An Epistle to Posterity/Chapter III
CHAPTER III
The life in New England was a studious one, but not gay, although the irrepressible spirit of sixteen got some dancing out of it. The vision of Washington to come was a not ungrateful one, and, although I have referred to it before, I may be allowed to speak for a moment of the political situation which obtained when I exchanged New England for Washington. My father had always been very kind and familiar in his talks with his children about politics as well as everything else. I had hated General Jackson as a child, as the Scotch children hated the Bruce; and although I had seen with my own eyes that Mr. Van Buren was not an ogre, I had still a very poor opinion of his character. A girl brought up in the old Whig party had no idea which favored "Locofocos," as the Democrats were called. Antislavery agitation at the North was growing more intense every day. We had gone through the Mexican war. I knew by heart the name of every hero in it; we were waiting to know now what was to become of the territory won by that war. Our friend and neighbor General Franklin Pierce, although my father's political foe, was a very agreeable guest at our dinner-table. He had gone to the war, and it had made him President; although, poor man! he would have been better off without that distinction. As we look back upon it now, we see that the time held the "irrepressible conflict" (the "immortal march" of Roger A. Pryor) in the rude Wilmot Proviso, the Compromise Resolutions, etc,; and I remember John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives, with his noble old head, battling for the North. Mr. Clay and Mr. Webster were "compromising," as were most of the Northern Whigs. It was intensely exciting, and rather mortifying to Northerners.
Mr. Lincoln, then obscure but for his great height, was towering physically above everybody, as he was later on to tower mentally and morally above us all; but no one suspected his greatness then.
John Wentworth, of Chicago, six feet seven; Caleb Cushing, and George Ashmun, with his bright black eyes burning with genius, his fine, shining bald head, were among those who were on the floor of the House. I have forgotten many of the others, but these were the days when I knew the House of Representatives very well and heard many good speeches.
Mr. Winthrop, prince of Speakers, was in the chair. General Scott, fresh from triumphs in Mexico, walked about outside. I once saw him, Mr. Lincoln, John Wentworth, and my father talking together in the lobby, and my father, who was six feet four, was the shortest of the quartet.
In the Senate, Mr. Calhoun, Mr. Benton, Mr. Clay, and Mr. Berrian made that scene notable. Rufus Choate was in the Senate in the John Tyler days, a very fervid orator and man of genius. Later on Mr. Polk was in the White House surrounded by an army of Southern sympathizers. This was in 1847.As one fine spring day we were looking from our windows in Four-and-a-Half Street we saw a great commotion and outcry. It was the most heart-breaking scene I have ever witnessed.
It was a cargo of runaway slaves who had been caught in Chesapeake Bay trying to get away from cruel masters. They had been becalmed, and so captured. Their fate was to be taken to Northern or to Washington jails, and then to be whipped and sent back again. The captain of the little craft which had essayed to save them was being carried up to the jail in a carriage, guarded by soldiers, else the citizens of Washington would have murdered him, so strongly Southern was the feeling there. I remember one poor negro mother with a baby in her arms, and two or three pickaninnies hanging to her skirts, being whipped along with the rest. Her face with its hopeless agony is before me to-day, a greater picture than that of the Cenci.
What a sight that was for a Northern girl to see! Mr. Ashmun stood at my side, and as he watched the impotent tears fall down my cheeks he said:
"God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform."
And yet, after all that, we had to hear our idol, Mr. Webster, make the 7th-of-March speech.
I have never been able to decide whether it was because his great and well-informed mind saw the other side so clearly that it could not see the right side, or whether it was because he so much desired to be President, that he on that occasion advocated compromise and temporizing. It killed him, this Fabian policy. Had he taken strongly the Northern view, the view which Abraham Lincoln took, "Do right — and sleep," he would have been the next President, and the war would have been averted, for it would have been unnecessary.
My little part in that great day, the 7th of March, was this: Ladies were to be admitted on the floor of the Senate, and my father got me the seat of General Greene, of Rhode Island, very near Mr. Webster. The venerable and beautiful Mrs. Madison and Mrs. Webster sat not far off, while everybody of distinction in Washington and crowds from Boston and New York were present. Mr. Webster rose, dressed in buff and blue, the colors of Fox, which he always wore on great occasions — a dress-coat buttoned across the waist over a yellow vest — his great face serious, splendid; his cavernous eyes glowing with fire, his hair carefully brushed back from his majestic forehead.
Surely "no one could be so great as he looked." He had not proceeded far when Mr. Calhoun jumped to his feet, making some objection to what he said. "The gentleman from South Carolina and I have broken a lance before this," said Mr. Webster." I have no desire to do so again," said Mr. Calhoun, "but — " etc.
Mr. Calhoun was dying; in fact, he died on the 30th of the month. His face was spectral, and his stiff gray hair, which he brushed upward, gave a peculiar expression to his very marked appearance. This 7th of March was his last appearance in the Senate. He made on that occasion his most remarkable prophecy: "Sir, the Union can be broken." But neither of these great men knew that it not only could be and would be broken, but that it could be cemented together again, alas! by a mingling of the best blood on both sides — a cement which, please God! shall hold it through the ages. It seems now impossible that the great logical mind of Mr. Webster should have forgotten an impressive phrase from Lord Bacon which he had quoted in his famous letter to the "Citizens on the Kennebec River":
"Among the maxims left us by Lord Bacon, one is, that when seditions or discontents arise in the state the part of wisdom is to remove, by all means possible, the causes. The surest way to prevent discontents, if the times will bear it," he says, "is to take away the matter of them; for if there be fuel prepared it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire."
Slavery was that cause which should then and there have been removed.
But these great topics are beyond the meaning and the purpose of these rambling recollections. A young girl listening to a giant was not thinking of the past or the future; she was probably very much more interested in her own present.
But she was conscious of a great thud of disappointment, and was very angry when a beau of the period, Mr. Cabell, of Virginia, said to her: "Less than that concession of Mr. Webster would have dissolved the Union." Many years after in St. Louis, having suffered extensively from the evils of secession, Mr. Cabell talked to me in a very different strain.
Of the great we of the lesser type have a right to cherish all memories, however trivial; it therefore is to me, who saw this great man when I was a child, and afterwards when I was a young woman, a great pleasure to recall his smile, his careful dress, his commanding beauty, and his unvarying kindness. My memories of him in the Senate and in society are not less vivid and delightful than of the days at Marshfield. I saw him in the Capitol as he was sitting to Healy for one of his best portraits. He seemed perfect, and I ceased to question, as we should all do, what strain of human imperfection it was that clouded this celebrated life; why he was not more successful in the minor matters of every day; why he did not see more clearly what others thought to be the right; why there was one thread of logic that he did not find and follow — and so we should all cease to question. To-day I know no greater pleasure than to read his letters and his speeches.
Speaking of portraits of Mr. Webster, the earliest one, by Chester Harding (that man of genius who used to make Gilbert Stuart jealous, as his young fame in 1823 made the older man ask, "How rages the Harding fever?"), is, I think, in the Boston Athenæum. They are all good. I sat to Harding in my girlhood. He used to talk to me of Webster as of a man whom he really worshipped. He had a thorough comprehension of his subject, for he was a great man himself. He enjoyed for many years an enviable intimacy with Mr. Webster and his family, and he said, "The more unrestrained our intercourse grew the greater man he seemed to be." He was fond of telling of his taking a bottle of "mountain-dew" to Mr. Webster. Leaving the bottle on the hall table, he went in to the parlor and said, "I have left a Scotch gentleman of my acquaintance outside; may I bring him in?" On receiving a ready assent he produced the bottle (he had previously told Mr. Webster that this beverage must be taken with hot water and sugar).
"Oh," said Mr. Webster, receiving the bottle with gravity, "is this the gentleman who always bathes in hot water?"
Chester Harding was born in 1792, in Worth Conway, New Hampshire; he died in Boston in 1866, having painted nearly every one of note in that city. His fame grew to be a national one, and his last portrait was that of General Sherman, painted in 1866. He had been in England, and had studied under Leslie and Sir Thomas Lawrence. He painted portraits of his Royal Highness the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of Hamilton, the Duke of Norfolk, Allison the historian, and Samuel Rogers. He always held a high social position wherever he went. He was a grand-looking man, and in his old age, with a white beard, he sat to an artist for a head of St. Peter. A characteristic of his portraits was their suggestiveness of temperament and character. But in the fine lines which Nature draws upon the living face the artist should be inspired to read that half-hidden handwriting. In this Chester Harding excelled, and therefore his pictures of Webster are valuable. His conversation was always rare and instructive, and never more aageeable than when he talked of Mr. Webster.
I remember one anecdote of Mr. Webster's immense personal charm told me by Mr. W. W. Story, of Rome. "James Lowell and I," said he, "were very angry with Webster for staying in old Tyler's cabinet, and as he was to speak in Faneuil Hall on the evening of the 30th of September, 1842, we determined to go in and hoot at him and to show him that he had incurred our displeasure. There were three thousand people there, and we felt sure they would hoot with us, young as we were.
"But we reckoned without our host. Mr. Webster, beautifully dressed, stepped calmly forward. His great eyes looked, as I shall always think, straight at me. I pulled off my hat; James pulled off his. We both became cold as ice and respectful as Indian coolies. I saw James turn pale; he said I was livid. And when the great creature began that most beautiful exordium our scorn turned to deepest admiration, from abject contempt to belief and approbation."Mr. Webster talked one evening of his past, the past of the "Reply to Hayne." He told us how Mrs. Gales had saved it for him, as she could read her husband's shorthand, which no one else could. I remember that Miss Susan Benton was of this party — a very gifted girl, and the daughter of the great Missouri Senator. Mr. Seward often joined us in our after-dinner walks to the Capitol. These twilight strolls to these beautiful grounds were very fashionable then. We dined at five o'clock, and had a long summer evening to get rid of. How primitive Washington was in those days! But what good society this was during the long session!
A small, straggling city, with very muddy streets in winter; plain living and high thinking; rather uncomfortable quarters in the hotels and boarding-houses; here and there a grand house, but not many of them; the White House, serene and squalid; a few large public buildings; the Capitol, with its splendid dome, like an architect's dream, overhanging and dominating the scene, as it does to-day, one of the most splendid public buildings in the civilized world. Such was the early Washington to me.
I came to Washington as a very young girl, and was, of course, dazzled. I have only indistinct memories as to having seen the last years of Mr. Polk's administration and the first of General Taylor's. That was my first inauguration, and I remember it very well. What a cold, driving March day it was! What dreary waiting in a crowded part of the rotunda and the Supreme Court room! We had two friends — Mr. Dixon, of Connecticut, and Mr. Justice Wayne, of the Supreme Court — to put us through, and so we had very good chances. I remember now the impressive group as Judge Taney administered the oath to the sturdy little general. Judge Taney looked like the recently deceased Cardinal Manning.
But the ball! That was the great expectation. We went with ten thousand others to a sort of shed — a large wooden barracks — and spermaceti rained down on our bare shoulders in a white snow-storm. One of our gentlemen attendants, looking at his coat, said: "Spermaceti is very expensive. I have paid ten dollars for less than a pound." However, we enjoyed the crowd, the dance, and the novelty. Had the grippe been the fashion I should have died then and there, and you would have been spared these rambling recollections. But we never seemed to take cold in those days. Washington was cold and dreary in winter then; the houses were insufficiently heated, the hotels abominable.
The belles of that ball — how differently they were dressed from those of to-day! Falling ringlets, or the hair in bandeaux put under the ears; a low-cut gown with a berthe across the shoulders; a plain skirt or one with two lace flounces; a rose or a bow in front of the corsage; perhaps a pearl necklace; white kid gloves buttoning at the wrist with one button.
A few ladies wore white feathers. I think Mrs. Bliss, the delightful daughter of President Taylor, wore a red velvet dress and one long feather in her hair. She was always lovely and well apparelled. Very few ladies wore jewelry. I remember Madame Bodisco was famous then with a Russian head-dress full of diamonds. The wife of the English Minister, Lady Bulwer, wore handsome diamonds, but American women had not then adopted coronets. Nor was there anything like the display so common now of handsome jewelry. The young girls were very simply dressed, excepting some from Louisville and New Orleans. Great beauties, like Sallie Ward and Diana Bullitt, would be famously dressed, but they were the exceptions. Being a Northerner, an abolitionist, and a Whig, it was certain that my dearest friends should be Southern girls and Democrats. We never talked politics, but wondered that we liked each other so much. I adored them — these beautiful women with soft voices and gentle eyes who had been brought up so differently from what I had been. They were accustomed to be waited on; had had a dozen slaves about them all their lives, while I had been taught in cold New England to wait on myself. But we met on the common ground of youth and love of pleasure. I used to admire their pretty Southern accent and try to imitate it. They did not so much admire mine, and told me I spoke too fiercely. We differed, too, on the subject of engagements.
"Why, Miss Wilson," said one of these dear sirens, "I'd just as lief be engaged to five men at once, and then I'd pick out the best man at last and just marry him."
I gave her, I dare say, a Puritan lecture on constancy, at which she laughed. Oh, such a musical laugh! Her brother was one of my beaux, and she said to me: "Now, Miss Wilson, you needn't marry Preston, because you're a wicked abolitionist; but you just get engaged to him and come down to Georgia and pay us a visit."
It was through the friendship of one of these dear Southern friends that I was smuggled in to a dinner at Mrs. Polk's, just before she left the White House. I remember how very long it seemed and how dreary — state dinners at sixteen are dreary. The dinner was a very elegant one, and I can now see Mrs. Ashley's plumes across the table. Mrs. Ashley was a very handsome widow with a very handsome daughter, Miss Wilcox. Mrs. Ashley was afterwards the wife of the Hon. J. J. Crittenden. She was a most amiable woman, who always called every man colonel or general. ("Always give men brevet rank," she said to me, confidentially. "If they are colonels call them general; if they are captains call them colonel. They will forgive you.") Mrs. Ashley could say a sharp thing when occasion required. She once said to me that a certain lady, who had always been very jealous of her, had bought of her a French invoice, a toilette, which she, going into mourning, could not wear. This other woman sent back the slippers after having worn them, saying, " They are too big. I could swim in them." Mrs. Ashley took them calmly, and looking at them remarked, "My dear, I am a larger woman than you are in every respect."
The President's "levees," as we used to call them, were very much smaller than to-day, but they were very like them. I always wonder what we did for light in those days, as oil lamps, always smoky, and candles, always dripping, are all that these splendid affairs had to use in place of the diamond brilliancy of to-day. I once went up-stairs in the White House to search for a pair of overshoes, and I remember there was one candle in that immense hall. I can see now that feeble glimmer.
Mr. Corcoran gave fine dinners; so did the English and French ministers; but elsewhere I do not remember anything like the luxury of to-day. Indeed, it did not exist, and those who could afford it did not care for it. John Quincy Adams, whose magnificent head was the pride of the House, whose fame made him our first citizen, who was a rich man, lived plainly in rather a Southern fashion. It was a great treat to be permitted to see Mrs. Adams, who had been, as Mr. Everett told me, one of the most admirable hostesses of the "White House — her conversation was charming. It was the fashion to be poor in Washington in those days, and I remember the witty Henry A. Wise, who had just then published his clever book, Los Gringos, when he became engaged to the brilliant Miss Charlotte Everett, saying to his fellow-officers: "Don't be afraid. She is so unlucky as to have some money, but she is a good fellow for all that." What a witty man he was, and how much we enjoyed the suppers at the Mays', of which he was a factor!
Then there were quiet literary parties at Mrs. Frank Taylor's, where we met a very remarkable man, Mr. George Wood, who wrote Peter Schlemihl; or, The Man without a Shadow. Mr. Wood used to take us to see Mr. King's pictures, and he introduced us to charming, quiet people, who were the citizens of Washington, mostly Southern by descent, and those ladies would sit in plain black silks and dark gloves to receive their guests. It was a splendid distinction then, as now, to be asked to the White House to dine, and it was one we looked forward to once a winter; but dinners were too long and heavy, and the drinking of healths, now so happily abolished, was a nuisance, at least we young ladies thought so.
Mr. Seward was in the Senate, a youngish man, very witty and very delightful. His great fame was ahead of him, but we of New York, the Whigs, were very proud of him. His head resembled that of Julius Cæsar on the coins.
On New-Year's Day we went first to the White House and then to call on the cabinet, and sometimes to Arlington to call on Mr. Custis. That was a great chapter out of history to see for the first time his historical pictures, and to be asked by his lovely and amiable wife to drink tea out of the Washington china. Later on I used to go there in the spring over that old Long Bridge, now happily replaced with iron. It looked as if it would break down, even with our one old hack, then.
The wild roses, the woods of Arlington, even that neglected tangle of a garden, were a delight to me, and Mrs. Lee used to encourage my love for the pink bonsa-line rosebuds which blossomed all winter. Indeed, I remember that once at New-Year's Day I plucked these roses in the city garden of Mrs. Seaton, and when I was there later, in a snow-storm, I wondered if the once soft, Southern climate of Washington was one of the vanished pleasures of youth, like a good appetite and a love of balls. Washington is a garden of delight in spring. I think Proserpine sets her blessed foot here earlier and more charmingly than anywhere else; but even in winter she used to throw us out a rose or two.
Such were some of the pleasures of the early Washington, the greatest of which was to hear the talking. A very grand set of talkers were those men. Mr. Calhoun was a most elegant conversationalist; he talked literature, social events, and even gossip, pleasantly. All that severe and almost iron logic of his speeches melted away, and he rattled on gayly; he liked to talk to ladies. Mr. Berrian was another finished talker when conversation was an art. Mr. Clay, the ugliest man in the world, was one of the most fascinating. He could have said with Wilkes, "Give me one hour's start and I will captivate any woman before the handsomest man in England." He was very gallant, and could make the dullest dinner go off bravely. How near he came to being President, and how wofully disappointed were he and his friends! Mr, Webster, however, talked better than any of them, to ladies or to anybody.It was a highly exciting, agreeable, improving life for a New Hampshire girl. We saw Mr. Webster every day, often dined with him, and spent a winter at the National Hotel, dining usually at a "mess" with Mr. Clay. I saw General Taylor inaugurated, and during the winter of his short reign saw much of Mrs, Bliss at the White House. She made a charming hostess. We went very often to the House and Senate in those days. Can it be possible that the little room now devoted to statuary, with its beautiful clock, was once that immense space? The modern Capitol confuses me. I feel at home nowhere except in the rotunda. Those stiff old pictures seem like real friends — something to take hold of — in that magnificent bazaar of politics. The library, then much smaller than now, was a great lounging-place and the arena of flirtation.
A wary, witty old gentleman, General Greene, of Providence, and General Waddy Thompson, of South Carolina — they were our watchdogs. They took turns in mounting guard; and if there was a fascinating lieutenant in the navy or a wandering officer from the plains whom we wanted to meet in the library they used to try and frustrate us. But we were equal to the emergency, and I think we saw our dark-eyed lieutenants.
Mr. Benton — striking figure, with his high nose and his recollections — was a near neighbor of ours in Four-and-a-Half Street. His brilliant daughter, Mrs. Fremont, had already run away with her lieutenant, whom she so adored all her life. Susan Benton was a most brilliant woman, whom I saw afterwards in her pleasant life as the wife of a French minister, but destined to close that life under the most cruel of misfortunes. Annie Wilcox, the beauty, became Mrs. Cabell, and died. "All, all are gone, the old familiar faces." I went to my first grand ball at Mrs. Carroll's, her beautiful fair daughters being the ornaments of the scene.
Here came General Scott; in those days he was grandly the hero of the Mexican war. Here I saw many of the young heroes destined later on to be world-renowned — Admiral Farragut and Rogers, young, handsome, and stately; General Lee, a magnificent man; Zachary Taylor, Colonel Bliss, and a little quiet man who shrank out of sight — he was known later on as U. S. Grant; Franklin and McClellan, fresh from Mexico, and a thousand others whose later fame has made their early day seem dim.
Mr. Robert C. Winthrop was a prominent figure. He was Speaker of the House, and much admired for his admirable justice and presence of mind, his fairness to his political opponents, his fine temper, and his ready wit. He was, like the Earl of Clarendon, a man with a balance of the qualities, none of them overweighing the other. Mr. Winthrop was an hereditary gentleman, a man of fortune, entertained hospitably, and was of infinite service in the House when passions ran high.
Washington was seething then with the question of abolition and "North and South." The South was very much to the front in social as in political matters. The women were beautiful, full of all the accomplishments, and knowing how to entertain. The men, like Mr. Berrian, were scholars and most admirable talkers. Perhaps we young girls, in the flippancy of youth, found some of them rather verbose, rather sesquipedalian, quoting Pope more than Longfellow, and sometimes the elderly ones would attempt an elephantine flirtation. We preferred the foreign attaches and the young officers of the army and navy, and I do still. But we had our General Dix, most accomplished of men — he who, for his pleasure, translated the Dies Iræ, and who, bless his heart! wrote that immortal line, better than poetry, "If any man hauls down the American flag, shoot him on the spot." We could brag of Mr. Winthrop, who, one Southerner told me, was the only Northern gentleman he ever saw! And at his house could be seen some lovely Boston girls. Among the Southern ladies I particularly remember the beautiful Mrs. Yulee, a soft Creole brunette with exquisite manners. She was, before her marriage, Miss Wickliffe, of Kentucky, but she had the air of a Louisiana woman.
Mr. Morse — Professor Morse — was there, trying to get an appropriation for a new invention, the electric telegraph. I heard the first click that went through, either to Baltimore or New York, I forget which. Just imagine it! The year 1850 was a transition era. The old was going out, the new was coming in. The looker-on little knew of its importance. It is now to me like those mosaics at Ravenna which mark the Pagan and the Christian epoch as they separated.
As I have visited the city often since to partake of its elegant festivities, to drive out to the Soldiers' Home through palaces and flowering trees, did I ever regret that old Washington?
Yes. It is impossible not to regret the plain beginnings and the sincere patriotism, the poor little homes which held such noble lives; and I can safely affirm that anything so delightful as Washington I have never seen elsewhere. There were a mingled simplicity and grandeur, a mingled state and quiet intimacy, a brilliancy of conversation — the proud prominence of intellect over material prosperity which does not exist in any other city of the Union. I believe it does not exist anywhere but at Rome, which always, geographically as well as politically and socially, reminded me so of Washington that I used to call Rome Washington inadvertently. As I was driving with Mrs. Story to the Pincian Hill, I would say, "Is he in Washington?" meaning Rome. She said I was not the first one who had felt it. Rome, like Washington, is small enough, quiet enough, for strong personal intimacies; Rome, like Washington, has its democratic court and its entourage of diplomatic circle; Rome, like Washington, gives you plenty of time and plenty of sunlight. In New York we have annihilated both.
So my early Washington recollections became crystallized. Cameo-like, they stand out clear and distinct. I see again that great straggling outline so little filled up, a collection of houses here and there, and then great empty spaces. I see, in my mind's eye, the Capitol and the White House, and the distant view of Arlington and Georgetown, almost a distant city. For a picnic on a June afternoon we would drive through deserted lanes to Kalorama, now, I believe, in the middle of the city. Then we had always a delightful treat in visiting Brentwood, at that time kept up with true Southern hospitality; Silver Springs, most beautiful; and to Mrs. Gales's pretty cottage. My visits to the Custis and Lee families at Arlington were frequent and delightful. It was a consecrated place then, as now; but then there was not between us and General Washington the unhappy blood-red gash of civil war. I regret that it was made a graveyard, that beautiful home.