“I forgot to tell you that we met Miss Cushman, the American actress,” Elizabeth reported to her sister, Arabella. “She was with her Miss Hays.” The two went everywhere together, she noted. “They live together, dress alike… it is a female marriage.” Though Elizabeth was shocked by this, a sophisticated friend assured her the relationship was “by no means uncommon.”
Female marriages, however, were expected to be chaste, and female passion was never discussed in public. A woman who loved other women too fiercely could be treated as a novelty, or, as the horrific novel The Female Husband warned, she could be hunted down and whipped in the public square. Charlotte and Max had to be careful. This would be particularly true in America, which was even more puritanical than Victorian England.
Max resisted going with Charlotte on the American tour because it would mean putting off the translation work she had already delayed. Ultimately, though, she gave in and Charlotte released to the press the news of her triumphant return to her native land. Newspapers in America reported giddily that Miss Cushman, “the greatest American Actress,” was finally returning, accompanied by “her friend, Miss Hays.”
The America Charlotte returned to in 1849 was more volatile than the one she had left. Former president Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act in 1830 had led to the state-sanctioned murder of nearly four thousand Cherokees and the displacement of many thousands more. Nearly eighty thousand white men were now traveling through what was once Indian land to reach gold country in the unincorporated lands of the Far West. The Mexican-American War had just ended, and many enslaved African-Americans were fleeing north on the Underground Railroad. The Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York had rallied many thousands around women’s rights. There, the writer and intellectual—and former slave—Frederick Douglass made an eloquent speech linking women’s suffrage to universal suffrage for people of all races. And yet hostilities between the North and South were rising.
In New York, the Astor Place Riots shocked the country. The tragedy began in May with a feud between William Macready and Edwin Forrest over competing performances of Macbeth. Macready disliked Forrest. He thought the bombastic actor unrefined and brutish, but he failed to appreciate how much Forrest meant to his working-class supporters in America. When Macready disparaged Forrest in a newspaper, it sounded to American ears very much like the kind of insults they’d endured from the British since the nation’s founding. The wealthy, British Macready represented everything the working-class audiences detested. Forrest was playing to a mixed audience at the Bowery, while Macready was performing at the new Astor Place Opera House, an opulent, expensive venue created expressly to keep out the lower classes. When some of Macready’s supporters came to Forrest’s Macbeth and hissed at him from the audience, it was the last straw. A group of Bowery Boys—always Forrest supporters—plotted to disrupt Macready’s performance of Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House. This protest, however, was met by the National Guard, whose presence inflamed the protest into a riot. Guardsmen fired on their own people, killing thirty. If it was, as some said, a restaging of the Revolutionary War, it was also a struggle over whether the rich or poor would have the right to define American culture. Some called it “the Shakespeare Riot.”
Perhaps because of the growing ideological divisions in America, the nation was hungrier than ever for theatre. As railroad lines extended into St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, and farther west, theatre troupes found a new way to access the American interior. There was more money to be made by performing the same show in city after city than by casting, rehearsing, and mounting a new production every few weeks, and Charlotte planned to use this approach with her own work. She already had a repertoire of successful characters with Lady Macbeth, Meg Merrilies, Nancy, Hamlet, and Romeo, and once she cast the other parts she knew she could make the same great dish a hundred times without fail. She was recognized everywhere she went, and with railways and newspapers expanding far across the nation, her name and reputation traveled ahead of her. It was time for her talents to come home.
One rough, cold winter afternoon, a train nicknamed the Hercules was traveling from Logansport to Chicago on the Chicago and Great Eastern Railroad. It was, the captain recalled, a bad day for crossing the prairies “with the wind blowing over them as I believe it never blows anywhere else except off Lake Michigan.” Suddenly, he received an order to hold the train at the station while two more cars were added to its load. The Hercules was strong enough, but the captain was baffled. He’d never received such an order before. Far in the distance a little engine towed the two additional cars toward the train. When they arrived, the Hercules passengers were surprised to see the great tragedienne Charlotte Cushman disembark with her attendants. She had missed a connection somewhere and needed to arrive in Chicago in time for that night’s performance. She traveled in style, with her “belongings”—both her family and friends as well as her luggage and costumes—filling both cars.
Though the captain did his best with the late start, the headwinds got the better of him and “out on the open prairie, about four o’clock on the gray November afternoon, we came to a dead halt.” The captain picked up his oil can and heaved the door open against the wind, struggling to reach the engine room, as a gust thrust him backward each time he made progress. Finally he gave up and dropped to his hands and knees, crawling back the way he’d come. “Presently,” the captain recounted, “one of the brakemen, with his hat tied to his head with a stout scarf” to keep it from blowing away “came forward to tell me that Miss Cushman wished to see the engineer in the passenger car.”
He declined, sending
