First Ladies (13 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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After the first few months when Jane saw no visitors and “seem[ed] to be bowed to the earth,”
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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,
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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.
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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.”
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She appeared briefly at only one dinner (but left after starting to cough),
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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.”
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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.
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