With Buchanan, Harriet Lane also passed from the horizon of public life, spending with him at Wheatland those historic four years that followed her days in the White House. There, in January, 1866, she was married to Henry Elliott Johnston, of Baltimore. The ceremony was performed by her uncle, the Rev. Edward Y. Buchanan, of the Episcopal Church.
Her honeymoon she passed in Cuba and her married life in Baltimore, in whose social doings she took a prominent part. At her uncle's death, in 1868, she inherited Wheatland, where for a number of years she passed her summers. In 1892 she bought a home in Washington, where she now spends the greater part of her time.
Much has been given her of life's joys and triumphs, and much, too, of its sorrows. Death has repeatedly crossed the threshold of her home, robbing her, one by one, of her heart's treasures: in 1881 the elder of her two sons, James Buchanan Johnston, a boy of brilliant promise, then in his fourteenth year; in 1882 her second son, Henry Elliott Johnston; and two years later her husband. Surrounded not only by life's comforts, but its elegancies, by friends of her own and a succeeding generation, there is yet about Harriet Lane Johnston to-day much of that same majestic isolation that marked her youth.
[ADÈLE CUTTS]
(MRS. ROBERT WILLIAMS)
During the four years that Franklin Pierce presided over the nation so many beautiful women came prominently before the public at the capital that his was called the "beauty administration." Many were the wives and daughters of men in high official position, but the fame of none exceeded that of the daughter of James Madison Cutts, who held the office of Second Controller of the Treasury.
Born within a stone's throw of the White House, all her young days centred about it, and how near she came to living there as the wife of a President we may gauge by how near Stephen A. Douglas came to possessing that office. Adèle Cutts flourished in that truly golden era before material wealth became a necessary adjunct to a woman's popularity, when men were distinguished by a greater spirit of gallantry and disinterestedness, and in the days before a belle's powers at a watering-place were rated by the number or size of the trunks she took with her; in a word, in the days when the woman herself was pre-eminent and the accident of worldly possessions secondary.
It was recently said of a wealthy American girl, who, though she has generously expended much of her large fortune in the endowment of seats of learning and similar public benefactions, has yet in herself none of that magnetism that would entitle her to enrollment among the great belles of her country, "Yes, she is a great belle this summer. She brought thirty trunks, and she dresses six times a day." At the same resort forty years ago, Adèle Cutts, remarkable for the simplicity of her toilettes even among a generation that had no conception whatever of the elaborate costuming of women which marks the close of the century, was the most renowned of its belles.
While she derived in the preliminary stages of her social career some prestige from her connection with two of the most illustrious families not only of Virginia but of the entire country,—Washington and Madison,—she attained while yet a very young woman a pre-eminence by reason of her beauty, the distinction of her bearing, and a genuine loveliness of character, which reflected as much honor upon the somewhat remote relationship as it had bestowed upon her. She was born in the home of her grandfather, Richard Cutts, who, in the days when Maine was part of Massachusetts, had for twelve years represented in the Congress of the United States that district which at this end of the century was for so long a period associated with the name of Thomas B. Reed.