ABOUT three miles distant from
the Wallace House is a venerable old Dutch dwelling, reposing above the placid little Raritan. It was erected half a century
before the Revolution by a member of the Van Veghten family,
and it is truly an abode of merry memories, as it was the head-quarters of General Greene
and his wife – the dancing Greenes – during the army's
stay in Central Jersey.
The Van Veghten family were among the first Dutch
pioneers in the Raritan Valley, and the name is prominent
in Somerset history. At the time of the Greene occupancy of the Van Veghten House aged Derrick Van
Veghten was the host, and there are traditions that he was
the willing slave of the young wife, then in her early twenties. Mrs. Greene will always be remembered as one of
the brightest and sprightliest figures in Revolutionary history. Very fascinating, indeed, she was to have made the
generally grave and austere Washington forget his dignity, which she did on one occasion. We have her
husband's own words, in a letter to Colonel Wadsworth,
that there was a little dance at the Van Veghten House
on March 19, 1779, when "His Excellency danced
with Mrs. Greene for three hours without sitting down,"
and ending his communication with the giddily sounding sentence, "Upon the whole we had a pretty little
frisk."
General Greene, although of Quaker origin, was exceptionally fond of "the Devil's exercise," as some of the
most stem of the Quakers of Southern Jersey used to
refer to dancing, and many anecdotes have come down
to us of his fondness for the pastime. W e read of him
first as a handsome, fun-loving youth, going to balls
and parties by stealth, and his stern father on some
evenings parading his hallway with a horsewhip to greet
him on his return home. Then there are those happy
'dances at Block Island, the home of Mrs. Greene, who
was then Miss Littlefield, the governor's ward, and so
on all through his life, until his sad death at Mulberry
Grove, the seat Congress voted him in Georgia, he seems
to have always gone hand in hand with the frolicsome
muse. The night of his commander-in-chief's little frisk
with Mrs. Greene he too was probably tripping his
merriest with some fair partner. Perhaps she was little
Cornelia Lott, over from Beaverwyck, near Morristown,
with her harp and French books, as Mrs. Greene's guest,
or one of the Andrew girls, staying with Mrs. Knox,
"fetched by the beauing Captain Lilly from Elizabeth
Town." But we shall have to content ourselves with only a guess at her identity, for no record has been preserved of the company. One young man, at least, who
must have been there was Harry Lee, the gay Virginian
for whom Mrs. Greene conceived such an affection.
Upon their first meeting they were attracted to each
other, and the friendship lasted all through life, Lee
dying at Mrs. Greene's Georgia home. He inherited
his mother's beauty of features, who is said to have been
Washington's " Lowland Beauty;" and from his chiefs
evident partiality for hint, he was sometimes dubbed
the pet of the army."
Most likely some of the gay young officers helping
our cause were also present. Baron Stevens's secretary,
Pierre Duponceau, was the leader in all frolicking. He
was then only nineteen, and had given many proofs of
his Gallic assurance since his kissing a pretty girl on a
Portsmouth street to celebrate his arrival in America.
The French were very high in the country's esteem
then, just after the celebration of the anniversary of the
French alliance, and a French name was a passport to the
best society. This feeling grew; and when a son was
born to Louis XVI., at the close of the Revolution,
nearly every city was en fete, and Philip Freneau put
into the mouth of Prince William Henry, the lad who
became King William IV., some amusing verses echo-ing the sentiment of the times, of which the following
is a specimen:
People are mad to thus adore the dauphin –
Heaven grant the brat may soon be in his coffin.
The honors here to this young Frenchman shown
Of right should be King George's or my own.
Besides this record of frivolity the old Van Veghten
House boasts of many other stories. Its walls could
tell of Mrs. Greene's long hours of serving for the
soldiers, making her almost a rival of the knitting wife
of Counsellor Condict at Morristown ; of her planning
for better quarters for the privates with her host, one of
those staunch patriots who held nothing back from his
country; and of her enduring devotion to the sick and
suffering soldiers.
From all that is known of Mrs. Greene, she was a
fitting helpmate for a man who after undergoing all the
hardships of the Revolution still retained enough sentiment in his nature to want to play "Puss in the Comer"
with his wife for the sake of old times, when, after the
war was over, visiting her former home at Block Island
where he had wooed and won her.
Though we know of her goodness and charity, we
like best to picture her on the night she made the Father
of his Country dance three hours. Perhaps it was partly
in memory of this dance at the Van Veghten House,
when in later years she appeared at one of Mrs. Washington's state levees in Philadelphia as a widow, that the
President personally brought her from and conducted her
to her carriage, an honor much remarked upon at the
time.
