J. K. C. Forrest, a longtime insider in the Illinois political and newspaper communities, spent his final years writing a pseudonymous gossip column for one of the Chicago dailies. It contained some juicy information, as the war era had been an active one for the prominent crowd he hung around with. He addressed a press club meeting by telling them what he had said to his wife upon receiving the club’s invitation to speak: ‘“You can't put a quart of whisky in a pint bottle,’ and no more can you tell in five minutes of the tortuosities and the sinuosities of the old time journalists of Chicago.”
I get the sense that sometimes, as is common, his firsthand memories were overwritten by decades of published reminiscences. Still, many of his revelations are things he was in a position to know and unique but plausible enough to indicate a basis in reality.
Forrest was also familiar with the Springfield community, and seems to have known Mary’s sister Ann Todd Smith fairly well. He only mentioned “Mrs. Smith” in passing, describing a party at her “fine residence,” with no comment on her personality. (Chicago Daily News, May 13, 1890). The main topic of the column was the disgrace of Gov. Matteson for embezzlement or some other financial crime that ruined the social standing of his prominent and incredibly wealthy family.) Around the time he started his column, he spoke to journalist Ida Tarbell, who noted he was sort of a pessimistic crank by that point, a fan of dirty stories who liked to brag about his relationship with Lincoln. She found him hanging with Lyman Trumbull and Judge James Bradwell, the latter of whom assisted Mary with her regaining her freedom in 1875. Forrest kept trying to engage Tarbell about the more suggestive parts of Herndon’s recent Lincoln biography.
In 1820, long before he became a somewhat creepy old man, Joseph K. C. Forrest was born in Ireland. He immigrated to Chicago with his family in 1840, studying in the law office of John Y. Scammon and Norman B. Judd, prominent attorneys in that city. Entering the newspaper world, he became associate editor of the Chicago Democrat with John Wentworth in 1847–48.
Eventually, Forrest’s politics shifted somewhat, and he ran in the same circles as some prominent Lincoln associates, including Illinois Governor-turned-Senator Dick Yates, Chicago Tribune editor Joseph Medill, Scammon, Judd, and Wentworth. As a result of this, he occasionally interacted with Lincoln in the 1850s, and had dinner with President-elect Lincoln when he traveled to Chicago late in 1860. The dinner took place at Scammon’s house, and Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, whom Lincoln had never met, also dined with them. (Forrest’s version was that Lincoln came to Chicago “to afford [his wife] an opportunity to buy a few clothes suitable to her new position at Washington. At the same time he arranged to have vice-president Hannibal Hamlin meet here for a conference.”)
Forrest did not know Lincoln very well until he became president, but after the inauguration, he moved to Washington to represent the Chicago Tribune, for which he had worked or some time. At the capitol, he “lived on terms of familiarity with the President until his reelection.” (Interview with Forrest, Chicago Tribune, February 10, 1895.) During the war, he was was also private secretary to Gov. Yates, with the rank of colonel.
From 1891 to 1895, he gave many assessments of Mary Lincoln, and they grew increasingly favorable and revealing. He started out by confirming existing opinions, portraying her as difficult, unbalanced, and corrupt. However, he seems to have found this kind of amusing, in a you know how women are kind of way. His general opinions of women were not enlightened, even for the time. While he often spoke fondly of individual women who were anything but shrinking violets, women’s “inferior” nature was a favorite topic of his, and seemed to explain his willingness to laugh off their antics. True ire was usually reserved for men who wielded power, the only people he saw as fully “responsible” for their actions. He’d known quite a few of them.
Everyone else got condescending pity. The opening of his longest Mary Lincoln-related column reads like a parody of bigoted thinking from that era. First up are the proper roles of the sexes:
The longer I live, the more satisfied I become that those modern ideas and measures, under the guise of so-called woman’s rights, which would, in their last analysis, remove the distinctive qualities which mark the respective spheres of man and woman in life and society, most certainly tend to a societary [his word] deterioration. In all of Shakespeare’s plays he is careful to cast is men and women in separate and distinctive molds. His greatest men are forensic. His greatest women are emotional. His males reach their desires and satisfactions through the insistence that the reasoning function should be the moral and mental guide to their ends and aims. His females reach theirs though the insistence that their affections should be their main dependency. His men fail—as Othello and Hamlet and Lear and Romeo failed—when they permitted their emotions to transcend and override their intellects. His women fail—notably like Lady Macbeth—when they unsex themselves and, instead of being guided by the stronger and more provident minds of their companions in life, endeavor to rule the latter through the dominance of their own desires and passions. (Chicago Daily News, April 7, 1891.)
Then he moved on to some racism, noting that readers are welcome to consider his “reflections” more like “fancies,” so he seems to have been aware he might be getting off track (his column was called “Old Time Facts & Fancies”). Forrest seemed to think all the world’s problems related to “emotion,” and that intellect must come to rule the day or the country would perish.
It is even a question with me whether the highly emotional and [poetic?] races—such as the Latin, the Celtic and, notably, the African—are as capable of self-government as the Anglo Saxon and the Teutonic . . . *** Is it not true that this is an age and generation in which all reformations and success of any worth or of any practical value are the results of reflection, application, and of practical experiment? This is the . . . age of a posteriori investigation as opposed to the Aristotelian, the age of a priori assumptions—the age of reason as opposed to the age of authority. In such an an age the emotions must serve and the intellect must rule, where all dominant people and races must necessarily be intellectual rather than emotional. At the same time, when any dominant race is overborne by the emotional element therein its day of domination is a thing of the past. When the energy of any nation centers in the women and the priests that nation is on the broad road which leads to decay and death.
Forrest then explained what had led him to think of all this. Napoleon’s youngest brother had recently died, and there was a white house scandal related to President Harrison employing first his wife’s widowed sister, and upon her death his wife’s widowed niece, as the White House maid. This was frowned upon not because of nepotism or corruption, but because high society had been accepting his niece as a guest of Mrs. Harrison, not knowing of her $100 salary. High society women made it clear she had to give up the job or stop coming to social events; she chose the latter.
If they thought that was a scandal, what must they have thought soon after? A year after Forrest wrote this, Mrs. Harrison died. By 1895, her niece had announced she was engaged to President Harrison! He was out of office, so White House arrangements no longer mattered.
Anyway, these two news items had gotten Forrest thinking about this week’s topic, and so had one more headline:
Finally, the death of Mrs. Abraham Lincoln’s sister, Mrs. C. M. Smith of Springfield, has recalled to my mind circumstances which tend strongly to prove that women are not in a technical sense so rigidly constituted, ethically, as men; or, at least, that the habit and fashion of arriving at just modes of action are so different from those pursed by the male sex as to place them at a disadvantage, intellectually and in a governing point of view, as compared with the male members of society. One of the rules of life laid down to me by an American statesman who filled three or four among the highest offices in the state and nation was: “Never have any business transactions or dealings with a woman or a church.”
And then he gave a detailed run-down of the John Watt drama of 1861 and 1862.
Watt is mentioned in other posts, but he was the longtime White House gardener when the Lincolns arrived in 1861.
It was an open secret at Washington . . . that Mrs. Lincoln was a source of great and perpetual anxiety and annoyance to the executive. The sufferings of the man on account of her eccentricities—to designate them by no stronger appellation—were literally such as would crush a man of less elastic moral and physical constitution. The most charitable conclusion is that the lady was mentally unbalanced and thus at times was not responsible for her acts. And this brings me to an episode in the interior history of the White House in which Prince Napoleon . . . was the central figure . . . toward the end of 1862, Prince Napoleon Joseph visited . . . I believe he occupied the rooms which the princes of Wales occupied in Buchanan’s time. It was suggested that he should be entertained at a grand dinner . . . by President Lincoln . . . and Mrs. Lincoln, whatever other failings she might have been afflicted with, could not be called a spendthrift, though possessed of abundance of “the industrial spirit.” At that time the steward of the white house and it grounds was a Scot with an historic and scientific name.
The story as told by Forrest goes that Mary was concerned about the amount of money they would have to spend entertaining Prince Louis Napoleon in the summer of 1861. Watt told her that "such entertainments as that proposed for the prince were always paid for by the government and charged in the congressional appropriation to the expense of the presidential establishment, including the cost of maintaining the house, the grounds, the stables, the hothouses, etc." He assured her that "it would not personally cost the president a cent."
The dinner went off well, according to Forrest, including in the press, but Mary was surprised to get a huge bill in her husband's name. She of course was not going to go down easily, but "even the elastic liberality of ‘Sir Issac Newton’—as he was universally dubbed—the commissioner of agriculture, was not equal to the task of passing favorably upon them." Panicking, Mary went to Watt, who "readily explained how it was the custom to do it," asked for all the bills, and split the charges up among "the separate branches of the White House expense account."
Rumors arose "that after every . . . ordinary expenditure for the care of the house and grounds had been reasonably swelled by the charges for the dinner, there still remained a considerable sum for which no . . . branch of expenditure remained to which it could be reasonably charged. Still, the canny Scot was equal to the difficulty. The grounds needed top dressing and the gardens required a fillip to their normal powers of production. And so the last remaining unprovided-for bills for the dinner was charged to the ‘manure account.'"
This became the subject of gossip after Mary and Watt had a falling out and Watt was let go, but when exactly this happened, and how it connected to the Wikoff drama in early 1862, is unclear.
Just before everything went to hell, around November 10, 1861, John Hay wrote to John G. Nicolay, “Hell is to pay about Watt’s affairs. I think the Tycoon begins to suspect him. I wish he could be struck with lightning. He has got William & Carroll turned off, and has his eye peeled for a pop at me, because I wont let madame have our stationary fund. They have gone to New York together.”
This indicates that Watt was trying to find a way to deal with the carpet bills in excess of the appropriation for White House furnishings. (He must have failed, as this came to a head in December—I discussed the carpet bill issue here.) And Lincoln had wised up to something, as on November 16, he wrote wrote to Lorenzo Thomas asking that Watt be removed to his army duties, away from the White House. His second lieutenant commission would fall through around this time, but he held other positions.
In any event, things got worse quickly.
…to revenge himself the Scot sent invitations to a recherché dinner at “Wormley’s” [a popular restaurant] to a number of the attaches of the several foreign legations in Washington. At this dinner this unscrupulous person is said to have related the entire transaction over the wine and walnuts, and even to have read notes written to him by the wife of the President. Finally the enemies of Mr. Lincoln, principally represented by the Chase section of the Republican Party, got hold of the entire business, with additions and variations, and threatened to publish it in their organs. Hearing of this rumor, a gentleman in Washington, who though a democrat, was a friend of Mr. Lincoln, I called on Mr. Dole, then commissioner of Indian affairs and informed him of the status of the entire transaction. He begged me to go to Mr. Lincoln with him and lay the whole business before him.
They went over one evening to see Lincoln. "It turned out that the steward had been pressing for some other occupation," wrote Forrest, before mentioning Watt's duplicity. Perhaps he meant that Watt was approaching Lincoln in good faith for a position while simultaneously humiliating him. Lincoln was upset, and Dole suggested sending Watt out of the country, and this was very quickly done. Ward “Hill” Lamon told him they'd sent Watt to obtain garden seeds in Scotland, and that he hoped never to see him again.
On March 24, 1862, the Syracuse Daily Standard reported that Watt, "who with the aid of Wikoff abstracted the President’s message for the Herald," had departed for his native Scotland. Accompanied by his wife, he remained only a short time. By September 20 of that year, the Evening Star reported he had returned from Europe, where he had gone "some time ago on behalf of the Agricultural bureau." He brought with him "a large . . . assortment of seeds , plants, &c. They will be daily distributed among he agricultural community in the States.”
However, he ran into some kind of trouble with Newton, who ran that department, which set him on what seems to have been a blackmail kick. He threatened to have one or more letters of Mary Lincoln's published, which would be embarrassing because they discussed their petty corruption ventures. It may not have technically been blackmail because Watt may have truly believed he was owed money by Mary Lincoln, and lashed out due to perceived bad treatment, just to put the pressure on. There is only one known letter of Mary's that he probably sold, to an early local collector of Lincolniana. It was a simple note to Mrs. Watt, published in the local paper in 1871, and one of my previous posts addresses it.
Lamon was not happy when he bumped into Watt on the street and realized he was already back. In fact, as he told Forrest, Lamon told Watt that if he ever saw him again he'd "cut his throat." Lamon was satisfied it was now taken care of. But Watt was irrepressible.
On January 8, 1863, Lincoln was writing to Caleb B. Smith, "I wish you would tell me in writing, exactly what you did promise Watt about going to Europe last Spring. If it was in writing send me a copy; if merely verbal, write it as accurately as you can from memory, and please send it to me at once." No response survives, but it is likely that Watt was in some way paid off. After the war, he flirted with selling similar letters to the press, but they were never published, and he never gave a press interview. Instead, he went back to work as a government gardener, asking Secretary of War Robert Lincoln to help him get a raise as late as 1881. Robert complied, and his letter doesn’t really indicate it had been done on threat of blackmail, but who knows? At the time of Forrest’s writing, he was still alive and living in Washington.
This version of events is probably the closest we’ll get to what really happened with Mary’s shady dealings with Watt—financial and otherwise—and how the Napoleon dinner was paid for. For the love of god, after one hundred and sixty years, let’s dispense with re-litigating the morass of distorted and remixed rumors related to this!
It is also worth reexamining Forrest’s framing of the story. To him, it was one that contained “circumstances which tend strongly to prove that women are not in a technical sense so rigidly constituted, ethically, as men; or, at least, that the habit and fashion of arriving at just modes of action are so different from those pursed by the male sex as to place them at a disadvantage, intellectually and in a governing point of view, as compared with the male members of society.”
As he told it, did Mary Lincoln act ethically inferior to the men around her? In this version, Watt assures her that the dinner will be covered, and she believes him. When it isn’t, he and Newton find ways to spread the cost around, assuring her it is normal practice. She surely knew it was a petty corruption, but that was hardly an anomaly at the time. Forrest’s comment that this happened due to the folly of one and the duplicity of another would seem to suggest he considered Mary’s behavior folly, and Watt’s duplicity. What they were up to in NY or what exactly they did to “turn off” the carpet merchant is unclear, but Watt was front and center. When she fights with Watt, he proceeds to hold a dinner for foreign diplomats for the reason of reading aloud her letters discussing petty corruption, and tries to blackmail her. Chase’s political supporters eagerly grab it to use against Lincoln, adding extra charges. Dole, Lamon, Lincoln and some others essentially bribe Watt to go away, but fail to actually pay him. Lamon threatens to kill Watt, and Watt is probably bought off somehow. Was Mary the only one displaying a remarkably roundabout “fashion of arriving at just modes of action”?
Just about the only one in this story who could make a claim to be “rigidly constituted, ethically,” is the gentleman in Washington who told Forrest about what Watt was up to, because “though a democrat,” he was “a friend of Mr. Lincoln.”
Part II of Forrest’s reminiscences will be published soon.