CHAPTER XXIII.

SCENES AT THE WHITE HOUSE—MEN AND WOMEN OF NOTE.

Widows “at par”—Four Sonless Presidents—Supported by Flattery—A Delicate Constitution—Living to a Respectable Age—Teaching Her Grandsons How to Fight—Inheriting Religion—“Another Sensitive, Saintly Soul”—A Pathetic Reminiscence—A Perfect Gentlewoman—A Stately Black-eyed Matron—A Lady of the Old School—Obeying St. Paul—A Woman Who “Kept Silence”—“Sarah Knows Where It Is”—Commanding “Superlative Respect”—An English Lady “Impressed”—Three Queens in the Background—A Very Handsome Woman—Retiring from Active Life—A Lady’s Heroism—“My Home, the Battle-field”—A Man Who Kept to His Post—A Life in the Savage Wilderness—A Life’s Devotion—The Colonel’s Brave Wife—The Conquering Hero from Mexico—Objecting to the Presidency—“Betty Bliss”—The Reigning Lady—An Overpowering Reception—“A Bright and Beaming Creature, Dressed Simply in White”—An Inclination for Retirement—The Penalty of Greatness—Death in the White House—A Wife’s Prayers—A New _Regime_—The Clothier’s Apprentice and the School Teacher—The Future President Builds His Own House—Becomes a Lawyer—Chosen Representative—Domestic Happiness—Twenty-seven Years of Married Life—“A Matron of Commanding Person”—A Scarcity of Books—Home “Comforts” at the White House—The Memory of a Loving Wife—A Well Balanced Young Lady.

Three of the first four Presidents of the United States married widows. Jefferson, Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and Tyler, were all widowers while occupying the White House. Neither Washington, Jefferson, Madison, or Monroe, left sons to succeed them. The wife of Martin Van Buren died in her youth, long before he had grown to high political honors. She had been dead seventeen years when, as the eighth President of the United States, he entered the White House. During his administration, its social honors were dispensed by his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Abram Van Buren, born Angelica Singleton, of South Carolina, who entered upon her duties and pleasures as a bride. She was of illustrious lineage, possessed finely cultivated powers, and “is said to have borne the fatigue of a three hours’ _levée_ with a patience and pleasantry inexhaustible.” Doubtless she shared some of the help which bore Mr. Monroe triumphantly through a similar scene.

“Are you not completely worn out?” inquired a friend.

“O, no,” replied the President. “A little flattery will support a man through great fatigue.”

* * * * *

Anna Symnes, the wife of President Harrison, a lady of strong intelligence and deep piety, never came to the White House. Her delicate health forbade it, when her husband made his presidential journey to Washington. In a little more than a month he was borne back to her, redeemed by death. She survived, almost to the age of ninety, to bid sons and grandsons Godspeed when they went forth to fight for their country—as she had bidden her gallant husband the same, when he left her amid her flock of little ones, in the days of her youth, for the same cause. From time to time sons and grandsons came from the field of battle to receive her blessing anew. She said to one: “Go, my son. Your country needs your services. I do not. I feel that my prayers in your behalf will be heard, and that you will return in safety.” And the grandson did come back to receive her final blessing, after many hard-fought battles. Her only surviving son writes: “That I am a firm believer in the religion of Christ, is not a virtue of mine. I imbibed it at my mother’s breast, and can no more divest myself of it, than of my nature.”

Mrs. Letitia Christian Tyler, wife of the tenth President of the United States, was another sensitive, saintly soul, whose children rise up to-day, and call her blessed. She died in the White House, September 10, 1842. Her daughter-in-law, Mrs. Robert Tyler, writing of the event, says:

“Nothing can exceed the loneliness of this large and gloomy mansion, hung with black, its walls echoing only sighs and groans. My poor husband suffered dreadfully when he was told his mother’s eyes were constantly turned to the door, watching for him. He had left Washington to bring me and the children, at her request. She had every thing about her to awaken love. She was beautiful to the eye, even in her illness; her complexion was clear as an infant’s, her figure perfect, and her hands and feet were the most delicate I ever saw. She was refined and gentle in every thing that she said and did; and, above all, a pure and spotless Christian. She was my _beau ideal_ of a perfect gentlewoman.

“The devotion of father and sons to her was most affecting. I don’t think I ever saw her enter a room that all three did not spring up to lead her to a chair, to arrange her footstool, and caress and pet her.”

Mrs. Robert Tyler presided at the White House till June, 1844, when President Tyler was married to Julia Gardiner, of Gardiner’s Island, New York, a youthful beauty and _belle_. After many vicissitudes Mrs. Tyler entered the Catholic church, and now resides in Georgetown. Like Mrs. Madison, she has returned to the scenes of her early triumphs, and during the sessions of Congress may often be seen in the diplomatic gallery of the senate chamber, a stately black-eyed matron dressed in deep mourning.

Mrs. Polk, intellectually, was one of the most marked women who ever presided in the White House. A lady of the old school, educated in a strict Moravian Institute, her attainments were more than ordinary, her understanding stronger than that of average women; but she obeyed St. Paul, and held her gifts in silence. She never astonished or offended her visitors by revealing to them the depth or breadth of her intelligence; nevertheless she used that intelligence as a power—the power behind the throne. Never a politician, in a day when politics, by precedent and custom, were forbidden grounds to women, she no less was thoroughly conversant with all public affairs, and made it a part of her duty to inform herself thoroughly on all subjects which concerned her country, or her husband.

She was her husband’s private secretary, and, probably, was the only lady of the White House who ever filled that office. She took charge of his papers, he trusting entirely to her memory and method for their safe keeping. If he wanted a document, long before labeled and “pigeonholed,” he said: “Sarah knows where it is;” and it was “Sarah’s” ever ready hand that laid it before his eyes. At the age of twenty she came to Washington as the wife of Mr. Polk, then a Member of Congress from Tennessee. Many years of her youth and prime were spent at the Capital, and, as she had no children, she had more than ordinary opportunity to devote herself exclusively to the service of her husband. She was the wife of the Speaker of the House before she was the wife of the President of the United States, and in every position seems to have commanded superlative respect and admiration on her own behalf, aside from the honor always paid to the person holding high station. Many poems in the public prints were addressed to her—one, while she was the wife of a Member of Congress, by Judge Story. When her husband became the President, Mrs. Polk was deemed the supreme ornament of the White House, and the public journals of the land broke forth into gratulation that the domestic life of the Nation’s house was to be represented by one who honored American womanhood. Mrs. Polk was tall, slender, and stately, with much dignity of bearing, and a manner said to resemble that of Mrs. Madison. The stateliness of her presence was conspicuous, and so impressed an English lady, that she declared that “not one of the three queens whom she had seen, could compare with the truly feminine, yet distinguished presence of Mrs. Polk.”

Mrs. Polk was considered a very handsome woman. Her hair and eyes were very black, and she had the complexion of a Spanish donna. Without being technically “literary,” she was fond of study, and of intellectual pursuits, and possessed a decided talent for conversation. In her youth, she became a member of the Presbyterian church, and through a long life her character has been eminently a Christian one. Always devout, her piety in later years is said to have merged into austerity; but even in the prime of her beauty and power, she never gave her smile or presence to the dissipation, the insidiously corrupting influence of what is termed “gay life in Washington,” whose baleful exponent to-day is the all-night “German” so destructive to freshness of beauty and purity of soul.

Mrs. Polk still lives at “Polk Place,” Nashville, Tennessee, a stately and noble home, like the Hermitage in this respect, that the mortal remains of its master, amid verdure and flowers, beneath the shadow of its trees, await the final call. The inscription on the monument, to the memory of President Polk, is in Mrs. Polk’s own words; and here, in this home, consecrated by his death, the venerable widow of the eleventh President of the United States peacefully awaits the summons which will recall her to the Soul whose life and name it has been her chief earthly glory to embellish and to represent.

* * * * *

Mrs. Taylor, the wife of General Taylor, the twelfth President of the United States, was one of those unknown heroines of whom fame keeps no record. Her life, in its self-abnegation and wifely devotion, under every stress of privation and danger on the Indian’s trail, amid fever-breeding swamps, and on the edge of the battle-field, was more heroic than that ever dreamed of by Martha Washington—or continuously lived by any Presidential lady of the Revolution—yet time will never give her a chronicler.

When General Taylor received the official announcement that he was elected President of the United States, among other things he said: “For more than a quarter of a century my house has been the tent, and my home the battle-field.” This utterance was simply true, and through all these years, this precarious house and home were shared by his devoted wife. He was one of the hardest worked of fighting officers. Intervals of official repose at West Point and Washington never came to this young “Indian fighter.” His life was literally spent in the savage wilderness, but whether in the swamps of Florida, on the plains of Mexico, or on the desolate border of the frontier, the young wife persistently followed, loved and served him. Thus all her children were born, and kept with her till old enough to live without her care; then, for their own sakes, she gave them up, and sent them back to “the settlements,” for the education indispensable to their future lives—but, whatever the cost, she stayed with her husband.

The devotion to duty, and the cheerfulness under privation of this tender woman—the wife of their chief,—penetrated the whole of his pioneer army. It made every man more contented and uncomplaining, when he thought of her. Her entire married life had been spent thus; but when her husband, as Colonel Taylor, took command against the treacherous Seminoles, in the Florida war, when the newspapers heralded the new-made discovery, that the wife of Colonel Taylor had established herself at Tampa Bay, it was considered unpardonably reckless, that she should thus risk her life, when the odds of success seemed all against her husband. Nothing could move her from her post. As ever, she superintended the cooking of his food; she ministered to the sick and wounded; she upheld the _morale_ of the little army by the steadfastness of her own self-possession and hope, through all the long and terrible struggle. Time passed, and the brave Colonel of the Border became the conquering hero from Mexico, bearing triumphantly back to peace the victories of Palo Alto, Monterey, and Buena Vista, inscribed upon his banners. The obscure “Indian fighter” was at once the hero and idol of the Nation. The long day of battle and glory was ended at last, the wife thought,—and now she, the General, their children, in a four-roomed home, were to be kept together at last, in peace unbroken.

It is not difficult to imagine what a home so hardly earned, so nobly won, was to such a woman. Nor is it hard to realize that when that home was almost immediately invaded by a nomination of its chief to the Presidency of the Nation, the woman’s heart at last rebelled. The wife thought no new honor could add to the lustre of her husband’s renown. She declared that the life-long habits of her husband would make him miserable under the restraints of metropolitan life, and the duties of a civil position. From the first, she deplored the nomination of General Taylor to the Presidency as a misfortune, and sorrowfully said: “It is a plot to deprive me of his society, and to shorten his life by unnecessary care and responsibility.”

When, at last, she came to the White House, as its mistress, she eschewed the great reception-rooms and received her visitors in private apartments. She tried, as far as possible, to establish her daily life on the routine of the small cottage at Baton Rouge, and she essayed personally to minister to her husband’s comforts, as of old, till her simple habits were ridiculed and made a cause of reproach by the “opposition.”

The reigning lady of the White House, at this time, was General and Mrs. Taylor’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, or, as she was familiarly and admiringly called, “Betty Bliss.” She entered the White House at the age of twenty-two, a bride, having married Major Bliss, who served faithfully under her father as Adjutant-general. Perhaps no other President was ever inaugurated with such overwhelming enthusiasm as General Taylor—and the reception given his youngest child, who greatly resembled him, and who, at that time, was the youngest lady who had ever presided at the White House, was almost as overpowering. The vision that remains of her loveliness, shows us a bright and beaming creature, dressed simply in white, with flowers in her hair. She possessed beauty, good sense and quiet humor. As a hostess she was at ease, and received with affable grace; but an inclination for retirement marked her as well as her mother. Formal receptions and official dinners were not to their taste. Nevertheless, these are a part of the inevitable penalty paid by all who have received the Nation’s highest honor. Society, in its way, exacts as much of the ladies of the White House, as party politics do of the men who administer state affairs in it. A lack of entertainment caused part of the universal discontent, already voiced against the hero President, whose heroic ways were naturally not the ways of policy or diplomacy.

The second winter of President Taylor’s term, the ladies of his family seemed to have assumed more prominently and publicly the social duties of their high position. A reception at the President’s house, March 4, 1850, was of remarkable brilliancy. Clay, Calhoun, Webster, Benton and Cass, with many beautiful and cultured women, then added their splendor to society in Washington. The auguries of a brilliant year were not fulfilled. Amid the anguish of his family, President Taylor died at the White House, July 9, 1850. When it was known that he must die, Mrs. Taylor became insensible, and the agonized cries of his family reached the surrounding streets.

Dreadful to the eyes of the bereaved wife were the pomp and show with which her hero was buried.

After he became President, General Taylor said, that “his wife had prayed every night for months that Henry Clay might be elected President in his place.” She survived her husband two years, and to her last hour never mentioned the White House in Washington, except in its relation to the death of her husband.

She was succeeded by a woman of superior intellect, who in a different sphere had proved herself an equally devoted wife. Mrs. Abigail Filmore, the daughter of a Baptist clergyman, grew up in Western New York, when it was a frontier and a wilderness. Yearning for intellectual culture, with all the drawbacks of poverty and scanty opportunity, she obtained sufficient knowledge to become a school-teacher. It was while following this avocation that she first met her future husband, the thirteenth President of the United States, then a clothier’s apprentice, a youth of less than twenty years, himself, during the winter months, a teacher of the village school. They were married in 1826, and began life in a small house built by her husband’s hands. In this little house the wife added to her duties of maid-of-all-work, house-keeper, hostess and wife, the avocation of teacher. She bore full half of the burden of life, and the husband, with the weight of care lifted from him by willing and loving hands, rose rapidly in the profession of law, and in less than two years was chosen a member of the State Legislature. Thus, side by side, they worked and struggled, from poverty to eminence.

Strong in intellect and will, her delights were all feminine. Her tasks accomplished, she lived in books and music, flowers and children. At her death, her husband said: “For twenty-seven years, my entire married life, I was always greeted with a happy smile.” She entered the White House a matron of commanding person and beautiful countenance. She was five feet six inches in height, with a complexion extremely fair and pure, blue, smiling eyes, and a wealth of light-brown curling hair. A personal friend of Mrs. Filmore, writing from Buffalo, says:

“When Mr. Filmore entered the White House, he found it entirely destitute of books. Mrs. Filmore was in the habit of spending her leisure moments in reading, I might almost say, in studying. She was accustomed to be surrounded with books of reference, maps, and all the other requirements of a well furnished library, and she found it difficult to content herself in a house devoid of such attractions. To meet this want, Mr. Filmore asked of Congress, and received an appropriation, and selected a library, devoting to that purpose a large and pleasant room in the second story of the White House. Here Mrs. Filmore surrounded herself with her little home comforts; here her daughter had her own piano, harp, and guitar, and here Mrs. Filmore received the informal visits of the friends she loved, and, for her, the real pleasure and enjoyments of the White House were in this room.”

Mrs. Filmore was proud of her husband’s success in life, and desirous that no reasonable expectation of the public should be disappointed. She never absented herself from the public receptions, dinners, or _levées_, when it was possible to be present; but her delicate health frequently rendered them very painful. She sometimes kept her bed all day, to favor that weak ankle, that she might be able to endure the fatigue of the two hours she would be obliged to stand for the Friday evening _levées_.

Mrs. Filmore was destined never to see again her old home in Buffalo, with mortal eyes. She contracted a cold on the day of Mr. Pierce’s inauguration, which resulted in pneumonia, of which she died, at Willard’s Hotel, Washington, 1853. What she is in the memory of her husband, may be judged by the fact—that he has carefully preserved every line that she ever wrote him, and has been heard to say that he could never destroy even the little notes that she sent him on business, to his office.

The child of this truly wedded pair, Mary Abigail Filmore, was the rarest and most exquisite President’s daughter that ever shed sunshine in the White House. She survived her mother but a year, dying of cholera, at the age of twenty-two, yet her memory is a benison to all young American women, especially to those surrounded by the allurements of society and high station. She was not only the mistress of many accomplishments, but possessed a thoroughly practical education. She was taught at home, at Mrs. Sedgwick’s school, in Lenox, Massachusetts, and was graduated from the State Normal School of New York, as a teacher, and taught in the higher departments of one of the public schools in Buffalo. She was a French, German, and Spanish scholar; was a proficient in music; and an amateur sculptor. She was the rarest type of woman, in whom were blended, in perfect proportion, masculine judgment and feminine tenderness. In her were combined intellectual force, vivacity of temperament, genuine sensibility, and deep tenderness of heart. She saw clearly through the forms and shows of life, her views of its duties were grave and serious; yet, in her intercourse with others, she overflowed with bright wit, humor and kindliness. Her character was revealed in her face, for her soul shone through it. Words cannot tell what such a nature and such an intelligence would be, presiding over the social life of the Nation’s House. She used her opportunities, as the President’s daughter, to minister to others. She clung to all her old friends, without any regard to their position in life; her time and talents were devoted to their happiness. She was constantly thinking of some little surprise, some gift, some journey, some pleasure, by which she could contribute to the happiness of others. After the death of her mother, she went to the desolate home of her father and brother, and, emulating the example of that mother, relieved her father of all household care; her domestic and social qualities equalled her intellectual power. She gathered all her early friends about her; she consecrated herself to the happiness of her father and brother; she filled her home with sunshine. With scarcely an hour’s warning, the final summons came. “Blessing she was, God made her so,” and in her passed away one of the rarest of young American women.