She passed the evening at number 56 Beacon St., her house was at 107, the same street. It was a bitter cold night and the wind howled most fearfully as the time drew near for her departure she felt a presentiment of death stealing upon her, and was loath to depart, but at last summoning up all her courage she set forth, attended only by one of the masculine tribe. She had passed in safety the three first crossings below Charles Street when arriving at the last crossing a sudden gust of wind, caught her nose—that being the most prominent feature of her body, and whirling her through the air dashed her up the frozen waters of Back Bay the servant was seized by a contrary wind and drowned in the waters of the River Charles. A milkman riding in from the country on Wednesday morning discovered her body lying upon the ice [and] on looking at the face he discovered that it was minus a nose and whilst returning in perplexity to the land he perceived a nose minus a head. A Coroner’s Inquest will be held upon the body this afternoon at 3 o’clock precisely. Price of tickets 25 cents, children half price 12 cents. The tea caddy will be forked over subsequent to the inquest, enclosed in this note is a passem of blue for her funereal riggings, that color being most becoming to her style of beauty, a customary speech of hers was it’s a weary world we live in, and her last speech just before reaching the 4th crossing was changed to “it’s a windy world we live in.” P.S. All arrangements entrusted to Miss A. M. Hooper will please be attended to promptly.
In this imaginative writing, illustrating a close acquaintance with the customs and language of funerals, Clover joined her mother and Aunt Sue in death. By making her long Hooper nose the cause of her fictional death, her satire reveals too how she hated feeling unattractive, feared being the plain-looking daughter of a mother everyone recognized as classically beautiful. The losses of Clover’s childhood, its grief and uncertainties, had begun to thicken into a self-loathing she sometimes had a difficult time shaking off. Pictures of her as a young girl show her bright intense eyes, her father’s long nose, reddish or dark blonde hair, and a slender face tilted ever so slightly, giving her a quizzical look. But only a few photographs of Clover as a grown woman survive, and none with a clear view of her face. Several years before her marriage, she is pictured seated on her horse at a far distance, her face mostly obscured. In photographs taken during her honeymoon, Clover bowed her head or turned away from the camera. In an undated tintype of Clover—in profile, holding one of her dogs—her face is mostly hidden. She had pulled her straw hat over it.
Education rescued Clover. The new Agassiz School in Cambridge, an academy for girls, had been organized in 1855 by Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the second wife of Harvard’s acclaimed professor of zoology and geology, Louis Agassiz, and later the first president of Radcliffe College. Just as Clover turned twelve, she and her sister, Nellie, began taking the forty-minute ride by horse-drawn omnibus every morning across the Charles River for classes held in the spacious attic rooms of the Agassiz’s house at the corner of Quincy Street and Broadway, next to Harvard College. Clover’s classmates included Ralph Waldo Emerson’s oldest daughter, Ellen; the abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s adopted daughter, Phoebe; the architect Henry Greenough’s daughter, Fanny; and the Agassizes’ younger daughter, Pauline, who would be one of Clover’s close friends at school.
Elizabeth Agassiz believed that a young girl’s education should include subjects beyond those aimed at cultural refinement, the traditional curriculum for daughters of the elite: literature, music, and foreign languages. The Agassiz curriculum added geography, natural history, biology, anthropology, and mathematics. Classes were rigorous and their content was up-to-date, as several were taught by Harvard professors. At the close of the morning sessions, Professor Agassiz himself would give his daily lecture on botany, zoology, and embryology, wanting to show, as one student remembered, “the thoughts in Nature which Science reveals.” It was the best education a young girl could receive in Boston, and possibly all of America.
Clover’s grandfather, Captain Sturgis, now called his favorite granddaughter “a good scholar.” Academic study drew out Clover’s strength and her curiosity as well as the enthusiasm her mother had noted early on. Quick and ambitious, she was gifted at languages and found the natural sciences fascinating. Clover’s later passion for flowers was most likely nurtured by memorizing the classifications of plants and by Mrs. Agassiz’s own fervor for botany. She filled the schoolroom with fresh flowers for the children. Clover’s geography teacher, Catharine L. Howard (called Kate), only ten years older than Clover when she began teaching at the school in 1856, may have recognized something familiar in her bright, eager student, having also lost her own mother when very young. Several years after Clover had been her student, Miss Howard would ask a friend what perhaps other teachers and students wondered: “Was there ever anyone like Clover?”
Clover liked to sign her letters “Clover leaf,” this name a prized gift from her mother, or with a drawing of a four-leaf clover. Above her signature, she’d sometimes write “the Hub.” She was referring to Boston’s moniker “the hub of the universe,” a term coined in 1858 by Oliver Wendell Holmes in his monthly column in the Atlantic Monthly. When away from home, Ned asked Clover to “write me often giving names, dates, and further particulars from the ‘Hub,’” but advised her to remember that those living in the “‘Hub’ don’t know everything.”
Clover loved being at the center of things, and how she grew had been shaped by being at the center of a city during extraordinary years of go-getting, reform, and creative achievement. The 1850 census of Boston shows the population at a bit below 140,000. The city teemed with the energies of abolitionist politics, Unitarian reform, and Transcendental individualism. There had been a “flowering”—in the literary critic Van Wyck Brooks’s well-known formulation—of creative genius. Figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, Bronson Alcott, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow won enduring fame, to be sure, but numerous other Boston-area writers and reformers, preachers and scientists, including Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Lydia Maria Child, Theodore Parker, James Freeman Clarke, Dorothea Dix, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Asa Gray, and Louis Agassiz, were widely influential in their day. The Boston Athenaeum’s art gallery—first opened in 1827—now held shows of American and European art throughout the year. The Handel and Haydn Society, an amateur ensemble, had been started by merchants in 1815 to bring choral music to American audiences, and the Boston Academy of Music had formed a first-rate orchestra, often packing and even overflowing Odeon Hall. The Boston firm called Ticknor and Fields was transforming American publishing. A correspondent for a book trade magazine wrote in 1856 that “no other establishment in the Union issues annually a more attractive and carefully selected list of belles lettres.” The city was home to the country’s leading literary journals, the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly; the Boston Public Library opened its doors in 1854; bookstores dotted the city’s neighborhoods. Public lectures on literature, philosophy, science, politics, reform, religion, and a host of other topics proliferated, sponsored by the Lowell Institute, men’s debating associations, women’s literary clubs, and numerous other organizations, churches, and colleges.
The debate about slavery, which would soon split the nation, had drawn “a line of cleavage through all Boston society,” and the gathering forces of social change—industrialization, immigration, and expansion into the West—began to shake the confidence of Boston’s Brahmins. Even so, when the great English novelist Charles Dickens visited Boston and nearby Cambridge in 1842, a year before Clover’s birth, he observed and later recorded in his American Notes that “the almighty dollar sinks into something comparatively insignificant, amidst a whole Pantheon of better gods.” What Dickens admired was the effort to learn, to teach, to achieve, and to build lasting institutions that fulfilled the promises of liberty. All of this striving, of course, was underwritten by generations of wealth—from trade, finance, cotton, manufacturing—which enabled
Bostonians to invest not only in the city but in the rest of the country. Living in Boston meant being connected to the nation and beyond. Young men who had earlier gone off to sea and returned transformed by their travels now worked on the railroads, studied art and philosophy in Europe, and settled western towns to check the spread of slavery. They came back to the city with deepened knowledge and experience, with talents and stories.
A young privileged woman like Clover Hooper—educated, but without any clear path laid for her future, struggling with feelings that she had few ways to articulate—would live such adventures vicariously through reading, lectures, and conversation. And she would be a front-row witness to the coming war.
CHAPTER 3
Clover’s War
DURING HER SIX YEARS at the Agassiz School, Clover studied hard, immersing herself in math, botany, and zoology. She read Shakespeare’s plays and Tennyson’s poetry, learned German, and became fluent in French. Perhaps in homage to her mother’s own interest in Greek history, she developed a lifelong passion for reading and translating Latin and Greek poetry. But she was no recluse, and she engaged in the usual whirl of activities enjoyed by young girls of her social class: theater, concerts, teas and dinners at the homes of friends. If she feared closeness because it held potential for loss, she loved telling a good story or joke. Occasionally, Clover can be glimpsed in other people’s diaries and letters—a quick flash of her skirt as she rounds a corner. Elizabeth Rogers Mason, a close friend of Clover’s sister, Nellie, described in her diary an evening of theatricals, meaning amateur stage plays, at the North Shore home of Samuel and Eliza Cabot, Mason’s future in-laws. The Cabot house, Mason wrote, was “a model one for the country home, and the little greenhouse which serves as a passage way to the theater, enchanting, full of drooping vines and beautiful flowers, and lighted by colored lanterns.” Observing that the plays were “excellent,” Mason also noted that the young “Clover Hooper sat in front of me.”
By the time Clover graduated at age seventeen in the spring of 1861, however, her attention had turned to the news of the day. The nation was on the brink of a full-scale civil war. In January, the secession of the South had begun, with seven states withdrawing from the Union. Though Boston was far from the front lines, the city was gripped by war fever. The debate about slavery had pitted abolitionists against the manufacturing interests of Boston’s commercial elite, particularly those depending on southern cotton for their textile mills. On April 17, five days after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, soldiers of the Massachusetts Militia (later known as the Sixth Regiment), equipped with new rifles and new gray overcoats, marched through Boston streets to board trains for Washington, D.C. There they would protect the nation’s capital, which was precariously positioned between North and South. “Nobody thinks of anything but war,” a neighbor of the Hoopers wrote on April 23, adding that “there is no more bunting to be bought in Boston” and “the importer was out of toy-flags.”
Clover was beside herself with excitement. On May 8, she wrote a consoling letter to her cousin Annie Hooper, who was away from the city and missing all the news. “I don’t wonder you are home-sick,” Clover empathized on stationery with a STAND BY THE FLAG emblem in its upper left corner. “Nothing whatever would have tempted me to lose these last 3 weeks in Boston. I’ve had a splendid time—we literally gorge ourselves with newspapers.” With her family she toured the steam frigate Minnesota at the Boston navy yards, with its “600 sailors and two rows of enormous dull green guns,” and noticed Captain Van Brunt, whom she thought “splendid looking” in his navy uniform. She, her sister Nellie, and their friends immediately started cutting and sewing fabric to make apparel for the soldiers, and she scolded Annie: “Don’t for mercy’s sake make any more red flannel shirts—they have been forbidden to our troops as making them a mark for the enemy. Bluish gray is the color ordered.”
Every family experienced the war in some way. Clover’s father had been asked by the Massachusetts governor, John A. Andrew, earlier in the year to serve as a founding member of the Boston Educational Commission (later renamed the New England Freedmen’s Aid Society), a group organized to address the immediate needs of recently freed slaves who sought protection and aid from the Union army. The organization raised money for bedding, clothes, food, and emergency health care in the early years of the war, later shifting its focus to education. Clover—like many young women—joined Boston’s New England Women’s Auxiliary Association (NEWAA), a soldiers’ relief group of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, which, in the words of the commission’s 1864 report, depended on “the never-failing fountains of woman’s sympathy and aid for the sick and wounded.” The group rolled bandages, knit socks, sewed blankets, collected medicines and money for the troops—tasks that gave them some tangible way to participate and contribute. Clover reported to her father that, with Alice Mason Hooper, the young wife of her cousin William Sturgis Hooper, she had been to “Dr. Howe’s ‘Sanitary’ rooms and stamped blankets, towels, etc. from 1 o’clock till 4½. The store was cold and dark and though it was hard work, we like it.”
In spite of Clover’s enthusiasm for war work, she retreated from the city to the Berkshire Mountains the first summer of the conflict, taking the train 130 miles west and staying by herself for several nights at the largest hotel in Stockbridge. It was not unheard of for a young woman to travel alone, but it was not common practice either. In a letter Clover assured her father that the bed at the hotel was “very nice,” the food was first-rate—“berries, salmon, good bread and butter”—and that she “shan’t be lonely.” Her brother, Ned, planned to arrive four days later to be her chaperone, and she visited almost daily with her Aunt Cary, who had returned with her family from their European travels the previous year.
Aunt Cary, still brilliant, increasingly complicated, often unhappy in her marriage, loved to talk and entertain—Henry James once said she was “insatiably hospitable.” To her father, Clover described a typical summer day, often spent at Aunt Cary’s spacious Lenox property, which had been bought in 1849 and was later known as Tanglewood. “The weather has been intensely warm here all the week so that muslins are the only wearable things,” Clover reported. With family and friends, she relished sitting outdoors “since breakfast, laughing and sewing, eating New York candy and shelling peas for dinner.” Aunt Cary also introduced Clover to her friends. In August 1861, Clover went along to a soiree hosted by Catharine Sedgwick, the famed author of the widely popular novels A New England Tale and Hope Leslie, published in the 1820s. Here Clover met Miss Sedgwick’s close friend, the famed British-born actress Fanny Kemble. “Miss C. Sedgwick introduced me to Mrs. Kemble & sat me down by her & we talked off and on nearly an hour I should think,” Clover exclaimed to her father, sounding very much like a star-struck schoolgirl. “She found I liked rowing . . . whereupon she remarked that she had a boat and would be happy to lend it to me or to have me row her!!!! I’m afraid I looked bland, I’m sure I felt so but I won’t back down and I’ll row her if I perish in the attempt.”
But as months passed and news from the war grew more ominous, Clover’s feelings about it became more ambivalent. By the early spring of 1862, it was clear the conflict wasn’t going to be a ninety-day war, as some had originally predicted. Clover wrote to her cousin Annie that, though it had been “nearly a year since the war began,” she couldn’t quite “realize that we were ever at peace.” Even so, there was also something thrilling about war: all the newspaper stories, the parades and soldiers in the streets, the occasions for real-life bravery and heroism. “What fearful times we are living in,” she wrote in the summer of 1862 from Lenox, not saying where she was staying. She declared the war “nothing but disaster and excitement on all sides. I really feel ashamed to be having such a good and jolly time. Though I don’t know that I can do any good by being blue.”
Clover’s brother, Ned, had decided not to enlist in a regular army regiment but in the spring of 1862 had instead signed up to
go to South Carolina’s Sea Islands with Edward Pierce, a young Boston attorney hired by Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury, Salmon Chase, to prepare former slaves for—in Chase’s words—“self-support by their own industry.” Ned, an 1859 graduate of Harvard Law School, knew all too well he didn’t have a “natural taste” for active military duty. Clover’s cousin William Sturgis Hooper (called “Sturgis” by the family), the older brother of cousins Annie and Alice Hooper, enlisted that same year as a volunteer aide to General Nathanial P. Banks, a former Massachusetts congressman and governor now in charge of the Army in the Gulf, while Clover’s more distant cousin Robert Gould Shaw had joined the Second Massachusetts Infantry at the start of the war (later he would become major, then colonel, of the all-black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry).
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., called “Wendell,” the son of Dr. Holmes and a neighbor of the Hoopers at their summer home in Beverly Farms, was commissioned with the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Wilky and Bob James, younger brothers of William and Henry James, who had grown up in Cambridge and were part of Clover’s social sphere, both enlisted. Clover also met people outside her immediate circle who had joined the military. She found Henry Lee Higginson, a major in the First Massachusetts Cavalry and a charismatic music lover, later founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, “cozy and pleasant.” She thought Higginson and his best friend, Charles Russell Lowell Jr. (by May 1863, the colonel of the newly formed Second Massachusetts Cavalry), two of the “very nicest men I know.”
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