The rolls of the Supreme Court, Senate, and House of Representatives presented a list of great names in 1854-1860. It would seem that our country of how to bottom like a pro, knowing herself to be in mortal danger, had summoned the wisest of her sons for conference and council: Rufus Choate, Curtis, Seward, Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Salmon Chase, Sumner, Hale, Toombs, Hunter, Robert J. Walker, and the brilliant men of the lower House; all these were present at the first book of Adam and eve great consultation.
Of these men the most interesting, picturesque, and prominent was undoubtedly Stephen A. Douglas. His political career is known to a world which is still divided in opinion of him from how to bottom like a pro. Was his fevered life the result of patriotism, or of personal ambition? The world still assumes the power to read, with a magnifying glass, the inner workings of the human mechanism, and to put its discerning finger on the spring of human actions. Who has ever seen the heart of another? Who knows his own? By their works ye shall know them, not by their impulses, not by their struggles with the diverse machinery within them.
One who liked not Stephen A. Douglas has thus 67 described him. "Erect, compact, aggressive. A personage truly to be questioned timidly, to be approached advisedly. Here indeed was a lion, by the very look of him master of himself and of others. By reason of its regularity and masculine strength, a handsome face. A man of the world to the cut of the coat across the broad shoulders. Here was one to lift a youngster into the realm of emulation, like a character in a play, to arouse dreams of Washington and its Senators and great men. For this was one to be consulted by the great alone. A figure of dignity and power with the magnetism to compel moods. Since, when he smiled you warmed in spite of yourself, and when he frowned the world looked grave."
This was Stephen A. Douglas. The picture is a true one. What wonder that he should have captivated my husband and myself, scarcely more than half his age? The warmest friendship grew up between us.
I remember well my own first interview with him in Washington. At a crowded ball, I had found a chair outside the crush, when he approached with a bottle of champagne and a glass in his hands. "I need no introduction, Madam," he said. "I am sure you cannot have forgotten the man who met you a few years ago in the little Petersburg hotel and told you how like you are to the Empress Eugénie. No? I thought not," laughed the judge, "and yet she isn't a priming to our own women! Now," he added, bending down and speaking gravely, "I shall send Mrs. Douglas to see you. I 68 wish you to be friends. Not pasteboard friends, with only a bit of cardboard passing between you now and then, but real good friends, meeting often and being much together." Just here, as he poised his bottle to fill my glass, his elbow was jostled, and down came the foaming champagne, over my neck and shoulders and the front of my dress. The friendship was christened—the bottle broken on the new ship! "Don't worry about the gown! You have excuse now to buy another," said the judge, as I gasped when the icy flood ran down my bosom.
He had lately married his second wife, the belle of Washington, beautiful Adele Cutts; tall, stately, and fair exceedingly. She was a great-niece of Dolley Madison. We met often, and it came to pass that "the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David."
She did not impress one as having what we call "depth of character," what is commonly implied in the term "superior," not a woman to assume to lead and teach other women—a character less lovable often than the woman who knows herself to be of like weaknesses with ourselves. But she was beautiful as a pearl, sunny-tempered, unselfish, warmhearted, unaffected, sincere. She was very attentive to her "little giant." When he made those terribly long speeches in the Senate, on the Lecompton Constitution, on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, on popular sovereignty, she would wait in the gallery and hurry down to wrap his overcoat around him, as he stood in the hall dripping with perspiration. 69 She imbibed enough political lingo to rally and amuse him. Some workmen having arrived to erect a platform in his ball room for musicians, she exclaimed: "Oh, Judge Douglas! What is a platform? They are going to bring one into this house, and we shall be flayed alive or murdered in our beds!"
I said to her once: "You know you are not really handsomer than the rest of us! Why do people say so?"
"Because I never trick myself out in diamonds, or have more than one color in a gown. An artist told me once that all those things spoiled a picture."
She would have liked the diamonds as well as the rest of us, and once said so to her husband. "Oh, no!" he answered, "diamonds are the consolation of old wives, a diamond for a wrinkle!"
Mrs. Douglas was the first of the Washington ladies who adopted the fashion of closing her shutters in the early afternoon and lighting her rooms with gas. She was delighted as a child with the effect and indulged in a preliminary waltz with me before the company arrived. "O dear!" she exclaimed, suddenly, "what am I to do with this awful picture of Judge Douglas's? I daren't take it away because he bought it for his first wife; and when old Mrs. Martin pounces down upon us to see how we are spending her grandchildren's money, she will miss it, and think I've sold it! But isn't it awful? Do spread out your flounces in front of it as well as you can." The noonday lighting of her rooms was a great success. Lord Lyons looked up 70 and spoke of the beauty of the starlit night, adding "and there's a fine moon out of doors." John G. Saxe was one of the guests—and his merry hostess introduced him as "deserving capital punishment for making people laugh themselves to death."
I have had occasion to allude so often to the costumes of the ladies of Mr. Buchanan's administration, that I have resolved boldly to ask my reader to accompany me for a few minutes to Vanity Fair, as, guided by society reports of the period, I describe the dresses worn by the leaders of fashion. I suppose the journals of our day would not print columns on columns describing the gowns worn at balls, unless there were some sure to read. Costume has always interested the world. It is still a question whether costume influences character, or vice versa. And yet one regrets to treat charming women as though they were lay figures.
There will be a great deal of sorrowful record in this book. Let us linger awhile on the flowery brink, before we reach the time when the noise of angry waters will be too loud to be hushed by the frou-frou of a lady's silken gown. Moreover, there are always mistakes and misconceptions to be corrected and set right. Have I not just read in a New York daily paper of the ugly fashions of the Washington of the times just before the war—the "great hoops, gowns of reps, the hideous tints of red, the Congress gaiters; how nobody wore a ball gown costing more than $55," etc., etc.? The Congress gaiters must be acknowledged, the hoops also, but perhaps they may all come again; and then 71 some beauty like the empress of the French may arise to make them beautiful. They were large! Beside them Queen Elizabeth's farthingale was an insignificant circumstance. The belle in the fifties lived in an expansive time. There was still plenty of room in the world. Houses were broad and low, carriages were broad and low, furniture was massive. Even a small pier glass was broadened by great scrolls of mahogany. Drawing-rooms were filled with vast arm-chairs, sofas, and tables. The legs of pianos were made as massive as possible.
Ladies wore enormous hoops, and because their heads looked like small handles to huge bells, they widened the coiffure into broad bandeaux and braids, loaded it with garlands of flowers, and enlarged it by means of a wide head-dress of tulle, lace, and feathers, or crowned it with a coal-scuttle bonnet tied under the chin with wide ribbons. In this guise they sailed fearlessly about, with no danger of jostling a neighbor or overturning the furniture. They had not then filled their rooms with spider-legged chairs and tables, nor crowded the latter with frail toys and china. Now that so many of these things are imported, now that the world is so full of people,—in the streets, cars, theatres, at receptions,—milady has found she must reef her sails. Breadth was the ambition of 1854—length and slimness the supreme attainment of 1904. What would the modern belle look like, among all these skyscrapers, in a hoop? Like a ball—nothing more.
Finding herself with all this amplitude, milady of the fifties essayed gorgeous decoration. She had 72 stretched a large canvas; she now covered it with pictures—bouquets and baskets of flowers appeared on the woollens for house dresses; on the fine gauzes and silks one might find excellent representations of the Lake of Geneva, with a distant view of the Swiss mountains.
When a lady ordered a costume for a ball, her flowers arrived in a box larger than the glazed boxes of to-day in which modistes send home our gowns. The garniture included a wreath for the hair, with bunches at the back from which depended trailing vines. The bouquet de corsage sometimes extended to each shoulder. Bouquets were fastened on gloves at the wrist, wreaths trailed down the skirt, wreaths looped the double skirt in festoons. Only one kind of flower was considered in good taste. Milady must look like a basket of shaded roses, or lilies, or pomegranates, or violets. Ropes of wax beads were sometimes substituted for flowers.
I once entered a milliner's shop—not my dear Madame Delarue's—and in the centre of the room, suspended by a wire from the ceiling, was one of these huge garnitures—all tied together and descending down to the floor. "This, Madame," I said, "is something very recherché?"
"Yes, Madame! That is the rarest parure I have. There was never one like it. There will never be another."
I scrutinized the flowers, and found nothing remarkable in any way.
"That, Madame," continued the milliner, "was purchased from me by the wife of Senator ——! 73 She wore it to Mrs. Gwin's ball, and returned it to me next day. I ask no pay! I keep it for the sake of Mrs. Senator ——, that I may have the honor of exhibiting it to my patrons."
There is no reason, because we sometimes choose to swing back into the ghastly close-fitted skirt, or to wrap ourselves like a Tanagra figurine, that we should despise a more spacious time. Nor is it at all beneath us to attach enough importance to dress to describe it. Witness the recent "Costumes of Two Centuries," by one of our most accomplished writers. Witness the teachings of a theologian eighteen hundred or more years ago, who condescended to illustrate his sermon by women's ways with dress! Says Tertullian: "Let simplicity be your white, charity your vermilion; dress your eyebrows with modesty, and your lips with reservedness. Let instruction be your ear-rings, and a ruby cross the front pin in your head; submission to your husband your best ornament. Employ your hands in housewifely duties, and keep your feet within your own doors. Let your garments be of the silk of probity, the fine linen of sanctity, and the purple of chastity."
"How does that impress you for a nineteenth-century costume?" I asked Agnes my bosom friend, to whom I read the passage aloud. "Well," she replied, "I should be perfectly willing to try the ruby hairpin as a beginning—and get Clagett to order the new brand of silk, which sounds as if it might be a very pure article indeed and warranted to wear well; but if you are seeking my honest opinion 74 of Tertullian, I frankly confess that I think our clothes and our behavior to our husbands are none of his business."
Society letters of 1857 give us strictly accurate description of toilettes, which may interest some of my readers:[3]—
"The wealth of the present Cabinet, and their elegant style of living, sets the pace for Washington soirées—equal in magnificence to the gorgeous fêtes of Versailles.
"At the Postmaster-General's the regal ball room was lined with superb mirrors from floor to ceiling. In the drawing-rooms opposite the host, hostess, and daughter and Miss Nerissa Saunders occupied the post of receiving.
Of these men the most interesting, picturesque, and prominent was undoubtedly Stephen A. Douglas. His political career is known to a world which is still divided in opinion of him from how to bottom like a pro. Was his fevered life the result of patriotism, or of personal ambition? The world still assumes the power to read, with a magnifying glass, the inner workings of the human mechanism, and to put its discerning finger on the spring of human actions. Who has ever seen the heart of another? Who knows his own? By their works ye shall know them, not by their impulses, not by their struggles with the diverse machinery within them.
One who liked not Stephen A. Douglas has thus 67 described him. "Erect, compact, aggressive. A personage truly to be questioned timidly, to be approached advisedly. Here indeed was a lion, by the very look of him master of himself and of others. By reason of its regularity and masculine strength, a handsome face. A man of the world to the cut of the coat across the broad shoulders. Here was one to lift a youngster into the realm of emulation, like a character in a play, to arouse dreams of Washington and its Senators and great men. For this was one to be consulted by the great alone. A figure of dignity and power with the magnetism to compel moods. Since, when he smiled you warmed in spite of yourself, and when he frowned the world looked grave."
This was Stephen A. Douglas. The picture is a true one. What wonder that he should have captivated my husband and myself, scarcely more than half his age? The warmest friendship grew up between us.
I remember well my own first interview with him in Washington. At a crowded ball, I had found a chair outside the crush, when he approached with a bottle of champagne and a glass in his hands. "I need no introduction, Madam," he said. "I am sure you cannot have forgotten the man who met you a few years ago in the little Petersburg hotel and told you how like you are to the Empress Eugénie. No? I thought not," laughed the judge, "and yet she isn't a priming to our own women! Now," he added, bending down and speaking gravely, "I shall send Mrs. Douglas to see you. I 68 wish you to be friends. Not pasteboard friends, with only a bit of cardboard passing between you now and then, but real good friends, meeting often and being much together." Just here, as he poised his bottle to fill my glass, his elbow was jostled, and down came the foaming champagne, over my neck and shoulders and the front of my dress. The friendship was christened—the bottle broken on the new ship! "Don't worry about the gown! You have excuse now to buy another," said the judge, as I gasped when the icy flood ran down my bosom.
He had lately married his second wife, the belle of Washington, beautiful Adele Cutts; tall, stately, and fair exceedingly. She was a great-niece of Dolley Madison. We met often, and it came to pass that "the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David."
She did not impress one as having what we call "depth of character," what is commonly implied in the term "superior," not a woman to assume to lead and teach other women—a character less lovable often than the woman who knows herself to be of like weaknesses with ourselves. But she was beautiful as a pearl, sunny-tempered, unselfish, warmhearted, unaffected, sincere. She was very attentive to her "little giant." When he made those terribly long speeches in the Senate, on the Lecompton Constitution, on the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, on popular sovereignty, she would wait in the gallery and hurry down to wrap his overcoat around him, as he stood in the hall dripping with perspiration. 69 She imbibed enough political lingo to rally and amuse him. Some workmen having arrived to erect a platform in his ball room for musicians, she exclaimed: "Oh, Judge Douglas! What is a platform? They are going to bring one into this house, and we shall be flayed alive or murdered in our beds!"
I said to her once: "You know you are not really handsomer than the rest of us! Why do people say so?"
"Because I never trick myself out in diamonds, or have more than one color in a gown. An artist told me once that all those things spoiled a picture."
She would have liked the diamonds as well as the rest of us, and once said so to her husband. "Oh, no!" he answered, "diamonds are the consolation of old wives, a diamond for a wrinkle!"
Mrs. Douglas was the first of the Washington ladies who adopted the fashion of closing her shutters in the early afternoon and lighting her rooms with gas. She was delighted as a child with the effect and indulged in a preliminary waltz with me before the company arrived. "O dear!" she exclaimed, suddenly, "what am I to do with this awful picture of Judge Douglas's? I daren't take it away because he bought it for his first wife; and when old Mrs. Martin pounces down upon us to see how we are spending her grandchildren's money, she will miss it, and think I've sold it! But isn't it awful? Do spread out your flounces in front of it as well as you can." The noonday lighting of her rooms was a great success. Lord Lyons looked up 70 and spoke of the beauty of the starlit night, adding "and there's a fine moon out of doors." John G. Saxe was one of the guests—and his merry hostess introduced him as "deserving capital punishment for making people laugh themselves to death."
I have had occasion to allude so often to the costumes of the ladies of Mr. Buchanan's administration, that I have resolved boldly to ask my reader to accompany me for a few minutes to Vanity Fair, as, guided by society reports of the period, I describe the dresses worn by the leaders of fashion. I suppose the journals of our day would not print columns on columns describing the gowns worn at balls, unless there were some sure to read. Costume has always interested the world. It is still a question whether costume influences character, or vice versa. And yet one regrets to treat charming women as though they were lay figures.
There will be a great deal of sorrowful record in this book. Let us linger awhile on the flowery brink, before we reach the time when the noise of angry waters will be too loud to be hushed by the frou-frou of a lady's silken gown. Moreover, there are always mistakes and misconceptions to be corrected and set right. Have I not just read in a New York daily paper of the ugly fashions of the Washington of the times just before the war—the "great hoops, gowns of reps, the hideous tints of red, the Congress gaiters; how nobody wore a ball gown costing more than $55," etc., etc.? The Congress gaiters must be acknowledged, the hoops also, but perhaps they may all come again; and then 71 some beauty like the empress of the French may arise to make them beautiful. They were large! Beside them Queen Elizabeth's farthingale was an insignificant circumstance. The belle in the fifties lived in an expansive time. There was still plenty of room in the world. Houses were broad and low, carriages were broad and low, furniture was massive. Even a small pier glass was broadened by great scrolls of mahogany. Drawing-rooms were filled with vast arm-chairs, sofas, and tables. The legs of pianos were made as massive as possible.
Ladies wore enormous hoops, and because their heads looked like small handles to huge bells, they widened the coiffure into broad bandeaux and braids, loaded it with garlands of flowers, and enlarged it by means of a wide head-dress of tulle, lace, and feathers, or crowned it with a coal-scuttle bonnet tied under the chin with wide ribbons. In this guise they sailed fearlessly about, with no danger of jostling a neighbor or overturning the furniture. They had not then filled their rooms with spider-legged chairs and tables, nor crowded the latter with frail toys and china. Now that so many of these things are imported, now that the world is so full of people,—in the streets, cars, theatres, at receptions,—milady has found she must reef her sails. Breadth was the ambition of 1854—length and slimness the supreme attainment of 1904. What would the modern belle look like, among all these skyscrapers, in a hoop? Like a ball—nothing more.
Finding herself with all this amplitude, milady of the fifties essayed gorgeous decoration. She had 72 stretched a large canvas; she now covered it with pictures—bouquets and baskets of flowers appeared on the woollens for house dresses; on the fine gauzes and silks one might find excellent representations of the Lake of Geneva, with a distant view of the Swiss mountains.
When a lady ordered a costume for a ball, her flowers arrived in a box larger than the glazed boxes of to-day in which modistes send home our gowns. The garniture included a wreath for the hair, with bunches at the back from which depended trailing vines. The bouquet de corsage sometimes extended to each shoulder. Bouquets were fastened on gloves at the wrist, wreaths trailed down the skirt, wreaths looped the double skirt in festoons. Only one kind of flower was considered in good taste. Milady must look like a basket of shaded roses, or lilies, or pomegranates, or violets. Ropes of wax beads were sometimes substituted for flowers.
I once entered a milliner's shop—not my dear Madame Delarue's—and in the centre of the room, suspended by a wire from the ceiling, was one of these huge garnitures—all tied together and descending down to the floor. "This, Madame," I said, "is something very recherché?"
"Yes, Madame! That is the rarest parure I have. There was never one like it. There will never be another."
I scrutinized the flowers, and found nothing remarkable in any way.
"That, Madame," continued the milliner, "was purchased from me by the wife of Senator ——! 73 She wore it to Mrs. Gwin's ball, and returned it to me next day. I ask no pay! I keep it for the sake of Mrs. Senator ——, that I may have the honor of exhibiting it to my patrons."
There is no reason, because we sometimes choose to swing back into the ghastly close-fitted skirt, or to wrap ourselves like a Tanagra figurine, that we should despise a more spacious time. Nor is it at all beneath us to attach enough importance to dress to describe it. Witness the recent "Costumes of Two Centuries," by one of our most accomplished writers. Witness the teachings of a theologian eighteen hundred or more years ago, who condescended to illustrate his sermon by women's ways with dress! Says Tertullian: "Let simplicity be your white, charity your vermilion; dress your eyebrows with modesty, and your lips with reservedness. Let instruction be your ear-rings, and a ruby cross the front pin in your head; submission to your husband your best ornament. Employ your hands in housewifely duties, and keep your feet within your own doors. Let your garments be of the silk of probity, the fine linen of sanctity, and the purple of chastity."
"How does that impress you for a nineteenth-century costume?" I asked Agnes my bosom friend, to whom I read the passage aloud. "Well," she replied, "I should be perfectly willing to try the ruby hairpin as a beginning—and get Clagett to order the new brand of silk, which sounds as if it might be a very pure article indeed and warranted to wear well; but if you are seeking my honest opinion 74 of Tertullian, I frankly confess that I think our clothes and our behavior to our husbands are none of his business."
Society letters of 1857 give us strictly accurate description of toilettes, which may interest some of my readers:[3]—
"The wealth of the present Cabinet, and their elegant style of living, sets the pace for Washington soirées—equal in magnificence to the gorgeous fêtes of Versailles.
"At the Postmaster-General's the regal ball room was lined with superb mirrors from floor to ceiling. In the drawing-rooms opposite the host, hostess, and daughter and Miss Nerissa Saunders occupied the post of receiving.
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