MARRIAGE
In the summer of 1837, before leaving Virginia for his high endeavor in the land which he sometimes calls the "South," but more often the "Far West" young Archibald Cary had become engaged to be married. His fiancee was Monimia, youngest daughter of old Thomas Fairfax of Vaucluse, Fairfax County, Virginia. Archibald was twenty-two and Monimia but seventeen and they agreed to keep
the engagement secret until her old father could be persuaded to agree. Monimia was of course a cousin, for that was an almost unavoidable status in a marriage between tidewater families. Moreover, Dr. Orlando Fairfax, an older brother of Monimia had, some years earlier, married
Mary Randolph Cary, the sister of Archibald. The result of these two unions was a group of "double-first" cousins, well known in Alexandria before the war.
One member of each family was in the secret of the engagement. One of these was Archibald's younger sister Martha ["Patsy"] Jefferson Cary, of the same age as Monimia, and who, in later years became Mrs. Gouverneur Morris of Morrisania, New York. The other was Monimia's elder sister, Eugenia, and we suspect that she served as an "accommodation post" for the young man's letters to his lady-love. Since Monimia had come with sister Eugenia to the railway station to see Archibald off on the first leg of his journey, he was able to write in his first letter from Mississippi to his own sister Patsy "I have had a fine opportunity to accomplish the desire end expressed in my letter from Edge Hill--the result you shall all know when I return to the north next summer."
Old Thomas Fairfax was somewhat of a domestic tyrant. A miniature of him done in his old age shows rather a forbidding personality--aquiline features, and cold blue eyes scarcely softened by a mane of long white hair. He was, no doubt exasperated by an over-abundance of widowed
daughters in his household, who came winging back to Vaucluse upon their respective bereavements. Moreover, his wife's two sisters, maiden ladies of a certain age and eccentric dispositions formed part of his establishment. Such was his impatience with a house full of unoccupied females that he had built himself a bolt-hole in Alexandria, still known there as the "Fairfax House."
Thomas Fairfax had been fifteen years old when the Declaration of Independence, of which he heartily approved, had been signed. But when that had been attained, he still found there was something lacking--he wanted his own personal independence. So one morning, without a word to anybody, he drove quietly away from home in his shay, and was gone for two years. Weeks later it was discovered that he had driven all the way to Salem, Masschusetts to visit relatives there who were agreeably puritanical, since one of their ancestors had sat upon the court which condemned the last witches tried in New England. He kept a journal of his long drive which was printed in London a few years ago by the late Lord Fairfax.
Though old Thomas Fairfax hardly seems to have been what Dr. Johnson called "clubbable", he had three much esteemed and popular sons, Henry, who died in the War in Mexico, Dr. Orlando Fairfax of Alexandria and Richmond, and his youngest, a sailor son Reginald who was enshrined forever in the hearts of the children at Vauclause because of the weird specimens, dried or stuffed, he brought home from time to time from foreign climes. Even Lieutenant Reginald Fairfax found momentsat
Vaucluse when he wished he were back on the quarter-deck, for it was noticed that whenever anybody who was not present was criticized in the family circle, he would slip silently from the room.
Such, then, was the family into which Archibald Cary was to marry. At the time of the wedding early in the summer of 1838, Patsy Cary wrote to an elder sister who was absent in the north, "This is without doubt a love match as there is certainly no interest in the case."
In October the newly-married couple started off for "that dreadful country" as Patsy called Port Gibson. They steamed down the Ohio and the Mississippi upon "the monster," "the river-autocrat," "the emperor,"--a most palatial boat. The only disturbances on board were caused by the inevitable river gamblers. Archibald is so delighted with his honeymoon that he naively asks the Captain how much it would cost them by the year to stay permanently on board. Monimia causes much amusement
by asking an acquaintance on the promenade deck if he would find for her "the gentleman I am traveling with." She was too shy to say in public the embarassing words "my husband !'