Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  Ceremonies commenced again in the afternoon, with a long parade of over twelve hundred Harvard graduates marching to an enormous tented pavilion erected in the yard. The graduates sat at tables festooned with white linen and black bunting. Clover, Nellie, and Alice watched the proceedings, with all the other women in attendance, on bleachers under the pavilion. General Meade, who had led his troops to bloody victory at Gettysburg, stood up to speak to thunderous applause, followed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said in his brief speech that “the war gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation.” Other dignitaries followed, and the day concluded with the poet James Russell Lowell reading his long, moving ode: “We sit here in the Promised Land / That flows with Freedom’s honey and milk / But’twas they won it, sword in hand, / Making the nettle danger soft for us as silk.”

  Coming of age during a war, Clover had been utterly absorbed by national events, devouring newspaper reports of battles and political maneuvering, talking with high-ranking soldiers, listening with rapt attention to Ned and her father talk of their war-related work. She had access to national politics and pageantry via her Uncle Sam Hooper. She had borne witness as many close to her sacrificed their lives for a noble cause. The war had been, in many ways, her university and her most enduring education.

  CHAPTER 4

  Six Years

  UNLIKE MANY YOUNG WOMEN in her social circle, Clover did not keep a diary—or if she did, she never mentioned doing so, nor did anyone else make reference to it. Though a talented writer, attentive to detail and pace in her compositions, she didn’t enjoy writing much. She despised her handwriting and often asked the recipients of her letters to excuse her “wretched-looking scrawl.” She complained at times about the drudgery of constant letter-writing and once stated to her father her hope that “pen and ink will be banished in the next world—a celestial telephone will be a great relief.”

  But in the years after the war, Clover began keeping another record, a visual one, to preserve her experiences and memories. Sometime during her trip to watch the Union army victory parade in the spring of 1865, Clover bought stereographic photographs made from the negatives of Mathew Brady’s studio; they included images of dead soldiers on the battlefield, a panoramic view of Richmond, and a picture of the victory parade itself. Stereographs are dual side-by-side photographs that produce a 3-D visual effect when seen together through a viewer. This way of looking at photographic images had been popularized by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes with his 1861 invention of a handheld stereoscope; Clover may have first heard about this new viewer from Holmes. In any case, on the back of each Civil War stereograph, Clover carefully noted in her distinctive hand the date and place of her purchase of the stereographs: “May 26, 1865, Washington.”

  In 1866, less than a year after the Washington parade, Clover began putting together a photograph album that would create a record of the European Grand Tour it was now her turn to take. The war had not changed the fact that this overseas trip constituted a mark of social refinement for young women of her social class. Together, she and her father traveled to Paris, then to London; then they toured through England, Wales, and Scotland, and finally through Germany and Switzerland.

  In an album with a gold-embossed green pressboard cover, inscribed “Clover Hooper, London, March 29, 1866,” she kept track of the tourist sites she visited by purchasing professionally produced photographs and then pasting them into her album. They provide the only record of her trip. Under each of the sixty photographs, she marked the name of the view: “Louvre,” “Rue de Rivoli,” “Notre Dame,” “St. Paul’s,” “Westminster Abbey,” “Stonehenge,” “Salisbury Cathedral,” “Geneva,” “Valley of Rhone,” and so on. To personalize the photographs—to invest them with her memories and make them more her own—she meticulously framed each image, using gold, blue, green, yellow, and red colored pencils. Under an image of Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon, she attached two stems of violets, her favorite flower, and a small leaf of English ivy, as if to say, “I was here, I saw this.”

  Clover returned home with her father in 1867 to a city transformed by the aftereffects of war. As a later historian put it, “In that Civil War the elder America perished.” Boston was no longer the financial, cultural, and spiritual center of the country that it had been twenty-five years before. The cataclysm had badly shaken the already shifting foundations of Boston’s elite. Big business and industrial interests in other cities, most notably New York, had become the chief drivers of the economy, and settlement of the West took up the energies of the young and adventurous. Many trends threatened the comfortable homogeneity of old Boston: increasing immigration, especially by the Irish; urban congestion; and technological developments, such as the telegraph and the ever-expanding railroads, which changed the pace of life. The cherished values of an earlier generation—self-reliance, moderation, intellectual pursuit—seemed antiquated, eclipsed by other concerns.

  Much had changed in Clover’s household as well. When Ned returned from the Sea Islands, he didn’t come home, but rather set up housekeeping with his new bride, Fanny Chapin, whom he had married in 1864. Marriage threatened Clover’s close connection to Ned, something she had dreaded. Upon hearing that Ned would marry one of her good friends—Fanny was a soft-spoken young woman with a kind manner—Clover had gone almost limp with relief. “I feel about this,” she told her Aunt Cary, “as if I had gone to the dentist, had my tooth out and found it a most enchanting sensation.”

  More changes were afoot. Clover’s sister, Nellie, who now preferred to be addressed by her given name, Ellen, announced her engagement to Ephraim Whitman Gurney and their plans to marry in the fall of 1868. Ellen and Whitman, as he was known, were well matched. Alice James, the youngest sister of William and Henry James and the same age as Ellen, would later remark that Ellen was “certainly the most married and the most happy woman I know.” The two had met when Ellen was a student at the Agassiz School; Gurney had been her Latin tutor. He was a professor at Harvard, first teaching Latin, then philosophy, and then history, and he later served a distinguished term as the first and much-beloved dean of the faculty. Known less for his written scholarship and more for his teaching, Gurney had a remarkable “capacity for personal attachment” and a “ready sympathy.” According to Ned’s wife, Fanny, Clover thought it very nice “to have such a bright person come into the family.” This gave Clover, as she said, a chance to “learn something.”

  Even so, Clover dreaded Ellen’s impending nuptials. She had depended on her older sister’s care and concern. Whatever the nature of their intimacy—so little of their correspondence survives—they’d shared many interests, including a love of horseback riding and an abiding passion for books and learning. In fact, Ellen would later help organize the Harvard Annex for women college students, a precursor to Radcliffe College. But Ellen, who spoke with her mother’s low voice, tended to be more introspective and shy with others than was Clover. Ellen Emerson, the oldest daughter of Waldo Emerson, once watched as Ellen put on her gloves before a party, remarking that “her hair was done so beautifully that I shall never forget it.” Another friend recalled her “lovely head and figure,” her “beautiful hands and feet,” the “exquisite way” she held herself; perhaps Clover felt some envy for her sister’s beauty. In any case, as Ellen prepared for her wedding, Ellen Emerson, also unmarried, reported that Clover had been complaining about the way that “‘Cupid has made dreadful ravages in Beverly life this summer.’” Too many were engaged and “‘withdrawn,’” in Clover’s words, “‘from old pursuits.’” Clover felt left out. Why didn’t Ellen and Whitman Gurney just elope, she wondered. “‘It would save a great deal of fuss.’” Ellen Emerson went on: “Poor Clover does not find [the wedding] a cheerful prospect in any way, [and] it changes her lot into housekeeping and solitude.” Solitude, feeling left behind—this was exactly what Clover most feared.

  If fortunate in her new in-laws, Clover watched her siblings start new lives in f
ull knowledge that her own marriage prospects were dimmed by the quandary faced by many women of her generation. The deaths of so many young men in the war had severely skewed the male-female ratio. In 1870 women outnumbered men by fifty thousand in Massachusetts, which had at that time a population of almost 1.5 million residents. Clover was not unhappy living with her father at 114 Beacon Street. (The Hooper address changed in 1862 from 107 Beacon Street to 114 Beacon Street after new homes had been built on the other side of the street.) Clover’s close and intense bond with her father had given her security and a certain confidence; being the mistress of her father’s house had its benefits. Unmarried women from an established family could enjoy considerable latitude, even power. Yet Clover found that the freedom and privileges of an unmarried woman could become tiresome as she “drifts towards her thirties.”

  Clover’s uncertain situation might have devolved into symptoms of physical debility. Newspapers, women’s journals, and advice manuals were filled with apprehension in the postwar years about an apparent decline in women’s health. Abba Goold Woolson, a Boston columnist and poet, alarmed that many of the women she knew were “constantly ailing,” argued that womanhood in America had come to be equated with debility. “To be ladylike,” declared Woolson, one had to be “lifeless, inane, and dawdling,” and concluded that “our fine ladies aspire to be called invalides.” The increasingly common malady of neurasthenia, a diagnosis made first by the neurologist George Beard in 1868, located the problem in the nervous system. A patient with this problem suffered from nerves that were depleted or overly excited—either condition was said to produce a chronic illness that often proved difficult and complicated to manage. Its symptoms might include sick headaches, hopelessness, fainting, ringing in the ears, phantom limb pain, uncontrolled thoughts, chronic pelvic pain, and fears of contamination, and these various complaints might shift from day to day. Alice James, almost five years younger than Clover, suffered an emotional breakdown at age nineteen and never fully recovered; she later received several diagnoses, including hysteria and neurasthenia. In her diary she would characterize herself as “an appendage to five cushions and three shawls.”

  Clover escaped chronic debility, though she couldn’t seem to shake an undercurrent of restlessness and discontent, which intensified during her twenties. Her father was no substitute for a mother or some other female role model who might show Clover how a young woman might craft her future. She was interested in art. She had taken up watercolors during the war, painting meticulous landscapes and portraits of friends. One such portrait depicted her childhood friend Eleanor Shattuck, daughter of the prominent Dr. George Cheyne Shattuck, a professor of medicine at Harvard. In this painting Eleanor sits primly on a dock with her spectacles carefully drawn onto her expressive face. Clover had opportunities to pursue this interest more seriously. William Morris Hunt, a student of the French artist Jean-François Millet of the Barbizon school, had begun offering, in 1868, drawing and painting classes to women in Boston. But Clover’s interest in watercolor painting and collecting photographs remained a hobby, a diversion, much like needlework or knitting—something to do during leisurely afternoons and long summer evenings.

  Instead, Clover kept busy with volunteer work and her round of friends. She served as assistant treasurer, with Ned as treasurer, on the board of the Industrial School for Girls in Dorchester, Massachusetts, a school started in 1853 for destitute girls between the ages of six and ten. Together with Ellen, she was involved in the Howard Industrial School for Colored Women and Girls, which had been organized in Cambridge in 1865 for freed slaves sent north by General Charles Howard. She donated one hundred dollars and became a life member of the recently chartered Massachusetts Infant Asylum for abandoned and destitute children. And she was a founding member of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, organized in 1868 by the Boston lawyer George Angell to stop the brutal treatment of horses. Dr. Hooper would at times protest Clover’s reform work, perhaps wanting her to stay close to home. He sometimes said to her, as Clover repeated to Ellen Emerson, “I hope you’re not going to that place to-day!” But at a dinner in 1868, when Dr. Hooper made an impatient speech about his daughter’s activities, Clover disregarded her father’s grumbling, saying he’d been “terribly inconsistent,” especially given the example of his commitment to social reform and his often-repeated refrain to “go teach the orphan boy to read, or teach the orphan girl to sew.”

  Clover also spent time with friends, most of whom she’d known since childhood, though the substance of these relationships is somewhat unclear—the direct record of these postwar years is sparse. Josephine Shaw Lowell, called “Effie,” the sister of Colonel Shaw and the young widow of Charles Russell Lowell, would visit on occasion with her young daughter, Carlotta. One winter, Clover reported to Eleanor Shattuck that she’d spent “perfectly delightful” days with Pauline Agassiz Shaw and Quincy Adams Shaw during a bitter cold snap. With her school friend Ida Agassiz, who had married Henry Lee Higginson during the war, Clover picked up more serious studies and together they “plunged through” Theodor Mommsen’s three-volume History of Rome in the original German. Clover’s friends counted on her to be entertaining. Ellen Emerson reported how Clover was “full of funny stories” at a “perfect dinner party” hosted at the Hoopers’. And Clover could display a generous spirit to a friend in need. When she found out that Kate Howard, a favorite teacher from the Agassiz School, was struggling with ill health and had few financial resources, she hatched a plan to send her to Europe for a year, giving her five thousand dollars to cover all her travel and living expenses. “Switzerland in the summer and Italy in the winter,” Clover exclaimed to Kate in the spring of 1869. “You may think me interfering, if you like, but that I consider one of the perquisites of a spinster friend.”

  Though Clover occupied herself with volunteer work, friends, and her father, she found herself caught between eagerness and an uneasy boredom, not knowing what to do next, counting the months as they passed, waiting for something to happen. After a while, all the teas and dinners, theater and dances added up only to a “mild drizzle of gaiety,” as she told Eleanor Shattuck in the early spring of 1871. In the same letter, she hinted at a flirtation with Eleanor’s brother, Frederick. At the age of twenty-seven, Clover had passed the typical age for marriage at the time. But if she hinted at romance, she also quickly countered any notion that Frederick might represent her future by portraying him as a mere child—though, at twenty-three, he was Clover’s junior by only four years. “Your brother dined here today,” she reported to Eleanor, “and was very silly and amusing in his accounts of his journey,” adding that “he also took me to church a fortnight ago and was ever so good and only whispered once.”

  Clover wrote to Eleanor again several weeks later on a sunny Sunday morning. She began with a pleased confession that she had skipped church, delighting in the first signs of spring. There’s a suggestion of sensual consciousness in her languid description of a “hot sun going through me”:

  It seems a fitting time for a friendly chat when the gay church bells have rung the good white sheep into their respective folds, and left the naughty black ones to outer sunshine and quiet. I’m so happy sitting on the floor with my back against the window and hot sun going through me bringing a prophecy of spring and summer and green things. I’m afraid that your carnal nature craves lower topics than rhapsodies about sunshine tho’ and yet nothing happens to tell you of.

  Her “small sprees,” as she liked to call them, were not completely without interest. At one dinner, she sat next to Charles Eliot, Harvard’s president since 1869. At a soiree at her sister Ellen’s, she sat between the American historian Francis Parkman and the Reverend Phillips Brooks, the young preacher who had so impressed the attendees at Harvard’s Commemoration six years before and who was now the rector of Trinity Church. She found Brooks “very unclerical and jolly and full of talk. He told me interesting things of Paris . . .
and [I] think him much nicer out of the pulpit than in. I’ve heard him preach twice but each time neither heart nor brain got any food tho’ I like his earnestness very much.” But as she closed her letter to Eleanor, she undercut herself, asking that her friend not take anything she wrote too seriously. “Of all the stupid letters I’ve written you this surely is the most but spring sunshine has a softening effect on the brain.”

  Clover suspected that her most ready path to a secure future and a home of her own was through marriage and motherhood. Despite the fact that some women in her own family, such as her Aunt Cary, had flouted convention and lived more according to their own preferences, Clover recognized the powerful social realities of her class and era and her own deep desire for stability. She had many interests but none were well formed enough to serve as the foundation of her life. Her charitable concern for those less fortunate, her passion for art, her love of the outdoors, her facility with foreign languages, together with her excellent education—all these attitudes and skills made her more suitable for marriage, not less, and she hoped that marriage would enable her to establish herself in the world. But achieving this would require a delicate balancing act of patience and discreet pursuit.

  CHAPTER 5