Alarums of War and Mr. Seward

For Charlotte, the "good" life was never more hard to define than in the fall of 1860. The old creed that work and duty and the glorification of God spelled the real meaning of man's time on earth weighed heavily in Charlotte's uncertainties as she grew older and richer. The leisure that her wealth made possible had brought confusion.

Letters she wrote during her last days in Rome informed her American friends that circumstances were "forcing" her back to the stage ("I shall be in Boston again sometime in December professionally--I am ashamed to say"¹), that her style of life in Rome had proved unduly expensive, that her dreams and ambitions for her son Ned, who planned to marry soon, had created new drains on her pocket.

Deep down, Charlotte knew there were better reasons to return to battle. The good life was a mixture of pressures. Too much leisure, too much work--along neither road had she found fulfillment. More important, without some concept of duty to depend upon as a guide, whether that duty was to an audience or to another person or to her own talent, she felt too much a wanderer through a trackless wood. It was incidental that hard work paid off in money, incidental too that Ned's plans would prove expensive.

Only Emma Stebbins saw the inconsistency in Charlotte's concern about Ned: her notion that working for Ned would necessarily make him happy. Emma might have enlightened her: Ned could see to his own needs perfectly well; requiring him to do his own work might even encourage his "soul to grow." But the matter was delicate, and where Ned was concerned Emma had already learned that silence was golden.

Charlotte's returning to America involved another feeling, one that came from reading the headlines. If the Gulf States pulled out of the Union and if war exploded as a result, she wanted to be in America when it happened. Frivolous expatriate life was all well enough when affairs at home ran smoothly, but now, living in dreamlike ease across the Atlantic when people at home were nobly confronting the bitterest worries, her conscience troubled her. Whisking Emma Stebbins and Ned through London, she mentioned her "shakey" finances to Jane Carlyle. She explained to Charlie--now married and none too happily--and Mary Eliza that the expenses involved in Ned's wedding plans made her trip to America mandatory. Yet throughout the stormy crossing, she found ease in knowing that going home now was "right."

She did not, however, let that sober conviction spoil the greetings that welcomed her home. If the two years away had indeed heightened her glamour, if the Boston papers now wanted to call her "legendary," she accepted the role indicated. If his respect for her mind prompted Bronson Alcott to invite her out to Concord to hear one of his famous "conversations," this time with Whittier, Charlotte held herself perfectly still and grandly intense while Bronson's daughter, Louisa May, and most of the crowd sat admiring her. If the Fieldses asked her to breakfast mainly to urge her to follow her fame to California, Charlotte accepted their compliment. Yet recent word from Wayman Crow in St. Louis painted such a dark picture of the journey by Butterfield stage through savage Indian country that the thought rather frightened her now.²

For the present she chose an easier course. To get ready for New York, Charlotte took a farmhouse in Newport for two weeks, well away from the resort's noisy, fashionable life. Strolling with Emma among the wild pink roses along Newport's low cliffs, she watched the blue waves surge up the white beaches and break in foam on the rocks.

When she reached New York, she smiled when the Times told its readers what had "really" prompted Miss Cushman's second return. She had never left them for good; "the impulse of genius" had goaded her back to the stage, the nervous thirst that genius always feels for battle. Miss Cushman had fooled nobody, and it was a pleasure now, as always, to welcome back to her proper station "so great an honor in every sense to the National Stage as 'Our Charlotte.'"³

Returning to work in October 1860, Charlotte quickly discovered that the easy years in Rome had left her little energy for long engagements. She welcomed the worshipful droves that crushed to her door, the invitations that piled in white drifts on her table; when Sallie complained, "You can never bear to be quiet, you always want company," she confessed to the charge. Afternoons in bed on performance days were one answer. The roaring applause that greeted her again and the old thrill she felt playing her part were the other. Sweeping proudly off the stage at the end of the play, her head held high while the applause poured over her, Charlotte was overjoyed to see in Emma's smiling face her full understanding, her awareness that Charlotte's return to the stage, however much it was costing her in time lost from her chisels and mallets in Rome, was justified.

It was gratifying too to read about herself again in the papers. The Times cried its old pleasure in seeing her "die"--her Katharine did it so "superbly"⁴--though seeing Miss Cushman come grandly to the footlights at the end of the play to smile and gather up the bouquets pleased its man just as much. Two thousand disappointed fans had to be turned away at the box office the first night she played Meg. She had hesitated to resurrect her sordid old Nancy, but even that wretched character set off an ovation. When the Prince of Wales, then visiting America, saw her perform--"quite without ceremony . . . as he had not been invited"⁵--he sent her an ebony box to express his pleasure.

So, it was good to be working again, good to know that she was still appreciated in the roles that always gave her pleasure. A later age might wonder that each time she "returned" to the stage, indeed, each time she reappeared in a town, her audiences demanded nothing different. When somebody questioned her about her own favorites, Charlotte gave a straightforward answer. Her characters were equally dear: "I try to make them all best, and leave my public to judge which I can like best."⁶

But why would crowds pay again and again to see the old plays, pieces that had lost all novelty, whose very plots were tritely familiar. As Charlotte well knew, the answer lay in virtuosity. Someday, the play itself might be the thing and its actors only incidental, but to the eager crowds that jammed Charlotte's performances in 1860, the play was secondary--when an actress who compounded genius and fame and legend gave life again, with ringing words and slashing gestures, to towering protagonists. Her dying queens might create sympathy, her gypsy Meg might horrify, but eyes watching her now admired her artistry, her points achieved as skillfully as arias in opera.

At the end of her forty-eight nights at the Winter Garden, Charlotte counted her final take, appreciating the newspapers' amazement that her income for the run, if figured proportionally, more than doubled the salary paid the President of the United States. She could sympathize with James Buchanan, and not merely because a woman outearned him. Like any actor, she had scars to prove that the actor's lot was not easy, but she would not willingly face one-tenth of a President's woes. Out of friendship, she rejoiced that Seward had lost the Republican Party's nomination for the Presidency. In the talk at the Alcotts, one guest had been a Mr. Stuart, "conductor" of the Underground Railroad of "this charming free country," as Louisa had put it. Hearing his comments, Charlotte had felt her own fears about coming months heighten.

Riding through New York's banner-hung streets, watching the noisy campaign parades below her hotel window, Charlotte pondered with Emma the outcome of the approaching election. However loudly the banners shouted economic promises, their loudest undercurrent was slavery. Lincoln had made no speeches, issued no statements that Southerners could misrepresent. Yet turmoil lay crouched in the shadows. On election day, November 6, she wrote Wayman Crow for advice about a new issue of insurance bonds: "I note what you say about withholding any further investments until we see whether my 'Republican Friends' as you are pleased to call them 'bring about a dissolution of the Union.'"⁷ Yet Lincoln's administration, if elected, would surely be the most "reputable, conservative, and protective we have ever had." Reading her papers in Rome, she had already reached that conviction.

And however much she abhorred slavery, if Southern passions were to threaten the Union forever, then "better, infinitely better that it should at once be dissolved," amicably if possible, "but if not--not!" About that, Seward was right. However despicable the Negroes' plight, did the North have to shoulder the burden of setting them free and risk splitting the nation in the process? The blacks were God's poor, Seward had said more than once, as they always had been. They must find their own proper level. Actually, what danger could spring from an amicable separation of the States, if it came to that? Under the law, bad marriages could be dissolved. "Better be respected and apart, from the integrity which may exist in each," she wrote Wayman Crow, than be despised by the world because there is no respect for Union.⁸

About her investments, did Mr. Crow agree with Fields that Boston real estate would always be safe? Was $17,000 too much to pay for a fine house and lot on the water side of Beacon, with an open view of the river? "You see how I bother you. Spinsters are notoriously troublesome if they get a foot hold."⁹

Lately, Wayman Crow had said, fairly enough, that he would consent to Emma's marrying Ned only if Ned held a job. Charlotte wondered if Seward as Lincoln's incoming Secretary of State might help, possibly with an appointment for Ned as American Consul in Rome? For Ned and Emma, she could see two long-range openings ahead. She could furnish 1 Bolton Row to their taste--assuming that Ned went to work at something in London. Or better still, she could set them up in a fourth floor apartment at 38 Via Gregoriana--especially if Seward granted Ned the Consulate--and they could all live together, she and her beloved Emma Crow and Ned, as one family. In the meantime, if Fields could locate Ned a temporary position in Boston, she would be eternally grateful: "Heaven knows how earnestly I desire him to succeed." Could Jamie advise him about friends and lodging? Ned might listen to a man when he only ignored "old Auntie's notions."¹⁰

When Wayman Crow gave his consent to the marriage after Lincoln's inauguration, if there was no war, Charlotte was relieved: "Ned has been one of my large anxieties and to feel myself so much helped with regard to him is a great blessing." Emma Crow could be Ned's salvation.

No less important, his marriage to Emma could fulfill one of Charlotte's richest dreams. Much as she loved Ned, or tried to, there had been little doubt from the start about her affection for Wayman Crow's daughter. Even now the matter was not wholly clear, but in the back of her mind she had always envisioned the time when young Emma could occupy a permanent place in her life. If Emma's marrying Ned could achieve that place, so be it. All parties could gain in the process, though Charlotte did everything now that honesty demanded to let Emma Crow see that Ned was a bundle of immaturities, a selfish adolescent who might never grow up. Saying that, her conscience was clear. Having heard it, Emma Crow could make up her own mind.

With the match more or less settled, Charlotte took her triumph to Boston in early December. At the Fieldses' dinner--"I was enchanted with Lowell, as I always am and have been"¹¹--word circulated that a statue of the late Horace Mann was to be made for the State House lawn. Considering American women's shabby chances in the arts, Charlotte saw immediately that the commission could be a real plum for Emma Stebbins. When she learned that Elizabeth Peabody and her sister, Mrs. Horace Mann, would choose the sculptor, Charlotte sent them free tickets to all her plays. Elizabeth took keen delight in the performances: "I do not know but I thought Rosalind the most marvelous of all." Charlotte's wit and grace and makeup made her "seem but twenty-eight."¹²

Later in the month, in Philadelphia, Charlotte had her first chance to act with the slender, poetic Edwin Booth. She had relished the thought of this meeting, but at rehearsals she quickly revised her opinions about this celebrated young star with the flowing black locks, the deep brooding eyes, and noble profile. Booth must surely know that Macbeth was no delicate Hamlet, no insipid refined intellectual. He was more nearly "the grandfather of all the Bowery villains." Booth nodded in agreement, but in the performance he made Macbeth a "mere willow."¹³ She could only flash her disgust and urge and scold him on to murder, while Booth stifled a wish to cry out, "Why don't you kill him? You're a great deal bigger than I am."¹⁴

Watching both stars, a famed observer muttered, "Ridiculous!" Resenting the rising star he saw in young Booth, still bitterly convinced that Charlotte Cushman had ruined him in England in 1845, Edwin Forrest sat glowering and snorting when Booth entered, gazing moodily at the ground. "What's the damn fool doing? He looks like a super hunting for a sixpence." In the sleep-walking scene, when Charlotte solemnly moaned that "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand," Forrest laughed his scorn. "Little hand! Why it's as big as a codfish!"¹⁵

Interpretations aside, the meeting with Booth occasioned a happy reunion backstage. Gaily ignoring Charlotte's advice, Mary Devlin had married Booth in July, and because her husband wished it, she had renounced her career. The young wife who rushed into Charlotte's arms after the first night's curtain expressed no regrets about it. Whatever Edwin wished he would have. But listening to Mary eagerly spell out her plans, Charlotte kept her sad thoughts to herself. To bury a talent like this because of a husband's ego! Only cruelty in a man could extract such a promise from a wife so gifted.

While Charlotte was still in Philadelphia, Fields mailed her an advance copy of the February Atlantic containing an article Paul Akers had written about William Page. "America's finest contemporary portraitist," the sculptor called him. But reading the piece, Charlotte found that it actually glorified her. In a certain portrait, said Akers, Page had depicted the "fearful tumultuousness of a Lady Macbeth, the passionate tenderness of a Romeo, the Gothic grandeur of a Scotch sorceress."¹⁶ The artist had recorded a face "rendered impressive by the grandest repose--a repose that pervades the room and the soul." Seeing it, one felt himself in the presence of a woman who had "borne on through and above all obstacles of discouragement and temptation."

Charlotte immediately wrote Annie. "What he says of me is wondrous." For once, her face had been given some credit; a critic had looked beyond her "ugliness." Yet strangely enough, Akers had not identified her. "Do you think," she asked Annie, "that an Editor's note might put my name at the bottom of the page?"¹⁷ The occasion seemed to deserve, somehow, a bit more detail.

While she was still in Philadelphia, Charlotte's doubts about Booth prompted her to tackle Hamlet again. If Mrs. Siddons had risked playing the Dane, why shouldn't she? On January 28, 1861, she inched herself into Booth's tight costumes and put herself through Hamlet's paces, feeling swept up by the dazzling poetry, the virile heart that most actors overlooked in the role. Next day she wrote Emma Crow: "I acted the part so much better than anything else I have done here that I am really amazed at myself."¹⁸

Unfortunately, Philadelphia disagreed. A vigorous, well-fleshed woman in her forties playing the Prince was too much--especially for Booth and Forrest, though a few days later in Washington, when a delegation of Congressmen petitioned her to play it for them, the elegant silk playbill carried Charlotte's delighted answer: "I am happy to meet your wishes."¹⁹

Talking with Seward, Charlotte found the Washington air boiling with trouble ahead. Seven states had already left the Union. In his debates with Douglas, Lincoln had made clear his moderate views on the presence of "slavery amongst us and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way." He hoped, he said, that his incoming administration could arrest its spread, but he had no intention of leading the country to war. In Seward's parlor, Charlotte heard all the controversy expressed and debated, noted the worried faces that came and went through his doors--while Seward himself insisted that if war came, it would not last sixty days.

Yet Charlotte recognized clearly Seward's valiant efforts to hide his fears, especially from Fanny, the shy, plain-faced daughter whom he obviously adored. When Seward turned his attention to other visitors, Charlotte tried to befriend the awkward Fanny--especially when the girl confessed how "stale" and "unprofitable" she felt alongside her brother Frederick, a young man of singular intellect and beauty. Charlotte could sympathize with any plain girl, especially one who had no mental gifts either, who suffered among all the vivid personalities who came and went in her father's house. To reassure Fanny, Charlotte proposed that they maintain a correspondence. The day she left for New York, Charlotte gave her a small gold ring to seal the friendship.

She tried to bury her own fears in work. Back at the Winter Garden in late February 1861, dragging herself "through blood" as Nancy, she "horrified" the Times, though it wondered if any Bill Sykes could kill a woman so muscular. Any man would have a tough job defeating "so powerful a will and so strong an arm."²⁰ Yet however much she despised the role, Charlotte found in it an outlet for her own pent-up emotions, as the time for Lincoln's inauguration approached.

On March 4, on the steps of the Capitol, Lincoln took his stand. "Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them." On his inauguration Bible the new President swore to maintain the Union--peaceably if possible. In that thought Charlotte felt her own hopes renewed. Two days later she wrote Seward. Some free moment when the new Secretary of State was not too "worn down by cares," would he consider appointing Ned Cushman the next American Consul in Rome? Married, the young man ought to be highly effective.

In Boston the middle of March, Charlotte borrowed Edwin Booth's costume again to play Hamlet. But she played to poor houses. Too many fears had been loosed when Maine's regiment marched down State Street, singing "John Brown's Body," ready for war if Lincoln issued the call. Yet for Charlotte, family matters were more important just now. Lincoln was already President and war had not come. Wayman Crow would honor his promise to Ned.

On March 21, Charlotte joined Booth in New York to play Macbeth at the Academy of Music, still convinced that his Macbeth was a flimsy, pale thing. Then, three days later, she took the train to St. Louis for Ned and Emma Crow's wedding. Before the flower-banked altar, she watched them recite their vows, then turn as man and wife to smile their happiness at her--while she sat dreaming grand schemes. Her wedding present to them was a house in Boston at 70 Pinckney Street, quite near the Fieldses. The checks she now gave them would furnish it. She had thought she might give Emma a special gift, a purse containing a thousand dollars in gold,²¹ but she decided against it lest Ned feel some resentment.

The wedding had come in good time. On April 13, when newsboys ran through the streets shouting that General Beauregard had fired on Fort Sumter, Charlotte knew that all hope for peace had withered. Now Lincoln would have to use force. With guns trained against the Union, she could only declare, with Lincoln, that war, however tragic, must come. On April 27, 1861, Charlotte ended her benefit for war volunteers at the Howard Athenaeum by singing Holmes' new stanza for The Star Spangled Banner.

When our Land is illumined with Liberty's smile,
If a foe from within strike a blow at her glory,
Down, down with the traitor that dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By the millions unchanged, when our birthright was gained,
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave.²²

But far-off war was too big and too terrible to ponder. Better channel her thoughts to battles she might win closer to home. As long as Ned's work kept him and Emma in Boston, she would see to their social position. With the young Cushmans settled in their new home, Charlotte detailed a guest list for their first big reception in May. Among all the proper Bostonians, "Why not call on the Booths at the Tremont and ask them; it will give others pleasure to see them. . . . You can tell Mary Booth that I told you to call and ask her." Ned must go in person to invite the Fieldses; they had been more than kind to present them to Emerson and Holmes and Mrs. Stowe. "Have tea handed round and cake and wine," she instructed Emma. Ned must buy some greenhouse flowers "with stems."²³

Advising "her children," Charlotte made no effort to throttle her delight in seeing them properly installed in a Boston that she herself, against all odds, had had to work to enter. Jamie Fields' note to her, a few days after the reception, only deepened her satisfaction. On behalf of Ticknor and Fields, Publishers, could Charlotte lend him $5,000? "You know how well our house stands, and I need not to say to you anything more about," except that with authors like Hawthorne and Scott and Holmes, "our list is second to none in this country, and we mean to keep it, in spite of Harpers or anybody."²⁴ Charlotte's loan would help guarantee the firm's supremacy in American publishing.

Charlotte promised Fields to do whatever she could. As for his intention to proceed normally in spite of Fort Sumter, she heartily concurred. "We shall be all right next fall."²⁵ The North's "flood of men and money" had taken the South by surprise; already the moral effect was showing.

"With all the bad blood let out of the land," she wrote wishfully in another letter, "we shall be better, stronger, happier than ever before. . . . The blocks had to be cemented in Blood, and better that we should do it than leave it to our children."²⁶

Under the terrible clouds, Charlotte felt an almost physical lift to her spirits one morning when Emma Stebbins rushed in with the mail. Hearing her delighted cries, watching her dance around in a circle, then hungrily reread her letter, Charlotte caught Emma's sudden passion to get back to Rome and pick up her tools. Emma had received the Horace Mann commission. In that, Charlotte saw her own future turn. She had had her year's work; she had honored her patriotic urge to come home. Now, Emma's needs were crying their valid demands.

Since the commission said nothing about money--was it that Emma was only a woman?--Charlotte wrote a quick note to Jamie. Couldn't Fields persuade Charles Sumner to stump the state on behalf of funds for the project? If Jamie got "somebody clever" to write a eulogy of Mann, she could deliver it herself at a benefit. "In this way women will raise the statue."²⁷

For while the country was so fearfully preoccupied with slavery, it might give some thought to its downtrodden women. Thinking about that, Charlotte would go back to Rome out of duty to women in general. In June, when Thomas Wentworth Higginson met her in Boston, he recognized the fire that had taken hold of her. After producing her, Higginson wrote, America could win pardon for "a million half-alive women."²⁸

Against the chaos of war, distant Rome seemed now an incredible paradise where, despite its Popes and Garibaldis, frivolity could flourish almost shockingly. Yet visualizing her return, Charlotte found comfort in knowing that idleness was no longer the object. She had joined a campaign. More privately, she faced her heart's commitment. Acting these past months in America, she had been apart too much from Emma Stebbins. Where Emma went now, she would follow.

She would not, however, leave America without another comforting word from Seward. The man she knew as a true kindred spirit understood well enough about duty: his sense of it kept him living in Washington, aiding an awkward, untried new President, when he might have lived in a happier, more cultivated place like Rome. Talking with Seward, it was good to recall that warfare and politics actually related to nobler concerns. John Adams had said it in 1780--that his duty required him to study politics and war now, that his sons might later study mathematics and commerce and agriculture, so that their children in turn might study painting and statuary, music and poetry. In the long range, if she could not shoulder a gun and fight at the front, she could go home to Rome, the art capital of the world, and do her bit beside Emma for the world of the future, when war would be obsolete.

With Seward, she rode out the afternoon of July 1 to Arlington Heights to see the raw entrenchments and military camps springing up in a circle around Washington. Fifty thousand volunteers were already stationed in white tents in and about the city, and in the humidity the dust from marching feet, galloping cavalry, and rumbling wagons hung like a pall. To Seward she mentioned that Algernon Chase's son, Lewis, hoped to obtain an appointment to the Military Academy. Would Seward help? The Secretary's reply took her a little aback, but by the time they had returned to Lafayette Square, she gratefully accepted his offer. He would help her place her request where it would do the most good.

Together, they walked across the Square, through the iron gates, and entered the guarded white portals of the building where lamps burned throughout the night. Charlotte had seen the President on his rides about Washington, tall and sober in his dusty black suit and black stovepipe hat, his cavalry guard riding beside him with drawn sabres held upright. But only when Seward ushered her into Lincoln's second-floor office at the White House did the new President become real.

The lanky figure that rose slowly to greet her was not prepossessing. There was an obvious backwoods clumsiness about the man, a deep lack of polish. But Charlotte quickly sensed in Lincoln a warmth and sentiment that made her forget everything else. Standing beside the flag in front of his marble fireplace, tilting back in his black leather chair, Lincoln drawled his eager references to the theatre, especially Shakespeare, to plays he had seen recently when he had slipped unannounced into a box. Regrettably, he said, he had not yet seen Miss Cushman herself on stage, especially since Macbeth was his favorite play. Smiling, pointing a bony finger at her, Lincoln hoped she would not retire--and mean it--before he could see her Lady Macbeth.

Charlotte thanked him. She had only slowly discovered, she confessed--and that by bitter experience--that a workhorse was nervous without his harness, that an actor was lost with nothing to do. She saw a gentle envy play momentarily across Lincoln's face, yet something in his somber manner, his character, and quick wit made her suddenly happier about this new president.

Passing again through the gates, she still felt mixed emotions, she told Seward, about this brooding man who had gravely shaken her hand, yet a quality in him set him apart somehow from all other men she had known. Only the next week in Boston did she remember the point of her White House visit. "I was so completely taken up with him and his humour," she wrote Seward, "that I forgot my mission and came away."²⁹

Bidding Ned and Emma Crow good-bye in Boston, Charlotte explained again just how truly Emma Stebbins' needs encompassed her own. "I love her very much," she wrote them later; "she is the finest nature I have ever been thrown in contact with, the very truest and dearest of human beings and I want you both to love her."³⁰ Life was involvement, whether one wished it or not. Their own marriage surely had convinced them of that.

Two events just now dramatized that matter all too well. Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence on June 30, leaving Robert so desolate that Isa Blagden wondered if he could survive. Then scarcely more than a week later, paralyzing word went out from the Longfellows in Cambridge. Frances Longfellow was sealing up packets of her daughters' curls when her dress caught fire from the candle; she died the next day. "How can I live any longer!" Longfellow had cried.

Looking toward Rome, Charlotte answered her own heart's dictates. Seeing the light that sprang into Emma's eyes when a note arrived from Hawthorne wishing her much happiness abroad and "trusting that your native land will receive many memorials from your hand as beautiful (if possible) as the Lotus-Eaters,"³¹ she was ready to face her duty. On the seventeenth of July, 1861, she and Emma headed home.