Galahad in the Gilded Age:: A Life of George William Curtis

By Linda Dowling

Galahad in the Gilded Age is the story of George William Curtis, regarded at the beginning of his career as little more than a handsome, amusing young man from a socially prominent family. His life would change dramatically after four years traveling in Europe and the Levant, from which he returned to find himself a literary celebrity—“the Howadji”—following the appearance of two books describing his Middle East experiences that some considered so provocatively sensuous as to border on obscenity. Yet during this early celebrity, Curtis would find his life changing profoundly—discovering marital happiness, facing financial bankruptcy and finding himself irresistibly drawn into increasingly bitter controversies: the national battle against slavery, against wide-spreading political corruption, and against what Curtis regarded as a wholly unreasonable resistance to granting women the right to vote. George William Curtis, a contemporary would conclude after his death, was “the best knight of our time.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664153936

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Copyright © 2021 by Linda Dowling.

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Rev. date: 03/25/2021

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Providence of Rhode Island

Chapter 2 The Newness Comes to Providence

Chapter 3 Brook Farm

Chapter 4 Concord

Chapter 5 The Wander Years

Chapter 6 Wandering Into Revolution

Chapter 7 The Howadji at Home

Chapter 8 Gilded Youth

Chapter 9 Recalled to Life

Chapter 10 Finding His Voice

Chapter 11 A Civil Warrior

Chapter 12 The Lesson the War Taught

Chapter 13 A System So Contemptible

Chapter 14 Snivel-Service Reform

Chapter 15 Curtis vs. Conkling

Chapter 16 The Making of a Mugwump

Chapter 17 The Approaching End

Chapter 18 The Empty Chair

Notes to Galahad in the Gilded Age

Abbreviations Used in Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

While working on a biography that took more than a decade to write, I’ve accumulated countless obligations to librarians and archivists throughout the country. I am especially grateful for the help provided by persons at smaller institutions. The promptness, efficiency and encouragement of all were remarkable given their limited staffs and budgetary constraints. The names that follow represent only a selection of those who went far beyond the call of bibliographical duty: Kaitlin Buerge, Assoc. Archivist, Middlebury College Special Collections; Christopher Densmore, Curator, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College; Hannah Elder, Reproductions Coordinator, Massachusetts Historical Society; Angela Fritz, Head of University Archives, University of Notre Dame; Krista Lauren Gray, Illinois History & Lincoln Collections, University of Illinois; James Harte, Mss Department, National Library of Ireland; Sarah Horowitz, Head of Quaker & Special Collections Haverford College; Elizabeth Jakubowski, Senior Librarian, MSS and Special Collections, New York State Library, Albany, NY; Tomas Jaehn and Heather McClure of the Chávez History Library, Santa Fe, NM; Fr. John E. Lynch, CSP, Paulist Fathers Archives, Washington, D.C.; Tal Nadan, Reference Archivist, Mss, Archives and Rare Books, New York Public Library; Eisha Neely, Research Services Librarian, Cornell University; Sigrid Pohl Perry, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University; Paul Rehbein, Technical Support Consultant, ProQuest, Ann Arbor, MI; Richard Simpson, Historian, Moravian Cemetery, Staten Island, NY; Hampton Smith, Reference Librarian, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, MN; James Stimpert, Senior Reference Archivist, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University; Amy Vedra, Director of Reference Services, Indiana Historical Society; Philip J. Weimerskirch, Special Collections Librarian, Providence [RI] Public Library; Vicki Weiss, Librarian, Mss and Special Collections, New York State Library, Albany, NY; Nicole Westerdahl, Reference and Access Services Librarian, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Librairies; Penny White, Reference Librarian, Albert & Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

I want to thank others who provided invaluable assistance: the booksellers Michael Manz of Bablylon Revisited Rare Books, Northampton, MA; John R. Paul of Prairie Archives, Springfield, IL; Steve Pepple of Buddenbrooks, Boston, MA; and especially, Mark Stirling of Up-Country Books, Gardnerville, NV. At Houghton Library, I am indebted to Peter Accardo, James Capobianco and Emily Walhout; at the Library of Congress, Patrick Kerwin, Bruce Kirby and Lewis Wyman, all Reference Librarians in the MSS Dept.; at Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site, in Cambridge, MA, Kate Hanson Plass and Christine Wirth, Archive Specialists not only aided me but saved me from error; at the Phillips Library of the Peabody Essex Museum in Rowley, MA, Irene Axelrod and Jennifer Hornsby solved difficulties in the Hawthorne-Manning Collection. Most of all, the invaluable specialists at the Staten Island Museum, now and in years past when it was known as the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, have earned my heartfelt thanks: Dorothy D’Eletto, Cara Delatte (now of the NYPL), Gabriella Leone, the current History Archives Manager, and the head of all, Janice Monger,

For WCD

Sine quo nihil.

INTRODUCTION

Who exactly was George William Curtis? A nineteenth-century American essayist, lyceum lecturer and editor? A litterateur who wrote about Egyptian dancing girls and American summer resorts? A graceful, gentlemanly speaker who discoursed on Sir Philip Sidney? A journalist who filled the Editor’s Easy Chair at Harper’s Magazine and addressed the ladies from the pages of Harper’s Bazar? Curtis was indeed all these things, but viewed from this angle, he seems plainly to have been a lightweight trifler. Modern literary historians largely remember him as a minor writer of the pre-Civil War period, the author of such gently satiric works as The Potiphar Papers (1853) and Prue and I (1856). Modern political historians tend to remember him as an earnest if ineffectual reformer intent on improving the civil service. There is, however, another, more consequential George William Curtis who has not survived into modern memory: a formidable, indefatigable warrior in the cause of essential political change and a higher moral and intellectual life for the country.

What little renown Curtis retains today chiefly centers in the phrase man milliner hurled at him in 1877 by his chief political enemy, Roscoe Conkling. Man milliner,¹ that is, an effeminate or emasculated fop whose preferred milieu was the drawing-rooms of society ladies, was felt at the time to be a particularly devastating epithet. Contemporaries were shocked by the virulence of Conkling’s abuse when he demanded who are these rancid, canting, self-righteous reformers who work themselves into conventions in order to parade their own thin veneering of superior purity? They are nothing but wolves in sheep’s clothing whose real object is office and plunder.² One of Conkling’s lieutenants would gloatingly remember that man-milliner stuck to Curtis to his dying day³ in 1892. Elaborately prepared and repeatedly rehearsed, Conkling’s sneering assault on Curtis would quickly become famous in the annals of American political invective, to be called one of the most deadly personal attacks in the history of American politics.⁴

But why should Roscoe Conkling engage in such a savage personal attack, especially upon an unimportant man seated directly in front of him at the New York Republican Convention at Rochester in September 1877? Conkling was the senior U.S. Senator from New York. He was the towering field marshal of the Stalwarts, as Republicans hoping to win a third presidential term for Ulysses S. Grant were called. He was the implacable boss of the powerful New York political machine controlling all the patronage in the State from the little post offices on the Canadian border to the rich Customs House Collectorship of the Port of New York City. He was widely celebrated for his magnificent physique, his elaborate oratory, his imperial pride and his inveterate vengefulness. What did Roscoe Conkling have to fear from a modest man milliner like Curtis?

Simply this: just the year before, at the Republican State Convention in Syracuse, Curtis had protested a unit-rule proposal—glossed as a suggestion that the New York delegation be instructed or requested to support the Convention’s favorite-son choice for the Presidential nomination (that is, Conkling himself). In a speech more finished in structure, more electrical in effect⁵ than any ever heard in a state convention (as the New York Times described it), Curtis told the delegates that the better part of the Republicans would listen to New York only if we are the free, unbought, uncoerced, untrammeled, unrequested, unpledged voice of the Republican Party.⁶ Curtis appealed to them to take care, gentlemen, that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,⁷ prompting great applause and moving many men to tears.

The next day, Curtis voted against Conkling’s nomination as New York’s favorite son. Three months later, when the National Republican Convention met in Cincinnati, Curtis—again and alone among the New York delegation of seventy—voted against Conkling through five ballotings.⁸ Only on the seventh ballot, after Indiana broke for Rutherford B. Hayes and sixty-one New York delegates swelled the victorious Hayes surge, did Curtis relent and join the majority. For this unique and unflagging independence Curtis had to be punished, lest it encourage other dissenters and endanger Conkling’s New York machine. This was why Conkling sought to crush Curtis at Rochester in 1877.

Curtis remained serene under Conkling’s venomous attack, even at the moment when the Senator, shouting out his denunciation of Curtis’s unique and delicate vote, bent forward, as one witness recalled, to hurl his words at him with the help of his index finger as straight as a boy would fling a stone.⁹ It was, Curtis told a friend immediately afterwards, the saddest sight, that man glaring at me in a fury of hate, and storming out his foolish blackguardism. I was all pity.¹⁰ Contemporaries immediately deplored the Senator’s tirade, for they recognized in Curtis an eminent and respected figure. From his first highly popular travel books, Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) and The Howadji in Syria (1852), Curtis had gone on to become the beloved author of the Editor’s Easy Chair column in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, the column Harper’s readers always turned to first. From an acclaimed lyceum lecturer Curtis had become a celebrated political and patriotic orator, whose power of extemporaneous speech repeatedly galvanized crowds and political conventions. Most significantly, from the middle of the Civil War Curtis had become political editor of Harper’s Weekly, whose unsigned editorials enlarged and guided the opinions of hundreds of thousands of readers all across the country every week.

Yet if Curtis was so genuinely important a figure in his own day, why should he have disappeared from our own? Perversely enough, the false terms of Conkling’s attack—that snivel-service reformers hungered after political office and its spoils, that they reveled in self-righteousness, that they were nothing more than carpet knights playing at real war—came to be taken by later historians and commentators as expressing an essential truth about Curtis and Gilded Age reformers like him.¹¹ For what else could Curtis’s disinterestedness, modesty, purity and self-abnegation be, if not a mask for his ulterior purposes? It was simply inconceivable that a private man who assumed a public role, as Curtis did, would not have had some motive other than idealism and disinterested service for doing so. If such a man were not seeking public office, then he must be after enhanced reputation; if not fame, then he wanted to redeem his social class’s fading superiority; if not social redemption, then he desired the intoxicating pleasures of pharisaical self-righteousness. Doing what was right simply because it was right, because it was better for everybody, was in the view of Conkling and his followers not merely unintelligent, it was unintelligible. Conveniently enough for later writers, the vocabulary of contempt established by Conkling and his cohorts—carping, aristocratic, ineffectual, self-righteous—lay ready to hand.

More recent commentators have moderated their contempt without minimizing their dismissal of Gilded Age reformers by suggesting that men like Curtis may in fact have injured or even undone the very cause of reform they were championing. In this view, civil service reformers—Curtis was an acknowledged leader among them—by seeking to wrest the power to fill government jobs away from the professional politicians, may have unwittingly opened the way¹² for the malign domination of modern political parties and candidates by private and corporate interests, with their enormous, and too often secret, blandishments of cash. In a similar way, the reformers’ insistent stress on education, intelligence, calm deliberation and reasoned dissent in politics may have worked to dampen and dull the exuberant popular energies of a nineteenth-century politicking style known for its brass bands, colorful floats and torchlight parades. The coolly detached, intellectualized style of the independent or Mugwump reformers, it has been argued, narrowed the cultural authority of partisanship,¹³ thus heedlessly encouraging a 20th-century politics of publicity and televisual passivity.

There are notable exceptions to this tradition of contemptuous or condescending dismissal of the Gilded Age reformers.¹⁴ But even in the most skillful and sympathetic hands, it has been difficult to see George William Curtis clearly. For one thing, the long-established habit of treating Curtis as a member of a group—the genteel or Mugwump or transatlantic liberal reformers—leads even in the most careful treatments to approximation, generalization and distortion. To the degree that Curtis’s life and work have been assimilated to the measure set, for example, by those brilliant but by no means representative witnesses to the Gilded Age, Henry Adams and E. L. Godkin, he has been misunderstood. To take either Adams or Godkin as the voice of the independent reformers is effectively to muffle or silence the distinctive voice of George William Curtis. For another thing, the preoccupation of political scientists and historians of politics has led them inevitably to focus on practical tactics, vote tallies and concrete results, while at the same time setting aside any appeal to ideals or disinterestedness as vapid or irrelevant at best, viciously hypocritical at worst. This is the context in which Curtis’s dedicated reform efforts have been construed as an attempt to veil his own frustrated political ambitions.¹⁵

The disinterestedness and idealism that earned Curtis such immediate contempt and later disregard came to him, as we shall see, through a variety of personal and cultural experiences. Chief among them was the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Curtis first heard speak as a youth in Providence, Rhode Island. The Emersonian ethos floated over Brook Farm where Curtis boarded for two years, and then intensified when he moved to Emerson’s very neighborhood in Concord for two more years. At first entranced by Emerson’s emphasis on individualism, Curtis would become more deeply shaped by his teaching that the material was merely the apparent, while the ideal was the truly real. No less impressive upon the younger man was Emerson’s gay defiance in delivering his address on the tenth anniversary of the emancipation of the slaves in the British West Indies.

Yet these Pilgrim and Transcendental influences would silently recede during Curtis’s wandering, drifting years during the later 1840s and early 1850s. As a handsome, talented, charming young man from a socially prominent family, Curtis enjoyed free access to the select social circles of New York and Newport. There, as the suddenly successful author of the Howadji books, he was welcomed by adoring debutantes and their watchful parents. There he devoted himself to dancing and parties, evenings of uproarious song and, more dangerously, to romantic engagements. As one contemporary observed in 1853, He’s a nice, pleasant, amiable, superficial, genial Epicurean.¹⁶

The events that changed him began in the middle of the 1850s—the most momentous epoch of our history, as Curtis always regarded it.¹⁷ But it was also the most momentous of his own personal history. For it was then that he truly fell in love and married, found his real calling, suffered financial ruin and set forth on his civic quest. The next decade of the 1860s simply confirmed this new path and, with the war deaths of men he loved, consecrated it as with blood. From being a lounger and a fashionable man of letters, Curtis would become, as a colleague at Harper’s Magazine said, the best knight of our time.¹⁸

After a twentieth century of horrific carnage, cruelty and destruction, and a new century of indecipherable promise or menace, it can be difficult for modern readers to regard Curtis as anything but the naively hopeful carpet knight of politics in Conkling’s scornful phrase. A closer examination of Curtis’s life and work, however, suggests that if he is to be regarded as a knight at all, it should not be as the deluded dreamer, Don Quixote, charging at windmills, but as Sir Galahad. Galahad, in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s celebrated retelling of the legend, was the only knight of King Arthur’s Round Table who was able to see the Holy Grail. All the other knights failed in the quest, despite their prowess, ambition, desire and will. But Galahad’s prowess was of a different order. His strength, as Tennyson famously has Galahad say, is as the strength of ten/ Because my heart is pure.¹⁹

Curtis’s indomitable optimism, idealism and disinterestedness—his pure heart—would become the cause of hope in other men and women. The golden age still glitters upon the horizon, he told his Harper’s Weekly readers early in 1861 as the Union was slipping into dissolution. The ‘good old times,’ he continued, is a phrase which describes the condition we are approaching rather than that we have left behind.²⁰ As Curtis wrote these words, he could not know the horror and heartbreak that lay ahead. But after the Civil War’s end, when he did know, his faith in the future remained unbroken. The castles of hope, he said then, always shine along the horizon, showing that the vision of a loftier life forever allures the human soul.²¹ Despite setbacks, personal sorrows and unceasing abuse, Curtis, armed with invincible tenacity, humor and that redeeming idealism of the soul that we find dwindling in the modern world, but which alone lends humanity hope for the future,²² persisted in his quest for a purified American politics and an elevated cultural life—a vision, a grail—that would remain forever imperceptible to Roscoe Conkling and his heirs.

CHAPTER 1

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THE PROVIDENCE OF RHODE ISLAND

[1824 –1835]

Land of Hope

When George William Curtis gave the toast at a New England Society dinner in New York City in December 1876, he declared with unusual stress something he had expressed many times before: I stand here as a son of New England. In every fibre of my being am I a child of the Pilgrims.¹ Curtis’s special emphasis arose from the critical moment in which he spoke—a crucial juncture in the life of the nation when the tensely disputed 1876 Presidential election between the Democrat Samuel Tilden and the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was still unresolved, and some feared a new civil war. Curtis’s full remarks on this occasion would be influential on the ultimate resolution of the dispute, as we shall see. But to comprehend the man who made them, it is necessary to grasp the peculiar nature of Curtis’s regional inheritance—what kind of son and child actually he was. For though he had been a neighbor of Emerson and Hawthorne in Concord and was a frequent and welcome guest of the Boston’s famed Saturday Club, he was no Boston Brahmin. And though he lived two-thirds of his life in or adjacent to Manhattan, carousing with the Knickerbockers in the 1850s and later consorting with the elite men of the Century Club, Curtis was never a true New Yorker. Instead, the geographical affiliation that shaped his life and thought was this: he was born in Providence, Rhode Island.

By the time Curtis was born in February 1824, Providence, Rhode Island was becoming a commercially bustling little town of some 12 or 13,000 inhabitants. But its origins lay in the bitterly contested religious past of the seventeenth century. Established in the early spring of 1636 by a Puritan refugee driven out of both the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, the tiny settlement was named Providence because its founder so keenly felt a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress.² This was Roger Williams. Banished in deepest midwinter by the civil and religious authorities in Massachusetts, Williams had barely survived his journey south. Sorely tossed for fourteen weeks, not knowing what bread or bed did mean,³ he sustained life only with the aid of the Wampanoag Indians, with whom he had previously traded and whose language he understood. Cast out of the English colonies because of his dyverse newe and dangerous opinions⁴ in religious and civil questions, as well as his refusal to retract those opinions, Williams insisted on the separation of church and state and on complete individual freedom of conscience—what he called soul liberty.

When neighboring Narragansett sachems agreed formally to deed him land in March 1638 for a settlement on the eastern bank of the Mosasshuck River, they demanded no money—Rhode Island, Williams would later say, was purchased by love.⁵ Thus from the very beginning, Providence represented much more than simply new territory for another English settlement. It was a refuge from authoritarian religious and civil dictates, a haven for dissenting opinions. Above all, Williams declared, I desired it might be for a shelter for persons distressed for conscience.⁶ As this desire was fulfilled, an apt text from the Epistle to the Hebrews (6:18-19) came to mind: that . . . we might have a strong consolation who have fled for refuge to lay hold on the hope set before us: which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast. Even though Providence itself would later be attacked by the Wampanoags, and Williams himself burned out of his own house,⁷ hope persisted. Thereafter, the image of an anchor and the motto Hope would appear on Rhode Island’s charters, seals, flags and streets.

To be sure, the expansive freedoms of Providence attracted some loose-living adventurers and malcontents in addition to the sincere refugees for conscience’s sake. As a minister in New Amsterdam mordantly observed in 1657, the settlement at Rhode Island is the receptacle of all sorts of riff-raff people, and is nothing else than the sewer (latrina) of New England . . . . All the cranks of New England retire thither.⁸ But among the riff-raff were the antinomian dissenter Anne Hutchinson and the wealthy William Coddington who, aided by Williams, secured a deed for the balmy and fertile island of Aquidneck in Narragansett Bay—later to be the site of Newport—as a settlement for their well-to-do followers. During the mid-seventeenth century, set against the bloody background of the English religious wars between Parliament and King Charles I, the Rhode Island settlements were often bitterly hostile to each other, and menaced from outside by threats from Massachusetts and the Indian powers. Providence itself verged on anarchy, prompting Williams to write a celebrated letter that forcefully distinguished the fullest liberty of conscience from all unfettered license of political action.

With the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660, however, much of the tumult in old and new England subsided. King Charles II not only confirmed the essential premise of Roger Williams’s Providence: that a most flourishing civil state may stand and be best maintained . . . with a ful [sic] liberty in religious concernments. He inscribed it in a new 1663 charter for Rhode Island which transformed Williams’ brave original hope into an emphatic declaration of law: No person within the said colony, at any time hereafter, shall be any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question, for any differences in opinion, in matter of religion, who do not actually disturb the civil peace.⁹

Grand old Roger Williams, Curtis called him, declaring, He is, perhaps, the greatest man among all the historical founders of states because alone among all the great moral heroes of history, the founder of Providence was the only one who saw clearly, and incorporated in a social system, the principle that absolute honesty of thought should be preserved by protecting the thinker and speaker from all suspicion even of coercion on account of his opinions.¹⁰ Asserting Williams’ pre-eminence could be uphill work in the nineteenth century, when the sesqui-bicentennial commemorations in Massachusetts disposed Bay State celebrants to stress the disruptiveness and danger posed by the man their ancestors had exiled for his preaching and writing more than two centuries before.

Yet it was precisely the events of the nineteenth century which so engaged Curtis’s energies—the Civil War, the fight against political bossism and corruption—that continually drove him to invoke the name and deeds of Roger Williams. For the Slave Power of the South and the ruthless exactions of regular party conformity both aimed at crushing all dissent in the name of protecting society. And this, Curtis knew, could only lead to a far more fearsome anarchy. What is called license of thought and speech must be risked, he declared in February 1861,

because the danger of that license can never be so great as the danger of allowing any body to determine what shall and what shall not be said. It is nobody’s business, in a certain sense, what you think or say; it is only what you do, that is their affair. If they think that your wrong speaking, as they consider it, may lead to wrong doing, let them resist your wrong speaking by right speaking, and your wrong doing by right doing. But if they may gag you to-day, you may gag them to-morrow; and you have pure anarchy instead of civil society.¹¹

For all the cultural and historical pre-eminence of Massachusetts, for all the political and economic domination of New York, then, Rhode Island, the smallest of States, as Curtis insisted, has the largest of principles for its birthright.¹² The glory of Providence was its settlement by the man who first proclaimed and practiced the doctrine of soul liberty, a principle much more comprehensive than even Williams himself realized: It is a sun which he saw as a star. But it was a polestar for him, as it has been for American civilization.¹³ Curtis believed that Williams’ soul liberty had been quietly subsumed into the fabric of American post-Revolutionary War civic life. Yet he also knew that the people of Rhode Island might legitimately assert the glory of their first great man. If the burning of the British revenue schooner Gaspé by Rhode Island colonists in 1772 could not match in revolutionary consequence the Boston Tea Party of 1773, nonetheless The American who looks back to the settlement of Roger Williams as his native place, he proudly declared, is not less fortunate than he who claims descent from Plymouth Rock.¹⁴

As a boy, Curtis experienced Providence less as the cradle of soul liberty than as a small town curiously divided between old and new. Born on the older, more fashionable east side of town, he grew up among the handsome eighteenth-century residences built by the prosperous merchants in the then-flourishing China and India trade. But that traffic was dwindling rapidly as Providence lost out to the rival ports of Boston and New York—the last East Indiaman to sail from Providence would return to port in 1841. This decaying trade left behind husks and shells of its former activity which Curtis recalled with delight as his very earliest remembrances: a long range of old, half dilapidated stores; red brick stores with steep wooden roofs, and stone window frames and door frames, which stood upon docks built as if for immense trade with all the quarters of the globe.¹⁵ After school, he would roam down to the wharves and peer into the silent, twilight interiors, glimpsing vast coils of cable, like tame boa-constrictors, serv[ing] as seats for men with large stomachs, and heavy watch seals, and nankeen trousers, who sat looking out of the door toward the ships, with little other sign of life than an occasional low talking as if in their sleep.¹⁶ Hogsheads oozing with slow molasses, bales of airy summer stuffs, little specimen boxes of precious dyes, the old stores overflowed with the penetrating colors and odors of the enchanting East. Returning home, his mind awhirl with visions of Madagascar and Ceylon, his clothes saturated with spicy fragrances, the young Curtis had difficulty persuading his mother he had not spent the day in a bakery.

The lure of the indolent, exotic East that he glimpsed in the slow progress up the harbor of a great Indiaman, and felt when he touched its rusty, seamed and blistered side would haunt Curtis’s imagination, leading him later to venture to the Middle East itself, and then to write about it as a Howadji—a traveler—in the first books that brought him literary celebrity: Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851) and The Howadji in Syria (1852). As Providence shifted from a romantic maritime to a more prosaic industrial economy, the traces of a vanishing past became more precious to a boy with a flammable imagination. Curtis never forgot seeing the venerable ex-president of Brown, Asa Messer, solemnly preaching in the knee breeches of the eighteenth century.¹⁷ Conversely, the blank insensibility of Providence as a town newly intent on manufacturing to any expressions of charm or color or fancy oppressed him.

Primed by Washington Irving’s Bracebridge Hall stories of English Christmas customs—the mighty wassail-bowl, the bringing in of the boar’s head, the entrance of the mummers, and, above all, the kissing under the mistletoe—the young Curtis was bitterly disappointed to find, for example, that there was no such observance of Christmas in sternly Baptist, Congregational and Quaker Providence: no stocking at the fire-place, there was no green in the windows, there was no sign of Christmas.¹⁸ Beyond his personal grief, he felt there was something exceptionally wrong and monstrous in such disregard of such a day. When his mother, to compensate his disappointment, gave him a purse with a bright silver coin, he ran to spend it on almond candy at the French confectioner’s nearby. With a sudden impulsive hope of finding sympathy, he held up his new purse to the old Frenchman and said bashfully, "‘That’s my Christmas present.’

‘What’s dat you say, little boy?’ replied the Frenchman.

‘That’s my Christmas present.’

‘Christmas! Christmas!’ exclaimed the old man impatiently. ‘No, no: nobody know Christmas here.’"

The Frenchman’s instantly scornful repudiation of a community that knew no Christmas salved the boy’s wounded imagination, and he left the confectioner’s shop feeling that his deep longing for some due observance of the day had been satisfied by the suppressed but immense feeling of the old Frenchman.¹⁹

The grand ceremonial occasion Providence did provide was Commencement at Brown University. Curtis had been born virtually under the shadow of the college, on the southern slope of the hill on which it stands,²⁰ that is, in William Street (as it was then called), four short blocks from campus.²¹ He remembered the architectural severity of University Hall, and the dormitory called Hope College used to admonish my wistful young mind of the stern discipline of study to which they were consecrated.²² In that day, Brown was a sort of higher grammar school, stiff with monkish traditions and numbing routine, where boys from fourteen to twenty gently studied a little Latin and less Greek, and ogled a choice selection of isoceles triangles.²³ When their prejudices were affronted, the students did not hesitate to riot, assailing the library and attacking President Messer’s house, breaking his windows and forcing him to resign.²⁴ As a boy, Curtis watched in admiration as the Brown students thronged down College Hill, across the bridge and up Westminster and High Streets in the western section of town for their afternoon constitutional.²⁵ Their Commencement was the culminating event of the year in Providence, its supreme public holiday, surpassing Christmas, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July.²⁶

Early on the appointed day, in the first week of September, rural people, drawn by the spectacle and dressed in their Sunday best, would drive their wagons into town, and then loiter along the sidewalks crowded with food stands, munching melons and candy and peanuts or sipping spruce beer at two cents a glass—and how cool and pungent and delicious it was!²⁷ But no early recollection was more vivid to Curtis than the commencement ceremony itself, initiated by the band parading down the hill, through the busy marketplace in Main Street and on to the old church, the First Baptist Meeting House (1775). At the head of the black-gowned dignitaries strode the formidable Dr. Francis Wayland, the new president who had replaced the hapless Messer. His thunderous brows crowned with the tasselled academic cap and the academic gown draping his massive form, he was followed by the awful board of fellows, and a cloud of clergymen, and the elect seniors in flowing gowns and new shoes, bringing up the rear.²⁸ Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science (1835) would become the most widely used textbook of moral philosophy in America, and in 1847 he would win fame for his reasoned debate with a pro-slavery Baptist clergyman on the Biblical sanction for slavery.²⁹ Among Brown students, however, the president was known for his imperial spirit and surprising kindliness as a teacher.

On Commencement Day, Curtis prized President Wayland for the lofty way he led the college procession through the bustling marketplace in Main Street, as if he delighted, in the midst of trade, to assert the dignity of letters, as if he relished giving an annual reminder, at least, to the busy citizens that there were other interests than those of the counting-room.³⁰ Once inside the crowded old church, the young Curtis always pushed up to the side of the platform which the graduating orator ascended. For this could be the moment of transfiguring glory for a speaker. Curtis would remember for years afterward the phrases he heard then. Thus it was that he recalled a gowned and graduating youth speaking of Byron to the expectant throng. The orator was portraying the genius and power of the poet, who did this and that—‘making even madness beautiful.’ To be sure, orator’s four-word phrase was only a quotation and commonplace rhetoric. But this did not matter in the electric moment, for the thunders of applause seem still to haunt that old church. The young speaker was the hero of the hour. What was not believed of him? What was not possible for him?³¹ Even Curtis’s mature knowledge that the orator had in fact dwindled into a country school teacher starving on five hundred a year could not erase the glory of his speech that had on that day overcome the commercial clatter of the town. The little boy I was dilated with its grandeur.³²

A Courteous Family

His family was an old one, its name deriving from the Norman French courteis or courtois,³³ meaning polite, civil, (neatly appropriate for a magazine columnist who would later write Manners Upon the Road for Harper’s Bazar). Tracing its line back to a Stephen Curtis of Appledore, Kent, circa 1450, the family’s first American representative was Henry Curtis (b. 1607), a wheelwright who arrived in Massachusetts in 1635, settling first in Watertown and later Sudbury. His son Ephraim (b. 1642) left Sudbury with a pack on his back, a long light Spanish gun on his shoulder, and an axe in his hand,³⁴ drawn by the rumor of a lead mine in the area of what would become Worcester. There in 1673 he laid claim to some 200 acres, a homestead which would be held by Curtises into the nineteenth century. But Ephraim was not merely the first actual white settler in Worcester.³⁵ He was a skilled and formidably intrepid soldier and Indian scout.

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George Curtis, senior

When King Philip’s War broke out in 1675, and Mendon, the nearest English settlement to the south of Worcester, was burned by the Nipmucks on 14 July, Ephraim, who had been conducting reconnaissance for the colonial authorities, made his way to Brookfield, the nearest English settlement to the west. There, on the fatal night of August 2, the Nipmucks besieged the village, set fire to it, and forced its eighty surviving residents to shelter in the garrison house, the only building left unburned. Ephraim Curtis was among them. Their situation was perilous, even though, as a modern historian has noted:

only those who ‘occasionally stept out’ lost their lives. Thomas Wilson was shot when he went to get water, and Sargent Prichards’ son had his head chopped off when running to fetch goods from his father’s house.

Henry Young never actually left the garrison but merely took a peek ‘out at a garret window’; for his curiosity, he was shot and mortally wounded.³⁶

With diminishing supplies and dwindling manpower, the remaining townspeople could not long survive. Then it was that Ephraim did not so much step out, as crawl out, on his hands and knees, to seek help at distant Sudbury. On his way, he met Major Simon Willard and Captain Parker with forty-six men on their way elsewhere.³⁷ Told by Curtis of the desperate plight of Brookfield, they marched thirty miles to relieve the garrison.

Ephraim’s brother Joseph (b. 1647) served in the Mount Hope campaign against the Wampanoags that ended the war,³⁸ with the execution of their sachem, King Philip, on August 12, 1676.³⁹ The descending line of Curtises⁴⁰ from Joseph to George William’s grandfather, David, then passes through four generations, some of them soldiers, none of them ecclesiastics, all of them bold, practical men. (David was the principal blacksmith of Worcester). George William Curtis showed scant reverence for old families, especially as the fashion for laborious genealogies and improbably cobbled-together coats of arms grew among socially ambitious Americans later in the nineteenth century. When a character, a successful merchant, in Curtis’s novel Trumps (1861) asks a young employee named Bennet, ‘Bennet—Bennet—what Bennet?,’ and the young man answers that he doesn’t know, the merchant replies, ‘Well, my son, you do wisely to say at once you don’t know, instead of going back to somebody a few centuries ago, of whose father you have to make the same answer.⁴¹ Even those Americans who prided themselves on their historic family names, as Curtis declared in 1883, all sprang from some thrifty trader or refugee or shrewd lawyer or able tailor or other craftsman, Curtis adding, This is the pit from which we were all digged, and concluding, By right of what blueness of blood does a cobbler sniff at a tailor?⁴²

Curtis’s father, George (b. 1796), left Worcester at the age of sixteen or so, in the company of his brother Edward, to seek his fortune in Providence. From a modern-day perspective, their chosen destination might seem unaccountable: why not Boston? why not New York or Philadelphia? Yet though virtually invisible to us now, the link between Worcester and Providence in the early years of the nineteenth century was strong and dynamic—for this reason: it lay along the Blackstone River valley. Although a relatively small stream, the Blackstone was swiftly moving, falling 438 feet in its 46-mile descent from Worcester to Providence, hence ideal for powering mills.⁴³ In 1790 two Providence men had joined with Samuel Slater, a young English immigrant familiar with Arkwright’s famous machinery, to build the first fully mechanized spinning mill, not just in Pawtucket but in all America. In the years that followed, the Blackstone and its many tributaries became dotted with mills and the workers’ villages that supported them. An intensifying commercial reciprocity—finished goods for markets, markets for finished goods—bound the two towns ever more closely together. First proposed in 1796, the Blackstone River canal linking Worcester to Providence was completed in 1828. Thus it was that Providence, in earlier times dominated by Newport because of its superior harbor and easier access to the sea, now easily surpassed its rival in wealth and population.⁴⁴ Providence sent investment monies and entrepreneurs into the Blackstone River valley, while Worcester and the Blackstone hinterland poured commerce and ambitious young men like George Curtis into Providence.

George Curtis succeeded quickly in Providence. After beginning his business career in the banking office of J. B. Wood,⁴⁵ he was offered—at the age of twenty-three—the highly responsible position of Cashier at the Exchange Bank in Westminster Street, for it was seen that he possessed great practical abilities, to which were added a remarkable theoretical grasp of financial and business matters.⁴⁶ Beyond his technical capacities, however, Curtis was notable for his impartiality and fair-mindedness, qualities which led to his political success as Moderator of the Providence Town Meeting (Oct 1830 to May 1832), member of the Providence Common Council (June 1833 to June 1838), Representative for Providence to the R. I. General Assembly (1832, Aug 1835 to Jan 1839) and Speaker of the General Assembly (Oct 1837 to Jan 1839).⁴⁷ Losing but one election in his entire political career, Curtis consistently outpolled even his fellow Whigs. His son George William would never achieve a comparable electoral success—or indeed any electoral success at all—but he closely observed and absorbed his father’s qualities of fair-mindedness, independence and resolution.

These were tumultuous years in Providence, as the town swelled with the influx of outsiders and the old communal ties frayed. The notorious Olney Lane riots of September 1831⁴⁸ symbolized this tumult: a group of white sailors, on a cruise into a black district known for its dance halls and brothels, encountered resisting blacks who fired on them, killing one sailor and wounding two others. On that night and for three nights following, increasingly large and violent white mobs set about destroying black-occupied houses in Olney Lane and Snow Town. The sheriff and deputies were powerless before mob’s ferocity. Reading the riot act only enraged the mob further. Even the state military, called in by the governor, found itself attacked and seriously injured by the unremitting hail of stones and brickbats. Only when the infantry, after repeated warnings to the surging crowd, fired their muskets into the human mass, killing five men and wounding several others, did the violence cease and the mob disperse.

George Curtis was named to the Town Meeting committee to investigate the riots, and write a report. His account of events is notably temperate and even-handed, declining to give any opinion as to the comparative guilt of the whites and blacks until proof is produced before the proper tribunal, but firmly convinced that the necessity of a discharge by the Infantry was forced upon them by the mob, and that it was strictly in defence [sic] of their lives.⁴⁹ The only real urgency in the report comes in its call for a vigorous and efficient Executive Magistrate⁵⁰—in short, a mayor—a structural change in Providence’s government that would arrive in less than a year.

George Curtis’s professional and civic achievements were matched by his social success. He was a handsome, scholarly-looking man, and in 1821 he married Mary Elizabeth Burrill (b. 1798), the eldest daughter of James Burrill, Jr. Despite poor health, Burrill had served successively as Attorney-General, Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court and U. S. Senator for Rhode Island, before dying in office in 1820 at the age of 48. (In 1806, when a new township was incorporated twenty miles northwest of Providence, it was named Burrillville in gratitude for his service.)⁵¹ Mary Elizabeth Burrill was pretty, affectionate and humorous, as we glimpse when she tells her father in an 1818 letter that on a trip to Salem and Boston she has "unavoidably run in debt some even though I have been and was while in Salem as economical as I could possibl[y] be, and only dresst just well enough for your daughter."⁵²

She honored her father by naming her first son after him: James Burrill Curtis, born in 1822. Two years later she bore another son, George William Curtis. Two years after that she died, aged 28, after five years of marriage. Her husband was granted guardianship over Burrill (as he was always called) and George in 1827,⁵³ and surrounded by a web of Curtis and Burrill relatives, the two boys lived in Providence for four years until it was time to send them away to school. The motherless brothers became very close: we were never separated. We slept in the same bed, and being two, without a mother, were peculiarly united.⁵⁴ Both were blue-eyed, and George would become handsome, but from the first Burrill was beautiful: His face was symmetrical and delicate; his figure was slight and graceful. . . . The blood ran close to the skin, and his complexion had the rich transparency of light.⁵⁵ Intense and passionate, Burrill was also possessed of a severe and powerful will.

The Curtis brothers spent five years, from 1830 to 1835, at a successful boarding and day school for lads⁵⁶ in the bowery village of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts run by Charles W. Greene and his wife. Contemporary engravings of the Greenes’ academy show it resembled very closely the school Curtis would later describe in Trumps: a large house, with an avenue of lindens in front, a garden on one side, and spacious play-ground in the rear. The pretty pond [cf. Jamaica Pond] was not far away, with its sloping shores and neat villas, and a distant spire upon the opposite bank—the whole like the vignette of an English pastoral poem. If Mr. Greene at all resembled the headmaster Mr. Gray in Trumps, then he was probably not very learned, and therefore could not communicate knowledge. But he did his best, and tried very hard to be respected. The boys did not learn anything; but they had plenty of good beef.⁵⁷ There Curtis read history and Peter Parley’s Juvenile Tales, studied geography, Murray’s English Grammar and the National Spelling Book.⁵⁸ After a year, he was at the head of his class. He took to declaiming the famous apostrophe to the Revolutionary War veterans at the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument delivered by Daniel Webster in June 1825 (VENERABLE MEN!).⁵⁹ The other boys took to calling George Deacon.⁶⁰

Young George’s fascination with orators and oratory was more than shared by his father. It was, after all, the great age of American oratory, when a Whig political dinner in New York City, beginning at 7:30 in the evening and ending at 6:00 the next morning, could present Daniel Webster speaking from 2:00 am to 4:00 am and not a man among the 150 diners would depart before Webster had finished. What gourmands we Americans are when we get hold of a dish of popular oratory! exclaimed one exhausted but enthusiastic attendee.⁶¹ Curtis père, writing his sister-in-law, Eleanor Burges, then in Washington, D.C., declared he envied her opportunity to hear the appeals of the warm-hearted Clay, to witness the rapid outpourings of fire which flow from the elevated volcano Calhoun presents but above all,to be lifted as with the power of an archangel into the highest heaven of intellectual excellence by the phlegmatic but lofty & dignified eloquence of Webster.⁶² This was in the winter of 1833-34, when the great triumvirate of the Senate was fighting President Andrew Jackson’s attempt to destroy the Second Bank of the United States. A modern historian has described the scene: Crowds flocked to the Senate galleries to witness their debates, for it was a generation that appreciated public speaking as an art form and relished the drama unfolding.⁶³ Sitting in the Senate gallery, excited by the power of those mighty men who there develope [sic] no minds of a common cast, Curtis told Eleanor, you may fairly imagine yourself clothed with something of the glory they create. Then with an effort he wrenches his imagination away from this resounding arena of eloquence lest I shall become discontented with my lowly estate of undignified duties.⁶⁴

Perhaps undignified when compared to Webster’s lofty orations, but duties nonetheless important. For George Curtis was now in the midst of the arrangements that would reunite his small family around a vital new center: Julia Bowen Bridgham (b. 1810), whom he would marry in the Westminster Congregational (Unitarian) Church on April 3, 1834. Julia was the highly educated daughter of Samuel W. Bridgham, elected as Providence’s first mayor in June 1832. Bridgham was the precisely the sort of vigorous and efficient Executive Magistrate that George Curtis had called for in the aftermath of the Olney Lane riots. Imbued with the spirit of reform and moral regeneration, Bridgham proposed free public education, temperance, and relief for the poor as remedies for the disorder threatening the city. He would be repeatedly reelected as mayor until his death in office in 1840.⁶⁵

Julia possessed her father’s reforming energy and high public spirit: she is so charmingly vitalizing to any good cause, a friend declared who knew her in the 1850s.⁶⁶ To these qualities she added literary cultivation decidedly above the average, as Burrill Curtis would recall many years later. She wrote with ease, whether in letters or other compositions, a full, graceful, flowing, delightful English style.⁶⁷ She writes an affectionate, teasing letter to Burrill himself many months before her marriage that indicates how close she had become to the Curtises. With her own mother and brothers away in Boston to see the great parade honoring President Jackson, she tells him, I have been left quite alone as housekeeper with none but father, the furniture & servants to preside over. . . .I should be very glad to hear your voice interrupting the stillness of our usually gay mansion. Of a new Providence literary magazine, she asks, How do you like the ‘Literary Journal’? Perhaps Burrill may render himself worthy of a place on its pages. Would Burrill like her to come to Jamaica Plain and help him study? Not to get your lessons for you, but with you. Would you enter into honourable [sic] competition with me? But no, better not. The twenty-three-year old Julia should feel so mortified if I could not succeed over the twelve-year-old Burrill.⁶⁸

Instead, Julia tells him of the weekly phrenological lectures by Dr. Jonathan Barber she has been attending with his father. I expect to know so much upon the subject that she will be able to tell what professions the boys will follow. I have as yet my doubts concerning George’s being a minister, but shall not make up my mind decidedly, until I shall have felt of his head. As for Burrill, he must take care how you indulge in any evil propensities, for they will all stand boldly out from your head, like a brood of wens.⁶⁹ Julia would make herself to a very unusual degree, recalled Burrill, our intimate friend and companion, becoming mother and sister (we never had an actual sister) in one.⁷⁰ After her death, George William would tell a friend, She was really my stepmother, but in her case that meant nothing,⁷¹ for Julia would be the only mother he ever knew. After her marriage, she would bear her husband four more sons: Sam, Joe, Ned and John. But Burrill remembered Julia once wrote to us in high girlish spirits that she ‘believed she loved her ready-made children the best.’"⁷²

Both boys took a deep interest⁷³ in the marriage of their father to the fourteen years’ younger Julia, and came home from school early in March to be present at the wedding. Their father,most affectionate & beloved in his family & extremely kind and indulgent to his children, was also according to Burrill, sharp & severe in his demands as to manners & morale.⁷⁴ Yet at this time George Curtis was almost taken aback by the great progress his two sons had made. He says to Eleanor Burges, his first wife’s younger sister, I cannot tell of course but what the natural partiality . . . perhaps produces its usual effect in my own case, leading [me to regard] my sons as prodigies to a certain extent, but they certainly do seem to me somewhat remarkable for the propriety of their demeanour [sic] & conduct. Their manners and I believe their principles are unexceptionable.⁷⁵ Thus in 1834, the rapidly maturing Burrill and George would return to live in a new home in a Providence that was itself coming under the influence of what many people were calling the newness.

CHAPTER 2

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THE NEWNESS COMES TO PROVIDENCE

[1835-1842]

At the Coliseum Club

As in eastern Massachusetts a little earlier, the new ferment in Providence grew out of the Unitarian revolt against Calvinist Congregationalism. The First Congregational church at Benefit and Benevolent streets (where George William heard Asa Messer preach in knee-breeches) unobtrusively became Unitarian after 1815, notes a modern commentator.¹ In the last year of his life, Curtis would testify to the formative effect this change had upon him, telling a conference of Unitarians that bred a Unitarian I have been all my life accustomed to great liberty of thought and speech . . . that soul liberty, as Roger Williams called it, which is the distinctive glory of the Unitarian communion.² The next Providence defection from Congregational orthodoxy, the same commentator continues, occurred with the establishment of a new Unitarian church by the Westminster Congregational Society in 1829³ (where George Curtis and Julia Bridgham were married five years later by its first minister, Frederick A. Farley). It was the Rev. William Ellery Channing of Newport who delivered the ordination sermon at Farley’s induction, giving on this occasion, as another critic has said, the strongest statement Channing ever made of the Transcendental position.⁴ His sermon, Likeness to God, was a moving, lyrical, at times even breathless outpouring from which Channing would, however, retreat during the next decade.⁵

Much like Channing’s hesitating withdrawal, the impulses of Transcendentalism were more tentative and diffuse in Providence than in Massachusetts, its partisans less committed and intellectually talented. Where in Boston Transcendentalism became, in Henry Adams’ words, almost chemical in its effects—a power, a greatly needed solvent in the place where it grew up,⁶ gaining strength from its contention with the very Unitarian orthodoxy it opposed, in the smaller city, the Transcendentalist insurgency was chilled and overcast by the Baptist conservatism of Brown College, whose influence, as Curtis would later say, was always more religious than literary.⁷ Yet despite this hesitancy, the Transcendentalist impulse in Providence was essentially seeking to realize what Henry Adams saw Boston Transcendentalism had already accomplished: it questioned values, it ignored conventions . . . it gave great help toward showing that freedom . . . meant free speech, free opinion, free living.⁸

The strange intertexture of social, scientific and religious reforms characteristic of Transcendentalism in its earlier phase (What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world! Emerson would exclaim a few years later) may be glimpsed in Julia Bridgham Curtis. For not only was she a parishioner at Farley’s Westminster church, the site of so many Transcendental occasions, she attended the phrenology lectures at the Providence Franklin Society, when phrenology, mesmerism and animal magnetism were seriously regarded, even in the pages of the stolidly