Summer Love

Hettie Evarts was twenty that summer of 1872 in Geneva; Charlie Beaman was thirty-two. It was a time of important international negotiations and also, for the younger set, a summer of social intrigue. Hettie's sister Helen was there, as was Mary Adams and her brother Brooks who was secretary for his father Charles Francis Adams. Henry showed up in August with his new bride Clover Hooper, who he had first met when he was in London with his father and Wm M. Evarts during the war. After visiting Paris and calling on the government at Versailles, the delegation settled in Geneva. The Davises took quarters at the Beau Rivage, a well appointed hotel whose verandas provided a splendid view of the lake. The Evarts took a villa nearby and made it their home. The Adams took a place in the country.

William M. Evarts, one of the senior counsels for the tribunal, cultivated young friends and he was very fond of Beaman who shared his energy, common sense, intellectual ability, cheeriness, and dry wit. Charlie was evidently growing very fond of Hettie as well, and William M. encouraged the union. They made a fine young couple – Hettie inherited her father’s distinctive profile and his wit; Charlie sported a mustache, but had not yet grown portly. They were both smart and assertive, full of good taste, and had the wherewithal to use it.

Charlie had graduated from law school at Harvard in 1865. He was admitted to the bar that November and secured a position as secretary to Senator Charles Sumner and clerk of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. After privately publishing The National and Private Alabama Claims in 1871 he lobbied for a post as junior counsel on the Alabama Commission. Sumner had him appointed Examiner of Claims for the Department of State in November of 1871; in January 1872 he became solicitor for the US before the Arbitration Tribunal in Geneva.

In September the Tribunal found that Britain was liable for the damages caused by the Alabama, and awarded $15.5 million to the United States. While less than the $2 billion (and all of Canada) Sumner had originally sought, it was an advantageous settlement and helped launch Beaman’s career.

Returning to New York in 1873, Charlie went into partnership with Edward Dickerson who represented Thomas Edison, the New York Telephone Company and Western Union as patent attorney. While he had one of the five telephones in New York in his office, the Senate had none, so he wrote to Sumner telling him of his engagement to Hettie.

Charlie and Hettie were married in Windsor the summer of 1874. Fifty guests stayed at the Evarts compound for two days and two nights and Hettie looked magnificent in white silk and orange buds. After the wedding everyone returned to Runnemede to continue the party and Charlie sat down at the piano and belted out “I wish I was Single Again”. The next morning, Evarts was heard warbling away, making a horrible noise in the parlor, and his daughters rushed in aghast, “Father, we didn’t know you could sing!”

“Well, I never knew it myself until I heard Beaman.”

~

By the time of the marriage, Evarts had developed one of the finest farms in the country at Windsor. The main house, Runnemede, was raised up from the street on a knoll, rambling, unpretentious, yet full of comfort. When guests came, which they did with frequency, they were lodged next door at “Giants”, with its billiard room, and the separate office which eventually came to be called the “State Department”. Behind the house stood a greenhouse, a flower garden, and walks hedged with symmetrically trimmed pointed hemlocks. Beyond the garden was Paradise Pond, and fields of hay and corn and stables and barns, and tall stands of pine trees.

Charlie Evarts, who had been badly hurt during the war, thrown from his horse while serving in the Shenandoah, managed the farm for his father. Charlie raised swine and five hundred sheep and the farm won nearly all the blue ribbons at the Claremont fair in 1875. “The crops are magnificent and the cattle superb. I have had numbers of people remark that they never saw such a splendid crib of corn . . . I wish you might see the produce we are now harvesting.”

Altogether Evarts owned about six hundred acres on both sides of the Connecticut River, with over two hundred in cultivation. Evarts made the farm pay by “crediting the farm with everything taken off of it and charging nothing put on.” He offered his guests both milk and champagne, “Take your choice; they’re both refreshing, and they cost me the same.”

He took particular pleasure in sending produce of the farm to his friends. Writing George Bancroft, “I hope you will find as much useful aliment for the body and mind in this product as in former years from the same pen. If you continue to give it preference, for a scholar’s breakfast, over the grass-fed pork or mutton, it will give a new meaning to the high-sounding pretension on, “The pen is mightier than the sword.”



William M. Evarts served as Chief Counsel for the Republican Party during the disputed presidential election of 1876 between Hayes and Tilden. It all came down to some disputed ballots in Florida; after Hayes took the office in the great compromise of 1877 and reconstruction effectively came to an end, Evarts took office as Secretary of State.

He had the rare faculty of saying at the dinner table the best things that were said there - invariably something that was quoted everywhere for days and even years afterward - and giving the impression while saying it that he had better things in reserve if he really cared to produce them. - John Hay

A cabinet position was a great honor, but it only paid ten thousand dollars per year, and the house that he rented on K Street cost him five thousand. There were social compensations however; John Hay served as his assistant Secretary of State, and Henry Adams found the State Department under Evarts to be "magnificently hospitable."

Lucy Hayes, the new first lady tried to bring social affairs to a more urbane level than had been the case during the Grant administration, but she didn’t permit dancing, exiled the billiard table to the White House attic, and frowned on liquor. When the Secretary of State arranged a grand state dinner for the visiting Russian grand dukes, the president and his wife left their wine untouched; and after another formal White House dinner Evarts drolly reported "It was a brilliant affair; water flowed like champagne!"

Charlie and Hettie bought a house on North Main Street in Windsor just above Runnemede in 1877. This extra space came in handily when the family needed all the space it could find when President Hayes visited Windsor after dedicating the Bennington Monument.