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 h
er 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 report
ed 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.
First Ladies Page 9
