for the first time fully realized how unusually beautiful she was. So
favorable was the impression she made upon the queen that on state
occasions she was assigned to places usually given only to the wives
of ambassadors and ministers. She was well known throughout England,
and on the day that Oxford University conferred the degree of Doctor of
Civil Laws upon her uncle and Alfred Tennyson its ancient walls rang
with the cheers that went up from its hundreds of students who rose _en
masse_ to greet the entrance of Harriet Lane.
"She was a most distinguished young person," said one of her countrymen
recently, growing enthusiastic over the recollection of the impression
she created, "whom more than one Englishman would have given his head
to marry."
Her beauty was not less appreciated by the artistic eye of the French
people, and Mr. James Edward MacFarland, who was secretary of the
American legation at the time of her visit to the family of Mr. John
Y. Mason, then our minister to France, was full of anecdotes of the
_naïveté_ with which the people in the streets of Paris were wont to
express their admiration.
Shortly after her return to America the loss of her only sister, Mrs.
George W. Baker, who died in California, sent Harriet Lane into deep
mourning. While the country was filled with stories of her beauty and
the impression it had created in foreign capitals she was passing
her days in the grateful quiet of Wheatland. Her uncle's nomination
to the Presidency but added to her fame, the campaign, election, and
inauguration bringing her gradually into that eminent position she
was so admirably fitted to fill. At the ball attending the inaugural
ceremonies at Washington she made her first reappearance in public,
clad, as best became her noble form, in the simplicity of a white
dress, flower trimmed, and with a necklace of pearls.
In those days, before social functions had attained the proportions
that now characterize them, they reflected in the White House, as
elsewhere, more of the individuality of the host and hostess than is
now possible. Many details that are now consigned to secretaries and
stewards then appertained to the master and mistress of the house.
Harriet Lane and her cousin James Buchanan Henry, who acted as private
secretary to his uncle, invariably arranged the seating of the guests
at state dinners, an onerous task now performed by an under-secretary
of the Executive Mansion, who, besides being familiar with the rules
of official precedence, must also know something of the social
relationship each guest bears to his possible neighbor. She made no
mistakes, for she had been trained to her position as had none of her
predecessors, unless we except the wives of the two Adamses.
In 1860, when the Prince of Wales visited England's North American
possessions, on President Buchanan's suggestion and invitation, he
extended his travels so as to include at least a portion of the United
States. The memory of his sojourn among us still lives in many of the
cities and towns whose territory had once formed part of the kingdom
of his ancestors. The five days he spent in Washington were passed
in the White House. A guest of the nation at the capital is usually
assigned to a suite of rooms in one of the hotels of the city. Between
Buchanan and the Prince of Wales, however, owing to the former's recent
residence at the court of St. James, there existed more of a personal
feeling than is usual between the President and state guests.
In all the festivities by which the Executive Mansion did honor to his
presence the unerring hand and faultless taste of Harriet Lane were
evident.
One memorable day of his visit was spent at Mount Vernon. The revenue
cutter "Harriet Lane" was selected to take the distinguished little
party, consisting of the President, Miss Lane, the Prince, his suite,
and the British Minister down the river. The simplicity of George
Washington's home and the picturesque beauty of its situation were
themes of interesting study to the Englishmen. At his tomb they
reverently bared their heads, and near it the Prince planted a tree in
remembrance of the day.
After he left Washington he wrote to the President expressing his
appreciation of the hospitality he had received, and sending him his
portrait painted by Sir John Watson Gordon, with a set of engravings of
the Royal family for Miss Lane, to whom now also belong the portrait
and the letter, together with one written by the queen. It echoes the
gratification already expressed by her son concerning the kindliness of
his reception among the American people, and shows in what high regard
she personally held both the President and his niece.
Buchanan's administration was the last of the old _régime_, a period
in which there had been that unity of purpose that had fostered the
nation, that wise forbearance that had preserved it, and withal much
of illustrious oratory and brilliant debate. But the parting of the
ways had come. A day of action was at hand. Buchanan, oppressed with a
sense of his impotency to avert a crisis that was inevitable, retired
to Wheatland, and Lincoln, full of high purposes and many misgivings,
stepped into the pathway of destiny. Upon the one public life instantly
relaxed its hold, while about the other it threw its myriad feverish
tendrils, clutching him hourly closer to itself till the long watches
of that fatal April night, during which its imperious tenure was
loosened by death.
With Buchanan, Harriet Lane also passed from the horizon of public
life, spending with him at Wheatland those historic four years that
followed her days in the White House. There, in January, 1866, she
was married to Henry Elliott Johnston, of Baltimore. The ceremony was
performed by her uncle, the Rev. Edward Y. Buchanan, of the Episcopal
Church.
Her honeymoon she passed in Cuba and her married life in Baltimore, in
whose social doings she took a prominent part. At her uncle's death, in
1868, she inherited Wheatland, where for a number of years she passed
her summers. In 1892 she bought a home in Washington, where she now
spends the greater part of her time.
Much has been given her of life's joys and triumphs, and much, too, of
its sorrows. Death has repeatedly crossed the threshold of her home,
robbing her, one by one, of her heart's treasures: in 1881 the elder of
her two sons, James Buchanan Johnston, a boy of brilliant promise, then
in his fourteenth year; in 1882 her second son, Henry Elliott Johnston;
and two years later her husband. Surrounded not only by life's
comforts, but its elegancies, by friends of her own and a succeeding
generation, there is yet about Harriet Lane Johnston to-day much of
that same majestic isolation that marked her youth.
ADÈLE CUTTS
(MRS. ROBERT WILLIAMS)
During the four years that Franklin Pierce presided over the nation so
many beautiful women came prominently before the public at the capital
that his was called the "beauty administration." Many were the wives
and daughters of men in high official position, but the fame of none
exceeded that of the daughter of James Madison Cutts, who held the
office of Second Controller of the Treasury.
Born within a stone's throw of the White House, all her young days
centred about it, and how near she came to living there as the wife
of a President we may gauge by how near Stephen A. Douglas came to
possessing that office. Adèle Cutts flourished in that truly golden
era before material wealth became a necessary adjunct to a woman's
popularity, when men were distinguished by a greater spirit of
gallantry and disinterestedness, and in the days before a belle's
powers at a watering-place were rated by the number or size of the
trunks she took with her; in a word, in the days when the woman herself
was pre-eminent and the accident of worldly possessions secondary.
It was recently said of a wealthy American girl, who, though she has
generously expended much of her large fortune in the endowment of
seats of learning and similar public benefactions, has yet in herself
none of that magnetism that would entitle her to enrollment among the
great belles of her country, "Yes, she is a great belle this summer.
She brought thirty trunks, and she dresses six times a day." At the
same resort forty years ago, Adèle Cutts, remarkable for the simplicity
of her toilettes even among a generation that had no conception
whatever of the elaborate costuming of women which marks the close of
the century, was the most renowned of its belles.
While she derived in the preliminary stages of her social career
some prestige from her connection with two of the most illustrious
families not only of Virginia but of the entire country,--Washington
and Madison,--she attained while yet a very young woman a pre-eminence
by reason of her beauty, the distinction of her bearing, and a genuine
loveliness of character, which reflected as much honor upon the
somewhat remote relationship as it had bestowed upon her. She was born
in the home of her grandfather, Richard Cutts, who, in the days when
Maine was part of Massachusetts, had for twelve years represented in
the Congress of the United States that district which at this end of
the century was for so long a period associated with the name of Thomas
B. Reed.
In 1804 Richard Cutts married Anna Payne, the youngest sister of the
famous Dolly Payne, who some years before had become the wife of James
Madison. Still another sister had married George Steptoe Washington,
the nephew of our first President. It was of her sister Anna's family
that Mistress Dolly wrote her lines adapted from John Gilpin's ride:
"My sister Cutts and Cutts and I and Cutts's children three
Will fill the coach, so you must ride on horseback after we."
The home Cutts built for his bride, and where his children and
grandchildren were born, was in those early days one of the pretentious
houses of the capital. It overlooked Lafayette Square, and its
beautiful garden, where Addie Cutts played as a little girl, skirted
along H street to the end of the block. Cutts was a widower when his
son James Madison married Miss Ellen O'Neale, of Maryland, and took her
to "Montpelier" to spend their honeymoon days with his aunt and uncle,
whose namesake he was. On their return to Washington his bride became
the mistress of her father-in-law's home, where in the following year,
1835, Adèle Cutts was born.
In the guise of a little flower-girl she made her first formal
appearance at the White House when she was but seven years old, at a
children's fancy ball given there in 1842 during the administration of
President Tyler.
She was for the most part educated at Madame Burr's school, in the city
in which she was born. Her wonderful grace of manner, however, was
not the result of education; it was the manifestation of a character
beautiful by nature and developed amid happy surroundings. An only
daughter, she was the close companion of her beautiful and brilliant
mother, besides spending much of her time until her fifteenth year with
her great-aunt Madison, whose genius had sown the first seeds of social
life in the barren wastes of the national capital and drawn together
the scattered elements of its subsequent levees and dinner-parties.
After the death of Madison, finding herself unable to support the
solitude of her life at "Montpelier," which had been theretofore most
complete and happy, she returned to Washington and took up her home in
the Cutts house, which now belonged to her and which bears her name to
this day, though it has had many other distinguished occupants. Richard
Cutts had mortgaged it to Madison, and dying before he had repaid him,
the house passed into the possession of Mrs. Madison. There she held a
court as brilliant as any ever presided over by an American woman, and
Adèle Cutts was early familiarized with the greatness of a generation
that was already passing away. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, as well as every
President of the United States whose term of office fell during her
residence in Washington, paid her the tribute of frequent visits, and
felt honored by his privilege to do so.
[Illustration: Adèle Cutts
(Mrs. Robert Williams)
From portrait by George Peter A. Healy]
At the time of her death her great-niece was fourteen years old, and
already possessed a beauty of the purest Greek type, whose stateliness
increased as she advanced towards womanhood. The faultless outline of
her profile, the shapeliness of her head, her large, dark eyes, her
chestnut hair that showed glints of a golden hue in the sunshine, the
creamy tone of her skin, the perfect proportion and development of
her tall figure, all combined to make the rare beauty of a personality
whose charm was augmented twofold by her own unconsciousness of its
rich possessions.
Like many girls of southern proclivities, she spent her summers at that
famous old resort that has witnessed the rising and going down of so
many social stars, the White Sulphur Springs. There, dressed always
in white, with a white kerchief in the mornings folded across her
bosom and showing her fair throat, there was about her a freshness and
simplicity that suggested her descent from the Quaker Paynes.
The spirit of gallantry has no age limit in the South, and she, like
many another girl in the blossom of her youth, received the homage of
men of all periods of life. The beautiful Imogene Penn, afterwards Mrs.
James Lyons, of Richmond, and whose belleship days were contemporaneous
with those of Adèle Cutts, encountered the irrepressible Richmond wag,
Tom August, one morning as she was returning from the springhouse
between two devotees, one of whom was the unsuspected possessor of
forty-five, while the other concealed about his person as many as fifty
summers. "I thought, Miss Imogene," said August, bowing profoundly to
the trio and availing himself of a wit's privilege, "that you were just
eighteen, but I see you are between forty-five and fifty."
Some Virginia beaux, who were young then, have treasured up and
still relate an anecdote of the manner in which one of Adèle Cutts's
elderly admirers lost the only opportunity she ever gave him to
propose to her. He came from New Orleans, and was blessed with many
good things, including sons and daughters older than Miss Cutts. At a
fancy-dress ball she appeared completely disguised in the character
of a housekeeper, having borrowed the entire costume, including the
cap, apron, and bunch of keys at her side, from the housekeeper of
the hotel. Before any one had had an opportunity to speculate on her
identity, discovering her old admirer among the spectators of the gay
and bewildering scene, she approached demurely and asked him if he did
not need a housekeeper. He parried the question somewhat playfully, and
ended by answering in the negative. She dropped him a courtesy with a
grace no housekeeper could emulate, peeping at him with laughing eyes
over her mask, and disappeared in the throng of the ball-room.
At a White House reception, early in the winter of 1856, she met
Stephen A. Douglas, who was then prominent as a Presidential
possibility; he was also one of the Illinois Senators, and his ringing
speeches had won him a national fame equal to the intensity of his
local popularity. His able defence of Andrew Jackson on the floor of
the Senate so gratified and touched the old President that he preserved
a copy of the speech, laying it aside as an inheritance for those who
should come after him, and endorsing it as a defence of himself and
his administration. The one great fault of that administration, in his
own estimation, was none of those for which popular opinion of his
day condemned him, but that he had not hanged Calhoun. "Douglas,"
writes one of his biographers, "had wonderfully magnetic powers, and
usually carried his audience with him." It is small wonder, then, that
at the end of a few months of ardent and eloquent debate, with an
audience consisting of one young girl, that he should have carried her
completely with him.
He was a widower with two sons when he met Adèle Cutts, and, like many
a less fortunate man, he was instantly impressed with her absolute
loveliness. He would go to her direct from the Senate chamber while
the whole city was ringing with the fame of his speeches, which she
not infrequently heard from a place in the gallery, and throw all his
irresistible eloquence into his courtship of her.
In the Democratic Convention of the summer of 1856 Douglas and Buchanan
were rival candidates for the Presidential nomination. Pierce, also,
though there had been some doubt in the minds of his own townsmen about
his making a successful President at all, was seeking the nomination
for a second term. "Frank Pierce is all very well up here where he
knows everybody and everybody knows Frank Pierce," said a New Hampshire
sage during the summer preceding Pierce's election, "but when it comes
to spreading him out over the whole country, I'm afraid he'll be mighty
thin in some places." The thinness had evidently been apparent, for
while he had the high honor of coming in almost unanimously, as Senator
Benton said, he went out with as great a unanimity.
When it became evident that the nomination was not for Douglas, so
intensely was he beloved by the people of the West, and particularly by
those of his own State, that many a sturdy, hard-featured delegate from
that section, to all appearances the embodiment of stoicism, put down
his head and wept like a little heart-broken child.
On the 20th of November, a few weeks after the election of Buchanan,
he was married to Adèle Cutts, and it has been said that, of the many
beautiful women who witnessed the incoming of Buchanan's administration
at his inaugural ball, Douglas's wife was the most beautiful.
Already known to the South and the East, her fame now spread westward,
and when it was rumored that Douglas would take her to Chicago, where
he had maintained a legal residence for some years, the people of the
town made ready to receive her with the enthusiasm which she inspired
in them then primarily as the young wife of Stephen A. Douglas. She
made her first appearance among them at St. Mary's Church, where many
people who had never been in a Catholic church before were found in the
congregation that Sunday morning, and far more than the usual external
contingent waited patiently on the sidewalk to see her as she came out.
When she appeared with her husband at the celebration held on the State
line between Illinois and Wisconsin, in honor of the union of the two
railroad companies between Chicago and Milwaukee, she was hailed with
uproarious cheers. There was that in her very presence which seemed to
completely satisfy every man's ideal of all womanly perfection.
It was in the year of the great contest for the Legislature between
Lincoln and Douglas that the people of the West came to know her,
however, as she was already known at the East, and to love her with
that same loyalty and devotion. Her home in Chicago was always in
hotels, sometimes at the Tremont House and again at the Lake View.
Many of the men who have made Chicago the queen city she is to-day
were then young. Among them were professional men and men full of
commercial enterprise, all brainy and ambitious, and a fair number of
them Democrats and followers of Douglas. These gathered about her in
her parlors or under the trees in the garden overlooking the lake, and
though she never entered into any political discussion, the very fact
that Douglas possessed such a wife inspired them with renewed ardor
for his cause. In her gentle graciousness, infinite tact, and entire
unconsciousness of the admiration she everywhere aroused, they felt the
full force of her high breeding.
Lincoln and Douglas are so conspicuously identified as political
enemies, that few people realize that personally they were friends.
Not unfrequently they travelled a whole day together only to take
the platform that night against each other and to pommel each other,
figuratively, out of recognition. Douglas was adroit, however, and
Lincoln once said of him that it was difficult to get the best of him
in any debate, because his power of bewildering his audience was so
great that they never knew when he was worsted. During the summer
in which their political enmity first achieved so much prominence,
Douglas's wife went with him through the State winning favor for
him in all eyes, even including those of the "ablest whig rascal in
all Springfield, Abe Lincoln." He liked to sit beside her as they
journeyed from place to place and pour some funny story into her
attentive ears, or, perhaps, divining the tender sympathy of her true
woman's soul, tell her some incident of his early days, touching off
its sorrowful details with a bit of homely philosophy or a stroke of
his inexhaustible humor; and as the train pulled into some expectant
town, and the two opponents were greeted by factions whose enmity was
real, he would say, "Here, Douglas, take your woman," and so they would
part to meet again as foes. As the final victory was with Douglas,
he and his wife made that tour of the Southern States that was much
in the nature of a triumphal procession, and was a forerunner of his
Presidential campaign which shortly followed.
His real home was in Washington, where as a Senator he spent the
greater portion of each year. There he built a commodious house, with a
ball-room, by no means a frequent adjunct at that time, which witnessed
much generous hospitality in those difficult days preceding secession,
when a woman like Mrs. Douglas could best hold warring elements in
abeyance.
The result of the campaign of the summer of 1860, in which Lincoln and
Douglas again confronted each other, this time for the higher prize of
the Presidency, precipitated that crisis which at length brought these
two life-long opponents together in defence of the Union. The whole aim
of Douglas's life had been for the Presidency. He had accomplished all
else he had ever set his heart upon, and he was so absolutely the idol
of the people that it had not seemed possible to him he should fail
here. He swallowed the bitterness of his disappointment heroically,
however, and was a generous and even a graceful friend to Lincoln.
It is related that, when Lincoln rose to read his inaugural address,
he hesitated a moment, uncertain as to what disposition to make of his
hat; it was a new, high silk hat, too elegant an acquisition to the
mind of one reared in the more than frugal atmosphere of Lincoln's home
to be intrusted to the pine boards of the flag-draped stand in front
of him. Douglas, divining the mental process of which Lincoln himself,
in the embarrassment of the moment, was scarcely conscious, stepped
forward and relieved him of the hat, holding it for him till the
conclusion of the address.
During the early days of the conflict between the North and the South,
which he had patriotically done his utmost to avert, he aided Lincoln
with able counsel, pointing out to him among other things the necessity
of securing Fortress Monroe and cautioning him against bringing the
troops through Baltimore, prophesying that bloodshed that did occur.
But before the conflict had assumed those proportions which it did
later in the same year, on the 3d of June, 1861, Douglas's life
closed. His last hours were spent in Chicago among the people he had
so ably represented. There, with his wife beside him, and her mother
and brother, James Madison Cutts, who was his private secretary, near
by, and with his keen, dark eyes upon her face, as if he would forever
fix upon his spirit its beautiful lineaments, and his hand in hers, his
mind retaining all its strength and clearness till the end, he uttered
his last memorable words. She had asked him if he had any message to
send to his sons, and he replied, "Tell them to obey the laws of the
land and to support the Constitution of the United States."
Generous even to the point of recklessness, he died poor. Subscriptions
were immediately begun among his friends towards a fund for his widow.
She declined, however, to receive it, and begged that the sum thus
raised be devoted to the erection of a monument to Douglas's memory.