Belle of the Fifties Became Refugee of the Sixties

by Carole E. Scott

Copyrighted 2004

The above picture is from her autobiography, "Belle of the Fifties"

Virginia Caroline Turnstall married Clement Clay, Jr. in 1843. Clay, who served both in the U.S. and Confederate senates, died in 1882. In 1887, she married a widower, Judge David Clopton of the Alabama Supreme Court, who had served in both the U.S. and Confederate congresses. After her marriage to Clopton she adopted the surname Clay-Clopton. Her long career, says a biographer of the Clay family, “embraced drama as exciting as any fiction she could have invented.” Most dramatic were the war years.

The gaiety she had previously enjoyed in Washington began to wane in the winter of 1859-1860. Then, instead of discussing furbelows and flounces, women talked of forts and fusillades. “For weeks,” she wrote, “the pretense of amity between the parties had ceased, and social formalities no longer concealed the gaping chasm that divided them. When the members of each met, save for a glare of defiance or contempt, each ignored the other, or, if they spoke, it was by way of a taunt or challenge.”

The saddest day of her life was January 21, 1861, when her husband left the U.S. Senate. On that day, she says, the galleries of the Senate were densely packed, mostly with women. As senators from the South renounced their allegiance to the United States, “women grew hysterical and waved their handkerchiefs, encouraging them with cries of sympathy and admiration.”

She was convinced that the problem was that Northerners envied the South’s long hold on the “Federal City” in politics and society, and it was obvious that they intended to “quell us” by physical force. Shortly before her husband left the Senate, she let Virginia’s fiery secessionist, Edmund Ruffin, the only man she knew personally whose ferocity led him to collect and secret weapons of warfare, store a dozen spears in her parlor. “Often,” she says, “the ‘dread arms’ deposited by Mr. Ruffin proved a subject of conjecture and mirth, with which closed some weightier conversations” with visitors to the Clay’s home. Included among their visitors were sympathetic Northern Democrats.

After the Peace Commission failed, former President Tyler came to the Clay’s home with tears trickling down his cheeks. “Clay,” he said, “the end has come!”

Like her husband and friends of theirs like James H. Hammond, a former South Carolina governor and senator, she was an ardent supporter of slavery. “From Maryland to Louisiana,” she believed, “there had reigned, since colonial times, an undisturbed, peaceful, prosperous democracy, based upon an institution beneficial alike to master and servant.”

Shortly after her husband left the U.S. Senate, the Clays journeyed to Minnesota because his physician thought that the air there might alleviate his severe asthma. He did improve there, but they left sooner than they wished because, he said, “infamous & insulting bulletins” and “demonstrations against the Rebels” became intolerable.

Clay was elected to the Confederate Senate for a two-year term. (So that all the senators’ terms would end at the same time, they were given different length terms, and Clay was unlucky and got the shortest term.) “We were,” she says, “in gay spirits during that first session of the Confederate Congress...There was an unintermitting beating of drums, too often muffled, and the singing of merry bugles. With the knowledge that we were in the city which, more than any other, invited and defied the attacks of the enemy, a sense of danger spurred our spirits.”

The pleasures of social life in Richmond soon disappeared in sorrow and “undreamed of privations.” Few, she said, realized it then, but as early as the spring of 1862 the fortunes of the Confederacy were declining.

The Clays spent little time during the war at their home in Huntsville, Alabama because it was not long before it was occupied by the Union Army. Once, when it was driven out of Huntsville, they were able to briefly return. Dismaying them was the fact that there were many Unionists in North Alabama who cooperated with the Yankees.

After Huntsville became the headquarters of Union General O. M. Mitchell, she said that her father’s “negroes, and most of our own, were conducting themselves in an insolent manner, taking to the mountains when there was work to be done, or wandering in the train of straggling union soldiers, but returning when hungry to feed upon their master’s rapidly diminishing stores. In some instances, relying upon the protection of the soldiers, the negroes of the town would take possession of the home of an absent master, revelling in an opportunity to sleep in his bed or to eat from the family silver and china.”

Her mother wrote that “The enemy came demanding food or horses, taking all they could of breadstuffs, meat stock, and all the able-bodied negroes, whether willing or not. Our men hid, but they took the horses and mules, and promised to return in a week and take everything!” In their absence, the Clay’s home was ransacked. After the war her husband was never able to recover financially, and, just as did her second husband, died deeply in debt.

Because conditions were so bad in Richmond, where it came to cost her husband more to live than his income, she spent most of the war in the homes of various relatives and friends in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, the safest and most affluent state before Sherman’s men cut a swatch of destruction through it.

She spent several months in Macon, Georgia where, she said, “The contrast between the comfort in the pretty city of lower Georgia, a city of beautiful homes and plentiful tables, and our poverty-stricken capital and meager starving camps, was terrible to picture.”

She bought cloth in Macon, where it was cheaper, and made clothes for her husband. Along with an “elegant robe de chambre,” she sent him a letter in which she told him to “dress like a gentleman & senator My Darling, for my sake. Strangers by scores, who do not know, see you. Comb yr. Hair & beard & use clean fresh handf’s. Won’t you? – You look old & dilapidated when you neglect yourself.”

Except for two instances she did not visit hospitals, nurse wounded, or engage in any other war work.

She was in Richmond when Dahlgren made his daring, failed raid. When informed of his coming, members of Congress, she recalled, “shouldered guns, where they could get them, and mounted guard around the capital.”

When Clay’s term in Congress ended, President Jefferson Davis sent him to Canada to “conduce to the furtherance of the interests of the Confederate States of America which have been intrusted to you.” For months after he left, her only direct news of him was through “personals” published in the Richmond Enquirer that it obtained from the New York Daily News.

“By the autumn of 1864,” she says, “the Southern States found themselves ravaged of everything edible or wearable. Food was enormously high in cities and in locations which proved tempting to foragers.”

In order to be near the coast when her husband returned, she went to South Carolina, where she stayed at the home of James H. Hammond. After Hammond died, she helped hide his silver from both his slaves and Sherman’s men, who were expected to arrive soon. However, they bypassed Augusta, Georgia and Hammond’s nearby home.

In February Clay returned on the Rattlesnake, a blockade runner. After fruitlessly seeking a port to enter, it ran aground near Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. It then came under fire from Union guns. Its passengers and crew escaped in life boats, which also ran aground, forcing them to wade ashore.

Clay felt duty bound to report to President Davis and Secretary Benjamin. After a failed effort to reach Richmond from Robert Toombs home in Washington, Georgia, he finally arrived in Richmond just as Davis was packing to leave.

When Clay heard that on the basis of “indubitable evidence” that he and President Davis, and several other men had “incited and concerted” the assassination of Mr. Lincoln that the Federal government had issued an order for his arrest and offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who turned him in, he decided that the safest course for him to follow was to surrender. Accompanied by his wife, he was taken to Fortress Monroe in Virginia, where, like Davis, he was imprisoned for months without any charges being filed or being allowed to talk to a lawyer.

Virginia and Mrs. Davis and her children were told that after they, their baggage, and their rooms on the steamer Clyde were searched that they would be taken to Savannah. As a “gaudily dressed woman” emptied Virginia’s gripsack, she heard her “utter a half-shriek of alarm.”

“Oh!" she cried, "you have a pistol!”

“Of course I have complacently reaching for it and taking it in my hand; and, a spirit of mischief seizing me (it has often been my salvation), I twirled the alarming firearm in the air, taking care that the barrel should fall pointing toward her, saying, as I did so, You may take everything in the stateroom but this. If necessary, I shall use it! As I marked the effect of my words, her shrinking and ejaculations of fear amused me more and more, nor did she resume her work until, tired of the farce, the pistol was once more safely bestowed in my bag. When she renewed her search, her manner was somewhat more timid.” Virginia then further annoyed the woman by taking a deep breath and holding it in order to prevent her from removing her corset.

Before she reached Savannah Virginia had began writing letters seeking help to lawyers and influential friends in the North. When she was finally able to get permission to go to Washington she set off to personally seek her husband’s release. Several lawyers volunteered to help her.

As she had been advised to do, she visited General Grant and “explained as succinctly” as she could her reason for visiting him. She reminded him of how magnanimously he had treated General Lee. When she finished “he responded in his characteristic, quite way: ‘If it were in my power, Mrs. Clay, I would tomorrow open every prison in the length and breadth of the land. I would release every prisoner unless–‘ (after a pause) ‘unless Mr. Davis might be detained awhile to satisfy public clamour [sic]. Your husband’s manly surrender entitles him to all you ask. I admire and honour [sic] him for it, and anything I can say or do to assist you shall be done. I heartily wish you success.’”

Because he was soon leaving to go to Richmond, he could not, as she requested, go to the White House to tell President Johnson this, but he agreed to write him a letter. While she talked to his wife, he wrote the letter.
One of her lawyers visited Representative Thaddeus Stevens, a leading Radical Republican, and reported to her that Stevens “scorned the idea of either his guilt or that of any of the prominent sojourners in Canada. He said, too, that because the “belligerent character of the Southern States was recognized by the United States, neither Mr. Davis nor Mr. Clay can be tried for treason.” Stevens put in writing his belief that Clay played no role in the assassination of Lincoln..

On the first of her many visits to President Andrew Johnson one of the first familiar faces she saw as she entered the White House was the widow of Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, who volunteered to go with her to visit the “good President.” Johnson greeted her civilly, but, as she had been warned he would, he put the responsibility for her husband’s fate on Secretary of War Stanton. Perceiving her distress, Mrs. Douglas “added her pleadings to mine, and, as the President’s shiftiness became more and more apparent, she burst into tears, and, throwing herself down on her knees before him, called upon me to follow her example. This, however, I could not comply with. I had no reason to respect the Tennesseean before me. That he should have my husband’s life in his power was a monstrous wrong, and a thousand reasons why it was wrong flashed through my mind like lightning as I measured him, searing it as they passed. My heart was full of indignant protest that such an appeal as Mrs. Douglas’s [sic] should have been necessary; but that, having been made, Mr. Johnson could refuse it, angered me still more. I would not have knelt to him even to save a precious life.”

She was, however, not above making emotional appeals to Johnson. In one letter she wrote that “Mr. Clay, always delicate, is dying daily. His thin pale face daggered my heart to look upon! He told me he was dying but resigned to God’s will and perfectly willing to perish in those four walls if his country would be thereby benefitted.”

In another she was indignant. “My patience is fled, & I am outraged,” she wrote, “that Mr. Clay should be still denied the right of trial, & yet refused a parole. If the Gov. Thinks him guilty, why does it not try him & prove his guilt?”

Perhaps the most intriguing support she recorded was when she wrote her father to tell him that “I have had strange visitors lately. Some extremists of the Radical party have called upon me to assure me of their belief in my husband’s innocence!” In her diary she wrote, “When will wonders cease? Who but the Honourable [sic] Mr. Wilson, of Massachusetts [Johnson’s vice president], has called, and voluntarily, to say he will do anything in his power for me or Mr. Clay; knows he is innocent; believes Mr. Davis to be also innocent! It is the goodness of God!”

President Johnson told Virginia that Wilson would not commit to writing what he had told her because he feared the Radical press too much. Her response was to assure President Johnson that Wilson would provide a letter supporting her husband’s release, and “If not,” she added, “I will extort it!” When he questioned her as to how she would do this, she replied, “Simply by an avowal that I will give to the Herald (a New York newspaper) and other papers the whole affair, telling them how the Honourable [sic] Senator had come, secretly, by night, like Nicodemus, to deceive by false promises a sorrowful woman, for some base reason known to himself!”

“Leaving the President still with an incredulous smile upon his face,” she returned to the home she was staying at and wrote a note to Wilson, who then complied with her request for a letter that she bore in “some triumph” to the President. In his letter Wilson said: “Mrs. Clay, the wife of Clement C. Clay, is now in the city and has requested me to obtain permission for her husband to go to his home on parole. His father is said to be at the point of death, his mother recently deceased, and, if there be no objections or reasons unknown to me why the request of Mrs. Clay should be denied, I have no hesitation in recommending its favourable [sic] consideration, if only from motives of humanity, as I have no doubt Mr. Clay will be forthcoming when his presence is again required by the Government.”

On April 17, 1866 Virginia arrived at the White House, determined not to leave until Johnson issued an order to release her husband. When, at about eleven o’clock, Johnson paused at his desk, she demanded a parole for her husband; telling him she would not leave until she got it. Johnson responded by writing an order to release her husband. He was freed the next day. Neither he nor Davis was ever charged or tried for anything.

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This article is based on information in these books: "Belle of the Fifties" and "The Clays of Alabama"