Found a lobbying firm hooper, hooper and awin. She holds a journalism degree from the university of illinois, a law degree from georgetown, and a master of arts from George Washington university. Her writing has been published in the journal of military history and the new york times. She has lectured at the u. S. Naval academy. In addition to serving on the founding board of directors at president lincolns cottage, she serves on the Advisory Board of the Ulysses Grant foundation. Susan swain is the coceo. She integrates our management role at the network with that as on camera interviewer sitting down with president s and first ladies. During 20132014, she was a host of cspans special biography history first ladies. This was the ninth book project she has led working with public affairs. Past titles have included the Supreme Court and abraham lincoln. Each book is a special collection of cspan interviews edited to retain the unique perspective of their featured subjects. Historians have written hundreds of volumes on lincolns role in the civil war and his relationship with the military leadership and rank and file. This new book gives voice to the other half of society and provides a valuable addition to civil war scholarship by looking at the wives of john fremont, George Mcclellan, william sherman, and Ulysses Grant and the key role they played. Providing a look at these womens complete lives including mapping their movements running the civil war, she shows how Jessie Fremont and Nellie Mcclellan butted heads with lincoln as their husbands did while Ellen Sherman and julia grant encouraged their husband dedication to lincoln. It is a fascinating tale on how influential noncombatants played a key role in lincolns military strategy. Please join me in welcoming candice shy hooper and susan swain. [applause] susan good evening everyone. Nice to see you. I will tell you a personal note. Candy and i knew each other 30 years ago and we have not seen each other since. When the cottage folks called and asked if i would do this tonight, first of all, cspan has done a number of events here and we are happy to support the cottage but to have a chance to see candy in this capacity, i could not possibly say no. This is a bit of a personal sotry so we want this to be a personal event tonight and we are emphasizing the conversation part of this. I will be talking to candy for 25 minutes or so and then we really want to hear your questions. These are four very interesting women. I will only be able to skim the surface and we want to hear what you would like to hear about them. Let us get started. I know from the many biographers i have had a chance to meet over the years that when you take on a project like this, you and your family live with these people. For the time you are doing the research and the writing. Having lived with these women, which ones did you most enjoy living with and which one did you want to divorce . [laughter] candy as you said, we lived with them. My husband and i lived with them. My husband says he lived with five women for eight years. [laughter] it is pretty clear that Jessie Fremont seemed to be the one that was most irritating at times. She had such a strong personality and really always charged forward on everything. The one that i think that i enjoyed the most though was probably julia grant. Julia was a revelation to me. She was a much more complex character then i really think most biographers give her credit for. If you read her memoirs, and she was the first first lady to ever write memoirs. She mostly dictated them. But they were not published until 1976. They were set aside for many years. If you read her memoirs closely, you will see that she gets back at everyone who did not think that her ulysses was going to be successful in life. She jabs at them. She is funny as can be. She makes some of the funniest comments. And she is just really a delightful person but with a sense of gravitas and dignity as well. Susan and putting the concept of this book together, you had a basic thesis. I will have you explain to the audience the basic system that pulled this into a cohesive whole. Candy my first instinct after graduating from graduate school was to write an article about women who had gone to see lincoln during the civil war to ask for help for their husbands who were in the military. I had stumbled on a number of these stories. Most notably Jessie Fremont who had a disastrous meeting with lincoln. One of the most famous meetings in the white house during the civil war and famously bad. And i learned that Ellen Sherman had gone to washington to try to get help for her husband when he was declared insane by all of the newspapers, north and south. And her meeting went very well. At that time, even as i was still i had gone back to graduate school, i was still working as a lobbyist. And i thought that these were two different lobbying styles and i thought let me look and see what they did. I knew there were other women, wives of military officers but what really brought this book together was when i tried to find them another general whose career path matched that of fremont who started out as a Major General the first month of the war in may, 1861, lincoln appointed him. By the end of 1862, lincoln had relieved him of command. I was looking for another general and there was George Mcclellan. Same career trajectory. With Ellen Sherman i went and wondered what other general had the same career path as William Tecumseh sherman. He could hardly get back into the army. Even when he did, he could not get a command. He had setbacks and rough footing but by the end of the war, he was on top. Who matches that . Ulysses grant. And i wanted to look at their wives. I looked at Nelly Mcclellan and i looked at julia grant and they seemed to have some very similar characteristics to fremont and sherman. And i thought this cannot be a coincidence that you could have the wives of two generals that have such a disastrous short tenure of command and their wives versus the wives of the two men who really rose to greatness. Susan it seems the great men are supported by their wives. Let us talk about Victorian Women. The influence of Victorian Women appears to be an opposing concept. At that time, women were domestic. They were not to have public personas. How did these women wield influence . Candy as part of that thesis, was part of their relationship and their opinion of lincoln. You first begin to get a sense of what each of them thought about lincoln and then you put them in this victorian mold where the iconic victorian wife was the shy, behind the scenes person and the husband was out in the public sphere. But women who wanted to have ways of making their opinion known and getting their husbands to begin to think their way. In some cases, it might be like julia grant mary lincoln invited them to the theater on april 14, 1865. Julia refused to go. Her husband had already told lincoln in another meeting that they would go but julia said no. So she had what she called a freak. Another way they could influence them. And this is where i think the book becomes the most interesting. It is where you see the women who encouraged their husbands every thought and even their every judgment as opposed to the women who questioned their husbands on what they were doing and questioned why they were doing things or said to them as julia grant did when grant issued the edict to move the jews out of the military camps because they were selling cotton. She said it was odious and he should never have done that. You can see that women have a means of reinforcing either the best in their husbands or the worst. And that is what this study is. Susan as an aside, i asked the Museum Director which room in this cottage was the bedroom and you are sitting in it. I can just see the conversations between mary lincoln and the president that may have happened in this room. When we mention lincoln he is the sun around which these planets orbit. Candy first of all, lincoln was so heavily involved in choosing officers and Senior Officers in command. It is a world that we have not seen maybe truman was probably the last president that really intervened so directly in the choosing of senior commanders, the hiring and the firing. And in most of those cases, he knew something about the general. He either knew them from their reputation in the earlier war, the mexican war, when many of them did make their reputation or he knew them from their relationship or their family or their family ties or their politics as in general mcclellan and frank blair who were members of congress who he appointed. He appointed political generals and he raised meritorious generals. This was washington was a small world then. And when generals or captains or majors or even first lieutenants felt they should be promoted, and they were not getting the attention they wanted, sometimes they sent their very pretty wives in to see lincoln and he enjoyed that very much. He actually wrote about at least two of the wives and how his pretty wife says i should make him a major. Or, about another wife, that she wants her husband to be a Brigadier General and i may just have to do it or that bossy woman will torment me forever. [laughter] but it was a very personal relationship with his generals. Susan evidently making him lobbyable. Mary lincoln kept her eye on his correspondence with some of these women. It was a divisive thing between julia grant and mary lincoln because she may have been paying a little too much attention to the president. Candy mary lincolns dressmaker, elizabeth kegley, she once observed that if a woman wanted to get into great disfavor with mary lincoln she should pay president lincoln a compliment. And julia did that on one occasion. At city point late in the war. And mary was very unhappy about that. And it set the tone for their whole experience together in the last days of the war. Susan she had a long memory. Before i leave my planet metaphor, you used a metaphor for these generals. I wanted to share that. The two generals who had the difficult careers were meteors and the two, sherman and grant that were successful, were stars. What did this metaphor mean to you . Candy what i tried to say was that fremont and mcclellan burst on the scene in the civil war as meteors. They climbed high in the public sight. They created huge light and chaos and then they disappeared from sight. In a short time. Where sherman and grant were more like stars. In twilight, you dont see them too much but as things get darker and darker, they get brighter and brighter. And they essentially led the path home. Susan we will spend more time with these women. It is always more fun to start with the negative. Let us start with Jessie Benton fremont. I am emphasizing her maiden name because she was the daughter of a famous legislator. Tell me about the family. Candy she was the daughter of Thomas Benton, one of the first senators from missouri. A man that was so respected for his integrity, particularly his antislavery stance which first cost him his seat in the senate and then in the house. That both Theodore Roosevelt wrote a biography of him and john kennedy included him in his profiles in courage. He was a giant of a man who came from a slaveholding family and then went in completely the opposite direction. He was sure that his first child was going to be a boy and he was going to name the boy after his father jesse. Well, things happen. And she was named jesse but spelled a little differently jessie. And he educated her like a man. He had one of the best libraries in washington, it rivals the library of congress. He had the best library in the west. As i said, he raised her with an education as a man and taught her politics and by the time she was a teenager, she spoke french and spanish and she read latin and greek. And she was totally unfit to be a victorian wife. She was so interested in politics. Her mother who was obviously somebody she was very close to but was a woman who had been raised on a plantation. She hated slavery but she also did not feel comfortable either in the rough and tumble st. Louis or in washington politics and she withdrew from society. Jessie grew up as her fathers daughter. Susan did she share her fathers pastime for revolution . Candy she was very antislavery. She wrote against it. She said that she would rather have her children brought up in the midst of smallpox than in the midst of slavery. Susan how did she end fremont make a match . Candy John Charles Fremont was one of the great explorers or leaders of expeditions and mapmakers in our history. But he had been born out of wedlock in south carolina. He had no future. He did not go to west point. But he did go to the college of charleston. And he got some good skills there which he turned into mapmaking. He became part of what is called the Army Topographical service. He went on many expeditions. When he would come back from the west, he went across the country on five different expeditions. And his first one, when he came back, thomas was always there in st. Louis to grab everyone coming from the west because he had such a strong belief in the potential for the west for the u. S. He would grab fremont and when fremont came to washington to write up his reports and make his maps from his fieldnotes, he would meet him and was enchanted by this dashing young lieutenant. At one point, when jessie was 15, thomas took john fremont to a concert at his daughters boarding school in washington. And jessie fell immediately in love at 15. And stayed in love. It was a passionate relationship. But as soon as senator benton and his wife realized that this daughter they had raised and groomed to be the toast of Washington Society was in love with a man with no pedigree and no real future, they shipped him off to another expedition in nebraska or something. But in fact, when he did come back and when she was 17, they got married. The parents were not happy about it. But when benton told him to leave the house, she looked at her husband and said where you go, i go and at that point, Thomas Benton said then you are both staying here because he could not give her up. Susan because of time i want you to get to the crux of their story and what it was that put them at odds with president lincoln and doomed his career. Candy the most important thing was one of the things we celebrate today in this room which is called the emancipation room where lincoln helped write the preliminary emancipation proclamation which was issued in september, 1862. In august, 1861, at the beginning of the war, before anyone was fighting to end slavery and they were fighting to keep the union together, John Charles Fremont issued his own emancipation proclamation in st. Louis for the missouri territory and kentucky. And lincoln had to read about it in the newspaper. He did not send him an advance copy or a tweet or anything. [laughter] and what started happening was that men in missouri were signed up to fight to save the union decided they would not fight for slavery. It was too early. At that point, lincoln asked him to revoke his emancipation order and jessie gets on a train to washington and goes to the white house and insists on a latenight meeting. They go in and they end up having a verbal fistfight. He insists that fremonts order be revoked and she is still not happy about it for several days afterward. And in fact, she encourages fremont to continue to distribute the order afterwards. It is when lincoln learns that that fremont is out. Susan you tell us that over time Jessie Fremonts view of lincoln evolved from naive to irrelevant to open disdain. Where was she in that progression at the time of the meeting . Candy when the meeting happened, she was still thinking he was irrelevant. That fremont did not need to let him know because he told fremont to take care of things in missouri and that is what he was doing. Soon after the meeting, he took fremonts command away and she moved to disdain. And then that became her pattern. She never said a nice thing about lincoln again. Susan would you spend just a minute because these people had big lives. They made a fortune and then lost it and she died penniless. How did that happen . Candy it was all because of fremonts poor management skills which were on display in his management of the military department of st. Louis which is something he had been investigated for. But he had, during one of his expeditions to california, given a man 3000 and told him to invest it in some land which is now san francisco. The man messed up and invested it in the yosemite valley. And at that point, fremont is too busy to undo that error. But pretty soon, they find gold. And they find a lot of gold. The problem is that it takes a lot of money to take a lot of gold out of the ground and fremont was not good at matching the input and the output of those equations very well. But he finally did sell the property after the war. He sold it for 4 million which at that time was real money. And they were fabulously wealthy. And then he invested most of it in a railroad scheme which went bust. In the end, he went back to washington to try to get a pension for himself and he was given a pension and on his way back home, he died of a heart attack. And so, jessie was left with nothing. Susan i was fascinated by the fact that the disdain lasted for the rest of her life for lincoln. She published her memoirs and she omitted lincoln from those that she had met. Biographers wanted her to write about lincoln and she refused. She said his cruel depths silence much truth. She held her tongue. Susan let us jump into Nelly Mcclellan who also had a famous father. How did she meet general mcclellan . Candy one of the things i love about this book is how important these womens fathers were in their careers. He was also a famous explorer. And he did much of the early expeditions into the great plains and his books were used by many guides and