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FAMOUS AMERICAN BELLES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
[Illustration: Emily Marshall
(Mrs. William Foster Otis)
From portrait by Chester Harding]
FAMOUS AMERICAN BELLES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
by
VIRGINIA TATNALL PEACOCK
Illustrated
[Illustration]
Philadelphia & London
J. B. Lippincott Company
1901
Copyright, 1900
By
J. B. Lippincott Company
Electrotyped and Printed By J. B. Lippincott Company,
Philadelphia, U.S.A.
_To
My Dear Mother
from whom I derived my first
conception of all that is
most beautiful in
woman_
PREFACE
During the century now drawing to its close there have appeared in
America from time to time women of so pre-eminent a beauty, so dazzling
a wit, so powerful a magnetism, that their names belong no less to
the history of their country than those of the men whose genius has
raised it to the rank it holds to-day among the nations of the earth.
Among them have been women of the highest type of mental and moral
development, women of great political and of great social genius,
all of whom have left the impress of their remarkable personalities
upon their time. When they have manifested these qualities in their
girlhood they have risen frequently to an eminence such as it is
scarcely possible for the women of any other country to attain at a
correspondingly early age.
From among the latter class the subjects of these sketches have been
taken, those having been selected who seemed most adequately to
represent their period and locality and whose fame was beyond question,
it having been frequently of national and sometimes of international
extent.
Rising to wield the magic of their influence in every decade of the
century and in every section of the country, some study of the time in
which each lived has been necessary in order to give her her proper
setting and to justly estimate the power she exercised.
The inventions and discoveries America has given to the world in
this great century have made vast changes in our material condition,
which, in turn, have been productive of striking contrasts between the
existence of the women who gave life and color to the early years of
the century and that of those who reflect the myriad advantages of its
closing days.
It argues the possession of extraordinary attributes to have been a
belle of wide repute in the days when there was no telegraph to flash
the record of a woman's beauty, charm, or social progress from one end
of the country to the other, when the press contained only the briefest
accounts of purely local and wholly public events, when every letter
that might or might not have contained her name or have been a herald
of her loveliness cost its sender twenty-five cents a sheet in postage,
when her few and simple toilets were painstakingly made by hand, when
she went to balls on horseback, arriving sometimes with a wrinkled gown
but seldom with a ruffled temper, when all travelling was done by means
of a stage-coach, and a journey from one city to another was sometimes
the event of a lifetime, and when the comparatively few women who
crossed the seas did so in merchant vessels not infrequently owned by
their own fathers, and spent many long weeks in the passage.
Those who come within the radius of its charm, however, easily
recognize the power of a queenly personality, as the lives of the most
illustrious men in every period of our history have borne testimony.
Among the women who unite the centuries there is a brilliant promise,
moreover, that there will be those in the twentieth, as there have been
throughout the nineteenth, "to perpetuate that empire which beauty
first established."
The writer gratefully acknowledges her indebtedness to all those whose
courtesy or assistance has in any way lightened the task of collecting
the data for these sketches; to those who by kindly lending portraits
in their possession, as well as to those who by graciously permitting
the use of their own portraits, have thereby added so much to the value
and interest of this volume.
PARIS, June 22, 1900.
CONTENTS
[Illustration]
PAGE
MARCIA BURNS (Mrs. John Peter Van Ness) 11
THEODOSIA BURR (Mrs. Joseph Alston) 18
ELIZABETH PATTERSON (Madame Jerome Bonaparte) 39
THE CATON SISTERS 61
MARGARET O'NEILL (Mrs. John H. Eaton) 69
CORA LIVINGSTON (Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton) 80
EMILY MARSHALL (Mrs. William Foster Otis) 90
OCTAVIA WALTON (Madame Le Vert) 102
FANNY TAYLOR (Mrs. Thomas Harding Ellis) 118
JESSIE BENTON (Mrs. John C. Frémont) 123
SALLIE WARD (Mrs. George F. Downs) 148
HARRIET LANE (Mrs. Henry Elliott Johnston) 161
ADÈLE CUTTS (Mrs. Robert Williams) 175
EMILIE SCHAUMBURG (Mrs. Hughes-Hallett) 190
KATE CHASE (Mrs. William Sprague) 206
MATTIE OULD (Mrs. Oliver Schoolcraft) 230
JENNIE JEROME (Lady Randolph Churchill) 239
NELLIE HAZELTINE (Mrs. Frederick W. Paramore) 257
MARY VICTORIA LEITER (Baroness Curzon of Kedleston) 264
NEW YORK AS A SOCIAL CENTRE 288
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[Illustration]
PAGE
EMILY MARSHALL (Mrs. William Foster Otis). From portrait
painted by Chester Harding in 1830; owned by her daughter,
Mrs. Samuel Eliot, of Boston, by whose permission it is
here reproduced for the first time in colors _Frontispiece_
MARCIA BURNS (Mrs. John Peter Van Ness). From miniature by
James Peale, painted in 1797; owned by the Corcoran Art
Gallery, Washington, D. C. 12
THEODOSIA BURR (Mrs. Joseph Alston). From the original
engraving by Charles B. J. F. Saint Memin; owned by Hampton
L. Carson, Esq., of Philadelphia, by whose permission it is
here reproduced 22
ELIZABETH PATTERSON (Madame Jerome Bonaparte). From portrait
painted by Quinçon; owned by her grandson, Mr. Charles
Bonaparte, of Baltimore, by whose permission it is here
reproduced for the first time 42
MARY CATON (Lady Wellesley). From portrait owned by Mrs.
Charles Carroll Mactavish, of Baltimore, daughter of
General Winfield Scott. Painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence,
and reproduced by permission of Miss Emily Mactavish, now
Sister Mary Agnes of the Visitation, at Mount de Sales,
Catonsville, Maryland 64
CORA LIVINGSTON (Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton). From a miniature
painted by herself. Reproduced for the first time by
permission of her niece, Miss Julia Barton Hunt, of
Montgomery Place, Barrytown-on-the-Hudson 84
OCTAVIA WALTON (Madame Le Vert). From portrait, reproduced
by permission of her kinswoman, Miss Josephine Walton.
Present owner, Mr. George Walton Reab, of Augusta, Georgia,
grandson of Madame Le Vert 104
FANNY TAYLOR (Mrs. Thomas Harding Ellis). From portrait
painted by Thomas Sully. Reproduced for the first time by
permission of her husband, Colonel Thomas Harding Ellis.
Present owner, her adopted son, Mr. Beverly Randolph
Harrison, of Amherst, Virginia 118
SALLY CHEVALIER (Mrs. Abram Warwick). Painted by Thomas Sully.
Reproduced for the first time by permission of Colonel
Thomas Harding Ellis 122
SALLIE WARD (Mrs. George F. Downs). From a miniature painted at
the age of eighteen, owned by her husband, Mr. George F.
Downs, of Louisville, Kentucky, by whose permission it is
here reproduced for the first time 150
HARRIET LANE (Mrs. Henry Elliott Johnston). From photograph by
Julius Ulke 164
ADÈLE CUTTS (Mrs. Robert Williams). From portrait by George
Peter A. Healy, in possession of her husband, General
Robert Williams, United States Army. Reproduced by
permission of her daughter, Miss Adèle Cutts Williams, of
Washington, D. C. 178
EMILIE SCHAUMBURG (Mrs. Hughes-Hallett). From portrait by
Waugh, in possession of Mrs. Hughes-Hallett, of Dinar,
France, by whose permission it is here reproduced for the
first time 194
KATE CHASE (Mrs. William Sprague). From photograph by Julius
Ulke 212
MATTIE OULD (Mrs. Oliver Schoolcraft). From photograph by
George S. Cook. Reproduced by permission of her cousin,
Mrs. Virginia Brownell, of Washington, D. C. 232
LIZZIE CABELL (Mrs. Albert Ritchie). From photograph.
Reproduced by permission of her sister, Mrs. John D.
Lottier 234
MARY TRIPLETT (Mrs. Philip Haxall). From photograph by Roseti.
Reproduced by permission of her sister, Mrs. Meredith
Montague 236
JENNIE JEROME (Lady Randolph Churchill). From photograph by Van
der Weyde. Published by permission of Lady Churchill 244
NELLIE HAZELTINE (Mrs. Frederick W. Paramore). From photograph
by J. C. Strauss; by permission of her brother, Mr. W. B.
Hazeltine, Jr. 258
JENNIE CHAMBERLAIN (Lady Naylor-Leyland). From the painting by
H. Schmiechen 266
MATTIE MITCHELL (Duchesse de Rochefoucauld). Daughter of
ex-Senator Mitchell, of Oregon. From photograph by C. M.
Bell 272
MARY VICTORIA LEITER (Baroness Curzon of Kedleston). From
photograph by Miss Alice Hughes, of London. By permission
of Lady Curzon 276
MISS MAY HANDY, of Richmond, Virginia. From photograph by James
L. Breese 284
CATHERINE DUER (Mrs. Clarence Mackay), of New York. From
portrait 288
MARCIA BURNS
(MRS. JOHN PETER VAN NESS)
Marcia Burns! What memories the quaint Scotch lassie's name calls up!
The city of Washington disappears and its site spreads before us in
flourishing farm lands and orchards. Scattered farm-houses raise their
chimneys amid primeval oaks and elms, and from the low doorway of the
humblest emerges the winsome form of Marcia Burns. Six hundred acres,
representing the thrift of generations of Scotch ancestors, surround
her. The Potomac, one of the great water-ways of the South, carrying
the produce of the fertile lands above into Alexandria for consumption
or reshipment, almost kisses her feet. This is her patrimony, over
which she has already heard such spirited debate between her father
and General Washington, then President of the United States, and the
three gentlemen commissioned by Congress, at that time sitting in
Philadelphia, to select and purchase the ground on which is to be
built the capital city. As she looks riverward a canoe is beached in
the shadow of the vine-hung trees, and the President, accompanied by
two of the commissioners, whose forms have of late grown familiar to
her childish eyes, have come again to confer with her father, whom
Washington has already dubbed "the obstinate Mr. Burns."
"And I suppose you think," says Burns, as the dispute again waxes warm,
"that people here are going to take every grist that comes from you as
pure grain. But what would you have been if you had not married the
widow Custis?" Gracefully or ungracefully, however, he must eventually
yield, for the "Widow's Mite," as Burns's acres were described in the
land patent of 1681 which bestowed them upon his emigrant ancestor,
form part of the tract which Maryland has ceded to the nation for its
capital. Here is stalwart Johnson, governor of the State, to emphasize
the fact with many a round oath that makes the gentle Marcia's heart
stand still.
"And yonder lassie," says Daniel Carroll, "will be the greatest heiress
hereabouts." Davy Burns' eyes wander towards his daughter. He is long
silent. The shadows have lengthened into darkness when he says, "Very
well, sirs, take the land, and I leave it to your fairness to fix the
terms."
[Illustration: Marcia Burns
(Mrs. John Peter Van Ness)
From miniature by James Peale, 1797]
Supper is served, and the guests are accommodated for the night beneath
the moss-grown roof of the attic, for Burns' cottage boasts but four
rooms,--two sleeping-rooms, a sitting-room, and a dining-room, the
kitchen being built apart from the house, as was the custom of the time
and country. Unpretentious as the little abode is, the deed conveying
the property to the commissioners, in trust for the government,
provides that the streets of the new city shall be so laid out as
not to interfere with it.
* * * * *
Marcia Burns was but yet a child when fate wrought the change in her
destiny which no wisdom could have foreseen. By the death of her only
brother she became sole heiress to what was at that time an immense
fortune. Yet it is not through the magnitude of her wealth that she
illumines the period in which the lines of her life were cast. It is
through the exquisite qualities of a most exalted womanhood.
With wise forethought and some premonition of the change about to take
place in her life, her parents placed her in the family of Luther
Martin, in Baltimore. Martin was at that time at the height of his fame
as an advocate at the Maryland bar. In the enlightened atmosphere of
his home, Marcia grew up in close companionship with his daughters, her
refined nature imperceptibly acquiring that ease and grace which were
ever afterwards characteristic of her, and her receptive mind readily
cultivating those attributes that were to render her most attractive
in conversation to such men as Hamilton, Burr, Marshall, Randolph, and
Webster.
That face of nature familiar to her from her infancy was in a state
of unlovely transition when she again returned to her home. Verdant
orchards and sloping meadow lands had been divided into building lots
and crossed and recrossed by muddy thoroughfares. In what had been
a piece of woods within a stone's throw of her father's home, the
President's house was nearing completion. A mile and a half to the
east, on the summit of a hill, the white walls of the Capitol were
becoming visible to all the surrounding country. At irregular intervals
houses, single and in rows, were in course of construction. There was
nothing in the so-called city of Washington to which Marcia Burns came
home, and of which the government took formal possession in 1800,
that ever so remotely suggested the garden spot that it is to-day.
Members of Congress and foreign ministers alike reviled it, and the
lamentations of Mrs. Adams are too well known to be repeated here.
Of such social life as there was scattered over so vast an area of mud,
in which "pedestrians frequently slumped and horses became stalled,"
Marcia Burns became a central figure. Though she was too gentle and
modest ever to assume a leadership, yet all that was best and brightest
in the life about her naturally gravitated in her direction.
Notwithstanding the pretentious homes that were going up around her,
she still dwelt contentedly in her cottage of four rooms. There, in the
summer evenings, gathered on the low, broad stone slab of its south
door, overhung with blooming wistaria, her friends and neighbors,--the
Tayloes from the afterwards famous Octagon house, the Calverts, and the
Daniel Carrolls from Duddington Manor over near the Capitol.
In the winter season, when Congress was in session, the cheery
sitting-room and the hospitable dining-room were seldom without their
guests. There came Aaron Burr, to flatter her as he flattered every
attractive woman with whom he came in contact, and gallant Hamilton,
the lover of all lovely women, and Randolph of Roanoke, seeking balm
for his tempestuous spirit in that sweet and gracious presence, and
Jefferson, to admire, with all the ardor of his democratic soul,
the simplicity of her life. There, too, Tom Moore was entertained
during his visit to Washington, whence he returned home to write
things that did not make pleasant reading matter about the city and
Mr. Jefferson, who was our President at the time and who had looked
rather patronizingly upon the foppish little Irish bard. There also
came suitors for the hand of Marcia, men with a nobility of soul that
enabled them properly to estimate the beauty of her character, as well
as men who were attracted simply by the stories of her great wealth.
In 1802, when she was twenty years old, she became the wife of John
Peter Van Ness, a member of Congress from New York. He had been
graduated from Columbia College and admitted to the bar of his
native State. In 1800, when he was thirty years old, he was elected
to Congress. His youth, his graceful, winning manners, his handsome
countenance, and his wealth won him an easy popularity in the society
of the capital.
Shortly after the death of Marcia's father, Van Ness erected, close by
the old cottage, one of the handsomest houses of that day in the city
and one that compares not unfavorably with the most elegant homes built
there in recent years. It was designed and built by Latrobe at a cost
of nearly sixty thousand dollars, its marble mantel-pieces, which are
works of art, being imported from Italy. It had, moreover, a _porte
cochère_, which was a rarity in those days,--the President's house
having the only other one in Washington. A truly magnificent home it
was, and destined to be the scene of many brilliant occasions, as also
to witness days as full of heart-rending unhappiness to Marcia Burns
as those both in the cottage of her girlhood and the home of her early
married life had been of pure joyousness.
With all its treasures of art, the chief ornament of the new home
was Ann Van Ness, who completed her studies at a boarding-school in
Philadelphia and returned to Washington about the time her parents took
possession of it. Two years later she married Arthur Middleton, of
South Carolina, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
and probably that same Arthur Middleton, of whom Mrs. Edward Livingston
made mention in a letter to her husband ten years later to the effect
that his moustaches, whiskers, and velvet shirt were creating more of
a sensation in New York than the quarrel between Jackson and Calhoun.
Ann died within a year after her marriage. She was an only child, and
to her mother life held nothing that could amend her loss. Thenceforth
she withdrew from the sphere to which she had been since her early
girlhood so great an ornament. She frequently sought the seclusion of
the little cottage, and there, perhaps, lived over in memory the days
that had known no shadow.
She did not need the discipline of sorrow, which some natures require
to sweeten them, but under its influence she rose to the loftiest
heights of benevolence. Her pictured face reveals to us the beauty of
her soul. The truth that speaks in her eyes, the spirituality of her
brow, the tenderness of her mouth, combine to make the perfection of
human character. The Washington City Orphan Asylum, which she founded
and to which she devoted both time and means, is a fitting monument to
her memory.
She died on the 9th of September, 1832, and is the only woman who was
ever honored with a public funeral in Washington. Through her charities
she had become as widely known and as tenderly loved in the later years
of her life as she had been in her youth through qualities not less
endearing.
The following tribute to her is by Horatio Greenough:
"'Mid rank and wealth and worldly pride,
From every snare she turned aside.
She sought the low, the humble shed,
Where gaunt disease and famine tread;
And from that time, in youthful pride,
She stood Van Ness's blooming bride,
No day her blameless head o'er past
But saw her dearer than the last."
THEODOSIA BURR
(MRS. JOSEPH ALSTON)
Theodosia Burr was, as has been said of the daughter of another eminent
statesman with whom Aaron Burr was closely identified, "the soul of her
father's soul." If we would know the better part of a man who was one
of the most remarkable characters of his age, we must know Theodosia,
through whom, perhaps, his name, which all the subtlety of his soul was
bent on immortalizing, may live to a better fame in the centuries to
come than has attended it through the years of that in which he lived.
Under the inspiration of her presence both her father and husband
rose to lofty pinnacles in the political arena of their country. Her
father on the eve of her marriage stood at the very portals of the
Chief Magistracy. In less than ten years of political life he had so
progressed that the election of 1800 resulted in a tie vote for the
Presidency between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson.
In 1801, while the festivities attending Theodosia's marriage at Albany
were at their height, the House of Representatives at Washington
entered upon that long session of seven days which terminated in
declaring Thomas Jefferson President of the United States and Aaron
Burr Vice-President.
From the moment Theodosia linked her life with another's, and thus in
a measure ceased to be part of his, the retrogressive period of Aaron
Burr's life began.
To her husband she carried that same inspiring influence which she
had wielded over her father. She gave an impetus to his luxuriant and
aimless existence, and at the time of the tragedy which ended her
twenty-nine years of life he was occupying the gubernatorial chair
of his State. Her life was closely allied not only with the private
interests, but with the political ambitions of both. Her father rarely
dined, either among friends or strangers, that her health was not
drunk. He made her known to everybody, and during his travels in Europe
so interested Jeremy Bentham and other writers in her that they sent
her sets of their books.
At a time when woman was regarded rather as the companion of a man's
heart than as his intellectual mate, "the soft green of the soul on
which we rest our eyes that are fatigued with beholding more glaring
objects," Theodosia Burr's mental faculties were so developed and
trained as to fit her for the most complete and sympathetic union with
father, husband, and son.
It is but a negative tribute to say that she was by far the
best-educated woman of her time and country. In the beauty of her mind
and person she realized her father's ideal of a perfect woman, and
amply satisfied his pride and vanity. On the eve of his duel with
Hamilton he wrote to her, "I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia,
for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this
life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections
had hoped for or ever wished."
Theodosia was the only child of Burr's marriage with the widow of a
British army officer who had lost his life in the West Indies.
Fresh from the battle-fields of the Revolution, where he had won honors
of which he was ever more tenacious than of those achieved elsewhere,
and but recently admitted to the bar after a brief period of study,
his marriage to a woman ten years his senior and the mother of two
well-grown boys was a source of genuine wonderment to Burr's friends in
New York. Young, of fascinating manner and appearance, some means, and
good family, he might readily have aspired to an alliance with any one
of those families which were a power in the State,--the Livingstons,
the Van Rensselaers, or the Clintons. But before he quitted the army,
Burr had discovered the charms of the society at the "Hermitage,"
presided over by Mrs. De Visme and her two daughters, one of whom was
the widow of Colonel Prevost.
There he met the most distinguished men of his country, through whose
influence this family had been spared the inconvenience of moving
within the British lines at the outbreak of hostilities. In the
library, there, he discovered a treasure-house of French literature,
to which he was ever partial, and in the interchange of thought which
followed his reading, Aaron Burr and Mrs. Prevost became constantly
more imbued with a sense of the beauty and attraction of each other's
minds. Through her he gleaned his first reverence for the intellectual
power of woman, and to her he owed the happiest days of his life.
"The mother of my Theo," he said, speaking of her towards the close of
his life, "was the best woman and the finest lady I have ever known."
In her finished manner, her fine bearing, and her exquisite mind there
was a delicate harmony that soothed and satisfied Burr's artistic soul.
His marriage to her in July, 1782, put an end to the rumor that he was
paying his addresses to Miss De Visme, to which his frequent visits to
the "Hermitage" had given rise.
The first year of their married life was spent in Albany, where he was
engaged in the practice of law, and where Theodosia was born on the 23d
of June, 1783. In the fall of that year her parents removed to the city
of New York, where they had leased a house in Maiden Lane, at a rental
of two hundred pounds per year, to commence from the time the British
troops left New York, which they did on November 23, 1783.
So prosperous were Burr's financial affairs that he early in his
married life acquired also the possession of a country-seat, Richmond
Hill, then two miles from the city. The house, a stately frame building
with a lofty portico supported by Ionic columns, stood on a noble
hill, several hundred feet in height, overlooking the river and the
Jersey shore. It was surrounded by a lawn shaded by oaks, lindens, and
cedars, on the outskirts of which on all sides stretched woods of more
than a hundred acres. Within the enclosure was a pond known for many
years after the property had passed from Burr's possession as Burr's
Pond. On it Theodosia learned the graceful art of skating when still
quite a little girl.
The house, built about the middle of the last century, was Washington's
head-quarters in 1776, and Burr, who was there with him, conceived
his first desire to become its possessor. It was occupied by John
Adams during his tenure of the Vice-Presidency, when New York was
the capital, and Burr's long possession of it culminated in the
elegant hospitality of which it was the scene during his term as
Vice-President. He returned there from Washington at the close of the
sessions of Congress, and entertained with a lavishness that eventually
bankrupted him.
[Illustration: Theodosia Burr
(Mrs. Joseph Alston)
By Charles B. J. F. Saint Memin]
His library, which bespoke the critical taste of the scholar, and
which he had begun to collect as a boy, was a feature of the house,
recalled in after years by men who had been his guests as vividly
as the brilliant dinner-parties given beneath the same roof by the
distinguished Adams and his wife. He had his London bookseller, through
whom he made constant additions to his collection, for Burr was ever
a lover of books, and he recorded in his journal in his days of exile
and want with what pangs he had been obliged to part with some odd
volumes he had with him upon discovering that he was again under the
necessity of dining.
His passion for books he imparted to his daughter, urging upon her
at all times the necessity for study and improvement, and never
relinquishing his endeavors to carry her mind to a high order of
cultivation. In the communication he addressed to his son-in-law on
the night before his duel with Hamilton, he asked as a last favor that
he would urge Theodosia to continue to study. In all his letters to
her his efforts to stimulate this habit were uppermost. "The longer I
live," she wrote to him after her marriage, "the more frequently the
truth of your advice evinces itself, that occupation is necessary to
give us command over ourselves."
In the development of her mind and character he pursued a
clearly-defined and well-directed course. When she was ten years old he
wrote to his wife from Philadelphia, where he was at the time occupying
a seat in the Senate, reminding her that he had left a memorandum of
what Theodosia was to learn during his absence. While his public duties
were such that he was not able always to personally superintend her
studies, he gave minute instructions to the tutors to whom he intrusted
her, and constituted himself their vigilant and inexorable critic. "If
your young teacher," he wrote to her when she was in her sixteenth
year, "after a week's trial should not suit you, dismiss him on any
pretence, without wounding his pride, and take the old Scotchman.
Resolve to succeed, and you cannot fail."
Mary Wollstonecraft's book, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women,"
in which Burr became so absorbed that he sat up all night reading
it, so affected him that its influence told on all Theodosia's
life. On the principles it inculcated were based both her mental
and moral development. "If I could foresee," he wrote to his wife,
"that Theodosia would become a mere fashionable woman with all the
attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace
and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence.
But I yet hope by her to convince the world what neither sex appears to
believe,--that women have souls."
"And do you regret," he wrote to Theodosia herself, when she was a
little more than sixteen, "you are not also a woman? That you are
not numbered in that galaxy of beauty which adorns an assembly-room?
Coquetting for admiration and attracting flattery? No. I answer with
confidence. You feel that you are maturing for solid friendship. The
friends you gain you will never lose; and no one, I think, will dare to
insult your understanding by such compliments as are most graciously
received by too many of your sex."
Burr was himself an ornament to many a drawing-room, and no man ever
had better opportunities for estimating the deficiencies in the system
of educating the women of his day. Theodosia he brought up like a
young Spartan, with few or none of the feminine affectations then in
vogue. Courage and fortitude were his darling virtues, and so instilled
into her from her infancy that they formed almost the groundwork of
her character. "No apologies or explanations. I hate them," he said,
reproving her for some fault of omission when she was a little child.
"I beg and expect it of you," he wrote to her from Richmond, where he
was awaiting trial for treason, and whither she was hastening to him,
"that you will conduct yourself as becomes my daughter, and that you
manifest no signs of weakness or alarm."
Theodosia's affection for her father was the absorbing passion of her
life. "You appear to me so superior, so elevated above other men,"
she once wrote to him, "I contemplate you with such a strange mixture
of humility, admiration, reverence, love, and pride, that very little
superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior
being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me. When I
afterwards revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities
appear. My vanity would be greater if I had not been placed so near
you; and yet my pride is our relationship. I had rather not live than
not be the daughter of such a man."
He sent his love to "the smiling little girl," in a letter he wrote
his wife when Theodosia was two years old, not knowing that with his
going she had not only ceased to smile, but that she wept bitterly
and heart-brokenly whenever his name was mentioned, and that it
required the combined efforts of her mother and nurse to divert her
thoughts from the painful fact of his absence. As her mother said, the
attachment which thus early manifested itself in so marked a manner,
was not of a common nature. Theodosia's life is an evidence of how
exalted it was, when, with all the world against him, she was yet proud
to be his daughter.
Burr exercised an almost hypnotic influence over both men and women,
and there are extant innumerable anecdotes of the conquests he
continually made over those who had gone forth to apprehend him as a
villain. In his intercourse with Theodosia he brought into play all
those delicate attributes of his mind which captivated so many women.
She was constantly in his thoughts. "The ideas of which you are the
object, that daily pass through my mind," he wrote to her in 1799, from
Albany, where the Legislature was in session, "would, if committed to
writing, fill an octavo volume.... Indeed, my dear Theodosia, I have
many, many moments of solicitude about you."
He exacted much of her even as a child, among other things that she
should keep a journal in his absence, to be sent to him at regular
intervals, and that she should answer his letters minutely and
promptly. Writing to her when she was eleven years old, he said,--
"Yesterday I received your letter and journal to the 13th inclusive.
On the 13th you say you got nine pages in Lucian. It was, to be sure,
a most surprising lesson. I suspect it must have been the second time
going over, and even then it would have been great, and, at the same
rate, you will be through a second time before my month is up. I
should be delighted to find it so. I have not told you directly that
I should stay longer than a month but I was angry enough with you to
stay three months when you neglected to write to me for two successive
posts."
"I beg, Miss Prissy," he wrote to her from Philadelphia during the same
year, "that you will name a single '_unsuccessful effort_' which you
have made to please me. As to the letters and journal which you did
write, surely you have reason abundant to believe that they gave me
pleasure; and how the deuce I am to be pleased with those you _did not_
write, and how an omission to write can be called an effort, remains
for your ingenuity to disclose."
In his next letter to her, he referred again to "the unsuccessful
effort."
"Your letter of the 9th, my dear Theo, was a most agreeable surprise
to me. I had not dared even to hope for one until to-morrow. In
one instance, at least, an attempt to please me has not been
'_unsuccessful_.' You see, I do not forget that piece of impudence."
He was mindful, too, of her health, and in one of his letters begged
her to carry herself erect. He had himself a remarkably erect and
graceful carriage, which lent a majesty to his bearing and gave the
impression of much greater height than he possessed.
While his letters to her were full of advice and suggestions for her
improvement, they were by no means lacking in commendation. As she grew
to womanhood this was more marked, as was also his tendency to confide
in her. Her father's frequent and prolonged absences from home, her
mother's long illness, attended with much suffering and terminating
in death when Theodosia was but eleven years old, had necessitated an
early assumption of those responsibilities which mature and strengthen
character. To a suggestion contained in a letter written by her father
shortly before her mother's death, that he would leave Congress that he
might have more time to devote to his wife, Theodosia replied with a
quaintness that was characteristic of her: "Ma begs that you omit the
thought of leaving Congress."
From her close association with her mother under such circumstances
her receptive mind became imbued with the beauties of the Christian
philosophy, which her father, though a grandson of Jonathan Edwards and
a son of the Rev. Aaron Burr, founder and first president of Princeton
College, had not included in the course of studies so exactingly marked
out for her. She was at this time studying Latin, Greek, French, and
music, and learning to dance and to skate.
After her mother's death, Burr, who had a profound admiration for the
language, literature, and people of France, consigned her to a French
governess. She acquired a complete mastery of that tongue, and the
fluency with which she spoke it added much to the grace with which
she presided over her father's home, for Burr frequently entertained
Frenchmen. Louis Philippe, Jerome Bonaparte, Talleyrand, and Volney
were all at various times his guests at Richmond Hill.
When Theodosia was fourteen she took her place at the head of her
father's household and became his inseparable companion, her playful
wit illuminating his hours of relaxation, her steadfast courage, her
strength, her very presence, constituting his most powerful defence in
the darkest hours of his life.
She had much of her mother's self-poise and elegance of manner,
together with her father's dignity and wit. When she reached maturity,
though short in stature like her father's family, she carried herself
with a noble dignity which, with a certain lofty benevolence of
countenance, the refinement of her features, the frank intelligence of
her brow, the healthful bloom of her complexion, made her singularly
beautiful. So absolute was her father's confidence in her that he wrote
when she was but seventeen, "Many are surprised that I could repose in
you so great a trust as that of yourself, but I knew you were equal to
it, and I am not deceived."
He sent Brant, the Indian chief, to her from Philadelphia with a letter
of introduction,--she was but fourteen at the time and mistress of
Richmond Hill, where she entertained him with an ease which gave her
father much gratification. She gave a dinner in his honor, inviting
to meet him some of her father's friends, among them Volney, Bishop
Moore, Dr. Bard, and Dr. Hosack. She was already a belle, with many
admirers ever in her wake, when Edward Livingston, then mayor of New
York, taking her aboard a French frigate lying in the harbor of the
city, thus warned her: "You must bring none of your sparks on board,
Theodosia. We have a magazine here, and we shall all be blown up."
Her life was full of happiness at this time, with Hamilton's wife
and daughters among her friends, her father one of the Presidential
possibilities, and she enjoying much of his society, accompanying him
frequently to Albany on horseback and visiting in the neighborhood
while he transacted his business at the capital.
In February, 1801, a few months before she was eighteen, Theodosia was
married to Joseph Alston, of South Carolina. He also was young, being
but twenty-two, and wealthy, possessing extensive rice plantations,
talented and ambitious, though as yet without a specific object
on which to expend these qualities. He had studied law and been
admitted to the bar, though he had not begun to practise. Upon Burr's
suggestion he entered upon a political career, rising eventually to the
governorship of his State.
Theodosia argued for a deferment of the marriage, quoting Aristotle,
that a man should not marry till he was thirty-six. With convincing
eloquence and ardor, Alston replied, winning his suit, notwithstanding
Aristotle and other equally eminent authorities.
On February 7, 1801, the New York _Commercial Advertiser_ announced
the marriage, which had taken place on the 2d, at Albany, where the
Legislature, of which Burr was then a member, was in session. It was
a period of intense excitement throughout the country, and the names
of Jefferson and Burr were in all mouths. The people of the country
had cast a tie vote, which threw the election into the House of
Representatives. Party spirit manifested itself for the first time in
the young republic, and the strength of the constitution was early put
to a severe test.
Theodosia, on her way to her new home in the South, stopped in
Washington, where, on the 4th of March, she saw her father inducted
into the Vice-Presidency.
Her marriage and her father's new honors inaugurated for her three
years of absolute happiness. Though her husband's home and her father's
were a journey of twenty days apart, she went frequently back and
forth, and though she wrote to her husband during one of her early
visits to her old home, "Where you are, there is my country, and in
you are centred all my wishes," she was undoubtedly in better health
and spirits when in her northern home. Her winters were passed in
Charleston, where she was well received and much beloved, and where she
became an important factor in her husband's political success.
Her father missed her sadly. "For what else, for whom else, do I live?"
he had written to her shortly before her marriage. When she was no
longer at Richmond Hill he returned there with painful reluctance.
Theodosia urged him to marry again, and from the tone of a letter he
wrote to her about this time there seems to have been some probability
of his accepting her suggestion. If he were really in earnest, however,
he at least did not conduct the affair with his usual sapiency, and
though Theodosia from afar threw light on the young woman's vagaries,
it was to no purpose.
Theodosia's only child, a son, she named after her father, to whom he
was a source of much pride and affection. To Burr the anniversaries of
the day of Theodosia's birth were ever occasions for rejoicing. Her
twenty-first birthday, though she was not with him, he celebrated with
a dinner-party at Richmond Hill. He had her portrait placed in a chair
at the table, but, as it was a profile and appeared unsociable, he had
it hung up again. "We laughed an hour, danced an hour, and drank your
health," he wrote to her.
But already the days of her contentment were drawing to a close. Before
this letter telling her of the happiness the day had given him had
reached her, the tragedy of Weehawken had been enacted. Its shadow fell
forever upon him who survived it, and who doubtless became a potent
instrument in Hamilton's canonization. With awful blackness, too, it
fell upon the far-away daughter when she heard that her father was a
fugitive with an indictment for murder hanging over him.
From that moment shadows gathered about her with ever-increasing
sombreness till they culminated in that hour of darkness in which her
life went out.
In Burr's Mexican scheme, which he set on foot shortly after
the expiration of his term as Vice-President, Theodosia became
involved sentimentally, and her husband financially. The President's
proclamation and Burr's arrest put an end to their visionary dynasty
in Mexico. Instead of beholding him upon a throne, they saw him
arraigned before the tribunal of justice at Richmond, on a charge of
high treason, with Chief Justice Marshall the presiding judge, and
John Randolph of Roanoke foreman of the jury. Never, it has been said,
did two more wonderful pairs of eyes than those of Marshall and Burr,
black, brilliant, and penetrating, look into each other.
In arraigning Burr, there was an element to be reckoned with that is
not ordinarily taken into consideration,--the marvellous personality
of the man. From his appearance, his manners, his voice, his eyes,
emanated an influence not to be lightly estimated. In his bearing and
presence he was peerless. He spoke without effort, in a full, crisp,
rather than powerful, voice, clothing his thoughts in the language
best suited to their most accurate expression, terse, epigrammatic
and devoid of figures, his mobile features lending themselves to the
thought that was severe or scintillating, tender or impressive. With a
woman's tact he combined an adroit intellect equal to any emergency.
He conducted his own defence, supported by the best legal talent in
the country. His son-in-law sat beside him every day in court, and
Theodosia, the beautiful, noble Theodosia, with sublime faith in her
father, inspired a confidence in him in other breasts. She appealed
to the poetic fancy of Washington Irving, then a young barrister, who
was sent from New York to report the trial for his brother's paper, and
whose letters evince an unmistakable sympathy for Burr. Luther Martin,
one of the foremost geniuses of the Maryland bar, defended him with an
eloquence that rendered Martin himself an object of suspicion to Thomas
Jefferson.
"I find that Luther Martin's idolatrous admiration of Mrs. Alston,"
wrote Blennerhassett, "is almost as excessive as my own, but far more
beneficial to his interests and injurious to his judgment, as it is the
medium of his blind attachment to her father, whose secrets and views,
past, present, and to come, he is and wishes to remain ignorant of.
Nor can he see a speck in the character of Alston, for the best of all
reasons with him,--namely, that Alston has such a wife."
Though Burr was acquitted, there was an element of hostility to him
in the government, and much distrust of him among the people of the
country at large. In the following year, therefore, he went to Europe.
Theodosia had gone to New York to be near him. He saw her for the last
time on June 7, 1808, the night before he sailed. She spent that summer
at Saratoga, and the following winter in New York, where she lived in
retirement.
"The world," she said, in one of her letters to her father about this
time, "begins to cool terribly around me. You would be surprised how
many I supposed attached to me have abandoned the sorry losing game
of disinterested friendship." She repeatedly urged him to return,
promising him that if the worst came to the worst, she would leave
everything and suffer with him.
A few months after Madison's elevation to the Presidency she wrote to
Mrs. Madison, whom her father had known when she was a young widow, and
to whom he had introduced Mr. Madison. "Ever since the choice of the
people was first declared in favor of Mr. Madison, my heart, amid the
universal joy, has beat with the hope that I, too, should soon have
reason to rejoice," she wrote. She desired to know if there was danger
of any further prosecution of her father in the event of his return.
For the same purpose she wrote two years later from the Oaks, her South
Carolina home, to Albert Gallatin, then Secretary of the Treasury,
and once a friend of her father's. The letter was calmly logical, yet
eloquent with feeling.
In another year Burr was within sight of his home and country. As he
neared her shores he wrote in his journal, "A pilot is in sight and
within two miles of us. All is bustle and joy except Gamp [the name by
which his little grandson called him]. Why should he rejoice?"
Of all the misfortunes of his life, the heaviest were to fall upon him
that year. A month after her father's arrival in New York, and while
her heart was yet rejoicing that he had been kindly received, the young
life of Theodosia's son, full of beauty and promise, closed. "I will
not conceal from you," wrote Alston to his father-in-law, "that life
is a burden, which, heavy as it is, we shall support, if not with
dignity, at least with decency and firmness. Theodosia has endured all
that a human being could endure, but her admirable mind will triumph.
She supports herself in a manner worthy of your daughter."
Theodosia longed to see her father. We were at war with England at the
time, and her husband, governor of his State and general of militia,
could not leave his post of duty to accompany her to New York. Her
health was so feeble that she could not safely attempt the journey
alone. Her father's old friend Timothy Green offered his services,
going from New York to bring her north. Under his care, and accompanied
by her maid, Theodosia sailed from Charleston on the "Pilot" on the
30th of December, 1812. Save by her fellow passengers on the ill-fated
vessel, she was never seen or heard of again. A violent storm swept the
coast on the following day, and it has been supposed that the "Pilot,"
with all on board, went down off Cape Hatteras. After weeks and months
of despairing silence, father and husband gave her up. Burr during this
period of torturing suspense acquired a habit which clung to him to the
end of his life,--of wistfully scanning the horizon for ships as he
walked on the battery, then the popular resort of all New Yorkers.
Two or three years after she had gone from their lives, her husband
sent a chest of her belongings, which he had not had the courage to
open, to her father. "What a fate, poor thing!" sighed Burr, as he
recognized the familiar articles. Among the contents was a letter
addressed, "To my husband. To be delivered after my death and before
my burial." It was dated August 6, 1805, and had been written during
an absence of her husband from home, at a time when, being depressed
in health and spirits, she feared that death was approaching. After
leaving some remembrance to the various members of her husband's
family, and begging her husband to provide for Peggy, an old servant,
she says,--