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IN NOVEMBER OF 1873, Salem resident George H. Williams was about to be confirmed as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The president seemed to want him in the job, and the senators on the Judiciary Committee didn’t feel like taking on the White House over it. So they voted to confirm him.
But then, before they could make it official, something happened. For no reason that anyone could (or would) articulate, the senators suddenly decided they needed to reconsider the nomination, and look more closely into the background of Judge Williams — who, at the time, was the U.S. attorney general, and a former U.S. Senator himself.
The letter, signed by President U.S. Grant, asking the U.S. Senate to
remove George H. Williams for consideration as a nominee for U.S.
Supreme Court chief justice. (Image: Daniel Rice/riceonhistory.
wordpress.com)
They found some irregularities there — notably, they learned that during a bank panic when he couldn’t draw on his bank accounts, Williams had paid some bills using government funds, although he’d reimbursed them as soon as his bank reopened its doors. There were also rumors of “gifts” being accepted in exchange for lack of prosecution, although nothing definite.
Nothing that they found was, by the standards of the day, enough to disqualify Williams. And yet, one by one, the senators changed their minds until the committee was unanimous. Williams would not be confirmed. Grant, when he heard, feared another scandal — his administration suffered through several of them — and asked Williams to decline the nomination. Which, with a reluctance bordering on bitterness, he did. He really had no choice.
So, why had this happened?
Washington insiders had a ready answer to that question. It wasn’t Williams’s alleged financial improprieties. It wasn’t Williams’s alleged intellectual inadequacy. It was Williams’s wife.
Pride goes before a fall
Kate Ann Williams was described by nearly everyone, friends and enemies, as a strikingly gorgeous and very intelligent thirty-something lady. Her enemies, though — a category of people that grew with alarming rapidity while her husband was in office — added a few more adjectives to that roster, the most popular of which was “arrogant.”
After her husband had left the Senate and been named to the cabinet position of attorney general, Kate almost immediately made a bitter enemy of virtually every other senator’s wife.
“Mrs. Williams, through her inordinate desire to dominate the social life of Washington, had flaunted her status as the wife of a cabinet member over the wives of lesser official standing, particularly the wives of senators,” historian Sidney Teiser wrote. “She had just moved into a great house on Rhode Island Avenue … which she furnished extravagantly. There she held receptions of regal splendor, announcing, to the ire of the Senate ladies, that as a Cabinet wife she would expect the wives of senators to call on her first. And further, it was said of her that she accepted ‘presents’ from those who had cases before the Department of Justice.”
Victorian women’s real power
The 1870s were, of course, not a time of great empowerment for women. Women were half a century away from having a vote, and were mostly treated by the men — as Frances Fuller Victor remarked in 1875 — with a kind of pat-on-the-head condescension, like children or idiots. But they were hardly without real power — as George Williams was now learning the hard way.
As word spread around the social circles of Senate wives that Williams was on the cusp of joining the Supreme Court, it’s not hard to imagine the response. If these women found Kate Ann Williams insufferable now, just think how much worse she’d be after her husband was one of the Supremes — in fact, the supreme Supreme.
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A portrait of George H. Williams from the time of his tenure as
attorney-general in the Grant Administration. (Photo: Matthew Brady/
Library of Congress)
To judge from the results, the response was swift, canny and coordinated. The members of the Judiciary Committee went from a consensus to confirm to a firm, unanimous determination to not confirm — in less than a week.
Response makes things worse
Kate’s response played right into her new-found enemies’ hands. She immediately launched rumors of financial impropriety by other senators. This not only stiffened their determination to take her down, it also was something like a tacit confession of real wrongdoing — as any parent of more than one child who’s ever heard “But Sis did it too!” will immediately understand.
So Williams, reluctantly, turned down what would have been the crowning achievement of his political career (and a major feather in the cap of the new frontier state of Oregon), at the specific request of the president.
He was still attorney-general of the U.S., and Grant was happy to have him stay on — at first. But it seems Kate, trying to make things better in what seems to have been the only way she knew how, now gave full rein to her talents for malicious gossip, and thereby came to the wrathful attention of the First Lady, Julia Boggs Grant. History got busy repeating itself. Under the guidance of his wife, Grant’s conviction that Kate was a liability grew and his faith in the legal and intellectual abilities of her husband waned. Soon Williams was on the brink of dismissal, and everyone knew it.
Then a fairly credible rumor arose — a rumor of a $30,000 bribe accepted by Kate, it was said, in exchange for her husband not prosecuting a pending case. Pressure started building for an investigation.
Blackmailing the President?
That’s when the first of several “anonymous and scurrilous letters of a blackmailing nature written for purposes of keeping Attorney General Williams in office” (Teiser’s words) arrived in the mail, addressed to the President of the United States.
Now, conventional wisdom was (and still is) that these letters originated from Kate. Appealing as this interpretation is, it’s not very likely. Kate may have been an insufferable, prideful prig, but she was not an idiot; she would have known those letters could only have come from her. It’s far more likely that they were a frame-up created by someone who wished her ill, to make a new and powerful enemy for herself and her husband.
If so, they worked great. Grant, as Teiser puts it, became “convinced of the unconscionable viciousness of Mrs. Williams.” And so, in early 1875, the president asked for Williams’ resignation.
The comeuppance was devastating for Kate, who reportedly went to bed and stayed there for a long, long time. Williams stayed in Washington for a few more years, practicing law, before returning to Oregon in 1881 and settling in Portland.
Defeated and humiliated, Kate was no doubt glad to be back home.
(Sources: Teiser, Sidney. “Life of George H. Williams: Almost Chief Justice,” Oregon Historical Quarterly, Sept. and Dec. 1946; Logan, Mrs. J.A. Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife. New York: Schribner, 1913)
