Part 8

Her parents' home in Mobile, of which city her father was for a time mayor, was near her own, and she continued to be much with them until their lives closed, which they did in close succession, shortly before the outbreak of the war. Her husband's death occurred during the last year of that melancholy period which shook the homes of the South to their foundation. She went North and remained for over a year after the close of the war, accompanied by her two daughters. She returned to the South for a time, but eventually removed to New York, disposing of her home and many of her possessions, the losses she had sustained and the altered conditions of her life rendering Mobile no longer to her a place of happy existence.

Having been so long a leader, she continued to exercise various queenly prerogatives, which to many people at the North seemed eccentric. She had not the prestige there that would have made them possible, though she was never without her coterie of admirers.

Her later years were not affluent, and she was obliged to put her talents to bread-winning purposes. She died in the city in which she had been born, Augusta, Georgia, on the 13th of March, 1877.

FANNY TAYLOR

(MRS. THOMAS HARDING ELLIS)

The loveliness of Virginia women has been a theme of song and verse. Among the Richmond belles of sixty years ago none were more justly celebrated than that trio known as the Richmond Graces, Sally Chevalier, Fanny Taylor, and Sally Watson. Close companions from early childhood, their unusual beauty as they grew to womanhood brought them fame individually and collectively. Sally Chevalier became the wife of Abram Warwick, Sally Watson, of Alexander Rives, and Fanny Taylor, of whom this sketch is designed to treat at greater length, was twice married. She was educated at the excellent school of Miss Jane Mackenzie, in Richmond, at a time when a young lady's education embraced a rather superficial dip into the languages, a good deal of poetry, some history, a neat Italian handwriting, and a care of their peach-blossom complexions and slender hands. Frivolous as it sounds compared with the curriculum of girls' schools in good standing at this end of the century, the history of the South furnishes many evidences of the profundity as well as the brilliancy of its women.

With her friends, Sally Chevalier and Sally Watson, Fanny Taylor was a pupil in the dancing academies of Mr. Xaupi and Mr. Boisseau. They excelled in the grace and beauty of their dancing, and at the Assembly balls it was their custom to occupy places in the same cotillon. They enjoyed the delicate celebrity of having pieces of dancing-music named after them, and when "Sally Chevalier," "Fanny Taylor," or "Sally Watson," was called for, Judah, Ruffin, and Lomax, those dusky magnates of the ball-room, brought forth the melody with an air that was their own peculiar tribute to the fair young queens.

About the time she reached maturity, Fanny Taylor removed with her mother from Richmond to "Glenarron," the superb James River estate of her brother-in-law, Mr. William Galt. Shortly afterwards she returned to Richmond, where she spent a winter as the guest of her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Warwick. She became noted as the most beautiful woman in the Old Dominion. In a word, she was the belle of Richmond, which boasted the most delightful society in the South, and she would not have exchanged places with a princess of the royal house of England.

Richmond of those days was too small for social divisions and subdivisions. There was but one set, and every one who went into society at all belonged to it. It was well established and conservative. Its traditions were ancient, and it tolerated no innovations. It had its calling hours from twelve till four, when its drawing-rooms were crowded with young men from the neighboring plantations, professional men, and legislators, on whose ears the tones of the Capitol bell announcing the opening of the session were wont to fall in vain. There were dancing-parties for young people, beginning at seven or eight in the evening, and dinner-parties for distinguished guests at four o'clock in the afternoon.

The graceful art of carving formed an indispensable part of a gentleman's education, and a host gave tangible proof of his hospitality when from his end of the table he served his guests with his own hand, selecting the choice parts of a joint or fowl for the guest of honor.

The ladies retired at the conclusion of dinner, leaving the gentlemen in possession of the table, being a custom of their English forefathers which their colonial antecedents had adhered to probably in the log-cabin days when there was a state occasion.

There were no teas and no _débuts_. Girls never came out, because, as Thomas Nelson Page has said, "they had never been in." As soon as they were old enough to be out of the nursery they drifted naturally into the drawing-room, and there grew up in that social sphere which many of them were destined later to sway as queens.

Within a year after her reign in Richmond society Fanny Taylor became the wife of Archibald Morgan Harrison, of Fluvanna County, a most distinguished agriculturist, at a time when it was worth being a Virginia farmer and a country gentleman. They lived at "Carysbrook," Mr. Harrison's estate on the Rivanna River, in the royal style easily possible to the South in her days of prosperity. She was a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Harrison, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and her husband was a great-grandson of Benjamin Harrison, the father of Benjamin the signer. Their life of pastoral beauty closed with Mr. Harrison's death. His widow was at the height of her loveliness, and when she went once more into the world she evoked the most unstinted and genuine admiration. Mrs. Nellie Custis Lewis, who was expending on her motherless grandchildren all the solicitude that her grandmother, Martha Washington, had lavished upon her when she was similarly bereaved, expressed the desire that her son-in-law should woo Mrs. Harrison. So truly did she admire the qualities of her character, as well as her great personal beauty, that she was the only woman she had ever seen, she said, whom she would welcome as her daughter's successor, and willingly see placed over her grandchildren. She never had an opportunity to extend that magnanimous, however cordial, greeting, for the youthful Mrs. Harrison, after six years of widowhood, bestowed her hand upon Colonel Thomas Harding Ellis, of Richmond. He had been secretary of the American legation at Mexico, and was subsequently for nearly fourteen years president of the James River and Kanawha Canal Company, his administration covering the period of the war, when the canal was the most important line of improvement in the State for supplying with agricultural produce the city of Richmond and the army of Northern Virginia.

They visited Washington shortly after their marriage, where they were guests of Mr. John Y. Mason. Mr. Mason presented them to President and Mrs. Polk, whose courtesies to them added much to the pleasure of the Washington chapter of their honeymoon days.

Mrs. Ellis's mother had stood at the bedside of her uncle William Henry Harrison when, in the presence of his cabinet, he uttered those memorable last words, "I desire the principles of the Constitution to be maintained."

The union of Colonel and Mrs. Ellis terminated with the death of Mrs. Ellis in July, 1897, followed, in a few months, by that of her husband. For nearly fifty years had they traversed life's highlands and lowlands together, closest companions, tenderest of lovers, she possessing all the strength not incompatible with the finest and gentlest traits of female character, and retaining to the last all the delicacy of her wonderful beauty, and he the embodiment of chivalry, the highest type of a Virginia gentleman of the old _régime_.

JESSIE BENTON

(MRS. JOHN C. FRÉMONT)

In the year 1868 the city of St. Louis erected a monument to the memory of one of her most distinguished citizens, Thomas Hart Benton. Of the forty thousand people who thronged the park on that May afternoon set aside for its unveiling, but one was of the great man's blood, the daughter most closely associated with the accomplishment of his loftiest conception, that dream of Western empire for his country. Accompanied by her husband, General John C. Frémont, she had accepted the invitation to unveil the statue. As she pulled the cord that loosened its wrappings, and the school children of the city threw their offerings of roses at the feet of him who had befriended their fathers, the huzzas of the vast multitude filled the fragrant air. The outgoing train to San Francisco halted to salute with flags and whistles as the bronze hand, pointing to the west, came into view, and the words graven on the pedestal: "There is the East. There lies the road to India." To General Frémont, quietly and reverently occupying a place of honor on the platform, it was one of those supreme moments when the landmarks of memory, those events that give color to our lives, stand forth to the exclusion even of that which is at the moment passing before the eye. Neither the vivas of the people nor the flowers of their children thrilled him as did the salute of that outbound train, that thing of strength and power and speed, bearing its message of progress and civilization.

He knew every mile of its route. He, the pathfinder, by his indomitable energy had traversed the virgin snows of its mountain ways, had penetrated the mysteries of its wild valleys, and by his valor had given to his country its golden terminus. And there, between the effigy of the one in the radiance of the spring sunshine and the living man, stood the woman still radiant with that high type of beauty that emanates from the soul, the link, she has said of herself, between the conception and the execution of the great scheme of Western aggrandizement. Cradled among great ideas, she had grown up to be an inspiration to the man with the prowess and daring necessary to give them life and form. Some men, such as Abraham Lincoln, have been great in spite of their wives, while to others, as to Frémont, through their wives have come not only the opportunity for greatness, but with them that identity of purpose that in itself is a fortification against all adverse circumstances.

The story of Jessie Benton Frémont's life is closely allied with that of the acquisition and development of the vast territory west of St. Louis, which even in her young womanhood was the outpost of habitation. Beyond its confines stretched that wonderland of her childhood, whence came the trappers and hunters with their wild tales of adventure, and whither she was destined to follow one day the princely pied piper of her girlhood. The seed of the thought which bore its first fruit when Frémont raised our flag on Wind River Mountain, thirteen thousand feet above the Gulf of Mexico, was sown in the mind of her father when, in 1812, he followed Andrew Jackson from Nashville to New Orleans to defend the Mississippi. In the stirring life on its broad bosom, together with a first realization of the extent of our domain, he recognized the possibilities of our future expansion and greatness. He had already been admitted to the bar of Tennessee and was a member of the Legislature of that State. With the idea, however, that the government of the United States should extend its protecting arm over the great western wilderness, in which it evinced no interest and whence it anticipated no benefit, he moved, in his thirtieth year, to its border-land.

Its people recognized his friendly attitude, and when Missouri rose to the dignity of a representation on the floor of the United States Senate, Benton was the first man to whom she delegated that honor. There, for over thirty years, with a limited following, he fought aggressively foot by foot for the development of the West. He often wearied his hearers, who had but little sympathy with projects that to the remote Eastern mind seemed preposterous. It was not infrequently a signal, when Benton mounted his hobby, for his fellow-Senators to take up their letter-writing and for the galleries to be deserted. It made little difference to them if England's hand were outstretched and her fingers daily tightening their clutch upon our northwestern territory. The mouth of the Columbia River was about of as much consequence to the welfare of the United States, in the estimation of the people on the Atlantic seaboard, as are the canals on the planet Mars.

Commercial relations with Asia and ports on the Pacific, however Utopian they may have seemed to others with less of a grasp on the world's history than his scholarly mind possessed, were to Benton vital questions, for which he fought with that vigor of utterance that provoked John Randolph into saying that his family motto, "Factus non verbis," should be "Factus et verbis."

He was a powerful man, with a forcible way of speaking, which he retained to the end of his life. When he was stumping his State in the summer of 1856, being already in his seventieth year, he was cautiously viewed one morning through the crack of an open door by two anti-Bentonites. He was standing at the moment and speaking in a vigorous way that appalled his surreptitious visitors. "Good God," ejaculated one, "we shall have to fight him these twenty years!"

He was a striking figure, with heavy black hair and side whiskers, and during all the years that he was in the Senate, like some of his illustrious successors, he never changed the style of his dress. His vehemence was expended in public. In his family life he was as gentle as he was devoted.

Jessie, the second of his four daughters, and the subject of this sketch, was born at the home of her maternal grandfather, Colonel James McDowell, near Lexington, Virginia. She grew up partly in the picturesque atmosphere of St. Louis, then almost wholly a French settlement, and partly in Washington, where Benton's home was considered one of the most interesting in the city, owing to the cultivated wife and daughters who gave it character and individuality. Intermingled with her school-days she had her little day of belleship, during which the two most notable events were a dinner at the White House, given by President Van Buren for his young son, and the wedding of Baron Bodisco, the Russian minister, at which she appeared as first bridesmaid. The bride, Miss Williams, was one of her school-mates, and a girl of sixteen, while the bridegroom was over sixty. The details of the ceremony, however, were all harmoniously arranged by him, and included eight bridesmaids between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, and eight groomsmen of his own period of life. With one of the most distinguished, James Buchanan,--then in the United States Senate, and but recently returned from the Russian mission,--walked Jessie Benton, fourteen years of age, and in her first long dress. Judged by his last will, this Russian January seems to have been an unselfish husband, for he therein expressed the wish that his still young wife should marry again and be as happy herself as she had made him.

The Van Buren dinner was a more or less memorable event, though the White House was familiar ground to Jessie Benton. During Jackson's administration she used frequently to go there with her father, for the old soldier-President was notably a lover of children. He liked to run his long fingers through her soft curls, while he talked with his old friend Benton, unwittingly giving the curls many a twist as he warmed to his subject, all of which the little girl bore heroically, finding ample recompense in her father's praise, which was sure to follow the ordeal.

She went to school both in St. Louis and Washington, in the former city principally for the sake of learning French by association with children to whom it was the mother-tongue. She spent two years at Miss English's boarding-school, in Georgetown, where she was not regarded as a diligent student. Many hours stolen from the class-rooms were not, perhaps, altogether unprofitably spent up a mulberry-tree listening to the fascinating accounts of a midshipman's life, as told by one of his cousins, and hanging hungrily upon every word, as if it in a measure foretold her own eventful career.

At home her mental training was continuous, and without conscious, or at least arduous, effort on her part. Each of Benton's daughters had her place at his library table, and there, stimulated by his studious habits, she acquired readily her portion of that vast fund of knowledge which he had gleaned first from his father's library of unusual excellence and later from his contact with men and measures of his day.

Of the measures there were many afoot when Benton's daughters were young, whose stupendous proportions we are scarcely able to gauge, knowing them only in the perfection of their full realization. Benton was the sympathetic friend of all progress, and beneath the steady glow of his astral lamp or the soft flicker of their mother's candles, in the nights before the advent of gas, his daughters, sewing each her fine seam, listened to the unfolding of the minds of the men who have developed America. They learned also those lessons of inexhaustible patience that must go hand in hand with every great undertaking and of the frequent subordination of the individual to the things his own mind has conceived.

Thither came Morse with that sublime faith in his conception of telegraphy that made him insensible or at least indifferent to the ridicule of Congress, where a member suggested, when he at length obtained his twenty-five thousand dollars for an experimental line to Baltimore, that a second appropriation should be made for an experimental line to the moon.

An overland emigrant route, the surveys for a railroad to the Pacific, and the Panama Railroad, Stevens coming to them directly from Central America and going later to the Isthmus, were some of the vast projects with whose details they were early familiarized. Later, when Jessie Benton, as Mrs. Frémont, crossed the Isthmus herself and was detained there by the fever, she saw Stevens every day, he coming, as he said, "to take his chill with her." He died in Panama, as he predicted that he would, one of the heroes in the vanguard of progress.

Into Benton's home quite naturally there drifted, in the year 1840, a young lieutenant of the corps of topographical engineers, fresh from the survey of the upper Mississippi. The son of a French father and a Virginia mother, John C. Frémont was born in South Carolina, in the year 1813. He was graduated, when he was seventeen years old, from Charleston College, where he remained to study civil engineering and teach mathematics. He was so unusually talented that Poinsett, the Secretary of War, recommended his services to Nicollet when the latter was about to undertake the survey of the Upper Mississippi. The two years in the field were followed by two years spent in Washington in preparing the scientific result of the expedition, during which period Benton became interested more perhaps in the work than in the individuality of the young officer, whose genius was later to open to us the western gates of our republic.

Accompanying Benton's eldest daughter to a concert at Miss English's school, Frémont for the first time met Jessie Benton. She produced on his mind at once "the effect that a rose of rare color or a beautiful picture would have done." She was but sixteen years old at the time, in the first bloom of girlish beauty, and her bright mind exhilarated by the pleasure of seeing her sister, poured itself forth in language as sparkling as it was natural. "Her beauty," he wrote later, in describing that first impression of her, "had come far enough down from English ancestry to be now in her that American kind which is made up largely of mind expressed in the face, but it still showed its Saxon descent. At that time of awakening mind, the qualities that made hers could only be seen in flitting shadows across the face or in the expression of incipient thought or unused and untried feeling."

Coming home for the Easter holidays, she found that the young lieutenant had become identified with her father's "Oregon work." He was an almost daily visitor at her home, and in his constant meetings with her in its unreserved atmosphere he found confirmation of the first impression he had formed of her. "There are features," he wrote later, "that convey to us a soul so white that they impress with instant pleasure, and of this kind were hers. Her qualities were all womanly, and education had curiously preserved the down of a modesty which was innate. There had been no experience of life to brush away the bloom."

Before the holidays were over this impression of her had penetrated Frémont's entire being, and he loved her no less profoundly than he admired her, rendering her an absolute devotion that knew no subsequent diminution. "Insensibly and imperceptibly," he said, "there came a glow into my heart which changed the current and color of daily life, and gave a beauty to common things."

That April day in 1841, when, a month after it had witnessed his inauguration, a mourning nation assembled to pay its last tribute to William Henry Harrison, a gray and gloomy day without, Frémont has recorded as the "red letter day" of his life. The government had leased quarters near the Capitol for the use of Nicollet, where the work on the map of the Mississippi's sources was going forward. From the windows of one of the rooms Senator Benton and his family were invited to view the funeral procession as it wound down Capitol Hill. Frémont, on leave of absence for the day, was the host of the occasion. Notwithstanding his best uniform, in which he looked very handsome, he personally tended the cheery log-fire, that gave a touch of cosiness to the big office, which he had, moreover, with somewhat reckless extravagance for a man on a lieutenant's salary, decorated with plants and cut flowers. From a daintily set table he served, with captivating grace, coffee and ices. Though the nation mourned, two hearts, at least, of all who looked upon the solemn pageant of that day were in gala attire.

The next day, though he discreetly sent Mrs. Benton the plants and flowers that had done decorative duty in his office, it availed him nothing in her wise eyes. Jessie was too young, and, besides, she did not wish her to marry an army man; the life was too unsettled. Mrs. Poinsett, the wife of the Secretary of War, was taken into her confidence, and, as a result, Frémont was ordered off to survey the Des Moines River. Jessie, moreover, as a further diversion, was taken to the wedding of one of her Virginia cousins, which meant in those days weeks of festivity.

It was but another case, however, of the best laid plans that "gang aglee," for in the autumn both Frémont and Jessie Benton were back in Washington, and on the 19th of October she was courageous enough, in defiance of both father and mother, whom she not only loved but truly revered, to become Frémont's wife. She married too young, she says herself, ever to have been a belle in the usual acceptation of that term, yet so gifted has she been with those qualities that evoke the chivalry of man that but few American women have had a better right to that title. Though her life has been one of much exposure, she herself has at all times been singularly sheltered.