From miniature by herself
It was the exception in those days for members of Congress to have their own homes. They lived for the most part in hotels and boarding-houses, and the resident branch of society was more distinctive. Mrs. Decatur, widowed by the famous Bladensburg duel of March 20, 1820, had retired to her estate at Kalorama, which became one of the most delightful centres of resident society. She favored the Livingstons with her sincere regard, and included them among her guests, frequently as often as three times in one week. To stand forth as she does from among the bevy of brilliant women who led the social life of Washington, at a time when conversation was a fine art, deriving a stimulus from such men as Randolph, Pinckney, Webster, and Story, and when women were quite the equals, in wit, humor, and happy rejoinder, of these veteran conversationalists, is an indisputable proof of the superior mental endowments of Cora Livingston.
The Capitol was then as much a feature to the people of Washington as it is to-day to the people outside of Washington. Thither the belles and beaux of the city betook themselves as regularly as the session opened, walking down Pennsylvania Avenue beneath the double row of Lombardy poplars, planted when Jefferson was President. The halls of Congress were smaller and better adapted to both seeing and hearing than they are at present. The discussion of public questions differed also from what one hears nowadays, there being more spontaneity in the oratory and a larger number participating, unless, indeed, there was a grand occasion when the big guns were brought into action, and Clay's mellifluous voice was heard, or Webster's organ notes pealed forth, or Randolph's shrill pipe rent the air.
A distinctive social feature of the time were the assembly balls, held usually at some such place as Carucci's, where Cora Livingston's graceful dancing again made her the cynosure of all eyes. The set in which she danced—there were no round dances in those days—was continually surrounded by admiring spectators, many dancers foregoing that pleasure for the greater one of watching her. Cora Livingston in a ball-gown, going through the stately evolutions of a quadrille, the very embodiment of winsome grace, was a vision that tarried long afterwards with many who so beheld her.
It was at Carucci's in the winter of 1826, when Miss Livingston's belleship was at its height, that the waltz was first seen in Washington. Baron Stoekelburg, of the Russian legation, was its sponsor, and all Washington looked on with dismay, the Baron and his fair partner, whose name has been lost in oblivion, though her temerity should have earned her a better fate, having the floor to themselves.
In 1829 Livingston went into the Senate, and in May, 1831, he succeeded Van Buren as Secretary of State, Van Buren having taken the high ground, so Livingston expressed it, that as a candidate for the Presidency he should not remain in the Cabinet.
In 1833 President Jackson offered Livingston the mission to France. Our affairs with that country were in a complicated condition, and Livingston's patriotism induced him to accept the office.
In April of that year his daughter was married to Thomas Pennant Barton, a son of Dr. Benjamin Barton, of Philadelphia. President Jackson appointed him Secretary of the legation at Paris, sending his appointment enclosed in a note to Cora, that she might have the pleasure of presenting it to him with her own hands. Her intimate acquaintance with the President dated back to her early childhood, when she was scarcely taller than the cavalry boots worn by the hero of the battle of New Orleans, who readily promised to hang Mitchell, the highest English officer among the prisoners, if the British so much as touched a hair of her father's head. He evinced a paternal pride in the adulation she everywhere received as a woman. At his request she stood as godmother to his wife's great niece, Mary Donalson, now Mrs. Wilcox, who was born in the White House during his term of office.
On their return to America, in 1835, both the Livingstons and Bartons made their home at Montgomery Place at Barrytown on the Hudson, an estate of three hundred acres, which Mr. Livingston had inherited from his sister, Mrs. Montgomery, the widow of General Montgomery, of Revolutionary fame.
Mr. Barton was a man of scholarly tastes, to which the tranquil atmosphere of Montgomery Place, with all its historic associations, together with the close companionship of his gifted wife, was an inspiration. He accumulated there a library which, at the time of his death, was considered one of the most valuable private collections in America. He bequeathed it to his wife with the request that she make such disposition of it as best pleased her. Shortly before her death she arranged for its transfer to the Boston Library, where it is preserved, as she knew her husband desired his life work should be, in its entirety, and known as the Barton collection.