Civil War Quilts: Washington Whirlwind #8: White House Steps

Washington Whirlwind #8: White House Steps by Elsie Ridgely

Living in the White House, the Executive Mansion, in the mid-19th century might be considered a luxury but for some residents it was a death sentence. The sanitation system before urban sewage infrastructure is now blamed for the deaths of three presidents (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor and James K. Polk.)

The building's elevation was lower than its water supply (the blue star-a natural spring), which was contaminated by a higher field (the green star) in which Washington's servants tossed the contents of the city's chamber pots. It was a series of step downs with dangers no one understood at the time.

William Henry Harrison (1773 - 1841)

President Harrison died a month after his inauguration. For generations people believed it was his cavalier disregard of a head covering at that open-air ceremony that killed him in 1841---more likely the sanitation system.

White House Steps by Jeanne Arnieri

The presidents were noted but how many unnamed servants and visitors caught typhoid fever from the mansion's contaminated drinking water? The disease, fatal in over 30% percent of the cases during the Civil War, was characterized by fever, rashes, abdominal pain & diarrhea, It wasn't until 1880 that scientists realized typhoid fever was caused by a water-borne bacillus, Salmonella typhosa.

Work continued on the new Capitol dome during the war.

White House Steps by Denniele Bohannon

The Lincoln boys came down with typhoid fever in February, 1862, 11 months after they moved into the Mansion. The long-term polluted sanitary system was made more dangerous by Army camps a few blocks from the White House with their open sewers.

William Wallace Lincoln 1850-1862

Photo in early 1862 by the Brady Studios.

Both Willie and Tad were very ill. Bud and Holly Taft were unaffected, although Bud visited his best friend daily while he was sick.

"Bud" Horatio Nelson Taft Jr. (1847-1915)

Bud was a few years older than Willie.

White House Steps by Becky Brown

Rebecca Rossignol Holiday Pomroy (1817-1884)

Abraham Lincoln asked Dorothy Dix, who supervised Union nurses, to recommend a nurse to help out. Dix had kept an eye on Rebecca Pomroy, who'd been treating typhoid patients in the Union hospitals in Washington. She was an empathetic, calm and consoling woman with a strong Protestant faith who had suffered too many illnesses and deaths in her own family shortly before the war.

No nursing could save 11-year-old Willie Lincoln who died on February 20, 1862. Tad survived the disease but his brother's death was a terrible trauma, as it was for the Taft boys.

Lincoln & Willie in Springfield

Willie is recalled as Abraham Lincoln's favorite child, much like him in his level demeanor and precise intelligence. Bud Taft's father Horatio N. Taft thought Willie a wise and amiable boy. Julia Taft remembered him as the "most lovable boy I ever knew."

"I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder,” recalled Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved woman who became Mary Lincoln’s seamstress and confident during the Civil War.

“His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved."

Lincoln historian Michael Burlingame's chapter on Willie's death in

When Life Strikes the President

Lincoln told Rebecca that Willie's death was his hardest trial. He found comfort in talking to a woman who'd lost two children and her husband yet had found peace and strength in Protestant principles. Lincoln's religion did not offer him the same comfort but he found talking to Rebecca therapeutic.

Nurse Pomroy

Library of Congress

Rebecca Pomroy's enameled earrings

The Library of Congress has several objects that once

were Rebecca's:

https://www.loc.gov/search/?fa=subject:pomroy,+rebecca

Once Tad recovered and his parents adjusted in their own ways to their loss Rebecca went back to her hospital but periodically visited the White House when they needed her or she needed a rest.

In 1873 Mary Clemmer Ames wrote of the changing capitol city:

"The green pools that used to distill malaria beneath your windows are now all sucked into the great sewers, planted at last in the foundations of the city."