Part 11

It has been said, in no matter how many places we may live, there is only one that is home to us. Wheatland was that to Harriet Lane, though she was destined to see much of the world and to spend years at a time away from its tranquil seclusion. Its improvement and adornment were ever matters of keen interest to her. There she first attracted an admiration which gradually extended over her own country and England, for the fame of Harriet Lane was international. There she had possession of her uncle, it being their custom to spend their mornings together, usually in reading the newspapers, she incidentally absorbing his statesmanlike view of the political questions of the day.

Buchanan frequently entertained at Wheatland both his political friends and those he had made through his diplomatic relations. His niece was a truly bewitching hostess on these occasions, to which there often attached much that was brilliant.

The first attempt at training after she passed under her uncle's care was not a happy one in the estimation of his young ward. Being obliged to go to Washington for the session of Congress, he closed his home at Lancaster and transferred his _ménage_ to the capital, for Buchanan always set up his household gods wherever he tarried for any length of time, his housekeeper, Miss Hetty Parker, who served him in that capacity for forty years, going with him from place to place. Harriet was left in Lancaster, in the home of some venerable spinsters of her uncle's acquaintance, who had pronounced ideas on the moral gait to be maintained by the rising generation. From her own accounts, given in letters to her uncle, she seems to have been frequently disciplined by means of her healthy young appetite. There were melodramatic occasions when she went without sugar in her tea, and was compelled to practise various similar mortifications of the flesh for which no small girl has a natural bent. After she was removed from these uncongenial surroundings she lived for some time in dread of an adverse circumstance that might return her to them. Her uncle, on whom neither the pathos nor the humor of the situation was lost, more than once suggested quizzically in his letters to her that she might like to go back to the old ladies.

When they were separated he wrote to her every day, at first from conscientious motives of the duty he owed to her, and later because of the pleasure he derived from this frequent interchange of thought and sympathy. When she was twelve years old he sent her with her sister, Mary, to boarding-school at Charlestown, West Virginia.

"Had Mary written to me that you were a good girl and had behaved yourself entirely well, I should have visited you during the Christmas holidays," he said, in the course of a letter written to her shortly after her initiation into boarding-school life.

In 1845 Buchanan became Secretary of State under President Polk. "My labors are great," he wrote to Harriet, shortly after entering upon the duties of his new office, "but they do not '_way_' me down, as you write the word. Now I would say '_weigh_,' but doctors may differ on this point." Further on in the same letter he continues thus: "Your friends, Mrs. Bancroft [wife of the Secretary of War] and the Pleasantons often inquire for you. They have given you somewhat of a name here, and Mrs. Polk and Miss Rucker, her niece, have several times urged me to permit you to come and pass some time with them. I have been as deaf as the adder to their request, knowing, to use a word of your grandmother, that you are too 'outsetting' already. There is a time for all things under the sun, as the wise man says, and your time will yet come." Again, he sends love from Miss Hetty, his housekeeper, and a message to the effect that she would be glad to see Harriet in Washington. "I fear she might be twice glad," added Buchanan, "once on your arrival and still more so on your departure."

It was Buchanan's custom to spend his summers or a portion of them at Bedford Springs, taking his nieces with him. To the younger it has ever been a place of happy memories. There, when she was still quite a young girl, she met the man, then also full of all the enthusiasm of youth, to whom, after exacting a prolonged devotion, she finally surrendered herself.

In one of her uncle's letters written to her in the summer of 1846 he tells her he will not be able to go to Bedford before the 10th of August, "when the season will be over and it will be too late for Mary to enact the character of belle; and you," he continued, "are quite too young to make the attempt."

He placed her, the autumn of that year, in the Visitation Convent, in Georgetown, whence she was graduated three years later with much distinction. She passed one Sunday in every month during these three years at her uncle's home on F Street, there catching her first glimpse of that world of which she was later to form a part. Her uncle was still Secretary of State, and his home was frequented by the most illustrious men who made up the public life of that day. There Harriet, looking upon herself as a full-fledged young lady, spent the first winter after her liberation from school duties. The following year, however, she passed quietly among her relatives in Pennsylvania, which was more in accord with her uncle's wishes, for she was still very young. The decision to do so was entirely voluntary on her part, which pleased Buchanan greatly, for he realized fully what a fascination the gay life of the capital held for a young girl in her high social position. He wrote her a letter full of praise for controlling what he knew to be her inclination and remaining at home. "This act of self-restraint has raised you in my estimation," he wrote, and then went on to relate frankly how gay the city was, and concluded by assuring her that Mr. John Sullivan, an Irish gentleman famous for his dinners, would be inconsolable when he learned that she was not to be there that winter.

It is supposed that no American woman ever had more offers of marriage than Harriet Lane, and it is evident, from a letter written her by her uncle about this time, that suitors had already begun to present themselves. "I wish now to give you a caution," he wrote: "never allow your affections to become interested, or engage yourself to any person, without my previous advice. You ought never to marry any person who is not able to afford you a decent and immediate support. In my experience I have witnessed the long years of patient misery and dependence which fine women have endured from rushing precipitately into matrimonial connections without sufficient reflection. Look ahead and consider the future, and act wisely in this particular."

With the incoming of Taylor's administration Buchanan retired to Wheatland, spending the ensuing four years there with occasional sallies to Washington and his summers as usual at Bedford Springs.

Harriet Lane was already a belle of far more than local repute when in 1852, her uncle having been appointed minister to England, she accompanied him thither.

Through the effect she produced in a strange land Buchanan probably for the first time fully realized how unusually beautiful she was. So favorable was the impression she made upon the queen that on state occasions she was assigned to places usually given only to the wives of ambassadors and ministers. She was well known throughout England, and on the day that Oxford University conferred the degree of Doctor of Civil Laws upon her uncle and Alfred Tennyson its ancient walls rang with the cheers that went up from its hundreds of students who rose _en masse_ to greet the entrance of Harriet Lane.

"She was a most distinguished young person," said one of her countrymen recently, growing enthusiastic over the recollection of the impression she created, "whom more than one Englishman would have given his head to marry."

Her beauty was not less appreciated by the artistic eye of the French people, and Mr. James Edward MacFarland, who was secretary of the American legation at the time of her visit to the family of Mr. John Y. Mason, then our minister to France, was full of anecdotes of the _naïveté_ with which the people in the streets of Paris were wont to express their admiration.

Shortly after her return to America the loss of her only sister, Mrs. George W. Baker, who died in California, sent Harriet Lane into deep mourning. While the country was filled with stories of her beauty and the impression it had created in foreign capitals she was passing her days in the grateful quiet of Wheatland. Her uncle's nomination to the Presidency but added to her fame, the campaign, election, and inauguration bringing her gradually into that eminent position she was so admirably fitted to fill. At the ball attending the inaugural ceremonies at Washington she made her first reappearance in public, clad, as best became her noble form, in the simplicity of a white dress, flower trimmed, and with a necklace of pearls.

In those days, before social functions had attained the proportions that now characterize them, they reflected in the White House, as elsewhere, more of the individuality of the host and hostess than is now possible. Many details that are now consigned to secretaries and stewards then appertained to the master and mistress of the house. Harriet Lane and her cousin James Buchanan Henry, who acted as private secretary to his uncle, invariably arranged the seating of the guests at state dinners, an onerous task now performed by an under-secretary of the Executive Mansion, who, besides being familiar with the rules of official precedence, must also know something of the social relationship each guest bears to his possible neighbor. She made no mistakes, for she had been trained to her position as had none of her predecessors, unless we except the wives of the two Adamses.

In 1860, when the Prince of Wales visited England's North American possessions, on President Buchanan's suggestion and invitation, he extended his travels so as to include at least a portion of the United States. The memory of his sojourn among us still lives in many of the cities and towns whose territory had once formed part of the kingdom of his ancestors. The five days he spent in Washington were passed in the White House. A guest of the nation at the capital is usually assigned to a suite of rooms in one of the hotels of the city. Between Buchanan and the Prince of Wales, however, owing to the former's recent residence at the court of St. James, there existed more of a personal feeling than is usual between the President and state guests.

In all the festivities by which the Executive Mansion did honor to his presence the unerring hand and faultless taste of Harriet Lane were evident.

One memorable day of his visit was spent at Mount Vernon. The revenue cutter "Harriet Lane" was selected to take the distinguished little party, consisting of the President, Miss Lane, the Prince, his suite, and the British Minister down the river. The simplicity of George Washington's home and the picturesque beauty of its situation were themes of interesting study to the Englishmen. At his tomb they reverently bared their heads, and near it the Prince planted a tree in remembrance of the day.

After he left Washington he wrote to the President expressing his appreciation of the hospitality he had received, and sending him his portrait painted by Sir John Watson Gordon, with a set of engravings of the Royal family for Miss Lane, to whom now also belong the portrait and the letter, together with one written by the queen. It echoes the gratification already expressed by her son concerning the kindliness of his reception among the American people, and shows in what high regard she personally held both the President and his niece.

Buchanan's administration was the last of the old _régime_, a period in which there had been that unity of purpose that had fostered the nation, that wise forbearance that had preserved it, and withal much of illustrious oratory and brilliant debate. But the parting of the ways had come. A day of action was at hand. Buchanan, oppressed with a sense of his impotency to avert a crisis that was inevitable, retired to Wheatland, and Lincoln, full of high purposes and many misgivings, stepped into the pathway of destiny. Upon the one public life instantly relaxed its hold, while about the other it threw its myriad feverish tendrils, clutching him hourly closer to itself till the long watches of that fatal April night, during which its imperious tenure was loosened by death.

With Buchanan, Harriet Lane also passed from the horizon of public life, spending with him at Wheatland those historic four years that followed her days in the White House. There, in January, 1866, she was married to Henry Elliott Johnston, of Baltimore. The ceremony was performed by her uncle, the Rev. Edward Y. Buchanan, of the Episcopal Church.

Her honeymoon she passed in Cuba and her married life in Baltimore, in whose social doings she took a prominent part. At her uncle's death, in 1868, she inherited Wheatland, where for a number of years she passed her summers. In 1892 she bought a home in Washington, where she now spends the greater part of her time.

Much has been given her of life's joys and triumphs, and much, too, of its sorrows. Death has repeatedly crossed the threshold of her home, robbing her, one by one, of her heart's treasures: in 1881 the elder of her two sons, James Buchanan Johnston, a boy of brilliant promise, then in his fourteenth year; in 1882 her second son, Henry Elliott Johnston; and two years later her husband. Surrounded not only by life's comforts, but its elegancies, by friends of her own and a succeeding generation, there is yet about Harriet Lane Johnston to-day much of that same majestic isolation that marked her youth.

ADÈLE CUTTS

(MRS. ROBERT WILLIAMS)

During the four years that Franklin Pierce presided over the nation so many beautiful women came prominently before the public at the capital that his was called the "beauty administration." Many were the wives and daughters of men in high official position, but the fame of none exceeded that of the daughter of James Madison Cutts, who held the office of Second Controller of the Treasury.

Born within a stone's throw of the White House, all her young days centred about it, and how near she came to living there as the wife of a President we may gauge by how near Stephen A. Douglas came to possessing that office. Adèle Cutts flourished in that truly golden era before material wealth became a necessary adjunct to a woman's popularity, when men were distinguished by a greater spirit of gallantry and disinterestedness, and in the days before a belle's powers at a watering-place were rated by the number or size of the trunks she took with her; in a word, in the days when the woman herself was pre-eminent and the accident of worldly possessions secondary.

It was recently said of a wealthy American girl, who, though she has generously expended much of her large fortune in the endowment of seats of learning and similar public benefactions, has yet in herself none of that magnetism that would entitle her to enrollment among the great belles of her country, "Yes, she is a great belle this summer. She brought thirty trunks, and she dresses six times a day." At the same resort forty years ago, Adèle Cutts, remarkable for the simplicity of her toilettes even among a generation that had no conception whatever of the elaborate costuming of women which marks the close of the century, was the most renowned of its belles.

While she derived in the preliminary stages of her social career some prestige from her connection with two of the most illustrious families not only of Virginia but of the entire country,--Washington and Madison,--she attained while yet a very young woman a pre-eminence by reason of her beauty, the distinction of her bearing, and a genuine loveliness of character, which reflected as much honor upon the somewhat remote relationship as it had bestowed upon her. She was born in the home of her grandfather, Richard Cutts, who, in the days when Maine was part of Massachusetts, had for twelve years represented in the Congress of the United States that district which at this end of the century was for so long a period associated with the name of Thomas B. Reed.

In 1804 Richard Cutts married Anna Payne, the youngest sister of the famous Dolly Payne, who some years before had become the wife of James Madison. Still another sister had married George Steptoe Washington, the nephew of our first President. It was of her sister Anna's family that Mistress Dolly wrote her lines adapted from John Gilpin's ride:

"My sister Cutts and Cutts and I and Cutts's children three Will fill the coach, so you must ride on horseback after we."

The home Cutts built for his bride, and where his children and grandchildren were born, was in those early days one of the pretentious houses of the capital. It overlooked Lafayette Square, and its beautiful garden, where Addie Cutts played as a little girl, skirted along H street to the end of the block. Cutts was a widower when his son James Madison married Miss Ellen O'Neale, of Maryland, and took her to "Montpelier" to spend their honeymoon days with his aunt and uncle, whose namesake he was. On their return to Washington his bride became the mistress of her father-in-law's home, where in the following year, 1835, Adèle Cutts was born.

In the guise of a little flower-girl she made her first formal appearance at the White House when she was but seven years old, at a children's fancy ball given there in 1842 during the administration of President Tyler.

She was for the most part educated at Madame Burr's school, in the city in which she was born. Her wonderful grace of manner, however, was not the result of education; it was the manifestation of a character beautiful by nature and developed amid happy surroundings. An only daughter, she was the close companion of her beautiful and brilliant mother, besides spending much of her time until her fifteenth year with her great-aunt Madison, whose genius had sown the first seeds of social life in the barren wastes of the national capital and drawn together the scattered elements of its subsequent levees and dinner-parties. After the death of Madison, finding herself unable to support the solitude of her life at "Montpelier," which had been theretofore most complete and happy, she returned to Washington and took up her home in the Cutts house, which now belonged to her and which bears her name to this day, though it has had many other distinguished occupants. Richard Cutts had mortgaged it to Madison, and dying before he had repaid him, the house passed into the possession of Mrs. Madison. There she held a court as brilliant as any ever presided over by an American woman, and Adèle Cutts was early familiarized with the greatness of a generation that was already passing away. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, as well as every President of the United States whose term of office fell during her residence in Washington, paid her the tribute of frequent visits, and felt honored by his privilege to do so.

At the time of her death her great-niece was fourteen years old, and already possessed a beauty of the purest Greek type, whose stateliness increased as she advanced towards womanhood. The faultless outline of her profile, the shapeliness of her head, her large, dark eyes, her chestnut hair that showed glints of a golden hue in the sunshine, the creamy tone of her skin, the perfect proportion and development of her tall figure, all combined to make the rare beauty of a personality whose charm was augmented twofold by her own unconsciousness of its rich possessions.

Like many girls of southern proclivities, she spent her summers at that famous old resort that has witnessed the rising and going down of so many social stars, the White Sulphur Springs. There, dressed always in white, with a white kerchief in the mornings folded across her bosom and showing her fair throat, there was about her a freshness and simplicity that suggested her descent from the Quaker Paynes.

The spirit of gallantry has no age limit in the South, and she, like many another girl in the blossom of her youth, received the homage of men of all periods of life. The beautiful Imogene Penn, afterwards Mrs. James Lyons, of Richmond, and whose belleship days were contemporaneous with those of Adèle Cutts, encountered the irrepressible Richmond wag, Tom August, one morning as she was returning from the springhouse between two devotees, one of whom was the unsuspected possessor of forty-five, while the other concealed about his person as many as fifty summers. "I thought, Miss Imogene," said August, bowing profoundly to the trio and availing himself of a wit's privilege, "that you were just eighteen, but I see you are between forty-five and fifty."

Some Virginia beaux, who were young then, have treasured up and still relate an anecdote of the manner in which one of Adèle Cutts's elderly admirers lost the only opportunity she ever gave him to propose to her. He came from New Orleans, and was blessed with many good things, including sons and daughters older than Miss Cutts. At a fancy-dress ball she appeared completely disguised in the character of a housekeeper, having borrowed the entire costume, including the cap, apron, and bunch of keys at her side, from the housekeeper of the hotel. Before any one had had an opportunity to speculate on her identity, discovering her old admirer among the spectators of the gay and bewildering scene, she approached demurely and asked him if he did not need a housekeeper. He parried the question somewhat playfully, and ended by answering in the negative. She dropped him a courtesy with a grace no housekeeper could emulate, peeping at him with laughing eyes over her mask, and disappeared in the throng of the ball-room.

At a White House reception, early in the winter of 1856, she met Stephen A. Douglas, who was then prominent as a Presidential possibility; he was also one of the Illinois Senators, and his ringing speeches had won him a national fame equal to the intensity of his local popularity. His able defence of Andrew Jackson on the floor of the Senate so gratified and touched the old President that he preserved a copy of the speech, laying it aside as an inheritance for those who should come after him, and endorsing it as a defence of himself and his administration. The one great fault of that administration, in his own estimation, was none of those for which popular opinion of his day condemned him, but that he had not hanged Calhoun. "Douglas," writes one of his biographers, "had wonderfully magnetic powers, and usually carried his audience with him." It is small wonder, then, that at the end of a few months of ardent and eloquent debate, with an audience consisting of one young girl, that he should have carried her completely with him.

He was a widower with two sons when he met Adèle Cutts, and, like many a less fortunate man, he was instantly impressed with her absolute loveliness. He would go to her direct from the Senate chamber while the whole city was ringing with the fame of his speeches, which she not infrequently heard from a place in the gallery, and throw all his irresistible eloquence into his courtship of her.