Part 1

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FAMOUS AMERICAN BELLES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

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

PAGE

MARCIA BURNS (Mrs. John Peter Van Ness) 11

THEODOSIA BURR (Mrs. Joseph Alston) 18

ELIZABETH PATTERSON (Madame Jerome Bonaparte) 39

THE CATON SISTERS 61

MARGARET O'NEILL (Mrs. John H. Eaton) 69

CORA LIVINGSTON (Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton) 80

EMILY MARSHALL (Mrs. William Foster Otis) 90

OCTAVIA WALTON (Madame Le Vert) 102

FANNY TAYLOR (Mrs. Thomas Harding Ellis) 118

JESSIE BENTON (Mrs. John C. Frémont) 123

SALLIE WARD (Mrs. George F. Downs) 148

HARRIET LANE (Mrs. Henry Elliott Johnston) 161

ADÈLE CUTTS (Mrs. Robert Williams) 175

EMILIE SCHAUMBURG (Mrs. Hughes-Hallett) 190

KATE CHASE (Mrs. William Sprague) 206

MATTIE OULD (Mrs. Oliver Schoolcraft) 230

JENNIE JEROME (Lady Randolph Churchill) 239

NELLIE HAZELTINE (Mrs. Frederick W. Paramore) 257

MARY VICTORIA LEITER (Baroness Curzon of Kedleston) 264

NEW YORK AS A SOCIAL CENTRE 288

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE EMILY MARSHALL (Mrs. William Foster Otis). From portrait painted by Chester Harding in 1830; owned by her daughter, Mrs. Samuel Eliot, of Boston, by whose permission it is here reproduced for the first time in colors _Frontispiece_

MARCIA BURNS (Mrs. John Peter Van Ness). From miniature by James Peale, painted in 1797; owned by the Corcoran Art Gallery, Washington, D. C. 12

THEODOSIA BURR (Mrs. Joseph Alston). From the original engraving by Charles B. J. F. Saint Memin; owned by Hampton L. Carson, Esq., of Philadelphia, by whose permission it is here reproduced 22

ELIZABETH PATTERSON (Madame Jerome Bonaparte). From portrait painted by Quinçon; owned by her grandson, Mr. Charles Bonaparte, of Baltimore, by whose permission it is here reproduced for the first time 42

MARY CATON (Lady Wellesley). From portrait owned by Mrs. Charles Carroll Mactavish, of Baltimore, daughter of General Winfield Scott. Painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence, and reproduced by permission of Miss Emily Mactavish, now Sister Mary Agnes of the Visitation, at Mount de Sales, Catonsville, Maryland 64

CORA LIVINGSTON (Mrs. Thomas Pennant Barton). From a miniature painted by herself. Reproduced for the first time by permission of her niece, Miss Julia Barton Hunt, of Montgomery Place, Barrytown-on-the-Hudson 84

OCTAVIA WALTON (Madame Le Vert). From portrait, reproduced by permission of her kinswoman, Miss Josephine Walton. Present owner, Mr. George Walton Reab, of Augusta, Georgia, grandson of Madame Le Vert 104

FANNY TAYLOR (Mrs. Thomas Harding Ellis). From portrait painted by Thomas Sully. Reproduced for the first time by permission of her husband, Colonel Thomas Harding Ellis. Present owner, her adopted son, Mr. Beverly Randolph Harrison, of Amherst, Virginia 118

SALLY CHEVALIER (Mrs. Abram Warwick). Painted by Thomas Sully. Reproduced for the first time by permission of Colonel Thomas Harding Ellis 122

SALLIE WARD (Mrs. George F. Downs). From a miniature painted at the age of eighteen, owned by her husband, Mr. George F. Downs, of Louisville, Kentucky, by whose permission it is here reproduced for the first time 150

HARRIET LANE (Mrs. Henry Elliott Johnston). From photograph by Julius Ulke 164

ADÈLE CUTTS (Mrs. Robert Williams). From portrait by George Peter A. Healy, in possession of her husband, General Robert Williams, United States Army. Reproduced by permission of her daughter, Miss Adèle Cutts Williams, of Washington, D. C. 178

EMILIE SCHAUMBURG (Mrs. Hughes-Hallett). From portrait by Waugh, in possession of Mrs. Hughes-Hallett, of Dinar, France, by whose permission it is here reproduced for the first time 194

KATE CHASE (Mrs. William Sprague). From photograph by Julius Ulke 212

MATTIE OULD (Mrs. Oliver Schoolcraft). From photograph by George S. Cook. Reproduced by permission of her cousin, Mrs. Virginia Brownell, of Washington, D. C. 232

LIZZIE CABELL (Mrs. Albert Ritchie). From photograph. Reproduced by permission of her sister, Mrs. John D. Lottier 234

MARY TRIPLETT (Mrs. Philip Haxall). From photograph by Roseti. Reproduced by permission of her sister, Mrs. Meredith Montague 236

JENNIE JEROME (Lady Randolph Churchill). From photograph by Van der Weyde. Published by permission of Lady Churchill 244

NELLIE HAZELTINE (Mrs. Frederick W. Paramore). From photograph by J. C. Strauss; by permission of her brother, Mr. W. B. Hazeltine, Jr. 258

JENNIE CHAMBERLAIN (Lady Naylor-Leyland). From the painting by H. Schmiechen 266

MATTIE MITCHELL (Duchesse de Rochefoucauld). Daughter of ex-Senator Mitchell, of Oregon. From photograph by C. M. Bell 272

MARY VICTORIA LEITER (Baroness Curzon of Kedleston). From photograph by Miss Alice Hughes, of London. By permission of Lady Curzon 276

MISS MAY HANDY, of Richmond, Virginia. From photograph by James L. Breese 284

CATHERINE DUER (Mrs. Clarence Mackay), of New York. From portrait 288

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."

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."