THREE GENERATIONS
[Illustration: MAUD HOWE _Frontispiece_]
THREE
GENERATIONS
BY
MAUD HOWE ELLIOTT
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
[Illustration: colophon]
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1923
_Copyright, 1923_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
_All rights reserved_
Published October, 1923
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To
JOHN ELLIOTT
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I TWILIGHT OF THE GODS 3
II THE OWLS 22
III GREEN PEACE 30
IV SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS 46
V UNCLE SAM WARD 64
VI A STAY AT THE WHITE HOUSE 78
VII SANTO DOMINGO 91
VIII NEWPORT 106
IX SOME PAINTERS AND POETS 118
X ENGLAND 138
XI ROME 158
XII EGYPT. PALESTINE. GREECE 174
XIII BOSTON IN THE EIGHTIES 194
XIV THE NEW ORLEANS COTTON CENTENNIAL 204
XV CHICAGO AND BOSTON IN THE NINETIES 217
XVI LONDON IN THE NINETIES 232
XVII ARABIAN DAYS 248
XVIII ARTIST LIFE IN ROME, 1894 256
XIX A YEAR OF TRAVEL 271
XX MY MOTHER’S LAST ROMAN WINTER 283
XXI QUEEN MARGHERITA AT OUR STUDIO 295
XXII BY THE TIBER AND BY THE CHARLES 309
XXIII WASHINGTON IN 1910 331
XXIV THEODORE ROOSEVELT AND THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY 346
XXV THE ART ASSOCIATION OF NEWPORT 367
INDEX 393
ILLUSTRATIONS
MAUD HOWE _Frontispiece_
EDWIN BOOTH 40
UNCLE SAM WARD 68
MY FATHER, DR. SAMUEL GRIDLEY HOWE 68
DR. HENRY MARION HOWE AND HIS SISTERS 86
EDWARD ASKEW SOTHERN 122
FRANCIS BRET HARTE 128
FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD 166
THE DRAWING ROOM AT 241 BEACON ST. 198
DR. HENRY MARION HOWE 200
MARGARET DELAND 204
JOHN ELLIOTT 216
LAURA E. RICHARDS 254
FLORENCE HOWE HALL 254
MY MOTHER, JULIA WARD HOWE 286
QUEEN MARGHERITA OF ITALY 304
HENRY JAMES 316
MRS. JOHN LOWELL GARDNER 378
THREE GENERATIONS
CHAPTER I
THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS
March 1st, 1916.
Henry James is dead. The news came to-day. A sudden warmth of old
friendship, a kindness of other years leaps up within me, and the memory
of how he looked at our house in Rome on a certain birthday of his that
corresponds to my own latest milestone.
It was a warm day in mid-April. We were lunching on the terrace of the
Palazzo Rusticucci, among the roses that shielded us from the windows of
the Vatican. We drank his health in his favorite _vino di Orvieto_; he
bowed with that exquisite courtesy of his and said in answer to our
congratulations:
“This is the time when one lights the candle, goes through the house,
and takes an account of stock!”
I can hear that slow, careful, hesitating voice of his and catch the
keen shy glance he gave me as he spoke.
The words come back to me with a new meaning; they seem like a legacy
from an old friend. It is high time that I, too, should light the
candle, go through the house, and take an account of stock.
What’s here worth saving?
Love and friendship, a treasure piled high as the rafters of the house
of life. To be of any value, an accounting must be honest; this I shall
remember in taking my account of stock and in telling how I acquired it.
* * * * *
I was born near midday on the ninth of November, 1854, in a large room
in the apartment familiarly known as “Doctor’s Part”, at the Perkins
Institution for the Blind, South Boston. My first friend, Mrs. Margaret
MacDonald, familiarly called D.D., presided at this, my earliest
introduction to society.
“Your mother was out walking. Much as ever she got up the long
Institution steps before you came, sooner than we expected you. Your
little clothes had not come home, so I wrapped you up, first along, in
an old flannel petticoat of your mother’s.”
If I am somewhat of a vagrant in habit and overfond of wandering,
haven’t I a good warrant for it? From my first hour I was wrapped in a
fragment of my mother’s garment. If her mantle cannot truthfully be said
to have fallen upon me, I have at least contrived to creep under a
corner of it, and it has kept me warm all my days!
“You were lying in a green cardboard box in papa’s arms the first time I
saw you. ‘Come and see little sister Polly,’ he called to us in the
nursery.” This, from sister Laura, is corroborative evidence that I
hurried into this world sooner than I was looked for, without even
giving them time to get the old cradle down from the attic.
On hearing of my birth, Theodore Parker rode post-haste to the
Institution to see my father. Their conversation was, in substance, as
follows:
“Another little girl?”
“So it seems.”
“A fourth daughter, a fifth child! You and Julia have your hands full
already. Give the baby to my wife and me; we’ll bring her up as our own,
call her Theodora, and make her our heir!”
“My dear fellow, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
When the proposal was repeated to my mother, she exclaimed:
“Parker certainly can have no idea what it means to have a child!”
What an escape! If they could have given me to any one, it would have
been to this beloved friend, who longed, above all else, for a child of
his own. He put this catechism daily to his wife:
Question. What are you?
Answer. A bear.
Question. What must this bear do to be saved?
Answer. Have pups.
The pups, alas, never came to the poor “bear”, remembered as far more
like a dove.
My first home was a public institution, but I had more right to it than
most of those who lived there, for the Perkins Institution was founded
and built by my father, Samuel Gridley Howe.
The Institution was a large brick building, with a classic façade and
big white Doric columns. It stood on an elevated plateau above Broadway.
Its windows looked out over Boston Harbor; you could see the Cunard
steamers as they started on their trips to Europe, or returned, their
red smokestacks covered with snow and icicles, after a winter passage.
Strangers, noticing the blind boys and girls pacing up and down the wide
piazzas that faced seaward, often spoke of the irony of fate that gave
the school for the blind such a view. The rooms were large and well
proportioned, with extra high ceilings. The corridors were paved with
squares of gray and white marble. An imposing staircase rose, circling
round and round a deep central well, to the giddy height of five tall
stories; it still remains to me a triumph of architectural splendor.
There was a polished mahogany handrail; to the daring, no sport was
comparable to “sliding down the banisters.” This was of course strictly
forbidden. It was held among us that a slip must prove fatal; one would
fall down, down, and crash horribly upon that cold marble pavement at
the bottom.
Till little Sam was born, I was the youngest of five children; during
his short life of less than four years there were six of us: Julia,
called Romana, in memory of her birthplace, Rome; Florence, named for
our parents’ friend, Florence Nightingale; Henry Marion, in memory of
our many times great-uncle, General Francis Marion of the Revolution;
Laura, for Laura Bridgman; and little Sam, for his father. My name was
given me for no better reason than that my mother fancied it. There had
been a deal of discussion about the matter; when Tennyson’s Maud was
published, my mother clinched it by naming me for the heroine of the
poem, a fashion her friends, the William Hunts, followed by naming their
first and second daughters Elaine and Enid.
The first distinct memory I have of my father is of waking one Christmas
morning and finding myself lying in the big mahogany bed in his room. I
knew I had gone to sleep in my black walnut crib, drawn close beside my
mother’s bed in the next room. He came dancing in, with a small bundle
of clothes in his arms.
“Here is a little monkey for your Christmas present,” he cried.
The little monkey was my brother Sammy, born soon after midnight,
Christmas morning. Until his advent, I had always slept close to my
mother. I remember now the chill of disappointment, if I ever, on waking
in the dimly-lighted room, put out my hand to feel for her and found her
bed empty and cold, as on some night when she had stayed out late. The
desolate sense of her absence at first overwhelmed me; than came a
shiver of fear of the dark corners of the room, inhabited by a strange
breed of nocturnal foxes.
I did not speak till I was two years old, never so much as saying
“mama”; then suddenly I pronounced a complete sentence, “See that little
dog.” To help me learn to tell the time, my father contrived a large
white cardboard dial with movable hands, like the face of a clock. This
soon solved the mystery of hours. It must have been at about this period
that some malicious governess taught me a bitter adage, which to this
day I repeat, as a penitent plies the scourge on his lacerated back:
Lost, a golden hour, set with sixty diamond minutes.
No reward is offered, for it can never be recovered!
Neither of my parents believed in the saying, “Spare the rod, spoil the
child.” They had both been rather strictly brought up and, as so often
happens, in avoiding the extreme of severity they themselves had known,
they perhaps went to the other extreme of indulgence with their
children. On second thought, and to be quite honest, I was the only
spoilt child in the family; the charge cannot fairly be brought against
the others. When the youngest child dies, and the next youngest becomes
the baby, as in my case, everybody knows what happens! Not only the
parents but the older children are as wax in those baby hands.
Of the little anecdotes every mother treasures about every child, the
following was the one that Mama liked best to tell of her “stormy
petrel.” One day, in that blessed period of silence before I had begun
to talk, she found me eating the wild cherries that grew at Lawton’s
Valley. Taking the forbidden fruit from me, she showed me a little stick
and said:
“If you eat those cherries again, I shall slap your hands with this
stick.”
The next day I came up to her, at about the same hour, one hand grasping
a fistful of wild cherries, the other holding the switch. Looking her
squarely in the eyes, I put the cherries in my mouth, handed her the
stick, and held out my hand. The whipping? She only caught, kissed, and
hugged me to her bosom.
My earliest friends were all more or less connected with the
Institution, where my first years were passed. My father was a good
judge of character, and the teachers and attendants he chose to help him
in his great task were all rather exceptional people.
Daniel Bradford, the Institution steward, was my father’s right-hand
man, and my most intimate friend. When young, he had been a ship’s
carpenter; the flavor of the sea was in his talk, the roll of it in his
legs. He was a short, stout man, full of a merry friendship for all
mankind. On Sundays he wore a gorgeous, flowered velvet waistcoat, a
full set of false teeth, and the most brazen scratch wig I ever saw. On
week days he was frankly bald and toothless as a new-born baby.
“Bradford, come and make the rounds!” my father called out one morning,
looking into the office, where the steward sat, laboriously making up
his accounts.
They started on their tour of inspection, my father striding ahead,
Braddie trotting after him, two steps to his one, and I tagging on
behind. I kept very close to them that day, for Braddie needed my
sympathy. Had he not that very morning confided in me?
“Old Turk, I’m going to get married. The Doctor’ll take on like the Old
Scratch. You get your Ma to put in a word for me.”
I told my mother; she looked grave.
“Yes, your father will feel the loss of his faithful Sancho Panza.”
“Braddie’s not going away,” I protested; “they’ll live right on here--”
“It won’t be the same; he can’t be ready at five minutes’ notice to
start for the ends of the earth at any hour of the day or night!”
There was a good deal of “taking on” about the lady who had “caught” the
old steward, and in order to get it over and done with, the marriage was
promptly arranged. It took place in our rooms and I was one of the
wedding party. There was another guest, Laura Bridgman, my father’s
famous pupil. I can see her white intense face, the sightless eyes
hidden by a green silk shade, the delicate fingers--that saw more than
some eyes--touching the bridal gifts, hear her plaintive cry of
pleasure, like the note of some forest bird, as she felt the large blue
cut-glass vase that she and I admired far more than such useful presents
as butter knives and pickle forks.
“Laura Bridgman--and who was she?” some one is sure to ask.
Who could have believed then that such a question would be possible? In
those days her name was known all over the civilized world. Laura was
the blind deaf mute for whom my father devised the marvelous scheme of
education which redeemed her from the awful loneliness of her isolation,
taught her language, and made her a happy and useful member of the human
family. Her education was hailed as a miracle all over Europe, and to
this day teachers and thinkers are still amazed by the patience and
ingenuity of the man to whom Helen Keller and scores of other educated
blind deaf mutes owe their deliverance from a living tomb.
Thursday was always “Exhibition Day” at the Institution. Boston people
took great pride in their School for the Blind, and by eleven o’clock
the visitors’ seats were filled. The pupils, dressed in their best,
gathered in the great hall, the boys on one side of the big organ, the
girls on the other. They occupied benches placed in tiers, one above the
other, so that you saw their faces rising row behind row; between them
shone the tall gold organ pipes, with the name of the donor on a blue
scroll: “The Gift of George Lee.” A blind musician sat at the organ;
sometimes it was my friend, Joel Smith, and sometimes William Reeves,
the leader of the band. The exercises opened with an organ solo, while
the visitors settled themselves in their places, facing the pupils. As
the deep organ tones thundered through the hall, Laura Bridgman sounded
her little ecstatic note of pleasure. She felt the vibration from the
organ and was thrilled by what she called “hearing the music.” The
exercises included reading aloud from the raised type of books, printed
in our own press; singing, violin and piano solos by the most gifted
scholars; and “selections” by our brass band, made up of the larger
boys. The finale was a chorus of all the scholars. The organist struck a
soaring melody, the blind boys and girls rose to their feet, their young
passionless voices ringing out:
“From all that dwell beneath the skies, let the Creator’s praise
arise.”
If there were a stranger present--there usually was--he was sure to be
deeply moved, often to tears. Music, their greatest earthly pleasure,
brings to the blind a supreme delight, whose reflection can be caught in
the rapture of those upturned faces.
My father’s was a restless temperament; as far back as I can remember,
our family life was diversified by frequent “movings.” “Green Peace”,
our own home, was only five minutes’ walk from the Institution in which
we lived part of the time; in these early days I am trying to recall, we
moved perhaps every six months from one habitat to the other. There was,
besides, the regular hegira to our summer home, Lawton’s Valley, in
Portsmouth, Rhode Island. At that time few Boston people moved out of
town before July. I can date our own summer flitting by the fact that it
immediately followed the Fourth. I find a confusion of the most
exquisite memories connected with this day, beginning with an early
waking to the sound of bells, whistles, guns, and firecrackers. The
bells were our own South Boston bells; the guns, from Fort Independence,
which we felt in some special sense belonged to us. Next comes a dim
memory of the procession of the “Antiques and Horribles” and the
dreadful fright produced by those grotesque masks. I was allowed all the
torpedoes I wanted, but forbidden firecrackers--vainly forbidden, alas!
I have the feel of them yet in my fingers--those small, furry scarlet
crackers with their white string fuses--and smell the good acrid smell
of the gunpowder, as they popped, popped, in those early morning hours,
when Papa was taking his ride, and Mama slept beside the baby that had
kept her awake till all hours. After these early adventures of the
pearly dawn came scorching midday hours on the wide yellow sanded paths
of Boston Common. Here we bought bunches of fragrant water lilies,
holding their long cool stems in our hot little hands, as we stood
watching the parade of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company.
The drum major struts like a glorified turkey cock, swinging his great
staff. The band! Oh! the band! How our spirits rise to the crisp notes
of “Yankee Doodle”; how our hearts melt within us as the gay tune
changes to a minor air:
We are tenting to-night on the old camp ground, give us a song to cheer,
Tenting to-night, tenting to-night, tenting on the old camp ground!
It is afternoon. We have moved with the crowd to the lower end of the
Common, just above the old cow path, where men I have known remember
driving their fathers’ cattle along the way now called “Charles Street.”
The balloon ascension is set for five o’clock; we are in good time,
together with hundreds of other eager spectators. We catch our breath as
the immense pink silk globe, in its coffee-colored network, sways above
our heads, the daring aëronaut striking an attitude in the car, a straw
basket which hangs four or five feet below.
“He’s off!”
No attitudinizing now. Very carefully the gallant aëronaut lowers the
grapnel over the side of the car, as the great balloon rises slowly,
slowly, into the burning blue. We watch it until it becomes a speck over
our heads. I am so filled with forebodings about the perilous journey
that my nurse seeks out a man who has helped prepare the balloon for the
ascension.
“This little girl,” she says, “is afraid that Mr. Wise will never come
down alive.”
“Not a mite o’ danger, miss, on a day like this. Didn’t you see all them
bags of ballast? And the valve rope? When he wants to go up, he chucks
out a few of the sandbags. When he wants to come down, he pulls that
there valve-string and lets out the gas, see? Just you look in the
_Boston Advertiser_ to-morrow morning and that will tell you where the
balloon landed.”
There is an interval between this thrilling experience and the final
rapture of the day. I am in the house of my Uncle and Aunt Wales, on
Boylston Street, opposite the Public Gardens, where I am put to sleep in
a big four-poster and later fed upon strawberries and sponge cake. This
quiet interlude between the excitements of the day seems a sad waste of
time. At half-past eight, thanks to the rest, I am fresh and eager for
the crowning event, “Fireworks on the Common.” I can hear now the hiss
of the rockets, the long-drawn “Ah!” of the multitude that follows each
fresh display. How clear it all is! Our elders’ fear of the crowd is a
slight shadow on our ecstatic happiness.
“Don’t let go the child’s hand!” seems a useless warning--the crowd is
so friendly, so cheerful, so full of an almost solemn excitement. How we
cheer the portraits of George and Martha Washington! When the last set
piece goes off, the final bouquet flares above the elms of the mall, how
quickly the great crowd melts and flows off in dark currents and eddies,
and how tightly now I cling to my nurse’s hand, lest I be swept away and
lost!
How cleverly Papa marshals us out of the crowd and down the side street,
where Billy Glass, our coachman, waits with the carryall to drive us
home, a tired happy crew of young patriots, who have survived the
dangers of firecrackers, giant torpedoes, and skyrockets. The latter
fear was ever present with Mama, who shuddered at the thought that one
of us might be blinded by a falling rocket stick. Papa made light of her
terrors with the epitaph:
Here lie I
Killed by a sky
Rocket in my eye.
It was not by accident that Papa kept us in Boston over the Fourth. He
must have longed, as elders do to-day, to be out of the hot city on
Independence Day. He knew the risks of city streets to his “young
barbarians”, and made it his business to minimize those risks, because
he also knew the value of those early impressions upon a child’s
imagination. Whatever his children might or might not turn out to be, he
took good care that they should all grow up red-hot patriots.
Looking back upon the first six or seven years of my life, I find myself
in a dim enchanted land, which I have come to think of as “The Twilight
of the Gods”, for the figures that peopled it were, indeed, heroes and
demigods. They drop easily apart into two groups, Mama’s friends and
Papa’s friends. Mama’s friends--we called them “The Owls”--were poets,
philosophers, and theologians, speculative men who sat long and
discussed abstract things. Papa’s friends were statesmen, soldiers,
militant philanthropists, men of action whose time was too precious for
long visits, but who came and went with a certain tense purpose in
strong contrast to those others. Such scraps of their talk as one
overheard one understood more or less; one at least had some idea of
“what they were driving at”, whereas the Owls talked rank nonsense,
“about objectivity and subjectivity, Kant and ‘Dant’ and all the rest of
them!”
Theodore Parker with his “hammer of Thor” was friend to both parents. I
cannot remember him; he lives for me in a sort of dim limbo behind the
Twilight of the Gods, peopled by men and women whom my parents had known
before I was born and of whom I had heard them talk. Here lives
Lafayette, who had signed himself in a letter to Papa (still preserved)
“your forever friend”, and Thomas Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, Maria
Edgeworth, Florence Nightingale, and a host of others. To this day I am
linked to these great shadows by my parents’ friendship, as with some
subtlest bond of sympathy and understanding. If I ever meet them, I
shall surely know them.
John Brown is perhaps the most real of all these shadowy figures. My
mother tells in her Reminiscences of her first meeting with him. My
father had warned her of his coming to our house, with these words: “Do
you remember that man of whom I spoke to you--the one who wished to be a
saviour for the negro race? That man will call here this afternoon; you
will receive him.”
The old house at Green Peace holds no more vivid memory than of that
visitor who must be secretly admitted by its mistress lest some gossipy
servant whisper. She stands, a slight gracious figure at the threshold,
gazing earnestly at the stranger, “A Puritan of the Puritans, forceful,
self-contained, with hair and beard of amber streaked with gray.”
In “The First Martyr”, one of the best of her patriotic poems, my mother
tells the story of an incident of which I have no memory, but which has
had its influence upon me for all that.
Returning from a visit to John Brown’s wife, a few weeks before his
execution by the Commonwealth of Virginia, my mother came into my
nursery and took me on her knee, hoping to distract her thoughts by
playing with me. Some sense of what she was suffering was borne in upon
me, for I questioned her closely: Why was she so sad? Where had she been
that afternoon? Who had she seen? Bit by bit, I got the story from her.
The poem, from which I quote the following verses, may be found in
“Later Lyrics”:
My five-years’ darling on my knee,
Chattered and toyed and laughed with me;
“Now tell me, mother mine,” quoth she,
“Where you went i’ the afternoon?”
“Alas! my pretty little life,
I went to see a sorrowing wife,
Who will be widowed soon.”
“Now, Mother, what is that?” she said,
With wondering eyes and restless head.
“He lies upon a prison bed
With sabre gashes on his head;”
“But, Mother, say what has he done?
Has he not robbed or murdered one?”
“My darling, he has injured none.
To free the wretched slaves
He led a band of chosen men,”
“O, Mother! let us go this day
To that sad prison, far away;
Some comfort we can bring him, sure:
And is he locked up so secure,
We could not get him out?”
“No, darling, he is closely kept.”
Then nearer to my heart she crept,
And, hiding there her beauty, wept
For human misery.
So it is something to be thankful for, that at the age of five I
volunteered for active service, in the forlorn hope of rescuing John
Brown.
Charles Sumner, dear as a brother to my father, is a very distinct
figure in the Twilight of the Gods, towering in mind, character, and
stature above other men.
Some ancestral trait of worldliness must have “got by” my parents (the
most unworldly people I have ever known) and down to me, for I was
rather a mundane youngster. I was much impressed by a certain dignified
splendor in Mr. Sumner’s bearing and clothing, which, together with his
single eyeglass, like those of “swells” in _Punch_, made me regard him
as the social superior of most of our intimates.
What a contrast to Charles Sumner was John Albion Andrew, the great war
governor of Massachusetts and one of Mr. Lincoln’s firm supporters in
the darkest days of the Civil War! To me, he was “Edith Andrew’s
father”, the cherubic, adorable parent of my intimate friend. The
mention of his name evokes memories of the Andrew house at 110 Charles
Street. The living room, with its worn leathern sofa where the children
were always welcome, was on the ground floor next the dining room. The
drawing-room was up one flight; it contained some fine old pieces of
colonial furniture, some good pictures, a strong charcoal drawing by
William Hunt, a brilliant painting of a troubadour by Babcock, a genre
by Elihu Vedder, a number of Japanese cabinets and bibelots.
There were four Andrew children: Bessie, who looked like her father, a
studious girl and a good musician; Forrester, a slender blond youth, who
later married Hattie Thayer and died young, leaving two charming
daughters; Edith, my friend and playmate, who looked like her pretty
mother; and a younger son, Harry. Governor Andrew was short and stout,
with very curly brown hair and a florid complexion. He had round
eyeglasses, from behind which shone kind blue eyes like a baby’s. He
wore a black soft felt hat and a black Inverness cape, with a military
cord and tassel that took my fancy. I shared many privileges with the
Andrew children, among them Sunday-morning excursions to the School
Ship, a training ship for juvenile offenders, where we looked curiously
at the young sailor boys and wished it was not forbidden to make friends
with them. We had the run of the State House, where we spent happy hours
romping in the Senate Chamber, under the big codfish. The Seal of State
was familiar to us; and one long rainy afternoon, when we waited while
the Governor and my father held an endless conference with other serious
looking men, we made free with the official pencils and notepaper and
made archaic drawings of men and horses. How lightly we flitted and
frolicked about the halls and corridors! And yet we had a certain sense
of the tense situations which every day faced the Governor and those who
labored with him for State and country. Andrew had no easy task, for the
pacifists were busy in those days as in these. A letter to “Frank” Bird
from my father, written at the time when war was imminent but not
declared, contains this sentence:
“Andrew is like a noble horse, harnessed in with mules; how long he
will retain his virility, I know not.”
On the thirteenth of April, 1861, the day when the news came that Fort
Sumter had been attacked, my father wrote the Governor:
“Since they will have it so, in the name of God, Amen. Now let all
the governors and chief men of the people see to it that war shall
not cease until Emancipation is secure. If I can be of any use,
anywhere, in any capacity (save that of spy), command me.”
I remember the thrill of horror that shook my small person on hearing my
father say:
“The Rebels have sent a box of live copperheads and rattlesnakes to
Andrew, but fortunately there was something suspicious looking about the
box, and no harm is done!”
On another occasion I was shocked at hearing of a case of clothing or
bedding, infected with yellow-fever germs, that had been sent to Mr.
Lincoln at the White House. Libby Prison seemed very real to us when
Alexander MacDonald, D.D.’s son, came home an exchanged prisoner, a
shadow of himself, wasted to a skeleton, and with a cough which soon
proved fatal. He brought with him a napkin ring made from a piece of
meat bone by one of his fellow prisoners. I took this in my hands with a
sense of awe; it seemed like a relic.
The Governor took full advantage of my father’s offer of service, and
during the next four years he was constantly going back and forth
between Boston and Washington. Among his many labors of that time was
the work of the Sanitary Commission, of which he was one of the
founders and most earnest workers.
His own experience as a young man, when he fought with the hardy
mountaineers of Crete in the campaign for Greek independence, fitted him
particularly well for the work. It made him, also, rather impatient at
the well-meant efforts of the Boston people who, in the kindness of
their hearts, sent cargoes of superfluities to the embarrassment of the
ill-prepared commissariat department. He writes to Andrew from
Washington, soon after the departure of the first Massachusetts
regiments:
“You may depend upon it that when our boys come back, they will
laugh heartily at the recital of the fears and sorrows excited
among their papas and mamas by the stories of their privations and
sufferings on their first march to Washington. The invoice of
articles, sent by the _Cambridge_ and other vessels for our troops,
contains articles hardly dreamed of even by general officers in
actual wars. Hundreds of chests of Oolong tea, tons of white
crushed sugar, and then a whole cargo of ice! Many of these things
will have to be left behind when the troops go into the field.
Their principal value (which is priceless) is as a testimony of the
patriotism, zeal, and generosity of the men and women, who felt
that they must do something for the cause.”
In speaking of the health of the troops, he writes:
“There is more need of a _health officer_ than of a chaplain; but
the U. S. knows no such officer. Soap! Soap! Soap! I cry but none
heed. I wish some provision could be made for army washerwomen;
they are more needed than nurses.”
I ought to remember far more about the Civil War than I do, for I was
six years old when it was declared. On the nineteenth of November of
the same year my mother, before dawn, received the inspiration of the
“Battle Hymn of the Republic”, but I never heard of this till many years
later. Two strong impressions of the wartime remain with me. Coming into
the breakfast room one morning, I found my brother Harry standing on his
chair, fluttering the newspaper over his head, the rest of the family
waving their napkins and crying:
“Hurrah! Hurrah! Vicksburg has fallen!”
Harry was then going to Boston Latin School and held a commission in the
school regiment.
I shall surely never forget a certain Sunday morning, when I was walking
with my father across Boston Common, to get the mail from the post
office. It was a lovely spring day; the elms on the Mall wore the
softened look that just precedes the time of leafage. We had stopped to
scatter some nuts for the squirrels, when a perfect stranger ran up to
my father, grasped him by the arm and panted in his ear:
“Doctor Howe, they have killed the President!”
My father staggered as if he had been struck and sank down on a bench,
with a cry:
“God Almighty!”
The anguish of his face and voice impressed me quite as much as the fact
that President Lincoln had been murdered.