Two. In Which the Girl Orator Comes to Town
Two
In Which the Girl Orator Comes to Town
THE NEXT MORNING
Beacon Hill, April 6, 1865
“Well, Father, who won the majority? Emma or Mansfield Park ?”
William Stevenson answered from behind his newspaper at the head of the breakfast table. “ Emma , of course.”
Charlotte, starved for victory no matter the hour, gave a little cheer. For the past two years, following her graduation from Miss Pride’s Peacock Academy, Charlotte had asked older sister, Henrietta, more reserved but no less radical, to tote her to every suffragette gathering within carriage distance. The academy had turned both of William’s daughters into ladies but failed to qualify them for college, making them disaffected as well as dutiful. Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, Angela Grimké—New England was in no shortage of angry women. As the century wore on, they seemed to grow only angrier.
Charlotte pecked her father on his left cheek before heading for the sideboard to pile her plate high with johnnycakes, sausage, and eggs. William always marveled at his youngest daughter’s ravenous diet, being strictly vegetarian himself. He was a strict man in many ways, even more so following his wife’s untimely death. Something happened with premature loss—a realization that the ancient cartographers had been right. One sailed too hastily, too happily, until the darkest depths of ocean yielded their unknown threat: here be dragons . As a widower, William Stevenson’s way of coping with two little girls had been to batten down everything in sight.
His sole indulgence was books—there could never be too many of those. In fact, he had been the one to suggest a reading circle at the state supreme court. The seven justices regularly met to discuss fictional characters as a refreshing change from the rigors of the bench. In contrast, local women’s reading circles were becoming increasingly vocal on social issues at large. Barred from most universities, women like his daughters were intent on finding intellectual spaces of their own.
William’s favorite such space was his library at home, to which his daughters had always enjoyed full access. Henrietta in particular spent hours at the large partners desk, poring over old law texts and political pamphlets. Now when his girls quoted Thoreau or Milton or Carlyle back at him, William knew he had only himself to blame. Still, he loved their youthful curiosity—very much like their mother, who had kept him young, too, for a time.
“Is Henrietta on her way down?”
Seating herself to his left, Charlotte nodded back between bites of sausage, little streaks of oil dribbling down between her long, bare fingers. Neither of his daughters wore jewelry—all of his late wife’s remained in the opaline glass casket on her dressing table, next to the untouched hairbrush and half-empty bottle of Otto of Roses. From childhood, both girls had kept their hands free for climbing, digging, and secretive writing. William could only hope they were composing inoffensive novels up in that shared attic room of theirs.
“How did Nash—”
“ Justice Nash,” he corrected Charlotte.
“—how did Justice Nash vote?” She licked her fingers free of the sausage fat, then drenched the cakes in maple syrup from the jug she had decoratively painted while at Miss Pride’s. Those simpler days of music, art, and deportment, her father wistfully recalled: French lessons for Charlotte, German for Henrietta, Latin at home for them both.
“He is as susceptible as anyone to Emma’s charms.”
“I bet.” Charlotte grinned. “Was it another close decision?”
William took a sip of coffee. “The usual minority—although Justice Norton did make some strong points on the Mansfield Judgment.”
“Lord Mansfield?” Henrietta asked from the doorway, bowing slightly beneath the head jamb. She was the tall one in the family; it didn’t help matters that she wore heeled boots and used the fashion for elaborate hair styling to pile hers high upon her head. This made her taller than most men she met and risked eliminating them as suitors, which worried her father. Could height alone be keeping Henrietta, teetering on the cusp of spinsterhood at age twenty-five, from marrying? Who could tell? Whereas twenty-year-old Charlotte was his wife’s daughter, energetic and fearless, Henrietta was his cipher and impossible to read—which was especially odd, since she was most like him.
“Yes, the justice who ushered in abolition for England—long before these United States.” William Stevenson put down his weekly copy of The Liberator . “But now the two countries are at one on this issue. Parity among nations and people is a wondrous thing. After all, our ancestors left England due to religious persecution—it is only right we put our own house in order.”
Henrietta came over to peck her father on his right cheek ( “Right will be for Harry—left for me,” Charlie had early on declared) before heading to the sideboard. Returning with a plate of fruit, toast, and jelly, she seated herself to his right and nodded at the newspaper on the table between them. “Garrison says he’ll wind down The Liberator to focus on women’s rights now that slavery’s being abolished.”
“The war’s not over yet.” William Stevenson had noticed this with everyone lately: the eagerness, after four long years, to just get on with things. But the law took time—and justice even more so. As for the vote that his daughters were after, something William did not necessarily begrudge them, he feared suffrage would take far longer than the angry women of New England were willing to accept.
Henrietta and Charlotte each placed a hand over one of his. “Yes, dear Father,” Henrietta tenderly began, “but with the fall of Richmond, surely the worst is behind us. They say Lee is to surrender any day.”
“On a happier note,” said Charlotte as she peeled a hard-boiled egg, “what does the bench read next?”
“Justice Peabody was angling to start Moby-Dick given the influence of Carlyle, but the chief justice lobbied for Persuasion and won. In fact, we voted—four to two—to examine all of Austen’s works over summer recess.”
“ Persuasion is her masterpiece,” Henrietta firmly declared.
“You say that of each one,” William replied with a smile.
The grandfather clock in the hall struck nine and Charlotte jumped up. “We better dash, Harry!” Both girls folded their dining napkins and kissed their father goodbye. They did everything together, a united, petticoated front.
“We’ll be missing tea,” Henrietta called to him from the doorway. “Garrison has brought the Girl Orator—Anna Dickinson—back to the Music Hall.”
“Imagine being our age,” Charlotte pined with envy, “traveling all over and lecturing, the first woman ever invited to speak before Congress.”
“Imagine,” William said as they raced out. But deep in his heart, he did no such thing. He wanted the world for his daughters but a known one, already discovered and mapped out. No unforeseen surprises, no lions or dragons in wait. He was immensely proud of both his girls’ intellects but knew for a fact—he saw it in operation every day—that the world was not yet ready for anything more than the mere possession of that.
The Boston Music Hall on Winter Street had been built in 1852 with Harvard money. Along with its massive coffered ceiling and tiered galleries, the venue housed the first and largest pipe organ in the nation. Most famously, abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, and William Lloyd Garrison had assembled here to celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation taking effect as church bells rang in 1863.
Newspaper editor Garrison loved bringing the Girl Orator to town. When she was only thirteen, Anna Dickinson, the daughter of devout Quakers and abolitionists, had written to The Liberator in outrage over the reported treatment of an anti-slavery schoolmaster in Kentucky. Now in her early twenties, Dickinson spoke with an electrifying and poetic style to standing-room-only crowds on the issue of equal rights for all. She had consumed literary classics as a girl—an example not lost on the bookish Stevenson sisters—and possessed a natural gift for rhetoric.
Daylight streamed through the arched windows at the top of the Music Hall’s four stories, casting Dickinson in a cone of radiance as she stood alone on the podium, an unremarkable slip of a girl—until she spoke. Henrietta and Charlotte watched her from the nearest gallery above the stage, rapt. Charlotte paid close attention to how Miss Dickinson used her blazing eyes and animated hands to win over the audience. Charlotte wanted to be an actress, something many in their society considered even closer to prostitution than nursing.
Henrietta, on the other hand, was most intrigued by Dickinson’s use of language—especially her homespun ask-and-answer style—to support her plea for women’s rights. There were dozens of rhetorical devices one could use for persuasion, and the Girl Orator appeared to be master of them all. Henrietta particularly noted the pleasing rhythm and cadence to the examples and hypotheses Dickinson shared:
The widows who see the homes they have helped to earn, the lands they have helped to buy, the very house with which they have been served their household work—swept away from them by an unjust decision of a dying husband, and a wicked law…
Are these duly represented and have they all the rights they want already?
The toiling wives who, struggling hard to save a home, to educate their children properly and clothe them decently, see their wages week after week, year after year, paid to their husbands or taken afterwards by them to be squandered in folly and vice, yet living on, staying on, enduring all things rather than part from their children whom the law would give to the degrading control of the husband…
Are these duly represented and have they all the rights they want already?
Both sisters enthusiastically nodded at every argument that Dickinson made. Gazing about the audience to witness the impact of the speech, Charlotte inadvertently caught the eye of Denham Scott watching from the gallery opposite theirs. Scott was a foreign correspondent for Reynolds’s Newspaper , twice a month mailing dispatches back to London on the Civil War and other American political and legal events. Recently he had begun sniffing about the lyceums and lecture halls, trying to capture the pulse of the struggling nation when it came to women’s rights. Although American women were a smidgen ahead of their British counterparts in that arena, agitation was springing up in tea salons and reading circles on both sides of the Atlantic.
Denham nodded at Charlotte, then hurriedly scribbled something down in his reporter’s notepad. She did not acknowledge him back, and gently elbowed Henrietta instead. “I’m awfully sorry, Harry,” Charlotte whispered. “I must have engaged his eye.”
The minute the Girl Orator finished her speech, Henrietta rushed her younger sister out of the Music Hall.
“Miss Stevenson! Charlotte!” Denham Scott called to them from the rush of the exiting crowd. When he wasn’t writing, Scott was running. Tall and lanky, with auburn locks falling across high cheekbones, he never appeared worried—just fast. Always in pursuit of a story, always seeking entrance to the very world of privilege he disparaged in print.
“Ladies, please, some words on Miss Dickinson?”
“Harry’s the writer,” Charlotte called back as she and Henrietta whirled around together to face him. “Your paper would do well to employ someone as eloquent as her.”
“I have no doubt Miss Stevenson would excel at anything she put her mind to.” Denham cocked his head at her. “And the performance just now, by your Girl Orator? How would you sum up that?”
“You call it a performance, do you?” replied Henrietta.
Denham smiled as if a secret ploy had worked. “I call it theatrically effective, yes.”
“But not eloquent?” Henrietta smiled back. “Because surely it can be both. Or is that only the case with male speakers?”
“Do you not think there is something of the mesmerist in her?”
“Why, Mr. Scott, you don’t need words from me—it appears you have already written your article.” Henrietta turned around to triumphantly shoulder a giggling Charlotte forward through the crowd.
“Harry, Harry!” Charlotte urged her once they were out of Scott’s earshot. “I am certain he likes you! He wants your opinion on everything!”
“Some things are meant to stay quiet,” Henrietta said with a sigh, while Charlotte grinned.
“Just imagine if he knew of the letter.”
But Henrietta motioned to Charlotte to hush. For they were not composing inoffensive novels in that shared attic room of theirs after all. They were writing something entirely different.