First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  Then the Grim Reaper intervened once more. One chilly February day in 1844, Tyler invited Senator David Gardiner and his daughter for a cruise on the Potomac River aboard the U.S. Navy’s new steam frigate, Princeton. The male guests went out on deck to see a demonstration of a new cannon, the Peacemaker. With a shattering roar, the big gun exploded, killing eight people, including the secretary of state, the secretary of the navy, and Julia’s father.

  Back at the Washington Navy Yard, a distraught President carried Julia ashore, almost falling into the Potomac himself when she awoke from her swoon and began struggling fitfully. Thereafter their tragedy-tinged romance progressed at a rapid tempo. In June the President slipped up to New York, eluding reporters, and married Julia in a private ceremony at the Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth Avenue.

  When the news of this May-September union got out, some newspapers were pretty ribald. A pro-Tyler paper in Washington had described the President’s departure from the capital as a vacation from his arduous duties. “We rather think the President’s arduous duties are only beginning,” chortled the New York Herald. Others made political jokes. One of Tyler’s goals was the annexation of Texas, which had won its independence in 1836 and was eager to join the American union. The Herald referred to the President’s marriage as a treaty of annexation “without the consent of the Senate.” That was not far from the truth. Along with her beauty, Julia conveyed a handsome fortune to Tyler, who was, like many Virginia landowners, frequently short of cash.

  Dolley Madison brought merriment to the White House; Julia Tyler brought zing. Impish, impulsive, flirtatious, she dazzled every politician in Washington, even congenital sourpusses like the South’s champion, John C. Calhoun, who became Tyler’s secretary of state. At one banquet, Julia reported to her mother, the captivated Calhoun spent most of the time whispering poetry “of infinite sweetness and taste” in her ear.

  Almost every day was crowded with glamour and excitement in Julia’s breathless reign as First Lady. When she was not presiding at luncheons, dinners, receptions, the new Mrs. Tyler dashed through the streets of Washington behind four snow white horses, finer than those of the city’s preeminent connoisseur of horseflesh, the Russian ambassador. When she was not driving, she was cruising on the Potomac or picnicking in the woods around Rock Creek. Strolling, she was accompanied by an Italian greyhound, the favorite pet of fashionable ladies.

  Even before she became First Lady, Julia was intensely interested in politics and had made a habit of visiting the House of Representatives to listen to the debates. There too she had worshipers, among them one of the many political bachelors of those days, a rather homely, bucktoothed character named Richard D. Davis from Saratoga County, New York. Whenever Julia appeared, he abandoned the issue of the moment and made a dash for the gallery to sit beside her. One day she appeared looking spectacularly beautiful in a huge flowered hat, which induced the panting Davis to break all previous speed records for getting to the gallery. A few minutes later, someone called for a vote on the issue under debate. When the teller got to Davis, another congressman rose and announced: “Mr. Speaker. Mr. Davis has gone to the gallery to study horticulture.”

  Julia Tyler looked-and acted-like a queen during her whirlwind occupation of the White House. Men, someone said, were so many notches in her parasol. (White House Historical Society)

  Julia also charmed the press. The Washington correspondent for the New York Herald, which was well on its way to becoming the nation’s most powerful newspaper, was so hypnotized, he volunteered himself as her press agent. He dubbed her “the Lovely Lady Presidentress” and never described her with fewer than two flattering adjectives. Among his raptures was the claim that Julia was superior to Queen Victoria and every other crowned head of Europe back to the consort of Louis XIV.

  Not content with the fabulous notices she received in the Herald, Julia assigned her older brother Alexander to pen equally lyrical accounts of her parties for other New York papers. She was not above dropping her scribes saucy notes, asking why a recent White House event had not yet been publicized. Because she married Tyler when there were only eight months left in his term, Julia knew she had no time to waste if she wanted to make her mark as First Lady.

  In the beginning, it looked as if her father’s death might pose a problem; it was customary to mourn a parent or a spouse for a full year by wearing black and eschewing any and all kinds of revelry. Julia persuaded herself and everyone else that White House entertaining was not revelry but a duty. With advice, some say, from Dolley Madison, who had returned to Washington after her husband’s death, Julia solved the mourning clothes dilemma by wearing black during the day and white, which was also acceptable, in the evening. Sometimes she combined the two colors, covering white satin or silk with black lace. Ropes of small pearls adorned her neck; on her forehead she wore a jewel cut out of black jet.

  Determined to ignore her husband’s unpopularity with the Whig half of Washington, D. C., Julia played her First Lady’s role to the hilt. When it came to entertainment, her motto was “the grand or nothing.” With lavish use of Gardiner money, she turned the White House from a “dirty establishment” (her phrase) into a shining model of contemporary good taste. In its spacious rooms she staged a succession of brilliant receptions, balls, and dinners that left staid Washington dizzy with delight.

  With delicious daring, Julia introduced the polka at White House balls. This dance was considered so racy, President Tyler had previously forbidden his daughters (several of whom were older than Julia) to perform it. But he did not so much as peep when the First Lady pranced across the East Room in the arms of one ambassador after another. The dance soon became the national rage.

  There was only one shadow on Julia’s reign—her husband’s jealousy of her long list of previous suitors. One in particular, the Supreme Court justice, still gazed wistfully at her whenever they met. One morning President Tyler refused to let her go to church because he feared the justice would be in a nearby pew with his eyes fixed on Julia instead of on the altar.

  I must confess that even I, who have gone on record in favor of every First Lady following her natural bent, was somewhat taken aback by some of Julia’s antics. She played the part of a royal consort a little too extravagantly for my down-home Missouri taste. She received her guests seated in a large armchair on a raised platform with a “court” of a half dozen or so ladies-in-waiting banked around her, all dressed in white. At times she wore a headdress of miniature gold bugles which resembled a crown. Only a President who was hopelessly in love—and knew he had no political future—would have tolerated such behavior.

  In one of those unexpected twists that unsettle political pundits, John Tyler’s embattled administration ended on a high note. When the Senate rejected the treaty of annexation he had negotiated with Texas, Tyler outfaked them. He argued that Texas could be added to the Union by a simple majority vote of both houses of Congress. Determined to get his way, the President used patronage and his not inconsiderable national following to pressure the opposition party, the Democrats, into making annexation one of the main planks of their 1844 platform. Thereupon he threw his support to the Democratic nominee, James K. Polk. When Polk defeated Henry Clay in yet another of the Kentuckian’s many attempts to become President, Congress concluded that the people had spoken and voted the Lone Star State into the Union in the final week of the Tyler administration.

  Many people think that without Julia’s magnificent entertainments in the first three months of 1845, this happy event might not have taken place. Like Louisa Adams’s ball for Andrew Jackson, Julia’s galas made Tyler look irresistibly popular, even if he lacked the support of the two major political parties. Julia began her campaign with a New Year’s Day reception that crammed two thousand people into the White House. One bemused reporter described the crush in verse:

  I beg your pardon General G

  For trampling on your toes,

  And Lady T, I did n
ot see

  My hat against your nose.

  And Holy Jesus! how they squeeze us

  To that small room where he,

  Old John, attends to greet his friends

  This New Year’s Day levee.

  A week after this dazzling display of democracy in action, Julia switched to elitism, limiting the guest list to a ball so severely, there were cries of anguished indignation echoing all over Washington. For access to this fete, guests needed to have influence on the upcoming vote on Texas. Julia also politicked relentlessly for the annexation among her legion of adoring congressmen and senators. “Last night,” she told her mother in one letter, “at least fifty members of Congress paid their respects to me.” Even after her marriage, she remained a consummate flirt. Men, one historian has remarked, were just so many notches in Julia’s parasol.

  From New York City encouraging news about Texas arrived via Julia’s brother, Alexander Gardiner. He reported that the city’s Democratic Party had passed a series of ferocious resolutions, demanding an immediate congressional vote on Texas lest the British or the Mexicans woo the Lone Star State into their grasp. Julia decided to celebrate this good news with the ultimate gala. With the help of her sister Margaret, who functioned as the first White House social secretary, two thousand invitations went out to prominent Americans up and down the eastern seaboard and into the far reaches of the West.

  An astonishing three thousand people showed up. They were somehow jammed into the bulging White House to ogle Julia and her court and a veritable roundup of other beauties she had corraled for the occasion. “We were as thick as sheep in a pen,” Margaret Gardiner said. Julia, in a white satin dress embroidered with silver, covered by a matching cape looped with white roses, was at her zenith. The Marine Band in scarlet uniforms played polkas, waltzes, cotillions. Julia and Madame Bodisco, the Russian ambassador’s equally beautiful wife, stopped the party when they joined in a cotillion with ambassadors from Austria, Russia, France, and Prussia. Eight dozen bottles of champagne were consumed, along with wine by the barrel. By the end of the evening, the huge chandeliers of the East Room had used up a thousand candles. Someone congratulated President Tyler on the sensational success of the affair. “Yes,” he quipped. “Now they cannot say I am a President without a party.”

  Less than a month later, Congress passed the annexation bill, and Tyler handed Julia the pen with which he signed it as a testament of her role in the victory. She told her mother she would always wear “suspended from my neck the immortal gold pen with which the President signed my annexation bill.” Note the personal pronoun. Julia had no doubts about who was responsible for this immense addition to the Union.

  When my father carried Texas, a crucial state in his comeback victory in 1948, I like to think “Cousin” John Tyler and Julia were looking down, smiling. There is not much doubt that they were Democrats at heart, a fact that became dramatically evident in their post-White House years.

  —

  AT FIRST GLANCE, FRANCES FOLSOM CLEVELAND SEEMS TO HAVE been little more than a latter-day Julia Gardiner Tyler. In reality, there are so many differences between them, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say the only things these two women had in common were their youth and beauty. To begin with, their husbands were as different as two men can possibly be.

  Geniality was the essence of John Tyler’s southern style. Most of the time, Grover Cleveland was about as genial as a rudely awakened grizzly bear. His temperament seemed permanently chilled by the howling blizzards that frequently bury his native city of Buffalo, New York. A thick-necked, massive man who threatened the scales with his 250-pound bulk, he made his way in politics with blunt talk and unwavering, uncompromising honesty.

  When he won the Democratic nomination for President in 1884, after a successful stint as New York’s governor, his Republican opponents promptly nailed him with a smear that would have ruined almost any other politician. The would-be President had a ten-year-old illegitimate son. Republican flacks gleefully circulated a chant: Ma, Ma, inheres my Pa? Gone to the White House ha ha ha.

  Instead of issuing irate denials, Cleveland told his aghast supporters to admit everything. He had been involved with a New Jersey widow named Halpin, who apparently was also familiar with several of his married friends. When she gave birth, Cleveland, a bachelor, accepted responsibility to save his friends from embarrassment. He had supported the child and his mother with a monthly stipend ever since. The novelty of a politician so forthrightly telling the truth enchanted the American electorate. With the help of high unemployment and some blundering Republican remarks about Irish-Catholic Democrats, Cleveland won the election, entitling his gleeful supporters to throw the Republicans’ campaign chant back in their dismayed faces.

  During his first year in the White House, the bachelor President worked eighteen hours a day to prove to the American people that they had elected the right man. For formal state dinners and occasional lighter entertaining, he enlisted his unmarried sister, Rose, as his hostess. An intellectual who taught English literature and had written a book on the novelist George Eliot, Rose was an ardent feminist who was as blunt as her brother. Male guests left the White House reeling from lectures on the oppressed state of women. Aside from the opportunity to proselytize for her sex, Rose found the White House boring and spent her time on receiving lines conjugating Greek verbs in her busy brain.

  Meanwhile, Cleveland was battling Congress over who was in charge of the country. Ever since the lawmakers almost impeached Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, the legislative branch had assumed virtually total power in Washington. But behind and beyond the raging political warfare and the President’s social isolation, romance was simmering. Again, the situation had all the ingredients of scandal. The young woman happened to be Grover Cleveland’s ward.

  Frances Folsom was the daughter of Oscar Folsom, Cleveland’s Buffalo law partner. Cleveland was so close to the Folsoms, he had bought little Frances her first baby carriage. Oscar Folsom had been killed in an accident when Frances was twelve, and Cleveland had become the administrator of his estate. The welfare of Folsom’s widow and daughter had been one of his major preoccupations ever since.

  Only a few close friends and family members realized that the relationship between Frances and the forty-eight-year-old President had slowly shifted from the paternal to the passionate. Rose Cleveland later admitted she knew her brother’s intentions even before he entered the White House. But Cleveland waited for Frances to graduate from Wells College in 1885 before formally asking her to marry him. His proposal was made by mail, but he later admitted that he had said some very romantic things to her in the East Room during a visit to the White House before he wrote the letter.

  Frances said she would marry the President, but first she wanted to tour Europe. Cleveland acquiesced, though he grew a bit grumpy over her decision to spend nine months there. Such considerations were overshadowed by his desire to forestall ugly gossip and innuendo in the press by keeping their engagement a secret until the eve of the wedding. Cleveland was painfully aware that many people considered him a coarse, lumbering oaf, “a brute with women,” as his predecessor Rutherford B. Hayes had indelicately put it during the campaign.

  Secrecy almost unraveled when Cleveland sent Frances an affectionate bon voyage telegram and the Western Union operator slipped a copy to a reporter friend. But the reporter identified the object of Cleveland’s affection as Frances’s mother! With such rumors swirling, Frances herself was not exactly discreet. In England she wrote a friend, telling her she was engaged to the President; the friend opened the letter in a room full of people and became so excited she read it aloud.

  Cleveland and his bride-to-be got a foretaste of things to come when Frances’s ship reached New York on May 27, 1886. The President went up to greet her and incidentally review the city’s Memorial Day parade. A small army of police was needed to hold back the crowds in front of Frances’s hotel. The President himse
lf was almost mobbed when he arrived to see her. But to Cleveland’s immense relief, the popular mood was vibrant with approval. His tough stance as the people’s spokesman versus a Congress dominated by special interests, his call for Congress to stop the exploitation of the working man by big business, had won him wide support and softened his rough image. The country was delighted that their forthright President had found a wife.

  At the parade, the bands saluted Cleveland with specially selected tunes, such as “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming.” Toward the end of the march, one regiment’s nervy musicmen swirled by the reviewing stand playing a song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s new operetta, The Mikado, “He’s Going to Marry Yum Yum.”

  The lucky few who attended the wedding got handwritten invitations from the President. Colonel William H. Crook, who had served as Lincoln’s personal bodyguard, described Frances’s arrival at the White House on the morning of June 2, 1886: “She tripped up the steps and swept through the great entrance like a radiant vision of young springtime… from that instant every man and woman [on the staff] was her devoted slave, and remained as such.”

  The White House was crammed with flowers from the conservatory—literally hundreds of potted plants on tables and mantels, plus ropes of fresh cut flowers draped along the moldings. At 6:30 P.M. the guests arrived, and at 7:00 every clock in the mansion began to chime, while across Washington church bells joined the chorus, and cannon in the Navy Yard roared a twenty-one-gun salute. The Marine Band, led by their eminent conductor, John Philip Sousa, struck up “The Wedding March,” and the President and his bride descended the grand staircase.

  Tall and full bosomed, Frances Folsom looked stunning in a dress of heavy corded satin, draped in almost transparent India silk, and fringed with orange blossoms. After a reception in the East Room and dinner in the State Dining Room, she and the President rode through cheering crowds to Union Station for a one-week honeymoon in Deer Park, in the mountains of western Maryland. There they soon discovered what would become the chief torment of their White House years—the prying eyes of the nation’s reporters.