As the month of June commemorates the most popular time for weddings, it seemed fitting to describe the weddings, marriages, and matrimonial partnerships of some of our nation’s Commanders-In-Chief and their First Ladies. In studying the connection between matrimony and the highest office in the land, it appears that, like most American couples, Presidents and First Ladies had their ups and downs. In choosing these couples, there was just one requirement they needed to have in common – the President had to have visited the village of Gettysburg. Here are a few of them:
1. The Washingtons. George and Martha Washington, contrary to what some historians have written, were not united merely for convenience. It appears that the marriage was a true love match. The two were wedded on January 6, 1759 – he was a tall and rugged soldier, surveyor, and planter, she was a petite and wealthy widow with small children. They endured the rigors of a revolution together – he often wrote to her, asking her to come to him while at camp. She seemed to ameliorate life for him. Friends and colleagues noted that Washington always seemed more at ease when Martha was around. Both George and Martha preferred a quiet retirement at their home, Mount Vernon, to public office after the war. Duty called, however, and the pair journeyed to New York City in 1789 – where Washington took the oath of office as the nation’s first President. The house on Cherry Street no longer stands where the couple resided while Washington served his first term as President. If it were to still exist, it would have had a grand view of the Brooklyn Bridge, which stands partly on the spot where the house was.
Martha slipped elegantly but simply into her role as First Lady. She had a penchant for white, and wore the color almost exclusively when seen in public with her husband. White muslin, silk, satin, or mobcaps all went well with her white hair, creamy complexion and easy smile.
Many paintings of Martha represent a dowdy figure, yet the real Martha was attractive and dignified. A perfect hostess and kindly companion, it is not surprising to realize that the Washingtons were married for forty years. When George Washington died of a virulent throat infection on December 14, 1799, a solemn silence filled the chamber. It was Martha’s quiet voice that finally asked the attending physician, “Is he gone?” The doctor, too overcome with grief to answer, nodded in assent.
A little known fact about the Washingtons is that they were over a foot apart in height. She was barely over five feet tall; he was six feet three and 1/2 inches and quite large in stature. Whenever Martha wanted to get her husband’s attention, she would grab his shirt and pull him down to her level. She just wouldn’t endure raised voices.
Washington came through the town of Gettysburg in 1789, traveling from his native Virginia en route to take the oath of office in New York City. He also came through Gettysburg in 1794, while leading an army to western Pennsylvania to end the Whiskey Rebellion during his second term, in which he served in Philadelphia.1
2. The Lincolns. Like the Washingtons, the Lincolns were also greatly affected by their difference in height. She was petite and plump, he was the tallest of our U.S. Presidents at six feet four inches, and exceedingly gaunt. He joked that he and Mary were “the long and short of it.” The pair met at a soiree in Springfield, Illinois, where he was a young lawyer and she was visiting her eldest sister, Elizabeth Todd Edwards. Mrs. Edwards remembered that while the two courted, Lincoln “would listen and gaze on [Mary] as if drawn by some superior power.” The pair both hailed from Kentucky, but their backgrounds were as different as two people could have. He was raised in poverty and rarely showed his feelings; she was born to a wealthy Lexington banker and rarely kept her emotions in check. Yet, they had a lot in common. Both were highly intelligent, both shared an avid interest in politics, and both had lost their mothers at a young age. The two were married on November 4, 1852 at the Edwards home in Springfield. The ambitious Mary Lincoln felt certain that her husband would one day become the President of the United States. Eight years later, he was elected to that office, just as Mary had predicted.
The Lincoln marriage by many accounts was rather stormy. John Nicolay, one of the secretaries to the President, called Mary “the Hell Cat.” One sister described her “like an April day”, calm and sunny one minute and stormy and wailing the next. Still, Mary adored her husband, and took great pains to care for his needs. Another sister declared, “[She] mothered her husband as she did her children, and he seemed very dependent upon her.”
Mary was seriously wounded in a carriage accident in July 1863, and after a partial recovery took her sons Robert and Tad on a trip to New England. She was gone for two months, and finally returned when the President urged her to come back to Washington. “Nothing very particular,” he wrote, “I would be glad to see you and Tad.” He later wrote more emphatically, “I really wish to see you.”
The war had taken its toll on the nation, and the Lincolns were not exempt. They had lost their son, Willie, to typhoid fever in 1862. Several of Mary’s brothers-in-law were killed in the war fighting for the Confederacy, and Lincoln, too, lost many friends and colleagues. On the last day of his life, Lincoln said to his wife, “We must be happy in the future. We have been most miserable.” They were holding hands at Ford’s Theater when John Wilkes Booth crept into the Presidential box and shot Mary’s beloved husband.
Mrs. Lincoln never recovered from the shocking assassination. Many years later, when describing her feelings over her husband’s tragic death, she said, “Time does not soften it. I will never be reconciled to my loss, until the grave closes over the remembrance, and I am again reunited with him.” She got her wish on July 15, 1882. She was buried next to her husband, wearing her black crepe dress and her wedding ring, which was inscribed “Love Is Eternal.”
Abraham Lincoln will be forever linked to Gettysburg from his visit on November 18-19, 1863, which produced his immortal Gettysburg Address. As their son, Tad, was ill, Mary did not accompany her husband to Pennsylvania.2
3. The Clevelands. Grover and Frances Cleveland were a couple who did two things that, to date, no other Presidential couple has done. Although other Presidents married while they were serving as Commander-In-Chief, like the widowed John Tyler and Woodrow Wilson, the Clevelands were the only President and First Lady to be married in the White House. The wedding took place in the Blue Room on June 2, 1886. He was 49, she was 21; and the event created such a national sensation that one would have thought that royalty had wed. When President Cleveland lost reelection in 1888, Frances told the White House staff that they’d be back in four years. She was right – Grover Cleveland is the only President to have served two non-consecutive terms in the White House.
Frances Cleveland was an intensely private person, hoping to bring some normalcy to the Cleveland children – a difficult task for any First Lady. When her husband lost reelection, the family moved to New York for four years, where Grover rode a streetcar to his work at a law office. When they moved back to Washington in 1893, they had their second daughter, Esther, born in the White House – the first Presidential child to be born there. In all, five children came to the Clevelands, and Frances (or “Frank” as Grover affectionately called her) graced the cover of countless women’s magazines of the day. In spite of her popularity, her husband did not win his party’s nomination for a third term and the couple settled in Princeton, New Jersey after William McKinley won the election against William Jennings Bryan.
With the 28-year age difference, and with the former President in failing health due to weight issues, it was not unexpected that Frances would outlive her husband. On June 24, 1908, just 22 years after their marriage, Grover Cleveland succumbed to the combined ailments of heart trouble and kidney failure.
Frances Cleveland remarried in 1913 – the first of the First Ladies to do so – to a Princeton professor named Thomas Preston. Shortly before her marriage, in January of that year, she was invited to the White House at the invitation of Nellie Taft. When Frances went into the Blue Room, where she had been married 26 years earlier, every eye was upon her and it was evident that “her inward feelings were profound.”
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Grover Cleveland visited the Gettysburg battlefield on May 4, 1885, in which he toured a Union veteran’s encampment. He had named a few former Confederates to cabinet posts, a conciliatory gesture toward the still distant South. His gesture angered people in the North. To soothe hurt feelings, he came to Gettysburg. He was still a bachelor when he made the trip.3
4. The Wilsons. Woodrow Wilson was not a likely candidate for President of the United States. A scholar, lawyer, and college President at Princeton, he had endured just two tenuous years as governor of New Jersey before he was elected President of the United States. When his beloved wife, Ellen, died the following spring after a long illness, Wilson was despondent and threw himself into his work. The following year, he met Edith Bolling Galt, an attractive Washington widow, at his cousin’s house. He was instantly smitten. The American public was charmed as well, especially when they learned that Mrs. Galt was a 9th generation descendant of Pocahontas.
Woodrow Wilson married Edith Galt in December, 1915. It was a tumultuous time with the advent of world war already taking place in Europe. That same year the Germans sank the ship Lusitania off the Irish coast. The incident took many innocent lives, including Americans. Wilson had to worry about reelection – and Americans did not want to enter the costly war. For weeks, Wilson preached to European allies to accept “peace without victory” – a ludicrous and unattainable effort. Edith told her husband to get tough with the Germans, and he listened. After winning the election, with the Kaiser threatening to sink American ships in the Atlantic, Wilson reluctantly asked Congress to declare war.
Edith Wilson was privy to more confidential information than any other First Lady up to that time. She sat by her husband’s side in the Oval Office and had access to classified documents – which she sometimes read. To save money so that a sufficient military force could be raised quickly, she held back on gala events; and purchased sheep to graze the White House lawn so that the gardeners could go to France and fight.
With the arrival of American troops in Europe, the tides of war were turned. Within a year the Germans yielded and Wilson went to France to sign the Treaty of Versailles. He did not want to go, but Edith convinced him that his presence there was absolutely necessary. She accompanied her husband to Paris to negotiate the peace terms. It took months to resolve the terms as European Allied powers, bitter over their tremendous losses, resented Wilson’s benevolence toward Kaiser Wilhelm. The Germans pushed the other way, for increased concessions on their behalf – leaving a man who had little experience with global events exhausted and ill.
It was not a surprise to Edith Wilson and the others close to the President that Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke in September 1919. He was in a coma for many days and one historian lamented that “it was a wonder and a tragedy” that he survived. Paralyzed on half his body and emotionally wrecked – he burst into tears at the slightest provocation – Edith Wilson suggested that her husband was too ill to continue as President.
Incredibly, Woodrow Wilson stayed in office, though he never left his private quarters for months. Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, some historians claim, acted as the first woman President. She decided what was important for the nation and what was not, serving as “the gatekeeper” of her husband’s room. Her actions were not well received by the press, Congress, or the American people when they learned about the circumstances at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Incapable of working even an hour per day by 1920, Wilson still hoped to be elected for a third term. The Democratic Party spurned him, and the Wilsons went home when Warren G. Harding was elected by a landslide. Woodrow never did regain his health, and died quietly in his sleep on February 3, 1924.
Margaret Truman, who knew Edith Wilson, said that “Love was First Lady Edith Wilson’s triumph – and her immolation. Maybe…love and politics do not mix very well.”
One outcome of Wilson’s love for Edith caused a change in the Constitution that we take for granted today. In 1920 the Wilson Administration got the 19th Amendment on the ballot and it was soon passed and ratified, giving women the right to vote.
President Wilson came to Gettysburg on July 4, 1913, and served as the keynote speaker at the 50th Reunion of the Blue and the Gray. His first wife, Ellen, was still living but was suffering from Bright’s Disease, the kidney ailment that took her life the following spring.
Woodrow Wilson also shares a unique connection to the Civil War, and to a man who was instrumental in the Battle of Gettysburg. The ten-year-old Wilson met an aged Confederate general one day at the train station in his hometown of Staunton, Virginia, in 1868. He was Robert E. Lee.
In 1917, the Virginia Memorial was dedicated at Gettysburg. It bears an excellent likeness of General Lee atop his favorite horse, Traveller. It is an interesting irony that a Virginian occupied the White House when the Virginia general was honored among the fields where the High Tide of the Confederacy had occurred over a half-century earlier.4
5. The Trumans. Like George Washington, Harry Truman would have preferred not becoming President of the United States. His wife, the former Bess Wallace, felt the same about serving as First Lady. The couple had married on June 28, 1919. Harry was 35, Bess was a year younger at 34. The late date of their wedding is unusual as they had known and loved each other since childhood. She was from a wealthy but troubled family, and Harry was a poor farmer. He had wanted to make a success of himself so that Bess would not be ashamed, in his own words, “to marry a gink like me.”
Because of his scrupulous honesty and plain way of communicating with the masses, Harry Truman became popular with the people of Missouri. After serving as a judge for eight years followed by a two-term senate seat, Truman was selected to run with incumbent President Roosevelt for his fourth term. Just a few months after FDR’s reelection, Roosevelt died of a brain hemorrhage on April 12, 1945.
It was difficult to take over the White House in the middle of a devastating war and having to replace an immensely popular President and First Lady – especially when the Trumans had not coveted the job in the first place. Daughter Margaret remembered that Bess Truman’s mood went “from blue to black” and quite a few marital squabbles ensued, as Bess was angry that Harry had gotten her into a situation that shattered all her hopes for normalcy and privacy. She was also concerned about her husband coping with the enormous responsibility that suddenly found itself upon his shoulders. “This is going to put a terrific load on Harry,” she confided to a friend. “Roosevelt has told him nothing.”
While Harry Truman worked on bringing an end to World War II, Bess worked on making the White House a comfortable place for her family to live. With the vestiges of Eleanor Roosevelt plainly evident, Bess had to deal with staffers and cooks who coolly stated, “That is not how Mrs. Roosevelt did it.”
Though shy, Bess was not easily subjugated. A good judge of character, she carefully weighed any situation before acting on it. She soon let the staff know, in her quiet and efficient way, that she was now in charge. She rarely intervened in governing matters but when she did speak, Harry listened.
When Truman’s advisors urged him to run for a third term, Harry knew that Bess wanted to go home to Missouri. The truth was, he wanted to go, too. Looking at Bess’s photograph on his desk in the Oval Office, he decided that he couldn’t let her down. When Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated on January 20, 1952, Harry and Bess walked quietly out of the White House, got into their car, and drove home.
Just a few years earlier, in 1950, Harry and Bess rode equally incognito into Gettysburg to take a day trip and get away from the capital. He had always wanted to visit the historical town, but had not done so because his unreconstructed mother, Martha Young Truman, forbade it. Hoping to avoid any publicity, the Trumans were slightly distressed when someone spotted them on the battlefield and alerted the National Park Service. Harry and Bess insisted they just wanted to be left alone to tour Gettysburg, but relented and agreed to a short press conference. Then, they got in their car and rode back to Washington.5
6. The Eisenhowers. Next to Lincoln, Ike is the President most associated with Gettysburg, as he lived many years on his farm south of town. Like Washington and Truman, General Eisenhower did not relish becoming President. Both the Democratic and Republican parties wanted him on their tickets and pressed him repeatedly. As the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Ike had handed President Truman victory in Europe. Truman responded to Japan with the atomic bomb, bringing an end to the devastating war. Hoping to retire, and just months after purchasing his Gettysburg farm, Ike reluctantly agreed to run. He won easily, but the ensuing eight years in office would not be as easily accomplished.
Ike met his wife, Mamie, in San Antonio. A recent West Point graduate, Eisenhower was a second lieutenant at Fort Sam Houston. Mamie, one of four daughters of a wealthy Denver businessman, was wintering with her family in Texas. A mutual friend introduced the couple, and Ike and Mamie were instantly attracted. He invited her to accompany him on his inspections of all the guard posts and she accepted. The couple married on July 1, 1916 and Mamie left her comfortable life to become the wife of a military commander.
The couple first came to Gettysburg at the onset of World War I. Ike was, to his disappointment, held back from the front and instead was ordered to oversee Camp Colt, a training ground for tank warfare. The varied and open battlefield at Gettysburg was an ideal place for familiarizing troops with these new weapons. It was here that the Eisenhowers first became familiar with the quaint, historic town – and decades later, when a second world war ended, it was Gettysburg the couple chose as their new home.
Being away for long periods of time and knowing his wife was alone, Ike worried about Mamie’s safety. He gave her a pistol and taught her how to use it. Feeling better, he decided one morning on an emergency rehearsal. “Mamie,” he said, “get your pistol out – as if somebody were trying to break through the front door.” Mamie went to the piano, struggled to tug it away from the wall, unrolled a piece of bedding, moved other possessions, and finally uncovered the pistol. Ike remembered, “She couldn’t have gotten it out in a week, much less in a hurry. I decided to keep on concentrating on trying to making the camp safer.”
Like the Trumans and the Lincolns, Ike and Mamie came from very different backgrounds. She had the wealthy connections, his family had struggled to make ends meet. Mamie loved the color pink, themed parties, musicals and family barbecues. Ike preferred reading, golfing, and painting. He had a temper, and sometimes got exasperated with her. She, like Mary Lincoln and Edith Wilson, fiercely protected her husband when the need arose.
When Ike suffered a serious heart attack during his first term in office, Mamie became more steeled in her resolve to help him recover. Beneath those signature bangs and pink bows was a crisp, firm managerial style. “She could give orders,” one White House staffer remarked, “as if it were she who had been a five-star general.” Yet, she generously remembered all White House employees at Christmas and invited them all to their Gettysburg farm for family barbecues. In spite of her proclivity to fine things, she bought discount jewelry and shopped at stores the rest of the populace frequented. She hated to fly, but learned to climb aboard and go when Ike needed her. No wonder Ike lovingly called her his “dear girl”, long after the bloom of youth had faded.
Mamie survived her beloved Ike by ten years. When she died on November 1, 1979, the Eisenhowers’ farm passed into the hands of the American people, and is now the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Visiting the farm, one feels the whisper of their presence in the comfortable place Ike and Mamie called home, where hundreds of people from cooks and gardeners to world leaders were treated with the same hospitality.6
Sources: Angelo, Bonnie. First Mothers: The Women Who Shaped The Presidents. New York: William Morrow, 2000. Anthony, Carl Sferrazza. First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power, 1789-1961. New York: William Morrow, 1990. Donald, David Herbert. Lincoln at Home. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Eisenhower, Dwight D. At Ease: Stories I Tell To Friends. National Park Service: Eastern Acorn Press, 1967. Flexner, James Thomas. Washington: The Indispensable Man. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Loski, Diana. “The Presidents Who Came to Gettysburg.” The Gettysburg Experience Magazine, February 1999. Neeley, Mark E., Jr. and Harold Holzer. The Lincoln Family Album. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press,1990. Oates, Steven B. With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. The Lincoln Museum, Springfield, IL. Truman, Margaret. First Ladies: An Intimate Group Portrait of White House Wives. New York: Fawcett Books, 1995. Whitney, David C. The American Presidents. 8th Edition. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1993.
End Notes:
1. Anthony, p. 38. Truman, p. 90. Flexner, p. 406. Loski, p. 1.
2. Neely, pp. 37, 68, 75. Donald, p. 25. Oates,
p. 63. Goodwin, p. 753. The Lincoln Museum, Springfield, IL. Loski, p. 2.
3. Whitney, pp. 175, 182. Anthony, p. 258. Loski, p. 3.
4. Whitney, pp. 236, 237. Truman, pp. 126-130. Anthony, pp. 356, 373. Loski, p. 5.
5. Truman, pp. 82-88. Angelo, pp. 56, 62. Loski, pp. 6-7.
6. Eisenhower, pp. 113, 125. Angelo, p. 101. Anthony, pp. 552-553.
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