1843

 

__________

 

“Without wearing any mask we are conscious of,

we have a special face for each friend.”

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes

__________

Telegraph to the moon?

CONGRESS finally realizes that Samuel Morse (see 1837) is onto something, and sets aside money to build his electro-magnetic telegraph from Washington to Baltimore. (124/346) 

    Mr. Morse had a model on exhibition at the Capitol, and the beaux and belles used to hold brief conversations over the mysterious wire. At last the House considered a bill appropriating twenty-five thousand dollars, to be expended in a series of experiments with the new invention.

 

    In the brief debate on the bill, Mr. Cave Johnson undertook to ridicule the discovery by proposing that one-half of the proposed appropriation be devoted to experiments in mesmerism, while Mr. Houghton thought that Millerism (a religious craze then prevalent) should be included in the benefits of the appropriation…Men of character, men of erudition, men who, in ordinary affairs, had foresight, were wholly unable to forecast the future of the telegraph. Other motions disparaging to the invention were made, such as propositions to appropriate part of the sum to telegraph the moon.

 

    The measure passed only 89-83. (Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, pp. 309-310.)

 

* 

WILLIAM MILLER predicts the end of the world. Thousands believe him and prepare for the end. It doesn’t happen.

Chart explaining his prediction.

    The Millerites published two newspapers in Cincinnati in these years, The Jubilee Trumpet and The Western Midnight Cry. In his diary, James Wickes Taylor notes:

 

March 1: The Miller delusion has its victims (the word is better than “converts”) here, as well as in the Eastern cities. (102/15)

 

April 23. This is the day, when our ears were to be greeted by the “crack of doom,” if Miller had donned the prophetic mantle. But its hours are speeding in safety to their bourn, and the curtain of time has not dropped over the world. (102/16-18)

 

    Taylor spends part of a Sunday in June at a display of flowers. On the corner of Third Street and Vine, he passes the office where the newspapers of William Miller, spreading the word of the worlds’ end, are published. 

    I glanced in, and there were seated several sinister-looking fellows, as lugubrious as the fate they are predicting. One was reading aloud, and I overheard a single phrase, “the wrath  of God.” I could not help contrasting the two scenes – the floral, and the fanatical. 

  Apropos, the Millerites have leased for several weeks the church across the way, and hold nightly their doom-denouncing meetings there. I have not attended them, but they cram our ears against the stomach of our success, from dusk till ten o’clock. (102/22)

* 

“We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.” 

July: Margaret Fuller publishes her manifesto, “The Great Lawsuit: Man Versus Men, Woman Versus Women.”

    At one point she remarks that “as the principle of liberty is better understood and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of woman. As men become aware that all men have not had their fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance.” 

    Religion itself has often failed, she says. 

The name of the Prince of Peace has been profaned by all kinds of injustice toward the Gentile whom he said he came to save. But I need not speak of what has been done towards the red man, the black man. These deeds are the scoff of the world; they have been accompanied by such pious words, that the gentlest would not dare to intercede with, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.” 

 

    The fight for abolition, however, has made for women a new class of allies. 

    It is not surprising that it should be the Anti-Slavery party that pleads for woman, when we consider merely that she does not hold property on equal terms with men; so that, if a husband dies without a will, the wife, instead of stepping at once into his place as head of the family, inherits only a part of his fortune, as if she were a child, or ward only, not an equal partner. We will not speak of the innumerable instances, in which profligate or idle men live upon the earnings of industrious wives; or if the wives leave them and take with them the children, to perform the double duty of mother and father, follow from place to place, and threaten to rob them of the children, if deprived of the rights of a husband, as they call them, planting themselves in their poor lodgings, frightening them into paying tribute by taking from them the children, running into debt at the expense of these otherwise so overtasked helots. Though such instances abound, the public opinion of his own sex is against the man, and when cases of extreme tyranny are made known, there is private action in the wife's favor. But if woman be, indeed, the weaker party, she ought to have legal protection, which would make such oppression impossible. 

 

    In her eyes, the nation has failed; but the principles are sound: 

    Though the national independence be blurred by the servility of individuals; though freedom and equality have been proclaimed only to leave room for a monstrous display of slave dealing and slave keeping; though the free American so often feels himself free, like the Roman, only to pamper his appetites and his indolence through the misery of his fellow beings, still it is not in vain, that the verbal statement has been made, “All men are born free and equal.” There it stands, a golden certainty, wherewith to encourage the good, to shame the bad. 

 

    The same men, she argues, who defend slavery, now attack those calling for equality for women. 

    “Is it not enough,” cries the sorrowful trader, “that you have done all you could to break up the national Union, and thus destroy the prosperity of our country, but now you must be trying to break up family union, to take my wife away from the cradle, and the kitchen hearth, to vote at polls, and preach from a pulpit? Of course, if she does such things, she cannot attend to those of her own sphere. She is happy enough as she is. She has more leisure than I have, every means of improvement, every indulgence.”

 

    “Have you asked her whether she was satisfied with these indulgences?”

 

    “No, but I know she is. She is too amiable to wish what would make me unhappy, and too judicious to wish to step beyond the sphere of her sex. I will never consent to have our peace disturbed by any such discussions.”

 

    “‘Consent’ – you? it is not consent from you that is in question, it is assent from your wife.”

 

    “Am I not the head of my house?”

   

    “You are not the head of your wife. God has given her a mind of her own.”

 

    “I am the head and she the heart.” 

 

    What is it that Fuller and the other feminists of that era demand? 

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we believe that the Divine would ascend into nature to a height unknown in the history of past ages, and nature, thus instructed, would regulate the spheres not only so as to avoid collision, but to bring forth ravishing harmony. … If the negro be a soul, if the woman be a soul, apparelled [sic] in flesh, to one master only are they accountable. There is but one law for all souls, and, if there is to be an interpreter of it, he comes not as man, or son of man, but as Son of God. 

 

    Men, as Fuller writes, are generally not ready to support the equality of the sexes. That leaves women little other choice: 

    It is therefore that I would have woman lay aside all thought, such as she habitually cherishes, of being taught and led by men. I would have her, like the Indian girl, dedicate herself to the Sun, the Sun of Truth, and go no where if his beams did not make clear the path. I would have her free from compromise, from complaisance, from helplessness, because I would have her good enough and strong enough to love one and all beings, from the fulness, not the poverty of being.

 

    Men, as at present instructed, will not help this work, because they also are under the slavery of habit. I have seen with delight their poetic impulses. A sister is the fairest ideal, and how nobly Wordsworth, and even Byron, have written of a sister.

 

    There is no sweeter sight than to see a father with his little daughter. Very vulgar men become refined to the eye when leading a little girl by the hand. At that moment the right relation between the sexes seems established, and you feel as if the man would aid in the noblest purpose, if you ask him in behalf of his little daughter. Once two fine figures stood before me, thus. The father of very intellectual aspect, his falcon eye softened by affection as he looked down on his fair child, she the image of himself, only more graceful and brilliant in expression. I was reminded of Southey's Kehama, when lo, the dream was rudely broken. They were talking of education, and he said:

 

    “I shall not have Maria brought too forward. If she knows too much, she will never find a husband; superior women hardly ever can.”

 

    “Surely,” said his wife, with a blush, “you wish Maria to be as good and wise as she can, whether it will help her to marriage or not.”

 

    “No,” he persisted, “I want her to have a sphere and a home, and some one to protect her when I am gone.”

* 

    Taylor also writes about the departure of the Wyandots from Ohio, the last natives to have lived in the state, and the Millerites, again.

“Farewell Ohio, and her Brave!” 

August 6. An interesting incident is told of the Wyandots. While passing North Bend – the machinery of the boat was stopped, the tribe were gathered on the deck, facing the tomb of [William Henry] Harrison and remained uncovered while the current bore them past the spot. The silence was unbroken, until the Chief stepped forward, and with a parting gesture, exclaimed, “Farewell Ohio, and her Brave!” A cannon on board uttered a salute, the boat shot forward, and thus ended a scene, more fraught with poetic association, than often comes within our observation. (102/41) 

 

“Millerism as a delusion.” 

Septr 25. Yesterday I went with Mr Jones to the place where the Miller tent is outspread. It covers an area of 200 feet in diameter, and will contain an immense crowd. While I was on the ground, it was thronged by thousands. … I remained among the Millerites the whole morning, interested by the appearance of the crowd, and listening with considerable interest to a sermon from a Mr [George] Storrs … About a year since I examined the subject, and satisfied my own mind, that these apprehensions are premature and groundless. All these lecturers assume that the power of the Church of Rome (Anti-Christ) was completely broken, overthrown in 1798. They must assume this, or all subsequent predictions have nothing to rest on. The fact is far otherwise. Almost within sight of their encampment, are going up the walls of a splendid Catholic Cathedral – a rebuke to their assumption, that the Downfall of the Roman religion occurred in the last century. This fact is sufficient to stamp Millerism as a delusion. (102/48-49)

 

* 

“The man who made it safe to murder.” 

    Junius Brutus Booth is immensely popular in the Washington theater, particularly in his Shakespearean roles. “Booth at this time was more than ever a slave to intoxicating drink, so much so that he would often disappoint his audiences, sometimes wholly failing to appear, yet his popularity remained unabated.” (Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, p. 281.) 

    Rufus Choate, a lawyer who went into politics, was a powerful debater. 

   Wendell Phillips once said of Mr. Choate that he was “the man who made it safe to murder, and of whose health thieves asked about before they began to steal.” It may have been that in the excitement of pleading before a jury he may have occasionally been carried beyond the depth of logical argument which his judgment approved. But in the Senate he had no equal as an orator. His elaborate and brilliant speeches were listened to with earnest attention by the other Senators, who would now be convulsed with laughter and then flooded with tears. (Benjamin Perley Poole, Reminiscences; Volume 1, pp. 292-293.)

 

* 

“A little drink was poison in his veins.” 

    Edgar Allan Poe publishes his most famous poem, The Raven. (Who knew an NFL team would someday choose its name based on that poem?) 

    Halleck provides an outline of Poe’s life, noting that his grandfather, Daniel Poe, also a citizen of Baltimore, was a general in the American Revolution. 

    An orphan before he was three years old, Poe was reared by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan of Richmond, Virginia. We are given a glimpse of the boy at the age of six, standing on a table, declaiming and drinking wine as a pledge to the health of the guests. If there was ever a child who ought never to have known the taste of wine, that child was Edgar Allan Poe. He could not touch one glass of it without losing moral and physical self-control. In 1815, at the close of the War of 1812, his foster parents went to England and took him with them. He was given a school reader and two spelling books with which to amuse himself during the long sailing voyage across the ocean. He was placed for five years in the Manor School House, a boarding school, at Stoke Newington, a suburb of London. Here, he could walk by the very house in which Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe. But nothing could make up to Poe the loss of a mother and home training during those five critical years. The headmaster said that Poe was clever, but spoiled by “an extravagant amount of pocket money.” The contrast between his school days and adult life should be noted. We shall never hear of his having too much money after he became an author.

 

    In 1820 the boy returned with the Allans to Richmond, where he prepared for college, and at the age of seventeen entered the University of Virginia. “Here,” his biographer says, “he divided his time, after the custom of undergraduates, between the recitation room, the punch bowl, the card-table, athletic sports, and pedestrianism.” (My version: here he yielded to the temptation of drinking and gambling, and he lost at the gaming table twenty-five hundred dollars in a few months.) Although Poe does not seem to have been censured by the faculty, Mr. Allan was displeased with his record, removed him from college, and placed him in his counting house. This act and other causes, which have never been fully ascertained, led Poe to leave Mr. Allan’s home.

 

    Poe then went to Boston, where, at the age of eighteen, he published a thin volume entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems. Disappointed at not being able to live by his pen, he served two years in the army as a common soldier, giving both an assumed name and age. He finally secured an appointment to West Point after he was slightly beyond the legal age of entrance. The cadets said in a joking way that Poe had secured the appointment for his son, but that the father substituted himself after the boy died. Feeling an insatiable ambition to become an author, Poe neglected his duties at West Point, and he was, fortunately for literature, discharged at the age of twenty-two.

 

HIS GREAT STRUGGLE. Soon after leaving West Point, Poe went to his kindred in Baltimore. In a garret in that southern city, he first discovered his power in writing prose tales. In 1833 his story, MS. Found in a Bottle, won a prize of one hundred dollars offered by a Baltimore paper. In 1834 Mr. Allan died without mentioning Poe in his will; and in spite of his utmost literary efforts, Poe had to borrow money to keep from starving.

 

    After struggling for four years in Baltimore, he went to Richmond and became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. He worked very hard in this position, sometimes contributing to a single number as much as forty pages of matter, mostly editorials and criticisms of books. In Baltimore he had tested his power of writing short stories, but in Richmond his work laid the foundation of his reputation as a literary critic. While here, he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, but even his affection for her did not enable him to withstand the conviviality of the place. A little drink was poison in his veins, unfitting him for work. Perhaps it was irregular habits that caused him to lose the profitable editorship of the Messenger soon after he married. Let us remember, however, that his mother-in-law was charitable enough not to unveil his weakness. “At home,” she said, “he was as simple and affectionate as a child.”

 

    The principal part of the rest of his life was passed in Philadelphia and New York, where he served as editor of various periodicals and wrote stories and poems. In the former city, he wrote most of the tales for which he is today famous. With the publication of his poem, The Raven, in New York in 1845, he reached the summit of his fame. In that year he wrote to a friend, “The Raven has had a great ‘run’ – but I wrote it for the express purpose of running – just as I did The Gold Bug, you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” And yet, in spite of his fame, he said in the same year, “I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my life.”

 

    The truth was that it would then have been difficult for the most successful author to live even in the North without a salaried position, and conditions were worse in the South. Like Hawthorne, Poe tried to get a position in a customhouse, but failed.

 

    He moved to an inexpensive cottage in Fordham, a short distance from New York City, where he, his wife, and mother-in-law found themselves in 1846 in absolute want of food and warmth. The saddest scene in which any great American author figured was witnessed in that cottage in “the bleak December,” when his wife, Virginia, lay dying in the bitter cold. Because there was insufficient bed clothing to keep her warm, Poe gave her his coat and placed the family cat upon her to add its warmth.

 

    Her death made him almost completely irresponsible. The stunning effect of the blow may be seen in the wandering lines of Ulalume (1847). The end came to him in Baltimore in 1849, the same year in which he wrote the beautiful dirge of Annabel Lee for his dead wife. He was only forty when he died. This greatest literary genius of the South was buried in Baltimore in a grave that remained unmarked for twenty-six years.

 

    In anticipation of his end, he had written the lines:

 

   “And oh! of all tortures,
     That torture the worst
   Has abated – the terrible
     Torture of thirst
   For the napthaline river
     Of Passion accurst:
   I have drank of a water
     That quenches all thirst.”

BLOGGER’S NOTE: I have slightly edited Halleck’s work, eliminating outdated punctuation marks, making “to-day,” “today,” etc. I doubt any Halleck fans out there will be upset.

* 

WE ADD HERE, the lines from one of his other famous poems, written in memory of his wife. She was only 13 years old in 1836, when they married, and 24 when she died.

 

Annabel Lee 

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Than to love and be loved by me.

 

I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love –

   I and my Annabel Lee –

With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven

   Coveted her and me.

 

And this was the reason that, long ago,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

   My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

   And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

   In this kingdom by the sea.

 

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

   Went envying her and me –

Yes! – that was the reason (as all men know,

   In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

 

But our love it was stronger by far than the love

   Of those who were older than we –

   Of many far wiser than we –

And neither the angels in Heaven above

   Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

 

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

   Of my darling – my darling – my life and my bride,

   In her sepulchre there by the sea –

   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

 

* 

RUTH FINLEY notes that Sarah Hale had been a patron of Poe, and he had been paid well, he felt, for his submissions to Godey’s. 

A tribute to the poet ends with these four lines: 

So worn and tempest-riven!

    Be all his faults forgiven!

Calm be his rest in heaven,

    Whose soul was love!

 

Hale had recognized his “gentleness of heart,” Finley writes. “To appear in Godey’s Lady’s Book was to be ‘made,’” said one editor in 1928. (113/252)

 

* 

THE HORDE of office-seekers which bedeviled President Tyler reminded Benjamin Perley Poore of a saying of John Randolph, when told that the patronage of the federal government was overrated. 

     “‘I know,’ said the sarcastic Virginian, ‘that it may be overrated; I know that we cannot give to those who apply office equal to their expectations; and I also know that with one bone I can call five hundred dogs.’” (Poore, Reminiscences; Volume 1, 355)