Yasnaya Polyana, New Jersey

I think of the Perkins as a raft of Boston culture, - one of those rafts that were to be found in many another American town, serenely riding the wild waters of the world around them . . . Now the Perkins were not only New Englanders, they were even doubly so, for they united the two great lines of Boston and New Haven, - Harvard and Yale, - the twin immemorial schools of the mind of New England. Max, descended on one side from the old East India magnates, - some of whom had been Loyalists in the Revolution in Boston,- was, on the other, through his grandfather Evarts, the Senator and Secretary of State, descended from John Davenport and Roger Sherman. I mention this merely because I have known few other Americans in whom so much history was palpably and visibly embodied, so that one saw it working in him, sometimes not too happily, for his mind was always in a state of civil war.

- Van Wyck Brooks

In his “hyperaesthetic youth”, Van Wyck Brooks was mortified to have been born in the dully named town of Plainfield, New Jersey. As he grew older however, he was greatly relieved to find out that Tolstoy’s place Yasnaya Polyana, where he wrote War and Peace, meant the same thing in Russian, and he eventually discovered that Plainfield in the 1880’s, had more mystery, intrigue, and personality than most simple unadorned American towns. By the time the new train station was built in 1885, Plainfield was growing into one of the affluent suburbs made possible by the railroad link to New York. With its relatively pure air, the local paper touted Plainfield as the “Colorado of the East” and a haven for sufferers of respiratory illnesses, even though it boasted no exalted Rocky Mountains. The “Town of a Hundred Millionaires” filled up with capitalists and robber barons, as well as some literary folk such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian, Julia Ward Howe’s daughter Florence, and Bret Harte’s abandoned wife and daughter. Edward and Betty Perkins moved out from Manhattan to Plainfield after the first three boys, Ned, Max, and Carley, were born. They bought a nice comfortable house on Central Avenue, and Edward, who never wore an overcoat, bought the first high wheel bicycle in town and rode it to the train station each morning to commute to his law practice at Gray & Davenport in the city. Three more children followed, Molly (1890) and Fanny (1892), and finally Louis (1896), and Edward and Betty quickly became close friends with other young parents in town, including Rowland and Fanny Cox and Charles and Sallie Brooks. The Perkins threw themselves into their new community. They were active in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, and helped found the “Shakespeare Club of Plainfield” where they read Shakespeare aloud with their neighbors (the first reading selection came from King Lear). They made sure not to miss a week, because the club had the habit of electing as president a member who was absent from the meeting. Betty and Sallie Brooks and Fanny Cox joined The Monday Afternoon Club which provided a literary outlet for women (Betty explicated Matthew Arnold's Dramatic Poetry, while Sallie addressed the club on Roman, Byzantine, Arabian, Turkish, and Moorish Ornament). Edward, whose father had been on the School Board in Boston, ran for School Trustee as a Democrat, and on Sunday nights at home, he read aloud to his children from Ivanhoe, The Rose and the Ring, and the Three Musketeers. “I have watched my own career since 1885 with friendly interest, but I hardly think a particular account of it is anxiously desired by my friends and classmates, though I hope many of them will be glad to know that I have been fairly prosperous and successful." When Mr. Gray was appointed to the Court of Appeals, the firm became Davenport, Smith & Perkins, then Smith & Perkins, and then Perkins & Jackson. Edward worked hard, and his practice was successful. One of his important cases was Goetze vs. United States in which it was decided by the Supreme Court that Puerto Rico ceased, after the treaty with Spain, to be a "foreign country" within the meaning of the tariff laws. His personal style reflected his New England training and ancestry and made him a valuable member of the grievance committee of the New York Bar Association. They often travelled into Manhattan to visit Betty’s parents and their city friends. Society in New York had moved uptown and the slums had moved in around the old downtown neighborhood, but the Evarts still lived in the old house at 231 2nd Avenue. Plainfield society came into the city when Uncle Charles Bruen Perkins finally, in 1896, got married to Elizabeth Ward, a tall and sweet looking brunette. Monsignor Doane conducted the ceremony, and the New York Times took note: "a fashionable wedding in an old-fashioned New York house early in September is so decidedly a novelty". Grandfather Evarts, the Senator, was getting old and blind. In 1889 he had sailed to Europe on “La Champagne” with his son Allen and his daughter Mary to consult the best oculists in Europe. By the mid nineties, he began to find it hard to travel. The grandchildren, however, were full of life. Ned and Max Perkins made life-long friends with Ames and Van Wyck Brooks. Ned and Max were sent off to St. Paul’s when they turned thirteen. Ned entered the School in 1896, where he was an Isthmian who played on the second eleven, an assistant editor of the Horae Scholasticae Magazine and a member of the Concordian Literary Society, the Missionary Society, and the Library Association. Max, who shared his literary inclinations, followed him in 1898 and became quarterback and captain of the third Isthmian Football Team. Grandfather Evarts became increasinngly housebound in New York. Joseph Choate came to call just before embarking for England where he had been appointed Ambassador to the Court of St. James. Evarts congratulated him and prophesied a brilliant diplomatic career, but then shook his head and said, "When I think what a care I am to my people, lying so helpless here, and that I can do nothing any more to repay their kindness, or to help in the world, I feel like the boy who wrote home from school to his mother a letter of twenty pages, and then added: 'P.S. Mother, please excuse my longevity.' " The former Senator and Secretary of State, who had moved the unanimous nomination of Lincoln, defended Johnson against impeachment, and secured Hayes disputed election, turned eighty-three on February 6th, 1901. Two weeks later, he was stricken with pneumonia. On the last day of February, he died. In the summer the family travelled to Grandmother Perkins house in Newport, Bruen Villa, a virtual museum of old paintings and objets d’art which C. C. Perkins had collected in Florence. She gave Ned and Betty a superb Michelangelo sketch for the Last Supper which they hung in the Plainfield house, (although some later challenged its provenance), and recalled stories of the old days in Italy, banditti in wild passes of the mountains and travelers robbed on the road in the middle of the night – musical soirees in Rome – the Marble Faun – “Harry” and “Willie” James and the family of Charles Eliot Norton. Great Grandmother Bruen rocked in her chair and remembered for the boys the time, when she was just a child, she saw George Washington ride on his white horse in front of New York’s City Hall. She lived to the age of 99, and died in 1892, while Grandmother Frances Davenport Bruen Perkins herself lived on in the Bruen Villa for fifty years until 1909. Every summer the family took the White Mountain Express to Windsor. Senator Evarts left the Skinner house in Windsor, as well as some property across the river in Cornish, to Betty. Fifty years later Van Wyck Brooks vividly remembered visiting with his best friend Max, and recalled "the little girls in pigtails, white dimity and sashes, playing croquet on the lawn in the golden afternoon". The children ran free - swam in Runnemede Pond, canoed on the Connecticut River, climbed Mt. Ascutney, ran through the woods in Paradise with their Evarts cousins, and caught turtles at Ohl’s Pond. You could catch turtles there from the bank, for they would poke their heads up through the weeds and you would grab just behind their head and get the turtle. One day we were doing this. Uncle Edward was looking sharply for a head. He saw one and grabbed, - and brought out a long slimey snake! You know a snake’s head is almost exactly like a turtles. Ned went on to Harvard in 1901. In October of his sophomore year, troubling news came from home. Father had developed a bad cold, and then a fever, and then pneumonia. On All Hallow’s Eve a telegram arrived; Ned rushed back from Harvard and Max was hurried back from St. Paul’s. Ned was 19, Max 17, Carlie 16, Molly 12, Fanny 10, and Louis 6, and at the age of 45, on October 30th 1902, Father was dead.

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."

Progress

Windsor, Vermont, where the Republic of Vermont was declared in 1777, is sandwiched between Mt. Ascutney, which rises three thousand feet just east of the town, and the Connecticut River. By 1820, it grew to become a thriving center for trade and agriculture and the state's largest town. In 1835, a dam was built across Mill Brook to provide water power, and as factories began to make guns and machinery, as well as tinware, furniture and harness, the region became known as the Precision Valley.

On August 30, 1843, in Windsor, William M. Evarts married Helen Wardner, whom he had met the year he taught school in Vermont. Helen was an attractive woman and the intellectual match of her husband (and fertile). Bill brought his bride to the house in New York City on East Nineteenth Street, next door to Horace Greely in fashionable Union Square. While not outwardly socially ambitious, Helen soon became a dominant player in the circles in which the Evarts moved. While she joined the New York social scene, she obviously also pulled Bill back towards her home of Windsor.

The Evarts bought the Edward Curtis house, next door to the Constitution House, in 1846, for a country retreat. Windsor, at that time, was a quintessential New England town, marred only by the state prison near the center of town.


“It is a beautifully conducted institution. None but the most worthy are admitted, and disorderly and intoxicated persons, it seems, are not allowed. Owing to the great demand, we are unable to supply quarters to all, and so we take the worst; but as the worst of a Vermont population corresponds to the cream of a New York legislature, some idea can be formed of our high standard as jailers.”


In 1847, Windsor broke ground for a rail depot, and the station soon connected the town to Burlington on Lake Champaign, and down the Connecticut River to New London and Long Island Sound. When the connections were complete, you could travel to New York in eight hours. Evarts next bought the house next door, which he used for his many guests, and in 1857 he bought the big house, Runnemede.

Bill’s family, as well as his legal and social career in New York progressed rapidly. By 1848, three children had been born; Saturday nights was always reserved for the family or for entertaining from home. Evart’s mother, Mehetebal lived with the family until she died in 1851, and then nine more children were born between 1851 and 1862.

He undertook admiralty cases, property cases, and settled estates. He tried cases in Federal District court, the Chancery Court, and the Court of Appeals. He represented the heirs of Matthias Bruen in a complicated suit involving the estate of a famous tea merchant. In the collision case of the Narragansett, he took on admiralty law. In Walworth v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company he parsed the validity of a second mortgage.

James and John Harper started printing and publishing books in Manhattan in 1817; brothers Fletcher and Wesley joined them in the 1820s. The Harpers learned early to keep books in print and in stock, produce better yet less expensive editions than the competition, and be the first one on the dock when a ship came into harbor. Since there were no international copyright laws at the time, they frequented the docks waiting for the latest proofs from Great Britain. When a ship came in carrying a new title, the Harpers often had a new American edition on the streets within 24 hours.

By the 1830s Harpers was the largest printer in the country. In 1833, a steam printing press was installed and the company became "Harper & Brothers". Harper bestsellers included Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, Webster's Dictionary, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Harper's New Monthly Magazine started publishing in 1850. By 1853 41 presses ran ten hours a day, six days a week, averaging 25 volumes per minute.

The plant included the most advanced printing and publishing equipment of its time, but in December 1853, the Harper plant caught fire. Damages were in excess of $1 million, and the insurance company was reluctant to honor the policy. The fire had evidently been started by a match accidently thrown into a pan of camphene, used as a cleaning solvent. The insurance policy exempted liability for fire caused by the use of camphene.

The Harper brothers retained William M. Evarts. Evarts argued the provision only referred to use of camphene for lighting (it was often used for lamps in the nineteenth century but was also known to be explosive). The court of appeals agreed with Evarts, and Harpers was able to rebuild.

William M. Evarts pocketed a handsome fee.

~

Vermont

John Evarts was perhaps the first of my forbears to come to America. He emigrated from Yorkshire and settled in Concord, Massachusetts around 1638. He lived in Concord where at least two of his children were born, before moving to Connecticut around 1650. The Evarts family farmed around Guilford for the next four generations.

After a century of plowing, overgrazing, deforestation, and erosion, the soil was becoming exhausted and the population growth limited options for farming new land locally. After the revolution my progenitor James Evarts, like many of his contemporaries, moved to Vermont, looking to resettle outside the inbred cluster of farms on the coast. Jeremiah Evarts was born in 1781 to James and Sarah Todd Evarts in Sunderland, Vermont, about fifteen miles north of where I live today in Bennington.

Settlements were being developed throughout the Republic of Vermont in the last decades of the eighteenth century. Ethan and Ira Allen, who also lived in Sunderland, had travelled across the Green Mountains four years earlier to meet with fellow settlers at the tavern in Windsor to declare the creation of the Republic of Vermont, independent from the jurisdictions of New York and New Hampshire.

The Evarts family farmed in Sunderland for a few years, but found that southwest Vermont was better suited for water powered mills, such as the paper mill Anthony Haswell was building in Bennington, than for agriculture. The Evarts soon moved north and helped settle the town of Georgia in the productive Champlain Valley. By 1790, Georgia, with its timber resources and fertile soil, was one of the most prosperous communities in northern Vermont.