A Queen's Progress

Charlotte moved down to Philadelphia lulled, it turned out, falsely. If she expected a brass hand and welcome home speeches at the Walnut, she overlooked the important fact that the city of brotherly love was the hometown of Edwin Forrest. Stormy applause greeted her entrance, October 29, in The Stranger, but an angry press outshouted it next day. Nobody could accuse Forrest directly, hut when one paper screamed "anti-American"¹ at her for bringing along the English Couldock to support her, when another paper jeered that England had taught her nothing hut Macready's mannerisms, when still another cried that she had come back a wretched "attitudinizer,"² Charlotte recognized the telltale signs of Forrest's work with the press.

She might have grieved at the bitter hostility if every night eager crowds had failed to jam Walnut Street and overflow round the corner. To reach the stage door she and Sallie forced their way through a crush of people begging for autographs or grimly determined to touch her. On November 8 when the Governor came to see her as Meg, the box office turned away hundreds.³ Still, if the papers could not ruin her with the Philadelphia public, they cheerfully supported her rough reception backstage. Against herself and Couldock, Charlotte found the Walnut company ranked almost solidly. Her "lofty manner" annoyed them, wrote one reporter; by "her supercilious and ridiculous airs" she meant to show, he supposed, that "her aristocratical associations" in England had forever set her apart from "her poor sisterhood"⁴ at home.

Charlotte could waste no thoughts on her "sisterhood." Fanny Kemble and William Macready could grandly disdain the greenroom lest they rub shoulders with mediocrity, hut she understood well enough the sullen looks she saw in these lesser faces. An envy all too human had sent them running to the Philadelphia papers. In this light, she could discount the papers' demands that the once "sensible Yankee girl" become herself again. Whether or not she had really brought home a taste for "the ribbon and the star," she had assuredly not come home to apologize for English success. She would cheerfully occupy whatever pedestal existed for talent. If jealousy now accused her of "airs," she would be the star that better critics than these had recognized. If envy accused her now of managing people necessary to her, she would mind the main chance like any good Yankee when opportunity opened.

When her run concluded in late November with the largest receipts ever taken in Philadelphia--neither Forrest nor Macready nor Kean had ever outdrawn her--she could rest content with her victory,⁵ secure in the knowledge that whatever fiasco Forrest had planned had come to nothing. Before she left Philadelphia, she took time out to invest in some local real estate. Money put into property now might ease the road ahead if a fickle public ever changed its affections.

Heading for Boston, Charlotte counted her blessings. Couldock had a high temper, hut he filled his role well; he did not upstage her. With Matilda at her side, marshaling visitors that daily flocked through her rooms, she could bask in a sense of home and permanence, no matter what the hotel. In Sallie, she had found a maid who could deal with the upsets that always went with travel, late arrivals, lost luggage, damaged stage props, the numberless little reversals that complicated her life. Once on stage when she forgot a speech, she moved to the side where Sallie fed her the lines. In the best New England sense, Sallie had "faculty." In tribute, her last day in Philadelphia she bought a house for Sallie's mother and laid the deed for it in Sallie's hand.

In Boston she would court no risk of failure--either on stage or in the drawing rooms of Boston's best houses. Though the National Theatre was now run by her old childhood friend William Pelby, she rejected it because its location was "unattractive." She also rejected Thorne's Howard Athenaeum because it could not match her terms. When the Boston Theatre raised the price of its tickets to meet her demands, she agreed to play there.

For this, Boston's best critic upbraided her soundly: "Acorn" blamed her "ruinous" prices for the fact that her opening as Mrs. Haller was not jammed. It was a fault of the whole star system, said "Acorn," that a star was able to bleed a town white before moving on, leaving the earnest local company struggling to stay alive. Charlotte saw the weak points in the system; she herself had suffered in her early days at the Park when the regular company played to forlorn-looking, thinly scattered audiences, while the very next week crowds "crushed each other to get a sight of some flippant, well-puffed star."⁶ The difference now was the value she could give the crowd's dollar. No flippant pretender, she was now fully aware of her worth as an artist. But she was no longer strictly an artist. Only foolishness ever prompted a businesswoman to sell her wares too cheaply.

Boston paid well for her acting, though "Acorn" raised loud cries against her "Macreadyism," her greater "art and less nature," her rolling eyes and screwing round of the mouth as Lady Macbeth, her Rosalind that was "ungraceful in the extreme."⁷

Against such cries, a lesser talent might have come to doubt her own gifts. Her rough American honesty, her "naturalness" had repelled some London critics. Now, her English "artistry" offended the louder critics in Philadelphia and Boston. The matter finally became clear when she learned that James "Acorn" Oakes and Edwin Forrest had long felt a tender regard for each other. She tossed off the criticism as "friendship" inspired.

Other voices proved friendlier the evening she and Matilda answered Longfellow's summons to dinner at Craigie House. Charlotte accepted the compliment gracefully. From his eminence at Harvard, Longfellow's fame as a poet had become international two years before with his Evangeline, A Tale of Arcadie. To be asked to his dignified yellow house in Cambridge was to share a little of Longfellow's own social, intellectual, and artistic grandeur. In a party that included the James Russell Lowells and Frederika Bremer, Charlotte feasted on canvasback ducks, quails, Roman punch, and three American wines. In a sense, the hospitality noted the risen status of the stage in Boston that was partly the fruit of Charlotte's efforts. To Longfellow, she stood now a cultural fact to be recognized, though in private he confessed, regarding her style, "I like less acting better."⁸

For the first time back in America, Charlotte felt the excitement she had known in the vivid conversations at Jane Carlyle's table. In Lowell, whose Yankee Biglow Papers were spreading his own fame worldwide, she saw a person a little like herself, another nod to Emerson's challenge to stand forthrightly American before the world. In Miss Bremer, the queer little Swedish novelist in lace cap and ribbons who had come to America to study its women, Charlotte greeted a kindred spirit, a determined champion for greater female recognition. Frederika made mental notes for the report of the meeting she would later publish, praising Charlotte as an "honest, earnest, and powerful soul." If the American actress looked "almost better in private than on the stage," Frederika could credit her "frank, blue eye, the strong intelligent forehead,"⁹ and the strong opinions she voiced over Longfellow's interesting wine.

Charlotte's return to Boston brought her further rewards when the red-haired Julia Ward Howe, who would reap later fame as a poet of battle hymns, bade her and Couldock to dinner--"Compliments to the Wild British. Bid him surely come."¹⁰ Charlotte saw in the small shapeless Julia a wit that could range all over Greek drama, women's rights, her husband's memories of Byron at war in Turkey.

When Theodore Parker, the Congregationalist minister, called on her backstage, he brought her a copy of Robert Cushman's sermon, "The Sin and Danger of Self Love," in tribute to the success she had achieved beyond Robert's wildest visions. In her conversation with Parker, she recognized the humane zeal behind his Letter Touching the Matter of Slavery that had recently bombarded America.

Tributes and invitations were one thing, but more fun just now was reading her box office sheets each day. Getting one's price began with knowing one's worth. She had not been joking when she had frankly labeled this American return a determined campaign to make money. In that sense, the "sensible Yankee girl" had indeed come home.

The flurry of letters she mailed from Boston specified the fees she demanded ahead. Corbyn could handle the bookings, but she herself would negotiate fees. Planning another run in New York, she briefly considered combining her talents with those of a popular ingenue, Jean Davenport. Couldock she could depend on, but nowhere in America had she found an adequate Juliet or a Celia for As You Like It. She would pay a fixed income each night to a young actress of talent who could support her creditably. Jean ought to consider "the good it would do her to act with me" before the "peculiar class of people"¹¹ she could attract.

Her last few nights in Boston, she saw no reason to scotch the rumor that these might be her last appearances. In the theatre, a star's "farewell" exuded a box office magic. To be honest about it, whether she truly meant to retire now or not, the more money she made on this tour, the brighter shone the dream beyond it, the day when she might pursue a different ambition happily free of the upheavals and discomforts of acting.

Looking south, she realized that Theodore Parker's concern over slavery touched Sallie. Arranging her New Orleans engagement for February 1850, Corbyn must determine exactly the troubles she and Sallie might suffer. Did Ludlow and Smith, the managers at the St. Charles, understand that Sallie, a free colored servant girl, must be shown every courtesy? They must "write me clearly on this point directing me how to ensure the girl's safety from arrest or stoppage."¹² In addition, their accommodations must be in a private house, away from the crowds that would dog Charlotte's steps at a hotel.

She would make the best of the crude trains and slow boats. If pioneers just now could brave a savage continent in the clumsiest covered wagons, she would not complain that American trains were hardly the speedy facilities she had enjoyed in England, though riding west through Pennsylvania and Ohio, she knew that Dickens had not wholly exaggerated his "agonies" on American trains, roaring pell-mell down the middle of dusty streets, hissing, screeching, scattering sparks over oblivious pigs and screaming horses and children. Inside the shabby hot cars, men sat crowded in seats back to back, smoking and spitting, making travel almost intolerable for fastidious people. At the numerous places where they had been forced to change trains, rude trainmen had thrust their heads into the car to cry, "Come out to the baggage car and tend to your plunder!"

Beyond Cincinnati Charlotte and her party fared better, relaxing as best they could aboard the puffing steamboat that threatened any moment to explode. Charlotte tried not to think about the human suffering that helped smooth her passage south. By the light of pine torches at night she watched the sweating black faces "wooding up," easing their work at times with dolorous song. By day she and Sallie caught fearful glimpses of light-skinned mulattoes below decks, sitting listless and dumb in fetters meant to foil their escape.

In the years since Charlotte had first known New Orleans, flames had taken the splendid St. Charles and the fortunes of James H. Caldwell, but Noah Ludlow and Sol Smith had rebuilt it. It was to this "clean, bright, and beautiful" theatre that Charlotte directed her steps. Rumbling along in her carriage, she glimpsed an occasional familiar shop front, an iron tracery decorating a window, hut what caught her eye now were the playbills plastering her route. "Our Charlotte" Cushman had returned to the city that had first recognized in a frightened beginner the attributes of a star.