Liberty

William M. Evarts tenure as Secretary of State came to an end when Rutherford B Hayes left office in 1880. President Garfield appointed Evarts as delegate to the International Monetary Conference getting underway in Paris. One of the volatile issues of the 1880s was whether currency should be backed by gold and silver, or by gold alone. Politicians from the west and the south joined in the call for the coinage of silver, while the bankers and industrialists of the northeast held firm for the gold standard. Then, as now, fair currency valuations and the availability of credit were essential to trade and the international conference was set to explore the feasibility of establishing fixed ratios at which gold and silver might be exchanged for currency.

As secretary, Evarts took along another bright young man, his daughter Elizabeth’s fiancé, Edward C. Perkins. Although young Ned came from an old Boston family and had graduated from the Harvard Law School, he had been born and raised in a villa in Florence and was just as much at ease in Europe with the diplomats of Germany, France, England, Italy and Spain as he was in Cambridge or New York.

While in Paris, Evarts and his young protégé must have met with Edouard de Laboulaye and Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and examined Bartholdi’s massive sculpture “The Goddess of Liberty” which was being constructed at the workshop of Gaget, Gauthier & Company. Evarts was leading the American arm of the Franco-American Union which was sponsoring the proposed French gift to the United States, and chaired the committee which was raising American funds for the statue’s pedestal and eventual erection on Bedloe’s Island.

When they returned from Europe young Perkins summered as usual at his Grandmother Bruen’s villa in Newport, and then clerked in the fall in a law office at Newport and over the winter at the office of Gray and Davenport in Manhattan. That spring he was admitted to the New York bar. He was a very personable young man; despite his dapper looks and continental upbringing he carried into his relations with his clients and brother lawyers a certain element which they considered “New England”. Evarts found him most charming and welcomed him warmly into his home in New York and Vermont.

Elizabeth Hoar Evarts married Edward Clifford Perkins in Windsor on August 2nd, 1882. They were both twenty-four years old. Betty was dignified and gracious and brought common sense to the marriage to compliment her groom’s aesthetic flair. She was said to always walk at the same pace, not so slowly as to seem to have no purpose, but not so fast as to be unladylike. The young couple however, made no delays in enjoying their marriage. My Grandfather, Edward Newton Perkins, was born nine months and two days after the wedding, on May 4th, 1883 in New York City. Max was born fifteen months later.

In New York the Franco-American Committee sold statuettes, photographs and pamphlets, and held benefit theatrical events, art exhibitions, auctions and prize fights to raise funds for the Liberty statue, but the New York Board of Education refused to allow school children to perform concerts in support, an appropriation in Congress failed and Grover Cleveland, then Governor of New York, vetoed a bill by the New York legislature to contribute $50,000.

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The idea of building a colossal statue of “Liberty Enlightening the World” in New York Harbor seemed a harebrained scheme. There was an avalanche of criticism – architects declared the statue would blow over in the first storm. Some rich patrons were slow to accept the artistic merits of the statue, the New York public was apathetic and raising money outside of New York City was difficult. Eventually, Evarts enlisted Joseph Pulitzer of the World who successfully recruited school children to raise pennies for the project, and financing for the pedestal was completed by the summer of 1885.

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In November, at the age of sixty-seven, William M. Evarts was finally elected to the United States Senate. He moved back to Washington while his daughter Betty’s young family stayed in the old house at the corner of Second Avenue and Fourteenth Streets in New York. He had to find a new house to rent in the capital – He sought out Henry Adams to see if his house was available, as he knew that the Adams and the Hays were building adjoining houses on Lafayette Park, but despite H.H. Richardson’s assurances, Adams didn’t think he would be in the new house by winter. Evarts wound up taking a house on the corner of Eighteenth and I Streets, and then moved to K Street in 1887.

Evarts thought that there were already too many laws on the books and regarded the Congress more as a debating society than a law-making body. He was the thinnest man in the Senate, weighing only a hundred and twenty-five pounds. His trousers were baggy at the knees, his coat hung loose, and his top hat seemed always crammed down to his ears. A Vermonter, seeing him for the first time declared “why he looks as though he boarded.” He may well have considered it - the Senatorship was a costly luxury – The five thousand dollar salary didn’t even cover the rent on his house and stable.

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“For Henry Adams the past, history, was a means by which he attempted to unravel the riddles of man and the personal New England riddle of himself. For Henry James the past was part of man’s imagination; he saw it as a vast accumulation of creative awareness applicable to a palpable present. Adams was trussed up in the rigidities of ancestry and upbringing and was always struggling to be free. For James, life was an act of joyful and imaginative curiosity; for Adams it was a gloomy questioning of personal experience that he could not reconcile to the eternal flux of history. At the end the novelist was to speak of Adams’s “rich and ingenious mind,” his “great resources of contemplation, speculation, resignation.” “Henry is very sensible, though a trifle dry,” was James’s comment on the historian during this period. He added: “Clover has a touch of genius.” Leon Edel – Henry James, A Life

Evarts didn’t think much of Grover Cleveland and rarely visited the White House, but he was a frequent guest at the Little White House on Lafayette Square. Evarts loved Clover Adams’s keen intellect and her feminine scorn for the commonplace. He knew that she was distraught over the recent death of her father, and he was glad to oblige when she asked him to sit for her camera. Evarts’s eyes appear a bit rheumy in the starkly monochrome print, but he holds a steady piercing gaze, and stares out past the present day.

On December 6, 1885, Henry Adams found Clover lying on the rug before her bedroom fire. The room smelled of bitter almonds, an odor he recognized as the potassium cyanide Clover used in the darkroom, fixing the images she took from life. The newspaper the next evening reported that she had suddenly dropped dead from paralysis of the heart. Henry could rarely bring himself to write or speak of Clover again; the Five of Hearts would be no more.

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William M. Evarts’s twelve children were mostly gone from the nest, starting their own families and careers. He was starting to have problems with his eyes, and was terribly concerned about his son Charlie, the farm manager, who had just suffered a paralyzing stroke. Even so, summer in Windsor provided a welcome respite from Washington and New York; by August the corn was shoulder high and the hay was being cut for the second time.

The young Perkins family came to spend a few weeks’ vacation. Edward, the older boy was four, and Max was about to turn three; Betty was seven months pregnant and her husband attentive to her needs as the grandsons toddled about by the pond. William M. and Helen Evarts were doting grandparents, and spent a few serene and happy days with the growing young family. They had plenty of room and invited their son-in law’s family to come visit. Charles and Fanny Perkins, the noted art critic and his wife, took the train up from Newport for a visit. They shared news of their families – the Perkins’s younger son Charlie had studied architecture with H.H. Richardson for a year and was now in Paris at The Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and beautiful Eleanor was being courted by a British naval officer. The Evarts’s sons Allen and Sherman were starting to practice law in New York, their daughter Hettie and her husband Charlie Beaman had bought the old “Blow-Me-Down” farm across the river in Cornish and were renting the old stage-coach inn “Blow-Me-Up” to the young sculptor Gus Saint-Gaudens.

On the afternoon of August 25 Wm. M. Evarts suggested that C.C. Perkins might accompany him on a carriage drive, along with an attractive young neighbor Jeannie Matthews. Charles was delighted at the opportunity and they set out to tour the valley; Perkins was full of enthusiasm at the beauty of the country, and looked forward to sketching the views of the river and Mt. Ascutney.

Suddenly when they were crossing a dyke-embankment the coachman reined in the horses, one of the bits broke, a bridle came off, and the horses ran out of control. The last thing Miss Matthews remembered was the smile Perkins gave her, as if to save her from alarm. Then the crash came; they were all thrown from the carriage - Miss Matthews was badly bruised, Evarts suffered a sprained ankle and a severe laceration on the scalp, and Charles Callahan Perkins was instantly killed.

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On October 28, 1886, the Statue of Liberty was set to be unveiled. Senator Evarts made an moving keynote speech, and at the end of a particularly eloquent passage he paused for effect and received a hearty round of applause. Bartholdi had gone up into the statue and held the rope with which he was to pull away the rain-darkened French flag which enshrouded Liberty's head, and unveil his masterpiece. A young boy gave him the "high sign"; the applause, he thought, marked the end of Evarts' oration; he pulled the rope.

The hundreds of steam craft in the harbour, discovering the giant face of Liberty, unanimously saluted her with their horns and whistles. The Senator was about to continue when the U.S.S. Tennessee, flagship of the squadron, fired a broadside. The band struck up "My Country, 'tis of Thee."

Senator Evarts went on to inaudibly finish his address in the din of the crowd, and President Cleveland - who possessed a keen sense of humor – appeared to give the speech which no one could hear his most grave and concentrated attention.