***
Henry plunged immediately into work, going most days to the State Department to read through enormous collections of letters and documents for his project on Albert Gallatin. Clover joined him. “I’ve been working at the State Dept. with Henry,” Clover told her father the week before Christmas. “If you want to know how we look, see Cruikshank’s illustration to Old Curiosity Shop,” a reference to the novel by Charles Dickens. Poring over papers at the archives, Clover and Henry looked like “Sampson and Sally Brass on opposite stools.” Clover relished her tangible proximity to history. She told of reading through the correspondence between the French philosopher Voltaire and Gallatin’s grandmother, who was Voltaire’s neighbor. Some notes, Clover explained, had been “written on the backs of playing cards—one in which he and his housekeeper Mme. Demis wish to borrow ‘twenty cups of flour.’” She went on to explain that Voltaire was then “75 years old—sick and feeble and witty,” adding, “I read and counted [the cards] this morning—fifty three in all! Probably no one since the lady to whom they are written has read them till now.”
She also threw herself into what she saw as her main responsibility—protecting Henry’s work time by managing the house and servants and by coordinating their social life, a task not without challenges. Polite society, what Edith Wharton later called “a hieroglyphic world,” required steely nerve and an exquisite ability to read subtle clues and gestures. Without such skills, one might misunderstand an invitation or accept one from somebody best avoided because of scandal; one might inadvertently offend someone who loved to gossip or become inundated with social obligations. “Politeness is power,” one observer noted, yet it was also exceedingly complex. A booklet on Washington etiquette published in 1873 advised that the intricacies of Washington society required extra caution. Because social life was “composed, in so great a degree, of official personages, who represent the mechanism of the State,” the writer noted, “the social obligations and customs have become about as complex as the constitutional laws.” Yet at the same time polite social life had “no constitution, or defined code.”
Clover recognized the dangers of social embarrassment and strove to avoid it. “In this social vortex,” she noted to her father, “one has to steer gingerly.” But she found many routines of polite society boring. She described a luncheon attended by twenty-five women, most between fifty and seventy years of age, as “a discipline worthy of the Spanish inquisition.” She reported repeating the mantra “this too shall pass away” until she could get up and flee. She found attending church tedious as well. When a neighbor stopped by one Sunday morning, asking her to go to services, Clover feigned weariness, later telling her father, “I think I’d best announce that I’m a Buddhist or a Mormon—the Washington females are such church goers.” She had particular disdain for morning calling. She’d receive dozens of calling cards from people wanting a visit, each requiring some sort of reply. Etiquette manuals filled pages with detailed rules for how to maneuver through this sensitive arena. The stakes were high. “The ‘calling’ nuisance,” as Clover dubbed it in a complaint to her father, “requires a cool head and imperturbable nerves to meet it squarely.”
But whereas Henry sometimes wanted more peace and quiet and “sighed for his pines” at Pitch Pine Hill in Beverly Farms, Clover preferred the company of “humans.” To manage, she instituted a daily five o’clock tea at their home on H Street, an open house that gave her escape from more tiresome rituals yet at the same time offered select friends a chance to stop by for some gossip, which she relished. “It’s very cozy,” she quickly declared. Once, Charles Nordhoff, the Washington correspondent for the New York Herald, stopped by alone, talking candidly with Clover and Henry about “state secrets.” “I drank it in with my tea,” she reported with delight.
Late in the year, Clover and Henry went to an eight o’clock tea at Mrs. Phoebe Tayloe’s, widow of Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, who’d been an activist in the Whig Party, formed in the 1830s to protest the policies and politics of Manifest Destiny and Jacksonian democracy. The Tayloes had built a “charming old house” on Madison Place, which had been a celebrated salon before the Civil War. Mrs. Tayloe “looked like an old picture as she sat pouring out tea,” Clover observed, “dressed in black velvet, with one big diamond on her lace stomach [a triangular panel at the front of her gown] and a soft widow’s cap tied under her chin.” Mrs. Tayloe, a friend of the new President Hayes and his wife, Lucy, invited Clover and Henry to pay their respects at the White House. Clover found Mrs. Hayes, with her low soft voice, “quite nice looking—dark—with smooth black hair combed low over her ears.” The president seemed “amiable and respectable,” but in spite of her overall sympathy with him politically, Clover couldn’t resist adding that she found him rather dull—“not a ray of force or intellect in forehead, eye, or mouth.”
Many evenings, Clover and Henry went to the theater, the opera, or concerts. One night they went for “a late carouse” at the Schurzes to hear the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi, a protégé of Franz Liszt, play privately for a few friends from eleven in the evening to one in the morning. When the violinist told Clover how much he’d enjoyed performing at a recent concert in Boston, she replied that Boston audiences had the reputation of being cold. “Cold!” Reményi exclaimed. “It was for me tropical vegetation!”
The Adamses fielded multiple requests to attend dinners and parties, but they preferred inviting friends for dinner, finding their own house “more agreeable than most others,” as Henry said. In the glow of their twenty-candle chandelier, the talk was of politics and art, scandal and history. Clover, alert to the most recent fashions, took pains to dress well but not extravagantly, opting for jewel-colored gowns and French yellow suede gloves that reached to the elbow. Men vied to be her dinner companion. Her attraction was her curiosity, her shining intelligence, her wit. She was an original. General William Tecumseh Sherman often sat next to her, knowing she’d be a perfect audience for his chitchat. At one dinner, he joked with her about President Grant “being the king of ‘Vulgaria.’” At another, he recalled for her his famous Civil War “march to the sea” by re-creating it “with knives and forks on the tablecloth” and concluding his story by sweeping “the rebel army off the table with a pudding knife, much to the amusement of his audience.”
Henry didn’t seem to mind when Clover was the center of attention. One guest remembered how he would double over at the dinner table in “uproarious laughter” after listening to one of Clover’s anecdotes, “waving his napkin up and down.” Another recalled that he seemed “so proud of her that he let her shine as he sat back and enjoyed listening to what she said.”
Sometimes the “talk parties,” as Clover called them, wore her out. She didn’t like it if people talked at her, particularly if she found them too impressed with themselves, as was the case with William M. Evarts, the secretary of state. “Mr. Evarts came in for a long talk the other night,” Clover reported in one letter. Luckily, she had stepped out of the room moments before and went immediately to bed—“I love him not—he orates too much.” After an exceptionally grueling week of hosting several dinners of twenty or more people, Clover joked to her father, “For a middle aged slightly spavined Boston nag last week’s pace has been too fast—last night I dropped on the track and went to bed at 7 o’clk.” From time to time, she’d be slowed down with a stinging cold, an aching tooth, a sick headache. In the spring of 1876, Clover had been so sick she couldn’t sleep or swallow and had difficulty breathing, frightening Henry out of his “wits for a week,” as Henry confessed to Gaskell. He feared diphtheria. But this bout of illness was an exception. Clover typically didn’t languish in bed for long.
What Clover enjoyed most was listening to a good story and seeing, for herself, the fascinating human scene. She often had a front-row seat. Early on in their life in Washington, she and Henry had driven by carriage out of the city to see friends, only to learn that those friends had traveled in t
he opposite direction to visit them at H Street. “So we came home a roundabout way,” Clover explained, and at a mill east of the Capitol building they spoke to the owner, who recognized Henry’s name, saying he used to know “H’s grandpa very well.” He took Clover and Henry to see his rose houses, which she described as a “fairyland—6-7-8 feet high all in bloom—such roses.” The man, it turned out, had once owned much of the land on Lafayette Square, from H Street to I Street, buying it for “3 and ½ cents a foot.” When Clover told him that the value of their lot was $30,000, he “gasped a little.” Then the man said, as Clover recounted to her father, “Well, there’s other things than money in this world—that’s of little count—I lost my only child last year—we couldn’t save her—I’ve enough to keep me from want—that’s all that’s needed.” The man insisted Clover not go home until he had covered a carriage seat with “superb roses.”
On the morning of December 7, 1877, a very tired General Nelson A. Miles delighted Clover by stopping in for a visit. Miles had just returned to Washington after a long season in Idaho and Montana, chasing down the Nez Perce. A farm boy from Massachusetts, the general had been wounded four times in the Civil War. Though not a graduate of West Point, he’d advanced rapidly through the military ranks. The previous year, commanding the Fifth Infantry, he’d fought the Sioux and Cheyenne after General George Custer’s death in the Battle of Little Big Horn. When Miles walked into Clover’s kitchen, she asked him if General William Tecumseh Sherman, as commanding general of the U.S. Army, had ordered Miles “to report to duty to 1501 H St.” The often cantankerous general didn’t catch Clover’s joke, but nonetheless settled down with some hot tea to tell his rapt listener of his adventures. He’d been part of the months-long 1,700-mile pursuit of the Nez Perce, which ended with Chief Joseph’s surrender on October 5 at Bear Paw in upper Montana territory. Whether Miles repeated Chief Joseph’s speech—“Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever”—Clover did not say.
But the general did relay to her what he and Chief Joseph talked about while riding side by side on the tribe’s long removal to Oklahoma Territory. Chief Joseph said that when “he saw the Indians about the agency hunting in small buckets for bones to gnaw he registered an oath never to become an ‘agency’ Indian.” Clover added incisively in a letter to her father that until “Miles conquered him he never was.” She noticed that General Miles did not deem the Indians mortal enemies, worthy of complete destruction, as did General Sherman, who had undoubtedly told her his views on the matter at one of their numerous shared dinners. General Miles, by contrast, spoke “very kindly and tenderly of them.” The general may not have mentioned to Clover his role in preventing the Nez Perce from returning to their homeland in Oregon, but he did tell her of his frustration at not being able to secure a hearing in Congress about building a large reservation school for the Nez Perce, a plan that Clover admired. When the general left that morning, Clover requested that he bring her a “warrior’s bonnet.” It wasn’t possible to obtain one, he explained, because the Nez Perce “never leave their bonnets behind.” The general promised, however, to bring her an Indian pipe on his return visit.
Most Sunday mornings, Clover sat down with her pen and ink to tell her father of her week, sometimes alarming herself by how much she’d written. She headlined one twelve-page letter with the words “How long Oh! Lord how long!” Her continuing claim to loathe the task of writing is hard to credit, given how her missives from Washington overflow with juicy gossip, set pieces, reports on friends and politics, quips, satire, and observations about fashion and art. “A propos to nothing,” she wrote in one letter, “isn’t this worthy of Mark Twain—a man the other day was describing to me how he saw a nitroglycerine explosion of Wells Fargo’s Express office in San Francisco—he said ‘I was standing at the hotel window opposite when the front blew out and the air was darkened with my intimate friends.’” She was a master at portraying people: the French philosopher Ernest Renan is “charming, most sympathetic, and chatty—as big as a whale, no neck, and jolly round face rising directly from his shoulders—you can think of nothing but a full harvest moon rising above a mountain;” the British physicist John Tyndall “looks like a typical Yankee ‘store-keeper’—just the keen-lantern jawed brush bearded face.” While visiting with a mother and daughter from New York, friends of friends, the mother asked, “‘Mrs. Adams, didn’t your husband marry a Miss Ogden?’ ‘Why, no,’ I said, ‘he married me.’” After they both laughed, the older woman asked Clover not to pass on her mistake to Henry, fearing he’d think her only a “silly old woman.” And in early spring of 1878, Clover witnessed the birth of a new technology. She went to the weather signal bureau and talked into a telephone, conversing with a man in Virginia at the other end of “forty-three miles of wire.” After she asked him several questions, she thanked him and heard him clearly say, “‘Very welcome Madame.’”
Clover meant to entertain her father with these stories, of course. Her letters provided a way for him to watch her as she went about her life, just as he’d done over the years as she’d grown up. And clearly, having a way to be seen and valued through her letters, to have a home to send them to, was of almost magical importance to her. Once, after a dinner party, when Henry repaired to the billiard room with the other men to smoke their “midnight cigars,” Clover retreated to her rooms to write her father. “I’ve a superstitious feeling,” she wrote, “that I must keep my prize of a Sunday letter to you and I’ve only fifteen short minutes left to do it.”
Dr. Hooper wrote back to Clover every Sunday, letters now lost; we get only one side of their weekly conversations. But he treasured her letters and kept every one, writing the date of each on the outside edge of its envelope and often reading portions aloud to family and friends. How could he resist? Clover’s exquisite powers of observation were like those of a novelist gifted with an unerring eye for detail and character.
Sometimes her rapier wit drew a little blood, whether she intended it to or not. In a letter of December 1877 she described how a young woman “stood under a chandelier and gave a recitation—every spire of hair . . . tortured into a distinct and separate spiral in order to heighten the pathos of her recitation.” At the same evening performance, another older woman recited her poetry, “‘pomes’ she called them—one was about magnolias and babies between whom she fancied she detected a strong resemblance.” To keep from laughing, Clover stared at the mantelpiece “and tried to think of sad things.” But, she cautioned her father, in the first of several warnings, “Beware how you quote me.” Several Boston women had attended the party, and she didn’t want her “gibes to come back and hurt any feelings.”
Her worry that she might cause harm or bad feeling by what she wrote was not unfounded; she had gotten into just that kind of trouble almost immediately after moving to Washington. Early in 1878, an innocuous comment she’d made in a letter to her father found its way to Mrs. Adams, who took offense. If Henry’s parents hadn’t liked Clover from the start, they’d managed to keep up appearances. But now, upon hearing Clover’s comment that Henry had for the first time felt “like a gentleman” after their move to Washington, Mrs. Adams reacted with rage. She wrote Clover a scathing letter, calling her a fool. “A most annoying pin 300 miles long twisted and sharpened has come in a letter from Boston,” Clover told her father in late January of 1878. “If we are fools we are,” she declared defiantly, and “too old to reform.” Dr. Hooper blamed Henry’s youngest brother, Brooks, for passing on the offending phrase, but Clover defended him, saying to her father that he did “Brooks [an] injustice—he is far too busy and loyal to nag” his parents. She instead suspected her cousin by marriage, Alice Hooper Mason, and begged her father to “never quote a word or syllable” to Alice, who’d recently divorced her second husband, Charles Sumner, and then moved back to Boston, taking up her maiden name, Mason. “Her tongue,” Clover cautioned, “is a
weapon which cuts right and left and I am cowardly enough to stand even at this distance in terror of it!” Clover felt relieved at having explained the family conflict. “There! That’s all—and I feel better,” but she added, with emphasis, “Burn this!”
Later that spring, Mr. Adams, in an attempt to cool tempers, made plans to meet with Clover and Henry but missed them because of a miscommunication. Then Henry went by himself to visit his parents at the old manse in Quincy to try to save the situation and explain things. But the damage was done. Mr. Adams had felt abandoned when Henry first moved to Washington, admitting in his journal, “I feel as if [Henry] was now taking a direction which will separate us from him gradually forever.” To protect his relationship with his son, Mr. Adams blamed Clover for the breach in the family, writing in his journal two years later that “I have no feelings but those of affection and love for him. I pity rather than dislike his wife. But henceforth I must regard her as a marplot.” Mr. and Mrs. Adams thought Clover nothing more than a high-flown meddler. From this point on, she would make few visits to the old homestead in Quincy.
Dr. Hooper, meanwhile, kept reading aloud from Clover’s entertaining letters. She warned him again in late March after four months in Washington that “I am told on high authority that you disregard all my prayers and tears and threats and inflict on patient friends my weekly filial drivel.” Dr. Hooper promised in a postcard that he followed her orders and hadn’t passed on what she said. Clover fired back that despite his claims, she’d heard otherwise. “Your postal card,” she wrote, “would be reassuring if not overborne by other testimony,” and she listed names as proof: “Mrs. Adams, Miss Bigelow, Adie Bigelow, Sally Russell, Ida Higginson, Henry Higginson, Mrs. George Perkins, Nanny Wharton, E. W. Hooper, F. C. Hooper, E. Whiteside, Mrs. Parkman, etc., etc., etc.” “All I can say,” Clover went on, “is that you don’t know how pleasant my notes might be if written to you only—you don’t know how many spicy things I should put in if I could trust you.”
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