One Glorious Ambition (35 page)

“The railroaders are in the Senate offices daily,” John Bell said.

“Then so shall I. And I will spend a little more time with the select committee. Might that help?”

Senator Bell shrugged. “Hard to know. They are generally supportive. Jefferson Davis and Thomas Hart Benton have come along. The two of us, you know, are supportive.”

“It is just so frustrating!”

“The very middle name of politics,” Jane Bell said.

Over the next week, with time running out, wrangling persisted over the territories issues. Dorothea’s bill sat like the spectator she was, while men argued about the role of the federal government within the territories. John C. Calhoun used his reason and eloquence as twin daggers attacking the very features that Dorothea needed for her bill to succeed. She would have to wait. That’s what legislation was about.

Meanwhile, she rose early, wrote letters while she ate a light biscuit, and garnered support from private and public asylum hospital
physicians and superintendents. She urged them to write to their congressmen and senators. She sat outside committee rooms in order to confer with aides during breaks, bringing facts and figures and stories to support their discussion—when it was of her bill. She lamented to Anne her frustrations, sent pressed flowers in her letters to Marianna, and increased her correspondence with Joseph, deciding that even if he did not write often, she would.

Optimism buoyed her one day, despair threatened on another. She felt powerful when asked for advice by legislators and committee members, but powerless when they failed to incorporate her ideas.
Why ask?
The session wore on with only the passionate debates about the territories and slavery filling the galleries. In between were tedious hours of sitting, waiting, hoping to catch a senator or congressman she might win to her side. The summer heat stifled her like a tight corset. A fan was her constant companion.

“My dear sister,” John Dix wrote in early August. “I have failed you. We are about to adjourn, and I have been unable to secure your land.”

Dorothea read his words, his sense of failure seeping through them like blood through linen, dark and foreboding and suggesting permanence.
It cannot be
.

“You did your best,” Dorothea wrote in reply. She must encourage him. There would be another session. “I have learned there are always obstacles, and it is a mark of one’s character how such challenges are met, how we allow them to shape us. You can reintroduce it again in the winter session.”

She did not hear back from him by letter, but two evenings later Senator Dix and Catherine appeared at Mrs. Bride’s. “I came to tell you myself.”

“What more bad news can there be?” Dorothea spoke cheerily. “We will find the good news inside the bad.” She said he could reintroduce the bill in the winter term. It would be fine.

The sadness in his eyes caused her heart to pound. He inhaled deeply. “I am resigning from the Senate.” Dorothea gasped. “I’ve broken with the Democrats. In November I’ll be the Barnburner–Free-Soil candidate for governor of New York State.”

“Oh.” She sank onto the settee.

“There is some hope,” Catherine said as she petted Mrs. Bride’s pug. “Polk won’t run again, and the party is split between Democrats and Free-Soilers.”

“The Whigs may win, so you could then have your friend Horace Mann introduce the bill in the next term,” Dix added.

“Yes. Senator Mann. From Massachusetts. That’ll agitate the western states.” Dorothea had so wanted a Democrat—the opposition party—to sponsor and guide the bill through Congress.

Dix sat across from her, leaned forward, clasping his hands between his knees. “I cannot not do this,” he said. “It’s as though my voice in the wilderness cries to me to take this risk. New York cries out for a leader. I know you know what that is like, dear sister.”

She did.

“Well, it is what it is. I wish you well in your new ambition.”
She looked up at him and forced a smile. “But you will still be in the political world and run the risk of insanity yourself.”

Without the likelihood of passage of her
Praying for a Grant of Land
, Dorothea felt herself removed from politicking. She knew she would have to gird herself for the next battle, that she had not yet lost the war. Planning ahead, she arranged to have her rooms kept for the winter session, and she declined an invitation to spend the fall in Boston with Anne. Before he left, she spoke with Senator Mann, as Dix had suggested.

“We’ll get something introduced,” he told her. “But you must know that slavery is the issue of this time. Until it is eliminated in the new lands and forever, we face the wrath of God for our lack of justice seeking.”

“God’s wrath is not limited to slavery,” Dorothea said on the veranda of Mrs. Bride’s. “He has His eyes on all sparrows, especially those relieved of their reason.”

“I am certain you are right,” he said.

“All that has happened,” Dorothea wrote to Anne in September, “is that Oregon has been named a free territory thanks to the Free-Soil Party. Congress rejected the railroad request; did not even consider my prayer for the grant of land. Then everyone went home.”

At least they had homes to go to.

Dorothea donned her traveling clothes and headed to North Carolina, one of three states she had yet to survey. She also inspected almshouses along the way.

The South gave her solace. She loved the scents of magnolia and jasmine, the thick spanish moss hanging from the branches of so many trees. The beauty and orderliness of the sweeping plantations appealed to her sense of propriety, but now she felt guilty with Anne’s words about slavery still ringing in her ears.

She spent the winter at Raleigh and drafted a memorial for the legislature. Her Whig friends told her the bill would be defeated because the state was poor and lacked resources. Undaunted and encouraged by prominent North Carolinians and people of faith with personal concerns about the insane, she implemented the same strategy she used in Washington: she selected a member of the opposition party, “Miss-Dixed” him with her passion and her charm, and convinced her Whig friends and their colleagues to support him when he introduced the bill in the state senate.

The bill passed, and she allowed herself a celebratory moment with a glass of tea at the Raleigh boardinghouse in which she was staying. There, she toasted herself.
How can I get these bills through the states and fail so dismally at the national level?

Brother John Dix lost his bid for governorship of New York, and James K. Polk would still be the nation’s president until March. On a positive side, Zachary Taylor, a Whig, had won the election that fall, and his vice president, Millard Fillmore, was a New Yorker. Brother Dix knew him and offered to make an introduction for Dorothea. Meanwhile, her
Memorial Praying a Land Grant
was still in place from the previous congressional session, having languished with the committee during the lame duck session. Yet bigger issues demanded the national attention: settling the issue of slavery in the territories, especially as people flocked to California at the news of a gold rush.

As for Dorothea, she was less concerned about the issue of slavery in California and more concerned with what was said about the future of the country in which people abandoned their homes and families and livelihoods to seek nuggets across the continent. This was just another example of how undisciplined the world was and how these future prospectors were gold crazy—or soon would be to leave everything they knew for the minuscule possibility of some measure of wealth. Couldn’t the country’s leaders see what lay ahead? The country would need asylums
more than ever, because the nation seemed to be coming apart at the seams. She would discuss that with the vice president when she met him.

“I hope you don’t mind, dear lady, but my wife, Abigail, and our daughter, Abby, have heard of your work and said they would be honored to meet you. Our son is away at boarding school.”

“I’m the honored one.” Dorothea had been ushered into the living room of the vice president–elect’s residence at the Willard Hotel.

“Likewise.” Abigail had flaming red hair and sparkling green eyes, and Dorothea could see devotion in the looks exchanged between the politician and his wife. She had heard they had met while he attended a small academy. There Abigail was a teacher whom he swept away and married many years later.

“You’re a teacher,” Dorothea said.

“Indeed. I even worked after Millard was elected to office in New York. Quite the scandal, you know, to be a working wife.” She smiled and her sausage curls danced in delight. “Teaching is my first love. Well, perhaps second. Books are what I adore most. Books and music and my family. May we sit?” She directed Dorothea to a settee. The Fillmores stayed here when Congress was in session. “My ankle is a bother,” Abigail continued. “It gives me fits when I have to stand in receiving lines, so I hope you will forgive me for needing to rest.” Millard lifted her leg onto a brocaded stool and revealed a soft slipper instead of a shoe.

“I’m of an age,” Dorothea said, “where sitting is quite lovely.” She turned to Abby, a pretty young woman of about seventeen. “Will you be following in your mother’s footsteps?”

“As a teacher? No. But I love music as she does. And books.”

“We shall have her play the guitar or harp for you one day,” the vice president–elect said.

“I would very much like that.”

Dorothea took pleasure in this quiet interaction with the Fillmore family. A fire burned in the brazier as a cold wind whipped the trees outside the hotel. The family appeared to genuinely care for each other, to give as well as receive. There was a sense of home here. To simply sit and be still was a luxury she had seldom allowed herself. What cost might there be if her top stopped spinning? Yet she must take advantage of this moment. How could she not?

“Was there something you wished to discuss with me of a congressional nature?”

“I don’t wish to compromise your wife and daughter’s feminine sensibilities by speaking of public matters—”

“Nonsense. Tell us what you are up to now, Miss Dix.” Abigail rubbed her hands as though before a campfire.

“Mother loves a good story,” Abby chimed in.

“There’s a bill titled
Praying for a Grant of Land
. It is being introduced on behalf of those who have been relieved of their reason, the epileptics, the mad, forgotten people. I have come to the conclusion that asking each financially strapped state to provide funds to establish public mental health hospitals—to remove
from the terrible almshouses and appalling jails people who need instead moral treatment, not incarceration or worse—is futile and not in the best interest of all the people.” She paused. “My bill requests federal land be sold and the proceeds going into each state’s coffers for the purpose of funding such humane hospitals.”

“A national charity.” Abigail quickly discerned the intent.

Dorothea nodded. “Senator Dix introduced it, and the select committee approved it, but it has gone nowhere.”