Chapter 3 of Civil War Scholars’ video and post explores the friendship between Henry Bedinger and Alec Boteler, two young fathers and lawyers with a shared love for art. Boteler’s great-grandfather was Charles Willson Peale, the leading portrait painter in early America, and Boteler himself loved drawing and painting. However, his father wanted him to pursue a more practical career, and he eventually became a congressman. Bedinger, on the other hand, was a passionate poet.
The two men’s friendship was cemented when Bedinger tossed off a limerick to his neighbor over the hill at Fountain Rock, inspired by his readings of Robert Burns. After serving in Congress for four years, Bedinger left with his family for Denmark, where he served as America’s first ambassador there for much of the 1850s. Meanwhile, Boteler had a costly miscalculation when he was forced to pay nearly twenty thousand dollars due to the failure of a local merchant. This may have pushed him into the field of elected office, and he served in Bedinger’s old Congressional seat from early 1859 until just before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Boteler continued to pursue his love of art, creating a cartoon of Charles Harper’s home and apothecary shop with the ominous words from Shakespeare’s Henry VI: “Heavy looks foretell some dreadful story hanging on thy tongue.” Bedinger, meanwhile, became a favorite to King Frederick VII of Denmark, and even played chess with Hans Christian Anderson. Upon their return to the United States, Bedinger’s family brought back the custom of a decorated Christmas tree, which had caught on in Europe when Prince Albert and Queen Victoria had one. Bedinger wrote about his homesickness, but his friendship with Boteler endured.
Posted by Jim Surkamp on 2015-03-26 12:49:08