The Square Pegs (33 page)

The tribute he most desired—an expedition into the earth’s interior— he would never receive. For less than a century after his death men had already learned firsthand that Symmes’s Hole existed neither in the Arctic nor in the Antarctic. If Peary’s discovery of the North Pole by land in 1909 had not been evidence enough, then certainly, the flights made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd over the North Pole in 1926 and the South Pole in 1929 would have severely taxed Symmes’s faith. As a matter of fact, soon enough, men would know all they needed to know of the inner world without the use of polar openings. Instead of attempting physical exploration, the engineers and geologists of a new era would sink manmade wells deeper into the ground than the Grand Canyon an oil well in Wyoming would penetrate 20,000 feet below the surface, and another in California would reach a depth of over 21,000 feet and through these drillings, as well as by analysis of radioactive rock, heat measurements in mines, and earthquake waves, they would learn much about the unseen world below. Though their borings and instruments would not take geophysicists more than one quarter of one per cent of the distance toward the earth’s center, they would know with some assurance that beneath the earth’s thin granite crust, only thirty-seven miles thick, lay a zone of rock, then one of iron, and then the great core itself, the size of Mars, composed of iron and nickel in a molten, plastic stage.

In this hot, dense interior, Symmes would have found little room for his five concentric spheres, little comfort for his underworld citizenry. Fortunately, he had died before the final disillusionment or he might not have rested so easily in his hollow and happier earth.

VIII

The Editor Who Was a Common Scold

“… let all pious Generals, Colonels and Commanders of our army and navy who make war upon old women beware.”

ANNE ROYALL

Between the years 1825 and 1829 the president of the United States was John Quincy Adams, whose father had been a chief executive before him. Adams was a lonely introvert, learned, austere, honest, and of formal habits except for one. It was his custom, during his single term, to rise before dawn, usually between four o’clock and six o’clock, dress, surreptitiously leave the White House, cross the expanse of front lawn that looked out upon the Potomac River, step behind a growth of shrubbery, remove his clothes, and then, quite naked, step into the water for a relaxing swim. Sometimes he would paddle about for an hour, then crawl up to the bank to dry himself with napkins, slowly dress again, and finally return to the White House fully refreshed and ready for his breakfast, his Bible, and his governmental chores. We do not know when these presidential swims ceased to be relaxing, but we do know when they ceased to be private. They became a spectator sport on that early summer morning, toward the end of the President’s term, when he emerged from the Potomac in his usual state of undress to find a rotund, unkempt, gray-haired woman casually seated on his under-wear, shirt, and breeches. Startled, the President hastily retreated into the river, halting only when the water reached his chin.

When he found his wits he angrily ordered the lady to leave at once. In a rasping voice she replied that she had hunted down the President so that she might interview him about the controversy surrounding the Bank of the United States, and that she intended to remain until he made a statement. It must be understood that this was an age when the President did not give interviews to reporters or hold press conferences, and that to grant this request John Quincy Adams had to break a precedent of long standing. Yet, he knew that if he did not break precedent, he might remain in the Potomac for the remainder of his administration for he knew the woman on the bank, and knew that if he was the immovable object, she was the irresistible force.

Her name was Anne Newport Royall. Raised on the Pennsylvania frontier, married to a wealthy and scholarly veteran of the Revolution, she had been deprived of her rightful inheritance and had come to Washington to obtain a widow’s pension. Adams had first met and befriended her the year before he was elected to the presidency, while he was still Monroe’s secretary of State. He had tolerated her obvious eccentricity, ignored her Masonic fanaticism, and promised to assist her in collecting the pension. He had also introduced her to his English-born wife, and had subscribed in advance to a book of travel she was planning to write. The book had since become five books, and her last three volumes, entitled
The Black Book, or a Continuation of Travels in the United States
, had shocked, irritated, and amused Washington and readers throughout the nation.

While other lady writers dipped their quills in gentility, Anne Royall more often dipped hers in venom. She, who would meet all fourteen presidents from Washington to Pierce, had already interviewed President Adams’s eighty-nine-year-old father. “When I mentioned his son, the present President and Mrs. A the tear glittered in his eye; he attempted to reply but was overcome by emotion. Finding the subject too tender I dropped it as quickly as possible.” She was less tender with other public figures. She found John Randolph of Roanoke pompous but gentlemanly. “He is said to be immensely rich but not charitable.” A brigadier general, who was anti-Mason, was ridiculous: “He is in height not quite so tall as the Puppy-skin Parson, about five feet, I should think, and about the size of a full-grown raccoon, which he resembles in phiz.” A New Haven attorney who ejected her from his office deserved only ridicule. “He generally wears a blue coat, short breeches and long boots; his body is large, his legs spindling; he wears powder in his hair; his face resembles a full moon in shape, and is as red as a fiery furnace, the effect of drinking pure water, no doubt.”

Anne Royall was as frank and harsh in discussing the municipalities that she visited, the sectional customs that she observed, and the national issues that she heard debated. In the pages of
The Black Book
she made clear her distaste for the Bank of the United States. The bank, a powerful monopoly capitalized at $35,000,000, controlled the lion’s share of government deposits. Its president, the socially eminent Nicholas Biddle, of Philadelphia, had once remarked: “As to mere power, I have been for years in the daily exercise of more personal authority than any President.” Upon meeting Anne Royall in person after she had castigated him in print, Biddle warned her with a smile: “Ah, Mrs. Royall, I will have you tried for your life for killing my President.”

To the relief of a majority of the population, the bank’s charter was to expire in 1836. However, there was a rumor that Biddle might try to force the Congress and President Adams to forestall this expiration by granting a new fifteen-year monopoly. It was to clarify this burning question for a forthcoming book that Mrs. Royall, tugging at her worn shawl and waving her green umbrella, had stormed the White House in an effort to see President Adams. He had refused to admit her. Persistent as an angry bee, Mrs. Royall investigated the President’s routine, learned of the morning swims, and soon managed to secrete herself on the White House grounds. When her prey was in the water she made her way to the riverbank and planted herself upon his clothes.

As the President impatiently remained immersed in the Potomac, Anne Royall shrilly reiterated her demand for an interview. Wearily, one may be sure, the President gave indication that he would cooperate. Mrs. Royall then asked him several pointed questions about the Bank of the United States. As she was a rabid Jacksonian who wanted the charter revoked, her questions were doubtless irritating. Nevertheless, the President answered them directly and fully. When the interview was done, Mrs. Royall rose, graciously thanked him, and triumphantly hobbled away. And Adams, having dispensed with the first executive press conference in American history, was free at last to wade out of the water and resume the dignity of full attire.

When someone at a later date asked Adams what he made of the remarkable Mrs. Royall, he ruefully replied: “Sir, she is a virago errant in enchanted armor.” No man ever characterized her better.

She was born Anne Newport near Baltimore, Maryland, on June 11, 1769. Her father, William Newport, was an offspring of the aristocratic Calvert family, but illegitimate and an embarrassment. He was given the name Newport instead of Calvert, awarded a small annuity, and kept at a distance from the manor house. He married a farm girl, and, mindful of his noble ancestry, named the first of his two daughters after Queen Anne of England. When the colonies seethed with revolt, and men took sides, Newport refused to be linked with the patriotic rabble. He announced himself a Tory sympathetic to the British crown and worked for the Tory cause. When his neighbors made threats, and the Calverts ended his annuity by fleeing to England, Newport realized that Maryland had become uncomfortable.

In 1772, when Anne was three years old, Newport took his family for a brief stay with his wife’s relatives in Virginia, and then joined a wagon train heading for the wilderness of Pennsylvania. In Westmoreland County, in the vicinity of present-day Pittsburgh, he built a narrow cabin, furnished it with a large bed and four crude stools, and tilled a small farm. He encouraged his wife to practice herb healing on the colonists, and he taught Anne the rudiments of reading by the phonetic method. On some unrecorded date Newport lost his life, probably in an Indian massacre. His widow and two daughters hastily moved to the safety of a fortified settlement known as Hannastown. Anne was twelve years old when her mother, desperately in need of support, married her second husband, a man named Butler. For Anne, the products of this new union were a measure of security and a half brother named James.

The Indians, attempting to stem the tide of white migration, were on the warpath. Life became a succession of alarms. So frequent were the hit and run attacks that eventually, they became a bore. When redskins approached one cabin outside the fort, as Anne recalled later, the housewife refused to take flight until she had dusted the furniture. “I can’t go off and leave such a looking house,” she said. But the party of savages that advanced on the thirty to forty cabins of Hannastown on July 13, 1782, was larger and more formidable than usual. Anne and her family fled to the protection of one of the three nearby forts. A large crowd of guests, including the settlement founder’s family, attending a wedding celebration at Miller’s Station in the vicinity, did not flee. The Indians fell upon them, slaughtered the men, took sixty women and children captive, put all of Hannastown to the torch, and left.

Despite the horror of this attack, most of the survivors remained in the area. Anne stayed on only three years more. By 1785, when she was sixteen, her stepfather had died, her younger sister had married, and she, her half brother, and her mother were again destitute. Mrs. Butler decided to leave the frontier and seek help from relations in Virginia. Upon arriving in Staunton, Virginia, Mrs. Butler fell ill of blood poisoning. She was advised to visit the nearby health resort at Old Sweet Springs, located in a valley of Monroe County. Though the cure worked, it did not replenish the family purse. Mrs. Butler would have been reduced to beggary had not the richest man in the county, Captain William Royall, heard of her lot. He immediately hired her as “his washwoman and menial,” an eccentricity frowned upon by his fellow landowners, who felt that such tasks assigned to a white woman instead of a slave would cause general loss of face. In hiring Mrs. Butler, Captain Royall also undertook the responsibility of providing for her children. And thus it was, in the most unashamedly romantic tradition, that Anne entered the great house on the slope of Sweet Springs Mountain and first kid eyes upon her future husband.

Captain Royall had served America well during the revolution. In 1777, at the age of twenty-seven, he had personally raised and financed Virginia’s first company of militia. He claimed that Patrick Henry had served under him. He and his militia raided a ship on which the British Governor, Lord Dunmore, guarded a vast store of ammunition. He spent, Anne later stated, “a fortune in the war. He was rich and generous. He brought the troops from Virginia and North Carolina, after Gates’ defeat, at his own expense to Guilford Courthouse, N.C. Entitled to ten rations a day, he never drew a dollar. He was Judge-Advocate to the Brigade, Judge-Advocate to the regiment.” He was an aide to Lafayette, and belonged to the same Masonic Lodge as his friend George Washington. He left the Army not a general, as Anne liked to think, but a captain, and in lieu of back salary accepted the acreage at Sweet Springs Mountain.

Because he was the wealthiest landowner in the area, his eccentricities were tolerated. He released slaves and would not buy new ones. He allowed his livestock to run wild. He would not permit “unnatural” cattle such as geldings and steers in his herds. He was obsessed with the virtues of Freemasonry. He was devoted to Thomas Paine and Voltaire, and his enormous library, filled with books by democratic authors and French philosophers, was generally regarded as radical. He was aristocratic and bookish, yet friendly and kind. He was uninterested in his many property holdings, and he disliked his many relatives. He lived the life of a puttering, scholarly recluse until he became interested in Anne.

For twelve years Anne lived under the Captain’s keen eye, first as a somewhat spindly, energetic assistant to her mother in household chores, then as a slender, darkly attractive assistant to her employer in managing minor affairs of his estate, and finally, as her master’s pretty and maturing protegee. After the passage of a few years Captain Royall learned, to his utter astonishment, that Anne possessed an intelligence beyond what he had expected in a menial. She wanted to become as educated as he was himself. She hungered to know what he knew. Only her semi-literacy held her back. The Captain’s astonishment turned to delight. He made Anne his project and his Galatea. After teaching her to read and to write, he fed her book after book off his shelves, all of Jefferson, all of Voltaire, all of Masonic history. He poured his entire library into her until, as one contemporary reported, “she became the most learned woman in all the county.” For almost twelve years he molded her in his image. Then he fell in love with his creation.