Page images
PDF
EPUB

the angry passions of the period; but now all is forgotten. Men meet as they met in the days of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, with even less of party rancor or personal alienation. The Southerner is sought out when he visits the city, and made at home. The Democrat once more hails the Republican as neighbor and friend. And if there is any reference to the unhappy past, it is flavored by a harmless. jest over a glass of champagne, or lost in the smoke of a fragrant Victoria cigar. Those who fought against each other talk of their battles with a judicial calmness, precisely as I have seen Grant and Mosby conversing in the White House, or Sherman and Longstreet at a Washington reception, or Joe Hooker and Mansfield Lovell hobnobbing at the Astor House in New York. When John C. Breckinridge visited the North after the war, he was welcomed by all his old friends as of yore; and if I had caught him in Philadelphia, I would have been glad to have had him for my guest, as in the days when we went gypsying and lost our way, one dark night, on our return from a famous dinner at Georgetown, District of Columbia, with John Appleton and Moses McDonald (both dead), and T. J. D. Fuller (yet living, I believe, in the city of Washington). Fifty years hence there may be men and women who will not be ashamed to acknowledge themselves our descendants, and not unwilling to linger lovingly over these lines.

XXIII.

PRESIDENTIAL DINNERS AT WASHINGTON.-ANECDOTES OF ADMIRAL FARRAGUT.

A DINNER at the "White House," as we call the mansion of the President of the United States in 1880, a designation that will be lost when the Chief Magistrate is located in the large

and more commodious residence now in preparation for him— a dinner at the White House has often been described. It is always a state affair, unless the President calls his friends around him en famille; but it is not, therefore, always cold and formal. I have been present at a number of these dinners, under Presidents Polk, Fillmore, Pierce, Lincoln, and Grant. How many agreeable people surrounded that long table!titled foreigners, diplomatists, scientists, and men of war; Cabinet Ministers, Senators, and Representatives; ladies of every rank and station; candidates for President and for every sort of office; genteel Bohemians, high-dressed fops; authors, editors, and actors. Here, when very young, I saw the giants of debate -Cass, Benton, Dromgoole, Silas Wright, Hannegan, Corwin, Clayton, Dayton, Mangum, Berrien, Douglas - during Polk's time. Here, later, came young Breckinridge, Bright, Humphrey Marshall, A. K. Marshall, Richard Thompson, Howell Cobb, Thomas H. Bayley, Morrison L. Harris, George Read Riddle, Robert C. Winthrop, George T. Davis, Jefferson Davis, W. L. Marcy, under Fillmore and Pierce; and here, under Lincoln and Grant, I met George Peabody, Charles Macalester, William M. Evarts, Horace Greeley, Henry J. Raymond, Thurlow Weed, George D. Prentice, and a small army of generals, commodores, and other celebrities. The guests were first assembled in one of the drawing-rooms, where the President received them, all in full dress, and then they filed into the dining-hall, where they were seated, the President taking his place exactly midway, fronting his wife, if there was a lady of the White House, with the most distinguished persons on his right and left. Your next neighbor might be a stranger, but he soon thawed under the influence of good wine, and generally gave you a fund of humor or information. Here all the Presidents, from John Adams to Grant, gave their State dinners (though for a period the accommodations were poor enough), with the exception of President Madison, who vacated the mansion on the ap

proach of the British in the war of 1812, and occupied the brick building at the corner of Twentieth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue while the White House was being repaired, after it had been burned by the invader. The historian of the future will find other Presidents in other and more spacious quarters, and, let us hope, in harmony with the original plan, happily carried out under the bold and sagacious administration of Governor Shepherd; and perhaps he will recur to these hasty sketches, not to find instruction, but to trace the difference between the manners of a past age and the manners of the generation in which he shall live.

It was at a President's dinner, in the winter of 1869-70, that I first saw Admiral David Glascoe Farragut. He had returned some months before from his splendid European cruise in the frigate Franklin, and General Grant seized the first occasion to honor the hero who had made our flag almost as victorious on the water as he had made it on the land. It was a brilliant company, and I was placed next to the veteran seaman, then in his sixty-ninth year. There was another aged man near us, Mr. Dent, the father of Mrs. President Grant (since dead, at the great age of eighty-six), hardly less interesting. His faculties were failing, but he was so kind, humorous, and genteel that he won me over at once by his quaint remarks and curious candor. He was a rare specimen of the gentleman of the old school, showing, in all he said, an independent spirit and a wonderfully retentive memory of the men of the West in the bygone days. I had seen some of these noted persons in my youth, and it delighted him to have me help him to recall their names, so that he might tell me what he knew of them. In this way I heard many things of the leading citizens of the towns west of the Alleghanies when they were villages, among whom Mr. Dent was much esteemed, and, as his intelligent children prove, a man of mark and credit. He slyly said to me, "I am a Democrat, the same as ever, and don't believe

in any other party, though I am not a rebel Democrat ; and you young fellows [here he looked at his son-in-law, the President] cannot bring me over to your new party." Very touching, indeed, was the confiding love for the dear old man that shone from the eyes of his daughter, and the President's eyes twinkled more than once at his harmless and witty observations.

Farragut was charming. I found him almost boyish in his frankness. He talked incessantly; was full of life, and had much to say of his jaunt among the grandees of the Old World. He had nothing to say of himself; but he was delighted with the curious presents he had received while in Europe, and the odd bijouterie he had bought; and he showed them to me with a confidential delight very like a lad at school who secretly exhibits his marbles to his envious playmates. As I looked and listened, I inwardly rehearsed his story. Born in East Tennessee, 1801; a midshipman when he was nine years old; in battle on board the Essex, under old Commodore Porter, in 1814; fought bravely, was wounded, and reported as follows: "The boy too young for promotion." Again in conflict with the West Indian pirates when he was a midshipman of twenty-two; and from that time to the Rebellion in active service on sea and land. What he did in the Rebellion, which found him sixty years old, "the world knows by heart."

There is something in seamen, commodore or common sailor, very different from the soldier. Their ocean service removes them from the scenes of terra firma, and they are never, or rarely, politicians. They gather a great deal in their voyages to other nations, but life on board ship makes them a peculiar people, who, by their long absences from home, grow to be strangers to local strifes. They are generally intelligent men, but they are so much citizens of the world that they are silent in the midst of statesmanship. I hardly know an exception to this rule. Of the many gallant officers of our naval and marine establishments, I cannot name one. There could not be a bet

ter illustration than Admiral David D. Porter, now a fixed resident in Washington. Hospitable, impulsive, and generous, he is as utterly indifferent to party quarrels as if he lived on the quarter-deck of a man-of-war. Commodore Perry and his contemporaries, Commodores Conner, Paulding, the two Hunters, Charles and William; Admiral Joseph Smith, Commodore Dupont, Admiral Turner, the two Goldsboroughs, Commodores Reynolds, Rogers, and Mullaney, belonged to the same school. Removed from the disputes of the hour or of the land, they are an interesting and a curious community, as well because of their natural and acquired intelligence as because of their invariable integrity and independence.

Another specimen was ex-Surgeon-general Foltz, who lived a few years ago in Philadelphia. Born at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1810, a graduate of Jefferson College, he entered the navy as a surgeon in 1831, and, after a most creditable career, reached the highest post in the service, as Surgeon-general of the Navy, in 1870. He died a few years ago, greatly esteemed by a host of friends. Like all the men I have named and have known in the naval service, he looked upon life from the experience of several voyages to other countries, one of which was round the world under that fine seaman Commodore Downes. He was fleet surgeon under Farragut, on the flag-ship Hartford, in all of his battles on the Mississippi in 1861, '62, '63, and occupied the same position under the illustrious Admiral on board the frigate Franklin during his long cruise to Europe, which began in 1867 and closed in the fall of 1868. He is, therefore, a good authority; and the following pleasant incidents from his pen are published still further to disclose the admirable traits of the character of a hero now dead and gone, but who will always be cherished with gratitude by the American people. The first anecdote is exactly as Farragut used to relate it in his familiar moods :

« PreviousContinue »