White House gossip : $b from Andrew Johnson to Calvin CoolidgeColman, Edna M. (Edna Mary)
History
White House gossip : $b from Andrew Johnson to Calvin Coolidge
Colman, Edna M. (Edna Mary)
Presidents -- United States -- Biography; Washington (D.C.) -- Social life and customs; White House (Washington, D.C.)
Greek legends and mathematical problems did not fill his entire time.
With the habit of youth, he had fallen deeply and seriously in love
with his first sweetheart, the charming dark-eyed daughter, Caroline
Lavinia, of Dr. John Scott, of a near-by academy. To the amazement and
the chagrin of a host of young men students, she became engaged to
eighteen-year-old Ben Harrison. Some of his mates were astonished and
wondered and commented on the queer ways of love and girls. They asked
each other, how could she--Caroline Scott--fall in love with a chap
small and insignificant in appearance, plain of feature and of dress,
afflicted with unusual diffidence and reserve, whose only claim to
pretensions of any sort was the possession of an ancestor who had been
a signer of the Declaration of Independence and another a President
of the United States. True, Ben Harrison also claimed a descent from
John Rolfe and Pocahontas. But Miss Caroline was content. The two
were married in the autumn of 1853 and started out in an Indianapolis
boarding house with a total cash asset of $800, a sum which the young
man had borrowed on a lot which he had inherited from a relative.
Harrison studied law and was admitted to the bar. Soon clients flocked
to him. There was nothing aggressive or dominant about him; but the
shyness or reserve, which at first was diffidence, wore away, leaving
a quiet assurance that bespoke power of mind. In 1860, he began his
political career as a candidate before the Republican Convention for
the position of Reporter of the Supreme Court, to which he was elected
by a substantial majority.
Two children soon came to more than fill Mrs. Harrison’s time. So the
young couple found themselves a tiny cottage, where Mrs. Harrison did
all of her housework, aided before breakfast, at midday, and at night
by her husband. He chopped wood, filled the wood box and water buckets,
and did all of the outside home chores.
This was their situation when the guns of Sumter sounded the tocsin
of war and sent the blood of revolutionary ancestry bounding in Ben
Harrison’s veins. However, he had a family dependent on him, and he
gave the matter serious consideration. Meanwhile, he made a call upon
Governor O. Morton, of Indiana, who settled for him the paramount
matter of his place in the war. Mr. Harrison had said to his friend:
“If I can be of service, I’ll go.” Without a moment’s hesitation, the
Governor replied, “Raise a regiment in this congressional district, and
you can command it!”
Harrison regarded this as a command as well as a promise. He went
straight home, found Mrs. Harrison in full sympathy with his anxiety
to do his part for his country. The Stars and Stripes were hung from
the humble law office window, and Lawyer Harrison started recruiting,
quickly assembling Company A, the nucleus foundation for the Seventieth
Indiana Volunteers. Soon a regiment was assembled, for the Harrison
name held a magic sound.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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