“My dear sister,” John Dix wrote in early August. “I have failed you. We are about to adjourn, and I have been unable to secure your land.”
Dorothea read his words, his sense of failure seeping through them like blood through linen, dark and foreboding and suggesting permanence. It cannot be.
“You did your best,” Dorothea wrote in reply. She must encourage him. There would be another session. “I have learned there are always obstacles, and it is a mark of one’s character how such challenges are met, how we allow them to shape us. You can reintroduce it again in the winter session.”
She did not hear back from him by letter, but two evenings later Senator Dix and Catherine appeared at Mrs. Bride’s. “I came to tell you myself.”
“What more bad news can there be?” Dorothea spoke cheerily. “We will find the good news inside the bad.” She said he could reintroduce the bill in the winter term. It would be fine.
The sadness in his eyes caused her heart to pound. He inhaled deeply. “I am resigning from the Senate.” Dorothea gasped. “I’ve broken with the Democrats. In November I’ll be the Barnburner–Free-Soil candidate for governor of New York State.”
“Oh.” She sank onto the settee.
“There is some hope,” Catherine said as she petted Mrs. Bride’s pug. “Polk won’t run again, and the party is split between Democrats and Free-Soilers.”
“The Whigs may win, so you could then have your friend Horace Mann introduce the bill in the next term,” Dix added.
“Yes. Senator Mann. From Massachusetts. That’ll agitate the western states.” Dorothea had so wanted a Democrat—the opposition party—to sponsor and guide the bill through Congress.
Dix sat across from her, leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees. “I cannot not do this,” he said. “It’s as though my voice in the wilderness cries to me to take this risk. New York cries out for a leader. I know you know what that is like, dear sister.”
She did.
“Well, it is what it is. I wish you well in your new ambition.” She looked up at him and forced a smile. “But you will still be in the political world and run the risk of insanity yourself.”
Without the likelihood of passage of her Praying for a Grant of Land, Dorothea felt herself removed from politicking. She knew she would have to gird herself for the next battle, that she had not yet lost the war. Planning ahead, she arranged to have her rooms kept for the winter session, and she declined an invitation to spend the fall in Boston with Anne. Before he left, she spoke with Senator Mann, as Dix had suggested.
“We’ll get something introduced,” he told her. “But you must know that slavery is the issue of this time. Until it is eliminated in the new lands and forever, we face the wrath of God for our lack of justice seeking.”
“God’s wrath is not limited to slavery,” Dorothea said on the veranda of Mrs. Bride’s. “He has His eyes on all sparrows, especially those relieved of their reason.”
“I am certain you are right,” he said.
“All that has happened,” Dorothea wrote to Anne in September, “is that Oregon has been named a free territory thanks to the Free-Soil Party. Congress rejected the railroad request; did not even consider my prayer for the grant of land. Then everyone went home.”
At least they had homes to go to.
Thirty
A Change of Fortune
Dorothea donned her traveling clothes and headed to North Carolina, one of three states she had yet to survey. She also inspected almshouses along the way.
The South gave her solace. She loved the scents of magnolia and jasmine, the thick spanish moss hanging from the branches of so many trees. The beauty and orderliness of the sweeping plantations appealed to her sense of propriety, but now she felt guilty with Anne’s words about slavery still ringing in her ears.
She spent the winter at Raleigh and drafted a memorial for the legislature. Her Whig friends told her the bill would be defeated because the state was poor and lacked resources. Undaunted and encouraged by prominent North Carolinians and people of faith with personal concerns about the insane, she implemented the same strategy she used in Washington: she selected a member of the opposition party, “Miss-Dixed” him with her passion and her charm, and convinced her Whig friends and their colleagues to support him when he introduced the bill in the state senate.
The bill passed, and she allowed herself a celebratory moment with a glass of tea at the Raleigh boardinghouse in which she was staying. There, she toasted herself. How can I get these bills through the states and fail so dismally at the national level?
Brother John Dix lost his bid for governorship of New York, and James K. Polk would still be the nation’s president until March. On a positive side, Zachary Taylor, a Whig, had won the election that fall, and his vice president, Millard Fillmore, was a New Yorker. Brother Dix knew him and offered to make an introduction for Dorothea. Meanwhile, her Memorial Praying a Land Grant was still in place from the previous congressional session, having languished with the committee during the lame duck session. Yet bigger issues demanded the national attention: settling the issue of slavery in the territories, especially as people flocked to California at the news of a gold rush.
As for Dorothea, she was less concerned about the issue of slavery in California and more concerned with what was said about the future of the country in which people abandoned their homes and families and livelihoods to seek nuggets across the continent. This was just another example of how undisciplined the world was and how these future prospectors were gold crazy—or soon would be to leave everything they knew for the minuscule possibility of some measure of wealth. Couldn’t the country’s leaders see what lay ahead? The country would need asylums more than ever, because the nation seemed to be coming apart at the seams. She would discuss that with the vice president when she met him.
“I hope you don’t mind, dear lady, but my wife, Abigail, and our daughter, Abby, have heard of your work and said they would be honored to meet you. Our son is away at boarding school.”
“I’m the honored one.” Dorothea had been ushered into the living room of the vice president–elect’s residence at the Willard Hotel.
“Likewise.” Abigail had flaming red hair and sparkling green eyes, and Dorothea could see devotion in the looks exchanged between the politician and his wife. She had heard they had met while he attended a small academy. There Abigail was a teacher whom he swept away and married many years later.
“You’re a teacher,” Dorothea said.
“Indeed. I even worked after Millard was elected to office in New York. Quite the scandal, you know, to be a working wife.” She smiled and her sausage curls danced in delight. “Teaching is my first love. Well, perhaps second. Books are what I adore most. Books and music and my family. May we sit?” She directed Dorothea to a settee. The Fillmores stayed here when Congress was in session. “My ankle is a bother,” Abigail continued. “It gives me fits when I have to stand in receiving lines, so I hope you will forgive me for needing to rest.” Millard lifted her leg onto a brocaded stool and revealed a soft slipper instead of a shoe.
“I’m of an age,” Dorothea said, “where sitting is quite lovely.” She turned to Abby, a pretty young woman of about seventeen. “Will you be following in your mother’s footsteps?”
“As a teacher? No. But I love music as she does. And books.”
“We shall have her play the guitar or harp for you one day,” the vice president–elect said.
“I would very much like that.”
Dorothea took pleasure in this quiet interaction with the Fillmore family. A fire burned in the brazier as a cold wind whipped the trees outside the hotel. The family appeared to genuinely care for each other, to give as well as receive. There was a sense of home here. To simply sit and be still was a luxury she had seldom allowed herself. What cost might there be if her top stopped spinning? Yet she must take advantage of this moment. How could she not?
“Was ther
e something you wished to discuss with me of a congressional nature?”
“I don’t wish to compromise your wife and daughter’s feminine sensibilities by speaking of public matters—”
“Nonsense. Tell us what you are up to now, Miss Dix.” Abigail rubbed her hands as though before a campfire.
“Mother loves a good story,” Abby chimed in.
“There’s a bill titled Praying for a Grant of Land. It is being introduced on behalf of those who have been relieved of their reason, the epileptics, the mad, forgotten people. I have come to the conclusion that asking each financially strapped state to provide funds to establish public mental health hospitals—to remove from the terrible almshouses and appalling jails people who need instead moral treatment, not incarceration or worse—is futile and not in the best interest of all the people.” She paused. “My bill requests federal land be sold and the proceeds going into each state’s coffers for the purpose of funding such humane hospitals.”
“A national charity.” Abigail quickly discerned the intent.
Dorothea nodded. “Senator Dix introduced it, and the select committee approved it, but it has gone nowhere.”
“You know there are many pressing issues before the Congress. Will California enter the Union as a slave state? Will the other territories be free or not? Will fugitive slaves from the South be required by law to be returned as property to their owners?” Fillmore ticked off the items from an imaginary list. “Will the federal government assist in that return though it be against the morals of those who receive the escaping slaves? Should other states carved out of the Mexican accessions decide for themselves about slavery or ought there to be a wider federal policy? These are highly controversial matters, Miss Dix.” The vice president–elect raised his eyebrows. “You do understand?”
“I know. But for those desperate souls who have no one to speak for them, I must be their voice. We must be their voice, Mr. Fillmore.”
The politician sighed. “I suspect I will be presiding over a senate as cantankerous as a bull with a nose full of porcupine quills.”
“Will there be any room on your agenda for my bill?”
He was thoughtful. “It falls under the rubric of land use, Miss Dix. Land and property are the issues of note, those and the role of the states and the federal government. But please know that I am sympathetic to your cause.”
“I thought you might be.”
He nodded. “I believe it is the role of federal government to put its resources to good use for the whole nation, ‘to form a more perfect union,’ and not dribble things state by state, like a patchwork quilt.”
“And the president-elect?”
Fillmore hesitated. “He is a southern slaveholder. I doubt that the issue of the insane has come to his attention, but we will see what we can do with your bill, Miss Dix. We can work on it together, perhaps go around the president if need be.”
Dorothea knew her smile was broader than it ought to be, but she was heartened by the vice president–elect’s words. She had a champion at the highest level of government. God had given her another man of faith with whom to work.
“Meanwhile, it would please Millard and me to have you to tea each week, should your schedule permit,” Abigail offered. “We can keep up on the progress of your bill, and perhaps you will enjoy a little concert now and then.”
“I will indeed.”
She would happily sit through a young girl’s harp playing, knowing that music soothed the raging souls of the insane. She was hopeful again about her memorial. “Maybe the Senate should consider music to begin their day,” Dorothea mused. “It might reduce their cantankerousness.”
“Oh, if only that would do it,” Fillmore said. “I should encourage an executive order immediately.”
Thirty-One
Hooked
The weekly teas, which the vice president sometimes attended, nurtured a growing fondness for young Abby Fillmore, reminding Dorothea of her teaching years. She found friendship with the spirited Abigail when they discussed books, and Dorothea silenced those moments of aching envy when she watched a husband treat his wife with gentleness and admiration. If this was what marriage could be, then it was indeed an institution worth considering. They were like the Rathbones and the Channings in that way, spouses who mutually cared for each other.
Away from those idyllic moments, however, Dorothea grew impatient with still more wrangling over land during the lame duck session. March could not come fast enough for the inaugural and Millard’s—as she now thought of the vice president—impending influence on behalf of her bill.
A February drizzle threatened to keep her indoors, so she forced herself to survey prisons in the Washington area instead. She also visited acquaintances to solicit funds for books for several jails and for the almshouses she had visited before. She heard several music boxes play during her inspections, confirming that they had been distributed since her prior visits. The cacophony of tunes playing simultaneously suggested to her that she might intersperse the music boxes with kaleidoscopes. Dorothea believed these would bring ease to people, along with magic boxes that popped up to delight. She found a shop displaying inexpensive prints of flowers and landscapes. She had them framed and gave them to the jailers and the asylum superintendents to offer the promise of spring in a world stuck in winter.
Dorothea met with legislators, wrote letters, even corresponding with her brother Joseph, telling him of her current social status in the capital and her weekly meetings with the vice president’s family. She compared her life in Washington with tedious stagecoach travel, though her journey through the halls of power was not nearly as likely to bring her to her desired destination. She stayed in the city for the inaugural and spent the last days of the congressional session listening to arguments that did not advance her cause. At the end of the session, she packed her bags, hooked her glass shoe buttons tightly around her narrow ankles, and moved on to the next campaign. By her calculations, fifty of the sixty senators supported her bill. She would push it again in the next session, after things had settled down for the new administration.
Dorothea headed south again, spending nearly seven months traveling. In November 1849 she arrived in Alabama. She did her usual work, cajoling and telling stories of the needy in her gentle yet mesmerizing way. “I was almost successful here in Mobile,” she wrote to Abigail Fillmore. “But then the statehouse burned, and when the assembly reconvened, of course, they had to fund reconstruction rather than my state mental hospital.”
She next headed to Mississippi, hoping for better results. These came about in March 1850 when the state set aside fifty thousand dollars for construction of the asylum the legislature had agreed to construct two years prior. “They want to name the institution after me,” she wrote to the vice president. “But I have told them in no uncertain terms I will not allow it, and my forcefulness has prevailed.”
“I have need of you!” Horace Mann told her. He championed her bill during the present term. “What were you doing in Alabama? You have to be here, be present. You never know when something will come up that can mean the life or death of your bill.”
“All the talk has been of slavery,” Dorothea defended. “Even rumblings about secession roll across the magnolia and jasmine, though I think it much exaggerated. No one speaks of those who have lost their reason. The vice president’s kept me informed, as have you.”
“Quite.” Mann brushed the air dismissively. “You’re here now. I have arranged for you to have an office in the Library of Congress. You may use my franking privileges and those of Senator Bell to write the necessary letters to once again gain support and move the bill forward. Write to Kirkbride. Get him to get the hospital superintendents behind this.”
“That’s … quite accommodating of you, Horace. An office? I will make good use of it and your postal benefits. I’m … I apologize. I simply could not sit in the gallery each day and hold my patience. I feared I would leap up and shout out a
t the futility of so many political speeches. I had to get away and make something happen.”
“I understand.” His voice softened and he patted her gloved hand. “I’ve thought of screaming once or twice myself. But we are now trying to find a way to soothe the western and southern states that object to the land distribution arrangement in the bill. They resist the New England states receiving money from federal lands in their states. They want to keep it all. We have to forge a compromise.”
A compromise? “No! I’ve determined this is the only way to fund this! If we lower the federal minimum for land sales, there won’t be enough money for the institutions. You know the western states will want to give the money from the lowered acreage and keep the remaining for their projects that might not include the insane.”
“It would be a start, Dolly.”
“Watered-down soup lacks nutrition even if you intend to later add meat. We must begin with a full-bodied meal.”
He sighed. “See who you can persuade then.”
“I shall sit right outside the Library of Congress, and I’ll … I’ll hook them.”
The thought had just come to her. She would use the small end of her shoe buttonhook to lightly grab at the congressmen’s sleeves as they rushed to their next meeting. She would pour on her charm, let her eyes twinkle. “I’ll invite them in for a moment of their precious time, sugar.” She took on the drawl of southern women quite easily. She noticed it worked to get a gentleman’s attention, and if it didn’t, the buttonhook would.
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