Society as I Have Found It

My Family--My Mother an Angel of Beauty and Charity--My Father’s Nobleness of Character--Building Bonfires on Paradise Rocks and Flying Kites from Purgatory with Uncle Sam Ward--My Brother the Soldier--My Brother the Lawyer.

In 1820 my mother, a beautiful girl of eighteen years, was introduced into New York society by her sister, Mrs. Samuel Ward, the wife of Samuel Ward, the banker, of the firm of Prime, Ward & King. She was a great belle in the days when Robert and Richard Ray and Prescott Hall were of the jeunesse dorée of this city. In my opinion, she was the most beautiful, Murillo-like woman I have ever seen, and she was as good as she was beautiful;--an angel in works of charity and sympathy for her race. Charlotte Corday’s picture in the Louvre is a picture of my mother. The likeness arose from the fact that her family were descended on the maternal side from the Corday family of France. This also accounts for all my family being, from time immemorial, good Democrats. No one was too humble to be received and cared for and sympathized with by my mother. Her pastime was by the bedside of hospital patients, and in the schoolroom of her children. She followed the precepts of her mother’s great-grandfather, the Rev. Gabriel Marion (grandfather of Gen. Francis Marion) as expressed in his will to the following effect: “As to the poor, I have always treated them as my brethren. My dear family will, I know, follow my example.” It also contained this item: “I give her, my wife, my new carriage and horses, that she may visit her friends in comfort.” This ancestor came from Rochelle in a large ship chartered for the Carolinas by several wealthy Huguenot families. The Hugers and Trapiers and others came over in the same ship. He did not leave France empty-handed, for on his arrival in Carolina he bought a plantation on Goose Creek, near Charleston, where he was buried.

While a belle in this city her admirers were legion, until a young Georgian, in the person of my father, stepped in, and secured the prize and took her off to Savannah. He was fresh from Princeton College, cut short in his college career by a large fire in Savannah (his native city), which burnt it down, destroying my grandfather’s city property. The old gentleman, when the fire occurred, refused to leave his residence (now the Pulaski Hotel), and was taken forcibly from the burning building in his chair. He then owned the valuable business portion of the city, and at once went to work to rebuild. His relatives would not assist him, and so he sent for his only son, then at college, and got him to indorse all his notes, and in this way secured from the banks the money he wanted for building purposes. He undertook too much, and my father bore for one-third of his life a burden of debt then incurred. Nothing daunted, he went to work at the bar and commenced life with his beautiful, young Northern wife.

At that time, there was a great prejudice against Northern people. My father’s mother never forgave my mother for being a Northern woman, and when she died, though she knew her son was weighed down with his father’s debts, insisted on his freeing all the negroes she owned and left him by will, enjoining him to do this as her last dying request. It is needless to say that he did it, and not only this, but became the guardian of those people and helped and cared for them so long as he lived. Being repeatedly Mayor of the City of Savannah, he was able to protect them, and so devoted were the whole colored population to him, that one Andrew Marshall, the clergyman of the largest colored church in the city of Savannah, offered up prayers for him on every Sunday, as is done in our Episcopal church for the President of the United States. Blest with five sons and one daughter, struggling to maintain them by his practice at the bar, this best of fathers sent his family North every summer, with one or two exceptions, to Newport, R. I., which at that time was really a Southern colony.

It was the fashion then at Newport to lease for the summer a farmer’s house on the Island, and not live in the town. Well do I remember, with my Uncle Sam Ward and Dr. Francis, of New York, and my father, building bonfires on Paradise Rocks on the Fourth of July and flying kites from Purgatory. The first relief to this hard-worked man was sending his oldest son to West Point, where, I will here add, he did the family great credit by becoming, being, and dying a noble soldier and Christian. Fighting in both armies, one may say, though I believe he was in active service only in the Mexican War, having graduated second in his class at West Point and entered the Ordnance Corps; so in place of fighting, he was making arms, casting cannon, etc. His pride lay in the fact that he was a soldier. His last request was that the Secretary of War should grant permission for his remains to be buried at West Point, which request was granted. My second brother, Hall, grew up with the poet Milton always under his arm. He was a great student. At the little village of Springfield, Georgia, where my family had a country house, and where we occasionally passed the summer in the piney woods, I remember as a boy of fifteen years of age, reading the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July from the pulpit of the village church to the descendants of the old Salzburghers, who came over soon after Oglethorpe, and it was before an audience of these piney woods farmers, that, with this brother, at a meeting of our Debating Society in this village, I discussed the question, “Which is the stronger passion, Love or Ambition,” he advocating Ambition, I Love. I well remember going for him, as follows: “If his motto be that of Hercules the Invincible, I assume for mine that of his opponent, Venus the Victorious. With my sling and stone I will enter this unequal combat and thus hope to slay the great Goliath.” The twelve good and true men who heard the discussion decided in my favor. To the end of his days this brother of mine was guided and governed by this self-same ambition; it made him what he became, a great lawyer, the lawyer of the Pacific coast; his boast to me being that he had saved seventeen lives, never having lost a murder case. I let ambition go, and through life and to the present moment swear by my goddess Venus. This brother, after entering the Georgia bar, started for a trip around the world. On reaching San Francisco he heard of the discovery of gold, and Commodore Jones, then in command of our Pacific Squadron, urged him to prosecute some sailors who had thrown an officer overboard and deserted, and it was this which caused him to settle down there to the practice of law.

LAW AND HOUSEKEEPING.