34 Southern Historical Society Papers.
with great artistic talent, and a painter far beyond mediocre amateur ability.
Her grandfather, William Johnson, of Charleston, was a patriot of prominence and force, and was deported by Sir Henry Clinton to St. Augustine with other distinguished patriots of South Car- olina.
During the siege of Charleston, his wife, Sarah Johnson, nee Nightingale, used to quilt her peticoats with cartridges, which she thus conveyed to her husband in the trenches.
With such traditions, the great-granddaughter of Sarah Nightin- gale Johnson and William Johnson, soldier and exile, could only be imbued with patriotism, with courage, with sentiment.
She spent the four years of her father's residence in Spain with him and her mother, and entered society there by her presentation at Court. There she became intimate with Eugenie di Montijo, Countess of Teba, who afterwards became Empress of the French. The attachment between the young girls was such that on the marriage of the Countess to the Emperor she sent her portrait to her American friend, which, though only a print, was and is, con- sidered the best likeness of her ever made.
Mrs. Johnson was a success at the Court of Isabella, the Catholic, and of Louis Napoleon, Emperor of the French in Paris, where she and her sister and mother spent the winter. In December, 1849, General Saunders was recalled and came home.
In 1851, Miss Saunders was married to Bradley T. Johnson, who had just been admitted to the Bar, and to whom she had been en- gaged for the preceding six years.
She was not 18, he just 21, and they went to live in Frederick, Maryland, where he rapidly acquired a good position at the Bar.
In 1857, in the great struggle to save the State from the Know- Nothing faction, he was placed at the head of the State ticket as the Democratic candidate for Comptroller of the Treasury, but was defeated by the Plug Ugly and Blood Tub Clubs, and fraudulent votes, and stuffed ballot-boxes, of the city of Baltimore.
In 1859, he was made the head of the Democratic organiza- tion of the State, as Chairman of the Democratic State Committee, and was a delegate from the State to the Charleston National Con- vention of 1860.
There he acted, spoke and voted with the extreme Southern wing of the Democratic party, and when the convention adjourned to Baltimore, joined with a majority of the Maryland Delegation, in
