An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew

by Annejet van der Zijl

Old age and illness are destroyers of individuality. Just as babies look alike, so do people at the end of their lives.

As long as she lay awake at night and heard the sea, she was still there.

But there was one Tew who hadn’t effortlessly followed in the first generation’s successful footsteps, and that was the man who would become Allene’s father: Charles, William’s youngest son. He was born in 1849, the last male descendant in the second generation, and it was as though the available supply of energy and ambition had simply run out.

He would be the only second-generation Tew male in Jamestown never to be lauded in the almanacs in which the era’s most prominent citizens of the region were portrayed.

On July 4, 1876, Americans celebrated one hundred years of independence. And celebrate they did, with a passion; seldom had a country been able to offer its inhabitants as many opportunities as the United States could at that moment.

It was a massive, still largely virgin country full of valuable resources like wood, rivers, and ore. New technologies and inventions were the order of the day, and there was an almost unequaled mentality of ambition and daring. Everything seemed to be conspiring not only to give Americans the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” as set down in the Declaration of Independence, but also to make that happiness genuinely possible.

In subsequent years, new inventions like the combustion engine and developments like the large-scale application of steel heralded the arrival of a second Industrial Revolution, and prosperity in North America became unstoppable. The United States’ share of worldwide industrial output grew to 30 percent, almost as much as that of its former motherland, England, which had considered itself the undisputed leader of the world’s economy up to that point. The Americans, who had been dependent on Europe for many of their resources before the Civil War, now began to export products back to the Old World at competitive prices. Entrepreneurs, still unhindered by limiting factors like income tax or trade regulations, made

The number of millionaires grew, in a few decades, from twenty to forty thousand. The American population tripled between 1865 and 1900 but became, as a whole, a whopping thirteen times richer.

Everything seemed possible in the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called this period of national expansion and unbridled optimism. Paupers came in rags on boats from Europe and worked themselves up to being millionaires. The attraction of this country of unlimited opportunities had never been greater for fortune hunters than it was now. During the first half of the nineteenth century, around two and a half million immigrants risked the ocean crossing; during the second half, the stream swelled to a dazzling eleven million.

She grew up with something better than wealth, a dream—the American dream, in which you could become whatever you wanted, wherever you came from. In which, as her great-uncle George and her grandfather had proved, you could start out in a primitive cabin in the middle of the hostile wilderness and end up in a marble bank building in a booming city, a city that you had wrested from the woods with your bare hands.