there one hundred years ago.
II
LAFAYETTE—REVOLUTIONARY TALES—PARENTS’ MARRIAGE
My father’s wooing, carried on, now at Dr. Rice’s house in town, now at Olney, progressed propitiously. During the engagement, Lafayette visited Richmond. My father was a member of the once-famous volunteer company, the Richmond Blues, and marched with it when it was detailed as a body-guard for the illustrious guest of the nation. My mother walked at the head of her class of Sunday-school children in the procession of women and girls mustered here to do him honor, as was done in Trenton and other towns. She kept among her treasured relics the blue-satin badge, with Lafayette’s likeness stamped on it in silver, which she wore upon her left shoulder. The Blues were arrayed in Continental uniform, with powdered hair. So completely was my father metamorphosed by the costume that, when, at the close of the parade, he presented himself in Dr. Rice’s drawing-room to pay his devoirs to his fiancée, she did not recognize him until he spoke.
I have heard the particulars of that day’s pageant and of Lafayette’s behavior at the public reception awarded him by a grateful people, so often that I seem to have been part of the scene in a former incarnation. So vivid were my reminiscences that, when a bride and a guest at Redhill, the former home of Patrick Henry, I exchanged incidents and sayings with the great orator’s son, Mr. John Henry, who had been on the Committee of Reception in 1824. In the enthusiasm of his own recollections of the fête he inquired, naïvely:
“Do you, then, remember Lafayette’s visit to America so well?”
The general burst of merriment that went around the table, and Wirt Henry’s respectful, half-distressed—“Why, father! she wasn’t born!” brought both of us back to the actual and present time and place.
A large platform erected upon the Capitol Square was filled with distinguished guests and officials. From this Lafayette reviewed the regiments of soldiers, and here he stood when the schools of the city sent up as their representative a pretty little girl, eight or ten years of age, to “speak a piece” written for the occasion by a local bard. The midget went through the task bravely, but with filling eyes and trembling limbs. Her store of factitious courage exhaled with the last line reeled off from the red lips, and, with a scared, piteous look into the benign face brought upon a level with hers by the table upon which she had been set, like an animated puppet, she cast herself upon the great man’s decorated breast and wept sore. He kissed and cuddled and soothed her as he might pet his own grandchild, and not until she could return his smile, and he had dried her tears upon his laced handkerchief, did he transfer her to other arms.
Major James Morton, of “Willington,” Prince Edward County, who married my grandmother’s sister Mary, of Montrose, had served under Lafayette and came down to Richmond to do honor to his former chief. The Major’s sobriquet in the army was “Solid Column,” in reference to his “stocky” build. Although he had been on Washington’s staff, he did not expect to be recognized, after the lapse of thirty years and more, by the renowned Frenchman, who had passed since their parting through a bloodier revolution than that which won freedom for America.
General Lafayette was standing at the head of the ball-room (which was, I think, in the Eagle Hotel), where he received the crowds of citizens and military flocking to pay their respects, when he espied his whilom comrade on the outskirts of the throng. Instantly stepping outside of the cordon of aids and attendants, the Marquis held out both hands with:
“Vy, old Soleed Coluume! I am ’appy to see you!”
A marvellous memory and a more marvellous facile tongue and quick wit had the distinguished leader of freedom-lovers! There lived in Richmond, until the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, a stately gentlewoman of the very old school whom we, of two younger generations, regarded with prideful veneration, and with reason. For Lafayette, who had seen her dance at the aforesaid ball, had pronounced her, audibly, “the handsomest woman he had seen in America.” Time had handled her disrespectfully by the time I heard the tale. But I never questioned the truth of it until I found in three other cities as many antique belles upon whom he had set a seal of the self-same pattern.
We were generously fed with authentic stories of Revolutionary days in my far-off childhood. I have sat at Major Morton’s feet and learned of the veteran much that nobody else wots of in our rushing times. I recall his emphatic denial of the assertion made by a Fourth-of-July orator to the effect that so grievous was the weight of public cares upon the Commander-in-Chief, he was never seen to smile during those eventful eight years of struggle and suspense.
“Not a word of truth in it, sir!” Thus old Solid Column to the man who reported the speech to him. “I was with him at Valley Forge, sir, and nobody there tried harder to keep up the spirits of the men. I recollect, particularly, one bitter cold day, when a dozen or so of the officers were amusing themselves and trying to get warm by jumping up and down, leaping high up in the air and trying to clap their heels together twice before they struck the ground in coming down. General Greene was sure he could do it, but he was fleshy and never light on his feet, besides being naturally sober. He was a Quaker, you know, and was turned out of meeting for joining the army. Well, on this particular day he took his turn with the others in jumping. And a poor hand he was at it! He couldn’t clap his heels together once on the way down, let alone twice. By-and-by he made a tremendous effort and pitched over, head down and heels up—flat on the snow. General Washington was watching them from where he stood in his tent door, and when General Greene went down—how the General laughed! He fairly held his sides!
“ ‘Ah, Greene!’ he called out. ‘You were always a lubberly fellow!’
“I am not saying he wasn’t one of the gravest men I ever saw, as a rule, but he often smiled, and he did laugh sometimes.”
My grandfather’s uncle and godfather, Sterling Smith, was one of our family Revolutionary heroes. My mother, who had a fair talent for mimicry, had an anecdote of the old war-horse’s defence of Washington against the oft-repeated charge of profanity upon the field of Monmouth:
“ ‘He did not swear!’ the veteran would thunder when irreverent youngsters retailed the slander in his hearing—and with malice prepense. ‘I was close behind him—and I can tell you, sir, we rode fast—when what should we meet, running away, licketty-split, from the field of battle, with the British almost on their heels, but Gen’ral Lee and his men?
“ ‘Then, with that, says Gen’ral Washington, speaking out loud and sharp—says he, “Gen’ral Lee! in God’s name, sir, what is the meaning of this ill-timed prudence?”
“ ‘Now, you see, Gen’ral Lee, he was mighty high-sperrited always, and all of us could hear what was going on. So he speaks up as haughty as the Gen’ral had done, and says he:
“ ‘ “I know of no one who has more of that most damnable virtue than your Excellency!”
“ ‘So, you see, young man, it was Gen’ral Lee that swore, and not Gen’ral Washington! Don’t you ever let me hear that lie again!’ ”
A Revolutionary reminiscence of my mother’s (or mine) is always renewed by the sight of an Old Virginia plantation-gate, swinging gratingly on ponderous hinges and kept shut by the fall of a wooden latch, two yards long, into a wooden hook set in the gate-post. This latch is usually nearly half-way down the gate, and a horseman approaching it from the outside must dismount to lift the heavy bar, or be
