In the coming months and years, many of the men Constance knew went to war, including her future brother-in-law, George Benedict; Flora’s brother Oliver; and Arabella’s brother George, whose experiences working for the U.S. Sanitary Commission she would use in The Old Stone House. (Charlie was too young to go.) But it was her friend Zephaniah Swift Spalding who would come to encompass for her the heroism and tragedy of the war, inspiring intense emotions like no others she had yet experienced. The eldest son of the abolitionist Judge Rufus P. Spalding, Zeph, as he was called, was a friend from Constance’s summers on Mackinac Island.19 He was two years older and had a sister her age who was a classmate at the Cleveland Female Seminary. When exactly Constance fell for him is not clear. But when the war started she already saw a crown, if not a halo, encircling his head.
Zeph was a dashing young man, Germanic in looks, with blond wavy hair, clear blue eyes, prominent cheekbones, a large moustache that curled over his lips, and a long, straight “Greek” nose. Constance would later base many characters on him. In one story she wrote, “He was a marvel of beauty, this young soldier, with his tall, well-knit, graceful form, his wavy golden hair, and blonde mustache sweeping over a mouth of child-like sweetness. He had a cleft in his chin like the young Antinous that he was, while a bold profile and commanding air relieved the otherwise almost too great loveliness of a face which invariably attracted all eyes.”20
In The Old Stone House she had Zeph particularly in mind as she created the character Hugh Warrington. Like Zeph during their last summer on Mackinac Island, Hugh is twenty, has curly hair, is strong and manly, and views the world as his to conquer. His younger cousin Bessie, an artist whose temper and restlessness were based in part on Connie’s own personality, looks up to Hugh, idolizing him and envying his independence. Hugh confides in Bessie his plans for his future—to go to New York, work his way up in business, and by forty retire a rich man with leisure to travel the world. “I suppose it sounds conceited,” Hugh admits, “but I have unbounded confidence in myself.”21 As did Zeph. Just as Constance had watched the circle of her own life contract upon her return from Madame Chegaray’s, Zeph was on his way to conquer the world, beginning with a job as a clerk in New York, just like Hugh. Zeph’s life was so full of promise, his physical presence so commanding, his disposition so sunny that Connie could not help but idolize him.
The only known surviving portrait of Zephaniah Spalding, Constance’s wartime beau, probably taken sometime after the Civil War.
(From the collections of Kaua’i Historical Society)
Upon his move to New York, Zeph had joined the Seventh Regiment, a “silk-stocking” militia that had the air of an “exclusive club for New York City’s patrician elite.” The war now handed these ambitious young men their destinies, and Connie watched eagerly to see what Zeph’s would be. Even thirty years later she vividly remembered his father’s speech at the public meeting back in Cleveland to send off the local militia. Rufus Spalding roused up the crowd with calls for “every able bodied citizen [to] put on the armor of a soldier.” They all wept as he offered his own son in his country’s defense, even if it meant he was “brought back to his home on his shield!”22
As his father’s thundering rhetoric resounded in Clevelanders’ ears, Zeph was on his way to Washington with the New York Seventh, outfitted with velvet stools and sandwiches from Delmonico’s. Back at home, Constance listened each morning as she awoke for “the distant call of the newsboy far down the street, ‘Extra! Extra! All about the last battle!’ ” For the rest of her life she would remember rushing out into the street for the paper and bringing it home to devour. On the fourth of May a letter from Zeph appeared in the Cleveland Leader. He and his comrades knew “that it would be necessary ‘to do or die.’ ” Despite the threats of the “Baltimore Roughs,” they made it safely to Washington, where they camped on the marble floors of the House of Representatives. Secretary of State Seward told them they would be “the men who would save the Union.”23 In those first days of the war, they all believed it.
THE ROMANCE AND THE REALITY OF WAR
When the thirty-day enlistment of his regiment was up and it became clear the war would not be over quickly, Zeph came back to Cleveland wearing his uniform. Constance and Flora were caught up in “the glamor that the war threw over the young officers,” Constance wrote many years later. Zeph’s effect on her must have been something like that of the fictional Lieutenant Maxwell Ruger on the inexperienced teacher Flower Moran in her story “A Flower of the Snow.” Ruger looks like Zeph—“a Saxon beauty”—and Flower soon finds herself “ready to plunge with him into those deep shadowed waters of feeling over which society talk usually glides hastily.” The narrator expresses how entwined Flower feels with him: “It is but seldom that souls see each other face to face in this world of masks and armor; sometimes there is a glimpse, sometimes a recognition, but instantly the visor is down again, and all is blank. In this case, however, there was no armor, no mask.” Amid the high emotions of wartime, Constance’s defenses and her fears of acquiescence in marriage crumbled. She and Zeph came to an understanding—they would marry one day, if he survived the war.24 In the meantime, they most likely kept their engagement a secret.
Zeph wasn’t home for long. On August 18, he received a commission as major, third in command, in the Ohio Twenty-Seventh Volunteer Infantry, on a three-year enlistment. Connie, stuck at home, was restless. Many years later she insisted that “the war was the heart and spirit of my life, and everything has seemed tame to me since.” But her experiences during those four years have left few traces. No letters from the period survive and only scattered glimpses appear in later letters. We know that she volunteered with the Soldiers’ Aid Society of Northern Ohio, collecting supplies for new recruits, singing at fund-raising concerts, and serving as postmistress at the Sanitary Fair, helping to raise money for the society’s activities. But as the war dragged on, nursing became Cleveland women’s primary task. Constance later wrote, “[S]ometimes a train of cars filled with wounded and dying would halt in the dépôt, and we tried with food, cordials, and fruits to alleviate the sufferings of the men; but some were past help.”25
Throughout the war, news of Zeph and his regiment appeared regularly in the Herald and Leader newspapers, which Connie read religiously. The highlight of his service came in October 1862 when he led his regiment to victory in the Battle of Corinth in Mississippi, after which he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. Other news from the front was less stirring. The Ohio Twenty-Seventh spent much of the war on senseless weeks-long marches for which they were poorly outfitted. Zeph’s experiences commanding the exhausted regiment, about which he must have written directly to Constance, would later appear in one of her first stories, “A Merry Christmas” (1872). There Mr. Blunt, a former officer in an Ohio regiment, describes the early part of the war as a “campaign full of the hardship without the glory of war. . . . We marched back and forth hundreds of miles through Tennessee and Kentucky, often traveling in a circle, and retracing our steps of the previous day, burning and rebuilding bridges, collecting supplies, guarding passes, acting as reserves, . . . [and helping] to bury the dead.”26
Zeph’s most harrowing wartime experience also appeared in the story as Blunt describes in detail his capture by Confederates and his detention at a prison that mirrors the one at Cahaba, Alabama, where Zeph was taken. Blunt was confronted by “the gaunt inhabitants. . . . Most of them seemed half crazed; but the saddest spectacles of all were those who sat apart, sternly hopeless, waiting for the deliverance of death.” Blunt reflects, “There was one at home who would hear of my capture. Need I say my thoughts were of her?” When a friend plans an escape, Blunt sends with him a note to his beloved. He didn’t have long to languish in prison, however. Like his real-life counterpart, he was soon exchanged and allowed to return home.27
POSTWAR BLUES
At war’s end it wasn’t only the hostilities that had suddenly ceased. The exci
tement and exhilaration that had made the war “the first great event” of Connie’s life were also over. The feeling of having truly “lived” was no more. Her friend and publisher J. Henry Harper wrote many years after her death, “The war for the Union was the great romance of her life.”28 His choice of words was more appropriate than he probably knew, for war and love would always be mingled in her memory, each heightening the experience of the other. With the war and the intense emotions it inspired now at an end, Constance and Zeph had to reexamine their wartime commitment to each other.
Zeph’s feelings about the war could not have been more different from Connie’s. While she tended to romanticize it, he had seen the ugly reality and futility of it. Afterward, he destroyed his uniform and discarded everything that reminded him of his service, refusing to ever talk about the war. He was impatient to get on with his life. In fact, he had done so before the war even ended. In early 1864, he had resigned his commission in the army and become Assistant Special Agent of the Treasury Department in the Military Department of the Cumberland, leasing captured plantations to throngs of northern entrepreneurs hoping to make their fortunes in the fertile cotton fields of the South. There were also many northern officers then involved in the lucrative, illegal trade, and Zeph may have been one of them. He was always “of a speculative nature,” Constance later wrote.29 Before marrying, he would have wanted to secure his fortune, the war having interrupted his upward climb. What he witnessed working for the Treasury Department convinced him that the place to make it was far from Cleveland.
The South had become the nation’s new Canaan. Zeph joined thousands of veterans streaming across the Mason-Dixon Line—including two brothers of Henry James and a son of Harriet Beecher Stowe—many of whom were motivated as much by the desire to help the freed slaves as to enrich themselves. Few profited from their ventures, however. In 1867, when the cotton market collapsed and the vast majority of Yankee planters went home deeply in debt, Zeph ventured even farther afield. By December of that year, he had found another Canaan, in faraway Hawaii, where sugar was set to become the new cotton.30
Zeph was first sent to Hawaii, then a sovereign kingdom, as a spy by his father’s close friend Secretary of State William Seward. He posed as a cotton planter investigating the potential profitability of sugar. Within a year he was appointed the U.S. consul, a post he held until 1869, when he helped form the West Maui Sugar Association. He was finally on his way to striking it rich. By this time, back in Cleveland, Constance already thought of herself as a “spinster.”31
We can’t know exactly how their engagement dissolved—whether she refused Zeph’s invitation to join him in Hawaii or he simply prolonged his return to Cleveland for so long that their understanding collapsed on its own. But there is good reason to believe that Constance felt she had made the greatest sacrifice of her life, for the forfeit of love for duty is one of the major themes of her writings. Her responsibilities at home had become all-consuming. She was the only one left to care for her invalid mother as well as her father, whose health had been deteriorating since the end of the war. Charlie was in his early twenties and trying to make his way in the world, while Clara had married and now needed her sister as much as her parents did. In late 1868, just days before Clara gave birth to her only child, her house caught fire. She was carried to the Woolsons’ home on Prospect Street and gave birth there, with her mother and sister at her side. Clara almost didn’t survive the ordeal. Indeed, it was Constance, not the baby’s mother, who first beheld the new baby’s “wise and scornful” look upon entering the world.32 Between her aging parents and the new mother and baby, Constance would not have felt free to marry a man who lived thousands of miles away on an island in the Pacific.
Whether or not Constance was the one to break the engagement, she was devastated to learn that on July 18, 1871, Zeph had married the sugar heiress Wilhelmina H. Makee. (The couple would one day inherit her father’s substantial holdings, making Zeph one of the wealthiest men in Hawaii.) The fact that Wilhelmina was nine years younger than Constance upset her even more. She would never get over the sting of being supplanted by a virtual child. By then she had started her literary career, and she soon began to write stories featuring unfaithful, inconstant men who prefer younger, wealthier women. She gave the name Wilhelmina, an uncommon name at the time, to a character who lures a man away from the heroine in a story she wrote in 1871. Three years later, the name of her usurper appeared again in “Wilhelmina,” the story of a young woman who patiently waits for her fiancé to return from the war only to find out that he has grown away from her and wishes to marry another.33
However, the story that comes closest to portraying the real-life events and their emotional toll on Constance was never published—yet it was saved when so many other papers and manuscripts were not. In “Hepzibah’s Story,” a New England farm girl waits for her fiancé through the long years of the war, her heart growing “sore with anxious waiting.” Yet even after the war poverty continues to prevent their marrying. Theodore goes west to make a living with his uncle, while she stays home to care for her ailing family. After a few more years and the death of her last family member, she decides to join Theodore, believing her small inheritance will be enough for the farm they always dreamed of. When she arrives, however, she finds him in love with Rose, “a dimpled bright eyed child of sixteen.” Hepzibah quickly discovers that during the long wait she has grown old and lost her youthful good looks. In fact, Theodore barely recognizes her at first, but he is prepared to carry through with his promise. Hepzibah gives him up, however, by faking her death in a fire. The story ends with the marriage announcement of Theodore and Rose.34
Constance would one day realize that all had turned out for the best. Just months before her death she wrote to her nephew, “I should like to see [Zeph] again. If I could get him alone, I dare say we should have a very friendly and funny talk. But, meanwhile, we should both be inwardly thinking, ‘Great heavens—what an escape I had!’ It was only the glamor of the war that brought us together.”35 At the time, however, she nursed her despair, writing fictional and poetic accounts of her pain and wreaking her revenge subtly on clueless male characters who foolishly pursue faithless ingenues.
If Constance felt like a failure in what was considered the most important contest of a woman’s life, she was also unsure about the desirability of success. She had seen the self-immolating quality of her sister Emma’s love and understood marriage as a kind of bondage. In one poem, she portrayed the bride as a “heart-slave for life,” and she had one of her heroines beg her would-be lover, “Let me be your servant,—your slave . . . my lord and master, my only, only love!” In nearly all of her novels, Woolson complicated her portraits of marriage, exposing the sacrifices women had to make to secure their husbands’ love. Marriage was always a mixture of reward and downfall. Yet she professed to believe that a family of one’s own was “the best thing in life . . . the only thing worth living for.”36 She would never get over the feeling that she had not only escaped the repression of marriage but also lost out on possibly the greatest joy in life.
A FATEFUL YEAR
The year before Woolson began her literary career, 1869, was a tumultuous one that would alter her life irrevocably. First, just as it became clear that Zeph was never coming back, Constance lost her two best friends—Flora Payne and Arabella Carter—to marriage. As they became wives, she began to confront what seemed like an empty life before her.
Flora had remained Constance’s idol. Not only had she studied with Louis Agassiz, but she had also spent two years during the war traveling with family friends throughout Europe and the Middle East. Constance’s envy was intense. She wrote to Flora, who felt as if she were in exile, “I wish I could be in ‘exile’ too, if I could visit the most beautiful and famous places the world can show! You are the most fortunate young lady I know, and ought to be the happiest.” After the war, Flora seemed more committed to her intellectual pursuits than
to prospects of marriage. Her friends “thought that she might be a famous musician, a scientist, a linguist, an author, an archaeologist, a translator, an authority on sociological science, so able and acute was her mind, and so thorough and various her training.” Nonetheless, she fell in love and became engaged. Constance watched as her intellectual friend was transformed into a precious object to be kept slim, clean, and fair.37 As the wife of William C. Whitney, future secretary of the navy, Flora would be on display for the rest of her life.
Arabella’s marriage was more distressing to Constance, however. Arabella had taken the place of Constance’s older sisters, and as Constance settled into her own spinsterhood, she had had Arabella to look up to. Arabella’s friendship had provided an alternative to marriage. In 1869 they were thirty-five and twenty-nine and probably imagined they would be spinster aunts together, doting on their nieces and nephews and caring for their aging parents. But now the forty-three-year-old Rev. Alvan Washburn, who had replaced Arabella’s father as rector of Grace Church in 1866, had proposed marriage. Arabella did not march calmly toward her fate, however, for reasons unknown. Constance had to convince her to embrace it, using language indicative of her own susceptibility to the romantic ideal: “Why can’t you fling all your misgivings to the winds and be simply happy? The glory of your life has come to you. Everything else is trivial compared to it. You and he are really alone in the world together. Two souls that love always are. Do give up your past life and duties and BE HAPPY!”38
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