Snow-Storm in August

by Jefferson Morley

  3.7. While customers perched: Walter Birkenhead, “Republicans, Democrats and Thoroughbreds,” Turf and Sport Digest, January 1945, 44.

  3.8. “You must not be astonished”: Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics in Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 86.

  3.9. Indeed the Jockey Club: Elinore Stearns and David N. Yerkes, William Thornton: A Renaissance Man in the Federal City (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects Foundation, 1976), 50.

  3.10. President Jackson’s arrival: Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences, 190.

  3.11. he loved wagering large sums: Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, Our Neighbors on La Fayette Square: Anecdotes and Reminiscences (Washington, D.C.: Junior League of Washington, 1982), 30.

  3.12. The Telegraph was as scrappy: “About this Publication: United States Telegraph,” Nineteenth Century Newspapers, Gale Databases, accessed March 15, 2010, http://gdc.gale.com/products/19th-century-u.s.-newspapers/.

  3.13. Beverly Snow: Advertisement, Telegraph, December 15, 1830.

  3.14. what the French called: British Concise Encyclopedia, 607.

  Chapter 4

  4.1. “They consume an extraordinary quantity”: Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 297.

  4.2. Mrs. Julia Seaton: James S. Osgood, William Winston Seaton of the National Intelligencer (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871), 217–19.

  4.3. “particular friend”: Paul Pry, October 31, 1835, 2.

  4.4. “Look at This!”: Advertisement, National Intelligencer, November 24, 1831.

  4.5. The surrounding streets housed: Carol M. Highsmith and Ted Landphair, Pennsylvania Avenue: America’s Main Street (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects Press, 1988), 77.

  4.6. “One can tell the New England member”: Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 145.

  4.7. When a cholera epidemic struck: “Authentic report of the Cholera in Washington, January 1, 1833,” Board of Health Minutes, 1822–1848, Washington, D.C., Archives. “A large number of foreign Emigrants had recently arrived in the City and were employed upon the public works,” the report concluded. “Most of these were from Germany and Ireland, men who understood not our language nor were accustomed to our climate, habits or modes of living. This manner of habitation and being as well as occupation probably exposed them to the disease. The cholera bore upon this class with great severity. It was also extremely fatal to our colored population and more specifically to the free blacks.”

  4.8. Isaac Newton Cary, who owned: Advertisements, National Journal, November 26, 1827; Globe, January 2, 1832.

  4.9. the son of a prosperous free black man: Luther P. Jackson, “The Early Strivings of the Negro in Virginia,” The Journal of Negro History 25, no. 1 (January 1940), 27. Thomas Cary’s name is spelled “Carey” in this article, a spelling that Isaac also used on occasion.

  4.10. Known for his excellent sense: Provincial Freeman, October 13, 1855.

  4.11. “Professor of Shaving”: Advertisement, Globe, January 2, 1832.

  4.12. Cary had supported: George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619–1880, vol. 2 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1883), 65.

  4.13. his aunt, Lethe Tanner: Tanner purchased the freedom of no less than twenty-three friends and relatives. They are named in A. N. Newton, Special Report of the Commissioner of Education on the Conditions and Improvements in the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1869), 197.

  4.14. “indefatigable application”: Williams, History of the Negro Race, 188–89.

  4.15. “a matter of astonishment”: Ibid.

  4.16. “seen nothing in all”: Ibid.

  4.17. Cook organized a celebration: “Exhibition No. 1 For the Benefit of A young man, about to disenthrall himself from Slavery,” October 17, 1832, Charles Francis Cook (CFC) Papers, Folder 10, at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Center.

  4.18. Cook would go on: CFC Papers, Folder 10 contains Cook’s lecture on tobacco addressed to the Philomathean or Young Men’s Moral and Literary Society in 1834. Free people of color in other eastern cities also adopted Philomathean as their name for talking societies where opponents of slavery gathered. See also Dorothy Porter, “The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies, 1828–1846,” The Journal of Negro Education 5, no. 4 (October, 1936), 555–56.

  4.19. Benjamin Lundy, a white man: Bruce Rosen, “Abolition and Colonization, the Years of Conflict: 1829–1834,” Phylon 33, no. 2 (Second Quarter 1972), 183n.

  4.20. Lundy had grown up: Thomas Earl, ed., The Life, Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy (Philadelphia: William D. Parrish, 1847), 13–16.

  4.21. He chose a headstrong: Harrold, Subversives, 18–23.

  4.22. “Nothing is wanting”: Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), 53.

  4.23. Their profession was hazardous: “Garrison’s Second Trial,” Genius of Universal Emancipation (GUE), October 1830, 1.

  4.24. He moved south: Earl, Life, Travels, and Opinions of Benjamin Lundy, 30.

  4.25. “to become more generally acquainted”: “Another Change of Location,” GUE, October 1830, 97f.

  4.26. Lundy scoffed at such: Spectator cited in GUE, December 1830, 144.

  4.27. When Lundy came: Werner Sollors, Caldwell Titcomb, and Thomas A. Underwood, eds., Blacks at Harvard: A Documentary History of African-American Experience at Harvard and Radcliffe (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 47.

  4.28. He and his four children: City of Washington, 1833 Tax Book, A–Z, Corporation of Washington, First and Second Ward, RG 351, entry 47, vols. 17 and 18.

  Chapter 5

  5.1. The Potomac River froze: Trollope, Domestic Manners, n223.

  5.2. an eclipse of the sun: Anna Maria Thornton Diary (AMT Diary), vol. 1, 785.

  5.3. The Fourteenth Annual Meeting: National Intelligencer, January 29, 1831.

  5.4. Colonization had been first proposed: WTP, reel 1. Thornton corresponded about colonization with Granville Sharp, the English antislavery campaigner. See also Beatrice Starr Jenkins, William Thornton: Small Star of the American Enlightenment (San Luis Obispo, Calif.: Merritt Starr Books, 1982), 22–24.

  5.5. Paul Cuffe, a black sea captain: James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 186–87.

  5.6. The society attracted gentlemen: Jay, Miscellaneous Writings on Slavery, 150. Jay notes that of the society’s seventeen vice presidents, five hailed from the free states. Of the group’s twelve managers, all were slaveholders.

  5.7. On a windy Wednesday evening: AMT Diary, vol. 1, 791.

  5.8. belonged to a network: James T. Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in America and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 32–36.

  5.9. The assembled crowd passed: National Intelligencer, May 4, 1831.

  5.10. Withers, at age fifty-five: “The Withers Family of Stafford, Fauquier, &c.,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 6, no. 3 (January 1899), 309–13.

  5.11. he used the profits of his mercantile firm to buy no less than seventeen different pieces of real estate: 1833 Tax Book, Third and Fourth Wards, RG 351, entry 47, vol. 19.

  5.12. the greatest benefactor: Harvey W. Crew, William Bensing Webb, and John Wooldridge, Centennial History of the City of Washington, D.C. (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing, 1892), 506.

  5.13. building that Withers: The building and its occupants in late 1835 are documented in “Blueprint, 6th Street and Pennsylvania Ave.,” Forrest Sweet Papers, 1778–1864, accession #5976, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Va. Also see the Directory for Washington City, 1834.

  5.14. “Snow’s Epicurean Eating House”: Advertisement, National Intelligencer, October 26, 1832.r />
  5.15. “the most rational system”: Carl J. Richards, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome and American Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 187.

  5.16. When Alexander Hamilton called: Richards, Founders and the Classics, 93.

  5.17. “Of all the philosophers”: New-England Magazine, October 1832, 353.

  5.18. Epicurus counseled avoidance: John Digby, Epicurus’s Morals (London: Sam Briscoe, 1712), xxiii.

  5.19. “No word has more”: Boston Masonic Mirror, October 16, 1830.

  5.20. “Beverly Snow: The Disciple of Epicurus”: Advertisement, Globe, June 20, 1833. The identical phrase in the Boston Masonic Mirror and Beverly’s advertisement two and a half years later may be coincidental. The literature of Epicurus often refers to his disciples. If a copy of the Boston Masonic Mirror reached Beverly’s hands, it may have come from the black Masons he knew, such as Isaac and Thomas Cary or William Jackson, the Post Office messenger.

  5.21. Ben Perley Poore, a newspaperman: Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences, 179; Barry H. Landau, The President’s Table: Two Hundred Years of Dining and Diplomacy (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 11–12.

  PART II: FRANK’S SONG

  Chapter 6

  6.1. a two-story brick home: Edward S. Delaplaine, Francis Scott Key: Life and Times (Stuarts Draft, Va.: American Foundation Publications, 1998), 46.

  6.2. Another child, Edward: Ibid., 227.

  6.3. His practice, representing: Francis Scott Key-Smith, Francis Scott Key: What Else He Was and Who (Washington, D.C.: National Capital Press, 1911), 39. The F. S. Key Papers, 1777–1843, Maryland Historical Society (MHS), MS 2199.

  6.4. On Sundays he prayed: 1819–1852 Receipts General, F. S. Key Papers, MHS.

  6.5. “the Blacks’ lawyer”: Marvis Olive Welch, Prudence Crandall: A Biography (Manchester, Conn.: Jason Publishers, 1983), 117.

  6.6. “a distinct and inferior race”: Delaplaine, Life and Times, 446.

  6.7. a distressingly serious man: Victor Weybright, Spangled Banner: The Story of Francis Scott Key (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1934), 289. I’m borrowing from Weybright, who called Key a “distressingly serious layman” (289).

  6.8. Lancaster schools: Delaplaine, Life and Times, 71 and elsewhere.

  6.9. He attended the annual General Convention: Key-Smith, What Else He Was, 18.

  6.10. “His whole life is spent”: Hugh S. Garland, Life of Randolph, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: D. Appleton & Co, 1850), 64.

  6.11. Key was decent: Weybright, Spangled Banner, 5–7.

  6.12. Key freed seven: Early Lee Fox, American Colonization Society 1817–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1919), 10–17.

  6.13. “I have been thus instrumental”: Ibid.

  6.14. “the begging business”: Delaplaine, Life and Times, 201

  6.15. Key preferred not to respond: See Key’s speech of January 19, 1828, in Eleventh Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Color (Washington, D.C.: Dunn, 1828), 21.

  6.16. a Negro servant: William Seale, The President’s House: A History (Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, National Geographic Society, 1998), 181.

  6.17. some of the rooms looked elegant: Ibid., 181–83.

  6.18. “I want to tell you confidentially”: “Letters of Francis Scott Key to Roger Brooke Taney and Other Correspondence,” Maryland Historical Magazine (1930), 25.

  Chapter 7

  7.1. graduate of St. John’s College: Delaplaine, Life and Times, 30

  7.2. graduate of Dickinson College: Taney manuscript memoir, written in 1854, handwritten, MHS, MS 645, box 8, 40–50.

  7.3. meshed in their differences: Delaplaine, Life and Times, 47.

  7.4. Roger Taney and Ann Key married: Weybright, Spangled Banner, 48; Delaplaine, Life and Times, 47.

  7.5. drew as close as brothers: Bernard C. Steiner, Life of Roger Brooke Taney, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (Baltimore: Wilkins & Wilkins 1922), 46–47.

  7.6. “a tall, square shouldered man”: John E. Semmes, John H. B. Latrobe and His Times (Baltimore: Norman Remington Company, 1917), 202.

  7.7. “ambition for legal eminence”: Taney manuscript memoir, 51.

  7.8. In 1819 he defended: Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D., Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Baltimore: John Murphy & Co., 1872), 126–31.

  7.9. Key had married Mary Tayloe: Weybright, Spangled Banner, 43.

  7.10. the governor of Maryland: Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, 165.

  7.11. “The worst men of a party”: Quoted in Garland, Life of Randolph, 25.

  7.12. “You will put down”: Garland, Life of Randolph, 29.

  7.13. Frank, as Key was known: Virginia congressman John Randolph addressed Key as “Frank” in an affectionate letter in 1810. They would be close friends for the next twenty years. Garland, Life of Randolph, 11–12; see also Delaplaine, Life and Times, 91.

  7.14. held a barbecue: Weybright, Spangled Banner, 234.

  7.15. “It is beautiful”: Gaillard Hunt, ed., The First Forty Years of Washington Portrayed by the Family Letters of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1906), 294.

  7.16. Watkins was convicted: Niles’ Weekly Register, vol. 36 (June 20, 1829), 275; on the politics of the Watkins case, see Sean Wilentz, Andrew Jackson (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 57.

  7.17. Margaret’s flirtatious style: The extensive Eaton literature is studded with intriguing, if apocryphal, details of her eventful love life. I consulted Queena Pollack’s sympathetic Peggy Eaton, Democracy’s Mistress (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1931), 38–39; Catherine Allgor’s protofeminist Parlor Politics, 203–38; John Marszalek’s entertaining The Petticoat Affair, 77–79; and Allen C. Clarke’s judicious article “Margaret Eaton (Peggy O’Neal)” in the Records of the Columbia Historical Society 44/45 (1942–1943), 1–33.

  7.18. “the wildest girl”: Delaplaine, Life and Times, 281.

  7.19. Margaret Eaton was “very handsome”: Hunt, The First Forty Years of Washington, 252.

  7.20. “one of the most ambitious”: Ibid., 318.

  7.21. “She is as chaste”: Delaplaine, Life and Times, 286.

  7.22. Reverend John Nicholson Campbell: Ibid.

  7.23. John Eaton wanted to challenge: Clarke, “Margaret Eaton (Peggy O’Neal),” 13.

  7.24. Margaret took a swing: Delaplaine, Life and Times, 283.

  7.25. Jackson dispatched his friend: Afterward, Johnson and several former members of the cabinet published their accounts of the negotiations in the National Intelligencer and other newspapers, including the Gettysburg Compiler, August 30, 1831.

  7.26. the idea of the cabinet purge: Telegraph, April 13 and 14, 1831.

  7.27. As a widower: Robert V. Remini, Life of Andrew Jackson (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 193.

  7.28. “I expect that I am”: This and all subsequent dialogue is from “Letters of Francis Scott Key to Roger Brooke Taney and Other Correspondence,” 24–25.

  7.29. Berrien resigned: James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, vol. 3 (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 356–57.

  7.30. Before long he was: Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, 168–73; Delaplaine, Life and Times, 294; Steiner, Life of Roger Brooke Taney, 103–4.

  Chapter 8

  8.1. how he came to write: I rely on Roger Taney’s preface to Francis Key-Smith’s Poems of the Late Francis S. Key (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1857), 13–31, in which he recounts the story as Key told it to him. Taney’s account serves as the “foundation of all further accounts,” noted Oscar G. Sonneck, chief of the music division of the Library of Congress, in his definitive historiography Report on “The Star Spangled Banner,” “Hail Columbia,” “America,” “Yankee Doodle” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), 7–42. I also consulted “ ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as Nation’s Anthem,” New York Times, July 15, 1917; Weybright, Spangled Banner, 98–106
; and Delaplaine, Life and Times, 129–74.

  8.2. moved a flotilla: William M. Marine, The British Invasion of Maryland (Baltimore: Society of the War of 1812 in Maryland, 1913), 87–103.

  8.3. offering freedom to enslaved: Frank A. Cassell, “Slaves of the Chesapeake Bay Area and the War of 1812,” The Journal of Negro History 57, no. 2 (April 1972), 144–55.

  8.4. “Mr. Francis Key informed me”: Weybright, Spangled Banner, 98.

  8.5. As the British forces approached: Walter Lord, The Dawn’s Early Light (New York: Norton & Co., 1972), 139–40.

  8.6. the British forces glided: Weybright, Spangled Banner, 104.

  8.7. “Are you then”: William Thornton’s self-serving account appeared in a letter to the National Intelligencer, September 14, 1814. See also Clarke, “Dr. and Mrs. William Thornton,” 182; Stearns and Yerkes, Renaissance Man, 41; Jenkins, William Thornton, 90–91.

  8.8. then a tornado ripped: Weybright, Spangled Banner, 104–5.

  8.9. “Key heard the voice”: Delaplaine, Life and Times, 146.

  8.10. He scrawled notes: Taney’s letter in Key-Smith, Poems of the Late Francis S. Key, 25–26.

  8.11. “beautiful and touching”: National Intelligencer, December 12, 1814.

  8.12. matched in popularity: Sonneck, Report on “The Star Spangled Banner,” 47. Sonneck noted that in the annals of nineteenth-century American patriotic songs, “none except Key’s ‘Star Spangled Banner’ and Reverend Smith’s ‘America’ were destined to rival the popularity of ‘Hail Columbia’ for almost a century.”

  Chapter 9

  9.1. These verdant hills: Weybright, Spangled Banner, 4.

  9.2. “The mansion was of brick”: Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, 101.

  9.3. Key delighted in his time: Key-Smith, What Else He Was, 11–12.

  9.4. “Insurrection of the Blacks”: Frederick Town Herald, August 27, 1831; National Journal, August 27, 1831.

  9.5. Sixteen of the black rebels: Telegraph, September 12, 1831.

  9.6. five-hundred-dollar reward: National Journal, September 20, 1831.