There was small interchange of civilities between Northern and Southern ladies. The new-comers were in much evidence; Southerners saw them riding and driving in rich attire and handsome equipages, and at the theatre in all the glory of fine toilettes.
There was not so much trouble opening theatres as churches. A good many stage celebrities came to the Richmond Theatre, which was well patronised. Decorated with United States flags, it was opened during the first week of the occupation with “Don Cæsar de Bazan.” The “Whig” reported a brilliant audience. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant, who had been driving over the city, were formally invited by General Weitzel to attend the play, but did not appear.
The band played every evening in the Square, and our people, ladies especially, were invited to come out. The Square and the Capitol were at one time overrun with negroes. This was stopped. Still, our ladies did not go. Federal officers and their ladies had their music to themselves. “There was no intentional slight or rudeness on our part. We did not draw back our skirts in passing Federal soldiers, as was charged in Northern papers; if a few thoughtless girls or women did this, they were not representative. We tried not to give offense; we were heart-broken; we stayed to ourselves; and we were not hypocrites; that was all.” So our women aver. In most Southern cities efforts were made to induce the ladies to come out and hear the band play.
The day Governor Pierpont arrived, windows of the Spotswood and Monumental were crowded with Northern ladies waving handkerchiefs. “I only knew from the papers,” Matoaca tells, “that the Mansion was decorated with flowers for his reception. Our own windows, which had been as windows of a house of mourning, did not change their aspect for his coming. Our rightful governor was a fugitive; Governor Pierpont was an alien. We were submissive, but we could not rejoice.” This was the feminine and social side. On the political and masculine side, he was welcomed. Delegations of prominent Virginians from all counties brought him assurances of coöperation. The new Governor tried to give a clean, patriotic administration.
Northerners held socials in each others’ houses and in halls; there were receptions, unattended by Southerners, at the Governor’s Mansion and Military Headquarters. It might have been more politic had we gone out of our way to be socially agreeable, but it would not have been sincere. Federal officers and their wives attended our churches. A Northern Methodist Society was formed with a group of adherents, Governor and Mrs. Pierpont, and, later, General and Mrs. Canby among them. “We of the Northern colony were very dependent upon ourselves for social pleasures,” an ex-member who now considers herself a Southerner said to me recently. “There were some inter-marriages. I remember an elopement; a Petersburg girl ran away with a Federal officer, and the pair sought asylum at my father’s, in Richmond’s Northern colony. Miss Van Lew entertained us liberally. She gave a notable reception to Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and his beautiful daughter, Kate.” Miss Van Lew, a resident, was suspected of being a spy during the war.
Our ladies went veiled on the street, the motive that caused them to close their windows impelling them to cover their faces with sorrow’s shield. There was not much opportunity for young blue-coats to so much as behold our pretty girls, much less make eyes at them, had they been so minded. That veil as an accompaniment of a lissome figure and graceful carriage must have sometimes acted as a tantalising disguise.
I heard of one very cute happening in which the wind and a veil played part. Mary Triplett, our famous blonde beauty, then in the rosy freshness of early youth, was walking along when the wind took off her veil and carried it to the feet of a young Federal officer. He bent, uplifted the vagrant mask, and, with his cap held before his eyes, restored it. That was a very honest, self-denying Yankee. Perhaps he peeped around the corner of his cap. There was at that time in Richmond a bevy of marvellously lovely buds, Mattie Ould, Miss Triplett’s antithesis, among the number.
The entire South seems to have been very rich then in buds of beauty and women of distinction. Or, was it that the fires of adversity brought their charms and virtues into high relief? Names flitting through my mind are legion. Richmond’s roll has been given often. Junior members of the Petersburg set were Tabb Bolling, General Rooney Lee’s sweetheart (now his widow); Molly Bannister, General Lee’s pet, who was allowed to ride Traveller; Anne Bannister, Alice Gregory, Betty and Jeannie Osborne, Betty Cabaniss, Betty and Lucy Page, Sally Hardy, Nannie Cocke, Patty Cowles, Julia, Mary and Marion Meade, and others who queened it over General Lee’s army and wrought their pretty fingers to the bone for our lads in the trenches. To go farther afield, Georgia had her youthful “Maid of Athens,” Jule King, afterwards Mrs. Henry Grady; in Atlanta were the Clayton sisters, and Maggie Poole, Augusta Hill, Ella Ezzard, Eugenia Goode, besides a brilliant married circle. In South Carolina were Mrs. James Chesnut, her sister, Mrs. David R. Williams, and all the fair troop that figure in her “Diary From Dixie.” Louisiana’s endless roster might begin with the Slocomb family, to which General Butler paid official tribute, recording that “Mrs. Slocomb equipped the crack military company of New Orleans, the Washington Artillery, in which her son-in-law, Captain David Urquhart, is an officer.” Mrs. Urquhart’s daughter, Cora (afterwards Mrs. James Brown Potter), was, I think, a tiny maiden then. Beloved for her social charm and her charities, Mrs. Ida B. Richardson, Mrs. Urquhart’s sister, still lives in the Crescent City. There were the Leacock sisters, Mrs. Andrew Gray and Mrs. Will Howell, the “madonna of New Orleans.” There was the King family, which produced Grace King, author and historian. A Louisiana beauty was Addie Prescott, whose face and presence gave warrant of the royal blood of Spain flowing in her veins. In Mississippi was “Pearl Rivers,” afterwards Mrs. Nicholson, good genius of the “Picayune”; and Mary E. Bryan, later the genius of the “Sunny South.” Georgia and Alabama claim Mme. Le Vert, to whose intellect Lamartine paid tribute, and Augusta Evans, whose “Macaria” ran the blockade in manuscript and came out up North during the war; that delightful “Belle of the Fifties,” Mrs. Clement C. Clay, is Alabama’s own. Besides the “Rose of Texas” (Louise Wigfall), the Lone Star State has many a winsome “Southern Girl” and woman to her credit. Mrs. Roger A. Pryor is Virginia’s own. Among Florida’s fair was the “Madonna of the Wickliffe sisters,” Mrs. Yulee, Senator Yulee’s wife and, presently, Florida’s Vice-Regent for the Ladies’ Association of Mt. Vernon. Mrs. Sallie Ward Hunt and Mrs. Sallie Ewing Pope lead a long list in Kentucky, where Mary Anderson, the actress, was in her tender teens, and Bertha Honoré (afterwards Mrs. Potter Palmer) was in pinafores. To Mississippi and Missouri belongs Theodosia Worthington Valliant; and to Tennessee Betty Vance, whose beauty’s fame was world-wide, and Mary Wright, later Mrs. Treadwell. At a ball given Prince Arthur when in this country, a wealthy belle was selected to lead with him. The prince thinking he was to choose his partner, fixed on Mary Wright, exquisite in poverty’s simple white gown, and asked: “May I lead with her?” In North Carolina were Sophia Portridge, women of the houses of Devereaux, Vance, Mordecai—but I am not writing the South’s “Book of Fair and Noble Women.” I leave out of my list names brilliant as any in it.
MRS. DAVID L. YULEE