Mr. and Mrs. Marcy were devoted to Mrs. Eames; her salon was almost the daily resort of Edward Everett, Rufus Choate, Charles Sumner, Secretary [James] Guthrie, Governor [John A.] Andrews of Massachusetts, Winter Davis, Caleb Cushing, Senator Preston King, N.P. Banks, and representative men of that ilk. Mr. [Samuel J.] Tilden when in Washington was often their guest. The gentlemen, who were all on the most familiar terms with the family, were in the habit of bringing their less conspicuous friends from time to time, thus making it quite the most attractive salon that has been seen in Washington since the death of Mrs. Madison, and made such without any of the attractions of wealth or luxury.
The relations thus established with the public men of the country at her fireside were strengthened and enriched by a voluminous correspondence. Her father, who was a very accomplished man, had one of the largest and choicest private libraries in New York, of which, from the time she could read, Mrs. Eames had the freedom; in this library she spent more time than anyone else, and more than anywhere else, until her marriage. As a consequence, it is no disparagement to any one else to say that during her residence there she was intellectually quite the most accomplished woman in Washington. Her epistolary talent was famous in her generation.
Her correspondence if collected and published would prove to have been not less voluminous than Mme. de Sevigné's and, in point of literary art, in no particular inferior to that of the famous French woman.
After three or four months spent in Washington, I returned to my home in New York; and several years later, in the spring of 1848, suffered one of the severest ordeals of my life. I refer to my father's death. No human being ever entered eternity more beloved or esteemed than he, and as I look back to my life with him I realize that I was possibly more blessed than I deserved to be permitted to live with such a well-nigh perfect character and to know him familiarly. From my earliest childhood I was accustomed to see the sorrowing and oppressed come to him for advice. He was especially qualified to perform such a function owing to his long tenure of the office of Surrogate. Widows and orphans who could not afford litigation always found in him a faithful friend. With a capacity of feeling for the wrongs of others as keenly as though inflicted upon himself, his sympathy invariably assumed a practical form and he accordingly left behind him hosts of sorrowing and grateful hearts. A short time before his death I visited a dying widow, a devoted Roman Catholic, whom from time to time my father had assisted. When I was about to leave, she said: "Say to your father I hope to meet him among the just made perfect." This remark of a poor woman has been to me through all these years a greater consolation than any public tribute or imposing eulogy. Finely chiseled monuments and fulsome epitaphs are not to be compared with the benediction of grateful hearts.
The funeral services were conducted, according to the custom of sixty years ago, by the Rev. Dr. William Adams and the Rev. Dr. Philip Milledoler. Members of the bar and many prominent residents of New York, including his two physicians, Doctors John W. Francis and Campbell F. Stewart, walked behind the coffin, which, by the way, was not placed in a hearse but was carried to the Second Street Cemetery, where his remains were temporarily placed. There were six clergymen present at his funeral—the Rev. Doctors Thomas De Witt, Thomas E. Vermilye, Philip Milledoler, William Adams, John Knox and George H. Fisher, all ministers of the Reformed Dutch Church except the Rev. Dr. Adams, the distinguished Presbyterian divine.
I find myself almost instinctively returning to the Scott family as associated with the most cherished memories of some of the happiest days of my life. During my childhood I formed a close intimacy with Cornelia Scott, the second daughter of the distinguished General, which continued until the close of her life. When I first knew the family it made its winter home in New York at the American Hotel, then a fashionable hostelry kept by William B. Cozzens, on the corner of Barclay Street and Broadway. In the summer the family resided at Hampton, the old Mayo place near Elizabeth in New Jersey, where they kept open house. Colonel John Mayo of Richmond, whose daughter Maria was the wife of General Scott, had purchased this country seat many years before as a favor to his wife, Miss Abigail De Hart of New Jersey, and Mrs. Scott subsequently inherited it. Colonel John Mayo, who was a citizen of large wealth and great prominence, was so public-spirited that not long subsequent to the Revolutionary War, and entirely at his own expense, he built from his own plans a bridge across the James River at Richmond. I have heard Mrs. Scott graphically describe her father's trips from Richmond to Elizabeth in his coach-of-four with outriders and grooms, and his enthusiastic reception when he reached his destination.
I have frequently heard it said that Mrs. Scott as a young woman refused the early offers of marriage from the man who eventually became her husband because his rank in the army was too low to suit her taste, but that she finally relented when he became a General. I am able to contradict this statement as Mrs. Scott told me with her own lips that she never made his acquaintance until he was a General, in spite of the fact that they were both natives of the same State. This did not by any means, however, indicate a marriage late in life, as General Scott became a Brigadier General on the 9th of March, 1814, when he was between twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age. In the Sentinel, published in Newark, New Jersey, on the 25th of March, 1817, the following marriage notice appears:
Married—at Belleville, Virginia, at the seat of Col. Mayo, General Winfield Scott of the U.S. Army to Miss Maria D. Mayo.
Mrs. Scott's record as a belle was truly remarkable, and in the latter years of her life when I knew her very intimately she still retained traces of great beauty. Her accomplishments, too, were extraordinary for that period. She was not only a skilled performer upon the piano and harp, but also a linguist of considerable proficiency, while her grace of manner and brilliant powers of repartee added greatly to her social charms. On one occasion during Polk's administration she attended a levee at the White House, and as she passed down the line with the other guests she received an enthusiastic welcome and was soon so completely surrounded by an admiring throng that for a while Mrs. Polk was left very much to herself. It was Mrs. Scott who wrote in the album of a friend the verse entitled, "The Two Faults of Men." Two other verses were written under it several years later by the Hon. William C. Somerville of Maryland, at one time our Minister to Sweden, and the author of "Letters from Paris on the Causes and Consequences of the French Revolution."
Women have many faults,
The men have only two;
There's nothing right they say,
And nothing right they do.