He had a most illuminating journey. He had never realized that Charles
Town, in the Carolinas, was the richest city south of Philadelphia,
nor that here he was to find a spirit of resentment against British
injustice as acute as that of his own people. “This town,” he wrote,
“makes a beautiful appearance as you come up to it and in many respects
a magnificent one. I can only say in general that in grandeur, splendor
of building, decorations, equipages, numbers, commerce, shipping, and
indeed everything it far surpasses all I ever saw or ever expect to
see in America.” From a Quincy of Massachusetts this was the perfect
tribute.
What prompted it? In his diary of March 8, 1773 he writes: “Dined with
a large company at Miles Brewton’s, Esq., a gentleman of very large
fortune.... At Mr. Brewton’s sideboard was very magnificent plate. A
very fine bird kept familiarly playing about the room under our chairs
and the table, picking up the crumbs, and perching on the window and
sideboard.” The bird was evidently the crowning touch to a panoply
of culture and luxury such as he had scarcely anticipated among the
outlanders. You may picture him, if you like, rising comfortably
fortified with good cooking, at the end of a whole afternoon at the
five-yard table; identifying with shrewd appraisal the excellent
furniture which his host and hostess had picked up in England five
years before; running a furtive proving finger over the carved woodwork
which had also come across the Atlantic; knowing that the portrait of
Miles Brewton on the wall was _good_, and knowing that another reason
why it was good was because Sir Joshua Reynolds had done it. Though
there were slaves in Boston at that time, you may conjecture that
he tacitly disapproved of the substantial slave quarters across the
courtyard--for he was the ancestor of a brilliant abolitionist. But for
the architectural excellence of the interior, its carved woodwork, and
its furnishings, he could have nothing but praise. And at the risk of
invading the visitor’s privacy you may follow him to the King Street
gate as he departs, and you may perhaps catch the emphatic wag of his
head, and hear his conclusive whisper: “These people know how! They
have _atmosphere_! I am amazed!” He carried back to Boston the warm
friendship of Miles Brewton and the firm conviction that Charles Town
could be relied upon.
Miles Brewton had for ten years been a member of the Commons House
of the Colonial legislature. He had watched the smouldering of a
spirit which would break out in flame the next spring, had given wise
counsel to the hot-heads, yielded nothing to injustice from London.
Then Charles Town heard the shot fired round the world. The Provincial
Congress met, voted to raise three regiments and a million dollars.
Into the uproar sailed his Majesty’s Ship _Scorpion_, bearing Lord
William Campbell, to be the new colonial governor, apparently for
no special qualification except that he had married Sarah Izard,
of Charles Town. Miles Brewton made his wife’s cousin and her
governor-husband his guests at once, and when the Provincial Congress
promptly stuck its verbal bayonets under the uncomfortable young
Campbell’s nose, His Lordship stayed up half the night wondering what
he could do, and then called Miles Brewton out of bed to help settle
the question.
A Committee of Safety presently supplanted the Provincial Congress, and
Brewton became a member. We know of his value to the colony in trying
to preserve equilibrium. Of what his service in war might have been
we can never know. Josiah Quincy had been urging upon his friend the
courtesy of a return visit. With Mrs. Brewton and the children he took
ship to Philadelphia--and Miles Brewton and his family were lost at
sea. Josiah Quincy lost a friend and the cause a level-headed patriot.
Although its builder was gone, and his direct line wiped out, the
Brewton house remained. It was left jointly to his sisters, Mrs.
Charles Pinckney and Mrs. Jacob Motte. It was Mrs. Motte’s home
while Parker and Clinton hammered at the city gates in 1776, and it
requires no documentary evidence to conceive how that “very magnificent
plate” on the Brewton sideboard shone at dinner the night of August
second--the night when the battered British fleet had sailed away,
and the night when Captain Barnard Elliott read the Declaration of
Independence to the soldiery and the cheering townsfolk.
There came a day, however, four years later when Sir Henry Clinton
cut off the peninsula from the mainland, and forced the city to
surrender. A conqueror likes to be comfortable, and Sir Henry and his
staff camped down upon Mrs. Motte’s thoroughly comfortable house. You
will find, scratched into one of its white marble mantels, a crude
sketch of a British frigate, and a portrait of the conqueror himself,
done by a staff-officer. Mrs. Motte, at the commander’s request,
presided at table, but the lady was as wise as she was tactful--her
three attractive daughters were behind barred doors in the garret--a
knowing precaution against the notorious tendencies of Lord Rawdon, who
succeeded Sir Henry Clinton. Other homes in the town fared less well:
Mrs. C. C. Pinckney and her family were turned out bodily, and the
families upon whom were quartered certain of the lesser invaders were
made wretched indeed.
Charles Town endured and waited. In pleasant weather the enemy staff
lounged in the deep-walled garden which reaches back of the Motte
house to Legare Street; when winter forced them indoors there were gay
dinners in the high-panelled dining-room, dinners attended by those of
the citizenry who had “played safe” and England to win. The patriots
wore brave smiles and old dresses. If you had been a sentry during
those days you might have challenged a charming young woman with a pass
through the lines to visit her plantation. If you had been a dutiful
sentry you would have glanced into her carriage, to make sure she
carried no contraband. If you had been an impertinent sentry you might
have seen that she wore heavy boots--but if she had smiled at you
you would not have been impertinent. And naturally when she returned
through the lines two or three days later and smiled graciously upon
you as an old friend, how could you know that those boots were men’s
boots, and that they were now in the stirrups of some cavalier serving
under Marion, the Swamp Fox? Or read behind her smile the secret that
Marion’s men that night would ride the harder, harass the British
patrols outside more bitterly, make foreign tenure of the city less and
less comfortable? That was the secret of the women of Charles Town.
A British officer caught Colonel Isaac Hayne after a brilliant capture
he had effected within five miles of the city. They brought him in and
condemned him to death as a spy, which he was not. The drawing-room of
the Motte house saw another phase of Charles Town’s women: heard their
pleading for Hayne’s life; saw Rawdon refuse. Then imprisoned Charles
Town saw Martyr Hayne hanged and bitterness crystallized to hate. The
same Mrs. Motte who had been an unwilling hostess to the British in
town went in 1780 to her plantation “Mount Joseph,” on the Congaree.
The British seized and fortified it the next year and she was moved to
a nearby farmhouse, so that Marion and “Light Horse Harry” Lee could
lay siege to the property. When Lee suggested to her the destruction of
her own home by fire-bearing arrows, she agreed heartily, and herself
brought forth an East-Indian bow and arrows of great range. The good
lady then watched the marksmanship of Marion’s men set fire to her own
plantation house, applauded its surrender, and when the fire was out
presided over captor and captive at her own table!
A watchman’s cry put an end to the poverty and distress in which the
besieged city found itself slowly mired. Cutting through the rain
it brought candle-light to life in every house as the news spread:
“Half-past-twelve of a stormy night and Cornwallis has surrendered!”
It meant victory, an end to suffering, reunited families. In 1782
Moultrie led his troops into the city, past “the balconies, the doors
and windows crowded with the patriotic fair, the aged citizens and
others congratulating us on our return home, saying, ‘God bless you,
gentlemen! You are welcome home, gentlemen!’ Both citizens and soldiers
shed mutual tears of joy.”
For ten years the Motte house followed the city’s returning prosperity.
Of the three girls who had been hidden in the attic during the wretched
Rawdon’s incumbency, one, who married Thomas Pinckney, died young; the
second, whose first husband died, married Pinckney and lived to see him
the first American ambassador to England and a candidate for president.
The third, Mary Brewton Motte, married William Alston, a colonel in
Marion’s Brigade.
It was natural, therefore, when President Washington journeyed to
South Carolina in 1791, he should stop at Clifton, Colonel Alston’s
plantation, and marvel at the luxurious cultivation of the fields
of young rice. If Mary Motte Alston had her mother’s character and
charm--as she probably did--it is no wonder the President who was also
a good farmer told her the plantation “looked like fairyland.” In
his journal he wrote: “Went to a concert where were 400 ladies, the
number and appearance of which exceeded anything I had ever seen.” And
later this: “Was visited about two o’clock by a great number of most
respectable ladies in Charleston, the first honour of the kind I had
ever experienced, as flattering as singular.” Nor can we omit the fact
that Commodore Gillon solved the delicate problem of where to seat the
President at the state dinner by placing him opposite the loveliest
lady in Charleston, and _next_ to the wittiest.
In 1791 Colonel Alston bought the Motte house. As the Alston house it
presided over the rise of an Alston to the governorship of the state.
Its gate swung wide at the arrival in Charleston of Joseph Alston’s
second wife, Theodosia Burr. Theodosia sailed for New York in 1813
in the swift privateer, _Patriot_, to join her lonely father Aaron.
Four weeks later Joseph Alston sat down at a French secretary in the
drawing-room and wrote Burr, “I have in vain endeavored to build upon
the hope of long passage. Thirty days are decisive. My wife is _either
captured or lost_. What a destiny is mine!” The ship was never heard of
again. Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel in her excellent volume, “Charleston,
the Place and Its People,” tells of the death-bed confession of an old
sailor thirty years later, who had been one of a crew of pirates who
had captured the ship and made the passengers walk the plank, and some
color is given to this solution by an anonymous note found in a volume
of Burr’s letters, saying “Some account appeared in the New Orleans
papers about 1848 of the deposition of a coloured woman--‘in relation
to the death of Mrs. Alston occasioned by Pirates.’”
The eldest daughter of the Alston house, born to the purple, justified
her claim to it by marrying Robert Y. Hayne, some time Governor of
South Carolina, United States Senator, and proprietor of the loser’s
share of a magnificent debate with Daniel Webster. That rare old
gentleman, William Alston, lived until 1839. He was a practical planter
who believed “that in the management of slaves the true interests
of the planter were in exact accordance with the dictates of an
enlightened humanity.” He loved horses, maintained a good stable on the
King Street place, and raced them in lively competition; this leads Mr.
Huger Smith, in his neighborly story of the Alston house, to “wonder
whether Washington’s well known interest in such things led to the
presence, at Colonel Alston’s plantation in 1799, of _Great Plenipo_,
sired ‘by _Royal Gift_, a Jack Ass presented to the late President
Washington by the King of Spain.’--_Georgetown Gazette, April 17,
1799._” Certain it is that he owned _Betsy Baker_, who defeated Colonel
William Washington’s _Rosetta_ in a stirring race, and _Gallattin_, and
_Alborae_--famous turf names all.
His children made him happy, and he endeared himself to an army
of friends, not the least of whom was Thomas Jefferson. It was
Jefferson, the founder of the political party which has since committed
prohibition, who wrote Colonel Alston in 1818:
“I have therefore made up a box of a couple of doz. bottles
among which you will find samples of the wines of White
Hermitage, Ledanon, Rousillon (of Riveralto). Bergasse, claret,
all of France and of Nice, and Montepulciano, of Italy.”
The visitor who penetrates to that cellar today will find it empty.
But on the drawing-room walls he will find another letter from
Jefferson--as he will find one from George Washington, both addressed
to John Julius Pringle, and asking him to be attorney-general of the
United States. Those letters hang there because John Julius Pringle, a
great lawyer, had a son, William Bull Pringle, and because fate married
him to Mary Motte Alston, and because she inherited the house--and
the letter--from the fine old Colonel in 1839. His brother, Robert
Pringle, was in Paris when the royal family abdicated, and had the
opportunity to buy the chairs from Louis Philippe’s palace which are
such an ornament to the house today. Those letters from two presidents
of the United States were cherished possessions of the family when
another Robert Pringle was killed at Battery Wagner on Morris Island
in the defense of his city against the United States. The teardrops
of the crystal chandelier in that same drawing-room tinkled at the
shock of two hundred and eighty days’ firing upon Fort Sumter, while
the harassed family lived through a bitter repetition of the siege
of eighty-odd years before, and when the Federal troops occupied the
city in 1865 history repeated itself as they made headquarters in the
Pringle house. Fifty thousand suns have not faded the Indian dyes in
the silk damask curtains Miles Brewton imported for his new house,
nor have the sea-fogs dulled the French secretary that was Rebecca
Motte’s. Her high-boy is there today, so is a graceful and inviting
old sofa. Time apparently cannot affect them--except as it makes these
possessions infinitely more precious to the present gracious owners,
Miss Susan Pringle Frost and her sisters. A seven-yard table cloth,
for example, would be an exploit in linen even if it were dated 1921;
dated, in scarlet cross-stitch, “Alston, 1797,” Miss Frost’s seven-yard
table cloth is beyond price.
I have no doubt that when, in 1918, there were rumors of an enemy
submarine base in the West Indies, and the possibility of raids upon
Charleston seemed more than mere fancy, the Spirit of the House
smiled, and whispered: “I recollect Miles Brewton’s father telling of
Blackbeard, the pirate. He was going to raid Charles Town, but thought
better of it. Then Stede Bonnet--we _caught_ him. There have been a
lot of them, trouble-makers of one kind and another. Admiral Cervera
and the Spanish had some such notion. Submarines? M-m-m, perhaps.
Who knows? I’m going to take a little nap now, but if you want me,
Charleston, let me know. I’ll be about anyway when they commence to
shell the town.”
APPENDIX
Those who find in the stories of Mount Vernon and The Quincy Homestead
a stimulus for the preservation of other famous American residences
will naturally inquire into the successful methods of the organizations
of patriotic women who now carry on that work in a manner so perfectly
suited to the charge.
To answer those inquiries, and more particularly to record the identity
of those who are now “carrying on,” there follows a list of the current
officers of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union.
_Regent_
Miss Harriet Clayton Comegys On the Green, Dover, Delaware
_Hon. Vice-Regent_
Mrs. Elizabeth B. A. Rathbone Michigan
_Vice-Regents_
Miss Alice M. Longfellow Massachusetts
Mrs. Charles Custis Harrison Pennsylvania
Mrs. Thomas S. Maxey Texas
Mrs. Robert D. Johnston Alabama
Mrs. Eugene Van Rensselaer West Virginia
Mrs. John Julius Pringle South Carolina
Mrs. William F. Barret Kentucky
Mrs. Henry W. Rogers Maryland
Miss Mary F. Failing Oregon
Mrs. Eliza F. Leary Washington
Mrs. J. Carter Brown Rhode Island
Mrs. James Gore King Richards Maine
Miss Mary Evarts Vermont
Mrs. Antoine Lentilhon Foster Delaware
Miss Annie Ragan King Louisiana
Miss Jane A. Riggs District of Columbia
Mrs. Horace Mann Towner Iowa
Mrs. Thomas P. Denham Florida
Miss Harriet L. Huntress New Hampshire
Mrs. Charles Eliot Furness Minnesota
Mrs. Benjamin D. Walcott Indiana
Mrs. Lucien M. Hanks Wisconsin
Miss Annie Burr Jennings Connecticut
Mrs. Willard Hall Bradford New Jersey
Mrs. Charles Nagel Missouri
Mrs. George A. Carpenter Illinois
Miss Mary Govan Billups Mississippi
Mrs. John V. Abrahams Kansas
Mrs. Margaret Busbee Shipp North Carolina
Mrs. Horton Pope Colorado
Mrs. Charles J. Livingood Ohio
Mrs. Randolph Anderson Georgia
Mrs. Celsus Price Perrie Arkansas
Mrs. Horace Van Denenter Tennessee
Mrs. Charles S. Wheeler California
The restoration and custody of The Quincy Homestead is in the hands
of a committee of the Massachusetts Society of Colonial Dames. The
promoting and sustaining figure in the work is the present chief
executive of the Society, Mrs. Barrett Wendell, of Boston.
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
Incorrect accent marks and archaic / dialect spellings were not changed.
Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation
marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left
unbalanced.
Page 100: Mid-sentence periods were printed that way.