Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

by Virginia Tatnall Peacock

On another morning of the early spring two years later, such were the contrasts which the events of her life produced, she stood in the throne-room of Buckingham Palace, awaiting presentation to the Queen of England. To the British eyes that looked upon her she was a graceful, distinguished woman, sharing in the renown of her husband, the American explorer, and a recent medallist of the Royal Geographical Society, whose honors are only conferred upon those whose expeditions are taken out at personal cost and sacrifice. In the faultless details of her court dress she was a gratification to the most critical taste. Its exquisite design, shading in color from the faint pink that touches the outer edge of a rose petal to the deeper tone it assumes near the heart, with clusters of the fair flower itself giving it an almost fragrant emphasis and bringing out the delicate beauty of her fine face, seemed a part of herself, so gracefully did she wear it, carrying its sweep of train with a queenliness that was of her nature.

On the 17th of June, 1856, Frémont was unanimously nominated for the Presidency by the National Republican Convention at Philadelphia. He was the first choice of the Free Soil, which became, later, the Republican party, and he was also, probably, the only man of whom Lincoln, the first successful candidate of that party, was ever jealous. Fearing a military rival, and recognizing in Frémont the qualities that gave him a natural supremacy among men, he kept him in the background. He foresaw correctly. The military hero came, but he came in the person of the man to whom opportunity had been a fairy godmother.

Though he polled the vote of all the Northern States but five, the time was not ripe for a Republican President when Frémont was a candidate for that high honor. The men, like Benton, who still led the political thought of that day, and who knew every aspect of the country, realizing the peril that lay in countenancing sectionalism, could not give their support to a candidate who stood upon a sectional platform.

Whatever were his hopes or his disappointment, his wife shared them. His accepting the nomination from so radical a party had meant the breaking up of many friendships for her, which in itself was a genuine grief to a woman of her temperament. The anguish she endured during the first months of the war between the North and the South, which she spent in St. Louis among familiar faces, whom the circumstances of her position as the wife of a Northern general had estranged from her, left its record in her beautiful hair, which, from a warm brown, became quite white within a few weeks. No matter with what heroism we endure, we sometimes bear all the rest of our lives the scars which our courage has cost us.

She has never outgrown, however, her early attachment to the South, to which she is united by many ties of blood. During the famine there that followed the war she applied to Congress for relief, which was immediately granted, with a ship to carry all the supplies the Freedman's Bureau could furnish. With warm and tender sympathies she has always taken up any cause that appealed to her with an enthusiasm that communicated itself to others. Relating to Mrs. Dix one evening the case of one of Lieutenant Frémont's men, who had been disabled by being wounded in both legs, and to whom Congress had refused a pension on the ground that he had not been regularly enlisted at the time the wound was inflicted, she did not observe that a man who was calling upon Senator Dix was attentively listening to all the graphic details of her story. It was Preston King, of New York, and at that time chairman of the Committee on Appropriations. He took Senator Dix to the door with him when he left, and bade him tell her to write out the story as she had just told it and send it to him, and he would see that the man got his pension; and he did.

With what tender gratitude and reverence the man himself, Alexis Ayot, a Canadian by birth, came to thank her!

"I cannot kneel to thank you," he said, balancing himself upon his crutches, "Je n'ai plus de jambes; but you are my Sainte Madonne, et je vous fais ma prière."

During her early California days she extended her generous young hand to a youthful compositor who was working on the Golden Era. He dined with her every Sunday, and she gave him not only that recognition and encouragement that were in themselves a stimulus to his talent and ambition, but she used her influence to obtain for him salaried offices that lifted him above anxiety concerning his material condition, and gave him the leisure necessary to the best development of his genius. His name is Bret Harte, and so entirely did he recognize his indebtedness to her that he once wrote to her: "If I were to be cast away on a desert island, I should expect a savage to come forward with a three-cornered note from you to tell me that at your request I had been appointed governor of the island at a salary of two thousand four hundred dollars."

She has both the versatility and adaptiveness that are characteristic of the genuine American woman, and which have enabled her to make almost as many friends in foreign lands as she has throughout her own country. The Count de la Garde, a cousin of Eugene and Hortense Beauharnais, whom she knew in Paris, and who left her at his death a valuable collection of souvenirs of the Bonaparte family, said of her that she was the only American woman he had ever known. He had known others of her countrywomen, but they were but imitations of English or French women, while in her he felt the originality and individuality of another people.

As a scientist and explorer, Frémont's reputation had gone forth to the countries of Europe, from many of which he received enviable honors and decorations. He and his wife were presented at the courts of England, France, and Denmark, attending at Copenhagen the wedding-festivities of the Crown Prince and his Swedish bride. As one of her friends has cleverly said of Mrs. Frémont, "she has entertained and been entertained through not only the gamut but the chromatic scale of society."