Chapter 3 of civilwarscholars.com focuses on the friendship between Henry Bedinger and Alec Boteler, two creative Congressmen from the area. Both were young lawyers with families and had a strong penchant for art – Henry for poetry and Alec for drawing and painting. Alec’s great-grandfather was Charles Willson Peale, the leading portrait painter in early America, who painted General Washington. Alec’s passion for drawing surfaced in fantastic irrepressible ways when he was a student at Princeton. As a young student, he drew the profile of a beautiful girl, Helen Stockton, whom he later met, fell in love with and married.
In 1851, while Henry Bedinger was home at his ancestral home at Bedford nearby and just outside Shepherdstown, he tossed off a limerick to his neighbor over the hill at Fountain Rock. Inspired by his recent readings of Robert Burns, he invited his friend Alec Boteler and others for a night of joy, “Just don your plaidie my merry boy, And o’er the meadow to me. A wee bit room in eastern wing, A ceiling so love and snug, A cheerfu’ bleeze in the chimney neuk And ablains a bit of a jug.”
After serving in Congress for four years, Henry Bedinger left with his family for Denmark where he served as the country’s first ambassador there for most of the 1850s. Meanwhile, Alec Boteler had a costly miscalculation in 1852 when a business calamity overtook him. In 1859, he served in Bedinger’s old Congressional seat from early 1859 until just before war broke out. In 1856, Congress had voted its first annual salary of $3,000.
In November of 1858, Ambassador Henry Bedinger finally returned home to Carrie and their three children who returned from Denmark two years earlier. They brought back the widespread Christmas custom of a decorated tree – a completely new notion in Long Island and Shepherdstown. The custom “caught on” in Europe when Prince Albert and Queen Victoria had one.
Posted by Jim Surkamp on 2015-03-26 12:48:55