Reminiscences of Peace and War

by Sara Agnes Rice Pryor

One who liked not Stephen A. Douglas has thus described him. "Erect, compact, aggressive. A personage truly to be questioned timidly, to be approached advisedly. Here indeed was a lion, by the very look of him master of himself and of others. By reason of its regularity and masculine strength, a handsome face. A man of the world to the cut of the coat across the broad shoulders. Here was one to lift a youngster into the realm of emulation, like a character in a play, to arouse dreams of Washington and its Senators and great men. For this was one to be consulted by the great alone. A figure of dignity and power with the magnetism to compel moods. Since, when he smiled you warmed in spite of yourself, and when he frowned the world looked grave."

This was Stephen A. Douglas. The picture is a true one. What wonder that he should have captivated my husband and myself, scarcely more than half his age? The warmest friendship grew up between us.

I remember well my own first interview with him in Washington. At a crowded ball, I had found a chair outside the crush, when he approached with a bottle of champagne and a glass in his hands. "I need no introduction, Madam," he said. "I am sure you cannot have forgotten the man who met you a few years ago in the little Petersburg hotel and told you how like you are to the Empress Eugénie. No? I thought not," laughed the judge, "and yet she isn't a priming to our own women! Now," he added, bending down and speaking gravely, "I shall send Mrs. Douglas to see you. I wish you to be friends. Not pasteboard friends, with only a bit of cardboard passing between you now and then, but real good friends, meeting often and being much together." Just here, as he poised his bottle to fill my glass, his elbow was jostled, and down came the foaming champagne, over my neck and shoulders and the front of my dress. The friendship was christened—the bottle broken on the new ship! "Don't worry about the gown! You have excuse now to buy another," said the judge, as I gasped when the icy flood ran down my bosom.

He had lately married his second wife, the belle of Washington, beautiful Adele Cutts; tall, stately, and fair exceedingly. She was a great-niece of Dolley Madison. We met often, and it came to pass that "the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David."

She did not impress one as having what we call "depth of character," what is commonly implied in the term "superior," not a woman to assume to lead and teach other women—a character less lovable often than the woman who knows herself to be of like weaknesses with ourselves. But she was beautiful as a pearl, sunny-tempered, unselfish, warmhearted, unaffected, sincere. She was very attentive to her "little giant." When he made those terribly long speeches in the Senate, on the Lecompton Constitution, on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, on popular sovereignty, she would wait in the gallery and hurry down to wrap his overcoat around him, as he stood in the hall dripping with perspiration. She imbibed enough political lingo to rally and amuse him. Some workmen having arrived to erect a platform in his ball room for musicians, she exclaimed: "Oh, Judge Douglas! What is a platform? They are going to bring one into this house, and we shall be flayed alive or murdered in our beds!"

I said to her once: "You know you are not really handsomer than the rest of us! Why do people say so?"

"Because I never trick myself out in diamonds, or have more than one color in a gown. An artist told me once that all those things spoiled a picture."

She would have liked the diamonds as well as the rest of us, and once said so to her husband. "Oh, no!" he answered, "diamonds are the consolation of old wives, a diamond for a wrinkle!"

Mrs. Douglas was the first of the Washington ladies who adopted the fashion of closing her shutters in the early afternoon and lighting her rooms with gas. She was delighted as a child with the effect and indulged in a preliminary waltz with me before the company arrived. "O dear!" she exclaimed, suddenly, "what am I to do with this awful picture of Judge Douglas's? I daren't take it away because he bought it for his first wife; and when old Mrs. Martin pounces down upon us to see how we are spending her grandchildren's money, she will miss it, and think I've sold it! But isn't it awful? Do spread out your flounces in front of it as well as you can." The noonday lighting of her rooms was a great success. Lord Lyons looked up and spoke of the beauty of the starlit night, adding "and there's a fine moon out of doors." John G. Saxe was one of the guests—and his merry hostess introduced him as "deserving capital punishment for making people laugh themselves to death."

I have had occasion to allude so often to the costumes of the ladies of Mr. Buchanan's administration, that I have resolved boldly to ask my reader to accompany me for a few minutes to Vanity Fair, as, guided by society reports of the period, I describe the dresses worn by the leaders of fashion. I suppose the journals of our day would not print columns on columns describing the gowns worn at balls, unless there were some sure to read. Costume has always interested the world. It is still a question whether costume influences character, or vice versa. And yet one regrets to treat charming women as though they were lay figures.