Mary Clemmer Ames, Pt. I
Mary Clemmer Ames did much to shape how Mary Lincoln was remembered. Her remarks deserve closer scrutiny.
Introduction
A good run-down of Mary Clemmer Ames and her career can be found here. What it shows is that she was an impressive person, who achieved great journalistic success at a time when this was pretty rare for women. It also shows that she was deeply conflicted about her identity. She grew up in New York and Massachusetts, a bright girl who would have liked more access to educational opportunities. Instead, she married as a teenager, probably under pressure, to a much older minister, Daniel Ames. It wasn’t a happy marriage, and they separated after 8 years, having had no children. She moved to New York City, met some prominent writers, and began her career, most notably as correspondent for Massachusetts’ Springfield Republican, a paper with national reach and rather moralizing in tone.
"Ames reunited with her husband during the Civil War and served as a nurse in Union hospitals in Washington DC, while developing close friendships with important political figures,” but divorced him immediately after and continued her journalism career, mostly as a Washington correspondent for several publications, using her real name or initials. After the divorce, she sometimes went by Mary Clemmer. In the early 1870s, she published the much-cited book Ten Years in Washington.
Ames stuck to moralizing journalism, which she believed was the only kind a woman could justify, having not let go of traditional norms about women’s role in society. She wrote a lot about women, especially famous women. Her views were incredibly idealistic, and she believed women were far more morally pure than men. She constantly spoke about how all a true woman should hope for was being ensconced in a loving domestic circle, surrounded by children. Of course, while writing this, she was conspicuously divorced and childless, and very much in the public eye. (She remarried late in life, but died shortly afterward.) Few seemed prejudiced against her for this—she was accepted in the best society. As Senator Justin S. Morrill wrote in an eulogy, "Mary Clemmer has been the trusted friend of many eminent men - of Sumner, of Whittier and of Garfield . . . . She made herself a power believed and feared."
Clemmer’s Style
It appears that Ames—I’ll refer to her as Clemmer from now on, as that seems to have been her preference—struggled to reconcile her actual life with the idealized image she had internalized. While she thrived in the exciting Washington scene, she seems to have projected her own fixations onto certain people. At times, her accusations became simply bizarre. They weren’t unique to her, and in many ways the journalistic style of today resembles her own, but I’m surprised that this hasn’t drawn more comment, then or now. Her word has consistently been treated as authoritative, even though she was an opinion columnist in a time of freewheeling opinions and partisan papers. I mean, she was from Massachusetts—that viewpoint was very recognizable and hardly neutral—but for some reason the Springfield (MA) Republican, where she got her start, is treated by historians as representative of mainstream opinion. It had talent and national prominence, but so did Charles Sumner. He wasn’t normative.
Clemmer was a big fan of Sumner, who is often criticized for reducing things to simple matters of good and evil. But much of the time, he showed more nuance than someone like Clemmer, who rewrote reality rather than trying and change it as Sumner did. She often seemed to project any problems with people she liked onto some “bad guy.”
For example, I just cannot take something like this seriously:
That’s nothing more than character assassination, not to mention an effort to shoehorn what was, if anything, a mistake, into a moralizing narrative that has Saintly Sumner as the enemy of Corrupt Cameron. This was a popular narrative in certain circles, despite what seems to me solid evidence that, while very different kinds of men, Sumner and Cameron had mutual respect for each other and got along just fine. It was Sumner who got Cameron’s appointment as minister to Russia through in executive session in 1862. While Grant’s decision to remove Sumner from the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1872 and replace him with Cameron was a blow, the issue there wasn’t hostility between Cameron and Sumner, but between Grant and Sumner.
Cameron’s corruption was exaggerated, and Sumner, while apparently spotless himself, didn’t see grandstanding over minor corruption as a good use of his time. (There was an eventual exception to this, in Sumner’s 1872 feud with Grant, in which he eventually denounced him as the most corrupt and nepotistic president ever.) But, the narrative being what it was in 1874, Sumner was eulogized less as an abolitionist and more as an anti-corruption crusader.
Clemmer’s Depictions of Women
When Clemmer died in 1884, a number of people commented on this tendency. On October 15, the Wellington (Ohio) Enterprise commented:
She was a brilliant writer, but her whims and prejudices over-balanced her judgement, and it was impossible for her to see anything good or noble, or any strength of character or honesty, in those who were personally distasteful to her, while, on the other hand, she invested her friend with talents and virtue more than human, and covered them with praise and adulation till it reached the level of common place-gush.
Particularly odd was her inability to describe a woman she admired. She had written off too many human traits as “personally distasteful to her” to plausibly depict a real woman. The result is at best “common place-gush,” and at worst a total void.
Only two first ladies met her approval, and both were imaginary. The first was an impressionistic word cloud she claimed was Abigail Adams. The second was the mysterious wife that Abraham Lincoln should have had. More on that later.
There were some real women she was fond of—let’s start with one who more than met her expectations. (Emphases all mine).
“Mrs [Carl] Schurz fulfills more perfectly than any woman I ever knew the intrinsic man’s ideal wife. Many women love their husbands, few find it possible to worship them. Mrs. Schurz began at fifteen or earlier to adore hers, and after sewing on his buttons and learning his limitations for twenty years, she worships him still…A little girl in Hamburg, she worshipped the pictured image of the revolutionist whom she had never seen.[1]" “A Perfect Woman,” quoted in Fort Scott Daily Monitor, March 6, 1875.
That sounds super healthy . . .
The Schurzes seemed happy together, and that’s all that matters. Still, it is notable that Clemmer reveres the marriage because of Mrs. Schurz’s girlish worship of the image of a man she never met, and rather than for the relationship that developed once they actually, y’know, knew each other! There’s no real picture of Mrs. Schurz here. She does later on quote Schurz as telling his teenage bride when they left for America, “You will hand me the bricks, and I will build.”
Then there was Ellen, the daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson who assisted him a lot later in life, when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Clemmer praised her because, like her “celestial” father, she could not feel temperature. Clemmer then drew a comparison between Ellen and other women who were helpmeets to powerful men. The example she chose is telling.
Per Wikipedia, Sir William Herschel, born in 1738, was a German-born British astronomer and composer of music, who collaborated with his younger sister and fellow astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750-1848). Sir William became famous for discovering Uranus. Caroline, who started out as his assistant, got the hang of it and discovered several comets:
She was the first woman to receive a salary as a scientist.[3] She was the first woman in England to hold a government position.[4] She was the first woman to publish scientific findings in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society[5], to be awarded a Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1828), and to be named an Honorary Member of the Royal Astronomical Society (1835, with Mary Somerville). She was also named an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy (1838). The King of Prussia presented her with a Gold Medal for Science on the occasion of her 96th birthday (1846).
Pretty cool. Here is Clemmer’s take:
"It has just come to light how much Sir William Herschel owed to the tender and tireless sister who through a lifetime of night stood by his side while others slept; who polished till her hands grew numb the mirror which were to reflect back for him immensity; who had no ambition in life but to be his servant;…and as her clear vision swept the paths of the spheres shrank from her own discoveries of her worlds, lest it might prove a shadow on his fame.
Burlington Weekly Free Press, July 21, 1876
??? Her ideal woman was a total doormat in a way that stands out even in the 1870s. A woman who was too devoted to need heat or sleep!
Clemmer and Abigail Adams
The major exception was Abigail Adams, hands down her favorite. Clemmer was fond of talking of what "an Abigail Adams" (in other words, not Mary Lincoln) could have done during the Civil War. Which of Abigail’s traits did she see as so well-suited to time? Enter the impressionistic word cloud:
"Abigail Adams is an illustrious example of the grandeur of human character. She proved in herself how potent an individual may be, and that individual a woman, in spite of caste, of sex, or the restrictions of human law or condition. She never went to school in her life, yet her thoughtful utterances will live where the labored utterances of her scholarly husband are forgotten. She was less than a year the mistress of the President’s house, yet she has lived ever since in memory a grand model to all who succeed her. The daughter of a country clergyman, the wife of a patriotic and ambitious man, whether she gathered her children about her or sent them forth across stormy seas, while she left herself desolate; whether she stood the wife of the Republican Minister before the haughty Charlotte in the stateliest and proudest court of Europe; whether she presided in the President’s house in the new Capital or in the wilderness, or wrote to statesmen and grandchildren in her own lowly house in Quincy, in prosperity or sorrow, in youth and in age, in life and in death, always she was the regnant woman, devout, wise, patriotic, proud, humble and loving. Her pictures of the social life of her time are among the most acute, lively and graphic on record. While in her letters to her son, to her husband, to Jefferson and other statesmen, we find some of the grandest utterances of the Revolutionary period. Cut off by her sex from active participation in the struggles and triumphs of the men of her time, not one of them would have died more gladly or grandly than she, for liberty; denied the power of manhood, she made the most of the privileges of womanhood. She instilled into the souls of her children great ideas; she inspired her husband by the hourly sight of a grand example; she gave, through them, her life-long service to the State, and she gave to her country and to posterity her spotless and heroic memory.
Now, Abigail Adams was an impressive woman, but this is remarkably light on substantive content. And nothing about Adams would have been well-suited to the Civil War era when it came to a public facing role. The reason Clemmer has so little to work with is because she is impressed by Adams’ letters to her husband and men like Jefferson, which were unknown to the public during Adams’ life. Her grandson Charles Francis Adams published a selection of them in 1848, thirty years after her death, under the title “Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams.” The copy uploaded to Google Books contains an annotation by some exasperated reader:
I don’t know why they didn’t just say “Mrs. John Adams,” but the more interesting thing is that the book was published at all. Certainly, by 1848, women authors were not shocking. But old private correspondence is another matter. It seems that the goal was to give the public a glimpse at the personal lives of the Adams family, and their relationships, as Charles including an appendix with other family letters, and identified himself as “her grandson.” He evidently recognized the impressiveness of the letters.
But, since the public did not know of these utterances prior to 1848, Clemmer is forced to appeal to how she worked through her husband and sons, inspiring them. Yet, she also claims “Abigail Adams comes down to posterity, independently of all relations to others, as one of the grandest women of her time.” How does that work?
Some of the other claims are questionable: “her thoughtful utterances will live where the labored utterances of her scholarly husband are forgotten.” This will be true for those for whom Abigail Adams is a “grand model”—people like Clemmer, intellectual women who grew up in Massachusetts, aspire to a writer’s life, and pore over the published correspondence of Abigail Adams. The publication coincided with Clemmer’s first marriage.
Interesting Digression About Abigail Adams That Gives Useful Context About Women and Politics in the 19th Century
Charles Francis Adams made some interesting comments in his introduction. Noting the endless appetite for more information about the Founders, he wrote:
It is of great importance not only to understand the nature of the superiority of the individuals, who have made themselves a name above their fellow-beings, but to estimate the degree in which the excellence for which they were distinguished was shared by those among whom they lived. Inattention to this duty might present Patrick Henry and James Otis, Washington, Jefferson, and Samuel Adams, as the causes of the American Revolution, which they were not. There was a moral principle in the field, to the power of which a great majority of the whole population of the colonies, whether male or female, old or young, had been long and habitually trained to do homage. The individuals named, with the rest of their celebrated associates, who best represented that moral principle before the world, were not the originators, but the spokesmen of the general opinion, and instruments for its adaptation to existing events. Whether fighting in the field, or deliberating in the Senate, their strength against Great Britain was not that of numbers, nor of wealth, nor of genius ; but it drew its nourishment from the sentiment that pervaded the dwellings of the entire population.
How much this home sentiment did then, and does ever, depend upon the character of the female portion of the people, will be too readily understood by all, to require explanation. The domestic hearth is the first of schools, and the best of lecture-rooms; for there the heart will coöperate with the mind, the affections with the reasoning power. And this is the scene for the almost exclusive sway of the weaker sex. Yet, great as the influence thus exercised undoubtedly is, it escapes observation in such a manner, that history rarely takes much account of it. The maxims of religion, faith, hope, and charity, are not passed through the alembic of logical proof, before they are admitted into the daily practice of women. They go at once into the teachings of infancy, and thus form the only high and pure motives of which matured manhood can, in its subsequent action, ever boast. Neither, when the stamp of duty is to be struck in the young mind, is there commonly so much of alloy in the female heart as with men, with which the genuine metal may be fused, and the face of the coin made dim. There is not so much room for the doctrines of expediency, and the promptings of private interest, to compromise the force of public example. In every instance of domestic convulsions, and when the pruning-hook is deserted for the sword and musket, the sacrifice of feelings made by the female sex is unmixed with a hope of worldly compensation. With them there is no ambition to gratify, no fame to be gained by the simply negative virtue of privations suffered in silence. There is no action to drown in its noise and bustle a full sense of the pain that must inevitably attend it. The lot of woman, in times of trouble, is to be a passive spectator of events, which she can scarcely hope to make subservient to her own fame, or to control.
If it were possible to get at the expression of feelings by women in the heart of a community, at a moment of extraordinary trial, recorded in a shape evidently designed to be secret and confidential, this would seem to present the surest and most unfailing index to its general character. Hitherto we have not gathered much of this material in the United States. The dispersion of families, so common in America, the consequent destruction of private papers, the defective nature of female education before the Revolution, the difficulty and danger of free communication, and the engrossing character, to the men, of public, and to the women, of domestic cares, have all contributed to cut short, if not completely to destroy, the sources of information. It is truly remarked, in the present collection, that “instances of patience, perseverance, fortitude, magnanimity, courage, humanity, and tenderness, which would have graced the Roman character, were known only to those who were themselves the actors, and whose modesty could not suffer them to blazon abroad their own fame." The heroism of the females of the Revolution has gone from memory with the generation that witnessed it, and nothing, absolutely nothing, remains upon the ear of the young of the present day, but the faint echo of an expiring general tradition. Neither is there much remembrance of the domestic manners of the last century, when, with more of admitted distinctions than at present, there was more of general equality ; nor of the state of social feeling, or of that simplicity of intercourse, which, in colonial times, constituted in New England as near an approach to the successful exemplification of the democratic theory, as the irregularity in the natural gifts of men will, in all probability, ever practically allow.
It is the purpose of this volume to contribute something to supply the deficiency, by giving to tradition a palpable form. The present is believed to be the first attempt, in the United States, to lay before the public a series of private letters, written without the remotest idea of publication, by a woman, to her husband, and others of her nearest and dearest relations. Their greatest value consists in the fact, susceptible of no misconception, that they furnish an exact transcript of the feelings of the writer, in times of no ordinary trial. Independently of this, the variety of scenes in which she wrote, and the opportunities furnished for observation in the situations in which she was placed by the elevation of her husband to high official positions in the country, may contribute to sustain the interest with which they will be read. The undertaking is, nevertheless, somewhat novel and perhaps adventurous, since it brings forward to public notice a person who has now been long removed from the scene of action, and of whom, it is not unreasonable to suppose, the present generation of readers can have neither personal knowledge nor recollection.
Such beliefs were fairly common among at least the elite class at this time, but the concept of “republican motherhood” was lost for quite a while. Lincoln expressed some of these sentiments in his Lyceum Speech. Women were very much understood as part of the political community, but in an indirect way.
Also very interesting is that the Jefferson correspondence was included:
Four letters addressed to Mr. Jefferson in the year 1804 have been admitted into the present collection for reasons which require a particular explanation. The answers written by that gentleman were published some time since in the collection of his works made under the authority and supervision of his grandson, Mr. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, though unaccompanied by any comment which could show what it was they replied to or how Mrs. Adams got into the rather singular position which she occupies of a disputant with him upon the leading political questions of the time.
LOL. He wasn’t happy with Thomas Jefferson Randolph. But this just goes to show how willing men were to publish women’s correspondence with Jefferson—there was nothing inappropriate about someone like Abigail Adams writing to someone like Jefferson, even, to a limited extent, on political issues—particularly on patronage issues. This was entirely normal.
There’s interesting stuff on the Jefferson-Adams drama, which stemmed from Jefferson’s defeat of Adams for the presidency, broke up their once close friendship, but the thing that bothered Abigail most was that Jefferson not only did not give John Adams an office, but removed one of their sons from the office he held. This was largely a loyalty dispute, revolving around patronage matters. Apparently, Abigail believed it to be an act of malice, or at least brutal indifference, while Charles thought it was simply a matter of not resisting pressure to give the office to someone else. When she reached out to Jefferson after his daughter’s death, he asked the reason for the estrangement all these years, and as Charles puts it, the general tone of her response “is not so conciliatory, as from other parts of her character, one might be led to expect.” Charles writes of Jefferson:
He solemnly affirms that he made the removal without knowing whom he was removing. And weakening the force of that argument by betraying his sense of the necessity of another, he maintains, in further extenuation, that the law which changed the form of the office had at the same time vacated it. Hence that, when he exercised his freshly-acquired power of appointment in favor of another person, he did not remove Mr. Adams. Perhaps the great majority of readers will agree with the writer in thinking less unfavorably of the deed itself, than of the apology it was thought advisable to make for it.
Ouch. Abigail had a few other complaints about things like Jefferson’s pardons, and what is interesting is that Jefferson defended himself by explaining his conception of constitutional theory and his powers as president. He evidently considered this a constructive discussion to have with a woman like Abigail Adams, not something beneath him or inappropriate. More details can be found here.
Clemmer’s judgment of Adams has held up quite well. From Wikipedia:
Historian Joseph Ellis has found that the 1,200 letters between John and Abigail "constituted a treasure trove of unexpected intimacy and candor, more revealing than any other correspondence between a prominent American husband and wife in American history." Ellis says that Abigail, although self-educated, was a better and more colorful letter-writer than John, even though John was one of the best letter-writers of the age. Ellis argues that Abigail was the more resilient and more emotionally balanced of the two, and calls her one of the most extraordinary women in American history.
I don’t think the same can be said of her judgment Mary Lincoln, as I’ll discuss in Part II.