Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

A BELLE OF THE FIFTIES

MRS. CLAY
of Alabama

A Belle of the Fifties
Memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, 1853–66 Put into narrative form by Ada Sterling

Illustrated from contemporary portraits

New York

Doubleday, Page & Company

1905

Copyright, 1904, by

Doubleday, Page & Company

Published, September, 1904

To

THE DEAR MEMORY OF THE HUSBAND OF MY YOUTH

Clement Claiborne Clay

Virginia Clay-Clopton

PREFACE

The memoirs of “Mrs. Clay, of Alabama,” by which title Mrs. Clement C. Clay, Jr. (now Mrs. Clay-Clopton), was known during the period comprised by 1850–87, begin in the middle of the second decade of the nineteenth century, the scenes being laid among the affluent plantations of North Carolina and Alabama, and, continuing through two brilliant administrations at the national capital, close, as she emerges from the distresses which overtook her and her husband after the never-to-be-forgotten tragedy that plunged a nation into mourning—the death of Mr. Lincoln.

In the researches made in order to obviate all possible inaccuracies in these memoirs (a precaution always necessary where one’s life has been long and experiences so varied), I have come upon no record of any other woman of her time who has filled so powerful a place politically, whose belleship has been so long sustained, or whose magnetism and compelling fascinations have swayed others so universally as have those of Mrs. Clay-Clopton. In the unrestful days at the capital which preceded the Civil War her winning personality was such as to cause even those whom she esteemed the enemies of her section, in those days when “sections” were, to be covetous of her smiles. At no period of her long career have her unique courage, her beautiful optimism, her inspiring buoyancy been more accentuated than during the making of the present book. The recalling of incident after incident, step by step, of so great a procession of memories as are here set down is a task from which many persons of twoscore years might shrink. At the ripe age of almost eight decades Mrs. Clay-Clopton entered into the work with a heart as light as a girl’s and a sustained energy and enthusiasm that have been as remarkable as they are unparalleled. While preparing these pages I enjoyed a daily intercourse with her extending over eight months, during which time I often found myself spellbound by the descriptive powers which nearly a half century ago compelled the admiration of leading men and women of that day.

“My wife was amazed at your eloquence,” wrote Attorney-General Jeremiah Black in 1866, and in succeeding letters urged Mrs. Clay to put her experiences with Messrs. Johnson, Holt and Stanton into book form. To these and urgings as powerful from many quarters, reiterated during the past forty years, until the present work was undertaken, Mrs. Clay-Clopton has remained indifferent. Her recollections of a long life are now gathered in response to a wide and insistently expressed desire to see them preserved in a concrete form ere the crowding years shall have made impossible the valuable testimony she is able to bear to ante-bellum and bellum conditions in her dearly loved South land. To that end many friends of Mrs. Clay-Clopton have lent an eager aid, and it is an acknowledgment due to them that their names be linked here with the work they have so lovingly fostered.

The inception of the work as now presented is primarily due to Mrs. Milton Humes, of Abingdon Place, Huntsville, Alabama, a daughter of the late Governor Chapman, of that State, and the friend from her childhood of Mrs. Clay-Clopton. For many years Mrs. Humes has ardently urged upon our heroine the necessity for preserving her rich memories as a legacy, not alone to the South, but to all lovers of the romantic and eventful in our national history, to whatsoever quarter of the country they may claim a particular allegiance. Through Mrs. Humes Mrs. Clay-Clopton and I met; through her unintermitting energy obstacles that at first threatened to postpone the beginning of the work were removed, and from these initial steps she has brought a very Minerva-like wisdom and kindness to aid the work to its completion. At the instance of Mrs. Humes General Joseph Wheeler lent me a valuable sympathy; through the courtesy of General Wheeler General James H. Wilson, to whom Clement C. Clay, Jr., surrendered in 1865, kindly gave his consideration to the chapters of the memoirs in which he personally is mentioned, correcting one or two minor inaccuracies, such as misapplied military titles. Through the continued forethought of Mrs. Humes and General Wheeler Colonel Henry Watterson’s attention was directed to the work, and he, too, generously scanned the manuscript then ready, at a considerable expense of time, guiding my pen, all untutored in political phrases, from some misleading slips. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Colonel Robert Barnwell Rhett, who, though an invalid while I was a guest of Mr. and Mrs. Humes in Huntsville, gave his unsparing counsels to me, enlightening me as to personages and events appertaining to the formation of the Confederate Government, which would have been unobtainable from any books at present known to me. For the acquaintance with Colonel Rhett I am, on behalf of the memoirs and for my personal pleasure, again the debtor of Mrs. Humes.

The aid of Mrs. Paul Hammond, formerly of Beech Island, South Carolina, but now residing in Jacksonville, Florida, has been peculiarly valuable. Possessed of a fine literary taste, a keen observer, and retaining a vivid recollection of the personages she encountered when a debutante under Mrs. Clay’s chaperonage in 1857–’58 in Washington, the six or seven weeks over which our intercourse extended were a continual striking of rare lodes of incident, which lay almost forgotten in the memory of her kinswoman, Mrs. Clay-Clopton, but which have contributed greatly to the interest of certain chapters dealing with Washington life in ante-bellum days.

Thanks are due to Mrs. Bettie Adams for her unsparing efforts to facilitate the getting together of the necessary manuscripts to support, and, in some instances, to authenticate and amplify the remembrances carried by our heroine of the crucial times of the great internecine war; to Miss Jennie Clay, who in her editorial pursuits discovered special dates and records and placed them at my disposal in order that the repetition of certain commonly accepted errors might be avoided; and to Mrs. Frederick Myers of Savannah, daughter of Mrs. Philip Phillips, who sent for my perusal (thereby giving me valuable sidelights on the times of ’61–62), her mother’s letters from Ship Island, together with the latter’s journal, kept during her imprisonment by General Benjamin F. Butler.

The letters of Judge John A. Campbell, contributed by his daughter, Mrs. Henrietta Lay, have been so well prized that they have become part of the structure of her friend’s memoirs; to Mrs. Lay, therefore, also to Mrs. Myra Knox Semmes, of New Orleans, Mrs. Cora Semmes Ives, of Alexandria, Virginia; Mrs. Corinne Goodman, of Memphis, Tennessee; Mrs. Mary Glenn Brickell, of Huntsville, Alabama; Mrs. George Collins Levey, of England, and Judge John V. Wright, of Washington, D.C., thanks are hereby given for incidents recalled and for suggestive letters received since the work on the memoirs began.

Ada Sterling.

New York City, September 15, 1904.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

A BELLE OF THE FIFTIES

CHAPTER I
Childhood, Girlhood, Marriage

My infant days were spent in North Carolina among the kinsmen of my mother. I do not remember her, save that she was young and fair, being but twenty when she died. She was the twenty-fifth child of the family united under her father’s roof, which remarkable circumstance may be explained as follows:

My grandfather, General William Arrington, who won his title in the Revolutionary War, having been left a widower with twelve children, wearying of his solitude, mounted his horse and rode over to visit the comely widow Battle, whose children also numbered twelve. The two plantations lay near together in the old “Tar Heel” State. My gallant ancestor was a successful wooer, and Mrs. Battle, née Williams, soon became Mrs. Arrington. Thus it happened that the little Anne—my mother—the one daughter of this union, entered the world and simultaneously into the affections of one dozen half-brothers and sisters Arrington, and as many of the Battle blood. This was a fortunate prevision for me, for, though orphaned at the outset of my earthly pilgrimage—I was but three years old when my girl-mother passed away—I found myself by no means alone, though my dear father, Dr. Peyton Randolph Tunstall, grief-stricken and sorrowful, left my native State at the death of his wife, and I was a half-grown girl ere we met again and learned to know each other.

My recollections of those early days are necessarily few; yet, were I a painter, I might limn one awful figure that lingers in my memory. She was a mulatto, to whose care for some time I was nightly confided. This crafty maid, Pleasant by name, though ’twas a misnomer, anxious to join in the diversions of the other domestics among the outlying cabins on the plantation, would no sooner tuck me into bed than she would begin to unfold to me blood-curdling stories of “sperrits an’ ghoses,” and of “old blue eyes an’ bloody bones” who would be sure to come out of the plum orchard and carry me to the graveyard if I did not go quickly to sleep. Fortunately, old Major Drake, of whose family I was then a member, chanced one evening to overhear this soothing lullaby, and put an end to her stories ere serious harm had been done; yet so wonderful is the retentive power of the human mind that though seventy and more momentous years have passed since I, a little fearsome child, huddled under the coverings breathless in my dread of the “bogie man,” I still recall my heartless, or perhaps my thoughtless, nurse vividly.

At the age of six I was carried to Tuscaloosa, then the capital of the young State of Alabama, where I was placed in the care of my aunt, whose husband, Henry W. Collier, then a young lawyer, afterward became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of his State, and its Governor. That first journey stretches out in my memory as an interminable pilgrimage. Mr. Fort, of Mississippi, his wife, my mother’s sister, and their two children, Mary and Martha, accompanied by a large following of Negroes, being en route for their plantation in Mississippi territory, I was given into their care for delivery to my kin in Tuscaloosa. No palace-car of later days has ever eclipsed the wonders of the cavalcade our company made as we passed along through towns and villages and the occasional Indian settlements that here and there dotted the untilled lands of those early nineteenth-century days!

My uncle drove in his gig at the head of the procession, while my aunt and the children made the journey in a big pudding-shaped carriage in charge of a trusty driver, beside whom my aunt’s maid sat. The carriage was built with windows at the sides, and adjustable steps, which were let down when we halted and secured in place by our Negro attendants. These followed behind the vehicles and were at hand to serve us when need arose.

Our cortege included several “Dearborns,” similar in shape to the ambulances of the present, in which the old and ailing Negroes were carried, and numerous wagons containing our household goods and provisions followed behind. At night, tents were pitched, in which my aunt and the children slept, unless by chance a storm arose, when the shelter of some hostelry or farmhouse was sought. The preparations for camping were altogether exciting, the erection of tents, the kindling of fires, the unharnessing and watering and feeding of the stock, and the eager industry of the cooks and their assistants in the midst of the array of shining utensils all combining to stamp the scene upon the mind of an impressionable child.

However, in the course of time the slow rolling of our carriage became monotonous to the restive children of the caravan, and the novelty of standing at the windows and gazing over the lifting hills soon wore off. My aunt felt the fatigue less, we thought, for she was a famous soliloquist, and often talked to herself as we rode, sometimes laughing aloud at her own good company. I think we children regarded her as deranged, if harmless, until one day she proved her sanity to our complete satisfaction. In a moment of insupportable tedium we conceived the idea of dropping the little tin cups, with which each was provided, in order to see if the wheels would run over them. One after another the vessels were lowered, and each, to our intense delight, was smashed flat as the proverbial pancake. When my aunt discovered our mischief, being a gentle soul, she merely reprimanded us, and at the next settlement purchased others; but when these and yet others followed the fate of the first, she became less indulgent. Switches were cut from the forest trees, three pairs of pink palms tingled with the punishment then and there administered, and the remembrance thereof restrained my cousins’ and my own destructiveness for the remainder of the journey.

Arrived at Tuscaloosa, I spent four years in the shelter of the motherly affection of my aunt, Mrs. Collier, when, her health failing, I was placed in the home of my mother’s brother, Alfred Battle, a wealthy planter, residing a day’s journey from the little capital. My recollections of that early Alabama life centre themselves about a great white house set in widening grounds, in the midst of which was a wondrous sloe-tree, white with blooms. Many times I and my cousins played under it by moonlight, watching the shadows of the branches as they trembled on the white-sanded earth below, wondering at them, and not sure whether they were fairies’ or angels’ or witches’ shapes. Around that tree, too, we played “Chickamy, Chickamy, Craney Crow,” and, at the climax, “What o’clock, Old Witch?” would scamper wildly to elude the pursuit of the imaginary old witch. Here, a healthy and happy child, I pursued my studies. My uncle’s wife, a woman of marked domestic tastes, taught me to sew and knit and to make a buttonhole, and I made progress in books under the guidance of a visiting teacher; but, my task ended, I flew to the meadows and orchards and to the full-flowering clover-field, or to the plantation nursery to see the old mammies feed the babies with “clabber,” with bread well crumbed in it, or cush, made of bread soaked in gravy and softly mashed.

It was during this bucolic period of my life that the stars fell. I did not witness these celestial phenomena, being sound asleep as a child should be; but, for years afterward, time was marked from that great event. I remember perfectly my aunt’s description of it. People ran from their houses weeping and falling on their knees, praying for mercy and forgiveness. Everywhere the terrifying belief spread that the Day of Judgment was at hand; and nights were made vocal with the exhortations of the black preachers who now became numerous upon the plantation. To very recent days old Negroes have dated their calendar from “de year when de stars fell.”

Ah, me! how long ago that time of childhood’s terrors and delights in that young open country! Of all my early playmates, but one, my cousin William Battle, remains, a twin relic of antiquity! From the first we were cronies; yet we had a memorable disagreement upon one occasion which caused a slight breach between us. We were both intensely fond of my aunt’s piano, but my cousin was compelled to satisfy his affection for music in secret; for Uncle Battle, who heartily encouraged my efforts, was positive in his disapproval of those of my cousin. He thought piano-playing in a man to be little short of a crime, and was quite resolved his son should not be guilty of it. My cousin and I, therefore, connived to arrange our practice in such a way as would allow him to finish his practice at the instrument before my uncle’s return from the day’s duties.

Upon the fatal occasion of our disagreement, however, I refused, upon my cousin’s appearance, to yield my seat, whereupon, losing his temper, he gave me a tap on the cheek. In a moment the struggle was on! Our tussle was at its height, I on top and pummelling with all my might, when, the door opening suddenly, a startled cousin appeared.

“La!” she exclaimed in terror, “Cousin Will and Virginia are fighting!”

“No, we’re not!” I replied stoutly. “We’re just playing;” and I retired with tufts of reddish hair in both hands, but leaving redder spots on the face of my cousinly antagonist. He, thoroughly satisfied to be released, no longer desired to play the piano, nor with me. His head has long been innocent of hair, an hereditary development, but he has always asserted that his baldness is attributable to “My cousin, Mrs. Clay, who, in our youthful gambols, scalped me.”

During my twelfth year, my uncle removed to Tuscaloosa, where my real school days began. It was the good fortune of the young State at that time to have in the neighbourhood of its capital many excellent teachers, among whom was my instructress at the school in Tuscaloosa to which I now was sent. I cannot refrain from telling a strange incident in her altogether remarkable life. From the beginning it was full of unusual vicissitudes. By birth an English gentlewoman, her mother had died while she was yet an infant. In the care of a young aunt, the child was sent to America to be brought up by family connections residing here. On the long sailing voyage the infant sickened and, to all appearances, died. The ship was in midocean, and the young guardian, blaming her own inexperience, wept bitterly as preparations went on for the burial. At last, all else being ready, the captain himself came forward to sew the little body in the sack, which when weighted would sink the hapless baby into the sea. He bent over the little form, arranging it, when by some strange fortune a bottle of whisky, which he carried in his pocket, was spilled and the contents began to flow upon the child’s face. Before an exclamation could be made the little one opened its eyes and gave so many evidences of life that restoratives were applied promptly. The infant recovered and grew to womanhood. She became, when widowed, the mistress of a school in our little capital, and her descendants, in many instances, have risen to places of distinction in public life.

An instructress of that period to whom the women of early Alabama owed much was Maria Brewster Brooks, who, as Mrs. Stafford, the wife of Professor Samuel M. Stafford, became celebrated, and fills a page of conspicuous value in the educational history of the State. She was born on the banks of the Merrimac and came to Tuscaloosa in her freshest womanhood. First her pupil, and afterward her friend, our mutual affection, begun in the early thirties, continued until her demise in the eighties. Many of her wards became in after years notable figures in the social life of the national capital, among them Mrs. Hilary Herbert.

In Tuscaloosa there resided, besides my Aunt Collier, few of my father’s and mother’s kin, and by a natural affinity I fell under the guardianship of my father’s brother, Thomas B. Tunstall, Secretary of State of Alabama. He was a bachelor; but all that I lacked in my separation from my father my uncle supplied, feeding the finer sides of my nature, and inspiring in me a love of things literary even at an age when I had scarce handled a book. My uncle’s influence began with my earliest days in Alabama. My aunt, Mrs. Collier, was delicate, Mrs. Battle domestic; Uncle Battle was a famous business man; and Uncle Collier was immersed in law and increasing political interests; but my memory crowds with pictures of my Uncle Tom, walking slowly up and down, playing his violin, and interspersing his numbers with some wise counsel to the child beside him. He taught me orally of poetry, and music, of letters and philosophy, and of the great world’s great interests. He early instilled in me a pride of family, while reading to me Scott’s fine tribute to Brian Tunstall, “the stainless knight,” or, as he rehearsed stories of Sir Cuthbert Tunstall, Knight of the Garter, and Bishop of London in the time of gentle Queen Anne; and it was in good Uncle Tom’s and my father’s company that the fascinations of the drama were first revealed to me.

While I was yet a schoolgirl, and so green that, had I not been protected by these two loving guardians, I would have been eaten up by the cows on the Mobile meadows, I was taken to see “The Gamester,” in which Charles Kean and Ellen Tree were playing. It was a remarkable and ever-remembered experience. As the play proceeded, I became so absorbed in the story, so real and so thrillingly portrayed, that from silent weeping I took to sniffling and from sniffling to ill-repressed sobbing. I leaned forward in my seat tensely, keeping my eyes upon the stage, and equally oblivious of my father and uncle and the strangers who were gazing at me on every side. Now and then, as I sopped the briny outflow of my grief, realising in some mechanical manner that my handkerchief was wet, I would take it by two corners and wave it back and forth in an effort to dry it; but all the while the tears gushed from my eyes in rivulets. My guardians saw little of the play that night, for the amusement I afforded these experienced theatre-goers altogether exceeded in interest the mimic tragedy that so enthralled me.

When the curtain fell upon the death-scene I was exhausted; but another and counteracting experience awaited me, for the after-piece was “Robert Macaire,” and now, heartily as I had wept before, I became convulsed with laughter as I saw the deft pickpocket (impersonated by Crisp, the comedian), courtly as a king, bowing in the dance, while removing from the unsuspecting ladies and gentlemen about him their brooches and jewels! My absorption in the performance was so great that I scarce heard the admonitions of my father and uncle, who begged me, in whispers, to control myself. Nor did I realise there was another person in the house but the performers on the stage and myself.

Years afterward, while travelling with my husband, he recognised in a fellow traveller a former friend from southern Alabama, a Mr. Montague, and brought him to me to present him. To my chagrin, he had scarcely taken my hand when he burst into immoderate and inexplicable laughter.

“Never,” said he to Mr. Clay, “shall I forget the time when I first saw your wife! We went to see Tree; but, sir, not half the house knew what was going on on the stage for watching the little girl in the auditorium! Never till then had I imagined the full power of the drama! Her delight, her tears and laughter, I am sure, were remembered by the Mobilians long after the ‘stars’ acting was forgotten.”

That visit to Mobile was my first flight into the beautiful world that lay beyond the horizon of my school life. In the enjoyments devised for me by my father in those few charmed days, I saw, if not clearly, at least prophetically, what of beauty and joy life might hold for me. Upon our arrival in the lovely little Bay city, my father, learning of a ball for which preparations were on foot, determined I should attend it. Guided perhaps in his choice of colour by the tints of health that lay in his little daughter’s cheeks, he selected for me a gown of peach-blossom silk, which all my life I have remembered as the most beautiful of dresses, and one which transformed me, heretofore confined to brown holland gowns by my prudent aunt, Mrs. Battle, as truly as Cinderella was changed into a princess.

Upon the evening of that never-to-be-forgotten Boat Club Ball, blushing and happy, eager, with delightful anticipations, yet timorous, too, for my guardians, the Battles, had disapproved of dancing and had rigorously excluded this and other worldly pleasures from their ward’s accomplishments, I was conducted by my father to the ball. In my heart lay the fear that I would be, after all, a mere looker-on, or appear awkward if I should venture to dance as did the others; but neither of these misgivings proved to have been well founded.

My father led me at once to Mme. Le Vert, then the reigning queen of every gathering at which she appeared, and in her safe hands every fear vanished. I had heard my elders speak frequently of her beauty, and somehow had imagined her tall. She was less so than I had pictured, but so winning and cordial to me, a timid child, that I at once capitulated before the charm she cast over everyone who came into conversation with her. I thought her face the sweetest I had ever seen. She had a grace and frankness which made everyone with whom she talked feel that he or she alone commanded her attention. I do not recall her making a single bon mot, but she was vivacious and smiling. Her charm, it seemed to me, lay in her lovely manners and person and her permeating intellectuality.

I remember Mme. Le Vert’s appearance on that occasion distinctly, though to describe it now seems garish. To see her then was bewildering, and all her colour was harmony. She wore a gown of golden satin, and on her hair a wreath of coral flowers, which her morocco shoes matched in hue. In the dance she moved like a bird on the wing. I can see her now in her shining robe, as she swayed and glided, holding the shimmering gown aside as she floated through the “ladies’ chain.” The first dance of my life was a quadrille, vis-à-vis with this renowned beauty, who took me under her protection and encouraged me from time to time.

“Don’t be afraid, my dear,” she would sweetly say, “Do just as I do,” and I glided after my wonderful instructress like one enchanted, with never a mishap.

Mme. Le Vert, who in years to come became internationally celebrated, was a kinswoman of Clement Claiborne Clay, and in after times, when I became his wife, I often met her, but throughout my long life I have remembered that first meeting in Mobile, and her charm and grace have remained a prized picture in my memory. It was of this exquisite belle that Washington Irving remarked: “But one such woman is born in the course of an empire.”

It was to my Uncle Tom that I owed the one love sorrow of my life. It was an affair of the greatest intensity while it endured, and was attended by the utmost anguish for some twelve or fourteen hours. During that space of time I endured all the hopes and fears, the yearnings and despairs to which the human heart is victim.

I was nearing the age of fifteen when my uncle one evening bade me put on my prettiest frock and accompany him to the home of a friend, where a dance was to be given. I was dressed with all the alacrity my old mammy was capable of summoning, and was soon ensconced in the carriage and on my way to the hospitable scene. En route we stopped at the hotel, where my uncle alighted, reappearing in a moment with a very handsome young man, who entered the carriage with him and drove with us to the house, where he, too, was to be a guest.

Never had my eyes beheld so pleasing a masculine wonder! He was the personification of manly beauty! His head was shapely as Tasso’s (in after life I often heard the comparison made), and in his eyes there burned a romantic fire that enslaved me from the moment their gaze rested upon me. At their warmth all the ardour, all the ideals upon which a romantic heart had fed rose in recognition of their realisation in him. During the evening he paid me some pretty compliments, remarking upon my hazel eyes and the gleam of gold in my hair, and he touched my curls admiringly, as if they were revered by him.

My head swam! Lohengrin never dazzled Elsa more completely than did this knight of the poet’s head charm the maiden that was I! We danced together frequently throughout the evening, and my hero rendered me every attention a kind man may offer to the little daughter of a valued friend. When at last we stepped into the carriage and turned homeward, the whole world was changed for me.

My first apprehension of approaching sorrow came as we neared the hotel. To my surprise, the knight was willing, nay, desired to be set down there. A dark suspicion crept into my mind that perhaps, after all, my hero might be less gallant than I had supposed, else why did he not seek this opportunity of riding home with me? If this wonderful emotion that possessed me also had actuated him—and how could I doubt it after his devotion throughout the evening?—how could he bear to part from me in this way without a single word or look of tenderness?

As the door closed behind him I leaned back in the darkest corner of the carriage and thought hard, though not hardly of him. After a little my uncle roused me by saying, “Did my little daughter enjoy this evening?”

I responded enthusiastically.

“And was I not kind to provide you with such a gallant cavalier? Isn’t Colonel Jere Clemens a handsome man?”

Ah, was he not? My full heart sang out his praises with an unmistakable note. My uncle listened sympathetically. Then he continued, “Yes, he’s a fine fellow! A fine fellow, Virginia, and he has a nice little wife and baby!”

No thunderbolt ever fell more crushingly upon the unsuspecting than did these awful words from the lips of my uncle! I know not how I reached my room, but once there I wept passionately throughout the night and much of the following morning. Within my own heart I accused my erstwhile hero of the rankest perfidy; of villainy of every imaginable quality; and in this recoil of injured pride perished my first love dream, vanished the heroic wrappings of my quondam knight!

Having finished the curriculum of the institute presided over by Miss Brooks, I was sent to the “Female Academy” at Nashville, Tennessee, to perfect my studies in music and literature, whence I returned to Tuscaloosa all but betrothed to Alexander Keith McClung, already a famous duellist. I met him during a visit to my Uncle Fort’s home, in Columbus, Mississippi, and the Colonel’s devotion to me for many months was the talk of two States. He was the gallantest lover that ever knelt at a lady’s feet! Many a winsome girl admired him, and my sweet cousin, Martha Fort, was wont to say she would “rather marry Colonel McClung than any man alive”; but I—I loved him madly while with him, but feared him when away from him; for he was a man of fitful, uncertain moods and given to periods of the deepest melancholy. At such times he would mount his horse “Rob Roy,” wild and untamable as himself, and dash to the cemetery, where he would throw himself down on a convenient grave and stare like a madman into the sky for hours. A man of reckless bravery, in after years he was the first to mount the ramparts of Monterey shouting victory. As he ran, carrying his country’s flag in his right hand, a shot whizzing by took off two fingers of his left.

I was thrown much in the company of Colonel McClung while at my uncle’s home, but resisted his pleading for a binding engagement, telling him with a strange courage and frankness, ere I left Columbus, my reason for this persistent indecision. Before leaving for the academy at Nashville, I had met, at my Uncle Collier’s, in Tuscaloosa, the young legislator, Clement C. Clay, Jr., and had then had a premonition that if we should meet when I returned from school I would marry him. At that time I was an unformed girl, and he, Mr. Clay, was devoted to a young lady of the capital; but this, as I knew, was a matter of the past. I would surely meet him again at Uncle Collier’s (I told Mr. McClung), and, if the attraction continued, I felt sure I would marry him. If not, I would marry him, Colonel McClung. So we parted, and, though at that time the Colonel did not doubt but that mine was a dreaming girl’s talk, my premonitions were promptly realised.

Upon my return to our provincial little capital, then a community of six thousand souls, I found it thronging with gallants from every county in the State. The belles of the town, in preparation for the gayety of the legislative “season” of two months, were resplendent in fresh and fashionable toilettes. Escritoires were stocked with stationery suitable for the billet-doux that were sure to be required; and there, too, were the little boxes of glazed mottoed wafers, then all the fashion, with which to seal the pretty missives. All the swains of that day wrote in verse to the ladies they admired, and each tender rhyme required a suitably presented acknowledgment. I remember, though I have preserved none save those my husband wrote me, several creditable effusions by Colonel McClung, one of which began:

“Fearful and green your breathless poet stands,” etc.

Shortly after my return from Columbus, I attended a ball where I danced with William L. Yancey, even then recognised for the splendour of his intellectual powers and his eloquence in the forum. I had heard him speak, and thought his address superb, and I told him so.

“Ah,” he answered gayly, “if it had not been for one pair of hazel eyes I should have been submerged in a mere sea of rhetoric!”

On the night of my dance with him I wore a white feather in my hair, and on the morrow a messenger from Mr. Yancey bore me some charming verses, addressed “To the lady with the snow-white plume!”

I have said my strange premonitions regarding Mr. Clay were realised. Ten days after we met we were affianced. There was a hastily gathered trousseau selected in part by Mme. LeVert in Mobile, and hurried on to my aunt’s home. A month later, and our marriage was celebrated with all the éclat our little city could provide, and the congratulations of a circle of friends that included half the inhabitants. It is sixty years since that wonderful wedding day, and of the maidens who attended me—there were six—and the happy company that thronged Judge Collier’s home on that crisp February morning when I crossed the Rubicon of life, all—even the bridegroom—have passed long since into the shadowy company of memory and the dead.

That marriage feast in the morn of my life was beautiful; the low, spacious house of primitive architecture was white with hyacinths, and foliage decorated every available space. The legislature came in a body, solons of the State, and young aspirants for fame; the president and faculty of the State University, of which Mr. Clay was a favoured son; Dr. Capers, afterward Bishop of South Carolina, officiated, and, in that glorious company of old Alabamians, my identity as Virginia Tunstall was merged forever with that of the rising young statesman, Clement C. Clay, Jr.

A week of festivity followed the ceremony, and then my husband took me to my future home, among his people, in the northern part of the State. There being no railroad connection between Tuscaloosa and Huntsville in those days (the early forties), we made the journey from the capital in a big four-wheeled stage-coach. The stretch of country now comprised in the active city of Birmingham, the southern Pittsburg, was then a rugged place of rocks and boulders over which our vehicle pitched perilously. Stone Mountain reached, we were obliged to descend and pick our way on foot, the roughness of the road making the passage of the coach a very dangerous one. But these difficulties only lent a charm to us, for the whole world was enwrapped in the glamour of our youthful joys. The sunsets, blazing crimson on the horizon, seemed gloriously to proclaim the sunrise of our life.

We arrived in Huntsville on the evening of the second day of our journey. Our driver, enthusiastically proud of his part in the home-bringing of the bride, touched up the spirited horses as we crossed the Public Square and blew a bugle blast as we wheeled round the corner; when, fairly dashing down Clinton Street, he pulled up in masterly style in front of “Clay Castle.” It was wide and low and spacious, as were all the affluent homes of that day, and now was ablaze with candles to welcome the travellers. All along the streets friendly hands and kerchiefs had waved a welcome to us. Here, within, awaited a great gathering of family and friends eager to see the chosen bride of a well-loved son. This was my home-coming to Huntsville, thereafter to be my haven for all time, though called in a few years by my husband’s growing reputation to take my place beside him in Congressional circles at Washington.

CHAPTER II
Washington Personages in the Fifties

When my husband’s parents were members of the Congressional circle in Washington—1829–’35—the journey to the capital from their home in northern Alabama was no light undertaking. In those early days Congressman (afterward Governor, and United States Senator) and Mrs. C. C. Clay, Sr., travelled by coach to the Federal City, accompanied by their coloured coachman, Toney (who, because of his expert driving, soon became notable in Washington), and a maid-servant, Milly, who were necessary to their comfort and station. Many days were consumed in these journeys, that lay through Tennessee, the Carolinas and Virginia, during which the travellers were exposed to all the dangers common to a young and often unsettled forest country. The tangled woods of the South land, odorous with the cedar or blossoming with dogwood, mimosa or magnolias, were often Arcadias of beauty. The land of the sky, now the object of pilgrimages for the wealthy and become the site of palaces built by kings of commerce, was then still more beautiful with primeval freshness. Far as the eye could see, as hills were scaled and valleys crossed, were verdured slopes and wooded mountain crests. The Palisades of the Tennessee, as yet scarcely penetrated by Northern tourists, were then the wonder as they still are the pride of the traveller from the South.

In 1853, my husband was elected a United States Senator, to take the seat of a former college friend, Jere Clemens, whose term had just expired, and succeeding his father C. C. Clay, Sr., after eleven years. In December of the same year, we began our trip to the capital under comparatively modern conditions. My several visits to Vermont and New Jersey Hydropathic Cures, then the fashionable sanitariums, had already inured me to long journeys. By this time steam railways had been established, and, though not so systematically connected as to make possible the taking of long trips over great distances without devious and tiresome changes, they had lessened the time spent upon the road between Alabama and Washington very appreciably; but, while in comparison with those in common use to-day, the cars were primitive, nevertheless they were marvels of comfort and speed to the travellers of the fifties. Sleeping cars were not yet invented, but the double-action seatbacks of the regular coaches, not then, as now, screwed down inexorably, made it a simple matter to convert two seats into a kind of couch, on which, with the aid of a pillow, one managed very well to secure a half repose as the cars moved soberly along.

Our train on that first official journey to Washington proved to be a kind of inchoative “Congressional Limited.” We found many of our fellow-passengers to be native Alabamians, the majority being on government business bent. Among them were my husband’s confrère from southern Alabama, Senator Fitzpatrick and his wife, and a friendship was then and there begun among us, which lasted uninterruptedly until death detached some of the parties to it; also Congressman Dowdell, “dear old Dowdell,” as my husband and everyone in the House shortly learned to call him, and James L. Orr of South Carolina, who afterward became Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Minister to Russia under President Grant. Mr. Orr, late in 1860, was one of the three commissioners sent by South Carolina to President Buchanan to arbitrate on the question of the withdrawal of United States troops from Forts Sumter and Moultrie, in Charleston Harbour.

Nor should I omit to name the most conspicuous man on that memorable north-bound train, Congressman W. R. W. Cobb, who called himself the “maker of Senators,” and whom people called the most successful vote-poller in the State of Alabama. Mr. Cobb resorted to all sorts of tricks to catch the popular votes, such as the rattling of tinware and crockery—he had introduced bills to secure indigent whites from a seizure for debt that would engulf all their possessions, and in them had minutely defined all articles that were to be thus exempt, not scorning to enumerate the smallest items of the kitchen—, and he delighted in the singing of homely songs composed for stump purposes. One of these which he was wont to introduce at the end of a speech, and which always seemed to be especially his own, was called “The Homestead Bill.” Of this remarkable composition there were a score of verses, at least, that covered every possible possession which the heart of the poor man might crave, ranging from land and mules to household furniture. The song began,

“Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm!”

and Mr. Cobb would sing it in stentorian tones, winking, as he did so, to first one and then another of his admiring listeners, and punctuating his phrases by chewing, with great gusto, a piece of onion and the coarsest of corn “pone.” These evidences of his democracy gave huge delight to the masses, though it aroused in me, a young wife, great indignation, that, in the exigencies of a public career my husband should be compelled to enter a contest with such a man. To me it was the meeting of a Damascus blade and a meat-axe, and in my soul I resented it.

In 1849 this stump-favourite had defeated the brilliant Jere Clemens, then a candidate for Congress, but immediately thereafter Mr. Clemens was named for the higher office of U. S. Senator and elected. In 1853 an exactly similar conjunction of circumstances resulted in the election of Mr. Clay. I accompanied my husband during the canvass in which he was defeated, and thereby became, though altogether innocently, the one obstacle to Mr. Cobb’s usually unanimous election.

It happened that during the campaign Mr. Clay and I stopped at a little hostelry, that lay in the very centre of one of Mr. Cobb’s strongest counties. It was little more than a flower-embowered cottage, kept by “Aunt Hannah,” a kindly soul, whose greatest treasure was a fresh-faced, pretty daughter, then entering her “teens.” I returned to our room after a short absence, just in time to see this village beauty before my mirror, arrayed in all the glory of a beautiful and picturesque hat which I had left upon the bed during my absence. It was a lovely thing of the period, which I had but recently brought back from the North, having purchased it while en route for Doctor Wesselhœft’s Hydropathic Institute in Brattleboro, Vermont.

The little rustic girl of Alabama looked very winsome and blossomy in the pretty gew-gaw, and I asked her impulsively if she liked it. Her confusion was sufficient answer, and I promptly presented it to her, on condition that she would give me her sunbonnet in return.

The exchange was quickly made, and when Mr. Clay and I departed I wore a pea-green cambric bonnet, lined with pink and stiffened with pasteboard slats. I little dreamed that this exchange of millinery, so unpremeditated, and certainly uncalculating, was a political master-stroke; but, so it proved. It undermined Mr. Cobb’s Gibraltar; for at the election that followed, the vote in that county was practically solid for Mr. Clay, where formerly Mr. Cobb had swept it clean.

When, upon the train en route for the capital in the winter of ’53, Senator Fitzpatrick insisted upon presenting the erstwhile triumphant politician, I took the long, flail-like hand he offered me with no accentuated cordiality; my reserve, however, seemed not to disturb Mr. Cobb’s proverbial complacency.

“I’ve got a crow to pick with you, Mrs. Clay,” he began, “for that pink bonnet trick at old Aunt Hannah’s!”

“And I have a buzzard to pick with you!” I responded promptly, “for defeating my husband!”

“You ought to feel obliged to me,” retorted the Congressman, continuing “For I made your husband a Senator!”

“Well,” I rejoined, “I’ll promise not to repeat the bonnet business, if you’ll give me your word never again to sing against my husband! That’s unfair, for you know he can’t sing!” which, amid the laughter of our fellow-passengers, Mr. Cobb promised.

Our entrance into the Federal City was not without its humorous side. We arrived in the early morning, about two o’clock, driving up to the National Hotel, where, owing to a mistake on the part of the night-clerk, an incident occurred with which for many a day I twitted my husband and our male companions on that eventful occasion.

At that period it was the almost universal custom for Southern gentlemen to wear soft felt hats, and the fashion was invariable when travelling. In winter, too, long-distance voyagers as commonly wrapped themselves in the blanket shawl, which was thrown around the shoulders in picturesque fashion and was certainly comfortable, if not strictly à la mode. My husband and the other gentlemen of our party were so provided on our journey northward, and upon our arrival, it must be admitted, none in that travel-stained and weary company would have been mistaken for a Washington exquisite of the period.

As our carriage stopped in front of the hotel door, Mr. Dowdell, muffled to the ears, his soft-brimmed hat well down over his face (for the wind was keen), stepped out quickly to arrange for our accommodation. The night was bitterly cold, and the others of our company were glad to remain under cover until our spokesman returned.

This he did in a moment or two. He appeared crestfallen, and quite at a loss.

“Nothing here, Clay!” he said to my husband. “Man says they have no rooms!”

“Nonsense, Dowdell!” was Senator Clay’s response. “You must be mistaken. Here, step inside while I inquire!” He, muffled as mysteriously, and in no whit more trust-inspiring than the dejected Mr. Dowdell, strode confidently in. Not many minutes elapsed ere he, too, returned.

“Well!” he said. “I don’t understand it, but Dowdell’s right! They say they have no rooms for us!”

At this we were dismayed, and a chorus of exclamations went up from men and women alike. What were we to do? In a moment, I had resolved.

“There’s some mistake! I don’t believe it,” I said. “I’ll go and see;” and, notwithstanding my husband’s remonstrances, I hurried out of the carriage and into the hotel. Stepping to the desk I said to the clerk in charge: “Is it possible you have no rooms for our party in this large hostelry? Is it possible, Sir, that at this season, when Congress is convening, you have reserved no rooms for Congressional guests?” He stammered out some confused reply, but I hurried on.

“I am Mrs. Clay, of Alabama. You have refused my husband, Senator Clay, and his friend, Representative Dowdell. What does it mean?”

“Why, certainly, Madam,” he hastened to say, “I have rooms for those.” And forthwith ordered the porters to go for our luggage. Then, reaching hurriedly for various keys, he added, “I beg your pardon, Madam! I did not know you were those!”

What he did believe us to be, piloted as we were by two such brigand-like gentlemen as Senator Clay and Mr. Dowdell, we never knew; enough that our tired party were soon installed in comfortable apartments. It was by reason of this significant episode that I first realized the potency in Washington of conventional apparel and Congressional titles.

My husband being duly sworn in on the 14th of December, 1853, in a few days our “mess” was established at the home of Mr. Charles Gardner, at Thirteenth and G Streets. Here my first season in Washington was spent. Besides Senator Clay and myself, our party was composed of Senator and Mrs. Fitzpatrick, and Representatives Dowdell and Orr, and to this little nucleus of congenial spirits were afterward added in our later residences at historic old Brown’s Hotel and the Ebbitt House, many whose names are known to the nation.

Though a sad winter for me, for in it I bore and buried my only child, yet my recollections of that season, as its echoes reached our quiet parlours, are those of boundless entertainment and bewildering ceremony. The season was made notable in the fashionable world by the great fête champêtre given by the British Minister, Mr. Crampton, and the pompous obsequies of Baron Bodisco, for many years resident Minister from Russia; but of these I learned only through my ever kind friend, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who for months was my one medium of communication with the fashionable outside world. She was a beautiful woman, with superb carriage and rare and rich colouring, and possessed, besides, a voice of great sweetness, with which, during that winter of seclusion, she often made our simple evenings a delight. While shortly she became a leader in matters social, Mrs. Fitzpatrick was still more exalted in our own little circle for her singing of such charming songs as “Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch,” and other quaint Scotch ditties. Nor was Mrs. Fitzpatrick the one musician of our “mess,” for Mr. Dowdell had a goodly voice and sang with lusty enjoyment the simpler ballads of the day, to say nothing of many melodious Methodist hymns.

My experiences as an active member of Washington society, therefore, began in the autumn of 1854 and the succeeding spring, when, notwithstanding an air of gravity and reserve that was perceptible at that social pivot, the White House, the gaiety of the capital was gaining an impetus in what later appeared to me to be a veritable “merry madness.”

It is true that it did not even then require the insight of a keen observer to detect in social, as in political gatherings, the constantly widening division between the Northern and Southern elements gathered in the Government City. For myself, I knew little of politics, notwithstanding the fact that from my childhood I had called myself “a pronounced Jeffersonian Democrat.” Naturally, I was an hereditary believer in States’ Rights, the real question, which, in an attempt to settle it, culminated in our Civil War; and I had been bred among the law-makers of the sturdy young State of Alabama, many of whom had served at the State and National capitals with marked distinction; but from my earliest girlhood three lessons had been taught me religiously, viz.: to be proud alike of my name and blood and section; to read my Bible; and, last, to know my “Richmond Enquirer.” Often, as an aid to the performance of this last duty, have I read aloud its full contents, from the rates of advertisement down, until my dear uncle Tom Tunstall has fallen asleep over my childish efforts. It is not, then, remarkable that, upon my arrival, I was at once cognisant of the feeling which was so thinly concealed between the strenuous parties established in the capital.

MRS. BENJAMIN FITZPATRICK
of Alabama

During the first half of the Pierce administration, however, though feeling ran high in the Senate and the House, the surface of social life was smiling and peaceful. The President had every reason to feel kindly toward the people of the South who had so unanimously supported him, and he was as indiscriminating and impartial in his attitude to the opposing parties as even the most critical could desire; but, gradually, by a mutual instinct of repulsion that resolved itself into a general consent, the representatives of the two antagonistic sections seldom met save at promiscuous assemblages to which the exigencies of public life compelled them. To be sure, courtesies were exchanged between the wives of some of the Northern and Southern Senators, and formal calls were paid on Cabinet days, as etiquette demanded, upon the ladies of the Cabinet circle; but, by a tacit understanding, even at the entertainments given at the foreign legations, and at the houses of famous Washington citizens, this opposition of parties was carefully considered in the sending out of invitations, in order that no unfortunate rencontre might occur between uncongenial guests.

The White House, as I have said, was scarcely a place of gaiety. Mrs. Pierce’s first appearance in public occurred at the Presidential levee, late in 1853. An invalid for several years, she had recently received a shock, which was still a subject of pitying conversation throughout the country. It had left a terrible impress upon Mrs. Pierce’s spirits. While travelling from her home in New Hampshire to Washington to witness her husband’s exaltation as the President of the United States, an accident, occurring at Norwalk, Connecticut, suddenly deprived her of her little son, the last surviving of her several children. At her first public appearance at the White House, clad in black velvet and diamonds, her natural pallor being thereby greatly accentuated, a universal sympathy was awakened for her. To us who knew her, the stricken heart was none the less apparent because hidden under such brave and jewelled apparel, which she had donned, the better to go through the ordeal exacted by “the dear people.”

I had made the acquaintance of General and Mrs. Pierce during the preceding year while on a visit to the New England States; my husband’s father had been the President’s confrère in the Senate early in the forties; and my brother-in-law, Colonel Hugh Lawson Clay, had fought beside the New Hampshire General in the Mexican War. The occupants of the Executive Mansion therefore were no strangers to us; yet Mrs. Pierce’s sweet graciousness and adaptability came freshly to me as I saw her assume her place as the social head of the nation. Her sympathetic nature and very kind heart, qualities not always to be perceived through the formalities of governmental etiquette, were demonstrated to me on many occasions. My own ill-health proved to be a bond between us, and, while custom forbade the paying of calls by the wife of the Chief Magistrate upon the wives of Senators, I was indebted to Mrs. Pierce for many acts of friendliness, not the least of which were occasional drives with her in the Presidential equipage.

A favourite drive in those days was throughout the length of Pennsylvania Avenue, then but sparsely and irregularly built up. The greatest contrasts in architecture existed, hovels often all but touching the mansions of the rich. The great boulevard was a perfect romping ground for the winds. Chevy Chase and Georgetown were popular objective points, and the banks of the Potomac, in shad-seining season, were alive with gay sight-seers. The markets of Washington have always excelled, affording every luxury of earth and sea, and that at a price which gives to the owner of even a moderate purse a leaning toward epicureanism. In the houses of the rich the serving of dinners became a fine art.

On the first occasion of my dining at the President’s table, I was struck with the spaciousness of the White House, and the air of simplicity which everywhere pervaded. Very elaborate alterations were made in the mansion for Mr. Pierce’s successor, but in the day of President and Mrs. Pierce it remained practically as unimposing as in the time of President Monroe.

The most remarkable features in all the mansion, to my then unaccustomed eyes, were the gold spoons which were used invariably at all State dinners. They were said to have been brought from Paris by President Monroe, who had been roundly criticised for introducing into the White House a table accessory so undemocratic! Besides these extraordinary golden implements, there were as remarkable bouquets, made at the government greenhouses. They were stiff and formal things, as big round as a breakfast plate, and invariably composed of a half-dozen wired japonicas ornamented with a pretentious cape of marvellously wrought lace-paper. At every plate, at every State dinner, lay one of these memorable rigid bouquets. This fashion, originating at the White House, was taken up by all Washington. For an entire season the japonica was the only flower seen at the houses of the fashionable or mixing in the toilettes of the belles.

But if, for that, my first winter in Washington, the White House itself was sober, the houses of the rich Senators and citizens of Washington, of the brilliant diplomatic corps, and of some of the Cabinet Ministers, made ample amends for it. In the fifties American hospitality acquired a reputation, and that of the capital was synonymous with an unceasing, an augmenting round of dinners and dances, receptions and balls. A hundred hostesses renowned for their beauty and wit and vivacity vied with each other in evolving novel social relaxations. Notable among these were Mrs. Slidell, Mrs. Jacob Thompson, Miss Belle Cass, and the daughters of Secretary Guthrie; Mrs. Senator Toombs and Mrs. Ogle Tayloe, the Riggses, the Countess de Sartiges and Mrs. Cobb, wife of that jolly Falstaff of President Buchanan’s Cabinet, Howell Cobb. Mrs. Cobb was of the celebrated Lamar family, so famous for its brilliant and brave men, and lovely women. Highly cultured, modest as a wild wood-violet, inclined, moreover, to reserve, she was nevertheless capable of engrossing the attention of the most cultivated minds in the capital, and a conversation with her was ever a thing to be remembered. No more hospitable home was known in Washington than that of the Cobbs. The Secretary was a bon vivant, and his home the rendezvous of the epicurean as well as the witty and the intellectual.

Probably the most brilliant of all the embassies, until the coming of Lord and Lady Napier, was that of France. The Countess de Sartiges, who presided over it, was an unsurpassed hostess, besides being a woman of much manner and personal beauty; and, as did many others of the suite, she entertained on a lavish scale.

Mrs. Slidell, wife of the Senator from Louisiana, whose daughter Mathilde is now the wife of the Parisian banker, Baron Erlanger, became famous in the fifties for her matinée dances at which all the beauties and beaux of Washington thronged. Previous to her marriage with Senator Slidell she was Mlle. des Londes of New Orleans. A leader in all things fashionable, she was also one of the most devout worshippers at St. Aloysius’s church. I remember with what astonishment and admiration I watched her devotions one Sunday morning when, as the guest of Senator Mallory, himself a strict Romanist, I attended that church for the purpose of hearing a mass sung.

I knew Mrs. Slidell as the devotée of fashion, the wearer of unapproachable Parisian gowns, the giver of unsurpassed entertainments, the smiling, tireless hostess; but that Sunday morning as I saw her enter a pew just ahead of Senator Mallory and myself, sink upon her knees, and, with her eyes fixed upon the cross, repeating her prayers with a concentration that proved the sincerity of them, I felt as if another and greater side of her nature were being revealed to me. I never met her thereafter without a remembrance of that morning flitting through my mind.

During the early spring of 1854 I heard much of the imposing ceremonials attending the funeral of Baron Alexandre de Bodisco, Minister from Russia since 1838, the days of Van Buren. His young wife, a native of Georgetown, was one of the first to draw the attention of foreigners to the beauty of American women. The romantic old diplomat had learned to admire his future wife when, as a little girl, upon her daily return from school, he carried her books for her. Her beauty developed with her growth, and, before she was really of an age to appear in society, though already spoken of as the most beautiful woman in Georgetown, Harriet Williams became the Baroness de Bodisco, and was carried abroad for presentation at the Russian Court. Her appearance in that critical circle created a furore, echoes of which preceded her return to America. I have heard it said that this young bride was the first woman to whom was given the title, “the American Rose.”

I remember an amusing incident in which this lovely Baroness, unconsciously to herself, played the part of instructress to me. It was at one of my earliest dinners at the White House, ere I had thoroughly familiarised myself with the gastronomic novelties devised by the Gautiers (then the leading restaurateurs and confectioners of the capital), and the other foreign chefs who vied with them. Scarcely a dinner of consequence but saw some surprise in the way of a heretofore unknown dish. Many a time I have seen some one distinguished for his aplomb look about helplessly as the feast progressed, and gaze questioningly at the preparation before him, as if uncertain as to how it should be manipulated. Whenever I was in doubt as to the proper thing to do at these dignified dinners, I turned, as was natural, to those whose longer experience in the gay world was calculated to establish them as exemplars to the novice.

On the evening of which I write, the courses had proceeded without the appearance of unusual or alarm-inspiring dishes until we had neared the end of the menu, when I saw a waiter approaching with a large salver on which were dozens of mysterious parallelograms of paper, each of which was about five inches long and three broad, and appeared to be full of some novel conserve. Beside them lay a silver trowel. The packages were folded daintily, the gilt edges of their wrapping glittering attractively. What they contained I could not guess, nor could I imagine what we were supposed to do with them.

However, while still struggling to read the mystery of the salver, my eye fell upon Mme. de Bodisco, my vis-à-vis. She was a mountain of lace and jewels, of blonde beauty and composure, for even at this early period her proportions were larger than those which by common consent are accredited to the sylph. I could have no better instructress than this lady of international renown. I watched her; saw her take up the little trowel, deftly remove one of the packages from the salver to her plate, and composedly proceed to empty the paper receptacle of its contents—a delicious glacé. My suspense was at an end. I followed her example, very well satisfied with my good fortune in escaping a pitfall which a moment ago I felt sure yawned before me, for this method of serving creams and ices was the latest of culinary novelties.

I wondered if there were others at the great board who were equally uncertain as to what to do with the carefully concealed dainties. Looking down to the other side of the table, I saw our friend Mr. Blank, of Virginia, hesitatingly regarding the pile of paper which the waiter was holding toward him. Presently, as if resigned to his fate, he took up the trowel and began to devote considerable energy to an attempt to dig out the contents of the package nearest him, when, as I glanced toward him, he looked up, full of self-consciousness, and turned his gaze directly upon me. His expression told plainly of growing consternation.

I shook my head in withering pseudo-rebuke and swiftly indicated to him “to take a whole one.” Fortunately, he was quick-witted and caught my meaning, and, taking the hint, took likewise the cream without further mishap. After dinner we retired to the green-room, where, as was the custom, coffee and liqueurs were served. Here Mr. Blank approached, and, shaking my hand most gratefully, he whispered, “God bless my soul, Mrs. Clay! You’re the sweetest woman in the world! But for your goodness, heaven only knows what would have happened! Perhaps,” and he sipped his liqueur contemplatively, “perhaps I might have been struggling with that, that problem yet!”

I met Mme. de Bodisco many times during her widowhood, and was present at old St. John’s when her second marriage, with Captain Scott of Her British Majesty’s Life Guards, was celebrated. It was early in the Buchanan administration, and the bride was given away by the President. While St. John’s, I may add, was often referred to as a fashionable centre, yet much of genuine piety throve there, too.

Mme. de Bodisco, who, during her widowhood, had continued her belleship and had received, it was said, many offers of marriage from distinguished men, capitulated at last to the young guardsman just named. Great therefore was the interest in the second nuptials of so popular a beauty. Old St. John’s was crowded with the most distinguished personages in the capital. The aisles of the old edifice are narrow, and the march of the bride and the President to the altar was memorable, not only because of the distinction, but also by reason of the imposing proportions of both principals in it. In fact, the plumpness of the stately bride and the President’s ample figure, made the walk, side by side, an almost impossible feat. The difficulty was overcome, however, by the tactfulness of the President, who led the lady slightly in advance of himself until the chancel was reached. Here the slender young groom, garbed in the scarlet and gold uniform of his rank, stepped forward to claim her, and, though it was seen that he stood upon a hassock in order to lessen the difference in height between himself and his bride, it was everywhere admitted that Captain Scott was a handsome and gallant groom, and worthy the prize he had won.

This was Mme. de Bodisco’s last appearance in Washington. With her husband she went to India, where, it was said, the climate soon made havoc of her health and beauty; but her fame lingered long on the lips of her hosts of admirers in Washington. Nor did the name of de Bodisco disappear from the social list, for, though his sons were sent to Russia, there to be educated, Waldemar de Bodisco, nephew of the late Minister, long continued to be the most popular leader of the German in Washington.

Throughout the fifties, and indeed for several preceding decades, the foreign representatives and their suites formed a very important element in society in the capital. In some degree their members, the majority of whom were travelled and accomplished, and many representative of the highest culture in Europe, were our critics, if not our mentors. The standard of education was higher in Europe fifty years ago than in our own land, and to be a favourite at the foreign legations was equivalent to a certificate of accomplishment and social charms. An acquaintance with the languages necessarily was not the least of these.

The celebrated Octavia Walton, afterward famous as Mme. Le Vert, won her first social distinction in Washington, where, chaperoned by Mrs. C. C. Clay, Sr., a recognition of her grace and beauty, her intellectuality and charming manner was instantaneous. At a time when a knowledge of the foreign tongues was seldom acquired by American women, Miss Walton, who spoke French, Spanish and Italian with ease, speedily became the favourite of the Legations, and thence began her fame which afterward became international.

During my early residence in Washington, Addie Cutts (who became first the wife of Stephen A. Douglas and some years after his death married General Williams) was the admired of all foreigners. Miss Cutts was the niece of Mrs. Greenhow, a wealthy and brilliant woman of the capital, and, when she became Mrs. Douglas, held a remarkable sway for years. As a linguist Miss Cutts was reputed to be greatly gifted. If she spoke the many languages of which she was said to be mistress but half so eloquently as she uttered her own when, in 1865, she appealed to President Johnson on behalf of “her loved friend” my husband, the explanation of her remarkable nightly levees of the late fifties is readily found.

Though never, strictly speaking, a member of our “mess,” Mrs. Douglas and I were always firm friends. While she was still Miss Cutts, and feeling keenly the deprivations that fall to the lot of the beautiful daughter of a poor department clerk,[^[1]] she once complained to me poutingly of the cost of gloves.

“Nonsense,” I answered. “Were I Addie Cutts, with hands that might have been chiselled by Phidias, I would never disguise them in gloves, whatever the fashion!”

Miss Cutts entered into the enjoyment of the wealth and position which her marriage with Stephen A. Douglas gave her, with the regal manner of a princess. Her toilettes were of the richest and at all times were models of taste and picturesqueness. The effect she produced upon strangers was invariably one of instant admiration. Writing to me in 1863, my cousin, Mrs. Paul Hammond (who, before her marriage, had spent a winter with me at Washington), thus recalled her meeting with the noted beauty:

“Yesterday, with its green leaves and pearl-white flowers, called to my memory how Mrs. Douglas looked when I first saw her. She was receiving at her own house in a crêpe dress looped with pearls, and her hair was ornamented with green leaves and lilies. She was a beautiful picture!”

I had the pleasure, on one occasion, of bringing together Mrs. Douglas and Miss Betty Beirne, the tallest and the shortest belles of their time. They had long desired to meet, and each viewed the other with astonishment and pleasure. Miss Beirne, who afterward became the wife of Porcher Miles of South Carolina, was one of the tiniest of women, as Mrs. Douglas was one of the queenliest, and both were toasted continually in the capital.

During the incumbency of Mr. Crampton, he being a bachelor, few functions were given at the British Embassy which ladies attended. Not that the Minister and his suite were eremites. On the contrary, Mr. Crampton was exceedingly fond of “cutting a figure.” His traps were especially conspicuous on the Washington avenues. Always his own reinsman, the Minister’s fast tandem driving and the stiffly upright “tiger” behind him, for several years were one of the sights of the city. In social life the British Embassy was admirably represented by Mr. Lumley, Chargé d’Affaires, an affable young man who entered frankly into the life of the city and won the friendly feeling of all who met him. He was one of the four young men who took each the novel part of the elephant’s leg at a most amusing impromptu affair given by Mrs. George Riggs in honour of the girl prima donna, Adelina Patti. It was, I think, the evening of the latter’s début in “la Traviata.” Her appearance was the occasion of one of the most brilliant audiences ever seen in Washington. Everyone of note was present, and the glistening of silk and the flash of jewels no doubt contributed their quota of stimulus to the youthful star.

Within a day of the performance, Senator Clay and I received a note from Mrs. Riggs, inviting us informally, not to say secretly, to an after-the-opera supper, to meet the new diva and her supporting artists. We responded cordially and drove to the Riggs residence shortly after the close of the performance.

There, upon our arrival, we found representatives from all the foreign legations, Patti’s entire troupe, and perhaps a dozen others, exclusive of the family of our hostess. The prima donna soon came in, a lovely little maiden in evening dress, with a manner as winsome as was her appearance. The entertainment now began by graceful compliment from all present to the new opera queen, after which Mr. Riggs led her to the dining-room where the sumptuous supper was spread.

The table was almost as wide as that of the White House. Its dazzling silver and gold and crystal vessels, and viands well worthy these receptacles, made a brilliant centre around which the decorated foreigners seemed appropriately to cluster. The little cantatrice’s undisguised pleasure was good to see. She had worked hard during the performance of the opera, and her appetite was keen. She did ample justice, therefore, to Mrs. Riggs’s good cheer, and goblets were kept brimming for quite two hours.

This important part of the programme over, a young Englishman, by name Mr. Palmer, who, as the Chevalier Bertinatti (the Sardinian Minister) whispered to me, had been asked “to make some leetle fun for leetle Mees Patti,” opened the evening’s merriment by an amusing exhibition of legerdemain. Mr. Palmer, at that time a favourite music-teacher, who spent his time between Washington and Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, having in each city numerous fashionable pupils, afterward became known to the world as the great prestidigitator, Heller.

On the evening of the Riggses’ supper the young magician was in his best form. Handkerchiefs and trinkets disappeared mysteriously, only to come to light again in the most unexpected places, until the company became almost silent with wonder. Mr. Palmer’s last trick required a pack of cards, which were promptly forthcoming. Selecting the queen of hearts, he said, looking archly in the direction of the diminutive Patti: “This is also a queen; but she is a naughty girl and we will not have her!” saying which, with a whiff and a toss, he threw the card into the air, where it vanished!

Everyone was mystified; but Baron de Staeckl, the Russian Minister, incontinently broke the spell Mr. Palmer was weaving around us by picking up a card and pronouncing the same formula. Then, as all waited to see what he was about to do, in a most serio-comic manner he deftly and deliberately crammed it down Mr. Palmer’s collar! Amid peals of laughter from all present, the young man gave place to other and more general entertainment, in which the most dignified ambassadors indulged with the hilarity of schoolboys.

ADELINA PATTI
Aged Sixteen

From the foregoing incident it will be seen that Baron de Staeckl was the buffo of the evening. He was a large man of inspiring, not to say portly figure, and his lapels glittered with the insignia of honours that had been conferred upon him. Like his predecessor, the late Baron de Bodisco, he had allied himself with our country by marrying an American girl, a native of New Haven, whose family name I have now forgotten. She was a lovely and amiable hostess, whose unassuming manner never lost a certain pleasing modesty, notwithstanding the compliments she, too, invariably evoked. Her table was remarkable for its napery—Russian linen for the larger part, with embroidered monograms of unusual size and perfection of workmanship, which were said to be the handiwork of Slav needlewomen. Although I had enjoyed their hospitality and had met the de Staeckles frequently elsewhere, until this evening at the Riggses’ home I had never suspected the genial Baron’s full capacity for the enjoyment of pure nonsense.

There were many amateur musicians among the guests, first among them being the Sicilian Minister, Massoni. He was a finished vocalist, with a full operatic repertory at his easy command. His son Lorenzo was as fine a pianist, and accompanied his father with a sympathy that was most rare. That evening the Massonis responded again and again to the eager urgings of the other guests, but at last the Minister, doubtless desiring to “cut it short,” broke into the “Anvil Chorus.” Instantly he was joined by the entire company.

At the opening strain, the jolly Baron de Staeckl disappeared for a second, but ere we had finished, his glittering form was seen to re-enter the door, with a stride like Vulcan’s and an air as mighty. In one hand he held a pair of Mrs. Riggs’s glowing brass tongs, in the other a poker, with which, in faultless rhythm, he was beating time to his own deep-bellowing basso. He stalked to the centre of the room with all the pomposity of a genuine king of opera bouffe, a sly twinkle in his eye being the only hint to the beholders that he was conscious of his own ludicrous appearance.

Meantime, Mile. Patti had mounted a chair, where her liquid notes in alt joined the deep ones of the baron. As he stopped in the centre of the room, however, the little diva’s amusement reached a climax. She clapped her hands and fairly shouted with glee. Her mirth was infectious and quite upset the solemnity of the basso. Breaking into a sonorous roar of laughter, he made as hasty an exit as his cumbrous form would allow. I think a walrus would have succeeded as gracefully.

We were about to withdraw from this gay scene when the Chevalier Bertinatti, with the utmost enthusiasm, begged us to stay. “You must!” he cried. “Ze elephant is coming! I assure you zere ees not hees equal for ze fun!” A moment more and we fully agreed with him. Even as he spoke, the doors opened and Mr. Palmer bounded in, a gorgeously got-up ring-master. I saw my own crimson opera cloak about his shoulders and a turban formed of many coloured rebozos of other guests twisted together in truly artistic manner.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he began grandiloquently, “I have the honour to present to your astonished eyes the grand elephant, Hannibal, costing to import twenty thousand dollars, and weighing six thousand pounds! An elephant, ladies and gentlemen, whose average cost is three and one-half dollars a pound! He is a marvellous animal, ladies and gentlemen, warranted to be as intrepid as his namesake! He has been called a vicious creature, but in the present company I intend to prove him as docile as—the ladies themselves! Advance, Hannibal!”

He threw himself prone upon the floor as the wide doors opened and “Hannibal” lumbered in, deliberately wagging his trunk from side to side, in a manner that was startlingly lifelike.

Arrived at the prostrate ring-master, he put out one shapeless leg (at the bottom of which a handsomely shod man’s foot appeared) and touched the prostrate one lightly, as if fearful of hurting him; he advanced and retreated several times, wagging his trunk the while; until, at last, at the urgings of the recumbent hero, the animal stepped cleanly over him. Now, with a motion of triumph, Mr. Palmer sprang up and, crossing his arms proudly over his bosom, cried, “Ladies and gentlemen! I live!” and awaited the applause which rang out merrily. Then, leaping lightly upon his docile pet’s back, the latter galloped madly around the room and made for the door amid screams and shouts of laughter.

In the mad exit, however, the mystery of the elephant was revealed; for his hide, the rubber cover of Mrs. Riggs’s grand piano, slipped from the shoulders of the hilarious young men who supported it, and “Hannibal” disappeared in a confusion of brilliant opera cloaks, black coats, fleeing patent-leathers, and trailing piano cover!

This climax was a fitting close to our evening’s funmaking. As our host accompanied us to the door, he said slyly to my husband, “Not a word of this, Clay! To-night must be as secret as a Democratic caucus, or we shall all be tabooed.”

CHAPTER III
A Historic Congressional “Mess”

Our “mess” at Brown’s Hotel shortly became so well-known, because of the interest attaching to so many of its members, that the enterprising proprietress of (what afterward became known as) the Ebbitt House, Mrs. Smith, came in person, with tempting terms to lure us to her newer establishment.

Heretofore our quarters in the historic old hostelry had been altogether satisfactory. It was the rendezvous of Southern Congressmen, and therefore was “very agreeable and advantageous,” as my husband wrote of it. For thirty-five years Brown’s Hotel had been the gathering-place for distinguished people. So long ago as 1820, Thomas Hart Benton met there the representatives of the rich fur-trader, John Jacob Astor, who had been sent to the capital to induce Congressional indorsement in perfecting a great scheme that should secure to us the trade of Asia as well as the occupation of the Columbia River. Within its lobbies, many a portentous conference had taken place. Indeed, the foundations of its good reputation were laid while it was yet the Indian Queen’s Tavern, renowned for its juleps and bitters. It was an unimposing structure even for Pennsylvania Avenue, then but a ragged thoroughfare, and, as I have said, notable for the great gaps between houses; but the cuisine of Brown’s Hotel, as, until a few years ago, this famous house continued to be known, was excellent.

In my days there, the presence of good Mrs. Brown, the hostess, and her sweet daughter Rose (who married Mr. Wallach, one of Washington’s rich citizens, and afterward entertained in the mansion that became famous as the residence of Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas) added much to the attractions of the old house. Nevertheless, those of the new also tempted us. Thither we went in a body, and there we spent one or two gay winters; but, the Ebbitt becoming more and more heterogeneous, and therefore less congenial to our strictly legislative circles, we retraced our ways, our forces still intact, to good old Brown’s.

In the interim, our continually enlarging numbers found the new quarters convenient and in many respects even desirable. “Our ‘mess,’ so far from being willing to separate,” I wrote to my husband’s father, late in ’57, “has insisted upon becoming enlarged. We are located in a delightful part of the city, on F Street, near the Treasury Buildings, the Court end as well as the convenient end; for all the Departments as well as the White House are in a stone’s throw. Old Guthrie’s is opposite, and we have, within two blocks, some true-line Senators, among them Bell, Slidell, Weller, Brodhead, Thomson, of New Jersey, who are married and housekeeping, to say naught of Butler, Benjamin, Mason and Goode in a ‘mess’ near us. Our ‘mess’ is a very pleasant one. Orr, Shorter, Dowdell, Sandidge and Taylor, of Louisiana, with the young Senator Pugh and his bride, Governor Fitzpatrick and wife, and ourselves compose the party. Taylor is a true Democrat, and Pugh is as strongly Anti-Free-soil as we. We keep Free-soilers, Black Republicans and Bloomers on the other side of the street. They are afraid even to inquire for board at this house.”

To the choice list then recorded were added shortly Congressmen L. Q. C. and Mrs. Lamar, David Clopton, Jabez L. M. Curry and Mrs. Curry, and General and Mrs. Chestnut. Our circle included representatives from several States. Messrs. Fitzpatrick, Shorter, Dowdell, David Clopton and Jabez L. M. Curry were fellow-Alabamians, and had been the long-time friends of my husband and his father, ex-Governor Clay, and of my uncle, Governor Collier; Congressmen Lamar and Sandidge were from Mississippi and Louisiana, respectively; Congressmen Orr and Chestnut represented South Carolina, and Senator Pugh was from Ohio. It was a distinguished company. Scarcely a male member of it but had won or was destined to win a conspicuous position in the Nation’s affairs; scarcely a woman in the circle who was not acknowledged to be a wit or beauty.

When Mrs. Pugh joined us, her precedence over the belles of the capital was already established, for, as Thérèse Chalfant, her reign had begun a year or two previous to her marriage to the brilliant young Senator from Ohio; Miss Cutts, afterward Mrs. Douglas, and Mrs. Pendleton and the beautiful brune, Mrs. Roger A. Pryor, being estimated as next in order of beauty. Like Mrs. Chestnut, also a renowned belle, Mrs. Pugh was something more than a woman of great personal loveliness. She was intellectual, and remarked as such even in Washington, where wits gathered. Both of these prized associates remained unspoiled by the adulation which is the common tribute to such unusual feminine comeliness.

MRS. ROGER A. PRYOR
of Virginia

I was not present when the Austrian Minister, the Chevalier Hulseman, paid his great compliment (now a classic in the capital) to Miss Chalfant; but it was soon thereafter repeated to me. It was at a ball at which pretty women thronged. As the Minister’s gaze rested upon Miss Chalfant, his eyes expanded with admiration. Approaching, he knelt suddenly before her, exclaiming, “Madame! I have from my Empress a piece of precious lace” (and he fumbled, but, alas! vainly, in his pockets as he spoke) “which her Majesty has commanded me to present to the most beautiful woman in Washington. You—you are more, the most beautiful in the world! I have not with me the lace, but I will send it if you will permit me!” And he kept his word. We were glad to welcome to our “mess” so lovely and famous a bride. Mrs. Pugh’s beauty was of so exquisite a type, the bodily so permeated by the spiritual, that she shone preëminent wherever she appeared, and this wholly independent of showy attire. Though always presenting an appearance of elegance, Mrs. Pugh’s gowns were invariably of the simplest. Our “mess” soon became aware that our beautiful favourite was primarily a lovely woman, and no mere gay butterfly. Her nature was grave rather than vivacious, the maternal in her being exceedingly strong.

I recall the reply she gave me on the afternoon of a certain Cabinet day. It was the custom on this weekly recurring occasion for several of the ladies of our “mess” to make their calls together, thus obviating the need for more than one carriage. As my parlours were the only ones that boasted a pier-glass, and, besides, had the advantage of being on the drawing-room floor of the hotel, it became a custom for the women composing our circle to come to my rooms before going out, in order to see how their dresses hung. Those were the days of hoop-skirts, and the set of the outer skirt must needs be adjusted before beginning a round of calls. As we gathered there, it was no uncommon thing for one of us to remark: “Here comes Pugh, simply dressed, but superb, as usual. She would eclipse us all were she in calico!” On the occasion alluded to, I commented to Mrs. Pugh upon the beauty and style of her bonnet.

“My own make,” she answered sweetly. “I can’t afford French bonnets for every-day use when I have ’tockies and shoes to buy for my little fellows!”

My friendship for Mrs. Pugh is a dear memory of that life of perpetual gaiety ere the face of Washington society was marred by war and scarred by the moral pestilences that followed in its train; nor can I resist the desire to quote her own remembrance of our association as she wrote it in a letter to Senator Clay late in ’64, when the glories of those earlier days had passed away, and the faces of erstwhile friends from the North were hidden by the smoke of cannon and a barrier of the slain.

“Your dear wife,” she wrote, “was the first and best friend of my early married life; and, when I was ushered into a strange and trying world, she at once took me into her heart and counsel and made me a better woman and wife than I would have been alone. No one in this world ever treated me with the same love outside of my own family. When I cease to remember either of you accordingly, it will be when I forget all things!”

Strangely enough, there comes before my mind a picture of Mrs. Pugh in affliction that overshadows all the memories of the homage I have seen paid to her. It was late in the spring of 1859; Congress had adjourned and many of our “mess” had gone their several ways, to mountain or seashore, bent on rest or recreation, when the little daughter of Senator and Mrs. Pugh was suddenly taken ill. For weeks the distracted mother hovered over the sick-bed of the child, until her haggard appearance was pitiful to see. My husband and I could not bear to leave her, and often I shared her vigils, watching hours beside the dying little Alice.

On an occasion like this (it was evening), my cousin Miss Hilliard, her cheeks glowing and eyes shining with all the mysterious glow of expectant youth, came into the sick-room for a few moments on her way to some social gathering. She was dressed in a pale green, filmy gown, which lent to her appearance a flower-like semblance that was very fresh and lovely. As Miss Hilliard entered, Mrs. Pugh lifted her burning eyes from the couch where the rapidly declining little one lay, and gazed at her visitor like one in a dream. We were all silent for a moment. Then the worn mother spoke.

MRS. GEORGE E. PUGH (THÉRÈSE CHALFANT)
of Ohio
“The most beautiful woman in Washington”

“So radiant! So beautiful!” she said in a voice of indescribable pathos, “And to think you, too, may come to this!”

I have spoken of Mrs. Pryor, the beautiful wife of the young diplomat, who had won general public approbation for his success in conducting a mission to Greece. Not of our especial mess, Mrs. Pryor frequently mingled with us, being the friend of Mrs. Douglas and Mrs. Pugh. They were, in truth, a very harmonious trio, Mrs. Pugh being a perfect brunette, Mrs. Douglas a blonde, and Mrs. Pryor a lighter brunette with soft-brown hair and eyes. She wore a distinctive coiffure, and carried her head charmingly. Even at that time Mrs. Pryor was notable for the intellectuality which has since uttered itself in several charming books.

Though not members of our resident circle, my memories of dear old Brown’s would scarcely be complete without a mention of little Henry Watterson, with whose parents our “mess” continually exchanged visits for years. Henry, their only child, was then an invalid, debarred from the usual recreations of other boys, by weak eyes that made the light unbearable and reading all but impossible; yet at fifteen the boy was a born politician and eager for every item of news from the Senate or House.

“What bills were introduced to-day? Who spoke? Please tell me what took place to-day?” were among the questions (in substance) with which the lad was wont to greet the ladies of our “mess,” when he knew them to be returning from a few hours spent in the Senate gallery; and, though none foresaw the later distinction which awaited the invalid boy, no one of us was ever so hurried and impatient that she could not and did not take time to answer his earnest inquiries.

It is safe to say that no member of our pleasant circle was more generally valued than that most lovable of men, Lucius Q. C. Lamar, “Moody Lamar,” as he was sometimes called; for he was then, as he always continued to be, full of dreams and ideals and big, warm impulses, with a capacity for the most enduring and strongest of friendships, and a tenderness rarely displayed by men so strong as was he.[^[2]] Mr. Lamar was full of quaint and caressing ways even with his fellow-men, which frank utterance of his own feelings was irresistibly engaging. I have seen him walk softly up behind Mr. Clay, when the latter was deep in thought, touch him lightly on the shoulder, and, as my husband turned quickly to see what was wanted, “Lushe” or “big Lushe,” as all called him, would kiss him suddenly and lightly on the forehead.

Yes! Mr. Lamar and his sparkling, bright-souled wife, Jennie Longstreet, were beloved members of that memorable “mess” in ante-bellum Washington.

Next to Congressman Lamar, I suppose it may safely be said no man was more affectionately held than another of our mess-mates, Congressman Dowdell, “old Dowdell,” “dear old Dowdell,” and sometimes “poor, dear old Dowdell” being among the forms by which he was continually designated. Mr. Dowdell had a large and loose frame, and walked about with a countryman’s easy indifference to appearances. A born wag, he sometimes took a quiet delight in accentuating this seeming guilelessness.

One evening he came strolling in to dinner, prepared for a comfortable chat over the table, though all the rest of our little coterie were even then dressing for attendance at a grand concert. It was an event of great importance, for Gottschalk, the young Créole musician, of whom all the country was talking, was to be heard in his own compositions.

“What!” I exclaimed as I saw Mr. Dowdell’s every-day attire, “You don’t mean to tell me you’re not going to the concert! I can’t allow it, brother Dowdell! Go right out and get your ticket and attend that concert with all the rest of the world, or I’ll tell your constituents what sort of a country representative they’ve sent to the capital!”

My laughing threat had its effect, and he hurried off in quest of the ticket, which, after some difficulty, was procured.

The concert was a memorable one. During the evening I saw Mr. Dowdell across the hall, scanning the performers with an enigmatical expression. At that time Gottschalk’s popularity was at its height. Every concert programme contained, and every ambitious amateur included in her repertory, the young composer’s “Last Hope.” At his appearance, therefore, slender, agile and Gallic to a degree, enthusiasm ran so high that we forgot to hunt up our friend in the short interval between each brilliant number.

When Mr. Dowdell appeared at the breakfast table the following morning, I asked him how he had enjoyed the evening. The Congressman’s response came less enthusiastically than I had hoped.

“Well,” he began, drawing his words out slowly and a bit quizzically, “I went out and got my ticket; did the right thing and got a seat as near Harriet Lane’s box as I could; even invested in new white gloves, so I felt all right; but I can’t say the music struck me exactly! Mr. Gottschalk played mighty pretty; hopped up on the black keys and then down on the white ones” (and the Congressman illustrated by spanning the table rapidly in a most ludicrous manner). “He played slow and then fast, and never seemed to get his hands tangled up once. But for all that I can’t say I was struck by his music! He played mighty pretty, but he didn’t play nary tchune!”

Two interesting members of our “mess” were General and Mrs. Chestnut. The General, a member from South Carolina, who became afterward one of the staff of Jefferson Davis, was among the princes in wealth in the South in the fifties. Approximately one thousand slaves owned by him were manumitted by Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation in 1863, when, childless, property-less, our well-loved Mrs. Chestnut suffered a terrible eclipse after her brilliant youth and middle age. She was the only daughter of Governor Miller, of South Carolina, and having been educated abroad, was an accomplished linguist and ranked high among the cultured women of the capital.

Moreover, Mrs. Chestnut was continually the recipient of toilette elegancies, for which the bazaars of Paris were ransacked, and in this way the curiosity of the emulative stay-at-home fashionables was constantly piqued. Her part in that brilliant world was not a small one, for, in addition to her superior personal charms, Mrs. Chestnut chaperoned the lovely Preston girls of South Carolina, belles, all, and the fashionable Miss Stevens, of Stevens Castle, who married Muscoe Garnett of Virginia. Indeed, the zest for social pleasures among our circle was often increased by the coming of guests from other cities. Among others whom I particularly recall was my cousin Miss Collier, daughter of Governor Collier of Alabama, and who married the nephew of William Rufus King, Vice-President of the United States under Mr. Pierce; and our cousins Loula Comer, Hattie Withers, and Miss Hilliard. The latter’s wedding with Mr. Hamilton Glentworth of New York was one of the social events of the winter of 1859.

Nor should I forget to mention the presence, at the Ebbitt House and at Brown’s Hotel, of another much admired South Carolinian, Mrs. General McQueen, who was a Miss Pickens, of the famous family of that name. My remembrance of Mrs. McQueen is always associated with that of the sudden death of Preston Brooks, our neighbour at Brown’s Hotel. At the time of this fatality, Dr. May, the eminent surgeon, was in the building in attendance upon Mrs. McQueen’s little boy, who was suffering from some throat trouble.

Mr. Brooks had been indisposed for several days, and, being absent from his seat in the House, it was the custom for one or the other of his confrères to drop into his room each afternoon, to give him news of the proceedings. On that fatal day, Colonel Orr (“Larry,” as his friends affectionately designated him) had called upon the invalid and was in the midst of narrating the day’s doings, when Mr. Brooks clutched suddenly at his throat and cried out huskily, “Air! Orr, air!”

Mr. Orr hastily threw open the window and began to fan the sufferer, but became bewildered at the alarming continuation of his struggles. Had the Congressman but known it, even as he tried to relieve his friend, Dr. May passed the door of Mr. Brooks’s room, on his way out of the house, his surgical case in hand; but the suddenness of the attack, and a total absence of suspicion as to its gravity, coupled with the swiftness with which it acted, confused the watcher, and, ere assistance could be obtained, the handsome young Southern member had passed away!

Congressman Orr, as has been said, was one of our original “mess” in the capital. From the first he was a conspicuous figure, nature having made him so. He was of gigantic stature, weighing then somewhat over two hundred pounds. His voice was of bugle-like clearness, and when, in 1857, he became speaker of the House of Representatives, it was a source of remark how wonderfully his words penetrated to the farthermost corner of the hall. He was extremely tender-hearted and devoted to his family, around the members of which his affections were closely bound.

Just previous to our arrival in the capital, Mr. Orr had lost a little daughter, and often, ere he brought his family to the Federal City, in a quiet hour he would come to our parlours and ask me to sing to him. He dearly loved simple ballads, his favourite song being “Lilly Dale,” the singing of which invariably stirred him greatly. Often I have turned from the piano to find his eyes gushing with tears at the memories that pathetic old-fashioned ditty had awakened. Mr. Orr was a famous flatterer, too, who ranked my simple singing as greater than that of the piquant Patti; and I question the success of any one who would have debated with him the respective merits of that great artiste and my modest self.

When Mr. Orr became Speaker of the House, Mrs. Orr and his children having joined him, the family resided in the famous Stockton Mansion for a season or two. Here brilliant receptions were held, and Mrs. Orr, a distinguée woman, made her entrée into Washington society, often being assisted in receiving by the members of the mess of which, for so long, Mr. Orr had formed a part. Mrs. Orr was tall and lithe in figure, of a Spanish type of face. She soon became a great favourite in the capital, where one daughter, now a widow, Mrs. Earle, still lives.

It was at the Stockton Mansion that Daniel E. and Mrs. Sickles lived when the tragedy of which they formed two of the principals took place. Here, too, was run the American career of another much-talked-of lady, which, for meteoric brilliancy and brevity, perhaps outshines any other episode in the chronicles of social life in Washington.

The lady’s husband was a statesman of prominence, celebrated for his scholarly tastes and the fineness of his mental qualities. The arrival of the lady, after a marked absence abroad, during which some curious gossip had reached American ears, was attended by great éclat; and not a little conjecture was current as to how she would be received. For her home-coming, however, the Stockton Mansion was fitted up in hitherto undreamed-of magnificence, works of art and of vertu, which were the envy of local connoisseurs, being imported to grace it, regardless of cost. So far, so good!

The report of these domiciliary wonders left no doubt but that entertaining on a large scale was being projected. The world was slow in declaring its intentions in its own behalf; for, notwithstanding her rumoured delinquencies, the lady’s husband was high in the councils of the nation, and as such was a figure of dignity. Shortly after her arrival our “mess” held a conclave, in which we discussed the propriety of calling upon the new-comer, but a conclusion seeming impossible (opinions being so widely divergent), it was decided to submit the important question to our husbands.

This was done duly, and Senator Clay’s counsel to me was coincided in generally.

“By all means, call,” said he. “You have nothing to do with the lady’s private life, and, as a mark of esteem to a statesman of her husband’s prominence, it will be better to call.”

Upon a certain day, therefore, it was agreed that we should pay a “mess” call, going in a body. We drove accordingly, in dignity and in state, and, truth to tell, in soberness and ceremony, to the mansion aforenamed. It was the lady’s reception day. We entered the drawing-room with great circumspection, tempering our usually cordial manner with a fine prudence; we paid our devoirs to the hostess and retired. But now a curious retribution overtook us, social faint-hearts that we were; for, though we heard much gossip of the regality and originality of one or more dinners given to the several diplomatic corps (the lady especially affected the French Legation), I never heard of a gathering of Washingtonians at her home, nor of invitations extended to them, nor, indeed, anything more of her until two months had flown. Then, Arab-like, the lady rose in the night, “silently folded her tent and stole away” (to meet a handsome German officer, it was said), leaving our calls unanswered, save by the sending of her card, and her silver and china and crystal, her paintings, and hangings, and furniture to be auctioned off to the highest bidder!

Everyone in Washington now thronged to see the beautiful things, and many purchased specimens from among them, among others Mrs. Davis. By a curious turn of fate, the majority of these treasures were acquired by Mrs. Senator Yulee, who was so devoutly religious that her piety caused her friends to speak of her as “the Madonna of the Wickliffe sisters!” The superb furniture of the whilom hostess was carried to “Homosassa,” the romantic home of the Yulees in Florida, where in later years it was reduced to ashes.

Of the Wickliffe sisters there were three, all notably good as well as handsome women, with whom I enjoyed a life-time friendship. One became the wife of Judge Merrick, and another, who dearly loved Senator Clay and me, married Joseph Holt, who rose high in Federal honours after the breaking out of the war, having sold his Southern birthright for a mess of Northern pottage.

For several years before her death, Mrs. Holt was an invalid and a recluse, yet she was no inconspicuous figure in Washington, where the beauty of the “three graces” (as the sisters of Governor Wickliffe were always designated) was long a criterion by which other belles were judged. Mrs. Mallory, the wife of Senator Yulee’s confrère from Florida, was particularly a favourite in the capital. The Mallorys were the owners of great orange groves in that lovely State, and were wont from time to time to distribute among their friends boxes of choicest fruit.

Of our “mess,” Congressman and Mrs. Curry were least frequently to be met with in social gatherings. Mrs. Curry, who was a Miss Bowie, devoted her time wholly to her children, apparently feeling no interest in the gay world about her, being as gentle and retiring as her doughty relative (the inventor of the Bowie knife) was warlike. Mr. Curry was an uncommonly handsome man, who, in the fifties and early sixties, was an ambitious and strenuous politician. He died early in 1903, full of years and honours, while still acting as the General Agent of the Peabody fund.

Nor should I fail to recall the lovely Mrs. Clopton, wife of one of Senator Clay’s most trusted friends, Congressman David Clopton. She joined our “mess” late in the fifties, and at once added to its fame by her charm and beauty. She was a sister of Governor Ligon of Alabama. One of her daughters married the poet, Clifford Lanier, and another became the wife of Judge William L. Chambers, who for several exciting years represented our Government at Samoa.

But my oldest and dearest mess-mate during nearly a decade in the capital was, as I have said elsewhere, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, whose husband, Senator Benjamin Fitzpatrick, was President of the Senate for four consecutive sessions. Senator Fitzpatrick was very many years older than his wife, having, indeed, held office in 1818, when Alabama was a territory, and when few of his Alabamian associates in Congress had been ushered upon the stage of life. Between Mrs. Fitzpatrick and me there was an undeviating attachment which was a source of wonder, as it doubtless was rare, among women in fashionable life. As confrères in the Senate, our husbands, despite the disparity in their years, were fully in accord; and a more congenial quartette it would have been hard to find.

I think of all the harmonious couples I have known, Senator and Mrs. Fitzpatrick easily led, though near to them I must place General and Mrs. McQueen. It was a standing topic in Brown’s Hotel, the devotion of the two middle-aged gentlemen—Messrs. Fitzpatrick and McQueen—to their young wives and to their boys, enfants terribles, both of them of a most emphatic type. “The Heavenly Twins” as a title had not yet been evolved, or these two young autocrats of the hostelry would surely have won it from the sarcastic.

Benny Fitzpatrick was at once the idol of his parents and the terror of the hotel; and, as Mrs. Fitzpatrick and I were cordially united in other interests of life, so we shared the maternal duties as became two devoted sisters, “Our boy Benny” receiving the motherly oversight of whichsoever of us happened to be near him when occasion arose for aid or admonition. “Mrs. Fitz” delivered her rebukes with “Oh, Benny dear! How could you!” but I, his foster-mother, was constrained to resort betimes to a certain old-fashioned punishment usually administered with the broadside of a slipper, or, what shortly became as efficacious, a threat to do so.

Benny, like George Washington, was the possessor of a little hatchet, with which he worked a dreadful havoc. He chopped at the rosewood furniture of his mother’s drawing-room, while his proud parents, amazed at his precocity, not to say prowess, stood by awestruck, and—paid the bill! The child was plump and healthy, and boys will be boys! Thus were we all become his subjects; thus he overran Hannah, his coloured nurse, until one day Pat came—, Pat Dolan.

Pat had been a page at the Senate, and in some forgotten way he and little Benny had become inseparable friends. Thereafter, Benny was taken by his fond guardian, into whose hands his three anxious parents consented to consign him, to see the varying sights and the various quarters of the city. As his experiences multiplied, so his reputation for precocity increased in exact ratio.

One day Hannah’s excitement ran high. “Lor! Miss ’Relia,” she burst out impetuously to Mrs. Fitzpatrick, “Pat Dolan done carried Benny to the Cath’lic church an’ got him sprinkled, ’n den he brung him to communion, an’ first thing Pat knowed, Benny he drunk up all the holy water an’ eat up the whole wafer!”

CHAPTER IV
The Cabinet Circles of the Pierce and Buchanan Administrations

Writing to my father-in-law, ex-Governor Clay, on Christmas night, 1856, of the deep inward excitement of the times, I said: “We feel a little as Fanny Fern says Eugénie felt when she espoused Louis Napoleon, as if we are ‘dancing over a powder magazine!’ Everything is excitement and confusion. I tell you Fusion reigns in truth, and Southern blood is at boiling temperature all over the city, and with good cause, too. Old Giddings, Thurlow Weed, Sumner, Seward, Chase (who is here for a few days prior to his inauguration[^[3]]) are daily taunting and insulting all whom they dare. There is no more prospect of a Speaker now than there was at first; indeed, less, and our men have despaired of Christmas holidays at home. Desertion of their post would mean death to their party and themselves, and they know and appreciate it, and, so far, stand firm as a Roman phalanx. Should there prove one deserter, the ‘game is up,’ for there is a Black Republican at every corner of our political fence, and if ever the gap is down we are gone. I wish you could be here to witness the scenes daily enacted in the halls of Congress, to hear the hot taunts of defiance hurled into the very teeth of the Northerners by our goaded but spirited patriots. I expect any day to hear of bloodshed and death, and would not be surprised at any time to witness (repeated here) the Civil War of Kansas! We still hope for Orr, though he is not sanguine. The President still holds his message, fearing to give it to the press, and it is thought it will go to Congress in manuscript. He, poor fellow, is worn and weary, and his wife in extremely delicate health.”

President Pierce was, in fact, a very harassed man, as none knew better than did Senator Clay. My husband’s friendship was unwearying toward all to whom his reserved nature yielded it, and his devotion to Mr. Pierce was unswerving. Though twelve years the President’s junior, from the first my husband was known as one of the President’s counsellors, and none of those who surrounded the Nation’s executive head more sacredly preserved his confidence. Senator Clay believed unequivocally that our President was “not in the roll of common men.”

Bold and dauntless where a principle was involved, Mr. Pierce’s message of ’5 fell like a bombshell on the Black Republican party. Its bold pro-slaveryism startled even his friends; for, never had a predecessor, while in the Executive Chair, talked so strongly or so harshly to sectionalists and fanatics. To this stand, so bravely taken, his defeat at the next Presidential election was doubtless at least partially attributable. Meantime, the South owed him much, and none of its representatives was more staunchly devoted to President Pierce than was the Senator from northern Alabama. How fully Mr. Pierce relied upon Senator Clay’s discretion may be illustrated by an incident which lives still very vividly in my memory.

My husband and I were seated one evening before a blazing fire in our parlour at the Ebbitt House, in the first enjoyment of an evening at home (a rare luxury to public folk in the capital), when we heard a low and unusual knock at the door. My trim maid, Emily, hastened to open it, when there entered hastily a tall figure, wrapped in a long storm-cloak on which the snow-flakes still lay thickly. The new-comer was muffled to the eyes. He glanced quickly about the rooms, making a motion to us, as he did so, to remain silent. My husband rose inquiringly, failing, as did I, to recognise our mysterious visitor. In a second more, however, perceiving that we were alone, he threw off his outer coat and soft hat, when, to our astonishment, our unceremonious and unexpected guest stood revealed as the President!

“Lock that door, Clay!” he said, almost pathetically, “and don’t let a soul know I’m here!” Then, turning, he handed me a small package which he had carried under his coat.

“For you, Mrs. Clay,” he said. “It is my picture. I hope you will care to take it with you to Alabama, and sometimes remember me!”

I thanked him delightedly as I untied the package and saw within a handsome photograph superbly framed. Then, as he wearily sat down before our crackling fire, I hastened to assist Emily in her preparation of a friendly egg-nog.

“Ah, my dear friends!” said Mr. Pierce, leaning forward in his arm-chair and warming his hands as he spoke; “I am so tired of the shackles of Presidential life that I can scarcely endure it! I long for quiet—for—” and he looked around our restful parlours—“for this! Oh! for relaxation and privacy once more, and a chance for home!”

His voice and every action betrayed the weary man. We were deeply moved, and my husband uttered such sympathetic words as only a wise man may. The egg-nog prepared, I soon had the pleasure of seeing the President and Mr. Clay in all the comfort of a friendly chat. Primarily, the object of his visit was to discuss an affair of national moment which was to be brought before the Senate the next day; but the outlook of the times which also fell naturally under discussion formed no small part in the topics thus intimately scanned. Both were men to whom the horrid sounds of coming combat were audible, and both were patriots seeking how they might do their part to avert it. It was midnight ere Mr. Pierce rose to go. Then, fortified by another of Emily’s incomparable egg-nogs, he was again, incognito, on his way to the White House.

FRANKLIN PIERCE
President of the United States, 1853–57

My remembrances of that secret visit have ever remained most keen. Often, when I think of the lonely grave on the quiet hillside at Concord, I recall the night when weariness of body and State formalities impelled the President to our cozy fireside, though he beat his way to it through snow and winds, stealing from the trammels of his position for the mere pleasure of walking the streets unimpeded and free as any other citizen.

President Pierce entered the White House in 1853, full as a youth of leaping life. A year before his inauguration I had seen him bound up the stairs with the elasticity and lightness of a schoolboy. He went out after four years a staid and grave man, on whom the stamp of care and illness was ineradicably impressed.

I often contrasted the pale, worn, haggard man whose “wine of life was drawn, and the mere lees left i’ the vault,” ere his term (so coveted by many) was spent, with the buoyant person I first met on the breezy New Hampshire hills!

Especially a lovable man in his private character, President Pierce was a man of whom our nation might well be proud to have at its head. Graced with an unusually fine presence, he was most courtly and polished in manner. Fair rather than dark, of graceful carriage,[^[4]] he was also an eloquent speaker, and, though reserved to a degree, was very winning in manner. He was still in middle life when elected to the Presidency, being less than forty-nine years of age when inaugurated.

Taken all in all, the Cabinet circle formed by Mr. Pierce was one of the most interesting bodies that has ever surrounded an American Chief Magistrate. Selected wisely, the ministerial body remained unchanged throughout the entire Administration, and this at a time of unceasing and general contention. But three such instances are recorded in the histories of the twenty-six Presidents of the United States, the others occurring in the terms of J. Q. Adams and James A. Garfield. The tie which bound President Pierce and his Cabinet so inalienably was one of mutual confidence and personal friendship. Perhaps the closest ally of the President’s was his Secretary of State, William L. Marcy. That great Secretary was a man whose unusual poise and uniform complacency were often as much a source of envy to his friends as of confusion to his enemies. I commented upon it to my husband on one occasion, wondering interrogatively at his composure, whereupon Senator Clay told me the following story:

Some one as curious as I once asked the Secretary how he preserved his unvarying calmness. “Well,” he answered, confidentially, “I’ll tell you, I have given my secretary orders that whenever he sees an article eulogistic of me, praising my ‘astuteness,’ my ‘far-seeing diplomacy,’ my ‘incomparable statesmanship,’ etc., he is to cut it out and place it conspicuously on my desk where I can see it first thing in the morning; everything to the contrary he is to cut out and up and consign to the waste-basket. By this means, hearing nothing but good of myself, I have come naturally to regard myself as a pretty good fellow! Who wouldn’t be serene under such circumstances?”

MRS. WILLIAM L. MARCY
of New York

To add to his contentment thus philosophically assured, the Secretary’s home surroundings were peculiarly satisfactory to him. Mrs. Marcy was a demure and retiring woman, taking little part in the gayer happenings of the city, but on Cabinet days her welcome was always diplomatically cordial and her full parlours gave evidence of her personal popularity. A charming member of her family, Nellie, daughter of General R. B. Marcy, became the wife of General McClellan, whose son, named for that military hero, at this writing is Mayor of America’s metropolis. Between President and Mrs. Pierce and Secretary and Mrs. Marcy a firm friendship existed. It was to the home of the Secretary that President and Mrs. Pierce retired while the White House was being rehabilitated for the occupancy of Mr. Buchanan, who had just returned from his residence abroad, where, as Mr. Pierce’s appointee, he served as Minister to the Court of St. James.

On the day of Mr. Buchanan’s inauguration a curious oversight occurred which demonstrated in marked manner how eagerly a populace hastens to shout “The king is dead! Long live the King!” The procession of carriages had already formed and the moment for beginning the march to the Capitol had almost arrived ere it was observed that the vehicle set apart for President Pierce was unoccupied. Inquiry was hastily instituted, when it was discovered that, owing to some omission on the part of the Master of Ceremonies, his Excellency had not been sent for! The horses’ heads were turned in a trice, and they were driven furiously to the Marcy residence, where the quiet gentleman who was still the President of the United States awaited them.

Late in the afternoon my husband called upon Mr. Pierce, and, during the conversation that followed, Mr. Clay referred indignantly to the unfortunate affair.

“Ah, Clay!” said Mr. Pierce, smiling quietly. “Have you lived so long without knowing that all the homage is given to the rising sun, never to the setting, however resplendent its noonday?”

Of Secretaries Campbell and McClelland, the gay, and especially the Southern world, saw but little; nor did Caleb Cushing, the Attorney-General, for whom every Southerner must ever feel a thrill of admiration for his spirited speech on their behalf in Faneuil Hall, mingle much with the lighter element. He was a silent man, a bachelor, who entertained not at all, though paying dutifully such formal calls as seemed obligatory; and Senator Clay, whose delicate health and naturally studious mind made continual attendance upon society an onerous and often shirked duty, had much in common with and greatly esteemed Mr. Cushing, at that time regarded as one of the most earnest statesmen in the capital.

In later life, one who had been a conspicuous Senator from Mississippi in ante-bellum days, appraised him differently, for in 1872 he wrote to my husband in this wise: “I had no confidence in Cushing beyond that of a follower to a quicker intellect and a braver heart. He could appreciate the gallantry and fidelity of Pierce, so he followed him. Like the chameleon, he was green, or blue, or brown, according to what he rested upon.”

An affable young man, Mr. Spofford, member of Mr. Cushing’s household, and serving as that gentleman’s secretary, was no inconsiderable figure in Washington. He became a great favourite in all the notable drawing-rooms, especially with young ladies, and the names of a half-dozen belles were given who had fallen in love with him; but he remained invulnerable to the flashing eyes and bright spirits about him, and married a clever authoress, whose writings, as Harriet Prescott Spofford, have become familiar to a large class of American readers.

My personal favourite of all the Cabinet Ministers was the Secretary of the Navy, J. C. Dobbin. He was a North Carolinian, and the children of my native State were always dear to me. Being a widower, Mr. Dobbin’s home was also closed from formal entertainment, but the Secretary was seen now and then in society, where he was much sought after (though not always found) by the leading hostesses, whenever he consented to mingle with it. In his parlours, which now and then he opened to his most favoured friends, he kept on exhibition for years, sealed under a glass case, the suit in which Dr. Kane, the Arctic explorer, had lived during his sojourn among the icy seas.

Secretary Dobbin was a small man; in truth, a duodecimo edition of his sex, and exquisitely presented—a fact which was as freely yielded by his confrères as by his gentler admirers. A man of conspicuous intellectuality and firmness in the administration of his department, his heart was also very tender. Of this he once gave me an especially treasured demonstration.

My friend, Emily Spicer, wife of Lieutenant William F. Spicer, afterward Commander of the Boston Navy Yard, at a very critical time, was suddenly obliged, by the exigencies of the Naval Service, to see her husband prepare for what promised to be a long, and, it might prove, a final separation. Tenderly attached to each other, the young husband at last literally tore himself from his wife, leaving her in an unconscious state, from which she did not recover for many hours. Grave fears were entertained as to the disastrous effect the parting would have upon the young matron.

Having witnessed the sad scene, I went at once to Secretary Dobbin and told him of it. His eyes lighted up most sympathetically, even while he explained to me the necessity for adhering strictly to the rules of the Service, but, even as he marshalled the obstacles to my plea, by intuition I knew his heart was stirred, and when I parted from him, he said, “Comfort her, dear Mrs. Clay, with this assurance: If Spicer is on the high seas he shall be ordered home; if he has arrived in Italy” (for which coast the Lieutenant’s ship was booked) “he shall remain there and his wife may join him.” I went away grateful for his sympathy for my stricken friend, and hastened to soothe her.

The Secretary kept his word. In a few passing weeks the young couple were reunited on the coast of Italy. “God bless you, my dear Madame,” wrote Lieutenant Spicer, thereupon. “I am forever thankfully yours!” And they kept a promise I had exacted, and named the baby, which proved to be a boy, after my dear husband! Long after his distinguished namesake had vanished from the world’s stage, a bearded man of thirty came across the ocean and a continent to greet me, his “second mother,” as he had been taught to think of me by my grateful friend, his mother, Mrs. Spicer.

Once more I called upon Secretary Dobbin, on behalf of a young naval officer, but this time with a less pathetic request. Our young friend Lieutenant ——, having returned from a long cruise (which, while it lasted, had seemed to be all but unbearable because of its many social deprivations), upon his arrival was so swiftly enthralled by the attractions of a certain young lady (who shall be as nameless as is he) that in his augmenting fervour he proposed to her at once.

The lady accepted. She was very young, very beautiful, very romantic, and, alas! very poor! He was scarcely older, fully as romantic, and also, alas! was, if anything, poorer than she—a fact of which his swashing and naval display of gold-plated buttons and braid gave no hint.

The romance lasted about two weeks, with waning enthusiasm on the youth’s side, when, in great distress, he came to see me. He made a clean breast of the dilemma into which he had plunged.

“I beg you will rescue me, Mrs. Clay,” he said. “Get me transferred, or sent out anywhere! I’ve made a fool of myself. I can’t marry her,” he declared. “I haven’t income enough to buy my own clothes, and, as for providing for a girl of her tastes, I don’t know whether I shall ever be able to do so.”

“But,” I remonstrated, “how can I help you? You’ve only just returned, and in the ordinary course of events you would remain on shore at least six weeks. That isn’t long. Try to bear it a while!”

“Long enough for a marriage in naval life,” he declared, ruefully. “And I can’t break it off without your assistance. Help me, Mrs. Clay! If you don’t—” He looked sheepish, but dogged. “I’ll do what the Irishman did in Charleston!”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Well! he was in exactly the same pickle I am in, so he hired a man and a wheel-barrow, and lying down, face up in it, had himself rolled past the lady’s house at a time when he knew she was at home. Then, as the barrow arrived at this point, he had his man stop for a few moments to wipe the sweat of honest toil from his forehead, and, incidentally, to give the lookers-on an opportunity for complete identification.... Only difficulty with that is, how would it affect me in the service?” And the Lieutenant became dubious and I thoughtful.

“If I knew on what grounds to approach Secretary Dobbin,” I began.

“There aren’t any,” the Lieutenant answered eagerly. “But there are two ships just fitting out, and lots of men on them would be glad to get off from a three-years’ cruise. I would ship for six years, nine—anything that would get me out of this fix!”

On this desperate statement I applied to the Secretary. Within ten days my gallant “friend” was on the sea, and one of Washington’s beautiful maidens in tears. Glancing over my letters, I see that at the end of ten years the young Naval officer was still unwed, though not altogether scarless as to intervening love affairs; but the lady was now the happy wife of a member of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the United States!

Secretary Dobbin was my escort on my first (a most memorable) visit to Fort Monroe. The occasion was a brilliant one, for the President and his Cabinet had come in a body to review the troops. Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War, and but recently the hero of the battle of Buena Vista, directed the manœuvres, his spirited figure, superb horsemanship, and warlike bearing attracting general attention. An entire day was given up to this holiday-making, and the scene was one of splendid excitement. At night the Fort and the waters beyond were lit up by a pyrotechnic display of great gorgeousness, and enthusiasm rose to its highest when, amid the booming of cannon and the plaudits of happy people, an especially ingenious device blazed across the night sky the names of Franklin Pierce and Jefferson Davis!

Always a man of distinguished appearance, Secretary Davis at that time was exceedingly slender, but his step was springy, and he carried himself with such an air of conscious strength and ease and purpose as often to cause a stranger to turn and look at him. His voice was very rich and sonorous, his enunciation most pleasing. In public speech he was eloquent and magnetic, but, curiously enough, he was a poor reader, often “mouthing” his phrases in a way that would have aroused Hamlet’s scorn. Though spoken of as cold and haughty, in private his friends found him refreshingly informal and frank. From their first meeting, Secretary Davis was the intimate friend of my husband, whose loyalty to Mr. Davis in the momentous closing days of the Confederacy reacted so unfortunately upon his own liberty and welfare.

Neither the Secretary of War nor his wife appeared frequently in society in the earlier days of his appointment, the attention of Mr. Davis being concentrated upon the duties of his office, and a young family engaging that of his wife. I have heard it said that so wonderful was Mr. Davis’s oversight of the Department of War while under his charge, that it would have been impossible for the Government to have been cheated out of the value of a brass button! So proud was his adopted State of him, that at the close of Mr. Pierce’s administration, Mississippi promptly returned Mr. Davis to Washington as Senator. Almost immediately thereafter he became the victim of a serious illness, which lasted many weeks, and a complication of troubles set in which culminated in the loss of sight in one eye. During that period my husband gave up many nights to the nursing of the invalid, who was tortured by neuralgic pains and nervous tension. Senator Clay’s solicitude for Mr. Davis was ever of the deepest, as his efforts to sustain and defend him to the last were of the most unselfish.

Aaron V. Brown, who became Postmaster-General in 1857, was at once one of the kindest-hearted and simplest of men, loving his home and being especially indifferent to all things that savoured of the merely fashionable and superficial. He occupied a house which by long association with distinguished people had become prominently known. Not infrequently the Brown residence was alluded to as the “Cabinet Mansion.” Here, among other celebrities, had lived Attorney-General Wirt, and in it Mrs. Wirt had compiled the first “Flora’s Dictionary.” The hospitality of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, being boundless, served to accentuate its reputation, for, unlike her husband, Mrs. Brown was socially most industrious, and, being exceedingly well-to-do, was full of enterprise in the invention of novel surprises for her guests. Mrs. Brown, who was the sister of the afterward distinguished Major-General Pillow, of the Confederate Army, was the first hostess in Washington, I think, to introduce orchestral music at dinner, and her daughter, Narcissa Sanders, with as pronounced a spirit of innovation,[^[5]] sent out enormous cards of invitation in her own name, inviting the distinguished folk of the capital to the house of the Postmaster-General to meet—herself!

I remember a dinner at this luxurious home of Mr. Brown, at which my host, who took me in, amused me immensely at the expense of the elaborate feast before us, and at some of his wife’s kindly, if costly, foibles. Behind a barrier of plants a band played softly; around us were the obsequious waiters from Gautier’s.

“All from Gautier’s!” sighed the Postmaster-General, in mock despair. “My wife’s napery is the best to be had, but she will have Gautier’s! Our silver is—certainly not the plainest in the city, but Mrs. Brown must have Gautier’s! We have an incomparable chef, but nothing will please my wife but these”; and he scanned the mysterious menu with its tier after tier of unknown French names. Then he turned suddenly and asked me, pointing to a line, “My child, what’s this? Don’t know, eh? Well, neither do I, but let’s try it, anyway. I don’t suppose it will kill us,” and so on, the good old gentleman keeping me in a continual bubble of smothered laughter to the end of the dinner.

A member of Mr. Pierce’s Cabinet, whose house was as conspicuous for its large and lavish entertaining as was Mr. Brown’s, was the Secretary of the Treasury, Guthrie, the wealthy Kentuckian. Mr. Guthrie was no society lover (it was a time when statesmen had need to be absorbed in weightier things), but he entertained, I always thought, as a part of his public duty. His was a big, square-shouldered and angular figure, and his appearance, it was obvious, at receptions was perfunctory rather than a pleasure. A widower, his home was presided over by his two daughters, Mrs. Polk and Mrs. Coke, both also widowed. I often thought Secretary Guthrie’s capacious ballroom suggestive, in its proportions, of a public hall.

Here, one evening, I had my never-to-be-forgotten rencontre with Chevalier Bertinatti, the Sardinian Minister. Dear old Bertinatti! In all the diplomatic circle of the Pierce and Buchanan administrations there was not to be found a personage at once more dignified and genial. Serious, yet enthusiastic, his naturally kind heart adding warmth to the gallantry for which foreigners are famous, the Chevalier was a typical ambassador of the Latin people. He was a learned man, especially in matters American, and knew our Constitution better than did many of our native representatives in Washington. He encountered bravely, though not always successfully, the difficulties of the English language, and his defeats in this field (such is the irony of fate) have served to keep him longer in the minds of many than have his successes.

Upon the occasion to which I have referred, a soirée was held at Secretary Guthrie’s house, at which half the world was present. I wore that evening a gown of foreign silk, the colour of the pomegranate blossom, and with it a Sardinian head-dress and ornaments which had been sent me by a Consular friend. Seeing me at some distance, the Chevalier failed to recognise me and asked one of the hostesses, with whom he was conversing, “Who is zat lady wis my kontree-woman’s ornaments?”

Upon learning my identity he came forward quickly and, gazing admiringly at me, he threw himself on his knee before me (kissing my hand as he did so, with ardent gallantry) as he exclaimed: “Madame, you are charming wis zat head-dress like my kontree-women! Madame! I assure you, you have conquest me behind and now you conquest me before!” and he bowed profoundly.

This remarkable compliment was long remembered and recounted wherever the name of the kind-hearted diplomat was mentioned. A great many ties bound Monsieur Bertinatti to Washington society, not the least of which was his marriage to Mrs. Bass of Mississippi, an admired member of the Southern and predominating element in the capital. Her daughter, who returned to die in her native land (she was buried from the Cathedral in Memphis, Tennessee), became the Marquise Incisa di Camerana.

When, after decades of political strife, the crucial time of separation came between the North and the South, and we of the South were preparing to leave the Federal City, I could not conceal my sorrow; and tears, ever a blessed boon to women, frequently blinded me as I bade first one and then another of our associates what was to be a long good-bye. At such an expression of my grief the Chevalier Bertinatti was much troubled.

“Don’t weep,” he said. “Don’t weep, my dear Mrs. Clay. You have had sixty years of uninterrupted peace! This is but a revolution, and all countries must suffer from them at times! Look at my poor country! I was born in revolution, and reared in revolution, and I expect to die in revolution!” And with this offering of philosophic consolation we parted.

CHAPTER V
Solons of the Capital

The classes of Washington society in the fifties were peculiarly distinct. They were not unlike its topography, which is made up of many small circles and triangles, into each of which run tributary streets and avenues. In the social life, each division in the Congressional body was as a magnetic circle, attracting to itself by way of defined radii those whose tastes or political interests were in sympathy with it. Not less prominent than the Cabinet circle (outranking it, in fact), and fully as interesting by reason of its undisguised preference for things solid, scientific and intellectual, was the Judiciary or Supreme Court set. The several Justices that composed this august body, together with their wives and daughters, formed a charmed circle into which the merely light-minded would scarcely have ventured. Here one met the wittiest and the weightiest minds of the capital, and here, perhaps more than in any other coterie, the new-comer was impressed with what Messrs. Nicolay and Hay describe as “the singular charm of Washington life.” In the Supreme Court circle, the conditions attending Congressional life in those strenuous times forced themselves less boldly upon one. Here one discussed philosophies, inventions, history, perhaps, and the arts; seldom the fashions, and as seldom the on dits.

The Nestor of that circle in the fifties was quaint old Roger B. Taney (pronounced Tawney), who, after various political disappointments, including a refusal by the Senate to confirm his appointment as a member of the Cabinet, had received his appointment to the Supreme Court bench in 1836. Upon the death of Chief Justice Marshall, Judge Taney became the head of the Supreme Court body; thus, for more than thirty years, he had been a prominent personage in the country’s legal circles and a conspicuous resident in Washington. He was an extremely plain-looking man, with frail body, which once rose tall and erect, but now was so bent that one always thought of him as small, and with a head which made me think of a withered nut. Swarthy of skin, but grey-haired, Judge Taney was a veritable skeleton, “all mind and no body”; yet his opinion settled questions that agitated the nation, and his contemporaries agreed he was the ablest man who had ever sat upon the Supreme Court bench. Judge Taney’s daughters, gifted and brilliant women, were seldom seen in society, but from choice or necessity chose bread-winning careers. They were great draughtswomen and made coloured maps, for which, in those days of expanding territory, there was a great and constant need.

Of Chief Justice Taney’s associates, Judges Catron and John A. Campbell became best known to Senator Clay and myself. These, and other statesmen equally distinguished and later to be mentioned, having been the friends of ex-Governor (then Senator) C. C. Clay, Sr., my husband had been known to them from the days when, as a schoolboy, he had visited his parents in the Federal City. Mrs. Judge Catron, whom I met soon after my arrival in Washington, was a woman of great elegance of manner and dress, and always brought to my mind the thought of a dowager Duchess. An associate of my husband’s mother, and a native of gay Nashville, Mrs. Catron had been a social queen in Washington in the late thirties, and her position of interest was still preserved in 1855.

Judge and Mrs. Campbell, being rich beyond many others, their home was widely known for sumptuous entertaining as well as for its intellectual atmosphere. Sharing to an extent the public favour, Judge Campbell, Reverdy Johnson, and Robt. J. Walker were the three legal giants of their day. Judge Campbell’s clients were among the wealthiest in the country, and his fees were said to be enormous. Had not the war ensued, undoubtedly he would have been appointed to the Chief Justiceship, as was commonly predicted for him. He was a man of great penetration and erudition, and was held in high esteem by everyone in the capital. In 1861 he cast his lot with the people of the South, among whom he was born, and went out of the Federal City to meet whatsoever fate the future held. Judge Campbell became the earnest adviser of Mr. Davis, and was a Commissioner of the Confederate Government, together with Alexander H. Stephens and R. M. T. Hunter, when the three conferred with Mr. Seward, acting as delegate from the Northern President, Lincoln. Nor did the ensuing years diminish the great regard of great men for our beloved Southern scholar.[^[6]] Writing to Judge Campbell from Washington on December 10, 1884, Thomas F. Bayard thus reveals the exalted regard which the former sustained to the close of a long life:

“Mr. Lamar, now Associate Judge of the Supreme Court, concurs with me,” he wrote, “in considering it highly important that your counsel and opinions should be freely given to Mr. Cleveland at this important juncture, and respectfully and earnestly I trust you will concur in our judgment in the matter. Mr. Cleveland will resign from his present office early in January, but can easily and conveniently receive you for the purpose suggested in the interview.”[^[7]]

In those days of Washington’s splendour, Mrs. Campbell and her daughter Henrietta were no less distinguished for their culture, intellectuality, and exclusiveness. Mrs. Campbell was the first Southern woman to adopt the English custom of designating her coloured servant as “my man.” At the home of the Campbells one met not only the legal lights of Washington, but scientists and travellers, as if law and the sciences were drawn near to each other by natural selection. Professor Henry, of the Smithsonian Institution, was a frequent visitor at this home, as was also Professor Maury, the grand road-master of the ocean, who, by the distribution of his buoys, made a track in the billows of the Atlantic for the safe passing of ships.

I remember an amusing visit paid by a party from our mess to the observatory of Professor Maury. It was an occasion of special interest. Jupiter was displaying his brilliancy in a marvellous way. For no particular reason, in so far as I could see, the Professor’s great telescope seemed to require adjusting for the benefit of each of the bevy present. I noticed Professor Maury’s eye twinkling as he went on with this necessary (?) preliminary, asking, betimes: “What do you see? Nothing clearly? Well, permit me!” And after several experiments he would secure, at last, the right focus. When all of his guests had been treated to a satisfactory view of the wonders of the sky, Professor Maury delivered himself somewhat as follows:

“Now, ladies, whilst you have been studying the heavenly bodies, I have been studying you!” and the quizzical expression deepened in his eye.

“Go on,” we assented.

“Well,” said the Professor, “I have a bill before Congress,” (mentioning its nature) “and if you ladies don’t influence your husbands to vote for it, I intend to publish the ages of each and every one of you to the whole of Washington!”

Remembering the mutability of political life, it was and remains a source of astonishment to me that in the Government circles of the fifties were comprised so many distinguished men who had retained their positions in the political foreground for so many years; years, moreover, in which an expanding territory was causing the envy for office to spread, infecting the ignorant as well as the wise, and causing contestants to multiply in number and their passions to increase in violence at each election.

When Senator Clay and I took up our residence in the Federal City, there were at least a dozen great statesmen who had dwelt almost continuously in Washington for nearly twoscore years. Writing of these to Governor Clay, in 1858, my husband said “Mr. Buchanan looks as ruddy as ever; General Cass as young and vigorous as in 1844, and Mr. Dickens[^[8]] appears as he did in 1834, when with you I was at his home at an evening party!” Thomas Hart Benton, the great Missourian, who for seven long years struggled against such allied competitors as Senators Henry Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, in his fight against the Bank of the United States, probably out-ranked all others in length of public service; but, besides Mr. Benton, there were Chief Justice Taney and his associates, Judges Catron, James M. Wayne, and John McLean, of Ohio; Senator Crittenden, of Kentucky, and General George Wallace Jones—all men who had entered political life when the century was young.

Among my pleasantest memories of Washington are the evenings spent at the home of Mr. Benton. His household, but recently bereft of its mistress, who had been a long-time invalid, was presided over by his daughters, Mrs. General Frémont, Mrs. Thomas Benton Jones, and Mme. Boileau. The last-named shared, with the Misses Bayard and Maury, a reputation for superior elegance among the young women of the capital. The daughters of Mr. Benton had been splendidly educated, it was said, by their distinguished father, and they repaid his care of them by a lifelong adoration. A handsome man in ordinary attire, the great old author and statesman was yet a more striking figure when mounted. He rode with a stately dignity, quite unlike the pace indulged in by some other equestrians of that city and day; a day, it may be said in passing, when equestrianism was common. Mr. Benton’s appearance and the slow gait of his horse impressed me as powerful and even majestic, and often (as I remarked to him at dinner one evening) there flashed through my mind, as I saw him, a remembrance of Byron’s Moorish King as he rode benignly through the streets of Granada. He seemed gratified at my comparison.

“I’m glad you approve of my pace,” he said. “I ride slowly because I do not wish to be confounded with post-boys and messengers sent in haste for the surgeon. They may gallop if they will, but not Senators.”

At his own table Mr. Benton was an oracle to whom everyone listened eagerly. I have seen twenty guests held spellbound as he recited, with thrilling realism, a history of the Clay-Randolph duel, with the details of which he was so familiarly acquainted. I never heard him allude to his great fight in the Senate, when, the galleries crowded with men inimical to him, his wife and General Jones sent out for arms to protect the fearless Senator from the onslaught which seemed impending; nor to his nearly thirty years’ strife for the removal of the onerous Salt Tax; but the dinners before which his guests sat down were flavoured with the finest of Attic salt, of which he was a connoisseur, which served to sting into increased eagerness our interest in his rich store of recollections.

Wherever Mr. Benton was seen he was a marked personage. There was something of distinction in the very manner in which he wore his cravat, and when he spoke, men listened instinctively. Of his daughters, Mrs. Frémont was probably the most gifted, and Mme. Boileau the most devoted to fashionable society. Mme. Boileau was the wife of a French attaché, and was remarked as she drove about in the streets with a be-ribboned spaniel upon the front seat of her calash. Many years after my acquaintance in Washington with Mr. Benton’s family (it was during the Cleveland Administration), I was present at a reception given by Mrs. Endicott when I observed among the guests a very busy little woman, in simple black apparel, whose face was familiar to me, but whom I found myself unable to place; yet everyone seemed to know her. I heard her address several foreigners, in each case employing the language of his country, and, my curiosity increasing, I asked at last, “Who is that small lady in black?”

To my surprise, she proved to be Mrs. Frémont!

I soon made my way to her. She seemed almost impatient as I said, “Mrs. Frémont, I can never forget you, nor the charming evenings at your father’s house, though you, I am sure, have forgotten me!” She looked at me searchingly and then spoke, impetuously:

“Yes! yes! I remember your face perfectly, but your name—Tell me who you are, quick. Don’t keep me waiting!” I promptly gratified her, and in the conversation that followed, I added some reference to her father’s great book, “Thirty Years’ View,” which, until the destruction of my home during the Civil War, had formed two of our most valued volumes.

“Ah!” cried Mrs. Frémont. “You are a woman of penetration! I have always said my father’s book is the Political Bible of America. I know it will not perish!”

I have referred to General George Wallace Jones. No memory of ante-bellum Washington and its moving personages would be complete were he, the pet of women and the idol of men, left out. He was born in 1804, when the Union was young; and adventure and patriotism, then sweeping over our country, were blended in him. As a child he came out of the young West, still a wilderness, to be educated in Kentucky. He had been a sergeant of the body-guard of General Jackson, and to the Marquis de la Fayette upon the latter’s last visit to the United States in 1824. Thereafter he figured in the Black Hawk War as aid to General Dodge. His life was a continual panorama of strange events. In the Great Indian War he became a Major-General; then a County Judge; and appeared at the capital as delegate from the Territory of Michigan early in 1835. General Jones’s personal activity becoming known to the Government, he was made Surveyor-General of the Northwest. It was about this time that he, being on the Senate floor, sprang to the side of Mr. Benton while the gallery hummed ominously with the angry threats of the friends of the Bank defenders, and personal violence seemed unavoidable. I never knew how many of the Western States were laid out by General Jones, but they were numerous. In his work of surveying he was accompanied by young military men, many of whom played conspicuous parts in the history of the country, at that time but half of its present size. Among these was Jefferson Davis, then a civil engineer.

General Jones was indefatigable in his attendance at social gatherings, and continued to out-dance young men, even when threescore rich years were his. He had been a great favourite with my husband’s parents during their Congressional life, so great indeed that father’s message of introduction spoke of him as “My son!” and his fraternal offices to us are among the brightest memories I hold of life at the capital. The General was a small, wiry man, renowned for his long black hair, glossy and well-kept as was any belle’s, and which seemed even to a very late period to defy time to change it. In society he was sprightly as a kitten, and at seventy-five would poke his glistening black head at me, declaring as he did so, “I’ll give you anything you ask, from a horse to a kiss, if you can find one grey hair among the black!”

General Jones died in the West, just before the close of the nineteenth century, but to the end he was gay and brave, and elastic in body and mind. So indomitable was his spirit even in those closing days, that he revived a memory of the war days in the following spirited letter written in 1894, just after the celebration of his ninetieth birthday. At this time he was made King of the Carnival, was complimented by the Governor of Iowa, “the two branches of the General Assembly, and by the Supreme Court, they, too, being Republicans and total strangers to me save one Republican Senator and one Democratic representative from this County,” as his gay account of the episode ran.

“I told several times,” he added, “of how you and dear Mrs. Bouligny prevented me from killing Seward. It was the day you stopped me, as you sat in your carriage in front of Corcoran & Riggs’s bank, and I was about to pass you. I would certainly have killed Seward with my sword-cane but that you stopped me. I was about to follow the Secretary as he passed the bank door, between his son Frederick and some other men. I would have run my sword through him and immediately have been cut into mince-meat by the hundreds of negro guards who stood all round. Do you recollect that fearful incident? God sent two guardian angels to save my life. How can I feel otherwise than grateful to you for saving me that day!”

The recalling of this pioneer-surveyor of the great Western wilderness revives, too, the name of as notable a character in the Southwest, and one who will always be identified with the introduction of cotton in the Southern States, and the land-grants of the territory of Louisiana. I never met Daniel Clarke, but very early in my married life, and some years before I went to the capital to reside, I became acquainted with that remarkable woman, his daughter, Mrs. Myra Clarke Gaines.