Mary Clemmer Ames and “Ten Years in Washington”: a Gilded Age chronicler of the capital

She was neither an abolitionist leader nor a suffragist nor a temperance campaigner, and most Americans today have never heard her name. Yet Mary Clemmer Ames (1839 to 1884), a lifelong resident of the District of Columbia, recorded Washington life from the 1860s to the early 1880s. Her book Ten Years in Washington, first published in 1874, describes the capital's notable buildings and agencies and the people who gave them life. Alan Gephardt, a park ranger at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, profiled her in the Garfield Observer in March 2017.

Mary Clemmer Ames, from the frontispiece of her book. Image from the NPS article.

What the book covers

The book ranges from the history of how Maryland and Virginia gave ten square miles for the District to detailed descriptions of the Capitol, the President's House, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. It follows the inner workings of the Treasury, the Post Office, the Patent Office, the State Department, the Army, the Navy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Interior Department. Gephardt calls her portraits of individuals, male and female, famous and not, who set the social tone or did the everyday work of government intelligent, sympathetic, at times witty and fully human.

She wrote about every mistress of the White House, including the President's wife or daughter. About Sarah Polk, she wrote that she was among the most marked women ever to preside there, a lady of the old school who, though never a politician, was well versed in public affairs, and who was likely the only White House lady to serve as her husband's private secretary, keeping his papers and trusting her memory and method. Julia Grant's morning receptions were popular, she said, not because the First Lady was a fine conversationalist but because she was good-natured and put others at ease, so that there was never so little formality at the White House.

Martha Patterson, daughter of President Andrew Johnson. Andrew Johnson National Historic Site, National Park Service.

Women at the Treasury

The book shows both the skill and the hardships of women who worked for the federal government. After the 1871 Chicago fire, cases of charred money worth $164,997.98 were sent to the Treasury for identification, and a committee of six women separated each fragment with thin knives and judged its value and genuineness by close scrutiny, with magnifying glasses seldom needed. One of them, Mrs. M. J. Patterson, handled the most famous case, a paymaster's trunk that had lain three years at the bottom of the Mississippi River after the steamer Robert Carter sank. She saved $185,000 of $200,000, and the express company responsible gave her $500.

Female workers at the U.S. Treasury Department in the period Ames describes. Image from the NPS article.

She also recorded unequal treatment. Of 45 women in the Internal Revenue Bureau, she wrote, only one, aged 50, did not support others besides herself on the small pay she received, yet whenever a cry of retrenchment went up, three women lost their jobs for every man, even though the men outnumbered the women and cost more. Gephardt sees in this a forerunner of today's call for equal pay for equal work.

Her view of Garfield

For years Ames wrote a column, "A Woman's Letter from Washington," for the New York Independent. In the March 27, 1879 column she painted Congressman James Garfield as unequalled among Republicans of the decade in mental capacity and wide intellectual culture, a portrait that mixed reservation with admiration. A correspondent from Boston sent Garfield the column, and Garfield noted in his diary on April 27, 1879, that it criticized him "in a vague, unjust, and indefinite way." He called on Ames, left the letter for her to read, and two days later had what he called a strong conversation with her. What was said is not known.

In 1882, the year after Garfield's assassination, a new edition of the book added "A Full and Authentic History of the Life and Death of President James A. Garfield." Gephardt wonders whether that was tribute to a man she had once questioned or a sales tactic. The biography praises Lucretia Garfield for taking her place by her husband's side during his long fight for life, and Ames concluded that Garfield had been large-framed, large-brained and large-hearted, a man physically, intellectually and morally who honored his country.

James A. Garfield, from an engraving in Ten Years in Washington.

Lucretia Rudolph Garfield, First Lady of the United States, March 4 to September 19, 1881. Library of Congress.

Ames died at 45, a year after her 1883 marriage to Edmund Hudson, editor of the Army and Navy Register. Her earlier marriage to Daniel Ames ended in divorce in 1874, the year her book appeared. She left, Gephardt writes, a wonderful chronicle of Gilded Age Washington.

Sources

• Alan Gephardt (park ranger, James A. Garfield National Historic Site), “Mary Clemmer Ames and “Ten Years in Washington”,” Garfield Observer, March 2017, National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/mary-clemmer-ames-and-ten-years-in-washington.htm. Quotations from the 1870s and 1880s are paraphrased; the article's portraits credited to Wikipedia are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.