22 chapters
6 hour read
Selected Chapters
22 chapters
Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century
Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century
Emily Marshall (Mrs. William Foster Otis) From portrait by Chester Harding Famous American Belles of the Nineteenth Century By Virginia Tatnall Peacock ILLUSTRATED Philadelphia & London J. B. Lippincott Company 1901 Copyright, 1900 by J. B. Lippincott Company ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A. To My Dear Mother from whom I derived my first conception of all that is most beautiful in woman...
26 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
PREFACE
PREFACE
During the century now drawing to its close there have appeared in America from time to time women of so pre-eminent a beauty, so dazzling a wit, so powerful a magnetism, that their names belong no less to the history of their country than those of the men whose genius has raised it to the rank it holds to-day among the nations of the earth. Among them have been women of the highest type of mental and moral development, women of great political and of great social genius, all of whom have left t
3 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
MARCIA BURNS (MRS. JOHN PETER VAN NESS)
MARCIA BURNS (MRS. JOHN PETER VAN NESS)
Marcia Burns! What memories the quaint Scotch lassie's name calls up! The city of Washington disappears and its site spreads before us in flourishing farm lands and orchards. Scattered farm-houses raise their chimneys amid primeval oaks and elms, and from the low doorway of the humblest emerges the winsome form of Marcia Burns. Six hundred acres, representing the thrift of generations of Scotch ancestors, surround her. The Potomac, one of the great water-ways of the South, carrying the produce o
7 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THEODOSIA BURR (MRS. JOSEPH ALSTON)
THEODOSIA BURR (MRS. JOSEPH ALSTON)
Theodosia Burr was, as has been said of the daughter of another eminent statesman with whom Aaron Burr was closely identified, "the soul of her father's soul." If we would know the better part of a man who was one of the most remarkable characters of his age, we must know Theodosia, through whom, perhaps, his name, which all the subtlety of his soul was bent on immortalizing, may live to a better fame in the centuries to come than has attended it through the years of that in which he lived. Unde
24 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
ELIZABETH PATTERSON (MADAME JEROME BONAPARTE)
ELIZABETH PATTERSON (MADAME JEROME BONAPARTE)
The city into which Baltimore Town was legislated on the last day of the year 1796 already fostered within its limits the germ of the dual life, social and commercial, to which it has owed its subsequent eminence. Not infrequently, in the days of its inception, the same roof sheltered drawing-room and warehouse, the earlier merchants deeming it necessary to keep their growing interests constantly beneath their personal vigilance. Later, the commercial life crowded out the domestic life, and merc
24 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
THE CATON SISTERS
THE CATON SISTERS
Among the belles of the early century loom the forms of those gracious women whose names are interwoven with those of the most historic figures of their age, the Caton sisters of Baltimore. Granddaughters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the most illustrious Americans of the period, they became through marriage identified with the most distinguished families in England. In 1787 Richard Caton, an Englishman who had settled in Baltimore two years before, and engaged in the manufacture of c
8 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
MARGARET O'NEILL (MRS. JOHN H. EATON)
MARGARET O'NEILL (MRS. JOHN H. EATON)
To the student of social history few careers surpass in interest that of Margaret O'Neill. Born of humble parentage, she ran the gamut of social possibilities, exercising more influence over the political destinies of her country than any other American woman has ever done. Unlike other great belles who owe their fame to the universal admiration they evoke, Margaret O'Neill owed hers quite as much to the animosity she roused. Her cause hotly espoused by the President of the United States, her co
13 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
CORA LIVINGSTON (MRS. THOMAS PENNANT BARTON)
CORA LIVINGSTON (MRS. THOMAS PENNANT BARTON)
Cora Livingston was born in New Orleans, "the little Paris of America," on the 16th of June, 1806, the year of the great eclipse. Her father, writing to announce her advent to his sister in New York, said God had given him so fair a daughter that the sun had hidden its face. Though she was a great belle with a national reputation during the decade from 1820 to 1830, those who attempted an analysis of her charm declared that she lacked that attribute which many would esteem the first requisite to
10 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
EMILY MARSHALL (MRS. WILLIAM FOSTER OTIS)
EMILY MARSHALL (MRS. WILLIAM FOSTER OTIS)
Boston claims as her own the greatest American man of the nineteenth century, and even with more justice, the most beautiful woman born in America within the same period. "Emily Marshall as completely filled the ideal of the lovely and feminine, as did Webster the ideal of the intellectual and the masculine," Quincy, a native of the same State, has written of her, adding that though superlatives were intended only for the use of the very young, not even the cooling influences of half a century e
14 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
OCTAVIA WALTON (MADAME LE VERT)
OCTAVIA WALTON (MADAME LE VERT)
Into a world in which so many are born strangers, some later to know it in part and others destined to remain forever out of touch with life, and lonely spectators rather than a part of it, Octavia Walton came as unto her own. Every atom of her being was in absolute accord with the universe. No bristling antipathies hedged in her genial personality nor raised barriers between herself and the beauties of life. She perceived them always and with an enthusiasm that raised not only her own existence
19 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
FANNY TAYLOR (MRS. THOMAS HARDING ELLIS)
FANNY TAYLOR (MRS. THOMAS HARDING ELLIS)
The loveliness of Virginia women has been a theme of song and verse. Among the Richmond belles of sixty years ago none were more justly celebrated than that trio known as the Richmond Graces, Sally Chevalier, Fanny Taylor, and Sally Watson. Close companions from early childhood, their unusual beauty as they grew to womanhood brought them fame individually and collectively. Sally Chevalier became the wife of Abram Warwick, Sally Watson, of Alexander Rives, and Fanny Taylor, of whom this sketch is
5 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
JESSIE BENTON (MRS. JOHN C. FRÉMONT)
JESSIE BENTON (MRS. JOHN C. FRÉMONT)
In the year 1868 the city of St. Louis erected a monument to the memory of one of her most distinguished citizens, Thomas Hart Benton. Of the forty thousand people who thronged the park on that May afternoon set aside for its unveiling, but one was of the great man's blood, the daughter most closely associated with the accomplishment of his loftiest conception, that dream of Western empire for his country. Accompanied by her husband, General John C. Frémont, she had accepted the invitation to un
29 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
SALLIE WARD (MRS. GEORGE F. DOWNS)
SALLIE WARD (MRS. GEORGE F. DOWNS)
One of those extraordinary women which the world from time to time produces, who rise to eminence solely through the force of their own personality, was born in America as the nineteenth century was rounding out its first quarter. Known all her life throughout the entire country, she was one of the most conspicuous figures in the life of the South and Southwest, and was the object of a sentiment that fell but little short of worship among the people of the state of Kentucky, to which she belonge
14 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
HARRIET LANE (MRS. HENRY ELLIOTT JOHNSTON)
HARRIET LANE (MRS. HENRY ELLIOTT JOHNSTON)
Of the men who have filled the Presidential chair of the United States, about none as about James Buchanan has romance hung that halo which in his case tends but to throw into bolder relief the substantial side of his character. Men of more dash, of more picturesque individuality have filled that high office than was he who rose to it through the gradations of a long legislative career. When he entered Congress, though he was but twenty-nine years old, the chapter of sentiment had already closed
16 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
ADÈLE CUTTS (MRS. ROBERT WILLIAMS)
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 t
16 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
EMILIE SCHAUMBURG (MRS. HUGHES-HALLETT)
EMILIE SCHAUMBURG (MRS. HUGHES-HALLETT)
Every Philadelphia girl who has hoped to be a belle during this last quarter of the century, and even many who have been without social aspirations, have been brought up on traditions of Emilie Schaumburg. Yet so eminent was the place she held in the old city whose standard of belleship had been fixed far back in the colonial days of America, that no one has ever succeeded her. Accustomed through long generations to women of wit, beauty, and a certain unapproachable taste in matters of personal
18 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
KATE CHASE (MRS. WILLIAM SPRAGUE)
KATE CHASE (MRS. WILLIAM SPRAGUE)
There was a name in America a little more than a generation ago that possessed a power amounting almost to enchantment, the name of Kate Chase, a woman who holds a unique place in both the political and social history of this century. The story of her life, between the high lights of its early days and the shadows in which it closed, presents a peculiar succession of superlatives. There stands forth, however, through all its changes, one unvarying dominant feature which must strike us at once, w
28 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
MATTIE OULD (MRS. OLIVER SCHOOLCRAFT)
MATTIE OULD (MRS. OLIVER SCHOOLCRAFT)
In the vicinity of one of Richmond's fashionable schools there was often seen on winter afternoons, in the late sixties, a group of young girls, who possessed far more than the usual attractiveness that belongs ever to health and youth. Two, at least, Lizzie Cabell and Mary Triplett, were singularly beautiful. The third, a tall, slender girl, with a trim figure, dark skin and hair, and eyes perhaps downcast as she stepped lightly along listening to her companions, a stranger would scarcely have
10 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
JENNIE JEROME (LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL)
JENNIE JEROME (LADY RANDOLPH CHURCHILL)
To -day, when there are so many American women adorning high places and filling more or less leading rôles in British society, it is difficult to realize that only a little more than a quarter of a century ago there was a strong movement afoot, among certain leaders of that society, to exclude their fair transatlantic cousins from London drawing-rooms. As to the oft-recurring Anglo-American marriage, while there are yet many people who look askance upon any sort of an international alliance, tha
20 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
NELLIE HAZELTINE (MRS. FREDERICK W. PARAMORE)
NELLIE HAZELTINE (MRS. FREDERICK W. PARAMORE)
Among the members of the graduating class at Mary Institute, St. Louis, in the year 1873, was a young girl who, in addition to the bright mind and intellectual ambition she had already manifested, was endowed with so extraordinary a physical beauty and so lovable a character that much of the brilliancy of her life might even then have been foretold. She was not yet seventeen years old, and was as absolutely unconscious of the unusual loveliness of her person as she ever seemed to be even after t
8 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
MARY VICTORIA LEITER (BARONESS CURZON OF KEDLESTON)
MARY VICTORIA LEITER (BARONESS CURZON OF KEDLESTON)
For the second time within the century an American woman has risen to viceregal honors. Mary Caton, the granddaughter of Charles Carroll of Carrollton and the widow of Robert Patterson, of Baltimore, through her marriage, in 1825, to the Marquis of Wellesley, who was at the time Viceroy of Ireland, went to reign a queen in the country whence her ancestors, more than a century before, had emigrated to America. In Mary Victoria Leiter, whose life, to the people of a future generation, will read mu
26 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter
NEW YORK AS A SOCIAL CENTRE
NEW YORK AS A SOCIAL CENTRE
The women who, both at home and abroad, are regarded as the leaders of American society in these last days of the century are or have been, almost without exception, at some time in their career identified with New York. Though there is no city in the United States that fills the central position which Paris holds in reference to all France, and which London occupies, at least socially, in England, the geographical position of New York, to a nation whose progressive spirit inspires it with a kee
2 minute read
Read Chapter
Read Chapter