Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth CenturyPeacock, Virginia Tatnall
History
Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century
Peacock, Virginia Tatnall
Women -- United States -- Biography
With Buchanan, Harriet Lane also passed from the horizon of public
life, spending with him at Wheatland those historic four years that
followed her days in the White House. There, in January, 1866, she
was married to Henry Elliott Johnston, of Baltimore. The ceremony was
performed by her uncle, the Rev. Edward Y. Buchanan, of the Episcopal
Church.
Her honeymoon she passed in Cuba and her married life in Baltimore, in
whose social doings she took a prominent part. At her uncle's death, in
1868, she inherited Wheatland, where for a number of years she passed
her summers. In 1892 she bought a home in Washington, where she now
spends the greater part of her time.
Much has been given her of life's joys and triumphs, and much, too, of
its sorrows. Death has repeatedly crossed the threshold of her home,
robbing her, one by one, of her heart's treasures: in 1881 the elder of
her two sons, James Buchanan Johnston, a boy of brilliant promise, then
in his fourteenth year; in 1882 her second son, Henry Elliott Johnston;
and two years later her husband. Surrounded not only by life's
comforts, but its elegancies, by friends of her own and a succeeding
generation, there is yet about Harriet Lane Johnston to-day much of
that same majestic isolation that marked her youth.
ADÈLE CUTTS
(MRS. ROBERT WILLIAMS)
During the four years that Franklin Pierce presided over the nation so
many beautiful women came prominently before the public at the capital
that his was called the "beauty administration." Many were the wives
and daughters of men in high official position, but the fame of none
exceeded that of the daughter of James Madison Cutts, who held the
office of Second Controller of the Treasury.
Born within a stone's throw of the White House, all her young days
centred about it, and how near she came to living there as the wife
of a President we may gauge by how near Stephen A. Douglas came to
possessing that office. Adèle Cutts flourished in that truly golden
era before material wealth became a necessary adjunct to a woman's
popularity, when men were distinguished by a greater spirit of
gallantry and disinterestedness, and in the days before a belle's
powers at a watering-place were rated by the number or size of the
trunks she took with her; in a word, in the days when the woman herself
was pre-eminent and the accident of worldly possessions secondary.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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