In the months before December 1862 General Robert E. Lee had led Confederate troops in the battles of Second Manassas and Antietam; he had broken bones in one hand and sprained his other wrist in a riding accident; and he had suffered the loss of his beloved twenty-three-year-old daughter to typhoid fever. Lee wrote the following letter to his daughter-in-law upon learning of the death of his only living grandchild, a baby girl. Outside his tent door Lee's troops awaited a Union attack. Three days later, on December 13, at the Battle of Fredericksburg, the Confederacy suffered more than four thousand casualties and the Union more than twelve thousand.
Camp Fredericksburg
December 10, 1862
I heard yesterday, my dear daughter, with the deepest sorrow, of the death of your infant. I was so grateful at her birth. I felt that she would be such a comfort to you, such a pleasure to my dear Fitzhugh, and would fill so full the void still aching in your hearts. But you have now two sweet angels in heaven. What joy there is in the thought! I can say nothing to soften the anguish you must feel, and I know you are assured of my deep and affectionate sympathy. May God give you strength to bear the affliction He has imposed, and produce future joy out of your present misery, is my earnest prayer.
I saw Fitzhugh yesterday. He is well, and wants much to see you. When you are strong enough, cannot you come up to Hickory Hill, or your grandpa's, on a little visit, when he can come down and see you? My horse is waiting at my tent door, but I could not refrain from sending these few lines to recall to you the thought and love of
Your devoted father
R. E. Lee
MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL CLEMENS) TO
CLARA CLEMENS GABRILOWITSCH
“I shall never be melancholy again, I think.”
He was feeling chest pains with increasing frequency and severity, and Samuel Clemens suspected he might not have long to live. The celebrated writer and lecturer had already lost his wife, a son, and a daughter; a second daughter, Clara, had recently married and moved to Europe with her husband, Ossip Gabrilowitsch. Clemens lived in Connecticut with his remaining daughter, Jean, who was an epileptic, and he worried about what would become of her if he should die. On the morning of December 24, he received the news from the family maid that Jean, twenty-nine years old, had suffered a fatal seizure and was dead in the bathtub upstairs. “Possibly I know now what the soldier feels when a bullet crashes through his heart,” he wrote.
Here, seventy-four-year-old Samuel Clemens writes to his remaining child, Clara, five days after Jean's death. Just four months later, Twain himself was in his grave.
Redding, Conn.,
Dec. 29, '09.
O, Clara, Clara dear, I am so glad she is out of it and safe—safe! I am not melancholy; I shall never be melancholy again, I think. You see I was in such distress when I came to realize that you were gone far away and no one stood between her and danger but me—and I could die at any moment, and then—oh then what would become of her! For she was wilfull, you know, and would not have been governable.
You can't imagine what a darling she was, that last two or three days; and how fine, and good, and sweet, and noble—and joyful, thank Heaven!—and how intellectually brilliant. I had never been acquainted with Jean before. I recognized that.
But I mustn't try to write about her—I can't. I have already poured my heart out with the pen, recording that last day or two. I will send you that—and you must let no one but Ossip read it.
Good-bye. I love you so! And Ossip.
Father
WOODROW WILSON TO
JESSIE WILSON SAYRE
“I find that the only way to sustain a broken heart is
to try to do what she would have done.”
On August 6, 1914, just five days after World War I erupted in Europe, Woodrow Wilson's wife, Ellen Axson Wilson, died in her sickroom at the White House. Months before she had been diagnosed with Bright's disease, a disease of the kidneys. Her death that summer afternoon “nearly paralyzed” her husband of twenty-nine years and shocked their three daughters, Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor. The last words Mrs. Wilson spoke were to the White House physician, Dr. Grayson—“Doctor, if I go away, promise me that you will take good care of my husband.”
Two months after Mrs. Wilson passed away, a devastated president wrote the following letter to his second daughter, twenty-seven-year-old Jessie Sayre of Williamstown, Massachusetts. Mrs. Sayre joined her father in the White House for the holidays and then remained in Washington, D.C., for the birth of her first child. To the president's and the country's delight, the baby, a seven-and-a-half-pound boy, Francis Sayre, was delivered in the White House by Dr. Grayson on January 17, 1915. He was Wilson's first grandchild, the eleventh and, to date, last baby to claim the executive mansion as his birthplace.
The White House 15 October, 1914
My precious Daughter,
My heart has long ago answered your sweet letter, though without words. I long to see you and Frank in your own home! I would give my head to turn away from things here and run up for a little visit. But, alas! I must not. Every day it is plain that I would simply be neglecting my duty if I were to go away. Much as it hurts, I must deny myself and stick at the endless job.
My heart carries thoughts of you all day long. I think your mother's feelings have been left with me, in addition to my own. The doctor and I have worked out a lovely plan for Christmas and the two months following. I shall have the chance to look after you for a little while, at least, and do very poorly what she would have done so wonderfully. I find that the only way to sustain a broken heart is to try to do what she would have done. So long as I act in her spirit and, as nearly as I can, as she would have acted I experience a sort of sweet relief and happiness that helps to carry me through the day.
Helen seems quite herself again (though I fear she must be rather lonely, poor little girl) and I am perfectly well. The days are, fortunately too full of pressing tasks to give me time for weakness and thoughts of myself.
It will not be very long before the Christmas holidays, and then we shall all be together again! How fine! God bless you, my darling! It is so fine to hear how well you are! Dear love to Frank.
Your devoted Father
Frederick Law Olmsted (above) and first page of his letter to his son John
Aging
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON TO
WENDELL PHILLIPS GARRISON
“The matter of death, regarding it as I do as simply
an exchange of spheres for the better, grows more
and more insignificant as I advance.”
In December 1878, William Lloyd Garrison was entering the final months of his life. With the end of slavery accomplished, thirteen years had passed since the publication of the last issue of Garrison's stalwart and influential abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. He had become a private person during these last years, but he remained until the end reform-minded and committed to improving the lives and education of freed slaves.
Here a contented seventy-three-year-old Garrison responds to birthday wishes from his son.
Roxbury, Dec. 12, 1878
My dear Wendell:
Thanks for your congratulatory letter, with its filial remembrance of the day, which certainly completes at least seventy-three years of my earthly pilgrimage. Notwithstanding this advanced period of life, to which so few comparatively attain, you propose for me additional “length of days,” even to a centennial climax! However that may be, while it will be hard for me at any stage to part with my beloved children and grandchildren, I trust to be ready for the summons to “go hence,” come when they may. The matter of death, regarding it as I do as simply an exchange of spheres for the better, grows more and more insignificant as I advance; and what may be a painful separation from loved ones here will, I doubt not, prove a joyful reunion with loved ones gone before. I shall not object to being permitted to see myself enrolled on the list of great-grandfathers; but I could hope that I might pass on before m
y faculties are essentially impaired, or the body bowed down with hopeless infirmities. The first two I desire to meet on “the other side of Jordan” are your fond mother and my own. It is something curious that, while my mother was only forty-seven years old when she died, and I am now seventy-three, I feel my filial impulses bounding within me as though I were again a child, whenever I think of the possibility of coming into her presence; and though our ages are reversed, according to earthly dates, there still seems to be the same relative distance between us, as to the point of time, that existed when she was here in the body.
I am often congratulated on being blessed with such good children—by those who mean no flattery, but who know from personal knowledge whereof they affirm. I have every reason to be devoutly thankful that you have all grown up to adult life with no stain upon your character, no youthful excesses to deplore, no vicious or unseemly habits to overcome; that your affection for me, and concern for my welfare and happiness, have been without measure; and that you have always shown a mutually disinterested regard for each other, without the slightest alloy. In all these respects my cup of bliss has been full to overflowing. I feel that I can safely trust all of you to maintain an upright character to the end, no matter by what temptations you may at any time be surrounded.
With your letter one of a similar nature comes from my darling daughter, and a brief one from dear little Helen.
The violent rain-storm which you report as so damaging at the Park was felt in all this region. Indeed, it covered all New England, besides New York and Pennsylvania; and the pecuniary loss sustained by it is to be counted by millions of dollars in the aggregate. I doubt if it has ever been equalled since I came upon the stage of action. Happily, as you know, my house is founded upon a rock; and though the rains descended, and the winds blew, and beat upon it, it did not fall as it might have done if it had been built upon a sandy foundation.
On the coming Sunday old lady May will complete her ninety-first year. On Monday Fanny will have achieved her thirty-fourth year. So we ripen.
Receive my benediction. Affectionate remembrances to dear Mrs. McKim, Lloyd, Phil, and queen Katharine.
Your loving Father.
No doubt John Ritchie and his lovable wife must have greatly enjoyed their visit to the Park. They were in luck as to the storm. I have not yet seen them.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE TO
CHARLES STOWE
“It gives me a sort of dizzy feeling of the
shortness of life and nearness of eternity . . .”
Residing with her husband and twin spinster daughters, Hattie and Eliza, Harriet Beecher Stowe busied herself during 1882 by putting her papers in order. She made her last public appearance that year and wasn't writing much anymore, aside from letters and notes. Life for Stowe had been filled with family, faith, and unprecedented accomplishment, yet she had also suffered nearly unimaginable sorrow—of her seven children, only three would survive her. In the following letter she mentions the loss of two sons, but of a third son, Frederick, she says nothing. A troubled alcoholic, thirty-one-year-old Frederick sailed around Cape Horn in 1871, landed in San Francisco, and was never heard from again.
Here, in the midst of arranging a lifetime of papers, at seventy-one years old, Stowe writes to her only remaining son, Charles, a minister, husband, father, and a bright spot in his mother's life.
[1882]
My Dear Charley,
My mind has been with you a great deal lately. I have been looking over and arranging my papers with a view to sifting out those that are not worth keeping, and so filing and arranging those that are to be kept that my heirs and assigns may with the less trouble know where and what they are. I cannot describe (to you) the peculiar feelings which this review occasions. Reading old letters, when so many of the writers are gone from the earth, seems to me like going into the world of spirits,—letters full of warm, eager, anxious, busy life, that is forever past. My own letters, too, full of bygone scenes in my early life and the childish days of my children. It is affecting to me to recall things that strongly moved me years ago, that filled my thoughts and made me anxious, when the occasion and emotion have wholly vanished from my mind. But I thank God there is one thing running through all of them from the time I was thirteen years old, and that is the intense unwavering sense of Christ's educating, guiding presence and care. It is all that remains now. The romance of my youth is faded; it looks to me now, from my years, so very young—those days when my mind only lived in emotion, and when my letters never were dated, because they were only histories of the internal, but now that I am no more and never can be young in this world, now that the friends of those days are almost all in eternity, what remains?
I was passionate in my attachments in those far back years, and as I have looked over the files of old letters, they are all gone (except one, C. Van Rensselaer), Georgiana May, Delia Bacon, Clarissa Treat, Elizabeth Lyman, Sarah Colt, Elisabeth Phenix, Frances Strong, Elisabeth Foster. I have letters from them all, but they have been long in spirit land, and know more about how it is there than I do. It gives me a sort of dizzy feeling of the shortness of life and nearness of eternity when I see how many that I have traveled with are gone within the veil. Then there are all my own letters, written in the first two years of marriage, when Mr. Stowe was in Europe and I was looking forward to motherhood and preparing for it—my letters when my whole life was within the four walls of my nursery, my thoughts absorbed by the developing character of children who have now lived their earthly life and gone to the eternal one,—my two little boys, each in his way good and lovely, whom Christ has taken in youth, and my little one, my first Charley, whom He took away before he knew sin or sorrow,—then my brother George and sister Catherine, the one a companion of my youth, the other the mother who assumed the care of me after I left home in my twelfth year—and they are gone. Then my blessed father, for many years so true an image of the Heavenly Father,—in all my afflictions he was afflicted, in all my perplexities he was a sure and safe counselor, and he too is gone upward to join the angelic mother whom I scarcely knew in this world, who has been to me only a spiritual presence through life.
Harriet Beecher Stowe lived for another fourteen years.
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED TO
JOHN CHARLES OLMSTED*
“It has today for the first time become evident to me
that my memory as to recent occurrences
is no longer to be trusted.”
In the spring of 1895, at the age of seventy-three, Frederick Law Olmsted knew his mind was slipping. He had been pushing himself especially hard for the past few years, working at full steam on major projects in Chicago, Milwaukee, Boston, Louisville, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. Details and names were beginning to escape him, and his sons John and Rick, both members of his landscape architecture firm, noticed the deterioration. They began briefing their father before client meetings and sometimes even made decisions in his name.
By 1895, the firm had been working for seven years to develop the grounds and an arboretum at the Biltmore, George W. Vanderbilt's magnificent two-thousand-acre Asheville, North Carolina, estate. Here, after a meeting with Mr. Vanderbilt, Olmsted writes to forty-four-year-old John at home in the Massachusetts office of Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot.
Biltmore, North Carolina
10th May, 1895
Dear John:
It has today for the first time become evident to me that my memory as to recent occurrences is no longer to be trusted. If Rick had not been with me and had not privately set me right I should have shown that fact in a flagrant way to Mr. Vanderbilt. I think it my duty to tell you this at once in order that you may take measures to guard the business from possible consequences. I try to look at the situation from an outside and impersonal point of view and so looking at it I see that I ought no longer to be trusted to carry on important business for the firm alone. This simply because I am liable to such lapses of memory as to recent experiences, as, fo
r example, as to instructions issued verbally, that I cannot be depended on to properly represent the firm. I think that I have no right to conceal this, or to delay telling you of it. I have no reason to think I have lost capacity in respect to invention, design or reasoning powers in any respect, only that my memory (or presence of mind) in regard to recent occurrences is less trustworthy than it has been. It follows, simply, for the present, that it will be prudent for you and Eliot to trust a little less to my presence of mind in interviews with clients than you prudently might hitherto; to recognize that I am instinctively less ready to take risks and more distrustful of myself than I have been and that I have a slower-working memory of recent occurrences.
I do not quite like to undertake alone such business as ought to come in Washington and Philadelphia next week. Perhaps this is in a considerable degree because I do not think that I am as well versed in the facts of the present situation of affairs in these places as I should be, but it is also in part because of a growing distrust of my presence of mind in matters the consideration of which involves action of memory of comparatively recent occurrences. Precisely this condition, I suppose, which lends to the rule that military and naval officers shall be retired at seventy.
I suppose that I am a little afflicted physically, as I always have been in previous visits, by the elevation of this place, but I do not think that I can rightly conceal from you the fact that I am more distrustful of myself than I have ever before been and am less willing to operate alone in matters of considerable importance, like this of the Biltmore arboretum, for example.
As to [?] at Washington, Brooklyn &c, we will do the best we can by telegraphic correspondence. I simply now do not want to deal with these matters alone.
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