A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay of Alabama, Covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, 1853-1866 Put into Narrative form by Ada Sterling

My infant days were spent in North Carolina among the kinsmen of my mother. I do not remember her, save that she was young and fair, being but twenty when she died. She was the twenty-fifth child of the family united under her father’s roof, which remarkable circumstance may be explained as follows:

My grandfather, General William Arrington, who won his title in the Revolutionary War, having been left a widower with twelve children, wearying of his solitude, mounted his horse and rode over to visit the comely widow Battle, whose children also numbered twelve. The two plantations lay near together in the old “Tar Heel” State. My gallant ancestor was a successful wooer, and Mrs. Battle, née Williams, soon became Mrs. Arrington. Thus it happened that the little Anne—my mother—the one daughter of this union, entered the world and simultaneously into the affections of one dozen half-brothers and sisters Arrington, and as many of the Battle blood. This was a fortunate prevision for me, for, though orphaned at the outset of my earthly pilgrimage—I was but three years old when my girl-mother passed away—I found myself by no means alone, though my dear father, Dr. Peyton Randolph Tunstall, grief-stricken and sorrowful, left my native State at the death of his wife, and I was a half-grown girl ere we met again and learned to know each other.

My recollections of those early days are necessarily few; yet, were I a painter, I might limn one awful figure that lingers in my memory. She was a mulatto, to whose care for some time I was nightly confided. This crafty maid, Pleasant by name, though ’twas a misnomer, anxious to join in the diversions of the other domestics among the outlying cabins on the plantation, would no sooner tuck me into bed than she would begin to unfold to me blood-curdling stories of “sperrits an’ ghoses,” and of “old blue eyes an’ bloody bones” who would be sure to come out of the plum orchard and carry me to the graveyard if I did not go quickly to sleep. Fortunately, old Major Drake, of whose family I was then a member, chanced one evening to overhear this soothing lullaby, and put an end to her stories ere serious harm had been done; yet so wonderful is the retentive power of the human mind that though seventy and more momentous years have passed since I, a little fearsome child, huddled under the coverings breathless in my dread of the “bogie man,” I still recall my heartless, or perhaps my thoughtless, nurse vividly.

At the age of six I was carried to Tuscaloosa, then the capital of the young State of Alabama, where I was placed in the care of my aunt, whose husband, Henry W. Collier, then a young lawyer, afterward became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of his State, and its Governor. That first journey stretches out in my memory as an interminable pilgrimage. Mr. Fort, of Mississippi, his wife, my mother’s sister, and their two children, Mary and Martha, accompanied by a large following of Negroes, being en route for their plantation in Mississippi territory, I was given into their care for delivery to my kin in Tuscaloosa. No palace-car of later days has ever eclipsed the wonders of the cavalcade our company made as we passed along through towns and villages and the occasional Indian settlements that here and there dotted the untilled lands of those early nineteenth-century days!

My uncle drove in his gig at the head of the procession, while my aunt and the children made the journey in a big pudding-shaped carriage in charge of a trusty driver, beside whom my aunt’s maid sat. The carriage was built with windows at the sides, and adjustable steps, which were let down when we halted and secured in place by our Negro attendants. These followed behind the vehicles and were at hand to serve us when need arose.

Our cortege included several “Dearborns,” similar in shape to the ambulances of the present, in which the old and ailing Negroes were carried, and numerous wagons containing our household goods and provisions followed behind. At night, tents were pitched, in which my aunt and the children slept, unless by chance a storm arose, when the shelter of some hostelry or farmhouse was sought. The preparations for camping were altogether exciting, the erection of tents, the kindling of fires, the unharnessing and watering and feeding of the stock, and the eager industry of the cooks and their assistants in the midst of the array of shining utensils all combining to stamp the scene upon the mind of an impressionable child.

However, in the course of time the slow rolling of our carriage became monotonous to the restive children of the caravan, and the novelty of standing at the windows and gazing over the lifting hills soon wore off. My aunt felt the fatigue less, we thought, for she was a famous soliloquist, and often talked to herself as we rode, sometimes laughing aloud at her own good company. I think we children regarded her as deranged, if harmless, until one day she proved her sanity to our complete satisfaction. In a moment of insupportable tedium we conceived the idea of dropping the little tin cups, with which each was provided, in order to see if the wheels would run over them. One after another the vessels were lowered, and each, to our intense delight, was smashed flat as the proverbial pancake. When my aunt discovered our mischief, being a gentle soul, she merely reprimanded us, and at the next settlement purchased others; but when these and yet others followed the fate of the first, she became less indulgent. Switches were cut from the forest trees, three pairs of pink palms tingled with the punishment then and there administered, and the remembrance thereof restrained my cousins’ and my own destructiveness for the remainder of the journey.