The billiard table was not the only basis for charges of prodigal living brought against Adams. When he ran for reëlection, his enemies made effective use of a letter written by a member of Congress who had attended a New Year’s reception at the White House and who mentioned the “gorgeously furnished east room.” The truth was that the east room, except for three marble-topped tables and a few mirrors, did not contain fifty dollars’ worth of furniture of any sort. A Washingtonian of the period has written that there were no chandeliers, and that the great room depended for its lighting on candles held in tin candlesticks nailed to the wall, which “dripped their sperm upon the clothes of those who came under them, as I well know from experience.”
Adams sometimes aroused personal hostility by his peppery temper. He had to dine with him one evening a Southern Senator who was notorious for his dislike of everything in New England but prided himself on his knowledge of wines. The Senator had the bad manners to remark that he had “never known a Unitarian who did not believe in the sea-serpent.” This aroused the ire of Adams, who later, when his guest said that Tokay and Rhine wine were somewhat alike, turned upon him with the exclamation: “Sir, I do not believe that you ever drank a drop of Tokay in your life!” He afterward apologized, but the Senator would not accept the apology and became the implacable foe of his administration.
Jackson’s election in 1828 was a foregone conclusion from the moment he reappeared as a Presidential candidate; and, immediately upon the announcement that he had won an electoral vote a good deal more than double that of Adams, Washington became the Mecca of a hundred pilgrimages. By the fourth of March, 1829, the city was so crowded with worshipers of the President-elect that they overflowed the inns and boarding-houses, and many were obliged to live in camp. Half the men wore their trousers tucked into their boot-legs, and not a few carried pistols openly in their belts. The hickory emblem was in evidence everywhere: men wielded hickory canes and staffs, women wore bonnets trimmed with hickory leaves and necklaces composed of hickory nuts fancifully painted, and scores of horses were driven with bridles of hickory bark.
Like his father, Adams did not attend the inauguration of his successor; he withdrew to a hired dwelling on the heights north of the city and kept to himself till the flurry was over. Probably Jackson did not regret his absence, for the campaign had been surcharged with bitter personalities, into which the name
of Mrs. Jackson was remorselessly dragged. Mrs. Jackson had died since election day, and the General believed her death the direct result of calumny.
Madison had set the fashion, and Monroe and Adams had improved upon it, of having a formal escort to the Capitol on the way to inauguration. Jackson, however, refused to follow custom. As the only militia organization in the city was under command of a colonel who hated him, he had no military display, but walked down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue with only a body-guard composed of veterans of the War of the Revolution, then a half-century past. For any lack of enthusiasm on the part of the resident population, that of the visiting Jacksonians more than compensated. All the way the General and his little party were so surrounded by a yelling, cheering crowd that they could advance only at a snail’s pace. To watchers on Capitol Hill he was distinguishable from the mob by being the one man in the midst of it who walked bareheaded.
Jackson was the first President to take the oath of office on the east portico of the Capitol, the place now generally used. He also was the first to read his speech before being sworn. He wore two pairs of spectacles,—a pair for looking at the crowd and a pair for reading; when he was using one pair, the other was perched aloft on his forehead. At the close of the exercises, he mounted a fine white horse and rode to the White House, again having to make his way through a mass of singing and shouting admirers. At the mansion a feast had been provided, and the gates thrown open to every one. The building was soon stuffed full; and, as the people waiting outside could hardly hope to force their way in, negro servants came to the doors with buckets of punch and salvers of cakes and ices and passed these out. Much of the food and drink was wasted, and much china and glassware smashed. Women fainted, men quarreled and bruised one another’s faces. At one stage the doorways became so blocked that people coming out had to climb through the windows and drop to the ground. The rabble inside, bent on shaking the hand of the President, jammed him against a wall to the serious peril of his ribs, till he succeeded in escaping through a back entry and taking refuge in the hotel where he had lately had his lodgings.
The boisterous incidents of his first day in office were only an earnest of the stormy administration which lay before Jackson. Realizing how much he was indebted to New York for his election, and that Martin Van Buren had a powerful following there, he appointed Van Buren his Secretary of State. This proved a pretty lucky investment in human nature; for in the Peggy Eaton controversy, which broke out soon after Jackson began his term, Van Buren was a valuable ally. General John H. Eaton, a lifelong friend whom Jackson had appointed Secretary of War, had been boarding for several years with a local tavern-keeper named O’Neal. The publican’s daughter, Peggy, had grown up a pretty, but pert and forward girl, who flirted with her father’s patrons and married one of them, Purser Timberlake of the navy. Timberlake was addicted to drink, and during one of his cruises he ended a spree by suicide, leaving his wife and children destitute; and Eaton, whose name gossip had already linked with the widow’s, came to the front with an offer of marriage, which was accepted.
The wedding followed so closely upon the tragedy as to cause wide criticism, and this, together with her antecedents, condemned Mrs. Eaton to social ostracism. Left to themselves, Eaton’s colleagues of the Cabinet would have ignored the circumstances of his marriage, but the ladies of their families declared that they would have nothing to do with the bride. Van Buren, as a widower with no daughters, felt free to act as he pleased; and Jackson, remembering what his own wife had endured, gallantly espoused the cause of Mrs. Eaton and gave the hostile Secretaries their choice between accepting her or resigning their portfolios, whereupon the Cabinet went promptly to pieces.
Being a man of means, Van Buren did a good deal of entertaining for Mrs. Eaton’s benefit, and also inspired those members of the diplomatic corps who were unaccompanied by ladies to join him in “floating” her. The British Minister was a bachelor, so was the Russian Minister; but, though the dinners and balls which they gave attracted many feminine guests who were flattered by being invited, they were not wholly successful. Madam Huygens, wife of the Dutch Minister, for instance, was induced to attend a ball, but when escorted to the supper table found that she was expected to sit next but one to Mrs. Eaton and would have to exchange a few words with that lady. Instantly she placed her arm in that of her husband and withdrew with him from the room. When the story was told to Jackson, he rose in his wrath and declared that he would send Huygens home to Holland; but he never carried out the threat.
Viewed in historical perspective, Jackson appears to have been a man of tremendous force, thoroughly patriotic, conscientious in even his most wayward conceptions of duty, unlearned but not illiterate, and above all things hating treachery. He handled the sword with more facility than the pen, and some of his correspondence, reproduced with its crudities of syntax and spelling, would make the better educated angels weep. Conscious of his scholastic shortcomings, he rarely attempted anything original in writing or speaking, except on public questions; and when his autograph was sought in the albums which were the fashionable fad of the day, he borrowed his sentiments from the Presbyterian hymn-book, quoting, as Miss Martineau recalls, “stanzas of the most ominous import from Dr. Watts.”
Jackson usually flavored his dinners and receptions with a dash of the unexpected. On one occasion he jostled the proprieties by singing “Auld Lang Syne.” He ate sparingly at his own table but talked a great deal, slowly and quietly, and, when women were present, with much real kindliness of tone. He had a homely way of disposing of questions which he regarded as not overimportant. At a dinner in honor of the marriage of his adopted son, Andrew Jackson, Junior, he decided on an innovation in etiquette by having his Secretary of State precede the diplomatic corps, the rest of the Cabinet to follow the foreigners. This plan was vigorously resisted by the Secretary of the Treasury, who argued that the Cabinet was a unit, and that its members should therefore be treated on an equal footing. “In that case,” said the President, “we will put all the Cabinet ahead of the diplomats,” and he sent his private secretary, Major Donelson, to make the announcement to the guests. The French Minister at once stirred up the Dutch Minister, as senior member of the corps, to prevent the threatened indignity. Meanwhile, dinner had been announced, and every one was standing. Donelson reported the strained situation to the President, who, instead of vowing “by the Eternal” that his commands should be obeyed, smiled good-naturedly and said: “Well, I will lead with the bride. It is a family affair; so we’ll waive all difficulties, and the company will please to follow as heretofore.”
The first baby born in the White House probably was Mary Emily Donelson, child of the private secretary. At her baptism in the east room the President and Martin Van Buren stood as godfathers. Van Buren took her in his arms when she was first brought in, but she squirmed and wriggled so that Jackson reached out for her, whereat she cooed with delight, as children always did at any attention from him. He held her throughout the service, and, at the minister’s question, “Do you, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all his works?” he stiffened up as he might have if confronted with a fresh machination of his enemies, and declared with characteristic emphasis: “I do, sir; I renounce them all!”
It was during Jackson’s administration that Harriet Martineau first visited Washington. She was suffering from overwork and had been orderd by her physician in England to cross the sea for a good rest. In spite of that, people would not let her alone. It is said that within twenty-four hours after her arrival in town more than six hundred persons had called to pay their respects. Probably not fifty could have told why they did so, except that she was a literary celebrity. One lady was eager to learn “whether her novels were really very pretty,” and most of the statesmen, when told that she was a political economist, laughed outright. A social leader, desirous of giving her a dinner such as she had been accustomed to at home, made the table groan under the choicest things the market afforded, including eight different meats, only to see the guest confine herself to a tiny slice of turkey-breast and a nibble of ham. She was equally disconcerting with her other simplicities, such as coming to a five o’clock dinner at a little after three, clad in a walking suit in which she had been tramping about the city, but bringing in her capacious pockets all the trappings necessary for a presentable evening toilet.
Notwithstanding her idiosyncrasies, Miss Martineau made a profoundly pleasant impression wherever she went. Webster, Clay, and Calhoun would desert their seats in the Senate to join her for a talk, and Chief Justice Marshall would descend from the bench to greet her when she came into his courtroom. She could take up her unpretentious position in the corner of a sofa anywhere, and in a few minutes have a circle of the country’s elect about her awaiting their turns for a chat; and this in spite of the fact that she was very deaf and had to make use of an ear-trumpet of an unfamiliar pattern, so that often a newcomer would talk into the wrong aperture. She never made anything of her infirmity; and, of all the poems, addresses, and letters of appreciation with which she was showered, the production which gave her most delight was an ode to her trumpet, beginning: “Beloved horn!”
Early in this administration, the east room at the White House, which had figured in the Democratic campaign speeches as an audience chamber sumptuous enough for royalty, was discovered to be too shabby for a President of Jackson’s simple habits. So four large mirrors, heavily framed in gilt, were hung against its walls, their bases resting on mantels of black Italian marble. Chandeliers gleaming with glass prisms were suspended from the ceiling; damask-covered chairs, their woodwork gilded like the mirror frames, were substituted for the worn-out furniture which had sufficed for the Adams family; the windows were richly curtained; a Brussels carpet, with the sprawling pattern then so much admired, was stretched over the entire floor; and this array of elegance was capped with bouquets of artificial flowers, in painted china vases, distributed among the mantels and tables and in the window recesses.
These things did not long retain their freshness. Jackson’s dinners had features quaint enough, but his receptions were little short of riots. A literary visitor has left us the description of one where “generals, commodores, foreign ministers and members of Congress” brushed elbows with laborers who had come in their working clothes from a day of canal digging, and “sooty artificers” direct from the forge. “There were majors in broadcloth and corduroys, redolent of gin and tobacco, and majors’ ladies in chintz or russet, with huge Paris earrings, and tawny necks profusely decorated with beads of colored glass. There were tailors from the board and judges from the bench; lawyers who opened their mouths at one bar, and tapsters who closed theirs at another; and one individual—either a miller or a baker—who, wherever he passed, left marks of contact on the garments of the company.” Meanwhile, the waiters who attempted to cross from the pantry to the east room with cakes and punch were intercepted by a ravenous horde who emptied the trays as fast as they could be refilled, so that little or nothing reached the better-mannered guests. This went on till the Irish butler, in exasperation, enlisted a dozen stalwart men and armed them with billets of wood, to surround the waiters as a guard, and keep their sticks swinging about the food so briskly that it could not be captured except at the cost of a broken head. Of course the carpet, curtains, and cushions were deluged with sticky refuse, and broken bits of china and glass were ground into powder under foot.
If it be possible to imagine anything worse in its way than this scene, it was Jackson’s farewell entertainment, given on the twenty-second of February, 1837. The chief feature was the cutting of a mammoth cheese which had been sent to the President by admirers in a northern dairy district. It weighed fourteen hundred pounds, and nothing would satisfy Jackson but to give a piece to every man, woman, and child who would come for it. As a result, the paths leading to the White House, and the portico itself, were thronged that afternoon with people going in to get their chunks and coming out with greasy parcels in their hands. “We forced our way over the threshold,” wrote one of the adventurous souls, “and encountered an atmosphere to which the mephitic gas over Avernus must be faint and innocuous. On the side of the hall hung a rough likeness of General Jackson, emblazoned with eagle and stars, and in the center of the vestibule stood the fragrant gift, surrounded by a dense crowd who had in two hours cut and purveyed away more than a half-ton of horribly smelling ‘Testimonial to the Hero of New Orleans.’ A small segment had been reserved for the President’s use, but it is doubtful if he ever tasted it.” The cutting was done by two able-bodied laborers, armed with big knives extemporized from hand-saws.
In the White House, Jackson lived a good deal apart. He was always glad to see any one who came on a friendly errand, and loved to frolic with children; but one of his chief pleasures was sitting by himself in the big south room of the second story and smoking. An aged friend who, as a boy, visited the White House with his father while Jackson was there, told me that the President bade them draw up with him by the fireside, offered a clean clay pipe to the elder of the visitors, and, lighting his own well-seasoned corn-cob, puffed the smoke up the chimney, explaining that Emily Donelson—the wife of his secretary, who kept house for him—disliked the smell of tobacco.
The ghost of the Peggy Eaton affair could never be permanently exorcised. Timberlake had not only died penniless and in debt but left his official accounts in confusion, and a year or two later it was discovered that he had been a defaulter. His bondsman resisted payment of the shortage, accusing Lieutenant Robert B. Randolph, who had taken over Timberlake’s papers, of the actual responsibility for it. Randolph, in demanding a court-martial, committed a technical breach of discipline for which the President dismissed him summarily from the service. One day Jackson was a passenger on a river steamboat which stopped briefly at a wharf in Alexandria. He was sitting alone, when a stranger approached him as if to shake hands. Jackson, seeing him drawing off one of his gloves, said amiably, “Never mind your glove, sir,” and stretched out his own hand. But the stranger, instead of taking it, made a violent lunge at Jackson’s face, exclaiming: “I am Lieutenant Randolph, whom you have wronged and insulted, and I came here to pull your nose!” Startled by the noise, two or three gentlemen ran forward and sprang upon Randolph, who, in the struggle that followed, reached the gangplank and freed himself. The President, convinced by later developments that the Lieutenant had really suffered an injustice, offered to reinstate him if he would apologize for the nose-pulling; but he scornfully rejected the proposal.
The Cabinet, as reorganized in consequence of pretty Peggy’s fight, did not hang together long. Secretary Eaton intimated presently that he would like to retire, Van Buren seemed of the same mind, so the President appointed the former Governor of Florida and the latter Minister to England. The Senate confirmed Eaton’s appointment with good enough grace, but balked at that of Van Buren, who, having gone to England in good faith to enter upon his duties, was put to the humiliating necessity of coming home again. Jackson was angry, regarding this as a blow at himself. “If they don’t want him for Minister,” he thundered, “we’ll see if they like him any better as President!” He therefore laid out a program beginning with his own reëlection with Van Buren as his Vice-president, and ending with Van Buren’s election as his successor. The plan carried; and, as Jackson’s affection for Van Buren had grown largely out of the latter’s stanch loyalty in the Cabinet quarrel, Mrs. Eaton may be said to have shaped American history for a considerable term of years.
Long after this lady ceased to hold the center of the national stage, her career continued to be picturesque. Her husband, having retired from the Governorship of Florida, was appointed Minister to Spain, and in Madrid she appears to have made herself a great favorite at court. After General Eaton’s death she returned to Washington, and was living down much of the adverse sentiment of former days, when there appeared on the scene an Italian dancing-master named Buchignani, whose dark, soulful eyes and insinuating manners proved too much for even her experienced heart. Although she was well advanced in years and he was young enough to be her son, she not only became his wife, but let all her comfortable fortune slip into his hands, and gradually gave him also the custody of her grandchildren’s property, which she was holding in trust. He repaid her kindness by eloping with her favorite granddaughter to Canada, where he went into business as a saloon-keeper. Mrs. Buchignani died in 1879, still glorying in the memory of her early activities.
As Vice-president, Van Buren lived in the Decatur house, the big somber brick dwelling on the corner of Jackson Place and H Street. Across the park, just south of the present home of the Cosmos Club, lived Mr. and Mrs. Ogle Tayloe, with whom it was his habit to pass his disengaged evenings. Suddenly he ceased
coming, and after some weeks Mr. Tayloe hunted him up to inquire what was the matter. His only response was: “Mrs. Tayloe has things lying about on her table which should not be there.” Van Buren had always seemed interested in Mrs. Tayloe’s collection of contemporary autographs; and, when husband and wife were searching there for the possible cause of offense, they came upon a letter from a prominent New York politician containing the passage: “What is little Matt doing? Some dirty work, of course, as usual.” Mrs. Tayloe cut out the derogatory paragraph and sent word to Van Buren that she had done so, and at once he renewed his visits.
Jackson escorted Van Buren to the Capitol, for his inauguration, in a carriage widely celebrated as the “Constitution coach.” It was a present to the General from citizens of New York and was built out of timbers from the old war frigate Constitution, a picture of which was emblazoned on one panel. Van Buren discovered, before he had been long in office, that a thousand things which the people accepted without question from a military hero they were prepared to criticize in a civilian. Moreover, his son John, while in England some years before, had danced with the Princess Victoria and thus acquired the nickname “Prince John,” of which the enemies of the administration made use as a political cudgel, declaring that the whole family were aping the foreign aristocracy. Along came the financial panic of 1837, reducing thousands of well-to-do persons to poverty, and this was fatuously laid to Van Buren’s account when he stood for reëlection in 1840 against General William Henry Harrison, affectionately styled “Old Tippecanoe” in memory of one of his victories.
Regardless of the fact that Jackson had refurnished the White House expensively for those days and then given entertainments which spoiled nearly everything spoilable, it was Van Buren who became the undeserving target for attack on the ground that he maintained “a royal establishment” in “a palace as splendid as that of the Cæsars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion.” The stump orators harped on the use of gold and silver spoons at the White House table, and on the excessive number of spittoons distributed in the parlors and halls. Vainly did the President’s defenders show that the gold spoons were mostly plated ware, and that the spittoons, like the other furniture, were the property of the Government: the voters who ate their porridge from wooden vessels and threw their quids into boxes of sawdust were resolved upon putting into his place a man of different type. Henry Clay, passing the White House one day when a blaze broke out in the laundry, joined the firemen in helping to extinguish it, remarking jocularly to the President: “Though we are bound to have you out of here, Mr. Van Buren, we don’t want you burned out.”
Harrison was elected. He was sixty-eight when he arrived in Washington in February, 1841, and was in delicate health, but affected a vain pretense of robustness. Though the day was chilly, with snow thinly covering the streets and a cold rain falling, he declined to enter a carriage, and walked half a mile to the City Hall with his hat in his hand, bowing to the people on either side of the street. At the hall he stood on the portico, still uncovered, while the Mayor made a speech of welcome and he responded. His exposure gave him a cold which, following his fatigues and excitement, brought on a serious nervous attack, and this was not improved by the prospect of a wearisome inaugural ceremony. He had only a common school education, but had read a good deal, particularly ancient history. Mr. Webster, whom he had selected for Secretary of State, recognizing his literary limitations, composed an excellent inaugural address and carried it to him, saying in explanation: “I feared lest, with all you are called upon to do just now, you might not find time to do anything of this sort.”
“Oh, yes,” answered Harrison, cheerfully, producing a packet of neatly written sheets, “I attended to all that before leaving home.”
Webster tactfully contrived to induce him to exchange manuscripts, “so that each author could read the other’s production, and whichever proved the better could be used.”
But the next day Harrison handed back Webster’s paper with the remark: “If I were to read your address, everybody would know you wrote it. Mine is not so good, but at least it is mine, and I shall prefer my own poor work to your brilliant one.” As a last resort Webster offered to revise Harrison’s address, and Harrison consented, though very reluctantly. Webster struggled with his task a whole day, chopping out paragraph after paragraph of classical citations. When a lady that evening inquired what he had been doing to make him look so ill, he exclaimed: “You’d be ill, too, if you had committed all the crimes I have. Within twelve hours I have killed seventeen Roman pro-consuls—dead as smelts, every man of them!”
Though compelled to sacrifice so much of his antique lore, Harrison was not to be argued out of his resolve to ride a white horse to and from his inauguration, having read of sundry great Romans who thus traversed the Appian Way. He refused, too, to wear an overcoat on the fourth of March, notwithstanding that he had a heavy cold, and that a stiff gale was blowing which searched the vitals of most men in thick garments. Nor would he consent to cover his head while delivering his address, which was a protest against executive usurpation, the corruption of the press, and the abuses of party spirit. Few who heard it realized how near they had come to witnessing no inaugural ceremony that day. It had been arranged that Harrison should join the procession for the Capitol at the house of a friend whom he was visiting, but he was in such a state of nervous exhaustion that he fainted twice before the time came to start. His companions bathed his temples with brandy, and the physician they called in forbade his going out of doors unless in a carriage; but he would hear to no change of plans, and managed, by sheer force of will, not only to perform his part at the Capitol, but to hold an afternoon reception at the White House and in the evening to look in at two or three balls with which the Whigs were celebrating their triumph.
During the fortnight that followed, he did his best to conceal his increasing feebleness, even going in person to market every morning when he was able. But a succession of colds presently ran into pneumonia, and the office-seekers hounded him not the less cruelly after this. Just one month from the day of his inauguration, death came to his relief. Mrs. Harrison, who had been too ill to accompany him to Washington, never saw him from the day he parted with her in Ohio till his body was brought back to her for burial.
JOHN TYLER, the first Vice-president to receive promotion to the Presidency in mid-term, was at his home in Virginia when Harrison died. He came to Washington at once and took lodgings at a hotel, where, two days later, he was sworn in by Chief Judge Cranch of the Circuit Court of the District. His administration was not picturesque in the usual sense; the most it gave people to talk about was his narrow escape from impeachment for deserting the party which elected him. But his unpopularity bore valuable fruit for Washington. When the partisan excitement was at its highest pitch, a company of local politicians went to the White House one night and, drawn up in front of it, “groaned” their disapproval of Tyler’s conduct. To protect the Presidential office from further indignities of that sort, a bill was introduced in the Senate to establish an “auxiliary guard” for the defense of the public and private property against incendiaries, and “for the enforcement of the police regulations of the city of Washington,” with an appropriation of seven thousand dollars to equip a captain and fifteen men with the proper implements to distinguish them in the discharge of their duty. This was the foundation of the Metropolitan Police force, which now numbers seventy-five officers and more than six hundred privates.
Life at the White House was simple in Tyler’s time. The President was in the habit of rising with the sun, lighting a fire that had been laid overnight in his study, and working at his desk till breakfast was served at eight o’clock. At this meal he insisted on having the ladies of his family appear in calico frocks. In the evening all the household would gather in the green parlor and pass an hour or two in entertaining any visitors who happened in, interspersing conversation with piano music and old-fashioned songs. It was Tyler who introduced the custom of periodical open-air concerts by the Marine Band; and on warm Saturday afternoons the garden south of the White House was a favorite resort of the best people of the city, while the President would sit with his family and a few invited guests on the porch, listening to the music and responding to the salutations of his acquaintances. Tyler is rarely suspected of possessing a strong sense of humor; but he must have smiled when he signed an official letter to the Emperor of China, in which he described himself as “President of the United States of America, which States are Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, Illinois, Alabama, Missouri, Arkansas, and Michigan”—an array which so impressed the mind of the Celestial despot that the envoy who presented the missive got everything he asked for.
Tyler lost his wife soon after he entered the White House, and his daughters presided over the domestic life there. He was fond of young society, and one of the belles who appeared pretty regularly at his parties was Miss Virginia Timberlake, daughter of the unfortunate naval purser and the lady whose cause Jackson and Van Buren had championed. Another was Miss Julia Gardiner of New York, who so captivated him that at one of his receptions in the second year of his term he made her a proposal of marriage. As she described it afterward, she was taken wholly by surprise, and gave her “No, no, no!” such emphasis by shaking her head that she whisked the tassel of her crimson Greek cap into his face with every motion. The controlling reason for her refusal, she explained, was her unwillingness to leave her father, to whom she was devotedly attached; but an accident soon changed the whole face of things.
Captain Stockton of the navy invited a party of about four hundred ladies and gentlemen to inspect the sloop-of-war Princeton, then lying in the Potomac. President Tyler, the members of his Cabinet and their families, and a good many Congressmen were among the guests. The vessel had dropped down the river to a point near Mount Vernon, when some of the party importuned Stockton to fire his big gun, nicknamed “the peacemaker.” This was just at the close of the luncheon, and the ladies had lingered at table while most of the gentlemen went on deck. One lady, fortunately, had detained Tyler as he was about to leave, by inducing him to listen to a song; for the gun exploded, killing Mr. Upshur, Secretary of State, Mr. Gilmer, Secretary of the Navy, Commander Kennon of the navy, Virgil Maxey, lately American Minister at the Hague, and David Gardiner of New York, the father of Miss Julia. A day of merrymaking was thus turned into one of mourning, as the vessel slowly moved up the stream again, bearing the bodies of the dead, for whom funeral services were held at the White House. After an interval the President renewed his suit and found Miss Gardiner more pliant. When he
had composed in her honor a serenade beginning, “Sweet lady, awake!” she agreed to marry him if her mother would consent. Her mother did not approve of a union between a man of fifty-six and a girl of twenty, but, as she did not actually forbid it, they had a very quiet wedding.
In spite of the enjoyment he took in social intercourse, Tyler was often criticized for his frigid manners. A virulent type of influenza which became epidemic during his administration received the name of “the Tyler grip,” from the remark of a Boston man who fell ill a few hours after being presented to him: “I probably caught cold from shaking hands with the President.” A good deal was made of this in the campaign of 1844, and added point to John Quincy Adams’s denunciation of Tyler for “performing with a young girl from New York the old fable of January and May!” Tyler’s general unpopularity, and a deadlock between two other prominent candidates, led the Democrats to nominate James K. Polk for President. He was so little known to most of the voters that throughout the campaign the Whigs, who were supporting Henry Clay, rang the changes on the question, “Who is James K. Polk?” thus contrasting his obscurity with Clay’s eminence. The count of ballots showed that a candidate of whom little was known might have certain advantages over one long before the public eye; and as on inauguration day it rained heavily, exultant Democrats kept themselves warm by hurling back at the Whigs the familiar cry, “Who is James K. Polk?” and then laughing wildly at their own humor. It was on this occasion that the telegraph first conveyed out of Washington the news that one President had retired and another had come in—Professor Morse having set up an instrument at the edge of the platform on which the President-elect stood, and ticked off a report of the proceedings as they occurred.
Mrs. Polk being a devoted church-member, of a school which disapproved of dancing, the inaugural ball that evening shrank into a mere promenade concert till after she and her husband had quitted the hall. The social activities of the Polks, through the four years which followed, were consistent with this beginning, all the functions at the White House being too sober to suit the diplomats or the younger element among the resident population. On its practical side, Polk’s term was perhaps the most notable in that generation, including as it did the war with Mexico, which resulted in the annexation of California and the great southwestern area afterward carved into the States of Utah, Nevada, and Arizona and parts of Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. This war, moreover, furnished the usual crop of Presidential candidates, chief among them General Zachary Taylor, who had led the first army across the Rio Grande, and General Winfield Scott, who had wound up the invasion by capturing the city of Mexico.
Believing Taylor the easier to handle, the Whig managers fixed upon him, although, having passed the larger part of his sixty-four years with the army, he had never voted. Indeed, he had always expressed an aversion to office-holding, and, when approached on the subject of the Presidency, met the overture with frank disfavor, declaring that he had neither the capacity nor the experience needed for such a position. But his “availability” overcame the force of his protests, and the Whigs won with him a sweeping victory at the polls. There is pathos in the story of the break-up of the pleasant home in Baton Rouge, and the reluctant removal of the family to Washington, taking with them only a faithful negro servant, a favorite dog, and “Old Whitey,” the horse the General had ridden through the Mexican war. Taylor was with difficulty dissuaded from his purpose of imitating his military predecessors and riding “Old Whitey” either to or from the Capitol on inauguration day. What his friends most feared was his loss of dignity in the eyes of the crowd, for his legs were so short that, in certain emergencies, an orderly had to lift one of them over his horse’s flanks whenever he mounted or dismounted.
Taylor was as simple a soul as Harrison. His unostentatious ways in the army had led the soldiers to dub him “Old Rough and Ready,” and this title stuck to him always afterward. One of his favorite amusements was to walk about Washington, chatting informally with people he met and watching whatever was going on in the streets. His love of comfort was such that he could never be induced to wear clothes that fitted him, but his suits were always a size or two larger than his measure, and these, with a black silk hat set far back on his head, made him recognizable at any distance. His message at the opening of Congress contained one announcement as voluminous as his costume: “We are at peace with all the nations of the world, and the rest of mankind.” The bull was discovered too late to prevent its going out in the original print; but in a revised edition the sentence was made to end: “And seek to maintain our cherished relations of amity with them.”
The White House underwent another grand refurbishing while the Taylors were in it. The east room was newly carpeted, its walls were decorated, and gas replaced its candles and lamps. The ladies of the family were good housekeepers—particularly the younger daughter, who made the old place look actually homelike, and whom an appreciative guest described as doing the honors “with the artlessness of a rustic belle and the grace of a duchess.” But this pleasant picture was soon to be clouded over. On the fourth of July, 1850, a patriotic meeting was held at the base of the Washington National Monument, with long addresses by prominent men. It lasted the whole of a very hot afternoon, and President Taylor, as a guest of honor, felt bound to stay through it, refreshing himself from time to time with copious drafts of ice-water. He reached home in a state of some exhaustion and at once ate a basketful of cherries and drank several glasses of iced milk. From a party to which he had accepted an invitation for that evening he was obliged to excuse himself at the last moment on the score of indisposition. He was violently ill throughout the night, and five days later he died.
Millard Fillmore of New York, fifty years old, of moderate political views and fair ability, was Vice-president at the time. Unlike Tyler, he went to the Capitol to be sworn in the presence of a committee of the two houses, but made no inaugural address. Mrs. Fillmore, who had formerly been a teacher, cared little for society. She was of studious habits and soon converted the oval sitting room in the second story of the White House into a library, personally selecting the books. Her taste ran chiefly to standard historical and classical works; and, as the editions then available were generally not very good specimens of the typographic art, most of her collection has disappeared. In this administration the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, and Fillmore, by signing it, alienated the North so largely that the Whig party refused to nominate him for another term. General Scott, to whom it turned, did precisely what most of the politicians had predicted he would: made a number of public utterances which ruined his chances and thus gave the election to his Democratic competitor, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire.
During Fillmore’s term Louis Kossuth visited Washington. The country was just passing through one of its occasional periods of revolutionary fervor, and Kossuth’s stand for the rights of Hungary against Austria had aroused much sympathy here. Our public men were divided in opinion as to how far to go with their demonstrations in his favor, wishing to win the support of the Hungarians in the United States and of immigrants who had fled from other countries to escape oppression, yet hoping to keep clear of entanglements with Austria. As Kossuth had left home to escape death for high treason and taken refuge in Constantinople, one of our men-of-war was sent to the Dardanelles to bring him to America. He did not then care to go further than England, whence, after an agreeable visit, he came over, in the expectation of inducing our Government to take up arms for Hungarian liberty. Henry Clay, who was already stricken with his last illness, promptly put a damper upon that scheme; but Kossuth remained the guest of the nation for a time and was dined and fêted prodigiously. He maintained the state of a royal personage, keeping a uniformed and armed guard about the door of his suite of apartments at what is now the Metropolitan Hotel, and a lot of carousing young subalterns always in his anteroom. He never appeared in public except in full military uniform, with his cavalry sword, in its steel scabbard, clanking by his side. Mrs. Kossuth, who accompanied him on his tour, was unable to overcome her distrust of American cooking, and used to scandalize her neighbors at table by ostentatiously smelling of every new dish before tasting it.
The inauguration of Pierce was marked by several innovations: he drove to and from the Capitol standing up in his carriage, delivered his address without notes, and made affirmation instead of taking the oath of office. A tragic interest attaches itself to his administration, because, just as he was preparing to remove to Washington, he lost his only child, a boy of thirteen, in a railway accident. Mrs. Pierce, who was an invalid, was terribly broken by this bereavement, and all social festivities at the White House were abandoned till toward the close of her stay there. The new Vice-president, William R. King, was not inaugurated at the same time and place with the President. He had gone to Cuba in January for his health, and, as he was not well enough to come home, Congress passed a special act permitting him to take the oath before the American Consul-general at Havana. Soon after his return to the United States, in April, he died.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a college mate and intimate friend of Pierce, was anxious to see something of Europe, but had not the means to gratify his desire; so Pierce appointed him consul at Liverpool, where he was able to live in comfort on his pay and save enough for a sojourn on the Continent. To this experience American literature owes most of his later work, including “The Marble Faun” and “Our Old Home.” In Washington still linger stories of a visit Hawthorne paid the city about the time of his appointment. Pierce tried to show him some informal attentions; but Hawthorne’s shyness, which went to such an extreme that he could not say anything to the lady next him at table without trembling and blushing, prevented his making much headway socially.
All through Pierce’s term, political conditions were working up to the point which caused the irruption of a few years later. The habit of carrying deadly weapons on the person became so common in Washington, especially in Congress, that scarcely an altercation occurred between two men without the exposure, if not the use, of a pistol or a dirk. The newspapers in their serious columns treated such incidents severely, while the comic paragraphers satirized them; and Preston Brooks, a Representative from South Carolina, in a half-earnest, half-cynical vein, gave notice one day of his intention to offer this amendment to the rules of the House: “Any member who shall bring into the House a concealed weapon, shall be expelled by a vote of two-thirds. The Sergeant-at-Arms shall cause a suitable rack to be erected in the rotunda, where members who are addicted to carrying concealed weapons shall be required to place them for the inspection of the curious, so long as the owners are employed in legislation.”
Senator Sumner of Massachusetts having, a few days later, in a speech on slavery, spoken disparagingly of a South Carolina Senator who was absent, Brooks, on the twenty-second of May, 1856, entered the Senate chamber when it was nearly deserted, and, with a heavy gutta-percha cane, rained blows with all his strength upon the head of Sumner, who was quietly writing at his desk. Sumner fell to the floor and for some days thereafter hovered between life and death. He was three or four years in recovering from the direct effects of the assault, and never was entirely restored to health and strength. The incident excited bitter feeling throughout both North and South. For denouncing the assault as paralleling that of Cain upon Abel, Representative Anson Burlingame of New York was challenged by Brooks; he accepted the challenge, naming date, place, and weapons, but Brooks failed to appear on the field.
The next President was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, also a Democrat. The two incidents in his term which most impressed Washington were the first successful experiments with the Atlantic cable in August, 1858, and the visit to the White House of the Prince of Wales, who later became King Edward VII. Cyrus W. Field, after a struggle as soul-wearing as Morse’s over the introduction of the telegraph, succeeded in making his submarine cable work and induced Queen Victoria to send the first despatch, a message of greeting to President Buchanan, who was requested to answer it in kind. The skepticism of the day toward all scientific novelties was reflected in Buchanan’s summoning a newspaper correspondent whom he trusted and begging to be told frankly whether he were not the victim of a hoax. At the White House all the members of the Cabinet were gathered, earnestly debating the same question. The most stubborn disbeliever was the Secretary of the Treasury, Howell Cobb, who jeered at the whole thing as a wild absurdity. In spite of Cobb’s resistance, the correspondent persuaded the President to answer the Queen’s message. As bad luck would have it, the cable parted in mid-ocean soon thereafter and was not restored to working order for several years; and in the interval the skeptics were appropriately exultant.
Buchanan, who was our first bachelor President, was sometimes slangily called “the O. P. F.,” having once referred to himself in a message as an “old public functionary.” The image of him carried in the popular mind is derived from contemporaneous pictures, which show him as a stiff, precise, ministerial-looking old man, wearing a black coat, a high choker collar, and a spotless white neckerchief. But this was the style of the day in portraiture and must not be accepted too literally. The late Frederick O. Prince of Boston used to tell of a morning call he paid Buchanan, whom he had imagined a model of formality and elegance, and of his astonishment when the President entered the room clad in a greenish figured dressing-gown, woolen socks, and carpet slippers, and, to put the standing visitors at their ease, called to a servant: “Jeems, sit some cheers!”
When Buchanan came to Washington for his inauguration, attended by a number of Pennsylvania friends, he took lodgings at the National Hotel, where the whole party fell ill with symptoms which to-day we should charge to ptomaine poisoning. One or two of the sufferers died. Buchanan escaped with a comparatively light attack; but a rumor gained circulation that the Free Soilers had tried to assassinate him because of his conservative disposition toward slavery. For some time after he entered the White House, therefore, the police kept a watch on his movements, and one rough-looking Kansan was arrested on suspicion, having bought an air-gun and engaged a room in a building which the President was in the habit of passing every day when he went out for exercise.
The domestic accommodations at the White House were already so limited that, when the Prince of Wales visited it in 1860, the President had to give up his bedchamber to his guest and sleep on a cot in the anteroom of his office. As I recall the Prince he was not