How was it that Ambition crept,
Unseen, amid the revels there,
Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt
In the tangles of Love’s very hair?*
In his first published poem, Tamerlane, Edgar Allan Poe adopted the persona of a defeated and world-weary warrior lamenting life from his deathbed. A shepherd in his youth, Tamerlane lived high above the world on a mighty mountaintop, sleeping soundly under a vast and open sky. There he wanted for nothing. He lived a life of simple pleasures and cares with a woman of unsurpassed beauty and goodness providing him all the companionship he could ever need. In her he glimpsed the heavens; in himself he found a better man for her company; together they shared the delights and pains of which human life is wrought. But one morning Tamerlane awoke with a fire in his heart. The clouds above him seemed like banners, unfurling to reveal his name; the distant thunder seemed a blasting bugle call, sent to wake his slumbering ambition. The world was his, the sky seemed to say; he had only to rise and take it. It was not for himself alone that he would conquer the world, however. Speaking to his beloved of his aspirations, he began to see that in her too was a light too bright to shine and fade in a desolate wood. She must have a throne—and he must win it for her. Thus did Tamerlane’s love and ambition become tied up together: “And, so, confusedly became / Thine image, and—a name—a name! / Two separate—yet most intimate things.”1
The bugle blast that woke Tamerlane from his mountain reverie was heard by countless young Southern men. In 1848, Mississippian Henry Hughes heard the call: “I will rise above doubt, dread, sense, sin,” he promised his diary. “I [shall] stand upon the pinnacle of Fame and look down on Washington & Napoleon….I will be the greatest mortal man that ever was.” Not surprisingly, Hughes’s ambitions, like Tamerlane’s, centered on Civilization building. “The Condition of Europe arouses and encourages me,” he noted of the 1848 Revolutions. “I will be the President of America and Europe. The Republics of earth shall all be joined in one Government. I will be their ruler. I feel that for some such destiny as this, God has marked me out.” Equally unsurprising, Hughes, like Patterson and Poe, Hammond and Tamerlane, fell from such dizzying heights, fetching up only when he had slipped below the suicide point. “Nothing seems to me so grateful as annihilation,” he confessed. “I am homesick for the grave.”2
As the last chapter noted, this cycle was an endemic aspect of masculinity in the late antebellum South. Having ascended with the romantic tenor of the times, men’s dreams of pride and power became ever loftier as their opportunities became ever more constricted; their frustrations had almost inevitably to be projected outward or in, with results that were usually destructive. What went unexamined in the last chapter, however, is the insight that lies at the core of Tamerlane. Men did not travel this cycle of elation and despair alone; they brought their women with them—real women if they were available, fantasies if they were not—folding them up in great, covetous visions of masculine becoming. Through the eyes of their women, men could appear grand and unconquerable, even in a clerkship; in making their bid for greatness in a woman’s name, men could feel that their quest was less about self-aggrandizement than self-sacrifice; and in their inevitable failures, men could rebuild on the bedrock of a woman’s love and faith. “Have I ever had a pleasure in which woman was not an element,” Henry Hughes asked, returning to the top of his cycle. “Ambition and Love, these are my life.”3
The confusing mess men made of ambition and love was, of course, distinctly personal and should not be overgeneralized. While the pressure to live up to the South’s masculine standard was common to the region, personality played a crucial role in shaping how individuals responded to that pressure. The following extended treatments of Laurence Massillon Keitt and Henry Craft give but a flavor of that remarkable variety, providing a glimpse into the complex ways in which men experienced what they regarded as the central fact of their lives—the fact that they were men.
In February 1857, a general melee broke out on the floor of the House of Representatives. For three days the legislators had engaged in a heated debate over the admission of Kansas as a slave state. The Buchanan administration had rammed the bill through the Senate with relative ease, but House forces were evenly matched and perennially ill-humored. One representative captured the general mood when he suggested that each man check his sidearm at the door—he was only half kidding. On the third day of the debate, opposition forces gained an unexpected advantage—an unusual number of dinners and dances had seriously depleted the Democratic ranks. Frantic, Alexander Stephens sent messengers to the likely salons to round up the wayward congressmen. Most probably, Laurence Keitt was among these reinforcements. His passion for politics was equaled only by his passion for fashionable life, and he was one of the city’s most notorious gallants. Regardless, by two in the morning the “leader of the Palmetto State’s young chivalry” had dragged himself into the House where he lay sprawled across two tables, half drunk and half asleep, one of his shoes having fallen to the floor. The Republican floor leader, Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania, was conferring with opposition-minded Democrats on that party’s side of the House when John Quitman of Mississippi offered another in a long line of silly motions designed to forestall a vote. Tired, frustrated, and not a little belligerent himself, Grow objected “with considerable tartness” to such parliamentary pettiness. Apparently the objection came as an unwelcome intrusion to the napping Keitt—with eyes still closed, he inclined his head just long enough to growl, “if you are going to object, go back to your own side of the house.” “This is a free hall,” Grow answered the prostrate congressman, “and I have the right to object from any part of it when I choose.” At this Keitt was up in a flash, fumbling for his footwear. “Wait until I put my shoe on, you Black Republican puppy,” he snarled at Grow, “and we will see about that.” Slightly amused, Grow held his ground, claiming he would be damned before some “nigger driver” fresh off the plantation would crack a whip about his ears and tell him where or where not to stand in the House of Representatives. Keitt, normally adept at such verbal sparrings, was at an unusual loss for words and instead launched himself at the defiant Republican, meaning to choke him. Accounts vary dramatically as to what happened next. Republican papers and Grow partisans claim the well-proportioned congressman caught Keitt with a hard right, knocking him to the floor. Keitt backers claim Grow’s fist went wide of the mark and that Keitt had “merely tripped.” Regardless, their tussle set off a general melee in front of the speaker’s podium in which dozens of congressmen fell upon each other, one wielding a heavy spittoon. The older representatives were just beginning to get wheezy when Cadwallader Washburn of Wisconsin grabbed William Barksdale of Mississippi by the hair, preparing to deliver him a heavy blow to the face. Unfortunately Barksdale’s wig came loose in Washburn’s hand and the startled Wisconsin representative swung at nothing but air. Convulsed by laughter, the rioters attempted to regain their composure as the embarrassed Barksdale reacquired and repositioned his crumpled hair. The next day, Keitt apologized for the incident, admitted he was the aggressor, and claimed that any blame belonged to him alone. But even Keitt’s friends shook their heads at his conduct, confirmed in what they had always known about the impetuous congressman. “I like Keitt for many things,” William Trescott told his friend Miles. “He is frank in his nature, honest in his politics, and I believe true to his work.” But “he has sadly depreciated the old Carolina standard…and I see no hope of [his] improving.” Indeed, Trescott noted, men like Keitt make “[me] apprehensive of some new mortification whenever I hear that a South Carolinian has been distinguishing himself.”4
By the late 1850s, brawls on the congressional floor were relatively commonplace. In this editorial cartoon entitled “Opened with Prayer,” the representatives are skirmishing before the chaplain can even complete the opening benediction. “[Such] Preliminary Piety,” noted the accompanying article, “[is useless] when the voice of the Divine is likely to be drowned at any moment by fierce eructations of Illinois wrath, or the sharp snaps of South Carolina Derringers. It [is onlytoo] clear… that the Christian precepts of the morning have no effect in repressing Mr. Kellogg’s tendency to muscular overthrow of his foes in the afternoon, or Mr. Keitt’s anxiety to bring forth his compact little death-dealer from his coat pocket in the evening.” The benediction, the article concluded, was as ill suited to open a session of Congress as a “Biblical inscription at the entrance of a Brothel.” From Vanity Fair, December 31, 1859.
It is for incidents like this one that Laurence Keitt earned the sobriquet “Harry Hotspur of the South.” There is much in his career to justify the title. Born near St. Matthews, South Carolina, in 1824, Keitt seems to have had a rollicking and happy youth. Of his earliest boyhood we know only that he was “famous for foot races, the gift of gab, and for never wincing when… flogged.” Still they are important details. Keitt was a child of privilege, at ease with his mind and body, self-assured enough to take punishment stoically, even proudly, self-aware enough to realize that if he wanted to be on the administrative end he would have to be on the receiving end of some of life’s hard knocks. (These would be important lessons for a man whose lifelong philosophy was “if the world buffets you, buffet it back.”) Like many of his rank and region, his natural brass would be given a little polish at South Carolina College where he threw himself into the proceedings and excesses of the Euphradian debating society.5
By his own admission Keitt entered politics a “mere boy,” elected at twenty-four to the Orangeburg district statehouse seat by a constituency that almost to a man disagreed with his political viewpoint. Keitt, however, believed that it was precisely this audacity that “drew the people” to him and gave him a hold on them greater than any of his predecessors. From his very first canvass, then, Keitt learned never to “stoop to a mamby-pamby dalliance” with public opinion before making up his mind. “I assume,” he claimed, “that my position is as much to teach…as to be taught.… [and] I have never stopped to inquire, when a vital principle was at stake, whether the multitude would think as I did or not.” Keitt would give speeches in his district—“even the gods of old sometimes showed themselves,” he noted—but he would not cavil or grovel with the “melodramatic flirtation” of the cringing office seeker. “No dreamy dalliance, no sated worship, pampered by the spicy condiments of whim or fancy will do in this life,” Keitt noted. “Life, in the very texture of the word, means struggle, motion, purpose, object.” From his first day in politics, Keitt’s object was the secession of the South from the United States.6
Once in Washington, however, Keitt threw himself as much into socializing as politicking. The city had an infectious energy that matched Keitt’s own. Parties were “as thick as leaves in Autumn” and the ballrooms were always “full of Belles.” The young congressman was a “favourite… among the ladies” and a constant companion of Buchanan’s niece, Harriet Lane, who oversaw all White House social functions. “In reality,” Keitt marveled of Washington, “this is a great place; I never saw any one who got tired of it.” While some men of his age were on their way west, preparing to cut their own swath out of the American dream, Keitt thought the frontier held out only the scrubby alternatives of hardscrabble living or ignominious dying. For his part, Keitt would stay in Washington, where “whoever likes gaiety can have enough of it” and the “rich geniality” of the social scene could not help but fascinate a man who could “make a figure” of himself.7
To be sure, Laurence Keitt cut quite a figure in Washington. As an orator, he was nearly unmatched, with a “rapid and fervent manner” that was “riveting,” “irresistible.” His voice was deep and powerful, and when he took up the subject of abolitionism (which he did gratuitously) he paced around his desk, scattering papers before him “like people in a panic” and pounding “the innocent mahogany” until pens, pencils, documents, and even “John Adam’s extracts shuddered under the blows.” Accounts of his forensic displays tend to be indulgent in their detail—not so much from partiality as from the smug satisfaction of the writer who has bumped into a walking archetype. “[His is a] pyrotechnic style,” remarked a writer for Harper’s Weekly. “His speeches are melo-dramatically effective, made up of the entrances and exits of ideas that sparkle vividly while they are on the stage and go off in a tumult of applause, leaving an intoxicating sense of beauty and of daring, yet nothing distinct but a metaphor or a bold antithesis.” Is the reporter describing Keitt’s speeches or Keitt himself? Hasn’t he conflated the two? Isn’t he implying that Keitt was himself melodramatically effective, strutting his hour upon the stage, beautiful and daring, sparkling and vivid, but ultimately just a bold antithesis? This sort of thing happened regularly to Keitt. He was the fiery Southern orator perfectly essentialized in the qualities of a single man, and one suspects that if had he not existed he would have been invented by a society that had given him the uncommon license to stand as his own caricature.8
The truth, though, is that Laurence Keitt was invented, first by a young man playing at politics, then by a constituency living vicariously through his frothy indignation, finally by historians who have always been content to regard him as his contemporaries regarded him—the fire eater essentialized. Undoubtedly he deserves his reputation as a swashbuckling secessionist. It would be difficult to find a man of the period more dedicated to the separation of North and South and impossible to find one whose rhetorical flourishes relied so regularly on the imagery of the embattled knight. However, our stereotypes of the Southern cavalier—the honorable warrior of a doomed civilization or the laughable dandy jousting with windmills—all tend to sell rather short the intellectual depth and motive power of the South’s unique blend of chivalric traditions. Keitt’s case is an excellent one. As a student at South Carolina College, Keitt developed a lasting respect for only one professor—the barely closeted Unionist, Francis Lieber. In Lieber’s class, Keitt sat among the busts of intellectual giants and watched transfixed as the armies of darkness and light moved across Lieber’s vast collection of maps. In the Euphradian debating society, where political questions dominated the discussion, Keitt held forth only on literary and historical subjects. Would Socrates have been justified in leaving prison when solicited by Crito? Was Coriolanus justified in fighting against his country? In truth, Keitt found the college’s conservatism, its disunionism, one of its least compelling features, at least when compared with the study of Roman imperialism, Grecian intellect, and Shakespearean poesy. Keitt was a romantic humanist searching not for a motion, purpose, or object but any motion, purpose, or object, so long as it corresponded with his (admittedly overblown) conception of what it meant to be a man. In Keitt’s mind the qualifications for this last, august office were quite strict. Most of the politicians he met were milk-and-water types, confirmed imbeciles who moved like amiable mutes through the world, “decaying through inaction, rusting out through sloth.” “Such a thing,” Keitt noted, “whom Nature wrangled about in fixing his positive gender and compromised upon the neuter, has no attractions to me.” True manhood did not dally or dicker, Keitt believed, but acted, and then decisively. In South Carolina this made him a secessionist, and certainly Keitt set about the role with his typical exuberance. But beyond the bravado and bluster one detects a literary and historical sensibility fueling his vision.9
Keitt was somewhat obsessed, for instance, with the notion that “white men [had] occupied South Carolina” in the tenth century and that the documents to prove his contention were rotting away in a records room in Copenhagen. He suggested to the legislature that many such “memorials of our history” were languishing in European archives and requested that “some proper person be appointed to collect [them] all.” When Keitt’s proposal was rejected, he had the nerve to deride the legislature for being too caught up with sectional questions to dedicate proper energy to documenting the past. Even Keitt’s proslavery arguments tended not so much to rest on historical justifications as to be overwhelmed by them. In a speech to the Virginia Military Institute, he set out to prove that the South would be a perfect commingling of ancient Greek and Hebrew traditions. Any enduring civilization, he claimed, rested on moral, mental, and material pillars. While the Greeks were accomplished in mental and material pursuits, they could not construct a perfect society because they had no true knowledge of God. The Hebrews, by adhering to God’s word, had constructed an incredibly strong moral society, but mental and material foundations were weak. The South was in a unique position to bring the great traditions together; from the Greeks it would borrow the “instinct for Beauty” and from the Hebrews the fear of God. Forcing blacks to perform the more onerous duties necessary to any society would give the intellectual elite the freedom to go about the business of civilization building, and a standing mudsill caste would spare the South the class conflict that plagued other nations. As a proslavery argument, the speech was no different from a thousand others and, indeed, by the 1850s positive good defenses of the institution had become so reified that an orator contributed only his passion and a little window dressing. But Keitt’s historical super-structure was no mere rhetoric or rationalization; it was to him as important as the defense itself, perhaps more so. To understand why requires an in-depth understanding of a subject far removed from politics or slavery—Keitt’s abiding love of poetry.10
Laurence Massillon Keitt. From a lithograph appearing in Harper’s Weekly, December 22, 1860.
On six occasions between 1851 and 1854, William Gilmore Simms delivered a series of lectures he titled Poetry and the Practical. It was, he admitted to audiences across the South, an odd title, a seeming oxymoron. Of what practical use was poetry? Poesy, after all, was a mere “pomp of words… wandering through eternity…a vain and empty discourse… which appeals not to the common reason.” And America, Simms acknowledged, had become a very practical place. For three generations it had dedicated itself to the quest for empire. Once just a motley collection of “little spots along the Atlantic shores,” the country had spread “with the flight of an eagle…to the far waters of the Great Pacific.” “We have conquered the savage nature [of] the wild forests,” Simms claimed, and “have gone fearlessly forth upon the high seas, declaring them our common.” “We have achieved wondrously” and have won by dint of “iron will” and “unbending earnestness” an empire for the ages. But the country had lost something along the way, Simms told his audience, and something very like its soul. Indulging its imperial appetite, America had become monstrous and engorged, with a passion only for conquest and a taste only for blood. “The nation living thus dies out and must die out,” Simms claimed, when in a gluttonous paroxysm it turns on itself for a final meal. Having won an empire, the country needed now to deserve it, to earn a dominion measured not by its extent but by its beauty. And the poet could teach them how, could give them the practical advice they needed to save the country from self-destruction. The poet’s arts, Simms noted, are “superior to those by which our possessions have been won.” The poet can teach us to “secure what we possess…to strengthen our bulwark with Beauty and to sharpen our spears with Love.” Simms understood that his audience wanted to hear nothing of such trifles, but they were going to hear it, he claimed, because they had forgotten what it meant to be Beautiful and because poetry had become the most practical subject in the world.11
Laurence Keitt may or may not have attended these lectures, but he undoubtedly read them. Keitt and Simms corresponded occasionally, met regularly, and shared a passion for poetry generally and Simms’s work specifically. With most of South Carolina, Simms found Keitt a somewhat volatile character. “He is a good fellow,” Simms noted, “but likely to flounder his Batteau in smooth waters.” Keitt, on the other hand, viewed Simms with wonder, almost as a student does a stern but brilliant schoolmaster. “He is a remarkable man,” Keitt wrote typically. “He has the most varied talents [and] the fullest information of any man in the state… with a generosity of spirit and a guilelessness of heart which hook him to those who know him most staunchly.” Keitt, moreover, believed, with everything he had, that he not only understood Poetry and the Practical but lived it.12
Like Simms, Keitt believed that poetry was the divine in man struggling to sing. Much of the time, of course, it did not sing very well. Most poets were mere “sonnatteers of the hour,” Simms noted, “possessing but a moderate command of language… manufactur[ing] verses upon the ordinary emotions and the received commonplaces of society.” Keitt concurred. “Modern poets,” he claimed, “seem to me to be like David, not like Solomon. They gather and accumulate and heap up, but they cannot construct and proportion.” Their problem was not a lack of talent per se, but a chronic self-involvement, a mental pettiness. “Continual introspection,” Keitt noted, “is dangerous; it is what Bacon calls the merest cannibalism—the heart eating itself up.” By writing from the self alone, these modern poets consumed their own humanity and their poetry became the “nightmares” and “hysterics” of the soulless. What they did not understand was that “one may learn from everything, from the mountain and the valley, from the flower and the shrub, from the bird and the insect, from any living and creeping thing in physical nature.” The Greeks had understood this. By peopling the woods with divinities and the waters with nymphs, the inherent Beauty of nature had been given a form and face and substance men could touch and be touched by. Certainly this made the Greek gods more human, but it also made humans more godly, made them dream more broadly, imagine more grandly. For Keitt, the Iliad and Odyssey were the “Genesis and Deuteronomy of the… indestructible Bible of Art,” and provided a model for a poetry of divine and titanic majesty. The true poet, for Keitt, was not some scribbler “twist[ing] and twin[ing] arabesques of metaphysical subtlety” and was not some exorcist chasing the ghosts and goblins that haunt men’s minds. The true poet was vatic, bardic, practical, himself a living poem, a man grasping at the essence of Beauty primeval and thrusting it before his fellows.13
Keitt did not muse on the subject of poetry, he did not dabble. Though he never wrote a line, Laurence Keitt is best understood as a practicing poet. His politicking was never about the campaign or the canvass, this bill or that legislation—it was not even particularly about democracy or even secession. Rather it was about giving birth to Beauty, conceived in the solitude of the poet’s mind, brought to “life and vigor and passion amid the shock and hum of men.” For Keitt, America was no republican experiment, a Britain with a better constitution. America was a promise God had made to man, an epic that began in 1776 and ended when the country took its rightful place not merely among nations but among civilizations. In other eras the poet had helped build such civilizations through literature or history; in Keitt’s era the practical poet exercised his muse in the arena of politics. “Public life…in a country like ours,” he said, “is a grand and glorious field. Two hundred years ago Milton said he who would write an heroic poem must make his whole life heroic. This is equally true of our own time, and true of politics too, for politics now is our epic poem.”14
History, Keitt believed, was punctuated by events, by Promethean moments when the world was returned to the potter’s wheel to be remolded, remade, and fired again. By 1855 the entire Atlantic community was on the brink of just such momentous change, “rocking with the throes of… august developments” that could “no more be stifled than the spirit of the earthquake.” In the coming storm, lesser men would be overwhelmed. They would miss the opportunity to shape the world and, as suddenly as it had come, the drama would be over, “its agencies, like waves, rocking and rolling themselves heavily to sleep.” This was the poet’s moment, Keitt’s moment, to marry his name “to mighty events, to mighty measures, and to an immortal future.” “He who cannot stand with steady eye and… steel nerve upon the glacier of power,” Keitt noted, and “lift the banner of truth and humanity above the mist and vapors and clouds of prejudice and popular passion…is not and cannot be a statesman.”15
To prepare himself for this glacial moment, Keitt spent the summer of 1855 at a secluded mountain resort near Greenville, South Carolina. For six weeks he received no mail or newspapers and gave no thought to politics. Instead he read six thousand pages of literature, history, metaphysics, and philosophy, comprehending them not as the student but as the “master.” Keitt believed the “intellectual gladiator” needed these moments of study to exercise the bulging muscles of his mind. But Keitt was no sword for hire. He was, he claimed, not so much ambitious as questing; his energy was not self-serving merely but “of kin to divinity and to a higher purpose.” Time was quickening, becoming elastic, the “tone of the world was changing” and Keitt would be damned if he would sit around slackjawed and let the “milk-and-water” men control the nation’s destiny. “The materials of heroic life,” he claimed, “were scattered all over the field of public life.” Some men saw only “grass and stubble and straw, or in office only gewgaws.” But the “soaring intellect” felt a “quickened pulse [and] throb of quenchless energy” at the thought that “his country [might] treasure him up as a portion of her precious heritage and remember him proudly when with jeweled brow… conquering tread and imperial stature she join[ed] the great Panthenaic procession of the nations.” Near the end of his stay in Greenville, Keitt rose early to catch the sunrise. The view, he said, was magnificent. He stood “on a cliff 1100 feet perpendicular,” a mountain chain surrounding him on three sides. A sea of clouds had settled in the valley and, agitated by winds, they lapped up against his precipice like waves. It was a sight Nature presented to Keitt alone, an ocean in the sky, stretching out like the unmapped waters of a great Civilization.16
Keitt’s description of his stirring moment on a Greenville precipice is eerily similar to that evoked by Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818). Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany.
Laurence Keitt was, by his own admission, a “visionary and a theorist.” Secession was to him but a blip in the grander becoming of the world; his ambition was epic, his aspirations colossal and grandiose. But every urge to dismiss his vision as the messianic exuberance of youth should be quelled; this man was elected to office, then reelected, then elected again. He insulted the people, brawled on the floor of Congress, and postured himself a god—and he usually left his audience hungry for more. Far from being held accountable for his audacity, he was elected for it. In the wake of the Sumner caning, Keitt hoped the northern men would rise en masse. If they did, he promised “the city would… float with blood.” Sick of “stagnation,” the prospect of a general bloodletting in the capital offered a tantalizing release. The tidy, modest revolution that had birthed the republic would not do this time; Keitt was looking for something more cathartic, wrenching. In the summer of 1856, he found it.17
Susanna Sparks was, by every account, a stunning woman. One breathless newspaper editor, utterly overwhelmed by their first encounter, pronounced her “magnificent… [with] fair brow and lovely arms, a sweet glow mantles upon her cheek…a bewildering beauty flashes from her eye and encircles her” like a dream. Even the curmudgeonly editor of the Charleston Patriot seemed susceptible to her “necromancy,” gazetting her every ball movement and indulging himself in paeans to her face and form. Uncommonly attractive on the outside, Sue was nevertheless an emotional wreck. She had been engaged to the son of a wealthy and prominent South Carolina family when without warning or explanation the young man had married someone else. The humiliating episode left Sparks darkly depressed and deeply distrusting of men, and she resolved thereafter to be “strong, hard, and cold.” Whether Keitt was first attracted to her uncommon beauty, biting intellect, or studied coolness, we do not know; their earliest courtship remains something of a mystery. But by December 1854, Keitt was thinking he might be in love. He had been fond of many women, but for Sue he felt an odd sort of “electric sympathy,” a spark of something divine. He resolved, however, not to confess his feelings until he could test them in “the most terrible of all trials—the flatteries of the brilliant and the éclat of triumph.” That winter he threw himself into the Washington social whirl, searching his heart thoroughly, determined to see if Sue’s image faded amid the honeyed compliments of beautiful belles and the high praise of men known round the world. But whatever Washington had to offer, it did not throw even a shadow over his feelings. On March 9, 1855, “doubtingly… tremblingly,” Keitt proposed.18
Sparks did not accept his proposal—nor did she reject it. Instead, she began a period of dissembling and recrimination that would last for two months. Keitt, she claimed, was a man of roving fancy, indiscreet in politics, notorious in the drawing room. If he loved her at all, it was for her beauty, and his fascination would fade as soon as he found some shiny new bauble to pursue. She had been betrayed before, by friends and by a lover who gave her all manner of assurances. She had recovered from that heartbreak, had even grown stronger by it, but would never again surrender to mere “sentiment whipped into froth.” Having studied music and painting for a year at Barhamville Academy in Columbia, Sparks was determined to give up the flighty life of the belle and continue her studies in Europe.19
Keitt was crushed but defensive and set about his courtship with the same zeal (and many of the same tactics) he employed in politics. He sent Sparks long letters countering her every objection, drawing deeper from philosophy and literature than his own feelings. Sue was like a “mannikin boy” with “hair erect, eyeballs staring, and tickled nerves” whistling bravely by the graveyard at midnight. As soon as she conquered her fears and threw off her torpor, she would learn, as Keitt had, to shine, not “in an untutored and rough society but in the circle of the Muses and Apollo where power and fashion are constellated.” He understood that she was crushed, weary, spent, and hurting, but whose fault was that? She was selling herself short to blame others for her heartache. The struggles of life were life itself; those who did not learn from them were not living but dying, slow as a tree. Keitt recognized that he was being forward to offer these observations, but believed it was exactly what she needed to hear. “Verily, Miss Sue,” he told her, “I have read your nature—may I say so?—better than you have yourself.” As for her rendering of his nature, Sue had been taunting and unfair. He did not “look upon all life as a dancing school” and was not “one of those whose life begins at 10 at night and closes in the morning at 4.” Whatever he may have done or been in the past, he had given Sue “no reason for such treatment” and could not understand why she would trifle with his emotions. “I have thought, I have thought again. Again I have thought,” Keitt told her—his love was no “galvanized sentiment.” He was prepared to share with her “everything that constitutes my manhood and my nature.”20
After two months of such importunings, the beleaguered girl reluctantly accepted Keitt’s proposal, but she promised him only her presentiments of disaster and feelings of hopelessness. This was enough for Keitt. “Your letter,” he claimed, “has poured upon me a brightness as gladsome to my little worth as that which streamed upon the universe when the morning stars first sang together.” He understood she was still soulsick and that the “spectre” of her earlier experience would occasionally rise before them, but he promised to treat her with “patience, gentleness, forebearance, and unselfish and unmixed devotion.” “That [morbid thoughts] should rise up now and then, I cannot complain of,” he noted, “for the waves of the ocean still roll for a time after the storm has passed away and calmness has breathed upon its surface.” “And now, dear Sue, as the flower under rude influences closes in upon its heart, enfolding there its fragrance, so would I, content with you alone, enclose you in my inner heart.”21
For the next year, Susanna Sparks chafed within her new confines. She postponed the wedding date twice, forgot to answer Keitt’s letters, and spurned his friends and family whenever the occasion presented itself. Confronted by this barrage of insults, in the face of all her cruelties, Keitt appears to have done what he had never quite managed to do before—he fell in love with her. His affections, he claimed, were not based on her physical beauty but on her superiority as a human being. When her eye had lost its brightness, when her hand had lost its roundness, and fortune had done its worst, then he would take her all over again, as joyously and as tenderly as he had when young, as the culmination of all his life’s earthly blessings. He admitted he had been presumptuous in their early courtship. He had so ably learned to read men’s hearts in the political world he had thought he would be able to read hers and direct it to his will. But what he had not realized was that she was better than he was, purer and more holy. Her love was not something to win, but to be worthy of, and he dropped the speechifying and sophistry, and threw himself on her mercy. His allegiance, he said, was bound to her unalterably, as to a superior being, and though she might stab him through the heart he could never reproach her—his love for her had become his religion, it had made him a better man.
On his way to the capitol one morning, Keitt stopped at the burned out wreck of a fellow House member’s home. The owner, Colonel Benton, was shuffling through some of the things, and Keitt expressed his condolences. “I care not for brick and mortar,” the Colonel replied, “for earthly things; my manuscripts, which have almost become my children, I could lose too. Yes I could have lost all these if the dresses of my wife had been saved. They hung by each side of my bed, and they were the last thing I saw at night and the first at morning.” It was a simple gesture, but Keitt was moved almost to tears, claiming the incident would never pass from his memory. “In him the curse and crime of selfish ambition has been mitigated and brightened” by the love of a noble woman. “Dear Sue,” he wrote her after the incident, “you much mistake me if you think, even for a moment, that I am not submissive to your lightest request….I would give my proudest hopes and my starriest ambition to win back freshness to your heart.”22
Taking him at his word, Sue exacted one final, staggering price—if he were serious he would give up politics forever and move with her to Europe for as long a period as she desired. Keitt reeled, but only for a moment. Politics, he said, had always held a strong attraction for him. The trappings of office might be contemptible, but the exercise of “power, raised by the scaffolding of thought and will and suspended like [a] mighty dome in… Heaven” was the work of his very soul. “I once thought nothing on earth could tempt me from” such a life, he wrote his beloved, but “for you I will give it up wholly, completely, and forever. [For you] I will snap now, as soon as you wish it—tomorrow—the wand of office, carry you to Europe, and linger with you around Tumuli—its mounds, its columns, and its ruins….for you I will make any sacrifice, and deem it no sacrifice” whatever. Keitt was not bluffing. He told friends and colleagues he would not be returning to Washington the next term and even met with the president to determine whether there might be a diplomatic post vacant in Italy. Forced to “choose between private and public life,” Keitt flung the latter aside—“the former will be perpetual, and to me it is a safety.” Soon, he promised Sue, he would transport her to Europe, plant her in any soil and in any clime she might choose, and preside over the recuperation of her heart. If, once there, “any rude blast visits you roughly, it shall be only because I cannot shield you from it. If the hand of sorrow presses heavily upon you, I shall feel its weight as painfully” because our lives will be joined together.23
Everything had come easily for Laurence Keitt—his material comfort, his charismatic good looks, his intellect and education, his career and uncompromising politics—everything was his for the taking—except Susanna Sparks. In her he had met a will as titanic and as immovable as his own, and what options did he have but to love her for it? He could not debate her, he could not challenge her to a duel, he could not cane her or race her for the privilege of her hand—he could only submit. It is critical to note, however, that this submission, when it finally came, was not begrudging or bitter; rather, Keitt seems to have been relieved, thankful, finally to surrender to something or someone without it costing him his manhood. “You are so much better, so much purer, so entirely holy to me,” Keitt noted, “that I can scarcely bind to my soul the sacred belief that you have mingled hopes and aims with one so much inferior…. Oh Sue, how much more do I owe you than I can ever pay.” But did he really owe her? The bombast and bullying of his early courting certainly warranted an apology, but did it amount to a debt? Did he owe her for ignoring his letters, for snubbing his friends, for requiring that he quit politics? No, he owed her for the opportunity she gave him to be whole, for the chance to stretch his love, exercise his weakness, and indulge his very human sympathy for surrender. “Hard struggles since I have been a boy,” Keitt admitted, “in a field where rough blows are dealt, have indurated me all over save in this one point…my inner affections have become [as] preternaturally keen as my nature otherwise has become cold and self-collected.” This is a remarkable insight for a man who considered self-reflection a kind of cannibalism. His love for Sue, his pursuit of her, was, by his own admission, directly related to politics. Every brutal beating he took in the political arena, every enemy he made or criticism he withstood, fed his need for the woman that might minister to that inner core, who might make him feel, by some whisper or touch, that he withstood the blows for reasons beyond his own ambition.24
But does this adequately explain Keitt’s willingness to give up politics forever? Not if Keitt is understood first as a fire eater or a politician—not if one reads only his encomia to slavery and state’s rights. But if he is understood as a man, and a man of poetic sensibility at that, the decision becomes explicable. Susan’s demand did not rankle or chafe; she had given Keitt something politics had not, an opportunity to make a grand and sweeping gesture—a moment in which time stood still and waited on his answer. Keitt was not surrendering his epic poem to Susanna, he was folding her up within it, transferring his poetic purpose from politics to romance, a distance perhaps not so very great. Granted he would never save mankind, but he might save this woman, and he had the sense he would save himself in the bargain. “You have given me an object,” Keitt admitted to Sue. “My struggles were becoming aimless. I had won a crown here and a chaplet there. I had broken a sword in this fight and beaten down a castle wall in another contest, and I was becoming somewhat indifferent both to feast and fray. You have been a promethean spark and I have relumed a spirit which was slightly waning and given a brighter blaze to fires which were somewhat fitfully burning.”25
On July 7, 1856, the relumed Keitt received a letter from his fiancée—she wanted to discontinue their courtship, this time indefinitely. Keitt drafted two replies, both drained of emotion. “Justice requires me to say that I trust we have met for the last time,” he noted in both, “and should we ever meet again, it must be as strangers.” Laurence Keitt returned to politics the following term, rededicated to the separation of North and South.26
Seen from the outside, Henry Craft lived an incredibly average life. His father, Hugh Craft, was born near Vienna, Maryland, in 1799, and removed at an early age to Milledgeville, Georgia, where he became a prosperous merchant and planter. Hugh’s first wife bore him a son, Henry, in 1823, but she died shortly thereafter. Hugh subsequently remarried and was just beginning a new family when the bottom fell out of his finances. Surrendering most of his worldly possessions to his creditors, Hugh collected his family and headed off to Holly Springs, Mississippi, the heart of newly acquired Indian country. Though somewhat awkwardly the only child of his father’s first marriage, Henry seems to have had a happy childhood, and he greatly enjoyed growing up on the South’s frontier. Holly Springs was quite possibly the most booming of all the boom lands of the Old Southwest. In January 1836 it was estimated that only twenty white men lived in the area; six months later the number was up to thirty-one hundred. The census of 1840 revealed that Mississippi’s population had nearly tripled in a decade, making it the fastest growing state in the country. Henry, then seventeen, literally helped his father carve a plantation out of the bush, and he would in later years remember these times as “the free roving of my woodsman days.” His father set up a sort of real estate business and taught Henry to be a land examiner.27
By 1847 Henry was twenty-four, had made a tidy sum in the land business, and was part of a social circle that met at neighboring plantations throughout the spring and summer for parties and dances. They were, he claimed, “the gayest of the gay,” and it seemed as if “the laugh[ing] and danc[ing]” would “reign unbroken.” He was particularly interested in one member of his gay party, Lucy Hull, who lived nearby at Tuckahoe plantation. At first Lucy had seemed all “outside show,” “a brilliant, careless, gay & rather heartless girl.” Gradually, though, he discerned a “certain under current beneath the surface ice.” Henry had been in love before. He had from his earliest recollection possessed an “ideal of a woman” he could love, and occasionally he would in the throes of a new crush fancy that the object of his desire measured up to that ideal. Time spent in her company, however, usually revealed that it was his own ideal he loved, that he had tricked himself by dressing his crush in the trappings of his perfect woman. At first he believed this was what he was feeling for Lucy. Like all the others, she would soon reveal her true self, and he would be filled with the same old “painful doubts & vacillations” that had accompanied his other crushes. But as the spring dragged on, Lucy appeared “more & more in her higher & better & hidden character” until she had actually eclipsed his ideal. Lucy taught Henry that “women might be what before I had never imagined.” “I [am] not deceived,” Henry confessed jubilantly. I will “elevate my love to reach the elevation of its object.”28
Desperate to confess his affections, Henry was devastated when Lucy spent one evening deep in conversation with a gentleman from Memphis he had never seen before. It became suddenly so apparent that Lucy loved this man, had loved him, and “was perhaps engaged to him.” Henry was “miserable, utterly miserable as I had never been before.” Lying awake that night, he vowed to speak to her the next evening and discover whether he had really “loved so utterly in vain.” Reaching the gate at Tuckahoe, he glanced up at the moon and it “seemed to smile so sweetly” that he felt it was an “omen, an encouragement.” He had since earlychildhood worshiped the moon, and he interpreted its smiling countenance as an acknowledgement of his devotion, “a promise of success.” The interview with Lucy must have gone well. After sitting with her on her couch for hours, Henry mounted his horse with a lighter heart. He had not told Lucy of his love for her but had learned that his “fears of another were groundless.”29
The next morning Henry arose with the intention of confessing his love. Lucy was leaving with her family for a vacation at a local spa and he could not wait for her return. He saw her at church that morning, but she was surrounded by her parents and he could not find an opportunity to talk to her alone. Instead, he slipped her a note, explaining that he wished when she returned to speak with her about a subject close to his heart. If she did not accept this proposal she was to leave his note on her front porch; if she accepted it she was to leave a flower. Anxiously, Henry rode to Tuckahoe that afternoon to see what her answer would be. Evidently, Lucy was a level-headed girl. She had not left a flower, but a sprig of arborvitae, the tree of life. “What a thrill of joy it sent to my heart,” Henry confessed. “It was the beginning of a happiness which none but those who have loved and been loved can appreciate.” Riding home, Henry found “all nature was bright & happy.” He was, he confessed, in love with all the world.30
As soon as Lucy returned, Henry requested an opportunity to talk with her alone at Tuckahoe. He longed for the chance to see her and his “heart beat rapturously when” he “thought of hearing from her own lips the sweet confession which her sprig of arbor vitae” had given him. Again the interview must have gone well. They were, he said, “hours vouchsafed but once to the mortal pilgrim,” and when he left Tuckahoe he had her ring on his finger, “a pledge of her love.” A week later Lucy and Henry were engaged to be married.31
The afternoon before the wedding, Henry procured the marriage license and readied their luggage for the honeymoon. He waited at the stage office for Lucy’s bags, but they never arrived. As evening wore on he went home and found a Tuckahoe servant waiting for him with a note. Lucy’s father and brothers had strenuously objected to the marriage and had talked Lucy into calling it off. Stunned, Henry sped to Tuckahoe and confronted Lucy’s father in the grove, “pacing to and fro over the wet grass” and demanding to see his fiancée. He received only a note from her—it read simply “oh, misery.”32
Crushed, Henry left for Memphis to cool off. While there he received a letter from Lucy—she had made up her mind. Her love, she said, was “unchanged & unchangeable,” and she had resolved to throw herself upon Henry for happiness “come what might.” Henry sped home with the “deep rapture” of knowing “that she would willingly endure the frowns & reproaches and even desertion of those whom she fondly loved” to be with him. What “fearful agony” she must have suffered, he thought, “when she knew that she must choose between them & me.” Henry could not get over the “devotion, the true woman’s heart, which characterized her conduct under those trying circumstances.” Lucy’s parents talked the couple out of being married immediately, but a date was set for early fall, and Henry was overjoyed.33
Two weeks before the wedding, Lucy collapsed. Henry blamed her brothers and parents for Lucy’s illness; they blamed him and forbade his seeing her, claiming that it “was imprudent to excite her.” Henry felt the “peculiar relative of hostility” that they entertained for him, however, and he grew bitter, hanging around outside Tuckahoe, hunting birds for the time Lucy might be up to eating them. Despite her family’s admonitions, Lucy was true to Henry, sending letters to him, claiming that he was in her dreams and that if possible she loved him more than ever. She planned a day when Henry could fetch the buggy, carry her from her sickbed, and drive her slowly through the grove. When that day arrived, she was not better. Henry was allowed to come and see her, but by then she was “insensible, the film of death… gathering in her eyes.” Henry could not bear to see her in that condition and left the room, but everywhere in the house echoed “that heart rending sound as she gasped away her life.” At 2 A.M., Lucy was laid out on the living room sofa in her bridal attire. “Her countenance,” Henry wrote, “had resumed its natural appearance & was smiling & beautiful in death.” He thought she seemed in a pleasant sleep. His grief had exhausted itself, his “rebellion… against Providence” had not commenced, and he spent an hour with her body, “calm and quiet.” “It was,” he said, “the holiest hour of my life.”34
Lucy’s death marked a turning point for Henry, a revolution in his humble history “as important and momentous to me as [those of] 1688 to England, 1789…to France, 1776 to the U.S.” Unable to enjoy Holly Springs without Lucy, Henry “sought refuge” at Princeton. He hoped to “find in the emulation and competition of a class” relief from his thoughts, a respite from mourning. However painful the last year had been, he vowed to “go on with an upward brow & a callous heart, ready to meet whatever” might confront him. His utmost hope was that the next year at Princeton would launch him upon a career. “I have suffered affliction & bereavement such as few perhaps are called to undergo,” he wrote, but there are “tender ties still binding my heart.” “The future,” after all, “is the future.”35
Though only twenty-five, Henry was older than most college freshmen. While he enjoyed the company of his fellow students and found in competition the incentive to study and discipline of mind he had always lacked, he felt alienated. “I am an old man as it were coming back to the employments of his youth,” he noted, a man “whose life is far advanced among those just preparing to live.” The perspective was one he could not shake, a feeling of always being outside looking in. He had come to Princeton to embark on a career, and he envied fellow students who seized upon professions and threw their shoulders to the wheel. But there was also something absurd about their zeal. “With what strange alacrity & thoughtlessness men run such a race,” he noted. Doubting his own worthiness to embark on such a project, he doubted equally the worthiness of the project itself. The result was a kind of paralytic self-loathing. He would spend hours in his room, “trifling away” his thoughts “upon nothing.” Daydreaming and “castle building” were his “besetting temptations,” and he indulged them liberally. Part of his difficulty, of course, was that he was still in mourning. Seven months had passed since Lucy’s death, but Henry treated himself to long descriptions of her in his journal. Henry, though, was not merely maudlin. He had remarkable powers of self-perception and could be incredibly frank in analyzing himself. One spring night after writing of Lucy he admitted that not having her to love, he had fallen in love with his own sorrow and was loath to give it up. “The memory of her love,” he noted, “is my greatest treasure.”36
After the death of his fiancée, Henry Craft carefully preserved his half-completed marriage license. He never recovered from the loss of his first love. Craft, Fort, and Thorne Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, UNC.
Henry might have turned to religion in his mourning, and he tried reading the Bible at night to find some solace. But he could not shake the suspicion that prayer was a human vanity, a ludicrous “farce of uttering solemn words upon the air.” Listening to the “confessions & petitions made” in church he could not help but wonder, “what is all this?” We address the Creator of the Universe “as though he were absolutely present & listening,” but do we believe it? At least heathen worshiping on a stone, he noted, have a God “sensibly present with them.”37
After five months at Princeton, Henry received a letter from home, proposing that he return to Holly Springs to form a law partnership with a local attorney. Henry decided to accept and went to New York to make the arrangements. His journey home was a long one, but it felt good to be back in a place he understood. “It may be weak & childish, the feeling of homesickness,” he noted, “but nevertheless I acknowledge that I have ever been subject to it.” After being in the North he almost enjoyed how “old & drearyed & scattered & uncomfortable” his hometown was. Some associations, however, ran too strong. The stores and the streets, the people and their homes, all were “connected with thoughts of her.” “Her image is ever rising up,” he noted, “and ever rushing down upon that bed of death.… Thus has it been every day & every hour.”38
But what gradually dawned on Henry was not that Lucy’s death had affected him too much but rather too little. Like the people he saw in church all “prone & grovelling in the dust,” he was going through the motions of feeling but had never grappled with the truth. Lucy’s death, however much he dwelled on it, had not made him see the value of time or life, had not elevated his character or brought him closer to God. Rather he had dwelled on death because he was trying desperately to conjure some kind of emotion from a heart that had turned to stone. The truth, he believed, was that he was a mere harlequin of a man, apt to “chatter and laugh an idiot glee & stumble & roll & chatter & laugh again & hate myself & know that I am a fool.” In these moments he felt like leaping “joyfully into the embrace of Death,” but he did not have the heart. “My heart!” he exclaimed, “if I have one, it is a hard rock of selfishness encrusted by a thin mould of sentimental sensibility in which mushroom feelings spring up & perish in a day.” “My worst enemy,” he confessed to his diary, “could not have a meaner opinion of me” than I do.39
Henry spent his first months back in Holly Springs living with his parents. His stepmother had prepared his old room, “improv[ing] it wonderfully & [making] it much more comfortable.” But his relationship with his father became strained. Henry was prone to getting up late, not so much out of laziness, as his father seemed to think, but because, nursing an ailing heart, he preferred the solace and dark quietude of evening time. Henry would sometimes vow to change, to rise early and throw himself into the day as his father did, but every time he did so it seemed as if his father was “so ready to exact another & still another sacrifice” of his habits that he sank back into his old routine. “He has no sympathy whatever with me,” Henry noted, “no indulgence for my foibles, no pity for my weaknesses.” Henry loved his father and recognized the sacrifices he made for his family, but confessed “I do not know how to appreciate his firmness & principles, how to yield to the exaction of his character.” Frustrated, Henry was too much the indulgent romantic to assume the “callous philosophical common place every dayishness” that his father associated with the ideas of a man. Unable to come to an understanding, Henry moved into a boardinghouse.40
Henry was no more satisfied with the time he spent at work. He was supposed to be reading to pass the bar, but each time he picked up a book he lapsed into a listless apathy, his eye wandering over the page, his “mind rov[ing] hither and thither in childish” vacancy. He had no energy or ambition, he claimed, and felt no enthusiasm or hope in his new profession. Again, laziness was not the problem. When there was mindless work to be done, he could “work as industriously as any other machine.” But Henry was quick to see the absurd in human enterprise; he was the kind of pessimist who could be consistently disappointed by the bad he discovered in things, even as he expected to find it there. Henry had revered the law as a boy; it had seemed like “a noble and venerable edifice… gradually built up by the successive labors of many generations of great intellects.” His imagination had pondered the “forgotten laborers whose work survives them” and the “generations of inhabitants who have called [this] shelter their home.” But upon entering this great edifice, he found the rooms dedicated not to ennobling the intellect but to degrading it. As he strolled on “from door to door he encountered the tokens of humbug & trickery and meanness and intrigue at every step.” His ideal temple of justice was in fact “a mart where learning is sold and impunity for villainy purchased, an exhibition room of human depravity & degradation and a prostitution house where for fees, principles are distorted, precedents seduced, and ingenuity and trickery and humbugery made the pimps of the wealth which passes for success.”41
It seemed to Henry as he moved between the “monotonous routine of office duties during the day & lonely, sad evenings” that he did not “live in [the] actual world.” Having for so long made his home in a land of melancholy reverie, he felt out of step with the people striding down the sunny streets. Henry was dissolving from their world, becoming invisible; he lived now “among the shadows” where “every thing” was “unreal & unworthy [of] interest or thought.” “Events have overtaken” me, he confided to his journal, and flit through “my memory in the semblance of the changing scenes of a dream.” The past held out only narcissistic pain; the future seemed but “a massive impenetrable wall, built right up in my very face.” Utterly without prospects, Henry began to have presentiments—which were wishes—that he would not live long; residing in a world of shadows, he found that mortality was the only thing he could see with any clarity. The “dark tide of Death,” he wrote in his journal, “sweeps every where beneath the sham & parade, the national greatness, the political existence & the intellectual march which constitute the world as it is spread out around us.” “No doubt all of the untold millions who have gone before me have… gazed into [the] gloomy stream [of time],” he noted, as “bewildered, stricken, stymied & stupified as I [am] now. What a sad record then must be the book which is kept on high by He who knows all the thoughts of men [and] all the emotions of their hearts.”42
But of course it was not God but Henry himself who was the keeper of sad records. His diary, after all, was a transcript of his depression, a witness to his mourning, a series of bleak love letters he sent to himself through the way station of the dead. But the intensity of Henry’s melancholy could not be sustained, however much he enjoyed it. By the first anniversary of Lucy’s death, he found that “the eclipse of sorrow is passing or past.” “This day brings with it no new sadness as I had supposed it would,” he confessed. “My first waking thought was… ‘One year ago she died.’ But there is no new pain which memory can inflict, no new echo which can answer those words ‘she died’ in my heart.” Henry gave his diary partial credit for the change. It was, after all, his and Lucy’s story, however sadly short, a narrative of their “love &… disappointment… right up to the closing scene.” “I here dedicate” this journal, he wrote, “to the memory of the past year, here inscribe it as the tombstone which I raise over the grave of my former life.… [And so] let me take my farewell of Tuckahoe, bury the past & turn toward whatever may be my future.” There was, he admitted, a “sweet, sacred joy in communing with the dead,” and he would miss it sorely. “In the busy hours of the day & the quiet midnight, in solitude & in crowds” Lucy had been always in his thoughts. But now he had to bury with her “the memory of what has been,” and “summon up the energy & hope & strength for the new existence” which lay before him. “Farewell Tuckahoe,” he wrote, “the past, the bright, the dark, the joyful sorrowful past—farewell.”43
For two years, Henry had kept a diary of his innermost thoughts, his gift for writing and for self-perception providing insights into the mind of a young gentleman of the Old South as he grappled with love, death, religion, the nature of man, family, and the professions. Without this diary, nothing would be known of him. Certainly none of his contemporaries could have guessed at the tortured entries in his journal. “I seem” to the outside world “happy & cheerful & hopeful,” Henry confessed to his diary, but “what a liar the seeming is.” “I know well what faculties I possess,” he wrote, “[I know] how I can most please & how most successfully deceive those around me. I know too then those in whose partial judgments I am capable of much, but I feel that I act the hypocrite when I encourage such opinions. I believe I can talk tolerably good nonsense, write a passably flimsy letter & beyond that am fit for nothing but a machine.” In passages such as these, Henry’s journal became part of his self-therapy, a place to confess the unconfessable in a world that was unsympathizing and absurd, a place to purge his despondency over his own worthless nature. Clearly he intended the diary for his eyes only. The cover page contains just two words, “my journal”; no name, no date, just a self-referential declaration of possession. “I have endeavored,” he explained, “to make these pages a true transcript of my feelings.” His days full of so much seeming, he filled his nights and his diary with the truth that existed beneath “the sham & parade.” But in 1849, after keeping a two-year record of these brutal truths, Henry disappeared from the historical record.44
Henry Craft resurfaced in 1859. Of the decade-long disappearance, he says nothing. An attorney in Memphis with a new wife and new baby boy, Henry began a new diary, this time to maintain a record for his son. The ten years, though, had not made Henry any less gloomy. In the first pages of his new journal he recorded his thoughts as he watched his new home being constructed. A new husband and father, Henry could have seen the house with all the hopefulness of a man starting over with his new family, building a new life from the ground up. Instead, “a shade of sadness” stole over his thoughts. “Of what events in our history may it not be the scene. What joy and what sorrow garnered for us in the coming time may reach us there. Shall the years glide over us within those walls bringing calm content.… Shall sickness lay its hand upon us there, and death come to claim its victims one after another from our circle.” “These are questions,” Henry confessed, “that sometimes seem to be uttered for my ear by the bricks as they are piled upon each other, and the wood as it takes it’s shape & place under the workman’s hand.” Typically, Henry was both sadly cynical and sadly correct. Construction of the house ran $5,000 over budget, and he was nearly ruined.45
Tight finances were not the only reason the house triggered such despondency—Henry Craft seems to have made a very unhappy marriage. His new wife, Ella, was an indulgently ill woman, a bundle of mysterious symptoms providing rationale for behavior that would otherwise appear selfish. Despite a “legion” of attempted remedies, nothing “seemed to help her at all,” and it was hard, Henry noted, “to see her just gradually fading away without apparent disease.” To cope with her affliction, Ella turned to the Bible with the sort of mono-maniacal vigor of the new convert on her deathbed. Henry had hoped that Ella would be God-fearing, that she would possess the sort of “genial, cheerful, loving home religion that brightens the family circle & so much beautifies woman’s character.” But Ella became a fanatic on the subject, adopting the “religion of gloom & austerity and asceticism—of fasts & vigils & penance—of constant seclusion and perpetual engagement in devotions.” “If she could only learn & feel that while she is in the world she must be to some extent of the world,” Henry wrote, if she could just understand “that she has other duties besides those of devotion there would be no trouble.” Instead she was but a step removed “from the spirit of the hair shirt and self-flagellation,” preferring the role of Christian to that of wife and mother.46
Occasionally, the Crafts would attempt to make amends, and Henry would record a meek hope that they were at a new beginning for their marriage. “No doubt I have been greatly in fault,” he admitted to his diary. “I must try to be satisfied… that her thoughts and affections are enjoyed by much higher & worthier objects” than myself. But always shortly after the reconciliation, the coldness returned. “I feel the estrangement between us grows day by day greater and more hopeless,” he noted. “I am satisfied that it is useless to think of our being happy together again.” By 1860 Ella had determined to remain almost exclusively in her own upstairs room, not coming down even to eat. Compounding such problems was the fact that Henry’s mother-in-law, Mona Douglass, both disapproved of him and lived on his property, always contributing where she could to the sense that Henry was unwelcome in his own home.47
Long business trips seem to have provided Henry with some relief from his failing marriage, but it was a home he had always wanted. “My nature,” he admitted, “is peculiarly dependent for its happiness on affection and sympathy, and I find myself wholly cut off from them.” He would in his intercourse with other men hear them talk of their homes and their families with a pang at his heart. “Others seem to be hurrying home as the benumbed man seeks the fire,” he noted, “but… I would sooner be almost anywhere else than at home. Home! What a mockery to talk of my having a home!” Occasionally, Henry contemplated going into town at night and finding “the pleasures… which some men seem to enjoy,” but he understood that he was “too domestic” in his habits and tastes to do such a thing. He contemplated leaving Ella, but that seemed too irresponsible. He contemplated suicide but seemed to think himself unworthy of such a grand gesture. Instead, he spent his nights at home, as alone in his room as he had been at Princeton and at Holly Springs in 1847 and 1848, and confessed his soul to his journal.48
Henry Craft also seems to have found some solace in opium. The hours spent over a writing desk, he claimed, had so soured his stomach that relief could only be found in laudanum. But as with Ella, the exact locus of Henry’s pain is difficult to pin down. He describes it variously as “torpidity of the liver,” “Protean… Dyspepsia,” “spinal disease,” “nervous derangement,” and finally, almost admitting the insurmountable problems of diagnosis, simply “my pain.” Regardless, opium was always the preferred remedy, with the explanation that he had been forced to resort to it. “I sometimes feel that my whole internal economy is deranged and diseased,” he admitted, “and that I must soon experience a general breaking up. I am obliged to keep my liver going by constant dosing.”49
By the fourth year of his marriage to Ella, Henry had to admit that his life was a wreck, “physically, intellectually, morally, socially, and emotionally.” He was not in control of anything, but rather “drifting along upon the stream of chance and accident.” “My life is a failure in every point of view,” he confessed. “I have not achieved even the poor success of making money. In Memphis I am cut off from all the associations and friendships, and professional ties that rendered life in Holly Springs pleasant if not successful. I have no friends here. In my profession, I am not known. I utterly abhor and loathe and detest the place, and yet I am tied down here beyond all hope of getting away.” Like the bricks of his new house, the days had piled on days, the months on months, the years on years, a great temple built to unworthiness, unhappiness. We are caught in a “web of difficulty,” he said, “from which extrication is improbable if not impossible.”50
Only one thing seems to have given Henry Craft even a modicum of joy—his son Douglass. “Today,” Henry wrote typically, “I have nursed and amused Douglass a good deal.” He is “my only resource. He seems to love me very much and that is very gratifying to me—all the more so perhaps because of my feeling of isolation.” While at home Henry stayed close to his own room, living a life as isolated as when he was a bachelor. But occasionally Douglass would come to his room and “his ‘pa pa’” would remind Henry that he was not alone. Henry had hoped that Ella would help him keep up his journal, and there are a few early entries in her hand, but she determined that diarizing smacked “too much of the sentimental” and gave it up. So Henry took up the journal, intending it not only as a place to purge his thoughts, but as a record for his son. As with all the endeavors of life that Henry found worthy, however, the journal quickly became to him absurd and self-defeating, a testament to his ongoing humiliation. “Should you ever see this Douglass,” he wrote, “and feel no responsive emotion—feel no appreciation of it, thank God that you are fitter for life than your father was.” And so Henry wrote a volume to his son, the sole source of his happiness, pouring out his true feelings on pages he hoped the child would never care to read. Indeed, a consistent theme of the diary is the hope that Douglass would somehow be spared his father’s overtender heart. “Let him be practical,” Henry urged, “common place, real, if he can & so all the more suited for the practical, common place & real which he will encounter.” The language Henry uses here corresponds perfectly with that used in his first journal when describing the “common place every dayishness” of his father’s male ideal. Henry’s father had been a man; Henry hoped Douglass would grow to become a man. Henry was himself something tragically less. “I always thought,” he wrote his sister in one of his few surviving letters, “I would have made a much better woman than a man.” It is the kind of startling remark easily made the more so by quoting out of context. But Henry’s failure to measure up to his own conception of manhood was a theme to which he constantly returned. “It is [on] the tender side of my own nature,” he wrote, that “I have been most often wounded.” He wanted desperately to change, to be tougher, to dwell not on the burdens and sorrows of his past, man’s past, but upon a future that was his to seize and build, as his fellow students at Princeton had seized and built. “But I am too weak and irresolute for all this,” he admitted. “I have dreamed and drifted too long now to be a man.… Indeed, I feel and have always felt that I am not a man; and have no business with a man’s affairs or responsibilities.” “My dear boy,” he wrote to Douglass, “how willingly would I see you dead rather than know that you have inherited my character; and yet how much I prize you & cling to your love no one can know.”51
On December 31, 1860, Henry Craft sat in his room, the house quiet, everyone else having gone to bed. Douglass began coughing and Henry took him some medicine, then returned to his journal. He had just come back from a five-day business trip, but there was no word of greeting from his wife. “I go away and come back now without a word of affection,” he wrote, “as a stranger indeed, and feeling that when I go all are glad, and when I return all are sorry.” This has been “the most unhappy year of my life.” Though he sat at the threshold of a new year, a new beginning, the gloom of the past twelve months extended “its pall into the future.” His thoughts, he said, dwelled now upon his mortality because “the things of this world [are] so unsatisfying and empty.” He knew that he was ungrateful and rebellious, sinful and selfish, and that many would see in his home and family something to envy. But Henry could not summon the strength to be thankful. “I feel broken down in health—broken down in spirit—sick at heart,” he confessed. But in that peculiar spirit of defiance that runs through his character, Henry somehow summoned the strength to go on, throwing down the gauntlet and challenging the new year to do its worst. Sitting alone in his room, ignored, unloved, unknown, his marriage and finances a wreck and an addiction to opium reaching an alarming level, at the close of the “most momentous year in our Country’s history,” and with dark clouds gathering on the political horizon, Henry Craft decided to “let the old year go with its chapter of the world’s history to the great archives where that history is kept—the world’s history made up of what individual men have done & been & thought & felt.” “Come on new year,” he demanded, “with whatever of weal and woe for me and mine thou mayst be charged; come on.” Henry Craft ended his second journal with this entry, and again disappeared from the historical record.52
Laurence Keitt and Henry Craft were distinctly different personalities. Keitt was what one might expect of the Old South—cavalier and brash, a living caricature of the swashbuckling secessionist at midcentury. Craft, by contrast, conforms to none of the stereotypes of the Old South. He was no dandy or patriarch, parvenu or hotspur, but a forgettable nobody, soulsick and broken down in his struggle with the indignities of life. In the full flower of his youth, reared on lands just wrested from the Indians, Henry Craft dwelt with loving excess on the subject of rot and decay. Like the coffins of the period, outfitted with bells that might sound an alarm if the occupant returned to life, or Poe’s detailed horror stories of a narrator entombed, so Henry was hyperconscious of his own living death, of the rot of his sick body and the zombifying monotony of his profession. In him, the pressures of being husband and father, professional and breadwinner—in short the pressures of being a man—were finally so great that he was crushed by an obligation to virility he could never discharge. It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast to the flamboyant, unsinkable Keitt.
But in important ways the two men are also curiously complementary. Each was an incurable romantic—Keitt of the British school, Craft of the Sturm und Drang. Each sought a romantic reunion of the self with forces of nature that were brutal and beautiful and capable of swallowing a man whole. Keitt, for instance, once claimed that he would be happy for his body to be atomized and scattered to the four winds. Craft once confessed that he would be content to slip below the earth to be consumed by the worms. But if Keitt’s psychic direction was always upward and out, and Craft’s was always inward and down, the two were equally fixated on stagnation—Keitt warring with it, Craft succumbing to it. In coping with and compensating for that stagnation, moreover, both chose to pour their emotions onto the written page, creating romantically elaborate narratives from the mundanities of daily existence. In their letters and journals, if not in their lives, these men had direction—Craft ever sinking, Keitt ever rising—toward something undefined and immense, something like immortality or death, which, after all, borrow deeply from one another.
Equally important, both Keitt and Craft could never keep their dream of a woman’s love separate from their dream of manly (in)distinction. Craft, of course, was pining for a woman who was dead, or later, a woman who was not his wife, in either case a fantasy woman who might finally make him the lord of not merely a house but a home. If he had not been cheated of this masculine essential, Craft seemed to think, he might have risen on steppingstones of his dead self to the status of a real man. Keitt’s trajectory, as might be expected, was just the opposite. Having established his masculine credentials on his own, he realized that his achievements were meaningless and hollow without a woman to bear them witness. Both men’s lives, however, illustrate a larger point: men’s oft vaunted independence was in fact an elaborate ruse. They, as much as women, depended on members of the opposite sex to validate and make meaningful their struggles and successes, to aid, comfort, and believe in them, even and especially when self-belief began to fade or fail.