Rebel Souls

by Justin Martin

  In what was perhaps the defining event of the Fiery Fifties, Brown—avenging abolitionist to some, bloodthirsty lunatic to others—had led a raid on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in an attempt to seize a large cache of weapons. He planned to distribute them to slaves in the hopes of fomenting an armed insurrection in the South. A force led by Colonel Robert E. Lee captured Brown, but not before ten of the raiders were killed, along with a US Marine and six civilians. Brown, age fifty-nine, tall and lean with a shock of white hair and that Old Testament beard, was placed under heavy guard at a jail in Charlestown, Virginia. From his cell, Brown composed the note that contained his last words: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood.”

  Upon arriving in Charlestown, amid all the commotion, John did little more than mill around. He wore a borrowed uniform, but had brought along his own pistol and knife. He camped and cooked, and at night he entertained his fellow militiamen by reciting Shakespeare. On December 2, 1859, he looked on as Brown was hung at the scaffold. Then John Wilkes Booth returned to Richmond and resumed his acting career.

  Meanwhile, back at Pfaff’s, Clapp continued to build an American Bohemia. There was Whitman, of course. Still unemployed, he was just barely scraping by. “Poor Walt!” he would recall of this period in his life. “Poor most everybody! Always hard up!” In lieu of money, however, he was luxuriating in time, having attained a kind of temporal wealth. He had time enough to hang out at Pfaff’s and ample time left over in which to write.

  As a consequence, Whitman was now in the midst of another creative cloudburst, the equal of the one that had produced the first edition of Leaves of Grass. He was working on a number of new poems. As yet, he wasn’t submitting any of them for publication. Whenever the mood proved placid and conducive, however, he continued to read his poems in progress to the assembled artists.

  Besides Whitman, there was no telling who else might show up at Pfaff’s. That was part of the fun, the intrigue. These were Bohemians, after all—things were free and loose, and the crowd varied from one night to the next. Sometimes O’Brien and Arnold were there, sometimes Ludlow and Aldrich. Other regulars in the saloon’s early days included sculptor Launt Thompson, playwright Ned Wilkins, and Count Adam de Gurowski, an eccentric, one-eyed Polish nobleman in exile.

  Clapp, an editor by both trade and temperament, applied his natural gifts to the composition of his table, constantly fiddling with the mix. He was forever driving away Bohemian hopefuls with cruel jibes so as to make room for writers and artists he held in greater esteem. He could be ruthless, but it was in service to an ideal—the perfect combination of clever drunken revelers. On any given night, one was guaranteed to meet some interesting men at Clapp’s long table.

  5: Bold Women and Whitman’s Beautiful Boys

  ALSO WOMEN. One of the notable things about Pfaff’s was that the saloon welcomed them at a time when American society was extremely segregated by gender.

  During the 1850s, there were considerable constraints regarding where a woman could go in public. A proper woman could accompany her husband or a serious beau to a church social or to an institution of betterment such as a library or museum. She could go for a stroll along a promenade, maybe take in an evening at the opera. But a woman who was unaccompanied by a man had to be very careful, lest she convey the wrong impression. A lone woman out on the town raised questions, invited suspicion. In fact, there’s a term from this era that says it all: prostitutes were commonly called “public women.”

  To avoid even the appearance of impropriety, to stave off unwanted advances from men, women frequently went on outings in groups. Many American cities accommodated this custom by providing spots exclusively for women. New York featured an array of these places, such as the Ladies’ Reading Room, Ladies’ Oyster Shop, and Ladies’ Bowling Alley. There was even a large women-only eatery on Broadway called Taylor’s, which fed three thousand female customers on an average day in the 1850s. It was “the restaurant of the age,” said the New York Herald. When Central Park opened in 1858, a separate section of the lake was set aside for unaccompanied women who wished to ice skate in peace.

  There were also public institutions that were decidedly male domains—taverns chief among them. McSorley’s, a legendary Manhattan watering hole and contemporary of Pfaff’s (it opened in 1854), had the slogan “Good Ale, Raw Onions, and No Ladies.” It wasn’t as though women didn’t drink. Rather, they had their own conventions in this gender-split society. Often, they consumed alcohol as the active ingredient in tonics and patent medicines, touted as mood elevators or means to calm frazzled nerves. Or a woman might purchase a “growler,” an ale-to-go that could be consumed in the privacy of her own home. To order a growler, a woman would enter a saloon via a separate doorway, if possible. A lady’s entrance was a common feature of drinking establishments of the time. That way, a respectable woman could be spared the embarrassment of walking through the barroom proper and being subjected to stares and lewd comments.

  But Herr Pfaff hailed from Europe, where different rules applied. He was also a smart businessman, who recognized an opportunity in catering to females, especially in populous Manhattan, where there were many different kinds of people, not all of them slavishly devoted to the prevailing mores of the day. Even in the 1850s, in other words, there were women who were happy to hang out in a bar. Pfaff’s was their place.

  As for Clapp, he was simply a man ahead of his time. In his youth, he’d become an esteemed lecturer on issues such as temperance and abolitionism, but also women’s rights. Nearly a century before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Clapp had been an advocate of women’s suffrage. Of course, he’d also had his own taste of European mores, visiting Bohemian Paris and hanging out in cafés where the sexes freely mingled. There, Clapp had spent time with women such as Octavie, enchanted by their conversational skills. No surprise, then, that when it came to assembling his coterie, Clapp was keen to include women. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he respected women, considered them his equals—provided they could match wits with him. Once, Clapp even took a swipe at the Nation magazine, calling it “Stag-Nation”—a well-aimed jab that, among other things, captured the fact that in those days the publication had male contributors, almost exclusively.

  One of the women who found a place at Clapp’s table was Ada Clare. Clare was born into a wealthy cotton dynasty that traced its Charleston, South Carolina, lineage back to the years before the Revolutionary War. Her given name was Ada Agnes McElhenney, and her family was related to some of the South’s most distinguished figures. She was a grandniece of Robert Hayne, a senator from South Carolina during the 1820s and 1830s. She was a distant relative of John Calhoun, one of the most outspoken advocates of states’ rights and slavery in the antebellum period.

  When Clare was still a young girl, both her parents died from illnesses, succumbing only a few years apart. She was raised by her grandparents. Every effort was made to prepare her to be a proper planter’s wife. The fine points of etiquette were ceaselessly drummed into her. To quell her appetite and keep herself slim, Clare was urged to drink a glass of vinegar in the morning. In the presence of eligible young gentlemen, Clare was encouraged to be mostly silent, restricting herself to a supportive laugh or a coquettish glance. None of this really took. By her teen years, she considered herself a “spirituelle,” a term often used (before the advent of Bohemian) to describe a woman who led a free and easy life in pursuit of art. Already, she longed to escape a future that threatened to be, as she put it, “a series of little acts, a dead level of vapid monotony.”

  At twenty, Clare set off for New York City to try to make it as an actress. In the eyes of her respectable southern family, there was shame enough in the choice. But she managed to pile on further scandal by stealing a private fund her relations had raised, earmarked for a monument to recently deceased John Calh
oun. She used the money to get settled in Manhattan (and would later pay back the sum with interest). Around this time, she also transformed from Ada McElhenney into Ada Clare. The latter struck her as a fitting stage name, easier to remember and easier to pronounce than her given name. “Ada Clare” also happens to be a character in Dickens’s novel Bleak House. The fictional Clare is an orphan, something her real-life counterpart saw as a meaningful parallel, since she had first lost her parents and then broken with the values of her South Carolina upbringing.

  Her acting career did not get off to a good start. Clare was petite and had a lovely voice, mellifluous with a pronounced southern lilt. But unlike an Edwin Booth, say, she was unable to project. On a nineteenth-century stage, she simply came across as a petite woman with a weak voice. For one of Clare’s first roles, Ophelia in Hamlet, a critic rated her performance as “passable.” Clare made far quicker inroads as a writer. (Along with Whitman, the poet/wander-speaker, many at Pfaff’s had dual aspirations, a hedge against the uncertainty of the artist’s life.) Clare became a frequent contributor of essays and verse to the New-York Atlas, a widely read Sunday-only newspaper. Upon publication of her work, “Lines to ___,” an Atlas editor sent her a note, praising it as “one of the most beautiful poems in the language.”

  At Pfaff’s, Clare brought a needed touch of refinement to the proceedings. She organized “common-purse” suppers, at which impoverished artists pooled their money to buy a decent shared meal. And she always made a point of remembering the birthdays of the members of the circle. Clare acted as a kind of counterweight to Clapp’s “evil influences,” as one Pfaffian put it. Soon she was given a title of her own, Queen of Bohemia.

  As queen, however, she could be equally as fierce and uncompromising as King Clapp. Clare was a sparkling conversationalist, who placed a high value on spontaneity. She had a particular aversion to canned jokes, which she called “a tyrant and slayer of conversation.” She once described herself as having “a frankness of speech and manners with men, a talent to dress becomingly, a good appetite, a cheerful expression, an acquaintance with rouge, an aversion to lying, and the ability to think for myself!”

  Clare was very striking. Upon sitting down at Clapp’s table, it was duly noted that she always chose a place where she’d be flatteringly illuminated by a gas lamp. She wore her blonde hair in a way that was highly idiosyncratic for the time: short and parted to the side, like a man. The hairstyle combined with her small stature gave Clare a pixieish look. She had wide-set blue eyes and a pointed nose, once described as the “right nose for a trim little person with a past.”

  The with a past is a reference to one of the most notable—and for the time shocking—things about Clare: she was raising a child who was born out of wedlock. The father was believed to be Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a man with whom she had carried on a torrid affair. Gottschalk was a New Orleans–born pianist, noted for working American idioms such as slave spirituals and folk songs into his compositions. During the 1850s, he became an international celebrity, the first American composer to achieve a stature to rival a Liszt or a Verdi.

  Gottschalk was darkly handsome and had a world-weary Lord Byron manner that drove women to distraction. Supposedly, a crazed female piano devotee kidnapped him after a concert in Switzerland and held him captive for five weeks, a love slave. That was part of the Gottschalk myth. But Gottschalk’s reality may not have lagged too far behind. His diaries are full of entries such as this: “an amiable audience warm, intelligent, elegant, the majority composed of young girls whose charming physiognomies are made to turn the heads of pianists!” Or this: “the most charming types of young women that ever crossed the dreams of an old bachelor” were visible as he scanned a different audience while playing his piano.

  Clare kept the details of her fling with Gottschalk a closely guarded secret. But a likely result was her son, named Aubrey. While out in public with Aubrey, she relished shocking people by introducing herself as “Miss Ada Clare and son.” Her meaning was instantly and provocatively clear: she had a child, but a missus she was not. Aubrey was by this time a toddler. Clare always had to arrange for a babysitter before going to Pfaff’s.

  A number of other women also became part of the Bohemian circle at Pfaff’s. Among them were journalist Jenny Danforth; Marie Stevens Case, a novelist and French translator; and Dora Shaw, an actress and poet.

  Inspired by Ludlow’s infamous book, Stevens Case and Shaw once ate hashish together. The two women slipped into a shared hallucinogenic state in which everything took on a sinister ancient Egyptian pall. Stevens Case had the sensation that her head was growing and growing; she was turning into a giant stone Sphinx. “I thought I was an oracle, doomed to respond through all Eternity,” she reported. Shaw, convinced that they had been bitten by an asp, à la Cleopatra, kept shrieking: “We are poisoned! We are poisoned!” In modern parlance, the women had a bad trip. They never ate hashish again.

  That little alcove room also kindled its share of dalliances. O’Brien paired off for a time with Jenny Danforth. During a brief separation, she sent him a letter in which she commanded: “Remember me while I am away. Come when I return.” Given his well-known penchant for alcohol, she added, “Be good. And let the festive cup alone.” Instead, she urged him, “Drink me silently.”

  Clapp, meanwhile, took a romantic interest in Ada Clare, a development that was carefully observed by the other Bohemians at the long table. She was queen to his king, after all. She did not, however, return the sentiment. When Clapp was pursuer rather than the pursued, he could transform from a snapping turtle into a puppy dog. So it was with Clare. He settled into an uneasy role as her friend and protector. If someone made a disparaging comment about her out-of-wedlock child, Clapp would invariably pipe in with, “It was an immaculate conception.” No doubt, this was wishful thinking on his part. Given Clare’s aversion to canned humor, she surely grew tired of this line.

  And then there’s the outrageously charismatic woman who first became a fixture at Pfaff’s in the summer of 1859. Clare gets credit for introducing her into the Bohemian circle. This latest addition was an actress whom Clare had met while making the rounds of auditions. Among Clapp’s set, she would soon earn the distinction as the wildest, most brazen, and most colorful. Given the volume of personality in the vaulted room, that’s saying a lot. Underneath it all, the newest Pfaffian was also a deeply vulnerable person. Nothing was ever simple, nothing ever straightforward, about Adah Isaacs Menken.

  On first arriving at Pfaff’s, she no doubt had a different story for every single person at that long table. She was a self-mythologizer par excellence, who, with complete abandon, spun out assorted and conflicting fantastical stories about her life: She was born Dolores Adios Los Fuertes, the offspring of Spanish royalty. She was the granddaughter of a Revolutionary War hero. She was raised an orphan in a convent in Rome and escaped by climbing over the wall. She translated the “Iliad” into French at the age of twelve. She was the adopted daughter of Sam Houston. An 1860 profile in the Wisconsin Daily Patriot guilelessly relays some of her questionable claims: “She speaks French, Spanish, and English; can ride, hunt, shoot, dance, and act; has been taken prisoner by the Indians; has learned the art of war from Gen. Harney.”

  About Menken’s earliest years, precious little is known with any degree of certainty. Her name at birth may have been Ada Berthe Théodore. It most certainly was not, as she was fond of claiming, Marie Rachel Adelaide de Vere Spenser. No question, she was a young woman in her Pfaff’s days. As to her exact age—who knows? (No birth certificate has ever been located.) June 15, 1835, is considered her birth date, by tradition, and because it’s the one most commonly professed by Menken herself. That would mean she turned twenty-four in 1859, the year she showed up at Pfaff’s. She may have been born in Milneburg, once a town on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, subsequently absorbed into the city of New Orleans.

  It seems likely
that she was the child of a mixed-race couple. Maybe her father was African American, or perhaps it was her mother. Possibly one parent was Irish—on the issue of ethnicity, the details are hazy once again. On this matter, however, there was also a sound, logical reason for Menken to keep things vague. This was an era when interracial children faced intense stigma, along with questions (varying from region to region) about whether they were free citizens or by legal status potential slaves. A bizarre and highly specific nomenclature existed, featuring terms such as mulatto (one black parent, one white parent), quadroon (one-fourth black heritage), and sambo (a heritage more black than white).

  Menken made her first stage appearance as a teenage chorus girl at the French Opera House in New Orleans. She joined the troupe, she would later say, to help support her family, which had slipped into poverty. Then, in the early 1850s, she took up as a bareback rider with Victor Franconi’s Imperial Hippodrome, a circus that toured through Texas. This was an extremely challenging gig, requiring her to strike acrobatic poses on a moving horse. For the circus stint, at least, there’s some support, including the recollection of someone who saw her perform. (As her life progresses, Menken’s story—while remaining crazily colorful—also becomes documentable.)

  In 1856, she married Alexander Isaac Menken, scion of a well-to-do Jewish family. He was conducting an orchestra in Galveston, Texas. He started out as her voice teacher, but things quickly turned romantic. What he almost certainly did not know: his new wife had already been married once before to Nelson Kneass, a member of a minstrel group called the New Orleans Serenaders. That marriage lasted only a few months, and she had left without even bothering to get a divorce. Alexander Menken and his new bride stayed on in Texas for a while. Soon enough, the family dry goods business beckoned, and the couple moved to his hometown of Cincinnati.