Mrs. Polk, though ever willing to converse, and always enriching the conversation from her ready store of information and observation, is remarkably reticent in regard to her own life. Her most familiar friends fail to persuade an account of incidents relating purely to herself. She is never seen in public except at church. The visits of chosen friends are grateful to her, but she does not return them, and no attraction is sufficient to draw her far away from the home where cluster so many dear and sacred memories. Occasionally she spends a few days with her relatives in other counties.
Having no children, Mrs. Polk, some time after the death of her husband, adopted a niece, who has ever since been an inmate of her house. No employment could have served better to console the many lonely hours that must be the inevitable heritage of a widowed heart, than the charge of a daughter.
Mrs. Polk was born in the dawn of the nineteenth century, and is a pure type of a class which is rapidly becoming extinct. With her will pass away many of the excellences and not a few of the foibles of a class modelled after the aristocracy of the old world on their graftings in the new. Her life has been spent in an age and country where chivalric honor to woman is a matter of national pride, yet in a land of slaves and slavery. The young and middle-aged of to-day will never know the opportunities of time and means which she, half a century ago, enjoyed; for the South is changed, and verily old things have passed away and all are new. The present generation, thrown more upon their own resources, and passing through the perplexities of change and misfortune, will grow away from the old regime, and may perhaps lose many of their virtues with too few of their faults.
During the late civil war, she suffered in common with the people of the South, losing much of her valuable property, but was fortunately left with sufficient means to enable her to live in her usual style of comfort. Her sympathies were with the section of country in which she was reared, but her conduct was throughout befitting her station, and no expression or action of hers is a reflection of aught save refined bearing and high-toned sensibility.
Surrounded with comforts and luxuries, and enjoying the companionship of her relatives and friends, Mrs. Polk glides calmly down the vale of years, with the memory of a past all brightness, and the hopes of a future all peace. The lifetime imitation of a pure and useful standard of excellence has rewarded her with a glorious fame, and she dwells among the friends of her youth, honored and respected, trusted and beloved.
XVI.
MARGARET TAYLOR.
The importance attached to Presidential honors is not in our country the inheritance of persons born to the wearing of them. Monarchial governments, by tradition and law, designate not only who is the “chief magistrate,” but also provide candidates in advance for the succession. People, therefore, born to such high estate are always, from infancy onward, objects of world-wide interest; and the minutest acts of their lives, before they achieve their inherited position as well as after, are subjects of note from a thousand pens.
In our own country the popular will selects its candidates for the highest office within its gift as often from those who have suddenly received popularity as from those who have, by antecedent history, become known to fame. It is probably true that, just before the breaking out of actual hostilities between this country and Mexico, there was no military officer—his long and faithful public service considered—who was as little known to the country at large as General Taylor.
That the future Mistress of the White House who was buried in the seclusion of his retired private life, should be little known out of her domestic circle, is therefore not surprising; and that a family, the members of which had always courted seclusion and were satisfied with making perfect the narrow circle of their accepted duties, should shrink from publicity and notice, is not to be wondered at; and, as a consequence, there is but little left to afford material for the pen of the historian.
Mrs. Taylor and her daughter “Betty,” who for a while shone forth as the acknowledged “first ladies of the land,” never sympathized with the display and bustle of the White House, and they always performed such official duties as were imperatively forced upon them, by their exalted position, as a task that had no compensation for the sacrifices attending it.