Before Charlotte, America had no celebrities; now they manufacture them like blue jeans. She made a lasting impression on young women like Alcott, who saw her as a model of women’s independence and a symbol of their “incarnate power.”
chapter one The First Disaster
If Charlotte Cushman’s life were a play, it would begin like something out of Shakespeare, with nature’s rebellion and man’s disquiet.
The great experiment of America was only a half century old. Despite American independence, the British still loudly disrespected American sovereignty. America was by many accounts hardly a country at all. “The effect of democracy,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, first published in 1835, “is not exactly to give men any particular manners, but to prevent them from having manners at all.” And if there was one thing American men lacked, it was manners. They drank too much, swore profanely, and spit on the floor. Abroad, America was considered a “vulgar” nation populated by “the dregs of Europe” and “religious fanatics” who were not educated or aristocratic enough to govern themselves.
In 1812, the new nation had again gone to war when the British began to board American merchant vessels, capturing the ships and conscripting their seamen by force. It took three years, but America won this second war of independence, though it left their capital in ruins.
Outside of the cities, plains of wildflowers, ancient forests of elm, cedar, and pine, canyons and waterfalls made the landscape a natural wonder, but it had not yet produced writers or artists to celebrate its beauty and energy; its future laureate, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was merely a thirteen-year-old boy living in Boston, while twelve-year-old Nathaniel Hawthorne wandered the woods in nearby Salem. The poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson still slept underground, waiting for spring. Though the United States was a country populated by American Indians, immigrants, political and religious refugees, speculators, and profiteers—the most diverse intersection of cultures since Cleopatra’s Egypt—it was still seen as a land without culture, or as one European traveler put it, a “nation of campers.”
But in July of 1816 it was also a nation about to meet its greatest actress. A woman who would insist she was destined for greatness at a time when women did not have careers or own property, were legally enslaved to their husbands if they were married, financially imperiled if they were not, had no public institutions dedicated to their art, scholarship, or health, and could not even go to the theatre alone or linger alone in a public place. At a time when actresses were thought of as little more than prostitutes, one actress would triumph in the most unlikely way.
Charlotte Cushman came from two of the oldest American families. Her mother, Mary Eliza Babbit, was decended from a wealthy family of Harvard-educated men and vivacious women. Her grandmother’s impressions could make a table erupt in laughter, and although her grandfather was a lawyer, he rarely charged his clients, spending his free time playing the violin and singing “from dawn to dusk.” Charlotte’s aunts and uncles were also musical. Uncle Charles had been a beloved local performer in their hometown of Sturbridge, Massachusetts. (He died young.) UncleAugustus, meanwhile, moved to Boston to become a merchant seaman and helped bring professional performing arts to the city when he became a founding investor in the Tremont Theatre. Charlotte’s mother, Mary Eliza, was “a good singer, a good scholar” and the most talented dramatic reader in her class.
Mary Eliza was twenty-two when she married Elkanah Cushman, a man nearly her father’s age, with a family from a previous marriage. Elkanah had grown up under extreme pressure to succeed, his family the proud but poor descendants of a line of Puritan preachers who could trace their American roots to the Mayflower. To them, singing and dancing were sinful—theatre even worse. But Elkanah, the fifth Cushman man to bear the name, broke from his family traditions, leaving home at thirteen and walking on foot from Sturbridge to Boston to seek his fortune. By the time Mary Eliza was introduced to him as a potential husband, Elkanah was forty-four and a successful Boston merchant with his own name over the door.
Mary Eliza Cushman paced the wide floorboards of her home in Boston, heavy with her first child and growing more uncomfortable and anxious every day. It was 1816, the year of no summer. “The seasons turned backward,” one New Englander recalled, and as spring turned, the sky grew mysteriously darker and temperatures dropped. In April, farmers—encouraged by the initially balmy weather—had already sheared their flocks. Then, suddenly, it grew so cold that the ground began to freeze, forcing farmers back into the fields where they tried desperately to tie the wool back on their sheep. Animals died by the thousands. The birds of spring—brilliant goldfinches, ruby-throated hummingbirds in coats of bottle-green, indigo buntings, mockingbirds—froze in the leafless trees, and were dead by the time they hit the ground, songs stopped in their throats. The land was eerily quiet.
In early June, it snowed. A white fur cloak lay gleaming on Boston Common and along the outstretched branches of the Great Elm. In Vermont, farmers tied rags around their crops to keep them from freezing and the poor foraged for “nettles, wild turnips and hedgehogs.” The economy of New England was still largely agrarian, and the poor were especially vulnerable to catastrophic climate fluctuations. Thousands starved, thousands more fled to the Midwest.
In the newspapers some argued the crisis was caused by deforestation, while others blamed Benjamin Franklin’s lightning-rod experiments. Most believed the intemperate temperatures were caused by either volcanic eruption or brief but powerful eruptions of light and heat from the sun. There was more to the mystery, wrote
