Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
nineteenth-century French-Swiss writer
Belva McNall went to Washington and forged a new identity. By luck, or design, the capital turned out to be the perfect place for a woman whose secret dream was to live the life of a great man.
In 1866 the District was a frontier, a town in search of its identity. Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were long-settled cities, defined in their character. But Washington, in the view of Boston Brahmin Henry Adams, was “a mere political camp, as transient and temporary as a camp-meeting for a religious revival.”1 Transience was the hallmark of District life. The men who were the government, and men having business with the government, lived in boarding houses and hotels. Their families remained at home in places other than Washington. Office seekers came and went with changing administrations, and with the seasons. Those who could do so escaped what Adams called the “brooding indolence” of Washington’s sultry summers.2
Journalists had few kind words for the city Belva decided to make her new home. Mary Clemmer Ames described Washington as a third-rate southern town, physically crude and dirty.3 New York newspaperman Horace Greeley cautioned that “the rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting, the mud is deep, and the morals are deplorable.”4 The view up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol was impressive, but the avenue itself had no majesty. Low brick and wooden buildings housing saloons, pawn shops, second-class hotels, and the offices of lawyers and newspapers filled the space that connected the White House to the Capitol. Adams remarked that the city lacked high society or an intelligentsia.5 Nevertheless, there was, he said, an ease to life and one could not stay a month without, inexplicably, growing to love “the shabby town.”6
During the Civil War former slaves, soldiers, and clerks had poured into the city, which struggled to accommodate a population that grew from seventy-five thousand in 1860 to double that number in 1864. The unkempt city smelled. Sewage was everywhere, as the streets were neither drained nor graded; most were not paved. In 1870 Senator William Stewart discouraged the efforts of local businessmen to organize an international industrial fair in the District: “None of us are proud of this place,” he said, arguing that the city had neither grandeur nor power to display.7 Still, the victory of the Union signaled the possibility of an awakening. A District commissioner later said that it was not until the capital had been fought over that Congress showed an abiding interest in it.8
Belva McNall went to Washington because it was the seat of expanding national power. She was intrigued by politicians, and by their power. Psychologically, the move from Owego to the nation’s capital was far less charged than her journey to college. She was thirty-six, had acquired a small amount of capital from the sale of her Owego school, and, with Lura nearly grown, was free to decide what to do next. In her autobiographical Lippincott’s article, Belva wrote, perhaps disingenuously, that she “came to Washington, for no other purpose than to see what was being done at this great political centre,—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.”9 She also said that she had not come to the capital with any idea of making it her home.10 Something about Washington, however, proved addictive. The city throbbed with political ego and the demands of a wounded nation. Perhaps the outspoken schoolteacher sensed that in this place she could break the restraining bonds of custom.
Belva arrived in Washington during the winter of 1866. It was an extraordinary moment. Members of Congress had assembled in December for the first time since the end of the Civil War, ready to consider President Andrew Johnson’s plan for the nation’s recovery and reconciliation. Questions quickly developed over Johnson’s use of pardons in the South as well as his wavering commitment to freedmen’s rights. Although many legislators were quick to denounce Johnson, neither the House nor the Senate had developed a firm plan of reconstruction. Eventually Congress would pass civil-rights and military-reconstruction acts, and approve constitutional amendments guaranteeing civil and political rights, but in these months the direction of postwar programs was uncertain.
Belva decided to spend a few months in the capital before going to see her parents in Illinois. She accepted a teaching position at the Young Ladies’ Seminary run by Margaret and Mattie Harrover. The school, at Thirteenth Street, NW, between G and H Streets, was advertised as a boarding and day school.11 Although the position did not pay well, it fit her needs as it was located in downtown Washington and she was free to leave each day at one o’clock.12
Day after day, indulging her passion for politics, she strode up the hill to the Capitol. At the Senate’s new chamber she sat in the recently opened “Ladies Gallery.”13 Here, and in the House gallery, she listened to wide-ranging discussions, which included renewal of the Freed-men’s Bureau bill, naval appropriations, pension reform, proposals to amend the federal Constitution, and the heated response to the president’s veto of a ground-breaking civil rights bill. She also observed the hallway lobbyists and, when it was in session, went to the chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, tucked away in a corner of the Capitol building, perhaps finding a seat when General Benjamin Butler, the “beast” of New Orleans, argued in defense of presidential authority and martial law in Ex parte Milligan.14 She took long walks. It is not difficult to imagine the athletic newcomer striding along, indulging her dreams as she visited neighborhoods and dodged into public buildings. Young, ambitious men cultivated political mentors. Women like Belva had a more solitary journey.
Belva left Washington temporarily in the summer of 1866. She traveled south to Richmond to see the former capital of the Confederacy, then turned north and sailed to New York City, journeying on to meet one of her sisters. Together, they went to Chicago and on to their parents’ home in Onarga. Belva, a 36-year-old widow with no financial security, had promised them that she would think about settling in Illinois, joining her brother and sisters who now lived in the Midwest. She inquired about teaching positions in several towns near Onarga, but found none that satisfied her. By summer’s end, despite her attachment to Hannah, Belva abandoned the idea of moving west.15 Putting rural Illinois behind her, she traveled back to the District by way of Harper’s Ferry, shaping two plans of action. One was easily and openly discussed: in order to support herself she would establish a small school. The second plan was less clear and more radical: she would pursue a life thought unsuitable for a lady, a life in government or law.
Belva had long been fascinated with law and lawmaking. Like most schoolchildren of her generation, she had been assigned the essays and speeches of American statesmen Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay.16 As a child she had eagerly read books describing the lives of important men, and later reported having discovered that “in almost every instance law has been the stepping-stone to greatness.”17 Perhaps for this reason, while at Genesee College she had taken the unusual step—for a woman—of studying the Constitution, the law of nations, and political economy. Standing at Harper’s Ferry, the site of tragic insurrection, she must have considered her own rebellious dreams. She had been born a woman “with all of a woman’s feelings and intuitions,” but, she acknowledged, she “had all of the ambitions of a man, forgetting the gulf between the rights and privileges of the sexes.”18
Belva proved daringly ambitious, but she was no fool. While she shaped her dreams into a concrete plan, she went forward with the task at hand: opening the new school. Early in the autumn of 1866 she placed an advertisement in the education column of the Evening Star: McNall’s Ladies’ Seminary, in the Union League Hall, Ninth Street, would begin classes on October 8, “Terms Moderate.”19 She planned to teach most of the subjects, but Lura, seventeen, home from Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, would be her assistant, conducting Latin and French recitations. The two women rented one floor of the Union League building, keeping the main section for the seminary, while making the east end their living quarters.20 Belva also earned money as a rental agent at the Union League, Commercial, and Temperance Halls.21 She said very little about the school except to suggest that teaching no longer engaged her. For practical reasons she could not stop, but her mind was elsewhere, engaged by other, more provocative projects.
One of these