Throughout “the poverty year” as many called it, Elkanah Cushman continued to go to work, despite the fact that few of his remaining customers had money to pay. Elkanah was a well-respected businessman, and government contracts helped his business through the crisis. He had weathered rough times before: after raising himself up from poverty, he made a tidy fortune importing goods from Europe and the Indies, and when the British began seizing American merchant ships in 1812 he went to war against them. His first child was conceived six months after peace was declared. On the 4th of July he and his very pregnant wife celebrated the country’s fortieth birthday in overcoats and mittens. On July 23 Mary Eliza gave birth to a daughter without anesthetic. They named her after Mary’s sister Charlotte.
Charlotte Cushman was a bright, energetic, and healthy child who loved to run fast and climb high. She grew up strong and tall, with a passion for books. Like many American children, she learned three texts by heart: the Bible, the Brothers Grimm, and Shakespeare.
Built around a bustling port, the Boston of her childhood still retained the rough magic of a little town surrounded by big woods. The Cushman family grew, and soon Charlotte was playing in the woods with her younger brother Charles, teaching him how to climb trees and make mischief. “Climbing trees was an absolute passion,” she later said. “Nothing pleased me so much as to take refuge in the top of the tallest tree when affairs below waxed troubled or insecure.”
Charlotte’s experience of America for the first ten years of her life was of an uneasy nation in constant upheaval. The War of 1812 had caused a deep recession, which led to a series of financial crises that businessmen like her father struggled to climb free of. The 1807 ban on international slave trading had a boomerang effect that meant the domestic slave trade exploded. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise enshrined slavery as a permanent condition in the South, allowing Missouri to enter the union as a slave state, while keeping Maine free. Genocide against the Seminoles in Florida and the Cherokee in the West filtered through to Charlotte as adventure stories, and in Byron’s odes to Daniel Boone.
Socially, the country was also changing. Charlotte could read the advertisements for British actors’ first American tours. The star power of Edmund Kean, William Macready, Fanny Kemble, and Sarah Siddons attracted audiences to theatres in New York and Boston. Unlike her parents, who grew up thinking novels were trashy and lowbrow, Charlotte grew up reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Jane Austen’s Emma, which was published the year she was born.
Raised on a diet of adventure stories, Charlotte began to chafe against the social conventions for how women should look and act. Nice girls did not climb trees, or beat boys at races, or laugh at their own jokes. Charlotte, however, declared herself a “tomboy,” and as the oldest of the family she was a tough act to follow. When Charlie was born, he was in effect the second son. She agreed to play dolls with her little sister, but while Susan industriously sewed her dolls new clothes, Charlotte “ruthlessly” cut their heads open “to see what they were thinking.” She was no good at sewing, she said, but “could do anything with tools.”
It may have come as a surprise to her parents when ten-year-old Charlotte fell in love with her youngest sibling, baby Augustus. She declared him her baby, her “child-brother.” She was possessive, bragging that Augustus was “by far the cleverest” of the Cushman children, “keener, more artistic, more impulsive, more generous, more full of genius.” He was “my child,” she insisted, and he loved her “best in all the world.”
Still, as the eldest, Charlotte was “tyrannical” to her siblings, though “very social and a great favorite with the other children,” as she later wrote. She made her friends roar with laughter with her “vivid representation of a hen pursued and finally caught, or of the strange, weird, mistrustful behavior of a parrot.” She was always curious about what people were thinking, and observed how their mannerisms betrayed psychological secrets. One afternoon Mary Eliza caught her staring at their pastor across the table, mimicking him as he drank his tea. “Charlotte, take your elbows off the table and your chin out of your hands,” her mother scolded. “It is not a pretty position for a young lady!” Charlotte obeyed, but felt stifled by the corseted world, and continued to look for outlets for her energy and ambition.
At school, she was not only popular, but a strong and competitive student. She won a medal for arithmetic and kept the title year after year. She also excelled at dramatic reading. Her uncle Augustus saw her talent and encouraged her with prizes. He was often away at sea, but when he came to port he urged Charlotte to cultivate her talent for singing and performance.
Encouraged by her uncle and bursting with creative energy, Charlotte often rallied her siblings and friends to put on plays for the adults. Charlotte wasn’t shy about bossing the other kids around, and when she passed out roles she always cast herself as the hero. After reading a play only once she had much of it memorized, and her vision of a character usually came quickly and fully formed. In the evening, the troupe of kids would transform one of the rooms of the house into a theatre, with Charlotte striding across their makeshift stage in pantaloons, a wooden sword strapped around her waist.
Elkanah worked long hours, so Charlotte and her brother Charles often walked from their house in downtown Boston to Long Wharf to visit their father’s office and rummage around his warehouse filled with exotic treasures. Long Wharf lay at the heart of the city, the chaotic intersection of India, Commerce, Market, Commercial, and Mercantile streets. As they made their way
