“Nothing can exceed the loneliness of this large and gloomy mansion,

hung with black, its walls echoing only sighs and groans. My poor

husband suffered dreadfully when he was told his mother’s eyes were

constantly turned to the door, watching for him. He had left

Washington to bring me and the children, at her request. She had every

thing about her to awaken love. She was beautiful to the eye, even in

her illness; her complexion was clear as an infant’s, her figure

perfect, and her hands and feet were the most delicate I ever saw. She

was refined and gentle in every thing that she said and did; and,

above all, a pure and spotless Christian. She was my _beau ideal_ of a

perfect gentlewoman.

“The devotion of father and sons to her was most affecting. I don’t

think I ever saw her enter a room that all three did not spring up to

lead her to a chair, to arrange her footstool, and caress and pet

her.”

Mrs. Robert Tyler presided at the White House till June, 1844, when

President Tyler was married to Julia Gardiner, of Gardiner’s Island, New

York, a youthful beauty and _belle_. After many vicissitudes Mrs. Tyler

entered the Catholic church, and now resides in Georgetown. Like Mrs.

Madison, she has returned to the scenes of her early triumphs, and

during the sessions of Congress may often be seen in the diplomatic

gallery of the senate chamber, a stately black-eyed matron dressed in

deep mourning.

Mrs. Polk, intellectually, was one of the most marked women who ever

presided in the White House. A lady of the old school, educated in a

strict Moravian Institute, her attainments were more than ordinary, her

understanding stronger than that of average women; but she obeyed St.

Paul, and held her gifts in silence. She never astonished or offended

her visitors by revealing to them the depth or breadth of her

intelligence; nevertheless she used that intelligence as a power—the

power behind the throne. Never a politician, in a day when politics, by

precedent and custom, were forbidden grounds to women, she no less was

thoroughly conversant with all public affairs, and made it a part of her

duty to inform herself thoroughly on all subjects which concerned her

country, or her husband.

She was her husband’s private secretary, and, probably, was the only

lady of the White House who ever filled that office. She took charge of

his papers, he trusting entirely to her memory and method for their safe

keeping. If he wanted a document, long before labeled and “pigeonholed,”

he said: “Sarah knows where it is;” and it was “Sarah’s” ever ready hand

that laid it before his eyes. At the age of twenty she came to

Washington as the wife of Mr. Polk, then a Member of Congress from

Tennessee. Many years of her youth and prime were spent at the Capital,

and, as she had no children, she had more than ordinary opportunity to

devote herself exclusively to the service of her husband. She was the

wife of the Speaker of the House before she was the wife of the

President of the United States, and in every position seems to have

commanded superlative respect and admiration on her own behalf, aside

from the honor always paid to the person holding high station. Many

poems in the public prints were addressed to her—one, while she was the

wife of a Member of Congress, by Judge Story. When her husband became

the President, Mrs. Polk was deemed the supreme ornament of the White

House, and the public journals of the land broke forth into gratulation

that the domestic life of the Nation’s house was to be represented by

one who honored American womanhood. Mrs. Polk was tall, slender, and

stately, with much dignity of bearing, and a manner said to resemble

that of Mrs. Madison. The stateliness of her presence was conspicuous,

and so impressed an English lady, that she declared that “not one of the

three queens whom she had seen, could compare with the truly feminine,

yet distinguished presence of Mrs. Polk.”

Mrs. Polk was considered a very handsome woman. Her hair and eyes were

very black, and she had the complexion of a Spanish donna. Without being

technically “literary,” she was fond of study, and of intellectual

pursuits, and possessed a decided talent for conversation. In her youth,

she became a member of the Presbyterian church, and through a long life

her character has been eminently a Christian one. Always devout, her

piety in later years is said to have merged into austerity; but even in

the prime of her beauty and power, she never gave her smile or presence

to the dissipation, the insidiously corrupting influence of what is

termed “gay life in Washington,” whose baleful exponent to-day is the

all-night “German” so destructive to freshness of beauty and purity of

soul.

Mrs. Polk still lives at “Polk Place,” Nashville, Tennessee, a stately

and noble home, like the Hermitage in this respect, that the mortal

remains of its master, amid verdure and flowers, beneath the shadow of

its trees, await the final call. The inscription on the monument, to the

memory of President Polk, is in Mrs. Polk’s own words; and here, in this

home, consecrated by his death, the venerable widow of the eleventh

President of the United States peacefully awaits the summons which will

recall her to the Soul whose life and name it has been her chief earthly

glory to embellish and to represent.

* * * * *

Mrs. Taylor, the wife of General Taylor, the twelfth President of the

United States, was one of those unknown heroines of whom fame keeps no

record. Her life, in its self-abnegation and wifely devotion, under

every stress of privation and danger on the Indian’s trail, amid

fever-breeding swamps, and on the edge of the battle-field, was more

heroic than that ever dreamed of by Martha Washington—or continuously

lived by any Presidential lady of the Revolution—yet time will never

give her a chronicler.

When General Taylor received the official announcement that he was

elected President of the United States, among other things he said: “For

more than a quarter of a century my house has been the tent, and my home

the battle-field.” This utterance was simply true, and through all these

years, this precarious house and home were shared by his devoted wife.

He was one of the hardest worked of fighting officers. Intervals of

official repose at West Point and Washington never came to this young

“Indian fighter.” His life was literally spent in the savage wilderness,

but whether in the swamps of Florida, on the plains of Mexico, or on the

desolate border of the frontier, the young wife persistently followed,

loved and served him. Thus all her children were born, and kept with her

till old enough to live without her care; then, for their own sakes, she

gave them up, and sent them back to “the settlements,” for the education

indispensable to their future lives—but, whatever the cost, she stayed

with her husband.

The devotion to duty, and the cheerfulness under privation of this

tender woman—the wife of their chief,—penetrated the whole of his

pioneer army. It made every man more contented and uncomplaining, when

he thought of her. Her entire married life had been spent thus; but when

her husband, as Colonel Taylor, took command against the treacherous

Seminoles, in the Florida war, when the newspapers heralded the new-made

discovery, that the wife of Colonel Taylor had established herself at

Tampa Bay, it was considered unpardonably reckless, that she should thus

risk her life, when the odds of success seemed all against her husband.

Nothing could move her from her post. As ever, she superintended the

cooking of his food; she ministered to the sick and wounded; she upheld

the _morale_ of the little army by the steadfastness of her own

self-possession and hope, through all the long and terrible struggle.

Time passed, and the brave Colonel of the Border became the conquering

hero from Mexico, bearing triumphantly back to peace the victories of

Palo Alto, Monterey, and Buena Vista, inscribed upon his banners. The

obscure “Indian fighter” was at once the hero and idol of the Nation.

The long day of battle and glory was ended at last, the wife

thought,—and now she, the General, their children, in a four-roomed

home, were to be kept together at last, in peace unbroken.

It is not difficult to imagine what a home so hardly earned, so nobly

won, was to such a woman. Nor is it hard to realize that when that home

was almost immediately invaded by a nomination of its chief to the

Presidency of the Nation, the woman’s heart at last rebelled. The wife

thought no new honor could add to the lustre of her husband’s renown.

She declared that the life-long habits of her husband would make him

miserable under the restraints of metropolitan life, and the duties of a

civil position. From the first, she deplored the nomination of General

Taylor to the Presidency as a misfortune, and sorrowfully said: “It is a

plot to deprive me of his society, and to shorten his life by

unnecessary care and responsibility.”

When, at last, she came to the White House, as its mistress, she

eschewed the great reception-rooms and received her visitors in private

apartments. She tried, as far as possible, to establish her daily life

on the routine of the small cottage at Baton Rouge, and she essayed

personally to minister to her husband’s comforts, as of old, till her

simple habits were ridiculed and made a cause of reproach by the

“opposition.”

The reigning lady of the White House, at this time, was General and Mrs.

Taylor’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, or, as she was familiarly and

admiringly called, “Betty Bliss.” She entered the White House at the age

of twenty-two, a bride, having married Major Bliss, who served

faithfully under her father as Adjutant-general. Perhaps no other

President was ever inaugurated with such overwhelming enthusiasm as

General Taylor—and the reception given his youngest child, who greatly

resembled him, and who, at that time, was the youngest lady who had ever

presided at the White House, was almost as overpowering. The vision that

remains of her loveliness, shows us a bright and beaming creature,

dressed simply in white, with flowers in her hair. She possessed beauty,

good sense and quiet humor. As a hostess she was at ease, and received

with affable grace; but an inclination for retirement marked her as well

as her mother. Formal receptions and official dinners were not to their

taste. Nevertheless, these are a part of the inevitable penalty paid by

all who have received the Nation’s highest honor. Society, in its way,

exacts as much of the ladies of the White House, as party politics do of

the men who administer state affairs in it. A lack of entertainment

caused part of the universal discontent, already voiced against the hero

President, whose heroic ways were naturally not the ways of policy or

diplomacy.

The second winter of President Taylor’s term, the ladies of his family

seemed to have assumed more prominently and publicly the social duties

of their high position. A reception at the President’s house, March 4,

1850, was of remarkable brilliancy. Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Benton and

Cass, with many beautiful and cultured women, then added their splendor

to society in Washington. The auguries of a brilliant year were not

fulfilled. Amid the anguish of his family, President Taylor died at the

White House, July 9, 1850. When it was known that he must die, Mrs.

Taylor became insensible, and the agonized cries of his family reached

the surrounding streets.

Dreadful to the eyes of the bereaved wife were the pomp and show with

which her hero was buried.

After he became President, General Taylor said, that “his wife had

prayed every night for months that Henry Clay might be elected President

in his place.” She survived her husband two years, and to her last hour

never mentioned the White House in Washington, except in its relation to

the death of her husband.

She was succeeded by a woman of superior intellect, who in a different

sphere had proved herself an equally devoted wife. Mrs. Abigail Filmore,

the daughter of a Baptist clergyman, grew up in Western New York, when

it was a frontier and a wilderness. Yearning for intellectual culture,

with all the drawbacks of poverty and scanty opportunity, she obtained

sufficient knowledge to become a school-teacher. It was while following

this avocation that she first met her future husband, the thirteenth

President of the United States, then a clothier’s apprentice, a youth of

less than twenty years, himself, during the winter months, a teacher of

the village school. They were married in 1826, and began life in a small

house built by her husband’s hands. In this little house the wife added

to her duties of maid-of-all-work, house-keeper, hostess and wife, the

avocation of teacher. She bore full half of the burden of life, and the

husband, with the weight of care lifted from him by willing and loving

hands, rose rapidly in the profession of law, and in less than two years

was chosen a member of the State Legislature. Thus, side by side, they

worked and struggled, from poverty to eminence.

Strong in intellect and will, her delights were all feminine. Her tasks

accomplished, she lived in books and music, flowers and children. At her

death, her husband said: “For twenty-seven years, my entire married

life, I was always greeted with a happy smile.” She entered the White

House a matron of commanding person and beautiful countenance. She was

five feet six inches in height, with a complexion extremely fair and

pure, blue, smiling eyes, and a wealth of light-brown curling hair. A

personal friend of Mrs. Filmore, writing from Buffalo, says:

“When Mr. Filmore entered the White House, he found it entirely

destitute of books. Mrs. Filmore was in the habit of spending her

leisure moments in reading, I might almost say, in studying. She was

accustomed to be surrounded with books of reference, maps, and all the

other requirements of a well furnished library, and she found it

difficult to content herself in a house devoid of such attractions. To

meet this want, Mr. Filmore asked of Congress, and received an

appropriation, and selected a library, devoting to that purpose a

large and pleasant room in the second story of the White House. Here

Mrs. Filmore surrounded herself with her little home comforts; here

her daughter had her own piano, harp, and guitar, and here Mrs.

Filmore received the informal visits of the friends she loved, and,

for her, the real pleasure and enjoyments of the White House were in

this room.”

Mrs. Filmore was proud of her husband’s success in life, and desirous

that no reasonable expectation of the public should be disappointed. She

never absented herself from the public receptions, dinners, or _levées_,

when it was possible to be present; but her delicate health frequently

rendered them very painful. She sometimes kept her bed all day, to favor

that weak ankle, that she might be able to endure the fatigue of the two

hours she would be obliged to stand for the Friday evening _levées_.

Mrs. Filmore was destined never to see again her old home in Buffalo,

with mortal eyes. She contracted a cold on the day of Mr. Pierce’s

inauguration, which resulted in pneumonia, of which she died, at

Willard’s Hotel, Washington, 1853. What she is in the memory of her

husband, may be judged by the fact—that he has carefully preserved every

line that she ever wrote him, and has been heard to say that he could

never destroy even the little notes that she sent him on business, to

his office.

The child of this truly wedded pair, Mary Abigail Filmore, was the

rarest and most exquisite President’s daughter that ever shed sunshine

in the White House. She survived her mother but a year, dying of

cholera, at the age of twenty-two, yet her memory is a benison to all

young American women, especially to those surrounded by the allurements

of society and high station. She was not only the mistress of many

accomplishments, but possessed a thoroughly practical education. She was

taught at home, at Mrs. Sedgwick’s school, in Lenox, Massachusetts, and

was graduated from the State Normal School of New York, as a teacher,

and taught in the higher departments of one of the public schools in

Buffalo. She was a French, German, and Spanish scholar; was a proficient

in music; and an amateur sculptor. She was the rarest type of woman, in

whom were blended, in perfect proportion, masculine judgment and

feminine tenderness. In her were combined intellectual force, vivacity

of temperament, genuine sensibility, and deep tenderness of heart. She

saw clearly through the forms and shows of life, her views of its duties

were grave and serious; yet, in her intercourse with others, she

overflowed with bright wit, humor and kindliness. Her character was

revealed in her face, for her soul shone through it. Words cannot tell

what such a nature and such an intelligence would be, presiding over the

social life of the Nation’s House. She used her opportunities, as the

President’s daughter, to minister to others. She clung to all her old

friends, without any regard to their position in life; her time and

talents were devoted to their happiness. She was constantly thinking of

some little surprise, some gift, some journey, some pleasure, by which

she could contribute to the happiness of others. After the death of her

mother, she went to the desolate home of her father and brother, and,

emulating the example of that mother, relieved her father of all

household care; her domestic and social qualities equalled her

intellectual power. She gathered all her early friends about her; she

consecrated herself to the happiness of her father and brother; she

filled her home with sunshine. With scarcely an hour’s warning, the

final summons came. “Blessing she was, God made her so,” and in her

passed away one of the rarest of young American women.

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE WHITE HOUSE DURING THE WAR.

Under a Cloud—“A Woman Among a Thousand”—Revival of By-gone Days—Another

Lady of the White House—A “Golden Blonde”—Instinct Alike with Power

and Grace—A Fun-Loving Romp—Harriet with her Wheelbarrow of Wood—A

Deed of Kindness—The Wheel Turns Round—An Impression Made on Queen

Victoria—In Paris and on the Continent—An American Lady at

Oxford—Gay Doings at the Capital—Rival Claims for a Lady’s

Hand—Reigning at the White House—Doing Double Duty—Visit of the

Prince of Wales—Marriage of Harriet Lane—As Wife and Mother—Mrs.

Abraham Lincoln—Standing Alone—A Time of Trouble and

Perplexity—Conciliatory Counsels Needful—Rumors of War—the Life of

the Nation Threatened—Whispers of Treason—Awaiting the

Event—Peculiar Position of Mary Lincoln—A Life-long Ambition

Fulfilled—The Nation Called to Arms—Contagious Enthusiasm—What the

President’s Wife Did—Nothing to do but “Shop”—Sensational Stories

Afloat—Stirring Times at the Capital—What Came from the River—The

Dying and the Dead—Churches and Houses Turned into Hospitals—Arrival

of Troops—“Mrs. Lincoln Shopped”—The Lonely Man at the White

House—Letters of Rebuke—An Example of Selfishness—Petty

Economies—The Back Door of the White House—An Injured

Individual—Death of Willie Lincoln—Injustice which Mrs. Lincoln

Suffered—The Rabble in the White House—Valuables Carried Away—Big

Boxes and Much Goods—Going West—Mrs. Lincoln Disconsolate—False and

Cruel Accusations—Considerable Personal Property—Missing

Treasures—Mrs. Lincoln as a Woman—Tears and Mimicry—The Faults of a

President’s Wife.

Mrs. Franklin Pierce entered the White House under the shadow of

ill-health and sore bereavement, having seen her last surviving child

killed before her eyes on a railroad train, after the election of her

husband to the Presidency of the United States.

Mrs. Pierce was remarkable for fragility of constitution, exquisite

sensitiveness of organism, and deep spirituality of nature. She

instinctively shrank from observation, and nothing could be more painful

to her in average life than the public gaze. She found her joy in the

quiet sphere of domestic life, and herein, through her wise counsels,

pure tastes, and devoted life, she exerted a powerful influence. One who

knew her writes:

“Mrs. Pierce’s life, as far as she could make it so, was one of

retirement. She rarely participated in gay amusements, and never

enjoyed what is called fashionable society. Her natural endowments

were of a high order. She inherited a judgment singularly clear, and a

taste almost unerring. The cast of her beauty was so dream-like; her

temper was so little mingled with the common characteristics of woman;

it had so little of caprice, so little of vanity, so utter an absence

of all jealousy and all anger; it was so made up of tenderness and

devotion, and yet so imaginative and fairy-like in its fondness, that

it was difficult to bear only the sentiments of earth for one who had

so little of life’s clay.”

It was but natural that such a being should be the life-long object of a

husband’s adoring devotion. Nor is it strange that the husband of such a

wife, reflecting in his outer life the urbanity, gentleness, and

courtesy which marked his home intercourse, in addition to his own

personal gifts, should have been, what Franklin Pierce was declared to

be, the most popular man, personally, who ever was President of the

United States. Notwithstanding her ill health, her shrinking

temperament, and personal bereavement, Mrs. Pierce forced herself to

meet the public demands of her exalted station, and punctually presided

at receptions and state dinners, at any cost to herself. No woman, by

inherent nature, could have been less adapted to the full blaze of

official life than she, yet she met its demands with honor, and departed

from the White House revered by all who had ever caught a glimpse of her

exquisite nature. She died December, 1863, in Andover, Massachusetts,

and now rests, with her husband and children, in the cemetery at

Concord, New Hampshire.

* * * * *

During the administration of Mr. Buchanan, the White House seemed to

revive the social magnificence of old days. Harriet Lane brought again

into its drawing-rooms the splendor of courts, and more than repeated

the elegance and brilliancy of fashion, which marked the administration

of Mr. John Quincy Adams.

Harriet Lane, the adopted daughter of James Buchanan, and “lady of the

White House” during his administration, was one of those golden blondes

which Oliver Wendell Holmes so delights to portray. “Her head and

features were cast in noble mould, and her form which, at rest, had

something of the massive majesty of a marble pillar, in motion was

instinct alike with power and grace.” Grace, light and majesty seemed to

make her atmosphere. Every motion was instinct with life, health and

intelligence. Her superb _physique_ gave the impression of intense,

harmonious vitality. Her eyes, of deep violet, shed a constant, steady

light, yet they could flash with rebuke, kindle with humor, or soften in

tenderness. Her mouth was her most peculiarly beautiful feature, capable

of expressing infinite humor or absolute sweetness, while her classic

head was crowned with masses of golden hair, always worn with perfect

simplicity.

As a child she was a fun-loving, warm-hearted romp. When eleven years of

age she was tall as a woman, nevertheless Mr. Buchanan, one day looking

from his window, saw Harriet with flushed cheek and hat awry, trundling

through the leading street of Lancaster a wheelbarrow, full of wood. He

rushed out to learn the cause of such an unseemly sight, when she

answered in confusion, “that she was on her way to old black Aunt

Tabitha with a load of wood, because it was so cold.” A few years later

this young domestic outlaw, having been graduated with high honor from

the Georgetown convent, was shining at the Court of St. James, at which

her uncle was American Minister. Queen Victoria, upon whom her

surpassing brightness and loveliness seemed to make a deep impression,

decided that she should rank not as niece or daughter, but as the wife

of the United States Minister. Thus the youthful American girl became

one of the “leading ladies” of the diplomatic corps of St. James.

On the continent and in Paris she was everywhere greeted as a

girl-queen, and in England her popularity was immense. On the day when

Mr. Buchanan and Mr. Tennyson received the degree of Doctor of Civil

Laws at the University of Oxford, her appearance was greeted by loud

cheers from the students, who arose _en masse_ to receive her. From this

dazzling career abroad, she came back to her native land, to preside

over the President’s House. She became the supreme lady of the gayest

administration which has marked the government of the United States.

Societies, ships of war, neck-ties were named after her. Men, gifted and

great, from foreign lands and in her own, sought her hand in marriage.

Such cumulated pleasures and honors probably were never heaped upon any

other one young woman of the United States.

At White House receptions, and on all state occasions, the sight of this

golden beauty, standing beside the grand and gray old man, made a unique

and delightful contrast, which thousands flocked to see. Her duties were

more onerous than had fallen to the share of any lady of the White House

for many years; the long diplomatic service of Mr. Buchanan abroad

involving him in many obligations to entertain distinguished strangers

privately, aside from his hospitalities as President of the United

States. During his administration the Prince of Wales was entertained at

the White House, who presented his portrait to Mr. Buchanan and a set of

valuable engravings to Miss Lane, as “a slight mark of his grateful

recollection of the hospitable reception and agreeable visit at the

White House.”

During the last troubled months of Mr. Buchanan’s administration, he

always spoke with warmth and gratitude of Miss Lane’s patriotism and

good sense. Neither he nor her country ever suffered from any

conversational lapse of hers, which, in a day so rife with passion and

injustice, is saying much. In 1863, Miss Lane was confirmed in the

Episcopal church at Oxford, Philadelphia, of which her uncle, Rev.

Edward L. Buchanan, was the rector.

In 1866, Miss Lane was married, at Wheatland, to Mr. Henry Elliott

Johnston of Baltimore, a gentleman who had held her affections for many

years. The congenial pair now abide in their luxurious home in

Baltimore, and in private life, as wife and mother, she is as beautiful

and more beloved than when, as Miss Lane, she was the proud lady of the

President’s House.

* * * * *

It was the misfortune of Mrs. Lincoln to be the only woman personally

assailed who ever presided in the White House. She entered it when

sectional bitterness was at its height, and when the need of her country

for the holiest and highest ministry of women was deeper than it had

been in any era of its existence, even that of the Revolution. In that

troubled hour, the White House needed a woman to preside over it of

lofty soul, of consecrated purpose, of the broadest and profoundest

sympathies, and of self-forgetting piety.

The life of the Nation was threatened. The horror of war was imminent.

The capital was menaced, as it had never been before, by the treason of

its own children. Wives, mothers and daughters, in ten thousand homes,

were looking into the faces of husbands, sons and fathers, with

trembling and with tears, and yet with sacrificial patriotism. They

knew, they felt that the best-beloved were to be slain on their

country’s battle-fields. With what supreme devotion and consecration

would Abigail Adams, or a thousand women of her heroic type, have

approached the Nation’s House as the wife of its President in such an

hour. It was the hour for self-forgetting—the hour of sacrifice.

Personal vanity and elation, excusable in a more peaceful time, seemed

unpardonable in this. Yet, in reviewing the character of the Presidents’

wives, we shall see that there was never one who entered the White House

with such a feeling of self-satisfaction, which amounted to personal

exultation, as did Mary Lincoln. To her it was the fulfillment of a

life-long ambition, and with the first low muttering of war distinctly

heard, on every side, she made her journey to Washington a triumphal

passage.

A single month, and the President’s call for troops to protect the

capital had penetrated the remotest hamlet of the land. All the manly

life-blood of the Nation surged toward its defence. All the heart of its

womanhood went up to God, crying for its safety. In the distant

farm-house women waited, breathless, the latest story of battle. In the

crowded cities they gathered by thousands, crying, only, “Let me work

for my brother: he dies for me!”

With the record of the march and the fight, and of the unseemly defeat,

the newspapers teemed with gossip concerning the new lady of the White

House. While her sister-women scraped lint, sewed bandages, and put on

nurses’ caps, and gave their all to country and to death, the wife of

its President spent her time in rolling to and fro between Washington

and New York, intent on extravagant purchases for herself and the White

House. Mrs. Lincoln seemed to have nothing to do but to “shop,” and the

reports of her lavish bargains, in the newspapers, were vulgar and

sensational in the extreme. The wives and daughters of other Presidents

had managed to dress as elegant women, without the process of so doing

becoming prominent or public. But not a new dress or jewel was bought by

Mrs. Lincoln that did not find its way into the newspapers.

Months passed, and the capital had become one vast hospital. The

reluctant river every hour laid at the feet of the city its priceless

freight of lacerated men. The wharves were lined with the dying and

dead. One ceaseless procession of ambulances moved to and fro. Our

streets resounded with the shrieks of the sufferers which they bore.

Churches, halls and houses were turned into hospitals. Every

railroad-train that entered the city bore fresh troops to the Nation’s

rescue, and fresh mourners seeking their dead, who had died in its

defence. Through all, Mrs. Lincoln “shopped.”

At the White House, a lonely man, sorrowful at heart, and weighed down

by mighty burdens, bearing the Nation’s fate upon his shoulders, lived

and toiled and suffered alone. His wife, during all the summer, was at

the hotels of fashionable watering-places. Conduct comparatively

blameless in happier times, became culpable under such exigencies and in

such shadow. Jarred, from the beginning, by Mrs. Lincoln’s life, the

Nation, under its heavy stress of sorrow, seemed goaded at last to

exasperation. Letters of rebuke, of expostulation, of anathema even,

addressed to her, personally, came in to her from every direction. Not a

day that did not bring her many such communications, denouncing her mode

of life, her conduct, and calling upon her to fulfil the obligations,

and meet the opportunities of her high station.

To no other woman of America had ever been vouchsafed so full an

opportunity for personal benevolence and philanthropy to her own

countrymen. To no other American woman had ever come an equal chance to

set a lofty example of self-abnegation to all her countrywomen. But just

as if there were no national peril, no monstrous national debt, no

rivers of blood flowing, she seemed chiefly intent upon pleasure,

personal flattery and adulation; upon extravagant dress and ceaseless

self-gratification.

[Illustration:

THE CABINET ROOM.

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE.—WASHINGTON.

]

Vain, seeking admiration, the men who fed her weakness for their own

political ends were sure of her favor. Thus, while daily disgracing the

State by her own example, she still sought to meddle in its affairs. Woe

to Mr. Lincoln if he did not appoint her favorites. Prodigal in personal

expenditure, she brought shame upon the President’s House, by petty

economies, which had never disgraced it before. Had the milk of its

dairy been sent to the hospitals, she would have received golden praise.

But the whole city felt scandalized to have it haggled over and peddled

from the back door of the White House. State dinners could have been

dispensed with, without a word of blame, had their cost been consecrated

to the soldiers’ service; but when it was made apparent that they were

omitted from personal penuriousness and a desire to devote their cost to

personal gratification, the public censure knew no bounds.

From the moment Mrs. Lincoln began to receive recriminating letters, she

considered herself an injured individual, the honored object of envy,

jealousy and spite, and a martyr to her high position. No doubt some of

them were unjust, and many more unkind; but it never dawned upon her

consciousness that any part of the provocation was on her side, and

after a few tastes of their bitter draughts she ceased to open them.

Even death did not spare her. Willie Lincoln, the loveliest child of the

White House, was smitten and died, to the unutterable grief of his

father and the wild anguish of his mother. She mourned according to her

nature. Her loss did not draw her nearer in sympathy to the nation of

mothers that moment weeping because their sons were not. It did not lead

her in time to minister to such, whom death had robbed and life had left

without alleviation. She shut herself in with her grief, and demanded of

God why he had afflicted _her_! Nobody suffered as she suffered. The

Nation’s House wore a pall, at last, not for its tens of thousands of

brave sons slain, but for the President’s child. The Guests’ Room, in

which he died, Mrs. Lincoln never entered again; nor the Green Room,

wherein, decked with flowers, his fair young body awaited burial.

In the same way, Mrs. Lincoln bewept her husband. And there is no doubt

but that, in that black hour, she suffered great injustice. She loved

her husband with the intensity of a nature, deep and strong, within a

narrow channel. The shock of his untimely and awful taking-off, might

have excused a woman of loftier nature than hers for any accompanying

paralysis.

It was not strange that Mrs. Lincoln was not able to leave the White

House for five weeks after her husband’s death. It would have been

stranger, had she been able to have left it sooner. It was her

misfortune, that she had so armed public sympathy against her, by years

of indifference to the sorrows of others, that when her own hour of

supreme anguish came, there were few to comfort her, and many to assail.

She had made many unpopular innovations upon the old, serene and stately

_régime_ of the President’s house. Never a reign of concord, in her best

day, in her hour of affliction it degenerated into absolute anarchy. I

believe the long-time steward had been dethroned, that Mrs. Lincoln

might manage according to her own will. At-any-rate, while she was shut

in with her woe, the White House was left without a responsible

protector. The rabble ranged through it at will. Silver and dining-ware

were carried off, and have never been recovered. It was plundered, not

only of ornaments, but of heavy articles of furniture. Costly sofas and

chairs were cut and injured. Exquisite lace curtains were torn into

rags, and carried off in pieces.

While all this was going on below, Mrs. Lincoln, shut up in her

apartments, refused to see any one but servants, while day after day,

immense boxes, containing her personal effects, were leaving the White

House for her newly-chosen abode in the West. The size and number of

these boxes, with the fact of the pillaged aspect of the White House,

led to the accusation, which so roused public feeling against her, that

she was robbing the Nation’s House, and carrying the national property

with her into retirement. This accusation, which clings to her to this

day, was probably unjust. Her personal effects, in all likelihood,

amounted to as much as that of nearly all other Presidents’ wives

together, and the vandals who roamed at large through the length and

breadth of the White House, were quite sufficient to account for all its

missing treasures.

The public also did Mrs. Lincoln injustice, in considering her an

ignorant, illiterate woman. She was well-born, gently reared, and her

education above the average standard given to girls in her youth. She is

a fair mistress of the French language, and in English can write a more

graceful letter than one educated woman in fifty. She has quick

perceptions, and an almost unrivalled power of mimicry. The only

amusement of her desolate days, while shut in from the world in Chicago,

when she refused to see her dearest friends and took comfort in the

thought that she had been chosen as the object of pre-eminent

affliction, was to repeat in tone, gesture and expression, the words,

actions and looks of men and women who, in the splendor of her life in

Washington, had happened to offend her. Her lack was not a lack of keen

faculties, or of fair culture, but a constitutional inability to rise to

the action of high motive in a time when every true soul in the nation

seemed to be impelled to unselfish deeds for its rescue. She was

incapable of lofty, impersonal impulse. She was self-centred, and never

in any experience rose above herself. According to circumstance, her own

ambitions, her own pleasures, her own sufferings, made the sensation

which absorbed and consumed every other. As a President’s wife she could

not rise above the level of her nature, and it was her misfortune that

she never even approached the bound of her opportunity.

CHAPTER XXV.

THE WHITE HOUSE NOW.

After the War—The Home of President Johnson—Shut Up in the Mountains—Two

Years of Exile—A Contrast—Suffering for their Country—Secretly

Burying the Dead—A Wife of Seventeen Years—Midnight Studies—Broken

Down—A Party of Grandchildren—“My Dears, I am an Invalid”—“God’s

Best Gift to Man”—The Woman Who Taught the President—A “Lady of

Benign Countenance”—Doing the Honors at the White House—“We are

Plain People”—The East Room Filled with Vermin—Traces of the

Soldiers—A State of Dirt and Ruin—Mrs. Patterson’s Calico Dress—In

the Dairy—A Nineteenth Century Wonder—How the Old Carpets were

Patched—The Greenbacks are Forthcoming—How $30,000 were Spent—Buying

the Furniture—Working in Hot Weather—“Wrestling with Rags and

Ruins”—“Renovated from Top to Bottom”—What the Ladies Wore, and What

They Didn’t—The Memory of Elegant Attire—Impressing the Public

Mind—How Unperverted Minds are Affected—“Bare-necked Dowagers”—“A

Large Crowd of Bare Busts”—Elderly Ladies with Raven Locks—The

Opinion of a Woman of Fashion—Very Good Dinners—Obsequious to the

Will of “the People”—Doors Open to the Mob—Sketching a

Banquet—Sentimental Reflections on the Dining Room—The Portraits of

the Presidents—The Impeachment Trial—Peace in the Family—The Grant

Dynasty—Looking Home-like—Mrs. Grant at Home—What Might Be Done,

if—What Won’t Work a Reformation—A Pity for Miss Nellie Grant—How

She Suddenly “Came Out”—“A Full Fledged Woman of Fashion”—A “Shoal

of Pretty Girls”—How a Certain Young Lady was Spoilt—Brushing Away

“the Dew of Innocence”—Need of a Centripetal Soul—Society in the

Season—Rare Women with no Tastes—The Wives of the Presidents Summed

Up.

Mrs. Lincoln was succeeded in the White House by three women, who

entered its portals through the fiery baptism of suffering for their

country’s sake.

While President Johnson was performing his duties as Senator in

Washington, his family were shut up in the mountains of East Tennessee,

where the ravages of war were most dreadful. For more than two years he

was unable to set eyes on either wife or child. While many of the

mushroom aristocracy, who afterwards looked upon them so superciliously,

were coining their ill-gotten dollars out of the blood of their country,

these brave, loyal women were being “hunted from point to point, driven

to seek refuge in the wilderness, forced to subsist on coarse and

insufficient food, and more than once called to bury with secret and

stolen sepulture those, whom they loved, murdered because they would not

join in deeds of odious treason to union and liberty.”

President Johnson’s youngest daughter entered the White House a widow,

recently bereaved of her husband, who fell a soldier in the Union cause.

His wife, who at seventeen was his teacher, when “in the silent watches

of the night the youthful couple studied together,” when their weary

tasks were done, came to the White House broken in health and spirits,

through the suffering and bereavements through which she had passed. She

was never seen but on one public occasion at the White House, that of a

children’s party, given to her grandchildren. At that time she was

seated in one of the republican court-chairs of satin and ebony. She did

not rise when the children or guests were presented, but simply said,

“My dears, I am an invalid,” and her sad, pale face and sunken eyes

proved the expression. She is an invalid now; but an observer would say,

contemplating her, “A noble woman, God’s best gift to man.” It was that

woman who taught the President, after she became his wife; and in all

their early years she was his assistant counsellor and guide.

Liable to be arrested for the slightest offense; ofttimes insulted by

the rabble, Mrs. Johnson performed the perilous journey from Greenville

to Nashville. Few who were not actual participators in the civil war can

form an estimate of the trials of this noble woman. Invalid, as she was,

she yet endured exposure and anxiety, and passed through the extended

lines of hostile armies, never uttering a hasty word, or, by her looks,

betraying in the least degree her harrowed feelings. She is remembered

by friend and foe as a lady of benign countenance and sweet and winning

manners.

During her husband’s administration, the heavy duties and dubious honors

of the White House were performed by her oldest daughter, Martha

Patterson, the wife of Senator Patterson of Tennessee. That lady’s

utterance, soon after entering the White House, was a key to her

character, yet scarcely a promise of her own distinguished management of

the President’s house. She said: “We are plain people from the mountains

of Tennessee, called here for a short time by a national calamity. I

trust too much will not be expected of us.” The career of Mrs. Lincoln

had chilled the people to expect little from the feminine administrator

of the White House; but from Martha Patterson they received much, and

that of the most unobtrusive and noble service.

The family of the new President arrived in June. Here was a new field

entirely for the diffident woman who was compelled to do the honors, in

lieu of her mother—a confirmed invalid. The house looked anything but

inviting. Soldiers had wandered unchallenged through the entire _suites_

of parlors. The East Room, dirty and soiled, was filled with vermin.

Guards had slept upon the sofas and carpets till they were ruined, and

the immense crowds who, during the preceding years of war, filled the

President’s house continually had worn out the already ancient

furniture. No sign of neatness or comfort greeted their appearance, but

evidences of neglect and decay everywhere met their eyes. To put aside

all ceremony and work incessantly, was the portion of Mrs. Patterson

from the beginning. It was her practice to rise very early, don a calico

dress and spotless apron, and then descend to skim the milk and attend

to the dairy before breakfast. Remembering this fact, of a President’s

daughter, in the President’s house, in the nineteenth century, for a

brief moment, let us cease to bemoan the homely virtues of our

grandmothers as forever dead and buried.

At the first reception of President Johnson, held January 1, 1866, the

White House had not been renovated. Dingy and destitute of ornament

Martha Patterson had by dint of covering its old carpets with pure

linen, and hiding its wounds with fresh flowers, and letting her

beautiful children loose in its rooms, given it an aspect of purity,

beauty and cheer, to which it had long been a stranger.

[Illustration:

THE BLUE ROOM.

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE.—WASHINGTON.

]

In the spring, Congress appropriated thirty thousand dollars to the

renovation of the White House. After consulting various firms, Mrs.

Patterson found that it would take the whole amount to furnish simply

the parlors. Feeling a personal responsibility to the government for the

expenditure of the money, unlike her predecessor, she determined not to

surpass it. She made herself its agent, and superintended the purchases

for the dismantled house herself. Instead of seeking pleasure by the

sea, or ease in her own mountain home, the hot summer waxed and waned

only to leave the brave woman where it found her, wrestling with rags

and ruins that were to be reset, repolished, “made over as good as new.”

For herself? No, for her country; and all this in addition to caring for

husband, children and invalid mother.

The result of this ceaseless industry and self-denial was, the

President’s house in perfect order and thoroughly renovated from top to

bottom. When it was opened for the winter season, the change was

apparent and marvelous, even to the dullest eyes, but very few knew that

the fresh, bright face of the historic house was all due to the energy,

industry, taste and tact of one woman, the President’s daughter. The

warm comfort of the dining room, the exquisite tints of the Blue Room,

the restful neutral hues meeting and blending in carpets and furniture

in many rooms of the White House still remain harmonious witnesses of

the pure taste of Martha Patterson. The dress of the ladies of the White

House was equally remarkable. The public had grown to expect loud

display in the costume of its occupants. But all who went to see the

“plain people from Tennessee” overloaded with new ornaments, were

disappointed. Instead, they saw beside the President a young,

golden-haired woman, dressed in full mourning,—the sad badge still worn

for the gallant husband slain by war,—and a slender woman with a single

white flower in her dark hair. Instead of the bare bosom and arms, the

pronounced hues and glittering jewels which had so long obtained in that

place, they saw soft laces about the throat ending the high corsage; a

robe of soft tints and a shawl of lace veiling the slender figure. It

was like a picture in half tints, soothing to the sight; yet the dark

hair, broad brow and large eyes were full of silent force and reserved

power. Little was expected, even in dress, of these “plain people from

Tennessee,” yet the chaste elegance of their attire was never surpassed

by any ladies of the White House, and its memory remains an example

which it is a pity that ladies of society are so slow to imitate.

The impression made upon the public mind by the tone and spirit of their

attire is significant as gathered from the utterance of contemporaneous

newspapers. It betrays how dress of an opposite character always affects

unperverted minds. A journal of the day says: “Mrs. Patterson, who stood

at the right of the President, wore a black Lyons velvet, a shawl of

white thread lace falling over her dress. The simple, unaffected grace

of this lady, and her entire freedom from pretension, either in garb or

manner, attracted highly favorable comment. Mrs. Patterson is quite a

young lady, and when some of the bare-necked would-be juvenile dowagers

were presented to her, the contrast was entirely in favor of the

President’s daughter.”

“Mrs. Stover assisted the President, and won golden opinions from

sensible people for her faultless taste, and high-necked costume in a

large crowd of bare busts. Elderly ladies, whose truthful wrinkles,

despite their raven locks, betrayed their years, stood about her in

low bodices, exposing to view shoulders long ago bereft of beauty and

symmetry. Mothers, whose daughters walked beside them, in similar

attire, gathered about her in their flashing diamonds and expensive

apparel, but no peer of hers eclipsed her rich simplicity. Alone she

stood, so tastefully arrayed that the poor who came were not abashed

by her presence, nor the rich offended by her rarer _toilette_. The

perfect harmony of her appearance pleased the eyes of all.”

The spirit of these comments redeems them from the faintest touch of

Jenkinsism. In this connection, it is easy to understand the comment of

a woman of fashion, on Mrs. Stover. She said: “She has very fine points,

which would make any woman a _belle_, if she knew how to make the most

of them.”

The state dinners given by President Johnson, were never surpassed in

any administration. They were conducted on a generous, almost princely

scale, and reflected lasting honor upon his daughter, to whom was

committed the entire care and arrangement of every social entertainment.

Simple and democratic in her own personal tastes, Mrs. Patterson had a

high sense of what was due to the position, and to the people, from the

family of the President of a great Nation. This sense of duty and

justice led her to spare no pains in her management of official

entertainments, and the same high qualities made her keep the White

House parlors and conservatories open and ready for the crowds of people

who daily visited them, at any cost to her own taste or comfort.

The following sketch of the last state dinner given by President

Johnson, written by a personal friend, is so vivid and life-like,

bringing the historic house so near, in the closing hours of an

administration, I am constrained to give it to you:

“Late in the afternoon, I was sitting in the cheerful room occupied by

the invalid mother, when Mrs. Patterson came for me to go and see the

table. The last state dinner was to be given this night, and the

preparation for the occasion had been commensurate with those of

former occasions.

“I looked at the invalid, whose feet had never crossed the apartment

to which we were going, and by whom the elegant entertainments, over

which her daughters presided, were totally unenjoyed. Through the

hall, and down the stairway, I followed my hostess, and stood beside

her in the grand old room.

“It was a beautiful, and altogether a rare scene, which I viewed in

the quiet light of that closing winter day. The table was arranged for

forty persons, each guest’s name being upon the plate designated on

the invitation list. In the centre stood three magnificent _ormolu_

ornaments, filled with fadeless French flowers, while, beside each

plate, was a _bouquet_ of odorous greenhouse exotics. It was not the

color or design of the Sévres China, of green and gold, the fragile

glass, nor yet the massive plate, which attracted my admiration, but

the harmony of the whole, which satisfied and refreshed. From the

heavy curtains, depending from the lofty windows, to the smallest

ornament in the room, all was ornate and consistent. I could not but

contrast this vision of grandeur with the delicate, child-like form of

the woman who watched me with a quiet smile, as I enjoyed this

evidence of her taste, and appreciation of the beautiful. All day she

had watched over the movements of those engaged in the arrangement of

this room, and yet so unobtrusive had been her presence, and so

systematically had she planned, that no confusion occurred in the

complicated domestic machinery. For the pleasure it would give her

children, hereafter, she had an artist photograph the interior of the

apartment, and he was just leaving with his trophy, as we entered. All

was ready and complete, and when we passed from the room, there was

still time for rest before the hour named in the cards of invitation.

.... “It was almost twilight, as we entered the East Room, and its

sombreness and wondrous size struck me forcibly. The hour for

strangers and visitors had passed, and we felt at liberty to wander,

in our old-fashioned way, up and down its great length.”

“It was softly raining, we discovered, as we peered through the

window, and a light fringe of mist hung over the trees in the grounds.

The feeling of balmy comfort one feels in watching it rain, from the

window of a cozy room, was intensified by the associations of this

historic place, and the sadness of time was lost in the outreachings

of eternity. Its spectral appearance, as we turned from the window and

looked down its shadowy outlines, the quickly succeeding thoughts of

the many who had crowded into its now deserted space, and the

remembrance of some who would no more come, were fast crowding out the

practical, and leaving in its place mental excitement, and

spiritualized nervous influences. Mrs. Patterson was the first to note

the flight of time, and, as we turned, to leave with the past the hour

it claimed, her grave face lighted up with a genuinely happy

expression, as she said: ‘I am glad this is the last entertainment; it

suits me better to be quiet, and in my own home. Mother is not able to

enjoy these things. Belle is too young, and I am indifferent to

them—so it is well it is almost over.’

“As she ceased speaking, the curtains over the main entrance parted,

and the President peered in, ‘to see,’ he said, ‘if Martha had shown

me the portraits of the Presidents.’ Joining him in his promenade, we

passed before them, as they were hanging in the main hall, he dwelling

on the life and character of each, we listening to his descriptions,

and personal recollections.

“At the dinner, afterwards, not the display of beautiful _toilettes_,

nor the faces of lovely women, could draw from my mind the memory of

that afternoon. More than ever, I was convinced that the best of our

natures is entirely out of the reach of ordinary events, and the

finest fibres are rarely, if ever, made to thrill in sympathy with

outward influences. Grave statesmen, and white-haired dignitaries

chatted merrily with fair young ladies, or sedate matrons; but turn

where I would, the burden of my thoughts were the remarks of Mrs.

Patterson, whose unselfish devotion to her father, deserves a more

fitting memorial than this insignificant mention. With her opposite

him, and by her proximity, relieving him of much of the necessity of

entertaining, he enjoyed and bestowed pleasure, and won for these

social entertainments a national reputation.

“During the impeachment trial of her father, unflinchingly Mrs.

Patterson bent every energy to entertain, as usual, as became her

position, wearing always a patient, suffering look. Through the long

weeks of the trial, she listened to every request, saw every caller,

and served every petitioner, (and only those who have filled this

position, know how arduous is this duty,) hiding from all eyes the

anxious weight of care oppressing herself. That she was sick after the

acquittal, astonished nobody who had seen her struggling to keep up

before.”

But no matter what the accusations against Andrew Johnson, they died

into silence without touching his family. If corruption crossed the

outer portals of the White House, the whole land knew that they never

penetrated into the pure recesses of the President’s home. Whatever

Andrew Johnson was or was not, no partisan foe was bitter or false

enough to throw a shadow of reproach against the noble characters of his

wife and daughters. There was no insinuation, no charge against them.

There was no furniture or ornaments gone; nor could any one say that

they had received costly presents:—no expensive plate, no houses,

horses, or carriages. No family ever left Washington more respected by

the powerful, more bewept by the poor. From the Nation’s House, which

they had redeemed and honored, they went back empty-handed to their own

dismantled home, followed by the esteem and affection of all who knew

them. The White House holds the record of their spotless fame.

Generations will pass before, from its grand old rooms, will fade out

the healing and saving touches of one President’s daughter.

The life of the White House under the administration of President Grant

is a purely domestic one. It is the remark of all who have known its

past, that the White House never looked so home-like as at the present

time. It took on this aspect under the reign of Martha Patterson. But

since then, pictures and ornaments have been added, one by one, till all

its old-time stiffness seems to have merged into a look of grand

comfort. Its roof may leak occasionally, and it certainly was built

before the day of “modern conveniences,” and may be altogether

inadequate to be the President’s house of a great Nation; nevertheless,

that Nation has no occasion to be ashamed of its order or adornment

to-day.

As in the Johnson administration, the house is brightened by

ever-blooming flowers, and the presence of happy children. Mr. Dent, the

venerable father of Mrs. Grant, also makes a marked feature of its

social life, and is the object not only of the ceaseless devotion of his

family, but of the respect of all their visitors.

Mrs. Grant is now, as she always has been, devoted to her family. Her

chief enjoyment is in it, in its cares and pleasures; the latter,

however, in her present life, largely preponderating. Born without the

natural gifts or graces which could have made her a leader of other

minds, even in the surface realm of society, she is, nevertheless, very

fond of social entertainments, and enters into them with a good nature,

and visible enjoyment, which at times goes far to take the place of

higher and more positive characteristics. If to the affectionate

domestic life of the White House could be added a finer culture and

higher intellectual quality as the highest social centre of the land,

giving exclusive tone to the official society, it might do more than

words could tell to redeem from frivolity and vicious dissipation the

fashionable life of the capital. Mere good nature, good clothes, and

unutterable commonplace are not forces sufficient to, in themselves,

work out this reformation.

On the whole it is a sad sight to see a President’s daughter, an only

daughter, at an age when any thoughtful mother would shield her from the

allurements of pleasure, and shut her away in safety to study and grow

to harmonious and beautiful womanhood, suddenly launched into the wild

tide of frivolous pleasure. Thus, while the daughters of Senators and

Cabinet ministers, far from Washington, under faithful teachers, were

learning truly how to live, and acquiring the discipline and

accomplishments which would fit them to adorn their high estate, Ellen

Grant, a gentle girl of seventeen, with mind and manners unfed and

unformed, suddenly “came out” a full-fledged young woman of fashion,

spoken of almost exclusively as the driver of a phaeton, and the leader

of the all-night “German.”

As a result, Washington is crowded with a shoal of pretty girls, bright

and lovely as God had made them; by a false life, late hours, voluptuous

dances, made already hard, old, _blasé_, often before their feet have

touched the first verge of womanhood. I think of one, but one, amid

hundreds, the daughter of a high officer, graceful, tasteful, the queen

of dancers, and of all night revels, but empty of mind, hard of heart,

brazen of manners! Who looking on her face can fail to see that the dew

of innocence is brushed from it forever.

The prevailing lack of fashionable society in Washington, to-day, is

high motive, purity of feeling, a more varied and brighter intelligence.

These all exist, and in no meagre proportion, but as scattered elements,

they wait the supreme social queen, the centripetal soul which shall

draw them into one potent and prevailing power that shall lift the whole

social life of the capital to a higher plane of æsthetic attire,

culture, and amusement. Fortunately, Mrs. Grant has been surrounded by

numerous ladies in official life of superior mental endowment and

culture, and true social grace. This is especially true of a portion of

“the ladies of the Cabinet,” of the Senators’ wives from several States,

and of no small number among the wives of Representatives. Many ladies,

whose husbands are in Congress, bring the most exquisite tastes in art,

music and literature, and the loveliest of womanhood to grace the life

of Washington. For what is termed its “society” in the “season,” the

pity is these rare women have no taste, it is to them a burden, or an

offence, and they have never yet combined in organized force (which

alone is power) to uplift and redeem it.

Nevertheless, Washington is rapidly becoming an intellectual as well as

social centre. The large and varied interests which concentrate in a

national capital tend more and more to draw the highest intellectual as

well as social forces into its life. These need but assimilation,

fusion, unity and purpose to develop into the most superb manifestation

of civilization. In looking back upon the wives of the Presidents, we

discover, with but two or three exceptions, they were women of

remarkable powers and exalted character.

CHAPTER XXVI.

RECEPTION DAY AT THE WHITE HOUSE—GLIMPSES OF LIFE.

Mrs. Grant at Home—A Reception—Feeling Good-Natured—Looking After One’s

Friends—Ready to Forgive—Mr. Grant’s “Likeable Side”—The East Room

on a Reception Day—“The Nation’s Parlor”—Rags and Tatters

Departed—The Work of Relic-hunters—Internal Arrangements—Eight

Presidents, All In a Row—“As Large as Life”—Shadows of the

Departed—A Present from the Sultan of Turkey—A List of Finery—A

Scene Not Easily Forgotten—How They Wept for Their Martyr—Tales

which a Room Might Tell—David, Jonathan and Sir Philip Sidney

Superseded—Underneath the Gold and Lace—“Into the Ear of a Foolish

Girl”—“The Census of Spittoons”—“A Horror in Our Land”—An Under-bred

People—“We Talk too Loud”—Preliminaries to Perfection—“More Than

Shakespeare’s Women”—The Shadow of Human Nature—Two “Quizzing”

Ladies—Nothing Sacred to Them—An Illogical Dame—Her “Precarious

Organ”—A “Vice that Thrives Amid Christian Graces”—How some Pious

People “Avenge their Defrauded Souls”—A Lady of Many Colors—“A New

Woman”—A Vegetable Comparison—What “a Good Little Girl” was Allowed

To Do—The Lady of the Manor—Women Who are Not Ashamed of

Womanhood—Observed and Admired of All—Another “Reigning

_Belle_”—Sketch of a Perfect Woman—After the Lapse of

Generations—The “German”—“You Had Better Be Shut Up”—The “Withering”

of Many American Women—Full Dress and No Dress—What the Princess

Ghika Thinks—A Young Girl’s Dress—“That Dreadful Woman”—“_My_

Wife’s” Dress—The Resolution of a Young Man.

It is Tuesday—Mrs. Grant’s day—and all the gay world is going to the

White House, besides a portion of that world which is not gay.

Mrs. Grant’s morning receptions are very popular, and deservedly so.

This is not because the lady is in any sense a conversationalist, or has

a fine tact in receiving, but rather, I think, because she is thoroughly

good-natured, and for the time, at least, makes other people feel the

same. At any rate, there was never so little formality or so much

genuine sociability in the day-receptions at the White House as at the

present time. General Babcock pronounces your name without startling you

out of your boots by shouting it, as on such occasions is usually done.

He passes it to the President, the President to Mrs. Grant, Mrs. Grant

to ladies receiving with her. After exchanging salutations with each,

you pass on to make room for others, and to find your own personal

friends dispersed through the great rooms. They are in each of them;

loitering in the Blue Room, where the receiving is going on; chatting in

the Green Room; promenading in the East Room. You may go through the

long corridor into the state dining-room, into the conservatories, full

of flowers and fragrance, and back, if you choose, to your

starting-point, where the President and Mrs. Grant are still receiving.

This is one of the pleasantest facts of these morning receptions—the

informal coming down of the President to receive with Mrs. Grant. I have

never been accused of over enthusiasm for him, but find myself ready to

forgive in him the traits which I cannot like, when I see him, with his

daughter, beside Mrs. Grant. _Then_, it is so perfectly evident that,

whatever the President may or may not be, “Mr. Grant” has a very true

and likeable side, with which nobody is so well acquainted as Mrs.

Grant.

Here is the East Room, that you have read about so long. It never looked

so well before. There are flaws in the harmony of its decorations which

we might pick at; but we won’t, as we are not here to-day to find fault.

Besides, it is too pleasant to see that the nation’s parlor, erst so

forlorn, has absolutely taken on a look of home comfort. In proportions

it is a noble room, long and lofty. It has seven windows—three in front,

facing Pennsylvania avenue and Lafayette square; three looking out upon

the presidential grounds and the Potomac; and a stately bay window

overlooking the Treasury. It has four white marble mantel-pieces, two on

each side. It has eight mirrors, filling the spaces over the mantels and

between the windows. Richly wrought lace curtains have taken the place

of the tatters left there a few years ago, when the curtains of the

White House windows were scattered over the country in tags, taken home

by relic-hunters. Over these hang draperies of crimson brocatelle,

surmounted by gilt cornices, bearing the arms of the United States. The

walls and ceilings are frescoed, and from the latter depend three

immense chandeliers of cut glass, which, when lighted, blaze like mimic

suns. On the walls hang the oil portraits, in heavy gilt frames, of

eight Presidents of the United States. Opposite the door, as you enter,

is the portrait of Filmore. On the other side of the mantel, that of

Lincoln. Next beyond the bay window, that of Washington; all of life

size. Beyond the further mantel is that of Franklin Pierce. Above the

door opposite, one of John Adams. Above the next door, of Martin Van

Buren; the next, of Polk; the last above the entrance door, of John

Tyler.

[Illustration: THE GREAT EAST ROOM.]

[Illustration:

THE GREEN ROOM.

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE.—WASHINGTON.

]

The carpet on the East Room, last year, was presented to the United

States by the Sultan of Turkey. It seemed like one immense rug, covering

the entire floor, and filled the room with an atmosphere of comfort,

grand, soft, and warm. The chairs and sofas are of carved wood, crimson

cushioned. A handsome bronze clock ticks above one of the mantels, the

others are adorned with handsome bronzes. The air is summer warm. On the

whole, isn’t the people’s parlor a pleasant place? I never enter it, but

comes back to me that tearful April morning when, in the centre of this

floor, under the white catafalque, lay the body of Abraham Lincoln,

dead. The crowd pressing in then, how different from this one! Rugged

soldiers bent down and kissed his face and wept, women scattered flowers

upon his breast, with their tears. Rich and poor, old and young, black

and white, all crowded round his coffin, and wept for him,—one, _only

one_, if the most august, of the martyrs of liberty.

Think what tales the room could tell, since the day when Abigail Adams

dried her clothes from the weekly wash, in it, if it but had a tongue.

Stand here, and see the stately procession move by. Believe in your own

day, my dears. You need not go back to Sir Philip Sidney, to find a

perfect gentleman, nor to David and Jonathan, to find faith and love

between man and man, passing the love of woman, nor to the days of

chivalry, to find true knights who would die for you. Here are men

bearing, under all this glitter of gold and lace, bodies battered and

maimed in their country’s cause. There, is a man, pouring foolish

nothings into the ear of a foolish girl, who would die for the truth.

We are far from being a thorough-bred people. The census of spittoons is

a horror in our land. We talk too loud, and too long; we gesticulate too

much; we can not keep quiet. We need, at least, more capacity for

repose, more unselfish consideration for the sensibilities of others,

more of the golden rule, before we can flower into the perfection of

fine breeding. Yet, no less here, are men at once strong and gentle,

brave and tender, gallant and yet true. Here are all and more than

Shakespeare’s women: Juliet, searching for her Romeo; Miranda, looking

through her starry eyes for a “thing divine” even in the Red Room;

tender Imogen; fair Titania; Portia, with hair of golden brown; and

Desdemona, imprudent, fond, yet truth itself. Here is not only the

beauty and the _belle_, but the sibyl, whose divining eyes beyond

volition, strike below every sham and every falsehood.

Yet here, too, falls the shadow of human nature. There stand two ladies,

whose supreme enjoyment here is “quizzing.” Among their thousand “dear

friends” here, not one is too sacred to be ridiculed. One of these

ladies, at least, would feel as if she had forfeited “her soul’s

salvation,” if she were to go to the theatre, or to give countenance to

a dance; but it does not occur to her, that she puts that precarious

organ in the slightest peril, when she stands in a public assembly, and

ridicules her friends.

These ladies are merely yielding to a vice which has grown with their

years, strengthened with their strength, the vice that thrives amid

Christian graces, the vice paramount of the Christian church. The most

unkind people whom I have ever known, have been distinguished for an

ostentatious sort of piety. The most uncharitable conclusions, the most

pitiless judgments, the most merciless ridicule, that I have ever

listened to, of poor human beings, I have heard from people high in the

church, not from people of the so-called “world.” This, not because the

normal human nature in either differs, but because the people of the

world have a thousand outlets and activities which draw them away from

microscopic inspection of the flaws in their neighbors; while ascetic

pietists, denied legitimate amusements, shut out from innocent

recreation, avenge their defrauded souls by feeding them on small vices.

I offer no defence for a life of folly; there is nothing I should dread

more, save a life of sin. Yet, if I were to make a choice, I would

choose foolishness rather than meanness.

This lady, flashing by in many hues, represents what one sees

continually in Washington—a new woman. Not new to the city merely, but

new to position and honor. These are but slight external accidents to a

nature that has ripened from within, drawing culture, refinement, and

dignity out of the daily opportunities of retired life. But, when the

public position is _all_ that gives the honor, how easy to tell it!

There is all the difference in the quality of the put-on, puckering

manner, and the simple dignity of real ladyhood, that there is between

the quality of a persimmon and a pomegranate. All she has is new. She,

herself, is new. Her bearing and her honors do not blend. There is no

soft and fine shading of thought, of manner, of accent, of attire. The

sun of prosperity may strike down to a rarer vein, and draw it outward,

to tone down this boastful commonplace; but we must bear the glare, the

smell of varnish, and the crackle of veneering, during the process.

When I was a very good little girl, I was allowed to read Mrs.

Sherwood’s Lady of the Manor, on Sunday. I read, and thought that heaven

on earth must be shut up in a manor house. When I grew to be a somewhat

bigger girl, sailing down the Hudson, a manor house, rich in historic

recollections, was pointed out to me. And here, in my summer-time, comes

the lady of this manor house, drops her gentle courtesy, and gives me

her hand, making more than real the enchanted story of childhood. The

lady of the manor in crude Washington revives the stately graces of old

days.

How quaint and rare they are! How I look and long for it; how glad I am

when I find it,—that indefinable, yet ever-felt presence of fine

womanliness, a thing as precious as the highest manliness,—each the

rarest efflovescence of human nature. I confess to a clinging adoration

for it, whether felt in the lady of the manor or in the sad-eyed woman

who cleans my gloves. The womanliness that is not ashamed nor

dissatisfied with womanhood, nor yet vain of it; the womanliness that

gives us the gracious, blending dignity and sweetness of wisdom and

humility, of self-respect and reticence, of spirituality and

tenderness—that ineffable charm of femininity, which is the counterpart

and crown of manhood, in very distinction equal with it, each together

maintaining in equilibrium the brain and soul of the human race.

Even while I write word comes: The lady of the manor is dead. The quaint

hood, the stately grace, the winning smile we shall see no more. All

have gone into the darkness of death. And who was the lady of the manor,

who for three winters in Washington has been the observed and admired of

all who met her in the circles of society? She was Cora Livingston

Barton, the reigning _belle_ of Jackson’s administration. She was the

daughter of Edward Livingston, who served his country as Member of

Congress and Senator from Louisiana, as Secretary of State during

Jackson’s administration, and as United States Minister to France. Her

father was as distinguished for goodness as he was for noble intellect

and exalted public service, and her mother was one of the most

remarkable women who ever graced the National Capital. She was a social

queen of the rarest endowments. She was the chosen friend and dear

counsellor of two persons as opposite in nature and temperament as

General Jackson and Mrs. John Quincy Adams. She was a very queen of

entertainers, as the wife of the Secretary of State, entertaining

foreigners and Americans and political foes, with an ease, elegance and

fascination of manner, which annihilated alike all prejudice and

animosity. She was a classical scholar, familiar with the best ancient

and modern thoughts. The chosen counsellor of her husband in the gravest

affairs of State,—a self-abnegating mother,—a devout Methodist, she

having chosen that communion as her own on account of the simplicity and

fervor of its mode of worship.

Of this rare woman, our “lady of the manor” was the only child. “Upon

her she lavished extraordinary maternal devotion, hardly ever suffering

her to be out of her sight. Her daughter had hardly reached girlhood

when her beautiful mother assumed the simplest matronly attire. Ever

afterwards she seemed rather displeased than flattered when allusions

were made to her own still remarkable appearance.”

Cora Livingston was worthy to be the child of such a mother. She was the

most famous _belle_ of the Jackson administration. She married Thomas

Barton, who went as Secretary of Legation with her father, the Minister

to France, and who remained as _Chargé d’Affaires_ when Edward

Livingston returned.

In the course of time, mother and daughter, both widows, spent their

winters in New York and their summers at Montgomery Place, that grand

old manor on the Hudson, of which we catch glimpses through its

immemorial trees, as we sail by on the river. Here, beautiful and

saintly, that mother died, October, 1860, at the age of seventy-eight.

Warned by physicians to seek a softer climate, after the lapse of

generations, in the winter of 1871 the daughter returned to Washington,

the scene of her childish home and early triumphs. She did not belong to

things gone by. With her two stately and beautiful nieces she became at

once the centre of a rare group of friends, of the attention and

reverence of the first men in the State, and an object of admiring

comment wherever she appeared. She appeared at many morning receptions.

I see her now as I saw her the first time stepping from her carriage

into the great portico of the White House, across its corridor to the

Blue Room, with the light, springing step of a girl; and yet, the soft

clinging black dress, the quaint hood of black silk, with its inside

snowy _ruche_, all told that she made not the slightest pretence to

youth. And now, in these summer days, comes the word: “While packing

some books in a trunk to go to Montgomery Place, she bent down, burst a

blood vessel in the head, and without warning died.”

They have all been morning receptions to which I have asked you,—the

“morning” ending at 5 P. M. I cannot invite you to go to the “German,”

which begins at 11 P. M. and ends at daybreak. I have too deep a care

for your physical and spiritual health to ask you to do any such thing.

When you read of the gay doings and bright assemblies here, perhaps you

think it hard sometimes that you must stay away in a quiet place to work

or study. You feel almost defrauded because you are shut out from the

splendor and mirth and flattery of fashion. You long for the pomp and

glory of the world, and sigh that so little of either falls on your

life-path. Thus I shall seem cruel to you when I say that you had better

be shut up for the next five years, even in a convent, silently growing

toward a noble life in the world afterward, than to be caught and

carried on by its follies now, before you have learned how to live.

Are you young? Then you should be more beautiful at twenty-five, at

thirty, at thirty-five, than you are now. Not with the budding bloom of

first youth, that is as evanescent as it is exquisite. What a pity that

it is beauty’s only dower to so many American women. They waste it, lose

it, then wilt and wither. I want you so to feed the sources of life

to-day that you may grow, not wither; that you may bloom, not fade, into

the perfect flower of womanhood.

Terpsichore is a sad sight to me; not because Terpsichore dances, for

dancing in itself may be as innocent as a bird’s flying; not because she

loves beautiful attire, for exquisite dress is a feminine fine art, as

meet for a woman as the flower’s tint, or the bird’s plumage. I sigh at

the sight of my pretty Terpsichore, because the first bloom of her

exquisite youth is being exhaled and lost forever in a feverish, false

atmosphere of being. Something of delicate sensibility, something of

unconscious innocence, something of freshness of feeling, of purity of

soul is wasted with the fresh young bloom of her cheeks in the midnight

revel, lengthened into morning; wasted in the heated dance, in the

indigestible feast, in the wild, unhealthy excitement through which she

whirls night alter night. Terpsichore, in her tattered tarletan dress,

creeping to bed in the gray morning, after having danced all night, is a

sad sight to see to any one who can see her as she is. Terpsichore’s

mother would be a sadder sight still, if she were not a vexatious one.

She brought back from Europe the notion, which so many of our

countrywomen think it fine to bring, that “full dress” is necessarily

next to no dress. She tells you, in a supreme tone, that admits no

denial, that you would not be admitted into the drawing-room of a court

in Europe unless in full dress, viz., semi-nakedness. She would be

nothing, if not European in style. Thus, night after night, this mother

of grown-up daughters and sons appears in crowded assemblies in attire

that would befit in outline a child of eight years of age. If we venture

to meet her _ipse dixit_ on European style, with the assurance of the

Princess Helena, Ghika, Dora D’Istria, one of the most learned and

beautiful women of this world, that the conventional society dress of

Europe is more immodest than any she saw while traveling over the

mountains and valleys of the East, she will tell you that Princess Ghika

“is not an authority on dress in Paris,” which is doubtless true.

Thus, in republican Washington, in glaring drawing-rooms, we are treated

to a study of female anatomy, which is appalling. Don’t jump to the

conclusion that I want every lady to go to a party in a stuff dress,

drawn up to her ears; nor that I am so prudish as to think no dress can

be modestly, as well as immodestly low. No matter how it be cut, the

_way_ in which a dress is worn is more impressive than the dress itself.

I have seen a young girl’s shoulders rise from her muslin frock as

unconsciously and as innocently as the lilies in the garden; and I have

come upon a wife and mother, in a public assembly, so dressed for

promiscuous gaze that I have involuntarily shut my eyes with shame.

I never saw Lydia Thompson; but from what I have heard of her, have come

to the conclusion that her attire is just as modest as that of many

ladies whom I meet at fashionable parties. They cast up their eyes in

horror at the name of poor Lydia Thompson. _They_ go to see Lydia

Thompson! No, indeed! How could their eyes endure the sight of that

dreadful woman? No less they themselves offer gratis, to a promiscuous

company, every evening, a sight, morally, quite as dreadful. The men,

who pay their money to Lydia Thompson and her _troupe_, know that their

dress and their burlesque, however questionable, make at once their

business and their livelihood. They cannot make the same excuse for

their wives, their sisters, and their sweethearts, if they see them

scarcely less modestly attired in some fashionable ball-room. Remember

this; if you ever find yourself in such a place, the best men in that

room, at heart, are not delighted with such displays. Being men, they

will look at whatever is presented to their gaze; more, many will

compliment and flatter the very woman, whose vanity at heart they pity

or despise; but it will always be with the mental reservation: “_My

wife_ should never dress like that!” “I don’t want to see my sister

dancing round dances for hours in the arms of a man whom even I cannot

think of without horror; and if —— dances with him again, I’ll not go to

another ‘German;’” said a young man to his mother, this very winter.

This is perpetually the fact; and it is the danger and the shame of the

round dances. Young girls guarded, from babyhood, from all contact with

vice, from all knowledge of men as they exist, in their own world of

clubs and dissipation, suddenly “come out” to whirl, night after night,

and week after week, in the arms of men whose lightest touch is

profanation. It would be long before it would dawn upon the girl to

dream of the evil in that man’s heart; far longer to learn the evil of

his life; yet no less, to her, innocent and young, in the very

association and contact there is unconscious pollution. There is a

sacredness in the very thought of the body which God created to be the

human home of an immortal soul. Its very beauty should be the seal of

its holiness. Every where in Scripture its sacredness is recognized and

enforced. Therein we are told that our bodies are the temples of God. We

are commanded to make them meet temples for the indwelling of the Holy

Spirit; and our very dress, in its harmony and purity, should

consecrate, not desecrate, the beautiful home of the soul.

CHAPTER XXVII.

INAUGURATION DAY AT WASHINGTON.

My Own Private Opinion—Sublime Humanity in the Lump—The Climate

Disagrees—The Little “Sons of War” Feeling Bad—“Think of the

Babies”—Brutal Mothers—The “Boys in Blue”—“Broke their Backs and

Skinned their Noses”—Our Heroes—Later Festivities—“Devoted to

Art”—Scene in “the Avenue”—A Lively Time—The Mighty Drum-Major—West

Point Warriors Criticised—Faultlessly Ridiculous—Pitilessly

Dressed—“Taken for a Nigger”—Magnificent Display—The Oldest Regiment

in the States—The President—The Senators—Invitation of the

Coldstream Guards—The Strangers—Generals Sherman and

Sheridan—Admiral Porter—Sketches of Well-known Men—The Diplomatic

Corps—Blacque Bey—Full Turkish Costume—Sir Edward Thornton—The

Japanese Minister—Senator Sumner Appears—The Supreme Court—Senator

Wilson—Cragin, Logan, and Bayard—Vice-President Colfax—Enter, the

President—Congress Alive Again—The Valedictory—Taking the Oaths—“The

Little Gentleman in the Big Chair”—His Little Speech—His Wife and

Family Behind—The New President—Memories of Another Scene—Grand

Jubilation—The Procession—The Curtain Falls.

I don’t like Inauguration day, but I hope you do, or will, when I have

told you what a gala day it is to many—to all who stay at home, and

catch the splendor which it sheds, through lines of printer’s ink.

Surely, there is something inspiriting and uplifting in the sight of

massed humanity, in throbbing drums and soaring music, in waving pennons

and flashing lances, all laden with heroic memories, all bristling with

intelligence and the conscious power of human freedom; but, in our

climate, and at the inauguration season of the year, enthusiasm and

patriotism demand a fearful price in nerve, muscle, and human endurance.

If you doubt it, think of the West Point Cadets—those young sons of war,

inured to martial training—who sank to the pavements in the ranks, at

the last inauguration of President Grant, overcome, and insensible with

the bitter cold which chilled and benumbed even the warm currents of

their strong young hearts. Think of the babies who shuddered and cried

in their mothers’ arms, who _would_ see the sight, if baby died!

No less the second inaugural procession of President Grant transcended,

in civic and military splendor, any sight seen in Washington since the

great review when the boys in blue, fresh from the victory of bloody

battle-fields, broke their backs and skinned their noses, in the June

sun of 1865, for the sake of shouting thousands who came hither to

behold them. Oh what a sight was that! when the bronzed and haggard, and

aged-in-youth faces of the boys before us, made our hearts weep afresh

at the thought of the upturned faces of the boys left behind—some in the

cruel wilderness, some in half dug graves on solitary hill-sides, and

lonely plains—all left behind forever, for freedom’s sake. Who that knew

old Washington can forget it? This is another Washington. But here they

come! Safe from cold and wind, thanks to—I look up. From this window, on

Fifteenth street, you can see Pennsylvania avenue past the Treasury

building, (whose marble steps are boarded in from the advancing people,)

to the Executive Mansion, glittering white through the leafless trees

just beyond. Opposite is Lafayette square, the prettiest little park of

its size in the United States. Above, you see the towering mansard of

Corcoran’s building, “Devoted to Art,” and just this side, the lofty

brown front of the Freedman’s Savings Bank. The avenue opens before

you—a broad, straight vista, with garlands of flags, of every nation and

hue, flung across from roof to roof. Above glitters an absolutely

cloudless sky, dazzlingly blue, and pitilessly cold. The very

tree-boughs swing like crystals glittering and freezing in the sun. The

air seems full of rushing fiends, or rushing locomotives running into

each other with hideous shrieks, whichever you please (on the whole, I

prefer locomotives, being fresher). Your imagination need not be Dantean

to make you feel that there is a dreadful battle going on in the air,

above you and about you. The imps come down and seize an old man’s hat,

and fly off with a woman’s veil, and blow a little boy into a cellar.

The bigger air-warriors, intent on bigger spoil, sweep down banners,

swoop off with awnings, concentrate their forces into swirling cyclones

in the middle of the streets, and bang away at plate-glass windows till

they prance in their sockets.

Before such unfriendly and tricksy foes, through the biting air, comes

the great procession. First, a battalion of mounted police; then West

Point, with its band and drum-major. Not a sprite of the air has caught

the baton of its drum-major. Not a sting of zero, has stiffened that

fantastic arm as he lifts and swings the symbol of his foolishness. He

is as inimitable in the bleak and dusty street as when I saw him last,

on the velvet sward of West Point, that delicious evening in October.

Something utterly ridiculous to look at, _is_ refreshing, and anything

more faultlessly ridiculous than the drum-major of West Point I never

saw.

I believe it is fashionable to find fault with West Point; but I

wouldn’t give much for anybody who could see these boys and not admire

them. They have their faults (their caste and their army exclusiveness

sometimes reaches an absurd pitch) but look at them! What faces, what

muscle, what manhood! Their movement is the perfect poetry of motion; a

hundred men stepping as one. What marching, and at what odds! They are

so pitilessly dressed! Thousands of men come behind, warmly muffled; but

the West Point Cadets have on their new uniforms, single jackets. More

than one will receive through it the seeds of death this morning. What

wonder, that two while standing in line sank insensible with the cold

not an hour ago. But, dear me! to think that more than one of them

should be taken for a “nigger!” The colored Cadet is whiter than a dozen

of his class-mates, and has straight hair.

In the distance rises, wave on wave, a glittering sea of helmets;

bayonets flash, plumes wave, bands play; all tell one story—the love of

military pomp and parade, the pride and patriotism which brings these

soldiers back to celebrate the second inauguration of their chief; and

at what cost of suffering to many of them. What cold and hunger, and

delay on the way, and now! what nerve and will it takes to march in a

wind like this!

After West Point comes Annapolis. Pretty “Middies,” young and slender,

in their suits of dark blue! As a body, they are younger than the West

Pointers, and slighter. Nor can any comparison be drawn between their

marching, for the Middies drag their howitzers. They look true sons of

their class; and for intelligence, chivalric manners, and gentle

manhood, the true officer of the American navy is unsurpassed.

The Midshipmen are followed by the famous United States Marine Corps,

then the Old Guard of New York with Dodworth’s band, the Washington

Light Infantry, the Corcoran Zouaves, the Washington Grenadiers, the St.

Louis National Guard. The Philadelphia City Troop, in navy-blue jackets,

tight knee-breeches, white braid trimming, high boots, bearskin helmets

with silver mountings—the oldest regiment in the United States, two

years older than the government, organized in 1774, and furnished men to

every war of this country since. It was in the battles of Trenton and

Princeton, in the Revolutionary War, and has in its armory a letter from

General Washington thanking the regiment for its services.

Now, the President’s mounted guard, in dark blue, yellow-trimmed

uniform, regulation-hat and black feathers. Now, the President in open

barouche, drawn by four horses, with the Senate Committee, Senators

Cragin, Logan and Bayard. The President looks decidedly cooler than

usual, and less indifferent; at least he has just lifted his hat to the

shouting crowd in the street, which requires an impulse of self-denial

this morning.

Now come the Boston National Lancers. They have left their milk-white

steeds there, and to their chagrin, no doubt, are mounted on sorry

Virginian roans instead,—old road and car horses, who act dazed and daft

under their light unwonted burdens. The Lancers are the oldest cavalry

regiment of Massachusetts, organized in 1836, under Governor Edward

Everett. This dashing looking squadron, which has the reputation of

being one of the most perfect military organizations of the United

States, is dressed in scarlet cloth coats, faced with a light blue and

trimmed with gold lace, sky-blue pants with yellow stripes on sides,

Polish dragoon cap, gold trimmings, flowing white feathers and

_aiguillette_, cavalry boots with patent leather tops, white belts and

shoulder straps; red epaulettes, with blue trimmings for the privates,

and gold for the officers, and armed with cavalry sabre and lance, on

which is appended a small red flag.

The Albany Burgess Corps, another famous regiment, led by Capt. Henry B.

Beecher, son of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, make a splendid appearance.

They are uniformed in scarlet coats, trimmed with white, light blue

pants, buff stripe, and bearskin shakoes, with gold clasp—similar to the

celebrated English Coldstream Guards.

But we shall not reach the capitol till next week, unless we leave the

rest of this splendid procession,—the “orphans of soldiers and sailors,”

the burnished and flower-garlanded fire-engines, the brave firemen,

black and white, and the civic societies. The strangers who rushed on to

inauguration, swarm the galleries till they overflow as they did on

_Credit Mobilier_ days. Generals Sherman, and Sheridan and Admiral

Porter; the first tall and red; the second, little, round, red and

bullet-headed; the third, tall, straight and black, are all being

intently gazed at.

The Diplomatic Corps enter the chamber by the main entrance, led by

Blacque Bey, the dean of the Corps, a tall, dark, gray-haired, handsome

man, wearing scarlet fez and full Turkish court regalia; next, the

English Minister, Sir Edward Thornton, a white-haired, ruddy-faced,

black-eyed, shrewd-looking gentleman; next, the Peruvian Minister,

Colonel Freerye, followed by the Italian and French Ministers, with all

the representatives of foreign governments, in order of seniority—over

fifty ministers, secretaries and _attachés_ in full uniform, excepting

Mr. Mori, Minister from Japan, in citizen’s dress. Just now Mr. Sumner

appears, for the first time in months. He looks pale, and shows the

traces of the acute suffering through which he has passed. His

appearance creates a buzz on floor and in gallery, and many senators go

over to him and exchange friendly greetings. Now the Supreme Court

appear, in their robes of office, kicking them high up behind, as usual,

and take their seats in front of the Vice-President’s desk. At fifteen

minutes to twelve o’clock, Vice-President elect Wilson, escorted by

Senators Cragin, Logan, and Bayard, comes down the centre aisle and

takes his seat at the right of Vice-President Colfax.

At three minutes before twelve, the President appears, leaning on the

arm of Senator Cragin, followed by Logan and Bayard, and takes the seat

assigned him, in front of the Secretary’s table. A deep hush falls on

the throng, as if something awful were about to happen. It’s a sort of

Judgment-Day atmosphere, yet nothing more terrific follows than the

pleasant voice of Vice-President Colfax, beginning the words of his

valedictory. (My! I forgot to say that the dying Congress has come to

life again, and is comfortably, and perforce quietly seated between the

Senate and Diplomatic Corps.) Now comes the new Vice-President’s little

speech. Then the oaths of office, the swearing in of new senators, the

proclamation of the President convening an extra session of the Senate,

to begin this minute, when all start for the back door—no, it’s the

front door of the Capitol, the Supreme Court leading, kicking up their

gowns worse than usual.

On the eastern portico, what do we see? Below, a vast mass of human

beings, line on line of soldiers—cavalry, artillery and infantry; a line

of battle flags at the base of the steps—shot-riddled, battle-torn, all

shuddering or numb in the freezing air. Before us, a little gentleman

sits down in a big chair—Washington’s inaugural chair, we are told. (Oh!

no, we’re not at all sentimental.)

A big gentleman, the Chief Justice, who has most unaccountably fringed

out in a long grey beard and a muffling moustache, holds forth with

solemnity a big Bible. The little gentleman kisses it—kisses these words

from the eleventh chapter of Isaiah:

“‘And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom

and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of

knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.

“‘And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord;

and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove

after the hearing of his ears.’

Then he rises, and, with manuscript in his hands, begins to “battle with

the breeze,” and to read his inaugural, which nobody hears. Behind him

sits his wife and daughter, the ladies of the Cabinet, the Diplomatic

Corps. What a compound of the ornamental and comfortable? Yet nobody is

comfortable—not here. We can catch no word through the outbearing wind,

yet know that for the second time Ulysses S. Grant has sworn to the oath

of office, according to the constitution, and for four more years is

made President of the United States. It seems but yesterday we saw a

loftier head, a sadder face, bowed above that book, within one little

month of its eternity; when, amid the booming of cannon and the huzzas

of the people, Abraham Lincoln for the second time was pronounced the

people’s President, and by the same lips which now utter the same words

for another, a happier, a more fortunate man.

Now the carnival of salute; the Middies fire their howitzers,

thirty-seven guns; the Second Artillery fire twenty-one salvos; the

Firemen ring the bells of their engines; ten thousand men warm their

hands with hat swinging, and make their throats sore with shouting. Amid

all, the multitude and the procession surge back towards the Executive

Mansion. Between the latter and Lafayette square, the review, the return

march, the military pageant culminates. The President, with lady

friends, enters the pavilion built for the purpose, and the troops march

by, encircling two solid squares; the West Point Cadets appear below

Corcoran’s building, marching downward, as the magnificent New York

Regiment—a thousand men—just arrived after an all night’s freezing

delay, have reached Fifteenth street, marching up. The entire body of

soldiery march and mass, till as far as the eyes can reach through the

glittering sunshine, one only sees gleaming helmets, flashing bayonets,

glancing sabers, the Cadets on double quick, the Middies firing their

howitzers, officers displaying fine horses and uniforms, drum-majors

tossing their batons, bands playing, and cannon thundering.

Amid all these the four horses dashing before the Presidential barouche,

bear the President to the Executive door, which now mercifully shuts

them from our sight.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

A PEEP AT AN INAUGURATION BALL.

How Sixty Thousand Dollars were Spent—Something wrong: “’Twas ever

Thus”—Recollection of another Festival—How “the dust” was Raised—A

Fine Opportunity for a Few Naughty Words—Lost Jewels—The Colored

Folks in a Fix—Overpowered by Numbers—Six Thousand People Clamoring

for their Clothes!—“Promiscuous” Property—A Magnificent

“Grab”—Weeping on Window-ledges—Left Desolate—Walking under

Difficulties—The Exploits of Two Old Gentlemen—Horace Greeley Loses

his Old White Hat—He says Naughty Words of Washington—Seeking the

Lost—Still Cherished by Memory—Some People Remind General

Chipman—“Regardless of Expense”—A Ball-Room Built of Wooden Laths

and Muslin—A Little Too Cold—Gay Decorations—How “Delicate” Women

can Endure the Cold—Modesty in Scanty Garments—The President

Frozen—The “Cherubs, Perched up Aloft,” Refuse to Sing—On the

Presidential Platform—Ladies of Distinction—Half-frozen

Beauties—“They did not Make a Pretty Picture”—Why and Wherefore?—A

Protest against “Shams”—A Stolid Tanner who Fought his Way.

Untold time, and trouble, and sixty thousand dollars were expended on

the last inauguration ball building, and yet there was something the

matter with the inaugural ball. There is always something the matter

with every inauguration ball.

When I wish to think of a spot especially suggestive of torments, I

think of an inauguration ball. There was the one before the last, held

in the Treasury Building. The air throughout the entire building was

perforated with a fine dust ground till you felt that you were taking in

with every breath a myriad homœopathic doses of desiccated

grindstone. The agonies of that ball can never be written. There are

mortals dead in their grave because of it. There are mortals who still

curse, and swear, and sigh at the thought of it. There are diamonds, and

pearls, and precious garments that are not to their owners because of

it. The scenes in those cloak and hat rooms can never be forgotten by

any who witnessed them. The colored messengers, called from their posts

in the Treasury to do duty in these rooms, received hats and wraps with

perfect facility, and tucked them in loop-holes as it happened. But to

give them back, each to its owner, that was impossible. Not half of them

could read numbers, and those who could soon grew bewildered,

overpowered, ill-tempered and impertinent under the hosts that advanced

upon them for cloaks and hats.

Picture it! Six or more thousand people clamoring for their clothes! In

the end they were all tumbled out “promiscuous” on the floor. Then came

the siege! Few seized their own, but many snatched other people’s

garments—anything, something, to protect them from the pitiless morning,

whose wind came down like the bite of death. Delicate women, too

sensitive to take the property of others, crouched in corners, and wept

on window ledges; and there the daylight found them. Carriages, also,

had fled out of the scourging blast, and the men and women who emerged

from the marble halls, with very little to wear, found that they must

“foot it” to their habitations. One gentleman walked to Capitol Hill,

nearly two miles, in dancing pumps and bare-headed; another performed

the same exploit, wrapped in a lady’s sontag.

Poor Horace Greeley, after expending his wrath on the stairs and cursing

Washington anew as a place that should be immediately blotted out of the

universe, strode to his hotel hatless. The next day and the next week

were consumed by people searching for their lost clothes, and General

Chipman says that he still receives letters demanding articles lost at

that inauguration ball.

Well, our latest brought discomfort, and discomfiture of another sort.

Neither money, time nor labor were stinted in this leviathan, that still

lifts up its broken and propped up back in Judiciary square. The

building was 350 feet long. The ball-room 300 by 100 feet. All this was

temporary, built of light boards, lined with lighter muslin. You might

as well have attempted to have warmed Pennsylvania avenue as such a

place on such a night. Twenty-four hours before the ball the wind-devils

went at it. If a host from the pit had received full power to move and

dismember it, it could scarcely look more forlorn than it did one Monday

morning. They had sat on its spine in one place till it curved in,

punched it up in another till it was hunchbacked. They had inflated its

sides till they swelled out like an inflated balloon, while the air was

black with the tar-rags, seaming its roof, which flying imps were

carrying up to high heaven.

No less the official report said of the inside: “The mighty American

Eagle spreads his wings above the President’s platform. He has

suspended, from his pinions, streamers one hundred feet in length,

caught up on either side by coats of arms. The circumference of this

vast design is one hundred and eighty feet. The President’s reception

platform is sixty feet long, and thirty feet wide. Twelve pilasters

support alternate gold-figured, red and blue stands, on which are pots

of blooming flowers. The platform and steps are richly carpeted. In the

rear of the balcony, are immense festoons of flags, banners, shields,

radiating from a huge illuminated star of gas-lights.”

What were all those white and rosy walls of cambric, to the

all-pervading polar wave that froze sailors’ fingers, and struck West

Point Cadets to the pavements, in congestive chills, at noonday? Why,

they were nothing but an immense sieve, to strain that same polar wave

through on to the persons of delicate (?) women, who, without money, and

without price, for the sake of dubious admiration and commend, in

promiscuous assemblies, outvie Lydia Thompson in paucity of attire.

But the ball. My intention was to say, that the President was so near

frozen in the day-time, he was not sufficiently thawed out to appear

under that spreading eagle, until half-past eleven o’clock, when the

north wind swooped in from behind, and he congealed again immediately.

The President’s platform was at the north end, and all the muslin

splendors of the presidential dressing and waiting-room could not, and

did not, warm that polar wave. The thousands of canary-birds perched

aloft, who were expected to burst into simultaneous song at the sight of

him, and to trill innumerable preludes in honor of Miss Nelly, instead,

poor wretches, had, one and all, gone to bed, with their toes tucked in

their feathers, and their bills buried in their breasts, in dumb effort

to keep them from freezing. Not a canary-bird sang. No, they were as

paralyzed with cold as the bipeds below.

On the presidential platform, the President and Mrs. Grant sat, the

central figures. A little in the rear, sat Mrs. Fish—stately, lovely,

and serene as ever; and just behind her, the Secretary of State. Next,

were Mrs. Boutwell and Miss Boutwell, and the Secretary of the Treasury;

then came, dream-like, Mrs. Creswell, handsome Mrs. Williams, and

motherly Mrs. Delano. Ellen Grant stood beside her mother, and Edith

Fish hovered beside her’s—both winsome and unaffected girls, though the

girlish grace of the latter shows, already, the fine intellectual

quality of her mother. The Governor of the District, with his wife and

daughter, and numerous other officials, filled the platform.

Back of the Cabinet stood the Foreign Ministers, bereft of their court

attire, but glittering with decorations. Tall Lady Thornton bent like a

reed in the blast; and Madame Flores, the beautiful young wife of the

Minister from Equador, glowed in her warm rich beauty, even at zero.

Alas! that all those wondrous tints of blue and gold, of royal purple

and emerald, of lavender and rose, all the gleam of those diamonds, all

the show of necks and arms, which was to have made the glory of this

“court circle,” alas! that they were all held in eclipse, by layers on

layers of wrappings, till, at a little distance, the whole platform

seemed to be filled with a crowd of animated mummies, set upright, whose

motions were as spasmodic and jerky as those of Mrs. Jarley’s wax works.

It was very sensible—the only refuge from certain death—that all those

necks and arms, diamonds, pearls, velvets and satins, should hide away

under ermine capes, cloaks and shawls; but, lumped in aggregate, they

did not make a pretty picture (the wraps, I mean). Indeed, the polar

wave submerged the presidential platform, and made anything but a

picturesque success. And how unlucky, when for the first time in the

history of inauguration balls, there was a “cubby” for every hat and

wrap, that every man and woman should be obliged to keep them on.

But why a “presidential platform,” and why a private presidential

“supper room” at an inauguration ball? Both are vulgarly pretentious.

Both are preposterous, in the representatives of a republican people, in

a national assembly. I am not a universal leveller. I respect the

inevitable distinctions begotten of personal taste and condition. I make

this remark to add a little force to my protest against meretricious,

and fictitious pretence and shams. The President, as an individual, is

not under the slightest obligation to invite anybody that he does not

want, to his private dinner table. But when the President, _as_ the

President, comes into the presence of a promiscuous assembly of the

people, through whose gift he holds all the honor he possesses,—a

citizen uplifted by citizens to the chief magistracy of their

government, how false to republican fact is the feeling that perches him

up, and hedges him about, with a mock heroic exclusiveness, as if he

were a king, or demi-god, instead of a stolid tanner, who fought his way

to place and power, conferred on him by a nation of stavers and fighters

like himself.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE UNITED STATES TREASURY—ITS HISTORY.

The Responsibilities and Duties of the Secretary of the Treasury—“The

Most Remarkable Man of His Time”—Three Extraordinary Men—Hamilton

Makes an Honest Proposal—How to Pay the National Debt—The New

Secretary at Work—Laying the Foundation of Financial Operations—The

Mint at Philadelphia—A Little Personal Abuse—The Secretary Borrows

Twenty Dollars—Modern Greediness—The Genius Becomes a Lawyer—Burning

of Records—Hunting for Blunders and Frauds—The Treasury

Building—Treasury Notes go off Nicely—Mr. Crawford Under a Cloud—He

Comes out Gloriously—A Little Variety—A Vision of Much Money—Fidgety

Times—Lighting the Mariner on His Way—Old Debts Raked Up—Signs of

the Times—Under Lincoln—S. P. Chase as Secretary—The National

Currency Act—Enormous Increase of the National Debt—Facts and

Figures—The Credit of the Government Sustained—President Grant’s

Rule—George S. Boutwell made Secretary—Great Expectations—Mr.

Boutwell’s Labors, Policy and Success—The Great and Growing

Prosperity of the Nation.

After the Declaration of Independence, the first thing that the

Continental Congress did was to organize a Treasury Department for the

new government of the colonies.

[Illustration: UNITED STATES TREASURY.—WASHINGTON.]

Michael Hilligas and George Clymer were appointed Joint-Treasurers of

the United Colonies. They were to reside in Philadelphia, and to receive

each a salary of five hundred dollars the first year, and to give bonds

in the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. The second year their salary

was raised to eight hundred dollars each. In a short time George Clymer

was sent to Congress as a delegate from Pennsylvania, and Michael

Hilligas remained Treasurer for the Colonies to the close of the

Revolution.

In six months after the resignation of Mr. Clymer, a committee of five

persons was appointed to assist him to superintend the small Treasury.

Three months after, an office was created in which to keep the Treasury

accounts. That office was an itinerant, like Congress, following it to

whatever place it assembled. Acts were passed for the establishment of a

National Mint. Alas! the poor Continentals had no precious ore to coin,

and never struck off a dollar or cent. An Auditor General’s office was

organized, and John Gibson appointed, with an annual salary of one

thousand and sixty-six dollars and sixty-seven cents.

The office of Comptroller of the Treasury was created November 3, 1778,

and Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., appointed, with a salary of four thousand

dollars. Money was painfully scarce. That made it the more imperative

that this poor little empty Treasury should have some supreme

responsible head who, by the adroit magic of financial genius, should

create a way to fill it, and by some way provide cash for the

unprovided-for emergencies which were perpetually imminent. Thus in

September, 1781, Congress repealed the act appointing five

Commissioners, and in their stead appointed a single supreme

“Superintendent of Finance.”

The first high functionary of the Treasury was Robert Morris, of

Philadelphia. He had already distinguished himself for his remarkable

financial talents as a merchant, and for his devoted patriotism.

Besides, he was the intimate friend and confidential adviser of

Washington. He was the man for the place and the hour. He kept the

credit of the struggling Colonies afloat in their direst moment. He gave

from his private fortune without stint, and added thereto the

contributions of the infant nation. When even Washington was ready to

give up in despair, because he had no money to pay his troops, and the

troops were ready to surrender and disband from sheer misery and

suffering, Robert Morris applied to “the purser of our allies, the

French,” and saved the perishing army and the struggling republic. He

proved then, what has been proved so conspicuously since during a still

greater struggle, that he who preserves the credit of his country in the

hour of its peril is as truly a patriot as he who dies for her sake on

the battle-field.

Notwithstanding his benefactions, at the close of the Revolution, the

jealousy among foremost men was so great, it was found to be impossible

to give to one man the precedence and power in so responsible a place.

The claims of the three contending sections were acknowledged by the

appointment of three Commissioners: one from the Eastern, one from the

Middle, and one from the Southern districts, in the persons of Samuel

Osgood, Walter Livingston and Arthur Lee. Robert Morris became a member

of the Convention which framed the Constitution of the United States,

and concluded his public services to his country as United States

Senator.

At the end of three years, the administration of the three Commissioners

of Finance had proved so inharmonious and unsuccessful that the country

was nearly bankrupt, and the Union of States ready to break into ruins,

for lack of money to pay its expenses and hold it together.