The debutante ball was a necessary but not sufficient element of the overall process, which covered the entire eighteenth year of a female’s majority. It stretched over several distinct social seasons—the fall season, the Christmas season, the spring season, the Lent season. The whole proceeding marched forward inexorably, ticking like the escapement of some massive, socially engineered pocket watch. Families such as the Minturns accepted without question the cultural imperative of this parade of events, which trained young women to assume their place in society.
Much of the training dictated tribe-specific modes of behavior. There were dancing lessons, at which students would grapple with the labyrinthine series of steps that comprised the typical cotillion. More seriously, young ladies would be cautioned about indecorous conduct and inappropriate dress, about the importance of safeguarding one’s honor.
The Victorian etiquette expert Abby Buchanan Longstreet, on the meaning of the social debut: “It is the barrier between an immaturity of character and culture, and an admission of the completion of both. Previous to this event, a young girl is not supposed to be sufficiently intelligent to be interesting to her elders among her own sex, and certainly not worldly-wise enough to associate with gentlemen.”
Calling and card-leaving held an intense importance to the protocol of the debut, with rigorous, unspoken guidelines for their execution. Mothers and daughters (in this case, Edith, even in reduced circumstances, and Susanna) spent hour upon hour visiting their neighbors and acquaintances, usually for no more than fifteen minutes apiece. (The exchange of cards, sniffed Longstreet, was “simply ornamenting the barren wastes of speechlessness.”) Any debut mandated a calling list that might consist of five hundred names. The flood of visits and letter-writing reached proportions so epic that secretaries were hired to manage the procedure.
The glorious finale to the whole endeavor, of course, was the successful nuptial announcement, an affirmation of all the previous preparations. One scholar described the debut process as “a sort of prolonged crisis, resolved finally by a marriage.”
What would happen if something went wrong? Edie had taken the dancing lessons. She and Susanna could make their way through the season of calls and card-leaving as they were expected to. But examining, selecting and purchasing coming-out clothes was itself a major part of the process, as essential to any well-bred young lady as the bridal trousseau. The all-important debutante costume, consisting of layer upon layer of chiffon, white tulle or satin, with fresh flowers and sparkling jewels adding grace notes, was for the moment unaffordable.
She had to make do with cotton.
EDITH MINTURN HAD been born into wealth and the moral obligations that accompanied it. Her paternal grandfather, Robert Bowne Minturn, rode the wave of one of the great transportation revolutions of the nineteenth century. The fifty-vessel fleet he built with Grinnell, Minturn & Co. not only made him one of the success stories of antebellum New York City, it allowed him the resources to focus attention on the rights of people who didn’t possess his advantages. The clipper ships of the eighteenth century were ragingly fast and stunningly handsome—the Concordes of their day. Besides building the stone mansion on lower Fifth Avenue in 1847, where his moody granddaughter stood at the window on the eve of her coming out, Robert Bowne Minturn bankrolled the largest and most magnificent clipper ship in the United States, Flying Cloud. Forever after its launch, the Minturns would be known as the family that owned Flying Cloud. As Edie would be known as the granddaughter of the man who put the ship in the water.
Here’s Flying Cloud sailing out of New York harbor on her maiden voyage in June 1851: “She passed down the bay . . . and went dancing into the broad Atlantic,” reported the New York Tribune. “There was a stiff, steady wind, and the beautiful vessel, almost hid by the cloud of canvas which she spread, seemed to glide through the waters.”
The overnight millionaires on the West Coast, their fortunes made from gold and speculation, demanded provisions such as whiskey, sugar-cured hams and brandied peaches. Grinnell, Minturn & Co. raced other shipping firms to satisfy their needs. The difficulty was the route, a treacherous 120-day trip down the Atlantic seaboard, around Cape Horn and up the Pacific Coast to San Francisco. Flying Cloud, built for $1.6 million in present-day dollars, made history when it arrived on the Barbary Coast after 89 days on the water.
Tall as a Fifth Avenue mansion, with a rock maple keel and soaring masts, carrying ten thousand yards of the heaviest canvas and a gold-and-cream horn-blowing angel for a figurehead, the full-bodied vessel must have made a striking contrast when it entered San Francisco Bay. Crews racing off to make their fortunes in the gold fields had abandoned hundreds of ships to molder in the harbor, rendering it a spooky, nautical graveyard.
West Coast citizens marveled at the freshness of Flying Cloud’s cargo. “Just think of eating butter in San Francisco on the heel of summer, that was made in New York in May,” ran one newspaper editorial, “and you will feel that the Flying Cloud has indeed ‘walked the waters like a thing of life.’” A further distinction of the voyage was the gender of the ship’s navigator, the wife of the captain, who successfully brought the vessel through storms and over shoals to its West Coast berth.
New Yorkers celebrated Flying Cloud’s return following the record-breaking journey, its name splashed in ornate gilt across the bow and its blue-and-white swallowtail pennant flying. Spectators jammed Battery Park. Fans thronged the Astor House, the most famous hotel in America, to view an exhibit of Flying Cloud’s sea-scarred lashings and seizings. There was even a souvenir logbook for dignitaries, courtesy of Grinnell, Minturn, just like the real thing but printed in gold letters on white silk.
Owning the fastest clipper ship in the world brought prestige and glamour to the firm, but trade was not the only interest of Edie’s grandfather. Another part of the business consisted of fetching thousands of victims of the Irish potato famine, the passage often paid with their last pennies, to make new lives in America. In the company of his outspoken wife, Anna Mary Wendell, Robert Bowne Minturn had set himself to remaking the world for the better. That meant speaking out for the rights of immigrants, becoming a benefactor of the Freedmen’s Association and helping to establish the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor.
Minturn also built a model apartment house for one hundred poor African-American families in what is now New York’s Chinatown. The apartments boasted features that were rarely found in tenements, including sitting rooms, fireproof walls and well-ventilated living spaces. At a time when the urban poor were sleeping on rags and burning manure chips for warmth, taking steps to remedy squalid conditions represented an extraordinarily munificent project.
Of course, the edification and pleasure of Robert Min- turn’s family would always come first. Edith’s father, Robert Junior, grew to see foreign travel as a luxurious commonplace, which makes sense for the scion of a shipping magnate. If Junior suffered from asthma or was troubled by gastric upset, Anna and Robert would pack up the eight kids and half-dozen servants and depart on a healing sojourn in Switzerland, say, or the Far East. In May 1848, the couple set off on an education-minded trip, an eighteen-month grand tour of England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Jerusalem and Egypt, with children in tow. Robert Junior, Edith’s father, was in his impressionable teens at the time.
That trip would irrevocably alter the lives of the Minturn descendants, including Edith—of all Manhattan dwellers, really. Upon the family’s return, Minturn père invited some of his associates to his Fifth Avenue mansion to discuss establishing a grand park in the center of Manhattan, modeled on the Bois de Boulogne, Hyde Park and other green and public spaces that had impressed him on his tour of Europe. The progressive firebrand Anna took the lead in persuading the couple’s peers that there was nothing the city lacked so much as a large, verdant area for walking and driving, not only to serve as a playground for the rich but to lift up the poor, improve public health and provide jobs in i
ts construction.
The island of Manhattan had not yet become a densely built cityscape. In Anna’s view, swaths of available acreage existed, at present underused by populations of squatters. In the words of a history published by New York’s Real Estate Association, Central Park’s original denizens “lived off the refuse of the city, which they daily conveyed in small carts, chiefly drawn by dogs.” Among the more arcane activities of these squatters was the nineteenth-century trade of “bone boiling,” which produced a byproduct used in sugar refining. The eight-hundred-acre Central Park was born by legislative fiat in 1853, and the squatters were removed, an effort in part initiated by Edith’s grandmother Anna.
After returning from their overseas odyssey, Robert Bowne and Anna Minturn settled in a summer estate they named Locust Wood, twenty miles north of Manhattan in the hamlet of Hastings-on-Hudson. Robert took charge of plantings and grounds himself, designing the cobblestone gutters along the winding carriage roads as if they were works of art. Minturn even turned his leisure into a charitable endeavor when he joined other gentlemen in organizing the New York Horticulture Society, which promoted landscape design and rural improvement. Locust Wood stayed in the family for a number of years beyond the death of the elder Minturn, making a breeze-cooled spot for Edith, in young adulthood, to spend the warm weather months with her parents and siblings, when they were not on Staten Island.
Edith’s father, Robert Junior, proved himself exceptional at an early age when, not ten years after his family’s grand tour, he wrote a book titled New York to Delhi. A recent graduate of Columbia University, Robert was sent abroad once more for the sake of his health, and afterward set down five hundred pages of richly detailed description of his adventures. Critics praised the memoir, saying it heralded the awakening of a promising literary talent, but it was the last published work for Minturn, who turned his attention, as his father and grandfather had before him, to building ships and sending them across the sea, enterprises that rewarded him with the level of profit needed to keep his growing family in style.
LIKE HER PATERNAL grandparents, Edith’s grandparents on the maternal side, Francis Gould Shaw and Sarah Blake Sturgis, were both inheritors of mercantile wealth. They left Boston, where Frank’s father was one of the richest citizens, and rejected their ancestors’ commercial interests to settle on a farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, out of a kinship with the socialist community of Brook Farm. Literary celebrities who gathered at the home of Frank and Sarah included such names as Thoreau, Emerson, Marga- ret Fuller and James Russell Lowell. At dinner parties, Sarah stood and recited Shakespeare and Milton by the page.
The abolitionist and writer Lydia Maria Child effused over the couple in her correspondence. “I love Frank and Sarah Shaw, partly because they are very good looking, partly because they always dress in beautiful clothes, and partly because they have many fine qualities,” she wrote. “Moreover, they are very free from sham, for which they deserve the more credit, considering they are Bostonians and are rich.”
The Shaws relocated to Staten Island when their children were small in order for Sarah to be treated for a vision ailment by Dr. Samuel MacKenzie Elliott, a renowned ophthalmologist. When not restoring the eyesight of luminaries, Elliott was both a charismatic abolitionist leader and a speculative builder. Over the years he erected dozens of houses in Elliottville, on the island’s north shore, which he made available to his antislavery followers. The enclave became known as a secure stop on the Underground Railroad. Frank and Sarah built a residence that cost $80,000 to construct, using a healthy inheritance from Frank’s father. This was the house where Edie Minturn would be born and raised, from where she journeyed to the shore to dodge her mother’s beach parasol.
While all of the Shaw children would grow into accomplished adults, perhaps the most impressive was handsome, popular Robert Gould Shaw. Shaw came of age during the Civil War, and took on the job of commanding the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first regiment of African Americans formed in the state. Mourned and lionized in the wake of his death in 1863, at the head of his regiment, while leading a charge on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, Robert Gould Shaw was, in the words of John Greenleaf Whittier, “the very flower and grace of chivalry.” Emerson would also extol the man in verse, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens would honor him and the 54th Massachusetts in a bronze bas-relief on the Boston Common. His reputation undimmed by the passage of time, Shaw and his regiment would be featured in the 1989 film Glory.
Only slightly less powerful in the family mythology were Susanna’s three sisters, though two of them were perhaps better known for their husbands’ accomplishments than their own. One, Anna, wed a columnist named George William Curtis, a fiery speaker who delivered up acerbic editorials for Harper’s magazine. Sister Ellen married Major General Francis Channing Barlow, one of the youngest generals of the Civil War, who later, as a lawyer in New York, would spearhead the breakup of the Tweed Ring.
But the aunt to whom Edith was closest as she was growing up was Josephine Shaw Lowell. Josephine’s early life was tinged with tragedy when her husband, Charles Russell Lowell, nephew of the man of letters James Russell Lowell, perished in the war. His nickname, “Beau Sabreur,” meant “handsome swordsman,” owing to his zesty and dashing character. His death came in 1864, at the battle of Cedar Creek, on the same day that his commission as brigadier general was signed. After taking a bullet to the chest that would eventually prove fatal, the scrappy war fighter had himself strapped to his horse so that he could lead one last cavalry charge against the Confederate lines.
Josephine, known to all in the family as Effie, triumphed over the loss to spend forty years pioneering social reforms for poor children and women. She was the best-known female philanthropist of her day, in an era when women were beginning to attack some of the ills of society. In 1913 she would become the first woman New York would honor with a civic monument, the Josephine Shaw Lowell Fountain in Bryant Park.
Edith Minturn grew up at Aunt Effie’s feet, hearing stories of Effie and Susanna knitting mittens for the front and tirelessly repacking boxes of donations for Union soldiers. Effie gave Edith the sense of being part of something bigger, the fight for racial and social justice.
Progressives such as Josephine Lowell worked to improve the problems wrought by industrialization. The United States now had great cities and had tamed its frontier, but troubles plagued some Americans still. Reformers at first focused on women’s rights and temperance, then on child labor, government corruption and other issues, driven by the belief that man was capable of improving social conditions. How common was it for industrialists and financiers to engage in philanthropy? Not all the rich made an attempt to cure society’s ills, but quite a few did.
Wealth married to social responsibility. But in the years following Emancipation, abolitionism receded as a cause around which progressives could be rallied. The offspring of the well-matched Shaw and Minturn families, including Edie and her siblings, found themselves as concerned, perhaps, with fashion trends as they were with political banners.
Aunt Josephine was the family’s moral compass, and it was she who escorted the two eldest Minturn girls to Europe in the spring of 1884, when they were in their late teens, on a trip that would combine sightseeing and visiting with relatives. May, at nineteen, and Edie, two years younger, were the closest of any of the Minturn siblings. They often attended events together, traveled and paid calls together. Now, as a special experience made possible by the success of their father’s business, they would go to Europe together. Aunt Josephine had her own daughter Lottie in tow. The Minturn filles were given an inside view of English society by a collection of family relations who had married into the gentry.
Susanna wrote long, chatty missives to her daughters every day. In a letter of April 4, 1884, she admonished them to behave like proper young misses: “Be sure to talk low in England—& don’t giggle—& don’t procrastinate! When you go to Aunt Susie’s wear your g
rey dresses—they are so becoming and lady-like.”
When they left London for Paris after a month of family visits, they should set their minds to assembling a wardrobe of pretty things, Susanna exhorted. Summer dresses both white and colored at Bon Marché in Paris for themselves, as well as thick wool coats and hats and cotton jumpers to ship home for their baby brother, umbrellas and Bibles as gifts for their sisters, caps to have made up for Grandma and, if they could manage it, a Shetland wool shawl for their mother (“Not very fine, as I want it for use”). Money for these purchases regularly arrived in London, with constant offers of more if they needed it.
Susanna also directed her daughters to take every opportunity for sightseeing (“after all the shopping is over”), in order to experience the grand historic places in England. They were to do the same in Paris—if they risked a visit there despite a raging cholera epidemic—or in Scotland and Italy if Aunt Effie deemed the French trip unwise. “I hope you can get over to the Continent,” Susanna wrote. “You need not go to Paris at all, but could get to Genoa by way of the Rhine.” London, Paris, Genoa and Rome were must-see stops on any upper-crust tour.
There was good news from the home front, too. Bob, the family’s idolized eldest son, collected his undergraduate degree from Harvard that spring and joined the firm of “Mr. Morgan.” “Altogether I’ve blossomed into a very remarkable person,” Bob wrote. “So much so in fact, that I quite long to appear at Hastings in an alcoholically befuddled condition in order to destroy at one blow the good repute in which I now stand and put an eternal seal on the lips which have been shouting in chorus ‘How perfectly splendid.’”
Susanna slipped in some worrisome news as well. Robert Minturn had been working too hard, becoming weak and rundown. But sojourns up the river to Hastings, “playing on the piazza with Baby,” indulging in croquet games with Mildred and Gertrude and peaceful walks to town were amazingly curative.
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