IN THE

EARLY REPUBLIC

BY

ANNE HOLLINGSWORTH WHARTON

AUTHOR OF THROUGH COLONIAL DOORWAYS," COLONIAL
DAYS AND DAMES," "HEIRLOOMS IN MINIATURES,"
"A LAST CENTURY MAID," ITC.

WITH NUMEROUS REPRODUCTIONS OF
PORTRAITS, MINIATURES, AND RESIDENCES

COPYRIGHT, 1902

BY

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY

Published November, 1902

P ESE

105

Electrotyped and Printed by

J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia, U. S. A.

NEW

PREFACE

EW YORK, Boston, and the Southern cities, in the early years of the republic, possessed a characteristic and interesting social life. Philadelphia still held the place that she had won in Colonial days as a literary and social centre, but the new capital was the scene of a life more typically republican than that of any of these older

towns.

During the first quarter of the last century men from the different States who had taken part in Revolutionary councils and congresses, those who had helped to win the battles of the republic and to frame its code of laws, were to be heard in the Senate and House or were to be met upon the streets of Washington, while women who had graced the drawing-rooms of Mrs. Washington in New York and Philadelphia passed through the doors of the new White House to pay their respects to Mrs. Adams, Mrs. Madison, and Mrs. Monroe. Among representative men and women from the centres of cultivation and refinement, North and South, there was a picturesque mingling of delegates from the recently admitted Border

States, all brought together in the closer relations that are only possible in a small city.

In the beautiful Washington of to-day, with its interesting, varied, kaleidoscopic life, it would be impossible to find a drawing-room like that of Mrs. Madison, Mrs. Edward Livingston, or Mrs. John Quincy Adams, in which all the great and little folk were to be met in one evening, as Mr. Josiah Quincy encountered them when he visited Washington in 1826. Many scattered centres of interest there are to-day, but no one centre towards which the rays of light focus, as in that earlier time when the mistress of the White House welcomed to her drawing-room Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Marshall, Story, Washington Irving, Sir Charles Bagot, Lord Ashburton, Father Richards, David Crockett, Matthew Lyon, the good Indian Pushmataha, “Eagle of the Choctaws," and his eulogist John Randolph.

One of the penalties incident upon advancing civilization is the passing away of the characteristic and individual features of society. After hearing an older Washingtonian say, when asked some question about Mr. Fillmore, that she "knew nothing about him or any of the modern Presidents," it occurred to the writer that it might be advisable to preserve for the generations to come a picture of the social life of the capital-an already fast-fading retrospect while men and women are living who describe Webster, Clay, and Jackson as they ap

peared to them, or recall the quaint figures of Mrs. Alexander Hamilton and Mrs. Madison in old age, or the younger faces of Cora Livingston, Adèle Cutts, Mrs. Gardiner G. Howland, and Madame de Potestad.

To those who have aided her with personal recollections or valuable family papers and letters the author makes grateful acknowledgment, her thanks being especially due to Mrs. Samuel Phillips Lee, Mrs. Beverly Kennon, Mrs. M. E. Donelson Wilcox, Miss Virginia Mason, Mr. James Nourse and the Misses Nourse of the Highlands, to Mrs. Robert K. Stone, Miss Fanny Lee Jones, Mrs. Semple, Mrs. Julia F. Snow, Mr. J. Henley Smith, Mrs. Thompson H. Alexander, Miss Rosa Mordecai, Mrs. Harriot Stoddert Turner, Miss Caroline Miller, Mrs. T. Skipwith Coles, Dr. James Dudley Morgan, and Mr. Charles Washington Coleman. A. H. W.

PHILADELPHIA, October, 1902.