ANDREW JACKSON’S INAUGURATION IN 1829 signaled a new mood in the country—one that would affect presidents’ wives for decades to come. Crowds converged on the capital from all over the eastern seaboard, arriving in carriages and carts, wearing silk and homespun. Never one to disappoint crowds, the tall, white-haired war hero gave his speech, took the prescribed oath, kissed the Bible, and then in an immensely popular gesture bent in a low bow to the people. Word immediately went out that the President’s House was now the People’s House and open to all without distinction. Thousands headed towards it.
No precautions had been taken to protect the mansion’s furnishings, but the unexpectedly large crowd would have rendered such measures ineffective anyway. Glasses shattered and furniture broke as the hungry and curious surged towards tables where food, prepared for hundreds, proved insufficient. People filled their pockets as well as their stomachs. When the president was nearly crushed, one Jackson admirer and staunch defender of “people’s rule” decided this was going too far: “Ladies and gentlemen only had been expected at this Levée,” Margaret Bayard Smith, a newspaper editor’s wife, wrote, “not the people en masse…. Of all tyrants, they are the most ferocious, cruel and despotic.”1
Margaret Bayard Smith rebelled against much more than the results of a single election. The 1820s and 1830s introduced changes that eventually altered the entire process by which Americans advanced to the top of the political ladder. Instead of looking to a small party caucus for nomination, anyone hoping to be president had to appeal to a convention of delegates, many of whom were strangers. Most states gradually changed the qualifications for voting so that all adult white males—rather than just property owners—had the suffrage. Old traditions of deference to the rich and the well educated weakened, paving the way for new ideas about who was qualified for high office.
Historians at first emphasized the democratic flavor of the changes and argued that the common man acquired great power, but later scholars concluded that candidates for high political office still came from wealthy backgrounds no matter how humbly they presented themselves.2 Andrew Jackson, so frequently touted as defender and symbol of the common man, possessed enormous personal wealth, and most of the nineteenth-century presidents who claimed to have been born in log cabins actually came from much more prosperous beginnings.
Yet for all the shifting interpretations in American history, the fact remains that presidential styles changed after 1829 so that new importance was put on appearing “natural” rather than “cultured,” and “good” rather than “learned.” Heroes seemed to come from the ranks of the common folk rather than from the obvious elite. John Calhoun had commented in 1817 that the quality of congressmen had declined, a change he attributed to low salaries. Although that may have played some part, the addition of new western states was also relevant since frontier areas frequently elected representatives who had little formal education and even less regard for fixed class differences. Robert J. Hubbard, a congressman from upstate New York, reported with some shock to his wife in 1817 that his colleagues sat through legislative debates with their hats on, removing them only when they addressed the Speaker.3
Much more important than changes in etiquette, the new style in politics altered voters’ ideas about who merited consideration for election to the highest office in the land. After 1829, presidents more frequently owed their elevation to military victories or to mundane political apprenticeships than to diplomatic service abroad or to years of leadership as statesmen. Their wives came to “the head of female society” with entirely different experiences from their predecessors. These later women had not had the opportunity to develop Elizabeth Monroe’s familiarity with French philosophers or Louisa Adams’s habit of sprinkling letters with Latin phrases. Nor had they had the pleasure, or pain, of having been presented at the Court of St. James as had Abigail Adams. Many had not ventured far from the town where they were born until they journeyed to Washington.
Thus, presidents’ wives after 1829 lacked some of their predecessors’ training in etiquette, a lack deemed important by a segment of the Washington population that had taken upon itself the responsibility of formulating and enforcing rigid rules of protocol and style. Called the “cave dwellers,” because of their long and continued residence in Washington while elected officials and their families came and went like “a kaleidoscope that changed every four years,”4 the locals did not shrink from claiming prerogatives. Sarah Pryor, wife of a southern congressman and newspaper editor, explained how the “cave dwellers” held themselves apart, separate from the “floating population” of transients, reigning as a “fine society of old residents who never bent the knee to Baal … sufficient to itself, never seeking the new, while accepting it occasionally with discretion, reservations and much discriminating care.”5 Presidents’ wives always counted among the “floaters,” up for critical judgment by the entrenched jury.6
In the middle four decades of the nineteenth century, presidents’ wives frequently chose to abdicate their public roles rather than risk the censure of the “cave dwellers.” Most First Ladies moved to Washington when their husbands were inaugurated, but they delegated responsibility for official entertaining to someone else. From 1829 to 1869, it is the exceptional First Lady who carves out for herself a public role. In the entire time, only Sarah Polk (1845–1849) and Mary Todd Lincoln (1861–1865) achieved any kind of public recognition. The other administrations had stand-in chatelaines in charge at the President’s House.
Three presidents in the forty-year span had no choice but to rely on substitutes. Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren were both widowers and James Buchanan never married. While they could have followed Thomas Jefferson’s example and relied on the wife of a cabinet member or on some other mature woman for official hostessing, each chose, instead, a niece or daughter-in-law, all less than thirty years of age. The other nine presidents in this period did have wives but six of these women (Anna Harrison, Letitia Tyler, Margaret Taylor, Abigail Fillmore, Jane Pierce, and Eliza Johnson) pled poor health or grief and escaped performing the tasks that had come to be seen as traditional for a president’s wife. They turned to daughters or daughters-in-law to serve in their stead. Elizabeth Monroe (1817–1825) had taken a similar course, but what had been an exception during the first few administrations became a pattern now. The long reign of substitutes can hardly be explained away as mere coincidence.
Even the spirited Rachel Jackson, who died while preparing to move to Washington, made arrangements for her niece to take over as White House hostess. Earlier brushes with the “cave dwellers” had soured Rachel on the capital, and she made no secret of her distaste for returning to live there. When word reached her of Andrew’s victory in the 1828 election, she had explained, “I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my Lord than live in that palace in Washington.”7 “For Mr. Jackson’s sake, I am glad, for my own part, I never wished it.”8
Staying in Tennessee and not going near Washington would have been Rachel’s preference, but she changed her mind after one of her husband’s supporters informed her that everyone was watching to see what she did. John Eaton, who later became Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war, wrote that if she failed to arrive she would not only disappoint her friends but also allow her “persecutors” to “chuckle” that they had scared her into staying away.9 Whether unwilling to disappoint her fans or stubborn about facing down her critics, Rachel started packing and called in friends to help update her wardrobe. She understood she would have to face the same old charges once again.
Rachel’s difficulties had begun many years before when she was just a teenager with more than her share of admirers around Harrodsburg, Kentucky. Described by a contemporary as of “medium height, [with a] beautifully moulded form, full red lips rippling with smiles and dimples,”10 she could ride a horse as well as anyone her age, tell the best stories, and dance the fastest.11 Among those who noticed her was Lewis Robards, and when she was eighteen, he married her. The couple went to live with his mother, who reigned as a kind of frontier aristocrat in that part of Kentucky. The elder Mrs. Robards got along well enough with Rachel but Lewis found fault with her every move. Abusive and jealous of even the slightest attention given her by other men, he soon sent her back to her mother. Attempts to patch up the marriage failed, and Rachel resolved to put as much distance as possible between herself and her husband. Neighbors said she feared bodily harm.
On her trip down the Mississippi to stay with relatives, Rachel had the company of two men—an elderly family friend and young Andrew Jackson, a boarder at her mother’s and an open admirer of the daughter. After settling her in Natchez, Andrew returned to Nashville but before long was back at her side. Believing that Lewis Robards had secured a divorce, as he had announced he would do, Rachel and Andrew were married in August 1791.
The young couple had anticipated Robards by some years; after obtaining permission from the Virginia legislature to end his marriage, he had failed to follow through. Whether from simple negligence or from other, more sinister motives, Robards waited three years and then asked for a divorce on the grounds that his wife was then living with another man. As soon as they heard what had happened, the Jacksons promptly remarried, but their mistake furnished their enemies with ammunition for years.
Such legal snags occurred frequently on the frontier and Rachel seems to have troubled herself very little about this one, but Andrew kept his dueling pistols oiled for thirty-seven years. His widowed mother had advised him as a youth not to expect law courts to protect him when words were at issue but to “settle them cases yourself.”12 He may well have smarted from the charge that a gentleman would have verified his bride’s divorce before marrying her; but whatever his reasons, his readiness to fight kept the subject alive long after gossip about it might have died out. In the process of defending his wife’s reputation, he invited many quarrels and received a bullet which he carried in his shoulder for twenty years.13
Rachel’s divorce was more than two decades old when she first accompanied Andrew to Washington in 1815 to celebrate his military victory at New Orleans. The Jackson marriage, although childless, appeared to be a happy one. That the capital gave Rachel such a cool welcome suggests that more than propriety was at issue. Her far bigger sin was her lack of both sophistication and education. As one social arbiter put it, “Mrs. Jackson is … totally uninformed in mind and manners,” adding gratuitously, “although extremely civil in her way.”14
Money was not the issue. Rachel’s parents were of some means, and her father, John Donelson, had served several terms in the Virginia House of Burgesses. But Rachel was a child of the frontier. One of eleven children, she had moved with her family from western Virginia to Tennessee and then to Kentucky, where schools were scarce. Nobody claimed her husband had benefited from much education but he had acquitted himself on the battlefield, an opportunity his wife never had. The same qualities of naturalness and strength that had contributed to his immense popularity and had provided his nickname, “Old Hickory,” became in his wife grounds for ridicule and exclusion. Women, especially the mature ones, were expected to represent culture, etiquette, and sophistication—not unstudied naturalness.
In no way did Rachel Jackson approach the accepted model of femininity. Nearing fifty by the time she made her first trip out of the Kentucky-Tennessee area, she had become set in her country ways. Tanned, leathery skin had replaced the creamy complexion of her youth. She preferred to ride a horse rather than sit in a carriage, and she cared little for fashions and cosmetics. Outside her family and friends, the Presbyterian church constituted her one interest, and a quiet evening at home smoking a pipe with Andrew remained her idea of a good time.
Rachel Jackson’s additional transgression against prevailing standards of femininity was her stoutness. A miniature painted of her about 1815 shows a plump woman with dark curls under a lacy cap. Her eyes are placid and resigned rather than sharp or alert. She was, one observer noted, “fat, forty, but not fair.”15 Her girth had already provided a source of amusement in New Orleans, where Rachel had gone to help her husband celebrate his military victory. She had been dazzled by the sights of the city, but the local women had exhibited less enthusiasm for her and they had revived an old French saying to describe her: “She shows how far the skin can be stretched.”16 A cartoon made the rounds of New Orleans: it depicted Rachel being laced, without complete success, into a fashionably small-waisted dress. When she danced with Andrew, someone present described her as “a short, fat dumpling bobbing” opposite him.17
Hardly oblivious to the insults, Rachel preferred staying home. She reluctantly accompanied Andrew to Florida where he served as governor, but she caused him to turn down a subsequent appointment as ambassador to Mexico when she refused to go. Although she would have gladly confined herself to their Hermitage plantation the rest of her life, she braced herself for Washington and made her way there again in 1824 when Andrew took his Senate seat amid speculation that he stood next in line for the presidency.
At first, Rachel Jackson tried to keep to herself in the capital and, except for church twice a week, rarely left her rooms at Gadsby’s Hotel. But on January 8, 1825, a party honoring her husband required her attendance. The hostess did little to make Rachel feel comfortable and the party became an ordeal for her. The other guests singled her out as “stout, vulgar, illiterate” and according to one who was present, they made “many repetitions of her ungrammatical speeches … the favorite form of spite.”18 Andrew Jackson later confessed that he had no idea his enemies would stoop so low as to treat “a woman in her declining years … [with such] wickedness.”19
By the time of the 1828 presidential campaign, Rachel’s fitness to occupy a conspicuous place had become a political issue. A North Carolina paper, admittedly hostile to Andrew Jackson, advised voters to consider carefully the wisdom of putting Rachel “at the head of the female society of the United States.”20 When rumors about her character multiplied, the Jackson camp sent out investigators to line up supporting evidence for its version of the divorce. Rachel understood that the attacks on her were politically motivated, but that hardly eased her discomfort. “The enemys of the Genls have dipt their arrows in wormwood and gall and sped them at me,” she wrote, adding in her curious spelling, “thay had no rite to do [it].”21
Rachel Jackson died of a heart attack in December 1828, before her husband’s inauguration in March. At sixty-one, she was older than any previous president’s wife. Her decision just before her death to ask her niece, Emily Donelson, to substitute for her might have been based on her own failing health.
But that explanation fails to suffice when it becomes clear that Emily Donelson is only the beginning of a long list of youthful chatelaines. After Emily’s untimely death at twenty-eight, another Jackson niece came from Tennessee to take her place; and in the subsequent administration, Angelica Van Buren, wife of Martin’s son, played a similar role. She was followed by Jane Harrison (daughter-in-law of William), Priscilla Tyler (daughter-in-law of John), Bettie Bliss (daughter of Zachary Taylor), Mary Abigail Fillmore (daughter of Millard), Harriet Lane (niece of James Buchanan), and Martha Patterson (daughter of Andrew Johnson). They presented a stark contrast to the earlier White House chatelaines. All were sweet, young models of girlish innocence, and they fit well the mood of a nation that expected little more of prominent women than cheerful acquiescence.
Respect for age and experience had begun to fall away in America between 1790 and 1820. According to the historian David Hackett Fischer, men felt the effects of the emphasis on youth more than women did. In his book, Growing Old in America, Fischer dated the change before the advent of both industrialization and urbanization. Towns changed seating arrangements in the late eighteenth century so that the oldest residents no longer automatically received the choice seats at meetings but had to compete with everybody else in bidding for places. Some state constitutions added mandatory retirement ages so that officeholders, especially judges, had to step down at a prescribed age rather than serve for life as had been the practice. John Adams, for one, thought the age limitations despicable and fumed to Thomas Jefferson that he could “never forgive New York, Connecticut, or Maine for turning out venerable men.”22
The new respect for youth enticed people to shave a few years off their real ages. “Rounding off” became common so that forty-five often translated into “early forties” and moving from the one decade to the next involved special reluctance. The temptation to remain thirty-nine rather than celebrate a fortieth birthday proved particularly irresistible.23
Concurrent developments in fashion reinforced the advantages of youth. The white wigs and powdered hair, favored by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, disappeared. Knee breeches, which had flattered the older man by exposing his legs, often the last part of the anatomy to go, gave way to leg-concealing trousers. Men’s jackets, which formerly featured a rather egg-shaped form with small shoulders and rounded middle, took on an entirely new outline which was considerably more difficult for the elderly man to wear: small-waisted with pronounced shoulders and a very straight, broad back.24 The United States did not originate the mode—France already led in clothing design—but Americans enthusiastically adopted the new styles.
Women’s fashion after 1800 also changed to feature first the straight-skirted, high-waisted line of the Empire style and then, the hoopskirt. Although it may be accurate, as David Hackett Fischer has argued, that women’s clothes all through the nineteenth century reflected the subjection of the entire sex to men, it is also true that changes after 1800 gave new importance to a youthful figure. The large posterior and sagging bodice, styles of the late eighteenth century, accommodated more comfortably a matronly figure than did the high-waisted, slim-hipped styles of the early 1800s. Women’s clothes in the early nineteenth century resembled children’s frocks: thin muslin that clung to the body and shorter skirts that revealed the white stockings and flat slippers so often associated with little children.25 The ribbons and curls of the 1820s and the hoopskirt and the simpler hairstyles of the 1830s all worked to the advantage of the young woman.
The English language also reflected a decreased respect for the elderly in the early nineteenth century. Words once flatteringly applied to older persons became pejorative or at least less complimentary. “Gaffer,” formerly a contracted, but affectionate term for “Grandfather,” changed to mean an old man deserving of contempt, and “fogy” went through a similar metamorphosis.
American writers joined in the praise of youth, and several of the transcendentalists commented bluntly on the uselessness of age. Henry David Thoreau wrote: “Age is no better, hardly so well, qualified for an instructor as youth, for it has not profited so much as it has lost. One may almost doubt if the wisest man has learned anything of absolute value by living. … Practically, the old have no very important advice to give to the young. … [The old] are only less young than they were.”26
Among the many foreigners who commented on the new admiration for youth in America was the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who connected the change to democracy.27 Others documented the existence of a youth cult but offered no explanation for its causes. Several European visitors thought the worship of youth had gotten completely out of hand, resulting in spoiled, although admittedly sometimes precocious, youngsters, but most outsiders wrote approvingly of Americans’ infatuation with youth.28
Eventually the United States earned an international reputation for being “youth conscious,” but the phenomenon began inconspicuously.29 The president’s residence, with its long string of youthful mistresses between 1829 and 1869, offers just one more example of the result.
Andrew Jackson’s niece, Emily Donelson, was, in many ways, just a younger version of her Aunt Rachel. When she married at seventeen, Emily had traveled little and boasted no superior education. But when she arrived in Washington three years later, her age evidently excused her limitations.30 Fanny Kemble, the British actress, described Emily approvingly as “a very pretty person … [with] simple and pleasant manners,” and John R. Montgomery, a lawyer from Pennsylvania, wrote his daughter that he had found the young Emily Donelson “a very agreeable woman.”31 It is difficult to account for Emily’s popularity in the same city that had so castigated her aunt, except by pointing to her youth. The very same adjectives (“sweet,” “simple,” “pleasant”), that had been directed at Rachel in sarcasm, became compliments for her young niece.
Andrew Jackson relinquished the White House in March 1837 to Martin Van Buren, the New York Democrat whose nomination for vice president Andrew had carefully engineered in 1832. In one term (1833–1837), Van Buren carefully groomed himself for the top office. A widower for many years, he maintained a mostly male preserve until his son’s marriage in 1838. Then he quickly acted to install his son’s bride as his hostess. Angelica Singleton Van Buren solicited the advice of her distant relative, Dolley Madison, whose word still carried a certain weight with the capital’s social arbiters, and soon the president’s parties livened up. After the 1839 New Year’s reception, the Boston Post raved: “[Angelica Van Buren is a] lady of rare accomplishments, very modest yet perfectly easy and graceful in her manners and free and vivacious in her conversation … universally admired.”32 She left behind a revealing portrait of herself. Painted by Henry Inman, it shows a smiling woman in plumed headdress, her head tilted to one side, a model of the youth and obeisance in style for women of her time.33
Other men (to be discussed later in the chapter) would win the presidency before another came to office without a wife. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan, the only bachelor president (1857–1861), continued the tradition of installing young hostesses at the President’s House by calling on his twenty-seven-year-old niece, Harriet Lane. At his inauguration, the press hailed her as the “Democratic Queen,” and in many ways she performed like a member of royalty. A United States cutter was named for her, necklines went down in response to her fashion lead, and she became the first White House occupant to be credited with having had a song dedicated to her: “Listen to the Mockingbird.”34
As a result of her popularity, Harriet was offered many gifts, which, although the president cautioned her not to accept the costly ones, she could not resist. One frequently repeated story had it that a wealthy young admirer of Harriet’s had picked up some pebbles, fashioned them into a bracelet for her, and then increased the value of his gift by adding a few diamonds. Harriet very much wanted to keep the bracelet but she realized that her uncle would object if he knew the true worth. She waited until she found him in a particularly good mood and then asked if she could keep some “pebbles” she had been given. Buchanan replied offhandedly that she could. Later, when she told the story, she would remind her listeners, “Diamonds are pebbles, you know.”35
Such stories of Harriet’s girlish innocence and her insistence on having her own way caused the president some embarrassment, but the press and the public tended to indulge the ingénue at the “head of female society.” Although campaigning for male relatives had not yet become acceptable for a “lady” in the 1850s, Harriet Lane met with an important Pennsylvania Democrat to promote her uncle’s candidacy. Her youth, and perhaps her unmarried state, evidently rendered the meeting politically acceptable, and the Pennsylvanian pronounced himself much taken with her.36 One contemporary judged Harriet the perfect combination of “deference and grace.”37
Behind the innocent charm, Harriet Lane showed evidence of considerable exposure to Washington politics and to foreign courts. Buchanan, then a United States senator from Pennsylvania, had assumed her guardianship when she was ten years old and her mother (his sister) had died. He had sent his niece to the best Washington school, and later, when he served in James Polk’s cabinet, he arranged for her to visit the White House. When he was appointed envoy to Great Britain in 1853, he took Harriet with him to London. Among her English admirers were Queen Victoria, who had accorded her the rank of minister’s wife, and an elderly, titled gentleman who proposed marriage. Harriet rejected that offer and returned to the United States with her uncle, who, after many years in public office, finally won the presidency in 1856. By then, Harriet was prepared to leave her own mark on Washington. One southern congressman’s wife saw in Harriet’s White House management the “highest degree of elegance.”38 It was sometimes said that the capital had never been gayer than in the years of Harriet Lane, even if the possibility of civil war was on many people’s minds.39
Harriet Lane was still a schoolgirl in Washington when Dolley Madison rounded out her long career as reigning social figure, but the lesson of the older woman was not lost on the younger. Harriet spared no effort in trying to complement her uncle’s political success. “[Harriet was] always courteous, always in place, silent whenever it was possible to be silent, watchful and careful,” one contemporary wrote of her in what might be considered a prescription for womanly success in the middle of the nineteenth century, and added: “She made no enemies, was betrayed into no entangling alliances and was involved in no contretemps of any kind.”40
Further evidence for a more serious side to the publicly frivolous Harriet showed up in her reaction to requests she received. People who felt they lacked representation elsewhere sometimes appealed to her for help, and her papers indicate that she tried to comply. Indians who turned to her for assistance showed their gratitude by naming many of their daughters “Harriet.”41 She intervened to get jobs for friends and she interspersed artists with politicians at White House dinners to give more importance to cultural subjects.42 Her genuine interest in art is attested to by the fact that she later provided that her own art collection, begun during the years she lived with her uncle, go to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Eventually, after funds became available in 1920 and other donations of considerably more worth were added to it, it became the basis of the National Collection of Fine Arts at the Smithsonian.43
Harriet Lane’s prominence and popularity led to rumors that she influenced the president, and according to one careful student of the correspondence between her and her uncle, people believed that he listened to her.44 Sarah Agnes Pryor, wife of a Washington newspaperman, described Harriet as her uncle’s “confidante in all matters political and personal.”45 She possessed political astuteness, Pryor noted, a trait of considerable value during the last months of the Buchanan administration when John Brown raided Harpers Ferry and war between the states seemed more likely than ever before.
In many ways, Harriet Lane is a transitional figure in the history of White House chatelaines. Although her age fits her into the string of youthful hostesses, her record indicates that she played a more substantial role. The historian Lloyd C. Taylor, Jr., singled her out as the “first of the modern First Ladies [because she] capture[d] the imagination of [her] contemporaries.”46 Indeed, her remarkable popularity, her experiment with campaigning, her response to individuals who sought access to the president through her, her mixing of artists and politicians at social functions, and her use of her position to promote American art all make her sound very much like a First Lady of the twentieth century.
The fact that youthful hostesses assisted Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan might not seem remarkable since none of these men had wives and each had to seek a substitute hostess somewhere. But the number of presidents’ wives who relied on young surrogates to fulfill what had come to be considered their official responsibilities raises other questions. What explains why so many presidents’ wives between 1829 and 1869 said they were too ill to take on the role of First Lady when such an explanation is quite rare before and after that period? Beginning with Anna Harrison in 1841 and ending with Eliza Johnson in 1869, there are only two exceptions to that curious pattern of invalidism.
Jacksonian America did not initiate illness among presidents’ wives. Beginning with Martha Washington, whom George described as “scarce ever well,”47 First Ladies recorded long and serious illnesses at one time or another. Abigail Adams became so sick in the summer of 1798 that John feared she would not survive.48 Dolley Madison believed she was dying in the summer of 1805 and put herself in the care of one of Philadelphia’s most prominent physicians, a man with the unlikely name of Dr. Physick.49 Elizabeth Monroe’s poor health had been the talk of Washington for years before her husband’s retirement in 1825, when he cited the strain of politics on her. Louisa Adams’s diary and that of her husband carry ample evidence that she frequently complained she was not well.
But none of these women, with the exception of Elizabeth Monroe, used their illnesses to excuse them from virtually all official tasks. Their successors did. From the distance of more than a century and without access to their medical records, it would be folly to attempt to assess the women’s health. But the evidence extant does suggest that claims of illness easily relieved women from the responsibility of attempting tasks in which they had shown little interest.
Individuals can, of course, recover from sickness and live many more years, but Anna Harrison’s longevity is intriguing. She cited illness as her reason for not going to Washington in 1841 for the inauguration of her husband, William Henry Harrison, but she survived another twenty-four years, outliving all but two of her nine children. Sixty-five years old at the time of William’s nomination, she began the campaign enthusiastically enough, greeting the people who came to her North Bend, Ohio home to assess the candidate. Then in June of that year, one of her sons died, and she became despondent and refused to appear in public. Cincinnati newspapers began to describe her as an “invalid.”50
When word came of William’s victory, Anna had little inclination to accompany him to Washington. His friends had done him no favor by elevating him to high office, she pointed out, when he had been happy and contented in retirement. As for herself, she preferred to wait for milder weather to make the trip and sent her widowed daughter-in-law, Jane Harrison, to substitute for her in the capital. The younger woman had little opportunity beyond the inaugural festivities to establish her reputation because William Henry Harrison died one month after taking office, but contemporaries spoke approvingly, of the “attractive, young” daughter-in-law.51
Because no president had ever died in office, many people seemed to think none ever would. Congress debated what arrangements should be made for the widow, and the vice president, John Tyler, prepared to move to Washington. The entire Tyler household was thrown into confusion, but not more confusion than reigned among the Whigs who had put him on the ticket. They had chosen him for his balancing effect, not his potential as president. John Tyler was known to disagree with William Henry Harrison on just about every important issue—the question of whether or not the country should have a national bank, the ideal tariff, and how public lands should be distributed. Once John Tyler took office, the Whigs quickly abandoned him and he was dubbed the “president without a party.”52
But John Tyler brought a large, supportive family with him to Washington and carried on the tradition of youthful hostesses at the President’s House. His wife, Letitia, had suffered a stroke two years earlier and, although some evidence suggests that she had continued to oversee her large household in Virginia, she showed no inclination to participate in social life in the capital. Her actress daughter-in-law, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, twenty-five years old, appealed to a country infatuated with youth. “Here I am actually living in and what is more, presiding at the White House,” Priscilla wrote to her sister in 1841, “and I look at myself like the little old woman and exclaim ‘can this be I?’ “53
Priscilla Cooper Tyler took great pleasure entertaining at other people’s expense54 and adding to her already large circle of admirers. “I am considered ‘charmante’ by the Frenchmen, ‘lovely’ by the Americans and ‘really quite nice, you know’ by the English,” she wrote with more than a little accuracy.55 Priscilla had already made a name for herself when she toured the East Coast playing lead parts opposite her famous father, Thomas Cooper, and one French minister ridiculed a country where a woman could pass from being an actress to “what serves as a Republican throne.”56 But most of her guests thought she did her job well. John Quincy Adams, not an easy man to please, found “the courtesies of Mrs. Robert Tyler all that the most accomplished European court could have displayed,”57 and the New York True Sun reported approvingly that Priscilla made “no enemies.”58
Priscilla Cooper Tyler gave up her White House role in the spring of 1844 so that an even younger woman could take her place. In the fall of 1842, her mother-in-law, Letitia Tyler, became the first woman to die during her husband’s presidency, and eighteen months later John Tyler remarried. At fifty-five, he selected a wealthy twenty-four-year-old New Yorker, Julia Gardiner, who had taken Washington by storm when she visited there with her family. Among the many marriage proposals offered the “Rose of Long Island,” the president’s evidently took precedence and in a very small ceremony at an Episcopal church in New York City, she became his bride on June 26, 1844.
A model of youthful exuberance and energy, Julia Gardiner Tyler served less than a year as First Lady but she worked hard to leave her mark. She initiated the custom of musicians greeting the president with “Hail to the Chief,” and she engaged help to see that she received favorable publicity. The latter was an unnecessary gesture since she had always shown a knack for attracting attention. Before her marriage she had shocked her parents’ socially conscious friends by posing for a department store advertisement at a time when ladies did not lend their likenesses to any commercial announcement. The Gar-diners had whisked Julia off to Europe to save them all from further embarrassment.
Julia’s impish, impetuous nature continued to gain her attention in the White House. Some people thought her extravagant to drive four horses, “finer horses than those of the Russian minister,” and a bit self-centered when she “received [guests] seated, her large armchair on a slightly raised platform … three feathers in her hair and a long trained purple dress.”59 One woman compared Julia unfavorably to her predecessors and concluded: “Other Presidents’ wives have taken their state more easily,”60 but for the most part people indulged Julia. Her husband doted on her and the public watched approvingly one more young woman, not yet old enough to have to be serious, preside over the President’s House.
The Tylers vacated the White House in March 1845, so that the hardworking Polks could move in for four years, a time in which Sarah Polk showed herself every bit as diligent in her role as her husband did in his. No substitutes would take her place, either in the limelight of executive mansion entertaining or in the close working relationship she had with her husband. Sarah Polk represents an exception, however, to be considered in the next chapter, and with her departure from Washington in 1849 the youthful substitutes tradition reappeared.
While Letitia Tyler’s stroke and Anna Harrison’s grief may seem plausible and sufficient reason for their retiring from First Lady duties, the cases of Margaret Taylor (1849–1850), Abigail Fillmore (1850–1853), Jane Pierce (1853–1857), and Eliza Johnson (1865–1869) are less convincing. Each maintained very low visibility throughout her husband’s administration, with Margaret Taylor and Eliza Johnson so little known as to have their existences described as “mysterious.” What remains undisputed about each one of the four women is her thorough dislike of the prospect of heading up Washington social life.
Margaret Mackall Smith Taylor, wife of the twelfth president, appeared to reject fashionable city life to marry Zachary Taylor. Educated in a New York City finishing school, she had to learn frontier ways as she followed her husband from one military post to another. While he built a military reputation (including acquiring the nickname “Old Rough and Ready” that extended beyond army life), she gave birth to five daughters and then finally to a son, when she was thirty-eight. By the time the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, she was looking forward to quiet retirement on their southern plantation, but a surge of popular sentiment pushed Zachary into political office. His admission that he had never cast a ballot in his life failed to quell enthusiasm for his candidacy. After he won the presidency in 1848, Margaret resigned herself to one more assignment with him—this time to the White House.
From the beginning, Margaret Taylor refused to have any part of the capital’s social life and designated her daughter, Bettie Taylor Bliss, as her substitute. Only twenty-two years old and a recent bride, Bettie Bliss appealed to youth-conscious Washington while Margaret Taylor’s vague explanations of having “delicate health” and being an “invalid”61 sufficed as reason for her to stay upstairs at the White House and entertain her family and close friends there.62
Margaret Taylor’s low visibility prompted many rumors about her, including the charge that she lacked sophistication.63 One contemporary explained that Margaret did little more than knit in her room and smoke her pipe—a description that persisted well beyond her death in 1852. Forty years later, a writer for a popular magazine reported that Margaret had “moan[ed] to the accompaniment of her pipe,”64 and other authors continued to refer to the pipe long after it became clear that she never touched one.
Family and close friends of Margaret Taylor pointed out that she had such a strong aversion to tobacco that no one who knew her smoked in her presence. As for resorting to moaning rather than talking intelligibly, she “ably bore her share in the conversation,”65 according to guests who were present. Margaret’s grandson, whom she raised, described her as a “strict disciplinarian … intolerant of the slightest breach of good manners.”66
The Taylor administration ended abruptly in July 1850, when the president suddenly took sick and died. Margaret did not attend her husband’s state funeral, such ordeals then considered beyond the capacity of widows. Two years later she died, so obscure that no likeness of her, either in painting or photograph, survives.67 Her obituary in the New York Times did not even give her full name—referring to her only as “Mrs. General Taylor.”
Abigail Fillmore, whose husband Millard Fillmore assumed the presidency at Taylor’s death, followed her predecessor’s example and turned to her eighteen-year-old daughter to substitute for her on official occasions. The daughter, Mary Abigail, had not yet had the chance to develop very clear ideas of her own, but the mother enjoyed a deserved reputation for erudition and wit. In the early years of her marriage, her large library and good conversation had made her home a gathering place for Buffalo’s literati, and an insatiable curiosity and desire to learn continued to motivate her all through her life. As an adult she taught herself French and began studying piano. Thurlow Weed, Millard’s political associate, reported that Millard always returned from business trips with books for Abigail because she was a “notable reader.”68 A Washington newspaperman described her as “tall, spare, and graceful with auburn hair, light blue eyes, a fair complexion—remarkably well informed.”69
Throughout her marriage, Abigail followed the issues related to her husband’s career and acted as a sounding board for him. She had a thorough understanding of pending legislation and could discuss knowledgeably current affairs.70 Millard’s respect for her opinions is well documented, including his admission that he never could destroy “even the little business notes she had sent him.”71 One of their friends described the great courtesy Millard always showed Abigail, “like that which a man usually bestows upon a guest,” and went on to note that he often said that he “never took any important step without [Abigail’s] counsel and advice.”72 In the spring of 1850 when he was vice president, Millard wrote to her after she had returned to Buffalo: “How lonesome this [hotel] room is in your absence. I can hardly bear to sit down. But you have scarcely been out of my mind since you left. … How I wish I could be with you!” After filling her in on the details of a Senate debate, over which he had presided, he ended the letter by outlining a political problem and then disclosing how he planned to resolve it.73
But Abigail Fillmore apparently had no interest at all in the social leadership role that went along with being the president’s wife. She preferred an evening with a book rather than meeting strangers at a party, and she recognized that the “cave dwellers” found readers dull.74 Although she attended weekly receptions and evening levées “health permitting,” she followed the lead of her contemporaries, who “wearied with formal society … embraced the opportunity … to withdraw … more and more into the domestic circle … [and leave the parties to the] young women of the court.”75
In her early fifties during her husband’s term, Abigail Fillmore was by no means an invalid (although she complained of a weak ankle that sometimes required her staying a day in bed if she had to stand for hours in a receiving line). A lively conversationalist at small dinners for family and close friends on Saturday evenings, she “never accepted any invitations whatever and this custom was so rigidly observed that none was ever sent [the Fillmores.]”76 Abigail fitted out a “cheerful room” on the second story of the White House, where her daughter “had her piano and harp … and here … surrounded by her books, spent the greater part of her time,” a family friend reported.77 Her one significant contribution as First Lady was the establishment of a White House library because she was disappointed to find that none existed.
That presidents’ wives in the middle of the nineteenth century were wary of a public role is not remarkable. It was a time of significant change in women’s lives. Industrialization took much of the work out of the home and put it in the factory, leaving wives who had supervised domestic production with less to do. The kind of operation that Martha Washington had managed at Mt. Vernon, or Abigail Adams at Quincy, was now altered or vanished. The division between women’s work and that of men became clearer, and even the women who went out each day to work the machines aspired to the leisurely life and lack of responsibility that seemed to go with being a “lady.”78
The nation was undergoing enormous geographic expansion at the same time. With just a few large acquisitions, the western boundary jumped to the Pacific Ocean by 1850. Behind the boasts about “manifest destiny” lay many problems, including how to distribute and govern the new land, how to service the people who settled there, and, most troubling of all, what role, if any, slave labor should play. The “stretch marks” of the rapid growth would prove disfiguring for decades to come, and it is not surprising that presidents’ wives kept aloof from the major debates of their time.
Invalidism provided a convenient escape, and it was not an unusual one for that time. Catharine Beecher, a New Englander of considerable energy, noted that illness seemed particularly prevalent among the better-off married women. It was the exception, she wrote, to find a healthy one among the lot. “I am not able to recall,” Beecher wrote in 1854, “in my immense circle of friends and acquaintances all over the Union so many as TEN married ladies born in this century and country, who are perfectly sound, healthy, and vigorous.”79 Foreigners underlined Beecher’s observation. The British actress Fanny Kemble judged Americans “old and faded” at twenty-five. Other visitors noted “a delicacy of complexion and appearance amounting almost to sickness.”80 Young, single American women appeared more energetic and healthy than their European cousins but they wilted after marriage into sickly matrons.
Women on both continents lacked the information to allow them to space, with any accuracy, the births of their children, so babies arrived one after the other more rapidly than the mother’s health or inclination to sacrifice personal freedom would have indicated. Hannah Van Buren, who died almost two decades before her husband became the eighth president, remains one of history’s shortest footnotes, but the small record she left points to the rigors of childbearing. Married at twenty-four, she gave birth to three (perhaps four) children in five years. Then after becoming ill, probably with tuberculosis, she gave birth to another son and died at age thirty-five.
Such experiences were becoming less common in Jacksonian America because women were having fewer children than had been the pattern and they were having their last child earlier.81 Fewer births should have improved women’s health, not worsened it. More important, it was not, Catharine Beecher and others noted, the women having the most children or performing the hardest labor who were the sickest. Middle-class and wealthy women complained the most. Poor women, compelled to go out to work to feed their families, may have concealed how they felt in order to earn, but the prevalence of illness among the economically advantaged women is striking.
Presidents’ wives, examples of more privileged women, may be particularly relevant to Catharine Beecher’s speculation that women used chronic illness to express unhappiness with the limitations on their lives.82 A woman who sensed very little control over what happened to her could retreat behind invalidism to earn some autonomy, or at the very least to avoid unpleasant obligations. Beecher had other explanations, too. She admitted women’s health would benefit if they avoided wearing tight corsets, but she stressed psychological factors, perhaps because she recognized their importance in her own life. As one of her biographers has pointed out, Beecher “consistently responded to external rebuffs by becoming unwell.”83 By retreating into illness, Beecher got a much-needed rest but, more importantly, she registered her own rebellion against contradictory signals that asked women to be both passive and strong.84
Women’s magazines underscored contradictory models for readers, encouraging them to be retiring and submissive, while at the same time working to develop their minds. Catharine Beecher advocated increasing women’s educational opportunities (because teachers were needed in the newly settled western territories), but she opposed enfranchisement as inappropriate. Abigail Powers Fillmore was about the same age as Beecher and from the same area of the country so the two women may have responded to contradictory signals in similar ways. As Millard rose from one political office to another, Abigail encountered a whole new world of ideas and action, but when he achieved the pinnacle of success, the presidency, she was left to look after seating arrangements at dinner parties. The wit and political savvy that had drawn admirers to her during Millard’s tenure in less conspicuous offices earned her few friends in Washington. “Cave dwellers” preferred the innocence and the inexperience of her teenaged daughter. It is no wonder that Abigail Fillmore relied on a weak ankle to help keep her upstairs in her library at the White House.
Nineteenth-century America encouraged women to describe themselves as sick and frail. The languishing woman, who fainted frequently, epitomized femininity. Susan Sontag, the writer and critic, has documented how thin bodies, even those emaciated by tuberculosis, became equated with creativity, wealth, and good manners.85 Although Sontag placed this development in both Western Europe and the United States, the latter took up the idea with greater zeal and applied it particularly to women. Foreign visitors frequently remarked on the great importance Americans placed on being thin. The Englishwoman Lady Isabella Bird reported in 1856: “The figures of the American ladies in youth are very sylph-like and elegant…. They are almost too slight for beauty…. Unfortunately a girl of 20 is too apt to look faded and haggard and a woman who with us would be in her bloom at 30 looks passé, wrinkled and old. It is then that the sylph-like form assumes an unpleasant angularity, suggestive of weariness and care.”86 The American fixation with slimness had its culmination in the twentieth-century maxim, attributed to various individuals, including the Baltimore-born Duchess of Windsor, “A woman cannot be too rich or too thin.”87
It would be unfair to imply that all nineteenth-century American women who complained of illness feigned pain in order to appear more feminine or escape unpleasant assignments. Many of their complaints were no doubt genuine, made even worse by the inadequate or mistaken treatment which they received. Physicians frequently concentrated on the one organ peculiar to women, the uterus, and cauterized it or applied leeches, even though an entirely different part of the body might have been the origin of the complaint.
Presidents’ wives, being such a small number of the total population, should never be thought of as a representative sample. Yet, with just a few exceptions, through the middle of the nineteenth century the women in the White House showed an amazing propensity for illness. What is perhaps more significant, the public accorded them enormous sympathy and wide latitude in refusing official responsibilities because of poor health or family tragedies.
Jane and Franklin Pierce, in the White House from 1853 to 1857, learned that such sympathy was reserved for women but denied their husbands. Just weeks before the Pierces moved into the White House, their young son, Bennie, was killed in a train accident in front of his parents’ eyes. To Jane, who had doted on Bennie, the tragedy represented retribution for her husband’s excessive political ambition—Franklin’s capturing the presidency had somehow cost her their son—and the old hatred that she had always felt for Washington and politics revived in her with such force that she could not bring herself to attend the inauguration.
Jane Pierce had a long history—her entire adult life—of citing illness as a reason for doing very little. When she had married the Democratic Congressman in 1834 her prominent New England family had objected that he came from a different political party and that his family stood well below theirs in wealth and prestige. Whatever Jane’s feelings about her husband, she never seemed to come to terms with his choice of careers. She accompanied him to Washington immediately after their marriage but begged off from the social engagements, saying she did not feel well enough to participate.88 During Franklin’s second year in Congress, Jane’s pregnancy gave her a reason to stay with relatives in Massachusetts. When that son died, three days after birth in February 1836, Jane withdrew more and more from any kind of public role.89 She insisted that Franklin sell their house in Hillsborough, another town she did not care for, while she remained in Lowell and submitted to leeching, the currently popular medical treatment.90
When Franklin Pierce’s political reputation grew and he won election to the United States Senate, Jane reluctantly returned to Washington, but she made no attempt to hide her displeasure with the capital and rarely ventured out of the boardinghouse where they lived.91 After giving birth to two more boys, one in 1839 when she was thirty-four and another in 1841, she became even more adamant in thinking that Washington would ruin her children as well as her husband. She thought the social scene encouraged Franklin to drink excessively, and she saw politics as a demeaning career that damaged the entire family. In 1842, when Franklin’s Senate term ended, Jane prevailed on him to move back to New Hampshire.92 To placate her, he refused an attorney generalship in the Polk administration, but the war with Mexico was another matter. He enlisted, achieved the status of local hero, and when the fighting ended, resumed his political career.
By 1852, when Franklin Pierce became a candidate for president, Jane’s abhorrence of everything about the capital and politics was well established. When she heard that the Democrats had nominated him, she fainted. A messenger, who brought the news to the Pierces while they were out riding in their carriage, had thought to please by pronouncing her the next “Presidentess.”93 Jane fervently prayed for her husband’s defeat because she could not bring herself to consider the alternative—his victory and her return to Washington, this time to the White House. If she had felt uncomfortable as a congressman’s wife, she would surely suffer in the considerably more conspicuous and demanding role of First Lady.
Bennie’s death in January 1853 relieved Jane Pierce of any obligation to attend her husband’s inauguration two months later, even though her family, more favorably disposed to Franklin after he had become so famous, urged her to be strong. They understood that all through her marriage she had found excuses for avoiding unpleasant tasks, and they could only hope that national prominence would help her face up to her responsibilities. One cousin explained that Jane had always been “so depressed [and] now has such bitter cause [but we hope she will not become] a source of sorrow and anxiety [to her husband] when he needs strength and consolation.”94
Although his grief may have equaled that of his wife, Franklin Pierce received little of the public sympathy offered to her. Bennie had planned to hear his father’s inaugural speech, and Franklin was achingly aware of his absence as he stood before the crowds on a cold March 4.95 The wife of a newspaper editor described Franklin Pierce as “the youngest and handsomest President we had ever elected, [but] … so sad.” When he began his speech with a reference to Bennie’s death, the audience was shocked: “The public does not tolerate the intrusion of a man’s personal joys and griefs into his official life,” Sarah Agnes Pryor observed, and some in the crowd pronounced Franklin’s move a ploy to gain sympathy while others thought it an unseemly exposé of his private life. In any case, it was unacceptable: “To keep one’s inner self in the background should be the instinct, and is surely the policy of every man and woman who aspires to popularity,” Pryor warned.96
In Franklin’s wife, however, grief was condoned and accepted as sufficient reason for avoiding official duties. Her widowed aunt stayed with her and became “virtually the lady of the White House,” according to one guest.97 The aunt shared Jane’s “seclusion [because her son’s death meant that] nothing of course will now be expected of her and wherever she is, she will be secluded from the world.”98 After the first few months when Jane saw no visitors and “seem[ed] to be bowed to the earth,”99 she appeared at some public receptions but could not throw off her grief. Washingtonians dismissed her as an invalid and pronounced the President’s House a gloomy place for the entire Pierce administration.
More than a decade would intervene between Jane Pierce’s unhappy years in the White House and the arrival of the next “invalid” chatelaine. In the meantime, Harriet Lane, niece of President Buchanan, enlivened the Washington social scene, and Mary Todd Lincoln—although she too grieved the loss of a son—refused to retreat into obscurity.
With Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, the newly inaugurated vice president, Andrew Johnson, assumed the presidency. The record of his wife, Eliza McCardle Johnson, lends credence to the theory that nineteenth-century women could easily withdraw from a public role by pleading illness or grief. In the case of a woman like Eliza, who had several reasons for not putting herself in a conspicuous role, the temptation may have proven understandably strong. Mary Lincoln had endured four years of almost unremitting criticism, and Eliza’s husband had not exactly paved the way for her to enjoy a more favorable reception.
Andrew Johnson had distinguished himself at his vice presidential inauguration on March 4, 1865, by lurching forward to take his oath and slurring the lines of a long, rambling discourse. Word spread quickly through the audience that he was drunk. Eliza had not been on hand to nurse him through a bad cold, and when on the day of the ceremony he had fortified himself with alcohol, the dose had proven too strong. Abraham Lincoln defended his running mate by volunteering that “Andy ain’t no drunkard,” but Mary Lincoln was thoroughly annoyed. When the president was shot just weeks later, Andrew’s performance was still fresh in people’s minds, and they had not forgotten it when his family came to join him in Washington in June.
The fragile, blue-eyed Eliza Johnson had other reasons for delaying her arrival in the capital. She had visited the city only once before 1865,100 but she understood how short she fell of possessing the social skill that “cave dwellers” assessed in each president’s wife. Grief and poor health sapped her energy. She had tuberculosis before the Civil War; and family tragedies, including the deaths of a son and a son-in-law, had further weakened her. Her husband’s political career had included few chances for her to develop self-confidence.
Eliza Johnson had not always lagged so far behind her husband, but like many political wives, she had watched the man she tutored outdistance her. Andrew had been a young, poorly educated tailor when she first saw him and it was partly her teaching and help that allowed him to move ahead. They had married while still in their teens, and as soon as he had mastered the three “r’s” and put his tailoring business on a prosperous route, he arranged to have himself appointed a trustee of the local academy. He was, one wag had it, a self-made man, inclined to give too much credit to his maker.101 Certainly he gave little credit to his wife. While he progressed through a string of elective offices—state representative, U.S. congressman, governor of Tennessee, and finally U.S. senator—Eliza followed the example of many other political wives by staying home and setting her sights narrowly on her family.
Unlike Mary Lincoln, who had stubbornly claimed a prominent place in the capital’s social life, Eliza Johnson insisted on remaining out of sight. Her invisibility was so complete that after four years in the capital, newspapers described her existence as “almost a myth.”102 She appeared briefly at only one dinner (but left after starting to cough),103 and her only other recorded social activity was a children’s party in December 1868, when she greeted her young guests by announcing that she was “an invalid.”104
Her invisibility should not be taken for inactivity. One report that Eliza’s influence over her husband was “boundless” no doubt exaggerated the case, but she did continue to keep remarkably informed during her life, reading many newspapers and magazines. During the White House years, she clipped articles she thought he should see, shrewdly separating the good news which she gave him at the end of each day, from the bad, which he got the next morning. One historian concluded that Andrew Johnson “may have consulted his wife and daughters more than he did any fellow statesman,” leaving it unclear how much he consulted anybody.105
Martha Johnson Patterson, who substituted for her mother at the president’s table, could rely on the country’s preference for youth to protect her from criticism. The Johnson daughter immediately disarmed potential detractors by announcing, “We are plain folks from Tennessee, called here by a national calamity. I hope not too much will be expected of us.”106 Then to lend credence to her claim, she covered the worn White House carpets with simple muslin and installed two Jersey cows on the lawn to provide fresh milk and butter. In an older woman, such decisions might have prompted ridicule or charges of bumpkin roughness, but in a younger woman, they apparently seemed refreshing. Margaret heard her sister and herself praised as assets to their father, “frank and unostentatious … [in a manner that has] gained for them the respect of all visitors.”107
In 1868, the Johnson family found themselves in the unwelcome glare of the first presidential impeachment trial in American history. The House of Representatives, in a show of their own strength and their disapproval of the president’s handling of a defeated South, had charged him with “high crimes and misdemeanors.” For three months while the Senate tried the case, people flocked to witness the proceedings as though it were a carnival show rather than a national trial. Kate Chase, whose father presided as chief justice, appeared each day to watch his performance, while others competed for tickets to see her, one of the city’s most popular young belles.
The Johnson women remained in the White House—the president’s daughters keeping up a regular social schedule and Eliza staying upstairs and out of sight.108 Each evening, a steward, delegated to attend the proceedings, reported on the day’s events. Except for that contact, the Johnsons feigned disinterest in the trial. When acquittal came (by the margin of a single vote), Eliza insisted that she had correctly predicted her husband’s vindication.
Several of the accounts of Eliza Johnson’s life raise questions about whether or not she was physically able to assume a more active public role in the White House. Her grandchildren evidently enjoyed her company, and according to one witness they ran to her room as soon as they finished their lessons—hardly evidence that she was incapacitated. Often described as fragile or frail but never uncommunicative or disabled, she remained central to the family’s life in the White House. After leaving Washington, she outlived her husband, and, when he died in 1875, she appeared healthy enough to have herself appointed his executrix under bond set at $200,000.109
Any conclusions about Eliza Johnson, however, are bound to be speculative because so little information remains. Her prospective biographer, Margaret Blanton, abandoned the project after years of work because she thought the subject impossible to know. Except for Eliza’s loyalty to her husband, which was unquestioned, nothing was clear. “In the end I did not know,” Blanton wrote, “whether she loved Andrew or hated him.”110
Blanton did not definitely conclude that Eliza Johnson withdrew behind explanations of illness to avoid unwanted social duties. But Blanton did judge the entire Johnson family “not very clever [and] put in a position to which they were unequal.”111 If that is true and Eliza remained a frontier woman, pushed by circumstances far beyond her accustomed setting, then it is not surprising that she looked for an escape. By making herself invisible for four years, she avoided criticism. The country’s acceptance of youthful substitutes provided a way out.
Illness as a permanent condition of First Ladies disappears with Eliza Johnson’s departure from Washington in 1869 (except for Ida McKinley, who came to the White House much later). Other presidents’ wives suffered serious and debilitating sicknesses but they remained inactive only temporarily. Helen Taft, after her stroke in 1909, delegated official responsibilities to her daughter and sister for much of the next year but then returned to resume a full and active role in Washington life. Florence Harding (1921–1923) and Lou Hoover (1929–1933) both suffered serious illnesses during their husbands’ administrations but kept full schedules. Betty Ford (1974–1977) underwent surgery and chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer but continued to make public appearances.
Nineteenth-century America’s tolerance—indeed, solicitous sympathy—for women’s withdrawal into illness and grief gave presidents’ wives a convenient exit from what had become onerous, often unpleasant responsibilities. No written rules dictated the activities of White House chatelaines, leaving them free to react to public attitudes as well as to express their own frustrations and needs. Women who were bored by the role of hostess that so many of their predecessors had taken had another choice. Rather than face judgment by the “cave dwellers,” they could take to their beds and install a young ingénue in their place, confident that any social lapses of the substitute would be tolerated and charged to inexperience.
Some exceptions (Sarah Polk and Mary Lincoln) broke the pattern, and they will be considered next. But for the most part, mid-nineteenth century America witnessed few mature or strong First Ladies. Youthful surrogates became a tradition because they evidently fit in with prevailing ideas about femininity—womanliness could be exemplified in obsequious, smiling mannequins who showed little evidence of thinking for themselves.