The Project Gutenberg eBook, Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century, by Virginia Tatnall Peacock

Famous American Belles
of the
Nineteenth Century

Emily Marshall

(Mrs. William Foster Otis)

From portrait by Chester Harding

Famous American
Belles of the
Nineteenth Century
By
Virginia Tatnall Peacock

ILLUSTRATED

Philadelphia & London
J. B. Lippincott Company
1901

Copyright, 1900
by
J. B. Lippincott Company

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

To
My Dear Mother
from whom I derived my first
conception of all that is
most beautiful in
woman

[PREFACE]

During the century now drawing to its close there have appeared in America from time to time women of so pre-eminent a beauty, so dazzling a wit, so powerful a magnetism, that their names belong no less to the history of their country than those of the men whose genius has raised it to the rank it holds to-day among the nations of the earth. Among them have been women of the highest type of mental and moral development, women of great political and of great social genius, all of whom have left the impress of their remarkable personalities upon their time. When they have manifested these qualities in their girlhood they have risen frequently to an eminence such as it is scarcely possible for the women of any other country to attain at a correspondingly early age.

From among the latter class the subjects of these sketches have been taken, those having been selected who seemed most adequately to represent their period and locality and whose fame was beyond question, it having been frequently of national and sometimes of international extent.

Rising to wield the magic of their influence in every decade of the century and in every section of the country, some study of the time in which each lived has been necessary in order to give her her proper setting and to justly estimate the power she exercised.

The inventions and discoveries America has given to the world in this great century have made vast changes in our material condition, which, in turn, have been productive of striking contrasts between the existence of the women who gave life and color to the early years of the century and that of those who reflect the myriad advantages of its closing days.

It argues the possession of extraordinary attributes to have been a belle of wide repute in the days when there was no telegraph to flash the record of a woman's beauty, charm, or social progress from one end of the country to the other, when the press contained only the briefest accounts of purely local and wholly public events, when every letter that might or might not have contained her name or have been a herald of her loveliness cost its sender twenty-five cents a sheet in postage, when her few and simple toilets were painstakingly made by hand, when she went to balls on horseback, arriving sometimes with a wrinkled gown but seldom with a ruffled temper, when all travelling was done by means of a stage-coach, and a journey from one city to another was sometimes the event of a lifetime, and when the comparatively few women who crossed the seas did so in merchant vessels not infrequently owned by their own fathers, and spent many long weeks in the passage.

Those who come within the radius of its charm, however, easily recognize the power of a queenly personality, as the lives of the most illustrious men in every period of our history have borne testimony. Among the women who unite the centuries there is a brilliant promise, moreover, that there will be those in the twentieth, as there have been throughout the nineteenth, "to perpetuate that empire which beauty first established."

The writer gratefully acknowledges her indebtedness to all those whose courtesy or assistance has in any way lightened the task of collecting the data for these sketches; to those who by kindly lending portraits in their possession, as well as to those who by graciously permitting the use of their own portraits, have thereby added so much to the value and interest of this volume.

Paris, June 22, 1900.

[CONTENTS]

[LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS]

[MARCIA BURNS]
(MRS. JOHN PETER VAN NESS)

Marcia Burns! What memories the quaint Scotch lassie's name calls up!

The city of Washington disappears and its site spreads before us in flourishing farm lands and orchards. Scattered farm-houses raise their chimneys amid primeval oaks and elms, and from the low doorway of the humblest emerges the winsome form of Marcia Burns. Six hundred acres, representing the thrift of generations of Scotch ancestors, surround her. The Potomac, one of the great water-ways of the South, carrying the produce of the fertile lands above into Alexandria for consumption or reshipment, almost kisses her feet. This is her patrimony, over which she has already heard such spirited debate between her father and General Washington, then President of the United States, and the three gentlemen commissioned by Congress, at that time sitting in Philadelphia, to select and purchase the ground on which is to be built the capital city. As she looks riverward a canoe is beached in the shadow of the vine-hung trees, and the President, accompanied by two of the commissioners, whose forms have of late grown familiar to her childish eyes, have come again to confer with her father, whom Washington has already dubbed "the obstinate Mr. Burns."

"And I suppose you think," says Burns, as the dispute again waxes warm, "that people here are going to take every grist that comes from you as pure grain. But what would you have been if you had not married the widow Custis?" Gracefully or ungracefully, however, he must eventually yield, for the "Widow's Mite," as Burns's acres were described in the land patent of 1681 which bestowed them upon his emigrant ancestor, form part of the tract which Maryland has ceded to the nation for its capital. Here is stalwart Johnson, governor of the State, to emphasize the fact with many a round oath that makes the gentle Marcia's heart stand still.

"And yonder lassie," says Daniel Carroll, "will be the greatest heiress hereabouts." Davy Burns' eyes wander towards his daughter. He is long silent. The shadows have lengthened into darkness when he says, "Very well, sirs, take the land, and I leave it to your fairness to fix the terms."

Marcia Burns

(Mrs. John Peter Van Ness)

From miniature by James Peale, 1797

Supper is served, and the guests are accommodated for the night beneath the moss-grown roof of the attic, for Burns' cottage boasts but four rooms,—two sleeping-rooms, a sitting-room, and a dining-room, the kitchen being built apart from the house, as was the custom of the time and country. Unpretentious as the little abode is, the deed conveying the property to the commissioners, in trust for the government, provides that the streets of the new city shall be so laid out as not to interfere with it.

* * * * *

Marcia Burns was but yet a child when fate wrought the change in her destiny which no wisdom could have foreseen. By the death of her only brother she became sole heiress to what was at that time an immense fortune. Yet it is not through the magnitude of her wealth that she illumines the period in which the lines of her life were cast. It is through the exquisite qualities of a most exalted womanhood.

With wise forethought and some premonition of the change about to take place in her life, her parents placed her in the family of Luther Martin, in Baltimore. Martin was at that time at the height of his fame as an advocate at the Maryland bar. In the enlightened atmosphere of his home, Marcia grew up in close companionship with his daughters, her refined nature imperceptibly acquiring that ease and grace which were ever afterwards characteristic of her, and her receptive mind readily cultivating those attributes that were to render her most attractive in conversation to such men as Hamilton, Burr, Marshall, Randolph, and Webster.

That face of nature familiar to her from her infancy was in a state of unlovely transition when she again returned to her home. Verdant orchards and sloping meadow lands had been divided into building lots and crossed and recrossed by muddy thoroughfares. In what had been a piece of woods within a stone's throw of her father's home, the President's house was nearing completion. A mile and a half to the east, on the summit of a hill, the white walls of the Capitol were becoming visible to all the surrounding country. At irregular intervals houses, single and in rows, were in course of construction. There was nothing in the so-called city of Washington to which Marcia Burns came home, and of which the government took formal possession in 1800, that ever so remotely suggested the garden spot that it is to-day. Members of Congress and foreign ministers alike reviled it, and the lamentations of Mrs. Adams are too well known to be repeated here.

Of such social life as there was scattered over so vast an area of mud, in which "pedestrians frequently slumped and horses became stalled," Marcia Burns became a central figure. Though she was too gentle and modest ever to assume a leadership, yet all that was best and brightest in the life about her naturally gravitated in her direction.

Notwithstanding the pretentious homes that were going up around her, she still dwelt contentedly in her cottage of four rooms. There, in the summer evenings, gathered on the low, broad stone slab of its south door, overhung with blooming wistaria, her friends and neighbors,—the Tayloes from the afterwards famous Octagon house, the Calverts, and the Daniel Carrolls from Duddington Manor over near the Capitol.

In the winter season, when Congress was in session, the cheery sitting-room and the hospitable dining-room were seldom without their guests. There came Aaron Burr, to flatter her as he flattered every attractive woman with whom he came in contact, and gallant Hamilton, the lover of all lovely women, and Randolph of Roanoke, seeking balm for his tempestuous spirit in that sweet and gracious presence, and Jefferson, to admire, with all the ardor of his democratic soul, the simplicity of her life. There, too, Tom Moore was entertained during his visit to Washington, whence he returned home to write things that did not make pleasant reading matter about the city and Mr. Jefferson, who was our President at the time and who had looked rather patronizingly upon the foppish little Irish bard. There also came suitors for the hand of Marcia, men with a nobility of soul that enabled them properly to estimate the beauty of her character, as well as men who were attracted simply by the stories of her great wealth.

In 1802, when she was twenty years old, she became the wife of John Peter Van Ness, a member of Congress from New York. He had been graduated from Columbia College and admitted to the bar of his native State. In 1800, when he was thirty years old, he was elected to Congress. His youth, his graceful, winning manners, his handsome countenance, and his wealth won him an easy popularity in the society of the capital.

Shortly after the death of Marcia's father, Van Ness erected, close by the old cottage, one of the handsomest houses of that day in the city and one that compares not unfavorably with the most elegant homes built there in recent years. It was designed and built by Latrobe at a cost of nearly sixty thousand dollars, its marble mantel-pieces, which are works of art, being imported from Italy. It had, moreover, a porte cochère, which was a rarity in those days,—the President's house having the only other one in Washington. A truly magnificent home it was, and destined to be the scene of many brilliant occasions, as also to witness days as full of heart-rending unhappiness to Marcia Burns as those both in the cottage of her girlhood and the home of her early married life had been of pure joyousness.

With all its treasures of art, the chief ornament of the new home was Ann Van Ness, who completed her studies at a boarding-school in Philadelphia and returned to Washington about the time her parents took possession of it. Two years later she married Arthur Middleton, of South Carolina, the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and probably that same Arthur Middleton, of whom Mrs. Edward Livingston made mention in a letter to her husband ten years later to the effect that his moustaches, whiskers, and velvet shirt were creating more of a sensation in New York than the quarrel between Jackson and Calhoun. Ann died within a year after her marriage. She was an only child, and to her mother life held nothing that could amend her loss. Thenceforth she withdrew from the sphere to which she had been since her early girlhood so great an ornament. She frequently sought the seclusion of the little cottage, and there, perhaps, lived over in memory the days that had known no shadow.

She did not need the discipline of sorrow, which some natures require to sweeten them, but under its influence she rose to the loftiest heights of benevolence. Her pictured face reveals to us the beauty of her soul. The truth that speaks in her eyes, the spirituality of her brow, the tenderness of her mouth, combine to make the perfection of human character. The Washington City Orphan Asylum, which she founded and to which she devoted both time and means, is a fitting monument to her memory.

She died on the 9th of September, 1832, and is the only woman who was ever honored with a public funeral in Washington. Through her charities she had become as widely known and as tenderly loved in the later years of her life as she had been in her youth through qualities not less endearing.

The following tribute to her is by Horatio Greenough:

"'Mid rank and wealth and worldly pride,
From every snare she turned aside.
She sought the low, the humble shed,
Where gaunt disease and famine tread;
And from that time, in youthful pride,
She stood Van Ness's blooming bride,
No day her blameless head o'er past
But saw her dearer than the last."

[THEODOSIA BURR]
(MRS. JOSEPH ALSTON)

Theodosia Burr was, as has been said of the daughter of another eminent statesman with whom Aaron Burr was closely identified, "the soul of her father's soul." If we would know the better part of a man who was one of the most remarkable characters of his age, we must know Theodosia, through whom, perhaps, his name, which all the subtlety of his soul was bent on immortalizing, may live to a better fame in the centuries to come than has attended it through the years of that in which he lived. Under the inspiration of her presence both her father and husband rose to lofty pinnacles in the political arena of their country. Her father on the eve of her marriage stood at the very portals of the Chief Magistracy. In less than ten years of political life he had so progressed that the election of 1800 resulted in a tie vote for the Presidency between Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson.

In 1801, while the festivities attending Theodosia's marriage at Albany were at their height, the House of Representatives at Washington entered upon that long session of seven days which terminated in declaring Thomas Jefferson President of the United States and Aaron Burr Vice-President.

From the moment Theodosia linked her life with another's, and thus in a measure ceased to be part of his, the retrogressive period of Aaron Burr's life began.

To her husband she carried that same inspiring influence which she had wielded over her father. She gave an impetus to his luxuriant and aimless existence, and at the time of the tragedy which ended her twenty-nine years of life he was occupying the gubernatorial chair of his State. Her life was closely allied not only with the private interests, but with the political ambitions of both. Her father rarely dined, either among friends or strangers, that her health was not drunk. He made her known to everybody, and during his travels in Europe so interested Jeremy Bentham and other writers in her that they sent her sets of their books.

At a time when woman was regarded rather as the companion of a man's heart than as his intellectual mate, "the soft green of the soul on which we rest our eyes that are fatigued with beholding more glaring objects," Theodosia Burr's mental faculties were so developed and trained as to fit her for the most complete and sympathetic union with father, husband, and son.

It is but a negative tribute to say that she was by far the best-educated woman of her time and country. In the beauty of her mind and person she realized her father's ideal of a perfect woman, and amply satisfied his pride and vanity. On the eve of his duel with Hamilton he wrote to her, "I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped for or ever wished."

Theodosia was the only child of Burr's marriage with the widow of a British army officer who had lost his life in the West Indies.

Fresh from the battle-fields of the Revolution, where he had won honors of which he was ever more tenacious than of those achieved elsewhere, and but recently admitted to the bar after a brief period of study, his marriage to a woman ten years his senior and the mother of two well-grown boys was a source of genuine wonderment to Burr's friends in New York. Young, of fascinating manner and appearance, some means, and good family, he might readily have aspired to an alliance with any one of those families which were a power in the State,—the Livingstons, the Van Rensselaers, or the Clintons. But before he quitted the army, Burr had discovered the charms of the society at the "Hermitage," presided over by Mrs. De Visme and her two daughters, one of whom was the widow of Colonel Prevost.

There he met the most distinguished men of his country, through whose influence this family had been spared the inconvenience of moving within the British lines at the outbreak of hostilities. In the library, there, he discovered a treasure-house of French literature, to which he was ever partial, and in the interchange of thought which followed his reading, Aaron Burr and Mrs. Prevost became constantly more imbued with a sense of the beauty and attraction of each other's minds. Through her he gleaned his first reverence for the intellectual power of woman, and to her he owed the happiest days of his life.

"The mother of my Theo," he said, speaking of her towards the close of his life, "was the best woman and the finest lady I have ever known." In her finished manner, her fine bearing, and her exquisite mind there was a delicate harmony that soothed and satisfied Burr's artistic soul. His marriage to her in July, 1782, put an end to the rumor that he was paying his addresses to Miss De Visme, to which his frequent visits to the "Hermitage" had given rise.

The first year of their married life was spent in Albany, where he was engaged in the practice of law, and where Theodosia was born on the 23d of June, 1783. In the fall of that year her parents removed to the city of New York, where they had leased a house in Maiden Lane, at a rental of two hundred pounds per year, to commence from the time the British troops left New York, which they did on November 23, 1783.

So prosperous were Burr's financial affairs that he early in his married life acquired also the possession of a country-seat, Richmond Hill, then two miles from the city. The house, a stately frame building with a lofty portico supported by Ionic columns, stood on a noble hill, several hundred feet in height, overlooking the river and the Jersey shore. It was surrounded by a lawn shaded by oaks, lindens, and cedars, on the outskirts of which on all sides stretched woods of more than a hundred acres. Within the enclosure was a pond known for many years after the property had passed from Burr's possession as Burr's Pond. On it Theodosia learned the graceful art of skating when still quite a little girl.

The house, built about the middle of the last century, was Washington's head-quarters in 1776, and Burr, who was there with him, conceived his first desire to become its possessor. It was occupied by John Adams during his tenure of the Vice-Presidency, when New York was the capital, and Burr's long possession of it culminated in the elegant hospitality of which it was the scene during his term as Vice-President. He returned there from Washington at the close of the sessions of Congress, and entertained with a lavishness that eventually bankrupted him.

Theodosia Burr

(Mrs. Joseph Alston)

By Charles B. J. F. Saint Memin

His library, which bespoke the critical taste of the scholar, and which he had begun to collect as a boy, was a feature of the house, recalled in after years by men who had been his guests as vividly as the brilliant dinner-parties given beneath the same roof by the distinguished Adams and his wife. He had his London bookseller, through whom he made constant additions to his collection, for Burr was ever a lover of books, and he recorded in his journal in his days of exile and want with what pangs he had been obliged to part with some odd volumes he had with him upon discovering that he was again under the necessity of dining.

His passion for books he imparted to his daughter, urging upon her at all times the necessity for study and improvement, and never relinquishing his endeavors to carry her mind to a high order of cultivation. In the communication he addressed to his son-in-law on the night before his duel with Hamilton, he asked as a last favor that he would urge Theodosia to continue to study. In all his letters to her his efforts to stimulate this habit were uppermost. "The longer I live," she wrote to him after her marriage, "the more frequently the truth of your advice evinces itself, that occupation is necessary to give us command over ourselves."

In the development of her mind and character he pursued a clearly-defined and well-directed course. When she was ten years old he wrote to his wife from Philadelphia, where he was at the time occupying a seat in the Senate, reminding her that he had left a memorandum of what Theodosia was to learn during his absence. While his public duties were such that he was not able always to personally superintend her studies, he gave minute instructions to the tutors to whom he intrusted her, and constituted himself their vigilant and inexorable critic. "If your young teacher," he wrote to her when she was in her sixteenth year, "after a week's trial should not suit you, dismiss him on any pretence, without wounding his pride, and take the old Scotchman. Resolve to succeed, and you cannot fail."

Mary Wollstonecraft's book, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women," in which Burr became so absorbed that he sat up all night reading it, so affected him that its influence told on all Theodosia's life. On the principles it inculcated were based both her mental and moral development. "If I could foresee," he wrote to his wife, "that Theodosia would become a mere fashionable woman with all the attendant frivolity and vacuity of mind, adorned with whatever grace and allurement, I would earnestly pray God to take her forthwith hence. But I yet hope by her to convince the world what neither sex appears to believe,—that women have souls."

"And do you regret," he wrote to Theodosia herself, when she was a little more than sixteen, "you are not also a woman? That you are not numbered in that galaxy of beauty which adorns an assembly-room? Coquetting for admiration and attracting flattery? No. I answer with confidence. You feel that you are maturing for solid friendship. The friends you gain you will never lose; and no one, I think, will dare to insult your understanding by such compliments as are most graciously received by too many of your sex."

Burr was himself an ornament to many a drawing-room, and no man ever had better opportunities for estimating the deficiencies in the system of educating the women of his day. Theodosia he brought up like a young Spartan, with few or none of the feminine affectations then in vogue. Courage and fortitude were his darling virtues, and so instilled into her from her infancy that they formed almost the groundwork of her character. "No apologies or explanations. I hate them," he said, reproving her for some fault of omission when she was a little child. "I beg and expect it of you," he wrote to her from Richmond, where he was awaiting trial for treason, and whither she was hastening to him, "that you will conduct yourself as becomes my daughter, and that you manifest no signs of weakness or alarm."

Theodosia's affection for her father was the absorbing passion of her life. "You appear to me so superior, so elevated above other men," she once wrote to him, "I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love, and pride, that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me. When I afterwards revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities appear. My vanity would be greater if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is our relationship. I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man."

He sent his love to "the smiling little girl," in a letter he wrote his wife when Theodosia was two years old, not knowing that with his going she had not only ceased to smile, but that she wept bitterly and heart-brokenly whenever his name was mentioned, and that it required the combined efforts of her mother and nurse to divert her thoughts from the painful fact of his absence. As her mother said, the attachment which thus early manifested itself in so marked a manner, was not of a common nature. Theodosia's life is an evidence of how exalted it was, when, with all the world against him, she was yet proud to be his daughter.

Burr exercised an almost hypnotic influence over both men and women, and there are extant innumerable anecdotes of the conquests he continually made over those who had gone forth to apprehend him as a villain. In his intercourse with Theodosia he brought into play all those delicate attributes of his mind which captivated so many women. She was constantly in his thoughts. "The ideas of which you are the object, that daily pass through my mind," he wrote to her in 1799, from Albany, where the Legislature was in session, "would, if committed to writing, fill an octavo volume.... Indeed, my dear Theodosia, I have many, many moments of solicitude about you."

He exacted much of her even as a child, among other things that she should keep a journal in his absence, to be sent to him at regular intervals, and that she should answer his letters minutely and promptly. Writing to her when she was eleven years old, he said,—

"Yesterday I received your letter and journal to the 13th inclusive. On the 13th you say you got nine pages in Lucian. It was, to be sure, a most surprising lesson. I suspect it must have been the second time going over, and even then it would have been great, and, at the same rate, you will be through a second time before my month is up. I should be delighted to find it so. I have not told you directly that I should stay longer than a month but I was angry enough with you to stay three months when you neglected to write to me for two successive posts."

"I beg, Miss Prissy," he wrote to her from Philadelphia during the same year, "that you will name a single 'unsuccessful effort' which you have made to please me. As to the letters and journal which you did write, surely you have reason abundant to believe that they gave me pleasure; and how the deuce I am to be pleased with those you did not write, and how an omission to write can be called an effort, remains for your ingenuity to disclose."

In his next letter to her, he referred again to "the unsuccessful effort."

"Your letter of the 9th, my dear Theo, was a most agreeable surprise to me. I had not dared even to hope for one until to-morrow. In one instance, at least, an attempt to please me has not been 'unsuccessful.' You see, I do not forget that piece of impudence."

He was mindful, too, of her health, and in one of his letters begged her to carry herself erect. He had himself a remarkably erect and graceful carriage, which lent a majesty to his bearing and gave the impression of much greater height than he possessed.

While his letters to her were full of advice and suggestions for her improvement, they were by no means lacking in commendation. As she grew to womanhood this was more marked, as was also his tendency to confide in her. Her father's frequent and prolonged absences from home, her mother's long illness, attended with much suffering and terminating in death when Theodosia was but eleven years old, had necessitated an early assumption of those responsibilities which mature and strengthen character. To a suggestion contained in a letter written by her father shortly before her mother's death, that he would leave Congress that he might have more time to devote to his wife, Theodosia replied with a quaintness that was characteristic of her: "Ma begs that you omit the thought of leaving Congress."

From her close association with her mother under such circumstances her receptive mind became imbued with the beauties of the Christian philosophy, which her father, though a grandson of Jonathan Edwards and a son of the Rev. Aaron Burr, founder and first president of Princeton College, had not included in the course of studies so exactingly marked out for her. She was at this time studying Latin, Greek, French, and music, and learning to dance and to skate.

After her mother's death, Burr, who had a profound admiration for the language, literature, and people of France, consigned her to a French governess. She acquired a complete mastery of that tongue, and the fluency with which she spoke it added much to the grace with which she presided over her father's home, for Burr frequently entertained Frenchmen. Louis Philippe, Jerome Bonaparte, Talleyrand, and Volney were all at various times his guests at Richmond Hill.

When Theodosia was fourteen she took her place at the head of her father's household and became his inseparable companion, her playful wit illuminating his hours of relaxation, her steadfast courage, her strength, her very presence, constituting his most powerful defence in the darkest hours of his life.

She had much of her mother's self-poise and elegance of manner, together with her father's dignity and wit. When she reached maturity, though short in stature like her father's family, she carried herself with a noble dignity which, with a certain lofty benevolence of countenance, the refinement of her features, the frank intelligence of her brow, the healthful bloom of her complexion, made her singularly beautiful. So absolute was her father's confidence in her that he wrote when she was but seventeen, "Many are surprised that I could repose in you so great a trust as that of yourself, but I knew you were equal to it, and I am not deceived."

He sent Brant, the Indian chief, to her from Philadelphia with a letter of introduction,—she was but fourteen at the time and mistress of Richmond Hill, where she entertained him with an ease which gave her father much gratification. She gave a dinner in his honor, inviting to meet him some of her father's friends, among them Volney, Bishop Moore, Dr. Bard, and Dr. Hosack. She was already a belle, with many admirers ever in her wake, when Edward Livingston, then mayor of New York, taking her aboard a French frigate lying in the harbor of the city, thus warned her: "You must bring none of your sparks on board, Theodosia. We have a magazine here, and we shall all be blown up."

Her life was full of happiness at this time, with Hamilton's wife and daughters among her friends, her father one of the Presidential possibilities, and she enjoying much of his society, accompanying him frequently to Albany on horseback and visiting in the neighborhood while he transacted his business at the capital.

In February, 1801, a few months before she was eighteen, Theodosia was married to Joseph Alston, of South Carolina. He also was young, being but twenty-two, and wealthy, possessing extensive rice plantations, talented and ambitious, though as yet without a specific object on which to expend these qualities. He had studied law and been admitted to the bar, though he had not begun to practise. Upon Burr's suggestion he entered upon a political career, rising eventually to the governorship of his State.

Theodosia argued for a deferment of the marriage, quoting Aristotle, that a man should not marry till he was thirty-six. With convincing eloquence and ardor, Alston replied, winning his suit, notwithstanding Aristotle and other equally eminent authorities.

On February 7, 1801, the New York Commercial Advertiser announced the marriage, which had taken place on the 2d, at Albany, where the Legislature, of which Burr was then a member, was in session. It was a period of intense excitement throughout the country, and the names of Jefferson and Burr were in all mouths. The people of the country had cast a tie vote, which threw the election into the House of Representatives. Party spirit manifested itself for the first time in the young republic, and the strength of the constitution was early put to a severe test.

Theodosia, on her way to her new home in the South, stopped in Washington, where, on the 4th of March, she saw her father inducted into the Vice-Presidency.

Her marriage and her father's new honors inaugurated for her three years of absolute happiness. Though her husband's home and her father's were a journey of twenty days apart, she went frequently back and forth, and though she wrote to her husband during one of her early visits to her old home, "Where you are, there is my country, and in you are centred all my wishes," she was undoubtedly in better health and spirits when in her northern home. Her winters were passed in Charleston, where she was well received and much beloved, and where she became an important factor in her husband's political success.

Her father missed her sadly. "For what else, for whom else, do I live?" he had written to her shortly before her marriage. When she was no longer at Richmond Hill he returned there with painful reluctance. Theodosia urged him to marry again, and from the tone of a letter he wrote to her about this time there seems to have been some probability of his accepting her suggestion. If he were really in earnest, however, he at least did not conduct the affair with his usual sapiency, and though Theodosia from afar threw light on the young woman's vagaries, it was to no purpose.

Theodosia's only child, a son, she named after her father, to whom he was a source of much pride and affection. To Burr the anniversaries of the day of Theodosia's birth were ever occasions for rejoicing. Her twenty-first birthday, though she was not with him, he celebrated with a dinner-party at Richmond Hill. He had her portrait placed in a chair at the table, but, as it was a profile and appeared unsociable, he had it hung up again. "We laughed an hour, danced an hour, and drank your health," he wrote to her.

But already the days of her contentment were drawing to a close. Before this letter telling her of the happiness the day had given him had reached her, the tragedy of Weehawken had been enacted. Its shadow fell forever upon him who survived it, and who doubtless became a potent instrument in Hamilton's canonization. With awful blackness, too, it fell upon the far-away daughter when she heard that her father was a fugitive with an indictment for murder hanging over him.

From that moment shadows gathered about her with ever-increasing sombreness till they culminated in that hour of darkness in which her life went out.

In Burr's Mexican scheme, which he set on foot shortly after the expiration of his term as Vice-President, Theodosia became involved sentimentally, and her husband financially. The President's proclamation and Burr's arrest put an end to their visionary dynasty in Mexico. Instead of beholding him upon a throne, they saw him arraigned before the tribunal of justice at Richmond, on a charge of high treason, with Chief Justice Marshall the presiding judge, and John Randolph of Roanoke foreman of the jury. Never, it has been said, did two more wonderful pairs of eyes than those of Marshall and Burr, black, brilliant, and penetrating, look into each other.

In arraigning Burr, there was an element to be reckoned with that is not ordinarily taken into consideration,—the marvellous personality of the man. From his appearance, his manners, his voice, his eyes, emanated an influence not to be lightly estimated. In his bearing and presence he was peerless. He spoke without effort, in a full, crisp, rather than powerful, voice, clothing his thoughts in the language best suited to their most accurate expression, terse, epigrammatic and devoid of figures, his mobile features lending themselves to the thought that was severe or scintillating, tender or impressive. With a woman's tact he combined an adroit intellect equal to any emergency.

He conducted his own defence, supported by the best legal talent in the country. His son-in-law sat beside him every day in court, and Theodosia, the beautiful, noble Theodosia, with sublime faith in her father, inspired a confidence in him in other breasts. She appealed to the poetic fancy of Washington Irving, then a young barrister, who was sent from New York to report the trial for his brother's paper, and whose letters evince an unmistakable sympathy for Burr. Luther Martin, one of the foremost geniuses of the Maryland bar, defended him with an eloquence that rendered Martin himself an object of suspicion to Thomas Jefferson.

"I find that Luther Martin's idolatrous admiration of Mrs. Alston," wrote Blennerhassett, "is almost as excessive as my own, but far more beneficial to his interests and injurious to his judgment, as it is the medium of his blind attachment to her father, whose secrets and views, past, present, and to come, he is and wishes to remain ignorant of. Nor can he see a speck in the character of Alston, for the best of all reasons with him,—namely, that Alston has such a wife."

Though Burr was acquitted, there was an element of hostility to him in the government, and much distrust of him among the people of the country at large. In the following year, therefore, he went to Europe. Theodosia had gone to New York to be near him. He saw her for the last time on June 7, 1808, the night before he sailed. She spent that summer at Saratoga, and the following winter in New York, where she lived in retirement.

"The world," she said, in one of her letters to her father about this time, "begins to cool terribly around me. You would be surprised how many I supposed attached to me have abandoned the sorry losing game of disinterested friendship." She repeatedly urged him to return, promising him that if the worst came to the worst, she would leave everything and suffer with him.

A few months after Madison's elevation to the Presidency she wrote to Mrs. Madison, whom her father had known when she was a young widow, and to whom he had introduced Mr. Madison. "Ever since the choice of the people was first declared in favor of Mr. Madison, my heart, amid the universal joy, has beat with the hope that I, too, should soon have reason to rejoice," she wrote. She desired to know if there was danger of any further prosecution of her father in the event of his return. For the same purpose she wrote two years later from the Oaks, her South Carolina home, to Albert Gallatin, then Secretary of the Treasury, and once a friend of her father's. The letter was calmly logical, yet eloquent with feeling.

In another year Burr was within sight of his home and country. As he neared her shores he wrote in his journal, "A pilot is in sight and within two miles of us. All is bustle and joy except Gamp [the name by which his little grandson called him]. Why should he rejoice?"

Of all the misfortunes of his life, the heaviest were to fall upon him that year. A month after her father's arrival in New York, and while her heart was yet rejoicing that he had been kindly received, the young life of Theodosia's son, full of beauty and promise, closed. "I will not conceal from you," wrote Alston to his father-in-law, "that life is a burden, which, heavy as it is, we shall support, if not with dignity, at least with decency and firmness. Theodosia has endured all that a human being could endure, but her admirable mind will triumph. She supports herself in a manner worthy of your daughter."

Theodosia longed to see her father. We were at war with England at the time, and her husband, governor of his State and general of militia, could not leave his post of duty to accompany her to New York. Her health was so feeble that she could not safely attempt the journey alone. Her father's old friend Timothy Green offered his services, going from New York to bring her north. Under his care, and accompanied by her maid, Theodosia sailed from Charleston on the "Pilot" on the 30th of December, 1812. Save by her fellow passengers on the ill-fated vessel, she was never seen or heard of again. A violent storm swept the coast on the following day, and it has been supposed that the "Pilot," with all on board, went down off Cape Hatteras. After weeks and months of despairing silence, father and husband gave her up. Burr during this period of torturing suspense acquired a habit which clung to him to the end of his life,—of wistfully scanning the horizon for ships as he walked on the battery, then the popular resort of all New Yorkers.

Two or three years after she had gone from their lives, her husband sent a chest of her belongings, which he had not had the courage to open, to her father. "What a fate, poor thing!" sighed Burr, as he recognized the familiar articles. Among the contents was a letter addressed, "To my husband. To be delivered after my death and before my burial." It was dated August 6, 1805, and had been written during an absence of her husband from home, at a time when, being depressed in health and spirits, she feared that death was approaching. After leaving some remembrance to the various members of her husband's family, and begging her husband to provide for Peggy, an old servant, she says,—

"Death is not welcome. I confess it is ever dreaded. You have made me too fond of life. Adieu then, thou kind, thou tender husband. Adieu, friend of my heart. May Heaven prosper you, and may we meet hereafter. Adieu; perhaps we may never see each other again in this world. You are away, I wished to hold you fast, and prevent you from going this morning. But He who is wisdom itself ordains events; we must submit to them. Least of all should I murmur, I, on whom so many blessings have been showered, whose days have been numbered by bounties, who have had such a husband, such a child, such a father. Oh, pardon me, my God, if I regret leaving these. I resign myself. Adieu once more, and for the last time, my beloved. Speak of me often to our son. Let him love the memory of his mother, and let him know how he was loved by her.

"Your wife, your fond wife,
"Theo.

"Let my father see my son sometimes. Do not be unkind towards him whom I have loved so much, I beseech you. Burn all my papers except my father's letters, which I beg you to return to him. Adieu, my sweet boy. Love your father, be grateful and affectionate to him while he lives, be the pride of his meridian, the support of his departing days. Be all that he wishes, for he made your mother happy."

After expressing a wish that she may not be stripped and washed according to the usual custom, being pure enough to return to dust, she concludes: "If it does not appear contradictory or silly, I beg to be kept as long as possible before I am consigned to the earth."

Alston, who survived her but four years, wrote heart-brokenly to her father: "My boy, my wife, gone both! This, then, is the end of all the hopes we had formed. You may well observe that you feel severed from the human race. She was the last tie that bound us to the species. What have we left? Yet, after all, he is a poor actor who cannot sustain his hour upon the stage, be his part what it may. But the man who has been deemed worthy of the heart of Theodosia Burr, and who has felt what it was to be blessed with such a woman's love, will never forget his elevation."

[ELIZABETH PATTERSON]
(MADAME JEROME BONAPARTE)

The city into which Baltimore Town was legislated on the last day of the year 1796 already fostered within its limits the germ of the dual life, social and commercial, to which it has owed its subsequent eminence. Not infrequently, in the days of its inception, the same roof sheltered drawing-room and warehouse, the earlier merchants deeming it necessary to keep their growing interests constantly beneath their personal vigilance. Later, the commercial life crowded out the domestic life, and merchants built their dwellings—stately bricks or frames, painted blue, yellow, or white, facing on avenues of locust-trees—in another part of the town, all bearing quaint evidence of the far-away ports with which their vessels traded, while the whole town was permeated with the odor peculiar to shipping districts.

The first theatre troupe that took the town by storm played in one of the old warehouses, whose walls re-echoed the approbation of the pleasure-hungry audience, among whom were no fastidious critics to pick flaws in "King Richard III.," and still less in "A Miss in her Teens," which followed.

Baltimore never had the qualms of conscience which afflicted some of her puritanical sister towns concerning the pleasures in which she might rightly indulge. She looked out upon life, rather, with a liberality of mental vision which partook of the breadth of the seas her merchantmen traversed.

The brick theatre built in 1781 became one of the most revered spots in the town, and when the actors came her way, Baltimore turned out en masse to give them royal welcome.

At the close of the Revolutionary War a number of the French officers of the army and navy who had remained in this country settled in Baltimore, thereby adding a foreign flavor to the social side of its existence, which, like that of all the cities and towns of the young Republic, was characterized more or less by a wholesome simplicity.

In the town, a dozen years before it blossomed into the city, before its streets were paved, when its only communication with inland towns was by means of the stage-coach, and three years before Maryland had ratified the Constitution of the new union of States, there was born to one of her merchants, William Patterson, a daughter, the repute of whose beauty was destined to fill two continents, the spicy aroma of whose wit to penetrate the sacred precincts of imperial throne-rooms, and the story of whose life to touch the hearts of many generations.

The daughter of one of the self-made men whose sterling qualities have lent such stability to the industries and development of the country, who, born of Irish parentage and coming to this country in his fourteenth year, had carved his own way shrewdly and judiciously to the position of distinction he held among his fellow-townsmen and the people of his adopted country, Elizabeth inherited many of his dominant characteristics. He was estimated to be the wealthiest merchant, and, with the possible exception of Charles Carroll, the wealthiest man, in the United States. Her mother, Dorcas Spear, came of good Maryland lineage, and was a woman of gentle character and cultivated mind. She superintended for the most part Elizabeth's education, which, if somewhat erratic, was, nevertheless, superior to that enjoyed by the average woman of that period. It is said that she acquired an early familiarity with Rochefoucauld's "Maxims" and committed to memory Young's "Night Thoughts." Lady Morgan, whose friendship she formed later in life, realizing the brilliancy of her mind, regretted that its earlier direction had not been more systematic.

Her father, from his own statement, seems to have looked after the conduct of his family with the same minute vigilance which he bestowed upon his financial concerns.

"I always consider it a duty to my family," he said, "to keep them as much as possible under my own eye, so that I have seldom in my life left Baltimore either on pleasure or business. Ever since I had a house it has been my invariable rule to be the last up at night, and to see that the fires and light were secured before I retired myself, by which I found little risk from fires and managed to have my family keep regular hours. What I possess is solely the product of my own labor. I inherited nothing of my forefathers, nor have I benefited anything from public favors or appointments."

Strangely similar is the concluding sentiment to that expressed by the founder of another family on another continent,—Napoleon Bonaparte. "Sole fabricator of my destiny, I owe nothing to my brothers," said he, whose fortunes, though he had reared them upon a loftier pinnacle, were, nevertheless, to be crossed by those of the Patterson family.

The eldest daughter in a family of thirteen children, Elizabeth Patterson grew up at a period when the beaux of society read Chesterfield, when no man begrudged the time expended on the profound and sweeping bow then dictated by gallantry, and when fencing and dancing formed a part of every gentleman's education.

Elizabeth Patterson

(Madame Jerome Bonaparte)

From portrait by Quinçon

"She possessed the pure Grecian contour; her head was exquisitely formed, her forehead fair and shapely, her eyes large and dark, with an expression of tenderness that did not belong to her character; and the delicate loveliness of her mouth and chin, the soft bloom of her complexion, together with her beautifully rounded shoulders and tapering arms, combined to form one of the loveliest of women." She had had numerous offers of marriage before she reached her eighteenth year, her father's wealth and prominence, independent of her own attractive personality, having insured her social prestige, but as yet she walked heart whole and fancy free.

In the summer of 1803 Jerome, the youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, and then less than nineteen years of age, detaching himself from naval duty in the West Indies and following the bent of his own inclination, eventually put into the port of New York. Whatever breach of military discipline this implies will in no way astound those familiar with Jerome's character.

Too young to have taken part in the struggles that had elevated his family to such dizzy heights, he yet, at an age most susceptible to the altered conditions of his life, came into the full enjoyment of all the advantages they offered. Napoleon was wont to take a humorous rather than a serious view of this "mauvais sujet," as he frequently called Jerome. Madame Junot relates a characteristic anecdote in her memoirs which, she says, she had from the Emperor himself. Returning to Paris after the battle of Marengo, Napoleon was presented with various bills contracted by Jerome during his absence. One of these, to the amount of twenty thousand francs, was for a superb shaving set in gold, mother of pearl, silver, ivory, and costly enamels. It was a work of art, but of no possible use to Jerome, who, being but fifteen years old, was without the suggestion of a beard.

To his mother he was an idol, and to the end of her life he was able to extract from her in generous measure much of that substance which she expended grudgingly even upon herself.

Enveloped in the glory of a great name, Jerome's advent into the social current of New York was noised abroad in the few and ordinarily but little-read newspapers of the day.

By stage the news was brought to Baltimore. The returning coach took an urgent invitation to Jerome and his suite to visit that city from Commodore Barney, who had been his recent comrade-in-arms in the West Indies. They accepted the invitation, and early in September found themselves the objects of a lavish hospitality.

Shortly after their arrival one of Jerome's suite, General Rewbell, lost his heart to Miss Henrietta Pascault, one of the belles of the town, to whom he was, after a brief courtship, married.

At the fall races, which were in progress when he arrived in Baltimore, Jerome for the first time saw the woman in whose life he was thereafter destined to play so conspicuous a part. We may well believe that she was radiantly beautiful in a gown of buff silk with a lace fichu and a leghorn hat with tulle trimmings and black plumes.

He had already heard of the beautiful Miss Patterson, and had declared with youthful impetuosity that he would marry her. The fact that she was aware of his preconceived sentiments gave a piquancy to their first meeting, which was enhanced by the boyish enthusiasm with which he referred to her as his "belle femme." The coquetry with which she resisted his too evident admiration had the invariable effect of further ensnaring his princely affections.

They met frequently in those centres of hospitality, the home of Samuel Chase, who twenty-odd years before had put his name to the Declaration of Independence; at "Belvedere," the home of Colonel John Eager Howard, the hero of Cowpens; at "Greenmount," "Druid Hill," and "Brooklandwood," where three other afterwards celebrated beauties were in course of development.

When the festivities in honor of Jerome were at their height, Elizabeth was borne away to the seclusion of a Virginia estate, under the wing of a vigilant mother, who rightly interpreted the course of events and foresaw the obstacles that loomed in the pathway of their happy termination. There only an occasional echo of the gayety that was rife at Baltimore reached her, making unbearable that rural quiet, which means happiness only to a contented mind, and is a veritable torture to such a restless spirit as ever possessed Elizabeth Patterson. Her entreaties at length prevailed, and she was brought back to the city, where, on the 29th of October, to prove how futile the separation had been, scarcely eight weeks after their first meeting, Jerome procured a license of marriage.

He was probably remonstrated with by the members of his suite, whose age and the length of whose friendship made possible that liberty. Rewbell, in the first flush of his own happy union doubtless gave Jerome a reckless support that not even the crafty Le Camus could counterbalance. To such opposition as Elizabeth's family offered, she replied that she "would rather be the wife of Jerome for one hour than of any other man for a lifetime."

On Christmas Eve, 1803, Jerome Bonaparte, brother of the man who five months later declared himself Emperor of France, and Elizabeth Patterson, daughter of an American merchant, entered into that union whose subsequent rending was to echo throughout Christendom. The ceremony was performed in the home of Elizabeth's father, according to the rites of the Catholic Church, by the Right Reverend John Carroll, first archbishop of America. It was witnessed by the French Consul at Baltimore, M. Sotin, Alexander le Camus, who was Jerome's secretary, and the mayor of Baltimore.

The marriage contract, which was drawn up by Alexander J. Dallas, afterwards Secretary of the Treasury, bears evidence of the apprehension felt by Elizabeth's family as to the outcome of this international union with so youthful a bridegroom.

The dress worn by Elizabeth on her bridal night was of exquisitely fine white muslin, elaborately embroidered. She said of the gown in after years that it was one she had frequently worn, as she particularly desired to avoid anything like vulgar display. "And to tell the truth," she added, "there was as little as possible of any gown at all, dress in that day being chiefly an aid in setting off beauty to advantage," which concurs with the statement made by a man who was present at the wedding, to the effect that he could have put all the clothes worn by the bride into his pocket.

The honeymoon days of Jerome and Elizabeth were passed at her father's estate outside of Baltimore, "Homestead." Late in January they were mingling with the merrymakers one afternoon in Market Street. There was good sleighing, and the crisp air rang with the joyousness of an old-time winter. A snowball, sent with the unerring aim and democratic disregard of a small boy of the town, struck Elizabeth. Jerome was outraged at the indignity, and offered a reward of five hundred dollars for the discovery of the youthful miscreant. How trivial seems this "missile light as air" by comparison with those shafts sped later by a not less unerring hand, and striking into the very soul of her womanhood, Jerome making no effort to avert them.

In February this bride and groom of the early century went to Washington, whither since have wended their way so many happy bridal couples. Of the journey there, made in a stage-coach, General Samuel Smith, member of Congress from Maryland, wrote to Mr. William Patterson describing the runaway of the horses as they entered the city and Betsy's presence of mind. The driver having been thrown from his seat, Jerome sprang from the coach with the hope of catching the horses. But as they still sped on, and her danger increased as they penetrated towards the centre of the straggling little capital, Elizabeth opened the door and jumped out into the snow without injury.

While in Washington they were the guests of the French Minister, General Tureau. Aaron Burr, then Vice-President of the United States, meeting Elizabeth at this time, wrote to his daughter Theodosia, whom he thought Elizabeth much resembled, and referred to her as "a charming little woman with sense, spirit, and sprightliness."

Jerome's thoughts were already turning towards France, where every effort was being made to bring about his return—alone. While in New York during the following summer he was made acquainted with the annulment of his marriage, as follows: "By an Act of the 11 Ventose, all the civil officers of the Empire are prohibited from receiving on their registers the transcription of the act of celebration of a pretended marriage that Jerome Bonaparte has contracted in a foreign country during the age of minority, without the consent of his mother and without the publication in the place of his nativity."

In February following the marriage Mr. William Patterson had written to our Minister at Paris, Robert Livingston, enclosing him letters from the President and Secretary of State, to be presented to Napoleon with the hope of obtaining his approval, or at least mitigating any displeasure the marriage might have caused. "I can assure you," he wrote to Livingston, "that I never directly or indirectly countenanced or gave Mr. Bonaparte the smallest encouragement to address my daughter, but, on the contrary, resisted his pretensions by every means in my power consistent with discretion. Finding, however, that the mutual attachment they had formed for each other was such that nothing short of force or violence could prevent their union, I with much reluctance consented to their wishes."

He had, moreover, despatched his eldest son, Robert Patterson, to Paris, to discover which way the wind of the imperial temper blew. As the matter lay rather outside the pale of usual diplomatic issues, it required most delicate manipulation, and while young Patterson received kindly yet cautious expressions of interest and good-will from Napoleon's brothers, an ominous and forbidding silence enveloped the First Consul. His indignation increased with Jerome's continued absence, and when at length he spoke through his Minister of Marine, it was to bid Jerome, as lieutenant of the fleet, to return to France, at the same time forbidding all captains of French vessels to receive on board "the young person to whom Jerome had attached himself." Through the same channel Napoleon offered his forgiveness to Jerome on condition that he abandon Elizabeth and return to France, there to associate himself with his fortunes. Should he persist in bringing her, she would not be allowed to put foot on French territory. Jerome's mother wrote to him at the same time, suggesting that he return to France alone and send his wife to Holland. Robert Patterson, however, who succeeded admirably in keeping himself posted on the variations in the attitude of Jerome's family, advised that Jerome should not return to France without his wife.

Though he made several efforts during the year that followed to return thither, there is only one on record when it was his purpose to sail alone.

In September, 1804, General Armstrong sailed from New York to replace Livingston at Paris. He had agreed with Jerome to take Madame Bonaparte with him, Jerome himself intending to go on one of the French frigates then in New York harbor. She could thus, at least, have landed in France as a member of the family of the American minister, who might have succeeded in presenting her to Napoleon, with whom she could, no doubt, have pleaded her cause with more effect than could have been produced by any amount of diplomatic correspondence or family intervention. She had the gifts which he most admired in women, great personal beauty and wit, and though the latter might have been too keen for his entire appreciation, she no doubt would have been shrewd enough to temper it to his taste.

She wrote her father from New York, September 5, 1804, of her disappointment at Armstrong's having sailed without her. The reason given was that Jerome and Elizabeth had arrived by stage a few hours after the ship had sailed.

An effort to sail during the following month ended in shipwreck off Pilot Town, where they were finally landed and temporarily housed by one of the inhabitants, on whose clothes-line Madame Bonaparte dried her wardrobe, and from whose hospitable board she enjoyed a dinner of roast goose with apple-sauce, being in exuberant spirits over her rescue.

On March 11, 1805, they finally made their departure from Baltimore in the "Erin," a ship belonging to Mr. Patterson. Though they sailed at an early hour in the morning, and the arrangements for their departure had been conducted with much secrecy, General Tureau wrote from Washington two days later to Mr. Patterson to ask what disposition had been made of Jerome's four carriage-horses, and to suggest, if they were to be sold, that he should like to be considered as a purchaser.

The "Erin" reached Lisbon on April 2, whence Jerome wrote in English to his father-in-law of their safe arrival, and took the opportunity to express his affection for and gratitude towards his second family. He spoke of Elizabeth having been very sea-sick, and added,—

"But you know as well as any body that sea-sick never has killed nobody."

Napoleon's ambassador met the ship upon its arrival, and called upon Elizabeth to ask what he could do for her, addressing her as Miss Patterson.

"Tell your master," she replied, "that Madame Bonaparte is ambitious, and demands her rights as a member of the Imperial family."

She was forbidden to land, and Jerome, taking that farewell of her which fate had destined should be his last, went overland to Paris, while the "Erin" sailed for Amsterdam.

On his way to Paris Jerome met General and Madame Junot en route for their new post in Spain. He breakfasted with them and opened his anxious young heart to them, showing them a miniature of Elizabeth, from whom, he declared, nothing should ever separate him.

Upon reaching Paris he went at once to Malmaison and sought an audience with Napoleon, who refused to see him, bidding him write what he wished to say. He wrote, simply announcing his arrival, and received the following reply:

"I have received your letter this morning. There are no faults you have committed which may not be effaced in my eyes by a sincere repentance. Your marriage is null and void, both from a religious and a legal point of view. I will never acknowledge it. Write Miss Patterson to return to the United States, and tell her it is not possible to give things another turn. On condition of her return to America, I will allow her a pension of sixty thousand francs a year, provided she does not take the name of my family, to which she has no right, her marriage having no existence."

From this position Napoleon never swerved. The annuity was paid to Elizabeth after her return to America until the fall of the Empire, and formed the basis of the fortune of one and a half million dollars, accumulated through a long life of frugality and cautious investment, of which she died possessed.

The reply of Pope Pius, to whom Napoleon appealed for the annulment of the marriage, accompanying his request with a costly gold tiara, to the effect that after mature deliberation he had been able to discover no grounds on which the marriage could be cancelled, though it chagrined the Emperor to an extent which he never forgave, did not yet alter the stand he had taken. When Jerome was finally admitted to his presence, he greeted him with that magnetic smile whose potency swayed men and women alike.

"So, sir, you are the first of the family," he said, "who has shamefully abandoned his post. It will require many splendid actions to wipe off that stain from your reputation. As to your love-affair with your little girl, I pay no attention to it."

The "Erin," meanwhile, arrived in the Texel Roads, where, though flying the flag of a friendly power, and a merchant vessel whose clearance from Baltimore showed that she carried no guns, she was placed under guard of two French men-of-war and all communication with the shore prohibited. Through the intercession of Sylvanus Bourne, our Consul at Amsterdam, she was permitted at the expiration of a week to depart, and, bearing her full measure of human desolation, she headed towards the shores of England. The fame of her fair passenger had preceded her, and so large a concourse of people had gathered at Dover to witness the landing of Madame Jerome Bonaparte that Mr. Pitt, then Prime Minister of England, sent a military escort to protect her from possible annoyance of a sympathetic though curious throng.

At Camberwell, near London, her son was born on the 7th of July, 1805, and named Jerome Napoleon.

In June of that year, two months after his return, Jerome had been restored to his rank in the navy and was cruising off Genoa, whence he wrote, through his secretary, Alexander le Camus, to Mr. William Patterson, of Baltimore, expressing his dissatisfaction at Elizabeth's having gone to England, that country being at the time at war with France. The tone of the letter betrays the change that was already working in Jerome's feelings, though he was at that time sending Elizabeth by every available opportunity messages and pledges of his unswerving love for her.

When we judge him, let us bear in mind not only his youth and all the circumstances of his life, but, above all, that soul-crushing will which he, weakly enough it seems to us, was striving to stand against.

In a subsequent letter to Mr. Patterson, written also by Mr. le Camus, in the course of which Jerome expressed the desire that Elizabeth should return to America and wait there in her own home till he obtained her recall from the Emperor, one feels instinctively that between the lines is written the finale to the short chapter of the romance of Elizabeth Patterson and Jerome Bonaparte.

She returned to her father's home in the fall, though she had written shortly before that she was glad to be among strangers, because "in Baltimore, where people are always on the watch," she would be more observed.

On August 12, 1807, Jerome married Princess Frederika Catherine, daughter of the King of Wurtemburg. As King of Westphalia he offered Elizabeth a home within his dominions, with the title of Princess of Smalcalden and a pension of two hundred thousand francs per year. In regard to the former, she replied that Westphalia was a large kingdom, but not quite large enough for two queens, and with regard to the pension, having already accepted Napoleon's annuity of sixty thousand francs, she made the oft-quoted response that she preferred "being sheltered under the wing of an eagle to being suspended from the bill of a goose."

Napoleon, with his high appreciation of a bon mot, desired to know what favor he could bestow upon a woman capable of this witticism. Elizabeth replied through the French Minister at Washington that she was ambitious, and would like to be a duchess.

The Emperor promised the gift, but never conferred it. Notwithstanding her unremitting yet ever futile struggle for recognition, Madame Bonaparte cherished always the most enthusiastic admiration for the genius of the man who had blighted her life. In one of her letters to her father, written from Europe, whither she returned after the fall of the Empire, she said, "They do not in England pretend to revile Napoleon as we have done. His stupendous abilities are admitted; his misfortunes almost respected by his enemies. I listen silently to any discussion in which he bears a part. I easily perceive that he has more justice done him here than with us."

In a subsequent letter she details more fully her attitude towards the entire family.

"I cannot say," she writes, also to her father, "that I have the least reliance on that family, although I am inclined to reciprocate their kind words and receive their offers of friendship without allowing myself to be deceived by either." And farther on in the same letter she says, in regard to allowing her son to visit Pauline Bonaparte, then the Princess Borghese, at Rome, "My resolution is uninfluenced by personal feelings, never having felt the least resentment towards any individual of that family, who certainly injured me, but not from motives which could offend me. I was sacrificed to political considerations, not to the gratification of bad feelings, and under the pressure of insupportable disappointment became not unjust."

From her letters there seem to have been frequent rumors afloat in regard to her marrying again, both in this country and in Europe, where she was greatly admired. In one letter to her father, written in 1823, she says that while the American newspapers were marrying her she was making her will.

Though she obtained from the Maryland Legislature a divorce, after the fall of Napoleon, it seems to have been rather as a precautionary measure against any possible demands Jerome might make upon her financially than with a view to marrying again.

Tom Moore, whom Lady Morgan sent to her with a letter of introduction, afterwards described her as a beautiful woman, but destitute of all sentiment and with a total disbelief in love, on which, indeed, she bestowed only ridicule. There can be no doubt, however, of the concern and tenderness which she expended upon a dog, Le Loup, which belonged to her son, and which she said was "superior to half the persons one meets in the world." There are many traditions of her wit, which, though tinged with asperity, was ever ready and scintillating. The Honorable Mr. Dundas, who sat beside her at a dinner in London, she speared so unsparingly with the shafts of her sarcasm that his egotism never forgave her. When he asked her, finally, if she had read Captain Basil Hall's book on America, she replied affirmatively. "And did you observe," he continued, bluntly, with the hope of avenging his wounded self-love, "that he called all Americans vulgarians?" "Yes," replied Madame Bonaparte, while the table paused to listen, "and I was not surprised. Were the Americans descendants of the Indians and Esquimaux, I should have been. But being the direct descendants of the English, nothing is more natural than that they should be vulgarians." For both her wit and her beauty she was admired by men and women of fastidious taste, among whom were Sir Charles and Lady Morgan, Talleyrand, Gortschakoff, and Madame de Staël. She so fascinated the Prince of Wurtemburg, uncle of Jerome's second wife, that he confessed his wonderment that Jerome could ever have abandoned her. "Si elle n'est pas reine de Westphalie, elle est au moins reine des cœurs," was Baron Bonsteller's tribute to her.

She seldom alluded to Jerome, though she believed that she always stood first in his heart. She referred in a letter to her father to the probability of his coming to Rome while she was there, but added that she should not see him, "nor would he like it himself after the unhandsome way in which he has always conducted himself. I shall hold my tongue, which is all I can possibly do for him."

Though the greater part of her life was spent in Europe, and she was for a time on terms of considerable intimacy with his family, she met Jerome but once, when they passed each other in the gallery of the Pitti Palace in Florence, Jerome with the Princess Catherine upon his arm. Though they recognized each other, they passed without greeting, Jerome exclaiming, "That was my American wife." Jerome Napoleon, the son of his American wife, was frequently his guest, and was treated with much kindness by the Princess Catherine. Jerome, however, added practically nothing to this son's material comfort, much to his mother's chagrin, and at his death in 1860 it was found that he had not even mentioned his name in his will, a lack of recognition which wounded both mother and son in a more profound sense than his lifelong failure to make provision for him had done. So great was his son's resemblance to his family, and particularly to the Emperor, that the chargé d'affaires of France at Amsterdam, in 1820, refused his mother a passport for him to travel through France. It was a strange coincidence that Madame Jerome Bonaparte herself should bear a remarkable resemblance to the Bonaparte family, particularly to Napoleon and Pauline, even having some of their mannerisms.

In August, 1855, Louis Napoleon offered to create Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte Duke of Sartène, but he declined the honor, as the object was to take away his name and the rights he possessed as his father's eldest son.

At the request of his half-brother a family council was called, before which the celebrated Berryer pleaded the cause of Madame Jerome Bonaparte and her son, whose rights were ultimately defined as limited exclusively to the use of the name.

On November 3, 1829, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, to his mother's intense dissatisfaction and disappointment, married an American, the lovely Miss Susan Mary Williams, of Baltimore. During a long residence abroad Madame Bonaparte had become imbued with the idea that it was a duty her son owed both to her and to himself to ally himself matrimonially with some European family of distinction. Writing to her father from Florence, where she was residing at the time of her son's marriage, she said, "I would rather die than marry any one in Baltimore, but if my son does not feel as I do upon this subject, of course he is quite at liberty to act as he likes best."

Her father died in 1835. He had never been in sympathy with her desire to live in a foreign country, and had frequently upbraided her for her prolonged absence from home. In his will he denounced her as an undutiful daughter, bequeathing her a few small houses besides the home in which she was born, on the east side of South Street, with the lot surrounding it.

In April, 1879, Madame Bonaparte, who was then in her ninety-fifth year, having outlived her son and all of her own generation, passed from the sphere where she had been so conspicuous a figure. She died in a boarding-house in her native city, where she had acquired the reputation of being a keen, eccentric old woman. The sorrows of her youth, belonging to the early days of the country, were too remote to be remembered by her later-day contemporaries, who discovered in her no trace of the bewitching Elizabeth Patterson who had taken by storm the heart of the youthful Prince Jerome.

She rests to-day in Greenmount Cemetery, Baltimore, in a small triangular lot which she selected shortly before her death, saying that as she had been alone in life, so she wished to be in death. On her monument are graven the words that express so much for her,—"After life's fitful fever she sleeps well."

[THE CATON SISTERS]

Among the belles of the early century loom the forms of those gracious women whose names are interwoven with those of the most historic figures of their age, the Caton sisters of Baltimore. Granddaughters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the most illustrious Americans of the period, they became through marriage identified with the most distinguished families in England.

In 1787 Richard Caton, an Englishman who had settled in Baltimore two years before, and engaged in the manufacture of cotton goods, succeeded in winning the fair hand of Mary Carroll. Rumor said that it had been already partially plighted to her cousin John Carroll of Duddington Manor. Cousin "Longlegs," however, as Kitty, her irreverent younger sister, called him, was in Europe at the time with her brother Charles, and in those days of slow travel Mary had probably capitulated to the young Briton before John even knew that he had a rival.

Her father, who was reputed the wealthiest man in America, and who provided liberally both for his children and grandchildren, settled upon Mary at the time of her marriage to Richard Caton, the beautiful estate of "Brookland Wood," in the centre of the suburb which has since sprung up and been named for them, Catonsville. Their four daughters were born there and grew up to beautiful womanhood,—Mary, Elizabeth, Louisa, and Emily. They derived every grace of mind and body from a cultivated and accomplished mother who had been educated abroad, and who, accompanying her father to Philadelphia when Congress met there, had known the best there was of social life in America. Closely associated, moreover, from their infancy with their grandfather, a most courtly gentleman, who ever beheld in woman an object worthy of his most chivalrous devotion, they bore every evidence of that innate refinement which created distinction for them in England as the "American Graces."

The life at that time surrounding such men as Carroll was idyllic. Honored by his countrymen, blessed with the wealth giving him every material comfort and luxury, owning his town house, his estate of Doughoregan, and his plantation the famous Carrollton, sought out by the most distinguished men and women at home and from abroad, to say nothing of the myriad resources which such a man as Carroll possessed within himself, he already saw his family—the third generation born in America—well established, with the roof-trees of his son and daughters close by his own. His granddaughters were much with him, and though they were the belles of Baltimore town from their earliest girlhood, a very delightful phase of their life was that portion of it spent on their own and their grandfather's estates. There is frequent mention both in the journal and letters of Charles Carroll of visits from them and also of that princely hospitality that is ever associated with the names of many of the old Maryland estates.

In one letter he alludes to a ball to be given by Captain Charles Ridgley of "Hampton," for which three hundred invitations were out, and to which Mary, Betsy, and Louisa were all going. In another he mentions a ball given by Louisa, who was entertaining the Misses Pinkney at his place at Annapolis.

Many a belle in those days went to balls on horseback with a blanket thrown over her muslin gown to protect it from the dust. Yet it was not too much of an undertaking to go all the way from Annapolis to Baltimore, or vice versa, for the pleasure of being present at somebody's ball or dinner-party. Roads and weather permitting, the Catons occasionally made the trip in winter time in a "sled." Roads and weather had much to do with the timing of one's visits in those days of primitive transportation facilities when Charles Carroll recorded that he sent his servant from Doughoregan with a led mare to fetch Miss Nancy Robinson who had been visiting at Homewood, his son's estate.

Nature lent her perfecting hand to the rural life of these people, for nowhere was she ever more munificent in the bestowal of her epicurean gifts than in the State of Maryland, whose lands and whose waters alike cater to the gastronomic proclivities of the bon vivant.

Oliver Wendell Holmes at a later period attributed a lack of appreciation of literature which he fancied he had detected among the Baltimoreans to the preponderance of these very blessings, and suggested that the highest monument in the city should be crowned with a canvas-back duck.

There were club-houses and merrymaking in plenty, with oysters, soft-shell crabs, terrapin, canvas-back ducks, and a roasted young pig with an apple in its mouth, or a turkey stuffed with oysters, as pièce de résistance, with a nip of punch for sauce. Miss Ridgley depicts it very temptingly in her little book.

Foremost among the beautiful women whose presence lent piquancy to this life were the Catons. In 1807 Mary, who was at the time nineteen years old, was married to Robert Patterson, the eldest son of William Patterson. She thus became the sister-in-law of the unhappy Madame Jerome Bonaparte, between whom and herself there seems to have existed no great sympathy, through no fault of Mary Caton's.

Mary Caton

(Lady Wellesley)

From portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence

The event was a welcome one to William Patterson, who was at the time the wealthiest merchant in America. The wedding ceremony was performed in the private chapel of the Carroll family by Archbishop Carroll, who four years previously had similarly united Elizabeth Patterson and Jerome Bonaparte. In April, 1811, Robert and his wife, accompanied by her sisters Elizabeth and Louisa, went abroad, sailing from Baltimore on one of his father's ships and landing in Lisbon in the latter part of May. Robert Patterson had already travelled and lived much in Europe. To the Catons it was the first of a series of numerous trans-Atlantic trips.

While in Spain they met the Duke of Wellington, who was there at that time conducting the peninsular war, and Colonel Sir Felton Bathurst Hervey, who had been his aide-de-camp at Waterloo and whom Louisa Caton afterwards married. Charles Carroll, writing of Hervey after his marriage to Louisa, which occurred on the 1st of March, 1817, said, "All who know him love him." He was a gallant soldier and had lost his right arm at Vittoria.

The Duke of Wellington's ardent admiration for Mrs. Patterson drew him within the wake of the little American party as they progressed in their travels over Europe, lending them the prestige which opened for them the most exclusive houses in England. Apparent as his admiration was, not the least breath of scandal ever touched the name of this beautiful young matron. The Prince Regent, to whom Wellington presented her, spoke later to Richard Rush, the American Minister, of her unusual beauty. When she came, later in life, into contact with William IV. as first lady in waiting at Windsor, she won the sincere admiration of that sovereign on account of the high standard of morality which she maintained.

After the marriage of Hervey and Louisa Caton they were entertained by the Duke of Wellington at Walmer Castle. The Duchess of Rutland gave them a ball, and bestowed upon the sisters on that memorable night the title under which they became famous,—the "American Graces." Hervey's death occurred in 1819, and Robert Patterson's at Baltimore in the fall of 1822. The widow of the latter shortly afterwards rejoined her sisters in England, where they were again entertained at Wellington's country-seat. While there they met for the first time his eldest brother, Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, and like himself a soldier and a statesman. In 1797 he had been made Governor of India by George III., who, in return for the services he rendered there, had created him Marquis of Wellesley. At the time he met Mrs. Patterson and her sisters he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Two years later, when Mrs. Patterson and Elizabeth Caton visited Dublin, he entertained them royally, bestowing the most devoted attentions upon the former, to whom he subsequently offered himself.

After a brief engagement they were married at the viceregal castle, the ceremony being performed twice, to accord with the religious convictions of both the bride and the groom, the Archbishop of Dublin marrying them according to the rites of the Catholic Church, and the Lord Primate of Ireland according to those of the Church of England.

Unusual magnificence marked the festivities which followed this event, as well as those of the remainder of Lord Mornington's reign as viceroy.

On July 4, 1827, Bishop England, of South Carolina, gave the following toast to Charles Carroll, who was the last survivor of the signers of the Declaration of Independence: "To Charles Carroll of Carrollton: in the land from which his grandfather fled in terror his granddaughter now reigns a queen."

It was rather a strange coincidence that two daughters of the little American town of Baltimore, Elizabeth Patterson and Mary Caton, neighbors and contemporaries, should have married brothers of two of the most formidable characters in modern history,—Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-styled conqueror of the world, and the Duke of Wellington, his conqueror.

Madame Jerome Bonaparte, who was in Europe at the time of her sister-in-law's second marriage, thus wrote to her father concerning it:

"Havre, November 21, 1825.

"Dear Sir,—I write by this packet to announce to you the marriage of Mrs. Robert Patterson. Mrs. Brown received a letter from Betsy Caton the day on which it was to take place. She has made the greatest match that any woman ever made.... The Marquis of Wellesley is Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He is sixty-five. He married an Italian singer, by whom he had a family of children. She is dead. He has no fortune. On the contrary, he is over head and ears in debt. His salary is £35,000 per annum as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He will be there eighteen months longer, and if the King does not give him another place he is entitled as a poor nobleman to at least a thousand pounds a year. He is brother of the Duke of Wellington. Mary's fortune is reported in Europe to be £800,000 cash. It has been mentioned in all the papers at that sum."

Wellesley retained his position in Ireland till 1828. He was then appointed Controller of the Royal Household of William IV., and his wife first lady in waiting at Windsor Castle. Wellesley's death occurred in 1842, the Marchioness surviving him over eleven years. The latter part of her life was spent at the Royal Palace at Hampton Court, where Queen Victoria presented her with a house in recognition of her husband's services.

Louisa Caton was married for the second time in 1828 to the eldest son of the Duke of Leeds, Francis Godolphin D'Arcy Osborne, Marquis of Carmarthen, who came into his title and estates ten years later.

This marriage called forth another letter from Madame Jerome Bonaparte to her father: "Louisa has made a great match. He is very handsome, not more than thirty-eight, and will be a duke with £30,000 a year."

Elizabeth Caton married once, and that much later in life than her sisters. She became, in 1836, the wife of Baron Stafford, whose family name was Jerningham.

Emily Caton, the youngest of the four sisters, and the only one who left descendants, married John Mactavish, a Scotchman, who had settled in Canada, whence he was sent as consul to Baltimore. Josiah Quincy, who met her at dinner at her grandfather's in 1826, recorded in his journal that he had been much impressed with her air of high breeding.

[MARGARET O'NEILL]
(MRS. JOHN H. EATON)

To the student of social history few careers surpass in interest that of Margaret O'Neill. Born of humble parentage, she ran the gamut of social possibilities, exercising more influence over the political destinies of her country than any other American woman has ever done.

Unlike other great belles who owe their fame to the universal admiration they evoke, Margaret O'Neill owed hers quite as much to the animosity she roused. Her cause hotly espoused by the President of the United States, her conduct made the subject of cabinet debates, she rose to fame as broad as the land of her birth, and later beyond the seas to a fame unshadowed by enmity, though not dearer to her patriotic soul. Born late in the last century, she came to be a belle in so far as having beaux makes a girl a belle in the days when the native Washington girl had few rivals. The shriek of Fulton's steamboat had not yet startled the world. The stage-coach was the universal means of conveyance, though the daughters of some Southern and Western Congressmen, from districts unfamiliar even with its lumbering proportions, ambitious to taste the pleasures of a season at the capital, used frequently to make the tedious journey on horseback. Her girlhood belleship had well terminated, indeed she had married and brought children into the world, before the completion of the great canal in 1826, which made the more sanguine voyager of that day hopeful that eventually eight miles might be travelled in an hour!

Though she never knew the exact date of her birth, she had heard it frequently related that she was two weeks old at the time of Washington's funeral, December 18, 1799. She was the eldest daughter of William O'Neill, a descendant of the O'Neills of Ulster County, Ireland, and himself a native of New Jersey, who had migrated to the capital with the hope of improving his fortunes. There he opened a tavern in the western section of the city, a short half-mile from the President's house. He was a genial host, and his house soon attained popularity with the jeunesse dorée, as well as with military men and Congressmen, though it was a long way from the Capitol. The Union Tavern, in Georgetown, however, which was also popular with our early law-makers, was still farther away. From its door to the Capitol the old 'bus known as the Royal George, one of Washington's earliest institutions, made frequent trips, stopping at O'Neill's and other taverns and boarding-houses along the route to pick up its patrons.

Margaret grew up in the unconventional atmosphere of the tavern, a type of undisciplined American girlhood, wayward, high spirited, full of generous impulses, her mind fed on impetuous and misguided admiration, and herself blessed with a magnetic soul that drew most men and many women irresistibly to her. She was a toast that stirred the hearts of the most phlegmatic of mankind and evoked unparalleled enthusiasm from those of more ardent temperament. Hers was the highest type of Irish beauty, a marvellously white skin, soft gray eyes, warm chestnut hair that curled above an expressive brow, exquisite features, a small round chin, a delicately beautiful figure of medium height, with an erect carriage and her spirited head nobly poised.

The "Health," written by Edward C. Pinkney, whom Edgar Allen Poe placed first in his estimate of lyric poets of America, is said to have been inspired by her in 1824.

"I fill this cup to one made up of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex the seeming paragon,
To whom the better elements and kindly stars have given
A form so fair that, like the air, 'tis less of earth than heaven.

"Her every tone is music's own, like those of morning birds,
And something more than melody dwells ever in her words;
The coinage of her heart are they, and from her lips each flows,
As one may see the burthened bee forth issue from the rose.

"Of her bright face one glance will trace a picture on the brain,
And of her voice, in echoing hearts a sound must long remain;
And memory such as mine of her so very much endures,
When death is nigh, my latest sigh will not be life's, but hers.

"Affections are as naught to her, the measure of her hours;
Her feelings have the fragrancy, the freshness of young flowers.
And lovely passions, changing oft, so fill her, she appears
The image of themselves by turns the idol of past years.

"I filled this cup to one made up of loveliness alone,
A woman, of her gentle sex the seeming paragon.
Her health! And would on earth there stood some more of such a frame,
That life might be all poetry and weariness a name."

She went to school at Mrs. Hayward's seminary, and later to Mr. Kirk. She also attended a dancing-school that gave exhibitions of the grace and proficiency of its pupils in the parlors of the Union Tavern in Georgetown. At one of these exhibitions Margaret was crowned by Mrs. Madison, the wife of the President, as the prettiest girl and most graceful dancer in the room. Naturally ambitious, this first social triumph pointed out the possibility of greater ones, to be achieved only after bitter contests that would have crushed the spirit of a more sensitive woman.

Her father deeming her sufficiently well educated, in which opinion she concurred, she quitted school in her fifteenth year, and, being now a young woman of bewitching beauty and abundant leisure, she entered extensively upon her career as a belle.

Two young military men whom her fascinations had ensnared were at one time on the point of a duel. With one of them, Captain Root, she had planned an elopement, and was actually about to descend from her window when she accidentally overturned a flower-pot: this crashing on the ground below, roused her father and put an end to her flight. More than that, her indignant parent carried her off to New York, where he left her under the wing of his old friend Governor De Witt Clinton, to go to Madame Nau's school. Clinton was very severe with the spoiled little beauty, and the staid atmosphere of his home was not congenial to her. She wrote her father very homesick letters, in one of which she promised that if he would take her home "neither Root nor branch should ever tear her from him." Her wit greatly pleased him, and after he had passed the bon mot around among his guests and his Peggy's admirers, he went to New York and brought her home.

It has been said that she was not yet sixteen when from a window of her father's tavern she for the first time saw John Bowie Timberlake, as he passed along Pennsylvania Avenue on horseback. Their acquaintance, engagement, and marriage followed within the space of a few weeks.

Several years of quiet happiness ensued, during which three children, a son, who died in infancy, and two daughters, were born to them.

Timberlake was a purser in the navy, and when he was ordered to sea duty he closed his little home, and his wife and children went to her father's to stay during the time of his absence. He died of asthma aboard the "Constitution," at Port Mahon.

His widow shortly afterwards married General Eaton, who was at that time a United States Senator and a guest at her father's house. For the first time the little Peggy O'Neill, of triumphant dancing-school days, felt that her foot was actually upon the rounds of the social ladder. John Quincy Adams was President at the time, and one of the bitterest Presidential campaigns this country has ever witnessed had just drawn to a close in the election of Jackson. One victim of the freedom of press and speech, everywhere indulged in, was the wife of the President-elect. Her gentle soul, stung by the breath of slander, which all the vigilance of a devoted husband had been powerless to avert, had passed unregretfully from earth. Jackson came to Washington a bereaved and embittered man.

There was a puritanical tendency among the women who made up the society of that era, and to whom Margaret O'Neill appeared as the embodiment of a sport-loving element that prevailed among men.

Life had a rural quality in those days which it has since lost. Horse-racing was universal, and the great race between Eclipse and Sir Henry, run on Long Island May 27, 1823, for a purse of ten thousand dollars, was a national event. Hundreds of thousands of dollars had been staked, and Peggy O'Neill no doubt was intimately acquainted with some of the heaviest winners and losers, among the latter of whom was John Randolph. Though she was far too young to remember the opening of the first race-track in Washington, November 3, 1803, she was yet familiar with all the details of its inauguration, on which occasion both houses of Congress had adjourned, the Senate to have the ceiling repapered, and the House, which was apparently less resourceful, because it had no pressing business on hand.

Growing up in a public house, she was undoubtedly familiar with much in the lives of men of which other women of her day, leading more secluded lives, feigned ignorance. Yet she had become in no way contaminated by the liberal atmosphere she had breathed from infancy.

General Eaton and his bride returned from their honeymoon shortly before Jackson's inauguration. A few of the Senators' wives called upon her, but she was generally not well received, and slander had already begun its mischievous work when Jackson appeared in Washington and swore "by the Eternal" that his little friend, whom he had known all her life, should not be defamed.

Her name was already on every lip at the capital, and there is no doubt that as many went to Jackson's inauguration ball to see her as to see the President. They stood on chairs and benches in their efforts to catch a glimpse of her, and she made a picture worthy of their endeavors, in her pink gown, with her headdress of nodding black plumes.

Eaton was made Secretary of War. He was Jackson's old friend, and had labored unremittingly for his election. Moreover, thought the chivalrous old President, this would insure Mrs. Eaton's triumph. The women of the cabinet, however, refused to recognize her. Though Mrs. Calhoun, the wife of the Vice-President, had called upon her as a Senator's wife, she declined to associate with her as the wife of a cabinet minister. Calhoun, to whom an appeal was made, declared himself powerless, as "the quarrels of women, like those of the Medes and Persians, admitted of neither inquiry nor explanation."

Van Buren, Secretary of State, and Barry, Post-Master-General, the former a widower and the latter a bachelor, stood aloof from the tempest in which their fellow-officials were engulfed. That astute politician and prince of diplomats, Martin Van Buren, won Jackson's undying friendship by the warmth with which he took up his friend's cause. He had been a beau at evening functions when he was in the Senate, and he knew the social status of every one at Washington, and precisely what brought every stranger to the capital. While he admired Mrs. Eaton and desired to defend her, he also undoubtedly realized all the advantages to be gained by such a course.

The spirit of hostility gradually spread to every branch of society. The Diplomatic Corps became involved; Vaughn, the British minister, and Baron Krudner, the Russian envoy, both bachelors, ranged themselves beneath Mrs. Eaton's standard. They féted and dined her, and gave her substantial evidence of their adherence to her cause. Huygens, the Dutch minister, having a wife who belonged to the opposition, was less fortunate. Finding herself placed next to Mrs. Eaton at dinner on one occasion, Mrs. Huygens took her husband's arm and turned her back upon the assemblage. While all who witnessed the affront were appalled into an awkward silence, Mrs. Eaton, following the retreating form with critical eyes, commented admiringly upon her fine carriage.

Between her defenders and her defamers her Celtic blood bore her up, and her sunny soul lost none of its serenity. One of Jackson's biographers, however, states that when the matter reached the ears of the irate President, he threatened to demand Huygens's recall unless he and his wife forthwith apologize to Mrs. Eaton.

The contest waxed warmer day by day, both houses of Congress furnishing recruits to one side or the other.

The cabinet was dubbed the "Petticoat Cabinet," and Mrs. Eaton's fame as Bellona, the Goddess of War, spread through the land. Calhoun attacked the President for retaining in his cabinet an element of so much discord. But Jackson was a true knight, and his friendship was stanch.

The bitter feeling, meanwhile, among the cabinet ministers had attained such a pitch that they could no longer come together amicably. Their resignations were tendered to the President and accepted, and a new cabinet was formed.

It was during a recess of Congress. Van Buren was sent as minister to England, where he was cordially received. When Congress reassembled, however, the Senate refused to confirm his appointment, Calhoun casting the decisive vote.

A letter of Daniel Webster's, written about this time, reveals the seriousness of the situation. "It is odd enough," he wrote, "that the consequences of this dispute in the social and fashionable world are producing great political effects, and may very probably determine who shall be successor to the present Chief Magistrate." And they did. Jackson's power and popularity were such that he was in a position to dictate to his party the choice of his successor. His choice fell upon Van Buren, who had undoubtedly labored for him in the days of his bitter fight for the Presidency, and who had further and effectually endeared himself to his chief by his zealous defence of Mrs. Eaton, who in Jackson's eyes was not only a fair and beautiful woman, but the representative of oppressed womanhood.

General Eaton was appointed governor to the Territory of Florida, and later he was sent as our minister to the court of Madrid.

This ended Mrs. Eaton's social conflict. She was graciously received and universally admired in that land of aristocrats, and her long residence there and in Paris, whither she went before returning to this country, formed one of the happiest periods of her life.

One of her daughters, the beautiful Virginia Timberlake, familiarly known among the men and women who were young with her, as "Ginger" Timberlake, married the Duke de Sampoyo and went to live in France, where, in turn, one of her daughters has recently married a son of the elder Rothschild. Margaret, Mrs. Eaton's second daughter, married one of the Virginia Randolphs. To the children by this marriage, deprived by death of both parents, Mrs. Eaton devoted many years of her life. General Eaton died in 1859.

A third marriage contracted by his widow late in life, and subsequently annulled, was productive of much unhappiness in her home.

On the 8th of November, 1879, she reluctantly gave up her hold on life, whose volume had held for her so few blank pages.

In the presence of that foe which every woman fears most, slander, she had never retreated from the position she early determined to carry, and which circumstances proved she was well able to fill. She bore all with a sweet courage, feeling keenly, but not morbidly, the world's sting.

Preserving to the end her wonderful elasticity of spirit, she went out from a life that had been one of alternate turmoil and triumph, beholding only its beauties and loving it to the last. "I am not afraid to die," she said, "but it is such a beautiful world to leave."

[CORA LIVINGSTON]
(MRS. THOMAS PENNANT BARTON)

Cora Livingston was born in New Orleans, "the little Paris of America," on the 16th of June, 1806, the year of the great eclipse. Her father, writing to announce her advent to his sister in New York, said God had given him so fair a daughter that the sun had hidden its face.

Though she was a great belle with a national reputation during the decade from 1820 to 1830, those who attempted an analysis of her charm declared that she lacked that attribute which many would esteem the first requisite to belleship,—beauty. Yet she was a notable example of that subtle power that raises a woman above her contemporaries, that evokes an involuntary homage from every eye.

Her mother, writing of her when she was about sixteen and already the belle of New Orleans, to one who had never seen her, said, "She is not a beauty, not a genius, but a good and affectionate child."

Josiah Quincy, that ubiquitous beau who paid his court to the belles of so many cities, seeing her in Washington in 1826, declared that she was not handsome, while he admitted that she was undoubtedly the greatest belle in the United States. "She has a fine figure, a pretty face, dances well, and dresses to admiration," he continued, endeavoring to solve the mystery of the attraction exercised by this exquisite specimen of womanhood. He further confessed that when he left her he bore away an image of loveliness and grace never to be erased, and he went on to quote Burke's apostrophe to the Queen of France,—"Surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision."

She was the daughter of Edward Livingston, a brother of that Chancellor Livingston who, on the 30th of April, 1789, administered the oath of office to the first President of the United States, and of an eminently beautiful creole, Louise Moreau.

Fleeing the terrors of the negro insurrection in San Domingo, Madam Moreau, a young widow, arrived in New Orleans just as the Louisiana purchase was consummated and the province became the property of the United States. French then to the very core, the city has retained evidences of its origin longer than any city of the Union. The thrill of anguish with which it realized that Louisiana had been sold by Napoleon to the United States "on this 9th of July, 1803, at seven P.M.," left its indelible impression upon a people loyal to their nationality and tenacious of its prerogatives.

The wave of emigration which swept into the newly acquired territory from the north bore thither Edward Livingston, of New York. Fortune's reverses had driven him into the new country with the hope of finding there a more promising field for his talent and labors.

The Americans were not well received. Scarcely more than a hundred out of the eight thousand inhabitants had greeted the stars and stripes as they were raised for the first time over the city. So strong, indeed, was the prejudice against them that every unfortunate occurrence was instantly attributed to them. Miss Hunt relates that upon one occasion when a ball was interrupted by an earthquake an indignant old creole gentleman exclaimed that the pleasure of ladies had never thus been interrupted in the days of Spanish or French dominion.

Livingston's knowledge of the language, his tact, his adaptiveness, together with his splendid ability, soon raised him to a conspicuous place at the bar. He was a widower, thirty-nine years of age, when he married Madam Moreau, who was but nineteen. Cora was the only child of this marriage, and ever, even after her own marriage, the inseparable companion of both parents. From her father she derived a sound knowledge of the political questions of the day that made her an intelligent spectator of the historic period in which she lived. From her mother she inherited that grace, mental and physical, that so indelibly impressed her upon the life of which she formed so brilliant a part that her name can no more be eliminated from it than can the names of Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, Daniel Webster, or Henry Clay.

The cultivation of her mind was intrusted to her uncle, Major August Davezac, from whom she received an education of unusual scope. She matured early, being probably more or less at all times a part of the social life that surrounded her parents and into which she made her formal entrée at the age of fourteen.

The social atmosphere of New Orleans at this time was like that of no other city on the North American Continent. Creole tastes and institutions were predominant. The only society of the city was Creole, and very delightful and very exclusive it was. The French opera was then, as it has been since, one of its conspicuous features. Tuesdays and Saturdays were the nights when the fashionable world was to be seen in the boxes, and the stage presented nothing more attractive than the beautifully dressed women of the audience, with their artistic coiffures. There were receptions in the boxes between the acts, and a belle's powers of attraction were thus publicly manifested to a people ever ready to add the tribute of its homage.

Cora Livingston before she was sixteen years old, gentle and retiring, shrinking from publicity such as attaches to belles at this end of the century, was known throughout the city of her birth as its greatest belle. In the evenings of the warm season, when the balcony of her house in Chartres Street was converted into a reception-room, in the midst of a devoted family she received not only the admiration of distinguished guests, but the chivalrous and silent homage of many an unknown passer-by.

Frenchmen visiting New Orleans frequently brought letters of introduction from Lafayette to Livingston, whom he had known in New York. Cora thus early became accustomed to an association not only with people of her own city, but with many eminent cosmopolites.

In 1812, when war was declared against England, New Orleans fell into line and gave glorious proof of her loyalty. Her prejudices were swallowed up in the common cause that drew all sections of the country together, and she became in deed, as she already was in name, an American city.

General Jackson's friendship for the Livingstons, of which he gave so many handsome proofs, began at this time.

In 1822 Edward Livingston was elected to Congress, and for eleven years thereafter Washington became his home. While he achieved prominence as a legislator and statesman, the brilliancy of his daughter was acquiring for her a national reputation. He leased the Decatur residence on Lafayette Square, within a stone's throw of the White House, and there gathered about this distinguished family the most cultured element of the Washington of that period,—the Calhouns and their gifted daughter with her perspicuous political theories, the Adamses, Webster, Clay, Chief Justice Marshall, Martin Van Buren, Mrs. Madison, their neighbor across the Park, and the widow of Admiral Decatur.

Cora Livingston

(Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton)