In the fall of 1856, Louisa May Alcott met Julia Ward Howe at Theodore Parker’s house, and found her to be “a straw colored supercilious lady with pale eyes & a green gown in which she looked like a faded lettuce.”1 Alcott, proudly poor, with one good dress, which she carefully tended, saw Howe as a haughty society lady. She could not have known how much Julia had treasured that green Parisian gown with its filmy, now bedraggled, flounces. When she had ordered it, she had been young, fresh, hopeful, and crisp; now she felt washed-out and limp. Maud’s birth had not resolved her quarrels with Chev. He continued his efforts to get control of her income and property, and harped on the issue of a divorce. The sisters were concerned for her, and so was her brother-in-law Tom Crawford. He wrote to Louisa, who had visited Julia in the summer and was spending some months with Annie, that “I am really alarmed by what you tell me of poor Jules’s treatment by Chev. The man must be mad, and Jule will be if she allows him to get possession of property. I do hope Uncle John will take the matter in hands and cleanup the difficulty by actually separating them, allowing Chev a small portion of her income to bring up the child he is determined to keep. I think Jule is justified in leaving him whenever she pleases. Certainly such a dog’s life is insupportable, as there can be no object in continuing it any longer.”2
In public, Julia and Chev put on their best faces, and at home they concealed all their frustration, suspicion, even desperation, from the children, who remembered only glorious years of parties, music, books, and games. As parents, they poured all their affection, playfulness, and imagination into creating an idyllic home. Every spring the Howes gave a famous children’s party in the garden at Green Peace, with a play, a donkey carriage, bowling outdoors, and delicious sweets, and a comic play written by Julia. At home, too, she played the piano energetically every afternoon while the children danced, or taught them songs and ballads. She wrote a play for their doll theatre and played all the parts, alternately grunting and squeaking the voices while Chev operated the puppets. Chev read to the children, took them horseback riding, and dressed up as a bear in his fur coat and chased them, growling, around the dining room. While they were constantly moving around and changing schools, tutors, and modes of education, their sense of a stable and enchanting family life kept them secure, and as adults, even when they read the letters and journals, they found it hard to believe that their parents had been unhappy together.
Much more vivid were their memories of antislavery activism. In the 1850s the Howes gradually became converted to Abolitionism. Both had been resistant to abolitionist ideas; Julia had indeed looked down snobbishly on the abolitionists, believing them to be “men and women of rather coarse fibre, abounding in cheap and easy denunciation, and seeking to lay rash hands on the complex machinery of government and of society.” She had a particular aversion to William Lloyd Garrison, whom she had never seen, “but of whose malignity of disposition I entertained not the smallest doubt.”3 Chev, who generally agreed with the opinions of the abolitionists, nonetheless disapproved of their methods. It was Parker who persuaded the Howes to meet Garrison at his home, which was the headquarters of radical discussion. Julia ended up sharing a hymnbook with Garrison as they sang around the piano, and was humbled to find him “gentle and unassuming in manner,” sincere and benevolent in his ideals. She also came to respect Maria Weston Chapman, the editor of The Liberty Bell, and Wendell Phillips, one of the great orators of the day and an early supporter of women’s suffrage.4
The most fiery and committed abolitionist of their circle was Sumner. His strong opinions, the harsh and vehement way he delivered them, and his elaborate oratory made him one of the most unpopular men in the Senate, hated by his fellow senators for what they saw as his pretensions and “sanctimonious idealism.”5 In the 1850s, according to Carl Sandburg, Sumner became “the most perfect impersonation of what the South wanted to secede from”—self-righteousness, humorlessness, arrogance.6 Speculating on the sources of his bachelorhood, gossips wondered wickedly whether he avoided marriage to avoid reducing a woman to slavery.
On May 19, 1856, Sumner gave a blistering three-hour speech in the Senate on “The Crime Against Kansas,” excoriating the campaign to make Kansas a slave state. He had memorized the 112-page oration to enhance his delivery, and a large crowd gathered in the Senate to hear it, spread over two days. On both days he singled out Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina as a Southern Don Quixote, who “has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight . . . the harlot, Slavery.” There was much more invective, including mockery of Butler’s speech impediment. Sumner meant the speech to insult and offend, and it did. Butler was not in the chamber to hear himself attacked, but Southern congressmen were enraged, and Sumner’s friends feared for his safety.
Three days later, Butler’s cousin, Congressman Preston S. Brooks, entered the Senate chambers determined to avenge the honor of his family and South Carolina. He accosted Sumner, who was sitting at his desk reading some papers, and beat him unconscious with his gutta-percha cane, which splintered and broke with the force of the blows. Afterwards, Brooks boasted of giving Sumner the flogging he deserved, and Southern newspapers inflamed mob sentiment by editorializing that antislavery senators were “a pack of curs” who needed to be “lashed into submission.” For every insult to the South, blustered the Richmond Enquirer, “they will suffer so many stripes,” that “they will soon learn to behave themselves like decent dogs—they never can be gentlemen.”7
In the North, however, Sumner’s bloody coat became an emblem of martyrdom, and Brooks was denounced as a savage thug. Boston welcomed Sumner home in November with a grand parade on Beacon Hill, but he was far from recovered. For three years, he would be absent from the Senate, unable to concentrate or return to work, suffering from headaches that made him fear a brain injury, limping, shaky, and unable to get up from a chair without assistance. He wandered from health resort to spa to specialist, and eventually went to Europe, for two lengthy trips in 1857 and 1858, combining frenetic sightseeing and compulsive socializing with frequent medical consultations.
At last, in Paris in June 1858, he saw a distinguished physician who gave him hope that he would recover. Dr. Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard was one of the strangest characters in this strange story. Born in Mauritius, of French and American ancestry, he was trained in France, but for sixteen years in the middle of his career, traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, teaching and practicing in Richmond, New York, Boston, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, London, and Paris. He taught at Harvard Medical School and the Collège de France, and is credited with some important discoveries in the field of neurology; but he was also an eccentric and controversial physician, whose enthusiasms led him to endorse some bizarre remedies. The most spectacular of these was the “elixir of life,” a treatment for male aging and erectile dysfunction. In 1889, he would publish an article in The Lancet on the dramatic rejuvenating effects of injected extracts of the testicles of guinea pigs and dogs. After three injections, he wrote ecstatically, “I had regained at least all the strength I possessed a good many years ago . . . With regard to the facility of intellectual labor, which had diminished within the last few years, a return to my previous ordinary condition became quite manifest.”8 The article created a sensation, and the use of animal testes, tissues, and glands became an enormous fad. A 2002 study of Brown-Séquard’s research concludes that his reported effects were the result of a placebo response.9
After a three-hour examination of Sumner, Brown-Séquard diagnosed injuries of the spinal cord produced by blows on the head and prescribed a course of applications of a powerful cauterizing agent called moxa. Used in ancient Chinese medicine, moxa is a cylinder of dried mugwort ignited and burned directly on the skin. It is excruciatingly painful, but Sumner wished to begin at once and refused chloroform, lest it make the moxa less effective. Over the next two weeks, Sumner endured six applications of fire on his bare back. “I have never seen a man bearing with such fortitude . . . the extremely violent pain of this kind of burning,” the doctor noted. It was months before the burns healed. “The torment is considerable,” Sumner wrote to Chev, “… I walk with pain; lie down with pain; rise with pain.”10 Chev thought that Brown-Séquard was a quack, and his prescriptions ridiculous, but fully supported Sumner. Nonsensical as a medical remedy, moxa was a peculiar placebo that assuaged Sumner’s post-traumatic stress disorder. His wounds were psychological as well as physical. Brooding about the unmanly shame of being so badly beaten, and knowing that the newspapers accused him of malingering, he needed to restore his sense of masculinity, prove his courage, and assuage any remnants of guilt about his actions. Word spread about his heroic endurance of treatment, and the rumors of shamming stopped. After Sumner’s treatment, David Herbert Donald suggests, “identifying himself with the martyrs of the past erased any unconscious doubts about the correctness of his course,” and he came to regard himself as “a symbol of a righteous cause,” rather than a vulnerable and defeated man.11 Brown-Séquard, however, never used moxa again, regarding the pain it caused as too severe.12
The combination of “bleeding Sumner” and “Bleeding Kansas” had immediate consequences in 1856. After hearing about the attack on Sumner, John Brown, a fanatical abolitionist who wanted to start an armed slave insurrection, led his ragtag band of guerrillas to take violent revenge on the proslavery settlers in Pottawatomie, Kansas. They massacred five men in the settlement, beheaded one, and mutilated their bodies. Brown denied knowledge of the infamous raid. He escaped and went underground, trying to raise funds to carry out his plans.
In January 1857, he came to Boston to stay with Theodore Parker. Chev met the fugitive at Parker’s home and was captivated by the simple strength and Puritan conviction Brown displayed. By March, along with Parker, he became an enthusiastic member of a group dedicated to funding Brown’s antislavery campaigns. The other members of the “Secret Six,” as they were known, were Franklin B. Sanborn, an abolitionist activist, transcendentalist, and disciple of Emerson; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a minister, reformer, and literary critic; George Luther Stearns, a wealthy businessman; and Gerrit Smith, a philanthropist. Their antislavery beliefs did not preclude racism. Like Emerson, Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, each of them regarded black slaves as an inferior race. Abolitionism and white supremacy were not contradictions. They were drawn into the conspiracy, however, for humanitarian and ideological reasons. In addition, Chev brought the romantic fervor of his youth to the Secret Six, and based his military support of Brown’s mad schemes on his memories of guerrilla warfare in Greece. Once more he was reminded of the exhilarating insurgency in the mountains of Arcadia. “The prospect of a slave stampede on a large scale was quite in Dr. Howe’s line,” Higginson wrote.13 But thirty years after the Greek revolution, Chev was no longer the passionate youth who had eaten raw snails in Athens and reveled in waving a scimitar or a pistol. He was caught up in a Boys’ Own Adventure with terrible consequences.
• • •
Julia did not stop writing. Indeed, 1857 was the peak of her literary career in terms of the amount of work she produced, published, and had performed. In February 1857, she braved Chev’s anger by publishing her second book of poems, Words for the Hour, with Ticknor and Fields. Signed by “the Author of Passion-Flowers,” the book included fifty-four poems on topical subjects, including two on Sumner’s martyrdom, “An Hour in the Senate” and “The Senator’s Return.” The hour had room for personal history, too. Other poems defiantly revisited her friendship with Horace Binney Wallace. In 1854, Wallace’s brother John had brought out a limited edition of his writings, Art, Scenery and Philosophy in Europe. Julia composed a sorrowful poem on receiving the book, in which she expressed her longing to visit the shrine of his grave:
But, held by ties that let me not depart,
On grief’s wild sweeping opinions any whither,
I can but send my pilgrim wishes thither,
Folding thy dear, dumb volume to my heart.
She also wrote “Via Felice”—the happy way—named for the street he lived on in Rome, and, imagining them back in Rome forever, while she waited at her window for him to come with her morning violets.
But in the ancient city
And from the quaint old door,
I’m watching, at my window
His coming, evermore.
For Death’s eternal city
Has yet some happy street;
’Tis in the Via Felice
My friend and I shall meet.
As in Passion-Flowers, Julia wrote best when she was angry. Two poems on Florence Nightingale criticize those people (probably she had Chev in mind) who put the exceptional woman on a pedestal but continued to oppress ordinary women:
If you debase the sex to elevate
One of like soul and temper with the rest,
You do but wrong a thousand fervent hearts,
To pay full tribute to one generous breast.
She also took an injudicious shot at the Brownings, whom she believed had snubbed her in Rome, and she used their names.14 “I am told you do not praise me, Barrett Browning, high-inspired,” she declared in “A Word with the Brownings.”
Nor you, Robert, full of manhood, with your Angel interlyred;
In my sometime invocation the poet-brotherhood,
’Twas a word from you I wanted, in a word, a sentence,—good.
That was risky enough, but “One Word More with E.B.B.” hinted that Barrett Browning attempted “unmeasured heights” in her poetry with the help of opium, while Howe herself more morally shrank “before the nameless draught / that helps to such unearthly things, / and if the drug could lift so high, / I would not trust its treacherous wings.” She might be the lesser poet, but she filled her pages “with pictures of the things I see.” These imprudent lines made lifelong enemies of the Brownings, scandalized by her sense of entitlement. Howe attacks us, Browning wrote to his friend Isa Blagden, “because we didn’t praise her!”15 Ironically, some of the poems in Words for the Hour were imitations of his dramatic monologues.
The new book received respectful but muted reviews. “After the reign of the myriad Lady Magazine poetesses,” the editor George Curtis wrote in Putnam’s, “… ladies who have written the most graceful good grammar about emotions they never had, it is truly refreshing to encounter a torrent of lava streaming out of the heat of real experience.” He judged it “a better book than its predecessor,” but accurately predicted it would “probably not meet with the same success.”16 Other reviewers found it deeply sad. “The wail of private sorrow which forms the keynote of these remarkable poems can never harmonize with universal sympathies . . . If the author stands before us like Niobe, she exhibits nothing effeminate, maudlin, or sentimental. Her compact and resolute intellect seems armed as with triple steel.”17
Julia was also writing plays and channeling her volcanic emotions through the representation of powerful heroines. On March 16, 1857, her tragedy in blank verse Leonora, or The World’s Own was performed in New York at Wallack’s Lyceum Theatre. Set in sixteenth-century Italy, Leonora is the story of a young woman whose seduction and cruel betrayal by the cynical Lord Lothair violates the sexual codes of her society, stigmatizes her as damaged and dangerous, and precipitates her ejection from the village. So far, the familiar plot, in which the woman pays. Yet Leonora does not meekly accept her shame, but plots to punish her seducer and takes on the identity of a veiled and vengeful madwoman. In the fourth and fifth acts, aided by a sympathetic prince who loves her, she becomes “the Lady of the evil eye,” whose power “shows its malignant presence everywhere.” Mercilessly she plots to destroy Lothair, his wife, and his son, only to realize in the end that she has become the demon of her own disguise. She stabs herself, and in her last few moments envisions herself as a young girl once more, dressed in white, dancing with the “maiden band,” and “taller than the rest.” The ebbing of her “life blood lets the madness out,” and she is restored to “the peaceful visions of my youth.”
Howe’s brother Sam was an enthusiastic supporter of the production, as always; but the New York critics did not like the theme or the treatment, and the play closed after a brief run. As the New York Times reported, “the critics quite unanimously concede that Mrs. Howe’s new play ‘The World’s Own,’ is a poetic success and a dramatic failure . . . And they all have a great deal to say of the immorality, if not indecency, of the play.” The Times critic agreed that “in working up the material there are great faults of taste, misconceptions of the laws of dramatic art, and an unnecessary prolixity.” Moreover, he felt, “there are offensive expressions which should be cut out, as there are whole scenes and characters by whose entire removal the play would gain in unity, force and interest.”18
Later critics, however, have seen much to admire in Leonora. Arthur Hobson Quinn, who included it in his anthology of American plays in 1925, saw it as a projection of Howe’s rebellion in the medium of romantic drama, and saw its fate as another example of her creative silencing. “With any real encouragement,” he argued, she “could have contributed plays to our stage that would have enriched our literature as well as our theater.”19 Zoe Detsi, in 1996, described it as “a self-conscious attempt at the creation of feminist theatre,” which attacked the sexual double standard and portrayed a “powerful, assertive, Mediterranean female character.”20
For all its melodramatic extravagance, Leonora has some strong lines and some exciting scenes; writing dialogue forced Howe to be direct and clear. It belongs to the tradition of the mad female double who expresses the heroine’s rage, as in Jane Eyre. Later that summer, Howe, like Louisa May Alcott and many other American women, was reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s newly published biography of Charlotte Brontë. Alcott was moved and inspired. “Read Charlotte Brontë’s life. A very interesting, but sad one. So full of talent; and after working long, just as success, love, happiness, she dies. Wonder if I shall ever be famous enough for people to care to read my story and struggles. I can’t be a C. B., But I may do a little something yet.”21 Howe resisted identification with Brontë. “Charlotte Brontë is deeply interesting,” she wrote to Annie, “but I think she and I should not have liked each other, while still I see points of resemblance, many indeed, between us.”22 There were certainly resemblances between them, especially the attraction to Gothic images, but Brontë did not have five children or a difficult husband. Why Howe thought they might have disliked each other is harder to guess. She was not sufficiently intrigued by their similarities to read Jane Eyre.
Fanny Longfellow took obvious pleasure in gossiping to her Cambridge circle about the scandal of Leonora. “Julia Howe’s play has been abused by all the papers here and in New York except in one or two cases,” she wrote a friend, “but she is serenely indifferent and thinks it was a success. The sudden virtue of the Herald about it is amusing, but it is strange so clever a woman should have chosen so hackneyed a story and so wretched a heroine, and should not see there is tragedy enough in life to inspire a drama without condescending to vice . . . The poor Doctor must feel it painfully as a thing he cannot give his daughters to read.”23
In her wasp-ridden attic room at Lawton’s Valley, Julia, undaunted by the failure of The World’s Own, was writing another play, for the young actor Edwin Booth, whose Boston performance as Hamlet had made a strong impression on both the Howes. When Booth’s manager asked her to write a play for him, she was honored and chose the subject of Hippolytus, based on Euripides’s Hippolytus and Racine’s Phaedra. The part of Hippolytus seemed to her like a perfect fit for Booth: “his austere beauty, his reserve and shyness, all seemed to her the personification of the Hunter Prince.”24 Between the composition and the production, however, many years went by, as Booth became an increasingly famous American actor. At last in 1864, E. L. Davenport, the manager of the Howard Athenæum, agreed to produce the play with the celebrated actress Charlotte Cushman as Phaedra. To Julia’s dismay, Davenport suddenly decided Hippolytus was too shocking, and it was withdrawn; according to local gossip, Mrs. Davenport was unhappy with her part. Julia was crushed. “This was, I think, the greatest letdown that I ever experienced. It affected me seriously for some days, after which I determined to attempt nothing more for the stage.”25 Fifty years later, she still felt the disappointment: “This with much other of my best literary work has remained a dead letter on my own shelves.”26 Hippolytus was not performed until March 24, 1911, after Howe’s death, starring the future movie actor Walter Hampden as Hippolytus.
• • •
Chev barely noticed the book or the plays; he was preoccupied that spring with his own dramas. He confided in Julia that he had met “a wonderful man, an apostle, a Puritan of the old type, who had devoted himself to an elaborate plan for the emancipation of the Southern blacks, with the zeal and courage that ever characterized the saviors of mankind.”27 On March 7, he identified the man “who wished to be a savior for the negro race” as John Brown, and told her Brown was coming to their home that afternoon. As she told the story in her Reminiscences, “At the expected time, I heard the bell ring, and, on answering it, beheld a middle-aged, middle-sized man, with hair and beard of amber color, streaked with gray. He looked a Puritan of the Puritans, forceful, concentrated, and self-contained.”28 Brown remembered Julia Ward Howe too: “A defiant little woman, all flash and fire.”29 While he was in Boston, he also went to see Charles Sumner, who was still recovering, and asked to see the blood-soaked coat he had been wearing in the Senate. He gazed upon the garment silently for some minutes, as if it were a holy relic. For Brown, it was.
Julia may have responded to Brown’s charisma, at least in retrospect; but she and Chev were hardly ideological partners. Through the spring and summer, the Howes were traveling and quarreling. Julia and Flossy accompanied Chev on the Middle Western leg of a trip to Kansas. “Heaven knows what I have not been through since I saw you,” she grumbled to Annie, “—dust, dirt, dyspepsia, hotels, railroads, prairies, Western steamboats, Western people, more prairies, tobacco juice, captains of boats, pilots of ditto, long days of jolting in the cars . . . There ought to be no chickens this year, so many eggs have we eaten.”30 Chev bought land in Grasshopper, Kansas, on this stage of the trip, another in his long line of bad investments.
That summer, the tension between Julia and Chev was obvious to their friends and family. In July, Parker wrote to Julia, appealing to her generosity and suggesting that she take the initiative in working out a compromise between them. “It grieves me sadly to see you both unhappy—each made so by the other . . . It seems to me not difficult for one so richly gifted as you to turn out such a silver lining in the house as to fill it all with brightness, & charm it into love. Chev has his faults—some of them you bear with great sweetness—but there is such a soul of Generosity in him that it seems to me you might make such music as would charm all the little household duties about him & so gladden & bless all the family—making the seven into one.”31
She did make an effort—she always made an effort—and the summer months seemed to have calmed the waters. But by October, Chev was once more urging divorce. “Down comes Chev with his fall madness of separation and a week or so of misery undoes all the summer’s gain. The ground this time is that there is no unkindness between us, and that for the present is the best time to make a decision. I will not amplify on all this, but will only say that I have not made one drop of good blood since this most strange and unexpected turn of matters.”32
Still, she had learned how to recover and bounce back. On one particularly bad day, she quarreled with Chev and he “pummeled me until I was black and blue in the soul.”33 The rhetoric of Sumner’s thrashing had entered their marriage. But somehow they got over it, wound the clock, and went to bed. Quarreling had become a routine; there was no point in losing more sleep over it.
Chev was feeling even more depressed than Julia. He missed his friends—Sumner still in Europe; Mann in Ohio; Parker, whose tuberculosis he had diagnosed in December, slowly dying. His close friendship with Longfellow had not survived the affair of Passion-Flowers. In the winter of 1859, when Parker decided to go to Cuba and Santa Cruz for his health, he pleaded with the Howes to join him and Lydia for the first part of the trip. Before they sailed, Chev wrote a letter of introduction to a wealthy Bostonian for John Brown: “He is of the stuff of which martyrs are made. He is of the Puritan order militant.”34
Julia described their expedition in A Trip to Cuba, travel letters that had been commissioned by the Atlantic Monthly. It contained some of her wittiest and most candid observations. She made fun of herself being seasick on the trip down:
A woman, said to be of a literary turn of mind, in the miserablest condition imaginable. Her clothes, flung at her by the Stewardess, seem to have hit in some places and missed in others. Her listless hands occasionally make an attempt to keep her draperies together, and to pull her hat on her head; but though the intention is evident, she accomplishes little by her motion. . . . This woman, upon the first change of weather, rose like a cork, dressed like a Christian, and toddled about the deck in the easiest manner . . . is supposed by some to have been an impostor, and, when ill-treated, announced intentions of writing a book.35
Chev appears in the text as The Philanthropist, or occasionally, The Phrenologist. She also gave scathing and uncensored descriptions of the Nassauese, Cubans, Creoles, and slaves. In Nassau, she reflected “it is a dolorous thing to live on a lonely little island, tied up like a wart on the face of civilization.” She was dismayed by the docile subordination of the society women, who accepted “an Oriental submission. In the public street they must on no account set foot, . . . without the severe escort of husband or brother” or “the black coachman who escorts the wealthiest women to shop and pay visits.” After a few days in Havana, Julia concluded that Cuban men had so much “animal vigor” and could be so sexually aggressive in the street, that “women must be glad to forgo their liberties for the protection of the strong arm.” She thought the Cubans overall had poor taste and little artistic talent.
Her most offensive comments were about race and slavery. She recorded her views that “the Negro of the North is an ideal Negro; it is the Negro refined by white culture, elevated by white blood, instructed even by white inequity;—the Negro among the Negroes is a coarse, grinning, flat-footed, thick skulled creature, ugly as Caliban, lazy as the laziest of brutes, chiefly ambitious to be of no use to any in the world.” Her racist prejudices underlay her feeling that emancipation should come gradually as slaves grew intellectually and morally through exposure to white society and culture. The slave, she concluded, “must go to school to the white race, and his discipline must be long and laborious.”36 It’s astonishing to think that she had been serving tea to John Brown a month before, and that in another year she would be writing about the Christian duty to abolish slavery. When the book on Cuba came out in 1860, she was attacked for her views by William Lloyd Garrison in theLiberator. Chev was mildly disturbed; “some things in it made me sad,” he wrote to Parker, “e.g. the question whether viewing the actual condition of the Negro, enforced labor is not best!—As if anything would justify the perpetuation of such wrong by the stronger race.”37
When they got to Havana, Theodore and Lydia Parker departed for Santa Cruz, en route to Italy, where they hoped he might recover. The Howes were melancholy to be parting, probably forever, from “the great fighter. How were we to miss his deep music, here and at home! With his assistance we had made a very respectable band; now we were to be only a wandering drum and fife—the fife particularly shrill and the drum particularly solemn.” They said a sad good-bye. “And now came silence, and tears, and last embraces; we slipped down the gangway into our little craft, and looking up, saw bending above us, between the slouched hat and the silver beard, the eyes that we can never forget, that seemed to drop back in the darkness with the solemnity of the last farewell. We went home, and the drum hung himself gloomily on his peg, and the little fife shut up for the remainder of the evening.”38
On the way home, the Howes traveled through the South and stopped at the South Carolina plantation of a wealthy couple, Wade Hampton II and his wife, whose company they had enjoyed in Cuba. They were planning to stay for two days, but the visit grew into two weeks. It was Julia’s first experience of Southern slave owners, and she was impressed by their civilized and hospitable manners. She could not connect this charming couple to the brutality of slavery, and Chev, for all his abolitionist fervor, was similarly attracted to their gracious lifestyle. The trip to Cuba had brought the Howes closer; in April she conceived her sixth child.
John Brown returned to Boston in May, and Chev invited several prominent Bostonians to meet him as “a practical, not a talking abolitionist,” who would be glad to tell them “in his rough way something about his mode of abolitionizing.”39 Brown also tried to persuade Frederick Douglass to join him in a raid of the US Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and get weapons for the army of slaves he was sure would escape and join them in their insurrection, but Douglass thought the plan was doomed and refused to help. In August, Brown’s son John Jr. went to Lawton’s Valley to see Chev, who gave him fifty dollars. Brown then rented Kennedy Farm in Maryland, near Harpers Ferry. That was the last the Howes heard of him for several months. All summer Chev was preoccupied with worries about Julia Romana, who was studying too hard. He wrote to Sumner in July that he “had been in great alarm & distress about my dear & beautiful daughter Julia breaking down under her course of study.” She had been so upset he had feared that “there was danger of aberration of mind, but happily all the . . . symptoms have passed away & she is doing well.”40 His dear friend Horace Mann died on August 2, and Chev busied himself raising money for a monument.
On the evening of October 16, Julia read in the Boston Transcript about a disturbance at the Virginia Armory at Harpers Ferry and drew it to Chev’s attention. “Brown has got to work,” he nonchalantly remarked. Everyone soon knew the bloody nature of that work. Brown had launched an attack with only twenty men, including two of his sons. The siege lasted less than thirty-seven hours. Easily defeated by the federal troops led by Captain Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart, Brown was wounded but captured alive. He was tried and convicted at the end of October for murder and treason, and sentenced to hang on December 2.
During the six weeks he spent in prison, Brown impressed not only New England abolitionists but many citizens, with his dignity, serenity, and courage. His speech before the sentencing judge on October 30 spoke eloquently about his motives: “If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.” Deciding he could best serve his cause as a speaker, writer, and Christian martyr, Brown became a hero to writers including Melville and Whitman. The leading transcendentalists passionately took up his defense. Thoreau was among the first to compare him to Jesus; Emerson rebranded Brown as a holy warrior rather than a mad fanatic, and called his death sentence a crucifixion of “the new saint awaiting his martyrdom, and who, if he shall suffer, will make the gallows glorious like the cross.”41 Bronson Alcott described him as “the manliest man I have ever seen.”42 No wonder that Chev had been so drawn to him.
To his death, Brown refused to name his supporters, but the Secret Six panicked when their letters were discovered in the rented farmhouse and printed in the New York Times. The media rapidly spread the story. On October 27, the day of Brown’s trial, the anti-abolitionist New York Herald printed a lurid editorial about the Secret Six, titled “The Exposure of the Nigger-Worshipping Insurrectionists,” calling for the arrest of Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith as accessories to the crime. Douglass was gone; he had fled the country and stayed away in England. Gerrit Smith had a mental breakdown, convinced that he was responsible for the bloodshed, and tried to join Brown in the prison at Charlestown. Lured by friends who told him they were taking him to Brown in Virginia, Smith was committed for six weeks to the New York State Lunatic Asylum in Utica. Frank Sanborn hastily destroyed his manuscripts and letters. Chev was panicking and terrified that he would be arrested. Only Parker and Higginson stuck by their support of Brown.
Julia always insisted the Howes were unaware of the plans for the Harpers Ferry raid, despite admiring John Brown. “I confess that the whole scheme appeared to me wild and chimerical. Of its details I knew nothing, and have never learned more. None of us could exactly approve an act so revolutionary in its character, yet the great-hearted attempt enlisted our sympathies very strongly.”43 She was most concerned to persuade Annie that Chev was innocent. On November 6, she wrote that “Chev is not at all annoyed by the newspapers, but has been greatly overdone by anxiety and labor for Brown. Much has come upon his shoulders, getting money, paying counsel, and so on. Of course all the stories about the Northern Abolitionists are the merest stuff. No one knew of Brown’s intentions but Brown himself and his handful of men. The attempt I must judge insane but the spirit heroic. I should be glad to be as sure of heaven as that old man may be, following right in the spirit and footsteps of the old martyrs, girding on his sword for the weak and oppressed. His death will be holy and glorious—the gallows cannot dishonor him—he will hallow it. . . .”44 In these words we can see the hint of the “Battle Hymn” to come—the vision of Brown as one of God’s martyred warriors.
This was the only time that Julia deliberately misled her sister. Chev and George Stearns fled by train to Montreal, and on November 16, Chev published an open letter in the New York Tribune denying any knowledge of Brown’s plans and expressing shock that this prudent and peace-loving man could have committed such a bloody act: “It is still to me a mystery and a marvel.”45 His flight and his continued denials infuriated his compatriots and injured his reputation as a courageous hero. “Is there no such thing as honor among confederates?” Thomas Wentworth Higginson demanded of Sanborn.46
Meanwhile, Julia was becoming anxious about the forthcoming birth. Her sixth pregnancy had been her most uncomfortable; she was trying to cope on her own, and fearful that she might die in delivering the child. In late November, she wrote to Chev that she was having a lot of pain, and “should give up altogether but for my red hair.”47 Chev reassured her by mail from Montreal with his customary hearty insouciance. “Dear child, do not be hypochondriacal—like me; you have no cause for it. Look! You inherited a sound and vigorous constitution: you did not marry until it was fully matured. Childbearing when the number does not exceed eight . . . & is not too frequent, & if the system is healthy, tends to prolong, not to shorten the duration of life.”48
When Brown was executed on December 2, still calm and at peace with his acts and motives, New England radicals, intellectuals, and abolitionists were brought together in grief. Bronson Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau attended a memorial meeting in Concord to honor Brown. In Montreal, on the execution day, Chev had taken his usual morning ride. Returning to Boston about December 6, he wrote anxiously to Sumner about his legal position and was reassured that he would not be charged.
Julia was not ungrateful for his presence. By December 22 she was too uncomfortable to sleep, and appreciative, albeit with many qualifiers, for Chev’s “on the whole kind treatment . . . He has really been very good & and has seemed quite fond of me,” she reassured Annie.49 Their second son, Samuel, was born at 3:00 a.m. on Christmas Day. The baby weighed twelve pounds; no wonder Julia had trouble sleeping. Within a week, Chev had returned to Canada, allegedly to study “methods for the education of the blind,” always his cover story and euphemism for whatever adventures he might pursue.
He had agreed to testify before the Senate committee investigating Harpers Ferry, and finally did so on February 3, 1860. His self-protective testimony, in which he answered most questions by saying he could not remember, got him off but left a dent in his knightly image. In May, the Howes learned that Theodore Parker had died in Florence. He was buried in the English Cemetery, where Elizabeth Barrett Browning would also have her tomb. His Florence physician, William Wesselhoeft, was the son of the German homeopath of the same name who had run the Brattleboro Water Cure spa Chev had frequented. Wesselhoeft thoughtfully sent the Doctor a jar containing Parker’s pickled brain. Chev hid the brain in a cupboard; it was not so easy to conceal the guilt of his repudiation of Brown.
In Julia’s mind, Sammy’s birth would always be connected with the death of John Brown. “The time of your birth was a sad one,” she wrote to the infant. “It was the time of the imprisonment and death of John Brown, a very noble man, who should be in one of the many mansions of which Christ tells us.” The delivery could not have been as easy as her others. But Sammy was an enchanting baby. She nursed him for thirteen months, slept with him lying on top of her, dressed him in silk and velvet, and took him with her everywhere. But she did not go out very much. When she came home, she was happy to be with the infant. “It was always sweet to come to the bed, and find you in it, sound asleep, and lying right across. . . . I learned to sleep on a very little bit of the bed, you wanted so much of it. This winter, I bought you a pair of snow-boots, of which you were very proud. . . .” Sammy took up all her attention and love. “I used to think: this Baby will grow up to be a man, and will protect me when I am old,” she wrote in her journal.50 She could not depend on Chev to protect her, but Sammy would be there to take his place.