The First Ladies Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Feather Schwartz Foster

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Schwartz Foster, Feather.

  The first ladies : From Martha Washington to Mamie Eisenhower, an intimate portrait of the women who shaped America / Feather Schwartz Foster.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Presidents’ spouses—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  E176.2.S37 2011

  973.09’9—dc22

  [B]

  2010041948

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  VP 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To the Ladies themselves…

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MARTHA WASHINGTON (1731–1802): The Domestic Lady W

  ABIGAIL ADAMS (1744–1818): John’s Wife

  DOLLEY MADISON (1768–1849): The Magnificent

  LOUISA ADAMS (1775–1852): The Shadow Lady

  RACHEL JACKSON (1767–1828): Her Sacred Name

  JULIA TYLER (1820–89): The Rose of Long Island

  SARAH POLK (1803–91): Sarah, Straight and Strong

  THREE RECLUSIVES AND MISS LANE

  MARY LINCOLN (1818–82): The Born Diva

  JULIA GRANT (1826–1902): Rock Solid to the Core

  LUCY HAYES (1831–89): The Old-Fashioned New Woman

  FRANCES CLEVELAND (1864–1947): A Star Is Born

  CAROLINE HARRISON (1832–92): Alias Martha Stewart

  EDITH ROOSEVELT (1861–1948): The Elegant White House

  NELLIE TAFT (1861–1943): The Wind Beneath

  ELLEN WILSON (1860–1914): The Steel Magnolia

  EDITH WILSON (1872–1961): Dragon Lady

  FLORENCE HARDING (1860–1924): Duchess

  GRACE COOLIDGE (1879–1957): Bountiful Graces

  LOU HOOVER (1874–1944): The Unsung Hero

  ELEANOR ROOSEVELT (1884–1962): The Incomparable Mrs. R

  BESS TRUMAN (1885–1982): Reluctant Lady

  MAMIE EISENHOWER (1896–1979): The Grandma Next Door

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To the docents of the dozens of presidential sites I have visited over the years, who have cheerfully put up with my zillion questions.

  My personal presidential library full of nearly two thousand volumes—far too many to list. Their authors taught me to read and write. And think.

  The staff of the Scotch Plains, New Jersey, library, where I was a fixture for years, scribbling away.

  The staff of the Williamsburg, Virginia, library, where I am currently a fixture and plan to continue to be for years to come.

  To the editors at Sourcebooks, who have been patient with me and more helpful than they realize.

  To Dr. Paul C. Nagel, who encouraged me and helped more than he could ever know.

  To Ron Pitkin, who believed in me.

  To the memory of Laura G. Haywood, who put me on the path and kept after me.

  To my dear friend Barbara Lepis, who instinctively asks the right questions.

  And finally, to my husband and daughter, who have been sharing me with a bunch of old gals for a very long time.

  MARTHA WASHINGTON

  1731–1802

  FIRST LADY: 1789–97

  The Domestic Lady W.

  It has been said that the best political decision George Washington ever made was to marry the Widow Custis. He was a Virginia militia colonel seeking a career change. Efforts for a commission in the regular British army had been consistently thwarted. Washington determined to focus his attentions on the estate he had inherited from his half brother, but in order to make his Mount Vernon plantation the envy of Fairfax County, he needed an appropriate consort. And it was time. He was twenty-six.

  Martha Dandridge Custis was the daughter of well-to-do Virginia gentry on a social and economic par with the Washingtons. Her academic education was modest. She could read, write, and do sufficient arithmetic to manage the household accounts. At seventeen, she married into the wealthy Custis family and was widowed at twenty-six, left with two small children (four and two years old), and one huge estate (more than twenty thousand fertile acres, two hundred slaves, and the scarcest commodity among land-poor planters: a substantial amount of cash). Remarriage was her best option, and Martha required a mate with sufficient property of his own, since she was understandably wary of fortune hunters. She also required someone who would be a kind stepfather and honest manager for her children’s sizable inheritance.

  Both of them made fortunate choices for a happy and successful marriage.

  Martha was the consummate colonial mistress and hostess, reasonably cultured, and superbly skilled at household management. It would fall to her to supervise the numerous slaves and cottage industries that accounted for a successful plantation. She sewed beautifully, danced the minuet gracefully, was said to set the finest table in northern Virginia. Her kitchen and recipe collection was the envy of her neighbors. She boasted a medical box with all the proper herbs and remedies the eighteenth century could provide, and she took pride and pleasure in caring for others.

  The Custis wealth helped to assure Washington a seat in the House of Burgesses, a responsibility he accepted with the usual eighteenth-century noblesse oblige. Within ten years of their marriage, Washington had increased his own holdings to include acreage as far west as the Ohio Valley. Mount Vernon had been renovated and enlarged. Most important, he had established and engaged more than a dozen tenant farmers and craftsmen to provide mills, shipbuilding facilities, a fishing fleet, spinners, and weavers for his ever-growing conglomerate of industries. The Washingtons had become extremely wealthy, thanks to his shrewd business instincts, but they seldom dined alone. Their home was a mecca for friends and neighbors, relations on both sides, and weary travelers. No one was turned away. Their hospitality was known throughout the colony.

  Martha’s Legacy

  Everything Martha Washington did between 1789 and 1797 set a precedent and TONE for future First Ladies determined by her modest gentility and coupled with years of executive skills at plantation-house management. The exquisitely fine line walked between a dreaded monarchy à la England and the rabble of democracy à la France would find no finer example than that of L
ady Washington. Her elegance was simple. Her natural friendliness seeped through the prescribed deportment. The tone she set was completely new. And it was decidedly American.

  At the onset of the American Revolution, both George and Martha were forty-three, which was considered well into middle age. War in the eighteenth century was primarily a seasonal affair: spring, summer, and fall. In the winter, armies usually went into winter quarters, and Martha Washington would travel from Mount Vernon with her medicine box and knitting needles to meet her husband wherever he was encamped. She had never before ventured beyond Virginia’s borders. The exacting general, who was always hard-pressed to maintain his ragtag army, heartily welcomed Mrs. W. and whatever supplies she could bring, which were a godsend. She immediately took charge of seeing to the general’s personal comfort, supervising the officers’ kitchens, and organizing other officers’ wives to sew, knit, scrape lint for bandages, and make themselves useful. Above all, she had her medicine box for tending the sick and wounded. Come spring, she went home and the war continued.

  It would be seven years before Private Citizen and Mrs. Washington could be together again in their beloved Virginia home. Their idyll would not last long. Politics would take center stage in the new nation, and Washington was considered the indispensable man with a new title: president of the United States. There had never been anything like it before.

  How would he and Lady Washington behave in this new office? It was virgin territory. Every known political paradigm was based on royalty or quasi royalty, and this had been so for nearly two thousand years. There was no precedent for a republic on the scale of the tiny United States on the vast continent of America. How would they chart the course for generations to come?

  Lady W. (some honorific was needed, and aristocratic titles were verboten) was nearly sixty and not about to change her ways—certainly not willingly. She continued to dress in the same simple fashions she had worn for decades and determined to remain refined and dignified. But she had a serious predicament. Her elevation in social stature as the premier woman in the country precluded her traditional Virginia hospitality. She could not appear aloof and remote, since it would smack of monarchial tendencies. But neither could she be warm and welcoming, as was her nature. It would suggest an unbecoming familiarity for a head of state. After a lifetime of full houses and of exchanging frequent visits with friends and family, the new protocol made her feel isolated. Some middle ground had to be met. But how?

  She was happy, of course, to open the presidential home in New York and later in Philadelphia (rented in both cases) for entertaining. Political dinners for President Washington were usually stag affairs. Martha would plan and supervise, but she did not attend. Instead, she instituted regular drawing room levees, inviting carefully selected guests for carefully prepared entertainments, trying to tiptoe that fine line required for a republican court. People were contemptuous of royal trappings, but they definitely wanted some glitz. Martha was decorous but not glitzy. Obviously she could not please everyone. The criticism in society, in the political world, and in the press annoyed her.

  Having tirelessly devoted themselves to the welfare of their country, valuing honorable conduct above all else, both Washingtons were notably thin-skinned and sensitive to public reproach for their behavior, which they believed to be estimable at all times. Martha resented being watched by the colonial paparazzi and criticized at every turn. Where did she go? What did she wear? Whom did she speak to? Which carriage did she use? Why did she sit on a slightly raised platform at her receptions? What did all this mean? It rankled her to no end, so she chose to go out as seldom as possible, pining for the time she could return to Mount Vernon and their own vine and fig tree.

  It was a difficult line to walk, and both Washingtons were more than happy to finally relinquish the power, the glory, and the comments. For the first time in twenty years, they could sit down to dinner by themselves.

  Postscript: DESPITE PETTY COLONIAL-STYLE GOSSIP, MARTHA WASHINGTON HAS GONE DOWN IN HISTORY SIMILARLY TO HER ILLUSTRIOUS HUSBAND: ABOVE REPROACH AND REMEMBERED FOR ESTABLISHING A NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE POSITION.

  ABIGAIL ADAMS

  1744–1818

  FIRST LADY: 1797–1801

  John’s Wife

  Even if John Adams’s immortality had been only as a signer of the Declaration of Independence, his wife would still be considered the preeminent colonial woman. For all the intellectual brilliance and wisdom of Abigail Smith Adams, her contribution strictly as First Lady is adequate but certainly not outstanding. Her huge contribution to history is purely as John’s wife. And what a wife she was!

  John Adams met the fourteen-year-old minister’s daughter in her own house. At twenty-three, the young lawyer occasionally stayed with the Smith family when he was in Weymouth, Massachusetts, attending to legal business. The young girl’s wit, outspoken manner, and pithy questions attracted him from the start, and they began courting in earnest when she was seventeen. They married a month before her twentieth birthday.

  Abigail’s Legacy

  Not so much as First Lady but by being herself and being John’s wife, Abigail Adams brought SCOPE to the role of First Lady. Only a rare few mistresses of the White House have embodied the wisdom, insight, political savvy, and acumen to make them not only their husband’s partner but a genuine confidante and advisor. Barely known to most of her countrymen during her lifetime, once her correspondence was published a quarter century after her death, Abigail became a beacon and example of some of the finest attributes to which any woman could aspire. Today she ranks high in that pantheon where intelligence and wisdom is an admired attribute.

  The Adams marriage was a remarkable partnership for their times. Abigail once said that their hearts were “cast in the same mold.” She possessed all the usual domestic skills of a New England housewife, but while Abigail was homeschooled, she was well educated, particularly in unladylike subjects such as philosophy, theology, economics, and politics. John encouraged her serious interests. Had he not, had he relegated her to the customary domesticity of eighteenth-century womanly behavior, Abigail Adams would likely have provided nothing more than a series of almanac facts for historians. As it was, however, she buoyed him when he was in one of his despairs, soothed his recurrent spells of crankiness, and never failed to encourage his best efforts. He in turn was that rare man who appreciated a good mind wherever he found it, and if it was in the body of a woman—even his wife—so be it. He sincerely valued her prescient and insightful opinions and willingly gave her the respect and esteem she well deserved. Abigail had always enjoyed the abstract concept of politics and understood it as well as any male contemporary.

  By the time she was thirty, Abigail was raising four small children in a tiny saltbox house, maintaining their modest farm, and devoting herself to running the household with limited funds and only seasonal or day help. They were never a wealthy family, and Abigail did her own housework, cooking, and sewing. She doctored the children when they were sick. She tutored all four in their basics until they were ready for neighborhood schooling. She maintained regular social contact within her community. And she did it alone. Her husband was four hundred miles away in Philadelphia, trying to form a new nation.

  John delighted in their lively correspondence wherein they discussed all the events of the day, the potentials for unknown tomorrows, plus insights into the complex personalities that made up the Continental Congress. Their letters, a treasure trove for history, are peppered with lively comments, sprightly exchanges, genuine respect and counsel, and overwhelming encouragement and affection for each other.

  After nearly a decade of long separations, John finally sent for her. By the mid-1780s he had been dispatched to Europe to chart treaties for America’s peace and trade. “Come to Paris,” he said. Nearly forty, Abigail had never ventured farther than Boston. Everything she knew about France, including the language, was from books. She was totally unprepared for her great awakening. Like mos
t Puritan-reared New Englanders, she came to Europe with a lifetime of prejudices: European society was decadent, scandalous, expensive, sacrilegious, and shocking to her preconceived moral values. What she learned, however, was that other values might have merit and that she could be open to change.

  The ballet, for instance, which she found immoral at first, with women wearing flesh-colored tights and short skirts, became beautiful and graceful once she became exposed to it. The social liberties granted to women astonished and then delighted her. Her ingrained republican (small “r”) standards and principles would also moderate in Europe, as she began to appreciate some of the benefits of societal order, hierarchy, and etiquette. She learned that the elegant trappings of the Old World had a definite place, even in the coarse and rugged New World across the Atlantic.

  When John and Abigail returned to their beloved New England, duty again called, this time to New York and then Philadelphia. John Adams had been elected vice president of the new United States. Abigail was in residence only sporadically, however. Her health, never robust, was becoming iffier. Their new house in Braintree, purchased by proxy when they were still abroad, needed remodeling and supervision. Two of their children were not prospering, and it would eventually fall to Abigail to raise several grandchildren. Most of all, John hated his job, calling it “the most insignificant office ever devised by the hand of man.” He would escape back to Massachusetts at every opportunity. Nevertheless, when Abigail was available to fulfill her role as Second Lady, she performed graciously and in a spirit of friendship with Lady Washington. The two women sincerely liked each other.

  Mrs. Adams was well known in political circles by the time she reached New York, at least by reputation. Her husband had spoken of her often over the years, and Abigail had engaged in her own personal correspondence with many notables of the day. (While conversation between the sexes was severely curtailed in the eighteenth century, written communication was permitted.) All were aware of her fine mind, as well as her noticeable lack of restraint in expressing herself. John, no shrinking violet himself, cautioned her that “we must both hold our tongues.” For her part, she grumbled about imposing “a silence upon myself, when I long to talk.”