Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 July 1884 — Washington in John Quincy Adams' Administration. [ARTICLE]

Washington in John Quincy Adams' Administration.

I Meantime, at Washington, there had been a great increase in wealth and social refinement since the earlier days. Mr. Josiah Quincy, in his “Recollections of Washington Society in 1826,” presents for us a polished and delightful community, compared to that which had preceded it. Himself a handsome young Bostonian, with the prestige of a name already noted, he found nothing but sunshine and roses in his path through the metropolis. Names now historic glitter through his pages; he went to, balls under the escort of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Webster; his first entertainment was at Mrs. William Wirt’s, where he met Miss Henry, Patrick Henryk daughter, who played the piano and sang to the harp. The belles of the day smiled upon him; Miss Catherine Van Rensselaer, of Albany, and Miss Cora Livingston, the same who in her old age, as Mrs. Barton, sold the great Shakspearean library to the city of Boston. The most conspicuous married belle of that day was known as Mrs. Florida White, so called because her husband represented that region, then new and strange. More eccentric than this sobriquet were the genuine names in the household of Mrs. Peter, grand-

daughter of Mrs. Washington, and the fiercest of Federalists, who had named her daughters America, Columbia, and Britannia, the last by way of defiance, it is said, to Jefferson. With these various charmers Mr. Quincy attended many a ball in Washington, these entertainments then keeping modest hours —from Bto 11. He saw a sight not then considered so modest—the introduction, in 1826, of the first waltz, danced with enthusiasm by Baron Stackelburg, who whirled through it without removing his huge dragoon spurs, and was applauded at the end for the skill with which he avoided collisions that might have been rather murderous. The young Bostonian also went to dinner-parties; sometimes at the White House, either formal state dinners of forty gentlemen and ladies, or private occasions, less elaborate, where he alone among witnesses found the President “amusing.” He gives also an agreeable picture of the home and household manners of Daniel Webster, not yet fallen into those questionable private habits which the French M. Bacourt, sixteen years afterward, too faithfully chronicled. Mr. Quincy also found the Vice President, John C. Calhoun, a man most agreeable in his own house, while Miss Calhoun had an admirable gift for political discussion. The presence of these eminent men lent a charm even to the muddy streets and scattered houses of the Washington of that day. The two branches of Government then met in small, ill-arranged halls, the House of Representatives having huge pillars to intercept sight and sound, with no gallery, but only a platform for visitors, but little higher than the floor. In this body the great Federal party had left scarcely a remnant of itself, Mr. Elisha Potter, of Rhode Island, describing vividly to Mr. Quincy a caucus held when the faithful few had been reduced to eleven, and could only cheer themselves with the thought that the Christian apostles, after the desertion of Judas, could number no more. The houses of Congress were still rather an arena of debating than for set speeches, as now; " and they had their leaders, mostly now fallen into that oblivion which waits so surely on merely political fame. Daniel Webster, to be sure, was the great ornament- of the Senate ; but McDuffie, of South Carolina, and Storrs, of New York, members of the House, had then a national reputation for eloquence, though they now are but the shadows of namea To these must be added Archer, of Virginia, too generally designated as “Insatiate Archer,” from his fatal long-windedness.— T. W. Higginson,. in Harper’s Magazine.