April 20, 2010
My RJB research continues to go well — though since I’m in 1852, I’m heading into one of the worst stretches, as RJ’s marriage to Virginia is falling apart. They married in 1847 and seem to have done pretty well for a couple years. But Virginia never got along well with his eight children. I came across a couple letters in 1851-52, where the 15 year old Marie (who prided herself on being only the third fattest girl in her school) told her father that she couldn’t write to her brother or sister because she feared that she would misspell the word “which.” The first time I saw that, I wondered. After the second time (by which point I had come across other unmistakable indications), it became clear that the Breckinridge children may well have been the ones who came up with the “Witch of Danville” nickname.
This is not to absolve RJ. While he seems to have gotten along fairly well with her children at first, her two sons died in 1848, and her 19-year old daughter soon married and wound up in a protracted legal battle with RJ over her father’s estate. I don’t think that was wise. He plainly had the law on his side (and so was able to gain a sizeable piece of the Shelby estate for their daughter, Virginia), but his wife was furious. She wanted the entire Shelby estate to go to her daughter, Susan. RJ’s comment to his nephew, John C. Breckinridge, who had served as his lawyer for the case, reveals something of the strain in the marriage: the news of the verdict was “to the inexpressible distress and rage of your Aunt; and to my perfect satisfaction.”
It has been interesting to watch the Breckinridge children grow up. Mary was four years older than any of the others (she was the only one of the first four children to make it past the age of four), so she was the responsible sixteen-year-old who took care of her younger siblings after the death of their mother in 1844. But when Mary married William Warfield in 1848, her younger sister Sally began to step into her place. By the time she was 19 in 1851, RJB felt comfortable letting Sally take seven-year old Charley from Baltimore (where he was at the General Assembly) to Richmond to visit family for a few weeks. A few weeks turned into a few months (after all, no one in those days would dream of sending an unaccompanied 19-year old girl across or around the mountains from Virginia to Kentucky), and so Sally and Charley wound up traveling with cousins who were visiting relatives in Virginia, South Carolina, and New Orleans, before finally coming up to Louisville with Cousin Sally McDowell (yes, the same Sally McDowell who six years before had divorced Governor Thomas — and five years later would marry John Miller — it turns out that she spent a couple months in Kentucky with RJ and Virginia in the spring of 1852, which gives her letters to John a whole lot more weight than I first gave them). Sally’s letters to her father reveal a very confident young woman who sought to respect her father’s wishes — but also (given the fact that her father’s wishes might take a week to become known!) was capable of making responsible decisions for herself and her brother. She even counseled her father in how to handle her 17-year-old brother RJ Junior (who was the black sheep of the family — a drunk, a gambler, and a womanizer by the age of 17! Oh, how his father must have rued the day that he named a son after himself!), and professed to be eager to get back to Lexington and resume the charge of RJ’s children — which again demonstrates that Virginia was simply not interested in them.
