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."

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.

American Cicero

After Lincoln’s death, Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency, and immediately began arguing with the Republican congress about the proper path to reconstruction.

William M. Evarts appeared before a great rally at Cooper Union in October 1867. Standing before a banner inscribed “Andrew Johnson: Traitor, Renegade, Outcast”, Evarts castigated the Democrat Johnson as a “President without a Party”. The Radical Republicans won more seats in November, and, smelling blood, conducted an elaborate inquiry looking for evidence of “treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors”. When they couldn’t find enough evidence to start impeachment proceedings against the President, the Republican Congress passed the “Tenure of Office Act” which made the removal of Cabinet officers subject to Senate consent, and any infraction would be deemed a “high misdemeanor”.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was intriguing against the President, and Johnson knew it; he requested Stanton's resignation several times. After Stanton repeatedly declined the request, Johnson suspended him and appointed Grant in his place. Predictably, the Senate refused to confirm the removal of Stanton, and Grant relinquished the position. Johnson then appointed General Lorenzo Thomas; Stanton was incensed and claimed the office was still legally his. He had Thomas arrested, and barricaded the doors of the War Office to prevent his return.

The radicals claimed that Johnson’s removal of Stanton violated the Tenure Act and was grounds for impeachment. A vicious power struggle between the legislative and executive branches of government was under way.

Evarts, despite his opposition to Johnson four months previous, was one of the best litigators in the country, and, at William Seward’s suggestion, was retained as defense counsel when the impeachment trial got underway. This turn surprised many; Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, thought Evarts “a cold, calculating, selfish man”; The radical Independent called him “a hireling counsel . . . who pawned his honor for a lawyer’s fee.”

Thomas Nast chronicled the trial with his cartoons in Harper’s Weekly, and depicted Johnson as a murdered Caesar. Evarts, looking like Cicero, closed for the defense with a four day oration. He picked apart the managers case legally, practically, politically, morally; he piled on classical allusions, and pled for justice with the aura of a revival minister proclaiming the Gospel.

"We could summon from the people a million of men and inexhaustible treasure to help the Constitution in its time of need. Can we now summon resources enough of civil prudence and restraint of passion to carry us through this trial, so that, whatever result may follow, in whatever form, the people may feel that the Constitution has received no wound?"

The spectacle of the trial, the “Great American Farce”, elevated Evarts to the Pantheon of great American orators. Seven Republicans joined twelve Democrats to vote for acquittal, and Johnson stayed in office by one vote.

~

After the trial Johnson appointed Evarts Attorney General of the United States. Evarts took the position somewhat reluctantly, writing to Richard Henry Dana “As for a personal career in politics, I have never felt at liberty to plan for one, and I have less inclination for it than ever. I came here to do my duty in a difficult and dangerous juncture of the Government. I shall do it, and return to my business of farming and lawing, and leave to the newspaper correspondents the conduct of my affairs.”

The New York Bar Association honored the new Attorney General with a public dinner. Four hundred men marched into the Astor House arm in arm. The menu include green turtle soup, salmon, striped bass, filet of beef, turkey, ham, mutton, partridge, capon, oysters, sweet breads, lamb chops, venison, duck, claret, hock, sherry, champagne, brandy, bourbon, scotch, and rye whiskey, and the tables were festooned with edible ornaments including a statue of Evarts to accompany the Monument of Justice and Temple of Liberty.

William M. Evarts, noted for his love of wine, was asked whether drinking so many different vintages made him feel ill the following day. "Not at all," he replied, "it's the indifferent wines that produce that result."

~

Hanging on the wall in my “library”, next to my desk where I am writing this, there hangs a handsome steel engraving (marked “artist’s proof”) by Thomas Johnson of Abraham Lincoln in profile facing left. Below it is a photograph of Saint Gaudens’ bust of William M. Evarts, facing right. The common assumption is that he looks like Cicero, but to me he looks just like my grandfather.

Ulysses S.Grant took office in 1870, and in 1872 he sent William M. Evarts to Geneva to try to settle the Alabama claims. Evarts's oldest daughter, Hettie, accompanied him and travelled around Europe with her friend Belle Gibbs who introduced her to a young sculptor in his studio in Rome. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was about to start a small portrait bust of Belle, and when she brought Hettie around to the studio, Hettie recognized Gus as the son of their old shomaker in New York. Belle's father had just bought his new statue of Hiawatha, with the intent of bringing it back to Central Park; Hettie commissioned Gus to copy two Roman busts, one of Demosthenes, and one of Cicero for her father.

There were two prominent busts of Cicero in Rome for Saint-Gaudens to copy. Gus asked Mr. Gibbs which one Mr. Evarts would like best. He started to copy the Capitoline Cicero, because he thought it would compliment the Demosthenes best, but Mr. Gibbs discovered that the Vatican Cicero was rather thin and bony, compared to the heavy set Capitoline.

“Mr. Evarts has the idea, as many of his friends have told him, that he resembles Cicero,” Gibbs explained. “Now Mr. Evarts is thin as possible and if he sees the bust of a fat man, I am sure he will not accept it.”

Saint-Gaudens bought another piece of marble and started over.

Education

By 1870 The Athenaeum needed more room for its growing library, Harvard College had a large collection of engravings it had been given by Francis Gray, but they were hidden away in Gore Hall, MIT had a collection of architectural casts it wished to display, and the American Social Science Association was considering the acquisition of a large collection of plaster copies of classical sculpture for the use of students and the instruction of the public.

Charles Callahan Perkins was back from Italy, and his mission was clear - to use all his warm persuasive skills to bring these groups together. The time had come for Boston to have a public Museum of Fine Arts. The city agreed to grant land on Copley Square for the building, and C.C.’s cousin John Hubbard Sturgis was retained to design the new museum. The new museum building would be a copy of the Queen Anne style Pine Bank on a grand scale, using the same terra cotta design elements as on the Perkins home.

The leaders of the new museum started a large fundraising campaign, but C.C. couldn’t wait for the new building to get the museum off the ground. He was anxious that the new museum become active immediately, and, as the new museum’s first Honorary Director, organized its first exhibit in the picture galleries of the Athenaeum.

The Boston Art Club had suspended its activities when the Civil War broke out, but C.C. met with his old friend, amateur painter and music publisher, George Russell in 1871, to discuss reviving the club. With Perkins at the helm they called a general meeting, and the revived club opened its membership to upper-class men who professed an interest in art. C.C. was elected President and the Club engaged a bow-front townhouse on Boylston Street for its quarters. The Club added a spacious picture gallery behind the building and in 1873 opened its first annual exhibition. From an informal artists' supper club, Perkins created a refined gentlemen's club with dining and reading rooms, an extensive library, paintings collection and a picture gallery. It hosted two juried exhibitions each year and hosted informal gatherings for its members on the first Saturday of each month.

For the improvement of the general public, he edited an American edition of Eastlake's "Hints on Household Taste" in 1872, and Von Falke's "Art in the House," in 1879. Anyone could become a connoisseur, if they read the book.

Just as it was important to collect material in museums, and for gentlemen to share their love of art, art education needed to begin in the public schools; from the time a child could guide a pencil, his instruction in drawing should start. In 1871, C.C. was elected a member of the school committee of Boston, and he worked tirelessly to establish art education in the schools. The previous year Massachusetts lawmakers had mandated drawing as one of nine required subjects taught in all public schools of that state. With passage of "An Act Relating to Free Instruction in Drawing", Massachusetts became the first state to legislate compulsory public art education.

The intent of this act was two-fold – industrial drawing was a skill needed for the economic development of the country, particularly for machinery and textile patterns. The lack of good ornamental designers forced the importation from Europe for articles that could be produced cheaper at home. Secondly, there was a moral benefit: drawing cultivated the habits of neatness and accuracy; it tended to improve the intellect of the masses and purify the tone of their moral character. It was directly useful in academic subjects such as natural history, natural science, and geography and it introduced students to the beautiful, the good and the true.

For his own sons, Charles took his brother Ned’s advice and packed son Neddy up in 1872 when he turned fourteen, and sent him to Saint Paul's, the new school set just west of Concord, New Hampshire for which Ned served as a trustee. Neddy soon found himself living in a dormitory cubicle and shinnying hockey pucks on the Lower School Pond, a world away from the Villa Capponi overlooking the Arno. His brother Charlie would follow him two years later, while their beautiful older sister Eleanor would be introduced to society on the continent.

Young Ned was simple, friendly, unassuming, interested in his studies, in literature and art, but not much into athletics, although he did play tennis. He entered Harvard College as a Sophomore in 1876, and became a member of the Hasty Pudding Club, the O.K. Club, the Art Club, and was on the Crimson Editorial Board. He wrote a poem for the Class Supper and the Class Ode for Day. He roomed in the privately owned Beck Hall, favored by the society swells (including Teddy Roosevelt), and known for the “Beck Hall Spread”, the most exclusive society fest at Harvard each spring. Of course, with his family living on Jamaica Pond, Ned was often at Oakwood, enjoying its delightful hospitality. He must have missed something of the full swing of college life, but perhaps gained more from all the cultivated people he met at home.

He did have one notable social success. While still in college he became engaged to Miss Elizabeth Hoar Evarts, the daughter of the Secretary of State of the United States of America, William M. Evarts.

Art for All

Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance - Henry James

When we commenced this first century of our national existence, we were newly emancipated colonies whose richest possession was a God-given love of liberty. We are at present one of the great powers of the earth, and have reason for well-justified pride in the history of the hundred years which have now so nearly elapsed. We have sent ships into the uttermost parts of the world, and by commerce have increased in wealth; we have manned great fleets, and have equipped great and heroic armies; we have intersected the vast area of our territory with a net-work of iron, and have brought its farthest extremities into possibility of instant communication; we have built countless cities, and enriched them with every kind of useful and charitable institution, and have gained for ourselves a world-wide reputation in science and in literature. All this and more, for we have given to the world examples of men in power whose reputation is unstained by any shadow of self-seeking ambition, and of men in private life whose overflowing charity has won for them the love and admiration of mankind. These are great things, some of them the greatest things which a nation can do. And yet it seems to me, that we can hardly arrogate to our country the title of the model republic so long as we are content to live without art, which both in ancient and in modern times has been regarded by all civilized nations as one of the crowning glories of a great state, and neglect all means for the cultivation of an appreciation of its beauties. — C. C. Perkins.

Charles Callahan Perkins was a true amateur - he loved the arts. He had considerable talents; he could paint and engrave and he could compose and conduct music, but he was torn between his talents, and perhaps he would never, with his great wealth, be able to feel the suffering a great artist so often requires. With his enthusiasms however, and his ability to collect and patronize and endow, Charles discovered a great role to play with his life.

All around him in Tuscany he found sculpture created by the old masters going back to the thirteenth century. It was the finest sculpture the world had known since classical times, but its history had never been adequately recorded. C. C. Perkins researched, wrote, and engraved the illustrations to The Tuscan Sculptors, in 1864. The book was immediately recognized as the standard authority on the subject. He continued this work in 1868 with The Italian Sculptors, a history of the art in the other Italian cities during the same period. In 1869, in recognition for his contributions, he became the first American elected to the Academe des Beaux Arts in Paris.

With two young sons and a teenage daughter, the time came for the Perkins family to return to Boston in 1869. They moved into the family’s Oakwood house on Jamaica Pond, next door to sister Sarah Cleveland’s new stick wood style Nutwood, and up the embankment from the Queen Anne Revival Pine Bank that brother Ned was having built on cousin John Hubbard Sturgis’s design, following the disastrous fire that had destroyed Pine Bank II the previous year. The pond provided excellent skating in the winter and sailing in the summer, and an abundant supply of good company in the generous houses found around its shores.

For a summer home Charles’s wife Fanny and her mother Mary Anne Bruen purchased a cornfield on Bellevue Avenue in Newport and worked to recreate the grand style they had lived in Florence. They planted beautiful trees all around the property, and built a relatively modern stone summer cottage, Villa Bruen, in the Gothic Revival style with large porches to catch the breezes off the ocean.

Longfellow invited Charles to join the Saturday Club which met every month at the Parker House. As Oliver Wendell Holmes explained it, the Saturday Club had no organization, and seemed to have sprung to life fully clothed as it were, almost without parentage. It was natural that men such as Emerson, Longfellow, Agassiz, Hawthorne, Motley, and Sumner should meet and dine together as they did, in fact, every month. The club had no constitution or by-laws, made no speeches, read no papers, observed no ceremonies. Its members came and went at their pleasure. There was nothing Bohemian about the club, but it certainly provided many good times and not a little good talking.

Charles and Fanny entertained at both Oakwood and Villa Bruen, frequently sponsoring concerts and recitals. They attended Harriet Beecher Stowe’s birthday party, and continued to correspond with Julia Ward Howe, Matthew Arnold, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Brownings.

There was no question Charles had come into his own on the European continent as an art historian and a connoisseur. His next career was to become one of the great evangelists of art and culture to America.