After the performance, Wayman Crow introduced Charlotte to his family, and during the rest of her time in St. Louis, Charlotte spent all her free time with nineteen-year-old Emma. By the time Charlotte finally left Missouri, the two women were in love.
“Darling mine, I wish you would burn my letters,” Charlotte wrote to Emma Crow on June 20, as she departed for Albany, New York: “You do not know into whose hands an accident might make them fall.” “If you do not promise to burn them I shall have to be careful how I write and you will not like that,” she warned, “You can always keep one and when another comes then destroy the old one,” she advised. But Emma Crow ignored the request. And even after Charlotte returned to Rome that winter with Emma Stebbins she continued to write to her “little lover” with abandon.
Charlotte settled back into her domestic routine in Rome, but after the breakneck speed of her tour, her days seemed prosaic. She rose at 7 a.m., had breakfast with her household at 8, and then said goodbye to Emma Stebbins, who began the mile-long walk to her studio. Charlotte’s friends, it seemed, were looking more ragged than before. Hattie was often out at all hours, going to parties, and their mutual friend Elizabeth Barrett Browning worried she might be taking drugs. (Elizabeth herself was addicted to opium.)
The physical pain Charlotte often felt after the rigors of performing and after the nausea of ocean travel did not retreat even after days of rest, and she often was too tired to complete even the simplest daily tasks. The weather was bad that winter, the paths too slippery and treacherous for riding. She felt stifled and ill, and the only cure seemed to be her letters from Emma Crow.
In letters to Emma Crow she now referred to her partner as “Miss Stebbins” and claimed they were only good friends. Emma Stebbins knew about the other Emma but thought it was a passing flirtation. When she found out that Charlotte was still writing to her, she was furious.
Charlotte denied that she had done anything wrong and went ahead and invited Emma Crow to Rome. As a buffer, she also invited Ned to come at the same time. Now grown-up, Ned had been working in India and had recently recovered from a long illness. In her letters to Emma Crow, Charlotte bragged about Ned’s good looks, especially his new beard, which she said made him look more manly.
When Emma Crow arrived, she was hurt that Charlotte avoided her, trusting her together with Ned. Ned seemed interested, and after several weeks together he proposed. Emma married Ned and by a kind of transitive property took Charlotte’s name, becoming Emma Cushman. The arrangement was meant to placate Stebbins, but it also gave Charlotte and her little lover license to spend as much time together as they wanted.
Even after the marriage, tensions in the household grew, and finally the newlyweds decided to move back to America. The move was painful for Emma Cushman, who had married Ned believing she could continue her love affair with Charlotte. When she became pregnant, Emma hoped for “a little Charlotte,” and after she and Ned moved back to America, Charlotte wrote to her daily, openly wishing the unborn baby was her and Emma’s child. When Emma miscarried late in her pregnancy, they were both devastated. But Emma soon became pregnant again, and when the little boy was safely delivered, Charlotte rushed across the Atlantic to be at Emma’s side.
Though she was deeply wounded by the affair, Emma Stebbins was too well bred to storm off to London as Max had done. She and Charlotte remained committed to each other, and though Charlotte did occasionally return to the stage in brief, frenetic burtsts, she dedicated herself to Stebbins’s career. When Stebbins was competing for a commission to make a statue of Horace Mann for the Massachusetts State House Charlotte sent free theatre tickets to Horace and his wife, the former Mary Peabody. Emma got the commission.
Emma also began working on the statue that would be her masterpiece, Angel of the Waters for the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. Emma got the commission in 1862 from her brother Henry—who was then chairman of the New York Parks Committee on Statuary. The Angel shares Charlotte’s powerful body, her strong thighs and hips, her powerful back and shoulders. The fountain would commemorate the opening of the Croton Aqueduct, which brought clean water to New York City, and would stand at the end of the Poet’s Walk in Central Park. The Angel holds a lily, the symbol of healing. This was particularly symbolic because by the time she began designing the statue, Emma knew that Charlotte’s migraines and recurring colds were symptoms of breast cancer. Though no women were celebrated on the Poet’s Walk, Emma used the opportunity to make the Bethesda Fountain a secret tribute to Charlotte.
chapter fourteen Civil Wars
In May 1854, a Democratic senator from Illinois named Stephen A. Douglas, along with President Franklin Pierce, won passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed slavery to be voted on state by state. Many believed Douglas would be Pierce’s successor. The act, however, angered Abraham Lincoln, who decided he would not let Douglas win without a fight. Lincoln and Douglas debated each other across the country. The debate over slavery revealed that nothing had been solved by the Compromise of 1850, and bit by bit the American people became so divided that a major conflict became inevitable, even as Lincoln assumed the presidency in March 1861.
The war began in April. The Rebel Army bombarded the garrison at Fort Sumpter and took it over, raising the Confederate flag. Then Virginia seceded from the Union.
