Stir up the Animals!

Betty took her boys on the train to Washington to visit their grandparents when Edward was about seven and Max was five. They made themselves comfortable in the parlor in the big house on K Street as the grown-ups socialized and the boys found their own special nooks where they could play their own special games. When the doorbell rang, the boys ran and hid under the table - A tall thin man came in with their Aunt Mary – The boys lay low, but couldn’t keep from giggling. They giggled some more, and Aunt Mary said, “Oh, those are Betty’s boys. Come out boys, this is General Sherman” The boys giggled some more, but didn’t move.

Then General Sherman, in a very deep voice, took command: “You boys come right out now or I’ll get some of my big guns and blow you out!”

The quickly terrified boys scampered out from under the table and nervously shook hands with the tall thin man with the white pin-feathery beard who marched through Georgia, and said “War is Hell!”

~

The summer of 1891 the Perkins family spent most of August in Windsor as usual. By then William M. Evarts had bought up five houses in a row on Main Street just north of the center of town, with open country, and a lake, and Paradise behind them. Evarts had given Betty one of the houses, and in this extended compound the Evarts cousins gathered en masse each summer.

Benjamin Harrison was President and he travelled through Vermont that August, stopping at Bennington on Battle Day, August 19th, to dedicate the new Bennington Monument, and then travelling on through Saratoga Springs, Castleton, Fairhaven, Middlebury, Burlington, St. Albans and St. Johnsbury, before arriving in Windsor on August 27th.

Senator Evarts and Charlie Beaman, along with the town dignitaries, met the President at the depot and escorted him to Runnemede Lodge for luncheon.

It is pleasant to be here today at the home of my esteemed friend and your fellow-townsman, the Hon. William M. Evarts. [Applause] I am glad that he has introduced into Vermont model farming [Laughter and applause], and has shown you what the income of a large city law practice can do in the fertilization of a farm. [Laughter and applause] He has assured me to-day that his farm yields a net income. I accept the statement of my host with absolute faith—and yet Mr. Evart's reputation as a bookkeeper is not the best in the world. [Laughter and applause] It is pleasant to see him and to be for a while in his genial presence, and to have this journey illuminated by a visit to his home. I hope he may dwell long with you in peace and honor, as he will always dwell in the honor and esteem of our whole people. [Applause]


Edward and Max lived in the world of boys and were not much interested in seeing the President, but when they went up to their grandfather’s house and saw the long lines of carriages drive in, with many stately men in black frock coats and silk hats, they realized something was going on. Billy Evarts, who was then about three and whose father was a clergyman said, “It looks like a funeral.”

Edward and Max were soon at the tables where the caterer’s men were working, and making the most of the opportunity. But eventually Aunt Mary, who had a different idea of their opportunities, and wanted to make the most of them, ran them down and herded them through a forest of legs and skirts, for a long distance, until the boys came into a little clearing where the President stood. He was a short man with a remarkably round chest, like a barrel, and a white beard, which rested upon it. He was surrounded by all sorts of great Republicans.

Aunt Mary said, “Mr. President, may I present my sister Betty’s children?” And the President laughed and shook their hands, and said in a remarkably deep, booming voice, “Well, I suppose you boys are good Republicans too.” There was silence all around the President, of course, when he was speaking, and there the boys stood. There was a long silence.

Their father was one of the original mugwumps who had jumped ship from the Republicans and supported Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884 rather than James G. Blaine (The Continental Liar From the State of Maine). Benjamin Harrison, a Republican, had ousted Cleveland from the presidency in 1888.

Then Edward spoke up loudly and defiantly: “No, we are not. We are Democrats!” There was a great burst of laughter, to which the President himself contributed.

Years later, Max thought it was a truly brave "magnificent thing" his brother had done and suggested as much to his mother. "Yes", she replied, "but it would have been different if you had been the one to do it. Edward always did like to stir up the animals."

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~

“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.

~

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.

~

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.

Full House

Generous by nature, prodigal in hospitality, fond of young people, and a born man of the world, Evarts gave and took liberally without scruple, accepted the world without fearing or abusing it. He laughed where he could; he joked if a joke were possible; he was true to his friends and never lost his temper. - Henry Adams

In August of 1877 President Hayes toured Vermont and New Hampshire hoping to draw public interest away from economic collapse and the great railroad strike that had pitted militia against workers in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Chicago. Twelve years after the end of the Civil War, the country was divided both economically and by the politics of Reconstruction; Hayes hoped the tour to mark the centennial of the events of the Revolution would also help salvage America’s fragile sense of unity. A large crowd greeted the President and his Secretary of State when they arrived in Bennington to celebrate the centennial of the Battle of Bennington. Hayes was brief in his remarks: 100 years ago it was meritorious to be a minute-man, to fight in the cause of independence. Is there not some merit in my becoming a minute-man? When Wm. M Evarts took the podium, he followed the president’s lead: I should warn you that although I am very slow to begin a speech, I am much slower to end it, and I know your only safety is in my retiring before I commence. Evarts did, however, speak at length at dinner, recalling that he was only a few miles from Sunderland, birthplace of his father. The Presidential party spent the night at the Walloomsac Inn and the next day travelled on to Windsor to commemorate the founding of the Republic of Vermont. Arriving in Windsor, the president introduced his Secretary of State, “the gentleman who conducts the correspondence with foreign governments, and who writes the high sounding words in the documents to which I have to put my signature. If you ever see my name under such documents you must bear in mind that they were written by your neighbor.” The President and his party spent the weekend as Evarts’s guests at Runnemede. Saturday was a grand day - speeches were made from the piazza, the band played, three cheers were given, and thousands came to shake hands with the President. On Sunday Evarts and Hayes attended church and then toured the abundant countryside, admiring the views of the Connecticut Valley and Mt. Ascutney from the family barouche.

Rutherford B. Hayes never really seemed comfortable as President. He did his best to heal the festering sores left over from the war, but he effectively ended Reconstruction and allowed Jim Crow’s return to the south. A stigma from the contested election hung over his four years in office despite his attempts to divert attention. William M. Evarts, however, seemed right at home as Secretary of State. He was back in Washington, living in a nice big house at 15th and K Street – two blocks from Lafayette Square. He had the most markedly intellectual face; wearing an old fashioned stock and a high velvet collar, his hair fell carelessly over his hawk-like nose, and his eyes glittered grey. Helen Evarts was still handsome and young looking despite being the mother of twelve, including two sets of twins (all pretty and some of them more than pretty and all well behaved according to Chief Justice Chase). By 1877, their own children were leaving the nest, and while Washington was the capital of a democracy and full of “over-dressed, loud-mouthed, vulgar people”, the Evarts assembled a coterie of bright young friends in the aristocratic enclave near Lafayette Square. As John Hay wrote Mark Twain, "a man reaches the zenith at forty, the top of the hill. From that time forward he begins to descend. If you have any great undertaking ahead, begin it now. You will never be so capable again." Henry and Clover Adams, John and Clara Hay, and Clarence King were a generation younger than the Evarts; in common with the Secretary of State they were all small in stature (they averaged five foot three in height) but outsized in personality. They called themselves The Five of Hearts, and they were at the top of the hill. Henry Adams had moved back to Washington in 1877 to research his biography of Albert Gallatin; thanks to Evarts, he had access to the records of the State Department. Evarts, who had enjoyed Adams so much in London, had shared his house with him when he was Attorney General while the family summered in Windsor, and Evarts had showed Adams the town, as well as his wit- “as for disgust with myself, I feel it every time I steal an idea from Evarts, who produces them naturally”. Henry had married Clover Hooper in 1872 despite his brother Charles’s warning against marrying a Hooper - “Heavens! - no – they’re all crazy as coots” - He was madly in love - “always in Clover”. Clover was from good stock, a Sturgis from Boston, and while Henry James thought Henry Adams “very sensible, though a trifle dry,” he found that “Clover has a touch of genius.” While no beauty, with a prominent nose and jutting chin, and prone to bouts of depression, she had a quick wit and an assured presence which provided a sharp compliment to the often enigmatic Adams.

She is certainly not handsome; nor would she be quite called plain, I think. She is twenty-eight years old. She knows her own mind uncommon well. She does not talk very American. Her manners are quiet. She reads German also Latin also, I fear, a little Greek, but very little. She talks garrulously, but on the whole pretty sensibly. She is very open to instruction. We shall improve her. She dresses badly. She decidedly has humor and will appreciate our wit. She has enough money to be quite independent. She rules me as only American women rule men, and I cower before her.

Henry and Clover Adams rented a large house on Lafayette Square. The Adams rode through Rock Creek Park in the morning, breakfasted at noon, Henry wrote in the afternoon, and then they poured tea at five. Childless, they fawned over their Skye terriers Boojum and Pollywog. The house was stuffed full of potted palms and Japanese vases, drawings by Rembrandt and Michelangelo, Kashmir carpets and oils by Turner and Constable. Their home soon became known as the “Little White House” and drew more admirers than the larger (and much dryer) White House across the square. Henry, the grandson and great-grandson of Presidents, seemed to have no political ambitions of his own, but was relentlessly drawn to the Capitol for the human capital it provided. He had considerable wealth, excellent taste, and a discriminating mind. Above all else he valued his friends, and he found his old mentor Evarts “very cordial and civil, and the State Department magnificently hospitable”. At a time when women could watch but not participate in politics, Clover became an accomplished voyeur. She and Henry learned the new art of photography on their honeymoon trip up the Nile, and Clover became a very accomplished photographer – her portraits of Oliver Wendell Holmes, George Bancroft and John Hay and the Adams family and the Adams dogs (Possum, Marquis, and Boojum at tea in the garden) capture a world of parlors, picnics and teas, afternoons playing banjo on the porch, and catboat sails in the bay, and great men considering their legacies to the world. The State Department became even more hospitable in the fall of 1879, when Evarts called John Hay back from Cleveland to become his Assistant Secretary of State. Hay resisted the call at first, but agreed to serve when he learned that Henry Adams was in town. Hay had been a young assistant to Lincoln during the war, had edited the New York Tribune, written some best-selling doggerel (Jim Bludso of the Prairie Belle), and married very, very well to Clara Stone, the daughter of a railroad baron. The youngest of the Hearts, Clara was at the same time their mother figure. She was a pious and robust young woman, with deep brown eyes and thick dark hair. She loved reading books aloud to her husband and her four children, and glared at Mark Twain when he came to call on the Sabbath. She was the quiet foil to the wits of the other four hearts, pouring tea and being amused by their brilliance. Clarence King was campaigning for the creation of the U.S. Geological Survey. King had been a fixture at dinners at the Union League and Century Clubs in New York, and had made a name for himself by exploring the west along the fortieth parallel with his friend James Gardiner (son-in-law of Bishop Doane). Unlike Hay and Adams, who both inherited and married well, King needed to get rich and he needed female companionship. He was, according to Hay “the best and brightest man of his generation, with talents immeasurably beyond any of his contemporaries . . . with everything in his favor but blind luck".

"Hang it," said Bonnycastle, "Let us be vulgar and have some fun - let us invite the President" -Henry James, Pandora

Evarts’s protégés were bound together by their common arrival at the seat of power at the apex of their lives. They played their private games – amusing themselves with Five of Hearts tea sets and stationery, snubbing the President, and continuously accusing each other of authoring Democracy, the roman-a-clef about a New York socialite who "for reasons that many people thought ridiculous . . . decided to pass the winter in Washington."

"What she wished to see," the anonymous author wrote, "was the clash of interests, the interests of 40 millions of people and a whole continent, centering at Washington; guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the tremendous forces of government and the machinery of society at work. What she wanted, was POWER."