Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century
by Virginia Tatnall Peacock · English · Gutenberg #46013 · 456,492 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century
Author: Virginia Tatnall Peacock
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FAMOUS AMERICAN BELLES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
[Illustration: Emily Marshall
(Mrs. William Foster Otis)
From portrait by Chester Harding]
FAMOUS AMERICAN BELLES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
by
VIRGINIA TATNALL PEACOCK
Illustrated
[Illustration]
Philadelphia & London
J. B. Lippincott Company
1901
Copyright, 1900
By
J. B. Lippincott Company
Electrotyped and Printed By J. B. Lippincott Company,
Philadelphia, U.S.A.
_To
My Dear Mother
from whom I derived my first
conception of all that is
most beautiful in
woman_
PREFACE
During the century now drawing to its close there have appeared in
America from time to time women of so pre-eminent a beauty, so dazzling
a wit, so powerful a magnetism, that their names belong no less to
the history of their country than those of the men whose genius has
raised it to the rank it holds to-day among the nations of the earth.
Among them have been women of the highest type of mental and moral
development, women of great political and of great social genius,
all of whom have left the impress of their remarkable personalities
upon their time. When they have manifested these qualities in their
girlhood they have risen frequently to an eminence such as it is
scarcely possible for the women of any other country to attain at a
correspondingly early age.
From among the latter class the subjects of these sketches have been
taken, those having been selected who seemed most adequately to
represent their period and locality and whose fame was beyond question,
it having been frequently of national and sometimes of international
extent.
Rising to wield the magic of their influence in every decade of the
century and in every section of the country, some study of the time in
which each lived has been necessary in order to give her her proper
setting and to justly estimate the power she exercised.
The inventions and discoveries America has given to the world in
this great century have made vast changes in our material condition,
which, in turn, have been productive of striking contrasts between the
existence of the women who gave life and color to the early years of
the century and that of those who reflect the myriad advantages of its
closing days.
It argues the possession of extraordinary attributes to have been a
belle of wide repute in the days when there was no telegraph to flash
the record of a woman's beauty, charm, or social progress from one end
of the country to the other, when the press contained only the briefest
accounts of purely local and wholly public events, when every letter
that might or might not have contained her name or have been a herald
of her loveliness cost its sender twenty-five cents a sheet in postage,
when her few and simple toilets were painstakingly made by hand, when
she went to balls on horseback, arriving sometimes with a wrinkled gown
but seldom with a ruffled temper, when all travelling was done by means
of a stage-coach, and a journey from one city to another was sometimes
the event of a lifetime, and when the comparatively few women who
crossed the seas did so in merchant vessels not infrequently owned by
their own fathers, and spent many long weeks in the passage.
Those who come within the radius of its charm, however, easily
recognize the power of a queenly personality, as the lives of the most
illustrious men in every period of our history have borne testimony.
Among the women who unite the centuries there is a brilliant promise,
moreover, that there will be those in the twentieth, as there have been
throughout the nineteenth, "to perpetuate that empire which beauty
first established."
The writer gratefully acknowledges her indebtedness to all those whose
courtesy or assistance has in any way lightened the task of collecting
the data for these sketches; to those who by kindly lending portraits
in their possession, as well as to those who by graciously permitting
the use of their own portraits, have thereby added so much to the value
and interest of this volume.
PARIS, June 22, 1900.
CONTENTS
[Illustration]
PAGE
MARCIA BURNS (Mrs. John Peter Van Ness) 11
THEODOSIA BURR (Mrs. Joseph Alston) 18
ELIZABETH PATTERSON (Madame Jerome Bonaparte) 39
THE CATON SISTERS 61
MARGARET O'NEILL (Mrs. John H. Eaton) 69
CORA LIVINGSTON (Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton) 80
EMILY MARSHALL (Mrs. William Foster Otis) 90
OCTAVIA WALTON (Madame Le Vert) 102
FANNY TAYLOR (Mrs. Thomas Harding Ellis) 118
JESSIE BENTON (Mrs. John C. Frémont) 123
SALLIE WARD (Mrs. George F. Downs) 148
HARRIET LANE (Mrs. Henry Elliott Johnston) 161
ADÈLE CUTTS (Mrs. Robert Williams) 175
EMILIE SCHAUMBURG (Mrs. Hughes-Hallett) 190
KATE CHASE (Mrs. William Sprague) 206
MATTIE OULD (Mrs. Oliver Schoolcraft) 230
JENNIE JEROME (Lady Randolph Churchill) 239
NELLIE HAZELTINE (Mrs. Frederick W. Paramore) 257
MARY VICTORIA LEITER (Baroness Curzon of Kedleston) 264
NEW YORK AS A SOCIAL CENTRE 288
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
PAGE
EMILY MARSHALL (Mrs. William Foster Otis). From portrait
painted by Chester Harding in 1830; owned by her daughter,
Mrs. Samuel Eliot, of Boston, by whose permission it is
here reproduced for the first time in colors _Frontispiece_
MARCIA BURNS (Mrs. John Peter Van Ness). From miniature by
James Peale, painted in 1797; owned by the Corcoran Art
Gallery, Washington, D. C. 12
THEODOSIA BURR (Mrs. Joseph Alston). From the original
engraving by Charles B. J. F. Saint Memin; owned by Hampton
L. Carson, Esq., of Philadelphia, by whose permission it is
here reproduced 22
ELIZABETH PATTERSON (Madame Jerome Bonaparte). From portrait
painted by Quinçon; owned by her grandson, Mr. Charles
Bonaparte, of Baltimore, by whose permission it is here
reproduced for the first time 42
MARY CATON (Lady Wellesley). From portrait owned by Mrs.
Charles Carroll Mactavish, of Baltimore, daughter of
General Winfield Scott. Painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence,
and reproduced by permission of Miss Emily Mactavish, now
Sister Mary Agnes of the Visitation, at Mount de Sales,
Catonsville, Maryland 64
CORA LIVINGSTON (Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton). From a miniature
painted by herself. Reproduced for the first time by
permission of her niece, Miss Julia Barton Hunt, of
Montgomery Place, Barrytown-on-the-Hudson 84
OCTAVIA WALTON (Madame Le Vert). From portrait, reproduced
by permission of her kinswoman, Miss Josephine Walton.
Present owner, Mr. George Walton Reab, of Augusta, Georgia,
grandson of Madame Le Vert 104
FANNY TAYLOR (Mrs. Thomas Harding Ellis). From portrait
painted by Thomas Sully. Reproduced for the first time by
permission of her husband, Colonel Thomas Harding Ellis.
Present owner, her adopted son, Mr. Beverly Randolph
Harrison, of Amherst, Virginia 118
SALLY CHEVALIER (Mrs. Abram Warwick). Painted by Thomas Sully.
Reproduced for the first time by permission of Colonel
Thomas Harding Ellis 122
SALLIE WARD (Mrs. George F. Downs). From a miniature painted at
the age of eighteen, owned by her husband, Mr. George F.
Downs, of Louisville, Kentucky, by whose permission it is
here reproduced for the first time 150
HARRIET LANE (Mrs. Henry Elliott Johnston). From photograph by
Julius Ulke 164
ADÈLE CUTTS (Mrs. Robert Williams). From portrait by George
Peter A. Healy, in possession of her husband, General
Robert Williams, United States Army. Reproduced by
permission of her daughter, Miss Adèle Cutts Williams, of
Washington, D. C. 178
EMILIE SCHAUMBURG (Mrs. Hughes-Hallett). From portrait by
Waugh, in possession of Mrs. Hughes-Hallett, of Dinar,
France, by whose permission it is here reproduced for the
first time 194
KATE CHASE (Mrs. William Sprague). From photograph by Julius
Ulke 212
MATTIE OULD (Mrs. Oliver Schoolcraft). From photograph by
George S. Cook. Reproduced by permission of her cousin,
Mrs. Virginia Brownell, of Washington, D. C. 232
LIZZIE CABELL (Mrs. Albert Ritchie). From photograph.
Reproduced by permission of her sister, Mrs. John D.
Lottier 234
MARY TRIPLETT (Mrs. Philip Haxall). From photograph by Roseti.
Reproduced by permission of her sister, Mrs. Meredith
Montague 236
JENNIE JEROME (Lady Randolph Churchill). From photograph by Van
der Weyde. Published by permission of Lady Churchill 244
NELLIE HAZELTINE (Mrs. Frederick W. Paramore). From photograph
by J. C. Strauss; by permission of her brother, Mr. W. B.
Hazeltine, Jr. 258
JENNIE CHAMBERLAIN (Lady Naylor-Leyland). From the painting by
H. Schmiechen 266
MATTIE MITCHELL (Duchesse de Rochefoucauld). Daughter of
ex-Senator Mitchell, of Oregon. From photograph by C. M.
Bell 272
MARY VICTORIA LEITER (Baroness Curzon of Kedleston). From
photograph by Miss Alice Hughes, of London. By permission
of Lady Curzon 276
MISS MAY HANDY, of Richmond, Virginia. From photograph by James
L. Breese 284
CATHERINE DUER (Mrs. Clarence Mackay), of New York. From
portrait 288
MARCIA BURNS
(MRS. JOHN PETER VAN NESS)
Marcia Burns! What memories the quaint Scotch lassie's name calls up!
The city of Washington disappears and its site spreads before us in
flourishing farm lands and orchards. Scattered farm-houses raise their
chimneys amid primeval oaks and elms, and from the low doorway of the
humblest emerges the winsome form of Marcia Burns. Six hundred acres,
representing the thrift of generations of Scotch ancestors, surround
her. The Potomac, one of the great water-ways of the South, carrying
the produce of the fertile lands above into Alexandria for consumption
or reshipment, almost kisses her feet. This is her patrimony, over
which she has already heard such spirited debate between her father
and General Washington, then President of the United States, and the
three gentlemen commissioned by Congress, at that time sitting in
Philadelphia, to select and purchase the ground on which is to be
built the capital city. As she looks riverward a canoe is beached in
the shadow of the vine-hung trees, and the President, accompanied by
two of the commissioners, whose forms have of late grown familiar to
her childish eyes, have come again to confer with her father, whom
Washington has already dubbed "the obstinate Mr. Burns."
"And I suppose you think," says Burns, as the dispute again waxes warm,
"that people here are going to take every grist that comes from you as
pure grain. But what would you have been if you had not married the
widow Custis?" Gracefully or ungracefully, however, he must eventually
yield, for the "Widow's Mite," as Burns's acres were described in the
land patent of 1681 which bestowed them upon his emigrant ancestor,
form part of the tract which Maryland has ceded to the nation for its
capital. Here is stalwart Johnson, governor of the State, to emphasize
the fact with many a round oath that makes the gentle Marcia's heart
stand still.
"And yonder lassie," says Daniel Carroll, "will be the greatest heiress
hereabouts." Davy Burns' eyes wander towards his daughter. He is long
silent. The shadows have lengthened into darkness when he says, "Very
well, sirs, take the land, and I leave it to your fairness to fix the
terms."
[Illustration: Marcia Burns
(Mrs. John Peter Van Ness)
From miniature by James Peale, 1797]
Supper is served, and the guests are accommodated for the night beneath
the moss-grown roof of the attic, for Burns' cottage boasts but four
rooms,--two sleeping-rooms, a sitting-room, and a dining-room, the
kitchen being built apart from the house, as was the custom of the time
and country. Unpretentious as the little abode is, the deed conveying
the property to the commissioners, in trust for the government,
provides that the streets of the new city shall be so laid out as
not to interfere with it.
* * * * *
Marcia Burns was but yet a child when fate wrought the change in her
destiny which no wisdom could have foreseen. By the death of her only
brother she became sole heiress to what was at that time an immense
fortune. Yet it is not through the magnitude of her wealth that she
illumines the period in which the lines of her life were cast. It is
through the exquisite qualities of a most exalted womanhood.
With wise forethought and some premonition of the change about to take
place in her life, her parents placed her in the family of Luther
Martin, in Baltimore. Martin was at that time at the height of his fame
as an advocate at the Maryland bar. In the enlightened atmosphere of
his home, Marcia grew up in close companionship with his daughters, her
refined nature imperceptibly acquiring that ease and grace which were
ever afterwards characteristic of her, and her receptive mind readily
cultivating those attributes that were to render her most attractive
in conversation to such men as Hamilton, Burr, Marshall, Randolph, and
Webster.
That face of nature familiar to her from her infancy was in a state
of unlovely transition when she again returned to her home. Verdant
orchards and sloping meadow lands had been divided into building lots
and crossed and recrossed by muddy thoroughfares. In what had been
a piece of woods within a stone's throw of her father's home, the
President's house was nearing completion. A mile and a half to the
east, on the summit of a hill, the white walls of the Capitol were
becoming visible to all the surrounding country. At irregular intervals
houses, single and in rows, were in course of construction. There was
nothing in the so-called city of Washington to which Marcia Burns came
home, and of which the government took formal possession in 1800,
that ever so remotely suggested the garden spot that it is to-day.
Members of Congress and foreign ministers alike reviled it, and the
lamentations of Mrs. Adams are too well known to be repeated here.
Of such social life as there was scattered over so vast an area of mud,
in which "pedestrians frequently slumped and horses became stalled,"
Marcia Burns became a central figure. Though she was too gentle and
modest ever to assume a leadership, yet all that was best and brightest
in the life about her naturally gravitated in her direction.
Notwithstanding the pretentious homes that were going up around her,
she still dwelt contentedly in her cottage of four rooms. There, in the
summer evenings, gathered on the low, broad stone slab of its south
door, overhung with blooming wistaria, her friends and neighbors,--the
Tayloes from the afterwards famous Octagon house, the Calverts, and the
Daniel Carrolls from Duddington Manor over near the Capitol.
In the winter season, when Congress was in session, the cheery
sitting-room and the hospitable dining-room were seldom without their
guests. There came Aaron Burr, to flatter her as he flattered every
attractive woman with whom he came in contact, and gallant Hamilton,
the lover of all lovely women, and Randolph of Roanoke, seeking balm
for his tempestuous spirit in that sweet and gracious presence, and
Jefferson, to admire, with all the ardor of his democratic soul,
the simplicity of her life. There, too, Tom Moore was entertained
during his visit to Washington, whence he returned home to write
things that did not make pleasant reading matter about the city and
Mr. Jefferson, who was our President at the time and who had looked
rather patronizingly upon the foppish little Irish bard. There also
came suitors for the hand of Marcia, men with a nobility of soul that
enabled them properly to estimate the beauty of her character, as well
as men who were attracted simply by the stories of her great wealth.
In 1802, when she was twenty years old, she became the wife of John
Peter Van Ness, a member of Congress from New York. He had been
graduated from Columbia College and admitted to the bar of his
native State. In 1800, when he was thirty years old, he was elected
to Congress. His youth, his graceful, winning manners, his handsome
countenance, and his wealth won him an easy popularity in the society
of the capital.
Shortly after the death of Marcia's father, Van Ness erected, close by
the old cottage, one of the handsomest houses of that day in the city
and one that compares not unfavorably with the most elegant homes built
there in recent years. It was designed and built by Latrobe at a cost
of nearly sixty thousand dollars, its marble mantel-pieces, which are
works of art, being imported from Italy. It had, moreover, a _porte
cochère_, which was a rarity in those days,--the President's house
having the only other one in Washington. A truly magnificent home it
was, and destined to be the scene of many brilliant occasions, as also
to witness days as full of heart-rending unhappiness to Marcia Burns
as those both in the cottage of her girlhood and the home of her early
married life had been of pure joyousness.
With all its treasures of art, the chief ornament of the new home
was Ann Van Ness, who completed her studies at a boarding-school in
Philadelphia and returned to Washington about the time her parents took
possession of it. Two years later she married Arthur Middleton, of
South Carolina, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
and probably that same Arthur Middleton, of whom Mrs. Edward Livingston
made mention in a letter to her husband ten years later to the effect
that his moustaches, whiskers, and velvet shirt were creating more of
a sensation in New York than the quarrel between Jackson and Calhoun.
Ann died within a year after her marriage. She was an only child, and
to her mother life held nothing that could amend her loss. Thenceforth
she withdrew from the sphere to which she had been since her early
girlhood so great an ornament. She frequently sought the seclusion of
the little cottage, and there, perhaps, lived over in memory the days
that had known no shadow.
She did not need the discipline of sorrow, which some natures require
to sweeten them, but under its influence she rose to the loftiest
heights of benevolence. Her pictured face reveals to us the beauty of
her soul. The truth that speaks in her eyes, the spirituality of her
brow, the tenderness of her mouth, combine to make the perfection of
human character. The Washington City Orphan Asylum, which she founded
and to which she devoted both time and means, is a fitting monument to
her memory.
She died on the 9th of September, 1832, and is the only woman who was
ever honored with a public funeral in Washington. Through her charities
she had become as widely known and as tenderly loved in the later years
of her life as she had been in her youth through qualities not less
endearing.
The following tribute to her is by Horatio Greenough:
"'Mid rank and wealth and worldly pride,
From every snare she turned aside.
She sought the low, the humble shed,
Where gaunt disease and famine tread;
And from that time, in youthful pride,
She stood Van Ness's blooming bride,
No day her blameless head o'er past
But saw her dearer than the last."
THEODOSIA BURR
(MRS. JOSEPH ALSTON)
Theodosia Burr was, as has been said of the daughter of another eminent
statesman with whom Aaron Burr was closely identified, "the soul of her
father's soul." If we would know the better part of a man who was one
of the most remarkable characters of his age, we must know Theodosia,
through whom, perhaps, his name, which all the subtlety of his soul was
bent on immortalizing, may live to a better fame in the centuries to
come than has attended it through the years of that in which he lived.
Under the inspiration of her presence both her father and husband
rose to lofty pinnacles in the political arena of their country. Her
father on the eve of her marriage stood at the very portals of the
Chief Magistracy. In less than ten years of political life he had so
progressed that the election of 1800 resulted in a tie vote for the
Presidency between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson.
In 1801, while the festivities attending Theodosia's marriage at Albany
were at their height, the House of Representatives at Washington
entered upon that long session of seven days which terminated in
declaring Thomas Jefferson President of the United States and Aaron
Burr Vice-President.
From the moment Theodosia linked her life with another's, and thus in
a measure ceased to be part of his, the retrogressive period of Aaron
Burr's life began.
To her husband she carried that same inspiring influence which she
had wielded over her father. She gave an impetus to his luxuriant and
aimless existence, and at the time of the tragedy which ended her
twenty-nine years of life he was occupying the gubernatorial chair
of his State. Her life was closely allied not only with the private
interests, but with the political ambitions of both. Her father rarely
dined, either among friends or strangers, that her health was not
drunk. He made her known to everybody, and during his travels in Europe
so interested Jeremy Bentham and other writers in her that they sent
her sets of their books.
At a time when woman was regarded rather as the companion of a man's
heart than as his intellectual mate, "the soft green of the soul on
which we rest our eyes that are fatigued with beholding more glaring
objects," Theodosia Burr's mental faculties were so developed and
trained as to fit her for the most complete and sympathetic union with
father, husband, and son.
It is but a negative tribute to say that she was by far the
best-educated woman of her time and country. In the beauty of her mind
and person she realized her father's ideal of a perfect woman, and
amply satisfied his pride and vanity. On the eve of his duel with
Hamilton he wrote to her, "I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia,
for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this
life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections
had hoped for or ever wished."
Theodosia was the only child of Burr's marriage with the widow of a
British army officer who had lost his life in the West Indies.
Fresh from the battle-fields of the Revolution, where he had won honors
of which he was ever more tenacious than of those achieved elsewhere,
and but recently admitted to the bar after a brief period of study,
his marriage to a woman ten years his senior and the mother of two
well-grown boys was a source of genuine wonderment to Burr's friends in
New York. Young, of fascinating manner and appearance, some means, and
good family, he might readily have aspired to an alliance with any one
of those families which were a power in the State,--the Livingstons,
the Van Rensselaers, or the Clintons. But before he quitted the army,
Burr had discovered the charms of the society at the "Hermitage,"
presided over by Mrs. De Visme and her two daughters, one of whom was
the widow of Colonel Prevost.
There he met the most distinguished men of his country, through whose
influence this family had been spared the inconvenience of moving
within the British lines at the outbreak of hostilities. In the
library, there, he discovered a treasure-house of French literature,
to which he was ever partial, and in the interchange of thought which
followed his reading, Aaron Burr and Mrs. Prevost became constantly
more imbued with a sense of the beauty and attraction of each other's
minds. Through her he gleaned his first reverence for the intellectual
power of woman, and to her he owed the happiest days of his life.
"The mother of my Theo," he said, speaking of her towards the close of
his life, "was the best woman and the finest lady I have ever known."
In her finished manner, her fine bearing, and her exquisite mind there
was a delicate harmony that soothed and satisfied Burr's artistic soul.
His marriage to her in July, 1782, put an end to the rumor that he was
paying his addresses to Miss De Visme, to which his frequent visits to
the "Hermitage" had given rise.
The first year of their married life was spent in Albany, where he was
engaged in the practice of law, and where Theodosia was born on the 23d
of June, 1783. In the fall of that year her parents removed to the city
of New York, where they had leased a house in Maiden Lane, at a rental
of two hundred pounds per year, to commence from the time the British
troops left New York, which they did on November 23, 1783.
So prosperous were Burr's financial affairs that he early in his
married life acquired also the possession of a country-seat, Richmond
Hill, then two miles from the city. The house, a stately frame building
with a lofty portico supported by Ionic columns, stood on a noble
hill, several hundred feet in height, overlooking the river and the
Jersey shore. It was surrounded by a lawn shaded by oaks, lindens, and
cedars, on the outskirts of which on all sides stretched woods of more
than a hundred acres. Within the enclosure was a pond known for many
years after the property had passed from Burr's possession as Burr's
Pond. On it Theodosia learned the graceful art of skating when still
quite a little girl.
The house, built about the middle of the last century, was Washington's
head-quarters in 1776, and Burr, who was there with him, conceived
his first desire to become its possessor. It was occupied by John
Adams during his tenure of the Vice-Presidency, when New York was
the capital, and Burr's long possession of it culminated in the
elegant hospitality of which it was the scene during his term as
Vice-President. He returned there from Washington at the close of the
sessions of Congress, and entertained with a lavishness that eventually
bankrupted him.
[Illustration: Theodosia Burr
(Mrs. Joseph Alston)
By Charles B. J. F. Saint Memin]
His library, which bespoke the critical taste of the scholar, and
which he had begun to collect as a boy, was a feature of the house,
recalled in after years by men who had been his guests as vividly
as the brilliant dinner-parties given beneath the same roof by the
distinguished Adams and his wife. He had his London bookseller, through
whom he made constant additions to his collection, for Burr was ever
a lover of books, and he recorded in his journal in his days of exile
and want with what pangs he had been obliged to part with some odd
volumes he had with him upon discovering that he was again under the
necessity of dining.
His passion for books he imparted to his daughter, urging upon her
at all times the necessity for study and improvement, and never
relinquishing his endeavors to carry her mind to a high order of
cultivation. In the communication he addressed to his son-in-law on
the night before his duel with Hamilton, he asked as a last favor that
he would urge Theodosia to continue to study. In all his letters to
her his efforts to stimulate this habit were uppermost. "The longer I
live," she wrote to him after her marriage, "the more frequently the
truth of your advice evinces itself, that occupation is necessary to
give us command over ourselves."
In the development of her mind and character he pursued a
clearly-defined and well-directed course. When she was ten years old he
wrote to his wife from Philadelphia, where he was at the time occupying
a seat in the Senate, reminding her that he had left a memorandum of
what Theodosia was to learn during his absence. While his public duties
were such that he was not able always to personally superintend her
studies, he gave minute instructions to the tutors to whom he intrusted
her, and constituted himself their vigilant and inexorable critic. "If
your young teacher," he wrote to her when she was in her sixteenth
year, "after a week's trial should not suit you, dismiss him on any
pretence, without wounding his pride, and take the old Scotchman.
Resolve to succeed, and you cannot fail."
Mary Wollstonecraft's book, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women,"
in which Burr became so absorbed that he sat up all night reading
it, so affected him that its influence told on all Theodosia's
life. On the principles it inculcated were based both her mental
and moral development. "If I could foresee," he wrote to his wife,
"that Theodosia would become a mere fashionable woman with all the
attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace
and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence.
But I yet hope by her to convince the world what neither sex appears to
believe,--that women have souls."
"And do you regret," he wrote to Theodosia herself, when she was a
little more than sixteen, "you are not also a woman? That you are
not numbered in that galaxy of beauty which adorns an assembly-room?
Coquetting for admiration and attracting flattery? No. I answer with
confidence. You feel that you are maturing for solid friendship. The
friends you gain you will never lose; and no one, I think, will dare to
insult your understanding by such compliments as are most graciously
received by too many of your sex."
Burr was himself an ornament to many a drawing-room, and no man ever
had better opportunities for estimating the deficiencies in the system
of educating the women of his day. Theodosia he brought up like a
young Spartan, with few or none of the feminine affectations then in
vogue. Courage and fortitude were his darling virtues, and so instilled
into her from her infancy that they formed almost the groundwork of
her character. "No apologies or explanations. I hate them," he said,
reproving her for some fault of omission when she was a little child.
"I beg and expect it of you," he wrote to her from Richmond, where he
was awaiting trial for treason, and whither she was hastening to him,
"that you will conduct yourself as becomes my daughter, and that you
manifest no signs of weakness or alarm."
Theodosia's affection for her father was the absorbing passion of her
life. "You appear to me so superior, so elevated above other men,"
she once wrote to him, "I contemplate you with such a strange mixture
of humility, admiration, reverence, love, and pride, that very little
superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior
being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me. When I
afterwards revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities
appear. My vanity would be greater if I had not been placed so near
you; and yet my pride is our relationship. I had rather not live than
not be the daughter of such a man."
He sent his love to "the smiling little girl," in a letter he wrote
his wife when Theodosia was two years old, not knowing that with his
going she had not only ceased to smile, but that she wept bitterly
and heart-brokenly whenever his name was mentioned, and that it
required the combined efforts of her mother and nurse to divert her
thoughts from the painful fact of his absence. As her mother said, the
attachment which thus early manifested itself in so marked a manner,
was not of a common nature. Theodosia's life is an evidence of how
exalted it was, when, with all the world against him, she was yet proud
to be his daughter.
Burr exercised an almost hypnotic influence over both men and women,
and there are extant innumerable anecdotes of the conquests he
continually made over those who had gone forth to apprehend him as a
villain. In his intercourse with Theodosia he brought into play all
those delicate attributes of his mind which captivated so many women.
She was constantly in his thoughts. "The ideas of which you are the
object, that daily pass through my mind," he wrote to her in 1799, from
Albany, where the Legislature was in session, "would, if committed to
writing, fill an octavo volume.... Indeed, my dear Theodosia, I have
many, many moments of solicitude about you."
He exacted much of her even as a child, among other things that she
should keep a journal in his absence, to be sent to him at regular
intervals, and that she should answer his letters minutely and
promptly. Writing to her when she was eleven years old, he said,--
"Yesterday I received your letter and journal to the 13th inclusive.
On the 13th you say you got nine pages in Lucian. It was, to be sure,
a most surprising lesson. I suspect it must have been the second time
going over, and even then it would have been great, and, at the same
rate, you will be through a second time before my month is up. I
should be delighted to find it so. I have not told you directly that
I should stay longer than a month but I was angry enough with you to
stay three months when you neglected to write to me for two successive
posts."
"I beg, Miss Prissy," he wrote to her from Philadelphia during the same
year, "that you will name a single '_unsuccessful effort_' which you
have made to please me. As to the letters and journal which you did
write, surely you have reason abundant to believe that they gave me
pleasure; and how the deuce I am to be pleased with those you _did not_
write, and how an omission to write can be called an effort, remains
for your ingenuity to disclose."
In his next letter to her, he referred again to "the unsuccessful
effort."
"Your letter of the 9th, my dear Theo, was a most agreeable surprise
to me. I had not dared even to hope for one until to-morrow. In
one instance, at least, an attempt to please me has not been
'_unsuccessful_.' You see, I do not forget that piece of impudence."
He was mindful, too, of her health, and in one of his letters begged
her to carry herself erect. He had himself a remarkably erect and
graceful carriage, which lent a majesty to his bearing and gave the
impression of much greater height than he possessed.
While his letters to her were full of advice and suggestions for her
improvement, they were by no means lacking in commendation. As she grew
to womanhood this was more marked, as was also his tendency to confide
in her. Her father's frequent and prolonged absences from home, her
mother's long illness, attended with much suffering and terminating
in death when Theodosia was but eleven years old, had necessitated an
early assumption of those responsibilities which mature and strengthen
character. To a suggestion contained in a letter written by her father
shortly before her mother's death, that he would leave Congress that he
might have more time to devote to his wife, Theodosia replied with a
quaintness that was characteristic of her: "Ma begs that you omit the
thought of leaving Congress."
From her close association with her mother under such circumstances
her receptive mind became imbued with the beauties of the Christian
philosophy, which her father, though a grandson of Jonathan Edwards and
a son of the Rev. Aaron Burr, founder and first president of Princeton
College, had not included in the course of studies so exactingly marked
out for her. She was at this time studying Latin, Greek, French, and
music, and learning to dance and to skate.
After her mother's death, Burr, who had a profound admiration for the
language, literature, and people of France, consigned her to a French
governess. She acquired a complete mastery of that tongue, and the
fluency with which she spoke it added much to the grace with which
she presided over her father's home, for Burr frequently entertained
Frenchmen. Louis Philippe, Jerome Bonaparte, Talleyrand, and Volney
were all at various times his guests at Richmond Hill.
When Theodosia was fourteen she took her place at the head of her
father's household and became his inseparable companion, her playful
wit illuminating his hours of relaxation, her steadfast courage, her
strength, her very presence, constituting his most powerful defence in
the darkest hours of his life.
She had much of her mother's self-poise and elegance of manner,
together with her father's dignity and wit. When she reached maturity,
though short in stature like her father's family, she carried herself
with a noble dignity which, with a certain lofty benevolence of
countenance, the refinement of her features, the frank intelligence of
her brow, the healthful bloom of her complexion, made her singularly
beautiful. So absolute was her father's confidence in her that he wrote
when she was but seventeen, "Many are surprised that I could repose in
you so great a trust as that of yourself, but I knew you were equal to
it, and I am not deceived."
He sent Brant, the Indian chief, to her from Philadelphia with a letter
of introduction,--she was but fourteen at the time and mistress of
Richmond Hill, where she entertained him with an ease which gave her
father much gratification. She gave a dinner in his honor, inviting
to meet him some of her father's friends, among them Volney, Bishop
Moore, Dr. Bard, and Dr. Hosack. She was already a belle, with many
admirers ever in her wake, when Edward Livingston, then mayor of New
York, taking her aboard a French frigate lying in the harbor of the
city, thus warned her: "You must bring none of your sparks on board,
Theodosia. We have a magazine here, and we shall all be blown up."
Her life was full of happiness at this time, with Hamilton's wife
and daughters among her friends, her father one of the Presidential
possibilities, and she enjoying much of his society, accompanying him
frequently to Albany on horseback and visiting in the neighborhood
while he transacted his business at the capital.
In February, 1801, a few months before she was eighteen, Theodosia was
married to Joseph Alston, of South Carolina. He also was young, being
but twenty-two, and wealthy, possessing extensive rice plantations,
talented and ambitious, though as yet without a specific object
on which to expend these qualities. He had studied law and been
admitted to the bar, though he had not begun to practise. Upon Burr's
suggestion he entered upon a political career, rising eventually to the
governorship of his State.
Theodosia argued for a deferment of the marriage, quoting Aristotle,
that a man should not marry till he was thirty-six. With convincing
eloquence and ardor, Alston replied, winning his suit, notwithstanding
Aristotle and other equally eminent authorities.
On February 7, 1801, the New York _Commercial Advertiser_ announced
the marriage, which had taken place on the 2d, at Albany, where the
Legislature, of which Burr was then a member, was in session. It was
a period of intense excitement throughout the country, and the names
of Jefferson and Burr were in all mouths. The people of the country
had cast a tie vote, which threw the election into the House of
Representatives. Party spirit manifested itself for the first time in
the young republic, and the strength of the constitution was early put
to a severe test.
Theodosia, on her way to her new home in the South, stopped in
Washington, where, on the 4th of March, she saw her father inducted
into the Vice-Presidency.
Her marriage and her father's new honors inaugurated for her three
years of absolute happiness. Though her husband's home and her father's
were a journey of twenty days apart, she went frequently back and
forth, and though she wrote to her husband during one of her early
visits to her old home, "Where you are, there is my country, and in
you are centred all my wishes," she was undoubtedly in better health
and spirits when in her northern home. Her winters were passed in
Charleston, where she was well received and much beloved, and where she
became an important factor in her husband's political success.
Her father missed her sadly. "For what else, for whom else, do I live?"
he had written to her shortly before her marriage. When she was no
longer at Richmond Hill he returned there with painful reluctance.
Theodosia urged him to marry again, and from the tone of a letter he
wrote to her about this time there seems to have been some probability
of his accepting her suggestion. If he were really in earnest, however,
he at least did not conduct the affair with his usual sapiency, and
though Theodosia from afar threw light on the young woman's vagaries,
it was to no purpose.
Theodosia's only child, a son, she named after her father, to whom he
was a source of much pride and affection. To Burr the anniversaries of
the day of Theodosia's birth were ever occasions for rejoicing. Her
twenty-first birthday, though she was not with him, he celebrated with
a dinner-party at Richmond Hill. He had her portrait placed in a chair
at the table, but, as it was a profile and appeared unsociable, he had
it hung up again. "We laughed an hour, danced an hour, and drank your
health," he wrote to her.
But already the days of her contentment were drawing to a close. Before
this letter telling her of the happiness the day had given him had
reached her, the tragedy of Weehawken had been enacted. Its shadow fell
forever upon him who survived it, and who doubtless became a potent
instrument in Hamilton's canonization. With awful blackness, too, it
fell upon the far-away daughter when she heard that her father was a
fugitive with an indictment for murder hanging over him.
From that moment shadows gathered about her with ever-increasing
sombreness till they culminated in that hour of darkness in which her
life went out.
In Burr's Mexican scheme, which he set on foot shortly after
the expiration of his term as Vice-President, Theodosia became
involved sentimentally, and her husband financially. The President's
proclamation and Burr's arrest put an end to their visionary dynasty
in Mexico. Instead of beholding him upon a throne, they saw him
arraigned before the tribunal of justice at Richmond, on a charge of
high treason, with Chief Justice Marshall the presiding judge, and
John Randolph of Roanoke foreman of the jury. Never, it has been said,
did two more wonderful pairs of eyes than those of Marshall and Burr,
black, brilliant, and penetrating, look into each other.
In arraigning Burr, there was an element to be reckoned with that is
not ordinarily taken into consideration,--the marvellous personality
of the man. From his appearance, his manners, his voice, his eyes,
emanated an influence not to be lightly estimated. In his bearing and
presence he was peerless. He spoke without effort, in a full, crisp,
rather than powerful, voice, clothing his thoughts in the language
best suited to their most accurate expression, terse, epigrammatic
and devoid of figures, his mobile features lending themselves to the
thought that was severe or scintillating, tender or impressive. With a
woman's tact he combined an adroit intellect equal to any emergency.
He conducted his own defence, supported by the best legal talent in
the country. His son-in-law sat beside him every day in court, and
Theodosia, the beautiful, noble Theodosia, with sublime faith in her
father, inspired a confidence in him in other breasts. She appealed
to the poetic fancy of Washington Irving, then a young barrister, who
was sent from New York to report the trial for his brother's paper, and
whose letters evince an unmistakable sympathy for Burr. Luther Martin,
one of the foremost geniuses of the Maryland bar, defended him with an
eloquence that rendered Martin himself an object of suspicion to Thomas
Jefferson.
"I find that Luther Martin's idolatrous admiration of Mrs. Alston,"
wrote Blennerhassett, "is almost as excessive as my own, but far more
beneficial to his interests and injurious to his judgment, as it is the
medium of his blind attachment to her father, whose secrets and views,
past, present, and to come, he is and wishes to remain ignorant of.
Nor can he see a speck in the character of Alston, for the best of all
reasons with him,--namely, that Alston has such a wife."
Though Burr was acquitted, there was an element of hostility to him
in the government, and much distrust of him among the people of the
country at large. In the following year, therefore, he went to Europe.
Theodosia had gone to New York to be near him. He saw her for the last
time on June 7, 1808, the night before he sailed. She spent that summer
at Saratoga, and the following winter in New York, where she lived in
retirement.
"The world," she said, in one of her letters to her father about this
time, "begins to cool terribly around me. You would be surprised how
many I supposed attached to me have abandoned the sorry losing game
of disinterested friendship." She repeatedly urged him to return,
promising him that if the worst came to the worst, she would leave
everything and suffer with him.
A few months after Madison's elevation to the Presidency she wrote to
Mrs. Madison, whom her father had known when she was a young widow, and
to whom he had introduced Mr. Madison. "Ever since the choice of the
people was first declared in favor of Mr. Madison, my heart, amid the
universal joy, has beat with the hope that I, too, should soon have
reason to rejoice," she wrote. She desired to know if there was danger
of any further prosecution of her father in the event of his return.
For the same purpose she wrote two years later from the Oaks, her South
Carolina home, to Albert Gallatin, then Secretary of the Treasury,
and once a friend of her father's. The letter was calmly logical, yet
eloquent with feeling.
In another year Burr was within sight of his home and country. As he
neared her shores he wrote in his journal, "A pilot is in sight and
within two miles of us. All is bustle and joy except Gamp [the name by
which his little grandson called him]. Why should he rejoice?"
Of all the misfortunes of his life, the heaviest were to fall upon him
that year. A month after her father's arrival in New York, and while
her heart was yet rejoicing that he had been kindly received, the young
life of Theodosia's son, full of beauty and promise, closed. "I will
not conceal from you," wrote Alston to his father-in-law, "that life
is a burden, which, heavy as it is, we shall support, if not with
dignity, at least with decency and firmness. Theodosia has endured all
that a human being could endure, but her admirable mind will triumph.
She supports herself in a manner worthy of your daughter."
Theodosia longed to see her father. We were at war with England at the
time, and her husband, governor of his State and general of militia,
could not leave his post of duty to accompany her to New York. Her
health was so feeble that she could not safely attempt the journey
alone. Her father's old friend Timothy Green offered his services,
going from New York to bring her north. Under his care, and accompanied
by her maid, Theodosia sailed from Charleston on the "Pilot" on the
30th of December, 1812. Save by her fellow passengers on the ill-fated
vessel, she was never seen or heard of again. A violent storm swept the
coast on the following day, and it has been supposed that the "Pilot,"
with all on board, went down off Cape Hatteras. After weeks and months
of despairing silence, father and husband gave her up. Burr during this
period of torturing suspense acquired a habit which clung to him to the
end of his life,--of wistfully scanning the horizon for ships as he
walked on the battery, then the popular resort of all New Yorkers.
Two or three years after she had gone from their lives, her husband
sent a chest of her belongings, which he had not had the courage to
open, to her father. "What a fate, poor thing!" sighed Burr, as he
recognized the familiar articles. Among the contents was a letter
addressed, "To my husband. To be delivered after my death and before
my burial." It was dated August 6, 1805, and had been written during
an absence of her husband from home, at a time when, being depressed
in health and spirits, she feared that death was approaching. After
leaving some remembrance to the various members of her husband's
family, and begging her husband to provide for Peggy, an old servant,
she says,--
"Death is not welcome. I confess it is ever dreaded. You have made
me too fond of life. Adieu then, thou kind, thou tender husband.
Adieu, friend of my heart. May Heaven prosper you, and may we meet
hereafter. Adieu; perhaps we may never see each other again in this
world. You are away, I wished to hold you fast, and prevent you from
going this morning. But He who is wisdom itself ordains events; we
must submit to them. Least of all should I murmur, I, on whom so
many blessings have been showered, whose days have been numbered by
bounties, who have had such a husband, such a child, such a father.
Oh, pardon me, my God, if I regret leaving these. I resign myself.
Adieu once more, and for the last time, my beloved. Speak of me often
to our son. Let him love the memory of his mother, and let him know
how he was loved by her.
"Your wife, your fond wife,
"THEO.
"Let my father see my son sometimes. Do not be unkind towards him
whom I have loved so much, I beseech you. Burn all my papers except
my father's letters, which I beg you to return to him. Adieu, my
sweet boy. Love your father, be grateful and affectionate to him
while he lives, be the pride of his meridian, the support of his
departing days. Be all that he wishes, for he made your mother happy."
After expressing a wish that she may not be stripped and washed
according to the usual custom, being pure enough to return to dust, she
concludes: "If it does not appear contradictory or silly, I beg to be
kept as long as possible before I am consigned to the earth."
Alston, who survived her but four years, wrote heart-brokenly to her
father: "My boy, my wife, gone both! This, then, is the end of all the
hopes we had formed. You may well observe that you feel severed from
the human race. She was the last tie that bound us to the species. What
have we left? Yet, after all, he is a poor actor who cannot sustain his
hour upon the stage, be his part what it may. But the man who has been
deemed worthy of the heart of Theodosia Burr, and who has felt what
it was to be blessed with such a woman's love, will never forget his
elevation."
ELIZABETH PATTERSON
(MADAME JEROME BONAPARTE)
The city into which Baltimore Town was legislated on the last day
of the year 1796 already fostered within its limits the germ of the
dual life, social and commercial, to which it has owed its subsequent
eminence. Not infrequently, in the days of its inception, the same roof
sheltered drawing-room and warehouse, the earlier merchants deeming
it necessary to keep their growing interests constantly beneath their
personal vigilance. Later, the commercial life crowded out the domestic
life, and merchants built their dwellings--stately bricks or frames,
painted blue, yellow, or white, facing on avenues of locust-trees--in
another part of the town, all bearing quaint evidence of the far-away
ports with which their vessels traded, while the whole town was
permeated with the odor peculiar to shipping districts.
The first theatre troupe that took the town by storm played in one
of the old warehouses, whose walls re-echoed the approbation of the
pleasure-hungry audience, among whom were no fastidious critics to pick
flaws in "King Richard III.," and still less in "A Miss in her Teens,"
which followed.
Baltimore never had the qualms of conscience which afflicted some
of her puritanical sister towns concerning the pleasures in which
she might rightly indulge. She looked out upon life, rather, with a
liberality of mental vision which partook of the breadth of the seas
her merchantmen traversed.
The brick theatre built in 1781 became one of the most revered spots in
the town, and when the actors came her way, Baltimore turned out _en
masse_ to give them royal welcome.
At the close of the Revolutionary War a number of the French officers
of the army and navy who had remained in this country settled in
Baltimore, thereby adding a foreign flavor to the social side of its
existence, which, like that of all the cities and towns of the young
Republic, was characterized more or less by a wholesome simplicity.
In the town, a dozen years before it blossomed into the city, before
its streets were paved, when its only communication with inland towns
was by means of the stage-coach, and three years before Maryland had
ratified the Constitution of the new union of States, there was born
to one of her merchants, William Patterson, a daughter, the repute of
whose beauty was destined to fill two continents, the spicy aroma of
whose wit to penetrate the sacred precincts of imperial throne-rooms,
and the story of whose life to touch the hearts of many generations.
The daughter of one of the self-made men whose sterling qualities
have lent such stability to the industries and development of the
country, who, born of Irish parentage and coming to this country in his
fourteenth year, had carved his own way shrewdly and judiciously to
the position of distinction he held among his fellow-townsmen and the
people of his adopted country, Elizabeth inherited many of his dominant
characteristics. He was estimated to be the wealthiest merchant, and,
with the possible exception of Charles Carroll, the wealthiest man,
in the United States. Her mother, Dorcas Spear, came of good Maryland
lineage, and was a woman of gentle character and cultivated mind.
She superintended for the most part Elizabeth's education, which, if
somewhat erratic, was, nevertheless, superior to that enjoyed by the
average woman of that period. It is said that she acquired an early
familiarity with Rochefoucauld's "Maxims" and committed to memory
Young's "Night Thoughts." Lady Morgan, whose friendship she formed
later in life, realizing the brilliancy of her mind, regretted that its
earlier direction had not been more systematic.
Her father, from his own statement, seems to have looked after the
conduct of his family with the same minute vigilance which he bestowed
upon his financial concerns.
"I always consider it a duty to my family," he said, "to keep them as
much as possible under my own eye, so that I have seldom in my life
left Baltimore either on pleasure or business. Ever since I had a house
it has been my invariable rule to be the last up at night, and to
see that the fires and light were secured before I retired myself, by
which I found little risk from fires and managed to have my family keep
regular hours. What I possess is solely the product of my own labor. I
inherited nothing of my forefathers, nor have I benefited anything from
public favors or appointments."
Strangely similar is the concluding sentiment to that expressed by the
founder of another family on another continent,--Napoleon Bonaparte.
"Sole fabricator of my destiny, I owe nothing to my brothers," said
he, whose fortunes, though he had reared them upon a loftier pinnacle,
were, nevertheless, to be crossed by those of the Patterson family.
The eldest daughter in a family of thirteen children, Elizabeth
Patterson grew up at a period when the beaux of society read
Chesterfield, when no man begrudged the time expended on the profound
and sweeping bow then dictated by gallantry, and when fencing and
dancing formed a part of every gentleman's education.
[Illustration: Elizabeth Patterson
(Madame Jerome Bonaparte)
From portrait by Quinçon]
"She possessed the pure Grecian contour; her head was exquisitely
formed, her forehead fair and shapely, her eyes large and dark, with
an expression of tenderness that did not belong to her character;
and the delicate loveliness of her mouth and chin, the soft bloom of
her complexion, together with her beautifully rounded shoulders and
tapering arms, combined to form one of the loveliest of women." She
had had numerous offers of marriage before she reached her eighteenth
year, her father's wealth and prominence, independent of her own
attractive personality, having insured her social prestige, but as yet
she walked heart whole and fancy free.
In the summer of 1803 Jerome, the youngest brother of Napoleon
Bonaparte, and then less than nineteen years of age, detaching himself
from naval duty in the West Indies and following the bent of his own
inclination, eventually put into the port of New York. Whatever breach
of military discipline this implies will in no way astound those
familiar with Jerome's character.
Too young to have taken part in the struggles that had elevated his
family to such dizzy heights, he yet, at an age most susceptible to the
altered conditions of his life, came into the full enjoyment of all the
advantages they offered. Napoleon was wont to take a humorous rather
than a serious view of this "_mauvais sujet_," as he frequently called
Jerome. Madame Junot relates a characteristic anecdote in her memoirs
which, she says, she had from the Emperor himself. Returning to Paris
after the battle of Marengo, Napoleon was presented with various bills
contracted by Jerome during his absence. One of these, to the amount of
twenty thousand francs, was for a superb shaving set in gold, mother
of pearl, silver, ivory, and costly enamels. It was a work of art, but
of no possible use to Jerome, who, being but fifteen years old, was
without the suggestion of a beard.
To his mother he was an idol, and to the end of her life he was able to
extract from her in generous measure much of that substance which she
expended grudgingly even upon herself.
Enveloped in the glory of a great name, Jerome's advent into the social
current of New York was noised abroad in the few and ordinarily but
little-read newspapers of the day.
By stage the news was brought to Baltimore. The returning coach took
an urgent invitation to Jerome and his suite to visit that city from
Commodore Barney, who had been his recent comrade-in-arms in the West
Indies. They accepted the invitation, and early in September found
themselves the objects of a lavish hospitality.
Shortly after their arrival one of Jerome's suite, General Rewbell,
lost his heart to Miss Henrietta Pascault, one of the belles of the
town, to whom he was, after a brief courtship, married.
At the fall races, which were in progress when he arrived in Baltimore,
Jerome for the first time saw the woman in whose life he was thereafter
destined to play so conspicuous a part. We may well believe that she
was radiantly beautiful in a gown of buff silk with a lace fichu and a
leghorn hat with tulle trimmings and black plumes.
He had already heard of the beautiful Miss Patterson, and had declared
with youthful impetuosity that he would marry her. The fact that she
was aware of his preconceived sentiments gave a piquancy to their
first meeting, which was enhanced by the boyish enthusiasm with which
he referred to her as his "_belle femme_." The coquetry with which
she resisted his too evident admiration had the invariable effect of
further ensnaring his princely affections.
They met frequently in those centres of hospitality, the home of
Samuel Chase, who twenty-odd years before had put his name to the
Declaration of Independence; at "Belvedere," the home of Colonel John
Eager Howard, the hero of Cowpens; at "Greenmount," "Druid Hill," and
"Brooklandwood," where three other afterwards celebrated beauties were
in course of development.
When the festivities in honor of Jerome were at their height, Elizabeth
was borne away to the seclusion of a Virginia estate, under the wing
of a vigilant mother, who rightly interpreted the course of events
and foresaw the obstacles that loomed in the pathway of their happy
termination. There only an occasional echo of the gayety that was rife
at Baltimore reached her, making unbearable that rural quiet, which
means happiness only to a contented mind, and is a veritable torture
to such a restless spirit as ever possessed Elizabeth Patterson. Her
entreaties at length prevailed, and she was brought back to the city,
where, on the 29th of October, to prove how futile the separation had
been, scarcely eight weeks after their first meeting, Jerome procured a
license of marriage.
He was probably remonstrated with by the members of his suite, whose
age and the length of whose friendship made possible that liberty.
Rewbell, in the first flush of his own happy union doubtless gave
Jerome a reckless support that not even the crafty Le Camus could
counterbalance. To such opposition as Elizabeth's family offered, she
replied that she "would rather be the wife of Jerome for one hour than
of any other man for a lifetime."
On Christmas Eve, 1803, Jerome Bonaparte, brother of the man who
five months later declared himself Emperor of France, and Elizabeth
Patterson, daughter of an American merchant, entered into that union
whose subsequent rending was to echo throughout Christendom. The
ceremony was performed in the home of Elizabeth's father, according to
the rites of the Catholic Church, by the Right Reverend John Carroll,
first archbishop of America. It was witnessed by the French Consul at
Baltimore, M. Sotin, Alexander le Camus, who was Jerome's secretary,
and the mayor of Baltimore.
The marriage contract, which was drawn up by Alexander J. Dallas,
afterwards Secretary of the Treasury, bears evidence of the
apprehension felt by Elizabeth's family as to the outcome of this
international union with so youthful a bridegroom.
The dress worn by Elizabeth on her bridal night was of exquisitely fine
white muslin, elaborately embroidered. She said of the gown in after
years that it was one she had frequently worn, as she particularly
desired to avoid anything like vulgar display. "And to tell the truth,"
she added, "there was as little as possible of any gown at all, dress
in that day being chiefly an aid in setting off beauty to advantage,"
which concurs with the statement made by a man who was present at the
wedding, to the effect that he could have put all the clothes worn by
the bride into his pocket.
The honeymoon days of Jerome and Elizabeth were passed at her father's
estate outside of Baltimore, "Homestead." Late in January they were
mingling with the merrymakers one afternoon in Market Street. There
was good sleighing, and the crisp air rang with the joyousness of an
old-time winter. A snowball, sent with the unerring aim and democratic
disregard of a small boy of the town, struck Elizabeth. Jerome was
outraged at the indignity, and offered a reward of five hundred dollars
for the discovery of the youthful miscreant. How trivial seems this
"missile light as air" by comparison with those shafts sped later
by a not less unerring hand, and striking into the very soul of her
womanhood, Jerome making no effort to avert them.
In February this bride and groom of the early century went to
Washington, whither since have wended their way so many happy bridal
couples. Of the journey there, made in a stage-coach, General Samuel
Smith, member of Congress from Maryland, wrote to Mr. William Patterson
describing the runaway of the horses as they entered the city and
Betsy's presence of mind. The driver having been thrown from his seat,
Jerome sprang from the coach with the hope of catching the horses. But
as they still sped on, and her danger increased as they penetrated
towards the centre of the straggling little capital, Elizabeth opened
the door and jumped out into the snow without injury.
While in Washington they were the guests of the French Minister,
General Tureau. Aaron Burr, then Vice-President of the United States,
meeting Elizabeth at this time, wrote to his daughter Theodosia, whom
he thought Elizabeth much resembled, and referred to her as "a charming
little woman with sense, spirit, and sprightliness."
Jerome's thoughts were already turning towards France, where every
effort was being made to bring about his return--alone. While in New
York during the following summer he was made acquainted with the
annulment of his marriage, as follows: "By an Act of the 11 Ventose,
all the civil officers of the Empire are prohibited from receiving
on their registers the transcription of the act of celebration of a
pretended marriage that Jerome Bonaparte has contracted in a foreign
country during the age of minority, without the consent of his mother
and without the publication in the place of his nativity."
In February following the marriage Mr. William Patterson had written
to our Minister at Paris, Robert Livingston, enclosing him letters
from the President and Secretary of State, to be presented to Napoleon
with the hope of obtaining his approval, or at least mitigating any
displeasure the marriage might have caused. "I can assure you," he
wrote to Livingston, "that I never directly or indirectly countenanced
or gave Mr. Bonaparte the smallest encouragement to address my
daughter, but, on the contrary, resisted his pretensions by every means
in my power consistent with discretion. Finding, however, that the
mutual attachment they had formed for each other was such that nothing
short of force or violence could prevent their union, I with much
reluctance consented to their wishes."
He had, moreover, despatched his eldest son, Robert Patterson, to
Paris, to discover which way the wind of the imperial temper blew. As
the matter lay rather outside the pale of usual diplomatic issues,
it required most delicate manipulation, and while young Patterson
received kindly yet cautious expressions of interest and good-will
from Napoleon's brothers, an ominous and forbidding silence enveloped
the First Consul. His indignation increased with Jerome's continued
absence, and when at length he spoke through his Minister of Marine,
it was to bid Jerome, as lieutenant of the fleet, to return to France,
at the same time forbidding all captains of French vessels to receive
on board "the young person to whom Jerome had attached himself."
Through the same channel Napoleon offered his forgiveness to Jerome
on condition that he abandon Elizabeth and return to France, there to
associate himself with his fortunes. Should he persist in bringing her,
she would not be allowed to put foot on French territory. Jerome's
mother wrote to him at the same time, suggesting that he return to
France alone and send his wife to Holland. Robert Patterson, however,
who succeeded admirably in keeping himself posted on the variations in
the attitude of Jerome's family, advised that Jerome should not return
to France without his wife.
Though he made several efforts during the year that followed to return
thither, there is only one on record when it was his purpose to sail
alone.
In September, 1804, General Armstrong sailed from New York to replace
Livingston at Paris. He had agreed with Jerome to take Madame Bonaparte
with him, Jerome himself intending to go on one of the French frigates
then in New York harbor. She could thus, at least, have landed in
France as a member of the family of the American minister, who might
have succeeded in presenting her to Napoleon, with whom she could,
no doubt, have pleaded her cause with more effect than could have
been produced by any amount of diplomatic correspondence or family
intervention. She had the gifts which he most admired in women, great
personal beauty and wit, and though the latter might have been too keen
for his entire appreciation, she no doubt would have been shrewd enough
to temper it to his taste.
She wrote her father from New York, September 5, 1804, of her
disappointment at Armstrong's having sailed without her. The reason
given was that Jerome and Elizabeth had arrived by stage a few hours
after the ship had sailed.
An effort to sail during the following month ended in shipwreck off
Pilot Town, where they were finally landed and temporarily housed by
one of the inhabitants, on whose clothes-line Madame Bonaparte dried
her wardrobe, and from whose hospitable board she enjoyed a dinner
of roast goose with apple-sauce, being in exuberant spirits over her
rescue.
On March 11, 1805, they finally made their departure from Baltimore in
the "Erin," a ship belonging to Mr. Patterson. Though they sailed at an
early hour in the morning, and the arrangements for their departure had
been conducted with much secrecy, General Tureau wrote from Washington
two days later to Mr. Patterson to ask what disposition had been made
of Jerome's four carriage-horses, and to suggest, if they were to be
sold, that he should like to be considered as a purchaser.
The "Erin" reached Lisbon on April 2, whence Jerome wrote in English to
his father-in-law of their safe arrival, and took the opportunity to
express his affection for and gratitude towards his second family. He
spoke of Elizabeth having been very sea-sick, and added,--
"But you know as well as any body that sea-sick never has killed
nobody."
Napoleon's ambassador met the ship upon its arrival, and called upon
Elizabeth to ask what he could do for her, addressing her as Miss
Patterson.
"Tell your master," she replied, "that Madame Bonaparte is ambitious,
and demands her rights as a member of the Imperial family."
She was forbidden to land, and Jerome, taking that farewell of her
which fate had destined should be his last, went overland to Paris,
while the "Erin" sailed for Amsterdam.
On his way to Paris Jerome met General and Madame Junot _en route_
for their new post in Spain. He breakfasted with them and opened his
anxious young heart to them, showing them a miniature of Elizabeth,
from whom, he declared, nothing should ever separate him.
Upon reaching Paris he went at once to Malmaison and sought an audience
with Napoleon, who refused to see him, bidding him write what he wished
to say. He wrote, simply announcing his arrival, and received the
following reply:
"I have received your letter this morning. There are no faults you have
committed which may not be effaced in my eyes by a sincere repentance.
Your marriage is null and void, both from a religious and a legal point
of view. I will never acknowledge it. Write Miss Patterson to return
to the United States, and tell her it is not possible to give things
another turn. On condition of her return to America, I will allow her a
pension of sixty thousand francs a year, provided she does not take the
name of my family, to which she has no right, her marriage having no
existence."
From this position Napoleon never swerved. The annuity was paid to
Elizabeth after her return to America until the fall of the Empire,
and formed the basis of the fortune of one and a half million dollars,
accumulated through a long life of frugality and cautious investment,
of which she died possessed.
The reply of Pope Pius, to whom Napoleon appealed for the annulment of
the marriage, accompanying his request with a costly gold tiara, to the
effect that after mature deliberation he had been able to discover no
grounds on which the marriage could be cancelled, though it chagrined
the Emperor to an extent which he never forgave, did not yet alter the
stand he had taken. When Jerome was finally admitted to his presence,
he greeted him with that magnetic smile whose potency swayed men and
women alike.
"So, sir, you are the first of the family," he said, "who has
shamefully abandoned his post. It will require many splendid actions to
wipe off that stain from your reputation. As to your love-affair with
your little girl, I pay no attention to it."
The "Erin," meanwhile, arrived in the Texel Roads, where, though flying
the flag of a friendly power, and a merchant vessel whose clearance
from Baltimore showed that she carried no guns, she was placed under
guard of two French men-of-war and all communication with the shore
prohibited. Through the intercession of Sylvanus Bourne, our Consul at
Amsterdam, she was permitted at the expiration of a week to depart,
and, bearing her full measure of human desolation, she headed towards
the shores of England. The fame of her fair passenger had preceded her,
and so large a concourse of people had gathered at Dover to witness the
landing of Madame Jerome Bonaparte that Mr. Pitt, then Prime Minister
of England, sent a military escort to protect her from possible
annoyance of a sympathetic though curious throng.
At Camberwell, near London, her son was born on the 7th of July, 1805,
and named Jerome Napoleon.
In June of that year, two months after his return, Jerome had been
restored to his rank in the navy and was cruising off Genoa, whence
he wrote, through his secretary, Alexander le Camus, to Mr. William
Patterson, of Baltimore, expressing his dissatisfaction at Elizabeth's
having gone to England, that country being at the time at war with
France. The tone of the letter betrays the change that was already
working in Jerome's feelings, though he was at that time sending
Elizabeth by every available opportunity messages and pledges of his
unswerving love for her.
When we judge him, let us bear in mind not only his youth and all the
circumstances of his life, but, above all, that soul-crushing will
which he, weakly enough it seems to us, was striving to stand against.
In a subsequent letter to Mr. Patterson, written also by Mr. le Camus,
in the course of which Jerome expressed the desire that Elizabeth
should return to America and wait there in her own home till he
obtained her recall from the Emperor, one feels instinctively that
between the lines is written the finale to the short chapter of the
romance of Elizabeth Patterson and Jerome Bonaparte.
She returned to her father's home in the fall, though she had written
shortly before that she was glad to be among strangers, because "in
Baltimore, where people are always on the watch," she would be more
observed.
On August 12, 1807, Jerome married Princess Frederika Catherine,
daughter of the King of Wurtemburg. As King of Westphalia he offered
Elizabeth a home within his dominions, with the title of Princess of
Smalcalden and a pension of two hundred thousand francs per year. In
regard to the former, she replied that Westphalia was a large kingdom,
but not quite large enough for two queens, and with regard to the
pension, having already accepted Napoleon's annuity of sixty thousand
francs, she made the oft-quoted response that she preferred "being
sheltered under the wing of an eagle to being suspended from the bill
of a goose."
Napoleon, with his high appreciation of a _bon mot_, desired to know
what favor he could bestow upon a woman capable of this witticism.
Elizabeth replied through the French Minister at Washington that she
was ambitious, and would like to be a duchess.
The Emperor promised the gift, but never conferred it. Notwithstanding
her unremitting yet ever futile struggle for recognition, Madame
Bonaparte cherished always the most enthusiastic admiration for the
genius of the man who had blighted her life. In one of her letters to
her father, written from Europe, whither she returned after the fall
of the Empire, she said, "They do not in England pretend to revile
Napoleon as we have done. His stupendous abilities are admitted; his
misfortunes almost respected by his enemies. I listen silently to any
discussion in which he bears a part. I easily perceive that he has more
justice done him here than with us."
In a subsequent letter she details more fully her attitude towards the
entire family.
"I cannot say," she writes, also to her father, "that I have the least
reliance on that family, although I am inclined to reciprocate their
kind words and receive their offers of friendship without allowing
myself to be deceived by either." And farther on in the same letter
she says, in regard to allowing her son to visit Pauline Bonaparte,
then the Princess Borghese, at Rome, "My resolution is uninfluenced
by personal feelings, never having felt the least resentment towards
any individual of that family, who certainly injured me, but not
from motives which could offend me. I was sacrificed to political
considerations, not to the gratification of bad feelings, and under the
pressure of insupportable disappointment became not unjust."
From her letters there seem to have been frequent rumors afloat in
regard to her marrying again, both in this country and in Europe, where
she was greatly admired. In one letter to her father, written in 1823,
she says that while the American newspapers were marrying her she was
making her will.
Though she obtained from the Maryland Legislature a divorce, after
the fall of Napoleon, it seems to have been rather as a precautionary
measure against any possible demands Jerome might make upon her
financially than with a view to marrying again.
Tom Moore, whom Lady Morgan sent to her with a letter of introduction,
afterwards described her as a beautiful woman, but destitute of all
sentiment and with a total disbelief in love, on which, indeed, she
bestowed only ridicule. There can be no doubt, however, of the concern
and tenderness which she expended upon a dog, Le Loup, which belonged
to her son, and which she said was "superior to half the persons one
meets in the world." There are many traditions of her wit, which,
though tinged with asperity, was ever ready and scintillating. The
Honorable Mr. Dundas, who sat beside her at a dinner in London, she
speared so unsparingly with the shafts of her sarcasm that his egotism
never forgave her. When he asked her, finally, if she had read Captain
Basil Hall's book on America, she replied affirmatively. "And did you
observe," he continued, bluntly, with the hope of avenging his wounded
self-love, "that he called all Americans vulgarians?" "Yes," replied
Madame Bonaparte, while the table paused to listen, "and I was not
surprised. Were the Americans descendants of the Indians and Esquimaux,
I should have been. But being the direct descendants of the English,
nothing is more natural than that they should be vulgarians." For both
her wit and her beauty she was admired by men and women of fastidious
taste, among whom were Sir Charles and Lady Morgan, Talleyrand,
Gortschakoff, and Madame de Staël. She so fascinated the Prince of
Wurtemburg, uncle of Jerome's second wife, that he confessed his
wonderment that Jerome could ever have abandoned her. "Si elle n'est
pas reine de Westphalie, elle est au moins reine des coeurs," was Baron
Bonsteller's tribute to her.
She seldom alluded to Jerome, though she believed that she always
stood first in his heart. She referred in a letter to her father to
the probability of his coming to Rome while she was there, but added
that she should not see him, "nor would he like it himself after the
unhandsome way in which he has always conducted himself. I shall hold
my tongue, which is all I can possibly do for him."
Though the greater part of her life was spent in Europe, and she was
for a time on terms of considerable intimacy with his family, she met
Jerome but once, when they passed each other in the gallery of the
Pitti Palace in Florence, Jerome with the Princess Catherine upon his
arm. Though they recognized each other, they passed without greeting,
Jerome exclaiming, "That was my American wife." Jerome Napoleon, the
son of his American wife, was frequently his guest, and was treated
with much kindness by the Princess Catherine. Jerome, however,
added practically nothing to this son's material comfort, much to
his mother's chagrin, and at his death in 1860 it was found that he
had not even mentioned his name in his will, a lack of recognition
which wounded both mother and son in a more profound sense than his
lifelong failure to make provision for him had done. So great was his
son's resemblance to his family, and particularly to the Emperor,
that the _chargé d'affaires_ of France at Amsterdam, in 1820, refused
his mother a passport for him to travel through France. It was a
strange coincidence that Madame Jerome Bonaparte herself should bear
a remarkable resemblance to the Bonaparte family, particularly to
Napoleon and Pauline, even having some of their mannerisms.
In August, 1855, Louis Napoleon offered to create Jerome Napoleon
Bonaparte Duke of Sartène, but he declined the honor, as the object
was to take away his name and the rights he possessed as his father's
eldest son.
At the request of his half-brother a family council was called, before
which the celebrated Berryer pleaded the cause of Madame Jerome
Bonaparte and her son, whose rights were ultimately defined as limited
exclusively to the use of the name.
On November 3, 1829, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, to his mother's intense
dissatisfaction and disappointment, married an American, the lovely
Miss Susan Mary Williams, of Baltimore. During a long residence abroad
Madame Bonaparte had become imbued with the idea that it was a duty
her son owed both to her and to himself to ally himself matrimonially
with some European family of distinction. Writing to her father from
Florence, where she was residing at the time of her son's marriage, she
said, "I would rather die than marry any one in Baltimore, but if my
son does not feel as I do upon this subject, of course he is quite at
liberty to act as he likes best."
Her father died in 1835. He had never been in sympathy with her desire
to live in a foreign country, and had frequently upbraided her for
her prolonged absence from home. In his will he denounced her as an
undutiful daughter, bequeathing her a few small houses besides the home
in which she was born, on the east side of South Street, with the lot
surrounding it.
In April, 1879, Madame Bonaparte, who was then in her ninety-fifth
year, having outlived her son and all of her own generation, passed
from the sphere where she had been so conspicuous a figure. She died
in a boarding-house in her native city, where she had acquired the
reputation of being a keen, eccentric old woman. The sorrows of her
youth, belonging to the early days of the country, were too remote to
be remembered by her later-day contemporaries, who discovered in her no
trace of the bewitching Elizabeth Patterson who had taken by storm the
heart of the youthful Prince Jerome.
She rests to-day in Greenmount Cemetery, Baltimore, in a small
triangular lot which she selected shortly before her death, saying that
as she had been alone in life, so she wished to be in death. On her
monument are graven the words that express so much for her,--"After
life's fitful fever she sleeps well."
THE CATON SISTERS
Among the belles of the early century loom the forms of those gracious
women whose names are interwoven with those of the most historic
figures of their age, the Caton sisters of Baltimore. Granddaughters of
Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the most illustrious Americans
of the period, they became through marriage identified with the most
distinguished families in England.
In 1787 Richard Caton, an Englishman who had settled in Baltimore two
years before, and engaged in the manufacture of cotton goods, succeeded
in winning the fair hand of Mary Carroll. Rumor said that it had been
already partially plighted to her cousin John Carroll of Duddington
Manor. Cousin "Longlegs," however, as Kitty, her irreverent younger
sister, called him, was in Europe at the time with her brother Charles,
and in those days of slow travel Mary had probably capitulated to the
young Briton before John even knew that he had a rival.
Her father, who was reputed the wealthiest man in America, and who
provided liberally both for his children and grandchildren, settled
upon Mary at the time of her marriage to Richard Caton, the beautiful
estate of "Brookland Wood," in the centre of the suburb which has since
sprung up and been named for them, Catonsville. Their four daughters
were born there and grew up to beautiful womanhood,--Mary, Elizabeth,
Louisa, and Emily. They derived every grace of mind and body from
a cultivated and accomplished mother who had been educated abroad,
and who, accompanying her father to Philadelphia when Congress met
there, had known the best there was of social life in America. Closely
associated, moreover, from their infancy with their grandfather, a
most courtly gentleman, who ever beheld in woman an object worthy
of his most chivalrous devotion, they bore every evidence of that
innate refinement which created distinction for them in England as the
"American Graces."
The life at that time surrounding such men as Carroll was idyllic.
Honored by his countrymen, blessed with the wealth giving him every
material comfort and luxury, owning his town house, his estate of
Doughoregan, and his plantation the famous Carrollton, sought out by
the most distinguished men and women at home and from abroad, to say
nothing of the myriad resources which such a man as Carroll possessed
within himself, he already saw his family--the third generation born in
America--well established, with the roof-trees of his son and daughters
close by his own. His granddaughters were much with him, and though
they were the belles of Baltimore town from their earliest girlhood, a
very delightful phase of their life was that portion of it spent on
their own and their grandfather's estates. There is frequent mention
both in the journal and letters of Charles Carroll of visits from them
and also of that princely hospitality that is ever associated with the
names of many of the old Maryland estates.
In one letter he alludes to a ball to be given by Captain Charles
Ridgley of "Hampton," for which three hundred invitations were out, and
to which Mary, Betsy, and Louisa were all going. In another he mentions
a ball given by Louisa, who was entertaining the Misses Pinkney at his
place at Annapolis.
Many a belle in those days went to balls on horseback with a blanket
thrown over her muslin gown to protect it from the dust. Yet it was
not too much of an undertaking to go all the way from Annapolis to
Baltimore, or _vice versa_, for the pleasure of being present at
somebody's ball or dinner-party. Roads and weather permitting, the
Catons occasionally made the trip in winter time in a "sled." Roads and
weather had much to do with the timing of one's visits in those days
of primitive transportation facilities when Charles Carroll recorded
that he sent his servant from Doughoregan with a led mare to fetch Miss
Nancy Robinson who had been visiting at Homewood, his son's estate.
Nature lent her perfecting hand to the rural life of these people, for
nowhere was she ever more munificent in the bestowal of her epicurean
gifts than in the State of Maryland, whose lands and whose waters alike
cater to the gastronomic proclivities of the _bon vivant_.
Oliver Wendell Holmes at a later period attributed a lack of
appreciation of literature which he fancied he had detected among
the Baltimoreans to the preponderance of these very blessings, and
suggested that the highest monument in the city should be crowned with
a canvas-back duck.
There were club-houses and merrymaking in plenty, with oysters,
soft-shell crabs, terrapin, canvas-back ducks, and a roasted young pig
with an apple in its mouth, or a turkey stuffed with oysters, as _pièce
de résistance_, with a nip of punch for sauce. Miss Ridgley depicts it
very temptingly in her little book.
Foremost among the beautiful women whose presence lent piquancy to
this life were the Catons. In 1807 Mary, who was at the time nineteen
years old, was married to Robert Patterson, the eldest son of William
Patterson. She thus became the sister-in-law of the unhappy Madame
Jerome Bonaparte, between whom and herself there seems to have existed
no great sympathy, through no fault of Mary Caton's.
[Illustration: Mary Caton
(Lady Wellesley)
From portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence]
The event was a welcome one to William Patterson, who was at the time
the wealthiest merchant in America. The wedding ceremony was performed
in the private chapel of the Carroll family by Archbishop Carroll, who
four years previously had similarly united Elizabeth Patterson and
Jerome Bonaparte. In April, 1811, Robert and his wife, accompanied by
her sisters Elizabeth and Louisa, went abroad, sailing from Baltimore
on one of his father's ships and landing in Lisbon in the latter
part of May. Robert Patterson had already travelled and lived much
in Europe. To the Catons it was the first of a series of numerous
trans-Atlantic trips.
While in Spain they met the Duke of Wellington, who was there at that
time conducting the peninsular war, and Colonel Sir Felton Bathurst
Hervey, who had been his aide-de-camp at Waterloo and whom Louisa
Caton afterwards married. Charles Carroll, writing of Hervey after his
marriage to Louisa, which occurred on the 1st of March, 1817, said,
"All who know him love him." He was a gallant soldier and had lost his
right arm at Vittoria.
The Duke of Wellington's ardent admiration for Mrs. Patterson drew him
within the wake of the little American party as they progressed in
their travels over Europe, lending them the prestige which opened for
them the most exclusive houses in England. Apparent as his admiration
was, not the least breath of scandal ever touched the name of this
beautiful young matron. The Prince Regent, to whom Wellington presented
her, spoke later to Richard Rush, the American Minister, of her unusual
beauty. When she came, later in life, into contact with William IV. as
first lady in waiting at Windsor, she won the sincere admiration of
that sovereign on account of the high standard of morality which she
maintained.
After the marriage of Hervey and Louisa Caton they were entertained by
the Duke of Wellington at Walmer Castle. The Duchess of Rutland gave
them a ball, and bestowed upon the sisters on that memorable night the
title under which they became famous,--the "American Graces." Hervey's
death occurred in 1819, and Robert Patterson's at Baltimore in the
fall of 1822. The widow of the latter shortly afterwards rejoined her
sisters in England, where they were again entertained at Wellington's
country-seat. While there they met for the first time his eldest
brother, Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, and like himself a
soldier and a statesman. In 1797 he had been made Governor of India by
George III., who, in return for the services he rendered there, had
created him Marquis of Wellesley. At the time he met Mrs. Patterson and
her sisters he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Two years later, when
Mrs. Patterson and Elizabeth Caton visited Dublin, he entertained them
royally, bestowing the most devoted attentions upon the former, to whom
he subsequently offered himself.
After a brief engagement they were married at the viceregal castle,
the ceremony being performed twice, to accord with the religious
convictions of both the bride and the groom, the Archbishop of Dublin
marrying them according to the rites of the Catholic Church, and the
Lord Primate of Ireland according to those of the Church of England.
Unusual magnificence marked the festivities which followed this event,
as well as those of the remainder of Lord Mornington's reign as viceroy.
On July 4, 1827, Bishop England, of South Carolina, gave the following
toast to Charles Carroll, who was the last survivor of the signers of
the Declaration of Independence: "To Charles Carroll of Carrollton: in
the land from which his grandfather fled in terror his granddaughter
now reigns a queen."
It was rather a strange coincidence that two daughters of the little
American town of Baltimore, Elizabeth Patterson and Mary Caton,
neighbors and contemporaries, should have married brothers of two of
the most formidable characters in modern history,--Napoleon Bonaparte,
the self-styled conqueror of the world, and the Duke of Wellington, his
conqueror.
Madame Jerome Bonaparte, who was in Europe at the time of her
sister-in-law's second marriage, thus wrote to her father concerning it:
"HAVRE, November 21, 1825.
"DEAR SIR,--I write by this packet to announce to you the marriage
of Mrs. Robert Patterson. Mrs. Brown received a letter from Betsy
Caton the day on which it was to take place. She has made the
greatest match that any woman ever made.... The Marquis of Wellesley
is Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He is sixty-five. He married an
Italian singer, by whom he had a family of children. She is dead. He
has no fortune. On the contrary, he is over head and ears in debt.
His salary is £35,000 per annum as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He
will be there eighteen months longer, and if the King does not give
him another place he is entitled as a poor nobleman to at least a
thousand pounds a year. He is brother of the Duke of Wellington.
Mary's fortune is reported in Europe to be £800,000 cash. It has been
mentioned in all the papers at that sum."
Wellesley retained his position in Ireland till 1828. He was then
appointed Controller of the Royal Household of William IV., and his
wife first lady in waiting at Windsor Castle. Wellesley's death
occurred in 1842, the Marchioness surviving him over eleven years. The
latter part of her life was spent at the Royal Palace at Hampton Court,
where Queen Victoria presented her with a house in recognition of her
husband's services.
Louisa Caton was married for the second time in 1828 to the eldest son
of the Duke of Leeds, Francis Godolphin D'Arcy Osborne, Marquis of
Carmarthen, who came into his title and estates ten years later.
This marriage called forth another letter from Madame Jerome Bonaparte
to her father: "Louisa has made a great match. He is very handsome, not
more than thirty-eight, and will be a duke with £30,000 a year."
Elizabeth Caton married once, and that much later in life than her
sisters. She became, in 1836, the wife of Baron Stafford, whose family
name was Jerningham.
Emily Caton, the youngest of the four sisters, and the only one who
left descendants, married John Mactavish, a Scotchman, who had settled
in Canada, whence he was sent as consul to Baltimore. Josiah Quincy,
who met her at dinner at her grandfather's in 1826, recorded in his
journal that he had been much impressed with her air of high breeding.
MARGARET O'NEILL
(MRS. JOHN H. EATON)
To the student of social history few careers surpass in interest that
of Margaret O'Neill. Born of humble parentage, she ran the gamut of
social possibilities, exercising more influence over the political
destinies of her country than any other American woman has ever done.
Unlike other great belles who owe their fame to the universal
admiration they evoke, Margaret O'Neill owed hers quite as much to the
animosity she roused. Her cause hotly espoused by the President of
the United States, her conduct made the subject of cabinet debates,
she rose to fame as broad as the land of her birth, and later beyond
the seas to a fame unshadowed by enmity, though not dearer to her
patriotic soul. Born late in the last century, she came to be a belle
in so far as having beaux makes a girl a belle in the days when the
native Washington girl had few rivals. The shriek of Fulton's steamboat
had not yet startled the world. The stage-coach was the universal
means of conveyance, though the daughters of some Southern and Western
Congressmen, from districts unfamiliar even with its lumbering
proportions, ambitious to taste the pleasures of a season at the
capital, used frequently to make the tedious journey on horseback. Her
girlhood belleship had well terminated, indeed she had married and
brought children into the world, before the completion of the great
canal in 1826, which made the more sanguine voyager of that day hopeful
that eventually eight miles might be travelled in an hour!
Though she never knew the exact date of her birth, she had heard
it frequently related that she was two weeks old at the time of
Washington's funeral, December 18, 1799. She was the eldest daughter
of William O'Neill, a descendant of the O'Neills of Ulster County,
Ireland, and himself a native of New Jersey, who had migrated to the
capital with the hope of improving his fortunes. There he opened a
tavern in the western section of the city, a short half-mile from the
President's house. He was a genial host, and his house soon attained
popularity with the _jeunesse dorée_, as well as with military men
and Congressmen, though it was a long way from the Capitol. The Union
Tavern, in Georgetown, however, which was also popular with our early
law-makers, was still farther away. From its door to the Capitol the
old 'bus known as the Royal George, one of Washington's earliest
institutions, made frequent trips, stopping at O'Neill's and other
taverns and boarding-houses along the route to pick up its patrons.
Margaret grew up in the unconventional atmosphere of the tavern, a type
of undisciplined American girlhood, wayward, high spirited, full of
generous impulses, her mind fed on impetuous and misguided admiration,
and herself blessed with a magnetic soul that drew most men and many
women irresistibly to her. She was a toast that stirred the hearts of
the most phlegmatic of mankind and evoked unparalleled enthusiasm from
those of more ardent temperament. Hers was the highest type of Irish
beauty, a marvellously white skin, soft gray eyes, warm chestnut hair
that curled above an expressive brow, exquisite features, a small round
chin, a delicately beautiful figure of medium height, with an erect
carriage and her spirited head nobly poised.
The "Health," written by Edward C. Pinkney, whom Edgar Allen Poe placed
first in his estimate of lyric poets of America, is said to have been
inspired by her in 1824.
"I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex the seeming paragon,
To whom the better elements and kindly stars have given
A form so fair that, like the air, 'tis less of earth than
heaven.
"Her every tone is music's own, like those of morning birds,
And something more than melody dwells ever in her words;
The coinage of her heart are they, and from her lips each flows,
As one may see the burthened bee forth issue from the rose.
"Of her bright face one glance will trace a picture on the
brain,
And of her voice, in echoing hearts a sound must long remain;
And memory such as mine of her so very much endures,
When death is nigh, my latest sigh will not be life's, but hers.
"Affections are as naught to her, the measure of her hours;
Her feelings have the fragrancy, the freshness of young flowers.
And lovely passions, changing oft, so fill her, she appears
The image of themselves by turns the idol of past years.
"I filled this cup to one made up of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex the seeming paragon.
Her health! And would on earth there stood some more of such a
frame,
That life might be all poetry and weariness a name."
She went to school at Mrs. Hayward's seminary, and later to Mr. Kirk.
She also attended a dancing-school that gave exhibitions of the grace
and proficiency of its pupils in the parlors of the Union Tavern in
Georgetown. At one of these exhibitions Margaret was crowned by Mrs.
Madison, the wife of the President, as the prettiest girl and most
graceful dancer in the room. Naturally ambitious, this first social
triumph pointed out the possibility of greater ones, to be achieved
only after bitter contests that would have crushed the spirit of a more
sensitive woman.
Her father deeming her sufficiently well educated, in which opinion she
concurred, she quitted school in her fifteenth year, and, being now
a young woman of bewitching beauty and abundant leisure, she entered
extensively upon her career as a belle.
Two young military men whom her fascinations had ensnared were at one
time on the point of a duel. With one of them, Captain Root, she had
planned an elopement, and was actually about to descend from her
window when she accidentally overturned a flower-pot: this crashing on
the ground below, roused her father and put an end to her flight. More
than that, her indignant parent carried her off to New York, where he
left her under the wing of his old friend Governor De Witt Clinton, to
go to Madame Nau's school. Clinton was very severe with the spoiled
little beauty, and the staid atmosphere of his home was not congenial
to her. She wrote her father very homesick letters, in one of which she
promised that if he would take her home "neither Root nor branch should
ever tear her from him." Her wit greatly pleased him, and after he had
passed the _bon mot_ around among his guests and his Peggy's admirers,
he went to New York and brought her home.
It has been said that she was not yet sixteen when from a window of her
father's tavern she for the first time saw John Bowie Timberlake, as
he passed along Pennsylvania Avenue on horseback. Their acquaintance,
engagement, and marriage followed within the space of a few weeks.
Several years of quiet happiness ensued, during which three children, a
son, who died in infancy, and two daughters, were born to them.
Timberlake was a purser in the navy, and when he was ordered to sea
duty he closed his little home, and his wife and children went to her
father's to stay during the time of his absence. He died of asthma
aboard the "Constitution," at Port Mahon.
His widow shortly afterwards married General Eaton, who was at that
time a United States Senator and a guest at her father's house. For the
first time the little Peggy O'Neill, of triumphant dancing-school days,
felt that her foot was actually upon the rounds of the social ladder.
John Quincy Adams was President at the time, and one of the bitterest
Presidential campaigns this country has ever witnessed had just drawn
to a close in the election of Jackson. One victim of the freedom
of press and speech, everywhere indulged in, was the wife of the
President-elect. Her gentle soul, stung by the breath of slander, which
all the vigilance of a devoted husband had been powerless to avert, had
passed unregretfully from earth. Jackson came to Washington a bereaved
and embittered man.
There was a puritanical tendency among the women who made up the
society of that era, and to whom Margaret O'Neill appeared as the
embodiment of a sport-loving element that prevailed among men.
Life had a rural quality in those days which it has since lost.
Horse-racing was universal, and the great race between Eclipse and Sir
Henry, run on Long Island May 27, 1823, for a purse of ten thousand
dollars, was a national event. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had
been staked, and Peggy O'Neill no doubt was intimately acquainted with
some of the heaviest winners and losers, among the latter of whom was
John Randolph. Though she was far too young to remember the opening
of the first race-track in Washington, November 3, 1803, she was yet
familiar with all the details of its inauguration, on which occasion
both houses of Congress had adjourned, the Senate to have the ceiling
repapered, and the House, which was apparently less resourceful,
because it had no pressing business on hand.
Growing up in a public house, she was undoubtedly familiar with much in
the lives of men of which other women of her day, leading more secluded
lives, feigned ignorance. Yet she had become in no way contaminated by
the liberal atmosphere she had breathed from infancy.
General Eaton and his bride returned from their honeymoon shortly
before Jackson's inauguration. A few of the Senators' wives called upon
her, but she was generally not well received, and slander had already
begun its mischievous work when Jackson appeared in Washington and
swore "by the Eternal" that his little friend, whom he had known all
her life, should not be defamed.
Her name was already on every lip at the capital, and there is no doubt
that as many went to Jackson's inauguration ball to see her as to
see the President. They stood on chairs and benches in their efforts
to catch a glimpse of her, and she made a picture worthy of their
endeavors, in her pink gown, with her headdress of nodding black plumes.
Eaton was made Secretary of War. He was Jackson's old friend, and
had labored unremittingly for his election. Moreover, thought the
chivalrous old President, this would insure Mrs. Eaton's triumph. The
women of the cabinet, however, refused to recognize her. Though Mrs.
Calhoun, the wife of the Vice-President, had called upon her as a
Senator's wife, she declined to associate with her as the wife of a
cabinet minister. Calhoun, to whom an appeal was made, declared himself
powerless, as "the quarrels of women, like those of the Medes and
Persians, admitted of neither inquiry nor explanation."
Van Buren, Secretary of State, and Barry, Post-Master-General, the
former a widower and the latter a bachelor, stood aloof from the
tempest in which their fellow-officials were engulfed. That astute
politician and prince of diplomats, Martin Van Buren, won Jackson's
undying friendship by the warmth with which he took up his friend's
cause. He had been a beau at evening functions when he was in the
Senate, and he knew the social status of every one at Washington, and
precisely what brought every stranger to the capital. While he admired
Mrs. Eaton and desired to defend her, he also undoubtedly realized all
the advantages to be gained by such a course.
The spirit of hostility gradually spread to every branch of society.
The Diplomatic Corps became involved; Vaughn, the British minister, and
Baron Krudner, the Russian envoy, both bachelors, ranged themselves
beneath Mrs. Eaton's standard. They féted and dined her, and gave her
substantial evidence of their adherence to her cause. Huygens, the
Dutch minister, having a wife who belonged to the opposition, was less
fortunate. Finding herself placed next to Mrs. Eaton at dinner on one
occasion, Mrs. Huygens took her husband's arm and turned her back upon
the assemblage. While all who witnessed the affront were appalled into
an awkward silence, Mrs. Eaton, following the retreating form with
critical eyes, commented admiringly upon her fine carriage.
Between her defenders and her defamers her Celtic blood bore her
up, and her sunny soul lost none of its serenity. One of Jackson's
biographers, however, states that when the matter reached the ears of
the irate President, he threatened to demand Huygens's recall unless he
and his wife forthwith apologize to Mrs. Eaton.
The contest waxed warmer day by day, both houses of Congress furnishing
recruits to one side or the other.
The cabinet was dubbed the "Petticoat Cabinet," and Mrs. Eaton's fame
as Bellona, the Goddess of War, spread through the land. Calhoun
attacked the President for retaining in his cabinet an element of so
much discord. But Jackson was a true knight, and his friendship was
stanch.
The bitter feeling, meanwhile, among the cabinet ministers had attained
such a pitch that they could no longer come together amicably. Their
resignations were tendered to the President and accepted, and a new
cabinet was formed.
It was during a recess of Congress. Van Buren was sent as minister to
England, where he was cordially received. When Congress reassembled,
however, the Senate refused to confirm his appointment, Calhoun casting
the decisive vote.
A letter of Daniel Webster's, written about this time, reveals the
seriousness of the situation. "It is odd enough," he wrote, "that the
consequences of this dispute in the social and fashionable world are
producing great political effects, and may very probably determine who
shall be successor to the present Chief Magistrate." And they did.
Jackson's power and popularity were such that he was in a position
to dictate to his party the choice of his successor. His choice fell
upon Van Buren, who had undoubtedly labored for him in the days of his
bitter fight for the Presidency, and who had further and effectually
endeared himself to his chief by his zealous defence of Mrs. Eaton,
who in Jackson's eyes was not only a fair and beautiful woman, but the
representative of oppressed womanhood.
General Eaton was appointed governor to the Territory of Florida, and
later he was sent as our minister to the court of Madrid.
This ended Mrs. Eaton's social conflict. She was graciously received
and universally admired in that land of aristocrats, and her long
residence there and in Paris, whither she went before returning to this
country, formed one of the happiest periods of her life.
One of her daughters, the beautiful Virginia Timberlake, familiarly
known among the men and women who were young with her, as "Ginger"
Timberlake, married the Duke de Sampoyo and went to live in France,
where, in turn, one of her daughters has recently married a son of the
elder Rothschild. Margaret, Mrs. Eaton's second daughter, married one
of the Virginia Randolphs. To the children by this marriage, deprived
by death of both parents, Mrs. Eaton devoted many years of her life.
General Eaton died in 1859.
A third marriage contracted by his widow late in life, and subsequently
annulled, was productive of much unhappiness in her home.
On the 8th of November, 1879, she reluctantly gave up her hold on life,
whose volume had held for her so few blank pages.
In the presence of that foe which every woman fears most, slander, she
had never retreated from the position she early determined to carry,
and which circumstances proved she was well able to fill. She bore all
with a sweet courage, feeling keenly, but not morbidly, the world's
sting.
Preserving to the end her wonderful elasticity of spirit, she went
out from a life that had been one of alternate turmoil and triumph,
beholding only its beauties and loving it to the last. "I am not afraid
to die," she said, "but it is such a beautiful world to leave."
CORA LIVINGSTON
(MRS. THOMAS PENNANT BARTON)
Cora Livingston was born in New Orleans, "the little Paris of America,"
on the 16th of June, 1806, the year of the great eclipse. Her father,
writing to announce her advent to his sister in New York, said God had
given him so fair a daughter that the sun had hidden its face.
Though she was a great belle with a national reputation during the
decade from 1820 to 1830, those who attempted an analysis of her charm
declared that she lacked that attribute which many would esteem the
first requisite to belleship,--beauty. Yet she was a notable example of
that subtle power that raises a woman above her contemporaries, that
evokes an involuntary homage from every eye.
Her mother, writing of her when she was about sixteen and already the
belle of New Orleans, to one who had never seen her, said, "She is not
a beauty, not a genius, but a good and affectionate child."
Josiah Quincy, that ubiquitous beau who paid his court to the belles of
so many cities, seeing her in Washington in 1826, declared that she was
not handsome, while he admitted that she was undoubtedly the greatest
belle in the United States. "She has a fine figure, a pretty face,
dances well, and dresses to admiration," he continued, endeavoring
to solve the mystery of the attraction exercised by this exquisite
specimen of womanhood. He further confessed that when he left her he
bore away an image of loveliness and grace never to be erased, and he
went on to quote Burke's apostrophe to the Queen of France,--"Surely
never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more
delightful vision."
She was the daughter of Edward Livingston, a brother of that Chancellor
Livingston who, on the 30th of April, 1789, administered the oath of
office to the first President of the United States, and of an eminently
beautiful creole, Louise Moreau.
Fleeing the terrors of the negro insurrection in San Domingo, Madam
Moreau, a young widow, arrived in New Orleans just as the Louisiana
purchase was consummated and the province became the property of the
United States. French then to the very core, the city has retained
evidences of its origin longer than any city of the Union. The thrill
of anguish with which it realized that Louisiana had been sold by
Napoleon to the United States "on this 9th of July, 1803, at seven
P.M.," left its indelible impression upon a people loyal to their
nationality and tenacious of its prerogatives.
The wave of emigration which swept into the newly acquired territory
from the north bore thither Edward Livingston, of New York. Fortune's
reverses had driven him into the new country with the hope of finding
there a more promising field for his talent and labors.
The Americans were not well received. Scarcely more than a hundred out
of the eight thousand inhabitants had greeted the stars and stripes as
they were raised for the first time over the city. So strong, indeed,
was the prejudice against them that every unfortunate occurrence was
instantly attributed to them. Miss Hunt relates that upon one occasion
when a ball was interrupted by an earthquake an indignant old creole
gentleman exclaimed that the pleasure of ladies had never thus been
interrupted in the days of Spanish or French dominion.
Livingston's knowledge of the language, his tact, his adaptiveness,
together with his splendid ability, soon raised him to a conspicuous
place at the bar. He was a widower, thirty-nine years of age, when
he married Madam Moreau, who was but nineteen. Cora was the only
child of this marriage, and ever, even after her own marriage, the
inseparable companion of both parents. From her father she derived a
sound knowledge of the political questions of the day that made her
an intelligent spectator of the historic period in which she lived.
From her mother she inherited that grace, mental and physical, that so
indelibly impressed her upon the life of which she formed so brilliant
a part that her name can no more be eliminated from it than can the
names of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Daniel Webster, or Henry
Clay.
The cultivation of her mind was intrusted to her uncle, Major August
Davezac, from whom she received an education of unusual scope. She
matured early, being probably more or less at all times a part of the
social life that surrounded her parents and into which she made her
formal _entrée_ at the age of fourteen.
The social atmosphere of New Orleans at this time was like that of
no other city on the North American Continent. Creole tastes and
institutions were predominant. The only society of the city was Creole,
and very delightful and very exclusive it was. The French opera was
then, as it has been since, one of its conspicuous features. Tuesdays
and Saturdays were the nights when the fashionable world was to be seen
in the boxes, and the stage presented nothing more attractive than
the beautifully dressed women of the audience, with their artistic
coiffures. There were receptions in the boxes between the acts, and a
belle's powers of attraction were thus publicly manifested to a people
ever ready to add the tribute of its homage.
Cora Livingston before she was sixteen years old, gentle and retiring,
shrinking from publicity such as attaches to belles at this end of the
century, was known throughout the city of her birth as its greatest
belle. In the evenings of the warm season, when the balcony of her
house in Chartres Street was converted into a reception-room, in the
midst of a devoted family she received not only the admiration of
distinguished guests, but the chivalrous and silent homage of many an
unknown passer-by.
Frenchmen visiting New Orleans frequently brought letters of
introduction from Lafayette to Livingston, whom he had known in New
York. Cora thus early became accustomed to an association not only with
people of her own city, but with many eminent cosmopolites.
In 1812, when war was declared against England, New Orleans fell into
line and gave glorious proof of her loyalty. Her prejudices were
swallowed up in the common cause that drew all sections of the country
together, and she became in deed, as she already was in name, an
American city.
General Jackson's friendship for the Livingstons, of which he gave so
many handsome proofs, began at this time.
In 1822 Edward Livingston was elected to Congress, and for eleven years
thereafter Washington became his home. While he achieved prominence
as a legislator and statesman, the brilliancy of his daughter was
acquiring for her a national reputation. He leased the Decatur
residence on Lafayette Square, within a stone's throw of the White
House, and there gathered about this distinguished family the most
cultured element of the Washington of that period,--the Calhouns and
their gifted daughter with her perspicuous political theories, the
Adamses, Webster, Clay, Chief Justice Marshall, Martin Van Buren, Mrs.
Madison, their neighbor across the Park, and the widow of Admiral
Decatur.
[Illustration: Cora Livingston
(Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton)
From miniature by herself]
It was the exception in those days for members of Congress
to have their own homes. They lived for the most part in hotels
and boarding-houses, and the resident branch of society was more
distinctive. Mrs. Decatur, widowed by the famous Bladensburg duel of
March 20, 1820, had retired to her estate at Kalorama, which became
one of the most delightful centres of resident society. She favored
the Livingstons with her sincere regard, and included them among her
guests, frequently as often as three times in one week. To stand
forth as she does from among the bevy of brilliant women who led the
social life of Washington, at a time when conversation was a fine art,
deriving a stimulus from such men as Randolph, Pinckney, Webster, and
Story, and when women were quite the equals, in wit, humor, and happy
rejoinder, of these veteran conversationalists, is an indisputable
proof of the superior mental endowments of Cora Livingston.
The Capitol was then as much a feature to the people of Washington as
it is to-day to the people outside of Washington. Thither the belles
and beaux of the city betook themselves as regularly as the session
opened, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue beneath the double row of
Lombardy poplars, planted when Jefferson was President. The halls of
Congress were smaller and better adapted to both seeing and hearing
than they are at present. The discussion of public questions differed
also from what one hears nowadays, there being more spontaneity in the
oratory and a larger number participating, unless, indeed, there was a
grand occasion when the big guns were brought into action, and Clay's
mellifluous voice was heard, or Webster's organ notes pealed forth, or
Randolph's shrill pipe rent the air.
A distinctive social feature of the time were the assembly balls,
held usually at some such place as Carucci's, where Cora Livingston's
graceful dancing again made her the cynosure of all eyes. The set
in which she danced--there were no round dances in those days--was
continually surrounded by admiring spectators, many dancers foregoing
that pleasure for the greater one of watching her. Cora Livingston
in a ball-gown, going through the stately evolutions of a quadrille,
the very embodiment of winsome grace, was a vision that tarried long
afterwards with many who so beheld her.
It was at Carucci's in the winter of 1826, when Miss Livingston's
belleship was at its height, that the waltz was first seen in
Washington. Baron Stoekelburg, of the Russian legation, was its
sponsor, and all Washington looked on with dismay, the Baron and his
fair partner, whose name has been lost in oblivion, though her temerity
should have earned her a better fate, having the floor to themselves.
In 1829 Livingston went into the Senate, and in May, 1831, he succeeded
Van Buren as Secretary of State, Van Buren having taken the high
ground, so Livingston expressed it, that as a candidate for the
Presidency he should not remain in the Cabinet.
In 1833 President Jackson offered Livingston the mission to France.
Our affairs with that country were in a complicated condition, and
Livingston's patriotism induced him to accept the office.
In April of that year his daughter was married to Thomas Pennant
Barton, a son of Dr. Benjamin Barton, of Philadelphia. President
Jackson appointed him Secretary of the legation at Paris, sending
his appointment enclosed in a note to Cora, that she might have the
pleasure of presenting it to him with her own hands. Her intimate
acquaintance with the President dated back to her early childhood, when
she was scarcely taller than the cavalry boots worn by the hero of
the battle of New Orleans, who readily promised to hang Mitchell, the
highest English officer among the prisoners, if the British so much as
touched a hair of her father's head. He evinced a paternal pride in the
adulation she everywhere received as a woman. At his request she stood
as godmother to his wife's great niece, Mary Donalson, now Mrs. Wilcox,
who was born in the White House during his term of office.
On their return to America, in 1835, both the Livingstons and Bartons
made their home at Montgomery Place at Barrytown on the Hudson, an
estate of three hundred acres, which Mr. Livingston had inherited
from his sister, Mrs. Montgomery, the widow of General Montgomery, of
Revolutionary fame.
Mr. Barton was a man of scholarly tastes, to which the tranquil
atmosphere of Montgomery Place, with all its historic associations,
together with the close companionship of his gifted wife, was an
inspiration. He accumulated there a library which, at the time of his
death, was considered one of the most valuable private collections
in America. He bequeathed it to his wife with the request that she
make such disposition of it as best pleased her. Shortly before her
death she arranged for its transfer to the Boston Library, where it is
preserved, as she knew her husband desired his life work should be, in
its entirety, and known as the Barton collection.
In 1870 she went to France to superintend there the publication of
a new edition of her father's work on Penal Laws, which appeared
simultaneously with an English edition. In France a number of her
father's friends were still living, among them Mr. Charles Lucas, of
the French Institute, who wrote the Preface to the edition brought out
in that country.
Having survived her parents and husband, Mrs. Barton died suddenly at
Montgomery Place on the 23d of May, 1873.
The last two winters of her life were spent in Washington, where, at a
time when American society was singularly rapid, she shone as the last
ray from the glory of an age that was gone, in her whole manner and
bearing the unmistakable gentlewoman.
Going one day to her former home, the Decatur House, she requested,
without giving her name, that she might be permitted to see the
drawing-room. General Beale, who then occupied the house, of which
his widow still retains possession, in courteous compliance with her
request, led the way thither. As she entered the familiar apartment,
memory, conjuring up the forms that were no more, shut out the actual
presence of her host. At length regaining her self-possession, she
said, "A strange desire has of late possessed me to see again this
house in which I spent such happy days. Just where I am standing now I
stood thirty-nine years ago and was married." "You then were Miss Cora
Livingston," said the general, entering into her mood and reverting
instinctively to the days when her scintillating wit had made the name
famous, though in the sorrow-laden woman there was no trace of the
glorious girl.
EMILY MARSHALL
(MRS. WILLIAM FOSTER OTIS)
Boston claims as her own the greatest American man of the nineteenth
century, and even with more justice, the most beautiful woman born in
America within the same period. "Emily Marshall as completely filled
the ideal of the lovely and feminine, as did Webster the ideal of the
intellectual and the masculine," Quincy, a native of the same State,
has written of her, adding that though superlatives were intended only
for the use of the very young, not even the cooling influences of half
a century enabled him to avoid them in speaking of her.
He never forgot the first time he saw her walking on Dover Street
Bridge, Boston's fashionable promenade in those days. "Centuries are
likely to come and go," he continued, "before society will again gaze
spellbound upon a woman so richly endowed with beauty as was Miss Emily
Marshall. She stood before us, a reversion to that faultless type of
structure which artists have imagined in the past, and to that ideal
loveliness of feminine disposition which poets have placed in the
mythical golden age."
Daniel Webster upon one occasion, during his residence in Boston,
entered the old Federal Street Theatre, and was hailed with cheers.
A few minutes later Emily Marshall appeared in her box, when the
entire audience rose as one man and offered her the same homage it had
bestowed upon Webster. To us who look back upon her, through nearly
three-quarters of a century, she stands forth in such exquisite relief
from her environment that we are conscious of it only where the light
of her beguiling presence touches it.
She was the daughter of Josiah Marshall, a Boston merchant in the
China trade, a man of sagacity and enterprise in business affairs, and
possessed of those traits that made him a most lovable father, wisdom,
benevolence, and gentleness, with a quaint humor and readiness in
_repartée_ that enhanced the bond of comradeship between himself and
his children.
The people of his own State, as well as the inhabitants of the far-away
Sandwich Islands, are indebted to him for many benefactions. To the
latter his ships carried the first missionaries, the materials for
the first houses erected there, and the carpenters to build them.
Upon being charged duty on some salmon which he had imported from
the Columbia River, he pointed out to Louis Cass the desirability of
establishing the claim of the United States to the region of Oregon.
In the improvements which added so much to the prosperity of Boston in
1826 he was Mayor Quincy's constant adviser and abettor.
He was a handsome man, with firm mouth and kindling eyes, and his quick
step was well known in the business world, where to many a young
man he gave the opportunity which was the opening of a successful
mercantile career.
He was a son of Lieutenant Isaac Marshall of the Revolutionary
army, and a great-grandson of John Marshall, one of the founders of
Billerica, Massachusetts, in which town he was born. In the year 1800
he married Priscilla Waterman, a daughter of Freeman Waterman, who
represented the town of Halifax in the Cambridge Convention which
ratified for Massachusetts the Constitution of the United States.
Waterman had a sister who was distinguished for her charm, and who
married a Mr. Josselyn. Traditions of the Josselyn beauty lingered in
Plymouth until Emily Marshall's time. Mrs. Marshall was a woman of much
beauty, grace, and dignity.
Emily was born in the year 1807 on an estate at Cambridge, which had
been laid out a century before by Thomas Brattle. Shortly after her
birth her parents moved into a house in Brattle Square, Boston, known
as the White House. It was built upon a terrace, with steps running
down to the square. A large, old-fashioned garden in the rear was
one of its attractions. The house had already had two distinguished
tenants, Lieutenant-Governor Bolin and John Adams, the latter having
lived there when he was a young lawyer.
When Emily was fourteen years old her family once more transplanted
their household gods, going this time into the house on Franklin
Place, to which her beauty brought such fame. It had already begun to
manifest itself, and when she was but nine or ten years of age she was
frequently stopped on the street by strangers, who asked whose child
she was and involuntarily told her of her budding loveliness. Yet so
unconscious did she ever appear of its possession, so wholly lacking
in personal vanity, that one of her sisters, gazing upon her one night
arrayed in a ball-gown, and unable to restrain her admiration, asked
her if she realized how beautiful she was. "Yes," she replied, "I know
that I am beautiful, but I do not understand why people act so unwisely
about it."
Her education was begun at Madame English's school, where Russell
Sturgis, afterwards a partner of the Barings, said he first made her
acquaintance. Like every one else who ever saw her, he never forgot
her. More than forty years after her death, writing to thank her
daughter for the photograph of a portrait she had sent him, he said, "I
remember perfectly the portrait and the time when it was painted. No
painter could ever give the brilliant expression which always lighted
her beautiful face; the portrait is as good, therefore, as any one
could make it."
At Dr. Park's school on Mount Vernon Street, then one of the best
girls' schools in Boston, Margaret Fuller was one of her school-mates,
and confessed later to a sister of Emily's that she would willingly
have changed her mental gifts for those of the beauty and magnetism
with which Emily was endowed.
From Dr. Park's Emily went to Madame Canda's French school on Chestnut
Street. Her musical education, which continued till the time of her
marriage, was conducted by Mr. Matthew, Mademoiselle Berthien, and Mr.
Ostinelli.
The long acquaintance existing for generations among the families and
individuals who made up the Boston society of Emily Marshall's day,
had instilled into it a spirit of delightful simplicity. A traveller
from Great Britain who visited the United States early in the century
declared that all the people of the Bay State called one another by
their Christian names.
Dinner-parties were daylight affairs, beginning usually not later than
four o'clock. The dinner was served in courses, beginning with soup,
which was followed frequently by a corn-meal pudding designed for the
avowed purpose of mitigating the appetite before the introduction of
the roast, which was carved upon the table by the host, and served with
Madeira, port, or sherry.
One of Harrison Gray Otis's favorite after-dinner stories, which he
told in his own matchless way, was of the first appearance of champagne
in Boston. It was introduced by the French consul, the unsophisticated
Bostonians partaking of the palatable beverage with all the confidence
which they were wont to bestow upon cider, of which they thought it to
be only a mild form and of foreign extraction.
From eight until twelve were the hours for balls, at which girls
out for the first time wore white book-muslin frocks, the belles of
a season or more appearing in tarleton, and dancing out a pair of
slippers in an evening, slippers then being made with paper soles and
no heels. Light refreshments, such as nuts, raisins, or oysters, were
served at these evening affairs, and were passed on trays, there being
no elaborately set supper-tables.
The five-o'clock tea, now so prevalent throughout the country, made its
way first into Boston and New York, where it appeared in all its native
English simplicity.
From England also came actors bringing us our first conception of
Shakespearean characters, Cooper interpreting Hamlet to a Boston
audience in 1807, the year Emily Marshall was born, followed by
Wallack, Edmund Kean, Charles Matthews, the comedian, and Phillips,
with his infectious songs, the echoes of such refrains as "Though love
is warm awhile" floating long after from drawing-room, nursery, and
kitchen.
From the mother-country came our literature of the early century,
Scott, the new writer, being much read, also Fanny Burney, Jane Austen,
Maria Edgeworth, and Shakespeare always.
Boston early achieved her reputation as a patroness of letters. At her
noted seat of learning not only the youth of America, but a number of
foreigners were even then educated. Many an American boy who claimed
Harvard as his Alma Mater had journeyed to her sacred precincts, when
the country was in its teens, all the way from the wilds of Kentucky on
horseback.
Commencement day was a State holiday, when the flower of Massachusetts
womanhood united to do honor to the occasion. Many a man went thence
on his way with a face enshrined in his memory that he had not found
in his Virgil or his Homer, though nothing more perfect graced those
classic pages than the face of Emily Marshall.
Though Willis's sonnet speaks of her eyes as hazel, they have been
described elsewhere as black. It is probable that their color varied
and intensified with every thought or emotion. Her hair was of that
golden brown that flashes like bronze in the sunlight. In height she
was five feet and five inches. "Her personal grace," said one of her
admirers, a judge of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, "was not
acquired; a creature of such absolute natural perfection was physically
unable to make an ungraceful movement."
One who knew her in daily life writes: "The unspeakable grace, the
light of the eye, the expression of the face, they come back to me as I
think of her, but I cannot convey them to others. It was the light in a
porcelain vase. You could draw the outlines of the vase, but when the
light was quenched it could be known no more."
Enshrined in this form of almost unearthly loveliness was a spirit of
even rarer beauty, a character that would have made even an ugly woman
a force. In every relationship she wielded an exquisite influence. With
a nature profoundly and silently religious were combined a high sense
of duty, a ready sympathy, an absolute frankness and simplicity, a
clear, practical judgment, and a rapid insight into character.
In conversation she drew out the best thoughts of others intuitively
and without vanity, reserving her own brilliant intellect and ready wit
for those who really enjoyed it.
To her children, her self-abnegation, her gentleness, her faultless
judgment, the intense womanliness of her nature, made her an ideal
mother. She was as tenderly loved by women as she was chivalrously
worshipped by man. Her twenty-nine years of life were all too short for
those who prized and lost her.
"Say that no envious thought could have been possible in her presence,"
is another woman's tribute to her; "that her sunny ways were
fascinating to all alike; that she was as kind and attentive to the
stupid and tedious as if they were talented and of social prominence."
Of the effect everywhere produced by so exquisite a personality there
are countless evidences. It was not restricted to any age, sex, or
social class. Mr. William Amory claims to have been in his youth the
most distinguished man in Boston, because he was not in love with Emily
Marshall.
A carpenter, whose shop was near the house in which she lived after her
marriage, failed to go home to his dinner one day, and being asked the
reason, replied that he had seen Mrs. Otis go out earlier in the day
and he hoped that she might come back that way, adding that he would
rather see her any day than eat his dinner.
Franklin Place became the favorite walk with the young men of Boston,
many of whom never failed once or twice daily to pass her house, with
the hope of catching a glimpse of her at one of its windows. Dr.
Malcolm's church, of which she was a member, also added many devotees
to its congregation, William Lloyd Garrison being among the number, who
confessed that he occasionally went there with the hope of seeing the
lovely face of Emily Marshall.
Nor was the repute of her beauty confined to her native city. Wherever
she went her unusual presence was instantly felt; she needed no society
correspondent to herald her, no princely admirer to create prestige for
her. Her claim to the world's homage was self-evident. She was a queen
in her own right.
When she visited Philadelphia, so great was the desire to see her that
the young girls were let out of school before the usual closing hour,
that they might have an opportunity to see her as she passed along the
street.
While she was at Saratoga, "gay, amusing, and confusing," reached
in those days from Boston by a tedious stage-coach ride across the
country, she never left the hotel nor returned to it without attracting
a throng of people, eager even for a passing glimpse of her.
Nathaniel Parker Willis, who once had made a journey in the same
coach in which Emily Marshall and her mother were travelling, related
afterwards that wherever the coach stopped for dinner the news of the
marvellous beauty of one of the passengers was spread abroad so rapidly
that by the time Miss Marshall returned to her seat in the coach a
great crowd of people would be assembled to see her.
The following is Willis's very pretty acrostic on Emily Marshall, which
is included in his published verses in the form of a sonnet:
"Elegance floats about thee like a dress,
Melting the airy motion of thy form
Into one swaying grace, and loveliness,
Like a rich tint that makes a picture warm,
Is lurking in the chestnut of thy tress,
Enriching it as moonlight after storm
Mingles dark shadows into gentleness.
A beauty that bewilders like a spell
Reigns in thine eyes' dear hazel, and thy brow,
So pure in veined transparency, doth tell
How spiritually beautiful art thou,--
A temple where angelic love might dwell,
Life in thy presence were a thing to keep,
Like a gay dreamer clinging to his sleep."
Percival's sonnet, published in the _Literary Gazette_ of Philadelphia,
August, 1825, is perhaps the best known of the poetical outpourings
which her loveliness inspired. It also is an acrostic.
"Earth holds no fairer, lovelier than thou,
Maid of the laughing lip and frolic eye;
Innocence sits upon thy open brow
Like a pure spirit in its native sky.
If ever beauty stole the heart away,
Enchantress, it would fly to meet thy smile;
Moments would seem by thee a summer's day
And all around thee an Elysian isle.
Roses are nothing to thy maiden blush
Sent o'er thy cheek's soft ivory; and night
Has naught so dazzling in its world of light
As the dark rays that from thy lashes gush.
Love lurks among thy silken curls and lies,
Like a keen archer, in thy kindling eyes."
William Foster Otis, to whom she was married in May, 1831, first saw
her when she was fourteen years old, on her way home from school. He
loved her from the moment his eyes fell upon her, and honored her with
the loyalty of a lifetime, though death robbed him of her five years
after their marriage.
Of the wedding there is extant a very good description in the form of a
letter written by the bridegroom's sister, under date of May 20, 1831.
"There were fifty guests at the wedding, an enormous crowd at the
visit [reception] which kept us until half-past ten from supper.
The bride looked very lovely, and was modest and unaffected. Her
dress was a white crêpe lisse, with a rich vine of silver embroidery
at the top of the deep hem. The neck and sleeves were trimmed with
three rows of elegant blond lace very wide. Gloves embroidered with
silver, stockings ditto. Her dark-brown hair dressed plain in front,
high bows with a few orange-blossoms and a rich blond lace scarf,
tastefully arranged on her head, one end hanging front over her left
shoulder, the other hanging behind over her right. No ornaments of
any kind, either on her neck or ears, not even a buckle. I never saw
her look so beautiful. Every one was remarking on her beauty as they
passed in and out of the room. Mrs. Marshall [the bride's mother]
looked extremely handsome. William [the bridegroom] looked quite as
handsome as the bride, and seemed highly delighted. The bride and
groom went to their house alone [70 Beacon Street] about one o'clock
[in the morning]. The groomsmen serenaded them until the birds sang
as loud as their instruments."
James Freeman Clarke, who was present at her wedding, said afterwards
that he "had often been perplexed at the accounts he had read of
the great personal power of Mary Queen of Scots. He had never been
able to comprehend how the mere beauty of a woman could so control
the destinies of individuals and nations, causing men gladly to
accept death as the price of a glance of the eyes or a touch of the
hand." After he had beheld Emily Marshall, however, he realized the
possibilities of such a power that is not created once in a century.
She died in 1826, leaving two daughters and an infant son.
"She had no autumn, not a storm
Darkened her youthful happiness;
No winter came to bend that form,
Or silver o'er a silken tress.
"We miss her when we gaze on beauty's throng,
We miss her, aye, and we shall mourn her long.
Yet mourn her not, she had the best of life;
A tender mother and a happy wife."
The above lines were written by her friend Fanny Inglis, afterwards
Madame Calderon de la Barca.
The chivalrous devotion which her daughters call forth, after more than
threescore years, from the men who knew her is in itself sufficient to
place her among the classics of American womanhood.
OCTAVIA WALTON
(MADAME LE VERT)
Into a world in which so many are born strangers, some later to know it
in part and others destined to remain forever out of touch with life,
and lonely spectators rather than a part of it, Octavia Walton came as
unto her own. Every atom of her being was in absolute accord with the
universe. No bristling antipathies hedged in her genial personality nor
raised barriers between herself and the beauties of life. She perceived
them always and with an enthusiasm that raised not only her own
existence, but that of many others, above the level of the commonplace.
She was a sort of social sun, radiating light, warmth, and beauty upon
all the lives that touched hers, and it has been said that no one
ever came in contact with her, of no matter what rank or condition in
life, without experiencing a sense of elation. She was one of nature's
cosmopolites, a woman to whom the whole world was home and the people
of all nations her friends. Far more to this gift of temperament than
to those of her personal beauty or intellect, does she owe the eminence
of her position among the American women of her century.
She was born early enough in the history of the Republic to partake
in a measure of the glow of patriotic enthusiasm that had been the
inspiration of its founders. Though she was intensely American, she
grew up with no touch of bitterness for the mother-country, cherishing
the memory of Chatham's words uttered in the House of Lords, "You
cannot conquer America," rather than his sovereign's misguided efforts
"to be a king."
Her grandfather, George Walton, who died two years before her birth,
was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. He was a
native of Prince Edward County, Virginia, but removed, prior to the
Revolution, to Georgia, whence he was sent as a delegate to the first
Congress. He had married, in the State of his adoption, Miss Camber,
the daughter of an English nobleman and the heiress to large tracts
of land that were grants from the crown. To this grandmother Octavia
Walton was indebted for many graphic stories of the thrilling days
through which her country had passed in establishing itself as an
independent nation. She was in Philadelphia with her husband, who was
in attendance upon the Congress there, when the news of the fall of
Yorktown was received. The town was quietly sleeping when the watchman
calling the hours announced, as usual, "Past midnight, and all's well!"
then, after an instant's pause and in a voice that resounded through
the streets, "And Cornwallis is taken!" It sent a thrill through the
town, and turned that October night into day, for presently the streets
were swarming with people wild with joyous excitement.
When Madame Le Vert related to Lamartine, with whom she passed
an evening during one of her visits to Paris, in speaking of the
Declaration of Independence, that her grandfather's name was thereon
inscribed, and that he had given his blood and his fortune to the cause
of America's freedom, the Frenchman arose and bowed to her profoundly.
"Madame," he said, "in his name you have a noble heritage. It is the
true patent of nobility, and you rightly cherish your descent from such
a brave and heroic patriot with honest pride."
The State of Georgia gave George Walton high honors, making him
governor and, later, judge of the Supreme Court, and erecting a
monument to commemorate his sterling qualities in one of the principal
thoroughfares of the city of Augusta. His son and namesake married
the accomplished and beautiful Miss Sally Walker, the daughter of
a distinguished jurist of Georgia. Of the two children of their
marriage,--a son and a daughter,--the latter was born at Bellevue, near
Augusta, in the year 1810. She was named by her mother after the Roman
Octavia, the beloved and noble sister of Augustus and the deserted wife
of Marc Anthony, and was taught to revere the beauty of a character
that possessed, as Pope Pius IX. said, when Madame Le Vert told him for
whom she was named, "every virtue and grace that should adorn a woman."
[Illustration: OCTAVIA WALTON
(MADAME LE VERT)]
Her early education was directed entirely by her mother and
grandmother. An old Scotch tutor later assumed charge of the studies
of Octavia and her brother, instructing them together in the
sciences and languages. The facility with which Octavia mastered the
latter was an evidence of the remarkable elasticity and adaptability
of her nature. She acquired readily not only the language, but all the
gestures and mannerisms of a foreign people. To her father this branch
of her education was a matter of much interest. In the year 1821, when
she was eleven years old, he became Secretary of State for Florida
under Andrew Jackson, who was governor of the Territory. There often
came to him in connection with the affairs of his office, letters and
despatches in French and Spanish, of both of which languages she had so
accurate a knowledge that he could entirely rely upon her translations
of them. During a court ball at which she was present while in England,
some years after her marriage, she delighted the ambassadors from
France, Spain, and Italy by talking with each in his own tongue. She
pleased the Holy Father no less upon the occasion of her audience with
him, when, after he had spoken with her in both French and Spanish,
thinking it might be less of an effort for him, she asked him to speak
in his own tongue. During her residence in Florida, where her father
succeeded General Jackson in the governorship, she also acquired a
goodly store of Indian legends, which became later the delight of many
an audience. She related on shipboard one night the story of Alabama
having received the name from a tribe of Indians who were driven by a
fierce northern foe to the forests of the southeast, and, coming upon a
beautiful river, the chief struck his tent-pole, exclaiming "Alabama!
Alabama!" meaning, "Here we rest." She was greeted, upon going on deck
the following day, with an outspread buffalo-robe, which a Chicagoan
was taking to England as a gift for the Queen, and requested to make it
her "Alabama" during the remainder of the voyage.
When her father selected a permanent seat of government for Florida, he
permitted her to give it a name, and she called it Tallahassee,--the
Indian word for "beautiful land,"--as a courtesy to the Seminole chief
who had first pitched his tent on the spot. She had much sympathy and
affection for the Indians, often pleading their cause against some act
of aggression or injustice, and they had a tender reverence for her,
calling her frequently "the white dove of peace."
One of the memorable events of her young life was the visit of
Lafayette to America. It enters into the record of many lives that
covered that period, some of which were far spent and some so
tenderly youthful that the little marquis saluted them only by proxy,
delegating somebody else "to kiss the babies" while he shook countless
outstretched hands, for he was as complaisant as he was artistic.
He wrote to the widow of his old friend, General George Walton,
expressing a wish to see her during his stay in Mobile. Her health
was not sufficiently robust, however, to admit of her undertaking a
journey with the few comforts that were then possible. She sent her
daughter-in-law and her granddaughter to represent her, intrusting to
Octavia a miniature of her husband, the better to recall his features
to Lafayette's memory and to enable him to realize how strong was the
resemblance the little girl bore to her illustrious grandfather. She
talked to him in French, so that the interview was to Lafayette a time
of delightful relaxation, and it was with genuine reluctance that he
saw it draw to a close. To Octavia it was the first in a long series of
interesting memories associated with Mobile, whither her family removed
from Florida in the year 1835. In the latter State, however, she spent
the happy period of her young womanhood; hence Lady Emmeline Stuart
Wortley, in some lines addressed to her at a later period, calls her
"Sweet Rose of Florida."
Pensacola was the naval station of the gulf coast, and the constant
coming and going of men-of-war, with the attendant festivities of balls
of welcome and farewell banquets, were a distinctive feature in the
social life of that portion of the Territory.
Octavia Walton, the governor's daughter, cultivated intellectually
to a degree that made her the appreciative listener and intelligent
talker among men of science and of letters, and with a personal beauty
that made her the admiration of every one, occupied from her earliest
girlhood a position of unusual prominence.
Long runs with her brother in the invigorating air of the coast had
given to her supple figure, with its graceful curves, that erect
carriage which she always retained. Her head was well poised, and her
soft brown hair parted simply above a broad brow of unusual whiteness
and transparency. In her blue eyes there lurked a suggestion of
the cool and quiet depth of a forest, while her mouth, that feature
which, says Oliver Wendell Holmes, we all make for ourselves, denoted
the sweetness of her character. These were the visible forms of the
loveliness of the young Octavia Walton, whom Frederika Bremer, the
Swedish novelist, called "the magnolia flower of the South."
In 1835, the year her family moved to Mobile, accompanied by her
mother and brother, she made a tour of the United States, visiting
during the summer the famous resort of the North, Saratoga Springs,
and going to Washington after the assembling of Congress in December.
She attained a fame during that year that made her the inspiration of
poets noted for the beauty of their lyric verse, and the subject of
several analytical writings. She formed during the same period the
friendship of two of the most eminent men of that time, Washington
Irving and Henry Clay. She met Irving in travelling, and discovered
his identity in a singular way. It was three years after his return
from Spain, where he had represented his country with so much dignity
and ability that his welcome home had been much in the nature of an
ovation. The stage-coach, in which so many pleasant acquaintances were
made, was yet the usual means of transportation, though the duration
of journeys had been greatly lessened by the successful introduction
of the steamboat, in which enterprise Fulton already had competitors,
one young Vanderbilt running a rival line on the Sound between New York
and Providence. Irving, who had been on the dock when Fulton made
the first experiment with his steamer, used to relate with exquisite
humor how the breathless silence of the crowd of curious spectators
who watched her puff off into the stream was broken by the voice of
an incredulous man saying, "She may go well enough for a time, but
give me a good sloop." Being singularly shy, he usually talked but
little among strangers. Divining in the young girl, who sat opposite
him in the stage-coach for several days during the summer of 1835,
those same qualities--"the sound and pure intellect and the heart
full of affection"--that so endeared her to Miss Bremer, he dropped
frequently into the current of bright talk she kept up with her mother
and brother. They speculated frequently upon his identity, for his
appearance was unusual, his manner courtly, and his language that of a
most cultivated man. While she was talking with her brother in Spanish
one day, he joined in their conversation and related some incident in
connection with a bull-fight he had seen when in Spain. Octavia had
already heard the identical story from another source, and, connecting
the two narrations, she exclaimed, quickly, and quite unconsciously
betraying the fact that his identity had been a matter of curiosity
to her, "I know who you are! You are Washington Irving. Mr. Slidell,
who related that story to me, told me that Washington Irving was
standing beside him when it happened." Thus began a friendship that
had an extensive influence upon her life. Realizing how keen were her
powers of observation, and how unusual her command of language, he
advised her to keep a journal, which was her first effort at writing,
at which she attained later a leading position among women of letters
at the South. He corresponded with her till the end of his life, and
aided her with many suggestions gathered from his own experience in
a long literary career. She in return shed many a ray of brightness
over an existence that, with all its fame and success, was not without
its lonely hours. The last time they met he reluctantly watched her
departure from Sunnyside. "I feel, my child," he said, "that you are
taking all the sunshine away with you."
Henry Clay looked upon her with the same tender pride that
characterized Irving's attitude towards her. The beauty of her feet
being at one time a subject of comment in his presence, he said that,
while he was not prepared to pass judgment upon them, he was proud to
be able to bear testimony to a beauty of tongue that he considered
without parallel. Like Irving's, his friendship for her knew no change
during the remainder of his lifetime. When the corner-stone of the
monument erected to his memory in New Orleans was laid, she delivered
an address that was well worthy of the eloquence of the man it
eulogized.
In 1836 Octavia Walton was married, in the city of Mobile, to Dr.
Henry S. Le Vert, a son of Dr. Claud Le Vert, who, coming to America
as surgeon of the fleet under Rochambeau, had remained there after
the termination of hostilities, settling in Virginia, and marrying a
niece of Admiral Vernon. As Madame Le Vert, Octavia Walton attained
that same social sovereignty that was achieved a few years later by
Mrs. Rush, of Philadelphia, and at a still more recent period by Mrs.
Astor, of New York. The same sort of instinctive tribute was everywhere
accorded each of these women, raising her to an eminence in which
she was sustained by the unusual order of the gifts with which she
was endowed. In Mobile, so absolute was the leadership of Madame Le
Vert that she was frequently designated simply as "Madame," it being
everywhere understood that the title without the accompaniment of any
name applied only to her.
Her home on Government Street was the most noted of the city. There
she entertained at various times not only the most distinguished of
the people of her own country, but many eminent foreigners, Kossuth,
among others, and Frederika Bremer. Lady Emmeline Stuart Wortley, the
daughter of the Duke of Rutland, having been her guest for several
weeks, gave her later that introduction that made possible the
establishment of her social fame in England.
Joseph Jefferson, growing up in the profession in which he now stands
in the foremost rank, and in whom she early recognized the divine spark
of genius, had frequent proofs of the kindliness of her hospitality.
Her library was the feature of her home in which she always evinced the
most interest. She never abandoned those habits of study which kept
her in touch with the progressive minds of the world. Beauty alone
is not sufficient to give a woman the place Madame Le Vert filled.
It attracts, but there must be behind it the sustaining force of an
intelligence radiating sympathy, of a mentality developed and adorned
with those graces that enable it to enter into and illuminate the
lives that approach it. She continued to read in the foreign languages
she had mastered in her early girlhood, painstakingly teaching them
to her children, whom, in their infancy, she often sung to sleep with
the love ditties of Italy. To her husband she was a continual source
of revelation and pride. Precise, practical, profoundly interested
in his profession, he felt little interest in the purely fashionable
element of the life that revolved about her. In her relationship to
it, however, her power to attract and hold such a diversity of tastes
and temperaments he found an interesting study. At her levees and
receptions it was his delight to take up his position where he could
watch her, and, if possible, where he could occasionally catch the
sparkle of her words.
To a nature keenly alive to every impression, the loss of her only
brother, to whom she was attached by ties of an extraordinary sympathy,
brought a grief that for a long time overshadowed her happy spirit. A
few years after this loss,--in June, 1853,--accompanied by her father
and the elder of her daughters, she made her first visit to the Old
World, whose treasures and resources her classical education had so
ably fitted her to enjoy. Her journal and letters written during this
period and a subsequent trip ring with the enthusiasm of a girl. They
formed the basis of her first published work, which met with much
success, for in those days the theme was fresher, and she handled it
with a sprightliness that gave individuality and interest to every
page. Very graphically she relates how the first ardor with which she
embarked upon the new and delightful experience of a transatlantic
voyage was quenched by that unromantic malady, sea-sickness. With the
memory of the torture fresh upon her, she wrote that Solomon, when
he ejaculated, "O that mine enemy would write a book!" probably knew
nothing of the agonies of sea-sickness, or he would rather have invoked
that malady upon him.
The London season was at its height when she arrived there. Well
introduced, she created so favorable an impression upon a society
where the success of an American depends largely if not entirely upon
personal merit as evinced by his or her good breeding, intelligence,
and powers to entertain, that she experienced all the delights of a
hospitality which to the uninitiated is cold and exclusive. She was
presented to the Queen at a court ball, to which she received the
unusual honor of an invitation without a previous presentation to Her
Majesty. With genuine regret she saw the days allotted to her stay
in England draw to a close. Everywhere, however, she found and made
friends, many strangers recognizing in her, in all its strength and
purity, that sympathy which makes the world akin, and involuntarily
opening their hearts to her. She was intensely interested in every
one and everything, so that her life never contracted. Her early
memories were associated with the Spanish, and she never outgrew
her appreciation for the grace of their civilization. Her ability to
speak the language added much to the pleasure and profit of her visit
to Spain, and her journal recounting her stage-coach experiences
contains frequent allusions to the unfailing courtesy of the people
of that country. In Italy her knowledge of the language of the land
again made her the spokesman of her little party, and with beneficial
results. In Florence she had the pleasure of meeting the Brownings,
and the interest they inspired in her seems to have been mutual. Mrs.
Browning, whose health did not permit her to go out in the night air,
broke the rule it had entailed upon her and went to a party given in
honor of Madame Le Vert on the eve of her departure, that she might
once more have the pleasure of seeing and talking with her. During one
of her visits to Rome she had one of those peculiar experiences that
evinced the friendliness she everywhere inspired. She had gone with her
daughter to St. Peter's to attend the ceremony known as the Apostle's
banquet. At the termination of the exercises there began an awful
struggle for liberty in the packed aisles of the great church. Madame
Le Vert was well-nigh overpowered, when suddenly she felt herself
lifted from her feet, raised high in the air, and safely ensconced on
a window-ledge, while a reassuring voice whispered, in French, "There,
little woman, don't be afraid; you'll be safe there." Her rescuer was
a powerful Russian woman, who, when she had placed Miss Le Vert beside
her mother, said, simply, "Do not forget me when you think of the
Apostle's banquet," and moved away with the surging crowd.
In all her journeys, both in her own country and in Europe, she was
accompanied by her colored maid Betsey. "North, South, East, and
West," wrote one of her friends, "goes Betsey with her mistress
through bristling ranks of abolitionists, up the Rhine, over the Alps,
everywhere goes Betsey."
"If you would see the ideal relationship between a lady and her female
slave," said Frederika Bremer, "you should see Octavia Le Vert and her
clever, handsome, mulatto attendant, Betsey. Betsey seems really not to
live for anything else than for her mistress Octavia."
At the Austrian border they were put through a series of questions,
all of their responses "being recorded," said Madame Le Vert, "for
the benefit of posterity." Betsey was put down as a Moor, much to her
dismay, and she besought her mistress to assure them that she "had
nothing but pure American blood in her veins, and was a slave from the
South."
During her second visit to Europe, in 1855, Madame Le Vert spent the
summer in Paris, the governor of Alabama having named her Commissioner
from that State to the Paris Exposition of that year. His gallantry was
a frequent subject of comment and appreciation, for she was the only
woman among the commissioners. The position, however, seems to have
been purely honorary, for she lamented that when asked to point out
the products of Alabama in her department, she could only indicate her
daughter. "If there had been even only a few cotton-seed," she said,
"it would at least have served to swear by."
She witnessed the enthusiastic reception tendered by the French nation
to the Queen of England, was present at the ball given by the Emperor
in her honor, and was at the opera the night the royal party visited
it, when the whole audience rose _en masse_ at the first note of
England's national anthem, sung by Roger, Alboni, and Cruvelli. She
heard with a thrill of enthusiasm the "Vive la Reine Victoria" that
burst from a thousand lips, and saw the Emperor lead the gracious queen
three times to the front of the box to acknowledge the tumultuous
tribute. In her own box sat, on that memorable night, an ex-President
of the great republic across the water,--Millard Fillmore.
A visit made during her stay in Ferrara, Italy, to the home of the poet
Ariosto so impressed Madame Le Vert that it was productive of a notable
result after her return to America. His house had been purchased by the
government, and everything in it was preserved in the order in which he
had left it at the time of his death. Realizing that it was regarded
as a shrine, and devoutly visited by those who would honor the memory
of the immortal poet, her thoughts reverted to the home of the great
American general, Mount Vernon, then falling into decay, whereas it
might be similarly preserved by the patriotism of the people. She took
up the question earnestly after her return to America, and did for the
cause at the South as much as Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis did for it at
the North. In one day she received at her home in Mobile, in small
contributions, upward of a thousand dollars.
Many of Madame Le Vert's most charming letters were written to her
mother. After a long day of travel or sight-seeing she frequently sat
up far into the night that she might not neglect the pleasant duty of
writing these letters.
Her parents' home in Mobile, of which city her father was for a time
mayor, was near her own, and she continued to be much with them until
their lives closed, which they did in close succession, shortly before
the outbreak of the war. Her husband's death occurred during the last
year of that melancholy period which shook the homes of the South to
their foundation. She went North and remained for over a year after the
close of the war, accompanied by her two daughters. She returned to
the South for a time, but eventually removed to New York, disposing of
her home and many of her possessions, the losses she had sustained and
the altered conditions of her life rendering Mobile no longer to her a
place of happy existence.
Having been so long a leader, she continued to exercise various queenly
prerogatives, which to many people at the North seemed eccentric. She
had not the prestige there that would have made them possible, though
she was never without her coterie of admirers.
Her later years were not affluent, and she was obliged to put her
talents to bread-winning purposes. She died in the city in which she
had been born, Augusta, Georgia, on the 13th of March, 1877.
FANNY TAYLOR
(MRS. THOMAS HARDING ELLIS)
The loveliness of Virginia women has been a theme of song and verse.
Among the Richmond belles of sixty years ago none were more justly
celebrated than that trio known as the Richmond Graces, Sally
Chevalier, Fanny Taylor, and Sally Watson. Close companions from early
childhood, their unusual beauty as they grew to womanhood brought
them fame individually and collectively. Sally Chevalier became the
wife of Abram Warwick, Sally Watson, of Alexander Rives, and Fanny
Taylor, of whom this sketch is designed to treat at greater length,
was twice married. She was educated at the excellent school of Miss
Jane Mackenzie, in Richmond, at a time when a young lady's education
embraced a rather superficial dip into the languages, a good deal of
poetry, some history, a neat Italian handwriting, and a care of their
peach-blossom complexions and slender hands. Frivolous as it sounds
compared with the curriculum of girls' schools in good standing at this
end of the century, the history of the South furnishes many evidences
of the profundity as well as the brilliancy of its women.
[Illustration: FANNY TAYLOR
(MRS. THOMAS HARDING ELLIS)
From portrait by Thomas Sully]
With her friends, Sally Chevalier and Sally Watson, Fanny Taylor was
a pupil in the dancing academies of Mr. Xaupi and Mr. Boisseau. They
excelled in the grace and beauty of their dancing, and at the Assembly
balls it was their custom to occupy places in the same cotillon. They
enjoyed the delicate celebrity of having pieces of dancing-music named
after them, and when "Sally Chevalier," "Fanny Taylor," or "Sally
Watson," was called for, Judah, Ruffin, and Lomax, those dusky magnates
of the ball-room, brought forth the melody with an air that was their
own peculiar tribute to the fair young queens.
About the time she reached maturity, Fanny Taylor removed with her
mother from Richmond to "Glenarron," the superb James River estate of
her brother-in-law, Mr. William Galt. Shortly afterwards she returned
to Richmond, where she spent a winter as the guest of her friends, Mr.
and Mrs. Warwick. She became noted as the most beautiful woman in the
Old Dominion. In a word, she was the belle of Richmond, which boasted
the most delightful society in the South, and she would not have
exchanged places with a princess of the royal house of England.
Richmond of those days was too small for social divisions and
subdivisions. There was but one set, and every one who went
into society at all belonged to it. It was well established and
conservative. Its traditions were ancient, and it tolerated no
innovations. It had its calling hours from twelve till four, when
its drawing-rooms were crowded with young men from the neighboring
plantations, professional men, and legislators, on whose ears the tones
of the Capitol bell announcing the opening of the session were wont to
fall in vain. There were dancing-parties for young people, beginning
at seven or eight in the evening, and dinner-parties for distinguished
guests at four o'clock in the afternoon.
The graceful art of carving formed an indispensable part of a
gentleman's education, and a host gave tangible proof of his
hospitality when from his end of the table he served his guests with
his own hand, selecting the choice parts of a joint or fowl for the
guest of honor.
The ladies retired at the conclusion of dinner, leaving the gentlemen
in possession of the table, being a custom of their English forefathers
which their colonial antecedents had adhered to probably in the
log-cabin days when there was a state occasion.
There were no teas and no _débuts_. Girls never came out, because, as
Thomas Nelson Page has said, "they had never been in." As soon as they
were old enough to be out of the nursery they drifted naturally into
the drawing-room, and there grew up in that social sphere which many of
them were destined later to sway as queens.
Within a year after her reign in Richmond society Fanny Taylor became
the wife of Archibald Morgan Harrison, of Fluvanna County, a most
distinguished agriculturist, at a time when it was worth being a
Virginia farmer and a country gentleman. They lived at "Carysbrook,"
Mr. Harrison's estate on the Rivanna River, in the royal style
easily possible to the South in her days of prosperity. She was a
great-granddaughter of Benjamin Harrison, a signer of the Declaration
of Independence, and her husband was a great-grandson of Benjamin
Harrison, the father of Benjamin the signer. Their life of pastoral
beauty closed with Mr. Harrison's death. His widow was at the height of
her loveliness, and when she went once more into the world she evoked
the most unstinted and genuine admiration. Mrs. Nellie Custis Lewis,
who was expending on her motherless grandchildren all the solicitude
that her grandmother, Martha Washington, had lavished upon her when
she was similarly bereaved, expressed the desire that her son-in-law
should woo Mrs. Harrison. So truly did she admire the qualities of
her character, as well as her great personal beauty, that she was the
only woman she had ever seen, she said, whom she would welcome as her
daughter's successor, and willingly see placed over her grandchildren.
She never had an opportunity to extend that magnanimous, however
cordial, greeting, for the youthful Mrs. Harrison, after six years of
widowhood, bestowed her hand upon Colonel Thomas Harding Ellis, of
Richmond. He had been secretary of the American legation at Mexico, and
was subsequently for nearly fourteen years president of the James River
and Kanawha Canal Company, his administration covering the period of
the war, when the canal was the most important line of improvement in
the State for supplying with agricultural produce the city of Richmond
and the army of Northern Virginia.
They visited Washington shortly after their marriage, where they were
guests of Mr. John Y. Mason. Mr. Mason presented them to President and
Mrs. Polk, whose courtesies to them added much to the pleasure of the
Washington chapter of their honeymoon days.
Mrs. Ellis's mother had stood at the bedside of her uncle William
Henry Harrison when, in the presence of his cabinet, he uttered those
memorable last words, "I desire the principles of the Constitution to
be maintained."
The union of Colonel and Mrs. Ellis terminated with the death of Mrs.
Ellis in July, 1897, followed, in a few months, by that of her husband.
For nearly fifty years had they traversed life's highlands and lowlands
together, closest companions, tenderest of lovers, she possessing all
the strength not incompatible with the finest and gentlest traits of
female character, and retaining to the last all the delicacy of her
wonderful beauty, and he the embodiment of chivalry, the highest type
of a Virginia gentleman of the old _régime_.
[Illustration: Sally Chevalier
(Mrs. Abram Warwick)
By Thomas Sully]
JESSIE BENTON
(MRS. JOHN C. FRÉMONT)
In the year 1868 the city of St. Louis erected a monument to the memory
of one of her most distinguished citizens, Thomas Hart Benton. Of the
forty thousand people who thronged the park on that May afternoon
set aside for its unveiling, but one was of the great man's blood,
the daughter most closely associated with the accomplishment of his
loftiest conception, that dream of Western empire for his country.
Accompanied by her husband, General John C. Frémont, she had accepted
the invitation to unveil the statue. As she pulled the cord that
loosened its wrappings, and the school children of the city threw their
offerings of roses at the feet of him who had befriended their fathers,
the huzzas of the vast multitude filled the fragrant air. The outgoing
train to San Francisco halted to salute with flags and whistles as the
bronze hand, pointing to the west, came into view, and the words graven
on the pedestal: "There is the East. There lies the road to India." To
General Frémont, quietly and reverently occupying a place of honor on
the platform, it was one of those supreme moments when the landmarks
of memory, those events that give color to our lives, stand forth to
the exclusion even of that which is at the moment passing before the
eye. Neither the vivas of the people nor the flowers of their children
thrilled him as did the salute of that outbound train, that thing of
strength and power and speed, bearing its message of progress and
civilization.
He knew every mile of its route. He, the pathfinder, by his indomitable
energy had traversed the virgin snows of its mountain ways, had
penetrated the mysteries of its wild valleys, and by his valor had
given to his country its golden terminus. And there, between the effigy
of the one in the radiance of the spring sunshine and the living man,
stood the woman still radiant with that high type of beauty that
emanates from the soul, the link, she has said of herself, between
the conception and the execution of the great scheme of Western
aggrandizement. Cradled among great ideas, she had grown up to be an
inspiration to the man with the prowess and daring necessary to give
them life and form. Some men, such as Abraham Lincoln, have been great
in spite of their wives, while to others, as to Frémont, through their
wives have come not only the opportunity for greatness, but with them
that identity of purpose that in itself is a fortification against all
adverse circumstances.
The story of Jessie Benton Frémont's life is closely allied with that
of the acquisition and development of the vast territory west of St.
Louis, which even in her young womanhood was the outpost of habitation.
Beyond its confines stretched that wonderland of her childhood, whence
came the trappers and hunters with their wild tales of adventure, and
whither she was destined to follow one day the princely pied piper of
her girlhood. The seed of the thought which bore its first fruit when
Frémont raised our flag on Wind River Mountain, thirteen thousand feet
above the Gulf of Mexico, was sown in the mind of her father when,
in 1812, he followed Andrew Jackson from Nashville to New Orleans
to defend the Mississippi. In the stirring life on its broad bosom,
together with a first realization of the extent of our domain, he
recognized the possibilities of our future expansion and greatness.
He had already been admitted to the bar of Tennessee and was a member
of the Legislature of that State. With the idea, however, that the
government of the United States should extend its protecting arm over
the great western wilderness, in which it evinced no interest and
whence it anticipated no benefit, he moved, in his thirtieth year, to
its border-land.
Its people recognized his friendly attitude, and when Missouri rose
to the dignity of a representation on the floor of the United States
Senate, Benton was the first man to whom she delegated that honor.
There, for over thirty years, with a limited following, he fought
aggressively foot by foot for the development of the West. He often
wearied his hearers, who had but little sympathy with projects that to
the remote Eastern mind seemed preposterous. It was not infrequently a
signal, when Benton mounted his hobby, for his fellow-Senators to take
up their letter-writing and for the galleries to be deserted. It made
little difference to them if England's hand were outstretched and her
fingers daily tightening their clutch upon our northwestern territory.
The mouth of the Columbia River was about of as much consequence to the
welfare of the United States, in the estimation of the people on the
Atlantic seaboard, as are the canals on the planet Mars.
Commercial relations with Asia and ports on the Pacific, however
Utopian they may have seemed to others with less of a grasp on the
world's history than his scholarly mind possessed, were to Benton
vital questions, for which he fought with that vigor of utterance that
provoked John Randolph into saying that his family motto, "Factus non
verbis," should be "Factus et verbis."
He was a powerful man, with a forcible way of speaking, which he
retained to the end of his life. When he was stumping his State in
the summer of 1856, being already in his seventieth year, he was
cautiously viewed one morning through the crack of an open door by
two anti-Bentonites. He was standing at the moment and speaking in a
vigorous way that appalled his surreptitious visitors. "Good God,"
ejaculated one, "we shall have to fight him these twenty years!"
He was a striking figure, with heavy black hair and side whiskers,
and during all the years that he was in the Senate, like some of his
illustrious successors, he never changed the style of his dress. His
vehemence was expended in public. In his family life he was as gentle
as he was devoted.
Jessie, the second of his four daughters, and the subject of this
sketch, was born at the home of her maternal grandfather, Colonel
James McDowell, near Lexington, Virginia. She grew up partly in the
picturesque atmosphere of St. Louis, then almost wholly a French
settlement, and partly in Washington, where Benton's home was
considered one of the most interesting in the city, owing to the
cultivated wife and daughters who gave it character and individuality.
Intermingled with her school-days she had her little day of belleship,
during which the two most notable events were a dinner at the White
House, given by President Van Buren for his young son, and the wedding
of Baron Bodisco, the Russian minister, at which she appeared as first
bridesmaid. The bride, Miss Williams, was one of her school-mates, and
a girl of sixteen, while the bridegroom was over sixty. The details
of the ceremony, however, were all harmoniously arranged by him, and
included eight bridesmaids between the ages of thirteen and sixteen,
and eight groomsmen of his own period of life. With one of the most
distinguished, James Buchanan,--then in the United States Senate, and
but recently returned from the Russian mission,--walked Jessie Benton,
fourteen years of age, and in her first long dress. Judged by his last
will, this Russian January seems to have been an unselfish husband, for
he therein expressed the wish that his still young wife should marry
again and be as happy herself as she had made him.
The Van Buren dinner was a more or less memorable event, though the
White House was familiar ground to Jessie Benton. During Jackson's
administration she used frequently to go there with her father, for the
old soldier-President was notably a lover of children. He liked to run
his long fingers through her soft curls, while he talked with his old
friend Benton, unwittingly giving the curls many a twist as he warmed
to his subject, all of which the little girl bore heroically, finding
ample recompense in her father's praise, which was sure to follow the
ordeal.
She went to school both in St. Louis and Washington, in the former
city principally for the sake of learning French by association with
children to whom it was the mother-tongue. She spent two years at Miss
English's boarding-school, in Georgetown, where she was not regarded as
a diligent student. Many hours stolen from the class-rooms were not,
perhaps, altogether unprofitably spent up a mulberry-tree listening to
the fascinating accounts of a midshipman's life, as told by one of his
cousins, and hanging hungrily upon every word, as if it in a measure
foretold her own eventful career.
At home her mental training was continuous, and without conscious, or
at least arduous, effort on her part. Each of Benton's daughters had
her place at his library table, and there, stimulated by his studious
habits, she acquired readily her portion of that vast fund of knowledge
which he had gleaned first from his father's library of unusual
excellence and later from his contact with men and measures of his day.
Of the measures there were many afoot when Benton's daughters were
young, whose stupendous proportions we are scarcely able to gauge,
knowing them only in the perfection of their full realization. Benton
was the sympathetic friend of all progress, and beneath the steady glow
of his astral lamp or the soft flicker of their mother's candles, in
the nights before the advent of gas, his daughters, sewing each her
fine seam, listened to the unfolding of the minds of the men who have
developed America. They learned also those lessons of inexhaustible
patience that must go hand in hand with every great undertaking and of
the frequent subordination of the individual to the things his own mind
has conceived.
Thither came Morse with that sublime faith in his conception of
telegraphy that made him insensible or at least indifferent to the
ridicule of Congress, where a member suggested, when he at length
obtained his twenty-five thousand dollars for an experimental line
to Baltimore, that a second appropriation should be made for an
experimental line to the moon.
An overland emigrant route, the surveys for a railroad to the Pacific,
and the Panama Railroad, Stevens coming to them directly from Central
America and going later to the Isthmus, were some of the vast projects
with whose details they were early familiarized. Later, when Jessie
Benton, as Mrs. Frémont, crossed the Isthmus herself and was detained
there by the fever, she saw Stevens every day, he coming, as he said,
"to take his chill with her." He died in Panama, as he predicted that
he would, one of the heroes in the vanguard of progress.
Into Benton's home quite naturally there drifted, in the year 1840, a
young lieutenant of the corps of topographical engineers, fresh from
the survey of the upper Mississippi. The son of a French father and a
Virginia mother, John C. Frémont was born in South Carolina, in the
year 1813. He was graduated, when he was seventeen years old, from
Charleston College, where he remained to study civil engineering and
teach mathematics. He was so unusually talented that Poinsett, the
Secretary of War, recommended his services to Nicollet when the latter
was about to undertake the survey of the Upper Mississippi. The two
years in the field were followed by two years spent in Washington
in preparing the scientific result of the expedition, during which
period Benton became interested more perhaps in the work than in the
individuality of the young officer, whose genius was later to open to
us the western gates of our republic.
Accompanying Benton's eldest daughter to a concert at Miss English's
school, Frémont for the first time met Jessie Benton. She produced on
his mind at once "the effect that a rose of rare color or a beautiful
picture would have done." She was but sixteen years old at the time,
in the first bloom of girlish beauty, and her bright mind exhilarated
by the pleasure of seeing her sister, poured itself forth in language
as sparkling as it was natural. "Her beauty," he wrote later, in
describing that first impression of her, "had come far enough down
from English ancestry to be now in her that American kind which is
made up largely of mind expressed in the face, but it still showed its
Saxon descent. At that time of awakening mind, the qualities that made
hers could only be seen in flitting shadows across the face or in the
expression of incipient thought or unused and untried feeling."
Coming home for the Easter holidays, she found that the young
lieutenant had become identified with her father's "Oregon work." He
was an almost daily visitor at her home, and in his constant meetings
with her in its unreserved atmosphere he found confirmation of the
first impression he had formed of her. "There are features," he wrote
later, "that convey to us a soul so white that they impress with
instant pleasure, and of this kind were hers. Her qualities were all
womanly, and education had curiously preserved the down of a modesty
which was innate. There had been no experience of life to brush away
the bloom."
Before the holidays were over this impression of her had penetrated
Frémont's entire being, and he loved her no less profoundly than he
admired her, rendering her an absolute devotion that knew no subsequent
diminution. "Insensibly and imperceptibly," he said, "there came a glow
into my heart which changed the current and color of daily life, and
gave a beauty to common things."
That April day in 1841, when, a month after it had witnessed his
inauguration, a mourning nation assembled to pay its last tribute
to William Henry Harrison, a gray and gloomy day without, Frémont
has recorded as the "red letter day" of his life. The government had
leased quarters near the Capitol for the use of Nicollet, where the
work on the map of the Mississippi's sources was going forward. From
the windows of one of the rooms Senator Benton and his family were
invited to view the funeral procession as it wound down Capitol Hill.
Frémont, on leave of absence for the day, was the host of the occasion.
Notwithstanding his best uniform, in which he looked very handsome, he
personally tended the cheery log-fire, that gave a touch of cosiness
to the big office, which he had, moreover, with somewhat reckless
extravagance for a man on a lieutenant's salary, decorated with plants
and cut flowers. From a daintily set table he served, with captivating
grace, coffee and ices. Though the nation mourned, two hearts, at
least, of all who looked upon the solemn pageant of that day were in
gala attire.
The next day, though he discreetly sent Mrs. Benton the plants and
flowers that had done decorative duty in his office, it availed him
nothing in her wise eyes. Jessie was too young, and, besides, she
did not wish her to marry an army man; the life was too unsettled.
Mrs. Poinsett, the wife of the Secretary of War, was taken into her
confidence, and, as a result, Frémont was ordered off to survey the Des
Moines River. Jessie, moreover, as a further diversion, was taken to
the wedding of one of her Virginia cousins, which meant in those days
weeks of festivity.
It was but another case, however, of the best laid plans that "gang
aglee," for in the autumn both Frémont and Jessie Benton were back in
Washington, and on the 19th of October she was courageous enough, in
defiance of both father and mother, whom she not only loved but truly
revered, to become Frémont's wife. She married too young, she says
herself, ever to have been a belle in the usual acceptation of that
term, yet so gifted has she been with those qualities that evoke the
chivalry of man that but few American women have had a better right to
that title. Though her life has been one of much exposure, she herself
has at all times been singularly sheltered.
The year following his marriage, Frémont applied to the Secretary of
War for permission to explore the far West and penetrate the Rockies.
The plan was supported by Benton, who believed that by making surveys
the government would be giving at least a semblance of protection
to its Western possessions. Congress gave its sanction, and in May,
1842, with a handful of venturesome spirits gathered on the Missouri
frontier, Frémont went forth to the exploration of the southern pass.
It was the first of numerous similar expeditions, his scientific
reports of which--going into astronomy, botany, mineralogy, geology,
and geography--were translated into many tongues, and gave their author
world-wide fame.
During his absences, which were always of uncertain duration, his wife
sometimes remained in her parents' home. Her father sent for her one
morning, when she had been married about a year, and, pointing out
her old place at his library table, he said, "I want you to resume
your place there; you are too young to fritter away your life without
some useful pursuit." So she dropped back quite naturally into her old
habits of study, as if her honeymoon days had been but another form of
vacation.
She frequently accompanied Frémont, however, as far as St. Louis,
waiting there for his return, or going out again to meet him after a
fixed time. He was once eight months overdue, during which period of
awful silence and suspense she had a supper-table set for him every
night with all the comforts and luxuries of that civilization to which
he had been so long a stranger. He came at length, in the dead of the
night, and, rather than disturb a household, he went to a hotel, and
for the first time in eighteen months slept in a bed.
With whatever misgivings she may have seen him set out for a field
where he would encounter certainly many dangers, and possibly even
death, she never, even when the opportunity came, of which many a
weaker woman would have availed herself, endeavored to withhold him
from his purpose. He would sometimes, after having covered many miles
of his route, come back to her for another good-by, overtaking his
party again by hard riding or pressing forward while they were resting.
In the summer of 1843, while he was still on the frontier gathering
together men and animals for his second expedition, his recall to
Washington was ordered, to explain there why, making a scientific
expedition under the protection of the government, he had armed his
men with the howitzer. The order, however, never reached him, for he
had already left St. Louis, where it fell into the hands of his wife.
Though she still labored under the depression of their recent parting,
she yet, with all the spirit which the emergency demanded, sent him a
swift messenger, bidding him hurry off and rest and fatten his animals
at Bent's Ford, stating that there was sufficient reason for the haste
which could not then be given.
When he was quite beyond the reach of recall, for it was before the
days of telegraphy, she wrote to the colonel of the Topographical
Bureau, and confessed what she had done, at the same time giving
ample reason for her action. To have obeyed the order, she explained,
would have meant the ruin of the expedition. Together with the time
it would have required to settle the party before he could leave
it, the length of the trip to Washington, and the inevitable delays
there, the early grass would be past its best, and the animals thus
would be thrown underfed into the mountains for the winter. She then
replied to the charge made against Frémont in the order of his recall.
The expedition must cross the country of the Blackfeet and other
unfriendly tribes of Indians, with no reverence whatever for the cause
of science, but with a very wholesome regard for any rights that were
backed up with a howitzer. Her father, who was absent from St. Louis
at the time, endorsed her action, and wrote to Washington, assuming
the responsibility for it, saying he would call for a court-martial
on the point charged against Frémont. Nothing further was heard of
it, however, and the precious time, that meant so much more to the
scientific mind of the explorer than to his government, to which all
seasons are the same, was saved.
From an historical point of view this was the most important of all
Frémont's expeditions. With the French territory which we had acquired
by the Louisiana purchase we inherited also France's old feud with
England, the underlying cause of which was the control of the markets
in the East. When we took up the cudgels, their conflict, so far as
the Western hemisphere was involved, had narrowed down to the ultimate
possession of that portion of Mexico's territory which included the
harbor of San Francisco. England had already made her survey of the
ground, and her eye coveted that matchless port. She was the power we
confronted in California when our war with Mexico ushered in the moment
for decisive action. Two courageous, intensely American men, however,
held the situation in their grasp,--in the Senate, at the climax of
his powers, Benton, who had ever had a jealous eye upon England's
encroachments on our boundary; in the field, Frémont, with all the
gallantry and spirit that final coup demanded.
The British admiral, moving with more deliberation than the American
colonel, with characteristic love of sport and appreciation of success,
gracefully accepted his defeat, and tendered his felicitations to the
intrepid rival, whose flag he found already floating above the coveted
territory.
Frémont, after his gallant conquest, became the victim of a quarrel
between two officers commanding the United States forces in that
vicinity, and was brought back a prisoner over the territory
he had acquired for his country. During the ninety days of his
trial by court-martial, which stripped him of his commission as
lieutenant-colonel of mounted riflemen, inspired by a lofty enthusiasm,
his nights were devoted to writing the history of the expedition.
Though he was reinstated by the President, he returned his commission,
and in 1848 took out a private expedition, opening the route from the
Mississippi to San Francisco. His mountaineers flocked to him, ready
to follow wherever he should lead. He had that faith in himself and in
his purpose that evoked a corresponding confidence in them, and his
presence was light and warmth and refreshment to their daring spirit.
When it became necessary at times to divide the party, those who were
not with him suffered sorely. The memorable winter of 1848, however,
was one of hardships for all, travelling days and weeks within sight of
eternal snows. Frémont wrote to his wife during a brief respite from
that agonizing period, when his men were starving and freezing and
wandering off in despair to lie down alone and die: "We shall yet enjoy
quiet and happiness together; these are nearly one and the same to me
now. I make frequent pleasant pictures of the happy home we are to
have, and oftenest and among the pleasantest of all I see our library
with its bright fire in the rainy, stormy days, and the large windows
looking out upon the sea in the bright weather. I have it all planned
in my mind."
Mrs. Frémont was, meanwhile, making ready for the long journey towards
the land of this picture-home. It was the first break from the real
home, her father's, where she had passed the greater part of the eight
years of her married life, five of which her husband had spent in the
field. She started in March, 1849, going by way of the Isthmus, where
the man selected by Mr. Aspinwall for her guide had many misgivings
about undertaking the charge. He had a wife, who had prophesied that,
coming from Washington, Mrs. Frémont would be "a fine lady" and would
make him no end of trouble, especially concerning the scant attire of
the Indians.
In the sunshine of her presence, however, his misgivings melted
away. She was not a "fine lady" at all, he said, that bugbear of his
unconventional mind, but a slender woman with a head so level and a
heart so stout as to render all the more forcible the appeal of her
delicate body.
She was stricken with the fever, and ill for many weeks in Panama,
where she was surrounded with that warmth of friendship and sympathy
which s
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