Walks about Washington

by Francis E. Leupp

In the White House, Jackson lived a good deal apart. He was always glad to see any one who came on a friendly errand, and loved to frolic with children; but one of his chief pleasures was sitting by himself in the big south room of the second story and smoking. An aged friend who, as a boy, visited the White House with his father while Jackson was there, told me that the President bade them draw up with him by the fireside, offered a clean clay pipe to the elder of the visitors, and, lighting his own well-seasoned corn-cob, puffed the smoke up the chimney, explaining that Emily Donelson—the wife of his secretary, who kept house for him—disliked the smell of tobacco.

The ghost of the Peggy Eaton affair could never be permanently exorcised. Timberlake had not only died penniless and in debt but left his official accounts in confusion, and a year or two later it was discovered that he had been a defaulter. His bondsman resisted payment of the shortage, accusing Lieutenant Robert B. Randolph, who had taken over Timberlake’s papers, of the actual responsibility for it. Randolph, in demanding a court-martial, committed a technical breach of discipline for which the President dismissed him summarily from the service. One day Jackson was a passenger on a river steamboat which stopped briefly at a wharf in Alexandria. He was sitting alone, when a stranger approached him as if to shake hands. Jackson, seeing him drawing off one of his gloves, said amiably, “Never mind your glove, sir,” and stretched out his own hand. But the stranger, instead of taking it, made a violent lunge at Jackson’s face, exclaiming: “I am Lieutenant Randolph, whom you have wronged and insulted, and I came here to pull your nose!” Startled by the noise, two or three gentlemen ran forward and sprang upon Randolph, who, in the struggle that followed, reached the gangplank and freed himself. The President, convinced by later developments that the Lieutenant had really suffered an injustice, offered to reinstate him if he would apologize for the nose-pulling; but he scornfully rejected the proposal.

The Cabinet, as reorganized in consequence of pretty Peggy’s fight, did not hang together long. Secretary Eaton intimated presently that he would like to retire, Van Buren seemed of the same mind, so the President appointed the former Governor of Florida and the latter Minister to England. The Senate confirmed Eaton’s appointment with good enough grace, but balked at that of Van Buren, who, having gone to England in good faith to enter upon his duties, was put to the humiliating necessity of coming home again. Jackson was angry, regarding this as a blow at himself. “If they don’t want him for Minister,” he thundered, “we’ll see if they like him any better as President!” He therefore laid out a program beginning with his own reëlection with Van Buren as his Vice-president, and ending with Van Buren’s election as his successor. The plan carried; and, as Jackson’s affection for Van Buren had grown largely out of the latter’s stanch loyalty in the Cabinet quarrel, Mrs. Eaton may be said to have shaped American history for a considerable term of years.

Long after this lady ceased to hold the center of the national stage, her career continued to be picturesque. Her husband, having retired from the Governorship of Florida, was appointed Minister to Spain, and in Madrid she appears to have made herself a great favorite at court. After General Eaton’s death she returned to Washington, and was living down much of the adverse sentiment of former days, when there appeared on the scene an Italian dancing-master named Buchignani, whose dark, soulful eyes and insinuating manners proved too much for even her experienced heart. Although she was well advanced in years and he was young enough to be her son, she not only became his wife, but let all her comfortable fortune slip into his hands, and gradually gave him also the custody of her grandchildren’s property, which she was holding in trust. He repaid her kindness by eloping with her favorite granddaughter to Canada, where he went into business as a saloon-keeper. Mrs. Buchignani died in 1879, still glorying in the memory of her early activities.

As Vice-president, Van Buren lived in the Decatur house, the big somber brick dwelling on the corner of Jackson Place and H Street. Across the park, just south of the present home of the Cosmos Club, lived Mr. and Mrs. Ogle Tayloe, with whom it was his habit to pass his disengaged evenings. Suddenly he ceased

Decatur House

coming, and after some weeks Mr. Tayloe hunted him up to inquire what was the matter. His only response was: “Mrs. Tayloe has things lying about on her table which should not be there.” Van Buren had always seemed interested in Mrs. Tayloe’s collection of contemporary autographs; and, when husband and wife were searching there for the possible cause of offense, they came upon a letter from a prominent New York politician containing the passage: “What is little Matt doing? Some dirty work, of course, as usual.” Mrs. Tayloe cut out the derogatory paragraph and sent word to Van Buren that she had done so, and at once he renewed his visits.

Jackson escorted Van Buren to the Capitol, for his inauguration, in a carriage widely celebrated as the “Constitution coach.” It was a present to the General from citizens of New York and was built out of timbers from the old war frigate Constitution, a picture of which was emblazoned on one panel. Van Buren discovered, before he had been long in office, that a thousand things which the people accepted without question from a military hero they were prepared to criticize in a civilian. Moreover, his son John, while in England some years before, had danced with the Princess Victoria and thus acquired the nickname “Prince John,” of which the enemies of the administration made use as a political cudgel, declaring that the whole family were aping the foreign aristocracy. Along came the financial panic of 1837, reducing thousands of well-to-do persons to poverty, and this was fatuously laid to Van Buren’s account when he stood for reëlection in 1840 against General William Henry Harrison, affectionately styled “Old Tippecanoe” in memory of one of his victories.

Regardless of the fact that Jackson had refurnished the White House expensively for those days and then given entertainments which spoiled nearly everything spoilable, it was Van Buren who became the undeserving target for attack on the ground that he maintained “a royal establishment” in “a palace as splendid as that of the Cæsars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion.” The stump orators harped on the use of gold and silver spoons at the White House table, and on the excessive number of spittoons distributed in the parlors and halls. Vainly did the President’s defenders show that the gold spoons were mostly plated ware, and that the spittoons, like the other furniture, were the property of the Government: the voters who ate their porridge from wooden vessels and threw their quids into boxes of sawdust were resolved upon putting into his place a man of different type. Henry Clay, passing the White House one day when a blaze broke out in the laundry, joined the firemen in helping to extinguish it, remarking jocularly to the President: “Though we are bound to have you out of here, Mr. Van Buren, we don’t want you burned out.”