Southern First Ladies

Culture and Place in White House History

Katherine A. S. Sibley, Katherine A. S. Sibley

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780700630448
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Southern First Ladies explores the ways in which geographical and cultural backgrounds molded a group of influential first ladies. The contributors to this volume use the lens of "Southernness" to define and better understand the cultural attributes, characteristics, actions, and activism of seventeen first ladies from Martha Washington to Laura Bush.The first ladies defined in this volume as Southern were either all born in the South—specifically, the former states of the Confederacy or their slave-holding neighbors like Missouri—or else lived in those states for a significant portion of their adult lives (women like Julia Tyler, Hillary Clinton, and Barbara Bush).Southern climes indelibly shaped these women and, in turn, a number of enduring White House traditions. Along with the standards of proper behavior and ceremonial customs and hospitality demanded by notions of Southern white womanhood, some of which they successfully resisted or subverted, early first ladies including Martha Washington, Dolley Madison, Julia Tyler, and Sarah Polk were also shaped by racially based societal and cultural constraints typical of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of which have persisted to the present day.The first nine women in this volume, from Martha Washington to Julia Grant, all enslaved others during their lives, inside or outside the White House. Among the seven first ladies in the book's last section, Ellen Wilson, for example, was profoundly influenced by the reformist ethos of the Progressive Era and set an example for activism that five of her Southern successors—Lady Bird Johnson, Rosalynn Carter, Barbara Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Laura Bush—all emulated. By contrast, Ellen's immediate successor in the White House, Edith Wilson, enthusiastically celebrated the "Lost Cause." Southern First Ladies is the first volume to comprehensively emphasize the significance of Southernness and a Southern background in the history and work of first ladies, and Southernness' long-standing influence for the development of this position in the White House as well as outside of it.

part i

From the Early Republic Through Late Reconstruction

chapter 1

Martha Washington

Southern Influences in Shaping an Institution

Diana Bartelli Carlin

Martha Dandridge Custis Washington’s life symbolized that of many elite white eighteenth-century Southern women, and her background helped shape her role as presidential spouse. Although she made history, the Washingtons’ joint decision to burn their personal correspondence with each other makes it difficult to provide a full-blown picture of her and her influence. First lady scholar Robert P. Watson noted that she “has received surprisingly little attention” and is “a relatively enigmatic figure,” with her identity “largely tied to that of her husband’s.”1 The lack of attention is even more striking, he adds, because “she was the source for much of her husband’s success—financially, socially, and politically; and her contributions to his achievements were significant” (19). Fortunately for this analysis of the Southern influence on the first lady role, her correspondence with family and friends, her diaries, and legal documents help fill in the gaps, as do historians’ accounts of Southern landholding women in the colonial era.

Martha Washington was a product of her times, but the unique demands she faced as George Washington’s wife and as the first first lady made her a trailblazer. Like other daughters of plantation-owning parents, she was prepared to be a wife, mother, estate manager, and slave owner. She fulfilled those roles at the Custis White House plantation for her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis, and then at Mount Vernon for George Washington. Managing a complex plantation and hospitality were skills that made her transition to a new and uncharted role as the first president’s wife more seamless than it might have been for others. Although some of her background was not unique to Southern women, few were called upon to manage holdings as extensive as those of the Washingtons’. Nor were many women asked to entertain the endless streams of visitors her husband’s prepresidency positions, most notably that of commander in chief of the Continental Army, attracted to their home. This chapter frames Martha Washington’s story within the context of an elite, eighteenth-century, Virginia woman’s life and then examines the lasting influence of the first Southern first lady on the women who followed.

Martha Washington in about 1790. In Evert A. Duyckinck, Portrait Gallery of Eminent Men and Women of Europe and America: Embracing History, Statesmanship, Naval and Military Life, Philosophy, the Drama, Science, Literature, and Art (New York: Henry J. Johnson, 1873), 182.

characteristics of a southern, eighteenth-century woman

This book presumes that the South and its culture uniquely influenced the ways Southern women served as first lady. The words “Southern woman,” however, often evoke stereotypes. Two early scholars of Southern women’s history, Joanne V. Hawks and Sheila L. Skemp, wrote, “The history of Southern women is enveloped in myth and fantasy. . . . Images of Southern women are more likely to be found on the pages of Gone with the Wind than in history books.”2 Thus, we envision the Southern belle of the antebellum plantation as a wealthy woman of leisure concerned primarily with social gatherings and catching the right husband, or as the steel magnolia who can take whatever life throws at her and gives as well as she gets. Black Southern women’s portrayals are even more circumscribed, if they are visible at all.

Despite the simplistic and incomplete picture these images provide, historians have long considered the South a distinctive region with a subculture based on ethnic and regional identity that persists to this day.3 With an influx of transplants from across the United States and the world over the past thirty years, some of the South’s distinctiveness has faded, but many elements remain, often rooted in the colonial South. These include emphases on family, community, religious practice, and social rituals.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when women’s studies were in their infancy, scholars did not overlook Southern women and their particular attributes. Caroline Matheny Dillman noted that it is important to distinguish between “women of the South, that is women who not only were born and reared in the South but more importantly have a heritage of Southern culture and generations of Southerners in their family backgrounds . . . and [those] in the South.”4 But what constitutes a heritage of the South? One important distinction made between men’s and women’s roles in gender studies is that of spheres—public and domestic. However, in the eighteenth century, spheres were not always as clearly defined as they came to be in the nineteenth. The Southern record offers strong evidence for this, especially in elite plantation households.5 In the plantation household, as Jacquelyn Dowd Hall confirms, boundaries were “constantly renegotiated under the pressures of social and economic change.”6 Although married women were not firmly tied to the domestic sphere, most had little or no autonomy and were under the traditional British common law, by which they “became legally bound to their husbands. . . . The law stripped married women of property rights; everything they owned automatically became the husband’s property.”7 In Martha’s case, her new husband was the custodian of her Custis dower inheritance during her life. These negotiations would engulf her. By the age of twenty-six, she had lost a husband, her own father, and two of her four children, and she was forced to fulfill her late husband’s business obligations.

For women of any class, life was not easy, as Sally McMillen writes: “A South of magnolias, mansions, and courtly gentlemen was real for only the tiniest minority of women. Far more realistic is a view of Southern women as survivors, constantly facing the death of loved ones, living with poor health, enduring physical discomforts, and relishing only a few moments of joy or leisure. . . . They were a remarkable group, indeed a ‘hardy mold’” (12). This imagery illustrates the steel magnolia archetype, which persists today for women of the South. And even for the plantation class, life was arduous beyond the loss of loved ones. McMillen describes the life of a white woman born into a family similar to the Dandridges’, with a modest-sized plantation and a small number of enslaved people working in the fields. Women “gardened, weeded, managed the dairy, knitted, sewed and mended endlessly, nursed sick children and slaves, and . . . cooked. . . . Jobs required skill or strength or both” (131).

Because of the difficulties of colonial life and the interdependence among plantation owners, enslaved workers, and communities at large, relationships were important to survival. Family was an integral part of the Southern culture, and a wife’s dedication to her husband and his pursuits was paramount. Because early death, especially in childbirth, was so common along with second or third marriages as a result of a spouse’s death, the family structure was often blended in many ways. For slaveholding women, as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has noted, “the most positive interpretation of the household lay in the metaphor ‘my family, white and black,’ which captured the important, if elusive, vision of an organic community.”8 Such a community required interaction and negotiation between white masters and enslaved servants, but such interactions, as Mary Jenkins Schwartz notes, “were not between equals, but, within the confines of law and custom . . . [that] created a peculiar world of their own—a world that reveals much about class, race, and gender in the early nation.”9 This was a community of interdependence, then, but not one of choice for both parts of the “family” in creating or maintaining the community and its values or standards.

Beyond their husbands and children, notes McMillen, “all women, regardless of color, enjoyed primary friendships with other females, including their mothers, daughters, relatives, neighbors, and friends.”10 For Southern white women especially, the importance of relationships put an emphasis on the need to avoid tackiness—which Sarah Brabant defines as a “failure to act appropriately [and] a lack of sensitivity and insight into the response of others. The Southern lady was constantly alert to what was going on around her and the implications of those events for her and for her family.”11 As indicated in the description of community, this quality applied almost exclusively to men and women of the same class and race but could be applied, as is discussed in the next section, to recipients of elite women’s charitable works. Thus, the stereotype of Southern hospitality and charm is likely grounded in the colonial period.

In the rural South, Sunday gatherings before and after church were important for developing and maintaining relationships. Religion provided comfort in the face of almost certain loss of loved ones and friends. Deeply rooted religious beliefs were not unique to Southern women, nor were they class specific; however, “Southern religious values imperceptibly merged with the high culture and high politics of slaveholders, which in turn permeated Southern society,” as Fox-Genovese notes.12 For example, church officers such as Martha’s father and her first husband “oversaw not only church operations but also civilian matters, including the control of slaves in the community.”13 Frederick Douglass commented scathingly on this kind of control, especially when overlaid with religious sanctimony, in his Narrative regarding his master’s conversion: “[He] found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty. He made the greatest pretensions to piety.”14 Nevertheless, many Southern women carried out charitable efforts inspired by “their [Christian] responsibility to assist the less affluent women of their neighborhood” as well as people enslaved on their plantations.15

Slaveholding families also required daughters to develop social graces to navigate in society and practical skills for plantation management. This necessitated home-based instruction in the basics of reading, writing, and “ciphering.” Being a lady required a woman to “read history and the classics and play a musical instrument” for the purposes of “entertaining her h...