Bringing Down the Colonel

by Patricia Miller

  When voters nevertheless called for a constitutional convention in 1799, Breckinridge worked to ensure the selection of pro-slavery delegates—all but one of the delegates owned slaves—including himself, and took the lead in framing a new constitution that protected slavery in Kentucky, although he lost his bid to prevent the direct election of the governor and senators. At least one historian has argued that if the surprisingly strong but poorly organized anti-slavery forces, which included a young Henry Clay, had prevailed, “Kentucky would have been made a free state and the causes of the civil war destroyed in the germ.”

  It was the Kentucky Resolutions that Breckinridge introduced the previous year, in 1798, as a member of the state legislature that declared that acts of the federal government beyond those powers specifically designated in the Constitution were “void, and of no force.” While Breckinridge altered Thomas Jefferson’s original draft to remove the phrase “where powers are assumed which have not been delegated, a nullification of the act is the rightful remedy,” a single Kentucky Resolution of 1799 did use the term “nullification” regarding joint action by states to protest a federal act. Together, these resolutions, says the historian James Klotter, “would form a stepping-stone” to the theory of nullification that the southern states used as a “theoretical basis” for secession.

  Yet John’s son, the Reverend Robert Jefferson Breckinridge—Willie’s father—was a leading opponent of slavery in Kentucky, despite the fact that he himself owned slaves. Beginning in 1830 with a series of high-profile articles called “Hints on Slavery” in the Kentucky Reporter, Breckinridge denounced slavery and proposed the gradual emancipation of slaves in the state. “Domestic slavery cannot exist forever,” he warned. “It may terminate in various ways—but terminate it must.” He argued that the very constitution that his father had framed to protect the rights of slaveholders gave the state legislature the power to modify laws applying to unborn enslaved individuals “to allow for the gradual prospective emancipation of the descendants of female slaves.”

  Robert Breckinridge’s sentiments were so controversial they cost him his seat in the state legislature and ended his political career. He joined with Henry Clay in the Kentucky Colonization Society to promote the idea of transporting freed slaves to a colony in Africa established for that purpose; to them, this would solve the problem of free black people living among white people, which was one of the objections to ending slavery. In 1833, he emancipated eleven of his slaves and provided “considerable money and supplies” to send them to Liberia.

  Breckinridge remained prominent as an emancipationist throughout the 1830s and 1840s, as northern abolitionists looked to Kentucky as a key battleground over slavery, hoping that if it abolished slavery, even gradually, other border states would follow and tip the balance toward abolition. In 1849, when the state called a constitutional convention to address the simmering issue of slavery, Breckinridge stumped the state with Clay promoting his “Platform of Emancipation,” which called for a constitutionally mandated system of gradual, compensated emancipation. Despite a number of prominent slave owners in their ranks, the emancipationists—who were painted as tools of radical northern abolitionists by supporters of slavery—were defeated; the new constitution further codified the status of slaves as property.

  Despite his moral condemnation of slavery, Breckinridge remained a slave owner until the Fourteenth Amendment freed Kentucky’s slaves. Yet throughout the Civil War he was, according to Klotter, “a leading spokesman for the North in wartime Kentucky.” The influential clergyman publicly rallied support for Lincoln and the Union even as he disagreed bitterly with Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which he warned would only make southerners dig in and “fight harder.”

  While Robert Breckinridge believed that African Americans should be treated fairly, he adhered to a rigid racial hierarchy and never countenanced the idea of “amalgamation”—the mixing of races. He was harshly criticized by famed northern abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison as “unchristian” and promoting the “spirit of negro hatred” for his assertion that black Americans could never be fully equal to whites or integrated into society.

  It wasn’t only African Americans who Robert Breckinridge believed were inferior to native-born white Protestants. He came to national prominence in the 1830s as a vituperative anti-Catholic who helped lay the philosophical foundation for the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party, which briefly replaced the Whig Party in the mid-1850s before it evolved into the Republican Party. When he was pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church of Baltimore, a city that had a large and growing Catholic population, he cofounded the Baltimore Literary and Religious Magazine with his brother John to warn the country about the rising danger of “Papism,” an “aggressive, exclusive and intolerant” religion that he said should be “extirpate[d] … from the face of the earth.” He considered Catholics the “most degraded and brutal white population in the world.” He suggested that Protestants might need to “take arms in their hands and put down by force” the rising Catholic menace and so demonized a local Carmelite convent, which he suggested was holding women against their will, that it prompted three days of rioting, as crowds tried to storm the convent but were repelled by the city guard. Breckinridge was so convinced of what he believed to be the subversive influence of Catholics in the culture that he refused to preach in a church where an organ was used, believing it “had been for centuries one of the particular devices of the Papists to seduce mankind into attendance at their superstitious and idolatrous worship.”

  Given the Breckinridges’ conflicted views on race and slavery, perhaps it’s not surprising that Willie Breckinridge was an amalgamation himself, combining his father’s relatively progressive views on race—for a southerner of his time—with his grandfather’s belief in the primacy of states’ rights. He was never a slave owner like his father and grandfather—he was young and in debt before the war—although his wife Issa did bring one slave, a woman named Clacy, into the marriage. As Ella told it, when Clacy was twelve, Grandfather Desha “took her by the hand, led her into the house and gave her as a first present to the hour-old” Issa. Clacy stayed with the family after the war as a servant, largely running the household for the frail Issa, to whom she remained devoted. “She bossed everyone in the place,” remembered Ella, “except Grandma [Desha].”

  If anything, Issa Breckinridge was a more enthusiastic Confederate than her husband. She “almost despised” her Unionist father-in-law, Robert, according to the Breckinridge biographer Klotter, and wasn’t subtle about it. When she asked President Lincoln for a pass through Union lines to visit Willie during the war, he wrote back and told her she could have it only if Rev. Breckinridge “sees fit to ask it in writing.” She refused to ask Robert and got her pass only when Willie asked a general friend to intercede. Eventually she found Kentucky under Yankee domination so unbearable that she decamped to Canada with other prominent Confederate wives, leaving young Ella with her parents. Willie “accepted the verdict of the Confederate failure,” as Nisba put it, and reconciled with his father as soon as he came home, but Issa refused to make peace. She shunned the elderly Robert and wouldn’t let him meet his grandchildren until after Desha was born in 1867.

  For his part, Willie lost his very first election when he ran for district attorney in 1868 because he supported allowing African Americans to testify in court. “I am aware that this avowal will most likely defeat me in this canvass,” he told one audience, and chided them for letting “prejudices blind your judgment.” But while he believed in basic civil rights for African Americans, and helped several up-and-coming young African American attorneys with their law careers, he didn’t believe the federal government had the power to intercede to ensure those rights. Politically, he had followed his cousin John Cabell Breckinridge, who caused much consternation when in 1849 he diverged from the family’s Whig leanings to become a free-trade, anti-monopoly “loco-foco” Democrat and eventually embraced the t
heory of nullification regarding the primacy of states’ rights that could be traced to John Breckinridge.

  By way of making sense of the contradictions in her father’s life, Nisba would later say that “he was always for fair play” and he especially “favored the development of educational facilities for women and negroes.” So it was in early September 1884 that Willie Breckinridge accompanied Nisba north to Wellesley College. No sooner had they arrived at College Hall to register Nisba for classes when they saw a “handsomely dressed couple of the negro race with an attractive daughter likewise approach the door.” One of the other parents turned to Willie and said, “Well, Colonel, maybe you won’t like to have Nisba here after all.” Willie appeared nonplussed. “She got on all right with the boys; I think she will get on all right with the colored,” he said. In private, he wrote to Nisba that she should view the situation as “temporary” and treat it with “forbearance.” Her mother told her that it was “hard for people raised with our prejudices to ever treat them as equals,” but said that she trusted Nisba to “treat them properly.” Issa was relieved, however, when Nisba wrote that she saw “nothing of the colored girls.”

  Willie and Issa were at a crossroads that fall, though it’s not clear if either of them knew it. The marriage had always had its strains. Issa was a “proud, even haughty woman,” notes Klotter, and this, plus her treatment of her father-in-law, Robert, had caused friction in their marriage, as did their strained financial situation. Breckinridge was away from home frequently, traveling most of the week between various circuit courts. The winter before Nisba left for Wellesley, he had announced his candidacy for the seat in the famed “Ashland” Seventh Congressional District vacated by Joe Blackburn’s election to the Senate, so the spring had been filled with campaigning. When he was home, there was often friction, especially over Ella, whom he found disrespectful, and he frequently felt “uncomfortable at their house,” says Klotter.

  Given that no additional Breckinridge children were born after 1875, when Issa was only thirty-two, and her long bedridden bouts and marked frailty—which some southern women cultivated to avoid childbearing—it’s likely that sexual intimacy between the couple had ceased, or at least become extremely limited. Issa hinted at the growing estrangement between them in a letter she sent to Willie that fall of 1884: “I have loved you Willie—twenty-four years—loved you at first with the love of a whole heart.” But, she said, “I [fear I] will grow less lovable—more cold in manners as I grow older.”

  Now, Willie was losing Nisba, his favorite child, who had been the companion to him that in some ways his wife never was. “You know you are your father’s idol,” Issa wrote to Nisba after she left for school. Issa seemed contemplative, telling her daughter to make the most of the opportunity she had been given, and noting how “the days, weeks & months fly—years,” as if she was assessing her own life and its disappointments. Willie seemed resigned to the loss. “I know it is inevitable that you will drift away from me,” he told Nisba.

  Just a month before he took Nisba to Wellesley, Breckinridge was at another college with another young woman very close in age to his daughter. Maybe she seemed much like Nisba, a mix of naïveté and an intelligence beyond her years; maybe she reminded him of his first wife, Lucretia, who, he told her, was his great love. Who knows what calculus of longing and loss was making itself felt that August in Cincinnati, of promises made that couldn’t be kept. Within months Willie Breckinridge would be elected to Congress, and his life would change forever. In some ways, it already had.

  9

  The Needle, the School Room, and the Store

  After a brief bout of homesickness, Nisba conquered Wellesley. It was paradise for her, with an all-woman faculty and challenging classes; it made women think they could be whatever they wanted. With a mind that one friend likened to “quicksilver—ever active, amazingly fluid,” Nisba took the top rank in all her classes. She was “the most brilliant student in the class … no one else grasped the essentials of a subject so quickly as she or expressed herself with as much clarity and accuracy,” said her classmate May Estelle Cook. With the whiff of Bluegrass glamour that trailed in her wake, she immediately stood out from her classmates from New York and New England and Ohio. They found her southern accent charming and reveled in her “keen Southern wit.” She also had, said Cook, “an ease and grace of manner which was a revelation to most of her college mates.” Nisba’s appearance also was distinctive, with her “slender face with fine aristocratic features, her wonderful dark eyes that emphasized her pallor, her crown of dark hair” piled atop her head. When Nisba was elected president of the freshman class, it was confirmation that the reluctant southern belle had blossomed in northern climes.

  Her father was thrilled with her success. “We hear pleasant and sweet things of you—of your beauty … your brains,” he wrote. And, as if something else was on his mind, he praised her for being “dutiful” and “pure” and told her not to be “selfish in the gratification of your desires.”

  Nisba’s time at Wellesley sped by. She was elected class president two more times, and the academic accolades continued. In her spare time, she attended lectures, taught Sunday school, and delighted in sleigh rides in the New England winters. Her parochial southern world broadened. She went from a girl who told her mother “my own food I could not swallow” when she was seated at a table with the African American guests of the college president to someone who successfully stood up for a black student named Ella Smith when some of her classmates tried to keep Smith from inviting black guests to the junior prom. She said the experience helped her work through “the problem of racial relationships” and presaged a divergence from her family on issues of race. Nisba also got her first exposure to feminist ideas and wrote home to her mother about wanting to wear the new, looser styles of a working girl, no more “heavy dresses and things tight about the waist.” Above all else, she wrote, “I ache to get out and work.”

  As college drew to a close, the question of what she would do weighed heavily on Nisba. She wasn’t alone in her dilemma. “The great contradiction in the revolution in woman’s higher education was that it prepared the first college graduates for a world of opportunity that did not really exist,” notes the historian Ellen Fitzpatrick, as there were virtually no professions open to women. Nisba excelled at math, and Willie had counseled her in her freshman year to make a career in the sciences, telling her that “in chemistry, botany and such sciences there is a great field of profitable and honorable work for women.” The botanist Carrie Harrison recently had gained prominence as the assistant curator of the Smithsonian’s National Herbarium, and Breckinridge clearly saw an opportunity for his daughter to make a respectable career in the sciences working for a government agency or a university. Such work, he told her, was “less onerous and more attractive than the needle, the school room and the store.” These jobs—sewing, teaching, and, more recently, clerking in stores—had defined women’s work for generations. And now Nisba had a chance to break free from this dreary trinity.

  But science held no appeal for Nisba. She felt the family pull toward public service and involvement in the affairs of the nation. She wanted to do what her father had done and her great-grandfather and countless cousins and uncles: become a lawyer. The path forward, however, was largely unpaved. It was at the time one of the hardest professions for women to crack. The 1890 U.S. census would find precisely 208 women lawyers in the United States (as well as 124 women engineers, 39 women chemists, and 22 women architects). Even becoming a doctor was easier, thanks to the proliferation of schools of osteopathic and homeopathic medicine that were happy to admit women. There were just over 4,500 women physicians at the time, although few were MDs.

  The first woman to graduate from law school was Ada Kepley in 1870. Twenty years later, as Nisba was preparing to graduate from college, only a handful of law schools admitted women. It was the state bar associations, however, that proved the biggest hurdle. Many
states restricted admission to the bar to white males, and even in states without statutory prohibitions, judges scoffed at the idea that women could practice law, so refused to admit them to the bar. Many held that women didn’t have the intellectual capacity for law, while others expressed fear that women would use their “feminine wiles” to influence juries. Married women were told they couldn’t be admitted to the bar because under the doctrine of coverture their legal rights had been folded into those of their husbands, so they had no legal person with which to represent clients.

  When Myra Bradwell passed the Illinois bar exam in 1869 with high honors, the judge who needed to certify her admission to the bar refused to do so. An appeals court turned down her challenge, saying that women “were designed by God for domestic responsibilities.” Bradwell fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which also ruled against her, saying the idea that a woman could have a career independent from her husband was repugnant and that women’s “natural and proper timidity and delicacy” made them unfit for civil life. Many judges argued that barring women from the practice of law was for their own protection. One judge who said that women shouldn’t be allowed to “mix professionally with all the nastiness of the world” that found its way into courts apparently saw no irony that the cases he mentioned as being unfit for women’s delicate sensibilities—“sodomy, incest, rape, seduction, fornication, adultery, pregnancy, bastardy, illegitimacy, prostitution, lascivious cohabitation, abortion, infanticide”—usually involved women.