In the spring of 1766, a poor boy of fourteen, named William Patterson, from the north of Ireland, landed at Philadelphia. He was the son of a small farmer, a Protestant, one of that conquering Scotch-Irish race which has contributed so many distinguished persons to the history of the United States. The boy obtained a place in the counting-house of an Irish merchant in Philadelphia, and served him with singular diligence and fidelity. He acted upon the principle of making himself valuable to his employer.
At twenty-one he was in business as a merchant. When he had been established about two years the American Revolution broke out, threatening to put a stop to all business. William Patterson availed himself of the crisis to make his own fortune, and, at the same time, to serve his adopted country. He loaded two small vessels with tobacco, indigo, and other American products, investing in the speculation the whole of his small capital, and sailed for France. Both vessels reached France in safety. He sold the cargoes, invested the proceeds in warlike stores, of which General Washington was in direst need, and set sail for home. On the way he touched at St. Eustatius, an island of the Dutch West Indies, then a place of great trade, containing about twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Seeing his chance, he remained on this island, and sent his vessels to Philadelphia.
They were both so lucky as to escape the cruisers, and to arrive in March, 1776, when the army had scarcely powder enough to conceal from the enemy that they were short of powder. We can imagine that these two cargoes of ammunition were welcome enough, and sold at a good price. The vessels appear to have returned to the West Indies, where William Patterson remained two or three years, sending supplies home as best he could, until the alliance with France put an end to the scarcity of military stores. He then prepared to return. In June, 1778, he landed in Baltimore, then a town of three or four thousand inhabitants, bringing with him, in gold and merchandise, a hundred thousand dollars, the result of five years' business.
He was then twenty-six years of age. Upon looking at Baltimore with the eyes of a long-headed man of business, observing its situation, and perceiving the necessity of its becoming one of the first cities of the world, he concluded to settle there. With one half of his fortune he bought lots and lands in and near the city, as Astor did in New York a few years later. With the other half of his capital, including his little fleet of small vessels, he went into the business of a shipping merchant.
During the next twenty years the commerce of the infant republic had a most rapid development, particularly while supplying the warring powers of Europe with provisions. William Patterson in those twenty years accumulated what was then considered an immense fortune. President Jefferson, in 1804, spoke of him as probably the richest person in the United States except Charles Carrol of Carrollton, who inherited lands and slaves. His fortune, too, was a growing one, since he continued to purchase lands near the city that were certain to rise in value with the increase of the place. After settling in Baltimore he married a young lady named Dorcas Spear, and soon became a family man of the old-fashioned type. The Scotch-Irish have the family instinct very strong, and are apt to center all their hopes of happiness in a home. He was a man of quiet and regular habits; during a long life he scarcely ever left Baltimore, either on business or pleasure. He said once, in speaking of his own history, that ever since he had had a house of his own it had been his invariable rule to be up last at night, and to see that the fires and lights were in a safe condition before going to bed. Like other rich men, he served as bank director and president, and held other offices of a similar character from time to time.
The most fortunate individuals--and few men were more fortunate than this Baltimore merchant--have their share of trouble. Calamity came to him in the bewitching guise of a most beautiful daughter, born in the early years of his wedded life. This was that Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, whose recent death at the age of ninety-four has called attention anew to the strange romance of her early life. In 1803, at eighteen years of age, she was the pride of her father's home, and the prettiest girl in Baltimore, a place noted then, as now, for the beauty of its women. If the early portraits of her are correct, the word pretty describes her very well. There was a girlish and simple expression in her countenance at variance with her character, for, with all her faults, she was a woman of force.
In the fall of 1803 this Baltimore beauty attended the races near the city, and there she met her fate. Jerome Bonaparte of the French navy, Napoleon's youngest brother that brother whom he hoped would accomplish on the ocean what he had done on the land was at the races that day. Napoleon wanted a great admiral to cope with Nelson and conquer the British navy, and had flattered himself that this favorite brother could be the man. If beauty of form and face could make a great commander, Jerome would have been a promising candidate; for on the day that he rode out to the Baltimore races in 1803, he was one of the most superb looking young men then living.
They met! All the world knows what followed.
William Patterson, with his sturdy Scottish sense, perceived the utter incongruity and absurdity of such a match. He opposed it by every means in his power. He used both authority and persuasion. He sent her out of town, but she returned more infatuated than before. At length, discovering that both of them were set upon the marriage, he gave a reluctant consent; and married they were, by the Roman Catholic bishop of Baltimore, her father taking every precaution to fulfill all the forms which the laws of both nations required. The Bonaparte family, with one exception, approved the match, and several of them congratulated the newly married pair. That one exception was Napoleon, the head of the family, First Consul, and about to declare himself Emperor. He refused to recognize the marriage. When, at length, Jerome stood in his presence to plead the case of his young and lovely wife, who was about to become a mother, Napoleon addressed him thus: “So, sir, you are the first of the family who has shamefully abandoned his post. It will require many splendid actions to wipe off that stain from your reputation. As to your love affair with your little girl, I pay no regard to it.”
And he never did. Jerome had the baseness to abandon his wife, and she stooped to accept from Napoleon an income of twelve thousand dollars a year, which was paid to her as long as the hand of that coarse soldier had the wasting of the French people’s earnings. She came back to Baltimore with her child, one of the most wretched of women. She thought that marrying into this family of Corsican robbers had elevated her in rank above her wise and virtuous father! She wrote to that father many years after, describing her feelings at this time.
“I hated and loathed a residence in Baltimore so much, that when I thought I was to spend my life there, I tried to screw my courage up to the point of committing suicide. My cowardice, and only my cowardice, prevented my exchanging Baltimore for the grave. After having married a person of the high rank I did, it became impossible for me ever to bend my spirit to marry any one who had been my equal before my marriage, and it became impossible for me ever to be contented in a country where there exists no nobility.”
She never, to the close of her long life of ninety-four years, ceased to cherish such sentiments. In 1849, she wrote from Baltimore to the celebrated Irish authoress, Lady Morgan, a letter in which she gives an amusing revelation of her interior self.
“I consider it,” she wrote, “a good fortune for myself that you inhabit London. To enjoy again your agreeable society will be my tardy compensation for the long, weary, unintellectual years inflicted on me in this my dull native country, to which I have never owed advantages, pleasures, or happiness. I owe nothing to my country; no one expects me to be grateful for the evil chance of having been born here. I shall emancipate myself, par la grace de Dieu, about the middle of July next; and I will either write to you before I leave New York, or immediately after my arrival at Liverpool.
"I had given up all correspondence with my friends in Europe during my vegetation in this Baltimore. What could I write about except the fluctuations in the security and consequent prices of American stocks. There is nothing here worth attention or interest save the money market. Society, conversation, friendship, belong to older countries, and are not yet cultivated in any part of the United States which I have visited. You ought to thank your stars for your European birth; you may believe me when I assure you that it is only distance from republics which lends enchantment to the view of them. I hope that about the middle of next July I shall begin to put the Atlantic between the advantages and honors of democracy and myself. France, Je l'espére dans son intérêt, is in a state of transition, and will not let her brilliant society be put under an extinguisher nommêe la République.
“The emperor hurled me back on what I most hated on earth my Baltimore obscurity; even that shock could not divest me of the admiration I felt for his genius and glory. I have ever been an imperial Bonapartiste quand Même, and I do feel enchanted at the homage paid by six millions of voices to his memory, in voting an imperial president; le prestige du nom has, therefore, elected the prince, who has my best wishes, my most ardent hopes for an empire. I never could endure universal suffrage until it elected the nephew of an emperor for the chief of a republic; and I shall be charmed with universal suffrage once more if it insists upon their president of France becoming a monarch. I am disinterested personally. It is not my desire ever to return to France.
“My clear Lady Morgan, do you know that, having been cheated out of the fortune which I ought to have inherited from my late rich and unjust parent, I have only ten thousand dollars, or two thousand pounds English, which conveniently I can disburse annually. You talk of my ‘princely income,’ which convinces me that you are ignorant of the paucity of my means. I have all my life had poverty to contend with, pecuniary difficulties to torture and mortify me; and but for my industry and energy, and my determination to conquer at last a decent sufficiency to live on in Europe, I might have remained as poor as you saw me in the year 1816."
She speaks in this strange letter of having been disinherited by her father. This was not quite true, although the poor, deluded woman was the plague of her father's declining years. It is but common charity to think that the acuteness of her mortification had impaired in some degree her reason. She spent many years hankering after that false European life, and heaping every kind of contempt upon her native land. She appears to have been incapable of human affection. She abandoned her father and his home, to roam around among the titled idlers of Europe, at a time when he peculiarly needed her presence and aid. He wrote to her thus in 1815, soon after the death of his wife:
“What will the world think of a woman who had recently followed her mother and last sister to the grave, and quit her father's house, where duty and necessity call for her attention as the only female of the family left, and thought proper to abandon all to seek for admiration in f9reign countries ?”
The old man intimates that he, too, regarded her as a person not quite sound in mind. He died in 1835, aged eighty-three years, leaving an immense estate, and the longest will ever recorded in Baltimore. He did not disinherit his daughter, Betsy; but left her a few small houses and lots; which, however, greatly increased in value after his, death. He explains the smallness of his bequest thus:
"The conduct of my daughter Betsy has through life been so disobedient that in no instance has she ever consulted my opinions or feelings; indeed, she has caused me more anxiety and trouble than all my other children put together, and her folly and misconduct have occasioned me a train of expense that first and last has cost me much money. Under such circumstances it would not be reasonable, just, or proper that she should inherit and participate in an equal proportion with my other children in an equal division of my estate; considering, however, the weakness of human nature, and that she is still my daughter, it is my will and pleasure to provide for her as follows, viz.: I give and devise to my said daughter Betsy, first, the house and lot on the cast side of South Street, where she was born, and which is now occupied by Mr. Duncan, the shoemaker. Secondly, the houses and lots on the corner of Market Street bridge, now occupied by Mr. Tulley, the chairmaker, and Mr. Priestly, the cabinetmaker. Thirdly, the three new adjoining brick houses, and the one on the corner of Market and Frederick Streets. Fourthly, two new brick houses and lots on Gay Street, near Griffith's bridge; for and during the term of the natural life of my said daughter Betsy; and after her death I give, devise and bequeath the same to my grandson, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte.”
She survived her father many years, a well-known figure in Baltimore, a brisk old lady with a red umbrella and a black velvet bonnet, with an income of a hundred thousand dollars a year, but living in a boarding-house on two thousand. A lady asked her what religion she preferred. She said that if she adopted any religion it would be the Roman Catholic, because “that was a religion of kings--a royal religion.” Her niece said: “You would not give up Presbyterianism?” To which she replied: “The only reason I would not is, that I should not like to give up the stool my ancestors had sat upon.” She died in April, 1879, and left a million and a half of dollars to her two grandsons. Her letters have been published, and they exhibit to us a character unlike that of any other American woman who has been delineated in print. She once said, with equal sincerity and truth that, in the course of her experience of life she had found but one friend that was always faithful, namely, her Purse. Such a woman can have no other, and to that friend she was faithful unto death.