A Woman's Power in the National Struggle

"The news brought by the last steamer has made me so sad and so heartsick," Charlotte wrote Emma Crow from London, "that I hardly know how to talk or write about it." Yet the tragic defeat at Bull Run must somehow be seen as proof of God's goodness. The recruiting would surely go better now, and in the flush of success the South would be less careful next time. The Devil helped his own at first. "Let those laugh who win."¹

In Paris an invitation from Rosa Bonheur, the painter, summoned Charlotte and Emma to her turreted studio near Fontainebleau. Talking with Rosa, watching the zest the mannish little woman brought to her work among the animals she used as models, Charlotte discovered a fear that made her suddenly dread the long days ahead. How would she feel, totally bereft of her own art? Over a lunch of bread and wine, grapes and pears, while they talked of their admiration for each other's work, Charlotte felt her fears deepen. She knew sadly what she was sacrificing for Emma.

Back in Rome, while Emma threw herself heart and soul into work, Charlotte filled her time writing long letters back to America. Her weekly reports to Emma Crow became full essays. In tightly packed onionskin pages, writing from left to right and then crosswise from top to bottom to save postage, she ranged over all the topics that challenged her mind.

About Ned's irresponsibilities, she was frank. "Ned is affectionate, dear, and a good disposition, but he thinks more of his pleasures than his duties."² His mother and grandmother had spoiled him, and though it might take years, his wife must exert every effort to set him straight. About money, Ned was a careless child. If he ever considered "going out" without her, Emma must put her foot down. "It is not right or proper, and if begun so early, will grow upon him."³ When business took him away from Boston a few days, Charlotte sympathized fully with Emma. "Oh, dear, if I were only a man that I could have been born to care for a woman."⁴

She was philosophical: "The wish to be better, the strong desire to live higher, purer lives, the determination to be worthy in spite of lets and hindrances, the small conquest over self today, shall lead to the larger tomorrow, until we get nearer to our true mosaic of life--the one spot which we have been destined to fill worthily, highly, perfectly, without flaw, if we would follow the Creator's law for us."⁵

She was candid about herself and the family: she knew that Ned and Mary Eliza resented her household in Rome, especially her friendship with Emma Stebbins. Emma paid her own bills, but even if the truth were otherwise, she would owe Charlotte nothing, because together they had found so much happiness. "If I were to swear this before a magistrate neither my mother nor Ned would believe it." But let them think what they would. "I have always done the utmost of my duty by them and ever shall."⁶

She tried to express her religion: she had joined the other Protestants in Rome recently in petitioning the Vatican to allow them to build a church inside the walls, but creeds were merely creeds after all, "and whether propounded by Jesus, or any other of woman born, they are simply scaffoldings which surround the temple, and by which different thinkers mount to their distinct and separate entrances." She could find God in any church. Any good and earnest man who led a pure life, who worked for the good of others, who led her to think higher and better things herself "is my saviour." Nobody could doubt a First Cause, and "whether we call it God, or nature, or law of the universe, it amounts to the same thing." For herself, "I believe in all things good coming from God, in all forms, in all ways; my faith is firm in him and his love. I believe in instincts marvelously." Sin was only weakness, "which entails upon us evils which we have to combat." Hence, man must strive to lead a "life of unselfishness, a life of devotion to--well--doing everything a human being can do for the largest good of all."⁷

In her new leisure, Charlotte took up her correspondence with Jane Carlyle. Coming through London, she had enjoyed again the flattery of Jane's interest. At Cheyne Row she had listened to Jane and Thomas' "wondrous" talk, admired again their wide-ranging minds, and been amused again at Thomas' bluster. When she learned from a London friend the middle of December that terrible headaches had made Jane unable to write, Charlotte saw again why Carlyle and his sharp-tongued wife were so often at odds. Thomas had tiptoed one morning into Jane's darkened room to ask if he might order some mint jelly for her. From deep in her pillows, Jane had whispered "Yes," but she wanted some changes in it. He took his instructions carefully, had them repeated twice, "looking all the time with his old Norseman face and figure grandly unfit for the task," but he was so anxious and tender and childlike in being taught what he had to do that in a quarter of an hour, the maid came in to say that Master had turned back, still not sure of his mission. "Would Mrs. Carlyle tell it him again?"⁸

To Jane, Charlotte offered her sympathy: "How shall I tell you, dear, that I have been sad to death over your illness. . . . What comfort can I bring you, who have no power even at this distance to bring you healing of any kind?" From conversations with various Englishmen in Rome, she was stirred to her soul at England's "evident sympathy" for the American South and unspeakably angered at the notion that slavery was a natural inheritance into which a large portion of the human race would always fall, regardless of how strongly compassion tried to free them. Pray God that England would not make excuses for interfering in a matter that was strictly America's business. But should hostility break out with England, "I shall choose my English for fighting with," wrote Charlotte, "and you shall be first. I could be content to be whipped by you and kiss your hands."⁹

Recovered by late January 1862, Jane replied gratefully: "My dear! my dear! I want to put my arms around your neck and give you oh such a good kiss. . . . I should like to lay my head on your shoulder and take a good cry. That is how nature prompts me to acknowledge your dear letter . . . rather than with any written sentences that my poor nearly extinct brain can gobble together in these hard times." But since the gods would not "annihilate time and space to make two lovers happy," she must write without further delay, lest she appear both fickle and ungrateful "when, God bless you, I am as far as possible from being either and as unwilling as possible that such an idea should be entertained of me by you!"¹⁰

To Emma Crow Charlotte wrote a confession: "I am in such despair when I get such letters, for my head at the best of times is not equal to these great women and here in Rome I never seem to have any solid foundation of ability either to write or to talk."¹¹

With Seward she felt more comfortable. "You will be too busy for me to intrude upon you long, and I will only tell you how anxiously I have watched your movements from the distance, and how hard it is to be patient, as you are and must be, with all the miles between me and the great events which are taking place at home." Every hour seemed to make matters less clear. "Sometimes I am faint and sick at heart as the clouds of injustice and wickedness rise up on the side to obscure my true vision." Seward must "believe that I write to you in all affectionate interest and that I am anxious for and about you, although my faith in you is so strong." The dangers surrounding him daily did not frighten her, for he was strong enough to meet them, "but a word from or about you would give comfort to the heart of your faithful friend."¹²

Still, she wrote Seward, with Emma's needing her in Rome "I am fain to think that my place is here, where I can help those of my own sex to work better than I can at home." Indeed, if Seward could ever turn his thoughts away from problems, did he think Miss Stebbins might be given an order to make some statue for the Capitol when it was finally complete? "It would be a good encouragement to our women workers!"¹³

When an ecstatic letter from Emma Crow brought word that she and Ned were expecting a baby in the fall, Charlotte was immediately full of motherly advice. "How I shall pray God that it may be a healthy and dear little thing to bless and comfort you." To make it so, Emma must regulate her mind "during the whole time you are bearing it by a sense of duty and respect for your obligation and don't suffer yourself to be made nervous or angry or fretful. . . . Give it peace to grow and develop well."¹⁴

About names, they might think of Allerton for a boy--it would honor the wife of the first Cushman to set foot on Plymouth Rock--and for a girl, well, Charlotte would be lovely, but perhaps Emma would prefer giving it her mother's name.¹⁵ About rearing the child, they must avoid tossing it about. Its feeding must be kept to a schedule. From the start, they must surround the baby with beauty, even to hiring a pretty nurse. And please, however appalling the thought, if anything should happen to Emma, couldn't everybody be told now that Aunt Charlotte would take the baby to rear?¹⁶

In May, when word came that Emma had lost the baby, Charlotte's sympathy came from memories. In her girlhood, she wrote, she had been "called upon to bear the very hardest thing that can come to a woman," and while Emma might doubt that disappointment in love could equal a mother's grief in losing a child, the abortive romance in Albany had seemed no less devastating at the time. But grief had passed; loss had brought compensations. It had helped her--she could say now--to see clearly her real purpose. Otherwise, "I should have been casting about for the 'counterpart,' and not given my entire self to my work." Properly enough, most women looked to one end in life, marriage, an end no doubt best for the largest number, but it "would not have been wisest and best for my work, and so for God's."¹⁷ Sooner or later, a way must open for her and Ned and Emma Crow to live together, either in America or Europe--or wherever God's will determined.

In the meantime, she must center her efforts doubly hard on helping Emma Stebbins' Horace Mann project. The bronzist in Munich was demanding $1,500 in advance, another $1,000 when the casting was finished, and the remainder when the statue was delivered at Rotterdam for shipment.¹⁸ Writing Fields, Charlotte urged him to get the money together as soon as possible, hopefully a large enough sum to include something for Emma. And incidentally, Fields must pass on to Lowell how much she admired his Biglow Papers. About America's current problems, "there is more said in those papers than has been said by any writer or speaker yet," especially in such lines as these:

The hardest question ain't the black man's right,
The trouble is to 'mancipate the white;
One's chained in body an' can be sot free,
But t'other's chained in soul to an idee:
It's a long job, but we shall worry thru it;
Ef bagnets fail, the spellin'-book must du it.

Riding idly on the Campagna, Charlotte forced herself to notice the beauties of another spring, yet day after day, she moaned inside whenever she thought of the positive things she could have been doing in America. Parties were hardly the answer, though she continued to give them and accept invitations to other people's empty affairs.

Nor were feelings among the "three old maids of the Gregoriana" quite what they should be. Though she kept herself hard at work on a colossal statue of Zenobia, Hattie had been snippish and jealous ever since Emma Stebbins returned from America bearing the news that she had been given the Mann commission. More than once Charlotte had had to speak to Hattie about her selfishness. After all, Hattie lived at 38 Via Gregoriana rent free and had few complaints coming. In Rome, the other disappointed American sculptors were even more jealous.

Charlotte found herself in the eye of the storm. Long ago she had sensed Story's resentment, and she was even more certain of the scorn she saw in Randolph Rogers' eyes. Her determination to battle with them now might have seemed like personal ill will or busy work to ease her boredom, if it had not centered in her favorite crusade. More than once at a social gathering, while the crowd was wiping its tears after one of her songs, she saw Rogers half smirking in the shadows. Warfare between them opened when at other gatherings Rogers offered to sing the same songs. No one could doubt his skill as a mimic, and he brought off roars of laughter parodying Charlotte's voice and gestures. When he finished, he sat smiling, then turned in wicked delight to watch Charlotte force herself to applaud.¹⁹

According to the American Consul, this explained why Charlotte's anger soon included all of Rogers' friends. In that group was the Consul himself, William J. Stillman, against whom Charlotte began pulling strings with Seward. She had known Stillman years before when he reported theatre news for the New York Evening Post; she had entertained for him when he first came to Rome following an intimate friendship with John Ruskin. Her wrath, said Stillman, really began in a question about American passports.

At the outbreak of war, the State Department had ordered its consuls to cancel all passports and issue new ones only to those Americans who pledged allegiance to the United States government in Washington. When Charlotte arrived back in Rome, she refused to surrender her passport. Instead, she wrote Seward, complaining of Stillman's "rudeness." When Seward backed up his consul, from that day, said Stillman, war with Miss Cushman was "open and malignant."²⁰

For Charlotte, the sheer incompetence and boorishness of the American consul were grounds enough to plead with Seward to have him replaced. Even William Story would be better than Stillman, though Ned Cushman might qualify best of all, especially with her at his elbow. When Stillman recognized this, he only increased his campaign against her. Complicating things almost too much was the delicate personal condition Charlotte now confided to Emma Crow. Could Emma send her some bottles of "Dr. Kennedy's" medicine for women who had reached that difficult period when "nature is presumed to take revenge" upon them for "unemployed faculties?" Women ought to be very careful at such times, "and I have tried to be this winter, but I am afraid I have given my poor nerves more to attend to than they can well bear."²¹

The thing to do was get away from the cross fires in Rome--its summers were unbearably hot anyway--especially when Wayman Crow offered to send Emma over to England for August. In London with Hattie and Emma Stebbins, Charlotte made herself clear to Ned's wife about her devotion to Miss Stebbins. "I know that you would never deprive me of a happiness and my life with Aunt Emma," especially since "she is so dependent upon me that she could die without me and I know it."²²

Visiting the Carlyles, Charlotte poured out to Jane her grievances that the people around her allowed her own heart so little freedom. When Sheridan Muspratt surprisingly agreed to let Susan's daughters come up for a visit, she was overjoyed but so pressed with details that her nerves threatened to break. Hoping for another visit with Jane, she could only write her a quick note: "God knows whether I shall accomplish it, for while these children are with me, I do not seem to belong to myself or be mistress of my time or actions."²³ She simply had no time to look up Browning, who was miffed when she failed to call.²⁴

Leisure in England was scarcely more pleasant than leisure in Rome. England's "smugness" and scorn for the American North bothered Charlotte more than ever. By the time she had seen the Carlyles once more--"having heard some of his wonderful sledgehammer arguments against the way they are doing things in America"²⁵--and stood in Paris for dress fittings, she was back in Rome writing Fields. "Send, send, oh send the Atlantic Monthly. My soul aches for it."²⁶

In her frustration, she confessed her troubles to Fields: "I hear you are making your fortune. Alas, why am I not? If Emma had only been content to stop in America this year, I would have made mine too, but she would not, and I sit here and grieve." She was still suffering losses because of Harlan's mistakes in Philadelphia. Many years ago she had made up her mind that it would be "a mistake to trust any of your sex," she told Fields. "Hence my spinsterhood. Why was I ever so weak as to trust my property to one of them?"²⁷

By Christmas, her hands had broken out in a flaming rash which her doctor said might be helped by applications of starch but could only be cured at a sulphur spa. But Charlotte knew that action, better than any medicine, was what she needed. Word of the glorious triumph at Vicksburg in January 1863 cheered her. The Mississippi was in Northern hands at last, but no matter how grievous the loss of life for both sides, the war must not end before slavery was eradicated once and for all. The news that Emma Crow was pregnant again raised her spirits even more.

A break in Charlotte's empty routine came in a letter from Henry W. Bellows, director of the American Sanitary Commission, the country's civilian effort to assure its fighting men that American homes and hearths still cared about them. Volunteer women all over the Union were knitting sweaters, folding bandages, serving as nurses--yet the Commission itself needed funds. Would Miss Cushman come home to act in benefits in the major cities?

When Emma Stebbins insisted that she could happily spend most of the time with Isa in Florence, Charlotte saw her way clear to answer. By June 6, she and Sallie were on the high seas. To limit her temptations to make a full acting tour, she had packed costumes for only two roles, Lady Macbeth and Meg. At Queenstown, Ireland, she and the other Union passengers sent up a thunderous cheer at news that General McClellan had just fought an overwhelming victory at Antietam. During the voyage, hostility threatened to erupt with the many Rebel sympathizers on board, and in New York when the pilot boats hove in sight, a skirmish broke out as each group, eager to hear the news first, struggled to possess the gangway.

"What news?" a voice sang out as the pilot made his way up the plank. Charlotte and the crowd closed in around him. "Lee has passed the Potomac with 25,000 men and is marching on Washington, if not already there!"

Hands that held hats ready to toss in the air dropped slowly. Heavy, outraged silence fell over the Northern group when the Confederate sympathizers began cheering. When she could stand it no longer, Charlotte stamped her foot on the deck: "I don't believe it!" Her anger broke the tension. A voice called out, "Three cheers for Charlotte Cushman!"²⁸ The cheers lasted until she had made her way down the plank and into Emma Crow's arms.

At her hotel, Charlotte dashed off a note to Seward. "I am again upon 'my native heath' and among my first wants is to see and hear from you that you are well, doing and being!" Since Lee had bypassed Washington and moved on north, she purposed making "an invasion--or 'raid' (to speak in the vernacular of the day) upon you in Washington." Her niece, Mrs. Ned Cushman, would come with her. In spite of his thousand cares, could Seward drop her a note? "The sight of your hand writing will be good for 'sair e'en.'"²⁹ Seward replied immediately. "You and your niece will find rooms in apple pie order at my house. I have not thought it necessary to look further."³⁰

The Washington she entered in late June 1863 had changed sadly in the past two years. The hills were spread with hospital barracks and tattered gray tents housing thousands of wounded. Huge four-horse wagons were common sights rumbling up Fourteenth Street to one of the hospitals. Ambulatory patients trudged aimlessly up the main streets in long, sad processions. From time to time, cavalry troops galloped by or picked their way through the great droves of cattle that milled through the dust, their drovers on horseback cracking their whips and shouting. Except for the misery it all represented, the scene might have been a painting by Rosa Bonheur.

Charlotte's first look at Seward hardly cheered her. Sleepless nights had taken their toll of Mr. Lincoln's Secretary. But in breakfast conversations with him, in late afternoon talks after he had trudged wearily home, she saw the deep lines in his face relax at some witticism, some insight from her that helped relieve his tensions. Seward was at heart a poet, she recognized again, and she lightened his cares by describing the brilliant beauty she had left behind on the Campagna.

More than once Seward asked her advice about some matter of state. When Lincoln himself turned in at the gate, his face drawn with worry, to sprawl a few moments for talk with his Secretary, Seward insisted that Charlotte remain in the room.³¹ Sallie had stopped in Philadelphia to visit her mother, but on June 29, Sallie's wire to Seward amused him so much he showed it to Lincoln. "The Rebels are expected here. What shall Sallie do?"³²

Watching the President, Charlotte saw his face break in a smile, then relapse again in sadness, as if a lamp inside had suddenly gone out.

Charlotte's talks with Seward ranged over more than the war. Should she transfer her investments to the other side of the Atlantic to hedge herself if worse days were coming? Could Seward give her any hope that Ned might qualify for a consular opening, if and when one occurred in Rome? The unmistakable pessimism in Seward's words left her wondering. Had he been serious when time and again he had shaken his head and sadly commented, "If the future of the country shall continue until then"?³³

Seward acknowledged her bread-and-butter note in brighter spirits. After Gettysburg, General Lee had pulled back his campaign and now the clouds seemed to be lifting. "I can't but think how much more agreeable your visit here would have been for yourself if it had come now when the bright sunshine of victory is shining upon us,"³⁴ but perhaps it was just as well that she had seen some of the trials that went with guarding a nation in civil war. He hoped she would come again in September.

When Seward sent her two volumes of his published correspondence, Charlotte wrote her gratitude. "No living man in our country could have written these letters but yourself or steered the barque of state so skillfully through the perils at home and abroad." Many felt this who did not speak "their thinkings," and many of Seward's grateful friends might never reach him except through good wishes and prayers, yet "Your children's children will find the fruits of your labours and be glad."³⁵

But talks and letters with Seward were, after all, not her prime reason for coming home. After two weeks at Newport enjoying the sea air and walks along the low cliffs, weeks that confirmed her growing conviction that if she ever came home to live it would be here, she was ready to work for the Sanitary. On September 12, 1863, she played Lady Macbeth at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia opposite Edwin Booth, still irked at the man's preposterous delicacy in the part, but filled now with sympathy for the grief in his eyes. Mary Devlin Booth-- "the tiniest woman ever called wife," as Annie Fields had labeled her--had died in February, leaving him and their daughter Edwina in despair. Yet she did not recant what she had once written Emma Crow: "Edwin Booth is not a gentleman and to my mind has no more gentlemanly instincts, which would make him hesitate to hurt a woman or give her pain, than Mr. Edwin Forrest." Mary Booth's husband was living proof how short the country was of gentlemen, "men who would never descend into being 'Masters' merely for the sake of . . . showing their power over a weak woman."³⁶

Next week, Charlotte was in Boston for more good talk with the Fieldses. At dinner, Annie saw through some of Charlotte's interest in this acting trip. "She can't endure to give up the stage," Annie remarked in her diary. "She is a woman who lives for effects."³⁷ Yet watching her Boston benefit on September 25, Annie was smitten again with Charlotte's Lady Macbeth. "Her reading of the letter when she first appears is one of her finest points." And though she found no hint of beauty in the devilish part, it was "delightful to hear the wondrous poetry of the play intelligently and clearly rendered." The sleep-walking scene was fine--"that deep-drawn breath of sleep is thrilling."³⁸

A few days before her Washington, D.C., benefit, when John P. Usher, the Secretary of the Interior, escorted her through the new Capitol rotunda, Charlotte took the occasion to put in a word for Emma Stebbins. Had Usher thought of adding a Columbus statue to the sculpture collection already begun there?

For the benefit on October 17, Charlotte could have used either of Washington's two theatres, Leonard Grover's lavish new National on Pennsylvania Avenue or John Ford's older house on Tenth near F Street. Both managers begged her, but she selected the National because of its Shakespeare company--and because rumor held that Ford, willy-nilly, catered to Rebel sympathizers.³⁹

Grover spared no cost in presenting the star whom his ads hailed "the most gifted actress of the present age."⁴⁰ He brought in J. W. Wallack, Jr., for Macbeth and E. L. Davenport for Macduff. The night's program was printed in red ink on a lacy sheaf of white satin edged in ribbon.⁴¹ At her entrance, Charlotte found the theatre jammed. To her left, in the President's flag-draped box, she saw Lincoln sitting grave and stiff in his chair. With him sat his wife, his young son Tad, and his private secretary, William Stoddard. In the box to her right, she saw Seward, Fanny, Emma Crow, and the Frederick Sewards, all cheering. Every part of the house was crowded with dignitaries.

Watching Charlotte's Lady Macbeth glower and swoop and wander in her sleep, Emma Crow sensed the joy of a veteran newly returned to battle. Offstage, Auntie might be the strong shoulder, the wisdom and brains that she and Ned both envied sometimes and feared a little, but between her and the statuesque presence on stage, Emma saw no connection. Auntie's power on stage was mainly a matter of voice. With it she could cast any spell, move any crowd to feel whatever she wished. There was no trick about it; its perfect tone came, said Emma, "from a perfect heart," from a throat "like the Arc de Triomphe."⁴² One never missed a whisper, however far back he might be sitting.

At the end of the play, when Charlotte came through the curtains for her bow, a smiling Lincoln and his family stood cheering, and the women in Seward's box tossed her an elegant bouquet. The night had brought the Sanitary Fund over $2,000.

Two nights later the Baltimore proceeds were lower (due to the manager's negligence, Charlotte discovered), but receipts at the sold-out New York benefit on October 22 more than made up--even though mismanagement had allowed scalpers in Wall Street to sell many tickets for $20.⁴³ With Edwin Booth, Charlotte took the ovation that erupted at the final curtain. Next day, the Tribune hailed the event "brilliant, the greatest theatrical success of the year."⁴⁴ The Spirit of the Times was not surprised that the box office had cleared nearly $3,000. For its own taste, said the Spirit, Macbeth was too bloody and dark, but this had been an unforgettable performance by America's two reigning stars.⁴⁵

In New York, Charlotte let herself be persuaded to play one other performance. On October 28, she played Lady Macbeth to John Wilkes Booth's Macbeth at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on behalf of the American Dramatic Fund. * As a child John Wilkes had taken delight in dressing up "as Charlotte Cushman as Meg Merrilies" and sending the Negroes on his father's farm shrieking. Now, as a man, he demanded complete realism on stage: often his sword thrust and fisticuffs left scars and bruises--in return for which he often got the same. He frankly admitted that after playing Richard II, he generally slept bandaged in steak and oysters. One night when a sword caught him square on the forehead and sent the blood gushing over his eyes, the actor playing Richmond had cried, "Good God!" But Booth had muttered genially, "That's all right, old man! Never mind me--only come on hard, for God's sake, and save the fight!"⁴⁷

* I find no proof for the report that John Wilkes Booth carried to his death a scar on his neck put there, as he solemnly declared, when Charlotte Cushman's vigorous acting with him in 1863 tore open a recent surgical incision.⁴⁶

Soon after the New York benefit, Jamie Fields invited Charlotte to help dedicate the great new organ in Boston's Music Hall. Annie herself had written an ode, anonymously, which Charlotte would deliver on November 2 as a prelude to an elaborate concert played by six different organists. Clad in black silk, Charlotte read Annie's lines eulogizing Boston, the founding fathers, and the young men now dying in battle.⁴⁸

To celebrate, the Fieldses gave a supper afterward for Charlotte, the Oliver Wendell Holmeses, William B. Ogden, and Mrs. Howe.

With that, Charlotte's mission home was complete. Sailing for Rome, she could rest content that her five nights' work had brought the Sanitary more than $8,000, the most striking example America had yet seen, said Henry Bellows in a grateful newspaper card, of "woman's power and will to do her full part in the national struggle."⁴⁹ When a huge album of watercolors and oils reached her in Rome on December 22, Charlotte felt doubly rewarded. Artists in the five benefit cities had taken their own means of adding their thanks to the country's.