sheet. It was
exceptionally spicy, and it dealt so much in personalities that my
father, who was a gentleman of the old school with very conservative
views, was not, to say the least, one of its strongest admirers. Several
years before the Civil War, at a time when the anti-slavery cauldron was
at its boiling point, its editor, the elder James Gordon Bennett,
dubbed its three journalistic contemporaries in New York, the World, the
Flesh, and the Devil--the _World_, representing human life with all its
pomps and vanities; the _Times_, as a sheet as vacillating as the flesh;
and the _Tribune_, as the virulent champion of abolition, the
counterpart of the Devil himself.

During the winter of 1842 James Gordon Bennett took his bride, who was
Miss Henrietta Agnes Crean of New York, to Washington on their wedding
journey. As this season had been unusually severe, great distress
prevailed, and a number of society women organized a charity ball for
the relief of the destitute. It was given under the patronage of Mrs.
Madison (the ex-President's widow), Mrs. Samuel L. Gouverneur (my
husband's mother), Mrs. Benjamin Ogle Tayloe (Julia Maria Dickinson of
Troy, New York), and other society matrons, and, as can readily be
understood, was a financial as well as a social success. Tickets were
eagerly sought, and Mr. Bennett applied for them for his wife and
himself. At first he was refused, but after further consideration Mrs.
Madison and Mrs. Gouverneur of the committee upon invitations granted
his request on condition that no mention of the ball should appear in
the columns of the _Herald_. Mr. Bennett and his wife accordingly
attended the entertainment, where the latter was much admired and danced
to her heart's content. Two days later, however, much to the chagrin and
indignation of the managers, an extended account of the ball appeared in
the _Herald_. This incident will be better appreciated when I state that
at this time the personal mention of a woman in a newspaper was an
unheard-of liberty. It was the old-fashioned idea that a woman's name
should occur but twice in print, first upon the occasion of her marriage
and subsequently upon the announcement of her death. My husband once
remarked to me, upon reading a description of a dress worn by one of my
daughters at a ball, that if such a notice had appeared in a newspaper
in connection with his sister he or his father would have thrashed the
editor.

John L. O'Sullivan, a pr