Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century

by Virginia Tatnall Peacock

One evening, when she had kept up her amusing prattle until a later hour than usual, she went up to General Young, who was seated near her father, and stood beside him, resting her head against his shoulder. "Come, come," called her father, "it's time mammy was hunting you up, little sleepy head. General Young can't get on very well with you there." "No, no," insisted Mattie, dreading a summons of that autocrat, in whose presence there could be neither pleading nor protest; "don't send for mammy. I'm not sleepy. I was just trying an old head on young shoulders." She was quoted through all grades of Richmond life, and long before she had grown to womanhood a frequent question on many lips was, "Have you heard what Mattie Ould said?" Then every one listened to her latest bon mot, which was repeated till the whole city had heard and laughed. With a dash and esprit that were peculiarly her own, she had many masculine traits, an independence and a camaraderie that were irresistible.

Mattie Ould

(Mrs. Oliver Schoolcraft)

From photograph by George S. Cook

With the magnetism of her gifts she would have been known to fame even had her family been of less prominence. Well placed, however, as she was in life, her brilliancy illumined a vast horizon. Her father, Judge Robert Ould, always held a distinguished position, both in the District of Columbia, where he was born, and in Richmond, whither he removed at the outbreak of the war. Besides being thrown in intimate contact with the prominent citizens of both places, he was frequently called upon to extend his hospitality to eminent strangers who came to him with letters of introduction. His home during part of his residence in Washington was in the quaint old building opposite the Treasury Department, now Riggs Bank. There President Buchanan was his guest for several days after he quitted the White House. No extraordinary preparations, however, were made for the entertainment of the ex-President in a household where distinguished guests were a frequent occurrence. A loose rod in the stair-carpet was secured on the suggestion of Mrs. Ould's mother, lest Mr. Buchanan, not accustomed to the circumnavigation that it had imposed upon the family, should fall and break his leg, in which event they would have him three weeks instead of three days.

Judge Ould came prominently before the public as the district attorney at the time of the prosecution of General Daniel Sickles for the killing of Barton Key, Sickles being defended by Edwin M. Stanton, who became more widely known later as Lincoln's Secretary of War.

Ould's prominence was rather augmented after the outbreak of the war and his removal to Richmond, where he was made commissioner of the Confederate government for the exchange of prisoners. He had married a celebrated Virginia beauty, Miss Sarah Turpin, and had four children, all of whom, with one noted exception, are still living. His wife, after having been long an invalid, died before his family was grown, and he, some years later, married Mrs. Handy, of Baltimore, the mother of the beautiful May Handy, one of Richmond's belles of the present day.

Mattie Ould was born in the District of Columbia, which she left in her childhood for the home with which her fame is associated. She returned, however, to spend the last two years of her school life in the Visitation Convent, Georgetown. Though known to all Richmond from her childhood, her renown throughout the South dates from her first appearance at the White Sulphur Springs, which in her day, before the advent of the Northern pleasure-seeker, still possessed all the distinctive features of a Southern watering-place. Though it was already a long-established resort, to the magic which her presence shed about it during the seasons that she spent there it owes much of its wide fame to-day. All the details of the war were then yet vivid memories, and there many a battle was fought over again in graphic words by men whose bravery and gallantry in action have never been surpassed. Many of them had been distinguished officers in the army of the Confederacy,—Joe Johnston, of Virginia; Wade Hampton, of South Carolina; Gordon, of Georgia; Beauregard, of Louisiana; Butler, Gary, the gallant Pickett, of Gettysburg fame; and Hood, of Alabama, then lifting himself about on his crutches. It was such men as these who stamped their striking individuality upon the life of the Southern watering-places at that period, and among whom, keenly appreciating the wit, ardently loving the beauty, and reverencing the goodness of a woman beyond all things, Mattie Ould came to be the greatest belle the South has had since the war.