The cultivation of her mind was intrusted to her uncle, Major August Davezac, from whom she received an education of unusual scope. She matured early, being probably more or less at all times a part of the social life that surrounded her parents and into which she made her formal entrée at the age of fourteen.
The social atmosphere of New Orleans at this time was like that of no other city on the North American Continent. Creole tastes and institutions were predominant. The only society of the city was Creole, and very delightful and very exclusive it was. The French opera was then, as it has been since, one of its conspicuous features. Tuesdays and Saturdays were the nights when the fashionable world was to be seen in the boxes, and the stage presented nothing more attractive than the beautifully dressed women of the audience, with their artistic coiffures. There were receptions in the boxes between the acts, and a belle's powers of attraction were thus publicly manifested to a people ever ready to add the tribute of its homage.
Cora Livingston before she was sixteen years old, gentle and retiring, shrinking from publicity such as attaches to belles at this end of the century, was known throughout the city of her birth as its greatest belle. In the evenings of the warm season, when the balcony of her house in Chartres Street was converted into a reception-room, in the midst of a devoted family she received not only the admiration of distinguished guests, but the chivalrous and silent homage of many an unknown passer-by.
Frenchmen visiting New Orleans frequently brought letters of introduction from Lafayette to Livingston, whom he had known in New York. Cora thus early became accustomed to an association not only with people of her own city, but with many eminent cosmopolites.
In 1812, when war was declared against England, New Orleans fell into line and gave glorious proof of her loyalty. Her prejudices were swallowed up in the common cause that drew all sections of the country together, and she became in deed, as she already was in name, an American city.
General Jackson's friendship for the Livingstons, of which he gave so many handsome proofs, began at this time.
In 1822 Edward Livingston was elected to Congress, and for eleven years thereafter Washington became his home. While he achieved prominence as a legislator and statesman, the brilliancy of his daughter was acquiring for her a national reputation. He leased the Decatur residence on Lafayette Square, within a stone's throw of the White House, and there gathered about this distinguished family the most cultured element of the Washington of that period,—the Calhouns and their gifted daughter with her perspicuous political theories, the Adamses, Webster, Clay, Chief Justice Marshall, Martin Van Buren, Mrs. Madison, their neighbor across the Park, and the widow of Admiral Decatur.
Cora Livingston
(Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton)