized physical power, rugged individualism, and a willingness to fight with the fists for dignity, power, or survival. Lincoln, whose love of book learning, absentminded ways, and outlandish appearance distinguished him from other frontiersmen, was fortunate in having inherited his father’s two outstanding traits: a powerful, athletic body, and a gift for storytelling. Thomas Lincoln had been obliged to prove himself by sheer physicality—winning neighborhood respect when he clobbered the local bully at a Kentucky tavern—much as his son took on the Grigsbys to defend his sister. In both cases, the lion of the territory was the most powerful slugger. As a kinsman noted, no one ever again tested Thomas’s “manhood in personal combat,” and this allowed him to become the mediator in community disputes. His son’s strength also earned him the right to make peace, rather than continually fight other males.⁵⁸

But as midcentury approached, Lincoln consciously moved away from the cruder male stereotypes, embracing a new sensibility about masculinity that was sweeping the nation’s middle class. Restraint, self-reliance, and financial success were now considered the measure of a man; family concerns were his legitimate “sphere” as much as a woman’s; and real power came from directed energy and self-control. Maleness was not defined as a set of physical attributes, like muscularity, but as a series of actions. A true man achieved, rising in society and assessing masculinity by his economic standing vis-à-vis other men. De Tocqueville noticed this obsession to “get ahead,” seeing the American male as “restless in the midst of abundance”—forever glancing over a shoulder to gauge his comparative advantage. During this period, Lincoln stopped viewing himself as an axe-swinging, arm-wrestling strongman of rural districts and began identifying with the Whig Party’s professional men and bourgeois aspirations. He was especially taken by Whig leader Henry Clay. Although a Virginia aristocrat, Clay adopted the persona “Harry of the West” to promote the virtues of “self-made men,” a term he coined in 1832. To rise through “patient and diligent labor,” argued Clay, was to be a man worthy of the highest esteem. The conceit worked well for Lincoln, whose desire for betterment and earnest application to learning would become the stuff of national myth.

Interestingly, it was this generation of men who so neatly defined the concept of separate spheres for the sexes, the better to demark success in the male world. At the same time, their philosophy softened gender boundaries, so that men might also be admired for child rearing or their interest in culture. Mixed messages formed part of this credo and contributed to the anxiety de Tocqueville recognized in aspiring Americans, as well as the sexual confusion manifested by young men like Lincoln.⁵⁹

IV

As he rose in society, Lincoln wanted to associate with women of a better class. Thus Mary Todd enters the stage. Lincoln evidently met the vivacious Kentuckian during the Tippecanoe campaign of 1840, when she and her friends were among the young women enjoying the excitement. Plump, bright-eyed Mary was one of sixteen children in a prosperous plantation family with important connections throughout the Ohio Valley. Her sister Elizabeth had married into the prominent Edwards family of Illinois, and when Mary visited them in 1839, she was a popular addition to Springfield society. Well-educated and an enthusiastic Whig, Miss Todd had supped with Lincoln’s hero Henry Clay, and she enjoyed parlor politics and flirtatious repartee. She was also ambitious. Mary told more than one person that she intended to marry a man who would become president. Lincoln caught her eye.⁶⁰

The two corresponded, planned group outings, and occasionally met, probably at the Edwards home. Twenty-one-year-old Mary was described as the “very creature of excitement,” and her sister recalled that Lincoln was often struck dumb in her company. Their backgrounds were strikingly different and Mary’s family thought Lincoln an unsuitable match. Still, the two had similarities. Both had lost mothers at a young age; both enjoyed reading and reciting poetry and were obsessed by politics. Yet whatever fascination Lincoln felt for Mary Todd in 1840, by the following year he had either rethought the friendship or possibly was smitten by another visitor, the bewitching Matilda Edwards. Even Mary admitted she had never seen a lovelier girl than Matilda, who stole several Springfield hearts during her stay. Mary apparently tried to keep Lincoln’s interest by playing her many beaux off one another, but according to later accounts, he broke off the relationship in an awkward interview.⁶¹

What happened next is not entirely clear. Lincoln sank into a deep depression, which he called “the hypo,” making him “the most miserable man living.” On Mary’s side there was self-accusation, perhaps for playing too fast and loose with her suitors. Ultimately some friends intervened and a rapprochement followed. The two wed on November 4, 1842. Acquaintances speculated that Mary was the more interested party, and that Lincoln struggled with his sense of honor for having led her on. Others thought Lincoln’s insecurity left him doubting his ability to make a woman happy. There was also talk that he was selling his soul to gain the patronage of Mary’s powerful family. In any case, Joshua Speed was not “entirely satisfied” that his friend’s “heart was going with his hand.”⁶² Historians have wondered if a sexual element was not present, compelling the couple to marry quickly. The wedding did take place in haste, under arrangements that were unseemly for the elite Edwards family, and particularly for Mary, who loved parties, finery, and attention. Robert Todd Lincoln was born almost nine months to the day from the Lincolns’ marriage; but even had the couple enjoyed premarital relations, Mary could not possibly have known with certainty that she was pregnant. (Abraham was unsure too. The following March he told Speed he could not “say, exactly yet” if Speed would have “a namesake at our house.”) Both bride and groom were silent about their decision to wed, except for Abraham’s cryptic comment that his marriage was a “source of profound wonderment.”⁶³

Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, daguerreotypes by Nicolas H. Shepard, c. 1846

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The relationship between a man and a woman is among the most basic and ancient of conflicts; each contains some element of mystery, as well as tension. The inner workings of the Lincoln marriage are particularly opaque, for scanty evidence of it survives. Mary sentimentally spoke of her husband’s “dear loving letters,” but only a few remain today. Perhaps she or their son Robert destroyed them; perhaps there were never more than a handful to begin with. Herndon thought his law partner wrote “fewer social letters—& even political ones” than any man he knew, and Lincoln admitted he avoided writing letters to women, “as a business which I do not understand.” The correspondence that does exist is kind and confiding, full of pets and plans and the domestic details that make up every life. The rest of what we know is secondhand, often relayed decades after the fact, making it exceedingly hard to sort the marital wheat from the chaff.⁶⁴

The impression given in many recollections is that of an uneasy marriage between two difficult partners, whose tastes and inclinations sometimes clashed. Lincoln was moody and aloof, slovenly and coarse, careless and overindulgent with their four sons. He retreated into himself, whereas his extroverted wife looked for companionship and comfort—which she did not always receive. She was from a well-heeled home and she expected to live with a certain gentility. Lincoln’s muddy boots, unschooled table manners, and informal habits sorely tried her. Mary was often left alone, to feel vulnerable and unprotected while her husband rode the court circuit, or swapped stories in male-only back rooms. She was also apt to scold and demand, and many friends recounted ugly bouts of henpecking. Lincoln often ignored or laughed at this, which was perhaps an impolitic response. Nonetheless, his compatriots tended to think he was the long-sufferer. The frictions are illustrated by an instance when Lincoln harnessed himself like a horse to the baby carriage and, lost in thought, allowed the buggy to overturn and pitch the child—“kicking and squalling”—into the gutter. He did not notice and trotted on, but Mary flew from the house, full of fright and fury. Her husband ran off “with great celerity,” without waiting to face her stormy protest. Whether they fought it out or toughed it out in these situations is impossible to know; but a separation was clearly never in order. A cousin thought they were mismatched, but overlooked each other’s foibles and appreciated the values that lay beneath. Herndon, who was not an admirer of the marriage, concluded that “when all is known the world will divide between Mr. Lincoln and Mrs. Lincoln its censure.”⁶⁵

There were also bright sides to the relationship. Mary was volatile and thin-skinned, yet she was “a delightful conversationalist, and well-informed on all the subjects of the day.” Lincoln had brought large debts to the marriage and in the early years she was game enough to live (and give birth) in a tavern. Mary epitomized devotion to a wife’s circumscribed sphere, in which home life was bound by the man’s expectations and career. Her husband was loyal and hardworking and intellectually stimulating, with serious prospects of becoming a leader in the state, if not the nation. What Abraham and Mary shared was the sum of these worlds: pleasure in their growing sons and searing sorrow at the death of Eddie, the second eldest; a comfortable life; excitement in their future prospects. Moreover, their political ambitions meshed. Mary was not only politically astute but enormously proud of “Mr. Lincoln” and protective of his interests. She encouraged him to dream large. He, in turn, took her advice seriously. There is also evidence that they enjoyed their companionship. Having looked forward to time alone when he arrived in Washington as a congressman, Lincoln almost immediately missed his wife. “I hate to stay in this old room by myself,” he admitted; a few months later, he encouraged Mary to “come along, and that as soon as possible.” After the ballots were counted on that fateful November night in 1860, the first person the president-elect ran to tell was his wife. “Mary, Mary!” he cried out, “we are elected!”⁶⁶

The election would affect a great deal, including Lincoln’s family relations. From the beginning it was a controversial win, and the president-elect and his wife became targets for those wanting to diminish the Republican triumph. The nation’s deteriorating stability, a strenuous (and often criticized) whistle-stop trip to Washington, and threats of assassination did not lessen the tension. Nor was the situation helped by both Lincolns’ naïve expectations of the presidency. Republican insiders doubted the president-elect knew how to conduct himself in his new position and feared he and his wife would become objects of fun. Both Lincolns showed strain under these pressures.⁶⁷

The White House was the prize they had worked for all their lives, but from the start the Lincolns were uncomfortable there. The transition from obscurity to First Lady had been abrupt for Mrs. Lincoln. She had envisaged herself as a grand hostess and was unprepared for either criticism or national crisis. Now the spotlight was trained on her without mercy. “Her smiles and her frowns become a matter of consequence to the whole American world,” observed journalist William Howard Russell. “If she but drive down Pennsylvania Avenue, the electric wire thrills the news to every hamlet in the Union.” Her dress, her manners, and, most of all, her political maneuvering were soon talked about. Mary first overstepped her position by spending large sums for furnishing the White House, without thought to either regulations or discretion. The Executive Mansion undoubtedly needed renovation, but it infuriated Lincoln to find her buying “flub dubs for this damned old house” while soldiers suffered.⁶⁸ Mrs. Lincoln also sent unwise letters to major political figures, in which she censured generals and cabinet members, tried to influence appointments, or promoted Kentucky-bred horses for the cavalry. (There are indications that she was quite effective in her lobbying: Washington insiders stated that “she always succeeds,” and men of prominence like New York Herald owner James Gordon Bennett and Senator Charles Sumner courted her for access and information.) She was also vulnerable to intriguers like Henry “Chevalier” Wikoff, a professional rogue notorious for leaking information and angling for personal gain. Such men sometimes led Mrs. Lincoln into verbal indiscretion. If the motive was to help her husband, the impression it left accomplished the opposite.⁶⁹

There were many who knew and admired Mary Lincoln, finding her, as did Commissioner of Grounds Benjamin French, “a smart, intelligent woman” who “bore herself well and bravely & looked Queenly.” George Bancroft, a renowned historian and a Democrat, was similarly “entranced” by the First Lady, whom he thought “a fair counterpart to Mr Lincoln’s brains.” General John Sedgwick noted how she visited his corps hospital “giving little comforts to the sick, without any display or ostentation.” Indeed, the dichotomy between those judging from afar, such as a catty diarist named Maria Lydig Daly, who concluded Mrs. Lincoln was little more than “a vulgar, shoddy, contractor’s wife,” and those who actually knew her is striking. But the damage had been early done and only worsened under the pressure of war. Mary Lincoln’s intrigues were whispered about both North and South, with the truth sometimes embellished. Some thought she was passing along state secrets, either through foolhardiness or from lingering Southern sympathy. Her relatives were slaveholders and three Todd brothers and a brother-in-law were enrolled in the Confederate Army, sparking “dark insinuations against her . . . Union principles, and honesty.” A British journalist observed that “the poor lady is loyal as steel to her family and to Lincoln the first, but she . . . has permitted her society to be infested by men who would not be received in any respectable private house.” The First Lady’s image had become so distorted that no number of admiring comments could bring it back into focus.⁷⁰

And the missteps continued. There were rounds of receptions that Mary must have envisioned in the Dolley Madison mode—elegant levees at which opponents could meet and ideas be exchanged. Her husband hated these events but did nothing to prevent them. The fact that the Executive Mansion was used to present evenings of conjuring tricks by “Hermann the Prestidigitateur” or Barnum-like displays of Tom Thumb and his bride did not elevate the reputation of either Lincoln. The unfortunate optic reached its apogee when the Lincolns gave a lavish and ill-timed ball on February 5, 1862. Refreshments included more than a ton of turkeys, pheasants, and venison, as well as spun-sugar confections in the shape of nymphs and a fully gunned Fort Sumter. Such a wartime spectacle was unseemly to say the least, and it caused a backlash in both press and political circles. “A dancing-party given at the time the nation is in the agonies of civil war!” exclaimed Henry Dawes, a Republican congressman already critical of corruption in Lincoln’s administration. “With equal propriety might a man make a ball with a corpse in his house!” Even staunch supporters boycotted the affair. The questions now were not about the First Lady’s overspending but the President’s judgment.⁷¹

“Grand presidential party at the White House, Washington, Wednesday evening, February 5th,” wood engraving,

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, February 22, 1862

Family tensions came to a head with the illness of Willie Lincoln during that ill-fated dance. By many accounts he was the most likable, and perhaps the most promising, of their boys. He and younger brother Tad had caught typhoid fever, and, despite their parents’ desperate ministrations, Willie began to succumb as the party roared below. Both Lincolns were devastated. Nicolay recalled how the President came to his room in tears; a nurse brought in to help recorded his nightlong vigils at Tad’s bedside. Indeed, the tragedy may have affected his stability. Under constant pressure from the slow advance of the war, he now made a series of extremely poor military decisions, with serious consequences. Still, he had the distraction of official business and constant company, while his wife lay in a darkened room, falling prey to self-reproach, as well as to anxiety for her sons. Although Tad recovered, eleven-year-old Willie died at five in the afternoon on February 20 in the carved rosewood bed, now known as the Lincoln Bed. Mary, already suffering from isolation and public criticism, sank to new levels of despair. Friends came to help, and she tried to relieve her mind by dabbling in spiritualism, but her once coveted position now seemed a “mockery.”⁷²

Lincoln’s Midnight Thinky, pencil, by Charles W. Reed, c. 1862

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Perhaps she took morphine as well, for it was a popular remedy for a variety of physical and psychic ailments. More than one person thought the drug detached Mary’s mind from reality. Misfortunes only multiplied, as several Todd men fighting for the Confederacy were killed in horrible battles like Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Chickamauga. These were losses she could not mourn publicly, and “like a barrier of granite” they estranged the First Lady from her family. One sister, the widow of Southern general Benjamin Helm, came to visit; but the press was quick to resent the presence of a rebel officer’s wife in the White House, and Mrs. Helm soon retreated. Once Mary was cut off from sympathy and blasted as “the scape-goat for both North and South,” a close acquaintance remarked: “I do not believe her mind ever fully recovered its poise.”⁷³

The double burden of grief and public pressure formed a gulf in the Lincolns’ marital relations. There is evidence that both partners tried to console each other but were handicapped by the wartime situation and their own divergent personalities. “Sister has always a cheerful word and a smile for Mr. Lincoln, who seems thin and care-worn and seeing her sorrowful would add to his care,” Mrs. Helm noted in her diary, and the President tried to find medical help and kindly friends to soothe his wife’s misery. Despondent, Lincoln became recklessly oblivious to his personal safety, complaining that the war was destroying him, and wandering alone at night without a guard. “I often meet Mr. Lincoln in the streets,” wrote State Department translator Adam Gurowski. “Poor man . . . ! [His] looks are those of a man whose nights are sleepless, and whose days are comfortless.”⁷⁴ Lincoln’s imprudent outings filled his wife with fear, as did the idea that his draft-age son, Robert, might also be lost to the conflict. She became increasingly erratic, her clandestine correspondence more frequent, and swings of emotion more pronounced. Many of the President’s colleagues had not particularly liked Mary Lincoln in Springfield; now they viewed her as a dangerous interloper, incautious in her words and actions. Secretaries called her the “Hell-Cat,” and Republicans worried she was revealing sensitive information to the opposition. Her imperiousness was also noted. Although Mary could be exceedingly gracious, she often demanded special prerogatives. She also appears to have been jealous of her husband’s time and imagined he gave attention to other ladies. At a military review toward the close of the war, Mrs. Lincoln raised a fuss when an officer’s good-looking wife rode alongside the President, causing her to fear the young woman would be mistaken for the First Lady. The episode was much magnified by Adam Badeau, an aide to General Ulysses S. Grant, raising more eyebrows. Grant’s wife, Julia, who was present, later tamped it down, describing it as awkward but not a major scene. Still, it was indicative of Mary Lincoln’s volubility during these years, and her dangerous flirtation with unreality.⁷⁵

In her anxiety, Mary fell into a pattern of frantic economizing, alternating with compulsive overspending. Gossips thought she starved her husband, or lowered the tone of the White House by grazing cows and goats on the lawn. Actually she tried to persuade the President to eat and sleep more regularly and orchestrated their summer moves to the Soldiers’ Home, where the breezes and political pressures blew cooler. At the same time, she made eye-popping purchases, “ransacking” jewelers and dry goods stores, inviting criticism of her self-indulgence. The First Lady was undoubtedly the prey of sharp-eyed merchants in Washington and New York; and the problems were compounded by Lincoln’s inattention to household finance. However, this kind of aberrant behavior also bespoke her fear of destitution and desire to escape through compulsive spending. After her eldest son, Robert, joined the Army the wild splurges increased. Toward the end of the war, Mary bought eighty-four pairs of kid gloves and $3,200 worth of jewelry within a few weeks. Some believed she had also begun to steal objects. At the time of Lincoln’s death, she was $25,000 in debt—as much as his yearly salary.⁷⁶

More grief would come to Mary Todd Lincoln, as each of her worst nightmares came true: her husband murdered before her eyes; her kin and eldest son estranged; Tad succumbing to death while in his teens; and the horrid specter of poverty slowly tightening its grasp. Her eyes, once universally described as “sparkling,” became dull with the inability to absorb more disaster. Yet her descent into darkness, destructive as it was to her family and to herself, was never malicious. To read her life’s correspondence, with its shattering chain of sorrows, is to be moved more to pity than to disdain.⁷⁷

V

It is unclear whether Mary Lincoln’s strong personality influenced her husband’s reticence toward forceful women—if so, he never stated it in so many words. But that he disliked women with confident ideas or pointed demands is too well documented to doubt. His secretaries noted that he thought it an “unpleasant and irksome thing” for a lady to arrive on “business,” when she could have made her requests through a male emissary. Even noted women like Barton, Howe, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were unwelcome at the White House without an escort, and often it took a congressman or other luminary to gain them access. This was in stark contrast to the “open door” policy of the presidential office, in which, theoretically, anyone could enter and speak his piece. (“Nobody ever wanted to see the President who did not,” claimed William Seward, “there was never a man so accessible to all sorts of proper and improper persons.”) Despite his attempts to discourage female callers, Lincoln complained he was “constantly beset by women of all sorts, high and low, pretty and ugly, modest and the other sort.”⁷⁸ Letters also regularly arrived from prominent women, on themes that included deporting freed slaves (Anna Ella Carroll), women’s right to government jobs (Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck, editor of Sybil, a feminist magazine), and the President’s failure to rally the country’s “moral enthusiasm” (Lydia Maria Child). For the most part, the notes were left unacknowledged. When Mary Livermore wrote to request Lincoln’s participation in a fair being organized to animate Northern esprit and attract Union dollars, he did not respond until prodded by a Chicago politico, Isaac Arnold. Even constructive suggestions seem to have been taken as censure. Lincoln disliked criticism from men as well as women, but something about the commentary of female activists seemed to have particularly grated on his nerves.⁷⁹

Lincoln was also annoyed by the nearly ceaseless parade of women who arrived to promote the interests of their menfolk. Some were angling for promotions, others for release from prison or from military service altogether, and some for political position. Their tactics ranged from bluster and belligerence to weeping and prayerful entreaty. A few cases touched the President’s sympathetic nerve, for many women had truly suffered during the war, experiencing overwhelming personal loss, and sometimes economic devastation. “So many women . . . in these days, have their hearts wrung with sorrow, and want a scapegoat to bear the wrongs which have been the cause of it! And who can bear them better than the President?” asked journalist Lois Bryan Adams. “Who, they ask, is more responsible?” Some wives and daughters became unreasonable, demanding Lincoln overrule his generals, or that he dispense special privileges. Apologists have claimed he was uniformly kind and patient with female supplicants, but, in fact, he often angrily rebuffed the more aggressive, particularly those grumbling about hardships faced by pro-South families. His impatience is clear in a note sent to John Nicolay about a woman seeking a brigadier generalship for her husband. “She is a saucy woman,” complained the President, “and I am afraid she will keep tormenting till I may have to do it.”⁸⁰ More than one lady tried to gain favor by appealing to Lincoln’s vanity. An acquaintance claimed the chief executive told him of a woman who came to his office soliciting a job for “somebody supposed to be her husband.” She bent so close to the President that he thought she intended to embrace him. Then, Lincoln said, “indignation came to my relief, and drawing myself back . . . I gave her the proper sort of a look and said: ‘Mrs.——, you are very pretty, and its very tempting, BUT I WON’T.” Petitioners also inundated the White House with letters—pleading, insistent, or chastising. “I know you are harassed, by half the women in the country, seeking one favor or another and often feel tempted to throw every feminine letter into the waste basket,” sympathized Lincoln’s friend Jane Speed. She then begged to have her son be transferred from the field to a soft job in the paymaster’s department.⁸¹

Lincoln had brought it all on himself, of course, through his belief that the public should be granted such extraordinary access. But he never found the knack for handling his feminine constituency. His innate discomfort around women left him not knowing how to deny unwelcome requests firmly without provoking tears or causing offense. The social tools Lincoln had honed were ones that smoothed his path in the male sphere—logic and cool taciturnity to control situations, or humor to disarm opponents and leave them laughing. Seward thought this ability “a cunning that was genius,” but with women—even those who were politically attuned—the practical jokes and clubroom banter fell flat. They did not like the earthy stories, and they generally wanted action, not words, as proof of leadership. Moreover, he was often plainly rude.⁸²

Over the years Lincoln had taught himself many things—from grammar to geometry—but he had never bothered to master the etiquette so valued by mannered society. An assistant treasury secretary acknowledged that Lincoln was not “overburdened” with civility, “and his manners were any thing but acceptable to the fair sex.” The wife of a favorite aide was alarmed that he made faces and “threw himself around promiscuously” when in their company. In another instance, visitors to the White House were stunned when Lincoln remained seated while a woman standing near him spoke to him earnestly. “After a while he arose and drew up another chair, as she supposed with the intention of offering it to her. Nothing of the sort. He stretched out his own long legs upon it.” (Told he was the worst-bred man the company had ever seen, Lincoln had the good humor to agree.) In the best cases, such as with the Stowe party, accomplished ladies left his company in gales of laughter, simply thinking him ludicrous. With women like Anna Dickinson, his dismissive attitude was taken as an insult, inviting contempt for his inelegant conduct. These ladies had expectations. If Lincoln was going to lead the country without their consent at the polls, he should at least act the part.⁸³

The most difficult encounters were with women who had connections to men leading the war effort. They brought complaints about Lincoln’s policies or his personal treatment of generals, and their confidence was often matched by their insistence. Among the more notable was Ellen Ewing Sherman, who arrived to tackle the chief executive on January 29, 1862. William Tecumseh Sherman had been so frustrated by his “impossible” command in Kentucky (“thirty thousand raw recruits . . . armed with the old European muskets that McClellan had rejected” to guard three hundred miles of mountainous terrain) that he had spectacularly vented his temper. Some labeled him “insane” and the War Department quickly accepted Sherman’s resignation. His wife immediately took charge, harnessing support from her prominent father, political broker Thomas Ewing, as well as Sherman’s brother John, a Republican senator from Ohio. She marched to the White House with her father and pointedly asked Lincoln why her husband had been left “to be reviled & ridiculed and calumniated & scouted as a madman” by jealous officials, while the war stagnated and the President did nothing. She demanded that Sherman’s name be cleared and that he be restored to an appropriate position. Lincoln took one look at the powerful Ewing-Sherman front before him and capitulated on the spot, professing ignorance of the situation (though the Kentucky plans had come directly from him), and proclaiming himself eager for Sherman’s promotion. It was, Ellen Sherman told her husband, a “most satisfactory interview.”⁸⁴

Jesse Benton Frémont, carte de visite by Mathew Brady, c. 1860

COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, FINE ARTS LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Another talked-about encounter involved Jesse Benton Frémont. Like Ellen Sherman, Frémont had a distinguished political pedigree through her father, Thomas Hart Benton. She also had long experience dealing directly with high-level officials, including presidents. Her political activism went beyond Mary Lincoln’s armchair politicking to embrace a joint presidential campaign with her husband in 1856. In 1861 John C. Frémont was a general, commanding the volatile Missouri district. It quickly became apparent that he was less capable, both politically and administratively, than his legendary status suggested. At the same time, another powerful family, the Blairs, whose eldest son was Lincoln’s postmaster general, was waging a struggle for influence in Missouri. They secretly tried to recruit Jesse Frémont as an informant, hoping to form a coalition through which they would divide power in the state. She refused the offer. On August 30, with conditions deteriorating, General Frémont issued an order that, among other things, liberated the slaves of traitorous owners in his district. Abolitionists applauded the move, but Lincoln questioned it. He was worried that the proclamation might alarm slaveholding Union states like Kentucky; and also noted it was at odds with laws passed a few weeks earlier. When the President asked Frémont to rescind the emancipation clause, Jesse boarded the night train for Washington.⁸⁵

According to her account, Frémont had to sit up two nights on the train, arriving at Willard’s Hotel on September 10, exhausted and soiled from the journey. Undaunted, she immediately sent a note to the White House, time-dated 8:00 p.m., asking when she might have an interview, either that evening or the next day. She received a one-word reply—“Now.” Even though her baggage had not yet been delivered, she contacted a prominent judge to escort her and hurried to the Executive Mansion. This was a familiar place, where she had always been treated as family, noted Frémont, and “with all the old confidence of the past, I went forward now.” She was received in the Red Room, but the tone of the President’s greeting jarred her. It was midnight by this time, and Lincoln barely acknowledged her; nor did he offer a seat. The weary Mrs. Frémont drew up a chair nonetheless. She handed the chief executive a letter from her husband, and added her own arguments in favor of the proclamation, stressing that it would encourage badly needed European support for the Union. “You are quite a female politician,” the President remarked with a disapproving glance. “I felt the sneering tone,” stated Frémont, “and saw there was a foregone decision against all listening.” She then described a tirade, during which Lincoln expounded on the disadvantages of her husband’s order, and his unhappiness that it had “dragged the negro into the war.” The commander in chief gave a different version of the story. Two years later he told John Hay that Jesse Frémont had demanded the midnight audience and then “taxed me so violently with many things that I had to exercise all the awkward tact I have to avoid quarreling with her.” The President also accused her of intimating “more than once” that the Frémonts’ public support outweighed his. If crossed, “[t]he Pathfinder” could simply “set up for himself.”⁸⁶

The Blairs angrily accosted Jesse Frémont the next day, accusing her of alienating the chief executive and trying to undermine their family. They let slip that they had written to Lincoln, complaining about her husband’s slipshod military skills and lack of control in Missouri. Although they had not been present at the meeting between Frémont and Lincoln, they wrote a for-publication account, featuring a raging Jesse, who “stamped her foot like a virago” when her unrealistic demands were not met. Jesse then wrote to the White House, asking for copies of the Blair correspondence relating to Missouri, as well as for a reply to her husband’s missive. The President sent a placating answer but evaded her request. Instead, he sent a message through military channels to rescind Frémont’s proclamation. Lincoln, who needed to act quickly in a delicate matter, believed he had good reasons for doing this, and not just because he was suspicious of Frémont’s potential rivalry.⁸⁷

Still, the version of the meeting Lincoln gave Hay was not accurate. The time on Jesse’s note shows that it was the President, not she, who insisted on the midnight meeting; Lincoln exaggerated Frémont’s intentions by claiming he was planning to set up a “bureau of Abolition”; and he erroneously placed Mrs. Frémont’s confrontation with the Blairs before the White House meeting, making it appear she was motivated by a personal feud rather than genuine political differences over the proclamation. The competing stories form an arresting example of the way gender lines were drawn on these occasions. The lady voiced bitter resentment at unbending male authority and the disdainful attitude shown her abilities. The President’s team fell back on the convenient stereotype of a shrewish woman, out of her depth and out of control.⁸⁸

VI

Lincoln’s impatience with women who challenged his opinions is perhaps understandable, given prevailing attitudes. After all, even Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book noted in 1853 that it was “injudicious for ladies to attempt arguing with gentlemen on political or financial topics” because it would “not elevate them in the opinion of the masculine mind.” More intriguing is the fact that Lincoln kept women who were actively working on his behalf at a distance. His ambivalence here is striking, for they played a large role in spurring the North to victory, by supplying the Army, tending the wounded, and invigorating morale. Yet Lincoln did little to encourage them, and he often seemed to look askance at feminine activities. When he did praise female war workers it was for cheering on the men, who, he stressed, were the ones actually saving the Union.⁸⁹

An unprecedented number of women offered their services during the Civil War. Some eight thousand alone worked as nurses on the Union side, and countless others established hospitals and orphanages, guided slaves to freedom, or met in community circles to sew. Indeed, they were among the first to join the cause. Dorothea Dix, who was appointed to superintend female nurses, arrived at the scene on April 19, 1861, three hours after Union troops were fired upon in Baltimore; Mary Ann (“Mother”) Bickerdyke began work in Cairo, Illinois, a few days later. Many women were motivated by helping their soldier sons or husbands. Those with abolitionist leanings viewed the conflict with missionary zeal, believing it would finally bring true liberty to the land. Still others felt the adrenaline rush of a righteous battle. Caught up in the martial spirit, Clara Barton admitted that “[t]he fight is in me and I will find a pretext.”⁹⁰

Although countless women found an outlet in rolling bandages or hemming blankets, others found only frustration in the traditional female roles of clothing, healing, or encouraging men. “A lonely, dull day—stitch, stitch, stitch,” Caroline Healey Dall confided to her diary—and that moment decided to contribute with her intellect, as well as her needle. “It was the only time in my life that I ever thought I would rather be a man than a woman, that I might go and fight and perhaps die for my country and freedom,” agreed author Lucy Larcom; she then added, with a sigh, “I had to content myself with knitting blue army socks and writing verses.” The stories of Florence Nightingale, whose saga of hospital reform in the Crimean War had been published in 1858, caused many women to believe their highest mission was to tend the sick, inspiring their active involvement in hospital wards. A few score cast off convention completely to don a soldier’s uniform and fight at the front. Another handful, like Elizabeth Van Lew of Richmond, faced daily danger spying for the Union.⁹¹

The outpouring of assistance, however well intentioned, was unofficial and uncoordinated. In some quarters it aroused more alarm than appreciation. When Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to receive a medical degree in America, tried to systemize a training program for nurses, she found herself sidelined by male physicians who were not enthusiastic about female volunteers and did not want advice from a woman whose credentials equaled their own. They “refused to have anything to do with the nurse education plan if ‘that Miss Blackwell, were going to engineer the matter,’” she wrote, adding regretfully that “we kept in the background.” Instead, a group of powerful New York doctors and businessmen created the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) to advise on matters of soldiers’ health, raise funds, and assist in procuring supplies and hiring personnel. Both Blackwell and the USSC organizers hoped to structure war efforts so that a stream of well-meaning amateurs would not inundate hospital corridors. The men involved were also eager to have a springboard to political influence, and the rivalry for access and recognition began early. Heeding the War Department, which viewed all outside activities as meddling, Lincoln was slow to encourage citizen contributions. Such interference, the President thought, might become “like a fifth wheel to the coach.” Although Lincoln authorized the Sanitary Commission on June 19, 1861, it was only when Winfield Scott publicly acknowledged how much the citizens’ relief efforts were needed that it was officially sanctioned.⁹²

“United States Sanitary Commission: Our Heroines,” wood engraving, Harper’s Weekly, April 9, 1864

Dorothea Dix, nationally known for her work reforming insane asylums, was appointed to supervise the flood of volunteer nurses. She was earnest and hardworking, but completely inexperienced in this line of work. “Miss Dix, though in many respects an estimable & sensible woman is deficient in the power of organization, and has no idea of the details of Hospital management,” observed Dr. Blackwell’s sister Emily, herself a physician. “I think there cannot fail to be much confusion.” It would prove to be an understatement. Dix directed affairs under a strict code of conduct, shunning nurses who looked for adventure (or seemed too attractive), in hopes of overturning the popular view that women serving the Army were wrongly motivated. The regimentation was well meant, but so harsh that it alienated doctors as well as nurses. (Jane Swisshelm, who worked for seven weeks at Washington’s Campbell Military Hospital, described Dix as “a self sealing can of horror tied up with red tape.”) In any case, the war’s pressing needs proved too great to address with the modest corps Dix recruited. Freelancers—among them, Barton, Bickerdyke, and Sojourner Truth—either ignored or avoided her. There were problems as well with the USSC leaders, who found Dix a difficult personality and suspected she was responsible for the creation of a powerful rival organization, the Western Sanitary Commission. When these commissions began leveling criticism at the administration’s ability to discipline the Army, and interfered in the selection of a new surgeon general, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton curtailed their activities. Ultimately Dix, too, was given a smaller portfolio.⁹³

Dix struggled in her position, showing more doggedness than genius, but in many ways she had been given a near impossible task. All but a few army doctors disliked the presence of women in their wards, protesting loudly to the War Department. Some tolerated female laundresses and cooks, but most resented participation in medical matters. Lincoln made a few overtures on Dix’s behalf to reluctant officers, but the appeals went unheeded and soon stopped. “No one knows, who did not watch the thing from the beginning, how much opposition, how much ill-will . . . these women nurses endured,” wrote Georgeanna Woolsey in 1864. Woolsey, who worked on hospital ships during the Peninsula campaign, came to believe the abuse was a “cool calculation” on the part of surgeons to eliminate female nurses from the system. “Government had decided that women should be employed, and the army surgeons . . . determined to make their lives so unbearable that they should be forced in self-defence to leave.”⁹⁴

Nurses were ignored, physically molested, given prisonlike living quarters, and sometimes spat upon. The strongest simply forged ahead. Dr. Mary Walker, a maverick in trousers, was denied a surgeon’s commission by Lincoln, who informed her that he was “sure it would injure the service” to “thrust” her among male doctors against their consent. She proceeded to set up a valuable surgery without his sanction.⁹⁵ USSC official Frederick Law Olmsted initially doubted female nurses could survive the hostility but came away a true believer after observing the ladies’ “untiring industry, self-possession and tranquil cheerfulness.” Some volunteers, like Bickerdyke, garnered support from grateful soldiers, helping them to override doctors who were deficient or corrupt. (When an irate surgeon tried to keep Bickerdyke in line by handing her a copy of army regulations, she turned the tables by memorizing it, later finding it “invaluable” for holding officers to account.) Her work, if an irritation to incompetent doctors, earned the respect of senior commanders, including Ulysses S. Grant.⁹⁶ Writing from St. Louis, surgeon Francis Bacon gave full flavor to the annoyance, frustration, but ultimate respect “strong-minded” hospital matrons could inspire:

I reluctantly confess that I am subjugated and crushed by a woman who sings The Star-Spangled Banner copiously through all the wards of my hospital. . . . She weighs three hundred pounds. She comes every morning, early. She wears the Flag of our Country pinned across her heart. She comes into my room, my own office, unabashed by the fact that I am the Surgeon in charge, and . . . looks me in the eye with perfect calmness and intrepidity. She takes off her sunbonnet and mantilla and lays them upon my table, over my papers . . . and begins to exude small parcels from every pocket. . . . She nurses tenderly, and feeds and cries over the bad cases. Poor Martin Rosebush, a handsome, smooth-faced, good boy from New Hampshire, desperately wounded and delirious would start up with a cry of joy when she came, and died with his arms around her neck, calling her his mammy. . . . Of course I do not encourage the visits of this creature with the Flag of our Country and the National Anthem. On the contrary, they encourage me.⁹⁷

Ineffective or opportunistic volunteers, the very sort Dix was trying to weed out, inevitably did appear, and some of the ladies’ more naïve contributions became the stuff of waggish jokes. “Oh! Woman—thoughtful woman! The soldier thanks thee for sending him pies and cakes that turn sour before they leave New York,” crooned humorist Orpheus C. Kerr.⁹⁸ But many made real contributions. African Americans were among them, working chiefly in kitchens, but also playing an active political role, by raising funds, supporting the U.S. Colored Troops, and trying to improve conditions for freedmen and -women. Some, like Harriet Tubman, heroically challenged the slaveholding establishment by leading bondmen to freedom or serving as Union Army scouts.⁹⁹ Women also used the power of the press to further the cause. “Pestilential” feminist writer Gail Hamilton, though deeply concerned about the “astounding incapacity” of Lincoln’s leadership, used her pen to inspire steadfastness and sacrifice on the home front. “The war cannot be finished by sheets and pillow-cases,” she insisted, calling on her countrywomen to throw off self-pity and commit themselves to upholding the glories of republican government. Hamilton went on to write rousing tracts after debacles like the 1862 battle at Fredericksburg, rallying the nation with cries of “Courage!” when the President’s words failed to inspire.¹⁰⁰ Annie Wittenmyer, a special agent for the Iowa Sanitary Commission, despaired of the filth and inappropriate food of army hospitals, but persevered to initiate diet kitchens that became models in both theaters of the war. Wittenmyer downplayed her influence by claiming the kitchens were just an extension of women’s traditional role in food preparation—but also insisted that she and her staff be treated as professionals. Later she established the first orphanages for children of slain soldiers. Some field workers, like Barton, found that resistance to them evaporated in the chaos of battle, when need trumped prejudice. When male nurses flinched under artillery fire at Antietam, Barton aided surgeon James Dunn with the amputations. Dunn would sing her praise: “In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.”¹⁰¹

The hardships under which civilians—men and women—labored were sometimes severe. Dix recorded that “this dreadful civil war has as a huge wild beast consumed my whole of life.” She refused all remuneration for her work. Barton too worked for free, proudly noting that “[n]o soldier has eaten harder ‘tack’ or slept on barer ground or under more malarious damps than I have within these four years.” Yet the effort also yielded valuable insights and experience. Women working directly in the field tested their courage and their capacity to endure privation in ways that had been unimaginable a few years earlier. Those serving organizations like the USSC learned to budget and raise funds, to strategize and direct operations. They also had to navigate daily relations with men who were not part of their family and find ways to deal with jealousy, sexual advances, and the male propensity to take credit for their work. Most management skills were new to them, and some unprecedented for a woman to perform. Many volunteers surprised themselves with their abilities.¹⁰²

These activities also had a way of politicizing women. Instincts about effective governance were honed, and their lack of political clout was painfully underscored. Wartime work fed the mounting frustration that female citizens had been reduced to what one group termed “legal pauperism.” In addition, it exposed many for the first time to African Americans and their plight. Clara Barton was among those whose consciousness was kindled in this regard: by war’s end she had moved from defending herself against workplace inequality to campaigning for civil liberties that would benefit women as well as freed people. Nevertheless, even when the war blurred traditional gender roles, it did not represent a revolution in the status of women, or an abrupt change in what they considered their duty as helpmates for men. Rarely did it radically change lives, though it did offer a glimpse of greater possibilities. Successful women like Mary Livermore and Jane Hoge, who shaped the Western Sanitary Commission’s work despite a male governing council, understood their position was subordinate to government officials, surgeons, and board members, and found ways to accommodate to that reality. Only a few truly broke the shackles to pursue careers in medicine or philanthropy.¹⁰³

Among the large lessons these trailblazers learned was that whatever their achievements, they could not necessarily count on public appreciation. Many Unionists hesitated to recognize the contribution women made to their cause, including President Lincoln. He occasionally praised Sanitary Commission efforts and individual civilian sacrifice, but the words came sporadically and often seemed halfhearted. In the early days of the war, Lincoln sanctioned both Dix and the USSC, but he quickly adopted the War Department’s skepticism, disparaging what he called the “sentimental department of the army,” and accusing commission members of trying to “run the machine.” Thereafter, Lincoln kept his distance. His meetings with dedicated women like Livermore were not—as previously noted—calculated to encourage their zeal. Barton, Swisshelm, Josephine Griffings, and other “angels” he declined to meet at all. Dix also seems to have had little access to the White House—the only direct evidence of her being consulted was when the President wanted to procure a caregiver for his wife and Tad after Willie’s tragic death. Lincoln was friendly to the nurse Dix sent, but she was, after all, taking responsibility for his family. In most cases, he delegated meetings with benevolent ladies to other officials.¹⁰⁴

Lincoln also shied away from participating in commission activities and charitable events, and from publicly praising women. He sent a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to auction at the female-organized Western Sanitary Fair but only when prodded by male friends. It was a fine contribution, but the gesture soured when he declined to acknowledge either the organizers or the $550,000 they had raised for his army. The President took note when the clergyman Edward Everett, a former secretary of state, gave a handsome accolade to women in the address he made alongside Lincoln at Gettysburg in November 1863. He later read Everett’s tribute to a delegation of war workers. But his own words of praise came more slowly and with less certainty. Compare remarks given a few months later by former president Millard Fillmore and Lincoln, at two fund-raising fairs held on the same day. Fillmore beamed brightly about the “noble and praiseworthy exertions” of the ladies, commending Dix’s leadership, and concluding, “I can truly say that I am proud of my countrywomen for what they have done, and for what they are doing to mitigate the evils of war.” At a parallel event Lincoln refused to speak until an embarrassing drumbeat of applause forced him onstage; he then chastised the organizers for practicing “a little fraud” by asking him to address the crowd. Fearing he “might do both himself and the nation harm” by speaking, he said only that he hoped the affair would be a success.¹⁰⁵

That event may have jolted the President into realizing that the ladies’ contribution had grown far beyond a few socks knitted by loving hands to a multimillion-dollar effort, with national attention and the backing of leading citizens. In any case, he appeared more appreciative when pressed to speak at the fair’s closing. “I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women,” he remarked, “but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of woman were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war.” He might have done well to repeat these gracious comments on later occasions. Instead he generally chose to frame women’s efforts in the terms most comfortable to him and to the prewar language of the “spheres”—that the ladies were working to “reward” the noble men who were saving the country.¹⁰⁶

Lincoln was generally more supportive of women actually employed by his administration. A small group of ladies, like Barton, had entered government offices during the 1850s, but the numbers increased greatly as wartime bureaucracies grew and men were needed at the front. Lincoln showed no signs of the discomfort with female workers his predecessor had. Women like Anna Dickinson staffed the U.S. Mint, or signed and cut the newly created greenbacks issued by the Treasury Department. Swisshelm held a post at the War Department. Others were hired in factories producing uniforms and haversacks, in post offices or arsenals, and sometimes as teachers for the newly freed slaves. They faced many of the difficulties hospital staff did. The working world was a male preserve, where men acted freely in ways not always acceptable to mixed society. These men frequently balked at the presence of women—or competition from them. Barton, who held down a job at the Patent Office while ministering to soldiers, had already experienced the “hazing” in these situations, with men lining up to spit tobacco juice on her as she entered the building or actively conspiring to undermine her credibility. Swisshelm had long supported working women, railing against “shutting her out of employments . . . [for] which she is amply qualified,” as well as unequal pay and dangerous conditions. Now she voiced irritation at men’s inability to accept female co-workers. “The idea of treating them as copyists and clerks, simply this and nothing more,” she complained, seemed “beyond the mental caliber of almost any man.”¹⁰⁷

Lincoln took the side of female workers a number of times, recognizing the need for better wages and working conditions. Just why he did this is not clear, because his administration was a highly capitalistic one. Perhaps he was influenced by the pitiable women filling his office, who so poignantly represented the catastrophe of war. Perhaps something of his reverence for labor was stirred, or his belief in the need for fair compensation. Whatever the reason, Lincoln tried to help several women find government employment when the death of male relatives left them destitute, and he sometimes intervened if a woman’s property was being unjustly requisitioned by the military. When seamstresses at the Philadelphia armory complained in 1864 that businessmen were raking immense fortunes from government contracts while their own wages had been cut, he asked Stanton to increase the salaries. It was a simple case of “equity,” wrote the President “that the laboring women in our employment, should be paid at the least as much as they were at the beginning of the war.” The seamstresses’ pay was raised by 20 percent, and Lincoln promised to run the factories at full capacity. Unfortunately, conditions did not really change, nor did the episode indicate a directed, long-term policy by the President. In 1865 sewing women in Cincinnati again protested that they were “unable to sustain life” while contractors “fattened” on their work. This time the chief executive did not defend them.¹⁰⁸ Nonetheless, he had at least given a nod to women’s right to a fair wage as well as to legitimate protest against discrimination. Perhaps the most visible support Lincoln gave to female laborers came in June 1864, after an explosion at the Washington arsenal killed twenty-one young women who were filling minié-ball cartridges. The funeral included a mile-long procession and representatives of every military branch, with Lincoln leading the cortege as chief mourner. “It was most appropriate that he should,” wrote a member of his staff, “and will be appreciated by all our citizens, particularly the humble class to which the victims belonged.” There is no record of his speaking eulogistic words; nonetheless, it was the most public tribute Lincoln would offer the women who contributed to his cause.¹⁰⁹

VII

One organization Lincoln and his wife tried actively to avoid was the Women’s National Loyal League. Founded by two of the most forward-leaning feminists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Brownell Anthony, the Loyal League was an outgrowth of their social activism—a long history of fighting for African Americans, promoting temperance, and speaking out for women’s equality. When the league was envisioned in 1863, its stated purpose was to rally greater civilian support for the Union cause. Anthony and Stanton were strongly dedicated to the war effort, and both had relatives (a son and two nephews in the Stanton family and Anthony’s brother) fighting at the front. But the Loyal League had an agenda broader than that of a patriotic ladies’ aid society. Committed feminists viewed it as a new political stage, from which they could call on Lincoln to produce clearer policies. They had resolved, said Anthony, “to make an opportunity for Woman to speak her thought on the War” and to ensure that the battle was not one of bullets and bayonets alone, but a concerted action toward universal freedom. As Stanton remarked, women who diligently sewed, bound wounds, and sent loved ones off to die deserved “an object equal to the sacrifice.”¹¹⁰

Like many feminists, Stanton and Anthony had cut their activist teeth on the abolitionist cause. They were idealists—influenced, like other reformers, by evangelical Protestant teachings that encouraged God-fearing folk to fight for a more virtuous society. When Stanton had joined Lucretia Mott and like-minded women to hold the first women’s rights conference at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, it was directly linked with the fight to overturn slavery. In their eyes there was glaring ethical inconsistency in a land devoted to liberty, yet denying freedom to four million people—and many believed women’s condition was scarcely better than the bondmen’s. “For although we have not the chains, the lash and the auction block, in their literal sense,” wrote Elizabeth Buffum Chace, one of the pioneers, “there is enough that is unjust and degrading in the condition of women, to convince us that [it] is of far wider significance to the progress of all mankind than . . . the Anti-Slavery Struggle.” The women’s movement learned well from the robust organization of the abolitionists, honing tools of careful preparation, public visibility, and newspaper publicity for their fight. Men like Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison joined the coalition, and the issues broadened from legal parity to include prison reform, educational opportunity, and sexual relations. Lincoln was in sympathy with some of these views, but he did not like the abolitionists’ inflexibility and absolutism. While the crusaders were fired by pure principle, and impatient with compromise, he advocated a practical approach, based on cautious advance. Radicals like Anthony took unyielding positions, forcing debate ever more to their side. Although the President did edge closer to emancipationist views over time, he also resented this pressure. Moreover, the zealots were broadly unpopular, especially the feminists. Lincoln evidently thought it best to keep well away from the “isms” of the reform movements.¹¹¹

What these women were testing was whether democracy had fixed limits or could be expanded to include increasingly diverse groups of people. This had been debated since the dawn of America’s experiment, with the question of race foremost among the issues. Women had tried to have their rights considered when the nation was created, but in the paternalistic spirit of the Revolutionary era it was widely believed their welfare, like children’s, was implied by benevolent male oversight. The weak, the fearful, or the reactionary had sporadically tried to put fences around republican society, limiting who could enjoy its blessings and benefit from its protections. Catholics, immigrants, free blacks, and Jews had all been shunned at one time or another. Lincoln protested this, understanding that if the democratic circle was drawn ever smaller, it could ultimately exclude the majority it was designed to serve. If the Declaration of Independence guaranteed equality, he asked, when one began making exceptions, “I would like to know . . . where it will stop?” But he too defined inclusion narrowly, never embracing the concept of a truly pluralistic society. Frederick Douglass, who came to admire Lincoln, nonetheless noted that “in his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices he was a white man,” willing to sacrifice the rights of others to protect his own clan. Lincoln’s friends agreed, describing him as bound by conservative structures and uncomfortable with change. “He loved to move on old roads,” remarked William Herndon. Lincoln’s long-term vision for Native Americans, freedmen, and women rarely extended further than the limited vista of the complacent masses.¹¹²

The feminists of his time wanted just the opposite: to test democracy’s elasticity. They hoped to stretch the sense of inclusion, so that instead of being “protected” by laws administered with paternalistic “good-will,” women played a role in forming those laws and defining national policy. They also wanted to mold public opinion, so that the war was seen as an opportunity to do more than just whip back the rebels. It was, as Stanton boldly wrote, a chance to “EDUCATE THIRTY MILLIONS OF PEOPLE INTO THE IDEA OF A TRUE REPUBLIC.” This was the golden moment, she advised, to make democratic ideals a tangible reality. “Let none stand idle spectators now,” Stanton and Anthony exclaimed; “every hour is big with destiny.”¹¹³

Recognizing the opportunity to push forward emancipation, Stanton at first decided to let feminist concerns take a backseat to abolitionist activities. She canceled a women’s rights convention scheduled for the spring of 1861, remarking that the focus should now be to crush the “slaveocracy’s power.” Anthony did not agree and resented placing suffrage and other women’s issues on hold. “I have not yet seen one good reason for the abandonment of all our meetings,” she complained, “and am, as time lengthens, more and more ashamed and sad.” But other feminists thought that with the slaves still in bondage, and the country distracted by military matters, it would look improper to push their own political agenda. “It is true, as you say, that we ‘should not forget our principles, or fail to declare them because the majority do not or cannot recognize them,’” counseled Martha Coffin Wright, “but it is useless to speak if nobody will listen.”¹¹⁴

By midwar, however, feminist leaders were convinced they could take a more visible role. They determined to hold a meeting, ostensibly to foster Northern morale and lobby for a constitutional amendment that would dismantle slavery completely. This led to the first Women’s National Loyal League convention in May 1863. The Loyal League sincerely supported the Union, but its conferences looked remarkably like earlier women’s suffrage assemblies. The same elected officers, similar resolutions, and a commitment to secure “the rights . . . of women to equal citizenship” were showcased. The meeting drew the predictable heckling from newsmen who noted the resemblance to those “funny” prewar conventions. One sarcastically quipped that the President should put these strong-viewed ladies in his cabinet, as the country “couldn’t be worse any off.” Statements from the league were quite serious, however, earnestly challenging women to “[f]orget conventionalisms; forget what the world will say, whether you are in your place or out of your place . . . looking only to suffering humanity, your own conscience, and God for approval.” League members were also critical of Lincoln’s leadership, which they thought errant. They resolved to draw up a million-signature petition supporting full emancipation, something at odds with the President’s program at the time. Under Anthony’s direction, the women did gather some four hundred thousand signatures, which they persuaded Charles Sumner to present to the Senate.¹¹⁵

The following year the league went further, approving a platform that directly confronted a number of Lincoln’s policies. It accused the administration of obscuring “light and liberality” by continuing to defend slavery in Union states like Kentucky, of underpaying female nurses, of pursuing a reconstruction policy that was lenient to slaveholders and negligent of black needs, and of failing to protect U.S. Colored Troops from outrages at rebel hands. All of this, noted their official statement, was “but added proof of its heartless character, or utter incapacity to conduct the war.” Instead of rallying women to give unconditional support to the administration, the Loyal League rejected Lincoln’s plea for “Unionism,” voting instead to back only those who waged a war to establish equality as the cornerstone of government. The league also directly advocated suffrage for all who bore arms or paid taxes, and called on women to join fully in creating the structures of a freer nation. The day was past, wrote Stanton, when women needed “permission” to enter politics, or an “invitation” to participate in their own governance. This was a deep dive into public affairs, one that alarmed even the sympathetic Sumner, who cautioned the ladies against involvement in “the strife of politics” during an election year. But the stage had been set for a major leap forward in women’s political influence. During the next months, the Women’s National Loyal League would use all the power of its pens, its allies, and its public protests to try to unseat Abraham Lincoln.¹¹⁶

With or without the league’s support, the election of 1864 was a difficult one for Lincoln. Many Americans were weary of war, sick of stalemate or outright disaster, and tired of pouring men into a directionless army. Unlike the feminists, much of the nation was skeptical about emancipation and fearful of a color-blind society. Military officers were also widely disgruntled. They formed their own caucus, called the Strong Band. This was a coalition between War Democrats and radical Republicans that worked to bring a bolder leader (they favored Benjamin Butler) into power. Lincoln was also challenged within his own party. The radical wing believed his limited political courage was retarding social progress as well as prolonging the war. Lincoln did not disdain the liberals (compared with the conservative Democrats, he said, “there could be no doubt which side we would choose”), but managing them had been a sore trial—one in which he did not always prevail. However well meaning his advocacy of compromise, attempts to be all things to all men frequently backfired, satisfying no one.¹¹⁷

Most of the complaints women had about Lincoln followed those of the radical faction. Like their male counterparts, progressive women criticized what they saw as halfway measures and short-distance vision, as well as the President’s tendency to waste time by “forever pottering about details and calculating chances.” Many saw him as a reluctant emancipator, a fear borne out by some tactless remarks Lincoln made to Sojourner Truth, who came to see him in 1864. Truth traveled far to greet the man who had freed her people, but when she thanked him, Lincoln bluntly told her that if Southerners had “behaved themselves” he would have liberated no one.¹¹⁸ In addition, those working with freed people, like Frances Dana Gage and Josephine Griffings, shared Anna Dickinson’s concern about Lincoln’s reconstruction plan. “What judgments may be reserved for this Christian nation who snatch from the womb of Chattel Slavery a Race of Immortal Beings and throw them raw and naked into the jaws of starvation and the devouring blasts of winter,” Griffings dramatically asked the President. Harriet Tubman, the “Moses” who led so many of her people out of bondage, agreed, angrily denouncing the lower pay given to U.S. Colored Troops as well as the chief executive’s apparent disregard for the ex-slaves’ welfare. She had no interest, stated Tubman, in meeting Mr. Lincoln.¹¹⁹

For her part, Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw Lincoln as “a dead weight on the people . . . at the very moment they needed a pillar of light to go before them in the wilderness.” She and Anthony also protested the administration’s “tendency to despotic rule,” through the curtailment of civil liberties. Stanton’s views were not changed by a conversation with the President in May 1864, during which he largely ignored her while telling stories to her husband. Even though she came away thinking Lincoln a “stronger & better man” than she had supposed, Stanton’s main impression was still of a “wily” politician “making capital out of the blood of the nation.” Vowing not to support him, she announced: “If Lincoln is reelected I shall immediately leave the country for the Figee Island.”¹²⁰

Outspoken as these pronouncements were, it was the Women’s National Loyal League’s actions in 1864 that were most striking. Not content with debate among themselves, they made public their disgruntlement with the administration. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others had been proud to present ceremonial banners at torchlight parades in 1860, although their role was only slightly above that of stage decorations. Now they raised critical issues on national platforms. Women like Dickinson and Swisshelm already had an audience and used their word power to persuade the public that Lincoln was not the man for the job. The war would be prolonged under the present milk-toast policies, Swisshelm argued, and the nation’s prestige would continue to fall. Dickinson’s words were so strong that she was chastised by Republicans who feared she would severely impact the vote. Nonetheless, she held firm in her anti-Lincoln campaigning throughout the summer of 1864. “I think him the vilest scoundrel in the country,” she stoutly declared, “& I would rather lose all the reputation I possess & sell apples & peanuts on the street, than say ought that would gain a vote for him.” Authors like Gail Hamilton wrote anti-administration tracts, and Anna Ella Carroll used her political expertise to help the Democrats plot Lincoln’s overthrow.¹²¹ Stanton also published bold diatribes in papers like the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, striking enough that they were reprinted around the nation. If her words pinched, she was unapologetic, asserting that women would “undoubtedly be a power in the coming Presidential campaign” and that it was their duty to speak forthrightly. An unprecedented number of people agreed with her. “Where is Anna Dickinson? Why don’t she come to the rescue of her Uncle Abraham?” cried the New Haven Courier. “The men are all quitting him—the females should stick the closer.”¹²²

But the females took a further step back. Not content with rhetoric, Anthony and Stanton began to plan a populist movement that might overturn the renomination of Lincoln. What they had in mind was a liberal convention, Stanton told Jesse Frémont, that would embody “the right of the people to bring down a presidential platform, and chose a man who in word and action has proved himself great and grand enough to stand on it.” It would be a real revolution, joined in Anthony, which would educate the people to shun candidates from the smoky back rooms and elect a leader directly. Their choice was Frémont, who still inspired them, despite the tarnished edges of his reputation.¹²³ It was a notion as idealistic as it was impractical; yet, as it happened, a good number of Republican men were also angling to put forward an alternative candidate. Editors Theodore Tilton and Horace Greeley canvassed every Republican governor in the summer of 1864, asking them candidly if they would help overturn Lincoln’s nomination. They received remarkably similar replies from each man. Lincoln was “essentially lacking in the quality of leadership” needed to direct the country, wrote one; he had “disappointed the expectations of the people and has no hold on their affections,” agreed another. But the governors would make no move to dislodge him, both for the party’s sake and because it was too late to rally around a new man. An unprecedented meeting of the radicals, called to find another candidate, came to the same conclusion. Lincoln was inadequate but inevitable, wrote Massachusetts governor John Andrew. Charles Sumner echoed his fellow Bay Stater’s words to Lydia Maria Child. He considered Lincoln’s nomination a great mistake, the senator wrote, but he was not prepared to enter into “the darkness of the Presidential contest.” Choosing Lincoln because he was the least objectionable candidate was like “self-deception,” protested the feminists, but their plan to undercut his candidacy gradually disintegrated.¹²⁴

What convinced many women to back off was the fear they might divide the electorate, pushing it into the arms of Democratic nominee George B. McClellan. Some began to give cautious support to the President, though real enthusiasm was rare. Caroline Healey Dall tried to answer Stanton’s barbed critique by stating that as flawed as Lincoln was, he was improving and she would not second-guess him. Harriet Beecher Stowe, though so distressed about the war’s direction that she was physically ill, also wrote on Lincoln’s behalf, so as not to encourage the South to further defiance. He was not “a man who could dare and do,” said Stowe, but she praised his presidential papers and allowed that he was perhaps the “safest” choice. Swisshelm also reluctantly backed off when faced with the prospect of McClellan as president. Dickinson was among the most immovable, vowing to remain a lone voice in the wilderness, until abolitionist leaders counseled her to relent or watch their program be undercut by the opposition. “I think,” Tilton candidly told Dickinson, “that if you and I should do anything . . . to divide the Union party, and so break it with defeat, giving the government to the Copperheads, we would weep over it.” Tilton would not praise Lincoln, for he did not admire him, the editor said, but neither would he desert the only acceptable party while the nation was in crisis. It was a painful personal struggle for the principled Dickinson. But the choices now were stark, and in the end she acquiesced. Carefully choosing her words, she told the public she could “support the party represented by Abraham Lincoln,” but not the man. Stanton and Anthony were the last holdouts, but they were now isolated. When Stanton tried to keep dissent alive, the reformist Gerrit Smith, himself no administration admirer, told her he wondered “how sad you will be when you shall have defeated Lincoln & elected McClellan.”¹²⁵

Disillusioned, feminists accepted Lincoln’s reelection on November 8 with resignation. “There was no enthusiasm for honest old Abe,” sourly remarked Lydia Maria Child, marveling that the public would accept this man “notwithstanding the long, long drag upon their patience and their resources.” Anna Dickinson almost immediately renewed her pointed criticism of Lincoln’s reconstruction and racial policies. Others vowed to hold Republicans to their pledges, to renew their push for an emancipation amendment, and to simply ignore the President. But if male voters had chosen to march in place, women had broken new ground with their active participation in national affairs. Stanton was proud that she had tried “to lift the nation higher & that no word or thought or prayer of ours has been without its influence.” Female activists had now moved significantly beyond “moral suasion” to hardheaded agendas, eye-catching public statements, and concrete political actions. Perhaps Lincoln took no notice, for as prolix and persistent as the feminists were, their ability to hinder him was limited while they could not vote. Yet, if the President missed the message it was too bad. For these women were doing nothing less than testing the “new birth of freedom” he himself had prescribed.¹²⁶

VIII

Clara Barton was despondent on inauguration day, March 4, 1865. She had tried again to reach the President with her proposal to locate missing men but had once more been turned away. It was all most discouraging. Barton had supported this man for so long and now he would not even meet with her, leaving her frustrated that she had “not one request granted in all this year.” She would go that evening to the inaugural ball, in a borrowed silk skirt, grandly escorted by Admiral David Farragut, but she was disenchanted with the festivities. Unwilling to force herself on a leader who ignored her work, she did not shake Lincoln’s hand. In her diary Barton flew straight to the heart of why he so offended the nation’s leading women: he failed to appreciate their contribution. “Remember that of all the anguish Our Heavenly Father calls us to endure,” she mused, “none pierces more keenly or wounds more deeply—than the sting of ingratitude—”¹²⁷

Barton’s hurt may have been salved the next day after she read the inaugural address. Unconsciously or not, Lincoln’s words recalled four years of arduous labor performed by thousands of women. The binding of wounds undertaken by Bickerdyke, Dix, and myriad others; caring for widows and orphans, pioneered by Annie Wittenmyer and the volunteers in freedmen’s camps; the “firmness in the right” that had animated women like Stowe, Truth, Dickinson, and Stanton, who had never wavered from principle, despite resistance from party men and party machines; the “charity for all” shown by Barton in treating soldiers of both sides equally; even the reliance on God, about which Elizabeth Comstock had tried to persuade a skeptical Lincoln. The President’s words never mentioned women by name or as a group, yet the power of what they had accomplished rang through the lines. He pledged to realize these goals in the future; women had been embracing them for years. Perhaps he was just oblivious—unaware that his eloquent purpose was borrowed from the “sentimental department” he had derided. Perhaps Lincoln was willfully obtuse; unable to admire what he refused to see. At best the inaugural’s fine phrasing was a sideways glance at the ladies—a backhand tribute. But it mattered not. For there they stand, seven hundred cherished words, memorializing forever the influence, aspiration, and achievement of those feisty, fussing she-devils.¹²⁸