LAURA’S DEATH IN THE EPIDEMIC OF ’78.
The war fully ended and our city home recovered, we removed to New
Orleans. I devoted myself wholly to my family and to domestic affairs.
Friends gathered about us and some delightful people made our neighborhood
very pleasant. It was in my present home that my daughter Laura was
married to Louis J. Bright, and soon after, Clara was united to James B.
Guthrie; both young men were settled in New Orleans, so that I was spared
the pain of total separation. My son David established himself on his own
plantation in Point Coupe, and soon after married Miss Lula Dowdell of
Alabama. Our summers were spent alternately in Myrtle Grove and the North,
or the Virginia Springs.
Mothers are usually held responsible for the shortcomings of their
children. Sometimes this is just, but children often cruelly misrepresent
good parents. It should never be forgotten that mothers and children are
very human, and that the vocation upon which young people enter with least
training is parenthood. Children and parents get their training together.
It takes love and wisdom and proper environment to bring both to their
best; but sometimes evil hereditary and vicious social institutions prove
stronger than all of these combined forces of the home. The nation can
never know the power and beauty of the mother until it evolves a true
protective tenderness for the child, and encompasses it with safest
conditions for its development. It is a growing wonder that women have
borne so long in silence the existence of establishments which the State
fosters to the debasement of their sons. Only the habit of subjection--the
legacy of the ages--could have produced this pathetic stoicism. If a horse
knew his strength, no man could control him. When women realize their
God-given power, the community in which their children are born will not
tempt them to their death by the open saloon, the gambling den and the
haunt of shame. Until that happy time the inexhaustible supply of love and
sympathy which goes out from the mother-heart is the child’s chiefest
shelter. Obedience is what parents should exact from infants if they
expect it from grown children. The slaves of the severer masters stayed
with them during the war, when those of indulgent ones ran away. It is the
petted, spoiled darlings whose ultimate “ingratitude is sharper than the
serpent’s tooth.”
When friends were won by my daughters it was gratifying to me, for it
proved that the womanly accomplishment of making themselves beloved was a
lesson they had laid to heart--and they had learned it by their own
fireside where love ruled and reigned. I was glad in all my children, and
a devoted mother is sure of her ultimate reward. I was very proud when
Clara replied to a friend who expressed surprise that she should visit me
on my reception day: “I should be happy to claim a half-hour of my
mother’s society if she were not related to me.” I was very content with
my two daughters happily married and settled near me--doubly mine by the
tie of congenial tastes and pursuits.
In 1878 my household had gone North for the summer. On September 1st a
telegram reached me at Wilbraham, Mass., saying, “Laura died at 12
o’clock, M.” I had plead with her to leave New Orleans with me, but in her
self-sacrificing devotion to her husband, who was never willing that she
should be absent from him, she remained at home and fell a victim in the
great yellow fever epidemic.
Previous to her marriage she had spent all her summers in the country or
in travel, and was wholly unacclimated. Clara wrote thus to Captain S. M.
Thomas from Sewanee, Tenn., in September of that dreadful year: “The pity
of it, Uncle Milton! You will understand how it is with us at this time.
Mother is broken-hearted. You have ever been a large figure in Laura’s and
my girlhood recollections, and mother asks me to write to you. Laura
Ellen’s death was just as painful as it could be. Father and mother were
in Wilbraham, and every one of us gone but dear, good cousin Louise
Brewer, and Louis--her husband. Oh! he made a terrible mistake in
remaining in that doomed city. I have an added pang that I shall carry
with me till I too go away--that I was not with her in her supreme hour.
“The dear girl wrote daily to mother, David, and me, until death snatched
away her pen. ‘Fear not for me, dearest mother,’ was on her last postal
card. ‘My trust is in God.’ It were enough to make an angel weep if the
true history of this awful summer could be written. Our grief is without
any alleviation--unless in sister’s beautiful character and Christian
life. If I had been there I should have tried with superhuman efforts to
hold her back from death. It was Sunday--and Dr. Walker dismissed his
congregation at Felicity church to go, at her request, to her deathbed. He
has told us of her great faith, her willingness to go, the perfect
clearness of her mind, and the calm fortitude she manifested even when she
kissed her children good-by. Breathing softly she went to sleep and closed
her sweet blue eyes on this world--forever.
“Cousin Louise says Louis was nearly frantic. It is a terrible blow, and
he has the added pain of knowing it might have been different but for the
fatal mistake of judgment which brought such awful results. I have to
school myself, and fight every day a new battle for calmness and
resignation. I shall never grow accustomed to the hard fact that her
bright and heavenly presence must be forever wanting in her own home, and
shall never again grace mine. She died saying, ‘Jesus is with me!’ Well He
might be, for she died, as He, sacrificing herself for others.”
There was no one too old or too poor, or too uninteresting to receive
Laura’s attention. Sometimes this disposition annoyed me; but though I did
not always recognize it, she was always living out the divine altruism of
Christ. She was ever active in charities and a useful director of St.
Ann’s Asylum.
Among many others I gather the following expressions in letters from those
who had known her intimately: “Nobody feared her, everybody loved her. She
was an angel for forgiving. The brightness in her life came from the
angelic cheerfulness of her own soul, which would not yield to outward
conditions. She had an infinite capacity for getting joy out of barren
places.”--“I do not hope to know again a nature so blended in sweetness
and strength. It is no common chance that takes away a noble mind--so full
of meekness yet with so much to justify self-assertion. There was an
atmosphere of grace, mercy and peace floating about her, edifying and
delighting all who came near.”
Coming from a long line of tender, gentle, saintly women--the Brewers on
the Merrick side--she belonged to that type celebrated in story and
embalmed in song, of which nearly every generation of Brewers has produced
at least one representative human angel.
A more than full measure of days has convinced me that among our permanent
joys are the friends who have drifted with our own life current. In
addition to the pleasure of communion with lofty and sympathetic spirits
such friendships have the “tendency to bring the character into finer
life.” “A new friend,” says Emerson, “entering our house is an era in our
true history.” Our friends illustrate the course of our conduct. It is the
progress of our character that draws them about us. Among those friends
whom the struggling years after the war brought to me was Mrs. Anita
Waugh, a Boston woman; a sojourner in Europe while her father was U. S.
Minister to Greece, a long-time resident of Cuba, and, during the period
in which I made her acquaintance, a teacher in New Orleans. In an old
letter to one of my children I find: “Mrs. Waugh makes much of your
mother. She is happier for having known me. I have been helped by her to
some knowledge from the vast store-house which may never be taken account
of--still I here make the acknowledgment.”
Frances Willard said of her, “She is rarely gifted, and I enjoy her
thought--so different from my own practical life. She is a seer (see-er)!”
Her wide acquaintance with remarkable people invested her with rare
interest. In one of her many letters to me, dated in 1873, she says with
fine catholicity of spirit and exceptional insight: “I think the so-called
religious world lays too much stress on the infidelity of such men as
Tyndall and Huxley and Spencer. They have not reached the point in their
spiritual growth where knowledge opens the domain of real, pure worship;
they are in a transition period, are still groping about in a world of
effects, living in a world of results of which they have not yet found the
cause. Spencer has given the most masterly exposition of the nervous
system which has yet been made. The next step would have been into the
domain of the spiritual. Here he stopped, because his mind has not yet
reached the degree of development in which the utterances of truth
perceived becomes the highest duty. When he shall have rounded and brought
up all of his studies to a point equally advanced with his Psychology then
he will be obliged to say, ‘My God and my Lord!’ I hope he may soon, as
Longfellow said, ‘Touch God’s right hand in the darkness.’”
Science--and the Church--did not long have to wait for the Wallace and
Henry Drummond of Mrs. Waugh’s intuition.
During repeated visits to the Yellow Sulphur Springs in Virginia, Mr.
Merrick and I were seated at table with the famous Confederate Commanders,
General Jubal Early and General G. T. Beauregard, who had become
additionally conspicuous by their connection with the Louisiana lottery.
General Beauregard called frequently upon us, and I met him also at
Waukesha, in Wisconsin. He was very kind to me, and greatly enjoyed
hearing some of my nonsensical dialect readings. At the latter place the
women were much impressed by his handsome and distinguished appearance and
manners. When he called at my hotel many of them were eager in their
entreaties to be introduced; our gallant general would bow graciously, but
they were not to be satisfied unless he would also take them by the hand.
On February 24, 1893, General Beauregard was lying in state on his bier in
the City Hall of New Orleans, and I was holding a convention of the
Louisiana W. C. T. U. I could not help alluding to the death of this
beloved old soldier, and I asked the women to go and look upon his
handsome face for the last time. He was a perfect type of his
class--courtly, generous, chivalrous. He had been in the Mexican war, and
was the only general of the old Confederacy who belonged in New Orleans.
The hearts of the people were touched, and when the meeting adjourned
many groups of W. C. T. U. women were added to the crowds who went to look
their last upon the face of the dead. Miss Points was pleased to say in
the _New Orleans Picayune_: “It was a beautiful act on the part of our
women; and it acquired a new significance and beauty in that it was the
outgrowth of the strong friendship and appreciation of the wife of the
distinguished man who was our Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the
days of the Confederacy.” This was a tribute which she reminded them to
offer to one of the dead heroes of our late war between the states!
“The great effort of courage I have made in my life was going in a skiff
in an overflow, with Stephen and Allen, two inexperienced negro rowers, to
Red River Landing in order to reach a steamboat for New Orleans, where, at
the close of the war, I wanted to get supplies for my family and for my
neighbors, who were in extremities by reason of the crevasse. That was an
act of bravery--hunger forced it--which astonished into exclamation the
captain of a Federal gunboat, Capt. Edward P. Lull, who made me take the
oath of allegiance before I could leave. You know how afraid I am of water
and of any _little_ boat; but give men or women a sufficiently powerful
motive and they can do anything.”