One Glorious Ambition (38 page)

Dorothea spent a week at the Trenton hospital in the apartment provided for her. She walked the grounds, checking on the growth of the pear trees. She ate meals with the patients and marveled at their table manners. Moral treatment worked! She could see it in their smiles and on their faces. This humane approach was needed in every state in the nation.

Her bill, however, languished in Congress again during the winter session, until January 1851, when a sponsoring senator disputed Senator Davis’s constitutional concerns by pointing out that the sale of public lands would increase economic development and add value that was every bit the role of the federal government as a trustee of the country, thus improving the condition of state lands.

Dorothea nearly cheered from the gallery. What a gallant and inventive argument! His argument carried the day, and her bill passed the Senate, carrying New England and winning thirty-five to sixteen votes. She praised the senator effusively when she hooked him outside her office door. “Brilliant, just brilliant.”

“It is only the truth, dear lady,” he said. “Only the truth.”

Dorothea waited anxiously for the House bill to move quickly as well. An argument to deal with the states’ rights advocates was at hand and had been used successfully by the Democrats. She was so hopeful that they, too, would see it as “only the truth.”

Instead, amendments and delays and referrals stalled the bill.
How can this be? We are so close
.

She waited in her office for some positive note. She wrote letters furiously, requiring frequent refilling of her sandbox. She thought of the Madeleines and the Abrams, how this grand plan
would help them and all who came after them. Here was her life’s work laid at the hands of men with factions pulling them left and right. Had she kept the needs of the suffering always before them? Had she done enough to champion the argument that would push them to her side?

“Dolly?”

Horace Mann entered her office.

“Yes?” she answered, rising from her chair.

“I’m so sorry.”

“What? What!”

“Benton, on the select committee.”

“He was in favor.”

“He thought he needed more time. The opposition grew.” Mann cleared his throat. “There were so many amendments, motions, delays, requests for the Speaker to reschedule. Then one of the representatives—from our beloved Massachusetts—rose and said he had voted for your bill that day as often as he could, and now he felt they should take up other, more important measures before adjourning.”

“It’s dead.” She sank back into her chair.

“Until the next session. Are you all right? We did our best.”

“I am aware of your great efforts.” She was a clock winding down. She would have to find a way to wind herself back up. She rubbed her temples with her fingers, then sighed. “My efforts were simply not enough. I was not enough.” Failure was as familiar as the face in her mirror.

The southern states still had causes: Alabama supporters asked for her help once again in passing legislation for a hospital there. She packed her trunk, boarded a stage, and bounced her way to South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

“You’re from where? Massachusetts?”

The innkeeper frowned at her. She had always been greeted graciously in the South. Now this man in Florida acted as if she were there to assault him rather than purchase food from him.

“Yes. But I have spent a fair amount of time in the South. I love it here.”

“Spying on us?”

“Why, no. I—”

“We don’t need no northerners telling us what to do or how to think.”

“No, of course not. I am here to assist the mentally ill—”

“We take care of our own.”

She wrote to President Fillmore and others of these sentiments. “Abolitionists visiting here have upset the people, and there is secessionist talk that borders on the extreme. People appear to think all northerners are abolitionists.”

She did not receive the usual invitations from her friends to visit their plantations and stay with them. Instead, she found rooms at boardinghouses while she did her work for those who had lost their reason. Once or twice while mending a tear in her
skirt or stuffing her shoe soles with newspaper, she wondered if perhaps she had lost hers.

Following the midterm elections, she returned to Washington to learn that the Whigs had been greatly diminished. The president’s support also waned with the change in the government’s complexion.

In her office at the Library of Congress, she conferred with her colleagues about what these changes might mean for her bill. They shook their heads. Predicting the weather was easier than forecasting how legislation would fare through Congress.

While she awaited word on the status of her bill, she wrote another memorial, this one for Maryland to help them replace a psychiatric hospital. Not able to twiddle her thumbs while waiting for congressmen to act, she learned of a move to provide funds for a psychiatric hospital for Washington and for veterans. She thought about getting involved … it was a worthy cause. But if she did, would it appear she was less committed to her own bill? Horace Mann’s chastisement of her earlier diversions for deaf schools was still fresh in her mind.

“There’s an amendment attached to your bill,” Mann told her during a session break. “But I think it will pass anyway. It resolves the question of the distribution so the western states are satisfied.”

“You know how I feel about making any concessions that might weaken the overall resources for the national asylum centers,” Dorothea said.

“For once, I trust you will let practical politics prevail.”

She ran a cleaning rag around the ink bottle on her desk. She wiped errant sand into the palm of her hand and returned it to the sandbox. “I won’t protest the amendment, but I will have an ache in my heart always if it passes.”

The bill passed the House with the amendment intact. Since it had passed the Senate previously, and the changes would only appease not distress the Democrats there, Dorothea waited hopefully for word that in August 1852 she would at last see her dream accomplished.

Instead, the Senate refused to vote on the bill because of the railroad amendments attached to it.

“But the railroad amendment was supposed to further the bill along.” Dorothea stood before the president in his office. Aides hovered in the background.

“Things happen. But you will be back,” Fillmore told her. “Next session for certain.”

“Like lemmings to the sea, you mean? Yes, I imagine I will come back. And you, will you be back?”

The president harrumphed. “I am hopeful. I would like to be elected for my own full term. I know my signing of the Fugitive Slave Act has distanced my northern Whig friends, and my position on the Caribbean invasion has disgruntled my southern Whig friends.” He shrugged. “Perhaps you will outlast me, Dolly.”

“I need you.”

“And I will try to be of service.” He nodded to her and an aide touched her elbow to usher her out. The president was a busy man, and only friendship had allowed these few minutes for him
to offer his time to a passionate woman who had again failed in her attempt to promote a piece of legislation.

Amazingly, the federal hospital in Washington that she had declined to assist was approved, and while Dorothea had not championed it during the session, she saw the authorization of the hospital as a first step in recognizing the federal government’s role in treating the mentally ill. She decided to remain in the city and see what she could do to support “my district hospital.” She had a cause for the summer and the fall, until once again she would champion her bill and hopefully Millard Fillmore, as the newly elected president in his own right, would sign it.

In 1852 the Whigs did not nominate Fillmore for a run at the presidency. And the Democrat nominee, Franklin Pierce, won the presidential election.

“Perhaps we can still get the measure through both houses in the lame duck session that I might sign it before leaving office,” Fillmore told Dorothea. He did not appear all that disappointed that he had not won his own term in office. She commented to him about that, and he nodded. “I have done what I could do to serve my country. I will go home to New York now, with my dear Abigail and Abby, and when this session is over, I shall become a country squire again.”

“You shall always be involved in public life.” Dorothea smiled as he poured her a cup of tea.

“Perhaps. But it would please me to see your bill through,
Dolly. It would be a solid and memorable period on the sentence of my presidency.”

She smiled, and for a moment she thought his look was one of endearment, perhaps more deeply than merely as a friend. She felt her face grow warm. He cleared his throat and backed away. Admiration as a colleague, she decided. That was what had passed between them.

To the end of having him be the president who would sign her bill into law, she lobbied daily, buttonhooking legislators. She was doing it for the country’s insane but also for her friend the president. In both houses, the bill languished, however. Other bills were attached to it, or it was moved to be attached to some other issue related to land. It was squeezed into discussions that seemed unrelated, though championed by some senators as a pet project. Nothing, absolutely nothing, moved closer to resolution. Still, in the wee hours of the last day of the session of March 3–4, 1853, a final effort was made to pass the bill so Millard Fillmore could sign it.

Dorothea knew the president had spoken to many congressmen on her behalf. She had agreed to changes related to the western states, and Dorothea was still there in her office in the Library of Congress as the voices of debate droned on, hopeful that this tiny bit of compromise would be the ticket to the railroad of hope she had been riding these past few years.

She waited for the final vote. The clock ticked. She stared out a window, urging spring forward.

The last act of the Thirty-Second Congress, however, was a vote to kill Dorothea’s bill.

She kept a smile on her face at the inauguration of Franklin Pierce, watching as the Fillmores took their seats on March 4, 1853, a very cold day in Washington. Inside, Dorothea burned. She had to be optimistic, had to assume these small wins and defeats were part of some larger plan. She could not make enemies of the new administration. So she nodded her feathered hat toward the new president and his wife, smiled, then slipped in next to the Fillmores in the seat they had reserved for her.

Snow spit over them, driven by a relentless east wind. The canopy erected to shelter the dignitaries did little against the icy cold, however.

Dorothea had dressed warmly, with a winter muffler close around her neck. Even though March often announced the coming of spring in the city, today it spoke of a winter unwilling to leave.

“I may as well attach this handkerchief to my nose,” she told Abigail.

“Like a grain bag for a horse.”

“Exactly.”

Abigail shivered and coughed, her auburn sausage curls bobbing as she huddled on the dais as required of the former first lady. The speeches dragged on, and then the parade began. Even the horses looked chilled. Was that frost forming on their noses?

“I hope you’ll forgive me, but I’m going where it’s warm,” Dorothea said through chattering teeth. There were hours of festivities left to come, many of them outdoors.

“I would if I could,” Abigail said and sneezed.

Dorothea wrapped her knitted muffler around Abigail’s neck, patted her arm, and said she would see all of them later in the week. At her boardinghouse, she took tea before a warm fire and added a splash of brandy for inner warmth. She considered her strategy. Her friend Horace Mann and a few other supporters had left Congress with the last election.

Senator Bell had cooled toward her too, though she did not know why. Maybe because she had given in on the amendment that had doomed the bill. Or perhaps he was beginning to see all northerners as abolitionists. Now that they lived in different boardinghouses, she had not seen much of Jane Bell either, and she missed that but did not have the time to change it. Her bill held her hostage.