wind through Gothic arches of elms along a skilfully engineered road
which picks its way through the estate for a half-mile or more. Either
course will bring you before a wide low house of yellow brick, with
green blinds and white woodwork and English ivy. Directly ahead of
you, across the circle of the driveway, the square main section of the
house, capped by a tower, rises above a bright portico. To left and
right the house throws out long extensions of even height, terminating
in wings set endwise to you, like double-faces in the game of dominoes.
Your first impression will be one of unusual size, your next of flatly
rectangular simplicity. Your eye will be caught momentarily by a
cross-tipped bell-tower of the right wing, where Charles Carroll built
the only private chapel in America because England would not let him
worship in peace. You will know that you have never seen such a house
in America, and you will probably not suspect that it is a monument to
several great Americans.
A lad of four or five is playing on the grass circle of the driveway
before the great house. The undulating Maryland countryside is not
half as absorbing as the game in hand, though his great-grandfather
was governor of all those miles. If you were to ask him the way to
Annapolis he would probably indicate the double file of venerable trees
which stand sentinel along the tapering avenue, smile courteously if
you thanked him, and then scurry off on an important engagement. He
wouldn’t tell you that in his grandfather’s great-grandfather’s day
Annapolis was the national capital, nor that that gentleman was one of
the bold spirits who made a national capital possible.
There is no reason why he should know of it, or be interested. If,
with your heavy wisdom, and your rhapsodies on the pride of race, and
your generally affable tourist behavior you succeed in alarming the
lad until he retreats to the shelter of the portico, know, stranger,
that you have aroused the suspicions of Charles Carroll, the Ninth in
America, and the seventh heir of that name to Doughoregan Manor.
Ancestors can be lived up to or lived down, and there is no particular
point or prowess in bragging about them. To me there is glorious
romance in the fact that this youngster of five is romping on the
ground that was granted to his ancestor by a King of England. Perhaps
it is glorious and romantic because it is fact, but I prefer to believe
that the real reason may be found in a verse in the book of Exodus,
which reads:
“Honor thy father and thy mother.”
They were worth honoring; they have been duly honored even unto the
eighth and ninth generations.
Charles Carroll the First, like many another Irishman since, went
west. He came to Baltimore in 1688 with the ink hardly sanded on his
commission as attorney-general of Maryland. As a Roman Catholic he
found the commission suddenly nullified by revolution in England, and
it was four years before a Royal government was set up in the colony
restoring and protecting its proprietary rights. His wife had died
childless during that period, and he married again. Of ten children
of his second wife, the eldest died on the voyage home from school
in Europe. Back at St. Omer’s in French Flanders he left a younger
brother, Charles Carroll the Second, and presently the plodding
ships bore back to him the news of Henry’s death and the heritage
of responsibility and affection which devolved upon him. In 1723 he
came back to his own people, married in his turn, and in 1737 Mistress
Elizabeth Brooke Carroll bore him a son. The precedent for the name
Charles was already strong, Charles was a good name, and so was
christened Charles Carroll the Third.
In the archives of the State Department at Washington you will find his
signature. It is hidden from the light, but reproductions of it and the
pledge to which it is attached have already made it familiar to every
American. The story runs that in the congress at Philadelphia when
the Declaration of Independence was presented, John Hancock turned to
Carroll and offering him a quill, asked “Will you sign?”
“Most willingly,” was the reply. And he signed, in an easy clear hand,
with less flourish, perhaps, than Franklin’s or Hancock’s, but no less
sincerity--and Carroll, the richest man in America, had more to lose
than either.
“There goes two millions with the dash of a pen!” a bystander remarked.
“Oh, Carroll, you will get off,” said another. “There are so many
Charles Carrolls.” At which Charles Carroll Third took the pen and
jabbed “of Carrollton” under his signature, that George Third of
England might make no mistake and punish any other of the same name.
There is some cherry-tree flavor in the story, and precious historians
maintain that he invariably signed his full title; but, if it can
accomplish by example what the cherry-tree fable has accomplished, let
it stand.
What circumstances carried this patriot, whom we left a moment ago
as a baby, to the front rank of his country’s champions? The best of
schooling then was to be had abroad. An ardent father and mother put
aside their fierce attachment to their only child in order that he
might become a proper heir to the estate which Charles Carroll the
Second was accumulating. Just as the young Pinckneys and Rutledges and
Middletons of Charleston in pre-Revolutionary days went to the mother
country for their cultural training, so the youths of the middle states
whose families could afford the excursion were dispatched to France,
or England, or Flanders. One day in 1748 saw Charles Carroll, a boy
of eleven, take ship with his cousin John for Europe. What pangs his
mother experienced at the loss of her only chick are faintly reflected
in a passage from the correspondence between the two: “You are always
at heart my dear Charley and I have never tired of asking your papa
questions about you. I daily pray to God to grant you his grace above
all things, and to take you under his protection.” “With your mother,”
his father wrote in 1753, “I shall be glad to have your likeness in the
compass of 15 inches by 12”--and directed him to have the specified
portrait done by a good painter. But the mother was not well, and in
1761, when the baby who had sailed away was a grown man, a student of
Law in the Temple in London, and nearly ready to return to the warmth
of his mother’s adoration, she died.
Such a beau as he would have made her! Heredity gave him an active mind
and bearing of real charm, and just as the Manor house back in Maryland
took on through the years extensions and embellishments which multiply
its effect of useful luxury, so each addition to Charles Carroll’s
intellect only seemed to make him more companionable and genuinely
attractive. Even during his student period his sensitive spirit was
not altogether proof against affairs of the heart, and if it had not
been for her meddlesome sister, Miss Louisa Baker would have gone back
to Maryland as his bride, as mistress over 68,000 acres. Instead, the
catch of the commonwealth returned at twenty-nine under a cloak of
melancholy from the shelter of which he wrote, dourly, “Matrimony is
at present but little the subject of my thoughts.”
Persons familiar with the laws of gravity and more particularly with
the physics of the rebounding heart will not be surprised to learn that
within a few months he was again engaged to be married, this time to
Miss Rachel Cooke. He wrote to London for her trousseau--such intimate
finery as he hardly dared describe, things to turn even the Babylonian
fiancée of today as green with envy as the Doughoregan meadows. But the
Brussels lace was not for her, for Rachel Cooke fell ill of a fever,
and died, and her miniature and a lock of her tresses were hidden away
in a secret partition of Charles Carroll’s writing desk.
Undiscouraged, he found serious distraction in the fermenting affairs
of the colonies. From provincial grievances such as his father had
related from time to time in his letters dwelling on the oppression of
the rights of Catholics, the problems of the colonists had overflowed
greater areas. Like a flood swelling over the landscape, the minor
swirls of flow and eddy were merged into a common misfortune of drab
color and threatening proportions. It was Charles Carroll’s first
chance for constructive citizenship. At the writing-desk where Rachel’s
miniature lay hidden he wrote a program of letters which may be said
to constitute the brief for independence. And by the time his heart
had healed, and he had fallen in love with Miss Mary Darnell, whom
he preferred, he said, “to all the women I have ever seen, even to
Louisa,” and had married her, he was caught in the flood himself. There
was no turning back even if he wanted to--and he did not want to turn
back.
His town house at Annapolis and the manor of Doughoregan (it is
pronounced _Dooráygan_, and it means the house of the king, because a
thousand years or so ago the O’Carrolls were Irish kings) opened their
doors with special welcome to those who were prepared to resist the
oppression of a king. “A warm, firm, zealous supporter of the rights
of America, in whose cause he has hazarded his all,” wrote John Adams,
Carroll’s “all” at that time yielding an income of some ten thousand
pounds a year. When, in 1773, an outraged importer set fire to his
cargo of taxed tea in Annapolis, Charles Carroll was his chief legal
counsel. When the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia the next
year, he was a member. When the Congress sent a delegation to Canada to
enlist support for the Revolution, it seized upon his French training
as an asset in Charles Carroll, as it chose Benjamin Franklin for his
practical judgment, Father John Carroll (later the first Archbishop of
Baltimore) for his ecclesiastical influence, and Samuel Chase for his
legal ability. The mission failed; Canada would not help; we must work
alone. So to indicate that he welcomed the opportunity Charles Carroll
signed the Declaration of Independence.
Years later he wrote this summary of his career:
“On the breaking out of the Revolution I took a decided part in the
support of the rights of this country; was elected a member of the
Committee of Safety established by the Legislature; was a member of the
Convention which formed the Constitution of the State. The Journals
of Congress show how long I was a member of that body during the
Revolution. With Dr. Franklin and Mr. Samuel Chase I was appointed a
Commissioner to Canada. I was elected a member of the Senate at the
first session of Congress under the present Confederation.... The mode
of choosing the Senate was suggested by me....”
That was all he found to write. It ought to be enough to qualify him
for the emphasis which, in the eminent line of Charles Carrolls, we
have placed upon him. But if, after you have followed him through the
Revolution, you inquire just what connection the details of his career
have with Doughoregan Manor, listen to a short recital of what he was
too modest to write.
In 1780 his father, Charles the Second, was standing on the veranda of
his Annapolis house and peering through a spy-glass at a sail in the
Bay. He made a misstep, pitched heavily from the porch, and was killed.
Mary Darnell Carroll, his daughter-in-law, saw him fall. Her health,
already taxed by her devotion to Mrs. Carroll II during her last
illness, gave way at “Breakneck” Carroll’s tragic death, and she died
within a fortnight, leaving to her husband a son and two daughters. The
son, of course, was Charles Carroll the Fourth. The Signer saw him go
to Liége to school, return, as his father had returned before him, the
idol of a gay countryside, court Nellie Custis at Mount Vernon, marry
Harriet Chew of Cliveden, and rejoice with pride at the advent in 1801
of Charles Carroll the Fifth.
Charles the Fourth, of Homewood, has been described by a contemporary
as follows: “Nothing in Greek art surpasses the perfect symmetry of his
figure.” No less a person than Washington had asked Harriet Chew to
remain in his presence while he sat for his portrait to Gilbert Stuart
in order that his own face might “wear its most agreeable expression.”
Therefore if the baby Charles the Fifth was not handsome it was neither
the fault of his parents nor of the distinguished grandfather who
immediately became his devoted slave.
The concerns of the estate, and the larger questions of the nation, had
the Signer’s first attention. His avocations were to ride his lanes
and woodland, to read Greek and Latin in the original--he was reading
Cicero’s “De Senectute” at ninety-three; to preside over a growing
flock of grandchildren at Homewood with his son, at Brooklandwood,
where Mary Carroll Caton was bringing up the three stunning daughters
whom society called the “American Graces”; and to spend much time in
the company of his daughter Kitty’s husband, Robert Goodloe Harper.
From time to time he was called upon to step into his earlier character
as Signer. In 1824 he was invited, with Jefferson and Madison, the
only survivors of that great company who fixed their names to the
Declaration, to attend the anniversary of the surrender of Cornwallis
at Yorktown. His age forced him to decline, but he compromised by
meeting Lafayette at Fort McHenry and lunching with him in a tent which
had been Washington’s, and by attending a ball given in Lafayette’s
honor at Colonel Howard’s “Belvedere.”
Few men of eighty-seven have shown such activity as was his; most
men of his years would have given way to the misfortunes which now
trooped out of the shadows. Charles Carroll the Fourth died; General
Harper, the beloved son-in-law, followed. In the next year John Adams
and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, and it was the sad duty of
Charles the Third to mourn at their funeral. He was now the last of the
Signers. At eighty-nine he signed a copy of the Declaration which is
now held in the New York Public Library--and signed it in a handwriting
as firm as it had been fifty years before; at ninety he laid the
foundation stone of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; at ninety-three
the cornerstone of St. Charles’ College, near Doughoregan Manor. And
by this time the patriarch had seen born into his grandson’s family a
sixth Charles Carroll.
There are three ghosts at Doughoregan Manor. One is the shade of an
ancient housekeeper, whose quiet tread may be heard in the corridors,
and whose keys tinkle faintly when the house is still. Another is the
spectral coach--its wheels grind on the driveway when death rides to
claim a member of the household--the coach which swung up to the
door on a still November day in 1832 when the Signer went to join his
fathers. It is hardly dignified to call the third a ghost. A warm,
lively, pervading spirit it is--that of the Signer himself, smiling
down from his portrait on the walls. It beamed on Charles the Sixth
through a long and active life until it beckoned to him in 1895. To the
son of Charles Carroll VI, John Lee Carroll, it nodded: “Well done, my
boy,” when he became Governor of Maryland, and to the seventh Charles
it told again all that its cumulative history could convey of the
philosophical guidance and binding parental attachment that has made
Doughoregan Manor something more than a home. Charles Bancroft Carroll,
the Eighth, “carries on” and injects typical enthusiasm into farming
twenty-four hundred acres of the grant you will see in the hall on a
map the first Charles Carroll drew.
You will feel the spirit strongly as you contemplate the Signer’s
place of burial in the chapel where the countryside gathers each
Sunday for services. You will sense the alliance between devotion to
God and to profoundly national ideals, and recall the sympathetic
correspondence between the Signer and his father, as you enter the
Cardinal’s room, a gorgeous chamber decorated in red, containing a
great mahogany bed where Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop John Carroll, and
the Marquis de Lafayette have slept. In a mellow library are the books
he read. Trophies over the door of a panelled dining-room, cups won
at yachting, a friendly hound from the present master’s hunting pack
at your feet--remember that the Signer believed that a clear mind was
most likely to be found in a sound body. We may fairly conceive that
when the house was to be renovated, as it has been four times in its
history, the Signer laid a gentle hand upon the sleeve of the workmen
and cautioned them so: “Paint, if you like. Replace, where the old
has given all its service. But remember, sirs, this is and must be a
home.” And in the fullest connotation of the word, it is a home, with
old chairs to fit you, bright cretonnes at the windows, and friendly
things about you to rest your eyes upon--the sort of a home that a lad
like Charles Carroll the Ninth, who isn’t much interested in ancestors,
likes to take refuge in when strangers grow inquisitive.
THE JUMEL MANSION
[Illustration:
© D.McK
THE JUMEL MANSION
Alone in its brittle modern neighborhood, this lovely anachronism
stands on the highest point of Manhattan, untroubled, unruffled, and
undisturbed except by Sunday idlers to whom its orchards are just
another breathing spot. Though it was Heath’s headquarters, then housed
Washington, later was captured by Howe, and was one of the smartest
suburban estates of Colonial New York, it will never be forgotten
as the home of a person of no military or aristocratic consequence,
yet of caprice, beauty, ambition, impropriety, common sense and
eccentricity--yes, a woman.]
THE JUMEL MANSION
A little over a hundred years have passed. Much sea-water has pressed
up the Harlem on the incoming tide, boiled and eddied in the narrow
pass of Spuyten Duyvil, and slipped away again to the Atlantic,
diluted by the contribution of mountain streams in the Catskills
and Adirondacks, tainted by the factory waste of busy cities up the
Hudson and the Mohawk. Men threw giant bridges across its ebb and
flow, tunneled under its current, bit and blasted and scratched at its
Hell Gate channel. The placid, austere heights that stood above the
stream “nine miles from New York City” bear now the unromantic name of
Coogan’s Bluff, and are as many miles within the city’s northern limits.
The camera had not been invented when Roger Morris built the house for
his young wife. To the westward, where his acreage touched the Hudson,
apartment houses have risen and cut off the Palisades; to the south,
where once he could see far down Staten Island, a tangle of bridges
and shipping is half screened by the battlements of more apartment
buildings; only to the east and north, over the sunny throat of the
Sound and the far blue profile of the Long Island hills, has the
prospect its former grand, pure simplicity. A fan of railway tracks are
at the Harlem where once was “Fishing, Oystering and Clamming,” and
from the very skirts of the estate rises each afternoon the roar of
fifteen or twenty thousand “busy Americans” who are totally unoccupied
except with the baseball game in process on the Polo Grounds.
It is hard, without photographic record, to reconstruct the picture.
Alone in its brittle modern neighborhood this lovely anachronism is the
only fragment of the composition left to us. It stands on the highest
point of York Island, untroubled, unruffled, and for the most part
undisturbed, except by Sunday idlers to whom its orchards are just
another breathing spot.
It may be unjust to the Jumel Mansion to compare it with the lady
in one of Leonard Merrick’s stories who “had outgrown her sins,
but remembered them with pleasure,” but the spirit of Madame Jumel
haunts the air so persistently that the suggestion is not altogether
out of place. Despite the fact that when the British were advancing
across Long Island in 1776 it was General Heath’s headquarters, that
it housed Washington for six weeks, and that fifteen minutes after
he had left it on the day Fort Washington was taken General Howe
established his own headquarters there--despite its standing as one
of the smartest suburban estates of Colonial New York, the house
will never be forgotten as the home of a person of no military or
aristocratic consequence, yet a person of caprice and beauty, ambition
and impropriety, common sense and eccentricity. She was no sort of
person to talk about, and therefore talked about; a kaleidoscopic
contradiction--in short, a woman.
Though General Washington probably never heard of the lady, the house
which she occupied was strangely related to important moments in his
own career. When he was an athletic officer of twenty-five, neither
Betsy Bowen nor her mother, Phebe Kelly of Providence, knew of him
or cared about him, for they were both yet unborn. Of his restrained
sentimental interest for Polly Philipse, the Yonkers heiress, they
could not know, nor had they comment to offer when Colonel Roger
Morris, a gallant of the colonial forces, crowded the young Virginian
out of her affections and married her. In 1760 when Washington
himself married Martha Custis, Phebe Kelly was three years old; at
the age of eighteen, in the same month when Washington was appointed
commander-in-chief of the American army and rode to its head at
Cambridge, Phebe Kelly Bowen of Providence gave birth to her second
daughter, and called her Betsy.
Ten years before, Roger Morris had built a lovely house for his wife
and their growing family on the topmost point of Manhattan; the wailing
baby in Providence in that turbulent July, 1775, scarcely suspected
that one day she would be the mistress of that house, or that a month
ago Roger Morris, a Tory, too peaceful to fight, had fled to England
for refuge. But there began the chain of events which finally landed
his estate in Betsy Bowen’s hands.
The city of Providence was so named because its founders had supreme
confidence in its namesake. With the advent of a pathetic little atom
of humanity called Betsy Bowen, Providence the power, through the
agency of Providence the city, undertook to show off. “Her father was
a seafaring man of no account; her mother of less,” said the town.
“It looks bad. It probably is. If not, it ought to be. In any case,
Providence shall be appeased.” Betsy’s mother was presently arrested
and thrown in jail, and Betsy, with her sister Polly, then a child of
fourteen, was first locked up in the workhouse and later sent to live
with a more respectable family. John Bowen, the father, was knocked
overboard by the boom of a sloop and drowned; his widow and her second
husband were allowed out of jail long enough to be ordered out of town;
they returned and were shortly expelled at the expense of the town,
to carry on a wretched existence in a hut on the Old Warren Road.
As the daughters matured they moved to a less respectable family.
In 1794 a son was born to Betsy Bowen, and its father’s name being
either unknown, undesirable or Jones, the baby was christened George
Washington Bowen. Three years later her mother and her step-father,
once more expelled from Providence, made their way to the North
Carolina mountains, got sufficiently acquainted with their neighbors to
start a lawsuit, and then were shot by a squirrel rifle in the hands of
one or more of the defendants. Providence the town had forgotten them,
Providence the power had accomplished a _tour de force_.
The divine lightnings were apparently spent. Betsy Bowen left her baby
in the hands of a friend and fled from the mockery of her native city.
She began six obscure years of adventure as Betsy Bowen, reappeared in
New York for a fleeting glimpse as Madame De la Croix, and emerged as
Eliza Brown, the mistress of the wealthy Stephen Jumel. From 1800 to
1804 she occupied this prosperous French merchant’s house at the corner
of Whitehall and Pearl Streets, near the lower tip of Manhattan. He
came home one day to find her apparently on her death bed, explaining
faintly, through the medium of her physician, that she wanted nothing
more than to leave a sorry world as his wife. To Jumel, who was
deeply touched, it was an irresistible appeal, and the clergyman who
had come to pray for her married the pair. No hypodermic has since
been discovered by a vaulting medical science which ever had such
magical powers of restoration, for two days later Betsy Bowen-de la
Croix-Brown-Jumel was riding out behind Stephen Jumel’s smart horses as
Stephen Jumel’s lawful, gleeful, wedded wife. Her program, after a bad
start, was fairly begun.