Marion Harland's Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life

Part 1

Chapter 13,466 wordsPublic domain

MARION HARLAND’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

THE STORY OF A LONG LIFE

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMX

_Printed in the United States of America_

WITH REVERENT TENDERNESS THIS SIMPLE STORY OF MY LONG LIFE IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE I. FOREBEARS AND PATRON SAINT 1 II. LAFAYETTE; REVOLUTIONARY TALES; PARENTS’ MARRIAGE 16 III. A COUNTRY EXILE; DEATH OF THE FIRST-BORN; CHANGE OF HOME; A FIRESIDE TRAGEDY; “COGITO, ERGO SUM” 27 IV. A BERSERKER RAGE; A FRIGHT; THE WESTERN FEVER; MONTROSE; A MOTHER REGAINED 37 V. OUR POWHATAN HOME; A COUNTRY FUNERAL; “OLD MRS. O’HARA” 52 VI. OLD-FASHIONED HUSBAND’S LOVE-LETTER; AN ALMOST HOMICIDE; A “SLAUGHTERED MONSTER”; A WESLEYAN SCHOOLMISTRESS 61 VII. MY FIRST TUTOR; THE REIGN OF TERROR 70 VIII. CALM AFTER STORM; OUR HANDSOME YANKEE GOVERNESS; THE NASCENT AUTHOR 84 IX. A COLLEGE NEIGHBORHOOD; THE WORLD WIDENS; A BELOVED TUTOR; COLONIZATION DREAMS AND DISAPPOINTMENT; MAJOR MORTON 90 X. FAMILY LETTERS; COMMENCEMENT AT HAMPDEN-SIDNEY; THEN AND NOW 104 XI. BACK IN POWHATAN; OLD VIRGINIA HOUSEWIFERY; A SINGING-CLASS IN THE FORTIES; THE SIMPLE LIFE? 110 XII. ELECTION DAY AND A DEMOCRATIC BARBECUE 117 XIII. A WHIG RALLY AND MUSTER DAY 129 XIV. RUMORS OF CHANGES; A CORN-SHUCKING; A NEGRO TOPICAL SONG 143 XV. THE COUNTRY GIRLS AT A CITY SCHOOL; VELVET HATS AND CLAY’S DEFEAT 149 XVI. HOME AT CHRISTMAS; A CANDY-PULL AND HOG-KILLING 162 XVII. A NOTABLE AFFAIR OF HONOR 171 XVIII. THE MENACE OF SLAVE INSURRECTION 186 XIX. WEDDING AND BRIDESMAID; THE ROUTINE OF A LARGE FAMILY; MY FIRST BEREAVEMENT 196 XX. OUR TRUE FAMILY GHOST-STORY 203 XXI. TWO MONUMENTAL FRIENDSHIPS 218 XXII. THE “OLD AFRICAN CHURCH” 227 XXIII. HOW “ALONE” CAME TO BE 237 XXIV. THE DAWNING OF LITERARY LIFE 246 XXV. BROUGHT FACE TO FACE WITH MY FATE 254 XXVI. LITERARY WELL-WISHERS; GEORGE D. PRENTICE; MRS. SIGOURNEY; GRACE GREENWOOD; H. W. LONGFELLOW; JAMES REDPATH; THE “WANDERING JEW” 262 XXVII. MY NORTHERN KINSPEOPLE; “QUELQU’UN” AND LIFELONG FRIENDSHIP 270 XXVIII. MY FIRST OPERA; “PETER PARLEY”; RACHEL AS “CAMILLE”; BAYARD TAYLOR; T. B. ALDRICH; G. P. MORRIS; MARIA CUMMINS; MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY 280 XXIX. ANNA CORA (MOWATT) RITCHIE; EDWARD EVERETT; GOVERNOR WISE; A MEMORABLE DINNER-PARTY 288 XXX. A MUSICAL CONVENTION; GEORGE FRANCIS ROOT; WHEN “THE SHINING SHORE” WAS FIRST SUNG; THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS; BETROTHAL; DEMPSTER IN HIS OLD AGE 297 XXXI. WEDDING BELLS; A BRIDAL TOUR; A DISCOVERED RELATIVE; A NOBLE LIFE 304 XXXII. PARSONAGE LIFE; WILLIAM WIRT HENRY; HISTORIC SOIL; JOHN RANDOLPH; THE LAST OF THE RANDOLPHS 313 XXXIII. PLANTATION PREACHING; COLORED COMMUNICANTS; A “MIGHTY MAN IN PRAYER” 325 XXXIV. MY NOVITIATE AS A PRACTICAL HOUSEWIFE; MY COOK “GETS HER HAND OUT”; INCEPTION OF “COMMON SENSE IN THE HOUSEHOLD” 333 XXXV. THE STIRRED “NEST AMONG THE OAKS”; A CRUCIAL CRISIS 346 XXXVI. MIGRATION NORTHWARD; ACCLIMATION; ALBERT EDWARD, PRINCE OF WALES, IN NEW YORK; POLITICAL PORTENTS 355 XXXVII. THE PANIC OF ’61; A VIRGINIA VACATION; MUTTERINGS OF COMING STORM 363 XXXVIII. THE FOURTEENTH OF APRIL, 1861, IN RICHMOND 370 XXXIX. “THE LAST THROUGH TRAIN FOR FOUR YEARS” 382 XL. DOMESTIC SORROWS AND NATIONAL STORM AND STRESS; FRIENDS, TRIED AND TRUE 389 XLI. FORT DELAWARE; “OLD GLORY”; LINCOLN’S ASSASSINATION; THE RELEASED PRISONER OF WAR 399 XLII. A CHRISTMAS REUNION; A MIDNIGHT WARNING; HOW A GOOD MAN CAME TO “THE HAPPIEST DAY OF HIS LIFE” 408 XLIII. TWO BRIDALS; A BIRTH AND A PASSING; “MY LITTLE LOVE”; “DRIFTING OUT”; A NONPAREIL PARISH 417 XLIV. TWO YEARS OVERSEAS; LIFE IN ROME AND GENEVA 427 XLV. SUNNYBANK; A NEW ENGLAND PARISH; “MY BOYS”; TWO “STARRED” NAMES 436 XLVI. RETURN TO MIDDLE STATES; THE HOLY LAND; MY FRIENDS THE MISSIONARIES; TWO CONSULS IN JERUSALEM 448 XLVII. LUCERNE; GOOD SAMARITANS AND AN ENGLISHMAN; A LECTURE TOUR; OHIOAN HOSPITALITY; MR. AND MRS. MCKINLEY 457 XLVIII. THE CLOUDS RETURN AFTER THE RAIN; ABROAD AGAIN; HEALING AND HEALTH; IDYLLIC WINTER IN FLORENCE 470 XLIX. THE GOING-OUT OF A YOUNG LIFE; PRESENT ACTIVITIES; “LITERARY HEARTHSTONES”; GRATEFUL REMINISCENCES 481 APPENDIX 491 A FRATERNAL TRIBUTE THE GOLDEN WEDDING

FOREWORD

FROM the time when, as a mere baby, I dreamed myself to slumber every night by “making up stories,” down to the present hour, every human life with which I have been associated, or of which I had any intimate knowledge, has been to me a living story. All interest me in some measure. Many enlist my sympathy and fascinate the imagination as no tale that is avowedly fictitious has ever bewitched me.

I hold and believe for certain that if I could draw aside the veil of conventional reserve from the daily thinking, feeling, and _living_ of my most commonplace acquaintance, and read these from “Preface” to “Finis,” I should rate the wildest dream of the novelist as tame by comparison.

My children tell me, laughingly, that I “turn everything into a story.” In my heart I know that the romances are all ready-made and laid to my hand.

In the pages that follow this word of explanation I have essayed no dramatic effects or artistic “situations.” “The Story of My Long Life” tells itself as one friend might talk to another as the two sit in the confidential firelight on a winter evening. The idea of reviewing that life upon paper first came to me with the consciousness—which was almost a shock—that, of all the authors still on active professional duty in our country, I am the only one whose memory runs back to the stage of national history that preceded the Civil War by a quarter-century. I, alone, am left to tell, of my own knowledge and experience, what the Old South was in deed and in truth. Other and far abler pens than mine have portrayed scenes of those days with skill I cannot emulate. But theirs is hearsay evidence—second-hand testimony as truly as if they wrote of Shakespeare’s haps and mishaps in the grammar-school at Stratford-on-Avon, or of Master George Herbert’s early love affairs.

True, the fathers told it to the generation following, and the generation has been faithful to the traditions committed to it. What I have to say in the aforesaid gossip over the confidential fire is of what I saw and heard and did—and _was_ in that hoary Long Ago.

Throughout the telling I have kept the personal touch. The story is autobiography—not history. I began it for my children, whose importunities for tales of the olden—and now forever gone—“times” have been taken up by the least grandchild.

It was my lot to know the Old South in her prime, and to see her downfall. Mine to witness the throes that racked her during four black and bitter years. Mine to watch the dawn of a new and vigorous life and the full glory of a restored Union. I shall tell of nothing that my eyes did not see, and depict neither tragedy nor comedy in which I was not cast for a part.

Mine is a story for the table and arm-chair under the reading-lamp in the living-room, and not for the library shelves. To the family and to those who make and keep the home do I commit it.

MARION HARLAND.

NEW YORK CITY, _November, 1909._

MARION HARLAND’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY

FOREBEARS AND PATRON SAINT

MY father, Samuel Pierce Hawes, was born in the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, July 30, 1799.

The homestead, still standing and reckoned among the notable sites of the region, was built in 1640, by Robert Pierce, who emigrated to the New World in 1630, having sailed from Plymouth, England, in the _Mary and John_, in company with others of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On the voyage, he married Ann Greenaway—registered as “Daughter of Goodman Greenaway,” a fellow-passenger.

The family trace their descent, by old domestic and town records, from the Northumberland Percies. Traditions, cherished by the race, affirm that Godfrey of Bouillon was a remote ancestor. It is unquestionably true that “Robert of Dorchester,” as he is put down in the genealogy of the Percies, was a blood relative of Master George Percy, John Smith’s friend, and his successor in the presidency of the Jamestown colony.

The emigrants had a temporary home in Neponset Village, prospering so far in worldly substance as to justify the erection of the substantial house upon the hill overlooking the “village,” ten years after the landing. So substantial was it, and so honest were the builders, that it has come down in a direct line from father to son, and been inhabited by ten generations of thrifty folk who have left it stanch and weatherproof to this day.

My father’s mother, a handsome, wilful girl of seventeen, ran away to be married to one whom her father—“Squire Pierce”—considered a presumptuous adventurer. He was from Maine, a stranger in the neighborhood, and reputed (justly) to be wild and unsteady. When he asked for the girl’s hand he was summarily commanded to hold no further communication with her. He had served as a private in the Revolutionary War; he had winning ways and a good-looking face, and Ann had a liberal spice of her sire’s unbending will. She would have him, and no other of the youths who sued for her favor.

The family genealogy records that “Squire Pierce,” as he was named by his neighbors, received a captain’s commission from the parent government at the outbreak of the Rebellion, and on the self-same day one from the Continental Congress appointing him as a colonel in the Massachusetts forces. As “Colonel Pierce,” he fought throughout the eight bloody years to which we owe our national life.

In his home he was a despot of the true Puritan, patriarchal type.

For three years after the elopement the name of his daughter’s husband was never uttered in his hearing. Nor did she enter the house, until at twenty, her proud spirit bowed but not broken by sorrows she never retailed, she came back to the old roof-tree on the eve of her confinement with her first and only child. He was born there and received the grandfather’s name in full. From that hour he was adopted as a son of the house by the stern old Puritan, and brought up at his knees.

With the shrewd sense and sturdy independence characteristic of the true New-Englander, the mother was never forgetful of the fact that her boy was half-orphaned and dependent upon his grandfather’s bounty, and began early to equip him for a single-handed fight with the world.

Within a decade I have studied an authentic and detailed genealogy of the Hawes stock from which my grandfather sprang. It is a fine old English family, and the American branch, in which appear the birth and death of Jesse Hawes, of Maine, numbers many men of distinction in various professions. It is a comfort to a believer in heredity to be assured that the tree was sound at heart, in spite of the warped and severed bough.

By the time my father was fourteen, he was at work in a Boston mercantile house, boarding with his employer, Mr. Baker, a personal friend of the Pierces. The growing lad walked out to Dorchester every Saturday night to spend Sunday at home and attend divine service in the “Dorchester Old Meeting-House,” the same in which I first saw and heard Edward Everett Hale, over forty years later. The youth arose, in all weathers, before the sun on Monday morning in order to be at his place of business at seven o’clock. When he was sixteen, his employer removed to Richmond, Virginia, and took his favorite clerk with him. From Boston to the capital of the Old Dominion was then a fortnight’s journey by the quickest mode of travel. The boy could hardly hope to see his mother even once a year.

At twenty-five he was an active member of the First Presbyterian Church in Richmond, established and built up by Rev. John Holt Rice, D.D., who was also the founder of Union Theological Seminary, now situated in Richmond. The young New-Englander was, likewise, a teacher in the Sunday-school—the first of its kind in Virginia, conducted under the auspices of Doctor Rice’s church—a partner in a flourishing mercantile house, and engaged to be married to Miss Judith Anna Smith, of Olney, a plantation on the Chickahominy, five miles from the city.

I have a miniature of my father, painted upon ivory a few years after his marriage. It is that of a handsome man, with deeply set gray eyes, very dark hair, and a well-cut, resolute mouth. The head is nobly shaped, the forehead full and broad. His face was singularly mobile, and deeply lined, even in youth.

In intellect he was far above the average business man. His library, at that early date, was more than respectable. Some of the most valuable early editions of the English classics that enrich my book-shelves have his book-plate upon the fly-leaves. He had, moreover, a number of standard French books, having studied the language with a tutor in the evenings. The range of his reading was wide and of a high order. Histories, biographies, books of travel, and essays had a prominent place in his store of “solid reading.” That really good novels were not included in this condemnation we learn from a brief note to his betrothed, accompanying a copy of Walter Scott’s _Pirate_. He apologizes for the profanity of certain characters in semi-humorous fashion, and signs himself, “Your friend, Samuel.”

Doctor Rice, whose wife was my mother’s first cousin, appreciated young Hawes’s character and ability; the parsonage was thrown open to him at all times, and within the hospitable precincts he first met his future wife.

She was a pretty, amiable girl of eighteen, like himself an omnivorous reader, and, like him also, a zealous church-worker.

Her father, Capt. William Sterling Smith, was the master of the ancestral estate of Olney, rechristened in the latter part of the eighteenth century by an ardent admirer of William Cowper. I am under the impression that the change of name was the work of my grandmother, his second wife, Miss Judith Smith, of Montrose, and a second cousin of “Captain Sterling,” as he was familiarly called.

Late in the seventeenth century, William Smith, of Devonshire, a lineal descendant of the brother and heir of Capt. John Smith of Pocahontas fame, married Ann Sterling in England, and, emigrating to America, pitched his moving tent, first in Gloucester, then in Henrico County. His cousin, bearing the same name, took up land in Powhatan, naming his homestead for the hapless Earl of Montrose. The questionable custom of the intermarriage of cousins prevailed in the clan, as among other old Virginia families.

My maternal grandmother was petite, refined in feature, bearing, and speech, and remarkable in her day for intellectual vivacity and moral graces. Her chief associates of the other sex were men of profound learning, distinguished for services done to Church and State. Among them were the founders of the Presbyterian Church in Virginia. The Smiths had seceded from the Established Church of England before Thomas Jefferson rent it from the State.

There lies at my elbow a time-worn volume bound in unpolished calf-skin, and lettered on one side, “D. Lacy’s Letters”; on the reverse, “Friendship Perpetuated.” It contains one hundred and forty-two letters, copied from the original epistles and engrossed in exquisitely neat and minute characters. They represent one side of a correspondence maintained by the scribe with my grandmother before and after her marriage. The writer and copyist was the Rev. Drury Lacy, D.D., then a professor in Hampden Sidney College, and destined to become the progenitor of a long line of divines and scholars. The Hoges, Lacys, Brookeses, and Waddells were of this lineage. The epistles are Addisonian in purity of moral teaching and in grammatical structure, Johnsonian in verboseness, and interfused throughout with a pietistic priggishness all their own. We are glad to carry with us through the perusal (in instalments) of the hundred and forty-two, the tales current in that all-so-long-ago of the genial nature and liveliness of conversation that made him a star in social life. One wonders, in hearing of the “perpetuation” of the brotherly-and-sisterly intimacy, begun months before he wedded the “Nancy” of the Montrose group, who, from all I have been able to gather, was a very commonplace personage by comparison with “Judith”—one marvels, I say, that the affection never ripened into a warmer sentiment. They had themselves better in hand evidently than the “affinities” of the twentieth century.

Old people I knew, when a child, delighted in relating how, when “Mr. Lacy” held meetings in country churches in Powhatan and Prince Edward, and his sister-in-law was in the congregation, everybody listened for the voices of those two. His was strong, flexible, and sweet, and he read music as he read a printed page. While she, as an old admirer—who up to his eightieth year loved to visit my mother that he might talk of his early love—used to declare, “sang like an angel just down from heaven.”

She added all womanly accomplishments to musical skill and literary tastes. An embroidered counterpane, of which I am the proud owner, is wrought in thirteen varieties of stitch, and in patterns invented by herself and three sisters, the only brother contributing what may be classed as a “conventional design” of an altar and two turtle-doves perched upon a brace of coupled hearts—symbolical of his passion for the beauty of the county, Judith Mosby, of Fonthill, whom he married. Our Judith held on the peaceful tenor of her way, reading all the books she could lay her shapely hands upon, keeping up her end of correspondences with Lacys, Rices, Speeces, Randolphs, and Blaines, and gently rejecting one offer after another, until she married at thirty-three—an advanced stage of spinsterdom, then—honest Capt. Sterling Smith, the widower-father of three children.

Her husband was the proprietor of broad acres, a man of birth and fair education, high-minded, honorable, and devoted to his delicate wife. Nevertheless, the dainty _châtelaine_ must, sometimes, have missed her erudite admirers, and wished in her heart that the worthy planter were, intellectually, more in tune with herself.

My own mother’s recollections of her mother were vivid, and I never wearied of hearing them. My grandmother’s wedding night-gown, which I have, helps me to picture her as she moved about the modest homestead, directing and overseeing servants, key-basket on arm, keeping, as she did, a daily record of provisions “given out” from store-room and smoke-house, writing down in her hand-book bills-of-fare for the week (my mother treasured them for years), entertaining the friends attracted by her influence, her husband’s hospitality, and his two daughters’ charms of person and disposition.

This gown is of fine cambric, with a falling collar and a short, shirred waist. The buttons are wooden moulds, covered with cambric, and each bears a tiny embroidered sprig. Collar and sleeves are trimmed with ruffles, worked in scallops by her deft fingers. The owner and wearer was below the medium height of women, and slight to fragility. Her love of the beautiful found expression in her exquisite needlework, in copying “commonplace-books” full of poetry and the music she loved passionately, and most healthful of all, in flower-gardening. Within my memory, the white jessamine planted by her still draped the window of “the chamber” on the first floor. Few Virginia housewives would consent to have their bedrooms up-stairs. “Looking after the servants” was no idle figure of speech with them. Eternal vigilance was the price of home comfort. A hardy white-rose-tree, also planted by her, lived almost as long as the jessamine—her favorite flower.

In the shade of the bower formed by these, Mrs. Judith Smith sat with her embroidery on summer days, her little name-daughter upon a cricket beside her, reading aloud by the hour. It was rather startling to me to learn that, at thirteen, the precocious child read thus _Pamela_, _The Children of the Abbey_, and _Clarissa_ to the sweet-faced, white-souled matron. Likewise _The Rambler_, _Rasselas_, Shakespeare, and _The Spectator_ (unexpurgated). But Young’s _Night Thoughts_, Thomson’s _Seasons_, _Paradise Lost_, Pope’s _Essays_, and the Book of Books qualified whatever of evil might have crept into the tender imagination from the strong meat, spiced. Cowper was a living presence to mother and girl. My mother could repeat pages of _The Tas_ from memory fifty years after she recited them to her gentle teacher, and his hymns were the daily food of the twain.

The Olney family drove in the heavy coach over heavy roads five miles in all weathers to the First Presbyterian Church of Richmond. My grandfather had helped raise the money for the building, as his letters show, and was one of the elders ordained soon after the church was organized.