Until 1826 all the Shrivers in America were Protestant. That changed when William Shriver, the fourth of Andrew Shriver’s sons, wed Mary Josephine Owings, a devout woman from a prominent Maryland Catholic family. William at first declined to convert to his wife’s faith, but Mary Owings raised her children as Catholics, among them Sargent’s grandfather Thomas Herbert, known as Herbert. After his wedding, William Shriver assumed management of his father’s mill and built a new home for himself across the road from the mill, where he lived until the end of his life. In this home were born both Sargent Shriver’s grandfather and Sargent’s mother, Hilda, Herbert’s daughter. Sargent himself spent his childhood summers in this house and was baptized in the chapel that Maria Owings had had consecrated in the living room.
During the Civil War, Maryland lay on the border between North and South, and although officially on the side of the Union, its citizens were divided in their sympathies: The county that included Union Mills sent about 600 soldiers to the North, 200 to the South. Neighbors in adjacent houses took opposing sides. Families turned against each other.
The Shrivers were no exception. William Shriver, although he was opposed to slavery, was a great champion of states’ rights and ardently supported the Southern cause. Six of his nine sons would serve in the Confederate army. Just across the road lived William’s brother Andrew, who, despite being a slave owner, was a staunch Unionist; his son was serving in the Twenty-sixth Emergency Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers. “My four cousins, C. Columbus, A. Keiser, Mark O. and T. Herbert Shriver, joined the Confederate army, while my own brother, H. Wirt Shriver, went to the defense of the Stars and Stripes,” wrote Louis Shriver years after the war. “Our two families lived close together and although we continued to visit back and forth, social intercourse was always strained and often resulted in unhappy arguments.”
On the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg, the Shriver family became divided as never before. On June 27, 1863, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s cavalry commander, J. E. B. Stuart, entered Maryland with 5,000 Confederate cavalry and two days later arrived in Westminster, 7 miles south of Union Mills. On the morning of Tuesday, June 30, General Stuart arrived for breakfast at the Union Mills home of William Shriver, setting up his headquarters in the home where Sargent Shriver would be born fifty years later.
As Stuart began making preparations to lead his troops north toward Gettysburg, he took aside William Shriver’s son Herbert, who was sixteen years old, and asked him if he could lead him through the backwoods country roads to Pennsylvania. When Herbert said he could, Jeb Stuart asked permission of William and Mary Shriver to take their son as a guide. When they consented, General Stuart promised to keep him safe and to enroll him at the Virginia Military Institute. After breakfast the whole family—William Shriver’s family on one side of the road, Andrew Shriver’s family on the other—gathered on the front porch to watch Jeb Stuart’s cavalry ride north toward Pennsylvania, with Herbert Shriver riding directly alongside the general. Herbert led Stuart’s cavalry 4 miles north through the back roads of Maryland into Pennsylvania to Gettysburg, where General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was already engaged with the Army of the Potomac. During the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Herbert stood alongside General Stuart amid a grove of hickory trees, watching the green of the fields become obscured by piles of the dead, and clear streams turning opaque with blood. When a Confederate soldier fell back into Herbert’s arms, mortally wounded by a rifle shot, he gasped, “for God’s sake, Shriver, tell them I was facing the enemy.”
Hours after the last of Stuart’s cavalry had disappeared from view over the hills to the north of Union Mills, Gen. George Sykes’s Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac appeared from the south. Sykes’s men marched directly into Union Mills, pitching their tents all along the hills above Pipe Creek. Andrew and William Shriver now switched roles: Andrew’s family swelled with pride at the Union blue; across the road, the Confederate-gray hearts of William’s family fell. Whereas General Stuart had made his staff headquarters at William Shriver’s house, Gen. James Barnes, a Union commander, now made his staff headquarters across the road in Andrew’s house. The following morning the Fifth Corps broke camp and marched north, arriving on the morning of July 2 at Gettysburg, where it helped the Army of the Potomac seal victory.
As North and South clashed at Gettysburg, the sound of gunfire shook the windows and rattled the dishware at Union Mills. “We heard the cannon of the battle,” wrote Andrew’s daughter Kate Shriver in her memoir, “and soon the wounded and prisoners began to go down the pike toward Westminster.” The wounded soldiers made great demands on both Shriver families. Whereas the Andrew Shrivers were robbed and vandalized by the Confederate soldiers, the William Shrivers were robbed and vandalized by the Union soldiers. “There has been a sort of bitter feeling between the two families,” wrote Frederick Shriver a few days later, “but there is hardly any doubt but that it will soon wear off.”
One evening during the Battle of Gettysburg a drunken soldier began raising a ruckus in front of the Shrivers’ mill. When an officer arrived to discipline him, the soldier shot him dead. The bullet tore right through the officer’s body and lodged in the wall of the mill, 2 feet from its front door. The bullet remained lodged in the wall of the mill, still there when Sargent Shriver was a boy, a tangible memento of Union Mills’s Civil War days.
As General Stuart had promised, Herbert Shriver returned home safely several months later and shortly thereafter enrolled as a cadet at the Virginia Military Institute (VMI). On May 15, Herbert Shriver and some 280 of his fellow VMI cadets were called upon to assist the embattled Gen. John C. Breckenridge, who was pinned down by Union troops at the sleepy crossroads town of New Market, Virginia. Herbert was shot and wounded, but the VMI cadets routed the Union soldiers of the Thirty-fourth Massachusetts Army, helping to produce a Confederate victory at the Battle of New Market. Herbert Shriver was decorated for his efforts, and he served out the remainder of the war in the First Maryland Cavalry.
The lore of the Shrivers’ service during the war permeated the culture of Union Mills. The Civil War, although it ended fifty years before his birth, was a living part of Sargent Shriver’s childhood. Enmity over the war lingered long into the twentieth century and colored the relations between the residents of Sargent’s house (William Shriver’s Confederate household) and the residents of his cousin Louis’s house across the street (Andrew Shriver’s Union household). As William H. Shriver, Sargent Shriver’s uncle, would later recall, the Civil War stories of Herbert Shriver’s generation “echoed throughout the home, year after year, to hosts of friends and guests even … up to the departure of those who lived during these times of cherished memories.” The “hurrahs and songs” of Jeb Stuart at the Union Mills Steinway piano “re-echo through long memories” and were passed on to later generations. To the young Sargent Shriver, the Civil War was not some abstract fact from the history books but, rather, a tangible part of the culture that surrounded him.
Herbert Shriver—one of the last surrendering Confederates—returned to Maryland to take over the business of running the family mill, with the help of his older brother, Benjamin Franklin Shriver. They remodeled the mill and upgraded its equipment with machinery produced by the Industrial Revolution. In 1869 the two brothers founded the B. F. Shriver Canning Company.
In addition to working at the canning company, Herbert continued the Shriver family political tradition, representing Carroll County for one term each in the Maryland House of Representatives and the Maryland Senate. In 1908 he was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, which nominated William Jennings Bryan; in 1912 he was a delegate at the Baltimore convention that nominated Woodrow Wilson. According to Men of Mark in Maryland, published in 1912, “Lately [T. Herbert Shriver] has been frequently mentioned as the next nominee for governor of Maryland of the Democratic party.”
Hilda, the eldest of T. Herbert and Elizabeth Lawson Shriver’s four c
hildren, was born in 1882. She debuted in Baltimore society in 1900 and graduated at the top of her class from Notre Dame College in Baltimore in 1902. In 1907, at a party at the family homestead in Union Mills, she was introduced to a second cousin, Robert Sargent Shriver. Robert, the fourth of Henry and Sarah Van Lear Perry Shriver’s ten children, had been raised in Cumberland, Maryland. Superficially, the cousins appeared ill matched: Robert’s family was Republican and Protestant and had been staunchly pro-Union. Hilda’s family was Democratic and Catholic and had been avowedly pro-Confederacy. But Robert found himself powerfully attracted to Hilda’s good looks, broad intellectual interests, and striking self-confidence. The two were married on June 1, 1910—although not before Hilda received special dispensation from the cardinal archbishop of Baltimore, who was a close friend of her father’s, to marry a non-Catholic. They moved into a rented home at 196 Green Street in Westminster, where Robert was working as an officer of a local bank. Their first son, Herbert, was born in 1911. And on November 9, 1915, their second son, Robert Sargent Shriver, was born in his mother’s bedroom on the second floor of his parents’ house 7 miles south of the Shriver family homestead in Union Mills, on the Pennsylvania border.
For young Sarge, the world revolved around his mother. That wasn’t surprising: Her force of personality was so strong that anyone who came in contact with her tended to find themselves in orbit around her. The patriarchal T. Herbert Shriver had doted on Hilda, his only daughter, instilling in her a confidence and independent-mindedness that were rare in women in the 1920s. Her political principles were fiercely held—she had campaigned strongly for women’s suffrage—but she was so warm and social in her demeanor that everyone (and men in particular) melted in her presence.
In 1914 Robert and Hilda Shriver, at the urging of the Catholic Church hierarchy in Baltimore, agreed to take in a Belgian woman, a refugee from the fighting in Europe. Before the war drove her out of her country, Louise Thiele Carpentier had been an opera singer in Antwerp. She became the nursemaid to the infant Sarge and his older brother. Aside from Hilda, no one—not even his father or brother—exerted a stronger formative influence on young Sargent Shriver than Louise Carpentier. Under Louise’s influence, Sargent was speaking fluent Flemish before he spoke English; by the time he was five years old he could sing along with Enrico Caruso on the records she played for him on the family Victrola. His earliest career aspiration was to be an opera singer.
Sargent’s father was more reserved than Hilda and more distant in his relationship with his two sons. But Robert, like his son, felt Hilda’s force powerfully. He left banking and went to work for his father-in-law as a vice president at the B. F. Shriver Canning Company. As the two brothers grew older, Sargent took after his mother, becoming garrulous and outgoing, with a zest for political discussion and public life; Herbert, meanwhile, took after his father, becoming taciturn and reserved, with a yen for Wall Street finance.
Although Robert Shriver was a Protestant when he married Hilda, he soon converted to Catholicism. This was not a conversion for mere appearance’s sake; Robert became devout in his faith. He later joined or founded many Catholic aid societies: In 1922 he and Hilda founded Baltimore’s Catholic Evidence League (whose purpose was to help Catholics apply Church teachings to their daily lives), and in the 1930s the Shrivers would found a Catholic bookstore in New York City. Robert also founded the National Catholic Convert League, later renamed the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, which gave money to support married Protestant clergymen who converted to Catholicism. Robert also made weekly forays into the Baltimore slums to distribute food to the poor.
It is impossible to overstate the presence of religion in Sargent Shriver’s childhood. Maryland had been founded on the principle of religious toleration by Lord Baltimore, a convert to Catholicism who set out to establish an American colony whose inhabitants might worship freely, according to their consciences. The years preceding Sargent’s birth had seen Baltimore become “the Catholic capital of the United States.” The city of Baltimore had been the first Catholic diocese in the United States, and by 1860, the archdiocese had 120,000 Catholics and 127 priests and was continuing to grow fast. The councils of the American Catholic Church were based in Baltimore, and much of the communication between the Vatican and the American bishops came through the Catholic hierarchy in the city. Maryland’s large Catholic population was still rapidly growing when Sargent was born. The Smith & Reifsnider men who delivered coal to his house would warn the young Sargent to “watch out for the Ku Klux Klan,” alluding to the organization’s virulent anti-Catholic bias—but as far as he knew, practically the whole world (except for his grumpy cousins at Union Mills) was Catholic.
Upon his discharge from the Confederate army, Sargent’s grandfather T. Herbert Shriver had believed his true calling to be the priesthood. Twice he had entered St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, run by the Sulpician Fathers, intending to become a priest; twice, after falling gravely ill, he had been compelled to leave. After Herbert’s second illness, Father François Lhomme, the superior at St. Mary’s, told him, in effect, “You are clearly a good Catholic and have a sincere desire to become a man of the cloth. But maybe God is telling you that you are meant for other things.” Herbert agreed and went on to become a successful businessman and politician, as well as one of Maryland’s leading Catholic laymen.
During one of Herbert’s sojourns at St. Mary’s, he roomed with a skinny young Irishman named James Gibbons, who would go on to become the archbishop of Baltimore and, a few years after that, the first American priest to be designated a cardinal. Herbert’s sister Mollie Shriver lived year-round in Union Mills, and whenever Cardinal Gibbons wanted to escape the press of city life in Baltimore, he would retreat to her rural home—the same home where Sargent’s family spent its summers. Sargent and Herbert Shriver were surely the only boys in America who slept next to a cardinal every night during their summer vacation.
“In the simple and dignified atmosphere of this Catholic family Cardinal Gibbons felt thoroughly at home,” Gibbons’s biographer has written. “He frequently remarked that he knew of no finer Catholic family than the Shrivers. At Union Mills … the Shriver girls served him as temporary secretaries and prepared the dishes he relished, while their brothers drove him back and forth to the city, discussed current baseball or horse-racing news, and sometimes accompanied him on his walks or afforded him competition at horseshoes.” Hilda Shriver spent each summer as the cardinal’s full-time secretary, helping him with the administrative affairs of the archdiocese. Sargent and his older brother and their cousins would serve as altar boys at Mass in the family chapel, which Gibbons himself had consecrated in the late 1800s at the behest of Sargent’s great-grandmother Mary Shriver. It’s a striking picture: Five-year-old “Sarge”—as everybody called him—and his cousins would be playing baseball in the rolling fields beside the creek in Union Mills. A bell would ring, signaling evening Mass. Throwing balls, bats, and gloves aside, the boys would run into the house, rustle through the closet for their acolyte vestments, and then stand silently as they prepared to assist with the pouring of the wine.
When stricken with his final illness, the cardinal went to Miss Mollie’s to rest; he spent all but his very last days in her home. Sarge and his cousin William served as altar boys at the last Mass ever served by the cardinal, on December 9, 1920. Soon thereafter, Gibbons was confined by illness to his bedroom at Mollie Shriver’s, and he was anointed with the last rites of the Catholic Church there on December 17. But a week later his health momentarily improved, and he was able to attend the Christmas Midnight Mass.
That Midnight Mass made an indelible impression on Sarge Shriver. The cardinal, for the first time in the last fifty-two Christmases, was too ill to celebrate a pontifical Mass, so another local priest was sent for. The cardinal had been sick for several days, too weak even to rise from his Union Mills bed, where he was tended to round the clock by Hilda and Mollie. But on Christmas Eve, Sarge�
��s Belgian nursemaid, Louise Carpentier, stood on the stairs between the first and second floors and, with her beautiful voice, sang Christmas carols to the cardinal; the nursemaid’s beau, a fellow Belgian, accompanied her on the organ from the chapel downstairs. Some forty Shrivers looked on. Lying in bed, Gibbons smiled, and Sarge could see the color returning to his face and the strength to his body. Unable to descend the stairs to the chapel, Gibbons asked to have his bed pushed out onto the upstairs landing, from which he could peer over the railing and participate in the Mass. This was the first time in his life that five-year-old Sarge contemplated the power of religion as a potentially miraculous force.
The Catholic religion was woven into the fabric of Shriver’s daily life. Baptized by the cardinal himself, Shriver was accustomed to the regular presence of nuns, priests, monsignors, bishops, and seminary students, who were always coming by the house, often staying overnight. On Sundays after the cardinal died, all the Catholic members of the extended Shriver clan would pile into two Model T Fords and four or five horse-drawn wagons and travel 7 miles in a convoy from Union Mills to Westminster to attend Mass.
Although he spent his summers in Union Mills, Sarge lived the first few years of his life in Westminster, in the rented home on Green Street where he was born. That house, a square, brick structure, two stories tall, still stands, its exterior not noticeably changed in eighty-five years.
Green Street was at the edge of the town proper; the Shrivers’ backyard ran down an incline a few hundred yards to where Westminster’s “Negro” population, ex-slaves or the descendants of slaves, lived in small shacks clustered together in the dirt. Every afternoon after school, Sarge would run into his backyard, halfway between his house and the Negro shacks, and meet his friends to play baseball. Sometimes he would go home with one or another of his Negro friends for dinner, and he’d come home marveling at the exotic foods he had eaten there. “Why don’t we slaughter hogs in the backyard and hang the pigs in the house until it’s time to eat them?” he would ask his parents.
Sarge: The Life and Times of Sargent Shriver Page 4