To keep up-to-date, Clover devoured the newspapers but also heard firsthand news from the young men among her family and friends, who told interesting and dramatic stories of the dangers of war. One of them, William Powell Mason, first caught Clover’s eye while she was staying in Lenox in the summer of 1862. Perhaps his attentions accounted for some of her restlessness as well as the fact that she was “having such a good and jolly time.” The two had grown up together—the Hooper and Mason families were neighbors in Beverly Farms, and Powell Mason was the brother of Elizabeth Rogers Mason, who was now married to Walter Cabot and who had long been a good friend of Clover’s sister. Captain Mason, a Harvard graduate in 1856, served as an aide-de-camp with General George B. McClellan in the early years of the war. His war photograph, included in an album kept by the Hooper family, shows him tall and trim, with a dramatic mustache and wavy dark hair framing beautiful large eyes and the hint of a grin.
In early August, using boot blacking and water instead of ink, which was scarce in wartime, Clover wrote to her sister from Lenox that Captain Mason had stopped by the day before and that he was returning to his regiment the next day. Clover had been worried—“I was very much afraid that I shouldn’t see him”—but quickly thereafter Powell came by and shook hands with her. “He looked older and thinner than when I last saw him,” she related, going on to report breathlessly to Nellie that the next morning, after breakfast with Aunt Cary, she had come back to her hotel to find that “Powell Mason had been to call. A few minutes after I was moaning over not seeing him and combing my chestnut hair came a bang at my door and announcement of a visitor, when on pumping I found ‘he looked to be a Captain.’ I sprang to and was down in a wink. He stayed till dinner time and told me a great deal about McClellan.”
Later that same evening, Clover and her father “spread a shawl under the elms,” and Captain Mason, along with his brother-in-law, Walter Cabot, joined father and daughter, staying three hours. They talked of what had been recently in the papers—General Lee’s successful defense of Richmond in what came to be known as the Seven Days Battles. Earlier in the spring General McClellan had shipped his Army of the Potomac to the tip of the Virginia Peninsula, aiming to capture Richmond from its eastern side in order to avoid Lee’s troops. But McClellan miscalculated where the rebels were stationed as well as the terrain of the peninsula. Lee attacked the Union army for seven days—from June 25 until July 1, at Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mill, Savage’s Station, Frayser’s Farm, and Malvern Hill—and pushed McClellan back, defeating Union hopes for a quick war ending in victory.
Clover reported to her sister how Captain Mason “squatted on the shawl by my side and drew and explained the position and disposition of the army in those seven day battles.” Mason told Clover that “people at home had no idea of the danger we are in,” and he refused to romanticize the battlefield. “I thought he didn’t speak as if there were much enjoyment in a soldier’s life,” Clover reported. “He said he longed for his own vine and fig tree.” When he was gone, Clover noted that “his being here seems like a dream—it was like having a person come back from the dead.”
If Captain Mason refused to romanticize war, Clover surely thought the tall young soldier a romantic figure, perhaps even a beau. But a romance never blossomed. By March 1863, in a long letter to her Aunt Cary complaining of a “pitiless cold and ulcerated tooth,” Clover wondered aloud about how “every friend and acquaintance I have in this world has written in the last two or three months” of their upcoming marriages, decisions that had been sped up by impending service in the war. “Away they go two by two . . . What,” Clover joked, “are the symptoms” of imminent marriage? “Are they toothache and cold in the head?” Was she saying that she felt herself at risk for making just such a match or that, at almost twenty years of age, she wanted one? Most likely she felt left out, and she tried to mute her disappointment about her fizzled flirtation with Captain Mason by employing her wit, her most ready tactic to fend off hurt. Now she felt differently about Captain Mason, she announced to Aunt Cary: “He will never be nice again.” She scorned how he had become “too inseparable” as aide-de-camp to General McClellan and “too attached” to “a Miss Peabody,” whom he eventually married later that fall. “What a dismal prospect,” Clover remarked. To shore up her confidence, she decided not to settle for just any man who came along. During an evening chat by the fire with Ida Agassiz, Pauline Agassiz’s older sister who had taught French and German lessons at the Agassiz School and who later that December would marry Henry Lee Higginson, Clover pledged to never lower her “standard” as she went on in life.
A “festive spree” that same March gave some respite. Pauline Agassiz, who had married the much older Quincy Adams Shaw in 1860, threw a party for several recently engaged couples and their friends at the barracks of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth at Camp Meigs, just south of Boston. At the dinner, Clover sat next to Wilky James, a younger brother of William and Henry James and a lieutenant in the regiment, whom she liked “very much.” She thought her distant cousin Rob Shaw, the commander, looked “very young and boyish,” but his manner conveyed that “he knows what he is about.” After a storm with “wind and hail beating on the boards overheard” and imbibing “real nectar and ambrosia,” she and the other partygoers visited the various barracks and found “some soldierly looking men standing straight as ram rods” who were of “every shade of color from café au lait to ebony.” Listening to them sing “John Brown’s Hymn,” with its message of defiance and freedom, Clover paused, remarking finally that it was a day “to be remembered.”
The war was going badly. Wendell Holmes had been seriously wounded in the Battle of Antietam the previous summer, the bloodiest single day of the war. Over two thousand Union soldiers had been killed and over nine thousand wounded. Trains filled with the dead and wounded traveled from the battlefield back to Boston, where a weekly newspaper, the Boston Pilot, described the horror. The dead were “strewn so thickly that as you ride over the field you cannot guide your horse’s steps too carefully.” The debacle at Chancellorsville, in early May of 1863, cost the Union army over seventeen thousand casualties.
By midsummer, when news traveled back to Boston of the bloodshed at Gettysburg, Dr. Hooper got on the first train available so he could help tend the wounded soldiers on the battlefield. If Clover asked what he had witnessed, he would have protected her from the worst of it. That same month, on July 18, Wilky James sustained grave injuries when he was shot in the ankle and the back in the attack by the Fifty-fourth on the Confederate stronghold of Fort Wagner, near Charleston. He had been standing next to Colonel Robert Shaw, who was shot and killed instantly. Colonel Shaw was buried in a mass grave along with his fallen troops. When efforts were made to retrieve his body, his father, Frank Shaw, resisted this, saying that he could “imagine no holier place than that in which he lies, among his brave and devoted” soldiers.
The man who brought the conflict closest to Clover, though he was not immediately engaged in battle, was her brother, Ned. The two had always gotten along well. Ned was the teasing older brother who referred to Clover as “The Infant.” Their natures were complementary: hers fiery, his more temperate. They confided in each other. She depended on him for company and comfort, and they shared common interests in the arts, particularly painting. At one point, Ned had wanted to be an artist, but he didn’t think he had the disposition to survive the disappointments endemic to such a career. Taking after his father—gentle, kind, talented, but shy—he didn’t have the outsized ambition of his grandfather Captain Sturgis, but his penchant for details and organization made him ideal for his assignment with Edward Pierce on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina.
When he applied to serve there, Ned got a recommendation from James Freeman Clarke, his family’s one-time preacher, who wrote in a letter to Pierce that Ned was “a young man every way suited to this work—one of rare conscience, love of usefulness, a religion’s purpose.�
�� Of the 150 applicants from Boston, 35 were sent to South Carolina with Pierce, along with others from New York, for a total of 53. The group—composed of both men and women—included reformers, medical doctors, engineers, and teachers. They became known as Gideon’s Band, and on March 3, 1862, they boarded the steamer Atlantic in New York, despite horrible weather. Six days later, they disembarked at Beaufort in Port Royal Sound to join the Union army and Treasury agents charged with overseeing what the government called “contraband,” the ten thousand slaves abandoned by their white owners when they fled inland after the Union army captured Port Royal. The tasks were many: establishing a coherent rule of law; providing medical care, religious instruction, and education; harvesting cotton and protecting the fields for the next year’s crop; and proving to business leaders in the North that the paid labor of freed slaves would be less expensive than the free labor of slaves.
Ned was assigned to General Pierce as his personal assistant, and he described his experiences to Clover in newsy, affectionate letters. He stayed first at the Eustis plantation on Lady’s Island in Port Royal Sound, across the river from Beaufort, marveling at the lush beauty of the blooms, already flourishing in mid-March. “The Island is lovely,” Ned wrote, adding details about the foliage because he knew how much his sister loved flowers. “Yellow jasmine everywhere. Roses, orange flowers in spots, etc., etc.” Ned also reported on the situation of the recently freed slaves, who were desperate for rations of salt but had “nothing now except their 1 peck of corn a week to each grown person and a proportional quantity to the children. Nothing else is dealt out to them and few of them have money to buy anything else.” Ned wrote respectfully of the Negroes, bringing to life and capturing the dignity of a people with whom neither he nor his sister had previously had such direct contact. He helped Clover visualize, in all its daily particulars, the great thing he was witness to—the long-awaited coming of freedom:
When we first reached his [Eustis] plantation we were received with great delight by the negroes, especially by old “Mary Ann,” who at once produced her “old missus’” looking glass, which she [Mary Ann] had hidden under her gown when she saw the plunderers come. Soon afterward I saw about half a dozen negro women coming towards the house, two with mahogany tables on their heads and two with chairs and one with two large china dishes, others with andirons, etc.—all things hidden away to prevent their falling into the hands of the soldiers.
By that June, Ned was promoted to military captain on the staff of General Rufus Saxton, the commander named when responsibility for the Port Royal effort moved from the Treasury Department to the War Department. And a year later, Ned’s excellent service was recognized. In a newspaper clipping dated June 13, 1863, about the work of the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, a relief effort organized by the federal government after emancipation, Ned was cited as “diligent, intelligent, courteous, and so admirably adapted and valuable in his service as to merit this prominent mention.”
Clover prized her brother’s letters because she was proud of him and they connected him to her. But she also relished the front-row seat Ned gave her to what would long fascinate her: the politics and the policymaking of government.
Once the hostilities were over, Clover insisted on going to Washington, D.C., after reading in the Boston papers the announcement that a victory parade was to be held in the capital, a “grand review” of the federal armies, on May 23 and 24. “Then and there,” she later wrote to her first cousin, Mary Louisa Shaw, called “Loulie” (and a first cousin to Colonel Shaw), “I vowed to myself that go I would. I begged Father to take me, but he hooted at the idea of such a thing.”
Clover finally persuaded Henry Rogers, who was active in the Sanitary Commission, to take her with him to Washington, along with her sister, Nellie, and Rogers’s own daughter, Annette. They first tried to make arrangements to stay with Clover and Nellie’s uncle, Sam Hooper, a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts since 1861, who lived on the corner at 1501 H Street. But the newly installed president, Andrew Johnson, and his administration were then encamped at the Hooper home to give Mrs. Lincoln time to move out of the White House after her husband’s assassination, so there were no available rooms except in a cramped attic. The travelers decided to stay down the street at a house near Willard’s Hotel.
Early on Tuesday, May 23, Clover and Nellie made their way to seats on the congressional platform, set up along Pennsylvania Avenue across from the White House; their Uncle Sam had secured these places for them. Under the order of General Grant, the Army of the Potomac, led by General George Meade, would march on May 23, followed the next day by General Sherman’s armies of the Tennessee and Georgia, which had formed the left and right wings for his victorious March to the Sea at the end of 1864. It could not have been a more thrilling insider’s introduction to the capital city. Now almost twenty-two years old, Clover had no way of knowing that she would call Washington her home sometime in the future.
The weather was cool and bright. Rain the previous week had cleared the air and tamped down the dust on the city’s dirt streets. “We were early and got nice seats, roofed over to keep off the sun; and eighty feet from us across the street sat the President, Generals Grant, Sherman, Howard, Hancock, Meade, and many others—Secretaries of War and Navy—diplomatic corps and ladies,” Clover reported to Loulie, who was then traveling in Europe.
The platform [was] covered with Stars and Stripes, gay flags; between the pillars, pots of flowers—azaleas, cactus, and all in full bloom; then Grant’s victories in great letters laid over the flags between the pillars—Vicksburg, Shiloh, Richmond, Wilderness, Antietam, Gettysburg. Up drove Uncle Sam’s carriage . . . out got the President. He [President Johnson] sat in the middle of the box, [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton on his right—Grant on Stanton’s right—Sherman in the corner on the left, opposite Grant; and then after each crack general had passed out of sight with his division, he came on foot and into the box, shaking hands all around, and then looked on with the rest . . . And so it came, this glorious old army of the Potomac, for six hours marching past, eighteen or twenty miles long, their colours telling their sad history. Some regiments with nothing but a bare pole, a little bit of rag only, hanging a few inches, to show where their flag had been. Others that had been Stars and Stripes, with one or two stripes hanging, all the rest shot away. It was a strange feeling to be so intensely happy and triumphant, and yet to feel like crying.
That night Clover and Annette went to Ford’s Theatre and visited the house across the street to see where President Lincoln had died. “The room is a small one,” Clover reported. “The pillow is soaked with blood . . . it is left just as it was on that night—a painful sight, and yet we wanted to see it, as it is an historical fact and it makes it so vivid to be in the place where such a tragedy had been enacted.” The drama was not lost on Clover. As she explained to Loulie, her visit to Washington had made her feel as if she’d finally had her “eyes wide open . . . and my pulse and heart going like race horses.”
Two months later, Clover went with her father, Nellie, and Ned to Harvard’s Commemoration, a day-long service in honor of Harvard graduates who had died in the war. Her older cousin William Sturgis Hooper had died almost two years before, from complications of an intestinal disorder, while serving with General Nathaniel P. Banks in Louisiana. Sturgis was only thirty. In the year following his death, Clover had visited his young widow, Alice Mason Hooper, and their five-year-old daughter, Isabella, hoping to bring some cheer. “I pine so much now and then for a good talk,” Alice wrote to her mother-in-law, Anne Hooper. “Intimate talk with a man—it’s an utterly hopeless indulgence.” Clover had tried to help Alice feel better, Alice reported, “by making me laugh—by advising me to advertise for one [a conversation] for twice a week.” The younger cousin had been intimate with loss and death and knew that one possible response was to laugh in the face of it.
On the morning of July 21, 1865, Dr. Hooper, Clover, her sister, and
her brother met Alice, so they could travel by train together from Boston to Cambridge. Though the day was steamy, a breeze from the northwest tempered the heat. On entering Harvard Yard, visitors were greeted with streams of black bunting, large displays of flags and shields, and a twelve-foot eagle, which held in its beak a banner that read, in Latin, MAY BOTH YOU AND THE NATION HAVE PEACE AND HAPPINESS. RETURN TO YOUR COUNTRY AND YOUR HOME. Alumni and the graduating class of 1865 gathered at Gore Hall, which housed the library, at the site where Widener Library now stands, then slowly marched, two by two, to the Unitarian Church across from the Yard. The dirge-like music kept the pace slow.
Clover, together with Nellie and Alice, crowded into the upper balconies of the church with the other women. The sanctuary, decorated with greens and bundles of flowers, was “crammed,” Alice reported to her mother-in-law. “When the time arrived—heroes came in, all in uniform and of course every one clapped.” The women’s colorful dress made a sharp contrast to the military garb of the sober procession below. The music, beginning with a rousing version of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and followed by the introit and sanctus of Cherubini’s Requiem, was accompanied by a twenty-six-piece orchestra, which thrilled the crowd. The sound shook the church rafters. A young Phillips Brooks, just twenty-six at the time, offered a prayer, a supplication that many remembered (a listener recalled that “one would rather have been able to pray that prayer than to lead an army or conduct a state”), but no one, unaccountably, wrote it down. Afterward, the women dined at the Harvard Hall on salmon and lobster salad, tongue and cold chicken, ice cream, tea, and coffee, while the men gathered to swap war stories.
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