It was natural, therefore, when President Washington journeyed to South Carolina in 1791, he should stop at Clifton, Colonel Alston’s plantation, and marvel at the luxurious cultivation of the fields of young rice. If Mary Motte Alston had her mother’s character and charm—as she probably did—it is no wonder the President who was also a good farmer told her the plantation “looked like fairyland.” In his journal he wrote: “Went to a concert where were 400 ladies, the number and appearance of which exceeded anything I had ever seen.” And later this: “Was visited about two o’clock by a great number of most respectable ladies in Charleston, the first honour of the kind I had ever experienced, as flattering as singular.” Nor can we omit the fact that Commodore Gillon solved the delicate problem of where to seat the President at the state dinner by placing him opposite the loveliest lady in Charleston, and next to the wittiest.
In 1791 Colonel Alston bought the Motte house. As the Alston house it presided over the rise of an Alston to the governorship of the state. Its gate swung wide at the arrival in Charleston of Joseph Alston’s second wife, Theodosia Burr. Theodosia sailed for New York in 1813 in the swift privateer, Patriot, to join her lonely father Aaron. Four weeks later Joseph Alston sat down at a French secretary in the drawing-room and wrote Burr, “I have in vain endeavored to build upon the hope of long passage. Thirty days are decisive. My wife is either captured or lost. What a destiny is mine!” The ship was never heard of again. Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel in her excellent volume, “Charleston, the Place and Its People,” tells of the death-bed confession of an old sailor thirty years later, who had been one of a crew of pirates who had captured the ship and made the passengers walk the plank, and some color is given to this solution by an anonymous note found in a volume of Burr’s letters, saying “Some account appeared in the New Orleans papers about 1848 of the deposition of a coloured woman—‘in relation to the death of Mrs. Alston occasioned by Pirates.’”
The eldest daughter of the Alston house, born to the purple, justified her claim to it by marrying Robert Y. Hayne, some time Governor of South Carolina, United States Senator, and proprietor of the loser’s share of a magnificent debate with Daniel Webster. That rare old gentleman, William Alston, lived until 1839. He was a practical planter who believed “that in the management of slaves the true interests of the planter were in exact accordance with the dictates of an enlightened humanity.” He loved horses, maintained a good stable on the King Street place, and raced them in lively competition; this leads Mr. Huger Smith, in his neighborly story of the Alston house, to “wonder whether Washington’s well known interest in such things led to the presence, at Colonel Alston’s plantation in 1799, of Great Plenipo, sired ‘by Royal Gift, a Jack Ass presented to the late President Washington by the King of Spain.’—Georgetown Gazette, April 17, 1799.” Certain it is that he owned Betsy Baker, who defeated Colonel William Washington’s Rosetta in a stirring race, and Gallattin, and Alborae—famous turf names all.
His children made him happy, and he endeared himself to an army of friends, not the least of whom was Thomas Jefferson. It was Jefferson, the founder of the political party which has since committed prohibition, who wrote Colonel Alston in 1818:
“I have therefore made up a box of a couple of doz. bottles among which you will find samples of the wines of White Hermitage, Ledanon, Rousillon (of Riveralto). Bergasse, claret, all of France and of Nice, and Montepulciano, of Italy.”
The visitor who penetrates to that cellar today will find it empty.
But on the drawing-room walls he will find another letter from Jefferson—as he will find one from George Washington, both addressed to John Julius Pringle, and asking him to be attorney-general of the United States. Those letters hang there because John Julius Pringle, a great lawyer, had a son, William Bull Pringle, and because fate married him to Mary Motte Alston, and because she inherited the house—and the letter—from the fine old Colonel in 1839. His brother, Robert Pringle, was in Paris when the royal family abdicated, and had the opportunity to buy the chairs from Louis Philippe’s palace which are such an ornament to the house today. Those letters from two presidents of the United States were cherished possessions of the family when another Robert Pringle was killed at Battery Wagner on Morris Island in the defense of his city against the United States. The teardrops of the crystal chandelier in that same drawing-room tinkled at the shock of two hundred and eighty days’ firing upon Fort Sumter, while the harassed family lived through a bitter repetition of the siege of eighty-odd years before, and when the Federal troops occupied the city in 1865 history repeated itself as they made headquarters in the Pringle house. Fifty thousand suns have not faded the Indian dyes in the silk damask curtains Miles Brewton imported for his new house, nor have the sea-fogs dulled the French secretary that was Rebecca Motte’s. Her high-boy is there today, so is a graceful and inviting old sofa. Time apparently cannot affect them—except as it makes these possessions infinitely more precious to the present gracious owners, Miss Susan Pringle Frost and her sisters. A seven-yard table cloth, for example, would be an exploit in linen even if it were dated 1921; dated, in scarlet cross-stitch, “Alston, 1797,” Miss Frost’s seven-yard table cloth is beyond price.
I have no doubt that when, in 1918, there were rumors of an enemy submarine base in the West Indies, and the possibility of raids upon Charleston seemed more than mere fancy, the Spirit of the House smiled, and whispered: “I recollect Miles Brewton’s father telling of Blackbeard, the pirate. He was going to raid Charles Town, but thought better of it. Then Stede Bonnet—we caught him. There have been a lot of them, trouble-makers of one kind and another. Admiral Cervera and the Spanish had some such notion. Submarines? M-m-m, perhaps. Who knows? I’m going to take a little nap now, but if you want me, Charleston, let me know. I’ll be about anyway when they commence to shell the town.”
Appendix
Those who find in the stories of Mount Vernon and The Quincy Homestead a stimulus for the preservation of other famous American residences will naturally inquire into the successful methods of the organizations of patriotic women who now carry on that work in a manner so perfectly suited to the charge.