Democrats, on the other hand, saw Jessie as a Republican virago who planned to foist women’s rights on the nation. A Boston paper fumed that Jessie’s supporters “are looking forward to the nomination of a Woman’s Rights Ticket, with one of their noble champions as standard bearer.—The hour of triumph for Abby Folsom and Lucy Stone is at hand. The auspicious day when strong minded women will take their places in the Cabinet and the Senate house is about to dawn.”49 In Pittsburgh, a journalist warned, “When women leave their quiet, happy home, neglect their domestic duties, and participate in public affairs, they become objects of pity, make the judicious grieve, and cause the virtuous to lament their degradation.” A Richmond paper declared that Jessie Circles were just “the old Amazonian phalanx, of which [feminist/abolitionist] Abby Kelly is Generalissimo.”50 The New York Day-Book went so far as to say “that if Frémont is elected, Jessie is to be president.”51
Actually, Jessie was neither the heroine idolized by Republicans nor the radical suffragist castigated by the Democrats. She was an intelligent, ambitious woman who had long been exposed to politics but who faced severe private struggles that periodically generated mood disorders and complicated her marriage.
She bore similarities to an emotionally erratic Springfield, Illinois, woman whose presidential ambitions for her husband would, unlike Jessie’s, soon reach fruition.
Jessie Benton Frémont and Mary Todd Lincoln had much in common. Though born into slaveholding families, both women envisaged the end of slavery and ended up marrying leading Republicans who represented the North. Both were well educated for their day: Mary had a decade of schooling in Lexington, Kentucky, and was fluent in French; Jessie, according to her biographer, “learned to read by the time she was four years old, and by her teens . . . spoke five languages, read Latin and Greek, and was well versed in history, geography, literature, and science.”52 Both grew up in a political atmosphere. Mary as a child knew Henry Clay and his circle, while Jessie lived much of the time in Washington, DC, and met many prominent associates of her father, the Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton. Both women became estranged from family members upon marriage. Senator Benton distanced himself from Jessie after she eloped at sixteen with the illegitimate, reputedly Catholic John Frémont; members of the Todd family frowned upon Mary marrying a seeming rube, and Mary in turn snubbed Abe’s family. Both women directed great energy toward promoting their husbands. Participating in politics vicariously, each came to be known as her spouse’s “kitchen cabinet.” Both dealt with money in ways then atypical for women. After John had lost his mining fortune, Jessie provided the family’s income by writing books about John and his experiences. Mary, as first lady, overspent government funds and engaged in backroom deals in order to redecorate the White House; after Lincoln’s death she used various means to augment the already substantial Lincoln estate, including pilfering White House furniture, selling her dresses, and pleading poverty to win a government pension.
And both women were unafraid to speak their minds to powerful men. In September 1861, Jessie, outraged when Lincoln revoked General Frémont’s military order in Missouri emancipating enslaved people there, visited the president in Washington to defend her husband’s position. Lincoln rebuffed her, calling her “quite a female politician.”53 But he was married to such a woman. As first lady—a term used regularly for the first time in relation to her—Mary became known for giving political advice to her husband and was dubbed “the lady President” and “the presidentess.”54 She became close to leading politicians, such as Charles Sumner, and she lashed out when one of them crossed her, as in the case of Thaddeus Stevens, who in 1867 opposed awarding her a widow’s pension and received her curses in return.
But neither Mary nor Jessie strayed far beyond the appearance of conventional womanhood. They didn’t want to ruin their own reputations or their husbands’. Dynamic and independent-minded, they nonetheless disapproved of women’s rights reformers and projected a traditional image. Jessie, who supervised a household that included three children and a teenage niece, was praised as “so feminine, . . . attractive as a woman, . . . devoted as a wife.”55 Mary also aligned herself with true womanhood. She assured James Gordon Bennett, whose paper had published the “lady President” comment, that “My character is wholly domestic.”56
Outwardly Mary honored the cult of domesticity. But she and Abe forged their own kind of marriage.
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