by John Waugh
Soon Hill was the officer in charge of Miss Nelly’s heart. The quality that citizens of Culpeper County had particularly noted in recommending him for West Point—his “amiability of heart” and “amenity of manners that endeared him to all his acquaintances”—also endeared him to her.19
In the spring of 1856 he proposed and she immediately accepted—without first clearing it with her father. Hill gave her a ring in which were etched the words “Je t’aime.” As Sylvanus Thayer, the father of West Point, had said so long ago, all the important things are written in French.
Captain Marcy in hot, dusty Laredo received the engagement announcement in a letter from Ellen, which hit his desk on May 28.
Only six days before, Marcy had written her; their letters had crossed. In his letter, partly out of the nagging worry about Hill whom he didn’t particularly like, he had rung some familiar themes. He painted for her once again as lurid a picture of garrison life on the frontier as he could. He reviewed the deplorable accommodations, the lack of vegetables, the nonexistence of the basic amenities of a civilized life.
“How in the world any girl of ordinary sense can think of marrying a line officer I cannot imagine,” he wrote pointedly, “for they must make up their minds to spend a life of exile, deprivation and poverty.” He concluded: “So my dearest Nelly I love you too well to see your happiness sacrificed in this way and I hope you will never entertain the idea.”20
Marcy therefore could scarcely believe what he was reading in the letter from her now open on his desk at Fort Mcintosh.
“Astonished,” was the first adjective to burst from his angry pen as he sat down immediately to answer her. A marathon eleven pages of heated words tumbled out. In essence they said, How could you do this to us?
It was a document of mounting recrimination and rage. Gone was the velvet glove with which he had always handled his beloved daughter: “I could never have supposed after the repeated conversations I have had with you upon the subject of marriage, and your knowledge of my opposition to your uniting yourself to a profession which has caused so many privations and separations in families that you would desire to do the very act of all others that is the most objectionable to me.”
As for Hill, “he seemed to be a gentlemanly man,” Marcy conceded, “and if he was not in the army but engaged in some business that would insure you a comfortable home I should not have so much objection, but I should suppose you would have more ambition.” He wrote this girl who knew only that she was in love, that “there are plenty of men who have wealth and position in society, who are equally agreeable as Mr. Hill, and would make you fully as good a husband. You do not think these things of any moment now, but you will see that it is stubborn truth in a few years.”
In a coda to the letter as chilling as any that a father could write a daughter, he said: “I thought I could confide in you and that I had nothing to fear but I find instead of that, you must have been holding out encouragement to him from the time I left. Did my affection for you merit such a breach of confidence? … I forgive you, but I shall expect that you at once abandon all communication with Mr. Hill. If you do not comply with my wishes in this respect, I cannot tell what my feelings toward you would become. I fear that my ardent affection would turn to hate. Do nothing therefore my dear child without choosing between me and him. If I cannot trust you who can I trust?”21
A week later Marcy wrote her a more conciliatory letter, addressing it to “My Dear Sweet Child.” Regretting that he may have caused her pain, he suggested that she postpone making up her mind on the subject for six months or a year. This would permit her to consider the subject “in all its bearings,” and come to “a more just and reasonable conclusion,” one more in line with his view of the matter.
He told her he needed more information about Hill. If the lieutenant had sufficient means to support her without his pay, he might look on him more favorably. He would make enquiries, but he would make no promises, “except that if I find he has not enough to make you independent in the event of his death, I shall refuse my consent.”22
In his next letter, Marcy told Ellen he had heard from Hill. He was worth about ten thousand dollars. “This is something,” the father conceded, “but not much.” Ellen by now was fighting back. She reminded her father that McClellan was also in the army, but he had no objections to her marrying him. McClellan was a different case, Marcy argued. “Although I should not have objected to your marrying Capt. McClellan yet I had no great desire for it after he went into the line of the Army, as the same hard fare would have awaited you as with other officers. His talents and well known high character, with the warm friendship which exists between us would have caused me to disregard all other considerations and given you to him.”23
In Washington meanwhile, Hill was feeling a strong sense of déjà-vu. This was Emma Wilson and her snooty parents all over again. But the worst was yet to come. While Marcy was playing hardball with his daughter, Mrs. Marcy was about to unload on Hill directly. She had somehow learned of his indiscretions at West Point and of the gonorrhea, and she would see that the word got out and about.24
Into this caldron, fresh from studying warfare in the Crimea, stepped the unsuspecting George McClellan. He had continued corresponding with Mrs. Marcy from Europe, for despite himself he couldn’t give up entirely the possibility, no matter how unlikely, that her daughter might someday be his. Early in January, after not having heard from the mother since August, and fearing the worst, he wrote her a long unhappy letter from Venice. It was a letter forlorn of hope, every dejected word falling like notes from the Dead March of Saul.
“I have had ample time & opportunity to think over the past,” he wrote her, “& to convince myself that, in certain matters, it would have been better long, long ago to have abandoned all hope—as I have done of late, & do fully now. It is idle to chase a phantom through life.… Silence is often eloquent. Yours is to me. I accept the omen.”
If he was reaching the wrong conclusions he wished to know it frankly, for now he was writing from his heart. “What I have said is the result of long reflection and deep conviction—what it has cost me to arrive at this conclusion I need not say.… You understand that in all this I go upon the supposition that Miss Nelly’s feelings are what I had every reason to believe them to be when I left—the most perfect indifference, if not actual dislike, to me; if by any miracle a change had come over the spirit of her dream it would I know bring back all my former hope & feelings. But such a change is not to be looked for, & I am sadly convinced that it were idle to think of it.”25
Back in the United States, McClellan soon learned of Hill’s courtship of Miss Nelly, and went directly to his old classmate for confirmation. McClellan was a gentlemen. When he learned that Hill loved Ellen, too, that settled it if nothing else did. He immediately withdrew from the competition—not that he was, realistically, still in it.
Hill was now seething. Rumors of his youthful indiscretions—the gonorrhea from West Point days and its ramifications—were out. Indeed, Mrs. Marcy was the suspected source. Now playing hardball herself, she had written disparagingly of Hill in two letters to McClellan. And now McClellan was also seething—upset that she would so defame his dear friend, former roommate, and now rival in love. He wrote her a stiff reply: “As a matter of course I transmitted to Hill none of the remarks you made; I thought that you would regret what you had written before the letter reached me—that reflection would convince you that you had been unjust to him, & that you had said unpleasant & bitter things to me in reference to one of my oldest & best friends.”
Under no circumstance, he told her, would he have repeated such things. “If a gentleman had made use of such expressions to me about Hill, I should have insulted him, & made the quarrel my own—as a personal insult to myself; had any lady, merely an ordinary acquaintance, done the same, I should have regarded it as sufficient ground to discontinue the acquaintance.…” But McClellan wouldn’t risk alienating th
e mother entirely—an alienated daughter was more than enough. “In your case,” he reassured her, “it is different. I know how much you felt, how deeply you have been distressed—& was confident that what you wrote was when under the influence of deep feeling, which for the moment overcame the natural kind impulses of your heart & judgment. So I shall destroy your letter & never allude to its contents to any human being.”26
But he had had it. He was through once and for all with this entire depressing business. If there had ever been hope, it was now clearly dead. McClellan returned to writing his Crimea report and spending his days and nights in Philadelphia “pretty much in the old way—a vast number of cigars, a good deal of reading & not a little working,”27 If a loveless life was to be his lot, then pass the cigars.
About the time McClellan was beating this final retreat, Ellen was also writing her father a letter of surrender. She had also had enough. She would bow to his wishes and call off her engagement to Hill. Marcy had won, and he was expansive in victory. “My dear daughter,” he wrote her, “I always had the most unbounded confidence in your integrity and purity of purpose.” Her act of sacrifice fully confirmed his opinion that “you are a noble generous girl and I long to take you in my arms again. You are the pride of my heart and a dear good girl.”28
Mrs. Marcy had mixed emotions. She too had won—and lost. Her hope had always been that Ellen would marry McClellan. That hope had been blasted in the Hill affair. She wrote her daughter: “Oh, Nell, such a treasure as you have lost forever. You can’t realize it now, but the time is coming sooner or later just as sure as you live when you will regret it—if ever a woman did. Mark my word, I see it, I know it! Yet your perverseness will in the end make you miserable. I have done all that is in the power of a mother to do, and now whatever your fate may be hereafter, I cannot reproach myself. The more I dwell upon that affair in Washington, the more I am convinced that I am right and you will be convinced of it by and bye. You are laboring under a delusion that perfectly astonishes me. I cannot account for it. You certainly have shown less good sense in this matter than I ever knew you to before.”29
However, if McClellan was through, if Ellen and Marcy and Mrs. Marcy were through, Hill wasn’t. He had been rejected, that was plain. Miss Nelly had reluctantly returned his ring with “Je t’aime” etched within, which he then gave to that other girl he loved, his sister Lute. But there was still the matter of his honor to settle. In the spring of 1857 he wrote Marcy demanding justice.
He charged Mrs. Marcy as the source of the affront to his character and good name. “I have ever thought her a woman of good feeling and judgment, though somewhat warped against me,” Hill wrote Marcy. Her objection to his suit, he wrote, was apparently on grounds that from “certain early imprudences, (youthful indiscretions I suppose), my health and constitution had become so impaired, so weakened, that no mother could yield her daughter to me, unless to certain unhappiness.” This was outrageous. The innuendo was “fatally blighting.” He demanded that Marcy set it right and that Mrs. Marcy “correct this false impression with whomever she may have had any agency in hearing it.” He demanded that “in justice both to herself and myself she should make known the name of her informant to be used by me as I may see fit.”30
A man of honor, Marcy wrote his wife demanding to know if this were so. If Hill’s charges were true, “I should insist upon Ellen’s marrying Mr. Hill at once as a just reparation.” But Mrs. Marcy was able to explain it away to her husband’s satisfaction. Nothing more came of it and Hill didn’t press the matter further. He too had finally had enough.31
But the result wasn’t doing much for that quirk in his constitution that made being in love with someone as necessary as his dinner. He returned to the social circuit, threading his way through the round of Washington parties. One evening a year after he had hopelessly lost Ellen Marcy, he found what he was looking for across another crowded room. She was young, petite, blue-eyed, vivacious, and beautiful with a head of cascading chestnut hair.
This find, Kitty Grosh Morgan McClung, was even more than met the eye. She was, at twenty-three, a high-born Kentucky girl and already the widow of a wealthy young St. Louis merchant who had unexpectedly and tragically died. Her family were the Morgans of Lexington. God willing, they wouldn’t be like the Wilsons and the Marcys.
As a baby, Kitty had been virtually picture perfect, resembling a life-size china doll, so her black mammy had nicknamed her Dolly. She hadn’t changed much over the years, adding to her arsenal of charms a soft, lovely talking voice, which when raised in song brought to mind the heavenly choir. Hill called her Dolly and fell in love with her. They courted through 1858, and on June 18, the next year, Hill wrote McClellan a letter.32
He wished he could tell his old friend this news over a cigar, he said, but a letter will have to do. “I’m afraid there is no mistake about it this time, old fellow,” he wrote, “and please God, and Kentucky blue-grass, my bachelor life is about to end.” He was about to swell the ranks of those other “blessed martyrs” who have been undone by “crinoline and blue eyes.” He was about to marry a Kentucky “ ‘widder’ … young, 24 years y no mas, gentle and amiable, yet lively, sufficiently good looking for me.” What is more, Mac, “I know you will like her, and when you come to know her, say that I have done well.” He said that he expected to assume his martyrdom in a ceremony in Lexington in July, and could Mac come down from Chicago for it? “You know that there is [none] whose presence would delight me more.”
In the same letter Hill blew final taps over his affair with Ellen Marcy: “I have heard a report lately which has amazed me a good deal, that the Marcys had given their consent to my marrying Miss Nelly, and that I had declined.” McClellan “would of course know this was untrue, but others might believe it. If you should ever hear it, please contradict it for me.” In the last communication he had had with Miss Nelly, about two years ago, “she positively and without leaving a ray of hope, rejected me—and that’s the truth.”33 McClellan knew how that felt.
Hill was married on July 18, 1859, at Hopemont, the Morgan home in Lexington, where Kitty’s mammy had first called her Dolly. The bride wore net-covered taffeta and Hill wore his full-dress uniform, a flowing red moustache, and a satisfied smile.34
George McClellan finished his Crimea report in 1856 to the general acclaim of all who read it. It was outstanding, as everybody expected it would be. Then he had done what he had been threatening to do for a long time. He left the army, to take a job as chief engineer of the Illinois Central Railroad. By 1858, when many of his classmates were still on the frontier fighting Indians, he was in Chicago beginning his rise in the corporate world.
In March that year he was reading in the papers, as the rest of an enthralled nation was, of a daring army relief expedition from Wyoming to New Mexico. It was an incredible story of courage and endurance that had saved the snowbound U.S. Army command that had been sent to quell the Mormon rebellion in Utah Territory. Forty army volunteers, twenty-five mountain men, and sixty-five mules with rations for thirty days had set out across the bleak snow-mantled wilderness for Fort Massachusetts over six hundred miles away. The success or failure of the Mormon campaign depended on the mission succeeding. The redoubtable mountain man Jim Bridger warned that it could not be done. And it nearly couldn’t. The journey took fifty-two days against inhuman hardships, an odyssey seldom matched for privation and suffering. It was making big headlines in newspapers in every city, and its leader had been Randolph Marcy.35
When McClellan read of it in Chicago, he set the papers aside and took up his pen. He saw this as more than the heroic epic of the century. He saw it as an opportunity. Slipping out a piece of official stationery impressively embossed with his title, Vice President of the Illinois Central Railroad Company, he wrote the date, March 17, 1858.
“My dear Nelly,” he began.
McClellan had made a miraculous breakthrough not long before. He had managed to start up a tentative corr
espondence directly with Ellen Marcy herself. He had just received a letter from her with an extract of a letter from Marcy following his ordeal. Suitors were still jostling and panting all about Miss Nelly, but she had unbent enough toward McClellan to begin writing him after her years-long silence. After all his many letters to her mother, McClellan was now in direct contact with the real thing. Hope was alive again. The patient had come back from the dead.
In the letter he was writing her now he praised the father’s heroism and soothed the daughter’s fears. It was “the most difficult journey ever made by an Army officer,” he wrote her of her father’s heroics. He told her he felt “very keenly for you & your mother in the anxiety you have felt—but hope that you will now look upon the bright side of things—& not invent difficulties which do not exist.” He promised her that the worst was over, that her father was now in no further danger. This coming from a man who ought to know must have been comforting to Ellen Marcy.
Having taken care of the father, McClellan now subtly turned down another avenue. “So you are as much of a Presbyterian as ever?” he asked playfully. From this he worked the letter around to his own lot in life. While things are going well with him, he said, they could be better. “I hate to think of the future now—it seems so blank—no goal to reach, no object to strive for! Yet, foolish fellow that I am, there are many much worse off than I am in this world, & who no doubt envy me my position! Was mortal man, or woman, ever contented? So life passes—we wish, and dream—build castles in the air—struggle for the unattainable.” Yes, he told her, “fate does not throw roses alone in our path,” and at last, when it is often too late, we awake to the fact that we have been “grasping at shadows all our lives! Is that not true—little lady?”