CHAPTER VI
CHARACTERISTICS OF SOCIAL LIFE IN 1858—LEADERS IN SOCIETY
There were many brilliant and beautiful women who escaped the notice of the society newsmonger of the day.
Mrs. Cyrus McCormick, recently married to the inventor of the great reaping machine, was one of these. Mr. McCormick, then a young man, was destined to be decorated by many European governments and to achieve a great fortune. His wife, just out of Miss Emma Willard's school, was very beautiful, very gentle, and winning. No sheaves garnered by her husband's famous reaper can compare with the sheaves from her own sowing, during a long life devoted to good deeds.
Then there were Mrs. Yulee, wife of the Senator from Florida, and her sisters, Mrs. Merrick and Mrs. Holt, all three noted for personal and intellectual charm; and beautiful Mrs. Robert J. Walker, who was perhaps the first of the coterie to be called to make a sacrifice for her country, exchanging the brilliant life in Washington for the hardships of Kansas—"bleeding Kansas," torn with dissensions among its "squatter sovereigns," and with a climate of stern severity, where food froze at night and must be broken with a hatchet for breakfast. Mrs. Walker shrank from the ordeal, for she was well fitted for gay society; but the President himself visited her and begged the sacrifice for the good of the country. She went, and bore her trials. They were only a little in advance of sterner trials ordained for some of her Washington friends. Nor must we fail to acknowledge the social influence of Mrs. Jefferson Davis, one of the most brilliant women of her time—greatly sought by cultivated men and women.
But the wittiest and brightest of them all was Mrs. Clay, the wife of the Senator from Alabama. She was extremely clever, the soul of every company. A costume ball at which she personated Mrs. Partington is still remembered in Washington. Mrs. Partington's sayings could not be arranged beforehand and conned for the occasion. Her malapropos replies must be improvised on the moment, and must moreover be seasoned with wit to redeem them from commonplace dulness. Mrs. Clay rose to the occasion, and her Mrs. Partington became the Mrs. Partington of the future.
The reader will not fail to observe the number of Southern women who were prominent in Mr. Buchanan's court. A correspondent of a leading New York paper[4] has recently written an interesting article on this subject. He declares that the Southern women (before Lincoln's day) had long controlled the society of Washington. "With their natural and acquired graces, with their inherited taste and ability in social affairs, it was natural that the reins should fall to them. They represented a clique of aristocracy; they were recognized leaders who could afford to smile good-naturedly at the awkward and perplexed attempts of the women from the other sections—Mrs. Senator This, Mrs. Congressman That—to thread the ins and outs of Washington's social labyrinth. To none of these ladies was the thought pleasant of secession from the Union and consequent giving up whatever of social dominion she had acquired."
I wish I could give some idea of the "days at home" of these court ladies in Washington in 1858. The large public functions were all alike then as now, with this exception, that nearly every man present was Somebody, and every woman Somebody's wife. It was not necessary for these people to talk. The men made little effort. It was well known what they had said yesterday in the House or the Senate Chamber; but we dared not express opinions in public (and not freely in private), such was the tense feeling at that time. Conversation had been always, at the South, an art carefully cultivated. Conversation suffered at a time when we were forced to ignore subjects that possessed us with absorbing interest and to confine ourselves to trivialities.
Excusing the silence of one famous man, somebody remarked: "Oh, well, you know brilliant men do not of necessity talk well. Thrilled by their utterances in their speeches and writings, we are surprised, when we meet them, at their silence." A "famous man's" eye twinkled. "Ask Galt," he said, "why he doesn't give away his gems. Probably he might answer that he proposes to sell them," an ingenious way of avoiding the remotest hint that silence was the result of preoccupied thought on the grave questions of the hour.
For some inexplicable reason the wives of great men are apt to be quiet and non-committal—little moons revolving around a great luminary. Moon-like, one side only is turned to the world. How is it on the other side? We have a glimpse of it over the demi-tasse in the drawing-room after dinner, or at our informal "at homes" in our own houses.
At these times of unbending in Washington we were wont to begin in a rather stilted manner, sipping our coffee and liqueurs in a leisurely way, and steering widely clear of politics and politicians. We talked of art and artists, galleries in Europe, shops in Paris,—anything except what we were all thinking about. The art of conversation suffered under such circumstances. But some interesting books were just out in England, and everybody was discussing them. Thackeray had recently given "The Virginians" to the world. Tennyson was turning all the girls' heads with "Elaine." A new star was rising—George Eliot. Dickens, we were, at the moment, cordially hating because of his "American Notes." Bulwer was well to the fore. Two valued members of our own special coterie were Randolph Rogers and Thomas Crawford the sculptor, whose genius, differently expressed, lives to-day in his gifted son, Marion Crawford. Thomas Crawford had been commissioned by the state of Virginia to execute a colossal statue of Washington for the Capitol Square in Richmond, a great work,—including statues of Virginia's statesmen,—which was happily completed in 1861, and from which I heard Jefferson Davis's inaugural address, February 22, 1862, upon his taking the oath as permanent President of the Confederacy. It was a black day of rain and snow; the new government, destined never to flourish in sunshine, was born in storm and tempest.