Though there was now no talk of "republican simplicity," there were still some old-fashioned people who were repelled by the ever-increasing dominance of society and social interests at the capital of the nation, and who reprobated the state with which the chief executive and his family held their court. Mrs. Fremont tells us that the second Mrs. Tyler was made the object of much animadversion because "she drove four horses (finer than those of the Russian minister) and because she received seated, her armchair on a slightly raised platform, in a velvet gown with three feathers in her hair;" and certainly, though the number of feathers would seem to have no bearing upon the matter of republicanism, that raised platform is unpleasantly suggestive of the dais of a throne. The first wife of Mr. Tyler died after a residence in the presidential mansion of little more than a year, and her successor in the heart of the president and to the dignities of "the first lady of the land," Miss Julia Gardner, of New York, enjoyed but eight months of official leadership. She was greatly admired for the ease and dignity with which she wore her high honors; but that raised platform suggests that it may not have been ill for some of the still cherished institutions of our country, even in its social aspects, that she was mistress of the White House and its customs no longer than was actually the case. The last administration during the first half century of the nineteenth of our era, that of President Taylor, was not remarkable for social innovations; but it is noteworthy for the fact that one of the prominent members of the society of the capital was the second Mrs. Jefferson Davis, who, little less than a decade later, was to abandon the sphere of her peaceful influence at Washington to share in the responsibilities of her husband as leader of a cause wholly antagonistic to the interests represented by the capital. The death of President Taylor in July, 1850, cast a gloom over the society of Washington and brings us to another era in the history of American womanhood. Greater gloom was to fall, not only upon Washington, but the whole country; and once more the leaders of society were to be forgotten in the heroines, noted or unnoted, of strife. CHAPTER XI THE SECTIONAL DIVISION