Amy Heard Letters from the Gilded Age

Amy Heard Letters from the Gilded Age Transcribed, Translated, and Edited by Robert M. Gray c Copyright 2005 by Robert M. Gray This document was produced using Otfried Cheong’s Hyperlatex package. Contents Contents..................................... i Preface iii 1 Introduction 1 2 1881 5 3 1882 21 4 1884 47 5 1885 53 6 1886 71 7 1887 105 8 1888 127 9 1889 155 10 1891 159 Bibliography 162 i ii CONTENTS Preface Famous or notorious people leave tracks through history that are easy to follow. Their letters and writings are avidly preserved and they are much written about by others. The persistant biographer need only visit libraries and family or historical society collections to piece together the details of the person’s life. Simply because the person was or is famous is usually sufficient motivation to make the effort to understand and describe their life, even if it has been done repeatedly before. In contrast, people who do not have a profound impact on their contempory general public can fade with time, leaving only a few family anecdotes and pho- tographs for their grandchildren Amy Heard in Washington and great grandchildren. Occa- sionally, however, such fameless people do leave enough traces in the forms of letters, notes, and journals to permit a determined researcher to piece together bits of their life years later, but the motivation to do so is usually lacking unless the person lost in the past is of particular interest to the sleuth of the present. As an obvious example, the life of ancestors is often of strong interest to a descendent who never knew them and knows little about them. Such research can be of interest to more than just the family of an ancestor. The ancestor might typify an interesting iii iv PREFACE time, class, or culture and their lives might by example provide an interesting ex- cursion into an entire period. The ancestor might have come in regular contact with remarkable contemporaries, people who have been written about and whose lives can be found in books and newspaper files. Even if these reasons are only rationalizations, the process of doing detective work on the past, of being an amateur historian, can be challenging and fun on its own, regardless of the famous person or unknown ancestor selected as object for the search. It can be satisfying to figure out who some individual was, to find previously unknown gossip, to find the details of a scandal only hinted at, to find the futures of the young people encountered, and to find romantic aspects to lives previously described in biographies as having had none. Reading century-old letters and journals for the first time can provide a window into the past, a vicarious adventure that is remote from the present, yet strangely familiar. Following the death of my father, Augustine Heard Gray, in 1982, I found in his papers a letter addressed to his mother, Amy Amy Heard in 1876, Brighton Heard, from a V. Sackville-West. The letter was in French and the handwriting was so unlike any I had seen that I at first found it illegible. With hints of a secret scandal and a hasty departure from the U.S., the letter caught my interest and led to a search among my father’s papers as well as the boxed collections of cousin Arthur Meeker Gray for further letters of the period. In parallel I began to discover in both contemporary and recent books the identity of Ms. Sackville-West and the other people who populated the letters, which proved to be full of Washing- ton gossip concerning the diplomats and politicians of the age. Amy proved to be a well-connected bystander to the political and diplomatic life in Washington D.C. PREFACE v at the end of the nineteenth century, with friends among the best known diplomats, politicians, and writers of the time. To date I have found approximately two hundred letters written to Amy, mostly from the daughters of politicians and diplomats and from her family during the 1880’s and the 1890’s, the period named the Gilded Age by Mark Twain [25]. These letters provide an intimate picture of close friendships of young women of the time and an insider’s view of many of the personalities and events of diplomatic and political life in Washington, D.C. In addition, Amy kept a daily notebook with brief entries describing visits, parties, dinners, receptions, and other Washington, D.C., social functions as well as vacations to Niagara Falls and Bar Harbor. The notebooks for portions of 1881, 1882, and 1886 survive. The early letters and the notebooks supplement the published letters of two of the most famous Washington women of the time: Mrs. Henry Adams [2] and Mrs. James G. Blaine[5], both of whom refer to many of Amy’s correspondents and to Amy her- self. Many of the people mentioned can also be found in the Dictionary of American Biogra- phy and several books devoted to that period such as Mrs. Jack [24], The Proper Bostonians [4], The Gentle Americans [14], and Lady Sackville [3] and others that will be cited. The later letters before and during the period when Amy’s father was U.S. Minister to Korea provide a story of Ameri- can politics and diplomacy of the time and of the difficult adjust- ments required of an unprepared diplomatic family in a new and struggling country. The Korean letters are the subject of a sepa- Victoria West rate book, Max and Max. Amy’s most famous correspondent was she who wrote the first letter I found: Vic- toria West, later to become Lady Sackville. Her biography Lady Sackville [3] by Mary vi PREFACE Alsop provides a lively account of her life and times and was my first source once I discovered her identity. Victoria was the mother of the writer V. Sackville-West (known as “Vita”) and the grandmother of the writer Nigel Nicolson, who among other things wrote biographies of Napoleon and Lord and Lady Curzon. Both daugh- ter and grandson described Victoria in books. Vita recounted her grandmother’s early life in her book Pepita [22] while Nicolson’s biography of his parents, Portrait of a Marriage [19] provide a brief account of his grandmother. Unfortunately the subse- quent television production of Portrait of a Marriage provided a painfully inadequate and unsympathetic portrait of an elderly Victoria. This chain of literary progeny and the notoriety of Victoria’s and Vita’s lives make discover- ing the family story a relatively easy task in comparison to track- ing down some of the less well known names mentioned in the letters, some of which remain a mystery. In addition to the letters from Victoria, many letters exist from friends and family. In particular, Victoria’s sisters Amalia and Flora and Amy’s sister He- len Maxima Heard (nicknamed “Max”) wrote often. Victoria’s younger sisters Amalia (then 15) and Flora (then 17) ar- rived in Washington in December 1883. Amalia was to become an even closer friend of Amy’s than her sister. While Amalia was later to become a bitter spinster, during this period she was bright, witty, and enthusiastic, though a Victoria, Flora, and Amalia hint of her future sadness shows and Mme Boumy in 1884 up in her musing about men, marriage, and death. Although published accounts suggest she never had a serious relationship with a man, the letters imply a romantic, and ultimately tragic, liaison with the nephew of the Spanish am- bassador. PREFACE vii These letters typify letters among close women friends of the Victorian period: they are warm, affectionate, gossipy, and occasionally catty. All of the letters from the West sisters and Max are in French. The journals are in French, Spanish, and, only rarely, English. The letters, journals, clippings, and photos became a hobby for me. I decided to try to translate the letters into English, track down the identities and what informa- tion I could about the people mentioned in the letters, and put together a book using the letters and journal entries as an excuse to describe one aspect of Washington diplomatic and political life during the Guilded Age, the view seen by the daughters and wives of male politicians and diplomats of the time. The stories of the writers and their friends are told, at least briefly, as their names occur in the journal and letters. The book is intended to provide a small guided tour of the times through the correspondence and notes of a participant. One advantage of writing books as part of my profession is the possession of the tools to try out a book for the fun of it, even if the potential audience comprises only a few friends and family members (and possibly the Lady Sackville archives at the University of Illinois and the small collection of avid Lady Sackville groupies that I have met at Book Fairs). I hope that a few might enjoy peering back into the past as much as I did. At this writing the letters from the Misses West and the notebooks have been transcribed and translated. The Korean letters have been transcribed translated and are presented in separate book, Max and Max. As time permits, I hope to add the original French (and other languages) of the daily journals as well as other relevant letters. A complete list of the letters follows. Letters from Victoria, Amalia, and Flora West.

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