Born in Charleston, South Carolina, to free parents, Daniel Alexander Payne distinguished himself early by building a school where he taught slaves. Because this activity was made illegal after the Nat Turner Slave Rebellion, he had to flee South Carolina in 1835; he moved north to study for the ministry in Pennsylvania, becoming ordained as a Lutheran minister in 1839 before switching to the African Episcopal Methodist Church in 1841. Payne held pulpits in Washington and Baltimore, rising to the rank of bishop. He traveled widely to preach and train other African American preachers and helped to shape the AME Church during Reconstruction.
In his memoir, Recollections of Seventy Years (1888), Bishop Payne recalled moving to DC to lead Israel AME Church, where “I laid aside my books, bought a jack-plane, smoothing-plane, saw, hammer, rule, etc.; threw off my coat, and, the Society furnishing the lumber, in a few weeks” created the pews for the church. While living in DC, he also published five “Epistles on the Education of the Ministry,” a series of controversial articles demanding systematic training for religious leaders. Payne reported that, as a result, “the enemies of Christian culture belched and howled forth all manner of vituperation against me.” But the AME General Conference appointed him chair of their Committee on Education, and in this influential position Payne laid out a course of studies for future ministers that was adopted by the church.
Payne was also active in the Underground Railroad in the Chesapeake region. In 1862, Payne wrote: “Congress passed the bill abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia. The following Monday night I called on President Lincoln to know if he intended to sign the bill of emancipation, and thereby exterminate slavery in the District of Columbia? Having been previously informed of my intention to interview him, and having on my arrival at the White House sent in my card, he met me at the door of the room in which he and Senator [William] Washburn were conversing. Taking me by the hand, he said: ‘Bishop Payne, of the African M. E. Church?’ I answered in the affirmative; so with my hand in his he led me to the fire-place, introduced me to Senator Washburn, and seated me in an armchair between himself and the Senator. . . . President Lincoln received and conversed with me as though I had been one of his intimate acquaintances or one of his friendly neighbors. I left him with a profound sense of his real greatness and of his fitness to rule a nation composed of almost all the races on the face of the globe.”
In 1863, Payne cofounded Wilberforce University in Xenia, Ohio, and served as university president for thirteen years, becoming the first African American college president in the country. In addition to his autobiography, Recollections of Seventy Years, Payne published a history of the AME Church, sermons, and a book of poems, The Pleasures and Other Miscellaneous Poems (1850).
Pleasures of Vice are those which most pursue,
Regarding all their promis’d joys as true;
Now will they heed the warning voice that cries,
the soul which sins, that soul in mis’ry lies.
But, like the headlong horse or stubborn mule,
Despise all truth, contemn all righteous rule,
Delight in sin as swine delight in mire,
Till hell itself entomb their souls in fire!
Thus does the Drunkard, in the sparkling bowl,
Pursue the joys which charm his brutish soul;
But soon he feels the serpent’s fang is there,
The gall of wo, the demon’s awful stare:
For in the visions of his crazied soul,
The furies dance and horrid monsters roll.
Some find their pleasure in tobacco wads,
Delight in them as goats in chewing cuds;
Others believe they find it quite enough,
In smoking cigars, or in taking snuff.
The glutton and the greasy epicure,
Believe they have it—for they tell us so—
In eating venison, turtle-soup and clams,
Beef a la mode and lobsters, ducks and hams;
In puddings, pound-cakes, pies and cold ice cream;
In black-strap, brandy, claret and champagne.
O who could think that men, to whom is given
Such souls as will outlive the stars of heaven,
Could hope to find in such a low employ,
The sweet pulsations of a real joy!
But dandies find it in their curled hair,
Greas’d with pomatum or the oil of bear;
In fine mustaches, breast-pins, golden chains;
In brass-capt boot-heels, or in walking canes.
Some ladies find it in their boas and muffs,
In silks and satins, laces, muslin-stuffs
Made into dresses, pointed, long and wide,
With flounces deep, and bran-bustles beside,
All neat and flowing in Parisian grace;
With small sunshades to screen their smiling face;
Then up the streets, like pea-fowls bright and gay,
They promenade on every sunny day.
Some seek for pleasure in the giddy dance,
Where Fashion smiles, and Beauty’s siren glance
The soul delights and fills light bounding hearts
With dreams of love,—such dreams as sin imparts;
Not the pure streams that flow, my God, from thee:
The streams of bliss—the love of purity.
In cock-fights others find it; some, in dice;
Some in the chambers of lascivious vice.
The vile blasphemer seeks it in his shame,
Who sport like devils with the Holy Name.
O hapless wretches! fool’d and self deceiv’d!
Angels weep o’er you! God himself is griev’d!
Christopher Pearse Cranch was born in Arlington (in what is today northern Virginia but what was, at that time, a part of the District of Columbia) and attended Columbian College, the fore-runner of George Washington University, and Harvard Divinity School. He came from a distinguished family: his father was a federal judge, his aunt was married to Noah Webster, and his grandmother was the sister of Abigail Adams. He would later marry a cousin, the great-granddaughter of John Adams.
Cranch was a Unitarian minister and associated with the Transcendentalists. He coedited the Transcendentalist journal the Western Messenger and contributed to the Dial and the Harbinger. Cranch spent a number of years studying painting in Italy and France and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1864.
He is the author of three books of poems: Poems (1844), The Bird and the Bell (1875), and Ariel and Caliban (1887). He also published children’s literature, wrote an opera libretto, and translated literature from Italian to English.
All things in Nature are beautiful types to the soul that will read them;
Nothing exists upon earth, but for unspeakable ends.
Every object that speaks to the senses was meant for the spirit:
Nature is but a scroll—God’s hand-writing thereon.
Ages ago, when man was pure, ere the flood overwhelmed him,
While in the image of God every soul yet lived,
Everything stood as a letter or word of a language familiar,
Telling of truths which now only the angels can read.
Lost to man was the key of those sacred hieroglyphics—
Stolen away by sin—till with Jesus restored.
Now with infinite pains we here and there spell out a letter;
Now and then will the sense feebly shine through the dark.
When we perceive the light which breaks through the visible symbol,
What exultation is ours! we the discovery have made!
Yet is the meaning the same as when Adam lived sinless in Eden,
Only long-hidden it slept and now again is restored.
Man unconsciously uses figures of speech every moment,
Little dreaming the cause why to such terms he is prone—
Little dreaming that everything has its own correspondence
Folded within it of old, as in the body the soul.
Gleams of the mystery fall on us still, though much is forgotten,
And through our commonest speech illumines the path of our thoughts.
Thus does the lordly sun shine out a type of the Godhead;
Wisdom and Love the beams that stream on a darkened world.
Thus do the sparkling waters flow, giving joy to the desert,
And the great Fountain of Life opens itself to the thirst.
Thus does the word of God distil like the rain and the dew-drops,
Thus does the warm wind breathe like to the Spirit of God,
And the green grass and the flowers are signs of the regeneration.
O thou Spirit of Truth; visit our minds once more!
Give us to read, in letters of light, the language celestial,
Written all over the earth—written all over the sky:
Thus may we bring our hearts at length to know our Creator,
Seeing in all things around types of the Infinite Mind.
Beyond the low marsh-meadows and the beach,
Seen through the hoary trunks of windy pines,
The long blue level of the ocean shines.
The distant surf, with hoarse, complaining speech,
Out from its sandy barrier seems to reach;
And while the sun behind the woods declines,
The moaning sea with sighing boughs combines,
And waves and pines make answer, each to each.
O melancholy soul, whom far and near,
In life, faith, hope, the same sad undertone
Pursues from thought to thought! thou needs must hear
An old refrain, too much, too long thine own:
’Tis thy mortality infects thine ear;
The mournful strain was in thyself alone.
Jane Grey Swisshelm was an abolitionist, a feminist, and the Washington correspondent for the New York Tribune and the St. Cloud Democrat. Swisshelm sometimes published poems under the pseudonym Jennie Deans.
Swisshelm was the first woman to be granted a seat in the Senate Press Gallery. She appealed directly to President Millard Fillmore for the privilege and wrote: “He was much surprised and tried to dissuade me. The place would be very unpleasant for a lady, and would attract attention. I would not like it; but he gave me the seat. I occupied it one day, greatly to the surprise of the Senators, the reporters, and others on the floor and in the galleries; but felt that the novelty would soon wear off, and that women would work there and win bread without annoyance.”
During the Civil War, Swisshelm worked as a clerk in the quartermaster general’s office and a volunteer nurse in army hospitals in DC. She published a memoir, Half a Century (1880).
In an obituary notice in the Washington Evening Star, she was noted as “one of the earliest champions of woman’s property rights, one of the apostles of abolition. . . . [A]lways shrewd, aggressive, active, generally engaged in some kind of warfare, she certainly led an eventful life, and did an amount of work, against heavy odds, that few of the stronger and more combative sex can boast of.”
The first poem reprinted here was published in the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter, a newspaper Swisshelm published from 1847 to 1851 for “the promotion of moral and social reform.” The poem was written to answer an outspoken critic who complained, “She is all man but the pantaloons.” This poem was reprinted in other newspapers and widely commented upon at the time.
Perhaps you have been busy
Horsewhipping Sal or Lizzie,
Stealing some poor man’s baby,
Selling its mother, may-be.
You say—and you are witty—
That I—and, tis a pity—
Of manhood lack but dress;
But you lack manliness,
A body clean and new,
A soul within it, too.
Nature must change her plan
Ere you can be a man.
The dead leaves, their rich mosaics,
Of olive and gold and brown,
Had laid on the rain-wet pavements,
Through all the embowered town.
They were washed by the autumn tempest,
They were trod by hurrying feet,
And the maids came out with their brooms,
And swept them into the street.
To be crushed and lost forever
’Neath the wheels, in the black mire lost,—
The summer’s precious darlings,
She nurtured at such cost!
O words that have fallen from me!
O golden thoughts and true!
Must I see the leaves as a symbol
Of the fate which awaiteth you?
Anna Hanson Dorsey wrote poetry, novels, and drama. Her works include May Brook (1856), Oriental Pearl (1857), Warp and Woof (1887), and Palms (1887). She was born in Georgetown and lived her entire life in DC. A convert to Catholicism in 1840, her writing is noted for its Catholic themes. She married Lorenzo Dorsey in 1837 and had four children; her only son was killed while serving in the Union army during the Civil War. One daughter, Ella Dorsey, also became a writer (of journalism and novels).
Dorsey was active in a number of organizations, including the Colonial Dames, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Washington Literary Society. The University of Notre Dame honored her in 1889 with a Laetare Medal for writing that “illustrates the ideals of the Catholic Church and enriches the heritage of humanity.”
The valleys rest in shadow and the hum
Of gentle sounds, and low-toned melodies
Are stilled, and twilight spreads her misty arms
In broader sadness o’er their happy scenes,
And creeps along the mountains’ snowy sides,
Until the setting sun’s last mellow beams
Wreathe up in many a gold and purple ring
Around the highest Alpine peaks.
So bright
Were these fair coronals, of brilliance, snow,
And mist—so sparkling was the rose-like hue
Which shed sweet halos round the far-off beams;
So spirit-like each whisper of the winds;
So solemn was the wild magnificence
Of their high solitudes, that every peak
And avalanche, whose rest is like the sleep
Of hungry giants, seemed the ministers
Of Him who reared those altars to himself!
But listen! ’twas no echo of the winds—
I heard a voice from yonder lofty height—
Again—
“Praise ye the Lord”—“Praise ye the Lord!”
In accents loud the tones demand, and then
From Alp to Alp, men’s voices catch the note
And swelling onward rolls the chorus sweet,
Until the valleys dim, and air and sky,
And mountain caverns tremble with the song.
The chamois pauses on his cloud-girt cliff
And listens with his head upturned—intent,
And conscious;—the wild gazelle, half startled
From her rest, which full of constant peril
Is but light, with one foot poised in air
Stands ready for a leap beyond man’s reach;
But soon distinguishing those blessed sounds
From hunter’s shout and bugle note, returns
Again, and closes her soft eyes in peace,
As swelling past the jubilate rings!
Charles Astor Bristed was an American scholar who sometimes wrote under the pen name Carl Benson. Bristed earned degrees from Yale College and Trinity College in Cambridge, England. He contributed articles and translations to Galaxy, the American Review, and other journals and edited the school textbook Selections from Catallus (1849). His other books include The Upper Ten Thousand: Sketches of American Society (1852); the four-volume Pieces of a Broken-Down Critic (1858); Now Is the Time to Settle It: Suggestions on the Present Crisis (1862); The Interference Theory of Government (1867); American Beauty Personified as the Nine Muses (1870); a book of poems, Anacreontics (1872); a memoir, Five Years in an English University (1873); and a novel, Prosper (1874).
Bristed was the nephew and heir of John Jacob Astor, making him independently wealthy. He married twice and had two sons. Bristed was one of the founders of the Astor Library, a free public library in Manhattan. He moved to DC in his later years and lived and entertained lavishly in a large house at 1325 K Street NW opposite Franklin Square (now razed) until his death at age fifty-three. An advocate of horse racing, Bristed also served as president of the Washington Turf Association. The two poems here align him with the temperance movement.
from the French
Come now! If I drink, where’s the crime? Can you tell?
Look round us! All Nature is drinking as well.
The Earth drinks the dew, and the Sun, floating free,
Stoops to drink of the wave from the cup of the sea.
The tree, as he plunged his roots in the ground,
Through numberless mouths drinks the torrent profound.
All drink—but man only, that Scion divine,
While others drink water, knows how to drink wine;
And, measureless tippler, can boast, he alone,
Having once drunk enough, that he still can drink on.
from the German
In the coolest cellar here I rest,
Near a full cask of liquor,
Right glad at heart, since of the best
I for myself can pick here.
The butler puts the spigot in,
Obedient to my winking,
Gives me the cup; I hold it up,
I’m drinking, drinking, drinking!
A demon plagues me, thirst to wit,
And so, to scare the fellow,
I take my glass and into it
Let flow the Rhine-wine mellow.
The whole earth smiles upon me then,
With ruddy, rosy blinking;
I could hurt the worst of men,
While drinking, drinking, drinking!
But ah! my thirst grows fiercer still
With every flask I ope here,
Which is th’ inevitable ill
Of every genuine toper.
Yet this my comfort, what at last
From chair to floor I’m sinking,
I always kept my purpose fast
Of drinking, drinking, drinking!
Famous for her associations with the American Transcendentalists, Caroline Healey Dall was active in the National Woman’s Rights Convention and the New England Women’s Club and was cofounder of the American Social Science Association, which advocated for improvements in the condition of prisons and insane asylums. Dall lived most of her life in Boston. She married Charles Dall, a Unitarian minister, and had two children, but her husband soon proved himself mentally unstable. When he finally abandoned the family in 1855 to take a post as a missionary in Calcutta, Dall was released to do the work to which she felt most naturally drawn: to write and give public lectures on women’s rights and abolitionism. She cofounded the pioneering feminist journal Una with Paulina Davis.
Dall’s books include Woman’s Right to Labor, or Low Wages and Hard Work (1860); Historical Pictures Retouched: A Volume of Miscellanies (1861), a revisionist feminist history; Women’s Rights under the Law (1861); The College, the Market, and the Court; or Woman’s Relation to Education, Labor, and Law (1867); Egypt’s Place in History (1868); The Romance of Association (1875); My First Holiday; or, Letters Home from Colorado, Utah, and California (1881); What We Really Know about Shakespeare (1885); Barbara Fritchie (1892); Margaret and Her Friends: Ten Conversations with Margaret Fuller (1895); Transcendentalism in New England (1897); and her memoir, Alongside (1900). She contributed articles to such publications as the Springfield Republican, the Cambridge Tribune, and the Nation.
From 1842 to 1844, Dall lived in the Georgetown neighborhood and was vice principal at Miss Lydia English’s School for Young Ladies (now converted to the Colonial Apartments, 1305–11 Thirtieth Street NW). She returned to DC upon her retirement in 1879, to live with her son, a naturalist and curator at the Smithsonian Institution. Their house (1526 Eighteenth Street NW in the Dupont Circle neighborhood) still stands and is now the Turkish American Assembly. Dall became close friends with First Lady Frances Cleveland, and was a guest lay-preacher in Unitarian churches. Alfred University awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1877.
Dear eyes that never looked reproach
Dear lips that always smiled,
Dear heart of grace, that never lacked
The sweet thought of a child!
How shall my life go on, when yours
Is wrapped in fuller light?
How dream a sun shall ever rise
Upon so drear a night?
“Come, lead me,” once you gently said,
“Lead onward to the end”
Putting my hand in yours, I see
“My Father is my Friend.”
My darling, I am led in turn
Along the sweet green way;
Bless God for all the light you give
With thoughts that never stray.
Close to that Father’s arm you cling,
Your dear eyes seek his face,
Your loving lips still chant his praise,
Your heart accepts his grace.
My darling, as I see you go,
I scarce can stay alone:
The glory from the Godhead draws
Both waiting spirits on.
Good-night! we say who linger here;
But you, a glad Good-morrow!
The joy that angels feel, you know—
Their peace we feebly borrow.
Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren published journalism and some early poems under the pen names “Corinne” and “Cornelia.” She also translated literature from French, Spanish, and Italian into English.
Dahlgren was associated with powerful men in DC: she was the daughter of Representative Samuel Finley Vinton (D-OH). She married and was widowed twice: first to Daniel Convers Goddard, first assistant secretary to the U.S. Department of the Interior (with whom she had two children), then to U.S. Navy Admiral John A. Dahlgren, commander of the Washington Navy Yard during the Civil War and famous for advances in gunnery (with whom she had three children).
In the 1870s, Dahlgren was one of the acknowledged leaders of DC’s high society. Henry James wrote a thinly fictionalized portrait of her in his short story “Pandora.” Her extremely successful nonfiction book Etiquette of Social Life in Washington established her as the primary expert on manners, decorum, and protocol, and was published in five editions, from 1873 through 1881. The book combines advice on such matters as proper attire, seating arrangements at formal dinners, and how and when to make social calls, with Dahlgren’s personal philosophy of integrity and subdued gentility.
In addition to her guide book, Dahlgren is best known for her Memoir of John A. Dahlgren, Rear Admiral United States Navy (1882), and Thoughts on Female Suffrage (1871), in which she argued against extending the vote to women. She also wrote several novels, including South-Mountain Magic (1882), A Washington Winter (1883), The Lost Names (1886), Lights and Shadows of Life (1887), Divorced (1887), and South Sea Sketches (1891). Her poems and short fiction appeared in newspapers, and she was a correspondent to the Washington Evening Star.
Dahlgren cofounded the Washington Literary Society and served as its vice president; she also served as president of the Ladies’ Catholic Missionary Society of Washington. In addition to her city home on Massachusetts Avenue NW (now razed), she lived at the historic Commandant’s Headquarters in the Navy Yard and maintained a country estate at South Mountain, Maryland, where she commissioned a Gothic revival stone chapel that still stands, and where she is buried in the family crypt.
No romance in this light we ween,
The useful only may be seen,
Yet visions of the past will rise,
Like Banquo’s ghost, thro’ faded eyes.
Of golden hair now pale of hue,
Of red, red lips, now wan and blue,
Of rounded cheek now puckered in,
Of swan-like neck, now wizened thin.
Once willowy form all bent with age,
Past happy hours of youth’s closed page;
These now, are retrospective joys,
Of life, the unsubstantial toys.
Again, we look these glasses through,
No vistas of the past we view,
The length’ning shades have vanished all,
That swept o’er nature like a pall.
But in their place, translucent rise,
The enlarged vision of the skies,
Nor things of Earth fill up the view,
For grander pageants form anew.
MORAL.
’Tis hope immortal in these “specs,”
That mirrors heaven in light reflex.
When God’s avenging angel hurled
Our primal parents from their world
Of blissful loveliness and rest,
And cast them forth sad and unblessed,
Our mother Eve, yet lingering, brought
The veil of Isis, which she sought
To hold from angry Nature’s grasp,
Her shrinking form from view to clasp.
And thus this boon of Heavenly gift,
A glimpse of Eden sent adrift,
Still rests o’er Blue Ridge craggy height,
And shadows forth a brighter light.
Empurpled mists float to the skies,
Translucent, glorious, they arise,
While Nature’s heart amid these hills,
With mystic throbs, enraptured thrills.
Born of free parents in DC, Solomon G. Brown worked in the U.S. Post Office beginning in 1844 when he was fifteen years old. In 1845 he was detailed to assist in the construction of the first telegraph system from Baltimore to Washington. (Brown later stated that he was the messenger who carried the first telegraph message to the White House.) His next job was as a packer for Gillman & Brothers chemical manufacturing, through 1852.
In 1852, at age twenty-three, Brown began work in the Transportation Department of the new Smithsonian Institute, making him their first African American employee. He was subsequently appointed to the Foreign Exchange Division, where he would serve as a highly regarded clerk, and in 1869 he became the institution’s first African American registrar. In addition, Brown was an avid amateur scientist; he provided scientific and educational illustrations for many lectures and publications. Brown remained in the employ of the Smithsonian Institution for fifty-four years, retiring in 1906 at the age of seventy-seven. He died in his home just a few months later.
Brown helped found the Hillsdale neighborhood of Anacostia and served three consecutive terms during the Reconstruction era as a delegate to the Territorial Government of the District of Columbia. His house on Elvans Road in Anacostia no longer stands. He was buried in Hillsdale Cemetery, near today’s Suitland Parkway, which is also no longer extant.
Individual poems of Brown’s were published in African American newspapers across the United States but were not collected until 1983, when the Smithsonian Institution published a pamphlet, Kind Regards from Solomon G. Brown.
His poem “Fifty Years To-Day” was written for a special ceremony honoring Brown’s long service to the Smithsonian Institution. It mentions by name the first three directors of what was then called the United States National Museum, under whom Brown served: Joseph Henry, a physicist; Spencer Fullerton Baird, an ornithologist; and George Brown Goode, an ichthyologist. The poem also refers to William Temple Hornaday, the zoologist who founded the National Zoological Park and served as its first director.
God’s vengeance is creeping, this Nation must pay,
For lives that are wasted, the crimes of our day;
We are cheated in election, denied every right,
The sin’s unrepented, not hid from God’s sight.
This Nation is dreaming, mid wrong and despair,
Our brothers’ blood streaming, their groans fill the air;
The blood that’s being wasted, will cry unto God,
This Nation, He measures by a just holy rod.
The North is protesting against this great shame,
No murderers are arrested, and none are arraigned;
Still onward they murder, untrammeled by laws.
These crimes become bolder; without any cause.
They charge men with arson, they charge them with rape,
No chance to disprove it, no chance for escape;
They’ll hang without mercy, without trial or proof,
Not waiting for jurors, for witness, nor truth.
Most all of such charges, are brought up for spite,
To drive off some leaders who must fly to-night;
None but these demons, have heard of these crimes,
The pretended outraged one, is deranged in her mind.
It’s strange all this outrage, occurs in the South,
The Rapers are Negroes, with hell in their mouths,
The white men are Angels, with power to slay,
They need no tribunal, but have all one way.
The justice won’t know them, pretends they are strange.
So none are arrested and none are arraigned.
He can not indite them, without he has proof;
Just who hung these negroes, he can’t get the truth.
Each week as it passes, fresh victims we see,
A ghastly cold body’s found hung from some tree.
With cards pinned down upon it, “this negro has raped,
The people of Pineville, provided this tape.”
The Nation’s unable, to care for black sons,
Her Courts are too feeble, and so are her guns,
Her dark sons are bleeding, and swinging from trees
While thousands are pleading, and mourning for these.
The Church of this Nation, why don’t it arise,
And cry from each station appeal to the skies:
By calling for justice, demanding what’s right,
Like they did in slavery, “arise in their might.”
No tide can withstand you, though hell may arise.
Should the North be united, and cry to the skies,
Demand from this Nation, these murders must cease,
that the sons of this country, may live here in peace.
Your millions are bowing to some kind of God,
We ask, whom you worship, and who is your Lord?
Is your God, our Creator, the Father of all?
That God you have told us, that all men must call?
We must say, “Our Father, for all are His Sons;
Do hear your own children, for we are all one.”
“Forgive us our Father, as we do each other—
And grant us our Father, what we give to our brother.”
How can we as neighbors, still worship one Lord,
And own that Christ Jesus, as the only true God;
How can they approach Him, and feel He is pleased,
Yet run down our brothers, and swing them from trees?
Do stop these foul murders, this lynching of men,
God hunt out these wretches, and purge our fair land;
Make up large meetings, unite everywhere,
Let Christians, while greeting, discuss this affair.
There are millions of Northmen, whose voice must be heard,
Loyal Southern Christians, who honor God’s Word;
And Western brave farmers, who believe in what’s right,
With Eastern Mayflowers, who in justice delight.
Then cry from your pulpits, your altars, and stand
How can you now falter, and not take a hand?
For mercy and justice, for law and for right,
Arrest these masked demons, who travel by night.
Your pulpits are silent, our priests are tied down,
The Southern church members, have blood on their gown
They sit in their places, pretending to pray,
With long pious faces, How Holy are they?
Oh! God what pretentions, of blood thirsty souls,
Whose priests dare not mention; what they do behold;
Oh! let loose Thy vengeance, and take up our cause,
We have no protection, under what they call laws.
God! visit this Nation, begin at its head,
Go down through each station, and purge every grade,
Move sin from high stations, move misery and crime,
To crush out such murderers, let Heavens combine.
God’s vengeance is creeping, the time’s near at hand,
A justice long sleeping, will burst o’er this land.
The pride and the hatred, against the black race;
Is a curse to this Nation, yes! a country’s disgrace.
’Mid all the changes I have seen
Since fifty years have rolled between,
My eyes can rest on only few—
Whose faces once could daily view,
And kindly greet on passing.
My mind goes back to hallowed spots
Fraught by memories by some forgot;
Which bring up friends most dear to me
Who’ve long since gone beyond the sea—
It seems I’ll not forget them.
Many I’ve known are dead and gone
Many are here who’ve since been born;
Some’s resigned and changed their home
Others through foreign countries roam,
And these are—
—Sending gems to you and me
They’ve gathered from the land and sea
These, too, were young, now growing old;
But many facts are yet untold,
To be revealed by others.
Every year since here I’d stay,
Some much loved friend’s been called away,
Younger men in every case—
Have come right up and filled their place
And suggesting some improvements.
We’ll now call up our first main chief
Whose history may be told in brief;
A pleasant man so meek and mild
Was great, yet gentle as a child,
A man whom all regarded
A man of pious, Godly fear
Affording all his friendly care;
’Twas he who first appointed me
Since then he’s gone beyond the sea—
We never can forget him.
Since then new generations born,
Take his research and move them on;
Are treasured by great men of thought,
Received the credit such research ought,
Thus adding much to knowledge.
By Henry the electric plans were laid,
His mind this grand conception made;
By him was launched out on the sea—
Which now brings news to you and me,
In the shortest space of time.
I’ve been impressed o’er fifty years
By Henry’s brain and patient cares;
The honors given F. B. Morse
Were wholly done at Henry’s cause
Which all his friends regretted.
By Henry, I always will believe
The telegraph was first conceived.
The part he played upon the staff—
Made complete the telegraph,
Which is our greatest blessing.
Our second chief who filled his place
Was one of justice, truth and grace;
A scientist of great renown
No greater naturalist could be found,
In this, or other countries.
My highest tribute to these names
My comrades here will do the same;
To Henry, Baird, and G. Brown Goode—
Each in his place wherein they stood—
Long may their fame be honored.
Wisdom from these minds would flow
Increasing knowledge more and more;
Now younger men can easily learn
Just how these great men were concerned
In diffusing useful knowledge.
From precious seeds these men have sown
Gigantic plants and trees and grown;
The Weather Bureau was planted here
From observations made each year,
And studies out by Henry—
The nation’s museum had its growth;
The Fish Commission was brought forth;
The exchange of books began to breathe—
By Baird and Henry these were conceived
And carried into practice.
I’ve lived to hail the third learned chief,
Whose election brought us much relief;
While we greatly missed the two then gone
Yet every branch moves smoothly on,
With many great improvements.
With our present chief the Zoo did start
And other additions for his part;
He also gained that splendid park
A place once dangerous, wet and dark,
Is now a splendid county.
Improvements seen on every hand
The costly, desirable, stretch of land;
See how grand since he begun
The work our honored chief has done—
To beautify this city.
Since eighteen hundred and fifty-two,
This may seem far back to you;
But much has passed I have not told—
Then I was young but now I’m old,
But still I am observing.
Mary Abigail Dodge, who wrote under the pen name Gail Hamilton, was born in Massachusetts and came to DC in 1856 to be governess to the children of Gamaliel and Margaret Bailey. Hamilton wrote poetry, essays, and journalism, published in Bailey’s New Era and other progressive publications, and her work was notable for its wit and strong feminist and antislavery stances.
Hamilton coedited Our Young Folks with Lucy Larcom, managed Wood’s Household Magazine, and wrote a biography of Senator James G. Blaine, whose wife was her cousin (1895). Her other nonfiction books include Woman’s Wrongs, a Counter Irritant (1868), Woman’s Worth and Worthlessness (1872), and A Battle of the Books (1870). In addition, she published a novel, First Love Is Best (1873); a travel book, Wool Gathering (1867); and a book of poems, Chips, Fragments, and Vestiges (published posthumously, 1902).
An obituary in the Washington Morning Times in 1896 states, “She had vigorous convictions which she expressed in graceful, witty and forceful language.”
This first poem was written in response to a poem by her friend John Greenleaf Whittier, accusing Hamilton of possessing “measureless ridicule” as “she wields a pen / Too sharply nibbed for thin-skinned men.”
Oh! My!
A little fly
Folding her wings
On a fly-leaf
Brief,
Suddenly sings
Exclamation-points and things
To see a poet
Painting her picture so that all the world will know it
And receive it—
But won’t more than half believe it;
For the beauty dear is all in your eyes
And doesn’t belong to flies
Of my size!
Paint a bee in your bonnet,
Paint a wasp alighting on it;
Paint a devil’s darning needle:
And don’t wheedle
All the good folk into spying
And trying
To find where I am lying
Underneath the glory
Of your story,
Whereas before a drawing
Of a hornet with a sting,
They would say with quick ha-ha-ing
“On my word, ’tis just the thing!
Heaven mend her faults”—Oh!
The wicked little Quaker,
To go and make her
Break her
Heart, talking about faults
When thee know I haven’t any—
Or not many—
Nothing to hurt you,
Only just enough to keep
Me from dissolving into a tasteless pap of virtue—
Or to be loved with holy fervor
By the New York Observer,
And the apostles of that shoddy
Sort of gospel now springing up from Oregon to Passamaquoddy,
Which teaches with a din,
Very pleasant to the din-ner
Not to save the world from sin,
But to fill the world with sinners!
Come now in good sooth,
Little friend, speak the truth—
Thy love for me such is
Thee put in those touches
Of rebuke and restriction
To quiet thy conscience, not speak thy conviction,
For thee know, heart and hand
I’m as good as thee can stand!
Am I not as sweet as maple molasses
When thee scold me for fingering thy brasses?
And did not the poet say of yore,
Angels could no more?
Ah, would not angels pity her
To be scolded by the “Saintly Whittier”?
That’s Mrs. Hannaford—
And cannot a man afford
When pulpits preach him
And the women screech him
Up for a saint,
Not to throw stones at them that—ain’t?
Ah, dear poet, and dear friend,
One whole sheet of paper has come to an end,
And the saucy fly with her jests and jeers
Shall stop her buzzing about my ears.
She folds her wings, she droops her eyes
And feels with an innermost glad surprise
The amber glory in which she lies—
The joy and beauty and wonder wrought
In the golden glow of a poet’s thought.
I fear it will seem an Hibernian stroke
To mark the sincerest of loves
By begloving a man whose great glory it is
That he handles all sin without gloves.
But remember, I pray, that the glove in old times
Was a signal of mortal defiance—
And in these evil days if a man can be found
On whom Christendom places reliance—
Who always stands ready to shiver a lance,
For the love of the right, not renown,—
It is surely the least his admirers can do
To provide him with gloves to throw down.
Henry McNeal Turner was the twelfth consecrated bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Born free in South Carolina, he was self-educated until enrolling in Trinity College in Baltimore, where he received his first formal education. He led pastorates in St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Savannah, and was appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to serve as the first African American chaplain to the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War.
Turner moved to DC in 1862 to lead Union Bethel Church. While in the city, he befriended powerful Reconstruction-era politicians, including Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens. After the war, Turner became politically active in the Republican Party and was elected to the Georgia legislature in 1868. When he was expelled from that body along with all the other delegates of color, he gave a famous speech, declaring: “I shall neither fawn nor cringe before any party, nor stoop to beg them for my rights. . . . I am here to demand my rights and hurl thunderbolts at the men who dare to cross the threshold of my manhood.” He was finally restored to his seat by the federal government in 1870. He held other notable political appointments: President Ulysses S. Grant named him postmaster of Macon in 1869, and in 1876 he was appointed president of Morris Brown College in Atlanta.
Turner edited two Black Nationalist newspapers: the Voice of Missions (1893–1900) and the Voice of the People (1901–4). He was also a correspondent for the Christian Reporter. He founded the International Migration Society and organized two ships that traveled to Liberia, resettling black Americans in two expeditions in 1895 and 1896. Turner was also a vocal supporter of prohibition and women’s suffrage. He wrote The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity (1885); his collected writings and speeches were published posthumously in 1971 under the title Respect Black.
A 1915 eulogy published in the Crisis stated: “Turner was the last of his clan: mighty men, physically and mentally, men who started at the bottom and hammered their way to the top by sheer brute strength, they were the spiritual progeny of African chieftains, and they built the African church in America.”
The second poem, read on April 16, 1863, at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church and reprinted in the Liberator newspaper, commemorates DC’s special status as the first place slavery was officially ended (and the only place where slave owners were compensated financially). Nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, nearly 3,100 people held in bondage in DC became the nation’s “First Freed.”
Kind Lord, before thy face
Again with joy we bow,
For all the gifts and grace
Thou dost on us bestow.
Our tongues would all Thy love proclaim,
And chant the honors of Thy name.
Here in Thine earthly house,
Our joyful souls have met;
Here paid our solemn vows,
And felt our union sweet.
For this our tongues Thy love proclaim,
And chant the honors of Thy name.
Now may we dwell in peace
Till here again we come;
And may our love increase
Till Thou shalt bring us home.
Then shall our tongues Thy love proclaim,
And chant the honors of Thy name.
Dedicated to the Emancipated Slaves of the District of Columbia
Almighty God! we praise thy name
For having heard we pray;
For having freed us from our chains
One year ago today.
We thank thee for thy arm has stayed
Foul despotism’s sway
And made Columbia’s District free
One year ago today.
Give us the power to withstand
Oppression’s baleful fray;
That right may triumph as it did
One year ago today.
Give liberty to millions yet
’Neath despotism’s sway,
That they may praise thee as we did
One year ago today.
O! Guide us safely through this storm;
Bless Lincoln’s gentle sway,
And then we’ll ever praise thee, as
One year ago today.
Born in Easton, Maryland, Bradley began publishing in periodicals while still an adolescent, encouraged by her schoolteacher father. Her younger sister was also a writer, as were her husband’s two sisters, giving her a supportive family environment in which to create.
Bradley published one book of poems, Hidden Sweetness (1886), and several books of short fiction for girls, including Bread upon the Waters (1855), Douglass Farm (1856), Birds of a Feather (1868), A Wrong Confessed Is Half Redressed (1870), and The Story of a Summer (1873). Much of her fiction and poetry for juveniles appeared in religious journals such as the American Missionary, but she also published poems in Century, Harper’s, Appleton’s, and Scribner’s Magazine. Bradley lived in New York and in Washington, DC.
There was a time when Death and I
Came face to face together:
I was but young indeed to die,
And it was summer weather;
One happy year a wedded wife,
And I was slipping out of life.
You knelt beside me, and I heard,
As from some far-off distance,
a bitter cry that dimly stirred
My soul to make resistance.
You thought me dead; you called my name;
And back from Death itself I came.
But oh! that you had made no sign,
That I had heard no crying!
For now the yearning voice is mine,
And there is no replying:
Death never could so cruel be
As Life—and you—have proved to me!
Originally from Evansville, Indiana, Margaret Louisa Sullivan Burke graduated from Butler University, married twice, and had four children. Burke was a cofounder and first president of the League of American Pen Women in 1897. Working as a freelance journalist for the Philadelphia Item, she became the first woman to qualify for entry into the Press Gallery at the U.S. Capitol in 1890 under new rules limiting membership to those who derived their primary salary as dispatchers to daily newspapers (rules intended to professionalize journalism and to exclude lobbyists, women, and people of color from obtaining press passes).
She is the author of The Story of Hercules, or the Truth about Financial Legislation of the Republican Party (undated) and The Truth about Our Finances (1892). Her essays and poetry were printed in major newspapers across the United States, sometimes under the gender-neutral name of M. S. Burke, and sometimes under Maggie Lute Burke.
Her house at 1602 Fifteenth Street NW still stands. She is buried in Glenwood Cemetery.
A troubled star was glowing red,
Upon the zenith’s brow, they said,
When I was born;
A baleful eye amid the gray,
That seemed to scan a rugged way,
’Mid brake and thorn.
Beside my cradle Sorrow, pale,
Her ditty crooned, a broken wail,
My lullaby;
And even childhood’s summer land
Grew dull, with clouds on every hand,
To veil the sky.
Love beckoned me, then turned away;
And Fame, when sought, had gone astray,
And left no trace;
Misfortunes, like a harpy brood,
Have snatched away my spirit’s food
Before my face.
Yet, with a heart grown strong by strife,
I’ll fight the battle still with life,
Though growing late,
Till on its battlements I’ll stand
The victor’s bay within my hand,
In spite of Fate.
Mary Clemmer Ames was a journalist best known for her “Woman’s Letter from Washington,” a column in the New York Independent that appeared for nearly two decades. Ames also wrote poetry and novels. She was one of the foremost women Washington correspondents in the period following the Civil War.
Her books include Victoria (1864), Eirene (1870), the nonfiction collection Ten Years in Washington (1871), Outlines of Men, Women and Things (1873), His Two Wives (1874), and Poems of Life and Nature (1886). Her journalism was also published in the Utica Morning Herald and the Brooklyn Daily Union in New York, the Springfield Republican in Massachusetts, and the Cincinnati Commercial in Ohio.
Unlike many women journalists of her time who reported only society news, Ames was a keen critic of politics. She was strong advocate for women’s economic independence and right to work for equal pay. She also supported civil rights for newly emancipated African Americans. Her column regularly exposed members of Congress who used their positions for personal enrichment or whose behavior evidenced weak morals or corruption.
Ames was married twice; her first marriage to Reverend Daniel Ames, a Methodist minister, ended in divorce in 1874, and she married Edmund Hudson, editor of the Army and Navy Register, in 1883. Her DC home, no longer standing, was a literary and social center. She is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.
The promise of delicious youth may fail;
The fair fulfillment of our Summer-time
May wane and wither at its hour of prime;
The gorgeous glow of Hope may swiftly pale;
E’en Love may leave us spite our piteous wail;
The heart, defeated, desolate may climb
To lonely Reason in her height sublime;
But one sure fort no foe can e’er assail.
’Tis thine, O Work,—the joy supreme of thought,
Where feeling, purpose, and long patience meet;
Where in deep silence the ideal wrought
Bourgeons from blossoming to fruit complete.
O crowning bliss! O treasure never bought!
All else may perish, thou remainest sweet.
Best remembered as first lady for her bachelor elder brother President Grover Cleveland during the first two years of his term, Rose Elizabeth Cleveland found her official duties so tiresome that she was said to conjugate Greek verbs during White House receptions. She was the first first lady to publish while residing in the White House, and an advocate of temperance and women’s rights.
Cleveland worked as a schoolteacher and editor of the Chicago-based magazine Literary Life. She published a popular volume of essays, George Eliot’s Poetry and Other Studies (1885, which went into seven editions); a book of social commentary, You and I: Or Moral, Intellectual, and Social Culture (1886); a novel, The Long Run (1886); and a translation, The Soliloquies of St. Augustine (1910).
In 1910, she moved to Italy to live with her lover, a wealthy widow named Evangeline Simpson Whipple, and died there during the 1918 influenza pandemic while working as a volunteer nurse to Italian World War I refugees.
Judith Von Stump fell sick, or fell to ailing,—
That was as clear as day to any one,—
And it was settled Judith’s health was failing,
That something was the matter, something must be done;
And so a meeting of the wise physicians
Of either sex was called upon to sit
In counsel upon Judith’s sad condition
And charged to find a speedy cure for it:
From far and near they came, and saw, and—sat!
Of conquering I speak not: you shall judge of that.
’Twas marvelous indeed how many doctors,
Of every school and age, of either sex,
Came at the call,—from fierce concoctors
Of potions blue the gastric juice to vex,
To those exponents of a dispensation
Whose sugar-coatings, redolent with ease,
Soothing and pleasant in their application,
Outside or in, can never fail to please.
Nor lacked there those astute manipulators
Who charge upon disease like gladiators.
***
And thus it briefly ran: “We find this woman
Existing without life, at twenty-one;
Possessing all those forces which a human
Nature can boast. The patient should be one
In robust health. Upon investigation,
We find the nervous centers and the brain
A little strained: local ossification
Threatens the heart, and yet no trace of pain
Is to be found. In fact, we are not sure
Of cause, and therefore find, as yet, no cure.”
On this a doughty doctor rose, and, calling
For silence, said, “The cause, sir, was a fall.
The woman fell in love, sir, and in falling,
Got hurt a little in the head,—that’s all.
And as to all your stuff about the heart, sir,
Nonsense! Among all woman-kind you can’t
Single out one who don’t possess the art, sir,
To make her heart as hard as adamant
If it suits her. Now bother all this chatter!
The woman is in love,—that’s what’s the matter.”
In a great heat and much exasperation,
A little burly doctor then cried out,
“You’re wrong, sir,—wrong! The proper explanation
Is quite the contrary, I have no doubt:
The woman’s not in love, and that’s the trouble.
Give her a husband, sir, a house to keep,
Children to rear, and this romantic bubble
Will soon collapse. Why, you must be asleep!
A woman, sir, is an absurd anomaly
Found anywhere but in the house and family.”
At this a murmur of shrill indignation
Arose from where the crinoline was dense.
A female here cried with determination
“Sir, we insist on truth and common sense
And science, sir. The musty old traditions
Left to us by the elders will not do.
In seeking to improve the sad condition
Of our sick sister, we must learn to view
Her case in the broad light of progress, which advances
Beyond the pale of these effete romances.”
Amidst the tumult, one, with face exuding
With fat complacence, smiling pleasantly,
Said, “My dear friends, I hope I’m not intruding.
Our fair friend’s sickness, it is clear to me,
Is one caused by unwholesome agitation
Of thought: in truth, her history
Makes clear that fact: it is an aberration
From woman’s law. The patient must be free
From all brain-labor. It is foul, inhuman,
And out of nature, sir, for lovely woman.”
Then up there jumped, with jovial air and bustle,
A little man, rubbing his hands with glee,
Who said, “The cause of all disease is lack of muscle.
Turn out the patient; let her climb a tree;
Feed her with bran; teach her to roar with laughter
All day; pack her in air at night;
Burn up her books, spill all her ink, and after
Ten months I’ll warrant her all right.
A woman’s proper sphere is vegetation
In air and sunshine, with good cultivation.”
The next who gained a hearing was a woman
Of visage resolute and purpose fell,
Who now proclaimed, in accents superhuman,
“The true cause of this illness I can tell,
And will. Our patient is a wretched sufferer
From man’s injustice: you will please to note
The cause, ’tis soon explained, and ’tis enough, sir,
To make a woman sick, sir, not to VOTE.
She never told her grief, yet how it cankers!
Give her the ballot, sir; for this she hankers.”
Immense applause, tremendous acclamation,
Followed the speaker. Quickly then arose
Another voice, which said, “This explanation
Is good enough, and true, as far as it goes.
Our Radical Committee of Research, however,
Are happy to assure you that they can
Announce the final cause. Our patient never
Can hope for perfect health until she is a MAN;
Which metamorphosis our noble science
Hopes soon to reach, bidding to doubt defiance.”
Marian Longfellow O’Donoghue was born in Maine, the niece of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a direct descendant of Anne Bradstreet. She published poetry and short fiction in the Boston Transcript, Boston Herald, Washington Post, and other newspapers, sometimes under the pen name Miriam Lester, and some of her poems were set to music. She also translated literature from French to English.
O’Donoghue was a charter member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and served on the board of the Washington Choral Society. She was active in the National Society of New England Women and the International League of Press Clubs (where she was named the only woman on the Board of Governors). But she is perhaps best known as one of three cofounders of the League of American Pen Women in 1897, along with Margaret Sullivan Burke and Anna Sanborn Hamilton, a group formed in response to the Washington Press Club’s refusal to admit women as members. O’Donoghue originated the idea, wrote the organization’s bylaws and constitution, and served as first secretary.
O’Donoghue is the author of the books Seven Stories for Christmas (1884), The Lily of the Resurrection (1885), Snow Crystals (1885), and Contrasted Songs (1904). She married twice and had three children.
O for the bounding wave, and the salt, salt spray on my face!
For the sweep of the filling sail, and its free, untrammelled pace!
For the life that hath no bound to its path but the open sea;
For the soul as free as air, that by right belongs to me!
For the power to cast aside these fetters dark and strong,
To bound over heaving deep—and no more to feel the throng
That cuts through the quivering heart and the restless soul, as well!
I yearn for a full life, with a might I cannot quell!
O for the bounding wave, and the salt, salt spray on my face!
For the strength to grasp and hold the plan of a waning race.
For might to compel the tide in its turn to serve my will,
That my heart of the fountain deep, may drink to the brim its fill!
Newell Houston Ensley was born enslaved in Nashville, Tennessee, and was educated at Roger Williams University and Newton Theological Seminary. He taught at Shaw University in North Carolina and Howard University in Washington, DC, before taking a position as professor of rhetoric, natural sciences, and vocal music at Alcorn University in Lorman, Mississippi. Ensley was fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
He was also in demand as a popular orator on issues of education, the Baptist Church, women’s rights, and civil rights. William J. Simmons, in Men of Mark (1887), praised “the music of his voice and his graphic style” of speaking, which “have held audiences spell-bound.” Simmons continues, “In his lectures he does not follow old stereotyped phrases nor hackneyed expressions, but his humor bubbles up like a pure rill at the foot of a mountain.”
Ensley lived in DC from 1879 through 1882. He died young, at age thirty-five. This is his most famous poem, originally published in 1886 in the Roger Williams University Record.
Write your name upon the sand,
The waves will wash it out again.
Trace it on the crystal foam,
No sooner is it writ than gone.
Carve it in the solid oak,
’Tis shattered by the lightning’s stroke.
Chisel it in marble deep,
’Twill crumble down—it cannot keep.
Seeker for the sweets of fame,
On things so frail, write not thy name.
With thee ’twill wither, die, rot;
On things so frail, then, write it not.
Would’st thou have thy name endure?
Go, write it in the Book of Life,
Engrave it on the hearts of men,
By humble deeds performed in love.
Wendell Phillips Stafford was born in Vermont and attended St. Johnsbury Academy and Boston University. He was admitted to the Vermont bar in 1882 and worked in private practice until appointed a federal judge on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. He received a recess appointment from President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. He also became a professor at George Washington University School of Law in 1908. Stafford served on the bench until his retirement on May 4, 1931. His houses at 1725 Lamont Street NW and 1661 Crescent Place NW both still stand.
Stafford’s books of poems include North Flowers (1902); Dorian Days (1909); and The Land We Love (1916). He was named the first poet laureate of Vermont in 1922.
Stafford once stated, “There are lawyers by nature, as there are poets by nature, endowed with two gifts, one to perceive the true relations of things and the other the disposition to see justice done.”
The poem “Passing Mount Vernon” was published in the Washington Post on July 12, 1917, three months after the American entry into World War I.
This is the fruit of that forbidden tree
Whereof the nation that doth eat shall die—
The tree of hate whose fruit is cruelty.
This nation eateth, and the feet are by
Of them that bore its brothers to the tomb:
The grave is ready and the dead make room.
This is the end of Justice and of Law:
the ages travailed and have brought forth this!
Here closes the sweet dream the prophet saw.
The seraph’s song ends in the serpent’s hiss.
The phoenix mounts refurnished from the fire:
The swine returns to wallow in the mire.
See these fanged faces leering round their prey!
Are these the sons of unforgotten sires
That hewed the wilderness for Freedom’s way,
And lit the midnight with her beaconing fires?
Not sons, but bastards, howsoever named!
In these ghoul forms the shape of man is shamed.
Here in this picture let the black man read
The noble white man’s view of what is just!
His fathers were the victims of white greed;
His mothers were the victims of white lust;
And if he learned his lesson but too well,
Pupil or teacher—which deserved this hell?
Thousands of readers, but no heart is stirred.
Hundreds of statesmen, but no move is made.
Ten thousand prophets, but no trumpet word.
Millions of men, cold, cruel, or afraid.
No brave blood burns with anger at the sight.
God ring the curtain down—put out the light!
No, no, my country, no! Thou shalt not die;
The grave was never made that shall hide thee.
The old brave wind will yet come blowing by
And thou wilt leap to life and liberty,
And, striding o’er the obscene monster’s maw,
Bring on resplendent brows thy down-slipped crown of Law!
God’s wrath is kindling. Fear it, each false priest
Of law and justice! He will surely smite
People and priest guilty against the light.
Tremble, you Christians who deny the least
Of Christ’s own brothers! Justice has not ceased,
If “Justices,” misnamed, see black and white.
The whisper of the wronged rolls up heaven’s height
In thunder; his avengers are released
Ere yet the crime is finished. Surely He
That led the fathers through a land blood-dewed
Will not desert the children when betrayed.
Think you God is a white man, He that made
Three quarters of the whole earth darker-hued?
There are no bastards in His family.
The slowing speed—the ship-bell’s toll—
The plain white porch outstanding clearly—
The sloping lawn—the wooded knoll
Within whose shade he lies austerely—
So on we pass. How peacefully
The Pater Patriae reposes,
With fresh returns of fleur-de-lis
And tribute late of British roses!
Today his Roman mask must wear
A smile that might be called complacent:
England and France, a loving pair,
Before his modest tomb obeisant!
But still he sleeps, unroused by wrong,
Unmoved amid a world’s commotion,
While his old river glides along
To where his war birds breast the ocean.
Yet is it true to say he sleeps?
For still his ghost, august and splendid,
Its march around our border keeps;
And by his faith are we defended.
To us his voice is speaking clear,
And sounds across the seas in thunder;
And ’tis the hand that crumbles here
Which yet shall cleave the thrones asunder.
John Henry Paynter is best known for Fugitives of the Pearl (1930), a novelization of a historic, unsuccessful slave escape from DC (and the largest-known mass escape attempt of enslaved people in the United States). Paynter was a direct descendant of two of the Pearl fugitives. His other books are Joining the Navy: Or, Abroad with Uncle Sam (1895), Fifty Years After (1940), and Horse and Buggy Days with Uncle Sam (1943).
Paynter served in the U.S. Navy and worked as a clerk at the U.S. Treasury. He lived at 322 A Street NE on Capitol Hill in the early 1900s (still standing), then moved to 701 Fifty-First Street NE in the Deanwood neighborhood (razed). He was active in St. Luke’s Protestant Episcopal Church, the Oldest Inhabitants’ Association (Colored), and served as board chair for the Universal Land Company, which created a popular amusement park for African Americans in Deanwood called Suburban Gardens (now the site of Merritt Elementary School). He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Listen, Selassie, Oh, King of Kings,
With prideful joy to thee I bring
A united voice of praise that rings
Full-throated from thy Negro kin.
Thy griefs are borne with regal poise
That scorns a bandit’s bluff and noise;
His fateful thrust to “muscle-in”
On thy heritage is unpardoned sin.
The peoples dark, on alien shores
Acclaim thy culture and share thy woes
And summon through prayer Jehovah’s aid
To turn back those who would invade.
So shall we hope thy lengthened Line
Of sovereigns’ lustrous since Solomon’s time
Shall ages hence thy praises sing
Who kept the faith and fought, as should a King.
Kelly Miller was born in South Carolina to an enslaved mother less than a year after the Emancipation Proclamation, narrowly escaping slavery. He described himself as one of the “first fruits of the Civil War, one of the first African Americans who learned to read, write and cipher in public schools.” He was the first African American to attend Johns Hopkins University, where he studied advanced mathematics, physics, and astronomy.
A professor and administrator at Howard University for more than forty years, Miller served as a math professor (1890), a sociology professor (1895–1934), and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (1907–19). Miller wrote a syndicated column that was published in more than one hundred African American newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s. His most prominent book, Race Adjustment (1908), was a crucial early text challenging racist notions of black inferiority. Miller was a prolific writer; some of his other books include The Education of the Negro (1902), From Servitude to Service (1905), The Ultimate Race Problem (1910), Out of the House of Bondage (1914), An Appeal to Conscience: America’s Code of Caste a Disgrace to Democracy (1918), The Negro in the New Reconstruction (1919), and Is Race Difference Fundamental, Eternal and Inescapable? (1921).
Miller was one of the leading advocates in the nation for public education for students of African descent. In an essay in Opportunity Magazine published in 1928, he wrote: “The Washington Negro has the only complete school system in the country practically under his own control. . . . The colored high and normal schools enroll over three thousand pupils above the eighth grade level. This number of secondary students cannot be approximated in any other city—not even New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, with a much larger total Negro population. . . . The Negroes of Washington have reached the point of complete professional self sufficiency. Howard has turned out an army of physicians, lawyers, teachers and clergymen. . . . The capital furnishes the best opportunity and facilities for the expression of the Negro’s innate gayety of soul. Washington is still the Negro’s Heaven, and it will be many a moon before Harlem will be able to take away her scepter.”
Miller was a founding member of the American Negro Academy, the first major African American learned society, and a coeditor of the Crisis, the journal of the NAACP. He is remembered in DC with a public housing development in the LeDroit Park neighborhood and a DC public middle school named in his honor. One of his daughters, May Miller, also became a writer of note.
I hate a cat. The very sight
Of feline form evokes my wrath;
When’er one goes across my path,
I shiver with instinctive fright.
And yet there is one little kit
I treat with tender kindliness
The fondled pet of my darling Bess:
For I love her and she loves it.
In earth beneath, as Heaven above,
It satisfies the reasoning,
That those who love the self-same thing
Must also one another love.
Then if our Father loveth all
Mankind, of every clime and hue,
Who loveth Him must love them too;
It cannot otherwise befall.
Isabel Likens Gates is the author of The Land of Our Dreams (1938). She also published a textbook, Synopsis of Grammar and Rules of Syntax (1931); a play, Modernity, or Latter Days (1932); Little Rhymes for Little People (1939); and various song lyrics, including the official 1920 GOP campaign song, “Harding We Want You, Yes We Do.”
Gates was born in Nevada and spent the first twenty years of her life in silver mining camps. But she proudly traced her lineage to the earliest Swedish settlers of Delaware in 1632. Gates began to write poetry at a young age and would later publish widely in newspapers and journals, including the Washington Post, Washington Evening Star, Washington Daily News, National Tribune, Forest Life Magazine, and American Motorist. She married Robert Woodland Gates and seems to have had no children; they lived in DC. She was active in the League of American Pen Women. Gates is buried in Rock Creek Cemetery.
Fort Myer, referenced in the following poem, was a military post in Arlington, Virginia, which was a staging area for a large number of regiments during World War I. The Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) is a program of the U.S. Air Force.
An R.O.T.C. gala picture
Of the first training camp at Fort Myer,
When a pall hung over the nation
And hearts were aflame with desire.
An R.O.T.C. flashlight picture,
With its steamers and banners gay,
And its stalwart young forms and glad faces,
And maidens in dainty array.
A farewell entertainment and supper,
An evening without alloy,
Music and dancing and flirting,
And favors and flowers and joy.
O heart, is it only a vision,
A picture on memory’s screen?
Is there never a Delphan to whisper
The fate of those on the scene?
They were there, then gone on the morrow,
And never a word to tell
How they fared, or living or wounded,
Or how many fighting fell.
Unanswered, forever unanswered,
Alive, or beneath the sod,
Wounded, missing or dying—
They are known in the home of God.
Bertha Gerneaux Davis was born in New York but moved to DC while still young and attended DC Public Schools. She wrote poetry, short stories, and articles on natural history and contributed to the Washington Post, New York Independent, Chicago Advance, and several Christian and children’s journals.
Davis published six books of poems: Verses (1903), Verses by Three Generations (1921, with son Mark Winton and mother, Harriet Winton Davis), The Guest (1926), Patient Scientists (1928), Opening into Nature, Humanity, Life (1935), and World Communion (1943).
Davis was active in the literary salon of Frances Hodgson Burnett and a member of the League of American Pen Women. Davis married in 1898 and had four sons. She lived in DC until 1910, then moved to Minnesota, where her husband, Albert Fred Woods, was employed as a dean at the University of Minnesota through 1917. When he was offered a job as the first president of what was then the Maryland State College of Agriculture (later renamed the University of Maryland), the family returned to the area. Under his tenure, the college grew to include undergraduate and graduate programs in seven schools, changing the focus from agriculture to the liberal arts, and gaining accreditation by the Association of American Universities. She published actively in journals through 1947; her papers are now in the archives of the University of Maryland at College Park.
The trolley brought them out by scores today—
Our boys from nearby camps, to go away
So soon to blood-stained fields. I watched one lad
Who stood apart a little—not quite sad,
Yet somewhat grave for one so young. (I doubt
If he were twenty!) He was looking out
Upon the fair Virginia hills, the trees,
The river flowing by. A gentle breeze
Made fragrance from the clover fill the air.
He wandered out to those green acres where
The thousands lie in sleep—such endless rows!
’Twas early evening, overhead the crows
Were darkening the sky. (In wearied flight
They wing their way to Arlington each night.)
Among those countless grass-grown graves he stood,
This soldier boy, his young face clean and good,
His stiff-brimmed hat in one slim hand—(Because
The day was warm and close? Or did he pause
In honor of those dead?) Then toward the sky
He turned his face. (To see the crows drift by,
Or was it something else, unseen by me?)
I only know his smile was sweet to see!
Only yesterday I passed it, small and commonplace and gray!
No one would have turned to give a second look—until today.
Now that little house seems altered—still the same low, sagging stairs,
Still the dingy paint, and yet what odd new dignity it wears!
For a tiny silken flag is pressed against the window-glass,
One blue star within its center—message mute, to all who pass.
Little house, the ones you shelter, are unknown to me and mine,
And though I am fain to linger, I go by and make no sign.
But I whisper this: “God bless them, whosoever they may be,
Dwelling in that star-marked cottage, but with hearts across the sea!”
Kendall Banning is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry and nonfiction, including books on the history of Annapolis and West Point. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he was a major in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War I. He subsequently became editor of such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Popular Radio, Snappy Stories, and Hearst Magazine.
Banning’s books include Submarine: The Story of Undersea Fighters (1942), The Fleet Today (1940), Censored Mother Goose Rhymes (1929, written in protest of U.S. Customs obscenity laws), and the poetry books Mon Ami Pierrot (1917), Bypaths in Arcady (1914), Songs of the Love Unending: A Sonnet Sequence (1912), and Songs for a Wedding Day (1907). He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
The curtain falls, the lights go out,
And silence ends the play,
And Columbine and Harlequin
In dust are laid away,
And Pierrot of the nimble heart,
And frail Pierrette, the star;
So we must dance and go, my lass,
God’s puppets that we are!
Who knows but that their little tricks
Still live, and still amuse?
And Columbine still runs away,
And Pierrot still pursues?
Who knows but that we too shall play
Our parts, and reign supreme
Upon the Stage of Silence, lass,
Within the House of Dream?