between two officers commanding the United States forces in that
vicinity, and was brought back a prisoner over the territory
he had acquired for his country. During the ninety days of his
trial by court-martial, which stripped him of his commission as
lieutenant-colonel of mounted riflemen, inspired by a lofty enthusiasm,
his nights were devoted to writing the history of the expedition.
Though he was reinstated by the President, he returned his commission,
and in 1848 took out a private expedition, opening the route from the
Mississippi to San Francisco. His mountaineers flocked to him, ready
to follow wherever he should lead. He had that faith in himself and in
his purpose that evoked a corresponding confidence in them, and his
presence was light and warmth and refreshment to their daring spirit.
When it became necessary at times to divide the party, those who were
not with him suffered sorely. The memorable winter of 1848, however,
was one of hardships for all, travelling days and weeks within sight of
eternal snows. Frémont wrote to his wife during a brief respite from
that agonizing period, when his men were starving and freezing and
wandering off in despair to lie down alone and die: "We shall yet enjoy
quiet and happiness together; these are nearly one and the same to me
now. I make frequent pleasant pictures of the happy home we are to
have, and oftenest and among the pleasantest of all I see our library
with its bright fire in the rainy, stormy days, and the large windows
looking out upon the sea in the bright weather. I have it all planned
in my mind."
Mrs. Frémont was, meanwhile, making ready for the long journey towards
the land of this picture-home. It was the first break from the real
home, her father's, where she had passed the greater part of the eight
years of her married life, five of which her husband had spent in the
field. She started in March, 1849, going by way of the Isthmus, where
the man selected by Mr. Aspinwall for her guide had many misgivings
about undertaking the charge. He had a wife, who had prophesied that,
coming from Washington, Mrs. Frémont would be "a fine lady" and would
make him no end of trouble, especially concerning the scant attire of
the Indians.
In the sunshine of her presence, however, his misgivings melted
away. She was not a "fine lady" at all, he said, that bugbear of his
unconventional mind, but a slender woman with a head so level and a
heart so stout as to render all the more forcible the appeal of her
delicate body.
She was stricken with the fever, and ill for many weeks in Panama,
where she was surrounded with that warmth of friendship and sympathy
which she ever seemed to attract. In addition to many substantial
evidences of genuine interest in her recovery, one resident of the city
vowed in that event to supply the hospital with limes for a year.
Gold was discovered in California in 1848. When Mrs. Frémont arrived
in San Francisco the people were in that first frenzy of excitement
that disturbed temporarily the whole aspect of their daily existence.
The population of the towns was flocking to the mines, and the
comparatively few who remained at home had many novel problems to
face. The art of cooking without eggs and butter had to be acquired,
for there were neither chickens nor cows, though one woman had as many
as thirty-seven satin dresses, "and no two off the same piece," she
averred.
A little Eastern bride, whom San Francisco society, consisting of
sixteen ladies, turned out in a body to welcome, set up her first
household belongings in a modest frame structure two stories in height,
that had been put up at a cost, out of all proportion to its intrinsic
value, of ninety thousand dollars.
Yet nothing was so valuable as time, and though it was estimated to be
worth fifty dollars a minute, there were busy men who paid Mrs. Frémont
the compliment of frequent day-time visits.
With every personal inducement to favor slave labor in the new
territory, both Frémont and his wife were among its most strenuous
opposers. Not only did they pay their first house-maid two hundred and
forty dollars a month with perquisites, which included the housing of
her husband and children, yet even with a disposition to retain her at
that neat figure, they found themselves obliged to do without her truly
valuable assistance when Mrs. Frémont refused the loan of her gowns as
patterns for the wardrobe she was having constructed at the hands of
a Chinese modiste. There were, moreover, on the lands that Frémont
owned, rich gold deposits, which could be most profitably operated by
slave labor.
When the convention to draft the constitution under which California
should come into the Union met at Monterey, where Frémont had
established himself, his home became the head-quarters for the
anti-slavery party. Its neatness, the smoothness of its internal
workings, and the evident contentment of his wife formed a text for
the friends of free soil, and many an incredulous opponent was brought
to behold, and, seeing, went away believing in the possibility of
domestic happiness without slaves. Mrs. Frémont had, to be sure, a
preference for underclothing that had been ironed, and she might have
wished also that the two Indian men who presided in her kitchen and
pantry had not been gifted with such facilities for terminating both
the ornamental and useful career of her china and glassware. Yet these
small clouds in no way overshadowed her domestic horizon. Her prejudice
to slavery she inherited from both parents, belonging, as she said,
"to the aristocracy of emancipation," or to that class of people who,
owning slaves, quietly gave them their freedom at infinite sacrifice
to themselves, as opposed to the abolitionists of the North, who, with
nothing to lose and much to gain, clamored noisily for that freedom.
Frémont was the hero of the hour, and could have been governor of the
new State or one of its first Senators. He chose the latter, however,
though it took him away from those material interests which California
then held for him. Going into the Union as a free State, it would need
in Congress a defence such as no man could give it with greater loyalty
than Frémont.
There is an anecdote told and applied indiscriminately to various
political heroes, most frequently, perhaps, to Lincoln, to whom,
therefore, it may possibly appertain, demonstrating delicately his
deference for the marital tie. On the night of his election to some
office, and while he was being inundated with the congratulations
of the friends who had assisted in the achievement of his triumph,
he further captivated their fancy by remembering his wife. "Well,
gentlemen," he said, quietly, "this is very nice, but there is a little
woman around the corner who will be interested in hearing this news,
and if you will just excuse me, I think I'll step around and tell her."
One woman interested in the balloting of the delegates at San José
for California's first Senators was not so conveniently situated. She
was at Monterey, and as a season of heavy rains was on, there was but
little prospect that her keen desire to know the result would find
immediate gratification. Before just such a merry blazing fire as his
imagination had once conjured up as a central feature of their library
sat Frémont's wife, her fingers for the first time fashioning a dress
for herself on the trustworthy outlines of one that had been ripped
up for the purpose. Her little daughter had been put to bed, and her
companions for the evening were the Australian woman who had replaced
her two Indian servitors, and whose accustomed fingers plied the
needle with a more rapid stroke than her own, and the woman's baby,
playing on the bear-skin rug near the fire. Besides the voice of the
woman and an occasional chirrup from the baby, she heard nothing but
the storm without, till the door opened and a man, dripping with rain,
stood on the threshold and asked, in consideration of his sorry plight,
if he might enter.
It was Frémont. He had torn himself away from his idolizing followers
and ridden out into the darkness and storm to tell his wife, seventy
miles away, that he had been elected to the United States Senate.
Though it was late in the night when he reached Monterey, he was in the
saddle again before dawn and on his way back to San José, making in all
a ride of one hundred and forty miles.
The home-bound steamer, sailing from San Francisco on the 1st of
January, 1850, carried, among others, the first two Senators from the
new State, Frémont and Givin. At Mazatlan a British man-of-war fired a
salute in honor of these two distinguished passengers.
They landed in New York the last of March, and from the long mirror
into which she looked, in her hotel bedroom, there gazed back at Mrs.
Frémont a comely young woman clad in a riding habit that had been
abbreviated to a convenient walking length, a pair of black satin
slippers, a leghorn hat tied down with a China crêpe scarf, and a
Scotch plaid shawl that had borne the brunt of her year's outing,--in a
word, the wife of a United States Senator from the golden West.
On another morning of the early spring two years later, such were
the contrasts which the events of her life produced, she stood in the
throne-room of Buckingham Palace, awaiting presentation to the Queen of
England. To the British eyes that looked upon her she was a graceful,
distinguished woman, sharing in the renown of her husband, the American
explorer, and a recent medallist of the Royal Geographical Society,
whose honors are only conferred upon those whose expeditions are taken
out at personal cost and sacrifice. In the faultless details of her
court dress she was a gratification to the most critical taste. Its
exquisite design, shading in color from the faint pink that touches
the outer edge of a rose petal to the deeper tone it assumes near the
heart, with clusters of the fair flower itself giving it an almost
fragrant emphasis and bringing out the delicate beauty of her fine
face, seemed a part of herself, so gracefully did she wear it, carrying
its sweep of train with a queenliness that was of her nature.
On the 17th of June, 1856, Frémont was unanimously nominated for the
Presidency by the National Republican Convention at Philadelphia.
He was the first choice of the Free Soil, which became, later, the
Republican party, and he was also, probably, the only man of whom
Lincoln, the first successful candidate of that party, was ever
jealous. Fearing a military rival, and recognizing in Frémont the
qualities that gave him a natural supremacy among men, he kept him in
the background. He foresaw correctly. The military hero came, but he
came in the person of the man to whom opportunity had been a fairy
godmother.
Though he polled the vote of all the Northern States but five, the time
was not ripe for a Republican President when Frémont was a candidate
for that high honor. The men, like Benton, who still led the political
thought of that day, and who knew every aspect of the country,
realizing the peril that lay in countenancing sectionalism, could not
give their support to a candidate who stood upon a sectional platform.
Whatever were his hopes or his disappointment, his wife shared them.
His accepting the nomination from so radical a party had meant the
breaking up of many friendships for her, which in itself was a genuine
grief to a woman of her temperament. The anguish she endured during
the first months of the war between the North and the South, which she
spent in St. Louis among familiar faces, whom the circumstances of her
position as the wife of a Northern general had estranged from her, left
its record in her beautiful hair, which, from a warm brown, became
quite white within a few weeks. No matter with what heroism we endure,
we sometimes bear all the rest of our lives the scars which our courage
has cost us.
She has never outgrown, however, her early attachment to the South,
to which she is united by many ties of blood. During the famine there
that followed the war she applied to Congress for relief, which
was immediately granted, with a ship to carry all the supplies the
Freedman's Bureau could furnish. With warm and tender sympathies she
has always taken up any cause that appealed to her with an enthusiasm
that communicated itself to others. Relating to Mrs. Dix one evening
the case of one of Lieutenant Frémont's men, who had been disabled by
being wounded in both legs, and to whom Congress had refused a pension
on the ground that he had not been regularly enlisted at the time the
wound was inflicted, she did not observe that a man who was calling
upon Senator Dix was attentively listening to all the graphic details
of her story. It was Preston King, of New York, and at that time
chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. He took Senator Dix to
the door with him when he left, and bade him tell her to write out the
story as she had just told it and send it to him, and he would see that
the man got his pension; and he did.
With what tender gratitude and reverence the man himself, Alexis Ayot,
a Canadian by birth, came to thank her!
"I cannot kneel to thank you," he said, balancing himself upon his
crutches, "Je n'ai plus de jambes; but you are my Sainte Madonne, et je
vous fais ma prière."
During her early California days she extended her generous young hand
to a youthful compositor who was working on the _Golden Era_. He dined
with her every Sunday, and she gave him not only that recognition and
encouragement that were in themselves a stimulus to his talent and
ambition, but she used her influence to obtain for him salaried offices
that lifted him above anxiety concerning his material condition,
and gave him the leisure necessary to the best development of his
genius. His name is Bret Harte, and so entirely did he recognize his
indebtedness to her that he once wrote to her: "If I were to be cast
away on a desert island, I should expect a savage to come forward with
a three-cornered note from you to tell me that at your request I had
been appointed governor of the island at a salary of two thousand four
hundred dollars."
She has both the versatility and adaptiveness that are characteristic
of the genuine American woman, and which have enabled her to make
almost as many friends in foreign lands as she has throughout her
own country. The Count de la Garde, a cousin of Eugene and Hortense
Beauharnais, whom she knew in Paris, and who left her at his death a
valuable collection of souvenirs of the Bonaparte family, said of her
that she was the only American woman he had ever known. He had known
others of her countrywomen, but they were but imitations of English or
French women, while in her he felt the originality and individuality of
another people.
As a scientist and explorer, Frémont's reputation had gone forth to the
countries of Europe, from many of which he received enviable honors and
decorations. He and his wife were presented at the courts of England,
France, and Denmark, attending at Copenhagen the wedding-festivities
of the Crown Prince and his Swedish bride. As one of her friends
has cleverly said of Mrs. Frémont, "she has entertained and been
entertained through not only the gamut but the chromatic scale of
society."
After the war, while her younger children were still growing up, and
during her husband's lifetime, she lived for some years in New York,
on a picturesque old property on the Hudson that still bore its Indian
name, Pocaho. Now, however, she lives again in the State that once gave
her health, wealth, and honors, near the great sea, away from which she
feels that she is never fully alive.
Her life has been full of changes and events, to all of which her alert
intelligence and quick sympathies have made her keenly susceptible, and
which wrung from her recently a plaintive, "We are tired, my heart and
I." That was all, for one who knew every phase of her life has already
borne testimony to that "sweet and happy and forbearing temper which
has remained proof against the wearing of time."
SALLIE WARD
(MRS. GEORGE F. DOWNS)
One of those extraordinary women which the world from time to time
produces, who rise to eminence solely through the force of their own
personality, was born in America as the nineteenth century was rounding
out its first quarter. Known all her life throughout the entire
country, she was one of the most conspicuous figures in the life of the
South and Southwest, and was the object of a sentiment that fell but
little short of worship among the people of the state of Kentucky, to
which she belonged.
James Lane Allen who has studied his people from every stand-point,
draws the typical Kentucky woman for us as "a refinement of the English
blonde, with greater delicacy of form, feature, and color."
"A beautiful Kentucky woman," he says, "is apt to be exceedingly
beautiful. Her voice is almost uniformly low and soft, her hands and
feet delicately formed, her skin quite pure and beautiful in tint and
shading, her eyes blue or brown, her hair nut-brown or golden; to all
which is added a certain unapproachable refinement."
Of such a class, Sallie Ward, with her blue eyes full of twinkling
humor and rather far apart, lending to her round face an expression
of candor, which was further borne out by her somewhat large though
finely shaped mouth disclosing handsome teeth in her happy tendency
to frequent smiling, her brown hair, and a skin faultless in tint and
texture, has been the most noted representative. A radiant woman,
instinct with sparkling life from the crown of her beautiful head to
the tips of her slender feet, spoiled, wilful, lovely, and loving, it
is probable that but few people will ever truly estimate her character.
She was the daughter of Robert J. Ward, a man of considerable wealth
and of that distinction of manner and bearing which is commonly
designated as of the old school. Like many another gifted young
Kentuckian, similarly placed in life, he began his career with
political aspirations, and before he had reached his thirtieth year
he had been elected Speaker of the State Assembly. His own private
concerns, however, gradually absorbing his time and interest, drew him
away from his youthful ambitions. He married the heiress of a large
fortune, Miss Flournoy, of Georgetown, Kentucky, the descendant of an
old Huguenot family, to whose fame her immediate ancestors had further
contributed by the gallant part they had taken in the war of the
American Revolution.
Sallie Ward, one of the eldest of a large family of children, was
born on her grandfather's estate in Scott County. She went to
boarding-school in Philadelphia, the reputation of whose educational
institutions in the first half of the century surpassed those of any
other city in the country. At even an earlier period, an entry in the
journal of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the most enlightened
men of his age, shows in what high estimation they were held, from the
fact that he mentions no other, though the praise in this instance is
rather of a negative order. He records in 1816 that he has sent his
little granddaughter, Mary Harper, to a school in Poitiers under the
care of Mr. Gallatin, then our minister to France, "where she will
be more piously educated than in the very best boarding-school in
Philadelphia."
There were some good students, no doubt, to uphold the reputation
of well-established schools, though it was before the influence of
Hannah Adams, the pioneer of a broader education for women, had been
widely felt, and before that delicate balance between the mental and
physical being of a girl student had ever been disturbed by over-study.
With that "little learning," that was not "a dangerous thing" from
the point of view of the women of that day, there were many with a
mental sprightliness that was far more exhilarating than all their
deep draughts from the Pierian spring had rendered a few such women as
Hannah Adams. A disappointed man who once made a stage-coach journey
with her related that she only opened her lips to enumerate the pieces
of baggage with which she was encumbered, lest in her descent she
should, in the preoccupation of her mind, leave behind her either her
"great box, little box, or bandbox."
[Illustration: Sallie Ward
(Mrs. George F. Downs)
From a miniature]
Sallie Ward, in deference perhaps to the prejudices of her French
origin, was sent to a school presided over by a woman of that
nationality. She enlivened its atmosphere of conventional elegance by
many startling ebullitions of her undisciplined young spirits, such as
appearing unannounced in male attire at wholly inappropriate moments.
Then, as everybody disappeared with more haste than dignity, her own
uncontrollable laughter would reveal the truth of the situation. Some
one would exclaim, "Sallie Ward!" and the others would troop back to
admire her, for, if a little effeminate, she made, nevertheless, a very
captivating youth, and no school-mistress could ever look into her
beaming face and find it in her heart to be harsh to her.
Her own mother attempted once when she was a very little child to
punish her for some misdemeanor, but Sallie, divining her purpose,
dropped quickly on her knees and raised her little hands in
supplication. There seemed at that moment something so seraphic in
her childish beauty that her mother afterwards admitted that her good
intentions were involuntarily thwarted. Though the rod was always
spared, she grew up to be none the less lovable, though a woman of the
world in all things rather than a woman of the spirit,--the logical
result of her environment.
A subtle quality that goes forth from some personalities, commanding
instant attention and reverence, went forth from Sallie Ward, evoking
everywhere admiration and love. She realized the power herself, and it
enabled her to do everything with an indefinable grace proceeding from
an absolute self-confidence. That which would have seemed daring coming
from another woman was approved and applauded in Sallie Ward. She
possessed a knowledge of horses that is more or less common among the
women of Kentucky, and rode with a dash and skill which the women of no
other State have ever surpassed. She sometimes capriciously utilized
this accomplishment to test a man's devotion, doing apparently without
premeditation some daring feat and discovering thereby the extent to
which he would follow her, for every man was at least worth measuring
weapons with, though in the process she unwittingly, no doubt,
despoiled many a less dazzling woman. She was, however, only exercising
what she conceived to be the prerogative of every woman. While riding
in Louisville one day she came upon the market-house, which ran for
some distance through the centre of the street. Instead of going around
it, she impulsively dashed through it without in any degree slackening
her speed. The man who was with her unhesitatingly followed, and was
rewarded, as he drew up beside her on emerging from the far end of the
structure, with an arch smile and "Now, sir, you'll have a pretty fine
to pay, twenty-five dollars apiece, for that little stretch." When he
went the next day, however, to pay the penalty for the pretty caprice,
he found that the obligation had already been quietly discharged by
Miss Ward herself.