Washington historians may not talk much about the year 1877, but consider this:
High-stakes political maneuvering narrowly averted a second Civil War, women and
blacks chipped away at their second-class status, a city that had been a malarial joke
blossomed into a world capital. And, oh yeah, a certain newspaper published its first
edition ...
Steam from the sweating horses swirled in the moonlight as they clattered up Pennsylvania Avenue in the winter chill. The sky was clear, the stars were out, the poles of the gas lamps cast slender shadows as the nearly full moon ascended over Capitol Hill. The lamps themselves were dark, left unlit on each full moon, whether the moon was visible or not, a token frugality in the face of the depression and bankruptcy that gripped the city.
The horses drew their carriages northwest, on the north side of the avenue--the side whose wood paving blocks, installed at great expense only six years earlier as the latest in urban infrastructure, had quickly rotted and had recently been ripped out and replaced with concrete--but the worthies inside the coaches were in no mood to appreciate the improvement. Drivers reined in the teams not far from the White House, at the intersection of H and 15th streets, and a handful of the most powerful men in town stepped quickly in their heavy frock coats and top hats to the portico-covered entrance of Wormley's Hotel. It was Monday, February 26, 1877. The next few hours would determine if a recently reunited nation could remain that way.
Capitalization
Wormley's Hotel was not the biggest hotel in 1877 Washington. Nonetheless, it was possibly the best, renowned for a cozy European charm, excellent food in an elaborately appointed dining room, and an exhaustive wine cellar. The minister to Spain had rooms there, as did powerful New York Sen. Roscoe Conkling.
Wormley's was a touch of sophistication and class in a city that had been busily engaged in raising itself, literally, out of the mud. Just a few years earlier, a young Mark Twain was repelled by what he saw on a visit to the capital city. Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol was lined by "mean, and cheap, and dingy" stores and hotels. Walking was impeded, he said, by the "deep and all-pervading" mud and slush. Rotting carcasses of mules were stacked outside ramshackle stables on the Mall. The unfinished Washington Monument looked like "a factory chimney with the top broken off."
In 1871, E.L. Godkin's political journal the Nation had described the city as "a struggling, shabby, dirty little third-rate Southern town magnificent only in its distances." Dairymen drove herds through the city. Pigs roamed the streets poking at plentiful garbage. The land just outside the iron gate on the south side of the White House had been used as a feeding pen for a slaughterhouse before the Civil War. Sewage flowed every which way in a system plagued by sinkholes large enough to swallow a horse. Much of the waste drained into a fetid canal dubbed "The Great Ditch" that slunk down the Mall from the foot of the Capitol to the Potomac. The river was supposed to carry it away, but the tide kept pushing the sludge back.
That same year, Wormley's began to rise, as did the city itself. Both did so fueled by the growing conviction that "the United States" was a singular noun, the sum more important than its parts.
Before the war, the federal capital was secondary, the union itself a loose association of similar but profoundly separate states--these United States. But the blood of half a million had changed that. Washington had led the war, had been the hub of Union armies and the focus of Southern hostility. The same troop concentrations that had nearly denuded the city of trees--for forts and fuel--had spurred a supporting commerce, from boot makers to butcher shops to brothels, and much of it remained when the troops went home. As did the power of federal government. It had saved the Union. Now it underwrote railroads, battled Indians, regulated the patents behind a technological revolution, controlled unimaginably vast acreage and natural resources. Far more significantly, if more subtly, Washington was for the first time seen as the place where the destiny of a continent would be determined, for good or ill.
John Wesley Powell knew that as well as anyone. He was the toast of the nation, a war hero who had lost his right arm at Shiloh but fought on through the war, then led two insanely dangerous explorations of the Grand Canyon. He would be acclaimed anywhere. But he recognized that the federal government would be the key to the exploration and settlement of the vast Western territories, so he came to Washington in 1877. The following year he founded the Cosmos Club, an association of writers, intellectuals and scientists, where he would meet people like Asaph Hall.
Hall was an astronomer, lured to Washington by the new 26-inch telescope at the U.S. Naval Observatory, located at Foggy Bottom on the banks of the Potomac. Late in the summer of 1877, Mars would come to within 35 million miles of Earth. Hall, watching through his government telescope, discovered the Martian moons.
Alexander Graham Bell had come in 1875 to demonstrate an invention--a multiple telegraph--to his patent attorneys. While here, he met a man he referred to as "the only electrician in town," George Maynard. Maynard had come to Washington in 1870 to help with a revolutionary idea: a national system of weather-reporting stations all transmitting their data via telegraph to the capital. Graham must have liked it that Maynard thought big. In 1877, when Bell came up with another invention, which he called the telephone, Maynard offered to help Bell set up a demonstration system. They spent the spring operating out of Maynard's shop at 1423 G St. NW, crisscrossing town, stringing wires out windows, over rooftops and along walls. Each phone connected directly to only one other, but the demonstration was impressive enough. By October, Maynard was asked to install a line between the White House and the Treasury.
As the country seethed with innovation, those in Washington saw a need to license, nurture and direct it. The bureaucracy exploded. Newly created departments such as Agriculture and Justice, and a variety of new agencies--the National Academy of Sciences, the Commission of Immigration, the Bureau of Statistics and others--extended their influence both inside and outside the capital. At the beginning of the Civil War, there were 2,199 civilian federal employees in Washington. In 1871, there were 6,222, with positions increasing by nearly a thousand a year. By 1877, the area's population had ballooned from 75,000 in 1860 to about 175,000.
The election dispute between Hayes and Tilden was negotiated at Wormley's Hotel, a hotel operated by the son of a slave, James Wormley. (1877). (Courtesy of Washingtoniana Division at D.C. Public Library)
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All of this was imposed upon an already overburdened and underdeveloped cityscape. The resulting mess, a riot of mud, had been such an embarrassment that a campaign arose to move the capital west, possibly to St. Louis or Cincinnati. Washington interests rallied. Congress was persuaded to action. A successful local businessman and Republican Party activist named Alexander Shepherd was appointed head of the Board of Public Works. Shepherd took a huge public endowment of $6 million and overspent it wildly--ultimately pouring $18 million into remaking the city in the space of two years, grading and paving 365 miles of road and sidewalk, planting 60,000 trees, installing 3,000 gas lamps, draining swamps, building sewers, clearing eyesore structures (whose demolition cost two bystanders' lives) and reclaiming the Mall from the railroad (whose tracks he ripped up without legal authority). His friends and associates got rich on government contracts. He made mistakes--like paving the streets with wood blocks--but in the end, though bankrupted, the city was reborn.
By 1873, Mary Clemmer Ames, a Washington correspondent for the New York Independent, was inspired to write, "The old provincial Southern city is no more. From its foundations has risen another city, neither Southern nor Northern, but national, cosmopolitan . . . We now see broad carriage drives, level as floors . . . Now where streets and avenues cross, emerald 'circles' with central fountains, pervading the air with cooling spray, with belts of flowers and troops of children, and restful seats . . . take the place of the old Saharas . . . The green pools which used to distill malaria beneath your window are now all sucked into the great sewers."
On that February evening in 1877, however, the gathering at Wormley's was less about Washington's new elevation, and more about saving it from plunging back into the quagmire.
Plowshares Into Swords
Four months earlier Americans had handed Democrat Samuel J. Tilden a 260,000-popular-vote margin over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the 1876 presidential election. But the voting was marred by widespread intimidation and brutalization of black voters by Southern Democrats, as well as fraud by Republicans. The mess at the polls extended to several Southern gubernatorial races. Now, less than a week from the March 5 inauguration, there was still no president, and the nation, split along the fault lines of the Civil War, teetered on the edge of chaos and possibly more bloodshed.
By the late 1870s, a maturing D.C. was a magnet for intellectuals, inventors and innovators. Here, the construction of the Washington Monument is in progress. (Library of Congress)
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Tilden represented those, in both North and South, opposed to continued "radical" Reconstruction in the South enforced by federal troops. Many Hayes supporters interpreted any retreat from forced Reconstruction as an abandonment of Southern blacks, and saw Hayes's election as a last chance to protect the future of former slaves. Tilden had piled up 184 undisputed electoral votes, one short of a majority. Hayes had 165. The 20 remaining were a swamp of contention.
Tilden, a brilliant lawyer but not an instinctual politician, had locked himself in his law library and spent the crucial weeks after the election writing an exhaustive legal brief demonstrating why he should be considered the legitimate president-elect. If he had been arguing his case before a judge, instead of the body politic, it might have been an effective strategy.
Meanwhile, Hayes's supporters went to work, lining up backers and cutting deals. Leveraging their political advantage--Republicans controlled both the Senate and the White House, where Ulysses S. Grant was still president--the Hayes forces were able to establish the all-important ground rules for settling the dispute in their favor: The election would be decided by a commission composed of eight Republicans and seven Democrats. From that moment, Hayes was almost sure to claim the 20 disputed electors. But House Demo-crats conducted a fierce filibuster to block the commission from declaring Hayes the winner. Hotheads on both sides were hollering "theft" and making threats of insurrection. Less than 12 years after Appomattox, nobody was taking the threats lightly. President Grant warned that he would respond to "any demonstration or warlike concentration of men" by declaring martial law.
Early in 1877, a compromise began taking shape. Southern Democrats--who wanted self-rule and stability more than they wanted Tilden--offered to help kill the filibuster, thereby giving Hayes the presidency, if Hayes promised to cease using federal troops to prop up Republican governments in Louisiana and South Carolina.
Hayes avoided making any explicit promises. From the beginning he resisted urgings that he come to Washington and lead his post-election campaign personally, remaining above the fray in Columbus, Ohio. Instead, a close-knit group of his supporters championed his cause, assuring those who needed assuring that Hayes would certainly do this or that when elected.
One of those in greatest need of assurance was Edward Burke, personal representative of the unrecognized Democratic state government in Louisiana, which, its supporters argued, represented "intelligent, white Southern rule." Burke wanted promises not only that Hayes would support the end of bayonet-enforced Republican rule, but that other Republican leaders would, too. But Hayes couldn't bring himself to make an ironclad promise, fearing it would be a transparent quid pro quo for the presidency.
On Monday morning, February 26, Burke was summoned to the White House. President Grant told the Louisianan that he supported self-rule--that Americans would no longer support a policy of a state government being upheld by U.S. soldiers. But he also said that he could not act on that conclusion, for fear of undercutting Hayes.
Burke raced back down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Hill. At the Capitol he found several of Hayes's closest advisers. They ducked into a committee room and locked the door. Burke announced that a way to end the impasse was at hand: Hayes would have to do nothing himself. All that was required was to convince Grant that an immediate withdrawal of federal troops from Louisiana would be no embarrassment to Hayes.
Ohio Sen. John Sherman, brother of Civil War Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, protested that Grant would never agree to such a thing. Burke produced a dispatch Grant had authorized, expressing support for Louisiana's Demo-cratic government. But Sherman was still not satisfied. He needed assurances that the Democrats would uphold the new constitutional amendments providing voting and other rights for blacks. It was time to settle this. They agreed to meet that evening.
They may have instantly thought of Wormley's as the likely meeting place. It was just over a mile away, a dignified, elegant and discreet place. A State Department official once recommended Wormley's by saying that, for $8 a day, one could obtain every amenity save one: the crowds of "high-toned Southern congressmen" whose late-night, high-stakes poker games were a fixture at so many other Washington hotels. The only Southern congressmen wanted at Wormley's that evening would be those willing to abandon the filibuster if the right assurances could be made.
Wormley's was also the residence of former U.S. attorney general William M. Evarts, soon to be Hayes's secretary of state. About a dozen men gathered in Evarts's rooms, basically to reassure themselves that each side could get what it needed in a compromise. The Southerners wanted to be sure that, despite Hayes's refusal to commit to them directly, his intentions of ending Reconstruction were reliable. And the Ohioans attempted to measure the sincerity of the Southerners' claim that they would uphold black civil rights.
In the decades after the electoral tension of 1877 Washington flourished. Here, F Street NW near 15th in the 1890s. (Courtesy Washingtoniana Division, D.C. Public Library )
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Whatever the white men who met at Wormley's intended, the long-term result of their agreement would be exactly what radical Reconstructionists had feared. As one black leader later lamented, "The whole South . . . had got back into the hands of the very men that held us as slaves."
What followed would be decades of disenfranchisement and discrimination. Jim Crow laws, the American form of apartheid, grew directly out of this "intelligent, white Southern rule." As the troops were withdrawn from the South, the Nation predicted, "the Negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him."
A Brilliant Career
There was a final irony to that evening at Wormley's. The hotel's proprietor was James Wormley, who had come into the world in 1819 in a two-room brick house near 14th and E streets NW. Because his mother was classified as a "free woman of color," James was born free.
His father, Lynch Wormley, was at least nominally a slave. But like many slaves in Washington, Lynch had been able to hire himself out and earn the capital needed to start a small business on the side.
Washington had been a special case for African Americans from its creation in 1791. Carved from the two states that together had half of the country's African American population, the District began as nearly 25 percent black. By 1849, it was nearly a third black, and a majority of those were free. In Washington, the laws limiting black activities and education were less restrictive, and those protecting freed men more extensive, than in surrounding slave states. More free, educated and skilled African Americans lived in Washington before the Civil War than anywhere else in the country. Free blacks and slaves often worked side by side on labor-intensive projects for the emerging city, and schools, churches and mutual aid societies in the free black community worked to free slaves and improve the conditions of all blacks. The Wormleys were central figures in that community. James Wormley's sister, Mary, operated a school for free blacks on the family property until her early death at age 18 from tuberculosis.
The Wormleys' ascendancy began in 1818. A bill of sale of that date shows that Lynch Wormley bought a hackney carriage and harness for $175, to be paid in $10 monthly installments, to launch a business ferrying the city's elite around town. Two years later, he bought something far more expensive, and far more valuable: his uncontested freedom.
On March 4, 1820, a Virginian named J.P. Cocke signed a document that read: "For and in consideration of the sum of four hundred dollars, I do hereby emancipate and set free a certain mulatto man commonly known by the name of Linch Wormley who has for several years past lived in the city of Washington . . ."
Still, nothing was easy for free blacks: Early laws in the District called the "Black Codes" forbade large gatherings and set a 10 p.m. curfew. In 1831, James Wormley's brothers Owen and William, local agents for the newly established abolitionist newspaper the Liberator, were criminally charged with disseminating incendiary materials. That same year, new laws were passed attempting to prevent blacks from owning or operating businesses. Fortunately for Lynch Wormley, because of their importance to Washington's elite, drivers of carriages and wagons had been exempt from both the curfew and the prohibition on business ownership.
Young James Wormley worked for his father driving a hackney carriage. Though his father remained illiterate, James was educated at the community Sabbath schools, and became confident and ambitious. He also grew tall and powerful with striking, chiseled features. In 1849, he struck out for California to prospect for gold. With his refined manner, he was able to get work along the way as a steward on a Mississippi steamer, and then on larger, oceangoing ships. When he returned to Washington, Wormley leveraged his old contacts and his new skills to land a job as steward at the elite Metropolitan Club. There he learned the finer points of catering to the rich and powerful, and as the Civil War approached he had accumulated enough capital and support to open a catering business and boardinghouse on I Street near 15th Street NW. In 1868, when the venerable Maryland Sen. Reverdy Johnson was appointed minister to England, Johnson asked Wormley to accompany him as personal caterer.
Wormley acquired, and somehow managed to keep alive on the long ocean voyage, a cargo of diamondback terrapins from Chesapeake Bay. He created a sensation in London society when he served his novel gourmet turtle entrees at the Court of St. James's, and the reputation gained by that success, and subsequent triumphs in Paris, followed him back to Washington the following year.
With astonishing boldness, he built Wormley's Hotel on land that had been purchased by his father almost half a century earlier. He had been unable to afford the mortgage for the first-class structure, so the payments were taken over by a friend and supporter, Massachusetts Rep. Samuel Hooper, who then leased the property back to Wormley. Hooper remained the nominal owner.
Wormley made friends with many powerful men in Washington who, like Hooper, supported civil rights for blacks. Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, for example, was the passionate leader of antislavery forces before the war and of the radical Republicans afterward. It was he who had, in 1864, successfully introduced a constitutional amendment that read simply: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States . . ." In the fall of 1871, Sumner wrote Wormley from Boston to say that he had learned his hotel would earn $25,000 the first year--a fortune when you consider the vice president made only $10,000, a member of Congress $5,000 and the average federal employee less than $1,000. "Good! Three cheers!" he wrote, but added, "How can you look after my small affairs! The great hotel will demand all your energies."
By 1877, Wormley's had become an unqualified success, a prototype of the kind of place Washington would soon become famous for, an elegant retreat abounding in taste and discretion where the powerful would come to do power's business. On that evening of February 26, it is not clear if Wormley was present at his hotel, or if he knew of the critical meeting occurring there. But there is little doubt he would have fiercely, though quietly, opposed the bargain in the offing. He was likely miffed, as many Reconstructionists were, at the great black leader Frederick Douglass when Douglass--whom Hayes appointed U.S. marshal of the District of Columbia after his inauguration--excused the hasty end to Reconstruction by saying, "Statesmen often are compelled to act upon facts as they are, not as they would like to have them."
As the men at Wormley's set back out into the winter night, the facts as they were went like this: Both the Hayes partisans and the Southerners got the assurances they had been seeking. The election of 1876 was over, except for desultory wrangling and oratory in Congress that took three more days to play out. At 4:10 a.m. on March 2, after an 18-hour joint session in the House chamber, Senate President Pro Tempore Thomas W. Ferry banged down his gavel and proclaimed, "I do declare that Rutherford B. Hayes, having received a majority of the whole number of electoral votes, is duly elected president of the United States . . ."
A few hours later, just after dawn, Hayes was awakened in his berth in a private rail car, which had stopped outside Harrisburg, Pa., en route to Washington, and was handed a telegram. When they heard the news, his sons Scott and Webb began to shout with glee.
"Boys, boys," Hayes admonished. "You'll waken the passengers."
Hardball
As always, there was more to Washington than politics. The power growing along the Potomac, a newly important and expanding capital of a newly important and expanding country, was the driving force, but the people and institutions who collected around that force often had other things on their minds.
Washingtonians vacationed at the Piney Point resort on the lower Potomac as well as at Cape May and Atlantic City. Those who couldn't afford an extended vacation away took steamers to Mount Vernon and to an amusement park farther downstream, or a canal boat up the C&O Canal to Great Falls. Families made excursions to picnic grounds everywhere. P.T. Barnum's circus came to town every year, and baseball games behind the White House were free, boasting that newest innovation, introduced just two years earlier: the baseball glove.
The Washington Nationals, the apex of local ball, were a dismal disappointment. In 1875, they'd bungled their way out of the big-league National Association, winning only five of 28 games and allowing three times as many runs as they scored (their star center fielder, and also their manager, John "Holly" Hollingshead, led the team with a pathetic .247 average). Now they were limping along in minor-league limbo, playing teams like Holyoke and Utica.
But there were consolations. In the fall, goose and duck hunting was abundant, and abundantly popular, as was chestnut gathering along Rock Creek. In the winter, there were church socials, choral societies and skating on ponds. For those inclined to less wholesome activities, there were cockfights in Foggy Bottom and Georgetown and plentiful entertainment from public ladies, who were identifiable by skirts so short their shoe tops were clearly visible. There were theaters and lectures to attend, and occasional sensations, like Buffalo Bill's traveling show with the Sioux Indian chiefs. Handsome new neighborhoods filled with fine homes sprang up on Capitol Hill, and on K Street NW west of 14th. Impressive mansions had risen on Dupont Circle, which until a few years before had been nothing more than a swamp. The city directory listed 45 boardinghouses, six billiard saloons, one purveyor of artificial limbs, 15 auctioneers, 80 bakers, 17 brewers, 163 tobacco vendors, two coffee roasters, nine colleges, 122 confectioners, 46 journalists, 11 junk dealers and 48 hotels, among other things.
Despite its problems, Washington gave off a hum of excitement that lured writers and intellectuals, adventurers and inventors, innovators and the ambitious in all fields, as well as those with programs to sell or grievances to redress.
Henry Adams, writer, intellectual blue-blood grandson and great-grandson of presidents, who would move to the city in the fall of 1877, wrote to a friend: "The fact is, I gravitate to a capital by a primary law of nature. This is the only place in America where society amuses me, or where life offers variety. Here, too, I can fancy that we are of use in the world . . ."
Adams's return to the city was a perfect example of how Washington was throwing together extraordinary people in extraordinary ways. His wife, Clover--one of the first accomplished American female photographers--was the niece of Samuel Hooper, Wormley's silent partner in the hotel. Hooper enlisted Wormley's assistance to help the Adamses transfer their belongings to the wisteria-covered house they had rented across the street from the hotel. Their landlord was William W. Corcoran, co-founder of Riggs Bank and the driving force behind Washington's first public art museum, at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW. Corcoran had been a Confederate sympathizer who fled the capital during the war, but had returned to become one of the most recognizable figures in the postwar social firmament, known for walking the streets with a gold-headed cane and a rose permanently affixed to his lapel.
Almost immediately upon settling into Washington, Henry and Clover Adams began gathering a group of Washington thinkers and doers at their dinner table--people like geologist Clarence King, who had mapped thousands of square miles of Western territory in the 40th-parallel expedition, cataloguing hundreds of plants and animals, finding glaciers and charting mineral resources. King would soon move into Wormley's, his base for a campaign to create an agency to coordinate the growing number of geological expeditions conducted by the government. When a disagreeable politician appeared to be on the verge of becoming the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey, King decided to lobby for the position and won it.
The Adams crowd was not short on self-esteem. Henry Adams once wrote a friend somewhat smugly that Rutherford Hayes had come into a parlor where he and his crowd were smoking after dinner, and the president had been virtually ignored. According to Adams, Hayes later commented on what "dull owls" they were--chortling between the lines that Hayes would have missed the snub.
After Hayes had moved into the president's mansion, his wife, Lucy, who would quickly become known as "Lemonade Lucy," banished all wine and spirits from state dinners--all the more reason for the bright lights of capital society to sup with the Adamses, known for excellent taste in wine and liquor.
Women's Slights
But Lucy and Rutherford Hayes did not lack for dinner guests. One frequent and enthusiastic diner was Malvina Shanklin Harlan, wife of John Marshall Harlan, Hayes's first appointee to the Supreme Court. "During the Hayes administration, the White House was a most perfect home, in the truest sense," she wrote years later. One evening, the Harlans found themselves at an intimate party for a dozen guests in a small dining room at the White House. The guest of honor, Chief Justice Morrison Waite, sat opposite the president, while his wife sat at Hayes's right hand.
"The good cheer and flow of soul was abundant," Malvina Harlan reported. The most remarkable topic was from the evening paper, "a most amazing account" of a young woman applying for admission to practice before the Supreme Court. "It was unprecedented . . . and the people of Washington generally were laughing in their sleeves over it."
The dinner company guffawed when the newspaper story arrived at the denouement: "The Chief Justice squelched the fair applicant."
Then, Lucy Hayes "turned her laughing face to the Chief Justice and asked in a tone of mock sympathy, 'Mr. Justice, how do you look when you squelch people?' "
The chief justice replied, " 'I do not know, I am sure,' whereupon. Mrs. Waite, pretending to shake, as if from some rather terrifying memories, said under her breath, 'I do!' " at which point "the whole company . . . broke out in delighted laughter."
One who was decidedly not laughing about the situation was Belva Lockwood, the "young woman" who was the object of the distinguished company's mirth. The year 1877 had been especially cruel to Lockwood, not especially young at 47, who was running a boarding establishment at 619 F St. NW, housing her brother, sister, mother, son, daughter, son-in-law and 11 renters, while caring for a dying husband. Yet she'd managed to single-handedly establish a law practice against long odds.
An Upstate New York farmer's wife who was widowed at 22, she put herself through college and became a teacher and principal. Then, in 1866, with no husband and a 16-year-old daughter, she did something astonishing: "I . . . came to Washington, for no other purpose than to see what was being done at this great political center--this seething pot, to learn something of the practical workings of the machinery of government, and to see what the great men and women of the country felt and thought."
In Washington, she got a job at a girls' school with "barely enough salary for my maintenance, but with all the time after one o'clock p.m. to myself. This was satisfactory as it gave me ample time for investigation; and during the five months that I spent in this school I listened to debates in Congress and the arguments in the United States Supreme Court, investigated the local government of the District, visited her public buildings . . ."
In 1869 she married a Baptist minister, the Rev. Ezekiel Lockwood, and decided to become a lawyer, without stopping to consider, she later said, "that I was a woman." "Born a woman," she wrote, "with all of a woman's feelings and intuitions, I had all the ambitions of a man, forgetting the gulf between the rights and privileges of the sexes."
She would soon be reminded.
She was rejected, on the basis of her sex, from one law school, and although she was accepted at another in 1871, the new National Law University of Washington, her reception there was little more than an extended hazing. Lockwood had persuaded 15 women to join her in her studies, but they were denied entry to most of the lectures, without explanation. Only Lockwood and one other woman managed to successfully complete the courses despite that handicap. Still she was denied a diploma--first told she would have to wait several months, then refused flatly. The reason: The men in the law school had protested that their diplomas would be devalued if women were given the same degree.
Lockwood's struggle to get her diploma dragged on for two years. At one point, no less an authority than Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley spoke out against female professionals. "The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life," he wrote.
The only other woman who completed law school with Lockwood gave up. Not Belva. National Law University had some conceit that it was a quasi-federal institution. Listed as figurehead president of the university was the president of the United States, U.S. Grant.
In September 1873, Lockwood wrote Grant a terse note: "Sir. You are, are you not, President of the National University Law School. If you are its President, I desire to say to you that I have passed through the curriculum of study in this school, and am entitled to, and demand, my diploma. If you are not its President, then I ask that you take your name from its papers, and not hold out to the world to be what you are not."
Two weeks later, the university chancellor handed Lockwood a diploma.
Despite the prevalence of the prejudices expressed by Justice Bradley, Lockwood built a thriving law practice, specializing in pension and land claims, and, eventually, she argued criminal cases. In 1874, she applied for admission to the U.S. Court of Claims to fight a patent-infringement case. The court rejected her application. Lockwood responded by lobbying Congress like crazy. She dashed madly about the Capitol, becoming the butt of snide remarks by newspaper columnists who cast her as lunatic fringe. Her reception among members of Congress was only marginally more respectful. Her proposed legislation protecting women's rights to practice law was referred to committee, where it sat for two years.
Outside downtown's Center Market in 1910. (Courtesy Washingtoniana Division at D.C. Public Library)
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Lockwood decided to go over their heads. By late September 1876, three years into her D.C. law practice, she was eligible to apply to practice before the Supreme Court. Lockwood knew that if her application was granted, the Court of Claims would have to follow suit.
Again she was rebuffed.
Much now argued for Lockwood to give up. The highest court had spoken, and there was no appeal. She not only had her law practice, her family and her tenants to care for, but also her husband, who had fallen seriously ill.
That fall and winter, while the rest of the city thought of little beside the disputed election, her husband declined rapidly. On April 23, less than two months after Hayes's inauguration, Ezekiel Lockwood died. Despite her grief, Belva became only more unrelenting in her efforts to get her due from the legal system.
She focused on one phrase in the Supreme Court ruling against her: "The Court does not feel called upon to make a change until such a change is required by statute."
Lockwood once again hurled herself into a lobbying effort, banging on the doors of congressmen and senators, pleading her case to anyone and everyone with the remote potential to help her. "Nothing was too daring for me to attempt," she would later recall. By fall she would have results, House Resolution 1077 "to relieve certain disabilities of women." The resolution was shepherded through the Judiciary Committee by an unlikely champion, Rep. Benjamin Butler, a hound-faced New Hampshire Republican who was called "Beast Butler" by Southerners for his infamous command of the occupation of New Orleans during the war. Among other harsh measures, he issued orders that any woman who insulted Union soldiers should be "treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation."
But he also believed that any woman who practiced law with distinction should be treated as an attorney. By early 1878, the resolution would pass Congress, and 13 months after that, the Senate. Exactly two years after Hayes was sworn in as president, the evening paper would carry a one-sentence item from the Supreme Court: "For the first time in the history of this court a woman's name now stands on the roll of its practitioners."
Five years after that, Lockwood herself would become the Equal Rights Party candidate for president.
Good News for Democrats
Two months after the inauguration, Stilson Hutchins was still sputtering with rage. Hutchins had been a delegate to the 1876 Democratic National Convention that nominated Tilden. But Hutchins wasn't just any Democrat. He was a Democrat with a newspaper; he was founder and editor of the St. Louis Times. Born in New Hampshire, Hutchins had nonetheless been a Southern sympathizer during the war, even naming a son after Robert E. Lee.
After founding the Times in 1866, be bought the rival St. Louis Dispatch, which he made into a kind of Democratic clubhouse. But Hutchins lost his stake in the Dispatch and retreated to the Times--until the paper was sold out from under him in 1877.
From where Hutchins sat, it had been a lousy year: First Tilden had had the election ripped off by sleazy Republicans with federal troops covering their backs. Then, two months after that pompous old fraud Hayes had been inaugurated, the Times was bought out, and Hutchins booted out, in short order.
But Hutchins wasn't easily defeated. One columnist for a competing paper noted that Hutchins had energy "of that sleepless kind which neither grows weary nor despondent . . . Cool in every emergency . . . fertile in resources and daring in plan and attack, he would be formidable in any fight."
Hutchins decided to take the battle to the enemy. He launched a bold, possibly even reckless plan: to start a Democratic newspaper in the Republican-run capital of the United States, a city that already had five daily newspapers and four weeklies.
Hutchins left St. Louis in May, and arrived in Washington just in time for the malarial summer heat the town was infamous for. He got his new paper up and running with remarkable speed. He acquired the office of a defunct daily, the Chronicle, at 914 Pennsylvania Ave. NW and collected an energetic staff. His managing editor, raided from the Cincinnati Enquirer, was Col. John A. Cockerill, who would stay only a year before heading to the New York World and the journalistic big time, but not before he suggested the paper be called The Washington Post. His city editor was Frederick Aiken, who had been one of Mary Surratt's defense attorneys in her trial for conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Surratt was hanged, and Aiken became a journalist.
Reporters for The Post would work long hours for short pay. One early staffer was hired for $7 a week to cover Georgetown in the morning, then come downtown to pick up news from the Treasury, Agriculture, Interior and Post Office departments in the afternoon. He'd take a streetcar back to Georgetown for an economical dinner, then head back to The Post for night duty until the paper went to press at 3 a.m. Then, since the streetcars were no longer running, he'd walk home.
A four-page edition of The Washington Post hit the streets on a Thursday, December 6, 1877, with a message from its publisher: "Washington city is too large and too important to be denied the benign influence of a Democratic daily . . . The Post will do what it can to uphold the Demo-cratic majority in the House, and the majestic Democratic minority in the Senate . . ."
The Post would never refer to Hayes as president, only "Mr. Hayes" or in a more biting mood, "His Fraudulency."
Although it was staunchly partisan, The Post was also smart, funny, irreverent, plain-spoken: "Nothing very well calculated to curdle the blood of the Nation occurred in any of the brain workshops of the Government yesterday," one report began, only to end in a crashingly short summation: "The meeting of the Cabinet yesterday was not important."
Its bias was frequently racist (suggesting the city would be better "for an immediate exodus of 15,000 or 20,000 of her Negro population"), sexist (a woman "should be grateful for the kindly curbs that have been placed upon her"), genocidal (it was only proper, the paper contended, that Indian tribes "with habits, customs and modes of life directly antagonistic to our civilization" be swept out of the way to allow "the tide of Empire" to roll over the continent). But in that, it was not so different from scores of other 19th-century American institutions.
By the end of the year, The Post was a solid popular and financial success, and mixed with pure invective was some of the nation's strongest journalism and most refreshing writing.
As the 19th century came to a close, The Post would become less Democratic and more independent. As its circulation rose above 10,000, Republicans as well found themselves regular readers. On its first anniversary, Hutchins boasted of his paper: "No man has been able to say that he owned it except the owner, and no clique, faction or set of men have been able to say they controlled it."
'What She Wanted'
The year had begun in contention and fear, and ended with a capital city surging with confidence and innovation. The wisteria had withered on the house on H Street where Henry Adams settled in for the winter, already at work on a novel that eventually he would call Democracy. It was about a New York socialite who "for reasons that many people thought ridiculous . . . decided to pass the winter in Washington."
Her friends tried to dissuade her, pointing out the various cultural charms of the far larger and more glamorous New York. But she couldn't be moved.
"What she wished to see," Adams wrote, "was the clash of interests, the interests of 40 millions of people and a whole continent, centering at Washington; guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the tremendous forces of government and the machinery of society at work. What she wanted, was POWER."
Major sources for this article: 'Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden and the Stolen Election of 1876' by Roy Morris Jr. (to be published in February 2003); 'Rutherford B. Hayes: Warrior & President' by Ari Hoogenboom (1995); comments of Carol Geldermen, professor of English at the University of New Orleans; "James Wormley of the Wormley Hotel Agreement" by Charles E. Wynes, the Centennial Review (1975); "The Measure of a Man: James Wormley," an exhibit by the Historical Society of Washington (1993); "Wormley Family Genealogy" records, courtesy Frieda Wormley; "Lynch Wormley: From Paul Sluby--Handwritten Notes"; "Before It Was Merely Difficult: Belva Lockwood's Life in Law and Politics" by Jill Norgren, Journal of Supreme Court History (1999); "Belva Ann Lockwood: For Peace, Justice, and President" for the Stanford University Women's Legal History Biography Project by Barbara Babcock (1997); 'The Washington Post: The First 100 Years', by Chalmers M. Roberts (1977); 'Henry Adams' by Ernest Samuels (1989); 'Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C., After the Civil War' by Kathryn Allamong Jacob (1995); 'Washington: A History of the Capital, 1800-1950' by Constance McLaughlin Green (1962); "The Telephone Comes to Washington" by George C. Maynard, Washington History (2000); "From 'Federal Town' to 'National Capital' " by Kenneth R. Bowling, Washington History (2002); comments and notes, Philip Ogilvie.
Tom Shroder is editor of the Magazine. Mary Kay Ricks is a freelance writer and researcher. Shroder will be fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m. Monday on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
