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Library of Congress Subject Headings,
19th edition, 1996
BY
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
Published October, 1911
TO
THE BELOVED MEMORY OF
MY BROTHER
WHO AFTER LONG SUFFERING, GALLANTLY ENDURED,
PASSED INTO REST AS THESE PAGES WERE
GOING THROUGH THE PRESS
Sea Urchins, Bar Harbor
September, 1911
Jefferson's mother, it will be recalled, was Jane, daughter of Isham Randolph; and when, in 1790, Martha Jefferson married Thomas Mann Randolph, she and her husband claimed a great-great-grandfather in common. Young Randolph having lived with the Jeffersons for two years in Paris, completing his education under Mr. Jefferson's direction at the University of Edinburgh, was entirely at home in the household of his future wife; so much so, that after their marriage he brought into it his little sister, Virginia, whose wit and charm, with her gift of making sweet music, appealed to Mr. Jefferson as strongly as did her motherless condition. Miss Randolph grew up under her sister-in-law's devoted care, and to Mr. Jefferson owed the
intellectual impetus he so well knew how to give to a girl's education.
She was by him inspired with the love of letters and habit of authorship that marked her in later years, when Mrs. Cary's novels, essays, and poems enjoyed considerable vogue. My father always spoke to me admiringly of his good mother's literary achievements, when, as a very little girl perched upon his knee, I listened in charmed awe to the tales of a grandmamma who was a real live author, publishing every scrap of MS. as fast as she wrote it; and said by the critics to combine the style of Hannah More with a grace and humor all her own. When I tried to read her books it must be owned that I thought them rather too grave and sermon-like for human nature's daily food. Not until many years had gone over my head did I appreciate them at their rightful value.
My father, an old-line Whig of the enthusiastic type, yet had great personal admiration for and loved to talk about his "Uncle Jefferson," the "Father of American Democracy." Certainly, he induced all of us, and our children after us, to look with appreciation upon Jefferson's splendid originality of thought and fearless expression of opinion, still more upon the breadth of his interest in the whole human field of intellectual endeavor, which made him a pharos in his time. Mr. Henry Watterson has well expressed our united family opinion in saying that, after Washington and Franklin, the one clear figure in the early history of American politics is Jefferson - "a perfect Doric column."
My son, Congressman Francis Burton Harrison, is fortunate in possessing a fine Gilbert Stuart portrait of Jefferson. Strangely enough, there is a strong likeness
in this, as in the St. Memin profiles of Jefferson, to various members of the family in the present generations.
A crackling (alas! time-dried) letter lying before me, addressed by my father to his sister, Mrs. Gouverneur Morris, of Morrisania, "Harlaem, New York," announces the arrival in this world of his daughter Constance, stating that "although she has red hair, he hopes if nothing happens she will not be a homely girl; of this, however, nothing can be said with certainty. The upper part of her head is very much like our mother's, so that "should she live, I anticipate for her some of her grandmother's talent for writing, particularly as I have great confidence in phrenology." This I insert more as a contribution to the annals of the science of bumps than with confidence in its interest to the public.
The Carys of my father's line had been scholars, leaders, and land-owners in the Virginia colony since 1640, and before that were well known in south-western Britain.
The head of the house is Byron Plantagenet, Viscount Falkland, a worthy inheritor of the family title of the great Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, who died on the field at Newberry for England's glory and his own. Of late years it has been a pleasure to me to meet in my recurrent visits to London the family of the present viscount, and to be welcomed into their hospitable home, filled with portraits and relics, some of which are duplicated in our transatlantic dwellings.
Lord Falkland, whose wife was Miss Mary Reade, of New York, has a household of handsome sons and daughters, his eldest son, possessing the picturesque title of the Master of Falkland.
Of the Carys of Virginia, a noteworthy one was Colonel Archibald Cary, of Ampthill, near Richmond, on the James, known as "Old Iron" in the American Revolution. He married a Miss Randolph of the Curls branch of that numerous family. Through these Curls Randolphs we have received a dash of Pocahontas blood, and I have found no reason to decry this attenuated strain of descent from the long-gone little Indian princess whose high fidelity and noble unselfishness made its indelible mark upon colonial history.
It must be owned we were brought up to think of our Randolph blood as a slightly menacing inheritance. "They were clever, every man and woman of them," said a family oracle,"often brilliant, successful, fascinating - but, beware, my dear, of eccentricity! Look at your cousin, John of Roanoke! He began by being one of the most beautiful and innocent looking lads the world ever beheld, as anyone can see from that picture of him in boyhood, painted by Gilbert Stuart; and look what a miserable life he led," etc., etc.
We did not trouble our heads much about the transmission of physical tendencies by descent in those days, and found the strange stories of our morbid kinsman very much to our taste. As leader of the Jefferson party in Congress at twenty-eight, also chairman of the Committee of Ways and Means, we felt very proud of him.
We were to hear of Randolph of Roanoke in more substantial fashion just before the war began. His estate, devolving upon his insane brother, St. George, who had lived in retirement all these years, was finally divided between Randolph heirs at large, among whom my brother
and myself were numbered. We received, to my great satisfaction, several "plums" in the way of executor's checks, a condition pleasingly continuing until after I was married and living in New York, and then the fountain ceased to flow. Various members of the family put these odd fragments of Randolph inheritance into souvenir rings and silver tea-sets, to be handed down in memoriam of the unhappy genius, the shooting-star of the Randolph galaxy.
My father was at the time of his death just entering upon his fortieth year (a period traditionally dreaded by Cary men as likely to cut short their mortal span), living in the beautiful mountain town of Cumberland, in Maryland, where he was editor of its leading newspaper, The Cumberland Civilian. Bred in the practice of literary study, well equipped in history, a classic by descent from men educated at English universities, and owners of the best libraries in the State, he was also an ardent Whig politician, and has left printed pamphlets, speeches, and editorials breathing the fiery spirit of his creed. One of my earliest recollections was being taken as a very small child to a hotel in Cumberland to visit his idol, Henry Clay, then an aged man, who lifted me in his arms and kissed me, to my secret discomfiture, as I thought him dreadfully old and ugly. A gentleman present remarked: "Little girl, you must never forget that you started in life with a kiss and a blessing from the immortal Henry Clay."
Of that interview I ought to have retained a silver pencil-case, which I promptly lost.
My father, when a young lawyer of three-and-twenty, had married his cousin Monimia, youngest daughter of Thomas, ninth Lord Fairfax, Baron of Cameron in the Scottish peerage, who, residing quietly on his
estates in Virginia, had never assumed his title except when going once to England to claim an inheritance.
My grandparents sometimes took a house in Washington for the season, and there my mother, making her début at seventeen, had been admired and belauded in the society of the capital. Chapman, the artist, engaged to paint "The Baptism of Pocahontas" for the rotunda of the Capitol, asked leave to introduce her into his picture as one of the two Englishwomen, their heads wrapped in scarfs, who stand directly behind the kneeling Pocahontas. My mother, at this time, made friends with Mr. and Mrs. N. P. Willis, he greatly extolling her beauty and inviting her to accompany them to various festivities. She remembered going to see them one day in their sitting-room at a hotel, and finding the lion still at his breakfast, in a gorgeous dressing-gown and smoking-cap, like Thackeray's "Clarence Bulbul," with a page-boy kneeling before the fire at his feet, toasting each mouthful of bread as demanded by his fastidious master, Willis declaring it was "the only way to make toast tolerable," to the amusement of the little Virginia girl bred in simplicity by her austere sire.
There is a story of the wedding-journey of this very young couple, Mr. and Mrs. Archibald Cary, when they travelled, as the custom was, to New York, stopping at some Broadway hotel, where, on the day of their arrival, the bridegroom went off alone to visit Trinity Church and church-yard. She was but eighteen, had never been so far from home before, and as lunch-time came and her husband did not, feared to go down to the big dining-room alone, because people "stared at her so." (The Rev. Dr. Philip Slaughter, a learned historian of
Virginia, wrote to me once, "I have a vivid picture of your mother in my memory, when, as Burke said of the young Queen of France, 'She first arose above the horizon of womanhood, and shone like the morning star, full of life and splendor and beauty.' ") When the recreant returned, hours after, full of concern and loving apology, his excuse was that he had been copying inscriptions on the tombstones in Trinity church-yard, and had no idea how the time flew.
My antiquarian progenitor seems, indeed, to have resembled that learned lawyer of the fifteenth century, William Budaeus, who, upon his wedding-day, stole away from his bride for six hours to hold converse with the mighty dead through his books.
Of the marriage of Archibald Cary and Monimia Fairfax, the fifth between these two families, were born three children, two sons, Falkland and Clarence, and myself. My brother Falkland, who died at sixteen, was one of those rare beings sent into the world to adumbrate perfection, then cut short in the flower of youth, to the bewilderment of mortals who cannot grasp the meaning of the Creator's scheme. As he lay after death, face and form were like one of the recumbent statues of sleeping Greeks in the galleries at Rome. All intellectual exercise was facile to him, languages ancient and modern were acquired without effort, and his literary compositions won the astonished comment of his teachers. Join to this an incomparably sweet temper and a great love of physical exercise, and his loss to his family may be understood.
My brother Clarence and I have kept together through a long life of harmonious association, varied by much travel and experience of people and places; we look back pleasantly upon our life in Cumberland, in the
brown modern Gothic house in Decatur Street, with its tower and balconies (which must have seemed rather spectacular in the quiet old town) bought by our father for his little family. In the tower I kept a small regiment of dolls with whom I used to enact plays from a tattered old copy of Dick's "Shakespeare," reading all the parts myself. I was once near hating my good parents and a friend of theirs, who, unknown to me, had crept up the tower stairs to listen laughingly to one of these performances. In our nursery my brother and I made tents out of bedclothes, and told each other, successively, stories of original travel and adventure, we who had never voyaged anywhere save from "the blue bed to the brown." The boys once had a mock trial, condemned and hung over the battlements a doll of mine, whose fate nearly broke my heart; but I enjoyed it, nevertheless. My father, very indulgent to his only girl, used to delight me with endless stories. Particularly did I relish those of the French-Indian campaign in that very neighborhood and of young Colonel Washington's return from the disastrous venture to Mount Vernon, where our mother's grandfather, Colonel William Fairfax of Belvoir, his son George the Tory (Washington's old comrade in surveying), and George's fascinating wife Sally, our father's great-aunt, had hastened to console the young Achilles sulking in his tent by kind notes and visits.
I loved all the gossip about the Mount Vernon and Belvoir families, and felt as if they still lived in my day. Then there were Indian massacres of the most exciting sort, the scenes of occurrence in the mountain fastnesses around us; and often was I bid to travel over-sea, and hear about the mother-land and the people we sprang from there. But, affectionate to England, my father
believed with all his heart in the ideal of our own republic and its institutions. He used to describe how its borders would go on broadening till it compassed the whole mighty continent; and once pointed out to me suddenly, in the red glow of sunset, the splendid cleft in the Alleghanies through which a river and a railway ran, westward of the town. "That, my daughter, is the gateway for the future greatness of our land," he said, so impressively that I looked to see some actual titanic form with trailing garments sweep outward through the gorge.
My education was carried on at day-school, in the polite establishment for young ladies of a Miss Jane Kenah, where I must have done something, however inadequate, to win from her the copy of "The Lady of the Lake," in faded red and gold, which still haunts my book-shelves, "Presented to Constance Cary, as a reward for scholarship, by her loving teacher." I honestly do not now believe I deserved it in the least, for I did not enjoy that school, nor yet the lessons in Latin imposed upon me by my father, at the hands of the amiable and learned Rev. Hillhouse Buel, in his study at the rectory. I must have made them a misery to my instructor! And as to mathematics in general, I have always considered them an invention of the evil one!
The Rev. Mr. Buel, a distinguished father in the church, was in my eyes chiefly an incarnation of the Spirit of Ritualism in which my darling mother took strange satisfaction. His beautiful church stood on a bold bluff over the river dividing the town; our house was at a good distance on the other side; and many a time, during Lent especially, I was haled from my warm bed in the gray dawn of a winter's morning,
dressed hastily without breakfast (my mother fasted on Fridays in Lent till after sunset), and made to accompany her on a brisk, chill walk to matins, celebrated by the rector, in the almost empty church, for the benefit of a literal "two or three." Once, she, I, and the celebrant were the only persons present on a stormy morning. On Sundays our family filled the first pew in the left transept, after a preceding hour of Sunday-school for the juveniles. When doctrine became too heavy for me I plaited the fringe of my mother's embroidered shawl of China crepe, to me the most sumptuous of garments, which she would afterward find woven into as many little kinks as a darky's wool.
The rule of our house was firm if loving. There was no weak yielding by either parent to our whims. Our pleasures were of a simple sort: long walks on the hills, flower-picking, skating in winter, and sledding over "jumps" on the snow-clad heights above our home; excursions to Flintstone, Frostburg, and the Mines; tea-parties with our little friends and, at rare intervals, a show at some town-hall, into which we walked proudly with free tickets as children of the editor. I think we heard Mme. Anna Bishop sing. My brother's sled bore her name in crimson letters.
There was a grand triple entertainment for grown people, given by my mother and her neighbors, Mrs. Thruston and Mrs. Davidson, living diagonally opposite us on Decatur Street. The invitations, printed in silver at the office of The Civilian, bid their friends repair to Mrs. Thruston, who lived in a wide, handsome old house in a terraced garden, at eight o'clock, for the reception; to Mrs. Cary, who possessed a large drawing-room and veranda, at nine, for dancing: and to
Mrs. Davidson (whose husband was a brother of the poetesses Lucretia and Margaret Davidson), for supper, at eleven. Allowed to sit up for this unprecedented festivity, I recall the guests assembling duly in Mrs. Thruston's stately rooms, to sip Madeira and lemonade and taste her excellent plum-cake; then coming in a variegated string across the street to our big dancing-room, decorated with evergreen and flowers, with a band in my father's study. Proud as I was of our place in the programme, prouder still I felt at the spectacle of my lovely young mother in "white swiss," with bunches of scarlet geraniums in her curls and at her breast; wearing her pearls, my father's wedding-gift; with flushed cheeks and laughing eyes and lips, leading "down the middle," with Mr. Philip Roman, in a Virginia reel! The supper at Mrs. Davidson's was, to my eyes, something too great and wonderful to be believed in. We and the Davidson children disgraced ourselves surreptitiously by eating impossible things, and when caught we were sent home with a swift rush and told to go straight to bed, arising next day none the worse for our indulgence. Since then, banquets in many lands have been set before us, but none could equal this! Lord Lytton, in his later days, said: "It's a long time since I've been hungry, but, thank God, I am still greedy" - a consolation in a very modest way.
One of the practices of Cumberland was for the male head of the house to go to market betimes in the morning, accompanied by a servant carrying a basket into which purchases were put. One of my keenest pleasures was when, at intervals, I was allowed to go there with my father. The dim spaces in the long building lit by swinging oil lanterns; the smiling, wheedling black faces behind piles of vegetables, meats, fowls,
fruit, and eggs; the joy of nibbling radishes, of licking honey that oozed out of its receptacle, of receiving gifts of horse-cakes from friendly merchants, of struggling through the busy crowd at my father's coat-tails; I tried religiously not to prefer it to matins, but failed.
A vivid memory of my father is of an occasion when my busy mother, going off for one of her rare holiday jaunts to Berkeley Springs, and leaving her children and their nurse in his care, I awoke in the night crying for her and would not be consoled. No one heard me, no one answered, and I sprang out of bed and ran barefooted down the stairs. There, in the little study where he was accustomed to sit half the night (in an armchair I still possess), and make clippings from exchange journals for The Civilian, I beheld the editor buried in reading, snowed in with newspapers! At my timid note of alarm he looked up, frowned a little, then smiled tenderly, and, bounding up the steps, caught me in his arms, pressed me to his breast, carried me down to his den, and after a brief, delicious time of cosseting and soothing, carried me back to bed, and stayed by me, tender as any mother, till I slept!
With his death, our Cumberland home was broken up forever. My mother, with her three young children, was reclaimed by her own mother, who took the long journey from Alexandria to Cumberland to fetch us. It did not seem a hardship to go to live with dear Grandmamma Fairfax - sweetest and gentlest of mortals!
Once, in an outburst of infant rebellion against powers that were, I had conceived the idea of running away from Cumberland to take refuge with her. I had been told the canal passing through our town
ran straight to her neighborhood, so I packed a preposterous little bundle, containing, among other necessaries, a tooth-brush, a prayer-book, and some lumps of sugar, and set out to walk down to the towing- path. A servant of ours, whom I always resented for the interruption to my very first adventure, espied, pursued, and captured me long before I reached the initial stage of my journey - the first lock of the canal.
Grandmamma was now a widow - the cold, stately old patriarch with silver locks and eyes of steely blue, whom I dimly recalled in earliest infancy, having gone to sleep with his grandfathers on the slope of a Virginian hill-side. He had been a wealthy man, as Virginian fortunes went, and to each of his sons - Albert, the eldest, grandfather of the present twelfth lord; Henry, of Ashgrove, a captain in the United States Volunteers, who died of exhaustion in marching through burning sun beside his soldiers in the war in Mexico, to encourage them; Orlando, the "beloved physician" of Alexandria and Richmond; and Reginald, then a lieutenant in the United States navy - he had given an estate, or its equivalent in money.
Vaucluse, the place in Fairfax County near the Theological Seminary of Virginia, had been left to the widow during her lifetime, to her son Reginald after her. And at Vaucluse our composite family lived until it was destroyed by the war between the States. When the dear châtelaine breathed her last there, our sailor uncle declared that everything must be kept as it was, to be a happy port for him at the end of his voyages. I was very much overawed by the continual remembrance of my dead grandpapa when first we reached Vaucluse. I did not dare tell any one how I was possessed by
an image of him when I was three years old (seen through an accidentally opened door, lying in bed in the Long Room in the wing, whether ill or merely asleep I have no idea), but the picture of that stern ivory profile against the pillow, and the long locks like spun glass beside it, haunted me for years with shuddering. There was a flight of stairs leading past his door to my mother's room, up which I used to fly with fast-beating heart after nightfall. Also, I dreaded a long clock-case standing at the foot, which I associated with a story in a chapbook, told me by my nurse, about a corpse set on end in one of them.
My brother tells me there was a tale among the servants at Vaucluse, that my grandfather, once looking in his mirror in the Long Room, saw over his shoulder a negro woman standing, who gazed into his face appealingly. Recognizing her as a servant who had been sent away to Ashgrove, he turned to ask when she had come back and what she was doing there, and found - nobody! Two days later they heard that she had died at Ashgrove at that same hour.
Grandpapa Fairfax was a devout Swedenborgian and had his children baptized in that faith, some of them subsequently being rechristened in the Episcopal Church, by their own desire. It was said in Virginia that in early days he had covers laid at table for the departed members of his family, but for this I cannot vouch. In my time, every place at meals was filled by a very hungry set of material beings. In actual fact, the old gentleman was not so alarming as reputed.
Thomas, ninth Lord Fairfax, although singularly reserved in habit, was a vigorous personality. Son of the Hon. and Rev. Brian Fairfax (eighth lord and rector
of old Christ Church in Alexandria, and life-long friend of Washington) and of Elizabeth Cary, of Ceelys, on the James, he had in boyhood made a journey to England with his Tory father in 1777, in order to make good before the House of Lords the claim of the latter to his title. In this then arduous expedition, made in raw winter weather, the father and son were assisted to pass through the lines of the American army by personal order of General Washington, who also assumed care of the wife and children left behind on the Virginian plantation. A tattered diary and letter written by little Sally Fairfax, during this time, were published by me in Scribner's Magazine for July, 1876, under the title of "A Little Centennial Lady." All that I could hear or glean about this quaint and charming little great-aunt was delightful to me, and a certain phrase in the letter to her sire in London, which he was to "receive owing to the Generall's interposition" has passed into family quotation. "My love to my brother Tommy, with the hope that he will preserve the polite assurance and affable cheerfulness of a gentleman, yet not forgetting the incidents of Fairfax County."
Of the diary I copy a few entries. Amid preparations for a Christmas dance at her father's house, Towlston, little housewife Sally writes: "On Thursday, mama made 6 mince pies and 7 custards, 12 tarts, 1 chicking pye and 4 pudings for the ball."
"Miss Molly Page and Mr. Perce Baillie and Mr. William Page and Mr. William Sandford, Mr. Mody and Miss Jenny, a man who lives at Colchester, Mr. Hurst, Mrs. Hurst's husband, young Harry Gunnell, son of old William Gunnell, John Seal from the little falls, Mr. Watts and Mr. Hunter, (etc, etc, etc) these are all the gentlemen and ladies that were at the
ball. Mrs. Gunnell brought her sucking child with her."
"On Monday night, when papa was at Mount Vernon my aunt Fairfax" [Mrs. George William Fairfax, born Cary] "sent my muslin apron to him which she gave me when I was at Belvoir, but I did not bring it home with me, so she made Miss Polly work it for me, and in it she sent me a note, the apron is mighty pritty."
"On Friday the 3rd, of Janna, came jon vane to undertake the building of the henhouse he got no incouragement so he went away the same way he came."
"On Friday the 3 of Jan came here granny Carty, she cut me out a short gown, and stayed all night."
"On Friday the 3 of Jan, papa went to Collo Washington's and came home again the next Wednesday which was the 8."
"On Friday the 3 of Jan that vile man Adam at night kild a poor cat of rage because she eat a bit of meat out of his hand and scratched it. O vile reach of new negrows if he was mine I would cut him to pieces a son of a gun a vile negrow he should be kild himself by rites."
"On Thursday the 2 of Jan Marjerry went to washing and brought all the things in ready done on the 9 of the same month I think she was a great wile about them a whole week if you will believe me reader."
"On Friday the 10 of Jannuary in the morning came here Danny Govens overseer for Taff, and Taff went away accordingly poor Taff I pitty him indeed, reader."
"On Friday the 17 of Jan I mended Tommy's shirt from head to foot. S. F."
"On Monday the 27 of Jan there fell an amazing snow two foot and a half deep, on Tuesday the 28 of Jan I craked a loaf of sugar, on Tuesday the 28, Adam cut down a cherry tree on Friday the 14 of Febberary, the red and white cow calved and had a red and white calf, 1772. S. FAIRFAX."
We have, alas! no portrait of S. F. in the family gallery. My grandmother, Margaret Herbert, who afterward became brother Tommy's wife, remembered pretty Sally, at seventeen, at the Carlyle house in Alexandria, dressed for a birthright ball, to which General and Mrs. Washington were to take her. She was now engaged to "a young Mr. Washington," cousin or nephew of the general's, and on this occasion the great Washington "devoted himself to her especially, leading off in a minuet with her, when they were the observed of all observers. Sally wore a dress of white net over white satin, the net trimmed with rose-colored satin leaves, a pink rose in her hair, with one white ostrich plume. It was the last ball she ever attended." So poor, bright, quaint little Sally, "the general's" pet of all her family, was cut off on her virgin stalk, dying before her wedding-day.
We always heard that our grandpapa mourned for her to his long life's end.
Later in life, Thomas, Lord Fairfax, again went abroad to take possession of an inheritance coming to him from his aunt, Mrs. George William Fairfax, of Bath, England, born Sally Cary, the famous belle of
Revolutionary times, around whom, with her two sisters, Mary, afterward Mrs. Ambler, and Elizabeth, wife of Brian Fairfax, cluster many a story, with variants, in the histories of the youthful Washington. She, with her Tory husband, finding life in the colony unendurable, had gone to live in England, passing on their voyage out the tea-laden ship that was to work havoc with king-craft in Boston harbor. Some of the silver now in daily use in my home, notably a pair of Corinthian column candlesticks with repoussé bases, was part of their table furniture. A full service of it had originally been brought to the colony by Colonel William Fairfax, of Belvoir, had voyaged back with Mr. and Mrs. George William Fairfax, was again transported to Virginia by my grandfather, used for years at Vaucluse, lay buried under the ruins of Vaucluse during the four years of war, and finally, exhumed intact, was distributed among the Fairfax heirs.
My grandmother, after the Southern custom, perhaps too often followed, was a cousin of her husband. As Margaret Herbert, of Alexandria, she had grown up in the old Carlyle house, with its heavy chimneys, dormer-windows, double balconies, and small-paned windows, now shown to tourists as the scene of Braddock's conference, in 1755, with the five governors of the colonies about the march to Fort Duquesne. The dwelling, in the temporary absence of the family, had been lent for the purpose by her grandfather, Major Carlyle, afterward quartermaster of the expedition, and his wife, Sarah Fairfax, of Belvoir. Traditions of this dwelling, coming to me from her, embody certain visits there "to dine and lie," of General and Mrs. Washington on the occasion of birthright balls at the City Hotel, describe the toilets and trains worn by the ladies,
Sister Nancy's collision with Aaron Burr on the stairway, when he put his hand on his heart with a bow and smile that (we youngsters thought) kept the lady forever unwed, and much of the same kind. The circumstance that I perhaps approved of most was that grandmamma was allowed to "come out" at fourteen!
The two daughters of the house, my mother, and my aunt, Mrs. Hyde, took care between them of the housekeeping. Our servants were hired black people, good and faithful souls, but, thank Heaven! not slaves of ours. My grandfather Fairfax had been the first gentleman in Virginia to manumit his slaves, had each of them taught a trade, and the efficient ones sent to Liberia at his expense. The latter part of his humanitarian scheme was, needless to say, not a success, most of them writing imploring letters to "old marse" to take them back again.
There was no farm attached to the place, only gardens, a chicken-yard, orchard, and dairy, from which the table was supplied with country dainties. In the rooms were assembled the flotsam of family furnishings accumulated from other homes in England and Virginia, Towlston, Belvoir, and Ashgrove. We had on the walls a few interesting old Fairfax portraits: a "Percy, Earl of Northumberland," a "Parliamentary General," a Lady Fairfax with a busk, carrying a long feather in her hand, Roundheads and Cavaliers; and in the secretary many old parchments and a pedigree illuminated in Elizabethan days, with a land transfer of the date of Richard Coeur de Lion. The drawing-room was large and bright, with many windows, all furnished and curtained in crimson damask. A large open grate held in winter a fire of logs and lumps of coal making a royal blaze; upon the mantle were girandoles and ostrich eggs, with some Dresden cups and saucers beautifully painted with wreaths of blossoms. In an alcove to one side were shelves of books, mostly old English volumes, saffron-hued and musty, that when opened were apt to send little queer bloodless insects scuttling out of them. There I sat (oftenest upon my foot) poring over the world of joy I got from this fragment of a library. When not thus employed, I was out-of-doors, scouring the woods, climbing trees, riding horses to water, wading streams, and picking wild flowers. Except for my cousin, Meta Hyde, younger than I, a big-eyed quaint creature whom her brothers teased and petted alternately, I was the only girl child at Vaucluse. Of the young men and boy cousins, passing in and out of the house, Vaucluse sent fourteen or fifteen to the war. They always seemed to me to illustrate what Colonel Lambert told Harry Warrington about the Persians. "They can ride and speak the
truth." The wonder is I was not spoiled utterly by their setting me on a pinnacle and doing all I asked, big or little, in or out of season.
It was then decided by my mother that I could no longer roam and ride, or go shooting with the boys; so, after a long foreign correspondence, a French governess, Mademoiselle Adami, appeared upon the scene and was instructed to keep with me always in my walks abroad. Poor lady! It must be owned that she had her hands full, that I writhed under her mincing conventionalities of social doctrine, and that the boys played many a welcome trick on her, including the offering of persimmons from a tree in the pasture upon which frost had not yet laid its redeeming spell. But she knew how to teach, and in school-hours I was interested, and learned to like reading in French, which I have kept up unremittingly all my life since.
Washington, our chief shopping-place, eight miles distant, was usually attained from Vaucluse in the family coach drawn by two highly groomed chestnuts with long frizzled tails, in which we jogged over the Long Bridge to have our daguerreotypes taken at Whitehurst's, to order bonnets of Miss Wilson, and to eat ices at Gautier's. To keep us children quiet on the drive, so that the elders could talk coherently, it was grandmamma's practice to smuggle into the carriage Scotch cakes, Everton toffee, and rosy apples. While we nibbled and munched (especially if the draw on the bridge were off and some slow-sailing Potomac craft were pursuing its dignified course down the tawny stream) they chatted, and oh! of what interesting things! Of the doings at Queen Victoria's court, which these British lined ladies dearly loved to discuss, of Washington social affairs and notabilities, of the dear bishop our neighbor and matters
of the church in Virginia, of books read, and of events, ancient and modern, in families who somehow or other seemed always to be of kin to ours! As the war came on the talk grew more solemn. They none of them wanted secession, and were waiting to see what Colonel Robert Lee would do. Sometimes mademoiselle was told off to conduct us upon improving visits to the dentist and various government buildings, especially the Patent Office, while my mother and aunt made calls upon old friends. Sometimes we children, too, were taken to call upon long- suffering acquaintances. At the corner of I Street and Sixteenth stood a brick house, overgrown with ivy, around which was a pleasant old garden. Here lived a kinswoman, Mrs. Richard Cutts, and in residence with her was her mother, Mrs. Hackley, sister of my grandmother Cary. My obeisance accomplished to Aunt Hackley, I generally made all speed to the garden in company with our little Cutts cousins, Gertrude (now Mrs. Moorfield Storey, of Boston) and her sister Lucia. My first glimpse of the radiant Adelaide Cutts, afterward Mrs. Stephen A. Douglas, was in this garden, and the vision smote my heart-strings with delight. And, strange to say, in part of the same garden was afterward built the house where I have now pitched my tent, "a day's march nearer home."
My grandmother Fairfax had a daughter, Mrs. Irwin, living in Washington with her husband and two children; so that we had always a pied à terre for visits and stops-over to see special sights. To this kind aunt I owed many happinesses as I grew older, and from her house, years after, I went to my first ball in Washington at the house of my present next-door neighbor - still living in the same spacious mansion, with its wide garden
shadowed on my side by a noble maple, in which, in early spring, to perch numberless migrating birds, including the cardinal grosbeak, who taps at my windowpane and flits through the branches, revealing his scarlet majesty before the leaves are out.
Better even than our visits to the seat of government, I loved those to quiet, dreamy old Alexandria, where every one of the historic cobblestones of King Street (now mercifully broken up, and relaid under a couch of asphalt) had some family chronicle to tell me. Because I may not be able so well to express the spirit of the place as it then appealed to me, I venture to quote here the opening pages of a book of my short stories, called "Belhaven Tales," chiefly published in the Century Magazine. Into that collection crept, without my knowing it, so much of autobiography that I have a kindly feeling even for its faults.
"In the quiet, grass-grown town of Alexandria, first named Belhaven, situated upon the lower bank of the Potomac, in Virginia, might have been perceived, just before the outbreak of the war between the States, a faint flavor of early colonial days lingering like the scent of rose-leaves in an old-time China jar.
"To begin with the streets - what a Tory smack in their names! - King, Prince, Duke, Royal, Queen, Princess, Duchess. Odd enough in the neighborhood of Mount Vernon - nay, under the very shadows, as it were, of the great dome of the National Capitol! At the time referred to, enjoyment for the greater part of a century of the blessings of political enfranchisement had not deprived some Alexandrians of a certain relish for the affairs of the English court. They liked to read the Illustrated London News, and to obtain correct information about the queen's walks with the youthful
royalties and the queen's drives, attended by Ladies X, Y, and Z. Had they not been fed upon the traditions of an English ancestry, as upon the toothsome hams, the appetizing roe-herrings, of their famous market-place? The Georgian era of tea-drinking and tambour, of spangles and snuffboxes, of high play and hair-powder, represented to them the Golden Age in the fortunes of their families of which every vestige must be guarded jealously. As children they had stood on tiptoe to study the lineaments of Great-grandaunt Betty, hanging in the fly-specked frame somewhere near the ceiling, and had been eager to hear how she had been toasted at Mayfair supper-tables or had danced the gavotte at a Ranelagh ball. Yonder beetle-browed warrior in a voluminous wig was a general in Queen Anne's time, before he condescended to his present station above the sideboard. The beautiful youth in armor, slender and graceful, with the fiery eyes, fought for King Charles against the Roundheads, never dreaming that he would come across the seas to find his niche in a staid Virginian sitting-room! In this wainscoted parlor, where the light comes through small, greenish panes of glass veiled with ivy branching from stems knit in a fibrous mass upon the outer wall, had great-grandmamma, dressed in her satin-paduasoy ('You may see a piece of it upon your aunt Prunella's pin-cushion, my dear!'), her hose with silver clocks, stood to receive General Braddock, on occasion of his first visit to the town."
In walking through the streets of Alexandria to-day, one sees residences keeping up the traditions of prosperous hospitality. Enclosed within high-walled gardens, where the Southern sun coaxes from mellow soil jasmines yellow and white, roses in prodigal variety, honeysuckle and other sweet-smelling things, the owners
of these homes dwell year after year, unambitious of change, gazing contentedly from afar upon that "microcosm on stilts, yclept the great world." It is the business quarter of the town that strikes most forcibly the visitor from one of the present centres of American commerce. From this old-time seat of Virginian custom, the "fret and fever of speculation" have forever fled. In the line of warehouses along the wharves the quick "pulse of gain" has ceased to beat. The vessels lying at anchor must be haunted by ghostly crews; they give no sign of life. The steamboat that plies her way between Washington and Alexandria seems to approach the wharf cautiously, as if fearing to awake a slumberer. Even the fishing industry - for the beautiful river has not ceased to yield her tribute - appears to move but languidly. All this has its delightful aspect; and he who would view a lotus-eater in his paradise should watch an Alexandrian darky dangling his legs over the worn beams of the dock under pretence of fishing - listening to the lap of water against the green and shiny piles, and droning away the livelong afternoon until the level sun, which gleams fiery red upon the broken windows of the warehouse at his back, begins to stir in him vague thoughts of corn-pone browning on the cabin hearth at home.
One winter of my early youth spent by us at the Mansion House in King Street, Alexandria, I used to look out, across the way, at a large old brick mansion with closed window shutters wearing a melancholy air of decay. When I asked who lived there, I was told that little girls should not ask questions and I had better run away and play. One day I espied, descending the high steps, the oddest little figure carrying a pitcher in her hand. She was a tiny old lady dressed in an "umbrella"
skirt, with white stockings and black kid slippers, a fantastic scarf around her shoulders, and, to crown all, a poke-bonnet covered with a sprigged black lace veil. Very quietly, with perfect dignity of demeanor, she tripped over to a pump in the neighborhood, filled her pitcher, and returned inside the dismal doorway. Even the street boys failed to jeer at her, and passers-by looked on respectfully. Then, to stay my eager curiosity, her story was told to me. She was a harmlessly mad kinswoman, who lived alone with her equally stricken sister in their old family home, the only survivors of a large household. For some time my grandmother had taken care of their needs, allowing them to remain in the home which they pitifully prayed to keep. Their handsome father, son of an Irish family of ancient lineage who had come to Virginia, it was said, to make good his losses on the Curragh race-track at Kildare, was reputed to be under ban by the priests in his native land because of his offence against the church of pulling down a chapel on the estate and using the stones to build a banquet-hall! Arrived in the New World, he had at first prospered, married an heiress, and had many children. But in the course of years everything went wrong with him; debts and his dissipation wrecked his wife's fortune, every son born to them died by violence or accident; finally, they two passed out of life, leaving these hapless daughters overpowered by their sorrows. One of the sons, with his little boy, died by accidental poisoning at the hands of the family doctor while on a visit to Mount Vernon, and they are both buried there; another, styled "Singing Billy" by the townspeople, having "a voice like an angel heard above all others in Christ Church choir," was, with his brother, swept off by a sudden pestilence of cholera in the
town. Still another was killed by lightning; and one, his exact fate foretold by his negro "mammy" in Alexandria, perished at the hands of Indians on the Western plains.
While I was away at boarding-school in Richmond came tidings that the two afflicted sisters had been finally removed to a sanitarium. The younger, to her life's end, wore around her neck a locket she would allow nobody to open, and it was buried with her. Those of her kindred who went through the forsaken house collecting their scattered belongings described a scene like a page from Dickens's "Great Expectations" - laces, cashmeres, slippers, gowns, heaped in dusty corners, cobwebs everywhere. Thus was wrought out the priest's ban in Ireland, and so ended a hapless family.
Our first place of rest in going to Alexandria was always my uncle's old home in Cameron Street, called "the Fairfax House" on modern post-cards. A hundred associations cluster around that house, with its brick-walled garden and semicircular front steps. There my uncle and his wife exhaled the kindness and fragrance of their truly Christian lives; there their son, the heroic young Randolph Fairfax, was born; there my brother Falkland died, a tragedy in my young life; and there I was one day to be, for the space of twenty-four hours, a prisoner of war.
The house of the two old maiden ladies everybody in our connection called "my aunts" was another, but less popular, resort of our early youth. It had rather a grim exterior, we thought, an impression intensified by our being bidden, before entering, to lay aside any flowers or sweet calycanthus shrubs we might happen to be carrying. It was in King Street, not far
from the river, where, in old times, the lawns in that part of town went down to the water's edge, and the owners of ships could see their cargoes coming safe to port, with everything ordered in England, from silken paduasoys to a coach for driving "four."
It used to be hard for me to picture my elder great-aunt as a "little pet" of family letters, on a visit to Madam Washington at Mount Vernon, learning from her to make a quilt, or perched on a taboret to sing "Ye Dahlian God" at General Washington's request.
But she left that quilt to me, so I know the tale was true. She was rather an alarming old lady, we all thought. Her stern Roman profile resembled that of a warrior on a bas-relief, her hawk's eye seemed to be searching for juvenile depravity. At Vaucluse she would sometimes so alarm shy theological students who came to call that they hardly spoke at all during the visit.
The other aunt was warm, generous, overflowing with the milk of human kindness, a walking encyclopedia of Virginian genealogy. She would "comfort us with apples," also gingercakes, and send us out into the backyard to pick up the little pipes that fell from a great sycamore tree shading it. Sometimes she let us go upstairs to visit a cousin who lived with them, who rarely went abroad on account of her unusual size. This was a very clever, pungent lady, whom we credited with having read all the books in the world, and who bred canary birds.
After "my aunts" came to reside at Vaucluse with "Sister Peggy," I cannot think of its long, cheerful living-room without seeing on either side of the fireplace a large beaded mahogany arm-chair containing an ancient dame poring over books and newspapers, which they kept stuffed around their persons as they sat. They
read, from morning until night, grave books, and all sorts and conditions of fiction, from Madame d'Arblay to George Eliot, when not talking about people who seemed to me coeval with the flood.
At the outbreak of the war, when my mother and Mrs. Hyde elected to leave Vaucluse and go to the scene of fighting in order to be near their volunteer soldiers and serve as nurses if desired, "my aunts" declined to move elsewhere. They were not afraid of armies, nor indeed of anything but mice. They stayed till the place was taken as a United States camp, and when courteously informed by the officer in command that they must go into Alexandria, for which purpose the war-carriage, an ambulance, stood in waiting at the door, the older sister positively refused to move of her own accord; and there she sat defying them, fire in her glance, iron in her veins, till two soldiers between them lifted her, chair and all, and bore her forever from the chimney-corner of Vaucluse.
The aged gentlewomen, finding refuge in the Cameron Street house, lived there during the remainder of the war. They will be kindly remembered by many Alexandrians of the old régime, as by their numerous kin. The older lady, unconscious of her surroundings for some time before the end, would not rest without books and newspapers literally covering her in bed. She bequeathed to me an interesting mezzotint, now hanging in my library, of General Nathanael Greene, presented by Washington to her father, and the counterpane of transfer work made by her at Mount Vernon; one of the Italian cotton toiles de Gênes, so familiar to tourists on the Riviera, cut out and "buttonholed" upon a heavier background, presenting to view a large tree with flowers fruit and birds, all at once upon its branches.
Our neighborhood was always deeply interested in what concerned the Lees, of Arlington, who lived in elegance and comfort not far away. Colonel Lee's splendid, soldierly figure was a mark for general approval when, on his visits home, he rode into Alexandria to visit his old friends. What he said upon subjects of national and civic interest was apt to lead other opinions always. His wife, a daughter of Mr. George Washington Parke Custis, "the old man eloquent," was of kin to us through her mother, a Randolph, and we knew all their boys and girls. I remember Mary Custis Lee, on horseback, accompanied by her little brother "Robbie," on his white pony Santa Anna, riding up on Sunday to service at the chapel of the Theological Seminary; two handsome and gallant figures they seemed to lookers-on. Mildred Lee was my dear friend, and during a tour we made together in the Dolomites, a few years before her death, we loved to conjure up old Arlington and Vaucluse reminiscences. In one of our walks near Cortina, she ventured into an enclosure where a couple of fierce dogs bounded out, barking, upon her; and I, from the road, beheld Mildred go forward to meet them without flinching, reducing both assailants to the condition of fawning upon her knees, she, absolutely calm, with no sign of the quickening of a pulse. The peasant who ran to her aid was astonished out of his wits; but he probably had never heard of General Lee, and was unaware of the transmission of hereditary traits.
The Augustin Washingtons, of Mount Vernon, were rather too far away from Vaucluse for us to see much of them, for our Fairfax County roads were then, as now, not inviting to sociability except on horseback. I had a delightful visit at Mount Vernon in childhood, and after the place became the property of the Women
of America, our cousin, Mr. Upton Herbert, an intimate friend of the late owner, was appointed to be resident superintendent. The most distinguished occasion I can remember at Mount Vernon was that of the visit of the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Newcastle, Sir Henry Holland, Lord Lyons, and others, with President Buchanan and his beautiful niece, Miss Harriet Lane, who came down by water and roamed freely about the old house and grounds. I had the glory of standing by a box hedge in the garden and presenting to his royal highness a basket of flowers picked from bushes traditionally said to have been planted by Mrs. Washington. Of this event I chiefly remember the young prince's charming manner in receiving the token, at once consigned to one of his followers to carry, and my own desperate anxiety lest my leghorn "flat," crowned with a wreath of feather flowers brought by my sailor uncle from Madeira, should have gone askew during my previous wild races through the garden.
On a high bluff commanding beautiful reaches of the Potomac, just below Mount Vernon, from which estate it was divided by a creek called Dogue Run, stand in a tangled wilderness of trees and shrubs, relics of the foundation walls of old Belvoir House, burnt down during the Revolution. This dwelling, familiar in Virginia annals as the home of Colonel William Fairfax, of Yorkshire, collector of the king's customs on the Potomac, and the frequent stopping-place of the bachelor Lord Fairfax of Greenway Court, has an especial interest to patriotic Americans in that it was the second home and beloved resort of Washington in youth. Of Belvoir, he himself writes that the happiest hours of his life were spent there.
My childhood was fed upon stories of old Belvoir and its inmates - the master, Washington's mentor in the art of war - his son, the young soldier who went away from there to find his death with Montcalm before Quebec - he to whom Wolfe said, "Young man, when we come into action, remember the name you bear" - and the sailor boy Thomas who went down in his majesty's ship Harwich fighting the French off Bourdaloue in the East Indies. Anne, the oldest daughter, married Lawrence Washington, and became the first mistress of Mount Vernon. George was Washington's comrade in the surveying tour in the Western wilderness. Hannah became Mrs. Warner Washington, and last, not least, was Brian, my great-grandsire, subsequently eighth lord. I cannot remember when I did not wish that the family would recreate the traditions of this old home. But Hygeia has been against it, for the old bogie of chills and fever to which our Virginian forebears bowed down so meekly - simply recording its annual return in their diaries, taking quinine or its equivalent and quaking without remonstrance - has never been banished from the spot.
My son, Fairfax Harrison, has come nearer than any other to realizing my dreams, for he has established a new Belvoir in Fauquier County, Virginia, upon land formerly belonging to the Greenway Court properties; and upon his library table lies the original "visitors' book" of the Revolutionary home, a copy of Thoresby's "Antiquities of Yorkshire," which, he had the luck to secure from England. Sold with other effects of the Fairfaxes at Bath, England, this interesting volume had for years been in the hands of the antiquarian collector, B. F. Stevens, Esq., in London, where a friend found it, subsequently waiving his right as a purchaser in
favor of my son. Upon its fly-leaves are written many names of the frequenters of old Belvoir, appended to "sentiments," mostly in French or Latin. Three great-great grandsons of the original owner recently inscribed themselves on its time-worn record, headed by the present American-born Lord Fairfax, who, in this twentieth century, has become an English subject, his title confirmed to him by the House of Lords in November, 1908.
As regards the pronunciation of the name "Belvoir," it is probable it was in early days pronounced "Beever," like the seat of the dukes of Rutland, who were akin to the English Fairfaxes. Colonel Harrison Dodge, the representative of the national owners of Mount Vernon, who is nothing if not exact, so pronounces it, but the moderns of our family give it the French sound.
In the small dining-room at Mount Vernon may be seen a fine old iron fireback, reclaimed from the ruins of Belvoir, bearing the lion crest and motto, "Fare Fac."
In our part of the county everything clerical was under the immediate domination of the Theological Seminary. We and other neighborhood families sat on Sundays in the chapel of that institution (my grandmother reserving two front pews in the left-hand transept for herself and guests), the main part of the nave being filled by the students and the high-school boys. Well do I remember when those pews of ours were filled to overflowing by devout female worshippers from Vaucluse - mothers, aunts, and cousins who would not have shirked attendance for the world. They made nothing of two services and two sermons a day, and if the great and learned Dr. Sparrow
chanced to be in the pulpit, those sermons were no twenty-minute screeds! Other professors beloved in our circles were the Rev. Doctors Packard and May; and at a little distance to the left, going down the hill where in my time blue iris bordered the roadside, lived dear Bishop Johns, genial, lovable, and strong mentally, as befits a father in the church. It was the custom of our neighborhood to give from time to time tea-parties to the clergy and seniors among the students. On these evenings my grandmother's table was spread with her fairest damask, the best silver, cut glass, and a service of early Derby china, deep lapis lazuli blue, bordered with gilt, with pink eglantine in the centre. A few cups and plates of this china deck my shelves to-day. Among the dainties heaped on the table one may be sure broiled chicken and thinnest slices of pink ham were not absent; nor hot Maryland biscuit, thin biscuit, every kind of biscuit, fresh butter, and a bewildering variety of preserves, including segments of watermelon rind carved like lace work, with peaches and quinces in amber syrup, for the clergy always liked Vaucluse preserves. Next followed a course of waffles, crisp and golden brown, over which one was asked to shake, out of the sifter of Queen Anne silver, a shower of sugar and cinnamon combined. To these reflections, in their turn came Messrs. Phillips Brooks and Henry Potter (already in their student days a head higher intellectually than the average of their fellows, and much in demand by Hill hostesses) with many another subsequent dignitary of the church. With the Hyde children and Clarence, I used to peep agape through the pantry door as it opened for the passage of successive good things, and wonder if the clericos intended to eat all night!
Among our neighbors were the McGuires, of Howard, he the reverend rector of the Episcopal High School, she a delightful whole-souled woman, born Brockenborough, who afterward wrote a lively chronicle of war days; the families of the professors I have named, and the household of General Samuel Cooper, then United States adjutant- general in Washington, who had a country home, Cameron, on the hill. Mrs. Cooper was a daughter of George Mason, of Gunston Hall, and sister-in-law of General Lee's brother, Admiral Sydney Smith Lee. She had two daughters, Maria (Mrs. Wheaton), and Jennie, a great friend of mine. The Coopers, who drove to service in a two-horse carriage with a smart coachman, took the pas over Vaucluse in this respect, since we either walked or drove ourselves in a one-horse rockaway, our servants all having holiday on Sunday, it seemed to us.
Near Cameron lived Miss Emily Mason, with her widowed sister, Mrs. Rowland, agreeable and cultivated women both, with Mrs. Rowland's two daughters and two sons. Miss Mason, since widely known for her noble service as an army nurse as well as for her literary works and compilations, was an especial spot of sunshine on "the Hill." She died in Georgetown, very recently, at an advanced and green old age.
Commodore French Forrest, with his gentle wife and his son, the late Rev. Douglas Forrest, once of the C. S. A., lived at Clermont. It was an attractive house, with wonderful box hedges and calycanthus bushes of unusual size. I remember a dance given by handsome Mrs. Forrest, when I wore a white "book-muslin," with my hair glued to my head with bandoline, then plaited in sixteen-strand braids coiled in a basket low upon the neck, in which were inserted
white cape-jasmines set in rose-geranium leaves. We danced hard till daybreak, and I drove home in a buggy with one of the older male cousins without dreaming of a chaperon.
Near Vaucluse lived our cousin Arthur Herbert, of Muckross (he was like the youngest son of grandmamma's household), who was to go off to war as captain in the Seventeenth Regiment of Alexandria Volunteers, and after four years of hard fighting, through almost every battle of the army of northern Virginia, come back as colonel, with a record of many gallant deeds, and settle again in his old home. He found the crest of the hill on which his former house had stood bare of everything - dwelling, trees, fences, and outhouses all gone; but a United States fort built upon the site had left behind casemates of solid masonry, serving as fine cellars for the new house. Colonel Herbert married Miss Alice Gregory, of Petersburg, and, with their family, has continued to reside at Muckross - named for the original home of the Herberts near Killarney, in Ireland.
Farther up in the county abode Mrs. Fitzhugh, of Ravensworth, the aunt by marriage of Mrs. Lee, of Arlington, to whose second son, General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee, she bequeathed her ancient estate. A visit I once made to Ravensworth, from Mr. Upton Herbert's neighboring "Bleak House," has been always remembered pleasantly. When my cousin Upton was nearly eighty, he used to make his visits to Ravensworth riding upon a fiery young unbroken colt, and the Lee family would send a mounted servant after him when he returned to Bleak House, with orders not to show himself, but to keep the old gentleman in sight.
At Ravensworth, to-day, lives the widow of General W. H. Fitzhugh Lee (once handsome Miss Bolling, of
Petersburg), with her sons, and General Custis Lee, who, dispossessed of Arlington, has since made his home with his late brother's family.
Time glided by peacefully in our sweet old home, broken only by the necessary severing of links in the chain of life that, by Heaven's mercy, close again to give us courage to go on. The early death of my brother Falkland, was followed in a few years by that of my gentle grandmother. We had few excitements; occasionally we went to the Springs, to make visits at Charlottesville, Baltimore, or Washington, and to the country-houses of friends. I visited sometimes at the Vineyard, the home of Mr. Conway Robinson, the learned Virginian jurist, near Washington. His son, Leigh Robinson, a brilliant graduate of the University of Virginia, fought through the war in the Army of Northern Virginia, and has since been at the bar in Washington. I had one journey, only, to the North, to visit the home of my aunt and uncle, the Gouverneur Morrises, of Morrisania. Not only did it seem wonderful to be penetrating to such a far-away region as New York, but I had heard such interesting stories about Morrisania: How it was built upon the site of his earlier home by Gouverneur Morris, member of the convention which adopted the Constitution of the United States, senator, and minister to France during the Reign of Terror - who had known familiarly all the great actors of that awful drama, and the grandees of other countries. How he had come back to live at Morrisania, bringing a ship-load of relics from old palaces in France, mirrors, tapestries, gilded chairs and couches, books, a rare dessert service of old Sèvres, with forks and spoons of solid gold - and had put all these inside the oak-panelled
walls of his home on the Harlem Kills, where they still remained. How he had entertained Talleyrand, the Jerome Bonapartes, Tom Moore, and all the visiting celebrities as well as statesmen of his day. How his romantic marriage at sixty with Miss Anne Randolph, of Virginia, had occurred there, his wife having a year later given him his only son, the then master of the house. How this second Gouverneur had in his turn married a Virginian lady, a first cousin. How when Grandmamma Cary went to see her nephew at Morrisania, in the early days after her sister's death, they would drive and drive, and be always, like the Marquis of Carabas, upon his own land! Now the estate had come down to forty acres surrounding the delightful, mellow old house. Piece by piece, my uncle had sold it for stations on the Hartford and New Haven railways, or else the great encroaching monster of New York had swallowed it by bits.
Naturally, I was eager to visit there, and it was a time of unalloyed pleasure with my uncle and aunt and their family of boys and girls near my own age.
But nothing whispered to me that one day, after a terrible war that should destroy my own home, I would be married from Morrisania. And yet this was to be!
I am making no attempt to record chronologically the events of my modest experience in childhood. I am simply writing down, as they drift to me out of the mists of memory, things about the people most familiar to me, thinking it may interest readers as a page torn from old- time chronicles of American social life before the war. The two or three years after the reign of my French governess came to an end, were spent by me in Richmond at the boarding-school of M. Hubert Pierre Lefebvre. As a rule, narratives of boarding-school life
are more interesting to the teller than to hearers, and I will only say that the experience broadened my horizon in introducing to me types of girls from the higher classes of society all over the South, and convincing me that the surrounding slave service was inspiring neither to the energy of body nor independence of ideas I had been taught to consider indispensable. Many of these pretty, languid creatures from the far Southern States had never put on a shoe or stocking for themselves; and the point of view of some about owning and chastising fellow-beings who might chance to offend them was abhorrent to me. But they all came out grandly during the war, and after it.
In some mysterious way I had drunk in with my mother's milk - who inherited it from her stern Swedenborgian father - a detestation of the curse of slavery upon our beautiful Southern land. Then, of course, omnivorous reader that I was - I had early found and devoured "Uncle Tom's Cabin," "that mischievous, incendiary book," as some of our friends called it. When the thunderbolt of John Brown's raid broke over Virginia I was inwardly terrified, because I thought it was God's vengeance for the torture of such as Uncle Tom.
I was on a visit to my aunt, Mrs. Irwin, in Washington, following Mr. Lincoln's inauguration, while yet arose in many households spirited discussion concerning the trend of national events. We young people had not waked up to a full understanding of the issues involved, nor had become the fierce partisans of after days. When, therefore, my aunt's husband (who remained a supporter of the Union during the war) insisted that, as an epoch in life, I should be taken to see the new President, I went with him to one of the levees at the White House. A terrible crush of people, it
seemed to me, of all sorts and conditions, foreign ministers preceding backwoodsmen in flannel shirts and Sunday coats, great ladies of the administration, in line with struggling women and children hardly dressed or kempt for festal occasion. That was the reception where the curtains had pieces cut out of them for souvenirs by the backwoodsmen, who, it was said, swarmed to Washington in the wake of the "man of the people." Budding secessionist although I was, I can distinctly remember that the power of Abraham Lincoln's personality then impressed itself upon me for a lifetime. Everything faded out of sight beside the apparition of the new President, towering at the entrance of the Blue Room. He held back the crowd a minute, while my hand had a curious feeling of being engulfed in his enormous palm, clad in an ill-fitting white kid glove. He said something kind to his youthful visitor, and over his rugged face played a summer lightning smile. We passed on, and I saw him no more till he drove past our house in captured Richmond, in an ambulance, with his little son upon his knee.
One of the letters from my mother of this date told how at the last moment before leaving Vaucluse, having no way of despatching the silver to a safety-vault in Washington or Alexandria, she had undertaken to bury it in the cellar of the house. Aided by a young nephew who was to go on the morrow to volunteer at Manassas, and a faithful old negro gardener, who died soon afterward, they worked half the night (she holding a lantern) till pits were made large enough to contain two large travelling trunks, into which the silver
had been hastily packed. The pits filled in and rubbish strewn over them, my mother got into the carriage before daybreak and drove away to the Confederate lines.
Four years later, the house having been destroyed by incendiaries, all the trees on the place cut down for breastworks, and the site used for a United States camp during many months, she came back to her home, accompanied by men with spades and picks. Save for slight depressions in the grass, there was no token of where the house had stood, and many bewildered moments were spent in searching for it. Some hours followed while the men toiled, and my mother sat on the ground and looked on, amid gathering tears. Any idle soldier prodding the ground might have struck the boxes, she argued, and there was little hope. Just as she was about giving the order to stop work, one of the men cried out, holding up a teaspoon black as jet! Soon the earth was covered with dark objects from around which the boxes had rotted. Candelabra, urn, tea-set, tankards, bowls, dishes, and the complete service of small silver were recovered, not a salt-spoon missing! Sent to Galt's, in Washington, for treatment, they were soon restored to pristine brilliancy.
In Mrs. Judith Brockenborough McGuire's "Diary of a Southern Refugee" is found the following, under date of July 30, 1862:
"Vaucluse, too, the seat of such elegant hospitality, the refined and dearly loved home of the Fairfax family, has been levelled to the earth, fortifications thrown up across the lawn, the fine old trees felled, and the whole grounds, once so embowered and shut out from public gaze, now laid bare and open - Vaucluse no more!"
If we were to join her at all, wrote my mother from Bristoe Station, it must be now, as who knew when the military lines might shut us out? She warned me in eloquent phrase that our sylvan paradise at Millwood must be exchanged for a poor little roadside tavern on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, treeless, shabby, crowded to excess with officers' families, under burning sun all day, no ice for rather muddy water, no fruit, the plainest of fare, and nowhere to walk but up and down the railway track. Per contra, the camp containing our boys was but five miles away; we should get all the army news direct; and day after day would see trains thundering by, full of eager soldiers, thrilling and shouting with joy that they were so near the goal! When the battle came we should be nearest it, to do our best for them. If our troops were to be driven back - why, then, we would "take our chance!"
We went. By lumbering stage-coach down the peaceful Shenandoah Valley, clad in the radiancy of summer foliage, by way-train here and there, passing "the Junction," the centre of all hopes and thoughts, the cradle of the future Army of Northern Virginia - arriving safely and gladly at Bristoe to "take our chance" with the others.
The month that elapsed before the first battle of the war, on July 18, 1861, was one in which I woke up to the strongest feeling of my young life. My mother saw her only remaining son, aged fifteen, looking several years younger, go into service as a marker in an Alexandria regiment. She sewed for him, with the neatest of stitches, white gaiters, and a "havelock" for his cap - these afterward abandoned by authority as too shining marks for riflemen - tears dropping now and then upon her handiwork, but never a thought of telling
him he should not go. All about me were women ready to give their all. I realized that love of country can mean more than love of self.
In the family carriage, sold later as a superfluity of luxury to refugees and hospital nurses, we drove to several impromptu entertainments at Camp Pickens, during the month of waiting the enemy's advance. What young girl's heart would not beat quicker in response to such experience? There were dinners cooked and served to us by our soldier lads, spread upon rough boards, eaten out of tin plates and cups amid such a storm of rollicking gayety and high hope that war seemed a merry pastime. In the infancy of war, the Louisiana chieftain, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, of ancient Creole family, was distinctly looked upon as the future leader of the Confederacy. His name was upon all lips, his praise on every breeze that blew. Some early war rhymester wrote verses, of which the refrain was:
"Beau canon, Beauregard! Beau soldat,
Beauregard!
Beau sabreur! Beau frappeur! Beauregard,
Beauregard!"
Needless to say that to be received with visitors' honors at his head-quarters was a source of undying pride. We met there the lamented Brigadier-General Bartow, killed at the first battle of Manassas; General Longstreet, who in those days, before he lost several children at once by scarlet fever, was rollicking and jolly always, looking, as his aid, Moxley Sorrel, afterward said of him: "Like a rock of steadiness when sometimes in battle the world seemed flying to pieces"; and many another destined to high fame. There were drills, dress parades, and reviews, viewed from the headquarters tents of great generals. In all our dreams
sounded the blare of trumpets, the roll of drums. And so till the morning of July 17, when word came that our troops were moving forward!
Now knew we the rude reality! Those women and girls and children left at Bristoe, who, on the 18th, spent all day on the railway tracks, straining eyes and ears in the direction of the belt of woodland above which arose columns of gun smoke, hearing the first guns of the war as distinctly as one hears a fog-horn on an Atlantic liner, had mostly all they loved best in the fight. It seemed eternal, that sullen roar of artillery, that crackle of fire-arms. And who should say how it was coming out? We could not rest; we could not speak or eat. Toward afternoon appeared, limping down a long, red clay road, a single, smoke-stained, fiery-faced bandaged soldier. With one accord the women fell upon him like a swarm of bees, questioned, fed, soothed, exalted him. He was rather a dreadful-looking person, we had to own, and his manner unpleasant, to say the least. His wound, on examination, proved a mere scratch on the middle finger, but he rose to the occasion as a hero, and answered our fevered, eager queries with statements that took our breath away.
"The Seventeenth Virginia," he responded to our especial inquiry. "Why, they fought like tigers and was cut all to pieces. Hardly an officer was left."
A beaming smile and a strong whiff of whiskey accompanying this revelation, we took heart to doubt. But none the less, that first wounded soldier from Bull Run had enjoyed a monopoly of patriotic sympathy never again to be surpassed.
A little later we heard of Confederate victory and that our boys were safe. It nerved us for the evening's work. After dark, a train came thundering into our station,
stopping to ask food and drink for the wounded. By lantern light we passed through the cars, carrying and distributing all there was to give.
Over and again we were to do this service during the four years to come. Never, perhaps, with such keen emotion.
The day before, a closely veiled, shabbily dressed little woman, her luggage a small archaic hair-trunk inscribed with undistinguished name, had been put off a train from Richmond upon the platform before our poor, overpacked hostelry. In vain did Lipscomb, our distracted host, assure her there wasn't a room or a bed left for any one - nothing save a servant's pallet on the floor of a hot garret. Also, he stated, looking her over doubtfully, all the occupants of this 'hotel' were members of officers' families well known to General Beauregard. She kept her ground manfully, explained that she had been ill of typhoid, had come all the way from New Orleans to be near her brother at the front, and had no strength to turn back; so he gave her the garret, where a negro girl carried her food and drink; and we lookers-on thought no more of her in the greater excitement of the coming battle.
In the evening, my mother having gone on to Culpeper Court House to volunteer as a nurse in the new military hospital, my aunt, who was busy elsewhere, suggested that I go up to see what had become of the odd little woman in the garret. When I tapped at the door it was no uneducated voice that bade me enter, but one sweet and refined, coming from a girl huddled on a chair near the window, who sprang up to meet me with a cry of joy.
"News! News from the front?" That was all she wanted, not supper or anything. The servant girl had
told her the troops were moving. It was a mercy to speak to any one; she had cried all day, and now thought she would go mad.
Little by little, it came out that she was the petted daughter of a wealthy Creole family, engaged to a lieutenant of artillery, with whom she had quarrelled and broken just as he went off to Virginia with the battalion in which her brother was also an officer. Repenting, she tried to wire him her regrets, and finally, on the impulse of a moment, had left the plantation where her family were, went into her mother's town house, possessed herself of the housekeeper's trunk and garments, and set off for Virginia. Her intention, only to see him and then go back again, spite of her dread of the brother's wrath should he find out her escapade, was now frustrated by the movement to the front!
Taken thus into confidence in a rare romance of which the heroine seemed to my fervid imagination one of the most fascinating little creatures ever seen - charmed by her good looks, her dainty lingerie with fine embroidery and lace, the rich toilet articles strewn about, and the gold-mounted writing-case from which she took her lover's portrait to show it to me I readily promised secrecy and, if possible, help. She cheered up at this, and to my surprise ended by kissing me, then promised to eat her neglected supper and try to sleep.
During the battle, next day, she again passed out of my mind, and when, at dusk, a shabby little veiled figure stole up upon the platform and begged me to go with her for an instant to her room, I acquiesced. When there, she burst into a storm of tears and sobs. The day had nearly killed her, she had spoken to nobody, her heart was breaking with anxiety. She had heard there was a list of wounded in the grocery store; would I
mind seeing whether his name or her brother's was upon it?
And then she told the names which I was to come to know well and respect in after days!
I coaxed her downstairs again, and while all the rest of us squeezed into the little country store where, behind the counter, by the light of a tallow candle, a man was spelling out a newly arrived register of the casualties of the day, she stood outside in the darkness, afraid to show herself. Begging for a glance at the paper, I ran my eye hastily over it, and the third or fourth name was that of her lover, "badly wounded!" And - strange happening of my first war love-story! - just after I had induced her to go back to her room with her misery, the first train of wounded men from Manassas slowed up at Bristoe, and while every woman and girl in the hotel except herself went through it carrying milk, water, brandy, and bread, to my lot it fell to minister to a young Louisiana artilleryman lying upon a cot in a freight car, suffering greatly, but with perfect fortitude; while she who had been his affianced was at ten steps from him, wearing her heart out in longing for him, yet knowing nothing of his vicinity.
The sequel of this episode was, alas! not cheerful. They met again in Richmond, whither he was taken and she followed, but the breach between them widened instead of drawing together, and then two lives went apart.
On Saturday evening, July 20, a messenger was sent by General Beauregard to the ladies and children at Bristoe, saying that an engine and car would be placed at their disposal, with urgent advice for them to leave immediately for a point of greater safety, since a battle was impending upon whose issue it was impossible to
count. The women, sewing flannel shirts and making bandages fast as hands could fly, looked at each other and sent thanks to the general, with the answer that they preferred to stay.
That Sunday of the "first Manassas" was a repetition on a larger scale of our experience of the 18th. Some women sewed awhile, then ran bareheaded, desperate, out in the burning sun to look, to listen, to pray, to yearn! With every fresh roar of cannon came the piercing javelin of thought, "Was mine taken then?" "Was mine?"
By mid-day we heard of victory and the rout of the Federal forces. By evening we had individual returns. Again, those most near to us were preserved in safety.
My brother, the marker, although twice ordered by his sympathetic superiors to the rear to guard hospital stores, had managed to get his full share of the excitement. The story told by his captain of seeing the tired little fellow, during an interval in the fight, asleep under a tree, near which a shell had burst without warning or awakening him, went into the newspapers with sundry other more sensational accounts of his prowess, since disavowed. He told us of wading Bull Run quite up to his knees, in pursuit of the fleeing enemy, and of the long tramp to Fairfax Court House and back; the greatest hardship to our troops being that they were obliged to pass by forsaken tents with delicious soup boiling itself away upon the fires, and abundant food everywhere - together with a sutler's wagon broken open, its tempting contents scattered on the ground - when all they could lay hold of as first spoils of war was a jar of "sticks of candy," greatly enjoyed in the ranks as far as it would go.
My brother was that same evening ordered by General Longstreet, who picked him up upon the field, to his head-quarters as "courier." His duties of message-carrying to the various head-quarters through the camps were made lighter by the necessity of exercising the fine horses of a late staff officer, Colonel Fisher, killed in the action of the 21st, and his leisure time more pleasant by the society of Colonel Moxley Sorrel and an afterward much-talked-of Major Terry, a noted scout and Texan ranger, who delighted him by stories of Indian warfare on the plains, etc.; the line of demarcation between officers and privates having hardly yet made itself felt, so numerous were the gentlemen in ranks. Shortly afterward, through our friend, Congressman W. W. Boyce, of South Carolina, Clarence received his commission as midshipman in the Confederate States navy, and reported for duty in Richmond. From that time till the end of the war he was in active service whenever opportunity occurred.
A fact about the first battle of Manassas told to me by my husband, years later, as an authentic instance of the secret history of the war, may be inserted here. A lady in Washington it was, a member of the family of Mrs. Dolly Madison, who actually enabled the Confederate generals to win that important victory in July, 1861, and the Confederate government, after that success, to muster men and resources in the South unavailable had we suffered defeat. The fact was well known and always admitted by Confederate authorities.
An impatient expectation was at fever heat in both North and South. General Scott and his lieutenants were incessantly urged by his government to move upon the enemy. The whole Northern press was clamoring
"on to Richmond." "We shall move to-morrow," was repeatedly announced from Washington, to be followed, on the morrow, by the explanation, "The advance is necessarily delayed for a week, for further preparation." By the middle of July, everything seemed to depend for the South upon concentration of our forces at the exact moment of advance, before General McDowell could be reinforced by General Patterson. Until then, her brigades must be kept widely distributed - General Johnston before Martinsburg, General Bonham at Fairfax Court House, General Holmes on the Potomac, near Eastport; a force that, if assembled, would be greatly outnumbered by General McDowell's single column.
To accomplish this end, General Beauregard must know exactly when McDowell should be ordered to begin his march of invasion.
From the lady in Washington this fateful information came to Confederate head-quarters, carried by a trusty messenger down the Potomac on the Maryland side, who, crossing near Dumfries, reached Manassas at the critical instant, safely arrived with a note, reading as follows:
"McDowell has certainly been ordered to advance on the sixteenth. (Signed) R. O. G."
The informant's initials and handwriting were recognized, her statement accepted. Bonham, pulled behind the line of Bull Run, narrowly escaped his pursuers, who, at noon on the 17th, marched through what had been his camp. Holmes was brought up on the right; Johnston was called down from before Patterson, to arrive in the very nick of time during the battle of
the 21st when the unexpected appearance of his men threw McDowell's right into confusion, resulting in the panic and rout of his army.
So much for a clever woman's use of official information gained unexpectedly. Not the first time, however, that a woman's touch has set the pendulum of a nation's fate aswing!
My dearest mother was by now well launched in her hospital nursing at Culpeper Court House, first, among the many soldiers ill in the Methodist church, and, later, among the wounded. Her life from this time forward (afterward at Camp Winder, near Richmond) was of the hardest and most heroic kind. I have never known any woman possessed of better qualifications for her task. With a splendid physique, almost unbroken good health, a tireless hand, and a spirit of tender sympathy, she was the ideal attendant upon homesick boys from the far South, disheartened by illness at the outset of their campaign, as well as those cruelly mangled and wounded in the first fights. Almost every comfort we have nowadays in nursing was absent from the beginning, and toward the last the hospitals were unspeakably lacking in needfuls. Sleeping on a soldier's bunk, rising at dawn, laboring till midnight, my mother faced death and suffering with the stout spirit that was a rock of refuge to all around her. Her record, in short, was that of a thousand other saintly women during that terrible strife. How many dying eyes looked wistfully into hers; how many anguished hands clung to hers during operations or upon death-beds! What poor lonely spirits far from home and kin took courage from her lips, to flutter feebly out into the vast unknown! What words of Christian cheer she whispered! what faith, hope, love were embodied in that tall, noble figure
and sweet, sad face moving tirelessly upon her rounds!
"They call to me all over the church like a set of boys after their mother," she wrote me at this time, "and tell me they should give up and die if I left them," and then, characteristically modest, she begs me not to show this letter to any one. And here, a lifetime intervening, I venture to disobey her!
A week after the first battle of Manassas I rode on horseback with a party over the field, between hill-sides piled with hecatombs of dead horses and scattered with hasty graves. The trees and undergrowth were broken and bullet-riddled. The grass between the scars of upturned earth was green as if it had known no baptism of fire and blood, and little wild flowers had already begun to bloom again, but for obvious reasons we could take but a passing glimpse. I saw a ghastly semblance of a hand protruding at one spot, and thought of it when I stood in the crypt of the Pantheon, in Paris, by the gloomy tomb of Rousseau, where a skeleton hand holds up from within the bronze coffin lid of the French philosopher and epoch-maker.
My mother had arranged for me to stay near her at Culpeper, at a beautiful old place called Belpré, where I was most kindly entreated and made one of themselves by the family. It was my wise mother's desire that I, already pressing forward into unwonted privilege and eager to consider myself "a young lady," should be put back into the place habitual to immature years, and spend my days in reading and study. Alas! it was wartime; I had already tasted the sweets of emancipation; the woods were full of handsome and delightful officers and privates, eager to be entertained and heartened for the fray. Like all the other girls of my acquaintance
thereabout, I grew up in a night, and soon there was plenty of women's work for us!
Even now, writing of it after so many, many years, I seem to feel again the pulse of that thrilling time. And it was here that there came intimately into my life one of its strongest influences, in the radiant person of my cousin, Hetty Cary, daughter of my uncle, Wilson Miles Cary, of Baltimore, my father's elder and only brother. She, with her younger sister, Jennie, had taken the lead in the secessionist movement among the young girls in Baltimore, who, having seen all their best men march across the border to enlist with the Confederates for the war, relieved their strained feelings by overt resentment of the Union officers and troops placed in possession of their city.
It was Jennie Cary who set Randall's stirring poem of "Maryland" to the air of "Lauriger Horatius" (brought to her by Burton Harrison, when a student at Yale College), and first sang it with a chorus of her friends in a drawing-room in Baltimore. She tells me that the refrain, as originally printed in the copy of verses cut by them out of a newspaper, was simply "Maryland!" and that she added the word "My" in obedience to the exigency of the music. As the song thus boldly chanted by young Confederate sympathizers, in a city occupied by their enemy and under strict martial rule, was to drift over the border, to be caught eagerly by the troops of the Maryland line, and to echo down the ages as the most famous battle-song of the Confederacy, it is fitting that to Miss Jennie Cary should be awarded all the honor of this achievement. We both sang it amid a little group of visitors in September, 1861, standing in the doorway of Captain Sterrett's tent at Manassas, the men of the Maryland line facing us in
the dusk of evening. This was in answer to the request sent in from the soldiers to their friend, Captain Sterrett, "that they might hear a woman's voice again." I can hear now the swing of that grand chorus, as the men gradually caught up the refrain and echoed it, and by next day, to our joy and pride, the whole camp at Manassas was resounding with "My Maryland!"
Miss Hetty Cary, as fearless as she was beautiful, having incurred the displeasure of the military government of Baltimore by shaking from the window of her father's home, while the Union troops marched by it, a Confederate banner smuggled through the lines, had been warned to leave Baltimore under penalty of immediate arrest and transfer to a Northern bastile. The two sisters, carrying drugs for the hospitals and uniforms for friends, had run the blockade with their brother, crossing to join the army through many perilous adventures, and were now stopping with friends in Orange, to be ultimately under my mother's chaperonage. I had always looked up to my cousin, Hetty, as a young girl is apt to do to an acknowledged belle and beauty older than herself, with a sort of adoring championship, and as circumstances were to throw us into the closest intimacy, I hardly believed in my good fortune, that summer, of going around with her in the exciting diversions of the hour.
Lest I be thought over-partial, I will quote an extract from a newspaper letter describing my cousin to the readers of the New Orleans Crescent (which gives also a fair idea of the liberality of praiseful epithet bestowed by Southerners upon their elected belles):
"Look well at her, for you have never seen, and will probably never see again, so beautiful a woman! Observe her magnificent form, her rounded arms, her neck
and shoulders perfect as if from the sculptor's chisel, her auburn hair, the poise of her well-shaped head. Saw you ever such color on woman's cheek? And she is not less intelligent than beautiful.... She is dressed in pure white. It is worth a king's ransom, a lifetime of trouble, to look at one such woman. No wonder Beauregard pronounced her the most beautiful in that city of lovely women - Baltimore."
Such, with variants, was the kind of rhetoric bestowed on this young lady in her path through life. Perhaps the best thing I can say of her is that it never spoiled her, that she was always simple, straightforward, generous, and high- minded - daring to a fault, but not stooping from her inheritance of good breeding and gentle womanhood. In her train, her sister and I enjoyed some merry experiences of military entertainment that would not otherwise have come our way. In addition to the already-spoken-of visit to Manassas, in September of that year - when our party slept, or rather giggled, half the night, upon layers of cartridge flannel on the hard floor of a tent, with a row of hoop-skirts hanging like balloons on the pole overhead, and soldiers guarding us outside - we enjoyed a dinner with General Beauregard upon what he called his "last duck." On this occasion was organized the troop of the "Cary Invincibles." On a scrap of torn blue paper I find pencilled the list of its officers, including myself as "captain- general"; Miss Hetty Cary, lieutenant-colonel; Miss Jennie Cary, first lieutenant, etc., etc., with many dignitaries of the day placed in inferior positions! Colonel A. S. Barbour and Colonel H. W. Vandegrift were our military engineers; staff officers, Colonel W. W. Boyce and Lieutenant P. B. Hooe; Lieutenant-Colonel William Munford was historian and bard; the Hon.
Mr. Clingman, private secretary; Mr. John Addison, chief cook; Governor Manning, scribe-general; and the vivandière was Mr. A. D. Banks.
To the readers of that ineffable romance, "The Heroine," will immediately occur the personnel of the Lady Cherubina de Willoughby's followers! So much fun grew out of our organization, and so much wit was lavished upon it by others, I venture to insert our nonsense here.
The Cary Invincibles being once bidden to a certain head-quarters dinner, given on a hot summer's day at a little roadside cabin near Bull Run, were treated afterward to the stirring spectacle of a division on the march, defiling along a red clay road gashed in Virginia soil, thus to be pictured by me as it appeared to my eager eyes:
"What was yonder cloud of luminous vapor rolling in - that wave of sound, gathering strength and substance as it reached the ear? Presently, emerging from the golden mist, we saw, first, horsemen, pacing leisurely; then caissons and guns; and after them, rank upon rank of marching men in gray! And above the dust, banners of scarlet crossed with blue!" And as they passed our group, some officer, recognizing us, started a chant, caught up along the line and rendered into a grand sonorous swing:
"She
breathes, she burns, she'll come, she'll come
Maryland!
My Maryland!"
There were our merry hosts, joining in the refrain with tremendous lung power; and there were we three girls laughing and crying, at once, in our delight. Who ever before had the luck, or planned with such consummate skill, so to entertain guests?
In the autumn, when my cousins had gone to Albemarle to visit relatives, we three had the honor of being asked by the committee of Congress to make the first battle-flags of the Confederacy after the design finally decided on by them. It is generally stated by historians that these flags were constructed from our own dresses, but it is certain we possessed no wearing apparel in the flamboyant hues of poppy red and vivid dark blue required. We had a great search for materials. I had to content myself with a poor quality of red silk for the field of mine, necessitating an interlining, which I regretted. I have always been sorry we did not keep the model sketches, with directions, assigned to us by the committee which decided the matter, and delivered by Major A. D. Banks. Our work done, a golden fringe sewed around each flag (and, in my case, my name embroidered upon it in golden letters), we were at liberty to present them as head-quarters banners to our favorite generals. Miss Hetty Cary, having first choice, sent hers to General Joseph E. Johnston, Miss Jennie Cary's went to General Beauregard - serving to drape the coffin of Beauregard and of Jefferson Davis - and mine to General Earl Van Dorn, a dashing cavalry leader, for whom was then predicted great fame and success. I had never seen Van Dorn, and was rather alarmed at my temerity in selecting him, but I knew his aide-de-camp, Captain Durant da Ponté, grandson of the librettist of "Don Giovanni," and himself a charming poet. Through Captain da Ponté, I was emboldened to send off my flag, with the following note. In those days, as I have shown, we were in favor of the flowery style of expressing high sentiment. I transcribe the correspondence from a newspaper clipping of the period:
"CULPEPER COURT HOUSE, VA.,
"Will General Van
Dorn honour me by accepting a flag
which I have taken great pleasure in making, and now send
with an earnest prayer that the work of my hand may hold
its place near him as he goes out to a glorious struggle -
and, God willing, may one day wave over the re-captured
batteries of my home near the down-trodden Alexandria ?
"I am, very respectfully, Genl. Van Dorn's obedient
servant,
"CONSTANCE CARY."
"ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, MANASSAS,
"To MISS CONSTANCE CARY, CULPEPER C. H.
"In the meantime, I shall hope that you may be as happy
as you, who have the soul thus to cheer the soldier on to
noble deeds and to victory - should be, and that the
flowers wont to bloom by your window, may bloom
as sweetly for you next May, as they ever did, to welcome
you home again.
"Very truly and respectfully, dear lady, I am your
humble and obedient servant.
"EARL VAN DORN,
Captain da Ponté
told me that when the flag arrived at
Van Dorn's head-quarters and was adopted into the
division, a young officer sprang up, unsheathed his sword,
and held it hilt downward upon the table, while one after
the other of his comrades clasped the blade; when all
swore a knightly oath to make good the giver's petition,
after which they drank to the flag and to her.
Ah! well! One may grow old and the snows of
"yesteryear" may have fallen thick over young hearts and
hopes, but one does not forget such scenes or the spirit
that inspired them!
One day at Culpeper, when I sat sewing with my
mother, I was summoned to see a man who said he "was a
messenger from General Van Dorn." I found awaiting me,
cap in hand, a huge cavalryman with a bashful boy's face,
who bowed and blushed as I came in, explaining that he
had a note from the general, to be put into my hand only.
The note placed at my disposition Charles Dillon, special
scout and most trustworthy courier, who "might be soon
going into Alexandria, and would bring out, if he had an
order to my friends, anything I had left behind, and
wanted."
"Oh! But there's nothing I have, or ever had, worth risk
to a brave soldier," I made haste to protest. "I've the
general's orders, miss," he said, "and if it wornt anything
better, I was to get you a little bit of a flower. You're the
lady that made our
head-quarters battle-flag, miss, and we think a good bit
of that flag."
The end of it was that, ten days later, Dillon brought me
a little wrap of blue and white, one of my girlish treasures,
deeply lamented, which he had secured through a note to
my great-aunts, now removed to Alexandria. He had gone
into the town disguised as a countryman driving a cart-load
of firewood; and what further the big fellow brought away
with him, I never asked.
Dillon became one of the most famous scouts of the
early war time, achieving a hundred brilliant exploits. He
came to his death, poor fellow, at the hands of a party of
United States cavalrymen, who are said to have cut the
head from his body, leaving him in the woods. For this
horror I cannot vouch. After mentioning him in an article
for the Century Magazine, I received this letter:
"MADAM:
"Very likely his comrades never knew his end, his grave
was marked with his name, but the evacuation of
Manassas was begun about that time, and the
Confederates never had possession of that territory
afterwards.
The incident of his capture created no little interest at the
time and you may have known of it. If you did not, then I
think if he was the same Dillon who brought you the relics,
you will be interested to know what I have written; and
these thoughts I beg to offer as an apology for the liberty I
take in addressing you.
"Very respectfully yours,
One of the meetings I prized most was that with Major
Pelham, of Alabama, a young hero, whose name, "the
gallant Pelham," given to him by General Lee, was already
on every tongue around us. He was on horseback before a
friend's door in Culpeper, waiting till I came out to mount
for a ride somewhere. A slim boy with a dark, sparkling
face is what the splendid Pelham seemed to me in that
brief encounter, followed by a little war of wits. He was
killed in 1863 - having just received his promotion as
lieutenant-colonel - in an engagement at Beverley Ford, to
which he had hastened on a borrowed horse while on
furlough, making a visit. Springing to arms at the first sound
of a cannon in his neighborhood, this brilliant
young officer, who had passed through so many general
engagements with safety, fell in a terrible fire from the
enemy, and was carried back into Culpeper to the house
of the friends where I first met him, and where his death
occurred.
To the latter, it was part of our creed always to dispense
our best smiles and tidbits. So great was the rush of visitors
that our mulatto attendant, Cornelius, dubbed "the
Centurion," was kept from striking for liberty only by much
cajolery and frequent small tips.
Of the town gayeties that winter I recall a fancy-dress
party at the McMurdo's, in Grace Street. One of the
daughters, Miss Saidee McMurdo, an exquisite creature
with large dark eyes and arched brows, married Mr.
Alfred Rives, of Albemarle, and became the mother of
Amélie Rives, the author, now Princess Troubetskoi (Mrs.
Rives has died since these words were written). This was
my first "real" party in Richmond, and my mother being in
town on a rest furlough, she made up for me, with her own
dear fingers, the costume of a Louis XV court lady, styled
"Mme. la Marquise de Crêve-Coeur," decided upon chiefly
because of a stiff old petticoat of wine-colored reps silk
found in some family trunk. Shopping diligently, she had
found spangles for my shoes and fan; feathers for the
high-rolled powdered hair were lent from some one's store;
mask, pearl necklace, and old blonde lace were
forthcoming, and my kind uncle cut out from court-plaster
a coach and horses, by way of a patch of the period, for
the cheek. What the other girls wore I selfishly can't
remember!
The first event to bring all patriotic Richmond into the
streets that winter was the inauguration of our President,
Jefferson Davis, on February 22, 1862. We were asked to
witness the ceremony from a window of the Virginia State
Library in the Capitol by our friend, Mr. John R.
Thompson, the librarian-in-chief, and were entertained,
while awaiting events, with the latest Northern papers,
Harper's Weekly and others, together
with the extraordinary apparition of a box of French
bonbons just arrived by underground express.
It was a dismal day, depressing to stoutest spirits, rain
falling heavily, and Capitol Square beneath us one mass of
open umbrellas. When the poor wet bishop and the
President-elect came upon the stand, there was an
immediate, portentous hush in the crowd. One heard
nothing but the patter of the winter rain. The brief
ceremony over, when President Davis kissed the book,
accepting, under God, the great trust of our young and
struggling nation, a great shout went up and we distinctly
heard cries of "God bless our President!" That evening
President and Mrs. Davis received at their residence,
making a most favorable impression upon all Richmond.
We had been hearing a good deal of the inner life of the
President's family from a young inmate of his household
destined to play an important part in my life thereafter. This
was Burton Norvell Harrison, born in Louisiana, of Virginia
parentage on the father's side, who, at the instance of his
friend, Congressman L. Q. C. Lamar, had been summoned
by the President to be his private secretary at the moment
when Mr. Harrison was about to enlist in New Orleans as
a private in the ranks of the Washington Artillery. Mr.
Harrison, having graduated at Yale in the class of 1859, had
been designated by President F. A. P. Barnard, then of
Oxford University, in Mississippi (whose first wife was Mr.
Harrison's aunt), to occupy a junior professorship in that
institution, and had remained there until the outbreak of the
war.
During vacations from Yale spent with his uncle, the
Rev. Dr. William Francis Brand, rector of St. Mary's
Church, near Emmorton, Maryland, Mr. Harrison had
made friends with my Baltimore cousins, who were
intimate with the Brand family; but I had never chanced to
meet the much-praised young Yalensian, whom the Cary
girls had vaunted until I declared myself aweary of his
name. It was at the Clifton House, where Mr. Harrison
came to call upon my cousins, that our acquaintance
began.
We were all interested in what Burton Harrison had to
say of the Davises. Every one knew the traditions of Mrs.
Jefferson Davis, as handed down from her career as a
senator's wife in Washington, in the administrations of
Pierce and Buchanan. She was declared to be a woman of
warm heart and impetuous tongue, witty and caustic, with a
sensitive nature underlying all; a devoted wife and mother,
and most gracious mistress of a salon. Miss Margaret
Howell, the exceedingly clever sister of Mrs. Davis,
afterward Mme. de Stoeurs, of England, was the young
lady of the Richmond White House; and it is safe to say that
no wittier talk was ever bandied over the teacups in any
land than passed daily between the several bright spirits thus
assembled at the President's table. Mrs. Davis had been
somewhat depressed, on the day of the inauguration, by an
arrangement for her progress to Capitol Square made by
her negro coachman. When they set out, at a snail's pace,
she observed, walking solemnly and with faces of unbroken
gloom, on either side of her carriage, four negroes in black
clothes, wearing gloves of white cotton. Demanding
impatiently of the coachman what in the world this
performance meant, she was informed: "This, madam, is the
way we always does in Richmond at funerals and sich-like."
Mrs. Davis, telling the story inimitably that evening, said she
was almost grieved to have to "order the pall-bearers
away," so proud were they of their dignified position.
Concerning the affairs, big or little, of "The Chief," Mr.
Harrison was wont to preserve continual discreet silence.
He would say only that the President had the happiest
relations with his family, by whom he was revered,
incidentally remarking that to accompany the chief on
horseback, always his duty, together with some of the
aides, was to sit in the saddle indefinitely, in good or bad
weather alike, never knowing when they were to bring up
at home again, and keeping Mrs. Davis in continual
uncertainty as to her dinner-hour, to say nothing of her
husband's fate. A familiar and picturesque figure was
President Davis in the streets of Richmond from that day
forth. From "Richmond Scenes in '62," published in
"Battles and Leaders of the Civil War," I reproduce my
sketch of him, which, since it was edited by my husband, I
feel may be regarded as of some worth:
"He might be seen daily walking through the Capitol
Square from his residence to the executive office in the
morning, not to return until late in the afternoon; or riding
just before nightfall to visit one or another of the
encampments near the city. He was tall, erect, slender, and
of a dignified and soldierly bearing, with clear-cut and
high-bred features, and of a demeanor of stately courtesy to all.
He was clad always in Confederate gray cloth, and wore a
soft felt hat with wide brim. Afoot, his step was brisk and
firm; in the saddle he rode admirably and with a martial
aspect. His early life had been spent in the Military
Academy at West Point and upon the then north-western
frontier in the Black Hawk War, and he afterward greatly
distinguished himself at Monterey and Buena Vista in
Mexico; at the time when we knew him everything in his
appearance and manner was suggestive of military training.
He was reported
to feel quite out of place in the office of President,
with executive and administrative duties, in the midst of
such a war; General Lee always spoke of him as the best
of military advisers; his own inclination was to be with the
army, and at the first tidings of the sound of a gun,
anywhere within reach of Richmond, he was in the saddle
and off for the spot - to the dismay of his staff-officers,
who never knew at what hour of the night or of the next
day they should get back to bed or to a meal."
The stories Burton Harrison told us of his adventures on
such excursions were many, and sometimes amusing. For
instance, when General Lee crossed the Chickahominy,
President Davis, with several staff-officers and his
secretary, overtook the column, and, with the secretary of
war and a few other non-combatants, forded the river just
as the battle of Mechanicsville began. General Lee,
surrounded by members of his own staff and other officers,
was found a few hundred yards north of the bridge, in the
middle of the broad road, mounted and busily engaged in
directing the attack then about to be made by a brigade
sweeping in line over the fields, to the east of the road and
toward Ellerson's Mill, where in a few minutes a hot
engagement commenced. Shot, from the enemy's guns out
of sight, went whizzing overhead in quick succession,
striking every moment nearer the group of horsemen in the
road as the gunners improved their range. General Lee
observed the President's approach, and was evidently
annoyed at what he considered a foolhardy expedition of
needless exposure of the head of the government, whose
duties were elsewhere. He turned his back for a moment,
until Colonel Chilton had been despatched at a gallop with
the last
direction to the commander of the attacking brigade; then,
facing the cavalcade and looking like the god of war
indignant, he exchanged with the President a salute, with
the most frigid reserve of anything like welcome or
cordiality. Then without allowance of opportunity for a
word from the President, the general, looking not at him
but at the assemblage at large, asked in a tone of irritation:
"Who are all this army of people, and what are they
doing here?"
No one moved or spoke, but all eyes were upon the
President; everybody perfectly understood that this was an
order for him to retire to a place of safety, while the roar of
the guns, the rattling fire of musketry, and the bustle of a
battle in progress, with troops continually arriving across the
bridge to go into action, went on. The President twisted in
his saddle, quite taken aback at such a greeting - the
general regarding him now with glances of growing severity.
After a painful pause the President said, deprecatingly: "It
is not my army, General." "It certainly is not my army, Mr.
President," was the prompt reply, "and this is no place for
it" - in an accent of command. Such a rebuff was a stunner
to Mr. Davis, who, however, soon regained his serenity and
answered:
"Well, General, if I withdraw, perhaps they will follow,"
and, raising his hat in another cold salute, he turned his
horse's head to ride slowly toward the bridge - seeing, as
he turned, a man killed immediately before him by a shot
from a gun which at that moment got the range of the road.
The President's own staff-officers followed him, as did
various others; but he presently drew rein in a stream
where the high bank and the bushes concealed him from
General Lee's repelling
observation, and there remained while the battle raged. The
Secretary of War had also made a show of withdrawing,
but improved the opportunity afforded by rather a deep
ditch on the roadside to conceal himself and his horse for a
time from General Lee, who at that moment was more to
be dreaded than the enemy's guns.
In the Union raid on Columbia, S. C., in the spring of
1865, Mr. Davis's best-known mount, a white Arabian, was
captured with all the horses and mules belonging to General
James Chestnut, to whose care the President had entrusted
it. I find in my album a letter from General Chestnut to the
President, lamenting this occurrence, and saying he ranked
all his own losses as nothing beside that of the famous
steed.
About March 1, 1862, martial law was proclaimed in
Richmond, and from that time till the day of the evacuation
we lived amid continually thrilling scenes. Now came the
joyful tidings that my brother's ship, the cruiser Nashville,
had successfully slipped through the blockading fleet off
Beaufort, N. C., and that all on board were well. Her
commander, the stately and gallant Captain Robert Pegram,
welcomed with acclamation on his return to Richmond,
came to call on us at the Clifton, and gave to our eager ears
a synopsis of their stirring experiences since leaving
Charleston in October. A few days later our midshipman
walked in, looking taller, broader, and supremely happy to
greet us all again.
The Nashville, intended for the convoy of the
Confederate States commissioners, Mason and Slidell, but
proving too big, had run the blockade from Charleston to
Bermuda, coaled at Bermuda, and made a long voyage of
twenty-three days to Southampton, England. In the British
Channel, off the Needles, they had burnt and
sunk the American merchant-man, Harvey Birch, bringing
her men, thirty in number, into Southampton, where they
were set at liberty. This exploit and the discussion ensuing
in the newspapers caused the Nashville to rise
immediately into prominence in England. While they lay in
port numberless visits were made to the ship. My brother,
standing one day on the quay, saw approaching him "a tall,
distinguished-looking man, with a florid face and long
smooth chin, whom I knew at once was 'somebody.'" This
proved to be no less a personage than Lord Palmerston,
Premier of England, who, on his way to visit the queen at
Osborn House, had turned aside, unofficially, to make a
call upon the commander of the famous Nashville. At his
request, my brother took his card in to Captain Pegram,
who immediately came out and conducted his lordship to
his cabin, where he remained some time, an incident
fortunately not getting into print.
Some of the officers of the Nashville repaired at once,
on leave, to London, others to Paris. My brother, in
company with his close friend and fellow-midshipman,
Irving Bullock, of Georgia (uncle of ex-President
Roosevelt), ran up to London to see the sights, and two
happier lads could not have been found. Drawing their pay
in gold, petted and welcomed by sympathetic Britons, and
having achieved the éclat of a notice in Punch, they
described themselves as "living like fighting chickens
generally."
Irving Bullock was declared by his comrades to be "a
tall, stalwart fellow, the best in the world, and a splendid
officer." Long after the war, when Mr. Bullock, married to
an English lady, was living in Liverpool, he would make it a
point whenever my brother crossed to England to come
out on the tender and welcome
his old shipmate, literally with open arms, lifting
Clarence off his feet in an exuberant embrace. His death
was a sorrow to all who knew him. Mr. Cary has
frequently talked of him to Colonel Roosevelt, who
remembers his uncle with sincere affection and respect.
London and all England was then under the pillar of
cloud of the Prince Consort's death. An incident of the
Nashville's stay at Southampton was the arrival of the
Trent, having aboard the Confederate ladies of the
commissioners' families. My brother had the opportunity of
hearing, at first hand, the version given by charming Miss
Slidell of her adventure with our mother's first cousin,
Lieutenant Donald Fairfax, U. S. N., the young officer sent
aboard the Trent to remove the Confederate envoys,
whom history has alleged to have been smitten in the face
by this spirited and justly wroth young lady! When, in later
years, Admiral Fairfax came to visit me at my summer
home in Bar Harbor, we did not revert to those long-ago
events.
Another happening in port, was the embarcation, for
service in Canada, of two crack regiments of the Royal
Life Guards, whose officers exchanged entertainment and
courtesies with those of the Confederate cruiser. When the
two troop-ships finally sailed away, decks crowded, bands
playing, colors flying, our midshipman decided that to be
the most gallant spectacle seen in all his life.
Very soon this holiday experience was to be exchanged
for grim duty. The Queen having declared England to be
neutral ground for the two opposing forces, the United
States warship Tuscarora, tired of lying in wait outside for
the coveted prize in harbor, came in to coal. While they
were obliged to wait in port for twenty-four
hours stipulated by international law, the Nashville,
hoisting what colors she could muster, sailed out to sea,
and lost them their precious opportunity. The voyage,
extremely bad from start to finish at Bermuda, was yet
without encounter with the enemy. More than once, with
broken machinery, both paddle-boxes stove in, starboard
bulwark carried away, decks and houses continually under
water, they almost gave up hope of reaching land. At
Bermuda they coaled and repaired the ship. Starting for
Fort Macon, at Beaufort, North Carolina, they captured
and burnt a schooner, and at six o'clock on a Friday
morning, in broad daylight, ran the blockade at that point
by means of a ruse, flying the private signal flag of the New
York merchant firm, "Spofford & Tileston," under the
United States flag.
One of the blockading squadron, believing them to be
the United States mail-boat, and thereby neglecting
precautions, lowered a boat for mail. The Nashville, by
that time inshore of her enemy, hauled down her false
colors, ran up the stars and bars, and dashed for Fort
Macon at a speed that made the old ship tremble at every
jump. Immediately, but in vain, the blockader sent thirty
shots after the fleeing cruiser, received with rapturous
applause by several thousand Confederate soldiers on the
ramparts of the fort!
In April my mother left Culpeper Court House to rejoin
me, and we removed from the coal, smoke, and gloom of
the Clifton House to lodgings in Miss Clarke's pleasant
home in Franklin Street, surrounded by a pretty garden
and embowering trees. In Richmond the spring opens with
a sudden glory of green leaves, magnolia blooms, and
flowering shrubs. My cousins, Hetty and
Jennie, were with us under my mother's charge. We had
rides into the surrounding country and walks in the woods
bordering the river and canal. There was a brief interval of
peace following the long winter of disaster and uncertainty.
I had, at the request of Captain B. F. Eshleman, of the
Washington Artillery of New Orleans, a body of admirable
soldiers who had wakened to enthusiasm the daughters of
Virginia, made for and sent to them another battle-flag. One
morning an orderly arrived at Miss Clarke's, to say the
battalion, on its march through Richmond, would pass the
house at a given hour, and desired my presence at the front
gate, that they might salute the donor of their flag. Punctual
to the moment, we stood, a group of ladies, bareheaded
under the canopy of green leaves above the sidewalk, I a
little in advance, while the travel-stained battalion filed by
us. My heart beat high with pride as the officers saluted
with their swords, the band played "My Maryland," the
tired soldiers sitting on the caissons that dragged wearily
through the muddy streets set up a rousing cheer; and there,
in the midst of them, taking the April wind with daring, was
my banner, dipping low until it passed me!
These were no holiday soldiers. Their gold was
tarnished - their colors faded by sun and wind and gallant
service - they were veterans on their way to the front, where
the call of duty never failed to find the flower of Louisiana.
In Captain William Miller Owen's spirited book, "In
Camp and Battle With the Washington Artillery," occurs a
passage describing the battalion as it went into battle at
Malvern Hill, a short time after: "This is a supreme moment
in the history of the Washington Artillery -
the first time it ever moved in full armament, with its
four batteries, to the battle-field. What a glorious sight! See
the sixteen guns! What beauties - rifles and Napoleons
taken from the enemy at Manassas and Seven Pines.
Sixteen caissons - thirty-two carriages in all - nearly three
hundred men and two hundred horses. What a sight to
gladden a soldier's eye! In front of all rides the colonel on
his black stallion, 'Rebel,' a pace behind rides the adjutant;
then the chief bugler and the guidon-bearer carrying the
little scarlet banner with the blue cross, the gift of
Constance Cary. Just behind came the batteries, the
captains riding in front of each."
Mr. Sumpter Turner, of the Washington Artillery,
writes, in 1908: "This flag, now in the arsenal at New
Orleans, was the one we carried through the war."
I went to a war-wedding at the Monumental Church on
the site of that old-time tragedy, the burning of the
Richmond Theatre, when Miss Adeline Deane, a beautiful
blonde, daughter of Dr. Deane, was married to Dr. Lyons.
There was a reception afterward at Dr. Deane's house in
Grace Street, crowded with rusty uniforms. A daughter of
this couple is Mrs. Swanson, wife of the recent Governor
of Virginia.
On coming out of church one Sunday we heard the
crushing news of the fall of New Orleans and of the
capture of our iron-clads. The information coming from the
lips of Mrs. Randolph, wife of our kinsman, General
George Randolph, Secretary of War, was undisputable.
Mr. Jules de Saint Martin, of New Orleans, brother-in-law
of Mr. Benjamin, who was walking with us, made no
remark.
"This must hit you hard," said some one to him.
"I am ruined, voilà tout!" was the answer, with a
characteristic gesture of throwing care to the winds.
This debonair little gentleman was one of the great
favorites in war society in Richmond. His cheery spirit, wit,
and exquisite courtesy made friends for him everywhere;
and although his nicety of dress, after the Parisian style, was
the subject of comment when he first appeared upon our
streets, he joined the volunteers before Richmond and
roughed it pluckily in the trenches as a private. Years after,
M. de Saint Martin, calling on my mother and me in Paris,
told a story of camp life in the freezing trenches, when on
one occasion Colonel T. L Bayne called him away from his
place of bivouac on the ground to come with him, bidding
him tell nobody, as he had found a spot where they could
"sleep warm." Eagerly Saint Martin followed his guide to be
introduced, in the wintry dark, to an enclosure full of
snuffling, grunting creatures, among whom they lay down in
oozing mud; it was a pigsty, nothing less, and there they
slept till morning!" It is true that their noses disturbed me
now and then," said the narrator, "but que voalez vous! I
was freezing!"
Now nothing was talked of but the capture of New
Orleans. The stout spirit of the South had received its most
telling blow! My brother, the midshipman, had just before
this been ordered to what was considered one of the finest
commands in the Confederate States navy - the new iron-clad
Mississippi, then building in New Orleans, and
expected to sweep the Northern coast. On the day before
the United States fleet passed in to the taking of the forts,
Clarence had been sent in charge of a boat-load of
deserters and ordnance to a Confederate States ship in the
river. That day, "just for fun," as
he expressed it, he and another middy accompanied
Lieutenant Reed, going on duty at Fort Jackson, under a
hot fire of shelling. While crossing the moat around the fort
in a canoe, a 13-inch mortar shell fell near them, half filling
their craft with water. No wonder the commandant of the
fort, in greeting them, asked the two midshipmen, in
vigorous terms, "What are you young fools doing here,
anyway?" They dodged about for a while in the
bomb-proof casements, listening to the swift rush downward
through the air of shells "that sounded as motor-cars do
now" (says the projector of this foolhardy expedition), and
then pulled back against the fierce strength of the
Mississippi current under the same fire, passing a wounded
alligator, hit by a piece of shell.
Aboard the steamship Star of the West (the vessel that
drew the opening shots of the war at Charleston and which
was seized off Indianola, Texas, in 1861, and was later sunk
by the Confederates in the Yazoo, near Fort Pemberton),
next day, saw my brother and other midshipmen in charge
of six millions in gold and silver coin from the mints and
banks of New Orleans, with three millions in paper money,
over which their orders were to keep guard with drawn
swords, hurrying away from doomed New Orleans, where
along the levees burning ships and steamers and bales of
cotton stretched in a fiery crescent. Had they delayed a
day, they would all have been swept away in the enemy's
resistless onslaught. Keeping just ahead of the enemy's
fleet, they reached Vicksburg, thence went overland to
Mobile, where their charge was delivered up in safety, my
brother returning to Richmond, where he was assigned by
Secretary Mallory to the somewhat light duty of aid to the
Secretary - "principally
reading newspapers at the Navy Department and once
escorting Mrs. Mallory to Drury's Bluff," as recorded by
himself.
We had come to the end of May, when the eyes of the
whole continent turned toward Richmond. On the 31st
Johnston assaulted the Federals, who had advanced to
Seven Pines! It was so near that the first guns sent our
hearts into our mouths, like a sudden loud knocking at
one's door at night. The women left in Richmond had, with
few exceptions, husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers in the
fight. I have never seen a finer exhibition of calm courage
than they showed in this baptism of fire. No one wept or
moaned aloud. All went about their task of preparing for
the wounded, making bandages, scraping lint, improvising
beds. Night brought a lull in the frightful cannonading. We
threw ourselves dressed upon our beds to get a little rest
before the morrow.
During the night began the ghastly procession of
wounded brought in from the field. Every vehicle the city
could produce supplemented the military ambulances.
Many slightly wounded men, so black with gunpowder as
to be unrecognizable, came limping in on foot. All next day,
women with white faces flitted bareheaded through the
street and hospitals, looking for their own. Churches and
lecture-rooms were thrown open for volunteer ladies
sewing and filling the rough beds called for by the surgeons.
There was not enough of anything to meet the sudden
appalling call of many strong men stricken unto death.
Hearing that my cousin, Reginald Hyde, was reported
wounded, two of us girls volunteered to help his mother to
search for him through the lower hospitals. We tramped
down Main Street through the hot sun over burning pavements,
from one scene of horror to another, bringing up
finally at the St. Charles Hotel, a large old building. What a
sight met our eyes! Men in every stage of mutilation, lying
waiting for the surgeons upon bare boards, with haversacks
or army blankets, or nothing, beneath their heads. Some
gave up the weary ghost as we passed them by. All were
suffering keenly and needing ordinary attention. To be there
empty-handed nearly broke our hearts. Bending down over
bandaged faces stiff with blood and thick with flies, nothing
did we see or hear of the object of our search, who, I am
glad to say, arrived later at his mother's home, to be nursed
by her to a speedy recovery.
The impression of that day was ineffaceable. It left me
permanently convinced that nothing is worth war!
My mother was now in her element - expert, silent,
incomparable as a nurse, she was soon on regular duty in
an improvised hospital. I spent that night at the window of
my room panting for fresh air, and longing to do something,
anything, to help. The next day my friend, Emily Voss, and
I had the pride and pleasure of having assigned to our care,
under an older woman, two rooms containing fifteen
wounded men lying on pallets around the floor. From that
moment we were happier, although physically tried to the
utmost. Gradually, some order came out of the chaos of
overtasked hospital service. The churches gave their seat
cushions to make beds; the famous old wine-cellars of
private houses sent their priceless Madeira, port, sherry,
and brandy; everybody's cook was set to turning out
dainties, and for our own men we begged unblushingly until
they were fairly well supplied. At night, carrying palm-leaf
fans, we sauntered out into the streets scarcely less hot
than in full sunshine. Once, literally panting for a fresh
breath of air, a party of us went with an official of the
Capitol up through the vapor bath of many steep stairs, to
emerge on a little platform on the summit of the building.
There - oh! joy - were actually breezes that brought
relief. There we sat and looked down on the city that could
not sleep, and talked, or listened to the voice of the river,
that I seem to hear yet over the tramp of rusty battalions,
the short, imperious stroke of the alarm bell, the clash of
passing bands, the gallop of horsemen, the roar of battle,
the moan of hospitals, the stifled note of sorrow - all the
Richmond war sounds, sacred and unforgettable.
Day after day one heard the wailing dirge of military
bands preceding a soldier's funeral. One could not number
those sad pageants in our leafy streets: the coffin with its
cap and sword and gloves, the riderless horse with empty
boots in the stirrups of an army saddle! Such soldiers as
could be spared from the front marching with arms
reversed and crape-shrouded banners, passers-by
standing with bare bent heads.
Funerals by night were common. A solemn scene was to
be enacted in the July moonlight at Hollywood when they
laid to rest my own uncle, Lieutenant Reginald Fairfax, of
whom in the old service of the United States, as in that of
the Confederate navy, it was said "he was a spotless
knight." My uncle, who had commanded a battery on the
James, was prostrated by malarial fever and taken to
Richmond, where he died at the Clifton House, tenderly
nursed by his sisters. He was to my brother and me a
second father. His property, fortunately so invested in
Northern securities as to be unavailable during the war,
was left between his three sisters, thereby enabling us, after
peace was declared, to resume a life of comfort, when
many of our Confederate
friends were in absolute want. My other uncle, Doctor
Fairfax, of Alexandria, had, in the abundance of his belief
in the Confederacy, put all of his fortune into Confederate
bonds, and suffered a total loss of it.
A personal incident of the fight of Seven Pines was a
visit during that morning from a young officer, sent into
town from the battle-field with important despatches to the
President. Whilst awaiting the reply, he came, with his
orderly in attendance, to say a word to me, and as I stood
with him at our garden gate the cannonading suddenly
increased tremendously.
"That's my place, not this. If I don't come out of it,
remember I tried to do my duty," he said with a hasty
handshake, and springing into his saddle, the horse rearing
fiercely, he waved his cap and spurred away, the orderly
clattering after him. It was the last time I ever saw him. In
one of the battles of July he fell, leading his men in a
splendid charge, and in him many bright hopes and a noble
future were extinguished.
Such, at least, should have been my attitude of mind. As
a fact, after a few days' absence from Richmond I longed
madly, wildly, to be back again. News penetrated to us
but grudgingly. We wrested it piecemeal
from the slow speech of passing stage-drivers, and from
weekly newspapers. We lived from mail to mail.
No privilege on earth seemed so great as sharing sorrow
with those we loved. From a wounded cousin, who arrived
on furlough, we heard of the fall in battle of General Turner
Ashby, "the stainless, fearless hero," as President Davis
called him; of whom General Stonewall Jackson wrote in
his report of the cavalry combat: "As a partisan officer, I
never knew his superior. His daring was proverbial; his
power of endurance inexhaustible; his tone of character
heroic; and his sagacity almost intuitive in divining the
purposes and movements of the enemy."
From childhood I had heard tales of the dashing and
hard-riding Turner Ashby, of Fauquier, and had felt proud
when he said nice things to me once at the Fauquier White
Sulphur Springs. All the men in our family knew and
lamented him. He was like one of the old-time warriors,
born not made.
Of that summer of sorrow I recall one bright episode -
a ride on horseback of seventy miles, to and from the
Natural Bridge of Virginia, with a stop on the way at the
handsome old mansion of the Andersons, where our party
was hospitably entertained. We felt that in that blest abode
of peaceful plenty war could not penetrate; yet, in the next
year, the house was burnt and the whole beautiful region
surrounding it laid waste by the firebrand, General Hunter,
in his retreat before Early and Breckinridge.
Our road lay between a succession of noble views of hill
and dale, the weather was perfect, and the before-
mentioned spirits of youth overflowed happily. We rode
races, jumped hurdles, improvised tourneys, spearing at a ring
of plaited willow hung upon a bough. I
wonder if a girl of to-day would believe that in addition to a
haversack with necessaries of the toilet strapped to my
saddle, I carried, hidden under the folds of a long, ample
riding skirt, a mysterious parcel like a cage collapsed and
twisted into a figure 8 - the hoop-skirt, without which no
self-respecting female of that day ventured to appear, save
on horseback!
We were upon the Natural Bridge without knowing it, of
course, and I needs must alarm our party out of its wits by
emulating a certain venturesome cousin, and old sweetheart
of my father's, Mary Chapman, handed down in local story
as having stood waving her handkerchief on the cut-off
stump of a tree projecting above the precipice. This lady
was grandmother of the lovely Ella, Marquise de
Podestad, renowned for her charm and beauty in
Washington and Madrid, who in her later days became
lady in waiting to ex-Queen Isabella of Spain, and died at
Biarritz after a life of many sorrows.
On our return from this expedition we heard of the
renewal of fighting before Richmond. My aunt heard, too,
of the alarming illness of her brother Reginald, in
Richmond. She was eager to go to him, and as to our
convalescent colonel, wild horses could not have bound
him to remain! I, only, was left under care of the principal
of the Hollins Institute and his kind family. How I begged
to go back with the others!
Next came the awful battle week - seven days of
furious fighting close to the gates of Richmond. During the
battle of Mechanicsville, the President and many of the
cabinet, with hundreds of spectators, watched its progress
from the encircling hills. The roofs of the high buildings in
the town were also crowded with lookers-on, and the
enemy's balloons were plainly visible hovering over the
field. After dark that night, the firing
still went on, and numbers of people saw the magnificent
sight of bombs bursting in air and the flash of thousands of
muskets, accompanied by the incessant roar of artillery.
To go home from such a spectacle was to seek a bed, but
not to sleep, and dawn next day brought a renewal of the
terrible experience, while the streets were again and again
filled with ambulance trains, the result of the day before.
And now a great pæan of gratitude went up to General
Lee, acclaimed as the savior of Richmond from
destruction, the supreme leader to whom all eyes turned
for protection from our foe. My family letters were full of
pride that our old neighbor at Arlington had thus risen to
the forepeak of glory in the Confederacy. Every one, too,
was talking of the wonders of Stonewall
Jackson's generalship; the two great Virginians seemed to
be riding on a wave of popular glory.
We chafed at absence from the centre of all interest.
Had not Commodore Sydney Smith Lee, our
midshipman's chief in the Navy Department, sent my
brother to me to recruit after an attack of malarial fever, I
could hardly have borne the strain, as news of my uncle
Reginald's death came at the same time. Then my mother
gave herself a brief rest. Worn out with grief and nursing,
with new lines in her sweet face, and eyes full of unshed
tears, she came to her children. Nothing seemed hopeless
after that!
When it was certain that our boys were marching across
the border into Maryland, and that, save for my brother on
sick leave, every male creature belonging to our numerous
"Connection" was in the advance, what wonder that we
strained at the leash of patience till it burst. No longer able
to endure peace in Botetourt, back we all went to hot,
dusty, uncomfortable Richmond.
There we found all thoughts fixed on Maryland, all
hearts dilating proudly with oft-repeated tales of victory to
our arms. Letters drifted to us telling of the hardships of the
march; of subsistence on a diet of parched corn, or corn
plucked and eaten raw as did the disciples theirs, of old; of
bare feet; of burning thirst quenched by lapping from
roadside pools and cowtracks; of ragged clothes and dirt
intolerable, borne until some blessed stream or river gave
them a chance to dip.
Many of these privates in the ranks were mothers'
darlings, hitherto lapped in the luxury of lavish Southern
homes - numbers of them just ready to enter the university.
One of his comrades told us of the youngest son of the
commanding general, a private in the Rockbridge
Artillery, at the battle of Sharpsburg, where his battery had
suffered from having three guns disabled and losing many
men and horses. Having but one gun left, they were ordered
out of the fight. Coming unexpectedly upon General Lee
and his aide, the general looked at first with unrecognizing
eyes upon the smoke-stained goblin who revealed himself
his son. Upon hearing that their remnant was ordered again
to the front for duty, young Lee protested: "Why, General,
you are not going to send us in again?"
"Yes, my son," he answered smiling, "you must all do
what you can to help to drive those people back." Another
incident, told in a soldier's letter, was when Private Robert
E. Lee, shabby and travel-worn, appeared at the
commanding general's head-quarters barefooted, carrying
in his hand the ragged remnant of a pair of shoes. "I only
wanted to ask, sir, if I might draw a new pair, as I can't
march in these."
"Have the men of your company received permission to
draw shoes yet?" asked the general.
"No, sir; I believe not yet."
"Then go back to your battery, my boy, and wait until
they have."
After recording these anecdotes, I received a visit at
Belvoir House, Virginia, from Captain Robert E. Lee
(strongly resembling his illustrious father) with his wife and
little girl, Ann Carter Lee. He says the Rockbridge Artillery
stories are in the main true. He doesn't remember about the
shoes, but it might well have been. What he does recall,
and has told in his own most interesting book about
General Lee, was once when, after one of the battles
before Richmond, black with dirt and smoke, he had
crawled under his caisson on the open battle-field, trying to
get a sleep, some fellow poked him awake with a sponge-
stick and said: "Come out o' that, will you! Here's
somebody wants to see you!"
On emerging, he was confronted by General Lee, in
speckless full uniform, mounted upon his charger and
surrounded by his staff with some distinguished foreign
visitors. Again the general did not recognize the begrimed
being who modestly presented himself, but when he did so
a loving smile broke over his face and he spoke to him
cheerily, saying he had ridden by to see if he were safe and
was glad he was well through it!
Captain Lee tells me it required some nerve to meet the
curious glances bestowed upon him by all those clean and
well-equipped people!
If of such stuff the leader, what of the troops? Such
stories, passed from lip to lip on bivouac, or written home
to anxious parents, did a world of good in heartening those
who had to bear the same hardships.
The tale of the Maryland campaign had about it a dash
and daring peculiarly attractive to young minds.
Our blood coursed hot in answer to the news of Stonewall
Jackson's repulse of Banks at Cedar Mountain; of Jeb
Stuart's wonderful raid, circling the entire Federal army; of
Jackson's capture of Union stores at Manassas; of the
bloody battles of Groveton, second Bull Run, and
Chantilly.
During their two hundred miles of march in one short
month, fighting and skirmishing continually, our friends went
barefooted, or with their feet in raw cowhides, living on
half rations, but their letters bore no complaint. Had not
their beloved General Lee said to them: "History records
few examples of greater fortitude and endurance than this
army has exhibited." After that, what did little things matter?
About one of my own nearest of kin, young Randolph
Fairfax, private in the Rockbridge Artillery in this
campaign, his friend and messmate, now the Rev. Lancelot
Blackford, head-master of the Episcopal High School in
Fairfax County, wrote:
"I have seen him when detailed as teamster from the
15th of July to the last of August, after a fatiguing day's
march and just as we were about to go to rest, called up to
go in the dark for forage to feed his teams. He bore all
exacting duties such as watering, feeding, currying and
harnessing horses with such equanimity and sweetness as
to strike his associates. The point on which officers and
men chiefly agreed in admiring Fairfax was his unswerving
devotion to duty whether in camp or in action. Members of
the company would remark with emphasis, 'What a good
soldier Fairfax is!'" The quality of men in action under whip
and spur of a certain animal excitement does not always
bear the fine test of such experience as this; I cite it as
illustrating a phase of war life on the Southern side
necessarily overshadowed in
history by the conspicuous achievements of the leaders. In
John Codman Ropes's splendid "Story of the Civil War" I
find the following:
"The population (of the Southern States), almost wholly
occupied in agricultural pursuits, was necessarily
accustomed to life in the open air, to horses, to hunting
and fishing, to exposure, to unusual physical exertion from
time to time. Such conditions of life naturally foster a
martial spirit. Then the aristocratic régime which prevailed
in the slave-holding States was conducive to that
preference of military over civil pursuits which has generally
been characteristic of aristocracies. The young men of the
better classes eagerly embraced the profession of arms as
offering by far the noblest opportunities for the exercise of
the higher virtues, and for allowing the greatest distinction in
the State. . . . Endowed with a marvellous capacity of
endurance, whether of physical exertion or lack of food,
uncomplaining, ever ready for a fight, the soldiers of the
South were first-rate material in the hands of the able
officers who so generally commanded them.... It cannot be
doubted that the Southern volunteers frequently scored
successes over their Northern adversaries for the simple
and sole reason that to them, the game of war, was not
only a perfectly legitimate pursuit, but one of the noblest, if
not the noblest that could claim the devotion of brave and
free men. They went into it con amore; they gave to its
duties their most zealous attention; and they reaped a full
measure of the success which those who throw themselves
with all their hearts into any career deserve and generally
attain."
We were in Richmond when that desperate fight was
fought at Antietam, of which a war historian has written,
"It is likely that more men were killed and wounded
on the 17th of September than on any single day in the
whole war." Twelve thousand men killed on each side!
Twenty-four thousand of the hope of the great continent,
the joy of their homes, North and South, left dead upon a
single battle-field!
By this time, in some degree keyed up to endurance of
the repeated shocks of war, we went quietly about our tasks
of daily life. Except for the numbers of people swathed in
black met in its thoroughfares, Richmond showed little trace
of its battle summer. As yet the pinch of the times did not
greatly affect the home commissariat, although we refugees
had to be satisfied with simple living in other people's rooms,
since a whole house to ourselves could not be thought of.
When asked into private houses we found tables laid, as of
old, with shining silver and porcelain and snowy damask,
although the bill of fare was unpretending. The custom of
giving the best of everything to the hospitals went on till the
end of the war. Society was reinforced by a number of
agreeable and high-bred women from all parts of the South,
many of whom had previously graced a wider social sphere
in Europe and America. Its peculiar attraction lay in the total
absence of pretence. People thus bound by a common tie of
interest and poignant sympathy tolerated no assumption of
superior fashion in any of their number. In such an
atmosphere flourishes best the old-fashioned grace of
neighborliness. To the very last, each refugee family shared
what it had with the other; while Richmond folk threw open
their broad, delightful homes to receive their friends, with or
without gastronomic entertainment; lent furniture to those in
need, and sent dainty little dishes to the sick. All rejoiced in
each other's joys, grieved with each other's griefs. Hardships
in such company were lightened
of their weight. Sorrows so shared were easier to
bear.
From our midshipman, now aboard the receiving-ship
Indian Chief, in Charleston harbor, came a stirring
account of a night of mutiny aboard, due to the crew
breaking into the spirit-room and possessing themselves of
its contents, then going mad with drink. For a time the
officers kept the drunken brutes in order with their
cutlasses; several were wounded, some fell down a
hatchway, breaking legs and arms, and then the rest were
secured. Next morning the ship presented a singular
appearance, prisoners in bonds on all sides, decks
encumbered with seamen bucked and gagged, and the
rigging freely adorned with men triced by their thumbs!
Next, our lad was transferred to the "Ladies' gunboat,"
the gift of the women of Charleston to the Confederate
States Government, an iron-clad carrying four guns, called
Palmetto State - an experience of bitter cold, in
November weather with no fires aboard. Later in the
winter Palmetto State went outside Charleston bar, in
company with the C. S. S. Chickamauga, and attacked
the blockading fleet. In their "metallic coffin," they ran up
toward the U. S. S. Mercedita, in the dim light of early
morning, and rammed her with their bow. "A crash, a
smash, a broadside" - so runs the letter I copy here -
"and the Mercedita surrendered, sinking. We had a running
fight all day, but slipped away unharmed, and came back
by Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, receiving their salutes."
That night Charleston could not make enough of her
defenders!
In December, 1862, Fredericksburg was fought. In that
notable victory to Confederate arms our family met with
an irreparable loss. My uncle's son, Randolph Fairfax,
aged eighteen, a private in the ranks, fell
beside his gun and was buried by his comrades after dark
upon the spot. This youth, handsome and gifted, serious
and purposeful beyond his years, the flower of his school
and college, in all things worthy the traditions of his warlike
ancestry, was killed by a piece of shell entering the brain, as
he stood by his gun at sunset under a hot fire from the
enemy's batteries. A day or two later his body, still
wrapped in his soldier's blanket, was disinterred and
brought through freezing weather to Richmond, where he
was placed, uncoffined, on a bier before the altar in St.
James's Church. An ever fresh memory is that of the sweet
and noble face so unchanged, after two days' burial. Save
for the cruel mark on the temple made by the piece of shell,
and the golden curls matted with the clay of his rude
sepulchre, he might have been asleep. He wore still the
coarse flannel shirt, stained with battle smoke, in which he
fell, and across him was thrown the blanket that had been
his winding-sheet. When it was proposed to my uncle that
the body be dressed again, he answered:
"No. Let my son sleep his long sleep as he fell at the
post of duty." And thus, his coffin draped with the flag he
had died for, Randolph Fairfax was borne to his rest in
Hollywood. From camp at Fredericksburg, on December
28th, General Lee wrote to my uncle the words that follow:
devotion to duty was appreciated by his country. Such an
opportunity would undoubtedly have occurred; but he has
been translated to a better world, for which his purity and
piety have eminently fitted him. You do not require to be
told how great his gain. It is the living for whom I sorrow. I
beg you will offer to Mrs. Fairfax and your daughters, my
heartfelt sympathy, for I know the depth of their grief. That
God may give you and them strength to bear this great
affliction, is the earnest prayer of your early friend.
"R. E. LEE."
Our stricken family,
like many another, felt how nobly
the great leader helped to bind up the wounds of war by
words like those!
General Lee certainly united extraordinary qualities. I
think it was Sir Walter Scott who somewhere said: "My
voice shall be for that general who will possess those
qualities which are necessary to command men like us.
High born he must be or we shall lose our rank in obeying
him - wise and skillful, or we shall endanger the safety of
our people - bravest of the brave, or he shall peril our
own honour; temperate, firm and manly, to keep us united.
Such is the man to command us!" He might have added,
"gentle as a woman in conveying sympathy."
In the latter part of February, 1863, it became
necessary for either my mother or my aunt to carry to
Washington certain papers connected with the inheritance
coming to them from the estate of their late brother, in
order to secure much-needed provision for the clouded
and uncertain future of their families. After some debate it
was decided that Mrs. Hyde should be the one
to go; and I, with the love of adventure coursing through
my veins, induced them to let me accompany my aunt. I
should never allow a girl of my own to do it, assuredly
- but "autre temps, autre moeurs" - and then, I knew not
fear.
Bidding farewell to those friends in Richmond who
looked upon us as predestined to a Northern prison, we
went first to stop with our friends, the owners of Belpré,
near Culpeper, not far from the winter-quarters of General
Fitzhugh Lee's division of cavalry. Here we remained while
casting about us for ways and means to cross the border
and get into Alexandria. Not only were the chances of war
in favor of our capture on the way - that did not appall us,
since we were intent strictly on private business - but from
every side came gloomy tales of swollen rivers, deserted
villages, a war-ravaged country liable to forays from
prowling vagabonds of either army, and the likelihood of
running upon a skirmish at any moment. Worst of all, it
seemed impossible to hire a conveyance.
Waiting, however, in a pleasant country house near the
head-quarters of a crack cavalry division, with a dozen
gallant knights ready to do one's lightest bidding, had its
endurable side. There were visits to and from camp; rides,
shooting-matches - "General Fitz" presenting me with a tiny
Smith and Wesson revolver captured by himself, which he
taught me to wear and use - and, at evening, gatherings
around the big wood fire at Belpré, when we laughed and
talked and sang . . . !
At this distance of time, it is not telling tales out of school
to say that the leader of fun in those evenings was the
major-general commanding, future governor of the
commonwealth of Virginia, and years later a trusted chief
of the United States forces in the Spanish-American
war. One was as sure of jollity and good-fellowship in
"General Fitz" off duty as of soldierly dash tempered by the
wisdom of a born leader when in action.
It is pleasant to note that to the last of his varied
soldierly experience this General Lee retained the wide
measure of popularity with the masses that had always
been his portion. It was observed that during the progress
of the procession at President Cleveland's inauguration
ceremonies, General Fitzhugh Lee, riding a magnificent
horse, provided for his use by a loyal old friend, a citizen
of Alexandria, was more continuously applauded when
passing down the lines than any other person present
saving the hero of the day; and this was apt to be the case
in all his public appearances.
One day, when returning from a visit to a friend, I rode
from Culpeper Court House to Belpré with the general, a
darky sent ahead on mule-back, detailed to carry my other
hat and dressing-bag, a very demon of mischief entered into
my escort. In a wood road, where no one could see him, he
rode standing in the saddle, picking dried wayside flowers at
a gallop, backward, forward, in every attitude that man can
assume upon a steed, while forcing my horse to keep pace
with his "stunts," as he called them, acquired in his old army
life upon the plains. Presently, espying our Mercury,
despatched some time before, slowly jogging down the
narrow road ahead of us, he put spurs to his horse, uttered
an Indian war-whoop, and bore down upon him at a run.
The negro, terrified by the onslaught, not stopping to inquire
into its nature, lashed his mule and set off like the Headless
Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, I, overpowered with laughter,
left far behind.
Looking around us for an opportunity of entering the
Union lines at Fairfax, we heard of a lady living at
some distance from Culpeper who had the same end in
view as ours. To visit this lady and propose joining forces
and sharing expenses in the expedition, it was necessary to
ride twelve miles across country as the crow flies, for
which purpose General Fitz Lee offered me his mare,
Refugitta - a beautiful high-spirited little creature I had
ridden several times before - and the escort of his aid and
cousin, Major Robert Mason. We set off in high feather on
a sunshiny morning of February, but were overtaken by a
tremendous storm of wind and rain, changing to snow,
when remote from any possibility of shelter, in a desolate
part of the country, all fences gone, a deserted negro cabin
here and there the only sign of past habitation. Very soon
my habit was wet through, my gloves were clinging to
fingers so cold I could hardly hold the bridle. When Major
Mason, himself looking like a young Father Christmas,
finally insisted that I should get down for a while and walk,
to restore circulation, I slipped like a log from my saddle,
so stiff that my members refused to do their office. The
short cape and military gauntlets of my comrade had
already been forced upon me.
Thus equipped, we tramped back and forth, beneath a
grove of pines, till the fury of the gale was spent. By and by
the wind lessened, the snow fell sparsely, and we resumed
our saddles. Soon, over on the slope of a near-by
mountain, we descried a large farm-house with - oh! joy -
a blue curl of smoke issuing from the chimney. Making all
speed, we reached the goal, which, indeed, proved to be
the dwelling we were in search of. Never have a big wood
fire, hot drinks, food, and a rest between blankets, while
my habit was dried, seemed such a boon to me! To my
disappointment, I found that the mistress of the house had
already set out "to
run the blockade," and that she would have been "only too
glad" of our company. I will not aver that the twelve miles
of ride home that day was not a trial to my endurance. My
comrade, a hardened cavalryman, said afterward that he
spent his time wondering if girls were not of tougher build
than men. I should have died of shame to confess how
often I longed to break down and say I couldn't stand it a
minute longer. Happily, after a good night's rest, I was
none the worse for my expedition.
At last General Fitz Lee told my aunt that from the
report of scouts he could venture to send us in a
head-quarters ambulance, with a guard of picked men, as
far as Warrenton. Our families being so closely allied in
friendship for many a year, he felt and appreciated the
importance of our mission, and most kindly desired to
furnish the transfer to Riggs's Bank, in Washington, of the
papers my aunt carried upon her person.
To Mrs. Hyde was apportioned a split-bottomed chair
in a comfortable ambulance drawn by the best mules at
head-quarters. To me was again allotted my favorite
"Refugitta," the general and several staff-officers forming a
gay cortège of escort for a certain distance on our way,
and Major Mason put in charge of the expedition. It was a
brilliant, cloudless day in late February, with a promise of
spring in the air, when we set out. Long before reaching
Hazel River, our first crossing of a risky ford, the general
and his aides had taken leave, after wishing us a hearty bon
voyage. On the banks of Hazel River, an angry, turbid little
stream, boiling between red clay banks, we were obliged
to possess our souls in patience for half a day, waiting until
it was safe to attempt a crossing for the ambulance.
Beyond the swelling flood we were to meet somewhere the
escort of
twenty-five cavalrymen, assigned to guard us into
Warrenton and sent on the day before to see that the way
was clear. In the society of a garrulous miller and his
spouse, who told many weird tales of skirmishes around
them during the past months, we remained till afternoon,
when the miller announced that though it was "still a leetle
resky for wimmin folks crossin'," he "reckoned we mout
try."
Consigned to a chair in the ambulance, on which I was
glad enough to climb and crouch before the end, we began
the passage of the Red Sea. Major Mason and his orderly,
kneeling in their saddles, rode by the heads of our mules,
tugging and adjuring them. At one point both mules and
horses became lost to sight, save for their heads, brave
little Refugitta following the orderly. A sticky fluid lapped
around our feet. Shouts rent the air. A sort of hurricane of
strong language burst from our united protectors. Our
mules were swimming.
Perched on our chairs, trying not to listen to the "music
in the air," we at last felt our wheels grate upon a pebbly
bottom. A long, strong tug, accompanied by more
language, and we were safe, if moist, upon a miry bank!
"You've jist got to coax a muel," said our driver blandly,
turning in his seat.
"Is that the way you coax in the Army of Northern
Virginia?" we asked, looking around rebukingly on the
chief guardian of our party. But he was mysteriously
absent, and did not show again till ready to help me upon
Refugitta's back. Bounding along in a swift, even gallop
over a smooth wood road, we spoke in undertones, for
we were now on debatable ground, where no one knew
what an hour might bring forth in the way of a surprise.
Approaching Jeffersontown, a poor deserted hamlet
where we were to pass the night, the major halted the
convoy while he rode forward to investigate. It was too
dark to distinguish faces. From a forsaken smithy upon a
little knoll, we saw issue two or three military figures,
showing black against a streak of yellow lingering in the
western sky. Simultaneously, a challenge, an answer, and a
cheer! It was our bodyguard on bivouac, waiting, uncertain
as to the cause of our delay. They surrounded and
preceded us, as we went hopefully forward to the sleeping-
quarters they had secured in a dwelling not far off. To the
ladies a bedroom was given, the major had another, while
the escort slept on their arms in the hallway below.
The family owning the house were ardent secessionists,
who made us welcome to their best. Two nights before,
they had less willingly provided refreshment for a party of
Union cavalry. One could never tell, they said, when the
blue-coats might ride up, or when the gray. Not a sound,
however, broke the silence of that wintry night. When we
came down, next morning, it was to find a snapping fire of
logs, around which gathered, in cheerful sunshine, a circle
of tall, bearded fellows, who rose up and stood smiling at
our approach. A good country breakfast of "hog and
hominy," with hot coffee, had already been served to
them. While the same fare, with corn-dodgers, was being
prepared for us, we made individual acquaintance with our
manly guards.
Off again, over ground every inch of which knew the
ring of troopers' steel and the clash of sudden conflict.
Two scouts preceding, the rest formed into a double line, I
riding midway with the major, the ambulance following.
Snow began to fall, and the deep woods were transformed
into a fairy-land of beauty, powdered
branches meeting overhead, a white mantle resting lightly
underfoot upon the carpet of last year's leaves and moss. If
there were a fallen branch ahead of me, a dozen hands
were stretched out to remove it. A big, rough trooper rode
up and begged me to put over my wet gloves the woolen
mittens his wife had knit for him at home. There was no
wind, and I did not mind the snow. Never would I have
exchanged this royal progress for the tame comfort of the
inside of the ambulance.
"One mo' ribber for to cross!" sang out
somebody ahead, and this time I begged to keep on my
saddle, effecting successfully the passage of a chafing
stream. Nearing Warrenton, we left the warm shelter of the
woods for a turnpike road, where every movement must
be one of caution. Our men, alert, speechless, eager, did
not relax their vigilance till one of the scouts, riding back at
a gallop, announced the way free into the village.
Clattering up to the door of the hotel, we found rooms
and supper. To my sorrow, our escort was dispersed into
the countryside to seek quarters less exposed. And now, a
long farewell to all our greatness! Into thin air melted the
pageant of the days before. Vanished our plumed
cavaliers, our bounding steeds, our mules and equipage!
Henceforward we must encounter for ourselves the perils
of the road, stealing like marauders into our own county,
where our people had been rooted like the oaks around
their homes.
We hired a country cart of the old-time hooded variety,
wherein, drawn by mules and enthroned on straw, we
made creeping progress toward Centreville. On the road
we passed a tired woman carrying her baby, a crying child
tugging at her skirts, driven by starvation, she
said, to go inside the Union lines. We naturally picked them
up, and the hours that followed were hardly cheerful.
Sleeping at a poor farm-house that night, we awoke to find
a party of Federal soldiers ringed around it, who
proceeded to search the premises. When we got
downstairs the officer in charge was waiting at the
breakfast-table. Although they were in pursuit of some one
more important, it was necessary for him to know who we
were and what our business there. "Property owners in
Fairfax County, going to their home on matters of private
business," did not seem to suffice him as an explanation.
We must come with him to report at United States
head-quarters in Centreville.
Lacking other means of advance, we then hired the only
vehicle of the establishment, a pole on four wheels, drawn
by two oxen; and balanced upon this, our trunks bound on
somehow by the depressed Confederate sympathizer who
drove us, a bayonetted guard walking on either side, we
superbly entered the village of Centreville. At
head-quarters the officials in charge made a thoroughly
conscientious effort to penetrate our disguise of innocence
and stamp us guilty, but the case baffled them. A full
examination of our luggage failed to develop anything save
the fact that Confederate principles were antagonistic in a
marked degree to the theory of personal adornment. In the
perplexity of the situation, they decided to send us on as
prisoners of war to Brigadier-General Hayes, stationed at
Union Mills, on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, whence, they
said, parties of "refugees from the rebel lines" were daily
expedited to Alexandria.
The bitter cold drive of six miles to Union Mills in a little
open trap, plunging up and down in deep ruts of frozen
clay cut by army wagons in a heavy soil, or going
at a snail's pace between six stolid Germans, holding
their bayonets as they marched on either side of us, was
actually the most painful experience of our adventure. My
aunt, with her stately figure and beautiful clear profile, in her
mourning garb, sitting so calm and self-controlled amid her
strange surroundings, reminded me of some grande dame of
the French Revolution going in a tumbril to execution. For
nothing in the world would she have condescended to make
a complaint; we had deliberately placed ourselves in this
situation, and must make the best of it!
Ahead of us were several wagons loaded up with country
refugees, Germans and Irish, going to Washington to take
oath of allegiance and seek for better fortunes. One of these
vehicles, piled high with household goods, upset, and there
were wails from the women and children belonging to it,
though nobody was badly hurt. While waiting for them to
clear the road, we suffered intensely with the cold, arriving
finally at Union Mills so thoroughly congealed it was hard to
set our feet upon terra firma.
Stumbling to the ground, we paid our driver and were
shown into a room heated to suffocation by a red-hot stove,
and crowded with the unhappy "refugees," men, women, and
children, who had arrived ahead of us, all nearly perishing of
cold and fatigue. We gave but one glance into the interior
and turned away sickened by the noxious atmosphere, to
meet a smart young staff-officer who, with the most
astonished face I ever saw, could not for the life of him
understand what we two were doing there!
Ten minutes later, seated before a bright fire in the
officers quarters above, we were kindly and courteously
urged to partake of hot coffee, which we accepted, and
champagne, which we refused. How long it had been since
we had seen champagne!
A room, hastily made ready, contained two army cots,
gayly striped blankets, tin basins set upon a bench, delicious
toilet soap and towels, a mirror, and two tall tin cans of
boiling water. A tray of supper sent in "with the general's
compliments," filled our hearts with overflowing gratitude to
our noble foes!
"I am glad I've Scripture warrant for it, for I simply love
my enemies," one of us exclaimed, in heart-felt tones.
A cattle-train, the box-cars crowded with the poor
emigrants on benches, afforded the sole means for our
getting on next day. Our kind host, the general, relieved his
mind of us by letting us go to Alexandria on parole, under
supervision of the provost-marshal there. By order from his
head-quarters we were allowed to travel in the cab of the
engine, and thus whizzing past many a well-known landmark
in our county, we regained the old town left two years
before under such different circumstances.
We went at once to my uncle's house in Cameron Street,
where my great-aunts were installed, and spent a day or
two with them, going about in the interval among old friends.
Things looked very sad, the secession spirit in the town kept
under by a rod of iron giving people a wistful, cowed
expression, and the streets crowded with alien soldiers.
Wherever we went, in shop or dwellings, our hands were
grasped with speechless sympathy, tears impeding the
utterance of greetings, then we were hurried into corners to
ask about "our boys." When I compared our shabby clothes
with their apparently smart ones, they would exclaim: "But
what are clothes to standing side by side with those one
loves in a life-or-death struggle like ours?"
Finally, leave was accorded us by authority to visit
Washington and remain there until some decision could be
arrived at in our case. We accordingly resorted to the
house of a relative at the Federal capital, and with brief
delay visited Riggs's Bank, where my aunt had the infinite
relief of depositing her valuable papers and realizing upon
them funds much needed by our refugee family in the
Confederacy.
For a few days we indulged in the pleasure of daily
seeing my aunt, Mrs. Irwin, and her children, and other
dear friends, as well as the unwonted practice of shopping
in establishments that, after the barren wilderness of
haberdashers' shelves in Richmond, seemed resplendent.
Then fell a thunderbolt! Certain Union sympathizers
among our whilom friends having taken pains to
communicate to the Secretary of War that he was
harboring dangerous characters from the seat of rebellion,
nearly allied with the leaders of Confederate Government,
and full of menace to the Union cause, an order was sent
to us, which I transcribe:
"HEADQUARTERS, MILITARY DIV. OF WASH.
"CAPTAIN H. B. TODD,
"Captain:
By direction of the Secretary of War Mrs. E.
C. Hyde and Miss Constance Cary, refugees from
Richmond, will be sent South over the lines, with orders
not to return inside the lines of the United States forces.
"By Command of
"Official
A trim young lieutenant with good manners and, as
afterward developed, a feeling heart - Lieutenant Clark
Smith of the 169th New York regiment - stood in the hall
below, as the instrument of fate. There was a wild rush of
packing, surrounded by zealous friends. Whatever it was
possible to squeeze into the Dixie trunks, with little presents
for all our circle, went into them; much was worn, a good
deal condensed into hand luggage. A smart braided riding-
habit, a gown or two, and other coveted fripperies had to
be left with their makers, ultimately reaching us by flag of
truce. But one thing I could not entirely forsake - a new
hat, an unimagined luxury since many months, that had been
tried on and was waiting orders at the milliner's! We had no
sooner seated ourselves in the carriage opposite the polite
lieutenant than a siege of the enemy ensued, shorter but no
less successful than that of Richmond. In the end, our
carriage, on its way to the boat wharf, drew up before the
door of Miss Wilson's fashionable millinery in Pennsylvania
Avenue, and our lieutenant, issuing from it, returned carrying
a bandbox! I hope this transgression has long ago been
forgiven him! The new hat, so thought the Richmond girls,
was well worth a dash upon the enemy.
I should perhaps have mentioned before the adventure
of the hat that we had been driven first to the office of
Provost-Marshal Todd, where the oath of allegiance to the
United States Government was offered, and declined, with
thanks. Mr. Montgomery Blair had sent me a note,
addressed to those in high authority, stating that as I was
the child of an early friend of his, he would be glad if
circumstances would allow them to grant my requests (I
suppose they were that we should not be molested, but
allowed to stay and shop, since that was
really all I wanted) but this did not avail! We were told
that we must positively return to Virginia "as we had
come," and that without delay.
In Alexandria once more, we spent the night as prisoners
of war, on an upper floor of my uncle's house, the lieutenant
occupying the little study to the left of the front door, a
guard upon the pavement. From the town we were the
recipients of universal sympathy, but in our hearts felt that
since our work in Washington was done, and well done,
our chief desire was now to get back to our friends. People
flocked to the house, asking for us and sending messages.
One of them, Miss Mary Daingerfield, afterward Mrs.
Philip Hooe, eluding the guard at the front, went in the rear
way where she had played as a child with my Fairfax
cousins, climbed through a window, and arrived in our
room, cobwebby and joyous, bearing a parcel of delightful
little gifts.
Back at Union Mills again, and surrendered into the
hands of our former host, we were greeted by jovial
General Hayes with pleasant tidings. "I'm not going to let
Fitz Lee boast he treated you better than we shall," he
exclaimed, when the question arose as to how he should
dispose of the bad pennies returned upon his hands. So
behold us seated in a smart ambulance, under escort of a
dashing guard of forty men in blue, the general himself, with
two of his staff, accompanying us to the limit of the Union
lines. (I was, in time to come, to see my own boy wearing
the blue uniform, as a member of Troop A of New York, a
volunteer in the United States service in the war with
Spain.) In parting I asked if General Hayes had any
message to send to his old West Point comrade, General
Ewell, who had lately lost a leg in Confederate service. (We
had liked and admired
General Ewell since the beginning of the war. After
his wound we went sometimes to call at his lodgings,
where we generally found installed, as guardian of his
hearth and spirits, his widowed cousin Mrs. Brown, and
her pretty, bright-eyed daughter Harriott, now living in
Washington as the widow of Major Thomas Turner, of
Kentucky, once of General Ewell's staff. General Ewell's
marriage to Mrs. Brown was the outcome of his
convalescence from this wound.) "Give my best love to
good old Dick, and tell him I wish it had been his head,"
was the laughing answer, transmitted in due time.
We made our way by divers methods and in slow stages
across the debatable ground, always received for the night
by sympathizers eager to greet and hear from us. After
giving us of their best, they managed to hitch up some sort
of a horse and vehicle to carry us on the next stage. A
memorable stop was at the interesting old house of the
Marstellars, whose master, even at that date, wore the
queue and smallclothes of his ancestors. They sent us on in
an antique coach of colonial pattern, yellow-bodied, blue-
wheeled, high-swung, with a flight of carpeted steps letting
down to admit the occupant, and a hoary old negro
perched on the high box, to preside over the meanderings
of "Blackberry and the colt," the only steeds left in the
Marstellar stable by raiders!
In bleak March weather, we crept wearily over deep-
rutted clay roads, or "Black Jack" sloughs of Virginia mire,
through melancholy wastes of landscape strewn with felled
trees and burned houses. We recognized Camp Pickens,
the seat of former gay visits to the troops, only by the
junction of the Manassas and Orange railroads. At another
old camping ground the earth was
inlaid with hundreds of shoes cast away by Union
troopers, newly shod. Handsome homesteads crowning
the hills looked at us through empty eye-sockets, showing
no sign of life; burnt barns and mills, trampled fields were
everywhere - it was depressing in the extreme.
But we forged ahead, and for the final stage of our
journey - to Rappahannock Station, where we expected
to find an ambulance from General Fitz Lee's head-
quarters, in answer to a note despatched by a wandering
Black Horse man encountered on the road - hired a
timorous countryman, in whose veins ran skim-milk, to
drive us in a little covered cart. We started betimes in the
morning, and as the day declined our protector's fears
waxed voluble.
"There ain't hardly a day somebody don't git held up
hereabouts," he would say gloomily. "One side or t'other,
'tis 'bout the same with these scouts when there's hosses or
mules to loot. Coase I ain't afeared for myself, but when
there's ladies - thet toy pistol o' yours ain't but a mite, and
anyways I'm no gret hand to shoot. A fellow don't like to
lose his critturs; does he, now? Last week they took a
man's mules and left him stropped up in the bottom of his
wagon. This ain't no place for female wimmen, nohow.
Reckon the money I get from you won't pay me for the
worry. It's a bad place we're comin' to, ahead. If ever I git
home safe-----"
He was interrupted by the apparition, on the summit of
the hill up which his tired beasts were slowly creeping, of a
horseman, looming to the height of a Doone warrior
against the evening sky. Was he friend or foe?
My brave aunt, who made moan over nothing, sat up,
breathing a little quicker. My heart gave a wild bound
as I grasped my pistol. All I could think of was what a
perfectly horrible thing it would be to have to fire it against
live flesh and blood! I, who had seen and dressed so many
wounds! What a relief to us and our chicken-hearted
driver when the stranger announced himself a Confederate
scout who hadn't had a mouthful of food that day! How
joyfully we watched him clutch at the remainder of our
luncheon and eat it like a hungry wolf! How good to hear
that the big railway bridge over the Rappahannock was but
a mile beyond, and that the way was clear, with General
Lee's outpost pickets on the farther side! "But I misdoubt
your crossin' that there ford to-night, ladies," were his last
disheartening words as we parted company.
Alas! it was too true. The Rappahannock, swelled to
fury by spring rains, was now a tearing, resistless yellow
flood, the ford invisible. And now our driver rose and
asserted his manhood. Go back we must and would. If we
liked, he'd take us "to the nighest house," some five miles
in our rear.
Upon the far side of the maddened stream we could
plainly see the camp-fires of our pickets. How to reach
them, we knew not; but turn back - no!
Our driver paid and in the act of swift retreat, our trunks
and bags piled under the stone buttress of the bridge, we
climbed the steep bank and stood upon the track above,
straining our eyes in the direction where we fain would be.
In vain did I throw all the vigor of strong lungs into a halloo
for notice. The rush of the river drowned my attempts, and
it was growing dark. The Rappahannock bridge,
subsequently burnt by military order, was then the highest
and longest on the lines of the Orange and Alexandria
Road. There was no way of crossing it save by stepping
from tie to tie of the
railway. When I proposed essaying this, for the first time
Mrs. Hyde's courage failed her. Over that raging river she
could not walk without vertigo, and how could she let a
young girl go alone?
The irreverent answer was that there were times when a
girl with a steady brain and a light foot was worth any
chaperon! And before the dear, alarmed lady could cry
out, I was off skipping across the ties, till about the middle
of the bridge the pickets espied me and sent forth a mighty
shout.
Three or four of them came running to meet me and hear
my tale. They said they were never more astonished than
to look up and see a young lady coming, at that hour,
apparently alone, out of the forsaken waste of country
beyond the bridge. They had had no order from the
general, but there was a house near their picket post where
we could put up for the night. After that all became easy
work in our eyes. Two of the troopers brought my aunt
across between them, others followed with our belongings.
At their little camp by the track over the water's edge we
were mounted on peaked saddles, upon rawboned horses,
and led along an unspeakably muddy road, a big
cavalryman loaded down with our rugs, bags, and
bandboxes bringing up the rear. At the farm-house where
they asked shelter for us the good woman fairly embraced
us in her hospitality. Cut off in that lonely world, where
battles, raids, and skirmishes were her only excitement, we
were a godsend. So eager was she to ask questions, we
could hardly eat the bacon and corn-bread she offered for
answering them. Warmed by a fire of pine knots, washed
and comforted, we sank at last into a feather-bed in the
loft, with heart-felt gratitude to God that we were safe at
last in dear, war-worn old Dixie!
Toward morning our sleep was broken by a noise as of
thunder beneath our windows - wheels, shouts, the tramp
of horses' feet, the ring of soldiers' steel - what was it?
Broad awake and up in the moment, we believed a
skirmish to be in progress. But leaning from the window
we espied in the gray dawn our host in colloquy with a
Confederate uniform, and the little house yard completely
filled with gray troopers dismounting around an empty
ambulance. The happy truth flashed upon us! This was our
ambulance, our guard, sent by our loyal friend, the general,
to convoy us to our original starting point! Hurrah for
General Fitz!
There, as adjutant of the ship, he had sometimes
occasion to read out his own name in the punishment list,
for the offences of smoking, laughing in section-room, etc.
The Navy Department had wisely decided not to allow its
little kiddies to grow up only in the school of
arms. To his rations of "real" tea and coffee saved for his
mother, we were indebted for the only taste of those props
of feminine existence that we enjoyed till the end of the war.
We had eggs, butter, potatoes, salt meat, and rice in
abundance, but almost no butcher's meat or fowls. My
mother catered for us, and we fared well, though by then
had set in the period when it was said a citizen went to
market with his money in a market basket and brought
home his provisions in his pocket-book. It is certain I could
not write a war book and omit that anecdote! Water-
cresses were the only green things visible at market, and
they were actually cheap. The precious bluebacks of
Confederate currency became alarmingly plentiful and
secured for us less and less. Early in the war there had been
a brief period of "individual" notes, quickly suppressed by
government. We had a good laugh at finding in our
honored mother's purse, whither it had drifted with some
change, one of these, inscribed: "Good for one drink. John
Smith."
One of our former boarding-house hostesses had
offered to supply our little ménage with china and glass,
not to be bought at any price in Richmond. We accepted
gratefully, and for a brief time enjoyed the luxury of French
porcelain plates and cups, when one day arrived a
messenger requesting the immediate return of these
articles, as an accident had occurred in which all of Mrs. ---'s
were broken. Back went the borrowed glory, and that
day we dined upon tin plates, with our salt and pepper in
cocked-hat dishes made of writing-paper. Another family
had, in this fashion, to give up a borrowed dining-table at
the very moment when their invited guests had just seated
themselves around it.
Letter-paper became desperately scarce. To Burton
Harrison I was indebted for the gift of a large package
of cream laid paper with envelopes to match, which took
the place on my writing-table of a pile of prescription
blanks presented to me by a doctor in a hospital, used with
envelopes made of wall-paper, the pattern side within. Mr.
Harrison said he was protecting himself against excuses for
non-response to notes. Wall-paper served also for the
binding of some of Miss Mühlbach's works, and of a
translation from Victor Hugo, welcomed in the army under
the popular title of "Lee's Miserables" ("Les Misérables").
I suppose, in view of the amount of ink-splashing
afterward perpetrated, I may be excused for saying that
before this time I had begun to write stories, verses, and
sketches which the editors of various war papers flattered
me by consenting to print. The Southern Illustrated
News, the "Best Family Journal in the Confederacy," edited
by Messrs. Ayers and Wade, had for its "regular
contributors" Messrs. John R. Thompson, John Esten
Cooke, Harry Timrod, James Barron Hope, and Paul H.
Hayne, certainly a list of important and charming writers.
The News, "sent to all parts of the Confederacy at ten
dollars a year," paid me my first literary checks. The paper
on which it was printed was yellow and coarse, and the
illustrations, mainly of generals in the field, made those
hopes of our nation look like brigands and cutthroats of the
deepest dye. The Magnolia Weekly, "A Home Journal of
Literature and General News," was the other patron of my
budding literary ambition. Both of these weeklies struggled
under the drawback of having the military authorities of
Richmond descend at any moment and drag off editors,
printers, engravers, and contributors to delve in the mud of
trenches or to stand guard around the prisons and bridges
of the Confederate capital. At that
peremptory call of the alarm bell Richmond learned to
know so well, the entire staff of the two periodicals often
had to forsake office duty and be absent for an indefinite
time. During the summer of 1864 there were many
suspensions of publication, but the work began again in
October, 1864, and continued I know not how long, to the
satisfaction of camps and citizens.
The greatest feather in my literary cap, however, I
conceived to be an appearance in verse in the columns of
the critical Examiner, of which people stood in awe for
the caustic utterances of its editor, Mr. John M. Daniel, on
subjects military and otherwise. I had met Mr. Daniel and
considered him as unapproachable as the north pole was
till recently; but, as has been proved, even the north pole
has been misunderstood, and the Jove-like editor not only
gave me a place on the editorial page, but came to call
afterward, and continued to be a kind friend. The verses in
question were the wail of a mother for a son shot in battle
before Richmond. Probably I imitated Mrs. Browning, but
without knowing it, for I always tried to write what I knew
or could feel myself. I had shyly shown them first to our
delightful next-door neighbor in lodgings, Mr. John
Mitchel, the famous Irish agitator, whom we knew only as
a kind-eyed, brown-bearded man, full of literary taste and
culture, residing with his family to whom he was entirely
devoted. To Mr. Mitchel I owed a range of new ideas. He
superintended my reading and urged me to go on writing
and to work hard. Mr. Daniel, too, gave me sane and
strong counsel. My third literary godfather was Mr. John
R. Thompson, former editor of the Southern Literary
Messenger, of which Poe was the most illustrious
contributor. Mr. Thompson wrote charming vers de
société after the style of Austin Dobson.
He was also a sort of laureate of the Confederacy, since to
him were due many tender and graceful verses written and
published in the daily press upon subjects of immediate
public interest, like the death of army heroes and the
winning of great battles. In 1864 he went to London to take
an editorial position on The Index, a journal supported by
the Confederate Government with the hope of inducing
France and England to lend aid to its cause, and became
also a leader writer on the London Standard. To reach a
British port, he ran out of Wilmington in a Confederate
blockade-runner, slept on a cotton bale, was chased by a
United States steamer, but reached Bermuda safely. There
he took the British mail-packet for Halifax, thence went by
the Asia to Liverpool. From London, he made visits to
aristocratic country houses in Scotland and Ireland, and on
returning to town in the autumn, surrounded himself with a
circle of friends comprising Tennyson, Mr. and Mrs.
Carlyle, Bulwer, Lord Donoughmore, Lord Houghton, the
Duke of Sutherland, Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, Disraeli,
Dickens, Mowbray Morris, editor-in-chief of the London
Times, Woolner, Millais, Charles Kingsley, Dean and Lady
Stanley, Lady Augusta Stanley (then lady in waiting to
Queen Victoria), who entertained him at luncheon at
Windsor Castle; Dowager Marchioness of Bath, a warm
friend of the Confederacy; Miss Thackeray, Mrs. Sartoris,
Sir Edwin Landseer, Lady Georgiana Fane, the Countess
of Harrington, and many others. An account in his diary of
this time described drinking tea and spending the evening
with Thomas Carlyle at 5 Cheyne Row, on October
14, 1864.
"Mrs. Carlyle has been for some time an invalid, but
made her appearance. Lady Ashburton and Miss Baring
came in after tea. Mr. Carlyle said it was his habit to
drink five cups of tea. He ran off into table-talk about tea
and coffee, told us that he had found in Lord Russell's
'Memoirs of Moore,' which he called a rubbishy book, the
origin of the word biggin; it comes from one
Biggin, a tinner, who first made the vessel and was
knighted afterwards. Then he talked of pipes and tobacco
and recited the old verse, 'Think this, and smoke tobacco.'
There was but one honest pipe made in Britain - by a
Glasgow man, who used a clay found in Devonshire. Mr.
Carlyle enquired about the Confederacy, its resources,
army, its supplies of food and powder. He read a letter
from Emerson in which the Yankee philosopher declared
that the struggle now going on was the battle of humanity.
When we rose to say good night, he called a servant for
his coat and boots (he had received us in dressing-gown
and slippers), and walked with us within a stone's throw of
Grosvenor Hotel, two miles, at half past eleven. On the
way passing Chelsea Hospital, he burst into a tribute to
Wren the architect, of whom he said there was a rare
harmony, a sweet veracity, in all his work. We mentioned
Tennyson, and he spoke with great affection of him, but
thought him inferior to Burns: he had known 'Alfred' for
years; said he used to come in hob-nailed boots and rough
coat, to blow a cloud with him. Carlyle said he thought
Mill's book on Liberty the greatest nonsense he had ever
read, and spoke despairingly of the future of Great Britain:
too much money would be the ruin of the land."
On October 31,1864: "At Carlyle's, who made many
enquiries about Lee, whom he greatly admires."
Again on May 17, 1865: "Went to Chelsea. Mr.
Carlyle amused us very much by his comments on the
proclamation of (President) Johnson. He styled him a
sanguinary tailor seated on Olympus."
On November 15, 1865: "Called on Carlyle. Found the Irish
patriot, Gavan Duffy there. Carlyle gave us a graphic
account of a visit to the thieves quarter at Whitechapel. He
also spoke of the great ignorance of the educated classes
in England and Germany, of German history and literature."
On January 25, 1866: "Called at Cheyne Row. Found
Carlyle in the best of humours. He gave us an account of
the rise of Chartism in England. He denounced the
Emperor Napoleon and John Bright with equal severity,
and said while there was not one noble soul to be found in
all France, England had become a great, horrible
discordant blacksmith's shop."
On June 1, 1866: "Met in Hyde Park Carlyle, the first
time since the death of his wife. We walked as far as
Brompton Road. He talked with all his peculiar brilliancy -
speaking of Jefferson Davis he declared that looking at the
war from first to last, Davis seemed to him one of the
manliest actors in it, and whatever the jury might say on his
trial, the grand jury of mankind had already declared him
not guilty."
In Carlyle's "Reminiscences," edited by Froude, occurs
this passage concerning Mrs. Carlyle's sympathy with the
South: "Amongst other last things she told me that evening
was, with deep sympathy: 'Mr. Thompson' (a Virginian
who sometimes came) 'called one night; he says there is
little doubt they will hang President Davis!' Upon which I
almost resolved to write a pamphlet upon it, had not I
myself been so ignorant about the matter, so foreign to the
whole fratricidal 'war' (as they call it); self-murder of a
million brother Englishmen for the sake of sheer phantasms
and totally
false theories upon the Nigger, as I had reckoned it - and
that probably I should do poor Davis nothing but harm."
On the 15th of June, in the same year, Thompson makes
another visit to Chelsea, when he saw Carlyle's brother
and his niece, Mrs. Welsh. "Mr. Carlyle said it seemed to
him men were bent on reversing the idea of a millennium,
which was to lock up the devil a thousand years, and were
going to give him a free passage to do his worst on earth."
A portion of Mr. Thompson's diary was edited and
published by his friend Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard, author of
several vigorous novels, and wife of Richard Henry
Stoddard, the poet. Thompson was a great deal at their
house when he lived, after the war, in New York, as an
associate editor of the Evening Post. Mrs. Stoddard
mentioned to me an entry in the journal of a check, "the
proceeds of a poem on the obsequies of General Stuart,"
sent to me, but "never received."
I explained to her that there was some mistake about
this, since I have now in my album the letter accompanying
the check sent as an offering to my work in the hospitals.
Mr. Thompson was present at my marriage and wrote an
account of it (strictly without names). He did not live long
enough after that, poor fellow, in his adopted Northern
home to become the frequenter of our house my husband
and I would both have wished him to be, for a sweeter-
tempered man and one more pleasingly in love with
literature never lived, than he!
To Mr. Thompson I was indebted not only for guidance
of my taste in reading and research, but for a steady
provision of English classics from the State Library,
weekly piled upon my table. I read constantly, and
studied. We had almost no ephemeral publications,
therefore no temptation to stray out of the straight and
narrow path of standard literature. I studied French,
Italian, and Spanish, and no day passed in which I did not
write something. I think, in this connection, the
distinguished trio of advisers who protected my juvenile
efforts in literature must have felt they had pulled a string of
a shower-bath from the scribblings that presently poured
from my pen. To these productions I began by signing the
name "Refugitta," meaning "Exile." From letters received
from friends across the line, I invented a "Blockade
Correspondence" between "Secessia," in Baltimore, and
"Refugitta," in Richmond, published in the Southern
Illustrated News. In one of these letters, dated 1864,
"Secessia" advises her blockaded friend to read "Russell's
Snobbish Diary, "Barren Honour,'" by the
author of that
"nice, naughty, 'Guy Livingston,'" and especially "Orley
Farm," by Anthony Trollope; Lever's "Barrington," and
Miss Mulock's "Mistress and Maid." She is in despair
because the dear Autocrat of the Breakfast Table has
called us Southerners "Lords of the Lash," but hopes he
will live to repent. She describes the newest method of
hairdressing, styled "rats and mice" - the forelock rolled
back, the back hair parted and rolled forward, a "cache
peigne" of ribbon or flowers in the middle of the head
behind; also the new bonnets, off the head two inches at
the top, filled with tulle ruching, in which rest full-blown
roses. She announces that high-necked ball dresses are
coming in, and raves over a bewitching pair of Paris boots
with scarlet heels and a ruche of black satin ribbon about
the ankle! She ridicules the New York public for going
wild about the marriage at Grace Church, superintended
by Brown and Barnum, of Tom
Thumb and his bride; says the last mode for dessert in
Paris is to have strawberries growing in pots placed before
each guest at table; and describes the travelling gown of
the new Princess of Wales as "a silk Victoria tartan dress,
trimmed around the skirt with a full row of black velvet, a
jacket of silver grey poplin, and a bonnet of white crêpe,
without a veil."
"Refugitta," in
return, narrates the difficulties of getting
anything at all to wear or to eat in Richmond, describes the
thrilling passage through the town of shabby, war-worn,
hungry troops, a thousand times dearer and more welcome
than in their days of gold lace and glitter; the amusing
attempts of the women to turn old rags into new garments;
quotes Southey's north countrywoman's directions to her
tailor: "Here, talleor, tak this petcut; thoo mun bind me't,
and thoo mun tap-bind me't; thoo mun turn it rongsid
afoor, tapsid bottom, insid oot." Next, "Secessia" is made
to feel that for all the fashions of Paris and New York
combined, Richmond girls would not exchange the chance
of receiving flying visits from Uncle Robert's boys in gray
uniforms, however threadbare and smoke-stained from a
hundred fights.
"Refugitta," in
passing, makes note of a cruel
disappointment endured by the maidens of Richmond for
whose entertainment had been planned, by the gallant and
plucky Jenkins's brigade of South Carolina stationed near
town, a tournament in which the prowess of Ivanhoe and
Brian de Bois Guilbert were to be emulated.
"Expectation was on tiptoe, when the Assyrian came
down like a wolf on the fold; in plain words, General
Elzey, Mr. Seddon, and other hard-hearted officials, shut
down a lid upon our hopes, and ordered the brigade
away!"
A mixing of metaphors does not yet seem to have been
eliminated from the style of the young aspirant for literary
place!
That spring we rode a great deal to the battle-fields
below Richmond, sometimes in sight of the Union picket
lines. My companion in these expeditions was now and
then the private secretary of the President, sitting erect and
easily upon his gallant gray; but this was only when his chief
would let him off from the afternoon rides that wore out the
patience of the staff.
Sometimes there was an excursion by steamer down the
James, to Drury's Bluff and beyond, including all the
people who made up gay society (a misnomer that, when a
sigh followed almost every smile!) chaperoned by Mrs.
Davis, or Mrs. Mallory, the wife of the Secretary of the
Navy. Our favorite walks were in the direction of
Hollywood and on to the bank of the canal above the
turbulent rapids of the James.
We received many visitors in our little ménage, and shared
our ups and downs of housekeeping with some stately and
important personages.
Charles Godfrey Leland has said that "every brain is like
a monastery of the Middle Ages, or a beehive. It is thought
that no man, however learned or experienced he might be,
ever contrived during all his life to so much as even half fill
the cells of his memory. Yes, they are all there - every image
of the past, every face which has ever smiled on us -
every line read in print, every picture, every face and house
is there----"
It is certain that since I began to write these pages,
memory has summoned up for me many names, persons,
and circumstances of my early youth that had been
overlaid by a thousand succeeding impressions, and
apparently forgotten.
I will try to extract from my honey-comb some of the
personalities of the war. But as I am just now writing
currente calamo, with a few old letters and jottings of a girl's
diary to draw upon, I must take them as they come.
Our most illustrious caller that spring was the
commander-in-chief of the Army of Northern Virginia.
General Lee came one evening, and after a pleasant talk
with my mother and me, arose to go, we escorting him to
the front door. It was broad moonlight, and I recall as if it
were yesterday the superb figure of our hero standing in
the little porch without, saying a few last words as he
swung his military cape around his shoulders. It did not
need my fervid imagination to think him the most noble
looking mortal I had ever seen. As he swept off his hat for
a second and final farewell, he bent down and kissed me
as he often did the girls he had known from their
childhood. At that time General Lee was literally the idol of
the Confederacy. His moral grandeur, recognized by all,
lifted him into the region where "Envy, nor calumny, nor
hate, nor pain" did not venture to assail him. We felt, as he
left us and walked off up the quiet leafy street in the
moonlight, that we had been honored as by more than
royalty.
We went often to Mrs. Davis's receptions, where the
President never failed to say kind words in passing, and
sometimes to tarry for a pleasant chat. Always grave,
always looking as if he bore the sorrows of a world, he
was invariably courteous and sometimes playful in his talk
with very young women. These entertainments of Mrs.
Davis, in the evening between limited hours, were attended
by every one not in deep mourning. The lady of the
Confederate White House, while not always sparing of
witty sarcasms upon those who had affronted
her, could be depended upon to conduct her salon with
extreme grace and conventional ease. Her sister, Margaret
Howell, aided to lend it brilliancy.
To one of these receptions, Hetty and I had accepted
the escort of a captain, convalescent after the loss of a leg
in service, who, poor fellow, was rejoicing in the
possession of a new artificial leg of the latest pattern, with
all modern improvements, which had reached him through
the blockade. We had all three walked together through
the dimly lit streets for but a short distance, when our
escort gave signs of distress - halted, begged our pardon,
stammered, then declared he could go no farther, as his leg
had "come unstrapped." The street was empty of passers,
and we, filled with dismay at our inability to serve, could
but aid him to back up against a house wall and, one on
either side of him, stand there almost crying through
sympathy, to await the arrival of assistance. After a long
delay, some officers came up, by whom we were relieved
of our charge and finally convoyed to the President's
house.
Mrs. Semmes, wife of the Louisiana senator, a handsome
woman with a gift for tragic acting that might have carried her
far upon the stage, gave an evening of charades in pantomime.
Mrs. Chestnut had asked to call and take me there, "in a
carriage" - a great event, as we usually walked everywhere!
Until I read her diary, published long after her death, I had no
idea of the marital discussion that had gone on between her
husband and her lively self about the price of that
carriage - "twenty-five dollars for the evening!" When she
arrived at our house we had just been hearing from Von
Borcke about the compliment paid him by Congress the day
before, a vote of "thanks of the country to Major Héros von
Borcke." He blushed tremendously
as always when we praised him. I think he and young
Preston Hampton were also asked by Mrs. Chestnut to
share in the transit to the party in that twenty-five dollar
carriage. She was so delightful we did not care if we never
got there. In her diary, she says she sent it back for her
husband, who brought Hetty Cary and Mr. Tucker, so it
certainly did duty as an omnibus.
When we reached the Semmes', the drawing-rooms
were crowded with smart people, the President and Mrs.
Davis, Mr. Benjamin, the silver-tongued Secretary of
State, Mr. and Mrs. Mallory and their sparkling little Ruby,
with all the high world of the government. When it came
my turn to perform (in something forgotten, where I wore a
cap and apron and carried a duster), they had to wrench
me away from a lively and pleasant conversation with the
President, whom I was trying to amuse between the acts.
Of that performance, easily the best feature was the
strong realistic acting of the hostess; and we considered it
an achievement that she had induced the hitherto haughty
and unyielding secretary of the President not only to
appear in such things at all, but to cut off his mustache in
order to be Eleazar to her Rebecca at the Well. Long
after, when my husband consented to put on an Arab
sheik's costume to please us, in Jerusalem, I was reminded
of his attire in the Semmes' tableaux, made up by Mrs.
Davis and Miss Howell from Oriental shreds and patches
found about the house.
General Stuart was, I think, one of their performers; a
tremendous card for the management when induced to
stalk through a pilgrimage scene and lay his sword at the
foot of a votive cross; then Mr. Cooper de Leon, in gloom
and chains, represented so thrillingly a condemned
prisoner in Bridewell as to leave the audience
inconsolable till the lights were turned up again. And lastly,
the evening was made memorable by a supper from the
hands of a chef; not a supper of makeshifts and dire
disappointments to the palate, but a genuine old-time
banquet.
One of the most picturesque and royally remembered
figures of our war was that same Prussian baron,
Lieutenant-Colonel Héros von Borcke, serving as a
volunteer on Stuart's staff. When he first appeared among
us, in the spring of 1863, he was a giant in stature, blond and
virile, with great curling golden mustaches, and the
expression in his wide-open blue eyes of a singularly
modest boy. It was said that he rode on the biggest horse
and wielded the heaviest sabre in the army, making his
appearance in skirmish or battle a living terror to his
enemy. Holding, from the first, high place in the esteem of
his fellow-officers and superiors, Von Borcke, whom the
troopers styled "Major Bandbox," won brilliant renown in
service, and was equally popular in society in Richmond.
To dance with him in the swift-circling, never-reversing
German fashion was a breathless experience, and his
method of avoiding obstacles in the ballroom was simply to
lift his partner off her feet, without altering his step, and
deposit her in safety farther on. Poor Von Borcke received
a dangerous wound in the throat in battle, and was nursed
back to life again by the family of the late Professor
Thomas R. Price, of Columbia, then resident near
Richmond. He went back into service, despite the fact that
"my bullet," as he always called it, was never removed and
became liable, upon any unusual exertion, to move its
position and threaten to choke him. Once, when sitting in
our drawing-room, he insisted upon leaning over the back
of a sofa to pick up a wandering thimble from
the floor, the effort bringing on a frightful fit of coughing
and struggling for breath, which my dear mother dealt with
skilfully, while we girls assisted with tears
streaming from our eyes. I have pictures of Von Borcke
before and after his wound, the first of the Athos, Porthos
and Aramis variety of manly hero, the last painfully thin and
emaciated. It was some consolation to his friends in the
South when, after having fought with distinction in the
Franco-Prussian War, married and settled upon his
ancestral estates in Pomerania, Colonel von Borcke
returned to visit America, displaying far more than his
original supply of avoirdupois. An absence in Europe at this
time prevented our claiming the pleasure of receiving him at
our home. His own account of his adventures in our war
was published soon after it in Blackwood's Magazine. He
died some years since, but it is certain that no hero of our
side has been more treasured in memory both for his
dashing feats at arms and his lovable qualities of mind and
heart than he.
Prince Camille de Polignac, who as readily adapted
himself to our simple ways in Richmond as he had done to
the courts of Europe, was much liked in our society. I can
still remember his look of sudden dismay when a guileless
Richmond hostess, at the end of an evening party, asked
him if he would "mind seeing" a certain young lady "home."
This meant a sufficiently long walk, without chaperon,
through the dim streets, but the prince acquiesced gravely,
and wrapping his Napoleonic cloak around him, he strode
majestically beside his charge, hardly speaking till he
deposited her at the parental door.
A very handsome and plucky young Englishman, Lord
Edward St. Maur, of the Duke of Somerset's family,
who had come to America with the Marquis of Hartington,
appeared in Richmond in the spring of 1862, and bore
himself with gallantry under hot fire with Longstreet at the
battle known as "Frayser's Farm," or "Glendale," soon
afterward going by flag of truce into the Union lines, and
returning to England to the regret of Richmond people who
had hoped to see more of him. General Moxley Sorrel
records that Lord Edward met the sad fate of being
mauled and eaten by a tiger while hunting big game in
India.
Colonel Garnet Wolseley, of the British army, now
Viscount Wolseley, who has endeared himself to all
Southerners of the true faith by his splendid eulogies of Lee
- ranking him with Marlborough and Wellington - made a
flying visit to the Confederacy, coming through from
Canada where he was then stationed. "Praise from Sir
Hubert," are Lord Wolseley's words of the Southern
leaders, since he has himself climbed to the pinnacle of the
ladder of fame in military service, and is now field-marshal
in the British army.
The Hon. Francis Lawley, correspondent in the
Confederacy for the London Times, is cordially
remembered among the survivors of the Southern friends
whose cause he so generously espoused.
Frank Vizitelly, correspondent and artist for the London
Illustrated News, could hardly have been called a "ladies'
man," but we nevertheless met him several times and were
immensely entertained by his varied accomplishments. He
was a big, florid, red-bearded Bohemian, of a type totally
unfamiliar to us Virginians, who could and would do
anything to entertain a circle. In our theatricals, tableaux,
and charades, he was a treasure-trove. Everything we
proposed was according to what they had done in London
in the theatrical club
of which Charles Dickens was the shining light, and we, of
course, bowed before his superior knowledge. He painted
our scenery and faces, made wigs and armor, and was a
mine of suggestion in stage device. He sang songs, told
stories, danced pas seuls, and was generally most kind
and amusing. The men said he was very plucky in the
saddle and on the battle-field. Later in life, we heard of
him in wars here, there, and everywhere, in the service of
the London Illustrated News. To our regret, we learned
of his death under Hicks Pasha, in the Soudan, and were
glad to find his name inscribed with honor on a memorial
tablet set in the wall of grand old St. Paul's in London.
At the time of which I am now writing, Lieutenant-
Colonel Freemantle, of the British Coldstream Guards, had
not yet come to Richmond, where he afterward joined
General Lee's army and went with it in the disastrous
invasion of Pennsylvania. No one ever heard Colonel
Freemantle spoken of by his Southern comrades save in
terms of enthusiastic praise. When he went back to
England after this campaign, his book, "Three Months in
the Southern States," was published, making its way to the
Confederacy, where its charming spirit and interesting
presentment of the situation was greatly welcomed. By the
next season we were all eagerly reading this brochure
reprinted in Mobile for circulation in the army. During the
remainder of his life Sir Arthur Lyon-Freemantle,
K.C.M.G., held distinguished place in the British army and
was during four years Governor of Malta, a place of
highest honor in his Majesty's service.
To return to our pseudo-housekeeping in Third Street.
One day when we had been giving tea to a
party of friends, I left my mother and cousin to entertain
them, while I, as we had only half the service of a maid,
retired into the pantry to wash the tea things for a second
use. Little Mr. de St. Martin, always merry and helpful,
insisted upon following me to volunteer in drying the cups
and saucers, so I equipped him with a long white apron
and bestowed on him a tea towel. While busily engaged he
and I did not observe that the pantry door was softly
opened, until a burst of laughter revealed my cousin Hetty
and several of our callers standing there making sport of
us!
In that same pantry I had rather a startling experience.
Coming home late from a party where, as usual, there was
no supper, after we had gone to our rooms, I ran
downstairs to get some food to stay the cravings of our
ever keen appetites. On lighting the gas, I immediately saw
that the window looking upon the back was open at the
bottom, the sill clutched by ten vigorous black fingers.
What to do cost me a momentary pang. But I reflected that
the town was full of half-starved, marauding negroes, and
that, in any case, I would get nothing by crying out. So,
appearing to have noticed nothing, I pulled down the
window with a slam, and the fingers withdrew suddenly. I
locked the sash at the top, lowered the blind carelessly left
up, secured my plate of cold corn-dodgers, put out the
gas, then tore, breathless, palpitating, and scared to death,
upstairs to rejoin my comrades. All together, we looked
out into the darkness of the yard, but our robber had
already climbed the fence and taken to his heels.
The reign of expedients in food had now begun. We had
pork enough in different forms, potatoes, bread, and eggs
(did we not practice the one hundred different ways
of cooking an egg?). For sweets, there were pies
made with dried fruit, or cakes with black sorghum
molasses in lieu of sugar, chopped dried peaches in place
of currants, dried orange-peel making believe it was citron,
and dried apples doing their best, but failing, to
masquerade as raisins.
Ladies plaited straw hats around the evening lamp. Von
Borcke, waxing enthusiastic about a Confederate bride
whom he had seen, declared: "Ach, she was most beautiful
in von spun-home dress and von self-made hat!" We
sewed dreadful-looking gloves of chamois leather, cut by a
pattern handed from friend to friend. Some made shoes that
others declared they would sooner by far go barefoot than
appear in. As loot from the battle-fields, young men passed
on to their sweethearts presents of toilet-soap, combs and
brushes, needlebooks (ah! so carefully made for the out-
going soldier in far-away Northern homes!), scissors, pins.
On the retreat from Maryland in the previous autumn, yards
of calico, rolls of tape, and spools of sewing cotton, had
been tucked into knapsacks to be gratefully received by
wives, mothers, and daughters of the soldiers.
Thanks to my shopping in Washington, I had gloves in
plenty, but shoes were sadly lacking. When Captain
Joseph Denègre said blushingly that he had received a pair
of ladies' boots by blockade from Nassau, intended for his
sister in New Orleans, which since he could not possibly
get them to her, he would presume to offer to me, never
was gift more gladly welcomed! Earlier in the war, Paul
Morphy, the celebrated chess-player, whom we knew in
Richmond, accepted a commission to purchase for me in
New Orleans, whither he was returning, a French voilette of
real black thread lace, the height of my ambition. When the
veil arrived,
as selected by himself, we voted Mr. Morphy an expert in
other arts than chess.
We even heard of a private in the Confederate ranks
bringing back from Maryland a pair of stays, which he
presented to his fiancée. One remembers when Mr.
Jefferson was minister to France, a young lady in America
commissioning him to buy for her the latest fashion in
corsets, he complying gracefully, and writing in return:
"Should they be too small, you will be good enough to lay
them by awhile, as there are ebbs as well as flows in this
world." A blockade-runner, coming in to a Southern port,
brought, instead of arms and drugs, an entire cargo of
corsets sold out at great profit by the venturer who had
stocked her! For women must lace, while men will fight,
might have been a motto of the hour!
A thrilling day for us was the Sunday of Stoneman's raid,
when, as usual, a large congregation met at St. Paul's
Church, remaining for the communion service. We knew
that a big and terrible fight was on at Chancellorsville, in
which sons, husbands, brothers of many of the people
present were engaged. Outside in the soft spring air, a
tumult of war sounds continually distracted our thoughts
and racked our nerves. The marching of armed men, the
wheels of wagons containing shot and shell, the clash of
iron gates in the Capitol Square opposite, went on without
ceasing, while repeatedly messengers came up the aisle
touching some kneeling or sitting worshipper on the
shoulder, a summons responded to by an electric start, and
then the hurried departure of shocked, pallid people from
the church. These were the calls to come and receive some
beloved
one brought in dead or wounded from the field. To the
rector of the church, Dr. Minnegerode, in the act of
administering the sacrament with another clergyman, the
sexton carried and delivered at the altar rails one of these
dread messages, at once obeyed by the father whose son
was reported dead and awaiting him at the railway station.
A great weight was lifted from the congregation when the
rector, looking dreadfully shaken but relieved, came back to
resume his interrupted service. It was the corpse of another
volunteer whom they had mistaken for his boy.
Nothing in the war, perhaps, excepting the surrender,
ever struck Richmond with such stunning force as the
announcement of Stonewall Jackson's fall, of the amputation
of his arm, and finally of his death, following the battle of
Chancellorsville. Even the brilliant victory of our arms was
in total eclipse by this irreparable loss. From the first, when
the shy Puritan professor of the Virginia Military Institute
had startled the armies by his extraordinary daring and
military skill, Jackson had taken hold of the popular mind as
a supreme favorite. "Old Stonewall," "Old Jack," or "Old
Blue Light" was by the soldiers held in the reverence
bestowed by Napoleon's grenadiers upon the person of their
sacred emperor. With Lee and Jackson to the fore, quiet
people sitting in their homes felt themselves behind two
massive towers of strength and meeting every adverse
wind.
Because it has somewhat passed out of memory, I insert
here Dr. J. W. Palmer's stirring lyric, "Stonewall Jackson's
Way." No man who writes a taking war song can realize its
power until he hears it soar up in a mighty chorus of men's
voices, fired by its eloquence. How many a time have I
played the accompaniment
for this, sitting at the piano, surrounded by a ring of bronzed,
rusty, gray-coated veterans, young in years but old in bloody
service, singing with martial fire! It was set to music, by
whom I know not, as I have lost my copy of the song.
FOUND ON THE BODY OF A SERGEANT OF THE OLD STONEWALL
Come,
stack arms, men! Pile on the rails;
We see him now! - the old slouched hat
Silence! ground arms. Kneel all! Caps off!
He's in the saddle now. Fall in
The sun's bright lances rout the mists
Ah! maiden, wait and watch, and yearn,
And now, Stonewall
Jackson, Lee's right arm, was dead
of his wounds received, by the awful irony of Fate, at the
hands of his own men. Dead? He, the stern Puritan
leader, who, when he rose up from wrestling in prayer,
launched himself like a destroying thunderbolt against the
foe! He, whose sword never lay idle in its scabbard,
whose iron frame had not once sought repose during all
those months of fighting - who saved the day at
Manassas, by standing like a stone wall and won
himself a deathless sobriquet; who had fought and won so
many desperate fights, independently, in the Valley; who
had smitten McClellan's flank with fury at Seven Pines -
Jackson, to follow whom the flower of our Southern
youths were proud to suffer all things - this, indeed, was
a blow under which his country staggered.
When they brought his body from the place of his death
to Richmond, all citizens were in the streets, standing
uncovered, silent or weeping bitterly, to see the funeral
train pass to the Capitol.
We were admitted privately late at night into the hall,
where the great leader lay in state. Two guards, pacing to
and fro in the moonlight streaming through high windows,
alone kept watch over the hero. A lamp burned dimly at
one end of the hall, but we saw distinctly the regular white
outline of the quiet face in its dreamless slumber.
How still he lay, the iron chieftain, the fierce, untiring
rider of Valley raids! The Confederate flag that covered
him was snowed under by the masses of white blossoms
left that day by all the fair hands of Richmond, together
with laurel wreaths and palms.
And then, Gettysburg! Mourning fell like a pall of crape
over the entire South, even though beneath it hearts thrilled
with deathless pride in the charge of Pickett's Virginians.
In the middle of the hottest season of the year, Hetty and
I went into King William County, far as yet from war's
alarms, to stay at an old house surrounded by plantations of
sorghum and cotton, by means of which its owners hoped
to resist the outside pressure of blockade. The cotton crop,
unfamiliar to our eyes, was a beautiful one, from its
blossoms of a delicate lemon tint, to the boll, opening to
disclose a fairy fall of snow. We took our
first lessons in spinning from an expert old darky woman
in the "quarter," and also in weaving the stuffs required to
clothe the small army of blacks on the estate. In her cabin we
tasted watermelon molasses, and were regaled with genuine
ash-cake, wrapped in cabbage leaves, baked under hickory
embers upon the hearth, and served with fresh butter and
foaming milk, by way of what she called "des a little snack,
honey, to keep yer strength up."
What a pretty scene met our gaze as we stood in the
doorway of the spinning-woman's hut! Two rows of
whitewashed cabins, bowered in foliage and overgrown with
morning-glory and scarlet runner, each having its neat patch
of ground with corn, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and
cabbage - ("Their vegetables beat mine all hollow!"
laughingly said the mistress of the house) - the walks
between, like the floors of the cabins, swept as clean as the
decks of a man-of-war. In chairs before their doors sat the
patriarchs of both sexes, looking out for numerous little
darkies who romped and kicked in the sunshine. No sign
here of the horrors for which John Brown had died on the
scaffold at Harper's Ferry!
All my observation of the colored folk that summer kept
me wondering if they could be happier free. For years after
the war I kept coming upon wretched homesick specimens
of their class in New York, praying aid and counsel of us
Southerners of the old régime, in whom they instinctively
trusted more than in their representative abolition friends.
One of the best women I ever knew, a lecturer and
missionary to her race, said to me once: "Some of these
people call me 'Miss' and ask me to sit down in their grand
parlors in satin chairs while they tell me how well off my
people are. Your
kind says, 'You, Susan Jones! you're just wet through,
tramping the streets; go straight downstairs to my
kitchen and get dry and have your dinner.'"
The maid specially detailed to attend to us
at the "gret hus" came one
night about nine o'clock to my room on the ground floor in
the wing, to conduct me to the quarter where I had
promised to read the Bible to a few "church members" in
the cabin of our spinning friend. We went down long paths
lit by the stars alone and embalmed with the scent of sweet
flowers after dark; and to my dismay found the quarter in a
state of advanced preparation for an "event." The cabin
where I was to read, its inner walls lined with pictures cut
from magazines, was brilliant with the glare from pitch-pine
torches set in the fireplace, while a couple of tallow candles,
in brass candlesticks, illumined the pages of the Holy Book,
laid open on a spotless pine table beside a split-bottomed
arm-chair. Every available space inside and out of the house
was filled with negroes in Sunday best, their black, cream,
or chocolate faces looking in at windows and open door. In
the foliage outside, fire-flies were glancing. Near by, a
whippoorwill was calling. Not another sound broke the
stillness as I, in great embarrassment, began to read.
Soon my equanimity was disturbed by an old woman
who sat in the corner rocking her body to and fro. "That's
so! Bress Jesus!" she cried out piercingly, and this was the
beginning of a fusillade of pious ejaculations, grunts, and
moans, which I could end only by shutting the Book and
desiring an ancient elder in their church to lead in prayer.
Once I could repeat - I have forgotten them now - his
words, extraordinarily picturesque, at times vividly
eloquent. To my surprise, he prayed for the stricken
Southern country and for
"our pore sufferin' soldiers in the camps and on the
march." He prayed for their "dear old mistis," for
everybody present, some specially mentioned, for their
reader, in very flattering and touchingly grateful terms, and,
lastly, for that "hoary old sinnah Uncle Si, settin' ober da
on his own do'-step this blessed minit, hearin' what was
read an' scornin' God's Holy Word, he hade a-whitenin'
fur de grabe, he soul a-ripenin' for hell's dark do'."
The climax bringing about a perfect tumult of groans and
piously abusive comments upon pagan Uncle Si, I was
able to make my escape. Susan told me afterward, that the
quarter had "no use for Uncle Si, anyways" and had taken
this occasion to administer a public rebuke. The meeting
was kept up till nearly morning.
From that time I was always the recipient of smiles, kind
words, and little gifts from the quarter. A wooden bowl of
luscious peaches, fresh from the tree, would be poked
through my open window of a morning; or flowers, a
couple of fresh eggs, a bag of chenquapins, and even a fat
sweet potato, left upon the sill.
The portly cook (whose price was far above rubies!)
lost her husband, and on the following Sunday gave him an
imposing funeral: returning from which she was escorted,
arm-in-arm, by the deacon who had performed the
ceremony, an enterprising fellow with an eye to the rich
pickings from the "gret hus" kitchen. The following Sunday
they were married amid much rejoicing. Emily, a trim little
housemaid, used to petition me to write letters to her
fiancé, Tom, a neighbor's "boy," who had followed his
young master to the war. In one of these epistles I was
requested, with many giggles, to tell Tom "yes, please,
young mistis." On beseeching her to supply words for this
avowal, she threw her apron
over her head and, tittering, observed: "Why, don' you
know, Miss? Jes' de way you does it yerself!"
When I wound up the epistle by bidding Tom "God
speed in his efforts to seek the bubble reputation in the
quartermaster's department," and asked if she liked the
phrase, Emily smiled rapturously. "Why, laws, Miss, I jes
knowed you'd turn it off someway grand." Another year,
Emily and Tom waited on me in gratitude for my share in
their newly wedded bliss.
We went to a "baptism" in a lovely mill-pond and saw
the sable clergyman stand knee deep in water beside a
little island, beckoning in one after another of the
candidates. One of these, proving obstinate to his appeal,
remained goggle-eyed upon the bank, staring toward the
preacher, when the latter called out persuasively: "Why
does yo' tarry, brother? Why don't yo' come to glory?
What is it that yo' fear?"
"I'se afeard o' that darned little moccasin on de lawg
'longside o' you," was the answer, and with one bound,
not stopping to look back, the celebrant gathered up his
skirts and made for the shore and safety.
When we came to leave our sweet asylum for the stern
realities and short commons of Richmond, there was an
overhauling of our trunks to find what we could afford to
give away to Susan and Emily, and an old crone from the
quarter, tottering up to our outer door, looked in longingly
at the unpacking. A certain antique petticoat of changeable
pigeon's-neck silk, used in some of my theatricals,
captured her fancy mightily. (A similar one was offered me
recently in the show-room of a fashionable dressmaker in
Paris.) Finally, she told me if I would let her have it she
would "pay me out" with a turkey sent to Richmond as
soon as hers were fit to kill. I gave old Dilsey the garment
and forgot it. In the late
autumn one day, a quaint old back country wagon stopped
at our door in town, and the darky driver brought in a box
containing not only a splendid fat turkey, but a fine supply
of sweet potatoes, some apples, and a bag of chestnuts,
with "Dilsey's service, please mistis, and she hopes you
find them good eatin'."
Good eating! Conquering a strong temptation to send the
whole box to the hospital, we committed the rash act of
giving a dinner party. None of us had in months tasted fowl
of any kind, and the result was a dazzling success. The
cordon bleu whose services we claimed covered herself
with glory. I fail to recall any of the guests save our
neighbor lodging in the same house, Mr. Robert Dobbin of
Baltimore, who accepted, on condition that he might bring
with him a round of Maryland spiced beef, which had just
dropped like manna upon his path. He came, bearing his
contribution in a large china dish, made himself most witty
and agreeable, and at the close of our banquet withdrew,
carrying the remainder of his beef, at my mother's insistent
request.
Upon our return to town that autumn, owing to General
Meade's ruminant attitude and the consequent inaction of
our troops, the streets and our drawing-rooms were well
filled with gray figures wearing stars, bars, scrolls, and
other insignia of military rank. The daily increasing need of
wearing apparel for women brought about a wide range of
inventions to meet the demands of the entertainments, on all
sides given and shared in. My one new evening dress of the
war, bought in our raid on Washington and sent through the
lines by friends, had been reserved for the smartest party of
the season (given by the "Scotch" Allens in the spacious old
house that sheltered Poe's wayward youth, the home of his
adoptive
father, Mr. John Allen) where there was to be, wonder of
wonders, a supper with, it was whispered by gossips, ten
thousand dollars worth of champagne! My dearest mother
had worked all day at the alterations necessary in my gown,
and I entered the rooms feeling as much puffed up with
pride as pet Marjorie's turkey. In the agitation of offering
some one beyond me in the supper-room a plate of real
creamed oysters and chicken-salad, a man spilt its entire
contents over my luckless gown, irrevocably ruining it.
Nothing could be done to restore the soiled and spotted
breadths, since, from Richmond, French cleaners were
absent. A minor tragedy, but one that sank deep in my soul!
Hope springs eternal, and for the next evening reception at
Mr. Stanard's, where one was sure to meet the cream of
society and all distinguished visitors to the capital, we fell
upon a new device. Two venerable dresses in the family
repertory, a fawn and a brown silk, were ripped, pressed,
laid upon patterns of the latest date, per underground, and
trimmed with double-pinked quillings of the same materials,
dispersed ingeniously in curley-cues upon the skirt and
"postilion bodice." We had invented, pinked, ruffled, and
sewed ourselves into a state of exhaustion, when at ten
o'clock at night the last stitch was set, and I soon stood
arrayed in what at casual glance seemed a brand-new
modish toilette. My way into Mrs. Stanard's drawing-rooms
was made glad by hearing other girls whisper that I had got
another new dress by blockade. But I took care, during the
evening, to sit in sequestered spots, not daring to stand
anywhere near the central chandeliers.
Early next morning came Mrs. Coulter Cabell's maid,
carrying a neat little oil-skin covered basket and a note
from her mistress - renowned for her elegance in dress
- to ask if I would mind letting her take the pattern of my
charming "postilion," which should be returned in half an
hour. Alas! poor me! Full well I knew that in daylight all
the pressed places, pieced places, washed and ironed
quillings, the age and expedients of that presumptuous
garment would stand revealed! But I bravely lent it, and
the poor dear fraud came back within the stipulated time!
I went to Cary Street to make a visit to Mrs. Chestnut, in
whom Hetty and I delighted. Although she might well have
been my mother, I never felt the difference in age, so gay
and sprightly was she as a comrade, leading all the fun and
nonsense in our talk. I found her with the Preston girls and
others, lamenting that she hadn't a bonnet of any kind to
wear in full dress. The few milliners of the town were
asking $500 for hats made of the homeliest materials from
"other side" patterns. She had heard of my knack at
millinery. Wouldn't I advise her and earn her undying
gratitude? So we all went into dear, laughing Mrs.
Chestnut's chamber, where the bed was soon strewn with
wrecks and relics of her Washington finery. I selected and
another girl ripped up an old velvet bodice, mignonette
green in hue, a point lace barbe, and some sprays of
artificial nasturtiums, pale yellow and old gold, and set to
work to shape over an old bonnet frame. It was a rainy
day; Mrs. Chestnut begged me to stay for luncheon, and,
amid a feu de joie of fun and droll sayings from those
clever women, I worked on till, whatever may be thought
by scornful latter-day maidens, a very stylish and becoming
head-piece was evolved.
Mrs. Chestnut declared she wore it with pride to every
function of state or fashion afterward. If I had possessed
the mercantile spirit of some London great
ladies of to-day, I might, after that initial success, have set
up a millinery on my own account; but the epoch of
commercialism in society had yet to come.
Just as I had put the finishing touch on my work, Colonel
Chestnut came in, saying he must be off at once with the
President to inspect fortifications, as the enemy were within
a few miles of Richmond. A tremendous roar of cannon
began and continued at intervals all the afternoon. I helped
Mrs. Chestnut to solace her warrior with sandwiches for
the fray, and we saw him off on horseback, returning to
every-day matters quite calmly, so used had we become to
such happenings. Burton Harrison told me that in these
rides of inspection, his chief, mounted on the white Arab
stallion, always led the staff as close to the ragged edge of
danger as was humanly possible, having an apparent
longing to escape from official thraldom and return to the
risks of his days of soldiering. But for all that, Mr. Davis
would not allow his private secretary, whom he treated in
every respect as a son, to indulge in his own ardent wish to
resign his position with the Executive and enlist in the army.
Twice during the four years of war, Mr. Harrison (styled
colonel by the President, as a member of his personal staff)
offered his resignation, and was asked to withdraw it in
deference to the wishes of his chief, who used these words:
"I can get many men to serve me in the field, but no one
who will take your place."
It was assuredly an interesting post held by the young
graduate of Yale, so unexpectedly summoned to the
innermost councils of the Confederate President. Before
him daily deployed the chief actors of the Southern side of
the mightiest struggle of modern warfare; under his hands
passed the most secret reports and instructions, going to
and from statesmen and military leaders;
he lived, literally, in the heart of a thrilling crisis. During the
whole period of the war and in the trying times thereafter,
his tact, vivid intelligence, and high courtesy enabled him to
preserve cordial relations with all those associated in his
life, friends and foes alike; and this, I think, there will be no
one to gainsay.
To return to my chronicle of Richmond gayeties. Now
was instituted the "Starvation Club," of which, as one of the
original founders, I can speak with authority. It was agreed
between a number of young women that a place for our
soldier visitors to meet with us for dancing and chat, once a
week, would be a desirable variation upon evening calls in
private homes. The hostesses who successively offered
their drawing-rooms were among the leaders in society. It
was also decided that we should permit no one to infringe
the rule of suppressing all refreshment, save the amber-
hued water from the classic James. We began by having
piano music for the dances, but the male members of the
club made up between them a subscription providing a
small but good orchestra. Before our first meeting, a
committee of girls waited on General Lee to ask his
sanction, with this result to the spokeswoman, who had
ended with: "If you say no, general, we won't dance a
single step!" "Why, of course, my dear child. My boys
need to be heartened up when they get their furloughs. Go
on, look your prettiest, and be just as nice to them as ever
you can be!"
We even had cotillons, to which everybody contributed
favors. The gatherings were the jolliest imaginable. We had
constant demands to admit new members, and all
foreigners and general officers who visited Richmond were
presented to our club, as a means of viewing the best
society of the South.
In summoning "spirits from the vasty deep" to record
upon these pages, I had occasion to address a question or
two, in writing, to a friend of yore, a Virginian who has
identified himself with the best intellectual achievement in
his State, since the sword he bore through all the battles
delivered by the Army of Northern Virginia was laid aside
to gather the rust of peaceful years. If it be a crime to
quote a passage from the letter he sent me in return, I cry
"Peccavi," swearing that I will never reveal his name. No
one else living, perhaps, could have written it, and its
insertion here is my best excuse.
"Lord! Lord! What a dazzling, wholesome highbred little
society it was! Night after night, I galloped into town to
attend dances, charades, what not? and did not get back
to my camp until two - three - what matter the hour? - but
was always up, fresh as paint, when the reveillé bugles
blew, and when, a little later on, my first sergeants
reported to me as adjutant with their Battery Reports.
"To you and to me, looking back, it was such a blending
of a real "Heroic Age" and a real "Golden Age" as could
come but once in a million years. Everybody knew
everybody (in the highest sense of that phrase), and there
was youth, and beauty, and devotion, and splendid daring,
a jealous honor and an antique patriotism, an utter self-
abnegation and utter defiance of fate, a knightly chastity
and beautiful surrender (of the coyest maid when her love
was going to certain death). God! what a splendid high
society that little handful was! Oh! I never talk of it now.
People would only say, 'Why there wasn't one of them
worth $100,000.'
"I wish I could tell you something, because, as Owen
Meredith sings, 'old ties, they cling, they cling.' But
I scarce remember anything of that brilliant winter except
that I went everywhere, that 'the Queen' was most
gracious to me, and that John S---, and C. de L---, and
I were said to be the best 'round dancers,' as they were
called then, in the world (think of that!); also that I was
very much in love with Miss ---
(I was afraid to be in love with the Queen, because my
dearest, dearest L--- R--- had said to me at the University of
Virginia that he'd 'offer up to instant death any caitiff who
ever dared look at her'); and then with Miss ---, and remotely
with Miss ---. It's all very vague, but I have an uneasy
remembrance that I was engaged to all of them, and that
when the bugles sounded in the early spring, I went to the
front with a hang-dog but a joyful heart!"
Wonderful were the toilettes concocted that festal
winter. Maternal party dresses that had done duty at
Newport, Saratoga, Sharon, the White Sulphur Springs,
and in Washington and New Orleans ball-rooms, were
already worn to rags. One of them would be made to
supply the deficiencies of the other until both passed
into thin air. The oft-told stories of damask curtains taken
down to fabricate into court trains over petticoats of
window curtain lace, and of mosquito nettings made up
over pink or blue cambric slips, now took shape. Certain it
is that girls never looked prettier or danced with more
perfect grace than those shut-in war maidens, trying to
obey the great general's behest and look their prettiest for
the gallant survivors of his legions.
If one were to trust the melancholy old faded vignette
photographs and cartes-de-visite of the sixties, any
statement as to the beauty of the women might be taken
with polite acquiescence but interior doubt. Before writing
my memories, I have looked over dozens of these
waifs of a long gone era, and in hardly one do I see more
than a faint suggestion of the beauty of the original. To read
descriptions brimming over with laudatory adjectives, and
then turn to the portrait of the subject, brings in most cases
a downfall of enthusiasm. It is always with a sigh of regret
that I turn away from the illustrations of the belles of the
Confederacy embalmed in the agreeable and sprightly
volumes of recollections published of late years.
Of the women who were most in evidence in the
Confederate capital, I have already spoken of Mrs. Davis
and her sister and adoptive daughter, Margaret Howell.
The ladies of General Lee's family lived in a pleasant house
in lower Franklin Street, then and afterward held as a
shrine in the eyes of patriotic pilgrims. Mrs. Robert E. Lee,
not strong in health and always a reserved woman in
society, rarely showed herself in general gatherings. Miss
Mary Custis Lee, who has for years been known to the
exclusive circles of foreign capitals, having spent most of
her latter life abroad, took the post of receiving and
entertaining the friends and admirers who thronged around
their doors. The death of a beloved daughter during the
war, followed by that of Mrs. Fitzhugh Lee and her
children, while her husband was in prison in the North,
placed the family in mourning, disqualifying them for
conspicuous appearance in society. Also, it was
understood that Mrs. Lee felt a sense of impropriety in the
suggestion that the wife and daughters of the commanding
general of half-starved armies, himself sleeping always in a
tent and living on ascetic fare, should take the lead in any
entertainments of a social sort; so the old elegant hospitality
of Arlington House, which had opened its doors to so
many in the past, was allowed to pass
away, to be renewed, however, at their future home in
Lexington.
Mrs. Joseph E. Johnston, coming of the distinguished
McLane family of Baltimore, had a little court of her own,
in later days rather antagonistic to the ruling power of the
Confederate White House, it was said.
Two daughters of Judge John Archibald Campbell, late
of the Supreme Court of Washington - Mrs. Lay, and
Miss Mary Ellen Campbell who married Arthur Pendleton
Mason, of Colross, Alexandria - were an important
element in the social side of Richmond life. To no one
memory of those days do I turn now, with kindlier feeling,
than to that of handsome and original Mary Ellen
Campbell, who was one of my chosen friends.
The family of General John S. Preston, of Columbia,
South Carolina, who had left a beautiful rose-embowered
home to share the weal or woe of the Confederacy, was
installed in a small undistinguished house in Franklin Street.
It consisted of the handsome aristocratic parents, two sons
in the army, and three daughters, like goddesses upon a
heaven-kissing hill, tall and stately, with brilliant fresh
complexions, altogether the embodiment of vigorous
health.
I met two of this beautiful trio in Paris after the war,
where they occupied, with their parents, a residence in the
Rue Lord Byron, receiving and received by the best of
French society, with the same grace they brought to our
happy-go-lucky refugee existence in Richmond.
Our good neighbors at Vaucluse, the Samuel Coopers,
had removed to Richmond, where the general, albeit of
Northern birth, had elected to serve the South. Made
adjutant-general of the Confederate Government, he was
much esteemed by his confrères and the public.
His wife, born as the nineteenth century came in, lived for
many years after the war at "Cameron," her home in
Fairfax, with her son and daughter, a picture of old-time
dignity and high breeding in her late eventide of life. Their
daughter, afterward Mrs. Dawson, fair and thoroughbred,
with a charming frankness of speech and manner, was one
of my coadjutors in the founding of the Starvation Club,
and with the joyous hours of my Confederate experience
her image blends pleasingly.
Commodore Sydney Smith Lee, son of "Light Horse
Harry" and brother of General Lee, had married a sister of
Mrs. Cooper. No one can forget the illumining brightness
and cheery sympathy of Mrs. S. S. Lee, who had given all
her stalwart sons to the Southern service, from "General
Fitz," always in the forefront of danger, to handsome
"Midshipman Dan," my brother's messmate and pal in
many a bit of risky naval service, now a settled but by no
means subdued paterfamilias, living on his own acres near
Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Mrs. Chestnut, known to the world through the
posthumous publication of letters revealing her strength,
sweetness, and vivacity of mind, was a fixed star in the
refugee circle of Richmond. The delightful Harrisons, of
Brandon, gave over their historic home upon the James to
the shelling of General Butler's gun-boats and subsequent
occupation by bats and birds and squirrels, and came to
live in Linden Row. Mrs. George Harrison, formerly the
beautiful Gulielma Gordon, of Savannah, had just come to
them as a bride. Mrs. Myers, daughter of General Twiggs,
of New Orleans, and youthful wife of General A. S.
Myers, quartermaster-general of the Confederacy,
bewitched men and women alike. When, just after the war,
my mother and I took up our abode at the Ville au Bois, a
villa of apartments at
Neuilly, General and Mrs. Myers and their little daughter
came to live there also, and made a large part of the
pleasure of our Parisian days. Mrs. Clement Clay, of
Alabama, was ever foremost in providing things clever and
original for the diversion of her friends. Mrs. Alfred
Barbour, wife of General Johnston's chief quartermaster,
with her sister, Miss Frances Daniel, later, wife of my
cousin John Brune Cary, of Baltimore, were among the
blooming young beauties of the day. Pretty Miss Lizzie
Peyton Giles, came through the lines from St. Louis,
reputedly to marry a Confederate general, bearing with her
sheaves in the shape of a trousseau of smart and admirably
fitting gowns. To our disappointment, the promised wedding
was declared "off," but since we kept the bride and she kept
her finery to delight us, no great harm was done to our
feelings. Colonel and Mrs. Eugene McLean, she ever bright
and sparkling, were much in evidence. My room-mate of the
Lefebvre school-days, pretty and outspoken Evelyn Cabell,
who sang like a bird, had already married young Russell
Robinson, of Richmond, and was disproving the statement
that a Southern matron, however few of years, cannot hope
to retain the belleship of her former estate. And apropos of
this assertion, it was said that the elegant Captain John
Moncure Robinson, of Philadelphia, recently arrived from
European travel and possessing a wide range of social
experience, had announced that his real mission in benighted
Richmond was to introduce the German cotillon and bring
out the young married women. What Captain Robinson
actually did was to marry Miss Champe Conway, one of the
prettiest of the more youthful set!
It is hard to write of the living save in stilted and self-
conscious phrase; but who could depict the days of
war in Richmond, and omit those two cousins, Jennie
Pegram (now Mrs. McIntosh, of Baltimore) and Mattie
Paul, whose marriage to Captain William Myers was one
of the interesting occurrences of that time! So blended are
they both in my memory with the long procession of friends
who have passed over the river and rest under the shade of
ever-living trees, that I know not whether to mention them
in sad or joyous words. But even under the stress of that
terrible hand of steel that for four years held us down, we
had many bright hours together.
Most of the people I have cited were in our own class of
refugees. Of the resident families, many of them abiding in
the wide old ample houses, set back from the street in
gardens of redundant bloom and foliage, with magnolia
trees guarding the portals, that we would pass in our walks
envying their suggestion of home delights, the list is longer.
Not only do their names represent, to any student of
Americana, the direct outgrowth of the best Colonial stock,
but it would have been hard to find a group of gentle-folk
better equipped to conduct the functions of good society.
A very young person who had been reading with avidity
some of the domestic war chronicles printed in latter days,
asked me quite gravely if it were true that every man of that
period was handsome, clever, and a paladin of bravery,
and every woman a radiant belle and beauty. We all know
how, as described in family letters and on tombstones, our
grandmothers and great-aunts, our grandfathers and the
uncles who died young, have seemed to our imagination to
wear separate little haloes. It behoves me, therefore, to
touch lightly upon the charms and virtues of those old-time
citizens of Richmond, and to let adjectives of praise remain
embalmed in the rosemary of individual recollection.
The Macfarland house in Grace Street was running over
with young and winsome women; including Miss Turner
Macfarland, who married Colonel Wilcox Brown, with her
cousins, the Bierne sisters and Mrs. Parkman, like tiny
Dresden figurines, the latter early a war-widow, clad in
deep sables, and rarely seen in public. Miss Bierne Turner,
the fifth of that group of charmers, married Colonel John S.
Saunders, of Baltimore, where they lived for many years.
Miss Betty Bierne became the wife of the Hon. Wm.
Porcher Miles in the autumn of 1862, and Miss Susan Bierne
married Captain Henry Robinson, of Georgetown.
With the hospitable dwelling of Mr. Barton Haxall in
Grace Street, I had been made familiar through my
friendship at Lefebvre's school with Harriet Haxall, later
Mrs. Henry A. Wise, Jr. Miss Lucy Haxall, the eldest
daughter of the house, who married Captain Edward Lees
Coffey, an Irish officer volunteering for Confederate
service, later lived and died in New York, where her
daughter Edwalyn met and married Mr. Charles de Kay,
author and poet. Charlotte Haxall, the first wife of Captain
Robert E. Lee, died early; Mrs. Wise, whose son, Barton
Haxall Wise, wrote an excellent life of his grandfather, the
fiery and virile ex-governor, later Brigadier-General Henry
A. Wise, of Virginia, passed away in the prime of
matronhood. Captain Philip Haxall married Mary Triplett,
of Richmond, whom I last saw at an entertainment given for
the first Mrs. William Whitney and myself at General
Joseph Anderson's in Richmond. When Mrs. Whitney, all
enthusiasm over her glimpse of the South and its society, on
our journey from Washington to Florida, beheld the famous
Richmond beauty, she whispered to me: "Here is one that
more than realizes what has been said of her!"
Fair as the lilies of the valley bordering her corsage,
dressed in a gown of white satin moulded to her beautiful
form, with gleaming eyes and a wonderful pink flush on her
cheeks, so I like to think of the Mary Haxall ere long to
pass away in her sleep from heart trouble, leaving no child
to endow with her heritage of beauty.
One of the younger set represented by Miss Triplett,
whose name was oftenest heard bracketed with hers, was
Miss Lizzie Cabell, now Mrs. Albert Ritchie, of Baltimore.
Miss Mattie Ould, daughter of General Robert Ould,
belonged to this group of girls who came on late in the
war. Good-looking, well placed and connected, this young
girl stands out on the background of the day as a
spontaneous wit and suave talker on any subject, one of
those who, like Mlle. Julie de Lespinasse in the salons of
old France, would have found her special chronicler. But
the sayings and repartees left behind at Mattie Ould's
death seem to me spoiled by handling, and such as I have
seen in print really give no idea of the girl's inimitable
drollery and continual play of wit. The home of Dr. Charles
Bell Gibson on Grace Street was a haunt of clever and
responsive people, welcomed and inspired by Mrs.
Gibson and her daughter Mary, to whose credit were
circulated many bon mots and amusing strictures on things
current.
I think we all fancied that Mrs. Robert Stanard came
nearer to realizing the French ideal of a salon than any
other hostess in Richmond. She was a widow, reputed
wealthy and of considerable personal distinction,
handsome, dark-eyed, and wondrously persuasive with the
other sex, who came when she called and left promptly
when she gave token of a change of mood. After the war
Mrs. Stanard was heard of in various
places abroad, always received with the cordiality befitting
her recognized position as a leader in her own home. We
knew her in New York after she became Mrs. Robb, and
to the last she maintained the gracefully imperious manner
of the admitted sovereign - a
"she-who-must-be-obeyed" to all around her.
At Mrs. Stanard's one saw much of Mr. Pierre Soulé, of
New Orleans, dark, suave, courtier-like, diplomatic in little
things and big ones. Mr. Benjamin brought there his
charming stories, his dramatic recitations of scraps of
verse, and clever comments on men, women, and books.
The Vice-President, Mr. Alexander H. Stephens, rarely
seen in other houses - spare, worn, pungent - dropped
in upon her sometimes; our brilliant friend Mr. L. Q. C.
Lamar lent the witchery of his presence; all the foreigners in
town made speed to attend her evenings; statesmen and
soldiers, old and young, came into the circle of her
magnetism. Needless to add, the women of Richmond
were not slow in availing themselves of her none too
profuse invitations.
Mrs. Pegram's house in Linden Row was another centre
for pleasant gatherings. Her daughter, Miss Mary Pegram,
and her younger daughter Jennie, aided this gentle lady in
doing the honors of a home which was also to give to the
Confederacy two of the fixed stars in its military firmament.
General John Pegram, a West Point graduate, who fell at
Hatcher's Run, near Petersburg, commanding Early's old
division, on February 6, 1865, in almost the last battle of the
war, was a noble and lovable fellow, and a fine officer. His
marriage with my cousin, Hetty Cary, three weeks before
his death, elsewhere told, was one of the tragedies of the
time, unforgettable by those who shared in it. His brother,
William Pegram, going into service aged
nineteen, at the outbreak of hostilities, and quickly attaining
rank and reputation as an officer of the Purcell Battery,
with which he took part in every general action fought by
the Army of Northern Virginia from the first battle of
Manassas to the surrender at Appomattox Court House,
won brilliant fame as a soldier. Colonel Pegram came to his
lamented death at the battle of Five Forks, while seated
upon his charger cheering his men to victory. The loss of
these two valiant brothers, who sleep side by side in
Hollywood, was keenly felt by Richmond, where their
memory is still treasured as a heritage to succeeding
generations of her citizens.
Of other hospitable homes overshadowed by the
sacrifice of their best beloved in war, one was that of
Colonel George Munford, secretary of the commonwealth,
whose beautiful young son, Ellis, killed at Malvern Hill, was
brought home in the dusk of evening, lying across his own
caisson, and delivered to his family sitting all unconscious
of their loss, upon the steps of their dwelling, seeking the
cooler temperature that falls after dark in a Southern
summer.
Another home made desolate was that of Lieutenant-
Colonel Bradfute Warwick, brought there to die of wounds
received in the battle of Gaines's Mill, aged barely twenty-
three, but with an experience in military service as full and
brilliant as his life was brief. Bradfute Warwick, the son of
a wealthy father, had just completed a journey in Europe
and the East, when his daring spirit was attracted to
volunteer with Garibaldi, in whose stirring campaign in
Sicily he won high honors. Upon the outbreak of war
between the States, he hurried back to give his sword to
Virginia, and was assigned to his first service in the western
part of the State.
In October, 1861, he received his appointment from
President Davis as major of the Fourth Texas Regiment,
upon the promotion of whose colonel, Hood, to be
brigadier-general, Warwick became lieutenant-colonel. At
the battle near Barhamsville, called Elkton's Landing, he
was conspicuous for gallant bearing and the resistless fury
of his attack. During the battle of Gaines's Mill, at a
moment when the tide seemed to have turned against
Confederate arms, three brigades having been broken to
pieces in the attempt to storm the enemy's works, General
Hood gave his old regiment preference to lead in a final
desperate assault. The fall of Marshall, their colonel, just
before the command to charge was heard, gave young
Warwick the leadership of this band of splendid soldiers.
His fierce and intrepid dash upon the enemy's breastworks,
breaking both their lines, has been told as a tale to their
children, by the two hundred and odd men who came alive
out of the furious fire that had cut down as many more of
their number. At the very moment of victory, when Colonel
Warwick, seizing a battle-flag from its bearer, was about to
plant it upon a captured battery, his right breast was
pierced by a minie ball, and he fell mortally wounded.
One of my favorite comrades on many a ride near
Richmond was young Preston Hampton, a model of manly
beauty, son of the gallant leader of cavalry, General Wade
Hampton, of South Carolina. A feeling of poignant sorrow
came into our home circle with the sad story of Preston
Hampton's death while fighting beside his brother, Wade,
as members of their father's Legion. It was said that the
general, seeing his youngest son plunge forward, far in
advance of his line of battle, ordered Lieutenant Wade
Hampton to "bring the boy back." The older son obeying,
reached his brother
as Preston fell from his saddle dead, and as he caught the
body, was himself shot through the shoulder. The general,
spurring toward them himself, lifted the dead boy from the
brother's arms, kissed Preston's face, and commending his
other son to his comrades, rode on into the fight, not
knowing till the day's end whether Wade had lived or died.
Of other Carolinians in service in Virginia, whom we
were accustomed to meet often, were the seven Haskell
brothers, renowned for gallantry in action and courtesy in
the society of women; and Colonel, afterwards General,
Moxley Sorrel, slender, high-bred, and handsome, whose
recent "Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer,"
finished shortly before his death, narrates better than can I,
the story of his valorous career.
I never saw Miss Antoinette Polk until long after she had
been the Baronne de la Charette, wife of the gallant and
illustrious General Baron de Charette, leader of the Pope's
zouaves, said to be to-day the most honored and beloved
soldier of the old régime in France. I had the pleasure to be
their guest at their chateau, La Basse Motte, near St. Malo,
in Brittany, a few years since. She was one of the heroines
of the sixties with whose beauty and romantic daring the
Southern country rang. It was the general himself who told
me, in rapid and dramatic French, this story of his wife's
youth, while we were standing in the chapel of his chateau,
hung with memorials and tattered banners of his own
stirring war life. She was a superb horsewoman, and one
day she and a girl cousin rode six miles into Columbia,
Tennessee, to find the town occupied by Union cavalry.
Ashwood Hall, her father's home, was at the moment filled
with young Confederate officers, all unconscious of the
enemy's vicinity. Miss Polk, grasping the situation
at a glance, decided to warn her friends. She and her
cousin, turning their horses, started at a run for home,
chased by a squad of United States soldiers, suspecting
mischief. The tradition of this wild ride by two girls, "over
brake and brier," till, as their horses began to show fatigue,
they suddenly wheeled and jumped fences their pursuers
dared not attempt, reaching Ashwood in time to save their
kinsmen from capture and imprisonment, has been handed
down wherever Baronne de Charette has carried her
charming presence; and it is always added how beautiful
she looked on arrival at her home, breathless and nearly
spent, her hat and whip gone, her blonde hair falling all
over her like a mantle.
No picture of Richmond in war days would be histoire
véridique omitting the household of the Hon. Randolph
Tucker, attorney-general of Virginia, the echo of whose
fame as a wit, story-teller of rare skill, and a brilliant jurist,
still echoes down the corridor of time in Washington as in
Richmond. When I went from New York to Washington
to visit the William C. Whitneys in H Street, while he was
Secretary of the Navy, my host said to me: "I am getting
together a dinner of the cleverest men and best fellows of
my acquaintance, at which I wish you and my wife to be
present, and whatever else is left out of it, there are two
indispensables: Ran Tucker and an old Smithfield ham!"
Mr. Tucker came to this dinner and, as a treat to me, was
placed upon my right. Brilliantly did he justify his reputation
in making the social wheels go round. One continued laugh
accompanied the menu at our end of the table, but, as
usual with table-talk, it was as hard to gather up as split
globules of quicksilver. I remember we asked him if it were
true they
served coffee in large breakfast cups during the White
House dinners in Mrs. Hayes's régime; and whether he
had given to a course of Roman punch, frappé with
brandy unknown to the good hostess and served in little
boats of crystal, the name of "Life-Saving Station"; but
this he was too discreet a diplomatist to admit.
My uncle, Dr. Fairfax, of Alexandria, had taken up his
abode in Grace Street, in a small house, poor in contrast
with the broad generous one in Cameron Street,
Alexandria, forsaken through patriotic motives. Here his
oldest daughter, Monimia, was married to the Hon.
George Davis, of Wilmington, North Carolina, attorney-
general in Mr. Jefferson Davis's cabinet, a man of high
character and mind, distinguished as a public servant in the
broadest sense, to whose memory his city has recently
erected a substantial monument. My cousin removed later
to live a happy life in Wilmington, where her two daughters
survive her.
Christmas in the Confederacy offered as a rule little
suggestion of the festival known to plum-pudding and
robin-red-breast stories in annuals. Every crumb of food better
than the ordinary, every orange, apple, or banana, every
drop of wine and cordial procurable, went straightway to
the hospitals, public or private. Many of the residents had
set aside at least one room of their stately old houses as a
hospital, maintaining at their own expense as many sick or
wounded soldiers as they could accommodate. On
Christmas eve, all the
girls and women turned out in the streets, carrying baskets
with sprigs of holly, luckily plentiful, since the woods
around Richmond still held its ruddy glow in spots where
bullets had not despoiled the trees beyond recall.
Our little household had been gladdened by the return of
our midshipman from Charleston, where he had been again
on duty, and his re-establishment on board the "Old Pat,"
as their school-ship was called by the youngsters. Just here
opened a delightful vision. We were all invited to spend
Christmas at "The Retreat," in King William County, the
way being then open and without danger of interruption,
save by overfull rivers. The postscript to this agreeable
epistle was brief, but to the point: "Bring your own
gentlemen!" After much merriment in deciding whom this
would include, the matter settled down into finding out who
could be got to go. Of the limited supply of men who could
get off for the jaunt, our friends Lee Tucker, naval
paymaster, Confederate States and Captain Joseph
Denègre, of the ordnance department, with my small
brother, were happily found available, and in the gray dawn
of a December morning we set off by train from Richmond.
At the last minute it was discovered that Midshipman Cary
had forgotten his passport, he and Mr. Tucker remaining
behind to secure it, thus necessitating a walk next day of
half the distance from the terminus of their railway journey,
the rest of the way by a hired buggy.
At our stopping-place, reached about 9 A.M. after a cold
and joggling run by train, finding Uncle Nebuchadnezzar, a
Retreat darky, in waiting in a covered wagon lined with
straw, we inquired of him the distance to the house.
"Well, mistis," he answered beamingly, "it mout be ten
miles and then agin, it mout be twenty; some says one!
some says t'other! but it's a right smart little bit; mebbe it's
more, mebbe it's less, but sure as yer bawn, I
disremembers."
And "Sure as yer bawn, I disremembers," was
incorporated in our coterie-sprache from that moment.
Whatever were the facts, evening found us still in the
wagon, less buoyant than at the start. Our Confederate
ideas of pleasuring were on a limited scale compared with
those of to-day, when parties of young people must have
motors, fur coats, foot-warmers, and thermos vacuum
bottles to facilitate their winter jaunts. When, toward
sunset, we finally turned in at the Retreat gate, amid the
barking of dogs and the rush out-doors of our glad hosts
and their children, attended by scarcely less welcoming
negroes, all woes were forgotten. Two minutes later we
were in enjoyment of intense physical relief, seated around
a fire of generous logs sending out a glow that wrapped us
in its warmth; and in half an hour we sat down to a table
heaped with old-time luxuries: partridges, a sugar-cured
ham, spare-ribs, and sausage - for those who knew what
pork at the Retreat could be - corn-pone, biscuits, fresh,
delicious butter, pitchers of mantling cream, and coffee,
hot, rich, fragrant, tasting of the bean! We had literally no
words!
Dear, cheery little "Cousin Nannie," our hostess,
despairing because Nebuchadnezzar had taken the wrong
ford, thereby causing our delay and suffering, did not stop
lamenting over us till we had eaten a disgraceful amount of
supper. As soon as possible, she insisted that we girls
should go to our rooms, and there, sinking into lavender-
scented, linen-spread feather-beds, with a fire dancing
itself out upon the hearth, and a smiling
negro woman waiting to extinguish the candles, elysium
was attained. Was it true - could such home comforts still
be for us war-worn children of the Confederacy? The last
sounds in my waking ears were the patter of childish feet
upon the landing, and a merry little golden-haired elf
putting her head in at the door to cry, "I'll catch you,
Christmas gift!" Then the strong, delicious aroma of forest
greens from the hall below was wafted in as some one in
authority captured the tiny invader and bore her off - and
so - oblivion!
Next day, a quiet, cosey morning on a sofa wheeled up
before the fire, with winter sunbeams glancing through
crimson curtains into a room bowered in Christmas
garlands. At mid-day a ramble through a forest heavy with
pine odors, where a carpet of brown needles and dry twigs
crackled musically under foot, amid currents of warm
perfumed air; across denuded fields, where morning rime
still glittered in fence corners upon the skeletons of last
summer's wild flowers, and in the wide blue sky overhead
crows wheeled and cawed - peace everywhere, peace
infinite, no evil sight or sound to break the spell; and best of
all, on our return to the house to find our two lost sheep of
yesterday arrived and safe in the fold! To have had our boy
miss that dinner would have robbed it of all savor.
Such a dinner! Served at three o'clock P.M. (after a
luncheon, at twelve, of cordials and cakes), the host at his
end of the long table, dispensing an emperor among
turkeys, "Cousin Nannie" at hers, engaged in carving
another ham (that of the night before having already gone to
its long rest among the house servants) - a ham befrilled
with white paper, its pink slices cut thin as shavings, the fat
having a nutty flavor - with cloves stuck into a crust of
sugar. I remember a course of
game, and then the plum-pudding, with a berg of vanilla
ice-cream and a mould of calves'-foot jelly, together with
many little iced cakes and rosy apples in pyramids. This for
us who had been for months living on salt pork and rice,
beans and dried apples, who were to live on that fare (and
in short rations, too) until poor old Richmond fell! The
deeds done with fork and spoon that day, are they not
written in the annals of the Retreat?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends! Our holiday
was over. Again packed in the wagon, this time with the
warmth of kindly good-byes and the memory of a royal
welcome forming a shield around our hearts against cold
and all Pandora's box of ills. "And just look here!" said Joe
Denègre as we started, designating a large split basket of
luncheon hidden in the straw. "Then, don't any of you say
there's such a word as trouble in this world!"
We creaked along. We sank into deep ruts and dragged
through miry reaches. The drive seemed endless. The cork
came out of our persimmon beer and it filled Lee Tucker's
shoe, but nobody complained. The victim, possessing a
very nice voice of his own, started: "If you want to have a
good time, jine the cavalry," in which everybody chimed.
Other songs followed, and catches: "Frère Jacques!" "A
southerly wind and a cloudy sky," and "White sand and
gray sand." At two o'clock we had luncheon, and a happy
silence fell.
More songs; then "Muggins" was proposed, a game of
cards I thought detestable; but they played it as earnestly
as people nowadays play bridge. Next, Mr. Tucker got
out "Elsie Venner," and gave us an example of his elocution
in the tea-party of "Mrs. Marilla
Rowens," and so we arrived at a ford that of course we
couldn't cross.
To crown all, it was raining. Captains Denègre and
Tucker went off in the gathering darkness through mud
ankle-deep, reappearing with news of a house somewhere
into which we might be taken. Whatever failed us in those
days, it was not Virginian hospitality! The good people
whose home we invaded seemed more than pleased to
receive us, and next morning betimes started us again "On
to Richmond." By that time all Christmas cheer had gone
out of us. To reach a ferry, where there was only a tiny
makeshift of a skiff, we and the mules wearily took up the
burden of life again, plodding five miles through sloughs of
hopeless mud, up perpendicular hills and down again, till
every bone ached and philosophy ceased to be a virtue.
Once more on the shores of classic Pamunkey, liquid
mud flowing everywhere, in prospect a crossing, two by
two, in a miserable egg-shell made of slimy planks, the
bottom quite under water! The crowning feat of our
expedition was, on reaching the other shore, all vehicles
failing, to take heart of grace and walk six miles, in a
downpour, to the nearest station of the railway. Old Uncle
Nebuchadnezzar, an ebon shade, smiling broadly over his
coat-pocket full of Confederate blue-backs administered
as tips, remaining with his mules on the far bank of the
Stygian River, alone told the tale of our perfect holiday. If
it is asked what were our notions of perfection, I would
answer that in those days we were sustained by what
Cervantes styled "the bounding of the soul, the bursting of
laughter, and the quicksilver of the five senses."
As all chronicles of our war-time must of necessity drop
often into melancholy detail, I am trying to
assemble some of the more cheerful aspects of Richmond
life. One day in January, Mrs. George Wythe Randolph,
the beautiful Oriental-looking wife of our cousin, the
Secretary of War, appealed to me to arrange for her an
entertainment for an evening party which it devolved upon
her to give to social and official Richmond. So I "thought
up" a series of charades in pantomime, called in the
players I could depend upon, and with the aid of Vizitelly,
who not only painted a reversible drop scene but the faces
of all the actors, the affair came off successfully.
The ready muse of Mr. Thompson bubbled over in a set
of verses, read with spirit between each word, by Miss
Mary Preston in the costume of a Greek chorus. I have
them now, in the author's beautiful distinct caligraphy.
"Knighthood," was the first word, and when the stanza I
shall quote was read, the allusion it contained to General
Hood, sitting well to the front in our audience, was a
complete surprise. The object of the eulogy, looking like
the hero of a Wagner opera, was compelled by a tumult of
hand-clappings to arise and bow, blushing to the roots of
his hair, and it was several minutes before the performance
could go on.
General Hood, who had
recently lost a leg in battle, was
generally supposed to be engaged to marry the fair and
regal being near whom he sat at our entertainment. His staff-
surgeon going abroad through the blockade about this time
was reported to carry, as his chief's direction for purchase
in Paris, this order: "Mem: Three cork legs, and a diamond
ring."
The love affair attributed to him did not materialize. It
was some time after the war, when General Hood, married
to a beautiful girl in New Orleans, and possessed of an
unusually liberal allowance of young children, was said,
upon his travels over the Southern country, where he had
once wired orders deploying conquering armies, to
telegraph ahead for fresh milk at the ensuing station.
From a stray leaf of my working copy of the
programme, I find our dramatis personæ in "Pen" were
Miss Josephine Chestney, as a quaint and pretty "Fanny
Squeers," cajoling Major Ward, as "Nicholas Nickleby,"
to sharpen her quill pen.
In "Eye," Miss Herndon, as the "Widow Wadman,"
displayed her ailing orb to Mr. Forbes, as "Uncle Toby."
In "Tent" we had one of those Eastern scenes dear to
amateurs, with all the jewels, spangles, and scarfs of
friends and family united on the persons of young ladies
who loll upon sofa cushions. In this word, Mrs. Russell
Robinson was a lovely "Light of the Harem." The only real
harem I ever penetrated in my journeys in Eastern
countries was utterly unlike our representation, but we
were all quite satisfied.
The word "Penitent" was posed by Miss Lizzie Giles in
the garb of a novice with what seemed real tears upon her
roseate cheeks.
Our next was time-honored "Matrimony." In "Mat,"
Mr. Robert Dobbin lost his lady-love by too great anxiety
in looking for a mat to kneel upon before Miss Pollard.
"Rye" revealed Vizitelly's painted fields as a background
for my Cousin Hetty Cary's appearance in the guise of a
Scotch lassie far too good-looking to be true, a picture
several times redemanded while the piano industriously
repeated "Comin' Thro' the Rye." After this scene my
cousin was about to go around to sit among the audience,
when her presence became necessary to quell an incipient
strike among my supers behind the scenes. These
volunteers being none other than Generals J. E. B. Stuart
and Fitz Lee, the former declared he wouldn't stay by
himself in that stuffy place next the butler's pantry and hold
up a step-ladder unless Miss Hetty Cary would come and
talk to him.
The result of this arrangement was that as the curtain was
about to rise upon "Money" - where I, as a rustic maiden,
was to divide my smiles between Colonel John Saunders,
an humble swain of my own estate, and Vizitelly, a plumed
cavalier with a purse of gold to offer - a fiasco occurred
that nearly wrecked me and the syllable. My scene,
charmingly painted as an English thatched cottage wreathed
in roses, with a glimpse of the Thames in the background,
had a garden fence, on the stile of which I was supposed to
be perched coquettishly. Just as I had seated myself upon
the stile, held up by General Stuart in the rear, and Vizitelly
was prepared to make his swaggering entrance from the
side, while Colonel Saunders began enacting whole
volumes of jealousy, my perch gave way and I slid to the
ground. Instantly the heroine was transformed into an irate
stage-manager darting behind the scenes to scold
an offending super. In vain General Stuart protested abject
penitence for having forgotten for a moment and let go,
and promised better behavior. Accused of gross neglect
while on duty, he was sentenced to lose his position and sit
among the audience for the remainder of the show.
General Fitz Lee, virtuously declaring that no young lady
could make him forget his responsibility as a step-ladder,
took and held General Stuart's post.
Poor Stuart - gallant and joyous Stuart! Lee's right arm
- the meteor cavalryman whose men gloried in following
him to the death! In a few short months after this brief
dalliance with fun in Richmond, he was to ride his last ride,
and be shot down by a bullet from the outpost after the
battle of the Yellow Tavern. In all our parties and
pleasurings, there seemed to lurk a foreshadowing of
tragedy, as in the Greek plays where the gloomy end is
ever kept in sight.
For those of this generation less familiar than were we
with Stuart's fame, I quote a striking description from a
book called the "Crisis of the Confederacy," written by an
English officer, Captain Cecil Battine, of the Fifteenth
King's Hussars. "James Stuart, or Jeb, as he was called in
the army, from his first initials, proved himself in his short
career the greatest warrior amongst the great men who
have been so called. Whether or not he was really
descended from Robert the Bruce, he certainly inherited
the kingly talent for leading men and making war. He won
the great battle of May 3, which was decisive in this
campaign, by skillful and gallant leading. He was but twenty-
eight years old when he took Jackson's place at the head
of the Second Corps." And again, in describing
Chancellorsville: "The signal was then given for an assault
right along the line. While
the guns swept the road and the clearing on either side of
it, Stuart led his infantry once more across the ravine,
singing at the top of his voice, and waving his sword. His
blonde beard, blue eyes and noble figure on horseback
recalled the Norman hero who led the van at Hastings,
singing the songs of Roland."
The finale of our performance at General Randolph's
(given before the President, the cabinet, and as many more
official people as the spacious rooms could hold) was very
satisfying to our pride, although that is a condition rarely
missing from the efforts of amateur actors. The whole word
"Matrimony" was embodied in the quarrel scene from the
"School for Scandal," beginning with the peevish protest of
"Sir Peter": "Lady Teazle, Lady Teazle, I'll not bear it," in
which the protean Mr. Lee Tucker and the writer of these
lines took the parts of the ill-matched pair. My costume that
night was like a New England minister's donation party, a
combination of unrelated parts contributed by friends. Miss
Maria Freeland, our neighbor, had at the last moment sent
over the white ostrich plumes, sought wildly among my
friends without success, that crowned the superstructure of
my powdered locks, and I wore dear knows who's pearl
necklace, in mortal fear of losing it. Everybody borrowed;
everybody lent; we had not the least reserve in seeking.
That winter, also, was given the amateur performance of
which several accounts have recently gone into print. Mrs.
Clement Clay, as "Mrs. Malaprop," was astonishingly
good, dominating our little stage with the ease of a veteran
actress. Mr. John Randolph as "Sir Anthony," Paymaster
L. M. Tucker as "Jack Absolute," Major R. W. Brown as
"Sir Lucius," Major
Frank Ward as "Bob Acres," Mr. George Robinson as
"David," and Mr. R. Dobbin as "Coachman," with my little
brother as "Fag," carried off their parts with a dash that
made me often long in the after days, when I conducted so
many amateur theatricals for charity in New York, for such
admirable material with which to cast my plays. The
drollest incident was when General Hood, new to "The
Rivals," said about "Bob Acres": "By Jove, I believe the
man's afraid!"
The witty, rattling old comedy went from beginning to
end without a lagging moment. I had the uninspiring part of
"Lydia Languish," serving as a foil for the real brilliancy of
Mrs. Clay's performance. We played it two nights
successfully before large audiences of our friends. I find in
a scrap of old diary, without a date, this entry: "My first
dress was white muslin, lace negligé cap, blue ribbons;
second dress, petticoat and bodice of pale blue brocade
(once worn by somebody else at a White House levee),
train of pale pink moiré antique, powdered hair, wreath of
pink roses, fichu of old Mechlin lace.... "Clarence had an
especial permit from the Secretary of the Navy (Mr.
Mallory) to leave the school-ship for these occasions.
Mamma patched up his livery with much skill, and at the
first performance, had the pride of hearing an old general,
doubled with laughter on the seat next to her, say: "By
George, that Fag beats all the rest of 'em! It's the best bit
of acting I ever saw...."
Tired as we were, next morning I went with Hetty,
General Fitz Lee, and Colonel von Borcke for a long
ride in brilliant winter sunshine, our hearts bounding
with our horses. Hetty looked so beautiful in her habit
none of us could keep our eyes off her. (The only girl
I ever thought compared with her in the saddle was Sally
Preston, whose habit, made in England, fitted her noble
figure like a glove. She rode in London park style, and
when mounted on her fine bay, Fairfax, was a glowing
picture of vigorous beauty.) I made them laugh by telling
"behind the scenes" anecdotes, and complaining of the
black and blue spot left on my shoulder by Mrs.
Malaprop's real pinch. I also confided to them that I should
love to go upon the real stage, but knew, if I did, all the
grandfathers and great-aunts would rise from their graves in
horror! It was not so long before that a member of the
Episcopal Church in Virginia was forbidden to go to the
theatre, and to races, or threatened with excommunication
for waltzing. This was during the period when the spirit of
valiant old Bishop Meade still controlled our Church, in
reaction from the days of the card-playing, fox-hunting
clergy and resident chaplains who read the service in
surplices worn over pink coats, keeping their hunters
saddled and tethered at the vestry door!
I am trying to remember, to write down here, some of
the men we were accustomed to meet at our parties and to
receive in our drawing-rooms. Of the general officers, first
and last, the list is a long one, besides those already
mentioned in these pages. General Custis Lee; General W.
H. F. Lee; Generals Elzey, Gracie, Roger A. Pryor,
Lawton, Albert Sydney Johnston (the noblest Roman of
them all in appearance), Gordon, Morgan, Buckner,
McCullough, Jenkins, Edward Johnston, P. M. B. Young,
and splendid General Breckinridge. The Hon. Mr.
Clingman was a devoted if rather melancholy squire of
dames. Then there were Colonels John Taylor Wood,
Lubbock, and Preston Johnston, of the President's staff;
Colonels George Deas and Bayne; Captain Basil
Gildersleeve, of Ewell's staff; Colonel
Osmun Latrobe (who has not let himself belong to a
by-gone age but still holds his own at New York, Newport,
and Lenox, as in our little war-jammed Richmond); always
popular Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas, of whom we were to
see so much in later days at Bar Harbor; Hon. William
Porcher Miles; General Chestnut and Governor Manning;
Captain Gordon McCabe (very young, but a hot fighter, a
nimble dancer, and already a rare wit); Captain Joseph
Bryan; Captain Frank Dawson (the clever, handsome,
venturesome English lad, who, in order to cast his fortunes
with the Confederacy, had come out from Southampton as
a stowaway in the Nashville's mad run described in my
brother's recital, and was to win fame and distinction in his
adopted land); that picturesque old warrior and fire-eater,
Colonel Frederick Skinner, of the First Virginia; Captain
Page McCarty; Captain John Esten Cooke, the author; Dr.
George Ross; Mr. Cooper de Leon, whom I had known
since crepuscular days in Washington; Captain Samuel
Shannon; Captain "Wragge" Ferguson; Captains Shirley
Carter, Stuart Symington, and James Fraser; Major
Theodore Chestney; Major Thomas Brander; Colonel
William Munford; young Captain John Sargeant Wise;
Captain Travers Daniel; the brilliant and many-sided Innis
Randolph; Captain Legh Page; Majors Caskie Cabell and
Willie Caskie; and my brother's friends, Midshipmen
Jefferson Davis Howell and handsome James Morris
Morgan, the latter early betrothed to the youthful daughter
of Secretary Trenholm.
A friend and guest of our Vaucluse days was Captain
William Washington, the artist of "The Burial of Latane," a
touching war picture, and others, some of which still hang
upon the walls of old Confederate sympathizers, more,
perhaps, "In Memoriam," than because
of very great intrinsic merit. Washington was a capital
fellow, clever, well-bred, and versatile, and deserved more
fame and fortune than he had won when we saw him later,
buffeting the fierce current of New York following the war.
Mr. Edward Valentine I met first when I was a schoolgirl
at Lefebvre's and he a mere lad trying short flights with his
budding wings of genius into the empyrean of success he
has since attained as a sculptor. To him the South owes,
besides many other works, the immortal recumbent statue
of General Lee on the hero's tomb at Lexington that to my
mind is as noble as any piece of memorial sculpture in Italy
or Greece, worthy to lie upon the glorious sarcophagus
(called that of the great Alexander) that stands in the
museum at Constantinople.
The Chevalier Moses Ezekiel, a sculptor also born in
Richmond, but long resident in Rome, where he won his
title and high honors from the Italian Government, has sent
back to his native country many examples of his ripely
cultured art. The "Virginia Mourning Her Dead," presented
by him to the campus of the Virginia Military Institute,
where he was a student in early youth; his bronze "Homer,"
recently installed at the University of Virginia; his
"Jefferson," in Louisville, Kentucky; and his promised
"Stonewall Jackson," still I believe in his atelier in the classic
quarter of the Baths of Diocletian at Rome, will enduringly
attest the fame of Virginia s wandering son.
William L. Sheppard, of Richmond, early transferred his
scene of activity as a clever draughtsman, colonist, and
modeller of war statuettes to New York, where his art is
familiar in the Harpers' publications and in other prominent
Journals and magazines.
Poor Alexander Galt, a modest and gentle fellow who
did good work in marbles representing some of our
leaders, came occasionally to visit us. He had asked my
mother's permission to make a bust of her daughter, and
the preliminary sketch, etc., was done, another
appointment settled, etc., when we heard to our grief and
horror that he was lying dangerously ill of contagious
smallpox, of which he shortly died.
A protégé of General Wise was Conrad Wise
Chapman, a young artist from Italy, son of my mother's
friend, John G. Chapman, who had painted her at eighteen
in "The Baptism of Pocahontas" for the Rotunda at
Washington. He left Rome to come over and enlist in the
Confederate army, and saw varied service. A number of
etchings of his battle scenes were put into circulation. We
met him later at his own studio in the Twenty-third Street
Building, corner of Fourth Avenue, New York, in which
city, I think, he still abides.
I could never employ the critical faculty in my estimate of
the work of John A. Elder, an artist of Fredericksburg,
Virginia, simply because his treatment of Confederate
subjects so gripped my heart that tears prevented a closer
scrutiny. His "Appomattox," "The Crater," and "The
Scout's Prize" have stood the test of years.
No feeling heart in Richmond failed to yield tender
sympathy to the President's family in the calamity that
befell them when little, merry, happy "Joe," petted by all
visitors to the Executive Mansion - he who, when his
father was in the act of receiving official visitors, once
pushed his way into the study and, clad only in an
abbreviated night-gown, insisted upon saying his evening
prayer at the President's knee - fell from the porch in
the rear of their dwelling and was picked up dead on the
brick pavement underneath. From Burton Harrison, upon
whom devolved all arrangements in behalf of the stricken
parents, we heard a pitiful tale of the mother's passionate
grief and the terrible self-control of the President, who,
shutting himself in his own room, had walked the floor
without ceasing all of the first night. To the bier of the little
lad, it seemed that every child in Richmond brought
flowers and green leaves.
The battle of the Wilderness, on May 6, 1864, and its
terrible sequel, of musketry setting fire to brush and
undergrowth on the field where dead and wounded were
alike wrapped in flame and smoke during one long
appalling night; the serious wounding of Lieutenant-General
Longstreet; the battles of Spottsylvania Court House on
May 10 and 12, with the death of Stuart near the Yellow
Tavern on the later date, renewed all the old strain of
continual yearning over the fortunes of our army. The
horrors of the slaughter at Cold Harbor, on June 3, in which
the Union amy lost over 13,000 men, the result, it was said,
of little over one hour's fighting, and the beginning of the
siege of Petersburg, focussed emotion. It did not seem we
could stand more of these "bludgeonings of Fate."
My mother, for some time inactive in her nursing,
declared she could rest no longer. She had been out to visit
the hospital at Camp Winder, in a barren suburb of the
town, where the need of nurses was crying. My aunt, Mrs.
Hyde, deciding to accompany her, they were soon installed
there, my mother as division matron, in charge of a number
of rude sheds serving as shelter for the patients, my aunt
controlling a dispensary of food for the sufferers. It had
been proposed that I should remain
in town with friends, but my first glance at my
mother's accommodations in the camp made me resolve to
share them and try to do my part. To the nurses and
matrons was allotted one end of a huge Noah's Ark, built
of unpainted pine, divided by a partition, the surgeons
occupying the other end. Near by were the diet kitchens
and store-rooms, around which were gathered wards and
tents, the whole camp occupying an arid, shadeless, sun-
baked plain, without grass or water anywhere, encircled by
a noxious trench too often used to receive the nameless
débris of the wards. To my mother, and myself as a
volunteer aid to her, was assigned a large bare room with
rough-boarded walls and one window, a cot in each
corner, two chairs, a table, and washing apparatus. Then a
kind lady coming to see us and declaring she was about to
remove to the country and had nowhere to store a roomful
of furniture, we fell heir to some nice old bits of mahogany,
a folding-screen, a matting rug, a mirror, and a pair of
white muslin curtains. While my mother was absent one
day upon her rounds, I invoked the aid of a nice old
colored man, and presto! our room was changed into a
bower, bed and sitting room combined. When the curtain
was hung up at the window - looking to the west, where
each evening the sun sank, sending up a fountain of
radiance behind a belt of inky pines - and tied back with
my one blue sash, I had a bright idea. We would have a
box of growing flowers nailed to the outside of the sill.
Enlisting the services of my friendly darky to secure a box
for me, he soon returned with what seemed exactly the
right thing. When he told me it had been given him by the
surgeons and had contained artificial legs my zeal
decreased - but we covered it with bark from the
woodshed, I bought somewhere plants of ivy,
geraniums, and sweet alyssum, and, in the end, our
window-garden was the envy of the camp. Just when I had
finished arranging my new bailiwick, a couple of rosy Irish
sisters, good, loving souls employed in the hospital, came
in to bring me linen sheets and pillowcases spun by their
mother in the old country and given to them for their
weddings in the New World - "an' seein' the Yankees
don't seem of a mind to spare us husbands anyhow, we'd
be proud for you to use 'em, miss, in your be-youtiful room
that's like a palace beside the rest."
Alas! the heat, the smell of the wounds, and close
confinement to her rounds brought upon my mother the
only illness I could remember, for her muscles and nerves
always seemed to be made of iron. It was fortunately brief,
and I then took my turn at the same trouble. But our
initiation to Camp Winder over, we soon found
forgetfulness of discomfort in the awful realities of brave
men's suffering on every hand. I followed my mother in her
rounds, aiding and supplementing her. Ere long, I found
certain patients who in due course were relegated entirely
to my care, with a ward helper in attendance. My whole
heart passed into the work. I could hardly sleep for wishing
to be back in those miserable cheerless wards, where dim
eyes would kindle feebly at sight of me and trembling lips
gave me last messages to transmit to those they would
never see again. Once, going into one of my mother's
wards, I found my way blocked by an arm lying on the
floor, and the surgeons who had just amputated it still at
work on Cavanagh, one of our favorite patients, a big,
gentle Irishman, always courteous and considerate. The
blood was gushing profusely from the flaps they were
sewing together, and for a moment I paused uncertain.
"Can you stand
it?" asked one of the doctors kindly. "If so, there's a little
help needed, as we're short-handed this morning." I
stayed, and in a moment I saw clear and all seemed easier.
When they hurried off, leaving Cavanagh to me, he came
out of chloroform looking me full in the eyes, as I stood
sponging his forehead. "So it's gone at last, the poor old
arm we worked so hard to save," I said, trying to speak
lightly. "Yes, miss, but it's not meself you should be thinkin'
about," he answered, "an' you standin' by, dirtyin' your
dress with the blood o' me." Cavanagh, I am glad to say,
got well and left the hospital, swearing eternal fealty to his
nurse.
One night, following a day when the cannon had not
ceased till sunset, we were awakened by an orderly
coming to tell my mother that a lot of new wounded had
been brought in from the field and were still coming. They
were putting them in a new ward just built at the far end of
the camp, but had actually no food or stimulant to give
them. Did Mrs. Cary think she could possibly spare a little
from her store-room, since many of these poor fellows had
been in the ambulance since the day before, some without
a mouthful passing their lips?
We sprang up, hurried into our clothes, and were
outside in a few minutes. My mother, unlocking her stores
with a sinking heart, found she had but one bucket of milk,
a small bottle of brandy, a piece of cold boiled pork, and a
pile of cold corn-bread. With our arms full, we stumbled in
the darkness over the rough ground, following the orderly
and his lantern. If we had spilt that precious milk our hearts
would have broken then and there!
The Southern night had spent its early heat, and a
wandering breeze laden with wood odors came up from
the river and smote our foreheads gratefully. At the door of
the new ward, a long pine shed, ambulances were
disgorging their ghastly contents, some of the wounded
uttering pitifully prayers to be left to die in peace, some
mercifully in stupor, while other forms were lifted out
already stiffened in their last sleep. Those for whom the
jolting ride from the battle-field had not finished the work of
the enemy's bullets were carried in and laid on the cots, and
by the insufficient glimmer of oil lanterns and tallow dips the
surgeons began their rounds. Before they were half
finished, a streak of saffron came into the sky seen through
the open windows, and in the sparse trees on the outskirts
of the camp, birds had begun to stir and chirp. We placed
our supplies on a table near the door, and my mother,
telling me the surgeons needed her assistance, bade me find
out the exact number to be fed and "make it go around."
Ah! that division of meagre portions! Never since, have I
been able to endure with complacency seeing the waste of
food in peace times. When, aided by the ward helpers, I
began to distribute it, some were past swallowing, and their
more vigorous neighbors looked with covetous eyes upon
the poor rejected bits. To hurry by carrying off these
morsels, to take cups away from thirsty lips before they
were satisfied, was a keen sorrow.
At length, when I had nearly finished the task and almost
exhausted my resources, I came upon a cot where lay
upon his face a mere boy apparently dying. There was no
time to call a doctor. I mixed milk and brandy, and after
forcing his body over poured it by teaspoonfuls down his
throat, keeping on till I had the joy of seeing the vital spark
creep back. Little by little he reached the point of opening
his eyes, and telling me he didn't exactly know what was
the matter with him,
but that he felt "so tired." As soon as I could capture my
favorite doctor, I brought him to my patient. A wound was
found, but a slight one. The lad was simply dying from
exhaustion, the joggling of hours in the ambulance, and
want of food. "He may thank his stars you kept on trying,"
said my doctor, "or he'd have been a dead one before
now. Think of children like this put into the ranks to fill the
places of the seasoned men they've killed for us!"
This patient also recovered on our hands, and in due
time went back to his "old woman" in North Carolina,
whose poor, scrawling letters to her son I had to read and
answer for him. While at Camp Winder he was indulged
by me to an extent that caused some jealousy and cutting
comment from his neighbors in the ward. For him were
reserved all the tidbits I could lay hands upon, but
fortunately he went home before he was too badly spoiled.
If we had visitors, there was nowhere to receive them,
so the few I allowed to come appeared during my off time
in the afternoon, and took me out to walk. With the private
secretary of the President, who never came save with
some welcome book in hand, I oftenest wandered out of
the grim precincts of Camp Winder into the woods above
the canal and river bank, where we would sit under the
shelving boughs and watch the silent boats steal by below,
reading, talking, and trying to forget the incubus of war.
Here the air knew no taint, wild flowers sprung profusely,
there was no sound save that of the chafing river.
Sometimes, on the canal-boats gliding past, the negro
deck-hands would sing in plaintive chorus, or play an obligato
upon some wind instrument dying in the distance like horns
of Elfland. Walking back in the evening, we carried
bouquets
and sprays of foliage arranged while we sat; some for my
own quarters, most of them for patients lying alone in the
tents where they put infected wounds. These last had my
deepest sympathy, so childlike they were in their terror of
being shut out of the wards and left day and night alone
save for the rare visits possible where there were so many
needing attention. We generally timed ourselves to reach
camp at sunset, just as the one-armed and one-legged
soldier on duty at the headquarters flag-staff lowered the
stars and bars to their evening rest, afterward performing
upon his asthmatic bugle a melancholy strain. Then I had an
hour of duty in feeding the patients in our ward who could
not help themselves, and after that my mother, my aunt and
I repaired to a bare refectory on the ground-floor of our
Noah's Ark, where we shared with innumerable flies a
coarse and insufficient evening meal.
To multiply instances of our work among the sufferers
that long, long summer would be monotonous. I depict it as
an example of a life led by hundreds of women of the South
- women who had mostly come out of beautiful and
luxurious homes. My mother, previously a volunteer, was
now a paid servant of government, and, of what she
received, spent the greater part in amplifying the
conveniences and supplies of her diet kitchen. We were
then in straits for everything considered indispensable in the
outfit of modern hospitals. Our surgeons, working with pure
devotion, were at their wits end to renew needful
appliances. Without going into painful detail, I can say that
our experience was continually shocking and distressing, as
were the burials of our dead in a field by Hollywood, six or
seven coffins dropped into one yawning pit, and hurriedly
covered in, all that a grateful country could render
in return for precious lives. All told, that Camp Winder
episode was the most ghastly I ever knew. If we had
possessed enough of any one hospital requisite it would
have been less grim!
In June, 1864, my brother, who had been under fire
repeatedly that spring aboard the iron-clad Virginia, in the
campaign against Butler below Drury's Bluff, was ordered
back to the school-ship for examination, becoming passed
midshipman. Thence he was sent to the Chickamauga, at
Wilmington, then fitting out for a destructive cruise which
she was to watch her opportunity of making. Often when
my mother and I returned from the hospital rounds to our
pine barracks, heated red-hot by the torrid Southern sun,
we would sit down to rest weary bones and speculate
about our wanderer - whether he was yet out upon the
deep that tells no tales, his ship to be shattered by a
broadside from the blockading fleet, and he to go down in
her, without a chance to send us a last message or farewell;
less happy in that regard than the young fellows from
whose brows we had that day wiped the death damps,
whilst charging ourselves with letters to their beloved ones
in far Southern homes.
It is a long lane that has no turning, and my holiday came
at last. Late in the summer a small house-party, consisting
of two men and two girls, was made welcome at "The
Retreat." Spite of all drawbacks and darkest prospects,
youth and happiness emerged triumphant from the
shadows, making the week one of immemorial incident.
After the male guests went back to duty, one of them,
returning for a "week-end" visit, left Richmond on
horseback late Saturday evening, rode all night, his horse
swimming a river wherever the ferryman was absent, spent
Sunday with us, and rode back
through the night, just arriving in time for a certain official
breakfast-table on Monday, where the mystery of his
absence created endless humorous speculations, even
from his stately chief.
A year later, the gay rider was in rigorous confinment in
the casemate of a Northern fortress, fighting fate hourly
within his valiant soul. The other - true knight, true lover,
tried and proved leader of armies in the field - lay in his
hero's grave in Hollywood, his radiant bride a stricken
widow, whose story passed into tradition as among the
saddest of the war.
My cousin Hetty and I lingered on in the country until
my holiday ended disastrously. A sudden sharp illness -
"Pamunkey fever," they called it, following the long stretch
of hospital work in summer heat - summoned my mother
from Richmond to attend me. She arrived in an ambulance,
finding me, however, so much on the mend that I was able
to drive back with her through the crimson and golden
glories of the Pamunkey Swamps.
Things, as I recall them, seem to have rushed onward
with the speed of lightning during the last winter of the war.
We had again settled ourselves in quarters in town. I had
recovered my full strength, and was almost always hungry.
We had little money, little food. It was impossible to draw
upon our funds in Washington, and my mother, with a
number of ladies, took a situation to sign bank-notes in the
Treasury Department. In what they called "Mr.
Memminger's reception-room," she daily met
gentlewomen, in whose veins ran the purest currents of
cavalier and Huguenot blood. The names written upon
those bank-notes might have served to illustrate the genesis
of Southern aristocracy.
This time we had been able to secure only one room
in a friend's house, with the use of her drawing-room and
dining-room and service of her cook, the latter being a
nominal one only; our breakfast, at 8 A.M., consisting of
corn-bread with the drippings of fried bacon instead of butter,
and coffee made of dried beans and peanuts, without milk
or sugar. For luncheon we had, day in and day out, bacon,
rice, and dried apples sweetened with sorghum. For our
evening repast were served cakes made of corn-meal and
water, eaten with sorghum molasses, and more of that
unspeakable coffee. I cannot remember getting up from
any meal that winter without wishing there were more of it.
I went once to call upon a family antecedently wealthy, and
found father, mother, and children making their dinner
upon soup-plates filled with that cheerless compound
known as "Benjamin" hard-tack, soaked in hot water,
sprinkled with salt or brown sugar. It is to be said,
however, there was in our community no discussion of
diets, fads, or cures, and the health chase of modern
society was an unknown quantity. People in better physical
condition than the besieged dwellers of Richmond, when
their cause was beginning to feel the death-clutch at its
throat, were certainly not to be found.
It is certain that Johnston felt keenly the blow of his
removal. One of my cousins, close to this general
throughout the war, told me the great soldier shed tears of
bitter mortification upon his removal, and that he heard him
say:
"I had drawn and drawn and drawn Sherman, and just
when I got him where I wanted him to be, I was taken
away."
And now for a stirring chapter in family annals, supplied
by our midshipman, between whom and his mother and
sister the veil of silence and uncertainty had fallen for
several months. I knew that England had struck her fiercest
blow at Spain by preying upon her
commerce in open waters; that France, in the Seven
Years' War, had sent numbers of bold privateers to
destroy shipping off the English coast and in the Irish Sea;
that, following these depredations, "all England had gone
mad after privateering," and had sent out hundreds of
vessels great and small to put the Frenchmen back in their
proper places. Any one might read of the liberal use made
by America in her war for independence of the fleets of
commissioned privateers sent forth to harry Britain upon
the ocean. It was all fair-play according to historical
precedent, and our President had issued letters of marque
and reprisal to private armed ships to do their best against
Northern merchant-men. All that one felt in cold blood,
however, was swept away in the thrilling excitement of
actual adventure.
I may here state that a diary (exacted of their
midshipmen by the Confederate navy, following the
old-time custom of the navies of England and the United
States), kept by my brother on the cruise of the
Chickamauga and during the siege of Fort Fisher,
achieved, unexpectedly to him, the honor of passing into
the archives of the State Department at Washington,
where, in "Room 311, Case 21," this boy's record of sea
adventure is now preserved. Found in the naval school
after the occupation of Richmond by Lieutenant-
Commander James Parker, U. S. N., it was sent by him to
the Navy Department in Washington. "The journal of
Midshipman Cary," says Commander Parker, "seemed to
me a very important and valuable contribution to the naval
side of a dispute between Admiral Porter and General
Butler as to the propriety of the withdrawal of the troops at
Fort Fisher. It was just such a journal as I would have kept
in my midshipman days fifteen or
more years before; and its entire truthfulness and
correctness were apparent, colored as they were by
boyish enthusiasm and frankness of statement.
"I promptly sent it to the Navy Department. I heard no
more of it until its reappearance several years later in
evidence before the Geneva Tribunal; where it contributed largely
to fix the responsibility of Great Britain for the destruction
of our shipping by these Confederate cruisers, whose
doings were faithfully chronicled in the journal."
How the diary came to be discovered in the files of the
Navy Department by those charged with preparing the
case of the United States for the Geneva Tribunal, and
extracts from it edited for that case, Mr. Cary has never
heard. It was not until the publication of the arbitration
proceedings in 1871 that he learned of the continued
existence of his almost forgotten journal, or that it had so
contributed to the making of history.
"The purpose of the production of the journal," writes
Mr. Cary, "was to show that the British had granted undue
favors to the Chickamauga during her call at their neutral
port at St. George's in Bermuda, both in respect of coal
supply and length of stay." In the "Opinions of Sir
Alexander Cockburn," a privy councillor and lord
chief-justice of England, and one of the arbitrators at
Geneva, occurs the following:
"The only authority for this statement (i. e., as to the
Chickamauga's overstaying her time limit of 24 hours at
Bermuda and her receipt there of 82 tons of coal instead of
the prescribed 25) is the diary of a midshipman who was
serving on board the ship. The diary is not unamusing, and
is not without its value.... In the result, the whole question
becomes immaterial. We see from Mr. Cary's diary that
the Chickamauga
arrived at Wilmington, where this young officer
unfortunately 'slipped up on his expectations,' on the
19th of November without having fallen in with, taken, or
destroyed a single United States vessel. The coaling at
Bermuda therefore did not the least injury to the United
States, and cannot in any point of view found a claim for
damages."
Lord Chief-Justice Cockburn's satirical quotation of a
bit of American boy's slang, as italicized above, gives my
brother occasion to observe that his unpretending little
journal "evoked the sole suggestion of humor that appears
to have enlivened the grave international proceedings here
concerned."
To go back to the beginning of the Chickamauga's
cruise in October, 1864, succeeding a long delay in
Wilmington harbor and several abortive attempts to nose
her way out through the blockading squadron. "In
profound silence; lights all dowsed, engine hatches and
even the slightest glow of the binnacle lamp alike carefully
shrouded; her furnaces crammed with picked Cardiff coal
that would neither smoke nor flare from the funnels, deck
orders were passed in whispers. At last we were off, on a
wild night of October 28th, with easterly squalls and inky
skies and a lumpy sea - creeping at first, furtively....
Some of the obstructing ships were dimly seen tossing like
tiny dots against a ragged eastern sky line."
Here is how running the blockade appeared to
Midshipman Cary, "on duty forward in the darkness and
slop of the top-gallant-forecastle deck, feeling the
quivering plunges of the little cruiser and the chill edges of
the short rough seas which bucketted down my shivery
neck.
"A shuddering anxious touch on the sand rip, and then
signal lights in jagged lines of red and white suddenly flashed
across the broken water; there was a glare of partial
broadsides, lighting alien guns and guns' crews and a bit of
black rigging overhead; there were the whiz of harmless
shells aloft, then a puzzled lull among the enemy, followed
by their chasing rockets! Meanwhile the Chickamauga
underwent a lively change! On the instant her sloppy
staggering decks became the scene of greatest activity.
Back went the coal bags (extra cruising fuel piled forward
to lighten her after weight) hustled aft, somehow or anyhow,
whether on trucks or by hand; to clear the guns and charge
the trim, with officers in full swing of commanding energy;
the boatswain and his mates heard at over concert pitch,
using characteristic language - and the Chickamauga
escaped her foe, going away eastward at her best fourteen
knot gait!"
Next morning, eluding a persistent chaser, the cruiser
began her hot work of as active a career of destruction as
may be found. Upon her first prize, the bark Mark L.
Potter, were found china-ware of which they had almost
none, and all sorts of food from "plum-pudding to pickles."
Close by the Capes of Delaware three more prizes fell into
their hands - the bark Emily D. Hall, sugar laden from
Cardenas to Boston; the crack clipper ship Shooting Star,
"a cloud of snowy canvas from her graceful hull to her
tapering top-gallant masts," and another bark, the Albion
Lincoln, which, bonded and released, served to relieve them
of the four crews of paroled prisoners already in their hands.
The Shooting Star, from New York, with supplies for the
United States Pacific Squadron, was a rich find, containing,
above all things desirable, a cargo of fine coal. Her
burning in the winter twilight was a glorious spectacle, the
comedy element of her capture being that of the captain's
wife, Mrs. Drinkwater, "who ignominiously routed in turn all
the young officers of the Chickamauga" until the Lincoln
relieved them of the shrewish lady's presence.
Struck by a gale of wind lasting seven days, the
Chickamauga then made her way to Bermuda, where our
midshipman was sent ashore to face Yellow Jack and look
up deserters, and, after sundry individual adventures, set sail
again in the cruiser for Wilmington and home, contriving to
run in under the veil of a thick fog, upon whose sudden
lifting next morning they found themselves face to face with
the whole blockading squadron of the enemy! After an
hour's hot fight, shot and shell raining fiercely around them,
Fort Fisher came to their aid, firing aimlessly but enough to
frighten off the fleet. "We started in, got stuck on a sand
bar, when behold the blockaders were down on us again, but
by lightening the ship we succeeded in gliding over the bar
to safety."
From the midshipmen of Battery Buchanan, on the shore
at the river's mouth, a signal by flags was fluttered to the
midshipmen on the victorious Chickamauga, to this import:
"For Heaven's sake send us some Yankee china. We are
eating our soup out of cigar boxes!" This, when Captain
Wilkinson and his first lieutenant of the Chickamauga were
eagerly expecting official instructions, may have been said
to break down the ceremony of the occasion!
A brief rest for our youngster brought him to Christmas
holidays of a memorable sort. By requisition of Major
General Whiting, commanding the land forces at Fort Fisher,
soon to be the scene of fierce conflict, my
brother was sent with two lieutenants and twenty-five
picked men of the Chickamauga's crew, to man navy
guns mounted on unfinished batteries within the fort. On
Christmas eve the United States fleet with 580 guns, headed
by iron-clads, moved in and attacked the fort, throwing all
kinds of projectiles from a three-inch bolt to a fifteen-inch
shell. "The grandest sight of my life," wrote the young
participant. "The firing on both sides was heavy all day."
Our one Christmas gift that year, received with tears and
smiles, was an item in the official report of Major-General
Whiting, sent on from the Navy Department by our good
friend Commodore S. S. Lee, whose son, Daniel Murray
Lee, was a midshipman on the Chickamauga.
"To passed Midshipman Cary, I wish to give personal
thanks. Though wounded, he reported after the bursting of
his gun to repel the threatened assault, and actively
assisted Colonel Tansill on the land front."
We had already heard that our boy's wound was on the
mend, and could afford to rejoice without alloy.
From the law offices of Cary & Whitridge, 59 Wall
Street, New York, in 1902, my brother wrote to me as
follows:
"The enclosed may interest you, for certainly the
circumstance is extraordinary, if only in the sense that it
can never possibly - with all its antecedents, etc. - occur
again."
Extract of letter from Bartlett S. Johnson to Clarence
Cary, dated December 3, 1902:
"What you say about the three Confederate
midshipmen on the Virginia Debt Reorganization
Committee had already occurred to me. I think it shows
that our fasting and privation kept our stomachs in good
shape
and still keeps us among the live men of the day. Then our
grit - pardon me for classing myself with you and Newton
- has something to do with it. I always had more than a
friendly feeling toward you. It is close to affection, and
dates back from the day when the men cheered you after
Fort Fisher fight."
Mr. Cary further writes to his sister:
"This correspondence shows a bit of diversion by the
way in the thorny paths of business. I think you will feel a
sort of clutch about the throat if not a slight moisture of the
eyes. Of course the 'cheering' referred to our ship's little
ragged remnant of mates returning after hard knocks.
"We had an exposed, unfinished part of the fort to hold,
had to show off before the soldier chaps and had our own
two big guns burst under our noses, the whole with a net
result that nineteen out of our twenty-six men were killed
or wounded.
"So you see it was not unnatural that our shipmates
aboard of the C. S. Chickamauga should give us a cheer
when we got back; or perhaps that the army and the other
forts along our route did likewise. I protest, as Thackeray
would say, I can't now think with equanimity of that
ox-cart load of removable wounded and their ragged,
bandaged, shabby survivors alongside, stumbling through
the heavy sand, after two days of hell, la bas, in Fort
Fisher. It seems so ridiculously far off, too, and there is a
pathetic side about the youth of its actors. Our oldest must
have been Lieutenant Roby, of the mature age of twenty-
six. Dornin, the other lieutenant, perhaps a year older,
stayed behind to await amputation that day performed
upon his leg."
As a final chapter of this episode, I have received, when
my work is nearly finished, a letter from my brother's
friend and shipmate of Confederate navy days, Colonel
James Morris Morgan, of Washington, himself sufficiently
acquainted with the methods of gallant service to be a
trusted reporter of Mr. Cary's youthful prowess.
"When Fort Fisher was threatened, two of the guns of
the Chickamauga were taken ashore and mounted in the
fort. Midshipman Cary was in charge of one of them, and
during the battle his gun burst, killing and wounding some
twenty odd men who were standing near it. Cary was
unhurt and, walking up to General Whiting, asked if he
could not give him something more to do. The Federal fleet
was at that time sweeping the beach with six hundred guns.
General Whiting expressed his desire to get a
communication to a detached battery some hundreds of
yards away, but said he would not order any man to carry
it, as he considered it hardly possible that the feat could be
accomplished under such a fire. Midshipman Cary begged
to be allowed to attempt the perilous journey. Lieutenant
Roby and Midshipman Berrian, who were present,
described the scene to me, and several of my old
classmates, who were with the Federal fleet, have borne
testimony to the accuracy of their statements.
"It seems that hardly had the little midshipman started
on his way when the shells from the fleet ploughed the
sand from under his feet and down he went into the hole
made. There was a groan from the fort as some one
exclaimed, 'Little Cary's gone!' and then, to their relief,
they saw him struggle to his feet and trudge on. This
happened again and again, until at last, as he neared the
battery, a shell was seen to explode very near him which
fairly buried him in the sand. All in the fort gave him up for
dead when, suddenly, to their amazement, they saw him
totter to his feet again, though wounded in
the leg. The fleet ceased firing and, as he staggered on to
his destination, both the men in the fort and on board the
fleet broke into a mighty cheer. This is the only occasion I
ever knew of during the war when a man heard both sides
cheer him."
The engagement of my cousin Hetty Cary to Brigadier-
General John Pegram having been announced, their
decision to be married on January 19 was a subject of
active interest. My aunt, Mrs. Wilson Miles Cary, of
Baltimore, had before Christmas obtained from Mr.
Lincoln, through General Barnard (chief of the United
States Engineer Corps, married to her adopted daughter),
a pass to go to Richmond to visit her children. The
presence of Mrs. Cary gave General Pegram opportunity
to urge that his marriage should not be longer delayed, and
such preparations as were possible were hurried on. My
aunt was stopping at the house of her niece, Mrs. Peyton,
whence the ceremony took place. On the evening of
January 19 all our little world flocked to St. Paul's Church
to see the nuptials of one called by many the most beautiful
woman in the South, with a son of Richmond universally
honored and beloved. Two days before, I being confined
to my room with a cold, Hetty had come, bringing her
bridal veil that I, with our mothers, might be the first to see
it tried on her lovely crown of auburn hair. As she turned
from the mirror to salute us with a charming blush and
smile, the mirror fell and was broken to small fragments, an
accident afterward spoken of by the superstitious as one of
a strange series of ominous happenings.
While a congregation that crowded floor and galleries of
the church waited an unusually long time for the arrival of
bride and groom, my aunt and the other members
of our family being already in their seats, I stood in the
vestibule outside with Burton Harrison and Colonel L. Q.
C. Lamar, speculating rather uneasily upon the cause of the
delay. Mr. Harrison told us that Mrs. Davis (who tenderly
loved and admired the bride) had begged to be allowed to
send the President's carriage to drive her to the church,
and he was sure it had been in prompt attendance at
Colonel Peyton's door. Directly after, a shabby old
Richmond hack drove up, halting before the church, and
from it issued the bride and groom, looking a little
perturbed, explaining that at the moment of setting out the
President's horses had reared violently, refusing to go
forward, and could not be controlled, so that they had
been forced to get out of the carriage and send for another
vehicle, at that date almost impossible to secure in
Richmond.
When the noble-looking young couple crossed the
threshold of the church, my cousin dropped her lace
handkerchief and, nobody perceiving it, stooped forward
to pick it up, tearing the tulle veil over her face to almost its
full length, then, regaining herself, walked with a slow and
stately step toward the altar. As she passed there was a
murmur of delight at her beauty, never more striking. Her
complexion of pearly white, the vivid roses on her cheeks
and lips, the sheen of her radiant hair, and the happy gleam
of her beautiful brown eyes seemed to defy all sorrow,
change, or fear. John Pegram, handsome and erect, looked
as he felt, triumphant, the prize-winner - so the men called
him - of the invincible beauty of her day. Miss Cary's
brother, Captain Wilson Miles Cary, representing her
absent father, gave away the bride. After the ceremony we,
her nearest, crowded around the couple, wishing them the
best happiness our loving hearts could picture.
General Pegram's mother, brothers, and sisters did the
same; then, as they passed out, all eyes followed them
with real kindness and unalloyed good feeling. There was
but a small reception afterward, but one felt in the
atmosphere a sense of sincere gladness in happy love,
very rare on such occasions.
Three weeks later, to the day, General Pegram's coffin,
crossed with a victor's palms beside his soldier's
accoutrements, occupied the spot in the chancel where he
had stood to be married. Beside it knelt his widow
swathed in crape. Again Dr. Minnegerode conducted the
ceremony, again the church was full. Behind the hearse,
waiting outside, stood his war charger, with boots in
stirrups. The wailing of the band that went with us on the
slow pilgrimage to Hollywood will never die out of
memory. Burton Harrison drove in the carriage with me
and my mother, my poor cousin with her mother, brother,
and General Custis Lee, her husband's intimate friend, who
stood beside her, as, leaning on her brother's arm, she
remained during the service close to the grave. General
Pegram's family clustered beyond her. Snow lay white on
the hill-sides, the bare trees stretched their arms above us,
the river kept up its ceaseless rush and tumble, so much a
part of daily life in our four years of ordeal that we had
grown accustomed to interpret its voice according to our
joy or grief.
The newly married couple had gone directly to General
Pegram's head-quarters, near Petersburg, where he was at
the head of Early's division. Their new home was in a
pleasant farm-house nine miles out of Petersburg, close to
the line of General Pegram's command, near Hatcher's
Run. Here, within constant sound of shot and shell, her
taste and skill busied itself in fitting up rooms that seemed
to her soldier the perfection of
beauty and comfort, and in preparing for him little dishes
that transformed their ordinary fare. When she rode beside
him during their short honey-moon, the men thronged to
look at her with pride in their leader's lovely wife. On
February 5 a demonstration was made by the enemy
against General Lee's extreme right, in which General
Pegram's forces were engaged. He returned to their
lodgings and, before daylight on the 6th, was aroused by
the information that the enemy was about to renew attack.
His wife made coffee and prepared breakfast for him in the
gray of dawn; then, after seeing him ride off, spent the day
with her mother, who had fortunately arrived upon a visit to
her son, Captain Cary. As the short winter's day closed in,
a messenger arrived from General Pegram to say he had
come safely through the fight.
The ladies were at this time sitting in an ambulance at
some distance away carding lint. At sunset a new charge
was formed against the enemy, General Pegram leading it,
sword in hand, when a minie-ball (claimed to have been
fired by a sharp-shooter a great way off) entered his heart,
killing him instantly, after striking the sword from his hand
and filling its scabbard with his blood. Of his comrades,
none was found who would volunteer to break the news to
my cousin.
Captain Gordon McCabe, of Richmond, a close friend
of General Pegram, has thus written to me:
"I can tell you of the tragic time after he was killed,
when our guns pulled past the ambulance where she was
carding lint and I heard her laughing merrily within. I knew
he was dead, shot at the head of his division, while she sat
there waiting for him to come to her." After his body had
been tenderly placed in the room used as the adjutant-
general's office at head-quarters,
word was sent to her that "she might safely return to their
quarters and go to bed, for it would be late before he
could get back." So she slept peacefully that night, in the
room above his body - a bride of three weeks.
In the morning an old gentleman, a civilian, volunteered
to go up and call her down to where Pegram lay. Kneeling
beside the body, she put her hand into the breast of his
coat, drawing out first his watch, still ticking, that she had
wound for him just before they parted; next, a miniature of
herself, both stained with life blood. My aunt and her son
accompanied the widow to Richmond in a freight car, she
sitting beside the coffin. No one of us is likely to forget the
sad days that followed. She was like a flower broken in
the stalk.
Another ordeal was in store for her in the death in battle
of General Pegram's younger brother, Colonel William
Pegram, who fell in the retreat from Petersburg. To remain
with the mother of these heroes, during her time of
crushing grief, was my cousin's loving duty. A short time
after the occupation, Mrs. Cary and Mrs. Pegram,
accompanied by Captain Cary, returned to their home in
Baltimore, with a free pass from General Grant.
At the end of March hope in the stoutest spirits seemed
to flicker but feebly and the ultimate failure of the
Confederacy to be a foregone conclusion. Coming in late
from a walk on the evening of March 29, I found to my
surprise a note from Burton Harrison, who had called in
my absence to say that he was unexpectedly desired to
take charge of Mrs. Davis, her sister, and the Davis
children on a "visit" to Charlotte, North Carolina. He had
just been for a farewell visit to Mrs. Wilson Miles Cary
and Mrs. Pegram - "the saddest I ever knew" - and must
hasten to the train, hoping to be back
in town ere long, to find me "well and happy and light
of heart."
When I saw him again, it was in the following autumn,
behind prison bars, after months of solitary confinement
succeeding his capture with the chief whose fortunes he
loyally chose to follow, when a dozen times he might have
found opportunity to avoid his subsequent hard fate.
Before dismissing his congregation the rector announced
to them that General Ewell had summoned the local forces
to meet for defence of the city at three in the afternoon.
We knew then that Longstreet's regulars must have been
suddenly called away, and a sick apprehension filled all
hearts.
On the sidewalk outside the church we plunged at once
into the great stir of evacuation, preluding the beginning of
a new era. As if by a flash of electricity, Richmond knew
that on the morrow her streets would be crowded with her
captors, her rulers fled, her government dispersed into thin
air, her high hopes crushed to earth. There was little
discussion of events. People meeting each other would
exchange silent hand grasps
and pass on. I saw many pale faces, some trembling lips,
but in all that day I heard no expression of a weakling fear.
Movement was everywhere, nowhere panic. Begarlanded
Franklin Street, sending up perfume from her many
gardens, was the general rendezvous of people who
wanted to see the last of their friends. All over town
citizens were aiding the departure of the male members of
their family who could in any way serve the dispossessed
government. In the houses we knew, there was
everywhere somebody to be helped to go; somebody for
whose sake tears were squeezed back, scant food
prepared, words of love and cheer spoken. Those good,
dear women of Richmond, who had been long tried as by
fire, might bend but would not break.
Between two and three in the afternoon formal
announcement was made to the public that the government
would vacate Richmond that evening. By nightfall all the
flitting shadows of a Lost Cause had passed away under a
heaven studded by bright stars. The doomed city lay face
to face with what it knew not.
In my "Confederate Album" is the original telegram from
General J. C. Breckinridge, Secretary of War, to
President Davis at Danville, describing the evacuation of
Richmond. It is written upon a half sheet of cheap
yellowish paper, and marked "206 / Collect 103.00," and
runs as follows:
"RED HOUSE, VIA CLOVER STATION,
"THE PRESDT.
and morning of the 6th to Rice's Station. During the
morning we captured some eight hundred (800) prisoners,
but in afternoon met a serious reverse, and portion of army
placed across Appomattox at High Bridge and other
points. I left Genl. Lee at Farmville yesterday morning,
where he was passing main body across the River for
temporary relief. He will still try to move around towards
North Carolina. There was very little firing yesterday and I
hear none to-day. No definite information as to movements
of enemy from Junction towards Danville. Stoneman's
advance reported yesterday to be near Liberty. Lomax
reports enemy in considerable force advancing up
Shenandoah Valley. No news from Echols, but he is
supposed to be close on Stoneman's rear. Genl. Lee has
sent orders to Lomax to unite with Echols against
Stoneman and to Colston to make firm defence at
Lynchburg. The straggling has been great and the situation
not favorable. Genls. Gilmer, Lawton, and St. John are
with me. We will join you as soon as possible.
"J. C. BRECKINRIDGE,
I had gone with my
brother to the station in the
afternoon, and saw him off with a heart that for the first
time in our war partings felt heavier than lead. His farewell
present to me was a ham, of which he unexpectedly came
into possession after we had said good-by, sending it to me
by a negro tipped with a large amount of Confederate
currency, who, to his honor be it said, was faithful to his
trust. My brother was aware that in addition to leaving me
alone in our lodging (in my mother's absence, gone to
nurse my cousin Ethelbert Fairfax, wounded in the battle
of Bentonville in
North Carolina) our larder was very nearly bare. I had
promised them if an emergency arose to go to my uncle's
house, where I presently arrived, my ham following!
I insert a letter written
at this time:
"GRACE STREET, RICHMOND, April 4,1865.
"MY PRECIOUS MOTHER AND BROTHER:
own bed linen was brought over, and here I write in
comparative comfort, so don't bother about me!
"Hardly had I seemed to have dropped upon my bed
that dreadful Sunday night - or morning rather - when I
was wakened suddenly by four terrific explosions, one
after the other, making the windows of my garret shake. It
was the blowing up, by Admiral Semmes, by order of the
Secretary of the Navy, of our gunboats on the James, the
signal for an all-day carnival of thundering noise and
flames. Soon the fire spread, shells in the burning arsenals
began to explode, and a smoke arose that shrouded the
whole town, shutting out every vestige of blue sky and
April sunshine. Flakes of fire fell around us, glass was
shattered, and chimneys fell, even so far as Grace Street
from the scene.
"By the middle of the day poor Aunt M.'s condition
became so much worse in consequence of the excitement,
the doctor said she positively could not stand any further
sudden alarm. His one comfort is that you, his dear sister,
are taking care of his wounded boy of whom his wife has
been told nothing. It was suggested that some of us should
go to head-quarters and ask, as our neighbors were doing,
for a guard for the house where an invalid lay so critically
ill. Edith and I were the volunteers for service, and set out
for the Capitol Square, taking our courage in both hands.
Looking down from the upper end of the square, we saw
a huge wall of fire blocking out the horizon. In a few hours
no trace was left of Main, Cary, and Canal Streets, from
8th to 18th Streets, except tottering walls and smouldering
ruins. The War Department was sending up jets of flame.
Along the middle of the streets smouldered a long pile, like
street-sweepings, of papers torn from the different
departments' archives of our beloved Government, from
which soldiers in blue were picking out letters and
documents that caught their fancy. The Custom House was
the sole building that defied the fire amongst those
environing the Square. The marble Statesman on the
Monument looked upon queer doings that day, inside the
enclosure from which all green was soon scorched out, or
trampled down by the hoofs of cavalry horses picketted at
intervals about it. Mr. Reed's Church, Mrs. Stanard's
house, the Prestons' house, are all burned; luckily the Lee
house and that side of Franklin stand uninjured. General
Lee's house has a guard camped in the front yard.
"We went on to the head-quarters of the Yankee
General in charge of Richmond, that day of doom, and I
must say were treated with perfect courtesy and
consideration. We saw many people we knew on the same
errand as ourselves. We heard stately Mrs. --- and the ---'s
were there to ask for food, as their families were starving.
Thank God, we have not fallen to that! Certainly her face
looked like a tragic mask carved out of stone.
"A courteous young lieutenant, now General Peck,
U. S. A., was sent to pilot us out of the confusion, and identify
the house, over which a guard was immediately placed.
Already the town wore the aspect of one in the Middle
Ages smitten by pestilence. The streets filled with smoke
and flying fire were empty of the respectable class of
inhabitants, the doors and shutters of every house tight
closed.
"I ought to tell you the important news that your tin box
of securities is safe and in my keeping. How do you think
this happened? On Sunday, after Clarence left, and we
were wandering around the streets like forlorn ghosts, I
chanced to meet our friend, Mr. ---,
the president of the --- Bank, in which I knew you
kept them. He was very pale and wretched looking, said
he could not vouch for the safe-keeping of anybody's
property, asked after you and wondered if I would feel like
taking your papers in charge. I walked with him to the
bank where he put the box in my hands and then I hurried
back with it to my uncle's house. I slept with the papers
under my head Sunday night, and spent Monday afternoon
in ripping apart the trimming of my gray beige skirt. You
know that trimming, like a wide battlement of brown silk all
around the hem? Well, into this wall of Troy I sewed with
the tightest stitches I could make (you would say those
were nothing to boast of, remembering the sleeve that
came apart) every one of your precious documents. And
here I am with the family fortune stitched into my frock,
which I have determined to wear every day with a change
of white bodices, till I see you or can get to some place
where it is safe to take it off...."
I will say in concluding the episode of the hidden papers,
that the next day after I had received them, the bank went
down in the track of the awful Main Street fire, its contents
destroyed utterly. I continued to wear the skirt, heartily
sick of it before I dared lay the thing aside, until the day in
late April when I went by flag of truce to Baltimore, and
there, at the home of my uncle, Mr. Cary, extracted the
papers, put them in a new tin box, and consigned them to
proper safe-keeping. I have certainly never since worn a
gown of the value of that one, ungratefully cast aside at the
first opportunity!
"And what will you say when I tell you that my one and
only book, like poor Mr. John R. Thompson's 'Across the
Atlantic,' has gone up in flames and smoke, in the
establishment of 'Messrs. West and Johnson, Publishers,'
who lost everything in the fire? A little
while ago, I should have wanted to cry over this calamity.
So many pages of good Confederate fool's cap closely
scribbled over; so much eloquence and pathos lost to the
world forever! Really now, joking apart, if West and
Johnson, who are clever men, hadn't thought it worth
publishing they wouldn't have accepted it, would they?
Now - now - nothing seems to hurt much, in the fall of
our Confederacy. Perhaps my poor 'Skirmishing' has made
more of a blaze in the world in this way, than it ever would
have done in the ordinary course of events!"
Certainly that conclusion was the wisest I could have
arrived at, and I lived to rejoice that this jejune effort never
saw daylight! It was years before I again ventured into
print. But I should like now to know what it was all about!
To resume the letter to my mother and brother: "The
ending of the first day of occupation was truly horrible.
Some negroes of the lowest grade, their heads turned by
the prospect of wealth and equality, together with a mob of
miserable poor whites, drank themselves mad with liquor
scooped from the gutters. Reinforced, it was said, by
convicts escaped from the penitentiary, they tore through
the streets, carrying loot from the burnt district." (For days
after, even the kitchens and cabins of the better class of
darkies displayed handsome oil paintings and mirrors, rolls
of stuff, rare books, and barrels of sugar and whiskey.)
"One gang of drunken rioters dragged coffins sacked from
undertakers, filled with spoils from the speculators' shops,
howling so madly one expected to hear them break into the
Carmagnole. Thanks to our trim Yankee guard in the
basement, we felt safe enough, but the experience was not
pleasant.
"Through all this strain of anguish ran like a gleam of gold
the mad vain hope that Lee would yet make a stand
somewhere - that Lee's dear soldiers would give us back
our liberty.
"Dr. Minnegerode has been allowed to continue his daily
services and I never knew anything more painful and
touching than that of this morning when the Litany was
sobbed out by the whole congregation.
"A service we went to the same evening at the old
Monumental I never shall forget. When the rector prayed
for 'the sick and wounded soldiers and all in distress of
mind or body,' there was a brief pause, filled with a sound
of weeping all over the church. He then gave out the hymn:
'When gathering clouds around I view.' There was no
organ and a voice that started the hymn broke down in
tears. Another took it up, and failed likewise. I, then, with a
tremendous struggle for self-control, stood up in the corner
of the pew and sang alone. At the words, 'Thou Saviour
see'st the tears I shed,' there was again a great burst of
crying and sobbing all over the church. I wanted to break
down dreadfully, but I held on and carried the hymn to the
end. As we left the church, many people came up and
squeezed my hand and tried to speak, but could not. Just
then a splendid military band was passing, the like of which
we had not heard in years. The great swell of its triumphant
music seemed to mock the shabby broken-spirited
congregation defiling out of the gray old church buried in
shadows, where in early Richmond days a theatre with
many well-known citizens was burned! That was one of the
tremendous moments of feeling I experienced that week.
"Dear Aunt E--- (Mrs. Hyde) is still at Camp Winder, not
yet reorganized under Federal rule. (I
hope the poor creatures there will fare better than we
could make them!) She wants to send to Redlands for
Meta, then go through the lines to Bert Mason's place as
soon as the way is clear. She has been with me to-day and
yesterday and says I must tell you her heart is broken.
"I walked around to the Campbells' this morning. The
Judge's quiet determination to remain on in Richmond has
produced some criticism, but his friends say that is
nonsense. I looked over at the President's house, and saw
the porch crowded with Union soldiers and politicians, the
street in front filled with curious gaping negroes who have
appeared in swarms like seventeen-year locusts. The
young leaves are just shaking out, the fruit trees a mass of
blossoms - the grass vividly green, the air nectar. I come
in from my melancholy walks and sit in this dull garret, and
pine and yearn for - what?
"I have just seen the Evening Whig, issued under
direction of a Northern editor. Governor Weitzel, the new
U. S. Commandant, says in his telegram to Stanton: 'The
people received us with the wildest joy.' That scene in the
Monumental Church looked like it, don't you think so? Mr.
R. D'Orsey Ogden reopens the theatre to-night with one of
his blood-and-thunder plays. Invitations have been sent to
Lincoln and Stanton to be present at the manoeuvres (here a
piece is torn from the original) the first we have had since
the Occupation. Some of the shops in Broad Street are
already restocked and opened by their Jewish proprietors
and are doing a flourishing trade in greenback currency. We
went into the Hall of Congress, finding there a sable official
in uniform, seated writing at the Speaker's desk. In the State
Library there have been
many pilferings of coins, medals and valuable papers. I
noticed they had removed from the library railings all the
captured Federal banners with which we had been able
abundantly to drape them."
persisted in enumerating the garments packed: 'clothes on
top of books, collars, and little things in trays,' etc., etc.,
with much minuteness of detail.
"'It's all right, James; all I want is for you to get those
letters out and bring them to me, and send the trunks to
Mr. Samuel Harrison's.'
"'Suttenly, miss, suttenly. I perfectly apprehend the
situation,' is what James answered. 'An' I tell you truly that
I have a prominent affection for Colonel Harrison. If he
was a mother or a brother to me, I couldn't love him any
better.'
"He suggested, before we parted, that the hardest
trouble of your lot must be your inability to send me any
more little notes by him, saying: 'I don' know jes how it kin
be managed, miss, unless Colonel Harrison could
somehow dodge the government an' git to see you. Don'
you think he mout dodge the government, miss?'
"While I write there is a commotion in the streets and
rumor of a reverse to Yankee arms. Oh! if I dared believe
it! A young woman has just passed wearing a costume
composed of United States flags. The streets fairly swarm
with blue uniforms and negroes decked in the spoils of
jewelry shops, etc. It is no longer our Richmond, yet
sometimes our eyes have a rest and are gladdened by the
gray uniforms of the Confederate surgeons left here on
parole to attend our sick and wounded soldiers. When one
of them goes by, instantly every shutter is flung wide open,
every cheek fluhes
, every eye sparkles a welcome.
One of
the girls tells me she finds great comfort in singing 'Dixie'
with her head buried in a feather pillow. My dear uncle, the
most saintly of men, to-day read prayers to his assembled
family, and having in hand an old-time prayer-book,
inadvertently read out the petition for
'the President of these United States.' Edith, his youngest
daughter, on our arising from our knees, immediately cried
out in reproachful tones, 'Oh! papa. You prayed for the
President of the United States!' 'Did I?' said the good old
doctor ruefully. 'Devil fetch him!' at which we all laughed.
"Last night, from the sweetest of dreams, I was aroused
by a band playing 'Annie Laurie' so beautifully it seemed to
chime with my happier thoughts. Directly it changed to the
majestic strains of 'The Star Spangled Banner,' which I
had not heard in four years. In one minute I was broad
awake and weeping. Oh! that such a noble air should send
such a pang to rend me!
"To-day, Mr. Lincoln, seated in an ambulance with his
son Tad upon his knee, drove down Grace Street, past
this house, a mounted escort clattering after."
The war was over. What had it cost the country now to
be ours again by force of arms? "More than seven
hundred men a day," says Professor Woodrow Wilson in
his "History of the American People," " for every day of
the four long years of campaign and battle; four hundred
killed or mortally wounded in the field, the rest
dead of disease, exposure, accident, or the slow pains of
imprisonment. The Federal Government had spent thirty-
four hundred millions of dollars upon the war - nearly two
and a half millions for every day it lasted - and less than
eight hundred millions of that vast sum had come into its
coffers from the taxes. More than twenty-six hundred
millions had been added to the National debt. The
Confederacy had piled up a debt upon its part of nearly
fourteen hundred millions and had spent besides no man
could say how much. The North had spent out of its
abundance. The South had spent all that it had, and was
stripped naked of its resources. While the war lasted, it
had been stripped naked also of its men."
My chief personal interest in the trend of events after the
surrender at Appomattox lay naturally with the retiring
government. The story of that retreat and the capture of his
chief was told by Burton Harrison in a paper written for his
sons, which the editors of the Century Magazine secured
for publication in their number of November, 1883. A letter
from Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, appended to my bound
copy of this narrative, says: "It is of absorbing interest, told
with evident frankness and truthfulness, and with a
refreshing sense of humor giving the comedy along with the
tragedy of the events. It would be one of the most
interesting and important contributions to history that the
Century has published, and I can see no reason why you
should withhold it longer or till the generation which would
take most interest in it, is passed away."
The prophecy of general interest in the paper put forth
by the editors had been assured to us on an occasion,
soon after the war, when my husband reluctantly told the
story, following a dinner at the Rev. Henry M.
Field's, at Stockbridge, Mass., where, among other
hearers besides our clever and inspiring host and hostess,
we had Mr. David Dudley Field, President Andrew White,
of Cornell University, and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. It
is true that much was lent to the narrative by the teller's
inimitable gift of narrative so well known to his friends, his
extraordinary flow of words, and dramatic action in recital.
But even among that company of antagonists in politics and
principle he won sympathy and interest as well as full belief
that the events disclosed had been exactly what he said of
them. When he had finished, all the guests gathered
around, thanking him for a vividly interesting chapter of
history; Mrs. Stowe, in particular, expressing herself as
profoundly impressed by what she had heard - a new
light thrown upon things misunderstood before.
Of this story it must suffice for me to give here the
leading incidents without detail or comment. After an
intolerably slow journey by interrupted trains, Mr.
Harrison succeeded in establishing Mrs. Davis and her
party at Charlotte, where, on Wednesday the 4th of April,
he received a telegram from President Davis at Danville
merely announcing that he was there. This was their first
news of the evacuation of Richmond on April 2.
Directly after Mr. Harrison joined his chief at Danville,
the President received the announcement of the surrender
of General Lee at Appomattox, and immediately gave his
secretary orders for the withdrawal of their party, the staff,
cabinet officers and others of the government, then at
Danville, into North Carolina. A train secured by Mr.
Harrison and soon crowded by depressed officials, their
families and hangers on, was enlivened when en route by
an explosion resulting from a young
officer of the Ordnance Bureau seating himself rather hard
on the flat top of a stove, the detonation caused by some
torpedo appliance carried in his coat-tail pocket!
At Greensboro, North Carolina, there was a halt for
consultation with General Joseph E. Johnston, whose army
was then confronting Sherman. A conference was held
including the President, General Johnston, General
Breckinridge (Secretary of War), General Beauregard, Mr.
Benjamin (Secretary of State), Mr. Mallory (Secretary of
the Navy), Mr. Reagan (Postmaster-General), and others,
in the temporary rooms of Colonel John Taylor Wood, of
the President's staff. On the next day the retiring
government moved southward, the President, his staff, and
some members of the cabinet riding their own horses. Mr.
Benjamin, declaring that he should not mount a horse until
forced to do so, General Samuel Cooper (adjutant-general
and ranking officer of the whole army), no longer a young
man; Mr. George Davis, the Attorney-General, and Mr.
Benjamin's brother-in-law, Mr. de Saint Martin, brought
up the rear of the column in an ambulance. Once, riding
back in search of this distinguished contingent, Mr.
Harrison found the whole party stalled in a hopeless
mud-hole in the darkness.
"I could see from afar the occasional bright glow of
Benjamin's cigar. While the others of the party were
perfectly silent, Benjamin's silvery voice was presently
heard as he rhythmically intoned for their comfort verse
after verse of Tennyson's 'Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington.'"
That Mr. Benjamin could ride as well as another, was
afterwards proved on this expedition, when he ultimately
left the party and set out alone for the sea-coast,
making his way to England via Bermuda. "So long as he
remained with us his cheery good-humor and readiness to
adapt himself to the requirements of all emergencies made
him a most agreeable comrade." At Yale College when a
boy; at the bar in New Orleans; in the Senate of the
United States from Louisiana; at first Attorney-General,
then Secretary of War, and finally Secretary of State of
the Confederate States at Richmond, this gentleman
became Queen's Counsel at the London bar and had high
honors bestowed on him by the bench and bar of the
United Kingdom.
"During all this march," wrote Mr. Harrison, "Mr. Davis
was singularly equable and cheerful. He seemed to have
had a great load taken from his mind, to feel relieved of
responsibilities, and his conversation was very bright and
agreeable. He talked of men and of books, particularly of
Walter Scott and Byron; of horses and dogs and sports; of
the woods and the fields; of roads and how to make them;
of the habits of birds and of a variety of other topics. His
familiarity with and correct taste in the English literature of
the last generation, his varied experiences in life, his habits
of close observation, and his extraordinary memory made
him a charming companion when disposed to talk. Indeed,
like Mark Tapley, we were all in good spirits under
adverse circumstances, and I particularly remember the
entertaining conversation of Mr. Mallory, the Secretary of
the Navy" (which does not agree with the item I recently
found in an old letter of Major Walton's to Mr. Harrison,
in which this secretary is styled "Mr. Malheureux ").
At Charlotte it was found that Mrs. Davis and her party
had left the day before to go further South. As the
Presidential party entered a house with difficulty
obtained for them (all the inhabitants fearing a threat made by
Stoneman's troopers to burn every house giving refuge to
Jefferson Davis), the President received by carrier from
General Breckinridge the news of President Lincoln's
assassination, tidings universally regretted by the staff and
following. "Everybody's remark," wrote Mr. Harrison, "was
that in Lincoln the Southern States had lost their only refuge in
their then emergency. There was no expression other than that
of surprise and regret. As yet we knew none of the particulars
of the crime."
During the speech made at this juncture by Mr. Davis to
a column of General Basil Duke's cavalry, Mr. Harrison
stood close to the speaker and heard distinctly every word
uttered by him. There was no reference whatever to the
assassination and no other speech was made. Mr. Davis's
remark to Colonel William Preston Johnston in Mr. Bates's
house, later on, was that "Mr. Lincoln would have been
much more useful to the Southern States than Andrew
Johnson, his successor, was likely to be"; "I myself," said
Mr. Harrison, "heard Mr. Davis express the same opinion
at that period."
So much for the oft-quoted charge against Mr. Davis
that he had on this occasion spoken approvingly of the
horrible crime committed by Booth in the name of the
conquered South! My husband often told me that of such a
spirit, much less an expression, Mr. Davis could never
have been guilty.
"No man ever participated," he went on to say, "in a
great war of revolution with less of disturbance of the
nicest sense of perfect rectitude in conduct or opinion; his
every utterance, act, and sentiment was with the strictest
regard for all the moralities, throughout that
troubled time when the passions of many people made
them reckless or defiant of the opinions of mankind. His
cheerfulness continued in Charlotte and I remember his
there saying to me, "I cannot feel like a beaten man.'"
At Charlotte, Mr. Davis's anxiety about his wife and
family led him to despatch his secretary to Abbeville,
South Carolina, in search of them, using his own judgment
as to what to do after he met them; the President himself
proposing to go as rapidly as possible to the Trans-
Mississippi Department to join the army under Kirby
Smith.
At Abbeville, Mr. Harrison found Mrs. Davis and her
party comfortably installed as the guests of Colonel Burt.
Mrs. Davis insisted upon at once seeking the sea-coast
with a view to sailing for Europe. Had she remained where
she was, yielding to the entreaties of all around her, the
capture of Jefferson Davis might never have been a chapter
of contemporaneous history.
Mr. Harrison's party, re-enforced by two gallant
volunteers, artillerymen of the Southern army, Captain
Moody and Major Victor Maurin, proceeded in wagons,
toilsomely southward; the men watching at night while the
women and children slept, to guard against the theft of
their wagons and horses by roving freebooters of whom
the woods were full.
At midnight, several days later, Mr. Harrison, who with
two teamsters (old soldiers) constituted the picket-guard,
heard the soft tread of horses approaching their camp on
the sandy road. Harrison challenged and to his
astonishment was answered by the President's voice. Mr.
Davis was attended by Colonel William Preston Johnston,
Colonel John Taylor Wood, Colonel Frank R. Lubbock,
Mr. Reagan, Colonel Thorburn, and Robert, the
President's negro servant.
This unexpected encounter kept the President with his
family for some days, when, in compliance with the earnest
solicitation of the staff, he consented to leave them and go
on unhampered by a wagon train. At the village of
Abbeville, South Carolina, he was overtaken by a
tremendous storm of thunder and lightning, with torrents of
rain, and, fearing for the safety of his family camping out at
night, again rode after them, to the discomfiture of the
party, joining Mrs. Davis in camp near the little hamlet of
Irwinsville in Georgia. Here, after promising his friends that
he would leave Mrs. Davis's party, finally, in the morning,
Mr. Davis retired to rest in the tent occupied by his wife.
Mr. Harrison, overcome by fever and dysentery
contracted on the journey, threw himself on the ground not
far away and fell into profound sleep, from which he was
awakened at daybreak by Jones, Mrs. Davis's coachman,
running to him saying the enemy was upon them.
"I sprang to my feet and in an instant a rattling fire of
musketry began on the north side of the creek. Almost at
the same moment Colonel Pritchard and his regiment
charged up the road from the south upon us. . . . We were
taken by surprise and not one of us exchanged a shot with
the enemy. Colonel Johnston tells me he was the first
prisoner taken. In a moment Colonel Pritchard rode
directly to me and, pointing across the creek, said: 'What
does that mean? Have you any men with you?' Supposing
the firing was done by our teamsters, I said: 'Of course we
have. Don't you hear the firing?' He seemed to be nettled
at the reply, gave the order 'Charge,' and boldly led the
way across the creek, nearly every man in his command
following. Our camp was thus left deserted for a few
minutes, except by one mounted soldier near Mrs. Davis's
tent
(afterward said to have been stationed there by Colonel
Pritchard in passing), and by the few troopers who
stopped to plunder our wagons. I had been sleeping on the
same side of the road with the tent occupied by Mrs.
Davis, and was then standing very near it. I saw her come
out and say something to the soldier mentioned. Perceiving
she wanted him to move off, I approached and actually
persuaded the fellow to ride away. As the soldier moved
into the road and I walked beside his horse, the President
emerged for the first time from the tent at the side farther
from us, and walked away into the woods to the eastward,
at right angles from the road.
"Presently, looking around and observing somebody had
come out of the tent, the soldier turned his horse's head
and, reaching the spot he had first occupied, was again
approached by Mrs. Davis, who engaged him in
conversation. This trooper was joined by perhaps two of
his comrades.... They remained on horseback and soon
became violent in their language with Mrs. Davis. The
order to 'Halt!' was called out by one of them to the
President. It was not obeyed, and was quickly repeated in
a loud voice several times. At least one of the men then
threatened to fire, and pointed a carbine at the President.
Mrs. Davis, overcome with terror, cried out in
apprehension, and the President (who had now walked
sixty or eighty paces away into the unobstructed woods),
turned around and came rapidly back to his wife near the
tent. As the President reproached the soldier who was
using rough language to his wife, one of the others,
recognizing him, called out: 'Mr. Davis, surrender! I
recognize you, sir!'
"While these things were happening, Miss Howell and
the children remained within the other tent....
I have not found that there was any one, excepting Mrs.
Davis, the single trooper by her tent, and myself, who saw
all that occurred and heard all that was said at the time.
Any one else who gives an account of it has had to rely
upon hearsay, or his own imagination, for this story....
"The business of plundering commenced immediately
after the capture; we were soon left with only what we had
on and what we had in our pockets.... While this was going
on, I emptied the contents of my haversack into a fire
where some of the enemy were cooking breakfast, and
there saw the papers burn. They were chiefly love-letters,
with a photograph of my sweetheart."
The prisoners en route for Macon were allowed to ride
their own horses (promptly seized by their captors when
four days later they reached the railway station in that
town), whence they were taken by train to Augusta, on
their way to Fortress Monroe.
What concerns Jefferson Davis in his subsequent terrible
imprisonment at Fortress Monroe, belongs to history.
The experience of Burton Harrison as a prisoner of war
was detailed to me by him in 1904, to refresh my memory,
during his last illness at our temporary home in Washington,
where we had gone to pass the winter near our sons. While
there was never any bitterness about it in his speech, or in
his manly soul, I could not, even after that lapse of years,
hear the recital without a pang of deep pain for what he
had needlessly suffered.
Whilst between him and the friends he had left in
Richmond a black veil of silence and sickening uncertainty
as to his ultimate fate had fallen, he had been confined at
first in a room of the Old Capitol Prison. A
few days later he was taken by a detective from this place
and conducted to a room in the same building, under
pretext of being introduced to a Confederate "lady" he
might "like to know." Feeling instinctively that mischief
threatened, he had no difficulty in keeping himself in check
when in the presence of an "old untidy woman with a shifty
eye," afterward identified as a spy for both sides, who, with
every assurance of cordiality for the South, sought to lead
him into conversation about Mr. Davis and Confederate
matters in general. She did not name the young girl suffering
from a bad headache, who, deadly pale, with a white
bandage around her brow, struck him as resembling some
face on a Roman coin. In honeyed tones the spy woman
sought to induce both of them to join in her strictures
against the Government and expressions of sympathy for
the conspirators. In a flash he divined the poor girl had
been brought there for the same purpose as himself. It was
designed that they should talk unguardedly in the presence
of authority. It was not until the interview - futile as to
results - was over that he chanced to hear the detective
call the young woman "Miss Surratt." He came away from
this hateful interview feeling he had escaped a trap. After
the disgust of it, his prison with the rough jailers seemed a
welcome haven.
Next day all the rebel prisoners at the Old Capitol were
allowed to crowd to the barred windows to witness
Sherman's imperial progress of return to Washington.
To eyes long used to faded gray and rusty
accoutrements, the vast array of blazing sheen and color
seemed oppressive. But all the same, he said, the Johnny
Rebs enjoyed the show hugely, not begrudging
professional praise to military details and ensemble.
Turning away from his window, he felt a touch upon
his shoulder from a detective he had not before seen, who
curtly told him he was to go to "another place." His prison
comrades, surrounding him with handshakes and kind
words, watched him depart sadly. The rumor had got
abroad that Jefferson Davis's secretary and confidential
friend was to be dealt with to the full rigor of the law.
A drive in an ambulance - in war-time serving for all
purposes of transfer - brought him to the United States
Arsenal, situated upon a peninsula running out from the
marshy borders of the eastern end of the Potomac, now
the site of the War College. It then contained, close to the
water's edge, a group of brick buildings amid level military
plazas, banked with pyramids of shells and balls,
surrounded by cannon, their carriages and caissons.
Behind a high wall towered conspicuously a sombre
building with barred and grated windows. Old Washington
knew this as a District Penitentiary. It was now
transformed into a military and political prison where, in
the inner cells, were confined the prisoners implicated in
the murder of President Lincoln. In the upper story was
sitting a Military Commission whose proceedings filled the
world with awesome interest.
On every one of these piping days of early summer the
conspirators were brought in irons through a massive nail-
studded door communicating with the cells and placed in a
line punctuated with armed guards, to sit in the court-room
facing their judges and a mixed audience, till, at the end of
the day's session, they were returned to their dungeons.
The ambulance containing the new prisoner and his
guard was several times put out of line before the arsenal
door by carriage loads of fine people, the women
dressed as if for a race day. One after the other of these
gay parties passed in, laughing and chatting, under a grim
wall atop of which patrols, ten feet apart, kept always on
the lookout. It had become a modish thing for society to
drop in for a peep at the conspirators' trial. Passes, limited
to the capacity of the courtroom, were in demand, like
opera tickets to a special performance.
The prisoner's last glimpse for many a day of the outer
world was of a broad dusty avenue with shabby fringes of
negro cabins and booths leading up to the entrance gate
that looked like a country fair. Cattle with lolling tongues
were there, disgruntled pigs, and mangy dogs getting in the
way of marching soldiers and fashionable vehicles. To the
left he saw a military encampment filling a sun-baked plain
where, under shelter tents, soldiers off duty lounged,
dozed, played cards, or tossed quoits. In the background
of the prison two gun-boats kept unceasing watch upon the
river front.
The prisoner was hurried through the door, marched up
two flights of steps, and, without warning, ushered before
the gaze of the crowded court-room, gaping for new
sensations, there to stand awaiting the Provost Marshal
General to whom he was consigned.
Without moving, he faced the ordeal, his lips set, hot
anger coursing through his veins. Spite of his sense of
unnecessary degradation, he noted and remembered well
the make-up of the scene - the Judge Advocate General,
Holt, presiding, with his swart cold face, boding ill for a
prisoner falling under his displeasure; his assistants, the
judges of the military commission, unfortunately for
themselves appointed to conduct this trial; the reporters of
the commission; the large whispering, smiling audience; and
the accused, seven men
and one woman shackled together, almost inevitably
doomed to death.
When relieved from his unpleasant position by the arrival
of the functionary who was to take official possession of
his body, he was again led out of the court-room, through a
jostling vulgar crowd, affecting to shrink away on either
side of him as if from a monster ill-secured. The general,
having annexed a formidable key, led the way, the prisoner
followed by the guard brought up the rear, a band of
vagabond loungers shuffling after them until turned back at
the entrance to a ponderous grated door.
Life stood still for him a long time thereafter, while he
alternately lay or sat upon a blanket on the cemented floor
of a felon's cell, four feet by eight, dark as night in daytime.
During five long weeks he was forbidden speech with any
one whomsoever. But in those days and nights, when he
threw himself down upon the blanket, or else walked, or
used gymnastic exercises to stretch his muscles and save
his reason, he might have said what a virile poet wrote long
afterward: "I am the Master of my Fate. I am the Captain of my
Soul."
He said what he minded most was the eye of a
bayonetted soldier, perpetually looking through the grating
in his door.
Of whatever his enemies might have accused him, it was
not a failure in stoic endurance of his lot. One of his jailers
at Fort Delaware told me afterward that of the many
thousands they had held, no Confederate prisoner had
borne himself with higher courage and cooler pluck. But
that experience of the dark cell came near to permanent
weakening of his strong physique. When they heard him
singing and laughing to himself
one day, the guards made haste to summon surgeon and
provost marshal, believing he had gone mad.
The surgeon finding his prisoner a wreck in physical
strength, the matter was reported to the War Department,
after which he was given leave to take daily exercise in the
prison yard below. From this glimpse of the world of the
living, such as it was, the return to solitary darkness
became more and more exhausting to nerve and body. His
good doctor again reporting his condition, he was then
transferred to a cell facing the Capitol, through which
plentiful summer sunlight sifted in, and he could see afar the
glitter of the golden dome. A chair allowed him, his next
demand was for a copy of Horace or Tennyson, for which
the doctor substituted Louis Napoleon's "Life of Cæsar,"
with a promise of more literature to follow.
Under these changed conditions the prisoner's health
improved daily. Although no one spoke to him of daily
happenings, his intuition kept him actually abreast of the
grim tragedy enacting under the roof that sheltered him. He
said he felt like a savage trained to notice the dropping of a
nut or the crackle of a twig. Of the unhappy beings on trial
he knew nothing, nor had he any sentimental desire that
they should escape justice. Once, walking in the prison
yard, he had seen at a window the wan face of the girl met
in the spy's company at the Old Capitol - now the most
crushed and sorrow-stricken creature that ever met his
gaze.
In the yard, also, he once picked up and secreted a bit
of greasy newspaper blown from some sentry's lunch.
From this he saw that the conspirators were hastening to
their doom.
When, one day, the guards failed to come for him to
walk, and from the yard below arose a great clamor of
saws and hammering, he surmised what was to be. Every
night before he had heard coming through the ventilating
tube the melancholy whistling of an occupant of the cell
beneath his, evidently absent in the day; for which sound
he had learned to listen with an odd sense of
companionship. That evening the whistle began - but was
halted suddenly and the listener thought the effort was
beyond the power of a condemned man probably on the
eve of execution.
That night also he heard a new sound - a ship's bell
striking the watches, close by.
"Some of them are to be transported, and that boat is
here to take them off," flashed through his mind.
At dawn he turned in his blanket, wakened by the noise
of renewed hammering. From his window he could see
many troops massing in Pennsylvania Avenue, and amid
them, riding alone, the Catholic priest - Father Walter, the
intrepid soldier of Christ (who, because of his belief in the
innocence of one of the condemned, was forbidden to go
with her to the scaffold) - coming to shrive departing
souls.
The officer detailed as usual to watch him at his
breakfast, generally so genial, to-day avoided meeting the
prisoner's eye, as did the soldier always holding a musket
before his door. He asked no questions, ate his food, and
sat afterward for hours without stirring from his chair.
Thenceforward, every sound in the prison came
unnaturally distinct. On all sides he heard the incessant
tramp of gathering soldiers. On the roof facing the arsenal
he saw gazers assembled, and could not look at them.
He heard cell doors opening below, and their occupants
led out into the corridor; heard the sobbing
of anguished women whose feet kept hurried pace a little
while with the others, then turned back heavily.
And lastly a hush, an awful calm, while the lives of a
woman and three men were taken from them upon the
scaffold.
At his usual hour that evening the guards came to lead
him out for exercise. Stepping from the prison door upon
the pavement of the courtyard, he saw the scaffold looming
black, exactly across a path he had made in the weedy
grass, called by the soldiers "Harrison's beat." And there,
lying across the path, were four new made graves . . .
"like beads upon a string," he said, over and over to himself,
"like beads upon a string."
The guards and bystanders watching curiously for
evidence of his emotion were not gratified. Giving no sign,
he began making for himself a new path parallel with the
former one.
That night he heard the sound of a faint, tremulous,
dejected whistle coming up the ventilating tube, and
actually laughed aloud, so glad he was to think the poor
devil had not been hanged. When the ship's bells ceased to
strike he was sure it had carried his whistling friend away!
All these things were told to and written down by me, a
short time before my husband's death in 1904 - calmly, without
resentment or animus of any kind. He also said that Major
---, a Dane from Michigan, who shortly after this transferred
him to Fort Delaware, told him during the journey that he
had been in personal charge of Mrs. Surratt in prison, had
put the black cap over her head and the rope around her
neck, launching her into eternity. He said Mrs. Surratt had
nothing to do with the plot to kill Lincoln - that she was
party to a
scheme to capture him only, and that she died an innocent
woman. (See General Butler's charge to Judge Bingham in
the House of Representatives that he had hanged an
innocent woman!)
Major --- also told Mr. Harrison that before sentence of
death was passed upon Mrs. Surratt her daughter had tried
continually, but in vain, to gain access to her cell. After she
was condemned the girl was allowed to meet her mother.
Major --- was present at the interview and said he never saw
such an exhibition of character. As the girl came into the
cell she could not stand but fell upon the floor, creeping
over it, weeping bitterly, till she reached her mother's feet
and kissed them, with a thousand loving, imploring words
of tenderness. The mother remaining cold as a stone, his
heart filled with wrath against her hardness to her child, but,
when Miss Surratt finally went out of the cell, the woman
broke down in such an awful passion of tears as he prayed
he might never see again, melting him utterly into sympathy
with her.
Burton Harrison was personally on good terms with his
jailers. When Major --- was conducting him, with two guards,
to Fort Delaware, they were halted in the station at
Philadelphia because of the failure of a carriage expected to
take them to the boat wharf. In some perplexity the major
said he would go himself and look for it. "And in the
meantime, colonel," he added seriously, "will you have an
eye upon these fellows of mine, and see that they don't
leave you?"
With General Hartranft also, the provost marshal who
had locked him in the black cell at the arsenal and came
every day with the surgeon to see if the prisoner kept his
health and sanity, Mr. Harrison had kind relations.
In after years, when as counsel for the Union Telegraph
Company, my husband went to conduct some business for
them at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, he found the official he
had to consult professionally was none other than his
former jailer. When Mr. Harrison came downstairs in the
morning at the Lochiel Hotel and saw Hartranft waiting for
him in the hall, he threw up his hands, exclaiming, "My
God, general, you are not after me again?"
They shook hands and the general answered: "I tell you,
Harrison; you haven't a better friend than I am in the
world. Come to breakfast and, after we've finished
business, we'll spend the day together."
Before ending this grim chapter, one of the horrible
sequelæ of the Civil War, I will say that after hearing these
stories told again in Washington in 1904, I desired to drive
with my husband to the scene of his old ordeal, where the
present War College buildings were then going up on the
site of the old prison of the arsenal.
Sitting in a victoria, he directed the coachman as well as
he could where to go, but became soon confused about
localities in the altered aspect of the place. We pulled up,
and I addressed the "boss" of a gang of workmen, asking if
he could tell me where we were.
"Why, ma'am, don't you know?" he answered. "This is
the place where the scaffold stood on which Mrs. Surratt
and the other conspirators were hanged."
My husband made no comment, nor did I, and silently
we drove homeward.
Our cousin, the Rev. Herbert Norris, rector of the
Episcopal Church at Woodbury, New Jersey, who had
lost a noble son in the Union service at Antietam, was
good enough to ask that I should be sent to remain under
his protection, and that of his wife, one of the Rawle family
of Philadelphia, intensely in sympathy with the triumphing
cause.
They were more than kind to their poor little storm-
tossed, rebel visitor, carrying in her young heart a world of
painful experience together with certain fears and sad
yearnings of which she could speak to nobody. It was as if
an iron door had closed between her and the one who had
gone out of her life so unsuspectingly that day of March on
the eve of the Occupation! Not a word had come from
him, and she only knew he was treated as a "dangerous"
prisoner.
The first thing Mrs. Norris wisely judged to be a healthy
restorative for girlish spirits, was for me to overhaul my
Confederate wardrobe and spend the check my mother
had given me for new clothes. I went into Philadelphia
escorted by my cousin Herbert, who took me to all the
necessary shops, and stood by patiently till my ardor was
appeased. I cannot now imagine anything
much uglier than the gored ruffled skirts stretched
over wide hoops, the short bolero jackets, and insignificant
little round hats shelved forward upon our brows. But
when they came home and were compared with the
threadbare, faded made-overs of my Richmond supply, I
felt richer than a queen! These exhilarations did not last
long, and many a night I sobbed for bygones and for
friends who felt with me. The great city of Philadelphia as I
saw it on our visits seemed so untouched by the war -
casual people were so prosperous, so indifferent, except
to say bitter, biting things against the Southern cause. If I
had been wiser I should have realized that the North, too,
was riddled with painful remembrances and sorrows of the
war.
My next visit was one of some length to my father's
sister, at old Morrisania. She had lent a son to the Union
army and, with her girls, was in mourning for President
Lincoln when I arrived. My uncle, an original member of
the Republican party (having been, like my father, an old-
line Whig of ardent enthusiasm), was strongly opposed to
the Southern idea of secession, and for the Confederacy
and its leaders had no tolerance or consideration. While a
man of large generosities and kind impulse, he was violent
in invective against the rebels and all their works. At table
and elsewhere it was the constant effort of the family, who
had received me with open arms and cemented a
friendship lasting all our lives, to restrain him from jocular
remarks of triumph over the conquered South that swelled
my heart to bursting, unable as I was to retort or give
expression to my sufferings. One day at luncheon, when he
quoted the verse about "hanging Jeff Davis to a sour apple
tree," I for a while "saw red," and came very near leaving
the house on foot and taking refuge I knew not
where. Afterward, on learning from his wife how he had
pained me, he was as sorry as I could have wished. I could
not understand why some of their country neighbors, calling
at Morrisania, looked at me curiously as at a brand
snatched from the burning. This dear house was to become
a second home to me, I to assume the position of elder
daughter to my aunt who had been my father's favorite
sister, and in the course of time I was to go out from under
its hospitable portal as a bride.
The ease and luxury of my surroundings, in startling
contrast to the life so recently led in Richmond, would have
been better appreciated had I known what was befalling
my prisoner at Fort Delaware. My girl cousins, full of
sympathy in the case, had already become warm advocates
of the unseen private secretary of the late Confederate
President. There was a universal thrill of satisfaction in the
family when, at last, one day in August, I received from him
a long full letter.
The way in which it came to me was never revealed until
by a letter written in 1876 by that preux chevalier, Colonel
Henry Kyd Douglas, of Hagerstown, Maryland, after
reading a Virginian paper I had published in Scribner's
Magazine. This letter tells, better than I can, the conditions
under which my prisoner was passing his days.
"But up in a keep among the battlements, strictly
guarded and confined, with no privileges and no
companionship of men and books, in solitary
imprisonment,
Colonel Harrison passed a longer servitude, wearily and
impatiently. He was suffering vicariously for the alleged
treason of his chief. Morning and evening he took his
unsatisfactory exercise along the battlements. We were
forbidden to speak to, or recognize each other, and yet
there was no prison rule which could prevent the unspoken
salute of the raised hat, although with averted faces. Even
the keepers and jailers of that fort, used as they had
become to many senseless tyrannies during the war, were
disgusted with the strict and hard imprisonment of Colonel
Harrison, and the men on duty freely expressed their
opinion of it. The day before I was released, a stalwart,
open-faced, coatless soldier came into my room. After
telling me that he cooked for and waited on Colonel
Harrison, he began to deplore the stringency of his
confinement, especially the order that forbade him to write
to, or receive letters from, his family and friends; and most
especially, with hot wrath and an oath, did he think it was a
shame the prisoner couldn't even write to the young lady he
was in love with! (How he obtained this information I do
not know.) He then said that 'one way or another' Colonel
Harrison had got hold of pen and ink and paper, and had
written a number of letters he wanted to send out to his
family; would I take charge of them? A flash of suspicion
on my part was dispelled by a look into his honest face. . . .
The next day he strolled again into my quarters and after
expressing his satisfaction at my release, and his regret that
Colonel Harrison was not freed, wandered about the room
a bit, then said good-by and walked out. Upon taking
down my coat which hung against the wall, I found therein a
solid pack of letters. That day General Schoeff took me to
Wilmington in his boat; that evening the letters were
delivered to Mrs. Cary
in Baltimore. I think the fullest letter there was addressed
to - whom? She must have received and evidently
appreciated it. Does she remember it?"
Other letters followed. A vegetable seller became the
messenger of Cupid, and carried more than one out of the
fort in hollowed carrots and cucumbers. We, in return,
contrived to get letters back addressed to a certain "Tony
Hardiman," care of a certain somebody else, at a certain
post-office, which shall be forever nameless. We knew,
now, that things had otherwise improved for the prisoner,
that books from the post library heaped his table, and a
friendship had sprung up between himself and the brave
commandant of the fort, ending in walks on the island and
visits to the general's home.
These things inspired in me hope that a pleasure even
greater might be given to the captive. With my mother, I
returned in the autumn to Woodbury, New Jersey, where,
with the aid of my young cousin, Dr. Herbert Norris, we
three made an attack in person upon the fort.
Our ways of getting there were devious and thorny.
From a village on the opposite shore of the Delaware
River, we sailed in a leaky fishing boat across a swelling,
roughening tide. Arrived at the moated fortress on the
bank, we sent in our cards by a soldier to the
commandant. To our delight, no question was made about
receiving us and, crossing a bridge to enter gloomy
corridors, we were soon in the presence of the redoubted
chief. Had I divined that the general's kind heart was
already enlisted for the prisoner, not only through his own
pleasure in his society, but because of his family's warm
liking and championship - had I supposed that in after
years these dear people were to name a son "Burton
Harrison," and to bid their other sons try to
model themselves upon one whom they conceived to be "a
perfect gentleman" - then I should not have been so
faint-hearted.
The general, maintaining a severe official aspect, looked
us over, and enquired of Mrs. Cary whether we were
perchance the mother and sister of Colonel Harrison.
"No," said my mother; "only friends."
"I understand!" said the general, hemming and hawing
greatly. A moment more and he had taken the parcel my
mother handed to him - a miniature of myself painted by
Mrs. Thompson in New York, to replace the one burnt up
in the soldier's camp-fire in the Georgia wilderness - and
the open letter sent with it, and despatched them by an
orderly to the prisoner.
And then, a sudden, even kinder, impulse overcoming
him, he asked my mother if she could trust him to show me
the interior of the fortress. He led, I followed, to a door
opening on the inner court, where, bidden to look up
toward the battlements, I saw my prisoner, standing
indeed between bayonets in a casemate, but alive and
well, waving his hat like a school-boy, and uttering a great
irrepressible shout of joy!
These are the things that remain green in memory when
the landscape of life is elsewhere dry and sere! But for the
courage and devotion of my dear mother and my cousin, in
accompanying me on what seemed a forlorn hope, we
should never have won the day!
The next winter we had a house in Washington,
principally for the purpose of winning the prisoner's
release. Through the tireless efforts with President Johnson
of our dear old friend, Hon. Francis Preston Blair, this was
finally accomplished. On the 16th of January, 1866, Burton
Harrison was freed from Fort Delaware,
coming at once to visit us in Washington, on his way to
rejoin his mother and sister in the South. Having spent the
latter months of his imprisonment in studying law, through
the aid of books furnished him by his old friends and Yale
chums, Eugene Schuyler and S. D. Page, of Philadelphia,
he, after journeys to Canada and to Europe, was admitted
to the New York bar. By advice of Mr. Charles O'Conor,
his first friend and advisor, then the leading lawyer of New
York, he entered the law office of ex-Judge Fullerton, and
shortly after began practice for himself, which continued
during many years of busy and successful experience.
In October, 1866, my mother and I sailed in the ship
Arago for Havre, the passenger list made up of many New
Yorkers known to each other, including the family of the
new American minister to the Court of Napoleon III,
General Dix. Other people we knew on board were Mr.
Martin Zborowski, of New York - whose wife had been
a Morris - with his sons, John, or "Laddie," and Elliot,
and his young daughter Anna, now the Countess de
Montsaulnin, of Paris. A young Southern widow, Mrs.
Hewitt, formerly Miss Belle Key, of Mississippi (sister-in-
law of Mrs. Walker Fearn), was taking a little blonde
daughter, Marie Hewitt, subsequently the handsome Mme.
Wilkinson, of Paris, to be put at Mme. Grenfell's school in
Paris. It was hardly a surprise to us when some months
later we were bidden to the marriage of Mr. Zborowski
with Mrs. Hewitt. Afterward we saw much of their
conjoined families abroad and in Westchester County
where Mr. Zborowski had a charming home. Several
young couples on their bridal tours (who have strangely
managed to become old couples by now) bore names
familiar to New York
society. Everybody on board was nice to us recent
enemies of the republic, and we contracted more than one
friendship of an enduring nature.
As our winter in Paris was avowedly for the purpose of
giving my education the "finishing" touches sadly omitted in
war experience, I was forthwith started in lessons of
various kinds, including a training of the voice by M.
Archaimbaud, of the Paris Conservatoire. To meet
exigencies of foreign opinion, I was transformed back into
the conventional jeune fille, accompanied everywhere by
my mother. I often wondered what my testy little maître
de chant would think if I told him I had sung war songs to
marching troops, or played accompaniments for a chorus
of soldiers surrounding me at the piano? I believe he
would have fainted, then and there!
Archaimbaud took interest in my voice and inspired me
with delight in his methods. By and by we removed from
the Hotel de Lille et d'Albion to a quaintly attractive
domicile where some New Orleans creole friends, had
advised my mother to go for the betterment of my French
accent. This was "La Ville au Bois," a villa boarding and
apartment house, at the Porte Maillot in Neuilly, as pretty a
place as could be, with ivy-grown buildings surrounding a
paved courtyard, where in fine weather the tables for
meals were set out of doors under the shade of great old
trees. A high brick wall, overhung with creepers, divided
us from the Bois de Boulogne. There, in a small but daintily
furnished rez de chaussée, consisting of two bedrooms
and a sitting-room, the latter upholstered in a warm
crimson moreen stuff, opening upon a wee garden of our
own, we spent the winter. We grew so attached to our
French home that when, during the Franco-Prussian war,
we heard it had been destroyed by shot and shell - the
second abode
of mine laid low through war's necessities - we were
genuinely grieved.
Until then, I had not believed there were so many bright-
eyed, smiling, chattering old people in the world as among
our comrades at Ville au Bois! The mystery was explained
when on Sundays, younger men and women, with children
carrying bouquets, came reverently to call upon their
seniors, most often leading them off in their best caps and
redingotes, to dine en ville with their offspring. The Ville
au Bois, generally, was dying to understand about "ces
dames de l'Amérique du Sud," who had taken the rez de
chaussée apartment. Upon my mother, who had a
beautiful clear olive complexion with large dark eyes, they
looked with some comprehension, but continued to ask
her if Mademoiselle were not remarkably fair for a denizen
of her country.
Old Mme. Letellier, Alexandre Dumas's sister, who had
an apartment all rosy chintz and growing plants, showed
me a lock of their "sainted father's" hair (we called it wool
in our part of the world), asking me if that was not like the
hair of our people, generally. She pointed with pride to the
deep tinting of blood underneath her finger nails, and said:
"I, too, am of your race, mademoiselle." To all of them, to
be of the South meant to be off color in complexion!
She was a dear little old person, who lent me books,
gave me one of the great Alexandre's MS. and petted me
extravagantly. She adored her nephew, Dumas fils, whose
"Les Idées de Mme. Aubray" had just made its success at
the Gymnase Theatre, and showed me the photograph of
her famous brother sitting with Adah Isaacs Menken on his
knee, saying, indulgently, "He was always an imprudent
boy, ce bon gros Alexandre."
One old lady had on her wall a picture, swathed in
crape, of her son, in French soldier's uniform, who had
been shot following Maximilian in Mexico. Underneath it
was a vase that always held fresh flowers.
We heard a glorious midnight mass at Christmas at the
Madeleine, with a baritone from the opera singing Adolphe
Adam's "Noël." Then came the joyous New Year's day,
and on Twelfth Night they had a regular bourgeois "Dîner
des Rois" at our establishment, to which we were formally
invited. A flower bed, over which butterflies and humming-birds
quivered, seemed the array of caps for this occasion;
and even the untidy, snuff-taking old gentleman who
distracted me by making queer noises in his throat, was
shaved and brushed, wearing a white waistcoat and new
skull cap with the inevitable red button of the Legion
d'Honneur on his breast. He ultimately won the bean
constituting him king of the revels, our landlady's baby
granddaughter, a charming imp of five, getting the other
bean that made her queen. Hand-in-hand, their majesties
circulated around the tables, clinking glasses with every
one, and - to my horror, as I saw them coming nearer to
"ces dames" - kissing as they went! Upon my hand,
luckily, the king, after a moment's hesitation, bestowed a
moist salute, but my poor mother received hers upon her
brow. I was glad to compromise by giving little Marie a
hearty hug and kiss.
From La Ville au Bois we usually walked to the Barrière
de l'Etoile, then took a cab or bus, to view the sights of
Paris. The Sainte Chapelle, Musée de Cluny, and
Napoleon's tomb at the Invalides were my favorites, but
eagerly we took it all in. Soon visitors began to appear, old
friends from the Confederacy, and some
new friends made at the North and on shipboard. Our little
red salon, with its "feu d'enfer," as Jean, our attendant,
called our generous fire, opened to some interesting
people. Prince Camille de Polignac and M. de St. Martin
were very kind in coming, also dear old Mr. Francis
Corbin, whose family were hereditary friends of the
Fairfaxes.
The ancestor of the Corbins had settled in Virginia about
1650, his son, Gawin Corbin, becoming president of the
Council of Virginia. In 1754, George Washington wrote
making application to Mr. Corbin to use his influence in the
council to procure for him a commission as lieutenant-
colonel, which Mr. Corbin answered in the following brief
phrase:
"DEAR GEORGE:
"Your friend,
My mother's
great-uncle, it was, who took the son of
this gentleman, then a boy, in one of the Fairfax ships from
Virginia to England, where the youngster was put to
school.
Mr. Francis Corbin invited us to dinner in the old Rohan
hôtel in the rue de Grenelle where he had long resided, and
we met an agreeable company, French and English, of
Southern sympathizers, of whom I remember only Mr.
Moncure Robinson, of Philadelphia, a connection of our
family.
Once, handsome General Breckinridge called, with
Colonel Dudley Mann, late Confederate States
commissioner to France, who won our hearts by asking if
we were "related to the gallant little Midshipman Cary,
who made so many friends when Captain Pegram ran the
Nashville into Southampton." From my Southern album I
take an interesting letter from Colonel Dudley Mann to
President Davis, which has never before been published.
"BRUSSELS, Dec. 17, 1864.
"Private.
"I confidently believe that I can render singularly
valuable services to our cause if it shall be agreeable to
you to embrace the Germanic Confederation and Holland,
in my present mission, in the manner indicated to Mr.
Benjamin.
"From the Emperor of the French, we never had nor
have now, anything favorable to expect. His Imperial
Majesty is deaf to international justice and blind to its
usages when he conceives that Mexico may possibly be
involved in danger. It is quite certain, as I had long ago
supposed, that there is a cordial understanding between the
Cabinets of the Tuileries and Washington in relation to
Maximilian. I now understand, upon good authority, that
the latter is to consider the Monroe Doctrine as utterly
obsolete, and that for this concession the former will
decline for an indefinite period to establish diplomatic
relations with us. This is a monstrous wrong, but one for
which unfortunately we have no redress. The hour of
retribution, however, may arrive sooner or later.
"Our friends everywhere enjoy your recent speeches
and your message. They like your confident and earnest
language. Our enemies, too, know that you speak
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
"I am hopeful that we have seen the darkest days of our
struggle. I indulge the belief that we shall experience no
more severe disasters. I have never feared but that our
independence was established, durably, the day that it was
declared.
"With cordial good wishes for your family, I pray you to
believe me,
"Yours devotedly,
"His EXCELLENCY JEFFERSON DAVIS,
The Preston girls came
from Rue Lord Byron; Mrs.
Myers, with her rosy young face, bright eyes, and dark
hair powdered with white, and the Amaron Ledoux's,
originally from New Orleans, long resident in Paris, aunt
and cousins of Burton Harrison. It was hard to tell which
was lovelier in this family - the mother, renowned since
her youth for good looks and gracious manners; Alice,
who died young; Anina, now the Baronne Brin, of Chateau
Beausoliel; or Gabrielle, the present Marquise de Valori.
Ex-Senator and Mrs. Gwin, of California, maintained
much of their accustomed elegance in a large apartment
where they gave many parties; Dr. and Mrs. Marion Sims,
with their handsome daughters, Mrs. Pratt (who appeared
at a fancy ball, as an American Indian princess, with great
éclat), Carrie, and Florence; and the Slidells, one of whom
went to the same ball as "Rain" under a wonderful umbrella
dripping with a shower of silver drops, were Southerners
much admired in the society of the day. Mr. and Mrs. John
Bigelow, to be
our good friends and neighbors in Gramercy Park in later
years, were just leaving Paris to yield their place to
General and Mrs. Dix when we arrived. Mr. Parke
Godwin, our future neighbor at Bar Harbor, made the
speech of the evening at the farewell banquet given to Mr.
Bigelow at the Grand Hotel in December.
Among the New York set two noted young beauties
were the Beckwith sisters - a miracle of cream and rose
complexions and charming costumes. "Baby" Beckwith was
afterward Lady Leigh, of England, her sister becoming Mrs.
Thorne. One saw a good deal of the pretty faces of that
period, since the Empress had set the fashion of bonnets no
bigger than a postage stamp. The newspapers complained
that this mode, requiring a great deal more hair than the
other, would cost husbands and fathers accordingly, since
hair fetched a much higher market price than did silk and
artificial flowers.
We went to "le skating," on a pond in the Bois de
Boulogne, where there were coronetted carriages,
powdered and plushed footmen, and Tom Thumb grooms
waiting on all the grand people of the Tuileries society.
There I had my first view of the Empress Eugénie, skating
slowly, holding on to a bâton supported between two
gentlemen of her court. She wore a short costume of
sapphire blue velvet, trimmed with grèbe, with a toque of
the same plumage. I lost my heart to her instantly, such
beauty, grace, distinction were hers, and her smile
adorable.
Now for some extracts from my diary.
"We hear of a negro actor named Ira Aldridge, who has
made his appearance in "Othello" at Versailles, after a
grand dinner given to him by theatre people and literati,
including Dumas père. He is said to play the part superbly,
wearing a costume covered with jewels."
"There was a sale of autographs last week, when
George Sand's brought six francs; Seward's, ten francs;
Jefferson Davis's, fifteen francs; and Verdi's, three francs,
fifty centimes.
"Heard Adelina Patti in 'Don Pasquale' at Les Italiens.
She doesn't look a day older than when I saw her, in
Washington before the war, as 'Rosina' in the 'Barbière,' a
little tripping thing of fifteen or sixteen. Now she is a great
diva, making twenty-four thousand pounds in a season at
the Italian Opera here. Crowds follow her carriage and
wait around her hotel till she comes out on the balcony to
throw them flowers. At Marseilles she was jostled until her
bonnet fell off and was torn to pieces for souvenirs.
Certainly she sings like the lark at Heaven's gate.
"Saw a ballet called 'La Source,' which fairly dazzled my
eyes - my first grand 'spectacle.' I wondered what they
would say to it on Seminary Hill. I accused mamma of
shutting her eyes during part of the capering. I also rallied
her for saying we had accomplished so much sight-seeing
together she did not believe there was a hole or corner of
Paris we had left undone! We really do have the most
delightful and sympathetic walks and explorings. She is a
marvel in remembering history, and is working at her
French grammar like a school-girl.
"Longstreet Branham called, a charming boy from
Mississippi, a friend of Burton Harrison and L. Q. C.
Lamar. We walked home from service in the Avenue
Marboeuf with the Smith Bryces, our companions on the
Arago. They have a pretty new apartment where they
asked us to breakfast the other day: only the family present
- Clémence and the two boys, Lloyd and Carroll. The
major says he wishes his ladies
would go more to the Louvre Gallery and less to the
Louvre Magasin."
"Saw that horrid, vulgar Teresa, the chanteuse of music
halls, of whom the fashionable world makes so much.
After one of her appearances in a salon of the Faubourg
St. Germain, she said quite naïvely: 'The songs I sing here
wouldn't be tolerated by the police in a music hall.' The
Papal Nuncio and his secretary were invited to hear her at
a very distinguished house and incontinently left the
premises. Princess Metternich sent her own carriage to
fetch her to one of her parties. As a commentary, Teresa's
predecessor, Rigolboche, who set Paris aflame a short
time since, died recently and was buried in the fosse
commune, or universal ditch where paupers are consigned.
"Had pointed out to me in the Champs Elysées the Oh!-
no-we-never-mention-her - Cora Pearl, with a lap-dog
dyed to match her yellow hair. She is a common-looking
thing!
"Went to a ball at the Gwins - everything beautifully
done. All the best-known ex-Confeds were present, with
crowds of foreigners. Mme. Ledoux took me, and
introduced many danseurs. Danced with Parthians, Medes,
Elamites, and Mesopotamians, who presented themselves
clicking their varnished heels together, and murmuring 'Est
ce que j'aurai l'honneur, Mademoiselle?' after which we
circled without a word passing between us, till they brought
me back to my chaperon. I could have told them I knew
better fun than that. Alice and Anina looked radiant and
were the greatest belles. A little slim Montenegrin prince of
royal family, named 'Dieu-Donné Petrovitch,' asked me to
dance twice, and actually said the room was hot. The
cotillon lasted till half-past three. I danced
it with the Count de Marnas. I wore blue
silk under an embroidered white muslin, made by Lucie
Décharme. It was cut in Empire fashion with the waist up
under the arms and a big blue sash, with a wreath of forget-
me-nots in the hair - 'toilette tout à fait jeune fille, et très
comme il faut,' Lucie said, when she brought it home in a
cab.
"To-day, the coldest of the winter, mamma and I
walked across the Bois de Boulogne in by-ways, under
pines and cedars fringed with snow, in a crisp delicious
atmosphere, coming out at the cascade where the ivy on
the rocks glittered with icicles. Then, on past Longchamps,
to Surèsnes, where we hired a voiture to bring us home.
How bitter chill it was! All Europe is grumbling at the cold.
Birds and beasts everywhere creeping from their retreats
in search of food.
"Went to the opera to hear Marie Battu sing in
'Alceste.' Archaimbaud insists that I must hear good music
constantly - a very nice prescription.
"To-day, through the Ledoux, who know him very well,
came from the Duc de Bassano, the Emperor's
Chamberlain, two huge rose-colored cards, admitting us to
the Midday Mass at the Tuileries Chapel, at which their
Majesties will be present. I had thought I had a dreadful
cold, but it got better directly after that. Of course the
trouble with my seeing court functions is that my dearest
angel of a mother won't hear of my receiving any favors
from the American Minister, although the Dixs have been
so good in offering things. She, who is gentleness itself,
actually said with a flushed face and flashing eyes, that I
should never go inside the Tuileries if it depended on
receiving favors from the representative of 'that
Government!' 'Besides, only a year ago, he gave the order
to shoot anybody who wanted
to pull down the Stars and Stripes, and you know, my
child, we did.'
"We were introduced into the Chapel by liveried
functionaries after waiting in an anteroom till the doors
were opened. To-day is the Feast of Candles, or
Purification of the Virgin Mary, and the pictures and
frescoes and gilding were lit up by a blaze of wax lights,
each priest and acolyte also holding one. At twelve, there
was a cry in the gallery 'L'Empereur,' repeated by a
functionary upon the altar steps. Then the priests came in,
and into the tribune draped with crimson velvet studded
with golden bees, stepped their Majesties. The Empress
sat on the Emperor's left, the Prince Imperial, a nice, manly
boy, on his right. She looked like some old ivory carving
of a saint. She wore a casaque and toque of marron
velvet, with a wreath of black and gold leaves low on her
lovely fluffy hair. She seemed pensive, even distressed, her
lids drooping, her face resting upon one long slender well-
gloved hand. I looked at the Emperor with close attention,
as at one whom some consider the master-mind of Europe
in these days. His face was grayish in tint, lined with deep
marks, his eyes had puffy places under them. While at
prayer, he seemed suddenly to break down into an old
unhappy man, goaded by unpleasant thoughts, probably of
Mexico and his lamentable fiasco there. But then, how can
any French Monarch feel settled and happy, living in that
great marble palace looking out on the fateful Place de la
Concorde?
"While the Emperor and Empress received the
sacrament alone, I looked, first at an exquisite painting of
an Annunciation" (destroyed in the Commune) "then back
at the pale sad face of the Empress. There was music of
harp and organ with voices chiming in pianissimo -
"We walked home through the Tuileries Garden, where
for a penny I bought of a most polite old woman, a bunch
of violets that fills the room with perfume as I write. No, I
shouldn't like to be peerless Eugénie in the Palace of the
Tuileries!
"We were asked to a soirée to be given by an English
lady in the Avenue de l'Imperatrice. Her cards read:
'Tea at eight. Electricity at nine. Music at ten.'
"We got there for the music, furnished mostly by the
guests. Mrs. Blanchard Jerrold, daughter of Mark Lemon
of Punch, helped to make it. Later on, to my dismay, our
hostess descended upon me. She was a large formidable
lady like a rocking horse in expression. Somebody had
fallen out, and she insisted I should sing in the garden duet
from 'Faust'; with whom but Garvarni, one of the tenors I
had heard at the Italian opera? I was cold with fear, but
managed to get through my part, my Faust helping
enormously with his unerring skill and ease. Archaimbaud
was amazed, but secretly pleased when I told him of this
next day at my lesson, and that I had also sung 'Cours mon
aiguille,' from the 'Noces de Jeannette,' at which he had
kept me working away till I was sick of it. My clever cross
little teacher then condescended to say I had rather a nice
voice, with some musical feeling, and if I sang 'exercises'
and 'vocalises' for a thousand years or so I might do fairly
well.
"Heard 'Mignon' at the Opéra Comique, with Galli
Marie and Victor Capoul, both exquisite. Then, the treat of
all treats, Christine Nilsson as the 'Queen of Night' in
Mozart's 'Magic Flute' her 'vocalises' like a rain of jewels."
I heard la diva afterward in New York in all her rôles, and
regretted to miss her appearance in Thomas's "Hamlet," at
the Théatre Lyrique,
after I left Paris, when the audiences simply went mad over
her. Her farewell in that opera in the spring of 1868 is said to
have been the most extraordinary scene of enthusiasm;
flowers covering the stage, and thunders of applause that
would not die away. I met her frequently at the houses of
friends in New York, and find among my autographs a
gracious little note from her accepting an invitation to our
home. I saw her, as the Countess Miranda, at Monte
Carlo, a few years ago, a thin net veil over her face, sitting
at the tables absorbingly intent upon her game. All that
beauty of complexion, the light of those wide-open eyes,
that grace and virginal joyousness were gone. She was
quite another person; a grievous disillusion!
"Heard some delicious concerts by Pasdeloup's
orchestra at the Salle l'Athénée. Have been in turn to hear
all the best artists of the day at the operas, also to the
Théatre Français, and to the Châtelet, for spectacles. All
the others are tabooed to a young girl. Went to the Cirque
de l'Impératrice, to see Léotard jump, or rather fly through
the air." After we left Paris he fell once into the lap of our
friend, Count de ---, and broke the poor count's leg, not his
own.
"On Feb. 27th, a card arrived for me for the ball at the
Tuileries, sent through a Southern friend married into one
of the old families of France, who offered to take me with
her daughter. We went up the fifty steps of the grand
staircase, on each end of which stood like a statue one of
the Cent Gardes, the Emperor's body-guard, the tallest
and handsomest men in the military service of France,
wearing the classic helmet with a snowy horse's tail arched
over its crest. I had to own to myself that nothing I had
seen at the poor shabby White House 'befo de wah' or in
the Governor's house
in Richmond, could come up to this! In the gorgeous Salle
des Maréchaux, with Strauss playing his best waltzes in the
gallery, we saw their Majesties sitting on golden thrones
under curtains studded with golden bees. Never since,
have I seen the outward form of sovereignty so splendidly
assumed.
"The Empress wore white tulle over satin, the skirt
bordered by a garland of soft white roses, the bodice a
mass of scintillating gems, her hair linked with diamond
clasps, around her waist her famous jewelled girdle. My
friends pointed out to me all the distinguished people of the
hour - Prince Napoleon, his wife, Princess Clotilde,
Princess Mathilde, Marquise de Gallifet, Duchesse
Tascher de la Pagerie, the diplomats generally, etc. I was
most interested in Princess Pauline Metternich, who calls
herself 'the monkey of the court,' because she dares
anything for a moment's diversion, but is, nevertheless,
grande dame to the finger tips. She has recently played
three parts of an evening, at theatricals given at Compèigne
- a vivandière, a cab-man (in complete costume, argot
and all!) and then the 'Spirit of Song' in white tulle, the skirt
decorated with music bars, the bodice one solid mass of
diamonds. The wit and tact of this Austrian Embassadress
are quoted everywhere. I stood near her at another ball
where I could not but overhear her sparkling talk -
equalled in glitter only by the high collar of emeralds and
diamonds around her slim throat.
"The State Ball at the Tuileries was such a terrible
squash, as they say in England, our tulles and laces were
simply carried away upon sword hilts. A handsome old
officer, asked by a lady pushed upon him in the jam, to
kindly take his finger out of her ear, said politely, 'Mille
excuses, Madame, but at present it is impossible.'
I had one dance only, with the 'God-given' Montenegrin
prince, who was not to be resisted as he came to seek me
in his stunning national costume, gleaming with color and
gold lace; but my feet were fairly trodden out of shape.
This Prince Pétrovitch, with Sir Hubert Jerningham, the
handsome young attaché of the British Legation - whom,
as a distinguished diplomat, author, and traveller, I was to
know in years to come, when I had the pleasure to be his
guest at his beautiful Longridge Towers near Berwick-on-
Tweed; on which estate are the ruins of Norham Castle,
the scene of the opening canto of Scott's 'Marmion' - were
often invited by the Empress Eugénie to lead the cotillons
at her private dances.
"We did not wait to taste the imperial supper, but,
letting ourselves be put into our wraps by the functionaries
in black velvet with silver chains around their necks, got
into our carriage and hurried away between huge bonfires
built at intervals in the rue de Rivoli, to keep waiting
coachmen and footmen warm, to a bal privé in the
Boulevard Malesherbes, where I danced in a cotillon till 3
A. M."
After that, we had more pomps and vanities, of which
the foregoing will serve as a sample. But amid all this
bedazzlement to ex-Confederate eyes, it is not to be
supposed that our hearts swerved from continual
remembrance of the dear ones left behind, with whom we
were in constant correspondence. Their joys and sorrows,
hopes and fears, were ours, and tears often flowed in
thinking of them. My mother, indeed, carried the
Confederacy written in her heart till death, as Queen Mary
once bore Calais.
My mother had by now settled down into a more
tranquil state of mind concerning her son, who, like many
another young officer of the Confederate States navy after
the collapse of our cause, had relieved the intolerable
uncertainty of the first days of reconstruction by shipping
before the mast in the bark Clifton, sailing from Baltimore
to Rio de Janeiro. This exploit, a greater ordeal to us than
to him, embodied a voyage of fifty days to South America.
Being a protégé of the owner, he at first lived aft in the
cabin, but resenting some chaff of the captain when in his
cups, he took his tin pot and spoon and went forward into
the forecastle with the men, who received him with open
arms.
"I was soon at home with the ship, and as active aloft
as any, turning out to reef and furl and laying out on the
weather top-sail yard-arm when the squall was roaring and
the sea below us outside the narrow hull churned to froth
and spoondrift. We were short-handed, and often and
again did our watch get below from off the sloppy decks in
nasty weather, and into the steaming forecastle, just in time
enough to fall into tired slumber - when bang, bang, bang
would come a handspike on the forecastle door, and
hoarse voices cry, 'All hands reef topsails!'
"Out we rolled, struggling into wet sea boots and
clinging oilskins, and tumbling half-awake out on the
slanting deck, and so with the weather rigging and up that
steep path against which the gale would flatten one; the
same gale which was roaring aloft and making the lowered
sail flat and struggle like a furious wild thing!
"Aloft and quickly with the swarming crowd, and over
the fullock shrouds, and away out on the yard-arm,
standing on the swaying foot rope and holding fast with
tooth and eyelid to the spar, from which the sail we wished
to catch and reef, would flap and belly out in its
imprisoning bunt and reef-lines. On the yard-arm, the
swinging roll of the ship was quick and wide reaching,
leaving one at moments poised as a bird in air over the
black and tumbling sea, and under a blacker fiercer sky.
No shout would reach us against the wind, but a
whispered word went back plainly to leeward. Obeying a
sign from the 2nd mate in the bunt, all hands reached out
and grasped the struggling devilish sail, and with a pull
together, which cracked one's back, and started finger-
nails, a little fold was gathered in and held under one's
body, until another skin could be had, and also fastened,
and the whole secured by reef points. Then 'Lay down
from aloft,' was the cry, and back we clambered, the
watch stumbling into the forecastle to sleep out what
remained of its precious time. The Clifton top-sails, I may
add, were of the old-fashioned back-breaking sort, rigged
with single top-sail yards. In early days, the most difficult
seamanship was in reefing top-sails, and the supreme test
of the able seaman was his manner of passing the weather
ear-ring, a duty which required him to be first aloft and on
the weather yard-arm, which he perched upon, a-straddle,
with foot on Flemish horse, and back against the left, ready
to make fast the ear-ring at the reef, provided the flattening
sail did not flap over his head and drag him from the yard,
as happened now and then."
I have copied this bit from my brother's diary, because
to me it has in it the whistle of angry seawinds and the stern
resistance of man to the elements. It will also give an idea
of a phase of sailor's life now passed away, as well as
mark the contrast between his experience as a young
officer in early command, and that of a common seaman
before the mast, in both doing his manly duty cheerily.
The voyage threw him into contact in Rio with sundry
other young ex-rebels like himself, experimenting for future
service in the merchant marine, and also with a Harvard
man at sea for a lark, on his way to India, who held out his
hand to Clarence, observing, "Hello! you, too, must be a
gentleman!" They laughed, shook hands, and parted, never
to meet again.
On his safe return to New York, my brother, who had
not abandoned his project of entering the merchant-
service, shared his quarters in that city with his old navy
shipmate, Jeff Howell, a brother of Mrs. Jefferson Davis,
afterward lost at sea in the wreck of a merchant vessel
under his own command. At the urgent entreaty of his
family, my brother abandoned this idea, and after a time
spent partly at hospitable Morrisania, partly in law studies
in Charleston, South Carolina, varied by fox hunting with
his friends Frank Trenholm and James Morris Morgan,
finally settled down in the law offices of Harrison &
Wesson in New York.
Long after he was an established member of the bar,
Mr. Cary avowed his weakness for spending spare time
wandering on the docks of New York, studying the
shipping, and filling his lungs with a whiff of salt air and his
nostrils with the smell of tarred ropes.
No, we were not yet thoroughly reconstructed, and
when in the spring we saw a superb review in Paris, of
troops gathered in honor of the royal and imperial visitors
to the "Exposition Universelle," a poignant memory got
hold of me. I thought of all those heroes of our war I had
seen defile into the shades of death, of their surviving
leaders, scattered, suffering ignominy, exile, or galling
poverty, and my tears changed into sobs;
there was nothing for it but to give up and ask to be taken
home.
As a matter of course, we and all the other wandering
children of the South we knew in Paris, were critically
anxious for the release of Jefferson Davis from his two
years of painful imprisonment in Fortress Monroe. His trial,
long delayed, now coming on under the care of some of
the most eminent counsel of the American bar, was ever in
our thoughts.
The story of that trial and Mr. Davis's release on bail
was told to us in two letters from Burton Harrison (here
for the first time put into print), and lifted a weight from our
lives.
"RICHMOND, VA., May 13, 1867.
"To-morrow's
papers may inform the far-off world of
Paris that our great chieftain has been finally liberated on
bail. In a little while we are to go into the courtroom where
the last act of his long drama of imprisonment is to be
performed - we may yet be disappointed, and may be
called upon to conduct Mr. Davis again to a dungeon . . .
we are very anxious of course - feverishly so - but there
seems to be no reason to apprehend failure this time.
"I left New York early Tuesday morning and have been
constantly busy moving ever since I brought the documents
here which have since been published to the world, and
have set the newspaper quidnuncs scribbling ten thousand
crude speculations. But my long training to reticence in
diplomacy, has enabled me to keep our real devices
concealed from the gossips.
"Spent Wednesday and Thursday here plotting and
making ready for the great day. On Friday I went down to
the Fortress and there spent, with him, the last
night of his sojourn in the bastile. It was the second
anniversary of our capture. Next day we came up the river.
General Burton was as courteous to his prisoner as he could
be - subjected him to no restraint, brought no guards - and
we travelled as amiably as a select party of gentlemen
could. There were very few passengers on the boat, but it
had become generally known that the chief was on board,
and at every landing was assembled an enthusiastic little
group to greet the President. It did my heart good to see the
fervent zeal of the good people at Brandon. They came
aboard and such kissing and embracing and tears as Belle
Harrison, Mary Spear Nicholas and Mrs. George Harrison
employed to manifest their devotion to the leader who was
beaten, have never been seen out of dear old Virginia.
"We were brought to the Spotswood Hotel and Mr. and
Mrs. Davis occupy the same rooms they used in 1861 when
they first came to Richmond under such different
circumstances. The Northern proprietor of the house has
caught the zeal of the entire community and actually turned
his own family out of that apartment. There are no sentinels,
no guards - no stranger would suppose the quiet gentleman
who receives his visitors with such peaceful dignity is the
State prisoner around whose dungeon so many battalions
have been marshalled for two years, and whose trial for
treason against a mighty government, to-day excites the
interest of mankind.
"Almost every one has called, bringing flowers and bright
faces of welcome to him who has suffered vicariously for
the millions. Yesterday, after service, half the congregation
from St. Paul's Church was here, and I confess I haven't
seen so many pretty women together for years.
"A mighty army of counsel is here. O'Conor is towering
in his supremacy over all lesser personages and looked like
a demi-god of antiquity, yesterday, when we gathered a few
of us around Mr. Davis to explain the details of his
arrangements. It was a scene so remarkable for the men
who constituted the group and for the occasion of their
meeting that I shall never forget it."
"NEW YORK, May 18, 1867.
"My last letter
was written in Richmond on the morning
of the great crisis. The telegrams in the newspapers
informed you of the result of our labors, and you will see
accounts enough of the various scenes of the drama from
newspaper correspondents. I enclose you one from the
Baltimore Gazette, written by Wilkins Glenn - as good a
story of what occurred as I have seen. The World will give
you a report of the speeches made by O'Conor and the rest,
which were very meager.
"The fact was everything had been agreed upon
beforehand, between O'Conor and the Attorney General,
and it was understood there should be no speeches of
pretentious declamation. Each actor in the drama did his part
soberly and with satisfactory precision. Although
Underwood, the Judge, had received from the government
an intimation of their desire that he should accept bail, we
were not sure that he would not disappoint us with some
assertion of the 'independence of the judiciary.' Underwood
is the bête noire of Richmond. The people regard him with
unlimited fear and dislike. They say he has shown himself
such an agent as has not sat on the bench to torment
humanity, since the days of James's Chief Justice. They
were terribly frightened by the step we took in securing Mr.
Davis's removal from Fortress Monroe to be within control
of the 'Civil'
authorities - thought it the greatest possible blunder -
were certain that Underwood would avail himself of the
opportunity to punish the whole Confederacy through their
representative man, and looked for nothing better than a
transfer of our chief from the quarters at the Fortress
where the custodian was a gentleman and his surroundings
were those of comfort, to the filthy dungeons of the town
jail! The women were in an agony of prayer - the men
more anxious than at any moment since the evacuation of
Richmond.
"But it really seemed as if the deep feeling of the
community had possessed the United States officials. The
desire to be polite and gracious manifested itself in every
one of them. After we were all in the court-room awaiting
the arrival of the judge and the prisoner, General Burton
came in dressed in full uniform and followed by Mr. Davis.
The marshal conducted them to the prisoner's dock,
coming immediately to me to invite me to sit by Mr. Davis,
that he might feel he had a friend with him and lose the
disagreeable consciousness of the presence of constables
and turnkeys. As I pushed my way through the crowd I
thanked the marshal heartily, and sitting down beside the
prisoner felt that I was enthroned with a king.
"In a very few moments, the courtesy was extended by
asking us to remove from the seat of the accused to join
Mr. O'Conor and Mr. Reed within the bar. There I stood
behind Mr. Davis during the whole of the proceedings, and
when it was all over, was the first to congratulate him.
"Observation of this kindness on the part of the officials
had inspired in anxious friends more hope in the Judge -
but there was still such a dread in everybody's eyes when
Underwood was about to speak - such a perfect
stillness in the halls as I shall rarely see again in a
lawyer's life of anxiety in court-rooms. And when the
oracle came - 'The case is undoubtedly bailable, and as
the Government is not ready to proceed with the trial, and
the prisoner is and for a long time has been ready and
demanding trial - it seems eminently proper that bail
should be allowed' - such joy and relief as came upon all
faces---!
"When it was done and 'the prisoner discharged,' Mr.
Davis asked me to convey him as rapidly as possible from
the court to his rooms at the Spotswood, and I did so in
triumph.
"Our carriage was beset with a crowd frantic with
enthusiasm, cheering, calling down God's blessings,
rushing forward to catch him by the hand and weeping
manly tears of devotion to 'our President.' I shall never see
such joy in a crowd again and some of the faces I saw
thro' the tears in my own eyes will remain impressed on
my memory forever.
"Reaching the hotel, he took my arm through the crowd
and up the stairway. The halls were full of friends waiting
to congratulate him, but everybody held back with
instinctive delicacy as he went in to his wife.
"In a moment I followed. Dr. Minnegerode, Miss Jenny
Ritchie and Mr. George Davis were already there, helping
Mrs. Davis to pass the time which we spent in the court-room.
The door was locked and we knelt around a table,
while the rector offered a prayer of thanksgiving; every one
of us weeping irrepressibly, for God had delivered the
captive at last, and with him we were all liberated!
"After a while the doors were opened, and I ran away
from the multitude of men and women who laughed and
cried by turns. And now, the whole town rejoiced.
The animosity of war was put aside, and every house-hold
vied with its neighbor in extending hospitalities to Genl.
Burton and the other U. S. officials who seemed to find
almost as much happiness in the result as we did. They
were breakfasted, dined and toasted, till they fully realized
what Virginian hospitality can be.
"We determined to take the chief as quickly as possible
away from these scenes of explosive excitement, and went
aboard ship that evening, coming to New York by sea to
avoid the multitudes on land. He will go in a few days to
visit his children in Canada. Beyond that his plans are not
made.
"At the New York Hotel he has been beset by
congratulating friends, and had become so nervous and
weakened by continued excitement that last night I took
bodily possession of him, put him into a carriage and drove
him out to Mr. O'Conor's to have a restful sleep in the
country and a day or two of quiet.
"He remonstrated, but in vain. He has been so long
accustomed to submit to his keepers that at last he ceased
to resist and I conveyed him away forcibly.
"Mrs. Davis and Miss Howell went to see Ristori -
her last night in New York. I suppose they will be in town
for a day or two longer, and I shall continue to be in
diligent attendance. But the decree which admitted Mr.
Davis to bail, liberated me also - and from that moment I
was released from all bonds - save one.
"The past is now the past - all is now in the future."
their lives, diverging at this point, never ran in parallel lines
again. When Mrs. Davis, after her widowhood, lost her
gifted daughter Winnie, and was to carry the body almost
in state, for interment in Richmond, she sent for my
husband to accompany her, and leaned upon him like a
son.
Our days in Paris, when we returned to the Hotel
France et Choiseul in the autumn for shopping, were
nearly over.
I have recorded the preceding glimpses of the French
capital in the later days of imperial régime because it has
never been, in outward show, so splendid since the reign
of Napoleon III and his beautiful consort.
The exposition brought into its streets thousands of
visitors and many of the sovereigns of Europe, or their
representatives. The great show itself was (in comparison
with its successors everywhere) rather meagre and
disappointing. Save for the exhibits of France and Austria
there was nothing resplendent to be seen. It was, indeed,
with a long sigh of relief of mind and body that we went
away from the modern Babylon, in June, into beautiful rural
Switzerland.
Except that we made the ascent of the Grand St.
Bernard Pass with a party of English friends, a little too
early in the season to be safe, and were taken in, almost
exhausted, by the Clavendier and monks at the hospice,
there was nothing of moment to record. My cousin, Anne
Cary Morris, came out to join us, also the James Howard
McHenrys, of Baltimore, so that our little group of kinsfolk
made a happy oasis in that summer of beautiful wandering.
In the autumn we received an invitation from Charles
Wykeham Martin, Esq., M.P. to Kent, to make him a visit
at Leeds Castle, near Maidstone, before returning
to America. It was the first time either of us had been in
England, and I had the surprise of hearing my good
mother say to herself, devoutly, as we landed: "Thank God,
I have at last set foot upon the soil of home!" The blood of
her tory ancestors had evidently not been chilled in her
veins by the lapse of a century of republicanism , or,
perhaps, as she could no longer claim Virginia, she would
have naught else but England! She was further made happy
by cordial welcome in one of the loveliest old castles in
England, overflowing with potraits, busts, books, and relics
of her family. My bedroom, a tower chamber once
occupied by the maids of honor of poor Anne Boleyn,
during Henry VIII's ownership of the castle, looking across
the moat into a park where deer were seen grazing or
vanishing amid great tree boles, filled my own measure of
satisfaction. The grandson of our kind old friend is the
present owner of the property. We had the pleasure, upon
our arrival at Leeds Castle, of beholding, set in the oak of
the mantel-piece in the banquet-hall, a replica of our
portrait of Henry, the fourth Lord Fairfax, of the
seventeenth century (the "missing link" they called it in
England, long years since vanished into America), which we
had brought over, the year before, to be cleaned in
London, allowing this copy to be made for Leeds Castle,
another for Colonel Ackroyd, of Yorkshire. The copy of
the graceful young man in armor still keeps its place at
Leeds Castle, but the original, after sundry wanderings in
the New World, has now "brought up" on the wall of my
library in which these lines are penned.
After an inspiring visit to London, we re-embarked at
Southampton in the Western Metropolis, a poor old side-
wheel steamer, put on by the Guion Line to replace the
one in which we had engaged passage. While
crossing recently in a new "monster of the deep," with
every luxury from a lift to a Ritz restaurant and wireless
telegraphy aboard, I thought of our sailing in that wretched
tub on an autumn voyage through stormy seas, when it took
sixteen days to bring us from shore to shore, and for a
week we rolled and plunged over mighty billows, hardly
crediting that she could survive the storm. We ate such
meals as we could at table in a saloon into which opened
the cabins where lay and groaned our ailing fellow-
passengers. Annie Morris and I, soon recovering from
malaise, persisted in playing the part of stormy petrels upon
deck.
All things have an end, and one bright day in early
November saw us landing at New York, and carrying
through the customs a set of very important trunks from
Paris. On the 26th of November I was married to Burton
Harrison in the little church, St. Ann's, built by my uncle,
Gouverneur Morris, to the memory of his mother, my
brother giving me away. We returned to Morrisania for the
reception, where were present a large assemblage of
representatives of New York and Virginian families, with a
contingent of Yale men, and of "Bones men" summoned by
the bridegroom to stand by their loyal brother on his
translation into married life.
To complete the requirements of a family chronicle, (this
chiefly for my granddaughters), I will add that the bride
wore a gown made by "Caroline Boyer, Faubourg St.
Honoré, Paris," of white satin with large pipings of the
same, heading frills of blonde lace; a full tulle veil and a
coronet of orange blossoms; that her bridesmaids
appeared in Paris confections of white tarlatan with many
skirts, bodices of white satin, and wreaths and bouquets of
lilies of the valley; and that the bride's
going-away gown, of marron velvet with a toque made of
a pheasant's breast crowned with a golden rose and
foliage, supported her during the trying ordeal of coming
down the stairs into the old panelled hall, between the
Marie Antoinette mirrors and tapestries of the Reign of
Terror, into a lane of people headed by men joyously
singing old Yale ditties as the carriage drove away!
Broadway, a long, unlovely thoroughfare, was filled with
huddled buildings, monotonous in line and tint. Union and
Madison Squares were still inclosed in high railings
(removed after 1871 and sold at auction), their grass and
trees, as now, a great relief to the eye in passing. Fifth
Avenue, fringed on either side with telegraph poles, was
abominably paved with irregular blocks of stone, so that a
drive to the park, or "away up-town to Fiftieth Street,"
was accompanied by much wear and tear to the physical
and nervous system. The celebrated and delightful Dr.
Fordyce Barker used to say he actually could not
recommend a convalescent patient to take the air, because
of the necessary jolting in a carriage in any direction away
from the residential quarter.
Apart from this discomfort, the noise of continuous
passage of vehicles knowing not rubber tires made open
windows in one's home a purgatorial trial. Certainly, we
modern grumblers in asphalted streets heave no sigh of
regret for that feature of the dear old by-gone says!
Plodding up and down town jogged the lamentable old
omnibuses, filled, as Mr. J. W. Cross once said of them,
"exactly the way we stuff the carts with calves in London."
A sorry spectacle, indeed, was that of well-dressed,
well-bred New Yorkers clinging to straps, jaded,
jammed, jostled, panting in the aisle of these hearse-like
equipages, to reach their goal. An astute traveller from
France, Monsieur Simonet, in an article published at that
time in the Revue des Deux Mondes, guilelessly records
that he was "told in New York" it was the custom of "the
ladies," on getting into a full omnibus in Fifth Avenue, to
seat themselves on the knees of "gentlemen" already
placed! The conditions of horse-cars in the neighboring
avenues showed for many years no improvement upon this
discomfort, and the prices of "hacks" and "coaches,"
procured after much preamble at the livery-stables, were
prohibitive save for the solvent citizen. On New-Year's-
Day, when calls were made by men upon the families of
their friends, it was common for four of the intending
visitors to unite in paying forty dollars for the hire of a
ponderous old hack, of the Irish funeral variety, and go
their rounds clad in evening dress, rumbling over the stony
streets, from mid-day till dinner-time at six o'clock.
In the absence of cabs, hansoms, and the sportive
"taxis" - then as unimaginable as the air-ship in common
use appears to-day - walking was very much in vogue. It
was a general practice of professional men, possessing
offices down town to go afoot in all weathers from their
dwellings to their business haunts and back again. A
lawyer prominent in that day lately said to me: "And
weren't we the better for it, I'd like to know? Who doesn't
remember Clarkson Potter's handsome, erect figure and
springing step, like a boy's in middle-age; and David
Dudley Field who always took his exercise in that way (as
well as on horseback, with a rest before dinner). Wasn't he
a picture of vigor in later life? No dieting and health foods
about those men,
I'll promise you. And what a cheery meeting-place
Broadway was for friends!"
It must be remembered, though, that the residential part
of town was then far south of its present limit. Arrogant old
Isaac Brown, of Grace Church, the portly sexton who
transmitted invitations for the elect, protested to one of his
patronesses that he really could not undertake to "run
society" beyond Fiftieth Street.
Central Park was already beginning to be beautiful in
verdant slopes and flowering shrubs and trees, although
still surrounded, and the way to it disfigured, by hill-sides
from which segments were cut away like slices from a
cheese, upon the summit of which perched the cabins of
Irish squatters left high and dry by the march of municipal
progress. The territory around these dwellings was
populous with curs, urchins, goats, pigs, and mounds of
débris revealing old tin cans and discarded hoop-skirts.
To reach old Morrisania, we generally walked to the
car-sheds on the site of the present Madison Square Garden,
there taking our seats in a train of ordinary day-coaches,
drawn in sections by horses along Fourth Avenue, through
the tunnel at Thirty-fourth Street - then a drear and
malodorous vault! - to the Grand Central Station where
locomotives were attached. The alternative to this method
of reaching Mott Haven was an hour spent in an
ill-ventilated, car of the Third Avenue line, drawn by
shambling, staggering horses, and crammed with an East
Side population bearing babies and market-baskets in
equal numbers. For a brief time the company put upon this
line what they called a "palace car," large, clean, and
comfortable, charging ten cents for a fare. But the great
American public that has always dominated New
York condemned this as an aristocratic luxury, and so it
passed from sight. Later on, when we began to achieve
Harlem by means of the elevated road, I remember going
out one day to my uncle's house for luncheon,
accompanied by our friend Eugene Schuyler, who had
recently made his adventurous journey into Turkestan. On
crossing part of the towering trestle work beyond Central
Park, he declared he felt positively ill with apprehension,
begging me please to return by boat, train,
horse-car - anything - rather than repeat this alarming
experience!
Dinners then, as now, the touch-stone of highest
civilization, were numerous, but the hours set for them
much earlier than now. From six o'clock we moved on to
half-past six, then to ultra-fashionable seven, and lastly to
eight o'clock, where the generality of people are still
content to assemble for the prandial meal. To my mind,
those dinners have never been surpassed in true elegance
and charm, although totally lacking in the sensational
features of decoration, gifts, and cookery developed by
later generations of New Yorkers. By the owners of
certain stately homes possessing chefs and wines of
admitted merit, formal banquets after the foreign fashion
were given in the best style. But well-bred people of less
pretension to great wealth and the custom of elaborate
entertaining were satisfied to bid their friends to meals
served to the last nicety in silver, damask, porcelain, and
glass, by their own customary attendants, and cooked by
their own resident artists after a fashion habitual to them in
the family menu of every day - a practice happily pursued
in many aristocratic homes of Britain and to be seen in
kindly easy Washington, but little familiar in New York
to-day.
What would have been thought in that epoch of New
York of a table stretched to the limit of the dining-room,
with chairs so pushed together as to prevent free
movement with spoon and fork; where forty or more
guests, corralled to eat insidious messes served by caterers
are shepherded by strange waiters on tiptoe thrusting
between them fish, flesh, and fowl, with their attendant
cates and condiments, at quarters so close the alarmed
diner must shrink back in order to avoid contact with the
offered dish!
No, that was hardly the way they served dinners in the
seventies! Rather were friends convened to the number of
ten or twelve around mahoganies of generous size and
space (small enough for talk to fly easily across them), and
host and hostess were near enough to their guests to mark
their own individuality upon the feast. Upon the authority of
the late Mr. Ward McAllister, we are told, that "Blue Seal
Johannisberg flowed like water; incomparable '48 claret,
superb Burgundies and amber-colored Madeira were
there to add to the intoxicating delight" of the best New
York dinner and supper tables. But, as the present
chronicler has never been able to distinguish old wine from
new, she fears in this matter she is in the category of a
certain well-known literary lady of New York, of whom
Mr. Ward McAllister once remarked to me with scathing
emphasis: "SHE write stories of New York society! Why,
I have seen her, myself, buying her Madeira at Park &
Tilford's in a demijohn."
It is not in me to offer regretful comparison of the New
York of my first acquaintance, its people content to dwell
in barns of brick with brown-stone fronts, its chief avenues
as yet untouched by the finger of art in beautiful buildings,
some of its streets yet encumbered with rows of trucks
and wagons kept there
by their owners for want of a place of shelter, ash and
refuse barrels in all their hideous offensiveness standing by
the basement doors of refined citizens, with our later city of
wondrous progress, a gathering-place of the art of the
whole wide world, as well as a sovereign of finance!
But putting aside the physical aspects of the place;
forgetting certain inherited crudities of custom, its vulgar or
lifeless architecture, I have never seen reason to renounce
my belief that the period I write of was illustrated by the
best society New York has known since colonial days. It
is generally admitted by commentators of our social life
to-day that the rock we split upon is the lack of leadership.
As to who are the present real great ladies of New York,
there is in the public mind a nebulous uncertainty only
occasionally dispelled by the dictum of some writer for the
newspapers.
In the earlier period, New York possessed what none
could question: a sovereignty over its body corporate
divided between five or six gentlewomen of such birth,
breeding, and tact that people were always satisfied to be
led by them. Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Mrs. Lewis Morris
Rutherford, Mrs. Belmont, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, and
the two Mrs. Astors were the ladies whose entertainments
claimed most comment, whose fiat none were found to
dispute.
Of these, Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt seemed to me easily
the most beautiful; and in the graciousness of her manner
and that inherent talent for winning and holding the
sympathetic interest of those around her, I have seen none
to surpass her. One asks oneself why such loveliness of
line and tinting, why such sweet courtesy of manner, cannot
be passed down the years instead of dying upon the stem
like a single perfect flower! Why
nature, having formed such a combination, should not be
content with repeating it! This lady was of Southern birth,
and many stories were whispered of her unhappiness
during the war because of the fulminations of the Northern
family into which she had married against her Confederate
kin and sympathies. I remember her, first, in a small,
inconspicuous house, one of a brown-stone row in a street
between Broadway and Fourth Avenue, where her
afternoons at home seemed somehow to convey a waft of
violets, of which blossoms she had many surrounding her;
and the service of her door and tea-table was performed
by neat little maids dressed in lilac print gowns, with muslin
aprons and caps surmounted by bows of ribbon in the
same shade. In the course of time the Roosevelts moved
uptown into a handsome modern house in west Fifty-
seventh Street. There a great ball was given, to which we
went. I believe it was to celebrate the entrance into society
of the eldest daughter, and the story was circulated that
eleven hundred invitations had been sent forth. I find this
mentioned in a letter written to my mother in Baltimore, by
whom I was besought to keep her au courant of everything,
big or little, in my new experience. I have no souvenirs to
contribute concerning the early youth of the future
President, but I fancy he was then enjoying the glorious
indifference of sturdy boyhood to the social happenings of
the hour.
Mrs. Belmont was a woman of charm and distinction, to
whom fortune had allotted means and opportunity to take
the lead in entertainments of the grandiose foreign order, in
a great house, with an illumined picture-gallery and
everything on a corresponding scale. It was said of her
later in life that much sorrow and the tragic death of one of
her sons in that stately mansion
had taken from her all power of enjoying it; a commentary
that might appropriately be made upon the experience of
many others we have seen ride for awhile on the crest of
the social wave, then pass away into shadows.
Mrs. John Jacob Astor was at the time I first came to
New York a noble-looking woman, full of gracious
sweetness and wide humanity. Her parties were a happy
union of the best elements procurable in New York,
surrounded by all that wealth and taste could add to
originality of conception. Her Southern blood revealed
itself in the cordiality and simplicity with which this lady
bore her honors of leadership.
Mrs. Hamilton Fish, a matron of exemplary dignity who
transferred her regnant attitude toward society from New
York to Washington, where her husband was Secretary of
State in Grant's administration, belonged to the Faubourg
St. Germain side of New York, the Second Avenue "set,"
embracing a number of old-school families of colonial
ancestry who had not thought it worth their while to
remove from their broad and spacious residences on the
East Side to emulate the mere fashion of living in Fifth
Avenue.
In this quarter abode also Mrs. Rutherfurd, wife of the
gentle and learned astronomer. Their oldest son,
Stuyvesant Rutherfurd, had reversed his name on inheriting
the Stuyvesant fortune. His first marriage was with Miss
Pierrepont, of Brooklyn, a picturesque beauty much
beloved by her friends. They inherited a large mansion not
far from his father's. No parties seemed more agreeable to
me, more an exponent of the best New York could do in
the way of uniting gentlepeople all of a kind, than Mrs.
Rutherfurd's. That pair presented the unusual combination
of an uncommonly
beautiful woman married to an uncommonly
handsome and distinguished man. Mrs. Rutherfurd was a
law-giver in her circle, and no weak one; she invited whom
she pleased, as she pleased; and an offender against her
exactions came never any more. But she had the prettiest
way in the world of putting people in appropriate place.
It was on the East Side of town that we, "reconstructed"
rebels, first pitched our tent in New York, so long to be
our home, in a building since locally remarked for the
number of "people one knows" who made a beginning
there. This was the apartment house built by Mr.
Rutherfurd Styuvesant, in Eighteenth Street near staid and
well-mannered little Irving Place. Our flat was diminutive in
size like all the rest, and not especially sunny, situated at
the summit of two long flights of stairs, of small account in
those days when Rosalind's complaint to Jupiter rarely
occurred to us. This "apartment," as we took care to call it,
thinking "flat" had a vulgar sound, had been engaged while
yet in lath and plaster, and we climbed workmen's ladders
to survey our future domicile. The suites, it was said, were
mostly taken in this way, by friends or relatives of the
proprietor, the list producing a very old Knickerbocker
sort of effect upon the outside mind.
I am sure no perfectly equipped Fifth Avenue
establishment, fitted up beforehand by the fairies who obey
the wands of millionaires, ever gave to a young couple the
delight we took in our simple quarters. The contrast with
surroundings in the war-worn South made the simple
necessaries of life, disposed with taste and harmony, seem
a fairy tale. I had brought from Paris some understanding
of the decorative value of crétonne in small rooms, and the
French gray of my
little salon, with its draperies and furniture of gray crétonne
relieved by medallions of pale blue enshrining shepherds
and shepherdesses, hearts and darts, pipes and tabors
tangled with knots of ribbon, filled the measure of my
ambition as a housekeeper.
A curious instance of the result of the Commune in Paris
was the drifting to our shores of many of the miscreants
who had worked havoc with the beauty and done to death
the fair fame of that imperial city, under the guise of
patriotism. My recollection of the hard-working, cheery
servants at the Ville au Bois, up early and to bed late,
serving delicious meals and keeping the house in every part
agleam with cleanliness, disposed me to make my first
efforts at securing domestic service among those of their
nationality in New York.
The rather prompt result was the installation of two
women concerning whom close scrutiny failed to arouse
the demon Doubt in our artless minds. The cook, Suzanne,
otherwise Mme. Dubois, wife of a clock-maker with
whom she had emigrated to America, hoping to set up a
shop and dispose of an assortment of his wares, had the
handsome tragic mask of some actress of the Comèdie
Française. She was dark, capable, and silent; respectful in
manner, but with an expression that more than once
suggested to me one of those matrons of the Terror who
sat knitting while royal and aristocratic heads dropped into
the basket beneath the guillotines. From the date of her
arrival things moved smoothly in her domain, and her
excellent cuisine made housekeeping a summer's day.
Florence, her friend and comrade, who went about her
work singing, in the frilled cap and apron of a heroine of
Béranger or Murger, was an extremely pretty girl,
silver-voiced and nearly always smiling.
By and by we began to detect in the long hall leading
from the back stairs to our kitchen stealthy footsteps,
arriving daily just as our dinner was going off. Later on in
the evening more footsteps, and from afar the sound of
muffled voices. It was evident that Suzanne's husband did
not neglect a diurnal visit to his spouse. Poor M. Dubois,
Suzanne explained to us, had been unfortunate in his
venture. Madame, she observed, had several mantels
needing clocks. Would madame allow M. Dubois the
privilege of decorating them with a few choice specimens
of his unsold time-pieces for which he had no place?
Madame, rashly acquiescing, on returning home one
afternoon found every room in the flat adorned with a
costly clock, all ticking and chiming together with
distracting regularity; and that evening the number of
visitors to the kitchen increased perceptibly, the household
bills making a corresponding jump upward in the week.
Soon, Suzanne and her bosom friend Florence had a hot
quarrel, which raged until Florence, bouncing into the
drawing-room, informed madame that the Duboises,
having been in the front rank of the horrible "vengeurs de la
République" in the Commune, had fled to America through
fear of the guillotine; and that our daily caller was none
other than the infamous wretch who boasted that his shot
had killed the good and gentle archbishop of Paris,
Darboy, in the massacre of the hostages at the prison of La
Roquette!
Next day Suzanne took her leave, polite to the end, but
with a vengeful gleam in her cold eye that boded ill for the
informing Florence. The clocks vanished from our mantels,
M. Dubois came not again, and I breathed a sigh of relief
that I had escaped so easily from the
hands of the handsome pétroleuse. Next, pretty Florence
also took her leave, declaring that she needed
"protection," being forced to give up service through fear of
the Duboises, and departed bag and baggage in company
with a "Monsieur," who called for her in a cab. After that
we made no more experiments in foreign domestics,
contenting ourselves with unadulterated Irish.
We now found ourselves in a circle of acquaintances,
alien in political creed, with a few exceptions among the
Southerners already established in New York, but most
kind and considerate always, and every year the number
grew and firmer friendships were cemented.
I cannot pretend to be chronologically exact as to the
social events of those years or their sequences. We went
out a great deal, as appears from the series of letters
addressed to my mother, my most constant correspondent.
There is the record of a ball at the Academy of Music of
which Lord Dufferin was the bright particular star among
the guests, with Sir Tatton and Lady Sykes and some other
smart English folk in the party. Mrs. Edward Cooper, of
Lexington Avenue, who entertained much and well, had
asked us to be of this gathering, occupying two boxes, and
to sup at a large table served for her. Lord Dufferin, with
his delightful Irish gayety, resembled a school-boy "out for
fun." I had been dancing with him, and was sitting
afterward enjoying his sparkling wit, when the movement to
supper was inaugurated. At once he arose and gallantly
offered me his arm, when I stopped him with a sepulchral
whisper: "Oh, thank you, but I can't! You are expected to
take in Mrs. Cooper, don't you see?" Lord Dufferin did
see, and with quick tact rectified his blunder, while kind
Mr. Cooper, who I felt mortally sure had never meant to
ask me, but had been looking
forward to conducting the jolly, handsome Lady Sykes,
stepped promptly up and led me off. He had Lady Sykes
on his other hand, however, while I had no more of
adorable Lord Dufferin until we were breaking up, when he
came back again with a rattling fire of chaff. I have rarely
met so agreeable a companion, and the story of the closing
in of his honored life amid troubles and distress of mind,
brought upon him by those whom he had trusted in
business overmuch, was a source of real regret.
To the Academy of Music we repaired for public balls
and operas. Till late at night on those occasions quiet,
sleepy Irving Place would resound with the roll of
fashionable carriages and the hoarse call, by the doormen,
of fashionable names or their equivalent numbers. And oh!
the song-birds caged for our delectation in that dear old
Temple of Music! There Patti, Nilsson, Gerster, Pauline
Lucca, Annie Louise Cary, Kellogg, Minnie Hauk, Parepa-
Rosa, Brignoli, Capoul, Campanini, Del Puente, and a host
of others, sang our hearts out of our bodies many a time.
Once when Campanini had caught sight of the great Salvini
sitting in a box near the stage while he was taking the part
of Don José in "Carmen," he rose to the occasion in quite
an extraordinary way, acting and singing superbly. After he
was disposed of by the toreador's dagger and came back
to life before the foot-lights in the usual way, we all saw
that he was pallid with real emotion. The house sprang
upon its feet, handkerchiefs waved, roar after roar of
applause went up; but Campanini's eyes sought those of
Salvini only. The tragedian, leaning forward, clapped his
hands until he could do no more. It was an event in musical
recollection. Years later I was invited to a spring meeting
of an amateur club in
a fashionable New York house, where Campanini, then in
his decline of power and popularity, was engaged to
alternate with the club's peformances. He sang several
times beautifully, but with a failing voice, and there was but
lukewarm applause, after the noisy plaudits bestowed by
their friends upon the amateurs. I saw him standing back,
alone, waiting his next turn, and, unable to resist the
impulse of sympathy with this artistic giant in bonds, I went
over and said a few words, incidentally recalling the
occasion above described, when he acted and sang a
whole opera for Salvini. Instantly Campanini's face flushed,
his eyes kindled, and he broke into warm, excited eulogy
of the great tragedian of his native country. The impression
left upon me by these two scenes in an artist's life was
ineffaceable.
Our matinées and concerts were held at stated intervals
in Steinway Hall before large and fashionable audiences. I
sat among the sopranos beside Mrs. George Strong, and
there was great excitement when Dr. Pech found it
necessary to raise our seats above the instrumentalists. We
all declared we felt like blondes in a transformation scene,
but that was soon forgotten in dealing with the "Twelfth
Mass" of Mozart, followed by the first act of Weber's
"Oberon," with fine professional soloists. We soon realized
the additional breadth of sound gained by our elevated
position.
All of us felt it an honor to sing in Steinway Hall, every
beam and rafter of which was embalmed in memories of
the music that had been heard there. It was the very home
and shrine of the glorious art. There I heard successively on
the piano Thalberg, Rubinstein, Joseffy, Essipoff, Mehlig,
Adèle Aus der Ohe, Arabella Goddard, Madeline Schiller,
and thrilled response to the magic bows of Vieuxtemps,
Wieniawski, Wilhelmj, Sarasate, Carl Rosa, Camilla Urso,
and Ole Bull on the violin. There I listened to the
performances in concert of Patti, Albani, Marie Rose,
Parepa-Rosa, Gazzaniga, Materna, Lilli Lehmann,
Nordica, and a host of other sweet singing birds of exalted
fame. There, too, sang Campanini, Wachtel, Santley, and
Maurel, big Formès and graceful Joseph Jamet, who as a
poseur in Mephistopheles I never saw surpassed. And
there, wielding the batons that sent afloat the waves of all
this heavenly melody, we had Thomas, Leopold
Damrosch, Seidl, Max Maretzek and other great leaders of
their day.
The last number of our first public concert was a hymn
in the Jubel overture: "Rise, crowned with light, Imperial
Salem rise," glorious words wedded to the air of the
Russian National Anthem, and the great volume of it most
inspiring! I have often felt, since the Church Musical
Association expired, what a good use it was to which to
put amateurs in society, as well as a delightful training in
that noble form of music. For two years we studied and
sang over a wide field of ancient and modern church music,
none of us flagging in zeal or interest.
I had begun lessons with dear old Ronconi, with his
pretty adoptive daughter to play the accompaniments, and
in the spring sang in a chorus at his concert given
at the Jerome Theatre, corner of 26th Street and Madison
Avenue. The next season I sang with Ronconi the duo from
"Elisire d'Amore," at a charity concert in the hall of the new
Young Men's Christian Association building. Ronconi, it
will be remembered, had been one of the greatest dramatic
singers of his day, and as an actor it was said of him by a
writer in the Saturday Review: "Ronconi was simply an
incomparable master of all the secrets and all the resources
of his art; by instinct, by temperament, by natural genius
and patient study, a consummate master and one who
neither on the lyric or any other stage, has left any
successor to eclipse his memory among those who can
recall his performances in 'Lucrezia Borgia,' in the 'Due
Foscari,' in 'Maria de Rohan,' and the 'Flauto Magico,' and
in the 'Barbière.' Versatile as Garrick, terrible and pathetic
as Kean, romantic and audacious as the great Frederick,
farcical as Liston, he touched all chords and played on all
strings with a hand that never forgot its cunning, and knew
how to shake his audiences with pity, terror, laughter at his
will. Never was an actor more richly endowed with such
magnetic power of holding an audience in his grasp, of
making them feel his presence on the stage. Ronconi's
voice, despite all this, was rather harsh and unsympathetic."
Although warned to expect it, I was hardly prepared for
his introduction of impromptu spoken words and phrases,
for his pacing about the narrow stage and eliciting bursts of
laughter from the audience, by droll faces and posturings I
was too much alarmed to see during the progress of our
performance. I really think the old fellow totally forgot the
existence of his soprano, who, on her part, was only
thankful she had been able to get to the final note without a
break. When we had finished
and my maestro gave me his hand for a final bow to the
public, I ventured a glance at his overpoweringly funny old
face and no longer wondered at the hilarity of our hearers.
The rest of the programme I do not recall, save that the
committee had been lucky enough to secure as star
performer Madame Anna Mehlig, the great German
pianiste. An incident of that evening was a loud, portentous
cracking, as if of lath and plaster, occurring during the
entr'acte. Mr. Chauncey Depew, one of the managers,
was, in a moment, upon the stage facing the excited
audience, explaining that the sound meant nothing but the
expansion and contraction of new wood in the building;
one of those ready and graceful little speeches of his that in
this case obviated a panic. As he concluded with a good
story, everybody laughed and settled down into peace and
good-humor for the remainder of the concert.
In the spring I undertook to give a musicale to about
thirty or forty guests, and find recorded my fears as to how
"all these grand musicians are to be accommodated in my
bird's nest"; for my performers were no less than Ronconi,
Miss Adelaide Phillips, the famous contralto; Mrs.
Gulager, Mr. Koppell, tenor, Mr. von Inten, pianist, and
Mr. Werner, 'Court-violoncellist to the King of Paraguay.'
"All the rest might be fitted in, but I dread the big fiddle
from the Court of Paraguay!"
Everything went well, and my fears were soon allayed.
The affair gave pleasure to a very critical, if small audience,
and the dear people who had performed for me for love,
remained afterward for a high tea with substantial dishes, at
which we waited on ourselves and had royal fun. I find a
full description of this ambitious venture detailing both
musical and culinary
programme, to which was added this significant
paragraph:
"The baby, fortunately, was invited out for the
afternoon."
We had a musical club, meeting at the home, in Madison
Square, of Mr. and Mrs. S. L. M. Barlow, where we did
earnest work. Miss Elsie Barlow was, of course, the
leading spirit of the affair; Miss Eloise Breese was a
member, and others whose names I fail to recall. The
atmosphere of that wide, beautiful house, with the high-
bred mother and daughter to inspire it, was in the best
sense an artistic one. This set of girls was said to have
inspired Laurence Oliphant's "Irene McGillicuddy," but I
do not vouch for the truth of the story.
Mrs. Ronalds, who to-day has all musical and
fashionable London thronging the rooms and stairways of
her little house in Sloane Street, eager to hear the artists
she assembles, was then in the zenith of her remarkable
beauty, singing adorably in private and on the concert stage
for charity. At an entertainment given at the little theatre
built by Mr. Jerome, she won golden opinions as a prima
donna of high society.
Mr. Edmund Schermerhorn, of West Twenty-Third
Street, used to give musical afternoons where one was
sure of hearing only the best talent, professional and
amateur. There, also, were enjoyed charming duos from
his nieces, Misses Schermerhorn, whose refined style and
technique reflected credit upon their instructor, Madame
Bodstein, much in vogue among the old families of New
York.
I find a letter in which is recorded that Mrs. Rutherfurd
called for me to go to a concert by Mrs. Gulager, where
the applause was tremendous and the
flowers so numerous they required a separate carriage to
convey them home. This lady had a deserved reputation as
a coloratura singer, both in society and on the concert
stage, and her voice was most beautiful and flexible.
Mr. Roosevelt, who lived on Broadway near Grace
Church, an uncle of the future President and father of Mr.
Hilborne Roosevelt, afterward the maker of fine organs,
was, like Mr. Edmund Schermerhorn, a musical virtuoso of
a high order of merit. When we went to his parties we
found him confined to a rolling chair, indeed, but very much
alert in directing and controlling his performers and
audiences. Woe betide the fashionable chatterer who
dared venture a word out of season while music was going
on. As a consequence, there were delightful instrumental
treats of which no note was suffered to escape unheeded,
and many soloists, vocal and instrumental. Our host won
my heart by asking me for "Vedrai Carino" and "Dove
Sono," by Mozart, in which Archaimbaud and Ronconi had
both drilled me carefully, and which I felt I could at least
sing correctly.
While all the world was going daft over the exquisite
singing and virginal loveliness of Christine Nilsson, no less
than the ineffably gallant and delicate acting of Victor
Capoul in his various rôles as her lover, my teacher, old
Ronconi, invited me to see a rehearsal of Italian opera at
the Academy. We had the big dusky auditorium pretty
much to ourselves, with a few others, to see the caste of
the following day's performance of "Somnambula" go
through their paces in walking dress, with overcoats, hats,
sticks, etc. Amina (was she Gerster? I am not sure,) in
furs, with her jacket tightly buttoned, tripped over the
bridge with reluctant
footsteps, and everybody sang à demi-voix. Rather
disillusionizing, certainly, but not so much so as my talk
with the elegant M. Capoul, who was presented to me
when he came strolling around into the house. In the
course of it, I spoke of the diva, Nilsson, her perfect
voice, her fine art, and great personal beauty.
"The only trouble with Mlle. Nilsson," responded her
ardent swain, with a malicious twinkle in his eye, "c'est
qu'elle a les mains d'un crapaud" (the hands of a frog).
"Oh! Oh!" I protested, in veritable distress. "Faust to
say this of his Marguerite!" And Faust laughed with a glee
borrowed from Mephistopheles.
Nilsson was at the time a great favorite in society. She
had head-quarters at the Clarendon Hotel, where in her
free moments she was surrounded by an adoring clique of
young matrons and maidens who found her frank cordiality
and good-fellowship a great attraction. When one has lived
long enough to see the completion or shaping out of a
career, it is interesting to note its extremes. For many years
I failed to see this lady, until once at Monte Carlo, strolling
through the salle-de-jeu (which I have always found the
most oppressive and least interesting place where idle
Americans go to look on, in Europe!), the Countess de
Miranda was pointed out to me sitting at one of the tables,
absorbed in her game. A thin black veil was tightly drawn
over her face, which bore but faint resemblance to that of
the radiant "Queen of the Night" at the Châtelet in Paris, to
the enchanting Marguerite of the spinning-wheel, to the
impersonator of a dozen rôles in which the great singer
appeared to ride as in a fairy chariot over the hearts of
vast, tumultuous audiences!
Other social favorites were the two distinguished
young American prime donne, Miss Clara Louise Kellogg
and Miss Adelaide Phillips. A Kellogg and Brignoli night at
the Academy was sure to bring throngs of enthusiasts.
Though Brignoli's voice was mellow and tuneful, the
famous tenor possessed an ungraceful, bulky frame, and
his progress across the stage ill accorded with the lover's
rôles in which he had always to appear. One wonders if
the obese, middle-aged men who are so often called upon
to sustain these parts embodying a mimicry of passion that
only youth makes tolerable, do not come, in time, to hate
the fair ladies before whom they must be forever posturing
and grimacing with hand on heart!
Miss Phillips was a delightful, whole-souled woman,
famed for her Azucena, the gypsy mother in "Trovatore," a
notably fine production. Madame Etelka Gerster was for a
time a supreme favorite at the Academy. As Amina in
"Somnambula," Lucia, and several similar parts she was
incomparable. Pauline Lucca also held us in thrall with her
rather mignonne beauty and exquisite rich soprano voice.
The Philharmonic Society's concerts, and their final
rehearsals held on the day previous, were occasions when
the big old theatre was packed to its utmost capacity. At
the rehearsals, women and girls crowded in till the lobbies
were unpleasantly congested with eager and palpitant
femininity. In spring and summer all the world resorted to
the open-air concerts of the wizard, Theodore Thomas, at
the Central Park. His orchestra, like its leader, was in the
first rank of musical excellence. In the stroll during the
entr'actes, the fashionable world met and discussed the
programme and each other. No old-time New Yorker of
musical sympathy, but will answer to the rappel of the
charming Mendelssohn
Glee Club. The first concert I attended given by this
distinguished amateur association of male voices, was in a
small room or hall on Broadway somewhere near Grace
Church, when Mrs. Arthur, wife of the future President,
sang the soprano soli for their chorus. Mr. Mosenthal
conducted with the vigor and knowledge that kept this
organization upon a high plane of excellence for many
years. I think it might have been twenty years later, after I
had been hearing them off and on during that time, that I
was present at one of their concerts, to outward
appearance much the same, save that the leader had lost
the slenderness of youth and the hall was some grand
up-to-date interior.
One can't fail to experience a sense of regret that the
great, swelling wave of noble professional music from the
foremost artists of the world has long ago swept away
every trace of amateur attempt to appear before a critical
audience of New York society. With the present
abundance and accessibility of operas and concerts, large
and small, there is literally no room for music of the second
grade, whereby amateurs earnest in pursuit of the divine art
lose an immense deal of wholesome and uplifting pleasure.
I remember so well years later when the "music of the
future" first possessed the stage of the Metropolitan Opera
House. We were dining in Lenox, at the house of Mr.
William Whitney, in company with Mr. George Haven,
when the conversation turned upon the prospects for opera
in the forthcoming season, both Mr. Whitney and Mr.
Haven being directors of the opera. Mr. Haven told us
they had, with much uncertainty as to the success of the
venture, engaged a German company, and were going to
give Wagner's operas. With the most comical face, he
confessed that he knew nothing
whatever about Wagner, and doubted if Whitney did, or
"any of the rest of our fellows." But they were going to
make the venture all the same, and "let Damrosch have his
way."
The first season was rather uphill work in educating the
New York public. The owners of the boxes who felt they
had a mission to accomplish, and the large German
population in the galleries, did their best, but many of the
evenings were manifestly "slow." People protested against
the long spaces of uninteresting dialogue in which Wagner
explained his plots. They declared he had no sense of
humor to help him in lightening the burden of his magnificent
metaphysics. Finally, it came to pass that in the two rows of
boxes containing devoted stockholders and their guests, the
spectacle was seen of many cold shoulders turned upon the
stage, while conversation went on merrily until the music-
lovers in the audience hissed it down. I sent a little joke to
Life which, as they considered it to embody two dollars'
worth of fun, I will repeat. " Friend of the family (visiting
Mrs. Bullion in her parterre-box at the Metropolitan Opera,
during a performance of the 'Flying Dutchman'): 'What is
that strange noise in the cloakroom back of the box?' Mrs.
Bullion: 'Oh! don't mind. It's only the girls playing bean-bags
with their callers. They're young, poor things, and must have
something to pass away the time.'"
One evening when a parterre-box was sent to me, I
invited to accompany us the American Minister to Greece -
Mr. Walker Fearn - and his wife, and Mr. and Mrs.
Frederick Whitridge, the latter a daughter of Matthew
Arnold. We had "Tristan and Isolde" with Lilli Lehmann,
Vogl, and Fischer, Seidl conducting gloriously, a perfect
banquet of high art. I asked Mrs.
Whitridge about her father's beautiful poem, "Tristan and
Iseult," whether this performance in illustration of the theme
would not arouse his enthusiasm.
"Not at all," said she. "He never enjoyed the music of
the Wagner operas, but would go to them in Berlin for the
sake of the stories, which he adored."
A few days after the above entry in my diary of the time,
we went to hear Lehmann and Vogl in the
"Gotterdämmerung." The act in the wood where Siegfried
was murdered was superb; the Death March and on to the
end thrilled the marrow of one's bones, giving a feeling of
intense nervous sympathy. Surely there is no grander music
than parts of that score, and Seidl rides through it like a
conquering hero. People listened as if in a thrilling dream.
Whereby it will be perceived that the musical education of
at least a portion of the New York public had rapidly
advanced.
One of the most picturesque and vivid of our visitors
from over-sea was Laurence Oliphant, whom I met several
times during his visits to New York, always coming away
from a talk with him with a sense of mental refreshment and
the influence of a truly original personality.
The many kind words spoken of my husband by his
brothers at the bar and in the public prints of the day,
complimenting him upon this service to the public, were
most gratifying to us both. A year later he left me alone
with my small son to go as one of the commissioners of a
company formed to follow up President Grant's
project to annex and develop the island of Santo Domingo,
rejected by the Senate in 1870. The three envoys were
Burton Harrison, Captain Samuel B. Samuels, and T. Scott
Stewart, all of New York; sailing over wintry seas on the
little steamer Tybee, a craft suspiciously uncertain in
seaworthiness, and arriving at Santo Domingo after a
stormy passage, to begin negotiations with President
Bonaventura Baez of the Dominican republic for a
commercial concession to their association styled the
Samana Bay Company. The story of their adventures and
reception by the suave if off-colored president, and the
speedy promise of his agreement to their terms, made a
picturesque chapter, and the commissioners returned to
New York bearing their sheaves in triumph. The
subsequent winter, that of 1873, was spent by Burton
Harrison in London, where the commissioners dragged
through long hours in the city, placing securities of the
company whose banner seemed to be flying high; but in
1874, President Baez was deposed by one of the customary
revolutions and the company fell to earth with him. Naught
remained with us in result of our commissioners' efforts
save a box of wondrous sweetmeats, guava and limes
wedding their luscious flavors, sent me with the
compliments of the late president of the Dominican
republic, and a case of wine presented by him to my
husband, of which one or two bottles remain unopened in
the family to this day as a souvenir of the affair.
It was during this absence in London that Mr. Harrison
received tidings at Christmas of the birth of his second
child, the news arriving by Atlantic cable - then also in
infancy - in these terms: "Boy. Bothwell," the two last
words telescoped by the operator to the bewilderment of
the recipient, who for some hours believed
himself the proprietor of a son endowed with the title of
Scott's ferocious hero of song and story. This pseudonym
went with the future congressman into school life, was
signed to his prize essays at college, and continued to
serve as a friendly alias whenever needed!
The possession of a strenuous young family compelling a
remove from the apartment, we found a cheery, sunshine-
haunted house at the corner of Lexington Avenue, a block
beyond Gramercy Park, where we lived for many years.
Within the high iron railings of Gramercy Park the children
of that neighborhood, whose parents held keys to the
square, were taken for their first airing, and grew up to
vigorous boyhood. Many among them, now fathers of
families of their own, look back with kindly affection upon
the sports, tussles, and interchange of pledges of good-
fellowship around the fountain and in the green arcades of
that dear old enclosure.
One of my first callers in the new house was the
venerable Mr. Samuel B. Ruggles, of Union Square, who
told me that as a boy he used to roam over all the land in
our neighborhood (the old Gramercy farm), and had often
picked watercresses in a beautiful little silvery stream that
flowed directly through our then cellar! Mr. Ruggles, a
genial and accomplished gentleman, was also a far-seeing
and public-spirited citizen. He it was who laid out and set
aside Gramercy Park to be the perpetual possession of
property-owners surrounding it, in order to tempt the
erection of the handsome and substantial homes
subsequently built there. Facing the square or near it, in our
time, were the homes of Mr. James W. Gerard, Mr. Cyrus
Field, Mr. David Dudley Field, Mr. John Bigelow, Mr.
George Templeton Strong, Mr. William G. Hamilton, Mr.
Cortlandt
Palmer, Mr. Peter Cooper and his son-in-law, Mr. Abram
Hewitt; Mr. Edward Cooper, Mlle. de Janon, and Mr.
Samuel J. Tilden. When, in due time, a third son was
added to our number, his eyes opened upon the glare of
torches lighting up the entire neighborhood its house fronts,
and rooms, as well as the trees in Gramercy Park, borne in
the hands of a mighty procession of citizens on their march
to congratulate Mr. Tilden upon his election to be
President of the United States.
This fond belief of the Democrats, among whom my
husband had been one of the ardent and prominent
workers in Mr. Tilden's behalf, died out with the smoke of
the torches, and bitter disappointment with an undying
conviction of their hero's real success, remained to rankle
in the unsuccessful party's breast.
We often saw Mr. Tilden, who with the gentlemen
enumerated above and their families, were our kindly
neighbors. Mr. Peter Cooper, a well-beloved and honored
figure in our midst, who had for old and young, gentle and
simple, the same benignant smile and greeting, lived at the
opposite corner from us. A commentary upon the
universality of his charity was the naif remark of one of our
children to a tramp hovering around our door-step. "Don't
come here, man. My father will scare you off! Go over to
Mr. Cooper's house. They all get something there!"
Perhaps the secret chronicle of Mr. Harrison's givings,
especially to the unending train of so-called Southern
survivors of the Lost Cause that promenaded through his
office, might have told a different tale! The number of needy
"veterans of the Southern service," who induced my
husband and my brother to pay their way back to Dixie,
reappearing directly after, in the thoroughfares of New
York, was a formidable one. The
argument of their victims offered in shame-faced excuse
for having been so often taken in, was that it were better
far to be mulcted now and then, than to let one
fellow-countryman who needed a helping hand, go out
unheeded into the chill environment of a great city's streets.
In the summer of 1875, Burton Harrison was secretary
and counsel of the first Rapid Transit Commission of the
city of New York, appointed under the so-called Husted
Act to consider the necessity of a system of rapid transit
for New York, and if they could find such necessity to
exist, to fix upon proper routes. Under the decision of this
commission, of which Joseph Seligman was chairman, the
elevated railways on Ninth, Sixth, Third, and Second
Avenues were constructed and were for many years the
main arteries of the town.
Mr. Harrison was also counsel for the Western Union
Telegraph Company and the New York Telephone
Company for many years, and was frequently heard in the
Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United
States. He was one of the earliest members of the New
York Bar Association and a member of several leading
clubs. Thus, from the first, our lives were cast in busy but
pleasant places, amid the hum and stir of current events in
the great city of our adoption, even before I took up the
professional ink-splashing which has filled so large a
portion of my life.
The first venture of the kind I embarked upon in New
York was at the instance of the Rev. Dr. Francis Vinton,
of Trinity Church, who suggested to me the advisability of
writing out a few stories of foreign experience that had
amused him in recital. These he placed, signed by initials
only, in one of the popular magazines.
It was later on, at the time of the Centennial Exhibition
in Philadelphia, where "all the world was furbishing up
ancestors and setting them on end, in company with
Colonial teapots, queue-ties, rusty muskets, snuffboxes
and paduasoys," that it occurred to me to "open the strong-
box of antiquity and abstract from there a charming little
figure, who, like the 'Bride of the Mistletoe Bough,' had
lain mouldering many a long year."
The quaint little personage proved interesting to the
public because of her intimate friendship with General
Washington and the innocent wit of her childish chronicle.
The appearance of "A Little Centennial Lady," in
Scribner's Magazine, and the kind treatment it received
from the critics, including the never-too-flattering Nation,
emboldened me to go on. "Golden Rod," reflecting our
own experience in a summer journey to Bar Harbor with
our children, was next published anonymously in Harper's
Weekly, and afterward in a little volume of the Half-Hour
Series. From that time to the present I have been writing
for my pleasure and to meet engagements made with
editors.
I am afraid my promptitude in meeting literary
engagements indicates the absence of the ear-marks of
genius from an author. But certainly, the years spent in
writing novels and tales published in Europe and America,
plays, historical studies, and essays, special editorial
articles by request on topics of the hour, etc., have given
me much happiness and made for me friends both in my
own country and abroad, where my work has often
appeared in translations.
The first sorrow that came to our cheerful home in
Lexington Avenue was the death of my mother while on a
visit to us in the autumn of 1875.
In a memorial pamphlet written at the time for private
distribution, I poured the full flow of my appreciation of her
almost perfect character. If she had faults, we knew them
not. For high heroism and pure unselfishness, for exquisite
sympathy with humanity and eager intellectuality combined,
I have never known her equal; and for her children there
were many long sad months before life seemed the same
after she was snatched from them by sudden illness.
I spent a good part of the winter following in service as a
visitor at Bellevue Hospital. What an extraordinary change
it was to be almost daily seeing the reverse side of the
tapestry of the rich and prosperous New York I had
known hitherto. The trained-nurse system, which Bellevue
afterward made famous, had not then been put into active
operation. The visiting ladies, under Mrs. Osborne's
direction, had each a ward where they examined and
reported to authority the conditions surrounding the
patients.
A sharp contrast was presented between my attendance
upon these waifs of the streets of a great cosmopolitan city,
and the soldiers we had worked for in the South. A little
story I wrote - which was translated afterward into other
languages - grew out of a true incident of my Bellevue
visiting. It was about an old French musician who played in
Pasdeloup's orchestra in Paris, and was noticed by the
great violinist Joachim, for commendation. When he
returned home after this supreme event, he found his only
child, his daughter Gabrielle, fled in dishonor from his
home. Following her to the New World, he saw and was
repudiated by her from her carriage standing in the street.
For a time he played as a member of the Philharmonic
orchestra in New York, then, falling ill, lost his power over
his bow, and drifted downward until he became a ward
helper at Bellevue. There, one day, when asked to "lend a
hand" in carrying out a dead body from one of the wards, a
gust of wind blew the cloth from off her face, revealing that
of his lost and beloved Gabrielle!
I, also, like so many preceding and succeeding women
in New York, served my apprenticeship as a manager of
the Nursery and Child's Hospital Board, of which Mrs.
Algernon Sydney Sullivan, a Virginian of executive ability
and tact, was, and still is, the chairman. In company with
Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, I went on tours of inspection of
the institution and performed the other duties assigned to
us. I mention these things to show acquaintance in detail
with the practical working of some of the great charities of
New York, which also gave me a correct idea of the
mission fulfilled by many deemed worldlings by those who
read of them only in newspapers as partakers of
fashionable functions. There has been so much in the
external aspect of modern New York society to tempt the
novelist to wing light shafts of satire, I sometimes fear I
have erred in this particular when it would have been as
easy to call attention to the substantial acts of goodness
and large beneficence which have never failed in response
to demands from worthy objects.
In the spring of 1876 was organized at our home, by a
number of women both patriotic and energetic, the Mount
Vernon Aid Society, to assist in securing funds for much-
needed repairs at Mount Vernon. Our board of managers
soon possessed a list of influential names, and the advisory
board fairly bristled with amiable dignitaries, including
Governors Tilden, Morgan, and Dix, Mr. William Cullen
Bryant, Mr. Schuyler, President
F. A. P. Barnard, of Columbia, Mr. Ruggles, Mr.
Whitelaw Reid, Mr. Charles A. Dana, Mr. George William
Curtis, Mr. Joseph H. Choate, and Mr. S. L. M. Barlow.
This array of leaders, each and all of whom swore
knightly oaths of fealty to the ladies who enlisted them, it
was tacitly agreed among the managers were not to be
called upon to appear otherwise than on paper, unless in
extraordinary emergency, and we would do the rest.
In the first year was given by amateurs at the Union
League Theatre an entertainment called the "Frog Opera,"
the initial performance attended by the Empress of Brazil
and her suite, then stopping modestly at the Fifth Avenue
Hotel. To my husband's lot fell the duty of escorting her
Majesty, and sitting in attendance upon her all the evening,
agreeably engaged in a conversation in insufficient French.
While putting her Majesty into the carriage after the
performance, a gust of wind caught the good lady's knitted
head-covering and blew it along Twenty-sixth Street, my
husband in hot pursuit for a much longer period than he
quite approved of!
We were invited, in recognition of these courtesies, to a
special audience with their Majesties, finding them a very
kindly and simple-minded pair. The frogs, croaking
successfully in their green doublets for three evenings,
amassed a thousand dollars to send to Mount Vernon. The
next year our society soared higher, taking the Academy
of Music and massing one hundred amateurs upon the
stage in "The Mistletoe Bough." From this performance for
two nights, we sent away four thousand dollars toward the
endowment fund at Mount Vernon. In the third year of our
existence we
gave "The Sleeping Beauty," a magnificent production of
the old fairy tale in pantomime, put into acting shape by me
in collaboration with Miss Ward, who took the leading part
of the Princess. This was staged by Mr. Leon John
Vincent, to the music of "Midsummer Night's Dream." It is
always what cannot be told of great amateur
entertainments that is most interesting, and we were not
devoid of some of the usual spicy experiences between
members of the corps dramatique and committees, and the
mothers of gnomes and elves, each of whom demanded for
her offspring the most conspicuous place in fairy-land. But
as a whole we came through it in peace and good-will with
each other, very proud of the substantial checks we
forwarded to Mount Vernon.
Sometimes our zeal in contributing to popular funds
overstepped itself, as in the case of "The Crescent and the
Cross," when the proceeds of a ball given by this
organization were designed to be despatched in equal
portions to Russian and Turkish sufferers from war.
Preliminary meetings of the society were held under what
the newspapers called "the highest auspices," i. e., in
mansions of Fifth Avenue never opened save to the elect of
the fashionable world. It must be owned that some of these
occasions witnessed stormy and irrelevant episodes, as
when our chairwoman was arraigned by the head of one of
her committees for saying that before the latter lady's
marriage to her solvent husband she had been poor and
unknown, dressing very shabbily. The protesting dame
wished to take this opportunity to say that everybody
knew her ancestry, whereas that of her critic was
uncertain, adding, to prove that Worth had equipped her in
her unmarried state, she was prepared to show the
receipted bills of the great faiseur. Tears bedewed the close
of the meeting, but peace was
finally restored. Unfortunately, the funds accruing from this
enterprise were destined to benefit neither cross nor
crescent, since the agent trusted with their distribution is
said to have failed to materialize before either army; but for
the truth of this I cannot vouch.
I entered into the movement for decorative household art
handed on to us by the Centennial Exhibition in
Philadelphia. The early days of that cult in New York were
fostered by the Society of Decorative Art, embracing a
number of women distinguished for refined taste and liberal
opportunity for culture and observation. Mrs. Candace
Wheeler, later the originator and presiding spirit of the
Society of Associated Artists, lent her taste and executive
ability to the beginnings of the Decorative Art Society. Mrs.
Custer, the young widow of the heroic General Custer of
the United States army, took, also, an active interest in its
councils, and the association soon became a power in New
York as well in directing household art as in providing for
the sale of the work of gentlewomen that could not find its
way into the general market. My contribution during the
first year was a series of articles written for the Art
Interchange, beginning as an organ for the society, later
becoming a skilfully conducted art journal. These articles
were collected and published by the Messrs. Charles
Scribner's Sons, with additional text and many beautiful
illustrations by leading artists, in a volume called "Woman's
Handiwork in Modern Homes." The extent of my
knowledge acquired by diligent study and seeing all the
rare specimens of embroidery, needle-work, porcelain,
and furnishings brought from abroad by private collectors
as well as the best-known New York dealers, is to me
now a matter of awesome surprise! I am certain I could not
at the
present date stand an examination on the contents of that
book.
The wave swept on and over us, and under its impetus
we had meetings at different houses to study stitches and
fabrics; we committed to unoffending burlap and coarse
crash marvels of crewel-work, to be ultimately consigned to
the depths of cedar chests or given away to servants
contemplating matrimony. I had, at my house, a class in
china-painting taught by Mr. John Bennett, an English artist
famed for a beautiful style of decorated faïence. We filled
our homes with the evil odors of the pigments used, and
with specimen plaques, which somehow did not in the least
resemble Bennett's, remaining to deck our highest shelves
and haunt our futures with remorseful penitence.
Our annual delight was the journey to Lenox, where we
early contracted the habit of going in summer-time, and
settling down there for three months, first in a tiny cottage
on the village street, and later in a pleasant and more
conventional home. Dr. Holmes once told me we had
chosen wisely to give our children such surroundings in
their earliest youth, as Lenox, and afterward Bar Harbor.
He said: "It is impossible that such beauty of landscape
should not leave its color on young lives." He then talked
affectionately of the days of his own youth in Berkshire,
when he helped his father to plant trees around their home
at Pittsfield, his father holding up the tree in the hole
prepared for it, whilst he shovelled in the earth. "Those are
great trees now," he added, with a sigh, "in the prime of
life, while I - ! But it was a joy to me I never have
forgotten!"
It is hard to say which is the more beautiful season at
Lenox: the early summer, when the woods gleam with the
pinky white of mountain laurel, and the fields
are a solid mass of buttercups and daisies growing knee-
high and rippled by the wind, or in autumn, when one might
drive for miles daily, during a month at least, through
illuminated forest glades and glorious uplands, and each
day find a new charm of color, scenery, and atmosphere
differently brought together. Speaking of ox-eyed daisies,
the farmer is not the only one who finds them a pest rather
than a beauty in his fields. Monsignor Doane, whom we
met at the Robert Olivers' merry tea-table, where wit
always flew like thistle-down, told, apropos of my corsage
bouquet of field daisies, each with its golden heart, a story
of Dr. McCosh, of Princeton, who in one of his walks
came upon a student of the university gathering a bunch of
them. "What'll you want of those, man?" asked the
professor. "Oh! I'm getting them for my mother, sir, who is
an invalid." "Then it's a tay she'll be making of them, for
sure," remarked the president, passing on.
When we first went to Lenox, the lovely hill village had
not parted with its old-time characteristics of unpretending
hospitality. The people who met there, summer after
summer, were of the cultured and refined class of
American society, knowing each other intimately, and
satisfied to exchange simple entertainments in their pretty,
picturesque homes. We had tea-parties followed by games
of twenty questions, by charades, and dumb crambo,
where fun and wit were the order of the hour. We walked
to and from each other's houses, attended by maids with
lanterns. Every Saturday evening there was a gathering at
Sedgwick Hall, for dancing and reunion, to which the
new-rich magnates of New York came as total strangers.
Young men called for young women to walk to the ledge in
the Woolsey woods, whither they were seen wending their
way, with a cashmere shawl upon the gentleman's arm for
the lady to sit upon, and a blue-and-gold volume of some
favorite poet in his hand, from which to read selected
passages, under dropping nuts in an amber atmosphere.
People met at the post-office after church on Sunday,
when the elm-shaded street became alive with gay faces
and graceful figures with attendant cavaliers. On Sunday
afternoons we walked up to see Mr. Goodman's cows. In
the rocking-chairs of the Curtis piazzas were discussed all
sorts of current subjects, from stocks to horses, from
domestic to foreign politics, resumed later by the male
participants at the Club in the village street.
I lived there long enough to see a mighty change. The
rural hill-sides and pastures, bought up at fabulous prices,
were made the sites of modern villas, most of them
handsome and in good taste. The villas were succeeded by
little palaces, some repeating the facades and gardens of
royal dwellings abroad. Instead of the trim maid-servants
appearing in caps and aprons to open doors, one was
confronted by lackeys in livery lounging in the halls. Caviare
and mousse aux truffes supplanted muffins and waffles. Worth
and Callot gowns, cut low and worn with abundant jewels,
took the place of dainty muslins made by a little day
dressmaker. Stables were filled with costly horses,
farmyards with stock bearing pedigrees sometimes longer
than that of the owner; the dinner-hour moved on to eight
o'clock, and lastly came house-parties, "weekends," and
the eternal honk and reek of the motorcar. An early
resident tells me mournfully that all the enchanting wood
roads of my early memories are now oiled for automobiles,
the scent quite overpowering that of uncrumpling ferns and
dewy moss as the
smoke-breathing monsters tear through these haunts of
ancient peace.
But happily a great many of the old habitués of Lenox
still resort to their former summer homes, and society there
retains more of the well-bred ease that comes from
continuity of common interest in a familiar spot, than is
perhaps to be seen elsewhere in America.
In Lenox I wrote for my sons two volumes of fairy tales
which have had an existence prolonged beyond my hope
for them. One of these, called "The Old-Fashioned Fairy
Book," was illustrated by my friend Miss Rosina Emmet,
who came to visit me ostensibly that we might work on it
together. We set off one afternoon in my phaeton drawn by
Bishop's mare, a tranquil steed warranted to stand till
doomsday if her nose were pointed toward a tuft of foliage.
Somewhere on the Lebanon road we halted, tied Bishop,
and wandered through the woods till we came out upon a
ledge having a glorious view of distant mountains, verdant
intervales, and winding river. Each of us sat with pad on
knee, pencil in hand, back against a tree, rapt in the beauty
of the scene.
"What's it to be called?" finally said the artist,
desperately rousing herself from dolce far niente.
"Oh! I don't know," was the author's lazy answer; "say
'The Ogress and - the Ogress and the Cook.' That'll do
as well as anything."
"What did the ogress do, and what had the cook to do
with her?"
"Haven't the least idea .... Oh! I'll tell you. Have her a
quite beautiful little cook, a cottage maiden, sitting at her
door, with the ogress in disguise as a poor old woman
coming to ask for food. After that something will turn up."
The result in Miss Emmet's case was a charming little
vignette. The second fairy-book, entitled, in America,
"Bric-à-Brac Tales," in England, "Folk and Fairy Tales,"
was illustrated by Walter Crane with all his well-known
taste and skill, and the two volumes are to-day in the
hands of the children of those for whom they were penned
at Lenox.
Miss Emma Lazarus, the brilliant young poet, who wrote
"The Banner of the Jew" and other spirited verse
embodying championship of her race, was also my guest at
Lenox, and sometimes in our drives talk became so
earnest that we would find ourselves halted in some grassy
wayside nook, the mare's head bent down to crop rich
clover, while we discussed points of mutual interest. Miss
Lazarus was the most feminine of women, but her eager
spirit seemed to burn like an unfailing lamp, and she could
not treat life with banality, even in trivial questions. I have
several letters from her reverting to this "happy visit" in our
home. She wrote later, at my solicitation, the stanzas
entitled "The New Colossus," as her contribution to an
album I brought together to be sold for the Bartholdi
Pedestal Fund, which I will here insert:
"'Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!' cries she
The circumstances under
which these lines were written
were as follows: Miss Lazarus was calling upon me when I
begged her to write something for my "Portfolio." She
declared she could think of nothing suitable, was mutinous
and inclined to be sarcastic, when I reminded her of her
visits to the Russian and other refugees at Ward's Island,
the newly arrived immigrants whose sad lot had so often
excited her sympathy. At once her brow cleared, her eye
lightened. She became gentle and tender in a moment, and,
going away, soon after sent me "The New Colossus,"
printed in the official catalogue of a loan collection for the
same fund, and widely copied and extolled.
The suggestions of this great loan collection at the
Academy of Design, from which Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith
as director was able to turn over to the pedestal committee
the substantial sum of upward of fourteen thousand dollars,
came originally from Mr. Montague Marks, editor of the
Art Amateur, whose letter outlining the scheme I have just
reread. By asking persons whom previous experience had
taught me would serve both as workers and leaders in such
a movement to come to my house for discussion of it, the
project was set afloat. Afterward it expanded into a vast
and wide-spreading enterprise, to which a large number of
influential private citizens as well as a long list of
"litterateurs," artists, collectors, and experts lent their aid.
Personally speaking, Bartholdi's monument came very
near to being mine. For several weeks I worked
continuously both as head of the ladies' committee on
china, jewelry, costumes, miniatures, lace, embroidery,
and fans; on the "Portfolio," sold ultimately to Mr. Lydig
Suydam for fifteen hundred dollars; on the executive
committee, and in writing the introduction
to the official catalogue brought together by Mr. A. W.
Drake. After it was over my husband satirically requested
me to oblige him by retiring for a while from public works.
He also said the dainty medallion made of the metal of the
statue, with a golden coating, and sent to me by M.
Bartholdi from Paris, accompanied by the sculptor's thanks
and "hommages respectueux" did not entirely requite our
household for the wear and tear of its domestic peace.
Already the aspect of New York social life had begun to
show tokens of coming radical changes. The lines of the
old régime revealed a certain elasticity toward families
previously excluded. It is curious to recall patronizing
sayings, that have stuck in memory, by conservatives of the
old school concerning some of those who have since
pushed them to the wall and stand before modern eyes as
symbols of the high aristocracy of the metropolis. For my
own part, I could never see that these arbitrary distinctions
of our society,
the shutting out of one family and snatching another
to its bosom, had any raison d'être in a republic. The
enormous influx of outside wealth brought to New York
by after-the-war prosperity, started the fashion of huge
dinners given at Delmonico's and elsewhere, where
splendor of decoration and extravagance of food and
wines flashed like electric light before the eyes of old-time
entertainers. To wonder at these novelties was to go and
enjoy them. Mrs. Potiphar and Mrs. Gnu, of Mr. Curtis's
satiric chronicle, were soon left behind in the race, though
we were still
reminded of these characters at receptions given in plain
Fifth Avenue establishments with brown-stone fronts and
rather dreadful picture-galleries, where, in a glare of
gas-light, we were jostled by hundreds of people standing
around supper-tables, from which floated searching odors
of fried oysters served with mounds of chicken salad, and
accompanied by champagne that flowed like water. This
ceremony accomplished, and a tour of the rooms made,
there was really nothing left to do but to begin the mad rush
through the upstairs dressing-rooms in search of coats and
hats and take one's leave.
Generally, the "social events" in question were presided
over, on the door-step, under the canvas awning, by
Brown, whose gruff tones in calling and despatching
carriages mingle with all such recollections of that day. His
function, when off church duty, was that (wittily applied to
his son-in-law and successor) of "the connecting link
between society and the curb-stone." Possessed of native
humor and an aggressive spirit, Brown became in time very
lawless in his methods with his employers; always inclined,
however, to temper justice with mercy in the case of his
earlier patrons, the old families, whom he considered
actually of first importance. I remember driving with one of
these ladies to a reception at a fine new house where
Brown stood near the carriage door, and greeted us.
"Many people here, Brown?" asked my friend casually.
"Too many," was the answer in a sepulchral tone tinged
with melancholy. "If you ladies will take my advice, you'll
go on to Mrs. ---'s. This is mixed, very!"
Once, when we were entering Grace Church to go to
our pew for Sunday morning service, we passed,
kneeling in the aisle near the door, his head bent in prayer
and crossing himself devoutly, an Italian laborer in rough
garb who had strayed in from Broadway, all unconscious
of alien faith, to make his devotions. His feet, extending
behind him, were of extraordinary size, clad in cow-skin
boots of formidable thickness. Brown, nudging my
husband in the arm, said in a hoarse whisper, with a glance
at these appendages: "Them's beetle-crushers!"
But he did not interfere with the suppliant until his
prayers were done!
A visiting clergyman who was to occupy the pulpit of
Grace Church on a Sunday afternoon consulted Brown as
to the usual length of the sermon on such occasions.
"Well, I should say, sir," said the despot, looking the
stranger over with a cool and critical gaze, "you'd better
make it twenty minutes; our people won't stand much
more."
When we were seeking a house for ourselves, upon
leaving the apartment, Brown visited my husband in his
office to offer him his own dwelling, which he was anxious
to rent.
"I can only tell you, Colonel Harrison," he said, with
entire solemnity, "that it suits me exactly. It's a perfect
bejoo."
We did not avail ourselves of this privilege, and I never
heard who occupied the bijou, which I have no doubt was
a comfortable residence. Brown's peculiar relation to
things social, and his intelligence and judgment about
people, caused the wits of the time to attribute to him the
possession of a list of "dancing young men," of respectable
connections, upon which hostesses not well established in
New York would draw for the
uses of their balls. But of the existence of the so-called
"Brown's brigade" I am not qualified to speak. The man
was certainly an unique figure in the middle-age of New
York, who, although his functions have since been ably
filled by members of his family, could not be seen again in
its present vast community.
Somewhere in the seventies appeared, and was received
in good houses, a certain "Count Henri de Tourville,"
who, for a season, disported himself as a French
nobleman of wealth and distinction. Such an event would
be impossible now, since not only is the world much
smaller, but people are wary and do not as a rule shed
hospitality broadcast upon adventurers. Together with a
large number of our friends, I attended a famous dinner at
Delmonico's, given by the count, of which the wonders of
live singing birds in branches suspended over the tables, a
lake in the centre with (drugged) live swans, and masses of
gorgeous flowers everywhere remain in memory. My
husband, who was in Europe on business at the time, took
care to say, when the sequel came, that, had he been at
home, his wife would not have been numbered among the
guests. But all the same his wife had many companions in
misfortune when, later on, we heard of our florid and
resplendent host's subsequent adventures. De Tourville,
proceeding from New York to London, there wooed and
won a wealthy but homely bride, took her on a honey-moon
journey to the Tyrol, and, after a fierce quarrel,
ended by pushing her over a precipice, at the foot of
which she was found dead by the people of their hotel.
Tried for her murder, De Tourville was convicted and
sentenced to life imprisonment in a gloomy fortress in
Germany, where, long years afterward, I read in a foreign
journal, he was still living, incarcerated.
Whether he was a "real count" or not I never heard, but,
although the aristocracy are perhaps in nowise superior to
commoners in the matter of getting rid of inconvenient life
partners, I have always had my suspicions about his title
since the day I partook of the "Comte" de Tourville's
bread and salt at the Delmonico banquet.
Were we simpler-minded in those far-off days, that an
evening at the play was an "event," from which we
came away happier and more healthily excited than from the
melancholy, morbid dramas of the present?
To the then Fifth Avenue Theatre, upon the site of old
Apollo Hall, for four years under the direction of Augustin
Daly, until it burned down in 1881, we went to applaud
beautiful Mary Anderson in her statuesque poses, the
youthful Modjeska in her lovely and stirring
impersonations, and later on the wholesome and joyous
diversion of Gilbert and Sullivan's "Mikado."
On the corner of Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue
arose the fine Renaissance structure of Booth's Theatre,
which we considered the last word in luxury and elegance
as a playhouse. Out of mists like those that wreathed the
Brocken, I seem to see arising successively Booth and
Barrett in "Julius Cæsar"; exquisite Adelaide Neilson
leaning from Juliet's balcony to be wooed by handsome
Harry Montague; George Ringgold superbly sitting Henry
V's battle-charger, surrounded by a victorious army
mingling lances and banners around his manly form; Sarah
Bernhardt, slim and silver-voiced, as Doña Sol, weaving
spells around Hernani - and again as Adrienne
Lecouvreur; noble Edwin Booth over and again in all his
varied rôles - surely we have nothing better in this present
year of grace!
And don't I remember, earlier still, going to the
Fourteenth Street Theatre, once called the Théâtre
Français, to sit spellbound while Adelaide Ristori swept
across the stage as Marie Stuart or gazed at us with the
woe-smitten eyes of Marie Antoinette on her way to
execution? There, too, we saw Fechter sustain, with
irresistible verve, the parts in his romantic dramas that
stirred the blood from start to finish of the play. There, too,
La Grande Duchesse first strutted and rollicked on the
American stage, and merry, audacious, captivating Tostée
appeared in "La Belle Hélène" ---!
And Wallack's Theatre, at Broadway and Thirteenth
Street, after 1883 known as The Star! What a splendid
company trod its boards for a score of years! Fisher,
Smith, Gilbert, Sefton, Davenport, Stoddart, Boucicault,
Coghlan, Lester Wallack above all, in the standard dramas
and interesting plays now vanished into the limbo of lost
things along with their genial interpreters. There it was that
Henry Irving made his American début as Matthias in "The
Bells," in 1883, appearing afterward in the rose-and-gold
brocade dressing-gown of Doricourt in "The Belle's
Stratagem."
Next in favor was the Union Square, where the tear-
bedewed "Two Orphans" and "Miss Multon" ran their
unending course with gifted Clara Morris, and Mansfield in
"A Parisian Romance" never failed to satisfy the crowds.
In Palmer's Theatre, at Broadway and Thirtieth Street,
the bright star of Lester Wallack arose again to sparkle
with undiminished vigor; and what would not one give now
for a ticket to see "The School for Scandal" with the same
eyes that looked upon the performance of 1882, when
Gilbert, Edwards, Tearle, Gerald Eyre, Rose Coghlan,
Madame Ponisi, and Stella
Boniface carried the old comedy to a triumphant finish
night after night?
There, also, Salvini as Samson, and Richard Mansfield
as Richard III, and for a while Coquelin and Hading,
reigned supreme in the attractions of the town.
To Daly's many people pinned their faith as the chief
theatre for refined audiences to go to with a surety of
always meeting the best players in the best plays. One
need no more than recall its exquisite presentments of
Shakespearian comedies and successful adaptations from
foreign sources by Augustin Daly, into which the talent of
Miss Rehan and Mr. Drew threw vivid life. All middle-
aged New York remembers and was proud of them!
I recall a performance of "The Critic" somewhere,
which kept the audience in a ripple of incessant laughter
occasionally merging into a roar. Who laughs in that way
now? And how we went from one normal emotion to
another while Boucicault played in the "Shaughraun"!
And who wasn't made brighter and cheerfuller for the next
day's toil of life for listening to one of Robertson's
comedies, just as, later on, we felt after Pinero's "Sweet
Lavender" at Mr. Frohman's Lyceum Theatre?
Yes, I maintain it, theatre-going was a better business
then, better for the nerves, the spirits, and the digestion,
than now, when problem plays and analyses of degenerate
character send us home dejected to our beds. And oh! for
Gilbert and Sullivan, in lieu of some of these boneless,
fibreless "musical comedies" where masculine horse-play
alternates with the gymnastics of prancing females, and the
music tinkles on and on, touching never a chord of human
feeling!
It has often struck me with a certain surprise that
with all the good, refined, and estimable women we have
seen upon our stage in New York there has been so little
seen of them, comparatively speaking, in the life of our
drawing-rooms, unlike London, where the actress of
character and position is cordially welcomed everywhere.
But New York has shown little of the catholicity and
independence of London concerning the relation of all arts
to society. It has been suggested that old New York was
too puritanical, modern New York is too uncertain of itself.
In recalling the queens of the stage whom one has heard of,
or met at the private functions of so-called high society in
America, the chief among them in by-gone years seem to
be Mrs. Frances Kemble Butler and Mrs. Anna Cora
Mowatt Ritchie. Mrs. Butler had been the honored guest of
half the aristocracy of England before she married a
Georgian gentleman and came to the States to divide her
days between staid Philadelphia, what she considered the
barbarism of a rice plantation full of slaves, and the more
congenial atmosphere of Lenox, where she owned a house.
Lenox, when I first went there, was full of stories of this
brilliant, masterful lady (who wrote of herself, "You know,
my dear, suddenness is the curse of my nature") both in her
own abode and as a frequenter of Curtis's Hotel,
described by her as "having a sort of blossoming season
with sweet handsome young faces shining about it in every
direction" - a condition of things continuing to the present
day!
Mrs. Anna Cora Mowatt, of a good old family of New
York, married Mr. Ritchie, of Richmond, where I, when a
school-girl, visited her in a quaint little cottage sort of house
set in a green garden, and she excited my imagination by
reciting Shakespeare beautifully and
telling me delightful stories of her life upon the stage. She
made quite a favorite of me, and I thought her fascinating,
but I had, even then, an idea that she was not happy
settled down as a wife and housekeeper, and that one
could not serve the two masters, Art and Domesticity.
Adelaide Ristori was the heroine of the hour in my first
days in New York. I saw her first in "Marie Antoinette,"
and in her other rôles later, and her extraordinary talent on
the stage, joined to her all-pervading common-sense and
love of her family, rather disproved my conception
expressed above. She was about fifty when she came to
America, and looked very much younger. As the
Marchioness del Grillo Capricani she was invited a great
deal to the best houses. At one of the Roosevelt balls
Madame Ristori, beautifully gowned, sat in the cotillon,
and danced whenever taken out.
Sarah Bernhardt I never met socially. When she played
Doña Sol in "Hernani," at Booth's Theatre, she was quite
painfully thin and far from beautiful. ("A Dog and His Bone"
was the name given by some French wit to her portrait in
the Salon in which was introduced that of her canine pet of
the hour.) But when one heard her voice of gold in Victor
Hugo's ringing verse, one criticised nothing, but simply
bowed down before her genius.
Adelina Patti had been in her youth, in the South and
elsewhere in America, a darling of the social world. When
she returned here after her separation from her first
husband, the Marquis de Caux, the dandy equerry and
cotillon leader of the Tuileries, and was known to have
formed a new alliance with Nicolini, the tenor singer,
whose wife still lived, New York, which rarely
condones an offence of this variety, failed to invite or
receive in private the world-famed diva.
Christine Nilsson, as I have said, was, when a young
woman, rapturously sought by entertainers. She was the
centre of a group of girls and youthful matrons who
haunted her rooms at her hotel, and could not make
enough of the exquisite Mignon and Marguerite of the
Academy of Music performances.
Miss Clara Louise Kellogg, a most lovely singer, was
also much fêted in New York drawing-rooms. Parepa-Rosa,
large, stately, and dignified, attended by her
diminutive husband, Carl Rosa, the eminent violinist,
commanded always a place in the homes of those who
applauded her on the stage.
Madame Modjeska, as noble-looking and full of
gracious womanhood behind the scenes as before them,
we met first at the house of our friends the Richard
Watson Gilders, where on their Friday evenings at home
one was always sure to encounter the "dessus du panier"
of the literary and artistic world. There, also, I first heard
Adèle aus der Ohe witch magic music from piano keys!
I find, in my correspondence, notes from Modjeska and
Count Bozenta concerning letters of introduction we had
offered to give them in New Orleans, where she charmed
those who encountered her in private life to the full as
much as when they sat spellbound before her lovely
impersonations.
I first met Ellen Terry at the house of Mr. Parke
Godwin, son-in-law of William Cullen Bryant, at an
evening party. Miss Terry was simply radiant in face and
voice and manner, an irresistible being on the stage and off
of it. Mrs. Lemoyne had just recited for Irving and herself
the spirited poem of "Kentucky
Belle," Miss Terry yielding to her the tribute of a gentle rain
of tears. One reads of a certain Miss Sophy Streatfield, a
friend of Dr. Johnson's, to whom her friends would say,
"Cry, pretty Sophy, cry," when she immediately responded
by an overflow of weeping in which she looked prettier
than before. Miss Terry must have been the only other
living person to whom tears were becoming.
We were sitting apart, a little group of women, of whom
one cried out, "Oh! I am ashamed of myself. I have such a
bad habit - that of sitting on my foot!"
"Have you?" cried Miss Terry joyously. "I've always
done so, and often on the stage. It lends one such height
and dignity; don't you think so? And as to not being able
to manage it gracefully, just see here!" And she rose and
resettled herself with the perfect ease and distinction of a
swan returning to its nest, amid laughing applause from us.
One more souvenir of Miss Terry of a later date. In 1903,
when Mrs. Minnie Maddern Fiske had in rehearsal a
play of mine, "The Unwelcome Mrs. Hatch," at Mr. Fiske's
Manhattan Theatre, I was startled by her bringing Miss
Terry into the box, where I sat alone in the gloom of the big
empty playhouse, to look on with me at the progress of
affairs. I felt sure that the famous actress would be horribly
bored, and was assailed by many fears. But the clever
band of ladies and gentlemen whom I was fortunate enough
to have as interpreters of my "Drama of Every Day" must
have had some idea of the presence of their distinguished
auditor, and did their best to carry off the monotony of a
rehearsal, which Miss Terry followed with a patience,
courtesy, and lightning-like intelligence of apprehension
astonishing to me. In one scene where
a number of young girls hover around the wedding-gifts of
a bride to be, she clapped her hands, exclaiming, "That's
pretty, pretty! They're like a flock of butterflies."
Mrs. Fiske's part she, of course, commended as it
deserved, for absolute naturalness and convincing
simplicity, underlaid with the great artist's true skill and
knowledge. Miss Terry said that day she had just refused
Sir Henry Irving's request for her to play Marguerite in his
revival of "Faust." "I told him to think of our combined
ages in an attempt to render this interpretation of the
passions of glowing youth!" Her laughter rang out so
merrily, her appearance and manner were so charmingly
girlish, it was hard to accept her version of the reason for
her decision.
Mrs. Fiske, in her dignity of character, high devotion to
her art, and ruling intellectuality, could always have claimed
and held any place she desired in the better society of New
York. But there was never a moment, save during her
periods of country rest, when her life was not given over to
study of her parts and discussion of the various
productions in her husband's theatres and elsewhere. My
intercourse with her during the preliminaries of the play
mentioned, which she gave at the Manhattan during the
winter season of 1901-02, and carried afterward on tour,
was uniformly agreeable and illumining. I shall never forget
those mornings, in my own library or in her dressing-room
at the theatre (a dainty place, indicative of its owner's
refined nature, utterly foreign to my preconceived ideas),
going over the play step by step, she reading, I interrupting
with requests to "stop just there, please." "We'll leave out
half that speech," etc., etc. Once, when we had extensively
blue-pencilled a scene,
Mrs. Fiske looked at me with a merry smile, saying: "The
Lord loveth a cheerful cutter!"
She introduced me to the mystery of "club sandwiches,"
which, with tea, were brought in from a neighboring
restaurant, serving us for luncheon after hours of strenuous
work. Her notes to me during this time were charming,
with a distinct literary flavor, touching upon authors and
playwrights in many countries, and themes other than those
of our common interests. I have always wished that Mrs.
Fiske had given us in her repertoire more pure comedy, for
which I am sure she possesses as high a gift as for the
emotional roles and analytical studies of woman's nature
she has made renowned.
Miss Georgia Cayvan, of the Lyceum Theatre, was a
charming, frank young woman whose talent as an actress
delighted many audiences. Once, when conducting an
amateur performance for charity of Octave Feuillet's
"Portraits of the Marquise" at the Madison Square Theatre,
lent to us for the purpose by its proprietors, the Rev. Dr.
Mallory, and his brother, Mr. Marshall Mallory, one of the
usual calamities of such enterprises overtook me. At the
eleventh hour, Miss Justine Ingersoll, of New Haven, who
was to play Lisette, a waiting-maid with a small but
sprightly part, had to withdraw, owing to the death of a
relative. In despair I appealed to Mr. Daniel Frohman to
come to my assistance, and to my surprise Miss Cayvan
volunteered to fill the part. She came among us with much
simplicity and grace, played Lisette at two matinees,
refused all emolument for her services, and said she was
amply repaid by the remembrance of "that brief happy little
time when I was an amateur!" Her sad fate in being
overtaken by insanity in the full flush of her
career, dying soon after in a sanitarium, will be
remembered and deplored. The little play in which Miss
Cayvan assisted was a powder-and-puff comedy, written
by Feuillet for the Empress Eugénie's private theatricals at
Compiègne, in which her majesty took the leading woman's
part. After using my translation several times for charity, I
sent some newspaper notices of the performances to the
author, with explanations, receiving in return the following
note:
"OCTAVE FEUILLET.
"Paris,
December 7, 1883.
Of course I sent my
translation, but equally "of course" I
was sure the gallant author never read it.
My strong bias toward the stage and all belonging to it,
although kept in check by circumstance, could not resist
dalliance with plays, mostly adaptations and translations
from French originals, sayinètes and monologues, given by
both amateurs and professionals all over the country. In
justification of my work in this direction, I may venture,
perhaps, to quote from the
notice of my "Short Comedies," gathered into a volume, in
one of the critical journals of the day:
"How many persons can touch and translate a French
comedy without extracting from it its perfume, its gaiety, its
trembling accent of vitality, its volatile essences and
airinesses. Here she is particularly skilful. In the five brief
comedies before us, she has laid the lightest hand
imaginable on the French originals, and whisked them into
English as deftly as a French cook turns an omelette. If
one must 'adapt' and 'arrange,' it is to be hoped that it will
be in such 'harmonies' and 'nocturnes' as these, which are
Whistler-like in their dexterity of touch and color, and
mirth-provoking in their keenness and fun."
The most ambitious of my attempts in this direction had
been a two-act comedy from the French of Scribe and
Legouvé, put into English with rather a free hand, scattered
with phrases and speeches of my own as well as quaint
Russian proverbs culled from many sources. This version,
first given by amateurs for a local charity at Sedgwick Hall,
in Lenox, was interpreted by Mrs. James Brown Potter,
Mrs. Walter Scott Andrews, Miss Craven, Mr. Henry
Chauncey, Mr. Alexander Mason, Mr. Andrews, and an
assortment of good-looking and too-well-dressed Russian
peasants drawn from the ranks of society around us.
Stopping at our house as guests, to remain over the
performance, were the star, Mrs. Potter, and her little girl,
and Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt. The day of the
performance it was discovered by the stage-manager that
we had no "snow" for the scene in which Poleska makes
her appearance in Ivan's hut, and all of my house-party
forthwith set to work helping to cut strips of paper into the
requisite small particles to be
shed from above the stage, and a merry task we made of it.
The little play took our audience promptly, and was
repeated, for charity, at the Madison Square Theatre in
New York, after we all went back to town.
Mr. Marshall Mallory came to see me, proposing to me
to enlarge the play to three acts for the professional stage.
I did my best with it, and "A Russian Honeymoon" was
accordingly put into rehearsal by the Madison Square
Company, and brought out in the spring with beautiful
scenery and costumes. In the cast were Mrs. Agnes
Booth, as Poleska; Miss Ada Dyas, as the Baroness; Miss
Estelle Clayton, as Micheline; Mr. Frederick Bryton, as
Alexis; Mr. William J. Lemoyne, who made a remarkable
character sketch of the part of Ivan the Cobbler; and Mr.
Max Freeman, a most clever Koulikoff, with Mr. Edwin
Arden as Osip.
The occasion was noted as being the first time when any
flash-light picture of the stage was taken, at midnight,
following the performance, and Mr. Daniel Frohman, the
manager of the theatre, was seen as one of the guards
crossing bayonets to keep the fond Alexis from returning
to his Poleska.
While we were preparing this piece for the stage, I had
spent much time in the Historical and other libraries looking
up Russian prints, and reading translations of Russian
books. For a wedding procession with which Mr. David
Belasco, then stage-manager of the Madison Square
Theatre, designed to adorn the opening scene, I found
what I took to be a very quaint and characteristic wedding
veil hung from a framework extending around the bride's
head, of which I made a sketch and submitted it without
having the legend underneath the print translated. We
found out that this was a mosquito
net worn in some of the northerly districts of Russia, in
time to save ourselves from decorating with it the peasant
bride in our play. When my husband, my son, and I were
once walking from a railway station in the land of the
midnight sun, where we had found no vehicle, we
encountered a band of "summer boarders," wearing these
curious appliances, and I fell into laughter at thought of our
"Russian Honeymoon," but in the dense cloud of
mosquitoes that swarmed around us soon realized the need
of this accessory.
As the time drew near for the production of my first
piece by professionals, my whole thoughts were naturally
absorbed by it. The season being Lent, I resolved to
punish myself by extra attendance at week-day services,
during which I would try to put the Madison Square
Theatre and all its works resolutely out of my mind. Alas!
when for this purpose I took possession of our pew in
Calvary Church, I heard "Dearly beloved brethren" in a
familiar voice, and there in the reading-desk was the Rev.
Dr. Mallory, with whom, in his brother's office at the
theatre the day before, I had been consulting long and
earnestly about the play! Dr. Mallory was also the editor
of the Churchman, and a very able exponent, in print, of
diocesan affairs.
I found my relations with Mrs. Booth very pleasant,
although confined altogether to our meetings at rehearsal. I
admired and respected her as an artist of real ability. Miss
Dyas, more of a woman of the world, and always a
charming actress, had been engaged by the management to
fill the part of the world-weary, capricious, yet good-hearted
Baronne, which she did to perfection.
That little play, "A Russian Honeymoon," proved to
be an extraordinary money-getter, given with my
permission, by amateurs all over the country for local
charities. After its professional run at the Madison Square
Theatre, it was taken on a six weeks' tour through New
England by professionals. Reproduced by our New York
amateurs at the Madison Square for the Rev. Dr.
Rainsford's Boys' Club of St. George's Church, the play
may have been said to have had the benefit of clergy from
start to finish.
Mrs. Brown Potter, then in the height of her remarkable
beauty and personal charm, was the Poleska, Mrs. Walter
Scott Andrews, an 'almost professional' Baronne, Mr.
Edward Fales Coward, our cleverest amateur, the Alexis,
Mr. Prescott Hall Butler, the Koulikoff, and Mr. Bedlow,
of Newport, the Ivan.
Played again in Brooklyn, in February, 1886, it
appeared at the National Theatre, in Washington, for the
Mount Vernon Endowment Fund. I was then the guest of
Mrs. Macalester Laughton, one of the regents of Mount
Vernon, and Mrs. Potter visited Mr. and Mrs. William C.
Whitney, while nothing could exceed the hospitality of
Washington in general to our amateur Thespians.
Mrs. Leiter gave for me a large luncheon, at which Miss
Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, then lady of the White House,
was present, and many another political and diplomatic
star in feminine society.
After this the little piece kept on appearing at intervals in
all sorts of unexpected places. Colleges, schools, amateur
clubs everywhere asked for it, and it rolled in money for
charities at quite a tremendous rate.
Omitting the royalties of "A Russian Honeymoon" paid
to me for its professional performances, and including
those of other plays and entertainments personally
devised and carried out under my direction, I had
the pleasure of distributing to worthy funds and charities,
during that time of enthusiasm and energy in dramatic
undertaking, the sum of thirty-two thousand one hundred
and fifty dollars. And what I think more entitled to be
written down was that our amateurs held harmoniously
together, putting honest hard work, and in some cases
distinct talent, into their endeavors, producing on the whole
entertainments that would have been creditable to the stage
in the Rosina Vokes style of light and graceful comedy. The
newspapers took us quite seriously, giving capital notices
as a rule. It is, however, due to Mr. David Belasco to say
that the largest portion of our success was owing to his
training and extraordinary skill in devising pictures and
effects from material that lent itself readily to lovely
grouping and vivid color.
One of the memorable occasions when this order was
reversed and the stage invaded society was the meeting of
the Thursday Evening Club at Mrs. C. Vanderbilt's, where
the Coquelins, père et fils, were the attraction. There was a
great gathering of eager people, the streets blocked with
carriages in line for some distance from the house. The first
choice of the great Coquelin for his programme was
Daudet's exquisite "Monsieur le Sous Préfet aux champs,"
from "Lettres de Mon Moulin" (of which I had made a
rhythmical version in English a year before, and sent it to
the Evening Post, the editor writing me they would publish
it with pleasure; but I never saw it more). Every line of the
original is as dainty and delicate as maidenhair fern, and it
has the same odor of the woods. Coquelin recited it, con
amore, giving next "Le Naufragé," a harrowing tale of a
shipwrecked man alone on a raft with
his dog, who goes mad, so that the master is forced to kill
his only comrade. Farcical monologues followed; excellent
fooling in the funeral oration pronounced upon his spouse
by "Monsieur Bourgeois," who, from weeping, passes
through every stage of mitigated woe into the broad arena
of rejoicing in freedom and the opening paradise of a vie
de garçon. Next we had a take-off of an English tourist in
Paris; and then the piece of resistance of the evening - a
scene from the "Mariage Forcé" of Molière between the
two Coquelins.
Here the imprisoned genius of pure comedy burst its
bonds and soared away over the heads of the jewelled
conventional crowd of not all understanding people. I sat
near enough not to lose a fleeting shadow or a glimpsing
light upon the grotesque mask and to catch every syllable
of his speech. On that tiny stage in the Vanderbilt
ballroom, he was like a giant sporting alone upon a little
hill.
A day or two later I met the great mime at an afternoon
party in Miss Elisabeth Bisland's flat, where, amid red
roses stuck everywhere into blue jars, a handful of
appreciative people gathered at the bidding of the clever,
tactful young hostess. (There it was on another day that I
met, for the only time, the man who has put the very soul of
Japan into glowing English prose - Lafcadio Hearn!) The
Lemoynes, gifted husband and gifted wife, came in, and
Mr. John Drew, of Daly's Theatre. Mrs. Pemberton
Hincks, of New Orleans, sang the best of her Créole
songs, then Sarah Lemoyne recited her inimitable "Mrs.
Maloney on the Chinese Question." Coquelin, squeezed
between me and another woman on a little sofa,
encouraged me to give him a brief synopsis of the piece in
French, quite unnecessary, it appeared, since he took it all
in by the
pores, understanding no word of the broad Irish, of
course, but nodding approval and wrinkling his face with
smiles at every climax! He led the applause with great
resounding claps in the hollows of his hands, and told me
he considered Mrs. Lemoyne "admirable" "tellement
sympathique," with a "vraie figure de théatre," commenting
on the cleverness of her nasal intonations in an excess of
excitement.
I told Coquelin how "Monsieur le Sous Préfet" had
charmed me at the Thursday Evening Club. He said it was
one of his own great favorites. He then told for us the
deliciously droll story I had heard from him before about
"The Butterfly and the Fountain." "Jolie nouvelle, originelle,
dramatique, n'est ce pas? Eh! bien, ce roman c'est de
moi." His solemn, self-satisfied, halting, hobbling
Englishman was perfect.
He told me it was astonishing how his American
audiences had come to know him and respond to him
since his first visit in the autumn. Now he believed them to
be "veritables bons amis."
We saw Coquelin in "Le Juif Polonais," at this time an
interesting contrast to Henry Irving in "The Bells." In April
we attended a meeting of the Nineteenth Century Club,
held at the American art galleries, where Coquelin read a
paper on "Molière and Shakespeare" - a very carefully
prepared, analytical study of the two playwrights, showing
a complete knowledge of Shakespeare's works and
characters. He read it, sitting, with much effect - a few
witty sallies to begin, but afterward settling into harness
with a keen, well-digested argument. General Horace
Porter followed in some drolleries spoken in French with
the strongest American accent I ever heard. Then Mr.
Coudert spoke also in French - a pretty, graceful, telling
speech, lauding
Shakespeare, rallying first, then praising Coquelin to his
heart's content. Every one crowded around the guest of
the evening afterward. When it came to my turn I said:
"Bonsoir, Monsieur le Sous Préfet," and the gleam of his
eye showed instant recollection.
All this took place in a gallery hung around with gloomy
old Spanish masters of the Duc de Durcal collection sent
over to be sold in New York.
Sir Henry Irving was at all times persona grata in New
York. But, as I said before, save as a means of
entertaining guests, the smart set never seemed to
welcome even the fixed stars of the dramatic firmament
into their homes, as the people of equivalent position so
gladly do in London and Paris. Fortunately, there has
always been existent in New York a larger, broader-
visioned "set," devotees of literature, art, music, and the
drama, who have more than made good the omission.
So general the attendance at this meeting, our chairs
were exhausted, and after every one of his confrères was
seated, Mr. Lathrop, unobserved by his hostess, went
behind a screen and drew out a venerable ancestral chair
from Virginia, invalided through age and condemned to
retire from active service ere calamity occurred. It was too
bad that the proceedings of this dignified assemblage
should have been inaugurated by the immediate crash of
their honorable secretary to the floor amid the wreck of a
Virginian heirloom, but the hilarity ensuing, together with
Mr. Lathrop's amiable acceptance of our apologies, did
not affect subsequent proceedings unfavorably.
The plan was developed. A committee of ladies sold
the tickets that brought together two splendid audiences.
Mr. George William Curtis, always a drawing card in
New York, opened the first day with a few pleasant
remarks. Professor Charles Carroll read a poem sent
by Dr. Holmes; Mr. Howells and Mr. Julian Hawthorne
followed with selections from their own writings.
Professor Boyesen, Mr. H. C. Bunner, Mr. F. Hopkinson
Smith, and Mr. Charles Dudley Warner made up
the remainder of the programme with appropriate
contributions.
The next day, some call having been made for women
authors to aid in swelling the rather melancholy group upon
the stage, a number of us took heart of grace to occupy
seats in the rear. When the curtain rose, and the Right
Reverend the Bishop of New York stepped to the front,
with all his accustomed grace, and began by a charming
little tribute to the ladies, "our co-author and workers in this
field who have honored us by appearing on the stage to-day,"
a laugh ran through the audience, and the bishop,
looking behind him, discovered not a single woman
remaining in her place! Just before the curtain went up we
had simultaneously arisen and stolen behind the scenes.
Some people averred it was through stage-fright, but one
honest woman declared we had thought of how dreadful
the men had looked behind the foot-lights the previous day,
and actually dared not face them.
Mr. John Boyle O'Reilly, Mr. Howells, Mr. Stockton,
Mr. Clemens, Mr. Lathrop, and Dr. Eggleston were the
contributors on this day; but the most dramatic effect of all
was produced by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, whose
story from his "Star Papers," of a street waif stretching a
hand through the railings around Grace Church, in
Broadway, to pick the first dandelion
of spring, was a masterpiece of delivery - his voice
literally playing upon the heart-strings of his audience.
Mrs. L. W. Champney told an anecdote before the
Woman's Club of Sorosis of her being invited to be present
at the Author's Club to discuss the question of the new
copyright bill, its coffers now enriched by some two
thousand five hundred dollars as a result of these two
readings. There was a pouring rain, and like a wise virgin
she donned water-proof and goloshes, and sought the place
appointed. A rather astonished servant admitted her, and
when she reached the clubroom she was received with
cordial greeting. Charles Dudley Warner removed her
dripping water-proof, and Mr. Howells took charge of her
more dripping umbrella, while a third chivalrous author of
note went down on his knees to take off her goloshes. She
was the only woman there! Much embarrassed and
flustered, Mrs. Champney took her seat and tried to
compose herself, but in vain. Presently, in came Mrs.
Burton Harrison, serene and composed, who sat down
beside her smilingly, and told how she had asked the aged
negro at the door if there were any ladies present, and was
answered "Yes ma'am. She's upstairs!" "Out of the
agitation of that rainy day's discussion of the copyright
laws," added Mrs. Champney, "the new bill was formed
and made a law."
I remember this circumstance, and that I ever after
associated the copyright bill with the smell of damp
India-rubber drying in a hot room.
The kind reception of these two entertainments
suggested to me something of the same order, to be given
by invitation to our house, of as many guests as we could
accommodate for an evening party. It was embodied in a
single issue of "a journal of a night," called
The Ephemeron, not printed, but read aloud by the editorial
staff and contributors. These last were selected from
among my literary friends, and the table of contents
follows:
What was lacking in the text of The Ephemeron was
spoken by my witty and scholarly coadjutors. We had
Bishop Potter's "Dream of the Thursday Evening Club of
the Future"; advance sheets of poems and sketches sent
me by the editors of the Century, the
Atlantic Monthly, St. Nicholas, and the Critic; a chapter
of a new novel by Mr. Frank R. Stockton, read by the
author, sent with the compliments of Mr. Thomas Bailey
Aldrich, of the Atlantic Monthly; two poems from Mr.
Richard Watson Gilder; stories read by Mr. Hjalmar
Hjorth Boyesen and Mr. Julian Hawthorne; a poem called
"Geist's Grave," by Matthew Arnold, contributed by his
daughter; a sketch by Mrs. F. R. Jones, and another called
"The Moujik," by Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger, read by
Mr. Dougherty; an amusing skit by Mr. John Kendrick
Bangs; and poems by Miss Edith Thomas, George Parsons
Lathrop, and Mrs. Piatt; all this, punctuated by a patter of
polite applause from a hundred seated guests, and followed
by a supper, made the second issue of my gauze-winged
creature of an hour an occasion both merry and
memorable.
The Thursday Evening Club, still in the green afternoon
of healthy age, met at the houses of different members, to
each of whom was allowed the privilege of selecting the
programme of entertainment - these differing widely -
followed by an hour of talk among the guests. To this club
have belonged successive generations of the more
conservative families of New York; its waiting list is long,
and elected members step serenely into place conscious
that neither fleeting time nor fickle fashion can disturb their
dignified tenure of the privilege.
To enumerate the past and present officers of this
association would be an interesting chapter, but the club is
before everything an affair for private entertainment. Of its
many meetings it were hard to single those most luminous
in memory. From the lordly mansions wherein Paderewski
played for us, Coquelin recited, or Nordica and
Schumann-Heink sang adorably,
we would adjourn to far simpler homes where the
programme was the outgrowth of native talent and
ingenuity; where some new discovery in science or
exploration was given at first hand by the exponent; or
else some question of civic interest, philanthropy,
education, or anything bearing upon the elevation of our
homes and the social brotherhood was so discussed that all
who listened might understand and profit. At times the club
relaxed into simple, unadulterated fun, as in the mock trial
at Judge Howland's, where Mr. Richard Hunt, as counsel
for the prosecution, interrogated the brilliant wife of Dr.
William Draper (daughter of Mr. Charles A. Dana, of the
Sun), who represented Bridget, a scrubwoman, a witness
for the defence. "And what, Bridget, was the nature of
your occupation before you came to work in this office
building?" "Please, your honor," came the answer, like a
flash, "I was takin' care o' Dr. Draper's children."
This trial brought out further a war of wits between
Judge Howland, Mr. Hunt, and my husband, of which the
details were too local and evanescent to repeat, that kept
the audience in a roar of irresistible laughter.
I was interested in the foundation of the Nineteenth
Century Club by my neighbor, Mr. Courtland Palmer, of
Gramercy Park, who, in the nebulous days of this vigorous
undertaking, asked me to serve as a vice-president and
also upon the lecture committee of the club, which I did for
many years. The meetings, first held by Mr. and Mrs.
Palmer in their own spacious house, were to many besides
myself a revelation of broad thought freely expressed by
leading exponents on divers sides of questions, theological,
scientific, economic, musical, artistic, or literary. The fervid
soul of the president, Mr. Palmer - kept always in check
by his
courteous deference to the views of his co-workers - knew
no bounds in his ambition for this club. Upon the
lecture committee were also Mr. Parke Godwin and Mr.
D. G. Thompson, I acting as a sort of conservative brake
when the outline for an evening's discussion, or a person
proposed by Mr. Palmer whom I believed would prove
unwelcome to the women of the club, caused a threatened
undue acceleration of its wheels!
Many a time the lecture committee meeting consisted
only of Mr. Palmer and myself, and I can truly say that I
never met from him aught save the nicest consideration of
good taste as well as the highest interests of the club. It was
an experiment hitherto untried, to bring into drawing-room
discussion some of the original thinkers he proposed, but
the results were signally successful and stimulating. The two
secretaries of the club during my connection with it were
young men destined to a large share of the world's
observation in days to come: Mr. William Travers Jerome,
later District-Attorney of New York City, and the present
Attorney-General of the United States, Hon. George W.
Wickersham, who succeeded Mr. Jerome. In a recent
conversation with the Attorney-General, designed to refresh
my memory of those early days of the club, I found him
quite of my opinion regarding its interest and intellectual
value to the community of New York. As an example of its
scope, we had a dignified debate upon religion sustained
between a monsignor of Rome, a Jew, a Free-Thinker, a
Churchman, and an Unitarian. Upon this occasion the Latin
prelate asked Rabbi Gottheil, who had taken part, why he
had not stood by him in a certain position attacked by the
others. "For," he added, "we are the only ones here who
believe anything."
The appearance before the club of Dr. Oliver Wendell
Holmes and George W. Cable, representing literature; of
Theodore Roosevelt and Frederick W. Coudert, discussing
politics; of John Swinton, embodying socialism; of Mrs.
Julia Ward Howe, the brilliant Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi,
and Miss Kate Field; of the Rev. Robert Collyer, the
stalwart Yorkshireman and well-beloved divine; of the
Rev. Dr. Heber Newton, Max O'Rell, Andrew Carnegie,
Felix Adler, Mr. Daniel Greenleaf Thompson (subsequently
president of the club), and many another leader of thought
and action in our land, upon subjects too varied and
numerous to here detail, will give some further idea of the
nature of the meetings. Of the founder I quote an apt
description in his funeral oration by Robert G. Ingersoll.
"He was a believer in intellectual hospitality, in the fair
exchange of thought, in good mental manners, in the
amenities of the soul, in the chivalry of discussion." The
motto of the Nineteenth Century Club was: "Prove all
things. Hold fast to that which is good."
A private house where the addition of a well-equipped
lecture-room made possible the presence of a large
number of guests was that of the late Professor Henry M.
Draper in Madison Avenue, whose widow has, with far-reaching
liberality, carried on his life work in astronomical
research.
Here we enjoyed many inspiriting evenings of lecture
and experiment by inventors and high experts from abroad
and from all parts of America. The first revelation, with
illustration by experiment, of the unbelievable marvel of
Marconi's wireless telegraphy to a company of private
persons was there made by the wizard young Italian,
sending us all home dazzled, bewildered,
and still slightly incredulous, to dream of wonders now a
thing of every day.
I used to enjoy at second hand the fun of the University
Dining Club (of which my husband was secretary at the
time of his death), for a long time a sort of sacred circle of
wits and good talkers. Their dinners, given from time to
time, each under charge for the evening of a member,
called "The Caterer," were held at different clubs, although
the University was the fountain-head of membership. These
banquets were followed by evenings of merry talk,
speeches, and what not, when the grave and dignified
seniors who made up the list became boys again,
disporting themselves in the sunshine of mutual friendship.
In the space of a few short years death swept through its
ranks with startling rapidity. The necrology numbered such
choice spirits as Charles C. Beaman, Frank Kernochan,
Alfred Taylor, Buchanan Winthrop, Frederic de Peyster,
George Baldwin, and Burton Harrison; also the member
who stood in loco parentis to the club, Mr. Edward Cooper -
and, subsequently, Charles Barney. Of a joyous group
taken upon the veranda of Mr. Beaman's summer home in
Vermont, where the club went upon a winter frolic in 1889,
Mr. Frederic Stevens and Judge Howland are, I believe,
the sole survivors.
By the time old Trinity bells had rung in a score of years
after our settling in New York all was supremely changed.
Externally, as in customs, standards, and observances, it
was a new city. The race for power and wealth first began
to make itself felt in the break-up of visible home life
among the friends who of old met in cordial informal
fashion. Hours moved on, and inexpensive parties became
things of the past.
The life of the bread-winner took on the gait that has
now become the pace that kills. Clever, masterful men who
set out to win huge fortunes in a decade, to juggle with
stocks and railways, to develop the common necessaries of
life in a great continent, to delve underground for the wealth
of fairy tales, enriched themselves indeed beyond the
dreams of avarice, but at what a cost! From morning till
night they toiled in their offices, going home at night tired of
everything, eagerly craving rest.
What they found in these homes is a tale familiar to New
Yorkers. Households straining every nerve to keep up with
society; dinners of ceremony abroad or at home; evenings
at opera or play, dances following; the husband and father
forced, night after night, into attendance at functions from
which he would be thankful to Heaven could he but tear
himself away to bury his weary head and quivering nerves
under cover of his couch.
Some one has called Wall Street the nursery of
paralysis. What is to be said of nights of exhausting
entertainments after days in Wall Street? No wonder
those who wander much abroad are continually running
upon the spectacle of some once famous master of finance
of our own land, shrivelled and shrunken, in the hands of
nurses to whom he is but as a child, spending dull days in
wandering from cure to cure in a manner pitiful to look
upon. This is the price they are paying for making the
world wonder at their money-getting. Their great houses in
their native land remain forsaken and shut up, while Europe
gives their owners unenthusiastic shelter till they are ready
to go home and die!
To this period we may date back the first struggles for
social prominence among people hitherto unknown in
the ranks of society; the craze for travel in every
practicable part of the world; the overtraining and
overindulgence of children; the general unrest. Some of
those who succeeded in shooting like meteors across the
social firmament have disappeared entirely. To many of the
more stable ones have come the disintegration of the family
circle by divorce and their reconstruction under unnatural
conditions, so that the uninformed outsider is confused to
know how to place, genealogically, many of the leaders of
to-day in the families whose names they bear.
Rebuilding, repaving New York has brought about a
more attractive external aspect. Transit is immeasurably
better but still behind that of most European capitals.
Entertainments held in the great new palaces of the rich are
now the last word in splendor and completeness. All over
the Eastern shore are scattered country houses, shooting
lodges, bungalows, inhabited islands and reservations,
luxurious camps, for the resort of those who are not
otherwise spending months abroad, sailing their yachts to
all the picturesque ports of Europe, or circling the globe
with parties of invited friends - doing anything, it would
seem, to get away from the uninteresting extravagance of
life in their native land.
When the million-makers first began indulging in these
vagaries, a larger class of professional and business men of
more enlightened type stayed at home with their families
and went about their daily avocations with increased
comforts in the methods of so doing, increased returns
from their work, and vastly increased expenses. I think
that at the dinners of that period we had pleasanter
reunions of brighter minds and more vivid personalities
than in years subsequent when New
York had reached her present eminence of material
prosperity. In my husband's area of professional
acquaintanceship were men whose presence at a dinner
was sure to make the wheels of thought and talk revolve
brilliantly. With either Mr. Choate, Mr. James C. Carter,
Mr. Beaman, Judge Howland, or Judge Patterson in the
circle around a friendly board, there was always something
to key other guests to a high pitch of enjoyable expectation
and realization. But no one could long kick against the
pricks of plutocracy.
Magnificence in entertainments had come to stay. New
families, new houses, flunkies in plush breeches, gold
services at dinner, the importation of priceless pictures,
tapestries, wall panellings, doors, ceilings, and furniture
from Old-World places, the building of sumptuous
dwellings, rose to the front and remained there. For a few
years following this birth of splendor in the metropolis
private entertainments were a wonder to lookers-on. Each
hostess strove to outdo the other in sensational display.
The giving of costly gifts to invited guests was begun and
overdone. People of the old order, of moderate means and
hospitable impulses, found their invitations superseded by
those of the beneficent plutocrats of the new. Their children
frankly avowed preference for latter-day splendor over the
dull comfort of the by-gones! Thus the iron entered into the
souls of those who aspired to feel that their offspring would
rise superior to mere show and glitter in homes of
yesterday, and for this reason, chiefly, many of the
pleasantest houses of the old régime closed their doors and
gave up the ghost as leading entertainers.
What joy it used to be to escape from the ever-increasing
stress and turmoil of our winter home to the
sea-girt island of Mount Desert, where we finally built a
summer residence at Bar Harbor on the shores of
Frenchman's Bay, after many conferences with our
architect, that fine artistic spirit, Mr. Arthur Rotch, of
Boston! I called our picturesque cottage (which went on
from year to year expanding with our needs) Sea Urchins,
partly to justify the avowed intention of teaching our lads to
know and live the water life of the island and also because
in the spot where Mr. Rotch drove the stake for the corner-
stone of our dwelling we dislodged a large cache of sea
urchins' shells, left there by birds who had flown with them
from the shore forty feet away.
We had first visited the tiny fishing hamlet of Bar Harbor
in 1871, sojourning in the cottage of Captain Royal George
Higgins, a brave mariner whose corner cupboard contained
a set of silver presented to him by the passengers of a
wrecked bark saved by his gallantry. Here we had the
company of several pleasant "rusticators," as the summer
visitor has always been called in the Maine vernacular,
chiefly authors, artists, and university men, including my
husband's former instructors, those Olympians of Yale
College, Dr. Porter and Dr. Woolsey, disporting
themselves like schoolboys in a sparkling atmosphere. I
remember a sail to one of the islands, carrying our luncheon
compounded by ourselves, when the Rev. "Prexy" Porter
stretched himself at full length on a bed of white-capped
moss, and recited poetry in lotos-eating ease. When, some
years later, we bought our land at the cost of city lots, and
began building our house, we spent a summer in a cottage in
Albert Meadow, scantily furnished indeed, but to us and
our boys as full of iridescent charm as any fairy palace in a
soap bubble.
Our first visitors as residents of the island were Sir
Clements Markham, long president of the Royal
Geographical Society of London, a connection
through the English Fairfaxes, who, with his wife, came
over for a summer journey to America. The guests arrived
in the teeth of one of the fierce easterly gales that
sometimes sweep our island, and were, I think, relieved
not to find us in a fisherman's hut, sitting around a fire of
driftwood mending nets, as I had suggested in my letter
sent to meet them in Boston. That night the little house
shook in the fury of the storm, but next day dawned crystal
clear and crisp, the mountain ledges glittered in the sun,
and the whole world smelt of pine, birch, sweet balsam fir,
and Atlantic brine. Our manly and delightful visitor lost no
time in inviting our lads to accompany him on the ascent of
Newport Mountain, where he made a map of the island
and came down knowing more than any of us about
everything, except the fact that Champlain had discovered
it; that Talleyrand had come there in a fishing smack (and
was by many supposed to be a native of the island); and
that Argall, the pirate, had massacred a band of French
Jesuit priests at Somes Sound in 1609.
We drove in a buckboard to Beach Hill, carrying our
tea basket to the summit of the cliff looking down into a
sparkling fiord, where some brewed tea while others threw
their rugs over low-lying mattresses of fragrant bush
juniper and rested like kings at ease. During the week of
the Markhams' visit we had consistently glorious weather
for our expeditions far and near. Many a time in later days
in London has genial Sir Clements recalled with me those
days of gypsying on the far Maine coast.
When ready to move into Sea Urchins from the
village, my carriage failing to come in time, I was convoyed
thither by Mr. James G. Blaine, who, with Mrs. Blaine,
was en route to take possession of their own just finished
villa, Stanwood, beautifully situated on the hill-side just
over Sea Urchins. ("If I were so inclined," said Mr. Blaine,
"I could sit on my veranda and throw potatoes down your
kitchen chimney!") I have always remembered my
installation at my Bar Harbor home, Mr. Blaine stepping to
the ground and assisting me to my door-stone, then, with
the charming grace of which he was master, making over
me a little airy invocation to the fates that I might be as
happy there as I, "who made so many others happy,"
deserved to be. The compliment, however unmerited, was
so daintily achieved, while Mrs. Blaine, one of my boys,
and the buckboard driver made a smiling audience, that I
venture to insert it here.
Mr. Blaine was often our guest thereafter and we theirs.
He was always a brilliant and sympathetic companion, and
seemed at his best and happiest at Stanwood, surrounded
by his clever family in the air of his native pines.
To begin writing about Bar Harbor and the joys it has
brought into our life, of the interesting and memorable
entertainments we gave and received there, and the
delightful people who yearly drifted to the island, is to want
not to lay by one's pen.
Mr. Matthew Arnold, who had promised to come to us
just before his departure from America in 1886, wrote me
a note of regret in these terms:
"STOCKBRIDGE, MASS., Aug. 20th, 1886.
"I have deferred
writing because I was really anxious to
propose coming to you next week, but last night I
had again one of those attacks of pain across the chest
which your too-stimulating climate has given to me; and as
I read in the papers that at Bar Harbor a man liable to
seasickness is thought intolerable, what would be thought
there of a man liable to spasms of the chest? I have
therefore made up my mind to remain quietly here, and to
deny myself the very great pleasure of a visit to you. We
sail for England on the 4th of September, and I shall need
all my solidity for the passage. But I assure you that to fail
in my engagement to you is a grievous disappointment to
me. I only console myself by the hope of seeing you before
very long on the other side of the Atlantic.
"Believe me, dear Mrs. Burton Harrison, most
respectfully and sincerely yours,
"MATTHEW ARNOLD."
I had arranged for Mr.
Arnold's pleasure, on one of the
afternoons he was to have spent with us, a water pageant
of Indian birch-bark canoes, one of the prettiest and most
characteristic spectacles imaginable, as seen from the rock
bastion of our lawn over the sea. The canoe club duly
made its appearance from behind Bar Island, went through
its manoeuvres, and came in to have tea upon the lawn.
There was some confusion in the announcement that our
guest of honor was after all not present, and most canoeists
went home firmly believing they had been seen and
admired by the famous apostle of sweetness and light, our
local newspapers duly announcing the great man's
presence.
The Bar Harbor home is still in my possession, though
less frequently resorted to in days when those whose
companionship made its charm complete are lacking. It is
a common thing to hear people nowadays
assert conviction that Bar Harbor, in becoming one
of the most renowned haunts of fashion in America, is
irremediably spoiled. But certain it is that nothing short of
an earthquake or a tidal wave demolishing it can impair
its supreme and enduring hold over old-time devotees.
I come now to the time when my zeal for works of
charity and dramatic diversion was to be turned definitely
into the channel of professional literary labor.
Sitting in our pew at Calvary Church during a weekday
Lenten service, my thoughts went over the social
conditions then governing New York, and I "planned out"
a story, subsequently written in a few weeks at my home,
its plot and characters epitomizing the new extravagance of
society, which I called "The Anglomaniacs." On my way
from service I fell in with our good friends Mr. Joseph
Gilder and his sister, Miss Jeannette Gilder, editors of the
Critic, to whom I confided the inception of my scheme,
pledging them to a secrecy for many months faithfully
observed. Excepting my own household and, later, Mr.
Richard Watson Gilder, of the Century Magazine, to
whom his sister succeeded in carrying my manuscript
without revealing the author's name, no one knew of my
connection with the novel until it had run as a serial through
the magazine.
I quote from my journal kept at the time: "By
appointment, to the Century office to talk with R. W. G.
about the A. M's. It was all charmingly funny and
mysterious, that closeting in his sanctum with the editor-in-
chief; those at the desks outside supposing, no doubt, I
had come to submit a new Dictionary. The orders were
that no one should disturb us. Only Mr. Drake dropped in,
momently, about some important
art matter, and Mr. William Carey to read aloud a letter
from Henry M. Stanley. I was delighted to hear that Mr.
G. thinks uncommonly well of my story; he says he read it
first without knowing me in the pages, then recognized
certain qualities and determined at once to begin publishing
it in the May Century if possible.
"Literature is the order of the day at 83 Irving Place. F.,
in the intervals of service at the oar in the Yale crew, is
writing his essay for the De Forrest prize. F. B. H. has on
hand a prize composition on the 'Sea Venture,' and A.
came in with a droll face, saying his subject for
composition this week at Cutler's, was the 'Mississippi
Bubble,' and as he had to find his own facts, asking if he
should look in the Encyclopedia under the heading of
'Mississippi' or of 'Bubble.' This recalled to B., the
Sophomore at Yale who had for subject "Is the Baptism of
Suffering Necessary to the development of a Great Soul?"
and went to the library enquiring for all the treatises on
Infant Baptism."
Another entry is as follows:
"Read the finish of my book, which they had not heard,
to my Council of Four after dinner in the library, all of them
luxuriously propped with silken pillows to enable them to
stand the strain! Poor undefended family! 'Rah! Rah! Rah!
Mother!' was the verdict in a Yale roar that deafened me!
Then, they were sworn to secrecy.
"Feb. 26. A hurried and conspirator-like note from R.
W. G., saying he can work the first of the A. M's into the
June number, and would I send him my final corrected
version. As my upstairs servants are known at the office, I
haled up the little new Irish laundress Alice, whom we have
dubbed 'The Bog Fairy' and asked her if she knew the
way to Union
Square. 'Oh! yes ma'm, to that Cemetery place where you
do be sending parcels now and thin!' I despatched her with
the papers, unblushingly telling her if anyone asked who
sent them to say she didn't know. She is bright enough
looking to be taken for a bran new genius with MSS. in
hand."
The next entry:
"Have just seen the drawings in illustration of the A. M's.
They are done by Charles Dana Gibson, a new young
artist for whom the Century people and others predict a
brilliant future. I am simply delighted with them. I hear Mr.
Gibson says drawing these society types has opened a new
vein to him which he enjoys greatly.
And lastly:
"Read the first instalment of the A. M's in the June
Century, - when F. had finished it, - in the drawing room car
returning from New Haven to New York. We had no end
of fun hearing a man and a girl in the chairs opposite ours
discussing it with fervor."
During that summer my somewhat embarrassing
diversion was to hear the story talked over at the luncheons
and dinners at Bar Harbor, and to be frequently called
upon for an opinion pro or con. I read constantly in the
newspapers of some new author or old one to whom it was
attributed, generally a man. Letters poured in on me
through the editors of the Century.
By the end of its run in the magazine, so many claimants
had arisen to own themselves responsible for the story,
that I was hardly surprised, at a large dinner in Bar
Harbor, to hear a secretary of the German legation in
Washington, who had just arrived from Newport,
announce to the company that he was in a position to state
that the author had at last been discovered
in the person of a lady then in Newport "whom
everybody knew."
"I am positive, because she told me so herself
yesterday," he added, turning to me, who sat beside him.
"Indeed?" I said calmly. "How very interesting!"
In the end, I wrote to Mr. Joseph Gilder saying he
might, if he so desired, tell the fact of the authorship in the
Critic. He, in turn, gave it to Mr. Richard Harding Davis,
the future novelist, then a young reporter on the New York
Evening Sun, which duly proclaimed my secret, the Critic
endorsing it next morning.
And so my innocent mystification had run its brief
course, affording much sport but a few anxious moments to
the author, who felt all the summer like a monster of
duplicity.
When I was sailing across the Atlantic the following
spring, I had for fellow-passenger, on the Majestic, Mr.
John Hay, reputed author of the anonymous novel, "The
Bread-Winners," whose secret was, however, never
officially disclosed. We had had a wonderfully tranquil
voyage; as Mr. Hay said, "the sea as smooth and
monotonous as a poem by Lewis Morris"; but one evening,
when he had been sitting by my chair on deck talking with
the genial charm and variety that always characterized him,
the old Majestic suddenly began a series of rather sharp
rolls. Mr. Hay undertaking to convoy me below in safety,
we were caught on the companionway by three or four
slanting movements of the ship, making it impossible for us
to do aught save stand helpless, hand in hand, clutching
with our free hands at the rails and swaying absurdly to and
fro. "What a situation for the authors of the 'Bread-Winners'
and the 'Anglomaniacs'!" I said to him tentatively. But the
trained diplomat failed to betray
himself, responding only by a merry twinkle of the eye.
During my husband's absence on business in London in
the spring of 1892, I went with my brother, as one of a large
party of invited guests, by special train to the newly built
Four Seasons Hotel, at Cumberland Gap, in Tennessee,
where the directors of a new land company and health
resort scheme had arranged for us a week of sports and
entertainments in glorious mountain air and scenery. About
forty congenial persons from New York and Washington
made up the party, the mountaineers and their families
along the route assembling at stations to see the notabilities
among them. The chief attraction, strange to say, seemed to
be Mr. Ward McAllister, who was expected, but did not
go. At one station Mr. James Brown Potter, engaged in
taking a "constitutional" walk along a cinder path while we
stopped, was mischievously pointed out by Dr. Holbrook
Curtis, to a group of gaping natives as the famous arbiter of
New York fashion.
"I want ter know!" remarked a butternut-garbed
horseman in cow-hide boots. "Wal, I've rid fifteen miles
a-purpus to see that dude McAllister, an' I don't begrutch it,
not a mite."
On our way home we stopped in Washington to dine
with Sir Julian and Lady Pauncefote, who with her
daughter was of our party, at the British legation. Next
day, a luncheon was given for me by M. Pierre Botkine, of
the Russian legation, whose article in defence of the
Russian Government I had helped him to put into English,
then introduced it to the editor of the Century Magazine.
M. de Strove, the Russian minister, Mr. Gregor, M.
Beckfries, of the Swedish legation; Marquis Imperiali, of
the Italian legation; Miss Pauncefote;
my two girl friends, Miss Lawrence and Miss Perkins, and
I, gathered around a table covered with Russian
embroideries and American roses, for a charming little
feast. We were asked to the White House by the
President's daughter, a pretty, gracious little lady with a
face like a deep-tinted cameo, who called to invite me to
hear a singing somebody, who was to perform for the
President alone.
Clever Mrs. Barney gave me a large reception, with
troops of people, in her artistic house; and there were
theatre-parties, luncheons, dinners for every day. Colonel
John Hay, whose wife was out of town, asked us for a cup
of tea in his beautiful home on Lafayette Square, then all
abloom with spring.
Mrs. Don Cameron, a lovely creature, poured tea in
Mrs. Hay's absence. Mrs. Cameron's daughters, Miss
Blaine, Miss Mary Leiter (afterward Lady Curzon), Mrs.
Cabot Lodge, and a few other women were there. The
men included Mr. Hay's beloved intimates, Mr. Clarence
King and Mr. Henry Adams; also Judge Davis, Mr.
Michael Herbert, of the British legation, and Mr. Alan
Johnston, "said to be engaged to our pretty neighbor in
Gramercy Park, Nettie Pinchot." Then Colonel Hay took
me off into a corner to show me an original MS. of
"Maryland, my Maryland!" written for him by the author,
Randall, and a little thrill ran through my veins at the
memory of that June night at camp at Manassas, when we
set it afloat on the Army of Northern Virginia, with gray
soldiers in ambush behind the trees catching up the
triumphing refrain!
To touch upon my early visits to London. I can't
remember just when I first made acquaintance with
Thackeray's daughter, Mrs. Richmond Ritchie, now
Lady Ritchie, whose father had been my literary idol and
whose charming cordiality of welcome mingles with the
pleasantest of my souvenirs. My youngest son and I went
several times to visit her at Wimbledon, once to celebrate
Thackeray's birthday, when she showed us the original
sketches of "The Rose and the Ring," with explanatory talk
of the way in which that immortal fairy tale had taken shape
in Rome. When she hesitated for a name of one of the
characters, and my boy from the little group of spectators
facing her table supplied it, she cried out in joyous
cadence, "Well done, America!" I have a very precious
little batch of Lady Ritchie's notes and letters.
Mrs. Walford, whose delightful novels are an integral
part of the home literature of England, became a friend for
whom my affectionate regard has continued along the path
of life. We visited her at Cranbrooke Hall, and she came
to us in New York with her daughter Olive. Her sweet,
sunny temper and elastic gayety of disposition are reflected
in her writings as they illuminate her home. We saw Mrs.
Harrison (Lucas Malet) and her sister, Rose Kingsley, who,
with her noble father, Canon Charles Kingsley, had visited
us in New York.
My husband had crossed the ocean, as a cabinmate of
Canon Kingsley's, a stimulating mental experience. Mr.
Kingsley afterward said of his companion that he
possessed the wholesome vigor of a Western prairie wind.
I saw Mrs. Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes) often, both in
London and New York. She had a wonderful personal
charm and acceptability to her friends, as well as the genius
that made her a marked woman in her era. Mrs. Chandler
Moulton was a great favorite in London in my time. Mrs.
Humphry Ward I met more seldom, and Mrs. Atherton I
knew both in Bar Harbor and
London. Among the men of mark whom it has been my
pleasure and privilege to meet in my London visits I may
cite Lord Morley, Lord Curzon, Mr. Balfour, Lord
Alverstone, Lord Glenesk, Lord Playfair, Mr. Matthew
Arnold, Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Sir Gilbert Parker, Mr.
Edmund Gosse, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Professor Waldstein,
Mr. Henry James, M. Paul Blouët (Max O'Rell), Sir
Edwin Arnold, Mr. "Anthony Hope," Sir Clements
Markham, Mr. J. W. Cross (husband of George Eliot),
and many another. To mention the incidents and places of
these meetings, and to enlarge upon the personalities of
those I encountered, would require another volume.
In London I was once one of the sixteen guests of honor
at a large dinner of the "New Vagabonds" Club, over
which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle presided. I had never
known such an experience, and a seat at the High Table
with the other lions of the menagerie frightened me
dreadfully. How much more so when, at the end of a very
graceful little speech by Conan Doyle, during which I was
wondering who the subject of these charming words could
be, I heard mention of "The Anglomaniacs," then my own
name. A sepulchral voice behind me whispered, "You are
expected to say a few words in answer." "But I can't," I
whispered back in agony. "Then rise and bow to right, left,
and centre," came the voice, with a note of disapprobation
at my stupidity.
This I did, mutely, tremblingly, before an audience of
hundreds of well-dressed and critical aliens, seated at
tables in the body of the hall, finally sinking into my seat,
heartily wishing I had been trained, like the English women-
authors present, to speak a few apt words in public when
need called for them. I wrote home
that my only consolation in the trying moment had been the
fact that I wore a new black satin gown, just come home
from Madame Amy, with spangles on every seam!
I was consoled after this episode, to receive from Mrs.
Burnett a note asking me to be present at a dinner at the
Authors' Club given in her honor, wherein occurs this
phrase: "It is very complimentary of these distinguished
gentlemen, but I would as soon be boiled alive as make the
few remarks decency will demand I should upon the
occasion. But as I lived through the speech to the New
Vagabonds, I may survive this." I find a number of sprightly
notes from this charming correspondent, one of them telling
me of her retreat to the banks of the Thames, to finish the
play "A Lady of Quality," and urging me, too, to retire to the
country before London should "kill me with much
cherishing," a fate I had certainly not her reason to
anticipate, although the pace was swift, the people I met
constantly differing, and the engagements delightfully varied.
Not a day passed without its half-dozen parties and
invitations to meet those known to the world of art,
literature, statesmanship, and fashion, so blended as to
furnish refreshing variety. This has always been my
experience in London, making it, in my eyes, the one social
centre best worth while in the world. Neither Paris, Rome,
New York, nor Washington can vie with it in these
respects. But as this modest chronicle is chiefly designed to
outline the busy and joyous years of my life in the South
and, later, in the city of my adoption, I must condense my
theme.
Alternating with our summers spent at Sea Urchins, we
and our sons made many journeys abroad, visiting
together, or in couples, most of the practicable parts of
Europe. In London, and in visits to country houses and
ancient historic homes in England, Ireland, and Scotland, I
felt, of course, more closely allied to people and things
than on the Continent; but to the present day, including a
motor run last summer through Holland and Belgium and in
the Black Forest, my delight has been to explore Old-World
haunts with congenial companions.
Perhaps the most varied and altogether satisfying of all
my journeys was a "Loop around Europe" in the summer
when, with my husband and my son Francis, I left England
after spending Henley week upon the Thames, the junior
member of the party crossing from Hull to Norway to do
some mountaineering among the fiords, whilst we
proceeded to Calais, and went from Brussels via
Copenhagen to Christiania, where he rejoined us. Our way
was as little hackneyed as we could make it, our détours in
the north countries being marked by intentional wanderings
from the beaten paths. From Finland we entered Russia,
and in Petersburg fell in, to my surprise, with my brother on
his way home via the Siberian railway from China, one of
several similar journeys undertaken by him in the interests
of an American-Chinese syndicate; his object in the
Russian capital, a semi-diplomatic mission, to meet certain
high Russian officials in order to adjust their combined
interests in northern China. Our minister at St. Petersburg,
Mr. Clifford Breckinridge, an old shipmate of Mr. Cary's in
the Confederate States navy, readily procured for him the
necessary audiences with Prince Lobanoff, then prime-
minister and one of the foremost statesmen in Europe.
A month later, when we arrived at Kieff, the Jerusalem
of southern Russia, for a week's visit, during that
of their imperial majesties, the newly crowned czar and
czarina, we met in the station the funeral cortège of Prince
Lobanoff, who had died on the train while coming in to
Kieff with the imperial party.
Here we met the famous Probédenotsòf, the head of the
Russian Synod, to whom was attributed so many of the
severities of the early part of the present emperor's reign. A
cold, cruel face, I thought, my ideal of a Spanish inquisitor.
Our friend, Prince Andronykoff, who brought us together,
was amused by my instinctive antipathy for the czar's great
counsellor.
We had previously travelled with a different kind of
churchman, to whom we were especially commended -
Father John of Kronstadt, the gentle and saintly "miracle-
worker" of the priesthood - who asked me when I left
Russia to speak always of the good things I had met there,
not of the evil, like so many travellers and writers. He,
certainly, was prominent among the subjects permitted me!
At St. Petersburg I had received the compliment of a
"passe-partout," given to authors visiting Russia during the
coronation summer, entitling me to passage by train and
boat throughout the czar's dominions. Our little party was
happily augmented by a young lady of English birth, who
spoke the Russian language like a native, whom I was
fortunate enough to secure as comrade and interpreter. We
travelled - everywhere finding telegrams sent ahead by
authority in St. Petersburg to secure our comfort - to
Moscow, Nijni-Novgorod, and the whole length of the
Volga River, visiting Kazan, the ancient Tartar city, and
other towns along its banks, crossing southern Russia, as I
have said, to Kieff and Odessa, finally traversing the Black
Sea on an up-to-date Clyde-built steamer, with porcelain
bath-tubs and brass
bedsteads and a pleasant company in the saloon, the meals
served with all the dainties of the region. Running through
the Ægean Sea in glorious weather, we reached
Constantinople two days after the Armenian massacre of
that year, when the blood of the victims, hastily covered
with buckets of whitewash, was still sticky in the streets.
Two exciting days were spent exploring the city in a
landau, protected by my son, a dragoman, the coachman,
and a "cavass," a superbly uniformed native soldier lent me
by our minister, Mr. Terrell, from the American legation. It
was thrilling to be told that every Turk we met wearing a
new handkerchief tied around his tarboosh had killed his
Armenian; and on all sides hearing stories of recent
violence and atrocity in the streets through which we
passed. I had then my first view, in the museum, of the
so-called sarcophagus of the great Alexander, which has
always seemed to me the most beautiful marble I have
seen.
From Constantinople to Smyrna, Patras, and Athens,
thence in a filthy Italian ship, by way of the canal of Corinth
(in which we crashed against the side of the chasm and
nearly came to grief), to Corfu, Brindisi, and Naples,
where we took the tiny steamer Ems for New York. The
worst storm I ever encountered at sea was met off the
Azores on that voyage home, but we arrived safely, none
the worse for it.
Another year I went from New York with my son and
his young wife in their private car on a journey of over nine
thousand miles in our own country, visiting Mexico, Texas,
and California before recrossing the continent.
In 1903 my husband and I made, with a merry young
party, the circuit of the Mediterranean, visiting Funchal,
Gibraltar, Algiers, Malta, Athens, Constantinople,
Smyrna, Palestine, and Egypt, spending the spring months
in Rome, thence returning by Venice and Milan to London.
In London all our arrangements were concluded, through
the kindness of friends, for an exceptionally good view of
the intended pageant of King Edward's coronation, when
the news of the king's illness came like a thunder-clap upon
the preparations and altered everybody's plans.
That spring in Italy had but made me lament the more
the lost chord in my experience occasioned by my
husband's necessary refusal to accept the post of the first
ambassador to Italy offered him by President Cleveland.
The image of what might have been a complete holiday for
us two busy brain-workers in hard-and-fast New York
has many a time since arisen temptingly in mind.
The three winters after my husband's death in 1904 were
spent at beautiful, kindly Cannes, in the French Riviera,
where nature overflows in blossom and residents lavish
welcome upon the stranger within their gates. The last
season was passed amid the palm and rose gardens and
forests of pine and heather belonging to Château St.
Michel, which my son had leased for his little children and
myself, from its owner, Lord Glenesk, who came there to
visit us in the spring, and told many interesting stories of the
celebrated and historic personages who had been his
guests at the château in the lifetime of his wife and son. The
children used to love using the donkey-chair provided for
the use of Empress Eugénie, which we found in the stables
and to which they annexed a pretty little cream-colored
beast, the very genius of obstinacy, for the circuit of the
spacious grounds. I remember one evening when Lord
Glenesk told of his being asked to go and inform the
empress of
her son's, the Prince Imperial's, death in Africa, and a
space of silence that ensued, while tears choked the old
man's utterance and poured down his cheeks like rain.
Later that spring, after a dinner in his house in Piccadilly -
Byron's house, of which Lord Glenesk had made a
museum of pictures, miniatures, objets d'art, and literary
souvenirs - he showed me several relics of his intimacy
with the family of Napoleon III as well as with other
distinguished people. He described a dinner once taking
place there, when, quite accidentally, there came together
the three most noteworthy young royalties in Europe -
Alfonso, King of Spain; Rudolph, Crown Prince of
Austria; and the Prince Imperial of France - all bright,
gay, and boyish in their talk, all destined to tragic ending of
lives full of promise. Amid his faded gildings and poignant
souvenirs Lord Glenesk moved, a sad and solitary figure
much troubled by physical infirmity, and never ceasing to
mourn the loss of his only son (Hon. Algernon Borthinck, a
charming young man who had brought us a letter of
introduction to New York and dined with us some years
previous).
A most engaging personality was that of Hon. Frederick
Leveson-Gore - "Freddy," as he was lovingly called by
his intimates, an old man then, but possessed of an unfailing
spring of sweetness, sympathy, and high intelligence that
endeared him to all acquaintances. I saw him quite often in
Cannes before the fatal cold he took that ended in
pneumonia, and he had brought to me one of his books to
read, which I returned with a note of thanks and
appreciation, reaching him in his sick-room just at the last.
Lord Rendel, Gladstone's friend, the owner of lovely
Château Thorenc, was full of recollections of his great
hero's visits, his habits when there on holidays, and the
delightful abundance of his talk among intimate friends. He
showed me the chair in which Gladstone used to sit and
look out upon the orange groves and paradise of flowers
surrounding the château, of which words of description can
give very faint idea.
A great pleasure was in our drives out to Château
Garibondy, to visit Lady Alfred Paget, oftenest found at
work amid her gardens on the wild, picturesque hill-side
looking up into deep gorges filled with forests of odorous
pine. Here, on one occasion, my son and I drove out to
meet at luncheon their royal highnesses, Comte and
Comtesse de Caserta and two of the princesses of Bourbon-
Sicily, the chief personages of resident society in Cannes,
to whom I had been indebted for kindness and sympathy in
a time of great stress and sorrow the previous year.
Everybody loved and welcomed the gentle and gracious
Countess of Caserta, whose husband would have been
reigning sovereign of Naples had not that throne been
dashed into nothingness by Garibaldi's fiery action. I recall
this occasion particularly because of the informality and
gayety of the talk at table in the home-like dining-room of
the quaint little old château.
To H. R. H. Countess Caserta I was beholden for the
pleasure of an acquaintance, one of the most interesting of
all those whom I made in Cannes, with that royal Lady of
Sorrows, Countess de Trani, sister of the ill-fated empress
of Austria, and mother of the invalid princess of
Hohenzollern, upon whom she was in loving attendance at
the Hotel Californie in close vicinity to Château St. Michel.
I suppose no one could have had a more dramatic history
than hers, one fuller of heart-breaking bereavements -
and yet she was a lesson of noble resignation to the will of
God,
of heroic cheerfulness to all who came within the radius of
her presence. A familiar sight in our bowery roads on the
Californie hill was her tall, swiftly moving figure, so strongly
resembling that of the empress of Austria, walking beside
the invalid chair of Princess Hohenzollern, whose wit and
spirit and vigorous young womanhood were doomed to an
early ending in the following year. The death of this lady
was to close for Countess Trani a cruel category of
sorrows. The sudden violent death of her husband, Count
Louis de Trani, the tragic breaking of the engagement of
her young sister with Ludwig, the mad king of Bavaria; the
frightful fate of the same sister, who, as Duchesse
d'Alençon, was burned up in the fire at the Charity Bazar
in Paris; the execution of her close kinsman, Maximilian,
emperor of Mexico; the madness of his wife Carlotta; the
calamitous death of her nephew, Prince Rudolph of
Austria, and, darkest tragedy of all, the assassination of her
beloved and radiant sister, the Austrian empress, made up
her litany of woes, soon to come to a climax in the loss of
her only child.
As an escape from the dusty roads of the neighborhood,
we offered to Princess Hohenzollern the use of the grounds
of St. Michel, where, in walks of bamboo or lemon trees
meeting overhead, she might be quite secluded from
invasion. But she often stopped beside the children playing
in their sand-heap among the pines for a friendly chat, or
came among us upon the terrace blazing with flowers,
making, when she felt in the mood for it, droll comments
and quaint sayings about passing matters.
Countess de Trani lunched and took tea with me at St.
Michel several times, and we had drives together, once to
the garden at Cap d'Antibes, where, at the
suggestion of the lady in waiting, Fräulein Nelly von
Schmidt, we took tea in a humble little roadside inn instead
of the stately hotel. We sat in a dingy inner room, and
watched the peasants coming and going to drink their wine
at the tables under the vine-clad pergola, which, said the
kindly Fräulein, "Her Royal Highness always enjoys."
Another time we visited Mougins, the old fifteenth-century
walled city on the hill rising from the olive groves, where
she went in to the little shop to buy post-cards with the zeal
of an ordinary tourist; and again, "on the road to
Mandelieu," where, when we got out of the carriage to see
a new-born lamb and were wooed onward to pick white
narcissus growing in masses in the rich meadow at hand,
she walked with as light a step as a school-girl, soon
acquiring a larger bouquet than any of us.
I dwell upon the memories of this lady because she has
always seemed to me to realize the noblest type of
womanhood - brave, serene, submissive, cheerful, yet
never gay, wearing her inheritance of sorrow like a crown.
Another royal invalid to whom we extended a
continuance of the freedom of crossing Lord Glenesk's
grounds was the elder Grand-Duke Michael of Russia,
since passed away, son of Czar Nicholas I, and patriarch
of the house of Romanoff, living at the Villa Valetta
adjoining ours. He came once with his suite surrounding his
donkey-chair, which he could not leave, and sent in to ask
if I would receive his thanks in person, which I did,
standing on the front driveway for a little talk, on his part
gentle and courteous, although principally about the
respective temperatures of our houses, the force of the
mistral at certain points, etc. His daughter, the
Grand-Duchess Anastasie, lived in an imposing villa
not far off, and there the present crown princess of
Germany passed her happy and beloved girlhood amid the
"blue and gold" of Cannes.
The Grand-Duke Michael of Russia, with his popular
wife, Countess Torby, and three charming, well-bred
children, who came sometimes to play with ours, lived also
near by; and in all these houses there was a perpetual
va-et-vient of the Russian imperial family, making a page of
contemporaneous history rather interesting to observe and
hear about in the gossip of the drawing-rooms.
From Cannes that year I journeyed, with my friend Mrs.
Stuart Forbes, the owner of Villa Valetta, which she had
leased to the old Grand-Duke Michael, to Varese, through
north Italy, and around the Italian lakes; bringing up finally
in London in June, and afterward making visits in the north
of England and in Scotland.
The following winter I took up my abode in
Washington. In our busy world events go on accumulating
till there seems no way to call a halt in a chronicle like this
save by laying down the pen, and that I proceed to do.
Secretary of War, telegram of,
to President Davis, 208.
Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas, 241;
visit of Miss Cary to, in prison, 243;
release of, from Fort Delaware,
243-4, 252; two letters of,
describing release and trial of
Jefferson Davis, 263-8; marriage
of, to Miss Cary, 271, 299;
kindness to ex-Confederate
soldiers, 301-2; secretary and
counsel of the Rapid Transit
Company, 302;
counsel for the Western Union
Telegraph Company and New
York Telephone Company, 302,
342; secretary of University
Dining Club, 345; refusal of, to
accept appointment as
ambassador to Italy, 365.
Return to Menu Page for Recollections Grave and Gay by Mrs. B. Return to First-Person Narratives of the American South, Beginnings to
1920 Home Page Return to Documenting the American South Home Page
"NOV. 10,1861.
"Nov. 12, 1861.
"Dear Lady: The beautiful flag made by your hands and
presented to me with the prayer that it should be borne by
my side in the impending struggle for the existence of our
country, is an appeal to me as a soldier as alluring as the
promises of glory; but when you express the hope, in
addition, that it may one day wave over the re-captured
city of your nativity, your appeal becomes a supplication so
beautiful and holy that I were craven-spirited indeed, not to
respond to it with all the ability that God has given me. Be
assured, dear young lady, that it shall wave over your home
if Heaven smiles upon our cause, and I live, and that there
shall be written upon it by the side of your name which it
now bears, 'Victory, Honor and Independence.'
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"Major-General, P. A. C. S."
Page 64
"In your article, "A Virginia Girl in the First Year of the
War," published in the August (1885) number of the
Century, you speak of a famous scout by the name of
Dillon, and when I read it I was filled with a desire to know
if he was not Charles Dillon, a noted Confederate scout
and spy, who lost his life near Burke's Station, Virginia, in
March, 1862. This fellow surely was one of the most
daring, and his body was decently buried by my company.
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"H. C. ALTENBURG."
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Page 67CHAPTER IV
IN the early days of the winter of '62, my mother, wedded
to her beloved hospital work at Culpeper Court House,
sent me to Richmond to be under care of my uncle and
aunt, Dr. and Mrs. Fairfax, who had found quarters in the
Clifton House, a dreary old building, indifferently kept,
honey-combed with subterranean passages suggesting the
romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, where, however, we girls
certainly managed to extract "sunbeams from cucumbers."
For there my Cary cousins, Hetty and Jennie, arrived from
Charlottesville to join our refugee band,
and the reign of the beautiful Hetty began as, perhaps, chief
of the war beauties of the day. Our cousin, Jennie Fairfax,
was also of our merry group. For want of a sitting-room,
we took possession of what had been a doctor's office, a
little way down the hilly street, communicating with the
hotel by an underground passage, dark as Erebus, through
which, in rainy or snowy weather, we passed by the light of
a bedroom candle. Many a dignitary of State and camp will
recall our Clifton evenings. Several times we gave suppers
to which we contributed only a roast turkey, a ham, and
some loaves of bread, with plates and knives and forks. It
was an amusing sight to see a major-general come in
hugging a bottle of brandied peaches, and a member of
Congress carrying his quota of sardines and French prunes.
At these feasts there was a democratic commingling of
officers and "high-privates."
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Page 86CHAPTER V
BEFORE the seven days' battles in front of Richmond were
delivered, my mother insisted upon my going with my aunt
to Botetourt Springs, in the south-western hill country of
Virginia, in a region that seemed to our strained and weary
gaze, to our ears jaded with sounds of battle and hospital,
akin to paradise. Leaving the train, we drove in an archaic
stagecoach through a fertile valley between bluest
mountains, under summer skies with little silver clouds afloat
"on the broad field of heaven's bright wilderness." At the
wayside hamlets where we stopped to water horses, stolid
country folk asked vague questions about the "fighting down
Richmond way," more interested in the non-arrival of a jug
of molasses or a sack of meal than in the issue of the
battles. When we arrived at our destination, a young heart
in spite of itself rebounded from dreadful pressure. I felt like
a bird that has flown through storm-clouds to rest in some
leaf-protected nest. What joy to lie down at night without
fear of being awakened by shot or shell or rattle of
musketry, or by summons to the window to hear of a
casualty to a friend or relative - to get up to idle days of
rambling in the woods, of freedom from surroundings of
mangled and fevered humanity one was powerless to save!
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"WASHINGTON, D. C., March 19, 1863.
"Provost Marshal,
"BRIGADIER GEN. MARTINDALE
"(Signed) JOHN P. SHERBURNE
"Ass. Adjt. General
"A. W. BAKER, Lt. and Adjutant, Washington D .C."
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Page 116CHAPTER VI
OUR "On to Washington" experience was a nine days'
wonder among our friends in Richmond, and for a brief
space I enjoyed distinction as an arbiter of fashion,
resulting from possession of a new hat and gown, boots
and gloves, all at once. My few fineries, snatched from the
protesting clutch of Uncle Sam, were handed about to be
copied, till I feared they would be worn out. My mother
having withdrawn for a while from her hospital work, we
enjoyed a semblance of home in the portion of a dwelling
in Third Street, kindly leased to us by the friends who
owned it. We had a large sitting-room with a pantry back
of it. In this we received visitors and took our meals,
prepared by our friend's negro cook in the kitchen in the
backyard. Upstairs were our bedrooms and bath. My
cousin Hetty Cary, returning again from Baltimore, had
rejoined us. My brother, who had been at Charleston
doing guard-boat duty at the time of the first attack on
Sumter by the iron-clad fleet - lying night after night in a
small boat upon an open sea, rocking on the waves,
listening intently for a movement from the enemy - was
ordered back to Richmond, to the school-ship Patrick
Henry, on the James.
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Page 137CHAPTER VII
DARK days were in store for Richmond. An incipient
bread riot occurred in her streets in April, when a large
number of women and children of the poorer class met and
marched through Main and Cary streets, attacking and
sacking several stores kept by known speculators.
President Davis, Governor Letcher, General Elzey, and
General Winder, with Mr. Seddon, Secretary of War, met
the painful situation by prompt but kind measures and
personal appeal. Rations of rice issued by the government
aided to calm the disturbance, which left, however, a
distressing impression upon all minds.
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Page 139STONEWALL JACKSON'S WAY
BRIGADE, WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA.
Stir up the camp fire bright;
No matter if the canteen fails,
We'll make a warring night.
Here Shenandoah brawls along,
There burly Blue Ridge echoes strong
To swell the Brigade's rousing song
Of "Stonewall Jackson's way."
Cocked o'er his eye askew -
The shrewd dry smile - the speech as pat -
So calm, so blunt, so true.
The Blue Light Elder knows o'er well;
Says he, "That's Banks - he's fond of shell,
Lord save his soul! - we'll give him - well,
That's Stonewall Jackson's way!"
Old Blue Light's going to pray.
Strangle the fool that dares to scoff!
Attention! it's his way.
Appealing from his native sod
In forma pauperis to God -
Lay bare thine arm; stretch forth thy rod,
Amen! That's Stonewall's way.
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Steady - the whole brigade!
Hill's at the ford cut off. We'll win
His way out, ball and blade.
What matter if our shoes are worn;
What matter if our feet are torn,
"Quick step," we're with him before dawn.
That's Stonewall Jackson's way.
Of morning, and by George
There's Longstreet struggling in the lists,
Hemmed in an ugly gorge.
Pope and his Yankees, whipped before,
"Bay'net and grape," hear Stonewall roar.
"Charge Stuart! Pay off Ashby's score,"
In Stonewall Jackson's way.
For news of Stonewall's band.
Ah! widow! read with eyes that burn
That ring upon thy hand.
Ah! wife, sew on, pray on, hope on,
Thy life shall not be all forlorn;
The foe had better ne'er been born
Than get in Stonewall's way.
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Page 166CHAPTER VIII
NOW came the winter's lull before the new fury of the
storm should break forth with the spring.
It was evident to all older and graver people that
the iron belt surrounding the Southern country was being
gradually drawn closer and her vitality in mortal peril of
exhaustion. Our armies were dwindling, those of the North
increasing with every draft and the payment of liberal
bounties. Starved, nearly bankrupt, thousands of our best
soldiers killed in battle, their places filled by boys and old
men, the Federal Government refusing to exchange
prisoners; our exports useless because of armed ships
closing in our ports all along the coast, our prospects were
of the gloomiest, even though Lee had won victory for our
banners in the East. We young ones, who knew nothing
and refused to believe in "croakers," kept on with our
valiant boasting about our invincible army and the like; but
the end was beginning to be in sight.
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That's doubly linked unto enduring fame;
The gentle poet of the Bridge of Sighs,
The hero, cynosure of tenderest eyes.
HOOD, whose keen sword has never known a stain,
Whose valor brightened Chickamauga's plain;
Well might he stand in glory's blazing roll
To represent to future times my whole;
For goodlier Knighthood surely never shone
Round fair Queen Bess upon her stately throne
Than his, whose lofty deeds we proudly call our own."
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Page 192CHAPTER IX
THE question of executive policy was by no means left at
rest among the exponents of public opinion in Richmond.
While there was a large faction supporting the President in
his disapproval of General Johnston's method of playing the
game of war with General Sherman, in northern Georgia,
many a bitter comment was heard upon Mr. Davis's final
action in relieving Johnston of his command. People we
met said outspokenly that the Executive's animus against
Johnston was based upon a petty feud between their
wives, who had been daily associates and friends in the old
Washington days. Others warmly defended Mr. Davis,
declaring that the brilliant and aggressive Hood was the
general of all others to make up for Johnston's delay in
bringing matters to a crisis.
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Page 207CHAPTER X
ON the morning of April 2, a perfect Sunday of the
Southern spring, a large congregation assembled as usual
at St. Paul's. I happened to sit in the rear of the President's
pew, so near that I plainly saw the sort of gray pallor that
came upon his face as he read a scrap of paper thrust into
his hand by a messenger hurrying up the middle aisle. With
stern set lips and his usual quick military tread, he left the
church, a number of other people rising in their seats and
hastening after him, those who were left swept by a
universal tremor of alarm. The rector, accustomed as he
was to these frequent scenes in church, came down to the
altar rail and tenderly begged his people to remain and
finish the service, which was done.
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"R. & D. R.R.
"Evacuation of Richmond completed in order on
morning of third. Genl. Lee concentrated pretty well about
Amelia C. H. on 5th, but enemy occupied Junction that
evening, and our forces moved during the night
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"Secy. of War."
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"I write you this
jointly, because I can have no idea
where Clarence is. Can't you imagine with what a heavy
heart I begin it--? The last two days have added long
years to my life. I have cried until no more tears will come,
and my heart throbs to bursting night and day. When I
bade you good-bye, dear, and walked home alone, I could
not trust myself to give another look after you. All that
evening the air was full of farewells as if to the dead.
Hardly anybody went to bed. We walked through the
streets like lost spirits till nearly daybreak. My dearest
mother, it is a special Providence that has spared you this!
Your going to nurse poor Bert at this crisis has saved you a
shock I never can forget. With the din of the enemy's
wagon trains, bands, trampling horses, fifes, hurrahs and
cannon ever in my ears, I can hardly write coherently. As
you desired, in case of trouble, I left our quarters and
came over here to be under my uncle's wing. In Aunt M.'s
serious illness the house is overflowing; there was not a
room or a bed to give me, but that made no difference,
they insisted on my staying all the same. Up under the roof
there was a lumber-room with two windows and I paid an
old darkey with some wrecks of food left from our
housekeeping, to clear it out, and scrub floor and walls and
windows, till all was absolutely clean. A cot was found and
some old chairs and tables - our
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Page 238CHAPTER XI
IT was thought best for us ex-Confederates of both sexes
to keep quietly out of public observation while still the
wave of feeling (enormously increased by the assassination
of Lincoln) dashed high over our reunion with Northern
friends.
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"I enclose you your commission, God prosper you with
it.
"RICHARD CORBIN."
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"MY DEAR MR. PRESIDENT.
"The Secretary of State will doubtless communicate to
you the suggestion which I made yesterday the subject of
a dispatch to him.
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"A. DUDLEY MANN.
"President C. S. A., Richmond, Virginia."
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Page 273CHAPTER XII
WHAT an odd, provincial, pleasant little old New York
was that of the seventies, just when the waves of after-the-
war prosperity had begun to strike its sides and make it
feel the impulse toward a progress never afterward to
cease!
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Page 287CHAPTER XIII
I WAS connected with a musical movement in New York
society inaugurated by a number of gentlemen, of which
Mr. George Templeton Strong was the president. It was
called the Church Musical Association, the director, Dr.
Pech, an Englishman thoroughly trained in such
conductorship. We had one hundred volunteers, including
many people in society, and fifty paid singers in the
choruses, with an orchestra of one hundred musicians,
many of them from the Philharmonic orchestra, of which
Mr. Strong was also, or had been, president. Our
rehearsals - solid, hard work, no shirking or favoritism
anywhere - were held in some rooms belonging to Trinity
Chapel. Dr. Pech, a cold, rather sardonic man, thoroughly
knew his business and brought us on rapidly. Particularly
did we progress in sight-reading, and the hours of
deciphering those grand masses were a keen pleasure.
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Page 298CHAPTER XIV
AMONG notable public events after our first settling in
New York, there was the riot of 1871, in which twenty-nine
policemen and soldiers were killed and wounded, together
with one hundred and four of their assailants, in the attack
of Irish Catholics upon parading Orangemen. To me, so
recently inured to war's alarms, this affair did not seem
more than a heavy skirmish, although it produced a great
sensation in the town. Our many years of peace and
happiness succeeding the turmoil and trials of early youth
now set in, leaving our little family without a history. My
husband had been recommended by Mr. Charles O'Conor
to prefer charges before the judiciary committee of the
Assembly at Albany against one of the most flagrant
offenders among the corrupt judges of the Tweed régime
who then disgraced the bench of the Superior Court of the
city of New York. This he did with such vigor and
conviction in opening the trial for the prosecution, in an
argument lasting one day, followed by Messrs. John E.
Parsons, Van Cott, and Stickney for the New York Bar
Association, that the offender was promptly found guilty
and removed from the bench.
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With conquering limbs astride from land to land.
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman, with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
With silent lips. 'Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free;
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The wretched refuse of your teeming shore -
Send these, the nameless, tempest-tossed, to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'"
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"Rue de Tourneau, 8."
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Page 337CHAPTER XV
IT has been hinted by disaffected people that the
originator of authors' readings from their own works has
much to answer for; and so timorously I admit having
devised for the benefit of the American Copyright League,
then in strong need of funds for the prosecution of their
cause, the first entertainment of this nature formally given in
New York. The appeal made to me by the secretary of the
association, Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, resulted in a
meeting of their body at our home to discuss the
advisability of two afternoons of "Authors' Readings," at
the Madison Square Theatre, promised by the Messrs.
Mallory should the idea take practical shape.
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Two years later, in a more capacious house to which we
had removed at 83 Irving Place - still looking into the
green precincts of Gramercy Park, although on the other
side - I repeated The Ephemeron when it became our
turn to receive the Thursday Evening Club. On this
occasion my associate editors were Bishop Potter and
Judge Howland, while to Professor Charles Carroll, of the
New York University, and the silver-tongued Mr. Daniel
Dougherty fell the reading of articles by authors too shy to
interpret their own productions.
Page 341
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INDEX
A
B
Page 372
Page 373
C
Page 374
Page 375
D
Page 376
E
F
Page 377
G
H
Page 378
I
Page 379
J
K
L
Page 380
M
Page 381
N
O
Page 382
P
Page 383
R
S
Page 384
Page 385
T
U
V
Page 386
W
Y
Z