Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

by Virginia Tatnall Peacock

Lincoln and Douglas are so conspicuously identified as political enemies, that few people realize that personally they were friends. Not unfrequently they travelled a whole day together only to take the platform that night against each other and to pommel each other, figuratively, out of recognition. Douglas was adroit, however, and Lincoln once said of him that it was difficult to get the best of him in any debate, because his power of bewildering his audience was so great that they never knew when he was worsted. During the summer in which their political enmity first achieved so much prominence, Douglas's wife went with him through the State winning favor for him in all eyes, even including those of the "ablest whig rascal in all Springfield, Abe Lincoln." He liked to sit beside her as they journeyed from place to place and pour some funny story into her attentive ears, or, perhaps, divining the tender sympathy of her true woman's soul, tell her some incident of his early days, touching off its sorrowful details with a bit of homely philosophy or a stroke of his inexhaustible humor; and as the train pulled into some expectant town, and the two opponents were greeted by factions whose enmity was real, he would say, "Here, Douglas, take your woman," and so they would part to meet again as foes. As the final victory was with Douglas, he and his wife made that tour of the Southern States that was much in the nature of a triumphal procession, and was a forerunner of his Presidential campaign which shortly followed.

His real home was in Washington, where as a Senator he spent the greater portion of each year. There he built a commodious house, with a ball-room, by no means a frequent adjunct at that time, which witnessed much generous hospitality in those difficult days preceding secession, when a woman like Mrs. Douglas could best hold warring elements in abeyance.

The result of the campaign of the summer of 1860, in which Lincoln and Douglas again confronted each other, this time for the higher prize of the Presidency, precipitated that crisis which at length brought these two life-long opponents together in defence of the Union. The whole aim of Douglas's life had been for the Presidency. He had accomplished all else he had ever set his heart upon, and he was so absolutely the idol of the people that it had not seemed possible to him he should fail here. He swallowed the bitterness of his disappointment heroically, however, and was a generous and even a graceful friend to Lincoln.

It is related that, when Lincoln rose to read his inaugural address, he hesitated a moment, uncertain as to what disposition to make of his hat; it was a new, high silk hat, too elegant an acquisition to the mind of one reared in the more than frugal atmosphere of Lincoln's home to be intrusted to the pine boards of the flag-draped stand in front of him. Douglas, divining the mental process of which Lincoln himself, in the embarrassment of the moment, was scarcely conscious, stepped forward and relieved him of the hat, holding it for him till the conclusion of the address.

During the early days of the conflict between the North and the South, which he had patriotically done his utmost to avert, he aided Lincoln with able counsel, pointing out to him among other things the necessity of securing Fortress Monroe and cautioning him against bringing the troops through Baltimore, prophesying that bloodshed that did occur. But before the conflict had assumed those proportions which it did later in the same year, on the 3d of June, 1861, Douglas's life closed. His last hours were spent in Chicago among the people he had so ably represented. There, with his wife beside him, and her mother and brother, James Madison Cutts, who was his private secretary, near by, and with his keen, dark eyes upon her face, as if he would forever fix upon his spirit its beautiful lineaments, and his hand in hers, his mind retaining all its strength and clearness till the end, he uttered his last memorable words. She had asked him if he had any message to send to his sons, and he replied, "Tell them to obey the laws of the land and to support the Constitution of the United States."

Generous even to the point of recklessness, he died poor. Subscriptions were immediately begun among his friends towards a fund for his widow. She declined, however, to receive it, and begged that the sum thus raised be devoted to the erection of a monument to Douglas's memory.

She returned to Washington and lived quietly for some years in the first home of her married life, taking no part in the social world whose magnet she had been for so many seasons. But she was not forgotten; and when she again, after four years of seclusion, resumed her place in its midst, her reappearance brought up innumerable memories of her earlier days, of her conquest of the "Little Giant," and of her queenly part in his political campaigns.

She was the guest of honor at a dinner given in the early winter of 1865, just as the war drew to its close, by Miss Harris, whose name lives in history in a very different connection: she was sitting beside Lincoln in his box at the theatre on the night he was shot. Among the guests bidden to meet Mrs. Douglas was Captain, afterwards General, Robert Williams, one of the handsomest and most gallant officers of the army, and a member of a well-established family of Culpeper County, Virginia. Mrs. Douglas was already known to him by fame, and suspecting her to be possessed of all the caprices of a spoiled beauty, he had no desire whatever to meet her, though he accepted Miss Harris's invitation for the sake of the pleasure he would otherwise derive from her hospitality. After he had been presented to Mrs. Douglas, however, whatever enjoyment he had anticipated from meeting others there passed from his mind. Combined with a gentle dignity, there was about her all the sweet simplicity of a young girl, and nothing that ever so remotely suggested any consciousness of a fame that was as wide as her country. He followed her with all the earnestness with which he had meant to avoid her, and in January, 1866, she again became a bride.

The chronicle of the most magnificent ball ever given, not only in Washington, but probably in the country, and which occurred shortly after her marriage to General Williams, hands her name and that of Kate Chase Sprague down to fame as the two most beautiful women who participated in the brilliant event. It was given by the French minister, Count de Moutholon, by order of his Emperor, in honor of the officers of the French fleet then anchored at Annapolis.

She gradually, however, abdicated her social queenship for a crown she wore with no less grace, that of a most noble motherhood.