Hale: For the honor of womanhood

When Matthew Vassar established a women's college in New York, he had one particularly vocal and prominent critic: Sarah Josepha Hale. Hale, the editor of the heavily-circulated and highly-influential Godey's Lady's Book for half a century, as well as the author of "Mary Had a Little Lamb," often wrote on behalf of women's issues — particularly education and health. Though she applauded Vassar's efforts, she had one issue: the name "Vassar Female College." As she wrote him on March 30, 1865:

Female! What female do you mean? Not a female donkey? Must not your reply be, 'I mean a female woman'? Then... why degrade the feminine sex to the level of animals... I write thus earnestly because I wish to have Vassar College take the lead in this great improvement in our language... I plead for the good of Vassar College, for the honor of womanhood and the glory of God.

The school had been in the works for four years by then, but Hale won out, and the school's name was changed to the simple title "Vassar College" in 1867. The term "Female" was scratched off the main building (pictured below). In their continued correspondence, Hale also objected to a school dress code and a proposed three-month academic break between December and April. One of the original "Seven Sisters," the school is now coeducational.

Hale supported the education of women in her ongoing efforts to promote economic self-sufficiency for her sex. This was the case in her own life; after the death of her husband, she was left with several children, and turned to the publishing industry for money. In her decades at Godey's Lady's Book, the "editress" (as she called herself) helped magazine one of the highest-selling monthly of the century. The influence she exuded over Vassar is a good example of the reputation she built for herself. Her interest in reform stopped (somewhat controversially) before reaching the political realm, however: she believed women had no need to vote, so long as they had influence over their husbands.

*More on the correspondence of Hale and Vassar is here.

Death of Bates

Katharine Lee Bates was 69 years old when she died at her home in Wellesley, Massachusetts on March 28, 1929. By then, she was well-known as well as a respected scholar and professor at Wellesley College and the editor of several anthologies of other writers and poets, including some collections of children's stories. Born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she was also widely recognized as the author of the song "America the Beautiful." She wrote many other poems of equal merit, however, including several which called for social justice throughout the world. This one is "When the Millennium Comes":

When the Millennium comes
Only the kings will fight,
While the princes beat the drums,
And the queens in aprons white,
Arnica bottle in hand,
Watch their Majesties throw,
With a gesture vague and grand,
Their crowns at the dodging foe,
Poor old obsolete crowns
That Time hangs up in a row.

When the Millennium comes
And the proud steel navies meet,
While the furious boiler hums,
And the vengeful pistons beat,
The sailors will stay on shore
And cheer with a polyglot shout
The self-fed cannon that roar
Till metal has fought it out,
But the warm, glad bodies of boys
Are not for the waves to flout.

When the Millennium comes,
Love, the mother of life,
Will have worked out all the sums
Of our dim industrial strife,
And every man shall be lord
Of his deed and his dream, and the lore
Of war shall be abhorred
As a dragon-tale of yore,
Myth of the Iron Age,
A monster earth breeds no more.

Frost: and I am everywhere!

Though he would be defined as a New Englander for most of his life and career, it was in San Francisco, California that Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874. He moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1885 and graduated from high school there as co-valedictorian, along with his future wife Elinor White. Often, his first published book is listed as A Boy's Will in 1913 but, strictly speaking, that's not entirely correct.

Frost self-published only two copies of Twilight in 1894, a small pamphlet collecting five of his earliest poems. One copy was given to Elinor White in the hopes of wooing her, the other he kept for himself. He traveled to Canton, New York expressly to offer her the gift but she did not seem interested (partly because he arrived unannounced and outside the visitation hours allowed by the all-women's school White attended) he burned his own copy of Twilight in frustration. Nevertheless, things eventually worked out and the couple married a year later.

Of the poems in Twilight, only one was collected in a later edition of Frost's poetry ("My Butterfly," collected in A Boy's Will). They were finally included in the Library of America edition of Frost's works, including the "Twilight," the title poem:

Why am I first in thy so sad regard,
O twilight gazing from I know not where?
I fear myself as one more than I guessed!
Am I instead of one so very fair?—
That thou art sorrowful and I oppressed?

High in the isolating air,
Over the inattentive moon,
Two birds sail on great wings,
      And vanish soon.
(And they leave the north sky bare!)

The far-felt solitudes that harbor night,
Wake to the singing of the wood-bird's fright.
By invocation, O wide silentness,
Thy spirit and my spirit pass in air!
They are unmemoried consciousness,
      Nor great nor less!
And thou art here and I am everywhere!

Lanier: Love hears the poor-folks' crying

"About four days ago," wrote Sidney Lanier, "a certain poem which I had vaguely ruminated for a week before took hold of me... I call it 'The Symphony.'" The letter, dated March 24, 1875, was addressed to Lanier's friend Gibson Peacock. "I personify each instrument in the orchestra," he continued, "and make them discuss various deep social questions of the times, in the progress of the music."

The long poem became one of Lanier's most-remembered works, in part for its final line: "Music is Love in search of a word." Its critique of society, however, is more visible in its first lines:

"O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
The Time needs heart—‘tis tired of head:
We’re all for love," the violins said.
"Of what avail the rigorous tale
Of bill for coin and box for bale?"

Lanier elsewhere lamented that trade, commerce, and the economy dictated the direction of society, including the arts. Businessmen the country in a stranglehold, he worries poetically, and the almighty dollar oppresses common people and, worse, prevents creativity from flourishing:

“Yea, what avail the endless tale
Of gain by cunning and plus by sale?
Look up the land, look down the land
The poor, the poor, the poor, they stand
Wedged by the pressing of Trade’s hand
Against an inward-opening door
That pressure tightens evermore:
They sigh a monstrous foul-air sigh
For the outside leagues of liberty,
Where Art, sweet lark, translates the sky
Into a heavenly melody."

But, Lanier reminds readers, an appreciation for love and beauty as seen in music could overturn all this:

        Sweet friends,
        Man's love ascends
To finer and diviner ends
Than man's mere thought e'er comprehends
        For I, e'en I,
        As here I lie,
A petal on a harmony,
Demand of Science whence and why
Man's tender pain, man's inward cry,
When he doth gaze on earth and sky?
I am not overbold:
        I hold
Full powers from Nature manifold...

And ever Love hears the poor-folks’ crying,
And ever Love hears the women’s sighing,
And ever sweet knighthood’s death-defying,
And ever wise childhood’s deep implying,
But never a trader’s glozing and lying.

Cawein: So mad, so wild is March!

"I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, March 23, 1865," wrote Madison Cawein, in response to a request about his biography. He spent much of his childhood in Kentucky and, for a time, Indiana ("Here I formed my great love for nature."). In high school, Cawein discovered writers like "Shelley, Scott, Goldsmith and Tennyson, mainly" and was inspired to attempt writing himself. "But my poor accomplishments as compared with their great ones filled me with despair very frequently.... and [I] determined to write no more."

Cawein changed his mind, however, and continued writing — though every poem he submitted for publication was rejected. Finally, upon graduating from high school in 1886 at age 21, he was elected class poet. He published his first book at his own expense and, with the help of a positive review from William Dean Howells, he suddenly became recognized as a poet. He earned the nickname "The Keats of Kentucky."

His first book Blooms of the Berry, published  in 1887 (the same year the image at left was taken), included the poem "Waiting":

...So mad, so wild is March!—
    I long, oh , long
To see the redbud's torch
    Flame far and strong;
Hear, on my vine-climbed porch,
    The bluebird's song.

How slow the Hours creep,
    Each with a crutch!—
Ah, could my spirit leap
    Its bounds and touch
That day, no thing would keep—
    Or matter much!

But now, with you away,
    Time halts and crawls,
Feet clogged with winter clay,
    That never falls,
While, distant still, that day
    Of meeting calls.

Edwards: Their foot shall slip in due time

After weeks of illness caused by an allergic reaction to a smallpox vaccine, Jonathan Edwards died in his sleep on March 22, 1758. "It seems to me to be the will of God that I must leave you," he dictated to his daughter Lucy earlier, "therefore give my kindest love to my dear wife, and tell her, that the uncommon union, which has so long subsisted between us... will continue forever." His last words were recorded as, "Trust in God, and you need not fear." Edwards's most famous work is his sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" from 1741:

"Their foot shall slip in due time." (Deuteronomy 32:35)

In this verse is threatened the vengeance of God on the wicked unbelieving Israelites, who were God's visible people, and who lived under the means of grace; but who, notwithstanding all God's wonderful works towards them, remained void of counsel, having no understanding in them. Under all the cultivations of heaven, they brought forth bitter and poisonous fruit.

Edwards then maps out several ways in which sinners will eventually be punished, even when it appears that they are not.

That the reason why they are not fallen already and do not fall now is only that God's appointed time is not come. For it is said, that when that due time, or appointed time comes, their foot shall slide. Then they shall be left to fall, as they are inclined by their own weight. God will not hold them up in these slippery places any longer, but will let them go; and then, at that very instant, they shall fall into destruction...

The sermon is notorious for its fire and brimstone image of religion. It concludes with a warning:

And let every one that is yet out of Christ, and hanging over the pit of hell, whether they be old men and women, or middle aged, or young people, or little children, now hearken to the loud calls of God's word and providence. This acceptable year of the Lord, a day of such great favour to some, will doubtless be a day of as remarkable vengeance to others. Men's hearts harden, and their guilt increases apace at such a day as this, if they neglect their souls; and never was there so great danger of such persons being given up to hardness of heart and blindness of mind. God seems now to be hastily gathering in his elect in all parts of the land; and probably the greater part of adult persons that ever shall be saved, will be brought in now in a little time... and the rest will be blinded. If this should be the case with you, you will eternally curse this day, and will curse the day that ever you was born, to see such a season of the pouring out of God's Spirit, and will wish that you had died and gone to hell before you had seen it...

Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly from the wrath to come. The wrath of Almighty God is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: "Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed."

Bradstreet: crown you with glory heerafter

On March 20, 1664, Anne Bradstreet wrote the following for her son Simon Bradstreet (named after the boy's father):

Parents perpetuate their liues in their posterity, and their masters in their imitation. Children do natureally rather follow the failings then the vertues of their predecessors, but I am perswaded better things of you. You once desired me to leaue something for you in writeing that you might look vpon when you should see me no more. I could think of nothing more fit for you, nor of more ease to my self, then these short meditations following. Such as they are I bequeath to you: small legacys are accepted by true friends, much more by duty sull children. I haue avoyded incroaching upon others conceptions, because I would leaue you nothing but myne owne, though in value they fall short of all in this kinde, yet I presume they will be better pris'd by you for the Authors sake, the Lord blesse you with grace heer, and crown you with glory heerafter, that I may meet you with rejoyceing at that great day of appearing, which is the continuall prayer, of your affectionate mother.

The letter (the image here is a facsimile of the original manuscript in Bradstreet's handwriting) was, in fact, a dedication to her book Meditations Divine and Morall. The book is comprised of a series of short affirmations and religious aphorisms, along with a few more practical recommendations for living. One, for example, is aimed at the mothers of young children (with, of course, the requisite moral):

A prudent mother will not clothe her little child with a long and cumbersome garment; she easily foresees what events it is like to produce—at the best but falls and bruises, or perhaps somewhat worse. Much more will the All-wise God proportion his dispensations according to the stature and strength of the person he bestows them on. Large endowments of honor, wealth, or a healthful body would quite overthrow some weak Christian; therefore God cuts their garments short, to keep them in such a trim that they might run the ways of his commandment.

Aldrich: In spite of it all, I am going to sleep

Suddenly struck with illness and lying in a hospital, 70-year old Thomas Bailey Aldrich turned to a friend and noted, "For myself, I regard death merely as the passing shadow of a flower."  Two days after leaving the hospital, on March 19, 1907, he smiled and said, "In spite of it all, I am going to sleep; put out the lights." He died in his Boston home that night.

Three years earlier, Aldrich (pictured here in 1903) had lost his grown son to tuberculosis. The event left the former "bad boy" devastated — enough that he stopped writing poems (instead, he wrote a play to help him cope). He was convinced to return to poetry, however, for the centennial of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in February 1907. Three weeks after completing his memorial poem to the deceased poet, he wrote a letter to George Woodberry, referring to the poem as the first one he'd written since his son's death. "I have not known a whole happy day in that time." It is the last poem Aldrich ever completed, and it was read at his funeral:

Above his grave the grass and snow
Their soft antiphonal strophes write:
Moonrise and daybreak come and go:
Summer by summer on the height
The thrushes find melodious breath.
Here let no vagrant winds that blow
Across the spaces of the night
   Whisper of death.

They do not die who leave their thought
   Imprinted on some deathless page.
Themselves may pass; the spell they wrought
   Endures on earth from age to age.
And thou, whose voice but yesterday
   Fell upon charmed listening ears,
Thou shalt not know the touch of years;
   Thou holdest time and chance at bay...

Both Longfellow and Aldrich are buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Chopin: cannot fail to attract much attention

The advertisement promised "stories... quite unlike most other American tales, and [which] cannot fail to attract much attention." So claimed an advertisement in the March 17, 1894 issue of Publishers Weekly. The "semi-alien" characters in this upcoming book are "picturesque and altogether worthy of description and literary preservation" — all for a cover price of $1.25. The book in question was Bayou Folk, featuring stories about Creoles and Acadians in Louisiana.

The author, Kate Chopin, presented what must have seemed exotic: a representation of the scenes and dialects of these people (though, according to the ad, these dialects are not used "at such length to be tedious"). Chopin had previously lived in Louisiana, until the death of her husband Oscar Chopin left her with too much debt and she moved to St. Louis. Oscar, many years earlier, had found out his father was beating his mother, and helped her escape him.

Reviewers certainly noted the book's uniqueness, awed by appearances of alligators and strange insects. But, what critics failed to notice, was that these coorful stories were really about the universal condition of women. In the tale "In Sabine," for example, a traveler named Grégoire comes upon the home of Bud Aiken and recognizes his young wife as someone from his home town. 'Tite Reine ("little queen"), as she is called, seems embarrassed, but giving him imploring looks; Grégoire vows to spend the night and find out her secret. In the middle of the night, she wakes him, crying:

"Mista Grégoire," drawing close to him and whispering in his face, "Bud's killin' me." He clasped her arm, holding her near him, while an expression of profound pity escaped him... "I tell you, he beats me; my back an' arms — you ought to see — it's all blue. He would 'a' choke' me to death one day w'en he was drunk." ...[Grégoire] was wondering if it would really be a criminal act to go then and there and shoot the top of Bud Aiken's head off. He himself would hardly have considered it a crime, but he was not sure of how others might regard the act.

Unable to read or write, 'Tite Reine cannot contact family in her home town. Now, Bud plans to move her further away from home. "Oh, don't leave me here, Mista Grégoire! don't leave me behind you!" she implores. With the help of her only friend, a local black man she calls Uncle Mortimer, Grégoire helps her escape then steals Bud's horse, leaving Bud unable to follow after her.

*Much of the information from this post comes from Kate Chopin: A Literary Life (2001) by Nancy A. Walker. See also Kate Chopin (2007), which includes an essay by Emily Toth which was particularly helpful here.

Harte: no longer a rough Westerner

The March 16, 1896 issue of The Critic printed a short article that was, ostensibly, a review of The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories, a new collection by Bret Harte. Instead, however, the review began by focusing on one of Harte's stories published 28 years earlier: "The Luck of Roaring Camp," printed in the Overland Monthly in 1868 while Harte was its editor.

As the review notes, that story immediately gave Harte an important position in American literature. According to The Critic, his earlier work (mostly poems), had previously "failed to elevate him" despite being widely admired 30 years later."The Luck of Roaring Camp" offered a subject and style that had "a distinct departure from the typical Western tale," with "qualities of a high order."

After working with the Overland Monthly in the late 1860s, Harte moved to Europe and served for a time as Consul to Germany before moving to London. Ultimately, he stayed in Europe for over two decades. It was while overseas that he wrote The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories, but he still maintained his interest in the American West, as reflected in these individual stories. The Critic noted how his style maintained "the same bold, daring type of manhood... the same idea of action, of dramatic effect," but that there was a problem:
 

Something is wanting —the personal presence, the personal participation, the personal interest of the writer." Memory will not do in this day of stern realism. A man who aims to reproduce in literature a certain phase of life must be apart of that life to feel directly its influence and inspiration. Mr. Harte is no longer a rough Westerner, living heart to heart with uncouth laborers and bold adventurers. The culture and ease of an older civilization have materially influenced him—have, in fact, transformed him. And while his powers and possibilities may not be any less than they once were, they are certainly very different. He has enriched American literature immensely by the exercise of his splendid genius in immortalizing a dramatic period of our national life: he should be content to rest upon what he has done so well—so far, at least, as American literature is concerned.

So, says the reviewer, stop writing, and Harte's place in American writing is already assured. If Harte refuses to return to the United States, he should stop writing stories set here. Instead, the article says, he should write about European scenery. In fact, it was in England that Harte died in 1902.

Bierce: Very cheerfully yours

Ambrose Bierce contributed a series of "Grizzly Papers" under the name "Ursus," published in the Overland Monthly in California. To anyone who has ever had an editor, no explanation is necessary. The following is a letter from Bierce, dated March 15, 1871:

Dear Sir; If the "proofs" I had yesterday represent the amount of my copy which is accepted, I think I will quit. Everything I send you is constructed with the utmost care; most of it being written three times over, and all of it twice. This involves too much labor to be undertaken without some reasonable hope that it will not be wasted. You told me the character of the mag[azine] was not to be changed when [Bret] Harte left. Harte never suppressed, nor altered, a line of my composition—nor, I may say, did anybody else ever do so, to any great extent.

Of course, I cannot hope to remain incog[nito]; some of the Eastern papers are even now publishing the "Grizzlies" over my real name. I cannot therefore concede the right of any editor to make any alterations or excisions in what he accepts—it is unfair and unprofessional. Whatever a writer (if he is known—especially if he have already some reputation) is permitted to say, he should be allowed to say in his own way. I have myself some editorial experience, and this rule I never dared to disregard. The suppression of entire articles is perfectly proper, but has in my case been carried too far to be endurable. Besides it changes the tone of the papers as a series—a tone which I carefully decided upon giving them, and in accordance with each separate article or paragraph is written. But I cannot complain of the principle of suppression—only its excessive application.

...This scissors business is quite unprecedented, and I don't like it.

Very cheerfully yours,
A. G. Bierce

*Special thanks to editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz for including this letter in A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce (2003).

Keckley: My life, so full of romance

Born enslaved in Virginia, Elizabeth Keckley learned to read and write before being sent to another family as a young teenager. There, she endured physical abuse from the wife of her master. When she remained proud and stubborn, a neighbor beat her further. At some point, her refusal to break down caused this neighbor and her white master to feel ashamed of themselves, and both vowed never to beat her again. Keckley claimed they kept their word.

Keckley found herself in North Carolina then in St. Louis, where she finally was able to purchase her freedom. She made her way to Maryland and the Washington D.C. area, where she worked as a seamstress. After one of her dresses was created on short order, her client offered to introduce Keckley to a friend — Mary Todd Lincoln, wife of President Abraham Lincoln. Impressed, Mrs. Lincoln hired Keckley as her personal modiste (hatmaker).

Years later, Keckley wrote about her life from enslaved woman to employee at the White House. She wrote the preface to her book, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, on March 14, 1868:

I have often been asked to write my life, as those who know me know that it has been an eventful one. At last I have acceded to the importunities of my friends, and have hastily sketched some of the striking incidents that go to make up my history. My life, so full of romance, may sound like a dream to the matter-of-fact reader, nevertheless everything I have written is strictly true; much has been omitted, but nothing has been exaggerated... A cruel custom deprived me of my liberty, and since I was robbed of my dearest right, I would not have been human had I not rebelled against the robbery... A solemn truth was thrown to the surface, and what is better still, it was recognized as a truth by those who give force to moral laws. An act may be wrong, but unless the ruling power recognizes the wrong, it is useless to hope for a correction of it. Principles may be right, bust they are not established within an hour... As one of the victims of slavery I drank of the bitter water; but then, since destiny willed it so, and since I aided in bringing a solemn truth to the surface as a truth, perhaps I have no right to complain. Here, as in all things pertaining to life, I can afford to be charitable.

Birth of Thomas Buchanan Read

In the rural world of Chester County, Pennsylvania, Thomas Buchanan Read was born on March 12, 1822. Early on, he recognized his drive for creativity, and became both an artist and a poet. After an unsuccessful stint apprenticed to a tailor, he moved to Cincinnati in his teen years. There he first learned sculpture. By 1840, he had a benefactor and had produced both poetry and sculpture to modest acclaim.

Read determined, nonetheless, that the United States was not the best place for such occupations. He determined that Rome, Italy was "the only city in the world for an artist or poet," let alone one who was both. In 1841, however, he moved to Boston, where he discovered that Washington Allston was already doing exactly that. Allston's influence was short-lived, however, when the elder man died in 1843. Read moved to Philadelphia and finally visited Italy, where he then spent much of his adult life.

Among his more famous works of art is the portrait of the daughters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, often used to illustrate the poem "The Children's Hour." As for his poetry, one critic thought well enough of Read to refer to one of his poems as "unquestionably the best American poem we have." That poem is "The Closing Scene." Excerpted from that poem:

Within his sober realm of leafless trees,
   The russet year inhaled the dreamy air;
Like some tanned reaper in his hour of ease,
   When all the fields are lying brown and bare...

There was no bud, no bloom upon the bowers;
   The spiders wove their thin shrouds night by night;
The thistle-down, the only ghost of flowers,
   Sailed slowly by, passed noiseless out of sight...

Amid all this, the center of the scene,
   The white-haired matron, with monotonous tread,
Plied the swift wheel, and with her joyless mien,
   Sat, like a Fate, and watched the flying thread.

She had known Sorrow, — he had walked with her,
   Oft supped, and broke the bitter ashen crust;
And in the dead leaves still she heard the stir
   Of his black mantle trailing in the dust.

While yet her cheek was bright with summer bloom
   Her country summoned and she gave her all;
And twice War bowed to her his sable plume, —
   Re-gave the swords to rust upon the wall.

Re-gave the swords, — but not the hand that drew
   And struck for Liberty its dying blow,
Nor him who, to his sire and country true,
   Fell 'mid the ranks of the invading foe...

At last the thread was snapped, — her head was bowed;
   Life dropped the distaff through his hands serene; —
And loving neighbors smoothed her careful shroud,
   While Death and Winter closed the autumn scene.

Higginson and Fuller: born for a literary critic

As he was writing his novel Malbone, Thomas Wentworth Higginson vowed to let nothing distract him: "I know that this Romance is in me like the statue in the marble... were it to be my ruin in fame and fortune I should still wish to keep on." Yet, on March 11, 1869, he acknowledges the one project that would pull him away. After writing four pages of the novel, he recorded in his journal: "I enjoy this extremely and am much encouraged, but cannot afford to reject the offer to write Margaret Fuller's life."

Higginson was asked to write an essay on Fuller, intended for a collection called Eminent Women of the Age (in the same volume, he contributed an essay on Fuller's friend Lydia Maria Child). Fuller's posthumous memoir had been written by her close friends William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and Ralph Waldo Emerson but was much maligned for painting her negatively (particularly due to the influence of Emerson). Higginson took a different approach and wrote an essay which showed his adoration for her. It opens:

Travelling by rail in Michigan, some ten years ago, I found myself seated next to a young Western girl, with a very intelligent face, who soon began to talk with me about literary subjects. She afterwards gave me, as a reason for her confidence, that I "looked like one who would enjoy Margaret Fuller's writings,''—these being, as I found, the object of her special admiration. I certainly took the remark for a compliment; and it was, at any rate, a touching tribute to the woman whose intellectual influence thus brought strangers together.

Higginson claims he knew Fuller's family when she lived for a brief period at the Brattle House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his essay, he presents her life and her work, emphasizing particularly her short stints as a teacher before she embarked on a literary career. "Of all Americans thus far, she seems to me to have been born for a literary critic," according to Higginson. Of her now-iconic feminist book Woman in the Nineteenth Century, he notes that it "was noble in tone, enlightened in its statements, and full of suggestion," but criticizes that it "was crude and disconnected in its execution." In fact, Higginson (a bit of a feminist himself who also encouraged Emily Dickinson) determines that her book had significantly less impact than Fuller herself: "Her life thus did more for the intellectual enfranchisement of American women than was done by even her book on the subject."

Higginson's article on Fuller was later expanded to a full-length biography, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, published in 1884 as part of the "American Men of Letters" series – the first woman represented in that series.

Birth of Ina Coolbrith

It was in Illinois that Josephine Anna Smith was born on March 10, 1842. History remembers her better as a resident of San Francisco, California, and poetry remembers her name as Ina Coolbrith. Her birth father was the brother of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Latter Day Saints movement, though he died when she was only a few months old. Her mother then married Joseph Smith himself, becoming his seventh or eighth wife. After Smith's death, the family moved to Missouri then to California. To dissociate with their polygamist background, the family reverted to mother's maiden name, Coolbrith.

Ina Coolbrith (the first name comes from her nickname Josephina) was writing poetry before reaching her teen years. She was 14 when one of her poems first saw print. After a young marriage ended in divorce, she found her way to San Francisco, and there met literary figures of the west like Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and even Mark Twain. When she became a librarian, she turned her library into a sort of literary salon and meeting place — her home was used in a similar way.

In 1915, Coolbrith was named the first Poet Laureate of the state of California. Her poem "I Can Not Count My Life a Loss" (1881):

I can not count my life a loss,
   With all its length of evil days.
I hold them only as the dross
   About its gold, whose worth outweighs;
   For each and all I give Him praise.

For, drawing nearer to the brink
   That leadeth down to final rest,
I see with clearer eyes, I think;
   And much that vexed me and oppressed,
   Have learned was right, and just, and best.

So, though I may but dimly guess
   Its far intent, this gift of His
I honor; nor would know the less
   One sorrow, or in pain or bliss
   Have other than it was and is.

Guest post: Mardi Gras, 1873

New Orleans in 1873

Mardi Gras has always been a serious business in New Orleans – fun, yes. But fun freighted with meaning. Amid the profound economic and social devastations of the Civil War, the Carnival season of 1873 was no exception. That year, parading organization the Mystick Krewe of Comus – the group credited with inventing many of the traditions of modern Carnival, including costumed street parades and floats, in 1857 – used Mardi Gras as a medium for satire. Members (all belonging to New Orleans’ white social elite) wore papier-mâché costumes: President Ulysses S. Grant was portrayed as a tobacco grub and Benjamin Butler – Union occupier of New Orleans during the Civil War – was transformed into a hyena. Enshrined on a throne was a banjo-playing gorilla, a telling symbol of the violent reassertion of white supremacy that was already underway in the city.

The literary implications of Mardi Gras in 1873 were of a different order. Eagerly observing the Comus parade was journalist and author Edward King. He was in town as part of a grand tour of the former Confederate States which formed the basis of a series of pioneering articles for Scribner’s Monthly, later published in a single volume as The Great South (1875). King’s sympathetic portrait of the South was a vital part of the national narrative of reunion that was just getting underway. His glowing portrait of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras celebrations – which pointedly ignored the politics on display – was clearly designed to enchant Northern readers:

Thousands of people assemble in dense lines along the streets included in the published route of march; Canal street is brilliant with illumination, and swarms of persons occupy every porch, balcony, house-top, pedestal, carriage and mule-car. Then comes the train of Comus, who appears only at night, and torch-bearers, disguised in outré masks, light up the way… After the round through the great city is completed, the reflection of the torch-light on the sky dies away… and the fearless, who are willing to usher in Lent with sleepless eyes, stroll home in the glare of the splendid Southern sunrise, yearly vowing that each Mardi-Gras hath verily surpassed its predecessor.

King’s depiction of Mardi Gras for a national audience helped establish Carnival in New Orleans as a tourist destination. But it was not the most important literary consequence of Carnival in 1873. Whilst watching Comus parade through the streets of New Orleans, King befriended a part-time journalist and part-time cotton clerk named George Washington Cable (pictured). In this casual acquaintance, as Christopher Benfey has put it, “the seeds of modern Southern literature" were sown.

After the parade, Cable took King on a tour of the city, and the pair ended up at Cable’s home in the Garden District. There, he read King the stories about New Orleans that he had been working on in his spare time. King was so smitten with what he heard that he lobbied his editors at Scribner’s to publish them. Eventually, they did: Cable’s “Sieur George” was published in October 1873. Soon, Cable was poised at the head of a Southern literary renaissance. Just as swiftly, his vision of New Orleans – a vision that was marked by a profound concern for the effects of slavery, war and Reconstruction in a way that was diametrically opposed to the neo-Confederate satires of the Comus Krewe members – became the dominant popular image of the city. All thanks to a chance Mardi Gras meeting. Fun, yes. But serious fun.


*Thomas Ruys Smith is a Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia in the UK. His new book, Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century, will be published by Continuum in May. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Jacobs: Patient in tribulation

At the very beginning of the Civil War, in 1861, the book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl drew new attention to the plight of enslaved people. The book's author, "Linda Brent," exposed the world to the sexual harassment and abuse inflicted upon enslaved women in particular. Brent was really Harriet Ann Jacobs, and the incidents she recounted were quite true. Her cruel slave master made efforts to rape her; instead, she is impregnated by a white neighbor. Incidentally, she wrote the book while in the employ of writer/editor Nathaniel Parker Willis (who she determined was a Southern sympathizer).

During the war, Jacobs and her daughter Louisa worked to help escaped enslaved people in the Washington, D.C. area. As the war neared completion, she particularly sought to educate blacks, and a school was even named in her honor. In the period after the war, however, race tensions in the South pushed her to move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she established a boarding-house. Many of her ambitions to help ease race relations fell apart and she fell into personal financial distress. More or less homeless, without employment, and suffering from illness and age, Louisa turned to friends and fellow abolitionists for hand-outs.

In the fall of 1896, Jacobs fell from her wheelchair and injured her hip. She never recovered and she died on March 7, 1897, at the age of 84. She was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery, where her tombstone reads:

Patient in tribulation, fervent
in spirit serving the lord.

At the time of her death, Jacobs was already mostly forgotten. Her slave narrative would not be rediscovered until the next century. Even so, some remembered her inspiration. Francis Grimké (brother of the famous Grimké sisters Sarah and Angelina) delivered an elegy in which he said: "She rose above the dead level of mediocrity, like the mountain peaks that shoot above the mountain range... She was no reed shaken by the wind, vacillating, easily moved from a position. She did her own thinking; had opinions of her own, and held to them with great tenacity."

*Much of the information for this post comes from Harriet Jacobs: A Life by Jean Fagan Yellin (2004). Jacobs's book is also available in a very inexpensive edition, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Larcom: Their mental activity was overflowing

Lucy Larcom was born in Beverly, Massachusetts on March 5, 1824, the ninth of ten children. When her father died in 1835, the family moved to Lowell so that her mother could run a boarding-house for local mill girls. Young Lucy became one of those mill girls at age 11. In her ten years there, she began writing poetry, soon drawing the attention of John Greenleaf Whittier, who became her life-long friend and advocate. After a short tenure teaching in Illinois, Larcom returned to Massachusetts and edited the children's magazine Our Young Folks, later renamed St. Nicholas Magazine.

Toward the end of her life, Larcom wrote A New England Girlhood. Published in 1889, the book was aimed for "girls of all ages, and [for] women who have not forgotten their girlhood." In it, she describes her early attempts at writing:

My early efforts would not, probably, have found their way into print, however, but for the coincident publication of the two mill-girls' magazines, just as I entered my teens. I fancy that almost everything any of us offered them was published, though I never was let in to editorial secrets. The editors of both magazines were my seniors, and I felt greatly honored by their approval of my contributions...

We did not receive much criticism; perhaps it would have been better for us if we had. But then we did not set ourselves up to be literary; though we enjoyed the freedom of writing what we pleased, and seeing how it looked in print. It was good practice for us, and that was all that we desired. We were complimented and quoted. When a Philadelphia paper copied one of my little poems, suggesting some verbal improvements, and predicting recognition for me in the future, I felt for the first time that there might be such a thing as public opinion worth caring for, in addition to doing one's best for its own sake...

And, indeed, what we wrote was not remarkable, — perhaps no more so than the usual school compositions of intelligent girls... But it was a perfectly natural outgrowth of those girls' previous life. For what were we? Girls who were working in a factory for the time, to be sure; but none of us had the least idea of continuing at that kind of work permanently. Our composite photograph, had it been taken, would have been the representative New England girlhood of those days. We had all been fairly educated at public or private schools, and many of us were resolutely bent upon obtaining a better education... The girls there were just such girls as are knocking at the doors of young women's colleges to-day. They had come to work with their hands, but they could not hinder the working of their minds also. Their mental activity was overflowing at every possible outlet.

The curtain was rung down

The issue of the Boston Evening Transcript for March 4, 1885, reported a "genuine surprise" for some of Boston's literary elite. The prior evening, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Dean Howells went to dine with Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly, to meet one of that magazine's newest sensations. Charles Egbert Craddock, whose writings included "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" and "In the Tennessee Mountains," was the special guest of the evening. Though they knew the name was a fake, they did not expect that the pseudonym hid that the talented writer was a woman.

For six years, it was not known that Craddock was really Mary N. Murfree, a young writer from St. Louis. As the Transcript reported, "Thus the curtain was rung down on one of the neatest comedies ever presented to the American reading public. And what a distinguished cast the comedy had!"

Aldrich (himself a poet and playwright) had met Murfree the night before and was quite shocked, expecting a strapping and broad-shoulder six-foot man from Tennessee. Knowing that the same reaction would come from Holmes and Howells, he orchestrated the dinner the next evening. The three men, it was reported, referred to Craddock/Murfree using the plural "they" for the evening. Upon seeing her, Holmes is said to have shouted, "He is a woman!" Irony must not have been lost on Howells; during his late tenure on the Atlantic before Aldrich took over, he had published some of the works of Craddock/Murfree. Later, in his Literature and Life: Studies, he praised Craddock/Murfree for the use of regional dialect and local color. But, somewhat passive-aggressively, he referred to her as "Miss Murfree, who so long masqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock."

*At least one account mentions that Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett were also present. Their reaction is not recorded, so far as I have found.

Una Hawthorne: business on earth now

In which his torment often was so great,
That, like a lyon, he would cry and rore;
And rend his flesh; and his owne synewes eat.
His owne deare Una, hearing evermore
His ruefull shriekes and gronings, often tore
Her guiltlesse garments and her golden heare,
For pitty of his payne and anguish sore:
Yet all with patience wisely she did beare...

When Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody had their first child on March 3, 1844, they named her after a character in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (quoted above from Book I, Canto X). Extended family was not happy. Nathaniel protested to his sister, "Almost everybody has had something to say about [the name]; but only yourselves have found out that it does not sound prettily!" Una Hawthorne's godfather was John L. O'Sullivan, one of Hawthorne's early publishers.

The delivery took 10 hours, but mother remained happy: "It was a great happiness to be able to put her to my breast immediately and I thanked Heaven I was able to have the privilege of nursing her." The new father noted it was "a very sober and serious kind of happiness" and was concerned about financially supporting his growing family. "There is no escaping it any longer," he wrote to a friend, "I have business on earth now, and must look about me for the means of doing it." Perhaps more prophetically, he predicted: "It will not do for me to continue merely a writer of stories for the magazines - the most unprofitable business in the world."

Scholars speculate that Una inspired the character of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter, published seven years after her birth (she was never allowed to read the novel). As a teenager, while the Hawthornes lived in Italy, Una came down with "Roman fever" (an illness similar to malaria). She later became engaged to a nephew of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but the marriage was called off for reasons which remain unclear. When her younger sister Rose Hawthorne married, she reportedly became depressed and possibly insane. A later potential husband, Albert Webster, died at sea. She lived with her brother Julian Hawthorne in England (Julian and Una are pictured above, circa 1850). It was in England that she died in 1877 at the age of 33. She was originally buried next to her mother before both were reburied in Concord, Massachusetts.

After her father's death, Una provided a preface for the posthumous publication of his incomplete novel Septimius Felton: Or, The Elixir of Life:

I believe it is a striking specimen of the peculiarities and charm of his style, and that it will have an added interest for brother artists, and for those who care to study the method of his composition, from the mere fact of its not having received his final revision. In any case, I feel sure that the retention of the passages within brackets (e. g. p. 30), which show how my father intended to amplify some of the descriptions and develop more fully one or two of the character studies, will not be regretted by appreciative readers.

Dunbar: I remember the occasion well

On March 1, 1901, Paul Laurence Dunbar received a letter inviting him to take part in the Inaugural Parade for William McKinley in honor of his second term as President of the United States. If accepted, Dunbar would be given the honorary rank of colonel. He almost refused. As he wrote years later:

When the document was brought to me, I refused positively to appear in the parade, as I did not consider myself a sufficiently good horseman. So I sent the gentleman away with that answer, but as soon as he was out of the house, my wife and mother made siege upon me, and compelled me to run after him. I remember the occasion well, how I ran down my front steps in housejacket and slippers and calling to my late visitor, told him that I had changed my mind, perforce.

The parade was held three days later, and Dunbar rode a white horse (despite his lack of confidence in his riding). In his speech, McKinley acknowledged the need for blacks and whites to work together:

Strong hearts and helpful hands are needed, and, fortunately, we have them in every part of our beloved country. We are reunited. Sectionalism has disappeared. Division on public questions can no longer be traced by the war maps of 1861. These old differences less and less disturb the judgment... If there are those among us who would make our way more difficult, we must not be disheartened, but the more earnestly dedicate ourselves to the task upon which we have rightly entered. The path of progress is seldom smooth. New things are often found hard to do. Our fathers found them so. We find them so. They are inconvenient. They cost us something. But are we not made better for the effort and sacrifice, and are not those we serve lifted up and blessed?

Only a few months later, McKinley was assassinated. When the President's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, ran for president, Dunbar wrote a campaign poem on his behalf. Roosevelt thanked him by presenting Dunbar with an honorary sword and, exactly four years later to the day, re-appointed him as an honorary colonel. The poet died the next year. His poem for Roosevelt:

There's a mighty sound a comin",
From the East and there's a hummin'
   And a bumtnin' from the bosom of the West,
While the North has given tongue,
And the South will be among
   Those who holler that our Roosevelt is best.

We have heard of him in battle
And amid the roar and rattle
   When the foemen fled like cattle to their stalls:
We have seen him staunch and grim
When the only, battle hymn
   Was the shrieking of the Spanish Mauser balls.

Product of a worthy sireing,
Fearless, honest, brave, untiring —
   In the forefront of the firing, there he stands:
And we're not afraid to show
That we all revere him so,
   To dissentients of our own and other lands.

Now, the fight is on in earnest,
And we care not if the sternest
   Of encounters try our valor or the quality of him,
For they're few who stoop to fear
As the glorious day draws near,
   For you'll find him hell to handle when he gets in fightin' trim.