Emma Foote's Days at the Hayes White House

                                                                                          

Emma Foote Glenn
Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums

During the Hayes Administration, it was not customary to hire a staff to assist the First Lady.  Without grown daughters, Lucy Hayes invited nieces, cousins, and daughters of friends to stay at the White House to help with social events and secretarial duties. One of these was Miss Emma Foote of Cincinnati, Ohio.  Lucy had known Emma since her husband's years as Ohio's governor.  

Emma was the daughter of Jane Foote who had come from New York to Champaign County and then to Cincinnati.  A widow, Jane and her daughter Emma lived in the Carlisle House owned by her brother-in-law George Carlisle, a wealthy Cincinnati banker. Hayes had also rented rooms for the family at the Carlisle in 1872.

When Hayes became president, Lucy immediately asked Emma to join them in Washington.  Of course, Emma was thrilled. Her letters to the Carlisles give a glimpse of life at the Hayes White House.  She not only assisted Lucy for more than a year, but also traveled with the Hayes family, attended social events and state dinners, including that given for the Grand Dukes Alexis and Constantine of Russia.  

(Emma's letter to her cousin about this event has been transcribed below.}

She and Winnie Monroe attended the theater accompanied by General William T. Sherman. She enjoyed elegant luncheons given but Kate Chase Sprague. Emma shopped in New York for Lucy, delivered flowers to disabled veterans, wrote letters, and accompanied the First Lady to charity events.  Emma traveled with the Hayes family to New York and throughout New England. She was pleased when Lucy gave her a "special room" at the Soldiers' Home where the Hayes family stayed during the hot summer months.  

Although not wealthy, Emma received an excellent education. She was deeply interested in politics and appreciative of the opportunity to know some of the nation's most prominent men and women.  Her nearly year-long stay led many to believe she was part of the Hayes family.

But, indeed, Emma was not a relative. In the spring of 1878, Webb, President Hayes' second son and secretary to his father, proposed to Emma. However, Emma was not interested.  It was then that she knew it was time to leave. 

She joined her cousin Florence Murdoch in New Jersey.  Later, she met Colonel George Glenn.  In the winter of 1880, Lucy and the President attended her wedding at the Carlisle House. From then on, Emma led a vastly different life. As an officer's wife, it was a harsh existence at forts on the western frontier and in Arizona.  Always cheerful and blessed with a buoyant personality,  Emma viewed her experience as a great adventure. When Colonel Glenn died of malaria contracted in Cuba during the Spanish American War, Emma returned to Cincinnati where she lived out the final days of a full and exciting life.

Emma Foote Glenn
Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums

Executive Mansion,   Washington                                                                  

                        Saturday April 21, 1877

My dear Florence,

I will send this letter to Orange [New Jersey] first so I will not have to write the same thing twice.  Thursday was the grand dinner. It was raining dreadfully, but everyone attended. Promptly at quarter of seven we all went down stairs to see the handsome table, then to the blue room. In a few moments members of the Cabinet and wives arrived.  Lady and Sir Edward Thornton, then the Grand Duke and party. he was dressed in a plain evening dress.  It was a little stiff before we went out to dinner.  Soon dinner was announced.  Right off the grand Marine band commenced to play the Russian March.  Stringed instruments, fifty of them, played all through the dinner.  They were so far off the music was not deafening.  Mrs. Hayes looked like a Queen as she sat between the Grand Duke and Constantine.  I went out with Gen. Schurz, Sec. of the Interior.  Sec. of War on my right.  The grandest sight I ever expect to see as I looked up and down the table.  It was not till after dinner that we were presented to his Royal Highness.  I had quite a long talk with him. I was not at all nervous or excited at dinner.

Nothing can ever compare with my feelings like the first dinner I took in the White House.  Then I was a bundle of nerves, could not eat much less speak, the other eve.  I send you a paper.  I can't believe I had shaken hands with his Royal Highness.  He is very sensible, not at all airy to use such an expression.  We were all sorry to have them say good night.    /signed/ Emma [Foote]

Colonel George Evan Glenn
Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums

A Reflection of Family Love: The Diary of Belinda Elliot McLellan

Belinda Elliot McLellan

           Rutherford B. Hayes Library & Museums

Far from home, Mary McLellan Fitch, once again, opened her mother's diary, given to her some years before her mother's death in 1873.  Mary and her husband the Reverend George Fitch had left Fremont, Ohio, to travel to Shanghai, China, as missionaries only a year after their marriage.  Mary's mother, Belinda Elliot McLellan, a first cousin of President Hayes, had nearly destroyed the diary she had kept for 20 years, believing it to be of little value. Instead, she gave the diary to Mary, who found, again and again, comfort in her mother's poems, prose, and prayers.  

Belinda Eliot had married Robert Bolton McLellan in Vermont. She recorded in her diary how the couple had come to Fremont, Ohio. Belinda and her husband, then suffering from depression and physically unwell, had accepted the invitation of her half brother, John R. Pease, to begin a new life in Ohio.  She recorded in 1852 on that "first Thanksgiving in Ohio, we have now been here nearly five months,  all the time living with brother John's family, who has made us very welcome and happy here. Still we have had the feeling of strangers in a strange land! But Fremont now begins to seem like home in many respects."

John R. Pease

Rutherford B. Hayes Library & Museums

Deeply religious and continuously concerned for the Christian upbringing of her daughters, Belinda depended on  Fremont's Presbyterian Church and its minister Reverend Bushnell to deepen her faith.  But is was John Pease, who helped his much-loved younger half-sister adapt to life in Ohio.  

First Presbyterian Church, Fremont, Ohio

Courtesy of First Presbyterian Church

He advised her husband in business prospects, gave Belinda a piano, money, presents, a lot and two others for her daughters. His daily visits to the McLellan home on his way downtown to his hardware store brought much good cheer and laughter to the household. 

John R. Pease, Oakwood Cemetery, Fremont, Ohio
Courtesy Find a Grave

On January 3rd, 1860, Belinda was at John's bedside when he died after severe suffering from tuberculosis.  She described in detail how much she loved him.  His help had even made it possible for her daughters to attend the Lake Erie Female Seminary in Painesville, Ohio.  And, they did not disappoint. Mary and her sister Jennie graduated at the head of their class.  They went on to serve as teachers.  Later Mary and Jennie married the Fitch brothers.  

Mary McLellan Fitch

Died in Shanghai, China 1918

Courtesy of Find a Grave

When Belinda died, President Hayes wrote in his diary that his cousin "was possessed of talents of a high order, excellent education, and a temper and disposition almost perfect.  In the small circle of her intimate friends she was dearly loved.  A poet of some excellence and a superior prose writer - she was religious - her piety a reality"  Mary, in a notation in Belinda's diary, paid to her mother the highest of tributes, "May Christ make me like her insomuch as she was like Him."  Today, Belinda's diary is part of the Hayes Manuscript Collection.

 

The Fisk Jubilee Singers

 

Courtesy Harper's Weekly

On May 23rd 1882, President Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary that the Fisk Jubilee Singers had stayed at Spiegel Grove for two days, following their "successful concert." Hayes was not the first president for whom the Jubilee Singers had performed. Touring the world for more than a decade, the group had sung for other presidents as well as for queens, ministers, prisoners, patients, and for thousands of concert goers.  

They were students at Nashville's Fisk University  The American Missionary Association founded the school in 1866 on the grounds of an old hospital used by Union troops during the Civil War.  The goal was to educate former slaves and other young African Americans..  Five years later, Fisk was functioning but teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Its treasurer and music director George White scraped together what funds he could to take some of his best singers on tour for a fundraising effort for Fisk.  

The American Missionary Association was opposed.  Concerned about its reputation, the AMA viewed the singers as Fisk's ambassadors for its educational mission.  Eventually, the organization relented, but demanded that performances, demeanor, and dress must be impeccable.  This was not lost on President Hayes years later who wrote that "Miss [Mattie] Lawrence ladylike and intelligent and even more so Miss [Ella] Sheppard."

On October 6, 1871, White took his singers to Cincinnati, then Columbus, and on to Oberlin, following the old path of the Underground Railroad.  The acapella ensemble, some of them teens and all but two born into slavery, had shared their "slave songs" with White.  Soprano, arranger, and Fisk's first black instructor Ella Sheppard wrote, "At first the slave songs were never sung in public, they were sacred to our parents." White deeply valued their songs and asked his singers to teach him the songs of their parents.  He called the group the Jubilee Singers, referring to the Old Testament's Jewish year of Jubilee.

As they toured New York and New England's churches and concert halls, their largely white audiences grew to appreciate the sacred songs that the group first performed only as encores. After touring for eight months, the Jubilee Singers returned to Fisk, having raised $40,000.

The following year, the Singers continued to hold performances in the U.S. and then spent nearly a year touring England. In 1875, the Jubilee Singers embarked on a three-year European tour.  But non-stop travel, discrimination, poor accommodations, exhaustion, illness, grueling practices, and discord took its toll among the members.

Forced to re-organize in 1879, the Jubilee Singers set out once again under the direction of White and singer Frederick Loudin. During the 1880s, they performed in Australia, Asia, New Zealand, and throughout the American West. The Singers raised $150,000 for Fisk University and its Jubilee Hall. 

The Jubilee Singers have continued to sing to this day, receiving awards and accolades from around the world.  In 2008, President George-W-Bush presented the Singers with the National Medal of the Arts. They are recognized for preserving the musical tradition known today as Negro Spirituals. You can listen to their songs at fiskjubileesingers.org.