Wherever Mr. Benton was seen he was a marked personage. There was something of distinction in the very manner in which he wore his cravat, and when he spoke, men listened instinctively. Of his daughters, Mrs. Frémont was probably the most gifted, and Mme. Boileau the most devoted to fashionable society. Mme. Boileau was the wife of a French attaché, and was remarked as she drove about in the streets with a be-ribboned spaniel upon the front seat of her calash. Many years after my acquaintance in Washington with Mr. Benton’s family (it was during the Cleveland Administration), I was present at a reception given by Mrs. Endicott when I observed among the guests a very busy little woman, in simple black apparel, whose face was familiar to me, but whom I found myself unable to place; yet everyone seemed to know her. I heard her address several foreigners, in each case employing the language of his country, and, my curiosity increasing, I asked at last, “Who is that small lady in black?”
To my surprise, she proved to be Mrs. Frémont!
I soon made my way to her. She seemed almost impatient as I said, “Mrs. Frémont, I can never forget you, nor the charming evenings at your father’s house, though you, I am sure, have forgotten me!” She looked at me searchingly and then spoke, impetuously:
“Yes! yes! I remember your face perfectly, but your name—Tell me who you are, quick. Don’t keep me waiting!” I promptly gratified her, and in the conversation that followed, I added some reference to her father’s great book, “Thirty Years’ View,” which, until the destruction of my home during the Civil War, had formed two of our most valued volumes.
“Ah!” cried Mrs. Frémont. “You are a woman of penetration! I have always said my father’s book is the Political Bible of America. I know it will not perish!”
I have referred to General George Wallace Jones. No memory of ante-bellum Washington and its moving personages would be complete were he, the pet of women and the idol of men, left out. He was born in 1804, when the Union was young; and adventure and patriotism, then sweeping over our country, were blended in him. As a child he came out of the young West, still a wilderness, to be educated in Kentucky. He had been a sergeant of the body-guard of General Jackson, and to the Marquis de la Fayette upon the latter’s last visit to the United States in 1824. Thereafter he figured in the Black Hawk War as aid to General Dodge. His life was a continual panorama of strange events. In the Great Indian War he became a Major-General; then a County Judge; and appeared at the capital as delegate from the Territory of Michigan early in 1835. General Jones’s personal activity becoming known to the Government, he was made Surveyor-General of the Northwest. It was about this time that he, being on the Senate floor, sprang to the side of Mr. Benton while the gallery hummed ominously with the angry threats of the friends of the Bank defenders, and personal violence seemed unavoidable. I never knew how many of the Western States were laid out by General Jones, but they were numerous. In his work of surveying he was accompanied by young military men, many of whom played conspicuous parts in the history of the country, at that time but half of its present size. Among these was Jefferson Davis, then a civil engineer.
General Jones was indefatigable in his attendance at social gatherings, and continued to out-dance young men, even when threescore rich years were his. He had been a great favourite with my husband’s parents during their Congressional life, so great indeed that father’s message of introduction spoke of him as “My son!” and his fraternal offices to us are among the brightest memories I hold of life at the capital. The General was a small, wiry man, renowned for his long black hair, glossy and well-kept as was any belle’s, and which seemed even to a very late period to defy time to change it. In society he was sprightly as a kitten, and at seventy-five would poke his glistening black head at me, declaring as he did so, “I’ll give you anything you ask, from a horse to a kiss, if you can find one grey hair among the black!”
General Jones died in the West, just before the close of the nineteenth century, but to the end he was gay and brave, and elastic in body and mind. So indomitable was his spirit even in those closing days, that he revived a memory of the war days in the following spirited letter written in 1894, just after the celebration of his ninetieth birthday. At this time he was made King of the Carnival, was complimented by the Governor of Iowa, “the two branches of the General Assembly, and by the Supreme Court, they, too, being Republicans and total strangers to me save one Republican Senator and one Democratic representative from this County,” as his gay account of the episode ran.
“I told several times,” he added, “of how you and dear Mrs. Bouligny prevented me from killing Seward. It was the day you stopped me, as you sat in your carriage in front of Corcoran & Riggs’s bank, and I was about to pass you. I would certainly have killed Seward with my sword-cane but that you stopped me. I was about to follow the Secretary as he passed the bank door, between his son Frederick and some other men. I would have run my sword through him and immediately have been cut into mince-meat by the hundreds of negro guards who stood all round. Do you recollect that fearful incident? God sent two guardian angels to save my life. How can I feel otherwise than grateful to you for saving me that day!”
The recalling of this pioneer-surveyor of the great Western wilderness revives, too, the name of as notable a character in the Southwest, and one who will always be identified with the introduction of cotton in the Southern States, and the land-grants of the territory of Louisiana. I never met Daniel Clarke, but very early in my married life, and some years before I went to the capital to reside, I became acquainted with that remarkable woman, his daughter, Mrs. Myra Clarke Gaines.