[CORA LIVINGSTON]
(MRS. THOMAS PENNANT BARTON)
Cora Livingston was born in New Orleans, "the little Paris of America," on the 16th of June, 1806, the year of the great eclipse. Her father, writing to announce her advent to his sister in New York, said God had given him so fair a daughter that the sun had hidden its face.
Though she was a great belle with a national reputation during the decade from 1820 to 1830, those who attempted an analysis of her charm declared that she lacked that attribute which many would esteem the first requisite to belleship,—beauty. Yet she was a notable example of that subtle power that raises a woman above her contemporaries, that evokes an involuntary homage from every eye.
Her mother, writing of her when she was about sixteen and already the belle of New Orleans, to one who had never seen her, said, "She is not a beauty, not a genius, but a good and affectionate child."
Josiah Quincy, that ubiquitous beau who paid his court to the belles of so many cities, seeing her in Washington in 1826, declared that she was not handsome, while he admitted that she was undoubtedly the greatest belle in the United States. "She has a fine figure, a pretty face, dances well, and dresses to admiration," he continued, endeavoring to solve the mystery of the attraction exercised by this exquisite specimen of womanhood. He further confessed that when he left her he bore away an image of loveliness and grace never to be erased, and he went on to quote Burke's apostrophe to the Queen of France,—"Surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision."
She was the daughter of Edward Livingston, a brother of that Chancellor Livingston who, on the 30th of April, 1789, administered the oath of office to the first President of the United States, and of an eminently beautiful creole, Louise Moreau.
Fleeing the terrors of the negro insurrection in San Domingo, Madam Moreau, a young widow, arrived in New Orleans just as the Louisiana purchase was consummated and the province became the property of the United States. French then to the very core, the city has retained evidences of its origin longer than any city of the Union. The thrill of anguish with which it realized that Louisiana had been sold by Napoleon to the United States "on this 9th of July, 1803, at seven P.M.," left its indelible impression upon a people loyal to their nationality and tenacious of its prerogatives.
The wave of emigration which swept into the newly acquired territory from the north bore thither Edward Livingston, of New York. Fortune's reverses had driven him into the new country with the hope of finding there a more promising field for his talent and labors.
The Americans were not well received. Scarcely more than a hundred out of the eight thousand inhabitants had greeted the stars and stripes as they were raised for the first time over the city. So strong, indeed, was the prejudice against them that every unfortunate occurrence was instantly attributed to them. Miss Hunt relates that upon one occasion when a ball was interrupted by an earthquake an indignant old creole gentleman exclaimed that the pleasure of ladies had never thus been interrupted in the days of Spanish or French dominion.
Livingston's knowledge of the language, his tact, his adaptiveness, together with his splendid ability, soon raised him to a conspicuous place at the bar. He was a widower, thirty-nine years of age, when he married Madam Moreau, who was but nineteen. Cora was the only child of this marriage, and ever, even after her own marriage, the inseparable companion of both parents. From her father she derived a sound knowledge of the political questions of the day that made her an intelligent spectator of the historic period in which she lived. From her mother she inherited that grace, mental and physical, that so indelibly impressed her upon the life of which she formed so brilliant a part that her name can no more be eliminated from it than can the names of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Daniel Webster, or Henry Clay.