GO TO LIST OF PEOPLE INVOLVED IN HARPERS FERRY

VARIOUS PERSONAGES INVOLVED

IN THE

FOMENTING OF RACE WAR (RATHER THAN CIVIL WAR)

IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Julia Ward Howe was a racist and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret “Six” finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of that committee’s agendas. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

THOSE INVOLVED, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY

SECRET “SIX”

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. No No No Finance white

Charles Francis Adams, Sr. subscribed to the racist agenda of Eli Thayer’s and Amos Lawrence’s New England Emigrant Aid Company, for the creation of an Aryan Nation in the territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas,” to the tune of $25,000.

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson Yes Yes Captain or Lt. 26 white

Jeremiah Goldsmith Anderson, one of Captain Brown’s lieutenants, was born April 17, 1833, in Indiana, the son of John Anderson. His maternal grandfather, Colonel Jacob Westfall of Tygert Valley, Virginia, had been a soldier in the revolution and a slaveholder. He went to school at Galesburg, Illinois and Kossuth, Iowa and worked as a peddler, farmer, and sawmill laborer before settling a mile from Fort Bain on the Little Osage in Bourbon County in “Bleeding Kansas” in August 1857. He was twice arrested by the proslavery activists, and for 10 weeks was held at Fort Scott. He then became a lieutenant of Captain Montgomery and was with him in the attack on Captain Anderson’s troop of the 1st US Cavalry. He witnessed a murder on his own doorstep by border ruffians, of a Mr. Denton. He went with John Brown on the slave raid into Missouri and remained with him thereafter. On July 5, 1859 he wrote of his determination to continue to fight for freedom: “Millions of fellow-beings require it of us; their cries for help go out to the universe daily and hourly. Whose duty is it to help them? Is it yours? Is it mine? It is every man’s, but how few there are to help. But there are a few who dare to answer this call and dare to answer it in a manner that will make this land of liberty and equality shake to the centre.” He was “J. Anderson” among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He was thrust through with a bayonet by one of the Marines, and pinned against the wall. A white man, he was taken by the attackers to be a light mulatto and tortured: “One of the prisoners described Anderson as turning completely over against the wall [to which he was pinned by the bayonet] in his dying agony. He lived a short time, stretched on the brick walk without, where he was subjected to savage brutalities, being kicked in body and face, while one brute of an armed farmer spat a huge quid of tobacco from his vile jaws into the mouth of the dying man, which he first forced open.” The corpse would be sent for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia along with that of Watson Brown (a corpse found on the banks of the Shenandoah River was more likely that of a local slave).

John Anderson ? ? Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Anderson, a free black youth from Boston allegedly killed at Harpers Ferry. Nothing is known as to who he was, other than that he was young, or where he came from, other than from Boston — and it is even possible that actually there had been no such person as this in John Brown’s company. (The John Anderson we do know about had an entirely different life trajectory, in Canada.)

Osborn Perry Anderson Yes No No Private 29 of color

Osborn Perry Anderson, “O.P. Anderson, or as we used to call him Chatham Anderson,” the only participant of color to survive Harpers Ferry and elude capture, had been born free on July 27, 1830 in West Fallowfield, Pennsylvania. He had learned the printing trade in Canada, where he had met John Brown in 1858. He was a member of Congress of John Brown’s Provisional Government in Chatham, Ontario in May 1858 and was “Osborn Anderson” on the list of signatories of the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States”; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. He would write later of the fight at Harpers Ferry and his escape in A VOICE FROM HARPER’S FERRY: “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated….” Anderson, Coppoc, and Meriam had journeyed separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Anderson enlisted in the US Army in 1864, becoming a recruiter and/or noncommissioned officer for a unit as yet undetermined, and mustered out in Washington DC at the close of the war (he would be identified by his father Vincent Anderson in 1872 as having been a recruiter for the “western regiments”). He was a member of the Equal Rights League in 1865, and represented Michigan at the National Convention of Colored Men in 1869. He died a pauper of TB and lack of care in Washington on December 13, 1872.

John Albion Andrew No white

Despite the fact that John Albion Andrew was a prominent Massachusetts politician, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would indicate long after the raid on Harpers Ferry, John Brown’s “general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Governor Andrew.

Henry Ward Beecher No No No Propaganda white

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher induced the congregation of his Plymouth Church to procure a crate of 25 rifles to ship illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” and to stamp upon that crate the term of art BIBLES. The Reverend’s personal attitude toward American blacks was that although those like Frederick Douglass whose blood had become partly mingled with the blood of whites were worthy of consideration as human beings, those who yet remained of pure African stock were still in such a “low animal condition” (his category, his words) of pure blackness that such consideration as human beings would be inappropriate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Blair No No No Armament white

Charles Blair supplied the pikes.

Ann Brown No No No Supporter white

Ann Brown, a daughter of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry. In the aftermath she would move to the West Coast.

Frederick Brown No No No Supporter white

Frederick Brown was fanatically religious to the extent that he attempted to sever his sexual organs when he was attracted to a young lady. He would have been 28 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, but in 1856 had been killed in the fighting in “Bleeding Kansas.”

Jason Brown No No No Supporter 38 white

Jason Brown, one of the elder sons of Captain John Brown, was a gentle sort of person who actually was trying to become an inventor. He took part in the battle at Black Jack in “Bleeding Kansas,” and in the killings on the Osawatomie Creek, but was not at Harpers Ferry. He and his brother Owen Brown would become grape growers in the mountains above Pasadena, California.

John Brown Yes Multiple Yes Commander white wounds

John Brown, “Captain” John “Shubel Morgan” “Isaac Smith” Brown.

John Brown, Jr. No No No Supporter 38 white

John Brown, Jr., 38 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid and Captain John Brown’s eldest son, had trained as a phrenologist. After the raid he would go into hiding in Ohio and, when summoned to appear before the investigatory committee of the US Senate, would refuse to appear. During the Civil War he served as Captain of Company K of the 7th Kansas Cavalry. He and his family would then find permanent safe haven on South Bass Island in Lake Erie.

Martha Brewster Brown No No No Supporter white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Martha Brewster Brown, wife of Oliver Brown and daughter-in-law of Captain John Brown, was with the conspirators at the Kennedy farm until shortly before the attack upon Harpers Ferry.

Oliver Brown Yes Yes Captain 20 white

Oliver Brown, the youngest of John Brown’s sons to reach adulthood, was born in Franklin, Ohio on March 9, 1839. He was a bookish lad. He went to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1855, with his father, and returned to North Elba in October 1856, where he married Martha E. Brewster (Martha Brewster Brown) in 1858. She was sent back north just before the raid on Harpers Ferry and he was shot dead at the age of 20 while serving as a sentinel at the river bridge.

Owen Brown Yes No No Captain 35 white

Owen Brown, 3d of John Brown’s sons and his stalwart aid both in “Bleeding Kansas” and at Harper’s Ferry, was born November 4, 1824 at Hudson, Ohio. With a withered arm, he had been attempting to make a career of writing humor articles for newspapers. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He was 35 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid. He escaped on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. It was due largely to his psychological grit and his endurance that the little group of survivors of which he was the leader managed to make it out. He and Charles Plummer Tidd found work and safety under assumed names on an oil-well crew in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. He was the only one of the 5 escaped raiders not to participate in the civil war. He would never marry. He would grow grapes for some time in Ohio in association with 2 of his brothers, and then migrate west, and would be the final survivor of the raiders when he would die on January 9, 1891 at his mountain home “Brown’s Peak” near Pasadena, California. A marble monument marked the mountain grave, until during July 2002 it mysteriously disappeared — since the grave was not a registered historical landmark, and not in a cemetery, there would be no investigation.

Salmon Brown No 23 white

Salmon Brown, 23 at the time of the Harpers Ferry raid, was said to have been exactly like his father, Captain John Brown, in every particular. He would once comment to a newspaper reporter that “The tannery business, farming, wool buying and the raising of blooded stock were my father’s life occupations, though all of them were subordinated to his one consuming passion — freeing the slaves.” Salmon would die in Portland, Oregon in 1919.

Watson Brown Yes Yes Captain 24 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Watson Brown, born at Franklin, Ohio on October 7, 1835, got married with Isabella M. Thompson during September 1856. His son by this union would live only to his 5th year but would nevertheless survive him, because he was sent out by his father John Brown to negotiate at the federal arsenal and was shot down by the citizens of Harpers Ferry. He managed to crawl back to the shelter of the engine house and lived on, groaning, his head cradled in Edwin Coppoc’s lap, for a considerable period, expiring on October 18th. The corpse would be sent for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. Recovering the skeleton from this college during the Civil War, his mother Mary Ann Day Brown eventually would be able to rebury it in the Adirondacks, before heading off to her retirement in California.

John E. Cook Yes No Yes Captain 29 white

John Edwin Cook, a well-connected 5'7" gentleman with blue eyes and long, curly blond hair, born in Summer 1830 to a well-to-do family in Haddam, Connecticut, had been a law clerk in Brooklyn and Manhattan after being expelled from Yale College on account of some student indiscretion, and had in 1855 become a member of the guerrilla force operated out of Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” by Charles Lenhart and had made himself an excellent shot. The name “John E. Cook” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He had been dispatched by John Brown to Harpers Ferry more than a year before the raid to work out the details on the ground and had secured employment as a lock tender on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, as a schoolteacher, and as a bookseller. He had gotten married with a Chambersburg, Pennsylvania woman, Mary V. Kennedy, on April 18th, 1859. After being sent out by Captain Brown to collect weapons, and having escaped by climbing into a tree and watching the events transpire, and after having evaded capture for some months, against the advice of his comrades he became reckless in his search for food and was captured on October 25th, 8 miles from Chambersburg. As an incessant and compulsive communicator he had always been considered by the Brown operatives to be indiscreet. In a confession which would be published as a pamphlet at Charles Town in the middle of November 1859 for the benefit of Samuel C. Young, a man who had been crippled for life in the fighting, Cook would detail for his captors all his movements from the point of his 1st meeting with Brown after the battle of Black Jack in June 1856 until after his capture. At the last moment he would seek to save himself by representing that he had been deceived through false promises. For this revelation Cook would be severely censured at the time, being termed “Judas.” Despite his confession, and despite his brother-in-law A.P. Willard being the governor of Indiana, he would in the end, one of the last, be also hanged for the treason and murder at Harpers Ferry, on December 16th.

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

John Anderson Copeland, Jr. was an Oberlin, Ohio carpenter and freeborn black American who was the son of a slave. He was active in the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society. It was rumored that he escorted John Price to Canada after the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue. Copeland later participated in the raid on the Harpers Ferry armory with John Brown. He got trapped in “Hall’s Rifle Works” along with his uncle Lewis Sheridan Leary and John Henry Kagi. When the 3 made a run for the Shenandoah River they got caught in a crossfire, but after Kagi had been killed and Leary had been shot several times and placed under arrest, Copeland was able to surrender without having been wounded. He refused to speak during his trial and was hanged with too short a drop and thus strangled slowly. On December 29, when a crowd of 3,000 would attend his funeral in his hometown of Oberlin, Ohio, there would be no body to bury, for after his cadaver had been temporarily interred in Charles Town it had been dug up and was in service in the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free citizens of color, Copeland, Leary, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). Judge Parker would assert in his story of the trials (St. Louis Globe Democrat, April 8, 1888) that Copeland had been “the prisoner who impressed me best. He was a free negro. He had been educated, and there was a dignity about him that I could not help liking. He was always manly.” Andrew Hunter at the same time was quoted as saying– “Copeland was the cleverest of all the prisoners ... and behaved better than any of them. If I had had the power and could have concluded to pardon any man among them, he was the man I would have picked out.” On the day that he died Copeland declared, “If I am dying for freedom, I could not die for a better cause — I had rather die than be a slave!” (Paul Finkelman avers on page 49 of HIS SOUL GOES MARCHING ON: RESPONSES TO JOHN BROWN AND THE HARPERS FERRY RAID that his middle name was “Anthony” rather than “Anderson.”)

Barclay Coppoc Yes No No Private < 21 white

Barclay Coppoc, from the Quaker settlement of Springdale, Iowa, was born in Salem, Ohio on January 4, 1839, and had not attained his majority at the time of the raid on Harpers Ferry. This Quaker escaped, although his adopted brother Edwin Coppoc surrendered and was tried and hanged. “We were together eight days before [John Edwin Cook and Albert Hazlett were] captured, which was near Chambersburg, and the next night Meriam [Francis Jackson Meriam] left us and went to Shippensburg, and there took cars for Philadelphia. After that there were but three of us left [John Brown’s son Owen Brown, Barclay Coppoc, and Charles Plummer Tidd], and we kept together, until we got to Centre County, Pennsylvania, where we bought a box and packed up all heavy luggage, such as rifles, blankets, etc., and after being together three or four weeks we separated and I went on through with the box to Ohio on the cars.” Osborn Perry Anderson, Barclay Coppoc, and Francis Jackson Meriam would travel separately to safe exile in the area of St. Catharines, Canada. Barclay then went to his family home in Iowa, with Virginia agents in close pursuit. There a band of young men armed themselves to defend him, and the Religious Society of Friends disowned him for bearing arms. He was back in “Bleeding Kansas” in 1860, helping to run off some Missouri slaves, and nearly lost his life in a second undertaking of this kind. He became a 1st Lieutenant in Colonel Montgomery’s regiment, the 3d Kansas Infantry. Soon he was killed by the fall of a train into the Platte river from a trestle 40 feet high, the supports of which had been burned away by Confederates.

Edwin Coppoc Yes Unwounded Yes Lieutenant < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Edwin Coppoc, who had been born on June 30, 1835 and orphaned and adopted at the age of 6 into a nonresistant- abolitionist Quaker farm family first of Salem, Ohio and then of Springdale IA. On March 6, 1857 he was disowned by the Religious Society of Friends and in the spring of 1858 went to “Bleeding Kansas” as a settler — but did not take part in the fighting. It was during a visit to Springdale in the fall of 1858 that he met John Brown. He would surrender with Captain Brown in the engine house at Harpers Ferry, and would be tried by a jury of his white male peers immediately after the conclusion of the trial of Captain Brown while his still-Quaker brother Barclay Coppoc was eluding capture. He was sentenced on November 2. From prison before his hanging, he wrote his adoptive mother that he was

“sorry to say that I was ever induced to raise a gun.”

He was hung with John Edwin Cook on December 16, 1859 and a day later his brother turned up at home in Iowa (he also would soon be disowned). The body of Edwin Coppoc was buried in Winona, Iowa after a funeral attended by the entire town (later the body would be reburied in Salem, Ohio).

Richard Henry Dana, Jr. No No No Enabler white

Treason being punished as what it is, why would the downtown Boston lawyer Richard Henry Dana, Jr. allow himself to become legal counsel to a “Secret Six” committee that was funding the activities of Captain John Brown, as that loose cannon prepared to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia? He was going to be implicated as having obviously had guilty prior knowledge, and was obviously making himself of necessity a prime candidate for the noose. As the going got hot he would make himself unavailable for prosecution –by venturing on a luxury trip around the globe– but the issue is not how he might extricate himself from this, but why he would have so endangered himself.

Martin Robison Delany No No No Supporter of color

Dr. Martin Robison Delany, Pennsylvania, 1843; attended the Colored National Convention of 1848; attended the Emigration Convention of 1854; a member of the Niger Valley Exploring Party in 1858; a member of the Vigilance Committee in Chatham and Windsor in September 1858. At a meeting of the conspirators in Chatham in Canada West in May 1858, “M.R. Delany,” the Reverend William Charles Munroe of Detroit, and several other leaders of the large black expatriate community approved something termed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the people of the United States,” as the charter for the pike-wielding fugitive society of raiders which was to be created in the remote fastness of the Allegheny Mountains by Captain John Brown subsequent to his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. That document would be discovered on Brown’s person when he was taken into custody. He would be a Major in the 104th Colored Infantry, and Sub-Assistant Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, in 1865. He was a Freemason.

Frederick Douglass No No No Supporter 41 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Waldo Emerson urged Frederick Douglass early on, to make himself into the General Toussaint Louverture of the North American continent. When Captain John Brown made a speech offering himself as the leader for the forces of freedom in “Bleeding Kansas”, Douglass stood in the audience and endorsed Brown and his mission despite the unpleasant fact that the plan of the abolitionists was to permanently exclude all persons of color, whether free or enslaved, from that new state. When the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was raided, his role was intended to be the raising aloft of the sword of General George Washington and the generaling of the black forces. His involvement in this raid was acceptable to such personages as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher only because his blood had been mixed with white it was removed to a degree from its original “low animal condition” (the Reverend’s category, the Reverend’s words) of blackness. At the very last moment Douglass perceived that the prospects of the raid were for either failure or betrayal, and fled by way of Canada to England.

Ralph Waldo Emerson No No No Supporter white

Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur of race war, recommended to Frederick Douglass in 1844 that he become the liberator of his people on the North American continent, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture. “Let me hold your coat while some white man kills you,” or something to that effect. We only know about this because Henry Thoreau rushed down to Boston right after the lecture, and had the lecture printed up as a pamphlet — after which there was no lying about the provocation that had been made and so all Emerson could do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present.

John Buchanan Floyd No No No Supporter white

Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd was one of those who had been warned, months in advance, that Captain John Brown was planning to attack a federal arsenal to seize weapons with which to arm black slaves, in the creation of a servile insurrection (he didn’t know precisely when, and didn’t know it would be at Harpers Ferry, Virginia). Such a prospect did not alarm him in the slightest. The official story, if the official story is what you want to believe, is that our Secretary of War would pass this warning along to no-one. I myself find it difficult to regard this as anything more than a cover. I think the truth was that these folks were aware that such a servile insurrection could lead to nothing but a race genocide, with white Americans exterminating the black ones, and what I fear is that such a race genocide would have been considered to be just fine, an improvement in our national condition. Let’s not have ourselves a civil war of brother against brother, that would be so nasty — let’s prevent that by having ourselves a nice little race war!

Hugh Forbes No No No Lieutenant white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Captain John Brown’s scheme, which he referred to as the “Subterranean Pass Way,” was that the escaped, armed slaves were to “swarm” into and set up a center of resistance in the Alleghenies from which they could liberate Virginia and then invade Tennessee and northern Alabama. Such a scoping of the situation never met with much respect from other of the other schemers. In particular, the Scottish adventurer Hugh Forbes, Brown’s onetime principal lieutenant, regarding blacks as inherently childlike, credulous, and cowardly, believed such a scheme to be doomed to failure from its inception. The scenario preferred by Forbes would have involved the herding of the slaves together by armed bands of white men and the driving of such herds of humans up the mountain chain toward Canada, neatly disposing of America’s entire race problem — by simple relocation of it to another nation. Evidently the two planners parted company over issues such as this after Forbes had functioned in Tabor, Iowa as the leader of military training for the recruits (Forbes was a veteran of the Grenadier Guards, and had fought along with Garibaldi in defense of the Roman Republic of 1849), and then Forbes attempted blackmail. When not offered a payoff, he wrote long, detailed letters to congressmen and to others, and it is one of the unresolved issues, how anyone in high office in Washington DC could have avoided knowing in advance that Brown was plotting a strike of some sort against slavery (another of the unresolved issues is what happened to Forbes once his extortion had failed — he simply disappeared from the pages of history).

George B. Gill

George B. Gill had come to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1857 after whaling in the Pacific Ocean, and had there been recruited by John Brown. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. During the year before the raid, Captain Brown sent Gill to visit a black con artist named Mr. Reynolds who persuaded Gill that he had gone through the South organizing and had brought into existence in areas of the South a militant organization of black men and women. Pointing out to Gill that Southern newspapers carried numerous references to the death of a favorite slave, he alleged that these were leaders of servile insurrection plots who were being discovered and offed. According to this “mumper” Southern blacks were ready and needed only to be given a cue. There is evidence that several slaves from the vicinity of the arsenal did participate in the raid itself, but returned hastily to their plantations when it became obvious that the raid was a failure. Several fires were set in the vicinity of Harpers Ferry in the week after the raid, probably by slaves and free black Americans (Richard Hinton estimates that $10,000,000 was lost in the sale of Virginia slaves in the year 1859; census figures show that between 1850 and 1860 there was almost a 10% decline in blacks in the three counties surrounding Harpers Ferry, a period during which the total number of blacks in Maryland and Virginia was increasing by about 4%).

The Rev. and Mrs. Gloucester No Financial support of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The Reverend James Newton Gloucester and Elizabeth A. Parkhill Gloucester of Brooklyn, New York were wealthy financial supporters of the servile-insurrection plot of Captain John Brown, or “Shubel Morgan,” or “Isaac Smith” (depending on what alias he was using at the time), and had put him up for a week at their home while he was enroute to Harpers Ferry. According to a report in a local newspaper: Brown said, “Goodbye, Sister Gloucester. I’ve only sixteen men, but I’m to conquer.” Mrs. Gloucester said to him, “Perhaps you will lose your life.” “Well, my life,” he replied, “is not worth much. I’m an old man. In Kansas, the balls flew around my head as thick as hail. I’ll never be killed by a ball. If I fall, I’ll open a ball in this country that will never stop until every slave is free.”

Shields Green Yes No Yes Private < 30 of color

Shields Green was an escapee from South Carolina who had served as clothes cleaner in Rochester, New York (his business card there declared “I make no promise that I am unable to perform”) and acted as a bodyguard for Frederick Douglass. He was known as “Emperor,” although how he obtained this nickname is not now known. He decided to go with John Brown when Douglass turned back at the stone quarry prior to the Harpers Ferry raid, saying to his boss “I believe I’ll go with the old man.” He took part in the raid and then refused to speak during his trial. At the time of his hanging he was about 23 years of age. His cadaver would be dug up and used for the instruction of students at the medical college in Winchester, Virginia. He, like John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary, had been a resident of Oberlin, Ohio. A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their 3 fallen free citizens of color (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971).

James Henry Harris HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

No one associated with Captain John Brown, and no one associated with politics in North Carolina, has ever been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. “J.H. Harris” signed, as a member of a Vigilance Committee, on May 8th, 1858, the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada, a document which would be found on the person of John Brown when he was captured at Harpers Ferry on October 18th, 1859. Although another person of this name, James Henry Harris, had been born a slave in Granville County, North Carolina and had gained his freedom at the age of 18 in about 1848, he was not this “J.H. Harris.” Educated at Oberlin College, he would hold a teaching certificate from the New England Freedman’s Aid Society. He was of Cleveland in 1859, and a member of the 102d US Colored Infantry formed in Michigan by George DeBaptiste that included so many men from Chatham. He would attend the 1st Freedmen’s Convention in the South, held in what would become the St. Paul A.M.E. Church on Edenton Street in Raleigh during September 1865 as a representative of Wake County. He would become the 1st black alderman from Raleigh, and a delegate from Raleigh to the North Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868; he got married with Bettie Miller, a daughter of Addison J. Smith and Mary Anderson, a cousin of Osborn Perry Anderson; he died in 1891 in Washington DC and the remains are at Mount Hope Cemetery in Raleigh. There is yet a 3d James H. Harris, who was not this “J.H. Harris” signatory, who was belatedly awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and is interred in the remote section of Arlington National Cemetery that was reserved for colored soldiers, and for contrabands.

Lewis Hayden

Lewis Hayden, a black leader in downtown Boston whose escape from Kentucky had been aided by Delia Webster in 1844. Eight years after escaping from slavery, he raised, as an act of gratitude and duty, a sum of $650, in order to ransom the Reverend Calvin Fairbanks out of the Kentucky State Prison at Frankfort, where the Reverend had been languishing under the accusation that he had assisted 47 slaves in their escape, and had served 14 years, and had been whipped and beaten. Just before the raid on Harpers Ferry, Hayden helped recruit Francis Jackson Meriam to carry a message and cash money to the hideout of John Brown, and take part in that struggle.

Albert Hazlett Yes No Yes Capt. or Lt. < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Albert Hazlett, born in Pennsylvania on September 21, 1837, did not take part in the fight at Harpers Ferry but, with John Edwin Cook who had escaped from that fight by climbing a tree and who later identified him to the prosecutors, would be belatedly hanged. Before the raid he had worked on his brother’s farm in western Pennsylvania, and he had joined the others at Kennedy Farm in the early part of September 1859. He was arrested on October 22d in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, near Chambersburg, where he was using the name “William Harrison,” was extradited to Virginia, was tried and sentenced at the spring term of the Court, and was hanged on March 16th, 1860. George B. Gill said that “I was acquainted with Hazlett well enough in Kansas, yet after all knew but little of him. He was with Montgomery considerably, and was with [Aaron D. Stevens] on the raid in which Cruise was killed. He was a good-sized, fine-looking fellow, overflowing with good nature and social feelings.... Brown got acquainted with him just before leaving “Bleeding Kansas.” To Mrs. Rebecca B. Spring he wrote on March 15th, 1860, the eve of his execution, “Your letter gave me great comfort to know that my body would be taken from this land of chains.... I am willing to die in the cause of liberty, if I had ten thousand lives I would willingly lay them all down for the same cause.”

Reverend T. W. Higginson No White

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth “Charles P. Carter” Higginson of the Secret “Six” believed that “Never in history was there an oppressed people who were set free by others” (it was therefore up to American black people to demonstrate their courage, and their worthiness to be free — basically by getting themselves exterminated). After Harpers Ferry he would attempt to organize an expedition to raid the Charles Town lockup and rescue the accused — this was an expedition Henry Thoreau would oppose, asserting that to the contrary Captain Brown’s highest and best purpose was to be hung.

Richard J. Hinton

Richard J. Hinton, abolitionist journalist whose opposition to slavery led him to transform himself into a gunslinger. Refer to: Richard J. Hinton, JOHN BROWN AND HIS MEN (NY: Funk & Wagnalls, 1894; Reprint NY: The Arno Press, 1968).

WHAT TO TAKE: Let your trunk, if you have to buy one, be of moderate size and of the strongest make. Test it by throwing it from the top of a three-storied house; if you pick it up uninjured, it will do to go to Kansas. Not otherwise. — James Redpath and Richard J. Hinton, HAND-BOOK TO KANSAS TERRITORY, 1859, as quoted on page 3

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and others of the Massachusetts State Kansas Committee raised $5,000 in one day, to buy enough Sharp’s rifles to arm 200 men to the teeth in “Bleeding Kansas.” He, as well as the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war (black Americans against white), would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators of the Secret “Six” finance committee clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Julia Ward Howe No White

Julia Ward Howe was a racist and, because she carried out errands for her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe who was on the Secret “Six” finance committee (such as having a surreptitious meeting in their home with Captain John Brown), must surely have been aware of and must surely have approved of that committee’s agendas.

Thaddeus Hyatt No white

Thaddeus Hyatt was a businessman and financier involved in the preparation of “Bleeding Kansas” as a “free soil” or “Aryan Nation” enclave. Summoned to give testimony before the congressional committee investigating the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, he would refuse to appear — and would be imprisoned for a period but ultimately would get away with this refusal.

John Jones No Support white

John Jones was a Chicago businessman of color (John Brown stayed at his home). He and his wife Mary Richardson Jones were active abolitionists, agitating for the repeal of the Illinois Black Laws. (Not only did these laws obligate black Americans to prove that they were free in order to enter the state, but once they were in state these laws barred them not only from visiting white homes, but from owning any property or merchandise, or entering into any contracts.)

John Henry Kagi Yes Yes Secretary of War, 24 white adjutant HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Although John Henry Kagi was largely self-taught, his letters to the New-York Tribune, the New-York Evening Post, and the National Era reveal him as the best educated of the raiders. A debater, public speaker, stenographer, wannabee writer, and total abstainer from alcohol, he was cold in manner and rough in appearance. A nonparticipant in organized religion, he was an able man of business. He had been born on March 15, 1835, a son of the blacksmith for Bristolville, Ohio in a family of Swiss descent (the name originally having been Kagy). During 1854/1855 he had taught school at Hawkinstown, Virginia but had indicated an objection to the system of slavery there and been compelled to return to Ohio with a pledge never to return. He had gone to Nebraska City in 1856 and been admitted to the bar. He then entered Kansas with one of General James H. Lane’s parties and enlisted in Aaron D. Stevens’s (“Colonel Whipple’s”) 2d Kansas Militia. In fighting in the town of Tecumseh in “Bleeding Kansas” he proved himself by killing at least one man, who had been coming after him with a club. After being captured by US troops he had been imprisoned at Lecompton and at Tecumseh, but was finally released. On January 31, 1857 he had been struck on the head with a gold-headed cane by a proslavery judge, drew his revolver and shot the judge in the groin, but Judge Elmore got off 3 shots and one struck Kagi over the heart, the bullet being stopped by a memorandum-book. He was long with his family in Ohio recovering from these wounds, but then returned to Kansas and joined John Brown. He bore the title of Secretary of War in the provisional government and was next in command to John Brown; he was also the adjutant. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. When in Chambersburg as agent for the raiders, he boarded with Mrs. Mary Rittner. At Harpers Ferry he was trapped along with John Anderson Copeland, Jr. and Lewis Sheridan Leary in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got ca in crossfire and Kagi was the first killed, his body being left to float in the river. [Eyal J. Naveh in CROWN OF THORNS: POLITICAL MARTYRDOM IN AMERICA FROM ABRAHAM LINCOLN TO MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. (NY: New York UP, 1990) described Kagi as black (Page 31: “Even though black followers of Brown, such as John Henry Kagi, were also executed in Virginia, for blacks, John Brown became the most famous martyr for their freedom.”), but this was just another of the long series of tendentious but uncontested errors which make such literature so unreliable.]

Amos Lawrence No White

Amos Lawrence provided the large bulk of the investment capital needed by Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Company for the purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas”, needed in order to encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there as “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior.

Lewis Sheridan Leary Yes Yes Private 25 of color HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Lewis Sheridan “Shad” Leary was a mulatto citizen of Oberlin, Ohio, a saddler and harness maker whose father had been a freeborn black harness maker as well. He was descended from an Irishman, Jeremiah O’Leary, who had fought in the Revolution under General Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, who had married a woman of mixed blood, partly African, partly of that Croatan Indian stock of North Carolina, which is believed by some to be lineally descended from the “lost colonists” left by John White on Roanoke Island in 1587. Leary was born at Fayetteville, North Carolina on March 17, 1835, and was therefore in his 25th year when killed during the raid upon the federal arsenal. In 1857 he had gone to Oberlin to live, marrying there and making the acquaintance of John Brown in Cleveland. To go to Harpers Ferry, he left his wife with a 6-month-old child at Oberlin, his wife being in ignorance of the purpose of his trip. He was given funds to go from Oberlin to Chambersburg in the company of his nephew John Anderson Copeland, Jr. He was isolated along with his nephew and John Henry Kagi in the armory called Hall’s Rifle Works. When the 3 made a run for it, heading down to the Shenandoah River, they got themselves caught in a crossfire, and after Kagi had been killed and Leary shot several times, he was taken, his wounds so severe that he would die the following morning. He was able to dictate messages to his family and is reported as saying “I am ready to die.” A monument was erected by the citizens of Oberlin in honor of their three fallen free men of color, Leary, Copeland, and Shields Green (the 8-foot marble monument would be moved to Vine Street Park in 1971). The Leary child would subsequently be educated by James Redpath and Wendell Phillips.

William H. Leeman Yes Yes Captain < 21 white

William H. Leeman was born on March 20, 1839 and was recruited in Maine as a 17-year-old very impressed with John Brown. Being of a rather wild disposition, he had early left his home in Maine. Educated in the public schools of Saco and Hallowell ME, he was working in a shoe factory in Haverhill MA at the age of 14. In 1856 he entered “Bleeding Kansas” with the second Massachusetts colony of that year, and became a member of Captain Brown’s “Volunteer Regulars” on September 9, 1856. He fought well at Osawatomie when but 17 years old. Owen Brown found him hard to control at Springdale, Iowa. George B. Gill said of him that he had “a good intellect with great ingenuity.” His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” as “W.H. Leeman,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. By the raid upon Harpers Ferry he had reached the age of 20. On October 17, 1859, the youngest of the raiders, he made a mad dash out of the relative safety of the armory to swim down the Potomac River but two militiamen caught up with him and shot him down on an islet in the river. His body would be used for target practice for hours by the drunken citizenry, until the hail of bullets pushed it into the current and it was carried downstream. Mrs. Annie Brown Adams would write of him: “He was only a boy. He smoked a good deal and drank sometimes; but perhaps people would not think that so very wicked now. He was very handsome and very attractive.”

Francis Jackson Merriam Yes No No Private < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Francis Jackson Meriam, grandson and namesake of the Garrisonian abolitionist and Boston historian Francis Jackson, was a young manic-depressive with but one good eye. He helped James Redpath collect materials in Haiti and across the American South for use in a book dedicated to John Brown and Redpath arranged for Meriam to join Brown’s guerrillas. He was not captured or killed at Harpers Ferry because he had been left in one of his fits of despair at the Kennedy farmhouse during the raid. After escaping through Shippensburg, Philadelphia, Boston, Concord, and the area of St. Catharines, Canada he served as a captain in the 3rd South Carolina Colored Infantry. Erratic and unbalanced, he urged wild schemes upon his superiors and sometimes attempt them. In an engagement under General Grant he received a serious leg wound. He died suddenly on November 28, 1865 in New-York.

Charles W. Moffett Yes white

Charles W. Moffett, a white drifter from Iowa about whom little is known. His name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” as “C.W. Moffit,” from a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. Perhaps his middle name was “Wesley” (according to an 1882 article in the Topeka Capital, “John Brown: A Reunion of His Surviving Associates,” a meeting of raid survivors at the Kansas Historical Society was called by C.W. Moffett of Montour, and a tombstone in the Maple Hill cemetery in Montour, Iowa is for a Charles Wesley Moffett, Jun. 20, 1827-Aug. 19, 1904) and perhaps he did not attend the raid on the federal arsenal because he had cold feet, or because he was one of a number of people suspected by the others of having written (2 anonymous postings, one dated August 18th, 1859 from near Philadelphia and the other dated 2 days later from Cincinnati) to alert the federal government to the plan for a raid on some federal arsenal (Secretary of War John Buchanan Floyd received this while at Red Sweet Springs in Virginia and did not alert anyone in the federal government; he would offer later that as War Secretary he had been getting a whole lot of spurious warnings, and anyway there wasn’t a federal arsenal in Maryland).

Edwin Morton No White

The very tall Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s intimate college friend Edwin Morton of Plymouth, a descendant of one of the prominent Founding Fathers, was about as deeply involved in the Harpers Ferry raid as any member of the Secret “Six”. He was Gerrit Smith’s private secretary and resided with his family, and after the raid, while the congressional investigation was going on, he fled overseas and chummed around at Shrewsbury and Hodnet with Henry Thoreau’s very tall friend Thomas Cholmondeley.

Dangerfield Newby Yes Yes bridge sentinel 39 light mulatto HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Dangerfield Newby, a free light mulatto, very tall and with a splendid physique, was serving as a sentinel at the Harpers Ferry bridge and was shot to death as he and the two white men with him retreated before the charge of the Jefferson Guards of Charles Town VA, coming across the Potomac from the Maryland side. He was not brought down by ball or bullet, but by a 6-inch spike being used as a musket projectile, which caught him in the throat and ripped him severely. Since neither of the two white men were shot, it appears that as a mulatto he was targeted. The body was beaten savagely, and its ears snipped off as trophies, and then a herd of hogs was driven up to root on it.

Reverend Theodore Parker No White

The Reverend Theodore Parker, a stone racist, declared from his pulpit that while he ordinarily spent $1,500 a year on books, the equivalent of 4 or 5 men’s annual wages, for the time being he was going to restrict himself to spending less than one man’s annual wage on books per year, and devote the remaining moneys to the purchase of guns and ammunition for the white people going to the Kansas Territory. Sharps rifles, the very latest in deadliness, cost $25 apiece when had in sufficient quantity:

“I make all my pecuniary arrangements with the expectation of civil war.”

He would take to marking the boxes of new Sharps rifles he shipped illegally to “Bleeding Kansas” with the word BOOKS, and he would take to referring to these firearms as so many copies of RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE as in “The right of the people to keep and to bear arms shall not be infringed.” He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six”, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces of servile insurrection. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their allies among the Northern and Southern black Americans slave and free, in order to foment a rectification of the Southern white Americans.

Luke F. Parsons White

Luke F. Parsons, 22-year-old white man, already a mercenary fighter seasoned in “Bleeding Kansas,” a petty thief in need of a paycheck and a legitimating excuse. His name “L.F. Parsons” was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859.

Richard Realf White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Richard Realf was a 23-year-old Englishman, the son of a blacksmith who had become a rural constable. In 1852 he had put out a collection of poetry, GUESSES AT THE BEAUTIFUL, and in 1854, after giving up being the lover of Lady Noell Byron, widow of George Gordon, Lord Byron, he was led to the United States of America by “instincts” which he characterized as “democratic and republican, or, at least, anti-monarchical.” He had been introduced by John Edwin Cook, whom he had met in Lawrence in “Bleeding Kansas” while working as a correspondent for the Illinois State Gazette, to John Brown in Mount Tabor, Iowa at the end of November or beginning of December 1857. He traveled through Chicago and Detroit to Chatham, Ontario West, Canada, and his name was among the signatories to “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He returned to England to lecture, and visited France, before traveling from Havre on March 2, 1859 to New Orleans, arriving April 17, 1959 with the objective of becoming a Jesuit priest. He would testify before the US Senate Committee.

James Redpath

James Redpath, crusading journalist out to make a buck in the best way.

George J. Reynolds of color

George J. Reynolds, a light mulatto blacksmith or coppersmith of Sandusky, Ohio, from Virginia although saying he was from Vermont, with native American as well as black African heritage, age 35 at the time of the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and active in the Underground Railroad. He had attended the Convention of Colored Men in 1858, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario West, Canada per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. as “J.G. Reynolds.”

Richard Richardson No of color

Richard Richardson, a fugitive slave from Lexington, Missouri who had joined John Brown in southern Iowa, was going through that unfortunate but now-well-understood initial period of reaction to freedom in which a former slave, accustomed to servitude and unaccustomed to self-origination, attaches himself to some authoritative white man who is able with courtesy to make use of him. He was a member of the African Mysteries, a secret defense group in Michigan in 1858, and signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859, but evidently did not get from Ontario to Virginia due to lack of travel money. He became a private in Company E of the 113th US Colored Infantry that was formed from the 13th US Colored Infantry that was recruited in and spent its entire service in Arkansas.

Judge Thomas Russell No White HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Mary Ellen Russell visited John Brown in jail a few weeks before his execution. She said that although she had never approved of his violent methods, she admired him as a man of vision and idealism. Brown had been friends with the Russells for years, and had stayed at their home on several occasions despite the fact that Thomas Russell was a prominent member of the Massachusetts judiciary. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of the Secret “Six” would allege long after the raid on Harpers Ferry that “Brown’s general purpose of attacking slavery by force, in Missouri or elsewhere, was known in 1857-8-9” to Judge Russell.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn No White

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns, fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white Secret “Six” conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies for servile insurrection in order to foment sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans. (John Brown, who had himself buried a wife and promptly recruited another one, once commented to Sanborn, in regard to the young man’s grief over the prompt death of his young bride Ariana Walker, that he was too young to be married to a gravestone.)

Gerrit Smith No White

The immensely wealthy “H. Ross Perot” political figure of that era was a former Millerite millennialist: Gerrit Smith. In this American’s mansion outside Syracuse, New York, standing in the center of his study, was an ornate mahogany desk. Rumor had it that this had once been the desk of the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte himself. The millennium of William Miller not having arrived on schedule, Smith had become determined to, as he put it, “make himself a colored man” –he desired to explore his inner blackness– and thus he befriended Frederick Douglass (Smith would be Douglass’s friend, that is, up to the point at which he would discover that black Americans were inherently racially inferior to white Americans and thus unworthy of consideration). He, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” fully grasped from the earliest moment that the probable result of their attempt to incite a servile insurrection of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of the black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies, in order to disrupt relations between Northern and Southern white Americans, toward the generation of a sectional civil war.

Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith, lumber dealer of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Lysander Spooner HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

The anarchist Boston attorney Lysander Spooner, who was well aware of John Brown’s plans for the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, wrote to Gerrit Smith in January 1859 warning that Brown had neither the men nor the resources to succeed. After the raid he would plot the kidnapping of Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the idea being to take him at pistol point aboard a tug and hold him off the Atlantic coast, at threat of execution should Brown be executed.

George Luther Stearns

George Luther Stearns, a Boston manufacturer of lead pipe and the secretary of the Boston Emancipation League, as well as Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, the Reverend Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith of the Secret “Six,” fully grasped from the earliest moment the fact that the probable result of their attempt to incite a race war, of black Americans against white Americans, would be, at least initially, a defeat of their black forces. These 5 of the white conspirators clearly had been willing to sacrifice the lives of their black allies in servile insurrection in order to foment a sectional civil war between Northern and Southern white Americans.

Aaron Dwight Stevens Yes Badly Yes Captain 28 white wounded

Aaron Dwight Stevens, John Brown’s drillmaster, born in Lisbon, Connecticut on March 15, 1831, had run away from home in 1847 at the age of 16 to serve with a Massachusetts volunteer regiment in Mexico. He made himself proficient with the sword. At Taos in May 1855, he received a sentence of death for “mutiny, engaging in a drunken riot, and assaulting Major George A.H. Blake” of the 1st US Dragoons. This was commuted by President Franklin Pierce to 3 years hard labor but he escaped from Fort Leavenworth in 1856, 1st finding refuge with the Delaware tribe and then joining the Kansas Free State militia of James Lane under the name “Whipple.” He became Colonel of the 2d Kansas Militia and met Brown on August 7, 1856 at the Nebraska line when Lane’s Army of the North marched into “Bleeding Kansas”. He became a devoted follower. He was a spiritualist. At Harpers Ferry, when Brown sent this middleaged man out along with his son Watson Brown to negotiate under a flag of truce, he received four bullets and was taken alive. The never-married Stevens was of old Puritan stock, and his great- grandfather had been a captain in the Revolutionary army. Because of a relationship with Rebecca B. Spring of the Eagleswood social experiment near Perth Amboy, New Jersey, after his execution on March 16th he would be buried there alongside Albert Hazlett. According to George B. Gill, writing after his death, “Stevens — how gloriously he sang! His was the noblest soul I ever knew. Though owing to his rash, hasty way, I often found occasion to quarrel with him more so than with any of the others, and though I liked [John Henry Kagi] better than any man I ever knew, our temperaments being adapted to each other, yet I can truly say that Stevens was the most noble man that I ever knew.”

Stewart Taylor Yes Yes Private 23 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Stewart Taylor was born on October 29, 1836 at Uxbridge in Canada. He became a wagonmaker and in 1853 went to Iowa, where in 1858 he became acquainted with Captain Brown through George B. Gill. He was a spiritualist. He signed the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Ontario, Canada West per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. A relative, Jacob L. Taylor of Pine Orchard, Canada West, wrote to Richard J. Hinton on April 23, 1860 that he had been “heart and soul in the anti-slavery cause. An excellent debater and very fond of studying history. He stayed at home, in Canada, for the winter of 1858-1859, and then went to Chicago, thence to Bloomington, Illinois, and thence to Harper’s [sic] Ferry. He was a very good phonographer [stenographer], rapid and accurate. He was overcome with distress when, getting out of communication with the John Brown movement, he thought for a time that he was to be left out.”

Eli Thayer No

Eli Thayer, an entrepreneur who believed in “doing well by doing good,” formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company, to purchase land in the new territory then well known as “Bleeding Kansas” and encourage the right sort of black-despising poor white Americans to settle there by providing information, cheapening transportation, and setting up saw mills and flour mills to give work and incomes to such “decent antislavery” homesteaders. The idea was to send entire communities in one fell swoop, increasing the value of the properties owned by this company. If political control over this territory could be achieved, they would be able to set up a real Aryan Nation, from which slaves would of course be excluded because they were enslaved, and from which free blacks Americans would of course be excluded because as human material they were indelibly inferior. Thayer would comment in retrospect, about the antebellum abolitionists with whom he had been affiliated, that they had constituted “a mutual admiration society possessed by an unusual malignity towards those who did not belong to it.” He would instance that there was never “any diffidence or modesty in sounding their own praises.”

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson Yes Yes Lieutenant < 30 white

Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, brother of William Thompson and a North Elba neighbor of the family of John Brown, was born April 17, 1838. He was “very quiet, with fair, thoughtful face, curly blonde hair, and baby-blue eyes.” His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown and his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. The two brothers were shot dead at Harpers Ferry.

William Thompson Yes Yes Captain? < 30 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

William Thompson was born in New Hampshire in August 1833, the son of Roswell Thompson. In Fall 1858 he married a Mary Brown who was not related to the family of John Brown. His sister Isabella M. Thompson married Watson Brown; his elder brother Henry Thompson married Captain Brown’s daughter Ruth. He had started for “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 but upon meeting the Brown sons returned with them to North Elba. Along with his brother Dauphin Adolphus Thompson, he took part in the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, and the two of them were shot dead. When Captain Brown sent him out from the engine house to negotiate under flag of truce, the mob of citizens placed him under arrest, took him to the local hotel barroom, discussed what to do, dragged him into the street, executed him by shooting him in the head, and dumped his body into the Potomac River.

Henry David Thoreau No white

When, in 1844, Waldo Emerson, acting as an agent provocateur, recommended to Frederick Douglass’s face that, modeling himself upon the leader of the successful Haitian revolution of the turn of the century, Toussaint Louverture, he fashion himself into the liberator of his people and initiate on the North American continent a servile insurrection or race war, it was Henry Thoreau who after the lecture rushed this information right down to Boston, and had a pamphlet printed up, after which there was no way to dissimulate about the provocation that had been made — and so all Emerson was able to do was pretend that Douglass hadn’t been present. (We, of course, have credited Emerson’s cover story, not because there is any corroboration for it but because ... well, he’s Mr. Emerson and wouldn’t lie to us.)

Charles Plummer Tidd Yes No No Captain 25 white HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

Person’s Name On Raid? Shot Dead? Hanged? His Function Age Race

Charles Plummer Tidd was born in Palermo, Maine in 1834 and had emigrated to “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856 with the party of Dr. Calvin Cutter of Worcester in search of excitement. After joining John Brown’s party at Mount Tabor, Iowa in 1857 he became one of the followers of “Shubel Morgan” who returned in 1858 to raid into Missouri. During the Winter 1857/1858 encampment of the Brown forces in Springdale, Iowa, he “ruined” a Quaker girl and the other members of the team had to sneak him away during the night. Nevertheless, the group obtained some recruits not overly impressed with the Peace Testimony of George Fox from among the residents of this town, such as the brothers Barclay Coppoc and Edwin Coppoc. He and John E. Cook were particularly warm friends. He signed, as “Charles P. Tidd,” the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States” in Chatham, Canada per a document in Brown’s handwriting that would be captured when he and his men were subdued at Harpers Ferry on October 18, 1859. He opposed the attack on Harpers Ferry but nevertheless took part both in the raid on the planter Washington’s home and on the federal arsenal itself, escaped, and made his way on foot toward the northwestern part of Pennsylvania. He and John Brown’s son Owen Brown would find work and safety, under assumed names, on an oil well in the vicinity of Crawford County PA. He visited Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Canada and took part in the planning for the rescue of Aaron D. Stevens and Albert Hazlett while the Mason Commission of the Congress was presuming that he had been killed in the fighting at Harpers Ferry. On July 19, 1861 he was able to enlist under the name “Charles Plummer” and would become a 1st Sergeant of the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers. On February 8, 1862 he died of fever aboard the transport Northerner during the battle of Roanoke Island. (This was a battle he had particularly wished to take part in because ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the nemesis of the Harpers Ferry raiders, was in command of the Confederates.) Charles Plummer Tidd’s grave is #40 in the National Cemetery in New Berne, North Carolina. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY

Harriet Tubman No of color

Harriet Tubman was negotiated with by John Brown for participation in the raid on the federal arsenal. She mistrusted these men and had persistent dreams in which Brown and his sons appeared as serpents. The attack had been scheduled to occur on the 4th of July, symbolic of national birth. At the last moment she alleged she was ill, and for this reason as well as delays in the deliveries of supplies, the attack needed to be postponed for months. On the day of the actual attack at Harpers Ferry she had a premonition that it would fail.

Henry Watson No of color

Henry Watson, barber of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania involved both with John Brown and with Frederick Douglass.

etc. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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“BRIGHT THINGS ALWAYS CAME READILY TO HER LIPS,

AND A SECOND THOUGHT SOMETIMES CAME TOO LATE

1 TO WITHHOLD A BIT OF A STING.”

1. Comment by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1819

May 27, Thursday: Julia Ward (Julia Ward Howe) was born in New-York City, into a strict and well-to-do Episcopalian Calvinist family. She was a descendant of two colonial Rhode Island governors, Richard Ward and Samuel Ward. Her mother would die while she was still young, and she would be raised by an aunt. When her banker father would die, she would become the ward of a more liberal-minded uncle.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 5th day 27th of 5th M 1819 / Our Moy [Monthly] Meeting this day held in Town was pretty well attended - in the first meeting which was a solid favor’d season - father Rodman was engaged in a Solid weighty testimony. — In the last we had considerable buisness, as is usual in this Month preparatory to the Yearly Meeting. — Benjamin Freeborn Isaac Lawton Zacheus Chase Amos Collins, Elizabeth Lawton Jane Lawton & Hannah Gould dined with us.

RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1831

The Ward family arrived on Aquidneck Island as summer residents. The family would reside in various locations and then purchase the home that would become known as “Ashurst Cottage,” “Buttonwood,” and most often “Redwood Lodge.” This house, at the corner of Bellevue Avenue and Old Beach Road in Newport, Rhode Island, no longer exists, its lot forming part of the present grounds of the famed Redwood Library. JULIA WARD HOWE HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1833

The first American community service for white blind people was formed, under the direction of Doctor Samuel Gridley Howe (he would become the husband of Julia Ward Howe).2

2. This facility would be renamed the Perkins Institute for the Blind because Thomas H. Perkins donated his home. Thoreau would apply to Dr. Howe for a job as an assistant teacher there on March 9, 1841 but would not be selected. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1837

October 12, Thursday: At Constantine (Qusantina) west of Tunis in Algeria, Charles, Comte de Damremont, Governor-General of French North Africa, fell in combat.

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe of the Perkins Institute for the Blind began to teach the alphabet to still-cute little blind, deaf, and mute Laura Bridgman:3

Helen Keller is now Perkins’ best-known deaf-and-blind graduate, but just as famous in her day was Laura Bridgman, who went to the school only five years after it opened. When Dr Howe taught her the use of language it was the first case of its kind recorded. We should think of things of this kind when we read of the atmosphere of hope and excitement then; and when we read Emerson and Thoreau urging their readers to cultivate the self and not to trust to institutions and philanthropies. We should also remember how tightly integrated this society was. Dr Howe was the husband of Julia Ward Howe, and they took their wedding journey in Europe with Horace Mann, Sr. and his bride, investigating new methods of teaching. A bust of Laura Bridgman was executed by Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, and copies were distributed at the expense of Mrs Peter Chardon Brooks, wife of one of Boston’s leading philanthropists, mother of Mrs Edward Everett, Mrs Nathaniel Frothingham, Mrs Charles Francis Adams, grandmother therefore of Henry Adams, Brooks Adams, and so on. All Boston was involved in its institutions. - Martin Green, THE PROBLEM OF BOSTON (London: Longmans, Green and Co, Ltd., 1966), page 49.

How amusing it would be to be able to inform Martin Green, quoted above, that Henry Thoreau would make application on March 9, 1841 to teach at the Perkins institution despite this air of philanthropy which Green presumes he so mistrusted, and of the fact that in 1861 Thoreau would visit Minnesota with the firstborn son of the deceased Horace Mann, Sr. and his bride. Boston society seems to have been even more tightly integrated than Green has succeeded in imagining - though that is not so very important. What I would suggest that it would be important for Green to learn is that Thoreau’s attitudes are no-way near so easily reducible, as he seems to suppose, to a variety of trivial self-cultivation or to a knee-jerk disdain for all things

3. In this year, also, because they were under attack by William Lloyd Garrison, the Perkins Institute for the Blind condescended to admit one token deserving blind black child. (All you other blind black children can just go pound salt.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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social. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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LAURA DEWEY BRIDGMAN

She was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the twenty-first of December, 1829, She is described as having been a very sprightly and pretty infant, with bright blue eyes. She was, however, so puny and feeble until she was a year and a half old, that her parents hardly hoped to rear her. She was subject to severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost beyond her power of endurance: and life was held by the feeblest tenure: but when a year and a half old, she seemed to rally; the dangerous symptoms subsided; and at twenty months old she was perfectly well. Then her mental powers, hitherto stinted in their growth, rapidly developed themselves; and during the four months of health which she enjoyed, she appears (making due allowance for a fond mother’s account) to have displayed a considerable degree of intelligence. But suddenly she sickened again; her disease raged with great violence during five weeks, when her eyes and ears were inflamed, suppurated, and their contents were discharged. But though sight and hearing were gone for ever, the poor child’s sufferings were not ended. The fever raged during seven weeks; for five months she was kept in bed in a darkened room; it was a year before she could walk unsupported, and two years before she could sit up all day. It was now observed that her sense of smell was almost entirely destroyed; and, consequently, that her taste was much blunted. It was not until four years of age that the poor child’s bodily health seemed restored, and she was able to enter upon her apprenticeship of life and the world. But what a situation was hers! The darkness and the silence of the tomb were around her: no mother’s smile called forth her answering smile, no father’s voice taught her to imitate his sounds: - they, brothers and sisters, were but forms of matter which resisted her touch, but which differed not from the furniture of the house, save in warmth, and in the power of locomotion; and not even in these respects from the dog and the cat. But the immortal spirit which had been implanted within her could not die, nor be maimed nor mutilated; and though most of its avenues of communication with the world were cut off, it began to manifest itself through the others. As soon as she could walk, she began to explore the room, and then the house; she became familiar with the form, density, weight, and heat, of every article she could lay her hands upon. She followed her mother, and felt her hands and arms, as she was occupied about the house; and her disposition to imitate, led her to repeat everything herself. She even learned to sew a little, and to knit. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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LAURA DEWEY BRIDGMAN

At this time, I was so fortunate as to hear of the child and immediately hastened to Hanover to see her. I found her with a well-formed figure; a strongly-marked, nervous-sanguine temperament; a large and beautifully-shaped head; and the whole system in healthy action. The parents were easily induced to consent to her coming to Boston, and on the 4th of October, 1837, they brought her to the Institution. For a while, she was much bewildered; and after waiting about two weeks, until she became acquainted with her new locality, and somewhat familiar with the inmates, the attempt was made to give her knowledge of arbitrary signs by which she could interchange thoughts with others. There was one of two ways to be adopted: either to go on to build up a language of signs on the basis of the natural language which she had already commenced herself, or to teach her the purely arbitrary language in common use: that is, to give her a sign for every individual thing, or to give her a knowledge of letters by combination of which she might express her idea of the existence, and the mode and condition of existence, of any thing. The former would have been easy, but very ineffectual; the latter seemed very difficult, but, if accomplished, very effectual. I determined therefore to try the latter. The first experiments were made by taking articles in common use, such as knives, forks, spoons, keys, &c., and pasting upon them labels with their names printed in raised letters. These she felt very carefully, and soon, of course. distinguished that the crooked lines spoon, differed as much from the crooked lines key, as the spoon differed from the key in form. Then small detached labels, with the same words printed upon them, were put into her hands; and she soon observed that they were similar to the ones pasted on the articles She showed her perception of this similarity by laying the label key upon the key, and the label spoon upon the spoon. She was encouraged here by the natural sign of approbation, patting on the head. The same process was then repeated with all the articles which she could handle; and she very easily learned to place the proper labels upon them. It was evident, however, that the only intellectual exercise was that of imitation and memory. She recollected that the label book was placed upon a book, and she repeated the process first from imitation, next from memory, with only the motive of love of approbation, but apparently without the intellectual perception of any relation between the things. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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LAURA DEWEY BRIDGMAN

After a while, instead of labels, the individual letters were given to her on detached bits of paper: they were arranged side by side so as to spell book, key, &c.; then they were mixed up in a heap and a sign was made for her to arrange them herself so as to express the words book, key, &c.; and she did so. Hitherto, the process had been mechanical, and the success about as great as teaching a very knowing dog a variety of tricks. The poor child had sat in mute amazement, and patiently imitated everything her teacher did; but now the truth began to flash upon her: her intellect began to work: she perceived that here was a way by which she could herself make up a sign of anything that was in her own mind, and show it to another mind; and at once her countenance lighted up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog, or parrot: it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits! I could almost fix upon the moment when this truth dawned upon her mind, and spread its light to her countenance; I saw that the great obstacle was overcome; and that henceforward nothing but patient and persevering, but plain and straightforward, efforts were to be used The result thus far, is quickly related, and easily conceived; but not so was the process; for many weeks of apparently unprofitable labour were passed before it was effected. When it was said above, that a sign was made, it was intended to say, that the action was performed by her teacher, she feeling his hands, and then imitating the motion. The next step was to procure a set of metal types, with the different letters of the alphabet cast upon their ends; also a board, in which were square holes, into which holes she could set the types; so that the letters on their ends could alone be felt above the surface. Then, on any article being handed to her, for instance a pencil, or a watch, she would select the component letters, and arrange them on her board, and read them with apparent pleasure. She was exercised for several weeks in this way, until her vocabulary became extensive; and then the important step was taken of teaching her how to represent the different letters by the position of her fingers, instead of the cumbrous apparatus of the board and types. She accomplished this speedily and easily, for her intellect had begun to work in aid of her teacher, and her progress was rapid. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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LAURA DEWEY BRIDGMAN

This was the period, about three months after she had commenced, that the first report of her case was made, in which it was stated that she has just learned the manual alphabet, as used by the deaf mutes, and it is a subject of delight and wonder to see how rapidly, correctly, and eagerly, she goes on with her labours. Her teacher gives her a new object, for instance, a pencil, first lets her examine it, and get an idea of its use, then teaches her how to spell it by making the signs for the letters with her own fingers the child grasps her hand, and feels her fingers, as the different letters are formed; she turns her head a little on one side like a person listening closely; her lips are apart; she seems scarcely to breathe; and her countenance, at first anxious gradually changes to a smile, as she comprehends the lesson. She then holds up her tiny fingers, and spells the word in the manual alphabet; next, she takes her types and arranges her letters; and last, to make sure that she is right, she takes the whole of the types composing the word, and places them upon or in contact with the pencil, or whatever the object may be. The whole of the succeeding year was passed in gratifying her eager inquiries for the names of every object which she could possibly handle; in exercising her in the use of the manual alphabet; in extending in every possible way her knowledge of the physical relations of things; and in proper care of her health. At the end of the year a report of her case was made, from which the following is an extract. It has been ascertained beyond the possibility of doubt that she cannot see a ray of light, cannot hear the least sound, and never exercises her sense of smell, if she have any. Thus her mind dwells in darkness and stillness, as profound as that of a closed tomb at midnight. Of beautiful sights, and sweet sounds, and pleasant odours, she has no conception; nevertheless, she seems as happy and playful as a bird or a lamb; and the employment of her intellectual faculties, or the acquirement of a new idea, gives her a vivid pleasure, which is plainly marked in her expressive features. She never seems to repine, but has all the buoyancy and gaiety of childhood. She is fond of fun and frolic, and when playing with the rest of the children, her shrill laugh sounds loudest of the group. When left alone, she seems very happy if she have her knitting or sewing, and will busy herself for hours; if she have no occupation, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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LAURA DEWEY BRIDGMAN

she evidently amuses herself by imaginary dialogues, or by recalling past impressions; she counts with her fingers, or spells out names of things which she has recently learned, in the manual alphabet of the deaf mutes In this lonely self-communion she seems to reason, reflect, and argue; if she spell a word wrong with the fingers of her right hand, she instantly strikes it with her left, as her teacher does, in sign of disapprobation; if right, then she pats herself upon the head, and looks pleased. She sometimes purposely spells a word wrong with the left hand, looks roguish for a moment and laughs, and then with the right hand strikes the left, as if to correct it. During the year she has attained great dexterity in the use of the manual alphabet of the deaf mutes; and she spells out the words and sentences which she knows, so fast and so deftly, that only those accustomed to this language can follow with the eye the rapid motions of her fingers. But wonderful as is the rapidity with which she writes her thoughts upon the air, still more so is the ease and accuracy with which she reads the words thus written by another; grasping their hands in hers, and following every movement of their fingers, as letter after letter conveys their meaning to her mind. It is in this way that she converses with her blind playmates, and nothing can more forcibly show the power of mind in forcing matter to its purpose than a meeting between them. For if great talent and skill are necessary for two pantomimes to paint their thoughts and feelings by the movements of the body, and the expression of the countenance, how much greater the difficulty when darkness shrouds them both, and the one can hear no sound. When Laura is walking through a passage-way, with her hands spread before her, she knows instantly every one she meets, and passes them with a sign of recognition: but if it be a girl of her own age, and especially if it be one of her favourites, there is instantly a bright smile of recognition, a twining of arms, a grasping of hands, and a swift telegraphing upon the tiny fingers; whose rapid evolutions convey the thoughts and feelings from the outposts of one mind to those of the other. There are questions and answers, exchanges of joy or sorrow, there are kissings and partings, just as between little children with all their senses. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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LAURA DEWEY BRIDGMAN

During this year, and six months after she had left home, her mother came to visit her, and the scene of their meeting was an interesting one. The mother stood some time, gazing with overflowing eyes upon her unfortunate child, who, all unconscious of her presence, was playing about the room. Presently Laura ran against her, and at once began feeling her hands, examining her dress, and trying to find out if she knew her; but not succeeding in this, she turned away as from a stranger, and the poor woman could not conceal the pang she felt, at finding that her beloved child did not know her. She then gave Laura a string of beads which she used to wear at home, which were recognised by the child at once, who, with much joy, put them around her neck, and sought me eagerly to say she understood the string was from her home. The mother now sought to caress her, but poor Laura repelled her, preferring to be with her acquaintances. Another article from home was now given her, and she began to look much interested; she examined the stranger much closer, and gave me to understand that she knew she came from Hanover; she even endured her caresses, but would leave her with indifference at the slightest signal. The distress of the mother was now painful to behold; for, although she had feared that she should not be recognised, the painful reality of being treated with cold indifference by a darling child, was too much for woman’s nature to bear. After a while, on the mother taking hold of her again, a vague idea seemed to flit across Laura’s mind, that this could not be a stranger; she therefore felt her hands very eagerly, while her countenance assumed an expression of intense interest; she became very pale; and then suddenly red; hope seemed struggling with doubt and anxiety, and never were contending emotions more strongly painted upon the human face: at this moment of painful uncertainty, the mother drew her close to her side, and kissed her fondly, when at once the truth flashed upon the child, and all mistrust and anxiety disappeared from her face, as with an expression of exceeding joy she eagerly nestled to the bosom of her parent, and yielded herself to her fond embraces. After this, the beads were all unheeded; the playthings which were offered to her were utterly disregarded; her playmates, for whom but a moment before she gladly left the stranger, now vainly strove to pull her from her mother; and though she yielded her usual instantaneous obedience to my signal to follow me, it was evidently with painful reluctance. She clung close to me, as if bewildered and fearful; and when, after a moment, I took her to her mother, she sprang to her arms, and clung to her with eager joy. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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LAURA DEWEY BRIDGMAN

The subsequent parting between them, showed alike the affection, the intelligence, and the resolution of the child. Laura accompanied her mother to the door, clinging close to her all the way, until they arrived at the threshold, where she paused, and felt around, to ascertain who was near her. Perceiving the matron, of whom she is very fond, she grasped her with one hand, holding on convulsively to her mother with the other; and thus she stood for a moment; then she dropped her mother’s hand; put her handkerchief to her eyes; and turning round, clung sobbing to the matron; while her mother departed, with emotions as deep as those of her child. * * * * * * It has been remarked in former reports, that she can distinguish different degrees of intellect in others, and that she soon regarded, almost with contempt, a new-comer, when, after a few days, she discovered her weakness of mind. This unamiable part of her character has been more strongly developed during the past year. She chooses for her friends and companions, those children who are intelligent, and can talk best with her; and she evidently dislikes to be with those who are deficient in intellect, unless, indeed, she can make them serve her purposes, which she is evidently inclined to do. She takes advantage of them, and makes them wait upon her, in a manner that she knows she could not exact of others; and in various ways shows her Saxon blood. She is fond of having other children noticed and caressed by the teachers, and those whom she respects; but this must not be carried too far, or she becomes jealous. She wants to have her share, which, if not the lion’s, is the greater part; and if she does not get it, she says, My mother will love me. Her tendency to imitation is so strong, that it leads her to actions which must be entirely incomprehensible to her, and which can give her no other pleasure than the gratification of an internal faculty. She has been known to sit for half an hour, holding a book before her sightless eyes, and moving her lips, as she has observed seeing people do when reading. She one day pretended that her doll was sick; and went through all the motions of tending it, and giving it medicine; she then put it carefully to bed, and placed a bottle of hot water to its feet, laughing all the time most heartily. When I came home, she insisted upon my going to see it, and feel its pulse; and when I told her to put a blister on its back, she seemed to enjoy it amazingly, and almost screamed with delight. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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LAURA DEWEY BRIDGMAN

Her social feelings, and her affections, are very strong; and when she is sitting at work, or at her studies, by the side of one of her little friends, she will break off from her task every few moments, to hug and kiss them with an earnestness and warmth that is touching to behold. When left alone, she occupies and apparently amuses herself. and seems quite contented; and so strong seems to be the natural tendency of thought to put on the garb of language, that she often soliloquizes in the finger language slow and tedious as it is. But it is only when alone, that she is quiet: for if she becomes sensible of the presence of any one near her, she is restless until she can sit close beside them, hold their hand, and converse with them by signs. In her intellectual character it is pleasing to observe an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and a quick perception of the relations of things. In her moral character, it is beautiful to behold her continual gladness, her keen enjoyment of existence, her expansive love, her unhesitating confidence, her sympathy with suffering, her conscientiousness, truthfulness, and hopefulness. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1841

On a visit to Boston, the redheaded 19-year-old heiress Julia Ward of Rhode Island encountered “Chev” Howe, noted philanthropist, intrepid educator, dedicated physician, dashing horse-rider, hero of a foreign war of liberation, devoted head of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, noticeably older and something of –how shall I put this– umm, something of a womanizer.

JULIA WARD HOWE SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE There was, of course, mutual attraction. This would be, of course, a marriage made in hell. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1843

April 23, Sunday: At the Miller Tabernacle on Howard Street in Boston, a large number of believers awaited the end of the world. Within a few year, this building would be sold to and repurposed by another organization.

Robert Wiley of Kinderhook, Illinois summoned a group of 10 or 12 companions to help him dig further into an ancient Indian mound near the village. Not much farther than Wiley had dug on the 16th, the work crew came upon “six plates of brass of a bell shape, each having a hole near the small end, and a ring through them all, and clasped with two clasps.”

The plates had been recently fabricated in a local blacksmith shop and then the inscriptions had been created with nitric acid, by Wilbur Fulgate, Bridge Whitten (the blacksmith), and Robert Wiley. They had been covered with rust to make them appear ancient and had been placed in the mound on April 16th to be thus “found.” Their intent, Fulgate would confess in 1879, had been to test the claims being made by Joseph Smith, Jr.

Redheaded 21-year-old Julia Ward gave up a life of rich independence to marry a somewhat older but exceedingly dashing Boston reformer, “Chev” Howe. Her trustees drew up a marriage contract by which supposedly she would be able to retain control of her fortune. As she would put the matter in the following HDT WHAT? INDEX

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year, this turned out to be her “Darkest Moment”:

Hope died as I was led Unto my marriage bed; Nay, do not weep, ’twas I Not thou, that slew my happiest destiny.

JULIA WARD HOWE SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE As long-term director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, Dr. Howe would house his family in a small house on campus. It would be there that the couple would have six children (four of whom would survive to adulthood and become professionals well known in their fields). This wife’s diary alleges convincingly that “Chev” would turn out to be utterly controlling, and resentful of her accomplishments. At times he would mismanage the considerable funds left to her by her father, funds that supposedly had been reserved to her by her marriage contract but for which he had managed to obtain a signed Power of Attorney document (which he would then interpret to represent a grant of veto power over any spending). Several times they would face the prospect of divorce. Much later the wife would discover that the husband had been unfaithful to her during a considerable portion of their marriage. She stayed in the marriage in part because of repeated threats that if she sought a divorce he could make full use of the legal standards and common practices of the time, to keep her away from her children. Her focus would thus be driven away from the marriage into the learning for instance of several languages. Going beyond merely working with her husband on his brief venture at publishing an abolitionist paper, the Commonwealth,4 she would begin, despite his opposition, to become involved in public life, and in publishing her own materials. When she would take two of their children to Rome, “Chev” would stay behind in Boston — although we can trust that the husband’s sex life did not suffer from this separation.

4. The Howes were your usual sort, racist abolitionists. They were opposed to the institution of human chattel slavery because they didn’t suppose that black people belonged here in America, and supposed that it was this peculiar institution that gave these unwelcome people a chance to exist and to be a problem. It never occurred to either of these abolitionists, for instance, that there were blind black children as well as blind white children, and that they should be admitting these blind black children to the Perkins institution for blind children and caring for them, rather than ignoring them. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May 1, Monday: Horace Mann, Sr. and Mary Tyler Peabody were wed (he for the 2d time), at 11:30AM, and at 12:30PM their ship sailed (they were accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe) so that they would be able to make an examination of the educational institutions of England, Scotland, Hamburg, Magdeburg, Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Saxon Switzerland, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Utrecht, Leyden, Haarlem, Amsterdam, Paris, England again, and Ireland.

Oh, the grand seriousness of it all (and let’s hope the Britannia rocked that night).

At about this point Charles Stearns Wheeler was falling ill in Leipzig. This would take the form of a violent gastric fever.

Joseph Smith, Jr. published, in the Times and Seasons of which he was editor, “President Joseph then asked the conference if they were satisfied with the First Presidency, so far as he was concerned, as an individual, to preside over the whole church; or would they have another? If, said he, I have done any thing that ought to injure my character, reputation, or standing; or have dishonored our religion by any means in the sight of men, or angels, or in the sight of men and women, I am sorry for it, and if you will forgive me, I will endeavor to do so no more. I do not know that I have done anything of the kind; but if I have, come forward and tell me of it. If any one has any objection to me, I want you to come boldly and frankly, and tell of it; and if not, ever after hold your peace.”

On this day, in addition, the prophet Smith “got married with” Lucy Walker, and promised the family of Helen Mar Kimball, 14 years of age, that if they would allow him to marry their “Ewe Lamb” –would willingly lay her “upon the altar” in his phrase– he could guarantee that entire family’s “eternal salvation and exaltation.”

Henry Thoreau was written to by [Ellery Channing?] presumably in Cambridge.

My dear Thoreau I leave with you, a schedule of repairs & improvements[,] to be made on the Red Lodge before I move into it, & upon the place generally.

Cellar, sand put in enough to make it dry — underpinned with stone, pointed inside & out. New cellar stairs to be put. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Bank to be made round the house, round well, & in woodshed. (This is to sodded after planting.)

House interior. Kitchen-floor painted, & the woodwork of the kitch- en. All the plastering white-washed. Lock to be put on front-door. Glass reset where broken. New sill put to front-door & back-door, & steps if necessary. Leaky-place about chimney, caused by pinning up the house, to be made tight. — A new entry laid at front-door.

Washroom — to be white-washed — & a spout made from sink, into into long enough to carry off dirty water, so as to keep it from its running garden. ^ ^ well.

Well. To be cleaned out, inner stones reset (as I understand the Cap- tain told you originally) — an outside wall to be built up, high enough to keep out all wash; this outside wall to be filled round. A new pump to be put in, & to pump up good, clean, fresh water.

The Acre, to be measured, & fenced around with a new four rail fence. [the fence] The acre to be less wide than long. of the barn,

Privy. — To be moved from where it is now, behind the end the ^ filth carried off, & hole filled in. The privy to be whitewashed, & have a new door, & the floor either renewed or cleaned up. —

Barn. (Not done at once as I understood). New sill, & pinned up, so as to make it dry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1854

It was at some point during the early 1850s that the Howes established a summer residence in South Portsmouth at Lawton’s Valley on Aquidneck Island. Eventually Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe and their six children would have the house at 745 Union Street known as “Oak Glen” as their long-term summer home. RHODE ISLAND HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1856

Slavery advocates were swarming into Kansas in an effort to stack the territorial legislature with men who would vote to make Kansas a slave state; a move made possible by the “popular sovereignty” principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Olathe was founded. Wide-spread violence was breaking out between pro- slavery and abolitionists groups (the phrase “Bleeding Kansas” derives from this period). The Worcester Unitarian reverend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was appointed as agent for the Massachusetts Kansas Aid Committee that was helping recruit and arm people who would emigrate to Kansas and would there vote against the territory becoming a new slave state (the Kansas/Nebraska Act repealing the Missouri Compromise). During this year the Reverend authored “A Ride Through Kanzas” [sic]. In the “Pottawatomie Massacre,” John Brown and his followers murdered five supposedly pro-slavery men. While the “Chevalier” Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe was away, heroically leading anti-slavery settlers to the territory, back home the undutiful wife and mother Julia Ward Howe was publishing poetry and plays. There are references in their correspondence not only to love turning into alienation, but also to familial violence.

In support of freedom voters moving into Kansas, Friend John Greenleaf Whittier wrote:

THE KANSAS EMIGRANTS. WE cross the prairie as of old The pilgrims crossed the sea, To make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free! We go to rear a wall of men On Freedom’s southern line, And plant beside the cotton-tree The rugged Northern pine! We’re flowing from our native hills As our free rivers flow; The blessing of our Mother-land Is on us as we go. We go to plant her common schools, On distant prairie swells, And give the Sabbaths of the wild The music of her bells. Upbearing, like the Ark of old, The Bible in our van, We go to test the truth of God Against the fraud of man. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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No pause, nor rest, save where the streams That feed the Kansas run, Save where our Pilgrim gonfalon Shall flout the setting sun! We’ll tread the prairie as of old Our fathers sailed the sea, And make the West, as they the East, The homestead of the free! HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1859

February: In Brooklyn, New York, The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher wrote to Charles Wesley Slack seeking a list of the lecturers in the Lyceum course and also mentioning the fact that the Reverend Theodore Parker was no longer welcome to lecture at the Boston Lyceum on account of his “peculiar moral doctrines.” Meanwhile, the Reverend and Mrs. Parker were seen off by the Reverend George Ripley, as they departed by steamship, accompanied on this leg of their quest for health by their friends and co-conspirators Doctor and Mrs. Samuel Gridley Howe (Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe), for the warmer climes of Cuba and Santa Cruz never to return.

October 19, Wednesday: Wilhelm Tempel discovered a diffuse nebula around the Pleid star Merope.

John Brown was being taken from Harpers Ferry to the nearby Charles Town jail. (Brown’s white jailer there, John Avis, it seems, had been a childhood friend of Dr. Martin Robison Delany.) Full reports of the event at Harpers Ferry were appearing in this day’s newspapers.

Henry Thoreau and Bronson Alcott were visiting Waldo Emerson when the news was brought in, of Captain John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. Thoreau immediately began working over his materials about Brown.

“If Christ should appear on earth he would on all hands be denounced as a mistaken, misguided man, insane and crazed.” –Thoreau, October 19, 1859

JOURNAL: Here comes Jesus again

mistaken, misguided

insane and crazed HDT WHAT? INDEX

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When Julia Ward Howe read in the Boston Transcript about the raid upon the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, her husband Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe would casually remarked to her “Brown has got to work.” The newspapers were beginning to carry an account of an intriguing set of papers that had been discovered where Brown had unaccountably left them behind, when he had gone off on the morning of the 16th to launch his raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal. Among the papers, in addition to an envelope from Dr. Howe incriminatingly addressed to Brown, were a note from Gerrit Smith and two letters from Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.

The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson began to plan a rescue of Brown from the jail cell in Charles Town. He actually would succeed in raising aid for the Brown family. He would opinion, much later in life, after having had a chance to compare and contrast his ineffectiveness as a member of the Secret “Six” with the effectiveness of the revolutionary terror organized by the Communist Party in Russia, that: The Russian revolutionists, who were so efficient in making the tyrant Tsar Alexander II explode, have much to teach us about practical terror. Thoreau was being written to by Theophilus Brown in Worcester. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Worcester Oct 19 Friend Thoreau— The book came duly to hand, and as it was not for me, you I intend to send ^ the money for it in this note— Blake must speak for him -self and not for me when speaking of that mountain walk of ours. I enjoyed it well enough, and aught to be ashamed of myself that I did, perhaps, since it yielded me so little. Our Cape Cod walk salts down better with me, & yet there was’nt much salt in that,—enough to save it perhaps, but not ^enough of the sea & sand & sky. The good things I got in it were rather incidental—[&]did not belong to the sea. But I did get

Page 2 some glimpses of the sea. I remember a smoke we had on a little ^barren knoll where we heard the plover, in North Dennis, in the twilight after a long & hot days walk. We heard the pounding of the surf against a shore twenty miles off[,—(]so said the man at whose house we passed the night,—)—and we were expecting to arrive there the next day. I have been in the habit of thinking our journey culmin -ated in that smoke, if it did’nt end there, for, though HDT WHAT? INDEX

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we arrived at the beach the next day according to programme & found the thirty miles stretch of it, with its accompaniments too large to complain of, yet—our anticipations were immense. But now

Page 3 in thinking of it the actual sea & sky loom up larger, while our smoke & dreams —hold their own pretty well— Your friend Theo’s Brown HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1860

May 12, Saturday: Henry Thoreau surveyed the boundary between Moses Prichard’s woods skirting the river, which were furnished with winding walks and rustic seats and formed an attractive and cool retreat, and the Joseph Holbrook houselots on Main Street in Concord. Thoreau’s charge was $1.50. Holbrook’s house was on the site of the house of common entertainment that belonged to William Buss in 1660, almost opposite the site that is now the Concord Free Public Library. This survey shows that the garbage disposal of that day was the pig, for Thoreau included the “piggery.” Thoreau’s charge was $0.25. Joseph Holbrook also owned land in Great Meadows and part of Frosty Poplar Hollow near Gowing’s Swamp and Copan.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/55.htm

A group of 105 white miners were trekking toward Pyramid Lake, seeking retribution against the redskins for their having massacred the five white rapists at Williams Station, when the Payute intercepted the group, managing to kill roughly half of them. Two days after the Reverend Theodore Parker’s death, Dr. B. Appleton (a Boston physician who had been in attendance during his last months) and Parker’s close friend Professor Pierre Jean Édouard Desor performed an autopsy, removing the brain and the heart. Expecting the corpse to be shipped back to Massachusetts for reburial, they sealed it in a lead casket, packed tightly in hemp and pickled in strong spirits. The brain and heart were put in separate boxes and sent on ahead, perhaps assuming that after the organs were studied they would be interred in the casket with the rest of Parker’s corpse. Parker’s widow, however, considered that moving his HDT WHAT? INDEX

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corpse would violate one of his final wishes, and would have the remainder interred in the Protestant cemetery

in Firenze in which Elizabeth Barrett Browning would be being interred in the following year, and Thoreau’s friend Thomas Cholmondeley in 1864:

So have I seen a pine tree in the woods, old, dry at its roots, capped with age-resembling snow; it stood there, and seemed to stand; but a little touch of wind drove it headlong, and it fell with a long, resounding crash. —Theodore Parker

We know that his brain was sent to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe at the Perkins School for the Blind, for a sailor would show up at the Howes’ door unexpectedly with a brain in a box. The cover letter had been lost in transit, so Julia Ward Howe stuck the box and its grisly contents in a closet on the top floor of the Perkins School (one of the Howe daughters would reminisce about being terrified of that closet as a child). Dr. Howe, meanwhile, would not mention the disgusting matter to anyone; for years, even Mrs. Parker would not know where her husband’s brain had gotten to. What happened to the box containing the heart is even more unclear; it may have been sent to Dr. Samuel Cabot, Parker’s physician and president of the Boston Society of Natural History.

Parker’s gravestone in Italy is of marble, about 4 feet high, and is topped by an “eternal flame” in a lamp that resembles a Unitarian-Universalist chalice. The stone provides a side view of Parker’s bust, with laurel wreath. The stone has become tilted and someday may fall and shatter. The cemetery is opened for visitors from 10AM to 1PM, except on Sundays and Mondays. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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THEODORE PARKER THE GREAT AMERICAN PREACHER BORN AT LEXINGTON MASSACHUSETTS UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AUGUST 24 1810 DIED AT FLORENCE ITALY MAY 10 1860 HIS NAME IS ENGRAVED IN MARBLE HIS VIRTUES IN THE HEARTS OF THOSE HE HELPED TO FREE FROM SLAVERY AND SUPERSTITION

May 12. Celandine. Very hot.

2.30 P. M.—81°. We seek the shade to sit in for a day or two. The neck-cloth and single coat is too thick; wear a half-thick coat at last [?]. The sugar maple blossoms on the Common resound with bees. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Ostrya flower commonly out on Island, how long? Maybe a day or two. First bathe in the river. Quite warm enough. River five and one half plus inches below summer level. Very heavy dew and mist this morning; plowed ground black and moist with it. The earth is so dry it drinks like a sponge.

June 3, Sunday: At the church on Bullfinch Street in Boston, the Reverend William Rounseville Alger delivered a commemorative discourse on the Reverend Theodore Parker. (The Reverend Parker had just died in Italy, and his brain and heart had been removed and were on its way back to the USA in two boxes entrusted to a sailor. The box containing the brain would soon arrive on the doorstep of Julia Ward Howe without anything to indicate what the hell it was that was in the box — and for lack of anything better to do with it she would shove the grisly object into the back of a closet. This commemorative discourse by the Reverend Alger, however, would fare better: it would soon be published in Boston by the firm of Walker, Wise and Company as A TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY AND SERVICES OF THE REV. THEODORE PARKER: FROM A DISCOURSE PRONOUNCED IN THE BULLFINCH-STREET CHURCH, BOSTON, JUNE 3, 1860.) Henry Thoreau did not make an appearance.

June 3. 6 A.M.—River three and three sixteenth inches above summer level; i.e., the river has begun to fall within twenty-four hours and less after the rain ceased. 2 P. M.—To bayberry. These are the clear breezy days of early June, when the leaves are young and few and the sorrel not yet in its prime. Perceive the meadow fragrance. Am surprised to [see] some twenty or more crows in a flock still, cawing about us. The roads now strewn with red maple seed. The pines’ shoots have grown generally from three to six inches, and begin to make a distinct impression, even at some distance, of white and brown above their dark green. The foliage of deciduous trees is still rather yellow-green than green. There are in the Boulder Field several of the creeping juniper which grow quite flat on the ground, somewhat like the empetrum, most elevated in the middle. Not only brakes, many of them tall, and branching two feet at least from the ground, have their branches nibbled off, but the carrion-flower has very commonly lost its leaves, either by rabbits or woodchucks. Tree-toads heard. See a common toad three quarters of an inch long. There are various sweet scents in the air now. Especially, as I go along an arbor-vitæ hedge, I perceive a very distinct fragrance like strawberries from it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1861

Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe became involved in the US Sanitary Commission, an important and poorly remembered institution of social service. More men would die during the Civil War from disease caused by poor sanitary conditions in prisoner of war camps and their own army camps than would die in battle by bullet or bayonet. The Sanitary Commission was the chief institution of reform for that condition, leading to far fewer deaths later in the war than earlier.

Late April: The construction of Fort Warren with its 10-foot-thick granite walls on Georges Island, just to the north of

the shipping channel into Boston Harbor known as Nantasket Roads, which had been begun by Sylvanus Thayer in 1833,5 was by no means complete, and it was feared that the Southrons or their European allies might attempt a sea attack upon the city of Boston. Therefore the “Tiger Battalion,” made up of four elite companies of Massachusetts’s 2d Infantry, was boated out to the construction site. As these troops began to clear away some of the construction rubble, they sang popular hymn tunes such as “Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us,” improvising various amusing verses about their Sergeant John Brown to fit the melody. It has been claimed therefore that it was these soldiers working on the fort’s parade ground who actually invented the lyrics to “John Brown’s Body,” and that the role of Julia Ward Howe later on was merely to clean the thing up for formal civic performance as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” When Governor Andrew came out on inspection, the troops were not ready and the Governor had to belay awhile as they scraping together enough powder to fire him an appropriate salute.

[THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR APRIL 26th]

5. Sylvanus Thayer had been born in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1785 and had studied military methods in Europe after the War of 1812, superintending West Point from 1817 to 1833. From 1833 until his death in 1872 he would improve and better fortify US harbors. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July: On a hot day during this month, marching down Broadway in Washington DC, a Massachusetts regiment sang to a song to the tune of a Southern camp-meeting hymn, — John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave/ His soul is marching on! The song, written by an unknown soldier, would become a favorite among Union soldiers. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe’s wife, Julia Ward Howe, was watching the Massachusetts men march past, and she would later write new words for the tune, calling it “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The 1st Battle of Bull Run. Public demand pushed General-in-Chief Winfield Scott to advance on the South before adequately training his untried troops.

Scott ordered General Irvin McDowell to advance on Confederate troops stationed at Manassas Junction, Virginia. McDowell attacked on July 21, and was initially successful, but the introduction of Confederate reinforcements resulted in a Southern victory and a chaotic retreat toward Washington by federal troops. Benjamin Wade, Lyman Trumbull, James Grimes, Zachariah Chandler, and other Washington politicians, had taken a day trip out into the countryside to witness the fighting. There had not seemed to them to be any HDT WHAT? INDEX

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particular risk involved. At one point, however, this group of politicos was nearly captured.

US CIVIL WAR Suddenly aware of the threat of a protracted war and the army’s need for organization and training, Abraham Lincoln replaced General McDowell with General George B. McClellan.

To blockade the coast of the Confederacy effectively, the federal navy had to be improved. By July, the effort at improvement had made a difference and an effective blockade had begun. The South responded by building small, fast ships that could outmaneuver Union vessels. On November 7, 1861, Captain Samuel F. Dupont’s warships silenced Confederate guns in Fort Walker and Fort Beauregard. This victory enabled General Thomas W. Sherman’s troops to occupy first Port Royal and then all the famous Sea Islands of South Carolina.

While the Confederate Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor was attempting to take possession of the Arizona Territory for the South, the Chiricahuas and Mimbreños were attempting to take possession of the area for their coalition of Apache Navajos. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November: The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson was granted authority to recruit and command a regiment of Massachusetts white men.

Julia Ward Howe had gone to Washington DC with a group including the Reverend James Freeman Clarke to HDT WHAT? INDEX

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bring supplies to Massachusetts volunteers, and was staying in Willard’s Hotel.

One morning she drowsed awake with a poem in her head, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” that could be set to the tune of the currently popular “John Brown’s Body,” and scribbled it with an “old stump of a pen” onto the back of a piece of Sanitary Commission stationery “without looking at the paper.” US CIVIL WAR

As I lay waiting for dawn, the long lines of the desired poem began to twine themselves in my mind.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword, His truth is marching on! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps;6 They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps. I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps; His day is marching on!

6. The “hundred circling camps” were just that — the ring of forts around Washington DC. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel; “As ye deal with my condemners, so with you my grace shall deal.” Let the hero born of woman crush the serpent with his heel, Since god is marching on! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat; He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgement seat. O be swift, my soul, to answer him, be jubilant my feet! Our god is marching on! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me. As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free While god is marching on! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on. He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave; He is wisdom to the mighty, he is courage to the brave. So the world shall be his foot stool and the soul of wrong his slave, As god is marching on!7 Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

7. This rarely-published sixth verse is presented as it appears in BEST LOVED POEMS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Samuel Langhorn Clemens, steamboat pilot, had been stranded in New Orleans because the Civil War had interdicted traffic on the Mississippi River, and had enlisted in the Confederacy. However, his brother Orion Clemens had been active in the presidential campaign of Abraham Lincoln and in reward had been appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory. –So he accompanied his brother on a 21-day stagecoach journey to the west, arriving finally in Nevada.

There is one thing which I can’t stand and won’t stand, from many people. That is sham sentimentality..., the rot that deals in the “happy days of yore,” the “sweet yet melancholy past,” with its “blighted hopes” and its “vanished dreams.”

Frederick Douglass renewed his linkages with the Garrisonians. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1862

February: The Atlantic Monthly published a new poem by Julia Ward Howe, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which would be set to the tune used by “John Brown’s Body” and would become a parable of Puritan New England’s morally self-righteous idealism.8 The magazine paid $4.00 or $5.00 for the rights — this lets you know approximately, oh, to the nearest Andrew Jackson twenty or so, what a song about how Jesus wants you to kill people might be worth.9

8. Edmund Wilson, in his PATRIOTIC GORE (1962), has pointed out that in this jingle, Christ’s having died to make men holy wasn’t a good enough job, so it was up to us to go him one better, and die to make men free:

Now come on, New England boys, get in step with the marching God! If you succeed in crushing the serpent [the Confederacy], God will reward you with “grace.”

What a commentary this “get in step with the marching God” of Wilson’s is upon the normative misremembering of Thoreau’s “drummer” metaphor in WALDEN, as “march to the beat of a different drummer”! 9. Recently The Atlantic Monthly was able to sell the original holograph manuscript that had been submitted to them by Julia Ward Howe, to some rich dude, of course for megabucks. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July: This is what New Orleans looked like in roughly this early war period:

The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s new book THE GOLDEN HOUR, an elaboration on his “The Golden Hour” sermon, amounted to a 178-pages missive to President Abraham Lincoln proposing that he utilize his war powers to decree an end to enslavement in these United States of America.10 THE GOLDEN HOUR

Albeit Conway was becoming somewhat less sanguine about Lincoln becoming the Graceful Emancipator at this point, than he had before, nevertheless the Reverend still was gracelessly holding out to people locked in mortal combat the utterly preposterous and counterfactual illusion that if the southern slaves were set free by proclamation at long range, then the Southern resistance would of necessity collapse — and all this killing

10. Among the many books offered by Ticknor and Fields at the back of this volume, Henry D. Thoreau’s WALDEN appeared as 1 volume, 16 mo. for $1.00 and A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS as 1 volume, 12 mo. for $1.25. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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would of necessity be suddenly over.

Conway was going around declaring stupid stuff like that if the announcement were made, those darkies would beat their African tom-toms and the good news would get all the way down the Mississippi River to New Orleans before it even could arrive by telegraph wire. Along the way Conway attempted to deploy the memory of Henry Thoreau in a most intriguing manner: The naturalist Thoreau used to amuse us much by thrusting his hand into the Concord River, and drawing out at will a fine fish, which would lie quietly in his hand: when we thrust in ours, the fish would scamper out of reach. It seemed like a miracle, until he explained to us that his power to take up the fish depended upon his knowledge of the color and location of the fish’s eggs. The fish will protect its spawn; and when Thoreau placed his hand underneath that, the fish, in order to protect it, would swim immediately over it, and the fingers had only to close for it to be caught. Slavery is the spawn out of which the armed forces of treason and rebellion in the South have been hatched; and by an inviolable instinct they will rush, at any cost, to protect Slavery. You have only, Sir, to take Slavery in your grasp, then close your fingers around the rebellion. This is enough to remind one of what certain of our irritated and frustrated professional warmongers would be saying during the Vietnam War: that once we had firmly grabbed them by their gonads their hearts and minds would of necessity follow. Waldo Emerson was really buying into this sort of Fantasy Island stuff about the efficacy of warfare. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The Atlantic Monthly, however, reported sad news, that the authenticity of the story of Winkelried and his “sheaf of Austrian spears,” a necessary part of the story of William Tell, had been cast into the shadow of doubt, owing to the fact 1.) that somebody had noticed that said events had gone unmentioned in contemporary documents and chronicles, and owing to the fact 2.) that somebody had noticed that the Halbsuter poem recounting said events actually had plagiarized a previous poem which had made no mention of such events, and owing to the fact that 3.) somebody had notice that actually this Halbsuter poet had not been a citizen of the fair commune of Lucerne.

Nothing is safe from the debunkers!

This stuff about Tell was presumably of great interest to the American audience, because during Thoreau’s lifetime some 40,000 Swiss had emigrated to America, out of a population of about 2,500,000. (People still play around with this legend. For instance, on January 16, 2001, at a circus performance in Paris, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Mme Cathy Jamet has been shot in the face by a crossbow arrow fired by her husband M Alain Jamet.)

During this month Sgt. Brown, the real or original subject of the song “John Brown’s Body,” a shortie, drowned while attempting to ford the Rappahannock with his unit. JULIA WARD HOWE

September 6, Saturday: 1st issue of the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn’s anti- slavery Commonwealth. This paper would publish works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Lydia Maria Child, Julia Ward Howe, the Reverend David Wasson, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Bronson Alcott, and Louisa May Alcott.

On some date subsequent to Miss Mary Moody Emerson’s death, I haven’t established exactly when, Sanborn would provide a savage “obituary” in which he would declare that this little lady while still among the living had been capable of “saying more disagreeable things in a half-hour than any person living.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1863

January: At his mansion in Medford, Massachusetts, George Luther Stearns of the Secret “Six” conspiracy staged an unveiling ceremony for a heroic bust of Captain John Brown which he had commissioned from the sculptor Edwin Brackett to place in the corner of his elaborately decorated Victorian foyer. Waldo Emerson recited his “The Boston Hymn” poem and Julia Ward Howe recited her “Battle Hymn of the Republic” poem. The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had become a Colonel in command of a black regiment, was of course understandably unable to be present. The New York millionaire Gerrit Smith had not responded to the formal invitation, made no appearance, and offered no explanation. In addition to Stearns and Brackett as providers, and Emerson and Mrs. Howe as performers, the ceremony was attended by John Murray Forbes, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Wendell Phillips, and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. The ceremony was catered by a black caterer who, when he saw who it was who was being honored, attempted to refuse payment and had to have a note jammed into his pocket.

In this month’s Harper’s New Monthly Magazine George William Curtis, from “The Editor’s Easy Chair,” wrote about the shanty of Friend Daniel Ricketson (without naming him). This shanty had walls on which “Wonderful artists have wrought the design: not spiders and butterflies and worms, nor the frost in autumn HDT WHAT? INDEX

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tinting forest leaves or ripening of them, as Thoreau says” but of copies of writings by “Milton, and John Woolman, and Dr. Johnson, and Henry Thoreau, and Cowper, and old John Brown, and Plutarch, and George Fox, overlap and crowd and combine in promiscuous wisdom.”

Louisa May Alcott contracted the cholera at Army Hospital and was administered massive doses of calomel, a mercury-based emetic.11 While lying desperately ill, Louisa May Alcott received $100.00 for her first “lurid” piece for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, a piece titled “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” published under the pseudonym “A.M. Barnard.” But she was thinking of Henry Thoreau, and writing a poem about him. The poem would be published in The Atlantic Monthly, in the summer of 1863, as “Thoreau’s flute.”

11. She would suffer for the remainder of her life from this systemic poisoning. Under such a regimen it was common for the hair and teeth of the patient to fall out, and for their tongues to protrude until they lost their voices and could scarcely swallow. In fact, if the patient’s reaction were not sufficiently severe, the physician of that era was likely to increase the dosage. (In May 1863, too late for Louisa May, the Surgeon General of the United States would proscribe this use of the calomel emetic.) HDT WHAT? INDEX

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As I shall forget the strange fancies that haunted me I shall amuse myself with recording some of them. The most vivid & enduring was a conviction that I had married a stout, handsome Spaniard dressed in black US CIVIL WAR velvet with very soft hands & a voice that was continually saying, “Lie still, my dear.” This was mother, I suspect, but with all the comfort I often found in her presence there was blended an awful fear of the Spanish spouse who was always coming after me, appearing out of closets, in at windows, or threatening me dreadfully all night long. I appealed to the Pope & really got up & made a touching plea in something I meant for Latin they tell me. Once I went to heaven & found it a twilight place with people darting thro the air in a queer way. All very busy & dismal & ordinary. Miss Dix, W.H. Channig [sic] & other people were there but I thought it dark & “slow” & wished I hadn’t come. A mob at Baltimore breaking down the door to get me; being hung for a witch, burned, stoned & otherwise maltreated were some of my fancies. Also being tempted to join Dr. W. & two of the nurses in worshipping the Devil. Also tended millions of sick men who never died or got well. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1868

Theodore Dwight Weld, Sarah Moore Grimké, and Angelina Emily Grimké were officers of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. Angelina and Sarah circulated petitions on behalf of this association. The New England Woman’s Club was formed with Julia Ward Howe as one of its first vice presidents. She would also become the president of the New England Woman Suffrage Association and, the following year, make herself one of the leaders of the American Woman Suffrage Association. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1869

August: Bronson Alcott wrote to Julia Ward Howe in Rhode Island:

You invite my views on the subject of your proposed American Woman’s Suffrage Association. I am accustomed to defer to woman the questions that are properly hers. But I will venture say that women ought to be admitted to full citizenship, via these measures: The Convention, The Lecture, The Press, and The Conversation, especially the last named, as being the simplest, the most natural, and in keeping with this humane reform. I trust your American Suffrage Association will be organized on the broadest principles, and set its machinery in motion forthwith. At this point, it would seem, Alcott must have been wrapping up the work he had been doing since April, 12 of preparing materials for a book on CONCORD DAYS that would see publication in 1872.

During this year the US Navy purchased what remained above water level of the Goat Island, which once had been part of the farm of Friend Mary Dyer, in Newport harbor. This would be the site for their Newport Torpedo Station. Its Mark 14 proximity torpedo was to be developed there, as the brainchild of Ralph Waldo Christie.

12. Bronson Alcott. CONCORD DAYS. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872 [bound in green cloth, blind-stamped; “Concord Days” stamped in gold in center of front cover; spine stamped in gold; brown wove endpapers] HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1871

Julia Ward Howe was responsible for establishing a Town and Country literary club, with members including Samuel Coleman, Charlotte Cushman, and George E. Waring. This club would be meeting in Rhode Island for about the 30 following summers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1873

June: In several US cities and in England, Switzerland, Italy, and Turkey, Mother’s Day was celebrated — a peace holiday that had in 1870 been proposed by Julia Ward Howe. CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE Arise then ... women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts! Whether your baptism be of water or of tears! Say firmly: “We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies, Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, For caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, Will be too tender of those of another country To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.” Blood does not wipe out dishonor, Nor violence indicate possession. As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil At the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace... Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar, But of God — In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask That a general congress of women without limit of nationality, May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient And the earliest period consistent with its objects, To promote the alliance of the different nationalities, The amicable settlement of international questions, The great and general interests of peace. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1876

January 19, Wednesday: Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe died in Boston. He would be succeeded as director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind by Dr. Michael Anagnos, born in Epirus, Greece, who would himself be the director until his own death in 1906. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1880

Spring: Charles Louis Flint, who had for almost a year been performing the functions of the president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College without any provisions for a salary, resigned from that position.

In Newport, Rhode Island, Julia Ward Howe wrote a poem for a memorial to Charles T. Brooks. JULY 23, 1880 Very busy all day. Rainy weather. In the evening I had a mock-meeting, with burlesque papers, etc. I lectured on Ism-not-m, on Asm, spasm, plasm.” JULY 24, 1880 Working hard, as usual. Marionettes at home here in the evening. Laura had written the text. Maud was Julius Ceasar; Flossie, Cassius; Daisy, Brutus. JULY 28, 1880 Read my lecture on Modern Society in the Hillside Chapel at Concord … The comments of Mssrs. Alcott and W. H. Channing were quite enough to turn a sober head. To the poorhouse and to Jacob Chase’s with Joseph Coggeshall. Old Elsteth, whom I remember these many years, died a few weeks ago. One of the pauper women who has been there a long time told me that Elsteth cried out that she was going to heaven, and that she gave her, as a last gift, a red handkerchief. Mrs. Anna Brown, whom I saw last year, died recently. Her relatives are people in good position and ought to have provided for her in her declining years. They came, in force, to her funeral and had a very nice coffin for her. Took away her body for burial. Such meanness needs no comment. … Jacob was glad to see me. Asked after Maud and doubted whether she was as handsome as I was when he first saw me (thirty or more years ago). His wife said to me in those days: ‘Jacob thinks thee’s the only good-looking woman in these parts. She was herself a handsome woman and a very sweet one. I wish I had known I was so good-looking. TO LAURA OAK GLENN OCTOBER 10, 1880 Dearest, Dearest L. E. R. – How I wonder how you R.! Cause of silence not hardness of heart, but the given necessity of scribbling for dear life, to finish promised paper for the Woman’s Congress, sedebit next week. I in Boston for Wed., Thurs., and Fri. – day being understood. Mowski [Adamowski] left us yesterday morning … We had him here a fortnight, and enjoyed his visit extremely. At table, between the courses, he played on every instrument of the orchestra. I asked once for the bass drum, which he imitated, adding thereunto the cymbals. We had a luncheon party last week, for the ride, Maud Appleton, and “invited quite fashionable,” and after all she didn’t come. “Sick in bed with diptheria.” May by some be considered an excuse, but then, it’s very rude to be sick, and its very troublesome to other people. (This to make you feel badly about your own shortcomings.) We had a little dance, too, on Friday evening. An omnibus party came out and a few others. I pounded the Lancers and some ancient waltzes and polkas, ending with the Virginia reel, in which last I thought my floor would give way, the young men stamped so. I have no paper left except some newspaper wrappers, so can’t write anymore. Got up and found this scrap, then hunted for my pen, which, after some search, I found in my mouth. This is what it is to be lit’ry. Oh, My! Isometimes wish I wasn’t.!… HDT WHAT? INDEX

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TO LAURA, OAK GLENN NOVEMBER 9, 1880 Behold the mum-jacket, sitting clothed and in her chair, confronting you after long silence, with comforting words of recovery. I am now in the fourth week of my infirmity, and I really think that the offending, or rather offended, muscles have almost recovered their natural power of contraction. My exercise is still restricted to a daily walk from my bed in the small parlor to my chair in the large parlor, and back again. But this walk, which at first was an impotent limp, with bones clicking loosely, is now a very respectable performance, not on the tightrope, indeed, but let us say on the tight garter…The only break in the general uniformity of my life was dear Uncle Sam’s arrival on Sunday last. He remained with us a couple of hours and was delightful as ever. Oh! More news. With his kind help, I have taken Mrs. Lodges small house for the winter and this opens me up to a comfortable prospect, though, even with his help, the two ends will have to be pulled a little in order to meet. It had been nine years since she last had a house in Boston and she moved to a furnished house in Lower Mount Vernon Street. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1881

January 1, Saturday: Julia Ward Howe wrote, “I have now been lame for twelve weeks, in consequence of a bad fall which I had on October 17, I am still on crutches with my left knee on a splint. Have had much valuable leisure in consequence of this, but have suffered much inconvenience and privation of preaching, social intercourse, etc. Very little pain since the first ten days. Farewell, Old Year! Thank the Heavenly Father for many joys, comforts and opportunities.”

At a reception in the White House, the United States Marine Band made its 1st public appearance under a new leader, John Philip Sousa.

JANUARY 18TH, 1881? ...My sixty years begin to weigh upon me. My spirits flag, and I often dread the fatigue of meeting with many people. My natural inertia causes me to delay indefinitely some pieces of work that I feel to be very important to me, such as the writing up of my notes of travel and the settling of my financial matters. I long for some hours of complete isolation every day, during which I might unfold books, papers, etc., without fear of interruption. I have much to enjoy, much to be thankful for, and very much to regret in my past mistakes and failures to do the right thing. God help me to resolve and do my best without losing all power in the discouraging retrospect of so much that has been honestly erroneous and of some things that may have been willfully wrong. God bless and help also my dear children and children’s children. With these prayers I will begin my new record. JANUARY 26TH, 1881 Busy most of the day with my lecture Had a visit from [Dr. H.P. Beach] who advised me to keep still and go nowhere until my lameness shall be much better. Took 4:30 train for Concord, Massachusetts. Maud would go with me, which grieved me, as she thereby lost a brilliant ball… We went to Mr. Cheyney’s, where we found Frank Barlow, a little older, but quite unchanged as to character, etc. He has the endearing coquetry of a woman. Dear Mr. Emerson and Mrs. Came to my lecture. Mr. E. said that he liked it. The audience was very attentive throughout. Stepped only once on my lame foot in getting into the sleigh… JANUARY 28, 1881 Busy all day with my address for woman’s suffrage meeting in the evening…When I entered with my crutches the audience applauded quite generally…Wendell Phillips made the concluding speech of the evening. He was less brilliant than usual, kept referring to what I had said. I thanked him for this afterwards, and he said that my speech had spoiled his own; that I had taken up the very points upon which he intended to dwell. FEBRUARY 11, 1881 Lecture at Groton, Massachusetts. As I went down the steps of the carriage, one of my crutches slipped and the careless hackman on my right let me fall, Frank catching me, but not until I had given my knee a sever wrench which gave me great pain. I suffered much in my travel, but got through, Fran helping me… My knee seemed much inflamed and kept me awake much of the night. My lecture on ‘Polite Society’ was well received. The good people of the house brought me their new ledger, that my name might be the first recorded in it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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FEBRUARY 12, 1881 Dinner of the Merchant’s Club. Edward Atkinson invites me. Got back by early train, 7:50 am, feeling poorly. Did not let Maud know of my hurt. Went to the dinner mentioned above, which was at the Vindome…Was taken into dinner by the President, Mr. Fitz. Robert Collyer had the place on my right. He was as delightful as ever. Edward Everett Hale sat near me and talked with me from time to time. Of course my speech afflicted me. I got through it, however, but had to lose the other speeches, the hour being so late and the night so inclement, so very rainy. FEBRUARY 20, 1881 Very lame this morning. No courage to try to go out. Have been busy with Kant and Miss Cobbe’s new book, ‘Duties of Women’ which I am reviewing for the ‘Christian Register’…” TO LAURA MOUNT VERNON STREET FEBRUARY, 1881 My Dearest Laura, - …Mr. Longfellow came to see us yesterday, and told us his curious dreams. In one of them, he went to London and found James Russell Lowell keeping a grocery. In another, people were vituperating the bad weather, and dear Papa said: “Remember, gentlemen, who makes it!” This impressed us very characteristic of our dear one. My lameness is decreasing very slowly, and I have now been a week without the splint. The knee, however, still swells if I attempt to use it, and my life is still much restricted as to movement. FEBRUARY 28, 1881 …A cloud seems to lift itself form that part of my mind which concerns, or should concern, itself with spiritual things. Sometimes a strong unwillen seizes me in this direction. I feel in myself no capacity to comprehend any features of the unseen world. My belief in it does not change, but my imagination refuses to act upon the basis of the ‘things not seen.’ MARCH 5, 1881 Longfellow to dine. MARCH 30, 1881 In the evening to the ever-pleasing Hasty-Pudding Theatrical play, a burlesque of Victor Hugo’s ‘Notre Dame de Paris,’ with many saucy interjections. The fun and spirits of the young men were very contagious, must have cheered up all present who needed cheering… TO LAURA MOUNT VERNON STREET MARCH 24, 1881 My Darling Laura, - The March wind blows and gives me the spleen. I don’t care about anything, don’t want my books, nor my friends, nor nothing. But you, poor child, may not be in this wicked, not caring condition, and so I will write you, having aughted to for a considerable time. N thin stays put, not even put-y. Letters don’t stay answered, faces don’t stay washed, clothes don’t stay either clean or new. Children wont stay the youngest. The world wont stay anywhere, anyhow. Forty years ago was good enough for me. Why couldn’t it stay? Now, I see you undertaking to comfort me in good earnest, and know just how you would begin by saying: “Well it should!” …Nunc Richard (Richard Sullivan) here yesterday. Remarked nothing in particular, I replying in like manner. Kept his arm very dark, under a sort of cloak. We condoled [with] each other upon our mental stupidity, and parted with no particular views or sentiments. I have been busy today at a worldly fashionable lunch. Nobody cared for anything but what they had on and had to eat. “He! he!” said one: “ho!ho!ho!” the other. “Is your uncle dead yet?” “No but my aunt is.” “Grandfather Wobblesticks used to say’ – “Why of course he did!” Which is all that I remember of the conversation. Now, darling, this is perfectly hateful of me to snarl at the hand which has just been putting good morsels into my mouth. But you see, this is a March wind in Boston, and I can’t HDT WHAT? INDEX

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help it. And I hobbled greatly up the big staircase, also down. That’s all. Auntie and Daisy and Maud lunched, too, munchingly. D. made a new capote for Maud. Nobody made nothing new for me. I had no lace bow under my chin, and looked so neglected! Maud and Daisy always on the wing, concerts, theaters, lunches, etc., etc. Auntie and I have had some good evenings at home, in which we refresh the venerable intelligence with the modern publication, we do, to wit, “Early Life of Charles James Fox.” We also play Russian backgammon. Big Frank Crawford had enlargement of ‘s liver. This p.m. late Mrs. C. C. Perkins had recep. For Miss Carl Schurz. Girls going, but going first to X.’s weekly week tea and weaker talk. Here again, you spleeny devil, get the behind me! I love my fellow-creatures, but bless you, not in this month…Julia Nagnos takes tea round generally, and finds it agrees with her … I regard you, on the whole, with feeling. Farewell, Laura, I am your poor old mad March Mamma. Love to Skip and the little ones.” APRIL 7, 1881 Finished Carlyle’s ‘Reminiscences’ today. Perhaps nothing that he has left us shows more clearly what he was and what he was not. A loyal, fervent, witty, keen man…His characterizations of individuals are keenly hit off with graphic humor. But he could make sad mistakes, and could not find them out, as in the case of what he calls our ‘beautiful Nigger Agony’!! I went to the Cambridge Club, having had chills and fever all the night before. Read my lecture on Paris, which was well received, and followed y a good discussion with plenty of differences of opinion. Evening at home; another chill and fever. TO LAURA MOUNT VERNON STREET APRIL 24, 1881 Bad old party is and was. Badness mostly of heart, though head has a decided crack in it. Unfeeling old Beast! Let Laura so long without a word. Guess ‘t is n’t worth while for her to write anything more. My poor dear little Laura, how miserably you must have been feeling, I know well by your long silence. Oh! posterity! How much you cost, and how little you come to! Did I not cost as much as another? And what do I come to? By Jingo! Darling, I have got some little miserable, mean excuses. Want ‘em? Have had much writing to do, many words for little money. For “Critic” (NY) and for “youth’s Companion” and other things. Then, have kept up great correspondence with Uncle Sam, who had given me a house in Beacon Street! Oh gonniac [Welsh for glory] We had a lit’ry party last week. Dr. Holmes and William Dean Howells read original things. James Freeman Clarke recited and we had ices and punch. Maud thought it frumpy, but others liked it very much. Have been to church today, heard J. F. C. ‘Most off crutches now and hobble about the house with a cane. Use crutches to go up and down stairs and to walk in the street…Have heard much music and have seen Salvini once, in the “Gladiator,” and hope to see him on Thursday, in “Macbeth.” How are the dear children? I do want to see them, ‘specially July Ward…” MAY 27, 1881 Soon after 7 am arrived Uncle Sam with my dear sister Annie Maillard from California; the whole intended as a birthday surprise. My sister is very little changed; always a most tender, sensitive woman. Sister Louisa did n’t know of this and came at 11am to bring my greetings and gifts, with Mr. Terry, Daisy, and Uncle Sam. When sister Annie appeared, Sister Louisa almost fainted with delight and astonishment. JUNE 20, OAK GLENN Dear Flossie suffering at 6am – about all day. Her child, a fine boy, born at 3pm. We are all very happy and thankful. It was touching to see the surprise and joy of the little children when they were admitted to a sight of their new relative. There was something reverent in the aspect of the little creatures, as if they partly felt the mystery if this new life which they could not understand. Some one told them that it came from heaven. Harry, four years old, said: ‘No, it did n’t come from Heaven, for it has n’t any wings.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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TO LAURA OAK GLENN JULY 10, 1881 Yes, she was a little injured, but not so bad as she pretends. Feelings hurt dreadful? Self-Esteem bruised and swollen? Spleen a little touched? Well, she has had the doctor, and the doctor said: “Her mother is a public character, what can we do about it? Could my ink forever flow Could my pen no respite know. Well, my darling, it was too bad, so we’ll make up, and kiss and be friends. But now you look here. Besides all my lit’ry work, which seems to be heaviest in summer time, I had an awful deal to do in taking care of Flossie’s children and the new baby. The babe is of the crying sort! When anything is to be done for his Ma, the nurse expects some one to hold him….I returned last night from a journey to Vermont, where I read a paper before the American Institute of Education, and also spoke at a suffrage meeting in Montpelier, and came back, after four days’ absence, very tired. (Chorus, Don’t tell Maud.)… AUGUST 30, 1881 My first performance at the Casino Theatre. It went very off very successfully, and I was much applauded, as were most of the others. Supper afterwards at Mrs. Richard Hunt’s, where, I had to appear in ‘plain clothes,’ having been unable to accomplish evening dress after the play. Dear Flossy went with me. SEPTEMBER 18, 1881 Preached in Tiverton today. Text: ‘The fashion of this world passeth away.’ Subject: Fashion, an intense but transient power, in contradistinction, the eternal things of God. SEPTEMBER 25, 1881 Spent much of this day in composing a poem in commemoration of President Garfield’s death. Spared no pains with this and succeeded beter than I had expected. SEPTEMBER 26, 1881 The President’s funeral. Services held in most cities of the United States, I should judge. Solemn services also in London and Liverpool. MONDAY, OCTOBER 4TH, 1881 I have felt today a special hope and impulse in the direction of useful labor. I have in mind at present two sermons, one on Christ’s saying about building the tombs of the prophets, of which the lesson would be the importance of learning from the living teacher and honoring him, instead of merely worshiping reputation, whether living or dead. The second would be upon the “Still, small voice,” which is the voice of God; its contrast to the violence of passion and the fury of fanaticism. I would also, if I could, continue my subject of warning to Americans, as conveyed in my Concord and Saratoga lectures. I must also have a paper for the Women’s Congress. Julia Ward Howe TO SAM WARD OAK GLENN, JULY 26, 1881 “Dearest Brother Sam: Marion Crawford came here to stay on Friday Last, and is still working at the papers ordered by Hurlburt. He enjoys the quiet of this place very much, he says, and prefers it to the town, as do I. I am also, I need not say, very greatful for the telephone you have had mounted in my house … OAK GLENN, JULY 25, 1881 ... Now I will tell you as well as I can of our life here and in town. Im-primis, Marion Crawford gave his lecture on Italy before the T. and C.C. on Friday last. The meeting was at Mr. Tweedy’s; the attendance large and fashionable. The lecture was very much liked. It was well written, but I was sorry that Marion took the occasion to ventilate he black Italian politics, and to abuse the present Italian government, declaring that the old state of things was much better, You can imagine that this to me was as “vinegar to the eyes and smoke to the nose,” as Job says. I don’t think it was quite fair play, either, as he is such a partisan, and was not expected to bring up the controversy, of which the scene is so distant, and of which he is careful to learn only one side. However, I brought him home with me, at his request, and here he is, busy on some papers upon Civil Service Reform, which have been ordered by Hurlburt for the World. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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OAK GLENN, JULY 25, 1881 ...Now I will tell you as well as I can of our life here and in town. Im-primis, Marion Crawford gave his lecture on Italy before the T. and C.C. on Friday last. The meeting was at Mr. Tweedy’s; the attendance large and fashionable. The lecture was very much liked. It was well written, but I was sorry that Marion took the occasion to ventilate he black Italian politics, and to abuse the present Italian government, declaring that the old state of things was much better, You can imagine that this to me was as “vinegar to the eyes and smoke to the nose,” as Job says. I don’t think it was quite fair play, either, as he is such a partisan, and was not expected to bring up the controversy, of which the scene is so distant, and of which he is careful to learn only one side. However, I brought him home with me, at his request, and here he is, busy on some papers upon Civil Service Reform, which have been ordered by Hurlburt for the World. OAK GLENN JUNE 30, 1881 My dear June Rose: On Sunday last I dined at Mr. Keene’s with Uncle Sam, the Duke of Sutherland, and Mr. Russell, Times War Correspondent. The Duke had expressed a wish to meet me. He, of course, took Mrs. Keene in to dinner, while Mr. Keene took me. I had Mr. Russel on the other side. Table too long for general conversation. I had a few words only with the Duke after dinner. He is a little lame, about fifty years of age, looks like his uncle Mr. Charles Howard, George’s father. This was quite a little whiff of “London in the Season.” TO SAMUEL WARD 241 BEACON STREET DECEMBER 22, 1881 Dearest Brother, - …Your house, darling, was bright and lovely, yesterday. I had my old pet, Edwin Booth, to lunch – we were nine at the table, the poet Aldrich disappointing us. From three to four we had a reception for Mr. Booth, quite the crème de la crème, I assure you. Among others, Dr. Homes came. The rooms and furniture were much admired. We gave only tea at the levee, but had some of your good wine at the luncheon. P. S. Mr. Booth in “Lear” last night was sublime! To the same… “Edwin Booth has sent us his box for the evening. The play was “Hamlet,” the performance masterly. People’s tastes about plays differ, but I am sure that no one on the boards can begin to do what Booth does. I saw him for a moment after the play, and he told me that he had done his very best for me. Somehow, I though that he was doing his very best, but did not suppose that he was thinking of me particularly… HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1882

When Oscar Wilde arrived in Boston for his year-long lecture tour of America he had with him, among his

letters of introduction to such hosts as Professor Charles Eliot Norton and Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, an invitation to make the acquaintance of Julia Ward Howe. Wilde was welcome in Howe’s Boston apartment on Beacon Street and in her home in Newport, Rhode Island, where she would arrange numerous receptions and dinner parties (when the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson in Newport would begin to write letters accusing Howe of impropriety, her entanglement with Wilde would be a large part of what was on his mind).

During this year and the following one, Marion Crawford would be making his home at 241 Beacon Street in Boston.

January 14, Saturday: The day after Richard Wagner wrote the final note of the libretto Parsifal in Palermo, Sicily, he was visited by the young artist Pierre-August Renoir. They had a pleasant chat and agreed that on the following day the painter would paint a portrait of the composer. LISTEN TO IT NOW

Le Ruisseau op.22 for female chorus and piano by Gabriel Fauré to anonymous words was performed for the initial time, by the Société National de Musique, Paris.

Julia Ward Howe wrote, “I have tried this week to do the things I ought to do for other people....” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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JANUARY 29, 1882 Frank [Marion Crawford had met Oscar Wilde the evening before at Dr. Chadwick’s; said that he expressed a desire to make my acquaintance. Wrote before I went to church to invite him to lunch. He accepted and Maud and Frank, or rather Marion, flew about to get together friends and viands. Returning from a lifting and delightful sermon of J. F. C.’s, I met Maud at the door. She cried: Oscar is coming.” Mrs. Jack Gardner, Madame Braggiotti, and Julia completed our lunch party. Perhaps ten or twelve friends came after lunch. We had what I might call a “lovely toss-up,” i.e., a social dish quickly compounded and tossed up like an omelet. MARCH 4, 1882 To Saturday Morning Club with Mrs. [John] Sherwood; very busy; the with her to Blind Asylum in a carriage. Drove up to front entrance and alighted, when the gale took me off my feet and threw me down, spraining my left knee so badly as to render me quite helpless. I managed to hobble into the Institution and to get through Julia’s lunch, after which I was driven home. Sent for Dr. Beach and was convicted of a bad sprain, and sentenced to six weeks of (solitary) confinement.” MARCH 5, 1882 In bed all day MARCH 6, 1882 On the lounge; able to work. MARCH 8, 1882 Day of mid-year conference for the A. A. W. Business meeting at the N. E. W. C., where I, of course, could not be present. Afternoon meeting was in my room. On the whole satisfactory. TO LAURA BEACON STREET MARCH 8, 1882 Whereupon, my dearest, let there be no further pribbles and prabbles, which I conjugate thus: I pribble, thou prabbles, he, she, it pribble prabbles. Maud Leaveth on a Tuesday, come thou on that same Tuesday, taking care to keep thy nose in front of thy countenance, and not otherwisely, which were neither wisely or too well. I hope thou wilt not fail to come on Tuesday. And pray don’t forget the baby, as the nurse might find it lonesome to be here without her. During the period of thy visit, I will change my name to Jinkins, we will have such high Jinks! … Beacon Street looks as though it wanted something. I think thou beesst it… Am Ever Thy Game MOTHER MARCH 24, 1882 Longfellow died around 3:30 pm today. He will be much and deservedly lamented. The last of dear old Chev.’s set, the Five of Clubs, nicknamed by Mary Dwight the ‘Mutual Admiration Society.’ On hearing of this event, I put off my reception for the Zuni chiefs, which should have been on Monday, when the funeral will probably take place. MARCH 26, 1882 Dear Bother Sam came on very unexpectedly to attend the funeral service held at the Longfellow [house] for relatives and intimates. I also was bidden to this, but thought it impossible for me to go, lame as I am. Sent word out to Julia Anagnos, who came in, and went in my place with Uncle Sam. The dear old fellow dined with us. I got downstairs with great difficulty and fatigue. We had a delightful evening with him, but he would go back to New York by the night train. MARCH 30, 1882 Today the Zuni chiefs and Mr. Cushing, their interpreter and adopted son, came to luncheon at 1:45. There were twelve Indian chiefs in full Indian dress. Reception afterwards. APRIL 1, 1882 Today Edward [Everett] Hale brought me a parting memento of the Zunis – the basket with which they had dipped up from the water of the ‘ocean of sunrise.’ Mr. Cushing sent this. E.E.H. also spoke about five hymns which should be written corresponding to the five great hymns of the Catholic mass. He asked me to write on of these and I promised to try. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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APRIL 6TH, 1882 This text in the Scripture lesson struck me as good for a sermon: Jeremiah 31: 34-”For they shall all know me from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord.” Subject: The democracy of Christianity. I felt as never before the grandeur and novelty of Christ’s having shown that the office of the Messiah as he conceived it, was to lift up the lowly and reclaim the erring and apparently worthless. Of course, I have heard this all my life, and have thought of it a good deal. What I saw to-day was the startling contrast between this view and the general ideas, not of the Jews only, but of Christians to-day. EASTER MORNING SERVICE APRIL 13TH, 1882 Shall I, for envy, sell the deep content Of God’s dear thought, to me one moment lent? In that brief moment did appear to me So vast the riches of Heav’n’s treasury That I no more considered that poor wealth Straining for which, souls lose their native health. APRIL 13TH, 1882 I felt this day that, in my difficulties with the anti-suffragists, the general spread of Christian feeling gives me ground to stand upon. The charity of Christendom will not persist in calumniating the suffragists, nor will its sense of justice long refuse to admit their claims. APRIL 14TH, 1882 I woke, heavy with uncertainties, and with much thought of my own shortcomings, past and present. I may say, what I rarely record, that an earnest prayer helped me very much, and set me on my feet, to walk and work another day. APRIL 16, 1882 Splint off today. Waited for Dr. Beach, so could not go to church. Had an interesting talk with the Doctor on the Immortality of the Soul, in which he is a believer. APRIL 20TH, 1882 My usual worry and depression at waking. Thought sadly of errors and shortcomings. At church, a penitential psalm helped me much, and the sermon more. I felt assured that, whatever may be my fate beyond this life, I should always seek, love, and rejoice in the good. Thus, even in hell, one might share by sympathy the heavenly victory. APRIL 23RD, 1882 My want of faith in myself lessens the value of my efforts. I have sometimes felt the bounds of my capacity too little. Perhaps now I feel them too much. APRIL 27, 1882 Made today a good start in writing about Margaret Fuller. This night at 8:50 pm died Ralph Waldo Emerson, i.e., all of him that could die. I think of him as a father gone – father of so much beauty, of so much modern thought.” O church, going out for the first time without a crutch, using only my cane. …JFC’s sermon was about Emerson, and was very interesting and delicately appreciative. I think that he exaggerated Emerson’s solid and practical effect in the promotion of modern liberalism. The change was in the air and was to come. It was in many minds quite independently of Mr. Emerson. He was the foremost literary man of his day in America, philosopher, poet, reformer all in one. But he did not make his age, which was an age of great men and great things. MAY 14, 1882 Had a sudden thought in church of a minister preaching in a pulpit and a fiend waiting to carry him off to hell. Made some verses out of this…This is Whitsunday … I do hope and pray for a fresh outpouring this year. While I listened to Dr. Furness, two points grew clear to me: one was, that I would hold my Peace Meeting, if I should hold it alone, as a priest sometimes serves his mass. The second was, that I could preach from the text:’ ‘As ye have borne the image of the earthy [sic], so shall ye bear the image of the heavenly,’ and this sermon I think I could preach to the prisoners, as I once tried to do years ago when dear Chev found the idea so intolerable that I had to give it up. I am twenty years older now, and the Woman Ministry is a recognized fact. …Still Sunday afternoon. I am now full of courage for this week’s heavy work.” SUNDAY. MAY 28TH, 1882 Whitsunday-the beginning of my sixty-fourth year. God grant me this year to do only what is worth doing and to desire only what is worth desiring. My prayer for the day was to worship God, our Father and untiring benefactor, in spirit and in truth. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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MAY 30, 1882 Alas! Alas! Dear Professor Rogers dropped dead today after some exercise at the Institute of Technology. How he had helped me in the Town and Country Club! Without his aid and that of his wife, I doubt whether I could have started it at all; he was always vice-president as I was president. I cannot think how I would do without him. JUNE 17TH, 1882 Black with depression. Longing to give up the fight, and retire as a veteran. JULY 6TH, 1882 In such peace as they only have who have been forced to go into turmoil for the sake of necessary results, and have mercifully come out of it. 1882 Julia Ward Howe TO MHE OAK GLENN, JULY 14, 1882 ... The plan of the visit has been so modified that my anxieties are diminished. Oscar Wilde and Uncle Sam arrived at Newport last evening. Marion Crawford and I dined with them at Hartman’s; a delightful dinner. They are coming out presently, and Uncle Sam and Wilde will stay the night. Wilde lectures tomorrow evening at the Casino. I don’t think he will stay here more than one night the house is slicked up uncommon, and the women have worked with a will. Marion’s liver is troubling him somewhat, a souvenir of India. Flossie and her chicks will arrive, DV, on Sunday morning. Marion sends his love to you. I send kind regards to Mrs. Jack re-Gardner. Marion and I are working industriously. -. he for the Century, I just now for the Critic .... OAK GLENN, JULY 15, 1882 (ELLIOT) Uncle Sam and Mr. Wilde arrived at Oak Glenn at about a quarter of two in the afternoon. I had invited some nice people to afternoon tea nearly all of whom came. Had seven o’clock dinner at which Mrs. Paran Stevens, Adamowiski, Sam Francis, Tom Appleton. and Lilla Eliott increased our party to eight. Marion says that the party yesterday was very successful. It seemed very hard to me without you. Uncle Sam and Mr. Wilde left us this morning at about eleven o’clock. I don’t think that they will come back. Lilla [Lady Eliott] and I are going in to hear the lecture this evening. Marion is under the weather; he can hardly eat anything. Mr. Richard Hunt was sick yesterday and could not come out, but she had a round cake made for me, with a sunflower in the middle comprised of lemon peel and angelica. this occasioned much mirth!... JULY 20TH, 1882 ...I thought of a text for my next sermon. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He hath appointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.” Christ twice quotes this, the second time in his message to John Baptist. He does not say, “The rulers and magnates follow me,” but “to the poor the gospel is preached.” A good point for me to make. JULY 22, 1882 Commemoration of Mr. Emerson at Concord Town Hall. Several portraits of him and very effective floral decorations. No music. Prayer by Rev. Sanborn in which he quoted a good part of a poem by W. E. Channing, R. W. E. its theme. Then came an unmercifully long paper by Dr. X., much of which was interesting and some of which was irrelevant. He insisted upon Mr. Emerson’s having been an evolutionist, and unfolded a good deal of his own tablecloth along with the mortuary napkins.” JULY 29, 1882 Had a studious and quiet day. Was in good time for the performance [at the Casino]…” AUGUST 11TH, 1882 (After preaching the sermon suggested above.) It may be that I am losing my power of extempore speech. I have suffered great distress about this occasion, though I do not know that it was considered a failure. I know that I had intended to strike a valorous blow against the wealth-worship of the time. My text was from Luke 4: 17 : “The spirit of the Lord is upon me. ..to preach the gospel to the poor.” I had studied and worked at my sermon much more than usual, and found the subject much larger than it had appeared to me at first. Like the little Christ on the shoulders of St. Christopher, it seemed to weigh me down to the ground, though I had taken it up lightly. Might this be a lesson of hope, and not of discouragement ... I remember that sometimes the effort is to be our success. It shows our good will-our power may not correspond to it. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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AUGUST 25TH, 1882 In my morning prayer, which is always short, and made standing, I asked for three things, to wit, the bitter of true repentance, the sharp flavor of a biting and spurring energy, the sweetness of believing that my sins are forgiven and that I have tried to do something to help my fellow men. SEPTEMBER 7TH, 1882 (After preaching the same sermon, under better conditions of health and spirits.) ...I enjoyed the service myself, and had some good moments of freedom in my sermon, quite like my best times. I was very thankful for this good coming through, and encouraged to try again in the future. SEPTEMBER 18, 1882 Left Newport to attend Saratoga Convention, being appointed a delegate from the Channing Memorial Church, with its pastor, Reverend. C. W. Wendte. NOVEMBER 8, 1882 Cousin Nancy Greene, my father’s cousin, enters today upon her ninety-ninth year. I called to see her, going first to town to buy her some little gift … Had a very interesting talk with her. She was nicely dressed in black, with a fresh cap and lilac ribbon, and a little silk handkerchief. For her this was quite an unusual toilette. I wished her a good year to come, but she said: ‘Why should I want to live another year? I can do nothing.’ I suggested that she should dictate her reminiscences to the girl who waits upon her and who writes, she says, a good hand. NOVEMBER 11, 1882 I sent to see the old Seventh Day Baptist Church, now occupied by the Newport Historical Society, in which my great grandfather, Governor Samuel Ward, used to attend service…” DECEMBER 24, BOSTON Spoke at the Home for Intemperate Women at 6pm. I did my best. Text: ‘Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth are named.’ Subject: The Christian family; God, its father, all mankind brothers and sisters … Afterwards went to the Christmas ‘Messiah.’ Felt more sure than ever that no music so beautiful as this has ever been written.” DECEMBER 28TH, 1882 ...Thought also of a new application of Christ’s words: “This is my body.” We too should so offer our bodily life to the service of God and humanity as to be able to say: “This which I offer is my very body, my very blood, the essence and quintessence of my daily life, which I lived subject to the laws of use and service.”

July 22, Saturday: The Concord School of Philosophy honored the day declared as Emerson Day by offering speakers such as Julia Ward Howe, William Torrey Harris, Bronson Alcott, and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn. Alcott read his poem in honor of Thoreau “Ion: A Monody.”13 I. Why, oh, ye willows, and ye pastures bare, Why will ye thus your bloom so late delay, Wrap in chill weeds the sere and sullen day, And cheerless greet me wandering in despair? Tell me, ah, tell me!—ye of old could tell,— Whither my vanished Ion now doth fare. Say, have ye seen him lately pass this way, Ye who his wonted haunts did know full well? Heard ye his voice forth from the thicket swell, Where midst the drooping ferns he loved to stray? Caught ye no glimpses of my truant there? Tell me, oh, tell me, whither he hath flown— Beloved Ion flown, and left ye sad and lone,

13. For another “monody,” see December 2, 1829. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Whilst I through wood and field his loss bemoan. II. Early through field and wood each Spring we sped, Young Ion leading o’er the reedy pass; How fleet his footsteps and how sure his tread! His converse deep and weighty;—where, alas! Like force of thought with subtlest beauty wed? The bee and bird and flower, the pile of grass, The lore of stars, the azure sky o’erhead, The eye’s warm glance, the Fates of love and dread,— All mirrored were in his prismatic glass; For endless Being’s myriad-minded race Had in his thought their registry and place,— Bright with intelligence, or drugged with sleep, Hid in dark cave, aloft on mountain steep, In seas immersed, ensouled in starry keep. III. Now Echo answers lone from cliff and brake, Where we in springtime sauntering loved to go,— Or at the mossy bank beyond the lake, On its green plushes oft ourselves did throw: There from the sparkling wave our thirst to slake, Dipped in the spring that bubbled up below, Our hands for cups, and did with glee partake. Next to the Hermit’s cell our way we make, Where sprightly talk doth hold the morning late; Deserted now: ah, Hylas, too, is gone! Hylas, dear Ion’s friend and mine,—I all alone, Alone am left by unrelenting fate,— Vanished my loved ones all,—the good, the great,— Why am I spared? why left disconsolate? IV. Slow winds our Indian stream through meadows green, By bending willows, tangled fen and brake, Smooth field and farmstead doth its flow forsake; ‘Twas in far woodpaths Ion, too, was seen, But oftenest found at Walden’s emerald lake, (The murmuring pines inverted in its sheen;) There in his skiff he rippling rhymes did make, Its answering shores echoing the verse between: Full-voiced the meaning of the wizard song, Far wood and wave and shore, with kindred will, Strophe, antistrophe, in turn prolong:— Now wave and shore and wood are mute and chill, Ion, melodious bard, hath dropt his quill, His harp is silent, and his voice is still. V. Blameless was Ion, beautiful to see, With native genius, with rich gifts endowed; He might of his descent be nobly proud, Yet meekly tempered was, spake modestly, Nor sought the plaudits of the noisy crowd, When Duty called him in the thick to be. His life flowed calmly clear, not hoarse nor loud; He wearied not of immortality, HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Nor like Tithonus begged a time-spun shroud; But life-long drank at fountains of pure truth, The seer unsated of eternal youth. ’T is not for Ion’s sake these tears I shed, ’T is for the Age he nursed, his genius fed,— Ion immortal is,—he is not dead. VI. Did e’en the Ionian bard, Mæonides, Blind minstrel wandering out of Asia’s night, The Iliad of Troy’s loves and rivalries, In strains forever tuneful to recite, His raptured listeners the more delight? Or dropt learned Plato ’neath his olive trees, More star-bright wisdom in the world’s full sight, Well garnered in familiar colloquies, Than did our harvester in fields of light? Nor spoke more charmingly young Charmides, Than our glad rhapsodist in his far flight Across the continents, both new and old; His tale to studious thousands thus he told In summer’s solstice and midwinter’s cold. VII. Shall from the shades another Orpheus rise Sweeping with venturous hand the vocal string, Kindle glad raptures, visions of surprise, And wake to ecstacy each slumberous thing; Flash life and thought anew in wondering eyes, As when our seer transcendent, sweet, and wise, World-wide his native melodies did sing, Flushed with fair hopes and ancient memories? Ah, no! his matchless lyre must silent lie, None hath the vanished minstrel’s wondrous skill To touch that instrument with art and will; With him winged Poesy doth droop and die, While our dull age, left voiceless, with sad eye Follows his flight to groves of song on high. VIII. Come, then, Mnemosyne! and on me wait, As if for Ion’s harp thou gav’st thine own; Recall the memories of man’s ancient state, Ere to this low orb had his form dropt down, Clothed in the cerements of his chosen fate; Oblivious here of heavenly glories flown, Lapsed from the high, the fair, the blest estate, Unknowing these, and by himself unknown: Lo! Ion, unfallen from his lordly prime, Paused in his passing flight, and, giving ear To heedless sojourners in weary time, Sang his full song of hope and lofty cheer; Aroused them from dull sleep, from grisly fear, And toward the stars their faces did uprear. IX. Why didst thou haste away, ere yet the green Enameled meadow, the sequestered dell, The blossoming orchard, leafy grove were seen HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In the sweet season thou hadst sung so well? Why cast this shadow o’er the vernal scene? No more its rustic charms of thee may tell And so content us with their simple mien. Was it that memory’s unrelinquished spell (Ere man had stumbled here amid the tombs,) Revived for thee that Spring’s perennial blooms, Those cloud-capped alcoves where we once did dwell? Translated wast thou in some rapturous dream? Our once familiar faces strange must seem, Whilst from thine own celestial smiles did stream! X. I tread the marble leading to his door, (Allowed the freedom of a chosen friend;) He greets me not as was his wont before, The Fates within frown on me as of yore,— Could ye not once your offices suspend? Had Atropos her severing shears forbore! Or Clotho stooped the sundered thread to mend! Yet why dear Ion’s destiny deplore? What more had envious Time himself to give? His fame had reached the ocean’s farthest shore,— Why prisoned here should Ion longer live? The questioning Sphinx declared him void of blame; For wiser answer none could ever frame; Beyond all time survives his mighty name. XI. Now pillowed near loved Hylas’ lowly bed, Beneath our aged oaks and sighing pines, Pale Ion rests awhile his laureled head; (How sweet his slumber as he there reclines!) Why weep for Ion here? He is not dead, Nought of him Personal that mound confines; The hues ethereal of the morning red This clod embraces never, nor enshrines. Away the mourning multitude hath sped, And round us closes fast the gathering night, As from the drowsy dell the sun declines, Ion hath vanished from our clouded sight,— But on the morrow, with the budding May, A-field goes Ion, at first flush of day, Across the pastures on his dewy way. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1883

January: Antonio Maceo’s wife María Cabrales Maceo arrived in Puerto Cortés. Later in this month General Máximo Gómez called on Maceo with a business proposition — establishment of an agricultural colony of Cuban emigrants.

Julia Ward Howe wrote to Sam Ward, “…the constant tear and trot of my Boston life, in which I try to make all end meet, domestic, social, artistic, and reformatory, and go about, I sometimes think, like a poor spider who spins no web… Marion has been very industrious, and is full of good work and of cheer. His book [Mr. Isaac’s] has been such a success as to give him at once a recognized position, of which the best feature, economically, is that it enables him to command adequate and congenial employment at fairly remunerative prices….” TO LAURA JANUARY 9, 1883 My Darling Child, - Your letter makes me say that I don’t know anything, whether I have written or not, or ought to write, or not. Mammy’s poor old head is very much worse than ever, and I don’t get time even to read letters, some days. I can’t tell exactly why, except that there are many points and people to be reached, in one way and another, and I rush hither and thither, accomplishing, I fear, very little, but stirring many stews with my own spoon. It seems to me that I could not bear another winter of this stress and strain, which is difficult to analyze or account for, as “she need n’t have done it, you know.” Why she must do it, notwithstanding, is hard to tell, or that it is in doing it which so exhausts all nervous energy and muscular strength. Now, darling, after this prelude in a minor key, let me thank heaven that, after all, I am well in health, and comfortable. … Wednesday, January 10, 1883 2:20pm. I wrote the above at noon, yesterday, expecting Salvini to lunch … Mrs. Appleton came in, and kept me, until 2 minus 20 minutes, at which time, nearly beside myself with anxiety, I tumbled upstairs, out of one garment and into another. Such was my dressing. Salvini came and was charming. After luncheon came a reception. Your little girls were there, looking delightfully. Porter was pleased to say that the little ones, hanging around the (old) grandmother made a pleasing picture … NO more from “fection Mar. UNDATED JANUARY 1883 ... a peaceful day at Vassar College … In the afternoon met the teachers and read some poems, to wit, all of the Egyptian ones, and the poem on the Vestal dug up in Rome. At to bedtime last night I had a thought of ghosts. I spoke of this to Maria Mitchell today. She told me that Mr. Matthew Vassar’s body had been lain in this room and those of various persons since, which, had I known, I had been less comfortable with than I was. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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FEBRUARY 18, 1883 Young Salvini [Alessandro] and Ventura to luncheon, also Lizzie Boott and Mrs. Jack [Gardner]. Salvini is beautiful to look at, having a finely chiseled Greek head. He is frank, cordial, and intelligent, especially of Romeo. … to the Intemperate Woman’s Home where I spoke from the text, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” TO LAURA MARCH 17, 1882 BOSTON Just drop everything, and take me up on your lap. I’se very tired, writing, tugging at all sorts of things. Long silences between us, eh? Growing estrangement, eh? Richardses are better, eh? Which nobody can deny…Have been hard at work upon a memoir of Maria Mitchell, which is well-nigh finished…Am spleeny today; the weather being accordingly… TO BROTHER SAM MARCH 28, 1883 My Darling Brother, I owe you two long letters, and am ashamed to think how long it is since you have seen my crabbed chirography. Of course, it is the old story. I have been dreadfully busy with all sorts of work, in all which I take delight, while yet to quote St. Paul, “The good that I would I do not.” To give you a few items, I have just finished a short memoir of Maria Mitchell, Professor of Astronomy at Vassar College. This was an interesting task, but had to be very carefully done. At the same time, I had to correct Maud’s memoir of me, which is to be published in the same collection of biographies of eminent women! I think I am eminent for undertaking ten times more work than I can do, and doing about one tenth of it! Well – I have given three Sunday preachments at a sort of Woman’s church which they have near here. My themes were; “The Order of the Nature and the Spiritual,” “tares and Wheat,” and “The Power of Religion in Life.” I was in New York last Wednesday, to preside over the mid-year conference of the Woman’s Congress … I had a visit from Salvini the other day. He was most charming, and sent me a box for last evenings performance of “The Outlaw,” in Italian: “Morte Civile.” I went, with my Harry and Laura, I in my best attire. I had received some very beautiful roses, which I threw on the stage, at the recall after the third Act. Today I met Wendell Phillips in the Street, and made him come in to see Marion, whose letter on English rule in India, printed in the New York “tribune,” he had liked very much. Phillips asked me how I came to live in this part of the city, and I told him about your gift of the house… Marion is sitting by my fire, with Browning’s “Jocoseria” in his hands, from which he has been reading passages. It sounds strange and silly… TO BROTHER SAM OAK GLENN, MAY 10, 1883 …I have been here all alone these days, with my gentle ghosts of past companionship, and with a task at which I work steadily every day. This is a life of Margaret Fuller, rewritten mostly from the memoirs already published, but also recast in my own thought. The publisher is in a hurry for it, and I have to work without intermission, i.e., as long as I can, every day; but will all the diligence in my power, I cannot get along very rapidly. When I have finished my stint, I refresh myself with a little Greek, and also with an Italian novel which I have brought with me. The place looks lovely, and I sat, this afternoon, on the western piazza, near that angle where you and I used to sit, last summer, and enjoyed a bath of sunshine… TO LAURA OAK GLENN AUGUST 21, 1883 My Much Neglected Darling, - I give you today my first hour, or half hour, as the case may be, feeling that my long silence has been abominable, and must be broken, even if you should feel it to be your duty to throw an inkstand at my head, in return for my letter. It is partly Backbone’s fault. Backbone had been so scrouged and put upon by the summer’s work that he sometimes cuts up amazing. Said work is pretty well out of hand at this moment, the last chapters of “Margaret Fuller” being ready for the press … I have so much felt the shocking uncharity of things in the way of diaries and letters which have been published within the last few years. Not the least bad exhibition in this kind has been made by Carlyle and his wife. I have just finished reading the three volumes of her letters and memorials, which were indeed interesting to me by the mention in them of persons who I myself have known. Still, the spirit of the book is painful. It is sad to see how she adopted, at times, her husband’s harsh creed. I should think Froude, the editor, must be wanting in common taste and decency, to have allowed the letters to appear in all their crudeness. I am so glad that I never went near them, after that one tea-drink, a very bad one, forty years ago. Is this enough about the Carlyle’s? And is it strictly charitable? I dunno; I’m getting very old to know anything….” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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TO BROTHER SAM DECEMBER 15, 1883 Darling Bro’ Sam,- I must write you at once or my silence will expand into a broad ocean which I shall be afraid to cross…I have had a very laborious year, now screwed to my desk, and working at timed tasks, now traveling widely, and scattering my spoken words…Well, so much for desk- work, not for the witch broomstick on which I fly. The Congress was held in Chicago in Mid-October. From this place, I went to Minneapolis … Harry and his wife are here, paying handsomely their share of our running expenses. The little house looks friendly and comfortable, and I hope, after a few more flights, to enjoy it very much. These will now be very short … Boston is all alove with Irving’s acting, Matthew Arnold’s lectures, Cable’s readings, and the coming opera. Pere Hycinthe also has been here, and a very eminent Hindoo, named Mozumdar. I have list many of these doings by my journey, but heard Arnold’s lecture on Emerson last evening. I have also heard one of Cable’s readings. Arnold does not in the least understand Emerson, I think. He has a positive, square-jawed English mind, with no super sensible apercus. His elocution is pitiable, and when, after his lecture, Wendell Phillips stepped forward and said a few graceful words of farewell to him, it was like the Rose complimenting the Cabbage…” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1884

February 2, Saturday: Wendell Phillips died in Boston.

February 3, Sunday: Julia Ward Howe wrote, “Wendell Phillips is dead. To speak at the meeting in memory of Chesub Chunder Sen at Parker Memorial Hall. Heard T. W. Higginson and Mrs. Cheyney. H. spoke at length of Phillips and said too much about his later mistakes, I thought, saying nothing about his suffrage work, of which I took care to speak, when it was my turn. Several persons thanked me for my words, which treated very briefly of Phillip’s splendid services to humanity.”

February 6, 1884 Wendell Phillip’s funeral. I am invited to attend memorial services at Faneuil Hall on Friday evening. I accept. February 9, 1884 ….I was very glad that I had come to this, the People’s meeting, and had been able to be heard in Faneuil Hall, the place of all others there the People should commemorate Wendell Phillips. My task was to speak of his services to the cause of Woman. Others spoke of him in connection with Labor Reform, Anti- Slavery, Ireland, and Temperance. To Laura Undated February 1884 Just so, knowed you’d take advantage of my silence to write su’thin saucy. Until I got your kammunikation I felt kind o’ penitent like – had n’t thanked for no Xmas nor nothing. Felt self to be shabby and piglike in conduct. Pop comes your letter – pop goes my repentance. “She’s got even with me,” I said: “If she went into a tailor’s shop to get a cabbage leaf, to make an apple pie, what does it matter by what initials she calls herself? Who’s going to distress themselves about the set of her cloak? And she do boast about it preposterous, and that are a fact.” Here endeth the first meditation, and I will now fall back upon the “Dearly beloved,” for the rest of the service…” TO LAURA BEACON STREET FEBRUARY 11, 1884 Oh, thou, who art not quite a Satan! Question is, dost thou not come very near it? … I have been very busy, and have orated tremendous, this winter. I did n’t go for to do it, you know, but I cou’n’ avoid it. [source of this phrase vol2 p59]” FEBRUARY 12, 1884 Hearing at Senate House, Committee of Probate, etc. on the petition of Julia Ward Howe and others that the laws concerning married women may be amended in three respects. We had prepared three separate bills, one providing that the mother shall have equal rights with the father in their children, especially in determining their residence and their education. A second ruling that on the wife’s death, the husband, who now gets all her real estate, may have one half, and the children the other, and that the widow shall have the same right to half of the husband’s real estate after his death. A third bill was devised to enable a husband and wife to contract valid money obligations toward each other.” MARCH 27, 1884 I heard with dismay of the injury done to my Newport place by the breaking of Norman’s dam. Was very much troubled about this.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

TO LAURA MARCH 29, 1884 My Dearest Darling, - Dunno why I hain’t wrote you, ‘cept that, while I was lame, the attitude of reclining with my foot extended was very fatiguing to me. The injury was very slight. I only knocked my left foot pretty hard (anglice, stubbed my toe) hurrying upstairs. But the weak left knee gave way, and turned, letting me down, and feloniously puffing itself up, which charity never does. It could not be concealed from Maud, and so Beach was sent for, and a fortnight of stay still ordered and enforced. On Tuesday last I broke bounds and railed it to Buffalo, New York, with my crutches, which were no longer needed, This was for the mid-year Conference of our Congress. Before I say more under this head, let me tell you that I returned from Buffalo this morning, much better for my trip. I had a lovely visit there, in a most friendly and comfortable house, with carriages at my disposition. A beautiful luncheon was given to us congressers and I gave a lecture on Thursday evening, price $50, and sat in a high chair, thinking it not prudent t stand so long…” APRIL 4, 1884 In the latter part of the eighteenth Century a Christian Missionary, Chinese, but disguised as a Portuguese, penetrated into Corea, [sic] and was much aided in his work by the courageous piety of Columba Kang, wife of one of the lesser nobles. She and the missionary suffered torture and death … Merchants, not diplomatists, are the true apostles of civilization. “Question for the A. A. W. [i.e., for the annual Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Women]: How far does the business of this country fulful [sic] the conditions of honest and honorable traffic? “What is the ideal of a mercantile aristocracy?” APRIL 7, 1884 General Armstrong called last evening. He spoke of the Negroes as being individually quick-witted and capable but powerless in association and deficient in organizing power. This struck me as the natural consequence of their long subjection to despotic power. The exigencies of slavery quickened their wits, but left them little opportunity for concerted action. Freedom allows men to learn how to cooperate widely and strongly for ends of mutual good. Despotism heightened personal consciousness through fear of danger, but itself fears nothing so much as association among men, which it first prohibits and in time renders impossible. APRIL 15, 1884 A delightful Easter. I felt this day that, in my difficulties with the Anti-Suffrigists, the general spread of Christian feeling gives me ground to stand upon. The charity of Christendom will not persist in calumniating the Suffragists, nor will its sense of justice long refuse to admit their claims. APRIL 17, 1884 Sam Eliot was in a horse-car, and told me that Tom Appleton had died of pneumonia in New York. The last time I spoke with him was in one of these very cars. He asked me if I had been to the funeral, meaning Wendell Phillips. I was sure that he had been very much impressed by it. I saw him once more, on Commonwealth Avenue on a bitter day. He walked feeble and was much bent. I did not stop to speak with him which I now regret. He was very friendly to me, yet the sight of me seemed to rouse some curious vein of combativeness in him. He had many precious qualities, and had some high views of character, although he was sometimes justified in his judgments of other people, particularly of the come-outer reformers. APRIL 19, 1884 To get some flowers to take to T. G. A.’s house. Saw him lying placid in his coffin, robed in soft white cashmere, with his palette and brushes in his hands…” TO FLORENCE APRIL 20, 1884 …I went yesterday to poor Tom Appleton’s funeral. It is very sad to lose him, and every one says that a great piece of old Boston goes with him…I dined with George William Curtis yesterday at Mrs. Harry William’s George Williams was one of Tom Appleton’s pall-bearers, - so were Dr. Holmes and Mr. Winthrop… Curtis’s oration on Wendell Phillips was very fine. APRIL 20, 1884 Thought sadly of errors and shortcomings. At church a penitential psalm helped me much, and the sermon more. I felt assured that, whatever may be the fate beyond this life, I should always seek, love, and rejoice in the good. Thus, even in hell, one might share by the sympathy the heavenly victory. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

MAY 5, 1884 I begin in great infirmity of spirit a week which brings many tasks. First, I must proceed in the matter of Norman’s injury to my estate, either to a suit or a settlement by arbitration unless I can previously come to an understanding with N. MAY 19, 1884 BRO. SAM DIES “Nothing could be more unexpected than this blow. Dear Bro’ Sam had long since been pronounced out of danger … Latterly we have heard of him as feeble, and have felt renewed anxiety, but were entirely unprepared for his death. MAY 20, 1884 Dark days of nothingness these, to-day and yesterday. Nothing to do but be patient and explore the past. MAY 21, 1884 Had a sitting all alone with dear Uncle Sam’s picture this afternoon. I thought it might be the time of his funeral. I read the beautiful 90th Psalm and a number of his bright, sweet lyrics. A sympathetic visit from Winthrop Chanler. MAY 27, 1884 …Dear Brother Sams’ death has brought me well in sight of the farther shore. May I be ready when it is my turn to cross. TO LOUISA UNDATED MAY 1884 Dearest Sister, - I was already in debt to you for one good letter when this later one arrived, giving me the full, desired particulars of our dear one’s last days on earth. You and Annie both write as though the loss were heaviest to me, and I only feel that I cannot feel it half enough. The pathos of a life of such wonderful vicissitudes! I cannot half take it in. What must he not have suffered in those lonely days of wandering and privation, while I was comfortable in my household!…God knows, I had every reason to love him, for he was heroically faithful to his affection for me. Now, I feel how little I appreciated his devotion, and how many chimeras, in my foolish wool-gathering head, crowded out this most precious affection, which was worthy of a much larger place in my thoughts. His death is a severe loss to Maud and me … We were always hoping to rejoin him, and pass some happy years with him. A great object is withdrawn from our two lives. Nothing can take his place to either of us… As I write, tears come. Like you, I long to sit and talk it all over with the two who are all I have left of my own generation. To our children, the event cannot be all what it is to us. They are made for the future, and our day is not theirs. I was comforted, in your first letter, in reading of that pleasant, quiet talk you had with him, when, among other things you read to him the lovely verses from St. John’s Gospel, which have become a classic of consolation among Christian people. I believe that he is in the heaven accorded to those who have loved their fellow-men, for who ever coined pure kindness into acts as he did? One of the lessons I learned from his life is that it is very hard for us to judge rightly the merits and demerits of others. Here was a man with many faults on the surface, and a heart of pure gold beneath…The thought of his lonely funeral and solitary grave has wrung my heart at times, but sometimes I think of it as a place where one might be glad to be at rest…But now, dear, I have had all the heart-break I can bear writing this letter. Let me now speak of the living and tell you where and how we are…I left very unwillingly to some down here, and try to get my poor wrecked place in order. You know, of course, that the dam which was built to cut off my water, and against which I obtained an injunction, burst this spring, and destroyed my two ponds, my carriage, and a good part of my barn. I have tried, in a lumbering way, to get justice, but have not yet succeeded. I have had, too, a great deal of trouble in my presidency of the Woman’s Congress, this year. Almost as soon as I open my eyes in the morning these black dogs of worry spring upon me. I long to be free of them. JUNE 28, 1884 Senator Bayard to William A. Duncan about Dear Bro’ Sam: ‘It is just one of those little kindnesses of which his life was so full. There is no doubt, as you say, that his later years were his best! The wine of life fined itself … He was readily sympathetic, and did in Rome as Romans did, and kept time and tune to a great variety of instruments. But the kind good heart always beat truly, and the array of good deeds to his credit in the great book of account is delightful to think of.’ HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

TO LAURA NEWPORT AUGUST 15, 1884 Have n’t I written to you? I have an idea of some long letter of mine not answered by you. But this may be one of those imaginary good actions which help to puff me up. Life, you see, gallops on to such a degree with me that I don’t know much difference between what I have intended to do and what I have done… I think novels is humbug. What do you think? They don’t leave you anything but a sort of bad taste… AUGUST 27, 1884 Simply good for nothing, but to amuse the little Hall children. A strange dead level of indifference. Do not see any difference between one thing and another. This, I should think, must come from a vagary of the liver. Worst sort of nervous prostration – to prostrate oneself before one’s nerves. To town in the afternoon, when the dead indifference and lassitude went off somewhat.” AUGUST 29, 1884 We dined at Booth’s today, meeting Mr. And Mrs. Joseph Jefferson and William Warren. A rare and delightful occasion. Jefferson talked much about art. He, Booth, and Warren all told little anecdotes of forgetfulness on the stage. Jefferson had told a love story twice, Booth had twice given the advice to the players [in “Hamlet”], Warren, in ‘Our American Cousin,’ should have tried to light a match which would not light. He inadvertently turned the ignitable side, which took fire, and so disconcerted him that he forgot where he was in the play and had to ask some one what he had last said, which being told him enabled him to go on.” SEPTEMBER 25, 1884 “Finished today my Congress paper. I have written this paper this week instead of going to the Unitarian Convention, which I wished much to attend … I did not go because I thought I ought neither to leave home unnecessarily, to spend so much money, nor to put of the writing of the A. A. W. paper. I shall look a little to see whether circumstances hereafter will not show that it was best for me to follow this course. My Daemon did not say “go,’ but he sometimes plays me false. I have certainly had the most wonderful ease in writing this paper which, I thought, would occupy a number of weary days, and lo! it has all written itself, currente clamo.” OCTOBER 5, 1884 Is the law of progress one of harmony or of discord? Do the various kinds of progress, moral, intellectual, political, and economic or industrial, agree or disagree? Do they help or hinder each other? TO LAURA NEWPORT OCTOBER 9, 1884 My Darling Laura,- My poor wits, in these days are like bits of sewing silk wound on a card. You unwind a little and straightway come to an end. The wonder is, there are so many ends. Here is a precise picture of our days as passed at present. Morning, I wake early, lie and think over my past life, with little satisfaction. Bathe. Breakfast. Walk with Maud, Sonny tugging alongside. Maud goes much further than I do. Sonny and I return, take a basket and gather dry twigs to brighten the evening fire. I visit my mare in her stable – a good custom as my man is not over-careful of her stall. Maud comes back, I exercise her voice. I go to books, she to desk. Study Greek a good deal, reading Thucydides and Aristophanes. Dinner, coffee, more reading and writing, unless we go to town. Evening, music, reading or cards, worrying about -, bed. I have not mentioned my own much writing, because you will understand it. I am trying to compass a story, but have my fears about it. My paper for the Woman’s Congress is entitled, ‘How to broaden the Views of Society Women.” Darling dear, what more can I tell you? Is n’t this too much already> Now, do spunk up and have some style about you … Be cheerful and resolute, my love, life comes but once, and is soon over… OCTOBER 13, 1884 To New Bedford, for the Suffrage meeting; trains did not connect at Myricks, where, after some delay and negotiation, I with difficulty persuaded the conductor of the freight train to take me to New Bedford in his caboose. This saved me time enough to go to the Delano Mansion, restore my strength with food, and put on my cap and ruche. The Delanos were very kind. I read my Congress paper on ‘Benefits of Suffrage to Women.’ HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

NOVEMBER 23, 1884 To Louisburg Square to my old friend’s funeral [Hamilton Wilde] … Around and before me were the friends and associates of the golden time in which his delightful humor and bonhomie so often helped me in charades and other high times. It was ghostly – there were Lizzie Homans and Jerry Abbott, who took part with him and William Hunt in the wonderful charade in which two artists rode a tilt with theatre hobbies. The gray heads which I had once seen black, brown, or blonde, heightened the effect of the picture. It was indeed a sic transit. I said to Charles Perkins = ‘for some of us, it is the dressing bell”’ Oh! This mystery! So intense, so immense a fact and force as human life, tapering to this little point of a final leave-taking and brief remembrance. New Orleans Exposition – Julia Ward Howe was the chief of the Woman’s Department. Opened Dec 16, 1884 UNDATED DECEMBER 1884 A steamer had been chartered to convey thither the officers of the Exposition and their invited guests. Seated on the deck, the chief of the Woman’s Department and her fellow-workers watched the arrival of the high dignitaries of the State and city, escorted by members of our military, and by two bands of music; one, the famous Mexican Band. All of the craft on the river were adorned with flags and streamers. The Crescent, which gives the city its familiar designation, was pointed out, and the ‘Father of Waters’ was looked upon with admiring eyes. The steamer brought us to the Exposition grounds, and here a procession was formed in which the ladies of the Woman’s Department were assigned a place which they had some difficulty in keeping. The march led to the Main Building. The opening prayer was made by the Reverend De Witt Talmage. At a given moment a telegram was received from the President of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, declaring the Exposition to be formally open. Immediately after, the son of the Director-General, a fine lad of twelve, touched the electric button by which the machinery of the Exposition was set in motion. Returning by land, we found the streets gay with decorations, in which the colors of the orthodox flag were conspicuous.” UNDATED DECEMBER 1884 TO THE LADIES OF THE WOMAN’S DEPARTMENT Ladies we must remember that women have sometimes built churches with no better instruments than thimbles and a teapot! If the worst comes to the worst, we must come before the public and endeavor with its aid to earn the money necessary to complete our enterprise.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1885

January 9, Friday: Julia Ward Howe wrote, “I pray God today that I may be able to give that attention to my business affairs which is necessary for the security of those who are to survive me. My absent habit of mind leads me to mislay important letters and papers, and to many sins of this kind.”

JANUARY 13, 1885 Preparing for my lecture this evening. Subject, ‘Is Polite Society Polite?’ Place, Werlein Hall. I was very anxious – the lecture appeared to me very homely for a Southern audience accustomed to rhetorical productions. My reception was most gratifying. The house was packed and many were sent away. Judge Gayarre introduced me. Joaquin Miller came first, reciting his ‘Fortunate Isles.’ I said in opening that even if my voice should not fill the hall, my good-will embraced them all. Every point in the lecture was perceived and applauded, and I felt more than usually in sympathy with my audience.” The second entertainment devised for the relief of the Woman’s Department was a ‘Soiree Creole,’ the third and last a ‘grand musical matinee’ at the French Opera House, for which we were indebted to the great kindness of Colonel Mapleson, who granted us the use of the house, and by whose permission several of his most distinguished artists gave their services. Monsignor Gillow, Commissioner for Mexico, also allowed his band to perform. FEBRUARY 6, 1885 Our Concert. The weather was favorable. Lieutenant Doyle came to escort me to the theatre. My box was made write gay by the uniforms of several navy officers. The house was packed. We took $1500 and hope to have more. I particularly enjoyed the Semiramide overture, which the band gave grandly. Rossini’s soul seemed to me to blossom out of it like an immortal flower. UNDATED FEBRUARY 1885 …opening of the colored people’s department; very interesting. A numerous assemblage of them showed a wide range of types. Music, military, drumming especially good. Saw in their exhibit a portrait of John A. Andrew which looked like a greeting from the old heroic time.” Woman’s Department formally opened March 3 though it had been open to the public since January. Set up the Twelve O’clock Talks given every Saturday from middle of Feb to close of Exposition MARCH 3, 1885 – from her address to the Woman’s Department on Opening Day “I wish to speak of the importance, in an industrial point of view, of a distinct showing of women’s work in the great industrial exhibits. There are few manufacturer in which the hand and brain of woman have not their appointed part. So long, however, as this work is shown merely in conjunction with that of men, it is dimly recognized, and makes no distinct impression. The world remains very imperfectly educated concerning its women. They are liable to be regarded as a non-producing class, supported by those to whom, in the order of nature, their life is a necessary condition of existence itself… Exhibits like the present, then, are useful in summing up much of this undervalued work of women. A greater moral use they have in raising the standard of usefulness and activity for the sex in general. Good work, when recognized, acts as a spur to human energy. Those who show how women can excel are examples to shame those who do not try. They lay upon their sex an obligation to stronger HDT WHAT? INDEX

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endeavor and better action, and society gains thereby. Still more have I at heart the association, in these enterprises, of women who are not bound to each other be alliance of blood, or affinity of neighborhood. Greater and more important than the acquisition of skill is the cultivation of public spirit. ‘Pro bono publico’ is a motto whose meaning men should learn from their infancy, and at their firesides. How shall they learn it unless the women, the guardian spirits of the household, shall hold and teach, beyond all other doctrines, that of devotion and loyalty to the public good? I value, then, for the sake of both men and women, the disinterested association of women for the promotion of the great interests in society.. You were stirred the other day y the bringing back of a battle-flag whose rents had been carefully mended. I tell you, sisters, we have all one flag now, broad and bright enough to cover us all. Let us see that no rent is made in it. All that the best and wisest men can imagine for the good of the human race can be wrought if the best women will only help the best men. 1885 – founded a Literary Assoc. for women called “The Pans” UNDATED 1885 My dear father’s birthday. I left the Exposition early and walked to visit dear Marion’s grave in Girard Street Cemetery. A lovely place it was. He is buried above ground in a sort of edifice formed of brick, the rows of coffins being laid on stone floors, each single one divided from those on either side of it by a stone partition. ‘Francis Marion Ward, died September 3, 1847.’ Erected by William Morse, dear Marion’s friend. MAY 16, 1885 Gave my talk to the colored people, soon after two in the afternoon in their department. A pretty hexagonal platform had been arranged. Behind this was a fine portrait of Abraham Lincoln, with a vase of beautiful flowers [gladiolus and white lilies] at its base. I spoke of Dr. Channing, Garrison, Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, John A. Andrew, Lucretia Mott, and Wendell Phillips, occupying about an hour. They gave me a fine basket of flowers and sang my ‘Battle Hymn.’ Afterwards, the Alabama cadets visited us. We gave them tea, cake and biscuits and I made a little speech for them.” UNDATED 1885 - PRESIDENT OF THE WOMAN’S DEPARTMENT REPORT The business of the Woman’s Department having thus been brought successfully to a close, it only remains for its President to resign the office she has filled, with some pain and much pleasure, for more than six months, - to thank the officers of her staff for their able and faithful services, the vice-presidents, and the lady commissioners in general, for the friendly support she has had from them almost without exception… The classification by States she considers to have justified itself, partly through the more distinct knowledge thus gained of the work of women in localities widely distant from each other, partly in the good acquaintance and good-will developed by this method of work. The friendly relations growing out of it still bind together those who are now thousands of miles apart, but who, we may hope, will ever remain united in a common zeal for promoting the industrial interests of women. Finally, she would say that she considers herself happy in having taken part in an Exposition of so high and useful a character as that which had latterly made New Orleans a center of interest in the civilized world. She takes leave with regret of a city in which she had enjoyed much friendly intercourse and hospitality; a city in whose renewed prosperity she must henceforth feel a deep and lasting interest. TO LAURA OAK GLENN JULY 19, 1885 How I left New Orleans, how I came North, how I let myself down here, is no doubt known to you thro’ inference. How hot New Orleans was before I left it, you cannot know, nor how sick I was once upon a time, nor how I came up upon iced champagne and recovered myself, and became strong again. Ever since I came home, I have slaved at my report of the Woman’s Department. Weary pages have I written. Life seems at last to consist of putting a pen into an ink-stand, and taking it out again, scribble, scribble, nibble, nibble (meal-times), and go to bed between whiles… SEPTEMBER 6TH, 1885 Busy in the morning with preparing my sermon on the Gospel of Hope, in contradistinction to the old terrible doctrines. Danger of religious indifference and of want of religious training for our children on the present skeptical basis. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

TO LAURA OAK GLEN NOVEMBER 4, 1885 YOU LITTLE HATEFUL THING! Herewith returned is the letter you wrote for. I had a mind to send it to you, beast that you are, without one word, just to pay you for that postal. Of course, I meant to write you immediately afterward in a separate envelope, telling you that I still love you. But there! I reflected that you could have a bad feeling if you opened the envelope and found no greeting from me. For the sake of posterity, Madam, I declined to give you this bad feeling. I do also retain some proprietorship in a certain pair of eyes which are like Sapphira’s. Oh! Mean sapphires, and I don’ want to dim them with any tear diamonds. “You flatter yourself,” Replies the Good-Natured One, to think of my shedding tears about anything that you could say or do, or leave unsaid or undone.” Just so. All right. I have got beefsteak for dinner today. What do you think of the weather and does your husband know when your lacking is out? Now, my sweet darling, your old Mammy is just back from a tremendous jaunt. I had a beautiful time in Iowa, and am as well as possible. Only think, traveling and at work for one calendar month, and not a finger ache, ‘cept one day, when I had a slight headache. And I brought home over $200 earned by lectures…

December 1, Tuesday: Porfirio de la Cruz Porfirio Diaz replaced Manuel del Refugio González Flores as President of Mexico. He would not relinquish the office for 27 years.

A treaty was signed in Washington by representatives of Nicaragua and the United States. It provided for a canal across Nicaragua. The treaty would be rejected by the Senate and withdrawn by the new Cleveland administration.

Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, ed. THE LIFE AND GENIUS OF GOETHE: LECTURES AT THE CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY (July 17, 1885: Mrs. Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney of Boston, “Das Ewig-Weibliche”; July 18, 1885: John Albee of New Castle, New Hampshire, “Goethe’s Self-Culture”; July 18, 1885: Reverend Doctor Cyrus Augustus Bartol of Boston, “Goethe and Schiller”; July 18, 1885: Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge of Cambridge, Massachusetts, “Goethe and his ‘Märchen’”; July 20, 1885: Franklin Benjamin Sanborn of Concord, Massachusetts, “Goethe’s Relation to English Literature”; July 20, 1885: Professor William Torrey Harris, “Goethe’s Faust”; July 21, 1885: Horatio Stevens White of Cornell University, “Goethe’s Youth”; July 21, 1885: Mrs. Caroline Kempton Sherman of Chicago, Illinois, “Child Life as portrayed by Goethe”; July 22, 1885: Mrs. Samuel Hopkins Emery, Jr. of Concord, Massachusetts, “The Elective Affinities”; July 23, 1885: Professor W.T. Hewett of Cornell University, “Goethe at Weimar”; July 25, 1885: Professor Thomas Davidson of Orange, New Jersey, “Goethe’s Titanism”; July 27, 1885: Mr. William Ordway Partridge of Brooklyn, New York, “Goethe as Playwright”; July 27, 1885: Professor William Torrey Harris, “The Novellettes in ‘Wilhelm Meister’”; July 28, 1885: A Conversation conducted by Mr. Snider and Professor Harris, “Goethe as a Man of Science”; July 28, 1885: Mr. Denton Jaques Snider of Cincinnati, Ohio, “History of the Faust Poem”; July 29, 1885: Mr. C.W. Ernst of Boston, “The Style of Goethe”; August 1, 1885: Mrs. Julia Ward Howe of Boston, “Goethe’s Women”; (Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1886). CONCORD SCHOOL OF PHIL.

During the winter of 1885/1886, Julia Ward Howe was residing in New-York City at Berkeley Chambers. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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TO LAURA THE BERKELEY NUISANCE, NEW YORK DEC. 26, 1885 …What have I been doing for the last eight weeks? Never you mind, my little dear. Mostly putting a girdle round the earth by correspondence, and some- ly worrying about my poor relations. Don’t you flatter yourself that I ever thought of you under this head. But the -, and the -, and the -, taken together are enough to give one a turn at he worry-cat system. Well ‘m, I had also to see the distribution of the whole edition of my New Orleans Report, and I can only compare this to the process of taking down a house, and of sending each individual brick somewhere, labeled with your compliments; supposing the bricks to be one thousand in number, it would take some time to distribute them, Harry Richards will be able to tell you how much time, and how many masculine oaths would go to each hundred of the articles. Well, that’s enough about that. You have had one of my bricks sent you, and hang me if I believe you have read it. Sweetison (a new little ‘spression which I have this minute invented), I stayed at Oak Glen until Monday last, which was the 21st. Then I came here by way of Boston, and arove on Tuesday evening. Our quarters, or rather eights, are small considering my papers and Maud’s clothes. The food is fine, the style first-rate, the rigs imposing to a degree, but, ah! I kind of hate it all. New York is too frightfully dirty! and then so stereotyped and commonplace. Boston losing its prestige? Not as I am at present advised… HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1886

End of February: Julia Ward Howe wrote that the weather was “direful: bitter cold and furious wind … arriving found my dear child seriously but not dangerously ill. Her joy at my coming was very pathetic.”

1886 February 28, 1886 I cannot be sure whether it was on this day that she said to me; “Mamma, don’t you remember the dream you had when Flossie and I were little children, and you were in Europe? You dreamed that you saw us in a boat and that the tide was carrying us away from you. Now the dream has come true, and the tide is bearing me away from you.” This saying was very sad to me; but my mind was possessed with the determination that death was not to be thought of. Undated February 1886 Saw by Katie’s face when she opened the door that things were worse. I flew up the stairs and found my darling little changed, except that her breathing seemed rather worse. She was glad to see me!…About this time I noticed a change come over her sweet face … I felt but would not believe, that it was the beginning of the end. Julia was presently very happy, with Michael on one side of her and myself on the other. Each of us held a hand. She said: ‘I am very happy now; if one has one’s parents and one’s husband, what more can one want? And presently, ‘The angels have charge of me now, mamma and Mimy.’ She said to me: “What does the Lord want to kill me for? I am dying.’ I said, ‘No, my darling, you are going to get well.’ She said: ‘Remember, if anything happens to me, you two must stay together’… A little later Michael and I were alone with her. She began to wander, and talk as if with reference to her club or some such thing. ‘If this is not the right thing,” she said,’ call another priestess’; then, very emphatically: “Truth, truth.’ These were her last words. My darling would have been forty two years old this day … TO MARY GRAVES MARCH 30TH, 1886 (After the death of her daughter Julia.) Wrote to Mary Graves: “I am not wild, nor melancholy, nor inconsolable; but I feel, as America might if some great fair State were blotted from the map, leaving only a void for the salt and bitter sea to overwhelm. I cannot so far get any comfort from other-worldly imaginings.” If God says anything to me now, He says “Thou fool.” The truth is that we have no notion of the value and beauty of God’s gifts until they are taken from us. Then He may well say, “Thou fool,” and we can only answer to our name. MARCH 30TH, 1886 This is the last day of this sorrowful March which took my dear one from me. I seem to myself only dull, hard, and confused under this affliction. I pray God to give me comfort by raising me up that I may be nearer to the higher life into which she and her dear gather have passed. And thou? eleison…” APRIL 27TH, 1886 Have had an uplifting of soul to-day. Have written to Mary Graves: “I am at last getting to stand where I can have some spiritual outlook.” The confusion of “is not,” is giving place to the steadfastness of “is.” Have embodied my thoughts in a poem to my dear Julia and in some pages which I may read at the meeting intended to commemorate her by the New England Woman’s Club. July 20, 1886 [She had written a careful study of Beatrice and Dante for the Concord School of Philosophy] I cannot think of the sittings of the School without a vision of the rapt expression of her [Julia’s] face as she sat and listened to the various speakers. … much more nervous than usual … really sounded a good deal better than it had looked to me. It was wonderfully well received. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

MAY 30TH, 1886 ...To Church of the Disciples, where it was Memorial Day in the Sunday School. Told the children about my writing of the Battle Hymn. Told them that the true glory of God which I saw then was not in the pomp and circumstance of war, not in military glory and victory, but in the rising up of the nation to stand up for the right and to die for it if need be. I told them that whenever they would stand up for the right in any struggle, contest or trial, they would see this glory. Undated September 1886 [In Sept 1886 she planned an “industrial circle” in each state; a woman’s industrial conference, and attending this Suffrage Convention at Providence where she] Spoke of the divine right, not of kings or people, but of righteousness. Spoke of Ouida’s article in the North American Review. It had been reported that I declined to answer it. I said: ‘You cannot mend a stocking which is all holes. If you hold it up it will fall to pieces of itself.’ In the afternoon spoke about the Martha’s, male and female, who see only the trouble and inconvenience of reform; of the Marys who rely on principle. UNDATED SEPTEMBER 1886 …a day of dreadful hurry, preparing to go West and also to shut up this house. Had to work tight every minute…” Western Lecture Trip – saw Mamouth Cave of Kentucky; taking the seven mile walk; went as far as Kansas City OCTOBER 12, 1886 Dunkirk, lecture…No one must know that I got off at the wrong station – Perrysburg, a forlorn hamlet. No train that would bring me to Dunkirk before 6:30 pm. Ought to have arrived at 1:30. Went to the ‘hotel,’ persuaded the landlord to lend his buggy and kindly old fellow to harness his horses to it, and drove twenty miles or more over the mountains, reaching Dunkirk by 5:10pm. When the buggy was brought to the door of the hotel, I said: ‘How am I going to get in?’ ‘Take it slow and learn to pedal,’ said my old driver. Presently he said, ‘ I guess you ain’t so old as I be.’ I replied, ‘I am pretty well on toward seventy.’ ‘Well, I am five years beyond,’ said he. He drives an accommodation wagon between Perrysburg and Versailles, a small town where a man once wanted to set up a mill, and to buy land and water power, and they wouldn’t sell either. Whereupon he went to Tonawanda and made the place. ‘Guess they’d have done better to gin him the land and water, and to set up his mill for him,’ said my man Hinds. To Laura December 1, 1886 You see, I was waiting for the winter to begin, in order to write you, and that you ought to have known. But bless you, in Gardiner, Maine, you don’t know when real Winter begins, ‘cause you have so much sham winter. Well, better late than never. Here’s thanking you very much for the delightful [tea] cozy. Maud said, ‘ What are you going to do with it?’ sarcastic like. I replied, ‘Put it on my head’; to which she inquit, ‘Most natural thing for you to do.’ The sight of the monogram gave me real satisfaction and a sense of inborn dignity. You boil down to your monogram, after all, and this one was beyond my highest expectations. I am only thinking, dear, whether you would not have shown more respect by putting the crimson satin bow on the monogram side, and thus, as it were, calling attention to the distinguished initials…I am grinding now in all of my mills, of which one is a paper for the Woman Suffrage Bazaar,’ which paper I am doing my best to edit. I cannot in conscience ask you to send me anything for its columns, because, poor dear, you have so much work on your own account. At the same time, a trifling overflow into the hat would be very welcome… DECEMBER 27, 1886 The day was a very distressing one to me. I sat much of the time beside Flossy with a strange feeling that I could keep her alive by some effort of my will. I seemed to contend with God, saying, ‘I gave up Julia, I can’t give up Flossy – she has children…” DECEMBER 28, 1886 Most of the day with dear Flossy, who seems a little better. I sat up with her until 1.30 am, and made a great effort of will to put her to sleep. I succeeded – she slept for a while without any narcotic. DECEMBER 31, 1886 God bless all my dear people, sisters, children, grandchildren, and cousins. God grant me also to serve while I live, and not to fail of the high and holy life. Amen! HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1887

Julia Ward Howe, upon hearing the Reverend William Rounseville Alger’s sermon on “Blessed Life,” wrote: “Very spiritual and in a way edifying; but marred by what I should call ‘mixed metaphysics.’ One goes beyond his paper to feel a deep sympathy with him, a man of intense intellectual impulse, in following which he undergoes a sort of martyrdom; while yet he does not seem to me to hit the plain, practical truth so much as one might wish. He is estray [sic] between Western and Eastern thought, inclining a good deal, though not exclusively, to the latter.”

Completing her paper on “Women in the three professions, Law, Medicine, and theology” for the Chautauquan really tired Julia Ward Howe out.

Julia Ward Howe spoke at the Newport Opera House with Mrs. Livermore and took part in the “Authors” Reading for the Longfellow Memorial in the Boston Museum, where she recited “Our Orders” and the “Battle Hymn,” as well as recently composed lines for Longfellow: “I wore my velvet gown, my mother’s lace, Uncle Sam’s Saint Esprit, and did my best, as did all the others.”

Julia Ward Howe spoke at a suffrage meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, emphasizing that woman suffrage represented individual right, integral humanity, and ideal justice. She spoke of the attitude and action of Minerva in the “Eumenides,” her resistance to the Furies, who she pointed out personified popular passion fortified by ancient tradition, and emphasized her firm stand for a just trial, and her casting of the decisive ballot. “I hoped that this would prefigure a great life-drama in which this gracious prophecy would be realized.”

Julia Ward Howe talked with Miss Eddy, who was devising a correspondence and circular to obtain information concerning art clubs throughout the country, and agreed to draft that circular.

April 11, Monday: Julia Ward Howe wrote, “To Providence; invited to attend supper of Unitarian Club and make an address. The keynote to this was given me yesterday by the sight of the people who thronged the popular churches, attracted, in a great measure no doubt, by the Easter decorations and music. I thought: ‘What a pity that everybody cannot hear Phillips Brooks.’ I also thought: ‘They can all hear the lesson of heavenly truth in the great Church of All Souls and of All Saints; there is room enough and to spare.’”

UNDATED 1887 [Writes a poem for Blind Kindergarten at Jamaica Plain] I worked at my poem until last moment and even changed it from the manuscript as I recited it. The occasion was most interesting. Sam Eliot presided, and made a fine opening address, in which he spoke beautifully of dear Julia and her service to the blind; also of her father. I was joined y Drs. Peabody and Bartol, Brooke Herford, and Phillips Brooks. They all spoke delightfully and were delightful to be with. I recited my poem as well as I could. I think it was well liked, and I am glad of the work I bestowed on it. UNDATED 1887 [Preaches at Parker Fraternity on the ‘Ignorant Classes.’] UNDATED 1887 At the Club Tea] not over-bright …. [had a ] flash or two. The state of Karma [calmer], orchestral conversation, and solo speaking. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

UNDATED 1887 [Upon hearing Reverend William Rounseville Alger’s ‘Blessed Life.’] Very spiritual and in a way edifying; but marred by what I should call ‘mixed metaphysics.’ One goes beyond his paper to feel a deep sympathy with him, a man of intense intellectual impulse, in following which he undergoes a sort of martyrdom; while yet he does not seem to me to hit the plain, practical truth so much as one might wish. He is estray [sic] between Western and Eastern thought, inclining a good deal, though not exclusively, to the latter. UNDATED 1887 [She goes to conferences of woman preachers, to peace meetings, to jubilee meetings, in honor of Queen Victoria; she conducts services at the Home for Intemerapte Women, and thinks it was a good time. She ‘bites into’ her paper on Aristophanes ‘with a very aching head;’ finishes it and delivers it at the Concord School of Philosophy (kids v. 11 p 127) “Before I began, I sent this one word to Davidson, eleison. This because it seemed as if he might resent my assuming to speak at all of the great comedian. He seemed, however, to like what I said, and in the discussion which followed, he took part with me, against Sanborn, who accuses Aristophanes of having always lent his wit to the service of the old aristocratic party. Returned to Boston and took the train to Weirs, New Hampshire, where arrived more dead than alive.” UNDATED 1887 – NEWPORT Dreamed this morning of Charles Sumner and dearest Julia. She was talking to me; part of the time reclining on sort of a lounge. I said to some one, “This is our own dear Julia, feel how warm she is.”…I think I said something about our wanting to see her oftener. She said pathetically, ‘Can’t you talk of me?” I said, “We do, darling.” “Not very often,” I think was her reply. Then she seemed to come very near me, and I said to her, “Darling, do they let you come here as often as you want?” She said, “Not quite.” I asked why, and she answered almost inaudibly, “they are afraid of my troubling people.” I stirred and woke; but the dear vision remains with me, almost calling me across the sea. UNDATED 1887 The bane of all representative action is that the spur of personal ambition will carry people further than larger and more generous considerations of good are apt to do. SO the mean-hearted and ambitious are always forward in politics; while those who believe in great principles are perhaps too much inclined to let the principles do all the work… NOVEMBER 7, 1887 Left for Boston by 10.20 am train, to attend the celebration of Michael [Anagnos] fiftieth birthday at the Institution, and the opening meeting of the N. E. W. C. … Arriving in Boston, I ran about somewhat, fatiguing myself dreadfully. Reached the Institution y 4.30 pm, when, throwing myself on the bed for necessary rest, the desired rhymes for Anagnos’s birthday flashed upon me, ‘all of a sudden,’ and instead of napping, I called for pen and ink and wrote them. The meeting was very good; I presided. Dwight and Rodocanachi made speeches, the latter presenting the beautiful chain given to Michael by the teachers of the institution. Michael was much moved and could not but be much gratified. I proposed three cheers at the end. I stole half and hour to attend a meeting in memory of Hannah Stephenson [ the friend and housemate of Theodore Parker] of whom much good was said that I did not know of. I reproached myself for having always been repelled by her ugliness of countenance and tart manner, and having thus failed to come within the sphere of her really noble influence. The occasion recalled a whole vision of the early and painful struggle in Boston; of the martyrdom of feeling endured by friends of the slave – of Parker’s heroic house and pulpit. It seemed, as it often does, great to have known these things, little to have done so in consequence. NOVEMBER 17, 1887 Finished my lecture on ‘Women in the Greek Drama.’ It was high time, as my head and eyes are tired with the persistent strain…All the past week has been hard work. No pleasure reading except a very little in the evening. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

DECEMBER 1, 1887 Took the 2.30 train for Melrose … I read my new lecture – ‘ Woman as shown by the Greek Dramatists’; of whom I quoted from Aeschlus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes. A Club Tea followed; a pleasant one. I asked the mothers present whether they educated their daughters in hygiene and housekeeping. The response was not enthusiastic, and people were more disposed to talk of the outer world, careers of women, business or profession, than to speak of the home business. One young girl, however, told us that she was a housekeeping girl; a very pleasant lady, Mrs. Burr, had been trained by her mother, to her own great advantage. DECEMBER 18, 1887 For the [Parker] Fraternity a text occurs to me, ‘Upon this rock I will build my church.’ Will speak of the simple religious element in human nature, the loss of which, no critical skill or insight could replace. Will quote some of the acts and expressions of the true religious zeal of other days, and ask why this means nothing for us of to-day. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1888

January 1, Sunday: Julia Ward Howe wrote, “My first act this year was to preach before the Parker Fraternity. My text was Christ’s saying to Peter: ‘Upon this rock ] will build my church.’ The text came to me almost as soon as I received the invitation and 1 wrote the sermon under great difficulties of interruption, removal to Boston, et cetera. My theme was the religious element in human nature, and its normal manifestations in worship, sacrifice and revelation, or the vision of divine things. It seemed to interest those present a good deal, as it did me.”

JANUARY 20TH, 1888 I have no superstition about opening on passages of the Bible, yet will record that as I opened our service book for reading this morning, my eye rested on the following passage: “I have blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions, and as a cloud thy sins; return unto me for I ‘have redeemed thee.” SUNDAY, MARCH 28TH, 1888 Thought I ought to stay at home and work. Struck a good vein and scratched awhile, then rushed for my dear church where I heard a good deal of the good minister’s * prayer and a sermon from him which * The Revd. Charles Gordon Ames, who had recently succeeded Mr. Clarke as pastor of the Church of the Disciples. I can only call surpassing in its beauty and pathos. “As we forgive those who trespass against us” was the text, and never did divine words receive a more divine interpretation. It will surely be published, and my head is too tired to repeat any of it here. Suffice it to say that it moved me to real heart-tears of joy and comfort. The hymn was “Nearer My God to Thee.” I should like to write a poem about it. A woman composed it, and I heard it again and again at Theodore Parker’s. Heard it most at my sweet Julia’s funeral. Felt it much to-day. Julia leaves in April for a visit to her sister Annie in California … she had never been … in order to pay for the trip she organized lectures on the way…After an AAW conference in Boston and a Woman’s Council in Washington, she took to the road…(the kids v.2 p. 131 ) UNDATED 1888 …a day of frightful hurry and fatigue. I had been preparing for this departure for some time past; yet when the time came, it seemed as if I could hardly get off. Maud worked hard to help me. She insisted upon arranging matters for me; went to the bank; I got my ticket. We parted cheerfully, yet I felt a wrench. God knows whether she will ever be in my house again, as my partner in care and responsibility…. CHICAGO 1888 Very busy and not quite well. Divided the day between Maud and some necessary business. At 3.15pm the dreadful wrench took place. Maud was very brave, but I know that she felt it as I did…. TO MAUD MERCHANT’S HOTEL, ST. PAUL MINNESOTA APRIL 10, 1888 So far, so good, my dear sweet child. I got me off as well as possible, though we had many complications and delays as to the ticket. My section was very comfortable. I had supper in the dinning-car, and slept well, no theater-troupe or Dr. T. being aboard. I have now got my ticket all straight to ‘Frisco, and won’t I frisk oh! when I get their! SPOKANE FALLS 1888 A brochial attack; very hoarse and sore in my throat and chest. Went over my lecture carefully, leaving out some pages. Felt absolute need of tea-stimulant, and went downtown, finding some in a grocer’s shop. The good servant Dora made me a hop cup which refreshed me greatly. Very hoarse at my lecture. Opera House a good one enough; for a desk, a box mounted on a barrel, all covered with a colored paper; decent enough. Lecture; ‘Polite Society’: well received. The Spokane of today may smile at the small things of yesterday; yet our mother always spoke with pleasure of her cordial reception there. Travelled to Walla Walla, Walula, and Paser HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

PASER 1888 Found a tavern with many claimants for beds. Mrs. Isaacs, who came with me from Walla Walla for a change of air, could not have a separate room, and we were glad to share not only a small room but also a three- quarters bed. I was cramped and slept miserable. She was very quiet and amiable. TACOMA 1888 [“At Tacoma again 9 on the way whiter she felt as if her life hung be a thread while crossing the Notch), there was bit one room for two ladies, but they occupied it “very peacefully.” After church at Tacoma] we heard singing in one of the parlors, and went in quest of it. In the great parlor of the hotel where hops takes place, we found an assemblage of men and women, mostly young, singing Gospel hymns, with an accompaniment of grand piano. The Bishop of New Zealand stood in the middle of the apartment singing with gusto. Presently he took his place at the instrument, his wife joining him as id she thought his situation dangerous for a ‘lone hand.’ A little later, some one, who appeared to act as master of ceremonies, asked me to come over and be introduced to the Bishop, to which I consented. His first question was: “Are you going to New Zealand immediately?” He is a Londoner. “Ah, come; with all your States, you can show nothing like London.” Being asked for a brief address, he spoke very readily, with a frank, honest face, and in a genial, offhand manner. A good specimen of his sort. Not fine-brained, now over-brained, but believing in religion and glad to devote his life to it. The Bishop has blue eyes and a shaggy head of grizzled hair. SEATTLE 1888 “Hospitable Seattle” [she lectured and attended a meeting of the Seattle Emerson Club] OLYMPIA 1888 [Took a small sound steamer] A queer old bachelor on board, hearing me say that I should like to live in Washington Territory, said he would give me a handsome house and lot if I would live in Olympia, at which several Olympians present laughed. PORTLAND 1888 [ON her way to Portland she bought a piece of property “Tumwater”. In Portland she spend several days, lectured three times, and played music for singing and dancing in one of the hotel parlors (kids v2 p 134) she made slight acquaintance with various people. MAY 5, 1888 San Francisco and then Annie’s “San Geronimo” [At Decoration Day celebration given by the Grand Army of the Republic in the Grand Opera House in SF – she was guest of honor and gave an address guest of honor (kids v.2.135)] I join this celebration with thrilled and uplifted heart. I remember those camp-fires, I remember the dreadful battles. It was a question with us women, “will our men prevail? Until they do they will not come home.” How we blessed them when they did; how we blessed them with our prayers when they were in the battlefield. Those were the times of sorrow; this is one of joy. Let us thank God, who has given us these victories. UNDATED 1888 SANTA BARBARA “Sauntered a little, and spent a little money. Bought some imperfect pearls which will look well when set. Wanted a handsome brooch which I saw; thought I had best conquer my desire, and did so.” UNDATED 1888 VENTURA Got so tired that I could hardly dress for lecture. [The next day she proposed to Mrs. S. at dinner (1p,) to invite some young people for the evening, promising to play for them to dance. “She [Mrs. S.] ordered a buggy and drove about the village. Her son stretched a burlap on the straw matting and waxed it. About thirty came. We had some sweet music, singers with good voices, and among others a pupil of Perabo, who was really interesting and remarkable. JUNE 10, 1888 OAKLAND [Preached] The one sermon which I have felt like preaching in these parts; “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock.” The house was well filled…After service as I leaned over to speak to those who stopped to greet me, I saw one of our old church-members, who told me, with eyes full of tears, that our dear James Freeman Clarke is not more. That was like a live-bolt; I could not realize it at first. “A very tender history Did in your passing fall” Years of sweet converse, of following and dependence, end with this event. Left Cali and traveled to Salt Lake City. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

SALT LAKE CITY UNDATED 1888 [the Mormon Tabernacle] An enormous building with a roof like the back of a turtle; many tourists present. The Mormons mostly an ill-looking and ill-smelling crowd. Bishop Whitney, a young man, preached a cosmopolite sermon, quoting Milton and Emerson. He spoke of the Christian Church with patronizing indulgence; insisted upon the doctrine of immediate and personal revelation, and censured the Mormons for sometimes considering their families before their church. Communion, bread in silver baskets and water in silver cups, handed to everyone, children partaking with the rest; no solemnity. JUNE 26, 1888 To visit the penitentiary, where thirty Mormon bishops are imprisoned for polygamy. Spoke with one, Bishop of Prove, a rather canny-looking man, whom we found in the prison library, reading. The librarian (four years’ term for forgery) told me it was the result of liquor and bad company. I said a few motherly words to him and presently proposed to speak to the prisoners, to which the jailer gladly assented. I began by saying, “I feel to speak to you, my brothers.” Said that all of us make mistakes and many of us do wrong at times. Exhorted to them to give, in future, obedience to the laws upon which the existence of society depends. The convict Montrose sent me a little chain and ornaments of his own making. I promised to send one or two books for the library…” [She traveled from Utah home, through “Bowery and breezy Nebraska; such a relief to the eyes and nerves!” then onto Chicago where she met Maud. Then to Boston and finally to Newport.]

Summer: Julia Ward Howe wrote: “Mr. Alger seized upon my left ear metaphorically and emptied it into all the five- syllable words that he knew, and the result was a mingling of active and passive lunacy, for I almost went mad and he had not far to go in that direction.” WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER

She also wrote “My cow, of which I was fond, was found dead this morning.… My neighbor Almy was very kind.… I felt this a good deal, but complaining will not help matters.”

She also wrote “Mr. [George] Bancroft, historian, brought Dr. Hedge to call after dinner. Mr. B. kissed me on both cheeks for the first time in his life. We had a very pleasant and rather brilliant talk, as might have been expected when such men meet.”

She also wrote “How the great world does use up a man! It is not merely the growing older, for that is a natural and simple process; but it is the coating of worldliness which seems to varnish the life out of a man; dead eyes, dead smile, and (worst of all) dead breath.”

July 8, 1888: Julia Ward Howe wrote to Maude, “Oh! the dust of it, and the swirl, in which the black porter and the white babies all seemed mixed up together. A few dried and withered old women, like myself, were thrown in, and occasional smoky gent, and the gruel ‘thick and slab,’ was what is called Human Nature! This is the spleeny vein, and I indulge it to make you laugh, but really, my journey was as comfortable as heat and speed would allow. Imagine my feelings on learning that there was no dining or buffet car! Do not grieve about this, the biscuits and bananas which you put up carried me quite a way. We got a tolerable breakfast at Cleveland, and a bad dinner at Buffalo, but dry your eyes, the strawberry shortcake was uncommonly good. And think how good it is that I have got through with it all and can now rest good and handsome.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

September 23, Sunday: Julia Ward Howe wrote: “To church in town. A suggestive sermon from Mr. Alger on ‘Watching,’ i.e., upon all the agencies that watch us: children; foes; friends; critics; authorities; spirits; God Himself. As we drove into town I had one of those momentary glimpses which in things spiritual are so infinitely precious. The idea became clear and present to my mind that God, an actual presence, takes note of our actions and intentions. I thought how helpful it would be to us to pass our lives in a sense of this divine supervision. After this inward experience I was almost startled by the theme of Alger’s sermon. I spoke to him of the coincidence and he said it must have been a thought wave. The thought is one to which I have need to cling. I have at this moment mental troubles, obsessions of imagination, from which I pray to be delivered. While this idea of the divine presence was clear to me, I felt myself lifted above these things. May this lifting continue.” WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28TH, 1888 In my prayer this morning I had again a glimpse of the transcendent things. The presence of God appeared to me on Sunday last as a constant point of reverence and judgment for conduct; to- day it appeared to me as a perpetual nearness of help and loving comfort. Extracts from my prayer at the Tiverton Service, September 9th, O Thou who art to us the supreme of comfort and consolation, the supreme also of judgment and correction. We pray to thee as individual souls, to each one of which thou hast given an immortal promise and an immortal destiny-as members of families, surrounded by dear ones whose welfare is as precious to us as our own-as citizens of a country to which thou hast given a leadership of the nations of the earth.” I forget what I asked for us as individuals--as members of families I asked that the bond of love might rule in our households, and that with children and servants we might remember that God is father of all and master of all. For our dear Country in this time of excitement and doubt, I asked that she might remember that, whoever may govern, God is really governor of all. I have written this down because I thought it better than my usual prayers. I write it from very imperfect remembrance. Text of a screed unused:-’Oh I you dear young people, upon whose faithfulness depends the fate of further generations, / do not waste precious years in the mistakes of selfishness ! Now that the generous impulses of Youth and the discipline of good teaching are fresh and strong in you, address yourselves to discern the most imperative needs of Humanity. So shall you learn to meet them with good service. So shall future generations rise up rightly to call you blessed. SUNDAY. NOVEMBER 4TH, 1888 In my prayer this morning I thanked God that I have come to grieve more over my moral disappointments than over my intellectual ones. With my natural talents I had nothing to do; with my use or abuse of them, everything. I have thought too, lately, of a reason why we should not neglect our duty for others for our real or supposed duty to ourselves. It is this: yourselves we have always with us; our fellows flit from our company, or pass away; and we must help them when and while we can. MONDAY. NOVEMBER 5TH, 1888 My last day here this season. I go, thanking God for the lovely summer of work and rest, family affection and social enjoyment. It is all delightful to look back upon, and another such season is lovely to look forward to, though my age more than anything else makes this doubtful. However it may chance, I feel as if I should be reconciled, trusting in the infinite goodness and wisdom. DECEMBER 5, 1888 “Bitter news of Abby May’s death. Alas! And alas! For the community, for her many friends, and for the Club and the Congress in which she did such great silent service. God rest her in His sweet peace!” DECEMBER 10TH, 1888 The ideal Christ is justified by the love and worship of humanity. With our imperfect knowledge of facts concerning him and our equally imperfect capacity of interpreting them, it is better as well as happier to hold on to this vision of the divine man, than to dogmatize either way about his nature. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

DECEMBER 25, 1888 “Trinity Church, where I enjoyed Phillips Brooks’s sermon. Felt much drawn to go to communion with the rest; but thought it might occasion surprise and annoyance. Going into a remote upper gallery I was present at the scene, and felt that I had my communion without partaking of the ‘elements.’ These lines also suggested themselves as I walked home: - The Universal bread, The sacrificial wine, The glory of the thorn-crowned head, Humanity divine. DECEMBER 31, 1888 The last day of the year dawned upon me, bringing solemn thoughts of the uncertainty of life, and sorrow for such misuse of its great gifts and opportunities as I am well conscious of. This has been a good year to me. It has carried me to the Pacific slope, and showed me indeed a land of promise. It gave me unexpected joy in the harmonious feeling toward me and the members of the A. A. W. at the Detroit Congress. It has, alas! Taken from me my dear pastor, most precious to me for help and instruction, and other dear and valued friends, notably Sarah Shaw Russell, Abby W. May and Carrie Tappan. I desire to set my house in order, and be ready for my departure; thankful to live, or willing to cease from my mortal life when God so wills. HDT WHAT? INDEX

RACE WAR, NOT CIVIL WAR

1889

January 1st, 1889 Julia Ward Howe wrote, “In my prayer this night I asked for weight and earnestness of purpose. I am too frivolous and frisky.” JANUARY 29TH, 1889 My word for the Danvers Suffrage meeting was Christ’s two sayings about his bringing a sword and also giving peace. The sword was the weapon of discriminating thought, bringing in a better interpretation of the old faith and doctrine. The peace was what would follow the adoption of the better doctrine. Suffrage divides society now and calls for a new study in the doctrines of freedom and justice. Peace will come when this study shall have been made and its results practically applied. FEBRUARY 24TH, 1889 In the evening heard Verdi’s beautiful Requiem. Was struck with the expression it gave to the terrorism of the old theology; the vengeance of offended majesty on the one hand, the piteous pleading of frightened souls on the other. As a work of human imagination, this old scheme of judgment, damnation and salvation was sublime; as a revelation of a Being superhuman in goodness and wisdom, it is simply absurd. JUNE 1ST, 1889 I have said to God on every morning of these busy days: “Give me this day,” and He has given them all; i.e., He has given me power to fulfill the task appointed for each. JUNE 9TH, 1889 I find, more and more, that the thought which came to me at the Worcester reading helps me to a new view of life in which the soul perpetually gives up to God and receive from Him. What we give up in this way we receive in another, with a happy sanction and confidence. JULY 1ST, 1889 I take for my guidance a new motto: “1 will ascend,” not in my ambition but in my thoughts and aims. JULY 21ST, 1889 A dry Sunday, i.e., no church, it being the women’s turn to go. ...I think of two sermons to write, one “A spirit of Power” one, “Behold, I show you a more excellent way.” OAK GLENN, AUGUST 8, 1889 Dearest Maud: The week just ending has been for me a dissipated one, three luncheon having had me for a guest. One was at Mrs. Ellis’s for Mrs. Sherwood, who did not arrive in time for it; one at Mrs. Wales’ and one at Mrs. Weld’s. I enjoyed them all, but am also so thankful today not to be going anywhere. Mrs. Sherwood was wonderfully got up at the Wales luncheon this [the shape of the trefoil} in heavy jet, crowned to her forehead. Mrs. John Bigelow, the great woman, came out yesterday. She brought Mrs. Cherry Pectoral Ayer, both parties wishing to attend the Town and Country Club next day. I could not help giving them the requested invitation. Mrs. Ayer had in her ears turquoises as large as robin’s eggs, set in diamonds. She was powdered, bewigged and furbelowed... AUGUST 9TH, 1889 I think to-day of a good theme for a sermon: “The Glory that shall be revealed.” Am not quite sure whether this is a scripture text, but could find one which would take its place. Query: What will be the glory of the future revelation ? It is a truth and a glory now, only we do not see it. The eternal principles of the moral law, the progress of the divine order. These eternal verities are always present in the world and are partially known to elect spirits here and there; but when “all flesh shall see it,” then these great truths will be made known to all and will become embodied in human life and government. AUGUST 14TH, 1889 My inward prayer is still, “Take and give! Take away my foolish life and give me my life back again, informed by Thy wisdom.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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September 8, Sunday: Julia Ward Howe wrote: “To-day for the second time I seemed to have met Mr. Alger’s sermon as I drove in to attend church. The discourse was very metaphysical and long winded, but the direct and important train of thought was much like that which seized me as I sat in my carriage. I thought of the different ways of serving Duty; first, as Christ did, in loneliness and hardship. I thought of him as one standing on a lonely beach waiting to find, as he did, the pearl of a perfect doctrine with which to redeem the world; then of a fire ship with its devoted crew; then of a pleasant party of saintly people. This, it seemed to me, would be my best chance. Alger named several gates of Heaven, innocence, victory, penitence, resignation, retribution. This was the best part of the sermon because the most tangible. Tried to write this out in verse, some of which occurred to me as I drove into town; succeeded poorly.” WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER

OCTOBER 20TH, 1889 We do not ask that Thy truth may conquer, because it cannot but conquer; its conquest is assured from the very foundation of the world. But we do ask that we may have a part in this great victory, the part of humble, faithful followers who have seen Thy banner unrolled in its glory, which is above all other glories, above all the splendors of the visible universe, above sunrise and sunset. May everyone of us be enrolled in the Church of All Saints and All Souls, which has been ordained, instituted and inspired by Thee, from and for all time. Amen. Spoke to the text, “God hath not left Himself without a witness.” This witness is in all human hearts, which, with all its intense desires, desires most of all law, order, religion. OCTOBER 21ST, 1889 The afternoon service yesterday was a vesper with much music, really sweet and soothing. I applied my text to the coming out into the new territories ; a rough Exodus stimulated by the love of gold, but with the army of fortune seekers go faithful souls, and instead of passing out of civilization, they extend its bounds. “Praise waiteth for thee in Zion”- yes, but the Prophet says: “The solitary places shall be made glad for them,” et cetera. I set this down for future use. Good Mr. Van Ness called just now and thanked me warmly for my sermon of yesterday morning. My statement of the way in which religion does bind… seems to have impressed him. I ask God to give me grace and comfort in what I have now undertaken. I spoke also of religious faith as belief not in especial dogmas but in the power of God’s truth and in man’s power to receive it. NOVEMBER 24TH, 1889 Preached for Dr. Stebbins my “Eleventh Hour” sermon. The organist introduced my Battle Hymn into his voluntary~ I sought much in mind for my prayer, but found two leading thoughts for it, the best being: God’s knowledge not only of the evil in us but of our good capacities; also His power of uplifting us to the ideal humanity for which He created us. “The seed of faith which Thou hast put in our heart through all generations, may it multiply and grow and prevail with might.” “Not one glorious feature is lost to Thee, of those with which Thou didst make man in Thine own image.” My sermon and prayer told, I was assured, and indeed I felt it at the time. Deo gratias. DECEMBER 22ND, 1889 (In California.) A lovely day with dear Sister Annie and Loullie. A. would have a little Sunday service. I read part of the twenty-third chapter of Matthew and spoke first of the Bible in my hands; the same which dear father formerly used at family devotions. “This book preaches,” I said, and then took the passage about the altar sanctifying the gift, and the temple the vow, taking Christ’s intention in this to have been to lead his hearers inward from the symbolic right to the depth of the religious thought. Spoke of sincerity in religion as attainable only by effort; getting away from the stereotyped phrases and attitudes to the inwardness of religious life. Spoke of God as the great light at which we may rekindle our little candles blown out by the strong currents of our earthly life. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1893

Our national birthday, the 4th of July: The World’s Fair continued in Chicago, Illinois as a spanking new Liberty Bell was rung.

Auburn, New York, celebrated not only our nation’s birthday but also the centennial anniversary of its settlement.

Julia Ward Howe read poetry to the crowd at Woodstock, Connecticut.

For the benefit of the citizenry of Cape May, New Jersey, former President William Henry Harrison delivered a patriotic oration on the rights and duties of citizenship.

At Castle Garden at the tip of Manhattan, a gunner delivered a 23-gun national salute, rather than the precise number of 21 rounds (this man would be searched out and taken into custody).

In Bridgeport, Connecticut, a bronze statue as ugly as Phineas Taylor Barnum was unveiled. This had been sculpted from life by Thomas Ball. CELEBRATING OUR B-DAY HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1900

Julia Ward Howe’s REMINISCENCES, 1819-1867 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, materials about Adam Gurowski on pages 220-7): Shortly after my return to Boston, my husband spoke to me of a new acquaintance, –a Polish nobleman, Adam Gurowski by name,– concerning whom he related the following circumstances. Count Gurowski had been implicated in one of the later Polish insurrections. In order to keep his large estates from confiscation he had made them over to his younger brother, upon the explicit condition that a sufficient remittance should be regularly sent him, to enable him to live wherever his lot should thenceforth be cast. He came to this country, but the remittances failed to follow him, and he presently found himself without funds in a foreign land. Being a man of much erudition, he had made friends with some of the professors of Harvard University. They offered him assistance, which he declined, and it soon appeared that he was working in the gardens of Hovey & Co., in or near Cambridge. His new friends remonstrated with him, pleading that this work was unsuitable for a man of his rank and condition. He replied, “I am Gurowski; labor cannot degrade me.” This independence of his position commended him much to the esteem of my husband, and he was more than once invited to our house. Some literary employment was found for him, and finally, through influence exerted at Washington, a position as translator was secured for him in the State Department. He was at Newport during the summer that we passed at the Cliff House, and he it was who gave it the title of Hotel Rambouillet. His proved to be a character of remarkable contradictions, in which really noble and generous impulses contrasted with an undisciplined temper and an insatiable curiosity. While inveighing constantly against the rudeness of American manners, he himself was often guilty of great impoliteness. To give an example: At his boarding-house in Newport a child at table gave a little trouble, upon which the count animadverted with great severity. The mother, waxing impatient, said, “I think, count, that you have no right to say so much about table manners; for you yesterday broke the crust of the chicken pie with your fist, and pulled the meat out with your fingers!” His curiosity, as I have said, was unbounded. Meeting a lady of his acquaintance at her door, and seeing a basket on her arm, he asked, “Where are you going, Mrs. ————, so early, with that basket?” She declined to answer the question, on the ground that the questioner had no concern in her errand. On the evening of the same day he again met the lady, and said to her, “I know now where you were going this morning with that basket.” If friends on whom he called were said to be engaged or not at home, he was HDT WHAT? INDEX

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at great pains to find out how they were engaged, or whether they were really at home in spite of the message to the contrary. One gentleman in Newport, not desiring to receive the count’s visit, and knowing that he would not be safe anywhere in his own house, took refuge in the loft of his barn and drew the ladder up after him. And yet Adam Gurowski was a true-hearted man, loyal to every good cause and devoted to his few friends. His life continued to the last to be a very checkered one. When the civil war broke out, his disapprobation of men and measures took expression in vehement and indignant protest against what appeared to him a willful mismanagement of public business. William H. Seward was then at the head of the Department of State, and against his policy the count fulminated in public and in private. He was warned by friends, and at last officially told that he could not be retained in the department if he persisted in stigmatizing its chief as a fool, a timeserver, no matter what. He persevered, and was dismissed from his place. He had been on friendly terms with Charles Sumner, to whom he probably owed his appointment. He tormented this gentleman to such a degree as to terminate all relations between the two. Of this breach Mr. Sumner gave the following account: “The count would come to my rooms at all hours. When I left my sleeping-chamber in the morning, I often found him in my study, seated at my table, perusing my morning paper and probably any other matter which might excite his curiosity. If he happened to come in while a foreign minister was visiting me, he would stay through the visit. I bore with this for a long time. At last the annoyance became insupportable. One evening, after a long sitting in my room, he took leave, but presently returned for a fresh séance, although it was already very late. I said to him, ‘Count, you must go now, and you must never return.’ ‘How is this, my dear friend?’ exclaimed the count. ‘There is no explanation,’ said I, ‘only you must not come to my room again.’” This ended the acquaintance! The count after this spoke very bitterly of Mr. Sumner, whose procedure did seem to me a little severe. Unfortunately the lesson was quite lost upon Gurowski, and he continued to make enemies of those with whom he had to do, until nearly every door in Washington was closed to him. There was one exception. Mrs. Charles Eames, wife of a well-known lawyer, was one of the notabilities of Washington. Hers was one of those central characters which are able to attract and harmonize the most diverse social elements. Her house had long been a resort of the worthies of the capital. Men of mark and of intelligence gathered about her, regardless of party divisions. No one understood Washington society better than she did, and no one in it was more highly esteemed or less liable to be misrepresented. Mrs. Eames well knew how provoking and tormenting Count Gurowski was apt to be, but she knew, too, the remarkable qualities which went far to redeem his troublesome traits of character. And so, when the count seemed to be entirely HDT WHAT? INDEX

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discredited, she stood up for him, warning her friends that if they came to her house they would always be likely to meet this unacceptable man. He, on his part, was warmly sensible of the value of her friendship, and showed his gratitude by a sincere interest in all that concerned her. The courageous position which she had assumed in his behalf was not without effect upon the society of the place, and people in general felt obliged to show some respect to a person whom Mrs. Eames honored with her friendship. I myself have reason to remember with gratitude Mrs. Eames’s hospitality. I made more than one visit at her house, and I well recall the distinguished company that I met there. The house was simple in its appointments, for the hosts were not in affluent circumstances, but its atmosphere of cordiality and of good sense was delightful. At one of her dinner parties I remember meeting Hon. Salmon P. Chase, afterwards Chief Justice of the United States, Secretary Welles of the Navy, and Senator Grimes of Iowa. I had seen that morning a life-size painting representing President Lincoln surrounded by the members of his Cabinet. Mr. Chase, I think, asked what I thought of the picture. I replied that I thought Mr. Lincoln’s attitude rather awkward, and his legs out of proportion in their length. Mr. Chase laughed, and said, “Mr. Lincoln’s legs are so long that it would be difficult to exaggerate them.” I came to Washington soon after the conclusion of the war, and heard that Count Gurowski was seriously ill at the home of his good friend. I hastened thither to inquire concerning him, and learned that his life was almost despaired of. Mr. Eames told me this, and said that his wife and a lady friend of hers were incessant in their care of him. He promised that I should see him as soon as a change for the better should appear. Instead of this I received one day a message from Mrs. Eames, saying that the count was now given up by his physician, and that I might come, if I wished to see him alive once more. I went to the house at once, and found Mrs. Eames and her friend at the bedside of the dying man. He was already unconscious, and soon breathed his last. At Mr. Eames’s request I now gave up my room at the hotel and came to stay with Mrs. Eames, who was prostrated with the fatigue of nursing the sick man and with grief for his loss. While I sat and talked with her Mr. Eames entered the room, and said, “Mrs. Howe, my wife has always had a menagerie here in Washington, and now she has lost her faithful old grizzly.” I was intrusted with some of the arrangements for the funeral. Mrs. Eames said to me that, as the count had been a man of no religious belief, she thought it would be best to invite a Unitarian minister to officiate at his funeral. I should add that her grief prevented her from perceiving the humor of the suggestion. I accordingly secured the services of the Rev. John Pierpont, who happened to be in Washington at the time. Charles Sumner came to the house before the funeral, and actually shed tears as he looked on the face of his former friend. He remarked HDT WHAT? INDEX

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upon the beauty of the countenance, saying in his rather oratorical way, “There is a beauty of life, and there is a beauty of death.” The count’s good looks had been spoiled in early life by the loss of one eye, which had been destroyed, it was said, in a duel. After death, however, this blemish did not appear, and the distinction of the features was remarkable. Among his few effects was a printed volume containing the genealogy of his family, which had thrice intermarried with royal houses, once in the family of Maria Lesczinska, wife of Louis XV. of France. Within this book he had inclosed one or two cast-off trifles belonging to Mrs. Eames, with a few words of deep and grateful affection. So ended this troublous life. The Russian minister at Washington called upon Mrs. Eames soon after the funeral, and spoke with respect of the count, who, he said, could have held a brilliant position in Russia, had it not been for his quarrelsome disposition. Despite his skepticism, and in all his poverty, he caused a mass to be said every year for the soul of his mother, who had been a devout Catholic. To the brother whose want of faith added the distresses of poverty to the woes of exile, Gurowski once addressed a letter in the following form: “To John Gurowski, the greatest scoundrel in Europe.” A younger brother of his, a man of great beauty of person, enticed one of the infantas of Spain from the school or convent in which she was pursuing her education. This adventure made much noise at the time. Mrs. Eames once read me part of a letter from this lady, in which she spoke of “the fatal Gurowski beauty.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1908

Harriet Tubman established in Auburn, New York a home for the aged, the Harriet Tubman Home. Ms. Tubman would continue to care for elderly and indigent African Americans until her death. The proceeds from two biographies written by Sarah Bradford would help support her during her old age.

Julia Ward Howe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (the 1st woman so honored). HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1909

October 17, Sunday: It was the 50th anniversary of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, and the survivors of that scheme met in the riverside brick mansion of Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, on Elm Street in Concord.

When the 77-year-old Sanborn took Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s elbow to lead his 86-year-old friend into the sitting room, the Colonel pulled his arm away — despite the fact that the Reverend was now walking by use of a cane. In the siting room, a circle of six chairs had been set out, one chair for each of the original Secret “Six”: The Reverend Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, George Luther Stearns, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, Colonel Higginson, and Sanborn, despite the fact that Parker, Smith, Stearns, and Howe had by this point deceased. The chair for Dr. Howe was occupied by 90-year-old Julia Ward Howe, who remained seated when the others entered, with a shawl around her shoulders. Julia had her ear trumpet with her so that she would not need to miss any of the conversation. Also in the room was a young reporter, Katherine Mayo, who had been detailed to take copious notes by a grandson of William Lloyd Garrison, the author Oswald Garrison Villard. Villard was then wrapping up work on a study of Captain Brown that hopefully would be an improvement on Sanborn’s botched 1885 attempt at a biography. Colonel Higginson needed to make certain that Miss Mayo clearly understood, so that she could convey this information to Villard, that he and the other members of this 6-member finance committee had been entirely aware of John Brown’s intent to incite a slave rebellion in Virginia, and that they’d been quite as prepared that Brown’s raid would turn into a disaster for him and his little band as they had been prepared that it might prove against all odds to be a success. SERVILE INSURRECTION HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1910

October 17, Monday: Julia Ward Howe died at her summer home in Newport, Rhode Island (the funeral would be at the Channing Memorial Church she had regularly attended).

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: September 14, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.