“To-day I read beside”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann. To those who knew her, Ellen became after death a kind of “Transcendental angel,” according to Miller, The American Transcendentalists: Their Prose and Poetry, 272. Wendell Phillips, the rabble-rousing abolitionist speaker and activist for women’s rights, liked to copy out Ellen’s most well-known poem next to his own signature in the autograph books of his Lyceum audience members. Carlos Martyn, Wendell Phillips: The Agitator, rev. ed. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1890), 446.
“How the sunlight crinkles up”: SSB to Mary Eliot Dwight Parkman, n.d., Parkman Family Papers, MS Am 2120 (57-69b), Houghton. The rest of the letter reads: “How shall I bear the long lonely summer days—she will never come to me again. Oh, shall I ever go to her?”
“his saddest days”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, November 6, 1848, privately printed by EWH, Swann.
[>] Clover’s older sister, Ellen: Ellen also cherished her mother’s poetry. In later years, she wrote to Alice Howe James, the wife of William James, “I send also my mothers poems. She died at 36. It is some of it—like the few strokes in a portfolio of drawings—that it is hardly fair to show—but others have I think great beauty.” EHG to Alice Howe (Gibbens) James, n.d., William James Papers, MS 1092.9–1092.12 (4305), Houghton.
CHAPTER 2. The Hub of the Universe
[>] “take all the care I can”: SSB to Mary Eliot Dwight Parkman, n.d., Parkman Family Papers, MS Am 2120 (57–69b), Houghton.
“dresses up” . . . “sad and touching”: SSB to CST, n.d., 1849, S-T Papers.
[>] “religious feelings”: Harvard University Memoirs, 1830 (Boston: Press of Rockwell and Churchill, 1886), 143–44.
pew number 45: Henry Wilder Foote, Annals of King’s Chapel from the Puritan Age of New England to the Present Day, vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1881).
“good breeding”: Clover found the scrap of paper, with the excerpt of George Sand copied in French, in her father’s desk. Sand is quoting her own grandmother’s account of married life. The entire quotation reads, in translation, “It’s that we knew how to live, back then; we didn’t have important infirmities. If one had gout, one walked anyway and without grimacing; good breeding meant that we hid our suffering.” George Sand Fragment, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“well-balanced and even”: Ephraim Peabody to William W. Swain, Boston, November 6, 1848, unpublished letter privately printed by EWH, Swann.
Betsey Wilder, who became: Even as a grown woman, Clover frequently asked her father to give her greetings to Betsey, saying she often missed Betsey’s “good care.” MHA to RWH, July 26, 1872, LMHA, 20. Clover and Clover’s mother, Ellen, spelled Betsey’s name differently at different times, not always including the second e.
Not much is known: Though little information can be found on Miss Houghton’s school, many schools for girls were run out of individual homes. For an example of the courses offered at different grade levels, see Circular and Catalogue, Albany Female Academy (Albany, NY: Munsell and Rowland, 1860), 4–6.
At eleven, Clover: MHA to Ellen Hooper, July 5, 1854, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
[>] “I got a box full”: MHA to Eunice Hooper, July 29, 1851, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“a flitting hither and thither”: Henry James, Selected Stories, ed. John Lyon (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 26.
“I am taking painting lessons”: MHA to EHG, August 19, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“under the present circumstances”: SSB to CST, 1851, Caroline Sturgis Tappan Papers, MS 1221 10, Houghton. This letter to Caroline, in more detail, reads, “And yet I find it difficult to take up the thread which has been for one year kept united between us by written communications. I want to see you and your last baby and your first baby and I think I should like to see how you live and what you have about you. . . . However, I am ‘picking up’ so they say, which is better than being ‘picked up’ by Barnum for promiscuous exhibition. I couldn’t think for one minute dear child of leaving my baby and certainly not for ½ a minute of bringing him, therefore my dear girl I can’t come, which deduction clearly evolves itself from the statements just made. I hope to some time or other. I fear lest we shall not know one another when we do meet. We certainly cannot recognize our mutual infants. My baby does everything cunning, patty cakes, puts people bye bye, smacks his lips like Grandfather, clucks to the horses, imitates pussy cat by a prolonged squeak, kisses by bunting his head about indefinitely, tells where Mama’s eye is by nearly eradicating it with his forefingers. He is very bright, has a great variety of expressions, a very wild eye, bow mouth and a particularly good nose, high broad forehead and is the image of Henry. Father and he are very confidential and happy together and I really regret to leave this calm nest, which I am to do on Monday next for Anne Hooper’s. However I think it will be very pleasant there and under the present circumstances I find all places where I go quite similar in one respect—i.e.—Henry is not in them—suffice it to say. He is gone and I have consented. The personal experiences resulting from these facts are not easily narrated in a letter. May you never have to try it dear Cary.”
“pact with loneliness”: SSB to Mary Eliot Dwight Parkman, n.d., 1848, MS Am 2120 (69a–b), Houghton.
[>] her “sudden death”: Susan’s obituary in the June 10, 1853, edition of the Boston Daily Evening Transcript read as follows: “Sudden death. We regret to learn that Mrs. Bigelow, wife of Dr. Henry J. Bigelow, of this city, died very suddenly last evening at the country residence of her father, the Hon. William Sturgis, in Woburn.”
“Generally, we must rely on” . . . “to be shaken”: Ralph Waldo Emerson to CST, July 4, 1853, in Tilton, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 8, 371.
various family members: In the joint family letter, Eunice Hooper, Dr. Hooper’s oldest sister, with whom Clover was staying, told Nellie that Clover had been “very bright and happy since she has been here and not so desirous of a change as she is sometimes when she is with us.” Eunice Hooper to EHG, August 1854, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“My dear Miss Hooper”: MHA to EHG, August 1854, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“before me so I”: MHA to EHG, September 10, 1854, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
extended tour of Europe: For a description of Caroline’s European travels, see Cornelia Brooke Gilder and Julia Conklin Peters, Hawthorne’s Lenox (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008), 38–39. See also George Dimock, Caroline Sturgis Tappan and the Grand Tour: A Collection of 19th-Century Photographs (Lenox, MA: Lenox Library Association, 1882), 61–69.
[>] erotic friendship, “my Muse”: Ralph Waldo Emerson to CST, May 10, 1845, in Tilton, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 8, 27.
severed connection: Aunt Cary’s flight to Europe expressed a need to get away from family, an action that may have led to Clover’s subsequent detachment from her aunt. Years later, on hearing others “rave” about the “depth and freshness of her [Aunt Cary’s] mind,” Clover would remark that her impressions of her aunt were “dim” and that “she must be more amiable and patient than I remember her.” MHA to RWH, December 3, 1882, LMHA, 404.
Clover could be sensitive: Clover even threatened her father once when his return letters hadn’t arrived as soon as anticipated: “Write me immediately a very long letter or I won’t write you another word.” MHA to RWH, August 1, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“As for Alice I can”: This letter is undated and incomplete, and there is no opening salutation indicating the recipient. But a letter in a nearby file, written with similar stationery and ink, has the line “I shall be 16 in September,” which would make the year 1859. Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
[>] “The ring accompanying”: MHA to unidentified recipient, presumably Annie M. Hooper, n.d., Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“passem of blue”: This phrase in Clover’s satire likely means “a scrap” or “an example.” It could also be
that she meant to write passim, meaning “here and there.”
[>] “the thoughts in Nature”: Lucy Allen Paton, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919), 399.
It was the best education: For descriptions of the Agassiz School and who attended, see Paton, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, 45–51, 394–401; and Louise Hall Tharp, Adventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1959), 137–44.
“a good scholar”: WS to unknown recipient, December 26, 1859, quoted in Mrs. Henry Adams, 38.
“Was there ever anyone”: Catharine Lathrop Howard, Memorials and Letters of Catharine L. Howard, compiled by Sophia W. Howard (Springfield, MA: Springfield Printing and Binding Co., 189?), 448.
“the hub of the universe”: Oliver Wendell Holmes’s original phrase was actually “hub of the solar system.” It became more commonly cited as “hub of the universe,” keeping the Holmes attribution. See Oliver Wendell Holmes, “Every Man His Own Boswell,” The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, Atlantic Monthly (April 1858): 734; Annie Fields, Authors and Friends (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1897), 135.
“write me often”: EWH to MHA, February 15, 1863, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.
[>] “no other establishment”: as quoted in Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Business of Ticknor and Fields (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21.
“a line of cleavage”: Dale Baum, quoted in Carol Bundy’s The Nature of Sacrifice: A Biography of Charles Russell Lowell Jr., 1835–64 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 78.
“the almighty dollar”: Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (London: Oxford University Press, 1957, first published in 1842), 27.
CHAPTER 3. Clover’s War
[>] “a model one”: More Than Common Powers of Perception: The Diary of Elizabeth Rogers Mason Cabot, ed. P.A.M. Taylor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), 182.
[>] “Nobody thinks of anything”: Mary Warren Dwight to “Annie,” April 23, 1861, Dwight-Warren Family Papers, MHS.
“I don’t wonder” . . . “color ordered”: MHA to Annie Hooper, May 8, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
[>] “the never-failing fountains”: The Sanitary Commission of the United States Army: A Succinct Narrative of Its Works and Purposes (New York: Published for the Benefit of the United States Sanitary Commission, 1864), 12. The report states the commission’s objective in this way: “to bring to bear upon the health, comfort, and morale of our troops, the fullest and ripest teachings of Sanitary Science in its application to military life” (5). Activities of the NEWAA, headed by Abigail Williams May, included caring for wounded soldiers and organizing the collection and delivery of a wide range of supplies to the Union army, such as uniforms, bandages, sheets, medicine, soap, preserves, pickles, tea, coffee, crackers, and bread. See also Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000); and Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
“Dr. Howe’s ‘Sanitary’ rooms”: MHA to RWH, December 5, no year (most likely 1862). Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe was one of the founding members of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and a friend of Dr. Hooper. See Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, ed. Laura E. Richards (Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1909), 479–507.
“very nice” . . . “shan’t be lonely”: MHA to RWH, August 1, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“insatiably hospitable”: James, Notes of a Son and Brother, 213.
“The weather has been intensely”: MHA to RWH, August 1, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
[>] “Miss C. Sedgwick introduced me”: MHA to RWH, August 7, 1861, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“nearly a year since”: MHA to Annie Hooper, April 1, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“What fearful times” . . . “by being blue”: MHA to unknown addressee, August 13, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. It’s not entirely clear where Clover stayed during the summer of 1862. Her likely host would have been her Aunt Cary, but Clover doesn’t clearly indicate one way or the other. She mentions, however, that she spent the day or went to dinner at Aunt Cary’s, which implies that she slept somewhere else as she’d done the previous summer.
“self-support by their own”: Frederick J. Blue, Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1987), 184.
“natural taste”: EWH to MHA, January 25, 1863, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.
while Clover’s more distant cousin: Clover’s mother’s younger sister, Mary Louisa Sturgis, married Robert Gould Shaw Jr. in 1841. He was the brother of Francis G. Shaw, who was the father of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Colonel Shaw’s mother was Sarah Blake Sturgis, a descendant of the large Russell Sturgis branch of the family.
[>] “very nicest men”: MHA to CST, March 1863, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“having such a good”: MHA to EHG, August 13, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
His war photograph: A family album of mostly Hooper siblings and cousins also includes Mason’s photograph, indicating his closeness with the family, and perhaps his attentions toward Clover. Swann.
“I was very much afraid” . . .
[>] “come back from the dead”: MHA to EHG, August 5, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“pitiless cold” . . . “standard”: MHA to CST, March 1863, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. William Powell Mason Jr. (1835–1901), a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, married Fanny Peabody on November 25, 1863.
[>] “festive spree” . . . “to be remembered”: MHA to CST, March 1863, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. Quincy Adams Shaw, born in 1825, was the younger brother of Clover’s uncle Robert Gould Shaw Jr.
[>] “strewn so thickly”: quoted in Thomas O’Connor, Civil War Boston: Homefront and Battlefield (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997), 105–6.
bloodshed at Gettysburg: EWH to EHG, July 19, 1863, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (5), Houghton.
“imagine no holier”: Frank Shaw, as quoted in Lorien Foote, Seeking the One Great Remedy: Francis George Shaw and Nineteenth-Century Reform (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), 1.
The man who: Ned Hooper wrote fifteen letters to Clover between March 11, 1862, and October 26, 1863. MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.
Ned had wanted to be an artist: Interview with descendant, June 27, 2008.
Taking after his father: Ned Hooper settled on a career that suited his talents and temperament; he would serve as Harvard’s treasurer from 1876 to 1898.
“a young man”: James Freeman Clarke to Edward L. Pierce, February 14, 1862, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (1).
[>] “The Island is lovely”: EWH to MHA, March 11, 1862, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.
“nothing now except”: EWH to MHA, March 26, 1862, EWH Letters, MS 1969 (3), Houghton.
“When we first”: EWH to MHA, March 11, 1862, MS Am 1969 (3), Houghton.
[>] “diligent, intelligent”: Only the date, July 13, 1863, was preserved on the newspaper clipping. On a postcard, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw wrote that Ned was held in “the highest opinion” by everyone. The comment by Shaw was copied many years later by his niece Louisa Jay in a letter to Louisa Ward Thoron. Louisa Jay wrote, “In looking thro some Civil war letters the other day I came across the following from my Uncle R. G. Shaw. It was written to his mother from St. Simon’s Island and was dated June 18, 1863. ‘Ned Hooper at Beaufort is the head of the whole contraband department. Every one has the highest opinion of him. I should like to have remained where I could see him every day.’” Newspaper clipping and letter, Louisa Jay to Louisa Ward Thoron, May 13, 1955, EWH Letters, MS Am 1969 (11), Houghton.
prized her brother’s letters: Clover’s return letters to Ned are missing.
“Then and there” . . . “going like
race horses”: MHA to Mary Louisa “Loulie” Shaw, May 23 and 24, 1865, LMHA, 3–10. Loulie, a year younger than Clover, was her first cousin, the only child of Mary Louisa Sturgis and Robert Gould Shaw Jr., the paternal uncle of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. Clover was also distantly related to Colonel Shaw through Shaw’s mother, Sarah Blake Sturgis. See LMHA, 465–67.
[>] “I pine so” . . . “twice a week”: Alice Mason Hooper to Anne Sturgis Hooper, October 17, 1864, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. For information on William Sturgis Hooper, see Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Harvard Memorial Biographies, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Sever and Francis, 1866), 189–203. Later, in December 1864, Alice passed on Clover’s news that a recent dinner party, hosted by Caroline Sturgis Tappan to give people the chance to meet Ralph Waldo Emerson after his Sunday evening lectures, had been “very successful.” Alice M. Hooper to Anne Sturgis Hooper, December 19, 1864, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
[>] “crammed” . . . “everyone clapped”: Alice Mason Hooper to Anne Sturgis Hooper, August 6, 1865, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“one would rather”: Quoted in Hamilton Vaughan Bail, “Harvard’s Commemoration Day, July 21, 1865,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2 (June 1942): 266.
Other dignitaries followed: New York Times, July 25, 1865. The coverage of the memorial service that day took up the entire front page of the New York paper.
The Hooper family had already left by the time of Lowell’s reading. As Alice Mason Hooper wrote to her mother-in-law, “We had to go away before it was over—because as usual Uncle Will [Clover’s father] got fidgety about their train so we left an hour before it was necessary.” To have missed anything of that dramatic day must have grieved Clover.
CHAPTER 4. Six Years
[>] “wretched-looking scrawl”: MHA to Fanny Chapin, September 15, 1862, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“pen and ink will be banished”: MHA to RWH, January 27, 1878, Adams.
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