A purpose of this blog is to give me a space to write about topics that are not in my book (still in the works) but are related to it. There are many interesting stories about the families involved in late 19th-century American politics.

I previously posted a copy of this photo from the Maine Historical Society because it showed Truxtun’s first wife on another post:

On our far left, on the edge of the picture, is James G. Blaine, Jr. He was sort of the black sheep of the family. His father once noted that young James was:

“The most helpless, least responsible member of my family; erratic but controllable through his strong affections; an object of constant watchfulness to his parents, his brothers and his sisters, a source of constant anxiety, but not despair, because he is of good abilities, as readily influenced to the right as the wrong, and because the patience of love can never know weariness.”

Landrigan, Dan. 2019. Bar Harbor Babylon: Murder, Misfortune, And Scandal On Mount Desert Island. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, p. 93.

James had been kicked out of a couple of private schools, so his parents found him a tutor. She was one year older than James, so naturally, at age 17, he ran off with her and they got married. Divorce, after the birth of a son, would follow not long after. In this picture, James was still married but living apart from his wife. I think his placement in this photograph says something about his relationship with the rest of his family.

Next to James, Jr. was Mrs. Henry Cabot Lodge. And while I don’t know much about her, her husband, standing behind her and President Harrison, was then a young Republican Congressman from Massachusetts. He would go on to become a Senator. He wrote a chapter for Truxtun Beale’s book of Herbert Spencer’s writings published in 1916. His son, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., was also involved in public life, including a run for Vice President with Nixon in 1960. It’s also pretty cool that Lodge’s grandson is still alive as of this date.

This brings us to the next character in this photo, President Benjamin Harrison. Harrison, a Republican, had just defeated Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, who had narrowly defeated James G. Blaine four years before. Grover Cleveland would go on to defeat Harrison in the 1892 election. That election was fairly quiet, out of respect for the fact that Harrison’s wife, Caroline, was dying from tuberculosis.

About four years later, Benjamin married his wife’s niece (I guess his niece technically, by marriage, as well), who was about twenty-five years younger than him and the same age as his daughter. Speaking of his daughter, both she and her brother had some sort of problem with this and refused to attend the wedding. But that didn’t stop the happy couple. They had one surviving child, Elizabeth, who became a lawyer and wrote an investment newsletter for women. She married James Blaine Walker, a relation to James G. Blaine, and they had one daughter, Dr. Jane Walker Garfield, who to put things into perspective was walking the earth last year. So while Harrison’s kids didn’t like it, a lot of good came into the world because of his second marriage.

Walker Blaine is next to Lodge. President Harrison probably thought he would be the center of attention in this photo, but your eye is naturally drawn to Walker, standing above the rest, proudly behind his mom. Walker, a close friend of Truxtun’s, was thirty-four in this picture. A successful diplomat and lawyer with a bright future. He would be dead within a year.

The long-suffering Harriet Stanwood Blaine stands in front of Walker. She lived until 1903. After her death, her daughter, Harriet Blaine Beale, published two volumes of her mother’s letters that give insight into her personality. They can be found on the Internet Archive here and here. First editions often appear on eBay, and I have copies of each volume.

Behind Harriet Stanwood Blaine and next to Walker, on our right, is Elijah Walker Halford, private secretary to President Harrison. I do not know much about him, except that he may have been born in England and his papers are available for research at the Library of Congress. The fact that “Walker,” which was a family name, is in his name, makes me suspect he was a Blaine relation, although as of now, I don’t know.

Secretary of State James G. Blaine is on our right. He was the Republican nominee for President in 1884 and narrowly lost to Grover Cleveland in a rather nasty election. Cleveland was attacked for having a child out of wedlock, which he never denied. But that’s only part of the story. Blaine was attacked for profiting off his office, which was probably true. So in 1884, the voters could either vote for a guy with some pretty decent ideas but a questionable personal life (Cleveland) or for an uninspiring family man who was corrupt as hell (Blaine). Thank God we haven’t had the choice again.

Finally, standing close to her father was Harriet Blaine, the youngest of the Blaine children. She was about seventeen or eighteen in this photo. With her was her mastiff, Jose, who Truxtun had purchased for her a couple of years before. And while most parents may have been alarmed by a guy in his early thirties buying a dog for their teenage daughter, the Beales and Blaines had known each other for a long time. They were neighbors in Washington. Truxtun’s father, Edward Beale, helped Blaine in his Presidential race, and Truxtun was friends with Walker. And maybe the family just wanted to marry her off to someone. The press, which was brutal back then (not nice like they are now), couldn’t help commenting on her looks. For example, this was written in The New York Times a few years later:

Harriet lived the longest of anyone pictured here. Dying in 1958, at the age of eighty-six, she also outlived, in years and time, Truxtun and his second wife, Marie, who died in 1956.

From a simple picture taken one day in 1889, we have several interesting stories and we can see how even times we thought were long ago are closer than we imagine. And we can see how, in many ways, we aren’t so different from what they were.