Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

by Virginia Tatnall Peacock

He was a powerful man, with a forcible way of speaking, which he retained to the end of his life. When he was stumping his State in the summer of 1856, being already in his seventieth year, he was cautiously viewed one morning through the crack of an open door by two anti-Bentonites. He was standing at the moment and speaking in a vigorous way that appalled his surreptitious visitors. "Good God," ejaculated one, "we shall have to fight him these twenty years!"

He was a striking figure, with heavy black hair and side whiskers, and during all the years that he was in the Senate, like some of his illustrious successors, he never changed the style of his dress. His vehemence was expended in public. In his family life he was as gentle as he was devoted.

Jessie, the second of his four daughters, and the subject of this sketch, was born at the home of her maternal grandfather, Colonel James McDowell, near Lexington, Virginia. She grew up partly in the picturesque atmosphere of St. Louis, then almost wholly a French settlement, and partly in Washington, where Benton's home was considered one of the most interesting in the city, owing to the cultivated wife and daughters who gave it character and individuality. Intermingled with her school-days she had her little day of belleship, during which the two most notable events were a dinner at the White House, given by President Van Buren for his young son, and the wedding of Baron Bodisco, the Russian minister, at which she appeared as first bridesmaid. The bride, Miss Williams, was one of her school-mates, and a girl of sixteen, while the bridegroom was over sixty. The details of the ceremony, however, were all harmoniously arranged by him, and included eight bridesmaids between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and eight groomsmen of his own period of life. With one of the most distinguished, James Buchanan,—then in the United States Senate, and but recently returned from the Russian mission,—walked Jessie Benton, fourteen years of age, and in her first long dress. Judged by his last will, this Russian January seems to have been an unselfish husband, for he therein expressed the wish that his still young wife should marry again and be as happy herself as she had made him.

The Van Buren dinner was a more or less memorable event, though the White House was familiar ground to Jessie Benton. During Jackson's administration she used frequently to go there with her father, for the old soldier-President was notably a lover of children. He liked to run his long fingers through her soft curls, while he talked with his old friend Benton, unwittingly giving the curls many a twist as he warmed to his subject, all of which the little girl bore heroically, finding ample recompense in her father's praise, which was sure to follow the ordeal.

She went to school both in St. Louis and Washington, in the former city principally for the sake of learning French by association with children to whom it was the mother-tongue. She spent two years at Miss English's boarding-school, in Georgetown, where she was not regarded as a diligent student. Many hours stolen from the class-rooms were not, perhaps, altogether unprofitably spent up a mulberry-tree listening to the fascinating accounts of a midshipman's life, as told by one of his cousins, and hanging hungrily upon every word, as if it in a measure foretold her own eventful career.

At home her mental training was continuous, and without conscious, or at least arduous, effort on her part. Each of Benton's daughters had her place at his library table, and there, stimulated by his studious habits, she acquired readily her portion of that vast fund of knowledge which he had gleaned first from his father's library of unusual excellence and later from his contact with men and measures of his day.

Of the measures there were many afoot when Benton's daughters were young, whose stupendous proportions we are scarcely able to gauge, knowing them only in the perfection of their full realization. Benton was the sympathetic friend of all progress, and beneath the steady glow of his astral lamp or the soft flicker of their mother's candles, in the nights before the advent of gas, his daughters, sewing each her fine seam, listened to the unfolding of the minds of the men who have developed America. They learned also those lessons of inexhaustible patience that must go hand in hand with every great undertaking and of the frequent subordination of the individual to the things his own mind has conceived.

Thither came Morse with that sublime faith in his conception of telegraphy that made him insensible or at least indifferent to the ridicule of Congress, where a member suggested, when he at length obtained his twenty-five thousand dollars for an experimental line to Baltimore, that a second appropriation should be made for an experimental line to the moon.

An overland emigrant route, the surveys for a railroad to the Pacific, and the Panama Railroad, Stevens coming to them directly from Central America and going later to the Isthmus, were some of the vast projects with whose details they were early familiarized. Later, when Jessie Benton, as Mrs. Frémont, crossed the Isthmus herself and was detained there by the fever, she saw Stevens every day, he coming, as he said, "to take his chill with her." He died in Panama, as he predicted that he would, one of the heroes in the vanguard of progress.

Into Benton's home quite naturally there drifted, in the year 1840, a young lieutenant of the corps of topographical engineers, fresh from the survey of the upper Mississippi. The son of a French father and a Virginia mother, John C. Frémont was born in South Carolina, in the year 1813. He was graduated, when he was seventeen years old, from Charleston College, where he remained to study civil engineering and teach mathematics. He was so unusually talented that Poinsett, the Secretary of War, recommended his services to Nicollet when the latter was about to undertake the survey of the Upper Mississippi. The two years in the field were followed by two years spent in Washington in preparing the scientific result of the expedition, during which period Benton became interested more perhaps in the work than in the individuality of the young officer, whose genius was later to open to us the western gates of our republic.