The content discusses the friendship of two creative Congressmen, Henry Bedinger and Alexander “Alec” Boteler. Before Bedinger became the first US Ambassador to Denmark in the 1850s, the two were close friends, both young lawyers with families, and shared a love for art, with Henry into poetry and Alec into drawing and painting. Alec was the great-grandson on his mother’s side to Charles Willson Peale, the leading portrait painter in early America, who painted General Washington. Even while at Princeton, Alec’s passion for art surfaced while he drew a sketch of a beautiful girl named Helen Stockton, who he eventually married.
After serving in Congress, Bedinger left with his family for Denmark, leaving Boteler to serve in his old Congressional seat until just before the Civil War. But in 1852, Boteler had to pay nearly $20,000 because of a business calamity, a large part of it his wife’s money, which may have propelled him into the field of elected office with a steady salary. In 1856, Congress had voted its first annual salary of $3,000. As a Congressman, Boteler created a cartoon of Charles Harper’s home and apothecary shop with an ominous caption from Shakespeare’s Henry VI.
After serving as Ambassador, Bedinger finally returned home to his wife, who brought back the Christmas custom of a decorated tree, a completely new notion in Long Island and Shepherdstown. Bedinger became a favorite of King Frederick VII, and many a late evening was spent playing chess with an excessively homely and sensitive man, Hans Christian Anderson, the famed children’s writer.
Posted by Jim Surkamp on 2015-03-26 12:49:04