Why Grover Cleveland Married The Girl He Was Guardian To

Subscribe to my channel    / @loveandsuccession   In 1864, a 27 old Buffalo lawyer walked into his best friend's house to meet a days-old baby girl, and he brought her a present: a baby carriage. 22 years later he married her in the Blue Room of the White House while serving as President of the United States. He was 49. She was 21, still the youngest First Lady in American history. Almost everyone tells this story wrong. They say Grover Cleveland was Frances Folsom's legal guardian and married his own ward. He wasn't, and the paper trail says something narrower and stranger: after her father's death he was appointed administrator of the estate, a ledger, not a child. But the correction is not the defence people think it is. What the myth covers up is worse than the myth. This video follows the documents instead of the legend: the 11 year old whose age has been quietly shaved down for a century, the diploma that appeared when a future mayor intervened in a schoolgirl's education, the 10 month secret engagement carried across an ocean while Washington gossiped that he was courting the mother, the 1874 Buffalo birth record with the middle name Folsom on it, and five surviving letters in Cleveland's own hand in which he looks straight at what the White House will do to a twenty-one-year-old, "her clear life repressed and perplexed", asks himself in writing whether it is right, and does it anyway. It ends with what Frances did at 48, alone, with the entire archive of her husband's life in her hands. If you want history told this way, the document first, the story second, and an honest sentence whenever the record runs out, subscribe. There are more files than you would think, and I keep opening them.